Can Brazil Become the World’s First Environmental Superpower?

This article from the Guardian newspaper of London is as good a starting point as any for my analysis. Let us accept the inevitability of Brazil’s continued economic growth and it’s eventual place in the club of “developed” countries. The question now is how will Brazil get there? Will Brazil get there the classical route of exporting its resources till it has enough capital to move up the value chain? Or will Brazil be able to skip the normally destructive and painful steps in the value chain through enlightened policy?  It is a hopeful and seeming realistic question to ask, consider this one piece of evidence: Brazil holds a world record for renewable energy production. That is 47% of the Brazilian economy is already powered by sustainable power. This is from a country that hasn’t even yet merited the tile “developed.” Unfortunately, the temptations from Brazil are seemingly limitless, or at least as limitless as their limited their resources inevitable are, and in my next post we will explore some of these temptations.