[LINK] "Can Brazil Get Its Ethanol Mojo Back?"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Mac Margolis describes how a confused Brazilian energy policy is harming the country's ethanol fuel industry.

By June, the international regulator, ASTM, had signed off on commercial use of farnesane, a new Brazilian-made jet fuel ginned up by biotech firm Amyris and French energy major Total. But the Brazilian wonks are a nationalistic lot and demanded tests of their own. Barred at home, Gol had its homemade fuel jetted from Sao Paulo to Orlando and triumphantly flew back, the other way.

If only Brazil's struggling ethanol industry had such a flight plan. Farnesane, which scientists say will sweeten the skies by releasing drastically fewer greenhouse gases, would probably not exist without the innovations of Brazil's clever sugar and ethanol makers.

For the past six years, however, the world's signature manufacturers of clean-burning renewable fuels have lived on razor's edge.

Some 60 ethanol plants have shuttered this year alone and "blue slips," Brazil's unemployment notices, are multiplying: Nearly half of the more than 36,000 industrial jobs erased last month were in the sugar and alcohol industry, reports Valor Economico.

What's worse, they are victims of the wonks and activist bureaucrats whose good intentions to goose growth and contain inflation have only compounded their troubles. The road to ruin was paved by the government of President Dilma Rousseff, a micro-manager who converted state-run companies into the useful idiots of misguided economics.