This BRIC Stands Out: Brazil's Outsized Role in the Fight Against Global Warming

DEVELOPMENTS

In 2009, Brazil experienced two major milestones, which, while seemingly unrelated, have significant implications for the future of global climate change.  First, U.S. car purchases in 2009 are predicted to be eclipsed for the first time by purchases by BRIC nations, an informal grouping of the four major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with Brazil alone experiencing a rise by nearly a third in auto sales two years in a row.  Given the fact that cars were responsible for 6.3% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions measured in 2000, as reported by 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, the rapid growth of auto purchases by BRIC countries is likely not only to profoundly impact the pace of climate change, but also the strategies utilized to combat global warming. In recent decades, Brazil has adopted one such strategy through its embrace of biofuels.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, Brazil's government has introduced its most ambitious plan ever to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions caused by deforestation by approximately 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Considering that around 75% of Brazil's carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, and that global deforestation has been estimated to be responsible for more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide, the Brazilian government’s efforts, if successful, could potentially have a huge positive impact on the effort to combat global warming.

Brazil’s anti-deforestation plan, along with its progressive biofuels policy, could transform it from a country that has historically been on the defensive in environmental debates to a nation on the forefront of the effort to prevent global warming.

BACKGROUND

The Brazilian government has been on a crash-course with environmentalists and climate change specialists since the start of the modern environmentalist movement in the mid-Twentieth Century. The path to economic development and national security chosen by the Brazilian government greatly contributed to Brazil’s becoming the world’s fourth largest contributor of greenhouse gases.

Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions accelerated during the late 1960s and 1970s after its democratically elected government was overthrown by the military. The twin focuses of the military government were a security-obsessed concern with protecting Brazil’s borders from foreign infiltration and a desire to promote rapid economic development and industrialization at any cost. The vast Amazon rainforest, with its sparse population and long porous borders, was viewed by the military as an impediment to both of these goals. Thus, the government offered numerous legal and economic incentives to encourage landless families to settle and farm the region. This initial wave of human settlement led an expanded road network in the Amazon, which in turn fueled a subsequent wave of larger-scale land speculators and ranchers, which greatly accelerated the pace of deforestation as well as the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions from the burning and decomposition of the forests.

Meanwhile, the dominant economic model embraced by the Brazilian government in the twentieth century was to promote massive nationwide industrialization and to support investment in infrastructure such as roads in undeveloped regions. As a result, Brazil experienced an explosion of car ownership in the past half-century, with its per capita car ownership still far outpacing other large emerging economies such as India and China.  Currently, among BRIC economies, it trails only Russia in per capita car ownership.

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Ironically, it was not merely growing Brazilian environmentalism, but also the military government’s preoccupation with national security and self-reliance that laid the groundwork for the creation a viable domestic biofuel industry for Brazilian cars. After the first oil shock of the 1970s, the military government invested in developing technology that would allow Brazil to develop part of its ample sugarcane production into highly efficient ethanol, which it promoted on a massive scale through collaboration with auto manufacturers. Moreover, the government invested heavily and early in creating a national network of ethanol fuel stations so that drivers could fill up their cars with biofuels virtually anywhere in the country. By 1985, between 85%-90% of Brazilian vehicles could use gasoline, ethanol, or any combination of the two.

As a result, car usage Brazil is by far more environmentally friendly in terms of size and greenhouse gas emissions than in any other BRIC country. Unlike the car markets in Russia and China, which strongly favor high and wide SUVs, or India, where the use of poor-quality diesel fuel is widespread, the flex-cars favored by the Brazilian market tend to be smaller and with relatively less carbon emissions. While Brazil remains a major carbon dioxide emitter due to deforestation and other types of industrialization, the spread of its flex-fuel car technology to other countries can only help in efforts to reduce the level of greenhouse gases released worldwide.

Likewise, Brazil’s recent ambitious rainforest conservation plan is likely to further reduce the country’s level of emissions as well as allow it to emerge as a major player in worldwide efforts to combat global warming. The targets pledge to reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72% by 2017, and unlike recent plans presented by the former Bush administration, offer bold and specific benchmarks to achieve it in the immediate future. Rather than push the hard work to a new administration, the government of Luiz Ignacio da Silva has pledged to reduce deforestation by 20% within the next year to less than 4,000 acres during its final year in office. While some have questioned whether the government’s promised goals can be met, it is undoubtedly a major change of course for a nation that, like the U.S., has traditionally avoided offering specific numbers or dates to reduce deforestation.

ANALYSIS

Although Brazil currently remains one of the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas that plays a major role in global warming, the nation’s recent actions offer some reasons to believe that there may be hope for the future. Unlike every other BRIC country, Brazil’s growing car industry strongly favors smaller compact vehicles, most of which are capable of running on renewable biofuels. As such, Brazil’s experience serves as a rebuttal to those who argue that developing nations lack the resources or technological know-how to develop environmental strategies that can successful reduce carbon emissions while still pursuing rapid economic growth.

Similarly, Brazil’s ambitious rainforest conservation plans offer an unprecedentedly bold timetable to reduce global warming. Moreover, it offers an implicit challenge to wealthy nations to increase their own efforts to reduce global warming. For years, many in the U.S. argued that it is against the economic interests of the U.S. to join the Kyoto protocol when large emerging economies, epitomized by the BRIC economies, were unwilling to their share to limit greenhouse gases. Now that one of the world’s four largest emerging economies has unilaterally committed itself to dramatically reducing its carbon emissions and expanding its biofuels technology, such arguments by the U.S. sound increasingly hollow. If Brazil, long viewed as being indifferent or even hostile to the global climate change movement, can now emerge as one of its leaders, then there is no reason that the U.S. cannot show similar global leadership in fighting climate change as well.

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Adam Benz is the Americas Region Editor for Foreign Policy Digest.

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