[tchaffee]

Why did you wait? A poor country like Brazil is already 80% renewable for electricity. You cannot buy pure gasoline at the pump. It's mixed with a minimum of renewable ethanol, and that minimum has been going up every year for over a decade. Almost all cars run on pure ethanol and some consumers choose to never use petrol based fuel for their car. Diesel is not pure either. It's mixed with biodiesel by law and that percentage goes up every year.

If a poor country can achieve this, there is nothing stopping much richer countries.

You didn't lose a decade due to renewable capabilities. You lost a decade due electing the wrong politicians, influenced by big oil.

Carter installed solar panels on the White House. Reagan removed them two years later. It's nonsense like that that resulted in your lost decades. While other countries were already racing ahead.

[otabdeveloper4]

> renewable ethanol

Is it really renewable? (I don't know, but I assume biofuels are only viable with massive fertilizer subsidies. Also, I hope "renewable" doesn't mean "let's cut down the Amazon rainforest and wait 200 years for it to grow back".)

[tchaffee]

You get a new crop 2x a year as opposed to waiting 180 million years for new fossil fuels, so yeah, it's really renewable. As far as net carbon, I'd like to see the math but since plants take carbon out of the air it's far closer to carbon neutral than burning fossil fuels.

Cutting down the Amazon to power cars would indeed be foolish but the same folks protecting the Amazon are the same folks pushing renewables. Likewise, the current president turned a blind eye to deforestation while pushing for more fossil fuels. For the time being if you want to protect the Amazon it's the renewables folks you need to get behind.