Look to Brazil for a way to go over to a renewable energy economy.

Earlier this year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said his country would become the world’s largest producer of renewable energy. Brazil generates 43.8 percent of its power from renewable energy sources, including hydroelectricity, ethanol and biodiesel, according to Agencia Brasil, a government communications division. By contrast, the United States produced only 6 percent of its power from renewable sources in 2003, according to the Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Outlook 2005.

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, Brazil’s economy is one-eighth the size of the United States’, yet the country produces more ethanol, mostly from sugar cane.

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