But in the long term, it's hard to see how a low price for ethanol will be an enduring problem.

If the low price is based on artificially segmented markets, it is a problem. It's questionable whether corn based ethanol can ever be economically competitive. Sugar cane ethanol is but US consumers can not benefit from sugar cane ethanol due to tariffs.

Tariffs make the economy as a whole worse off. They benefit a small number of people, corn farmers, at the expense of every one else.

Brazil's problems for the last 100 years were Brazil's alone. We didn't invent the Banana Republic. They did. If they'd like to sell us a product at a price we'd like to pay, that's wonderful. Anything else is rhetorical horseshit like all the other fools we've seen tramp their way to NYC this week. In the meantime Lula - try getting your contracts with Venezuela on power generation enforced. Or when Chavez tore them up was that the White Man's Problem too?

BTW, is there anyone out there in IT? Brazil's IT market was THE most restrictive in the world until recently. 100% had to be indigenously developed and sourced. This meant a crazy quilt of paper companies DBA Brazilian firms with fees I mean bribes going every which way. Plus - take a look at Brazilian telcom. Expensive and underbuilt. That's what having closed markets and then turning around and making demands gets you.

Oh I know this kind of post coloialist talk plays well to the bongsmokers in the audience at the Daily Show or here at Potemkin Willage #54 People's Industrial Blogging Combine but it's nonsense. And what's worse it simply wrongheaded. Everyone knows that as soon as we met Brazil on those terms they'd turn around and accuse us of forcing them to destroy the rain forest to make the stuff.

What we really need is for the enzymatic processes that convert cellulose to ethanol to make it out of the labs and into the real world. Anything that requires extensive cultivation is going to have a significantly lower net energy yield than something farmers can simply let grow until it's time to cut it and process it.

And even that is ideally a bridge to non-combustion based power for as much of our energy requirements as possible. Cleaner air, lower carbon dioxide, what's not to want there?

here at Potemkin Willage #54 People's Industrial Blogging Combine

Comrades, we may meet this year's snark production quota after all!