Google Guys travel to Brazil to check out ethanol
Quicknote bioenergy business
The pantheon of VIP's eyeing or visiting Brazil to learn more about its successful ethanol program is rapidly filling up: president Jacques Chirac, China's president Hu Jintao, OPEC president Edmund Daukoru, IEA chief Claude Mandil, Bill Gates, president George W Bush, and now reportedly Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google.
There has been quite some blogosphere buzz about the Google Boys in Brazil. Apparently they visited the country incognito a few months ago, but they were recognized pretty quickly and several brazilian bloggers broke the story.
Ethablog, our preferred resource on news about Brazilian biofuels, translates one of the blogs who had the scoop:
The two Google Guys' noble motto is "do no evil", and with this in mind, we are interested to learn why they were in Brazil. If they are looking into investing in ethanol in the US, then it's a mystery why they would visit sugarcane country. After all, the development of the ethanol industry in America is entirely different from that in Brazil. If they want to put a few billions in the developing world, then definitely samba country is a great example to learn from, but then "doing no evil" becomes a very difficult task. Mr Page and Mr Brin will have to invest in social sustainability first and foremost, because large-scale biofuel production in the third world can never get around people - people who live off the land, people who want radical land reform and social justice, people whose food security and access to energy must get priority, people who are willing to work on a small scale where they are in control of local resources, people who have a tradition of working collectively using social technologies like unions and cooperatives, people who have had bad experiences with predatory multinationals and who have successfully resisted their grip. Indeed, there is a lot to learn, and we hope the Google Guys had an eye for these aspects too.
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biofuels :: page :: brin :: google :: investing :: sustainability :: Brazil ::
The pantheon of VIP's eyeing or visiting Brazil to learn more about its successful ethanol program is rapidly filling up: president Jacques Chirac, China's president Hu Jintao, OPEC president Edmund Daukoru, IEA chief Claude Mandil, Bill Gates, president George W Bush, and now reportedly Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google.
There has been quite some blogosphere buzz about the Google Boys in Brazil. Apparently they visited the country incognito a few months ago, but they were recognized pretty quickly and several brazilian bloggers broke the story.
Ethablog, our preferred resource on news about Brazilian biofuels, translates one of the blogs who had the scoop:
“The Google guys came to a restaurant next door for dinner. Can you believe that?”The billionaires' visit was later confirmed by mainstream news outlets, and a picture of them meeting with Brazilian academics at the University of Minas Gerais did the rest. But let's not milk this story too much. It doesn't really come as a surprise. Ethanol is feverishly hot, in Silicon Valley too, and Brazil's success just symbolises the reasons why the enthusiasm is not unfounded.
“They displayed a local’s familiarity with Ipanema. But I’m sure the two guys were really Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The went inside the Gula Gula restaurant on Anibal Street, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And you know what? Nobody noticed.”
“On the mezzanine, they tried to make sense of the menu. ‘What is picadinho?’, they asked. They thought it was some kind of fish, when, in reality, it is a Brazilian dish made of small pieces of chopped beef. Their reaction: ‘No, no red meat’”.
The two Google Guys' noble motto is "do no evil", and with this in mind, we are interested to learn why they were in Brazil. If they are looking into investing in ethanol in the US, then it's a mystery why they would visit sugarcane country. After all, the development of the ethanol industry in America is entirely different from that in Brazil. If they want to put a few billions in the developing world, then definitely samba country is a great example to learn from, but then "doing no evil" becomes a very difficult task. Mr Page and Mr Brin will have to invest in social sustainability first and foremost, because large-scale biofuel production in the third world can never get around people - people who live off the land, people who want radical land reform and social justice, people whose food security and access to energy must get priority, people who are willing to work on a small scale where they are in control of local resources, people who have a tradition of working collectively using social technologies like unions and cooperatives, people who have had bad experiences with predatory multinationals and who have successfully resisted their grip. Indeed, there is a lot to learn, and we hope the Google Guys had an eye for these aspects too.
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biofuels :: page :: brin :: google :: investing :: sustainability :: Brazil ::
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