Leapfrogging Possibilities For Sustainable Consumption and ...

Biofuel
The development of large-scale ethanol based mobility made Brazil the world’s major
laboratory for the use of ethanol as a fuel.
The National Ethanol Programme of 1975 has successfully reduced the number of
cars running on gasoline in Brazil by 10 million. This Brazilian leap has avoided the
conventional phase of using fossil fuels for many
Brazilians who leaped direct from a situation of no-access-to-fossil-fuel to a new
situation of using ethanol. As the Brazilian ethanol is based on the most efficient crop
namely home grown sugar cane, the leapfrogging is evident.
One of the major economic benefits of this has been the obvious reduction in the
country's dependence on oil imports. Brazil achieved self-sufficiency in oil, the year
when 17.7 million m 3 of ethanol and 11.3 TWh of electric and mechanical power were
produced within the sugar-cane agribusiness. Besides, the country’s exports ethanol fuel
to countries like Sweden and Japan. More than 5 million vehicles designed to run
exclusively on ethanol manufactured in the country.
On the social front, improved health and large number of job opportunities in the
plantations as well as ethanol industries can be mentioned. On the job front, the sugar-can
growing business is responsible for around one million direct jobs. In the State of São
Paulo, there are around 400,000 direct jobs, and 95 percent of those workers are formally
employed. In terms of income apportionment, the suppliers get most of the income
created. In São Paulo, the home of around 11 000 sugar-cane suppliers, 62.1% and 37.9
percent of the income goes to suppliers and processors respectively.
Environmentally, the most obvious is the avoided carbon dioxide emission both in Brazil
and in the countries to which the ethanol is exported. In this regard, greenhouse gas
emissions avoided by the sector in 2003 are around 33.2 million CO 2 equivalent.
Generally such reduction can correspond to 18 percent of all carbon emissions in Brazil 50 .
One important factor in the environmental and economic advantages of this sugar-cane
based energy advancement is the ratio between the renewable energy produced to the
fossil energy used which in 2005 was 8.9.
ICT
Indian Bangalore, known as the Silicon Valley of the developing world, features a
massive hive of interlocking programming shops, call centres, and high-tech companies.
This hub has made bypassing the conventional needs of transporting people and/or
materials and leaped to a phase of “transporting” information on the ICT highway that
connects to different parts of the world very far from this area.
Socio-economically a lot of jobs are created. According one estimate, Bangalore employs
some 160,000 tech workers, the vast majority concentrated in value-added IT
occupations, as opposed to call centres or business outsourcing. It has significantly
50 Goldemberg (1998)
31