Winter has finally given up the ghost, the sun is shining and SUV drivers everywhere are paying through the nose for gasoline. Gas prices always seem to go up as the days get longer and, like clockwork, it becomes a political issue. It seems to get worse every year. Last summer Hurricane Katrina created fears that gas would increase to three, four or even five dollars a gallon, and politicians all over the nation have made symbolic efforts to relieve the situation.

Of course, we’ve seen much worse before. We don’t have a shortage like we did during the energy crisis of the 70s. But we haven’t done a great deal to wean ourselves off the stuff either, as we promised we would then. Brazil has.

Unlike the United States, the energy crisis that occurred in the 70s prompted Brazil to take action. They launched a program to find a substitute and they settled on ethanol produced from sugar-cane. Today, that ethanol fuels three quarters of Brazilian cars. This year, Brazil will announce they have become completely energy independent. This was the subject of a report on “CNN Presents,” April 23. It made me wonder, why hasn’t the United States yet reached this goal? The success of ethanol in Brazil is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. It went out of favor for a time because the availability of ethanol was affected by the price of sugar. As the global price for sugar went up, farmers produced more sugar and less ethanol from the cane they grew. The result was a shortage of ethanol.

But in 2003 carmakers rolled out Flex-Fuel vehicles designed to run off ethanol, gasoline or any combination of the two. In addition, production of ethanol increased a great deal. Today, the production of ethanol in Brazil is completely self-sufficient. The plants which distill the ethanol can burn the leftover waste product to run a turbine, which generates all the electricity the plants need for processing cane and turning it into fuel. And all that is released into the air is harmless steam.

You may have seen advertisements for Flex-Fuel vehicles on television. The cars being produced for American drivers are advertised as running on ethanol from corn. “Live Green, Go Yellow” the ad slogan commands. But producing ethanol from corn requires almost as much energy as is contained within the ethanol itself.

Sugar-cane can be made into ethanol eight times as efficiently. By placing too much emphasis on ethanol from corn we may have stunted our own infant ethanol industry. But, the future looks bright. There is now talk of easing tariffs to allow Brazil to import ethanol, and new research is looking at ways to create ethanol not just from corn or sugar cane, but from all sorts of plant waste. It might not be too far down the line when we have a clean and cheap alternative to the fossil fuels killing our planet.