Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will focus on renewable fuels during his visit to Beijing this week, hoping to team up with China to develop bio-fuels, the Caijing Magazine has reported.

Lula arrived in Beijing on Monday and will pay a state visit for three days.

Brazil could already arrive at grid parity - if modules were produced in the country. Meanwhile, Brazilian home owners are becoming inventive with the installation of solar thermal systems. One popular approach: buying tubes and water collection tanks from the home improvement store.

A motorcycle that can run solely on sugar cane ethanol, gasoline or a mixture of both has gone on sale in Brazil, where biofuel cars already dominate the roads, burning cheaper home-grown energy.

As Washington tries to rebuild its strained relationships in Latin America, China is stepping in vigorously, offering countries across the region large amounts of money while they struggle with sharply slowing economies, a plunge in commodity prices and restricted access to credit.

The Brazilian alcohol programme, focussing exclusively on the industrial-scale production of ethanol, has been successfully operating for more than thirty years. This article discusses how the same can be accomplished for cooking and household energy - a Proalcool movement for the household.

While exporting and importing governments are often at loggerheads over the legitimacy of sustainability criteria for biofuels, private companies have agreed on a certification scheme that allows verifiably sustainable ethanol to be imported from Brazil to Sweden.

With the average price of a gallon of gasoline hovering somewhere around $4 in the U.S. and oil prices continuing to rise the whole world is refocusing their attention on the viability of alternative energy sources. A window seems to be opening for genuine progress in lessening our dependence on fossil fuels.

Water is not distributed evenly over the globe. Fewer than 10 countries possess 60% of the world's available fresh water supply: Brazil, Russia, China, Canada, Indonesia, U.S., India, Columbia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, local variations within countries can be highly significant.

Less than 3% of the world's water is fresh - the rest is seawater and undrinkable.

The discovery of huge offshore oil reserves has made Brazil one of the world's hottest energy markets, with firms that make everything from planning software for wells to floating "hotels" for platfor

Much to the worry of environmentalists, India is on the way to becoming the third largest carbon emitter by 2015. But there is some good news, too. Indian and Brazilian consumers are the most eco-friendly in the world, says a recent study.

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