Day 4
Florianopolis

Today we had our first hours of free time during the day! We decided to take a taxi to Lagoa de Conceicao to shop, visit the beach, go paddle boarding and see the sand dunes. As it turns out, we did not have enough time to visit the beach but we did have a delicious Brazilian-style lunch near at a restaurant right on the water. I wish I could remember the name of all the desserts. Paddle boarding was a lot of fun. Stay tuned for the pics.

In the late afternoon, we attended a lecture by Dr. Baltazar Guerra on renewable energy, specifically energy trends in Brazil and the energy matrix. Dr. Baltazar has a background in economics and conducts research on sustainable cities and the social relationship between food, water, and energy. Brazil uses four times the average amount of renewable energy, mainly hydropower. A serious drought, however, recently decreased power production. There is a need for diversification of renewable energy sources -  wind, solar, biomass – to avoid this type of problem.

As an introduction to the issue of sustainability, Dr. Baltazar showed and briefly explained this image, 15 Global Challenges Facing Humanity. Sustainability is the overlap of social progress, economic development, and environmental protection. He gave a brief overview of energy in Brazil. One of the problems that Brazil has is with transmission of power from wind farms that has resulted in the total capacity for wind power generation not being used. He continued on to discuss problems that ours and future generations will have to solve. Mainly the growing global population, the infeasibility of sustaining our current energy consumption rates and climate change. As countries, such as India, grow economically there will also be an increase in the population’s energy consumption. For this reason, it is extremely important that India and China for example invest in green energy and that countries like the U.S., who has the highest per capita level of CO2 emissions, learn to incorporate more green energy and reduce consumption.