SOLAR ENERGY, PHOTOSYNTHESIS, AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

 🌱⚡ SOLAR ENERGY, PHOTOSYNTHESIS, AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS ⚡🌱

WLADMIR COELHO

1 – The Brazilian ruling class once again celebrates the billions announced for investments in SOLAR ENERGY, reinforcing a dependent and largely uncritical vision of development.

2 – First, an essential clarification is required: for this ruling class — and for most policymakers and opinion-makers — SOLAR ENERGY has been narrowed to the importation of technology and the large-scale deployment of photovoltaic systems, mostly tied to the National Interconnected Grid (SIN), raising serious concerns about grid stability and systemic resilience.

3 – What is ignored is that the structural alternatives to fossil-fuel dependence are rooted in PHOTOSYNTHESIS — and that this misunderstanding leads to the systematic loss of NATIONAL developmental possibilities.

4 – This is not a new problem. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Pandiá Calógeras warned against the mere importation of technology, emphasizing the need to map and develop Brazil’s own material and energetic potentials, including biomass.

5 – By the late twentieth century, Bautista Vidal — the intellectual architect of PROÁLCOOL — demonstrated that it was both feasible and necessary to build a national energy technology, rather than reproducing imported models that ultimately constrain autonomous development.

6 – Within this framework, the work of Álvaro Vieira Pinto is indispensable, particularly his effort to theorize the formation of a NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. Brazil is a diverse and plural society — yet it remains A NATION NONETHELESS, requiring strategic coherence and historical awareness.

7 – Brazil — to return to Bautista Vidal — possesses exceptional SOLAR ENERGY potential. Reducing this advantage to technological imitation and foreign supply chains is a strategic error. What is required is planning, institutional learning, and long-term industrial policy — a perspective also developed by another major Brazilian thinker, Washington Albino.

8 – Recovering Brazil’s national intellectual tradition is essential if the country is to move beyond electoral spectacle, technocratic enthusiasm, and structural dependence.

wladmircoelho@gmail.com