There was a rare note of agreement last week between George W. Bush in his State of the Union address and the punditocracy at the World Economic Forum in Davos: the world has to find an alternative to fossil fuels. But is the biofuel movement a space race or a gold rush?

Some Americans dub the attempt to develop second-generation biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel a new space race. It is a challenge that US scientists need to solve, probably with government backing, in order to help Americans to sleep easy at night. In the 1960s, the country’s foreign rival was the Soviet Union; now it wants
to lessen dependence on energy from oil states such as Saudi Arabia.