Biofuel

Finally, an answer for that age-old question: What part of the chicken does the nugget come from? Answer: maybe not from a chicken at all. The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering a $1 million prize for laboratory-produced meat that tastes like fried chicken. Of course, there's a lot of fried stuff that tastes like chicken, but PETA is quite firm on the laboratory bit. They expect scientists to grow the meat in vitro - without killing any animals.

Jean Ziegler, the United Nations special rapporteur for the right to food, recently raised blood pressures by dubbing biofuels "a crime against humanity" because they divert grains from food to fuels. This summer, the Group of Eight summit in Japan will attempt to address the global food crisis. And just yesterday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said he plans to establish a task force to tackle that crisis and avert "social unrest on an unprecedented scale." How to make sense of all of this?

A Perry Hall man was sentenced Friday to 121/2 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $42 million in restitution after being convicted of selling $9 million worth of fake biodiesel fuel credits to oil companies and commodities brokers. Rodney R. Hailey, 34, was found guilty in June of eight counts of wire fraud, 32 counts of money laundering and two counts of violating the Clean Air Act. Hailey operated Clean Green Fuel, a company that purportedly created renewable fuel from waste cooking oil but sold credits for more than 23 million gallons of biodiesel he never made.

QUEENSTOWN -- Ken Staver stepped into his stand of switchgrass beside the Wye River and quickly vanished. The green blades and tassels bobbed 6 or 7 feet high in the 4-acre plot at the University of Maryland's Wye Research and Education Center. The grass stood thick enough to hide him from a visitor just a few feet away and enveloped him in a stifling, humid embrace. "You walk into it and you disappear," Staver said, a biosystems engineer at the Wye center. All this dense growth has sprung up - without fertilizer or chemicals - since the plot was last cut in April.

A federal prosecutor said Thursday that the government has recovered only a third of the $9 million that authorities charge a Perry Hall businessman with taking from his customers in a massive biofuel fraud scheme. The businessman, Rodney R. Hailey, president of the now-shuttered Clean Green Fuel, appeared in U.S. District Court for what had been scheduled as an arraignment. But Hailey surprised prosecutors by not going through with a guilty plea that they said he had agreed to before the proceeding.

Green investing is no longer just for those who celebrate Earth Day. Decades of talk about alternative fuels and green technologies has turned energy independence into a national priority. The investment category that focuses on the environment and alternative-energy sources has earned a position in the mainstream financial world. Some shares have been in a slump during the oil price decline over the past several months and have historically moved with that indicator. Even though oil is primarily used for transportation while most alternative energy is for electricity and heat generation, the two are intertwined in the public consciousness.

Sao Paulo, Brazil -- President Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva set aside past differences yesterday and announced a new partnership to promote the use of alternative fuels to reduce the Western Hemisphere's dependence on fossil fuels. Da Silva, whose left-of-center government has been critical of Bush on Iraq and the environment, suggested that the two countries can work pragmatically on issues of common interest even if they disagree in other areas. "After all, we ... who have polluted the world so much in the 20th century, need to make our contribution to de-polluting it in the 21st century," da Silva said after showing off a state-of-the-art fuel depot outside Sao Paulo.

Maryland Agricultural Commission, meet the Agricultural Stewardship Commission. One group answers to the governor, the other to the Senate president and House speaker. Both plan to make recommendations for the 2006 legislative session on how to best preserve farming in Maryland, and not necessarily the same ones. Not that the agriculture community is complaining. "We're just delighted that we've got that much interest in farming now," said Lewis R. Riley, secretary of the state Department of Agriculture.

OSCO, Ill. -- Gary Asay raises thousands of hogs in this small town near the Mississippi River, and for years he's had nothing much around him but farmland stretching in every direction. Now an ethanol plant will be opening just 25 miles to the south in Galva. Another is coming to Annawan, about 25 miles to the east, and another just 30 miles across the river in Buffalo, Iowa. The town of Fulton, 44 miles to the north, will be getting a big one, too, leaving Asay to wonder if all those factories amount to too much too soon: "Anyone who has looked into it is concerned," he says.

After months of wrangling, the Senate on Wednesday approved a $138 billion spending bill that would extend jobless benefits, help the states pay for Medicare and extend a bundle of tax measures designed to stimulate the economy. The measure - which must still be reconciled with a House-passed version - also extends tax cuts for college tuition, the program that helps laid-off workers keep their job-based health insurance, and tax breaks for research and development that has long been important to the nation's high-tech industries.