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As the world's two largest economies, the European Union (E.U.) and the United States (U.S.) are dependent on traditional fossil fuels for transportation, and consume more traditional fossil fuels than any other countries, or regions. Hence, for these two regions, dealing with shortages of traditional fossil fuels and battling global climate change are critically important. In recent years, bio-fuel, a much debated and controversial alternative energy source, has been proposed as a solution or a strategic policy tool, in answer to the aforementioned concerns in the transportation sectors of many other countries. The U.S. and the E.U. have developed comprehensive regulations to promote the usage of bio-fuels, such as mandates or direct/indirect subsidies, etc. This article aims to review the history and development of biofuel policies and legislation in U.S. and E.U., such as the "Renewable Energy Directive" and "Renewable Fuel Standard II", and focuses on the sustainable development criteria of biofuel legislation in these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the research on the normalization of European Union ( EU) studies by presenting an analysis and assessment of the EU- US comparative literature. Using an original and comprehensive data set of 104 publications, it shows not only that these comparisons have grown considerably since the early 1990s, but also and more interestingly that EU- US scholarship itself has increasingly conformed to mainstream political science by becoming more diverse, causal in nature and empirically inclusive. Unlike other accounts of normalization, however, it is argued here that these transformations are only partly desirable, and that a better direction for the future is to develop EU- US research as a distinct programme within EU studies, centred on a 'dual mission' - theoretical and empirical - that accepts political science's scope and explanatory objectives, but at the same time sees the two cases as worthy of being studied in isolation owing to their importance and the political value of their comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]