AAPG GEO-DC Blog

Subsidized production of ethanol generates strong opinions. Either it is saving the world from greenhouse gas emissions or endangering our food and water. This blog has a few unbiased statistics to guide your opinion.

This blog only has space to consider ethanol impacts on food; water and greenhouse gas emissions will have to wait.

Ethanol production requires a huge share of the U.S. corn production: In 2012 U.S. farmers produced 10.8 billion bushels of corn (down from 12.4 billion bushels in 2011), and 4.6 billion bushels were used for ethanol production. Using these numbers, ethanol consumed 42 percent of all our corn. But, before you start hoarding tortilla chips, we need to …

As of May 1, over 3,000 bills and resolutions have been introduced in the 113rd Congress, and nine measures have become law. This is about the same pace as in the 112th Congress. It is impossible to predict whether this Congress will eventually be more productive than the last.

There are 45 bills and joint/concurrent resolutions, including several energy bills, that are likely to be voted into law. These promising bills have had a significant vote in one chamber and are likely to get a vote in the other chamber according to the Govtrack.us website.

Due to real bi-partisan cooperation, energy legislation, covering topics from hydropower to helium, has a good …

Everyone seems to know about the across-the-board, federal spending cuts, known as sequester, that took effect March 1. In addition, the law passed last week to rescind the sequester-driven furloughs of air-traffic controllers was in virtually every newspaper in the country.

However, cuts in research and development (R&D) are having less-obvious impacts that get little news coverage. The major impacts deduced from discussions with government managers, and from the American Geoscience Institute (AGI) weekly sequester-impact survey are:

• Government agencies are taking a long time to determine how to implement the sequester cuts.
• Government agencies are choosing to cut funding for grants and contracts rather than furlough or lay …
  

There is now evidence to contradict the widely held belief that there is a shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers.

The Economic Policy Institute reported this week that only half of STEM graduates get STEM jobs. These statistics primarily apply to information technology (IT) and engineering graduates. Additional evidence for this finding is the fact that salaries in these areas have not increased since the late-1990s.

These statistics are not consistent with jobs information for the oil and natural gas industry where salaries are climbing rapidly. The April 2012 AAPG Explorer reported that salaries for petroleum geologists rose 15 percent over three years.

However, the STEM employment numbers may …