The Democrats in Congress have gone home for the Christmas recess. They didn't do much this year, thankfully, and barely managed to pass a budget the President could approve; constraining their spending to a mere 11,144 pork appropriations a decline of only 17% from their Republican counterparts.
The Democrats are in charge, so their priorities prevail, as it should. But it should be pointed out that their priorities did not include basic science.
The $515 billion spending package takes a big bite out of President George W. Bush's promise--backed up by votes earlier this year in Congress--to give a substantial boost to the research budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Instead, the agencies get meager increases--a portion of which is eaten up by projects earmarked by legislators for their constituents--or across-the-board cuts. The package also makes moot the double-digit hikes authorized for research, education and training, and investment in innovation spelled out in a 6-month-old law, the America COMPETES Act, that the community fought hard to pass (ScienceNOW, 3 August). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive a 0.5% increase after high hopes for a slice that would at least keep up with inflation. Among the major science agencies, only NASA would receive the president's request--a 3% rise that is universally acknowledged as too little to handle all the projects in its pipeline.
However, Congress did fund
$700 million for a Minnesota bike trail, $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska, and $1 million for an energy project in the district of Lousiana Democrat William Jefferson, who faces trial for bribery next year.
The new Energy Bill does boost ethanol production, however, but it doesn't appear to be a good investment
Let’s start with the math. Corn doesn’t grow like a weed. Modern corn farming involves heavy inputs of nitrogen fertilizer (made with natural gas), applications of herbicides and other chemicals (made mostly from oil), heavy machinery (which runs on diesel) and transportation (diesel again). Converting the corn into fuel requires still more energy. The ratio of how much energy is used to make ethanol versus how much it delivers is known as the energy balance, and calculating it is surprisingly complex.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory states that, “Today, 1 Btu of fossil energy consumed in producing and delivering corn ethanol results in 1.3 Btu of usable energy in your fuel tank.” Even that modest payback may be overstated. Skeptics cite the research of Cornell Uni¬versity professor David Pimentel, who estimates that it takes approximately 1.3 gal. of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol.
If the benefits are in doubt, the costs are not. It would take 450 pounds of corn to yield enough ethanol to fill the tank of an SUV. Producing enough ethanol to replace America’s imported oil alone would require putting nearly 900 million acres under cultivation—or roughly 95 percent of the active farmland in the country. Once we’ve turned our farms into filling stations, where will the food come from?
There’s a simple reason that ethanol is popular with politicians: money. Substituting corn ethanol for a large fraction of the gasoline we burn will mean sluicing gushers of cash from more populated states to politically powerful farm states. And a lot of that cash will wind up in the pockets of the big agribusinesses, like Archer Daniels Midland, that dominate ethanol processing—and whose fat checkbooks wield enormous influence in Washington.
Congress has it's priorities such as $1,000,000 for a Woodstock Museum at Bethel, NY.
But clearly science is suffering.