Nov 29, 2014 1 min read

November’s fossil fuel-funded Energy Report uses green vine leafs as backgrounds for science, technology, engineering, and math, and indeed, “Stemming a new workforce” for future ethane cracker plants and manufacturers of advanced fossil-fuel products would hasten the day creepy jungle vegetation invades the region.

But, as one might suspect of a study of “attitudes and perceptions about STEM education,” funded by Chevron and Nova Chemicals, too much carbon in the atmosphere is not part of the curriculum.

A “seminal finding” of the study is that rural workers “represent one of the greatest, yet underexploited, opportunities for STEM education,” training for “a vast number of jobs,” Allegheny Conference CEO Dennis Yablonsky calculates, “will likely be available the rest of this decade, and probably beyond.” Unlike fossil-fuel jobs, too much carbon in the atmosphere is neither short-term nor uncertain. Along with stopping the epoch-ending mass extinctions, this time caused by mankind, prompting scientists to call the new age the Anthropocene, developing alternatives to fossil fuels and training workers in the new energy technologies is the urgently-needed point of STEM education and why coal, oil, and gas companies are urgently trying to subvert it.

Jim Greenwood

Washington