Yves here. Speaking of rat races, I have a bunch of things to do and I need to dig. But hopefully this post about the sad state of science, as in education, research will provide some grist. This section describes perverse motivations and provides examples of negative outcomes. This shortage reminds me of our arms procurement processes, where gee-whizzery is valued more than due diligence and (gah!) low cost.
By Veronique Carignan, environmental chemist and former assistant professor of chemical oceanography. Originally published in Undark
In 2022, In a few years as an assistant professor in chemical oceanography, I watched my department join a multi-million dollar robotics program. The goal was to make a splash (pun intended) and impress funding agencies and other institutions with a plan to use autonomous vehicles for underwater testing. The project included the design and construction of a 20-foot long test tank, housed in a new 27,000-square-foot building with space for eight laboratories.
I was not at all surprised. Since training faculty three years ago, I have been bothered by the battle cry of our administration to “separate your funding sources!” As a member of a small faculty, I am exempt from the “publish or perish” battleground, where survival – and staying – often depends on receiving at least one major grant in your first four years. I frantically wrote grant applications to every government agency and charity I had cash to spare, submitting eight proposals in my first two years alone.
Not only did I get the institutional concern about the deduction, but I also saw that it was misdirected. My department didn’t ignore small (but arguably meaningful) projects. For months, I tried and failed to find enthusiasm for a small-budget initiative to connect high school students with our ocean science program, for example. I had proposed a project to bring local school administrators to interact with the faculty to find synergistic educational opportunities and I was not ignored by my peers.
I am done sacrificing my passion for public engagement in climate science to satisfy the desires of funding agencies. I also stopped chasing grants instead of spending meaningful time doing research and connecting with my community. The report comes after another department meeting about splitting our department to get funding for climate science purposes. Looking at the robotics lab environment of the future, I wrote my resignation letter.
Having a positive impact on the environment drew me – and many of my colleagues in the field – to the course. After all, academic science centers are where many idealistic scientists – like me – go to make a difference. If getting rich was the goal, there are many easy and very profitable career opportunities to choose from. However, although academic scientists are idealists, there is no escaping the fact that the institutions that inhabit them are increasingly financially oriented.
Academic scientists become experts on small, but fundamental, elements of our natural world, often with the hope that one day they will come closer to understanding our place in the universe. The further down the academic path one goes, the more complex the science becomes – and, by extension, the more difficult it is to make one’s research accessible to the general public. This fact makes many important projects unfunded, as the research needs a general audience framework within the context of current affairs in order to receive meaningful financial support. Therefore, in order to get funding, I believe that many researchers can oversee the relevance of their projects to climate change and the climate crisis.
This year so far, the National Science Foundation has already provided funding to more than 500 projects with the acronym “climate change,” on topics such as salamander color responses to climate change, microplastics in Lake Ontario, and reducing uncertainty in tree ring records. . The problem is that while projects like these are linked to climate change — tree-ring data allows researchers to reconstruct past climates, for example — they do little to address the immediate need to mitigate climate change. It’s like monitoring the soil moisture of a forest 1,000 miles away from a raging wildfire and saying you’re working to put it out.
I am not alone in seeing a conflict between the goals of funding climate science and the urgent need for climate action. Some who are leaving academia and some who are still working hard in it have coined the dangerous practice of “climate delay”: a term that slows down the pace of decision-making, preventing effective climate action. My weather-delayed door robot system utilizes the hope of technology. It focuses on the efforts of current and future technologies to open up opportunities to address climate change rather than tangible, tangible solutions for our local community.
Outside of this facility, funding is also used in ways that hide inefficiencies and promote climate change. So far in 2024, for example, the United States has spent about $50 billion in response to climate and weather disasters — but the Biden administration has budgeted only $4.5 billion for climate research. Often, money exacerbates climate change, such as pressure for more computing power and data storage. It is well known that cloud computing has a huge environmental impact, with a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry. However, in its 2023 budget, the NSF sought to increase climate funding by $500 million to, in part, launch large cloud computing networks.
This misunderstanding is not a secret. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office reported that 94 percent of federal climate funding went to programs that “affect, but are not dedicated to, climate change,” with the bulk of the money going to technological development of programs like hydrogen fusion and nuclear research. plans.
Similar trends can be seen in the private sector, especially in climate-driven technology, which is often driven by the direction of academic climate science. From 2021 to 2023, more than 3,000 agreements have secured more than $150 billion in venture capital and private funding raised in climate technology. However, this gargantuan investment has yet to have the same impact.
For example, there are a number of initiatives aimed at taking advantage of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a concept originally proposed by an academic scientist in the 1970s when carbon dioxide from the atmosphere settled in the oceans. Today, startups are making CCS in a variety of ways such as farming kelp, growing microalgae, injecting carbon dioxide into oil wells to speed up production, and converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into solid carbonate. All of these methods are very expensive, and none of them have the capacity to effectively capture a significant portion of the carbon dioxide emissions.
CCS highlights how academic science efforts can encourage the misuse of climate dollars, leading to serious disruption of climate action. Take fresh air, which removes the carbon dioxide that is already being released into the atmosphere. It would take a system the size of a three-story, three-mile-tall building to capture one million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — or a tiny 0.02 percent of the United States’ annual emissions. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the government has allocated more than $3.5 billion to this ineffective technology by 2023, and a number of tech startups have jumped on the bandwagon: Airhive, RepAir, CarbonCapture, and Sustaera just a few.
So how do we stop this runaway, ivory tower train?
One way to stop investing in frivolous problems is to reframe what is seen as important when solving the climate problem. To date, the vast majority – up to 95 percent – of government and private funding has gone to basic science. But efforts based on social science — including a carbon tax, putting countries in “climate groups,” and grassroots activism — are critical when it comes to mitigation. Climate solutions depend on social dynamics around the world. So while basic science is important in understanding the causes of climate change, dollars also need to be spent on changing attitudes, practices, incentives, and politics.
Academic scientists have a responsibility to help citizens understand and deal with the climate crisis. When they use climate science as a hook for funding projects that have a lot to do with helping solve climate change, they’re not just pulling dollars from finding a solution, they’re setting the tone for other sectors — like Congress, industry, and technology development — to move climate forward. delay, too.
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