The Rat Race for Research Funding Delays Scientific Progress

Yves here. Speaking of rat races, I have a sudden pile up of things to do and I need to dig myself out. But hopefully this post on the sorry state of scientific, as in academic, research will provide some grist. This piece describes the perverse incentives and gives examples of sub-optimal outcomes. These deficiencies remind me of our arms procurement practices, where gee-whizzery is prized much more than practical and even (gah!) low cost investigations.

By Veronique Carignan, an environmental chemist and former assistant professor of chemical oceanography. Originally published at Undark

In 2022, a few years into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in chemical oceanography, I watched my department rally around 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 leverage autonomous vehicles for underwater exploration. The program included the design and construction of a 20-foot-long testing tank, housed in a new 27,000-square-foot building with space for eight laboratories.

I wasn’t exactly surprised. Since faculty orientation three years prior, I had been haunted by our administration’s battle cry to “diversify your funding sources!” As a junior faculty member, I was released into the “publish or perish” combat zone, where survival — and tenure — typically depend on securing at least one major grant in your first four years. I frantically wrote grant applications to every government agency and philanthropic foundation with cash to give, submitting eight proposals in my first two years alone.

Not only did I find the institutional obsession with funding draining, but I also felt it was misdirected. My department ignored less flashy (but arguably more meaningful) projects. For months, I had tried and failed to garner enthusiasm for a low-budget initiative to connect local high schoolers with our ocean science program, for example. I had proposed a project to bring in local school administrators to connect with faculty for possible synergistic educational opportunities and was roundly ignored by my peers.

I was done with sacrificing my passion for engaging the community in climate science to satisfy the whims of funding agencies. I was also done chasing grants instead of spending meaningful time doing research and connecting to my community. The final straw came after another faculty meeting about setting our department apart to secure funding for ambitious climate science objectives. Gazing out at the site of the future robotics lab, I drafted my resignation.

Having a positive impact on the environment drew me — and most of my colleagues in the field — to academia. After all, academic science institutions are where many scientists who are idealists — like myself — go to make a difference. If getting rich were the goal, there are many easier and more lucrative career paths to choose from. And yet, as idealistic as academic scientists may be, there is no escaping the fact that the institutions that house them are increasingly financially oriented.

Academic scientists become experts on small, yet fundamental, elements of our natural world, often in the hopes of one day getting closer to understanding our place in the universe. The further along the academic path one travels, 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 reality makes many important projects unfundable, since research needs to be framed for a general audience within the context of current issues to receive meaningful financial support. So, to get funding, I have come to believe many researchers are overselling their projects’ relevance to climate change and the climate crisis.

This year to date, the National Science Foundation has already awarded funding to more than 500 projects with abstracts mentioning “climate change,” on subjects 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 connected to climate change — tree-ring data allows researchers to reconstruct past climate regimes, for instance — they do little to address the immediate need for climate change mitigation. It’s like monitoring the soil moisture of a forest 1,000 miles away from a blazing wildfire and saying you’re working on putting it out.

I’m not alone in recognizing the incongruity between funding targets for climate science and the urgent need for climate action. Others leaving academia and some still toiling within it have named the dangerous countermovement “climate delay”: discourse that slows the pace of decision making, effectively deadlocking climate action. My department’s robotics program engaged in climate delay using technological optimism. It focused efforts on current and future technology to unlock possibilities for addressing climate change rather than tangible, actionable solutions within our local community.

Beyond the academy, funding is also being used in ways that obscure inaction and promote climate delay. So far in 2024, for instance, the United States has spent an estimated $50 billion responding to weather and climate disasters — but the Biden administration budgeted only $4.5 billion for climate research. Often, funds exacerbate climate destruction, as with the push for more computing power and data storage. It is well known that cloud computing has a massive environmental impact, with a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. And yet, for its 2023 budget, the NSF sought to augment climate funding by $500 million to, in part, launch vast cloud computing networks.

This misdirection is no secret. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office reported that 94 percent of government climate funding went to programs that “touch on, but aren’t dedicated to climate change,” with the bulk of funding going to technological development of initiatives like hydrogen fusion and nuclear research programs.

The same trends can be seen in the private sector, specifically in climate-driven technology, which is often inspired by the direction of academic climate science. From 2021 to 2023, more than 3,000 deals yielded over $150 billion in venture capital and private equity funding raised towards climate technology. And yet, this gargantuan investment has not yet had a corresponding impact.

For example, there are a plethora of startup initiatives purporting to take advantage of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a concept originally proposed by an academic scientist in the 1970s whereby carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is sequestered in the ocean. Today, startups do CCS through a variety of means such as farming kelp, growing microalgae, injecting carbon dioxide into oil wells to speed production, and converting atmospheric carbon dioxide gas into solid carbonate. All these methods are extremely costly, and none have the potential to efficiently capture a significant fraction of emitted carbon dioxide.

CCS highlights how academic science initiatives can inspire the misappropriation of climate dollars, leading to massive distractions from climate action. Take direct air capture, which removes carbon dioxide that has already been emitted to the atmosphere. It would require a system equivalent in size to a three-story, three-mile-long building to capture a million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – or a meager 0.02 percent of the United States’ annual emissions. And yet, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the government appropriated more than $3.5 billion on this inefficient technology in 2023, and a plethora of tech startups have hopped on the bandwagon: Airhive, RepAir, CarbonCapture, and Sustaera are just a few.

So how do we stop this runaway train, heading outbound from the ivory tower?

One way to stop funneling money into flashy distractions is to reframe what is seen as valuable when it comes to solving the climate crisis. Until now, the vast majority — as much as 95 percent — of government and private sector funding has gone towards basic science. But initiatives based in social science — including carbon taxes, putting countries into “climate clubs,” and grassroots activism — are just as important when it comes to mitigation. Climate solutions depend on global social dynamics. So while basic science is critical in understanding the underlying causes of climate change, dollars also need to be spent changing attitudes, norms, 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 to fund projects tangentially related to helping solve climate change, they not only draw dollars away from finding a solution, they set the tone for other sectors — like Congress, industry, and technological development — to perpetuate climate delay, as well.

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