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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“Climate solutions depend on global social dynamics.” To a large degree because we are all using carbon based energy to supply ourselves. If there were global solutions to CO2 and chemical and plastic pollution then social dynamics could be focused and trained to mitigate climate/environmental imbalances by using best practices, which is what this implies. It looks impossible. Unless we allow local innovation. One way to approach this would be for every locality to write their own proposal for environmental cleanup projects. Each would be specific to its natural environment and required to find the experts necessary. And then if you want to get all grandiose and global about it just gradually form coalitions of cooperating environments. Definitely want everybody upstream to stop peeing in the river, and etc.
Too many rich and powerful people are dependent upon the fossil fuel industry and endless energy powered growth. Your proposal is that we all basically piss in the wind rather than deal with the source of the wind.
I am actually saying the exact opposite. I’m saying that pollution needs to be localized to be dealt with. And further, we need to identify it everywhere, isolate it and deal with it where it actually is. Because, for one thing, once it gets into the atmosphere or the ocean it is far more difficult to control. So to my thinking it is a no brainer that we handle this with political engagement as well as technology. If every town had the authority to construe an environmental planning dept. and write up requirements for monitoring the local environment and maintaining it in good health it would not only clean up the environment, but prevent further abuse and create opportunity for new technology development, not to mention very useful employment.
[Deleted as in wrong place]
Since I don’t know (and the article doesn’t mention) how much other funding than climate research is available, I’m left to wonder how other groups (and branches of science) can make better grant applications than directly involved research.
I’m not saying she’s wrong, though. Just wondering. Where I personally have experience is that she does have it easy compared to getting funding for research infrastructure. In academia it’s pretty much non-existent, and the poor support teams have to do a lot of inception to get it into research grant applications and then keep twisting arms to get the money actually invested in the crumpling infra.
For most of academia, IT is just magic that happens. They need ridiculously fast, absolutely reliable data storage for a petabyte, connected to a “supercomputer” reserved for only their group – but it can’t cost more than their MacBook.
Sabine Hossenfelder explains her experience in Academia:
My dream died, and now I’m here
This Institute isn’t about knowledge discovery, it’s about making money…
“Sabine Hossenfelder explains…”
This is saddening but excellent.
@Alice X — that was great! Thanks so much.
I’m glad I have not been the only person in the NC commentariat to draw attention to that post by Sabine.
If she has lost hope then we are family blogged
My link to her post is here
I want a date with her …
I’m gay guy and *I* want to date her! THAT is how good she is.
I’m not surprised to hear any of this. I’m a PhD student in astrophysics, and slowly coming to realize that funding agencies consistently prioritize flashy, expensive, “too-big-to-fail” projects, and whizbang technical solutions (anything that has “machine learning” in the title), over actually trying to answer basic questions.
In my field, that often looks like dumping money into huge surveys of the universe with enormous amounts of data – which in and of itself, is a great idea! But funding agencies are often shockingly myopic about what research they’ll fund on that data, focusing on only the one or two stated aims of the project. To the detriment of the dozens of other science cases that it can be used for. This incentivizes researchers to join a huge collaboration for its funding, and hyper specialize on one of the many small problems necessary for that project. I’m often surprised how much this encourages narrow minded thinking. Many PhD students seem to spend years developing fancy statistical approaches to the problem, without gaining much understanding at all of the objects they’re trying to study in the first place.
Funding agencies’ mandate in this kind of basic research is less about doing science and answering basic questions, and more about spurring “innovation” and pumping out young people with flashy skills (in my case “data science”, “machine learning”).
All of this is beside the point of this authors plea for meaningful climate action. And climate research might feel useless if there’s no hope of acting on it.
As Jem Bendell puts it in Chapter 5 of his 2023 book Breaking Together:
“Unfortunately, establishment climatologists have unwittingly facilitated the corporate hijack of the climate agenda. Now the capture of government by greedy venture capitalists is leading to subsidies for unhelpful schemes like Carbon Capture and Storage and Direct Air Capture machines, instead of the many better responses. Leadership by elites on environmental issues generally is leading to sentiments, policies and initiatives which are hypocritical, ineffective, self-enriching, unfair and increasingly authoritarian, while also marginalising attention to the kind of policies that might really help.”
Sorry, I could not get the link function to work today, so here is the link: https://jembendell.com/2023/07/10/breaking-together-for-free-and-my-launch-speech/
Thanks for the Jem Bendell link, Craig. Have called up his book from the public library.
Craig, thanks for this link.
The perverse incentives are equally grotesque in Humanities and Social Sciences. I work (worked?) in a science adjacent branch of philosophy–incidentally on the works of widely regarded as the ‘greatest American philosopher’, who is now only paid lip service in the academia. Two negative points for being from the third world, two more for working on the subject of the fundamentals of scientific practice (too broad for philosophy, apparently). The hyperspecialization means you can’t find post-docs in your broader interests, and because the job advertisements are so specific, your lack of experience is always available as an excuse for rejection. I quit and remain unemployed after trying and failing to comprehend the rules of this circus.
My favourite living philosopher, Susan Haack, has a bunch of interesting papers on the state of the discipline, which more and more looks like a sympotom of a broader rot in academia:
https://againstprofphil.org/2022/09/25/a-guest-essay-by-susan-haack-universities-research-imperative-paying-the-price-for-perverse-incentives/
In my experience another major obstacle to scientific research is that grants are all peer reviewed. This fosters goupthink and doing “safe” research over risky and, sometimes, controversial. It’s enough for one of the reviewers to disagree to tank the grant and reviewers are often older researchers who are less likely to be open to new ideas.
Some of them are treating them like an Amazon review, if any details are not to their liking they give the lowest possible score. I’ve had two NIH grants in the last couple of years where one out of three reviewers gave a 6 (equivalent to 1-star) to a grant proposal because, while they liked the technology we are developing, they disagreed with the experiment plan. It’s just wild.
An entomologist friend of mine at U.C. Berkeley specialized in the study and, if found safe to do so, introduction of exotic parasitic wasps that were obligate predators of the myriad exotic agricultural pest species here in California, one of the most invaded (or would that be welcoming) ecosystems on the planet. Others that he worked with in the study of pest species’ life cycles, developed timing methods for the application of pesticides that could reduce the quantities used by farmers by as much as 75%. None, or very little of this, produced patentable products. Their funding, therefore, was considerably less than was available to labs dedicated to the profit-driven production of pesticides or genetically modified organisms.
My friend was also very much interested in community outreach:
https://nature.berkeley.edu/cnrelp/Home.html
Indeed, many good points here. Some other thoughts:
1. One of the big issues is the rise of “soft” money positions for researchers. You need to get grants to pay your own salary – maybe even 90% of it. Administrators love this, they can treat researchers like landless peasants and a source of revenue – and researchers are forced to spend their time trying to get multiple grants when really only one should be enough. And it makes it impossible to start a research project that is not funded, or continue a long-term one past a gap in funding. The NIH should have insisted on some minimal level of institutional support for researchers, but now it’s so baked into the system there is probably no way back. And more and more ‘tenure’ is fake – your job is permanent, you just don’t get paid. Such a soft deal.
2. We have been pushing to produce ever more scientists, and why? We have more mediocre scientists than we need. We don’t need more scientists, we need fewer really good scientists. And we should limit the rate of future immigration. One is reminded that the immigration system that gave the United States people like Einstein and Fermi and Szilard etc. was a restrictive one – we let in the BEST scientists but keep the overall numbers moderate to avoid flooding the market. You can have quality, you can have quantity, but in the long run you can’t have both. What would Harvard be if it hired EVERY nominally qualified faculty applicant without regard for whether it had the resources to support them? It’s mostly industry and their insatiable lust for cheap labor that is responsible for this but still.
3. We need competition – but too much is toxic. When even the smartest scientists can’t see their way to earning an honest living, well, the system decays. The pressure to embellish or oversell results becomes overwhelming, people will leave for other countries (the best researchers from China are increasingly not coming/not staying), and more and more I see scientists dreaming more of becoming an administrator because you get a pay increase and get out of the rat race… Sure we need good administrators but when becoming the assistant dean for student testicle fondling is more attractive than being a faculty member in a basic science department, that doesn’t sound good. Ultimately science requires honor, and honor is ever the casualty of privation.
Hello,
Yes, where you have washed looks amazing! And yes. I’ll shift those things out of the garage so you can get a good go at it tomorrow.
All the other things you have mentioned. I feel very much out of my depth commenting.
xxxx is in charge of advising on grants. She is also in charge of hiring people and has driven an amazing. her husband, has to “fight”, or perhaps I should say, “compete” for money for his Lab. He is studying lung diseases especially cystic fibrosis and has had his Lab for a year. I know it cost a lot to set it up.
It’s interesting because I’ve seen it in the Arts Academic Circles. Academics have to find more and more esoteric subjects write about because the number of papers that have to be produced to keep one’s job is mind boggling! Research in Arts areas is just saturated.
Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow and I don’t think you are prattling on!!
My life … our lives …