To figure out how best to address climate change, federal climate funding is crucial. But government granting agencies are increasingly at the mercy of climate deniers.
Scientists study the effects of climate change on coral in Miami, Florida, on February 23, 2018. (Emily Michot / Miami Herald / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Record-breaking temperatures and billion-dollar climate disasters occurring every three weeks in 2024 have even climate skeptics in the United States scratching their sweaty heads. Climate change is claiming lives and land: fires in New Mexico have burned over seventeen thousand acres, extreme heat caused an estimated 175 deaths in Phoenix in June, and Beryl became the earliest hurricane on record to hit the Atlantic United States in a calendar year. To address the crisis, Americans depend on interactions between government and academic science. But the truth is that those interactions are woefully inefficient, leading to delays in climate change mitigation and deepening public distrust in scientific climate research.
The greatest expertise in climate science resides in academic institutions, where professors and their graduate students toil away in university departments and labs. They address climate change both by educating the next generation and by producing knowledge through research. That knowledge then mitigates climate change through government action. “I’ve always seen [government] grants, especially federal basic research grants, as a critical part of the scientific fabric,” says Dr Adam Subhas, professor of oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the nonprofit ocean science arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In climate science, research grants come from a variety of government branches, reaching as far as the Department of Defense and Highway Administration, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) is primarily where academic scientists go to fund basic research. This basic research sets the foundation for our understanding of how the climate works and ideally informs policy.
Government and academic science thus operate mutualistically to address climate change: academic scientists depend on government funding to conduct research, and the government relies on academic scientists to determine necessary courses of action. However, government granting agencies like the NSF are increasingly at the mercy of climate-denying wings of the US Congress and operate on timelines that are ineffective at dealing with the urgency of climate change and that delay climate action.
Scientists deciding the fate of grant funding at the NSF are bound by the limitations of working with Congress, explains Dr Taylor McGlynn, an ecology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “The central challenge is that there are climate change deniers in Congress,” he said, adding that the NSF has to make complex scientific research digestible to those climate-denying lawmakers in order to minimize negative interactions with them. This often results in the oversimplification of climate science and can cause research projects that are not central to solving the most pressing issues of climate change to receive funding. Worse still, the less than 25 percent of Congress that denies the climate change reality pushes misinformation about climate science, while continuing to subsidize fossil fuels at the expense of funding for solutions to climate science.
The pace of government funding is also problematic. It takes a few years — and up to ten — to fund an idea through the NSF, depending on the scale of the project. Yet the research itself has to produce results relatively swiftly, often in three- or five-year increments, explained McGlynn. That leaves little room for creativity or collaboration. What’s more, while short-term goals are well suited to the cycles of Congress, such structures prevent climate researchers from examining the big picture. After all, climate change, while accelerating rapidly, does not occur overnight. And science relies on long-term datasets to properly incorporate seasonality and large-scale global processes like the Polar Jet Stream or El Nino Southern Oscillation.
The struggling relationship between government and academic science is pushing climate science into new territory. Climate scientists are now looking to funding sources outside of government grants. Subhas explains that more transformative climate science in recent years has been “spearheaded by foundations and philanthropic groups in a way that none of the federal agencies have had an appetite for.” These foundations will often fund riskier technology, move faster than the government, and speak louder when it comes to results and outcomes. This thrust toward exploratory technological adaptations is also being seen in venture capital groups and start-ups entering the climate change space.
And so, with more money have come more problems, as the adage goes. “All this money has started getting directed toward start-ups in this capitalist way: we’ll seed a bunch of companies, they’re probably going to fail, and something will come out of it,” Subhas said. This new venture capitalist climate research, via competition within and outside of academia, can speed the pace of science, but it can also have its problems. Dr Subhas explained that “it’s really challenging to have any sort of scientific community input and consensus in the same way that the peer review process operates for government agencies like NSF,” and as a result, while some areas of climate science are taking off quickly, they aren’t helping to mitigate the crisis.
One example of this is kelp farming, which has been lauded as an atmospheric carbon mitigation strategy. Now highly incentivized by the US government, it has taken off wildly as an industry in the private sector.
The basic idea is that via photosynthesis, kelp will draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it within the aquatic plant’s organic material. The part that most people miss is that as the kelp decomposes — either on land or in the ocean — the supposedly sequestered carbon dioxide is released straight back into the atmosphere.
That means that even if we farmed all available US waters with kelp, it wouldn’t even make a dent, explains aquaculturist and citizen-scientist Dr Dan Ward. “It’s just stoichiometry,” Ward said. He continued, “When it comes to these solutions being put forward by industry and start-ups, there’s no path. The people that understand how these things work on global scales know that there is no path for kelp, but the people running the start-ups don’t. The people funding this, be it NSF or venture capitalists, they don’t know either.”
Kelp farming raised $130 million in venture investments in 2023, but in peer-reviewed academic science literature, it has been found that “any carbon removal capacity provided by seaweed farms globally is likely to be offset by their emissions.”
Ask almost any climate scientist and they will tell you that the solutions to climate change are in hand. The bottom-line solution is to stop using fossil fuels, stop emitting greenhouse gasses, and dismantle rampant consumerism, especially surrounding plastics. The United States is wildly behind all targets to address any of these objectives and is projected to spend $18 billion on oil and gas in 2024, compared to $1.2 billion in funding for projects that reduce air pollution. As Ward says, “We’re bailing out a boat, but the water is flowing in faster than we’re pulling it back out. We need to equalize that equation first.”
By targeting Congress-friendly climate research, government-funded academic science effectively distracts the public from actual solution-driven work. With technological solutions as its carrot, academic science draws funds — government, philanthropic, venture capital — away from initiatives centered around changing behavior. Instead of funding projects centered around flashy technology or promising large datasets, government funding and privately funded science initiatives need to be more socially minded (despite the fact that the social sciences are notoriously disregarded by funding agencies).
At this point, we don’t need massive innovations in science to change climate, but massive shifts in mindset. To do that, academic science needs to get out of the weeds and onto the ground so that scientific minds can begin to mend the broken trust this funding circus has created.