“Don’t forget long-term fundamental research in energy”

Enthusiastic announcements from the United Nations climate summit in Paris have been promising planetwide public and private cooperation to achieve clean-energy advances quickly. One news report declared that the envisioned public financing and private backing “are likely to constitute the biggest investments in clean energy technologies in history.” But some journalists—and some technoscience stakeholders and leaders—appear to be scanting the basic-research component. This occasional tendency in the public discussion seems worth noticing whether or not the public needs to learn technically about the places where nature itself must be probed, and whatever the probing choices funders will actually make.

Back in 2007, George M. Whitesides of Harvard and George W. Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory warned explicitly against scanting basic research in the climate-and-energy realm. In Science, they published the article “Don’t forget long-term fundamental research in energy.” They stressed that “achieving a fundamental understanding of the phenomena that will underpin both global stewardship and future technologies in energy calls for a thoughtful balance between large-scale immediate solutions using existing technology and the fundamental research needed to provide better solutions in the 50-year period.”

Half a century? Observers and experts in the media discussion today would call that way too slow. It’s easy to find enthusiasm about “the biggest investments in clean energy technologies in history,” as quoted above, but harder to find enthusiasm about historic investments in basic research for clean energy. India.com , serving a claimed 28 million unique users, headlined an article “Tens of billions of dollars promised to boost clean energy technology to fight global warming.” The New York Times headlined an Associated Press report “Countries, investors pledge billions for clean energy tech.”

Possibly the best known of those investors is Bill Gates. He often emphasizes basic research, but he told the Wall Street Journal that “there’s a sense of urgency.” He used, and dismissed, the half-century framing: “Usually it takes 50 years. We have to move faster than that.” The lead sentence in a Washington Post article about the Paris announcements cited “an urgent search for solutions.”

Whitesides and Crabtree understood that urgency. They responded in their 2007 Science article by affirming the central, practical importance of fundamental scientific understanding for engaging energy and climate:

Whitesides and Crabtree briefly discussed their own “personal and idiosyncratic” list of “representative long-term problems in research that are vital to the development of future technology for energy.” Their list of the places where nature needs deeper probing included:

* The oxygen electrode problem

* Catalysis by design

* Transport of charge and excitation

* Chemistry of CO₂

* Improving on photosynthesis

* Complex systems

* The efficiency of energy use

* The chemistry of small molecules

Whatever the status today of each of those specific basic-research desiderata, comparable specificity has been rare in the media discussion that has followed the Paris announcements. The Financial Times did mention Gates’s interest in the research group of Nate Lewis at Caltech, which says of itself that it studies “ways to harness sunlight to generate chemical fuel, specifically by splitting water to generate hydrogen.” And Joby Warrick of the Washington Post, after interviewing Gates in Paris, reported that Gates “faulted governments and private industry alike for stinting on basic research into new technologies for generating, storing and transmitting energy.” Warrick noted that “Gates’s list of ‘cool’ innovations” included “solar-chemical technology, which converts the sun’s energy into hydrocarbons that can be stored and used as fuel.” But after hearing Gates say that “there are about 20 different things like that,” Warrick apparently didn’t press for specificity about, or even mention of, any of the other 19.

In the public discussion, specificity about the basic-research probing of nature to achieve clean-energy advances would require deeper science explanations—and it would force a focus on the R in R&D, just when the hubbub is celebrating the D and the hoped-for practical results. Nevertheless, when Gates summarized the overall clean-energy initiative for the Guardian in the UK, he emphasized basic research explicitly. Implicitly he also emphasized the linear model of progress, with basic research supplying new fundamental knowledge that applied researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and others use for developing new technology. Though the linear model is often seen as oversimplified, a comment in the Washington political publication The Hill from Obama adviser Brian Deese echoed Gates’s reliance on it. The San Francisco Chronicle article “How the Bay Area could benefit from Bill Gates’ climate pledge” ended with an implicit acknowledgment of it. That piece proposed that a “huge shift, a pretty fundamental shift” had taken the focus “away from early-stage investment and into deployment,” but that both the public and private initiatives newly announced in Paris had begun to reemphasize “early-stage innovation.”

Still, in the recent media coverage, it’s easy to find discouragement about the time lag in the linear model. At the New York Times in the front-page Science Times article “A path for climate change, beyond Paris,” Justin Gillis reported that analysts at the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project , based in Paris and New York, “made a point of ruling out energy miracles, such as technologies like nuclear fusion that could help enormously if they became available but are still largely on the drawing board.” A commentary at the National Public Radio website didn’t demote basic-research breakthroughs to the “miracle” category, but did contain this passage disparaging government-funded basic energy research:

At the New York Times, Gillis reported that 20 countries pledged to double their “investment in basic energy research.” But in fact those countries’ Mission Innovation home page says, under the heading “Government Leadership,” that the focus is “transformational clean energy technology innovations.” The page does advertise research and development, but neither there nor on the “Joint Launch Statement” page does any of the adjectives basic, fundamental, or pure appear.

Besides Gates, the investment-pledging business leaders involved—under the name “Breakthrough Energy Coalition"—include Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Their webpage makes plain their impatience with lag times, starting with those imposed in the linear model. The page declares that the “existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks, and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilize investment in truly transformative energy solutions for the future. We can’t wait for the system to change through normal cycles.”

Still, that page does call for “aggressive increases in government funding for basic and applied energy research, which can lead to breakthrough technologies for our energy future.” The Breakthrough Coalition summarizes the overall plan:

So what will actually constitute that “dramatically scaled-up public research pipeline”? It’s important to note again that anecdotal monitoring of the media discussion can yield little information about that. But unless the planet really is in extremis—and maybe even if it is—possibly it’s also important to note again what Whitesides and Crabtree advised: “In the rush to do something—to find technological solutions to global-scale problems—we should not forget that we must ultimately understand them, if we are to find the most effective, sustainable solutions.”

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.