A new US National Laboratory for What?

The Biden administration has proposed Department of Energy programs that were never requested and for which there is little scientific justification.

President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $35 million to start planning a new national laboratory to study the impact of climate change on poor communities. The new lab would be aimed at resolving problems facing “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.”

Sounds laudable. About time? Actually not.

The first hint that this attempt at social justice is, from a scientific perspective, misplaced, may come from the recognition that the Department of Energy, which administers all US National Laboratories, never requested the money in the first place, and never suggested this was a realistic or worthwhile expenditure for scientific resources. 

One gets the sense that the Biden administration is searching for ways to spend money to fulfill its Justice40 initiative, which will funnel “40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments” to such ‘distressed and marginalized’ communities.

While, on the surface it might seem that this scientific study could be a good way to invest in these communities, the utility diminishes once you think about things in more detail. 

Former Harvard Engineering Dean Cherry Murray was the head of DOE’s Office of Science, which manages 10 of the national labs, from 2015-2017, and pointed out that ‘Current global climate models don’t provide enough spatial resolution to allow local policymakers to come up with plans tailored to the needs of their constituents.’ As she put it in a Science Magazine report about the new Biden proposal “Coming up with community-scale climate models is a huge challenge,” Murray says. “Nobody knows how to do that now.” 

This is a massive understatement. Global climate models that might accurately resolve regional impacts are challenging, and become more so the finer the resolution of one’s simulation. While it is currently possible to infer large scale differential effects—in the tropics vs northern climes, for example, or the potential for rainfall changes in Africa or the US Southwest—it is well beyond the capabilities of current simulations, and likely always will be, to focus on climate at the level of individual urban areas. 

As Murray noted, again in an understated way, inferring community effects is especially challenging in heterogeneous urban environments. Put more succinctly, climate change will have the essentially same the same physical impact on the south side of Chicago as in the wealthier suburbs, just as it will in Harlem vs Park Avenue. What will differ will be the ability to respond to these impacts. 

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a multi-billion dollar laboratory, to surmise that the differential effects of climate change on communities will not be physical in nature, but societal. Mediating the impacts of climate change in poor communities will depend on better access to medical care, transportation improvements, and improved availability of good food and housing. These are all laudable goals, but they don’t require a National Laboratory, much less one that is not likely to be able to provide any truly relevant scientific insights. It is not brain surgery, or multibillion dollar science to realize that ameliorating the plight of poor and disadvantaged people requires inputs of funds and improved infrastructure and access to services.

But creating a National Laboratory that appears to address a politically expedient goal is not the only bit of bad science policy here. It has also been proposed that such a laboratory should be located at a historically black institution. 

As Murray noted in the Science piece, even assuming the desired goal was computational possible, it is impractical to imagine that such research at the limits of what is computational possible would be easily achievable by starting from scratch at an institution that has little or no traditional expertise in these areas. As she put it, “Building up the necessary computing capacity is going to be very expensive. And then you also need to have the administrative expertise to manage a national lab.” 

Murray suggested a more rational mechanism for improving the research climate at historically black colleges, by allowing them more easily to gain access to facilities and scientific expertise at existing national laboratories. 

But that would be a measured and rational approach. It would not play in a climate that seems to prioritize virtue signaling over sound science policy.