Professor Rowland, science, and policy change

Having worked in Professor Rowland's group as an undergraduate at UC Irvine, I would be remiss in not saying something this week after his passing.

I spent a few quarters working in his labs between 1994-1995 (and was fortunate enough to be around when his Nobel Prize was awarded!). Those experiences were my first taste of research that "really mattered". I had another project I was working on simultaneously in the Engineering department, having something generically to do with microelectronics, but when I took a step back, I asked myself, "Who cares about this?" I wanted to be working on a project, in whatever capacity possible, that had real societal impact. Studying and measuring the impacts of air pollutants just seemed a hell of a lot more important to me. While later in my career in graduate school and as a postdoc I drifted away from atmospheric chemistry, those early experiences were formative, and I still aligned myself with research that I believed mattered (solar energy, water purification).

Whenever I think of my research experience in Rowland's group, it both inspires me for what is possible when science drives policy making, but also discourages me, considering the sorry state of affairs we're in right now. I continue to be blown away at how comparatively easy it was to go from the discovery of ozone-depleting reactions by Rowland, Molina and colleagues, to the discovery of a hole in our ozone layer, to later passing the Montreal Protocol. While I'm sure those events felt like an eternity to those guys between the late 70s to late 80s, they are going to seem like a blink of the eye relative to how much time we're going to continue to filibuster on the issue of climate change. More specifically, the anthropogenic causes of increases in atmospheric CO2 (and other more potent greenhouse gases) and its resulting impact on global temperatures. See this article in Tech Review for additional historical perspective.

How was it that we managed to muster enough will to get the Montreal Protocol passed? What was different then compared to today? You still had large corporate lobbies and interests to fight against. For example,

The chair of the board of DuPont was quoted as saying that ozone depletion theory is 'a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense' (Source)

I think the popular explanation here is that politics was less polarized back in the 80s. That feels too simple and sentimental an explanation. However, I do have this gut feeling that at least science was not as politicized back then. Politicians were smart enough to realize that they weren't smart enough to issue well informed opinions on technical matters themselves.

What changed then? For all the positive attention it has brought to the issue of climate change, Al Gore's work in 90s may have flipped the switch and turned science into politics. I believe it to be mostly well-intentioned - you're passionate and well informed about a topic, you have political clout, so you want to get the message out and see if you can drive change. Sadly, not all politicians "did their homework" as much as Gore did on this subject, and so subsequently you had every bonehead on The Hill weigh in with their take on global warming.

I've proposed this wacky idea before, but a scientific literacy test for Congressman might help. You just have ask the question, are these politicians really that poorly informed about "real science", or are they just pretending to be obtuse and playing the political game? If you assume the former, we can try to inculcate some science into politicians or try to convince a scientist to become a politician. But while politicians today liken themselves to armchair scientists, I'm not sure any self-respecting, successful scientist would want anything to do with the practice of politics.

Why do we blog?

Countless people have covered this subject before, but after trying this blogging thing for a few months, I thought it important to ask myself, "Why am I doing this?", and, appropriately, put those thoughts into a blog.

I've noticed that numerous thoughts and ideas enter my head every day about almost any subject.  Occasionally, one of those is actually useful and I try to make a mental note to contemplate that later. Of course, as one would expect, the thought vanishes almost as quickly as you tell yourself to make that note. This is where the blogging comes in.

I think of blogging like I do a dream journal. They say you can never remember your dreams (and begin the rich process of figuring out what they tell you about the skeletons in your closet), unless you jot them down on a notepad.

Blogging about my thoughts and ideas, regardless of whether I have an audience, is a tremendous focusing exercise. It helps you make concise what might otherwise be a series of incoherent, disconnected concepts, because you never know, someone might actually be paying attention to all of your babbling.

It's the rate that matters!!!

I say it week after week, but another great post this week by Tom Murphy (UCSD Physics Professor) on our fossil fuels dilemma. He reviews the Hirsch report, which outlines the peak oil problem and its ramifications. To review, peak oil occurs when we are roughly halfway through our conventional oil supply, and it is at that point that the production peak (the maximum rate of extraction) is reached.

Among the solutions offered to the peak oil problems are: increased vehicle efficiency, enhanced oil recovery, heavy oil and oil sands, coal liquefaction, and gas-to-liquid conversion. If one examines some of these options from a purely supply point of view (e.g., our now seemingly inexhaustible natural gas reserves), one naively reaches the conclusion that our problems are solved for decades or centuries.

This thinking ignores the rate side of the equation and the related problem of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). When you switch from a resource like conventional petroleum that offers a 100:1 ratio to as low as 5:1 for heavy oil/tar sands, you impact the rate at which that resource can be tapped into, no matter how large the supply might be (in theory).

And it is precisely the saturation and eventual decline in our rate of production of fuels that poses the biggest challenge to us (globally) right now. We have not faced such a dilemma before, as we have continued more-or-less unabated on a 2-3% global energy growth curve for many many decades.

The inability of some of our policy makers to see this is frustrating to me, being someone who is a scientist/engineer by training. Or perhaps they do see this and are just feigning ignorance about the problem?

Perhaps they could benefit from an introductory calculus class where they would begin to appreciate analogies like - a car with a 300 mile range that's only capable of going 1mph, or a car with a top speed of 100mph that takes the better part of an hour to reach said speed.

It's the rate that matters people!

The (Broken) Academic Publishing System

One thing many scientists have been griping about for a while is the broken system we have for disseminating scientific information. Among the complaints:

• Motivation - The peer-review system does not sufficiently motivate reviewers to provide a critical review of papers. It is far easier to sing the praises of a paper and spend half the time reviewing it, than to trash it.
• Quality - There is a little too much of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" dynamic at play. Authors that have historically produced high quality work often get follow-on publications rubber stamped by reviewers, just on the basis of reputation, not on the individual merits of the work in review. There has also been a flood of "me too" journals, perhaps in response to complaints about cost, that publish arguably inferior work to their more well known counterparts.
• Money - The large publishers, like Elsevier, charge institutions and individuals an arm and a leg for journal subscriptions and individual articles (exceeding >$100 per article in some cases!). Only the largest of institutions can afford these, leaving the curious, scientifically-minded taxpayer who funds this research out of the loop.

How do we fix this? There is a growing movement for an open-source model to academic publishing that has worked in other disciplines like code development. One such example is arXiv, which began in Physics and has spread to other disciplines. From their website:

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Submissions to arXiv must conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is funded by Cornell University Library and by supporting user institutions. The National Science Foundation funds research and development by Cornell Information Science. 

arXiv has its own scientific advisory board and has "published" over 700,000 e-print articles to date, seeming to have all the trappings of a legitimate publisher.

In disciplines like particle physics, particularly with the experiments coming out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the open-source movement is well established and has a legitimacy associated with it. Why is that? Well, a project like the LHC involves many hundreds of researchers spread out across the world, was funded by several countries, and involves experiments whose finding are potentially so important (e.g., the discovery of gravitons) that the results must be widely and easily disseminated. Without the input of many other researchers, many of whom will attempt to replicate the results disclosed, no one will trust the legitimacy of those papers.

Unfortunately, not all research is this high impact and involves as much investment from the scientific community, and that is the uphill challenge we face. While the system works and is necessary in these specialized sub-disciplines of Physics, the key question is, how do you motivate scientists in other disciplines who have results worthy of a top-tier journal (like Science or Nature) to publish their results in an open-source journal? Why on earth would an Assistant Professor do that, and potentially jeopardize their tenure? Well, they wouldn't.

Hopefully, with the involvement of enough well published scientists (and a few Nobel Laureates thrown in there) we can start to build some steam in other fields like Chemistry and Biology.

The difference between cleantech and other sectors

Below is one of the best statements I've heard that captures the challenge for cleantech companies versus those in other sectors (by Bob Walker of Sierra Ventures). This came at TiE Energy event where several VCs weighed in on the challenges in cleantech:

"We are used to companies that are powered by Moore’s Law that sell into an entrepreneurial environment. Intel, Google, Samsung, and LG [all] have an entrepreneurial core. They’ve got to come up with the next cell phone or display technology. These are industries where if you miss a product cycle or two, you are dead. A lot of the industries that we consider cleantech don’t operate that way."

Being the founder of a company in the water space with a new membrane technology, these statements certainly resonate with me. Pick your clean technology, whether it's a new membrane or a new energy storage device, and an associated metric (flux, energy/density, etc...) and you'll see anything but Moore's Law-like performance improvement.

Moore's Law transistor count growth curve, courtesy Wikipedia. Transistor count roughly doubled every two year, while chip performance (a function of number of transistors and their relative speed) doubled every 18 months.

For example, in the reverse osmosis membrane industry, the improvement in seawater membrane element productivity (that is, number of gallons per day a spiral wound element can produce) has averaged roughly 3% per year for the last 3 decades, as compared to the 60% per year performance improvement given by Moore's Law.

Why is this the case? Well, it may partly reflect the relative lack of innovation in the water and energy sectors relative to computing, but there are also hard physical limits many of the technologies work up against that will not budge, no matter how hard we try. Going back to the water example, energy/pressure reduction is one of great challenges in membrane-based desalination (reverse-osmosis) right now. However, currently technology is only within 50% of the theoretical (thermodynamic) minimum, and practical constraints limit the potential energy reduction to less than 50%.

To practicing VCs in clean tech, I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm not sure these points are well internalized by the industry as a whole and perhaps society at-large. Order(s) of magnitude  performance improvements are not to be expected (in many cases) and timelines for prototype development/evaluation operate on fundamentally longer time scales than, say, the beta-release of an IT/Social Media product.

I think it's important for all of us to be properly calibrated as to what to expect of innovation in the clean tech sector and evaluate emerging technologies and investments therein accordingly.

Clean Tech Bust?

There's been much talk this week about the "clean tech bust", particularly after the article in Wired by Juliet Eilperin (national environmental reporter for the Washington Post). While some of underlying macro-trends (huge boost in domestic natural gas production) behind this are undeniable, we can't carry the bubble analogy too far here. Doing so masks very different underlying causes for the internet boom/bust of the 2000s and the current challenges in clean tech. I prefer the term "challenges" over "bust" so as to differentiate it from what happened in the internet sector and because "bust" has a more fatalistic connotation in my mind.

The internet boom was fueled by an explosion of companies with very low capital barriers to entry for investors. This led to a multitude of companies with no clear path to profitability, or in many cases, no business plan of any kind. The advantage here compared to other investment sectors was that the product (e.g. a search engine), or at least a beta version of it, could be developed quickly and the "business experiment" could be run in relatively short order. As an investor you were taking a big market risk here (with the technology risk relatively small), but you could do so on the cheap and get feedback quickly.

In clean tech, we have somewhat the reverse problem. Companies on the supply-side of energy will ultimately have huge capital requirements, and this has posed a huge barrier to entry for many investors. The comparatively long development horizon for most of these cleantech companies (~10 years to exit) means you don't have that quick feedback mechanism offered by the internet/IT investments. Thus, you may not discover flaws in your business model assumptions until $10M-100M of capital has been sunk in a given company. Nevertheless, what keeps investors engaged is the view of a clear, huge market opportunity as everyone uses kWh's, while not everyone absolutely needs those products of the internet boom. Investors have to be sold on this end-game. They must subscribe to ideas like "peak oil", suggesting that conventional petroleum prices will eventually rise once the easily-extracted reserves begin to dwindle, allowing renewables to reach cost-parity or ultimately become cheaper.

Another area where I think clean tech faces unique (but not insurmountable) hurdles relative to internet/IT concerns the lobbying efforts and influence of the incumbents. Take any example you like from the internet-age - say traditional print media battling online publishers, the recording industry battling distributors of digital music - and I would offer that that pales in comparison to the pressures exerted by the petroleum industry on the renewables industry. There's just a different order of magnitude of dollars at stake here.

All this being said, I think we are simply going through the inevitable growing pains that comes with a new technology sector and I remain optimistic about the future of clean-tech.

Energy growth

From Monday, September 26th 2011...

With much of the focus in clean-tech on the supply-side of the energy equation, i.e. how can we generate more kW-h?, I think we still don't pay enough attention to the demand-side. This is changing, as investments are happening at the interface of IT/energy, such as the clever, consumer-friendly devices made by Nest. But more broadly speaking, I think there is still a pervasive notion that scaling back our energy needs means a loss in productivity, and this is driven by some pretty telling correlations, e.g. see energy use vs GDP. Yes, there is a correlation, but we are going to have to figure out how to get off that trendline soon.

There is certainly lip service being paid to the idea of energy efficiency, but the calculations by Tom Murphy (UCSD Physics Professor) in this post really highlight how increased efficiency and a consequent reduction in energy demand is really the only way we're going to tackle what would eventually become an existential crisis. In a nutshell, if we don't reduce our energy growth rate (~3% annually), the Earth will become a downright inhospitable place in a matter of a couple of centuries. This is just simple thermodynamics, never mind the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Now the critic will of course jump on some of the assumptions made and tell us we're smarter than "frogs in a pot of boiling water", but it's quite conceivable our climate system is more complicated than we imagine, with various positive feedback loops that could exacerbate the problem before we reach consensus that things are getting hot.

While not a perfect analogy here, the problem we face is reminiscent of Pascal's wager. While our error bars on various predictions may be huge, this uncertainty must be normalized by the consequences of being wrong. One way of being wrong has us putting billions or trillions of dollars into a new energy infrastructure to reduce per capita energy usage and weans us off a finite resource, even if there is no climate impact; the other way of being wrong has the human race in 10-15 generations looking longingly at one of those recently discovered Earth-like planets.

Getting back to the original point, Prof. Murphy's post really drives home the point that, while our efforts in supply-side energy solutions are clearly important in the near-term, a true long-term solution will require our energy growth rate to slow. Here's hoping we find a way to do so.