Scientists Are Not Always Wise on Policy

A head buried in academia doing government-funded
research may not be good at public policy decisions

We owe much to working scientists who measure things, gather information and publish it. When done with integrity, scientific research becomes a foundation for informed “evidence-based” decision making by the government. Those two roles, however, are best left separate. A good illustration why appeared in one of Nature‘s journals recently.

Batteries show the difficulties of being greener (Editorial, Nature Materials, 2 Feb 2022). Governments have given money to researchers to get the scoop on climate change, and they have cheerfully obliged. The journals are filled with papers measuring temperatures, gathering data on weather trends, and finding the amount of particulate matter in tree canopies. Big Science (the academic deans, journal editors and society heads who pretend to “speak for science” along with science advocates in government) pass this along to international organizations and government leaders in the form of easily-digestible warnings: ‘The planet is warming! We’re all going to die! Do something!’ Asked what the primary problem is, the Big Science reps give the simplified summary, “It’s fossil fuels!” And so the government decides to reduce fossil fuels and promote electric vehicles. Problem solved?

A light must have come on in the editorial room of Nature Materials: ‘What have we done?’ Based on this editorial, they must be thinking, ‘Have we created another problem worse than the disease?”

With climate change firmly and urgently on the global agenda, there is plenty of discussion about how to regulate industries to reduce their carbon footprint. That debate is particularly intense in the transport sector, where electrification is becoming a priority. The European Union (EU), for example, is planning to require that all new cars sold from 2035 have zero carbon emissions — a bold and valuable goal, but one that will demand the rapid development of both vehicle-charging infrastructure and battery production. At the same time, the EU has proposed new regulations on battery technologies that aim to also make the industry more sustainable and less polluting. These goals are laudable, but not everyone is persuaded that they add up to a coherent strategy.

Simplistic questions can have simplistic answers. The editors are realizing what this means: electric cars are going to need lots of batteries. Batteries don’t just appear on the shelves of auto parts stores; they have to be manufactured. What does that require? It takes a lot of lithium for the leading lithium-ion technology. If the EU wants to (1) reduce carbon emissions and (2) have non-polluting batteries and (3) have lots of them, they will need to pick any two – or maybe just one. Trying to get all of these is an incoherent strategy. And that’s not all. The EU doesn’t have the ingredients; they have to shop the international market.

But here’s the problem: Europe is not especially well situated to optimize compliance with the new demands. It does not, for example, have a strong domestic market for lithium: global supplies of the metal come mostly from Australia, Chile and China. Portugal is the only substantial European source, but its annual production is barely 4% of that of Australia. So battery companies will need to ensure that their raw materials are produced in ways that meet the standards even though the key suppliers are not themselves bound by EU laws.

This creates perverse incentives for electric car manufacturers to offload the responsibility for green energy to foreign governments with lax standards of “sustainability” and non-polluting practices.

The irony is that by placing stringent regulations on the still-emerging battery and electric-vehicle industries to enforce the desirable goal of making them more environmentally friendly, they might end up having to cope with more challenging constraints than the existing transportation industries relying on fossil fuels.

Imagine that! The solution could be worse than the problem. Where has government done THAT before? Probe recent memory for a big example (hint: read this paper from Johns Hopkins University).

The editors are realizing that maybe Big Science was promoting government electrification policies without sufficient forethought. Maybe private enterprise was the solution after all. Policy makers should have relaxed the reins and given the horse his head.

The bottom line is that if you want an industry or a technology to grow, you generally have to allow it some latitude in the early days. Excessively rigid restrictions on how it may operate can stifle its ability to adapt and compete. Holding European battery manufacturers to high standards is a noble aim, but becomes self-defeating if it sets the bar too high for them to compete in the global marketplace.

A big part of healthy competition is innovation. Governments are not very good at that (video). Bureaucrats love writing rules about what manufacturers must do to comply with government policy decisions, but think: “a suite of carefully constructed regulations on materials is pointless if technical advances quickly render them obsolete.”

Far be it from a Nature journal to advocate “capitulation to a dangerous laissez-faire” (capitalism). But like Lenin learned the hard way, socialism isn’t very good at economic policy. Whenever he relaxed the stifling regulations on free markets, things got better… long enough for him to catch his breath and clamp down again.

We need scientists, but we must keep them out of government strategy rooms. Wise leaders need to weigh scientific knowledge (if it is knowledge) against a host of other factors. Scientists are too close to their own piece of the puzzle to have enough wisdom for such decisions.

The real culprits in this fiasco are the Big Science power brokers. They don’t know all the details coming from hundreds (thousands?) of climate papers. They selectively pick the most alarming bits of data to force governments’ hands to ‘do something.’ They make fossil fuels the bogeyman, and propose globalist leftist solutions because of their disdain for free markets. Result? Western prosperity gets shipped to China, which uses slave labor and commits genocide and slavery, and carbon footprints don’t really change much.