Center for a New American Security

Over the last several months, Dr. Jay Gulledge and I have been exploring the gap between climate science and security policy through our Lost in Translation project. The central tenet of our project and forthcoming report is that there are fundamental ways in which the climate science and policy communities operate that make it very difficult to get the right information they need from each other in order for the two communities to work together in a mutually supportive effort. And though the scope of our project focuses more narrowly on climate scientists and the decision makers who are increasingly using climate science to guide policy decisions, what we have come to notice through our exploration of the relationship between science and policy writ large is that, generally speaking, the foundation of our argument rings true for the broader science and policy communities. Indeed, there are specific aspects of climate science that make it unique compared to the broader gap between science and policy, but that scientists and policy makers tend to have difficulty working together is not an unfamiliar claim.

With that said, over the last several weeks we have met with folks who actually confound this paradigm and facilitate collaboration between the two communities. I wrote last week on the blog that we were on travel in Colorado where we visited with officials at U.S. Northern Command and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. During our visit we met with folks who have demonstrated that there are indeed strong relationships between scientists and decision makers at these places, relationships that cross this gap between the science and policy communities, in support of addressing serious national security challenges. 

At U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which includes North America in its area of resposibility, scientists and decision makers are working together to address a range of national security challenges. But one challenge in particular that we noted cooperation around was electrical grid security and addressing the threats posed to the Department of Defense by its dependence on the commercial electric grid. As I reported on the blog in November:

99 percent of the energy consumed by DOD installations is generated from outside the installation, while 85 percent of the energy infrastructure that DoD relies on is commercially owned. This bodes poorly for the Department given that, according to the DSB Task Force on DoD Energy Strategy, the commercial power grid is “brittle, increasingly centralized, capacity-strained, and largely unprotected from physical attack, with little stockpiling of critical hardware.” (quoted in Defense Critical Infrastructure, p. 13)

Just a relatively short drive north of NORTHCOM is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a Department of Energy laboratory, where scientists are taking energy security (including grid security) very seriously in their portfolio of work. In fact, in support of NORTHCOM’s mission to look at electric grid security, NREL has a liaison who works inside NORTHCOM to provide the staff deep technical expertise on these issues to help decision makers at the command working on these issues to have a more robust understanding of the scientific and technical challenges behind electric grid security. What is more, working inside the command offers the NREL liaison a better understanding of how the command and the Department of Defense writ large operate. From our brief visit, it was clear that this was a well-developed and functioning relationship.

But NREL’s cooperation with the Department extends beyond just electric grid security. In fact, one NREL scientist has been working closely with the Marine Energy Assessment Team to provide a scientific basis for near- and long-term energy efficiency and conservation measures that can be implemented at forward operating bases in Afghanistan in order to stem the consequences of a long logistics tail that exacerbates the financial and human costs of the war.

According to a Department of Energy blog post, Dr. John Barnett “represented a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory [NREL] on a military-led team working in a war zone, helping to solve operational problems with his expertise in energy efficiency and renewables.” Indeed, in our conversation with Dr. Barnett when we visited with him at NREL, it was clear that his exposure working with the military has also helped fostered a better understanding of how the military operates and what is considered a practical solution in the field.

The bottom line message that I took away from what these folks at NORTHCOM and NREL are accomplishing by navigating across the gap between science and policy is this: when it comes to serious national security challenges like grid security and operational energy, the two communities indeed have the capacity to confound expectations and work together in support of our national security. And if these two communities can do this around grid security and operational energy, then crossing the gap between climate science and security policy may not be a bridge too far at all.

Photo: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO. Courtesy of NREL.