After the fire

In the middle of a dry September night in 1970, I watched my grandmother’s house burn. The house was huge, nearly 60 feet at the peak of the roof. The fire was all-consuming.

The place had seen history and been part of history. It started as an ordinary inn. The British General, Charles Cornwallis, had camped on the grounds en route to Yorktown during the American Revolution.

At 200 years old, the structure was neither well-kept nor rotten. It was an enormous pile of fuel built of drying pine and cypress. The wood in the house was full of natural resins that kept it from rotting in the wet heat of North Carolina.

The fire started in a single room.

There was no phone. The lone caretaker who lived there ran to the fire station, a long block away, to report the disaster.

The fire department arrived quickly. At the start it seemed easy to extinguish. They ran hoses from the hydrant. They turned on the water and the hydrants were dry.

With that delay, the house was lost. Soon, we knew it would be best to just let the place burn completely. Don’t waste the water, but that was not the nature of the fire fighters.

Then, the fire began to creep across the dry grass toward the old hotel a couple of hundred yards away. At that point, it was time to contain the damage.

We set the fire

In a recent column, I wrote about disruptive events, catastrophes. Here in 2025, we have arrived at a climate policy catastrophe.

We are watching the burning of our scientific institutions. And we set the fire.

If there is a fire department concerned about the destruction, it is not effective.

They have no water in their hoses.

New fires are constantly being set.

It is too early to predict the ultimate damage caused by this anti-climate disaster. But, the intent seems to be total destruction.

Fueling the fire

I was a government manager for 15 years. A management consultant for another 15 years. I was hired into management positions to change organizations — to focus fragmented expertise on institutional goals.

Many times I felt that tearing something down and starting over would be easier than steering an entrenched organization in a new direction.

However, I had no successful examples within government to draw from or point to that would support such destruction. Most evidence showed the opposite.

Simultaneously, I was skeptical of new initiatives and new money. My experience was that they pulled organizations in new directions. They were as likely to feed the entrenched fragmentation as they were to help focus efforts.

Fragmentation is built into our scientific organizations because funding sources and reporting are fragmented. Fragmentation plays well with scientists pursuing their research. Then, use of that research falls to someone else.

Though fragmented and siloed, since World War II, the U.S. developed government research capacity that was second to none. Pockets of American excellence led the world.

Groundbreaking findings contributed to the nation’s economic well-being and public health.

Research contributed to national security and environmental security.

The current administration’s actions only erode scientific advancement, with no benefit to the scientific mission. We are losing scientific contributions to national security and environmental security.

No efficiency is being gained.

Rebuilding trust

Many individuals in government science who resign, retire, or get dismissed will find new positions elsewhere. They are among the world’s best scientists. Some are likely to make much more money.

Foreign countries, economic and scientific competitors, will recruit them.

Many foreign nationals will return to their homelands and grow centers of excellence there that will outpace the U.S. and lead the world.

Even if the U.S. government decides to build or rebuild capacity, trust in our institutions is lost.

To adapt, grow, and thrive after this kind of catastrophe requires innovation.

We, the climate community, need to be thinking about the emergence of new institutions beyond government. We need to find the leaders and sponsors who allow the development of cohesive, focused research efforts.

Rearranging deck chairs

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I contributed to a number of documents presenting new “business models” to support needed simulation capacity.

My colleagues and I argued that we needed an organization distinct from a single federal agency. One proposal was the creation of a consortium governed by the community and administered by a non-profit, with the goal being the environmental security of the nation.

It was a tough sell to the federal agencies.

One of the management challenges I faced working in the government came down to numbers.

The pool of talented, trained, and government-interested people was small. The only way we could build excellence at one center came at the expense of another. All we did was to rearrange the proverbial chairs on the deck of the Titanic, an outcome I fought to avoid my entire career.

With the chaotic dispersal of expertise right now, there is the possibility of finding something new, something fantastic amid the disarray. Presently, unanchored and outstanding expertise abounds.

Emergency response

After my grandmother’s house burned, the town bought the property and built a new town hall and government center. Some have said that the fire saved the downtown from the deterioration experienced by other towns and cities.

If we organize and assert ourselves, we can hold some of our scientific expertise and save the research enterprise from burning all the way to the ground. We can focus and contain the damage, and, maybe, save some other institutions in the meantime.

At the moment, the fire still rages, and we struggle to find the fire department.