Science & Diplomacy Go Together
From climate change to nuclear security, we need science and diplomacy to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
— A preview of major themes in remarks by Secretary Moniz at The Institute for Politics at Harvard University (Harvard IOP) on April 14, 2016 —
Science and technology are at the heart of humanity’s big challenges. If we are to find solutions, science and diplomacy must go hand in hand.
To meet large international challenges like climate change, like nuclear nonproliferation, like cybersecurity or like ozone depletion, we need to understand the underlying science driving the challenge, we need to understand the technologies that offer solutions, and we need to understand how those technologies relate to national interests.
Science and diplomacy are increasingly connected because, in part:
No amount of politics can override the laws of physics.
Because the Department of Energy is a powerhouse for science and technology, the Energy Department and our network of 17 National Laboratories are increasingly called upon to back the nation’s diplomatic efforts. We’ve provided analysis and technical solutions on issues ranging from nuclear security to climate change.
What follows are examples of how science and diplomacy have worked together, and a call for what we must do to solve the problems that affect us all.
The Iran Deal
Last year’s negotiations with Iran hinged on science.
While crippling sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table, negotiations had stalled by the middle of 2014.
Getting past the deadlock required an integration of science and international affairs. In this case that was embodied by the arrangement of the U.S. Secretaries of State and Energy on one side, and Iran’s Foreign Minister and Atomic Energy chief on the other side — two teams of a diplomat and a scientist.
The formidable analytic capacity of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories and nuclear security sites cross-checked the delegation’s proposals and each other’s work. And they helped contribute creative solutions when the team reached impasses.
The result of the negotiations is Iran’s plutonium, uranium and covert pathways to a bomb have been blocked.
To reach Implementation Day on January 16, 2016, Iran shipped 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium out of the country, dismantled two-thirds of their centrifuges and placed them in monitored storage and filled the core of the Arak reactor with cement.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is now implementing the strictest verification and monitoring regime ever negotiated — thanks in part to technologies developed by our National Labs.
Going forward, the National Labs will continue to support implementation and verification, including supporting the IAEA in its duties.
This is a deal that significantly enhances nuclear security for the U.S. and our friends and allies in the immediate term, and with vigilant implementation in the long term.
It’s worth pointing out that many of the experts from DOE working on the Iran negotiations had prior experience from work in the early 1990s, when our primary concern was former Soviet nuclear programs.
Megatons to Megawatts
The biggest nonproliferation deal in history was reached between the U.S. and the newly-independent Russia in 1993. Again, it depended on the integration of science and diplomacy in multilateral negotiations.
After the Soviet Union broke up, the U.S. and the world faced the urgent challenge of ensuring that no part of the massive Soviet stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fell into malicious hands.
Recognizing that this security interest could be matched up with Russia’s need for foreign capital, the U.S. had the idea for America companies to buy Russian HEU. That HEU, originally intended for Soviet weapons, could instead be downblended and used as nuclear fuel to make electricity in American reactors.
After 20 years, the last shipment of HEU arrived in the U.S. in 2013, concluding the deal. Again, this deal took both an understanding of the technology and an understanding of the national interests to overcome the complex technical and legal challenges. In this case, commercial interests of the parties were also involved.
All together, we eliminated 500 metric tons of HEU from the worldwide total, enough for around 20,000 warheads. The world is an appreciably safer place as a result.
Montreal Protocol
The close engagement of science and diplomacy is equally important beyond the nuclear realm.
The Montreal Protocol, one of the single most successful environmental agreements to date, arose from the combination of a scientific solution and diplomatic efforts to solve a growing international problem — the CFCs eating the ozone layer.
The problem was identified by three chemists in the 1970s — for which they received Nobel Prize for Chemistry — and recognized as urgent in the 1980s.
Researchers developed HFCs as a substitute for CFCs, and that alternative technology enabled negotiators to reach a major international treaty by 1987. As a result, CFC use dramatically diminished and the hole in the ozone is clearly on the path to repair.
However, we did not fully anticipate one side effect. While HFCs are better for ozone than CFCs, it turns out HFCs are also tremendously powerful greenhouse gases.
So today one of the major actions on the agenda for global climate change action is to amend the Montreal Protocol to limit the use of HFCs, and instead use newer substitutes, very similar to the approach originally taken with CFCs.
The Montreal Protocol provides some indication for how we can take on the climate concerns we now face — with a combination of scientific innovation and tenacious diplomatic effort.
Paris Agreement
Last year’s negotiations in Paris were led by the State Department. In support of those negotiations, a Department of Energy contingent attended with a single message:
Clean energy innovation is the solution to climate change.
Research and development drives down the cost of clean energy technologies, and lower costs mean wider and faster deployment for these technologies.
For the Paris negotiations, science was a key enabler. Global goals for reducing carbon emissions were linked to the available technologies for efficiency and clean energy.
And now that countries around the world have set their goals, our skill in developing and deploying clean energy technologies will be critical to achieving those goals — and to ratcheting up goals for the future.
To accelerate the development and deployment of clean energy technologies, President Obama and the leaders of 19 other nations announced a new initiative in Paris, called Mission Innovation. Over the next five years, the 20 Mission Innovation nations will double public clean energy research and development.
These nations represent over 80 percent of clean energy research and development budgets worldwide — as well as 58 percent of the world’s population and 68 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
In other words, this doubling is significant at the global scale — not only as a signal to industry, but actually in terms of real dollars to be invested.
A private-sector effort, called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, was also announced in Paris, as a complement to the government-led Mission Innovation. Led by Bill Gates, this group of 28 private investors from 10 countries has pledged long-term, risk-tolerant capital to invest in technologies from Mission Innovation countries.
These investors are certainly motivated by the possibility of large returns over the long run, but are also interested in spurring and accelerating an energy transformation.
They recognize that research and development paired with patient capital investment can bring innovative technologies out of the lab and into large-scale deployment — and when it does, dramatic growth can result.
All three of these efforts — the climate negotiations, Mission Innovation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition — are international and at their core and depend on science and technology.
To meet the challenges of the modern world, we will need science, diplomacy, politics, economics — we will need people of different backgrounds working together to solve real problems.
What Does This Mean For You?
If you are a scientist, you have a responsibility to participate in the world beyond your own laboratory.
If you are a practitioner of international relations, you have a responsibility to ground your work in the sometimes hard realities of scientific fact.
And finally, it means that we should sustain the robust ecosystem of National Labs, universities, and private sector research and development that makes the United States a world leader in technology innovation.
That’s how we ensure the availability of the expertise needed to support accomplishments like the JCPOA, the Montreal Protocol, or the Paris Agreement.
And ultimately, that’s how we will meet the big challenges for humanity over the coming century — with science, with technology, and with diplomacy.
