Comment by internet_points
9 days ago
https://mastodon.social/@knutson_brain@sfba.social/114000564...
> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )
So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.
> So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it.
Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.
But what is political now? Isn't climate science a political issue in the US.
Since I don't live in the USA, I don't have a feeling for the current political climate [pun intended] there, so take the following remark with a grain of salt.
But if I go by my gut feeling, I'd say that there is a difference between wanting to understand by what and how much the climate is influenced by various factors (as unpolitical as possible in this academic discipline) vs having a political stance which policy measures to take based on these insights (e.g.
- do nothing and tolerate the possible risks
- lobby for strongly reducing CO2 emissions
- lobby for doing geoengineering to stop the climate change
). My feeling is that at least some climate scientists want to be both researchers and "politicians" for their academic discipline.