Caltech’s contribution to environmental policy A 10-year-old experiment at Caltech, the Environmental
Quality Laboratory, brings together scientists, engineers, and economists to tackle interdisciplinary problems that haue implicationsf o r public policy
About eight years ago, Glen R. C a s , then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, wanted to do a study on particulate sulfate in the Los Angeles area-what its sources are, how it might be controlled, and how much that would cost. He was told no one was interested. But an unusual experiment at Caltech, the Environmental Quality Laboratory, provided the seed money to get the project started. And almost as soon as the study was finished five years later, its results were in hot demand. “The results became available at the same time that the state of Cal-
ifornia ordered the local Los Angeles basin air pollution control district to come up with a plan for meeting California’s sulfate air quality standard,” said Cass. “They came to us and said, look we have five or six months to come up with a plan for a problem that would clearly take a number of years to solve. You guys have done the work that needs to be done in this area; give us the results and we’ll use them.” This is one of the success stories of the Environmental Quality Laboratory’s IO-year history. EQL attempts to bring together scientists, engineers, and economists; provide a channel for
funds; and establish links with the outside world in order to tackle environmental problems that have public policy implications.
“Forum for common interests” EQL occupiesa curious niche within the university (see the accompanying interview with EQL Director Norman H. Brooks). It conducts no laboratory work itself; it is not an academic department in the traditional sense; and it has only a small permanent staff of its own. It is rather an umbrella that draws together Caltech‘s expertise and carries it into the storm of complex,
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interdisciplinary problems. “The real value of EQL,” said John H. Seinfeld of the Chemical Engineering Department, “is, first of all, that it’s a forum for common interests to come together and that it makes it easier for us to talk with each other.. even more important, though, i s the link it’s provided us with the governmental and industrial communitythe people out there who are making decisions. EQL has an image in the outside world of doing objective policy studies that involve a good component of science and engineering, and that’s been a catalyst, not only for us inside, but for us to talk with the people in the state and in the companies.” Seinfeld and a graduate student, Gregory McRae, are developing an air
..
Environmentalstudy in an academic environment How does the interdisciplinary work of Caltech’s Environmental Quality Laboratory fit into the traditional disciplinary framework of a university? ESdT discussed E W s niche with its director, Norman H. Brooks.
Norman H. Brooks € S T . How did EQL start? Brooks. The origins of EQL really go back to 1969 when Harold Brown came to Caltech as president. He was more disposed to applied efforts or trying to work on societal problems than the previous administration. so he asked a group of faculty members: Isn’t there something Caltech can do to help solve the air pollution problem in Los Angeles? Is it really understood to the extent it should be? Out of that, a discussion group was formed: sane companies put in some discretionary money and Caltech put in scfne; and it was launchedunder the directorship of Lester Lees [a professor of environmental engineering and aeronautics at Caltech]. It started off as an effort which perhaps had more of an advocacy flavor than it does now. It was less academic. Lester’s style was to appear at more hearings and have mwe news
16 Environmental Science 8 Technolog
quality simulation model that w i l l be used by the State Air Resources Board. Their dealings with the “people out there who are making decisions” have made them look a lot harder at some of the practical questions. “As a result of getting thrust into the public arena with the modeling work,” Seinfeld said, “we really have to be able to answer the kinds of questions that the regulator or regulate faces. I n a lot of modeling work that has been done everywhere-universities, companiesthey develop a model, and that’s it. There’s not a lot of consideration given to how it’s going to be used, where the numbers [that go into the model] are going to come from, how good they are, how accurate they are. But because this model i s going to be used in
conferences. and write more popular pieces. At the same time, it depended on the enthusiasm of the environmental movement-it wasn’t plylged in enough to the basic science, engineering, and economics that is necessary to make progress. Under my directorship [which began in 19741, my objective was to greatly increase the amount of faculty participation, to decentralize the program to the extent that it would be more attractive fw individual faculty members to participate. Also, I had as my objective that it would be a place for the invoivement of pduate students. I’m very much an educator at heart, and Ido not want to see EQL become an organization that would drift off and become a separate entity. The third thing Idd was to insist that there be no permanent research staff members at EQL except the professors and a few senior research faculty members, and that others, like postdoctorals. would come here with a very definite understanding that they would have a tenure of something like two to five years. The reason for that is that I feel it is more important to have a place where people can get research experience than to become permanently staffed to do studiesbecause that’s what Rand is for, or SRI, where they can have permanent careers doing policy studies. E S T . How are EQL’s studies chcsen and where does the direction come from? Brooks. There is a close interweaving of the various Caltech wganlzational units. The academic departments canyon research projects of the traditional kind, with a single principal investigator doing something in the lab. Ranging from hse-which tend to ha %re basic, single-di*ri-
big decisions, with lots of dollars involved, we’d better know what the uncertainties are and what the implications are going to be on the answer. The involvement with the ultimate clientele has forced us to face these issues as hard as any that we’ve faced i n developing the science behind the model, which I think i s a good thing.”
Bringing in economics The grafting of disciplines that EQZ fosters is also bearing fruit. James P. Quirk, a professor of economics, has worked on several environmental policy studies through EQL; he i s currently working with Brooks and others
on a study of water resources in connection with proposed western energy
pline activities-there is a spectrum which goes over to broader policy questions. By that I mean questions like: What are the possible ways to control air pollution in Los Angeles? C more traditional academic subjec might be: What are the kinetics o conversion of SOz to sulfate? Now the reason EQL exists is tu stimulate more activity on the broader questions and to make them easier to tackle. ES&T. Who comes up with the ideas for these broader studies? Brooks. The ideas for the research projects here all come from the faculty members. EQL is very much under the guidance of the professors, and evev oroiect has one or more facultv in Ledigators. E S T . Does it ever haDDen tha someone from the outside’comes t< you and says, ”We want a study on this”? Brooks. That‘s not the usual way it happens. Let me say it this way: The things we do well are already known to the agencies. Sometimes ideas for research arise out of a technical discussion-which isn’t exactly as if we’re sitting here and they march in and say: Will you do this for us? We do mt sit here and respondto people who walk in the door. We’re not a consulting firm. €S&T. But does EQL play a role somewhere between that of a consulting firm and the traditional way researchers get funding? Brooks. It‘s not at all like a consulting firm. We really follow the traditiml funding approach except there are apt to be larger groups of professors. EQL provides a framework to make this work easier. The other thing that’s different is that we do collect some money from corporations and era1 discretionary
projects. “I wouldn’t have thought of any of these things without EQL,” Quirk said; for one thing, “there were a lot of technical issues out there that we couldn’t understand at all.” Yet many of these technical issues lead to economic issues: “You often start out with a problem that looks purely like a technical problem, but which very quickly becomes one of how you get the incentives toget people to make the technical changes.” Quirk has also found that he gets “interesting leads” for his own basic research in economics from the work he does through EQL. The water study, for example, led him to examine the more fundamental question of the efficiency of competitive markets when
operating under uncertainties. Quirk cautions, though, against too high hopes for what EQL can do to bring together the different disciplines. “There’s a limited amount of cooperation that can be achieved. There is always a problem when you have cross-disciplinary relationships! What engineers are interested in is not what economists are interested in. Both parties find it better to work on projects that get published in their own journals.” The real cooperation, according to Quirk-and the real value of EQL to him-comes in suggesting ideas and in providing technical information. Economists are involved in a relatively small number of current projects at EQL; in addition to the water re-
sources study, these include studies of transferable licenses to emit air pollutants, energy pricing, regulatory problems of energy industries, and methods of risk-benefit analysis for management of toxic substances. But by any conventional standard of academic wall-building, even this degree of cooperation is a minor miracle. “You have to have something like EQL really to have engineers and economists coming together at a place like Caltech,” argued James J. Morgan, professor of environmental engineering science. “Because without EQL, why shouldn’t economists just work by themselves-it’s a hell of a lot easier.” Morgan also pointed to the importance of allowing graduate students to
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work in more than one department and so receive the training that will allow them to carry on interdisciplinary work in the consulting world. This, according to graduate student Gregory McRae, is “probably in the long run the major contribution of EQL. Unfortunately, there are relatively few places in the country that are doing that.” The “Statement of Objectives” put out by EQL gives this point high priority: “This educational effort is just as important as the results of the studies themselves, and probably of more lasting effect on the nation’s ability to solve environmental problems.” Thirteen graduate students, from the departments of mechanical engineering, civil engineering, environmental engineering science, and social science, are currently affiliated with EQL. Independence and circumspection Morgan, whose research centers around trace metals, has worked on a study of acid rain that demonstrates-as does Cass’s sulfate EQL’s independent study-how funding can provide the seed for projects that are “speculative,” often because they are at the forefront. “EQL played an important role because it allowed us to get into a business at a time when there was no other way to support the research,” Morgan explained. This ability to anticipate the interests of outside sources of funds is clearly one of EQL’s key strengths. And, EQL refuses to play the role 18 Environmental Science 8 Technology
of contractors, such as RAND or Battelle, and does not wait for an outside group to come to them with a problem to be solved. “By the time an agency has formulated a set of questions it wants answered,” said Morgan, “it’s no longer exciting. I want to answer the question that someone out there is going to need the answer to in five years.” E. John List, professor of environmental engineering science, sees this as the basis of EQL‘s effectiveness: “You can take a longer look than the people in industry laboratories who have to worry about stockholders or people in government laboratories who have to worry about the next budget cycle. You can look at these policy questions a long time ahead-and you get to look at things in a little more circumspect manner.” Along with this longer look is a reluctance to take on problems of specific areas, unless the results are of general applicability or are of “strong public interest or educational value,” as the “Statement of Objectives” puts it. Cass explained: “We’re trying to do one-of-a-kind prototype studies to convince people that it can be done and to encourage them to take it over themselves. We mainly view ourselves as a methods-development laboratory.’’ Question of advocacy But where does “methods development” stop and advocacy begin? Brooks’s study of ocean-disposal of
sewage sludge, for example, was a reaction to a congressional ban on ocean dumping that Brooks believed to be scientifically unjustified. Even though EQL officially refrains from taking positions, doesn’t the very choice of research topics carry with it an implicit advocacy? Brooks says no, though he admits to having drawn a “carefully constructed line.” He said, “It’s close to advocacy, but if some scientists and engineers don’t do analyses of controversial problems and make the alternatives clear, then how do you expect legislators to make informed decisions? ‘‘I don’t think that there’s any more advocacy in that than in some professor deciding what topic he wants to work on. Suppose he wants to study the chemical composition of fine particles that come from burning coal. You might say, well, if he does that, if he develops a lot of new information on that, it might stimulate the regulators to be more stringent about fine particles and establish regulations that cost a lot of money. “I think if your studies are objective . . .any increase in objective knowledge on a sticky problem is going to help in the long run to make for better decisions by an informed group of regulators or politicians.” In its attempt to avoid advocacy and to he more academic, though, EQL may have fallen down in getting this knowledge to the regulators and politicians. The attitude of EQL seems to be, “We’re doing the best work
around; it’s up to the people out there to recognize it.” Brooks feels that the job of transmitting (and translating) their results is better left to individual faculty members, who may, for example, give testimony to legislative committees, than to EQL as a whole. And Seinfeld argued, “I think it’s enough in terms of EQL’s role if the reports that are written from EQL get to those people in the companies and the government, those responsible for understanding the problems technically. Because I think that the major service that we provide is a very strong technical base for these environmental problems that have policy implications. Now the second problem is how that information gets translated up to the people who are really making the decisions-that’s a societal problem. I don’t know if there’s anything EQL can do about that.” Outside views A typical outsider’s view of EQL’s role was given to ES& T by Stephen J. Gage. Gage, until recently EPA’s assistant administrator for research and development (he left the agency to take a position as vice-president of International Harvester in Chicago), sees a real need for “at least a limited number of academic institutions” doing the sort of work that EQL is engaged in. “EPA and the country have been on such a treadmill in racing towards environmental goals; what has been sorely missed is the interest in getting some of the longer-term questions answered,” he said. Gage pointed to EQL’s sludgedumping study as an example of where “independent groups have a particularly strong role to play.” The Office of Management and Budget and Congress’s oversight committees are not going to allow EPA to spend money on examining alternatives outlawed by Congress. “But just because we have established a ‘forbidden alternative’ doesn’t mean we should rule out all research on it.” Should government support independent groups such as EQL? Yes, said Gage, but with some direction. “The old academic cry of ‘give us money and let us do what we want’ doesn’t have much currency these days.” But, he said, “You basically have to protect universities in this sort of activity. This kind of independent thinking is going to be essential over the long haul.” He added: “Scientists on the outside are in the best position to form the template through which policy decisions are made.” -Stephen Budiansky Stanton Miller
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