The National Academy of Sciences is firing back at Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson, who recently filed a $10 million lawsuit against the organization and a fellow scientist.

Jacobson authored a paper two years ago claiming that the U.S. power grid could run entirely on renewable energy sources by 2050

A year later, a team led by Christopher Clack challenged Jacobson’s paper, saying his study committed a host of mistakes

Jacobson stunned many in the scientific community by suing Clack and the academy, which published both papers

Attorneys for the academy say Jacobson is trying to “muzzle speech” and want the case thrown out of court

Jacobson says he just wants to set the factual record straight

Here are the details:

The debate about the feasibility of the U.S. economy running exclusively clean-energy sources has gotten heated — and, in a move that has attracted attention in the scientific community, litigious.

Attorneys for the National Academy of Sciences late last week urged a Washington D.C. judge to throw out a $10 million lawsuit filed by Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson against the academy and a scientist who was the lead author of a paper that challenged a study Jacobson published two years ago.


The lawyers said Jacobson is trying to “silence those who disagree with him” and his suit amounts “to little more than an unvarnished attempt to muzzle speech and end-run the First Amendment.”

In a brief telephone interview Monday, Jacobson told the Union-Tribune he filed the lawsuit to correct the record about a paper he and his team wrote in 2015 asserting the U.S. power system could run solely on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar by 2050.

“They claim this is an issue of science and not of fact, and that’s where we disagree,” Jacobson said. “This is not a scientific debate. It’s a factual debate.”

In addition to the $10 million, Jacobson wants the National Academy to retract the paper, whose lead author is Christopher Clack, a mathematician who is the chief executive of the grid modeling firm Vibrant Clean Energy.


Clack is also a defendant in the lawsuit and his attorneys joined the academy in calling on the judge to throw the case out of court.

Jacobson claims the paper by Clack and 20 other scientists amounted to defamation but Clack’s attorneys said Jacobson “is pursuing costly litigation to stifle debate on an important issue of public interest and to prevent his scientific theories from being fully scrutinized and evaluated.”

The back and forth has been the buzz of the scientists and researchers, especially in the clean energy sphere.

Jacobson has become a hero to some environmental activists, who have used his 2015 study as proof that shifting the entire power sector to sources like solar and wind will be less a question of practicality than political will.


But the Clack study reviewed the work and concluded Jacobson and his team relied on “invalid modeling tools” and made “implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”

Both papers were published and peer-reviewed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s most cited scientific journals, whose editor-in-chief is Inder M. Verma, a noted professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla.

Jacobson strenuously objected to the Clack paper’s findings and the dispute seemed restricted to academia.

But that all changed last month, when it was reported that Jacobson had filed his lawsuit against the academy and Clack.


“Using the courts to adjudicate these debates among experts about the best ways to achieve climate goals is really a chilling and threatening approach,” said Danny Cullenward, a research associate with the Carnegie Institution for Science and an energy economist at the think tank Near Zero. “It also creates the possibility of people working in this field worrying about whether somebody will be coming after them if they say something too controversial.”

Cullenward said the lawsuit also bothers him because it was filed against Clack, who is not a tenured professor or employed by a major research institute. Clack runs a small energy consultancy in Colorado.

“That means Dr. Clack is personally responsible for hiring a lawyer and paying for that,” Cullenward said. “And that’s where the chilling effect comes in. Even if you win in court, that can set you back many thousands of dollars.”

The case is also hitting close to home in California, the nation’s leader in clean energy.


Cullenward, is a lecturer at Stanford and wrote an op-ed in the Stanford Daily last week with the headline, “Suing an academic critic isn’t only wrong, it’s also unjust.”

One of the co-authors of the Clack paper is David Victor, a professor of international relations and co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at UC San Diego.

Victor was not named in the lawsuit but told Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik last month, “Even when I’m talking with other scientists in an on-the-record setting, I find myself being careful about what I say because there’s the threat of legal action out there.”

Verma of the Salk Institute is in China this week on a business trip and a media representative from the academy said it would not comment on the Jacobson case.


But in July, Verma sent a letter to Jacobson and Clack.

“There is clearly a scientific disagreement about how to address these issues, and the scientific community will have to make their assessments of the articles,” Verma’s letter said.

He concluded by saying the academy “will not continue to referee this situation” and “considers this matter closed.”

But that letter was written before Jacobson filed his lawsuit.


While Clack and his co-authors criticized Jacobson’s work, Jacobson has accused the Clack article of making errors of its own.

Jacobson said Clack and his team mixed up maximum values with average values in one table and claimed Jacobson’s paper made a modeling error in regards to hydro power. Jacobson denies any modeling error in his hydro power numbers.

“I just want to be clear we absolutely deny this is any issue related to the science of the article, their criticisms of our assumptions or our responses to them,” Jacobson said. “It’s a clear issue of correcting factually inaccurate information that was not only published but we requested to be corrected before publication. And these were issues of fact, they weren’t issues of scientific debate.”

But are the courts the proper venue to take the disagreement?


Jacobson said he’d prefer not to comment on that, given the pending lawsuit.

Cullenward said he had never heard of a similar case.

“I think the quicker it’s dismissed, the better it is for the scientific enterprise,” said Cullenward, who is also a lawyer. “But that is not a question for the scientists. It’s now a question for the courts. I don’t think we should be here.”

Jacobson has come under fire for filing the case but some have defended him.


“Jacobson’s lawsuit is about correcting the factual scientific record — it’s about ensuring that the process and rules that govern science are protected,” said environmental geologist Stacy Clark in the Huffington Post.

Lawyers for the academy and Clack want the presiding judge, Elizabeth Carroll Wingo at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, to dismiss the case, saying it qualifies under what is called the Anti-SLAPP Act which involves speaking out on issues considered to be of the public interest.

The next court date is scheduled for Dec. 29.


Business

rob.nikolewski@sduniontribune.com


(619) 293-1251 Twitter: @robnikolewski

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