"The EPA's 2024 zinc-ion battery guidelines," Theodore Whitmore said, setting his dry-erase marker down on the whiteboard ledge with a quiet click, "were drafted by three people in a Washington conference room who had, collectively, never spent a day at an active field site. Not a single day. In their entire careers."
Hamilton 303 laughed.
Genevieve Ashbury rested her chin on her hand and watched him from the window seat, middle section-the same seat she'd claimed every Tuesday for six weeks, without ever making a deliberate decision to keep coming back.
The hall held three hundred and forty people and was running at roughly three-quarters capacity, which was exceptional for a nine AM elective competing against two more popular gen-ed options. Engineering undergrads had settled in the back rows with their laptops open to simulation tools they were quietly running while appearing to take notes. Pre-law students occupied the center block with yellow highlighters poised over printed syllabi. And there was a whole category of people she'd started thinking of as the regulars-students who'd audited the class without enrolling, who showed up every week with their notebooks and their coffee and their willingness to sit on the floor if the seats were gone.
She understood it. She'd been one of them, briefly, before she gave in and enrolled.
Theodore Whitmore moved when he lectured. Not pacing-that was the wrong word for it, too restless and unfocused. He moved with intention, tracking his own argument across the room, his body positioned to maximize the visual logic of what he was saying. He'd walked in with his shirt cuffs buttoned and had rolled them to the elbow within the first five minutes, and the unselfconscious quality of that gesture had prompted a whispered exchange two rows in front of Genevieve that she hadn't needed to hear to interpret.
The rimless glasses sat straight on his face today. Some days they slipped slightly to the right, and on those days he pushed them up three or four times during the lecture without seeming to notice. She had noticed this detail and had thought about what it meant that she'd noticed it, and then had decided not to think about it further.
"Here's the part that should actually bother you," he said now, turning to the whiteboard and writing a number in the upper right corner, underlining it twice. "This is the projected zinc-ion storage capacity currently being allocated across two states based on those guidelines. Implementation has already begun. The allocation models are in use." He capped the marker. "They don't account for field conditions. The three people in the Washington conference room didn't know enough about field conditions to know they should account for them." He let the room hold that for a second. "That number represents a policy failure with a real cost attached to it. And the reason that failure happened is that the people who understood the science well enough to prevent it didn't show up to the table where the decision was made."
Someone in the third row: "But isn't that actually the right call? I mean, if you're a scientist, shouldn't you stay out of-"