Science's War on America

John Holdren, Obama's "science advisor" (does he help him cheat on tests?) was in the Bay Area rending his garments and preaching an apocalyptic tale of woe, er, "logical conclusions based on rigorous standards."

"We are already experiencing increased heat waves, drought, wildfires, floods and pest infestations - all of that is at today's levels," said physicist John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"In my judgment, climate change is already dangerous, and the question is, 'Can we stop short of a completely unmanageable degree of climate change?' " he said.

Pest infestations? That's all you got? Call when you can bring down a plague of frogs.

The solution to all of this is simple, of course: Greenhouse gases must be cut, Obama aide says

Holdren called for deep cuts in emissions, more climate research and greater preparation for inevitable planetary change. He also is pressing for large investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

"The scientific evidence has increasingly supported the idea that the risks rise rapidly above an increase of 3.6 degrees in the global average surface temperature," said Holdren, 65, who was confirmed last month, told The Chronicle in an interview.

Sophisticated progressives never stop moaning about how W "lied about WMD's to get us into war." I honestly don't see how Holdren's doomsday ranting (on which he has built a lucrative career) is any different. He would have us spending trillions of dollars to revamp the basic engines of our economy to combat "climate change." Well, the climate changes all the time. How do we know the gradual warming of the last 100 years, which by all accounts ended 10 years ago, is man-made and not a natural phenomenon?

Holdren is hardly an innocent scientist following the facts to their conclusion. He is as results oriented as any appellate court judge enamored of a "Living Constitution." And, he has a history of making doomsday predictions that turn out to be R-O-N-G wrong. John Holdren, Ideological Environmentalist

In his salad days, Holdren was a fully paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club. For example, in his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren declared that "it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population." This sounds very much like contemporary prognostications of "peak oil."

Also near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced in 1971--with his colleague and perennial population-alarmist, (Paul) Ehrlich--the concept of the I=PAT identity. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world.

History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology actually promote environmental flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams cleaner and the forests more expansive.

That Paul Ehrlich was a mentor to Holdren should have been enough to keep him down at the community college level. Instead, he is the peddler of a fashionable apocalypse for the poli-sci crowd, a fear monger who says the cure for doom is the re-ordering of our lives by the government and the scientific community with (blush) you-know-who in the vanguard.