Ron Bailey has some background on Dr. Holdren.
I put the “science” in quotes, because I’ve always thought the position misnamed. It’s really about science and technology (as indicated by the name — the Office of Science and Technology Policy), and the science advisor should also be a technologist, not just a scientist. Either that, or get a different and separate advisor for technology. When you put a “science” advisor in charge of providing advice on NASA, it reinforces the false perception that NASA is primarily about science, which results in all manner of policy ills.
In any event, I hope that Dr. Holdren has modified his environmental views from the seventies, and no longer allies himself with Paul Ehrlich.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Yuval Levin has more thoughts and concerns:
Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth. And he didn’t say all this in the 1970s either—have a good look at the speech he delivered when he assumed the leadership of the AAAS in 2006. It describes a fundamentally activist liberal mentality about the very purpose of science and its place in our kind of society. My favorite part of that speech is his call for ending population growth which, in the published text of the speech, is accompanied by this footnote:
This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown’s prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man’s Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.
The Population Bomb was the book in which Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death,” because all the world’s resources were running out while population was growing out of control, and there was simply no way we could sustain our civilization at modern levels of consumption and growth. Just about every one of the book’s predictions has proven wrong, and its empirical claims and methods have not held up well under later scholarly scrutiny. It certainly made a useful political point for the left, though.
I wonder if all those who complained about the supposed “politicization of science” by the Bush administration will raise worries about Holdren…don’t you?
No, actually, I don’t wonder at all. I think we know the answer to that one.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more from John Tierney:
Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.
Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.
I hadn’t realized that there were other bettors besides Ehrlich, or that Holdren had made the pick. To be honest, I had never heard of the guy until Obama named him. So now we shift from a “Republican war on science” to a “Democrat war on science.” Or, perhaps, a Democrat war on the economy and freedom in the ostensible name of science. And I have no idea what this portends for space policy.
[Late afternoon update]
“Solve Climate” has an extensive set of Holdren links. I sure hope that he at least gets some tough questioning in confirmation hearings.
I’m a little confused. During the campaign there was much talk of a cabinet level CTO position being created. If that’s the case and they do recognize that Science and Technology are different then that could be a good thing, if they decide that NASA is technology and not science. So where would the National Space Council fit in here? Who would the new NASA Administrator report to beyond Congress? I’ve had three bosses before and it sucks…
Well, he’s not really much of a pure scientist anyway, these days. Looks like he got his degrees in physics, to be sure, but all of his professional positions in the last 35 years have been very much in applied fields.
Given his last position is director of Woods Hole, and before that he had positions at Berkeley, Caltech, Livermore and Stanford — not to mention way way back he worked for Lockheed Missile Division — he’s clearly very, very smart.
But, yeah, probably also very, very passionate about the whole green thing. I don’t think that should be held too much against him a priori. It’s perfectly reasonable that the President surround himself with advocates who espouse unbalanced views. It’s the President’s job to balance the competing points of view. He should balance this guy’s passion for pure environmentalism at any price against his economics advisor’s passion for fiscal sanity.
Well, and postscriptum, I don’t think much of Ron Bailey’s column. Seems kind of a drive-by hit job for no useful purpose. The fact that some nuggets from his past suggest the guy is a passionate ecologist and has some moderate (and on its face unreasonable) contempt for economics is not much of a fault.
The Reason people tend to fetishize economics, failing to understand that its beautiful and impeccable logic rests (alas!) on a surprisingly flimsy foundation, that being our understanding of human nature and social psychology. If only we understood how people are motivated as well as economists typically and perforce assume we do!
Reason’s point of view on science policy is very worth considering, of course, just as is the point of view of a crazed greenie — but neither should be swallowed whole.
During the campaign there was much talk of a cabinet level CTO position being created.
From what I’ve heard, “Chief Technology Officer” really means “Chief Information Officer.” By technology, they seem to mean IT.
Off-topic a bit, but speaking of environmental concerns, this is a fascinating read, courtesy of The Corner.
If the article Carl Pham links to is correct and if re-forestation following decimation of North American natives by European germs did contribute to the 17th century Little Ice Age then it would seem that human influences on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels do affect climate rather directly.
I would not be surprised if it were established that 3000-5000 years of human civilization have slowed or reversed what would otherwise have been a reversion to the ice levels that existed maybe 14,000 years ago and that human pre-industrial activities of forest clearing may well be extending the current inter-glacial period of our current Ice Age.
If these theories are true then assertions that the far more massive CO2 releases coming from our Industrial Age processes would seem more plausible rather than less plausible.
If these theories are true then assertions that the far more massive CO2 releases coming from our Industrial Age processes would seem more plausible rather than less plausible.
So? It does nothing to validate the policy “solutions” advocated by the warm mongers.
If these theories are true then assertions that the far more massive CO2 releases coming from our Industrial Age processes would seem more plausible rather than less plausible.
I should add, this sentence doesn’t seem to parse.
Does a “science advisor” even NEED congressional hearings in order to start work?
Does a “science advisor” even NEED congressional hearings in order to start work?
No, in the sense that it’s not a confirmable position. But he can’t do anything, really, until the new president takes the oath of office.
Wow, someone who is actually concerned about Earth’s ever increasing population and the enviroment. Good choice Mr. B.
I’d prefer a Science Advisor who saw technology and scientific advancement as a solution to problems, rather than a being a problem. Holdren and Ehrlich invented I = P × A × T, where Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of population (P), affluence (A: consumption per capita) and technology (T: environmental impact per unit of consumption).
In other words, affluence and technology only increase our impact on the environment. Therefore people, wealth and growth are all bad; they harm Gaia. Which is why he is for population control (both kinds!) and restrictions on development.
Ugh. And I thought Leon Kass was bad.
This is why, although I’m mostly libertarian, I usually vote Republican. Republicans, for all their talk, really can’t legislate how you fool around in the bedroom. But Democrats really can screw up the economy.
Thanks for the Solve Climate info links. I commented there on Holdren’s ideological bent.
>> I = P × A × T
I’ve seen that equation before. It’s bunk. Taken literally it says that with tech near 0, stone age, the Earth can support far more people at high affluence. A more reasonable formula is
I = P * A / T
Where Technology represents the know how to produce goods for human consumption more efficiently.
The Reason people tend to fetishize economics, failing to understand that its beautiful and impeccable logic rests (alas!) on a surprisingly flimsy foundation, that being our understanding of human nature and social psychology. If only we understood how people are motivated as well as economists typically and perforce assume we do!
First, a market (and similar economic concepts) are abstractions. It doesn’t really matter how the participants are motivated or their psychological makeup, if any. The market functions the same.
Second, I’d say that understanding human psychology in the limited sense of economic decisions is well-understood by Madison Avenue.