President Obama’s chief science adviser turns out to have quite a checkered past. George Will’s recent column on environmental doomsaying makes an interesting observation in passing:
Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a “basket” of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.
An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama’s science adviser.
(Via Power Line.)
One could hardly have been more entirely wrong than Paul Ehrlich. I had not known of Holdren’s involvement with Ehrlich and the neo-Malthusian gang, but I should have. Holdren, it turns out, was central to the gang, and he never abandoned that line of thought.
In 1995, he published a paper with Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily under the auspices of the United Nations. That paper, now using the buzzword “sustainability”, refrained from making predictions (Holdren had learned something) but relied on the same thoroughly failed “I=PAT” framework from 1971.
President Obama has spoken about the danger of politicizing science, but Holdren’s 1995 paper was thoroughly political. It calls for disarmament, international control of military force, and redistribution of wealth, as well as other uncontroversial political aims. Further, it specifically criticizes conservative political thought, listing among the “ills that development must address”
Underlying human frailties — Greed, selfishness, intolerance, and shortsightedness — which collectively have been elevated by conservative political doctrine and practice (above all in the United States in 1980 92) to the status of a credo.
This is the man President Obama has chosen to champion science against politicization.
Internet Scofflaw 