Obama Science Adviser--Zero Everything Growth

President Obama's top science adviser is telling the President to act on theories which have been totally discredited by the passage of time, logic and moral considerations. That doesn't stop Obama from acting on them. Just like his boss, this adviser can bend his theories to sound like he's actually proposing something considerably milder.

The adviser's name is John P. Holdren. His credentials look like the registry of blue-blood schools. BA from MIT. PhD from Stanford. Professor at U C Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard. He has held lofty positions with scientific organizations throughout his entire professional career. And he has topped it all off by becoming Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Wow! Oh, and he's also more than a little nuts.

If you have a tendency to use Wikipedia as your source of information, I strongly suggest you discontinue that practice. Holdren's biography, and particularly the section entitled "controversy," is a puff piece, pure and simple. If I had to bet, I would guess it was written by either Holdren or a very loyal disciple, and edited multiple times to make the whole thing look much tamer than it actually is. The man is a zealot, but his Wiki entry looks like a guy with a couple of theories that were basically right, but completley misunderstood by all the poor uneducated slobs who dared to question him. The only refutation of the underpinning of the criticisms (which are glossed over) come from Holdren himself.

POPULATION GROWTH: Holdren cut his teeth on this issue. He was heavily influenced by the 1968 book by Paul R. Ehrlich entitled The Population Bomb. Ehrlich had predicted that the 200 million people who lived in the United States would reproduce themselves into starvation before the end of the eighties. This was the beginning of the "zero population growth" movement, already in full swing in the far more "sophisticated" European nations. Like all the other theories of apolocalyptic and milennial writers, the end never came. Not even close.

But if you're a highly-educated, highly-degreed savant, the utter failure of a theory doesn't mean it's wrong. Holdren never takes the opportunity to discuss how the Europeans ended up having to import fecund laborers from the Middle East to build up the base of their massive social welfare ponzi schemes since they dropped well below zero population growth themselves.

In 1969, thirsting for fame and fortune, and academic chops, Holdren joined up with his idol and co-wrote several highly-admired academic treatises in co-authorship with Ehrlich on the same subject. Holdren argued that "if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come." By 1973, Holdren was saying "210 million now is too many and 280 million by 2040 is likely to be much too many." I hasten to point out that the current population of the United States is somewhere between 305 million and 315 million, depending on whose figures you believe. And according to the Obamacrats, our problem is that Americans are too fat, not starving. You got some 'splainin to do, Professor.

In 1977, once again in partnership with Ehrlich and Ehrlich's wife Anne, Holdren wrote a textbook that an entire generation of American students took as gospel. It was entitled Ecoscience, Population, Resources, Environment. For the first time, Holdren added radical environmentalism to his already failing theory. Only in academia and among true believers can crazy and failed theories become good again by the addition of more crazy theories.

So what does the good professor have to say in this magnum opus? He advocates a variety of solutions (to the problem that didn't exist) ranging from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls, including but not limited to forced abortions and government limits on the number of children each family could produce. That's the part Wikipedia soft-pedaled. They claim these were just possible alternatives, which were followed by Holdren's statement that he actually recommended "the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences." That latter statement is pure fabrication. If you can find a copy of the original book, I challenge you to read it and then tell me that those were "possible alternatives," not advocacy.

In the 2009 hearings confirming Holdren to his position as Science and Technology Director, Holdren continued his denials. He testified to the Senate Committee that he does not believe that government should have a role in determining the optimal population size, and that he never endorsed forced sterilization. The same Senators who voted for three massive economy-destroying bills in a row without reading them took Holdren's word for it because otherwise they might have had to read his books. God forbid. As someone who was very actively involved in the world of academia contemporaneously with Holdren, I can tell you of my own knowledge that Holdren was advocating, not suggesting.

Today, Holdren hasn't changed his views one iota, despite having advocated a theory that was based on junk science, poor research, political agendas, and pure nonsense which turned out to be entirely wrong. Now, as in the Senate hearings, he claims his solutions were merely suggestions, and ignores the fact that the underlying theory has turned out to be a massive error.

ECONOMIC GROWTH: Holdren's theories on the economy got very little notice. They should have. He furnished the administration with a policy paper based almost entirely on his academic paper published in May of 2009 and entitled Science in the White House. His policy paper submitted to the President and the Council contains major portions of his chapter (from the book referenced above with the two Ehrlich's) entitled Changing American Institutions. And where did he get the brilliant ideas included in the White House Paper? Where else? He got them from his own writings from the 70s.

Holdren calls America the leader in humanity's reckless exploitation of the earth. "It would be entirely logical to set limits on the amount of product a nation needs and then strive to reduce the amount of work required to produce such a product [and, we might add, to see that the product is much more equitably distributed than it is today]." The authors call a healthy economic growth pattern "growthmania." "It is logical that economists have clung to their 'growthmania' since natural scientists often cling to outmoded ideas that have produced far less palpable benefits than the growing mixed economies of the Western world in the twentieth century. " You mean outmoded ideas like overpopulation and global warming?

"The question of whether a different economic system might have been produced a more equitable distribution of benefits is not one that Western economists like to dwell on." True enough, Professor. That question was addressed by a theoritician almost as famous as you--Karl Marx. And we all know how well Marx's theories worked out, don't we?

Holdren (and the Ehrlichs) clearly believed and advocated the theory that zero population growth and zero economic growth were lofty goals which had to occur at the same time. Time has proven their entire concept to be pure hooey. But that doesn't stop Holdren from continuing to advocate it. Holdren has written that zero economic growth woud be "a threat to some of the most clearly held beliefs of this society and would attack the Protestant work ethic." Those crazy workers will just go out and spend their earnings on "those wonderful automobiles, detergents, appliances, and assorted gimcracks that must be bought if the economy is to continue to grow." For a man who seems to understand the genius of capitalism, he sure doesn't seem to like it much.

And now to the part Obama probably likes best: "The critical question, of course, is how to get around the extraordinary power interests that would be unalterably opposed to maximum income limits and (if possible) even more opposed to direct taxation of wealth." Nothing like a pure ripoff of Das Kapital to warm a budding socialist's heart.

Holdren has written that "it would be entirely logical to cap the Gross National Product (what we now call the Gross Domestic Product or GDP). It is by now abundantly clear that the GNP cannot grow forever. Why should it?" That was in Ecoscience, Population, Resources, Environment referenced above.

Holdren has scarcely been questioned on his economic views, though they are part and parcel of his unified theory of zero everything growth. If pushed, however, no doubt the nutty professor would respond that zero population growth and zero economic growth by any means necessary were merely suggestions, as he has done before. That might have been true when Holdren was writing academic papers, textbooks, and delivering lectures to feeble-minded Harvard, MIT and Berkeley students. But when he put it in a policy paper and delivered it to the President, it ceased to be a suggestion or a possible alternative and became a proposal. For that, Professor Holdren, you should be very, very ashamed of yourself.