[Editor Note: An earlier series at MasterResource on John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor, is being reprinted given the recent controversy surrounding Dr. Holdren’s earlier views. This original post is dated December 31, 2008]
Paul Ehrlich founded the neo-Malthusian movement with his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, and John Holdren was an instant convert. In 1971, mentor-and-disciple wrote:
“We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)”
… Continue Reading– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, ‘What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure’, in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology, p.
[Editor Note: An earlier series at MasterResource on John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor, is being reprinted given the recent controversy surrounding Dr. Holdren’s earlier views. This original post is dated December 30, 2008]
Skeptics of climate alarmism have often trotted out the fact that a number of climate scientists sounded the alarm over global cooling before they sounded the alarm over global warming–an argument for humility in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and change.Global cooling was more than fringe thinking. As Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich wrote in their 1996 book, Betrayal of Science and Reason (p. 34):
… Continue Reading“Predictions of future climate trends by Stephen Schneider and other leading climatologists, based on the prevailing knowledge of the atmosphere in the early 1970s, gave more weight to the potential problem of global cooling than it now appears to merit.”
The Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) recently put out a study called “Green Prosperity” with the subtitle: “How Clean-Energy Policies Can Fight Poverty and Raise Living Standards in the United States.” I have posted a full critique for the Institute for Energy Reserach, which I summarize here.
Helping Business By Crippling It?
The PERI study makes this bold claim:
The building of a clean-energy economy in the United States can also serve another purpose: to create new ‘pathways out of poverty’ for the 78 million people in this country (roughly 25 percent of the population) who are presently poor or near-poor, and raise living standards more generally for low-income people in the United States. (p. 2)
This is nonsense. You don’t make a country richer by taking away options from businesses.…
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