Behind Global Warming Alarms

As the danger of global warming fades, the influence of those who would use it to expand government regulation grows.  Neil Maghami of the Capital Research Center investigates those behind today’s climate of environmental alarmism in his October 2009 article, “The Triumph of Environmental Alarmism: Science ‘Czar’ John Holdren and the Woods Hole Research Center.”

In the article, Maghami describes who John Holdren is and why he is significant.  Holdren is today President Obama’s science “czar,” and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).  The OSTP is responsible for keeping the president up to date on all matters scientific, ranging from leaps in technology to science ethics issues to climate science.  The office helps decide on budget allocations for various research and science programs.  Therefore, Maghami argues, the director of the office should be trusted “to make sound recommendations about what the federal government should do.”

However, John Holdren’s scientific background is questionable, Maghami asserts, citing Holdren’s co-authorship of the controversial textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, which he wrote with radical environmentalist Paul Ehrlich.  In this book, Holdren presents arguments for compulsory abortion; the establishment of a “Planetary Regime;” and “zero economic growth (ZEG).”

Maghami goes on to discuss Holdren’s involvement with the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), a non-profit institute dedicated to producing science that supports the claims of environmental alarmists.  Maghami writes, “From 1994 to 2005, Holdren was vice-chair of the Woods Hole Research Center board of trustees, and in 2005 he became director of the Center.”

Holdren’s association with the WHRC is troubling.  The Center actively promotes and advertises “a rapidly developing global climatic catastrophe,” which they aver can only be stopped by “town and state and national governments.”  The WHRC has written, “Contrary to the conservative dogma of the moment, the free market offers no solution to major environmental crises.  Intensification requires new rules, new laws, and a competent and evolving governmental system in which science, as well as economic and political interests, has a guiding hand” (emphasis added).  Clearly, the WHRC is interested in implementing a series of new rules and laws based on their own dubious science and “political interests.”  This is the culture and ideology Holdren has associated himself with.

The WHRC is dedicated to training people such as John Holdren who go on to policymaking positions.  Maghami writes, “In 2002, the Center received $2 million from a single contributor to endow a Chair in Environmental Policy.  Its primary focus is ‘to connect science, conservation and human affairs nationally and internationally and to incorporate the findings of science into the decisions of government.’”  Holdren is not the only eco-alarmist the WHRC will be sending out into an influential government job—be on the lookout for their current Chair in Environmental Policy, Kilaparti Ramakrishna.  We have not seen the last of the WHRC.

Allie Winegar Duzett is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.