Les Jones

John Holdren, Obama’s science czar, advocated totalitarian measures to address overpopulation

Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | Environment, Population, Science | Permalink | 5 Comments |

Via Ace of Spades, Zombietime has unearthed a book of environmental extremism written by Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, advocates extreme measures such as forced abortions and forced sterilization to combat the threat the authors foresee from overpopulation.

All quotes directly from the book (and Zombietime has photographs of these passages if you have any doubts):

• Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
• One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
• Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
• If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.
• In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

In the 1970s overpopulation was the environmental boogeyman that would destroy us all. Now global warming has replaced overpopulation as the all-encompassing threat to our existence, with not just a hint that overpopulation is the real problem that will have to be controlled. Reading the quotes above you can’t help but be reminded of the shameful history of social Darwinism and eugenics.

The only country that followed this sort of advice was Communist China, which enforces its one child per couple policy with forced abortions. Disgusting as the proposals above are, they’re the tip of the iceberg. In order for a government to engage in forced abortions or forced sterilizations they would first have to eliminate most civil liberties, just as China has done. In the name of saving the planet our government would have to become as brutal and totalitarian as China’s.

P.S. Holdren was the loser of a famous bet involving the Earth’s resources and commodity prices.

Tags: democrats aren't the party of science either, john holdren

Obama’s science advisor was loser of a famous bet

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 | Environment, Science | Permalink | 2 Comments |

John Tierney - Flawed Science Advice for Obama?:

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.

And Holdren is a global warming true believer, natch.

Tags: democrats aren't the party of science either, john holdren