image above: John Holdren at Harvard microphone. Photograph by Keith Srakocic for Bloomberg News
At age 64, Holdren now is taking on his toughest assignment: getting the American public and Congress to curb fossil fuel use. Barack Obama has named Holdren as assistant to the president for science and technology as well as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post for which he will face a Senate confirmation hearing on Feb 12.
The White House “is the place where he ought to be right now, trying to save the world,” said Paul Ehrlich, author of the “The Population Bomb” (Ballantine, 1968), a manifesto that predicted disaster from depletion of the Earth’s resources. Holdren is “absolutely brilliant,” Ehrlich said.
As the head of the technology office, Holdren would also be co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, along with Harvard geneticist Eric Lander and Harold Varmus, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist who is president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. All three declined to be interviewed until after Holdren’s confirmation.
Lander, Varmus
Leonard Zon, a Harvard stem cell scientist who knows Lander and Varmus and has followed Holdren’s career, said the three men are likely to recommend more federal support for embryonic stem cell research, and budget increases for the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. agency that backs the bulk of basic science conducted at academic institutions.
“I know they’re very enthusiastic about stem cell biology,” Zon said.
Holdren’s areas of expertise are climate change, alternative energy and arms control. At the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, scheduled for December in Copenhagen, the U.S. will be urged to adopt carbon-dioxide limits that 183 countries accept already, said Paul Epstein, an environmental researcher at Harvard.
Kyoto Protocol
Holdren may push for the U.S. to be part of a carbon- curbing treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, said Epstein, associate director of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, who has consulted Holdren on research.
Holdren will counsel Obama on how to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The gas has risen to a concentration of about 385 parts per million in the atmosphere, from about 275 parts per million in the early 1700s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Studies have suggested that halting levels at 550 particles per million by the year 2050 would avoid the worst effects of global warming and help avoid flooding and major crop losses. Holdren may aim for even bigger reductions, said Graham Allison, director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
'Genius Grant'
“He believes at this stage that the world’s got to get down to no more than 550 parts per million and may have to get lower than 450 parts per million,” Allison said.
Holdren first gained public attention in December 1981, at age 37, when he won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, or “genius” grant, for analyses of energy and arms control. He joined the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an organization focused on limiting nuclear weapons, and gave an acceptance speech in Oslo in December 1995 after Pugwash shared the Nobel Peace Prize. He later served for 14 years on the MacArthur board.
Those credentials haven’t immunized him from criticism. While Holdren has focused on the dangers of burning fuel, he hasn’t taken into account the possibility of diminishment of oil supplies, a factor that would reduce carbon emissions in the future, said Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School who wrote “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
“If he can manage to get his facts right, then that’s good for his boss,” Lomborg said. “But he hasn’t on this issue.”
‘Climatic Disruption’
Soft-spoken and professorial, with a gray beard and a shaggy, full head of hair, Holdren typically begins his climate change lectures by telling the audience members they can use his slides that paint a bleak picture of the future without the need to get his permission. That’s part of his effort to spread his point of view.
“‘Global warming’ is a misnomer,” he told an Aspen Ideas Festival audience of about 300 in July. “What we’re experiencing is global climatic disruption. We’re already experiencing serious harm.”
During the presentation, his rapid-fire graphics showed the effect of future warming, with rising sea levels creating a map without Greenland, Florida and parts of New England.
More than 100 listeners, mostly non-scientists, requested copies of Holdren’s slides after the July talk, said Kitty Boone, a vice president at the nonprofit Aspen Institute.
Responding to Crichton
Despite his quiet manner, Holdren hasn’t shied away from public disagreements. In congressional testimony in September 2005, the author Michael Crichton in September 2005 questioned the severity of climate change. Speaking before reporters in February 2008 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren dismissed Crichton as a “lapsed physician turned science fiction writer.” Crichton, a Harvard Medical School graduate best known for “Jurassic Park” (Knopf, 1990), died last November.
Consensus Building
Holdren has nonetheless shown talent for building the kind of consensus needed to pursue his goals, said William Reilly, Holdren’s co-chairman on the National Commission on Energy Policy. When the panel convened in 2002, Holdren helped persuade Ford and ConocoPhillips executives on the commission that climate change threatened to raise sea levels and harm crops.
A December 2004 report, endorsed unanimously by members of the bipartisan commission, recommended a cap-and-trade policy for the U.S. The system would allow companies to trade the right to emit carbon dioxide.
Now Holdren has to sell such a policy to Congress after two presidents spurned it. President Bill Clinton, faced with conflicting assessments of what the 1992 Kyoto Protocol would cost the U.S. economy, opted not to bring the treaty before the Senate for ratification. President George W. Bush refused to support the seven-year agreement, calling it “unrealistic.”
‘Significant Force’
“John is going to be a very significant force in the office of the president,” said Robert Stavins, a Harvard economist and a specialist on cap-and-trade strategies. “He’s not going to shy away from discussions and debates, no matter who is in the room.”
Holdren and his wife, Cheryl, live in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and have two children and five grandchildren. He earned his 1965 bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. While working toward his Ph.D. degree in plasma physics, which he received in 1970 from Stanford University near Palo Alto, California, Holdren immersed himself in environmental and population issues.
He arrived at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1996. He became a professor focused on environmental science and policy, in both the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. He also directed the independent Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod.
Fishing Technique
Holdren brings the rigor of science to fishing along the Cape, said Allison, the Belfer Center director. Before the two of them set off in search of striped bass, Holdren consults a spreadsheet that he keeps to track tides, water temperature, weather conditions and currents.
“He’ll look at these charts and say, ‘I’m betting you the stripers are there,’” Allison said. “He’s pretty much a scientist from when gets up in the morning to when he goes to bed.”
To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net
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