By Victor Morawski
Let’s face it: the world is full of egregious kooks who consider all of mankind their mortal enemies. We expect to find them within the inner sanctums of some global association of Islamic Terrorists. Or, perhaps, amongst the huddled holdouts within musty halls of the old Communist Block nation headquarters.
But never, ever would one expect to find such malevolent miscreants occupying seats of honor at the highest reaches of the U.S. government. Unless, of course, that government had fallen into the hands of those who boldly claim to loving mankind – while hating people.
America, meet John Holdren, Barack Obama’s new Science Czar.
Mr. Holdren has long advocated launching a “massive campaign…to de-develop the United States” for environmental reasons. Long a believer in lessening the impact of human beings on the Earth, his three-decade career has focused on doing this in two ways.
First, by limiting the number of people on the earth through recommendation of a litany of eugenicist measures so extreme that they strike most reasonable people as more a part of science fiction than science: “forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.”
And his recommendations sound even more like the stuff of science fiction when one considers that he supported establishment of a global police force to enforce these measures worldwide.
More recently, Holdren has directed his efforts toward attacking affluence and technology. In the 1970s, he and his mentor and co-author Paul Ehrlich actually developed a “formula” which allegedly accounts for human Impact (or Influence) on the Earth: I=PAT.
Even the mathematically challenged can easily understand it. It says that human Impact on the Earth is equal to the overall Population times its Affluence times its Technology.
Here, it should be noted, Impact is always to be understood as negative. A population with a higher degree of affluence and technology will have a proportionately higher negative Impact on the global environment than an equivalent population not so technologically advanced or affluent.
Thus, technology and affluence become negatives to mitigate, not positives to seek. And Holdren suggests doing just this through de-development by which he means, “lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets….”
Critics challenge Holdren and Ehrlich’s formula by pointing out that population, by itself, is a neutral element—larger population does not necessarily mean larger negative environmental impact—while, “affluence and technology, far from harming nature, actually promote its flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams clearer, the forests more expansive.”
But, Holdren will hear none of it. He is, in fact, a member in good standing of the Chicken Little Global Warming Doomsday Club. He has gone from falsely predicting global catastrophe due to overpopulation in the 1970s to now predicting it due to global warming in the 21st century. In fact, for him “Global warming” is not even a strong enough phrase as it suggests something gradual and benign. He prefers “global climatic disruption” and says while we can no longer avoid “dangerous anthropogenic [manmade] interference” our goal must be “to avoid catastrophic interference.”
And how do we avoid this “catastrophic interference”? Well, if Barack Obama’s Science Czar’s writings and pronouncements are any indication, we replace Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” with a mailed fist. Welcome to John Holdren’s depraved new world.
Victor Morawski is a Liberty Features Syndicate contributing writer and a professor of philosophy at Coppin State University.
