The Right Truly Has Gone Insane

It’s become a confederation of sovereign dunces, fantasizing about forming their own free state and cheering for their media champions, and regurgitating their hysterical screeds, from couches and basements across America.

Progressive blog One Utah has been getting a lot of comments on their recent post,
“The right has truly gone insane”. Predictably, there’s some crazy stuff to investigate. I’ll look at just one from a contrarian commenter, in a laundry list of statements about Obama administration “czars” (such as FCC Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd) that need a little scrutiny.

Science Czar John Holdren has written extensively about forced abortions and putting sterilents in our drinking water.

Hmm. That just seems too hairy-eyeballed to believe. It appears to be a direct quote from that paragon of journalistic integrity, Glenn Beck. As I commented at One Utah, it reminds me of the old “the gummint wants to poison our children by fluoridating the water in a Communist plot!!1!” paranoia that was current in the Mountain West when I was a sproggin.

Well… that was almost too easy. As Politifact notes, Glenn Beck said this exact thing, and refutes it by actually buying the one textbook and READING it. Imagine. They go on to note reactions from Holdren and his co-authors to the craziness from the Beck wing of the GOP:

In response to the comments from Beck and others, Holdren’s office issued this statement: “The quotations used to suggest that Dr. Holdren supports coercive approaches to limiting population growth were taken from a 1977 college textbook on environmental science and policy, of which he was the third author. The quoted material was from a section of the book that described different possible approaches to limiting population growth and then concluded that the authors’ own preference was to employ the noncoercive approaches before the environmental and social impacts of overpopulation led desperate societies to employ coercive ones. Dr. Holdren has never been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive means of population limitation.”

Holdren’s office also provided a statement from Annie and Paul Ehrlich, the co-authors: “We have been shocked at the serious mischaracterization of our views and those of John Holdren in blog posts based on misreadings of our jointly-authored 1000-page 1977 textbook, ECOSCIENCE. We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described — but not recommended — in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.

Here’s the list of Holdren’s professional and academic publications. Wow! He’s one scary guy. ::eyeroll::

John P Holdren – Curriculum Vitae

Recent publications

Dr. Holdren is the author of some 300 articles and papers, and he has co-authored and co-edited some 20 books and book-length reports, such as Energy (1971), Human Ecology (1973), Ecoscience (1977), Energy in Transition (1980), Earth and the Human Future (1986), Strategic Defences and the Future of the Arms Race (1987), Building Global Security Through Cooperation (1990), Conversion of Military R&D (1998), and Ending the Energy Stalemate (2004).

Byers, Stephen (Co-chair), Olympia Snowe (Co-chair), Bob Carr, John P. Holdren, Martin Khor Kok-Peng, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Claude Martin, Tony McMichael, Jonathon Porritt, Adair Turner, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Ni Weidou, Timothy E. Wirth, and Cathy Zoi. 2005. Meeting the Climate Challenge: Recommendations of the International Climate Change Task Force. Institute for Public Policy Research, Center for American Progress, and Australia Institute. January.

Holdren, John P. (Co-chair), William K. Reilly (Co-chair), John W. Rowe (Co-chair), Philip R. Sharp (Congressional Chair), Jason Grumet (Executive Director), et al. 2004. Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America’s Energy Challenges. Washington, DC: National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP), 128 pp. December.

Holdren, John P. 2003. U.S. Climate Policy Post Kyoto. Paper presented at The Convergence of U.S. National Security and the Global Environment, The Aspen Institute Congressional Program, 18(3)7-24.

Holdren, John P. 2003. Environmental Change and the Human Condition. Lecture. 1864th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, November 2002. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fall 24-31.

Holdren, John P. 2001. The Energy-Climate Challenge. Environment 43(5)8-21.

Holdren, John P., and Kirk R. Smith. 2000. Energy, the Environment, and Health. In The World Energy Assessment: Energy and the Challenge of Sustainability, ed. Jose Goldemberg, 61-110. UN Development Programme, New York.

Holdren, John P. 1996. Arms Limitation and Peace Building in the Post-Cold-War World (Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs). In Les Prix Nobel 1995. Nobel Foundation, Stockholm. Also in Pugwash Newsletter January 33(3)123-128; and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 52 (2)29-32.

Holdren, John P., Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich. 1995. The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects. In Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations, ed. M. Munasinghe and W. Shearer. World Bank, Washington, DC, 3-17.

Holdren, J.P., and R.K. Pachauri. 1992. Energy. In An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st Century, ed. Dooge, J.C.I., G. Goodman, and J.W.M. Riviere, et al. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 103 118.

Holdren, John P. 1981. Renewables in the U.S. Energy Future: How Much, How Fast? Energy The International Journal 6(9)901 916.

Ehrlich, Paul R., Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren. 1977. Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Holdren, John P., and Paul R. Ehrlich. 1974. Human Population and the Global Environment. American Scientist 62(3) 282 292.