Dr. John Holdren
WHITE HOUSE News:
Have a question about our changing climate? You’ve got the President’s science advisor at your fingertips.
Since November, Dr. John Holdren has been encouraging the public to ask him anything about climate change on social media using the hashtag #AskDrH.
You’ve been asking — and he’s been answering. Most recently, students asked what the U.S. is doing to prepare for future storms, and how we can cut carbon dioxide emissions without hurting our economy — among other critical questions.
Watch video here.
“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” That’s what the President said in his State of the Union address last month.
The fact is that there’s a lot of misinformation out there about our climate, and it’s on all of us to do our part to set the record straight and make sure people are as informed and knowledgeable about the very real effects of climate change as possible.
About Holdren
John Paul Holdren, 70, is the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues through his roles as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)
Holdren was previously the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.
Holdren was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and grew up in San Mateo, Calif. He trained in aeronautics, astronautics and plasma physics and earned a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1970 supervised by Oscar Buneman. He taught at Harvard for 13 years and at the University of California, Berkeley for more than two decades. His work has focused on the causes and consequences of global environmental change, energy technologies and policies, ways to reduce the dangers from nuclear weapons and materials, and science and technology policy. He has also taken measures to contextualize the United State’s current energy challenge, noting the role that nuclear energy could play. In 2008, he lived in Falmouth, Mass., with his wife, biologist Cheryl E. Holdren, with whom he has two children and five grandchildren.
Holdren was involved in the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager in 1980. He, along with two other scientists helped Paul R. Ehrlich establish the bet with Julian Simon, in which they bet that the price of five key metals would be higher in 1990. The bet was centred around a disagreement concerning the future scarcity of resources in an increasingly polluted and heavily populated world. Ehrlich and Holdren lost the bet, when the price of metals had decreased by 1990.
Holdren was chair of the Executive Committee of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1987 until 1997 and delivered the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture on behalf of Pugwash Conferences in December 1995. From 1993 until 2003, he was chair of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences, and Co-Chairman of the bipartisan National Committee on Energy Policy from 2002 until 2007. Holdren was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2006–2007), and served as board Chairman (2007–2008). He was the founding chair of the advisory board for Innovations, a quarterly journal about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges published by MIT Press, and has written and lectured extensively on the topic of global warming.
Holdren served as one of President Bill Clinton’s science advisors (PCAST) from 1994 to 2001. Eight years later, President Barack Obama nominated Holdren for his current position as science advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in December 2008, and he was confirmed March 19, 2009, by a unanimous vote in the Senate. He testified to the nomination committee that he does not believe that government should have a role in determining optimal population size and that he never endorsed forced sterilization.
Source: wikipedia