Earth Equity News

John Holdren to Pitch Science of Climate Change for Obama. By John Lauerman, Bloomberg News, February 10, 2009. "At age 64, John 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... 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... 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... 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... 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. Holdren became the head of the Kennedy School's Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy. He also was named director of the independent Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod."