Obama Czar Favors "Planetary Regime"

By Cliff Kincaid  |  August 17, 2009

Holdren cannot wiggle out of responsibility for these statements because he does not specifically attribute them to anyone else in particular.

Does Obama's science adviser advocate compulsory abortions and putting chemicals into the water supply to sexually sterilize human beings? Some well-known conservative bloggers and columnists have repeated this information, based on revelations on a website strangely called Zombietime. But an analysis by Accuracy in Media has determined that some of the most sensational charges against Dr. John P. Holdren fall short of the mark. Still, he has a lot to answer for, including his curious belief in a "Planetary Regime" to manage the world.
That Holdren endorsed the concept of a "planetary regime" is shocking, considering that he is now a top White House official. In fairness, however, it doesn't seem much different from Pope Benedict XVI's endorsement of a "World Political Authority," which was included in his recent encyclical. Devotion to some form of world government seems popular in religious and government circles these days, especially in the age of Obama.
The difference, of course, is that Holdren was confirmed by the Senate of the United States and his salary is paid by U.S. taxpayers. However, senators may not have been aware of many of his views.
The Senate unanimously confirmed Holdren to the position of Science Adviser and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on March 19. He was previously the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Public Policy, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Professor of Energy and Resources Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He also served as director of the Woods Hole Research Center. 
Senator David Vitter of Louisiana took the February 12 confirmation hearing seriously and grilled Holdren about some of his doomsday views on climate change, population growth, and the possibilities of nuclear war.
Vitter noted, for example, that Holdren had written that 280 million people would be "too many" for the U.S. In response, Holdren said, "I no longer think it's productive, Senator, to focus on the optimum population for the United States. I don't think any of us know what the right answer is. When I wrote those lines in 1973, I was preoccupied with the fact that many problems the United States faced appeared to be being made more difficult by the rate of population growth that then prevailed."
Warnings Ignored
William Yeatman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute had warned the Senate that Holdren had "a 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices" that made him "unfit to serve as White House Science Adviser."
Still, no senator voted against Holdren.
Holdren is now under renewed assault for statements that are being attributed to him in a 1977 book he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.
Holdren was a close associate of Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who, as noted by AIM founder Reed Irvine in a 1999 AIM Report, is "the discredited former Stanford butterfly expert who used to show up regularly on television shows warning of impending disasters that have never materialized." Highlighting one of Ehrlich's most notable gaffes, Irvine explained that "In 1980 Ehrlich bet economist Julian Simon $1,000 that the price of a group of raw materials that he selected would be higher in 1990; Simon, who predicted prices would be lower, won the bet." This became known internationally as the "Simon-Ehrlich Wager."
At the time it was reported that Obama would nominate Holdren as science czar, John Tierney of the New York Times noted that Holdren was "one of the experts" that Ehrlich had enlisted on his side in making that bet.
What Is Zombietime?
The website Zombietime attracted attention by seeking to prove the most sensational charges against Holdren with actual excerpts from the book that are reproduced for everyone to see. Its headline screamed, "John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet." The subheadline was, "Book he authored in 1977 advocates for extreme totalitarian measures to control the population." The author of the piece about Holdren is anonymous and there seems to be no way to contact or even know the identity of the person or persons behind the website.
What's worse, some of the key excerpts have been taken out of context to attribute views to Holdren that he attributes to others.
Zombietime reports, for example, that on page 837 Holdren and his co-authors write that "Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however."
However, this statement is preceded by this paragraph: "The impact of laws and policies on population size and growth has, until very recently, largely been ignored by the legal profession. The first comprehensive treatment of population law was that of the late Johnson C. Montgomery, an attorney who was president of Zero Population Growth, and whose ideas are the basis of much of the following discussion."
Zombietime says that on pages 942-943 the book calls for a "Planetary Regime" that "should control the global economy and dictate by force the number of children allowed to be born."
Page 942 does include a heading, "Toward a Planetary Regime," and page 943 declares, "The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime should have some power to enforce the agreed limits. As with the Law of the Sea and other international agreements, all agreements for regulating population sizes, resource development, and pollution should be subject to revision and modification in accordance with changing conditions."
World Government?
Holdren cannot wiggle out of responsibility for these statements because he does not specifically attribute them to anyone else in particular. Hence, the endorsement of a "planetary regime" can be correctly attributed to the authors of the book, including Holdren. What's more, Holdren's endorsement of the Law of the Sea Treaty is currently relevant because this is a treaty that Obama is now pushing for ratification by the U.S. Senate.
The book declares on page 943: "Should a Law of the Sea be successfully established, it could serve as a model for a future Law of the Atmosphere to regulate the use of airspace, to monitor climate change, and to control atmospheric pollution. Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP [United Nations Environmental Program] and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime-sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural re-sources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist."
This is not only dangerous but an accurate prediction of what is currently happening under Obama, who is pushing Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty and hoping to produce another and much tougher global warming treaty at a United Nations conference in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Global Enforcer
Zombietime highlights that the Holdren book declares on page 917 that "If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force."
This statement is followed by the important caveat: "But it seems probable that, as long as most people fail to comprehend the magnitude of the danger, that step will be impossible."
In this case, the caveat is not convincing, in part because Holdren seems to have dedicated his career to exaggerating "the danger" and can be counted on to continue to do so in his White House position.  
It goes without saying that the major media should belatedly begin to probe Holdren's views with a careful reading of the book Ecoscience.

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