The Kennedy School’s John Holdren credits two books for inspiring his move from the lab to the halls of Capitol Hill and the White House.
Written by David Holzman
It might seem odd that a Stanford-minted PhD in theoretical plasma physics has become better known for speaking out on the dangers of global warming, international security issues, population, and energy. But that was by design.
John Holdren, the director of the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the current head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is known for helping to shape U.S. policy on climate change and nuclear weapons management.
“Holdren is one of the foremost figures in the world on climate change,” says William Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President Bush and is now the head of a San Francisco-based private equity firm investing in water projects. “He has a very attractive objectivity.”
Growing up, Holdren planned to become a scientist. But two books he read in high school triggered a passion for what he calls the “big interdisciplinary problems of the human condition.” In The Challenge of Man’s Future, Harrison Brown argues that the problems of overpopulation, resource development, energy, and security are inextricably intertwined. The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow asserts that civilization’s biggest afflictions require solutions that straddle the gulf between the domain of science and technology and that of the social sciences and humanities.
Holdren studied plasma physics partly because of his interest in nuclear fusion, which was being touted as a clean and inexhaustible source of energy. But he soon realized that this billing glossed over fusion’s many problems.
At Stanford, Holdren began his long-standing collaboration with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford ecologist who published his well-known book The Population Bomb in 1968. Their first joint publication, Population and Panaceas: A Technical Perspective, argued that technology can’t solve the problems created by limitless population growth.
During this time, Holdren says he became convinced from his reading that human impacts on climate were going to be the “biggest and most intractable of environmental problems due to human activity.”
In 1973, at the University of California, Berkeley, Holdren cofounded an interdisciplinary graduate program with Snow’s philosophy in mind. Students in the program learn about energy, environment, development, and security issues.
With the election of Ronald Reagan and the Cold War escalating, Holdren in the 1980s began to turn his attention to nuclear energy and weapons proliferation. He became involved in the Pugwash Conferences, where scholars and public officials meet as private citizens to discuss arms control and disarmament.
In 1995, Holdren accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Pugwash, which he had chaired for a decade. “It was a tremendous honor to give that speech,” he says. “I had my wife and kids in Oslo, in a huge auditorium with the King and Queen of Norway in the front row.”
In the 1990s, Holdren chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and ran a special panel assessing options for disposing of surplus plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons. This work influenced Department of Energy policies, says Frank von Hippel, a public and international affairs professor at Princeton University, who was assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first Clinton administration. Holdren became a member of Clinton’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, where he had the nuclear materials and nonproliferation, climate change, and energy portfolios.
Holdren moved from Berkeley to Harvard in 1996, partly because he feared his weekly trips from California to Washington, DC, kept him away from his students too much. Massachusetts was closer, and the offer from Harvard to head a program built by two of his mentors, Harvey Brooks and Louis Branscomb, was a big lure. Also, his wife, a New Englander, had always wanted to return.
One of Holdren’s most recent achievements was a 2004 report about energy and climate change policy, which has been credited with influencing the U.S. Senate, says Ken Connolly, staff director of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The Senate passed a resolution last year that “for the first time recognized both the seriousness of the climate-change problem and the human contribution to it,” says Reilly, who cochaired with Holdren the bipartisan group that wrote the report.
Indeed, Holdren “is probably one of the leaders in trying to educate Congress on the possibilities for energy innovation for solving the climate dilemma,” says Connolly.
After years in the world of policy, does Holdren miss science? “I still use the tools of science in analyzing the issues that I work on,” he says. But, “the opportunity to affect those issues at the highest levels of government was one I wouldn’t have missed for the world. So much of the point of my trying to understand the world better was to improve the human condition.”