Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

That line's from Bird Dog, at Maggie's Farm. And it's memorable. I can't get it out of my own head, anyway. Mr. Obama appears to have drunk all of the Al Gore-ian environmental Kool-Aid. The Bird Dog links to a WSJ article: "Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters."

Moonbattery has this charming picture:


Glenn Reynolds links to John Tierney at the NY Times, who asks, "Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday."

The reports appear to have panned out, and colleagues at Woods Hole and Harvard, and some other people in Massachusetts, are excited.

Ron Bailey says that "In his salad days, Holdren was a paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club.… Near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced with his colleague, perennial population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, the concept of the I=PAT equation. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world. In the past Holdren has adhered to the common ecologist's disdain for insights from economics in helping solve environmental problems." [Typo in Ehrlich's name corrected by me.]

More Holdren at Solve Climate. And Luboš Motl isn't being coy: "John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world."

So Browner and Holdren are Deep Greens. Will they be having policy meetings with Paul Watson to determine the optimum method for bringing the world population down to a "sustainable" level, maybe one billion or so? That's a lot of Soylent Green.

In the meantime, the world is growing colder. Are we are getting closer to Fallen Angels all the time? Let's have enormous, expensive, economy-killing programs to stop the Earth from warming, when in fact the Earth is cooling.

Maybe we need to throw another log on the fire, as our ancestors did long ago. (via, via)

Here previously: Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash.

Update, Dec 24: a follow-up from Tierney: "My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is “sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the pessimists."

Update: Original source of the picture.