John Holdren Quotes

#1. People are seeing the impact of climate change around them in extraordinary patterns of floods and droughts, wildfires, heatwaves and powerful storms.

John Holdren

#2. A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States ... [we] must design a stable, low-consumption economy.

John Holdren

#3. A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

John Holdren

#4. Reliable and affordable energy is essential for meeting basic human needs and fueling economic growth, but many of the most difficult and dangerous environmental problems at every level of economic development arise from the harvesting, transport, processing, and conversion of energy

John Holdren

#5. Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control.

John Holdren

#6. I don't like the term 'global warming,' because it's misleading. It implies something that's mainly about temperature, that's gradual, and that's uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that's changing.

John Holdren

#7. The e-mails are mainly about a controversy over a particular data set and the ways a particular small group of scientists have displayed that dataset.

John Holdren

#8. Wildfires are a result of temperature conditions, of soil moisture conditions; and, of course, something has to start it.

John Holdren

#9. It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.

John Holdren

#10. My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing, the human role in causing it.

John Holdren

#11. When I need to see the president, I make a request directly to his scheduler. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to see the president except the president. Some weeks, I see him multiple times. Some weeks, I don't see him at all.

John Holdren

#12. I think we ultimately ought to look to put all uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing, if any is done, under multinational control. Those are the two technologies by which nuclear energy can be translated into nuclear weapons programmes.

John Holdren

#13. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.

John Holdren

#14. To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated.

John Holdren