Mitch, Lyons has a big problem here. The fellow he holds out as the paragon of intellect with a string of highfalutin academic credentials, John Holdren, is a bit of a kook. Or at least we can say he readily embraces apocalyptic predictions that wind up wildly, even laughably wrong. And yet he learns little from his previous failures in judgment.
When Holdren was picked by Obama in December, Ross Douthat (who’s hardly a raving right-winger) noted Holdren’s long-running collaborations with Population Bomb scarifiers Paul and Anne Ehrlich, who were, in Douthat’s words, pitching “a mix of hysteria and moral idiocy.”
Holdren was also a key player in the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon. Simon bet Ehrlich, who was predicting that the 1980s would bring mass famines and a total scarcity of basic commodities, that human ingenuity would triumph over shortages. Simon bet $1,000 that the price of any natural resource would go down over time. Holdren picked five precious metals, and over a decade — the agreed-upon timeline — Simon won on all five.
If Lyons wants to pick an example of a smart guy who can run circles around the presumed mouth-breathers, he’d do better to select someone who has a track record of occasionally being in the same time zone as reality.
