Harvard’s John Holdren to be Obama’s Science Advisor

In this week’s Phoenix, as a companion to David Bernstein’s excellent cover story, 20 Reasons the Earth Will Be Glad to See Bush Go, I took a look at the incoming officials of the Obama administration who’ll be charged with the stewardship of the environment — a group one member of the League of Conservation Voters called a “Green Dream Team.”

Well, it looks like we can add one more name to the squad. Science magazine is reporting that John Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School, has been tapped to be Obama’s science advisor.

Holdren, a physicist who teaches in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is also director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth and a past president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (see his impressive CV here). He specializes in global warming issues, sustainable development, energy technologies, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation.

While there’s some concern, as the magazine notes, that having too many proverbial cooks might “complicate how the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Holdren will run, will manage energy and environmental policy,” there’s just as good a chance that another first-rate intellect like Holdren will be a fine complement to Obama’s new energy secretary, Faulkner-quoting Nobel laureate Steven Chu, and former EPA chief Carol Browner, who’s been chosen for the Obama White House’s newly-created “climate czar” position.

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Sorry. Just fainted for a second there. The thought of a president that encourages scientific inquiry after these last eight years was a shock to my system. Better now.