Holdren taught at Harvard for 13 years and at the
University of California, Berkeley for more than two decades.
Mike Boots, President's Environmental Youth Award (PEYA) winner / EPA intern Apoorva Rangan, EPA Administrator
Gina McCarthy, PEYA winner May Wang, PEYA award winner Deepika Kurup, and White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren before the PEYA awards ceremony Holdren was involved in the famous
Simon–Ehrlich wager in 1980. He, along with two other scientists helped
Paul R. Ehrlich establish the bet with
Julian Simon, in which they bet that the price of five key metals would be higher in 1990. The bet was centered around a disagreement concerning the future scarcity of resources in an increasingly polluted and heavily populated world. Ehrlich and Holdren lost the bet, when the price of metals had decreased by 1990. In 1981, Holdren was awarded a
MacArthur Fellowship (informally known as the "genius award") for his efforts to promote world peace through energy management. Holdren was chair of the Executive Committee of the
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1987 until 1997 and delivered the
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture on behalf of Pugwash Conferences in December 1995. From 1993 until 2003, he was chair of the
Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the
National Academy of Sciences, and co-chairman of the bipartisan National Committee on Energy Policy from 2002 until 2007. Holdren was elected
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2006–2007), and served as board Chairman (2007–2008). He testified to the nomination committee that he does not believe that government should have a role in determining
optimal population size and that he never endorsed
forced sterilization.
Writings Overpopulation was an early concern and interest. In a 1969 article, Holdren and co-author
Paul R. Ehrlich argued, "if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come." In 1973, Holdren encouraged a decline in fertility to well below replacement in the United States, because "210 million now is too many and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many." (The population of the US was 327.2 million in 2018.) In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich,
Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook
Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. Other early publications include
Energy (1971),
Human Ecology (1973),
Energy in Transition (1980),
Earth and the Human Future (1986),
Strategic Defenses and the Future of the Arms Race (1987),
Building Global Security Through Cooperation (1990), and
Conversion of Military R&D (1998). •
Science in the White House. Science, May 2009, 567. •
Convincing the Climate Change Skeptics. The Boston Globe, August 4, 2008. • ''Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy To Meet America's Energy Challenges.'' Presentation at the
National Academies 2008 Energy Summit, Washington, D.C., March 14, 2008. •
Global Climatic Disruption: Risks and Opportunities. Presentation at Investor Summit on Climate Risk, New York, February 14, 2008. •
Meeting the Climate-Change Challenge. The John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture,
National Council for Science and the Environment, Washington, D.C., January 17, 2008. ==Personal life==