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The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition

Document 142: John P. Holdren on Energy and Human Well-Being (1990)

John P. Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, served as a science advisor in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and was involved in preparations for the Kyoto Protocol [Document 145B] and the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. He is concerned about the failure of the United States to establish an energy policy that adequately encourages the development of clean, safe fuels to satisfy the nation’s long-term energy needs. Foreseeing negative social, political, economic, and environmental consequences from the continued absence of such a policy, he worries about its effect on America’s position as a world leader.

[C]ivilization is not running out of energy resources in an absolute sense, nor is it running out of technological options for transforming these resources into the particular forms that our patterns of energy use require. We are, however, running out of the cheap oil and natural gas that powered much of the growth of modern industrialized societies, out of environmental capacity to absorb the impacts of burning coal, and out of public tolerance for the risks of nuclear fission. We seem to be lacking as well the commitment to make coal cleaner and fission safer, the money and endurance needed to develop long-term alternatives, the astuteness to embrace energy efficiency on the scale demanded and the consensus needed to fashion any coherent strategy at all.

These deficiencies suggest that civilization has entered a fundamental transition in the nature of the energy-society interaction without any collective recognition of the transition’s character or its implications for human well-being. The transition is from convenient but ultimately scarce energy resources to less convenient but more abundant ones, from a direct and positive connection between energy and economic well-being to a complicated and multidimensional one, and from localized pockets of pollution and hazard to impacts that are regional and even global in scope.

The subject is also being transformed from one of limited political interest within nations to a focus of major political contention between them, from an issue dominated by decisions and concerns of the Western world to one in which the problems and prospects of all regions are inextricably linked, and from one of concern to only a small group of technologists and managers to one where the values and actions of every citizen matter.

Understanding this transition requires a look at the two-sided connection between energy and human well-being. Energy contributes positively to well-being by providing such consumer services as heating, lighting and cooking as well as serving as a necessary input to economic production. But the costs of energy—including not only the money and other resources devoted to obtaining and exploiting it but also the environmental and sociopolitical impacts—detract from well-being.

Source: John P. Holdren, “Energy in Transition,” Scientific American 263, no. 3 (September 1990): 157.

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MLA 9th
"Document 142: John P. Holdren On Energy And Human Well-Being (1990)." The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, edited by Peninah Neimark & Peter Rhoades Mott, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0153.
APA 7th
Document 142: John P. Holdren on Energy and Human Well-Being (1990). The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, In P. Neimark & P. R. Mott (Eds.), Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0153.
CMOS 17th
"Document 142: John P. Holdren On Energy And Human Well-Being (1990)." The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, Edited by Peninah Neimark & Peter Rhoades Mott. Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0153.