Holdren sees opportunities in energy challenges
The two toughest challenges the nation faces in terms of energy, according to presidential science adviser John Holdren ’65 SM ’66, are meeting our transportation needs with less oil, and meeting economic aspirations while producing less climate-altering carbon-dioxide emissions. But the good news, he told an MIT audience on Monday, Oct. 25, is that meeting those challenges really can promote significant job creation and business growth.Holdren, delivering the David J. Rose Lecture in Nuclear Technology, noted that as of 2008, 82 percent of the world’s energy needs were being met through the use of fossil fuels — a degree of dependence he called “shocking.” And the percentage of fossil-fuel dependence is even higher in the United States and China, he said. But the world’s energy problems are often framed in the wrong terms, he suggested. It’s not that we’re running out of energy sources, or running out of the money...