Ugo at Cassandra's Legacy has a post contrasting the old style scientist / engineer technocrats like M King Hubbert with the modern version - neoliberal economists like new Italian leader Mario Monti - Technocrats.

Marion King Hubbert had foreseen many things correctly in his career, mainly about oil production. But he had also joined a group called the "technocrats" who proposed that technical experts should run governments. Maybe he was right also in this prediction, as the recent events in Italy may indicate.

Professor Mario Monti has been appointed by the President of the Republic as the new head of the Italian Government, replacing the democratically elected, but disastrous, Silvio Berlusconi. I am not sure of whether Mr. Monti likes to be defined as a "technocrat," but the term fits his present job very well. Is this the start of a new trend? It is too early to say but, who knows?

I normally only ever come across the Canada Free Press (I'm not sure what is "free" about a Canadian publication that worships America, but whatever) when people are spouting conspiracy theories about global warming and the apparently baleful influence of Canadian Maurice Strong. Today however I came across an article on Hubbert and the Technocrats and how their ideas about an energy based currency may be slowly coming to fruition via carbon credits - Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy ?.

Critics who think that the U.S. dollar will be replaced by some new global currency are perhaps thinking too small.

On the world horizon looms a new global currency that could replace all paper currencies and the economic system upon which they are based.

The new currency, simply called Carbon Currency, is designed to support a revolutionary new economic system based on energy (production, and consumption), instead of price. Our current price-based economic system and its related currencies that have supported capitalism, socialism, fascism and communism, is being herded to the slaughterhouse in order to make way for a new carbon-based world.

It is plainly evident that the world is laboring under a dying system of price-based economics as evidenced by the rapid decline of paper currencies. The era of fiat (irredeemable paper currency) was introduced in 1971 when President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world’s primary reserve asset, all other currencies eventually followed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increasingly undesired, unstable, unusable.

The deathly economic state of today’s world is a direct reflection of the sum of its sick and dying currencies, but this could soon change.

Forces are already at work to position a new Carbon Currency as the ultimate solution to global calls for poverty reduction, population control, environmental control, global warming, energy allocation and blanket distribution of economic wealth.

Unfortunately for individual people living in this new system, it will also require authoritarian and centralized control over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave.

What is Carbon Currency and how does it work? In a nutshell, Carbon Currency will be based on the regular allocation of available energy to the people of the world. If not used within a period of time, the Currency will expire (like monthly minutes on your cell phone plan) so that the same people can receive a new allocation based on new energy production quotas for the next period.

Because the energy supply chain is already dominated by the global elite, setting energy production quotas will limit the amount of Carbon Currency in circulation at any one time. It will also naturally limit manufacturing, food production and people movement.

Local currencies could remain in play for a time, but they would eventually wither and be fully replaced by the Carbon Currency, much the same way that the Euro displaced individual European currencies over a period of time.

Sounds very modern in concept, doesn’t it? In fact, these ideas date back to the 1930’s when hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens were embracing a new political ideology called Technocracy and the promise it held for a better life. Even now-classic literature was heavily influenced by Technocracy: George Orwell’s 1984, H.G. Well’s The Shape of Things to Come and Huxley’s “scientific dictatorship” in Brave New World.

This paper investigates the rebirth of Technocracy and its potential to recast the New World Order into something truly “new” and also totally unexpected by the vast majority of modern critics.

Background

Philosophically, Technocracy found it roots in the scientific autocracy of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and in the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798- 1857), the father of the social sciences. Positivism elevated science and the scientific method above metaphysical revelation. Technocrats embraced positivism because they believed that social progress was possible only through science and technology. [Schunk, Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th, 315]

The social movement of Technocracy, with its energy-based accounting system, can be traced back to the 1930’s when an obscure group of engineers and scientists offered it as a solution to the Great Depression.

imageThe principal scientist behind Technocracy was M. King Hubbert, a young geoscientist who would later (in 1948-1956) invent the now-famous Peak Oil Theory, also known as the Hubbert Peak Theory. Hubbert stated that the discovery of new energy reserves and their production would be outstripped by usage, thereby eventually causing economic and social havoc. Many modern followers of Peak Oil Theory believe that the 2007-2009 global recession was exacerbated in part by record oil prices that reflected validity of the theory. ...

Conclusion

If M. King Hubbert and other early architects of Technocracy were alive today, they would be very pleased to see the seeds of their ideas on energy allocation grow to bear fruit on such a large scale. In 1933, the technology didn’t exist to implement a system of Energy Certificates. However, with today’s ever-advancing computer technology, the entire world could easily be managed on a single computer.

This article intended to show that

* Carbon Currency is not a new idea, but has deep roots in Technocracy
* Carbon Currency has grown from a continental proposal to a global proposal
* It has been consistently discussed over a long period of time
* The participants include many prominent global leaders, banks and think-tanks
* The context of these discussions have been very consistent
* Today’s goals for implementing Carbon Currency are virtually identical to Technocracy’s original Energy Certificates goals.

Of course, a currency is merely a means to an end. Whoever controls the currency also controls the economy and the political structure that goes with it. Inquiry into what such a system might look like will be a future topic.

Technocracy and energy-based accounting are not idle or theoretical issues. If the global elite intends for Carbon Currency to supplant national currencies, then the world economic and political systems will also be fundamentally changed forever.

What Technocracy could not achieve during the Great Depression appears to have finally found traction in the Great Recession.

The Guardian has a fairly technocractic article on the low value accorded to engineers in Britain and the value of implementing some large scale and tecnically complex infrastructure to rebuild the economy on "solid foundations" - Let engineers make Britain great again.

Orson Welles said film-making was the biggest electric train set a boy ever had. He was wrong. A new high-speed train line would be, if the boy or girl grew up to engineer it.

But in Britain, the train set is broken and has been packed away in the attic. We're not proud of industry and we certainly don't want our kids to grow up to be engineers. It's a tragedy. It never used to be this way. We need to rediscover the power of engineering, its impact and contribution. It can stimulate young minds and it can stimulate the economy. ...

So the young are innately curious about how and why things work. Yet what happens between childhood and adulthood? We stamp it out of them. Engineering gets stigmatised and we encourage our kids to become "professionals" - lawyers, accountants, doctors. Unlike in France or Germany, engineers are a bit of a nonentity here. Engineering is almost a dirty word. We're told it's "old industry" and that we are a "post-industrial nation".

Part of the problem is that engineers are not accorded the status they deserve. We celebrate designers and architects, but forget the clever people who turn the theory into reality. The Millau bridge in France was designed by Norman Foster, but it was French engineer Michel Virlogeux who made it work. A magnificent achievement, but whose name do people remember? In 2005, Ellen MacArthur became the fastest person to sail round the globe, but little was made of Nigel Irens, who engineered her trimaran. ...

The problems come when the moneymen take the reins instead. Take the British car industry. In the 1950s, half of the world's cars were manufactured in Britain. But beginning with the formation of the British Motor Corporation, the car industry's emphasis on invention gradually bowed to commercial pressure and government intervention. In a desperate effort to balance the books, the industry was soon ground down by internal rivalries, lacklustre designs and labour disputes. Good invention was forgotten.

Today, besides the recently appointed science minister Lord Drayson, engineers are not represented in the highest levels of British government. In contrast, Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, graduated in hydraulic engineering from Beijing's Tsinghua University, and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, is a postgraduate engineer. China produces 14 times as many engineers as we do.

While we will struggle to compete with growing industrial economies on the speed and efficiency of assembly lines, we can compete through ideas and technology. To do this we need bright engineers. But there aren't enough. Just 4% of undergraduates read engineering and fewer still actually end up in the profession.

This is worrying. Making things is still the future. Manufacturing accounts for half of our exports. But we import more than we export to the total of around £8bn a month. That's more than £90bn a year in the red. Unlike the US, we don't have a huge internal economy we can rely on to help support us in this difficult time. The UK can't afford to be protectionist - we've always been exporters. The trouble is that we're running out of things to sell.

Besides the commercial world, the importance of engineering to us as a society cannot be underplayed. Last year, the first British tidal turbine was connected to the national grid, producing enough power for 1,000 homes. The UK accounts for half of Europe's tidal power and it's been estimated that tidal energy could provide a fifth of British energy needs. These initiatives are what we need to excite and inspire people.

If the government backed these large infrastructure projects, as in France, their importance would be recognised, helping to restore engineering's contribution to our economy and society. I worry that for all the rhetoric about addressing attitudes to science and industry, the action is not dramatic enough to shake the UK out of its apathy.

President Obama has got it right with his "smart grid" project, an electricity network that will use information technology to link the US to renewable sources of energy. Not only will this create jobs and stimulate the US engineering, but in the long run it will save billions on the national electricity bill and cut the country's carbon footprint. Meanwhile, in the UK, projects get caught up in planning regulations, never to see the light of day.

We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood. We've built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dotcom bubble. Now that's collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don't, we risk losing an already weakened position for good. Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.

In the wake of the recent interview with Jay Hanson posted at The Oil Drum, there was some discussion of Hubbert's role in the Technocracy movement.

I hadn't been aware that Hubbert was a Technocrat (or that the technocrats were an organised grouping, for that matter), so in this post I'll explore the Technocracy movement and Hubbert's role in it.

The knowledge essential to competent intellectual leadership in this situation is preeminently geological - a knowledge of the earth's mineral and energy resources. The importance of any science, socially, is its effect on what people think and what they do. It is time earth scientists again become a major force in how people think rather than how they live. - M King Hubbert

Genesis of the Technocrats

M. King Hubbert joined the staff of Columbia University in 1931 and met Howard Scott, who had earlier founded a short-lived group of engineers and scientists called "The Technical Alliance". Hubbert and Scott co-founded Technocracy Incorporated in 1933, with Scott as leader and Hubbert as Secretary.

The Technocrats were influenced by figures such as Thorsten Veblen, author of "Engineers and the price system", and Frederick Soddy, winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1921 and author of "Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt" which looked at the role of energy in economic systems. Soddy criticized the focus on monetary flows in economics, arguing that “real” wealth was derived from the use of energy to transform materials into physical goods and services.

The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin. Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability. - M King Hubbert

Technocracy

Technocracy is form of government which is administered by scientists and technical experts administer, resulting in a form of planned economy.

The Technocracy movement aimed to establish a zero growth, science based socio-economic system, based on ideas of conservation and abundance as opposed to the usual scarcity-based economic systems.

In a technocratic system, money is replaced with energy acounting, which records the amount of energy used to produce and distribute goods and services consumed by citizens in a Technate (Technocracy based society). The units of this accounting system are known as Energy Certificates.

Energy certificates are not saved or earned, but periodically distributed among the populace, with the number calculated by determining the total productive capacity of the technate and dividing it equally after infrastructure requirements are met. Certificates not used during a period expire.

The Technocracy movement flourished for a while in the 1930's but became steadily less influential over time in broader society (writer Charlie Stross dubbing science fiction "the fictional agitprop arm of the Technocrat movement" which "carried on marching in lockstep into the radiant future even after Technocracy withered in the 1930s").

Hubbert's membership of the Technocracy movement was investigated in 1943 by his employers, the Board of Economic Warfare, who may have regarded it (not entirely unreasonably) as a form of communism - though engineers desiring political control didn't seem to do much better in the Soviet Union either.

Technocracy Inc. lists the following papers as Hubbert's contributions to Technocracy:

* Professor Hubbert was the primary author of the Technocracy Study Course.
* Man-Hours and Distribution which was derived from an earlier article, Man-Hours -- A Declining Quantity in Technocracy, Series A, No. 8, August 1936.
* Determining the Most Probable in Technocracy, Series A, No. 12, June 1938
* Some Facts of Life in Technocracy, Series A, No. 5, December, 1935.
* The ``Spirit of the Constitution'' in Technocracy, Series A, No. 6, March 1936.
* Book review: The Tools of Tomorrow in Technocracy, Series A, No. 3, Aug 1935
* Book Review: Reshaping Agriculture and Nations Can Live at Home. Technocracy, Series A, Number 7, May 1936
* Book review: An Orientation in Science in Technocracy, Series A, No. 16, July, 1939.

Technocracy Inc also has a tract on Technocracy and peak oil, which outlines a fairly utopian vision of abundant energy for all if we are willingly to become sufficiently efficient in our energy usage.

So why does Technocracy think that its proposal can "save" us from Peak Oil? Quite simply Technocracy's plan knows how to do more with less. Technocracy's design will allow all North Americans to live with a standard of living many times greater than is the average even today. Not only this, but is does so by using far less, both in terms of resources and labour. The calculations done as part of the initial study performed by Technocracy's scientists back in 1930 showed that at that time it would be possible for every citizen to have a standard of living the equivalent of a lower-upper class income, and only have to work for 16 hours per week, with 2 and a half months vacation per year, at a job that they have both chosen and were well trained for. Also included were things such as free, high-quality education and health care, indefinite maternity rights, and retirement at age 45 with no loss of income or benefits. How they could achieve this was through an ingenious reorganization of continent-wide industry, that would unleash its potential to produce this "abundance" for all. They showed conclusively how business, politics, and money were all holding back this production, and causing ever-greater need of waste of resources. The key was automation, which allows us to produce more while requiring less resources to do it, as well as less labour to operate these machines.

Today it is obvious that automation has improved many thousands of times, with the advent of the computer and industrial robotics. There in no longer any need whatsoever for anyone to have to work at a menial labor or unskilled service-industry job because it can all be performed by machines. By harnessing automation like this, we consume far less resources, including energy, and can still increase our overall standard of living. One estimate shows how by simply reworking the continental transportation system, we could operate our entire society on as little as 5% of the energy we consume today, with no corresponding drop in standard of living! Adjustments in other areas would allow us to decrease even this number, but it should be obvious that with so little energy consumption, and the enhanced abilities of scientific research allowed by a society of abundance, we would have plenty of time to devise alternative and sustainable sources of energy that would also be non-polluting.

Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. We are not starting from zero, wWe have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time. - M King Hubbert