Howard Scott speaking in 1933: Technocracy is a dual thing. On the one hand it is
an organization of scientists, engineers, technologists and workers in
other technical fields; on the other, it is a body of thought. This
body of thought may be concisely described as a technological approach
to, and an analysis of, all social phenomena. Technocracy is not
premised on any philosophical preconceptions, convictions or beliefs.
Technocracy is based primarily on a study of the rates of growth of all
energy-consuming devices on this Continent as a function of time.
Technocracy is concerned with the natural resources available for
conversion into use-forms and their quantities; with the quantity of
energy and materials consumed in the proper operation of the physical
equipment on this area; with the number of people required in this
total operation and the hours of work within a given time. These are
some of the principal questions with which Technocracy has always been,
and is now, concerned. …

Ever since man was driven from the
jungle by his more agile but less enterprising relative, the ape, he
has been conducting a long and arduous struggle, fighting his way
toward ever more effective sources of energy. In this struggle the
problem of population has come to play an increasingly important part.
For example: in the 200,000 years prior to 1800 the biologic
progression had so far advanced that the total world population of the
human species in the latter year was approximately 850,000,000. In the
subsequent 132 years this population grew until it is now approximately
1,800,000,000–a greater increase than in the previous 200,000 years.

The
point to be especially noted is that most of this population increase
is due to the introduction of technological procedures into social
life. By way of contrast, consider China. According to the Nanking
estimates of 1932, China has a population of 470,000,000 today an
estimated growth of only 71,000,000 in the past two centuries.
France–according to the estimates of Reid, Baker, and others–would
require over four hundred years to double its present population of
approximately 40,000,000. Both of these countries are admittedly
backward in their rates of growth on the technological level; that is
to say, neither of them has taken full advantage of the incentive to
population increase afforded by the introduction of technological
procedures into their social life.

Compare these examples with
the United States. In 1830, slightly over a century ago, this country
had a little more than 12,000,000 people. Today the figure is
approximately 122,000,000–an increase of 10 times in a century. Now
set these figures against the background of the energy consumption
during the same period: In 1830 we were consuming as a nation less than
75 trillion British Thermal Units of total extraneous physical energy
(derived principally from windmills and domestic animals with some coal
and water power.) In 1929 we consumed slightly less than 27,000
trillion British Thermal Units of extraneous physical energy–an
increase in the century of 353 times. What is the drift of such
facts–which can be supported and strengthened from many sources?

Technocracy
points out that in all social systems prior to the last 200 years man
was the chief engine of energy conversion. Efficient from the
mechanical point of view, this engine was severely limited in output,
rating at approximately one tenth horsepower per eight-hour day. All
the work and wealth of human society from the dawn of recorded history
to the beginning of the 18th century depended exclusively upon this
engine. Thus we have Adam Smith, in the opening sentence of his famous
book, (published in the same year as America’s Declaration of
Independence and, ironically, within a short distance of the town where
James Watt was developing his steam engine) defining wealth in terms of
human labor which in turn created all values. This was a correct
description of the conditions of which Adam Smith wrote, but it has
since become increasingly evident that man, as a creator of physical
wealth, is receding more and more into the background, yielding, and
not unwillingly, to the rapid growth of technology and of power
procedures. Technocracy emphasizes that in all the older social systems
there was no means of altering the rate of doing work: You could
increase the total number of human beings only up to the physical
limits of the area in which they lived, that limit reached, migration
was the only alternative to the reduction of population by mass famine. (10/30/08)
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George Monbiot writes: How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said “there you go again”. His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD.

But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies. (10/30/08)
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Ellen Brown, JD writes: October 24 marks the 79th anniversary of the October 1929 stock market crash. Heavy selling started on Thursday, October 24, 1929, and accelerated the following week on Black Monday and Black Tuesday, October 28 and 29. Many feared a repeat of this disaster on Friday, October 24, 2008, after Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell nearly 10% during the night, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 8%, and Germany’s and Britain’s fell 5%.

“In a stunning turn of events,” reported Yahoo! Finance, “the futures for the major indices were ‘lock limit’ down before the start of trading Friday, meaning they had hit a 5% threshold that prevented them from trading any lower until the stock market opened Friday.” Traders prepared for the worst, but remarkably, disaster was averted. The U.S. market fell only 3.5%, just another “ordinary” bearish day.

Why the more modest drop in the U.S., where the financial debacle originated and should have hit hardest? Suspicious observers saw the covert hand of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), the group set up under President Reagan to maintain market “stability” by manipulating markets behind the scenes. Bill Murphy commented in LeMetropoleCafe.com:

In response to Bill Saporito’s comment in Time it might be countered that Henry Paulson’s Plunge Protection Team
is quite adept at rigging an economy. The difference between an
acknowledged socialist state and the stealth socialism we have in the U.S.
today is that in a socialist state, everyone expects the market to be rigged
and operates accordingly. In a rigged pseudo-capitalist economy, investors are
easily separated from their money because they expect the market to follow
“free market principles” based on “supply and demand.” They are seduced into
“pump and dump” schemes – artificial manipulations that allow insiders to
unload stock at a high price or buy it at a low price – because they trust in
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is supposed to automatically set things
right in a market left to its own devices. The market today is indeed
controlled by an invisible hand, but it is not necessarily serving the
interests of small investors.  (10/30/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: In the typhoon of commentary that’s blown around the world a step behind the financial tsunami that’s wrecking everything, two little words have been curiously absent: “fraud” and “swindle.” But aren’t they really at the core of what has happened? Wall Street took the whole world “for a ride” and now a handful of Wall Street’s erstwhile princelings have shifted ceremoniously into US Government service to “fix” the problem with a “toolbox” containing a notional two trillion dollars. This strange exercise in financial kabuki theater will shut down sometime between the election and inauguration day, when the inaugurate finds himself president of the Economic Smoking Wreckage of the United States. What will happen?

I have thought for some time that things could get dangerously out of hand in America, despite our exceptionalist notion that we are immune to the common plot-lines of history. For starters, inauguration night will seem more like Halloween, as those two little words fly in to haunt the new president. So, a large and looming question is: who will be appointed the next attorney general of the US (to replace the human sash-weight currently occupying the office), and how soon will the federal marshals be scouring the wainscoted hallways of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, not to mention a thousand Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund boiler rooms, with man-sized nets?

A story-line is already emerging to the effect that these birds really didn’t quite know what they were doing in grinding out that multi-trillion dollar basket of alphabet securities sausage (a theme on Sunday’s “60-Minutes” broadcast). Nobody will buy that line of bullshit, though — and certainly not in the courtroom where, for instance, Mr. Hank Paulson will have to answer why his own firm of Goldman Sachs set up a special unit to short its own issues. It will be edifying to see how they answer.

In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg’s All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches? (10/30/08)
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BBC Environmental Science – The thickness of Arctic sea ice “plummeted” last winter, thinning by as much as 49 centimetres (1.6ft) in some regions, satellite data has revealed. A study by UK researchers showed that the ice thickness had been fairly constant for the previous five winters.

The team from University College London added that the results provided the first definitive proof that the overall volume of Arctic ice was decreasing. The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The ice thickness was fairly constant for the five winters before this, but it plummeted in the winter after the 2007 minimum,” lead author Katharine Giles told BBC News.

Sea ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record in September 2007, when it extended across an area of just 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles), beating the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km, measured in 2005. The team from the university’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling - part of the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation - found that last winter the ice had thinned by an average of 26cm (0.9ft) below the 2002-2008 winter average. Dr Giles added that the data also showed the western Arctic experienced the greatest impact, where the ice thinned by up to 49cm (1.6ft).

The recent record losses of ice cover in the Arctic has led to suggestions that the region could have reached a “tipping point.” (10/28/08)
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BBC Environmental Science — The planet is headed for an ecological “credit crunch”, according to a report issued by conservation groups. The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.

The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network. It says that more than three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.

This makes them “ecological debtors”, meaning that they are drawing - and often overdrawing - on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them.

The report concludes that the reckless consumption of “natural capital” is endangering the world’s future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy.

“If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,” said WWF International director-general James Leape.

Dr Dan Barlow, head of policy at the conservation group’s Scotland arm, added: “While the media headlines continue to be dominated by the economic turmoil, the world is hurtling further into an ecological credit crunch.”

The countries with the biggest impact on the planet are the US and China, together accounting for some 40% of the global footprint. The report shows the US and United Arab Emirates have the largest ecological footprint per person, while Malawi and Afghanistan have the smallest. (10/28/08)
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In in his essay “What Can Be Done?,” Arthur Noll wrote : As someone with no power except my voice, I am aware that our human
society must change and change radically if we are to survive. It is
from this perspective that I ask, what can be done?

There are things we could do, no matter who we are, to get changes rolling. I’ve posted a set of principles for society, and a plan for getting there. …  

Scott Meredith
writes: “Actually this is true. Arthur has at least proposed something,
thus he’s done more than most of the rest of us have. I guess we all
remain silent in the teeth of our understanding the degree of inertia
that would need to be overcome to make the changes he has outlined ?” …

Jack Dingler writes: “If humans were rational, then I’d agree with you. As it
is, humans are not rational. Humans in general do not think, do not
exercise logic and have a great deal of difficulty understanding
ethics. If humans in general do not have these skills, then you must
first teach them these things, before they’ll even be able to
understand that there is a problem.”(10/26/08)
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Bill McKibben writes: The election campaign has (unofficially) lasted almost two years. It’s featured endless discussions on health care, the housing crisis, and who should get blamed for something their minister said. But when we elect a new leader, among his very first jobs will be figuring out how to deal with global warming.

He almost certainly won’t want it to rise to the top of his to-do list, but it will. He who comes next is the Climate Change President. Global warming is going to be the most important new foreign policy challenge of the Climate Change President’s tenure, because, unlike the Bush administration, the rest of the world hasn’t spent the last eight years ignoring the climate problem. In the other developed nations, it’s been diplomatic question number one.

What these governments have realized is that when the Northwest Passage opens for the first time in human history, it’s clearly time to do something. For the last five years, ongoing gatherings on the issue have all been working toward the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December of 2009. This is when the world is supposed to conclude a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol and really put the planet on the path to dealing with climate change. The conference is just eleven months after Inauguration Day.

This could be an agreement as key as those struck at Yalta or Versailles. It could determine the economic architecture of the 21st century. And the rest of the world’s leaders are not going to issue the new president a free pass. If America plans on getting back in the good graces of the international community, it’s going to have to start leading on the issue. (10/26/08)
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BBC Biotechnology — Pilot seaweed and algae farms are needed to assess Scotland’s marine biomass potential, experts have urged. The recommendation comes in a report on using biomass for heating and fuel while avoiding the use of valuable agricultural land. Scientists want to see pilot farms and research into the most energy-rich types of seaweed.

The report was carried out by the Scottish Association for Marine Science for The Crown Estate.

Prof Mike Cowling, science and research manager at The Crown Estate, said: “Given Scotland’s rugged western coastline and island groups, and relatively clean seas, it is sensible to examine the farming of seaweeds and sustainable harvesting of natural supplies as a source of energy, to heat our homes and fuel our vehicles. Heating and transport make up around three quarters of our energy use so it’s vital that we find new ways of meeting that demand. Extracting energy from seaweed is a particularly efficient and reliable method of producing green energy, and the growing of seaweed could have positive impact on local marine biodiversity.”

One key advantage of using seaweed is that it avoids the problems associated with agricultural crop biofuels such as pressure on arable land and fresh water.

Dundee University professor of microbiology Geoffrey Codd has also been promoting the idea of using seaweed and other algae as fuel.

He feels the practice could help revive traditional UK industries such as harvesting seaweed and create viable and sustainable biofuel sources. (10/26/08)
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BBC Technology – Indian newspapers have hailed the successful launching of the country’s first mission to the Moon on Wednesday.

The unmanned Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft blasted off smoothly from a launch pad in southern India to embark on a two-year mission of exploration.

Awesome headlined the Hindustan Times newspaper. The newspaper said that India’s premier space agency, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) had become commercially successful, and that the Indian Moon mission had cost a lot less than Japan and China’s missions.

“Isro’s competitiveness lays the basis for making India a nation with a competitive space industry - far more difficult than making it merely space capable,” the newspaper said.

‘Our baby’s on its way’ headlined The Indian Express. …

The Pioneer said the mission was “essentially a tribute to India’s inherent genius”.

And The Hindu hoped that the mission would “catch the imagination of young Indian men and women who are to become tomorrow’s pool of talented scientists, the lifeblood of such programmes”.

“The Indian space agency is also looking at missions to Mars, to asteroids and comets, and even one to study the Sun. At the heart of such missions of space exploration is the ability to do good science,” the newspaper said.

The Asian Age said that “riding [on the mission] are not just the nation’s hopes and dreams, its mission is being keenly followed by space scientists in more advanced nations”.

The Telegraph said “the significance of Chandrayaan-1 goes beyond national pride”.

“This mission not only gives a measure of what scientists in India are capable of achieving, but also places their work in a global context. It is a matter of no less pride that other than the four indigenous instruments, the Chandrayaan-1 is carrying three made by the European Space Agency, two from Nasa and one from Bulgaria.”

“Although it is impossible to predict the outcome, the journey to the moon might change people’s lives radically. For one, it could unlock the mysteries of Helium-3, a rare source of nuclear energy.” (10/26/08)
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