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Hubbert: King Of The Technocrats
Big Gav, The Oil Drum: ANZ
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. …
Technocracy
Technocracy is form of government which is administered by scientists and technical experts, 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”).
(13 December 2008)
Inconceivable: Why Failure Is Normal, and Should Be Part of the Plan…but Isn’t
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
… My interviewer was playing devil’s advocate, of course, but I think she articulates a pretty common viewpoint – the idea that thinking about failures and bad stuff is too depressing and that it isn’t worth the time and energy to prepare for most contingencies. The reasoning behind that is that most disasters – or even minor disasters – don’t happen very often. Of course, when those disasters do happen, well, the sheer discomfort of being unprepared is pretty intense, but then we forget.
In fact, I’d go further than she did, and think that the idea of contingency planning in the US comes with a taint of superstition – that ill luck will strike those of us who actually spend time thinking about what might go wrong. The fact that our culture’s only vision of someone who is prepared is the survivalist curled up in a shack with his stash of guns suggests that we fundamentally think that preparation for negative outcomes is on the whacked out side. I think this leads us to actually radically underestimate how often things go badly wrong.
And this leads to a painful reality – despite the fact that winter power outages happen out my way all the time, we know for a fact that the extended outages in my region there will leave us with people who are freezing, and hungry, isolated and unable to cope. They won’t have the batteries for their flashlights, or any strategy for cooking or eating. At best, they will come out of this traumatized and miserable. At worst, some of them may actually die.
But we also know that these folks will be deemed normal, and their lack of preparation will be treated as normal.
… All of which suggests that we have a very troubled relationship to the idea of failure. Speaking as someone whose entire body of work could probably be summarized as “Ummm…have you thought about what happens if something goes wrong?” I’m acutely aware of how unpleasant and frightening most of us find the idea of failure – and because we find it unpleasant and frightening, we are likely to dramatically underestimate its likelihood and frequency, and be truly shocked when failures happen. But in fact, we shouldn’t be shocked – failure is far more routine and normal than we expect. Not only is it normal, but treating it as normal might actually reduce the likelihood of disaster.
(13 December 2008)
A distant mirror: Ireland’s great famine
Ugo Bardi, The Oil Drum: Europe
… Deforestation was not the direct cause of the Great Irish famine of mid 19th century, but it was the start of a chain of events that led to it. In this article, I show the condition of “overshoot” that Ireland was in at the time of the famine has much in common with the “overshoot” condition our world is in today.
… 1. Introduction
Today, we are more concerned about being overweight than about not having enough to eat, at least in the industrialized world. Famines appear to us as events that occurred in remote ages, nothing that could happen to us in our enlightened era of progress and abundance. Yet, the last major famine recorded in Western Europe, the Irish famine that started in 1845, is not so remote after all. It took place at a time when people already had railways, steamships, press, telegraph and more. Those were also the times of the great gold rush in California, of the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, of the unification wars in Italy. It was a period of optimism and of economic growth; and yet more than a million people died in a few years in a
European country because of lack of food. That is not something that we can ignore so easily.
Trying to understand the Irish famine means, usually, to seek its causes. We could just say that it was caused by the “potato blight” (Phytophthora infestans) that killed the potato crops and, in a narrow sense, we would be right. But that is not enough, obviously. We are looking for deeper reasons: what had led to conditions so critical in the Irish agricultural system that the potato blight could have such devastating effects? Many interpretations have been proposed. One is that the famine was due to overpopulation, as Malthus would have interpreted it. But several studies maintain that the Irish land could have sustained many more than 8 million people–the island’s population at the time of the famine.
An Irish tradition says that the English were the culprit in the famine. If they hadn’t really caused the famine, it is said, they had at least exploited it to get rid of a good number of their unruly Irish subjects. For (perhaps) this reason, you sometimes see the term of “Irish holocaust” applied to the famine.
There are other interpretations, such as those given by Joel Mokyr in his comprehensive work of 1983, “Why Ireland starved”. We read of low productivity of labor, insufficient accumulation of capital, and other contributing factors.
Is a single one of these explanations the “correct” one, or are they all correct in a certain measure?
Perhaps there is some confusion as to what we mean, exactly, as the “cause” of the famine.
(11 December 2008)
New Scientist: Top 10 environment articles in 2008
Various, New Scientist
Climate change has continued to dominate environmental science in the past year. There are plenty of other issues out there, though, whether it’s a surprise cause of diabetes, or the precious metals we leave behind in waste dumps.
NewScientist.com is now making free all in-depth articles from the past 12 months. In case you missed them, here are the top 10 best features on environmental science.
(10 December 2008)
Leanan at The Oil Drum says:
The free articles now include the The Folly of Growth issue from Oct. 2008, with articles like Why politicians dare not limit economic growth, Does growth really help the poor?. And this interview with David Suzuki.
