Murdoc's Journal: Global Warming

A bit late but oh well...

Any reason why I can't pick "science" as a category? Weird. Anyway, I settled for "The Almighty Buck" since I guess we'll talk about Technocracy vs. the Price System.

Global Warming Exposes New Islands in the Arctic

So what is Technocracy's stance on Global Warming? Technocracy does not study global climate change per se, but it was one of the first organizations to treat the environment seriously, and long before it became popular in the 1970s. Technocracy demonstrated, among other things, how all Price Systems were destined to harm their environment. The reason for this is simple: one attribute they all share is the need for exponential growth. While on a small scale with a small population, this tends to result in little damage, but as population and standard of living increases (as measured by the amount of extraneous (non-human) energy expended per capita), so does the consumption of resources. These trends occur at exponential rates, and the more mature a Price System is, the greater amount of waste is needed to prop up the system. This can be alleviated somewhat using slave labor, but it is still going to increase.

Thus resource consumption and environmental harm are inevitable byproducts of the Price System, and most notably in mature, technologically advanced ones such as in western societies today. Technocracy has long advocated a "steady-state" economic system, where resource depletion was on par with renewability, and environmental damage is minimized as much as possible. This is not possible in Price Systems, as to do so would be so financially costly as to sacrifice one's competitiveness, and be put out of business by one's competitors. Government regulation may seem to be able to mitigate this, but the cost to the entire economy, even if it were done, would be devastating, resulting in a lower standard of living for all. You won't find this happening today, and indeed haven't seen it for reasons that this user describes.

Theoretically, an environmentally-conscious civilization could early on in its history try to ensure that all future economic and industrial advances have little environmental impact, but likely this would result in slowing such advancement down considerably. They would either never advance far enough to even think of Technocracy, or otherwise naturally lead into it once sufficient technology and resources were acquired that they could install one.

So how does Technocracy do all this wonderful environmental stuff without the corresponding decrease in standard of living? Put most simply, it's efficiency. Not efficiency as in "best results for the dollar", but rather, "best results for any expenditure of resources". This is accomplished by the abolishment of the variable and subjective mechanism of money and replacing it with a solid method of measurement and resource accounting, such as Energy Accounting. The price of a chair can fluctuate from near-nil to priceless collector's item, but the energy it takes to make one will always remain the same, given the same access to resources and same method of manufacture. As technology and manufacturing methods improve, the resource or "energy" cost of the item will only go down, resulting overall in an increase in the standard of living of everyone.

So basically, if North America converted to a Technocracy, then the world's greatest contributor to pollution and climate change would then become the world's least contributor, and likely the most helpful in other ways as well. Remove money and many things become possible.

Another benefit of Technocracy regarding issues such as global warming is the lack of politics making issues such as this moot.

There would be no political careers to make or break given scare tactics, and no financial incentives to squash scientific theories that impede business revenues. So while we may argue today over who is right and wrong and why they might be lying, in a Technocracy this wouldn't be the case. Only objective, provable data would make a scientist's career; lying would only get him fired.

Again I just wish to reiterate that I am not trying to explain all of how Technocracy works here (see first post), but only show its impact and position on these issues. For more information on how these things are actually possible, visit the site associated with my account. :)