Carbon quota an eerie echo of Technocracy

…Although the report says there are a number of ways to organize this kind of rationing, it cites elements common to all of them. An “independent body” sets and polices the carbon caps. People surrender parts of their allowances as they buy fuel or book flights. With advanced credit card technology, carbon charges would be tracked with a swipe of plastic.

All of this is an eerie echo of Technocracy, the weird mass movement that attracted a great deal of support in the Great Depression by promising to end North America’s money economy and replace it with an energy economy.


Led by a onetime cement mixer named Howard Scott, the Technocrats proposed the merger of Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Central America into a single “Technate.” The government would consist of engineers and scientists who would rule – wisely, of course – through scientific management of energy resources.

The Technocratic visionaries of this earlier era were fashionably scientific, fashionably socialistic, fashionably fascist.

Globe and Mail