A PROGRAM By William Knight:
"Pragmatically, a way to begin would be to set up a capability in government to budget according to flows of energy rather than money. Energy is the all-pervasive underlying currency of our society."
U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield -1974
The late William Knight, member of Technocracy Inc., an aeronautical engineer and one time associate of Charles P. Steinmetz, compiled the following program decades before Senator Mark Hatfield's suggestion.
"If there are technological trends responsible to a large extent for the behavior of individuals, national entities and racial groups, we cannot much longer ignore the fact that our modern civilization-that on the North American Continent is characterized by the largest rate of degradation of energy, which in the U.S.A., is rapidly approaching the order of magnitude of 200,000 Kilogram-Calories per capita and per day-cannot be made to function much longer according to our wishes and beliefs only. There must be some limiting conditions making it possible for us to indulge forever in a wishful regulation of national policies and international relations, unless we harmonize them with modern technological trends.
If it is conceded that we have developed an entirely new type of civilization in which the work of the world is increasingly being done by the conversion of stored up solar energy-which no previous generation of men knew how to use-if this civilization is to endure, we must primarily concern ourselves, at the present time, with a thorough understanding of the social effects of a large and ever increasing use of energy upon the stability of slow-changing institutions-which is the province of Scientists and Engineers-before intangible spiritual, intellectual and emotional forces, equally responsible for the molding of modern society, can be studied in their true relationship to technological causes and their social effect-which is not the province of Scientists and Engineers. If this is the case, we must first approach the operating problem of modern society with the same methodology that we employ in the study of all scientific and engineering problems. In order to do so in the proposed investigation, it was necessary to specify a method of evaluation of all goods and services produced, based exclusively upon the energy degraded in the particular technological process of production and distribution used. This and only this is the true physical cost of anything produced by any civilization at any time and anywhere."
http://www.technocracyincorporated.org/a-program---william-knight.html

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