Technocracy: The 1930s Cult Making a Comeback for 2030

From 1930s “Energy Accounting” to Agenda 2030 “Resource Quotas” the cult that promised to run the world like a science experiment is making a comeback, or maybe never really went away.

You’ve heard the slogans. Net Zero by 2030. Personal carbon budgets. Sustainable consumption. They sound like environmental goals — but dig deeper and you find something else entirely: a plan to measure and ration every aspect of your life based on the energy cost of your actions.

From the fuel in your car to the food in your fridge, the new system will count the kilowatt-hours behind it all — and decide whether you’ve had your fair share. Once your quota is used up, you stop. No exceptions.

Sound futuristic? It’s not. This blueprint was written nearly a century ago, during the Great Depression. And it has a name: Technocracy.

TECHNOCRACY: The Forgotten Movement That Never Really Died

In 1932, a man named Howard Scott stepped forward with a radical solution for America’s economic collapse. Scott called himself an engineer, though he had no formal qualifications. What he did have was a vision — and a team of scientists from Columbia University, including geophysicist M. King Hubbert and economists inspired by Thorstein Veblen.

Howard Scott 1932

The Technocracy Movement's plan was breathtaking in scope: abolish democracy, scrap money, and replace the United States and Canada with a single, continent-wide Technate run entirely by technical experts.

Their goals:

• Replace money with energy certificates recording the exact energy used to produce goods.

  
  

• Redraw national borders into “resource zones” for more efficient management.

  
  

• Give every citizen a fixed energy quota — no buying more, no exceptions.

  
  

• End elections, parliaments, and political debate. Decisions would be made by “the data,” not the people.

  
  

Sound familiar?

They believed only they had the brains to run civilisation — and they were blunt about it. Ordinary citizens? Too emotional. Politicians? Too corrupt. The future belonged to the scientists and academics.

Scott and his inner circle believed they could literally design society like a scientist designs an experiment. They saw themselves as a new ruling class — a scientific priesthood who would manage the world’s resources, population, and behaviour with the precision of a laboratory experiment.

The grey suit became the cult's unofficial uniform.

Democracy, they claimed, was wasteful. Markets were chaotic. Human freedom was an inefficiency to be eliminated. To them, the people weren’t citizens — they were units of consumption.

This has been a plan a century in the making. The official Technocracy movement collapsed in less than a year, but the ideas didn’t vanish — they mutated.  

In the 1960s, the same logic about finite resources surfaced in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. In the 1970s, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth and, later, The First Global Revolution, which openly suggested that environmental crises could justify sweeping new systems of global governance.

Agenda 2030: The Technocrats’ Second Act

Today, the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 reads like the Technocracy Study Course with better branding. The “sustainable development goals” are wrapped in humanitarian rhetoric, but behind the PR is the same old architecture:

• Measure everything in terms of its energy or carbon cost.

  
  

• Set limits on what people can use, travel, and eat.

  
  

• Enforce compliance through monitoring systems.

  
  

The energy certificates of 1932 have become personal carbon allowances and digital IDs. The planned economy of the Technate has evolved into global climate agreements. The clipboard-wielding engineers of the 1930s have been replaced by AI, big data, and global supply-chain surveillance.

Technocracy was sold as the cure for the Great Depression. Today, it’s sold as the cure for climate change. The crisis changes. The solution never does.

And if they succeed, your life will be logged, measured, and rationed according to an energy balance sheet — the same vision that almost took root a century ago. The only difference?  This time, the technology exists to make it happen.