The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years, and in those 200 years the nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith

2. From spiritual faith to great courage

3. From courage to liberty

4. From liberty to abundance

5. From abundance to complacency

6. From complacency to apathy

7. From apathy to dependence

8. From dependence back into bondage

Supposedly the United States has entered into the stage of apathy in which everyone has their hand out, and simply votes for whoever offers to give the most. This apathy leads to a dependent welfare state that breeds laziness, and an ultimate sacrifice of our greatest liberties and freedoms, which will always lead back into tyranny and bondage.

Our new President Barack Obama stands for such a symbol of hope, and we are all wondering how that hope will translate. Many of his opponents say that he’s a socialist… yet isn’t the ultimate form of government socialism with an unbiased intelligence to allocate resources? Communism failed not in theory, but because the allocation of resources was placed into human beings hands, in which case greed and corruption festered and led to its demise. But isn’t the same thing happening to us in this free market ‘democracy’?

The United States is in a very unique situation to transcend and create a technological governance. We are pioneering the Information age. Everyone is becoming more and more connected and gaining a greater ability to have the information of their life sent into an intelligent neural network. If DARPA and the great minds of Silicon Valley and Cambridge can in fact spawn a true technological intelligence… a collective intelligence that has a symbiotic relationship with its citizens… then resources can be allocated optimally and much time and money can be diverted away from bipartisan attempts to come up with the right ‘amount.’ Instead public servants exist to execute and neural nets and genetic algorithms allocate. More importantly, citizens will breathe new life into our democracy by becoming transparent and contributing life information to the system.

The great concern is that human greed will be inherited by this collective intelligence. If humans are programming the algorithms then, there will inherently be greed and power ingrained in the fabric. Okay, so then the computers need to program the algorithms, but then you realize you reach a never ending cycle, and ultimately come to the conclusion that we may not have the capability to prevent this and live in a symbiotic harmony with a greater intelligence because power is what drives us and greed is a means to achieve power. Think about how we exploit lesser intelligence on our planet. The cycles of ups and downs that greed creates are simply the waves of the universe and not something uniquely felt or expressed by humanity. The higher intelligence must always possess this force to continue to evolve and neuralize our galaxy and our universe, helping it become aware of itself.

Regardless if this is true or not (movies like the Matrix or I, Robot tell us we can in fact achieve symbiosis, but only after a period of battle), it is inevitable that we are heading in this general direction. There have to be intelligent systems created to allocate resources, balance the interest rate, optimize the energy grid, and on and on. The global economy is too fast paced for any Fed Chairman or NGO to come up with answers fast enough. The question is can we control our future? Can we transcend democracy? Can we harness the force of greed for the good? Is the human race genius enough to create technology that governs us without exploiting us?

We are certainly reaching a threshold as China continues to buy our debt and our economy continues to weaken.  We all know that if things continue to escalate, our nation will become vulnerable to attacks, and if we’re attacked we will be forced to retaliate and the world will be pushed to the brink.

However, there is restored hope with Obama in office and the world waits to see the results of his administration. Obviously, what I believe will save us is technological advancement. Renewable energy, collective intelligence, creation of a smart energy grid combined with the growing user generated content of the Internet. All serving to educate the public to get involved and feel ego-less motivation to share their information with the world. Becoming altruistically transparent for the good of the whole, and ultimately benefiting individual lives more! Gotta love ideals.. Ayn Rand would probably want my head, but maybe not because benefiting yourself to benefit the whole is the psychology that can win. The more genuine your purpose is to benefit yourself for the whole, the more benefit you will gain.

Pretty much threw the whole kitchen sink into this one… was feeling rather alarmist today, which isn’t so much my nature. I tend to be an optimist that sees beauty and eros, as the ancient Greeks would say, as the driving force of the human spirit rather than greed, but these are all potential realities that we have to face.

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His team includes:

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis

Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor

The carbon tax is favored obviously because it lends predictability to energy prices, whereas the cap-and-trade system tends to be more volatile and discourages investment in carbon-free technologies (clean coal, energy efficiency, renewable energy).

The way cap-and trade works is the government sets a cap or limit on the amount of pollution that can be emitted. Companies are then issued a set number of emission allowances/permits, with which they trade amongst each other based on the amount of pollution they need to emit for operations. This system obviously rewards the seller for limiting emissions and punishes the buyer for needing to emit more. If the monitoring and enforcement of this system is sound and the ‘cap’ limit and initial allocation of allowances is determined using an appropriate process such as grandfathering provision based on historical emissions, then the cap-and-trade system can actually be more effective than a carbon tax by creating a marketplace of competition to solve the issue. However, the stipulations and costs to enforce this system may be too great, not to mention the potential corruption the system tends to encourage.

The carbon tax might be the simplest, most straightforward way to address emissions. The tax revenues would not only offset other taxes, be used to fund environmental projects, and give incentives for clean tech investment, but could also be allocated to start paying off the insane amount of debt that the US has racked up this year trying to prevent our economic collapse!

Whatever course of action we take, I’ve got faith Obama, Chu, and gang will figure it out.

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