Powerdown: learning from Cuba.

• Author: Heinberg, Richard
• Position: 80% Less Energy - Excerpt

[This article is taken from portions of Richard Heinberg's Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (2004), New Society Publishers, Chapter 3, The Path of Self-Limitation, Cooperation, and Sharing.--Editor]

If humankind is to avoid ruthless competition for dwindling energy resources, coordinated efforts toward cooperation and conservation will be needed. The ways cooperation and conservation could be achieved are probably limitless in detail, but the broad-scale options are likely few and easily surveyed. Industrialized societies would have to forgo further conventional economic growth in favor of a costly transition to alternative energy sources.

All nations would have to make efforts to limit per capita resource usage. To avoid competitive struggle, powerful countries would have to reduce disparities of wealth both among their own people, and also between themselves and poorer nations. Not only would oil, coal, and natural gas need to be conserved, but also fresh water, topsoil, and other basic and limited resources. Moreover, as energy available for industrial transportation declines, economies would have to be unlinked from the global market and re-localized. Everyone--especially those in rich, industrial nations--would have to undertake a change in lifestyle in the direction of more modest material goals more slowly achieved. And inevitably, with the conservation of resources would come the necessity to stabilize and reduce human populations.

Until now, most efforts toward the elimination of global conflict have centered on creating mechanisms for arms control and conflict resolution. In order to avoid resource wars we would need more such mechanisms; but in addition, we would need to address the ecological conditions for peace. If population pressure and resource depletion are predictable causes of antagonism between and within societies, then avoiding deadly competition would seem to require low population levels relative to the available resource base. Peacemaking would thus entail not only negotiation, but resource and population management on a global scale.

In short, Powerdown would mean a species-wide effort toward self-limitation. Powerdown is possible in principle. But we need more assurance than that. We need to see that industrial societies are capable of making the transition to sustainability. North Americans and Europeans need an example of a society that first industrialized--at least partially--and then had to deal with an energy crash.

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Perhaps the most instructive example of this scenario is Cuba. Following its revolution in 1959, Cuba had become dependent on the Soviet Union for oil as well as grain. Agriculture was collectivized into huge state-owned farms. Factory production and overseas trade increased. Though the US, its powerful neighbor to the north, used both covert and overt means to attempt to overthrow its revolutionary government and ruin its economy, Cuba managed to thrive, producing remarkable achievements in the fields of education and medical care.

Its people enjoyed the longest life expectancy, lowest levels of infant mortality, and highest literacy rates in the hemisphere. In 1989, Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the Overseas Development Council's Physical Quality of Life Index, while the US ranked 15th. While Cuba has only 2% of the Caribbean region's population, it was producing 11% of the region's scientists. Cuba exported trained...