Possible Responses to Peak Oil: Some Lessons from the Past

Joerg Friedrichs posits that the Cuban model of surviving the collapse of oil supplies is the best model for surviving peak oil in Possible Responses to Peak Oil: Some Lessons from the Past.

Countries with a strong community ethos may embark on Cuban-style socioeconomic adaptation,relying on their people to mitigate the effects of peak oil.

This is a polite way of saying that countries that are not Capitalist are most likely to survive. A Capitalist economy requires individuals to look after their own interests, first and foremost. Community has been destroyed in order to extract as much profit as possible.

Barry Healy is not so reticient about the secret of Cuba's success when he reviewed The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil:

Directed as it is at a US audience, the word "socialism" doesn't get a mention but the message is perfectly clear: there is a future for humanity — an alternative to capitalism.

Zoe Kenny stresses that it is the democratic nature of Cuba's Communism that allowed Cuba to make this adjustment to Peak Oil in a substainable way:

Through the country's system of participatory democracy, or People's Power, each Cuban citizen had a say in the development of the solutions to the crisis of the post-Soviet "special period" and understood the role that they needed to play in this — for example, riding a bicycle to work or setting up an urban garden.

Cuba's example shows that the major change the world needs to make in the face of the coming peak oil crisis is possible — but only if the world's working people are actively involved in creating and implementing the solutions, rather than relying on the profit-driven capitalist corporations for answers.

The Capitalist model of pricing to control allocation of resources is inadequate to confront a crisis of the magnitude of Peak Oil. Resource allocation has to return to democratic control. This means that the critical resources have to be under public ownership.

Private ownership means that the use of the resources is for the benefit of that individual or corporation. They only need to consider their own interests as they perceive them.

The idea of stakeholders seeks to expand the interests that a corporation has but the final decision of how to dispose of a resource resides with the owner.

To survive the hard times ahead, we need active, participatory democracy with public ownership of critical resources, means of production, and infrastructure. We are all in this together. We need each other to survive. Individualism is lethal.

Bibliography

Friedrichs, J., Global energy crunch: How different parts of the world would react to a peak oil scenario. Energy Policy (2010), doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2010.04.011

Healy, Barry. How Cuba survived its oil shock, GreenLeft Weekly, Wednesday, November 17, 1993 - 11:00, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/34885, viewed 8 May 2010.

Kenny, Zoe. Peak oil: Is the oil running out?, GreenLeft Weekly, Friday, October 6, 2006 - 10:00, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/36306, viewed 8 May 2010.