Comments on: Politically viable solutions for peak oil and global climate change

By: Cesar Lopez

Cesar Lopez — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:42:56 +0000

If any of us are going to survive the coming crisis we must move beyond the current political and economic paradigms. No existing government system, whether socialist, totalitarian, democratic, royal, or religious, will do anything more than attempt to hold on to power as the world declines further. Every current political leader, no matter who (Obama, Castro, Putin, Hu Jintao, Ahmadinejad, etc), must do all he can for the perpetuation of their particular system and maintenance of the status quo. Some may be less harmful than others but in the end there actions will be more similar than different.
Just for the record my family did not own much of anything in Cuba. We were poor subsistence farmers living with no electricity, running water, or any other modern convenience. The Cuban Revolution did little to change our way of life. We left Cuba and migrated to the US because my father was extremely independent and did not agree with the limits placed upon him by the new government. Because of this I have a unique perspective. I know what it is to live without electricity, cars, oil, plastics, and most other modern gadget. Currently I am preparing my family to eventually live that way again. Politics will do little to help use survive. On the contrary I believe it will be the breakdown of political systems that will ultimately give us any chance at survival.

By: jaime lopez

jaime lopez — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:32:05 +0000

Lots of ex-Cubans, especially from those who owned real estate there, never lose an opportunity to slander that island country, in hopes to discredit the Castro regime.

The undeniable truth is that Cuba has weathered the crisis better than the Colossus of North America, and the ex-Cubans are very upset about that.

By: Michael Irving

Michael Irving — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:00:29 +0000

Guy,

I didn’t read Cesar’s comment the way you did. I think he said that Cuba would do anything to bring in hard currency from elsewhere so that it could buy oil. I don’t think he was equating it to the US system of just printing more and more money.

Cesar does point out that when the USSR collapsed Cuba lost its main source of ready cash. The USSR was no longer a buyer for its sugar. Without that income Cuba was unable to buy oil. There are quite a few countries around the world right now, especially in Africa, that can’t generate enough foreign capital from their exports to purchase a sufficient quantity of oil. They are pretty much in the same shape as Cuba except their response has not been nearly as good and many of them are falling apart. Most of this is due to IMF loan repayment policies and outfits like Monsanto.

Cesar also points out that Cuba relies on Venezuela for its oil now, as if that were a negative thing. I would point out that we are dependant on several countries for the bulk of our oil. Of those, number 4 on the list is Venezuela just slightly below Saudi Arabia (where the 9/11 guys came from). Number two is Mexico projected to stop exporting within three years. We should be asking ourselves, “Then what?” It is clear that a small reduction caused a virtual meltdown for the US (and world) economy so what will happen when we lose the 5% Mexico contributes to our daily consumption? Getting oil from Venezuela may not be such a bad thing although they are running out of oil too.

Great post, Guy. I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments it’s been generating too.

Michael Irving

By: Cesar Lopez

Cesar Lopez — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:33:57 +0000

I have very little faith in any of the current government and political systems. The Cuban government solution was to do everything it could or had to do to maintain control of the country. This is what every government in the world will do. Government action will only grow more extreme as the crisis grows. The solution may only come after the collapse of the current nation/state government systems that feed of off the modern economic paradigms. I see local and tribal forms of government as the only viable stop measures as we eventually and hopefully decline back to the Stone Age.

By: Guy McPherson

Guy McPherson — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:14:02 +0000

Cesar Lopez, thanks very much for this first-person insight. If I understand you correctly, much of Cuba’s “solution” matches the contemporary approach used by Obama: flood the system with fiat currency. It doesn’t seem like such a durable solution, when you put it that way.

By: Cesar Lopez

Cesar Lopez — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:49:48 +0000

Very interesting post professor, but I most disagree about Cuba. I would like to bring a few facts to your attention regarding Cuba and the way they dealt with the decline in crude oil caused by the Soviet collapse. I am myself Cuban and have many family members and friends that lived through it. The situation is not as simple as you put it in your post. First, the fact that Cuba is a totalitarian socialist country is what led to them being in the situation in the first place to suffer a 90% decline in crude oil. With the decline Cuba was forced to take many non-socialist actions in order to bring foreign money into the country to purchase crude. Cuba opened up to tourism, mainly from Europe, and made other capitalistic changes. Cuba encouraged families of Cubans living in the US and other countries to travel to Cuba and to increase the amount of money they could send back into the island. This is just a sampling of the things the Cuban government did in order to bring needed foreign currency into the country.
During this period several human tragedies occurred in addition to the already existing human rights abuses inherent in a totalitarian state. One was the explosion of prostitution, especially among teen age girls, from sex tourism, which would lead to serious AIDS issues. The other was the rafter phenomenon. During the early 1990s 10s of thousands of Cubans fled the island in makeshift rafts. It is estimated that the death toll in the 15 to 20 thousand Cubans lost their lives (so much for “no measurable loss of human life”). Cuba allows citizens to leave the country as a form of population control. When things get bad they just open the door (think freedom flights, Mariel boatlift, and the rafters).
Today, Cuba relies on Hugo Chavez to provide it with the Oil the country needs. Foreign currency still comes in from tourism, families and other enterprises. Cuba would not have survived their Peak oil collapse if it was not able to bring in enough foreign money. It was good old capitalism with a socialist twist that saved Cuba. No your totalitarian socialism solution is not the answer either.

By: Michael Irving

Michael Irving — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:08:01 +0000

Greg Breneman,

Regarding Castro’s attempt to persuade the Russians to launch a nuclear first strike against the US, I think you have misstated the situation somewhat. Khrushchev put missiles into Cuba to deter a possible US attack. That we would do such a thing was made clear by the Bay of Pigs. Castro’s letter of October 27, 1962 calls for a nuclear first strike if he is attacked, an attack he felt was more and more certain as the missile crisis continued. Khrushchev then worked a deal with the US to guarantee no invasion of Cuba by the US or its allies in response to which the Russians would remove their missiles. Part of the deal also included the US removing missiles from Turkey and Italy that the Russians viewed the same way we viewed the missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev then wrote to Castro on October 30 to review the results of the US/Russian deal and to state that it had been a good thing to not have a thermonuclear war in which many millions of people would have died along with the total destruction of Cuba. So I think a better way to look at it might be that the entire episode was one of international brinkmanship on the part of all the players (Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro) that came very close to the ultimate disaster. Castro can be viewed as being caught between a rock and a hard place.

It has been suggested often on this site that the collapse of industrial civilization might be a good thing for the other (non-human) creatures of the earth. A bit of nuclear winter might have been just the thing to knock humans back to pre-industrial levels and could have been a really good thing for whales and polar bears. Certainly allowing western civilization to run unchecked for the last 50 years has not helped them.

Of course, I’ve really enjoyed the last four plus decades so I’m really glad it did not come to nuclear war. However, I am unhappy about the polar bears.

Michael Irving

By: Colin C

Colin C — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:35:01 +0000

Outstanding comment, tribeseeker13! Being in my “late” 50′s and a diligent observer and reader, I concur absolutely with your retrospection. Alas, watching how the events taking place in south-central and south-east Asia are “evolving” and given that 2 of those involved nations already possess nuclear weapons and share no “love-loss,” I see “radiation therapy” coming within the next decade. After all, will food and water shortages, and the resulting “climate refugees,” induce Pakistan, India and Bangladesh to be _more_ amicable toward each other? Will China willingly “suffer” the fallout that the winds will surely take over vast areas of that country? Will the USA stand idly by while our “allies” and “trading partners” nuke-it-out? Certainly Russia and the EU won’t be “appreciative” of seeing their “interests” in that region go up in smoke. At least the “nuclear winter” will abate rising global temperatures, a bit, for a decade or so. Then the dust will settle and, if anyone takes a measurement, GHG concentrations could very well be approaching, if not beyond, 1000ppm and whatever is left of “civilization” will cease shortly thereafter.

By: tribeseeker13

tribeseeker13 — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:58:52 +0000

Greg, I’ll refute the above. You may have grown up “during” the cold war; however, I grew up “on the front lines” of the cold war. There was NO cold war without the US. My parents were spy’s, responsible for fomenting the cold war. I know all about the US cold war. The “Cuban” Missile Crisis (which is more accurately called the “US Missile Crisis”) was only averted because Kennedy went AGAINST standard US military policy. He had a knack for doing that kind of thing. He wasn’t an accurate representation of the US policy pusher and suffered the consequences. And if Russia “was not simply interested in dying for nothing” that puts them leagues ahead of the US and its policies. “The US has in interest…in not blowing up the world…” is probably an unpopular statement in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden,… It’s not because the US system of governance is altruistic that we’re all lucky to be here. The US is a corporation, and a corporation, like it’s cousin in the “medical” world, is a cancer: mass production of identical units that feed off of its host and give nothing back in return. We’re only lucky to be here still because the cancer hasn’t finished its course yet. Now, ponder how cancer is treated in the “western medical” paradigm. It’s either with radiation or surgical removal. Let me remind you that radiation is also the fall-out from nuclear bombs. Let’s hope we have the foresight and courage to choose the latter “cure”, because, unfortunately, the actual healing method that we need does not even exist in the ‘western” paradigm. By the way, great article, Guy.

By: bubbleboy

bubbleboy — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:42:45 +0000

>Glad to_now_it.

But, Obama’s way of ‘dealing’ with climate change (or most anything) is no different.

-Sacrifice of everything for nothing.

(I think that is the point of this post.)

Life involves suffering for individuals and some triumphs for species.