[Fwd: [Marxism] Interview with Richard Heinberg]

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

".........It's been done before, albeit on a smaller scale. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba, which imported almost all of
its oil from the U.S.S.R., suddenly faced an annual energy shortage of
25 percent. Fidel Castro's communist government immediately went to
work, breaking up the country's large factory farms into small plots of
land, encouraging city dwellers to move to the country and become
organic farmers. Millions of bicycles were imported from China; cars
were banned from certain roadways. The reforms worked, and by the end of
the 1990s, Cuba had pulled itself out of what could have been a major
depression.

Such a plan might work on the global level, Heinberg believes, but there
are major obstacles, the primary one for the United States being that
some of the methods will smack of communism. "It would require a
command-and-control economy and a WW II­level of effort," Heinberg
says..............."

full: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/06.09.04/oil-0424.html


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