In all the recent talk about energy climate change and peak oil, I don’t recall seeing anything about Cuba. Until just now, when I came across this posting on left i on the news. Seems that:

In the early 1990s, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc nations dealt what could have been a fatal blow to the Cuban economy. From 1989 to 1992, Cuba experienced a 34% decline in its GDP. Its exports and imports dropped by 80%, and its oil imports dropped by more than half, as the Soviet Union unilaterally voided existing agreements …

The scope of the Cuban response, and the film’s coverage of the response, covers a wide swath: agriculture, education, health, transportation, housing, and energy alternatives. Agriculture gets the most focus, as the film discusses how Cuba shifted almost completely (80%) to organic farming, with its use of pesticides dropping from 21,000 tons in the 80’s to less than 1,000 tons now.

A massive campaign to use every available plot of land for urban gardening led to today’s Cuba, where more than 50% of the total vegetable needs for the 2.2 million Havana residents is supplied by urban agriculture, with smaller cities and towns reaching 80-100%, thus removing the need to transport food over long distances and cutting fuel usage.

In every area, Cuba worked to reduce its consumption of non-renewable fuels — more solar panels, more public transportation, widespread installation of energy efficient appliances and fluorescent lightbulbs (those last two items aren’t actually in the film), and on and on. Scientists brought their energies to bear on every aspect of the problem. In this, Cuba was aided by its previous decades of emphasis on education - Cuba has only 2% of the population of Latin America, but 11% of its scientists …

Not that Bush doesn’t have a plan to cope with the energy crisis, too. But the caribou-hugging Dems won’t let him drill in the Anwar wildlife refuge.