North Korea vs Cuba

A few days ago I just went through the DVD on how Cuba survived Peak Oil. Today I came across another article (Peak oil preview: North Korea & Cuba) that essentially tells us how North Korea did not survive Peak Oil.

North Korea and Cuba experienced the peak-oil scenario prematurely and abruptly due to the collapse of the former Soviet bloc and the intensified trade embargo against Cuba. The quite different outcomes are partly due to luck: the Cuban climate allows people to survive on food rations that would be fatal in North Korea’s harsh winters. But the more fundamental reason is policy. North Korea tried to carry on business as usual as long as possible, while Cuba implemented a proactive policy to move toward sustainable agriculture and self-sufficiency.

Chillingly, the main difference I derived from the article is that Cuba looked at the problem and said “let’s do something about this.”  In the case of North Korea, it seems like they simply ignored the problem, and people died of the food famine that followed.

Is Singapore looking at the problem and doing something about it?

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

When Soviet Union fall in 1990, Cuba lost over half of its oil imports. Cuba underwent transformation and survived. Cuba became a living example of how a country can successfully traverse what we all will have to deal with sooner or later, the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources.

I borrowed this DVD from Shooperman, who has a solid library of DVDs and books on Peak Oil listed on his BillMonk public library.  If you are interested in borrowing them, you can approach him, I am sure he will be most willing to lend you a copy.

We are not prepared…

Thanks to my friend Shooperman, I came to take the Peak Oil Crisis and the Dollar Crisis seriously. The Dollar Crisis might be averted, since it is fundamentally a man-made crisis. On the other hand, the Peak Oil Crisis will happen without doubt, just a matter of sooner vs later.

Singapore, where I live, is especially vulnerable to the impacts of these crises, since we depend on imports for almost everything that matters: food, oil, natural gas. While various countries are starting to implement measures to get themselves prepared, there are only very slight mention of the crises in Singapore. The bottom line is “We are not prepared”, and I hope something can be done to raise awareness to get enough people to be concerned enough for something to be done. Time is running out, and we’d better get our acts together now.