Dr Gustav Cederlöf

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

In the pursuit of socialism, Cuba become one of Latin America’s most oil-dependent economies. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies. In the face of this shock, Cuba started to develop a low-carbon economy based on economic and social reform rather than high-tech innovation. In this talk, Gustav Cederlöf introduces his new book, The Low-Carbon Contradiction (UC Press, 2023), to argue that energy efficiency – simultaneously a thermodynamic, economic, and cultural phenomenon – plays a key role for our understanding of Cuba’s period of low-carbon transition, a period that some have called “a real-life experience of degrowth”.