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Given the many problems with fossil energy, the fact that solar energy still only constitutes an insignificant fraction of global energy use requires explanation. The most common explanation is that multinational corporations with vested interests in fossil fuels have been actively preventing the development of solar energy technologies. But this explanation is difficult to apply to the case of Cuba. This article takes Cuban energy policy since the 1990s as a starting point to understand the sociometabolic prerequisites of a renewable energy transition. In 2014, Cuba embarked on a new renewable energy strategy while 95% of the island’s electricity was still generated from petroleum products. To explain Cuba’s halting renewable energy transition, we demonstrate that modern energy technologies are always embedded in global flows of resources and processes of capital accumulation. The requisite investments of capital and labor in energy technology represent substantial, indirect land requirements beyond the space occupied by the technological infrastructure itself. The theoretical argument is that energy technologies should be perceived not simply as local, politically neutral accomplishments of engineering but as sociometabolic displacement strategies, appropriating space from elsewhere. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this means that assessments of a technology’s “power density” also need to consider the spatial demands of the global economic context that makes the technology feasible. The Cuban case illustrates how visions of a renewable energy transition in both mainstream and Marxist thought will need to be based on a radically transformed ontology of technology attentive to global political economy and energy justice. Ultimately, the global anticipation of a transition to renewable energy implicates illusory assumptions about “technology” that have been taken for granted since the Industrial Revolution.

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Today, two great signs of change are occurring. On the one hand, the capitalist world economy is putting tremendous pressure on the earth's biosphere and bringing an onslaught of destruction to immediate environments and vulnerable people worldwide. On the other hand, the rise of new and progressive social-economic foundations is the result of an unprecedented increase of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Therefore it is arguably more crucial than ever to understand how social, economic and ecological foundations of the internet and ICT infrastructures are interwoven. What are we-as scholars, activists and citizens-to make of ICTs that seem to emerge from an economic and social system based upon ecological destruction and social oppression, while at the same time engaging millions of people in the proliferation of information, knowledge and active democratic collaboration? This special issue investigates how we can begin to understand this problem, and how we can hope to balance the perils and promises of ICTs in order to make way for a just and sustainable paradigm.