Cuba Becomes The First Country To Reach Net Zero. Shouldn't We Be Celebrating?

There it was on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times: with a small assist from the United States, the island nation of Cuba has almost entirely ended its use of fossil fuels. Finally, we have the first country in the world to achieve the climate movement’s Holy Grail and nirvana — Net Zero! Or at least a very close approximation. This should be cause for a huge celebration.

You would think that the Times, which has been demanding the elimination of fossil fuels for at least a couple of decades, would be leading the celebrations. But weirdly, now that Cuba has finally shown the way, the Times chooses to put a completely different spin on the achievement. The headline and subheadline are (print edition): “U.S. Choking Oil Deliveries To Cuba Ports; Military Action Brings a Nation to Its Knees.”

The piece reports that the Trump administration is helping Cuba to achieve Net Zero by preventing oil tankers from landing there. Somehow in this piece, that is spun as a bad thing. It has brought Cuba “to its knees.”

The funny thing is that here in the U.S., it was just over a year ago that we had President Biden and an administration full of zealous environmentalists who were using every governmental power at their disposal to force Americans to stop using fossil fuels. By Executive Order 14057 of December 8, 2021, Biden had directed all federal agencies to pursue an aggressive “all of government” operation to achieve “net zero” on an accelerated schedule. Goals number 1 and 2 from that EO are “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity on a net annual basis by 2030,” and “100 percent zero-emission vehicle acquisitions by 2035.” In 2023, the Department of Transportation released a “Blueprint” for eliminating all carbon emissions from the transportation sector. In 2024 EPA released a plan to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity generation. Similar initiatives were everywhere in the government.

Did the Times ever suggest that government forcing an end to the use of fossil fuels was “bringing America to its knees”? Or even that forcing the end of fossil fuels was any sort of a problem? If the Times ever suggested anything like that, I never saw it. What I saw instead was that the Times was the biggest cheerleader for the use of government coercion to suppress the use of fossil fuels, at least if the use was by Americans.

And yet, if you believe yesterday’s article, the banishment of fossil fuels, which was to be such a boon to the United States, is somehow a problem in Cuba. From the Times article:

In Cuba, people are struggling with frequent blackouts, shortages of gasoline and cooking gas and dwindling supplies of diesel that power the nation’s water pumps. Trash is piling up, food prices are soaring, schools are canceling classes and hospitals are suspending surgeries.

Here is a picture from the Times of the “garbage piling up”:

What am I missing? From reading the Times, I had thought that fuels like oil, gasoline, natural gas and diesel were no longer necessary to provide energy to the people, and indeed that they had become obsolete and uneconomic in the face of the much cheaper renewables, wind and solar. For one example among hundreds, here is a piece from the Times from August 17, 2023. Excerpt:

As the planet registers the highest temperatures on record, rising in some places to levels incompatible with human life, governments around the world are pouring trillions of dollars into clean energy to cut the carbon pollution that is broiling the planet. The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal. Private investment is flooding into companies that are jockeying for advantage in emerging green industries.

(Emphasis added.).

I thought that to eliminate use of fossil fuels all Cuba would have to do would be to slap up a few wind turbines and solar panels, and then it could run its economy on the abundant renewable electricity without need for any of those icky fossil fuels. With their economic system that is so superior to our own, surely that should be no problem. And Cuba actually already has a bunch of wind farms. Why doesn’t it just crank them up to provide the power formerly supplied by the fossil fuels?

It’s like the people who write at the New York Times don’t read their own newspaper. Or maybe their style book calls for different standards of reporting for the United States versus other countries.

Anyway, I for one want to be the first to congratulate the Cubans on their great success.