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 the 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.