BLOOMBERG: Cuba Is Struggling to Keep Lights On Amid Trump’s Oil Blockade.
Cuba’s blackout problem has worsened in the month since the US cut off oil shipments to the island.
Its grid was fragile even before a critical transmission line failure in early December temporarily severed the link between Havana and the Caribbean country’s primary thermoelectric power plants in Matanzas. Then the Trump administration blocked fuel shipments that supply 60% of the roughly 100,000 barrels of crude a day it needs to feed its aging power system.
Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.
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In addition to Venezuela, Mexico had been a steady supplier of oil to Cuba. It delivered a small cargo on Jan. 9, according to Kpler, a data and analytics firm. A few weeks later, Trump threatened tariffs on any nation that supplies the island with fuel, cutting off that flow as well. As a result, Havana has now gone a full month without a major fuel delivery, the data show.
Some analysts estimate Cuba has enough oil left in storage to last fewer than 20 days, but no official figures are available. Last week, the government unveiled a series of contingency measures including reducing public transportation routes, shortening the work week to four days, shutting down resorts and limiting gasoline sales to consumers who can pay in dollars.
In 2019, Think Progress reported, that while Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg wasn’t going to run for the White House, as “The former Republican (and then centrist independent) was always going to be a long-shot to win a Democratic primary, especially at a time when so much of the party’s energy is coming from its progressive wing.” But:
At the same time, Bloomberg points out that many of America’s most pressing problems can’t wait until 2021 — particularly climate change. “Mother Nature does not wait on our political calendar, and neither can we,” he emphasizes in the statement.
He has spent more than $100 million in the past decade on the Sierra Club’s remarkably successful Beyond Coal campaign, which has helped close over half the country’s coal plants plants — 285 out of 530 — and deployed cleaner, cheaper energy in their place.
This effort, Bloomberg notes, “was the single biggest reason the U.S. has been able to reduce its carbon footprint by 11 percent — and cut deaths from coal power plants from 13,000 to 3,000.”
The former New York City mayor said Tuesday that he will build upon those successes by investing even more in the effort to shut down coal-fired power plants. “First, I will expand my support for the Beyond Coal campaign so that we can retire every single coal-fired power plant over the next 11 years,” he says in the statement. “That’s not a pipe dream. We can do it.”
But then he went much further, announcing “a new, even more ambitious phase of the campaign — Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy.”
An economy entirely powered by clean energy is the exact same goal laid out in the sweeping Green New Deal that has captured the nation’s attention over the past few months. Bloomberg points out that while any such deal “stands no chance of passage in the Senate over the next two years,” the science makes clear action must start now.
Indeed, the world’s nations unanimously approved a landmark report from scientists last October making clear that to have any plausible chance of averting catastrophic climate change, we must make sharp reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 — and then quickly go to zero emissions.
Can Mike Bloomberg object to Trump’s treatment of Cuba? He’s heightening the contradictions, by giving Cuba’s socialist government a crash-course in decarbonization. As a result, Glenn asked on Friday on his Substack, “Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next? And after that?”