Why we don't need buried carbon.

Some say we could not build our society without coal oil and gas for energy sources, construction materials, chemicals for agriculture and industry. Others say maybe we could but it would be difficult and it would lead to an "inevitable" reduction in the quality of life or that it would be a difficult and morally dangerous experiment.

Well, that "experiment" has been done. And despite themselves the United States of America played a big part in setting up this experiment.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, much of the economic support Cuba received from the USSR, including oil imports, stopped coming. In the years following USA's government doubled down and tripled down on it's embargo's, at one point barring ship's that had entered Cuban ports in the prior six months from entering US ports.

This led to huge shortages of fuel needed to run electricity generation, run farm equipment, public transport, parts for machinery, agricultural chemicals and food.

Through community effort fostering innovation, education, and the use of low tech solutions Cuba now meets 90% of its energy needs from local production through biofuels and renewable energy. Urban farming supplies most of the food Cuban's need. and farmers are now among Cuba's affluent upper middle class. In short, Cuba thrives if not despite US embargo's but perhaps because of them, having forced Cuba to make the most of the resources they have while developing methods that respect the complex natural systems they were presented with after being forced to abandon industrial farming techniques.

This is a story fit for that "the opposite of what America does" punchline.

This could be easily one of those satires I write but here is the doco...

My guess is US Republicans  will continue to punish Cuba for this success, because in their minds if the American public understood this, it would demonstrate the counter factual nature of their rhetoric not only concerning Cuba specifically, but of the Republican narrative concerning jobs, economics, clean energy, even Socialism.

Actually the millennial generation are already looking more favourably on socialism, Republicans spent so much time bad mouthing socialism, the savvy bunch went and looked it and found it was nothing like what they were hearing from the GOP. Seattle just elected its first Socialist council woman and at less than only half the running cost of a regular council officer.