Mexico Elects First Woman President (Yay!) She's A Climate Scientist Too (YAY!)
Mexico's state-owned oil and utility companies have resisted decarbonizing. That looks likely to change.
Mexico elected former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum president on Sunday. When she takes offices, she’ll become Mexico’s first woman president, its first Jewish president, and its first climate scientist to be president, too. As far as we know, that also makes Mexico the first country in the world to elect a climate scientist as head of state — but just watch, now I’ll find out that Iceland or some Pacific island nation facing inundation did that already.
Sheinbaum’s election is likely a very good thing for climate policy in Mexico. She will succeed Andrés Manuel López Obrador (sometimes shortened to “AMLO” even if that sounds more like a company than a person), who pushed for Mexican “energy sovereignty” through support for fossil fuels, especially the state-owned oil company Pemex and the state-owned utility CFE. As Climate Home News points out, Mexico’s action on climate has been held back in part by
building a $15 billion oil refinery in Tabasco and closing off options for private investment in renewable energy. […]
Mexico is one of only two G20 countries not to have set net zero emission targets, and the climate plan it announced last year at Cop27 was criticised by Climate Action Tracker for being worse than its previous one.
Sheinbaum campaigned on a pledge to continue López Obrador’s expansive and very popular social safety net programs, but she is positioned to offer a significant contrast to her predecessor on energy. While she has said she will keep Mexican oil production at its current rate, about 2 million barrels of oil per day, she has a much greener record than López Obrador; she was a contributor to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and as mayor of Mexico City, she pushed for more rooftop solar, better bicycle infrastructure, and built a new all-electric public transportation line.
And as Kate Aronoff notes at The New Republic, Sheinbaum’s campaign platform included some excellent climate planks, including
a goal to have 50 percent of Mexico’s electricity demand met through zero-carbon sources by 2030, using a mix of wind and solar as well as hydroelectric and geothermal power; investing $13.6 billion in renewable energy; adding nearly 2,400 miles of transmission lines; and expanding on her work as mayor of Mexico City in expanding electrified mass transit via buses and passenger trains.
Her campaign argues the state-owned energy company, Pemex, can drive the transition away from oil, too, according to Alonso Romero, the campaign’s “energy ambassador of dialogues for transformation,” and can you imagine a US campaign having a job title like that? Again, here’s Aronoff:
In renegotiating Pemex’s debt, Sheinbaum has stated that she intends for its long-term plans to include new investments in lower-carbon lines of business. “In the face of climate change,” she said last month, “Pemex has to enter new markets.”
A Sheinbaum government, Romero told me during our conversation last Saturday, will emphasize coordination among Mexico’s state-owned firms so as to best play to their strengths. Mexico, for instance, has massive geothermal energy reserves, which can be accessed with drilling techniques already utilized by Pemex workers and engineers. That zero-carbon power could then be used for green hydrogen development in partnership with CFE, which can leverage its own expertise in scaling up wind and solar power.
One good thing about being state-owned: Despite their prior emphasis on fossil fuels, Pemex and CFE are also more able to make the shift to greater renewable capacity without shareholders screaming about losing profits.
“It’s cheaper and more efficient to implement these policies through state-owned companies,” Romero told me. “We believe that state-owned companies have a longer-term horizon that can sustain these kinds of investments. Sometimes private companies don’t, or the investment and return horizons are not within the range that investors are expecting, so they need to be incentivized and subsidized[.]”
We definitely like the sound of that! And as Aronoff adds,
There’s evidence to back up that approach, even if it might seem a bit alien in the U.S. Researchers at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research found that state-owned utilities in the European Union had a “significantly higher tendency” to invest in renewables than their private-sector counterparts.
We’re in a weird place in this transition to clean energy: The world needs to get off the fossil fuel teat as rapidly as possible, and finally, after decades of letting fossil fuel interests dominate, the US and even China, along now with Mexico, are ramping up renewable power far more quickly than at any point since scientists said we need to decarbonize.
That’s terrific, but at the same time we’re also seeing record production of oil in the US, China is only now starting to throttle down its expansion of coal plants, and Mexico, like most oil-producing nations (including the US), isn’t talking about cutting oil production just yet, although of course its plans to greatly expand renewables will make its overall energy mix cleaner.
As several analysts argue, renewable energy is now becoming so cheap that in much of the industrial world, it makes sense to argue for the transition away from oil primarily as an economic issue. In the next few decades, fossil fuels appear to be on track to put themselves out of business on the basis of cost, though waiting for that to happen on its own would still have disastrous consequences for global warming, so we need to keep pushing the energy transition forward.
All we have to do is elect leaders who are committed to that, and keep fascists from trying to turn it all back. Easy peasy!
[Climate Home News / TNR / AP]
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OT: Nigel Farage has already been milkshaked.
Actual collected stupid on Xitter:
Xits were calling her a pretend Jew yesterday because one of the first things she did was thank Jesus.
Her husband’s name is Jesus Maria Tarriba