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Summary
- Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s new president, has a background in climate science and is promoting a mixed energy strategy emphasizing gas power plants alongside renewable energy sources.
- Despite her past research on transitioning Mexico to 100% renewable energy, Sheinbaum has also expressed support for the state oil company and maintaining certain existing energy policies.
Key quotes:
- Mexico’s new president is a climate scientist who earned a reputation for meticulous attention to detail when she advanced rooftop solar, transit, and bicycle infrastructure as mayor of Mexico City. Now, Claudia Sheinbaum’s pronouncements on the presidential campaign trail suggest a “Frankenstein” energy strategy that promotes gas power plants alongside solar and sustains the influence of state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), while boosting private investment in renewable energy.
- Sheinbaum spent four years at California’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab analysing energy consumption in Mexico and other industrialized countries, and was a lead author for the fourth and fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The IPCC published its sixth assessment year.) Her ResearchGate profile lists 70 publications on topics like sustainable building programs in social housing, energy efficiency in Mexico’s iron and steel industry, a transition to renewable energy for Mexico’s power grid, the impact and social implications of wind projects, and carbon dioxide demand analysis.
- Mexico is the world’s 11th-biggest oil producer, its 15th-biggest climate polluter, and the only G20 country without a net-zero target, where renewable energy financing has declined since 2018 and experts say climate policy has moved backwards in recent years.
- Sheinbaum’s pledge to increase Pemex’s refining capacity is “hardly a recipe for a concerted move away from fossil fuels,” AP added.
Read the full post at The Energy Mix.
