Mexico is the 11th largest oil producer in the world. It has been seized by a deadly heat wave. Now, he’s elected a woman president with rare pedigree: a left-of-center climate scientist with a doctorate in environmental engineering named Claudia Sheinbaum.
Sheinbaum is no stranger to politics or environmental crises. He is the mayor of Mexico City, a vibrant metropolitan area of ​​23 million facing a water crisis. He helped write the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a sweeping United Nations document that has warned the world about the dangers of burning fossil fuels.
Mrs. Sheinbaum had to balance many, sometimes contradictory, tests when he took office. The federal budget is tight. Demand for energy is increasing. Mexico’s national oil company is heavily indebted. He will face the challenges of poverty, migration, organized crime and relations with the next president of the United States.
It would be foolish to predict what he will do, but it is worth looking at what he has said and done on energy and environmental issues so far in his career.
First, his record.
As mayor of Mexico City, he began electrifying the city’s public bus fleet. He set up a large rooftop solar array in the city’s main wholesale market. They expanded the bike lanes, creating permanent pandemic-era pop-up lanes for several kilometers.
He has been criticized by environmentalists for supporting one of the country’s most controversial infrastructure projects, the 1,500-kilometer Mayan Railway corridor, which runs through forests and archaeological sites to connect tourist sites like Cancún to the countryside on the Yucatán Peninsula.
As for the Mexican energy sector, Ms. Sheinbaum said on the campaign trail that he wants to expand renewable energy infrastructure, unlike his predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But he also said he would continue to support Mexico’s state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, and keep it under state control.
Pemex produces just under 2 million barrels of oil per day. Mrs. Sheinbaum has said he will maintain that level, while also expanding the company’s mission to include lithium production. Lithium is a key component in electric batteries and is essential to the global transition to cleaner energy.
Mr. López Obrador has limited private investment in renewable energy projects, including from the United States, and if Ms. Sheinbaum continued the policy, which could significantly slow the country’s clean energy transition.
“Claudia is an environmental scientist and unlike her mentor, AMLO, believes in decarbonisation and promoting renewable energy,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Mr López Obrador by his initials. “But they are also statists, wanting Mexico’s energy transition to be led and controlled by state-owned companies with money.”
Pemex is heavily indebted, and whether the government can continue to support it remains unclear. “The next president will have to find a solution to ‘fix’ the company’s problems because the current situation is unsustainable,” S&P Global, a commodity research firm, said in an analysis this year.
Mrs. Sheinbaum should also consider what role Mexico wants to play to further the United States’ ambitions to become the world’s leading supplier of liquefied gas. US gas companies are angling to build export terminals off the coast of Mexico to ship gas to Asia. If they are all built, as planned, they will increase emissions of greenhouse gases that heat the planet and, according to environmental campaigns, threaten sensitive ecosystems.
Among the many scientific works published by Ms. Sheinbaum’s paper examines how Mexico can make an energy transition from one based almost exclusively on fossil fuels to renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.
His academic work also examines social consequences. A 2015 paper, for example, examines the conflict that erupted in the relatively poor, largely indigenous state of Oaxaca following a wind project. It is recommended to create a national policy based on feedback from local communities.
“The development of wind energy in Mexico has been complicated and controversial; the large increase of wind energy in Oaxaca has created social conflicts in Oaxaca, which could even stop the development of more wind projects in the region,” said the newspaper, adding that the small shows” the need for national policy and regional.
His job as president is to consider the same trade-offs. Except he won’t be an academic.
