In her first days as Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum made a point of distancing herself from the fossil fuel reliance promoted by her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and vowed to resume an energy transition that he halted.
“We are going to boost renewable energies. The goal is that by 2030, they will have a 45% share (of total electricity production),” she said Tuesday in her first public speech in the capital’s Zocalo square, shortly after being sworn in as the country’s first woman president.
Specifics are still scant, but her speech marks a sharp departure from the energy policy of former President López Obrador, a fierce defender of fossil fuels who, among other things, spent more than $20 billion to build a new oil refinery and stopped the auctions that had allowed developers to build solar and wind farms in the country.
The president said in the coming days she will unveil an “ambitious energy transition program” aimed at “the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.”
Yet Sheinbaum has also promised to strengthen the nation’s Federal Electricity Commission, which owns older plants that mainly burn fossil fuels, and state-owned oil company Pemex.
Even without specifics, experts and environmentalists said the change in rhetoric was notable.
“The terms ‘sustainability’ or ‘renewable energy’ really never appeared,” in López Obrador’s policies, said Rosanety Barrios, who worked for more than a decade at the Mexican Energy Regulatory Commission. “He didn’t use the term in any speech, in any document. And she has been using it all the time.”
During her campaign, Sheinbaum repeatedly promised to promote renewable energy to meet an increasing electricity demand, due in part to rising temperatures from climate change. In a speech to Congress, also on Tuesday, with López Obrador sitting a few steps from her, the promises seemed more tangible.
The goal of reaching 45% clean electricity by 2030 is well above the 24% it represented last year, according to the Ministry of Energy. If achieved, Mexico would be back on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which seeks to keep the global average temperature to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The energy policy promoted by López Obrador led Climate Action Tracker, an organization that evaluates the actions countries take to comply with the Paris Agreement, to downgrade Mexico’s rating to “critically insufficient.”
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