Mexico's new president promises to resume fight against climate change
By TERESA DE MIGUEL
Updated 10:42 AM CDT, October 4, 2024
MEXICO CITY (AP) — 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 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 MNRegulatory Commission. “He didn’t use the term in any speech, in any document. And she has been using it all the time.”
More:
https://apnews.com/article/mexico-sheinbaum-energy-transition-climate-change-renewables-93a78b5f2c22d1eab0494a3d6dfaa5e9
(Best wishes to President Sheinbaum. Mexico has long needed a President who will work to bring desperately needed action before the predators have completely destroyed Mexico's environment altogether. Decades have passed with assassinations of environmental defenders and workers, not to mention ordinary journalists, etc.)
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