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.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to Sheinbaum hours after she defeated renewable energy advocate Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez with an estimated 58 to 60% of the vote. Trudeau committed Canada to working with her on climate change, international security and trade, gender equality, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, The Canadian Press reports.
Either Sheinbaum or Gálvez would have been the first woman elected to Mexico’s highest office.
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.
“Some view her as Latin America’s Angela Merkel: a politician with the rigorous mind of a scientist,” Bloomberg wrote last year. “Like Merkel, Sheinbaum holds a Ph.D. (Merkel’s is in quantum chemistry; hers is in energy engineering) and began her career in academia.”
Sheinbaum’s Jewish maternal grandparents immigrated to Mexico from Bulgaria fleeing the Nazis, the British Broadcasting Corporation reports.
Attention to Detail
In her five years as Mexico City mayor, Sheinbaum “oversaw the electrification of Mexico City’s buses and covered the huge Central de Abasto food market with solar panels,” the news agency added. During those years, she “rarely let her attention to detail slip. While being driven to meetings in her Chevy, she’d snap photos of traffic jams or clogged taxi ranks and send them to the city’s mobility chief, Andrés Lajous, asking him to sort them out. She once urged him to visit the site of a planned bus line extension, insisting he had to see it himself to manage the project.”
On the campaign trail, Sheinbaum pledged a US$13.6-billion, 3.3-gigawatt energy plan that would “boost her country’s use of renewable energy while still adding gas-burning power plants,” Bloomberg reported in April. “We have the possibility and potential to develop Mexico in a way that generates investment with well-being,” she told a business audience. “At the same time, that development does not have to negatively impact the environment.”
But the politics of taking office as what Bloomberg called the “ideological successor” to left-leaning President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) will be complicated. 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.
López Obrador “prioritized ‘energy sovereignty’, which has manifested in support for Pemex, the most indebted state oil company in the world, while building a $15-billion oil refinery in Tabasco and closing off options for private investment in renewable energy,” Climate Home News reported last year. Bloomberg says AMLO’s Morena government directed billions of dollars to prop up Pemex and “tried to dissolve the National Institute for Ecology and Climate Change as an austerity measure.”
‘Energy is Energy’
“Energy is energy,” New Climate Institute analyst María José de Villafranca told Climate Home shortly after Sheinbaum was nominated last summer. “They could invest public money in renewable energy and this wouldn’t take away from the sovereignty. But we haven’t seen this from the government. It’s a missed opportunity.”
At the time, Climate Home reported “some hope” that Sheinbaum would take a different tack in response to the climate emergency.
“She has been very careful not to go against the current president’s vision, but she has suggested that her vision for renewables energies is somewhat distinct,” said political analyst Carlos Ramírez. “And this has created some hope that her policies as president would be different.”
But not fundamentally different—as the campaign was getting under way, Sheinbaum was set to accelerate renewable energy development, invest in lithium extraction, and build solar plants in the northern state of Sonora, while maintaining that Pemex and the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), the national power utility, “should be architects of the country’s energy policy,” Climate Home wrote.
In their HEATED newsletter, climate journalists Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin contrast the delight in some circles at the election of a “leftist” Mexican president with Morena’s history of supporting a “fossil fuel-heavy” status quo. During the campaign, “Sheinbaum praised AMLO’s pro-Pemex—and therefore pro-fossil fuel—agenda,” Samuelson and Atkin write, citing an Associated Press report. “She said she ‘supports [ALMO’s] goal of keeping 54% of Mexico’s electricity generation under state control, a vision that effectively casts aside more renewable energy production in favour of dirtier fuels’.”
Sheinbaum’s pledge to increase Pemex’s refining capacity is “hardly a recipe for a concerted move away from fossil fuels,” AP added.
In her own past research, Sheinbaum was “a PhD engineer who specializes in determining how much energy industries and countries use, and how fossil fuels harm the planet,” HEATED writes. “In 2015 and 2018, she co-authored papers laying out strategies to transition Mexico’s electric grid to 100% renewable energy,” and her “scholarly work encompasses so many sectors—cement, transportation, iron and steel, and agriculture, to name a few—that it’s hard to imagine an industry whose climate impact she hasn’t studied. She also published papers on how to expand non-fossil fuel energy, while also considering the social and economic impacts of the energy transition.”
When it comes to the politics, “I want a leftist woman climate scientist for president, too,” said one social media post quoted on HEATED. “But please, English language viewers, take a look at Morena’s uniquely destructive environmental policy before celebrating the identity politics.”
A ‘Frankenstein’ Energy Policy
“The technocratic Sheinbaum is a protégé of the president, who’s so popular in Mexico that vendors sell dolls, balloons, and mugs with his grinning face,” Bloomberg added. “She’s unlikely to deviate from her mentor’s policies as the race gets under way. And it’s not clear she would make climate and clean energy top priorities even if she beats her competitor from a centre-right coalition, the entrepreneur Xóchitl Gálvez.”
Around the same time, Sheinbaum told a group of avocado and lime growers: “We are going to keep advancing with renewable energies and with the protection of the environment, but without betraying the people of Mexico.”
The upshot: “I think she will try to do something in between, giving more weight to renewables while also maintaining the policies around Pemex and CFE,” Ramírez said. “What will become of this Frankenstein, I’m not sure.”
The same news story cited Gálvez putting the shift to renewables at the heart of her platform and pledging to end Mexico’s “addiction to fossil fuels”.
In the immediate aftermath of the vote, analysts said Canada can expect a stronger bond with Mexico with Sheinbaum at the helm.
“I think we’ll see a friendly relationship,” Carleton University professor Laura Macdonald, who specializes in Mexican politics, told CP. “And if Trump is re-elected, I think Mexico and Canada will really need each other more than ever, in order to confront the bully in the North American relationship.”
Compared to AMLO, “she’s probably less likely to engage in inflammatory rhetoric,” Macdonald added.
Wilson Centre Vice-President Duncan Wood, the Washington think tank’s senior advisor on Mexico, told CP that Sheinbaum has talked about stabilizing trade and might repeal some restrictions on foreign investment, while strengthening environmental regulation and steering clear of policies that would lead to accusations that Mexico is violating trade agreements.
“The relationship with Canada has been difficult over the last six years for a number of reasons, in part because of the bluster of López Obrador,” he said. But also, because there are real issues in the bilateral relationship to do with investment disputes.”
