Mexico is the world’s 11th-largest oil producer. It has been gripped by a deadly heat wave. Now, it’s elected as its president a woman with a rare pedigree: a left-of-center climate scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering named Claudia Sheinbaum.
Sheinbaum is no stranger to politics nor to environmental crises. She was mayor of Mexico City, a vibrant metropolitan area of 23 million that faces a dire water crisis. She helped write the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the sweeping United Nations documents that have warned the world about the hazards of burning fossil fuels.
Sheinbaum will have to balance numerous, sometimes contradictory, tests as she takes office. Federal budgets are tight. Energy demands are rising. Mexico’s national oil company is heavily indebted. She’ll face the challenges of poverty, migration, organized crime and relations with the next president of the United States.
It would be folly to predict what she will do, but it’s worth looking at what she has said and done on energy and environmental issues so far in her career.
First, her record.
As mayor of Mexico City, she began electrifying the city’s public bus fleet. She set up a huge rooftop solar array on the city’s main wholesale market. She expanded bike lanes, making permanent several kilometers of pandemic-era pop-up paths.
She has been criticized by environmentalists for backing one of the country’s most controversial infrastructure projects, the over 900-mile so-called Maya Train corridor, which cuts across forests and archaeological sites to connect tourist sites such as Cancún to rural areas on the Yucatán Peninsula.
As for Mexico’s energy sector, Sheinbaum said on the campaign trail she wanted to expand renewable energy infrastructure, unlike her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But she also said she would continue to support the Mexican state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, and keep it under state control.
Pemex produces just under 2 million barrels of oil a day. Sheinbaum has said she would maintain those levels, while also expanding the company’s mission to include lithium production. Lithium is a key component in electric batteries and pivotal to the global transition to cleaner energy.
López Obrador has limited private investments in renewable energy projects, including from the United States, and if Sheinbaum were to continue that policy, that could significantly slow down the country’s clean energy transition.
“Claudia is an environmental scientist and unlike her mentor, AMLO, believes in decarbonization and in boosting renewables,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to López Obrador by his initials. “But she is also a statist, wanting Mexico’s energy transition to be led and controlled by cash-strapped, state-owned enterprises.”
Pemex is heavily indebted, and whether the government can continue to prop it up remains unclear. “The next president will need to find a solution to ‘fix’ the company’s problems as its condition today is unsustainable,” S&P Global, a commodities research firm, said in an analysis this year.
Sheinbaum will also have to weigh what role Mexico wants to play to further the ambitions of the United States to be the world’s leading supplier of liquefied gas. U.S. gas companies are angling to build export terminals along the Mexican coast to ship gas to Asia. If they are all built, as planned, that would hugely expand the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases and, according to environmental campaigners, threaten sensitive ecosystems.
Among Sheinbaum’s many published scholarly works are papers that examine how Mexico can make the energy transition from one that’s based almost exclusively on fossil fuels to renewables such as wind, solar and geothermal.
Her academic work also explores the social consequences. A 2015 paper, for instance, looked at the conflicts that erupted in the relatively poor and heavily Indigenous state of Oaxaca after a wind project came in. It recommended establishing national policy based on the feedback of local communities.
“Wind energy development in Mexico has been complex and contentious; the large increase of wind energy in Oaxaca has created social conflicts in Oaxaca, which even might stop further wind project development in the region,” the paper said, adding that the case shows “the need for a national and regional policy.”
Her work as president will have to consider similar trade-offs. Except they will not be academic.
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