Mexico’s president to resume fight against climate change

Mexico’s new president promises to resume fight against climate change

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.

During the term,of AMLO, Mexico’s rating for global warming deteriorated while temperatures increased and droughts worsened.

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 which evaluates the actions countries take to comply with the Paris Agreement, to downgrade Mexico’s rating to “critically insufficient.”

Here’s hoping the best of success for the new presidenta on this topic.