LOS ANGELES – Officials in California are cheering Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum‘s victory is also a victory for California’s climate.
“Having an engineer whose background works in climate is a big deal,” said Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat who represents California’s border region, who was in Mexico City with Sheinbaum’s team on Sunday to witness her landslide victory.
California politicians already have close relationships with their Mexican counterparts and have signed agreements to work on a host of climate issues, including drought, land conservation, recycling and cross-border truck emissions. But Californians hope Sheinbaum — an engineer by training who worked on the reports of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — will bring more urgency to the issue, especially around clean energy and transportation.
Governor Gavin Newsom was among California officials who on Monday shared photos of himself with Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor with ties to California. As a Ph.D. candidate in the 1990s, she spent four years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researching energy consumption in Mexico’s transportation sector while her then-husband, Carlos Ímaz, pursued graduate studies at Stanford.
Mexico has been a key target of Newsom’s international climate diplomacy efforts. The state has signed four climate agreements with Mexican officials since taking office in 2019.
“California already shares strong historical, cultural, environmental and economic ties with Mexico and looks forward to continuing its fruitful relationship with President-elect Sheinbaum,” Newsom said in an emailed statement.
Sheinbaum, a close confidante of outgoing left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is expected to continue advocating for Mexico’s energy independence and maintaining its state monopolies in oil and electricity. But she has been vocal about her areas of difference regarding investing in renewable energy. While López Obrador doubled down on the importance of fossil fuels as crucial to energy independence, his protege’s vision includes spending $13.6 billion to build out wind and solar power and the infrastructure to transport it.
“It’s been a slow change when it comes to the environment and climate change,” said Gil Tal, who as director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis, works with Mexican officials on heavy-duty electrification fleets, the development of chargers and second-hand EV trading. “We hope for a little more impetus for the environmental goals.”
Josué Medellín-Azuara, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Merced, said he hoped for more cooperation on water infrastructure and drought resilience in particular.
“There has been some information exchange, there have been some binational meetings, although support for science in Mexico has decreased significantly,” he said Monday from Tempoal, Mexico. “We may see a more prominent place on the climate science agenda.”
Garcia, who as chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on California-Mexico Bi-National Affairs is hosting a hearing Wednesday on education and economic opportunity, said he sees an opportunity to expand cooperation on electric vehicles, especially around the production of lithium. Sheinbaum has emphasized that the condition of Sonora’s lithium-rich clay deposits is ripe for extraction.
“I could imagine a partnership in that area, whether it’s the U.S. and Mexico, or California and the state of Sonora,” said Garcia, whose district includes the Salton Sea, which Newsom is trying to develop as the “Saudi Arabia of lithium’. ”
“Under this new leadership, many things can come from this partnership.”
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