Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, the country’s first female president and first Jewish president, has a background in environmental policy, including work for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Sheinbaum earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in energy engineering before serving as Environment Minister for Mexico City from 2000 to 2006 under then-head Andrés Manuel López Obrador, now the outgoing president. After leaving that role, she worked as a researcher at the IPCC and is listed as a co-author of its 2007 and 2014 reviews.
During his campaign, Sheinbaum supported the transition to renewable energy sources, but also emphasized the need to maintain fossil fuel infrastructure. At a campaign event in Mexico City, she said state oil company Pemex must “face climate change and enter other markets” and “not only in the oil and gas sector, which are indispensable, but also in enabling access to sustainable energy. sources.”
She has called for investing more than $13 billion in renewable energy sources, but has also vowed to continue Obrador’s anti-privatization policies, which would likely block US investments in the country’s energy sector.
Sheinbaum is seen as a close ally and protégé of Obrador, but her work on climate change and support for renewable energy sources contrasts with the Obrador administration’s advocacy for fossil fuel expansion. Obrador has sought to boost Mexico’s energy independence through oil and gas development, telling a crowd at a refinery opening in 2022 that Mexico has “ignored the song of the sirens, the voices that, perhaps in good faith, predicted the end of the world.” oil age and the massive arrival of electric cars and renewable energy sources.”
Obrador, a center-left populist, has framed his case for fossil fuels in economic nationalist terms, seeking to reverse neoliberal policies that increasingly opened up the country’s oil production to private investors.
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