Big Impact – Mexico Elects Climate Scientist as President: Positive Impact for California?

LOS ANGELES: Authorities in California are also applauding Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s win, citing it as a win for the state’s climate.

Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from California’s inland border region who was in Mexico City on Sunday with Sheinbaum’s team to watch her landslide triumph, said, “Having an engineer whose background is working on climate, it’s a big deal.”

Several climate-related concerns, such as drought, land conservation, recycling, and cross-border truck emissions, are already being worked on by California lawmakers in close collaboration with their Mexican counterparts.

However, Californians are expecting that Sheinbaum, an engineer by background who contributed to reports from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will increase the urgency surrounding the issue, particularly with regard to clean energy and transportation.

Along with Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor with ties to California, were other California officials who shared selfies on Monday, including Governor Gavin Newsom.

While her then-husband, Carlos Ímaz, pursued graduate studies at Stanford, she spent four years as a Ph.D. candidate in the 1990s conducting research on energy use in Mexico’s transportation sector at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Mexico has been at the forefront of Newsom’s global climate diplomacy endeavors. Since he assumed office in 2019, the state has inked four climate accords with the Mexican government.

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“Sharing already strong historical, cultural, environmental, and economic ties with Mexico, California looks forward to continuing its fruitful relationship with President-elect Sheinbaum,” Newsom wrote in a statement sent by email.

Sheinbaum, a close ally of departing leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is anticipated to support Mexico’s pursuit of energy independence and uphold the country’s monopolies on the production of power and petroleum.

Nonetheless, she has made it clear where she and he disagree when it comes to funding renewable energy. While López Obrador reaffirmed the importance of fossil fuels in achieving energy independence, his protégé has allocated $13.6 billion to the development of wind and solar power plants as well as the necessary transmission infrastructure.

When it comes to the environment and climate change, “it was a slow change,” according to Gil Tal, head of the University of California, Davis’ Electric Vehicle Research Center, who collaborates with Mexican officials on heavy-duty fleet electrification, charger expansion, and the trade in used electric vehicles. “We hope to see a slight increase in the push for environmental goals.”

Professor of environmental engineering Josué Medellín-Azuara of the University of California, Merced expressed his hope for increased cooperation, specifically in the areas of water infrastructure and drought resilience.

“There have been some binational meetings and some information exchange, but there has been a significant decline in support for science in Mexico,” he stated on Monday while speaking from Temporal in Mexico. “We may see some more prominent place in the agenda in terms of climate science.”

Garcia said he sees a chance to increase collaboration on electric vehicles, particularly around lithium manufacturing. Garcia is chair of the Assembly Select Committee on California-Mexico Bi-National Affairs and is conducting a hearing on education and economic possibilities on Wednesday. Sheinbaum has pointed out that Sonora possesses clay resources rich in lithium that are ready to be extracted.

“I can imagine collaboration in that field, involving the United States and Mexico or California and the state of Sonora,” stated Garcia, whose district includes the Salton Sea, which Newsom is attempting to establish as the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

“Many things can come out of this partnership under this new leadership.”