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Mexico was once a climate leader - now it's betting big on coal

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The men on the midnight shift smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes in the 
glow of their helmet lights as they prepared to go underground. They were 
loading safety equipment and coils of pipe on to wheelbarrows, in 
readiness for a second shift due to start working later that week.

“We’re reactivating the industry,” said Arturo Rivera Wong, who had just 
taken on 40 more workers at the mine he owns in the scrublands of the 
border state of Coahuila.

“Four furnaces at the big thermoelectric plant are going to be 
reactivated,” he explained. “This is going to kickstart coal sales.”

As the climate crisis worsens and clean energy prices plunge, governments 
around the world have been weaning their economies of coal and other 
fossil fuels.

Mexico is moving in the opposite direction.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has 
unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers 
like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on 
the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and 
renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.

Not only is López Obradorbetting big on fossil fuels, he is also 
curtailing clean energy.

The populist president has promoted a vision of energy sovereignty, in 
which state-run bodies – the oil company Pemex and the Federal Electricity 
Commission (CFE) – pump petroleum and generate electricity. Private 
players, which have heavily invested in clean energy, are relegated to a 
secondary role in López Obrador’s vision – while emissions and climate 
commitments are an afterthought.

“Instead of thinking of a transition from coal and fossil fuels, he’s 
thinking of using more coal and petroleum,” said Adrián Fernández 
Bremauntz, director of Iniciativa Climática de México, an environmental 
organisation.

“No other G20 country has such abnormal or retrograde energy policies as 
this government,” he added. “It’s not going to advance us toward our 
climate goals.”

Amlo’s policies stand in stark contrast to those of the Biden 
administration, which has declared that the climate crisis poses an 
“existential threat” and unveiled a flurry of policies to decouple the US 
economy from fossil fuels.

The CFE’s current investment plan forgoes clean energy projects entirely. 
And a bill for overhauling the electricity industry that was recently sent 
to Congress would force the CFE to purchase power from its own facilities, 
including coal plants, before renewables.

López Obrador has said his government will refurbish the CFE’s 
hydroelectric installations, which would allow Mexico to meet its climate 
commitments of generating 35% of its electricity via renewables.

But to make its case for prioritising fossil fuels and re-establishing a 
state-run electricity industry, the Mexican government has repeatedly cast 
doubt on the dependability of renewables – arguing that solar and wind 
energy are unreliable and claiming they had been given preference over CFE 
hydroelectric projects.

And despite increasingly powerful hurricanes, droughts and other extreme 
weather which have afflicted the region, it has stayed silent on the 
climate crisis.

After a December blackout plunged 10.3 million customers into darkness, 
the CFE partly blamed the afternoon outage on record levels of renewable 
energy overloading the power grid.

In the past, Mexico has been a climate leader. It was the first developing 
country to deliver its climate action plan ahead of the Paris agreement, 
but such ambitions are now treated with crushing lack of interest by the 
government.

“The Paris agreement has zero relevance to anything they’re talking about 
in the electric sector right now,” said Jeremy Martin, vice-president for 
energy and sustainability at the Institute of the Americas.

López Obrador outlook on fossil fuels and state-run companies stems from 
his upbringing in the oil-rich state of Tabasco at a time when Pemex was 
seen as the vehicle for national development. Private companies and 
foreigners had been excluded from the energy sector since a 1938 
expropriation.

But an opening of the industry in 2013 encouraged a spate of new 
investment – much of it in renewables. Mexico also introduced clean energy 
auctions, which “set record prices for how low developers were bidding to 
put renewables into the mix”, Martin said.

Those auctions stopped after López Obrador took power in December 2018. 
Anaid Velasco, research director at the Mexican Center for Environmental 
Law, described the new government’s policy as: “I’ll put obstacles in the 
path of the private sector, which invested most in renewables and I’ll put 
most of my efforts – and at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.”

Even as the coronavirus pandemic heaps misery on Mexico, López Obrador has 
continued to pour funding into Pemex and hasn’t slowed construction on a 
massive $8bn oil refinery.

“We’re going to rescue Pemex and the CFE,” Amlo says often, appealing to 
nationalism and impugning his predecessors for opening up the energy 
sector to private and foreign investors.

George Baker, a veteran Pemex analyst, compared Amlo’s rhetoric on energy 
to Donald Trump’s fixation with restoring the US coal industry. “It’s a 
kind of feelgood statement on the level of ‘Make America great again’,” he 
said.

López Obrador has also showed a marked enthusiasm for coal, which produces 
roughly 9.5% of Mexico’s electricity. In October, he travelled to the 
coalmining regions of Coahuila, to announce the reactivation of the CFE’s 
coal-fired plants. He called clean energy a “sophism” to prioritize 
private over public enterprise.

The president’s commitment to coal was welcome relief for miners like 
Rivera, whose family has worked in the mines for three generations.

Mining almost ground to a halt in 2019 when the CFE stopped purchasing 
amid plans to transition to cleaner energy source. About 10,000 miners 
lost their jobs.

To stay afloat, Rivera shut down the mine, and sold 20 cows and the house 
he had inherited from his mother. Some of his employees were forced to 
scrounge for nuts to feed their families.

His company now extracts 700 tons of coal a week from his mine which 
burrows under the parched terrain of cactus and mesquite.

The region is pocked with mines of all sizes, ranging from artisanal 
pocitos, or “little holes”, to large-scale operations and open pits. “You 
dig 30 meters and you strike coal,” said Javier Gómez Acuña, director of 
Prodemi, a state-government agency to promote mining. “It’s everywhere.”

Conditions are often hazardous: 19 February marks the 15th anniversary of 
the Pasta de Conchos disaster which killed 65 miners.

As the coal-fired plant reopens more furnaces, Rivera expects to ramp up 
production to 1,900 tons a week.

“What does the president want? To reactivate the economy because 50% of 
this region depends on mining,” Rivera said.

Rivera didn’t deny the climate crisis and said drought had gripped the 
region for three years. “We definitely believe in climate change and 
alternate forms of producing energy have to be pursued. But we need to 
advance bit by bit,” he said.

Workers preparing to reopen the coalmines seemed more worried about work 
than the climate.

“They say they’re no longer going to buy coal because of these solar lamps 
and stuff like that,” said Luis Alberto García. “But I hope we can always 
sell coal because we make more money from it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/mexico-coal-fossil-fuels-
climate-crisis-amlo

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Mexico was once a climate leader - now it's betting big on coal "2 x loser to Trump, Nancy Pelosi" <baltimore-nancy@sacbee.com> - 2021-02-21 23:41 +0000

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