As the world transitions away from fossil fuels and weans itself off emissions-heavy energy sources, one country is running against the current and right back into the arms of coal. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has bucked all convention as he tries to make good on his campaign trail promise to establish a norm of energy sovereignty for his country. Bringing down the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and curbing the extraction and combustion of dirty fuels - particularly coal - is paramount to the increasingly urgent missive of avoiding catastrophic climate change. In order to keep the globe’s temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages - the threshold set by scientists to stave off the very worst effects of climate change - we will need to cut oil use by 37% and gas use by 25% and cut out oil altogether by just 2030. Put simply, this decade will make all the difference in the future of our species.
This is why it’s particularly alarming that a sizeable economic and industrial force like Mexico has thrown caution and a fair amount of carbon dioxide to the wind and doubled down on its anachronistic dedication to ramping up its coal industry at the very time that most countries are attempting to phase out the particularly dirty fossil fuel.
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