The Biden administration’s special climate envoy John Kerry was in Mexico this week to pressure the López Obrador government to dispense with the notion of sovereign state control over fossil fuel energy resources, and jump into the green straitjacket instead. Kerry and the Biden administration don’t like López Obrador’s energy reform, which if passed, will give greater market share (54%) to the state-run Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and limit private and foreign firms that have invested in renewable energy. The reform is still tied up in Mexico’s Congress, as it lacks the two-thirds majority vote it needs to pass.
In public remarks Feb. 9, Associated Press reported, Kerry urged Mexico to keep its market “open and competitive,” rather than allow a majority market share for state-owned power plants, that, as AP put it, “often burn dirty fuel oil or coal” while limiting private wind, natural gas and solar plants to a minority market share. Right before Kerry arrived, the U.S. Embassy put out a statement expressing “concern over Mexico’s current proposal for the energy sector. Promoting the use of dirtier, antiquated and expensive technologies over efficient renewable alternatives would put consumers and the economy in general at a disadvantage.” The English-language newspaper Mexico Daily News emphasizes that the CFE is “fossil-fuel dependent.”
