Mexico: Leader in clean energy?

Friday, 21 February 2014 00:10 
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
The News


A day after North American leaders pledged to cooperate in the economic development of the region, one of the world’s most respected economic thinkers injected a dose of harsh reality into the conversation, telling a gathering of industrialists in Mexico City Thursday that unless Mexico radically shifts its economy to a renewables-based, “Third Industrial Revolution” model, it will be left behind.

Jeremy Rifkin, author of 17 books on the impact of technological changes on the economy, presented a harsh picture of short-term challenges in what he called the last stages of the era of great energy.

“Technologies like the internal combustion engine and centralized electrification that are based on 20th century energy sources — fossil fuels, crude oil, natural gas, shale, coal, tar sands — are old, moribund, antiquated and exhausted,” he told a gathering of Mexican industrialists belonging to Canacintra, the Mexican Chamber of Industrial Transformation. “There’s nothing we can do in the industrial community to get anything more out of these worn out technologies.”

Indeed, Rifkin warned, the stakes of continuing with carbon-based energy sources are much higher than lost economic competitiveness. “There have been five known major species extinction events in the history of life on earth,” he said. ¨The sixth species extinction event is happening in our time on our watch.”

But Rifkin’s message was as much a recipe for action as a warning of the consequences of inaction. The world has the two needed elements for a new industrial revolution, he said — new energy sources and a landmark advance in communication capability.

In fact, he said, Mexico is in a position to lead the way toward the new economic regime.

“What we need in the Americas is for one country to take this up and then move it north and move it south,” he said. “I think that country is Mexico. I actually do.”

One reason for that, he said, is the wealth of potential clean energy sources in the country.

“Mexico is the Saudi Arabia of the new energy, with the most exorbitant reserves of any country I know in terms of land mass,” he said. “You have the most solar capability, the most wind on the coast, the most geothermal, and huge possibilities in biomass and ocean waves.”

Rifkin, who has served as an economic consultant for the European Union, didn’t shy away from urging an end to oil dependence as he industry industry captains in a country whose economic engine has traditionally been petroleum.

“The true function of large energy enterprises is not really to sell energy, but to manage it,” he said. “They will continue to do that in the new economy as aggregators.”

Acknowledging that skeptics still exist who question the affordability of an accelerated shift to renewable energy, Rifkin insisted that the economic fallout will be entirely positive.

Sun, wind, geothermal and ocean wave energy sources are essentially free, he pointed out. The infrastructure development needed to tap the free energy in itself represents a jobs bonanza. And financial institutions will put up the capital, he said, because they know the resulting energy savings will pay back the investment.

An example, he said, will be turning buildings into solar energy generators, as is currently being done in Europe. “In Mexico, we’re going to have to retrofit every single building to make it energy efficient,” he said. “That means lots of construction and lots of jobs.”

Rifkin spoke Thursday morning at the National Industrial Convention organized by Canacintra. President Enrique Peña Nieto addressed the gathering later in the day.