By Nat Keohane
When President Obama joined Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in Ottawa last month at the North American Leaders’ Summit to announce ambitious goals on climate and clean energy, EDF President Fred Krupp said that “implementing them will be the true measure of success.”
Today, the United States and Mexico took important next steps towards successful implementation, announcing new details on how the two countries will work together to:
- curb emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for a quarter of today’s warming, by reducing emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40-45% by 2025;
- expand clean energy to meet the goal of 50% electricity generation from zero-carbon sources by 2025;
- promote residential, commercial, and industrial energy efficiency; and
- align methodologies for estimating the social cost of carbon, a key input into understanding the benefits of reducing carbon pollution.
If the June announcements were the poetry, today’s announcements were the prose — but they are no less important for it. The work plans, workshops, technical dialogues, and regulatory processes laid out in today’s announcement are the nuts and bolts of effective governing. Just as important, the concreteness and specificity of these plans give a clear signal of the countries’ strong commitment to getting these things done.
The two countries also reaffirmed their commitment to work together in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for the adoption of a robust market-based measure to limit emissions from international aviation, and to join the Paris Agreement and support its entry into force this year.
Today’s announcement provides yet another illustration of the growing importance of North American leadership on climate and clean energy — one of many recent bright spots in climate action.
The concreteness and specificity of these plans give a clear signal of the countries’ strong commitment to getting these things done.
And it’s not hard to see why. Canada and Mexico are two of the U.S.’s top three trading partners. By advancing together, the three countries can reap the full economic and environmental benefits of a clean energy economy, creating opportunities for clean energy entrepreneurs, low-carbon investment, and sustainable economic development across the continent.
Today’s announcement is a particularly strong signal from Mexico, which — with a well-earned reputation for climate leadership on the international stage — must still demonstrate how domestic policy will match those ambitious targets. Indeed, Mexico itself has much to gain from following through. With a historically oil-dependent economy, the country is already feeling the fiscal pinch of rock-bottom global oil prices. Combine that with the enormous untapped potential and newly opened market for renewable energy generation, and pathway is clear to major opportunities for economic growth through low carbon energy and efficient production.
The path to shared global prosperity is a low-carbon path. By moving from the bold type of headline announcements to the finer print of detailed workplans, the U.S. and Mexico just took a meaningful step in that direction.
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