Sheinbaum oversaw the electrification of Mexico City’s buses and covered the huge Central de Abasto food market with solar panels.
Photographer: Luis Antonio Rojas/BloombergClimate Expert Claudia Sheinbaum Aims to Lead Oil-Rich Mexico
The presidential candidate is an accomplished scientist—and a protégé of Mexico’s current president, a strong backer of fossil fuels. Will she fight to cut emissions if she wins?
As mayor of Mexico City, a job she held until June, Claudia Sheinbaum rarely let her attention to detail slip. While being driven to meetings in her Chevy, she’d snap photos of traffic jams or clogged taxi ranks and send them to the city’s mobility chief, Andrés Lajous, asking him to sort them out. She once urged him to visit the site of a planned bus line extension, insisting he had to see it himself to manage the project, Lajous recalls.
Now Sheinbaum, 61, is a top contender to become the next president of Mexico, and the ideological successor to leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. Some view her as Latin America’s Angela Merkel: a politician with the rigorous mind of a scientist. Like Merkel, Sheinbaum holds a Ph.D. (Merkel’s is in quantum chemistry; hers is in energy engineering) and began her career in academia. Not only has she published a raft of scientific papers, she’s contributed to two landmark reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s premier body of climate science.