On a recent scorching afternoon in his home state of Tabasco, the president of Mexico celebrated his government’s latest triumph: a new oil refinery.
Though not yet operational, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador hailed the refinery as a centrepiece in his grand campaign to secure Mexico’s energy independence.
“We ignored the sirens’ song, the voices that predicted, in good faith, perhaps, the end of the oil age and the massive arrival of electric cars and renewable energies,” he told the cheering crowd.
At a moment when scientists are sounding alarms about the need to move away from fossil fuels that contribute to catastrophic climate change, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global shift in the opposite direction,
