Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum in Torreón, Coahuila; 05 July 2023. Flickr; public domain.
In 2000, American voters picked climate activist Al Gore as their choice for president. However, the Supreme Court (5-4) stopped a manual recount in Florida, giving the electoral college victory to George Bush.
Almost 24 years later, Mexican voters have picked Claudia Sheinbaum — a Jewish climate scientist — as their next president, the first woman to hold that office. If you can imagine American voters picking a climate scientist for president, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.
The two — Gore and Sheinbaum — are linked by a Nobel Peace Prize. In 2007, former U.S. Vice President Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to develop and share public knowledge about man-made climate change as well as to “to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Sheinbaum “worked unpaid” as contributing author and lead author to the Working Group III contributions to IPCC’s Fourth & Fifth Assessment Reports.
“I grew up with … a belief that politics can transform the world alongside an academic and scientific mindset,” Sheinbaum said in a 2023 biopic, according to Reuters.
Voters in Mexico understand that climate change is real in a way that American voters do not. For example, 93% of Mexican respondents in 2023 said that climate change already impacted their everyday lives. In the US, only 46% thought climate change “would harm me personally (emphasis added).” For self-identified conservative Republicans, the percentage dropped precipitously to only 19%.
During May, Mexico experienced a “calamitous heat wave,” its third of the year.
Exhausted after weeks of exposure to temperatures above 50°C in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, howler monkeys fall from trees in a state of dehydration. Despite the efforts of locals to save them, the authorities reported that at least 164 of these primates had died in May. “Temperatures have never risen to this level for so long,” said a vet who took part in monkey rescue brigades in the jungle around the town of Comalcalco.
On Sunday 26 May, Mexico City experienced a peak temperature of 34.7°C (94.46ºF); it was the hottest 26 May in a century of weather records.
Hers is a landslide victory despite international dirty tricks:
[Sheinbaum’s victory] came despite a coordinated international campaign of media and bots that attempted to paint AMLO and MORENA as being in collusion with drug cartels.
