Mexico will almost certainly have its first female president in 2024, after the governing Morena party and the opposition coalition both chose women as their candidates.
Former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum was named Morena’s candidate on Wednesday, despite runner-up Marcelo Ebrard’s last-minute denouncement of the process and demand for it to be redone.
Sheinbaum is a climate scientist-turned-politician who was widely believed to be the preferred choice of president Andrés Manuel López Obrador who is unable to run again.
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Gálvez is a businesswoman who became a senator in 2018 and has seized media attention with her aspirational story of growing up with an Indigenous father and mestizo mother in Hidalgo state, before working her way through public university and into business and politics.
Angela Merkel is a famous example of someone who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and was a researcher before turning to politics.
It helped in some cases. E.g. the first thing the government did when faced with Covid was to ask experts and put it into the hand of the RKI with several people familiar with coronaviruses.
However, in other instances she understood the science and just chose to ignore it because of politics.
Understanding science is good, but you still need to act accordingly.
Do you have an example of that? I mean choosing politics over science doesnt immediately screams “wrong” to me
Nuclear energy.
She was at first in favour of keeping it, but after Fukushima and subsequent panic in Germany she U-turned and got out of it.
Now, I am aware that nuclear energy has issues, like the nuclear waste. However, we need something to tide us over until we fully transitioned into renewables and that something is now the shittiest coal we can get, And of course, at this point it’s way too late to reverse it again. We started to build down our nuclear facilities years ago and building them up again would not be worth it.
However, we should’ve not stopped using nuclear that early in the process of pushing renewable energy.
Mrs. Merkel was aware, but she rather went with the vox populi of fear of Fukushima.
I agree with you, but politics is complicated. If she felt like continuing to fight for nuclear at that time would be unpopular, it might not have been worth it. It probably would have made it impossible to achieve other goals.
Nuclear waste is better overall for the environment than coal ash ponds. I live near a coal power plant with those ponds. Not the prettiest sight to see and probably poisoning my local water table. Also, coal produces more nuclear radiation than nuclear power plants do.
I actually agree with Merkels decision.