Economics: A powerless energy program
The government has rolled out its energy sector program for the remainder of the administration that offers nothing encouraging. The haphazard way it seems to have been slapped together and its failure to address a vast array of essential issues is probably a good indication of the extent to which this text is much less an exercise in developing or clarifying official energy policy than an uninspired effort to comply with federal planning rules.
The most glaring weakness of the 2020-2024 Energy Sector Program (Prosener) is its failure to anticipate the amount of funding that its implementation would entail, an oversight that is essential to the administration’s efforts to sustain the myth that the public sector can single-handedly revamp the industry and cover future domestic demand at a time when the precarious state of public finance in Mexico effectively precludes it from even keeping energy output at current levels, much less gradually reviving the roles public sector energy companies have historically played as government cash cows, or “rescuing and promoting the energy sector in order to achieve energy self-sufficiency and national sovereignty.”
The disdain for environmental concerns is apparent throughout the Prosener, an issue that warranted in the text only a few superficial mentions. Furthermore, the private sector is only mentioned three times in the Program, the only one of any significance being the way in which it apparently relegates such investors to the confines of the petrochemical industry. In any event, the degree of central issues that the document fails to mention and the vague manner in which it touches on many others simply casts a denser pall of uncertainty in the eyes of private investors.
Officials display no modesty when listing the program’s "priority objectives", including making Mexico self-sufficient in sustainable energies, transforming Pemex and the CFE into "guarantors of sovereign energy security and sustainability", and bolstering scientific abilities for the 21st century’s energy transition. But all the while the government is assigning Pemex fewer resources than before and clearly not enough even to sustain operations at current levels, and the electric power utility CFE is not being allotted enough funds to maintain its current 56% share of output. The lack of elements explaining such lofty targets and objectives reduces the program to something more akin to a list of good intentions than any guiding instrument for sector policies.
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