From Charcoal to Oil: Economic Nationalism and Environmental Conflict in Mexico’s Energy Transition

In this age of climate change, debates about energy sources have intensified, and calls to transition from oil have escalated. In these efforts to balance development and environmental protection, histories of earlier energy transitions fall by the wayside as if they had no bearing on the present.  My paper examines the history of the transition from wood-based fuel to petroleum in mid-century Mexico to cast new light on the relationships among development, environment, and social structure. During the 1940s, scientists, government officials, and industrialists shared a belief that petroleum could both propel the country toward modernity and solve the country’s environmental crisis: forest destruction.  They hoped the newly nationalized state oil industry would modernize the nation’s energy infrastructure by conquering new domestic markets.  An enormous charcoal and wood fuel industry run by peasants and other country people, however, stood in their way.  They waged a vicious ideological and political war against this peasant industry, drawing on the strength of Mexico’s conservationist tradition and the recent conservative political turn. Petroleum energy would thus save the nation from a pending environmental catastrophe caused by an irresponsible peasantry. The shift to fuel oil, driven by the new nationalist politics of economic independence from foreign oil companies, extirpated an entire industry with enormous costs to thousands of rural people dependent on charcoal production.  This transition was most fraught with conflict in and around major urban areas.  While scientists and officials fretted over worsening urban floods caused by deforested and eroded hillsides, charcoal producers invoked conservationist values to defend their local economies. Urban residents, meanwhile, were obligated to buy prohibitively priced kerosene stoves as charcoal supplies diminished.  This paper locates energy use and environmental protection within a larger field of power and explores how development and environmentalism have intertwined over time.