Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Marcelo Mena is an environmentalist,
a scholar,
and he is the former Minister of Environment for Chile.
Welcome, Marcelo.
Marcelo Mena: How are you doing, Whitney. Thanks for the invitation.
WPR: Perfect. Great.
Of course, thank you so much for being with us here today.
And you know, before we dive into the future of climate action
in Chile and beyond,
I think it would be great for us to talk about the present,
and why Chile really represents a country that is worth thinking about
when we talk about climate.
You know, recently there have been lots of commendable actions
taken by your country when we think about climate.
Chile recently committed to net zero emissions by 2050,
the first in the Americas to do this,
and that's especially notable when you think about
how much of Chile's economy really depends on carbon emissions:
mining, agriculture, and spaces like that.
So could you start a little bit by just talking about
how would this even be possible to get to net zero emissions in 30 years,
and what would that mean for Chile?
MM: It was a very surreal image
when we saw Minister Schmidt,
the COP25 president,
Patricia Espinosa, the UN head on climate change,
with masks delivering this new NDC.
The important thing here is things that are hard to build require consensus,
but therefore to get rid of that commitment,
you need to have another consensus.
This hasn't happened,
so I think is, the reason why Chile has a sort of vision towards mitigation
that's ambitious
is that we see that there's a big economic benefit.
We have seen, we've witnessed,
what the renewable energy sector has been able to do for investment,
for lowering energy costs,
and so therefore to reach this goal
we will inevitably expand to 100 percent renewable,
but we'll also transform our industry, which is heavy on fossil fuels,
towards low emissions,
with the hydrogen economy kicking in,
with a recently launched committee that I formed, that Minister Jobet,
the Minister of Energy, set up.
And also energy efficiency and a lot of capture, carbon capture.
We are endowed with a lot of natural capital.
Taking care of that natural capital and expanding plantations
will allow us to reach net zero by 2050.
WPR: That's great.
And now it seems like Chile has such a huge focus, then,
in thinking about renewable energy and thinking about climate.
But this wasn't always the case.
Could you talk a little bit, I guess,
about the history of how Chile arrived at this moment?
MM: Yeah, so in 2011, 2010,
we had an energy discussion with incumbents
saying the only way we could solve our energy problems
will be through large coal and large hydro in Patagonia.
And that really polarized the discussion.
We got together as a community after large protests
that triggered a lot of social movements,
and we started discussing
how we should be able to do our energy going forward.
The population, public unrest, set up almost 6,000 megawatts
of coal fired power plants to never be built.
And when the government, Michelle Bachelet's government came in,
we pulled the plug on HidroAysén project,
which is a big hydro project in the Patagonia.
And both of these conditions enabled an opportunity
for renewable energy to be set in.
We put in carbon taxes,
we put in environmental regulations,
and we set up an energy strategy that we did building on discussing
and looking at the data
in which we thought that the 70 percent renewable energy by 2050
was going to be a target that we could agree on.
This target has been long surpassed.
Now we're thinking of reaching that same goal by 2030.
WPR: And what you were saying about social protests,
that's something that a lot of people maybe have been following
news of what's going in Chile are familiar with recent social protests,
and I think I'm curious about how you see that factoring in
to climate action moving forward.
How might these social protests
play a role in what climate action you see?
And, really, how is it possible for Chile to be a leader in climate action
while also struggling with some of these social issues?
MM: Well, the social issues,
which are very profound and important to address,
caused, for example, COP25
to not be able to be held in Santiago, and to go to Madrid.
And this also shifted a whole bunch of the discussions and announcements
that were done
and we were expecting to have.
But regardless of this,
the fact that we have this commitment from the government today
shows that there's a resolution to continue forward.
But really the model,
the economic model of Chile,
was brought into question,
because the environmental issues, for example, are quite widespread,
and many times you have large coal-fired power plants
being situated where people live
and with higher mortality rates.
Somebody who lives where a power plant is installed
has twice the rate of death
in comparison to other people in Chile.
So the model of having many people be impacted for the benefit of few
is something that caused and triggered the social unrest.
And it goes into the economic model itself
of extracting, colluding, impacting communities
that may not see the benefits of these economic activities.
So while we've done a lot, we've come a long way,
for example in securing
a very emblematic agreement to phase out coal-fired power plants,
many people that this wasn't done fast enough
and want this action to be brought faster.
WPR: And it sounds like having people be the voice and the engine
behind making that happen
has really been part of this historical thread
with climate action in Chile
and seems like it would really lead things moving into the future.
MM: No, definitely -- yes. Go ahead. Sorry.
WPR: Go ahead. Please go ahead.
We have a little bit of a delay.
MM: Starting out, we are doing well,
but I think we need to double down our commitments.
So even though we have ministries involved,
we have civil society involved,
we need to bring in the mainstream industry.
I think, for example, the mining sector has a great opportunity
to be the solution for the environmental issues,
because we provide the copper, the cobalt, the lithium
that are required for solar PV panels, for battery storage.
But we need to do this in a clean manner.
I think that's the biggest challenge we're going to have
in the next 20 years ahead.
WPR: And sort of pivoting to the pandemic
and to thinking about what's going,
right now the entire world has obviously been devastated by this crisis.
What have been some of the unique challenges that Chile has faced
during this pandemic?
MM: Well, definitely, as anybody,
we are always struggling within
taking actions today to prevent a deeper impact in the future.
And we started off pretty well.
We shut off schools.
We shut off different cities and had a quarantine.
But we gave the wrong signals to people
and we didn't have a consistent effort,
and this has brought us to have the highest infection rates per capita
in the world these days.
So this goes to show that, the same parallels with climate change.
We need to take action now to prevent deeper impact later.
And I think we need to take the lesson of this
to continue with an effort,
because one thing is to announce an ambitious NDC.
Another thing is to invest and do the regulations that you require
to turn this into reality.
But there are some things that are interesting.
The pollution in Santiago,
which is one of the most polluted capitals historically in Latin America,
has dropped substantially.
The car-related emissions are down almost 80 to 90 percent, which is pretty substantive. And we look at the example of what's going on. Harvard University showed a study in which they showed higher mortality rates for more polluted cities. And this is also the case in Chile. For every microgram of pollution, PM2.5, there is an increase of the fatality rate of nine percent. But the thing is, we could also look back at what we've achieved up to now. Had we not taken measures to clean the air, as we've done in Chile these last 20 years, we would be talking about five times more people would have died from COVID. We have around 800 people that have died due to COVID directly, but this would have been much higher had we not taken action. And in fact, due to the lower pollution, if we estimate and predict this to the rest of the year, we will have saved as many lives reducing the pollution as we have lost in COVID, showing that there's a pandemic that we also need to address, which is the crisis on air pollution that suffocates many cities in the world.