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2 results

  • Chapter 5 - 1950s: Fossil-Fueled Society

  • Germán Vergara, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Book:
    Fueling Mexico
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 176-220

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 tells the story of how, with the full support of the state and amidst a new push to further industrialize, fossil fuels powered virtually every aspect of life in Mexico by the 1950s. Transport systems became increasingly energy intensive. Vehicles with internal combustion engines drove down asphalt roads. Cars reshaped Mexico’s culture, class and gender divisions, and the way people experienced the nation’s territory and environments. Mexican cities entered a period of exponential physical and demographic growth, their layouts rapidly reorganized to accommodate increasing numbers of motorized vehicles. Industrial manufacturing and electricity generation used fossil fuels at virtually every stage of production and distribution, while the Mexican food system underwent a Green Revolution featuring fossil-fueled agriculture. Mexico had become a fossil-fueled society.

Fueling Mexico
  • Energy and Environment, 1850–1950
  • Germán Vergara
  • Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021
  • Around the 1830s, parts of Mexico began industrializing using water and wood. By the 1880s, this model faced a growing energy and ecological bottleneck. By the 1950s, fossil fuels powered most of Mexico's economy and society. Looking to the north and across the Atlantic, late nineteenth-century officials and elites concluded that fossil fuels would solve Mexico's energy problem and Mexican industry began introducing coal. But limited domestic deposits and high costs meant that coal never became king in Mexico. Oil instead became the favored fuel for manufacture, transport, and electricity generation. This shift, however, created a paradox of perennial scarcity amidst energy abundance: every new influx of fossil energy led to increased demand. Germán Vergara shows how the decision to power the country's economy with fossil fuels locked Mexico in a cycle of endless, fossil-fueled growth - with serious environmental and social consequences.