After a full season 2 of “Confidently Wrong about raising and educating your kids in Mexico,” George and I are back at it again, taking on important topics impacting Mexico.
Our objective with this podcast, as always, is to do a deeper dive into topics that we find many people (including George!) are often “Confidently Wrong” about: topics that social media tends to misrepresent, stereotypes that are shallow and misleading, and issues that people tend to form a very superficial opinion on. Our goal is not to convince you one way or another about our opinion, but rather arm you with more facts, data and perspectives to help you form a more informed opinion. As we often say in Mexico News Daily, our aim is not to tell you what to think, but rather to help inform you to be better prepared on how to think.
With that backdrop, our first episode of Season 3 is a good one. When many (if not most) people hear the word “fracking,” they often have a negative reaction. When pressed further, they talk about how we as a society should be moving beyond hydrocarbons to purely renewable energy. When I recently published a perspective piece on this topic, almost every comment talked about how Mexico should not pursue fracking and instead needs to focus on increased solar and wind energy. That misses the broader point.
The United States has already unleashed this technology, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, hundreds of billions of value creation, and achieving energy independence. More solar and wind power is certainly needed in Mexico, but that will not create nearly the amount of formal, high-paying jobs that the fracking industry would create. Mexico, more than ever, needs more jobs in the formal economy, and more levers to increase and accelerate economic growth. Equally important, Mexico needs to reduce its natural gas dependency on the United States.
Please take a few minutes to listen to this latest episode and tell us what you think about fracking in Mexico.
Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for nearly 30 years.
