Mexico passes tough climate-change law

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MEXICO CITY, April 20 (UPI) -- A climate-change law passed by the Mexican Legislature will be one of the strongest national climate-change laws on the books, environmentalists said.

The bill passed in Mexico's lower house Thursday with a vote of 128-10 and was later passed unanimously by the Senate, Nature reported.

Passed after three years of debate and revisions, the bill contains sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30 percent below current levels by 2020 and by 50 percent below 2000 levels by 2050.

It also requires 35 percent of the country's energy come from renewable sources by 2024.

Mexico joins other individual states and countries that, frustrated with stalled U.N. climate agreements, have started implementing their own emissions regulations, experts said.

"It's at the domestic level that the rubber hits the road. The actions we need to see at this stage are more in the nation's capitals than in the U.N. negotiations," Elliot Diringer, vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in Arlington, Va., said.

"The international regime is not very effective at driving domestic action."

Mexico's bill can be seen as a successful response to the 2010 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancun, he said.

"Mexico was widely credited for helping to rescue the international effort in Cancun. But some noted the lack of corresponding action domestically," he said.