Since the 70s — when the first institutions and environmental laws in the country were created — contamination and the ruthless logic of energy consumption for human need, has been a permanent problem in Mexico City.
We shouldn’t forget that Hernán Cortés fell in love with the climate of the Valley of Mexico just as much as the legitimate owners of the country. However, we must consider that during that time automobiles did not exist and there weren’t millions of Mexicans roaming the streets of the city.
Now Mexico is old, among other things, because a big part of our national recourses have gone to the wrong current accounts and have not been utilized to update the infrastructure that allows us to survive without altering the air quality and without dying by our own doing.
We have been annihilated by massive pollution emissions throughout planet, as it now begins to take revenge on us with phenomena provoked by the undeniable climate change.
In this sense, we lack strategies and actions aimed to avoid the consequences of not having invested in emissions control. Consequences can bring us to invest in programs that help us reduce the cost of our health, worsening the crisis that we are living in.
Prohibiting the circulation of cars is only half the problem, and the other half implies a series of repercussions for citizens that need to transport themselves to work. This is a situation that both the federal and local governments need to make and effort to fix from two different angles.
First, money should be invested into infrastructure. And second, it is necessary to improve the quality of urban equipment, particularly public transportation. This way, people won’t run the risk of dying, not just from the effects of air pollution, but also from the boredom of waiting for busses and metro trains, that are as full as if they were a testament to the worst third-world moments of the country.
Now Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera has to explain more and improve this crisis, which while he didn’t invent, is required to fix.
But overall, he needs to explain what it is that he needs from the federal government, so that citizens don’t end up dead like in a nightmare about weapons of mass destruction, which is what we have turned our cars, heaters and lack of foresight into.
