United States | Non-Resident Senior Fellow,
Former Director, Energy Transition and Climate Program
This post is also available in: Spanish
Lisa Viscidi is a non-resident senior fellow with the Energy Transition and Climate Program and the former director of the program. She is currently a senior manager in Deloitte Consulting’s government and public services practice, where she serves in project management and technical specialist roles on behalf of international donor clients. Viscidi has led teams in areas including electric mobility, advanced renewable energy technologies, and rural electrification in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and the Middle East.
Before joining the Dialogue, she was New York bureau chief and Latin America team leader for Energy Intelligence Group. Subsequently, as a manager in the energy and emerging markets groups at Deloitte, her work focused on business development and market intelligence for public and private sector clients. She has also served as director of EntreMundos, a nonprofit organization based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.
Viscidi’s articles have been published in The Financial Times, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, and Foreign Affairs. She frequently presents at conferences and universities throughout the world and has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, and other news outlets. She has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and received a Fulbright Specialist grant in 2017 to teach a course on climate change and environmental policy at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. She also served on the Leadership Council for the National Capital Area Chapter of the US Association for Energy Economics from 2018 to 2020.
Viscidi conducted her undergraduate work in history at the George Washington University and the University of Barcelona and completed a master’s degree in Latin American studies with a focus on economic development and public policy from New York University. Viscidi speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Electric vehicles (EV) play an essential role in mitigating transport sector emissions, reducing air pollution, slashing reliance on oil imports, and improving urban mobility. The six nations of Central America covered in this publication—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama—are all at differing stages of developing EV markets.
Rural subsistence farmers, ethnic communities, women, and young people are disproportionately affected by climate change in the Northern Triangle, according to a report by the Inter-American Dialogue, which focuses on adaptation in the region with an emphasis on climate justice and mitigating the impacts on vulnerable communities.
As delegates from around the world finish up their business in Glasgow at the United Nations climate conference, Mexico has not increased its emissions-mitigation goal, as countries pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is doubling down on policies that would make his country the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in Latin America and the 16th largest in the world, even more of a polluter.
The perfect storm of the plummeting oil price and the Covid-19 pandemic could have dire consequences for oil-dependent Latin American economies, lead to a reduction in upstream investment, and damage the prospects for renewable energy projects.
For over a decade Colombians have been debating whether or not to allow oil companies to use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to produce oil and gas from shale rock, a technique that has been controversial in many countries. The high court’s decision last week to uphold a moratorium on fracking suggests the increasingly polarized debate is far from over.
The Trump administration before and the Biden administration over the past year has criticized both in private conversations and in public the direction that things are going on energy policy. And [López Obrador] is only digging his heels in further and further consolidating this policy.
In Latin America as a whole, not nearly enough progress has been made in cutting emissions ahead of the Glasgow conference.
