Juan Manuel Briones began working in the coal mines in the isolated part of northern Mexico when he was 14 years old. He spent nearly two decades underground, only to be cast off a few years ago as Mexico started to embrace green energies and wean itself off fossil fuels. In late 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office and started moving back the years.

President Pea Nieto has suspended new renewable energy ventures, ridiculed wind turbines as "fans" that damage the landscape, invested heavily into state oil firm Petroleos Mexicanos, including $9 billion for a new refinery. Last month, he introduced legislation requiring the energy grid to prioritize state-run plants, which are powered primarily by crude oil and coal, over less costly wind and solar energy.

Briones was called back to work shortly after the president declared last summer that his government would resume purchasing coal from Mexican producers. One morning, coated in soot and puffing on a cigarette after finishing a change 300 feet below ground, he said, “We need to continue this and get our energy from coal.”

Lopez Obrador's commitment to fossil fuels and dismissal of greener fuels at a time when most countries are moving in the reverse direction has alarmed environmentalists, who fear that Mexico would be unable to meet its Paris climate agreement emission reduction commitments, and corporate leaders, fear that energy costs will rise because coal and gas are roughly twice as expensive as renewable energy.

Experts believe his policies are more grounded in nationalism and nostalgia than in climate change skepticism. LópezObrador, a nationalist, is capitalizing on Mexico's proud tradition as a fossil fuel powerhouse. In the decades after President Lazaro Cardenas annexed the properties of foreign energy firms working in Mexico and nationalized the country's oil reserves and mineral resources, he grew up in the oil-rich Tabasco province. Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil corporation has been a major engine of the country's economy for decades.

As inefficient and outdated infrastructure undermined the country's status as a top oil producer, it stayed as a part of national lore. In 2013, then-President Enrique Pena Nieto was forced through a constitutional reform that terminated the state monopoly and allowed private companies to operate in Mexico's oil and energy sector. Foreign companies flocked in, and a competitive bidding process slashed natural gas and sustainable energy rates to some of the lowest levels in the world.

Foreign-owned firms, according to Lopez Obrador, are robbing market share from Pemex and the state-owned electric utility, the Federal Electricity Commission.

The president's aim, according to Lisa Viscidi of the US think tank Inter-American Dialogue, is to "return their monopolies" by putting the energy market within state control, even if that means supporting filthier fossil fuels and creating more greenhouse gas emissions. She said, "Both of these aspects have been discarded for the objective of energy sovereignty."

Several sustainable energy firms have taken legal actions to stop the amendments, which they say are unlawfully excluding them. Given the legal uncertainty surrounding many of his proposals, Lopez Obrador has suggested that he might propose an amendment to the constitution to achieve his objectives. Not decades back, Mexico was hailed as a global pioneer in the war against climate change.

Mexico was one of the first countries to approve climate change legislation in 2012, and it entered a group of governments in 2017 that agreed to burn out coal-fired power by 2030.

It was the first developing country to send a proposal to reduce pollution under the Paris Agreement, and also the first Latin American country to do so. Members of the Paris Agreement are scheduled to lift their CO2 emission reduction goals every five years. Even so, under Lopez Obrador's leadership, Mexico refused to raise its target, sticking to its original pledge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 22% by 2030 compared to what it would have released if it had accomplished nothing.

Although Mexico produces just 1% of the world's carbon emissions, environmentalists believe it is important that it contributes, in part because it will set a precedent for the country.

“What Mexico does matters,” said Carolina Herrera of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Latin America team. Paradoxically, droughts, floods, and other effects of a changing climate could disproportionately affect Lopez Obrador's main constituency, the working people.

“The people Lopez Obrador claims he's reaching out to those will be most vulnerable,” Herrera said. The president seems to relish his status as a climate outcast. Concerns about his proposals' environmental consequences have been dismissed by him as "sophistry" from his political rivals and the nation's wealthy. At one of his regular press conferences in January, he asked, "Since when are conservatives worried about the environment?" “In the same way they confiscated the flags of feminism and human rights, they now seized the flag of renewable energy.”

He lashed out at several US lawmakers who had published a letter condemning his energy policies for supporting Mexico's state companies during a speech last fall at the reactivation of a coal plant in northern Coahuila. He said, "I am pleased to be here to tell those who advocate neoliberal policy that we will not back down."

When a winter storm knocked out power in Texas in February, his cause received an unforeseen boost. The governor of the state banned natural gas sales, leaving more than 4 million citizens in Mexico without power. Mexico depends heavily on natural gas imported from the US. “We must produce,” Lopez Obrador said emphatically. That is a heartening message in Coahuila, where coal mining started at the end of the 19th century, has become associated with wealth.

Sabinas, the state's coal capital, has a golf course and expensive steakhouses playing George Strait country music. When the government shifted its focus to renewable sources, the city's very existence seemed to be sabotaged, said, one resident.

President of the Mexican Union of Coal Producers, Bogar Montemayor said, “People in this area are familiar with coal mining. They've been doing it for centuries.”

Montemayor said he acknowledges the push for more renewable energy. Coal and other fossil fuels still have a position. He said, "We need to strike a balance where we all belong."

The highway was clogged with tractor-trailers hauling mounds of coal to two adjacent power plants, part of Lopez Obrador's pledge to buy 2 million tonnes of thermal coal from the area this year. He arrived at the Santa Catarina mine after an hour of traveling through the mesquite and cactus-dotted desert, where an automated belt held dusty bits of coal extracted from the earth by miners underground with air-powered weapons.

Last year, the mine closed due to a decrease in coal orders. When the president promised to purchase again, it reopened in January. “We're resurrecting,” said Juan Olvera, 63, the plant's protection manager. He said that a dozen men had turned up that morning applying for employment. All of them were recruited immediately.