“Roadless Rule” Town Halls across New Mexico

Trump’s Forest Service has moved to repeal the Roadless Rule, an essential piece of environmental regulation that protects 45 million acres of pristine land (1.6 million acres in New Mexico) from road construction and the inevitable logging, mining, and extraction that follows. The administration is attempting to suppress public input on this 25 year-old rule with a truncated comment period and no public meetings. So, the Wilderness Society, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, and the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter are holding our own across the state to activate people and collect tens of thousands of comments gathered on sc.org/roadlessrule.

Meeting locations, dates and registration

• Santa Fe – 6 p.m. September 8 @ Tumbleroot Brewery [register]
• Albuquerque – 6 p.m. September 9 @ Barelas Community Center [register]
• Silver City – 5:30 p.m. September 15 @ Besse Forward Global Resource Center, corner of 12th and Kentucky [register]
• Las Cruces – 6 p.m. September 15 @ the WIA Building [register]
• Pecos – 5:30 p.m. September 16 @ the Pecos Municipal Building [register]
• Virtual zoom hearing – 6 p.m. September 16 [register]

Download the flyer
Sign the petition

The rule ensured conservation, wildlife, clean water, cultural resources, and Indigenous Knowledge would be fully considered alongside development across more than 250 million acres of public land. Rescinding the rule strips the agency of critical tools needed to manage land health and respond to growing climate and ecological challenges, while also harming local communities built on recreational tourism who depend on healthy landscapes.

The move is part of the administration’s agenda to weaken protections in order to benefit extractive industries. As it has with similar attacks on our environment, the administration pushed the rule forward with a truncated public comment period and ignored more than 130,000 comments submitted on the rule–  98% were in support of the Biden-era protections .

The Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter urges our state officials to join other states in opposing this latest attack on New Mexicans, our environment and communities who need more safeguards than ever as climate-related disasters increase.

“The Bureau of Land Management has a responsibility to the land, not to corporations and their corrupt allies in the Trump administration,” said Chapter Director Camilla Feibelman. “Our public land supports tourism, recreation and local economies. And, as our wildfire and drought conditions continue to get worse, this short-sighted move would all but guarantee greater risk for the people of New Mexico. We need our officials to act now and protect us.”

Even with recent policy changes, the responsibility to care for public lands has not changed. The Bureau of Land Management continues to have both the authority and obligation to manage lands for long-term health, balance competing uses, and address the very real degradation facing many landscapes today. Land conservation and management has overwhelming public support. The Sierra Club and its allies will continue to resist all smash-and-grab attempts by the Trump administration to loot our public resources.

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Next week the Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) will hold a hearing on the New Mexico Environment Department’s Air Quality Bureau proposal to modernize air quality permit fees — unchanged for more than 20 years. Updating these fees would help ensure the state’s clean air program remains sustainable, stable, and financially solvent, giving the bureau the independence and resources needed to protect public health and enforce clean air laws.  This is urgent and essential given the rush of extraction from the Permian Oil Boom, not to mention the need to oversee aging oil and gas infrastructure around the state.

Support Modernizing Air Fees
Thank the Air Quality Bureau for Taking Action to Protect our Health

We can support these fee updates and thank the Air Quality Bureau for the critical work they do to protect New Mexico’s air while encouraging support for this rulemaking. About 70% of the new funding would strengthen the enforcement division — funding inspectors, air monitoring technology, and programs that keep New Mexico’s clean-air protections in force.

Public Hearing: March 23 – 25 | EIB calendar here | meeting notice

Ways you can take action

Sign the petition to the EIB

Write a letter to the editor | see information here

Leave a brief public comment at the hearing (virtual meeting) | register here | background information and tips

Clean-up is important for health and safety and is an opportunity for a source of good-paying jobs in the southeast and northwest parts of the state. Oftentimes, New Mexico taxpayers are left paying the clean-up bill so we need to change current laws and rules with incentives to close and clean up low or non-producing wells and prevent toxic chemicals like methane and benzene from polluting the air and seeping into groundwater. Currently, the oil and gas industry’s “insurance coverage” for clean-up doesn’t include enough funding to address the actual costs.

Community members, social justice advocates, and environmental organizations from across New Mexico are coming together to make these needed changes by filing a petition at the NM Oil Conservation Commission. The petition proposes to update how much “insurance coverage” the oil and gas industry must take out before drilling, creating new jobs, and protecting New Mexicans’ health, air, land, and water.

It’s critical that our decision-makers hear from New Mexicans like you that you want oil and gas operators to pay to clean up. And you’re not alone. Recent polling shows that an overwhelming 90% of New Mexicans support requiring oil and gas companies, rather than taxpayers, to pay for all of the clean-up and land restoration costs after drilling is finished. Join us and add your name to this petition that we’ll deliver to the Oil Conservation Commission.

Related press release

Featured image by SkyTruth via Flickr 

New Mexico has pledged to create Clean Cars standards to tackle the climate emergency — but the state’s timeline could delay adoption for years. So we did it for them. 

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham pledged in 2019 to create standards to tackle vehicle climate pollution and require manufacturers to deliver an increasing number of electric vehicles to New Mexico. When 2020 came, the state said rulemaking would start in spring 2021. Now the state has postponed again, promising a rulemaking in 2022.

But because of Clean Air Act requirements around compliance timing, if New Mexico misses the window of finalizing standards this year, it likely couldn’t implement clean-car rules until 2027 — much too long to wait.

So in May, a coalition of groups, including the Sierra Club, began the process ourselves, filing a petition at the state Environmental Improvement Board and supplying a draft rule and the regulatory documents needed for the state to swiftly adopt the standards. This rulemaking is less complicated than most because federal law allows only two options — the current default federal rules or the Advanced Clean Cars standard that 17 other states have adopted or are adopting. 

On July 1, our coalition also filed a petition with the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Air Quality Control Board, asking it to update its standards by the end of 2021. The state and city both adopted Advanced Clean Car standards under Gov. Bill Richardson, but Gov. Susana Martinez revoked the state rules. However, the city never revoked its own, so all it has to do is update the rules already on its books. 

The EIB must hear and approve our petition at its July 23 meeting in order to hit the deadline for the state to finalize Clean Car standards this year. 

Unfortunately, New Mexico’s Environment Department plans to oppose our petition, claiming that it doesn’t have the resources for a rulemaking and that it wants a long public-meeting process. But the EIB process already provides opportunity for public comment, and because the standard New Mexico adopts must match other states’, there aren’t adjustments or details for stakeholders to weigh in on. 

New Mexico’s environmental agencies have their hands full trying to protect us, and they are underfunded. Petitioning an EIB rulemaking reduces the onus on the Environment Department.

“2022 is too late,” said Tammy Fiebelkorn of Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, the group heading the coalition. “Transportation is New Mexico’s second-largest source of climate pollution. We need to act now in order to reach the governor’s goal of 45% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, we must start this rulemaking now.”

The Global Climate Strikes on the 20th will launch the September 20-27 week of Global Climate Action, to publicly call on world leaders and US elected officials to take the action needed to save our futures.

If you have children or grandchildren, please take them to march side-by-side with these courageous young people as they walk out of classrooms to call for the urgent implementation of climate action at every level of government.

This is likely to be the biggest climate mobilization ever, a global demonstration of power and solidarity to address the climate crisis head on. The youth have spoken: It’s time to take risks, speak up and fight hard with the power of our collective voice.

For more information, registration and event info for the Albuquerque Strike and Week of Action, visit ClimateStrikeABQ.com and the ABQ Strike Facebook Event.

Join our Climate Action Team

The team meets monthly and comes up with great ideas and actions to increase renewable energy at the local and state level. Contact Camilla Feibelman for more information and to join the team at camilla.feibelman@sierraclub.org.

This bill will be heard in the Senate Corporations Committee at the Roundhouse Saturday 3/9 morning at 9am in Room 322. Please attend and call your state senator and the members of the Corporations Committee to show your support.

Please join us for a Webinar on Understanding the Energy Transition Act, SB489 this Wednesday the 6th at noon.

Please register for Understanding the Energy Transition Act, SB489 on Mar 6, 2019 12:00 PM MST. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Also see Camilla’s video series on Facebook.

We wondered if you’d join us for the event at the Sheraton Airport Hotel at 2910 Yale Ave. SE

8:30am – Rally & Coffee – (industry can lease lands for cheaper than a cup of coffee)

9:00am – Press conference with speakers on the local and national impacts of lease sales and rock bottom royalties

9:15am – Speak out from the crowd

9:50am – Walk into the formal public comment period silently together (Please wear white to symbolize SOS on this issue)

10:00am – There’s only half an hour of formal public comment so we’ve asked select speakers to comment.

10:30am – Walk silently out together (this is when public comment ends)

Here’s a Washington Post article from February that talks about the committee.  Here’s another article by Laura Paskus published today in the NM Political Report – Federal royalty committee meeting comes to Abq, while top state officials head to D.C. for oil and gas hearings.

Meeting agenda
Talking points

RSVP to Camilla at camilla.feibelman@sierraclub.org

You’ve read it here more than once. Oil and gas operations throughout the state are wasting natural gas they extract from our public lands.

Methane — the key component of natural gas that also happens to be a powerful greenhouse gas — is leaked, vented or flared throughout the oil and gas drilling, transport and storage processes. As part of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Obama Administration passed rules at the EPA and BLM that would slow this waste, protect health, reduce climate change and brought more royalties into the state treasury.

That these methane rules (against all odds) are still in effect is thanks to you. The Trump Administration has done its best to turn these rules back but so far has failed, in the courts and in Congress. But sadly, anti-environment forces in the administration have resorted to the route that is slower but is more likely to succeed.

In March, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke proposed to gut the Bureau of Land Management rules that would reduce methane pollution on public lands. So we once again ask you to stand up for these rules so important to our climate, our health, our state income and our public lands. The agency has given the public until April 23 to comment. You can do that by clicking here. 

Late last year, when the comment period on Zinke’s proposed delay of the methane rule closed, the BLM received more than 150,000 comments — the vast majority in opposition to delaying the safeguards. That’s in addition to the hundreds of thousands of comments that citizens submitted in support of the original rule.

We sometimes hear that this administration is in chaos or is too disorganized to do too much harm. But the sad reality is that our environmental protections are being systematically dismantled. When we desperately need to take significant action to reduce climate pollution before its too late, Zinke’s revisions are a huge step backward.

The Zinke proposal would result in the same amount of climate damage as 8.3 million cars driven over 10 years. Not to mention the fact that oil and gas operations also release dangerous toxins such as benzene and other ozone-forming pollutants that can trigger asthma attacks and worsen respiratory diseases such as emphysema.

More methane waste means more air pollution that will harm families, especially those living closest to oil and gas development. So we hope you’ll join us in the continuing fight to protect New Mexico, its people and its public lands by commenting here before April 23.