Just one day left to urge New Mexico to develop the strongest possible safeguards to reduce the oil and gas industry’s methane pollution
It’s crunch time! Please raise your voice to urge the state to slash climate-damaging oil and gas methane waste.
Methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. It is also the main component of natural gas. But during the fracking process, New Mexico oil and gas companies leak, vent and flare so much methane into the atmosphere that the amount wasted could heat every home in our state. When methane leaks, it’s accompanied by dangerous volatile organic compounds that damage the health of the many communities living close to drilling wells.
The Trump administration has reversed most of the protections we worked so hard to enact during President Obama’s administration. But New Mexico, one of the nation’s top three oil and gas producers, is stepping up and writing its own methane reductions.
Thursday is the deadline for the public to weigh in before draft rules are written. Please join us in asking Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to create the strongest possible safeguards.
So the legislative session has ended, but the methane keeps rising. An invisible cloud keeps rising, but
Sharon Wilson can see it! She, a certified optical gas imaging operator working for Earthworks, has a camera
that makes methane visible, spewing from the wells of the Permian endlessly. We can’t see it but she can, and
the Environmental Defense Fund claims that the U.S. supply chain is leaking 60% more methane than previous
estimates (which largely relied on industry self-reports), a conflagration that helps smother whatever other efforts
we perform to curtail climate catastrophe! Meanwhile, lawmakers relax. In Texas, the 6,000 permits allowing
explorers to flare or vent natural gas this year is 40 times as many permits as were granted at the start of the
supply boom a decade ago. At one site, called “Desperado” Ms. Wilson saw emissions so dense she tried to
report by phone, but was put on hold. Unlit flares bellowing methane continue, while we sleep and while we are
awake. The session has ended.