On Monday, the Environmental Improvement Board approved a fee increase for air permits for the first time since 2009! This will double the agency’s enforcement budget.  We joined our partners with Western Environmental Law Center, EarthWorks and New Mexico Interfaith Power & Light to support the rules.

The same day we, along with partners, filed a protest at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opposing the methane gas pipeline that would feed Project Jupiter’s mega gas-fired power plant project in Dona Ana County.  We called for the denial of the permit and called for a full environmental impact review.

On Tuesday we joined a huge coalition of groups in opposing yet another attempt by the oil and gas industry to solve its liquid, toxic waste problem by again pushing for rules to use “produced water” outside oil and gas operations.  The Water Quality Control Commission will make a ruling on whether to take up this industry rulemaking at their meeting in May.

Thanks to all of you who are taking action on these important issues!

And we need to continue to build our base of support for protecting our little corner of the planet and we could use your help.  Here’s how you can help this Earth Month:

Thursday, April 23rd 10am- 2:30 pm (RSVP)

UNM Sustainability Fair

• HELP US STAFF THE SIERRA CLUB TABLE: Sign up here morning and pm slots available. Right now afternoon/pm slots are needed.

Sunday, April 26th, 10am – 3pm (Tickets | Be en Energy Guide | Volunteer)

EARTH DAY FESTIVAL 2026 ALBUQUERQUE – SIGN UP TO BE AN ENERGY GUIDE!

We can’t wait to see you at the 3rd annual Earth Day Festival at Balloon Fiesta Park. Help spread the word on Facebook.  Get your tickets or help out as a general event Volunteer.  But if you want help people make a climate difference at home:

Sign up to be an Energy Guide helping people find vendors and experts here.

Then, join us on April 23 from Noon – 1pm on NMClimateCorps for a pre-event volunteer training where you will learn how to greet and guide people at the festival to rebates and incentives to make their homes and transportation clean, comfortable, convenient and cost-effective. Sign up for Earth Day Pre-Event Energy Guides Training here.

The first legislative session of Gov. Michelle Luján Grisham’s term began eight years of progress on addressing the climate crisis.

In 2019, the governor addressed a group of 400 attending the Climate Summit we planned with a host of other groups to launch the first legislative session of her term. She laid out a vision of reducing emissions from the oil and gas industry, the electric sector, transportation and buildings. She joined other mayors and governors in meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement that President Trump had abandoned.

The next day, the governor signed this vision into reality with the third executive order of her administration, surrounded by the kid members of our after-school climate action program, the Global Warming Express. By the end of that session we had passed the Energy Transition Act, which would lead the state’s utilities and coops to dramatically increase their use of renewables to generate electricity while softening the blow of the San Juan coal-fired power plant closing PNM had announced a few years earlier.

The Administration later passed clean cars and trucks rules and updated our building codes twice to drive energy efficiency. In 2021, Senate Leader Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, led the passage of a little noticed but absolutely pivotal bill that allowed the state to adopt clean air standards more stringent than federal requirements. This meant that over the next several years, the administration could adopt oil and gas, methane and smog-pollution safeguards that led the nation. Our state rules helped push the federal government to make even stronger methane rules than it otherwise might have.

The trouble was the Permian oil boom. While lagging momentarily in oil extraction at the beginning of the pandemic, the basin in southeastern NM bounced back, becoming the second most abundant extractor in the country only after Texas (with 25% fewer workers because of automation). With the sheer number of wells, even with reduced leaking, venting and flaring of methane gas throughout the oil and gas fields, we are ever further from meeting our state climate commitments.

In response to this challenge the New Mexico Environment Department, in collaboration with a host of other agencies and stakeholders, has now published a Climate Action Plan that will help the state take the action necessary to urgently meet our goals. To ensure those plans and possibilities survive a change of administration in 2027, we urgently need to put the governor’s greenhouse-gas reduction goals into law and provide the Environment Department with the firm authority it needs to regulate climate pollutants.

This leads us to 2026 and its 30-day legislative session, the last for Governor Luján Grisham. This administration, legislature and grassroots supporters have achieved so much, from decriminalizing abortion to establishing free pre-K, all while stabilizing impacts from the boom-and-bust fossil fuel economy and protecting us from global collapse. That was done by investing royalty income in interest-earning accounts to supply the state with revenue for years to come without actually having to continue extraction. Though we haven’t agreed on everything with this administration, we’ve made real progress on protecting the climate together. Now is the time to ensure the durability of this climate action legacy. Here’s what to expect in the upcoming session.

Climate and energy

State Sen. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, and House Rep. Kristina Ortez, D-Taos, will introduce legislation to put the state’s climate goals into law, allow the Environment Department to do greenhouse gas rulemaking and require enforcement of these rules. Last session, we passed legislation providing over $200 million in climate solutions and just economic transition funds to be spent over three years for things like grid modernization, home weatherization and efficiency, and renewable energy and storage build-out. We’ll advocate for the appropriation of further funds for these purposes.

Water

High on the priority list is ensuring all of New Mexico’s water agencies are appropriately resourced. Without this, we can’t meet the challenges ahead. Priorities for one-time funding include the River Stewardship program, critical to restoring the state’s rivers and habitats; $15 million for the Strategic Water Reserve, which completes water rights transactions to keep more water in New Mexico’s rivers and streams; $3.5 million for the state-led surface water quality permitting program authorized by SB 21 in 2025; and $5 million for regional water planning, which provides a mechanism for communities who know their waters best to be involved in statewide water planning.

Lands

We’ll support improving the way the $350 million Legacy Permanent Fund is invested, increasing distributions to Legacy Fund programs from $12.5 million to $20 million annually, more than four years ahead of schedule.

Photo: Climate activist at March 6 Climate Crisis Day rally. Photo by David McGahey

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/my_view/lead-governor-climate-action-cant-wait/article_7bad2a60-e52c-11ed-baf0-fb56d639783a.html

I  work from home a lot. I don’t have to spend much of the day masked. I get a lot of social interaction, but mostly on Zoom. When I go out to drop the kids off at school or shop for food I’m sometimes struck by the impact of the pandemic — at what it’s like for every human on this globe to be aware of a problem and its solutions (whether they follow them is another story).

It makes me lament the climate crisis, which is upon us and affecting so many people today. People have lost their homes to storms, flood, fires. The stories of climate are on the one hand overwhelming and on the other hand easier to set aside than a problem that results in everyone in masks.

But climate is core to our survival, the quality of life of our kids in the future and now. It’s core to protecting our air, water, wildlife, lands, food and so much more.

You know already that this isn’t as simple as staying home, masking and getting vaccinated. But the Sierra Club has long prioritized climate action, and we can help you find ways to get and stay involved. Below is an overview of the key areas for action, and a timeline.

Now is the time and we are the ones. Join ClimateCORPS.

Meetings: We’ll meet at noon every other Thursday (on Zoom)

Sign up: Send an email titled: Join Climate Corps to sierraclubriogrande@gmail.com

Tell your story: Include a picture of you and your reason for action in your email. Maybe it’s a place, maybe it’s a person. Send a couple of sentences about your reason for action.

Add our ClimateCORPS action calendar to yours: https://bit.ly/2WRfGgB

Go social: Post your picture and statement to social media and tag us:
Facebook: facebook.com/NMSierraClub
Twitter: @RioGrandeSierra
Instagram: instagram/riograndesierraclub

Bring the kids!
Join our NMClimateParents listserv to find out how to get your kids and grandkids active on climate action. Email us to join: sierraclubriogrande@gmail.com.
Become a Global Warming Express mentor for kids ages 9 to 12. To apply, email Genie Stevens at genie@theglobalwarmingexpress.org.

A checklist for action on every front

Advocate for a climate moonshot allowing agencies to act comprehensively on climate and pass climate legislation putting the governor’s Climate Executive Order into law.

The Utility Affordability Act: Advocate for the Low-Income Utility Affordability Act that seeks to improve utility affordability, reduce energy burden, and increase utility access of low-income New Mexicans.

Drive economic, social and racial justice: Ensure transition funds and jobs for communities impacted by extractive industries and fossil-fuel workers in transition.

Support the Sustainable Economy Task Force that was passed into law last session.

Time to get over oil and gas
Bring on the strongest state methane and ozone safeguards in the country and enforce them.
Bring on federal methane rules that protect us from States like Texas that don’t regulate sufficiently.

Stop new oil and gas leasing on public lands: Ending oil and gas industry Subsidies at the DOI and in the tax structure.

Go electric, go renewable: Ensure that utilities move away from coal and toward renewables and storage, not more natural gas.

Pass Clean Cars and Trucks rules at the state ensuring that electric vehicles make it to our dealerships and our driveways.

Ensure the state regularly updates its energy-efficient building codes.

Stop greenwashing: “Blue” hydrogen, carbon capture, “certified green” gas are in many ways equivalent to the antiquated idea that we could have “clean coal.” While some of these technologies may be needed and useful in niche areas, we’ve got to set climate- and community-protecting guardrails before accepting the hype.

Timeline for action

Speakers Climate Summit
October 26: This is a chance to interface with New Mexico legislators and help drive climate legislation forward. In-person registration is filled but the event will be broadcast online.
Register on eventbrite.

COP26 Glasgow
October 31 to November 12
New Mexico Gov. Luján Grisham will attend the latest UN Climate Summit, the first since Biden took office. We’ll want to call for the greatest local action to do our part for the global climate.
See article – this is a make or break event

NM Legislative Session
January 18 to February 17, 2022
This 30-day budget session is a chance to push for greater climate action to put our greenhouse-reduction goals into law and get our environmental agencies fully funded.

The time is now.

Feature image by Frances Denny for The Luupe/theluupe.com

Eighty-five of you (parents, kids, faith leaders, Sierra Club members) spoke in favor of strong smog rules in front of the Environmental Improvement Board at the end of September. Wait. What’s smog, you ask? It’s the brown stuff you breathe in big, polluted cities right? Well, turns out that even though Albuquerque and Las Cruces have car-driven smog problems, the counties with F grades from the American Lung Association on ozone are Lea, Eddy and San Juan. That’s because ozone precursors leak out of oil and gas facilities alongside methane and then combine with other pollutants and sunlight to create smog, which drives respiratory disease.

The state’s rules, when they come out in final form in a few months, can help improve health conditions for local residents and have the additional benefit of keeping methane out of the atmosphere — which has a big climate benefit.

The Environmental Improvement Board hearing lasted two weeks and involved testimony, witnesses, and cross-examining, all while climate and community groups made a case for the strongest safeguards possible. Our lawyers, witnesses and public commenters advocated for some areas of improvement to the draft rule.

“As a practicing primary-care physician in New Mexico for the past 15 years, I have seen again and again the negative impact of poor air quality on the health of our communities: children whose uncontrolled asthma forces them to miss school and spend their days in the hospital and elders whose worsening emphysema forces them to stay indoors and limits their ability to enjoy life,” Dr. Jesse Barnes told the EIB. “The science clearly shows that certain oil and gas industry emissions are related to higher rates of respiratory and cardiac diseases.Unfortunately, there are parts of New Mexico where those industries are heavily concentrated and the air quality is unsurprisingly affected.”

Our coalition attorneys requested that those living closest to development be protected by requiring more frequent inspections to find and fix leaks. We won support from the Environment Department and, interestingly, Occidental (an oil and gas company) for that proposal.

We also want stronger requirements for operators to capture gases during the completion of a well and for pneumatic controllers that are used in oil and gas production.

Strong protections at the state level can set a strong baseline for the federal EPA as it prepares to draft its own methane rules for wells on public and private lands. These rules are currently under interagency review. By setting the bar high locally, we help drive the demand for strong rules federally and ensure that states like Texas that aren’t strongly regulating methane and ozone precursors locally aren’t polluting communities in our state and exacerbating our global climate crisis. Keep your eye out for your opportunity to engage on these federal rules.

An excerpt of EIB testimony from Dr. Jesse Barnes:
That is why many of my colleagues and I support of the state Environmental Improvement Board’s proposed new regulations on ozone precursor emissions. No New Mexican should have to choose between economic development and their health. We need strong, state-wide regulations with no loopholes, to ensure that all New Mexicans can enjoy clean, safe air.

Pulled from twitter:

Celerah from Moms Clean Air Force – “New Mexico has an opportunity to lead on ozone rules that protect our children, our communities, and help combat climate change. We owe it to our children to take it.” 

Sierra Club – Public commenter thanks oil and gas for paying for his daughter’s playground. But do they pay for his neighbor’s daughter’s nebulizer? Just curious. Ironically, stopping smog costs next to nothing. 

Sierra Club – Thank you Dr Jesse Barnes for speaking on behalf of Primary Care Advocates, and letting @NMEnvDep and EIB know the importance of having strong rules to protect children, the elderly, and POC who you have first hand seen suffer disproportionately from the impacts of air pollution.

Sierra Club – From 10-13 yo kids in the Global Warming Express – leaders in NM you have the power to make this happen, what on earth are you grown ups doing? Please stop taking profits from oil & gas. I don’t want to watch our future go to waste – the is very fragile

Featured image from Hobbs News-Sun.

As the last weeks of the legislative session pressed on, I started to imagine, on the one hand, the balm we’d all need when it was done and, on the other hand, the grounding in the reality of whether what we achieved would be enough.  Michelle Otero and Laura Paskus’s names came to my mind.  My husband had ordered Michelle’s new book of poems and it sat on my bedside as the promise of a leisurely spring time read that wouldn’t be interrupted by the urgent call to testify or count votes. Laura’s book came to my mind as I saw our key Climate Solutions  and Produce Liquid Waste bills fail even as we moved key issues forward on trapping, Gila protection, community solar and air stringency bills passed.

laura-paskus-book

michelle-otero-book

Both Michelle and Laura’s books speak to the urgency of this moment and the hope that the natural world and our relationship can provide. So as we begin Earth Month, with as much pressing need and reason to keep hoping, as ever, I hope you’ll join us. This free event is online Thursday, April 8 starting at 5 pm.

Register here

Michelle Otero is the author of Malinche’s Daughter, an essay collection based on her work with women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in Oaxaca, Mexico as a Fulbright Fellow, and Bosque: Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), a collection written during her tenure as Albuquerque Poet Laureate. Her memoir, Vessels is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Please get your copy of Michelle’s book at Bookworks, Organic Books, Harvest Moon Books, Collected Works or UNM Press.

Laura Paskus is a longtime environmental reporter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Currently, she is the environment reporter for New Mexico PBS, and produces the monthly series, “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future.” Her book “At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate,” was published in September 2020 by the University of New Mexico Press.

Paskus has been a journalist since 2002, when she began her career at High Country News. She has freelanced for local, regional, and national outlets and also worked as managing editor for Tribal College Journal, a publication of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, as a reporter and producer for KUNM-FM in Albuquerque, and as the environment reporter for New Mexico Political Report. She also edits New Mexico-based stories about the oil and gas industry and climate change for Capital & Main.   She’s a board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and formerly served as president of the Rio Grande Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Please get your copy of Laura’s book at Bookworks, Organic Books, Harvest Moon Books, Collected Works, Garcia Street Books or UNM Press.

This is a complex moment for legislative transformation. On the one hand, New Mexicans are clearly communicating their desire for big, bold change. We demonstrated that in the elections, creating a progressive state Senate to go with our progressive House.

On the other hand, despite the incredible opportunities of the moment, we don’t have a great sense of how the legislative process will take place. The House may limit legislators to five bills. The Senate may meet on the floor for a couple of days and then break out for virtual committee hearings for five days and then back for floor sessions. Legislators may hold office hours for constituents and advocates that will try not to conflict with committee times.

But given all that we’ve already navigated this year, maybe a virtual legislative session isn’t so bad. As a working mom, I enjoyed being able to participate during the summer special session and speak out, from home, in a committee at 11:30 p.m. in favor of expanded voting while folding the laundry.

We’ll need your support whether from the laundry room or the dining room on a host of environmental bills and other legislation to create equity and better quality of life for all New Mexicans. Our environmental community is working on legislation that will make a real difference for New Mexico. A carbon-reduction and climate-resilience bill being sponsored by Rep. Melanie Stansbury, Sen. Benny Shendo and Sen. Carrie Hamblen will tackle climate change by putting Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 2019 Executive Order on climate into law.

Stringency legislation, sponsored by Sen. Peter Wirth would allow state rules on air quality and hazardous waste to be stronger than federal limits. Just transition legislation from Rep. Angelica Rubio would help encourage and develop workforce solutions and diversification as we move away from fossil fuels. Community solar (Sen. Liz Stefanics, Rep. Patricia Roybal Caballero) would allow renters and homeowners without roof access to buy into larger community solar gardens. The Sustainable Buildings Tax Credit would incentivize emissions reductions from buildings and require they be EV-ready.

We are hoping this is the year to pass a ban on trapping on public lands (see article at left). An Environmental Database Law (Sen. Mimi Stewart, Rep. Gail Chasey) would allow agencies and the public to find wildlife, leasing, and air-quality data all in a centralized location. A memorial  from Stansbury would create a framework for a 50-year water plan. The Green Amendment (Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Sen. Bill Soules, Rep. Joanne Ferrary) would create an actionable environmental protection in the Constitution, while Private Right of Action legislation (Rep. Georgene Louis) would allow impacted individuals to sue for environmental compliance. Another bill would raise penalty caps in an array of environmental sectors. Oil Conservation Commission reform would put the public interest at the heart of state oversight of extractive industries, and amendments to the Produced Water Act would increase protection for human health and freshwater. Other promising bills from Sen. Soules explore solar- and EV-ready buildings, regular updates of energy-efficient building codes, and a 100% electric state vehicle fleet. Another bill would provide relief for those who couldn’t pay their electric bills during the pandemic.

Thanks to all of the incredible bill sponsors and to the organizers working so hard to make them happen.

With 3 million acres of public land currently leased to oil and gas companies for exploration and drilling, New Mexico is the largest producer of oil from federal lands in the country.

The policies governing how these lands are managed and leased haven’t been updated for a century, and companies are getting a sweetheart deal to develop under the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” regime.

In New Mexico, alone, we have lost out on up to $5.5 billion in revenue in the last decade because the federal government’s 12.5% royalty rate (a percentage of profit from extraction that must be paid back to the government) is so low and has not been changed for almost 100 years. On state land in New Mexico, this rate can be up to 20%, and even for federal oil and gas drilling offshore, the rate is 18.75%.

Also, because rental rates, which companies pay annually on each acre of public land they lease, have never been adjusted for inflation, companies have avoided paying $19 million in rent on lands in New Mexico over the past three decades  These rates also haven’t been updated since 1987 and range from $1.50/acre to $2/acre.

How can federal land in New Mexico only be worth $2/acre when state land is worth up to $300/acre?  When a company puts in a bid for federal public land, they start at $2 per acre, a number that hasn’t been updated since 1987. For comparison, a recent lease sale on state-owned land in New Mexico had minimum bids that, for many leases, ranged from roughly $200 to $300/acre.

Federal policy is letting oil and gas companies get away with highway robbery on our public lands. They’re propping up a broken system to take advantage of our public lands and using massive loopholes that allow them to make immense profits. We are working not just to change the overarching policy of energy dominance, but we’re also focusing on the specific ways that corporations take advantage of old rates to take resources for pennies on the dollar.

Small but important changes to modernize these laws could have a meaningful impact and make sure companies are paying their fair share for the use of our public assets.

By Camilla Feibelman and Erik Schlenker-Goodrich

On Wednesday, our groups joined hundreds of others in urging Gov. Lujan Grisham’s state agencies to take advantage of the opportunity to slash our state’s climate pollution and make our air healthier 

Yesterday, we joined national, state, and local groups and hundreds of people to call on the Lujan Grisham Administration to strengthen draft rules proposed by her administration to clean up methane waste and the dangerous pollutants from oil and gas extraction.

Methane is a powerful climate pollutant, 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a critical near-term time frame. Oil and gas producers leak, vent, and flare so much methane that the wasted methane – the primary ingredient in natural gas – could heat every home in New Mexico every single year. And the volatile organic compounds, or “VOCs,” that leak alongside methane at oil and gas facilities cause smog that exacerbates asthma and other respiratory diseases that many New Mexicans suffer from.

This is important: we wrote our comments as wildfires raged across more than five million acres of California, Oregon, and Washington state, glaciers shattered and disintegrated from Greenland’s largest remaining ice shelf, hurricanes spun across the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and New Mexico is seeing extreme drought conditions in every corner of the state. The climate crisis is not simply a future risk, but a lived reality that harms us and contributes to persistent environmental injustice. This crisis is now magnified by the ravages of COVID-19 and the financial hardship of families caused by a struggling economy.

We called on the Lujan Grisham administration with a simple message: Act with vision and ambition. The window of opportunity to address the climate crisis at the scale necessary to prevent massive suffering is closing, and the Lujan Grisham administration must act in full recognition of this sobering reality, serving as champions of people, not industry.

The problem and opportunity

We’ve known for years oil and gas air pollution and waste is a vast and growing problem in New Mexico. In counties with active oil and gas operations, New Mexico’s air quality is deteriorating with rising levels of ozone pollution, and our state is home to some of the worst methane pollution in the nation.

Fortunately, Governor Lujan Grisham has committed to adopting nation-leading oil and gas rules to cut methane and air pollution. Unfortunately, draft rules put forward by the New Mexico Environment Department and Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department fall short of that goal. To protect the health of New Mexico families and our climate, these agencies must make critical changes to close loopholes and that would effectively exempt 95% of all wells in New Mexico and seriously ratchet up their vision and ambition.

Why it matters for New Mexico to get this right

As people connected to the land, water, and sky, New Mexicans witness firsthand the price of inaction on methane and climate. Our summers are hotter and longer, impacting harmful ground-level ozone and contributing to more frequent and severe drought that impacts farms and ranches and dries out forests and rivers. It also puts our state at grave risk to more severe wildfires and impacts to our rivers and streams.

Adding insult to injury, the Trump administration has used the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate its reckless campaign to roll back at least 100 bedrock environmental and health safeguards. Indeed, in just the past month, the Trump administration gutted federal methane protections that have been in place since 2016. These rollbacks demand strong, unequivocal state action to protect our communities from oil and gas pollution and to fill the vacuum of climate leadership in Washington, D.C..

Even as emissions of methane threaten the stability of the climate system, emissions of ozone smog-precursors including VOCs and nitrogen oxides, or NOx, threaten regional and local air quality. Seven counties in the state of New Mexico, including all of the major oil-and-gas producing counties (Eddy, Lea, San Juan, and Rio Arriba), are currently at or above 95% of the national air-quality standard for ozone.

Oil and gas pollution threatens New Mexicans’ health and welfare, with children, elderly individuals, and adults with asthma and other respiratory conditions facing an especially high risk of adverse health impacts. Oil-and-gas pollution is a major contributor to New Mexico’s ozone problem, meaning actions to protect New Mexicans from this ozone pollution must address these sources first and foremost.

Improving the Environment Department Air Pollution Rule

We were deeply disappointed that the Environment Department’s rule sought to exempt the vast majority of wells in New Mexico from leak detection and repair requirements – one of the most effective ways to limit harmful oil and gas pollution. Two proposed exemptions – one for low-producing or stripper wells and the other for sites below a 15-ton-per-year pollution threshold – would collectively cause pollution from 95% of the wells in New Mexico to go unchecked. This is unacceptable, and the Environment Department should remove these loopholes.

This isn’t just a wonky, technocratic fight. The exemptions would disproportionately affect children as well as Navajo and Latino communities who are much more likely to live within a half mile of a well in oil and gas-producing counties. In fact, almost half of all Native Americans in San Juan County live within a mile of an exempted wellsite as well as 72% of kids under 5. Strong, comprehensive air pollution and methane rules are critical to safeguard our climate and secure environmental justice for the Navajo Nation and for all New Mexicans.

Tragically, the COVID-19 crisis shines an even brighter light on our air quality. Air pollution exacerbates lung disease such as asthma and emphysema and can lead to heart disease. As the Centers for Disease Control warns, people with underlying health conditions are at the most risk of serious complications and adverse outcomes from COVID-19. We must protect our health and our climate in this confluence of climate and pandemic crises.

We thus call on the Environment Department to get this right and not expect other agencies, such as EMNRD, to cover for any shortcomings. Unless the Environment Department eliminates the exemptions for stripper wells and smaller facilities, we sadly conclude that its rule would be the nation’s least effective oil and gas rule to reduce ozone pollution and the methane pollution that is emitted along with it.

Improving EMNRD’s Methane Waste Rule

We’re more pleased with EMNRD’s draft rule. While it still needs work, it proposes a sensible approach to reduce methane waste that can go a long way toward curtailing New Mexico’s $275 million per year methane waste problem. That’s because every metric ton of methane wasted to the atmosphere is a metric ton of natural gas that can’t be sold. With the following critical changes, EMNRD’s rule could rightly be described as nation-leading:

• OCD has set an appropriate goal that each operator capture at least 98% of all gas by 2026 statewide. That’s pretty good. But we can prevent far more waste and protect against air quality, public health, and environment by setting that requirement at a local, community-level scale, such as by county. This ensures that oil and gas companies take action everywhere in New Mexico, protecting the tens of thousands of people, in particular Navajo, Hispanic, and Latino people, who live in close proximity to oil and gas development.
• OCD should prohibit all venting of natural gas from all oil and gas wells and prohibit routine flaring from new oil and gas wells, taking action to also phase out flaring from existing oil and gas wells over a tight timeframe. In 2019, operators flared over 30 Bcf, which would have supplied enough gas to meet the home heating and cooking needs of 80% of New Mexico households for the year. That’s just unacceptable.
• OCD shouldn’t let oil and gas operators make the methane waste problem worse before they start clean up their waste from existing oil and gas wells. Operators that can’t capture at least 90% of their natural gas in the first year of the rule, and operators that don’t work actively to meet the 98% requirement, shouldn’t be entitled to spend money on drilling new oil and gas wells. Instead, they should direct that money to clean up their existing wells.
• The Oil Conservation Division should ramp up its enforcement tools. For too long, the oil and gas industry has called the shots in New Mexico. The Oil Conservation Division should not hesitate to shut in oil and gas wells from oil and gas companies that don’t play by the rules or otherwise hold those companies accountable.

Finalizing Rules New Mexico Can Be Proud Of

While much work remains, the Environment Department and Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department still have an excellent opportunity to fix the issues with these draft proposals and finalize requirements that will fulfill Governor Lujan Grisham’s goal of establishing nationally leading rules. We commend them for putting these proposals forward for public comment, even as we call on them to strengthen these draft rules with the vision and ambition that New Mexicans demand. The time is now for action commensurate to the scale of the climate crisis and to protect New Mexico’s communities.

Supporting documents

Sierra Club, Clean Air Task Force, et al comments

Western Environmental Law Center comments

The COVID-19 pandemic has only further shed light on this deep-rooted inequity as Black Americans are dying from the disease at a much higher rate than white Americans.

Sierra Club is on an ongoing journey to become better allies and accomplices in the movement toward anti-racism. We are committed to centering and uplifting the voices and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) on our staff and in our communities.

A key element of our mission at Sierra Club is to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment.

Environmental issues cannot be separated from racial and social justice — we can’t fulfill our mission to “enlist humanity” to protect the planet while racism continues to divide us and inflict pain and suffering in our communities.

While the world is focused on the widespread calls to transform our institutions for the better, the Trump administration continues to advance anti-environment policies and projects that endanger our natural world and our resources.

To learn more about the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter’s commitment to the Movement for Black Lives and to take action, please see our post here.

Featured image from Flickr.