SANTA FE – New Mexico lawmakers are leaving many large polluters out of climate change policy, according to a new report from the University of New Mexico and PSE Healthy Energy, a nonprofit research institute. And many of those polluters are in low-income communities and communities of color.
“The challenge of addressing climate change is quite great,” Associate Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico Gabriel Pacyniak said. “Our existing policies, while they’re some nation-leading policies in the electric power and oil and gas sectors, aren’t sufficient to meet the state’s climate goals.”
In 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an executive order calling for the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45% from 2005 levels by 2030, and later called for the state to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Several state departments and the state Legislature have responded with new rules and policies. That includes the 2019 Energy Transition Act, which requires utilities to supply 100% decarbonized electricity to New Mexico customers by 2050.
The authors of the study said that will help cut down on large source emissions, but it doesn’t directly require them to cut back or interfere with the power they provide to out-of-state customers.
“Climate policies provide a real opportunity to improve public health, but it depends on how they’re designed,” Pacyniak said.
The UNM study argues that the state government, in its efforts to meet those goals, stops short of requiring cuts to greenhouse gas emissions by large stationary sources, including power plants, oil refineries and natural gas processing plants. It said these sources make up a quarter of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
It also said of the sources in populous areas, about two-thirds are in mostly low-income communities, and nearly half are in areas with a high proportion of people of color. Those include the Rio Grande Generating Station in Sunland Park and the Rio Bravo Generating Station in Albuquerque.
“The state’s economy is being supported by the oil and gas industry, but that comes at a price,” said Michael Leon Guerrero, a sustainable economy policy advisor for the Center for Civic Policy, which helped advise the study. “It’s coming at the price of people’s health and their environment.”
The top large sources of pollution cited by the study included the Four Corners Generating Station on the Navajo Reservation, the San Juan Generating Station near Farmington, which has since closed in part because of a lawsuit, and the Lea Power-Hobbs Generating Station.
Leon Guerrero said he supports lawmakers transitioning the state away from its dependency on natural resource extraction, and that the Center for Civic Policy is working on House Bill 188, which would create an “economic transition division” within the New Mexico Economic Development Department.
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