Opinion: No need to wait for feds to start climate work

Here’s a crazy idea: Instead of following the federal government’s lead away from cleaner energy sources, New Mexico could lead the way toward a more sustainable energy future anyway.

Last November, Travis Kellerman, a senior policy adviser for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, attended the United Nations’ latest conference on climate change, also known as COP29. When he returned, he recalled the “uncertainty in the air” as questions loom large about future U.S. involvement under our incoming president.

“Yet amidst the unease,” Kellerman wrote in an opinion piece in The New Mexican last month, “a resounding message emerged: Subnational governments (states, counties and cities) must lead.

“This idea is not new,” he continued. “In 2017, when the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the Climate Alliance was born, uniting states still determined to uphold climate commitments.”

In other words, the movement to address climate change must come from the ground up rather than top down. That’s where New Mexico comes in.

In case you haven’t noticed, New Mexico has become a leader in U.S. energy production, and according to Kellerman, that places our state in a unique position “to answer this call.” New Mexico is the second-largest oil and gas producer in the U.S and, Kellerman contends, we do it cleaner than all the other energy producing states.

That’s a “distinction that offers a unique opportunity to influence global climate strategies,” he wrote in The New Mexican.

Kellerman suggests that as energy demand grows and the U.S. shifts back toward a fossil fuels emphasis, cleaner oil and gas production will gain greater attention. New Mexico’s efforts to reduce and eliminate methane leaks and reward producers for better environmental practices could “set a global standard,” he writes.

“Policies like New Mexico’s Clean Fuel Standard exemplify this approach. Rewarding producers who go above and beyond creates a virtuous cycle in which the cleanest fuels gain the greatest market advantage,” Kellerman writes.

“This is good policy — and it’s good business.”

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in southern New Mexico are gearing up for this year’s legislative session with calls to protect the oil and gas industry, as if there is no greater calling. As they correctly point out, our state government is flush with money, thanks in large part to revenues generated by the oil and gas industry. But it’s also true that, under our current governor, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the state’s production of clean energy sources.

Check out all the wind and solar farms going up around the state if you want to see how the business of energy is diversifying.

Surely even the most ardent oilmen out there can recognize the value in diversifying this state’s production of energy. They just don’t like the fact that’s been happening under one of our state’s more progressive moves in modern times — the Energy Transition Act of 2019.

If New Mexico has the courage to stay the course and do the right thing for an overheating earth, then maybe that’ll get us noticed on the world stage. Some would have us believe that following this hard turn backward, back to Trump’s “drill baby drill” mentality, is the way to survive the next four years as a major energy producing state, but I don’t buy that. I think a lot of states will follow Trump down his road to climate catastrophe — one extreme weather event at a time — but New Mexico doesn’t have to be among them.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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