Tick tock, tick tock…
Feb. 20 was halftime in this year’s two-month edition of the New Mexico Legislature and the deadline for filing proposed legislation. Its 111 members have now filed 1,182 bills for debate; about 20 of those deal with regulating some aspect of the oil and gas industry. With roughly 230 hours (10 hours a day, six days a week) to hear, debate and vote before the session ends March 22, the remaining month will be a rush of late nights, weekend committee meetings, filibustering — and bills left to languish.
Meanwhile, the federal government is busy dismantling itself, leaving New Mexico without its biggest environmental partner. Last Wednesday, the Trump administration quashed most environmental oversight of projects on public lands, which means far less opportunity to contest or craft oil and gas developments in the state.
The hammer came down from the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which, the day before New Mexico’s legislative halftime, announced it would remove the existing regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act as part of President Donald Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order.
This is huge news for a state that is the second-largest oil producer in the country. And, in theory, several of the bills before the Legislature could address the impending fallout. But that clock is ticking, and time is running out.
“We’re at the point in the session where everything feels both possible and impossible,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center.
He’s hoping for what’s possible because experts say that while fighting climate change and environmental pollution is expensive, it’s cheaper than the long-term consequences of doing nothing. The New Mexico Legislature needs to act, “not just to ensure we make forward progress at the state level, but to fortify us against the Trump administration’s transgressions,” Schlenker-Goodrich said. “We are less safe because of their actions.”
For roughly 50 years, the National Environmental Policy Act regulations were the primary means of assessing and disputing the environmental and social impacts of proposed development on federal lands — like fossil fuel leases. And in recent years the Biden administration clarified the regulations to include both the effects on local minority groups and the environmental cost of greenhouse gas emissions in federal projects. Now, all of those reviews are gone. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off an unknown number of federal workers charged with carrying out federal rules across New Mexico.
That leaves New Mexico’s politicians an even bigger share of the responsibility for regulating the state’s most powerful, most lucrative and most polluting industry.
The oil and gas industry is the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitting sector, and state Sen. Mimi Stewart (D-Bernalillo) has proposed SB4, the Clear Horizons & Greenhouse Gas Emissions Act, which calls for reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. This would codify one of Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s original goals, laid out six years ago in the inaugural days of her first term.
The Clear Horizons & Greenhouse Gas Emissions Act, died in a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week.
In a statement following the vote, Lucas Herndon, energy policy director at ProgressNow New Mexico said, “With today’s vote it’s clear that no amount of community input can sway the legislature to take action on climate in any meaningful way.”
This year’s two-month legislative session may be the final chance Lujan Grisham has to address reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero before her term limits usher her out of office. Next year’s one-month session will be devoted to the state budget and very little other legislation, and the state will elect a new governor that November.
Right now, Democrats hold a nearly 2-1 majority in both houses, but so far, oil and gas-related legislation has had a bumpy reception from legislators on both sides of the aisle. Also this session, industry representatives have fought vigorously against all legislation that would impose either higher fees or more regulations. All of this lessens chances for new legislation as the clock continues to tick.
Sen. Stewart said she tried to bridge the gap before the session began. “We reached out to NMOGA [the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association] to discuss SB4 and they responded that they did ‘not feel there is anything to negotiate.’”
Missi Currier, the president and CEO of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, paints the exchange differently. “NMOGA met with the senator and her staff at length and provided six pages of questions on the bill, none of which was taken into consideration,” she said.
Debate has spread well beyond the Capitol building. During the legislative session, lobbyists are required to report all expenses greater than $500 to the Secretary of State’s office within 48 hours. On Feb. 11, three weeks into the session, Currier filed a report for $126,000 spent on advertising against bills SB4, SB48 (which supports SB4), HB35 (which would exclude new oil and gas operations within one mile of schools) and other “anti-industry bills.”
Rep. Debra Sariñana (D-Bernalillo), who sponsored HB35, didn’t know about the ad campaign until informed by Capital & Main. “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t see that.”
Stewart said, “The oil and gas lobby is resorting to fear tactics to protect its bottom line — even at the expense of our state’s long-term well-being.”
It’s not the first time that the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association has bought ads during a legislative session. In 2022, it bought ads against the Clean Future Act, another bill sponsored by Stewart that was an earlier version of the Clear Horizons & Greenhouse Gas Emissions Act. Rep. Nathan Small (D-Doña Ana), was a co-sponsor then, before he became head of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee last year and one of the biggest recipients of oil and gas campaign funding. He was one of the Democrats who helped kill another Sariñana bill this session that would have added considerations for human health and the environment to the state Oil Conservation Division’s mission statement.
Sariñana is particularly upset that Democrats like Small are sinking her legislation. Her bill HB35 is stuck awaiting a committee hearing that she thinks won’t happen. “I haven’t heard directly but a lot of the signs are there,” she said. It’s probably “impossible” for the bill to make it to law at this point, she said, without all of its House hearings completed.
“It’s hard to see my side kill them,” Sariñana said.
Meanwhile, when it crosses from the Senate to the House, Stewart’s Clear Horizons & Greenhouse Gas Emissions Act will likely go through Small’s Appropriations and Finance Committee as well as the House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee, on which he also sits. Schlenker-Goodrich, of the Western Environmental Law Center, said, “It sets up a choice for Rep. Small: Will he be a climate action hero or villain?”
Small did not respond to questions from Capital & Main.
Currier, the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association president, sees the bill and other oil and gas regulations as an existential threat to the industry and the state. “This bill will devastate New Mexico’s economy across the board,” she said.
Stewart disagreed. “After methane regulations were adopted in 2020, state oil and gas revenues hit all-time highs,” she said. “No company has stated that it will shut down operations due to this legislation.”
“Oil and gas folks keep claiming that New Mexico produces some of the cleanest oil and gas in the world. If that’s the case, then this is an opportunity for them to prove it,” Schlenker-Goodrich said. “I won’t hold my breath on that.”
The Trump administration continues to rattle New Mexico in other ways, including through the ongoing federal layoff tsunami. When it comes to oil and gas, workers at the Bureau of Land Management oversee federal land leases and monitor for rules violations. The Environmental Protection Agency also monitors air quality across the state, and has found exceptionally high air pollution levels in the state’s portion of the Permian Basin (though it has done nothing about it). Both the EPA and the Justice Department worked with the New Mexico Environment Department to sniff out and prosecute oilfield violations. Last week, New Mexico’s U.S. attorney quit at Trump’s request.
All told, New Mexico had more than 29,000 federal workers before Trump took office, and no one in the state seems to know just how many have been laid off, much less from which agencies. Questions sent to the Bureau of Land Management’s New Mexico headquarters about statewide staffing cuts at both the bureau and at the wider U.S. Department of the Interior were forwarded to the Washington, D.C., headquarters and were not immediately answered.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) has repeatedly asked the administration for the number of New Mexicans who have been fired, and from which agencies or departments. “The administration is either refusing to be transparent or they simply don’t know,” a spokesperson for the senator said. “Either way, their actions are completely reckless.”
Drew Goretzka, director of communications at the state’s Environment Department, which has relied on federal help on big cases in the past, said, “We simply don’t know how all of these federal changes will impact us yet — whether it’s our funds, staffing or work.”
Rose Rushing, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, said the federal actions are “not even popular with voters in the intermountain west, who value our public lands and by and large consider climate change to be a serious problem.”
What has resulted instead, she said, is “chaos.”
Tick tock, tick tock…
This story was published by journalism nonprofit Capital & Main, which reports on economic, environmental and social issues in the West. capitalandmain.com
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