At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate

How the rise of copper reveals clean energy’s dark side

By |

This story is co-published by New Mexico In Depth and the Guardian US, as part of the series “America’s dirty divide.” Corky Stewart, a retired geologist, and his wife live in a rural subdivision in New Mexico’s Grant County, about a mile north of the sprawling  Tyrone copper mine.  

“We’ve been here three years and we’ve heard four blasts,” Stewart said of the mine, one of four on an expanse of land partitioned into dozens of four-acre lots. From his perspective, the blasts don’t seem unreasonable, given that a mining company owns the property and has the right to do what it wants. 

But he didn’t know when he bought the property that the company would propose a new pit called the “Emma B” just a half-mile from the wells he and his wife depend on for drinking water. “If they were to somehow tap into our aquifer and drain our water supply, then our houses become valueless,” he said. 

“We’re not making any effort to prevent the pit from being built,” he said. “All we’re really asking is for them to give us some commitment that they will fix whatever they do to our water supply.” But the mine refuses to give them this assurance, he said.  Freeport-McMoRan did not respond to multiple requests for comment by New Mexico In Depth and The Guardian.

Chaparral

Chaparral residents seek alternative to new El Paso Electric natural gas unit

By |

Ida and David Garcia outside their home, less than a mile away from the Newman Power station, in Chaparral, New Mexico. Image: Claudia Silva. When Ida Garcia looks out the kitchen window during cool mornings, plumes billowing from a power plant less than a mile away in Texas obscure her view of the broad Chihuahuan desert skies and expansive vistas. During hot summer days the plumes disappear but she still worries. 

“We see that plant everyday,” said Garcia of the Newman Power Station that sits between Chaparral, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. “We see how all this smoke comes out from the stacks… We know that it’s not just steam.

Water

Navajo-Gallup water delay spurs problem solving in arid Southwest

By |

Early this year, five of Gallup, New Mexico’s 16 water wells stopped producing water, including two of its biggest. After a few days of maintenance, two worked. The other three were out of commission for more than a month. Had it happened in summer, the city might have asked residents to dramatically reduce use. “I’m not in crisis mode,” said Dennis Romero, Water and Sanitation Director for the City of Gallup, but “it could go to crisis mode very quickly.”

The shortage isn’t wholly surprising — 20 years ago, the city decided it could limp along on aging groundwater wells with dropping water levels until a new water project began delivering San Juan River water in late 2024.

A century of federal indifference left generations of Navajo homes without running water

By |

When Julie Badonie was growing up in the small Navajo community of Tohatchi in the 1940s, her father drove a horse-drawn wagon early each morning to a nearby spring. There, he filled wooden barrels with water the family would use that day to drink, cook, and wash. 

Badonie, the youngest of seven children, including brothers who fought in World War II and the Korean War, or one of her siblings would go along. She remembers it as fun. At home, a hose siphoned the water into buckets to bring into the house. Badonie left for boarding school in kindergarten, first just a few miles across town, then several days’ travel away in Crownpoint, where an older sister worked as a cook, and eventually, all the way to Albuquerque for high school.

As water reaches eastern Navajo communities, it brings possibilities and homecomings

By |

For a while, Chee Smith Jr. thought he was going to have to send his father to die among strangers. His family lives at Whitehorse Lake, a Navajo chapter where, until a few years ago, roughly 550 of 700 residents had no running water in their homes, including Smith’s. As Smith’s father aged and his health worsened, it became harder and harder for him to live at home. “We had to haul water from the chapterhouse or the watering points every day for just basic things — for cooking, for laundry, for stuff like that, and also for our livestock,” Smith said. “It takes a big toll.

Covid-19

Economic downturn could add to state’s burden of methane

By |

The naked eye can’t tell you much about methane. Sometimes, distortion wavers above an open pipe or tank at an oil and gas well like the haze of heat over a desert highway. When Earthworks’ Sharon Wilson aims her FLIR camera, however, the screen renders the scene in black and white and plumes of black smoke can be seen wafting skyward. 

“There are so many pipes and vents and tubes, it’s a lot of opportunity for holes,” said Nathalie Eddy, a field advocate with Earthworks, an environmental organization that monitors and reports methane emissions to regulators. “This industry is built to leak.”

Oil and gas engineers say that’s the system releasing pressure before it compromises equipment, well production, or worker safety. But those pressure valves leak methane.

Covid-19

COVID-19 pandemic complicates 2020 wildfire season

By |

The BLM Gila District’s Safford Hand Crew works a burnout operation during the 2017 Frye Fire, Coronado National Forest, AZ. BLM/Kress Sanders. One morning in June 2017, while fighting the Frye Fire in southern Arizona, firefighters began visiting the on-site paramedic complaining of body aches, sore throats, fever, and fatigue. The paramedic diagnosed them with strep throat, a bacterial infection that can pass person to person or through food or water, and sent them to the regional medical center. 

Then another crew showed up with the same symptoms. And then, a third. Medical staff estimated nearly 300 people might have been exposed.

Environment

New Mexico counties want say over hard-rock mining proposal on federal land

By |

The kids called the heaps of waste rock from a shuttered mine “the moon,” and the bare mounds of yellow mill tailings “Egypt.”

“We played there. We loved it,” recalled San Miguel County Commissioner Janice Varela. “We didn’t know.”

Growing up on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, she said, they lived with a world of mountains, rivers, and canyons at their disposal. That world just happened to include the geologic oddities of an old lead and zinc mine, mill buildings and tailings piles. People would load up the back of a pickup truck and haul the waste rock away for use around their homes, including Varela’s ex-husband, who applied it to their driveway.

climate change

NM shifting from slow to fast lane for electric vehicles

By |

Interstate 25 runs roughly 450 miles through the heart of New Mexico from Las Cruces through Raton and into Colorado. In an electric vehicle, drivers would be hard pressed to find the fast-charging stations they need to make it seamlessly across the state unless they were driving the very newest or most expensive models. And even then, a large swath of rural New Mexico remains out of reach. 

That’s a problem for state officials who want to promote the use of electric vehicles as one way to reduce the climate changing greenhouse gases emitted in New Mexico. This chart from a New Mexico Interagency Climate Change Task Force report shows the emission sources of 2018 greenhouse gasses being emitted in New Mexico. According to a report released in November by the New Mexico Interagency Climate Change Task Force, the state’s production of greenhouse gases is about 70% more per capita than the national average — 31 tons per person per year compared to 18 tons.

climate change

Bridging silos to solve climate change

By |

Sea ice is melting, droughts and wildfires are becoming more severe, and countless other effects are currently being experienced around the world due to changes in climate. But because many people around the world don’t feel the effects directly, little action is taken to combat it, said Subhankar Banerjee, Professor of Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico. 

A good example, Banerjee said, is in northern New Mexico, where it’s “largely unknown” that roughly 90% of mature piñons died in the early 2000s, which Banerjee said shows the impact of both an ecological crisis and a climate crisis. Banerjee spoke to an audience in Las Cruces in late November about the decimation of hundreds of animal and plant species around the world. The 2018 global “Living Planet Report” produced by the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation organization, indicates an overall decline of 60% in vertebrate populations worldwide — animals such as mammals, birds, reptiles and fish — between 1970 and 2014. 

“This crisis as I see it is a more expansive crisis than the climate crisis,” Banerjee said. But the climate crisis is significant.