Environment

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

By Gitanjali Poonia for New Mexico In Depth; Graphics by Aliya Uteuova | November 9, 2021

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 residents seek alternative to new El Paso Electric natural gas unit

Navajo-Gallup water delay spurs problem solving in arid Southwest

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

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

Covid-19

Economic downturn could add to state’s burden of methane

By Elizabeth Miller, New Mexico In Depth | June 2, 2020

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 Elizabeth Miller, New Mexico In Depth | May 12, 2020

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 Elizabeth Miller, New Mexico In Depth | February 3, 2020

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 Leah Romero | December 11, 2019

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 Leah Romero | November 27, 2019

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.

climate change

More Water or More Wild: The Decades-Long Struggle over the Gila River’s Fate

By Elizabeth Miller, New Mexico In Depth | October 4, 2019

Since he first saw it in 1983, M.H. “Dutch” Salmon advocated for a free-flowing Gila River. Salmon died in March, but his allies are fighting a diversion proposal. | Illustration by Maddy Olson

This story was published in collaboration with Bitterroot, an online magazine about the politics, economy, culture, and environment of the West. On the sunny afternoon decades ago when M.H. “Dutch” Salmon first set eyes on the Gila River, he was not impressed. “This was no river,” he would later write.