On March 18, the New Mexico Legislature wrapped up this year’s two-month session, one fueled by a whopping $9.57 billion budget heavily boosted by oil and gas revenues and lacking any new legislation regulating that industry. Two days later, the United Nations’ climate change authority released its latest report on the state of the planet’s response to the crisis. The AR6 Synthesis Report is a final warning to act before the shifting climate becomes unfixable. It also indirectly reflects and rebukes the legislative session’s near-complete failure to rein in the state’s biggest industry — one largely responsible for the planet’s quickening slide toward irreversible climate damage.
New Mexico’s oil and gas output isn’t solely to blame for the heating planet, but the state’s gargantuan production numbers (it’s the nation’s second-largest oil producing state and fifth-largest natural gas producer) coupled with its historic inability to police fossil fuel producers make the legislative inaction consequential beyond the state’s relatively small population and economy. “I did get several bills I really, really care about passed,” says Antoinette Sedillo López, a state senator. “None of them were for the environment.” That lack of legislative action has at least one group pondering legal action and a state agency planning to help.
