The Pecos River rolls south from New Mexico’s highest mountains to its lowest point at the Texas border. Along the way it rushes through the forested canyon of the upper Pecos and across rolling farm and ranchlands in the middle of the state. Its final miles in New Mexico wind southward through the Permian Basin, the most productive oil and gas field in the nation.
People there have drilled tens of thousands of wells across the Permian to draw up the fossil fuels whose combustion warms the planet and shrinks the snowpack that feeds the Pecos. Hannah Riseley-White, director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, called the results of the changing climate “terrifying.” She said last year’s abysmal snowfall “was beyond anything that we could have imagined.”
A highly controversial proposal to clean highly toxic wastewater from the very oilfields fueling climate change may become a new tool in Riseley-White’s toolbox for meeting interstate water obligations.
