Next governor must lead on climate change

When our new governor takes office in January, he or she must be prepared to address climate change — the most pressing environmental problem of our time. Climate change threatens all life in New Mexico as we know it. In coming decades, the Rio Grande is expected to lose one-third of its water; warmer winters will wipe out our ski industry; and indigenous species — such as the piñon, our state tree — face extinction. And those are just a few examples of what’s coming.

In the face of this existential threat, we must take bold, innovative action. During the 1940s, New Mexico was at the forefront of a revolution in nuclear technology that transformed the world. Now, New Mexico must be at the forefront of another revolution — a revolution in clean energy and negative emission technology that will allow us to avert catastrophe and jump-start our economy.

In my capacity as an adviser to the governor, I will advocate for New Mexico to take a leadership role in the global fight to slow climate change and cope with its effects.

To start, we should update our renewable portfolio standards to require public utilities to obtain 100 percent of their electricity from zero-emission sources by 2035. We should offer tax credits for electric vehicles and commercial charging stations, and join California’s Zero Emission Vehicle program, which will require manufacturers to increase production of these vehicles. We should create a climate conservation corps, to put young people and recently returned veterans to work on energy-efficiency projects. And we should adopt methane emission standards modeled after those championed by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in Colorado.

These actions will demonstrate that New Mexico is serious about leading the clean energy revolution, helping us attract companies like Apple, CocaCola and Google that are committed to using 100 percent clean energy to power their operations.

We can complement these regulatory measures with investments in research and development. Regenerative agriculture and ranching practices — such as shifting from inorganic to organic fertilizer, planting cover crops and applying compost to rangeland — have the potential to substantially increase the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil while increasing yields and enhancing water retention.

Hawaii recently established a task force to study these practices and develop methods of quantifying and verifying their climate benefits. We should follow suit. A revolution in regenerative agriculture could mean a major new source of income for New Mexico’s rural communities, allowing farmers and ranchers to generate carbon offsets while increasing yield.

This research should be part of a broader exploration of negative emission technologies, or NETs. NETs are technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it elsewhere. Examples include bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration, direct air capture and enhanced weathering (the accelerated reaction of silicate minerals with carbon dioxide to form carbonate minerals). Although NETs are still in their infancy, they have the potential to significantly mitigate climate change if perfected and made affordable. The state that perfects NETs may very well find itself at the center of a global industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. I will recommend that the governor establish a state-of-the-art research center in our university system to perfect these technologies, so we can reap the economic benefits of this research.

Moving forward on these initiatives will take courage and commitment. Entrenched special interests and climate science deniers will mount fierce opposition. But the options are clear: either ignore the most significant environmental crisis we have ever faced — and potentially doom our communities to irreversible decline — or lead the world in the clean energy revolution and breathe new life into our region. That is not a hard choice. I stand ready to support our governor in doing what’s right for New Mexicans by taking on this challenge.