Environmental advocates: Move leaves N.M. ‘dead in the water’

New Mexico officials and environmentalists said Tuesday the state could be greatly impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order to roll back the Clean Power Plan and to remove a requirement for federal agencies to consider climate change in making new regulations.

Some said New Mexico’s regulatory agencies are unlikely to fill the vacuum created by the Trump administration and act on their own to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The state is dead in the water,” said Tom Singer, a senior policy adviser with the Western Environmental Law Center.

Trump’s “Energy Independence” executive order calls for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department to immediately review all existing regulations that “burden” the development of energy and suspend those rules that do. Those rules include the Clean Power Plan and methane regulations — both of which seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The order states the review should be done “with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources.”

The Clean Power Plan was put in place by the Obama administration to reduce emissions from fossil fuel-powered electricity plants.

“With this executive order, President Trump is killing our country’s best efforts to fight the urgent threat of climate change in order to benefit big polluters.”

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.

“With this executive order, President Trump is killing our country’s best efforts to fight the urgent threat of climate change in order to benefit big polluters,” said Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M. “He may deny that climate change is real, but the science is clear, and New Mexico and the Southwest are in the bull’s-eye when it comes to the devastating effects of global warming.”

Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., said in a Twitter posting that Trump’s order “will have deep impact on our environment, economy & health.”

Camilla Feibelman, regional director of the Sierra Club in New Mexico, said Trump’s order “is divorced from the reality that clean energy and energy efficiency have created thousands of jobs in New Mexico and are poised to take off here.

“The Clean Power Plan wouldn’t only boost job growth; it would keep our air and water safe and reduce our contribution to climate change,” she said.

Singer said the environment and public health will suffer as regulations are lifted from oil and gas production.

“The bottom line is just a lack of balance,” he said. The Bureau of Land Management “could decide that the oil and gas industry can do anything it wants to do without looking at the environmental impacts or the social health impact.”

Federal agencies have been required to develop resource-management plans and conduct environmental analyses for energy developments, but these processes now could be skipped, Singer said.

The BLM’s Farmington and Carlsbad field offices have been reconsidering their management plans. But under the Trump order, the agency is no longer required to consider the effects on climate change, he said.

“The BLM is going to be sort of toothless,” Singer said.

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, in the hopes of saving Navajo mining jobs and revenue, repeatedly has asked the Trump administration to roll back regulations that harm coalpowered plants.

The Public Service Company of New Mexico, which gets 50 percent of its power from coal, said it doesn’t yet know how the Trump order will impact the company.

“It will take time to see how the President’s actions may or may not impact our business going forward,” PNM spokesman Ray Sandoval said in an email.

Sandoval said the company still intends to shut down two of the four coal-burning units of its San Juan Generating Station by the end of this year. He also said PNM is still considering closing the entire plant as soon as 2022 but, “there is still much more to be done before any decisions are made.”

Singer said the suspension of the Clean Power Plan will not determine if plants close because coal has struggled to compete with low-priced natural gas and increasingly affordable renewable energy.