Where do you stand on the sequestration of CO2 in the Permian and San Juan Basins? How do you feel about modularized nuclear power plants popping up around the country, perhaps even in New Mexico? Are the tradeoffs in producing hydrogen energy too inherently risky for hydrogen to become a major source of power in an age dominated by greenhouse gases and climate change? Is it in any way acceptable that water policy decisions in New Mexico are based on next to no hard data about how much water the state actually has and uses and pollutes?
Questions such as these are swirling around the media environment that many of us explore every week. And we’re often left with feelings of bafflement. Trustworthy data is hard to come by in the Information Age in the United States. But that’s not exactly true in our state anymore these days. In fact, New Mexico and our region are flush at the moment with good sources of news. I don’t want to sound pollyannish, heaven forbid, but local media today does seem reminiscent of the local-news heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. When you consult The Albuquerque Journal, The Paper, New Mexico PBS, New Mexico Political Report, Searchlight New Mexico, and other sources, you have a good chance of at least encountering intelligent reporting on many of the pressing environmental issues of the day — even if they sometimes are presented in a way that confuses “fairness” with contentious pro/con “balance” in which ideology is given equal footing with solid news and expert opinion.
The Paper is a good example of strong journalism with a sense of mission that doesn’t confuse revealing inequities with so-called balanced coverage. It describes itself as “the only queer-owned, woman-managed paper in New Mexico.” It has a weekly free newsstand presence at 10,000 locations and can be read online. It partners with another news organization, the non-profit Searchlight New Mexico, “a nonpartisan, non profit” enterprise that runs its serious reporting in many news outlets in the state. And Gwynne Ann Unruh, The Paper’s environmental reporter, produces clear-headed and useful stories on water and other matters all the time. Though The Paper is a weekly, its online presence can respond to breaking news and often serves as a counterbalance to daily journalism. A recent piece in The Paper, supplied by Searchlight New Mexico’s reporters Annabella Farmer and Lindsay Fendt, made it clear, for instance, that New Mexico has an enormous problem when it comes to water data. Water planners literally have no idea how much water the state has.
There’s no integrated system of data collection on private and many public wells, on precipitation, on groundwater recharge or on groundwater pollution. We still don’t have an integrated system to tell us how much water is in all of the state’s 39 groundwater basins and how much of it has been contaminated. Laura Paskus — long considered New Mexico top environmental journalist, who is now a producer of NMPBS’s New Mexico In Focus series on “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present, and Future” — reported recently that the New Mexico Legislature once again this year has pathetically underfunded the state’s environmental agencies right when they need massive boosts in resources to give policy makers solid data on which to base anti-climate change legislation. Thankfully, it’s become much easier to keep track of environmental laws and issues here with New Mexico Political Report’s Environmental Project and the reporting of Kendra Chamberlain and Hannah Grover.
All these solid news sources confirm that we’re flying blind as far as water is concerned and that it doesn’t seem we’ll get the kind of across-the-board data we’ll need to carry out realistic water planning anytime soon. And that’s a tragedy for all of us.
The resurgent Albuquerque Journal has surprised many readers of late with its unusually comprehensive environmental coverage. The Journal’s redirection can be credited to the rigor and curiosity of Karen Moses, the paper’s relatively new Editor-in-Chief. Her rise to the top makes the Journal another “woman-managed” news organization in the state. And it’s serving us well. Surprisingly, the Journal’s business section is leading the way. Major pieces on hydrogen development in New Mexico, on nuclear power as a “green solution,” and on the debate over the “promise and perils” of carbon capture or sequestration have made a morning read of the Journal an information-rich experience. And the editorial focus on giving at least two opposing points of view on such matters is not a lock-step effort at meaningless “balance.” Of course, there are many more than two opposing opinions on all environmental issues, so balanced reporting reducing opinion to a mere dichotomy can be misleading. And there are connections between issues that “balance” always misses.
Take for instance the capturing and “burying” CO2 underground, and the underground storage of nuclear waste. They are intimately, though not always obviously, related. Using nuclear energy of any sort as a “green solution” is potentially — I’d say inevitably — calamitous because of its highly radioactive, lethal waste. Searching for geologically stable underground environments for the storage of nuclear waste has been politically and scientifically all but impossible. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) outside of Carlsbad is the only underground storage facility for nuclear waste in the country. And by law and negotiated agreements it’s already nearing full capacity. The problem with WIPP is the geology. Its storage is a half a mile down in unstable salt deposits between two bodies of underground water, in a geological situation that includes karst with its many fissures. And WIPP will never be large enough to contain anywhere near all the commercial and military nuclear waste in the country, much less new waste from so-called “green” nuclear solutions.
Finding stable geological environments for carbon sequestration could be just as difficult. But being able to capture CO2, perhaps even out of the atmosphere, and certainly on-site where it’s produced by oil and gas, is crucial for not only reducing CO2 emissions but even diminishing its existing hothouse presence. Here again, though, we’re flying blind on a wing and a prayer. Nowhere do you read about how much physical, secure underground space would be required to have any kind of meaningful CO2 sequestration. Or what would happen if such sites sprung leaks, or how they might be fixed. We just don’t know enough. And we have to make a relatively huge investments to find out.
Hydrogen power is not an either/or proposition. Producing so-called blue hydrogen has serious environmental risks involved, if natural gas is used as the fuel to run the processes. And it might prove to be impossible to find enough geological storage room to handle all the new CO2 produced to create hydrogen power, which itself emits virtually no CO2 when used. But hydrogen is a legitimately “green solution” to creating an alternative to petroleum combustion, if it is created in a “green” fashion, not using natural gas but wind and solar energy, as well as other renewable sources, to run the process of isolating hydrogen from water.
There are more than two sides to the hydrogen issue, of course. One of hydrogen production’s many facets has to do with labor and skills conversion. In 2019, some 11% of the New Mexico’s workforce, or 28,268 plus workers, made their livings in oil and gas production and refinement. From what I can tell, a transition to green hydrogen would require much the same skills as many of those workers already possess. Hydrogen is a labor as well as a quality-of-life issue. A major part of the state’s workforce can’t be abandoned in good conscience because we refuse to invest in the safe form of hydrogen production while steaming ahead on the profoundly risky form that could create a world in which none of us can survive.
We may still be flying blind into the future, but the blinders of shoddy journalism in the recent past have been lifted up a bit, and at least we’re beginning to get a preliminary sketch of how far behind we are in acquiring the basic knowledge that might help us survive the climate crisis looming in our almost immediate future.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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