The oil and gas industry has a lot to answer for, everywhere in the world, including New Mexico. Fossil fuel extraction processes, particularly venting and flaring, are the direct cause of some $7.3 billion in health costs in our country every year, according to a study conducted recently by the Boston University School of Public Health. Nearly 809,000 oil wells are active today in the United States, many of them near population centers. Evidence from numerous sources shows that the pollution they generate is a source of cancers, immunodeficiencies, liver damage, and neurological disorders, not to mention climate change.
What makes this all the more intolerable is that media mouthpieces for Big Oil are masters of pathetic outbursts of laughable indignation and self-pity.
Take what happened last March in New Mexico. When our Commissioner of Public Lands, Stephanie Garcia Richard, wanted to raise the royalty cap on oil and gas from 20% to 25%, she met with the usual moaning and badmouthing from the drilling giants of our state. Then, when she refused to allow Big Oil companies to drill on state property if they didn’t cough up the 25%, the Albuquerque Journal’s editorial page went ballistic, behaving like a snide, inhouse propaganda machine.
The Journal made it seem as if the raising the royalties would somehow decrease the production of oil and gas in New Mexico, an utterly absurd idea, of course. We’re the second-largest crude oil producing state in the country after Texas. We could charge 50% royalties and companies wouldn’t even consider abandoning the billions of barrels of petroleum still in the ground.
Our state land commissioner has one job — fulfilling the fiduciary responsibility to raise money for New Mexico’s public schools, universities, and hospitals from the 9 million surface acres and 13 million mineral acres of public lands in our state. The money goes to help support more than twenty educational and health institutions, including all the state’s universities, the schools for the deaf and visually handicapped, Carrie Tingley Children’s Hospital, the state penitentiary, the state mental institution, and the Miners Hospital.
The state land commissioner would not be doing her job if she didn’t do everything in her power to maximize revenue from state lands. Commissioner Garcia Richards is doing a record-breaking job of just that, breaking the $1 billion barrier five years ago, and last year generating $2.75 billion, much of it from fossil fuel companies who tirelessly pat themselves on the back for paying royalties.
Big Oil portrays its royalty burden in New Mexico as if it was some kind of colossal charity, not an enormously rich, profit-making enterprise that pays tax deductible royalties for the privilege of making money from extracting the bountiful, but finite, petroleum resources of our state.
Fossil fuel companies are perpetually trying to make themselves look better than they are. But their PR baloney is starting to fail them. A story in The Guardian last week, for instance, carried this headline: “Majority of US voters support climate litigation against big oil, poll show.” The story goes on to say that nearly half of American voters would “back an even more aggressive legal strategy of filing criminal charges” against Big Oil for “allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis.” Big Oil “knew pollution from the use of fossil fuels could have lethal consequences and yet still fought to delay climate action, which could be grounds for charges of reckless or negligent homicide.”
In July 2022, the Associated Press published a story by David Klepper that covered the contents of a leaked memo from the American Petroleum Institute. The memo said in part that “victory” over climate science “will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science… Unless ‘climate change’ becomes a non-issue… there may be no moment when we can declare victory.” Klepper wrote that starting in the 1980’s, “fossil fuel companies poured millions of dollars into public relation campaigns denouncing the accumulating evidence supporting the idea of climate change.”
We know now that Big Oil, including the companies and their stockholders who profit from extracting oil and gas from New Mexico’s San Juan and Permian Basins, has contributed to creating climate conditions that have led to so many wild fires in our country that the economic costs, not to mention human costs, approach upwards of $900 billion a year.
There’s no “victory” in sight for Big Oil now. Let’s hope it will stow its kvetching, whining, lying and boasting, and start accepting financial responsibility for the sickening environmental mess that is the universal byproduct of its profits.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
I always count on you not only to tackle the big issues but to give us the important details that tell us precisely how the greedy try to get away with their crimes. Thank you for years of this important, accurate, reporting.
My brother Jim Baca is giving you a standing ovation. He was Land Commissioner twice and this issue gave him a kind of malaise from which he has never recovered, even decades later.
Carlota
P.S. Next issue: The 1872 Mining Law — still the law of the land.