Climate change in New Mexico is the scourge of the homeless, the elderly, the poor and their children, students old and young, even moderate-income families, and those living on marginal fixed incomes with no opportunity for expanded earnings. It can’t be said enough. Climate change is as much a social disease as it is an anomaly of the atmosphere. Portraying it as a hoax is a form of callousness equivalent to criminality, a double hoax itself designed to protect polluters. It’s not unlike manufacturing children’s cereal in a filthy garage and selling it as health food.
Climate change is known for its extremes. This August was the hottest on record in New Mexico. September was the wettest. We all suffered from those exaggerated conditions in one way or another.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the September deluge caused flooding all over the state, some quite severe. There were even fatalities on the Navajo reservation near Newcomb when two adults and a child were literally washed away down an arroyo. The city of Clovis was particularly hard hit with water damage to many homes and roads. Dozens of drivers were trapped in their vehicles by the rising waters.
Santa Fe County near Cañoncito was blocked off by flooding and numerous households were stranded, according to the New Mexican. The social impact of continuous days in the high 90s or 100s was worse, it seems, than the flooding,
particularly if your home didn’t have air conditioning or had an old swamp cooler that couldn’t keep up with the heat. Without some way to escape the withering boil of the sun, older people with health issues, and invalids in general were put in grave danger.
As in all social conditions involving weather, money is the deciding factor. Climate change and its miseries are class issues of intractable ferocity. It’s all about where you live and how cool your home can get. The poorer you are, the hotter you are. And the hotter you are over long periods of time, the more damage your health
could suffer.
The terrible thing here is that so many of us live below the poverty line. In 2024, some 343,235 New Mexican’s were living with dire financial troubles. The census reckons that means that some 140,602 households suffer from lack of sufficient funds. The census also takes into consideration other households whose basic household budget is precarious and unable to afford such niceties as air conditioning. This means in total there are some 356,394 New Mexican working households barely keeping afloat, a condition known in government jargon as ALICE, meaning “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed households.”
Climate change impacts hardworking New Mexicans in devastating ways, one that a billionaire president who calls both climate change and “affordability” a hoax, could never possibly comprehend, even if he wanted to.
Some of us who started out our lives as poorly paid, barely employed workers, myself included, never forget what’s it’s like not to be able to protect yourself
from the elements when they turn against you. Being cold or overheated in your own home, or sloshing around under a leaky roof, is a bleak experience made monstrously cruel when it’s known to be a human-made phenomenon that perhaps could have been solved by humans if they hadn’t been driven to denial by the very polluters in the oil and gas industry that create and sustain this ongoing catastrophe to this day. As it stands, somewhere close to half of all New Mexicans know the cruelty of this experience firsthand. It’s a political abomination.
If you’re old and infirm or young and fragile, not being able get out of the heat in your own home can be life threatening. The weeks of high 90- and 100-degree weather this year caused so many cases of heat sickness in workers that medical and support services were profoundly stressed. Health agencies reported a steep rise in emergency visits, reaching close to 800 heat-related cases in 60 days—ranging from muscle cramps, extreme fatigue to near fatal heat stroke, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.
The heat devastated farmers of Eastern New Mexico who struggled with extremely dry conditions during the winter wheat planting season. Southern New Mexico pecan farmers took it especially hard as well, losing large amounts of water to evaporation during the hot spell. Some farmers were forced to turn to less water-intensive pistachio farming.
Reading reports and scouring the news, I get the feeling that the full impact of too much heat and too much water has not been studied with anywhere near the kind of rigor, or explained with the kind of clarity, that would have an activating impact on public opinion. And yet, clearly, the conjunction of these two powerful forces of nature on the wellbeing of all New Mexicans, especially the poor and infirm, could well become a defining characteristic of our state in the hot and wet decades and centuries ahead.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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