More Lost ‘Horizons’: How New Mexico’s Climate Plan Flamed Out Again

The Clear Horizons & Emissions Codification Act died on the New Mexico Senate floor when seven Democratic senators joined all of the minority Republican caucus to kill it. While several Democrats spoke in favor of the bill, also known as SB18, not one person spoke against it — a hint that the vote was decided before the Feb. 11 hearing began. 

When Sen. William Sharer (R-San Juan), the minority floor leader, voted, you could hear the sing-song in his “No!” 

After the vote tally was read — 19-23 — bill sponsor Sen. Mimi Stewart (D-Bernalillo) quietly said, “Thank you to the body for the discussion,” though there had been no real discussion.

In a later interview, Stewart said Republicans didn’t fight the bill that day because “they didn’t need to. They could just wait for the seven Democrats that voted with them.”

But there was plenty to discuss. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham exhorted the Legislature to “put it in law! Put it in law! Put it in law!” during her state of the state address that kicked off the ongoing legislative session.

And the bill — an attempt to finally codify and expand Lujan Grisham’s third executive order after taking office in 2019 — called for a series of gradual reductions in the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions over the next 24 years, leading to a return to 2005 emission levels or lower by 2050. 

The effort to reduce the climate altering emissions was often referred to as a “100% reduction by 2050,” which apparently confused some. Senate Republicans sent out a crowing press release right after the vote, with unflattering photos of the bill’s sponsors and the incorrect claim that the bill was a “‘zero emissions’ environmental mandate by the year 2050.” 

Actually, the bill had explicit carve-outs excluding sources emitting less than 10,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, like small businesses and agricultural interests. It also contained a provision proposed by oil and gas companies to allow large polluters — like oil and gas companies — to offset their emissions elsewhere in the state, rather than requiring reductions at their point of production.

Opponents did speak up in earlier hearings on the bill. Arguments were directed at unspecified costs to a broad spectrum of people, from ranchers to farmers to electric companies. There were claims that the bill would hurt the state’s oil and gas industry, with catastrophic economic effects for New Mexico.

However, the biggest producers in New Mexico already have greenhouse gas reduction goals that equal or better what was in the Clear Horizons Act. Chevron has committed to net-zero operational emissions by 2050. Oxy has plans to do so before 2040, “with an ambition to do so before 2035.” ExxonMobil committed to the same in the Permian Basin by 2030. 

Producers have extra impetus to reach these goals from the European Union, a major American market that has implemented stringent reporting requirements on fossil fuel imports leading to steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the production and supply chains. The group began phasing in reduction goals last year, beginning with information on the origins, monitoring, loss reductions and system repairs for all oil, gas and coal imported into the European Union.

At the bill’s second hearing on Feb. 7, Matthew Gonzales spoke as a vice president with the Consumer Energy Alliance. The group describes itself as an advocate for “affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy solutions” that “benefit everyday Americans” and is backed by a large swath of businesses, chambers of commerce and fossil fuel and power companies. At the hearing, he said SB18 “is a disaster for rural and tribal New Mexico.” The alliance ran the same anti-SB18 ad on Facebook and Instagram 10 times over the three days before the vote. 

Gonzales is also a registered lobbyist with the political consulting firm HBW Resources of Houston and Washington, D.C., and he has been at the center of a controversial plan to build a new pipeline across the Navajo Nation. First planned for hydrogen, it is now proposed to carry natural gas from Farmington, New Mexico, into Arizona. 

HBW Resources also manages Western States and Tribal Nations, a trade group of natural gas producers and affiliated industries pushing for increased gas production and exports from the intermountain west. The group’s chairman, Jason Sandel, is a friend of Gov. Lujan Grisham and the president of Aztec Well Servicing in Farmington. At the same bill hearing, he said he was worried about his employees. “When you impact me, you impact the unaffordability crisis in our society,” he said.

Michael D’Antonio, a lobbyist for Xcel Energy, an electric utility that powers part of the southeast corner of the state, said, “Please vote no to protect our most vulnerable families.” 

Xcel Energy subsidiary the Southwestern Public Service Company has a case before the Public Regulation Commission of New Mexico to build several new electric plants, including a pair of large gas-fired plants, in large part to power oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin, the most productive oil field in the nation. The larger of the two would be upwind and just over the Texas border a few miles from downtown Hobbs, New Mexico.

Stewart has a different target for her anger. 

“I point my finger at [the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association] for trying to confuse legislators, for giving them the wrong information and for trying as hard as they can to kill this bill,” she said. “It’s not fair what they do, I believe, by lying so much about the impacts.”

The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association is the state’s biggest, most influential and best-known oil industry trade group. In an interview with Capital & Main and New Mexico PBS in January, Missi Currier, the group’s president and CEO, and one of the state’s fiercest oil and gas promoters, said, “To get to an energy transition, you must first go through an energy expansion.”

She continued, “So will we transition from oil and gas one day? Yes. Is it going to happen in our lifetime? Probably not.”

In a lobbyist filing with the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office, Currier reported spending nearly $102,000 with McGuire Woods, a Virginia-based legal and government affairs firm, on ads opposing the bill in the days before its Senate hearing. Dozens of ads targeting individual Democratic legislators ran on Facebook and Instagram, and Stewart said she saw “TV ads trashing me every night.” 

A group called New Mexicans for Opportunity also ran ads opposing SB18, and made a YouTube video titled “No California Problems in New Mexico.” The public-sounding group is registered with the Secretary of State as a lobbying advertising campaign, and its entry on the department website names Currier as the person registering the campaign. 

The group’s website lists a who’s who of New Mexico chambers of commerce, oil trade groups, a conservative think tank and the Consumer Energy Alliance, among others, as members. Alex Curtas, director of communications at the Secretary of State’s Office, said that state law doesn’t require such groups to report ad spending until 15 days after the legislative session ends — March 6. 

Jessie Hunt, the communications director for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, referred questions about New Mexicans for Opportunity to the group’s website and didn’t respond to Stewart’s accusations. 

In a statement, Currier said the vote “underscores the widespread and bipartisan recognition that this legislation would have imposed costly and unrealistic mandates on families and businesses across our state.” She went on to say, “Our industry remains committed to reducing emissions, embracing innovation, and advancing responsible energy development.”

Stewart said that the senators who voted against the bill were “completely misinformed as to what the bill actually is. … They didn’t ask me a thing.”

Two of the seven Democrats who voted against the bill, Sen. George Muñoz (D-Gallup) and Sen. Benny Shendo (D-Jemez Pueblo), were the decisive votes killing a version of the Clear Horizons Act in last year’s session. None of the seven — including Sens. Roberto Gonzales, Shannon Pinto, Joseph Cervantes, Martin Hickey and Antonio Maestas — responded to requests for comment sent to their offices and to the Senate Democrats’ communications director.

Stewart said that without someone taking the lead to reduce methane emissions, “New Mexico is in for some terrible extreme weather and some horrible, just horrible things that are going to happen to us.” She cited fires, floods and the resulting difficulty of finding affordable home insurance. 

Camilla Feibelman, the director of the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, was one of the bill’s most vocal supporters — a yin to Currier’s yang. The day after the vote, in an interview with Capital & Main and New Mexico PBS, Feibelman echoed and expanded on Stewart’s thoughts. “There is no snow pack to speak of. This means no spring runoff, no recharge of our aquifers, curtailed irrigation. We have a new species of mosquito here in New Mexico. A member of the Senate’s husband has West Nile virus because of one of those mosquitoes,” she said. 

The last three years were not just the hottest on record — they were even warmer than the historic warming trend would predict. And some scientists are saying that if an El Niño sets up in the Pacific Ocean next year as expected, 2027 could be warmer still. 

“So the cost to our people and our state is profound,” Feibelman continued. “But … a majority of the Senate decided we would prefer to pay for those damages directly. And that’s what happened. I’m sorry about it.” 

Stewart said she will be back with another attempt next session because the underlying issues aren’t going away. “Climate change is not going to change between now and next January.”

“Technologies exist to do almost all of these reductions,” Feibelman said.

To be clear, opponents of SB18 weren’t the only ones buying ads. Feibelman is herself a registered lobbyist for the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, and she reported spending $6,800 for ads supporting SB18 in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Legislature’s hometown paper.

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