I grew up in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a small town in the Permian Basin. It remains a lovely place, but in its current state, it is not the town I once knew.
The climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction are reaching a point of irreversibility.
While oil and gas have always been a part of life here, the most recent boom brought by horizontal drilling has changed my hometown in fundamental ways. Over the past four years, Carlsbad has seen revenue and profit from oil and gas spike, but we’ve also suffered the consequences of unsustainable growth.
Since the most recent boom, I have seen too many people suffer from rare and unexplained cancers. It hit home as I watched my mother go through chemo for stage 3 ovarian cancer, which is aggressive and rare for someone her age. While there is no way to definitively link those sicknesses to the oil and gas industry, we do believe that the state’s failure to regulate drilling and fracking is at least a contributing factor.
There are other downsides. When fossil fuel workers flooded our small community, people across Carlsbad coined the phrase “stay alive on 285,” referring to the overload of traffic and deadly car wrecks along the highway. At times, it seems, my hometown has been transformed into a wasteland filled with tragedy.
But New Mexicans know our future is not beholden to a single harmful industry. We have the opportunity to invest in a robust, diverse clean energy economy that will create good new jobs. That transition will be smoother the faster we work to phase out oil and gas drilling on millions of acres of public lands.
Since January, the Biden administration has paused all new oil and gas leases on federal lands. With global oil profits plummeting, it is an opportune time to analyze the true economic, health and environmental impacts of the leasing system involved in fossil fuel extraction.
Right now, the state’s oil and gas industry is running multi-million dollar advertising campaigns claiming that students are dependent on their industry for an education, yet New Mexico public schools consistently rank among the nation’s worst.
Being trapped in the tight grip of oil and gas executives is not sustainable, and we must decouple oil and gas revenue from funding critical services like schools and health care.
Moreover, the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction are reaching a point of irreversibility. Southeast New Mexico is currently on the throes of the worst drought we’ve ever seen. Over the last year, a mere 2.4 inches of rainfall have been recorded, an extreme drop from past years. With fracking and drilling, we are depleting delicate groundwater upon which our communities, farmers and ranchers rely.
As a young woman who has seen drastic changes in this community over my lifetime, I know the industry’s impact has left our air and water polluted, our schools and public services dangerously vulnerable, public health in crisis, and our climate on the edge of a dangerous tipping point. But now, we have an opportunity to break a generations-long toxic cycle.
The Biden administration should expeditiously phase out new leasing for fossil fuels on public lands. There are hundreds of Carlsbads across this country — places that have lived through the toxic fossil fuel legacy and want healthier and safer communities for those who come after us.
They deserve a better deal.
This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.