State needs to face climate change head on

Stifling heat, brutal winds and massive wildfires. Extreme storms, flooding and still a years-long drought. Welcome to New Mexico’s summer of 2024.

Before the summer solstice even arrived, much of our state was experiencing 100-degree temperatures.

Then “fire season” blew up with a pair of wildfires in the Ruidoso area, while the 2-year-old Hermit’s Peak burn scar led to flooding in Las Vegas as the Gallinas River overflowed its banks.

No corner of the state is immune from what’s to come, which is probably going to be more extreme than in seasons past. The earth is warming up worldwide; this year is already on track to be the hottest on record, surpassing the previous hottest year on record, last year. 

So what can we do about it? Plenty, actually, if we’d only face it — both the dangers and the opportunities — head-on.

The dangers to climate change are expansive. Immigration and border disputes, energy production and consumption, the economy and the environment will all be impacted by a warming world, with solutions becoming harder to achieve the longer we wait. That’s why it’s imperative that we make both short-term and long-term plans to combat climate change, to survive and thrive into the future.

In the short-term, we need to prepare for larger and more frequent weather events.

As a state and a nation, we need to invest more heavily in our emergency response. From the hotshots who battle the wildfires to the volunteers who protect our small communities, firefighters need to be well equipped and better paid to do their jobs.

Ditto for emergency medical responders, who are often the difference between life and death. And you can bet your bottom dollar that police must be well funded to address the disruptions to law and order that will certainly come.

In other words, we need to invest in the here-and-now, to offset the harm that a changing climate is and will be causing. We need to be ready for the coming crisis.

We also need to invest in a future that’s sustainable, which means more clean, renewable energy sources.

New Mexico, with its Energy Transition Act of 2019, has already taken big steps to move away from coal, oil and gas, to wind, solar and other cleaner alternatives, which makes us a leader in our collective quest for a better future.

But we’re a small state, and we still need our oil-and-gas revenues to maintain a healthy state budget, so we’re only a drop in the bucket. We must turn to the federal government for real leadership, and therein lies the rub.

With the world’s largest economy, the United States could lead the way in saving the planet. We just don’t have the political will. 

“The climate emergency is a race we are losing,” the secretary-general of United Nations, António Guterres, has said, “but it is a race we can win.”

He’s right, humanity now has the technology and the ability to reduce carbon emissions and clean up our atmosphere. But it’s hard to see it happening without the U.S. stepping up.

This is an opportunity we can’t pass up, to lead the world toward a cleaner future.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]