Mr. President: Address the Permian climate bomb | My View ... - Santa Fe New Mexican
Mr. President: Address the Permian climate bomb | My View | santafenewmexican.com
New Mexico is blessed with abundant sunshine, wind and wide-open spaces, which should make it an epicenter for renewable energy production as our country shifts away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Our state is also home to the Permian Basin, one of the largest oil fields in the world. Under President Biden's leadership, the fossil fuel industry, which is the primary driver of the climate crisis, is booming.
Oil and gas production has reached historic highs and the pace of new drilling permits on public land is even faster than under the Trump presidency, with nearly two-thirds of Biden-approved permits coming from New Mexico. So much climate-destroying greenhouse gases are being spewed into the atmosphere from oil produced in the Permian Basin that the area is known as a global carbon bomb, and extraction is only accelerating.
Related Knowledge Center: Methane
As the production of natural gas from shale fields has expanded, so have methane emissions. U.S. methane emissions grew 27 percent from 1990 to 2009, according to the Energy Information Administration. Methane contributes about 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.