City Hall brings Las Cruces together to talk about clean energy and water
Las Crucins residents learned how they can save money on their energy bills by upgrading their homes during a town hall meeting on August 14 on the campus of New Mexico State University.
The town hall was sponsored by the Sierra Club and the Semillas Project to provide citizens with information about rebates, improvements and other issues related to climate change and the climate crisis.
Camilla Feibelman of the Sierra Club told attendees that the 52 days in 2023 when temperatures in the city rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit meant higher electricity bills, increased costs for medical treatment for heat stress and other health emergencies, increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases and water shortages.
“This is unbearable for the most vulnerable members of our community,” Feibelman said.
Climate change, she said, requires us to think about how renewable energy could have a positive impact on the city and its residents.
Speakers who delved deeper into the issue of a smart response to climate change included Reps. Nathan Small and Angelica Rubio, Luis Cifuentes, NMSU vice president for research, Patrick Noland, executive director of Friends of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, and Aline Castelan Gonzalez, campaign and program director for the Semilla Project.
Each panelist told the audience what their organization is doing to address the challenges posed by increasing heat and scarce water supplies and to raise awareness of these issues among the public, especially workers.
Cifuentes pointed to the need to train and certify workers in the technical skills related to renewable energy generation and manufacturing, work that is already underway at NMSU’s Arrowhead Center and the university’s new Global Campus.
Noland stressed the need for New Mexico’s people to have access to public lands, saying job creation in the sector aligns well with conservation efforts.
“If we want to mitigate the impacts of climate change, protecting our public spaces and public lands is a critical way to do that,” Noland said.
New Mexico’s renewable energy and energy conservation programs have made great strides over the past decade. The state passed the Energy Transition Act in 2019, which called for a strategic shift away from coal, oil, and gas energy toward wind and solar while reducing pollution and emissions. The Produced Water Act was passed in 2019 and was designed to protect the state’s water by regulating the disposal of wastewater, primarily from the oil and gas industry.
Small said these laws and other efforts have made New Mexico a national leader in producing clean, sustainable energy.
“When we talk about a just transition, it’s about more economic opportunity, more prosperity, more jobs… while also dramatically reducing carbon emissions,” Small said.
Rubio echoed this sentiment, saying, “We tend to forget the people who are affected by this every day.”
According to the Semilla Project, 133 people attended the town hall meeting, some of whom asked panel members questions about water quality in Doña Ana County communities, the extension of power lines onto private property and the health protections of farmworkers.
Feibelman said that to find a just and fair way forward, everyone must ask themselves what compromise is acceptable to them.
“Sometimes it’s, ‘Yes, in my backyard.’ Yes to solutions. We all give and we all take, and we need to make sure that happens fairly,” Feibelman told the crowd.
