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THE INTERFACE
Green Light
Advocates hope third time’s the charm at the Legislature for the Green Amendment
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BY JULIA GOLDBERG @votergirl
When The New Yorker magazine began serializing Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, her “fable for tomorrow” struck a deep chord in the American psyche. She wrote of “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings” until one spring when “a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.” Moreover: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had snuffed out life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”
Carson’s fable served as introduction to her painstaking research on synthetic pesticides, DDT in particular. Silent Spring ultimately sold millions of copies and, as the New York Times wrote on the book’s 50th anniversary, influenced “the environmental movement as no one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond.”
Actor Mark Ruffalo references Silent Spring in his forward to Maya K. van Rossum’s book The Green Amendment: The People’s Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment. While important environmental milestones followed Silent Spring’s publication—such as passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency—“any honest accounting of where we are as a country must acknowledge that what has been won is woefully insufficient, that in the broader war to prevent the poisoning of the world, we are losing badly,” Ruffalo writes. He has no shortage of examples (Flint, Michigan’s contaminated water system being perhaps the most well-known), and convincingly concludes “existing laws have clearly failed us. They are neither strong enough nor serious enough to protect what matters most.”
A new strategy is needed, he writes, and van Rossum’s book “has the power to spark a new movement, just as Rachel Carson’s did so many years ago.”
New Mexico lawmakers, environmental activists and van Rossum herself will try—for the third time—to pass legislation during the session kicking off this week that would allow New Mexicans next year to vote on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing their environmental rights (nmgreenamendment.org). Specifically, New Mexico’s Green Amendment would repeal the state’s pollution control provisions and add a new section to Article 2 guaranteeing New Mexicans’ “right to clean and healthy air, water, soil and environments, a stable climate and self-sustaining ecosystems” and directing state, county and municipal governments “to serve as trustees” of New Mexico’s natural environments.
Green Amendments exist in Pennsylvania, Montana and New York, and are being advanced in Florida, Delaware, Washington, New Jersey, Hawaii, Iowa and Maine. The nonprofit Green Amendments for the Generations (forthegenerations.org), founded by van Rossum, is working to pass Green Amendments across the country and, ultimately, at the federal level.
Given the comparison between her book and Silent Spring, I asked van Rossum what she sees as a key difference between 2023 and 1962 in terms of effective environmental strategy.
She said regardless of whether one looked at the ‘60s or any decade right up to present time, “the way our laws work in New Mexico and nationwide is they really do presume pollution and degradation, and then figure out how much they’re going to allow through permits. They don’t start from the premise that clean water, clean air, a healthy environment, stable climate are actually fundamental rights of people.”
Federal laws from the 1970s, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, helped “ratchet down” pollution, van Rossum, a lawyer notes, “but then what happened is we didn’t advance the laws any further. We didn’t recognize that, ‘OK, we’ve made progress. Now, how do we ratchet up protection so that it increases over time?’”
The approach the Green Amendment takes appealed to sponsor state Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, also a lawyer and former law professor.
“When I first I heard about this, I thought, ‘Oh, joy, just what we need is another constitutional amendment that will be ignored,” Sedillo Lopez tells SFR. But then she read van Rossum’s book and, subsequently, every case involving a Green Amendment. “And I’ve just been so impressed with what people have been able to do using it,” she says, citing a recent case in Rochester, New York in which that state’s recently passed Green Amendment allowed opponents to successfully (so far) sue for protective measures involving a landfill in the area.
In New Mexico, Sedillo Lopez says water is her top priority when it comes to passing a Green Amendment. “We are not going to have enough water and we’re not going to have enough clean water,” she says. “And so the decisions that the state makes about water in the future are just going to be really important.”
The bill’s sponsor on the House side, state Rep. Joanne Ferrary, D-Las Cruces, referenced the battle environmental groups and residents in Chaparral, New Mexico undertook to fight off El Paso Electric’s new fossil fuel power plant construction in 2021, and how helpful a Green Amendment would have been at that time (the groups ultimately settled with the company). “A lot of kids and people in that area have asthma from [the existing plant], and they came out to object and were telling their stories, that their health had been sacrificed,” she says. “Just think what could have happened if we’d had [a Green Amendment].”
A Green Amendment is useful across a spectrum of environmental issues, van Rossum explains: “Usually, when you achieve a legal or regulatory success, it’s around one issue in a limited context. But the beauty of the Green Amendment is…we’re going to address all of these issues. We’re going to lift all boats. We’re going to be ensuring that all communities are protected equitably.”
The proposed language for the constitutional amendment, in fact, directs the state to protect environmental rights across gender, race and geography.
“We talk a lot about the importance of a green amendment for environmental justice communities and to address environmental sacrifice zones,” van Rossum says. “Too many Indigenous communities in the state of New Mexico are really suffering because the laws are allowing them to be sacrificed to pollution and degradation.”
Advocates also dismiss critics who say the Green Amendment will lead to frivolous and increased litigation. None of the states with these laws have seen an uptick in cases, van Rossum says, and “none of them have been identified or dismissed as frivolous. They’re all meaningful. So even if you did have a lot, as long as they were meaningful, that’s really what counts because it means you have a problem that needs to be fixed.”
Of course, Silent Spring had its critics too. Monsanto published a brochure in 1962 entitled “The Desolate Year,” mocking both the book and its author.
Needless to say, that brochure hasn’t aged well.
KATHERINE LEWIN
Youth climate activists stage a rally at the Roundhouse in 2020. Advocates say amending New Mexico’s constitution to enshrine residents’ environmental rights will help protect the state from threats ranging from extractive industries to nuclear pollution to climate change.
Left Out in the Sun
City solar panels involved in complex finance plan are generating far less power than expected
Solar panels on top of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center are owned by a private company and are producing far less power than expected.
BY ANDREW OXFORD oxford@sfreporter.com
The first thing to know about the solar panels on top of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center is that they’re not just solar panels but also a sort of complex financial instrument.
That, and they’re about to cost the city a chunk of money.
Installed about a decade ago as part of a bid to cut the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, the array and another like it at a compost facility off Airport Road have been generating far less power than anticipated, according to an assessment from city staff that found the arrays haven’t been maintained.
But while maintenance could boost the output of these solar panels, neither array belongs to the municipal government. Instead, the city has to untangle an arrangement that has left the government paying a California-based company for electricity from the arrays on city buildings at the same time the company has declined to maintain the systems it owns.
The solar arrays went up in 2012 and 2013 at a time when the city was tacking several new solar arrays onto municipal buildings, including at the Buckman Direct Diversion, Fire Station No. 3 and the Genoveva Chavez Community Center.
For the systems at the convention center and the compost facility, the city made an arrangement with a private, San Francisco-based company, MLH Cripple Creek Solar.
The city loaned the company more than $300,000 to build the array on top of the convention center, which it agreed to repay over 20 years with 2% interest. The company would own the solar panels and reap the tax credits that come from them. The city would pay the company for power generated by the solar panels through at least 2026, getting a rate subsidized by those tax credits.
“Tax credit makes the array cheaper, which makes the power cheaper,” Public Works Director Regina Wheeler tells SFR, explaining the thinking of the time, which was before she took the job.
With the arrays, Santa Fe would take a step towards cutting carbon emissions. And as part of the deal, the company would be responsible for maintaining the equipment. But MLH Cripple Creek Solar sold off the solar arrays to a firm based in Mill Valley, California—Dissigno Holdings— around 2016.
What would that company want with a couple of solar arrays in Santa Fe? Dissigno Holdings didn’t respond to a message from SFR. And its website doesn’t exactly spell out its interests in arrays like this one. Instead, it only describes the outfit as “a ‘slingshot’ advisory firm advancing climate ventures.”
Wheeler likens the situation to the way mortgages are bought and sold, turning these solar panels into a financial instrument that’s supposed to be attractive to investors for the revenue the arrays generate.
In this case, the revenue for investors is the money the city has contractually agreed to pay for power generated by the solar panels.
But Wheeler tells SFR the company isn’t situated to actually maintain the arrays.
There’s another wrinkle, according to city staff: The panels have not been putting out as much power as expected.
The city initially promoted the system as producing over 170,000 kilowatt-hours per year—about 11% of the convention center’s energy needs. The power would offset more than 3,675 tons of greenhouse gasses over 20 years.
In 2022, the solar panels on top of the convention center were only producing 19% of the energy anticipated. That’s about $20,000 of lost value, according to a city assessment. The solar panels on top of the compost facility were faring even worse, putting out less than 1% of the anticipated power. That’s nearly $23,000 in lost value, the city says.
City staff report in a memo to councilors that they contacted Dissigno Holdings in January 2022, asking the company to repair the systems. But the company said it could not, according to the memo. So the city stopped paying Dissigno for power from the solar arrays.
Dissigno is now offering to turn over ownership of the arrays to the city in a proposed deal that started wending through City Council committees this week. Even so, repairs are expected to cost nearly $95,000, according to city staff.
Councilor Carol Romero-Wirth, chair of the council’s Finance Committee, said Tuesday morning she was not familiar with the matter.
The memo says repairs would bring the arrays up to generating 154,000 kilowatt-hours, with an estimated value of $45,000 a year combined. Agreements for generating the power would also bring in a combined $40,000 a year in value.
The wrangling is the legacy of a convoluted deal in the push to get more of the city’s power from solar energy. But even if attractive at the time, such deals may lose their luster in the future as Mayor Alan Webber pushes for more solar energy at city facilities. The sort of tax credit that was available for building the array a decade ago wasn’t available to the city government, making it more attractive to contract with a private business. The Inflation Reduction Act passed last year, however, gives cities new financial incentives for building such solar arrays, potentially making such deals unnecessary.
-Regina Wheeler, City of Santa Fe Public Works director
