Letters to the editor

It’s a conundrum

Editor:

Guess what! Australia is giving its citizens free solar electricity for several hours every day! Because most Aussies use these hours of free electricity to do high-energy tasks and recharge their home batteries, it helps the utility by reducing their load during peak use hours.

Everybody benefits. (Unlike the United States, Australia’s oil barons and right-wingers haven’t the power to hinder every step of their renewable energy transition, nor do they have an extremely addled president determined to destroy the nation’s wind and solar projects.)

For New Mexico, the global financial firm Lazard offers the following levelized cost figures: A new solar photovoltaic plant costs about $38-$78 per MGw (megawatt hour) and the fuel is free. A new gas fired plant costs about $70-$123 per MGw, nearly twice as much. While a gas plant is designed to withdraw 2,800 gallons of water per MGw, the PV plant uses almost none.

Recently the News-Bulletin published a letter that proclaimed “[Democrats will] be surprised to learn that renewables are not going to power the upcoming requirements for AI and all the data centers.” Yeah, I’d be real surprised, since that’s the exact opposite of what’s actually happening.

The industry is installing solar and wind power facilities as fast as possible. Maybe the letter writer should drive over to Los Lunas’ West Side to look at the giant solar installation Facebook/Meta installed to power their local facility.

Fossil fuel industries reportedly contributed about $1 billion to Donald Trump’s recent election campaign. But boy, did they get a deal! The Guardian newspaper reports that, in return, the U.S. currently subsidizes explicit fossil fuel costs at $35 billion yearly. (On the other hand, the U.S. taxpayer pays for the approximately $730 billion yearly in increased costs for environmental degradation and health care caused by burning fossil fuels.)

In spite of all the right-wing hissy fits, photovoltaic solar has accounted for 88 percent of new U.S. electrical generating capacity in the last two years. And that doesn’t include all the small-scale rooftop systems.

So we’re at a crossroads. Do we continue transitioning to non-polluting renewables? Or do we go back to burning Trump’s beloved fossil fuels until our coasts are flooded, our forests burnt, and staple crop yields shrinking from sea to shining sea?

Laura F. Sanchez

Los Lunas

New Mexico isn’t all that bad

Editor:

Ms. Crawford in her letter in the News-Bulletin (Oct. 20, 2025) has once again unfortunately fallen into a common pattern of the radical right — only citing partial facts to back up their assertions.

Ms. Crawford stated New Mexico ranks first in most violent crimes, first in having the largest percentage of people receiving state aid, second in highest poverty rates, fourth highest in suicide rates, one of the highest for Covid-19 deaths.

She also cited New Mexico being ranked last in educational systems in the country. Ms. Crawford then points to these “facts” as justifying her contention that it is due to Democratic control of the state for 100 years (it’s actually only from the 1930s, but why nit-pick?) that New Mexico is so back off.

What she failed to mention is that the other states which share the lowest ratings in education and the highest ratings in poverty, crime, etc., are consistently states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Oklahoma and others — all of which are strongly Republican-run states.

No, it is not a matter of which party has a majority in a given state, it is a far more complex combination of financial and societal issues which result in the vicious cycle of lack of education leading to poverty leading to crime leading to further poverty and so on.

We must remember that it is our Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham who is using state funds to help those people who are losing their food benefits due to the Republican shutdown. Further, Gov. Lujan Grisham has made New Mexico the first state in the nation to offer free day care to any New Mexico — allowing parents to work and raise our economic status.

Further, our state is supplementing subsidies for health care through BeWell New Mexico. I think the reason Democrats keep getting elected to our state government is because New Mexicans can appreciate policies which benefit working people, socially-marginalized people and which fight for the rights of all people — not just the privileged and wealthy.

Finally, I would ask people on the radical right to please stop stating that undocumented immigrants are getting Medicaid. The facts, again, are that undocumented immigrants, just like any foreign visitor to our country, can access emergency medical care through a special Medicaid funded program.

They cannot receive regular or ongoing medical care through Medicaid — only emergency medical care for emergent medical issues.

Ron Lahti

Belen