Common Ground Community Trust

New Mexico’s oil and gas bonding system was never designed to protect the public. It was designed to protect extraction.

For decades, companies were allowed to post bonds as low as $10,000 while cleanup costs exploded into the hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions. The result is abandoned wells, contaminated groundwater, methane leaks, toxic spills, and billions in liabilities pushed onto taxpayers.

Now the system is starting to crack open.

This week’s State Land Office hearing exposed the real crisis: New Mexico is trying to manage a climate emergency, worsening drought, collapsing water security, and industrial contamination while still operating under an extraction model built on denial and deferred accountability.

The public was promised prosperity. What communities inherited were orphan wells, poisoned land, rising cleanup costs, and a growing landscape of environmental sacrifice zones.

This is not just about bonding reform anymore.

It is about whether New Mexico continues subsidizing environmental collapse while corporations walk away with the profits.

My latest OpEd:
“New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Bonding Scam Is Finally Being Exposed”

https://open.substack.com/pub/elainecimino652909/p/new-mexicos-oil-and-gas-bonding-scam?r=281p2&utm_medium=ios

The South Valley fire was not just a local fire story.

It exposed how fragile and delayed public-health response systems can become during industrial disasters — even in a major metropolitan area already burdened by pollution, drought, wildfire smoke, and expanding industrial infrastructure.

This essay connects the South Valley plastics fire, the Southern California chemical emergency, Project Ranger, military-industrial expansion, and the growing push to weaken environmental review and public oversight in the name of “economic development” and “permitting reform.”

Communities are being asked to absorb more risk while receiving fewer protections.

Before The Next Fireball The failure of cumulative risk review