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A recent report from the Santa Fe New Mexican details far-left anti-energy “climate change” alarmist groups opposing Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) transferring its share of the coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant to the Farmington-based Navajo Transitional Energy Co. (NTEC). 

These extreme anti-energy groups opposing the transfer include the radical “350.org,” which wants to “Stop and ban all oil, coal and gas projects from being built” and the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, which has endorsed the expensive, economy crippling Green New Deal. 

The radical groups that comprise what they call the “Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy” contend that transferring the plant from PNM to the Navajo Nation-owned NTEC would let the economy stabilize powerplant “ stay open and keep polluting.” 

The groups opposing the transaction are hell-bent on closing the powerplant for good, by hook or by crook, with claims that PNM’s proposed contract with NTEC “will make it harder to shut down the power plant, said the adviser,” according to the Sierra Club’s technical adviser Jeremy Fisher of Oakland, Calif.

Fisher, who doesn’t even live in New Mexico, said, “the plant is the state’s largest stationary source of greenhouse gas emissions,” reports the New Mexican.

Another out-of-state Sierra Club representative, Matt Gerhart of Denver, Colorado, claimed the plant’s transfer to NTEC is “flawed,” arguing that it is “a bad deal for ratepayers and for the environment and for the people who live in the shadows of the Four Corners plant.”

PNM’s vice president, Tom Fallgren, Fallgren “said the deal with NTEC would preserve jobs at Four Corners, benefit the Navajo Nation, save PNM customers money and enable PNM to move to carbon-free energy faster. He also lauded the decision by plant owners to reduce emissions by 20 percent to 25 percent by going to seasonal operations in 2023,” according to the New Mexican.

But Stephanie Dzur, an attorney for the Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy, demeaned the powerplant, saying PNM has chosen an odd way to unload the “crappy old, polluting” Four Corners plant. “They want to abandon the plant to a coal company,” she said.

This is not the first time a coal-powered generating station has been closed due to out-of-state influences on the Land of Enchantment, most corrosively through 2019’s Energy Transition Act (ETA), the most extreme state-wide anti-energy bill in the country to install the “Green New Deal.” 

Previously, UNM was forced to close the San Juan Generating Station (pictured) due to the ETA. According to the Farmington Daily Times, the 2022 closure of the powerplant will “mean the loss of one of the major economic drivers in the county as well as approximately 1,500 direct and indirect jobs, with [a] high proportion of that workforce being Navajo.” 

It appears that far-left Democrats and out-of-state anti-energy groups are doing whatever necessary to displace more Navajo energy workers from their jobs to the chagrin of public officials, such as state Rep. Melanie Stansbury who said these displaced workers can just “sell your art and your wool.”