Two fascinating Journal stories on New Mexico’s oil and gas industry recently caught my eye – and two more got my attention only after someone else pointed them out (more on those later).

The first was the Sunday A1 article “New Mexico’s Emissions Battle: Some Question Rule Maker’s Environmental Ties.”

What grabbed me first was the prominent front-page picture of oil and gas industry mouthpiece Marita K. Noon of the Citizen’s Alliance for Responsible Energy. We’ve written about her before and questioned why, with her many misrepresentations and her hackneyed prose, the Journal keeps using her as a featured guest opinion writer.

The Journal story is ostensibly about a lawsuit filed by an environmental group aiming to force the state’s Environmental Improvement Board to adopt tougher standards on greenhouse gas emissions in order to help curb global warming. The article makes clear that the state’s oil and gas producers are diametrically opposed to tougher restrictions, which they say will devastate their industry and the state’s economy.

And then the article essentially devolves into an oil and gas-driven scorecard of each member of the Environmental Improvement Board, with Noon and others saying various members should be disqualified for their association with known environmental groups.

We learn that Noon has a special name for EIB chairman Gregory Green, who is a lobbyist for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, the New Mexico Audubon and the Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy.

She calls him “Greg Green and his Gang Green.”…aw, isn’t that just hilarious? (At least she didn’t call him a watermelon).

The story later quotes Green shrugging off Noon’s name calling with this: “Unfortunately in some circles, that is the level of debate.”

Indeed.

And the story goes on and on, listing each member and their (gasp) environmentalist ties, accompanied by scathing criticism from the oil and gas industry like Republican State Party Chairman Harvey Yates, Jr. (himself an oilman) and Journal cohort Terri Cole of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce.

I’m confused – isn’t it called the Environmental Improvement Board? Shouldn’t the people on it be concerned about protecting the environment? It’s not called the Promotion of the Oil and Gas Industry Board, is it?

Noon’s name calling brings me to the second article, “Oil, Gas Group Retools Approach.”

It’s all about how the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, with whom Noon works closely, recently fired longtime president Bob Gallagher for, well…we’re not sure. The Journal didn’t get an interview with Gallagher on the subject, instead choosing to repeat “Internet rumor mill” gossip that pressure from the Richardson administration led to his firing (a claim the story admitted that a Richardson spokesperson “ridiculed”).

Also, the article paraphrases Gallagher’s interview with some other paper in which he says he was told he damaged the association’s image so badly he could no longer be effective.

We are pretty sure the gas producers are now looking for someone to speak for the industry who’s not quite as “adversarial” as the famously intense and acerbic Gallagher.

That’s because the story’s final quote comes from John Byrom, an NMOGA member who said he wants the association to build new, more positive relations with regulators, legislators and the new governor: “No more finger-pointing and name-calling.”

So, I can’t help but wonder – how does calling someone Gang Green fit into that?

Finally, I share former state Land Commissioner and former U.S. Bureau of Land Management director Jim Baca’s bemusement on his blog, Only in New Mexico, at the Journal’s juxtaposition of two other oil-and-gas related pieces Sunday  – one a guest op-ed and one a news story.

The guest op-ed was from an oil and gas lobbyist decrying the New Mexico Pit Rule that would require the industry to be responsible for keeping the state’s groundwater clean.

The news story was about, writes Baca: …”the very real possibility of a gigantic sinkhole opening up and swallowing part of Carlsbad because of oil and gas related extraction of brine water from the site. The owner of the company that caused it said it was the state’s fault for not having tougher regulations.”

I could comment further, but do I really need to? The mixed messages here really boggle the mind.