The Spirit of ’06: As New Mexico’s LCFS approaches, health outcomes hang in the balance

On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill that many American businesses believed would ruin them.

The Pure Food and Drugs Act had been opposed for more than two decades by patent-medicine manufacturers, whiskey rectifiers, and food producers who warned that regulation would destroy consumer choice, cripple commerce, and hand the federal government powers it was never meant to have. One congressman scoffed that Washington would soon be cutting Americans’ “toenails and corns.” Others denounced the law as a creeping form of socialism.

Roosevelt signed it anyway.

He did so not because he distrusted markets, but because he had come to distrust what markets do when harm can be hidden—when ingredients go undisclosed, when risk is displaced, and when the public pays the bill later, quietly, through sickness rather than receipts. The law forced honesty. Baby “soothing syrups” laced with morphine could no longer masquerade as medicine. Alcohol and cocaine could no longer be sold as cure-alls. Industrial preservatives like borax and formaldehyde could no longer pass as progress. Labels had to mean something. Once they did, no serious American wanted to go back.

The argument sounded radical in 1906. It sounds familiar today. America has a long habit of resisting health regulation until the costs of inaction become undeniable. When those costs are finally counted—not in theory, but in bodies—the country tends to move quickly. And then, just as quickly, it forgets the fight ever happened.

We often invoke the Spirit of ’76 as rebellion against rules. In practice, it was something more disciplined than that. The colonies did not declare independence so they could do whatever they wanted. They declared independence so they could build a system strong enough to protect life, liberty, and the long term—together. They were not merely becoming independent. They were becoming states in a union, bound by shared standards precisely because the absence of standards had proven too costly.

Back to the Spirit of ’06, New Mexico-style

That same American instinct—resistance, reckoning, reform—ran through 1906. And it is running again now.

Later this month, New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board is expected to finalize the state’s Clean Transportation Fuel Program, a market-based standard designed to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels over time. The debate around the rule has been framed, predictably, as a climate story. It isn’t. At heart, this is a public-health decision dressed in regulatory clothing. Transportation remains one of the largest sources of harmful air pollution in New Mexico. Those pollutants do not distribute themselves evenly. They concentrate along highways, freight corridors, and in communities already carrying disproportionate health burdens. The costs appear not at the pump, but later—in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, missed school days, lost work, and shortened lives.

Public health, on its own, is not self-executing. It is a signal—urgent, morally compelling, and often well evidenced—but a signal nonetheless. Without a carrier, it dissipates. Capital is that carrier. It is the medium through which health objectives are embodied in plants, equipment, supply chains, and services that can scale, persist, and replicate. A health initiative that produces no investable goods or services has no way to travel. Capital without a coherent health signal moves quickly—but blindly. Policy succeeds only when the signal and the carrier are aligned.

This is where low-carbon fuel standards succeed or fail.

The Clean Transportation Fuel Program does not ban fuels. It does not mandate a single technology. It does something more characteristically American: it forces honesty. By accounting for fuels on a full lifecycle basis—from production through use—it asks whether the real costs of energy are paid up front or deferred to the public. The cheapest gallon at the pump is often the most expensive gallon a society can buy once health care costs are included. The cheapest way to treat disease, after all, is not to treat it at all.

What distinguishes New Mexico’s rulemaking is that this alignment between health and capital formation was not theoretical. It played out in real time, in the details. Three groups of advanced fuel producers entered the rulemaking process with distinct technologies and business models, but with a shared concern: whether the program’s accounting was rigorous enough to reward genuine reductions in harm, and stable enough to justify multi-decade capital investments. None sought exemption from the standard itself. All sought clarity.

The first group—the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Producers, including Gevo, NEXT Renewable Fuels, and World Energy—focused on how alternative jet fuel would be credited relative to diesel. Aviation is among the hardest sectors to decarbonize and among the most consequential for air quality. The Department’s proposed rule largely delivered what these producers asked for. Beginning in 2028, Alternative Jet Fuel would be eligible for crediting that exceeds diesel, with the premium rising to roughly 12 carbon-intensity points by 2030 and 22.5 points by 2040. The rule also allows crediting for jet fueling infrastructure and permits low-carbon electricity and natural gas to be sourced via book-and-claim mechanisms.

These provisions are technical, but their purpose is simple: to give health benefits a durable carrier in one of the most infrastructure-intensive parts of the energy system.

A second participant, Infinium, the world’s leading producer of electrofuels, entered the process with a narrower but equally consequential objective. Infinium sought recognition of synthetic fuels as an opt-in category explicitly encompassing electrofuels and power-to-liquid pathways, along with the ability to source low-carbon electricity via book-and-claim. Both requests were granted. The result is a rule that reflects the physics and economics of synthetic fuel production rather than forcing new technologies into old definitions—exactly the kind of clarity long-term capital requires.

The third major participant, Verde Clean Fuels, focused on methane—one of the most potent contributors to both climate change and local air pollution. Verde sought recognition for avoided methane emissions that go beyond compliance with New Mexico’s already strict anti-venting and anti-flaring rules. The final rule establishes a rigorous framework for crediting methane avoidance only when it exceeds existing regulatory requirements. That distinction matters. It ensures that health benefits are real, additional, and not merely relabeled compliance.

Taken together, these outcomes tell a coherent story. The rulemaking did not devolve into a contest for carve-outs. It produced a standard that distinguishes between avoidance and evasion, innovation and opportunism. Health set the direction. Capital found a way to carry it. That alignment is already shaping decisions well beyond New Mexico.

This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek publicly endorsed a $3 billion clean fuels project proposed by NXTClean Fuels, urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to approve the development. The governor cited thousands of union jobs, substantial air-quality benefits, and the restoration of hundreds of acres of wetlands along the Columbia River. Such vocal gubernatorial support for a large private industrial project is rare in Oregon. It is rarer still when it rests not on subsidies, but on confidence that regulatory standards reward genuine reductions in harm.

This is what long-term capital looks like when health has a carrier. It does not flee standards. It interrogates them. And when the accounting is tight—when reductions in harm are measurable, durable, and enforceable—it commits at scale. Opposition to New Mexico’s program has followed a familiar script. Industry groups warn of market disruption, higher costs, and the need for delay. Similar warnings were issued in 1906. Then, as now, the fear was not that regulation would fail, but that it would work.

The Pure Food and Drugs Act did not destroy American industry. It made American industry credible. It did not erode liberty. It strengthened trust. The same logic applies here. Two hundred and fifty years after the Spirit of ’76, and more than a century after the Spirit of ’06, New Mexico is being asked to make a familiar trade: to surrender the illusion that the cheapest option is the best one, in exchange for cleaner air, better health, and a future that costs less to live in.

History suggests how this ends. When health finds a carrier, progress tends to follow—and controversy tends to fade.