A worried friend of mine recently went through the laundry list of discouraging news: the United States has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world, our health care system – the most expensive in the world – has struggled to keep up, our economy has tanked and millions are unemployed.
New Hampshire currently has an unemployment rate above 16%, the highest since records have been kept. An Irish Times article pointing out that people around the world now “pitied” the United States has gone viral. My friend sighed and concluded: “We have become a third-world country.”
As a psychologist, I know that the capacity for hope is crucial to our emotional, physical, and spiritual survival. I also know that our capacity for denial is very powerful. Does it make sense to feel hopeful these days?
Yes, I think so.
One reason is that the pandemic, awful as it is, also represents a significant opportunity to deal with the other crisis of our times: climate change. Most people I know suffered from a sort of “climate anxiety disorder” before the pandemic hit. Now, there is a growing consensus that the path to economic recovery is through programs that support renewable energy and a restructured economy. Despite the tragic lack of leadership at the national level, state and local governments are stepping up. Many of us are so fixated on the dysfunction at the national level that we miss how much can be done here in New Hampshire at the state and local level.
Right now, for example, there are several bills in the New Hampshire Legislature that represent significant steps toward supporting renewable energy opportunities that will move our state forward in a rebuilding economy.
House Bill 1218 has now passed several committee reviews and is on its way for a full floor vote on June 11 when the House will convene at UNH in Durham (with social distancing). This bill would increase the size limit for large renewable energy customer-generators from one megawatt to five megawatts. This bill has the potential to encourage the production of clean, home-grown energy here in New Hampshire and allow businesses, municipalities, and school districts to save real money by generating their own clean power at zero fuel cost.
There are other important bills, including HB 1496, which would re-allocate state funds from emission allowances purchased by greenhouse gas-emitting fossil-fuel power plants into meaningful energy efficiency grants administered by the Public Utilities Commission’s Sustainable Energy Division.
These are just beginning steps, real as they are. We could think even bigger.
Another hopeful development is that the COVID pandemic has revealed that states working together are much more effective in dealing with the health crisis. Why not continue this model in dealing with the climate crisis? We could create here in New Hampshire an “Office of Renewable Energy Siting,” as New York state has. The idea is that private-sector investment will be attracted more quickly by tailoring the state’s approval process to fit renewable energy projects. New York’s approach also provides for reducing financial risk, helping to attract more private sector investment. We can do the same here in New Hampshire.
We need a dedicated office in state government to take on the task of planning for dealing with climate change in the coming years. New York state, for example, has created a Climate Action Council, which over the next two years will develop and propose a suite of strategies for supporting renewable energy and carbon reduction across the economy, updating those plans every five years thereafter. Council members are appointed in bipartisan fashion. So, here in New Hampshire, HB 1664 would establish a statewide climate action plan.
Beyond this, we have now the opportunity to join directly with other states in developing approaches to our climate future. Consortiums of states representing some of the largest economies in the world have banded together to support renewable energy development, including here in the Northeast. New Hampshire is the only New England state not to have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This group represents over 50% of U.S. GNP. We could also commit to implementing the plans of the other Northeastern states in the Transportation and Climate initiative, an important cap-and-trade effort.
The danger in our current moment also presents an opportunity. A hopeful, optimistic future is available to us. The roadmap is there. Will we have the political will and imagination here in New Hampshire to take that path?
(Sam Osherson lives in Nelson.)