Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

Awareness about the health, economic, and environmental costs of fossil fuel use aren’t the creation of liberal snowflakes, hippies, or communists, and the push back isn’t new, either.

In 1661, John Evelyn described London this way: “The immoderate use of… sea-coale ..[makes It] resemble… the suburbs of Hell [rather] than an assembly of rational creatures.”

A century and a half later, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Manchester, England: “Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills…. The wretched dwellings of the poor are scattered haphazard around them. Round them stretches…the fetid, muddy waters stained with a thousand colours by the factories ….These vast structures keep air and light out of the human habitations…there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most.”

A hundred years later, “killer fogs” increased in the U.S. and England, international councils were created to study and respond, and Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963. In 1978, President Carter called for investment in solar power, saying “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.”

In 1986, President Reagan removed solar panels from the White House, cut funding for renewable energy, and deregulated the fossil fuel industry. Donations rolled in from oil and automotive corporations.

In 2006, the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” presented data about the sharp rise in global temperatures that parallels global reliance on fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution began three centuries ago. But the fossil fuel industry is still pushing hard. On January 22, the American Petroleum Institute aired a TV ad claiming that “oil and gas is part of just about everything we touch” (as if that’s a good thing!) and suggesting that without it, everything we cherish and rely on will crumble to ash.

The API tells us just to be grateful to them for creating civilization as we know it and make ourselves comfy for as long as it lasts. This is no longer possible. The Earth is fighting for her life with storms, droughts, fires, and the human conflicts that come with scarcity and disaster. She will probably win in the end, but “I want it all and I want it now” consumers are unlikely to be around to enjoy the victory.

Denying the problem has done no good. What’s needed at this critical moment is action. We’ve already proved that change is possible. It took 19 years in court, but California’s catalytic converters cleaned up much of the smog that choked Southern California in the 1950s. Limiting the use of chlorofluorocarbons has nearly repaired our torn ozone layer in just a couple of decades. Industrial chimney scrubbers have decreased acid rain significantly.

Legal battles take too long, though. Big problems require communal action. There’s been recent hyperventilating over a proposal to convert fossil fuel infrastructure to electric. This is merely political theater when political will is needed.

In 1960, the United Kingdom became aware that“city gas” created from coal released methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, which were killing thousands of people a year in homes and factories. A few cities and towns created pilot programs to test conversion to natural gas. Through collaborative efforts by citizens, governments, and private entities, by 1977, every home, office, and factory in England had converted to cleaner power.

We have better options now, but that process still works. Solar farms and arrays have sprung up in many states, and now, finally, New Hampshire is on board. Because of legislation passed in 2019, dozens of towns and cities have banded together to create energy collaboratives like the Community Power Coalition of NH, where members negotiate prices and either buy electricity through the collaborative or the local electric utility company. Members can also develop innovative energy supply projects to help make them producers as well as consumers, and free us from big oil.

We can change the world. How do we know? We’ve already done it. It took about .00015% of human history (the 300 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) to get us where we are. Now that we know better, it’s our duty to our children and grandchildren to do better.

We can support or join advocacy groups, anything from NH Youth Movement to Elders Climate Action, support initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill that fund the modifications, adaptations, and innovations we need to meet the moment; join community action committees to make sure we’re using that funding for clean energy; and literally own our power.

Clean energy is both progressive and conservative — supporting innovation, making power production local, taking care of families and one another, and, to borrow from our Constitution, preserving what’s been graciously given to us “for ourselves and our posterity.”

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