Today, NRDC is launching a new feature on our website (http://www.nrdc.org/renewables/) and I’d like to know what folks think of it. This new tool is designed to help regular people from farmers to politicians, financiers to reporters understand that renewables are here now and posed to become major players in our energy mix. This site will help you determine whether renewable energy systems such as wind turbines, anaerobic digesters, solar installations and biomass energy facilities make sense for you or your community, and to help you understand how legislation being debated right now could help you adopt one.

Of course, the resources available to you depend on your site specifications. That’s why the central feature of the new site is a mapping application. You can find your county on the appropriate map; select the different map layers to see current renewable energy sites and resource potential; and then read about the latest technologies to see which mix of energy opportunities might work for you and your community.

And if you live in Florida, Ohio, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee, you can get even more detail about what’s going on with renewables in your state. We’ve started with these five states because we had to start somewhere and these states are key battlegrounds in the debate about what sort of action our country should take to stop global warming. By being able to see actual projects and renewable resource potential in each state, we hope everyone—and especially the folks in these states—will realize that renewables and other solutions to global warming are not something that someone else somewhere else will be worrying about but really opportunities for all of us often right in our own backyards.

Now, more than ever, America needs the ingenuity and resil­ience of our farmers, builders, engineers and business people to meet the growing energy chal­lenges shaped by the issues of global warming, national security and domestic job loss. Climate change threatens all of us with more unpredictable weather, stronger storms, more pests and diseases, and longer and more intense droughts. Reliance on foreign oil also puts us at the mercy of political affairs and currency exchange rates.

Fortu­nately, local action can make a difference. Each technology featured here can contribute to better air quality, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, add good jobs to the economy and protect environmental values such as habitat and water quality. When these technologies are combined to use the by-products of one system as the input for another, the economic and environmental benefits are even greater. Across the country, we are poised to tackle these problems and reap the myriad benefits of homegrown power generation: clean energy can bring jobs back to America, enhance our national security, promote conservation practices and reduce harmful pollution. Working together, farmers, investors and policymakers can forge these connections to help build a sustainable future for America and the planet Earth as a whole. 

This site was designed to show the enormous potential for new energy systems that reduce global warming emissions, protect critical environmental values and move the United States toward energy security. Please check it out. Poke around. Try the maps. And let me know if you think it’s cool or helpful or maybe even inspiring. And then check back in regularly. We’re going to be adding details on more states, more technologies, and more of the critical policies need to stop global warming and build our supply of clean, home-grown renewable energy.