“We are not very smart.”
That’s what it said on the very first slide in Clay Mitchell’s presentation at the Amos Fortune Forum on Friday night.
Mitchell was at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse joining the summer lecture series to talk about energy practices with his talk titled, “Renewing Energy: A Clear and New Vision.”
The University of New Hampshire professor teaches courses on sustainable energy and environmental policy. He has worked with local governments in the land use and energy fields and has developed programs for sustainability and security in the private and public sectors. In spite of his credentials, he insisted that none of us is all that smart.
“I thought I knew a lot about energy, until two days ago,” he joked, referencing a meeting he recently attended that raised questions about efficient power use.
The event was informative and, pardon the phrasing, energetic. The crowd took to Mitchell’s style and visibly reflected his energy, bobbing their heads and quietly affirming every point he made.
“My volume is going to go up as I go,” he said. “My energy is going to go up as I go.”
He led his presentation with a series of images from before extensive regulations began protecting the environment: clouds of debris consuming Dust Bowl towns, the Cuyahoga River on fire, Pennsylvania cities shadowed by pollutants from steel mills.
Then he demonstrated, chronologically, how energy production has changed, from Tesla and Edison to present-day fracking, nuclear power plants and mountain-top coal mining.
“This is not impact-free, and we need to talk about it differently,” he said.
Sparking conversation was among the principal themes of Mitchell’s talk. He thinks change begins on a local level, making adjustments to your own and your community’s behavior, and by getting people talking.
“Renewables can be done today, we’ve just got to get people talking about it,” he said.
By keeping his subject and recommendations for change community-based, he avoided getting explicitly political. The closest he got to talking about politics was in showing a graph of the relationship between party affiliation and belief in climate change. Republicans were always less likely to acknowledge it than Democrats, but independents, linearly, were more likely to believe if the temperature was higher on the given day they were surveyed.
Near the beginning of the event, he also said, “We are not going to talk about the election or the people involved in the election.” Then he added, “If you guys ask a question about it, I’ll deal with it and then go throw up.”
“We’re very lucky to live in New Hampshire,” he said. “New Hampshire has more communities focused on energy than anywhere else in the country.” His message was to open dialogues within the community, and accept that renewable energy can work right now.
“That’s why I’m here; that’s why I threw all this information at you in 45 minutes,” he concluded. “Go change the world.”
There is only two more weeks of the 70th year of the Amos Fortune Forum. This week, Aug. 12, Jamie Hamilton will present “Iqra: Reading the Qur’an” at 8 p.m.