Residents in rural Albany County — New Scotland as well as the Hilltowns — have recently received mailers from a California company asking to lease their land for solar arrays.

We’ve written for years in this space about the need to embrace renewable energy sources. The Earth’s carbon emissions have been rising ever since the Industrial Revolution, creating what scientists call the greenhouse effect, trapping heat within the planet’s atmosphere, and shifting the normal climate.

Most Americans now grasp the immediate need to act before our planet is destroyed. We wrote with great hope in December about the Paris accord where, for the first time, all the nations of the world, 195 strong, participated in an agreement — the rich and developed nations along with the poor and undeveloped nations — binding them by law to cut emissions. Representatives from all the countries in the world are to meet again in 2020 and every five years thereafter to continue with further plans to reduce pollution.

The hope is that, with the agreement in place, investors, heartened by the legal commitment, will produce more jobs and products for sustainable energies like wind and solar.

And now here, in our midst, is a company proposing to do just that. The company, Cypress Creek Renewables, is, of course, here to make money. A confluence of government programs makes this possible.

The federal government has extended tax credits for solar energy until 2020. And this past summer, in New York State, the Public Service Commission created the Community Distributed Generation Program, which reduced the risks of the former system of power purchase agreements.

Good for government encouraging business to produce renewable energy.

A spokesman for Cyprus Creek, Jeff McKay, told us that’s why his company is here: The new program is seeking distributed solar generation resources up to two megawatts to sell power directly to member utility customers.

“We are a solar firm developer trying to develop rapidly in New York,” McKay told us. His company, founded in 2014, already claims to have raised well over $1 billion as its local solar farms produce energy at or below market costs. McKay said Cypress Creek has over 100 operational projects, creating a standardized approach “allowing us to develop at scale with speed and efficiency.”

McKay described his company’s model this way: “We go in and acquire or lease land. We put in solar panels on the property and sell the power to companies or individuals.”

The benefits to the solicited owners of large tracts of land are substantial — they are being offered $1,500 per acre per year. “We typically work with landowners who have 20 continuous acres of relatively flat land,” said McKay, “which is in reasonable proximity to power lines and utility substations and free of wetlands or endangered species.”

We have long backed Helderberg Community Energy, a corporation formed by a group of volunteers, largely based in Knox, working now to set up a two-megawatt solar array to supply energy for as many as 150 residences or businesses in Albany County. The Altamont Enterprise as a business and two of its three publishers, who own a home together, signed up last year as being interested in being part of that project, which the organizers say would be run as a not-for-profit with all benefits being passed on to co-op members.

We believe the small local cooperative and the large money-making corporation can co-exist.

The bylaws of the Helderberg Community Energy LLC state that, if it establishes a project that generates funds, any excess balance not needed for projects shall be returned to customers; funds “shall never be distributed for personal use by HCE members.”

“I’m for anybody who can put these up and produce green energy,” Russell Pokorny, president of Helderberg Community Energy, told us of large solar arrays. “I don’t want to put up a roadblock.”

But both the small local co-op and the large private corporation face a common problem.

The chairman of the Knox Planning Board, who also volunteers as the project engineer for Helderberg Community Energy, told us last week that the town’s current zoning ordinance would allow a large solar array only in the town’s sole business district, which is the hamlet of Knox, and, further, he said that only one parcel in that business district would work as a solar farm.

The land that the Helderberg energy group has lined up for its solar array is not in the business district, nor are the properties of the large landowners solicited by Cypress Creek.

We urge Knox and other towns in our coverage area to make zoning for green energy a priority. When, several years ago, a large national company proposed industrial wind turbines on the Helderberg escarpment, several towns scrambled to deal with that in their zoning ordinances.

Now is the time for town leaders to examine local zoning with an eye to promote what is good for the town and good for the world. Certainly, with solar, it makes no sense to have an ordinance so restrictive that only one solar farm can be built.

There may well be restrictions that should be imposed — buffers to protect views, for example — but by and large the arrays work well in a rural landscape. Thirty-thousand dollars a year for leasing 20 acres could well help a farmer stay in business, preserving open spaces that many citizens of rural towns value.

Our hopes for the new year, when the Paris agreement was fresh, have been chipped away in recent months.

Last month, in a unusual and unexpected move, the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 vote, granted a stay, blocking regulations from the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s “Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units,” pending the outcome of challenges filed by dozens of states and industry groups.

This was President Barack Obama’s signature environmental legislation, meant to deliver the results the United States had agreed to in Paris.

The White House press secretary responded to the stay with this statement: “The Clean Power Plan is based on strong legal and technical foundation, gives States the time and flexibility they need to develop tailored, cost-effective plans to reduce their emissions, and will deliver better air quality, improved public health, clean energy investment and jobs across the country, and major progress in our efforts to confront the risks posed by climate change.”

It’s going to be tough to meet the requirements of the Paris agreement to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and every little bit will help.

The dangers of carbon emissions are evident now; we don’t have to wait to see one in six species become extinct as scientists predict.

As we write this, human beings are dying prematurely — from respiratory disease, heart attacks, and lung cancer — due to carbon emissions. A study published last month in the journal “Nature Climate Change” — “Climate and Health Impacts of U.S. Emissions Reductions Consistent with 2o C” — showed that reducing emissions in the United States alone enough to avoid a 2-degree Celsius increase in global warming could prevent up to 175,000 pollution-related premature deaths nationwide by 2030.

At the same time, that analysis by researchers at Duke University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, determined the emissions reduction would generate health benefits of about $250 billion annually.

This study focused just on premature deaths and did not even consider such emissions-related problems as the nearly 30,000 asthma attacks annually in children that result in emergency treatment or the 15 million lost work days for adults.

Why would we not want to both save American lives and increase national prosperity?

But the cause is bigger than our country; it’s global. In 2012, about seven million people died as a result of air pollution — one in eight of all global deaths — making air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk, according to the World Health Organization.

Think globally, act locally — a grassroots rallying cry for environmentalists — is rooted in the work of Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist and town planner who worked in the early part of the 20th Century. He wrote in his 1915 book, “Cities in Evolution,” that “local character” is not a matter of mere accident. Rather, he wrote ‘It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.”

We urge our local leaders to focus like a laser on zoning that will encourage green energy while preserving the essential and characteristic life of their towns.

Think globally, act locally — and do it right away.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer