Consumers can use their pocketbooks to vote for cleaner electricity production.

People in Maine have the power to improve the environment and the state’s economy by choosing to buy electricity from cleaner sources.

A growing number of companies, many of them small, provide electricity generated from renewable resources such as wind, water and wood wastes. Maine consumers can shop online for electricity products that reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce unhealthy air pollution and the serious risk of global warming.

Since much of this clean power is generated in Maine, purchasing it has the added benefit of contributing to the local economy.

Because the electric industry is reliable and works well, we tend to take for granted the infrastructure that supports it, which includes a huge network of transmission and distribution lines that connect thousands of electric generating plants. Because these plants are usually out of view, we sometimes forget that our own simple flip of a switch can generate harmful pollutants that end up in our air, our water and our food.

We don’t escape this effect in Maine. Much of the air pollution generated in the country flows over the Northeast and then over Maine. As it passes, numerous studies show that it causes tremendous damage.

Furthermore, when Maine residents use electricity, their power comes from the New England power grid. Since that power is mostly upwind of us, we end up breathing our own exhaust. New England’s electric power plants emit hundreds of thousands of tons of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides and carbon dioxide every day. Nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides and unmeasured tons of fine soot particles cause smog and acid rain, reducing our forest and crop productivity, acidifying our streams and lakes, and killing our fish.

Nitrogen oxide is a key ingredient in the formation of ozone, which combined with the particulate pollutants aggravates pulmonary diseases. According to the American Lung Association, Maine has the highest adult and childhood asthma rates in the nation, and respiratory disease costs us about $180 million per year in health care costs.

Carbon dioxide is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, and New England alone produces more than a hundred million tons of it per year from electric power generation. As a coastal state in a temperate climate, people believe that Maine will be greatly affected by the rising sea levels and losses to our forestry and agriculture industries.

In addition, the heavy metal mercury, emitted by coal-burning power plants, is a deadly nerve poison that adversely affects children and pregnant women, even those who live great distances from the power plants. Transported away from the power plant by the wind, mercury falls back to earth in rain and enters the food chain. It becomes concentrated in the tissues of predatory fish species, such as togue and tuna.

Maine lakes have been under fish consumption advisories for many years, due in significant part to mercury contamination. Studies show that children born to mothers with high levels of mercury in their blood score lower on brain function tests and start walking at a later age than other children.

Our congressional delegation has understood these problems for years, and has fought hard to cleanup the power plants upwind of Maine. Maine, along with nine other Northeast states, has gone to court to force the United States Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Air Act against these dirty power plants.

Maine people have led the nation in developing cleaner, renewable electric power sources. Each one of us can now buy up to 100 percent of our electricity from clean sources, instead of from coal and oil plants. We can ask our friends and neighbors to do the same. If enough of us act together and vote with our pocketbooks, we will increase demand and stimulate the market to develop more sources of clean power, which should help to keep the price reasonable.

Most important, we will have the comfort of knowing that when we flip the switch, we won’t be breathing the exhaust of our own pollution. We will quite literally, breathe easier.

The producers of clean electricity have formed a collaborative organization called the Maine Green Power Connection to jointly market their products. For more information about power generated with renewable resources and how you can use your power to choose, visit the Maine Green Power Connection Web site at www.mainegreenpower.org or write to them at 15 Laurel Road in Brunswick, ME 04011.

Denis Bergeron is the director of energy programs for the Maine Public Utilities Commission in Augusta.