It is misleading to assert, as writer Stephen Linsky does in a July 10 letter, that the proposed climate bill “address[es] the siting concerns” of the individuals quoted in the Gazette’s July 6 article [“Energy bill doesn’t address siting fears”]. A plain reading of that article and those concerns alongside the bill itself directly demonstrates the exact opposite: local control over energy industry siting is, in fact, expressly overridden in the bill.

The letter writer presumes that allowing the people of the “351 individual cities and towns” to have a say in how energy industry facilities are sited in their own communities is a bad thing. I would suggest the exact opposite: Because those people will be the most impacted by not just climate change but also such industrial development, they should have a deciding role — not merely an advisory one — in how and where those developments are sited.

The ends offered by green energy are vital, but that does not justify ignoring the means by which we achieve those ends. The state should have uniform advisory and even regulatory guidelines in place for such developments and it should provide a model bylaw, expert knowledge, and tax incentives, but ultimately final control of siting for green energy development should be under local control just as much as it is for any other form of industrial development.

The fact that the current climate bill does not include such measures demonstrates that it is a poorly conceived piece of legislation.

Any industry that so profoundly, often irreversibly, alters a community, its resources, and its quality of life should not be given a free pass to simply ignore local concerns. And yet the climate bill does precisely that. It pretends that the lives, concerns, and well-being of the citizens who live in the communities where these energy industry developments are to be sited are merely impediments —to the state’s climate goals but also, more nefariously, impediments to the profit goals of the companies and individuals who stand to gain from unrestrained industrial development.

Support of the current climate bill framed in the manner that Linsky adopts condescends to and demeans the diligence, goodwill, and expertise of local officials who know their communities best. Such support pretends that local elected representatives and zoning board members are inherently obstacles to the state’s renewable energy goals rather than partners or potential partners in achieving those goals.

Opponents to the climate bill are not opponents of renewable energy and it is obviously duplicitous to try to present them as such. Rather, those opponents object to the top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to siting such energy facilities enshrined in the current climate bill.

People who do not live in rural areas seem to take delight in maligning rural opponents of the bill as being driven by a “not in my backyard” agenda. But opposition to the bill is driven, rather, by a “not in anyone’s backyard” agenda.

Solar industrial facilities belong on top of our homes, municipal buildings, and schools. They belong on top of our industrial parks, office parks, and factories and on top of our malls, businesses, and parking garages. As 85% of Massachusetts residents indicated to the state Division of Energy Resources in 2022, they belong on the commonwealth’s roughly 1.5 million acres of already developed land — and not in our forests or working fields.

If even 25% of our rooftops hosted solar panels, Massachusetts would exceed its own 2050 climate goals 10 years in advance (we’re already at about 11% of rooftops with solar, by the way). And all without cutting down a single tree or stifling a single row of crops.

Energy industrial development does not belong in any of our backyards, whether we live in an urban community, a suburban one, or a rural one.

It belongs on our roofs.

Matteo Pangallo lives in Shutesbury.