If you don't know that rehabbing the homes and other buildings we already have is going to be one of the most important initiatives of the next 20 years, it's OK. That puts you well in the mainstream.

But that's going to change. Buildings use almost half the energy in America, and there are 110 million homes alone. Even if every new building in America over that time were to be zero net energy, we will have continued to squander energy and affect the climate adversely if we don't redo what we already have.

One of the best parts about being a journalist is you get asked — hell, you get paid — to explore subjects you might not have looked into otherwise. The best case in point for me is my story on the smart grid that is (finally) available online at emagazine.com.

I'm sad to report that Plenty magazine has gone out of production. My disappointment has a second layer, because I'd pitched them several times, but the magazine covered the green movement well, and anyone who's a partisan is a bit poorer.

This is another installment in my series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people. Joe Lstiburek (pronounced "stee-brick") is a nationally recognized authority on building science in general, and especially on moisture-related building problems and indoor air quality. To recap, the profiles are "mini" not only because they're short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match.

JOSEPH LSTIBUREK, 53, Westford
Principal, Building Science Corp., Westford and other locations

Green epiphany: “I don’t think I ever had one.”

Green hero: “I don’t have one; I think green is mostly overdone. But I do have an architectural hero, Edward Mazria.

A sustainability practice you’ve taken on: “”I’ve done my house. We took an 1880s house and made it ultra-energy-efficient.”

One of the points of my continuing series, "What We Do At Home," has been its subset, "What We Don't Do At Home." We're trying, but we're far from achieving a perfectly sustainable lifestyle, even within the bounds of what any two suburbanites can do without moving to the tropics and growing/shooting/foraging for everything we eat.

When you speak against coal, the most likely rejoinder is that half of our electricity is generated by burning the ultra-dirty fuel. (See the first comment. He adds that coal is "all natural, too.")   And that's true. Even though I hate the stuff, I acknowledge that I like my electricity, and I use it all the time, and if we ditched coal tomorrow, my electrical supply would quickly put me in touch with what it's like to live in, say, Baghdad.

Especially during the election, many among the climate-concerned called for a "Manhattan Project"-style initiative to devise or develop the technology that's going to save our asses.

But that's not a good analogy, because we don't need one solution — instead of trying to create one thing, we must solve a myriad of problems that don't all stem from the same stalk, even if energy is the most common point. That means we need a myriad of solutions.

Another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet. They're "mini" not only because they're short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match.

JOEL GORDES, 62, West Hartford, Conn. Energy consultant, Environmental Energy Solutions

What do you do? “I work on all sorts of energy-related issues, including energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate change and the insurance industry, and energy security.”

Green epiphany: “Flying missions over Vietnam. I was an Air Force officer flying unarmed reconnaissance, and the land looked like the craters of the moon in places. Then in 1972, after I came home, I happened to read an article in Scientific American about the cratering of Southeast Asia. That was my moment.”

Green hero:Dr. Albert E. Burke. He was a Yale professor who was the first to use television as an educational medium working at the connection of the environment, our resources, and our freedoms. He came publicly before Rachel Carson, before Barry Commoner, before Buckminster Fuller.”

You can approach sustainability from a number of directions, and for the current issue of Boston Home magazine, I came at it from two of them.

I spoke with three product providers that make their products with the ethics of recycle and reuse, and all three are in New England, making their use locally more sustainable than the same or similar goods from, say, Fiji.

It's a single-page presentation.

This is inside blogball, but one of the aspiring blogger's worst sins is omission — keeping a steady stream of posts coming, so that whenever anyone ever comes back, there's something new to read. Imagine if you got the newspaper one day and there was nothing in it. Or even a newsletter. Oh, wait: If you're a regular reader, you don't have to imagine.