A friend tipped me off to the blog of Dr. Joe Wright, writer-in-residence for the William B. Castle Society of Harvard Medical School, and I'm glad she did. The jumping off point for this post is Jamie Oliver, the young-ish chef cum nutritional crusader from Britain.

He makes several points, many of them really cogent. Such as...

 When the energy auditor came, years ago, he told us we could save $60 a year if we switched refrigerators; we'd been using the one that came with the house since we moved in five-and-a-half years ago. But we never pulled the trigger.

But now, for a pretty short period, we can get $200 in rebate from Mass Save, a state program whose wind-power program we supported for better than a year, if we buy an Energy Star model, and of course we'd do that anyway.

Grist looks at a septet of recipients of 7-figure Department of Energy funding, from a Steven Chu-devised program patterned on DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Ideas include liquid batteries, in which three substances that won't mix — in the manner of oil and water — conduct electrical charges; and using synthetic carbonic anhydrase to separate CO2 from coal-plant effluent before it leaves the stack. Carbonic anhydrase is the enzyme the human body uses to filter CO2.

Yes, readers, you have a right to be confused. The name on the blog is "Sustainably," but pretty much everything I write these days is on food, food policy, obesity, and addiction. As I've written before, there are parallels, but even so, what happened to the sustainability stuff?

And then comes a post like this one, after at least a couple of dozen "off-topic" posts! But I'm just going to live with the dissonance for now, and figure out what to do later. So, anyway...

Author and activist Bill McKibben [above] wasn’t only preaching to the choir when he addressed the annual meeting Sunday of the Mass. Climate Action Network, he was among the adoring.

You know that mondo wind turbine, just off I-93 when you're approaching Boston from the north? That's Medford. If you've ever wondered what kind of power that baby is generating, here's where to go for all the dope.

UPS has announced a carbon-neutral shipping option, and I suppose it's a good thing, but I thought it would be worthwhile to check in briefly on why that is. (Before proceeding, I want to be clear that this isn't about UPS any more than tangentially.)

Climate Ark has a pair of stories from the past couple of days boosting CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), showing again that bad ideas don't always go away on their own.

Most recent, from Reuters, is a report that Europe intends to invest heavily to help China, then India and others, to develop CCS technology.

A couple of dozen participants in the Energy Smackdown gathered for pizza, veggies, soda, and celebration last night at the Regent Theatre in Arlington to cap off the energy-saving competition's second season.

About 30 families from Arlington, Medford, and Cambridge vied for team and individual honors in the yearlong effort, whose larger purpose was to explore, experience, and model strategies for reducing humankind's impact on the planet.

The Energy Smackdown, a high-spirited, good-natured competition among teams of energy-conscious households will mark the end of the most recent campaign — and look forward to its next — Wednesday evening at the Regent Theatre in Arlington Center.