Switching to lower-energy-use CFL lightbulbs and driving a hybrid car are good responses to the planet's climate crisis, says Lester Brown, the internationally recognized climate-change advocate, but the most important step a concerned citizen can take is to become politically active, he told a near capacity crowd at Cary Hall in Lexington Sunday night.

"Saving civilization is not a spectator sport," he said near the end of his hour-plus address, using the sort of sweeping language that characterized his remarks.

Portfolio magazine offers up a list of 11 admirably green companies, and paired it with the "Toxic 10" list of companies that should be doing better. I found I was more interested in the bad guys, which I think says less about negativity (or, I hope so) than it says about new information: Companies doing more green are often cited as such, but I don't recall having seen many most-troubling-polluter lists.

I'll just pass on the names of each. You can follow the links if you want to know more.

An Orlando, Fla., company, Hydromatic Technologies, has been drawing blogosphere attention this week for what seems like a no-brainer, why-didn't-anyone-do-this-years-ago development for the clothes dryer, one of the home's worst energy hogs. It is so power-mad, in fact, that Energy Star doesn't list a single one.

I'm still a green neophyte, so I can't wax eloquent about Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, who has popped up on my radar a couple of times in short order. But E.O. Wilson, whose imprimatur I'll accept on any topic, says this...

I wouldn't have thought to match these two spots for comparison, or the others contained therein, but that's what makes this "Globalist Quiz" question in Sunday's Globe interesting... 

I spent four hours last weekend at the Going Green Expo, which was a very curious mix of really good, valuable, creditable presenters and some questionable participants, including Waste Management, Vita Mix, and some cookware manufacturer whose name I can't recall, even though I sat through the demo and have done so before, at the Home Show. (That won't make them happy!)

I may or may not comment more on that show, but for now, I wanted to note the proliferation of green-based conferences and trade shows around here.

It was a sure bet that the headlines on Earl Butz's obit this week would focus on the racial slur that torpedoed his public life, and it was in every one I saw. But Butz, agriculture secretary under Nixon and Ford in the '70s, was perhaps one of the most influential figures in 20th century America, although not exactly in a salutary way. He blessed, and hastened, the demise of the family farm, for example, stating baldly and  unapologetically that farming was now the domain of corporations, and the family farmer would just have to get used to it.

It's hard to know what's up with the Bush administration's decision to pull funding for the so-called "FutureGen" coal plant that was awarded only a couple of months ago to downstate Mattoon, Ill. The reason given by Energy Secretary Sam Bodman is that costs have grown beyond reason, but not surprisingly, the coal and oil companies behind FutureGen are disputing that.

LOVE THIS from Think Progress, which points out that CNN's Republican debate, the last one before Super Tuesday, is sponsored by some front for the coal industry. And, no questions have been asked on global warming, it says, in the past four debates.

I've been wanting for a while to get in a mention of "It's Not Easy Being Green," an 8-episode show shot in Cornwall, England in 2005 and 2006 that I've been watching. It is the made-for-TV attempt by the Strawbridge family to revive a 300-year-old farm via technology and self-sufficiency.