By a party-line vote, the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected an attempt to tie any limits on carbon in the US to the same limits in India and China. 

First off, it's good it failed. However...

I have finally found a legitimate use for coal, which I've consistently derided as evil crap whose only supporters are coerced by direct economic benefit. I don't claim much cleverness in my "discovery," since others have understood it for a while:

Coal is a bargaining chip, or, as Kenneth Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, puts it, "a universal fig leaf."

In a story in Scientific American, he is quoted as saying,

Congrats to Icon Architecture. It won awards for two of its affordable housing projects, Egleston Crossing in Roxbury and Maverick Landing in East Boston.

The latter is "Massachusetts’s first green, affordable multi-family housing development, adhering to “healthy homes” principles and achieving LEED certification. [It] is a model for projects funded through the Federal Housing and Urban Development HOPE VI program."

Cong. Ed Markey is the prize attraction of this year's fundraiser for the Environmental League of Massachusetts, whose 13th annual Earth Night is May 27. Markey's main task these days is the climate and energy bill that carries his name and Henry Waxman's. (A revised version was released on Friday, and the Committee on Energy and Commerce is meeting today to consider it. Here's a summary.)

I've been writing about business ideas to bring better food to your home for quite some time. The first one was Jeff Barry's Boston Organics, years ago, when I was still at the Globe; I had a feature for a while called "A Click Away," I think. More recently, I've written about Gabriel Erde-Cohen's urban/personal CSAs.

Now we can add Laurel Friel, the "queen bean" behind The Green Bean,  a start-up whose idea is to do the shopping for you at the region's farmer's markets and deliver your order to your door. I met her Saturday at the Somerville Climate Action Network's event I wrote about on Thursday. 

From 10-2 on Saturday, green partisans will gather at Somerville High School for demonstrations, giveaways, and fellowship with their own kind.

Byggmeister, the Newton energy efficiency buidling contractor, will have a representative to evaluate your energy bills for what you might save, there'll be recycled kids crafts and recycled fashions (and you can bring clothing donations to do some recycling yourself), free basic bike tune-ups for people who ride over, and plenty more.

The event is free; maybe I'll see you there.

I flew last week, which undercuts whatever I intend to follow that up with in this post, since hopping cross-country certainly is among puts one among the most egregious petro-users. I went in the name of service, and blah blah blah, but still, worth noting for the benefit of cynics.

In a couple of airports I was in, I noticed a book store touting "eco-totes" as a sales come-on, either as a stand-alone or a get-one-free-with-purchase sorta deal. The message was, help the planet by buying something.

I'm back from Albuquerque, and mostly de-lagged. Thanks for still reading through two-travel-related gaps in posting.

While I was gone, I posted three dozen times or so on another blog, not operated by me, and I got more than a dozen comments from readers. It made me realize that a) I used to get comments on my other blog, and b) I have never gotten one on this one.

In an unusual fit of negativity, I opined recently that "they" would probably screw up the Waxman/Markey energy bill, and it appears to be struggling, either because I was right or because I contributed some bad juju to it.

I'm still catching up on events from the food-addiction summit over at fisherblue.com/blog, and tomorrow I'm leaving for another week away (I'll be blogging in a third place for that, and though I know it sounds beyond dorky, I can't say where). But I did want to get in this mention from Paul Eldrenkamp about an "insulation slam" that's being given by a handful of local contractors at 7:30 p.m. on May 14 at 3 Church St., Cambridge.