In my opinion, Cuba will be a bad example of anything for the foreseeable future, and perhaps as long as I live. It has been exploited by dictators and superpowers for decades, and, and the resulting distortions are all the more intense because it is an island, and a small island at that.

So the sked is in for the Mass. Climate Summer bike tours, and they're skirting Arlington, though that doesn't mean we can't get in on the fun.

They'll be in Lexington July 21-24, Waltham July 24-27, and Newton July 27-30. 

Thanks to my friend Jeremy Marin, I attended the annual Earth Night fundraiser put on by the Environmental League of Massachusetts on Wednesday. After the year that environmental governance enjoyed in the state, it was a night to celebrate, and perhaps to crow a bit, and they did.

The VIP reception beforehand was supposed to feature climate champ Ed Markey, but he was off in China, discussing global warming policy with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other colleagues. That guy has to work on priorities.

You may be at least casually aware of the PowerShift movement, which brought 12,000 people to Washington for meetings and demonstrations earlier this year. I wouldn't say I measure up even to "casually," but what I think I know is that it is a coalition mostly of college-age climate-change activists. Every time I hear them mentioned, the operative word is energetic.

Well, the Mass. chapter will need that energy for its summer gambit, which will send three teams of cyclists across the state to carry the climate-change message to cities and towns. 

I have written previously (perhaps approaching cliche by now; you decide) about having two blogs and wanting to have one — not by jettisoning one by having them merge organically. Here's another post that fits in both places — about sustainable living (no link; you're reading it) and food issues, at fisherblue.com/blog; in fact, I starting writing this at the other one.

A half dozen people gathering in Bedford last night for the first in a series of planning meeting that will culminate in what they hope will be a large-scale demonstration calling for urgent action from climate-change delegates convening in Copenhagen in December.

I've been wasting my time parrying with a high school acquaintance on Facebook the past couple of days, after he posted something about how stupid it is that bankrupt companies will be forced to make small, unsafe (but high-mileage) cars that nobody wants.

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."