There is just an amazingly pervasive gloom at the show, not in feeling, but in expression of the problems the planet is facing.

This morning, Alex Wilson of BuildingGreen Inc., a founder and early supporter of NESEA, intended to give a speech that covered the "challenges" and then gave 10 categories of solutions, but then had to rush through the second half because the governor arrived. So he ended up spending more than 30 minutes, easily, on the many areas in which, it seems, we're just screwed, any minute.

I mentioned previously that Building Energy '08, a trade show and conference run by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, was coming up, and now it's here. The main event today was a two-hour open forum on energy efficiency and sustainability that was fascinating, inspiring, depressing, and annoying, in parts.

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.