Thanks for that Erica.

That is really good but kind of long! breaking it into 5 minute chunks would be very useful.

I can't believe erica doesn't sound like a man, beast or even Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Impressive.

Jonathan: could you give a few more details about that study? I've tried googling it based on how you described it, but to no avail.

Absolutely. I slogged about it quite a while ago.

Here is the original paper. If you can't access the full text, send me an e-mail.

All praise to endnote!

Here's the slog where I briefly discussed the climate effect of grounding airliners.

How come the RSS feed never works for dear science? The feed updates but the file is never there to download.

I'll limit myself to only one question:

Don't we have just as much responsibility to conserve as those whose power plants produce lots of GHGs? What difference does it make if Seattle's power generation comes from non-GHG sources like hydroelectric? Isn't it true that if I use less electricity, then more of Seattle's surplus green power will be available for sale to regions that burn coal? Not counting the losses from longer distance power transmission, a watt conserved here is one less watt produced by dirty sources. And conversely, if Seattle really hogs the energy then we will be forced to buy power beyond what we produce with our green sources, from coal and gas plants?

That's only one question, right?

@elenchos.

Yes. Conserve. But also think about the entire environmental impact of what you're doing. By my mind, a low-flow shower head is a winner over a CFL--conserving both water and energy and not contributing heavy metals to the environment.

The PNW is actually fairly isolated as far as the electrical grid, with only a few connections down to California and virtually none East. The wind power turbines straddling the border between Eastern Washington and Oregon aren't even connected to the Seattle grid, for example.