When there was no crawdaddy to be found, we ate coal.

There's a fun/scary tool in today's installment of the Slate.com Carbon Diet, an ongoing series of tips for reducing your CO2 emissions. Today's entry is about electricity, and it links to an EPA site that tells you where your local energy comes from.

Up here in Hoover, we're lovin' us some coal:


The good news is, up until a few years ago, Alabama was 30% coal, 43% suet, 6% moonshine and 3% bacon drippings. So there is some progress.

BTW, there are some great tips in this Slate series, so I really encourage you all to check it out each week.

Here are the two admonishments I was most guilty of today:

• How many times have you left your cell-phone charger plugged in, even when your phone is not? Wall chargers for things like iPods and cameras suck energy out of the socket, even when not attached to their mates. With the national average at five chargers per person, unplugging adds up.

• Rechargeable battery docks for gadgets like drills and handheld vacuum cleaners can draw from the socket five to 20 times more energy than is stored in the battery. Unplug them once tools are juiced.

Oops.