DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I haven’t wasted this much time since I saw the earth sandwich video from Ze Frank — and spent a couple hours over the next few days watching every previous episode of The Show.

My friend Pete, former recording engineer to the stars (and to my band too) sent me a link to an episode of the death-metal comedy cartoon Metalocalypse. It’s been on the Cartoon Network since August, so this may not be news to you unless you also live in a cave. Fortunately, either way you can see most of the episodes online.

Update 2008-01-07: The bleenks.com site appears to have gone away. Sorry, no more episode archive. But see http://www.diefordethklok.org/ for plot summaries and stills.

Some of the characters are all but unintelligible, but they’re funny anyway.

Update: whoa, things get dark midway through the first season. Or maybe I just have a limited appreciation for severed-limb humor.

I have to admit that buying carbon offsets feels a little like buying indulgences — as if making a donation over here clears one’s conscience of committing some sort of eco-atrocity over there. Wouldn’t it be better to just not trash the planet in the first place?

But of course everyone with the equipment and free time to read this website, including you, including and perhaps especially me, is doing more damage than can be sustained. It’s disturbing but true; just take the ecological footprint quiz to see what I mean. If everyone lived like me, we’d need 3.1 planets. (But a lot fewer roads.)

So, financing a group of people whose mission is to support zero-carbon energy sources, improve industrial energy efficiency, and plant trees seems like a pretty good idea.

Working Assets, my telco, sent an email promoting an offsets program from Carbonfund.org. The timing was right; I’d been meaning to do something along those lines since seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I didn’t comparison shop like I usually do, because Working Assets was willing to throw in an extra 5 tons’ worth of offsets for free — approx. $27 worth at Carbonfund’s rates ($55/10 tons).

I paid the $99, and got the 5 free tons. So, for 2007, I figure I’m carbon-neutral.

I’ve been trying out a couple carbon calculators while working on this article, and unfortunately it looks like the real planet-killer is air travel. Gah. Another reason to stay home!

I had to laugh at the listing of the best-selling calendars for 2007; #6 is the George W. Bush Out Of Office Countdown Calendar.

Why didn’t I think of that?

It’s just $7.79 at Amazon. But then you’d have a picture of the guy on your wall for the rest of the year. I wonder if the calendar comes with a medical disclaimer, like cigarettes.

The top-rated calendar is a Far Side page-a-day item. Haven’t we all seen all the good Far Sides already? Larson quit drawing it twelve years ago today. Is the boneless chicken farm still getting laughs?

Then again, we’re using an Escher calendar, and it sure isn’t like I haven’t seen all the good Escher prints a thousand times each.

Maybe this year we’ll finally get the flatscreen monitor in the kitchen and migrate to Google Calendar for good.

We closed out the 2006 “trueup” billing period with a disappointing $94.48 charge, after the ~$65 rebate for “distribution” fees we already paid. So our total out-of-pocket for the year’s electricity was about $160.

Our production was down this year, most likely due to shading; we generated only 3440 kWh in 2006, as compared to 3898 kWh in 2005 — a 12% drop. The graph of our monthly power generation makes this clear. We’ll be trimming some trees here in the near future in hopes of regaining some of our late-afternoon sunlight.

The graph of monthly unbilled charges is interesting. As it is based on fees, it reflects both generation and consumption; an expensive month could be due to low generation or to high usage, or a combination. We started 2006 well, beating our 2005 rates, but for the middle six months of the year we lost all early gains. The middle months were dismal; we didn’t build up nearly enough surplus to ride out the Fall. In fact, we didn’t come near to the zero line, much less cross it as we did in the summer of 2004 (when our final trueup bill was a mere $6.53). I’m looking forward to some additional conservation measures for 2007.

To put this in perspective, I’m quibbling about numbers in a way that masks the awesomeness of photovoltaic power generation. The critical takeaway is that we produced 50%* of our own electricity this year, and prevented 4544 lbs of carbon dioxide from being blown into the atmosphere on our behalf**. I feel good about that. Even better, we produced 100% of our peak-period electricity, plus 544 kWh surplus, which creates disproportionate benefits to the stability of the grid and to atmospheric effects of fossil-fuel power generation.

Previous anniversaries: 2005, 2005 breakeven calculation, 2004.

*The TOU meter-reading data on the trueup bill shows we burned 3413 kWh, but I believe that is the total after deducting the 3440 kWh we produced, as the meter runs backwards when the sun shines.

** “The output rate for CO2 from natural gas-fired plants in 1999 was 1.321 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour.” 3440 kWh * 1.321 = 4544 lbs.