DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

Back in September, security guru and common-sense advocate Bruce Schneier recommended that US citizens renew their passports before the end of the year. The reason? To avoid the risks of the new RFID passports, initially slated to be rolled out by January 1.

Schneier described potential consequences of carrying around a radio transmitter in one’s passport:

The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

I called the Passport Agency earlier this month to ask whether they’d begun issuing RFID passports yet. I was told that the main Passport center in Philadelphia — the one that all mailed-in renewal requests go to — had a warehouse full of the old, non-electronic passport jackets that they would need to use up before rolling out the RFID model.

That’s good news in at least two respects, the less obvious one being that the government had avoided sending tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of perfectly useful passport jackets into the local landfill.

The Agency representative couldn’t tell me how long their stock of radio-free passport jackets would last, but she speculated that they’d still be issuing them for at least a few weeks, and likely past the first of January. So, despite the fact that my old passport wouldn’t expire for four years, I sent in a renewal request two weeks ago.

Today I got my new, radio-free passport in the mail. RFID hax0rz can kiss my analog butt, at least for 10 more years.

If you want to avoid the frog-march of progress, start at the passport renewal page at the Dept. of State website. You’ll need a pair of passport photos; I recommend Fedex Kinko’s. Most offer Passport photo services. You’ll probably also want to pay the extra $60 for “expedited” processing, to jump your application to the head of the line.

But you may want to call the Passport Agency first, because at this point your attempt to be one of the last people to get an old passport might lead to being one of the first to get a new one. Call 1-877-487-2778 and ask to speak to a passport agent.