DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I sort of hate to kick the GOP while they’re down… but on the other hand, what a pack of assholes.

Check out deadelephant.org for a stack of great bumper stickers that say what you’ve been thinking for the past six years. Print them at home for $nada or buy the real thing for $cheap.

My good friend Andrew Thomas has released his first solo CD, Then… and Today: nine original compositions and one cover featuring 11 great musicians and me, too — I contributed drum tracks for seven of the songs, and hammer dulcimer for one.

The songs represent a variety of styles and influences, from pop-punk to fusion to smooth jazz. There are three vocal tunes, five instrumentals, and two bass solo pieces.

The bass playing is top-notch; Andrew elevates his bass(es) to the front of the mix, deftly pulling off cool grooves and catchy melodies. All the guest musicians turned in nuanced, passionate performances. And the production is completely professional; Evan Rodaniche’s mixes really shine.

Click through to the MP3s to hear the first four songs on the CD.

The sixth song, Not Fair, deserves special mention, not only because it features all three members of JAR. It was recorded and re-recorded by at least seven people in four studios over about five years’ time, but the result sounds like three guys in a room. I don’t know how we did that, but I love it.

(Related story: I wrote previously about tracking the dulcimer for Domino, now called This is How It Will End).

Charles Fishman stacks the astonishing facts into a mountain of evidence and the most compelling argument for Compact Fluorescents I’ve ever seen, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

• Since 1985, CFLs have changed as much as cell phones and portable music players.
• Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.
• The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100 [light bulb] sockets
• The single greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States is power plants
• if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL] … and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people … to turn off two entire power plants … one bulb [replaced per household] is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
• a $3 [CFL] pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months

I’ve thought CFLs were a no-brainer for five years: they cost less, they’re better for the planet; what’s not to love? But according to Fishman, I’m in the minority:

Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $1 billion to buy about 2 billion lightbulbs — 5.5 million every day. Just 5%, 100 million, were compact fluorescents.

Anyway, the next revelation in the article is that Wal-Mart aims to overcome this particular inertia within American society:

In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers — 100 million in all — one swirl bulb.

This is huge news. Most people will pick the less-expensive option if they know one is available, so a concerted marketing effort positioning CFLs as cheap will absolutely have an impact. There’s a convenience factor at play, too; if the local warehouse store sold recycled paper towels, half the people in the county would use them.

Of course, Wal-Mart has at best a mixed reputation as a steward of the planet or its inhabitants; BuyBlue.org ranks it negatively in 4 of 5 categories. I hope Fishman is correct when he reports that Wal-Mart “aims to change its own reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new positioning as an environmental activist.” Environmentalists would be crazy not to embrace such a change, so I’ll say this: within 30 days I will buy a CFL at Wal-Mart (and try not to dwell on the donation the company will make to the GOP on my behalf). Solidarity!

The article just gets better. Fishman describes WalMart V.P. Chuck Kerby’s CFL zen slap:

“Somebody asked, ‘What difference would it make if we changed the bulbs in the ceiling-fan display to CFLs?’” says Kerby. A typical Wal-Mart has 10 models of ceiling fans on display, each with four bulbs. Forty bulbs per store, 3,230 stores.

“Someone went off and did the math,” says Kerby. “They told me we could save $6 million in electric bills by changing the incandescents to CFLs in more than 3,000 Wal-Marts. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know I was paying $6 million to light those fixtures. I said, that can’t be right, go back and do the math again.”

Why is all this important? Read no farther than Fishman’s opening paragraph:

Sitting humbly on shelves in stores everywhere is a product, priced at less than $3, that will change the world. Soon. It is a fairly ordinary item that nonetheless cuts to the heart of a half-dozen of the most profound, most urgent problems we face. Energy consumption. Rising gasoline costs and electric bills. Greenhouse-gas emissions. Dependence on coal and foreign oil. Global warming.

I stopped by Office Depot on my way somewhere last weekend, to trade another dead inkjet cartridge for a ream of recycled paper, and I wondered yet again, why would Office Depot offer a ream of paper for an empty inkjet printer cartridge?

Today I saw an AP article that opened with a provocative question:

Ever wonder why office-supply stores will offer a ream of paper or $3 for empty inkjet printer cartridges?

In fact, I have!

The article goes on to explain that OEM cartridge vendors as well as refillers purchase used inkjet cartridges, even broken ones. Some models fetch $7 apiece.

Office Depot’s EnviroCopy paper retails for $3.50-$5.00 per ream; the manufacturing cost is probably half that. So it seems the inkjet cartridge exchange program is a profit center. Which is great news; it’s a useful public service too. I hope Office Depot is making money at it, because then they’ll keep the program going, which if nothing else means I won’t have to buy printer paper for the rest of my life.

Speaking of which… When I put my new ream of paper with the four already in the closet, I realised that an inkjet cartridge probably doesn’t print 500 pages. Which means I’m going to earn another ream of paper before I finish printing this one. And probably part of a third as well.

That’s the story behind the headline. If you own an inkjet printer, you’re almost certainly earning more free paper than you can use.

However, that means inkjet cartridges are the aluminum cans of the ’00s. They’re worth picking out of someone else’s trash. Maybe not for you, but for someone. When I lived in San Francisco, we’d put our recycling on the curb on Sunday nights; at dawn every Monday morning, homeless people would march up the street, picking the aluminum cans out of the recycling bins. The cans had passed a value threshhold, when suddenly they were worth picking through refuse for, stacking into shopping carts, and wheeling halfway across town to the recycling center.

I don’t know what homeless people are going to do with case upon case of recycled printer paper, but you get the idea.

Update, 2007-02-06: Never mind; Office Depot’s inkjet cartridge recycling program has begun to suck.

I needn’t have climbed the roof to determine whether the PV array has a shading problem. The kWh meter on the inverter makes it plain; on a sunny day, output drops from 1500 watts to 50 in the space of 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, this happens around 5:00 PM, so there’s over an hour of the daily peak period during which we’re not only not selling power to PG&E at 3x market rate, but in many cases we’re buying power at that rate. Ouch.

I met with an arborist today. He said he could prune the eucalyptus and birch trees that are shading the PV array, but not until December — cutting them now could damage them, and in the case of the birch, possibly kill it. So, we wait.

Unfortunately, the summer rate season lasts until October 31, and I expect the shade to impinge on production progressively earlier in the day (until the Winter Solstice). So we’re going to take a big hit in production this year.

I managed to reduce our peak-period consumption slightly this week — I found that the thermostat on the attic fan was set way too low, to 85° or something, which meant the fan ran for most of the afternoon and into the evening on warm days. I dialed it up to 110°, reducing the runtime by hours per day. A small but welcome victory.