PeakPhosphorous and topten.pt

In this article it is proposed that we will be running out of phosphorous fairly soon if we do not start using a bit intelligently. Time to talk about PeakPhosphorous just as one talk about PeakOil? They estimate 60-80 years of cheap mineral phosphorous. So we should start making use of all the shit and piss we "produce" all the time!

Quercus and EDP has just launched a new site called topten.pt. Aiming to be a Portuguese search tool to find the best sustainable choices of light bults, washing machines, cars, you name it...

slow travel and sustainable gaia

Some glimpses from Portugal in Jornal de Negocios from 2007-05-29:

A group of more or less abandoned villages in Portugal has formed Rede de Aldeias do Xisto. Old houses will be recuperated and used to house tourists that look more for local colour and culture than speedy impressions. Slow travel. With a touch of sustainability.

Vila Nova hopefully will plan to become sustainable in the near future. Luis Filipe Menezes (autarca?) will put forward a programme for self reliance. He has invited the University of Aveiro to plan the city into self reliance in energy including waste management ie recycling. Lets hope Gaia will become a role model for the rest of Portugal! Something for Mesquita!!!

Castro inspire us to use smart buildings?

In the article making buildings behave better in the Economist the market failure to reach smart houses is discussed. With smart I mean low over energy cost, ie both constructions and use. Since constructurs do not use the houses they build they also do not have to pay the electricity bills. Hence very little interest (from the constructors) to build smart houses.

In a recent newsletter from TreeHugger it says that "if every computer manufacturer sold sustainable green computers tomorrow, it would take only three years for the great majority to be green. If every car manufacturer sold only energy-efficient cars starting tomorrow, it would take ten years for almost all cars to be green. Yet even if every building was LEED Platinum starting tomorrow it would take a hundred years for the building stock to turn over."

Since the IPCC says that buildings are the biggest household culprit then of course the focus also should be on improving the current buildings ...

Pope says that Latin American natives welcomed Jesus?!

Here is quote of the English translation of speech that the Pope did in Brazil in May 2007:

"Yet what did the acceptance of the Christian faith mean for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean? For them, it meant knowing and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious traditions. Christ is the Saviour for whom they were silently longing. It also meant that they received, in the waters of Baptism, the divine life that made them children of God by adoption; moreover, they received the Holy Spirit who came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them and developing the numerous seeds that the incarnate Word had planted in them, thereby guiding them along the paths of the Gospel. In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture." [my high lights]

Has the pope turned into a revisionist?

Vattenfall and CO2 emissions

The Swedish energy "producer" Vattenfall has created a campaign site Moving towards a low carbon society. Their CEO has gone out strong with things that can be done to decrease human society´s impact on global warming.

But WWF in their top 30 list Dirty Thirty - Europe’s dirtiest power stations" put four of Vattenfall´s carbon power plants on the list (place 5, 11, 16 and 19). This makes Vattenfall one of the worst environmental crooks in Europe!!!

In a recent report by NyTeknik it is noted that Vattenfall only puts 0.04% of their turn-over (2006) into research and development of renewable energy ...

So when will the words of Lars Josefssons come into real action???

Soap nuts

If you are looking for an all natural washing detergent, look no further, I have found it. Or rather people in India, Pakistan and Nepal have been using the shell of the fruits of the tree Sapindus Mukorossi for millenia. It is high in saponin that is a natural detergent.

The French company Ecoidées sell these fruit shells in Europe. I found them in NaturCoop in Campanha in Porto, Portugal.

I have used them on two washes and it seems to be working just fine, on moderately dirty clothes.

mars bar vs muesly bar

Mars bar

Content........./100g...../bar (50g)

Energy.........1884kJ.....944kJ
Proteins.........3.7g.......1.9g
Carbohydrates...69.3.......34.7 g
Fats............17.4........8.7

Ingredients:
Sugar, glucose syrup, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, vegetable fat, cocoa paste, lactose, defatted milk powder, whey powder, low fat cocoa powder, butter fat, malted barley, salt, soy lecithin, egg white, hydrolysed mild protein

Hero muesly línea apple
(without added sugar)

Content............/100g....../bar (25g)
Energy.............1335kJ......334kJ
Proteins..............6.6g........1.7g
Carbohydrates........72.2........18.1
...Sugar.............12.5g........3.2g
...Polyalcohols......27...........6.8g
Fats..................5...........1.3
...Saturated..........3.4.........0.9
Alimentary fibres.....5.4.........1.4

Ingredients:
Cereals (oat, barley, wheat, rice and corn) (47%), maltitol syrup, dried apple (10%), salt, concentraded apple juice (7.6%), roasted coco nut flakes, vegatable oil, stabiliser (glycerol), malted barley, E471, citric acid, E450, E500.

Recommended daily energy intake: ca 10 MJ or 10000 kJ.
One mars bars is ca 1MJ and one Hero muesly ca 0.3 MJ
Anyway: one mars bar is 1/10 of the RDI of energy.
Eating muesly bars does not make you slim ...

Climate Prediction

Today I installed the software for the Climate Prediction.net and joined the Portuguse team.

So now my laptop helps out to calculate predictions of the climate in the near future.