climate-change – Stephen Hinton Consulting

Ecological Insolvency: When the Forestry Industry is unable to restore its damage

The term insolvency is normally used in finance. A company is insolvent when it can no longer pay its debts. What if we applied this concept ecologically?

Sweden’s forestry industry is in a state of ecological insolvency. It cannot meet the environmental obligations that come with responsible land stewardship. The industry is profitable and not financially insolvent. However, it fails to maintain biodiversity, soil fertility, water quality, and climate stability—its ecological “debts” continue to grow. This is a perfect example of where Real Capital – the forest ecosystem – is extracted and degraded and converted into money. It is becoming so degraded that it may even lose its material-producing capability.

A demand-side strategy for saving Swedish forests

Swedish forests are being clear-cut at such a rate that alarms bells are ringing about dramatic loss of biodiversity and old-growth forest. Once clear cut, it is unlikely that biodiversity and old-growth forest will return. Activists are calling for the preservation of the last remaining patches of bio-diverse forest. This must happen. However, we need to look at the demand side. What is driving this demand and are there demand-strategies available?

Swedish energy and climate planning goes normative. That poses questions

This year, 2025, is the year Swedish local authorities are tasked with preparing for the Green Revolution: To make sure the Paris agreements are reached, to fulfill EU directives on nature, AND to prepare for shocks from the ever-increasing weather volatility.

We need to first understand our culture before we can change it

To be part of developing our culture towards peace, it is vital we all gain an awareness of what our culture is. And why we need to be actively involved with its evolution. This article presents culture as a group’s way of living that emerges and adapts over time. We will seek to explore, in coming articles, how we as individuals can influence our culture towards peace. For now, let us explore this concept of culture. It has many dimensions that interact with each other. We may find places we as individuals, or as the groups we are involved in, where we can intervene to orient our way of life more towards peace.

What is a municipality to do? Abandon “progress” would be a reasonable strategy.

Does a good life entail pursuing progress? As a local politician my focus is turning to adapting society to extreme weather. And a supportive, inclusive culture. Kindness is good for a feeling of well-being.

As a local politician I’ve been involved in dialogue around strategy for 2025. The process will result in a plan to be agreed in September this year (2024) for next year. My group is responsible for the built environment – in Sweden the municipality has a monopoly on built environment planning as well as domestic waste, which brings great responsibility with it. Faced with the fact that warnings from the IPCC have gone unheeded, (use of fossil fuels has increased year on year) we concluded that our #1 priority is to prepare for the consequences of 1.5 degrees. Ideas on pursuing “progress” seem so last century. But how do you put a management system in place to achieve preparedness? How do you ensure a place is good one to live in? Can we have prosperity as our aim?

The ABC of supply chains. Allocation of common pool assets and services based on them.

Earlier posts explained that the Swedish system of classifying organisations according to the products they produce (SNI) is useful as a tool to study the workings of the supply chains. The classification is connected to a lot of data collected about Swedish companies. This section covers the concept of allocation – that is about how much of common pool resources each type of industry takes up, and how much of the total need is filled by the respective companies. We will explore the theory in this part. The aim is to develop approaches that better inform policy making.

A carbon dioxide balance sheet for Sweden

Based on official statistics it is possible to put together a high-level balance sheet for Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions and uptake. It does raise some interesting questions as to how the statistics are set up, but let us look at the overall picture – to better understand how the country can fulfil its ambition to be climate neutral by 2050.

2023: Looking Back in Anger-the realization it is too late to avoid hardship

2023 – the year I realised we are looking at the end of industrial civilisation as we know it.

Last year, some realizations hit me hard. For me, 2023 really saw the beginning of the end of what we might call the industrial way of life. For many years I have advocated transitioning to sustainability. Below I outline why I now think it is too late, instead the focus should be on mitigating the effects of destabilized weather patterns. It looks like several tipping points may be inevitable. At least we must prepare.

The Tax and Dividend mechanism. A simulation

One way to reduce fossil fuel in products is to, as suggested by The Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation, introduce a progressive tax and dividend on fossil fuel.