renewable-energy – Stephen Hinton Consulting

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?

Real Capital: A terminology list

For those studying and learning Real Capital (Multi-Capital) and its application to producing bases for decision-making, this glossary may be of help.

Modelling Supply Chains to inform Circular Economy policy

Short Communication

Stephen Hinton, Fellow, International Association of Advanced Materials

ABSTRACT

Supply chains are international. To be effective, it follows that actors should use a common language with the same vocabulary, metrics etc. in each country to be able to run, monitor and regulate them. They have a common grammar that embodies key generally accepted concepts. This grammar, however, still reflects the make-take-dispose mental models of the linear economy. This report presents a proposal for a description of supply chain grammar using the Swedish SNI categorisation of industries. The proposal models supply chains with sufficient granularity to allow identification of intervention points for the crafting of policy to stimulate the transition to circularity.

Each installed production device in the various types of the chain can be classified according to their capability for circularity, allowing for quantitative measures to help companies and countries craft policy and strategy.

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.

AI summarizes my circular economy work in 13 minutes

I’ve been at it a long time. Working on the circular economy. From advising the Swedish Circular Economy Delegation, to working on the circular region at the university in Gävle, Sweden, to creating an online education for county administrators. Thinking to put it all in a book, I started collecting fragments into Google’s experimental NotelbookLM. Of course, it offered to do a podcast summary of it all.

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.

The ABC of Supply Chains shows the disconnects killing the planet

Fortunately for us, Sweden keeps a pretty comprehensive set of statistics ¹ on how its industry performs. It takes a while to retrieve them and put them together at the highest levels, but the exercise reveals som particular insights about how the developed world works. You could say that supply chains represent the workings of the global super organism. When you look at the system from above, you see some glaring disconnects. It gives a good idea of who is doing what to the planet, and who is earning the money from it. They are definitely different industries, if not different people.

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.