There are now 593 interesting newspaper articles I haven’t talked about in my Climate folder in Gmail.

That is probably too many. They come too fast these days.

Let’s get that number down to 592.

It’s from Le Monde (it’s in French but pop it into Chrome and then automatically translate it):

Sweden is currently undergoing a cement crisis because the domestic limestone quarry that most of their raw material for cement comes from has been refused ongoing environmental permits from the appeals courts, including the Swedish Supreme Court!

This one quarry provides 75% of Sweden’s cement needs.

This one quarry employs 430 people.

Which could of course have follow-on effects on anyone whose job involves building buildings.

One question I have: Will Sweden simply import limestone from other countries and try to retain its current level of concrete-based construction?

Or will this be an accelerator in moving to other ways of building (e.g., using cross-laminated wood techniques to build taller buildings—it’s not like Sweden is short of trees or anything. Umm, IKEA anyone?), or simply building less?

It’s fascinating to me that European countries with almost flat population levels still appear to need to build so many buildings with concrete every year. Sweden’s population growth is barely above zero.