A Road Trip To Karlstad

On September 20, 2012, in Sweden, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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Last Friday I had the pleasure of bringing a piece of our Embassy to the region of Värmland and the city of Karlstad, in the Western part of Sweden. Packing up the car and placing a microcosm of our Embassy “in a box”, as we call our Embassy Roadshow, to travel to a new place to connect with a fresh group of people has become one of my favorite things to do as Ambassador.

 

I truly believe the best way to get to know a country and its people is by getting to know firsthand the many dimensions of its society, not just in the capital but in the four corners of the nation. Meeting new Swedes on their terrain, standing on the land they’ve worked to preserve for centuries and learning about their community firsthand from those who inhabit it is so rewarding for me and important for the great Swedish-American friendship.

 

My 317 km journey to the Delta City began before sunrise, and in fact the sun hid for the first half of the day as rain pelted the car throughout our trip to Varmland. The city has as its motto ‘Solen alltid Skiner’ (The Sun Always Shines), and I knew rain or shine, the trip would be phenomenal and full of positive energy.

 

While entering the city I was able to see the beautiful vision of two of Sweden’s great natural waterways; the 500km long Klara River and the mighty Lake Vänern. As a true nature lover, I am always awe-struck by the unvarnished, almost wild beauty of the Swedish landscape.

Upon arrival, I was Greeted by both the Mayor, Per-Samuel Nilsson and the Governor of Värmland, Eva Eriksson, who demonstrated what I have heard so frequently about Karlstad: that the people are exceedingly warm, welcoming and hospitable.

 

From the moment I stepped out of the car, I was able to meet and engage with enthusiastic citizens and inquisitive young people – that Friday I met with almost 500 young people. Having the opportunity to connect on a personal level and discuss shared values and a shared sense of social responsibility, was such a significant moment for our Embassy community. I felt we were building a vibrant foundation that would last and be cultivated over time.

 

By reaching beyond the city limits of Stockholm, we were able to connect with a dynamic community and open dialogue with more than 500 students. It is so important to us as an Embassy team to authentically connect with the young generation, to not talk at them but to truly listen and be open and responsive to their perspectives. I met some of the most impressive and informed young people that day, and was so excited to connect with them on issues of sustainability, environmental protection and other global challenges, including in the Middle East. It gave me an incredible opportunity to learn a lot from a group of future leaders.

 

On Saturday, I was given the opportunity to speak at the Swedish American Bridge
Conference. Sweden’s Ambassador to the U.S.A. (and a great friend) Jonas Hafström, and hockey legend Håkan Loob, joined me as speakers for the morning session of the conference. Here, I was able to convey America’s focus on environmentalism and the innovative things happening on sustainability in the US.

It was a great and memorable visit to Karlstad.  Here are photos of our US Embassy Road Show:

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Secretary Clinton’s Historic Visit to Sweden

On June 7, 2012, in Mark, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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Secretary of State Clinton being introduced to Embassy staff by Ambassador and Mrs. Brzezinski

Natalia and I have been in Sweden for less than seven months, but I honestly can not think of any other period of time in my life more packed with excitement than this first half-year in Stockholm.  We have had the time of our lives, and literally every day has been unforgettable.   But just when I thought it could not possibly get any better…the Secretary of State comes to visit!  What an incredible honor – and what an amazing recognition of the importance of our friendship with Sweden, and the high value our most important leaders place on this relationship.  This was the first visit to Sweden in more than 30 years by a U.S. Secretary of State, purely for the purpose of enhancing, deepening, and honoring the relationship between our two countries. And that’s what made it historic.

Swedish-American relations have never been stronger or warmer.  Literally as the Secretary landed on the coldest day in Sweden in decades, the warmth of Foreign Minister Bildt and his wife ,who joined Natalia and I in greeting the Secretary on the wet tarmac, was palpable and set the tone for the entire visit.
Sweden is in the very front ranks with us in direct engagement with the immediate global problems we all confront. Our Swedish hosts were both honored and very pleased the Secretary travelled to Stockholm. They welcomed Secretary Clinton with the same enthusiasm that the staff and families of US Embassy Stockholm did. We are so proud of our Secretary of State, and we are proud of the American – Swedish relationship which her visit deepened and honored.

A Powerful Global Partnership Based on Shared Values

As Secretary Clinton said, Sweden is – and has long been – one of America’s top partners and one of our oldest friends.  Importantly, Sweden brings its diplomatic heft and its development expertise to nearly every corner of the globe.  When it comes to global priorities, whether it is Afghanistan, Iran, counter-terrorism, global economic reform, humanitarian assistance, the Swedes are right by our side.  It is a relationship based on shared and deeply cherished values, values which we and Sweden are both committed to protecting.

At the recent NATO Summit in Chicago, the U.S. warmly welcomed Sweden as one of NATO’s strongest partners, standing with us in Afghanistan as we begin the transition to full Afghan responsibility for security by 2014, as well as working for the betterment of the Afghan people into the future.  In addition, Sweden offered NATO the use of its Nordic Center for Gender in Military Operations, which further demonstrates the strong and positive relationship between Sweden and NATO.  Secretary Clinton recognized this important offer in her remarks in Stockholm with the Swedish Prime Minister Frederick Reinfeldt and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.

Working Together To Keep The Internet Free

The Secretary also noted the close cooperation we share with the Swedes when it comes to protecting Internet Freedom.  She applauded Sweden’s leadership on Internet Freedom issues, stressing that those rights belong in the Internet as much as they do in the “real” world.  She also commended our Embassy for maximizing our social media platforms, and in particular for our our work in reaching out to Swedish bloggers.  As we all know, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is a prolific blogger himself.  So when he

complimented our embassy’s use of social media as a model for his own ministry to follow, it was high praise indeed! And when it comes to all of the large challenges that know no boundaries, such as climate change, or gender equality, or Internet freedom, it is true that Sweden is not just on the front lines, but leading.  And I am greatly appreciative for all of that work, and look forward to enhancing it in the months and years ahead.

Dealing With Climate Change Together

Personally, I’m delighted that Secretary Clinton also chose to focus on climate and the environment during her visit. Sweden and the U.S. have a strong partnership in this area — both countries are initiators of a global coalition to address short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). Secretary Clinton joined Sweden’s Environment Minister Lena Ek and H.R.H. Crown Princess Victoria at an event launching the coalition’s global awareness-raising efforts, and in her remarks she said: “Few people actually know about the impact we could have on global warming if we aggressively target short-lived climate pollutants.  And fewer still know that many cost-effective solutions already exist and are just waiting to be broadly implemented.”

To bolster the efforts led by Sweden and the U.S. to raise awareness about SLCPs, Secretary Clinton announced a global contest to find the most creative ideas for raising awareness of short-lived climate pollutants and the work that must be done to stop them. You can find details on the contest at www.unep.org/ccac.

It was so terrific to have the Secretary visit Stockholm and to spend some time with our Embassy team and their families.  Our Meet and Greet with Embassy staff and families was warm and uplifting, and reflected the respect and admiration our Secretary of State has for public service.  That she took time for photos with our Marines, our Embassy’s kids and all of us will long be remembered.  As the father of a young daughter with a wife joining me in a commitment to women’s empowerment, it was inspiring to have Secretary Clinton visit Sweden, as she is a global leader on this and many other issues.  In Sweden she finds a willing and capable partner which shares our values, as Sweden’s government today has more women ministers than men, including a female Minister of Defense.  Tack så mycket (“Thank you so much” in Swedish) Madame Secretary!!!!

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U.S. Green Cities Delegation Confirms “All Politics is Local”

On April 20, 2012, in Mark, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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In the late 1970s/early 1980s, then-U.S. Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, coined the now-famous saying “all politics is local”. This holds particularly true in the United States where the federal system reserves to states and cities most authorities and decision-making powers, making America a “ground-up” society were local action and grass-roots enthusiasm leads the way.

Earlier this week Natalia and I hosted a breakfast for a group of mayors and city representatives from the U.S. National League of Cities to get a flavor of how they are developing and implementing environmentally sustainable solutions. The delegation – representing Baltimore, Maryland; Cleveland, Ohio; Dubuque, Iowa; and St Paul, Minnesota – also met with Swedish counterparts under the auspices of the Swedish American Green Alliance (SAGA) to exchange best practices on urban sustainability to make sure that local politics does not stay local, but that these great solutions spread internationally.

Each of these elected officials displayed an impressive breadth of knowledge and determination to implement effective sustainability programs in their respective cities, each with very distinct and individual challenges and opportunities. Natalia and I were so inspired by the level of commitment and imagination in the room.  Whether it was tackling issues of transportation in Baltimore, spreading knowledge through early education on sustainability in Cleveland, or high-speed rail and an emphasis on public-private partnerships in St. Paul,  each of these city representatives were finding creative solutions to make improve the quality of life for their citizens. By utilizing his years of experience at John Deere Co.  and a dedication to improving the lives of his nine grandchildren, Mayor Boul of Dubuque, Iowa has helped make Dubuque one of the best small cities to raise a family, according to Forbes.

The delegation visited Hammarby Sjöstad together with Natalia. Hammarby has gone from being a former industrial site in the late 1980s to a sustainable neighborhood with cutting-edge holistic solutions that help its nearly 26,000 residents make significant energy savings while also saving money. The goal of the “Hammarby Model” is to integrate energy, water and waste to make the most efficient system possible.  What was once a polluted area populated by squatters, has now become a coveted residential areas for young families and professionals due to its vast and family-friendly “green areas”, efficient garbage sorting system, district heating and goal of making it the first completely electric car area by 2020. Hammarby Sjostad has become a global example of sustainability, and has over 13,000 visitors per year. Our city representatives, along with Natalia, were able to place a peg on a map of the world for all visitors. The map depicted visitors from Canada to China, Norway to Saudi Arabia.

In a similar fashion, the U.S. cities we met have adopted a number of sustainable initiatives. Council member Kraft of Baltimore told us that a 2.25% tax increase on downtown parking has allowed the city to offer free public transport in the city center which has encouraged residents to leave their cars at home.  Mayor Coleman of St Paul informed us about his city’s district heating grid which is run on biomass. Considering St Paul was one of the main destinations for Swedish emigrants in the late 19th century, it is not too surprising that it was two Swedes who constructed the city’s district heating system a couple of decades back

Both Natalia and I were pleased to see how Swedish and U.S. cities are uniting to take the lead in urban sustainability. This goes for both large and small cities. Dubuque, a town of 60 000, and its mayor, Roy Buol, has shown how a small city can serve as a small scale test pilot for bigger cities. As an example, Dubuque recently teamed up with IBM to launch a brand new smart metering system that will allow the town’s residents to keep a close eye on their energy and water consumption as part of Dubuque being IBM’s test bed for its “Smarter Cities” initiative. The overall goal is for this system to be spread around the United States and around the world.

All politics truly is local – sustainability is no exception.

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Wastewater is Serious Business in Sweden

On February 29, 2012, in Mark, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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From left to right: Käppala Managing Director Per Manhem, Lidingö Mayor Paul Lindquist, Ambassador Mark Brzezinski

Northern Stockholm, or the island of Lidingö to be more specific, hosts Käppala water treatment plant which is one of the world’s cleanest facilities of its kind. On Monday morning Lidingö Mayor Paul Lindquist and Käppala Manager Director Per Manhem offered me a tour of this facility.  This facility serves approximately 600,000 people in eleven municipalities in the Stockholm area.

The purpose of the visit was to learn more about Käppala’s active role in providing not just clean water, but the city buses with biogas, local farmers with fertilizer and adjacent households with district heating. The plant was inaugurated in the 1950s but as a result of the rapid growth of Stockholm the plant underwent an expansion in the late 1990s.

At Käppala, sludge is considered valuable stuff and serious business. It is one of few waste water plants in the world that actually generates annual revenue of several million dollars a year alone for the biogas. This is hardly surprising since it has the capacity to provide 100 buses with biogas and 30,000-40,000 houses with district heating. Käppala also generates approximately 20,000 tons of sludge annually which it gives away for free to farmers who use it as fertilizer.
Before sending the fertilizer to farmers, the plant removes 98 percent of the phosphorus in the sludge to make sure it does not end up in surrounding lakes and rivers causing eutrophication. People often talk about the danger of reaching peak oil — the point at which the production of oil begins an irreversible decline — but very few ever speak of peak phosphorus!

Phosphorus is crucial to a plant’s root, flower, fruit or vegetable and seed
development – and we are slowly running out of it. The work at Käppala is therefore important in order to avoid wasting this precious mineral. The plant does not only remove phosphorus but also traces of pharmaceuticals, some of which affects the reproduction of fish.

From left to right: U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Mark Brzezinski, Käppala Managing Director Per Manhem

Käppala clearly serves the people of Stockholm in a number of ways which is probably why it has become such an integrated part of society. I was excited to see how much the United States can learn about how not to waste our waste.

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Kiruna: In the air, on land and below the Earth

On February 3, 2012, in Natalia, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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Ambassador and Mrs. Brzezinski outside Esrange near Kiruna, Sweden

In the past 36 hours, I’ve observed the enormous capacity of man thousands of miles into space, and been plunged thousands of feet below the earth surrounded by molten rock and impenetrable darkness. From the Esrange Space Center to the vast LKAB iron ore mines, the impressive level of dynamism and symbiosis with nature that Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden with a population of less than 20,000 inhabitants, encapsulates is undeniable. Its strategic location makes it suitable for cutting-edge experimentation and it’s an example of a region not limited but buoyed by environmental awareness.

 
As I prepared for my trip north of the Arctic Circle (Kiruna is 145 kilometers (90 mi) north of the Arctic Circle), I was inundated with descriptions of untarnished forests, biting temperatures, and roaming reindeer. But instead of the soporific quality I expected, Kiruna is bustling with industry and linking the world from air, space and land in an amazing breadth of connectivity and information.

 
We began our trip by touring the Esrange Space Center. Started in 1964, it has become a leading research center for launching experimental sounding rockets, balloons and satellites. The center boasts more than 23 different nationalities working together on aeronautic experiments that attempt to answer the questions of the moment on ozone depletion, gravity and sustainability. As space becomes busier, more competitive and more cluttered, centers like Esrange are on the cusp of facilitating cooperation in this unregulated frontier.

 
Our first day in Kiruna turned out to be not only intellectually but also visually illuminating: the evening was capped off by an incredible display of the Aurora Borealis shining above our hotel room, with three pale green, luminescent lines like paint strokes splashed across the heavens.

 
The next morning, we toured the LKAB iron ore mines closer to the center of Kiruna. This mine alone provides 90 percent of the iron ore for the European Union, and is one of the largest iron ore mines in the world. In a true feat of modern engineering, we drove through a network of paved two-lane highways zigzagging through the rock as we spent nearly two hours viewing the facilities. The mine boasts a large conference center, multiple loading docks and layers upon layers of tunnels where massive, remote-controlled machines break rock and collect ore in record time. But for me, one of the most impressive features was that nearly fifteen percent of the employees manning the control stations were women. In one of the most traditionally and symbolically male-dominated occupations, that is a feat of engineering in itself!

 
One challenge for the city is managing the expansion of the mine and maintaining the sacred balance between man and nature that is so critical to the identity of Kiruna. This challenge will be tested this year, as the entire city must be moved to accommodate the natural growth of the mine. People, cultural landmarks and homes will be literally lifted and moved to a more stable setting, or completely razed and rebuilt. Despite the overwhelming nature of this task, there seems to be a level of trust and communication between the public and industry that will hopefully ease this transition.

 

In many ways, the Arctic region both asks the tough questions and holds the complicated answers to the future of our environment. This trip made me focus more on the potential for cooperation between man and land, and how we can create harmony through respect and awareness.

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We’re all in this together

On December 7, 2011, in Mark, by Ambassador Brzezinski
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Today marks the arrival in Stockholm of a person who personifies American leadership and great science:  Dr. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy. We at the U.S. Embassy are thrilled that Dr. Chu has come to Sweden for Nobel week.  Dr. Chu is a former Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize for physics in 1997.  He has run a national laboratory, is the holder of ten patents, and has published nearly 250 scientific papers — a background that spans invention, scientific collaboration, and real results on turning new ideas into action.

In announcing Dr. Chu’s selection as U.S. Secretary of Energy in 2009, President Obama said, “The future of our economy and national security is inextricably linked to one challenge:  energy.  Steven has blazed new trails as a scientist, teacher, and administrator, and has recently led the Berkeley National Laboratory in pursuit of new alternative and renewable energies.”

While I am not a scientist, I am passionate about the environment and where our world is going.  I feel most at home in the calm and stillness of nature.  There’s a place in Virginia where my family has gone for years, in the Blue Ridge mountains, for hiking and hunting, where the changing of the leaves marks the passage of time — and where every once in a while if one is very lucky one can see a black bear or wild bobcat.  When my family first moved to Washington DC in the 1970′s, the Potomac River used to freeze practically every year.  Now it rarely freezes at all.  I want my daughter and all of our children and grandchildren to live in a safe, prosperous and healthy world.  And I am very happy that the person in the United States leading our pursuit of alternative and renewable energy brings a genuine and accomplished scientific background to this challenge we all share.

I’ve been in Sweden as Ambassador for 19 days now.  One thing I hear from practically everyone is how important it is that we strive to find new solutions to energy challenges and global climate change.  It’s widely recognized that this is a challenge that does not recognize borders and national boundaries.  To make sure that we get the resources and technology to the countries that really need it, without losses through bureaucracy and corruption, the United States at this moment is collaborating with other nations, including Sweden, to put the essential mechanisms and governance in place to actually implement the important international agreements already made in Copenhagen and Cancun.

Here at the U.S. Embassy, we are working hard every day through the Swedish American Green Alliance (SAGA) to do things that make a difference — sharing technology, ideas and approaches and facilitating dynamic partnerships between Americans and Swedes.  And we want to welcome you to take part — please visit the SAGA website to see the best of what is happening on sustainability – in Sweden, in the United States, and more and more in partnership between our countries.  If you see something already happening in which you would like to be a partner, or have your own story to share so those who many want to partner with, or learn from, you can see it: send it to saga@state.gov.  Change starts with an idea, which by working together we can make reality.  But it means you need to share that project you are working on, or that “light bulb” idea in your head with the SAGA network so that we can all work together to tactically implement it.  We are all in this together.

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