One Point of Light in Bush's Environmental Legacy

Newsweek — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:56:41 GMT

By Anders Rönmark

Few Europeans shed tears for George W. Bush when he left office Tuesday. His handling of the Iraq War and the U.S. failure to ratify the Kyoto environmental treaty were two of the biggest black marks against him. Yet in Sweden, the end of the Bush era marks a bittersweet moment: the last day in office for Michael Wood, the most famous and perhaps most influential U.S. ambassador to Sweden in history. Since Bush appointed his long-time friend to the office in 2006, Wood, a media executive, has been feted by government officials, business leaders and the Swedish media for his groundbreaking work in alternative energy.

Unusually, for an ambassador, Wood has tried to promote Swedish business interests in the United States, rather than just U.S. interests in Sweden. Wood started out by visiting every county of Sweden, meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs and put together a list of the 23 most promising Swedish companies, such as Comfort Window System (which makes energy-efficient window fittings) and Sekab (a producer of cellulosic ethanol), and began promoting them to U.S. investors, both public and private. Wood's List, as it has become known, now numbers 52 companies, and federal agencies and departments in the United States, including the Pentagon, are now investing in and cooperating with Swedish companies. For instance, Swedish Biofuels has received $5 million dollars from the U.S Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop jet fuels containing biological components. Wood's program has also attracted the interest of several U.S. states. In 2007 Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm visited Sweden, on Wood's invitation, and her economic development team has made four trips to the country. Result: Swedish Biogas has opened a plant in Flint, Mich., to create biogas from the city's sewage plant, to power Flint's buses and produce fertilizers; Swedish company Chemrec is now working with a paper mill in Escanaba, Mich., on a technology called black liquor gasification that recycle pulp waste into fuel. All told, Wood's program has resulted in business activity worth approximately $150 to $200 million dollars, he says. "But the potential of the companies on just this one list is huge," he says. "We're talking billions of dollars."

Wood's interest in the alternative energy industry came shortly after his appointment, when he realized that an ambassador to a small country like Sweden was most likely to be successful if he focused on what he calls "one big thing." Nick Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state, "liked the idea of me working to make Sweden a member of NATO," says Wood. Condoleezza Rice "thought that promoting democracy in the former Soviet states should be my top priority." But Bush, the erstwhile oilman, liked a third option: "He told me 'I bet the Swedes are ahead of us when it comes to alternative energy. Go there and find out what they're doing.'" Many were skeptical. Bush had hardly demonstrated much interest in the industry, and many believed the failure to ratify Kyoto was emblematic of the administration's beliefs about the environment. But Wood's program has been so successful that it has inspired other U.S. embassies, particularly in Scandinavia, to work harder on promoting alternative energy solutions--a small bright spot in a presidential legacy most of the people living there would just as soon forget.

How to win the war against dengue fever

Mac Margolis — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:27:27 GMT

A bout of dengue starts with a pounding headache and a blazing fever. Next come excruciating body cramps and joint pain that render the stricken listless and useless for days on end. And that's if you're lucky. In its most extreme or "hemorrhagic" version, dengue is a killer. So far, 88 people have succumbed in this year's outbreak in the state of Rio de Janeiro, almost half of them children. And although the epidemic that turned the hospitals in Brazil's signature city into refugee camps now looks to have peaked, the balmy tropical autumn will surely keep the body count ticking higher over the next few months.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Yes, dengue fever is now the bug of the millennium, infecting close to a hundred million people in 100 countries wordwide every year. And there is no vaccine for dengue or even the faint hope that the mosquito, aedes aegypti, that spreads the contagion can be erradicated. But there are ways to fight back, if not to wipe out the disease then at least to keep every outbreak from becoming a funeral procession.

How? Prevention. A number of regions where the contagion has caused havoc in the past have managed to avoid the worst. Until late last century dengue was virtually unknown in the Americas, thanks to a a painstaking, hemispheric, door-to-door mosquito killing campaign. True, the main target back then was not dengue but yellow fever, which is also spread by aedes aegytpi. But slaying one contagion meant avoiding the other, and as late as 1980, both diseases had all but disappeared. Along came "progess" in the form of the great third world industrial revolution, which emptied the countryside and stuffed the cities with poor people in airless slums - perfect incubators for mosquitoes - and suddenly dengue came raging back, from the Antilles to Asuncion.

But some societies are winning the war against dengue. After two huge outbreaks in 1994 (20,000 cases) and 1998 (14,000), Puerto Rico, with the help of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the U.S. government headquarters for disease research and prevention, has managed to dampen subsequent outbreaks by mobilizing society, on television, in the classroom, and house-by-house, to kill mosquitoes and eliminate the standing pools of water where they flourish. "The problem is not just one of virology or public health, but also of engaging society," says Wellington Sun, head of CDC's Puerto Rico office.

Few countries can match Singapore for disease control. Dengue is now a major killer in Asia, but this city state has managed to beat back the disease. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the authorities act not only at the height of epidemics, when, alas," it's too late to do much," says Michael Nathan, an insect-borne disease specialist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Instead, Singapore works to wipe out mosquitoes in off years when the disease (and most politicians) sleeps. Significantly, it's not the public health bureaucracy but the environment and water resources ministry in Singapore that is charged with fighting dengue, a smart move when confronting a disease that thrives in the steamy, waterlogged urban jungle.

Singapore is not immune; 19 people died from dengue in 2005. But it has proved a model of moving fast and aggressively against the virus before an outbreak gets out of hand. (Case in point: Singapore managed to stop cold a recent global outbreak of a dengue-like virus called chicken gunya after just 13 cases.)

You don't have to go so far for successful disease control. Last year, Campo Grande, a city of 780,000 inhabitants in southwestern Brazil, was rocked by its worst dengue epidemic in years, with 46,000 cases. Only two people died. The reason: agile nurses and orderlies scurried to medicate victims who were standing on queue at hospitals, hydrating the worst cases with life-saving saline solution, well before physicians arrived.

My favorite example comes from a little town called Adolfo, 270 kms from São Paulo. Surrounded by cities plagued by dengue, the keepers of Adolfo knew they needed something more than bug repellant to ward off the disease. They needed citizen involvement. So they offered a carrot. Families that managed to eliminate pools of water and unkempt potted plants where mosquitoes flourish were rewarded with free wideband Internet access. The result: while nearby towns like José Bonifácio have all they can do to keep the mosquito at bay, Adolfo has been dengue free this year. The town fathers called their project Adolfo Connected to the World. They might have called it beating the millennium bug.

Why It Matters : Environment and leadership

One Point of Light in Bush's Environmental Legacy

How to win the war against dengue fever