I would like to thank the American Chamber of Commerce for inviting me to be here today. I admire all the work and the encouragement that you provide for small business people and entrepreneurs.

It is also a pleasure to share the stage with State Secretary Alterå. I treasure the cooperation that we have established between the U.S. and the new Swedish government, particularly your Ministry, and it is good to see you here.

Like everybody else, I try to do what I can for climate change. And in a group like this, I sometimes point out that George Bush is my childhood friend. I have known him since I was 14. Saying that often sends a chill through the room. As I have traveled around the country talking about the One Big Thing and technology cooperation, I do get a lot of audiences of people who say that is a good idea, and that in Sweden it is a good thing to know that the U.S. wants to cooperate with us. But people do ask me: 'Have you checked with the White House on that?' Of course I have. Let me tell you a little about U.S. activities and how that translates into my program here in Sweden, which is called the One Big Thing. (OBT)

I got the idea I guess -- and in fact some of you were probably here a year ago -- when I actually canvassed the AmCham and said of the three choices of things that I could concentrate on, which one does the group encourage me to follow? I think it was more or less obvious that we follow the track that we are on -- which is cooperation between then U.S. and Sweden on alternative energy. (See the text of remarks from August 31, 2006 here.)

After that I met with this man, Hans-Olof Olsson, former CEO of Volvo Cars. He's a great man, and he reminded me that there are two Swedish inventions that exist today on every automobile made anywhere in the world. I could not name them. They are the seatbelt and the catalytic converter. And hearing that, it reminded me of the great scientific and research development infrastructure that exists here in Sweden. I decided that maybe what I was looking for in the OBT is the seatbelt of alternative energy, some discovery here in Sweden that with cooperation could flower into a giant idea that would move the world away from fossil fuels and the rest of climate change. So that is what I have been looking for.

In the audience somewhere or maybe later this morning is my mentor and hero. Lars Josefsson of Vattenfall runs a giant corporation with worldwide significance. He is taking on for himself the personal challenge of persuading business leaders throughout the world to do everything that they can to curb climate change. A year ago when he first told me about this plan, he had no companies signed up. Today he has almost 50 companies, CEOs who have signed up for the Combat Climate Change. For information about Combat Climate Change see here.

There will be a meeting in Washington in the middle of November at the House of Sweden where the CEOs of these companies will come and have dinner with the King of Sweden and meet many of the leading policy makers in Washington. This group that Lars Josefsson has created has turned into something very important.

Now this is the image that many people have of the U.S. But there is another image. This is the solar farm in the desert of Arizona that produces 2.5 megawatts of electricity. And this is a wind farm in Texas -- one of the largest in the U.S. -- which produces 150 megawatts of power from wind. My wife, Judy, and I are going to Gotland tomorrow for several days to visit the largest wind farm which exists in Sweden. It will be interesting to compare the technology and the methods of storage and transmission in Sweden to what we know is going on in the U.S.

I just returned from a vacation in the U.S., and I was amazed at how quickly things have changed there, in fact, are changing every day on the subject of climate change. Foreign and other manufacturers have projected 750,000 green cars will be sold in the U.S. next year, 2008. That compares to 5,000 cars just eight years ago. There has been an explosion of purchasing of hybrid cars and flex-fuel cars. Enterprise Rent a Car runs ads on TV saying that when you rent our cars, we emit CO2, so we are going to plant 50 million trees to offset the CO2 that comes from our rented cars.

General Electric has a great program that you will hear about this morning -- Eco-imagination. One of the components of that is a goal of $20 million in sales of green products in just three years.

Wal-Mart -- in many ways, sort of the worst image of an American company or at least much maligned -- has a goal of selling 100 million of these compact fluorescent light bulbs that are much more efficient than incandescence bulbs -- 100 million of those by the end of next year. They are encouraging their customers -- hundreds of millions of people throughout the U.S. -- educating them on the benefits of these light bulbs and explaining that if the 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs are used, this will eliminate the need for the power equivalence of 450,000 new homes.

So it is almost like different corporations are now competing with each other to appeal to the growing attitude in the U.S. for responsibility in this area. So back to my attempts at humor at the beginning, I think that the U.S. was asleep on this subject. But we are very awake now.

Ola had mentioned the programs of different states, and this map shows the renewable fuel standards that exist in many of the states in the U.S. About 80 percent of all of the electricity that is generated comes from the states where there are renewable fuel standards. They vary from one state to another. Fifteen percent of the electricity generated in Minnesota will come from renewable sources. Twenty percent of the electricity in California will come from such sources. And while I was in the U.S., three additional states announced their renewable fuel standards -- further evidence of this trend that seems to change every day in the U.S.

Let me close with some remarks about current climate change policy in the U.S. The One Big Thing is the idea of seeking cooperation between the U.S. and Sweden in the development of alternative energy. It is finding the seatbelt of alternative energy. And Sweden is a great place to look for this. Since 1990 the emissions in Sweden have declined 7 percent. Yet this has been a period of dynamic economic growth. This refutes one of these myths about climate change responsibilities. And the myth is that it damages your economy. Sweden's experience proves that this is not the case. You see the decline in the use of oil and the increase of the use of bio-energy that is mostly for district heating. So Sweden is a good place to cooperate.

If you are interested in solving the problem of climate change, you need to know where these emissions come from, and so this pie chart in a very general way shows you that they come from industry in the blue, from the transportation sector, orange, and yellow and red are from buildings -- both residential and commercial buildings. So we need programs if you are serious about stopping this problem that addresses all of these sectors. And that is what I am looking for.

This is my most important chart. It shows the costs of producing electricity, on a per-kilowatt-hour basis. And what it says is that 3 cents per kilowatt hour is what it costs to produce electricity from coal or nuclear. And the other charts show that it costs 40 cents per kilowatt hour to produce electricity from solar. Or 12 cents per kilowatt hour to produce electricity from wind. This compares to 3 cents, which is the base line represented by coal and nuclear.

What technology needs to do is to improve the process that drives down the costs of these alternative investments. What can be done to make wind power available at something closer to 3 cents per kilowatt hour? That goes for solar and bio-mass and other sources as well. As I go through Sweden, talking to scientists and visiting companies, I am always looking for ideas that will lower the costs of producing electricity.

One of the highlights of our cooperation was this meeting that took place between Prime Minister Reinfeldt and President Bush on May 15 in the Oval Office. I was lucky enough to be there that day and after the introductions were made, President Bush said to Prime Minister Reinfeldt, 'What would you like to talk about?' Prime Minister Reinfeldt said "I would like to talk about the importance of reaching a global agreement on climate change post 2012." And that was the primary subject that was discussed at the White House.

Another highlight of the program was the trip I made to Stanford. This has been written up in the papers, some of you might have seen it, but visiting these companies in Sweden, I found 30 that were really exciting. Great companies, with smart leaders who have an idea for alternative energy but who lack the capital to turn that idea into a big business. Meanwhile, in the U.S., particularly in the Silicon Valley area, large volumes of money have been raised specifically for investment in alternative energy companies. And so it seemed like a natural thing to try to link the ideas and the entrepreneurs in Sweden with the sources and funding in the U.S. The meeting took place at Stanford on April 19 in Wallenberg Hall. Here is a picture of some of the people you see on the left of the photo and some logos of some of the companies that were on the list of 30.

Since we published that original list many companies in Sweden have contacted us and said "What about me? I have a great idea. I am doing bio-mass conversation. I figured out how to take animal carcasses and gasify the mass and turn those into waste into energy. What about me?" We now have 37 companies on the list because we added some of these other companies. And we still get calls every day. If that list turns out to be 50 or 60 or 75 companies, that is fine. The idea is to identify brave companies with a good idea in Sweden and do what is possible to connect them with resources in the U.S.

Another example of cooperation is with the U.S military. Fully half of all the energy that is used by the U.S. government -- that is, in buildings and cars and trucks - is used by Air Force jets. So guess what, the Defense Department is very interested in alternative jet fuel. We found a company here in Sweden called 'Swedish Biofuels AB' that has an idea about making jet fuel out of a 100 percent bio-fuel. We introduced the two to each other and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given Swedish Biofuels a three-year $5 million grant to develop that idea -- with the hope of producing jet fuel from something other than petroleum.

I found a great car in Sweden that runs on ethanol. As the State Secretary indicated, we signed a bio-fuels agreement between the U.S. and Sweden. The Swedish government in the budget to be introduced shortly will provide some funding to support this agreement, as will the Department of Energy in the U.S. And I think of it as a table that has been set up to which scientists and business people can bring their portfolios and their ideas and say, "I need some support to take this to the next level." And at the table will be sitting representatives from the Swedish government and the U.S. government. These ideas will be evaluated and the good ones will be funded.

Maybe the most important goal in the agreement focuses on bio-fuels or alternative fuels for cars that can be produced from different kinds of resources. For example, in Örnsköldsvik the SEKAB facility produces fuel for cars out of wood. Imagine if the forest in Sweden could be turned into a reliable source of large amounts of fuel. And imagine the benefits to the U.S. if that happened. This is the kind of thing that the bio-fuels agreement will focus on.

Volvo introduced just two weeks ago here in Stockholm -- some of you may have seen it -- seven trucks, heavy trucks that run on different forms of bio-fuel. This is another great example of a corporation in Sweden taking the lead and teaching lessons that not only people in the U.S. can benefit from but also people everywhere. Policy issues are also part of the One Big Thing. We have had representatives from four cities from the U.S. come to Stockholm to ask question about the congestion tax. Does it work? Does it really reduce traffic? Are there unintended consequences? The most prominent among these have been representatives from Mayor Bloomberg in New York.

This chart tells you that historically as you make investments in technology you can in fact drive the costs of the product down. This is the hope of the OBT. One of the three pillars that the State Secretary talked about is that we are concentrating on the technology investment to drive down the costs of those alternatives.

Let me close now, with the one- minute summary of the climate change policy in the U.S. In June President Bush announced -- and his plan was endorsed by the G-8 at Heiligendamm -- that the U.S. would agree to cap its emissions, that the US would take the lead in trying to organize a global conference of all the major emitters of CO-2, including China, and that the U.S. would try to encourage out of that meeting a post-2012 global agreement on climate change. This was huge news. The announcement was made in the beginning of June and was endorsed by the G-8.

The next important step was September 8, just two weeks ago; the APEC leaders of the Asian nations meet in Sydney, Australia. At this meeting the Sydney Declaration was signed -- sort of the next step of the Heiligendamm agreement that I referred to in the last slide. And here it was agreed that energy intensity would be reduced by 25 percent by 2030. And 50 million acres of new forest would be planted. It acknowledges that the richer nations have a responsibility to do more then the developing nations.

And maybe most importantly of all, China signed this agreement. China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases -- as of about three months ago -- in the world. The trend line shows that they are going to be even greater. So for any global agreement, post 2012, to make a real difference in the world, China must be involved. It was a great breakthrough that the terms of this agreement in Sydney was something that China could agree to.

Now the hope is that it can be built on with the next step, which is the meeting that will take place in Washington DC, on September 27 and 28 - the meeting that President Bush announced in June, and the 15 largest omitting countries will be there. (To read more about the meeting see here.) The idea is to establish at that meeting an aspirational goal. We want to cut our emissions by a certain amount by a certain period of time, or we want to limit, perhaps in degrees, the increase in temperature of the earth.

Each country will be asked to put on the table medium term goals for what they are prepared to do to contribute to the aspirational goals. Hopefully out of this there will come a framework that can maybe be discussed at the Bali Conference at the end of November or December -- an outline of what everybody wants, which is the post-2012 agreement on climate change. It gives governance to businesses and governments all over the world and is acceptable to China and the U.S. and to the EU. I am excited about the way the change of attitude in the U.S. has included the policy dimension and that President Bush is doing what he can to organize the next step.

Any if you who have ideas for companies in Sweden that we should know about, please contact me. If any of your companies belong on that list that I showed at the beginning of the slide, companies that are doing exciting things about their own responsibilities for climate change, please contact me.

Thank you for your time.