The goal of a “Green Olympics”, to Beijing’s chagrin, has become just another green light to have a go at its environmental woes. It is hard to hold back. After all, water is being pumped into a man-made addition to a parched riverbed, just to hold the Olympic rowing regatta. A reeking lather of algae docked on the shores of sailing host city Qingdao last month, requiring more than 10,000 workers to remove it. China's weather mod squad – officially, the ‘Weather Modification Office' – conducts constant aerial experiments in man-made rain to cool the cities and clear the skies. And the only thing less transparent than the air seems to be Beijing’s air pollution testing, which critics say is configured to lowball the numbers. Some Olympic runners are swooping into town for the days of their events alone, so leery are they of the haze. They’ll come muzzled in super-sophisticated masks.

The government's had to pull out all the stops - ordering half the cities' cars off the road (alternating daily bans on even- and odd-numbered license plates), closing factories, and shutting down construction - in the mere hope of making Beijing appear a less forbidding city.

So acute are the problems, however, that China’s also opened up to all sorts of innovative efforts at fixing them. At one newly established forum in Beijing earlier this month, environmental experts, green business gurus and grassroots activists pondered the future of the “environmental economy”. We emailed with Richard Marks and Sophia Trapp of Productions 1000, co-founders of the “International Earth Forum” (IEF), about China's prospects of improving a grim environment and their own challenges operating in a toxic climate of pre-Olympic security. Excerpts from our e-interview follow:

NEWSWEEK: Tell us what the International Earth Forum is and how it came about.

We brought together a mix of communicators, connectors, forestry experts, business people, renewable energy & carbon trading leaders, academic and youth leaders from the UK, US, Netherlands, Germany and China. Our core discussions centered around the theme of leadership within the new “environmental economy”, in which attendees asked, “How can we do Business with Nature?”

Why China?

Four years ago, China invited us into early discussions about the urgency for addressing its serious energy concerns. That first renewable energy business delegation brought us face-to-face with senior government leaders from Shanghai to Beijing to discuss renewable technologies, investment and long range environmental planning, sustainable development in China, clean energy technologies and policy planning for the protection of China’s environment.

To organize the International Earth Forum, we partnered with senior level Chinese business people and government officials to connect re-forestation projects with international venture partners. But as we proceeded, we realized the importance of communicating fresh international and inter-cultural thinking. We all want to know what China is doing about the environment. In addition, our third co-host, Jing Su, is a young Chinese woman who has undertaken to help the environment by bridging the gap between China and the international community on environmental ideologies and practices. She is now the China Program Associate for the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).

Timing-wise, why did you choose the run-up to the Beijing Olympics?

Planning an international event in the run-up to the Olympics was an obvious opportunity to celebrate and communicate the positive changes happening in China, to share common ideas and desires for sustainability, and discuss how doing business that is good for the environment can be profitable and healthy. In a dialogue, people coming from different backgrounds typically have different basic assumptions and opinions. In the course of our dialogues, we seek to question our assumptions, set them aside, and are willing to set them free if we find we can do better with the words and ideas that will light the way for others.

But the Olympics hasn’t made for the freest of times here. Plus conferences in China normally require local partners and official approvals. Yet you managed to avoid all that. How and why?

In the beginning, Productions 1000 was eager to partner with a Chinese environmental NGO that wanted its organization to be recognized as the host; otherwise "it wasn't interested." We had to hold firm that it's an inappropriate role for an NGO to host a business-oriented forum. We decided to risk it and continue on our own. Launching for the first time in China, it was touch and go until the end.

Through two years of relationship-building with private sector environmental business ventures in China, we had made friends with business people and NGO’s in China. Our idea to bring international people to the table required an agenda that would be communications-driven, so our approach was to remain a private and social gathering – an invitation-only event. This ensured the integrity of doing business while protecting the exposure to our guests, many of whom are CEO’s and presidents of significant venture funds for the environment.

While the original people we felt we needed to work in China did not stay along for the ride, some very senior government and business people working in China's environmental space ultimately gave us the "nod" to allow it to happen [on an unofficial basis]. We feel that’s because they recognized we are good people who had something good to contribute to China's environment and people.

I suppose it was inevitable.

After four days of (relatively) blue skies, the summer haze has descended once more upon Beijing. Nature's palette includes many lovely hues of blue: cerulean and cyan, turquoise and teal, azure and aqua; but the blue of a Beijing sky is seemingly indescribable and lies somewhere along the visible spectrum between tar heel pride and acid-washed jeans.

Granted, what we’re looking at today, Thursday, July 24 – a sky you can’t quite call overcast – is better than the polluted pall that usually hangs over our God-forsaken city. But still, it’s a sky the color of bed sheets that have been slept in too many times. Shadows lack defined edges. Visibility barely extends beyond the buildings across the street.

Which makes us wonder, will Beijing’s ambitious plan to reduce pollution in the capital ahead of the Olympics actually work?

Beijing is blossomed with Christmas-related paraphernalia in stores and along streets, lightening up the city a bit.And we had the year's first snowfall, a light dusting. But the coal-burning heaters which keep many Beijingers warm still manage to shroud the place in haze when there's no wind to dissipate the pollution. Those noxious, old-fashioned coal-bricks are being replaced by natural gas as a source of fuel, but not quickly enough to help dispel pollution worries during the 2008 Summer Games.

But, hey, in the name of holiday cheer, how about taking seriously the government's promises to create a "Green Olympics" -- or at least give it a good try, thus improving the city's environment in the process?

At least that's how Nicholas Parker, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Cleantech Group, would have it. Last week Beijing-based Cleantech held a forum in Beijing to encourage networking among "investors, innovators and influencers" in the world of environmentally-friendly technologies. They're certainly focused on the bright side of the future. Clean technologies are attracting 10 percent of total venture capital (VC) in China, third only to information technology and communications.

If the current trajectory holds true, cleantech's share of VC funds will only grow — to as much as 40 percent within the next investment cycle, reportedly. Within the first three quarters of 2007, eastern China landed a spot among the world's top-10 regions in terms of cleantech investment. It is the only region to do so in the developing world—and next to Western Europe, the only one outside the U.S.

China's expected to overtake the U.S. as the leading global emitter of greenhouse gases by the time the Olympics take place -- a decade sooner than expected. And many 2007 goals for cleaning up pollution and promoting sustainable development  have not been met.

Still, worries about a pollution-shrouded Olympics have penetrated official consciousness, and we'll no doubt see an increasingly ambitious raft of clean-up of measures -- such as reducing industrial production in neighboring areas -- in advance of the Games. The country's 11^th Five-Year-Plan outlines comprehensive measures which gear the country toward sustainable development, alternative energy (as opposed to fossil fuels) and cleaner technologies. The impact of those policies won't be felt before the Olympics take place. But as part of its legacy, the Games may leave a greener city than Beijing might otherwise have turned out to be.That's not a bad gift, Christmas or otherwise.

What do the Beijing Games have to do with this week’s diplomatic hissy-fit between Chinese and European Union senior officials over product safety? Following months of export scandals and Western recalls of flawed Chinese goods, the Beijing Olympics media center laid on a Nov. 12 press visit to a string of chicken-processing, pig-butchering and product-inspection facilities to emphasize the city’s commitment to food safety.

Among other things we saw neat assembly lines of pig carcasses being sawed, sliced and cut into bits. While graphic, the scenes bore little resemblance to how we imagine most meat gets processed in China, evoking the Chicago abattoirs of Upton Sinclair’s time. Chinese factory officials bent over backwards to assure us their high standards guaranteed food safety for ALL Beijing citizens, not just visiting Olympians. That was to deflate rumors that secret pig-raising centers had been established to guaranteed hormone-free “pampered” pork for Olympic athletes – gossip which blogger Andrew Lih dubbed “the Olympic pig conspiracy.”

The timing of that media event seemed quite the coincidence when, this past week, Beijing opened a big international food-safety conference. That’s when the high-level catfight erupted. First EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson tore into Chinese authorities for their record of unsafe exports and “tidal wave” of counterfeits. “During the summer some Chinese officials pointed out that less than 1 percent of China’s exports to Europe had alleged health risks,” he declared, “But Europe imports half a billion euros worth of goods from China daily, so even 1 percent is not acceptable.”

Mandelson’s rant was “unfair” and “inappropriate for today’s occasion”, maintained Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (one of the organizations that featured during our little press trip, by the way). Chinese vice premier Wu Yi-- Beijing’s top trade official, nicknamed the “Iron Lady” -- was even more miffed. She declared herself “extremely unhappy” with Mandelson’s remarks and defended China’s efforts to improve quality control and crack down on pirated goods.

Later that same day, Mandelson riposted that Wu should not have taken exception to his statement that four-fifths of the counterfeit items pouring over Europe’s borders originate in China. “We must seek truth from facts,” he said, citing a phrase identified with Beijing’s late strongman Deng Xiaoping.

What exactly are the facts surrounding China’s food-safety record, and why are Western officials so concerned? Here’s an interview my colleague Han Songmei conducted with Dr Roger Skinner, who’s investigated China’s food safety system as a consultant for the World Health Organization. The London-based specialist is lead author of a report on suggested reforms that was sponsored by China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the World Health Organization and the Asian Development Bank. Skinner was remarkably candid; check out these excerpts: