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.