Dive Summary:

• President Obama touted Sweden's energy policy as a model for the U.S. to follow in a Sept. 4 press conference in Sweden.
• Obama said, "What I know about Sweden [...] offers us some good lessons. Number one, the work you have done on energy [...] is something the United States can and will learn from. Because every country in the world right now has to recognize if we are going to continue to grow and improve our standard of living while maintaining a sustainable planet, we are going to have to change our patterns of energy use. And Sweden [...] is far ahead of many other countries."
• As a result of a carbon emissions tax and renewables targets, Sweden gets most of its energy from nuclear generation and renewable generation, using very little gas generation and almost no coal generation at all compared to the U.S.
• Ryan Korowoski of Think Progress comes to the conclusion that "it seems the main thing the U.S. can learn from Sweden on energy policy is that carbon pollution is not essential to economic success."

Here's a graphic from the Swedish Energy Agency's Energy in Sweden 2012 report (page 46) that shows where Sweden gets its energy from:

From the article:

After the press conference with the Prime Minister, President Obama visited an energy expo at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology. He spoke with people at Volvo who are aiming to have fully electric public transit buses up at running by 2015, which would pay for themselves within 10 years. Obama also looked at some fuel cell and electric personal vehicles, and posed the challenges of scaling up such a system as a “chicken and egg” question: “In the United States, one of the challenges has to do with distribution… if I was going shopping, where am I gonna refuel, right?”

Sweden’s longstanding carbon tax and emissions and renewable targets have been in operation while the nation thrived economically as much of the rest of Europe fell to pieces. C. Fred Bergsten, director emeritus at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that “Sweden has one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe; it runs a budget surplus every year; its corporate tax rates are considerably lower than U.S. rates; and it spends more on research and development, as a share of its economy, than we do.”