It is fun to be patriotic and I do of course oversimplifie some but yes it is in earnest. We are well on the way to 50% renewable energy in 2020 while becoming a significant net electricity exporter and I expect that we will make as much biomass based fuel as we use fuel domestically around 2030-2040. These trends and efforts have roots back to the first oil crisis in the 1970:s, each crisis has among the malinvestments added a fair ammout of infrastructure and knowledge and this has accumulated making it reasonable to handle the next crisis.

Labour migration has been made much simpler since last year, now you basicaly only need an employer and then you have to work for five years to apply for citizenship if I remember right. All the details can be found on http://www.migrationsverket.se/english.html , please correct me if I am wrong.

But there might be a political window that could close in late 2010 if the next election goes badly and the migration sceptical labour unions gets influence thru the socialist party. I do not expect that people who have moved over here will be thrown out since such an idea woud scare a significant number of socialist party voters but it might become harder to get into Sweden.

Btw, the first fairly large contingent of migrants were a complete surprise, Indian computer programmers that probably were following the outsourcing trail back to its source.

I have no immediate idea for how to transplant the good parts of Swedish politics to other countries. A significant part of the public and politicians simply listen to scientific advice but that do of course not protect from the risk that the scietific view is incorrect or bad science such as low quality social sciences. This gives the situation that citing a good source can be a debate winner and one of the most popular dumb-politician youtube videos is a left wing member of parliamet who during a hearing on electrical cars suggested adding a windmill on the cars to charge the batteries while driving.

I would also recomending a study ouf our neighbours. Most of the things we do good the Finns do better, the Norwegians handled massive oil and gas incomes withouth turning all lazy and the Danes paid off their government foreign debt before the financial crisis. One key might be that a significant part of the populations expects multi generational planning?