ENVIRONMENT:TAKE A BUNCH of US and European environmental journalists, put them up in a former royal hunting lodge in Sweden, get them to talk about what they do, throw in some briefings about the progress (or otherwise) of the climate negotiations - and see what happens.
That's what the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Swedish Institute (slogan: "Sharing Sweden with the World") did last month at Balingsholm, by a tree-fringed lake in the pleasant countryside south of Stockholm.
It was an illuminating encounter, and also somewhat dispiriting - not least because we discovered that our US colleagues, from Anchorage in Alaska to New Orleans, have an almost exclusively local focus and rarely address global issues such as climate change.
Despite progress made by Barack Obama in turning around US policies on renewable energy, the fuel efficiency of cars and "cap and trade" for CO2 emissions, US journalists are still pottering about in their own back yards.
Christy George, president of the US Society of Environmental Journalists, reckoned 20 of its 1,500 members would attend December's UN climate change summit in Copenhagen; she herself would travel from Portland if she could find an "Oregon focus" there.
Another US participant didn't know what UNFCCC stood for until I explained it's the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; she was unaware that negotiating sessions to prepare the ground for Copenhagen were already under way in Bonn.
The complexity of the climate talks was spelled out by Pierre Schellekens, an urbane and surprisingly witty Swede who heads the European Commission's office in Stockholm. What he had to say about the EU's position seemed to be news to our US colleagues.
Schellekens, who is well over six feet tall, worked with Margot Wallstrom when she was EU environment commissioner, and her successor, Stavros Dimas. Inevitably, the way he saw it was that the EU's environmental agenda had "moved closer to Sweden's".
He pointed out that it was EU support that kept the Kyoto Protocol alive after it was spurned in 2001 by George Bush. "The importance of it is in the structure, because it's actually quite an elaborate treaty containing targets and compliance mechanisms."
Schellekens noted it was at the insistence of the US that emissions trading had been included in the protocol. It was then embraced by the EU, for which it had become something of a "flagship". The hope now was that the US would also embrace it.
He said it was "very useful" for the EU to have adopted a target to reduce emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 in advance of the Copenhagen summit, because this showed to China and other major developing countries that Europe would be a "credible partner".
Referring to differences between the EU and US over the extent of China's willingness to reduce its own prodigious CO2 emissions, he suggested that Europe would act as a bridge between the two in brokering at least the framework of an agreement in Copenhagen.
Reginald Dale, a former Financial Timesjournalist who runs the CSIS Transatlantic Media Network, said the Obama administration wants to get its climate change legislation through both houses of Congress before Copenhagen, because "it doesn't want to see a repeat of Kyoto".
Johann Bergendorff, environmental reporter for Swedish radio, told us his show - which attracts 130,000 listeners per week - had to remove "abusive blogs" from climate sceptics and "put them in their own little box"; otherwise they would have "taken over our blog". As he put it, "there is a war on out there" - waged by engineers, scientists and "retired chief executives with nothing better to do" than seek to deny the scientific basis of climate change. "We don't get into a debate with them because we wouldn't be able to do our job."
I spoke to the group about Dublin and the books I'd written that helped to change public policy, before moving on to my experience of covering the climate talks since 1995 and how much perceptions of the importance of dealing with these issues changed over the years.
Dirk Asendorpf, of Die Zeit, talked of the evolution of "green politics" in Germany and his work in exposing "green-washing". When he glibly dismissed the idea that it was possible to find evidence of climate change, I said he should go to Greenland or sub-Saharan Africa.
Then it was back to basics with the US participants. Anne Raup, a photojournalist with the Anchorage Daily News, said her paper - like so many in the US - was in such financial crisis that it had cut staff by 50 per cent. "We should be doing climate change - it's our area, our franchise," she said. "But there's nobody on the environmental beat in the Anchorage Daily News. With only 12 reporters to cover the entire state, down by half on four years ago, we're in survival mode right now."
Mark Schleifstein, of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which won a Pulitzer prize for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, detailed how they did it and said "global warming protection" is now written into the manual of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Finally, US science journalist David Baron talked not about how he "braved erupting volcanoes" in Iceland and Monserrat or swarms of safari ants in Uganda or even what he found in Antarctica, but about the threat of demolition facing 20 beach houses in Surfside, Texas. As they say in the US, "so what?"
