Texas Got It Right!. Sam Wyly

this be? I thought. The City of

      Santa Monica proudly advertises that its buses run on

      liquid gas instead of diesel. And yet one of the city’s

      residents was being rewarded for kicking out the very

      source of that clean fuel—to say nothing of the jobs

      the plant would have attracted to her town. It was the

      NIMBY (“Not in My Back Yard”) mentality taken to

      the extreme—a principle some have appropriately

      called BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Any-

      where Near Anyone). That kind of knee-jerk

      response to energy development doesn’t go over too

      well in Texas.

      Texans are business-minded, first and foremost,

      but that doesn’t mean we’re not progress-minded.

      As an investor in and an employee of Green Moun-

      tain Energy, the Austin-based renewable-power

      utility, I’ve learned a lot about striking the balance

      between the two. Before my time at Green Moun-

      tain, I didn’t realize how expensive the technology

      for solar- and wind-energy development is. Turbines

      used to capture energy from wind and panels used

      to collect energy from the sun create significantly

      fewer units of energy for every unit of infrastructure

      when compared with fossil fuels like oil and coal,

      which contain a very large concentration of BTUs in

      a very compact volume. When Texas launched its

      groundbreaking private electricity market in the

      early 2000s, Green Mountain saw a chance to make

      clean energy not just available but profitable, by

      combining natural-gas operations with wind-energy

      projects to deliver electricity at a price that could

      compete with that of coal-powered sources.

      Back in 2004, a lot of my L.A. friends thought it

      was strange that I’d want to move to Texas from Cali-

      fornia. Eight years later, a few of them are probably

      wishing they’d done the same. Today the California

      economy is stalling, its population growth is flatlin-

      ing, and its political clout is waning. Residents of the

      Golden State are fleeing to Texas in ever-greaterv

      numbers, as are Northeasterners and Midwesterners.

      And once here, they’re staying put. In my mind,

      Texas today is a lot like Paris in the 1920s. Back then,

      the most innovative and creative writers and artist

      were breaking the staid confines of Prohibition-era

      America to taste the freedom of Paris when it was the

      artistic and literary capital of the world. Today, the

      best and brightest are flocking to Texas. Like Paris a

      century or so ago, Texas is having its own golden age.

      But unlike Paris’s, ours is built to last.

      TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

      12

      “Not only is labor not dishonorable among such a people,

      but it is held in honor; the prejudice is not against it, but

      in its favor.”

      —Alexis de Tocqueville,

      Democracy in America, Volume 2, 1840

      De Tocqueville could easily have been talking about

      modern-day Texas when he wrote those words

      about America in 1840. That’s because Texans aren’t

      interested in who your daddy was or where you

      went to school. We don’t care what you did in

      Tennessee or California or New York or Illinois or

      wherever you came from before you landed in the

      Lone Star State. If you’re ready to work hard, we’ll

      give you the benefit of the doubt. Blood and bacca-

      laureate don’t matter to us. We care more about

      what you do than where you’re from.

      This doesn’t mean Texans are blind to the past.

      After all, we’re part of the South, a place where, as

      Faulkner said, “the past is never dead. It’s not even

      past.” We’re mindful of our bygone triumphs and

      defeats. “Remember the Alamo” is just the beginning.

      We also remember Sam Houston’s victory at San

      Jacinto, where my great-great-uncle, Alfred Wyly, led a

      company of Tennesseans. And we remember Goliad,

      where an early Texas Declaration of Independence was

      Sam Wyly is the quintessential Texas entrepreneur—a

      migrant from Louisiana by way of Michigan who has been

      successfully starting companies and busting up monopolies in

      Texas since the 1960s.

      TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

      13

      signed by, among others, another great-great-uncle of

      mine, Christopher A. Parker, before he became one of

      the 187 heroes of the Alamo in 1836. We remember

      the grit of Texas’s first settlers—dirt farmers who

      scratched a living out of the hard earth and laid the

      foundation for the Lone Star Nation. We remember

      the great cotton and lumber barons who helped turn

      our towns into cities, and we remember when that

      first oil well at Spindletop blew in East Texas in 1901,

      ushering the age of cars and planes and launching a

      thousand fortunes. We remember the crash of the

      1980s, too, when so many of those Texas oil fortunes

      went belly-up and new fifty-story skyscrapers in Dallas

      and Houston remained “see-through” empty buildings

      for ten years.

      Those were tough times for Texans, but we’re

      optimists by nature—probably the most stubbornly

      optimistic people on earth. We see opportunity

      where others see disaster. In 1987, when real estate

      here