Book Review: 1,000 Dollars & an Idea

Down to Earth
SpokesmanReview.com

August 13, 2008

Sam Wyly was green before green was cool. Or maybe he understood green before understanding green was cool. Maybe Sam Wyly is just a real good businessman and similar to the subject of last week’s weekly feature – too much of a force to ignore.

To be honest with you all, we had never heard of Sam Wyly either. A quick Wikipedia investigation revealed that Wyly is, “an American entrepreneur and businessman, philanthropist and major contributor to conservative campaigns and candidates.” If we were the type of people who would keep a Forbes magazine handy we would have probably have known Wyly as one of the top 400 richest people in America. That being said, when we were contacted by his publicist about reviewing the book of a conservative business, well, the idea seemed more than preposterous, and right up our alley!

Naturally, our preconceived notions were that this book would be “light green” more than anything and thus a total surface skimming un-pragmatic call to action. But that’s why the saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Part autobiography and part business guide (the part we basically skipped over) 1,000 Dollars & an Idea is uber-successful Sam Wyly’s business memoir, the rags to riches tale of a small town country boy turned billionaire entrepreneur….. turned “greenie”??? Wyly’s name isn’t often mentioned amongst the likes of Richard Branson or now T. Boone Pickens but Sam Wyly recognized an opportunity in 1997, an opportunity to combine one thing he really liked— money —with something he saw as a major problem in America— electricity monopolies —“trespassing on the rights to clean air of all the rest of us who live on this small planet.”

Wyly became a major investor in the clean-air revolution. “I began what would become a $150 million investment in a little company called Green Mountain Energy, whose slogan is, ‘Choose wisely. It’s a small planet.’”

Much of Sam Wyly’s “green” story is quite amazing and remarkably unfinished. His ideas of finding ways to pursue cleaner energy and offering it to the public at, and get this, higher costs, is a bold line to take in our troubling economic times. “I found myself thinking that if Americans were actually given a choice between buying dirty or clean electricity, many of us would choose clean, even if it cost a bit more.” By “us” he may be referring to those who aren’t cutting back in every aspect of their financial lives but his statement isn’t inaccurate. And he has the experience to know so.

In the 1970’s lead poisoning was a real concern and Americans were faced with oil companies who had to “get the lead out” of gasoline. This of course came at a higher cost at the pump, a higher price that consumers accepted. Sam Wyly was there, he was invested in Delta Refinery Company, a Louisiana company that gambled on cleaner fuel at a higher cost. “We were rewarded for investing in cleaner technology that produced greater amounts of higher margin product. That meant that doing the right thing in this case carried an economic bonus. It was a win-win.”

A win-win isn’t getting Wyly a Nobel Peace Prize. A win-win isn’t stopping enviro’s from calling up his support of the last eight lost years of the Bush presidency. But to paraphrase Carl Pope, the director of the Sierra Club, when asked why T. Boone Pickens, a man quite similar to Wyly matters, “billions of dollars gets my attention.” It’s a desperate times call for desperate measures period in America and if that means that environmentalists resort to reading business guides from men who helped give us George W. Bush as president – well then, 1,000 Dollars & an Idea isn’t a bad place to start.