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