Environmental Talk

All about the Benjamins ….

I can’t believe it took me this long to connect the dots.

Green is the chosen color of environmental activists.

Green is the color of money.

It’s like the famous environmentalist, Navin Johnson, once said in The Jerk, “Ah… it’s a profit deal. That takes the pressure off.”

You might have thought that it was only corporations promoting global warming skepticism that were making money hand over carbon-emitting fist.

Au contraire, my little climate change Cassandra. It turns out there’s a good living to be made on both sides of the sustainable coin.

Reuters News featured an article about some newly-minted eco-millionaires who “see boom times ahead.”

This isn’t particularly surprising since most of the time people whose livelihood depends on a particular business will see boom times in that industry if you ask them.

Twenty years ago, Detroit automakers had a rosy outlook for American cars, Bush Sr. was certain he’d be re-elected and Vanilla Ice thought being a white rapper was a solid career choice.

Still, the argument can be made that the eco-boom is in it’s infancy which means there’s still time for you to make your fortune peddling 82%-recycled goods to the 100% of the suckers concerned citizens out there.

The Reuters article is short, but it features some solid advice from a few green barons who’ve already made it.

Bruce Khouri made $5 million in cash selling stock and has $11 million in remaining equity generated from the solar roofing company he co-founded in 2001. Bruce saw a market for solar panels in the early 1990s but started his company “once tax and subsidy incentives made the market more attractive.”

Pedro Moura Costa booked a profit of $10 million in cash and has $48 million in equity from his carbon-trading firm. His take on the sustainability of the green boom is that it’s only a problem “if we lack the political commitment.”

David Scaysbrook has a combined net worth of $12 million half of it from cashing out shares in his wind power firm and half of it from advising other companies on carbon credits. As to one of the three main factors in his success, David cites “tax breaks, subsidies and emissions caps.”

Clever ET readers will note that all three eco-millionaires cite political pull and favoritism as key ingredients to their success and all three have recently cashed out anywhere from a third to a half of their shares in companies that would appear to be ideally poised to take advantage of the coming worldwide eco-industry boom.

Hmmm … maybe I wasn’t so slow to connect the dots after all.

global warming, climate change, eco-millionaires, green barons, Bruce Khouri, Pedro Moura Costa, David Scaysbrook, do as I do not as I say