Sam is the superintendent for the contractor working on the building into which I’m moving my office.  It’s a brand new six-story office building, and Sam’s in charge of construction.  Construction sites are tough places.  No nonsense, not much mercy, get in, shut up, do your job, and get out, with subtle ethnic divisions among the various trades, and a bottom line rule that if you’ve not been told to do something by your boss, then you don’t do it.  Not the most sentimental of places.  Sam’s an older guy who has worked construction for a long time.  Despite the pressure and workload of putting up a big building, Sam’s a nice guy who hails from a little town outside of Dallas.  And in the process of finishing my office suite, there’s been a bunch of cardboard piling up from the light fixtures, cabinets, and other boxed goods.  We recycle cardboard in my house, everything, down to toothpaste boxes.  I look wearily at the big pile of cardboard now lying about.  For some reason, I’m just too tired to haul it away for recycling, and I know there’s no such thing as recycling at a construction site.  I ask Sam where I can get rid of the cardboard, and he tells me the dumpster downstairs.  As I’m launching flats into the bin, I tell Sam how bad I feel that I’m not doing the right thing, the environmental thing.  I figure he’s going to laugh at me, a gruff construction boss listening to a moping environmental tenant.  But instead Sam shakes his head and tells me he’s concerned about the environment too.  Especially, he says, for the kids of the future.  We look at each other.
 
Later in the day I visit Conn’s the appliance store to buy a microwave for the office kitchen.  Duvain, an older, handsome African American salesman nattily dressed in a maroon Conn’s sport jacket gives me terrific service, explaining that at Conn’s the salespeople work on commission.  He even has a desk with some guest chairs, like they do at a car dealership.  I sit in one of them while Duvain takes my information and processes the sale.  He wants to know what I do.  “I’m a financial advisor,” I tell him, “an investment manager.”  He looks up, “Oh, that’s good,” he says, “that – is – good.  Because you know why?  I’ve got investments, I’ve got some investments.”   That’s good, I tell him, that is good.  “Yes,” Duvain says, “that’s good, and they’re doing good.  You want to know how I make 50% on my money.”  50%’s a lot I say, over what time period. “Oh, this year.”  How? I ask.  Duvain leans over and says one word: “Solar.”  It reminds me of the scene in The Graduate where Mr. Robinson tells Dustin Hoffman that the future is in one word: plastics.  Solar, Duvain says, is happening.  And with that he carries my microwave out into the hot solar afternoon and puts it in my car for me.
 
Reading one of those wonky finance journals – with article titles like “Expected Rates of Return: Back to the Future”, “Using Derivatives to Enhance Returns and Manage Risk”, and “Behavioral Finance: Biases, Mean-Variance Returns, and Risk Premiums.”  I spot the lead article “Green Investing: Why It Is Different This Time”, written by Jackson Robinson, a manager of a green fund who has been at it for a while.  He notes how the promise in alternative energy has not materialized before, but gives the reasons why this time it’s here to stay, including growing global demand for oil, dwindling supplies of oil, the US need for oil importation, and the threat of climate change.  He concludes: “We believe there has never been a stronger investment story for alternative energy – increasingly cheaper, undeniably better, and more important than ever before.
 
Of the many themes that this show carries with it each week, one is the need for our country to understand that our problems are primarily created by us, not by foreign nations, foreign leaders, foreign ideologies, or foreign people.  And by the same token, our solutions will be primarily created by us.  When George Bush declares that our nation is “addicted to oil,” as a recovered alcoholic who understands addiction very well, he knows that recognition and solutions can only come from within the addict.  For the hard core of the Republican Party, those solutions continue to be old solutions that are fraught with problems: drilling for relatively insignificant quantities of oil in environmentally-sensitive, and often downright beautiful, places.  Or burning a fuel we have in abundance, coal, despite the harmful nature of its combustion.  But for an emerging majority, including liberals, progressives, financial investors, engineers, journalists, mayors, conservatives, and construction superintendents and appliance salesmen, we have homegrown solutions to our homegrown problems that promise extraordinary returns.
 
We all have our roles to play, and we will all play our roles.  Some of us will adopt green early, some will adopt it later, and some will fight against it until the very end.  And as a professional advisor, I try to pride myself on not zigging and zagging with the public, or listening to the self-interested arguments of investment fund promoters.  Part of my job is to protect clients from hype and spin.  Still, if Sam the construction superintendent and Duvain the appliance salesman are “getting it” in Houston, Texas, then Jackson Robinson might be right: this time, it just may be different.
 
I’m Leo Gold.   This is The New Capital Show.