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One day I was discussing the theme of this book

with a friend from Venezuela. I explained to him

that a big chunk of Texas’s prosperity owes to two

simple things: low taxes and few regulations (the

very same factors Chief Executive magazine most

consistently cites in its rankings). “What about all

your oil?” my friend challenged. “Your state must

get a lot of wealth from its oil revenues.” His

assumption reflected an understandable confusion,

given where he grew up. Venezuela, like many other

countries around the world, has nationalized its oil

industry to finance its government, to the enormous

detriment of the private oil companies that had

developed the infrastructure and technology for

extracting all that oil. We Texans wouldn’t do any-

thing like that, I explained, because from the

beginning we’ve recognized the primacy of private

mineral rights. Texas will prosper only by working

together with oil companies and individual property

owners to mutual benefit. Judging from Venezuela’s

present-day economic and social problems, nation-

alization, if anything, has failed the very people it

claimed to benefit.

Indeed, that’s something that sets Texans apart: a

sense that private energy development goes hand in

hand with every other kind of development. I

recently attended an environmental conference

hosted by the Aspen Institute. At one of the forums a

young woman from California received an award for

leading a successful effort to shut down a gas-to-

liquid processing plant—essential for converting nat-

ural gas into clean-burning fuel for combustion

engines—that was slated to be built near her home in

Santa Monica. How can 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!

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