JetBlue (JBLU) has gotten us to the West Coast safe and sound -- and we're already at Bacara, the spectacular, oceanside resort in Santa Barbara that will be the site of the Wall Street Journal's very first ECO-nomics Conference. The conference will bring together company leaders ranging from Dow Chemical to Wal-Mart to G.E. to Cypress Semiconductor and beyond to talk about green initiatives, innovation and profit -- all of it stemming from alternative energy and environmentally-friendly ideas. (By the way, the plane was full of New Yorkers riveted to their JetBlue mini-television screens, with just about everyone watching the build-up to NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation. We were somewhere above Colorado when, literally just as Spitzer was about to say, "...and so I will resign...," the pilot interrupted everyone's audio to tell us our flight elevation and current temperature. Half the plane started moaning, "Hey! We wanna HEAR this!" Typical New Yorkers, right?)
Well, now we're turning our attention to what is expected to be one of the most important and interesting CEO conferences we've covered in a long time. Fox Business jumped at the chance to come cover this because there truly seems to be a historic sea-change when it comes to how massive, publicly-traded companies view the environment and their role in creating products that help--- or at least don't hurt-- the planet.
Starting tomorrow, I'll be live from the beach, talking to CEOs and leaders in the field of "Green." We'll be talking to actor Ed Begley Jr. who woke up one day in 1970 and decided that he was going to change the way he lived... and change the impact his living would have on the environment. As recently as 5 years ago, perhaps some of the same CEOs attending this conference might have called him a kook. Now? They all want to get his ideas. Whether you think global warming is real or simply hype, you should know that many CEOs whose companies you might own in your own portfolio are now believers and ready to jump on the bandwagon.
We'll find out why starting tomorrow so keep Fox Business on.
