March 11, 2008 9:36PM

Green: Not *Just* the Color of Money!

By Liz Claman

Listen, I’m from California. I was the kid putting the brick in the toilet tank at age 7 with my dad who used to tell us, “Don’t take fresh water for granted. Don’t take electricity flowing from the flip of a switch for granted.” So for me, conserving and protecting the environment has always been ingrained. However, for Wall Street, being environmentally sound has, in the past, often been met with everything from skepticism to outright scorn. But now??? The green concept for many companies has become a steam train that’s laid down its tracks and is ready to roll… without the black smoke coming out of its stack.

It’s 9:20pm ET Tuesday night and I’ve just finished packing to head with the FOX Business crew to Southern California. We’ve got the Wall Street Journal to thank for the location of what is expected to be a most memorable assignment: The ECO:nomics Executive Conference at Bacara Resort in picturesque Santa Barbara. The Journal has organized this gathering of C-Suite (that’s Wall Street talk for top executives…i.e., CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s etc.) leaders who are working hard to change the way their companies operate when it comes to ‘green’ efforts: curbing global-warming emissions, creating more environmentally sound products and making a new, more focused effort to become more energy-efficient.

What makes this new and different is that the companies participating are not necessarily the ones you’d think of first for sporting the big green “G”: Dow Chemical (DOW), WalMart (WMT), Cypress Semiconductor (CY), General Motors (GM). But inside their offices, plants and assembly lines they’re now the ones pushing to be at the forefront of creating environmental capital. They’ve all found ways of making a huge ‘green’ effort pay off for their bottom lines.

So gang, I’ll be live starting Thursday through Friday on both my show with David Asman (2-5pm ET) and throughout the day on other FOX Business shows, giving you all the angles of how these companies are now deciding that being ‘green’ can bring in the green. You’ll hear from the CEO’s themselves, along with the people at the forefront of the green effort.

I’ll send some of that California sunshine your way as soon as I get there. Stay tuned, I’ll be blogging from Bacara resort the whole time. See ya on the other end!

P.S. And WAIT til you see our live location. My producer Michele Nunes had our FOX Business L.A. bureau guys scope out the location and let’s just put it this way: we’re talking serious California Dreamin’. Don’t miss it!