It’s easy to see why cable news shows love having Howard Gould for guest slots. He’s athletic, handsome, brisk, and bouncy, and he never, ever pauses or says, “Um…” He’s pretty clear about his message and his love of nature, and even though that message seems to be anathema to the Fox network, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have him on anyway. Gould is usually billed as an eco-entrepreneur.
When Gould gets in there and spars, however, he knows, like any good sparring partner, that you don’t go for the knockout. Anyway, the devoted environmentalist doesn’t bother talking about global warming anymore. He’s tired of using the word “green,” which he thinks makes his passion sound like a niche interest when, he believes, it will soon be the norm.
Maybe his early obsession, as a lifelong kite surfer and diver, was to save the planet. Now he’s pounding the message that a smarter use of new technologies not only saves the earth, but it also can make profound returns for investors. That, he has decided, is how to reach people.
And so he reaches across the political/cultural divide to talk with anybody, even if they view him as an environmental stooge. Sometimes the results can be comical. On a recent Sunday morning, he grabbed a table at Ten-Twenty Post in Darien to share some war stories. It was the usual weekend brunch crowd, couples and families catching up in a swirling din of conversation. The champagne bottle did not stop by Gould, however. He ordered a house green salad, a plain glass of water, and a cappuccino. Fair-haired and compact, he radiates an athletic vibe. His voice is slightly raspy, such as you’d hear from a football coach after a marathon game. He lights up as he talks about his media juggernaut.
“I was doing a thing for CNN,” he says, “and the other guest was a very well-known businessman who does not believe in any global warming. We had a healthy debate in the green room, and he went off and did his bit. When he came back, I was on my way out to the studio. He said, ‘I may not agree with you, but I’d like you to take a look at this biofuel company that we just put a lot of money into.’ I asked, ‘What are you talking about? You just got through telling me it’s all bull!’ He said, ‘Well, it may be bull, but that’s not to say there might not be a lot of money in it.’ ”
Knowing that the only way to reach the doubters is to show them the money, he is at work on a new hedge fund, to be called Tundra. He and his partners—portfolio manager Terry Corcoran, a former Tiger Cub, and head of research David Smith, former senior clean technology and renewable analyst at Citigroup—have looked around the world for companies wired into what they believe will be the next economy. Now the campaign begins.
IN HIS ROOTS
The talent for making money may be found deep in Howard Gould’s genetic coding. His great-great-grandfather was Jay Gould, one of the great robber barons of the nineteenth century, who controlled a vast portion of America’s rail business. Jay left most of his money to his six children. One of his sons, Edwin, begat Frank Miller Gould, who in turn had a son whom he named Edwin. This Edwin went on to own Douglas Elliman, a major New York real estate firm. One of Edwin’s children is Howard Gould.
“My father was a great outdoorsman and lover of the environment,” Gould says over the restaurant noise. “We had a boat, and I used to spend all my time as a child in the Bahamas, diving and fishing and constantly being around water.” In 1995 he set off around the world with cameras in tow, filming sharks in Australia, diving in Fiji, living in a bamboo hut in Indonesia for nearly a year.
When his accountant said it was time to get home and get serious, he threw himself into the new world of businesses setting up in Silicon Valley. But he quickly grew frustrated, wanting to see investment in the actual industries of the green revolution. His first major push was Equator LLC, a New York firm he cofounded three years ago. It invests in natural resources and manages carbon credits and environmental assets derived from reforestation projects. While he remains on the board, his main pursuit now is establishing Tundra, a hedge fund that backs the clean economy.
MANHATTAN CONNECTION
Our interview had been delayed a day as the family had just suffered the loss of Boris, one of their beloved pugs. The old dog had not only given Gould thirteen great years, but he was also responsible for his greatest happiness in life—the introduction to his wife. “I came out of my building one night and had forgotten to hook up my dogs, so they bolt over to this woman with her two dogs.” He looked at her. She was worth looking at. She was Ashleigh Banfield, a news correspondent, taking her two Westies for a walk. “She said, ‘You might want to be careful because one of my dogs is not that friendly.’ I said, ‘I think you’re somebody famous, but I’m not sure who you are.’ And that was it. That was how it all began.”
He was impressed by Ashleigh’s brilliance, her sense of fun, and the stories she could tell from her globe-trotting adventures. In 2004 they married. Later, when they knew kids were coming, they decided to get out of Manhattan and head for “the leafy green suburbs. And once we hit Darien, there was no question.”
The big yellow house they bought was newish, so he figured it would be decently weatherproofed. He was wrong. “It was leaking all over the place. Because these builders didn’t build with efficiency in mind—they built for acceptance, a location, and they built to get them up as quickly as they could. No one was asking how efficient it was five years ago. But that’s gonna change.”
RETHINKING INVESTMENT
As we talk, I wonder if people at surrounding tables can hear his passionate, clarion voice. It seems to pierce the Sunday hubbub like an Irish tenor in a windy gale. “Billionaires need to get created in this clean economy,” Gould says. “I think it’s coming—it certainly happened in China.” He offers the example of Wang Chuanfu, chairman of the battery company BYD, who is now the richest man in China.
“China is jumping headlong into the solar and wind industry. They’re going to beat us to the punch—they already have—and it’s going to be eye-opening for Americans.”
The lingering culture war, alas, seems to be getting in America’s way.
Gould almost pounds the table, he’s so astounded. “People still view this as a joke. They don’t see it as the big industries of tomorrow. I think they view these as cute little things that the green industry wants to prop up, but don’t view them as major energy sources a decade or even five years from now. China does.”
He sits back and sighs. “China is also a bit of a slippery slope because they have the ability to put things into action without getting approval from the people. If somebody wants to put a wind farm where a village stands, they’ll just move the village.
“But they’re taking our technology and putting it into action. We’re even sending our technology over to China, manufacturing it, and bringing it back for our solar needs.”
And it’s not just solar panels. He rattles off the list. “Its biofuels, battery systems, water, agriculture, waste management—all these things encompass a clean economy. All these things are growth drivers. For our hedge fund, we’ve done some calculations on this, and it’s huge. The clean economy is a $530 billion revenue sector—it’s larger than aerospace and defense combined. It’s massive but nobody knows it. There’s no index that covers it. The ETFs [Exchange-Traded Funds] that cover it are weighted to wind and solar. There is a monster industry out there that is poised to explode.”
He references a hundred-year-old metal-bending company. “They make coal hoppers. Five years ago they asked, What do we make? A large metal tube that goes on train tracks. They said, If we take these tubes and turn them this way, we can make the tower components for wind turbines. This only makes up 15 percent of their revenue now, but if you think how well-positioned they are, if you believe in the growth of the wind industry, which is supposed to grow about 800 percent in the next ten years, that 15 percent of revenue could become 35 to 40 percent over the next five years.”
This is the sort of company Gould is pursuing. He likes established companies that are positioned to rise if the new-energy economy takes off—but still have a strong foundation in case the new technology doesn’t catch on. “We’re approaching this in a more sedate manner,” he says. “We like to see a stable platform. Some investors are looking for the sexy new thing, the latest science project. These things might or might not catch on. But we want to take the volatility out of our investments. We’d rather invest in battery components than, let’s say, the latest electric car.”
What seems to get his goat the most is that the recession seems to have knocked away people’s interest in the environment. According to every survey he has seen, people no longer seem to care as much. “I’ve just come back from speaking at a panel of entrepreneurs in San Francisco,” he says, just a little plaintively. “We talked about this. Why is the media not talking about the environment? About climate change? First, people think they’ve heard it all before. And, second, it’s not making people feel any better. The irony is that as more and more information gets out about the environment, many people are turning against the issues of climate change. As science gets more definite, fewer people are believing it. It’s a very bizarre situation.
“Frankly, I think a lot of people are burned out on it. Or they say that fossil fuels are necessary job creators. The fuel industry has done a good job of promoting that viewpoint. My thing is, let’s take climate change out of the equation altogether. It is too polarizing and too many people don’t believe in it.
“I think we need to focus on what the clean economy is going to look like. Whether you believe in climate change or not, wind and solar are going to be part of our economy moving forward.”
We leave the restaurant and he heads to his Honda motor scooter, a tiny little music box that looks like it sips fuel by the micron. “It gets about eighty miles per gallon,” he says cheerfully as he straps on his helmet. “I go between the house and the train station on it all week, and go a whole month without thinking of a fill-up.”
And so he tootles off down the sunny street, the great-great-grandson of a ferocious financier, tilting not at railroads but at windmills…no, make that wind turbines. Some new engine, anyway, of a new American century.