we were at an American Council on an Energy-Efficient Economy conference and I was hearing how $1 spent on energy efficiency produced $2 in savings. That sounded like good business to me. We learned that Dow Chemical had spent just under $2 billion on energy-efficient programs since 1994 and had saved nearly $10 billion so far. It seemed like a no-brainer that every company would jump on this bandwagon. And it gave us hope for our movie, because we realized that if things don’t make money, don’t make business sense, they won’t really reach scale. So that was the early business message: cut energy use and save money. Then, during the filming, and even after, as I’ve been screening the movie all over the U.S., I’ve learned how business decisions, based on energy savings, can have unexpected cascading benefits. We have a story that takes place in Roscoe, Texas. Cliff Etheredge and his son David took on the challenge of organizing 400 small cotton farms into one large tract of land, enticing Eon Energy to develop a wind farm — the world’s largest at the time. Big ranches were easy to develop, with one or two owners, but Cliff’s small cotton farm, along with his neighbors’, was seen as unworkable – too many contracts. But Cliff is a natural leader and got it done. Now, farmers who were solely dependent on their hit-or-miss cotton crops had a steady source of income, derived from the turbines: a royalty that ranged from $3,000 to $15,000 per year, per turbine. This changed lives.