• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, December 29, 2008 10:45 AM

Billionaire Sam Wyly seems to have lived one of those entrepreneurial lives that can only be hatched in Texas, intersecting along the way with the likes of Jack Ruby, H. Ross Perot and Bunker Hunt. Now he's got a memoir out -- "1,000 Dollars & an Idea" (Newmarket Press, $24.95) -- about his bodacious ("a blend of bold and audacious that is properly uttered only with a Southern drawl") rise to the top by building such businesses as University Computing, Bonanza Steakhouse and the Michael's chain of craft stores.

Reviewer James Freeman, assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page, is evidently a skeptic of global warming. I know this because he finds fault with Wyly's latest venture into alternative energy and appreciative citation of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and Leonardo DiCaprio's "The 11th Hour" as eye-openers.

Freeman writes: "After spending more than 200 pages telling us how he instinctively and successfully rejected conventional wisdom, he now tells us that he turns to a former vice president and to Hollywood for his analysis of global weather patterns?" Freeman begs Wyly to not write a book he threatens on "a carbon-tax scheme." Freeman may be right about that, but the smart money all along has obviously been with Wyly.

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