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People are seeing the world in progressively greener hues lately, and it’s not just because Wednesday is the 39th Earth Day.

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Building contractor Frank Herring builds sunrooms. Herring at a job site in Sugarloaf Township adding on a sunroom to the Evans home. He also installs energy-efficient windows. The government this year is making it more attractive to replace drafty windows by increasing its tax-credit offer from $500 to $1,500.

Pete G. Wilcox / The Times Leader

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A sunroom in Sugarloaf Township built by Frank Herring of Just Windows & Much Much More, Freeland.

Pete G. Wilcox / The Times Leader

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The environmental movement of yesteryear that ran on peace, love and tie-dye has been supplanted with one tied to budgets, boardrooms and expense forecasts, and it’s being justified by ever-increasing energy costs.

“I would say it started out as a social responsibility, but we’re realizing that it makes good financial sense as well,” said Fred Croop, the dean of Misericordia University’s College of Professional Studies and Social Sciences. “My observation is the visibility of the green movement has made it much more saleable to the finance people and to anybody else who enters into the decision. Everybody is more readily accepting of it than they would have been 10 years ago. As companies look into it, and they’re crunching the numbers … it’ll affect the bottom line.”

Michelle Dempsey said the clients of her Scranton-based architectural and engineering firm are willing to go green if it cuts costs.

“Green to them is ‘I want it to pay itself back,’ ” she said. “It has to make financial sense too.”

With energy prices rising and resources dwindling, it almost always does. She noted she’s been able to manufacture repeat business from a bank thanks to her energy-efficient design suggestions.

“When you can tell somebody you can save them money … now they’re listening,” she said.

They’ll also listen when they’re shown the money. Just ask John Curtis, whose Green Energy Capital Partners is planning to build a 10.6-megawatt solar-energy plant – Pennsylvania’s largest – near Jim Thorpe. When discussing the future of alternative-energy production, he returns to one of his favorite quotes from a venture capitalist he heard speak: “More wealth will be created in the new-energy space than will ever be created in the Internet.”

That’s not simply more wealth for the wealthy, either. Curtis says his facility will create $3.1 million in wages and roughly 90 full- and part-time jobs during its construction and operation. Most of those jobs won’t require much training, which makes them enticing to laid-off workers in downsizing industries such as manufacturing and labor.

“Jobs that are based on sound environmental practices, sound policies are jobs that are going to last,” said Jason Brady of the Blue Green Alliance. “They can still support their families with this work. That’s what it comes down to for a lot of these folks.”

The alliance, which combines several national labor unions and environmental groups, was created to facilitate that transition, working to raise awareness and understanding of so-called green jobs in several traditionally industrial states, including Pennsylvania.

Freeland resident Frank Herring doesn’t need the alliance’s help to get a green job – he’s had one for almost 22 years. His company, Just Windows & Much Much More, installs energy-efficient windows and doors and builds efficient sunrooms.

“In the beginning, there were no energy-efficient windows. It was just double-paned glass. Now, it’s the low-E, the argon, the triple-X heat shield,” he said. “With the cost of fuel now, oil, gas, everything, they want to cut back on their fuel bills. Years ago, people just liked it because it was a tilt-in feature for easy cleaning. But now everyone’s very conscious of (conserving energy).”

And the government this year is making it more attractive to replace drafty windows by increasing its tax-credit offer from $500 to $1,500, he said.

“I let everybody know the benefits of buying Energy Star (the federal government’s efficiency-rating program), how it could save money in the long run,” Herring said. “A lot of people ask. The smart buyers always ask.” “If government wants this to work, you have to take an aggressive economic posture” through taxes, said Tony Liuzzo, an economics professor and the head of Wilkes University’s MBA program. “There are certain situations were government plays an important role, and this is probably one of few of them.”

Damages to the environment are traditionally ignored in expense sheets, Liuzzo said, because they don’t represent an immediate expenditure, even if their cost over time is substantial. By offering incentives to conserve while levying penalties on those who pollute or waste, governments can steer individuals’ actions to incorporate such costs.

“In economics, it’s called an externality. … If someone’s polluting the environment, it’s not that we want them to stop; it’s that we want them to pay for it. … If you make them pay for it, then they will care,” he said.

That’s why the United Nations has been promoting a so-called “triple bottom line,” which incorporates social and ecological performance along with financial, Croop said.

“It is a push to, in some way, report on those other aspects of the bottom line.”

So whether it’s social or fiscal responsibility, that pervasive international push is making green make more sense to more people.

“The green movement is just so pervasive and so visible that, again, I think that’s what’s changed,” Croop said. “It’s at the forefront of so much of the decision-making.”

Rory Sweeney, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 970-7418.