Remember 10 years ago when the Internet represented a “new paradigm” and everything connected to it was going to make everyone in America rich?

Investors in dot-com busts such as TheGlobe.com and Pets.com certainly do.

Then, plausibly enough, as the air rushed out of the technology bubble, investors moved to safer investments, notably real estate.

After all, land and the structures built on it are tangible, unlike all those phony dot-com companies. And there’s only so much real estate to go around, so as long as people are buying it values have to keep going up.

It’s simple supply and demand, right?

Now the question really isn’t whether there will be another financial bubble into which millions of investors will heedlessly plow money. There will be. The question instead is what the next bubble will look like.

Many astute observers of U.S. financial markets believe it will be “green.”

Again, the justifications are entirely plausible. Cheerleaders for the Internet made an eloquent and passionate case for the limitless potential of that new technology a decade ago.

Today, many environmentalists and important policy makers are voicing a similar argument for all things related to renewable energy and eco-friendly products.

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And this time there’s a convenient morality tale attached to make investors feel good as they steer their money into wind farms, solar panel manufacturers and hydroelectric dams by investing in companies such as SunPower (SPWRA) and First Solar (FSLR), or even Siemens (SI) and General Electric (GE).

Already, marketers and corporate executives from an array of industries pepper their pitches to consumers with descriptions of how “green” their products are.

“Do I think that’s the next logical place to look for a bubble? The answer is yes because we’ve already seen signs that it’s happening,” said Joel L. Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors.

Naroff noted that early evidence of a bubble may already exist: a huge surplus of solar panels sitting in warehouses because the expectation that all Americans would be attaching them to their roofs never came to fruition.

In theory, at least, a green bubble makes a lot of sense, according to Naroff, because without an emphasis on cultivating and exploiting certain renewable energy resources, the price tag for maintaining current levels of energy usage in the U.S. will continue to soar, he said.

A bubble can’t occur without the public on board, specifically in the form of retail investors. Broad public acceptance of the need to invest in renewable energies would create, in Naroff’s words, a “mantra that we have to get there. It doesn’t matter how we get there, we just have to get there.”

Individual investors played primary roles during both the Internet and housing bubbles.

First, they completely bought into the notion that the Internet was changing everything and they either bought the dot-com stocks themselves (remember all those day traders?) or demanded that their brokers buy them.

Tech-related mutual funds soared in the late 1990s then tumbled like so many dominoes.

A similar thing happened during the recent housing bubble, as homeowners en masse believed that their homes would continue to increase in value by 15% to 20% annually, and then borrowed and speculated accordingly.

We all know what happened when home prices leveled off and then began to fall.

In any case, both bubbles were fueled by the false notion that all the stars had aligned in favor of that sector and that risk had somehow been eliminated.

And each bubble had its gurus: in the 1990s it was Goldman Sachs economist Abby Joseph Cohen. In the 2000s it was a figure no less authoritative than former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

No high-profile “green guru” has emerged as yet, but colorful Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens recently made a run at the title.

Making the reasonable argument that America’s economic and political future depends heavily on achieving energy independence, Pickens last year announced a plan he said would dramatically cut U.S. dependency on foreign oil by replacing oil with renewable wind energy.

At the time, a gallon of gasoline cost about $4 at the pump and the U.S. was (and is) deeply immersed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The proposal never took off, however, and Pickens has since put on hold plans for a giant wind farm in Texas.

Experts note that a major upgrade will be needed to the country’s power grid for a renewable energy -- wind power, for instance -- to be widely distributed throughout the U.S. And if that upgrade is going to occur, the government will have to invest heavily.

Naroff said the Obama Administration is not in a position right now to make that kind of investment, a factor that might act as the sole impediment to the inflation of the next financial bubble.

Around the world, renewable energy is a subsidized industry, Naroff said. If the U.S. hopes to stay competitive in that industry, the same will have to occur here. But Naroff said soaring budget deficits and ongoing political debates -- namely, over health care -- will likely curb any willingness to earmark money toward that sector.

“The mess created cleaning the mess we were in is going to have enormous impact on the flexibility of the economy going forward,” he said. “One of the affected areas will be turning the U.S. into a competitive green economy.”

So it seems investors might have to wait another few years to participate in the all-but-inevitable “green bubble.”