Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window - Steve Wozniak

The Billionaire World-Savers’ Boys’ Club

by West Virginia Rebel

The rich are different from you and me-they ponder saving the world in style.

NECKER ISLAND,British Virgin Islands: Richard Branson was lounging under the starry midnight sky on this palm-dappled speck of an island recently when he popped a sobering question.

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio.

What he wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet.

Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Some of them, like Page, carbon-consciously jet-pooled in from Silicon Valley, where the financiers who bankrolled the Web boom of the 1990s have started chasing the new “New New Thing”: green power. In an era of $100-plus oil, venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, another invitee, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into young companies that cook up biofuels and harness the power of the sun.

Blair, who is now a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase, squeezed in a few idyllic days here between assignments (he left early for Jerusalem). Another attendee only sort-of showed up. The Medusa, the 198-foot, or 60-meter, yacht owned by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, was moored off Necker Island all weekend, but Allen never came ashore.

The Caribbean getaway was the brainchild of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur. Stromback, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, joked that a gathering like this might seem nefarious to some people.

“In James Bond movies, evil-doers meet in exotic settings to plot the destruction of the planet,” Stromback said, puffing on a cigar before dinner one night. But the people here, he said, were plotting to save the planet.

So far, however, the hopes and dreams of alternative energy have far outstripped reality. But for Stromback and many of the other participants, a confluence of two powerful forces - soaring oil prices and growing concern over global warming - means the era of economically viable green power is finally at hand.

While I do applaud them for at least doing something with their own money and not ours, I have to wonder how many island getaways these folks would be able to take if they were to truly “Go green.” Would they mind using catamarans and hot-air balloons instead of yachts and Learjets in the future?

Comments

Posted by on 03/20/08 at 05:03 PM from

Just goes to show you that lot of money doesn’t mean you can’t be brainwashed.

I feel sorry for these people…

Posted by InsipiD on 03/20/08 at 07:17 PM from

I applaud them only for recognizing the James Bond movie parallel.  Were Dick Cheney to show up (and if anyone eventually makes money on green power, it’ll be Halliburton), they would cut him in half with a laser and feed the bits to baby sharks.

Posted by Ed Kline on 03/21/08 at 05:50 AM from

venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, another invitee, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into young companies that cook up biofuels and harness the power of the sun.

soon gonna be a broke ass venture capitalist.

<< Back to main