Posted on 04/19/2007 11:01:35 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Some of the world's wealthiest are going green, spending their own greenbacks to protect the environment and fight global warming. In honor of the 37th annual Earth Day this Sunday, we are highlighting our picks for the 11 greenest billionaires. These moguls have made significant commitments to the environment, whether through investment in technology, commitment to earth-friendly living or simply by raising the world's environmental awareness.
Among the green billionaires are high-profile folks like Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT) co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates' investment firm invested $84 million in California's Pacific Ethanol (nasdaq: PEIX), which makes ethanol from corn; Allen's real estate investment company is constructing 100 million square feet of housing made from environmentally sensitive materials in downtown Seattle. While solar energy isn't viable in rainy Seattle, Microsoft employees also enjoy free access to mass transit and company-subsidized hybrid cars.
In Pictures: The World's Greenest Billionaires -- Slide show, automatically timed
But even in conservation, Google (nasdaq: GOOG) appears to be racing ahead of Microsoft. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, turned their Mountain View, Calif., headquarters into one of the world's most eco-friendly.
The 500,000-square-foot facility is heated by 9,212 solar panels; all the furniture in one building is made from recycled material, including old blue jeans as wall insulation. Employees can dine (for free) at Café 150, which uses ingredients only from farms within 150 miles of the kitchen. Brin and Page both drive hybrid Toyota Priuses and have made personal investments in Tesla, an electric car maker. And Brin reportedly has a solar-paneled rucksack to power his phone and MP3 player.
America's largest landowner Ted Turner and eBay's (nasdaq: EBAY) former president Jeff Skoll have used their fortunes to influence eco-culture. Turner was the creative force behind popular TBS children's series Captain Planet. Skoll was the executive producer of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary on the fearsome ramifications of global warming. A portion of the film's proceeds are being donated to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonpartisan research group.
Still, capitalists will be capitalists and it comes as no surprise that some billionaires have ulterior motives for going green. Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and his firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have invested $200 million-plus in more than a dozen alternative energy companies. He has famously been quoted as saying that "the field of greentech could be the economic opportunity of the 21st century."
In September, Richard Branson, whose airline business has been slammed by rising fuel costs, announced plans to commit a portion of the profits (an estimated $3 billion over 10 years) from his transportation divisions to developing renewable energy alternatives.
The $38 billion (estimated global investment) alternative energy industry has also coined a few billionaires of its own. Zhengrong Shi, chairman of China's solar energy giant Suntech Power (nyse: STP) and Tulsi Tanti of India's wind company Suzlon Energy have both netted billions in recent years by harvesting nature's own power sources. This year also saw the debut of the world's first ethanol tycoon, Brazilian billionaire Rubens Ometto Silveira Mello, who has made a fortune distilling processed sugarcane into the clean-burning fuel.
In Pictures: The World's Greenest Billionaires
Good on ‘em for putting their money where their mouth is.
I remember watching that show as a youngster in the mid-90s. It's a great tool for brainwashing children into joining the environmentalist religion of Gaia.
Thankfully, my parents cut off cable, and I learned the truth as I grew up.
ROFL. This article fails to mention that Brin and Page also a have Boeing 767 for personal use. Now, to be sure, I have absolutely nothing against people who can afford their personal wide-body jets. It's just that their 'environmentalism' is not very credible.
How many of these people made their fortunes in oil? Mining? How much pollution has the silicone chips development and refinement added to the total, Mr. Gates? It didn't add to the total, it made the total!
All your mansons, summer resrts, and the cost of heating.cooling and BUILDING them can NEVER be justified simply by claiming a charitable donation, money which you are directing to your own pet projects instead of giving to the government, thereby denieing it's use for social programs you liberals keep crying for in the first place.
pollute all you want with Al Gore’s carbon credits.
Pollute all you want using Al Gores' Carbon credit plan™ Al Gore's Carbon Credit plan™ features the lowest brokerage fee's in the country, with direct line to additional credits included with every membership plan. Need that Hummer? drive it off the lot today with an Al Gore Carbon credit plan™
Boeing non-pollution CO2 is good. Boeing makes bucks, bruinbirdman makes bucks.
A little aluminum shavings? Recycled. I love Boeing. Airplane exhaust? It's too high up, can't smell it. New engines are more efficient, powerful, so they get better mileage. Nothin' to do with pollution.
MS ain't so bad either. Over time I've chucked at least 6 puters at the local dump. No one has complained. The stock could do a little better on the dividend side and a little less on the enviro-whacko contribution side. Gates can do what he wants.
yitbos
Bill Gates also has a garage built into the side of the hill at his estate in Seattle that houses over 40 gas guzzling exotic supercars that he drives around Seattle and Bellevue frequently.
I saw him driving his ferrari and lamborghini around the Microsoft campus plenty of times when working there.
And you know what? If I had his money, I would be driving them too.
All these remedies are a drop in the bucket. It all requires energy to produce these green products. Unless you are out there dumping motor oil in a stream and/or they are living like Ted Kaczynski, you and I aren’t contributing any more waste to the system than these so called greenies. They probably contribute more output than your average person as it was found out with Al Gore. But hey, what do I care. It’s their money and if they want to spend it on useless stuff it’s up to them. It’s keeping someone employed. Unfortunately, these types usually aren’t satisfied with keeping it in the private sector. They like to make laws and force everyone to adopt their useless ideas.
That's my point. Who do they thinK they are fooling?
besides all the leftist moonbat envirowienie school aged children they have brainwashed. Youth are their favorite target because they don't any knowlage of how the world really works. They get a good 20 years of support and good media using cute little kids carrying signs saying "don't turn my future into a garbage dump" with water color painted faces used as extra billboard space.
Thankfully, SOME of them grow up to learn they've been used to promote a much more sinister plan by NGO's promoting a world governed by an elite class of un-elected marxist liberals who think that their idiotic beliefs are how the world should run.
They’re welcome to do Google Earth and check out my back yard.
Good point. Coulter should write a book on the topic.
yitbos
I I had Gates' money, I'd have 'bat caves" built all over the country attached to my estates too. There's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the money you've made.
He becomes a hypocrite however, when after he's had all the fun and done all the things he'sever wanted to do, he turns into this geeniac crusader trying to restrict the freedoms of others and prevent them from enjoyng the same things he does.
What he really is, is a greedy elitist who wants to take all the good things the world has to offer for himself and others in his elite class.
They don't want common low life trash to build cheap little cottages at THEIR summer lake resort, and annoy their peace and quit with their kids zooming around on jet ski's. So, they intentionally drive the price of real estate up beyond the reach of the commoner. have envirowienie laws passed preventing poor mans watercraft from being used in THEIR lake. (meanwhile, the Bill Gates super large pontoon lake cruiser with all the comforts of a 1,200 sq. ft. home is ok) is ok
The world’s largest carbon butt-prints
The World’s Greenest Billionaires hypocrites who will financially rape the average American family of $4,000 annually to pay for useless Marxist carbon credits.
How much energy did it take to manufacture all those solar panels?
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