Billionaire Clive Palmer, CEO of Blue Star Line, has decided to build a modern replica of the Titanic. Normally I wouldn’t care, but for reason this just pissed me off.
I heard about this one the radio this morning. Not as a news story, but as an advertisement. This guy is thinking ahead, but with the ship even started construction yet it may be a bit premature to start selling tickets.
He’s a billionaire and it’s his money and his company, he can do what he wants. But with the world economy not doing so well and more and more people with no disposable income and the actual problems on the Earth, a new cruise ship, in a market already over saturated with ships, is not a good idea. In 2009, 14 new ships were delivered and another 26 were on order.
The industry has some problems. There have been no shortage of issues with cruises lately.
But what really makes me mad/sad/depressed is that billionaires are one of the only groups of people that could actually make a difference in the world in a short time frame.
Here are some things that a billionaire could do with just part of their money.
At $2 per installed watt, commercial wind turbines would be a good investment and help the planet. Five hundred million dollars would build half a gigawatt of nameplate capacity wind turbines. That’s enough electricity for a quarter of a million homes. At ten cents per kilowatt hour, income would be roughly $50,000 per month depending on actual capacity.
Build electric vehicles. At a retail cost of $30,000 per, a billionaire spending $900 million (still have over $100 million for personal use) could buy and distribute 30,000 electric vehicles. That’s enough to replace every cab in New York City with an electric vehicle.
Build a decent train system in the US. It may not even be possible anymore, but this is one of my dreams. Use similar trains to what is used in the Chunnel so that US drivers can just roll their cars onto the train and will have them available at their destination. A good first route might be LA to Las Vegas or New York to Miami. Imagine all the cars that wouldn’t be on the road for those long trips.
These are just a few ideas. They may not make loads and loads of money, but I doubt that a cruise ship will either… though I just read that a lot of cruise ship profits come from company owned stores at the island destinations.
The point is that a few billionaires, just using their personal money without loans or other income could make a big dent in some of the major problems in the world. Everything from hunger (use drought tolerant grasses to start reclaiming the Sahara) to pollution.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it coming. There’s not enough benefit for them to work for the greater good.
