William Koch Builds Frontier Town All His Own Near Aspen
Source: Bloomberg
Energy billionaire William Koch is developing a private 19th-century Western village, with a saloon, a jail and a train station, high in the Rocky Mountains in a region pockmarked with historic ghost towns that died when the mines that supported them played out.
Koch, 72, who made his fortune partly by developing underground coal deposits in Somerset, Colorado, is building the out-of-the-way oasis at his nearby Bear Ranch, a working cattle operation southwest of Aspen. The compound will also include a 21,762-square-foot mansion with an elevator, a wine room and his-and-hers mud rooms overlooking the 50-building frontier town. A third of the house will be underground.
Koch is a collector of Old West memorabilia, including the only known photograph of Billy the Kid, which he bought for $2.3 million at a Denver auction last year. He plans to open the make-believe town solely to his family and friends, not the public, said Brad Goldstein, a spokesman for the company Koch founded, West Palm Beach, Florida-based Oxbow Carbon LLC.
... A land-swap deal Koch proposed to insulate his frontier town, which sits at the foot of the picturesque Ragged Mountains, an area popular with hunters and anglers, is sharply dividing organic farmers, miners and retirees who populate the region's blue-collar communities.
Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-koch-builds-frontier-town-040100137.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I don't know if there is any credible research on this particular subject, but I suspect that on average, over the course of a year, 1 wealthy individual consumes the same amount of natural resources as 30 - 50 working class/middle class individuals. This may be a low estimate.
Since the overwhelming majority of wealthy individuals are conservatives, I doubt that their voracious appetite for destruction concerns these wealthy conservatives in the slightest.
The wealthy buy our governments without our consent, and subsequently prevent us from bringing about necessary environmentally friendly regulations and socio-economic systems through transparent democratic processes. They use their wealth to maintain political control, thereby sustaining their destructive sources of profit and gluttonous lifestyles, in their own selfish interests, to the detriment of every other living creature on the planet.
William Koch is a prime example of these wealthy individuals who are responsible for selfishly destroying our planet without conscience.
Personally, I don't care about how much money someone has.
What I do care about is that it gives them the ability to personally cause massive, wanton waste of resources and environmental destruction, and that they use the privileges of wealth and power to destroy the planet without reservation.
The adults on the planet desperately need to find a way to prevent the thoughtless children on the planet from playing with weapons.
