And that's not the only huge problem with this boat, either.
Beautiful View
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns a genuinely colossal superyacht — so massive, in fact, that it has to be docked next to freakin' oil tankers down in Florida.
As the Luxury Launches yachting blog reports, Bezos' superschooner, which is named the Koru after the Maori word for "coil," is a whopping 416 feet in length, which makes it 16 feet too long to be docked at the biggest yacht spot in South Florida's tony Port Everglades.
Instead, it's been docked between 600-foot oil tankers, because that's extremely normal.
@JeffBezos Koru sailing yacht has finally arrived in the US, and it’s so enormous that it did not fit next to other superyachts at the Port of Everglades. The $500 million vessel was finally docked next to gigantic oil tankers at the South Florida.-https://t.co/i3BhZePtBq pic.twitter.com/vpDmgp8saR
— Luxurylaunches (@luxurylaunches) November 27, 2023
The Koru, reports indicate, set the centibillionaire back a cool $500 million and costs $137,000 per day to operate, but if you're rich enough to buy the Washington Post, who's to say you can't buy one of the world's most expensive yachts and pay way more than the average American's annual salary to make sure it's running every day?
Emissions Impossible
At nearly double the length of an Airbus A380, the Koru isn't just a gigantic waste of money but is also, as the New York Post reported based on a new analysis from the University of Indiana, a major polluter as well.
Using publicly-available data, Indiana anthropology PhD candidate Beatriz Barros and anthropologist Richard Wilk — who have for years been raising alarm bells about the billionaire pollution problem — calculated that the Koru produces an outrageous 7,154 tons of greenhouse gasses per year.
While it's not exactly shocking that the uber-wealthy are uber-polluters, these numbers do fly in the face of Bezos' purported commitment to turning back the clock on climate change, as evidenced by his commitment to spend $10 billion by the end of the decade to combat its worst effects.
In an interview with The Guardian about the research, Wilk explained that luxury sailboats like the Koru are one of the most egregious ways that billionaires pollute.
"The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else," the Indiana anthropologist said. "They have to have a crew, and they have to be constantly maintained even when they are docked. Then you have the helicopters onboard, the jetskis, the high energy-using luxury items like pools, hot tubs, private submarines and tenders, all of these require power, the air conditioning, the sophisticated electronic items."
"It is like having a hotel running on the water all the time," Wilk continued.
As media breathlessly recounts the Koru's debut, the superyacht that's too big to be docked normally will continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere at a far greater rate than the average Joe — but hey, at least it reportedly has a sculpture of Lauren Sanchez aboard.
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