There has been an onslaught of celebrity flight shaming lately. The high-profile ultra-short hops of the ultra-rich have got the regular recycling public seeing red. And it doesn't help when they flaunt their private jet habit on Instagram, as Kylie Jenner recently became aware. American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is the latest in line to face severe backlash over her private jet use. Although, her representative says the over 8,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions thus far this year is not really the singer's fault, as her jet was on loan most of the time.

"Blatantly incorrect," rep says

A new report by sustainability marketing firm Yard tracking the private jet use among celebrities and released last week found that Swift’s plane has taken 170 flights between January 1 and July 19, 2022. The estimated resulting CO2 amassed over a total flight time of 22,923 minutes in the air (15.9 days) is 1185 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions. Meanwhile, her representative told media outlet The Rolling Stone that,

Top ten offenders

Coming in as runner-up on the non-too-prestigious list is boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr's jet, a Gulfstream G-IV that has emitted 7077 tonnes so far this year. It also claims the title belt for shortest flight - a ten-minute hop to Las Vegas, emitting one tonne of CO2.

Jay-Z's $40 million Bombardier Challenger 850 racks up the third most miles. Rounding up the top five celebrity private jet polluters are Alex Rodriguez, aka A-Rod, and country singer Blake Shelton. Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, Mark Wahlberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Travis Scott are the remainder of the top ten (which, ironically enough, Kardashian's younger half-sister and mother of Scott's child, Kylie Jenner, did not make - she is only 19th overall).

Lack of personal accountability exacerbates divide

Private jet yearly emissions equal those of the entire country of Denmark. While this is nowhere near the pollution from large corporations and industries such as animal agriculture and fast fashion, what gets people riled up is the apparent disregard for the personal carbon footprint. Chris Butterworth, Digital Sustainability Director at Yard, commented on the study,

“It’s easy to get lost in the dazzling lives of the rich and famous, but unfortunately, they’re a massive part of the CO2e problem we have with the aviation industry. Aviation is responsible for 2.4% of human-produced CO2e every year, and research shows a vast divide between the super-rich and the rest of us regarding flights, travel, and even general emissions."

Money offer not enough to stop tracking Musk

The data used in the study comes from an automated Twitter account called @CelebJets, which tracks the movements of the private jets of the rich and famous (such as the Boeing 767 belonging to Drake.) It is run by a student coder at the University of Central Florida named Jack Sweeney.

Elon Musk has reportedly offered him $5,000 to stop tracking his movements. However, Sweeney told Bloomberg in January this year that that sum wasn't going to cut it. Too bad Musk got cold feet when it came to buying the social media network. Had the deal gone through, he could simply have blocked Sweeney's account.

Source: Yard, The Rolling Stone, Bloomberg