Celebrities’ fondness for using private jets to travel is environmentally disastrous. However, private jet travel remains intact even as the super-rich shift blame to sponsors, friends, and tenants.

Private jets and the Celebrities who rely on them have had a difficult summer. Both pop artist Taylor Swift and reality star Kylie Jenner were the targets of intense online criticism regarding their travel habits. But despite growing concerns about the climate problem, taking short trips on fancy airplanes seems to be a typical practice among the rich and famous.

The research named Taylor Swift’s plane as the “highest celebrity CO2e polluter this year so far,” with 170 flights since January and 8,293 metric tonnes of emissions. Swift’s spokesperson claimed amid the criticism that the celebrity wasn’t making all those trips by herself, but rather, she frequently lends her jet to friends.

On July 12, Jenner flew from Van Nuys in Los Angeles to the nearby hamlet of Camarillo, according to an automated Twitter account that monitors celebrity flights using transponders and tail fin markings. The trip took roughly 17 minutes. Following that, she was also criticized on Twitter for having an “absolute disregard for the planet” and for being a “full-time climate criminal.”

Her 17-minute trip is thought to have released a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, which, while not a tremendous quantity in and of itself, is nearly a quarter of the average person’s annual global carbon footprint. In a car, Jenner would have completed the journey in around 40 minutes, producing only a small portion of the emissions.

But Jenner is by no means the first famous person who travel short distances by private plane as opposed to driving or taking public transportation. The last fact, Jenner flew between the same two places in June on a flight that lasted just nine minutes.

Data from Celebrity Jets, a student-run Twitter account that scrapes data from the flight data and monitoring site ADS-B Exchange, shows that Floyd Mayweather, Blake Shelton, Jay-Z/PUMA, Steven Spielberg, Alex Rodriguez, and Travis Scott’s planes all continued to fly even after the sustainability research firm Yard published a list of the 10 celebrities responsible for the most private jet CO2 emissions on July 29.

The overwhelming majority of the super-rich, including many celebrities and public figures, emit far more greenhouse gases than their fair share due to their usage of private aircraft, superyachts, numerous homes, and mobile lifestyles, according to all available evidence. Additionally, purchasing carbon offsets does not stop emissions. The large and disproportionate effects of celebrity private plane travel should therefore be highlighted, even though it may seem unjust to some to single out any particular star for criticism.

How harmful are emissions from Private Jets to the climate?

If global greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, don’t start to decline by 2025, recent research from the UN says, we’re definitely rushing toward a climatic disaster. Researchers identify a potential standard: everyone on Earth should keep their carbon footprint to a maximum of 2.3 metric tonnes annually in order to maintain sustainability.

A private jet, on the other hand, produces two tonnes of carbon dioxide every hour. Short flights can be made using alternative, less-polluting methods because using a private jet can be up to 14 times more environmentally harmful than using a commercial one.

Published by HOLR Magazine.