With our current understanding of the climate crisis, it’s safe to say that everyone is trying to be more sustainable for the sake of the environment, whether that be through replacing single use plastics in your life with reusable alternatives, thrifting clothes instead of contributing to clothing waste, or even driving an electric vehicle.
However some people have a carbon footprint far beyond that of the regular person, specifically celebrities and higher-class individuals who use private jets to replace commercial flights.
Although many of us use air travel for long distances, commercial flights have an infinitely smaller carbon footprint than that of a private flight.
“According to [a] report, a passenger on a private aircraft is responsible for emitting roughly 45 times the amount of carbon dioxide as a commercial aircraft passenger on the 210-mile flight,” said Emma Tofu, with Capitol News Service.
Carbon emissions are released with the burning of energy, mostly through coal or natural gas, and are especially harmful to the atmosphere as they have the ability to stay within the atmosphere for hundreds of years, as such they are the major culprits of climate change.
“Aviation accounts for 8% of carbon-related emissions in the United States,” said the BBC’s Lola Mendez.
Based on usage of their private jets alone, celebrities are said to be producing “1,100 times the amount of [carbon emissions as] the average person,” according to Mendez.
However, some celebrities are causing more damage than others. Myclimate, a nonprofit based out of Switzerland, uses public information about private jet paths and social media to calculate the amount of carbon emissions being produced by specific celebrities. They found that in the year of 2023, Travis Scott was responsible for releasing 13,362,879 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, making him the celebrity with the highest CO2 emissions in the world, according to their calculations. This number is absolutely unimaginable, as the average person releases only 8,000 pounds of CO2 within a year, meaning that Travis Scott releases the same amount of CO2 as 1,670 people, according to The Nature Conservancy.
This is made especially despicable when you look at the distance of some of these flights. One of Travis Scott’s flights from Spa to Liege, Belgium, “could have been accomplished in a 40-minute car ride,” Tofu said.
Scott is not the only celebrity under fire for their reckless use of private jets; Taylor Swift has also recently been brought to the spotlight for her carbon emissions. During 2022, she was believed to be the single person with the highest carbon emissions due to private jet flights, but Swift’s team fought back against this, claiming that she had removed double the amount of CO2 from the atmosphere than she had put into it through the use of carbon credits.
Carbon credit programs promise to reverse unavoidable carbon emissions by corporations or individuals by allowing them to pay for a certain amount of CO2 consuming trees or algae to be planted proportional to the amount of CO2 they have produced. Though this may seem like the perfect solution, it’s not as amazing as it seems. In reality, “carbon offsets do not capture or reduce real emissions, and they have a dismal record when it comes to actually averting future emissions,” the New York Times’ Kit Dillon said.
So, what are these billionaires supposed to do? The answer is simple: avoid flying when possible.
Private car carbon emissions are minimal in comparison to that of a private jet, especially if making the choice to use an electric vehicle over a gasoline powered one.
That’s really just the minimum they can do. When these people have so much expendable money, we should not just expect them to cut back on flights where they can but to donate heavily to environmental charities and the communities most affected by climate change. It’s time we start holding celebrities accountable for their carbon footprint, because not only should we be focusing on recycling and doing the best we can for our environment, so should they.