Shocking stats on celebrity private jet usage has been leaked and A-listers, including Taylor Swift, the Kardashians, Drake and Kylie Jenner, are being called out for their reckless behaviour.
Taylor Swift has been named the ‘biggest celebrity CO2 polluter of the year’ by a new study that found her private jet has taken a whopping 170 flights since January.
The study released on Friday by British digital marketing firm Yard is based on an analysis of private plane flights tracked by the automated flight tracker Celebrity Jets, and found that Swift’s jet logged the most emissions of the pack.
The report came as a redemption for Kylie Jenner, who was branded a ‘climate criminal’ earlier this month for posting a picture of her and Travis Scott’s matching his-and-hers private jets earlier this month. But despite the backlash over that incident, and another in which she took a 12-minute flight instead of making a 26-mile drive, Jenner did not even make Yard’s top-10 list of celebrity polluters, ranking at a lowly 19.
Swift, through a representative, batted back furiously at the report after facing online backlash from fans, saying that she often let other people take her Falcon 7X jet on jaunts around the world.
‘Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,’ Swift’s rep told Rolling Stone. ‘To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.’
In the new pollution rankings, Swift’s jet narrowly beat out Floyd Mayweather’s for the top spot. Other notables in the top 10 include Jay Z, country singer Blake Shelton, director Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, Mark Wahlberg, and Oprah Winfrey.
Although Swift has remained silent on political and social issues for much of her career, she has spoken out more in recent years, and named climate change as one of the issues that concerned her in a 2020 interview with Variety.
Swift has not been on tour this year, and has performed only twice in 2022, in one-off appearances in London and New York City. Yet the study found that since the beginning of the year, Swift’s jet has logged 22,923 minutes in the air over 170 trips – equal to 15.9 full days of flight time, according to Yard. Her jet’s total flight emissions for the year came in at 8,293.54 tonnes, or 1,184.8 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions, Yard found. The study found that Swift’s jet had an average flight time of 80 minutes and an average flight distance of 139.36 miles.
‘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,’ said Yard’s Digital Sustainability Director, Chris Butterworth, in a statement. ‘Aviation is responsible for 2.4 percent 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,’ he added.
Swift has not been on tour this year, and has performed only twice in 2022, in one-off appearances in London and New York City (above) and yet her jet has flown 170 times this year
Following the report, even some of Swift’s loyal fans expressed disappointment at learning of her jet’s frequent travels. ‘D**n, she’s been flying around A LOT,’ one Swiftie wrote on the r/TaylorSwift Reddit fanpage. ‘What is she even doing that requires that much traveling?’
‘Going to get cancelled for this, but f**k Taylor Swift too, selfish as the rest of them,’ another person wrote on Twitter.
Kim Kardashian’s private plane made four flights of under 20 minutes in the past two months, according to data from celebrity flight-tracker @CelebJets. The private plane belonging to her half-sister, Kylie Jenner, did twice as many, the tracker found. One flight, on 24 July, saw Ms Kardashian’s plane make a 40-mile, 10-minute journey between Van Nuys and Camarillo, California. The trip required 81 gallons of fuel and emitted 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) – about the same as a gas-powered car emits being driven for six months. Overall, the reality TV family dominated the CelebJets dataset for short flights this summer. Ms Kardashian and Ms Jenner’s planes accounted for 12 of 36 total flights under 20 minutes recorded between 30 May and 24 July, 2022.
A customized Boeing 767 airliner owned by hiphop star Drake – named “Air Drake” – made five short flights in the same period. While other celebrity jets made greater numbers of flights, Drake’s plane reportedly spewed the most planet-heating emissions of all in the dataset due to its size. The Boeing 767, normally used by airlines to fly a couple of hundred people on intercontinental flights, emitted 21 tonnes of CO2 on the five trips, the analysis found. This is the equivalent emissions to four US homes’ electricity use for a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Drake attempted to defend the short flights in a recent social media post by saying that one flight flagged by CelebJets – an 18-minute trip between Hamilton, Ontario, and Toronto – was, in fact, empty. “This is just them moving planes to whatever airport they are being stored at for anyone who was interested in the logistics … nobody takes that flight,” he wrote on Instagram.
Second on Yard’s list was boxing legend Floyd Mayweather, whose jet emitted 7,076.8 tonnes of CO2 so far this year. However, Mayweather’s jet has amassed more flights than any other celebrity on the list, taking 177 so far this year. That amounts to 25 flights per month, or nearly one a day. In third place was rapper Jay-Z, whose jet emitted 6,981.3 tonnes of CO2 over 136 flights. Retired baseball player Alex Rodriguez ranked fourth with 5,342.7 tonnes of emissions. Blake Shelton, the country music singer and husband of Gwen Stefani, was number five with his jet logging 4,495 tonnes of emissions over 111 flights.Film director Steven Spielberg was sixth with 4,465 tonnes of emissions, followed closely by Kim Kardashian with 4268.5 tonnes. In eighth place was actor Mark Wahlberg whose jet has emitted 3772.85 tonnes of CO2, and Oprah Winfrey ranked ninth with an estimated 3,493.17 tonnes. Rounding out the top 10 was Travis Scott, with 3033.3 tonnes of emissions. However, Scott’s jet had the lowest average flight distance of the list, at just 7.31 miles per trip.
Film director Steven Spielberg was sixth with 4,465 tonnes of emissions, followed closely by Kim Kardashian with 4268.5 tonnes, while Oprah Winfrey ranked ninth with an estimated 3,493.17 tonnes
The study came in response to an Instagram post that Scott’s longtime on-again, off-again partner Kylie Jenner posted to Instagram on July 15. The internet reacted with fury after Jenner posted a photo showing what appeared to be her and Scott’s matching private jets, commenting: ‘you wanna take mine or yours?’
Reports also emerged that she had taken a 12-minute flight on her private jet for journey that would have taken just 40 minutes by car, leading some critics to dub her a ‘climate criminal’. Her jet travelled for 35 minutes from Palm Springs, just outside of LA, to Van Nuys, in Los Angeles, close to her $36million Hidden Hills mansion on July 15. Two hours later the mum-of-two then flew from Van Nuys, to Camarillo in in Ventura County, California – a trip which took just 12 minutes according to CelebrityJets on Twitter. The account also revealed that the Bombardier Global 7500 plane travelled from Camarillo, California, to Van Nuys two days before on July 13 – a trip of just 17 minutes. Her jet then took a 29-minute flight later the same day, travelling from Van Nuys to Palm Springs, California.
Original source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk
