The planet’s on fire, we have around seven years to avert a catastrophic rise in temperatures, and—ah, what’s that big fat whoosh-ing sound? Is that a bird? A plane? Oh, it’s Taylor Swift’s private jet.
As scientists panicked and issued ever direr warnings about our world being on the brink of climate collapse, there was one class of global citizens who remained steadfastly immune to their cries: celebrities.
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Before the advent of private jets, the rich and famous had to sit on planes with the rest of us plebs. Just look at Marlon Brando departing this Air France flight in 1959—that’s the tired, rumpled look of a celeb who’s had only a thin privacy curtain separating him in First Class from everyone else.
Now it seems every celebrity and billionaire—and billionaire celebs, too—is riding a PJ. In fact, some 300 of these gas-guzzling symbols of inequality and climate crisis have spent a combined total of eleven years in the air since the start of the year, according to a recent Guardian investigation. Those 44,739 journeys emitted just over 415,500 tonnes of CO2—which roughly works out to the combined carbon footprint of almost 40,000 Brits. That’s right, turns out those jolly little jaunts to Cannes for the film festival, Paris for Fashion Week, Reno for Burning Man and Naples for Capri add up. Who knew?
There was already heat building around celeb’s PJ usage last year, with a report from sustainability marketing firm Yard putting together a list of the worst offenders, with Taylor Swift sitting at the top with 170 journeys taken over the seven months of the study. That’s an estimated total flight emissions of 8,293.54 tonnes, more than a thousand times the amount of an average person over the course of a whole year. (A spokesperson for Swift told Rolling Stone at the time: “Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals. To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”)
This year, however, that heat coalesced into white-hot anger. Seventeen-year-old high school student Akash Shendure set up the interactive Climate Jets platform, which uses an army of volunteers to track the PJ footprints of the elite—some of whom, like Bill Gates, have claimed to be part of the “climate solution”. (We’ve been tracking the biggest PJ enthusiasts in our ongoing column, Celebrity Polluters of the Month.)
Others took directly to celebrities’ Instagram accounts to alternately bully and plead with them to stop behaving like climate-destroying freaks. It’s a tactic that has—maybe—caused some to stop posting content from their doubtlessly luxurious aeroplanes. (When was the last time you saw a Kardashian-Jenner take a bathroom selfie in one?)
Which makes the ones who do all the more egregiously off-putting. Take Peggy Gou, for instance—the “(It Goes Like) Nanana” DJ is a repeat offender for obnoxious PJ posts, with fans literally begging her to stop. Sample comment: “do we still think it’s cool to post about private jets 🙃🙃🙃”.
The fossil fuel industry are masters of misdirection—they’d prefer to see us turn against each other for not putting waste in the right recycling bin, as opposed to taking up arms against them for continuing to raze our planet to the ground. And sure, a mean tweet about Travis Kelce using Taylor Swift’s PJ might not be the thing that brings down the private aviation industry to a screeching halt. But if you want a symbol of everything wrong with our planet in 2023, and how financial and environmental inequality sit side-by-side as climate collapse looms, you can’t do any worse than a photo of a luxury handbag carefully posed on the leather seat of a private jet to nowhere.
