It started as a niche Swedish environmental movement in 2018, but flight shaming – publicly shaming people who take seemingly superfluous flights – has reached new heights in recent weeks. The guilty? Celebrity jet owners who take trips that last only minutes are named and shamed via the @CelebJets Twitter account by Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old Florida student.
Things really got going last month when reality TV star and businesswoman Kylie Jenner, who has 363 million followers on Instagram, posted a photo of herself and boyfriend, singer Travis Scott, kissing between two jets, with the rather misjudged caption “You”. do you want mine or yours?’ The flight was found to have taken just 17 minutes from a city in Los Angeles on the other hand.
A later flight Jenner took on August 1 flew just 35 miles over the city of Los Angeles and had a flight time of 12 minutes and was responsible for a ton of CO2 emissions. This is one way to avoid traffic.
Just 1 percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of global aviation emissions
GETTY IMAGES
Flights can be tracked via the website adsbexchange.com, which locates aircraft via their unique transponder and automatically tweets via a bot. Although Sweeney has been running his Twitter account for almost a year, Jenner’s post sparked very public outrage. One user replied, “This should be really criminal.” Another added, “Kylie and her rich friends are about to end this world.”
While the pandemic and global grounding of flights has caused a pause in flight shaming, it has gained momentum in recent months amid rising concerns about climate change. This summer’s wildfires and floods in California, along with record-breaking temperatures in the UK, have highlighted the extreme weather conditions caused by global warming.
According to a 2018 article in the journal Global Environmental Change, 1 percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of global aviation emissions. Overall, private jet travel accounts for 4 percent of aviation emissions.
However, it’s not just the Kardashians who treat private jets like an Uber service. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge came under fire in March for flying to Belize on a jet, even though William co-founded the Earthshot prize, given to people for their contributions to protecting the environment. In the past five years, the royal family has collectively completed the equivalent of a round trip to the moon. Most of these trips were made on private jets.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge came under fire in March for flying to Belize on a jet
GETTY IMAGES
Toronto-based rapper Drake owns a souped-up Boeing 767 — a jet that normally seats 375 passengers — as his personal plane, with a modified interior for just a select few guests. He has been known to take journeys of less than 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Jenner’s famous sister, Kim Kardashian, recently took a trip across California from Van Nuys to Camarillo. Total time in the air? Nineteen minutes. Other offenders named and shamed via @CelebJets include film director Steven Spielberg, boxer Floyd Mayweather, rapper Jay-Z and actor Tom Cruise.
● Sustainable travel companies that go the extra green mile
● 42 of the best no-fly trips from the UK
Fast in name and ostensibly by nature, American pop star Taylor Swift has the worst carbon emissions when it comes to celebrity aviators. Flights on her private jet (170 trips in 200 days) have injected 8,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere this year alone, a claim she responded to yesterday as “manifestly false” because she had borrowed the plane.
Sweeney has also set up a standalone Twitter account, @ElonJet, dedicated to Tesla founder Elon Musk’s flying habits – and has turned down a $5,000 (£4,100) offer from the multibillionaire to stop the account. Musk, who has ordered a £64million Gulfstream G700 private plane for delivery next year, has now blocked Sweeney on Twitter. It is known that he made the six-mile journey between Los Angeles International and Hawthorne Airport by private jet. The same journey would take about 10 minutes by car.
Undeterred by Sweeney’s flight-shaming reports, Musk has announced plans to build his own airport outside of Austin, Texas, near the headquarters of his rocket ship company, SpaceX. If he can get an environmental permit, that is.
Sign up for our Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and Twitter
Comments are closed.