The celebrities are not doing a good job of persuading all of us unwashed masses that they’re handling their wealth responsibly. Last week, in the middle of a summer that’s seen the weather across vast swathes of the planet resemble the air just above a low-boiling pot of soup, Kylie Jenner posted a photo showing her and Travis Scott posing between their matching private jets. In reaction to the post, people started sharing records of Jenner’s private flights, digging up tweets showing her jet taking off and landing to run errands that required as little as three minutes in the air.
These tweets come from Jack Sweeney, the creator of the automated Celebrity Jets Twitter account, which, as its name implies, gives us a way to watch our demigod rulers’ behavior in despair via posts that track the private flights of various celebrities along with their financial and environmental cost.
Aside from spotting the especially egregious three minute Jenner flight, Celebrity Jets includes a wealth of information about other frequent, short private flights by jets owned by everyone from Taylor Swift, Mark Wahlberg, Oprah Winfrey, Floyd Mayweather, and Steven Spielberg to Kenny Chesney, Drake, Kim Kardashian, and Blake Shelton.
A typical example of one of these posts sees Spielberg’s jet flying for approximately 24 minutes last Tuesday, using 1,437 pounds of jet fuel and producing 2 tons of CO2 emissions in the process. On Monday, in another example, one of Drake’s private flights lasted about 52 minutes, burned 10,190 pounds of jet fuel, and created 16 tons of CO2 emissions. Most of the celebrities whose names appear on the tracker take these kind of flights regularly.
As Mel Magazine points out in an article about Celebrity Jets, private jets “are disproportionately wasteful” and “pollute up to 14 times more than commercial planes per passenger, and up to 50 times more than rail travel.” The same article notes that private jet usage is only increasing, with 2021 marking a huge increase in new buyers and flights.
This leave us with only one conclusion: The celebrities, like the Roy family from Succession, must be pressured to give up their “PJs” for the good of the rest of the world.
[via Mel Magazine]
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