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PHILADELPHIA (news agencies) — For weeks, scrutiny over singer Taylor Swift’s travel in private jets has been bubbling up on social media, with people pointing out the planet-warming emissions of carbon dioxide released with every flight.
The megastar is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, one of the NFL’s most celebrated players. The growing romance between the couple has been closely watched, with Swift showing up at several games — which has meant much travel on private jets. The chatter got even louder the last few days after the Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday, sending them to the Super Bowl, which is in Las Vegas on Feb. 11.
Swift, the hitmaker whose dominance of pop culture now includes the first tour to gross more than $1 billion, is the latest in a long list of celebrities, government officials and elite businesspeople to come under scrutiny about private jet travel. A look at Swift’s recent travel, carbon dioxide emissions from private jets versus commercial planes and one of the most common, albeit controversial, solutions floated to address such pollution.
If Swift attends the Super Bowl, she will be traveling from Tokyo, where she is on tour. That will mean more than 19,400 miles (30,500 kilometers) by private jet in just under two weeks. Just how much carbon dioxide will that be?
While exact carbon emissions depend on many factors, such as flight paths and number of passengers, a rough estimate is possible, said Gregory Keoleian, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Traveling 19,400 miles on a Dassault Falcon 900LX, one of Swift’s jets, could release more than 200,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, he said.
That would be about 14 times as much as the average American household emits in a year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
How realistic commercial travel would be for Swift is open for debate. After all, she’s so famous that even if she wanted to, flying on commercial flights might be chaotic for an airline crew and any public airport she frequents. Keoleian said there are other important ways that public figures flying private can address climate change, such as through their influence on public attitudes and perceptions, investments and who they vote for.
The controversy over Swift’s use of private jets illustrates the “great disparity” between the wealthy and lower-income people when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions each person generates, said Julia Stein, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
