A representative for Taylor Swift has defended the left-wing pop icon in the face of climate activists raging over her reported 170 private jet flights this year alone, claiming that the Shake It Off singer regularly loans the plane out to other people.
“Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,” a spokesperson for Taylor Swift told TMZ. “To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”
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Over the weekend, backlash erupted online when the sustainable marketing agency Yard published “cutting-edge data” on the celebrities with the “worst private jet Co2 emissions” in 2022. According to the research, Swift’s private jet flew 170 times this year with an average time of 80 minutes.
Taylor Swift might be today’s pop princess, but Yard’s research found that Miss Swift is the biggest celebrity CO2e polluter of this year so far. Racking up a total of 170 flights on her private jet since January, Taylor has amassed a vast 22,923 minutes in the air – 15.9 days. Quite a large amount considering that she is not currently touring.
Taylor’s average flight time is just 80 minutes and an average of 139.36 miles per flight. Her total flight emissions for the year come in at 8,293.54 tonnes or 1,184.8 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions. Taylor’s shortest recorded flight of 2022 was just 36 minutes, flying from Missouri to Nashville.
Naturally, critics of Swift’s private jet use did not buy her representative’s excuse, arguing that the environmental toll still stands regardless of who uses the jet.
Singer Drake also took a hit in June for taking three 20-minute flights on his $185 million private jet. In response to the criticism, he told Real Toronto Newz that it was “just them moving planes to whatever airport they are being stored at for anyone who was interested in the logistics…nobody takes that flight.”
As Emily Kirkpatrick of Vanity Fair noted, “Just because no one was on board, that doesn’t negate the environmental toll of these flights.
Climate campaign coordinator Ian Borsuk told CTV New Toronto that a debate should spark about whether or not people should have access to private jets in the face of so-called climate change.
“I think we need to as a society have a conversation about whether we should be allowing these private flights to be happening in the first place,” he said. “I think it can really be frustrating for some folks when, you know, they’re thinking to themselves, ‘Okay, well, I’m doing everything I can in my daily routine to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, such as taking public transit, buying local products, and things like that.”
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