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It started out as a niche Swedish environmental movement in 2018, but flight shaming — publicly calling out people taking seemingly superfluous flights — has reached new heights in the past couple of weeks. The culprits? Jet-owning celebrities taking journeys lasting mere minutes and being named and shamed via the @CelebJets Twitter account run by Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old Florida student.
It really took off last month when the reality TV star and businesswoman Kylie Jenner, who has 363 million followers on Instagram, posted a photo of her and her boyfriend, the singer Travis Scott, kissing between two jets, with the rather misjudged caption ‘you wanna take mine or yours?’ The flight was found to have lasted just 17 minutes, from one Los Angeles town to another.
A later flight Jenner took on August 1 flew just 35 miles across the city of Los Angeles and had a flight time of 12 minutes, and was responsible for one ton of CO2 emissions. That’s one way to swerve traffic.
Just one per cent of the population is responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s aviation emissions
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Flights are trackable using 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, it was Jenner’s post that was the catalyst for the very public outrage. One user responded: “This really should be criminal.” Another added: “Kylie and her rich friends will end this world soon.”
While the pandemic and the global grounding of flights led to a hiatus in flight shaming, it has gathered pace in the past few months due to heightened concerns over climate change. This summer’s wildfires and floods in California, along with record temperatures in the UK, have highlighted the extreme weather brought about by global warming.
According to a 2018 article in the Global Environmental Change journal, 1 per cent of the population is responsible for 50 per cent of the world’s aviation emissions. Private-jet travel makes up 4 per cent of aviation emissions overall.
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 taking a jet to Belize despite William being co-founder of the Earthshot prize, awarded to people for their contributions to environmentalism. In the past five years the royal family have collectively travelled the equivalent of a return flight to the moon. The majority of those journeys have been by private jet.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge came under fire in March for taking a jet to Belize
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The Toronto-based rapper Drake owns a pimped-up Boeing 767 — a jet that typically seats 375 passengers — as his personal plane, with a modified interior for just a few selected guests. He has been known to take journeys of under 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Jenner’s famous sister Kim Kardashian recently took a journey over California from Van Nuys to Camarillo. Total time in the air? Nineteen minutes. Other offenders named and shamed via @CelebJets include the film director Steven Spielberg, the boxer Floyd Mayweather, the rapper Jay-Z and the actor Tom Cruise.
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Speedy by name and seemingly by nature, the American pop star Taylor Swift has been found to have the worst CO2 emissions when it comes to celebrity fliers. Flights made using her private jet (170 journeys in 200 days) have contributed 8,000 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere alone this year, a claim she responded to yesterday as “blatantly incorrect” due to her loaning out the aircraft.
Sweeney has also set up a standalone Twitter account, @ElonJet, dedicated to the Tesla founder Elon Musk’s flying habits — and has rejected a $5,000 (£4,100) offer from the multibillionaire to stop the account. Musk, who has a £64 million Gulfstream G700 private plane on order for delivery next year, has now blocked Sweeney on Twitter. He has been known to make the six-mile trip between Los Angeles International and Hawthorne Airport by private jet. The same journey would take about 10 minutes by car.
Musk remains undeterred by Sweeney’s flight-shaming account, and has announced plans to build his own airport outside of Austin, Texas, near where his rocket-ship company, SpaceX, has its headquarters. If he can get environmental approval, that is.
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