A list of celebrity private plane owners and their emissions leaked online recently, revealing which famous people have been spewing the most harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with their travel habits.
Data from the Celebrity Private Jet Tracker was posted in the r/SwiftlyNeutral subreddit. There are a number of well-known celebrities near the top of the list in terms of carbon footprint and miles traveled.
If you sort the list by the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, the leader far and away is president-elect Donald Trump. Trump has the largest plane on the list, a Boeing 757, and took 408 flights totaling 314,461 miles. This produced a staggering 27,785 metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than double any other plane on the list.
The only other celebrity on the list to produce more than 10,000 metric tons of pollution from their private jet use was rapper Travis Scott, whose jet pumped 10,319 metric tons of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere this year.
Former Google and parent company Alphabet executive Eric Schmidt also features prominently on the list, flying the farthest at 612,868 miles while producing over 7,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Jay-Z, and Drake also featured on the list.
Private jet usage among the super-rich is a growing concern in environmental circles. According to the Associated Press, the 250,000 richest people in the world accounted for 15.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere last year, and private jet emissions as a whole jumped 46 percent from 2019 to 2023.
There is research being done on clean fuels that could reduce those emissions, though. Hydrogen-powered engines are in development in Zurich, while fuel made from brewery wastewater is being researched in Illinois. And NASA is developing a new jet engine that could reduce fuel usage by 10 percent.
Commenters were quick to call out many of the people on the list.
"Why does Google need to fly, it's literally a search engine," one joked.
"Where the hell is Travis Scott going to use all that fuel?" another asked.
"Where is Judge Judy going so often?" another wondered.
Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Cool Picks
