Private jets belonging to 200 celebrities, CEOs, oligarchs and billionaires have spent a combined total of 11 years in the air since the start of 2022.
The carbon footprint of all those flights – a jaw-dropping 44,739 journeys – would be the equivalent of the total emissions of almost 40,000 Britons.
The Guardian used public data to track flights by private aircraft owned or used by celebrities and businesspeople including Elon Musk, the Rolling Stones, the Murdoch family and Kylie Jenner over 21 months.
The figures track the almost 300 jets belonging to those on the list and find that they emitted an estimated 415,518 tonnes of CO2.
The analysis shows that:
Among the most polluting jets covered by the list was a Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft used by the Rolling Stones. It emitted an estimated 5,046 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of someone taking 1,763 return flights from London to New York City in economy class.
Aircraft owned by Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire owner of the Aston Martin Formula One team, recorded a combined 1,512 flights since the start of 2022. His private aircraft, including two helicopters, also made the most journeys of 15 minutes or less.
Thirty-nine jets linked to 30 Russian oligarchs – including Roman Abramovich, Leonid Mikhelson and the recently deceased leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin – were responsible for 30,701 tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to the total average carbon footprint of around 1,000 Russians).
A significant minority of non-helicopter flights – around one in six – were for short-haul journeys of half an hour or less.
Q&AHow did the Guardian estimate celebrity private jet emissions?
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Known private aircraft registrations were taken from TheAirTraffic Database, maintained by the Ground Control Discord online community, a regularly updated database containing the tail numbers of aircraft owned by notable people.
The resulting 297 tail numbers were tracked through OpenSky, a volunteer-run database. Flights were taken between January 2022 and 22 September 2023. The true number of flights may be higher due to limited coverage, especially outside the US and Europe.
To calculate emissions we first identified the jet or helicopter model associated with each of the aircrat as sourced from the ADSBExchange Aircraft database and supplemented with data from Planespotters.net.
These model types were entered into Conklin & De Decker’s CO2 calculator to get the fuel consumption and emissions per hour for each plane. For models which were not in the Conklin & De Decker database the average fuel consumption was estimated using the Eurocontrol emission calculator.
Time in air was then multiplied by the fuel consumption to get an estimated amount of fuel consumed & the carbon dioxide emissions were estimated using EIA data
The Guardian’s findings follow a sharp rise in private jet use since the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, private jet activity in Europe was at its highest level since a 2007 peak and forecasts indicate that sales of private jets are likely to reach their highest ever level this year.
Not every flight analysed will have had the owner onboard. About 40% of private flights carry no passengers, as planes are moved around to pick people up. Many jets may have also been used by friends, family or business associates or lent to other individuals.
Some celebrities, such as Taylor Swift, who was also included in the analysis, appear to have dramatically changed their behaviour after being called out for their excessive use of private jets. Swift’s jet was spotted in the air an average of 19 times a month between January and August 2022. Since receiving negative publicity, its average flight frequency has dropped to just over two a month. A spokesperson for Swift said: “Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor bought more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel.”
None of the other celebrities and businesspeople mentioned in this piece wished to comment.
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The figures were based on flight data from the volunteer-run database OpenSky, and used publicly available emissions calculators from Conklin & de Decker and Eurocontrol to estimate fuel consumption and emissions. It is possible that the figures are conservative, due to limited coverage outside the US and Europe.
The approximately 27,793 flights in the dataset for the year 2022, responsible for an estimated 257,673 tonnes of CO2, represent only 0.5% of the estimated 5.3m private flights that year.
The data is part of a Guardian series looking at carbon inequality which shows astounding differences, not just between richer and poorer nations but between the wealthy and poor within individual countries.
Billionaires’ consumption emissions run to thousands of tonnes a year, with transport, including private jets and yachts, being by far the biggest contributor, according to a new Oxfam report on carbon inequality.
Transport also drives the outsized carbon emissions of the middle classes. Data from the International Energy Agency on CO2 emissions per person in 2021 in a dozen major countries shows that the richest 10% of people in many countries cause up to 40 times more climate-heating carbon emissions than the poorest 10%.
Transport, especially car use, is a major factor in these sky-high emissions: 20-40 times higher than for the poorest 10% in the countries analysed.