Technology allows us, almost in real time, to know which aircraft are crossing the skies of this planet. Yes, this place is polluted, heated, melted and all because of people who don’t separate plastic at home. Well, there are those who have more to do and on their last tour they used their private planes to travel more than 286 thousand kilometers. In order not to receive the title of the biggest polluter on the planet, the star bought some carbon credits.
Taylor Swift broke records on her tour... and not all of them were positive
The success of Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour made her a billionaire, but left a large carbon footprint on the atmosphere. Swift's private jets spent the equivalent of 16 flying days in 2023.
It was a year full of triumphs in many aspects of his life, and he became much more than a simple music star. At 34 years old, the Nashville singer broke several records, and not all of them were in music.
Swift has already accumulated more than 300 million plays on Spotify for her latest album “The Tortured Poets Department” and is already the best-selling album of the decade with 6.6 million physical copies sold all over the world, which is double credit.
The tour The Eras Tour had a huge impact on cities’ GDP wherever it went due to its enormous power of congregation, injecting around 5,000 million into the North American economy. Part of the profits from this tour made Taylor Swift a billionaire, one of the few artists who achieved this exclusively through her work as a performer and not through side businesses.
However, her tour also gave her another record she shouldn't be proud of: being the personality with the largest carbon footprint on the planetthanks to his continued travels on his two private jets throughout 2023.
In a video created by Ground Control, a platform that collects information about the flights of Taylor Swift or Elon Musk's private planes, all of the singer's flights in 2023 are compiled, in just under two minutes, as well as the kilometers traveled and the tons of CO2 that the artist released into the atmosphere.
Swift, along with Elon Musk and luxury mogul Bernard Arnault, are part of a group of millionaires who have repeatedly sued users and X accounts that follow celebrities' private jet flights.
Billionaires claim this violates their privacy and security, while users demand their freedom to use public air traffic data.
7.2 trips around the world and a huge carbon footprint
According to data compiled by Ground Control, two registered Swift private jets would have traveled 286,500 kilometers in 2023, the equivalent of 7.2 trips around the world on more than one hundred trips. Most of the recorded trips were to or from Nashville, where Swift's family lives, although trips to New York and Los Angeles are very frequent.
It should be noted that, although the jets are registered in her name, the artist still does not have the gift of ubiquity, so some of these flights were not made personally by her, but by her team or people close to her.
On the other hand, private jet owners often rent or lend their planes to other millionaires, so there is no indication that Taylor Swift has been on board every flight her private jets have taken.
The flights recorded are those belonging to the 2009 Dassault Falcon 7X with registration N621MM and the 1994 Dassault Falcon 900 with code N898TS (TS for Taylor Swift and 898 for her date of birth). The artist sold the latter in February, according to El Confidencial.
You Taylor Swift's Falcons were in the air 364 times and emitted 1,216 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023, according to data from aviation tracker JetSpy published by The Associated Press. This value is equivalent to the average annual emissions of 81 US households.
To offset this carbon footprint, the artist had to buy 2,433 carbon credits to cover more than double the carbon emitted by its two planes.
As we exemplify here, carbon credits are the method of compensating for polluting activities. The polluter buys a certain amount of these credits so that an external company can “capture” the CO2 from the atmosphere and process it.
The problem is that, as the carbon credit market is opaque and unregulated, we cannot know how much Taylor Swift had to pay for the pollution her planes emitted.
