Taylor Swift has responded via a representative to a damning report that placed her at the top of a list of celebrities whose private jets produce the most carbon dioxide emissions.
“Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,” the pop star’s rep told Rolling Stone. “To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”
The report, which purported to rank the “Celebs with the Worst Private Jet Co2 Emissions,” was put together by marketing agency Yard and was based on data from the CelebrityJets Twitter account.
However, Yard itself noted that its rankings were not “conclusive,” since @CelebJets does not track every single famous person who takes private flights. For instance, the account appears to largely focus on entertainers, and the Florida college student who created @CelebJets actually has separate Twitter accounts that track the private flights of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Nevertheless, Swift made headlines after the report dubbed her the number-one celebrity CO2 polluter for the year, with her plane racking up a total of 170 flights and 22,923 minutes in the air so far.
Yard crafted the report shortly after Kylie Jenner faced widespread backlash over her private jet usage, with the reality-TV star being branded a “climate criminal” on social media. But out of the celebrities in the study, Jenner was not even in the top 10. After Swift, the celebrities whose jets were ranked as seeing the most air time were Floyd Mayweather, Jay-Z, Alex Rodriguez, Blake Shelton, Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, Mark Wahlberg, Oprah Winfrey and Travis Scott. Rolling Stone also reached out to the other celebrities on the list, but Swift’s rep was the only one who responded.
The average United States resident has an annual carbon footprint of 16 tons of emissions, whereas globally the annual average is around 4 tons, according to The Nature Conservancy. In contrast, the estimated carbon emissions this year from the jet Swift owns has been 8,293.54 tons.
