If Taylor Swift "departs Tokyo in the evening after her concert, she should comfortably arrive in Las Vegas before the Super Bowl begins." The sentence is not futile fan speculation but comes from the official X account of the Japanese Embassy in DC. Peppering in references to the star's albums in a statement, the institution wished to confirm that "anyone concerned can be fearless" about her concert being held on February 10 in Japan. That's where the US singer will be on that date, as part of her "Eras Tour," the first tour in history to generate over a billion dollars in revenue. The following day is the most eagerly-awaited sporting event in the US: the Superbowl, the football final in which Travis Kelce, player for the Kansas City Chiefs and the 34-year-old artist's partner, is taking part.
Since their qualification, the question has been recurring in US media and on social media: will the woman who broke the record for the most Grammy Awards for Best Album of the Year come to support her boyfriend, with whom she has an ultra-publisized relationship?
Quite apart from the celebrity aspect of the issue, there's one figure that is catching the eye of some observers: 30,500. That's the number of kilometers Swift will have to travel in two weeks by private jet if she wants to be present at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas on February 11, departing from Tokyo and then flying back to Melbourne, Australia, where her tour continues. Named the most polluting celebrity by a ranking drawn up by the US sustainable marketing agency Yard in 2022, she has multiplied her private jet round-trips in recent months to attend Chiefs games.
More and more people on the Internet, activists and political scientists are pointing the finger at the excessive use of one of the most polluting means of transport. According to Julie Stein, Associate Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment program at the University of California Law School (UCLA), "estimates vary, but private jet travel emits about ten times more GHGs [greenhouse gases] per capita than ordinary commercial air travel."
According to a study by the Yard Group, 10 celebrities each emitted an average of 3,376.64 tons of CO2 emissions in 2022 – Swift is followed in the ranking by US boxer Floyd Mayweather – when the average person emits 7 tons per year. In Swift's case, the singer would have emitted 8,293.54 tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2022, 1,185 times more than the average person.
These figures were obtained principally through the work of Jack Sweeney, a 22-year-old US student famous for having created bots on social media to track the private jets of celebrities and billionaires using Federal Aviation Administration data and aircraft broadcast signals. The singer's teams are now threatening the young man with legal action for harassment. Her PR agent told Rolling Stone magazine that "Taylor's jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals," and "to attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect."
You have 40% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.