Interesting. Outside of that, do any of these people do any other activities that offset the damage they do with their private jets?
Just wondering because this is such blatant clickbait material for an editorial, I won’t be surprised if an article about it is being written right now.
Offsetting your damage doesn't change the fact that you are causing damage. What would be good is if these people stopped flying around the billionaire circuit on private jets _and_ paid their fair share of taxes but that's too much to ask these days.
I do agree having a separate list of who pays the most in taxes relative to wealth/income would be interesting but also obviously less accurat.
Fossil fuel is not subsidized with tax money. It’s subsidized with tax discounts. That’s happening regardless of tax income because the federal government doesn’t run a balanced budget.
In the sense that Taylor Swift and Elon Musk probably pay more taxes that can be used to offset the CO2 they produce by flying and being efficient for their work.
I don’t think anyone here can produce that information, tax records are private, right? We’d also need to know what percentage of our taxes go to cleaning up carbon emissions, which I think is… pretty low?
I kinda find it creepy tracking people’s flights. Besides, some jet owners charter out their planes when not in use, so it’s incorrect to attribute all the miles to them.
I think there's a hard public interest in tracking flights. They're so safe these days that we can kind of forget that we're talking about moving multi-ton vehicles over people's homes, churches, and schools, where anything going wrong can result in significant loss of life and property damage... At the very least, I want to know who and when as a societal tradeoff for the privilege of using the air over our heads freely.
(Also, that vested interest has been demonstrated in recent history. Keep in mind that it was ultimately plane-spotters who originally busted the extraordinary rendition policy of the US government open... They noticed planes had changed their regular flight patterns significantly).
For a low price per car we could track all cars and also ensure they don't break a bunch of rules (say speed, acceleration, traffic lights) where drivers endanger others.
It doesn't because cars stick to the road. The difference is a little hand wavy and path dependent on history, but pilots are required to file flight plans; nobody requires a drive plan.
(Of course, every car has a license plate and if somebody were to establish an infrastructure for tracking all of those plates and correlating it to motion of vehicles... I'm actually not against that. I'm of the personal opinion that we are far too deferential to drivers and do not demand nearly enough responsibility from them, and the fatality rates on roads are demonstrative of this).
Some people say its based on public data but I think that its tapping into a network of moles to track celebrities. Really creepy stuff.
> This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number.
> Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
These people don’t care about celebrities. They literally sit and watch planes take off for hours at a time because they enjoy it. Nearly every airport has a field of people doing that regardless of whether celebrities are around.
And here I am, hunched over the sink, rinsing the last pissing bit of mayonnaise out the container before I put it in the recycling.
Makes you wonder, really.
> Atlanta to Savannah and then depart again 2 hours later
Savannah is such a hidden and unique gem, and truly one of the most beautiful cities in the country. It's not hard to imagine taking a quick meeting there. Lots of important people flow through the city.
I'm hoping we get high speed rail on the Atlanta-Savannah corridor one day. The drive is a real slog and it's filled with deceptively unfair speed traps from podunk little towns using speeding tickets as their primary source of revenue.
There's a concept called the "$100-dollar hamburger" in aviation, which is where one takes an otherwise-unnecessary trip for aviation reasons (i.e. maintaining minimum flight time for qualifications, shaking down a plane after maintenance, etc.).
Atlanta -> Savannah -> Atlanta with a 2-hour turnaround could be hundred-dollar hamburger. It might also be two different people using the jet. But... TBH, it might also be that she owns a jet and wants to take a day-trip.
I hate to put it this way, but most flights are commercial passenger or freight. Only a small amount are private jets, so this really only affects a small number of people.
Do you think Mark Zuckerberg would argue in favour of greater privacy for you?
I think the effort of making flight data private (and all of the solutions we'd need to find for very important transponder/communications technology) is better spent on other privacy issues first.
I think we’d have trouble banning it outright, but we could maybe give everyone a set amount of carbon credits per life (or maybe doled out on a yearly basis), and then the rich would at least have to buy pollution capacity from the poor? They are ruining everybody’s planet after all, not just their own.
Tracking the jet owned by the person, which as others have pointed out, often is rented out for others to use (or they let friends, coworkers, etc take trips)
I only found out who she was about 6 months ago - which a number of people didn't believe. Many people don't experience the same world as you, it's odd you think they do.
I live in a western country, imagine a 65 year old tech nerd from Somalia on HN - how aware of American celebraties do you feel they'd be?
Routine private jet flights are nothing compared to last mile freight such as Amazon. Short frequent trips by delivery drivers from your local warehouse to your doorstep should not be so wasteful.
The largest source of pollution is freight in general. Hating on individuals solves nothing at all.
> I mean it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
If you had people to do that for you, why would you do that yourself? You tell your personal assistant to get a new iphone for you, new drapes for the living room, whatever.
That’s not true. The carbon emissions of rich people are enormous compared to that of regular people. Here’s just one finding, that the richest 1% of the world’s population cause as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50%:
I'm arguing a tool like this could counter act the pressure of the societal delusion caused by these celebrities berating the working class about their virtue signalling causes like plastic straws while incurring such outsizes externalities. I'm not arguing against a big to small approach but this effect on discourse is important and its hypocrisy currently harmful.
It does. It's a huge problem with so many complexities and requires so many sacrifices by all inhabitants of the planet.
The celebrities are already calling dibs on the problem claiming that they are the ones who solved it. If sacrifices are needed then some climate change dividend is also required at the end of such effort. And if there is no dividend for us then there shouldn't be for the celebrities.
It's only positive that an out of scale public shame would fall on them for flying private as it counteracts their massive PR effort orchestrated to fool the world into thinking that they alone have solved climate change or that they are 'the person who is doing the most in the world to solve climate change'.
My friendly neighbourhood Amazon driver fills his vehicle with packages, then drives a highly optimised route to deliver those packages to many destinations along the fastest/shortest route. Often when I'm tracking my package, I see that the twenty or thirty deliveries before me are all within a mile or two of my house.
At some point soon I expect he'll get an electric van, but other than that, I'm not sure how anyone could get stuff from businesses to people in a more efficient manner.
That's like saying a murderer shouldn't be chastised because vastly more people die from a bad diet (or not having food) than by their hands. Who cares?
The ability to restrict something doesn't imply it's ideal to restrict that thing. Some people should use more CO2, just like some people should go to space, or some people should be lawyer.
Right because taking a life is pretty instant. Unlike something that’s been fear mongered for the better part of 4 decades with the “end of the world” predicted to happen every decade.
This can be adapted into different scenarios or use cases. At least it could be the first action into the CO2 emission problem that everybody is complaining about but nobody really does a thing. Well, also maybe we can let Kim Kardashian to have Zoom calls rather than taking flights.
Sure, but it's important to put that in the context of the vast majority of the world's population who never fly, me who flies maybe three times a year, and people who flight weekly or more for the purpose of entertainment or a luxury lifestyle.
Make it progressively more expensive to fly more miles to moderate the excesses; offer tax breaks where it is beneficial for the entire community.
The idea that some people will use more of a resource than another doesn't imply it's ideal to have no limit whatsoever on its usage either though; there might be some amount of CO2 that's unreasonable for a single person to use, just like having different professions being useful doesn't mean that every possible profession (like murder for hire) should be allowed.
Private jet owners won't be the targets of such laws: luxury car are excluded from the future oil engine ban in the EU, and private jets aren't subjected to the recent law forbidding short distance domestic airlines in France.
That kind of ideas is parroted by people would be the first to suffer, while the "elite" will of course be exempted to comply. This is yet another power grab for the happy few.
There are multiple ways to travel. You can have a bike to commute into work rather than taking your car. This is not a freedom limitation. It is just a different perspective. Greta Thunberg travels everywhere freely by keeping emission in mind.
Just tax externalities and let people pay for the privilege. Banning things - literally using the force of the state to prevent traveling too often by plane or banning cars or making everyone ride bikes - is only a green fantasy, and a terrible authoritarian unworkable one.
That is some high-level authoritarian nonsense right there. Should there also be limits on how many KM's a person can drive a year? How many often the BBQ in their backyard?
What is the penalty for exceeding said limit in your fantasy?
edit
Just out of curiosity I took what seems to be the "average" of the reported number of billionaires in America as 800, and the average yearly CO2 from flying via the linked article at a high point of also say 800 tons (which is likely high but easy math). That works out to 640000 tons of CO2 from all the billionaires flying around in a year.
Another quick search on how much CO2 is produced in the USA per year came out as 5.2 billion metric tons.
That means these flights are accounting for 0.0123076923% of the USA's CO2 production ... or put another way it's a rounding error.
I'm just saying there should be a "regulation". A couple of years ago, everybody accepted the fact that people all should have 3 shots of vaccination to have a flight. Everybody got opposed to it. But got the shots eventually.
I'm not the guy who has the golden law that will change the world. I'm just proposing that CO2 emission is a big problem and some of the people are exploiting it.
>A couple of years ago, everybody accepted the fact that people all should have 3 shots of vaccination to have a flight. Everybody got opposed to it. But got the shots eventually.
Which if you look back it logically now with all the evidence, we have in hindsight was an overreach that did very little good.
>I'm not the guy who has the golden law that will change the world. I'm just proposing that CO2 emission is a big problem and some of the people are exploiting it.
Which I get - however the problem with your comment (and much of the internet as a whole) is that people see a complex problem and toss out a twitter sized "obvious solution" to it without any actual thought behind it, this then causes all kinds of noise with very little signal and furthers divides. Just by replying to you some other person suggested I was "triggered" and must be on said list... That's the problem.
Not sure why you're so deeply triggered by this; is your name on that list of top consumers that you would be personally affected?
Your comment comes across as yet another average joe randomly defending billionaires wrecking the world while we take the consequences of it. Meanwhile yet another daily disaster in nature, 100s of dolphins are dead today from record temperatures https://www.insider.com/dolphins-dead-brazil-amazon-lake-rec...
>Not sure why you're so deeply triggered by this; is your name on that list that you would be personally affected?
Your only response to someone finding this a gross overreach is to try and strawman them by suggesting I'm personally on the list?
I'm not defending billionaires any more than I'm defending an average person. Going down the road suggested (putting yearly or lifetime caps on how much CO2 you can produce) is frankly terrifying.
Tax the hell out of the fuel, charge larger landing fees, etc etc are all better options than having some sort of invisible countdown over everyone's head that for CO2 emissions.
Maybe the disconnect here is a misunderstanding of how much wealth billionaires have. We could increase fuel tax by 1000x, increase landing fees by 1000x, and this would not even begin to give billionaires pause on waste and excess flying.
The average person will be priced out by taxes and increased fees far long before any mega wealthy person will even feel it as a stiff breeze against their accounts.
Or maybe the disconnect is on the other side of the coin, let's say every billionaire on that list did zero flights next year - how much of a reduction in the US CO2 emissions does that actually result in. Does it equate in any meaningful (statistically) way or does it just make people like yourself "feel" better?
Oh I'm sorry asking you to backup your thoughts with actual data is a problem for you.
Just out of curiosity I took what seems to be the "average" of the reported number of billionaires in America as 800, and the average yearly CO2 from flying via the linked article at a high point of also say 800 tons (which is likely high but easy math). That works out to 640000 tons of CO2 from all the billionaires flying around in a year.
Another quick search on how much CO2 is produced in the USA per year came out as 5.2 billion metric tons.
That means these flights are accounting for 0.0123076923% of the USA's CO2 production ... or put another way it's a rounding error.
> > That means these flights are accounting for 0.0123076923% of the USA's CO2 production ... or put another way it's a rounding error.
This is not about the percentage of CO2 over the total.
People don't want to be chastised by hypocrites, it's the same as a President who declares that "heavy human losses are a price to pay for victory" and then exempts his 2 sons from serving.
2 soldiers are nothing in the face of a National military mobilization for a war, but nonetheless the public opinion would rightfully be enraged as soon as the reports come out about how the President's sons are draft dodgers.
And in a country that has institutions that work as it should they are grounds for removal.
Similarly emitting 1000 tons or even just 1 ton of CO2 in the environment should be ground for removal from the public discourse about climate change.
>should be ground for removal from the public discourse about climate change.
But that's not what the person I was speaking with was arguing for they wanted a cap on CO2 emissions on an individual basis.
As far as being "chastised by hypocrites" how many of the billionares that were mentioned are out there "chastising" people - keeping in mind there is a difference between chastising (ie. Hey, you average citizen you're doing something wrong stop it) and bringing awareness to an issue (ie. Climate change is impacting the planet).
Someone using a massive platform (fame) to spread a message that they may not fully buy into but is for the greater good isn't a terrible thing.
Standards evolve, for sure people are not feeling positive sentiments when seeing Taylor Swift or Leonardo Di Caprio appear on TV and talking about climate change.
Same thing for the PR of mr. Gates and the constant noise put into every media by mr. Musk.
So yes whatever you want to call it the point stands. Normal people don't like it and the approval rating goes down everywhere for the public person who does it, except among the fake circles of the Oscars and the Met Gala where swarms of aspiring celebrities don't miss a chance to give a good blowie and fluffing to what is perceived to be the celebrity of the moment who appeared the most all over media to virtue signal
These rules would not effect the truely rich. It would turn into a burden or inconvenience for the masses while the elite have loopholes or ways around the system.
> Your comment comes across as yet another average joe randomly defending billionaires wrecking the world while we take the consequences of it.
This is so painfully, hilariously wrong that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You could vaporize all billionaires in the world and it wouldn’t make any detectable difference to climate change.
In the same way that vaporizing vicious dictators--subtracting how many people they personally killed by their own hands--would have no detectable difference to global murder rate.
This specific idea of limiting CO2 is being taken a bit too out of context of the broader point. Sanctions against Russia hasn't stopped the murder, any more than limiting individual CO2 consumption would stop climate change. Yet both are correct actions because they are steps in the direction of fixing larger issues.
Instead of this petty, divisive and hostile nonsense, how about we just acknowledge that our civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and work towards making all our energy use carbon-neutral?
Our planet receives enough harnessable solar energy to allow every single human being an energy allocation far in excess of a typical American.
There's absolutely no need to be hostile towards other people's energy use. Advocate for fundamental change, not petty ineffectual bullshit.
> Our planet receives enough harnessable solar energy to allow every single human being an energy allocation far in excess of a typical American.
Yes, but is it currently being harvested? Do we have a plausible path towards that future?
> There's absolutely no need to be hostile towards other people's energy use.
No, but there's a dire need to properly account for the externalities of everybody's CO2 emissions if we want to be able to plausibly call our economy market-based.
"Sorry, the president of country X cant come to UN and discuss a ceasefire because he already ysed up all his emissions so the war has to keep going until the next CO2 reset"
I think it could make sense: scientists are probably able to compute a total quantity of CO2 that we can emit worldwide to achieve some climatic goals (like not being f* too badly too quickly). Then divide this total by number of inhabitant of this world and limit yearly individual emissions to that.
Then you don't have to track for everyone, just target those who are ostensibly breaking the limit.
A recent flight by Zuckerberg consuming 1.4 tons of CO2 just to get from New Jersey to Jamaica Bay NYC while travelling multiple times the distance between the two if he'd taken a car in a more or less cross-line. His money, his choice on how to use it, but it's rather incredible coming from a guy who yammers on so much to the media about social responsibilities...
Some things never change, and one of them is the way in which the elites take a tacitly "do as I say, not as I do" approach to their discourse.
Generally, flights like that one exist because the airplane is somewhere other than the most convenient place for the owner to take off from, so the crew repositions the plane in a better location for a more convenient pick up.
I don't think that this really invalidates your overall conclusion or anything, just wanted to point that out.
Fair enough, but as you say, doesn't change anything, possibly even makes it worse because that fuel was used entirely for his convenience just to move a plane closer, before he even hopped aboard for his flight.
Commercial airlines routinely move planes from JFK to LGA at night. There is a popular ATC recording of one not having the paperwork to fly IFR, so they want VFR instead. Mildly amusing twist on a common operation.
What is the point of this? Why do people care? Do you expect these people to fly commercial like you and me? Hoping for that fateful day when you're sandwiched between Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos on a Ryanair flight, so you can give them your elevator speech with all three of your knees pressed up against your nostrils?
Taylor Swift would be mobbed everywhere in the airport.
Donald was a former president. The Secret Service doesn't let you drive a car after that, let alone fly commercial. Even if they wanted to; they can't. Many former presidents were car fanatics; Bush Jr. lamented to Jay Leno about not being able to drive his truck off private property anymore. 45 was known for sneaking past security detail in his pre-POTUS days to drive his Rolls around NYC. Not to mention Biden and his Corvettes, in his pre-dementia days anyway.
This article is implying wrongdoing for situations can logically cannot exist.
I don't even think that these people need to "justify" their energy use.
It seems that the vast majority of people have an innate need to hate on other groups of people. Not only that, but it seems that when presented with a cross-cutting societal problem (like carbon neutrality), "hating on others" seems to be a substitute for actually doing something intelligent about the problem.
Our society is fundamentally based on energy use, and if we actually collectively cared about carbon-neutrality, we have an immense amount of potential clean energy available to us in the form of solar and nuclear. There's no need to play this silly hate game.
I wouldn't call it hate (or at least not all of it) – I would call it an understandable desire for some measure of fairness.
I'd even say this has little to do with carbon emissions, and much to do with the price of economy tickets for many routes having doubled over the past months, and it'll likely only go up from here in the foreseeable future as we (hopefully) shift to synthetic aviation fuels. Taking a private flight for a very driveable distance, or a connection that has excellent and frequent first-class services available, just isn't the best look right now between sustained high inflation and the common narrative of individualizing the responsibility for carbon emissions.
But yes, I agree that symbolic regulations and prohibitions without a viable alternative won't get us anywhere. Only setting effective regulatory incentives that properly account for the externalities of all forms of energy use will.
> > Do you expect these people to fly commercial like you and me?
No but back in the old days people with money had the justified fear and paranoia to keep quiet in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves and not be expropriated and/or executed.
They now not only don't hide but go out of their way to broadcast whatever opinion they have through the airwaves and especially on climate change the juxtaposition of talking about climate change while pumping into the atmosphere 1000 tons of CO2 per year is symptomatic of a sense of entitlement and not fearing any punishment or repercussion for their actions.
I wonder if we can see Mark Zuckerberg learning to fly here, or perhaps to skydive? A lot of recent flights that start in one city, fly to Tahoe, don't stop, but do a big turn around there, then go back home. Or which otherwise go way out of the way to do a short loop around Tahoe then land at a destination, and one a few months back that seemingly just circled there for a while.
Hard for me to get worked up about this. If you're rich, you're going to spend the money on something. It barely matters if that's on a cross-country flight, a large house, multiple cars, or a boat. The environmental impact is very similar.
Cool tracker, I am sure if there is a tracker that tracks all billionaires’ resources consumptions, not just we will see how hypocrites they are, but also the ratio of that to average person will be abysmal, but of course, we have to use paper straws for the planet!
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