By Morgan Sung
Ahead of Taylor Swift’s presumed Super Bowl appearance, the spotlight isn’t on her relationship with Travis Kelce—it’s on how she’s getting to the game. Her most devoted fans are so eager to deflect criticism of Swift’s excessive private jet usage that they fail to understand the root of the backlash, and spread inaccurate information along the way.
Her carbon footprint is no secret: She’s already under scrutiny for her flights after a 2022 report from sustainability marketing firm Yard PR named her the “biggest celebrity CO2 polluter” of the year, with her total flight emissions for the year clocking in at 8,293.54 tons of CO2. Between January and August 2023, she took 103 flights, according to data from the private jet tracker JetSpy.
Now, Swift is under fire for threatening legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who tracks public figures’ private jet usage and runs bots that publish the data on various social media accounts. One of Sweeney’s most popular accounts is SwiftJetNextDay, which posts Swift’s jet data 24 hours after each trip. The data that he posts is publicly available, and in a recent Twitter post, he said that he uses “unencrypted signals broadcast straight from planes.” That didn’t stop Swift’s team from sending a cease-and-desist letter Sweeney’s way, accusing him, according to the Washington Post reported, of “stalking and harassing behavior.”
Swift’s letter echoes previous legal threats that Sweeney has faced over his jet accounts; his 2022 feud with Elon Musk over ElonJet ended with Twitter updating its doxxing policy to forbid posting someone else’s live location, even if it’s publicly available information. Sweeney now posts flight data with a 24-delay to comply with the policy.
Many Swifties are not only doubling down on defending her, but are also insisting that she’s nowhere near the worst climate offender. Her fans claim that celebrities like Travis Scott, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé have far greater carbon footprints than Swift does. In fact, they argue, she’s not even in the top 30 worst celebrity polluters, a claim that stems from a viral Feb. 7 tweet by a Twitter account called Pop Factions.
Pop Factions’ source is questionable at best. The account cites an informal carbon tracker run by myclimate, a Switzerland-based climate nonprofit, that uses dubious methodology to rank celebrities and influencers’ carbon footprints based on public domain flight trackers and Instagram location posts. The organization only uses information that celebrities and influencers post themselves, and they don’t count routes shorter than 300 kilometers, or roughly 186 miles.
So when Swift, for example, takes a 13-minute flight from Cahokia/St. Louis, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri, it won’t make it to myclimate’s 2024 carbon tracker.
Myclimate didn’t immediately respond to request for comment, but on their website, note that not every trip is posted online and tagged with a location, and the actual number of flights that a celebrity takes “might be significantly higher.” “We do not claim that the numbers in our ranking are 100% accurate,” the website states. “The ranking is intended to raise awareness [of] an extended travel behavior and the problems it causes for our planet.”
The majority of Swift’s critics acknowledge that taking a commercial flight isn’t an option for her—the issue isn’t that she has a private jet, it’s that her jet use is excessive because she keeps taking inordinately short flights. That 13-minute flight is a 28-mile trip, and as TikTok users point out, typically a 35-minute to hour drive. During the first leg of her Eras tour, one of her jets often flew from her home base in Nashville and then flew straight back after the show, rather flying to the next tour stop. (A spokesperson for Swift told Business Insider that the pop star purchased “more than double the carbon credits needed to offset her jets’ carbon emissions” before the tour started. But as The Guardian reported, carbon credits don’t actually benefit the environment, and most carbon offset projects are “likely junk.”)
It’s worth noting that not all Swifties are blind to her faults. In r/TaylorSwift, a subreddit that typically fawns over her, fans expressed disappointment and criticized her for going after Sweeney. But Swift’s most vocal fans are also her most staunch defenders, and fail to acknowledge that her carbon footprint still drastically outweighs the average person’s. The fact that other celebrities may pollute just as much, if not more, than she does is a moot point. Even if we did have precise data on each celebrity’s environmental impact, it wouldn’t absolve Swift, or any public figure, of disproportionately contributing to climate change. The fact that other celebrities take shorter flights doesn’t justify Swift’s legal team threatening a college student.
And having Musk, who recently tweeted in her defense, on her side doesn’t make Swift’s 13-minute flight any less absurd.
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