Report: Taylor Swift's Private Planes Spew The Most Carbon

While private jets are used by rich folks of all kinds, their use among celebrities has come under scrutiny recently, with reports of the likes of Drake and Kylie Jenner taking flights that lasted less than 20 minutes. Rolling Stone reports the sustainability marketing firm Yard put together a new report using data to rank the celebrities whose private jets have flown the most so far this year — and subsequently dumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Drake and Jenner both appear on the list, but they’re actually nowhere near the top, which is occupied by none other than Taylor Swift. 

According to Yard, Swift’s jet flew 170 times between Jan. 1 and July 19 (the window for the Yard study), totaling 22,923 minutes, or 15.9 days, in the air. That output has created estimated total flight emissions of 8,293.54 tons of carbon, which Yard says is 1,184.8 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions. (At least one more flight can be added to that list, too: The flight-tracking Twitter account Celebrity Jets notes that Swift’s plane flew today, July 29.)

“Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,” a spokesperson for Swift tells Rolling Stone. “To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”

Coming in behind Swift’s plane on Yard’s list was an aircraft belonging to boxer Floyd Mayweather, which emitted an estimated 7076.8 tons of CO2 from 177 flights so far this year (one of those flights lasted just 10 minutes). Coming in at number three on the list was Jay-Z, though his placement does come with a caveat: The data pulled for Jay is tied to the Puma Jet, a Gulfstream GV that Jay — the creative director for Puma — reportedly convinced the sneaker giant to purchase as a perk for the athletes it endorses.

Yard's breakdown of the top 10 celebrity CO2e offenders:

1. Taylor Swift
2. Floyd Mayweather
3. Jay-Z
4. A-Rod
5. Blake Shelton
6. Steven Spielberg
7. Kim Kardashian
8. Mark Wahlberg
9. Oprah Winfrey
10. Travis Scott

To create this report, Yard scraped data from Celebrity Jets, which in turn pulls its info from ADS-B Exchange (“the world’s largest public source of unfiltered flight data,” according to its website). Yard based its carbon emissions estimates on a U.K. Department for Transportation estimate that a plane traveling at about 850 km/hour gives off 134 kg of CO2 per hour; that 134 kg estimate was multiplied with both time-spent-in-air and a factor of 2.7 to account for “radiative forcing,” which includes other harmful emissions such as nitrous oxide (2.7 was taken from Mark Lynas’ book Carbon Counter). That number was then divided by 1000 to convert to tons.