Image created by author in Canva using images from Wikimedia Commons under the CC license.

For the next ten years, people will be citing a shoddy study that they just read the headline of:

“You know, Taylor Swift is the worst celebrity for using private jets.”

Recently, Yard Marketing agency published a story listing the 10 celebs who were the “worst” offenders for private jet usage. It went viral. Congratulations to the author at Yard, that’s a marketing agency’s dream.

I put “worst” in scare quotes because I found their article bad. It was outright inaccurate in several places and drew its data from a biased source, @celebjets. @CelebJets only tracks 21 celebs, so Swift is “worst” out of those 21. Yard did not look at @CorporateJets and @ElonJet, other automated Twitter accounts run by the same person.

Now, I do not excuse private jet usage. Private jets emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases according to this 2020 study. That’s more than Denmark, which is a country of 5.8 million. Celebrities shouldn’t use private jets to fly 30 miles up the road when a car would work just as well.

But I have a few bones to pick with this study and the framing of it.

• The “carbon footprint” is a concept made up by the fossil fuel industry to shift blame away from themselves and onto individuals. I agree with the article’s premise but it did not mention the role of the government to better regulate, or that industries like the fossil fuel industry should. It’s much, much easier to blame individuals than call for systemic change.
• The article was cited as “research” from a “sustainability-driven marketing agency” in publications like Buzzfeed, The Tab, and others. But it’s not research; it’s a compilation of someone else’s data. Plus, nowhere on their site does Yard call themselves a sustainability-driven marketing agency. They literally scraped the data from a Twitter user called Celebrity Jets. (Celebrity Jets does get it from a reputable and fact-checkable if occasionally inaccurate source, @ADSBExchange.)
• There was no methodology. Maybe it’s the scientist in me, but for anything to be called a study you have to show your methods. The numbers were available upon request, so I have requested them, but otherwise it was unclear how they got these numbers.
• There were some other lingering inaccuracies. Let’s get into those.

Author’s note: I’ve had to resort to a lot of guesswork to figure out where they got these random numbers. I have emailed Yard to get their official data. I will update this article when I have their actual methods and data.

Taylor Swift has spent 13,600 minutes in the air so far, not 22,923 minutes.

Yard writer Emma Malcolmson writes, “Racking up a total of 170 flights on her private jet since January, Taylor has amassed a vast 22,923 minutes…”

Swift’s flights averaged 80 minutes, according to Malcolmson. But if we multiply Swift’s 170 flights times 80 minutes, we get 13,600 minutes in the air.

It’s possible the 22,923 number is correct, but then that means that her average flight time was 22,923/170 = 134.8 minutes.

I think they tried to extrapolate out to see how much flight time she would be expected to do this year in total, so dividing 13,600 (her total flight time to date) by the days in the year so far, and then multiplying by 365. The article was published on July 29th, so this gives me:

13,600 minutes in air / 210 days in the year so far = 64.7 minutes in the air on average per day.

64.7 minutes in air per day on average x 365 days in the year = 23,615.5 expected minutes in the air for 2022. That’s much closer to the number they provided, so I think that’s what they did.

However, that’s not what the article says. The article says “Racking up a total of 170 flights on her private jet since January, Taylor has amassed a vast 22,923 minutes in the air…”

That’s wrong.

Let’s talk about that CO2 number

Again, they didn’t publish their full methodology. All I could find was:

“CO2e estimates based on 134kg (DfT) and includes radiative forcing at a ratio of 2.7 = (The calculation works out as (timeinair x y)/1000 where x 134 kg/h as reported by the DfT and y = 2.7 which as reported by the book Carbon Counter by Mark Lynas and is the factor to include radiative forcing to include other emissions that create an impact such as nitrous oxide that can damage the ozone layer. Dividing the total by 1000 to convert to tonnes)”

This run-on sentence reads like absolute nonsense, but I think I pieced it together using Swift’s data as an example:

Time in air = 22,923. X is 134 kg/hour and y is 2.7. So that gives us:

22923 x 134 x 2.7 / 1000 = 8293.5414 tonnes, which tallies up with the number they gave.

Carbon Counter was published in 2007, so not the most reputable source.

I went back to Celeb Jets to get a better idea of CO2 emissions, since they use a more recent formula for calculating emissions. I’ve picked three of Swift’s flights of varying lengths to get a better idea of average CO2 emission per minute, which is the number I’m going for.

• One of her recent flights was 4h 17 m, or 257 minutes. The CO2 emissions were estimated to be about 17 tons or 15.4221 tonnes.
• Another was 84 minutes and estimated to produce 6 tons, or 5.44 tonnes
• Her shortest was 36 minutes. This was before @celebjets produced CO2 emissions, so I used this private jet fuel calculator and got 1.37 tonnes (1.51 tons).

That gives me 22.23 tonnes emitted for 377 minutes in the air. That’s an average of 0.058965 tonne per minute. Going back to THEIR original number for her total airtime, 22,923 minutes (which I believe is a vast overestimate), this gives us:

0.058965 tonnes/minute x 22,923 minutes = 1,351 tonnes this year so far.

This is very, very far off their estimate of 8,293.54 tonnes. And for the umpteenth time, because they didn’t show their methods, I have no idea how they got their number.

But Twitter user @coolcatolivia did the math himself and found the numbers don’t add up even by Yard’s methodology:

He also showed his sources and methods, again unlike Yard.

There are discrepancies here.

Yard got their math wrong with Mark Wahlberg and Kim Kardashian

Malcolmson claims Kim Kardashian flew 57 flights averaging 85 minutes, which totals 4,845 minutes.

Malcolmson also writes Mark Wahlberg flew 10,324 minutes over 65 flights.

So Mark Wahlberg has flown almost twice as much. But Malcolmson writes that Kardashian’s jet is responsible for 4268.5 tonnes of carbon emissions, while Wahlberg’s is the cause for 3,772.85 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

By their own calculation, Wahlberg should have emitted:

10,324 x 134 x 2.7 / 1000 = 3,735.22 tonnes.

Kim K, meanwhile, should have emitted:

4,845 x 134 x 2.7 / 1000 = 1,752.92 tonnes.

They said she emitted almost 3x that.

Looking at individual Kardashian and Wahlberg CO2 emissions, it looks like they produce comparable amounts of CO2.

I have no idea where this 4,268.5 tonne number came from because, again, no sources!

I’m drawing the line here because I’m exhausted from fact-checking.

Even if Taylor Swift did “only” emit 1.3k tonnes of CO2 emissions, that’s obviously still disgusting. It’s a ridiculous and unnecessary amount of private air travel. I support heavily taxing private jet use or imposing stricter limits on demanding carbon offsets.

My main problem is that Yard knowingly used Taylor Swift to be the face of this because they know she’s a controversial figure, much-loved and much-hated, and that she would get them attention.

I also think that Yard should have done a much, much better job with their original story. There were a lot of inconsistencies, unexplained findings, and poorly framed arguments.

The publications that copied their story, like Buzzfeed and Tabs, should not have called Yard a “sustainability-based marketing agency” just to give them some extra cred. They should have done their own investigations instead of blindly reporting that Taylor Swift was the “worst.”

This isn’t worse than the time hair-transplant company Longevita published a “study” by googling “prince william sexy” to see how many Google search results came up, and used that number to “rank” him with the likes of Jason Statham. But it’s up there.

People loved this story primarily because Taylor Swift maintains a good girl, wholesome, folksy persona and yet a lot of people rabidly dislike her (mostly for being a successful businesswoman? As far as I can tell?):

Screenshot from Buzzfeed article commenter

This story played right into their confirmation bias. Publications like Yard, Buzzfeed, The Tab, and others played on that, preying on people who love to have their worst suspicions confirmed: that Swift is a filthy hypocrite who deserves every bit of hate they can throw her.

Next time you see a piece of news that instantly corroborates your beliefs or values, dig a little deeper. There may be more to the story than you want to believe.

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