Taylor Swift is used to topping the charts and usually can celebrate each of these achievements. But the singer is pushing back against her latest alleged chart-topping performance.
On Friday, Swift found herself atop UK marketing firm Yard’s iist of celebrities who’ve left the biggest carbon footprint in the first half of this year, as covered by Rolling Stone. Their metric appears to be almost exclusively the use of private jets.
Common among celebrities, these private conveyances have come under scrutiny in recent months for allegedly being less than environmentally friendly. And according to the study, Swift flew more than anyone else.
The report lists her plane flying 170 times between January 1 and July 19 of this year with a combined total of nearly 16 days in the air. Yard suggests her total carbon emission for these flights was 8,293.54 tonnes.
Not so fast, though, says Swift’s camp. While they didn’t refute the numbers or the trips or any of that, they did take issue with the report suggesting that this was all Swift.
“Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,” a spokesperson for the singer told RS. “To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”
So it is her jet, but she’s not always the one on board when it’s taking these flights. For Swift’s camp this is an important distinction. Swift has been a prominent voice among celebrity environmentalists.
The data used comes from Twitter account @CelebJets, which tracks the private jets of the stars, but is by no means exhaustive. The data doesn’t always tell the whole story, either, as Swift’s rep was quick to point out. And they weren’t the first.
After Drake came under fire for a 14-minute flight from Hamilton, Ontario to Toronto, the rapper had to come out and explain himself — or more specifically, he had to explain the basic operations of airplanes.
He jumped onto the @RealTorontoNewz Instagram feed after they picked up the story to clarify that “this is just them moving planes to whatever airport they are being stored at for anyone who was interested in the logistics.”
There’s no one on those flights, and yet the minutes count against his overall usage and the carbon emissions are attributed to him. Just as someone else using Swift’s jet counts against hers.
In other words, the Yard study isn’t the whole story as there are always other factors at play.
Kylie Jenner also recently came under fire for a logged flight from Camarillo to Van Nuys, both in California. That was a 12-minute flight. In her case, though, she posted proof that she was on that flight, the second leg of a connecting flight that lasted a total of 39 minutes in the air.
Yard’s top ten list also includes Jay-Z, Floyd Mayweather, Alex Rodriguez, Blake Shelton, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott, Mark Wahlberg and Oprah Winfrey. Jenner ranked 19th.
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