Taylor Swift: Perfect Pop Star Icon or Climate Disaster?

By: Riya Dasgupta

Global warming is one of the largest threats to humankind today. Its presence is overbearing and it stays in the back of minds over some of the most important decisions made. In seemingly complete contrast, there is Taylor Swift, a fast-climbing pop artist and music record holder, whose songs are heard around the globe. Despite being completely different worlds, the two have more correlation than you would think.

Having sold over 200 million records globally, Swift is one of the best selling musicians, the most streamed female artist on Spotify, and the only person to have five albums with first week sales over one million copies in the U.S. She is incredibly successful, and in turn has an estimated net worth of $740 million. Naturally, like all celebrities, she travels as frequently as she wants and owns a private jet. Unlike others however, Swift has two private jets instead of one. This could be one of the factors that adds up to her “reputation” as the worst celebrity carbon emissary. During the year of 2022, Swift took over 170 flights, totaling up to 16 days in the air, and 8,293.54 metric tons of CO2 emissions. That is equivalent to all the emissions from the energy used by over 1,000 homes in the U.S. for a year.

Along with Swift’s private flights, the Eras Tour, her world tour that included 131 shows across five continents, racked up airline emissions. Forbes says that “Swift isn’t performing in New Zealand, but Air New Zealand experienced a ‘Swift surge.’ This was people rushing to book flights to Australia, where Swift will perform in February. The airline had to add 14 more flights to accommodate 3,000 more people … Some of the flights are getting a special Swiftie flight number: NZ1989, after Swift’s fifth album.”

While Swift is leading the index of celebrity carbon emissions, she gets a considerable amount much more hate than even her runner up. The man in question here is Floyd Mayweather, a retired boxer whose shortest flight of 2022 was a ten minute flight that landed in Las Vegas. Even though Swift has flown 16 days over the course of 2022, she has never resorted to taking flights shorter than an hour. Swift’s spokesperson has also made claims stating that she frequently loans out her jets to other individuals, although how common the practice is remains unknown. Another celebrity who has been receiving a lot of hate for the same actions as her male counterparts is Kylie Jenner. While traveling she posted a photo of herself and Travis Scott hugging. The black and white photo on Instagram shows the two celebrities standing between two private jets with the caption, “You wanna take mine or yours?” Jenner received and insinuated hundreds of articles and tweets berating her, while little to nothing was made about Scott. All the while, his carbon emissions have been worse than Jenner’s. His flights in 2022 averaged fewer than eight miles per trip. Felicia Kashevaroff, @Feliciak2, writes on X that “my feed is full of critiques of @KylieJenner and @taylorswift13 and I get it. But there is nary a peep about the private jet habits of wealthy men, just the young, ambitious women who dare to be successful and value their time like generations of men have before them. #misogyny.”

All these celebrities, while harboring seemingly large numbers of emissions towards global warming, are practically insignificant when it comes to the roughly 100 companies responsible for the most significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) states that “industry is percent of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions,” and “electricity production is 28 percent.” Transportation is only 25 percent.

With these huge numbers being thrown around so easily, it can be overwhelming to even think about slowing global warming. All in all, it might be up to the celebrities and politicians of the world to notice, make a change, and act. If they are not too busy flying their private jets, that is.