A shorter version of my latest column
-Hayes Brown, Bluesky
Transcription / Alt Text:
Panel one:
[off-screen] Fox News: Taylor Swift's plane is emitting soo much carbon
Angry Goose: Why are carbon emissions bad?
Panel 2:
[Man labeled Fox News being chased]
Goose: Explain why carbon emissions are bad, coward!!!
There are commercial flights....? What the fuck does a single person need a whole airplane for?
For some reason I don’t think that Taylor has a whole Airbus A380 to herself.
I was able to find she has a Dassault Falcon, a 12-seater. I doubt she travels alone in it…ever. Most of those seats are full, and I’m sure she’s flying direct and on her schedule.
Now, I get the absurdity of a single person needing a plane. But I also get the absurdity of a single person driving an F-250 crew cab to their office job 60 miles away.
After all, the guy in the pickup could have just as well taken public transit and shared. Except in order to take the train, he’d have to leave 3 hours earlier to arrive at the same time, and he’d get home two hours later. And there are several transfers along the way. Also there’s a store off the highway that he needs to go to, and he cant get there on the bus.
Private transport will always be needed. We will never meet 100% of personal transportation needs with just public transit and bikes. It’s an absurd goal.
The more important thing is that private-transport be right-sized for the individual need. In that lens, a 12-seat jet for a pop star, her pilot, body guard, and entourage, makes way more sense to me than a desk-jockey in a monster truck.
If you want to be mad at something, be mad at the fact that society is demanding that she actually fly all over the world so she can sing and dance in front of them, beholden to schedules that could never be possible on commercial flights. Commercial may not have the appropriate routes, or times, or may have unexpected route changes or delays or cancellations.
And the thing about planes is you kind of need to have them with you when you take off. You can’t exactly fly commercial and then take your private-jet for a specific hop and then go right back to commercial, either your jet stays with you or it dead-heads across the world without you.
Not to mention, this is Taylor Fucking Swift we are talking about. She is probably the single most famous person in the world. I would not be surprised if more people could pick her out of a crowd than they could Olaf Scholz. The amount of harassment she’d be subject to on commercial would be unbearable. She needs to fly private just to preserve a shred of sanity.
Add to this I read somewhere that she actually purchased more carbon credits than she would need for her tour to cover for unplanned travel - like to football games. Regardless of how some feel about the carbon credits, it’s more than nothing.
Yeah, you're not wrong but the point is that there are no simple solutions that any individual can do within an existing society with how it actually works today. We can't just change a few things and then continue with the same level of comfort or speed. Much of how we live and work would have to be redesigned, then already existing technological solutions could work very well. Basically the objection is just a diversion from e.g. drastically reducing meat consumption that would have an actual impact.
BTW there are single person electric VTOL vehicles like the "opener blackfly" that use less energy per mile than a tesla car. Not less than a (electrified) velomobile of course.