There was a lot of chatter around private jets last week as a result of Taylor Swift’s lawyers threatening to sue a person tracking her jet on social media. There’s a whole bunch of PR and legal maneuvers around that I won’t get into.
One thing that came out of that hullabaloo for me was finding this site: climatejets.org. While I don’t hold the creators of the site accountable for total accuracy, I do think it is accurate enough to highlight the fact that many wealthy people in the world use private jets a lot. And why wouldn’t they? Private jets do four things for rich people: they are efficient, they are private, they are status symbols, and they use up the excess amounts of money they have.
The focus on private jets has been centred around climate change. I think some of that focus should be on economic discrepancy. People use private jets because they have vast amounts of money and we have great inequality in our societies. If tomorrow someone invents private jets that run on clean energy, they will still highlight a problem in our society. It just won’t be a climate problem.
In our age of great inequality, it’s not enough to own large mansions or fancy cars or be surrounded by body guards. In our age, you need your own jet to bounce around in, whether you be Jay-Z or Bill Gates.
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