“Yesterday, five times the flight of Vincent Bolloré’s plane in the same day! This is a record since the opening of this account”. Tuesday August 9, the Twitter account “I Fly Bernard” recorded five flights of the Breton billionaire’s jet in the space of 24 hours, from Paris to Palermo, then from Palermo to Nice, from Nice to Paris, and finally between Paris and Toulon, there and back.
Behind this very followed Twitter account, which retraces the routes of the planes of French billionaires, hides Sébastien *. “What I’m trying to denounce is their use of private jets as taxis”, explains to AFP this 35-year-old aeronautical engineer, who created the account in April 2022. If his method aims to challenge the billionaires on their carbon footprint, it is however criticized by Guillaume Champeau: “it is not because a piece of data is public that it can be used in treatments to infringe on privacy”, esteem on his blog this lawyer and digital specialist.
In the United States, the “Celebrity Jets” Twitter account also tracks celebrity flights using public data available online. The origin of this account, a 19-year-old student named Jack Sweeney. It started in June 2020 following the private jet ofElon Musk and now has 30 accounts tracking sports stars, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and even Russian oligarchs. A sign that his activity bothers personalities, the boss of Tesla offered him $ 5,000 to bury the “ElonJet” account – more than 484,000 subscribers on the meter – which follows all the movements of the multi-billionaire’s plane.
Less known than services dedicated to aircraft, real-time maritime traffic monitoring applications are also very efficient and well developed, as it recalls Numerama. They make it possible to identify a ship but also, as for planes, to highlight the energy-intensive journeys of certain billionaires in their yachts.
Half of private jet flights travel less than 500 kilometers
From Vincent Bolloré to Taylor Swift and Bernard Arnault, the pressure is therefore increasing this summer on celebrities, political figures and big bosses to limit their travel by private jet with a high carbon footprint, while heat waves, fires and drought are increasing across the globe. This “name and shame” could, in the future, play a role in limiting these practices. “We know that the question of reputation is important, you just have to find the right tone so as not to be too aggressive”, reacts to L’Express Béatrice Jarrige, expert in long-distance mobility subjects within the association. ShiftProject. “Anything that can help to say that the behavior of each other has an impact on the climate is good to take,” she adds.
“This subject is sensitive insofar as there is a social injustice”, estimates for his part Jo Dardenne, aviation director with Transport and Environment. “These problems show that the aviation sector is a socially unjust sector,” she adds.
Private aviation has been booming since the Covid-19 pandemic, with customers keen to avoid flight cancellations and promiscuity in the face of the virus. According to a report by the federation of environmental NGOs Transport et Environment published in March 2022, while the air sector is responsible for 2 to 3% of global CO2 emissions, private flights have a carbon footprint per passenger 5 to 14 times greater than commercial flights, and 50 times greater than trains. “Traveling by private jet is climate nonsense at a time of the climate crisis. A private jet flight is ten times more polluting than a commercial flight”, insists Jo Dardenne.
On Twitter, many users point out that most trips made by French personalities, over relatively short distances, could however be made by train. According to the Transport and Environment report, one flight in ten that takes off or lands in France is by private jet and half of these flights cover less than 500 kilometres. Furthermore, only 30% of private jet travel is for business. “It is absurd to burn kerosene and pollute the atmosphere when we could use the train over this kind of distance”, regrets Jo Dardenne, recalling also that the fuels used by private jets “are not taxed in most European countries”.
What if the ultra-rich financed the decarbonization of the sector?
According to her, millionaires or billionaires “could be the first to pay” so that their jets use “cleaner, zero-emission solutions, or electric or hydrogen planes” insofar as they “have the financial means to launch the decarbonization of the sector”. Considered the most sustainable, synthetic fuels are not currently available in sufficient quantities to cover all aviation needs, however, recalls the aviation director of the environmental NGO. In September 2021, the business aviation sector had estimated that these sustainable fuels were the “key” to achieving the carbon neutrality objective it has set for 2050. “To say that we must fly with biofuels, it’s a bit of a communication operation. The most important thing is sobriety in jet travel”, believes Béatrice Jarrige, on the other hand.
Will the current movement, inspired by social networks, push political leaders to take new measures? For Jo Dardenne, officials should “ask the private aviation sector to decarbonize as quickly as possible”. They could also, according to her, introduce “a tax to finance the transition of aviation towards more sustainable technologies”. “Governments must encourage the use of synthetic fuels and industry must invest in their production and deployment,” summarizes the aviation director of the environmental NGO. She adds: “We should ban the use of private jets until they are zero emissions or use alternative fuels.”
“We can’t ban private jet travel either”, nuance Béatrice Jarrige. For her part, she suggests another avenue for reducing global CO2 emissions: reducing the number of commercial and private flights, as at Amsterdam-Schiphol airport. On July 4, 2022, the Dutch government announced that it wanted to reduce its flights from 500,000 per year to 440,000, a decrease of 12%, to make Europe’s third hub a “greener” airport. The reduction is expected to begin in November 2023.
*The first name has been changed, the creator of the Twitter account wishes to remain anonymous.