taylor swift's private jet dilemma

alas! let's discuss

Sure, why not! Let us once again talk about Taylor Swift's private jet usage.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that back in December, Swift’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist request to one Jack Sweeney, a college student who tracks the publicly-available flight data of busy private jets and publishes them in a variety of Twitter accounts.

After selling her other jet, this is the only one Swift currently owns. (Photo: flightaware.com)

I always feel a little insane whenever I write about Swift — someone I've been listening to since I was thirteen years old, by the way — because there is a sizable subset of her fanbase who refuses to see her as anything other than the never-wrong and always-wronged damsel in distress. If I criticize Swift, a 34-year-old woman who happens to be a freshly-minted billionaire and one of the most influential people in the world, then my reason must be singular and simple: misogyny. It is, of course, a tired and illogical response to Swiftian criticism, because if we agree (and we do) that women can reach the same levels of success that men can, then it would follow that powerful women can — and should — also become subject to criticism. It doesn’t mean we stop acknowledging the continuing impact of misogyny. It is instead a recognition that women are people, and as such are capable of mistakes, too.

But logic frequently eludes Swift's environs. 

To engage in a conversation about Swift is nearly always frustrating, because it tends to go like this: her most loyal fans will say, she is not taken seriously enough as an artist or as a person! but then when she is treated seriously, as the adult that she is, they (and Swift herself) respond with something like, you're only criticizing her because she's a successful woman. When the goal posts are in constant motion, an honest discussion proves to be impossible. But let's try. 

Is tracking, aggregating, and then posting famous people's private jet usage and their ensuing emissions a bit of a gimmick? Yeah, a little bit! But gimmicks often work, as does shame. It brings awareness to a public that may have been ignorant of an issue, in this case the very real and very high environmental cost of private jet usage.

I urge you, for background information, to take a look at this recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, which among other things found that "private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger" and "since the start of the pandemic ... private jet emissions have increased more than 23 percent." 

These are harrowing figures to me, especially as we non-private-jet-flyers are constantly chastised to bring our reusable bags to grocery stores, avoid plastic straws, and use public transportation instead of cars whenever possible. And we do these things, but they will never be enough when in the meantime, the most privileged among us flout any and all substantial efforts to avoid further destruction of the planet. There can be no social contract if the most powerful members of our society refuse to sign it.

To coexist alongside this much audacity, all while the earth's temperature continues to rise by concerning degrees, ushers in a certain level of desperation that confers a need for gimmicks. Because maybe it took the public shaming of Swift, one of the world's most famous public figures, and yeah, maybe it makes her and some of her fans uncomfortable, but the gimmick got our attention, didn't it? And it's a worthwhile subject, so we owe it to ourselves to be thoughtful about it, because there is no future for our sustainable existence on this planet if we decide, thanks to the toxicity of stan culture, to somehow value a celebrity's right to private flights over the health of the environment.