Carbon pollution from private jets has soared in the past five years, with most of those small planes spewing more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in about two hours of flying than the average person does in about a year, a new study finds.
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About a quarter million of the super wealthy – worth a total of US$31 trillion – last year emitted 15.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide flying in private jets, according to Thursday’s study in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment. That’s about the same amount as the 67 million people who live in Tanzania.
Private jet emissions jumped 46 per cent from 2019 to 2023, according to the European research team that calculated those figures by examining more than 18.6 million flights of about 26,000 airplanes over five years.
Only 1.8 per cent of the carbon pollution from aviation is spewed by private jets and aviation as a whole is responsible for about 4 per cent of the human-caused heat-trapping gases, the study said.
It may seem like a small amount, but it’s a matter of fairness and priorities, said the study’s lead author, Stefan Gossling, a transportation researcher at the business school of Sweden’s Linnaeus University.
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