Let’s Fact Check That Taylor Swift Private Jet Usage Story

Yard’s “study” got a lot of things wrong. Fight your confirmation bias.

Image created by author in Canva using images from Wikimedia Commons under the CC license.

For the next ten years, people will be citing a shoddy study that they just read the headline of:

“You know, Taylor Swift is the worst celebrity for using private jets.”

Recently, Yard Marketing agency published a story listing the 10 celebs who were the “worst” offenders for private jet usage. It went viral. Congratulations to the author at Yard, that’s a marketing agency’s dream.

I put “worst” in scare quotes because I found their article bad. It was outright inaccurate in several places and drew its data from a biased source, @celebjets. @CelebJets only tracks 21 celebs, so Swift is “worst” out of those 21. Yard did not look at @CorporateJets and @ElonJet, other automated Twitter accounts run by the same person.

Now, I do not excuse private jet usage. Private jets emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases according to this 2020 study. That’s more than Denmark, which is a country of 5.8 million. Celebrities shouldn’t use private jets to fly 30 miles up the road when a car would work just as well.

But I have a few bones to pick with this study and the framing of it.