A New Study Explores the Carbon Emissions From Private Jets

When Taylor Swift flies across continents to attend the Super Bowl, or Starbucks places a private jet at the disposal of its new CEO, what is the effect on the environment? For scientists, caclculating the carbon emissions from commercial air travel involves data that’s relatively easy to access. For private air travel, that’s more of a challenge — though a study that was published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment seeks to change that.

Titled “Private aviation is making a growing contribution to climate change,” the study looks at carbon emissions from the private jet world using data from 2019 to 2023. The study’s authors relied on data from ADS-B Exchange, a crowdsourced community whose website describes it as “an unfiltered, uncensored window into global aerial movements.”

What did the study’s authors learn from their research? First, that private air travel is leaving a growing mark on the environment. The scientists behind the study observed that “[e]missions increased by 46% between 2019-2023.” Their other findings included that 47.4% of the flights were of distances less than 310 miles, and that 68.7% of the private jets were registered in the United States.

As the authors write, there are a few unsettling implications for their findings. “[E]mission reductions are particularly difficult to achieve under scenarios of continued growth in economic output or wealth; and policies focused on CO2 will disproportionately affect less affluent population groups,” they note.

New York’s Most Underrated Airport Is About to Get a Lot More Private Jets

Stewart International Airport is expanding

It’s increasingly likely that future scientists may not have access to the same array of data that the authors of this paper had. As the Los Angeles Times‘ Noah Haggerty pointed out, a push towards privacy in the private air world could reduce the amount of information available to researchers.

“Private air transport illustrates the policy conundrum of addressing the role of the affluent, as policymakers are reluctant to focus on the wealthy and powerful,” the study’s authors write — and having less data on hand could magnify this considerably.