2 Million Pounds of Diesel: The Billionaire Vacation Is Upon Us
9. Dear Reader, I need to rant. (6 min read)
If you flew 88 times back and forth between San Francisco, USA and Frankfurt, Germany (economy class, don’t get too excited), how much CO2 emissions would you have caused? Instead of a number1, I’ll give you something better: Your CO2 emissions would be as much as what Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend emitted on his private jets.
In just January of 2022.
I can already hear your sigh of annoyance. Of course, billionaires travel in private jets, sip cocktails and eat caviar while literally and figuratively looking down on the rest of us peasants. This guy thinks he’s telling me something I don’t already know?
Trust me. Whatever you **think** you know, it’s far worse. In ways our collective middle-class brains can’t fathom. If “how much CO2 can you emit while on vacation” was a competitive sport, and we were each given $20 billion, you and I would still not win.
See, it’s not about intelligence. It’s about how creatively grotesque you can get, and appear chic, while gaslighting us suckers about caring for the planet. It’s an art form only bestowed upon by the masters in the hallowed halls of Davos and ski slopes of St. Moritz.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Climatonomics. This time, I will not serenade you with data on trade-based CO2 emissions, agricultural supply chains and our GDP decoupling, but just show you the utter pointlessness of it all when our laws don’t catch up with reality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me give you a proper introduction.
Like any good millennial degenerate on the internet, when I am not working my ass off for a future that is more uncertain than Bitcoin, I spend time doom scrolling on YouTube for my next dopamine hit. Rarely, I watch something that makes me go “Wait. What?” Here is one such video, from beloved Wendover productions. But watch it after you read this post. You’ll “enjoy” it much, much more.
So turns out there is a “billionaire social calendar”, which is a loose term for a transcontinental perpetual party where the top 1% compete on how far they can travel in fancy modes of transport to show off that they’re loaded (Bro, if you’re invited to this party, everyone already knows. But this isn’t about logic, I guess).
Private Jets? Pfft …Move on.
I learned something unexpected: In the billionaire world, private jets are now passé.
It’s the billionaire equivalent of your buddy owning a Tesla in 2020. Does it show he’s rich? Absolutely. But does it mean he’s rich enough to buy a beachside house in Monaco? Probably not. The “problem” today is that private jets are not exclusive enough. They are way too accessible, and penny-pinching millionaires can even rent them from companies that operate on a “Uber for private jets” business model.
I used to live near one of these cities where the biggest such company was founded2. It was a sketchy idea and investors questioned if the market existed. But as the number of millionaires increased, business went up, and so did the CO2 emissions. More companies have since mushroomed.
In fact, too many people are buying private jets, making it uncool for billionaires. Of course, Hollywood stars still prance around in them, but we’re told it’s just a mode of transport at this point. Albeit a ghastly polluting one, but hey, it gets likes on Instagram.
In case you’re interested in this carbon obscenity, a Twitter bot @CelebJets has got you covered. At the time of writing, Oprah Winfrey relaxed on a 21 minute flight in a Gulfstream G650 pumping out as many tons of CO2 as you would have if you flew from Paris to New Delhi and back.
“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe.” - Oprah
Well, Oprah certainly went high. About 30,000 feet, if I were to guess. But she also conveniently blocked the info so we cannot check3.
And I am sure she’s living grand in it too, since the aircraft features bedrooms and a spa. Well, Oprah walks her talk.
In contrast, every time I fly cattle class to a scientific conference enjoying leg cramps (not my fault I’m tall!), I am confronted by some guilt. Others like me, tormented by their conscience, write entire posts on airline CO2 calculators. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably give a damn too.
And thus, our highest, grandest visions continue to elude us.
But let’s move on, because there’s a new toy in town. The ultimate sign of wealth that is still out of reach to the 99.99%.
Yachts that Don’t Sail (Yes, Seriously)
It has been my understanding that we can use a big boat with powerful engines for two things: 1) Sailing into the ocean, and 2) Sailing far enough to reach places by the coast. Like private jets, it’s just another mode of transportation, right?
WROOOONG!!!
Smaller yachts get quite uncomfortable to travel in the ocean because the choppy seas throw it around like a rag-doll, and they cannot carry enough fuel for transoceanic crossings. This makes an Atlantic or Pacific voyage out of question. So how does our billionaire’s yacht at a Mediterranean beach party get to the next one in, umm, New Zealand?
Apparently there is a devilishly simple solution…
Put your big boat in an even bigger boat…
…that can cross the oceans to deliver it to the party.
And there is an entire industry around this. One such company is appropriately named https://www.yacht-transport.com/ with beautiful camera shots of a dozen yachts parked in a glorified container ship.
Here is one of the many “routes” they offer this month.
I can hear a voice in your head screaming HOW MUCH EMISSIONS IS THAT? One of their three vessels, The Super Servant yacht carrier, runs two heavy duty diesel engines. The engineer in me pulled up their specs, ran some numbers and it turns out the ship consumes ~ 1165 kgs of diesel per hour. It takes around 30 days to sail to Auckland from Italy. That is around a million kilograms of diesel. Almost 2 million pounds. Emissions of CO2? I won’t even bother4. I’ll just say it’s more than you and I can ever cause in a year of hard partying around the globe.
All this for yachts that will be parked by a beach so they can dress well and… tell everyone they have a boat5?
Billionaires are Not The Problem - We Are.
If you get your car registered to drive, it is required to pass an emissions test in most countries. Why? Because the government wants to keep the atmosphere clean and pollution low.
It is the law and applies even if you don’t care about the fumes bathing the people around you.
Yet, somehow even democratic nations all over the world have decided that defiling the atmosphere with gigatons of CO2 every year for yachts and private jets to serve the whims of a few bored individuals… is perfectly legal. In California, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley elite, you can get fined for $40,000 or go to prison if your car churns out just a few extra kilograms of CO2. Similar laws exist worldwide.
Laws like these send a message that ordinary masses are held to different standards than the chosen few who get a free pass, for no other reason than wealth. Fairness is a primal human emotion: Once you convince people that protecting the planet is a zero-sum game they will always lose, cooperation in times of crisis will be hard to find. And with climate change crises well underway, cooperation has never been in more demand.
Who’s fault is this? Not the billionaires. It’s us, because we are suckers for feel-good gaslighting from positions of fame and power. We don’t look at what they do, but look at what the say… and forget to demand even basic accountability.
It’s been a long day, so I’ll let you go with some more inspiration from Oprah:
Powerful words. On a scale of 0 to “I’M CAPTAIN PLANET”, how inspired are you now? Tell me in the comments below.
Thanks for reading my rant. I will resume normal programming next week.
The Twitter bot uses ADS-B Exchange data, which is publicly trackable to anyone who has a receiver. FlightAware is just an aggregator that jet owners can ask to block, but they can’t stop anyone from receiving the signal on their own hardware, like @CelebJets
And the math is far more complex without more data.
I personally prefer the Australian Navy version.
“We don’t look at what they do, but look at what the say… and forget to demand even basic accountability”
This is so true and applicable to other areas as well!
I completely agree. We do need to ask for laws that protect the planet from superpolluters. And incentives that reward people like “us” - the handwringers who deliberately sacrifice vacations in Hawaii for a cold cabin in the woods because of the amount of harm caused by flying. I think there should be a reward for that. And ... Why is flight shame only a thing in Europe? Can’t we import it here?