Taylor Swift has responded via a rep to a damning report that put her at the top of a list of celebrities whose private jets produce the most carbon dioxide emissions.
“Taylor’s jet is regularly loaned out to other people,” the pop star’s rep told Rolling Stone. “Attributing most or all of these trips to him is clearly incorrect.
The report, which claimed to rank the “celebrities with the worst CO2 emissions from private jets”, was compiled by marketing agency Yard and was based on data from the Celebrity Jets Twitter Account.
However, Yard himself noted that his ranking was “inconclusive”, since @CelebJets doesn’t track all famous people who take private flights. For example, the account seems to focus largely on entertainers, and the Florida college student who started @CelebJets actually has separate Twitter accounts that track the private flights of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Nonetheless, Swift grabbed headlines after the report dubbed her the top CO2 polluter of the year, with her plane having logged 170 flights and 22,923 minutes flown so far.
Taylor Swift’s rep says a report calling her the worst celebrity CO2 emitter this year was “demonstrably incorrect” because it includes flights from when Swift’s jet was loaned out to other people. (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Yard wrote the report shortly after Kylie Jenner faced widespread backlash over her private jet use, with the reality TV star being branded a “climate criminal” on social media. But of the celebrities in the study, Jenner wasn’t even in the top 10. After Swift, the celebrities whose jets were ranked as having seen the most airtime were Floyd Mayweather, Jay-Z, Alex Rodriguez, Blake Shelton, Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, Mark Wahlberg, Oprah Winfrey and Travis Scott. Rolling Stone also reached out to the other celebrities on the list, but Swift’s rep was the only one to respond.
The average US resident has an annual carbon footprint of 16 tons of emissions, while globally the annual average is around 4 tons, according to The Nature Conservancy. By contrast, this year’s estimated carbon emissions from the jet Swift owns were 8,293.54 tonnes.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.