“High-speed trains as an Alternative to Private Jets: Addressing Climate-Crime Among the Super-Rich”

Private jet users used to be a source of envy, and many celebrities, stars and starlets are now finding it difficult to break the habit of boasting about their private jets on social media. If they continue to do so, activists will quickly brand them as “climate criminals”.

That’s what happened to US celebrity Kylie Jenner in the summer of 2022 when she posted about a 17-minute flight in the greater Los Angeles area between two airports barely 70 kilometers apart. The CO2 emissions amounted to about one ton – for the same amount an SUV would have traveled more than 2500 kilometers.

Many celebrities are accused of hypocrisy on this point, such as Bill Gates, who wrote a book in 2017 entitled “How we prevent the climate catastrophe”, but in the meantime caused 1629 tons of CO2 on an incredible 356 private flights.

Just last week, EU Council President Charles Michel had to justify himself, who is supposed to represent the EU Green Deal, but has used private jets for 64 percent of his trips since taking office in 2019, as reported by the magazine “Politico”. For example, in December 2022 on a trip to Beijing with a delegation, which cost 460,000 euros.

“I understand that people find it expensive and I understand the sensitivity of private flights,” he said in interviews with Belgian media. To immediately point out, almost offended, that his boss, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, also uses private jets very intensively, but “nobody blames her for that”.

Significantly higher carbon footprint

One thing is certain: there are no bigger polluters in aviation than private jets, but this is due to the fact that the emissions are passed on to the people being transported and only in exceptional cases are there more than ten passengers on board.

The non-governmental organization (NGO) Transport & Environment, which has been campaigning for clean mobility for years, calculated in a 2021 report that private jets cause between five and 14 times more pollution per passenger than commercial flights, seven times more than a flight in business class , and up to 150 times more than electrically powered trains.

The numerically extremely small privileged clientele in this segment gives another cause for criticism, since up to now they have been sinning against the climate almost tax-free in the eyes of the activists.

Before the pandemic, just 1 percent of all air travelers caused half of all emissions from passenger flights. In the UK, half the population flies no more than once a year, while just 1% of Brits account for a fifth of all international flights from the UK.

In France, some multi-billionaires with extreme private aviation activities are particularly pilloried, such as Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury goods group LVMH with a whole fleet of company jets.

The Twitter account I fly Bernard (66,000 followers) follows their flight activity from publicly available sources. This makes it easy to add up that, for example, five LVMH jets on 16 flights in November 2022 produced over 257 tons of CO2 – the average Frenchman brings it to around ten tons a year.

The train as an alternative?

Criticism of private jet flights is also growing noticeably because the majority of flights apparently cover unnecessarily short routes for which there are more climate-friendly alternatives.

The busiest route in Europe runs from Paris-Le Bourget (Europe’s most important airport for business jets) to Geneva – 410 kilometers as the crow flies – the TGV express train also runs between the two cities in just three hours and 13 minutes.

This is followed in second place by the route from Paris-Le Bourget to Nice (686 km), a highly frequented domestic route, also used by the TGV (5:40 hours). After France and Great Britain, Germany is the third largest market in Europe for private jet flights. According to studies by the CE Delft research institute, exactly 208,645 tons of CO2 were released from/to Germany in 2022 with a total of 58,424 such flight movements.

A particular point of criticism for climate activists here are the often extremely short distances, including more than ten flights a year between Stuttgart and Böblingen, which are barely 15 kilometers apart.

Almost three quarters of the private jet flights taking off in Germany are not even 500 kilometers long, 60 percent of the routes are even less than 300 kilometers short, exactly 508 flights operated in 2022 between Hamburg and Westerland on Sylt alone, where trains also go in a good three hours.

Against the background of persistently high passenger numbers during the Corona crisis and currently mostly increasing compared to the pre-pandemic level, private jet flights are now not only in the sights of climate activists, but increasingly also in politics.

“For me, the Hamburg-Sylt flight route is symbolic of the fact that we have to change something in general if we want to promote climate protection effectively,” said Left Party leader Martin Schirdewan to the TV channel ZDF in March.

France’s transport minister wants transparency for private jet flights

The political agenda is furthest advanced in France. Here, Minister of Transport Clément Beaune, a confidant of President Macron, wants to regulate the use of private jets and campaign for an EU-wide regulation. His main goal is to create transparency, for example to publish the flights completed, which the users, who are often concerned with discretion, should not like at all.

Above all, Beaune wants to tax private flights higher. A ban would also make little sense for climate protection, private jets are responsible for around four percent of the emissions of all aircraft, and aviation as a whole accounted for 2.4 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2018.

According to the study by Transport & Environment, private jet owners have an average fortune of 1.3 billion euros, so they would be able to finance the development of future technologies for green flying with taxes on their flights.

At least 3,000 euros in taxes should be levied on every private jet departure in Europe, according to the NGO’s proposal. In addition, from 2030 onwards, private flights in Europe of less than 1000 kilometers should always be powered by green hydrogen or electricity.

Meanwhile, the first airports are also creating facts: Amsterdam-Schiphol will block private jets from 2025. This means that the scarce landing times can be used more efficiently for larger aircraft. On the other hand, private jet operators do not like to fly from large airports anyway, because there are long distances and waiting times that are better avoided. Instead of starting from Orly or Roissy, you switch to Le Bourget in Paris or to neighboring Egelsbach in Frankfurt.

Autor: Andreas Spaeth