The Wealthiest's contribution to the climate crisis

This is a guest post from Jorge Leitão.

For the past year, I have been working with scientists, journalists, and climate activists to quantify emissions of private aviation in a volunteer capacity.

This work has resulted in 4 main contributions:

• A scientific paper at Nature Communications Climate and Environment

• A contribution to a documentary by DR (major Danish media broadcaster)

• Use of the data by activist groups

• A website for public access to the results

In this post, I will summarize the context and the main results of this activity.

Distribution of global emissions of private aviation worldwide (2023). Dark red represents high emissions, to dark blue low emissions of CO2 by aircrafts registered in the country. From privateaircrafts.eu.

Introduction

Our most important collective good, a stable climate that supports human life, is being destabilized, endangering the livelihood of billions of us.

Rising average global temperature over the past 50 years. From NASA

At the core of this crisis is the socio-economic system we live in, in which  economic growth (GDP) and individual wealth is the primary metric of success. This system incentivizes constant increase of consumption, as consumer spending is a major contributor to economic growth.

Both the public and the private sectors incentivize, subsidize, and advertise for increased consumption. Even technological innovations lead to an overall increase in consumption — a phenomenon known as Jevons' paradox — where gains in efficiency are offset by increased usage.

Consumption is the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and, consequently, rising global temperatures. Everything we consume — clothes, housing, transportation, electronics, food — generates emissions. The climate crisis is a direct consequence of high consumption.

A crucial consequence of rising temperatures is the increasing cost of living. The climate crisis is driving more frequent and severe droughts, wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and rising sea levels, all of which make living conditions more expensive as additional resources are required to maintain safety, comfort and access to goods. For example, hotter regions require increased use of air conditioning, more investment in wildfire prevention and response, and more costly methods of water capture. In the US, the economic cost of disasters increased by 1000% over the last 30 years (see figure below). These costs will continue to increase as temperature continues to rise.

• The cost of large disasters rose from $10 B in 1990 to $110 B in 2023 when adjusted to inflation, with a peak of $400 B in 2017. From NOAA

The Climate Crisis Disproportionately Affects the Poor

The impacts of the climate crisis are not evenly distributed. Poorer are, and will continue to be, disproportionately affected by this crisis.

In the current system, the best strategy for individuals is to become wealthy enough to continue to afford food, secure housing, or relocation to another country with better climate resilience. This path is only available to a minority who can accumulate sufficient wealth to insulate themselves from the effects of this crisis.

The dangerous positive feedback loop capitalism and the climate crisis we are locked in

The fundamental problem with this strategy is that we are engaged in a negative-sum game: the wealthier I am, the higher the overall cost of living will be for everybody, including myself. Rich people consume more and more polluting goods and services — whether directly through personal purchases or indirectly through investments like pensions, index funds, or stocks. As a result, not only does the cost of maintaining my standard of living rise, but it also increases for everyone else. This cycle intensifies the pressure to accumulate more wealth, in a race to the bottom.

The Climate Crisis is Disproportionately Caused by the Rich

Contributions to the climate crisis are not evenly distributed. Richer people are, and will continue to be, disproportionately contributing to this crisis.

This disparity is a consequence of wealth and life standards and is evident in air travel. Approximately 90% of the global population does not fly while 1% of the world population is responsible for 50% of the emissions from air travel [1]. For those who do fly, a single round-trip flight emits nearly as much as they produce in an entire year of daily life. This consumption continues as we move up in the wealth ladder: the use of a private jet — accessible only to the wealthiest — once a month results in roughly 160 times higher emissions than those of an average person who flies once a year. This represents emissions per capita thousands of times higher than 90% of the population in flying private jets alone.

A Bombardier Challenger 300, one of the 25 thousands private jets worldwide. From jetphotos.

Private aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis

Over the last year I have been systematically collecting and analyzing data from private aviation worldwide.

There are three main reasons for this:

• Emissions from private aviation were never systematically and extensively quantified before

• Private aviation is a proxy of how wealth is correlated with disproportional high emitting lifestyles

• Data from private aviation is consistently  collected worldwide

In total, I have collected data from 25 thousand aircrafts from 72 different aircraft models, for a period between 2019 and 2024. This corresponds to around 27.5 million hours of flight time between  2019-2023. The graph below shows the  overall result of adding up the contribution of each of these 25 thousand aircraft for the past 4 years.

Global daily number of hours flown by private aviation. From 2019 to 2023, global usage increased from 4.5 million hours in 2019, to 6.4 million hours in 2023, an increase of 42%. From privateaircrafts.eu

Global daily CO2 emissions of private aviation. From 2019 to 2023, global emissions increased from about 30 M kg CO2 per day (11 M tons CO2 in 2019), to about 45 M kg CO2 per day (16.4 M tons CO2 in 2023), a 50% increase. From privateaircrafts.eu

The data shows that global private aviation increased its flying time by 42% between 2019 and 2023, and its total CO2 emissions by 50%. The difference between these two numbers is the direct result of the use of more emitting aircraft models: "high emitting" aircraft models such as the Bombardier Global 6000/6500 and Gulfstream 4 are proportionally flying more. The data also shows that the peak time for private flying is in Christmas and New Year, confirming the extensive use of private aviation for leisure.

We can segment these emissions by country:

Global CO2 emissions of private aviation of the 10 most emitting countries of registration in 2023 (kg of CO2). The United States aircrafts continue to be the main contributor in private aviation. From privateaircrafts.eu.

And finally, we can represent individual aircrafts’ trajectories:

Trajectory of N518FX (registered in USA) during July of 2023. This aircraft is owned by Flexjet, with a fleet of 248 private jets. From privateaircrafts.eu.

Trajectory of OY-JJJ (registered in Denmark) during July of 2023. Palma de Maiorca and Monaco are two popular European destinations of private aviation in the summer. From privateaircrafts.eu.

You can explore all this data at privateaircrafts.eu. You can also consult the scientific publication with Stefan Gössling (Wikipedia) and Andreas Humpe (Research gate) here.

Where we go from here

Aviation is direct evidence that the wealthier we are, the more we consume, and the more we consume, the more we disproportionally contribute to the climate crisis. People flying once a year emit a hundred times more than average. Rich people flying private jets emit thousands of times more than average. Emissions by private aviation increased 50% over the last 4 years and became more polluting per hour of flight.

Consumption is causing the climate crisis and making us unable to maintain a sustainable cost of living, causing loss of human rights and human lives. Whether through excessive fashion, excessive electronics, excessive large cars, excessive air travel or excessive meat consumption, we are denying our children the right to health and life.

As private aviation shows, reducing consumption will not happen by individual choice. Therefore, it must be enforced by policy. We have a legal and moral obligation to ensure that our rights are protected [ehr,usa]. We must enact policies that curb consumption [de].