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Comment by SlackingOff123 | Hacker News Reader

"He added that he received the threatening letter after media outlets began scrutinising Swift's carbon footprint.

In 2022, Swift topped the list of celebrities with the highest private jet CO2 emissions, according to digital marketing firm Yard.

The organisation found that her jet emissions were about 1,185 times more than the average person's total annual emissions."

Quite the coincidence.

Given this is public information that any potential stalker could easily find themselves, do you think the student is doing anything wrong or illegal?

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> The organisation found that her jet emissions were about 1,185 times more than the average person's total annual emissions.

I haven’t fact checked this but if that’s true then I find that horrifying.

I'm surprised it's so low. She's got two private jets and a job which requires multiple flights a month.

Also:

>Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor purchased more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel

https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours...

Really, I'd be more worried about the total amount of emissions from all the cars/flights from people going to her gigs. That's got to dwarf her own total.

Carbon credits are a scam.

How? I did a quick lookup and the results points to the otherwise.

https://consensus.app/results/?q=Does%20the%20carbon%20credi...

Not sure if this is what GP meant, but one funny thing about carbon credits is that energy producers that produce no emissions but don't do carbon capture (e.g. solar farms) can earn still carbon credits which they can sell to carbon emitters (e.g. steel mills). Zero is not a negative number, so the entire world can one day be "carbon neutral" following this funny accounting and physics won't care.

They are in many cases. I was trying to show she at least seems to care enough to try to counteract her own impact. That likely means the tried to minimise the number of fights too.

Easy Fix: Use part of the generous amount of taxes that Taylor Swift pays, to fight against climate change, remove pythons from Florida, or fund a panda refuge in Montana. We consider this acceptable for each big company since decades

All this people carefully registering the journey of some random famous and shaming them online, should better stop, think, and use their time in this planet more wisely. Scapegoating and witch hunts online that try to blame climate change on some famous target are extremely stupid.

Even worse, they waste our time gossiping chasing ghosts, instead to act. Even small steps would really make a difference but we still are distracted hoping for a magical fix-all solution appearing at the last minute to put us out of the pan; This is very unlikely to happen, no matter how much soup we'll trow to the Mona Lisa. Is time to accept it.

I agree that with enough wealth, we can reverse the climate change we're causing via greenhouse emissions, but the mechanism is anything but easy.

Every study I've read that examines activities companies undertake in order to become "carbon neutral" has found that the results aren't actually environmentally neutral. A panda refuge, for example, requires a climate without too much warming, but it doesn't result in one. Bold geo-engineering would definitely convert dollars into a cooler world, but with undesirable and not fully understood side-effects.

FWIW, I don't like the jet tracking (for Taylor or Elon or anyone), but for different reasons. Transparency on climate emissions is fine, but disclosing the location of vehicles of famous people in real time is real security threat. If Jack Sweeney just delayed his posts by a week, they'd be pretty much indefensible. That wouldn't grow his following on X as fast, though...

A main problem with this claims is that the value provided is clearly wrong (oversized) but nobody wants to see it. This is lying with maths basically.

100% agreed

>> fund a panda refuge in Montana

For those wondering, https://www.zoomontana.org/animals/red-panda.

How about someone here show us how "public" this info is? Since it is so "easily accessible"?

A Google search got me the tail number. ADS-B data is easily accessible, there are APIs. Seems like some bigger sites like Flight Aware are already redacting info for her tail number, but it took me a few minutes to find another site that didn't seem to.

I think you can credibly make the argument that when these protocols were invented, the intent wasn't for the data to be this public or accessible, and that we could perhaps update the protocols to avoid something like this.

But from a technology point of view, saying that flight data is somehow private is like saying that if I set up an FM radio station and someone buys an FM radio and listens in they're somehow snooping on my radio station.

If they are going to redact her tail number then I would appreciate them redacting mine as well.

This data is absolutely designed to be 100% public and actively broadcasted — by law.

Aircraft make use of the air space above a bunch of people's random property. They could (in theory) also come down on top of you.

I think it makes sense for that data to be public. If you don't like it don't fly.

Also you can't prevent this sort of thing. Airplane ADS-B squawks ident info for collision avoidance and to help ATC (Air Traffic Control). The signal is simple for reliability and compatibility. Anyone can receive that data.

This whole thing about her carbon footprint is also nonsense assuming those jets are ferrying her crew and equipment that would just have to travel by commercial jet otherwise. Unless it's a lux jet just for her it makes as good as no difference in CO2 emissions whether her jet emits them or she pays United to do it.

> Unless it's a lux jet just for her it makes

Why would we assume anything else? There’s probably a private jet for her and a chartered one(s) for crew and equipment

What I mean is if she has a luxury jet outfitted with a bedroom, living room, studio, etc that only she (and maybe 1-5 other people at most) fly in that would make having a private jet bad for carbon footprint.

But if the jet is configured to carry a decent number of people and is a substitute for buying her + crew (dancers, musicians, assistants, tech, etc) commercial tickets then the entire complaint about emissions is nonsense.

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