Look at all the post-Super Bowl private jets! Anyway, don’t forget to recycle.

Feel free to be very disgusted by this graphic imagery:

Social media loves to holler about carbon this and carbon that and Taylor Swift is going to hell because her jet is single handedly causing global warming (and not because she dated a Nazi who made fun of Ice Spice so now she trots around Little Hood Annie like a pet to make us forget).

But how much carbon released into the atmosphere could really be avoided if all of those people on those jets flew commercial instead? I did my best to dig up some numbers.

As best I can tell, CNBC says the average private jet releases two tons of carbon into the atmosphere per hour. It’s harder to find an average number of people on those flights (since almost half of private jet flights have no one but the pilot on board, wasting so much fuel to simply move the plane from one place to another) but the range I’m finding is between 4.3 and 4.7 passengers, so to be nice, we can just say 5.

Two tons = 2,000 kg, divided by 5 people per flight, and we have 400 kg of carbon per person per hour.

Looking at the flight tracker, a big chunk of those planes are making the 1 hour flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, so I looked up flights. I wanted to see what size plane was most commonly used and what the carbon emissions looked like. I only compared three airlines (United, Delta, and American) but the planes were in the 120 – 150 seat range, with the Airbus 319 seeming to be the most popular.

Delta has their Airbus configured for 132 people, with 12 in First Class and the rest in Not First Class (does it matter? rich people are not going to sit back there anyway).

Since I fly Delta, I pulled up a flight just to confirm and there are indeed 12 first class spaces on the flights from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.

So let’s book!

Wait — I do not want to buy a flight I never intend to take.

So let’s pretend to book so we can see the carbon emissions!

You’ll have to pull this up for yourself because I can’t link to the itinerary, but if you do your initial search on Google, you can click more information by the leg of your flight and see the carbon emissions. We can just round that up to 100kg per person for this hourlong flight.

400kg on a private jet vs 100kg on a commercial flight. That’s some very easy math.

But since we’re here, let’s do a little more math to look at how much of a failure the US is in general with regard to travel.

Taking the train is the most carbon efficient mode of travel, but to get from Las Vegas to Los Angeles by Amtrak, there is only one train per day and the trip will take you almost eight hours.

Eight hours to go a measly 271 miles. I’ve driven from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in just over five hours. The fact that our trains are slower than cars is so American I can’t stand it. But let’s say our government had invested in trains as much as the Japanese government.

The driving distance from Tokyo to Osaka is about 300 miles, so that’s about the same distance as Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Taking the famed bullet train between those cities is just two hours and thirty minutes. If you’re assuming that speed will be attached to a higher cost, you must not be paying attention to anything in the US where we pay more for less in just about every category.

Your 8 hour train ticket from Las Vegas to Los Angeles will be $109.
Your 2.5 hour train ticket from Tokyo to Osaka will be 13,620 yen, which is less than $90 at today’s exchange rate.

But I digress. I got off of the carbon topic, because any excuse to drag this sorry ass country is cause to go down a quick sidestreet.

So we were looking at private plane emissions of 400 kg per person per hour.

Commercial jet plane emissions of 100 kg per person per hour.

And if the US had the equivalent of Japanese bullet trains, that trip would be a whopping four kg of carbon per person per hour according to this Japan Times report on the country’s progress toward going carbon neutral by 2050.

So that disgust you felt at the top of the post, now you can spread it around! Not only are the 1% killing the planet by putting convenience over common sense, the US government continues to stymie progress at every turn. This country can’t catch up to the rest of the world because big corporations have lobbyists that pay our politicians to keep us chained to poor options and few choices.

But that Sprite you’re struggling to drink with a mushy straw will change everything.