Today, Explained - The air-istocracy

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Private jets aren’t what they used to be. AOC is calling out Hollywood executives for having too many, and European nations are trying to ban them. People are even saying Taylor Swift’s the problem. But wait until you hear who’s really paying for them. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Private jets aren't what they used to be. AOC is mad about them. This is a fight against the endless pursuit of more wealth. How many private jets does David Sasswell see? British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got called out for taking a PJ to make a big green energy announcement. Let me just ask you finally before you go, how are you getting up here to make this green announcement today?

Private jet? I'll be flying as I normally would, and that is the most efficient use of my time. A bunch of European nations are thinking about banning them. France has enacted its ban on domestic short-haul flights between many major cities. People are even saying Taylor Swift's the problem. Talk about champagne problems. But a spokesperson for Taylor is telling E! News you need to calm down. Why the tide is suddenly turning on the aristocracy, coming up on Today Explained. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer

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I've been on them on the ground. I have never been flying through the air on a private jet. No one's asked me yet. Me neither, man. Me neither. I don't know what's wrong. But I hear you were recently surrounded by them in Geneva, maybe? I found myself in Geneva, Switzerland recently. I was taking part in a professional capacity at a convention, basically, for what they call business jets, which is essentially the same thing as private jets, the kind of executive jets. You can call them different things. But it's the same deal.

We're talking about jets that are generally larger than a Cessna, but smaller than a 737, although they do make versions of 737s that are business jets. And increasingly, they're used not for business purposes, but for just people's personal use. But not everyone was happy to see these jets. Is that right? Yes, that's right. While I was at this convention, about 100 climate activists broke through security, climbed over fences, ran onto the tarmac and handcuffed themselves to

some of the jets that were on display there for the potential customers to look at. And it caused quite a kerfuffle, quite a lot of consternation. It was front-page news in Geneva the next day and really made headlines around the world. A Greenpeace campaigner said there was a recent rise of 64% in private jet flights in Europe. The climate crisis is escalating every day. And at the same time, a super rich, very small elite keeps polluting as if there is no tomorrow. This needs to stop.

This is something that the business jet, private jet industry is really terrified of, finding themselves in the crosshairs of the climate movement coming to be seen as sort of the face of global income inequality. And in fact, the theme of the conference that I was attending was about environmentally friendly aviation, green business jets. They want to be seen as being environmentally friendly, and they just functionally aren't. They have this idea that by the year 2050, they're going to be carbon neutral.

To get there, we have a bold plan that involves using sustainable fuels and radical technologies, aided by flight efficiencies and offsetting. It's a plan that needs industry and governments to work closely together. That somehow, you know, you're going to be flying through the air at 40,000 feet and you're going to somehow not be burning kerosene. There's various ways that you can propose to do that. That's why I was actually there to moderate a discussion panel on that topic. I was there because I'd written an article for Businessweek on whether it's feasible to either use batteries or use some kind of kerosene substitute that is made without fossil fuels. And I had concluded it's pretty much not possible, but they still invited me to host this talk.

So yeah, it's a really potentially existential problem for the makers of these small jets. The big question is, what if these baskets of measures, for example, sustainable aviation fuels, carbon offsetting, even the new technologies like the hydrogen aircraft, the electrical aircraft, if these solutions did not pay off by 2050, so what's plan B for the industry?

And the protesters, sounds like they weren't buying a green future for private jets either. They don't buy it. I mean, they are trying to draw attention to this problem that they see, not unreasonably in my estimation, as being potentially life-threatening for civilization and humanity. We're talking about people who have fortunes of about 1.3 billion euros on average. So if it's a question of asking them to pay a small toll, it won't change much. That's why I think we need a ban, a ban on flights taken on a whim. We need to bring them back down to earth. For the last decade or two, we have seen steady increases in income inequality throughout the world. And the rich are getting richer and the rich are kind of getting more and more irresponsible. We're seeing people like buy beloved social media sites and just

trash them just because they can. That know? That seems rather pointed, Jeff. I mean, I'm not speaking of anyone in particular, but that sort of thing is happening. There was an increase of people using private jets for their personal use because of the pandemic. And you're getting these kind of headlines. It's like a drip, drip, drip, right? It all adds up.

A 17-minute flight taken by Kylie Jenner. Kylie has received a lot of criticism from fans since her Instagram post on Saturday, which shows her hugging Travis in front of their private planes, writing, you want to take mine or yours? A 15-minute flight taken by Elon Musk, you know? Tonight, a popular Twitter account that tracked Musk's private jet has been suspended. The move comes just one month after Musk touted his commitment to free speech. It's terrible publicity and people are sort of suddenly realizing that they're fed up and this is kind of, they find something annoying. And I think it's annoying for a whole bunch of reasons that maybe people don't even articulate to

themselves, but they just see a headline about Kylie Jenner taking a 13 minute flight and they're like, this is annoying to me. One user commented, whose plane should we pollute the earth today? Another added, what about combating climate change? And another writing, girl, what am I recycling for? Why are celebrities like Kylie Jenner and known failures like Elon Musk taking these wildly short flights? It's almost like, you know, there's this famous theory of conspicuous consumption, that it's a way to demonstrate your wealth. The design options feature luxurious dressing rooms, breathtaking bathrooms, futuristic cinematic systems, state-of-the-art relaxation lounges,

and even a Turkish-style steam bath. If you're flying in this incredibly lavish manner that's known to be radically expensive, and you're doing it for flights, you could probably ride your bicycle that distance. It just seems like, well, I must be incredibly rich that I'm able to do something so dumb. How expensive are private jets these days? You know, it's expensive, but for different reasons. I mean, there's the plane itself, which can cost anything from a couple million to like hundreds of millions.

This jet belongs to Prince Al-Walid in Talal of Saudi Arabia. He owns an Airbus A380 with a mind-blowing price tag of $600 million. You know, you have to hire a staff. You've got to have a, you know, the whole point of a private jet is you can hop on and go wherever you want, whenever you want. But to do that, you have to have a pilot and maybe a first officer even. You've got to have maintenance people.

And then you have to, you know, then there's like maintenance costs, fuel costs. You know, you're talking about maybe on the order of $10,000, $20,000 an hour to fly somewhere. It's almost one of these, if you have to ask, you can't afford it type of things. But if you can't afford it, you probably can still get on one, right? You can rent one, you can charter one. You can charter one. They have these things now called fractional ownership. You can buy sort of like a club membership where you'd pay an amount. They let you fly like a certain number of hours per year. There's all different kinds of ways that people have come up with to kind of slice and dice the cake. And they are sort of varying degrees of cool, right?

Like if you show up in an Uber, it's different than if you show up in your own Lamborghini or something. And what's the Lamborghini of private jets these days? They sell 787s that are private. There was a scene in Succession. Let's say that there is an important character to whom something important happens on a Boeing business jet, which is a 737. So if you've ever flown to Chicago from LaGuardia, you probably were on something like a 737. And these are configured to carry not like 150 people, but to carry you, right? I'm glad you brought up that show because I think there's probably

never been a television show where you see more private jet action than succession. I can't believe I'm on a private plane. It's like I'm in a band. Very white, very wealthy band. It's like I'm in U2. Is there more private jet activity lighting up our skies right now than ever before? It seems that way. Well, I mean, I think if you look at the actual numbers, there's a lot of fluctuation because it went way down when COVID first hit, and then it went way up after people realized that this was how they could get around without getting infected. So the trend is, it's fairly inelastic, I would say. There wasn't a sudden increase in people who could afford this sort of thing, and there wasn't a huge increase in the number of planes available. The trend line is more or less up, but not in a fantastically

different way. When I wrote the story, I said, having sort of been on hand for this climate activist action in Geneva, I included the observation that that sort of thing doesn't happen in the United States so much. But in between me writing it and them running it, actually, there was an action at East Hampton Airport where a group of climate activists, including Abigail Disney, did a very similar thing. Huh. I'm sick and tired of watching people take off in private planes to ask them to talk about the freaking environment. The level of hypocrisy is sickening. And so we're kind of seeing this sort of outrage and real-world action spreading to the United States. And it's a sea change between being willing to post something on TikTok

about how angry you are and actually, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, as it were, and going out and doing in business class aspires to be in first class and everyone in first class aspires to have a private jet waiting in the wings to board and fly anywhere you want on a whim. It's shaming celebrities, be it, you know, Kylie Jenner or Elon Musk or Taylor Swift, who I remember caught some heat maybe a year or two ago for letting all her friends use her private jet. Really going to do anything? I mean, at the end of the day, rich people are going to rich. I mean, yeah, but that's part of being a human, isn't it? We want to do things that we shouldn't want to do. And we probably do them anyway, even though we know better. We all know that we should do less to generate carbon dioxide, to generate greenhouse gases. And, you know, we have to figure out how to be better people. And yeah, it's easy to be mad at people who fly private jets because

that's not us. It's, you know, you're being mad at somebody that seems very far removed. I put the glow on the wrist I got that glow on my I keep the drum on the test How about the color then baby Won't you tell That you tried Hopping on McLaren Please let's just vibe Hopping on McLaren Baby tell me why you stare

Jeff Wise wrote about the aristocracy For New York Magazine Find his piece at newYorkMag.com. We're going to give you a real reason to be mad about private jets when we're back on Today Explained. Heck, I'll give it to you right now. Even if you're not flying on them, you're paying for them. More on that in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. A to K to K to snake. All of the groups are exotic and I'm done with you, babe. Yeah.

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All right, give me a luxury. What luxury should I have? Private plane. Larry, I'm on Today Explained. I'm Chuck Collins, and I'm a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where I co-edit inequality.org. We've studied the impact of private jets with a series of reports called High Flyers, and we did a recent report just on the most recent impact of private aviation. And for the sake of this interview, let me ask, are you now or have you ever been on a private jet? Well, I'm not currently on a private jet, which is probably good for us being able to talk.

I have been on a private jet. I co-authored a book with Bill Gates Sr., the father of the founder of Microsoft. So I flew on his private jet, which meant you drive right up to Plainside. There's no security. You get to load your golf clubs and your hunting rifles and guns right on. Nobody pats you down or takes away your water bottle. And you have this one flight attendant for like four passengers. So it's pretty cushy.

So it's fair to say that you understand the appeal of a private jet. Yeah, especially after when you fly commercial these days, it just almost feels like barbaric and crowded and the delays. And I do have a friend, Stephen Prince, who has a private jet and he says it's addictive. It's very, very hard to go back to flying commercial after you've had the luxury of flying private. But now Stephen is planning to sell his jet. The gift card mogul has owned half a dozen private jets and is now selling his last one after realizing he couldn't ignore the cost to the climate and to future generations. He just thinks it's wrong. It's too luxurious. And he's started to really come to understand the emissions impact.

What has he started to understand about the emissions impact? Well, he was reviewing the report we did in May that showed that passengers on private jets burn somewhere between 10 and 20 times more emissions per passenger than a commercial flyer. And he's becoming more sensitized to the impact of climate change. It's hard not to these days with the disrupted weather. And he's saying, well, I don't really want to be part of this problem.

This is something I can do. It is addictive. It's hard to, it's a hard thing to give up. Flying privately is probably the coolest thing that I've ever done that money has provided me the access to. But I feel like I have to put my money where my mouth is in terms of this climate issue. Another important thing is that we, as the rest of the flying public and taxpayers, basically subsidize this luxury travel. Say what? So private aviation counts about one out of six flights. So they basically use about 16% of the airspace, but they only chip in about 2% of the fees to operate the air traffic control system.

So there's a bunch of airports that are just private jet airports that we all help pay for. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Chuck, do you think if people, if regular people, if the salt of the earth people out there knew that they were subsidizing Bill Gates's dad and Bill Gates himself and Taylor Swift and Elon Musk, all their private travel,

that we would see a ban on private jets like tomorrow? I think that the public would be shocked. And I think that's part of the point here is these folks are not paying the real full costs of their luxury travel. They're not paying the ecological costs in terms of the emissions, and they're not even paying their fair share of the air traffic system. And there's another argument, Sean, which is, you know, security experts do not believe the next 9-11 is going to be on a commercial aircraft. It's going to be a private jet. There's very little security regime. They check your name off when you get on. More and more private jets are

owned by shell companies where the owners are anonymous. There's very little security oversight of private jets compared to the commercial aviation sector. So the gap between those two is getting bigger. And the private jet lobby, which is a very powerful group, they want even more perks for private jet flyers. They want their data to be anonymous. They lobby every year so you and I can't look up the tail number and see if Taylor Swift took her jet for lunch for a 30-minute flight or whatever. So you're making three very compelling cases here against private jets, an exponentially higher ecological impact.

We, the humble taxpayer who flies coach or at best business class, maybe even first class, all of us, if we fly at all, are subsidizing private jet travel by the super rich. And then lastly, the next 9-11 may come from a private jet. I've seen murmurs of private jet bans out of countries like France, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Is anyone actually seriously considering this? Well, yes, I do think the European Union is ahead of the U.S.

France's transportation minister has taken notice and is calling for regulation in the name of climate equity. I think we need to act and regulate flights taken in private jets. They're becoming the symbol of a two-tiered system when it comes to effort. I think when people say we should decarbonize aviation, and we know that's going to be challenging, private jets are the logical starting point. And we had our U.S. Senator Ed Markey introduced legislation to tax private jet

fuel to increase the excise tax. That's why we need to pass my fat cat act to ground these fat cats and invest in the public infrastructure we so desperately need. It's currently 22 cents a gallon. Markey is proposing to raise it to $1.90 a gallon. That would raise almost $2 billion for green transit and infrastructure. So when people realize, A, we can discourage these jets, we can tax them, and that money could be channeled to green aviation or green transit that everybody could use. I think that's a winning politically popular program. Until we get there, how is it you think, you know, every third news story in a given week is about climate change, excessive heat, flooding, you name it. And yet people are taking 15-minute

private jet flights to get basically, I don't know, to someone's soccer practice or something like that. How are these two things happening at the same time, Chuck? Well, in some ways, I think it's a symptom of the extreme inequality we're living with. On the one hand, you have the ultra-rich who are kind of delinked from the ecological consequences of their actions. And you have everyone else who's saying, holy moly, you know, we're living in a disrupted future. The disruption is happening now. Near where I live, there's a private jet airport, Hanscom Field. And they're currently proposing to quadruple the private jet capacity. So this shows, you know, how many people are wanting to have private jets. But, you know,

what we've learned from just looking at it is that a high percentage of these flights are less than an hour, and half of them are going to vacation destinations. They're not even like the CEO flying to the board meeting or whatever. So the justification for the expansion is becoming more and more questionable. And our view is, just like we shouldn't be building new fossil fuel infrastructure, new coal plants and pipelines, we shouldn't be building new private jet infrastructure either. In 2017, the Trump tax cut included even more tax break for private jet owners. So we kind of have a Congress that's been captured by the private jet lobby.

But I do think popular pressure is just going to keep building for reform. Should we all be here three generations from now, our descendants, hopefully they'll look back and say, well, that was the turning point when you all started to tax and ban private jet travel on the way toward a more sustainable planet. Chuck Collins is with the Institute for Policy Studies. Their study on private jets is called High Flyers. Abishai Artsy produced our show while grounded in Los Angeles. He had help from Amina Alsadi, who edited, Laura Bullard, who fact-checked, and Michael Raphael, who mixed and mastered the program one last time. Thank you for hanging with us, Michael. Bon voyage

from Today Explained. Thank you.