This Twitter bot is exposing celebrities taking three-minute private jet flights

You know what they say: climate change is a societal problem, requiring widespread overhaul of our way of life, and shaming individuals might just be counterproductive.

But still, don’t take a four-minute flight on a private jet.

That’s what someone using Floyd Mayweather’s private jet did yesterday – a fact we know thanks to Celebrity Jets, a Twitter bot dedicated to tracking the ludicrously short journeys of the rich and famous.

The flight by Mayweather’s jet was seemingly from one side of Las Vegas to the other. But that looked positively long-haul compared to a three-minute flight taken by Kylie Jenner’s jet a couple of days earlier.

The flight saved its passengers a precious 37 minutes, given a drive between the two cities would have taken 40. Accounting for take-off, landing, taxiing, and boarding, it’s unclear exactly how many seconds were saved.

With all that in mind, it’s surprising Jenner’s jet didn’t need a stopover to complete a marathon 12-minute journey a couple of days later.

Other short flights revealed by Celebrity Jets include a 25-minute voyage by Steven Spielberg’s plane.

In many cases, the jets make multiple journeys a day. As well as flight duration, the Celebrity Jets bot shows flight path data, and also tells us carbon emissions.

Just 1 per cent of the world’s population were responsible for half of global carbon emissions from aviation in 2018, a study found.

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So-called frequent-flying “super emitters” who flew an average of 35,000 miles a year stood in contrast to the 89 per cent of the global population who did not take a flight.

The study estimated the value of the damage caused by aviation emissions to be $100bn.

Emissions from private jets rose faster than emissions from commercial air travel, another study found.

Unless there’s a secret network of celebrities air-couriering heart transplants to exclusively nice areas, it’s hard to see the justification.

• The government’s jet zero strategy for climate-friendly flying has been labelled a failure