Four months after Taylor Swift shrugged off concerns about the environmental harm caused by her private-plane use with the quip, “Jet lag is a choice,” she’s being called out again by one of her least favorite people for the some 178,000 miles her two jets flew in 2023 and the massive amount of CO2 they emitted in the process.
Jack Sweeney, the University of Florida college junior who’s become known as Swift’s plane “stalker,” has presented a video that visually shows how the pop star’s planes criss-crossed the United States and the globe an estimated 170 times in 2023, amassing a number of miles that is equivalent of flying around the earth seven times. Her planes also emitted 1,200 tons of CO2 in the process, 83 times the average American, according to Jack Sweeney.
Certainly, some of this travel was due to Swift traveling for her Eras Tour but, according to published accounts, she also took a number of plane trips for pleasure, including to see her NFL star boyfriend, Travis Kelce, play in games in different U.S. cities.
Sweeney’s video also quoted Swift as saying, “Jet lag is a choice.” That’s a comment she made after leaving her tour in Japan in February to make a quick trip to Las Vegas for the sole purpose of watching boyfriend Kelce and his Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl.
The fact that Sweeney posted the video shows that he hasn’t been deterred by a cease-and-desist letter sent by Swift’s lawyer earlier this year, threatening to “pursue any and all legal remedies” if he didn’t stop using his social media accounts to track the travels of the mega-star’s jets.
Before Sweeney’s run-in with Swift, he had become known for running accounts that post information about the takeoffs and landings of jet planes and helicopters owned by celebrities and billionaires, such as Swift and Elon Musk, as well as politicians, Russian oligarchs and other public figures, the Washington Post reported. His posts also have shared estimates of the carbon dioxide that these aircraft are emitting into the environment. The accounts use publicly available data from the Federal Aviation Administration, while volunteer hobbyists track the aircraft via the signals they broadcast, the Post also said.
Swift’s attorney alleged that Sweeney’s posts about the trips her jets make constituted “stalking and harassing behavior,” as the Washington Post reported.
“While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our client,” the letter read.
“Ms. Swift has dealt with stalkers and other individuals who wish her harm since she was a teenager,” the letter continued. “The reality has forced our Client to live her life in a constant state of fear for her personal safety.”
The Sun reported that Swift’s spokesperson went so far as to say that an Instagram account Sweeney dedicated to Swift’s jet travel had a “connection” to a man being arrested in January outside her townhouse in Manhattan.
But Sweeney told The Sun that he has not heard from Swift’s lawyers since their cease-and-desist letter to him went public.
“Nothing (has happened),” Sweeney said, according to The Sun. “I’m not really surprised.”
“It’s pretty much like with Elon, you know, they’ll say something to intimidate the smaller person,” Sweeney also said.
Sweeney is referring to his run-in with the Tesla CEO in 2002, sparking a debate about free speech and the public’s right to certain information on X, Musk’s own social media platform. Musk publicly slammed Sweeney for tracking his jet on X, accused him of publishing his “assassination coordinates” and offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop, but Sweeney refused, The Sun reported.
Sweeney said celebrities like Swift and Musk don’t like getting this sort of attention, but the college junior said that it’s important to bring “awareness.”
In an interview with the Post about his accounts tracking Swift, Sweeney also they offered “an incomplete sketch” of cities Swift might be visiting, similar to publicly available schedules for her concerts or NFL games she might attend. The accounts moreover don’t say whether Swift is actually traveling on an aircraft being tracked, or where she or other passengers go once the planes land.
Sweeney also isn’t the first person to call the “Anti-Hero” singer out for her excessive private-jet use. A 2022 report by Yard, a U.K.-based digital media marketing company, estimated that she was one of “the top 10 celebrity CO2 offenders.”
Even in 2022, when Swift was not on tour, she racked up a total of 170 flights between January and July of that year, Yard found. She spent an estimated 22,923 minutes in the air — or 15.9 days — with her total emissions amounting to 1,185 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions.
The week before Swift flew from Japan to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl, she also had been in Los Angeles for the Grammys. According to the Associated Press, this meant she needed to make a 19,400-mile round trip from the United States to Japan and back in less than a week. Two days after the game, she was back on a plane, flying another 8,000 miles from Las Vegas to Melbourne, Australia for the next stop on her tour.