By now, most of us are trying to do things to make the environment better, or at least not make the immediate future any worse. We recycle, take shorter showers, install solar panels on our homes, bike/walk/take mass transit to work when we can, and make other adjustments to ease the strain that modern life can take on the planet. However, stars like Kim Kardashian have taken lots of flak for using private planes, and there was one time she even admitted to flying to Paris…just for one piece of cheesecake.
What Did Kim Kardashian Say About Using A Private Plane To Fly To Paris For Cheesecake?
I know what you’re thinking, “Why is using a private plane such a big deal? Celebrities do all kinds of things that the rest of us can’t.” Well, while we fly on planes that are frequently packed to the gills with strangers and might wish we could make use of our own private jets and flight crews, the truth is that the practice really ratchets up the carbon footprint of the person who uses them. A bigger spotlight was put on this just in 2022, when Kim Kardashian’s sisters Kylie Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian faced backlash for using private planes.
A Vogue interview that the SKIMS founder did in 2015 was recently unearthed by Unilad, and in it she details the time a pregnancy craving led her to ship herself to the City of Light for a sweet treat. As she said at the time:
I don’t like cheesecake and the cheesecake at Hotel Costes…! It’s heaven. I flew in, maybe a couple months ago, just to have a last hurrah of all the food that I'm not going to be able to have for a while. And I get there, and they tell me they didn't have it. And I was like, ‘You don't understand! I leave tomorrow!’ I think I flew for one night… And they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to get it!’ And they got it and it really made my day.
Stars! They’re just like…other stars, because this simply isn’t something I or anyone I know would even consider doing. Can you imagine? Paying at least $500 for a round trip ticket, then spending many (many) hours on a plane just to cross an ocean and get something you could totally have after a 30 minute car ride to your nearest Cheesecake Factory and then turning right around and coming home? No. Of course you can’t. And I’m gonna bet that’s because you don’t have the barest hint of access to a private jet.
Obviously, the expansive Kardashian-Jenner family isn’t the only group of celebrities to get some negative attention for their usage of planes of a private nature. In fact, all the backlash about them using the luxurious mode of travel led to a study being done in that same year to see which of our beloved famous folk was the worst offender in that area, and it turned out that Taylor Swift flew on a private plane the most in 2022 (by mid-July when the study was done, anyway), noting that her jets (yes…PLURAL!) added 8,293.54 metric tons of carbon dioxide flight emissions to the air across 170 trips, which was 22,923 minutes of flight time.
In fact, because of her Eras tour, and many adventures with boyfriend Travis Kelce, it led to a student tracking her private plane trips, and then getting a cease and desist letter from Swift’s lawyers, which one BBC presenter thought was the wrong move.
Basically, this all boils down to people who have resources the rest of us can’t quite fathom doing with them what they will, and as often as they want to. It might annoy some of us that the belly chain and black bikini aficionado dedicated carbon dioxide emissions to getting one piece of cheesecake, but rich folks are gonna use their money, and it’s probably best that we get used to them maybe not using it the way we think we would if we were in their position.
