Between 1.5 and 2 tonnes of CO2 emitted for between 1,200 and 1,400 liters of fuel spent, over a distance of just over 600 kilometres. This is the carbon footprint of the round trip made by private plane by the new Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, and their staff, on the day of the start of the school year. All in just 1h20, a one-way ticket lasting around 38 minutes.
“20 Minutes” explains to you, in the video placed at the top of this article, the calculation of the carbon footprint of the two ministers, and what they could have saved by choosing another mode of travel.
A very polluting means of transport
Leaving from Vélizy-Villacoublay air base 107 on September 4, at the end of the morning, Gabriel Attal and Élisabeth Borne borrowed a Dassault Falcon 7X to reach Rennes, where a car was waiting to take them to the Amandine Mallet elementary school, in Saint-Germain-sur-Ille. A trip that earned them to be lambasted on social networks, in the media and by their opponents.
Beyond the reasons of “security” and “busy schedule” invoked by the comm service of the Prime Minister’s Office, it is above all the nonsense of this plane trip that has been pointed out by its detractors. In view of the reality of climate change but also of the various measures taken by the government since 2017 to limit air travel.
Because, by making this journey, the Prime Minister and her Minister of Education emitted, on average, 2 tonnes of CO2, depending on the carbon footprint calculator used, a private flight being, in fact, more emitting than a flight for the general public, in particular due to the much smaller number of passengers.
According to a report by the NGO Transport and environmentprivate jet flights would even be, for each passenger, “5 to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes and 50 times more polluting than trains”.
Sources:
– THE carbon footprint calculator from the Ecological Transition Agency (Ademe).
– THE carbon footprint calculator of the GoodPlanet Foundation.
– The website compareprivateplanes.com which makes it possible to refine the calculation by taking into account the specificities of private flights.
– The company website Aerobusiness specializing in the rental of private jets, which specifies that it takes, on average, “3.5 liters of fuel for 10 kilometers and per passenger”.
– THE X@Flottepresident account estimates which takes the data from the site ADS-B Exchangea collaborative platform that attempts to catalog data from flights around the world.