Like 400 Cars in One Day: The Ecological Impact of Jeff Bezos' Wedding in Venice
In just one day, with conservative estimates, Jeff Bezos 's wedding could be worth the pollution generated by around 400 cars. And this is only counting, always in the best of cases, the impact generated by the private jets used by the guests and not for example everything that can be entailed, in terms of emissions, by the logistics of a super wedding or other means, from ships to helicopters, particularly impactful for the environment. In Venice these are hot days not only for the weather but also for the protests related to the mega wedding of the owner of Amazon and his partner Lauren Sanchez planned for the weekend. Between limited airspace, dozens of taxi boats already booked, mega yachts and a context of pomp and extreme luxury, around two hundred guests from all over the world are expected in the lagoon and it is expected that there will be almost 100 private jets that will accompany them to Venice. Many of those planes come from the United States, like those of Kim Kardashian or Oprah Winfrey , others instead from Europe, like Bill Gates or Kylie Jenner . It is not possible to estimate exactly how much they will pollute, but an order of magnitude is provided by some data published in various reports and studies, such as the one published in Nature and published by an international group of researchers who certify that if there is a highly polluting means of transport, much more (even 14 times) than commercial airplanes, these are precisely private jets .
Calculating their CO2 emissions is complex because obviously you have to take into account routes, consumption and models, but several analyses - including those of Transport and Environment - agree that on average you can estimate 2 tons of CO2 per hour. A private jet from New York to Venice, for example, takes about 9 hours. On European routes, even considering that almost half of all private jets in the world (47.4%) are used for less than 500 kilometers, just over an hour. On average we therefore estimate 5 hours of flight, which between the outward and return journey becomes ten: this means at least 20 tons of CO2 per presence for those traveling on private flights, something more or less equal to the emissions of 400 cars.
"Disgusting," Angelo Bonelli , a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the Green and Left Alliance and spokesperson for Green Europe, tells Green&Blue bluntly, commenting on the news of the impact of the wedding. "It is an insult to poverty and the environment by the super-rich Bezos who buys Venice while his company sponsors the Israeli army that is massacring the Palestinian people. Today more than ever, faced with the climate crisis and wars, a tax on the world's super-rich is necessary, which could be worth 1,000 billion dollars a year to finance the fight against poverty, world hunger and the climate crisis," he concludes. An hour of flight on a private jet is comparable to more or less a quarter of the annual emissions of an average European citizen. Jets have increased by almost 30% in the last five years. The possible quantity - even if these are still forecasts - of private aircraft expected in Venice for a single private event, approximately 100 to be precise, is impressive in terms of numbers and impact.
At COP28 in Dubai, the great Climate Conference that hosts thousands of world leaders and delegates, there were 290. More than double that number were used at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year. For a social and climate issue, with a blitz in Piazza San Marco, Greenpeace and the group Everyone Hates Elon also called for a tax on Bezos and the super-rich who impact with their jets. On a banner unfurled in the square, activists reminded the magnate that "If you can rent Venice for your wedding, then you can pay more taxes", a message generally addressed to those "few billionaires who have lifestyles that are devastating for the planet, while on the other side there are the people who suffer the damage of the environmental crisis every day" said Simona Abbate of Greenpeace Italy. While Bezos' 417-foot superyacht, called Koru, could be moored in the lagoon's waters, Mr. Amazon's two private jets could appear in the airports, including the recent $80 million Gulfstream G650ER, another highly polluting aircraft.
In the latest Oxfam report on the impact of the super-rich, or 1% of the world's population, it was recalled that Bezos' two jets alone emit 2,908 tons of carbon dioxide per year, an amount that an average Amazon employee would not be able to emit in his entire life. And perhaps not even in three lives, considering that even in the most advanced economies, a citizen rarely produces more than 9 tons of CO2 in a year.
La Repubblica
