Although the use of private jets has traditionally been associated with business travel, Sumar believes that this is now changing and that it is now more linked to luxury holiday and tourist activity, as reflected in a report published by Greenpeace last September. According to data from the report on luxury tourism and its impact, carried out by T3 Transportation Think Tank, conventional tourism on scheduled flights and luxury tourism on private jet flights had a very similar seasonal pattern in 2023.
The study, which analyses private jet landings at 45 airports in the most important tourist and holiday destinations across Europe during that year, recorded 117,965, 42.6% of them between 1 June and 30 September, which represents 41.6% of CO2 emissions. In Spain, there were 27,122 private jet landings in 2023, 23% of the total for the countries analysed in the report: 7,502 at Palma airport, 6,504 in Ibiza, 6,314 at Málaga airport, 4,826 at Barcelona-El Prat airport, 843 at Menorca airport, 542 at Tenerife South airport, 434 at Gran Canaria airport, 93 at Lanzarote airport and 83 at Tenerife North airport. Those 27,122 flights - a third of them ‘very short-haul’ - emitted some 134,000 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of some 89,300 cars powered by fossil fuel.
With regard to luxury yachts, Sumar points out that they have more than doubled since 2000, with 150 new vessels every year (globally and with data from 2021), and that, despite the fact that they remain docked for most of the year, approximately 22% of their total emissions are generated during this period of inactivity.
In its non-legislative proposal, to which EFE has had access, the parliamentary group chaired by the Vice-President of the Government and Minister for Labour, Yolanda Díaz, argues that these yachts also tend to have support vessels for their personnel, helicopters that also need fuel and air-conditioned facilities.
Oxfam estimates that the annual carbon footprint of each of these vessels amounts to an average of 5,672 tonnes, an amount that is well over three times the emissions generated by the private planes of the ‘billionaires’ and equivalent to the emissions of an ‘ordinary’ person for 860 years.
“This type of transport is the most unequal, unjust and polluting in a world facing both a global energy crisis and an accelerating climate crisis that threaten millions of lives,” argues Sumar, who maintains that “those who pollute the most must not only respond to the ‘polluter pays’ principle, but also to the principle of polluting less, as the rest of the public does.”
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