MEDIUM: Infographic, Map, Data Visualization
DESCRIPTION:
This poster displays all of the trips of private jets owned by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk between July 2021 – 2022. The arrows are weighted by cumulative estimated carbon emissions for flights between those cities for that time period. All data collected for this project is publicly available and was collected from globe.adsbexchange.com.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
The inspirations for this project are Bill Bunge’s Nuclear War Atlas, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. I started seeing an “emissions calculator” on airline ticketing sites that compared emissions of different flights. As someone who flies once or at most twice a year this was frustrating when I knew how much the wealthiest in our society fly private (I didn’t realize then just HOW MUCH THEY FLY!) While I believe that we all need to take responsibility for reducing our consumption in the ways that we can, controlling the absurd, frivolous, and unethical resource hoarding of the ultra-rich can go a long way to slowing climate change. Those who have the most agency over their ability to reduce their consumption are also those who are consuming the most.
