Taylor Swift is a pop icon whose Eras Tour has been a worldwide phenomenon and a business mogul who’s reportedly managed to become a billionaire off the force of her music alone. To some people her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce makes her “couple goals.” But to certain right-wing circles on the internet, she’s become a favorite punching bag, not to mention a potential psy-op from the Pentagon. (Or is it the CIA?)
Case in point: a recent article from Fox News dinging Swift for flying on her personal plane from New Jersey to Maryland on Sunday to watch Kelce (and the Chiefs) play in the AFC championship game against the Baltimore Ravens. According to a Reddit account that tracks Swift’s jet and was cited in the Fox News article, that trip “cost $1,328 for the fuel and produced three tons of CO2 emissions.”
Every so often, Fox News comes dangerously close to making a solid point before swerving at the last second to avoid it. Here, it rightly calls out celebrities disproportionately adding to carbon dioxide emissions by flying ridiculously short distances on private planes. Fox News doesn’t, however, explain why carbon dioxide emissions are bad. The issue, as the network sees it, is that Swift is the one who produced them.
Every so often, Fox News comes dangerously close to making a solid point before swerving at the last second to avoid it.
Carbon emissions, which have been rising since the dawn of the Industrial Age but now are mostly caused by burning fossil fuels, are the primary driver of manmade climate change. As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, so, too, has the average global temperature. The world recently tipped over the 1.5-degree Celsius marker that climate scientists have warned would herald an unprecedented shift in weather patterns, wildlife vulnerability and humans’ ability to mitigate the effects on society. And yet the Fox News piece manages to avoid linking carbon…
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