Prime Minister Jean Castex used a jet to vote in his historic town. At the time of the alarming report of the IPCC, this immoderate use of a private plane went wrong.
Sunday April 10, 2022, Prime Minister Jean Castex takes off in a Falcon from Vélizy-Villacoublay (near Paris), to land in Perpignan at 8:30 a.m., before taking off again for the return trip at 10:30 a.m. The reason ? Jean Castex wanted to vote in Prades, the city of which he was mayor for a long time.
The sequence – which was intended to be symbolic, because he could have made a power of attorney – had the full attention of the cameras for images of a few minutes. But another symbol has come to overlap: that of pollution. Aviation is a very polluting means of transport, in particular because of the kerosene used as fuel (but also because of its production upstream). In total, this mode of transport represents about 5% of the sources of greenhouse gases.
The problem is particularly significant over short distances when the flight is really not necessary, so much so that one of the ecological issues is to favor the train rather than the plane on these journeys.
Several thousand kg of CO2 for a trip
In this case, the distance traveled represents almost 1,400 kilometers (Vélizy-Villacoublay to Perpignan, then the return), for finally less than two hours spent on site. If this journey took place in a conventional commercial aircraft, with several passengers, the carbon footprint would be more than 1,000 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) for the entire journey, according to the Ecotree calculator. It’s already huge: it represents 14 days of lighting the Eiffel Tower in comparison, according to the calculator.
But the fact is that Jean Castex’s flight was not a commercial flight, since he used a private jet from the Republic specifically for this brief trip. The carbon footprint is not the same: it is higher, since it is a flight dedicated to a single person. From the ComparePrivatePlanes calculator, where one can select the jet model (in this case a Dassault Falcon 900), the carbon footprint would be 2,230 kg for the distance, or a total of 4,460 kg for the round trip.
In the tweet went viral by Loup Espargilière, founder of the media Green, the journalist estimates that this total is equivalent to what a French person emits in 6 months. It turns out that a French person emits, on average, 32.6 kg of CO2 per day depending on his activities, which only reaches a figure of 4,460 kg after more than 5 months.
If the carbon footprint of Jean Castex’s vote has done so much controversy, it is because it comes at a pivotal moment: while ecology was not very present during the presidential election, the IPCC report warns of 2025 as the deadline for greenhouse gas emissions, which will then have to be reduced by 40% by 2030, in the hope of pinpointing the best scenario. In this context, the use of a private jet for a simple vote makes a bad impression.
This is not the first time that Jean Castex has been pinned on this subject. Early 2022, Mediapart conducted an investigation into his ” immoderate passion for Republic jets.