How much pollution did Obama’s birthday party cause?

A lot of people talked about Barack Obama having a 60th birthday party in Martha’s Vineyard where people such as Oprah, George Clooney, Stephen Spielberg and many other attended.

The guest list was originally 500 people, but cut to 200 after backlash over COVID.

I found the COVID debate amusing, but something else I found interesting were the amount of private jets involved in getting everyone there.

Martha’s Vineyard had a main airport which reported it was backed up from so many private jets flying in.

This is an airport which online says it can hold over 100 private jets easily.

There wasn’t a clear jet count done and nobody knows where exactly they flew from, but thought it’d be an interesting challenge.

Most of the guests coming are from Southern California.

It takes 6 hours and 16 minutes to go from LA to Martha’s Vineyard via private jet.

Private jets have a huge range in gas use, but the average seems about 370 gallons an hour.

Round trip, that would be 4,632 gallons of gas consumed for one jet.

There’s no actual count on private jets used, but from Google, I found a minimum of 10 jets used and everyone was someone from LA or Southern California.

Keeping it simple, that 4,632 number gets us 46,320 gallons of gas used round trip.

It’s important to know the average driver in the US consumes 656 gallons of gas per year for driving.

This means one round trip from LA to Martha’s Vineyard consumed what 7 Americans would consume for an entire year driving.

Getting worse, those 10 jets pulled in what 70 people produce.

Looking at who attended, the private jet count was likely way over 10 and while some flew a little closer, there were some flying from Europe or South America in.

This post isn’t about Obama, but it’s about a visible hypocrisy.

Stephen Spielberg
George Clooney
Oprah

Each one arrived in a private jet and just a quick Google search has them linked to some form of environmental activism.

And it’s not about this one party.

This happens every Oscar night, Golden Globes and so on.

Private jets are fine and really cool to fly in, but when there’s an entire crowd going which praises the environment publicly and acts like this privately, it’ll make people take environmentalist less serious.