Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has been exposed as a hypocrite by an automated Twitter account that has revealed the heavy use of his private jet even amid his climate change activism.
The automated Twitter account, ZucJet, is a bot that uses public data to simply calculate and report the distance, fuel use, fuel cost, and estimated CO2 emissions put out by Zuckerberg’s private jet as he and his staff use it on a near daily basis.
In just two months, for instance, the ZucJet bot has chronicled Zuckerberg’s jet creating a carbon footprint that was 15 times larger than the average American’s annual carbon output, Fox News reported.
One statistic that the bot found was that in that two-month period, Zuckerberg’s Gulfstream G650 has burned up more than $158,000 worth of jet fuel, Fox noted.
The fuel was spent across 28 trips between Aug. 20 and Oct. 15, according to the data revealed by the flight tracking software ADS-B Exchange created by programmer Jack Sweeney.
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The jet crisscrossed much of the United States from Zuckerberg’s home base in San Jose, California, to the East Coast and back again, making stops in states including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and others, according to Fox.
“In that time span, Zuckerberg’s private jet emitted more than 253 metric tons of carbon, a greenhouse gas that experts say is contributing to global warming and climate change,” Fox reported.
“By comparison, the average American has a total carbon footprint of 16 tons a year while the average person worldwide burns about 4 tons a year,” Fox added citing The Nature Conservancy.
Here are two recent postings on the ZucJet Twitter account with the information about the plane’s fuel use and estimated CO2 emissions:
729 mile (634 NM) flight from SJC to JAC
~ 809 gallons (3,061 liters).
~ 5,419 lbs (2,458 kg) of jet fuel used.
~ $5,361 cost of fuel.
~ 9 tons of CO2 emissions.— Zucc Jet (@ZuccJet) October 21, 2022
All this despite Zuckerberg’s constant proclamations that he is fighting to stop global warming. Indeed, he announced last year that he had launched a Facebook “fact checking” scheme to stop so-called “climate misinformation” on his social media platform.
The Facebook climate change initiative came as the platform faced pressure from the White House and others over its response to perceived misinformation circulating on Facebook.
President Joe Biden had even gone so far as to accuse Facebook of “killing people” for not adequately squelching free speech on the social media platform.
Along with lending his social media platform to combat “climate disinformation,” Zuckerberg has also been a big climate change donor, Fox added.
Zuckerberg even brought up climate change during his 2017 commencement address to Harvard University, according to Fox, saying, “It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved in manufacturing and installing solar panels?”
“We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics,” he told the graduates. “Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.”
Making his jet-hopping trips an even bigger example of hypocrisy, when he launched his new Meta rebranding for Facebook, with its emphasis on “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” technology, Zuckerberg said the virtual reality tech would be “better for society and the planet” than traveling on “cars and planes and all that,” according to Fox, citing a Zuckerberg interview with the tech site The Information in 2021.
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Zuckerberg’s new Meta project, though, has had other troubles. Only a month ago Zuckerberg’s site was found guilty of violating the intellectual property of another company when it used the new name.
Late last year, Zuckerberg’s credibility also took a hit when a Washington Post-Schar School poll found 72 percent of Americans had little to no trust in how Facebook handled private, personal data.
Then, in February of this year, Facebook announced it had experienced a decline in users for the first time ever. Zuckerberg reportedly lost an estimated $29 billion from the resulting drop in Facebook stock value.
Zuckerberg has enough trouble without being exposed as a climate change hypocrite. But the accusation is hard to avoid when his own carbon footprint is 15 times larger than the average American’s. If Zuck wants to “save the earth,” he might do well to start by looking at his own behavior.
