It's a big football weekend. And for private jets.
Nothing about Las Vegas is measured in moderation. The fluorescent buildings are towering and deliberately bright. Around casino floors, at pool parties and on the Vegas Strip, crowds of tourists play chicken with their alcohol tolerance levels and credit card limits every day.
With the Super Bowl, the nation's largest annual sporting event, taking place in the desert city on Sunday, the crowds (a.m an estimated 450,000 visitors) and the celebrations are expected to become even bigger and more lively.
But it's not just the hotels and casinos that will be busy in the days leading up to the big game, between the San Francisco 49ers and the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs: About 1,000 private planes are expected at Las Vegas airports.
And that's a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Emission levels from a mega-event like this from air traffic and energy consumption in a day are at least double what they would be on average,” said Benjamin Leffel, assistant professor of public policy sustainability at the University of Nevada. , Las Vegas.
The Super Bowl is one of the biggest annual private jet attractions in the United States. For last year's competition in Glendale, Arizona, 562 business jets arrived at area airports. The 2022 event in Los Angeles saw 752 arrivals, according to business aviation tracker WingX.
This year, officials say the Super Bowl could rival November's Las Vegas Grand Prix, for which WingX reported 927 business jet arrivals at the city's three airports.
“It is expected that the Super Bowl will see a similar level,” Joe Rajchel, spokesman for the Clark County Department of Aviation, which covers Las Vegas, said in an email.
One of those flights could take Taylor Swift from a concert appearance in Tokyo to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who plays for the Chiefs. She has two private jets at her disposal that can make the 5,548 mile journey. The problem for her is that the Las Vegas airports will be so busy A landing slot may not be available.
(But perhaps a spot would miraculously open up. When Ms. Swift flew from New Jersey's Morristown Airport to Baltimore for the AFC championship game on Jan. 28, in which the Chiefs advanced to the Super Bowl, Fox News estimated that the flight resulted in three tons of CO2 emissions. That prompted Liz Plank, who writes a newsletter called Airplane Mode, to note that Swifties could do anything because they had Fox reporting on climate change.)
Quantifying the exact CO2 emissions of a cluster of private aircraft is a challenge. Most municipal authorities in the United States, including Clark County, do not track emissions. A 2023 Greenpeace report It is estimated that private plane travel worldwide will emit 573,000 tons of carbon dioxide by 2022.
According to Klara Maria Schenk, a transport campaigner for Greenpeace based in Vienna, the estimate used a measurement system based on data from WingX and the Small Emitters Tool, a calculator developed by Eurocontrol, the agency that manages air traffic in Europe. But setting the right parameters and ensuring consistency around massive amounts of aeronautical data is difficult.
“There can be small mistakes,” Ms. Schenk said. “But generally speaking, if you have all this data, you can calculate the emissions from the machines to the best scientific standards.”
By comparison, Ms. Schenk's team calculated that the 1,040 private jet flights that landed in Davos for the World Economic Forum last year produced carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 350,000 cars in a week.
Las Vegas already faces energy, heat and drought challenges. These problems, and emissions and pollution from private aircraft, are raising concerns among some local residents.
Jaime Brousse takes her two children, who are in elementary school, to watch sleek executive jets take off and land at Henderson Executive Airport, about 13 miles south of Las Vegas. She noticed a spike in private planes and pollution during the recent Formula 1 event.
“It's easy to see the layer of smog over the city,” said Ms Brousse, 42. “I know most of that comes from cars, but you can't help but think all those private jets probably aren't helping.”
Dr. Leffel said he was concerned about the fallout beyond Nevada.
“When consumers, when the high rollers fly in, that's a planetary problem that, for a while, puts nominally more emissions into the atmosphere,” he said. “That small margin accelerates climate change.”
What could be the solutions? There are regulations, which could include higher taxes or a ban on private plane flights. Locally, the Brightline West, a high-speed electric rail line that connects Los Angeles to Las Vegas in just over two hours, is expected to be an environmental game changer. The opening is scheduled for 2028.
But even with that alternative, Dr. Ask a question.
“Will the top 1 percent use it?” he asked.