Here’s How Starbucks’ New CEO’s 2,000-mile-a-week Flights Could Be Harming the Environment
The world’s largest coffee chain Starbucks It was recently announced that it had poached Chipotle’s Current CEO Brian Niccol, and he’ll be commuting all the way from Newport Beach, California to SeattleWashington every week to meet Starbucks‘combined work policy. The distance between John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California and Seattle International Airport is more than 1,000 miles, and Niccol’s Invitation claims that he can use the company plane to travel from the city where he lives to the company headquarters. The reality is, a 2,000-mile round trip weekly on a private jet creates a huge carbon footprint.
According to Flightaware.comStarbucks’ corporate jet is a 2007 Gulfstream G550, a 20-seat jet powered by two Rolls-Royce BR710 turbofan engines that burns about 450 gallons of fuel per hour of operation on average. The flight from Orange County to Seattle takes nearly two hours, meaning the jet burns 900 gallons of fuel each way. Transport & Environment, a European clean-transportation advocacy group, says private jets can emit 2 tons of CO2 per hour of operation, so Niccol’s weekly commute is likely to release about 4 tons of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere.
To put that into perspective, the average American’s annual CO2 emissions are around 16 tons. That means that this aspect of the new Starbucks CEO’s monthly commute is likely to be equivalent to the average American’s annual carbon footprint. The average European Union citizen emits an average of 8.2 tons of emissions per year, which would take Niccol just two weeks of commuting to surpass. Note that it’s not certain that Niccol will fly the G550 every week, but this is the best guess we have right now. According to Washington Post:
“Brian’s primary office and the majority of his time will be spent in our Seattle Support Center or traveling to visit partners and customers in our stores, roasteries, roasting facilities and offices around the world,” Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Trull said in an emailed statement Thursday. “Brian’s schedule will meet or exceed the hybrid work guidelines and workplace expectations we have for all partners.”
In 2020, Starbucks set a public goal of cutting its carbon emissions from its direct operations and supply chain in half by 2030. In March, Starbucks released an environmental and sustainability review, in which the coffee giant revealed that its greenhouse gas emissions had actually increased by 8 percent since its 2019 baseline. Bringing Niccol on board and admitting his remote work will make it significantly harder for the company to meet its emissions reduction goals, but that doesn’t matter to the company as long as he increases shareholder value. During his time as Chipotle’s CEO, the company’s stock has increased 773 percent. according to CNBC, So Starbucks and its shareholders probably don’t care about the environmental devastation that Niccol’s commute might cause.
