We calculated the environmental impact of the new Starbucks CEO’s supercommute

Incoming Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol won’t be required to relocate to Seattle, where the coffee chain is headquartered. Instead, he’ll commute more than 1,000 miles from his home in Newport Beach, California—and he’ll do so with the use of the company’s corporate jet. It’s a big work perk that could also come with big carbon emissions.

Business travel already has a significant environmental impact. People who travel for work tend to have larger carbon footprints both because of the frequency with which they travel and because larger business-class seats are responsible for up to five times as many CO2 emissions as those in economy.

Corporate jets, which tend to have fewer than 20 seats, have an even bigger environmental impact. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), flying on a business jet can be 10 times as carbon intensive as flying on a commercial plane.

The environmental impact of corporate jets

It’s not exactly clear how often Niccol will be flying between Newport Beach and Seattle, or if he’ll always use Starbucks’s corporate jet. “When not traveling or spending time in our stores, Brian will be in the [Seattle] office at least three days a week, in alignment with our hybrid work policies,” a Starbucks spokesperson said via email.

Niccol’s ”primary office” will be in Seattle, and he will set up secondary housing there, according to the CEO’s offer letter. He’ll also have a small remote office in Newport Beach. According to the letter, Niccol will “be eligible to use the Company aircraft” for business-related travel, travel between his city of residence and the company’s headquarters, and his personal travel “in accordance with the Company’s policies.”

Though there are still unknowns, the potential environmental impact is massive. Under the assumption that Niccol will make the flight between Newport Beach and Seattle weekly in a 2007 Gulfstream G550 (a 20-seat aircraft registered to Starbucks, according to FlightAware), that would emit 1,000 tons of CO2 annually.

That’s equivalent to the energy-use emissions from 118 homes for one year. It’s also more than 60 times the annual emissions from the average American, and about 1,800 times more CO2 emitted from flying than the average American aviation passenger was responsible for in 2019, according to ICCT, which did the calculations for Fast Company.

When it comes to flying, Dan Rutherford, ICCT’s senior director of research, has a rubric for how people can reduce their emissions. “It’s to fly like a NERD,” he says. That stands for new aircraft, economy class, a regular-size aircraft (as opposed to a jumbo jet), and to fly direct whenever possible. “That’s sort of rules one through four,” he says. “But rule zero is basically, Don’t commute by plane.”

When it comes to business jets (and private jets in general), there’s also evidence they may be especially environmentally harmful because they create more contrails—the white lines of condensation in the sky that trail behind planes. Contrails can make up as much as half of aviation’s warming effect (rather than CO2 emissions). A recent study found that private jets and modern fuel-efficient jets, which both fly higher than other passenger jets, are more likely to produce longer-lasting contrails. (Google is working to help predict where contrails will form, so pilots can adjust their paths.)

Supercommuting CEOs and sustainability

Niccol won’t be the only CEO who frequently flies on corporate jets. A recent ProPublica article analyzed how Nike executives used corporate jets. Even as the sneaker company has promised climate action, its private planes emitted 20% more CO2 last year than they did in 2015 (the company’s baseline for its climate goals).

He’s also not the only remote or hybrid executive. Former Boeing CEO David Calhoun began working remotely just prior to the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported, and never moved to the company’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. Instead, he traveled by private jet from homes in New Hampshire and South Carolina. “Boeing’s fleet of private jets have made more than 400 trips to or from airports near Calhoun’s homes in the past three years,” the outlet reported in 2023.

A spokesperson for Boeing told Fast Company that the company’s Washington State fuel farms in Everett and Seattle receive sustainable aviation fuels, “so corporate flights fueled from those fuel farms operate on an SAF [sustainable aviation fuels] blend.” They added that emissions associated with the company’s corporate fleet have been mitigated for the past four years with the use of third-party-verified offsets.

(Both Boeing and Starbucks said emissions from its executive flights are Scope 1 emissions, meaning the direct result of an organization’s activities. Scope 1 emissions are more easily measured, and so more directly controllable. Business travel for regular employee commutes or trips on third-party vehicles are Scope 3, or indirect, emissions, which companies can’t directly control.)

Those actions hint at how corporate jet travel can be made more sustainable—though it’ll still be far from the most eco-friendly travel option. ICCT’s Rutherford noted that carbon offsets have a lot of issues, and that most companies in the aviation space have shifted away from offsetting and toward reducing emissions directly from both planes and their fuel. “I think a company today that says we’re going to offset our emissions primarily is lagging in their ambition,” he says.

Instead, Rutherford says more companies are making commitments to purchase sustainable aviation fuels. A Starbucks spokesperson said that such fuels are “one of the many opportunities we continue to explore and test on our journey to cut our climate footprint in half by 2030.” SAFs come with their own climate concerns, though—including that their environmental benefits could be overstated, and that it’ll be years before there’s enough supply to meet demand.

Rutherford also noted that Congress has floated a few proposals to tax business jet fuel use or such flights directly. Policymakers have asked ICCT how much revenue that might raise or if it could mitigate emissions, but that’s tricky to determine because there isn’t good data on overall corporate jet usage. The ICCT is currently undergoing a research project to take a global inventory of business jet travel. “There’s a huge data gap,” he says.