GB Breakfast News featured a discussion regarding the enormous pollution impact of Jeff Bezos’s “space tourism” venture – a brief joyride, taken on 14th April by a super-rich lineup of all-female crew, including Katy Perry.
CMC Climate Media Coalition founder Donnachadh McCarthy was invited to join the discussion in the studio, to give his opinion from a climate perspective and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.
Watch the GB News Breakfast segment here
In a lively debate with Charlie Mullins, a prominent climate-sceptic multimillionaire, Donnachadh highlighted that each participant in Bezos’s recent flight emitted up to 17 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Shockingly, this is roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution produced by the average UK household’s electricity use over 34 years! In practical terms, one family would have to turn off every electrical appliance for over three decades just to offset the 11-minute trip into space. To put it another way, every minute the ‘Blue Origin’ crew spent gazing down at Earth produced as much carbon as nearly three years’ worth of a typical household’s electricity emissions.
While Bezos claims his flights emit “no carbon pollution in flight,” this is deeply misleading. True, the rockets burn oxygen and hydrogen, producing only water vapour during the flight. However, Bezos conveniently omits that producing one tonne of hydrogen can emit up to 26 tonnes of CO2 if coal is used, and 12 tonnes if fossil gas is used. Even oxygen production contributes roughly 0.5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne. Furthermore, the 17-tonne figure doesn’t even account for the climate-damaging effects of releasing water vapour high into the atmosphere.
Ticket prices for these environmentally disastrous “space tourism” trips reach upwards of £300,000 per person, with companies like Axiom Space even offering a staggering $55 million for a ten-day stay at the International Space Station.
Donnachadh also emphasised the stark inequality of carbon emissions globally, pointing out that the richest 1% of people emit the same amount of pollution as the poorest 70% combined. He argued for the fairness of taxing the super-polluting wealthy and using that revenue to fund the green transition for the less well off. This could include funding initiatives like installing solar panels and insulation on lower-income households and restoring 50% of rural bus routes that have been lost over the past 15 years.
Despite initial pushback, Donnachadh was thrilled when GB News presenters Eamonn Holmes and Miriam Cates—a former right-wing Tory MP—expressed agreement, with Cates succinctly encapsulating the debate with a clear supporting closing statement: “More buses, fewer rockets!”
Engaging directly with media leaders across the political spectrum to secure enthusiastic support for an urgent, equitable, and economically beneficial green transition is part of CMC’s mission. If only it were as quick as a trip in a Bezos rocket!
