Here’s How Bad Starbucks' New CEO’s 2,000-Mile Weekly Flight Could Be For The Environment

The world’s largest coffee shop chain Starbucks recently announced that it poached Chipotle’s current CEO Brian Niccol, and that he will be super commuting from Newport Beach, California to Seattle, Washington every week to meet Starbucks’ hybrid work policy. The distance between John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California and Seattle International Airport is over 1,000 miles, and Niccol’s offer letter states that he may use the company aircraft to travel from his city of residence to the company headquarters. As it turns out, a weekly 2,000-mile round-trip commute on a privately owned jet creates a monumental carbon footprint.

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According to Flightaware.com, the Starbucks company aircraft is a 2007 Gulfstream G550, a 20-seat jet that has two Rolls-Royce BR710 turbofan engines, and averages about 450 gallons of fuel burn per hour of operation. The flight from Orange County to Seattle takes nearly 2 hours, which means 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 will potentially spew about 4 tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere.

A Gulfstream G550 plane lands at the Nagoya 2004 Business Aviation Conference at Nagoya Airport, March 2, 2004 in Nagoya, Japan.Photo: Koichi Kamoshida (Getty Images)

For context, the average American’s annual CO2 emissions equal about 16 tons. That means this one aspect of Starbucks’ new CEO’s monthly commute will potentially match the average American’s annual carbon emissions. The average European Union citizen produces an average of 8.2-tons of emissions annually, which will take Niccol just two weeks of commuting to beat. As a disclaimer, it’s not certain that Niccol will be flying in the G550 every week, but it’s the best guess we have right now. According to the Washington Post:

“Brian’s primary office and a majority of his time will be spent in our Seattle Support Center or out visiting partners and customers in our stores, roasteries, roasting facilities and offices around the world,” Starbucks spokesman 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 target of cutting its direct operations and supply chain carbon emissions in half by the year 2030. In March, Starbucks released its environmental and sustainability assessment, where the coffee giant revealed that its greenhouse gas emissions had actually increased by 8 percent since the 2019 baseline. Bringing on Niccol and acknowledging his super commute will make it significantly tougher for the company to meet its emissions reduction targets, but that doesn’t matter to the company so long as he increases shareholder value. During his time as CEO of Chipotle, the company’s stock increased 773 percent according to CNBC, so Starbucks and its shareholders likely couldn’t care less about the environmental devastation that Niccol’s commute may cause.