Amid these concerns, one private jet owner has decided to scale back. Stephen Prince, vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires – a group of wealthy Americans pushing for higher taxes which also contributed to the report – is giving up his Cessna 650 Citation III.

He decided to ditch the plane – a mid-size, long range corporate jet with room for up to nine passengers – after he learned how much more carbon-intensive flying private is compared to commercial.

[Yeah, but …]

“But I made my decision back in March this year. And I’m sticking with it, I’m selling it, I’m going to aggressively get rid of it.”

[Selling it means it will still produce carbon emissions, only with some other passenger. If Prince wanted to eliminate those emissions, he would dismantle the airplane, not sell it. But wait! It gets better … ]

There’s just one catch. Prince, an entrepreneur in the gift card and payments industry, may be ditching his jet – but he’s not going to give up private air travel entirely.

“I have a friend who’s going to let me lease his smaller aircraft,” he says, “It’s a twin turbo, which burns about a fourth of the amount of fuel of the Cessna – and I’m only going to use it two or three times a year to go out to a pheasant hunting preserve in the northwest corner of Nebraska.”

[So he’s not even giving up private air travel at all. How in the world did CNN get hoodwinked into writing this as a laudable story in the first place? — Ed]