The greenwashing tactic that gives jet-setting celebrities a ‘license to pollute’

One of the planes in Vegas that day was the 19-passenger Dassault Falcon 7X that had carried perhaps the world’s most famous woman on the last leg of her journey from a concert in Tokyo to watch her boyfriend Travis Kelce (a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs) play in America’s biggest sporting event.

Swift’s trip to Las Vegas was reported as breathlessly as the two teams’ chances, but her travel plans have also attracted some less positive attention over the years. Marketing company Yard named the 14-time Grammy winner the biggest carbon polluter of the year in 2022 (based on data from the now-defunct Celebrity Jets account on X).

And the backlash against Swift’s flights has only grown during the megastar’s $1 billion-grossing Eras Tour, which kicked off in Arizona in March 2023 and will end in Vancouver next December after 152 shows on five continents. Travels across the US to watch Kelce play have added to her air miles.

Swift’s team has pointed out that the analysis of her travel arrangements does not take into account how many other people are on the flights, that she lends the plane to others and that she has purchased more than double the carbon credits that necessary to offset all its costs. tour travel.

The latter has become the default line of defense. In 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who have campaigned on environmental issues, were accused of hypocrisy on social media after flying on Sir Elton John’s private plane to the south of France.

Sir Elton defended the couple on social media, adding that he had paid for the flight to offset carbon emissions ‘in support of Prince Harry’s commitment to the environment’.

At the time the Financial times calculated that this gesture may have cost Sir Elton (who, according to last year’s publication, has an estimated net worth of £450 million) Sunday Times Rich list) about £50.

The Germans even have a word – Flugscham – to describe feelings of guilt about the damage air travel does to the environment. But some green activists and climate skeptics argue that the $2 billion voluntary carbon credit market is a bunch of hot air that does little more than appease the consciences of globe-trotting superstars and predatory corporations. One US publication labeled it the ‘big cash-for-carbon hustle’.

While Swift made the final leg of her trip to Las Vegas in her own plane from Los Angeles, she traveled from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to LA in a three-cabin Bombardier Global 6000 chartered by global private aviation group VistaJet. The website proudly promotes the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon offsets.

This positive step requires some nuance. SAF is a form of biofuel produced from waste fats such as used cooking oil. Great leaps have been made in this area, but there are currently not enough raw materials to supply the industry on a meaningful scale, making it more expensive than traditional fuel. Airlines therefore tend to add small amounts of SAF to the fuel mix.

The industry’s own target was for SAF to make up 2 percent of the fuel it consumes by 2025, up from 0.1 percent in 2019, but aviation experts believe the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic means even this target is in doubt is. The hard work to compensate for the environmental impact of flying will therefore have to be done through compensation. VistaJet claims its purchases of verified carbon credits to date have offset an admirably accurate figure of 1,473,609 tonnes of CO2. Those who want to learn more just need to click on a link that will take you to the website of a company called South Pole, the world’s largest provider of carbon offsets.

The exact origins of the carbon offset market are somewhat uncertain. But credit for the original idea is usually attributed to an American energy company called Applied Energy Services (AES), which came up with a plan to grow a forest around its coal-fired power plant to reduce the enormous amount of carbon dioxide it would emit. to absorb. out.

Unfortunately, the factory was located in Connecticut, where land is scarce and relatively expensive. Then a bright spark indicated that CO2 has a habit of not staying in place. Therefore, it didn’t really matter whether the new trees sucked carbon from the atmosphere of Connecticut or, say, Guatemala. So in 1989, AES began paying 40,000 farmers to plant trees in the mountains of the Central American country.

Therefore, from the beginning, the carbon market has involved an implicit contract between the hemispheres, whereby the rich countries, which produce a lot of carbon and are generally located north of the equator, pay the poorer countries in the so-called Global South to do their work . projects that offset these emissions.