Greenwashing tactics give flying celebrities license to pollute

One of the planes in Vegas that day was a Dassault Falcon 7X carrying 19 passengers, carrying arguably the most famous woman on earth as she traveled from a concert in Tokyo to watching her boyfriend Terra The final leg of the journey for Travis Kelce.

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

The backlash against Swifts’ flights continued unabated during the superstar’s $1 billion Eras tour. , which will conclude in Vancouver this December. Traveling around the United States to watch Kelce games added to her air miles.

Swifts’ team noted that an analysis of her travel arrangements didn’t take into account how many other people were on the flight, that she loaned the plane to others, and that she purchased more than twice the carbon credits needed to offset all her travel.

Finally it has become a standard line of defense. In 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who have been committed to environmental issues, faced accusations of hypocrisy on social media after flying to the south of France on Sir Elton John’s private jet.

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

then, Financial Times It has been calculated that this move may have cost Sir Elton (his net worth is estimated at $450 million, based on last year’s figures) sunday times Rich list) about 50.

The Germans even have a saying flying team Describe feelings of guilt over the environmental damage caused by air travel. But some green activists and climate skeptics argue that a $2 billion voluntary carbon credit market is just talk and does little more than appease the consciences of global superstars and greedy corporations. One US publication denounced this as a massive cash-for-carbon scam.

When Swift flew her own plane from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, she was flying from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to Los Angeles on a three-cabin Bombardier Global 6000 chartered by global private aviation group VistaJet. Its website proudly promotes its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon offsets.

This positive step does require some qualification. SAF is a biofuel produced from waste cooking oil, e.g. The field has made huge leaps forward, but there are currently not enough raw materials to supply the industry on a large scale, making it more expensive than traditional fuels. Therefore, airlines tend to add small amounts of SAF to their fuel mixtures.

The industry’s own target is for SAF to account for 2% of the fuel it uses by 2025, up from 0.1% in 2019, but aviation experts believe the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic means even this target is in doubt. Therefore, the hard code to offset the environmental impact of flight must be accomplished through offsets. VistaJet claims that its purchases of verified carbon credits have offset an admirably precise figure of 1,473,609 tonnes of CO2 to date. Those keen to learn more can simply click on a link that will take them 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 the original idea is often credited to a U.S. power company called Applied Energy Services (AES), which came up with a plan to build a forest around its coal-fired power plants to absorb the large amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by the power plants. go out.

Unfortunately, the plant is located in Connecticut, where land is scarce and relatively expensive. Then a bright spark pointed out that carbon dioxide has a habit of not sticking around. So it doesn’t matter whether the new trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere in Connecticut or Guatemala. So in 1989, AES began paying 40,000 farmers to plant trees in the Central American country’s mountains.

So from the beginning, carbon markets have involved an implicit contract between hemispheres, with rich countries producing large amounts of carbon, often located north of the equator, paying poorer countries in the so-called Global South to operate projects that offset those emissions.