One of the planes in Vegas that day was the 19-passenger Dassault Falcon 7X that had carried arguably the most famous woman on Earth on the final 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 journey to Las Vegas was reported as breathlessly as the chances of the two teams, but her travel plans have also attracted some rather less positive attention over the years. Marketing firm Yard named the 14-time Grammy-winner the biggest celebrity CO2 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 increased during the megastar’s $1 billion-grossing Eras Tour, which started in Arizona in March 2023 and is set to conclude in Vancouver this coming December after 152 shows across five continents. Trips around the US to watch Kelce play have added to her air miles.
Swift’s team has pointed out that analysis of her travel arrangements doesn’t take into account how many other people are on the flights, that she loans out the plane to others, and that she purchased more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all her tour travel.
The last has become the standard line of defence. In 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who have campaigned on environmental issues, faced accusations of hypocrisy on social media after a flight on Sir Elton John’s private plane to the south of France.
Sir Elton took to social media to defend the couple, adding that he had paid for the flight to be carbon offset ‘to support Prince Harry’s commitment to the environment’.
At the time, the Financial Times calculated that this gesture may have cost Sir Elton (who has an estimated net worth of £450 million, according to last year’s 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 sceptics argue the $2 billion voluntary carbon credit market is a load of hot air that does little more than salve the consciences of globe-trotting superstars and rapacious corporations. One US publication denounced it as the ‘great cash-for-carbon hustle’.
While Swift made the final leg of her trip to Las Vegas in her own jet from Los Angeles, she travelled from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to LA in a three-cabin Bombardier Global 6000, chartered from global private aviation group VistaJet. Its website proudly trumpets its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon offsetting.
This positive step does need some qualification. SAF is a form of biofuel produced from waste fats such as used cooking oil. Big leaps have been made in this area but there are currently not enough raw materials to supply the industry at a meaningful scale, making it more expensive than traditional fuel. Airlines therefore tend to add small amounts of SAF into the fuel mix.
The industry’s own target was for SAF to constitute 2 per cent of the fuel it uses by 2025, up from 0.1 per cent in 2019, but aviation experts believe the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic means that even this goal is doubtful. The hard yards to counterbalance the environmental impact of flying will therefore have to be done by offsetting. VistaJet claims that its purchases of verified carbon credits have, to date, offset the admirably precise figure of 1,473,609 tons of CO2. Those keen to learn more need only click on a link which takes you to the website of a company called South Pole, the world’s largest carbon offsetting provider.
The exact origins of the carbon offset market are somewhat uncertain. But credit for the original idea is usually ascribed to a US power company called Applied Energy Services (AES), which came up with a plan to create a forest around its coal-fired power plant to absorb the huge volume of carbon dioxide it would spew out.
Unfortunately the plant was in Connecticut, where land is scarce and relatively expensive. Then one bright spark pointed out that CO2 has a habit of not staying put. It therefore didn’t really matter whether the new trees were sucking carbon out of the atmosphere in Connecticut or, say, Guatemala. So, in 1989 AES started paying 40,000 farmers to plant trees in the mountains of the Central American country.
Right from the start, therefore, the carbon market has involved an implicit contract between the hemispheres, with rich countries, which produce a lot of carbon and are typically located north of the equator, paying poorer ones in the so-called Global South to run projects that offset those emissions.
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