One of the planes in Las Vegas that day was a 19-seater Dassault Falcon 7X carrying perhaps the most famous woman on the planet, on the final leg of her trip from a concert in Tokyo to see her boyfriend Travis Kelce. I was riding on. Kansas City Chiefs) play in America’s biggest sporting event.
While Swift’s trip to Las Vegas has been as headlined as the potential for both teams, her travel plans have also received some less-than-favorable attention in recent years. Marketing firm Yard named the 14-time Grammy Award winner the year’s biggest carbon polluter in 2022 (based on data from X’s now-defunct Celebrity Jets account).
And the backlash against Swift’s Airmail is set to begin with the megastar’s $1 billion box office hit, which begins in Arizona in March 2023 and is scheduled to end in Vancouver this December after 152 performances on five continents.・It only gets better during the tour. Traveling all over the United States to watch Kelsey play has racked up air miles.
Ms. Swift’s team notes that the analysis of her travel arrangements does not take into account how many other people are on the plane, that she rents the plane to others, and that she offsets all costs. It pointed out that it had purchased more than twice as many carbon credits as it needed. tour travel.
The last line is a standard defense line. In 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who have campaigned on environmental issues, faced accusations of hypocrisy on social media after flying to the south of France on Sir Elton John’s private plane.
Sir Elton defended the couple on social media, adding that he paid for the carbon-offset flight ticket “to support Prince Harry’s environmental initiatives”.
at that time, financial times It calculates that this action may have caused damage to Sir Elton, who has an estimated net worth of £450m, according to figures from last year. sunday times Rich List) approximately 50 pounds.
Germans even have a word – Fulguscham – Explain feelings of guilt about the damage air travel causes to the environment. But some environmentalists and climate-change skeptics argue that the $2 billion voluntary carbon credit market is just a hot ticket to saving the consciences of globe-trotting superstars and greedy corporations. There is. One US publication denounced it as a “carbon-for-cash spree”.
Swift made the final leg of her trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on her own jet, but she traveled from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to Los Angeles on a three-cabin Bombardier Global 6000 chartered from global private aviation group VistaJet. did. The company’s website proudly touts its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon offsets.
This positive step requires some qualifications. SAF is a type of biofuel produced from waste fats such as used cooking oil. While great progress has been made in this area, there is currently a lack of sufficient feedstock to supply industry at any meaningful scale, and it is 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 the SAF to make up 2% of the fuel it uses by 2025, up from 0.1% in 2019, but aviation experts say disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic will make this more likely. Even the goal is questionable. Therefore, the environmental impact of flight is difficult to offset and must be offset. VistaJet claims that through the purchase of verified carbon credits, to date he has offset an impressively accurate figure of 1,473,609 tonnes of CO2. Anyone interested in learning more can simply click on the link to go to his website for a company called South Pole, his provider of the world’s largest carbon offsets.
The exact origins of the carbon offset market are somewhat uncertain. However, credit for the original idea is usually credited to a US power company called Applied Energy Services (AES). The company has come up with a plan to create forests around coal-fired power plants to absorb the huge amounts of carbon dioxide they emit. Outside.
Unfortunately, the factory was located in Connecticut, where land was scarce and relatively expensive. Then a bright flash of light pointed out to me that CO2 doesn’t stay. So it didn’t really matter whether the new trees were sucking carbon out of the atmosphere in Connecticut or, say, Guatemala. So in 1989 he began paying 40,000 farmers to plant trees in the mountains of the Central American country.
Carbon markets therefore contain from the beginning an implicit interhemispheric contract with rich countries that produce large amounts of carbon and are typically located north of the equator, giving operating costs to poorer countries in the so-called Global South. are paying. Projects that offset these emissions.
