The False Equivalence of Carbon Offsetting

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Anyone who has grazed social media in the past few months has inevitably seen constant headlines about Taylor Swift. And no, not necessarily ones having to do with the success of her recent Eras Tour or her relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce, but rather about her CO2 emissions. It is no surprise that celebrities can afford the luxury of lavish transportation and private jets, but with the climate crisis lingering ever more in the minds of the masses, Swift’s lead in personal carbon emissions this past year has the internet fuming. 

In 2022, a sustainable marketing company based in the U.K. called Yard released flight statistics based on the data found on Twitter, exposing to the world the sheer magnitude of environmental damage caused by private jet travel. Private jets, they believe, are “the worst offenders for emissions per passenger,” and yet, they revealed that celebrities have taken advantage of this convenience to hop on short, sometimes less than twenty-minute, flights. Twitter accounts such as CelebJets (which is currently suspended), run by Jack Sweeney, have been popular outlets to track celebrities, and their private jet usage specifically.

However, it had not come to the public’s widespread attention until Swift came under fire for becoming the “biggest celebrity CO2 polluter,” emitting over 138 tons of CO2 within the past three months, as the Economic Times reported in December of last year. With her massive following, the issue could not remain under the carpet. It would appear that these individuals need to find some sort of justification for their defenses to ease public anxieties about global warming, and they have found the perfect cover-up: carbon offsetting. 

Following the culmination of her Eras Tour, and the consequent tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, Swift claimed to have bought double the amount of carbon credits needed to offset the damage this past year. But what exactly is this technique of “carbon offsetting” that she, and many others, including some of the largest multinational corporations such as Shell, state that they are engaging in? Essentially carbon offset credits are offered as “tradable allowances” that permit that person, or corporation, to spend 1 ton of carbon dioxide with the promise of investing in environmental projects that, hypothetically, reduce carbon emissions—creating a break-even type scenario. 

The history of this carbon-trading project, as it is otherwise known, originates with a U.S. power company named Applied Energy Services, who sought to discover a way to reduce emissions, soon envisioning the idea of planting trees to absorb their carbon output. Since the idea of planting trees for every carbon emitting region in wealthy industrialized countries, such as the U.S., was an impossible task, they turned to the idea of the global commons—situating a forest elsewhere in the world to compensate. Nowadays, there are various ways that these carbon-offsetting plans work. They can still include forestation (which encompasses either planting new trees or preventing already existing trees from being cut down), funding renewable energy projects, waste and landfill management efforts, or even agricultural practices that focus on carbon-storing. Regardless of the method, this seemingly “cheap” solution to reducing one’s carbon footprint has become of great interest in recent years.   

By 2005, the U.N. initiated its own carbon-trading system. The thought was to convert this novel carbon-trading system into an industry, with profit as the key motivating factor. In 2022, the carbon-offsetting industry was valued at around $331.8 billion USD, and is expected to grow by three times that amount in the next four years. 

Nearly twenty years later, we face an even more pressing dilemma: how exactly can we quantify the amount of carbon dioxide reduced by such schemes? Presently, only a third of human emissions are being absorbed by the number of trees on Earth, and this percentage is sharply decreasing amid the fight against deforestation. The forest-based carbon-trading system that was developed is a trickly gamble, and heavily relies on paying business to stop cutting down what is left of the planet’s precious resources. When Swift claims to purchase these carbon offset credits, it implies her participation in efforts to reduce her carbon footprint. Yet, this subject of “green washing” emerges, raising the question on whether these people in the spotlight are using carbon trade claims as a facade to alleviate the guilt of destroying the atmosphere. Purchasing carbon offset credits are supposed to be regulated by government-driven or independent organizations that are reputable in order to ensure that these credits are being used to fund climate projects. Much of the discourse surrounding carbon-trading involves flights and have even entered into mainstream airline options, where normal passengers are given options to offset their own miles, stating that one’s carbon footprint could be decreased as a persuasion tactic. 

Research has shown that, in fact,  up to 78% of the top 50 emission projects globally have not followed through with their promised emission reduction strategies, being categorized as likely junk. With over $1.16 billion traded credits these top companies have deemed as untrustworthy, there are major apprehensions about the state of the climate crisis. This classification as junk, the Guardian reports, applies if the firm is in accordance with “high risk that it cannot guarantee additional, permanent greenhouse gas cuts among other criteria.” The Guardian’s research classified companies into five categories, including not additional (did they provide additional emission cuts), exaggerated claims, inflated baseline, not permanent, and leakage. Although it is not entirely false that these organizations engage in activities to reduce carbon emissions, they are highly unreliable and cannot provide a concrete guarantee to actually offset, as the name suggests it does. Independent researchers have claimed that proving the effectiveness of the scheme would involve tightly weaving carbon credits to improved, permanent offsetting efforts. 

Over and over again, the sheer inability of the currency carbon trading system to adequately address pollution to the atmosphere has been reiterated within academic spheres as well as journalistic media. Yet, a major intervening force has yet to be addressed: what is the government’s presence in this ordeal? Regarding policy implementation, the world was quick to trust this concept of carbon offsetting, and since less than a decade after the idea emerged, it became enshrined in international law. Following the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, thirty-seven industrialization nations, alongside the European Union, created goals to reduce emissions. The United Nations implemented its own offsetting system called the Clean Development Mechanism, which would aid richer countries in achieving their reduction goals by investing in climate projects within less industrialized nations. In setting particular goals for nations to achieve in their progress against the continuation of climate change, these carbon credits do not only act as avenues for profit, but also as tools to fulfill their promises. With the ongoing implementation of a new trading market being developed by the U.N., and stringent targets being applied to both developed and developing countries through the 2015 Paris Agreement, the use of carbon credits to reach national goals is only to skyrocket.

In Canada, a Greenhouse Gas Offset Credit System was implemented that allows the government to keep tabs on the potential offset credits that municipalities, Indigenous communities, farmers, and other potential carbon-emission sources may purchase. Those who become involved in these offset projects must meet federal requirements set according to the Canadian Greenhouse Gas Offset Credit System Regulations. However, skepticism still lingers about the validity of the whole carbon-trading program in the first place. As more and more research emerges documenting the flaws of this system, it will require governments and international institutions, such as the U.N., to rethink their stance on carbon-trading as a viable solution for the worsening climate change situation. And if it proves to be completely ineffective in remediating global warming, then activists face an even larger task: spreading the message to make sure that celebrities, like Taylor Swift, stop using carbon offsetting as a justification for their crimes towards the environment.