I’m a huge swiftie. That’s not a lie. However Taylor’s number one issue in my book is her absolute non-caring for the damage she’s done to the planet.
This isn’t a coincidence. It’s not about stalking. Last week she was caught taking a 40 minute flight, releasing more carbon by herself then most of us do in an entire year.
I love Taylor, but it’s shameful that she continues to do this. When she dated Joe the tracker showed she flew back and forth between England and New York on average 3 times a week. A week.
And she doesn’t even bother to at least buy offsets or something. She could buy massive swaths of rainforest to preserve to make up for it and it’d barely make a dent. She could replant entire forests.
I love Taylor, but I’m ashamed she’s hurting the planet so much without seemingly a care - and now trying to sue the people who expose her for it.
According to this, she is using carbon offsets - though I have no idea what percent of her footprint is being offset: https://carboncredits.com/taylor-swift-controversy-ahead-of-super-bowl-lviii/
Edit: this is moreso in response to the environmental concerns, it’s still silly she’s trying to sue someone aggregating public data. I really hope the court throws this out.
I have yet to find a legitimate case of carbon offsets. You can’t just plant trees. You have to bury trees and then replant them while taking into account the fuel you’re using to do so.
The problem with carbon offsets in a paradigm where everyone needs to get to zero is that the only way the offset makes sense is if it is priced according to the last ton of CO2 to be accounted for, which necessarily means they are going to be incredibly expensive.
But they are instead priced to match the lowest-hanging fruit, and even then are mostly scams.
There’s two offset markets, by and large. One is kind of private and the other is based on national economies. A lot lot lot of the offsets double-dip by ‘selling’/listing on both markets, which makes objectively no sense.
Mostly, celebrities and businesses are dealing with the private market. There’s no there there. Just invest in green technologies and brag about it – which is indeed what real corpos trying to “go green” are increasingly doing.
For the national market, it truly makes no sense. They usually flow from the poorest nations to the richest, the offsets. Which basically means the poorest nations are letting the richest take advantage of their cheap, easy-to-hit tons of CO2 that they will have to make up at the end of the day with the last few, hardest-to-capture ones. It clearly doesn’t make sense; these countries are selling a false promise that they will not and CANNOT make good on at the end of the day.
If it’s some $500/ton DAC facility selling offsets, then sure. Fine. Economically inefficient way of achieving the goal that no smart business would pursue, but at least it actually is based on sound principles. That’s the system working in a way that makes sense. Other than that, fuck right off with all these credits.
Yeah, this has always been my thought as well. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but in a lot of cases planting the trees where they weren’t present before can destroy ecosystems as well. The real solution is to stop using fossil fuels and other “dirty” fuel, but we all know how well the companies take that idea…
If ya ask me, we should install solar panels on the tops of all the skyscrapers / houses, invest a ton more into electric vehicles of all kinds (especially focusing on improving towing capacity), create non-polluting public transportation (especially talking from a US perspective), add some wind farms in the mountains and try desperately to find some solution to our ever-growing mountains of plastic.
That’s my thing. It’s the bare minimum, the laziest possible solution. You’re just throwing money at the problem and not even checking to see if it’s doing something.
Carbon offsets are often not even that much. Companies will pay other companies just not to bulldoze that forest or burn that oil.
But then the companies just do it anyway. So essentially, it’s just shifting money to make no difference.
So far this is all I’ve actually found. Like your article, it says nothing about the actual offsets.
Source.
It continues with a question of the efficacy
More importantly, we have to ask ourselves whether or not it’s okay for someone to do this. Swift is still consuming a fuckton of a nonrenewable resource and still pushing a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that would not be there if she didn’t use and share a private jet. Just because she also does some nice things does not undo the harm she’s causing. imo that’s like saying, “It’s okay for me to only use single use plastic packaging because I regularly clean a highway and always put the bottles I pick up in the recycling.”