Taylor Swift will be picking back up on her Eras Tour starting May 9, delighting European Swifties on the latest leg of her global trek. This, of course, requires the superstar to engage in air travel to reach all her designated stops...quite a lot of air travel, and all by private charter.
Swift's subsequent emissions footprint and its environmental impact has been the subject of discussion for some time now. Per Swift's camp, the singer is countering this by buying carbon offsets, and in fact had purchased double the credits she needed to offset all her travel prior to the start of her tour last year.
That sounds like a good thing. But what are carbon offsets...and is it really just so simple to counteract environmental impact with a financial transaction?
Experts Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, and Gilles Dufrasne, global carbon markets policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, spoke to Bloomberg to break down how it works.
Explaining that the process operates by "someone [setting] up a project that's meant to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, either through prevention or removal, and they finance it by selling credits," they adeed that these projects -- which cover a range of environmental/green interests -- are verified by third-party registries, then listed and sold as credits.
Credits can be resold until "retired," which means that it has been used to offset emissions, and the public cannot see who has purchased a credit until it has been retired, according to Haya and Dufrasne.
Haya, who works with a database that tracks issuances and retirements for some of the biggest carbon credit registries, noted to the outlet that there isn't any evidence that Swift has retired any of her credits yet.
There could be different reasons for this: Swift may have purchased them elsewhere, listed herself as "anonymous," or simply just has not retired them.
However, due to the unregulated nature of the market, "If anyone - a company, a wealthy person, an airline - says they're buying carbon credits, it's basically meaningless unless they're going to say which credits they bought," Haya stressed.
Swift's two planes emitted roughly 1,216 metric tons of carbon dioxide last year according to data provided to Bloomberg by aviation tracker JetSpy. She would have had to buy at least 2,433 credits to cover the double amount of offset her reps are claiming.
While Swift, who reached billionaire status in Oct. 2023, likely would have no trouble purchasing that amount, the actual cost of these credits can vary wildly. Higher-priced projects don't necessarily always translate to being the best, says Haya, but a low-cost project usually raises red flags as to whether there really is enough funding for it to be effective.
Furthermore, it's not set in stone exactly how much someone really needs to buy in order to counteract their emissions.Swift's buying twice as much sounds like a good thing, but according to Dufrasne it is a case-by-case situation. In certain cases, some individuals might need to actually buy 10 times as many credits to successfully cover their emissions, he said.
Swift's Eras Tour will conclude in December in Vancouver. The superstar's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is set to drop on Apr. 19.
