Can Taylor Swift Offset the Climate Impact of Her Private Jets? It’s Complicated

Taylor Swift will be back on stage next month for the European leg of her wildly successful Eras tour, racking up miles as her private jet carries her from Paris to Stockholm to Lisbon.

To counter her emissions, the recently minted billionaire is doing the same thing as longtime ultra-rich jetsetters like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates: buying carbon offsets.

Swift, according to her publicist Tree Paine, purchased more than double the credits needed to offset all her travel before her Eras tour kicked off in March 2023. In theory, that means the pop star’s private-jet use is more than just carbon neutral — it’s carbon negative, benefiting the environment.

But such straightforward accounting is complicated by the reality of the carbon market, a controversial tool in the fight against climate change. Proponents say it’s necessary to encourage people and companies to offset their inevitable emissions. Others say the market lacks transparency and has a wide variance in the quality of credits.

Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, and Gilles Dufrasne, global carbon markets policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, broke down why Swift and other billionaires purchase these offsets and the nuances of the still-nascent market.

How does the carbon offset market work?

Someone sets 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.

The projects, which range from technologically intensive carbon capture to allegedly “saving” trees, are verified by third-party registries such as American Carbon Registry and Gold Standard before they’re listed and sold as credits. Each one represents a metric ton of carbon, so if a project is selling 50 credits, it’s meant to prevent or eliminate 50 tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

Once a credit is purchased, it can be sold again until it’s “retired,” meaning it’s been used to offset emissions. The public can only see who purchased which project once that happens.