The Girl Who Cried Carbon Neutral

There’s a certain kind of modern celebrity defence that goes: I wasn’t even on the plane.

Taylor Swift’s people have wheeled this one out more than once now, and each time I hear it I picture a fifty-four-million-dollar jet, gleaming on some private tarmac, flying itself about the eastern seaboard for fun. Empty seats. No pop star. Just pure, unaccompanied jet fuel, burning for the sake of burning, like a fireplace nobody’s sitting in front of.

Because that’s the line, isn’t it. The jet has logged 81 flights, burned through 60,560 gallons of fuel and produced 580 metric tons of greenhouse gases since March, which is, by the by, more than the entire Eras Tour managed across its full run of 152 shows in 54 cities. An associate researcher who studies private jets for a living called the figure “pretty high” and “definitely above average”, which is the politest possible way of saying someone’s been having rather a lot of fun in the sky. And the answer to that, when pressed, is always some version of: ah, but it’s not always her up there. A spokesperson once said she “regularly loans” her plane to other people and that attributing most of the trips to her would be “blatantly incorrect.” Generous girl. Lovely jet. Lends it out like a neighbour’s lawnmower.

I don’t think Taylor Swift is uniquely wicked here. That’s not the point, and it’s never the point with any of these stories. The point is the sheer theatre of it. The carbon credits, for one. Her team has said, more than once, that she purchased more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all her tour travel. Which sounds marvellous, until you notice that she left blank exactly which offsets she purchased, and major outlets including Business Insider, the Associated Press and the BBC were unable to even confirm that she’d procured them, let alone which projects or registries were involved. It’s the corporate sustainability report of celebrity culture: a number with a tick beside it, and nobody’s ever allowed to see the working.

And even if the credits are real, the climate accountants aren’t terribly impressed. One watchdog group has been blunt about it: offsetting doesn’t actually neutralise the climate impact of flying, partly because the benefits embedded in a carbon credit are almost always smaller than the credit’s face value, and because many crediting projects simply displace polluting activity rather than eliminate it. So the “double offset” isn’t a receipt for a clean slate. It’s a receipt, full stop. The sin’s still on the books, it’s just been laundered through a market nobody can audit.

Then there’s my favourite bit, the bit that tells you everything about where we’ve ended up as a species. Two Just Stop Oil protesters took an angle grinder to a fence at Stansted Airport, fully convinced her aircraft was parked there. It wasn’t. They were convicted anyway, and the judge presiding noted that there could be no greater publicity than anything connected to Taylor Swift. He wasn’t wrong. He also wasn’t talking about the emissions. The plane they’d come to make a point about had, in the finest tradition of the entire saga, already buggered off somewhere else.

The other strand of this, and the one I find genuinely more interesting than the fuel receipts, is what happened to the lad who started keeping score. Jack Sweeney was twenty-one, a student at the University of Central Florida, running social accounts that did nothing more sinister than republish public flight monitoring data from the Federal Aviation Administration, the same data anyone with a laptop and a quiet evening could pull up. In December 2023, Swift’s lawyers sent him a letter accusing him of “stalking and harassing behaviour” and warning that if he didn’t stop, she would have no choice but to pursue any and all legal remedies available to her. The letter went further than mere legal posture, too. It told him plainly, according to his own account of it, that what he might see as a game or a route to fame was, for her, “a life-or-death matter.”

His lawyer’s response was the kind of sentence I’d happily have framed: “Put simply, there is nothing unlawful about Sweeney’s use of publicly accessible information to track private jets, including those used by public figures like Taylor Swift.” Sweeney himself was characteristically unbothered, captioning his own public post of the letter with a winking nod to one of her own songs, “Look What You Made Me Do.” You have to admire the nerve. You also have to notice that this is the actual shape of power in 2026: not a tracked jet itself, which is a fairly small environmental footnote in the grand scheme of a warming planet, but the attempt to make the tracking of it disappear. Sweeney’s lawyer called it what it was, an empty legal threat used by a billionaire to try to conceal her conduct, conduct that was, by the way, entirely legal to report on.

So she changed the plane’s registration number eventually. New livery, fresh tail number, presumably a quiet hope that the tracking would simply stop following the rebrand. It didn’t. A flight enthusiast spotted the aircraft back in service within what sounds like no time at all, after it had gone in for an extensive structural inspection that may have cost as much as fifteen million dollars. Fifteen million pounds, give or take the exchange rate, to service the very jet that’s at the centre of all this fuss, and the press still found it before the paint had properly dried. That, to me, is the whole story in miniature. Enormous resource, enormous effort, entirely undone by someone with a hobby and a wifi connection.

None of this makes her exceptional, and I want to be honest about that before this curdles into something it isn’t. Bill Gates offsets. Jeff Bezos offsets. Other celebrities reported to offset their jet emissions include Gates, Bezos, Drake and Elton John, and Drake’s converted airliner apparently burns through fuel at a worse rate per mile than her Falcon ever has. This is simply what wealth does once it’s grown large enough to stop being money and start being weather. The rest of us fret over whether to put the heating on. They fret over which carbon registry sounds most convincing in a press statement, and which lawyer to send after the student with the laptop.

I don’t begrudge anyone their jet, particularly. Plenty of people have legitimate reasons to want privacy and speed and a degree of physical safety that commercial air travel can’t always provide, and I’m not going to pretend that’s nothing. What I begrudge is the insistence that we applaud the offsetting as though it were the moral equivalent of not flying in the first place. It isn’t. It’s a receipt for a sin already committed, bought from a shop that won’t show you what’s on the shelf, while the person who pointed out the receipt gets a letter telling him his hobby is a matter of life and death.

Somewhere over Connecticut this weekend, the jet went up again, spotted at Groton-New London Airport, not far from her estate in Rhode Island, amid speculation about some kind of gathering. Whether she was on it, who can say. I suspect, by this point, even she’s lost count.

Until Next Time