Don’t Blame Me: Defending Taylor Swift’s Private Jet, and a Recommendation
Exploring why and how it can be okay to pay to do bad things, part one
Taylor Swift is best known for her music, but her carbon footprint earns serious notoriety too. You do not need to search far to find criticism of her frequent private jet flights. Some large social media accounts have even documented these flights in effort to name and shame, or something like that. Perhaps attempting to shake off this reputation and keep her side of the street clean, Taylor Swift reportedly bought enough carbon credits to offset double her emissions from the Eras Tour — therefore also covering much or all of her private jet travel.
Yet there is unease about whether she really has done the right thing. Carbon offset credits are suspect, as they often do not remove or prevent nearly the amount of emissions that they advertise. Hence, Swift may be attempting to justify her emissions with credits that fail to offset much at all. Many have rightly pointed this out, but few offer a serious solution.
I do see one solution frequently proposed, that Taylor Swift should simply focus on reducing her emissions rather than offsetting them. This is not a serious solution; it is an unconstructive criticism pointing out that she is emitting too much, without offering a standard for how much temperance is required.
If we want to criticise somebody’s behaviour, we ought to have an idea of how and how much they need to change their ways for us to stop criticising them.
So here, I attempt to outline a serious, constructive, solution. Carbon emissions are costly to us and the planet, yet they are interwoven into many of our most basic activities, making it also costly to do without them. Producing emissions, with no attempt at compensating for the costs, means asserting that the rest of the world should have to suffer the burden of your contribution to climate change for your own private benefit. Perhaps this assertion could be justified in some cases. But wherever it is not, we should feel obliged to pay society back for the harm we inflict. Hence, I propose that emissions are justified, so long as we pay for their societal cost. If somebody is unwilling to pay for the costs of this kind of harmful behaviour, we should immediately be sceptical of allowing them to indulge in it. That is, in general, and excluding extenuating circumstances. Ideally governments would enforce a standard like this, but here it will work as a standard for individuals’ voluntary behaviour.
A neat way of following this standard for carbon emissions is carbon offsetting. At least in theory. Any tonne of carbon produced is approximately as bad as any other. So if you emit one tonne, paying somebody else to prevent a tonne of emissions being produced is effectively you paying to clean up your mess; you have compensated the world for the tonne of carbon you emitted. Like if you made a mess in the share-house kitchen: you should make sure it gets cleaned up, but it does not make a meaningful difference if you pay someone else to do it.
Unfortunately, at the moment, carbon offset credits are not reliably effective at offsetting. But that does not mean that you could not rightly pay off the costs of your emissions some other way.
Taylor Swift, and anyone else, can offset the harms of their emissions by donating the social cost of their emissions to effective charities. Some credible estimates put the social cost of carbon around 185 or 190 USD per tonne, although with substantial estimation uncertainty. For our purposes, I will round these up to 200 USD to make our calculations into nicer, rounder numbers. This is mostly for convenience, although some of this increase is justified since the temporal discounting used in these estimates implies higher carbon prices today than when the estimates were made, 1–2 years ago. Regardless, this figure will suffice as a reasonable estimate of the costliness of each tonne of carbon emissions. We may quibble about its precise value without damaging the principle I am defending.
So if somebody wants to emit some amount of carbon, we have a reasonable quantification of the cost of doing so. If they are prepared to pay that cost to whatever charities will make the best use of the money, then I argue there is good reason to deem these emissions permissible. At the very least, the costs are covered by the benefits. Notably, this does lead to a transfer of benefits. Relative to the world where this person chooses not to emit, everyone is harmed by increased climate change, while the recipients of charity receive a benefit. In other words, utility is transferred from the world in general to the charity recipients. Climate change does disproportionately harm poorer nations, so we should be conscious of fairness issues here. However, given that the most effective charities tend to help the world’s most disadvantaged people, I do not think this transfer warrants a major distributive justice concern. More fair ways to distribute these compensatory payments may exist, although I suspect this would be unfeasible for individuals; I think it is sufficient that people ensure their payments are made to a good cause.
This is the standard we should hold Taylor Swift to, and most everybody else in wealthy nations. Personally, I do not doubt her authenticity in wanting to account for the costs of her emissions. However, unless she can confirm that her purchased carbon credits are credible, this remains my recommendation. Anyone failing this standard — without good reason — is not doing their best to fairly account for the costs they impose on the rest of the world.
However, individuals who meet this standard have legitimately compensated the world for their emissions.
Considering we have estimates of the cost of emissions; if somebody comes forward and is willing to pay this price for their emissions, and yet we object to them doing so, they can fairly respond “What more do you want from me?”. Perhaps a risk-averse objector would ask them to pay a price according the higher end of the confidence interval for the social cost of carbon estimate. Other than this, objections are on the backfoot. I think some are worth discussion, but in the interest of brevity I will address them in a second article, next week.
As for the extenuating circumstances I mentioned earlier, there are a few situations where I think people should be let off the hook on this genuinely strong expectation. This standard demands a willingness to pay for emissions, but not everybody has an ability to pay for them. Per capita CO2 emissions in Australia are around 15 tonnes meaning the average Australian would be expected to pay around 3000 USD yearly to cover their emissions costs, using the social cost estimate for 200 USD per tonne. This is not a perfect estimate since the average is likely skewed by bigger emitters, but it is a decent enough ballpark. First, it should alarm us that our way of life might be that costly to the world, and second, not everyone can spare that much money without giving up a lot. Also, not all these emissions are reasonably avoidable. If paying the cost of emissions for basic activities like getting to work or powering your house would cause serious hardship, this expectation can fairly be relaxed.
For most citizens of wealthy nations, and certainly for Taylor Swift, this is not the case. The key is to look at whatever it would cost to pay for your emissions, and consider what you would have to give up by either paying this price or foregoing the emissions. If you are willing to do neither, then you should have some justification for why the rest of the world should have to be worse off to allow you to do so. In the general case I noted above, a decent justification exists. Perhaps paying for the emissions from your car means missing rent, but not driving it means losing your job. In this case, I think we can fairly say the personal cost, even if not in a utilitarian sense, is too high to expect this of anyone.
But if the cost of either foregoing the emissions or paying for them is not so dire, this justification is more tenuous. Consider a similar scenario in which the car commuter has great public transport options for getting to work, with similar transit times and pricing to driving. In this case it is much harder to justify that society should suffer the social cost of their emissions from driving without compensation. Consider another person who is better off, for whom paying the social cost of their car emissions means at worst postponing a phone upgrade, missing a concert, driving a less luxurious car, or foregoing some other combination of personal, discretionary spending. Again, it is hard to justify why the world should be worse off, rather than that they forgo these things or the emissions.
Most people flying private jets fail both tests. Doing so is hardly a necessity, and most travelling by jet are doing well enough for themselves that paying for their emissions would not seriously harm their livelihood. For Taylor Swift, the choice is essentially between retiring from touring or paying some substantial amount of money while still being very rich. If not paying for emissions in the other cases was hard to justify, doing so in this case is nearly impossible.
What I expect to be the contentious part of my claim is that Taylor Swift and others can get off the moral hook if only they pay the social cost of their emissions (which she may have done with her carbon credits, although we cannot know without her revealing them). I think there is at least some intuitive appeal to this position; some emissions are justifiable, or else we would advocate everyone stop driving their cars and disconnect their homes from the electricity grid starting right now. If people are willing to pay off the cost of their emissions, then at least from their perspective the benefits are worth the costs. They are willing to prove this by transferring enough of their benefit to effective charities to compensate for the costs. This seems like a decent way to discern which emissions are the justifiable ones.
This justification is essentially — although I think not entirely — utilitarian, so it is subject to familiar criticism. Yet, without being a utilitarian, I think this argument survives this criticism. Showing this to be true is, I suspect, the biggest hurdle left for my argument. In the interest of keeping this article something closer to bite-sized, this defence will Debut next week. I will also defend against some other expected criticisms that I think are lesser hurdles: that allowing this type of behaviour just gives the rich a license to pollute, and that it does not do anything to reduce emissions. In the meantime, think of your own objections, perhaps even write a letter to the editor, and I’ll give you my best response.
One important note is that this is certainly not a solution to climate change. It is only a standard for us to hold individuals to in absence of sufficient climate change mitigation policy.
This article was written by Clancy Mcmahon. Clancy is a current PPE student with a gentle, well-informed disposition and will gladly argue you into the ground. This is his first article for statecraft so just try him!
Thank you to Clare Johns and Emma Toms for editing this piece.
