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Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

> The organisation found that her jet emissions were about 1,185 times more than the average person's total annual emissions.

I haven’t fact checked this but if that’s true then I find that horrifying.

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I'm surprised it's so low. She's got two private jets and a job which requires multiple flights a month.

Also:

>Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor purchased more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel

https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours...

Really, I'd be more worried about the total amount of emissions from all the cars/flights from people going to her gigs. That's got to dwarf her own total.

Carbon credits are a scam.

How? I did a quick lookup and the results points to the otherwise.

https://consensus.app/results/?q=Does%20the%20carbon%20credi...

Not sure if this is what GP meant, but one funny thing about carbon credits is that energy producers that produce no emissions but don't do carbon capture (e.g. solar farms) can earn still carbon credits which they can sell to carbon emitters (e.g. steel mills). Zero is not a negative number, so the entire world can one day be "carbon neutral" following this funny accounting and physics won't care.

They are in many cases. I was trying to show she at least seems to care enough to try to counteract her own impact. That likely means the tried to minimise the number of fights too.

Easy Fix: Use part of the generous amount of taxes that Taylor Swift pays, to fight against climate change, remove pythons from Florida, or fund a panda refuge in Montana. We consider this acceptable for each big company since decades

All this people carefully registering the journey of some random famous and shaming them online, should better stop, think, and use their time in this planet more wisely. Scapegoating and witch hunts online that try to blame climate change on some famous target are extremely stupid.

Even worse, they waste our time gossiping chasing ghosts, instead to act. Even small steps would really make a difference but we still are distracted hoping for a magical fix-all solution appearing at the last minute to put us out of the pan; This is very unlikely to happen, no matter how much soup we'll trow to the Mona Lisa. Is time to accept it.

I agree that with enough wealth, we can reverse the climate change we're causing via greenhouse emissions, but the mechanism is anything but easy.

Every study I've read that examines activities companies undertake in order to become "carbon neutral" has found that the results aren't actually environmentally neutral. A panda refuge, for example, requires a climate without too much warming, but it doesn't result in one. Bold geo-engineering would definitely convert dollars into a cooler world, but with undesirable and not fully understood side-effects.

FWIW, I don't like the jet tracking (for Taylor or Elon or anyone), but for different reasons. Transparency on climate emissions is fine, but disclosing the location of vehicles of famous people in real time is real security threat. If Jack Sweeney just delayed his posts by a week, they'd be pretty much indefensible. That wouldn't grow his following on X as fast, though...

A main problem with this claims is that the value provided is clearly wrong (oversized) but nobody wants to see it. This is lying with maths basically.

100% agreed

>> fund a panda refuge in Montana

For those wondering, https://www.zoomontana.org/animals/red-panda.

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