Fox News dunks on Taylor Swift’s carbon emissions but misses the point

Taylor Swift is a pop icon whose Eras Tour has been a worldwide phenomenon and a business mogul who’s reportedly managed to become a billionaire off the force of her music alone. To some people her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce makes her “couple goals.” But to certain right-wing circles on the internet, she’s become a favorite punching bag, not to mention a potential psy-op from the Pentagon. (Or is it the CIA?)

Case in point: a recent article from Fox News dinging Swift for flying on her personal plane from New Jersey to Maryland on Sunday to watch Kelce (and the Chiefs) play in the AFC championship game against the Baltimore Ravens. According to a Reddit account that tracks Swift’s jet and was cited in the Fox News article, that trip “cost $1,328 for the fuel and produced three tons of CO2 emissions.”

Every so often, Fox News comes dangerously close to making a solid point before swerving at the last second to avoid it. Here, it rightly calls out celebrities disproportionately adding to carbon dioxide emissions by flying ridiculously short distances on private planes. Fox News doesn’t, however, explain why carbon dioxide emissions are bad. The issue, as the network sees it, is that Swift is the one who produced them.

Every so often, Fox News comes dangerously close to making a solid point before swerving at the last second to avoid it.

Carbon emissions, which have been rising since the dawn of the Industrial Age and are mostly caused by burning fossil fuels, are the primary driver of manmade climate change. As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, so, too, has the average global temperature. The world recently tipped over the 1.5-degree Celsius marker that climate scientists have warned would herald an unprecedented shift in weather patterns, wildlife vulnerability and humans’ ability to mitigate the effects on society. And yet the Fox News piece manages to avoid linking carbon emissions to their disastrous consequences.

In fact, the word “climate” appears only as part of the phrase “climate indulgences,” a phrase borrowed from an editorial in The Wall Street Journal referring to a bygone Catholic Church practice of allowing the wealthy to purchase indulgences that countermand any sins they may have committed. Last year, Swift purchased double the carbon credits required to offset the emissions produced from her Eras Tour travel, the excess of which would cover her trips to see Kelce play. Those carbon credits are performative, the WSJ’s editorial board argued, if not downright useless:

They are a political creation that lets companies and countries—and now celebrities—virtue signal. If a manufacturer wants to claim it is reducing emissions, it can buy a credit rather than use less gas or coal power. Instead of flying commercial, Ms. Swift can buy credits to offset trips on her $40 million Dassault aircraft. Carbon offsets don’t significantly reduce emissions, but they do promote the illusion that a net-zero world is possible.

Like Fox News, by dismissing carbon credits, The Wall Street Journal approaches a real point only to artfully dodge it. It’s true that the voluntary carbon credit system hasn’t had a great track record for results in actually reducing the effects of climate change. Last year, The Guardian and the nonprofit watchdog Corporate Accountability found that according to their investigation’s criteria, a “total of 39 of the top 50 emission offset projects, or 78% of them, were categorized as likely junk or worthless due to one or more fundamental failing that undermines its promised emission cuts.” The much more effective solution to slowing and reversing the effects of climate change would be to use drastically fewer fossil fuels and transition to cleaner energy sources.

But the WSJ’s editorial ends by arguing that Swift is “a brilliant entertainer and businesswoman, and her private jet flights are nothing to feel guilty about. She might take her own advice and shake off the climate criticism without the offset illusions.” The idea that there’s nothing to feel guilty about in little hopscotch private flights not only is something we should all disagree with, but on top of that, the suggestion that she ought not feel bad undercuts the point of Fox News’ article that cited it. Or, at least, it would undercut it if the consequences of Swift’s carbon footprint were the real point Fox News wanted to make.

Fox News knows well enough that its audience, which is more likely to include major climate deniers, isn’t interested in learning about climate change. So why did it even attack Swift’s private plane usage? Well, because on the far right, Swift and Kelce have become a totem for progressives and Democrats writ large, prompting the sort of paranoid outbursts referenced at the beginning of this piece.

There’s a new craving among conservatives for anything that shows Swift in a negative light. At the same time, there’s zero appetite from those same conservatives to address climate change. The result is this kind of weirdly muddled messaging that implies that Swift has done something wrong but refuses to name the harm. Even though it’s a harm that people who care about the changing climate can clearly see.