I’m in a Secret Competition With Taylor Swift. The Environment is Losing
I was beaming about my trip to Patagonia for most of the fall semester. As any well-traveled person knows, half of the excitement is looking forward to the trip. I bought all the necessary materials for my ensuing backpacking trip: a headlamp, hiking boots, and ten flights from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, to a remote part of Argentina. As a frequent backpacker, most of my concerns stemmed from whether or not I could spend another night sleeping on the airport floor. When I tried to track all of my tickets, I was confused. Was I flying from Panama to Buenos Aires? Or was it Panama to Miami? Does my privilege of travel contribute to the climate crisis? What food do they have in the San Jose airport? While some questions were easier than others, I began to think about the ethical costs of my trip.
I do not own a private jet. But if I did, I would overuse it. In 2024, an American award-winning pop singer, Taylor Swift, was scrutinized for her private jet use. Notably, she drew the ire of Twitter and other social media platforms for an eight-minute flight from Illinois to Missouri (Naushad, 2024). Many correctly argued that she, along with her celebrity peers who own private jets, contributes to the climate crisis. Patrick Daly of Northeastern Global News writes, “Aviation is, according to the International Council on Clean Transport, responsible for 2.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which are a driver of climate change,” and produces more than 45 times the gas emissions of a similar commercial route. But can the same argument be used to assuage the frequent flyer’s guilt about contributing to global warming?
Therein lies our moral dilemma: should someone who takes more flights than the average American feel guilty for their potential contribution to climate change? Let’s turn to what seems to be a comparable example, factory farming. In Adrienne M. Martin’s “Factory Farming and Consumer Complicity,” Martin argues that a consumer of factory-farmed meats is complicit, or liable to be blamed, for animal suffering because the purchaser is the industry’s accomplice. It is not enough to say that they are a moral accomplice, however. They are morally culpable because they are not only contributing to the industry’s success, but the industry’s success is always guaranteed by this cycle; joining this collective of consumers can lead to increased production because of increased demand, and vice versa. She concludes that by being part of this complicit consumer group, one facilitates and incentivizes the industry. Animal suffering is more visible than the slow downward spiral of environmental degradation.
Just as individual consumers sustain and incentivize the meat industry through their purchases, frequent flyers uphold and drive the aviation industry's emissions. Travel seems less frequent than meat-eating, so the blame should be squarely on me or those who share my frequent travel habits. The International Council on Clean Transportation calculated that “12 percent of Americans who make more than six round trips by air a year are responsible for two-thirds of all air travel and, by extension, two-thirds of aviation emissions” (Tabuchi and Popovich, 2019).
As a frequent flyer, according to Martin, you are culpable for the greater industry’s contributions to the climate crisis as a complicit consumer. If Martin is correct in holding meat consumers accountable for perpetuating animal suffering, then frequent flyers must similarly reckon with their role in fueling climate change. The primary difference lies in visibility—while factory farming's cruelty is visceral and immediate, the damage caused by aviation emissions is abstract and incremental. Yet both contribute to large-scale harm sustained by individual choices. The moral dilemma remains: in a world where both meat consumption and air travel are normalized, can we justify our participation simply because the harm is less visible? Or does true ethical reflection demand that we take responsibility for the industries we sustain?
Either way, my gripe with my traveling lies more in its frivolity. I think back to a scathing article by Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosophy professor, where she says, “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.” Her words cut deep, framing travel not as an expansion of the mind but as a distraction from the harder work of introspection. Recently, rather than going to far-flung places, choosing to stay closer to the communities I’m part of and seeking out various experiences near me has meant more than some of my international adventures.
In the past, I’ve justified my journeys as necessary explorations of the world and myself. But increasingly, I wonder whether I’ve been chasing novelty rather than meaning. Would I have been better served by staying closer to the communities I am already part of, seeking out new experiences not in distant lands but in familiar spaces? Perhaps philosophy demands that I ask these uncomfortable questions. And as a philosopher, I must also be honest: my indulgence in travel, however personally enriching, contributes to a crisis much larger than myself.
My email signature includes a quote from Rumi about changing the world by first changing oneself. If I take that wisdom seriously, then perhaps the most profound journey I can undertake is not across continents, but inward—toward a reckoning with my complicity. For the frequent travelers out there, instead of booking another flight, consider another act of renewal: plant a tree, or a thousand. Maybe the best way to see the world is to help preserve it.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/climate/flying-shame-emissions.html
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/taylor-swift-shortest-flight-taken-160333581.html
https://theicct.org/publication/co2-emissions-from-commercial-aviation-2018/