Most Ryanair passengers are choosing not to pay as little as 78c to offset the climate impact of their flights, with less than 3 per cent of the airline’s customers using a “carbon calculator” service launched six months ago.
The airline offers all customers who are about to buy a ticket the chance to “fully offset your CO2 emissions for this flight” by paying a fee. The 730km journey from Dublin to Paris can be offset for €1.20, while a 486km journey from Dublin to London, one of the world’s busiest air routes, can be offset for 78c.
Between 2017 and last year, Ryanair charged a flat fee of €2 for offsetting each customer’s emissions. Last summer it launched a carbon calculator, which makes a specific emissions calculation for each flight. In practice this has reduced the cost of offsetting many journeys.
However, the airline revealed last week that the proportion of customers taking up the option is just 3 per cent. German and British customers were the most likely to do so, while solo passengers were more likely to pay up than those in group bookings.
Ryanair said: “The 3 per cent of customers that chose to go greener in 2019 has yet to substantially increase, with the impact of the pandemic on air travel potentially playing a part. To date, these customers have contributed €3.5 million to support environmental projects.”
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Aer Lingus also offers customers the option of buying cheap carbon credits. It allows customers to offset a flight from Dublin to New York, a distance of more than 5,000km, for €2.70. Brandon Graver, a researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a think tank, said that based on prices in the EU’s regulatory carbon market, this offset should cost about €35.
The projects from which Aer Lingus sources carbon credits include two schemes to “avoid deforestation”, while Ryanair’s projects include a wind farm in Turkey financed in partnership with Shell.
Gilles Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch, an NGO, said emissions reduction from “avoided deforestation” is almost impossible to calculate, since it is based on an imagined counterfactual scenario. Given that wind farms, being revenue-generating enterprises, would often get built anyway, there is often no additional carbon saving to claim as an “offset”.
Ryanair pointed out that its wind farm project was approved by the Gold Standard offset certification scheme. Both Ryanair and Aer Lingus also source offsets from projects providing cleaner cookstoves in developing countries, which are generally considered more credible.
Some environmentalists say claims that travellers can neutralise the climate impact of their journey by buying carbon credits as an add-on to their ticket are not credible. Dufrasne said: “If you can avoid flying, that will always be the better option.”
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Jo Dardenne, aviation manager at Transport & Environment, an NGO, said buying offsets was “like paying someone else to go to the gym for you, while you claim to be dieting”. Aer Lingus did not respond to a request for comment. On its website, it says offsetting lets customers “make [their] journey carbon neutral”.
