EasyJet Will Now Pay for Carbon Offsets on All Its Flights

It's the first major airline in the world to offset all its carbon—without passing the cost on to passengers.
easyJet airplane
Christian Brinkmann/Courtesy easyJet

If you often buy carbon offsets to mitigate your emissions and your flight shame, you might want to start booking more flights on EasyJet.

The U.K.-based, low-cost airline announced on Tuesday that starting immediately, it will be the world's first major airline to offset the carbon footprint of all its customers' flights.

Most airlines offer customers the chance to neutralize their portion of a flight's carbon emissions by purchasing an offset during the booking process. This means fliers put down a bit more money based on how far they're flying (and in what cabin class), and the money is sent to programs around the world that mitigate carbon output. These programs include initiatives that are meant to decrease the globe's net carbon emissions, like providing clean water filters to families in Laos, donating money for cleaner and safer cooking stoves in Malawi, planting biodiverse forests in Panama, or providing solar cooking tools to families in Chad. The projects are usually vetted by trusted groups like Cool Effect, Gold Standard, or Green-e.

For the most part, though, the extra cost of offsetting a passengers' carbon output is a charge foisted upon the flier and not covered by the airline. A growing number of carriers, however, have begun to build in offsets for certain passengers on certain flights. As of October, British Airways started offsetting emissions for all its domestic flights at its own expense (£3 million per year, or about $3.87 million dollars). Qantas recently announced that it would start matching its passengers' carbon offset contributions dollar-for-dollar, doubling the airline's mitigation efforts. Similarly, JetBlue has been known to sporadically offset certain flights for its passengers, mitigating the equivalent of 2 billion pounds of carbon emissions—an amount it says is the largest offset by a U.S. commercial airline. Scandinavian Airlines also has one of the most thorough mitigation programs, offsetting the carbon footprint of any flight booked with an I.D. number through its frequent flier program, EuroBonus.

EasyJet, one of Europe's largest airlines, says its new program will cover the cost of offsets to provide carbon neutral flights throughout its entire route network by supporting carbon mitigation projects in "forestry, renewable, and community based projects" vetted by Gold Standard and the Verified Carbon Standard guidelines.

There is some debate in the airline industry and among environmentalists over the true efficacy of carbon offsets. Some experts argue that it's nearly impossible to exactly track how effective some mitigation projects are at reducing carbon levels, that purchasing mitigation credits give airlines carte blanche to pollute, and that other solutions like aviation biofuel have been shown to slash carbon output at its source.

But EasyJet says the sweeping offsets are just a stop-gap solution in its effort to run a more sustainable airline. "Carbon offsetting is only an interim measure while new technologies are developed," EasyJet said in a release on Tuesday. "So the airline will continue to support innovative technology, including the development of hybrid and electric planes, working with others across the industry to reinvent and de-carbonize aviation over the long-term."