This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

The private jet supertax has to be a popular, slam-dunk of a manifesto policy from the Scottish Greens, promising to slap a £1000 levy per head on passengers.

After all, who among us doesn’t feel a smidge of green envy or just plain anger at the trail of greenhouse gas emissions left by these aircraft as they carry the rich across the planet?

The percentage of the global population that has or uses these aircraft is minuscule, mostly businessmen and celebrities, but also world leaders including the likes of Rishi Sunak, and even, recently, Keir Starmer. When the Labour Party leader took a flight from Wales to Scotland, on the general election trail, he described it as ‘essential’ – as many do when defending jet use.

Private jets are also on our mind following the departure of Taylor Swift from the UK, moving swiftly through a sequined sky in her Dassault 7X, a 16-seater, complete with kitchen, dining area and beds. But really Swift, who has become a key target of private-jet ire, is not the worst with her 178,000 miles of flights last year.

She doesn’t even rank on the top 30 list compiled by Myclimate Carbon Tracker and topped by Travis Scott, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Beyonce and Jay-Z, and Bill Gates: many of whom don’t even have the excuse that they are caught up in the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. 

Global unfairness

The other virtue of the Scottish Green party’s supertax on private jets is that it’s not just about greenhouse gas emissions – it’s about inequality. Slap that policy together with their other headline idea of abolishing the monarchy and what’s formed is a message close to class war.

But flight is also part of a wider global inequality story. 80% of the world’s population have never flown, as have 22% of Britons. To them, those of us who have taken, perhaps yearly to the air, or more frequently, might as well be that 1%.

It’s not, in other words, just about private jet users, but people who fly a lot – and the Scottish Greens manifesto also calls for another inequality-buster, a frequent flyer levy, which would target, it says, “the 1% of people who cause 50% of global carbon emissions”. 

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Notably, air travel accounts for a huge fraction of the emissions from the EU's wealthiest 1% of households. According to one pre-2020 report, flight was responsible for 2/5ths of their carbon footprint, at 22.6 tonnes of CO2 each.

Yes, private flights are responsible for a lot of emissions, around 5.3 million tonnes of CO2 according to Greenpeace, in Europe over the past three years, but overall commercial passenger flights last year produced closer to 780 million tonnes, and half of them were from those frequent fliers.

That said, someone like Swift is in a whole other category. Compare the flight she made to the Super Bowl in February 2024, which, according to Forbes magazine, would have probably created 41 tons of CO2. Given the global per capita average emissions at 4.6 tons, that’s a single trip the equivalent of nearly ten people’s yearly emissions.

Private flights have been responsible for 5.3 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in the last three years (Image: Derek McArthur)

No quick technofix

This would not be the first tax of its kind: Switzerland already has a private flight levy. The policy is also especially relevant in the UK, which has what might be called a private jet problem.

We are sixth in the world – after the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Germany – in terms of number of private jets based here. Last year, it was reported that one in ten departures from UK airports was private jets, up from 7.5% before Covid.

The private jet levy is just one of a portfolio of aviation measures put forward by the manifesto, which include the removal tax breaks on aviation fuel, the phasing out of short-haul flights where fast train routes are available, and reform of the airspace change process.

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That kind of attention to flight is particularly appropriate given the recent news of Scotland’s failure to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2022 – much of which, it turns out, was down to “increases in emissions from international aviation and shipping”.

It’s also pertinent because aviation is a sector for which there is not yet a quick technofix. I’ve covered some of the progress on Loganair’s hydrogen flight testing and, while the technology is exciting, it’s clear to me that emissions-free flights to Malaga are not just around the corner, even if we may see Scottish island-hopper zero-emissions flights by 2027.

Double the credit

I return to Taylor Swift, who, we learn, has bought more than double the carbon credit quota for her flights’ emissions. Also Keir Starmer, who after taking that private jet from Wales to Scotland, said, “We offset the carbon, we always do whenever we use transport in the air”.

Are we convinced those carbon credits let them off the hook?

Hardly. Still highly controversial, even when they are attached to good quality projects that really are reducing emissions, the chief problem with credits is that they create the illusion that it is possible just to erase emissions by offsetting them.

But there’s a further problem for those relying on carbon credits – and that’s the crunch that could be coming in a few years when airlines are forced to mitigate their growth in emissions.

A Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) is set to be mandatory from 2027 and will push up demand for carbon credits to such levels that, says market solutions provider Abatable, demand could reach seven to fourteen times supply.