Delta Air Lines misled customers with its sustainability claims, a new class action lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit was filed in California yesterday, seeking damages for every resident who has been on a Delta flight since it made a major climate commitment in 2020.
That year, the company made a $1 billion commitment to become carbon neutral. Rather than cut emissions completely, the plan relied on carbon credits to offset the airline’s pollution. The credits would represent tons of carbon dioxide emissions prevented or removed from the atmosphere. But the math on carbon offsets doesn’t add up. Years of academic research and studies have shown that carbon offsets often do not represent a true reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The plaintiff, Nickelodeon writer Mayanna Berrin, says in the lawsuit that she “paid a significant price premium because of the false and misleading carbon neutral claim.” “I felt comfortable paying more because I neutralized when I had to travel for work or to see my family,” Berrin told me. The associated press. Had she known the company’s carbon neutral claims were “false and misleading,” she would not have paid extra to fly Delta, the complaint says.
The math on carbon offsets doesn’t add up
The airline industry is under fire for how it uses carbon offsets to sell supposedly more sustainable flights. An October 2022 report found that some of Europe’s largest airlines were buying offsets from highly suspect forestry projects. The projects take advantage of trees’ ability to store CO2, but that benefit is temporary unless the projects save hundreds of years of forests from logging and burning.
Delta relied on contentious carbon credit broker Verra to verify its forestry offsets in 2021, according to the new lawsuit. a Guardian A study in January found that more than 90 percent of Verra-certified rainforest carbon offsets are likely “phantom credits” that do not represent a true reduction in emissions.
In an email to The edgeAs of March 2022, Delta claims that it has “fully shifted its focus from carbon offsets to decarbonising our operations, focusing our efforts on investing in sustainable jet fuel, renewing our fleet for more fuel efficient aircraft and implementing operational efficiencies. ” The class action lawsuit is “without legal merit,” the email says.
According to the latest ESG report, Delta was responsible for the equivalent of approximately 43.2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2022. That is comparable to the climate pollution of 109 gas-fired power stations in one year.