Delta Under Fire For Carbon Offset ‘Green’ Marketing Strategy

Delta Air Lines is facing a California lawsuit over its $1 billion claim of carbon neutrality. Plaintiffs maintain that the carbon “offsets” Delta pays for don’t do enough to mitigate global warming, and the airline is unfairly profiting from its claims.

In 2020, Delta announced it would invest $1 billion to achieve carbon neutral status within the following decade. The offsets purchased by Delta allegedly amount to “credits” for sponsoring initiatives to conserve rainforest, wetlands and grasslands as well as reduce fuel consumption by design improvements in propulsion and aerodynamics. But the California lawsuit claims that Delta is unfairly claiming to be “the world’s first carbon-neutral airline.”

The lawsuit plaintiffs maintain the claims are “demonstrably false” based on “junk offsets” that do little to mitigate greenhouse gasses. The suit further asserts that Delta is profiting by the claims, since customers are buying tickets from Delta—as opposed to competitors—based on the airline’s publicly asserted claims of carbon neutrality in LinkedIn posts, advertisements and on on-board napkins.

Plaintiff attorney Jonathan Haderlein said, “This is more than a climate-change case. This is also a business case. People are paying more for these greener products. If a company like Delta is raking that premium in by claiming they do it first and then doing a huge advertising blitz to try to get people flying again, we think that’s unfair to other companies that are buying higher-quality offsets or doing far better sustainability. And frankly, unfair to consumers.”