I feel like companies are “double dipping” by selling these carbon credits. Getting to “net zero” by itself is good. Sourcing CO2 “from an ethanol refinery in neighboring Oregon and, later, from pulp and paper facilities in Washington” means it’s coming from biomass, which is almost as good as using any hypothetical direct capture air scrubbers (do we have any functional examples of those yet or are they entirely fiction so far?). Sourcing electricity from hydro is good. (Sourcing from “fossil gas and a small amount of coal” is not.) We do need jet fuel. All continental routes should be replaced with high-speed trains, but we still have transoceanic travel. We can either give that up entirely or find a carbon-neutral way to make jet fuel.

But when you make this almost-zero carbon jet fuel, but THEN ALSO sell carbon credits, who actually gets to brag about being carbon-neutral? Is it the airlines who use the alternative fuel, or the GHG-emitting industries who bought the credits? “We paid someone to make alternative jet fuel which saved 1000 tons of oil from being pumped out of the ground, so we get to burn 1000 tons of coal at our factory guilt-free.” No! That doesn’t count if the airline ALSO gets to burn those 1000 tons of fuel.

At the very least the airline should lose the right to brag about using carbon-neutral fuel and be forced to go buy its own carbon credits elsewhere.