The more money you have, the harder it becomes to take your cries about a coming climate apocalypse seriously. Take Nike, for instance. The legendary athletic company has set big-time climate goals for itself, but according to reporting from ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive, Nike’s top brass are still private jet fiends.
Using flight-tracking records, ProPublica reported that Nike CEO John Donahue has landed a private jet over 100 times at Moffett Field, a federal airbase near his home in San Francisco, in his first three and a half years on the job. The fact that Nike also often flies these jets to some fancy destinations—Cape Cod, the Cayman Islands—makes the hypothetical justification that they’re necessary for business a little harder to swallow
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Nike, as a corporate entity, is vocal about its commitment to fighting climate change, with ambitious plans to reduce its climate footprint by 2030. They do so as flight-tracking data shows that Nike’s jets emitted nearly 20% more carbon dioxide in 2023 compared to 2015, the baseline year for its climate goals.
As we learned recently looking at Taylor Swift’s private jet habits, flying private is an inefficient mode of travel that produces way more carbon per passenger than commercial flights. As ProPublica explained, if you’re counting by number of passengers, private jets can release up to 80 times more carbon than commercial flights. They reported that, in 2023, the emissions from Nike’s jets were equivalent to driving a car around the equator 438 times or burning 4.7 million pounds of coal.
That’s not a great look when you consider that Nike also recently laid off 20% of its sustainability staff, either.
