Nike Promised Climate Action, But Its Corporate Jets Kept Flying — and Polluting

On dozens of occasions since 2020, a private Gulfstream jet belonging to Nike has touched down at Moffett Field, a federally owned airfield on the banks of San Francisco Bay.

The Silicon Valley site’s most notable feature is a hulking building known as Hangar One, which in the 1930s housed a U.S. Navy airship and today is a conspicuous landmark along U.S. 101.

It also happens to sit about a 30-minute drive from one of Nike CEO John Donahoe’s homes. He became the Oregon-based company’s top executive in January 2020, bought a condo in Portland and registered as an Oregon voter. But he also maintained a home in the Bay Area community of Portola Valley. His previous job was leading a tech company in Santa Clara, and his wife worked at Stanford University until September.

Nike’s jets landed at Moffett more than 100 times in the first three and a half years of Donahoe’s tenure, flight-tracking records show. Landings at Moffett stopped in July 2023 but became more frequent at a nearby airport with a similar drive time to Portola Valley.

Donahoe and Nike executive chairperson Mark Parker have made clear that climate change is a crisis demanding urgent action. “It’s about leading with actions, not words,” Parker said in Nike’s 2019 corporate responsibility report. “We are more committed than ever to help save the planet,” Donahoe said in a 2022 company video.

Yet Nike has failed to shrink one aspect of its carbon footprint that the two men directly influence: travel on the private jets, which emit far more carbon per passenger than commercial airliners.

Nike’s jet travel is up. Company disclosures show that its private planes last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The flights are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s commitment to sharply reduce emissions.

The company owns two Gulfstream G650ERs. Flight-tracking records show that their destinations include New York City, where the company has a corporate office, and Paris during the Olympics and in April, when Nike unveiled its Olympic uniforms.

In July, a Nike jet flew down to San Jose, California, and back to its base in Hillsboro, Oregon; it then took off two days later for Idaho, where Donahoe and his wife were photographed at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, an annual gathering dubbed “summer camp for billionaires.”

Vacation spots Nike jets have traveled to include Cape Cod, where Parker owns a home. Since 2020, the planes have landed there at least 15 times. They’ve touched down in the Cayman Islands at least six times since 2021.

But the Bay Area has been a magnet. It was an out-of-the-way pit stop for an Oregon-bound flight after Donahoe delivered the spring commencement keynote at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 2023. It has been a weekend destination with Friday landings and Sunday returns to Oregon. (The jets averaged about 10 flights a year to Moffett Field in the two years before Donahoe’s hiring, when he was a Nike board member and lived in California, versus an average of about 30 a year from 2020 through mid-2023, while he was Nike’s CEO.)

More than 30 times, one of the company’s private jets flew down to Moffett and back to Oregon in the same day, sometimes spending as little as 25 minutes on the ground.

If those flights ferried a single person in one direction, turning what would be one commercial flight into two by private jet, it would release 160 times as much carbon per passenger as if the person flew commercial, said Phillip Ansell, director of the Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He called this arrangement “completely inexcusable.”

“In the current climate where aviation does not yet have a viable route to fully decarbonize, we need to see these types of flights come to a halt,” Ansell said.

Nike did not make Donahoe and Parker available for interviews and declined to say why the jets frequented Moffett Field and, more recently, San Jose Mineta International Airport.

The company said in a statement that its jet passengers comprise a variety of people who are essential to its business objectives, including executives, employees, athletes, entertainers and others. The jets improve productivity and address security concerns for executives, Nike said, calling private flights a standard practice among large global companies.

As for curbing carbon pollution, the company said that “we focus on Nike’s areas of greatest impact,” noting that the bulk of its emissions come from the production of materials for its sneakers and apparel.

Celebrities including Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner have drawn scrutiny for their profligate jet-setting in the face of the planet’s record-breaking temperatures. And in the business world, CEOs are increasingly being allowed to use corporate jets for personal use, according to Equilar, a data firm that studies executive compensation. In 2018, 36% of S&P 500 companies included the perk in CEO pay packages. By last year, that had grown to 45%.

But Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel company, stands apart: It has staked a claim as a corporate leader on the environment, joining thousands of companies pledging to voluntarily slash carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Nike also stands out for disclosing more about its private jet travel than its peers. A review by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive of the disclosures of 30 companies, including 18 of Nike’s self-identified peers, found no others that publicly report emissions from corporate jets. Roughly half report emissions from business travel, which can include jet use.

In addition to reporting rising emissions from its jets, Nike’s disclosures show that it is behind on its ambitions for reducing its overall contribution to climate change. The company said in 2016 that it would halve its total emissions; instead they have grown slightly since 2015.

Meanwhile, since December, Nike has laid off 20% of its dedicated sustainability staff, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica have reported, and lost another 10% through internal transfers or voluntary departures.

Nike’s growing private jet use sets the wrong tone from the top, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

“It’s, ‘Do what I say, not as I do,’” Elson said. “Flying private aircraft all over the place certainly isn’t a bold action in support of climate responsibility. That’s the problem. Your actions and your words seem to diverge in unflattering ways. It is not a good look.”

Private jet use represents less than a tenth of a percent of all Nike’s emissions. The overwhelming majority come from production and shipping by the company’s overseas suppliers. But the jets generate 6% of the carbon coming from assets that Nike owns, a share that has grown as Nike has powered its buildings around the world with renewable energy.

Donahoe, whose $29.2 million compensation last year made him one of America’s highest-paid executives, has an arrangement with Nike that allows him to use the jets for more than business. He can fly in them for personal travel at his own expense. He has reimbursed Nike more than $700,000 for such trips in the last two years, securities filings show.

In addition, the company has given the chief executive $293,000 in free personal travel since 2020 as part of his compensation. Parker, the executive chairperson, has received $494,000 in free personal use of the jets in that time.

The jets’ flight paths can be found on the website of ADS-B Exchange, which crowdsources location readings from airplane transponders. The flight records don’t show who is on board, but in some cases flights coincided with news coverage and social media posts indicating their purpose.

Nike’s jets have landed at golf destinations around the country. They visited Augusta, Georgia, ahead of the Masters Tournament in 2022 and again in 2023. A Nike jet has joined the roughly 1,500 other private jets that crowd the small airport during the tournament, making it so busy that Golf Digest has described it as a “bonafide Heathrow.”

In 2022, Donahoe golfed in a morning pro-am event before the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club, outside Columbus, Ohio. Social media photos show Donahoe playing with Rory McIlroy, a golf star Nike sponsors.

One of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the golf event; it returned to Oregon after the pro-am ended, flight records show.

Traveling by private jet is far more polluting than flying commercial.

Ansell, the sustainable aviation expert, said a fully loaded Gulfstream G650ER flight releases about 4.5 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as a Boeing 737, the workhorse commercial airplane. If the Gulfstream is carrying only a single passenger, it’s about 80 times as polluting, he said, because the private aircraft’s weight and fuel consumption stay roughly the same.

Nike’s Gulfstream models can be configured to carry as many as 19 passengers. It’s unknown how many people typically travel on them.

“It is patently irresponsible to be using luxury G650s for flights that carry only a few passengers,” Ansell said.

The pollution from Nike’s jets adds up. Last year, they generated roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as a passenger car driving 10.9 million miles, company disclosures and an Environmental Protection Agency emissions calculator show. (Imagine driving a car around the equator 438 times.) It was roughly equal to the amount of carbon pollution that would be released by burning 4.7 million pounds of coal.

While Nike’s corporate jets have been generating more carbon, the company last year recorded a 65% decline compared to 2015 in emissions from another source: commercial air travel by rank-and-file employees.

Four former employees said the company has restricted worker travel in recent years. They said their managers didn’t cite the need to reduce emissions but instead the need to save money. Nike, in a statement, said its employees also had embraced remote meeting tools since the pandemic, allowing them to “operate effectively without extensive travel.”

By contrast, the company’s jets are used for transportation to “specific high-level meetings and events that require executive presence,” Nike said, “and cannot be conducted remotely.”

Ryanne Mena and Jeff Frankl of ProPublica contributed research.