Carbon offsets: the uncomfortable truth (and what actually works instead)
The billion-dollar market promising to fix our climate problem is mostly selling paper promises — here's what you should do instead.
Carbon offsets sound so elegant on paper. Your flight to Barcelona pumps six hundred kilograms of CO₂ into the sky, and for $12, some company plants trees in a rainforest somewhere, and suddenly you’re “carbon neutral.” Problem solved. Conscience cleared. Another gin and tonic, please.
Except it doesn’t work that way. Not really. And the uncomfortable truth is that the industry built around this idea has spent the last three decades quietly letting polluters off the hook while the planet got hotter.
This isn’t a fringe view anymore. A peer-reviewed study published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources in 2025, led by climate scientist Joseph Romm, reviewed over a decade of data and found that most carbon offset programs have not significantly slowed global warming. Global CO₂ levels hit a record 424 parts per million in 2024, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The offsets were running. The credits were selling. The atmosphere didn’t notice.
So what’s actually going on? And more importantly, what should you actually do instead?
The math that doesn’t add up
The core promise of a carbon offset is simple: someone else reduces or avoids an equivalent amount of emissions to make up for yours. In theory, this is fine. In practice, it falls apart in several ugly ways. 🌍
The biggest problem is called additionality — a jargon word for a genuinely important concept. For an offset to be real, the carbon-storing activity it funds must only happen because of the offset money. If that forest would have been protected anyway, your payment didn’t change anything. MIT Technology Review and ProPublica found exactly this when they investigated the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which had received carbon credits for conserving forests that were never actually in danger of being cut down. The companies that bought those credits, including Shell, Phillips 66, and the Southern California Gas Company, were paying for a fiction.
Then there’s the permanence problem. A tree is only a carbon store for as long as it stands. Virgin Atlantic’s Oddar Meanchey programme funded afforestation in Cambodia. According to the NGO Fern, continuing deforestation in the region later reversed the emissions those trees had balanced out. The credits stayed valid. The carbon didn’t.
Research from 2024 found that around 87% of voluntary carbon market offsets likely don’t deliver real, additional emission reductions. Worse, an investigation found that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets issued by the biggest certifier in the market were essentially worthless. The financial data makes the picture even clearer: according to University of Florida finance professor Sehoon Kim, more than 70% of retired offsets were priced below $4 per ton — a price point so low it almost certainly signals poor quality. Real, verified emission reductions don’t come that cheap.
The problems tend to cluster:
Additionality failures: projects that would have happened anyway
Permanence failures: forests burned, logged, or flooded after credits are issued
Double-counting: both the buyer and the host country claim the same reduction
Baseline inflation: projects that exaggerate what emissions would have been without the offset
Which of these surprises you most? Drop a comment — I’m genuinely curious which part of this breaks the spell for people.
How corporations got very comfortable with offsetting 🏢
It’s worth asking who benefits most from the current system. The answer isn’t hard to find. When Greenpeace describes carbon offsetting as “a licence to keep polluting”, they’re not just being provocative. The economics really do favour continued emissions over actual cuts.
According to the UN’s High-Level Expert Group on Net Zero Emissions, a company wanting to make a legitimate net-zero claim should be cutting its own emissions by 90-95% first, before offsetting the rest. Almost nobody does this. Instead, companies buy cheap credits, slap a “carbon neutral” label on a product, and let the marketing team handle the rest.
This approach has started catching up with people. FIFA claimed the 2022 Qatar World Cup was “carbon neutral.” Switzerland’s ad regulator ruled they had misled the public and told them to stop. Nestle quietly dropped its pledges to make products like Perrier and KitKat carbon neutral after scrutiny mounted. And Bloomberg reported that Shell — which had built the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets — ended the whole thing. ♻️
Legal cases against corporations for questionable offset claims quadrupled in one recent year. Airlines like Delta and KLM, and brands like Evian’s parent company, have all faced greenwashing lawsuits. The NYU Environmental Law Journal notes that while these cases are useful, they’re fundamentally reactive — stopping bad ads rather than fixing the underlying problem. 📋
What looks like corporate responsibility has, in many cases, been the opposite:
Companies buy the cheapest available credits rather than the highest quality ones
Offsets get used as a substitute for reducing actual emissions, not a complement to them
Marketing teams turn vague offset claims into major selling points for everyday products
The public — which is most of us — usually has no way to audit any of it
The ScienceDirect journal published a major review in 2025 identifying “fraudulent crediting, inflated baselines, lack of additionality, and unverifiable climate claims” as the systemic weaknesses undermining the whole market. That’s not one or two bad actors. That’s the architecture of the industry itself.
What “high quality” actually means (and why it’s still not enough) 🔬
To be fair, the offset world is trying to clean itself up. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market launched its Core Carbon Principles in 2024, setting minimum standards for quality, transparency, and permanence. Verra — one of the main registries — now requires verified real-time monitoring data from projects. Gold Standard has shifted its language from “offsets” to “climate contributions,” nudging companies toward genuine decarbonisation rather than accounting tricks.
These are real improvements. They matter. And yet, there’s a deeper issue that better standards alone don’t solve.
Carbon removal scientist Benja Faecks from Carbon Market Watch put it plainly in a 2025 press release: “Carbon credits have become a comforting myth, not a catalyst for genuine corporate climate ambition.” A study he cited found insufficient evidence that corporate investments in voluntary carbon markets actually increase a company’s climate ambition. In other words, even high-quality offsets may be giving companies an excuse to delay the harder, more expensive work of transforming their operations.
The Environmental Investigation Agency has warned that Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — which is meant to create international rules for carbon markets — still lacks robust enforcement and permits legacy credits from the discredited Clean Development Mechanism, a system that was riddled with fraud. One notorious case: chemical firms in China and India deliberately overproduced a potent greenhouse gas just to destroy it and claim lucrative credits, without cutting a single tonne of real-world emissions. That was the old system. The new rules don’t fully close that door.
A genuinely credible offset, if one exists, looks like this:
Permanent carbon storage, with monitoring that lasts decades
Additional: the project demonstrably wouldn’t have happened without the funding
Verified by independent, third-party auditors with real access to the site
Transparent: the methodology is public and challengeable
Non-exploitative: no displacement of local or Indigenous communities from their land
Even meeting all five criteria doesn’t make an offset a substitute for cutting emissions. At best, it makes it a useful supplement.
What actually works instead 💡
Here’s the thing nobody selling carbon offsets wants you to focus on: the most effective climate action is also the most direct. Reduce the emission. Don’t generate it in the first place. Then find somewhere else to put your money where the impact is cleaner, more verifiable, and harder to game.
If you’re an individual thinking about your own footprint, the SOMO research institute’s analysis argues that what the world needs is “strong regulation, a reimagined financial system, redistribution, and justice” — not an offset industry. That’s a systemic argument, and it’s right. But it doesn’t give you nothing to do right now.
Here’s where real impact tends to live at the personal level:
Cut your home energy use first, since heating and electricity are often the biggest slice of a household footprint. Practical ideas for doing this without misery are over at how to be more green and sustainable at home
Change how you travel, since transport is the other major chunk. Even swapping one flight for a train, or reducing car trips, moves the needle more than buying offsets ever will — more on greening your commute here
Shift your spending toward companies with genuine, verified emissions reduction plans — not ones hiding behind offset-based “carbon neutrality” labels. The eco-friendly shopping guide is a good starting point for navigating the noise
*Support carbon removal rather than avoidance — technologies and nature-based approaches that pull CO₂ out* of the atmosphere rather than just claiming something bad didn’t happen. Direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and biochar are real, if expensive
Back policy change through whichever organisations match your politics, because individual action without systemic change is ultimately insufficient 🌱
There is also a version of offsetting that might be defensible: funding genuinely hard-to-avoid emissions from truly hard-to-abate sectors, like certain industrial processes, while being honest that these are contributions rather than cancellations. The key word there is honest. Not “carbon neutral.” Not “net zero.” A contribution. That distinction matters enormously. ⚡
The question you should ask before buying anything “carbon neutral” 🌿
When you see a “carbon neutral” claim on a product or a company’s website, there’s one question worth asking: has this company published a verified, science-aligned plan to reduce its own emissions by at least 90%? If the answer isn’t immediately obvious, the answer is probably no.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is currently the most credible external benchmark for this kind of commitment — though even SBTi faced significant controversy in 2024 when it briefly floated allowing supply chain emissions to be covered by offsets, before walking it back under pressure. Trust the trajectory, not just the label.
What the research makes clear, from Romm’s 2025 study to the ScienceDirect review to decades of investigative journalism, is that offsets as currently structured are better at making emissions look reduced than making them be reduced. That’s a meaningful difference when we’re talking about a physical atmosphere that operates on physics, not accounting.
Carbon offsets probably have some role to play in a world that needs every tool available. But right now, they are absorbing attention, money, and moral energy that could go toward things that actually move the needle. The $4-per-tonne credit that lets a company slap “carbon neutral” on its packaging is not moving the needle. It’s moving the line on a spreadsheet.
So — do you think carbon offsets are reformable, or is the whole concept too broken to rescue? That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer probably determines what kind of climate action you end up backing with your time and money.