2024-08-13

🔗 Carbon offset setback risks corporate backtrack on climate goals

Stalled efforts to expand companies' use of carbon credits to offset greenhouse-gas emissions are raising the prospect that some will backtrack or abandon targets to shrink their carbon footprint.

Since 2015, when governments agreed in Paris to try to keep the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), more than half of the world's largest 2,000 publicly listed companies have announced targets to cut their emissions to zero on a net basis by 2050.

But environmental advocates are expressing concerns that companies are falling behind on those targets. Companies are in turn complaining that clean technologies are not being rolled out on time and that government policies are not doing enough to support the transition away from fossil fuels.

To summarize:

1. Companies have not actually reduced emissions.
2. Companies pretend to reduce emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.
3. Carbon offsets are shown to not be effective in actually reducing emissions.
4. Companies say, well, we won't even pretend anymore and continue making no effort to reduce emissions and also stop purchasing the offsets that weren't actually working.

Capitalism cannot fix the climate emergency.