“What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets.

Carbon offsets promise polluters that they can cancel out their emissions by funding projects that reduce or store emissions elsewhere. Let’s say a company emits 100 tons of carbon dioxide. Companies could buy offsets that would fund enough tree planting to hypothetically store 100 tons of CO₂, or enough solar panels to prevent 100 tons of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.

But carbon offset programs are rife with bogus math, ignore science, and are full of empty promises. They often don’t have the impact they claim, and they encourage companies to continue polluting.

Nevertheless, offsets are gaining traction at the state, national, and even international level. Dirty energy companies are angling to use bogus offsets to justify using fracked gas to claim lucrative hydrogen tax credits. They’re also pushing for a global offset market through negotiations happening around the COP29 international climate conference this November.

These so-called “market-based solutions” will allow corporations to pay to pollute, while doing little to tackle climate change. We cannot let our leaders continue support for carbon offsets, and here’s why:

Carbon Offsets Overestimate Their Climate Benefits

The benefits of carbon offsets and their associated projects are based on two ideas: additionality and permanence. 

Additionality means that an offset project stops or stores emissions that wouldn’t have been otherwise. If a wind farm was going to be built even without funding from offsets, then the offsets didn’t really help prevent new emissions.

This is incredibly difficult to confirm or quantify; as the U.S. Government Accountability Office has written, “[d]etermining additionality is inherently uncertain because, it may not be possible to know what would have happened in the future had the projects not been undertaken.”

Additionality is key to offsets’ effectiveness, yet it’s missing from many on the market. A 2016 study of one United Nations carbon offset program found that 85% of the offset projects had a “low likelihood” of additionality. In California’s primary forest offset program, an estimated one-third of offsets don’t store additional carbon in forests. 

Permanence means the emissions must be prevented or stored for a long time — hundreds, even thousands of years. That’s because CO₂ sticks around in the atmosphere for that long. Yet many offset programs can’t promise permanence. Forest offset programs, for example, tend to promise carbon storage for less than 100 years.

These promises are also threatened by climate change-driven disasters like wildfires, which are already tearing through forests managed through offsets. Our recent research shows that fires could release millions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere from forests under California’s offset program alone.

Even barring disasters, attempting to measure carbon storage in soil and forests is in itself an uncertain endeavor. Putting a number on an offset’s possible climate benefits is much more fraught than companies would have you believe.

Carbon Offsets Allow Corporate Pollution and More Emissions

It’s becoming increasingly common for corporations to declare “net-zero emissions” goals, but these climate pledges are misleading. The catch is in the “net,” as corporations plan to achieve these goals not by reducing their own emissions, but by using carbon offsets to “cancel” them out. This is especially egregious for oil and gas companies, which have invested in carbon offsets while continuing to drill. 

In this way, carbon offsets serve to greenwash companies. They allow corporations to tout their “efforts” toward climate goals while essentially paying them to continue polluting.

To make matters worse, this dynamic can lead to more CO₂ in the atmosphere, not less, when a company’s climate pollution outweighs the CO₂ meant to be stored through offsets.

These problems are magnified by the few regulations on carbon offset markets and the rampant fraud in the industry.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Treasury released new voluntary standards (read: friendly suggestions) for offsets, in an attempt to define “quality” credits. But these standards are incredibly weak. They don’t even suggest a time frame that offsets should pledge to store carbon, throwing any promise of permanence out the window.

As the climate crisis grows more dire, it’s clear that we can’t waste time with wildly imprecise, undependable accounting schemes. To actually lower emissions, we need to compel corporations to reduce them at the source. 

Carbon Offsets Hurt Environmental Justice Communities

While companies pay to pollute, the communities closest to their operations will continue to suffer. Rather than reducing pollution, carbon offsets just move it around, usually concentrating it even more into environmental justice communities. 

At the same time, some carbon offsets support climate scams, like factory farm gas production, which turns waste from factory farms into fuel. This is not only bad for the climate — it entrenches the harmful factory farm model. And due to historical racist and discriminatory policies, the folks living in these communities are disproportionately low-income and people of color.

Offset programs also have a track record of wresting land, resources, or autonomy away from local Indigenous peoples, farmers, and low-income communities. Many forest offset programs amount to “carbon land grabbing,” leading to displacement of Indigenous people from their forests, human rights abuses, and violations of Indigenous land rights.

In such cases, offsets can do double damage to local communities — pollution in one place from the company buying offsets, and harms in another place from the supposedly “climate-friendly” projects that the offsets support.

Carbon Offsets Are a Dangerous Distraction From Real Climate Policy

The carbon offsets behind corporations’ “net-zero” pledges are usually bought and sold on private markets. However, governments are increasingly supporting offsets, including the United States. For example, the California Air Resources Board allows companies to comply with state emissions limits by buying offsets for projects around the country. 

In Pennsylvania, dirty hydrogen companies are vying to use offsets to allow their operations to qualify for a lucrative tax credit. They ludicrously claim that by mixing fugitive emissions and factory farm gas with fracked gas, they can offset the harms fracking poses to our climate and public health. Nevermind the enormous harms caused by fracking that gas in the first place.

At the global level, the United Nations is working to establish an offset market to ostensibly help countries meet their climate goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Rather than focus just on cutting emissions, this would allow countries to support “climate-friendly” projects in other countries and have it count toward those goals.

In other words, wealthy countries could pay to continue polluting, while less wealthy countries hosting offset projects see dubious benefits. At last year’s COP28 climate conference, creating an offset market was a key topic of discussion, and talks will continue into this year’s COP29.

However, all this delays and distracts from already-proven climate solutions: transitioning to 100% clean energy and ending all fossil fuel use and production. 

We can’t let this distraction gain more traction. We won’t fall for corporate greenwashing schemes, and we can’t let our leaders do so, either. Instead, we need climate policy that truly addresses climate change and protects communities by stopping emissions at their source.