Do carbon offsets actually work? Mostly not — here's why
A carbon offset is a promise: you pay, and somewhere a tonne of CO₂ is avoided or removed on your behalf. It’s an appealing idea — and for most voluntary offsets sold to individuals, the promise doesn’t hold up. This is the reasoning behind CO2Mate’s flat refusal to sell them.
The three ways an offset fails
For a credit to mean anything, three things must all be true. In practice they often aren’t:
- Additionality. The reduction must not have happened anyway. Many credits pay to “protect” forests that were never going to be cut, or to build projects that were already commercially viable. If it would have happened without your money, you bought nothing.
- Permanence. A tonne stored in a tree must stay stored — for centuries. A forest that’s logged, or burns in a wildfire a decade later, releases the carbon back. CO₂ from a flight is effectively permanent; a tree is not a safe vault for it.
- No leakage. Protecting one forest can simply push the logging next door, moving the emissions rather than removing them.
What the investigations found
A 2023 investigation by the Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial into rainforest credits certified by Verra — the largest standard — concluded that the large majority of the credits examined were likely “phantom” credits that did not represent real reductions. Academic analyses of REDD+ forest projects have repeatedly found that baselines were inflated, overstating the carbon “saved.” This isn’t a fringe critique; it’s now the mainstream finding.
When offsets have a (narrow) role
High-quality carbon removal — durable, measured, verified — has a real place, mainly for emissions that genuinely cannot yet be eliminated. But it belongs at the end of the hierarchy, not the start:
Avoid → Reduce → (only then) Remove.
The failure mode is using a cheap offset at the front of that hierarchy, as a reason not to change the underlying activity. That’s not climate action; it’s accounting.
What to do instead
- Cut the emission at the source where you can — the flight, the beef, the gas boiler.
- Treat your footprint as information, not debt. The point of a number is to change a decision, not to be cancelled out by a purchase.
- If you do buy removal, buy durable, third-party-verified removal and treat it as a supplement, never a substitute.
CO2Mate shows you the number and stops there, on purpose. We don’t think planting trees in someone else’s country absolves a transatlantic flight — and we’d rather be useful than sell you absolution.
Sources: The Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial investigation into Verra rainforest offset credits (2023); peer-reviewed analyses of REDD+ baseline inflation; the standard mitigation hierarchy (avoid–reduce–remove).