I run a company that funds a tonne of verified CO₂ offsetting with hotel bookings, so you might expect me to defend offsetting unconditionally. I won't. The critics are half right, and pretending otherwise is how this industry keeps losing the public. The productive move is to say plainly which half is right, and what the fix is.
Where the critics are right
Additionality has been gamed. Credits have been sold for forests that were never going to be cut, for projects that would have happened anyway. That happened; the investigations were sound. Any offsetting programme that can't answer "would this have happened without the money?" with evidence deserves the scepticism it gets.
Verification was too often self-referential. Issuer, verifier and seller shared incentives, and buyers had no independent place to check anything. Trust chains that end in the seller's own PDF are not trust chains.
Cheap credits enabled lazy claims. "Carbon neutral" stickers were bought for pennies and worn like medals. The public noticed. They were right to.
Where the critics overreach
The conclusion "therefore stop funding climate projects with commerce" does not follow. The atmosphere doesn't care about our purity debates; it cares about funded action. Consumer commerce is one of the largest voluntary funding channels available to climate projects — abandoning it because its first decade was sloppy is like abandoning medicine because early pharmacies sold tonics.
The "licence to pollute" argument also proves less than it seems. In travel, the alternative to an offset-funding booking is not "no trip" — it's the same trip booked through a platform that funds nothing. Given two identical transactions, the one that moves verified money to climate projects is strictly better. Guilt-free is not the claim; funded is the claim.
What the fix looks like
The fix has three parts, and none of them is a slogan.
Supervised registries. The single strongest antidote to double-counting and phantom credits is a registry run by an accountable public institution. This is why IMPT moved toward the Generalitat de Catalunya's Climate Credit system, where — as Business Plus reported — we are set to become the first registered intermediary. Registration means obligations; obligations mean someone to answer to.
Local, inspectable projects. Verified local climate action — projects a regulator, a journalist, or a customer can physically visit — changes the epistemics. Distance was the voluntary market's best friend and the buyer's worst enemy.
Per-transaction accounting. Claims should attach to transactions, not to brands. "This booking funded this quantity, retired in this registry" is checkable. "We are a climate-positive company" is weather.
The bar we should all accept
Here is the standard I think every consumer climate claim should meet, ours included: a customer with no special access should be able to trace their transaction to a verified quantity of climate action inside a system the seller does not control. Offsetting that meets that bar deserves to grow. Offsetting that can't should feel the pressure — from inside the industry, loudest of all.
Common questions
Is carbon offsetting a licence to pollute?
In commerce the realistic alternative to an offset-funding purchase is the same purchase funding nothing. The honest claim is not 'guilt-free' — it is that the transaction moved a verified quantity of money to climate action.
What was actually wrong with the voluntary carbon market?
Gamed additionality, self-referential verification, and cheap credits enabling lazy claims — failures documented by serious investigations and worth taking at face value.
What fixes trust in offsetting?
Government-supervised registries, local inspectable projects, and per-transaction accounting — so any customer can trace their purchase to retired credits in a system the seller doesn't control.