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I have noted a report in the Guardian that says:
Shell has become the latest large company to pull back from carbon offsets amid concerns many have no environmental impact, it has emerged, as the Carbon Trust discontinues its “carbon neutral” labelling scheme based on offsetting.
They continued:
The FTSE 100 oil company, one of the leading proponents of carbon offsetting, abandoned targets to invest up to $100m a year in carbon credit schemes and purchase 120m nature offsets a year by 2030 as part of a broader watering down of its climate ambitions in June, the oil major has confirmed.
They then added:
The decision, first reported in Bloomberg, means Shell joins Gucci, Leon, Nestlé and other firms in moving away from offsets amid repeated indications that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating. Earlier this year, the Guardian published an investigation that found that the vast numbers of rainforest carbon offsets were worthless.
Why note this? Because when I launched sustainable cost accounting I made clear that I wanted companies to prove their net-zero claims without the use of offsets since many of these, I suggested, could not be substantiated.
It seems that my cynicism on this issue has now been justified. Offsetting and the whole industry that surrounds it is just another load of microeconomic mythology unrelated to any observable real world actuality, and is now being abandoned for that reason.
Many suggested to me (usually rather angrily) at the time that I made this proposal that I was being absurd and was placing impossible obstacles in the path of companies who wanted to prove they could be net-zero via offsets.
I suspect that those same people will not be turning up to apologise now. But if they did I would find it hard to resist saying ‘told you so’.
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