Buyers use carbon offsets to compensate for their emissions, but analysis shows at least half of those bought last year likely fail to do that job.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergCompanies Are Dropping Carbon Offsets, But Still Buying the Worst Ones
Purchases of carbon offsets last year fell for the first time since 2016, according to an analysis of 260,000 publicly available transactions.
(Corrects the percentage decrease in demand for offsets in the 2nd paragraph of a story originally published on Nov. 27, 2023, and related figures in the first two charts.)
Carbon offsets once looked primed for unstoppable growth. Analysts had forecast that the credits, which claim to wipe out a ton of emissions, would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years. But companies are starting to cool on the market as it faces increasingly sharp criticism from scientists and experts.