Are carbon credits doing more harm than good for the climate?

Do carbon credits really help to combat global warming, or are they counter-productive?

Transcript

00:00You can almost have the impression at the moment that you can consume and shop what you want while being climate neutral.

00:06You will find cheese, flights, bank accounts that claim, oh, this is climate neutral.

00:14The company pays another provider for so-called carbon credits.

00:20And this means that another project elsewhere is doing something to

00:24supposedly reduce emissions or take out emissions.

00:28There are a lot of question marks around it.

00:30Firstly, scientifically, it doesn't work that way that you can emit a lot of emissions here from an airplane.

00:35Somewhere else may take something out and then say, overall, this had no impact.

00:39Then there are also a lot of question marks around these providers of carbon offsets.

00:46The problem often is that companies then just rely on saying, oh, fine, if I can pay money for it and then get away with it,

00:52then I don't have to do as much effort to actually reduce the emissions in my own operations.

00:58It could even slow down emission reductions because companies have the possibility to just pay for it instead of taking genuine action.

01:08So actually, it derails the overall objective of climate neutrality as a society.