Why Carbon Credits Are Mostly a Fraud
March 10, 2026 · Frisian News
Corporate carbon credits fail to cut real emissions and often funnel money to projects that would happen anyway. Companies buy absolution instead of changing how they work.
A coal plant in Indonesia offsets its emissions by planting trees on land it already owned. A cement factory in Brazil buys credits for a wind farm that was built with government money anyway. These schemes sit at the heart of the global carbon credit market, a 2 trillion dollar industry that lets polluters claim they hurt the planet less than they actually do. The math does not work. The planet does not care about credits on a balance sheet.
The problem runs deep. Most carbon credits measure fictional carbon cuts. A project gets credit for not cutting down a forest, but that forest faced no real threat of being cut. A solar farm gets credit because it replaces coal power, yet the coal plant was closing anyway due to economics and local law. These are called baseline games. Companies and governments count carbon cuts that never were. Auditors, paid by the credit sellers, rubber-stamp the numbers.
Major oil firms and airlines buy these junk credits to maintain their public image while growing their real emissions year after year. Shell, BP, and Emirates all claim carbon neutral operations. Their actual fuel burned, their actual greenhouse gas pumped into the air, stays the same or rises. The credits just move money from rich countries to poor ones, creating a moral theater that costs almost nothing but feels expensive.
A 2024 study by Verra, the biggest certifier, admitted that 70 to 90 percent of its forest credits would not have reduced emissions at all. The firm had known this for years. It fixed the numbers anyway because that is where the money lives. When fraud comes from the top, it flows downward through every layer of the system.
Countries serious about cutting carbon do one thing: they stop burning coal, gas, and oil. They build power plants that run on wind and sun. They make cars run on electricity. They do this because it works, not because they bought a credit. Every dollar spent on carbon credits is a dollar not spent on real change. That choice tells you everything you need to know about who wants to actually fix the problem.
Published March 10, 2026 · Frisian News