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