On Sunday, Bloomberg published a detailed report that carbon offsets are only good for corporations and prestigious institutions to virtue signal and do not make the entities carbon neutral, saying the offsets do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are largely bogus.

Offsets are designed to allow companies to pay a small sum in exchange for removing carbon from their balance sheets. For years, researchers have been raising concerns that these transactions are letting polluters off the hook. Rather than actually reducing planet-heating emissions, they say, these offsets function like an accounting maneuver that allows more greenhouse gas to enter the atmosphere.

A Bloomberg Green analysis of more than 215,000 offset transactions in public datasets over the past decade reveals for the first time that dozens of global brands have followed in the footsteps of Credit Suisse. Airlines, online retailers, industrial firms and energy producers now rely heavily on the cheapest and most suspect type of offset — those tied to renewable-energy projects.

Most of these renewable-energy offset purchases are not credible, according to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at consultancy Carbon Direct and one of six researchers who reviewed the data. “I would consider these to be low-quality credits that did not avoid or reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” he said.

Purchasing credits tied to support of solar or wind projects sounds good for the climate. But experts consider these offsets largely bogus.

Carbon offset sales is how people, like Leonardo DiCaprio, are able to justify their lucrative lifestyles while their salesman, Al Gore, made millions. It was clear to people that carbon offsets were fraudulent as evidenced by the carbon offset-based market, CCX, shutting down 12 years ago while its founder, Al Gore, laughed all the way to the bank. Even ProPublica published an investigative report in 2019 describing how carbon offsets do next to nothing to achieve the climate-oriented goals they describe.

Like recycling, carbon offsets are tantamount to nothing more than an idea environmentalists took from the Catholic Church so people can feel like they can somehow atone for the sin of their carbon footprint. In the case of companies, like Delta Airlines or General Electric, their paying into carbon offsets is needless virtue signaling.