ABSTRACT
Corporations increasingly claim that the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to their products have been ‘offset’, or that their entire business is ‘carbon neutral’. The concepts of GHG ‘compensation’, ‘offsetting’ and ‘neutralization’ describe the idea that the climate harm caused by GHG-emitting activities could be undone by ‘offsetting activities’, such as afforestation. The underlying premise is that the climate impact of such offsetting activities is equivalent to that of GHG-emitting activities, thereby counterbalancing them.
Consumer law requires marketing claims to be factually accurate. The problem with offsetting claims is that the equivalence assumption on which they are based does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The climate benefits attributed to offsetting activities are significantly less certain than the climate harm caused by GHG-emitting activities, which means that no equivalence between the two can be assumed. Offsetting claims must therefore be considered to be factually incorrect: In the absence of equivalence, offsetting activities do not, and cannot achieve the promoted ‘compensation’, ‘neutralization’ or ‘offsetting’ of the climate harm caused by GHG-emitting activities. This is liable to influence the choices made by consumers who are concerned about the climate, which means that offsetting claims constitute misleading commercial practices. Recent decisions by the Dutch advertising authority confirm this view …
Kaupa, Clemens, Peddling False Solutions to Worried Consumers: the Promotion of Greenhouse Gas ‘Offsetting’ as a Misleading Commercial Practice (July 8, 2022), Journal of European Consumer and Market Law, 2022.
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