October 28, 2026
PART 1 · BITTEN ONCE
2/38 · Oversupply or Underdemand?
In my last post I argued that corporate buyers in the carbon market suffer a collective "trauma" which creates a fear below the level where explanations reach. Telling someone that things have changed rarely helps. Take any kid that has been bitten by a dog.
The carbon market's bite came in January 2023, when the Guardian, together with Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, published its investigation into "avoided deforestation" credits certified by Verra.
It was not the first criticism of carbon credits, but it was the moment a technical integrity debate became a mass-market reputational story. It gave the public a simple, vivid narrative: "most rainforest offsets are worthless".
While the criticism rightly questioned how reductions from avoided deforestation are calculated – against an estimate of how much forest would have been lost without the project – the public discussion quickly arrived at the misguided interpretation that all carbon credits are "worthless" and that buyers are thus (unwillingly) greenwashing.
The article named major corporates including Shell, Gucci and Disney, which turned an arcane baseline-methodology dispute into a story about consumer brands and greenwashing. Then followed a number of lawsuits.
Some of the criticism has since been refuted, but that is almost irrelevant. What stuck with corporate buyers was the image of companies that in good faith were spending money on carbon credits, issued by trusted standards and advised by credible consultants, suddenly ending up in major headlines blamed as greenwashers. A PR disaster, a trauma.
What for decades used to be the justification to spend corporate money on climate projects became, almost overnight, a potential reputational liability.
And the enduring mistrust is understandable: back then the experts recommended buying certain credits, who is to believe them now when they say that integrity has become better and that credits should be trustworthy?
The credits featured in The Guardian story were generated by a small number of large projects: 4% of all carbon projects at the time had generated 40% of all credits. The other 96% of the >4,000 projects, among them methane destruction for example, did not generate avoided deforestation credits, but were largely stigmatised all the same.
The lesson most sustainability and PR teams took from it was simple: if you buy carbon credits and say so, you can end up in court or on a front page. If you do nothing, however, there seemed to be little downside.
Next post: "what the bite taught" digs deeper into the problem (sounds negative, but I'll address solutions soon enough)