With my bike exploring the Dolomites (Italy)
When companies announce their climate strategy, the offsetting part almost always takes the heat. The reduction part usually escapes with little public challenge. Not because reductions are flawless, but because they are harder to see, more technical to unpack, and far trickier to question from the outside.
Offsetting is visible. They produce something tangible, a credit, a project photo, a registry entry and leave monitoring and verification report that is public. They also have a clear unit: one credit equals one tonne. That simplicity makes them easy to debate, even for non-specialists, and when something goes wrong the story is simple to tell. Reductions live in the shadows. They sit inside supply chains, procurement contracts, industrial processes, or shifts in product mix. From the outside, it’s almost impossible to verify whether a claimed 20% reduction comes from real transformation or just creative accounting. Truly understanding them means digging into baselines, boundaries, and counterfactuals forensic work that takes access, time, and technical expertise.
And even those baselines are not fixed. In many companies, the reference year against which reductions are calculated has changed more than once, conveniently resetting the trajectory. A simple shift in baseline can make progress look far more impressive than it really is. It’s one of the easiest tricks to turn incomplete data into favorable results, and one that often passes unnoticed.
Even science-based targets don’t fully solve this gap. SBTi has become the gold standard for corporate decarbonization pathways, but it is still voluntary and built on voluntary disclosure. It can validate a trajectory, but it doesn’t have the instruments to challenge whether companies are really delivering. A target may look credible on paper while still resting on weak assumptions, selective boundaries, or moving baselines. Once again, reductions remain largely untested while offsets are under constant fire.
Some might argue I am biased, always defending carbon credits. But this is not about defending offsets. It is about focusing attention where it matters: on the complexity of a real climate strategy. Too often, especially in hard-to-abate sectors, the smallest component of offsetting attracts all the criticism while the reduction pathway is barely discussed. Sometimes it even feels like companies use offsets as a distraction, drawing headlines and criticism while the much harder work of reducing emissions goes under the radar.
The same visibility gap applies to governments. In July, when the European Commission released its 2040 climate target, the immediate criticism focused on flexible mechanisms especially international credits and removals. Almost no one engaged with the most complex and decisive part: the actual reduction pathway. It is simply easier to attack credits than to unpack the intricacies of deep decarbonization. Offsets look like a shortcut; reductions require a level of analysis most observers don’t have the tools for.
This lopsided debate carries a risk. We have learned to spot offsetting greenwashing, but we may be missing a growing wave of reduction greenwashing simply because it is harder to detect. If we want real accountability, we need to close the visibility gap demanding transparency on both sides of the climate strategy, challenging not just what is claimed but how it is achieved, and recognizing that both reductions and offsets can be powerful when used well and misleading when used badly. Until then, we are only telling half the story.
This article is also published on Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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