Carbon neutral? Not in the EU.

Looks like a lot of carbon neutral hogwash is about to be outlawed in the EU.

The EU will ban sweeping environmental claims such as ‘climate neutral’ or ‘eco’, and possibly also claims such as ‘green’, ‘nature’s friend’, ‘energy efficient’ and ‘biodegradable’ by 2026, unless companies can prove the claim is accurate.

You may or may not recall this rant from January, where I had an absolute slay at White Pages for distributing books that amount to little more than garbage, yet displayed a carbon neutral badge on their packaging (they earned it through buying offsets).

This is a long time coming. Something I could never resolve in my head was whether “carbon neutral” as a term was legit or if just the process of attaining it was flawed. Likewise with offsetting.

Turns out, both are being stamped out anyway!

Hopefully, this encourages organisations to spend less time measuring their emissions to then offset them, and actually work towards reducing them.

Carbon neutral claims are greenwashing . . . The truth is that these claims are scientifically incorrect and should never be used.

Ursula Pachl, BEUC

To bang the drum again, the most impactful thing most of us can do is a triple-switch: Switch banks, switch super, switch power supplier.

I haven’t checked, but my guess is that the time, money and effort it takes to accurately measure your emissions, even as a soloist, then wait for the offset trees to grow and drink up all your emissions (assuming their trees are legit), will have minimal impact vs doing a triple switch, which you can probably do in a weekend.

The effort to impact ratio is no contest.