The voluntary carbon market was built on a single promise: that one credit cancels one tonne. Most scrutiny has asked whether that promise holds on the supply side – whether the credits are real. This column asks a different question: what did the mere availability of offsets do to the firms that bought them? Using a buyer-linked dataset spanning the near-universe of offset retirements, and the 2023 integrity scandals as a natural experiment, the authors find that firms which walked away from offsetting cut their own operational emissions sharply more than firms that stayed. Even a market of flawless credits could still slow real decarbonisation.



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