![]() I was hopeful, but in the end the company decided to pursue the Climate Neutral certification. You’d be the only CEO in your industry doing that! Then take the remaining time and energy and publish an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the need to pass climate legislation in the Senate. Instead, I suggested, why not use the money they would have spent on offsets for something actually impactful, even if it doesn’t allow you to make great claims? Retrofitting all the windows in your office to save energy, for example, or switching company vehicles to electric, as a model for your industry and the world. Given this growing press storm, there’s obvious brand risk to such a strategy. The media is positively exploding with offset takedowns these days, from Bloomberg to Fast Company to John Oliver, who recently spent a whopping 24 minutes brilliantly destroying the concept. Why? Taking tree-planting as just one example: It has proven devilishly hard to demonstrate that the trees you protect will stay alive over the long term, that they weren’t already legally protected but sold as offsets anyway, or that their preservation didn’t ensure that nearby trees would be cut instead. More to the point, from an environmental perspective, buying offsets-credits for carbon reduction elsewhere-is highly questionable. ![]() From a brand-differentiation standpoint, this would be reaching up to touch bottom. For a start, Climate Neutral has certified 300 companies, many of them in the outdoor industry (and they’re just one of many such certifiers). I spent the next hour explaining why I thought that was a terrible idea. They opened the conversation by saying they already had a strategy in mind: to pursue a certification called “ Climate Neutral,” and as part of that, buy offsets so that they could claim “net-zero” emissions status. Last year I did some sustainability consulting for a young outdoor company. Highlighting the gap between real action and tokenism, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s visionary donation of his company to the climate cause lights the way for other progressive corporations-if they choose to follow.
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