Welcome to the era of neon-green capitalism, where you can erase a coal plant like deleting an embarrassing browser history: by planting three ficus trees in some vaguely geolocated tropical zone.
It’s beautiful, it’s clean, it’s… “carbon offset.”
Ahhh, carbon offsetting—it’s so much more than an environmental measure, it’s a holistic experience of quantum reconciliation with the planet. A kind of spiritual pilgrimage where you atone for your CO₂ emissions by symbolically planting a tree… well, by paying someone else to plant it, because let’s not get carried away.
The principle is elegantly simple: you destroy here, you regenerate there, and voilà—you go from evil polluter to committed actor for a sustainable future. And all of this without changing your practices, let alone your profit margins.
In fact, it’s sustainable development… of your business model.
Even better, the magic of newspeak transforms every excess into an opportunity. We no longer talk about toxic factories, but “industrial sites in ecological transition.” We don’t say we’re dumping tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere—we’re “feeding the global carbon cycle.” And above all, we don’t just offset, we “valorize the positive impact of our planetary footprint,” as if the hole in the ozone layer were a new window to the cosmos.
And when these magic formulas spring into action, they produce communication masterpieces. Here’s how, with a little lexical creativity, the absurd becomes inspiring:
- An energy-guzzling data center in the middle of the desert, cooled by XXL air conditioners, but which has “neutralized its footprint” thanks to a mysterious partnership with a Peruvian NGO whose website, powered by low-cost AI, seems to have been hand-coded by the janitor’s intern on an old laptop that overheats.
- A printing company that churns out paper like an erupting volcano, but explains that each glossy brochure is an act of “responsible reforestation” of an entire forest of PowerPoints.
- A fast-fashion brand that “funds biodiversity” by offering three flowers to bees at an event sponsored by an oil company.
We are geniuses. True artisans in the craft of repainting an oil spill in pastel green.
We have invented the compensated moral footprint: you can commit the unforgivable, as long as you offer the planet a basil plant and a 120-page CSR report in PDF format, packed with photos of hands joined around a tree. And not just any PDF, mind you: eco-designed, compressed to reduce its digital weight, hosted on a “climatically conscious” server using an eco-responsible font.
Thanks to this breakthrough ethical innovation, an oil spill becomes an “opportunity for marine revitalization,” illegal construction in a protected forest transforms into “anthropic intervention for productive regeneration,” and the destruction of a fragile ecosystem proudly joins a program for “local biodiversity optimization.”
Our vision is simple: devastate today, offset tomorrow, communicate always. And to guarantee the traceability of our virtue, we implement a Virtuous Indexing System (VIS) certified by an Independent Committee for Moral Validation (ICMV), composed exclusively of strategic partners… and their mother-in-law for that citizen touch.
And here’s where it gets beautiful: not only do we solve nothing, but sometimes we make things worse. Transporting saplings to the other side of the world in air-conditioned containers with “optimized energy balance,” using drones to “seed” forests startup-style with “premium ISO 26000 certified” seeds, irrigating areas that never asked for anything using diesel-powered pumps running on “transition fuel.”
And while kerosene burns in the sky in the name of carbon neutrality, we organize “collaborative planting ceremonies” where three ministers, two lifestyle influencers, and an actor recycled as an eco-responsible ambassador pose for Instagram, knees in the dirt, calibrated smiles, next to a tree that will die of thirst in six months.
A bit like those COPs organized on the other side of the world to “save the planet”—last-chance conferences where we debate end-of-the-world ecology while drinking champagne, after taking 12-hour business-class flights with stopovers in oil hubs. We leave reassured: the planet is saved, we just need to sign a press release… and plan the next COP in Hawaii.
And all of this, of course, without ever questioning the source of the problem.
In short: we’re not saving the planet, but we’re optimizing your perception of our relationship to saving it.
So the next time someone sells you a “carbon neutral” product, remember: it’s not neutrality, it’s makeup. And like all good makeup, it eventually runs… but not before the next shareholder presentation.