Carbon ‘offsetting’ is a familiar term, but ineffective in impacting greenhouse gas emissions. Experts have long proposed ‘insetting’ as a more responsible alternative – but it needs a better name.

The familiarity of offsetting 

The first ‘carbon credit’ having been issued in 1988, most of us are now familiar with ‘carbon offsetting’.  For decades, when booking a holiday, paying an energy bill or buying a coffee, businesses have been offering us the ‘opportunity’ to ‘offset’ our emissions by paying a little more money.

As you may have noticed, it hasn’t worked. Consciously or not, we resent carrying the burden of ‘saving the planet’ via such manifestly petty daily actions. Some grandstand with ‘whataboutery’, pointing the finger at individuals who emit far more than us but don’t pay anything. Most of us just quietly stop paying such optional extras once no one’s looking, knowing they make zero difference, even if they did work as advertised.

This giving up, incidentally, is not an unfortunate accident, but a deliberate ploy. Just as the world’s first carbon footprint calculator was created by BP in 2004 to direct attention and responsibility away from oil companies and onto individuals, carbon credits, and the offsets they buy, have not turned out to be quite what they first appear. They too are a corporate sleight of hand, calculated to transfer responsibility for any climate action away from them, and onto individual consumers, while vigorously lobbying politicians to shelve mandatory regulations, and generally leave them alone to make money.

The notion of carbon offsetting has long been a gift for the forces of climate inaction. Its underlying economic theory is beguilingly elegant, making it a very convenient invisibility cloak to appear to be ‘doing something’ without really being required to do anything.

Voluntary schemes permit businesses to retain control over the rules and terms of engagement, and focus on their core goal of returning shareholder value, and offsetting has been central to this decades-long greenwashing offensive.

The appeal of offsetting

Nearly four decades on, people are becoming increasingly aware how ineffective carbon offsetting has been in even slightly retarding our exploding greenhouse gas emissions, let alone reversing them.  

The facts are bleakly compelling. In 1988, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 351 parts per million. In 2025 it’s 427.

Why do we persist with such a demonstrably ineffective ‘solution’ to our onrushing existential threat? 

Optimists can point to initiatives like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other government regulation that’s moving carbon reporting from the Age of Voluntary into the Mandatory Era. 

Cynics, slow-clapping, can point out this is very little, very late. They might also observe that despite its failure to address primary goal of carbon reduction, carbon trading is now a trillion dollar industry.

Students of history and behavioural psychology might compare offsetting’s secular role to religious rituals – low-cost actions performed for a high abstract reward: pouring a libation of wine to the gods, sacrificing a chicken to appease the demons, buying a papal indulgence to absolve our sins. 

Offsetting is, quite literally, a small price to pay for carrying on as usual.

Humanity hasn’t changed, and tends to only change behaviour when inaction clearly poses an immediate threat to life. 

When the status quo is comfortable, what would induce us to go to the inconvenience of changing our behaviour, when we can simply tick a box, and pay a small amount of money to someone in a suit in exchange for a piece of paper claiming carbon credit’?  

Two answers:

1. Better storytelling, making the alternative action more desirable
2. Government regulation, removing choice.

The problem with offsetting

What happens to our ‘offsetting’ fees, when we book our holiday, pay our bill, or buy our coffee? 

In truth, most of us are studiously incurious about this. Once we’ve spilled a few drops of wine to appease the Gods, we’ve ‘done our bit’. Like people who religiously wash plastic waste before placing it, pristine, in the recycling bin, we’d rather not know it will end up in an incinerator, or landfill.

But here’s where most offsetting money goes. Someone in a suit may pass some of your offsetting money to someone else, usually distant, poor, brown or black. Those distant poor people are nominally paid to plant some trees. Companies can then claim ‘carbon credit’ for the carbon those trees would have sequestered after a hundred years. 

In reality:

• the trees’ imaginary future carbon has sometimes already been ‘sold’ to someone else. 
• the trees are sometimes already mature, and you’re just paying to keep them in the ground. 
• through negligence or incompetence, sometimes the saplings wither and shrivel, having coughed up their fantasy future ‘offsets’.
• through fraud, sometimes the trees never get planted at all.

Such scandals are regularly exposed, but rarely cause more than a minor splash. Semi-apologies are made. Rules are tightened. ‘Lessons are learned’. Wrists might be slapped. Business carries on pretty much as usual. 

Meanwhile, the parts-per-million concentration of greenhouse gases continues on its hockey-stick upward trajectory, with increasingly obvious negative consequences for our species, and many others, in the form of storms, fires, floods, climate wars and climate refugees.

Offsetting’s main problem is that, whatever local good it can point to after nearly four decades, it has failed in its primary objective of reducing overall emissions.

The Merits of Insetting

Simply put, insetting means taking more responsibility for reducing your carbon footprint, either directly through your own actions, or indirectly via your supply chain.

Examples of insetting might include:

• An internet giant building a solar or wind farm to power its data centres
• Coffee brands encouraging agroforestry for their suppliers
• A fashion brand buying scrubland and reforesting it
• Farmers switching to regenerative farming

The World Economic Forum  defines it thus:

Carbon insetting focuses on doing more good rather than doing less bad within one’s value chain. 

The ‘business-lead organisation’ the International Platform for Insetting goes for:

Instead of investing in projects outside their value chains, companies engaging in carbon insetting invest in reducing carbon emissions within their own value chains. At the same time, these projects can also create positive impacts on communities, landscapes and ecosystems.

The charity the Carbon Literacy Trust says:

Not only does insetting help companies achieve their sustainability goals, but it also allows them to build climate resilience, supply chain stability and future-proof their businesses.

These different, and sometimes woolly, definitions reflect insetting’s immaturity. There are not yet clear standards to define insetting, nor transparent methodologies by which to calculate its impact.  

Until that happens, this does make insetting, for all its theoretical and psychological merits, vulnerable to the same PR manipulation as offsetting.

No sooner has the concept of insetting been raised, than some crafty businesses worked out how to game it for PR advantage. Such greenwashers have similar plans for ‘Scope 4 emissions’ (‘avoided emissions’), seeing it as another cunning wheeze for unearned reputational gain.

Without strict rules requiring real-world, verifiable leg-work to justify their claims of measurable supply chain carbon reduction, ‘insetting’ is just an innovative greenwashing variant.

Moreover, insetting’s credibility, like any financial tax law, is only as strong as its regulation and enforcement. As with tax, or offsetting, the best boost to credibility is transparency.  This is why openness and transparency is the foundation of the carbon reporting ecosystem being developed by See Through Carbon.

In a climate emergency where all options are becoming increasingly unpalatable, imperfection should not be an obstacle to progress. Neither insetting nor any other discrete action is enough on its own to steer us towards a sustainable future, but it’s certainly inherently better than offsetting.

For all these caveats, insetting is clearly ‘better’ than offsetting because it brings the reality of adapting to a sustainable model closer to home. Instead of outsourcing carbon reduction to third parties at a fee, insetting requires businesses to do it in-house.

Insetting should clearly be encouraged, if only as a better alternative to offsetting. 

This gives rise to insetting’s other big problem, that probably needs to be resolved before it can hope for any widespread uptake.

The problem with ‘Insetting’

Why have the first few hundred words in this article about insetting – and many other primers on the subject – been about the failings of offsetting?

Herein lies the problem; offsetting remains the easiest starting point to explain insetting. 

It saves time. It’s taken decades to familiarise people with the concept of offsetting, so offsetting is an obvious shortcut for inducting insetting-virgins into the elevated plane of taking responsibility for reducing your own carbon footprint.

Instead of holding an insetting novice’s hand from the starting line, why not give them a lift on the familiar offsetting tandem bike, and ditch it when the roads fork?

As anyone who’s tried this discovers, the problem is that people are still thinking about the bike when you’re trying to point them towards the insetting road. They tend to tune out to secondary explanations about the importance of transparency, regulation, enforcement etc..  Their buttocks still bruised from the offsetting tandem, voluntary off-setting carbon trading’s imperfections are still on their mind. 

The offsetting tandem, it turns out, has a lot of baggage, not easily disposed of.

How to avoid conversations about insetting getting bogged down in lingering offsetting questions? As we’ve said, only some of the issues are relevant to both, but a convert must be convinced by the benefits of switching to something new, not re-hashing the problems with the old. 

Frame insetting with offsetting, and it’s hard to get people to look at the picture. Waters get muddied. When most businesses are still more focused on profit than carbon impact, don’t offer them the opportunity to look for an exit, make their excuses and bail out, before you have a chance to sway them.

In short, insetting needs a re-brand. 

The brief is clear. 

Replace ‘insetting’ with a term that conveys all insetting’s positive benefits, without offsetting’s negative legacy.

Here are three suggestions, with pros and cons, to get the ball rolling.

‘Candiculture’

• Root word ‘candid’ highlights key role of transparency. Likewise ‘Candinomics’.
• Suggestive of a positive ‘can-do’ attitude.
• Literary association with Voltaire’s novel Candide: ou l’Optimisme (1759), whose famous final five words ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ (‘we must cultivate our garden’) turn out to work brilliantly as a sustainability mission statement.

Pro: Plenty of depth to the concept – Candide appeared at the birth of the Industrial Revolutions, when CO₂ concentration was around 280 parts per million, and it’s subtitle ‘or Optimism’ carries the right positive, but rational, connotations.

Con: The sound ‘candy’ invokes sweet/pink/Barbie – all inappropriately trivial. That final ‘d’ of candid sounds awkward before catchy suffixes, e.g. ‘candidnomics’, candid-gate’, ‘candidosaurus’ etc.

‘Carbon Take-ons’ 

• Highlights insetting’s key merit – taking on responsibility. 
• Echoes ‘off-set’s grammatical ingredients, but by reversing the verb and preposition, doesn’t make it too obvious. 
• Suggestive of near-homophone ‘token’, also appropriate proxy for emissions reduction.

Pro: Positive, assertive action.

Con: Not immediately obvious at first hearing.

‘See Through Savings’

• Transparency is literally part of the name.
• ‘Saving’ has more positive connotations than ‘reduction’, which can suggest sacrifice or diminution.
• Association with the accurate, free, open source, transparent carbon reporting ecosystem See Through Carbon.

Pro: Clear meaning, unambiguous spelling, no neologism required.

Con: Sounds too obviously like a brand extension. Even if See Through Carbon is zero-budget and 100% volunteer-driven, the may appear like a ‘hard sell’.

Any better ideas, and all feedback, welcome in the comments. Let’s work this out together.

2025 is a particularly critical moment in time to introduce an alternative to offsetting in the carbon reduction conversation. 

Wrapping up the concept of insetting in a better brand wrapper would be a very timely nudge towards better corporate contributions to sustainability. 

The sooner more businesses take responsibility for reducing their own carbon footprints, the sooner we can mitigate the worst impacts of human-induced climate change.

Who knows, if businesses start to demonstrate they’re finally taking carbon reduction seriously, it might even encourage us individuals to pay a little more every time we book a holiday, pay a bill, or order a coffee…

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