Fossil fuel companies aren’t giving up on greenwashing

March 15, 2025 by Ketan Joshi In Uncategorized 1 Comment

If you are a carbon offset, you thrive in a narrow band of corporate political conditions. For you to live your best life, companies must set ‘ambitious’ climate targets, but they must also do nothing to actually reduce emissions. Under these two active states, the demand for carbon offsets is maximised (as are the benefits to companies that generate, trade and sell carbon offsets).

A carbon offset looking at the state of corporate climate action around the world might be worried. The US government is lurching fascist, much to the delight of high-emitting companies. The European Union’s regulations are likely to be rolled back. And there has been a near-daily drumbeat of corporations seemingly weakening their climate commitments thanks to the new permission space granted by fascists, authoritarians and crony capitalists around the world.

When you look at the data, it’s clear that what is happening is that while companies aren’t setting many new climate commitments, existing ones persist. Many of the announcements are refinements rather than rollbacks. Carbon offset trading saw a peak in 2021, the same year net zero targets saw a peak, but there are still millions of offsets being traded. Both reached fever pitch a few years back, but both still persist at scale.

We can use data from the Net Zero Tracker project to interrogate the worst players here, too. Fossil fuel companies are comfortably the most permissive when it comes to allowing the use of carbon offsets to meet net zero targets – 83% by revenue explicitly allow offsets:

Fossil fuel companies fit the conditions perfectly: often quite willing to publish ‘ambitious’ climate targets but largely unwilling to cut real emissions.

A bunch of companies (like Equinor, Shell and BP) have recently weakened their climate commitments, and it has caused a quiet panic in the offsetting industry. But they tend to be cuts to marginal renewable energy goals (routinely ignored anyway) – no fossil fuel companies have dropped their actual net zero targets.

Woodside’s climate claims

Woodside, comfortably Australia’s biggest gas company, has an interest in continuing to vastly expand its production and sale of fossil gas, but it also has an interest in continuing to tell investors, governments and the general public that it’s On The Right Side of climate change.

Comms Declare (of which I am a committee member) shared advertising spending numbers that show in the last quarter of 2024, Woodside saw a huge surge in outdoor and TV advertising in Australia. This is a company that still cares about its public image:

Their most recent climate report loudly heralds that the company has almost achieved its 2025 climate targets. Wow! The company set a goal to reduce their scope 1 and 2 (the emissions from producing, processing and transporting gas, but excluding the emissions from when it’s burned after it’s sold) emissions 15% by 2025, and they’ve nearly achieved it!

The thing is, Woodside’s fossil fuel production has grown by nearly a third over the past four years. Could it be that Woodside’s operations have become wildly more efficient? Could they have implemented deep emissions reductions at their sites? Let’s check the data! I’m sure it’s fine.

Oh. It’s not fine. Woodside used a record number of carbon offsets in 2024 to fake the achievement of its climate target. Its real emissions are going up, and its claimed emissions are going down.

On top of that, Woodside use something known as an ‘equity’ filter when reporting on emissions for their target. They headline emissions proportionate to their financial share in a project, even when they have full operational control over it. When you look at their production based on the facilities they’re in operational charge of, the numbers are significantly bigger.

It is a neat way of slicing off a large chunk of a company’s emissions, and, as you can see above, it also has the effect of muting the steep growth of the company’s climate-damaging products.

As a greenwashing tactic, it pales in comparison to excluding the damage done to climate by the products sold by the company:

As you can see above, Woodside are simply selling much, much more of a planet heating product than they have been in the past. That they set their climate targets narrowly around only the emissions related to digging the stuff up is absurd. It’s like a weapons manufacturer bragging no one died of gunshot wounds in its factory.

Vertically integrated greenwashing

Woodside also illustrates something else pretty well: fossil fuel companies have begun vertically integrating greenwashing into their business models. They are bringing the bullshit in-house. The company has embarked on an intense buying spree: hoovering up large quantities of land so that it can generate its own carbon offsets – below, an extract from the regulator’s dataset showing the spoils of one of its carbon offsetting projects:

Pluto is one of Woodside’s worst carbon bomb projects. A long-term investment in a stream of self-generating and cheap greenwashing products within their own company makes a lot of sense. Recently, the company has been buying up even more land for the explicit purpose of generating offsets. An investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald revealed Shell is buying in too, “increasingly entering the supply chain of the Australian carbon offsets market, buying stakes in carbon companies, registering projects, trading credits or purchasing swathes of land to run their own carbon abatement projects”. The paper’s article compiles a range of old and new carbon offsetting projects (the newer ones haven’t yet begun generating offsets):

The aptly named “Corporate Carbon”, one of Australia’s largest carbon offsetting companies, is now part-owned by Shell. Their Managing Director told the paper:

“It’s not a problem they [the fossil fuel industry] created...it’s a problem that’s been created by us choosing to live the lifestyle that we do, which has resulted in the consumption of a large amount of fossil fuels. We’ve all benefited from that lifestyle, but it’s created a problem. But to point to the energy producers and say, you’ve created this problem, is a very narrow framing".

Saudi Arabia has enacted a massive land grab in Africa for similar purposes – not just offsetting emissions but for the projected revenue of selling carbon offsets to other entities. The deeper context is the slow but continuous activation of a global system of carbon offset trading (known as ‘article 6’) to be used not for corporate targets, but for country level targets under the Paris Climate Agreement. The American oil and gas company Occidental Petroleum has bought up its own fleet of ‘direct air capture’ units explicitly to offset its rising fossil fuel production (and use the carbon it captures to dislodge even more oil from depleting reservoirs).

I’m not sure it’s widely known that fossil fuel companies are now literally invested in greenwashing. This is a big part of why we’ll continue to see performative climate-goal-dropping, but mostly contained to the fringes. Despite the rise and fall of net zero hype, very little has changed since 2019 – the fundamental system incentives push fossil fuel companies to maximise the sale and burning of coal, oil and gas.