Seite 3: "Climate neutral" label with ignorance

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Of course, even without a protocol like Iota, real-time data on CO2 reduction could be compiled in a dashboard. But what's special about Iota's pilot project is that, thanks to the decentralized system, the data is much more reliable than when companies themselves provide information about their CO2 emissions or reductions. And the more data that goes into Iota's dashboard, the bleaker the picture becomes. "We may well end up looking at the numbers and thinking, 'Wow, we're having a much bigger negative impact than we thought; we're much further away from our targets than we hoped.' That can be uncomfortable. But even then, it's better to have clarity than to be ignorant."

The "climate neutral" labels contain precisely this ignorance, and many in the sustainability scene take a critical view of offsetting: "Offsetting should never obscure the fact that reduction is what it has to be about," says Tilman Santarius, who researches the environment, business and digitization at the TU Berlin. "I keep doing what I'm doing and can afford to compensate - that's a temporal and regional shift. It's just a niche solution today and in the long term."

Savings potential in the own supply chain

"Offsetting can be a cheap and uncomplicated way to make your company look good," Mareike Blum, a researcher at the MCC Climate Institute in Berlin, also explains. "Some see it as a danger of greenwashing, others understand it as a first step and say it's better than nothing."

Currently, Blum says, the trend is for companies to focus on potential savings along their own supply chain, often referred to as supply chain management or insetting. "It's about reducing CO2 in your own supply chain, rather than randomly offsetting something somewhere else in the world. It makes people more aware of their own problem areas and is also more tangible for consumers." This trend, Blum said, echoes a key point of the offsetting critique, which says that countries and companies should make their own efforts to audit and reduce their self-generated emissions, rather than offsetting them cheaply elsewhere.

To learn how this can work, I meet Elisa Naranjo at a Canadian pizzeria on Dieffenbachstraße in Kreuzberg. She's dipping the top of her pizza corner in a spicy-sweet dip, the house specialty, and rolls her eyes when I ask her what she thinks about simply tracking and offsetting CO2 emissions. Naranjo has worked for six years as "Head of Fairstainability" for Einhorn, a Berlin-based company for sustainable condoms and hygiene products. For Einhorn, consulting on sustainability issues has now become a separate line of business alongside condoms and hygiene products.

"The exciting question is not tracking, but what happens after that. Does anything happen then, or does it just level out?" says Naranjo. "If you're serious about sustainability, measures like switching to green power, rebuilding the fleet, eliminating domestic flights are obvious anyway. You don't need consulting for that."

"The question is how seriously to take the issue".

The first CO2 lifecycle analysis for Einhorn, Naranjo explains, was done by a student for his master's thesis. Since then, Einhorn has been working on its own supply chain: Where does the rubber come from? How much energy does the manufacturer consume? Can condoms be packaged without composite materials? "The question is how seriously to take the issue," she says. "I was the first employee at Einhorn, and I was paid to ask annoying questions." She says it gets really exciting when a company thinks about the product itself. "If someone is producing socks, it makes more sense to think about where the socks break and how they could last longer, rather than producing them first and just making up for it later."

I want to know how she sees our Porsche from the beginning of the story from that point of view. At first she just smiles. Then she says, "If Porsche were to think seriously about sustainability, the first question would be: What is the actual product here? Is this really about mobility? That could certainly be offered in a much more sustainable way than with a maximum of five people shooting through the neighborhood with 500 hp. The question is whether Porsche even wants to seriously address these questions."

(lca)