I Veganize: Carbon Credits Are a Scam and the Meat Industry Knows It

Deforestation in Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia

Tyson Foods is legally barred from calling its beef “climate-smart” for five years. Not because the company got cleaner. Because a court settlement in 2025 determined the claim wasn’t backed by evidence. JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, paid $1.1 million to settle allegations it misled the public with its “net zero by 2040” pledge — a pledge it made without first calculating what its emissions actually were.

Read that back slowly.

The world’s largest meat company pledged net-zero emissions without calculating what its emissions were. What does “net zero” mean if you haven’t measured zero? The New York Attorney General alleged in 2024 that JBS widely publicized this commitment before it had “even calculated its cumulative supply chain emissions.” The National Advertising Division found JBS’s net-zero claim “unsubstantiated and misleading” and told them to stop. JBS kept going. Then the AG sued. Then — November 2025 — JBS agreed to call their target a “goal,” not a “pledge” or a “commitment.”

A pledge is a promise. A goal is a vibe. That’s the difference $1.1 million bought them.

What Carbon Credits Are Supposed to Do

Here’s the pitch. A company like JBS or Tyson — responsible for hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gas annually — wants to tell investors, regulators, and your grocery store that it takes climate seriously. But actually reducing emissions means reducing production. Reducing production means reducing revenue. So instead of changing anything, they buy carbon credits.

A carbon credit is, in theory, a certificate that proves someone somewhere prevented or sequestered one metric ton of CO². Forests are the popular source. The idea: you pay a rainforest conservation project not to cut down trees. The trees absorb carbon. That absorption cancels out your emissions. Net zero on paper. No changes required in the slaughterhouse.

Sounds reasonable, right? Except the theory falls apart on contact with the actual world — and the evidence that it’s falling apart is now so overwhelming that even the courts are paying attention.

94% Worthless. Verified.

In January 2023, a nine-month joint investigation by The Guardian, the German newspaper Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial — a nonprofit investigative journalism organization — published what may be the most damning audit of voluntary carbon offsets ever conducted.

They analyzed rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra, the world’s largest carbon credit certifier. Their finding: 94% of Verra’s rainforest carbon offsets are “phantom credits” with no measurable climate benefit whatsoever.

Not 10%. Not 30%.

Ninety-four percent.

The mechanism of fraud is almost elegant in its simplicity. To issue a carbon credit, you first need to project how much deforestation would have happened if the conservation project didn’t exist. That baseline determines how many credits you can sell. And according to the investigation, Verra’s baseline projections overstated forest loss by approximately 400%. You invent a catastrophe that wasn’t coming, claim credit for preventing it, package the results into certificates, and sell them to Shell and Gucci and your bank’s ESG fund. Everyone’s sustainability report looks better. Nothing actually changes.

I want to sit with that number for a second. Four hundred percent overstatement. Not a rounding error. Not a methodology dispute. The baseline forest loss numbers were quadrupled — fabricated at a scale that would land you in prison in any other securities market. In voluntary carbon markets, it gets you a certification stamp from the leading certifier on Earth. Who’s auditing the auditors? Nobody. That’s the answer. Nobody with teeth.

JBS: Profits From the Market, Keeps Burning the Forest

Layer the meat industry on top of this and it gets worse.

A 2025 investigation by Mongabay found that JBS was actively profiting from carbon credit schemes while its supply chain continued sourcing cattle from newly cleared Amazon land. Participating in carbon offset programs on one side. Buying beef from freshly deforested territory on the other.

This isn’t new behavior for JBS. I’ve written before about the pattern: JBS gets caught sourcing from illegally deforested Amazon land, issues a statement, promises stronger monitoring, and then does it again. The carbon credit market gave them a new tool. Now they can quantify their virtue while the forest burns, issue a press release, and sell the certificate to a pension fund. The Amazon keeps shrinking. The sustainability report keeps growing.

Tyson Got Caught Too

JBS isn’t an outlier. Tyson Foods — the second-largest meat company in the world, processing roughly 20% of all US beef, chicken, and pork — also claimed to be on a path to “net-zero” and marketed its products as “climate-smart.” In late 2025, a settlement barred Tyson from making “net-zero” or “climate-smart” claims for five years unless those claims are backed by expert-verified evidence that both parties agree to in advance.

Read that again. They had to negotiate, in a legal settlement, the right to see the evidence before Tyson could use those words. Because when you asked them to show their work, there wasn’t any. I find that darkly funny. “You can claim to be climate-smart, but only if we can verify it first.” That’s now a legal condition. For a company processing 20% of America’s meat supply.

Two of the three largest meat companies in the world, within a two-year span, forced by courts and regulators to retract or requalify their flagship climate claims. If this had happened in finance or pharmaceuticals or aviation, it would be a years-long story. Because it happened in meat, it got a few news cycles and disappeared. Why? Because the industry has spent decades making sure its failures don’t feel like everyone’s problem.

Why Meat Can’t Be Offset — The Methane Math

There’s a harder truth underneath all the greenwashing cases — one that no settlement agreement touches.

The FAO estimates that livestock agriculture is responsible for 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions — more than the entire transportation sector combined. That’s the conservative figure. Methodologies that account for full land-use change push it higher. And the specific problem with cattle is methane.

Ruminant animals produce methane through enteric fermentation — bacterial breakdown of plant matter in their digestive systems. Methane is 80 times more potent than CO² over a 20-year window. It also clears from the atmosphere faster, which means that reducing cattle production could meaningfully slow warming within a decade, not a century. This is the part that makes the carbon credit approach not just ineffective but actively harmful: it creates the political and financial conditions to delay the one intervention that would actually work.

The math on offsetting meat production is brutal. Even if every carbon credit were legitimate — which, per the Guardian investigation, 94% of them aren’t — the scale of livestock emissions is so large that buying offsets is like bailing out a flooding basement with a coffee cup while the tap stays open. And animal agriculture’s environmental footprint goes beyond carbon: it’s land destruction, freshwater depletion, biodiversity collapse, antibiotic resistance, and the displacement of communities bulldozed to make way for cattle ranches.

Brazil’s Police Called It What It Was

In 2024, Brazil’s Federal Police launched Operação Greenwashing — Operation Greenwashing — targeting REDD+ carbon credit projects certified by Verra. What they found included fraud, land-grabbing, and timber laundering: illegally felled trees being commercially processed while project documentation claimed the forest was standing and protected.

Two certified projects were targeted. The overlap with cattle laundering — passing off beef from illegally deforested land as supply-chain-compliant — is not coincidental. It’s the same forest. The same corrupt intermediaries operating in the same Amazonian frontier where the paperwork says one thing and the satellite imagery says another.

The System Was Built Not to Be Policed

The Changing Markets Foundation’s investigation into how the meat and dairy industries derailed global climate action documents something beyond opportunism. These companies built institutional capacity for greenwashing: lobbying arms, industry coalitions, funded science. The same playbook the tobacco industry used to delay action on smoking for 40 years, applied to the climate question.

The voluntary carbon market was the ideal vehicle: a private, lightly regulated system where claims are made by certified third parties, corporations buy the credits and print them in sustainability reports, and no government body verifies whether any of it worked. The US GAO reported in 2025 that the federal government plays a “limited role” in voluntary carbon markets — meaning almost no oversight of a system projected to reach $250 billion by 2050.

The voluntary carbon market was worth approximately $2 billion in 2020. Morgan Stanley projects it could hit $250 billion by 2050. That growth isn’t coming from corporations cleaning up their operations. It’s coming from corporations buying their way out of having to. And if 94% of the credits are phantom, the $250 billion market will deliver the climate impact of $250 billion in notional carbon wishes.

What “Net Zero by 2040” Would Actually Require

If JBS genuinely wanted net zero by 2040, climate scientists are clear about what that would require: a substantial reduction in cattle production, complete elimination of deforested land from the supply chain, near-elimination of enteric methane, and real-time independently verified sequestration. None of this was in the original pledge. None of it was modeled. The IATP documented this explicitly: major meat and dairy companies made net-zero commitments that contained no plans to reduce production volume.

You can’t reach net zero in an emissions-intensive industry by growing the industry. You can only paper over it. And for a while — until the New York AG, until the German journalists, until the Brazilian federal police — the paper held. How long would it have held if nobody had looked? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the real one.

What You Can Actually Do

Earth Day is April 22. Every year, the meat industry publishes sustainability reports. Every year, new “climate-smart” labels appear. Every year, the Amazon shrinks. Every year, global livestock emissions tick upward. The voluntary carbon market is a growing industry premised on the idea that consumption doesn’t need to change — only the accounting. That premise serves everyone except the atmosphere.

Reducing demand for beef and dairy is the single most effective dietary climate action available to individuals on every continent. Faster-acting than rooftop solar, more accessible than an electric car, and — critically — not dependent on whether Verra’s certifiers are doing their jobs. The same industry already taking $38 billion in annual government subsidies is now also selling you paper certificates to cover the emissions from those subsidized operations. Two bites at the same apple. Both at your expense.

The next time you see a product labeled “carbon neutral” or “climate-smart,” ask one question: who verified this? Not the company. Not the company’s certifier. An independent party with actual enforcement authority. If the answer is “nobody,” you’re looking at a label that exists to make you feel better while changing nothing. Tyson was using those exact words while a court determined they weren’t backed by evidence. JBS made a net-zero pledge without measuring its emissions. These aren’t edge cases. They’re the two biggest meat companies on the planet.

I’m not asking you to be angry about this — though anger seems reasonable. I’m asking you to recognize it for what it is: a $2 billion industry selling permission slips so nothing has to change. Don’t buy the permission slip. Cut the demand instead.

Share this before April 22. The meat industry has spent decades making the climate conversation about coal plants and car exhausts. Point the camera somewhere else.

Carbon Credits Are a Scam and the Meat Industry Knows It