For over two decades, the voluntary carbon market (VCM) has promised a win-win solution: emit here, offset there. Business as usual—now with a green badge.
It was marketed as a flexible, market-driven tool to finance climate action, protect forests, and encourage emissions reductions across the private sector. A noble-sounding idea: price carbon, channel capital into environmental projects, and buy time for the economy to evolve.
But behind the promise was something far more cynical.
This system was not born out of a genuine desire to decarbonize—it was pushed by the very industries it was meant to reform. Fossil fuel companies, in particular, lobbied hard for the creation of voluntary carbon markets as a way to delay or avoid regulation. Rather than be subject to binding limits or rising carbon prices, they designed a market where they could keep emitting—just more cheaply.
And surprise, surprise: it worked.
From the beginning, the VCM was shaped to serve the interests of high emitters—not planetary health.
It allowed fossil fuel giants, airlines, fast fashion brands, and food conglomerates to claim climate action without changing business models.
The carbon price was kept deliberately low.
The rules were fragmented.
The incentives were backward.
Even as the climate crisis deepened, the voluntary carbon market offered an escape hatch, not a transformation pathway.
The core problems with voluntary carbon markets have been known for years:
Rather than financing the transition, the VCM became a buffer zone between image and responsibility.
And as more sectors joined—aviation, retail, food, shipping—the VCM became a growing illusion of progress, masking the absence of real decarbonization.
In the early 2020s, a new wave of experiments emerged: tokenized carbon markets.
The idea was simple: bring carbon credits onto the blockchain to improve transparency and liquidity. Projects like Toucan, KlimaDAO, and others aimed to build a financial flywheel for climate action.
It worked for a short period. Prices spiked. Billions flowed in. And then the cracks reappeared—only this time, on-chain.
Tokenizing credits with integrity issues didn’t make them good. High-impact narratives didn’t equal high-integrity assets.
Speculation replaced regeneration.
These innovation efforts should have gone beyond tokenization and liquiditiy provision and address more of the incentives and underlying integrity issues in the market - both regarding environmental, but also social integrity, e.g. benefit sharing with stewards.
Adding to that the Integrity Crisis of Verra, while Verra appears to have worked more for large capital interest (Banks) than integrity and impact, and being tied into scandals with leading developers like South Pole and the big market setback of 2022-2024 was cealed.
Another hype cycle. Another missed opportunity.
The failure of voluntary carbon markets runs deeper than weak verification or bad actors.
The problem is that they were designed with the same logic that caused the climate crisis in the first place.
Scarcity economics. Offsetting instead of reducing. Cost minimization instead of value alignment. Market mechanisms created to delay regulation, not accelerate change.
And when the banks and regulators finally stepped in, they too became entangled—not in service of transformation, but preservation. Preserving financial interests. Preserving heavy emitters. Preserving business models that cannot continue.
This is what happens when those being asked to change are given the power to design the change mechanism.
It becomes a slow-motion avoidance ritual. And the Earth doesn’t have time for that.
At their best, carbon markets could have:
Instead, the VCM became a loophole economy.
A system that enables extractive industries to call themselves climate leaders—while continuing the very activities that destabilize the planet.
We believe a new model is urgently required—not a reform of the old, but a fundamentally different operating logic.
The next system must:
That’s why Harmoniq is building a Contribution System, embedded in a Civilization Management System (CMS) that links verified impact to real-world financial and social rewards.
This is not about replacing carbon with another single metric.
It’s about creating a new logic of value—one where regenerative behavior is recognized, supported, and scaled.
We do not believe banks or regulators alone will get us there. Not because they’re incapable—but because they are structurally compromised by the very systems they’re meant to oversee.
The transformation must come from a new ecosystem of actors, coordinated around life, truth, and care—not loopholes, lobbying, and delay.
In the rest of this series, we’ll look at:
Because the truth is: we’ve been chasing carbon neutrality at the expense of real resilience.
It’s time to build something better—together.
Continue reding in Post 2: ESG - From Savior to Smoke Screen
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