More and more businesses present themselves as ethical, clean and green. They claim that they make up for unavoidable emissions created by their manufacturing processes by compensating in other areas. Critics refer to this practice as “greenwashing”: improving public image with very little benefit for the environment. Do these compensation projects, many of which are located in the global south, actually have any effect on the climate as a whole? Climate researchers across Europe are determined to find answers to this question, but instead discover a new range of disturbing issues. Why are some projects, like those conducted by L’Oréal, located in the unregulated Mosquitia region of Honduras? Can the carbon dioxide produced by large corporations ever really be zero-sum? And does this modern model of offsetting carbon dioxide production with apparently beneficial projects perhaps prevent more challenging and effective solutions from being implemented?