system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: When companies call themselves "carbon neutral", what does this mean - presumably every industrial process involves electricity and consuming energy?
gpt
*In theory*, it means that they remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as they put into it. So yes, they consume energy, some of which is produced by coal, but they also put money into initiatives to remove carbon, for example by planting trees.

In practice, it generally means very little, and these claims are based on some very creative accounting. For example, you might plant a tree and then say that "over the next 50 years of its life, it will remove 5 tons of carbon from the atmosphere. So let's just say that we've removed 5 tons *here and now*"