Do they even promise it will benefit local populations? The issue is that even if they are good projects from a viewpoint of carbon (which the companies argue), the global north is still ofsetting their emissions in the global south. Large swathes of land are reserved by these companies, with little or no benefit to the local population, only so they can keep their business models afloat in the western world. It’s just yet another form of neocolonialism.
For sure! Those promises aren’t exactly binding, and they probably came up with excuses at the same time, and there aren’t any serious consequences to fucking it up so long as voters in their home country stop paying attention quickly enough(and they’re conservatives and centrists mostly so practically by definition they aren’t even paying attention in the first place).