"Bosch to buy lots of carbon offsets by 2020." Without any breakdown on how much is just buying carbon credits, and without any comparison to emissions further down in their supply chain, I'm skeptical about whether this is meaningful.
So in the longer term we're still left with the question, how much of the total emissions (including supply chain) of Bosch is due to Bosch's use of electricity?
If somebody makes a battery final assembly plant in Iceland, and run it on geothermal energy only, but buy battery cells manufactured in China with energy from a brown coal powerplant, it's not so interesting that the 1% of emissions from final assembly was removed.
It can also be useful as a pressure to invest in cleaner technology, say if your currently are emitting X amount of CO2 that you have to pay for and if you invest some money to improve your processes and tech and now you emit X/2 then you will have to pay half as much in carbon taxes/credits in future.
