On November 11, The Standard ran a story about a local energy firm that lost out on a multibillion-shilling carbon credits deal with the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen). The story told us everything without telling us anything. It sat pretty in the usual business beat drama but buried the public interest angle.
A few decades ago, this would have been a perfectly normal story even in a business paper because business stories focused more on the power structure, catering primarily to middle-aged (mostly men) who dominated the industry. Today, business journalism cannot continue with that narrow focus. In 2025, audiences interested in business stories are diverse, curious, and increasingly conscious of climate issues.
The days when conflict largely drove business news sales are behind us. Today, the audience more than anything wants to understand the systems. They crave for meaning behind the conflict, rather than simply knowing who won and who lost. So, when a story involving carbon credits focuses solely on who challenged whom at the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board (PPARB), it fails journalism’s most basic duty – explaining what truly matters.
Dedicating an entire page to a story about a business involving a state corporation and private entities running into billions, without explaining what is being traded, how it works, or what this could mean for the taxpayer, is a missed opportunity. Especially because carbon credits are not your everyday commodity. They are complex in that they are financial instruments tied not only to environmental claims but also to global accountability and contentious verification systems. For these reasons, the paper oversimplified the story by treating it as a routine tender dispute.
Worldwide, carbon credits are a controversial subject that has kept the carbon offset certifier Verra extremely busy. Even here in Kenya, they’ve had to suspend issuance of credits to a project that won awards at COP27 and had been publicly endorsed by the President as exemplary. One can appreciate why the story deserved more than the procedural drama readers were presented with.
Additionally, it didn’t help that the accompanying picture was that of the Maasai Mau forest, which risked giving the impression that KenGen credits were tied to forest conservation. They are not. These are industrial credit – Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) from Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, such as geothermal, hydro, and wind power. Any of these clean energy projects should have been used as the visual representation instead of the Maasai Mau forest photo.
Journalists must never forget that the story is always in the details. Don’t get carried away by conflict in the story and ignore other news values that make it richer. The dispute at PPARB was never the main story. The real story lay in the nature of the credits, their credibility, market value, and the implications for the country’s climate goals as outlined in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). That should have been the focus.
Business journalists should exercise caution when covering climate finance stories, recognising that they can be complex and require connecting the dots, as carbon markets are often entangled in narratives of inequality, sometimes referred to as “climate colonialism”. Reporting on this requires curiosity, diligence, and an understanding of how the system operates.
In the end, we learned who won the tender but missed out on what was truly at stake. Let’s resist the temptation to relay boardroom disputes; otherwise, we’ll miss the real story the public deserves to know and debate.
