The Dutch advertising standards authority has again criticised an advert by oil giant Shell, following complaints by anti-fossil fuel campaigners and Greenpeace Nederland.

The company cannot claim that compensating for carbon dioxide emissions nullifies the damage to the climate caused by a car trip, the commission said on Wednesday.

Last year, the RCC ordered the term CO2-neutral be removed from the same ad. Shell complied, and replaced it with the CO2 compensation claim.

However, the RCC now says the new claim requires a strict burden of proof and that Shell has no way of demonstrating that compensating for carbon emissions by planning trees or protecting forests offsets the damage to the climate caused by petrol.

Shell has two weeks to appeal.

In February, the RCC also criticised a Shell advert stating that ‘we make millions of kilometres cleaner’, by providing green hydrogen to power buses, trucks and cars.

Wednesday’s ruling has not yet been uploaded to the RCC website.