A burgeoning set of for-profit companies is hoping to cash in on the eco-cachet of living as lightly on the Earth as possible.
Cleanairpass is hoping that users of conventional energy sources will feel like assuaging their guilt by taking a look at their carbon footprints and voluntarily spending to offset those emissions.
At the Cleanairpass website (www.cleanairpass.com) consumers can punch in the year, make and model of their car, along with how many kilometres they drive in a year and the calculator will figure out approximately how many tonnes of carbon the car produces annually.
If, for example, a car produces three tonnes of carbon in a year, for $29.95 a Cleanairpass can be purchased. In return consumers receive a certificate and a sticker for their car, and Cleanairpass purchases carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCE) - currently North America's only carbon-trading market. Carbon contracts on the CCE trade in units of 100 tonnes.
"What we are doing is allowing consumers to participate in that market by aggregating that consumer base and consumer demand under a single brand to purchase and retire credits from that market," says Bryce Conacher, CEO of Reknewco, the Toronto-based company that sells the Cleanairpass. "Really what we are doing is to help drive demand to bring those particular renewable energy sources to market."
Critics argue that companies such as Cleanairpass are doing little to combat climate change while making consumers believe that they can carry on polluting. Defenders of this new business model say that as long as it's done legitimately, an environmental difference can be made - as well as a profit.
Conacher admits Cleanairpass is off to a slow start, but the company is one of an increasing number of companies hoping to make money from clean air.
In the U.S, a relatively new company called Terrapass is doing something similar, and other companies popped up last year in the United Kingdom and Australia, Conacher says.
"We hope that its more than a fad," he says. "What we are trying to do is bring together like-minded consumers who think that renewable energy is a good thing and that recognize that we want to move more quickly towards technologies that are less polluting."
Offsetters, a Canadian-based non-profit company set up by the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia, allows consumers to purchase offsets of specific flights they have taken, or to offset 40, 100, or 200 per cent of average energy use, calculated at $16 per tonne. (Offsetters offers travellers a flight calculator at www.offsetters.ca.)
But will they be successful? Maybe as a business, but not likely in terms of stopping global warming, says David Wheeler, the Erivan K. Haub professor in business and sustainability at the Schulich School of Business at York University.
While Wheeler will not criticize the companies or the people who purchase their products, the fact that companies such as Cleanairpass depend on individual consciences to go out of their way essentially to pay a penalty, means that the company will likely never be very successful.
It is the "problem of the green consumer," Wheeler says. Ask people in the street if they prefer fair trade, organic, environmentally superior products and the favourable response rate will be 40 to 60 per cent.
"But the proportion of people who actually make those choices on a regular basis is actually very small," Wheeler says.
"There is a relatively small proportion of deep-green types that will go to the extent of paying money they don't have to - no one is requiring them to pay to offset their carbon emissions - and it is a good thing they are doing that. It is very worthy and very laudable, but I think what's even more interesting is how do we move the other 99 per cent of people," he says.
Wheeler says he is more interested in larger and more creative financing solutions that would, for example, get banks to help people spend an extra $10,000 on a Toyota Prius. Or on a larger scale, to develop incentives for countries such as China to buy clean coal-burning technologies.
"There are bigger fish to fry globally than even Canada delivering on its Kyoto commitments," he says.
Companies such as electricity generator TransAlta in Alberta are developing innovative ways to sequester carbon from various energy production methods, Wheeler says.
The larger global issues can be daunting for individual consumers, however.
"That's why I would never criticize it (Cleanairpass)," Wheeler says. "I would always say it's a good thing that people are doing that, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that it is going to deliver the results."
Environmental groups are generally supportive of the potential of emerging businesses that utilize the carbon-offset market to make change.
"We don't have a problem with companies that are being set up to provide carbon offsets," says Ian Bruce, a climate-change specialist at the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver.
"Addressing climate change is providing a lot of business opportunities. It also spurs companies to innovate as well with becoming more energy efficient, making them more competitive" he says.
Bruce says this really is the future and more and more companies will be popping up to provide the service. Given such an emerging market there will be companies that are legitimate, but also those that are not. The Suzuki Foundation supports the carbon-offset trade as long as it goes to promoting renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy-conservation projects.
There is already some debate in this emerging field about the carbon-offset benefits of one commonly used tool: Planting trees. Offsetters, for instance, have recognized this controversy and generally exclude support for reforestation efforts as a carbon offset.
The problem with tree-planting as a carbon offset, Bruce says, is that while trees do capture carbon, if there is a forest fire a few years down the road, all that carbon will be released back into the atmosphere. "So there is no guarantee that it is going to reduce emissions in the long term."
Other problems emerge regarding what is called "additionality," whereby money is going to projects that would have happened anyway. Or projects that happened 10 or 15 years ago.
"The government plays an important role in setting up carbon offsets that are legitimate and will add to climate-change benefits and climate protection," Bruce says.
In North America the CCE currently is the only carbon-trading market up and running. However, in December, the CCE and the Montreal Exchange agreed to a joint venture to establish the Montreal Climate Exchange - likely by the end of this year.
"This, of course, is conditional on the adoption by the Canadian federal government of various policy initiatives (regulation, registry, etc.) concerning climate change and related issues," the Montreal Exchange's Jean Charles Robillard says.
Once that happens, Cleanairpass hopes to offer more local products so that, for example, an Alberta driver would buy a pass and the company would source credits from Alberta sources, such as wind farms.
