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Being a trendy guy, I always want to catch on early to something like becoming "carbon-neutral."

So I went to http://www.cooldrivepass.ca, and its handy emissions calculator told me that my car (a small, fuel-efficient turbo-diesel) produces 3,170 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year.

That's the bad news. The good news was that for only $63.40 I could purchase enough environmental benefits elsewhere to undo all the damage I was doing by driving my car for a year.

What a bargain! Welcome to the world of carbon offsets.

We've all heard about schemes like this where your liberal conscience directs you to pay money to plant trees somewhere, feel good about it and, in effect, get a voluntary "license to pollute." But now a Vancouver-based group says they've found the way to make carbon offsets work for Canadians.

They sell you a CoolDrivePass and, with the money you pay voluntarily, they invest in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They charge you just enough money to buy just enough of a project to reduce emissions by just the amount that is produced by your car.

CoolDrivePass, a commercial enterprise, is part of a new industry that promises to make consumers climate friendly. Britain's Avis, for example, offers customers the option to make a rental car carbon-neutral by buying carbon offsets. WestJet has a similar deal with another Vancouver-based group called http://www.offsetters.ca in which the airline agrees to invest part of the normal ticket cost to offset the climate impacts of your travel.

Hadi Dowlatabadi is executive director of CoolDrivePass, and is the Canada research chairman and a professor in the Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

He grew up in Iran, but was sent to school in Scotland. He studied mathematics, physics and computer science at the University of Edinburgh, and then completed a PhD in physics at Cambridge.

Dowlatabadi says that a desire to solve real-world problems, rather than chasing elusive little particles, led him to focus on the interfaces of energy, society and the environment.

In 2001, he moved from the United States to Canada. Being an Iranian, he found that, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year in the United States, overseas travel had become very difficult. Instead of flying from one climate-change meeting to another, he focused on what he could do in the B.C. Lower Mainland.

Vaughan: I've heard of goodwill programs that buy trees to soak up carbon dioxide to offset pollution the donor has caused. Is the CoolDrivePass a variation of that?

Dowlatabadi: We use donations in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that is where the similarity ends.

For example, it is hard to know if trees are actually planted in some distant land and then not cut down for fuel or lost in a forest fire.

Our projects are located in Canada, and are chosen for their contributions to climate change mitigation, low overhead costs (20 per cent) and greenhouse gas (GHG) savings.

Ground-source heat pump systems are an example. It is easy to check up on a First Nations community centre using ground-source heating. The physics of the system makes sure we use less energy and reduce GHG emissions. The economics are already there if you have a long-term perspective.

Vaughan: Compared with the emissions of a power station, those produced by my little car are zilch. Isn't this just about salving my conscience?

Dowlatabadi: Power stations do belch out a lot of emissions, but they power many homes.

How many do you carry with you in your car? A typical home uses enough energy to generate about 10 tons of CO{-2}. The average vehicle in Canada emits about nine tons.

As it turns out, we have a reasonably economical approach to capturing and sequestering emissions from power plants for about $50/ton. Fossil energy (especially coal) is too cheap for us to abandon.

When we are serious about climate protection, we will capture power station emissions, and electricity costs will go up by about 20 per cent.

In our projects, we prevent emission of GHGs for less than half the cost of capturing it from power plants.

So, for now, while governments dither about what to do, we can soothe your conscience and do good, too, by locking in more energy-efficient technologies in socially desirable projects.

Vaughan: Where do you find the projects in which to invest? I'd be worried that well-intentioned donations could end up in some enviro-scams. It's happened, you know.

Dowlatabadi: We would not have started this venture if the other alternatives met our many concerns, including being scammed.

We studied some of the most-famous and less-expensive carbon markets for their transparency and quality of projects, and were not satisfied. We are desperately concerned about making good investments.

There are many more opportunities on our doorstep; just look around. Heat recovery is economical from supermarket fridges, ice rinks and domestic waste-water. The technologies are well understood, but the projects are rarely contemplated.

We will invest in such projects, putting them where people can see their donations at work.

We also plan to provide grants from our revenue to teach the engineers and tradespeople how to install and operate these systems.

We will invest in the right projects throughout Canada.

Vaughan: What do you think the take-up rate of a program like this will be? How many people actually spend money to soothe their conscience? Don't you really require government to force this kind of thing on people?

Dowlatabadi: It is too early to talk about the take-up of CoolDrivePass.

So, let me tell you about http://www.offsetters.ca, which we set up a year ago. Our hope was to capture offsets from corporate travel. We got about a thousand good-hearted souls who bought offsets, but later told us that their employers were reluctant to reimburse climate offsets.

But, this month, we became an affiliate of WestJet and it allows us to offer climate-neutral travel at no extra cost to the traveller.

WestJet pays us for bringing environmentally conscious travellers to its site. We invest their payment in projects that make their travel climate-neutral. Hey, presto, the traffic is picking up!

Reducing GHG emissions using CoolDrivePass is about one-tenth as expensive as doing the same by buying a hybrid car. It also allows you to drive what you like.

We hope that car dealerships, especially those that do not market hybrids, will put some of their marketing budget into buying offsets from CoolDrivePass for their clients. We are in negotiations with a number of different dealerships and hope to make an announcement soon.

You also asked if the government should be more involved. There are many examples of initiatives Canada could contemplate, but there is a sense of inseparability from the U.S. norms that tends to limit options here.

For example, five years ago, I suggested that Canada tax private vehicles by weight and fuel efficiency, recognizing that heavier vehicles not only emit more GHGs, but cause greater injury to other road users.

Vaughan: You've set up CoolDrivePass as a business, yet you're a professor at a publicly funded university. Any conflict there?

Dowlatabadi: Funny you should ask. I have to report all potential conflicts of interest to UBC.

They are supportive of our work because one of our goals is to foster global citizenship, and projects like this allow us to move from the "bright idea" in the ivory tower all the way through to implementation out in the real world.

Academics are full of bright ideas that rarely make an impact on the world. I am involved in four projects outside the university, each of which provides opportunities to learn about what stands in the way of our society becoming more sustainable.

In setting up Offsetters.ca (a non-profit) and CoolDrivePass.ca (a corporation), we hope to better understand whether different legal forms of realizing such initiatives will have different long-term consequences.

We want to learn which will attract more partners and become a successful template. We are in business to create irresistible opportunities for a change for the better.

Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on Report on Business Television and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.

mvaughan@globeandmail.com