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A quick click on your computer screen may be all it takes to reduce the impact your air travel has on the environment if a voluntary carbon-offset program announced Monday by Air Canada actually flies.

Now that we know that a single international flight can emit about as much greenhouse gas as an entire year of driving, Air Canada hopes that through its partnership with Zerofootprint, a not-for-profit organization that operates carbon-offset programs, customers will try to neutralize their environmental footprint.

It's a Herculean task: According to the David Suzuki Foundation, flying “has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for 4 to 9 per cent of the total climate-change impact of human activity.”

Customers who log on to the Air Canada website can use a calculator that prompts for a starting point and a destination; it then computes the amount of emissions the flight will produce.

Travellers are then given an offset dollar figure that they can pay at the time of ticket purchase or at a later date.

Environmentally conscious travellers have already been using the Internet to buy green tags – which support renewable-energy or tree-planting projects – for the past few years. With Canada's largest air carrier recently joining in, it is now a simple one-step process.

But in an unregulated industry that has become the chequebook environmentalist's equivalent to the Wild West, does paying for a few trees to be planted really help erase the dirty deed itself?

Jason Hogan, an executive vice-president at Equicom Group and a frequent flier with Air Canada, is doubtful. “If throwing down $12 every time you fly is all it takes to get rid of your guilt relating to what we're doing to the environment, then you've got a pretty low bar to get over.”

Still, as someone who flies 40 to 60 times a year, would he be interested in participating in the Air Canada offset program? “If I actually thought the money was going to go to programs that would have an impact, I might. … I mean, planting a couple of trees? I don't know how that offsets the millions of flights that occur.”

Dave LaBarre, president of Baseline Emissions Management Inc. of Calgary, which was behind Green My Flight (Greenmyflight.com), the first carbon-offset service to receive Environment Canada's EcoLogo seal of approval in early 2006, focuses on wind energy. He said the service steers clear of the divisive tree-planting projects because “trees provide temporary carbon storage but can easily release carbon into the atmosphere through things like fire, disease, natural decay and timber harvesting.”

Tree-planting projects are the main carbon-offset thrust of Air Canada's Toronto-based partner, Zerofootprint.

Other than the effectiveness of projects, the main concerns regarding the carbon-offset industry is that many firms are vague in their promises and do not provide an audit trail showing exactly where the money is going. Though carbon-credit trading is regulated in the developed countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol, the voluntary industry for personal credits is not.

The global voluntary carbon-credit sector is expected to rise to $4-billion (U.S.) by 2010. But Kevin Smith, a researcher with Carbon Trade Watch in Britain and co-author of The Carbon Neutral Myth, finds the fundamental notion of carbon offsets pernicious. “They send the message that you can have your ‘carbon cake' and eat it too,” he says.

He doesn't believe in using one project to justify the continued fossil-fuel consumption of another. He also cautions against what he calls the shell-game aspect of carbon offsets. “We need to be making emissions cuts across the board rather than using creative accountancy to make it look like an emissions cut here justifies further fossil-fuel use there.”

“We hear that a lot,” Mr. LaBarre says. “The best response I have is to encourage direct offsets first: Change your light bulbs. Change your insulation. Yet you get to a point where you can't offset everything in your life. If you've made changes but still want to take a trip to Cuba, you can put your money towards projects that are making a difference. You have to start somewhere.”

That “somewhere” is what some environmentalists call carbon colonialism: paying to maintain material privilege in a period they see as critical for emissions reductions.

Still, linking the idea of air travel with pollution is a start. But, if we cannot clear our conscience with offsets, where does this leave the average eco-minded carbon sinner?

“The only way to really tackle climate change,” Mr. Smith says, “is to deal with emissions at source. The most effective and empowering way of doing that is to organize in your communities and make political pressure for the bigger, systemic changes that need to happen.”

Special to The Globe and Mail