Seems to be working just fine.

Standing on the south bank of the Fraser River a stone’s throw from the Vancouver International Airport, Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi motions toward the frenetic activity at the Olympic speed skating oval construction site. “This exercise is about as valuable an experiment as I could have done in my academic career,” he says, pulling his Lee Valley Tools baseball cap tight to his black wire rim glasses to ward off the late June sunshine.

The project he’s describing, built as part of the oval site, is the Richmond Thermal Energy Network. Using the waste heat from the creation of ice at the Olympic venue, it’s one of the region’s biggest alternative energy projects.

“Ordinarily you build an ice rink, and to make the ice you have to reject a lot of heat,” explains the affable, Iranian-born UBC professor who’s also associate director of the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “Just like the back of your refrigerator. Cool inside the icebox, warm outside the icebox.”

The reflected heat that would otherwise be lost will be pumped to new apartments to be built around the oval. The Offsetters Carbon Neutral Society, a two-year-old Vancouver-based non-profit that Dr. Dowlatabadi co-founded, is instrumental in the project’s development. And the society’s involvement with the oval project is being paid for partly by people who want to cancel out the considerable carbon pollution they put into the atmosphere every time they step on an airplane. It’s a model scheme that typifies the new, but exploding, industry built on the concept of carbon offsets.

A carbon offset is a monetary investment in a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to the measured amount of a polluting activity. Individuals wanting to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle pay a fee to an offsetting company, which in turn invests that money in projects that either remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or result in less greenhouse gas expelled at source. For industry it often makes economic sense to purchase offsets rather than reduce emissions because it is immediately possible and often the cheapest alternative. Proponents of carbon offsetting argue it signals the beginning of assigning a monetary value to the environment. Any sort of acknowledgement of the impact of individual and corporate greenhouse gas emissions is invaluable, they say, as we move toward an uncertain future of global warming

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