Rod Mickleburgh, Globe and Mail

On British Columbia's officially proclaimed Clean Air Day, as a smog alert blanketed the hazy Fraser Valley, organizers of the 2010 Winter Games unveiled the most ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions in Olympic history.

For the first time, indicative of the growing importance of the environment at a time of global climate change, an Olympics now has a carbon offsetter as an official sponsor, with a goal of staging a carbon-neutral Games that goes well beyond the green goalposts of any previous Olympics.

"This deals with emissions associated with carbon neutrality in a way that's unprecedented," said James Tansey, co-founder of Offsetters Clean Technology Inc. "We are setting a target that future Olympics will aspire to beat."

His company was announced as the latest VANOC sponsor yesterday, in return for absorbing the estimated $5-million cost of offsetting 110,000 tonnes of carbon emissions that analysts conclude will be released into the atmosphere by the staging of the 2010 Winter Games.

Emissions are offset by investing in greenhouse-gas reduction projects, such as using wood biomass in place of coal as an industrial fuel, that cut carbon discharges.

VANOC has also enlisted the company's help in offsetting an additional 190,000 tonnes of carbon emissions associated indirectly with the Games, mostly from air travel by athletes, officials and spectators.

An Olympics has never tackled these so-called indirect emissions before. A major focus of the campaign will be individual travellers flying to Vancouver next February.

"We are not going to pressure anybody. It's a voluntary program," said VANOC sustainability vice-president Linda Coady. "But we want to try to get people coming here for the Games to offset their air travel."

Ms. Coady said formulas exist online that "spit out" how much someone should pay to offset carbon emissions from their flight, depending on the number of miles flown.

By securing Offsetters as an official sponsor to look after VANOC's direct carbon footprint of 110,000 tonnes, she said the Games have already met international standards defining "carbon neutral," but VANOC wants to do more.

"We want to go past that to tackle the 190,000 tonnes of indirect emissions," Ms. Coady said. "This is a big international event, and we're optimistic that when the world comes here, we can say we have offset both our direct and indirect footprint."

Mr. Tansey, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and director of the Centre of Sustainability and Social Innovation, said Offsetters was formed in 2005 to meet the growing need of businesses looking for reputable carbon-reduction projects to offset the impact of their own emissions.

Offsetters acts as a broker between carbon-reduction projects and green-conscious companies that want to be carbon neutral, taking a commission from the resulting sale of carbon credits. Mr. Tansey said Offsetters has identified 29 enterprises to offset VANOC's direct emissions. All comply with standards set by the province's new greenhouse-gas regulations, he said.

"In the past, there have been very poor quality offsets that undermined the whole philosophy. That's one of the reasons we started our company, to ensure there were high-quality offsets in the market," Mr. Tansey said. "We have a real commitment to quality. Reductions are real, verifiable and permanent."

Other proposed projects from which Offsetters intends to buy carbon credits include one to place fuel cell technology in transit buses and another to establish hydrogen fuelling stations to curb industrial use of gasoline and electricity.

Mr. Tansey said his company's role as an official Olympic sponsor, besides the perks such as event tickets and participation in the torch relay that come with it, serves as "an enormous endorsement for us as a company, and we hope it will help us build a business to assist others to achieve their goals of carbon neutrality."