Cool Business Ideas Cool Business Ideas

Taranto in his WSJ Best of the Web Today has a bunch of: Cool Business Ideas:

Our item yesterday on Al Gore's "carbon offset" scheme leads reader Tom Tyson to make the former vice president an offer:

I've recently been car shopping. My wife really likes the Toyota Prius, and it sure is a very nice car. I certainly don't object to getting better gas mileage. The only problem is that we can get a Matrix--another very nice car of similar size--for $5,000 less. If Al is interested, I'd be happy to sell him some carbon offsets for $5,000 and then go and buy the Prius!

Feel free to send Al my email address.

Mr. Gore, the ball is in your court. Reader Dan Carter takes the idea a step further:

With all of the concern about carbon "footprint" these days, I've decided to start my own carbon offset business to help the wealthy feel less guilty about their extravagance. Perhaps you would be kind enough to publicize my venture.

My business model is to don the hair shirt of self-denial in exchange for cash payment so that my clients can lead fuller, more enriching lives without worrying about carbon dioxide. And, just so there's no question about the validity of the offset, I'm not building wind farms or giving away fluorescent light bulbs. No, I'm offering to forgo real pleasures so that others may enjoy them.

A few examples from my brochure:

Want to fly to Paris in your Gulfstream? Hey, who doesn't--but the kind of CO2 emissions from a trip like that will come back to haunt you when global warming hits. But what if you persuaded someone else to cancel a similar trip? That's where I come in: For a modest fee of $10,000, I won't fly to Paris on a Gulfstream this spring, so your trip will be carbon-neutral, and you can stroll guilt-free along the Champs Elysées.

Though it's getting tougher and tougher to impress the ladies with a car these days, they still swoon for something really exclusive, like the $1.4 million Bugatti Veyron. But how can you sell your commitment to the Earth when you're behind the wheel of a 1,000-horsepower machine that, at its top speed of 230 mph, sucks up 26 gallons of gas in just 12 minutes? Easy. Let me do the conserving in a three-year-old Camry while you get busy in the Bugatti. For $70,000--just a 5% premium over sticker price--I won't buy a Veyron at any time in the next five years.

Household electrical usage is in the news this week after we learned that a prominent Democrat spends 10 times the U.S. average on his electric bill. Of course, more electricity means more fuel burned in a power plant and more CO2 spewed into the air, and that's just the kind of attention you don't need. So what are you going to do about that fabulous 2,500-square-foot addition you just got back from the architects? Quit fretting and tell the builder to get started! Your added carbon footprint will be neutralized because, for $25,000, I'll scratch my add-on plans for 10 years.

With some cooperation and ingenuity, we can be back in the Little Ice Age in no time!

This is such a great idea, it's almost too good to be true!