The Globe and Mail: John Barber

I’ve always had trouble with a central tenet of feel-good environmentalism – more an underlying assumption – that altruistic choices made by individuals can ever add up to real change. Governments can push people, and self-interest can lead them, but voluntarily doing the right thing rarely changes anything.

Virtue is its own reward, a fact advertisers happily ignore when they promote consumption of allegedly green products. As for fighting climate change and such, I always figured, that requires a carbon tax.

Then again, I also always reckoned myself to be rather green, even going so far as to reward my own conscience for the occasional altruistic lifestyle decision. But then I signed up at toronto.zerofootprint.net – a web machine designed specifically to combine millions of individual decisions together to achieve real social change – and I learned otherwise.

I learned first that my lifestyle is responsible for producing more than 12 tonnes of carbon a year – more than the Canadian average of 10 tonnes and well above the Toronto average of 81⁄2 tonnes a head. At the same time, I learned that social networking is something very new and powerful that I am probably too old ever to understand.

Who dares say it won’t change the world? It already has.

The key to the magic is “recognition,” according to ZeroFootprint founder Ron Dembo, a South-Africa-born Torontonian and high-tech entrepreneur who has invested no small part of a personal fortune into this enterprise.

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