Amid all the news about climate change I’ve become curious about the size of my ‘carbon footprint’. And it’s not been hard to work it out given the huge number of online calculators available. The estimates vary but my family is apparently responsible for about 7 tonnes a year. I’m troubled by this and I’ve been thinking about ways in which I could reduce it. So, when I read in a review of the new CarbonRally service by Martin LaMonica of CNET the line “Who knew tackling global warming could be so fun?” I thought it sounded like the answer to a faint-hearted environmentalist’s prayers.
CarbonRally works on the basis of the user accepting carbon-cutting challenges, which are currently set by the site’s organisers. (It’s currently confined to those with a US zip code, so I’m pretending I’m based in New York.) I’ve accepted the challenge to avoid using new grocery bags for a month — possibly not very ambitious but it will save me six pounds of carbon. And if I persist with this and take on other challenges there is the prospect of making it onto the ‘leaderboard’. Meanwhile I’ve already benefited from some tips on sustainable grocery shopping from other members.
CarbonRally isn’t the only player in this field, Google is doing something around its iGoogle pages in the UK, while MakeMeSustainable is taking a financial tack concentrating on the financial payback from cutting your emissions and integrating the purchase of carbon offsets for those emissions you just can’t cut.
The intriguing parallel for these kind of services is the Kyoto Protocol’s framework for the setting and monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions by governments. It might sound too good to be true, but given what we’ve learnt recently about the power of social networks could they not be used to harness peer pressure to create a kind of Kyoto on a micro scale?
I’ve been mulling this over for a while and I think there might be a problem with incentives. The closest offline analogy I can come up with is that of slimming clubs like ‘Weight Watchers’. These clubs take individual commitments to change behaviour, create a social network around them and act as a referee of performance. I have a friend who tells me that a key element of the clubs is the weekly weigh-in in front of your peers – objective evidence of whether you’re keeping your promises or not.
Without an online equivalent, I’m wondering whether I can trust the stars at the top of the leaderboard to tell the truth about whether they are keeping to their commitments or not. And now I’ve got these doubts I can see that I might start taking my own commitments less seriously than I should. I hope I’m wrong but I can’t see what can be done to get around this validation problem. That doesn’t mean these efforts are wasted just that there’ll be a limit to what they can achieve.
