The Guardian knows me so well! It talks here about their new initiative, Tread Lightly:

many people still have doubts about whether they can achieve much of an impact, and nowhere are these doubts aired so loudly as when it comes to lowering our carbon footprints. Like a dieter justifying one more chocolate biscuit, the excuses flow all too easily - why should I bother when China and India's emissions will engulf our own efforts? Why should I bother when the US refuses to sign up to Kyoto?

Today, the Guardian launches its 'Tread Lightly' online project. It is an attempt to counter the defeatist attitude about tackling rising carbon emissions, by establishing an online meeting place for the community of people who are keen to be part of the solution, but who still seek motivation. By bringing readers together and encouraging them to make lifestyle changes, the hope is to show that individuals acting collectively can achieve impressive results.

The G carries on being all clever, reasonable, and well argued. The point is to 'nurture a sense of community' - "No one likes to feel they are acting alone, swimming forlornly against the tide. Running a marathon is much easier when you know there are hundreds of others around with the same target. Achievable, verifiable goals are important."

And here's a nice little factoid as well: a quarter of greenhouse gases emitted in China come from making goods that are exported to the West. Yikes. (Though should we then conclude international trade is bad...?) Also, the UK produces 9.1 tonnes of CO2 per person, China only 3.2 tonnes.

I've been thinking for a while that doing this in a community, or through networks, has got be an effective way to create positive feedback loops between personal action and social change. This kind of site is one way of doing that, but more needs to happen. The Guardian site, for example, doesn't have the power of MySociety's pledgebank to get others to do the same ("I'll do this only if 100 other people do..."). Pledgebank is all the more powerful for providing pledgers with a ready-made kit to promote a pledge in their local area. Not only can you pledge, but then it can be up to you to find enough people to make it happen. (And then do it anyway, if you don't get the right numbers...)

These things are not government action, and not the most strident form of direct action, but maybe they're better for that. The Climate Camp protests have helped keep the issue in the news, and made sure no-one forgets the hypocrisy of mouthing concern for climate change whilst, say, flying to Australia and Back (and from Sydney to Cairns, from Melbourne to Sydney, from Oz to New Zealand...) but I don't think it'll be these protests that will ultimately change behaviour or markets. (Not that we have any way of measuring the impact of this kind of thing...)

If network-social change is the way, its not an easy one. I would find it much more within my comfort zone to get on a bus to a protest site than make a pledge up, draw a line around my house, and try and get pledges from neighbours.

Though there's plenty of scope in academia. I notice one person who's been campaigning against a local airport who recently took a lot of students on a field trip far abroad. I'm not accusing anyone of open hypocrisy - no more than I accuse myself at least. But... well, there are two points.

First, we have to try and be equitable and consistent, even if we don't always manage it. This is bloody difficult. This website tells me that I put just over ten tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere from my flying to and from Oz; it must be up to 15 tonnes with the other little flights. If I had a car and drove it the average yearly amount of ten to twelve thousand miles, that'd be 2.5 to 3 tonnes per year. So I've just managed the equivalent of 5 to 6 year's worth of driving, wiping out in one go a large chunk of the gains I've made for being a cyclist all of my adult life.

And that's how we - or I - justify these things to ourselves, as the Guardian's intro to Tread Lightly so accurately notes. In my head, I'd traded some years of cycling for this one-off trip. In reality, what it may have done is just normalise me to flying. Certainly, there's been plenty of of internal dialogue going, 'the planet's either fucked, in which case flying's OK because there's nothing can be done, or it's not (because our models are wrong or someone will come up with a tech-fix), in which case flying's OK. Awesome, I'll watch Groundhog Day at 35,000 feet and trouble myself no more.'

(Incidentally, the sites I used to find those figures offer me the chance to offset: the flights could have been bought off for £111, and I'd even get luggage tags saying, 'I am CO2 free and proud of it!' This is insane. At this stage of the transition to a carbon-neutral economy, the Guardian could just as well have set the Tread Lightly site up as a trading scheme. Sign up for the site, save carbon - sell it to someone else! Unless you have some kind of control over the total amount of carbon in the trading system, it won't work - interestingly, for precisely the same reasons, I guess, that laxity with money supply leads to inflation.)

It's also not equitable. Demanding that a local airport cease expansion whilst saying, 'I fly, but only occasionally and on business' misses the point: the airports aren't just expanding so that people already flying can do it more. This is an empirical question, and I don't know the answer, so I'll blag: I suspect if everyone flew the same kind of distance and frequency as academics do - even the environmentally conscious ones - we'd still need airport expansion. So what makes my flying to Honolulu for a conference more worthy of carbon expenditure than someone going on holiday who's just been working their arse off all year? (btw, I'm not really going to Honolulu...!) Do we want to be making moral choices about what expenditure is the more worthy? I suspect this must be the kind of internal justification going on with all of us, at one level or another, even if we don't admit that to ourselves. (It's the kind of inner bargaining that goes on furtively, somewhere in a back-room of the conscience.)

Second, cognitive dissonance can't be allowed to do its thing. Or rather, there's a balance to be struck. On the one hand, we can't get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. Holding several sets of beliefs and actions at the same time, and being happy and content with them all - not ideal. Slightly psychotic, in fact. But allowing the dissonance to mould a new psychic harmony won't get us anywhere either. I need to get over the fact I flew and spewed carbon outa my arse like a chimney (or a 747 did on my behalf) without getting stuck in the above 'its OK because...' rut. At least for the foreseeable future, there aren't any comfortable psychological or action ruts. Well, there are two: suicide (as in this Rowson cartoon - cut CO2: stop breathing) or primitivism: get one pallette beans, one pallette spam, find cave, stop. Starve coz you forgot can opener.)

It occurs to me the equity's the main thing: it's striking. The injustice of global inequity has been so smugly dismissed by the right. You can't redistribute: it's a co-ordination impossibility, it'll lead to tyranny, and it goes against natural liberty, which is the one morally unassailable truth of human society. (I've always thought that was a lucky combination: it's scientifically impossible AND morally unjustifiable. What are the chances, huh?) Now we're faced with the possibility that anything less than equity might do us in.