There's a great opinion piece in today's Independent, in which Johann Hari argues that leaving the fate of planet to consumer choice and voluntary action isn't going to work. His words echo those of George Monbiot and Mark Lynas, and he looks to government to force us all to use less stuff:

In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily.

If you're looking for some web-based wonders to inform, entertain or inspire, here's what's caught our collective eyes recently:

• The Story of Stuff has been doing the rounds since before Christmas but Annie Leonard's occasionally breathless but totally brilliant film about resources, consumption and consumerism is worth mentioning again.According to Annie, natural resources in the developing world are seen as "our stuff that got on somebody else's land".
• Another oldie-but-goodie is Breathing Earth, a global map that shows when someone is either born or dies, plus the CO2 emissions from each country. In real time. Be afraid, be very afraid.
• It looks like video, but apparently this evocative climate change film is composed entirely of still images by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk
• So popular they had to get bigger servers, this video shows what happened when 200-plus people stopped moving in New York's Grand Central Station. It's not really green but it's really cool.