Who is Gabriel Dalton?
I'm Gabriel Dalton, an AI strategist, TEDx speaker and digital sustainability advocate based in Vancouver, BC. I build energy-efficient, low-carbon websites for nonprofits. I founded Oasis of Change, a not-for-profit, in March 2024. I speak and write about AI and digital sustainability.
My TEDx talk · Speaking · Writing · Press kit
I was ten.
I built my first website at ten. It was a small project for a family friend, and I had no idea what I was doing. I figured most of it out the way every kid in the late 2010s figured anything out: YouTube tutorials, W3Schools tabs left open until they crashed Chrome, and a lot of trial and error. Mostly error.
What stuck wasn't the markup. It was the loop: change a line, refresh the page, see what happened. That cause-and-effect feedback became the closest thing I had to a hobby. I just kept building.
The number that changed everything.
A couple of years later, I came across a Google statistic I haven't been able to shake since: a single Google search produces enough energy to power a 10-watt light bulb for 108 seconds.
I read it twice. Then I sat with it.
I was already building websites every day. The people I knew used Google dozens of times a day without thinking about it. Across the planet, that's billions of searches every hour, indefinitely. What I had thought of as a weightless thing suddenly had a weight. The web wasn't immaterial. It was electricity, water, copper, concrete, and the lives that mine and ship them.
What does a lighter web look like? Who's going to build it?
That was the moment the work I was already doing became the work I wanted to do. Not as a hobby, but as a question.
Finding the people already doing it.
I assumed I'd stumbled onto something niche. I hadn't. Once I started looking, I found a quiet community of engineers, designers, and researchers already at work on what they called digital sustainability and sustainable web design. Some had been at it for a decade. They were patient with me. I read their reports, their case studies, their Lighthouse audits. I learned how to measure a page in grams of CO₂. I learned that almost every website is heavier than it needs to be.
The next few years were just me copying, learning, breaking things, and eventually making sites that loaded faster, used less energy, and reached more people on slow connections.
Oasis of Change.
In March 2024, I founded Oasis of Change, Inc., a Vancouver-based not-for-profit, to do this work in public. The mission is simple: digital sustainability and digital accessibility, treated as a single problem, because they are. A site that loads quickly on a five-year-old phone over a weak connection is a site that uses less energy. The two move together.
Since then we've worked with Plastic Bank, AccessibilityChecker.org, the Stanley Park Ecology Society, Mittler Senior Technology, and others. Together we've reduced website carbon emissions, energy use, and water use by up to 98% on individual projects.
What I keep coming back to.
The thing that hooked me at ten (type something, refresh, see what happens) is still the thing that hooks me. Just at a different scale. The web is the largest thing humanity has ever built. It costs more than most people realize. And the people who decide what it costs next are the people building it now.
I'd rather we built something lighter.