Ecomunicipality.com

A new study has put some hard numbers to the question of traveling to conferences, workshops, trainings and such, versus conducting them via the internet.

Now, on first blush, one might say that this is a no-brainer, and in some ways, of course, it is.  Staying put and letting the electrons do the traveling would certainly seem to be more eco-friendly.

But, don't forget that the world of the Internet is dependent upon servers and switches and hot and cold environments and a hell of a lot of computers being fired up.  So, doing the math and quantifying the different scenarios/outcomes is not as much of a "no-brainer" as first imagined.

To wit:  short travel by train to a conference, may, in fact, be just as eco-friendly as holding a video-conference.  Traveling beyond 150 miles, or using other liquid fuels in the process of virtually any kind of travel means that staying put and letting the electrons do the traveling is a better option. 

But, it is good to have the hard numbers to back up the argument.  And, in the U.S. of course, there are not many good options in terms of trains, so we are mostly in the universe where travel by video-conference is always a better deal environmentally.

And, in truth, it does bother me when environmental groups or the renewable energy industry travels some long distance to hold a convention.  It's like:  We are here to save the world by degrading it through coming here to talk about it.

Contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities.  We won't be getting rid of these anytime soon, but at least with the study quoted above we will know in concrete terms what kinds of choices we are making and what their tangible impact really is.