Turning off the camera during Zoom or video meetings can actually help reduce a person's carbon footprint of the call by 96 per cent, a new environmental study finds.
(link covers a 2021 study by Purdue, Yale, and MIT)
Some folks think teleworking is favorable to the environment on the basis that they avoid driving to work. IMO that’s quite far-fetched when you consider that a worksite with a capacity of ~1000 workers would consume much less energy than heating and cooling 1000 residential homes. Then you have account for the footprint attributed to heavy internet bandwidth demands.
Nothing beats cycling to work and working on-site. But if you are working from home, it’s worthwhile to try to attend non-video conferences. A presenter may have no choice in some cases but certainly you need not see everyone’s faces.
FWiW, these are steps to disable high-bandwidth frills:
disabling animated GIFs (useless?): about:config » image.animation_mode » (normal → none) or (normal → once, to just disable the play loops)
Or for refined on-the-fly control install this plugin
⚠Disabling animated GIFs in Firefox may be useless. I get the impression animated GIFs are still fetched but simply not played automatically, thus bandwidth is still wasted.
(disable still images)
about:config » permissions.default.image » 1→2
Chrome/Chromium
Disabling animations- impossible (bug report from ~14 years ago still unresolved). Hence “stop using Chrome” in the title.
Click the Customize and control Google Chrome menu button, which is the on the far-right side of the URL toolbar.
Select Settings on the menu to bring up that tab.
Click Privacy and security on the left side of Google Chrome.
Select Site Settings to view the content options.
Then click Images to bring up the options shown directly below.
Select the Don’t allow sites to show images radio button.
I have deliberately spared readers from the source links to the above info because the information is buried in enshitified webpages with shenanigans like cookie popups that have no reject all option. Looks like this post is a bit enshitified itself since the details/summary HTML tags are broken here (they tend to be accepted on other Lemmy instances). If anyone knows the fix plz let me know. (reported)
That number is if everyone turned off their webcams, and is the amount across everyone.
Of course. You don’t video conference with yourself.
You seem to be saying each individual should make the individualized decision that their own contribution is insignificant, which leads you to a room full of people needlessly each transmitting their face and cummulatively emitting 1kg CO₂/hr.
The point is theyve taken "If you didnt drive to work" in terms of phrasing, but the number is if everyone stopped driving into work.
Which heavily inflates it.
You seem to be saying each individual should make the individualized decision that their own contribution is insignificant, which leads you to a room full of people needlessly each transmitting their face and cummulatively emitting 1kg CO₂/hr.
This is about the equivalent of 1 person cooking something in their oven, which is such a miniscule amount. One person Each of the participants eating a small medium bag of nuts has a bigger footprint.
The author assumes that the alternative to remote work is that everyone bikes to work (year round) and doesn’t heat/cool their homes when they’re unoccupied?
When someone who fails to realize that drives a GHG-emitting car to work anyway, it’s obviously still lower emissions than heating and cooling a home for the day. (thus you’re wrong about assumptions.. it is not in the premise that everyone cycle to work.. the cycling option merely annihilates some claims)
doesn’t heat/cool their homes when they’re unoccupied?
Naturally. Not occupying the home sets the conditions by which sufficiently wise inhabitants can turn off the heating and cooling. It’s not a high bar of intelligence. If your workplace of ~1000 people is likely to have a large proportion of workers without that degree of wisdom, perhaps it’s not the most intellectually stimulating place to work. What kind workplace would this be? An Amazon warehouse? Teleworking is generally only an option for the kinds of careers that involve thinking. So I don’t imagine a realistic scenario that you claim -- that many needlessly heat or cool a home all day long.
Yes, you can ride in rain and cold weather, but we get ice storms, blizzards and powerful thunderstorms with very strong winds where I live, and clothes don't help you not fall off the bike, or see where you're going, or avoid drivers who have lost control of their car.
Not occupying the home sets the conditions by which sufficiently wise inhabitants can turn off the heating and cooling. It’s not a high bar of intelligence. If your workplace of ~1000 people is likely to have a large proportion of workers without that degree of wisdom, perhaps it’s not the most intellectually stimulating place to work. What workplace do you have in mind? An Amazon warehouse? Teleworking is generally only an option for the kinds of careers that involve thinking. So I don’t imagine a scenario where this is a problem.
Getting snooty about people's jobs, over which they don't always have much choice, isn't going to win anyone over.
Yeah, but there aren’t any clothes I can buy to fix 80 years of car-centric housing and infrastructure.
As for “sufficiently wise” people turning off heat in their house from 9-5, my dog and plants will not appreciate a 45°F (7°C) house in the winter, nor a 100°F (38°C) house in the summer.
And yeah, a lot of my coworkers can’t be convinced to do much in the way of sustainable choices, and some are really smart! Intelligence and values are separate and you come off as condescending when you try to say your argument is flawless because anyone intelligent agrees with you.
If your goal is to make the planet better, you need to change people’s minds. You do that with empathy and meeting people where they are at, not decreeing that remote work is bad for the environment because in a hypothetical ideal work scenario where everyone already can cycle to work we it seems like it should reduce emissions.
To me, one of the values in the permacomputing movement is learning to think about computing as a precious and beautiful resource, one that we should use wisely and cherish.
Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time, in my opinion. Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean is one of the genuine marvels of modernity, for which I'm so grateful. So much compute gets wasted on explicitly antisocial behavior, like advertising, tracking, or LLM training. It's good to know how much video conferencing uses, but I don't think that this personal-responsibility style framing is that productive.
It's like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there. It's a systems-level framework, not a personal responsibility one.
Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time
No, there really is little benefit to seeing everyone’s facial expression in a meeting apart (perhaps) from the presenter.
Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean
The decision should be made on a case-by-case basis. Wholly ignoring the waste in all situations is not practicing permacomputing.
I don’t get much from seeing my overseas family on a daily basis. Text is far more important for keeping in touch with timezone differences. Voice is cheap w.r.t bandwith and goes quite far in conveying mood, thus voice is a decent medium. Video has some sparse benefit on rare occasions but it’s the most wasteful and the least useful.
It’s like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there.
That’s a really poor analogy. Tomatoes do more for your diet than getting everyone’s realtime facial expressions in a meeting does for the productivity of a workplace meeting. It’s probably even counter-productive and distracting to have that needless information during a meeting. What is waste, if not a value judgement on the cost/benefit? Growing tomatoes is not wasteful in light of the benefits.
Reading this and your other comments here, you don't seem interested in productive conversations. Why would you argue against a thing that I explicitly said was my opinion? That's just arguing for its own sake.
I like seeing their faces. You don't have to like it. Movements are about understanding that different things matter to different people, and working through that to find a productive and shared understanding, not telling people that their subjective experience is wrong.
I always turned the camera off during meetings anyway, and no one said anything thankfully. I don't need people watching me if I have the option to prevent it. I don't even like open plan offices, which I also had to deal with. Give me privacy, please. Either give me a door I can shut or let me work from home.
In your case, privacy and the environment are at odds.
I actually prefer the social connection of an open plan where I share an office with ~2—4 people. Would be prohibitively inconvenient to get up and leave the office or pick up a phone every time I wanted to pick someone’s brain very briefly. There’s usually a harmony that develops where office mates can autodetect when others need a disruption-free moment. Headphones also make a great “do not disturb” sign. Solo offices are depressing.