It’s incredible to consider how many fossil-fueled miles we travel every day just for business meetings alone. WebEx, a UK-based video-conferencing company, has some startling national statistics:

British workers who travel to meetings by car are responsible for putting almost 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year….

Almost half (46%) of British workers regularly travel to business meetings, with only 7% replacing unnecessary face-to-face meetings with virtual ones. - WebEx

A more globally scaled company, Elluminate, provides some encouraging figures for carbon savings from using such technologies:

For the first calendar quarter of 2007 (Jan. 1, 2007 – March 31, 2007), Elluminate hosted 524,340 participants in conferencing sessions in 167 countries.

Let’s make the assumption that each person would have had to travel an average of 10 miles to attend an average session. This is a fairly conservative number given the number of countries that people attended from.

Now, the calculations:

Total miles people would have had to drive if they hadn’t used Elluminate - 5,243,400 miles
Total fuel saved, even if everyone drove a Toyota Prius - 95,334.55 gallons
Total Carbon Footprint reduction - 1,865,125.05 pounds

Let’s make sure we include our own datacenter’s carbon footprint in the calculation:

Total Energy used by datacenter in 1st quarter of 2007 - 8.33 MHw
US Average Carbon Dioxide output per KWh - 1 .34 pounds
Total Elluminate Data Center Carbon Footprint 11,155.50 pounds

Net Reduction of Carbon Footprint - 1,853,969.55 pounds, just in three months!

It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to figure that the amount of energy and pollution involved in physically going somewhere is significantly higher than getting ‘beamed’ there (if you’re a Trekkie, you’ll be especially conscious of this!).

Although services such as those mentioned above will provide features that some companies and individuals may not be able to live without - many of us will also get by fine with such freely available services as MSN Messenger, GoogleTalk, and Skype (I use all three - so I have access to as many people as possible).

As well as the energy savings inherent in such systems, especially for those maximising savings by operating from home rather than the office, another side benefit of cyber-meetings is the freedom to wear your comfortable bunny rabbit slippers without fear of ridicule.

Tip: If you use free services like Messenger, Skype, etc. - it’s not necessary to leave these running in the background on your computer (where they consume processor resources, and leave you wide open to be disturbed by grandma when you’re in the middle of a complex speadsheet). Become the master of your own time by using the respective program’s option settings to stop them from starting with your computer - then just run them when you need them.

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