@Dominic Mazoch posted:During a WWII cartoon short, Bugs Bunny kicked himself off a train at the end. Why? Trip non essential.
CV-19 and Zoom showed us that maybe a lot of trips are not essential, and should not be taken, or combined.
Maybe that should be the push. It would be greener both from a money as well as eco.
Question: Why are the "greens" not pushing this.
The greens have been pushing it for a long time, they have been arguing working from home and using teleconferencing could prevent a lot of pollution, where people are in traffic jams or the like, same with flying to business meetings vs teleconferencing. And no doubt Zoom and the like are going to be part of the permanent landscape. Managers are the ones who pushed back , time and again, they claimed if people worked remotely they would goof off, that unless they were there to crack the whip it would fall apart, collaboration wouldn't happen (of course, same business managers pushed for the infamous open floor seating, claiming it improved collaboration, when in reality allows fitting a lot more people in a given space.
On the other hand speaking from personal experience working remotely, using Zoom, has its limitations, there are still reasons for in person meetings and interactions. For jobs that can handle it I think hybrid work flows are going to be the norm for many people, whether you have to be in x days a month, or 3 days a week, will vary.
Same for business travel and the like, I think that using zoom and teleconferencing will replace some business travel, there is no doubt. On the other hand there will be pressure for face to face meetings, too, not to mention those business meetings they don't want any kind of a record of other than person to person communication. Or for that matter, the business types who insist that it be done in person.
The other thing is people don't do vacations by zoom, they want to see family and friends in person, for many reasons,visit places. People are going to travel because they want to see new things, if zoom was the answer then travel could go away, people could just watch you tube videos to see the world *shrug*. Right now even though Covid is not totally eradicated, travel is really heavy, at least in the US (my son just got back from a music competition in Italy, the planes were half full, though later this year flights are more and more getting filled up)>
Not to mention that technology is not necessarily that green, the infrastructure that runs zoom, the web/cloud farms, use a tremendous amount of electric power that is still generated mostly by fossil fuels. Amazons server farms are huge, same with other cloud providers, the power for all those computers (though obviously laptops and desktops and the like don't use nearly as much power).
