20000 km, $7000, 7 days and 4 tons of CO2
… or, "Making Event Attendance Count"
Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn't) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:
- ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
- ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the conference organizers)
- 7 days spent related to the events (time preparing + time traveling+ time attending + time following up)
- ~4 metric tons of CO2 (mostly emitted by the flights)
Particularly troubling was the amount of CO2. In most areas of my life, I have a small environmental footprint (at least by North American standards) – my household has no car, eats a low-meat diet centered around local organic foods, works from home, etc. – unfortunately, all of that pales next to how much I fly. In 2007 alone, I traveled to Australia, Boston, D.C., Finland, Germany, Mountain View, Norway, Portland, Romania, San Francisco, Slovenia and a few other places I can't immediately recall.
After spending a few weeks in a deep blue funk about the whole business, I started working out a plan for reducing the impact of my travel. The axiomatic version of the plan is, "Do plan. Don't fly." The more verbose and practical draft version of the plan follows:
- Prioritize events based on proximity. The closer to me (or someone on my team) the better. Dopplr provides a great way to see who is in a given place at a given time.
- Choose more environmentally-friendly forms of travel (or non-travel) to get to events. When traveling by vehicle, purchase carbon offsets:
- Bike, Walk, Tele-conference (Best)
- Bus, Ferry, Shared Car, Train
- Car, Taxi
- Airplane (Worst)
- Choose more environmentally-friendly accommodations:
- House, hostel (or environmentally friendly hotel, if you can find one) (Best)
- Shared hotel room
- Hotel (Worst)
- Make the most of your travel:
- Find a local to help you do research.
- Look for nearby events and user group meetings. Confabb, Meetup and Upcoming are handy for this.
- Look for interesting organizations in the area. Checking the sponsor list is a great way to start finding local organizations.
- Look for interesting people to meet. Check Dopplr, Facebook and LinkedIn. and review the lists of sponsors and speakers.
- Look for local radio shows or television shows to participate in. For example, if you are visiting Vancouver, pitch a session to the fine folks who produce the Lab with Leo Laporte.
- If you are presenting, try to present the same session at another venue - like a user group, library, etc. The practice will help and the exposure is good.
- There is a lot more you can do here - from talking to your publisher (if you have one) to working with your organization's PR department.
- Getting ready for the event:
- If you have a session, practice, practice, practice.
- Review the lists of speakers and sponsors. Contact those who you would like to meet. Engage other speakers by offering to review slides, etc.
- Keep track of pre-conference discussions with a Google Alert for the conference name, your session name (assuming you have one) and other relevant terms and URLs
- Blog before, during and after the conference. See http://zak.greant.com/conference-report-openmind-mindtrek-2007 for an example of a conference wrapup and a collection of links to liveblogged sessions.
- Organize Bird of a Feather sessions.
- Make the most of the event:
- Set alarms up in your cell phone/PDA/etc. for key events - it is easy to get talking to someone and miss your session or other key events.
- Arrive early enough to be well-rested and functional.
- Bring gum and/or breath mints. Your fellow conference participants will thank you.
- Blog before, during and after the conference. See http://zak.greant.com/conference-report-openmind-mindtrek-2007 for an example of a conference wrapup and a collection of links to liveblogged sessions.
- Take more than enough business cards.
- Write down everything you learn that you want to remember (because you probably won't remember it after the conference unless you do.)
- Sponsor events in an environmentally-friendly way:
- Favor environmentally-friendly events (eg. those that recycle, that seek local speakers, that purchase offsets, that don't use disposable cutlery, etc.)
- Don't give away disposable plastic junk. Get shwag providers to use less packaging for your goods. Choose environmentally-sensitive shwag providers.
- Sponsor nearby speakers. Encourage use of low-impact travel.
- Use reusable banners and identity materials
I'll expand this in the coming weeks and find a good home for it - perhaps http://wiki.mozilla.org would make a good home?
Feel free to comment. There is a good deal more that can be covered - from making sure that your travel is smoother (eg. remembering to check visa requirements, etc.) to tips on preparing session abstracts.
Link Summary
- http://www.mindtrek.org
- http://openmind.fi/
- http://ez.no
- http://mozillafoundation.org
- http://dopplr.com
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset
- http://confabb.com
- http://www.meetup.com/
- http://upcoming.yahoo.com/
- http://facebook.com
- http://linkedin.com
- http://www.labwithleo.com/
- http://www.google.com/alerts
- http://en.wikipedia.o...ather_%28computing%29
- http://wiki.mozilla.org
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Posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 9:19
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February 1st, 2008 at 10:20
How much of the CO2 from air travel is really due to you? Presumably those planes were going to fly with or without you and you're weight (you + luggage) is probably a small factor in the over all CO2 output.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:41
Hey mrz,
It would be less if I were to only account my body, my luggage and the goods loaded on to the flight to service me.
However, if fewer people fly, at some point this does mean that there will be fewer planes in the air.
Frankly, I don't want to go too far down the rathole of trying to produce exact calculations for each scenario.
That is why I have a simple hierarchy of choices - walk, then bus, then drive, then fly, etc.
Cheers!
–zak
February 1st, 2008 at 11:55
Approx 20,000 in air travel means you are contributing approx 16 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. See "Carbon Counter: Calculate your Carbon Footprint"(2007) by Mark Lynas.
I applaud the fact that you are raising awareness of the ecological costs of conferencing. Can't claim to be an angel myself - I mostly cycle to where I have to go but will blow my small footprint with a trip to Disney World with the kids in the spring. If that is the extent of my major air travel for the year then I might be able to keep my footprint under 10-12 tons which would be relatively good by North American standards. Some people say you should aim for around 3-4 tons although I would have to make sure I could heat my house in winter on a budget that small.
Regards,
Paul
February 1st, 2008 at 13:30
I think another good thing to do would be to check out some local blogs, both tech-related or not. The list would be overwhelming for a large city hosting an event, but for a small to medium-sized city might give pretty good coverage of who might be worth talking to.
February 1st, 2008 at 13:43
[...] keeping with my post about getting the most from conference attendance, I'm blogged my rough participation plan for the [...]
February 2nd, 2008 at 0:46
I'm definitely trying to cut down on my traveling as well. I have been trying to do that for a few years with very little success. 2007 was my heaviest schedule yet with 2 trips to Australia, 4 to Europe, China, India and another dozen trips around North America.
I think we need to come up with better remote presentation mechanisms. Having me fly to China to give a 30 minute talk and then fly back doesn't make much sense. Not having the intimacy of standing right there in front of your audience takes away a lot of the appeal both for the speaker and the audience, but perhaps we could figure out a way to get some of that back.
Of course, bandwidth at most conferences is a very scarce resource, so relying on any sort of high bandwidth bi-directional streaming mechanism which seems like the obvious choice, is probably not all that feasible. A lower bandwidth approach involving some sort of remote desktop mechanism and a phone call for the audio maybe? Sort of like a live screencast.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to hold a series of green conferences around the world where all the speakers were remote and all the attendees were from within the local area of each venue. It would scale better since it could theoretically
be held in multiple locations at the same time. From a speaker perspective whether you
are presenting to 100 people in 1 remote location or 100 people spread over 5 remote locations wouldn't matter much as long as they were organized and ready to go at around the same time.
The attendees of course lose the ability to mingle with the speaker before and after the talk, but the intra-attendee networking is probably more valuable anyway. The speaker at some level almost becomes a distraction.
And maybe, if some of the money saved on travel and lodging for the speakers was put towards better bandwidth, or since the venues could be smaller and more intimate at universities or local companies, the bandwidth problem might not be an issue since you wouldn't have 500 geeks all trying to apt-get dist-upgrade at the same time. Then a video conferencing link might be feasible and people could still come up and chat individually with the speaker. I could see 5 monitors with cameras and microphones set up in a room with little hats on with the name of the speaker in each station, some beer and snacks, and you have your virtual mingling session as well.
February 2nd, 2008 at 1:05
The Mozilla Corp./Mozilla Europe/Mozilla Japan folks organized something much like this for Mozilla24 (http://www.mozilla24.com), which I think that it came off brilliantly.
We dramatically cut the costs and waste associated with the event, while being able to involve people usually excluded from conferences for economic (and accessibility) reasons. For example, we were able to involve Thai students in the event - something that is basically impossible for any European or American tech event.
I've been chatting about some ideas along these lines with John Robinson from the Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability (http://www.cirs.ubc.ca/) - I bet that between CIRS, Mozilla and some committed tech partners and a few friends with some funds, we could throw some events like this as a way to build skills in the area and set expectations from conference participants about how stuff like this should be done.
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:17
I'm also reminded about how Dan Bricklin (of VisiCalc and WikiCalc fame) attended one of SocialText's Wiki Wednesday events: there was a computer with a web-cam and a net connection set up on a table. Dan left a Skype session running between the systems. Any time that someone sat down, Dan was happy to chat with them. It wasn't that different that having Dan sitting across the table.
February 2nd, 2008 at 17:00
"Green Conferences" - I like the sound of that…
We might eventually achieve this by following the path that Rasmus has laid out as they are good ideas. I think there is a gulf of execution, however, between the what Rasmus is envisioning and where we are now. This is the first blog to raise awareness of the issue of green conferencing.
Strategically, I think the next step is to keep this flame alive. Keep talking about it, keep blogging about it, keep doing the math to show this is unsustainable and unacceptable given what we now know about the probably consequences….
I've always been bothered by Al Gore's movie which consists of him in a car or flying here or there to preach the reduced co2 gospel. What gives might the right? Buy some offsets and ease your conscience? Because I'm preaching the gospel I get a special break?
It's not going to be easy. The path, however, involves keeping the discussion going IMO.
Regards,
Paul
February 2nd, 2008 at 20:03
16 tons per 20000km seems to fail a basic sanity check: If we assume that all of that CO2 came from burning jet fuel, then you would be responsible for burning around 4 tons of carbon, which is close to 4 tons of fuel. A 777 carries 310 people and around 130 tons of fuel for about 10,000km. Thus 20,000km is 260tons of fuel for 310 people. Even if the plane is only 70% full, that's only 1 ton of fuel per passenger, or about 3 tons of CO2. I haven't accounted for the overheads of how much carbon is released while refining the fuel, but that won't be much. This website provides similar numbers:
http://www.terrapass.com/flight/flightcalc.php
Another way to calculate this: Cheap tickets cost about US$1000 per 20,000km. I assume that the marginal increase in fuel consumption costs less than the ticket price. That $1000 will buy only about 400 gallons of jet fuel, which is about 1.5 tons of carbon. You may argue that I shouldn't use marginal fuel usage (see the post above), and you would be partly right. But if you buy cheap tickets, you are guaranteed to be using only marginal fuel because you are helping to fill up an aircraft that was going to fly anyway. If you buy the high-priced tickets you are encouraging the airline to fly even if it cannot fill the aircraft. If you must fly, perhaps the best thing you can do to improve your carbon footprint is to buy cheap tickets.
February 3rd, 2008 at 16:51
I guess I made a mistake on my math :-)
It is actually about a .5 multiplier you should use on air mileage to compute CO2 tonnage. I was doing a ratio of mileage to tonnage (approx .84) when I should have been doing a ratio of km to tonnage (approx .51). Read the columns in the data sheet too quickly. So Zak is approx correct.
Bradley - thanks for helping me discover my error. Sorry Zak.
You made an interesting point about flying cheaper. Flying with full capacity would be better than flying with less than full capacity. Not sure of the relationship of capacity to price however if it is as you suggest then your argument would follow.
I also noticed that in my data table they are using the same multiplier irrespective of whether you are taking a short flight or a long flight. I suspect this is a simplification - the number of takeoffs and landings is probably a significant factor as well.
FYI, in a few weeks I will be doing some "Green Math" on my website when things become a little bit less busy for me.
February 4th, 2008 at 17:43
[...] up a general plan to help us get good value from the events we participate in. The plan includes some thoughts on greening up our conference attendance and [...]
February 5th, 2008 at 23:27
Hey, thought you might be interested in the Dopplr Offsetr which calculates how much CO2 is consumed by your Dopplr travels: http://www.nodesnoop.com/offsetr/ I've always been leery of these CO2 donation organizations though, where do you donate to offset your costs?
In the meantime I'll be sweeping through the minefield of the Internet… ;)
February 8th, 2008 at 15:11
[...] you read my post on getting the most out of conference attendance, you know that I'm trying to reduce the environmental costs associated with my conference [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 18:11
I'm really proud of the response in the PHP community that your post has triggered. I've so far seen at least two other serious conference-goers making similar efforts. I'm not much of a traveler myself, but my TerraPass'd 4-cylinder car and my house full of CFL and LED light bulbs will be with you in spirit as you guys do your CO2-responsible traveling :P
August 4th, 2008 at 10:35
[...] exhaustive list of good eco-friendly conferenct tips, check out Zack Greant's post "20000 km, $7000, 7 Days and 4 tons of CO2 (or, 'Making Event Attendance Count')". //OBSTART:do_NOT_remove_this_comment var [...]