Turning cameras off during Zoom meetings can help the climate, study finds
www.ctvnews.ca
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.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4470763

(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:

Firefox

(disable animations)
  • disable animations (non-CSS, non-GIF varieties): about:config » toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled » true→false
  • disabling CSS animations needs these ad-hoc steps
  • 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

(disable GIF animations only)

Install this plugin first which only works sometimes; when it fails try this one.

(disable still images)
  1. Click the Customize and control Google Chrome menu button, which is the on the far-right side of the URL toolbar.
  2. Select Settings on the menu to bring up that tab.
  3. Click Privacy and security on the left side of Google Chrome.
  4. Select Site Settings to view the content options.
  5. Then click Images to bring up the options shown directly below.
  6. 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)

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    61·
    11 months ago

    There is never bad weather; only bad clothes.

    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.

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      15·
      11 months ago

      but we get ice storms, blizzards and powerful thunderstorms with very strong winds where I live

      Every day? Do you think perhaps it makes sense to throw out the outlier weather extremes in outlier regions when talking generally about teleworking in a global forum? And as I said, you can still drive a car and it’s still lower GHG emissions than teleworking.

      Getting snooty about people’s jobs, over which they don’t always have much choice, isn’t going to win anyone over.

      You’ve misunderstood. You always have the choice to turn off your heating and cooling before leaving the house. Who doesn’t believe that, apart from BeefPiano? Please point out any employers who do not allow their staff to control their home’s thermostat before going to work.

      BeefPiano’s absurd claim was that people are not generally wise enough to turn off the heating and cooling of unoccupied homes. It’s nonsense. It was a comically absurd claim and a good display confirmation bias – someone looking for any reason possible to rationalize their lifestyle and world view in resistance to accepting the opposing research because absorbing the reality requires them to rethink their position.

      So BeefPiano tried to pitch the idea that people heat and cool their unoccupied homes while they are at work - on a noteworthy scale. Bizarre that this pitch worked on a permacomputing community.