I've stopped flying to conferences for climate change reasons

People spend thousands to go to a conference and the stated benefit is to hear a few talks that are definitely recorded and to have a handful of useful conversations.

Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation. I know I've gone to things with that mindset before.

Don't get me wrong it's not the events that are the issue, it's how far we travel to them. I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.

On the train I can work all the way, stretch my legs when I want, use WiFi / 4G, and bring as many liquids as I like. The environmental benefits are a bonus on top.

I wish more of Europe was accessible directly via Eurostar from London, but I'm quite happy with Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam for now.

(I'll be attending https://opensourceawards.org/ - come say hi!)

A plane ticket from Finland to Japan would go from ~1000€ into 1020€ if it would pay the same CO2 emission prices as coal power pays. So basically nothing.

We should focus on reducing the big CO2 emission sources instead of these. But it is understandable why people do things like this. They are really easy way to signal one cares about the environment, even though they are basically meaningless as the same person enjoys bit lower electricity prices due to cheap coal that pumps way more CO2 than the flights ever would.

Also, low number of respondents and considering the survey went through his own twitter with a Climate Code idea, probably very biaised sample.

However, I'd totally favour a company with a flight offsetting policy. Can anyone point me some?

Though I agree face to face is definitely a different experience. My point is maybe crossing oceans is not mandatory to learn from one another. A while ago people didn't had the choice, yet they were able to do much in all science.

Certainly taking the train to a conference is better than flying, if that's the choice you have. Concentrating on conferences local to you is a good idea. Attending remotely sort of works, but it's really not the same as being there. It's better if you are with other people at your end, watching together.

I get that people want to have a sense of agency, but framing the problem as a question of individual choice is counterproductive.

I think the way to get society-wide change is for the government to either mandate or incentivize it at a systemic level. This “what can I do as an individual to make change” stuff seems like either virtue signalling or irrationally directed anxiety.

However, I’ve found that human face-to-face interaction is more productive vs email/Skype and wonder if there’s potential missed opportunities if we were to completely forego in-person conferences.

This part seem much more important, compared to trying to offset plane travel by buying carbon credits.

That is, of course, over-simplifying, but O'reilly's conferences line of business is an interesting example of a non-energy company who's business model is existentially threatened by a meaningful response to climate change.

Internet debate artists will endlessly get caught up in the false-binary of banning international flights or not, but functionally, from O'reilly's perspective, there's no meaningful difference between an outright ban and an order-of-magnitude price increase. Either way the conference business craters.

Can they "pivot to video"?

Do they feel ethically obligated to try?

Some thoughts:

1. Climate Code would be a second code for most conferences. Would it be the last, or should we anticipate conferences in 2022 needing 4 or 5 or 6 codes addressing various issues?

2. Will attendees be required to affirm & agree with the climate code (as they’re asked to follow the typical CoC)? If so, what do you do with people who disagree that conferences tracking their “food-miles” is of critical importance to averting climate catastrophe?

3. These codes of conduct will presumably dictate where resources and effort should be allocated to combat climate change. These resources are limited, meaning if you put resources towards tracking food-miles, you’re not putting them towards something else. Who will decide how to allocate these limited resources to achieve maximal ROI in terms of combatting climate change? Will it be a global team of PhD climate and political scientists, or a bunch of unqualified randos on a google doc? If the latter, how can anyone reasonably expect such a group to come up with a sensible plan? Assuming imminent climate catastrophe, it would seem the consequences of misallocation of resources would be dire.

I understand that people feel very passionately about this subject and see this as an end-of-the-world, holy crusade sort of subject. However, treating things as holy crusades will typically lead to bad results, such as virtue signalling taking the place of meaningful work & alienating people who don’t hold the same opinion. Let’s think carefully before we add another layer of moral bureaucracy to our professional community.

When a tree grows, it extracts some CO2 from the atmoaphere and stores it in its biomass. When it dies, this CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. When we use fuel for flying, we release hundreds of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a short flight of a single person!), which have been stored over the course of hundreds of millions of years. A tiny bit of a tree that you plant today might become fossilized, but even if that happens it will only store an incredibly small amount of the carbon that is consumed. It is quantitatively completely impossible to undo that by planting trees.

The only solution is, if at all possible, to stop flying, and use other means of transport, like electrical trains and buses. We can't have both mass air transportation and an alive planet.

I had this interesting idea of "economic entropy". In analogy with statistical physics, a macrostate is what and how much is produced by the economy (consumable commodities), and a microstate is how it is produced (all the intermediate supply chains). So to one macrostate can correspond a large number of microstates, logarithm of number of which is the entropy of the macrostate.

Now assume we have two completely independent (not involved in trade) economies, and each of these is in some macrostate and with the corresponding entropy. And we enable the trade. Then over time, we might end up in the same macrostate (they together still produce exactly the same amount of goods), but now the entropy of the entire system is much higher, because there is much more possibilities of how the supply chain works (they are not confined into one of the two previous economies).

Now imagine that for some reason, cost of travel and transportation is really economically negligible. Then microstates with long path of transport for products correspond to same macrostates as those with short path of transport for products. Even more, they will be statistically favored, since global economy has high entropy.

In practice, the high entropy state looks like: You have several multinational companies with sites in the same city, and their executives fly around the world to convince other executives of multinationals to buy their products (be part of their supply chain). The corresponding low entropy state would be that each city has its own set of companies, which all together form a single supply chain.

The point is, historically, we came from low entropy state into a high entropy state, and we are now screwed. We know the low entropy state would be more efficient, but we have no idea how to get there. But getting there would greatly reduce transportation, which is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions.

Otherwise, travel as much as you can, while it increases your output.

However, I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to do that on their own. For every person doing an ecologically responsible thing (taking trains instead of planes, taking public transit instead of driving, etc), there is just such a huge magnitude of people doing the "wrong" thing to cancel it out, largely because that (from a short-term-pragmatic-standpoint, the "wrong" thing is better) or at least cheaper. If you value your time at all, flying across the country is cheaper, meat is readibly available and inexpensive (and typically taste good), and driving to work is substantially easier than biking.

I don't know anything about ecology so I'll admit that I might regret writing this entire comment in a year, but it seems to me that the only way we're going to make a dent in climate change is to a) create technology that provides an experience that is competitive with the dirty version of something (electric cars could be a good example), or b) to start artificially taxing things that are really hurting the environment. If we started charging an extra dollar-per-gallon tax on gasoline, it would probably discourage people from driving as much, and put more economic incentive on point a).

I can commend someone not flying to conferences anymore, but I am afraid to say that I dont have the same self-discipline.

On that topic AWS really need to beef up its game!

Hence, it makes no difference. I love going to conferences and don't feel guilty about anything.

Talking about non-solutions might feel emotionally satisfying, yet it does nothing at all to really address the problem. Worse yet, it pulls the conversation away from real solutions.

one conference per year - 23.9%

two to four conferences per year - 47.8%

Five plus conferences per year - 16.4%

And this begs the question about their sincerity about what they are proposing about climate change, do they actually mean it or do they just want to appease their political base.