Over the past several months the global oil costs have increased day by day. Finally we are starting to see the price soften as the our behavior changes to adjust the radical travel cost shifts we have seen over the past few months. Personally it certainly impacted my choice for my daily commuting choice when relocating to the bay area recently and also our choice of vehicle rather than our previous family friendly yet carbon overloaded SUV although I wasn’t quite ready to go hybrid just yet, I suspect next time around we might.
I remember back in October last year hearing Gartner’s top strategic IT issues for 2008 I was not completely convinced that the Green IT theme was prime time, now I’m thinking how wrong I was.
Air travel costs are spiraling upwards, my partner recently bought a ticket for $300 to go to England, the tax was $800, $600 of the tax were actually hidden fuel surcharges. Many think the airline industry will never be the same again
Recently The Economist released an interesting report into managing your companys carbon footprint. In this report web conferencing was seen as the most popular way of carbon footprint reduction partly because the impact is so easy to measure (mental note to self, we should produce a syncswf to illustrate this) Further more we collectively have the opportunity for major improvements as 59% of organisations said almost no one works from home on a regular basis. Despite the enthusiasm for web conferencing companies appeared reluctant to mandate use of these technologies with 9% of organisations surveyed prepared to take that line with external meetings, this increased to 22% when related to internal meetings, however this figure rose to 46% when voluntary targets were proposed.
I plan to learn and share more of this area of using web conferencing to help reduce your personal and professional carbon footprint in the mean time I encourage everyone to play there part and help save the world one meeting at a time.