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)

  • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    To me, one of the values in the permacomputing movement is learning to think about computing as a precious and beautiful resource, one that we should use wisely and cherish.

    Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time, in my opinion. Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean is one of the genuine marvels of modernity, for which I’m so grateful. So much compute gets wasted on explicitly antisocial behavior, like advertising, tracking, or LLM training. It’s good to know how much video conferencing uses, but I don’t think that this personal-responsibility style framing is that productive.

    It’s like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there. It’s a systems-level framework, not a personal responsibility one.

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      26·
      1 year ago

      Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time

      No, there really is little benefit to seeing everyone’s facial expression in a meeting apart (perhaps) from the presenter.

      Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean

      The decision should be made on a case-by-case basis. Wholly ignoring the waste in all situations is not practicing permacomputing.

      I don’t get much from seeing my overseas family on a daily basis. Text is far more important for keeping in touch with timezone differences. Voice is cheap w.r.t bandwith and goes quite far in conveying mood, thus voice is a decent medium. Video has some sparse benefit on rare occasions but it’s the most wasteful and the least useful.

      It’s like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there.

      That’s a really poor analogy. Tomatoes do more for your diet than getting everyone’s realtime facial expressions in a meeting does for the productivity of a workplace meeting. It’s probably even counter-productive and distracting to have that needless information during a meeting. What is waste, if not a value judgement on the cost/benefit? Growing tomatoes is not wasteful in light of the benefits.

      • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
        51·
        1 year ago

        Reading this and your other comments here, you don’t seem interested in productive conversations. Why would you argue against a thing that I explicitly said was my opinion? That’s just arguing for its own sake.

        I like seeing their faces. You don’t have to like it. Movements are about understanding that different things matter to different people, and working through that to find a productive and shared understanding, not telling people that their subjective experience is wrong.

        • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          13·
          1 year ago

          I like seeing their faces. You don’t have to like it.

          This is my point. Hence why I said case-by-case basis. What I object to is your stance that this research has no value can be wholly disregarded which you then try to support by a false analogy fallacy. It’s horseshit. It’s not permacomputing to disregard resource consumption.