Take the climate challenge! 26 October 04

Hey mark will you be speaking anywhere else when you come to Australia?

Mark, you must know you couldn’t go much further, or in a more climate damaging mode of transport, than to go to a conference in Austraila by air. If it were me I’d want to be sure, very very sure, that the CO2 my travel will pump out into the atmosphere will be more than amply offset by any good done, becuase I know what critics say when they read of such things.

If we’re serious about climate change, well, we have to be serious about it. Just the opposite of those who don’t care, who fly and drive willy nilly around the planet.

So, what is the offset?

Just Sydney. I’m only staying for a week or so – too much to do back home. There’s going to be a public event in some place called Paddington Town Hall on the 20 November also.

Peter – as you might imagine, I’ve thought about this quite a bit. And I’ve recently turned down trips to Miami and Norway on the grounds of the emissions caused. I felt I had to make an exception for the Sydney event because it was a high profile and potentially influential meeting, and I would also get the chance to do media and public events (all on climate) whilst over there. Video links are an option, and my friend Mayer Hillman (who doesn’t fly at all) has opened two conferences by video link. My ‘offset’ is the potential good done by climate awareness-raising – I think tree-planting would be a little bogus in this case. And I look forward to the day when carbon rations are introduced and we don’t have to go through all this agonising!

Peter,

I think you raise a really interesting point about personal responsibility. My personal top-line thoughts about this:

a) Ends justifying means: If Marks’ trip allows for a really meaningful exchange of ideas, leading to action by various delegates – maybe it could be justified by that?

b) Group Off-set: I think Mark could be an excellent ambassador to all those concerned with Global Warming. If a number of us believe this, should we think of a group off-set?

c) Use of Internet: The blog on www.marklynas.com provides an amazing interaction without travel. Maybe this could be a model that could be developed? By the way, I work exclusively using Internet research (I am a market researcher) and one of the things that my clients have liked is that it is environmentally friendly (no paper questionnaires, interviewers travelling and so on). I have a little hunch that the Internet could save the world – if we used it properly. We are still in the early days of working out how we could use it to connect people in a human & effective way.

But I would end by saying that you do ask a very good question, and something that we should all be asking ourselves for actions we take.

Mark,

For my own business, I’ve just met the UK General Manager for a Teleconferencing company, with an suite based in central London (Savoy Hotel). He is quite interested in an environmental positioning (which he says could work well in Europe).

It’s very cutting edge technology, he tells me. The website is below – but why don’t we explore how you could use this?!

http://www.telesuite.com/