How green is my valley?

I’m going to begin with the blindingly obvious statement: I am not an environmental scientist.

What I know about global warming climate change I get from reading informed sources.

I watch very little television on the subject and avoid all films that deal with it, because I know, only too well, how easy it is to edit a sequence of images to produce something that may look factually accurate, but may be (un-) intentionally misleading.

So I am not a scientist.

Neither am I a politician.

But there are some things I do know.

I know that sending a press corp of 5,000 halfway around the world to Copenhagen created a fucking massive carbon footprint.

I know that sending *so many* politicians to Copenhagen that the entire country ran out of limousines and they had to import additional limousines from neighbouring countries is a total waste of carbon.

I know that sending 140 private airplanes halfway around the world to deliver (and then to pick up) delegates to (from) an environmental conference is a complete and utter nonsense.

I know that sending 15,000 delegates to an environmental conference, so many people that the travel distance is equal to sending half a dozen people to the moon, is totally fucking stupid.

If – and it’s a leap of logic the width of the Grand Canyon – if even half of these people needed to attend an environmental conference, why the fuck didn’t they use video-conferencing?

At one of my clients, I worked with groups of people who were based on research ships, groups who were located on multiple bases in Antarctica and with multiple groups based across Europe and the Far East.

We communicated for hours a day, every single day. We discussed technical and non-technical project details and we delivered two global projects – on time and on budget.

How did we communicate?

Video conferencing.

If these people in Copenhagen truly saw the environmental conference as anything other than a freebie junket, they would have stayed at home.