Can you cut off the Zoom video please?
If your face is like mine, you will be doing the audience a big service by not letting the video roll on during a Zoom meeting.
But whatever is your face value, you will be doing a service beyond your audience by cutting off the video – and that will be to the environment.
A recent MIT study found that cutting out video during videoconferencing can cut its environmental footprint (that includes CO2 emissions) by 96 blooming percentage points. A 1 hour streaming video on Zoom would result in emissions of over 150 g CO2, finds the study. An audio meeting would have just 4% of the environmental impact, so it is just about 6 g of CO2/hour for a meeting with just audio – which is probably all that’s needed for most virtual meetings. ( https://lnkd.in/giBhGH-h )
These data just confirm what most of us intuitively know, that video is far more resource hungry than audio – a HD video requires as much as 20-25 times the bandwidth of a high quality audio. Most of us however would not have correlated bandwidths to environmental footprints, and that’s what this study has done.
Our specialty focus areas include 
When I am about to enter a Zoom meeting, I see that Zoom has highlighted the video option instead of No video option. Just that small shift of the highlight from the first button to the second could make a world of difference – to the world.
Zoom-ers, you listening?
Zoom – Eric S. Yuan (he / him / his) – Velchamy Sankarlingam – Chris Potter | Jason Lee
Aren’t folks like Netflix bigger culprits in this context? Perhaps, but let’s start somewhere where it is possible right away – what’s the business case for Netflix without high quality video, anyone?
More such interesting stuff on CO2 and carbon footprint from All about CO2, and that would be over here – https://lnkd.in/ge8KveP7
MIT Energy Initiative – Kelley Travers – Maryam Arbabzadeh (Climatiq)
Yale MacMillan Center – Kaveh Madani
Purdue Climate Change Research Center | Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future
Image credits: E&T – https://lnkd.in/gxu2VwNh
See my LinkedIn post on this topic
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