Conferences and Carbon Impact

Moshe Vardi makes an excellent point in his January 2020 column in noting we, as a community, should do more to reduce carbon emissions and suggests ACM conferences do more to support remote participation. While I share his concern about carbon emissions, I have several concerns about his proposals for conferences.

First, time zones often make it difficult to participate in remote events, a problem that is also often faced by members of a distributed development team. At home, I'm nine hours behind Western Europe and about 12.5 behind India, so I would have to join late at night in both cases. That is just not a workable solution for a multiday conference.