I was in the states for a couple of days in December. It was only a short flight—about 1,600 miles one way and then back again. I saw a new town, met the CEO and a few other execs, picked up a few story ideas and a quote or three for some features I was working on, and then we went to dinner.

On the drive to the restaurant, we all got onto the subject of global warming. We talked about the Al Gore documentary and shook our heads sadly, as I have done with like-minded people many times before. “It seems pretty obvious to me, from the evidence at hand, that it’s a reality and that we’re changing the planet,” said one exec.

Fun time, very productive, and aside from the business stuff, we all felt very wise, having put the world to rights. The next day I sped home.

As soon as I got back, my wife mentioned an interesting show she’d heard on CBC Radio. The guest was Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who wrote “Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.” Monbiot was discussing ecotourism in the context of climate change, arguing that it was a paradoxical concept. By flying to get to the places that are in danger of disappearing or being drastically altered due to climate change, he worries that people are contributing to the climate change that is causing them to disappear.

So how much to planes contribute to global warming? I did a bit of digging. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the contribution of aviation to global climate change at about 3.5 per cent in 1992. It presents varying scenarios for future emissions from the aviation sector, drawing data from different organizations. The projections predict that the contribution to radiative forcing from aircraft will increase by between 2.4 per cent to 11 per cent over 1992 levels by 2050.

Issues factored into these scenarios include the likely possibility that regions currently expanding their air travel industries now will be able to do so more quickly than already-established regions did, because the technology for commercial air flight is now readily and cheaply available. Consequently, a lot of the scenarios show accelerated growth for air travel as these regions develop economically and then come online.

What does Monbiot say about this? Don’t fly, basically, unless your life depends on it. Enough talk, he says, what we need is action, and that requires sacrifices. Planning a business trip that isn’t absolutely essential? Forget it. Want to fly and see your loved ones each year? Don’t—go and see them every few years, and stay for longer.

Of course all of that would hurt. It has a significant impact on our everyday lives, and to be frank I don’t know if I could stop having my mum over every year, or forego the luxury of seeing friends and family occasionally. My mum’s over sixty. I like to see her as often as I can and once a year isn’t enough for me as it is.

But it does lead me to question our use of business trips. Whenever a company has called me and said “Come see us” I’ve generally gone. It has meant two or three days out of the office, which lowers my productivity, but I have gone anyway on the basis that meeting new people and learning new things will be worth the trip. Now, however, I’m becoming less certain that this is a good thing and I’m searching around for alternatives.

Consequently, I’m starting to change my mind about videoconferencing. Until now I’ve seen it as a bit of a gimmick, but I’d like to think that it might be able to replace at least some of the trips that we take, and make the face to face meetings less frequent. I don’t know about you but on the press trips I often attend, 90 per cent of the time is spent sitting in front of PowerPoint slides anyway.

What would be missing from the videoconference is the social bit—the one-to-one chats over coffee or dinner after the presentation, which is often where most of the good stories come from. You don’t get the same level of interaction over a video link, because they’re still so formal. If I conducted a videoconference rather than flying to see that firm in December, I may not have sat next to one guy at dinner and talked to him about his job before he came to this company, or discussed with another what it was like to live and work in that particular town. But sometimes I think the sacrifices may be worth it.

And I do believe that those more natural interactions would come, if the arrangements were not so formal. If we were all cammed up and we could just flick a switch and start visual nattering, conversations would become more fluid.

The trouble is that most of us working in the technology sector aren’t really geared up to do this. Since when did a corporate procurement department include a webcam in a standard desktop spec? I use a Mac now, and an iSight camera. On lower-end Macs, the cameras are for the most part built in. When other Macced-up friends pop up on instant messenger and we talk, it’s magic. It just works, and the quality is very good. But PC equipment is designed to be as cheap as possible, which means that few corps will tolerate the extra few bucks necessary for a built-in camera.

I’ve started fielding the question of video conferences with people when they ask me on trips. No wonder that when I ask this question, people seem a little doubtful and tell me they’ll get back to me (I’m still waiting and I’m not hopeful). It’s understandable because ad hoc videoconferencing isn’t part of a normal working day for them or the executives they represent.

It’s a bizarre world that we live in. I’m constantly hearing rhetoric about the communications revolution, and yet we’ve all been taught that it’s perfectly natural to spend days out of the office and burn tons of fuel just so that we can feel someone’s handshake and get the weight of them. The more that I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that there’s something very wrong with this.

Shouldn’t we begin travelling less for business, and trying to build the infrastructures that enable us to do that? That way, the next time I start telling someone how shocked I was by An Inconvenient Truth, my words won’t feel quite as hollow.

Danny Bradbury