The April Climate Summit Should Be Virtual.
2 min readFeb 4, 2021
No serious climate meeting should be face-to-face, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every face-to-face meeting is an opportunity to spread the COVID-19 virus. Every Virtual Meeting is an opportunity to model good behavior, save money, and experiment with improving virtual meetings so holding your next meeting virtually is an even better decision. No matter how careful the participants, any meeting poses some degree of COVID-19 risk. Far better to stay home and zoom! More important, a virtual climate meeting (especially one held symbolically on Earth Day) sends a host of good messages:
- ALL meetings should be virtual meetings to avoid spreading COVID
- Leaders and the priviliged ESPECIALLY need to cut THEIR huge carbon footprint. The top 1% and 10% in income account for huge % of global carbon footprint
- All meeting should be virtual meetings to drastically reduce global carbon footprint.
- Meetings people fly to should definately be virtual to drastically reduce carbon footprint from meetings.
- Key leader meetings should be virtual to save their critical time by eliminating travel time.
- Every virtual meeting is an opportunity to experiment in ways to improve virtual meetings and thus improve chances of future meetings being virtual
- Key leaders should experiment with virtual meetings so they’ll use them in the future and become advocates for virtual meetings.
- Every effort should be made to research and experiment with how to improve virtual meetings so they become the meeting type of choice
- Virtual meetings allow people to attend who couldn’t do so otherwise — especially those in poverty and otherwise underrepresented
- Virtual meetings can be easily recorded and shared — and listened in to live by those not invited to actively participate, can be shared on social media afterwards and excerpted later for news bites.
