insights 2.0

I am not a major business traveler – I have an operational function, and as such, don’t spend as much time in planes than people in business development. However, I have to travel once in a while to meet with clients and partners face-to-face or go to industry events. As I was preparing my trip to London next week for the Esomar Congress, I looked at the few business trips I did this year:
• Miami
• San Francisco
• New York (*2)
• London
• Barcelona
Those flights alone account for 38,090 miles and 15,024 lbs of CO2, or the equivalent of my car emissions over a year and a half.

Merrill Dubrow from MARC asks in his blog if there are too many market research conferences to attend for busy professionals. The same question is raised in all industries, including the Internet industry.

Budget and time constraints are generally the reasons why we don’t go to all conferences. Personally, I have also started to worry about the impact of conferences and business trips on the environment.

Global warming is a major threat for our civilization, and, after watching an Inconvenient Truth, I made the decision to offset my car emissions. If you are not familiar with the term, offsetting means paying a small tax, or green tag, which is the equivalent of the price difference between the actual cost of energy used and the theoretical cost to produce the same energy with sustainable sources. The green tag is paid to a third party which invests the sum in alternative energies.

The company I chose to offset my car emissions, TerraPass, has recently announced that they offered green tags for air travel, either directly on their website, or via their new partnership with Expedia.

I have observed that a lot of A-list bloggers are pro-environment, liberal, some of them are even proud owners of a Prius. This is great, and I can only salute the effort, but I don’t know if they all realize that the impact of a single cross-country flight burns about 100 gallons of fuel per passenger, which is what a Hummer burns in 1,000 miles (the average monthly gas consumption per person in the US).

I heard the other day someone comment on ResearchTalk about the social role of market research in terms of donations to charities. There are 4,000 members of Esomar. If they fly as much as I do and also decide to offset their business travel, the impact on the environment would be considerable. Could Esomar or another MR organization create the first climate neutral conference? industry?

Beyond the market research and marketing communities to which this blog is addressed, I hope that the blogosphere as a whole can spread the word. So, please digg this post, forward, write your own story, make some noise! Then you can go and buy your green tags. TerraPass is just an option, you can also check: Native Energy.

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