This threads mails on CO2 and climate change are somewhat pythonesque to me... The IETF trying to shame itself about 3 meetings of 1000 people a year while its product, the Internet has been the biggest reducer of energy that i could think of in comparison of equivalent alternatives. For the whole planet for the last few decades. Email/online-group-communications vs. transporting physical equivalents, video conferencing, Home office, Telecommuning vs. train, plane automobiles and ships ? Telemedicine, digitalization as opposed to all the paper economy overhead, remote telemetry, industrial operations instead of shipping people, ... ??? Do we like all the excesses (IP) networks are used for ? Of couse not. Should we continue to improve ? Sure! Should we eat more of our own dog food (e.g.: virtual meetings) ? absolutely. But should we feel ashamed about the limited transportation required to create the Internet standardization ? Try to come up with any metric in which that would make sense. Show me any other standards body where an equal or larger part of work gets done with such a low-power mechanism as ASCII emails. IETF travel is not part of this problem. Its been a key part of developing and applying the solution for a long time.
