This week I am teaching another Virtual Classroom session and I am appreciating being at my home office, away from the airports and highways especially as the price of gasoline heads skywards in the aftermath of Gustav, Hanna and Ike. My SQL Server students are from all over North America, from Texas to Ontario to California. Our Virtual Classroom partner, iLinc, has a way of calculating the savings in carbon emissions via their “Green Meter”. As I mentioned in an article before, this is a major factor in the increase in our Virtual Classroom training as both Managers and Students look at ways to be more “Green”, reduce our Carbon footprint and to save some money into the bargain. It is interesting to see how they come up with the figures.
The Green Meter is a cool application that is smarter than you may think. It determines the public IP address of each participant in the session and that of the leader (that’s me as the instructor). The system then identifies location based on longitude and latitude coordinates. If the distance between a participant and the leader is less than 200 miles, the system calculates carbon emissions based on car travel. Otherwise it will calculate based on air travel. The locations for this week’s class came up very accurate based on our manually entered roster: Frederick, MD (2 students), Fort Bragg, NC (1), Glenwood City, WI (1), Raleigh, NC (That’s me), Reston, VA (1), Salem, OR (1), San Francisco, CA (1), Sudbury, Ontario (1). There was one “Unknown Location” but I derived from a process of elimination that that was for Arlington, Texas. The round-trip miles of saved travel are added up and came to 15,722 miles for our small session alone. The burning of one gallon of gasoline produces 20lbs of Carbon Dioxide emission. A round-trip between NY and LA gives out 2000lbs CO2 per passenger. The Green Meter came up with a savings of 7,495 lbs of emissions total.
At Global Knowledge, we have calculated that we have prevented more than 4.4 million pounds of CO2 from entering the environment each month. That equates to saving more than 200,000 gallons of gasoline a month. One day this will be more than personal and collective responsibility. It may be a necessity. So let’s all get on the green bandwagon. It may save our planet.
Cheers
Brian
iLinc’s Green Meter: https://www.ilinc.com/greenmeter
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