Climate & Nature...

Every time you drive or fly to a meeting, or ask someone else to drive or fly to meet you, you're contributing to global warming.

One way you can reduce your impact on the environment (and save some of your company's rapidly disappearing monetary resources) is by meeting online. There are plenty of services offering teleconferencing or web conferencing, but ThinkGreenMeeting.com will not only save you some green, it will show you how much you are going green by meeting online.

TGM (as I call it) has a neat little online calculator where you can figure out how much carbon will be generated by the people driving or flying to an in-person meeting, and who much you will save by meating online instead. For example, according to their calculator, if five people were flying to a meeting, it would take 25 trees to offset that meeting's carbon footprint.

(Obviously, that's a generalization. The calculator doesn't take distance or other factors into account, but still, it's a nice illustration of a meeting's impact.)

The service offers flat, monthly fees based on how many people will be attending your meatings. If you need three "seats," the service starts at just $9.95 a month for unlimited meetings. And to get you started, the first month is free!

Give it a try. You may never fly again! (Now if I could just get my next family reunion to meet this way...)