[HPSG-L] Climate neutral HPSG conferences

[Stefan Müller]

Dear colleagues,

The conference season starts again and I have some thoughts to share. As
all of you noticed the global warming shows first visible effects: very
hot summers, next to no water in some regions of the world, floods and
storms in others. Dry woods burn like thunder. They are gone and not
available as water storage any more.

What does this have to do with HPSG or with science in general? Well, we
are responsible for part of this since flying produces CO2. I used
atmosfair to compute the impact of a flight from Berlin to San Francisco:

https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/

The result is attached.

One flight is app. 5,000 kg CO2. A person living in India uses 1,600 kg
CO2 per year (!). If you go by car for a year (12,000 km) this produces
2,000 kg CO2. Each of us could use up 2,300kg CO2 per year (Climate
compatible annual emissions budget for one person). So flying is really
bad.

Now, the question is this: Shouldn't we try and become a climate-neutral
conference? How can we achieve this?

- do not fly whenever possible (come by train)
- if we have to fly, use compensation like atmosfair

For the hypothetical trip Berlin-San Francisco this would be 114€
assuming an economy class trip.

>From now on I will compensate all the flights I am doing. (My last
holiday flight was 10 years ago, but business flights are sometimes
unavoidable). The question is whether our institutions pay for this and
if not whether you would be willing and capable to pay for
compensations. (In the not too long run we should make sure they pay.)

It is a bit of an organizational overhead but we could try to set up a
system that pays the compensation for those who cannot afford to pay it
themselves.

What do you think?

Best wishes

        Stefan


PS: The German state pays a test institute (Stiftung Warentest) so that
it is really independent. They tested atmosfair and other such
companies. atmosfair won. The company is a charity (Gemeinnützige GmbH).

https://www.atmosfair.de/en/about_us/others_about_us/tests_and_comparative_studies/

St.


-- 
PGP welcome

Stefan Müller       Tel: (+49) (+30) 2093 9631

Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Dorotheenstraße 24
10117 Berlin

https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/~stefan/

http://langsci-press.org/

https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/Projects/CoreGram.html