Turning cameras off during Zoom meetings can help the climate, study finds
www.ctvnews.ca
Turning off the camera during Zoom or video meetings can actually help reduce a person's carbon footprint of the call by 96 per cent, a new environmental study finds.

(link covers a 2021 study by Purdue, Yale, and MIT)

Some folks think teleworking is favorable to the environment on the basis that they avoid driving to work. IMO that’s quite far-fetched when you consider that a worksite with a capacity of ~1000 workers would consume much less energy than heating and cooling 1000 residential homes. Then you have account for the footprint attributed to heavy internet bandwidth demands.

Driving is not likely worse than heating a house but nothing beats cycling to work and working on-site. But if you are working from home, it’s worthwhile to try to attend non-video conferences. A presenter may have no choice in some cases but certainly you need not see everyone’s faces.

FWiW, these are steps to disable high-bandwidth frills:

Firefox

(disable animations)
  • disable autoplay
  • disable animations (non-CSS, non-GIF varieties): about:config » toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled » true→false
  • disabling CSS animations needs these ad-hoc steps
  • disabling animated GIFs (useless?): about:config » image.animation_mode » (normal → none) or (normal → once, to just disable the play loops). The docs are useless as there is no mention of whether downloads are prevented. Or for refined on-the-fly control install this plugin ⚠Disabling animated GIFs in Firefox may be useless. I get the impression animated GIFs are still fetched but simply not played automatically, thus bandwidth is still wasted.
(disable still images)

about:config » permissions.default.image » 1→2

Chrome/Chromium

  • Disabling animations- impossible (bug report from ~14 years ago still unresolved). Hence “stop using Chrome” in the title. This unmaintained extension by the creator of Ungoogled Chromium was suggested. It might work on some sites but the author admits it fails on many sites. The extension does not stop buffering, thus it’s useless from a permacomputing standpoint. He quit maintaining it in hopes that Google would produce a decent extension. Instead, Google created a junk extension which only mutes the audio and reportedly fails to disable the autoplay. This is useless for those who actually do not want to fetch animations due to bandwidth constraints.
(disable GIF animations only)

Install this plugin first (by Google) which only works sometimes; when it fails try this one (apparently non-existent?).

(disable still images)
  1. Click the Customize and control Google Chrome menu button, which is the on the far-right side of the URL toolbar.
  2. Select Settings on the menu to bring up that tab.
  3. Click Privacy and security on the left side of Google Chrome.
  4. Select Site Settings to view the content options.
  5. Then click Images to bring up the options shown directly below.
  6. Select the Don’t allow sites to show images radio button.

I have deliberately spared readers from the source links to the above info because the information is buried in enshitified webpages with shenanigans like cookie popups that have no reject all option. Looks like this post is a bit enshitified itself since the details/summary HTML tags are broken here (they tend to be accepted on other Lemmy instances). If anyone knows the fix plz let me know. (reported)