Prince Charles goes virtual, and other SL ecology news
By Adam Reuters
The heir to the British throne, facing criticism for burning who knows how much jet fuel to fly to New York with his entourage and accept an environmental award from Al “Inconvenient Truth” Gore, sounds like he may be thinking about getting a Second Life:
“I must warn you that I am in fact a video recording. I have only made a virtual flight across the Atlantic, and I am virtually by now half dead and only virtually royal,” he told the audience, according to the BBC World Service.
It’s just a joke — and not particulary a good one — but it does reasonate with something Linden Lab Mitch Kapor said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where climate change (along with Second Life) was at the top of the agenda.
He told the Independent that “Second Life could help the world to reduce its carbon footprint if more chief executives followed (IBM CEO Sam) Palmisano’s example and used the virtual realm for corporate meetings instead of fly their directors around.”
Nicholas Carr has calculated that a Second Life avatar consumers almost as much electricity as a real-world person, due to the huge outlays of power to run servers, graphics cards and the like. But it might not take too many cancelled long-distance flights to make Second Life carbon neutral.
In other climate change news, Publicis Chief Executive Maurice Levy made perhaps the world’s first carbon-neutral pledge in Second Life, as he vowed in Davos to make his advertising and marketing company carbon neutral by 2010 in a Reuters interview.
As a postscript, Prince Charles responded to environmentalist criticisms of his flight to New York by cancelling a ski trip in Switzerland. I don’t blame him — skiing isn’t so great this winter in the Alps, which have suffered their warmest winter in decades. Besides, there are too many people there talking about climate change this time of year.
