Here's a few suggestions:
- Make better use of web resources for the useful aspects of academic discussion (CosmoCoffee!)
- Travel grants at the moment seem to actively encourage excess travel, e.g. by paying all costs and per-diem so that it is personally cheaper for people to travel than stay at home. Some obvious suggestions:
- Make people pay (say \$50) out of their own pocket per flight. This could be compensated by a personal payment of \$200 a year to cover reasonable travel.
- Grant travel in terms of emissions rather than money, or some combination.
- Give people greater flexibility to spend money on e.g. videoconferencing hardware rather than travel if they wish.
- Synchronize conferences for close times and nearby locations; calculate locations based on minimizing average air-miles per attendee.
- I suspect many observers decide to be physically present when this is not really necessary. Put incentives in place to encourage people to do other people's observations, make full use of facility staff, etc.
- Many departments and people benefit from use of free software (CMBFAST/CAMB, Healpix, etc) and free datasets (WMAP, millennium run, etc). The licence for these could be changed to allow free use only to departments with an active and useful environmental sustainability policy, or to individuals who take less than four flights a year. I'm seriously considering something like this for most of my software. A charge of, say, $1000 per copy should be enough to concentrate some minds... this is the only idea I can come up with for trying to enforce responsible behaviour.