This is the thing I worry about -- my business requires a decent amount of air travel, and in general business travel is where you hear most of people bopping in and out of town in a single day, whereas vacationing is often for at least a few days.

No question that physical presence is huge, but that doesn't justify it from an environmental POV at all, esp. since most sales are about making owners/investors richer, not making the world a better place.

I think real creative thought about how business travel could reduce impact would be massively impactful. It would probably need regulation, because the sales team that tries to, say, do all meetings virtual will be whomped by the other team that shows up.

That single thing right there is the answer: freedom isn’t harmed, but the benefits are huge. It would solve housing issues because you wouldn’t need to live near work. It would solve transportation issues because commuting would be vastly reduced. It reduces pollution for the same way. It also reduces the need for commercial real estate. It would lower costs to business, so prices go down. Encouraging widespread remote working helps everyone with minimal impact on freedom. If all office workers would stop commuting, we could eat whatever we wanted. We wouldn’t need to spend as many billions on public transportation. The way to encourage this is to provide significant tax incentives for businesses for remote workers. Instead of lowering quality of life by restricting things (such as air travel,) we could increase quality of life by eliminating unnecessary commutes. There also wouldn’t be too much political disagreement because tax incentivized remote working wouldn’t be that controversial and it wouldn’t require the average person to give up anything other than a commute nobody likes in the first place. I, for example could move out of the Bay Area to a cheaper, less crowded area and eat steak without the climate police having a coronary. I could fly my Cessna without the enviro-crusaders losing their minds. Combining remote-first policy along with nuclear energy for electricity and we could substantially reduce pollution with no net impact to freedom or quality of life.

The problem with that however is that many climate activists don’t actually care about the climate as a first priority, they care about wealth redistribution and larger, more powerful government. Climate policy is first and foremost an anti-capitalist masquerade. While that might seem to be a weird assertion, from where I sit, Climate activists also seem generally to share a strong anti-capitalist, anti-market perspective.

Nuclear power and profound incentives for remote work would get us much further than eating a fake-hamburger.