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I think "participate" needs more clarification.
My main goal in attending meetings is meeting people.
Tele- / Video-conferencing is nice... but that can be done year-round anyways, and not during a meeting.
Meetings could be organized to minimize travel. A meeting held at a hotel at a major hub airport would be much more efficient, eliminating the need for the hotel shuttle/cab ride into town (often 10-25miles). Many meetings are held at some very nice resorts, but which are remote and require 2-3hr in a bus/rental car from the airport. Careful choice of location could reduce both travel time and the carbon footprint of meetings.
How about, "Yes: Participating remotely may ultimately turn out to be MORE valuable than attending in person once we as individual participants are accustomed to doing it and we as a society are geared up to do it properly."--? As some previous commentators have noted, the traditional format of meetings certainly can get old with repetition. I think there is at least a chance that once we get into the remote format in a big way and properly, we may wonder how we (as individual participants) ever tolerated all the dead time associated with the old way of doing meetings. Remotely served and accessed meeting content should in theory--IF the interface is designed well enough--permit one to browse and access relevant portions of the offerings much more efficiently and sensibly than ever.
Do you really mean to limit this to "annual meetings", by which I assume you mean "annual meetings of some learned society"? Those make up a tiny fraction of the meetings I attend (and the most useless).
While I voted for "Yes: It would lose some value, but the trade-off would be acceptable given the environmental benefits," my actual position would be somewhere between that and "No: It would lose some value, and the trade-off would be unacceptable despite the environmental benefits". This is because much of the value of such meetings comes in establishing rapport and talking informally with one's fellows during meeting breaks, lunch, etc. So teleconferencing is useful in some circumstances, but to truly replace large meetings it would require (at the very least) the ability to have smaller groups split off and have side meetings etc. We are not there yet technologically. Furthermore, there would be a temptation not to do this at all and just return to one's desk/lab and get on with one's work.
So the answer is both yes and no. Yes for some meetings, no for others. Until we come up with holographic teleconferencing with the ability to eat virtual lunch together in smaller groups, there will always be a need for large gatherings from time to time.
I have recently started watching webinars on a more or less regular basis, and I think there isn't much of a difference between watching a webinar on your screen versus watching one live. Many webinars are set-up to receive questions by phone or voice over IP, so the dynamics of Q & A can be maintained, although there will be a transition period as scientists become accustomed to the new technology. However, conferences are also an opportunity to meet new people, discover new lines of research, and make new collaborations. I have also used conferences as a meeting point with my collaborators to talk about ongoing projects. Some of these activities often occur "by chance", and if you are not there in person, they may not occur at all. There are benefits to attending conferences in person that cannot be replaced by a webinar. However, I agree that if a scientist participates in more than one conference a year, why not attend some of them online. We all need to do our share to reduce carbon emissions, and this is a compromise that I think most scientists could do.
Not only the environmental benefits that we need to worry about. Considering the amount of time spent during travel and almost certainly due to missed or delayed flights, etc., it sure is more beneficial in participating remote conference. Not only the time--what about the money from that difficult to obtain grant? I have seen PIs traveling 1st class. This money could be better spent in buying the much needed supplies in the lab.
Besides, imagine a lab where the PI (probably well known in his/her field) is always on the run from one conference to another, spending much less time down on earth with the students/ post-docs, who in fact toil day and night to generate the data that PI is showing all over the places!
Having said that, I still believe that limited number of more focused conferences with limited number of participants are probably welcome.