nordicwalker
Dan LykeYeah, I know, everyone else is sharing the article, but we need this message in the public consciousness: Working from home may reduce a person's carbon footprint by 50%.
brennen@danlyke even given that i commuted by bike or bus quite a bit, the amount of fuel i burn, car maintenance i put in, etc., since i started WFH and rarely traveling for work could easily be half what it was.
i'm not even remotely going to claim i'm living lightly on the earth or whatever over here. i just got done traveling pretty close to the width of the country. still, a hundred miles a week and half a dozen flights will stack up on you.
Big Ed Magusson@danlyke quarantine dropped carbon emissions dramatically. So, yeah.
John BurnsAnd an effective pay raise by the amount of money saved by not commuting (e.g. fuel, bus/train tickets, etc).
beforewisdom 
Sadly, it also reduces the real estate value of office buildings very rich people own.
I wish I was wrong!
Play Ball and Fight Fascists@danlyke
10,000 miles a year not driven for me.
10,000 miles a year not driven for me.
Big Head Tales@danlyke What people don't seem to be connecting is that CEOs are typically filthy rich and hold large sums of their fortunes in commercial real estate.
By forcing workers back into office buildings, they protect their own bottom line. It's not like they have to drive in themselves.
Morgan ⚧️@danlyke I'm not really sure to what end this article is being written/shared tho tbh, the reason people don't work from home is because their bosses won't let them, and I'm pretty sure the corporations mandating in-office work don't give a shit about their employees' carbon footprints
Steven Bodzin@danlyke Please read the original study. Among other findings: "decarbonizing office energy may make light remote work more carbon intensive than onsite"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2304099120
There are so many harms to remote work. The authors identify some of them. One impact they completely ignore is that remote workers have been buying bigger and bigger homes to accommodate home offices. This almost certainly swamps any climate benefit from remote work.
@danlyke I am a fan of remote work and have been doing it for decades. But it's silly to think that running the A/C in a largely empty office while also cranking it in an ever-bigger, ever-more-distant suburban home is somehow better than just having people gather in one place for work, thereby clustering them more and letting them live in more modest homes.
@guacamayan @danlyke Yes this. I got clobbered by the electric bill while working at home. Now if they'd get rid of the office and let me work at home all the time that would be good. But having to go in two days a week, while the other three running the A/C both at home and at work, is not economical.
When at the office, I get home to an 85-90 degree F inside temp and turn on a big box fan (100 watts) to air the place out, versus 2kw for the air con if working at home.
Doug 🌈🇨🇦 
@danlyke
How about retiring from home and mot owning an RV.
How about retiring from home and mot owning an RV.
@Oldfartrant Naw, I wanna live in and build a community.
ChristineSaysHi@danlyke Great news!
Goerp@danlyke
If I'm allowed to offer a different view:
To me working from home is like being buried alive. Enforced depression. My productivity drops tremendously as well, co workers become unreal.
Although for a while a lot of colleagues liked working from home most have changed their view and returned to the office (though not full time).
Maybe for some jobs it works, but in my experience cooperation really improves when people work side by side.
@goerp yeah, admittedly part of my last job change was so that I wasn't just at home ruminating all day, although Covid showed that this current (very small) company has a communication culture where distributed worked.
I think that no matter what, we need to build stronger social support structures than we typically have. Even from home, I'm morning coffee-ing and lunch-ing with friends several times a week. Just walking to do so.
Steven Barnhart
John Gruber@StevenBarnhart @danlyke File under “duh", right? How could it not, especially in car-centric countries. And not working at all would reduce emissions further.
beSpacific@danlyke The paper referenced in the article is - #Climatemitigation potentials of #teleworking are sensitive to changes in #lifestyle and #workplace rather than #ICT usage - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2304099120
bojkotiMalbona@bespacific @danlyke It’s hard to accept these astonishing results. If you heat a well-insulated commercial building for 1000 workers, surely that has a much lower footprint than heating 1000 individual homes (many of which are likely poorly insulated). Surely car emissions are insignificant compared to that difference.
What they do not seem to account for is careless idiots who will heat their house even when no one is home, or to a level comfortable for humans when only pets are in the house. Office working would have less impact than #teleworking if done right (cycle to work and leave the home cold when working).
@bojkotiMalbona the energy impacts of commuting likely outweigh any climate control issues. And if the would-be commuters are living close enough to use low carbon mobility options, they're likely living in efficient multi-family units anyway.
(And then we get to the non-energy impacts of commuting, and it all goes to hell even harder.)