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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions, so any company that claims to care about the environment and their future should really be doing all they can to make themselves as remote friendly as possible, especially now that technology is good enough to make it happen.

I've been working 100% remotely for a large company for a year and a half now. They shut down our office (and a bunch of others) to save money on real estate, but with software like Microsoft Teams (and I'm sure there are just as good alternatives, but this has a solid mobile app and Outlook integration, so it's pretty enterprise-friendly), it's not that hard to do.

We also VPN to the same network that we were on when we still had an office, so I still have access to everything we had and can remote into our other servers as needed, just as I could when I was at the office.

Obviously the environment is not a big factor to a lot of these companies, despite the lip service they may pay to it, but perhaps the government could provide incentives to facilitate the transition for several companies?

It really doesn't help that several of the biggest tech companies, which should be a model for how other companies could use tech for this benefit, have gone anti-remote in recent years though. I think that's shown other companies "Well it doesn't work for them, so it can't work for us." and has done a lot of harm as well.

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> so any company that claims to care about the environment and their future should really be doing all they can

The company that owns my office publicly boast about ecology and saving the planet all the time. Yet every single morning I come in to find the windows open and the heaters on, lights stay on all night, they heat the stairs to 30c degrees even though nobody ever use them, &c.

It's always the same shit, they talk the talk but never walk the walk. Apple doing everything in its power to not let you repair your devices, not even replace consumables, is a prime example of that. 0 companies really give a shit about ecology outside of PR moves.

Anyway, many people value office time to meet actual human beings. Commute isn't that bad if the public infrastructure is decent.

> It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions

Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience... How many car journeys do I have to have saved to pay for one flight to the office every now and again?

About the distance of the flight.

About the distance of the flight by bus. How does the efficiency of a car compares to a bus/plane? (Both are roughly on the same mark, larger planes are usually more efficient.)

If you commute 10km each way every working day, you'll move nearly 3,000km on a year.

If you work remote anyway, take the train! (only partly joking)

I've thought about this, the problem is the cost. My trip would cost 3-5 times more, which is hard to justify to the company. They'll probably just tell me they'll pay for those "CO2 compensation programs".

A fully loaded aircraft gets pretty good fuel economy per person, at least as good as a Prius. I've seen figures from 50-100mpg depending on aircraft and of course how fully loaded it is.

So it's basically like driving a little less than the flight distance.

Right, but (from what I remember from an article I read years ago) emissions from aircraft are worse, pound for pound of CO2, than those of a car because they're deposited directly into the upper atmosphere as opposed to at ground level. I don't remember exactly why, but it's worse because of its location rather than the actual amount.

I'm a bit skeptical that remote/distributed work (as opposed to just WFH instead of going into a local office every day) nets out to be all that green. It's hard for me to factor out travel that would have happened anyway from travel that's specifically related to being on a distributed team. But I probably do something like 10K miles/year flying that wouldn't exist if the team were co-located.

This is something I have some experience with. I work from home most of the time, except for travel across the US one week a month. I was concerned about my carbon footprint, so I ran some numbers. The result I got was that I was about 8% worse than someone with an uncongested 10-mile (one way) daily commute in a typical compact car. That guy driving a Ford Compensator thirty miles each way at peak hours is way worse. Nonetheless, I wish my number could be reduced still further.

The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote. If the rest of your team is colocated somewhere else then you'll have to travel. If your team is spread all over but still relies on face to face meetings (e.g. planning sessions, "all hands" announcements, hackathons) then you'll still have to travel. If your job/role involves dealing with customers who aren't even slightly remote-friendly, you'll have to travel. If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. Most of these exceptions are not necessary. Unfortunately, most people and companies don't even try to avoid them. They just do what they've done, and the not-really-remote workers have to fly in.

> If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences.

I really think we should be working to change this - conferences are huge wastes of resources IMHO. I usually see a handful of inspiring talks, which could just as easily have been delivered as webinars (which would also allow asynchronous viewing, involving a wider potential audience).

Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me.

>Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me.

And, really, the "hallway track" is the value of going to conferences. For the most part, if someone just goes to a conference to sit in breakout sessions, they're probably better off just watching video of the sessions (if they were filmed) or a webinar version of the content.

I love going to conferences, even though I'm an introvert - some would even say a misanthrope. I just need time to recharge afterward. But the fact that some people enjoy them is far outweighed by both the environmental harm and the exclusionary aspect of requiring such travel. We need to figure out how to replicate that energy and easy discovery of like-minded people online. Even as a 30+ year online native myself, I don't quite see it yet.

Most people are social, even if they express it in different ways.

Virtual events are fine, as are watching videos. (In fact, for bigger events, I'll often watch the keynotes from my hotel room rather than packing myself into a room with 10,000 of my closest friends so I can watch the distant speaker projected on the screen.)

But it's a small subset of the experience of attending live.

Well put - that's exactly how I feel.

It's a huge problem that makes the hypocrisy argument palpable when thousands of climate scientists fly across the world every year for conferences on climate change. Teleconferences should be a thing for nearly everyone but the presenters, but it'll never happen because of prestige and elitism.

This hypocrisy is a reoccurring issue with most people who favor coercive political solutions to problems instead of voluntary and cooperative ones.

When people make arguments like "taxes should be higher" or "air travel should be more expensive", they almost always mean "for other people".

People need to eat their own cooking or they instantly lose all credibility, even when the facts are on their side.

No, they mean "for all", rather than just for the patsies sacrificing themselves so that others can just consume more.

Taxes aren’t coercive (unless you’re a Galt’s Gulch Randian, I suppose), and I’m sorry, but would you rather deal with driving a more efficient car or millions of immigrants trying desperately to escape drought, war, and famine after it’s too late? If climate change really is the looming disaster it seems to be (and I personally think we’re fucked), then yeah, sorry, governments might have to do some things you find unpleasant. That’s the price we pay for unfettered consumption for generations. It might be time to pay the piper.

Also, it’s really hard to live in the modern world without using fossil fuel-based comforts. You can criticize air travel and still travel to a climate conference. It doesn’t make climate change any less real. You can maybe argue that people are hypocrites, but so what? The ice caps don’t give a shit. And maybe that meeting of scientists in-person is what it takes to fix a really big global problem. Flying to Asia every year for a vacation definitely won’t do that, though.

I never argued that climate change isn't real or that nothing should be done about. My point was simply that when people behave in a hypocritical manner, they tend to lose all credibility even when they're right, and they hurt the credibility of those around them who are making the same argument. It's like an anti-halo effect.

Every Hollywood actor demanding we take action on climate change while flying around in a private jet weakens the argument for real action on climate change. It makes the issue look like a vanity cause even though it's not.

You see the same thing on taxes. You've got guys like Bernie Sanders out there demanding we all pay more taxes while he himself has a very low rate of charitable giving by most standards. He could also opt to voluntarily pay more taxes right now. Of course he doesn't, which again undercuts any broader point he may have.

Human beings are hardwired to be turned off by hypocrisy.

I'm not sure there is hypocrisy if they believe gathering together will ultimately lead to solutions that lower future carbon emissions.

It could be viewed as an investment in future lower emissions, the same way spending money on R&D today can improve profits in the future.

Even voluntary and cooperative solutions would benefit from the type of coordination an in-person conference affords.

> I work from home most of the time, except for travel across the US one week a month. The result I got was that I was about 8% worse than someone with an uncongested 10-mile (one way) daily commute in a typical compact car.

Are you sure about that? I'm curious about your numbers. This is 12 round-trip flights across the US a year, right? And I assume they're always on full flights (peak efficiency)?

From [1] (2013; maybe it's more efficient now), that's 2-3 tons of CO₂ per round-trip—so in your case, let's average and say about 25 tons/year.

The EPA [2] says "A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year."

That means your flying (1 person) is costing 543% as much as driving (1 car)? It's unfortunately not apples-to-apples, so I'm curious what your calculation was.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Those 2-3 tons are the "warming equivalent", based on some multiplier that they don't specific (see the correction at the end of the article). The actual CO2 emitted by the flight is much lower, less than 200kg/passenger (EDIT: per leg).

The other estimates I've seen put flights as worse than cars, but not that bad.

Oh wow, interesting. I was looking around and found another estimate that it's 1.4 tons (SFO/NYC round-trip).

I guess this is better (365% vs. 543%), but still looking much worse than driving?

[1] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new

I got about 1.3 tons for BOS<->SEA. Close enough I guess. For cars, start with

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Look at the third answer down. The figures I cited earlier were based on about half that mileage per year, so that comes out to 2.3t. Lots of unit confusion here, but I think those both end up being metric tons and the daily commute is already worse than monthly air travel. Maybe that's all wrong, but the point I'm trying to focus on is that the need for regular long-distance travel severely erodes the environmental value of letting people work from home.

> that comes out to 2.3t

2.3t per year, not per month, though.

Ah, right you are. Now I'm really sad.

Okay, so to also summarize for anyone else reading, here's what's going on. The assumptions are:

- Using 261 gal gas/year (which 21.5 gal/month, or e.g. driving 2 × 15 mi/day at 41 mi/gal)

- 1 gal gas = 8.9kg CO₂ (resulting in 2.3 tons of CO₂/year)

In your case that's 15.6 tCO₂/year for flying, vs. 2.3 tCO₂/year for driving.

So, yeah... your flying footprint is 678% more than driving. i.e. you need to fly to work less often than once every 7 months in order for it to beat driving the route you had in mind.

Sorry for the bad news :( but yes, you're very much correct that this makes it even harder for remote work to be good, if you have to fly even twice a year.

> this makes it even harder for remote work to be good, if you have to fly even twice a year.

Well, he's working a continent away from his office. There are still infinite possibilities for remote work without having to travel 2500 miles for those occasional visits.

If your measuring climate impact, then the "warming equivalent" is the correct metric and pure co2 is the wrong one. Am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

The problem is that we're comparing 2 numbers, one is "warming equivalent" and the other doesn't seem to be. We need to adjust one or the other, but which one we adjust shouldn't matter here.

No, it does matter, we should use Warming Equivalent. "Warming equivalent" is the correct metric. Warming equivalents are typically given in Tons CO2 equivalent. It's a way of converting methane and NO2 and other more powerful greenhouse gases to their CO2 equivalent. It's the standard metric anytime we're examining the climate impacts of actions.

In the case of gasoline powered cars, I believe they just put out CO2, the other components are pretty negligible. So you can directly compare the warming equivalent of planes to the pure CO2 of cars, it's a reasonable comparison.

It's worth double checking that last thing, it's been a minute since I looked at the numbers, but I'm about 85% sure of it.

Interesting... I just learned N2O is 300x worse than CO2. I don't know how to make a better comparison then. Some numbers I can find:

"Aircraft engine emissions are roughly composed of about 70 percent CO2, a little less than 30 percent H2O, and less than 1 percent each of NOx, CO, SOx, VOC, particulates, and other trace components including HAPs." [1]

For gasoline the ratio seems to be 51% CO2, 47% H2O, and 0.9% nitrogen oxides, and 1.3% other stuff (excludes nitrogen). [2]

Water vapor isn't considered to be relevant when calculating CO2 equivalents so we can ignore that. [3]

But I'm not sure how much the difference in NOx contribution is... given ground level emissions aren't the same as high-altitude and such.

On the face of it it seems unlikely to me that the non-CO2 components would tip things in the other direction, but I'd definitely welcome better numbers...

[1] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/env...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas#Spark-ignition_and...

[3] https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...

The first step is to make "kinda remote" way more normalized and pervasive ... then we can work on "truly remote".

I'm OK with that, as long as we realize that in the short term "kinda remote" might actually be worse than status quo due to long-distance-travel requirements. We're discussing the numbers in another sub-thread to see how much.

> travel across the US one week a month

That seems excessive. I work remote and only have to fly in once or twice a year for a few days at a time, maybe a week.

Do you have an idea of why they don't go all the way and let you WFH on the same basis as I do?

I kind of alluded to this in the first couple of reasons why people have to travel. Some companies, including this one, just don't have remote-friendly work flows/habits. Too many hallway conversations with outcomes that are never recorded because nobody can bother. Too many people who allow in-person interruptions to take unqualified preference over response to remotes. Too many people mumbling and/or talking over each other in meetings, so the remote has trouble following or breaking in. Inadequate videoconference and VPN infrastructure making that worse. Too many high-level planning or review meetings that are explicitly in-person for no good reason at all.

I could go on much longer. ;) The point is that accommodating remote workers requires significant cultural change, and people in mostly-colocated groups resist it. It's much easier for all-remote teams, somewhere in between for teams that are still mostly colocated but have already been "broken in" by someone like me. My last company was much better at this, though worse in other ways. Since there are only about five teams worldwide doing storage at the scale we are, and I want to keep doing that, it's a the "price of admission" and overall I think it's worthwhile. But it's still unnecessary and I'm still sad that it's not improving faster - for myself and others in similar situations.

> Too many people mumbling and/or talking over each other in meetings, so the remote has trouble following or breaking in. Inadequate videoconference and VPN infrastructure making that worse.

This, in spades. Thanks for taking the time to explain in more detail.

> I work from home most of the time, except for travel across the US one week a month.

I've worked full time remote for over 10 years for different companies and never had to fly that much. I've always flown once or maybe twice a year at most. I think this is more the norm, at least for software engineering and operations.

> The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote.

You follow this with some specific examples, most of which would require travel even if you were in an office. I don't agree on those you list as requiring face-to-face meetings, they are all fully capable of being done remotely. IMO the only ones that require you on site are one where you physically interact with things/people.

> they are all fully capable of being done remotely.

They certainly are, as long as others cooperate. Good for you if you've never been on a team where people resist and sabotage any such effort. I don't see any particular reason to believe your shorter experience is more representative than my longer one.

> your shorter experience

I had assumed I had the longer experience as most people I've discussed it with have only worked a few years remotely and you didn't specify.

I've only worked one job that was part-time remote where people weren't cooperative with it. But that was mostly the results of one manager who was generally bad, so I didn't take it as remote specific. The other 3 companies where I worked full time remote were all good experiences w/ no one sabotaging things. Solving the issue with one place with the bad manager was pretty simple though... I just found a new job where it wasn't an issue.

Anymore I only apply to places that are either fully remote or advertise themselves as remote friendly with a remote-first culture and it hasn't been an issue.

> Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience.

I don't think that 's true in general though. Is that even remote work? There are now hundreds of companies who only meet for yearly retreats. and these are optional.

Even the most remote of the remote workers I know will go into the office at least once a quarter or so. Four trans-oceanic flights is surely going to outweigh all but the most extreme car commutes.

That's curious, this hasn't been my experience. Why are they needed physically at the office so often?

To make in-person connections and to present and teach in-person. I don't think it's particularly contentious to say that these things often work better in-person, even as someone who thinks remote work is best and has been doing it my whole career. Once a quarter also probably doesn't seem like a lot to people who are going to a conference every month or so anyway.

A conference every month! How do you get any work done?

By teaching, do you mean workshops/classes? We generally mentor people, but never actually tried teaching. But do most developers in your company teach?

I don't do that many conferences, but I know people who do. They do work at the conferences around meeting people and presenting their work. I find I'm more productive straight after a conference.

Mentoring people, yes. For very difficult topics that's definitely easier in person. Everyone teaches to some degree yeah. How do you level people up without teaching them?

Most of the teaching at the office involved the regular processes, like giving appropriate tasks, recommending learning materials, and collaboratively reviewing work (their and ours). And of course, answering their questions.

I never tried to teach, or have been taught, something like a course (even a mini-course) in anything in the workplace. But then again I don't believe most developers are qualified to do that (I don't mean "credentialed").

> Even the most remote of the remote workers I know will go into the office at least once a quarter or so.

I've been working remotely for 5 years and have never once seen the faces of my co-workers. We don't do video chats. We don't do in person visits. We do everything by voice and text.

I wouldn't even consider myself the "most remote of the remote workers." We still do daily standups and quarterly all hands meetings.

> have never once seen the faces of my co-workers

Did you do your interview by text chat?

Phone call and a take home test.

Wow well I don't doubt you but that's pretty unusual.

I'm remote in the UK. For some years I went to the office once a year, all my other work (apart from conferences, which I would still have done if I was office based) has been remote.

All depends on the type of work, the team setup and the company culture.

This has been my experience as well. The amount of flying done by most remote workers is astounding. If anything, remote workers have a bigger carbon footprint than your typical commuter from all the flying.

The other thing I see is a lot of remote workers moving to very sparsely populated areas that are cheap to live in, but where they end up driving 40 minutes for groceries.

There are lots of great benefits to remote work, but environmentalism (in most cases) is not one of them.

I'm curious, why are those remote workers flying? I've started working remotely this year, and only flown once, at the start of the project.

Are you not flying anyway, to go to conferences and things?

A lot of developers really don't travel a lot for work if they don't speak to customers much. And it's not uncommon that a developer/sysadmin may get to go to one conference a year or something like that.

Certainly some people I work with, whether developers or other roles, are traveling all the time. But it's not everyone.

No, I go to big conferences less than once a year. I've lived in multiple EU countries, and never worked anywhere where a common developer went to conferences regularly. Didn't even realize that was a "thing" except for a few people who were known to give talks everywhere.

I (and everyone in my office, except the director, who flew once to go to corporate headquarters) have flown zero times in a year and a half of working remotely. It's not a guarantee that remote workers will necessarily do a bunch of flying.

It depends on the culture of the workplace. We are able to get plenty done with conference calls and email.

I can't speak for the management and executives above the director, though. They might do a decent amount of travel. But there's about 200 employees that aren't doing any travel at all for work, and only a handful of people in management above them.

And from what I hear, it sounds like a lot of the other departments in the corporation don't do a whole lot of travel either.

Agreed although, in a lot of cases, remote workers travel a lot not because they're remote (though that may contribute) but because people who travel around a lot anyway for their job are often a good candidate to work remotely some or all of their time. If you're only going to randomly come into the office for a day here and a day there anyway, it's not a big step to just go fully remote with, possibly, some F2F team meetings now and then.

It seems like a hybrid model would be ideal: teams that work from home in a metro area, with one or two "meeting days" a week at an office (which can be 20-30% the size it would be with no work from home).

This is something companies could incrementally adopt with existing employees.

I think it depends on one's personality. I worked for some years using that hybrid model and really didn't like it. Now I work 99.9% from home and vastly prefer it.

My only real gripe is that teleconferencing for meetings just doesn't work that well, because I find it hard to hear people that are not very close to the microphone, and background noise from the open-plan office in which the non-remote team works is very disruptive at times.

Well, and that sometimes remote workers are sort-of-not-quite second-class citizens, probably because we aren't in the office for people to see every day.

For many of us, remote work means staying home all day and working. (Or sometimes, traveling somewhere nice and working.) But how many flights and how often is up to you. In my case, it's just 2-3 per year... and I would have probably made those flights anyway for a holiday.

That has NOT been my experience, but mileage varies.

I've worked for a virtual company -- no offices anywhere, everyone works at home -- for 12 years. The developers almost NEVER travel.

The owner and I used to be on the road quite a bit (just like most software firms) -- say, through 2010 -- but then it seemed like all our clients and prospects kinda had the penny drop: they didn't NEED US on site to do implementations. GoToMeeting or Skype or WebEx or whatever was entirely sufficient, and saved a shitton of money too.

I haven't visited a client site in over 3 years. I see my boss at 2 conferences a year. HE makes a few more trips -- partner conferences, a few sales trips -- but nothing like what it was in 07-10.

This is in the current remote work environment. If we (the royal we) could encourage a 3 or 4 day remote in and a single day commute (preferably on a bus, but that would be too much to ask for), it would still be a local community and not make air travel necessary. There can be varying shades of remote work, even allowing for a weekly stand up =)

Sure, this can be done eco-friendlily or not. If you prioritize co2 emissions in the remote setup, you can decide that thete will be no flying.

Was this at a 100% remote company, or were you a remote worker at an in-office company?

I've worked remote 15+ years and that much flying is abnormal in my experience. Some places do quarterly, but I found that rare too. A lot of them do an annual retreat, but it's often optional. Or sometimes we would do a mini-meetup at a developer conference.

It also depends on the position. Most of the flying was for brainstorming sessions in the leadership / project team, but most of the team didn't need to be involved in those.

I will also say I've always interviewed over either phone or google hangouts and I've never had to meet in-person before the offer. I've sometimes gone years without meeting the people I work with in-person.

There should simply be a heavy tax on all presence-required jobs, payable by the company. Suddenly, as soon as there is monetary incentive, things will work quite fine remotely, "concerns" be damned

There is a monetary incentive: owning or leasing office space comes at a premium expense.

That's far from enough IME. And a remote employee might still need some place other than their home sofa to work so that cost isn't automatically removed just by moving people out of the "one office."

That's a great way to lose tons of manufacturing, skilled craftsmanship, assembly, repair, and service sectors jobs along with many people in the arts, cinema, music, and... well almost everything but coding, finance, and the CAD parts of engineering.

Came here to say the same thing. There remain a plurality of jobs that literally require physical access to tools, systems, cash registers, customers, etc.

I agree that where possible, remote should be allowed/encouraged. I also think that for roles where that can't work, we should consider 4 day work weeks, or other non-commute or less commute strategies. But, to a great extent we are not going to eliminate the in-person nature of working with other people, and we probably shouldn't aim to all live in little bubbles.

Source: I have been full time remote for 7 years. I estimate it saves me ~25k/year in direct and indirect costs + time.

From the employee side, an easy-to-use calculator for commuting expenses could help. The monetary incentive is there for choosing a remote position, but people don't always know what it is, especially with car commuting.

From the employee side, there should not be an extra cost to pay. The problem is with companies and bosses wanting people to come to the office. That is what needs to be fixed, therefore the company needs to be taxed, not the employee. Taxing the employee just makes shitty underpaid jobs even worse, no upside and maybe increased unemployment as a downside

One of the things economics is pretty sure about nowadays is that it doesn't matter who you tax, it matters who is more flexible. If employers can fire you and hire someone to replace you easily they'll be able to pass on most of the cost of the tax. If you could have your pick of jobs you can make your employer pay most of the new tax even if technically it's a tax on employees.

Ask essentially any at least minimally competent expert in economics and they'll tell you it doesn't matter who hands the money to the government (although they might call it the relative elasticity of supply and demand dictating tax incidence). They may all be wrong, but your phrasing gives me the impression you haven't considered this and came up with a good counterargument.

> heavy tax on all presence-required jobs

It's called a carbon tax -- if you tax jet fuel, gasoline and coal-based electricity for office a/c equally, the invisible hand of company bean counters and employees will figure out the low-carbon compromise.

It doesn't have to be as extreme as 100% remote. Most office jobs would be ok with a 3/2 split between in office and WFH. And everyone doing those days WFH would make a massive immediate difference in CO2 and other air pollution. Also less traffic on the roads. Government could easily encourage this with tax benefits for companies doing this. To fight climate change, I would prioritize this above any EV rebate or EV related program. This is such an easy and immediate win for climate change and reducing traffic. Even those not concerned about climate change can get behind reducing traffic.

It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions

Is that really true?

When my wife started working from home, our utility bills went way up. Still need to heat/cool the place, lights are on, water is being used in the washroom and kitchen.

It's probably far less efficient to have 1,000 employees all using utilities in their own homes than have them all in a handful of buildings.

There's a good chance your home is more energy-efficient than an office building. This can go either way, and perhaps modern office buildings would win, but my experience with ridiculous behavior around heating and aircon provides a counterbalance. As for water use, I think people drink and use the restroom at the same rate, regardless of whether they're at home or in the office, so the only difference here is who's footing the bill - which is irrelevant in terms of emission reduction.

On top of commute, if you work in an office, you also probably eat out or take delivery - both being arguably much more wasteful than eating at home.

Don't forget to account for the total lifecycle in a building. Companies will fit out a new office space with company branding, furniture, etc. I suspect this happens far more often than myself making equivalent changes to my home's interior design. Which is to say, I don't move houses much and I'm not in the habit of arbitrarily rearranging partition walls.

> It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions,

Heating or cooling your home can easily more than offset the emissions associated with driving. E.g. My car might consume 4 kwh round trip (20 miles); that's about an hour of running a typical home air conditioner.

Offices have to be heated and cooled too.

Yes, but with high people density, it is much more efficient.

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