I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion.
EDIT: It rarely happens this way but in retrospect I feel my comment is way too tame. You think your problem is going to work. The problem is the whole american lifestyle where you live in an individual house and need a car to do anything, your house is an ecological disaster in terms of how much energy you need to keep it warm/cold, and even bringing food to your house will incur a large carbon footprint.
I know the system is hard to changes, but some people need to see the bigger picture, even if you can't do anything about it yet.
Public transportation has a higher environment cost than staying at home to work. That should be fairly obvious.
So unless your home has such ridiculously bad insulation that it quickly approaches outside temperature after turning off heating/cooling, you won't see significant energy savings by going outside of the house half the time. Never mind multiple occupants, kids and the elderly, pets, diverging working hours etc.
Usually it needs to be done by predicting ahead, e.g. so you put on more busses when there is a football game, or when it's School or University term time.
The social interaction thing is a big deal, but I don't think remote work will be the coffin nail, there. In fact, it could improve social interactions between neighbors.
There's a school of thought, that the air conditioner has been the true bane of social interaction, as everyone used to hang outside, and now, they don't.
That said, a whole lot of places are gonna have to get used to using air conditioners, and that won't be good for the environment.
I remember being in a town in Northern Germany, when a summer heat wave hit. It was awful. No one had air conditioning, and there were no fans to be found, in any stores.
Now we are slowly getting used to the new reality of hot weather for weeks or months each year, and getting air conditioning is something many people think about (but most still put off because electricity is expensive).
I think in general warm weather is conductive to social activities (just look at Southern Italy vs Norway, or basically any place in Northern Europe vs any place in Southern Europe), but air conditioning drives people to just stay at home. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
The ratio of gasoline to electricity price in Germany is slightly smaller than that in the US, so the incentive to electrify is proportionally smaller. This is bad. We shouldn’t be paying for renewable energy subsidies via consumer electricity prices; the US does this right by funding it from the general budget instead, which encourages electrification.
I'm not advocating for staying home; I'm advocating for less driving. It may not make as much of a difference in the E.U., but if we're aiming to be carbon neutral, less driving will be necessary, or, at least, extremely helpful in achieving that goal.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if people drive less, they'll realize that their car-centered lifestyles don't work anymore, and will have to find alternatives. Let's hope that's easier than what I envision :)
What vision? People in Europe drive cars. The cars are smaller and things are less sprawled out than in the US, but people still drive. Europe is not just central London or Barcelona.
Of course some do, but far fewer than in the US. France and UK have roughly half the number of cars per capita compared to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
In Munich, you'll find 1/2 of people owning a car.
E.g. the 2 biggest employers in Oxford UK are the University, where almost no one would commute by car, and the MINI car factory, where almost everyone would. That's because the University is in the historic part of town, with good bus service, near the main train station, easy cycling and no parking, but the car factory is at the edge of town, with good access to the road network and lots of parking.
I'm pretty sure a large part of the reason why Americans are so lonely compared to the rest of the world is that the suburban bedroom community model physically divides us and makes it much more difficult to get to know one's neighbors. By the time you get home from work at 6:30 in the evening, it's time to cook dinner, and, once you're done cleaning up, there's not much time for anything aside from watching a bit of TV before you go to bed.
And then the weekend rolls around, and your time is dominated by catching up on all the housework and errands you didn't have time to do during the week because of your long commute. So you're not really getting to know your neighbors then, either.
It's really strange and I sometimes feel like an outsider. But everyone's going on hikes on the weekend and going to movies together. I'm not going back into the office at this point and one thing that appeals to me about remote distributed work is that it's separate from the rest of my life. When I walk away from my laptop, it's just gone.
I can indeed see a world where working from home might in the short term infuse some life in local life, from neighbors to associations etc.. So maybe it's actually a positive change!
The shift from doing lunch with your coworkers to doing lunch around your neighbors seems really positive to me.
Ultimately, people are more of a pain to deal with than a pleasure until you really get to know them. I suspect this is the same reason suburbs seem to be more appealing and costly than condos.
In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you live around Paris or London you may be able to commute to work by public transport, and many people do, indeed, but many also commute by car, and the vast majority do outside of these areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other countries.
Edit: By the way I am French and living in England, so I know full well from experience how important cars are for the majority despite small islands of some town centres where people can do without.
> you live in an individual house
On the other hand, living in an individual house with a garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this, but if preserving the environment means severe constraints on people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life while still preserving the environment.
My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in tower blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
>In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you live around Paris or London you may be able to commute to work by public transport, and many people do, indeed, but many also commute by car, and the vast majority do outside of these areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other countries.
Actually in France it's much more than Paris, living in Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Besancon to name just some cities I'm familiar with, you can live without a car. Similarly in a lot of German cities even down to population levels of 50,000 people you can often live perfectly fine without a car.
>> you live in an individual house
>On the other hand, living in an individual house with a garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
And a lot of people at the same time want those houses to be right in the city centre as well, and can't afford it. Also I think the flat vs house trade-off is a huge function of type and quality of flats and the city planning.
>I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this, but if preserving the environment means severe constraints on people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life while still preserving the environment.
Sounds like a great idea. It's funny how people regard reducing carbon emissions by changing behaviour (e.g. moving to flats, using less cars ...) unrealistic, but then put suggestions like this forward. How would you reduce earths population by a factor 2 in the next 100 years? Even if you could somehow do this, there would be huge economic implications (much bigger than going to a zero carbon economy in the same time).
> My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in tower blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
What are you willing to give up for that future, because the reduction in population that would make this possible doesn't come for free.
I'm not suggesting that this is unrealistic or that we should not reduce emissions.
However, my view is that we live and work to make our lives more interesting and enjoyable, not to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of squeezing ever more of us on the planet.
The end of population growth, and even more population reduction, are massive changes to the way society and our economy work, I fully agree.
But ultimately this is unavoidable if we accept that population cannot grow forever on a finite planet (and it is already expected that it will stabilise of even decrease by the end of the century). I'm suggesting that we should therefore embrace this and see it as a positive rather than a negative (which is the usual view) because it has tremendous potential for making quality of life better for all humans in a sustainable way.
London is better because the Tories weren't able to abolish its public transport network and sell it off piecemeal - because the government's own workforce lives there and can't get anything done without that transport system, but even in a city with a dysfunctional semi-privatised mess of a transport system it's still just better than trying to turn everything into highways stacked upon highways forever so everybody can use private cars. There's actually a 70s-80s division of my city that was built with that approach, over the river, and it's awful there. But it's nice here and further into the city.
> perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life
I definitely think people who believe this should agree which of you will die so that the others can "enjoy life". Are you volunteering? Because if not you don't have an actual proposal here, just ordinary selfishness.
Why do people feel the need to always make this sort of ridiculous comment?
Population cannot keep growing forever but it is still seen as positive and needed. First step would be to remove all incentive to have more children and to prioritise education and family planning worldwide. Then, we can think of how to adapt society to the consequences (which are coming anyway because that's already starting to happen). I'm only suggesting that we should embrace the trend instead of trying to delay it.
- Tram
- Train
- Electric bicycle hire
- Electric moped hire
- Bicycle hire
- Foot
- Taxi
- Bus
- Own bicycle / ebike / electric scooter / moped
- Aeroplane
- Own car (if you can afford ~€40k to buy a parking space)
- Ferry
Transport options available in American suburbs:
- Own car
It seems to me that most Americans are already living under severe restrictions : )
- Lightrail
- Train (Amtrack station downtown, accessible from lightrail)
- Bus (w/bike rack, bus stop 100ft from my front door)
- Electric bicycle hire
- Electric scooter hire
- Foot (nearest grocery is 1.2mi, nearest restaurants are 0.8mi)
- Taxi
- Own bicycle (bike trail from neighborhood to the office park where I work)
- Aeroplane (lightrail goes to one of the largest international airports)
- Own Car (large driveway, two car garage w/ electric vehicle charging)
- Own bicycle
- Own Motorcycle
(Although living 2km away from a supermarket is an alien concept to me. I have three within a hundred metres.)
Its then the same thing when it comes to going to restaurants. I can easily walk to three or four restaurants. Bike, add another handful. Bus, add another dozen. A 10min drive? Literally a dozen options of practically any kind of food you could possibly imagine.
So you get less choices for more time if you ride a bike or take the bus. This is the math that most Americans do. Since its somewhat cheap to own a car for most of the US, they don't even stop to think of the cost of driving versus the cost of riding a bike or walking or taking the bus.
As to having a supermarket close by, the supermarkets near me as absolutely massive. The Kroger near me has at least 30 aisles, a full deli, full bakery, full butcher stand, full florist, fresh sushi station, massive produce section, and a hot and ready to go meal area. And its only about average sized for the area. If you've never seen them, modern American supermarkets are incredibly massive, larger than what I've seen of most European groceries. There's usually a bit of distance between them because they're such massive places. Its often not just a small hole in the wall grocer with a dozen or so aisles and a produce section.
I think part of the difference is density - my city is only about 3km x 3km. If I cycled 5 miles I'd end up in the next town along. I just looked on TripAdvisor to see how many restaurants were within that range but it maxxed out at 1,000+.
We do have big supermarkets too, at the edge of the city - about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart. I've never really seen why I would go there, except perhaps for ease of parking if I was going to buy a huge amount of food with a car. And this is France so even the tiny supermarkets make room for a bakery : )
So the maths here is mostly that cars are just negative. I'm very optimistic that electric bikes will begin to dominate transport in European cities - we just need to build the infrastructure to make sure that they're safe to ride.
The average Walmart is twice that size at ~180,000sqft.
Big American stores are absolutely massive, and they're all over the place.
https://247wallst.com/retail/2014/03/22/walmart-now-has-six-...
You mentioned you had like one of these massive stores at the edge of your town, and it was still only half as big. I've got several of these monsters within 8mi of my home.
There are broadly 5 big shops within comfortable distance of me - one of them is between 150-200,000 sqft [1], so I guess a mid-sized American store. But I've only been to one of them, when I needed some electronics, because I don't see the point otherwise. Presumably other people do or the shops wouldn't exist...
Unrelated - does "town" mean something different in American English? To me it means a place bigger than a village but smaller than a city. The city I'm in has 300k - 1m people in it, depending on how you draw the boundaries.
[1]: its car park extends onto its roof which I guess might be amusing to an American. Land is expensive here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metr...
I just checked Google Maps, there are almost a dozen of these 180,000sqft Walmarts within a 10min drive (a "comfortable distance" here) from my home. And that's just Walmart, there's also probably another six or so Target locations of similar size. I do agree this is absolutely excessive and insane though, there's such a massive amount of real estate of just big box retail.
The reason why these stores are seemingly dominating local retail is the same reason why cars are dominating travel in the US or why Amazon seems to be dominating internet retail. Apparent convenience. Why bother going to a clothier, then go to a cobbler, then go to the electronics store, then go to a video store, then go to the furniture store, then go to the auto parts store, then go to the butcher, then go to the baker, then go to the grocer. Instead, you can do practically every bit of your shopping in a single store, all at once. Find some new linens for your bed, then go grab a new pair of shoes, better stock up on some fresh underwear, maybe that 40" TV we got a few years ago isn't cutting it get a bigger one, then grab some milk and eggs and we'll check out in the Auto department to pick up the car after the oil change.
I do understand consolidating regular purchases into one trip - I just go to the supermarket for food (and occasionally Asian supermarkets for non-perishables that French supermarkets don't sell). I don't see the added convenience in doing the same with once-in-5-year purchases. If anything I'd probably get fed up with walking past loads of things I wasn't remotely interested in buying. Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.
I'm definitely in the more special case kind of area, by choice. There were many reasons why I picked the place where I live, and transit options were one of the key ones.
> Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.
I feel you on this idea. I'm not really a huge fan of these ridiculously giant stores with absolutely massive parking lots, I'd like for smaller grocers to be more popular. In the US at least, smaller grocers are dying, and grocers surviving are building bigger stores to try and compete more on the level of those 180,000sqft behemoths. The death of the smaller grocers leave behind 15-20,0000sqft largely empty retail storefronts around, at least in the big cities.
> horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses.
There's a municipal golf course real close to my house, at the edge of my neighborhood. What is so horrifying about it? This land was prairie land, so its not like we're greenifying the desert or something like that. It would have been a bunch of small rolling hills, creeks, small ponds, and grasses before it was a golf course. The people in the area like to golf, why is it any worse than it just being a more generic park? Would you have also expressed such horror if it was filled with frisbee golf courses, or soccer fields?
That said, within my neighborhood there's a several acre park that is a bit more of generic greenspace. It has playgrounds for kids, a fishing pond, a soccer field, a baseball field, a softball field, etc. It also has a bunch of picnic tables and grills scattered at the tree lines. These kinds of parks are pretty common around where I live as well. It is not like all parks are golf courses. Certainly more than what you'd see in France, but golf is also significantly more popular here than in urban areas of France I'd imagine. If nobody was using them I'd get the point of them being horrified at the waste, but for many of the golf courses you need to book your tee time days in advance.
FWIW we do have golf clubs here - Cannes / Antibes in particular has loads - but that's unrepresentative of France as a whole.
Your park does sound nice. I'd heard stories of Americans in suburbs having to drive their dogs to places where they could be walked - maybe it was an exaggeration.
At least when it comes to the municipal golf courses, those are usually open to the public during the day to walk all the trails around the courses. They're often also connected to the bike trails in the municipal area which are then usually connected to a lot of the other parks and nature preserves. There are over 80 miles of bike and walking trails in my small city that connect most of the parks and greenspaces. They are not bike lanes on a busy street; these are separate paths that cut through behind neighborhoods, down utility corridors, go under busy bridges, etc.
And I do acknowledge many French people love golf and there are golf courses around, but especially compared to DFW I can't imagine on average its as popular. I'd wager at least 20% of families have at least one full set of golf clubs, and a large percentage of them do some kind of golf event a few times a year. Dallas is the home of places like Top Golf, which is a massively popular evening outing. You wouldn't be able to even think about building something like this inside most urban areas of France, but DFW has four and they're always like a 30-40min wait.
* Its only a few miles on walking trails, but my dog would probably be halfway worn out just getting to the park and would be completely exhausted starting out the trip home.
I used to drive 40km to work every day in single direction. Not gonna happen with a bike.
And frankly I'm sick of being lumped in to large generalizations of America that simply don't apply to me or millions of other people living here.
The media (including social media, and the internet) largely consists of the most divisive and stereotyped parts of life. America doesn't consist solely of highways and single family communities. There isn't just one "American lifestyle."
My first few times in the US were in NYC, where I found a way of life that is very close to what I know as a Parisian. Imagine my surprise discovering basically any other city in the US.
You might not be part of that population, but the US problem goes way beyond a problem of perception, and there are numbers to confirm it.
Racism is another one. I don't have any fscks left to give for anyone who wants to lecture me on racism in America. Our racial tensions are only visible because we aren't totally marginalizing (or cleansing for that matter) our minority populations.
I would say this idealized environment is not really present in Amsterdam, but it surely is in the rest of .nl
But aside from that, when I started being remote my social interactions went way up in terms of quantity and quality. I was free to choose where I lived, had lower cost of living, and had more time and less stress and other factors that would put me in a bad mood. Consequently, I spent more time with extended family members on both sides of my family. I played more with my children. I picked up healthier hobbies, including one where I train with a team at the gym. My social circle is far more diverse, more distinct from work. As others have experienced during COVID: I got to know my neighbors better, and we look out for each other. Having your social interaction primarily at work is very far from ideal, and in my experience and from many anecdotes here, cutting down the work interaction helps most others.
I live in a "European city with good public transportation" and looking out my living room window I can see the main motorway into town, and it is bumper to bumper to traffic every single morning and evening. So obviously someone here is using their cars to get to and from work.
Think that depends a lot on where you live. When I was a student, I didn't use a car at all, but my wife did during my PhD to get to work, and now we both have to have cars because our commutes are not practical by public transport. This is living in the Midlands in the UK.
The difference, briefly: bright greens (I prefer Viridian†) support a high-technology road to sustainability, while crunchy greens are about bringing our carbon footprint down to sane parameters through traditional lifeways and reduction in energy use.
† https://www.viridiandesign.org
Simply, we don't have time to indulge the crunchies any longer. Carbon zero isn't going to cut it, we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and that calls for substantial additional energy.
Either we get everyone up to a nearly-American energy budget, with plenty left over for carbon capture, or we reduce everyone's standard to that of an Indian peasant and still roast.
There are Americans living in big houses, with good insulation and heat pumps, solar, and a battery bank, whose homes are net exporters of energy. This is not a total accounting due to embodied energy, but it points the way.
To me the solution has always been simple: tax carbon and apply the proceeds directly to subsidizing replacements for polluting technology. If you ask people to give up their lifestyle to 'save the planet' they're just going to ignore you, and if you try and force them, expect violent resistance.
The hard truth is that America has already flattened carbon emissions, and given our great wealth we're uniquely positioned to pay the new-technology premium to fund the transition to a sustainable technology stack. Most of us are willing, some of us are stubborn, but insisting that everyone live in a pod and eat bugs isn't a winning move. We're wealthy, relatively far north, and well armed: why should we?
We're not Europeans here, Raphael. We don't want to be.
Secondly, I've been on business trips to the UK, and the motorways are jammed in the morning, as someone else said here.
Maybe 20-somethings live in apartments and take the bus, but even in your country, home ownership is high and many people drive their cars.
Speak for yourself. Almost everybody I know would be thrilled to see better transit, walking, and bicycle options even if it means getting rid of their car and yard.
But if 100 employees are all at home and are heating/cooling their houses all with different levels of insulation and efficiency, how does that compare to an office building that is controlled and built to be efficient?
Or the amount of electric they use to power their home workstation and radio, rather than a shared office radio? Or lower power machines.
Or the more shopping trips for lunch or deliveroo orders - because I can't just walk down the road to grab a sandwich.
Or those who now drive or catch the bus/train after work to go for a pint - rather than stopping in on the way back.
I'm totally all for staying working at home, but I do recognise that it's not just the commuting that has an effect here
There are just too many factors involved to make a fair comparison - especially across countries
I don't really see a difference in electricity unless I'm traveling for an extended period but I have very limited AC which I don't use much. As for heat, the difference associated with dropping the temperature maybe 10 degrees F for 8 hours a day doesn't add up to a lot.
Commuting costs completely dominate in terms of energy costs. As to getting delivery for lunch, that’s well outside of most peoples price range. The vast majority of people are going to simply buy more food on their normal shopping trips.
The running the same computer hardware at home or the office is meaningless for the environment, but you will notice the difference in your personal electric bill.
Radio’s use minimal electricity ~25w depending on volume, which is why you can find hand crank models etc.
> Home temperature is fairly consistent over the day.
You must live in a mild climate where the outside temperature doesn't change much because everywhere I've lived in the world, you constantly turn on/off heating/fans/air-conditioning depending on the season and time of day.
> Commuting costs completely dominate in terms of energy costs.
Assuming usage of cars. Leave the US and generally public transportation is a thing used by most people. The trains/trams/buses still travel the same routes and times as before-pandemic times.
> The running the same computer hardware at home or the office
Why is that? My PCs at work each use ~150W and I never turn them off because Wake-On-Lan doesn't always work. I presume it's the same for most of my 700 co-workers who also WFH. That's a lot of KW and not to be scoffed at.
> Radio’s use minimal electricity ~25w
You are taking the minimal example of radio. I would guess that more than a negligible amount of people have something more substantial at home which uses more than 25w (including amp/speakers/wifi to connect to Alexa, etc), granted it's probably still not much and could even balance out with people who don't listen to radio while working? Who knows, IMO it's futile to even try to calculate this value globally.
Across the US and presumably the world mass transit reduced service in response to reduced ridership. If WFH becomes more common that will definitely cover more areas as schedules very much are based on demand. Ex: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/03/24/coronavirus-mta-subw...
> IMO it's futile to even try to calculate this value globally.
Electricity is directly measured at the grid level and 2020 saw a clear reduction, how much of that relates to WFH is more questionable.
Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost more than an office space optimized for it, right?
Depends on the comparison, someone microwaving lunch at home or the office is basically identical. Restaurants can be more efficient than cooking at home, but for example the open air style refrigerators used in some restaurants have terrible energy efficiency. https://www.kitchenall.com/open-air-merchandisers.html?p=2 At the extreme end when talking out door heating for guest comfort etc restaurants can be shockingly bad because it’s generally the least important aspect of the business.
> Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost more than an office optimized for it.
Depends, the comparison might be to not having an office and therefore not needing to heat or cool it at all. There is some opportunity to let empty homes get closer to ambient temperature and therefore reduce heat gain or loss, but it’s not clear cut. We can say that total electricity demand dropped in the pandemic which suggests WFH is likely more energy efficient even with empty office space.
So, sure in some cases it’s better and in some cases worse, but that really doesn’t cover the commute costs.
I was just trying to point out that just the fact of stopping people commuting doesn't really mean a lot, there are a lot more things in play.
I'm in the UK, and our houses are not really built for extreme temperature fluctuations, so in the summer I run the portable AC - which is terrible but otherwise we can't sleep. In the winter, it's crazy cold - but at least now we have the log burner in so not as bad.
I think it does depend on where you are in the world, I can't walk to a pub, or a shop where I live. I have to drive further than my office to get to a supermarket or town.
But yes, I may have not made great points in that post!
No need for regulation in this regard: greed will do the work.
Of course, if the cost to companies is positive, things are less clear cut.
If you want any regulation here, the boring standard econ answer applies: a carbon tax.
I suspect that there are investments with large fixed costs companies can make to make remote productivity go up. (Not so much investments in eg actual hardware, but eg in how you set up team processes.)
That would explain heavy pushback from companies before the pandemic, but also that things seem to be running ok now.
But a big part of why lower density is bad is because it leads to lots of commuting.
If I lived in the suburbs and had to use a car for most trips, then my carbon footprint would be substantially higher, even without having to commute. This map gets to the heart of the issue: https://twitter.com/TheJakeSchmidt/status/142478272240963174...
(I work from Singapore for a London based company, for example.)
This claim is false when they are forcing employees to commute and not offsetting the emissions from this required activity.
Edit: The OP makes an extraordinary claim about remote work and reduction in CO2. I would assume members of HN would be intellectually curious enough to want to dig deeper.
> A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
> This assumes the average gasoline vehicle on the road today has a fuel economy of about 22.0 miles per gallon and drives around 11,500 miles per year.
I'd pad the estimate for carbon saved and say like 3.5ton/yr per work from home employee.
Edit - The Ford F-150 is the best selling "car" in the US by a long shot. That isn't all fleet sales - a significant number of normal people own trucks for one reason or another (myself included - Honda Ridgeline).
You need a heck of a lot of 10-15mpg vehicles to drag the fleet average down to 22. Most white collar employees who own trucks aren't commuting in them and even then there's more people commuting in 40+mpg subcompacts and hybrids so it should more than balance out.
Look at a high class parking garage, 22mpg just doesn't pencil out. 28-30mpg sounds believable.
Welcome to Texas.
> Fuel cost estimates assume national average fuel prices and assume you drive 15,000 miles each year, 45% under highway driving conditions (steady speeds with little or no stopping) and 55% in city driving (low speeds with lots of stopping).
Noting that I'm not the typical home worker, but I went from an average of 600 miles/month (7200 miles/year) to 30 miles/month over the past year and a half. This took my carbon footprint for driving from 1.7 T/y to 0.1 T/y.
The flip side of this number is (for me) that I went from heating the house only a few hours a day in the winter to heating or cooling one room to comfortable. I don't have good numbers on my electrical footprint change. This would again be different with different life circumstances (number of other people in the house, size of house / apartment, etc...)
If it would reduce 20% of all energy usage worldwide it would hugely significant.
> The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high.
Reasonable, but source please so I can learn more.
> If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.
A more extraordinary claim. I also need sources to learn more.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f...
Granted an unknown portion of the reduced transportation was decreased economic activity, so presumably the affect of permanent remote work would be smaller.