Zoom has done more to reduce emissions than electric vehicles | Hacker News Reader

Zoom has done more to reduce emissions than electric vehicles

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62 pointscaaqil19 comments

This is attributing 100% of the difference between driving and not driving to work to zoom, which seems very very generous.

Better title would be "Working from home has done more..."

Rather, videoconferencing has. If there were no Zoom we would be using its competitors.

Transportation in the US aid particularly bad, but I’m not convinced that there has been a reduction in overall energy usage due to WFH.

For one thing, I haven’t seen any news outlet, or other source that I frequent, show that the US overall consumed less energy over the past 2 years.

If WFH was truly saving us energy it would have shown up in the overall numbers somewhere, and if it did, I suspect that would have been very big news.

And I can see mechanisms why WFH may not actually have led to an energy consumption decline.

The biggest to me would be the fact that most Americans live in single family homes with poor insulation. These require a lot of energy for heating and cooling. As opposed to the almost certainly more energy conserving office building spaces most of these White collar workers work in.

In addition, these office spaces are obviously cooling far less volume per capita than a home air conditioning system would have to for even 1-2 people working out of even the smallest apartment in a big city.

And heating/cooling is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the US.

That’s just 1. However, there’s probably other stuff. So, for example, WFH may not actually have reduced all that many trips. Because most people tend to run errands on their way back to work, and pick up food on their way to work at a drive in.

If they’re continuing those habits, WFH means they may still be driving out to pick up breakfast in the morning (or even if they order in, someone’s driving), and taking the car out again to run the errands they used to. So they might be canceling out a ton of the saved commuting energy as well.

WFH, in new insulated houses, with p.v./eolic systems do reduce much energy consumption, only it not a widespread thing and can't be so far. That's the real computation error.

If you carefully read what neoliberals have published about green new deal and great reset you'll discover the "new urban agenda", where essentially reading under the trees you found a neofeudal society vision where rich-enough people who can afford substantial autonomy will happily live in modern homes while most, the "new poor", are concentrated in prisons called smart cities, try to compare just

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex...

with

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-w... https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34827717.html https://youtu.be/p-9X8Z2kJt8

Did you see differences? What I see is a stereotypical ancient Greek "useful idiot" with an "idiotic smile" (sorry for being rude, my poor English limit my choice of words) like the one you see here https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... happily living in a sarcophagus, receiving a porridge of mixed grains and crushed insects by a drone, living to work as he/she is told to. Those who can afford being "outside" will benefit from such work doing a hopefully somewhat happy life. Not much differently than the colonial period of slavery where westerns people elicit big benefit from slave work in the colonies, in that case slaves where from ALL the world and just few benefit from them. Nothing really new under the Sun.

If you are moving from "emissions" to "energy usage", then electric cars also do nothing. The question is if emissions went down, not energy use.

NASA says that CO2 emissions were down, so does the NIH. About 5%.

But that's only greenhouse gases. Air pollution was down as well. Because it turns out non-CO2 pollution in smokestacks can be absorbed by filters not present on tailpipes.

Big business execs: "climate change is bad... but not bad enough for me to let people keep working remotely"

More like the pandemic has...

Has it? https://twitter.com/steeve/status/1502734175018835974?s=21

Now find the impact of EVs.

We need much bigger changes to bend that curve. We have done so little when measured against what needs to happen.

I still think anything that helps is worth acknowledging.

Funny, I've been working remotely and and video chatting daily without zoom for 6 years but I guess Zoom is totally responsible for my entire work situation.

What about heating or cooling hundreds of homes during the day vs heating or cooling a single office? Same with lighting (though less impactful).

It does stand to reason that not driving to work would be more efficient than any form of transport, even a bicycle.

> If you truly want to reduce emissions, then you should be looking at changing the way people use transport (or avoiding it altogether) rather than merely improving the fuel source.

On top of that, only 29% of emissions in the US come from transportation.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

"only"

Yeah maybe he thinks he wants the other 70%. Which is far less likely to be reduced than the 30% that is in large part entirely unnecessary, and only enforced by capitalist masters for productivity gains.

I meant to say that even if we solve individual transportation there is still a huge chunk that that leaves out. Heck, even of those 29%, only half is individual transportation.

Teams and its cpu/gpu usage will make the pendulum swing back.

Seriously though, I wonder if there are some events that require really high fidelity/bandwidth that will be replaced by videoconferencing in the next few years.

Nah. Unless it's a social call, the video stays off in our team.

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