Massively increased WFH (triggered by the pandemic) has done more to improve carbon emissions from transportation than any electric vehicle movement will ever do. yet you don't see a hard line top-down push for more WFH, only resistance, why?
The software industry, and things similar to it, like finance, certainly are suitable to work-from-home answers.
But construction, service trades (plumbing, electrical, roofing...), transportation, factory work, retail, restaurant work, farming, janitorial, and more, require people to show up for work at specific places.
How do you mandate that the work most people do, that can't be done from home, should be done from home. Yes the lock-down reduced carbon emissions. But those bounced right back, except for those few "tech" jobs that stayed remote.
Maybe require tech workers to stay home? Maybe the tech-worker shuttles could be electric? I don't think government is particularly good at nuanced rule-making. Let's solve the problem some other way.
Yes. If humans were any good at thinking, we’d be trying a little harder to stop pooping where we eat. We’d have been decarbonizing everything a whole lot sooner.
But we’re not all that good at thinking, so here we are and this is how it’s going.
Who is saying this? There are some businesses types saying to go back to the office. There are some environmentalists saying drive an EV. They are different people. There are hundreds of different view points from people with an opinon of what you should do.
The generic "they" that are supposedly controlling your life is just lazy victim thinking
Some people are saying that, but if you rationally think about the actual claims, it's clearly not like that.
The goal of net zero by 2050 was clearly set by some rounding. If we achieve net zero by 2060, it does not mean that in 2050 we are at 100% and boom, in 2060 we are at 0%. It means we are somewhere at 10-15% in 2050. It won't change that much the trajectory of the climate change.
We will clearly get to net zero. My bet is that in the US we will get there by 2040. It's going to take longer in China and India. But working from home will not make the difference between apocalypse and paradise.
Ah, the old "it doesn't matter if we do X, so long as we do Y" where "X" keeps shifting to whatever the arguer wants it to be in that moment. In this case "X" is the 860,000 US office workers driving fossil fuel cars back and forth to work every day for their entire working life, which I was told was a bad thing, but now it actually doesn't really matter.
The average car in the US emits 350 g CO2 per mile [1]. The average American commute is 40 miles [2]. That's 14 kg of CO2 per commuter, or 14 million kilograms per 1 million commuters. So, about 14000 tons of CO2 per day, or about 5 million tons per year. 5 MT.
Every year the US emits about 5 GT of CO2 equivalent [3]. If a million people stop commuting right now, the US will reduce its emissions by 0.1%.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1223-janu...
[2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...
Look, some people want to work from home, and it's good for a lot of reasons, but climate has nothing to do with that.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Since car commuting also correlates with other negatives, that seems like a good thing to try to reduce since there are very few downsides — someone giving up their commute is _happy_ about it, unlike a business being asked to stop using an industrial furnace or a farm being told they shouldn't truck in feed. Every bit we save in one area gives us more time to work on the others.
Big relative to what?
Let's run the numbers.
For a 2000 sqf home the AC consumes about 3-4 kW of electricity [1]. The vast majority of electricity in the US is produced with natural gas, where 1 kWh of electricity results in about 0.5 kg of CO2 [2]. Let's say 1 million people run the AC for 10 hours per day during the hot season, which is roughly 100 business days per year. That's 40 kWh per day, or 20 kg per person, or 20000 tons per one million people. Multiplying with 100 we get 2 MT of CO2.
Heating is probably similar. Obviously heating does not happen at the same time as AC, and people in the Southern states use more AC, and those in the Northern ones use more heating. Anyway, let's say heating adds another 3 MT of CO2, so overall the commute and the AC and the heating come to 10 MT of CO2 or 0.2% of the emissions.
[1] https://itlandes.com/how-many-watts-does-an-air-conditioner-...
Also, I thought of another thing you should factor in: restaurants. They're incredibly wasteful with food. With no office workers, many restaurants (especially around offices) have drastically fewer customers. You'll need to include the carbon savings from some percentage of the food that goes to waste.
Yes, I was just being conservative. The savings on the office side would be much lower, because as I said, offices are more efficient than homes. Plus, most offices would not close if people work from home.
As for restaurants, you are going into second and third order impacts. Why not calculate the savings from all the dry-cleaning that doesn't happen because people can work in their sweat pants at home?
Yes, that's what systemic change is, and you appear to be presuming (with your mocking jab about sweat pants, give me a break) that it's irrelevant to study second and third order effects of large social changes. That's not a very credible perspective to have.
We can’t solve the problem by ignoring the government and government regulations. The government not only is failing to protect the planet from the employers destroying it, they are such an employer. The public is MORE environmentalist than the government will tolerate. It is the stultifying nature of the government you allude to that’s causing the issue, the government is actively resisting the environmentalism of its own staff by threatening their jobs.
Work from home will let us get more gas vehicles off the road than EVs ever will. Government and legal reform can disempower those forcing others to pollute.
Even with a sizable increase in WFH, the people who were previously dissuaded from driving alone by traffic have filled much of that road space with cars (in the case of Seattle, nearly all of it).
[1] https://carbonliteracy.com/fast-fashions-carbon-footprint/
I always assumed that WFH is better for emissions but that assumption isn't necessarily true.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282716/oil-consumption-i...