Dirty downside of 'return to office'; ending WFH could make climate crisis worse | Hacker News Reader

Dirty downside of 'return to office'; ending WFH could make climate crisis worse

businessinsider.com

181 pointsmyshpa183 comments

I love this story [1] of how folks in Jalandhar and north India were able to see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years due to the lack of traffic pollution during the COVID lockdowns. It gives some hope as to what is possible.

Relatedly, I'd recommend watching the documentary The Year Earth Changed [2] which is about several environmental systems that recovered to some degree during COVID.

I don't think we should necessarily aim to restrict commuting to protect the environment, but now there's evidence that WFH + transitioning to cleaner energy sources can make a significant impact.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/himalayas-visible-lockdow...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XswV_yqPq28

It reminds of joke around that time: The air is so clear nowadays that one can even see their dark future clearly

> able to see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years due to the lack of traffic pollution

One though regarding this. I think complicated and expensive emission controls on cars became grudgingly acceptable because it reduced smog - which people can see.

I wonder if anything would have happened if smog wasn't visible. For example, I wonder if particulates might be worse than smog.

>became grudgingly acceptable because it reduced smog

as well as switching from leaded gasoline. within my lifetime we no longer hear about acid rain. it took a lot of convincing to make the switch to unleaded, but the results are obvious. CFCs from spray cans are also an example.

essentially, we've known for decades that emission controls can allow for the climate to repair itself. it just takes a lot of convincing to get people/industry to accept those changes. we didn't need a global pandemic. or did we? GenZ has no experience with the examples i mentioned, so maybe this was their version???

Acid rain was stopped by controlling the amount of sulfur in the fuel and adding catalyzing converters at the engines output. It has no relation with lead.

Okay, so I confused the cause of the acid rain with an entirely different man made climate atrocity. The point still stands if not even stronger as we've just provided a separate example

True, acid rain was not caused my lead but there was public and industry resistance to requiring all vehicles use catalytic converters. Lead had to be removed from fuel because it corroded the catalytic converter. It was chaotic for several years but the car industry was able to make it work. The market didn’t remediate acid rain, regulation did.

That region of Punjab (Doab region) and Himachal (Kangra Valley) is heavily industrialized.

When the COVID lockdowns in India kicked into enforcement, factories shut down, and millions of migrant workers from Eastern UP and Bihar left.

The area in the Doab and Kangra regions was better simply because factories shut down and haven't returned, fueling a localized recession that has resurrected the ghost of Khalistan, exacerbated the Heroin epidemic in the region, and further incentivized the (by Indian standards) highly educated and economically well off local population to emigrate to "Kaneda", "Noo Jeeland", and "Oostralia".

Hopefully with the massive $1.3 billion API/Pharmaceutial precursor industrial park the BJP and Congress Party are building together in that area [0] along with the high speed rail [1] making the commute time to Greater Chandigarh (the largest city and economy north of Delhi) and New Delhi doable within 1 hour and 2.5 hours respectively, we might see an economic recovery.

Source: extended family live in the region

[0] - https://www.outlookindia.com/outlook-spotlight/department-of...

[1] - https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/new-delhi-una-vande...

Feynman wrote that in 70s, before emissions control, he could barely breathe in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. The smog burned the throat and eyes.

I want to watch that show "The Year Earth Changed" but I'm afraid it will just make me so sad.

"Could" is a joke. Not commuting vs commuting with respect to its impact on the climate? The resources not spent by staying home are collectively enormous.

It’s probably not this simple. A lot of people commute by public transport (that’s running anyway or running on electric), walk, or bicycle. The world is a big place. Heating/cooling office buildings might be more efficient than everyone doing this to their homes. I don’t know one way or the other, likely neither do you. Making big pronouncements (or deciding huge societal norms like where work) because climate change is probably not a good idea.

It says in the article:

"Ty Colman, a cofounder and the chief revenue officer at Optera, a carbon-accounting firm that helps organizations quantify their emissions, said that in general, a fully remote company with no offices has the lowest impact-per-employee per year, at less than 1 metric ton of carbon-dioxide equivalent. That includes the uptick in energy used to power computers, keep the lights on, and maintain a comfortable temperature at home."

(versus 1.4 tons for hybrid and 1.7 tons for full time in the office). There's quite a lot more about the effects on the environment in the article.

I wonder if it also factors in travel for remote employees though. Every fully remote company I’ve ever worked for has had regular in-person meetups where people fly to some central location a few times a year.

And every office-based company I've ever worked for has had regular travel to shuttle people between offices or send teams to offsites. I'm not sure there are massive differences in travel in remote companies - although maybe there should be.

I guess you've only worked for big companies. Smaller ones only have one office.

Small companies are, indeed, small.

You’re missing the point: small remote = flying to meet everyone. Small with office attendance = no need to fly to meet.

I've never worked at a small remote only company that regularly flew the whole company anywhere. I've worked at one company with 75 employees or so that flew 5-10 remote engineers up to NYC to meet with the rest of the company who lived within driving distance (though they were all remote).

I doubt there are all that many people meeting the following conditions: work for small companies with one office, live far enough away from that office to need to fly, work for a company with enough extra money sitting around to fly everyone out, work for a company that wants to fly everyone out, are willing to fly out. I really doubt there are enough to have much impact on carbon emissions.

Only if it’s globally remote. There are plenty of small companies where people work from home, but nevertheless all live in close proximity

Given that a one-way flight from seattle to san francisco generates ~0.1t of CO2, and a flight from new york generates around 0.35. One or two meetups can easily blow away those savings.

I think this only considers the direct impact of “work”.

If remote work means people switch their city flats for suburban or rural houses, the impact could reverse

Last time I checked it was roughly double, but that didn't included the fact the house could have solar which isn't really an option for an apartment.

Impact is pretty much more heating/cooling required for house and I'd imagine that would compensate at least part of that.

So that’s the building itself, but then there’s the massive impact of a non-urban home due to network spread (roads, water, electricity, shops, services etc are all less carbon efficient when spread over large surfaces per capita)

Various bodies that track worldwide congestion/traffic show traffic trending upwards for years now. Of course not counting the CoVid year(s) but afterwards, it has been on an upwards trend. Even in "less developed" areas in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa the trends are to greater congestion and the associated lost time, deaths, increased pollution and lower quality of life.

https://inrix.com/blog/2022-traffic-scorecard/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/road-con...

https://www.itdp.org/2021/03/22/the-next-pandemic-surge-traf...

>A lot of people commute by public transport (that’s running anyway or running on electric), walk, or bicycle.

Do you think people riding public transit pollute more or less than people who don't commute at all?

That's addressed in the sentence immediately following that quote

>Heating/cooling office buildings might be more efficient than everyone doing this to their homes.

Heating and cooling office buildings AND heating and cooling homes is less efficient than just heating and cooling homes. Many people aren't stopping heating/cooling their homes when they leave, or just reduce it, or don't do it at all since there are still other people in the home.

It's almost as if the drive to end fossil fuel use and build vast mixed-use Arcologies at the end of the 70's were good ideas that conservative politicians overturned and here we are in the hell they made for us, trying to fend off their rabid supporters.

Conservative politicians ended those in urban areas, which largely votes liberal? Is this US conservative or world-wide? Because the meaning of conservative varies.

IDK about you, but in temperate middle Europe if you don't heat your house at least some when it's empty, Oct-Apr, you are going to spend way more to get it at 19-20°C when you come back. Not to mention the pipes risk exploding if you let it go close 0°.

That's incorrect. It will always cost more to maintain a temperature while away than to heat/cool when you aren't. The area under the curve of temperature difference vs. energy use is what you're optimizing for, and that curve has a higher slope when the temperature difference is high.

It's not that simple. If all of society turns all of it's home heating to max at 5pm to prepare for a 6pm arrival, we'll need to overinvest in either generating capacity or storage.

Not to mention the fact that houses aren't completely empty when the adults aren't there. Kids, pets, plants, and last but not least, pipes with water in them. All of these will die horribly in cold temperatures.

Afraid that with 30 or so years experience of heating my home, evidence contradicts you

You can't just point to an efficiency number without considering the entire system. A gasoline engine has a higher efficiency than petrol on Liter per 100km metric, does it mean it is preferred?

- What if they are two adults working from the same home vs two different office spaces. - What if you have kids or taking care of elderly at your home. They don't need heat? - What about the quality and amount of food consumed? Would restaurant/sandwich shop near your office have the same preferences for your vegetables? (e.g. not imported from the other side of world, organic, fair-trade?)

people cool and heat their homes when they go home though.

You must not have heard how, apparently, most Americans do not turn off (or down) the heat / A/C when they're not home. It's pretty crazy yet is a real thing!

If you haven't run the numbers you could in fact be wasting more electricity by fully turning off your system when you aren't home. Depending on your home, system (central air versus room unit), how long you are away, climate, and temperature preferences it can often make sense to leave your AC or heating on at a different temperature versus fully shutting it off.

Having your home heat up to 90 degrees while you're doing some weekend errands only to crank the AC to cool it back down to 70 to 75 will often times use more electricity than if you just set the AC to 80 while you were gone.

> If you haven't run the numbers you could in fact be wasting more electricity by fully turning off your system when you aren't home

I've seen similar statements a few times, even in this HN thread. Most articles just repeat the statement without showing any numbers. This article does show numbers and the graphs. From the article:

> What we found was that even when the A/C temporarily spikes to recover from the higher indoor temperatures, the overall energy consumption in the setback cases is still less than when maintaining a constant temperature throughout the day.

Full data on https://theconversation.com/does-turning-the-air-conditionin...

They are multiple reason why it is better to leave AC on. But it really depends on the house.

One main reason is that when AC is off is that humidity increases which causes cooling harder. This is because the cooling process of an AC unit involves removing humidity from the air as well as heat. When the air is humid, the AC unit has to work harder to remove the excess moisture from the air, which can decrease its overall cooling efficiency.

The other reason is that house and furniture will store heat and then cooling will get harder.

Also AC runs more efficiently if its constant.

Digging into the article, it's a hypothetical home and they are only testing fully off versus ideal temperature blasting.

I don't think it's always true, which is why I listed the factors that can influence it.

But I am also getting into home automation and just watched a video where some one ran through the numbers on their specific house after getting electricity monitoring connected to their heating and Home Assistant. It's not that clear cut and really depends on your specific home.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8NRC1XrrA

I don't see how this could be possible, because it should always cost more energy to maintain a higher temperature gradient, assuming a non-zero R-value. If there are other factors you're optimizing for, such as energy cost rather than overall usage, then I could see how avoiding peak pricing could net savings in cost, but the laws of thermodynamics are pretty absolute if you're optimizing for energy consumption.

You're assuming that the system is the same in both cases. It's not.

1. You run the A/C all day: the gas stays both cold, and dry. Cold, dry air is, it turns out, ok as an insulator. Not very good thermal conductivity at all.

2. You turn the A/C on at the end of the day in a warm, humid environment. The air is moist, which causes two compounding problems: first, the volume of air you need to cool just holds more energy than it would if it was dry. But second, because moist air is more thermally conductive, it's better at coupling heat in from the outside, so more energy is coming into the system as you're trying to cool it.

At least, that's the argument. I haven't run the numbers to check orders of magnitude or anything. I wasn't expecting the difference in thermal properties of dry and moist air to be that significant, but there are some very interesting numbers at https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/moist-air-properties-d_12....

Relaxing HVAC usage such that the temperature increases from 75F to 78F, and then is lowered back to 75F saves energy compared with holding it at 75F. The max temperature can't be too high because the system might need hours to lower the temperature by 3 degrees. e.g. A family leaves at 7 a.m. AC turns off. The high temperature is reached around 1 p.m. Cooling resumes at 2:30 p.m. so it can hit the target temperature by 5 p.m.

I only know of two mechanisms that could make holding a temperature more efficient. Heat pumps in winter time should be left to maintain a temperature. If it is well below freezing outside the heat pump may need to fallback to a secondary mechanism of resistive heating. Therefore it's better to not setback the temperature immediately when the home is unoccupied. Variable speed fans on higher end furnaces use less energy at lower RPM, so running a system at full effect requires more power.

Not to mention that most prescription medication specifies that it must be held at room temperature (72-ish degrees) or risk spoilage.

Your refrigerator will also work harder as the ambient temperature climbs.

That's not a thing. Any prescription medication can be stored in a refrigerator if it degrades with heat.

So the label on the package that says "must be stored between 20-25C at all times" is bullshit? Because some random internet people said it was false? Why would they put the label on the package then?

I've literally never seen that on any medication ever, and it's impossible for pretty much any household to meet such stringent measures.

Odd how common this notion is. It would be like leaving your oven running all day because you make food in it occasionally.

Or water boiling all day.

I think that's just power companies not wanting everyone to turn on AC at roughly same time is the reason for those power "saving" tips.

I actually got an e-mail from my apartment manager telling us not to do that because supposedly the A/C uses more power to cool down the room by a few degrees every evening than it would've spent to keep it at that temperature all day.

although personally i disregarded that because eight years of living in overpriced CA apartments that were built during the kennedy administration has conditioned (no pun intended) me to feel more comfortable with the AC off.

I'd imagine that has more to do with price of power than absolute amount.

Here is an article[1] which cites Logan Kureczka, lead communications consultant at Duke Energy in North Carolina: "If you're just leaving home for the day, it's more energy efficient to keep your air conditioning turned on – but turn it a few degrees higher than you might set it for comfort if you were at home."

This seems pretty legit. I also remember getting similar tips from PG&E here in California. Do you have any citations as to why turning off AC/heater is better than leaving them on when we leave home?

[1] https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/should-turn-ac-u...

There doesn't appear to be any actually sensible evidence in the article?

> I also remember getting similar tips from PG&E here in California.

Company that sells you energy telling you to not stop consuming energy...

Aside from that, I'd imagine they also want to limit power usage spikes. Everyone coming back from the weekend then running AC on the full blast just consumes a lot of power.

Our office was actually given same advice (just leave AC running over weekend) but it was explicitly said it was to avoid power usage spikes, as cooling back down space that big just takes a lot of power for a long time.

There might be some truth about saving money, if say the rate for power when you'd be turning AC back on is high, vs having that spread over lower rates, but certainly not kWh, at least not if you go out for a whole day or two.

> Do you have any citations as to why turning off AC/heater is better than leaving them on when we leave home?

Basics of thermodynamics ? I think easiest comparison would be boiling water. What makes more sense, to turn off a pot of boiling water after making tea, or to keep it running till you want next cup of tea? You can keep it running to get the next tea instantly ready, or turn it off to not.

It's the same for AC. Turning it off saves power, but it will take longer to get back to the cold state)

You need to keep moving energy (whether heating or cooling) to/from the system to keep it at temperature different than ambient.

The bigger the difference, the more energy needs to be moved.

Keeping AC on constantly is like keeping a pot boiling, you need to pump that energy constantly.

Turning it off means that you stop, and while yes, you have to dump more power to get back to the desired temperature, you save all that power that you'd need to use to keep it at previous temp.

> There might be some truth about saving money, if say the rate for power when you'd be turning AC back on is high, vs having that spread over lower rates, but certainly not kWh, at least not if you go out for a whole day or two.

That might be the main reason behind PGE's suggestion - they charge more for 4-9pm usage and it is much cheaper to pre-cool the house between 12-2pm when the demand is lower.

Isn't that... normal?

I want to come home in a comfortable house. My parents used to do that. Turn off all heating. Come home, it's cold outside, cold inside and you have to wait until the radiators start to heat up. That takes a while.

But it worked, radiators can heat up a room quite fast.

On the other hand, if we consider heating with a heat-pump, or cooling with a heat-pump (i.e. just a normal AC) they rely on continuously heating up (or cooling down) air (or water in the case of an air-to-water or water-to-water heat-pump).

So you just can NOT quickly change the temperature in a room. So I leave the AC on 78 all day. If I go away for a couple of days I'll set it to 85, but anything higher than that is not recommended.

This is a non-issue with Nest thermostats (and maybe other brands as well). They have a pre-heating/cooling feature which figures out how long it takes for your heating system to get up to temp, and starts heating/cooling early so it can reach the target temp by the scheduled time (eg. when you get home).

It's not crazy at all. For example my house has floor heating. It takes a looong time for that slab of concrete to cool down. There's no point at all to mess with the temperature for a short time.

Every apartment I've ever rented has had a barebones, one-temperature, set it and forget it thermostat.

I would fully support legislation requiring a minimally-programmable thermostat in rental housing.

I don't understand. What stops you from changing it yourself and swapping it back when you move out? And you're ready to propose more legislation.

Most programmable thermostats need batteries, which now have to be changed on a maintenance schedule. One more task for the superintendent.

These batteries often fail without warning. Which means pipes can freeze, leading to property damage. Most homeowners don't even know they have batteries till the heat stops working and they call the HVAC guy.

Shady property managers consider security deposits an additional revenue stream and will cite any minuscule damage as reason for forfeiting it. For example they'll cite a need for "professional carpet cleaning" that coincidentally costs as much as the deposit, and then just pocket the money without delivering clean carpets for the next resident.

When property management does not pay the utility bill they will furnish apartments with the cheapest energy hog appliances. When they do pay the utility bill they will lock the thermostat.

If you select an premium apartment and the market is not tilted in favor of landlords as it is in most cities then they tend to care about the customer experience. Since they're making their margin on the higher rent already and they know too much BS will lead to people switching away.

I've always been told it was cheaper to maintain than to cycle on/off within a day as long as the insulation is decent and you aren't trying to get to 60F during 100F weather. My guess is that comes from a belief that the units work inefficiently to get the temp down as fast as possible when turned on, but work more efficiently to maintain a temp, but I have no idea if that's true.

If anything it should be less efficient the colder you go.

Cold house running during middle of hot day should be lowest efficiency during the day

considering the mass of a home, what’s the efficiency difference between letting the temperature stay in uncontrolled for 8+ hours and then trying to rein it in quickly vs just keeping it in place the whole time? remember to account for wear and tear on the relevant HVAC equipment.

>considering the mass of a home, what’s the efficiency difference between letting the temperature stay in uncontrolled for 8+ hours and then trying to rein it in quickly vs just keeping it in place the whole time?

The energy lost from your home to the environment is dependent on the temperature difference. A warmer house (during the summer) loses less energy than a house that's cooled the entire time. Therefore at least from a pure energy use perspective, it's always cheaper to only turn on the system when you actually need it (ie. when you get home) than trying to maintain the same temperature.

>remember to account for wear and tear on the relevant HVAC equipment.

Without an accurate wear/tear model of HVAC equipment this can easily go either way. You could argue that having the equipment run for longer cycles shortens life because it has to work "harder", but you could also argue the opposite because most of the wear originates from the system starting/stopping and/or thermal stress from it being on/off.

A lot of those Americans have pets. Many of those pets (i.e. a husky) need climate control 24/7.

So to save environment we should ban pets

Shooting you would be far preferable to getting rid of my pets.

Do they though? If it’s hot, sure, but they seem able to tolerate temperatures of -50 centigrade, and sleep outside at the South Pole.

What pets can survive sleeping outside in Antartica?

The husky.

They had kennels but they didn’t have doors or anything.

They would nap in the snow and let it pile up to keep them warm.

https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/wild...

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hut-shackleton-antarctic.h...

goldfish?

We could likewise list off plenty of stereotypes about the French too, but I thought we're above that here.

Oh those dumb stupid Americans, like Willis Carrier.

Even public transport can cut back schedules if there is that much less riding going on. While there's less to be saved there, we shouldn't act as if that's for free.

Heating/AC might be the only area where energy consumption isn't reduced by WFH.

If we don't decide social norms by what we consider to be pragmatism, how the hell do we decide them at all? I'm not a big believer in climate change, but when people are driving less, the price of gasoline tends to go down even as I need less of it myself. I can get behind that.

The idea that people must work in the office, even when no one can articulate why that's a good idea, is some obscure form of lunacy that is transmitted by being bitten by rabid upper management.

The other thing about public transport is that it is, generally speaking, more practical to switch to renewable power. Yes there's plenty of red tape to wade through to get any kind of infrastructure work done, but even factoring that in, a project like converting a commuter rail network to solar-powered electric is achievable on a dramatically shorter timetable than elimination of fossil-fueled cars and trucks.

So while the impact of a public transport user is higher than someone staying at home, it's still smaller than that of someone driving to work each day and has greater potential for being shrunk in short order.

Even renewable power isn't magical. When they switch buses or trains over to electric, they have to build a new vehicle... the processes of manufacturing them aren't 100% renewable. No one's exactly making renewable steel. When they have to repair a road for the buses to ride around on, that concrete puts CO2 in the air as well.

If they need fewer because of WFH, they build fewer.

WFH is a net win, if you care about this stuff. And, it turns out, it's a net win even if you don't. Might want to pull your money out of commercial real estate if you have any of that though.

> When they switch buses or trains over to electric, they have to build a new vehicle... the processes of manufacturing them aren't 100% renewable. No one's exactly making renewable steel. When they have to repair a road for the buses to ride around on, that concrete puts CO2 in the air as well.

Yeah, at least for busses that's annoying. Like sure, buy the ecological ones but don't just trash a perfectly good bus

Of course, it's part of why I'm a big proponent of WFH. There will always be some number of people who can't do that though, and so I think it's also important to shrink public transit footprints as much as practically possible.

Trains generally either redeployed across the network, with the oldest least efficient ones coming off.

Ah, so every available inch of asphalt in every single freeway in LA being 100% occupied by personal cars at every hour of the day is just an illusion?

This fundamentally does not make sense.

- public transport does not run "anyway". If no-one goes on a route, any sane transit system will schedule less frequent services

- heating a big building may be more efficient than a house, but isn't it really dumb to heat it efficiently if you don't have to heat it at all? It's not like people can switch off 100% of their home climate control when they go to the office. Likewise, the building is likely kept in a certain temperature range 24/7.

>Heating/cooling office buildings might be more efficient than everyone doing this to their homes

On the flipside, how many people even have climate-controlled homes year-round? When I used to live in California, air-conditioning was a rare and valuable treasure in a $3k/month apartment. I think I've heard euros claim they don't have air conditioning, too.

> I think I've heard euros claim they don't have air conditioning, too.

This. I don't know about Italy, Spain, and the like, but here in Paris, people mostly don't have A/C in their homes, but basically every office does.

So yeah, carting people to the office and back consumes energy, then you have to consume some more to keep them cool. Bonus points for an impossible number of people burning gas in their cars while waiting around on gridlocked highways and polluting the air. At least public transit uses (mostly) nuclear power here.

> When I used to live in California, air-conditioning was a rare and valuable treasure in a $3k/month apartment.

In the mild climates of the Bay Area and similar places, sure, but not, at least in the last half century or so, in the LA Basin and the Central Valley.

Depends where you live. In Southern California, air conditioning is extremely common. Either central or window units.

Go up to the Bay area, and I'd think it was fairly rare.

Well, I was with you until that last sentence.

> I don’t know one way or the other, likely neither do you.

Basic physics shows that energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance.

So moving more mass, further distances uses more energy than not, especially via the personal cars that are used in the US.

> Heating/cooling office buildings might be more efficient than everyone doing this to their homes

That might be true but doesn’t this assume that people stop heating/cooling their homes whilst they are at work?

Do people actually stop heating/cooling their homes while at work?

I used to, but I got sick of coming home mentally exhausted, just to get to “rest” in a 90 degree room.

Do people not??

Definitely not. And even less so during winter months I would guess.

Add to that many apartment buildings share utility cost across the unit so there’s even less incentive.

You are assuming that a fully remote worker stays in the same house as a commuter. Lots of HN posts say one of the benefits of remote work is that you can move anywhere and afford a nice big house on your engineer's salary. I would like to see a study on the average house size of commuters vs remote workers, but my gut says if people can work from anywhere, they would purchase bigger houses in cheaper location and increase their impact on the climate.

This is a good point but it makes you wonder - when the majority of the world’s population is urban, what percentage of them would move to rural areas if offered the choice?

What i see as more likely is people moving o suburbs. Suburbs, especially north american ones, are terrible for the environment and city finances.

Agreed. In fact now that I am trying hard to recollect posts describing an ideal remote work setup, every single one of them advocated for a separate room for your home-office.

At least in my local bubble in NYC, people working from home as consuming more fossil fuels. They're moving to the suburbs, buying a car, or flying around the world as digital nomads. Obviously, it's not representative most office workers who already live in the suburbs.

Putting solar on home can at least offset part of that usage.

If I commute to the office, I need to heat the office and my apartment so it's not freezing when I return. If I work from home, I just need to heat my tiny home. And I pay for all the electricity so I care about waste. And there's no commuting, no lunch rush hour, and other car related emissions

Who knew millions of people not driving for hours every day could have a positive effect?

WFH is here to stay. If you look at which companies are mandating office returns it’s the large and old incumbents. The young companies and startups are investing in remote and global workforces. In a few decades time these companies will replace the dinosaurs of today. There is reason to be optimistic about long term remote work.

Correct take, Infact I would argue enforcing work in the office probably accelerates the current tech oligopoly guard in their transformation into IBM like businesses

For young companies offering WFH is one of numerous ways to be competitive in the job market with large old incumbents.

I really hope so. I also hope that we have better tools for remote collaboration in the future. IMO (I've worked remotely for well over a decade) the current stack of Zoom/Teams/Slack/Meet/Whatever are also dinosaurs that need to go extinct.

But on the plus side, we'll gain absolutely nothing at all.

Well this is just narrow thinking. We'll gain more noise, distractions and busybody managers coming by to interrupt us every 30 minutes to ask for status updates. And also individually wrapped tiny portions of snacks.

Wait wait wait, you forgot about spontaneous collaboration

'Serendipitous innovation!'

More like boomer bosses taking full volume phone calls in cube farms, people eating stinky lunches, zero privacy, and high anxiety as a function of feeling the need to 'look busy'

Suddenly climate change doesn’t require lifestyle changes when it’s time for the plebeians to get back to the office.

Oh but it does require liftestlye changes. You'll have to spend more money on "green" cars. Instead of you know, not spending any money since WFH means you dont need a car.

… in the US you definitely need a car to do everything else. Unless you live in NYC.

Where I live in the UK taking the bus from my town to a town 2 miles away is a 40 minute journey.

In London, taking public transport means massively dense crowds. The city is still choked with traffic. Seriosuly, we have to move away from the mindset of uber dense cities to a more sparse living style. Everything in between filled with trees and vegetation.

We built all this tech so that customers can shop remotely, I dont see why workers couln't work from their homes too.

Honestly, public transport can be an immense pain, even in cities that are famous for having good systems.

Only the most common use-cases are catered for in a reasonable way. As soon as you take a journey that's an edge-case in any way, get ready for major discomfort. Furniture shopping, major grocery shops, moving house, going from one out-of-the-way place to another, travelling at an odd time.

Some of that is also caused by forcing everyone to show up 8-9 AM. In city I live driving to work at 9AM is nightmare but delay departure to just 10AM and it is suddenly reasonably pleasant drive. Similarly with public traffic, going at 8-9 AM is crowded, just an hour delay and it's decent.

But what’s the point of “in-person collaboration” if everyone isn’t at the same place at the same time? If you don’t have to be at the office at 9am, perhaps you don’t need to be there at all.

You can get by without owning a car in Philadelphia too. There are pain points, but it is possible.

I'm sorry but I hate this type of argument. There are different people saying different things but you conflate them all together and say "they" are telling you contradictory things. It makes no sense.

A much more immediate reason to stick with WFH, in the mass transit averse USA at least:

> Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1–54

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...

WFH has so many benefits, whoever mandated it during COVID deserves Noble Peace Prize for the work towards wellbeeing of humanity.

RTO is pretty much incompatible with having a family.

At the end of the day you lost up to 4h of your time and you paid for it - 1.5h commute - 0.25-0.5h getting presentable - 1h lunch - 1h total in many small bits getting the dishwasher / dryer / washer running

Were either in a climate crisis and wfh needs to be the new norm where possible or everything is window dressing. We should be taxing office space to account for the additional pollution

We're in the kind of climate crisis that requires you to stop flying back home to see your family at thanksgiving and using your air conditioner, but also requires you to spend a couple of hours a day driving in stop and go traffic.

Businesses influenced politicians to force workers back into the office.

We as workers should form some sort of collective union to push back against these policies.

All employees are replaceable. If we don't fight back now then we will ultimately go back to where we were pre-pandemic.

Or it slowly goads people back into cities with efficient transportation networks.

I've been saying the following for a couple years now:

If you believe governments believe climate change is real(and I phrase it this way to avoid debating people on the reality of AGW), then you accept that incentives will align to reduce energy usage(assuming no mass carbon neutral energy on the horizon, which I believe is a safe assumption) and goad the population away from inefficent suburbs/exburbs and back into higher density urban environments.

And I say this as a lover of suburbia who generally hates urban areas(save Tokyo, which is wonderful).

Isn't that a massive issue? That cities are overcrowded, expensive, and polluted? Europe has decent public transport and there's the same issue. Cramming people into cities makes things worse.

If you're only thinking of European capitals, there's some truth in that. But it does not apply to every city, not even close.

You don't even have to go down the list very far, the 2nd or maybe 3rd most populous city is any random European country is much more affordable and less crowded than the capital.

Correct, but see, people in tech or many blue collar jobs can't afford to live in small towns since all jobs are in large cities.

And since high earners are all in large cities then so does everyone else move there because that's where the money is.

Instead we should facilitate spreading out, so that wealth can also spread out, and people can enjoy what you just mentioned.

As much as there is a brutal logic to densification, people are already being nudged towards cities by carbon taxes, and most municipalities are interested in raising property prices & increasing quality of life for residents more than they are in fixing the climate, and those goals are at odds with densification. Likely people will not be able to afford densification and any legal reform to start changing this will run into entrenched political opposition.

Urban areas may also fix one issue, that of AGW and the looming energy crisis, but you also run into other issues like air pollution increasing in urban areas whilst more people are concentrated inside of them. 80% of urban areas exceed UN air pollution standards. So uh, this change will spike lung cancer deaths and such.

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/05/un-he...

Urbanisation is already a growing the trend as it is I think in no small part due to the factors you point out.

https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-...

there’s too much red tape and special interest play in trying to expand transit options in the United States.

Examples in California include: car companies killing off successful street cars in SoCal, car dealers and residents block the expansion of BART down the SF Peninsula, residents in northwestern Bay Area blocking BART from entering their area for fear of criminals accessing their area easily from the East Bay.

> car companies killing off successful street cars in SoCal

You're referencing a conspiracy theory/urban legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

> residents block the expansion of BART down the SF Peninsula, residents in northwestern Bay Area blocking BART from entering their area for fear of criminals accessing their area easily from the East Bay.

This one I believe. I live near a BART station and it is where most crime happens. My next place will be far, far away from any public transportation.

Nobody will be goaded unless a lot of housing is built there. Hard to move to a place with no place to live.

There are a lot of political barriers to that throughout the West.

The multifamily market is different from the single-family home market. Lots of MFH going in lately. But I'm not saying that people will move into the existing cities. I'm only contending that folks will be forced into denser, urban environments and those may be built in previously suburban/rural areas or maybe existing cities. The incentives are coming though.

The problem is that NIMBY folks have the ability to block multifamily in California almost indefinitely. And often do. The cities where they most efficiently bock it are the ones with most of the offices, because local government collects more taxes over time with offices than housing. This is a result of https://www.nber.org/digest/apr05/lock-effect-californias-pr....

The result? California is about 3-4 million housing units short of what it needs. And it is getting steadily worse. There is no prospect of this changing any time soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

When it comes to rent, we're boiling the frog. And the frog is already well-cooked.

You seem oddly fixated on CA(and, really, Coastal CA) regional issues. Issues with fixes already in the works.

> about 3-4 million housing units short of what it needs

Completely separate rant, but I take issue with this. You can go find stats and articles from 2006 saying the same thing, and then, suddenly, we had enough housing. It's almost as if economics drives the housing people choose and when circumstances change they can opt for something else(relocation, MFH, living with family, delaying household formation, etc).

She had a remote position over the past few years, but landed a new job in February at a nonprofit, which came with a catch: The job required her to make the hike to its Silver Spring, Maryland,

----------------------------------------------

Rachel, who was granted a pseudonym to speak freely about her employer's policy,

----------------------------------------------

Let's hope the first sentence is obfuscated too, otherwise, the pseudonym probably isn't going to help.

Make employers liable for the fuel costs of an average commute for the region then so they can face the pinch of carbon taxes. Give them a rebate for every day out of the office.

The way we have things arranged now, those with the authority to determine how much carbon does or doesn't get used are not the same people who actually pay carbon taxes.

Why? Just add the tax onto the fuel. Employees aren't dumb - they know commuting costs time and money. So on-location employers will have to offer more money / struggle to recruit.

The office-heads have to adapt or die. Perfect.

It seems like a large percentage of the United States population is not in a position to negotiate. If noise that living is literally unaffordable is everywhere, and people are racking up credit card debt to buy groceries, they're not suddenly going to get a higher wage when fuel prices rise yet again.

Lots of variables - where I live there are no traffic jams and I commute by bike. For suburbanites calculating the tradeoff between traffic and heating/cooling individual residences is pretty complex.

Similar to what I call the "farmer's market illusion": industrially grown produce may well be better for the planet.

Agreed. If WFH reduced total vehicle miles by a significant amount, then according to my calculations, RTO should increase total vehicle miles by a significant amount. Check my work!

What percentage od the total workforce can actually work from home? Construction workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, shop salespersons, waiters… I expect these jobs are the majority od the workforce? Not everyone is in IT so that it is easy to transfer to WFH

IT is ~2% of the US workforce. 'Professional and business services' at 14% might be a target for work from home?

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Looks like we are stuck with the insane officers on our submarine, who demand restarting the reactor, which is known for leaking poisonous gases and they dismiss all objections from the crew because their personal rooms are sealed better.

If the work could survive the pandemic remotely it can survive now. RTO is bs and just a management initiative to try to maintain some sort of control. Management and its need to maintain relevancy is the bigger issue to me here.

Screw the planet, think of the shareholders and all the money they're not making because no one wants vacant office real estate.

https://archive.is/25eSJ

Most things make the environment worse.

Kids are the worst.

Even the environment seems to have a negative effect on itself once the ball starts rolling.

To add onto this comment, saying "having children is the worst thing for the climate" is a totally defeatist attitude towards the issue. What people are saying is "human life is incompatible with the Earth so we should stop perpetuating it". We might as well count our living selves alongside hypothetical future children and all kill ourselves now if that's the case. Of course, the people espousing this message are pretty much exclusively talking to western/European people, who are in almost all cases already giving birth at far below-replacement levels.

none of these arguments are useful if they are all phrased in terms of two absolutes. we could clearly chart a middle course between breeding as much as possible and lying down and dying.

ignoring our apparent inability to do anything at all about anything of course

> none of these arguments are useful if they are all phrased in terms of two absolutes. we could clearly chart a middle course between breeding as much as possible and lying down and dying.

That's also primarily an American issue. They tend to view everything through the lens of 2 political camps and "whose side are you on?".

That kind of view is completely antithetical to actually solving problems.

I always wonder if it's related somehow to the deep imprint that organized professional team sports, especially football, seems to have on the US psyche.

Yeah, hockey is popular here in Canada, but it's not nearly on the same level as the NFL in the US. And "college sports" etc. is not even a thing. I feel like the American mindset is ever more leaning towards framing everything in a "my team vs your team" dynamic.

And makes any discussion absolutely obnoxious with the usual "if you don't agree you must be on the other side and be the enemy"

> saying "having children is the worst thing for the climate" is a totally defeatist attitude towards the issue

But, spreadsheet at hand, it is.

It's always the parents that get offended by this. We are not judging anyone's lifestyle. Relax.

If we're attributing the carbon emissions of children to their parents, then we can pass the buck all the way back up to a handful of apes that decided to descend from the trees.

Right. But to many "saving the future" is to have good future for their children.

Saying that basically sounds like saying "don't have children peasants, so our the world is better for our overlord's children"

It really isn't though. Spreadsheet at hand, having American children is.

It's always the Americans that get offended by this. Relax. It just happens to be your fault.

Not American, sorry.

No worries. You're probably only 40% responsible baby.

While I'm not skeptical about the reality of anthropogenic climate change, I _am_ skeptical of viewing the climate like a fundamentally unstable / delicate system, like that all life on Earth will perish and the planet will become like Venus on a runaway path if we hit +2C.

Earth _has_ had periods both much warmer than that and with more CO2! There are checks and balances to any system - like Life - that has been around a billion years. So Life will go on. And so I'm skeptical of a claim that "the environment seems to have a negative effect on itself" generally given its longevity. Life will go on -- though...that might be with or without Sapiens.

So you think if a bunch of people is Palau go under water because of sea level increase, they are not worth saving?

Are they just going to sit there for decades as the water rises and drown very, very slowly? Might there be some other way of "saving" them?

This is another piece of the puzzle climate change deniers don't understand (I am not calling you one btw). Of course these people are not going to stay there. We will see mass migration. It is easy to dismiss climate change by saying that life will go on. But we all know how the western societies view and treat migrants these days.

> But we all know how the western societies view and treat migrants these days.

Migrants from incompatible bring crime and strife. Countries don't want to have more crime and strife.

Right, so either accept that, or spend resources on combating climate change. Or at least do not instigate proxy wars in other parts of the world.

Lmao, they don't migrate because "it's too hot", they migrate coz their goverment is fucked and the country they migrate to gives free handouts. Nothing to do with climate, everything to do culture and development.

Easy to slam poor countries and their governments when you're practically living in the most powerful and rich country in history. You sound like one of today those who never ventured outside their bubble.

I don't live in US or Germany or France if that's what you're suggesting.

Hell, my countrymen had reputation for "stealing immigrants" in Germany before the way worse ones arrived there in droves...

Similar cultures can mix. Different ones cause at best strife. AT BEST. Usually worse.

If you live all your life in "every man for himself" and absolute zero regard for law and other human beings then come to country that has those values, well, France happens.

You don't have to explain to me about culture mix. The British came and ruled us for 210 years. Before them the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese came. Unlike the migrants you are getting, we were sent the worst of them with the explicit intent to be stolen from, enslaved, maimed, raped and killed.

Whether you’re skeptical or not, you accept that there is some risk of catastrophic destabilisation.

And the appropriate attitude to uncertainty and risk is not to bet everything on the mean outcome.

I hope no one takes this kind of junk science seriously.

"could" is typical for wild speculation and at attempts at news-making rather than news-reporting.

Other words in that category "might, potentially, risks"

There is no climate crisis. The climate is changing, we will adapt. It's that simple.

I guess it could be worse but it’s pretty fucking bad already ?

Original title: Dirty downside of 'return to office' - Push to end work-from-home could make climate crisis worse

Ah yes, the "climate emergency". Aka total bullshit cooked up by the Malthusians in charge of UNESCO etc in order to control the sheep

I'm not convinced, although I like working from home. I think human impact on the environment isn't as big deal. The doomers have been calling for the end of the climate for decades and been wrong everytime but they don't change their outlook they just move the clock forward another 5-10 years.

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