Working remotely can more than halve an office employee’s carbon footprint | Hacker News Reader

Working remotely can more than halve an office employee’s carbon footprint

scientificamerican.com

293 pointsrustoo254 comments

Remote work seems like one of many missed “Jetsons opportunities.”[a] Why wouldn’t we, given the ability, work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday? Why isn’t this practice that workers clearly love, and are willing to leave companies to keep, seen as a great step in the progress of labor? We should be counting our blessings instead of counting beans, that such a way of working is even possible today.

[a] A Jetsons opportunity is any missed prediction of the future from the past, usually in a form like “where’s my flying car?”

I understand and even expect the lack of empathy from RTO executives, but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.

I've worked primarily remote since 2016; but I have the option of going to an office a few miles away when I want to. My wife, forced to work from home, finds the entire experience to be socially isolating and misery inducing.

> work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?

This one-sidedness is a strawman. Not everyone's home is comfy or has space for working; some people made housing decisions based on one person leaving the home for most of every day (e.g. choosing a smaller apartment closer to city). Not every office is crowded and stuffy; some are quite pleasant. Not every worker gets their social needs met outside of work, and forcing them home ends up isolating them from the primary source of social interaction in their world, with all of the mental health and well-being issues that entails.

Personally, think that "more remote work" is the way to go, but the issue is more nuanced than "why are people resisting this obviously beneficial change?"

Work is not voluntary, there are no alternatives. Unlike other social opportunities in ones free time. So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.

Folks forced into an office cannot choose to opt out of all work. Changing jobs is a bigger lift than picking up some social hobby or activities after work.

I agree hybrid can be nice, yet executives are too often demanding RTO compliance. That's why there is so much breathless enthusiasm for remote work, and angst against attempts to both-sides the issues.

Why do people constantly equate picking up a social hobby after work to an in person workplace? They are not equivalent, and the social needs fulfilled are very different.

I might pick up a hobby and make some friends there - these friends are going to linked to my personal life, not my professional one.

I cannot ask this hobby friend for a referral for a job in the future. I cannot ask this hobby friend for some help if I’m dealing with a difficult boss or a challenging technical problem.

I might ask this friend to come skiing with me or come to the bar with me though. That’s nice, but it’s not a work relationship and I can’t fulfill work relationship needs through it.

Remote coworkers can be a referral network and help with difficult problems.

Perhaps you can strike up friends at a co-working space or a company where RTO is optional. (I go snowboarding with a former co-worker occasionally. Since we live far away it's usually a big trip, yet still no less an adventure.)

Hopefully losing your job won't also put your social life at risk.

Remote coworkers generally don’t care about you to the same extent. It can be generally difficult building social bonds remotely, and there’s mountains of evidence that shows the veneer of internet communication doesn’t actually fulfill them.

That’s not to say it’s impossible, of course, but just much harder. Your professional social network is much smaller remotely. You have to work with someone remotely for months to form the same relationship you could have in an afternoon in-person.

Hybrid work is a good compromise.

Losing my job wouldn’t put my social life at risk - as work relationships don’t and shouldn’t fill that role for me. Again, you seem to be conflating personal and professional relationships.

But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy. For them finding fulfillment off hours is not going to cut it.

Personally, I would probably be happiest with a remote office situation.

> But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy.

That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.

This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.

Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.

Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.

My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.

Remote advocates by and large aren't arguing for abolition of offices. Only a choice.

And remote work can also be done from co-working spaces. Or with occasional all-hands IRL.

This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.

Are they perhaps subcontractors, or none of your management etc are remote too?

When there is a good mixture of everyone remote, I've found it not to be an issue.

How cold this world is to cut out communal spaces and force us to spend 40h/w in solitude.

How cold the world is to make the primary form of communal spaces be working in the rigid hierarchy, abuse, and discomfort of the modern American workplace.

I don’t live in America. How cold the world is that you lot resign yourselves to the expectation that you’ll resent your coworkers and employer.

I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.

Not everyone is a single tech employee who lives alone. Some (in fact, many) people have a social life outside the office where not going to an office doesn't result in eternal solitude.

If you scroll to the top of the thread, it's a person mentioning their wife finds remote work isolating.

This weird grandstanding about having a social life every time remote works comes up on HN is sad.

It's not grandstanding, I only brought up social life because someone mentioned social isolation from remote work. That is a real problem and I can empathize with it, but the solution isn't forcing RTO on co-workers to force them to hang out with you.

I don't believe you.

do i need to add the /s

> "do i need to add the /s"

Sadly, probably yes. This is the "age of outrage" after all.

Perhaps that's a niche for co-working spaces? Or mid-level management which can get an _optional_ office for others so inclined?

> So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.

How? If my remote work makes my employer schedule 2 hrs of extra zoom meetings and the workday is now 8-6 instead of 9-5, how can I find fulfillment elsewhere? In that scenario, office seems better because I get to hang out with other people between 9-5. Remote is much worse if one likes to socialize.

I don't know, the problem there doesn't seem to be that you work remotely, it seems to be that your employer doesn't respect your time.

If your employer is increasing the workday to 8-6 due to Zoom calls then you are in the minority and that is an issue with your employer, not remote work.

> but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.

You are making the straw man here. People are mostly asking for a right to work remotely if they want to, that's all. And the status quo until very recently was (and still is) the opposite: not allowing remote work for people who want it, without any empathy for their needs. Try not to read it as an attack on the office, but more as millions of people asking for not being forced to commute and go to the office for a miserable experience.

If you read the replies to that post you might think otherwise, it's full of people suggesting the only reason you would go to the office is you don't have a social life, and every time this subject comes up on HN it's the same narrative.

I don't hear the same sentiment in the real world but there you go.

I generally think that we, as a society, should prioritize happiness and human flourishing. Work-from-home has been great for me, but I understand why others wouldn't enjoy it.

Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives. It should be easier to form worker-owner cooperatives and to organize strong unions, and generally promote more democracy in the workplace. And we should, as a society, de-emphasize work a bit. With all the automation we have, most people should be able to work a 32-hour work week and society would clip along just fine. Meanwhile, people would have more time to devote to the rest of living a life (pursuing art, socializing with friends/family, volunteering in social projects, studying an interesting subject, etc).

That's all to say, we are all individuals with different wants and needs, and we spend a lot of time at our jobs. We should restructure society to make us all happier and more fulfilled.

> Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives.

To be fair, this is especially egregious in the United States, where urban design is incredibly hostile and workers have long commutes because of distortionary policies to boost car sales and maximize returns on real estate speculation. Likewise, workers have so few protections and paid leave relative to other developed countries.

I probably wouldn’t care about going into the office in a nice, walkable European city, where I didn’t live in constant fear of being fired, be unable to take sick days, or be constantly forced to work over 40 hours, rarely take vacations, etc. But if you’re going to design society around maximizing my misery to make as much money as possible for someone else, I’m sure as hell not going to want to go into work if I can do my job from my couch with my dog beside me.

> My wife, forced to work from home

Your wife is not "forced" to work from home. She is forced to find her own work accommodations. At the extremes of requiring a dedicated IP address and fiber connection, it's still an option to rent an office space individually. At the less extreme: an individual membership at a coworking space, likely a public library, or a coffee shop. Similarly, whether at home, at a office, or at a coworking space she is not forced to be socially isolated or miserable.

There are also, frankly, a lot more jobs out there where 100% remote isn't even an option. Maybe they should consider changing jobs? 100% WFH is a dream for a lot of people, so let someone else have that spot

It's always more nuanced, but headlines don't have room for that.

If you advocate for "mostly remote work, with hybrid scheduling and hot desking as needed", some unempathetic execs and clueless middle micromanagers are inevitably going to try to turn that into a privilege to be allowed to work from home once a month. You have to open the negotiation by demanding full remote, so there's room for concessions allowing a few satellite campuses and occasional all-hands meetings.

> unempathetic execs and clueless middle micromanagers

What about clueless employees who think remote is great for their needs but is actually counterproductive to what the company needs?

The employee only have to care about their work and paycheck. Is they were paid to accommodate company needs, CEO wouldn't be paid 500 times the media pay and C-suite wouldn't be paid 100 times what I earn.

That doesn't answer my comment at all in the context of this thread

There is more to life than work and it should never be your entire or even most of your social life. Being socially isolated as a result of not having to go to work is a pretty good sign that your entire existence revolves around your work. Go outside, make friends, have a social life outside of work. It doesn't and shouldn't have to rule your world.

On the flipside, it's pretty sick that we've normalized getting all of one's social fulfillment from wage slaving rather than genuine social experiences that don't involve exploitation of our labor.

the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp

LMAO, and you're the one complaining about strawmen? Give me a break.

I have a nice office at work, where I have less distractions than at home. Face to face meetings allow for better discussions and whiteboarding than video conferencing. I can commute by bike on nice route, thus getting regular exercise and fresh air. I can better compartmentalize work from leisure. I don’t have to spend my whole day within the same walls. I get to see other people and have random encounters with interesting technical and non-technical discussions at work.

So it depends on circumstances and preferences. Both modes should be possible.

> Both modes should be possible.

I am not sure there is more than one mode. Remote work isn't about working from home, it about working from wherever you want. That necessarily includes working from an office, if that is what you want.

That’s an interesting definition of “remote”. Remote-work companies usually don’t have offices. If remote work became the new norm, employees would be forced to arrange for a working space on their own, removing the choice.

I agree that remote is interestingly defined. Remote normally refers to somewhere away from where the population is found or away from where one is usually located. Home is where the population is found – where one is usually located. The office is what is remote.

It is bizarre that the companies without offices – with workers most likely to work from home – are the ones given the "remote" moniker. Technically, it is the companies with offices that are most likely to have remote workers.

Remote work just means you are communicating with your coworkers remotely. You’ve just gonna and made up your own definition!

I used the dictionary definition, but I agree that there is not a great consensus around what remote actually means. Your definition seems to be in alignment with how computer science has traditionally used the word remote, seeing this from a networked computer perspective instead of a human perspective.

Which perhaps makes perfect sense if the work involves using a networked computer, but what about work that doesn't use networked computers? We also have trucks that allow coworkers to work at a distance from each other.

If that's your definition, then I have been working remotely since 2014 -- because that was the year my employer opened a second office, and many coworkers go to the closest office, not where the majority of their team is located.

>We should be counting our blessings instead of counting beans

In America, we generally treat exclusively counting the beans as a literal capital-V Virtue. And there are hordes of lumpenproletariat who will vehemently defend it when any thought is paid to not exploiting workers to the maximal extent possible where there is even the slightest hint of perceived additional beans to be acquired.

My company went fully remote. Moved the office out of SF proper to avoid the Twitter Tax and downsized it, now it can only hold about half the locals, and most days nobody goes in.

At the same time, we started hiring without geographic concern. The mandate became get the best folks you can, we don't care where they are[1].

It has worked out well for us. We've gone heavily international, and grown our customer base and expanded markets at a slightly faster faster pace than we were before going remote. (I don't think going remote did that - more capital and people did. But it didn't hurt.)

And maybe we're just selecting for folks who like remote work now, but I don't know of anyone who wants to go back to the old days.

[1] With some exceptions, some managers want people in the same timezone, some roles are inherently place-bound, etc.

Maybe a part of the problem is that the two work patterns are suitable for much different personalities, but when switching from all-in-office to remote, the mix of personalities leads to lower aggregate productivity. E.g. someone who needs a periodic tap on the shoulder (nothing wrong with that, I've known plenty of people like this) might do very poorly in a much more loose environment. Of course it could be argued that this is a badly executed remote switch, which could be worked on, but still - I'd guess that when starting out hiring for full remote, you preselect a group that works well in that environment.

My company had a similar experience. They were a smaller Bay Area company only hiring locally, then went remote and expanded their candidate search. They were able to get a much better selection of candidates after they started hiring remotely.

Any kind of return to office is now impossible. Their (now much smaller office) can only hold about 5% of the employees, and the vast majority of employees are now scattered throughout the United States. Not even the founders or any of the executives live near the office anymore; they're all scattered geographically as well.

I was hired as part of the wave of remote hiring, and it seems to me based on the stories I hear from those that worked there in the pre-remote times that the switch to remote hiring really worked out well for them.

I think a lot of people are less productive when they work from home. It's easier to switch into "work mode" when there's a specific physical location where you only work.

A separate room as a home office probably has the same benefit though.

That's a fair hypothesis and intuition... that has not been apparent for the majority of people. Some folks really do benefit from an office setting and I think we should support those people by having such a setting still available... but I'm going to keep dancing to thumping techno in my bathrobe as it makes me far more productive

The very fact that companies are doing everything they can to bring people back into the office refutes your comment. Do you really think if people were as/more productive at home that companies would throw that increase in productivity away? It's so funny that half the comments on the topic are about how evil and money hungry companies are, but at the same time they're supposedly choosing to throw away free money? It's nonsensical. Just another political echo chamber social war.

Basically yes - I think that a fair number of companies would throw away that increase in productivity purely for a sense of control. Companies do dumb stuff all the time and I've personally worked under an "asses-in-chairs" style owner who assumed that if you went for a walk to get a coffee with a coworker while having a technical discussion your productivity was 0. A lot of people are dumb and there are no secret smart people at the tops of companies making smart decisions - companies are ruled by majority and the majority is usually quite easily influenced by marketing campaigns (i.e. the ones launched by commercial real estate holders who are currently losing money hand over fist). And, just for reference, companies are also evil primarily because they're dumb and petty and there is a constant struggle for fiefdoms within the budget.

I think a fair number of people struggle with imposter's syndrome because they imagine that somewhere above them there's someone that is really really smart and has a plan - no such person exists, we're all just trying our best... and that "all" is all-inclusive - the person you remember who got D's in middle school is probably a middle manager somewhere.

> I think that a fair number of companies would throw away that increase in productivity purely for a sense of control.

Citation needed. This seems like a really bogus claim which assumes decision makers don't know what's best for themselves.

The asses-in-chairs owner I mentioned briefly had us discount time we spent on coffee breaks or on walks from our daily hours... exercise tends to encourage brain activity and for me specifically (I have ADHD) it has an extremely strong effect. Things slowed down for a while before senior management stepped in and said "Enjoy your coffee breaks and walks on the company time - be healthy!"

This is absolutely an anecdote - but I'm not certain how else to source data around this.

You have to remember that companies are run by people and people have incentives that are not always aligned with the company.

For example if you are a very wealthy person who runs a large company you need to put that money somewhere and that somewhere may be real estate. In fact it may be real estate in a city such as San Francisco. Prior to covid and work from home that was a very good place to keep your money, but today it’s a lot less good. Companies themselves may have significant real estate investments as well. There are more inputs to this than productivity (and real estate for that matter but it was the first example that came to mind)

>t. Do you really think if people were as/more productive at home that companies would throw that increase in productivity away?

Yes, I do.

Also, I don't think the vast majority of office-based companies have any idea what their actual productivity levels are.

> Do you really think if people were as/more productive at home that companies would throw that increase in productivity away?

I think the main reason is all those expensive office towers are now sitting empty and no one wants to buy them. I bet 75% of RTO is sunk cost fallacy trying to make use of all that leased empty space.

I personally think yes, upper management will prioritize nonsensical behaviors that incentivize their own self aggregation over the betterment of the company. This is sort of mindset is also behind shit like “don’t hire women, I might be tempted to sexually assault them” rhetoric.

We don't need to guess at this, companies like Amazon already admitted there's no data to support RTO:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...

https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

I say this out here whenever this comes up…but if we are truly being honest there really is no hard data out there to support that WFH benefits the organization. All of the arguments and anecdotes I hear are specific to the individual. If you can’t support your argument with data against the people who get to make the decisions where you work, you can’t really blame them for going back to a historical work environment that made them successful in the first place.

I always caveat this idea with the fact that I love WFH and do not want to RTO, but I can’t make an argument why it’s better for my organization.

Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics. But, say, Goldman definitely has these statistic since they pay bonuses based on them and it is pretty aggressive in RTO. I imagine Amazon has statistics too but they just don't want to publish them, afraid (rightfully so, IMHO) of what that will do to their stock price.

Disregarding data from one of the most profitable companies in the world just to ply an argument that makes no sense in the context and disqualifies based on an entirely fabricated and unmeasurable dimension — that’s called:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Sorry, I don't follow. The GP said that Amazon has no data and I argued that they probably have but don't want to publish it. But even if you are arguing against the GP your bringing up "No true Scotsman" makes no sense in this context.

Amazon has no data to prove that rto is effective and have admitted it was a gut feeling — thats a data point to the point further up the thread about “companies willing sacrifice productivity for control” So yes that is a data point: Amazon can’t find data saying their workforce was more effective in the office. You employ no true Scotsman by discarding g this data point and saying “they don’t matter because I suspect they are in productivity trouble” Which has no basis in reality as the CEO just admitted they could not find data to support that point — otherwise they would say “people are more productive in the office based on our studies.” Your refutation is a no true Scotsman under the sense of invalidly discarding the counter example given based on your suspicion which is actually disproved by the comments of the CEO himself. Also Goldman Sachs has maintained a buy position on Amazon for this entire time — so your suspiscion about Amazon being unstable and Goldman being stable doesn’t really hold water.

Also their own studies find wfh increases productivity by 3%: https://www.gsam.com/content/gsam/us/en/advisors/market-insi...

So yes just another indicating that companies will sacrifice productivity for control.

There is no evidence that Amazon has no data showing decreased productivity during WFH period. The statement from the management is carefully worded so Amazon won't get smacked by SEC for misrepresentation: the stated "gut feeling" is about the RTO mandate, not about the productivity metrics. Amazon having or lacking performance statistics is a speculation, the CEO hasn't proved or disproved anything. But even if we agreed that, indeed, Amazon not having performance data is a fact, how is it "True Scotsman" again? Bringing up a counterexample against a claim "All companies have no data and do RTO out of spite!" only appears as a fallacy to you because you might be emotionally invested in this. A counterexample is is the proper way to refute a false assertion like that. "True Scotsman" is, in fact, a fallacy of trying to invalidate a counterexample, interesting that you brought it up.

Your misrepresentations of my argument and assumptions about my feelings aside the no true Scotsman is this in quotes: “Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics.” The counter example you are discarding is the fact that the Amazon ceo said that it was simply a gut feeling and not based on any data and they are a successful company who is willing to do rto based on control with no consideration for productivity (all of your speculation aside those are the facts we have to work with). You are trying to disqualify this data point based on your assumption that something is wrong with the company and no “non dysfunctional” (or no true company) would allow wfh. You then point to Goldman Sachs as a “true” company that did rto and should therefore be considered in place of Amazon. This assumption is not supported by your example (Goldman sachs) which actually has research supporting the opposite but that’s beside the point of you attempting to protect the assertion (companies will not do rto for purely aesthetic/control purposes while it may decrease productivity) by discarding the example of Amazon which is just that: a company pursuing rto without (as far as we know) knowledge as to how it affects productivity whether negatively or positively; it was done based on a gut feeling of management. Nice set of assumptions about someone you don’t know though, I’ll be disengaging now.

I see, you believe that the statement "Amazon goes RTO even though it has no data about productivity impact from WFH" is a counterexample to the assertion "No company does RTO despite the data showing increased productivity from WFH", this makes your arguments more rational for somebody who accepts that, indeed, Amazon having no data proves that it acted against the data (which it did not have but, I imagine, in some philosophical sense it's also "data", and if you really, really want it, that "data" also shows WFH increased productivity by the virtue of not showing the decreased productivity, even though it also does not show that e.g. not putting employees in front of a firing squad for missing some KPI bar would decreased productivity too).

You failed to capture both the meaning and actual words of my argument and the way you have re-worded it doesn’t make semantic sense so I can’t really understand what you are trying to communicate. The continued misrepresentation of my argument does not actually prove your point.

Why would I even try to capture your actual words? It's all there already, you can re-read this thread. And I definitely did not try to reword anything you say, unless now you are saying you did not claim that the Amazon is a counterexample to the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614850 ? Well it's either that or your "True Scotsman" accusations make no sense, pick either, I don't care.

There was recently some research showing that people working for only 4 days a week instead of 5 were equally/more productive, and yet you don’t see companies rushing to implement a 4 day work week.

Your assumption is flawed on a number of levels, first and foremost due to the fact that it is based on the faulty premise that companies will always make optimal decisions based on perfect data, when the reality is:

- in most cases the data on whether remote work is more or less productive is murky at best, non-existent at worst. For ever study showing and increase/decease in productivity there is a study showing the opposite. Most companies struggle to even define and measure productivity in the first place, outside the context of remote work. - productivity isn’t the sole axis of decision making. Some companies prioritize excellent benefits to retain talent in the belief the benefits of a happy talented workforce will outweigh the costs of providing it. Other companies are much less generous, happy to churn through less competitive employees to keep costs down. Similar disagreements on remote work exist, which is why there are many companies with no plans to mandate in office work - what company leadership prioritizes is not necessarily what is best for the business. I’m not sure how anyone, after 40 years of Jack Welch-style executives destroying long-term business value for short-term profits, would fail to recognize this. Company leadership will do what is in company leadership’s best interest, whether that’s cutting long-term profits for short term share price increases that are tied to personal compensation, exorbitant spending for unnecessary company amenities like private transportation, or dictating the workforce comes back into the office because they prefer to work that way. Note when outspoken critics of remote work like Elon Musk, personally, almost exclusively work remote.

I guess you've been lucky to never have a bad manager? I can think of plenty of times in my career that corporate leadership was short-sighted. From terrible managers who think their job is to ensure butts are in seats, to turf battles that make the company worse off, and so much more. Awful behavior, but nothing that provides being money-hungry and sociopathic at the same time.

What is political about the topic?

Do you think most companies can reliability measure productivity? As an SWE I haven't seen it.

Productive in the Office? You are surely joking?

I do the exact same amount of work now that I did in an office, except now I can just watch a video on YouTube or an old episode of Veep or something if I want to take a break, rather than looking at my phone for a few minutes wondering if someone is going to tap me on the shoulder.

I literally saw a coworker sleeping in his cubicle, and had I not woken him up he probably would have gotten fired that day when our boss walked in maybe 90 seconds later. Offices are not the meccas of productivity the RTO crowd would like us to believe.

> Offices are not the meccas of productivity the RTO crowd would like us to believe.

Indeed - just today I joked with my manager that being forced on-site has perks; aimlessly wandering/engaging people looks like productive work.

You can run a gambit with this; nobody expects you to be able to really prove Useful Conversations happened.

>aimlessly wandering/engaging people looks like productive work.

Indeed, even though it might actually be _negative_ work, if one of those people would have otherwise been productive. Which was one of my major gripes with being in the office.

That negative work is so true. Like you, that's my main complaint.

I'm a local celebrity due to putting out all the Big Fires - so now, whenever people see me on-site as a trapped/captive audience, I hear about every hint of smoke.

Thankfully our mandates are currently more... suggestions, giving credit to the "layoffs but not really" story IMO.

It's annoying to even re-negotiate. I've been remote for years, pre-pandemic, only appearing when required.

You have a separate room at home and that's where you switch to work mode. Some people don't even need that, just an environment free of interruptions. No need to overthink it, both home and office are a "physical location"

> You have a separate room at home and that's where you switch to work mode.

Ironic to see this comment in a discussion about carbon footprints of remote work. Separate rooms do not come from free - they also have a high carbon cost in terms of bigger house, more heating/cooling, most likely suburban setting which has its own carbon costs etc.

But does that room come at a higher carbon cost than commuting to the office (45mins each way(!) afair on average in the US) and having an office building that's entirely empty at night. That building needs maintenance, gardening, cleaning, ...

The gas engine in a car surely comes with a stellar carbon cost compared to heating another room in the house.

Then maybe work from home but in your car is the answer

Yeah but I already have the room and it is being cooled/heated whether I’m there or not. Driving 25 miles each way to the office on the other hand is something that I stopped doing completely once my work started letting me WFH full time.

So having a small room at home dedicated for work is bad? I don't really get it. How is office different, cooling/heating isn't needed there?

Per capita sqft of office space is much lower than everyone having their own room (even a small 9x9 one). In other words, office heating/cooling is amortized across a large population.

I'm pretty sure there are lower hanging fruits than trying to pack as many people as you can in one space to optimize carbon footprint. I find this argument to be a far fetched way to guilt someone who works remotely at best. What's the next step, why have homes or apartments that generate excess carbon emissions when you can pitch a tent in the open space inside office buildings?

There is a big spectrum of possibilities between "everyone having a typical American suburban home with an extra room for their office" and "pitch a tent in the open space". Walkable dense cities is one such example. It is no surprise that NYC's carbon footprint is 11 MTCO2 per person while the number for the overall US is ~14.5 MTCO2. Or, NYC gives you almost one-fourth reduction in the carbon footprint per capita.

> I think a lot of people are less productive when they work from home. It's easier to switch into "work mode" when there's a specific physical location where you only work.

I switched from a clearly defined (imposed) lunch break with multiple intra day whole floor coffee breaks to working straight 10 hours with a break when I can slip into the kitchen and I feel I am both more productive and happy when working from home.

The point is not on the clock hourly days of work but rather being treated like an adult and trusted.

I'm really, really curious about this data, because I can only extrapolate from personal anecdata.

I've personally measured this for myself and WFH is overwhelmingly more productive for me, measured via sheer output. I think part of this is because I'm naturally just working... longer? It's a mind shift, but this was generally my stance when I was in office too, which is:

1. When I'm in office, those are my working hours. Unless there was a very critical crunch period, I did not work at home at all. It was a very strong boundary.

2. I was very diligent about keeping my office hours - partially because of traffic. So I'd put in my 8 hours, often skipping lunch, and go straight home. 7am-3pm every day.

3. When you're in the office, people really love impromptu meetings. So a good chunk of the day is used talking to people. Sometimes this is productive, but often it just means the project you are working on gets 1-2 less hours that day than it would otherwise.

Contrast this with WFH:

1. My commute was 1 hour both ways (Bay Area), which is now gone. I usually work in the range of 7am - 5pm now. I take a break for lunch and to go for a run. Ultimately, I end up working 8.5-9 hours now (a .5-1 hour increase in duration), but I'm actively healthier because I can take a break + exercise.

2. Because my desk is always setup, I end up doing more sporadic tasks - especially when it comes to long, async build processes, I'm more inclined to quickly debug something and run a pipeline again. Before I just left my laptop in my bag, and couldn't (wouldn't) be bothered to pick it up.

3. Sporadic meetings are non-existent. Slack is async, so I just check it a few times a day. I can control my time much better meaning actual focus on a task is possible - which is nearly impossible in an office environment.

Not to mention just the overall quality of life improvements from being able to eat lunch with my wife and daughter, be able to take appointments and slightly shift my calendar, be flexible in where I am (we can actually visit family not on weekends now!). Also I save about $5k/year by not driving all the damn time. Also, my company could save money by just not leasing their office anymore...

I'm happier, healthier, more energetic, and thus ultimately more productive remote. In office work sets stronger barriers, sure, but returning to the office will mean that's where I leave my work too. To satiate someone's requirement for social interaction through coworkers is bizarre to me.

Anyway - that's my personal view. I'm curious what actual macro data shows. Perhaps I'm one in a million - but I doubt it.

Except, didn't the intro to the Jetsons have George headed to the office every day?

Yes, and when he got there he put his feet up and closed his eyes.

https://youtu.be/0JQbeCAlF6s?t=61

What does it say about our culture that futuristic media envisioned flying cars and robotic servants but not an altered labor arrangement?

Modernism. Infatuation with the transformative power of technology. It transfers responsibilities of political participation (what it means to be a citizen) to a mechanistic, consumptive process (what it means to be a consumer). Could not exist without mass manufacturing (without which technology cannot fulfill its telos) or mass media (without which humans would not submit to this ideology).

I'm not sure it says anything about our culture specifically. It speaks to all cultures.

The future is always going to be what we have now, but sexier in some way. So replace cars with flying ones, and replace work we do with robotic servants.

The really interesting science fiction doesn't do a linear extrapolation, it looks at how we might really change. But that's not what we get from a kid's cartoon.

It was a kid’s show. I doubt it was meant to be a cutting commentary on social structures.

And, while we are at it, what's up with the Flintstones and dinosaurs and humans living side by side. If that isn't commentary on the sorry state of academic culture I don't know what else is.

Flintstones is based in the future, not the past ;-)

Also, do cassowaries count as dinosaurs?

Yes, that's what they're saying: that the Jetsons completely missed this prediction.

> Why isn’t this practice that workers clearly love, and are willing to leave companies to keep, seen as a great step in the progress of labor?

It's better to think of people as individuals, and not as "labor" or "not-labor". I think remote working is great for this, much better than top-down mandates on cars and congestion zones, although those swell the tax coffers nicely, but I don't think it's a great victory. Lots of people (particularly those who do actual physical labour, such as builders and shopkeepers) have to go to a workplace. It's not a victory for them, because lumping people into tribes means category errors abound.

Why is it not a victory for them? Less congestion on the roads, higher prices for their labor since WFH work is more attractive.

For the shopkeepers and others who provided services for the office workers… fewer jobs.

If society wants to make jobs, there is tons of trash to pickup. And infrastructure to maintain/build.

Oh I’m not saying people should go back into an office because of the retail and restaurant workers. It’s just this isn’t good for those workers as an upstream comment seemed to suggest.

Are you thinking that picking up trash and building infrastructure are examples of labour that is victorious with working from home?

Good luck getting people to drop the "labor"/"not labor" schtick when you literally have people here using Marxist language to describe working from home vs. commuting into an office like it's the 1800s.

One issue is that lots of people don't have the work space at home. It takes a lot of privilege to have an extra room for office. Lots of people managed to work from other places in house during pandemic because they had to.

Coworking spaces are one solution. But many disappeared during the pandemic. Also, somebody needs to pay for them. I bet we'll see a lot more of them using the empty commercial space. But they will work best near residential areas.

Why does it take privilege? I worked for many years in a studio apartment and made just slightly over the poverty line and, although the pay sucked, the wfh was awesome and doable even on a nothing budget.

> one of many missed “Jetsons opportunities.”

This isn't a missed opportunity, it's just an opportunity. Large-scale remote work wasn't feasible prior to the advent of the web and the personal home computer in the 90s, and realistically wouldn't have happened prior to the mass penetration of the internet and the computerization of everything circa 2005/2010. It just so happened that the covid pandemic occurred at approximately the exact moment in human history where mass remote work was even an option (and obviously is still limited to people in knowledge sectors).

For most of recorded history, people also worked from wherever they lived, largely in agriculture. The protoindustrialization that emerged in the 16th century saw rural residents performing many new industrial tasks beyond subsistence farming. During slow parts of the season they earned extra money by spinning wool or weaving and washing cloth.

The urbanization driven by the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century didn’t tip the balance to a majority of the US population living in cities until 1920. Other countries were even further behind.

Work From Not Home is the actual historical anomaly here. Information technology allowing people to perform their 21st Century, postindustrial knowledge work at home is just reversion to the mean.

> Why wouldn’t we, given the ability, work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?

Because a considerable part of our economy apparently relies on people getting out of the house, (mostly) driving somewhere, buying their lunch (and other stuff) and temporarily occupying some landlord's building.

Because it just doesn’t seem to work (in aggregate, it may work for you, but not the firm, and not the firm over an indefinite time span).

The research on this is very mixed, and in many cases has found that remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. Anecdotally, I've found some organizations work great fully remotely, while others require in-person presence at least some of the time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/time-savin....

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/1/165/2337...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

It's especially annoying when your job only needs 3-5 meetings every week. If a task can be fully explained in a ticket, and the architectural design has already been done by someone higher up, then why do you need to see the foot soldiers working. Either the work gets done or it doesn't.

I understand 1 day in the office, but 3-5 days/week is madness. Doubly so in places where the commute is upwards of 1 hour in each direction. M

There are people who make a lot of money from the consumption of gas and tires and oil. Also the manufacturing and selling of automobiles. Those people make a lot of financial contributions to politicians and sometimes become politicians themselves.

Executive & management culture.

Fortunately the management of a lot of medium-large tech companies have a tech background and have allowed WFH to continue.

It's extra large tech companies with career managers who are trying to get people to RTO.

History shows the employer -> employee relationship is about exerting control over the employee, not making the employee happy.

One might call the relationship dialectical, and the most effective analysis of its dynamics rooted in materialism.

Because real estate speculation is more important to Capital owners.

Is there a carbon credit for that?

If not, there should be a tax on employers for RTO, in the cause of realizing externalities.

Public companies will be required to report their carbon emissions as part of new SEC rules. Perhaps this could be reported to the SEC if they don't report these emissions? Sounds like securities fraud to me if they don't (hat tip to Matt Levine's "Everything is securities fraud" series).

Buy some shares, get some standing, spin up the legal apparatus. Not legal advice.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-46

> The proposed rules also would require a registrant to disclose information about its direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Scope 1) and indirect emissions from purchased electricity or other forms of energy (Scope 2). In addition, a registrant would be required to disclose GHG emissions from upstream and downstream activities in its value chain (Scope 3), if material or if the registrant has set a GHG emissions target or goal that includes Scope 3 emissions. These proposals for GHG emissions disclosures would provide investors with decision-useful information to assess a registrant’s exposure to, and management of, climate-related risks, and in particular transition risks. The proposed rules would provide a safe harbor for liability from Scope 3 emissions disclosure and an exemption from the Scope 3 emissions disclosure requirement for smaller reporting companies. The proposed disclosures are similar to those that many companies already provide based on broadly accepted disclosure frameworks, such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

Credits should be for actually removing carbon. Credits for this devolve really quickly into giving people credits because they bought a sedan instead of a truck. Tax emissions, credit removal. Less tax is its own reward.

There never was a tax to begin with, in fact there is the opposite (tax credits) in a lot of America if a business decides to open up a shiny new $200 million concrete jungle and forces employees to commute in.

Tax credits for what exactly?

For bringing business to the community. People will move to live close to the office, the company itself pays taxes in the future to the township, more traffic = more opportunities for small business. It's generally seen as healthy for an economy, but the huge downside is the environmental externalities are completely ignored.

Depending on the community, they may be required to do an environmental study which does...many things that I'm not familiar with. All I know is a lot of new buildings in my area come with lots of green space and solar panels over parking lots. And probably other green things.

One of my favorite examples: my Dad worked at a F100 company, and they moved a large group of employees to a new office building. That office building was taxed in a special "opportunity zone" that gave the employer tax credits while the employees got stuck with a new higher local income tax.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the worker should be given incentives to bring their income to an area. This allows a community to diversify economically, vs handouts to large corporations who will continually wield their business contributions against a jurisdiction to continue to obtain substantial tax breaks or other economic concessions, and when they finally leave, they do substantial harm to the community.

As a community, you then cater to workers to draw and keep them there (not maliciously, simply providing high quality of life like a community should), and they will continue to contribute to the community by way of their spending from income (on taxes and consumption) for their productive lifespan.

> Fundamentally, the problem is that the worker should be given incentives to bring their income to an area

This can be done naturally, if local government intervention is low, so there's more money for local businesses to spend, or unnaturally, if local government intervention is high, so local businesses have less decision power, and the local government spends that money on infrastructure for companies coming in who pay less tax.

I understand how it works but it just seems a zero sum game. When someone moves from city A to city B, it's more tax for city B but less for A, and it often happens in one direction than the other. Same for companies. Reminds me of the silly and meaningless "border war" between Missouri and Kansas.

Typically cities A and B fall under different local governments (states or counties or whatever), making it not zero sum for the government of city B to attract the business.

> I understand how it works but it just seems a zero sum game.

Not necessarily, most companies are growing and building new offices in addition to existing ones.

It would be far, far more direct to just have a carbon tax.

You realize the effect would be to drive businesses out to foreign jurisdictions that don't have that carbon tax.

Tariffs on goods that originate from countries that don't properly account for this externality.

If a country doesn't want to collect it from their domestic producers, we'll handle it on our end. Companies offshoring production to avoid the carbon tax will be a no-op.

Same with VAT really. Yet some business just stay there.

The tax is typically on fuel, which employees pay for. In theory this ought to filter through to employers who may well end up having to pay more for in-office employees to cover the extra costs. Whether that plays out in practice I'm not sure.

Companies should be taxed MORE for having people work in an office?

Yes. They are causing negative externalities without exposure to the costs. Why would we collectively not force them to internalize the costs of their requirements? Pay up.

Tangentially, it is sort of fun to potentially wield capitalist economic mechanisms against poor human decisions powered by hierarchical social power structures causing detriment to physical systems. Not all hacks require code (although, one could consider statute and executive branch rule making a form of code processed by the legal system I suppose).

I don't think a tax like this would have the intention you think. It would likely increase outsourcing, massively benefit large corporations who can afford to absorb the fees (and have better accountants/lawyers compared to startups), destroy the tax base of cities (after the companies flee to business friendly states), shut down tons of small business that rely on commuters/workers (like restaurants, bars, cleaning staff, etc). Believe it or not, many people like to see their co-workers daily and don't view going to an office as a crime against humanity. This forum skews heavily towards the opposite view obviously.

Either pay for the climate damage you cause or don't cause it. If tariffs are needed to avoid using outsourcing to evade the spirit of the law, implement them. No freeloading, no papering over unsustainable systems. If city tax bases crumble, so be it. If small businesses fail, that is what one would expect in a dynamic, constantly changing economic system when the system changes.

> Believe it or not, many people like to see their co-workers daily and don't view going to an office as a crime against humanity. This forum skews heavily towards the opposite view obviously.

I take no issue, just pay your fully loaded costs to have this experience. My work is an income, not my social life, so I cannot relate. Now if your argument instead is, "My in office work life is a core component of myself but I also don't want to pay for the externalities living this experience causes because I didn't have to previously," I do not have much sympathy.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397751/returning-office-cur... ("Approximately 56% of full-time employees in the U.S. -- more than 70 million workers -- say their job can be done working remotely from home.")

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights... ("Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it.")

Meh, I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of carbon credits/offsets. Its a new system and there's no way in telling if it will have its intended impact. Levying taxes and enacting policy is an inherently political game, and these solutions impact people TODAY. Most people would prefer to keep their quality of life high today, vs mitigating some potential risk 100s of years from now when they won't even be alive.

They pay them by paying their employees, who pay for transport.

…but not the pollution, road maintenance due to extra wear, fuel economy stagnation, etc.

That is what gp was referring to: externalities, which you don't directly pay for

Gas tax and car registrations cover a fair amount of what you're talking about.

I've got some bad news for you about the gas tax for repairs; at least on US Interstate highways.

> (2021) The transit and highway accounts are projected to have a shortfall of $207B over the next 10 years

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/its-been-28-years-since-we...

> The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives U.S. infrastructure a C-minus, is calling on the government and private sector to increase spending on roads and bridges by at least $2.5 trillion within a decade.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-...

Blame the people who should be setting the and spending taxes correctly for that one.

Work at office: hundreds/thousands of multi-ton SUV's try to get to the same place at 9am and 5pm; parents are absent from their children and each other half the day; real estate values near offices spike insanely; if people commute by bus/train they have to sacrifice even more hours, and also, share space with crazies and you still have to move a massive amount of physical stuff around.

Work from home: some electrons & photons move.

Which one costs society more?

Why not? They pollute more because of this decision (assuming we're talking about a desk job of course)

The title is misleading. For who didn't read the article (and judging by the reactions, that is most people here), this is what the study that the article refers to really found:

- the way how most people currently work remotely is -more- carbon intensive than commuting to the office

- working remotely -can- halve the carbon footprint, if employees take drastic measures to reduce their footprint at home. Such as using solar panels etc.

- still, offices could do the same, and employees could also choose more carbon friendly ways to commute to the office and then the balance would swing the other way again

The article seems to be implying that remote workers drive more because they live in more rural places, and some also take “several short trips” throughout the day that add up to more driving than their commute would have been. But why are they taking lots of short trips? To do errands that they would otherwise have done on the weekends? I don’t have any intuition about this.

> we observe substantially more total travel miles for remote workers > to drop off/pick up friends, conduct recreational activities, > visit healthcare facilities, visit friends/relatives, and exercise

This is genuinely surprising. From my sample set of 4 people on my team this is really not the case, neither is it for myself.

I work for a Fortune 500 company. One of the things a higher up said in discussing getting people back into the office is they need us spending money of food and driving. Food I can kind of understand. We have a ton of food options on campus that are ran by a third party company. I would guess that my company has a contract with them that we will spend $x and if the employees are not spending at least $x, then the company has to make up the difference.

But the driving comment didn't make any sense to us. Is our company getting some sort of kickback from the gasoline stations, car mechanics, or tire shops? Wouldn't the city rather have us not driving to save wear and tear on the roads?

Any my company gives so much lip service to sustainability and the environment. What could be better for the environment than nobody driving into work?

I used to work for a Fortune 500 company and in my case it was obvious that businesses in and around our campus suffered significantly with more people not coming to the office. My guess is the company had tax incentives in place with the city/state on the condition that their being there was a boost for the local economy. People not coming to work and spending money jeopardized those incentives.

The sunk cost fallacy in full effect, except in some of the big companies that involves actual investment in real estate they want to recoup somehow.

I don't know how long it'll take, but I expect less offices built, and less office floor area being leased in the long term.

Maybe they need you to spend more of your money so you have to keep working to make more money.

One of the problems with paying people more is that they often quit to enjoy the money they’ve made.

You can also think of it this way, if you're not spending money, you're saving it and thus, the company can't hold you hostage in the future because you "need the money".

Jokes on them. I bring my lunch everyday and ride my bike to work. I'm getting exercise and they are losing the time I could have been working if I had stayed home.

Having reliable public transportation with good headways for those who still need to commute to work, getting even more cars off of the roads.

It's the same with people who are paranoid of 15 minute cities as a concept. I don't know whose ends they're useful idiots for, but someone is rioting them.

Maybe they want to get the most use out of their parking garage? If they have one.

There are four parking garages and more surface parking lots than I could possibly count. I think it has more to do with the millions of square feet of office space on campus. But, they should just admit that rather than giving BS excuses.

Yeah, and at least halve the cost for the employer by rolling off office space, supplies, heating, insurance, etc. to the employee. And the decrease of the carbon footprint works “only if they take the necessary measures at home.” I am so done with virtue signalling that puts the responsibilty on the individual instead of holding corporations and policy makers accountable as the main systemic culprits.

> I am so done with virtue signalling that puts the responsibilty on the individual instead of holding corporations and policy makers accountable as the main systemic culprits.

I agree with you on this point, but staying in one place instead of commuting to and from work every day really does reduce the carbon footprint of most drivers. For people who take transit or bike to work, this may be a moot point.

Commuting,as a neccessity, is also for the policy makers to fix imo, after they have put billions (trillions?) into road infrastructure. Channel it to public/mass transport if you are serious about decreasing carbon footprint of individuals in that aspect.

I agree with that. Plenty of European and East Asian cities have massive commuter load with a way smaller per-commuter energy footprint than in the USA.

You still have to build an office building you wouldn't need, run the AC and heater, clean it, etc.

I don’t think companies can rightfully claim carbon neutral if they don’t account for the GHG emissions from their forced “working in the office” policy. They should be taxed heavily at the very least.

Much simpler to just tax things that cause GHG emissions like fossil fuels directly.

In this case, taxing fossil fuel directly won’t reduce emissions. The increased cost to fossil fuel will simply be passed to the consumers. It just adds cost to the affected employees and makes them accountable for bad corporate policies to make a choice between livelihood and climate. The root of the problem is not addressed. The deep pocket should be accountable. It is the unnecessary emissions forced onto the working class that should be discouraged.

Unless everyone has unlimited money, then increasing the price of a good decreases the amount of it that is purchased. The higher the price, the less is sold, even for things with low elasticity of demand.

Gas at $5/gallon? SUVs are not a problem, and commuting 1.5 hours in individual cars is a thing. Gas at $30/gallon, and you will see people demand more high density communities with walking/bicycling/public transit infrastructure.

What actually happened is the costs and wages are all jacked up and we ended up with inflation. There is no meaningful GHG emissions reduction overall.

Because the price is not high enough to curb consumption.

Tax the companies that deliberately and unnecessarily decided to go against climate policies. Let them feel the direct economic impact for their action. If we are to shield these initiators from the consequence through a series of convoluted economic maneuvers, then nothing will get changed and it’s just business as usual.

Taxing businesses for employees' GHG emissions is far more convoluted than simply taxing the things causing GHG emissions at the point of sale.

You would need to figure out which employee is driving which kind of car with which kind of emissions systems, then keep records of all of that, and then hire people to audit it, and then prosecute corruption.

All unnecessary.

The direct impact will easily be felt by businesses who unnecessarily require commuting because they will become less competitive. They have to pay their employees more than their competitors to pay for the commute, hence the prices for their products/service are higher than a competitor who does not require commuting. Obviously, this does not manifest at $5/gallon. It needs to be something that hurts, like $30/gallon, and not just at the fuel pump, but at the refinery/extraction level so everything that causes GHG emissions gets hit.

It is simple, easy to audit, fewer entities to audit, fewer chances for corruption, and easier to prosecute if need be.

I beg to differ. Impact will not be easily felt by businesses if it relies on trickle down consequences. In a capitalistic society, employers and employees don’t share the equal power dynamics.

The problem is that employees don't have a limited spectrum of employer choice in the modern world and a good chunk of those employers mandate a commute. If the employer is forcing the choice on employees they should be the one to pay the tax - rather than the employee.

Employers do not force people to work for them, and they also do not have an unlimited choice of employees. Certain commute lengths make sense at certain payrates at certain commute costs. If the commute costs change, then the other two variables have to change too, and the employer will have to pay more to incentivize people further away to work for them.

And if living closer to work costs more, then the employer is going to have to pay more to have their employees afford to live closer.

The choice of who to hire and who to work for is limited on both sides... but in this case it's the employer who is making the mandate that people should commute into the office - the employer should bear the cost of that mandate.

Should the employer also pay for the costs of clothes and water to bathe oneself since they mandate being presentable?

Should the employer pay for someone to commute 4 hours? How about a 2 hour flight everyday? This is all arbitrary, but it is much simpler to just let the market sort it out.

Employer offers $x for employee to be in y place at time z. Employee figures out if $x is enough to incentivize them to be there at the time, and otherwise asks for more money or seeks other employment.

If employer does not find sufficient employees at $x, then they have to increase.

Outside of things considered mandatory for normal life - yes, I think so. I absolutely loathe companies that make you purchase a company uniform (if they want a consistent employee appearance the company should pay for that benefit) and when it comes to bathing yourself that's a general social expectation so I don't believe it's valid to try and offload on a company - but if you are required to use certain high grade soaps (i.e. some expensive brand of hypoallergenic soap since you work at a health-care provider) or the like then I think the company should provide it.

In terms of commutes I think you're thinking too much with programmer brain - when it comes to laws of society we have the reasonable person/common sense standard. Companies should reimburse a reasonable commute to the office - if you're thirty minutes by car then gas reimbursement is reasonable... but if you choose to make that commute in a helicopter the costs of operating that helicopter are not reasonable.

I would bet most people consider showing up to a regular place of work mandatory for “normal” life. I cannot even think of an example where it is not the expectation.

And why is an environment damaging car considered be reasonable instead of a 30min bicycle? Or a Prius instead of an F250? What about variances? Road closures? Dropping kids off on the way? All unnecessary complications and arbitrary classifications.

The goal is to reduce carbon emissions, not subsidize individuals’ living preferences.

The IRS currently sets a cap on employer commute benefits of $300 a month, which probably needs to be adjusted for inflation a bit, but generally establishes a reasonable standard.

Yeah, but it makes downtown city centers deserted, and politicians can't have that, so their make your CEO make you get your ass back into the office.

People seriously underestimate how significant driving is to their environmental footprint.

Rough calculation is 14,000kg/y of CO2 per capita in the US. Of which 4,000kg would be from driving (at average yearly distance of 20,000km in average new ICE vehicle).

Recycling, and other initiatives are nice but don't come close. WFH is a huge help.

Man, I started reading the headline and was worried it would end with “can more than halve an office employee’s lifespan”, haha

I’m sure it’s great for the planet, but I’ve been working remotely for about 4 years and my body is not thanking me for it in any way whatsoever.

If the only exercise you were getting before really was what you got from the walking you did at work why not incorporate walks around your neighborhood into your day?

Everyone pretty much agrees that effective remote work needs a dedicated setup. Which means having an extra room. That means remote work is going to increase real estate footprint. The carbon savings on commute will instead be used up for propping up suburban lifestyle.

If one is living in a dense city and going to use wework instead, then we still need wework office buildings and commute will still be involved. So I don't see real carbon savings with a switch to remote.

> effective remote work needs a dedicated setup.

I have 900 sq ft apartment, when I switched to wfh I went to Ikea, put two desks in my one bedroom one for my partner one for, and it's doubled as our office for years now.

Yes you need a dedicated space but do you know what spaces typically have lots of extra room and involve activities that basically never overlap with work -- your bedroom. And this is with the fact that I work on call and get called into work during weird hours, I sit at my kitchen island with headphones.

Who is everyone and what does dedicated setup mean when they say it? You say it has to be an entire room but for me and most folks I work with outside of management that's a desk somewhere in their house like their room, family room or living room.

> what does dedicated setup mean when they say it?

the one where you are not distracted by other family members, like working from your kitchen or living room. That is simply unworkable for a WFH situation.

I assume you mean young children since older children and adults would respect your boundaries. If you do mean older children and other adults and they're not behaving ridiculously perhaps there's another issue at play impacting your ability to focus. I won't speculate but I had that problem a long time ago and exploring it changed my life for the better.

Everyone knows this yet there's not one head of state encouraging companies that can to relax on the RTO push.

Makes me think we aren't in a climate emergency.

Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee's Productivity (but don't have to)

https://www.businessinsider.com/wfh-work-from-home-decreases...

"The study observed groups of data-entry workers in India working from home and from the office."

And it can also double it.. this study, just to quote one bit

> observed data-entry workers in Chennai, India, across two groups — those working from the office and those working from home

Don't want to go into all the details that had been discussed when the study was posted first - yes you also said "can".

But to start, certainly not the representative office employee that's discussed here.

Yeah i’d rather spend the money saved by not commuting on solar panels and a nice little well, a massive internet pipe and a nice little house with a garden. Guaranteed my productivity will be through the roof, and i will also save on emissions. Win win.

It's amusing seeing people justify working from an office but the same people turning around and telling others to not eat meat or other restrictions on their life style.

Either it's all in or it's not, and for most people it's not.

Driving less is good. I hate my commute anyway. However, I did wonder whether having everyone's houses being actively heated/cooled because you are at home versus the business office would result in more net carbon.

I would just ask that anyone who makes such a calculation consider that, in the SF offices I used to work in, they heated the fucking garages. They literally heated the massive, multi-level car garages that were, for the vast majority of the time, completely unoccupied by human beings. In San Francisco.

That's not the mention the sprawling lobbies, long hallways, unused conference rooms and so on.

Personally,my homes heat and ac use us u changed whether or not I am home. There has been minimal savings (from my own small sample size) to reducing either while I am away, as when I would return the system would have to work longer to restore the desired temps.

So my situation it actually is a net benefit to work from home.

I think that’s typical. I can drop my thermostat about 7 degrees F in the winter if I’m not home. Just have a window unit AC which I rarely use and don’t even put in some years.

But I’m probably about 40 miles RT to go into my closer office which I have basically not done for years. Sometimes go into the urban one to meet with customer which is about 2x the distance and 3x the time.

For most people commuting costs dwarf the costs of being home for the day—unless they move to a bigger and more expensive place.

> 7 degrees F

Typo? Pipes freeze and burst at that temperature.

Drop by not to. To about 55 degrees.

If you have a modern heat pump system, it's often more energy efficient to keep it at a steady temp. They become more efficient the less they have to work. This means if you're changing the temp while at work, there's a spike when you return where it has to work harder. The efficiency loss there is often worse than what was saved by changing the temps while you were away.

Same, most people keep their home in a narrow temperate range, especially if you have pets at home.

The commute is what killed me. Doing what is essentially unpaid work to get to/from work seems pretty unfair when you’re losing potentially an hour each day doing it.

I have to imagine companies would quit this RTO nonsense if they were forced to pay hourly rates for commutes.

1.5 hours driving a day * 5 days a week = not going to the gym ever.

I'm a pretty big gym rat, so I went even when i did go to the office.

All that to say that having the freedom to go in the middle of the day/lunchtime and also having more energy for it was one of the single biggest benefits I enjoy from remote work as someone who lives alone.

I can also go for short walks around my neighborhood for small breaks without feeling like I'll be judged for not being at my desk/making smalltalk with people who don't wanna be active. Normally those breaks would just be sitting around the coffee maker, or people standing at desks.

Remote work opens up so much for human health in my opinion. I do understand some jobs can't be done from home, but in my opinion that should be reason to compensate them even more.

>Doing what is essentially unpaid work to get to/from work seems pretty unfair when you’re losing potentially an hour each day doing it.

I do not agree with this framing. People have agency to choose where they live and what tradeoffs they want to make in their life. No reason someone willing to live in a certain location should subsidize someone wanting to live further away.

So you have agency in theory but not in practice? I don't know many coworkers who can afford to live anywhere near our office aside from management and people far along on the technical promotion path. Every state, city and area is different but I can't imagine these circumstances are rare. Homes without commutes tend to have a much higher price or rental cost than those further away. If 80% of your workers have to commute to get to your office what agency do they really have? The agency to live in a van parked a few blocks away?

Suburban sprawl is highly subsidized in the USA. Having agency doesn't negate the environment your surrounded by.

Yes, and forcing business to pay people the further away they live further subsidizes the sprawl.

It also happens that living in an apartment in the middle of a city is depressing to many people, who wish for green spaces, gardening, and a bit of s p a c e. So I just disagree that suburbia is hell, and high-rise living is next to godliness.

I would live in a world where I was near wilderness, working remotely, but occasionally commuting to work through ultra high speed transport.

Tell that to the person cleaning your offices.

The person cleaning the office being too poor to live near the office is a separate issue, solved with wealth redistribution and more high density housing.

just fundamentally restructure your government and undertake decades-long construction projects!

That doesn't help the people in the 20-year interim before those changes are made. God forbid wealth redistribution doesn't actually solve the problem.

Yes, I know it is politically intractable, hence all of these problems are unsolvable. But technically, it is feasible, just requires a lot of reduced expectations from people who are anticipating living a certain lifestyle.

Depends on how much you blast the AC/heating while you're home I suppose, and whether or not you have pets and so need to keep your house somewhat heated/cooled all the time anyway.

The office I used to work at had the thermostat set far lower in the summer than I ever would at home.

This is pretty easy to figure out by looking at grid energy use. I think a lot of producers make that public info. Not sure there was much impact.

I keep my house the same temp whether I’m home or not. I figured most people probably do the same.

And yet they don't care.

The ultimate moral high ground.

Firing everyone can reduce an office's carbon footprint to 0. Just sayin'

Not if it takes 3 remote workers to do the work of 1 in office worker.

Gossip and smalltalk arent work.

and more than halve collaboration. thanks

When the death, strife and pain climate change is bringing becomes impossible to ignore at least we'll be able to say we were able to increase collaboration and shareholder value.

not (by far) the main reason for climate change. if people work together and figure out a way to solve climate change, I think it would happen faster than remotely figuring it out

And it's great for DEI as well, truly a moral free lunch https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbooksauthors/2023/01/10/r...

DEI is an income-suppressing initiative, as shown by "In fact, if your office is in a major hub like New York or Hong Kong, the distant designer may be even more appealing because of lower salary expectations.".

That's not a positive.

Feels like that's a matter of perspective, the distant designer and non-Americans may like working for this company and significantly increasing their wages.

The (often) unsaid truth about carbon footprint is that dead people produce no carbon. The lineage of the movement can be directly traced to Neomalthusian and eugenicists.

You could say this about any pov that discourages any behavior: "Dead people don't murder, and so the movement to stop murder can be traced directly to Neomalthusian and eugenicists."

It's obnoxious to exaggerate the perspective of people you disagree with, just to make them seem less reasonable. Those who want people to decrease their carbon footprint don't want you dead, they just want people to decrease their carbon footprint.

No, dead people produce about 13 kg of carbon.

The title is misleading as it ignores the qualifier that the employees have to take certain steps at home to achieve this. Some examples:

> You and his team found that this isn’t the case. In fact, remote workers often drive more often than their in-office counterparts by taking several short car trips throughout the day.

> The researchers also found that working from home can prompt people to use more energy over the course of a workday on things such as air-conditioning and a dishwasher. And remote workers are more likely to move out of big, centralized cities, where lifestyles are generally less carbon-intensive than in suburban or rural areas.

These issues are key. Thanks for raising them.

In some recent transport modelling work we decided there wasn't yet enough evidence about wfh, specifically because people may move further from the office. If this study fills some gaps, it's good work.

...edit: ok so it doesn't address causality. Alas. We need a study following a cohort for a few years after wfh became available, vs another cohort denied wfh.

Down votes are being used reddit style, I see. I'd love to know what the disagreement is exactly?

I wondered the same thing with my comment which was largely quoting clarifying items from the article. I think this is a touchy subject for people who cannot emotionally handle anything challenging their view.

Yet somehow the C02 PPM kept on climbing during Covid era when many worked from home. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

Does it surprise you that despite many working from home, the world in general kept on trucking along? Of course CO2 PPM kept rising. Where people work isn't the only cause of carbon emissions.

You could read the article that you had to scroll past to look at the chart.

Can we see a change in the CO2 record because of COVID-19?: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/covid2.html

So?

So lockdown was a liberal hoax! It never actually happened and there never really were any restrictions.

You joke, but I've legitimately seen people try to argue that "we never really locked down" and the restrictions were never that stringent.

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