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Comment by ragazzina | Hacker News Reader

I love WFH but how is it a win climate change solution for anyone outside of the USA? If my office building WFH, instead of heating a building we need to heat 500 people homes all day. And most of the people commute by public transport.

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Vast majority of people are not touching their thermostat much at all when going to the office.

But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.

>stupid made up arguments

All arguments are made up.

>getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting

If I work from home my home must be kept at 19°. If I go to the office, my house can go down to 14-16° no problem.

So 500 people leave for office and turn off the heating at their homes, even if there are other people (kids, elderly) or animals (cats, dogs, birds) living there?

Kids are at school during office hours, I'm not sure about pets but they I don't think they care whether the house is 23° or 16° considering most of them go outside without any issue.

How is their commute relevant? If they are WFH, theres less people needing to commute. Thats less fuel or more efficient fuel economy for public transport to use

Yes but we are offsetting their lack of commute (being public transport, a small impact anyway) with having to heat many more houses.

Most energy goes into making up for the temperature delta. If you turn the heating down, the delta at either evening or morning goes up.

Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.

I would hazard a guess that (x houses @ minimal heating + x amount of petrol burned during a commute + emissions from heating an office) > whatever amount of emissions x houses would generate going from minimal heating to comfortable heating.

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