Why isn't remote work advertised as a pro environment initiative?

Because corporations are doing the majority of that pro-environmental advertising. I mean that both in terms of companies making changes (both real and greenwashing) and the News/Media corporations reporting on it.

Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.

Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).

There is nothing more illogical in modern society than commuting to an office every day. Employees waste 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Employers waste time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms, etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.

Two main problems

1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.

If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.

There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.

I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.

We used to spend $400 a month on gasoline because we both commuted 25 minutes each way. During the pandemic that was down to about $100 a month. And when we did have to go somewhere the traffic was so much lower so less wasting gas in stop and go traffic. I'm supposed to go in 3 days a week. In reality I go in once a week for a few hours and no one cares as 90% of the people on my project are in other offices. I told my manager "What is the point of driving in to put on my headset and disturb everyone with my meetings while trying to block out the noise of everyone else on their meetings?" He couldn't argue with that so he hasn't pushed the in office thing.

When I had an office with a door and window I liked going in. It was a good mix of seeing people and privacy. I hate the 1 year of cubicle stuff after 15 years in an office with a door. Then the pandemic hit and I really hate cubicles even more.

I live in a small apartment a short train ride from the office. It isn't big enough to work from home. If I worked from home I'd get a big house in the suburbs, and buy a car to get around. My environmental footprint would be much bigger.

Edit - if I didn't have kids I'd totally have a beach house and a mountain house to live in. Maybe in different countries too.

Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure. Building one kilometre of subway costs anywhere from around $100 million to $1.6 billion (https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events/how-much-does-it-cost...), and then requires subsidies to run. Why not use this money to provide incentives for people to telecommute?

And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....

Because employers do not really care about the environment. They’re pretending to because they think supporting the cause positively impacts their revenue. When they have a choice to make an impact, like now, they pass.

The environmental argument is sometimes used, but often (and often correctly) seen as someone who prefers remote work dishonestly slapping an environmental argument on it (dishonest, because the actual primary reason they're pushing for it doesn't match the stated primary reason).

It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect either - one argument I've heard is that in areas where air conditioning is a large contributor to energy use and homes are poorly insulated, someone staying home and cooling their home with an inefficient, small air conditioner may be worse than having that person commute to an office instead. This argument is often generalized and sometimes dishonestly used by people who prefer office work to argue that teleworking is actually bad for the environment.

I found a meta-study https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8a84/... that claims vehicle miles traveled increase (because people move further away) while the studies generally claimed a reduction in overall energy consumption.

Several studies claim grossly exaggerated environmental impacts for streaming/data transfers. I don't remember seeing it misused to dismiss the environmental argument for teleworking, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it. The worst offender here is the Shift Project, which overstated the results of their already flawed study by another factor of 8 in an interview, and then used that huge mistake to argue that their other mistakes aren't that relevant because they're small (compared to the initial mistake, not compared to their claimed impact). https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-...

Couldn't the opposite be argued as well?

Everybody spending 8 more hours at home means so much more individual heating, whereas before, when you went into the office you'd turn the heating off.

Also as someone else pointed, working remote leads to leaving small apartments in the city to move into larger spaces (houses) in the suburbs. Then you would need to use a car more to meet people, get groceries etc. Cities are much more carbon efficient.

I'm not convinced it is a net positive in the end. Especially for big companies, heating an office space with 500+ people is probably much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses for example

Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too

Back in 1964 Arthur C. Clarke predicted [1] that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress.

Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.

Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results. Office workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294

I actually don't know the answer to this question and what baffles me the most is hearing what urban/transport activists have to say about that - those I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl".

I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).

Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.

The initial covid lockdowns did result in a large drop in global emissions. Somewhere around ~2 Billion tons or about 5% drop for 2020.

2021 emissions were about equal to 2019 emissions. So there may be not much of an effect from remote work.

For my case, it was worse. When normalized to dollars, I spent nearly 2x more in HVAC expenses compared to driving's fuel costs, and that's with a modest commute (20 miles). Its much less energy intensive to air condition one large medium-density building than many smaller low-density buildings.

Because most of workers have not enough pro-ability to adapt a remote working environment. More details, to work remotely efficiently, you need to:

- Have good writing skills, because communication is asynchronous most of the time.

- Task description needs to be as clear as possible ! You don't want to spend most of time to explain what the specification means.

- Self-management and time management: How to do things concurrently without less help as possible from others ?

My guess would be that the target audience that buys these products (read companies) don’t really care about the environment

Because it isn't necessarily pro env, at least not everywhere. This has to be subject of larger studies I guess. Some thoughts. 1. If I WFH I need to heat/cool my apartment/house my self. This is much more inefficient than heat office spaces, if you take the people inside an filled office space into account. 2. The public transport is going and consuming energy anyways. 3. Zoom, Teams, etc is consuming a lot of energy due to servers and videostreaming. 4. Walking a little bit does not harm yourself and maybe saves medical treatment, which in itself harms the environment.

FWIW: I'm sure that heating and cooling my 3rd floor office negates some of my impact from telecommuting. I also have extra equipment in the office, and at home, that goes mostly unused.

I've been working ~90% remote for about 8 years. It works for me, because I'm disciplined and honest, and because I have a job that can be performed remotely. It also works for me because I've been able to find good ways to have facetime with the people I work with; but I'm normally shy and prefer to work in isolation.

Not every job can be performed remotely. Even jobs that can be performed remotely need facetime for helping people early in their careers start. Some people, unfortunately, aren't disciplined enough to work remotely.

Other people are extreme extroverts and really, really need to be around a large group of people for most of their day. A good friend of mine, who works in a hospital, used to love his job until he was assigned work-at-home work. He hates it now, just because he's a major extrovert.

There's another post in this thread from someone who lives in a small city apartment and commutes by train a few stops to their office. That's also environmentally friendly.

Because people don't look at issues like climate change rationally. We're attacking the problem almost randomly based on what's politically expedient/ popular instead of what gives the biggest greenhouse gas reduction for the price.

To phrase it another way, our governments are fucking stupid and it makes me sad.

If we really care about this problem, we should attack it coldly, rationally, as an engineer or economist might.

Zoom's customers aren't the WFH people, but rather the IT and procurement managers that decide which tool to spend their 5-figure budgets on. Presumably their marketing efforts will be specific to that audience.

It may be risky to throw up billboards talking about the evironmental benefit of WFH if your customer's CEO thinks that they should be back in the office.

The majority of advertising on environmental initiatives ("hey go out there and recycle" and that kind of crap) is funded by polluters to shift the conversation from a manufacturer problem to a consumer problem. You need to ask "who is advertising" and "who is the market."

So let's say Zoom wanted to run an initiative like this… the market wouldn't be workers, it's be the bosses. So already you're talking about a tiny sliver of the population. No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market.

Okay, now that you've identified the target audience, what do they respond to? "This way of working that most of you hate, it's happy days and sunshine?" No, they respond to money. The campaign that would resonate with bosses is "your office lease costs too much money." Environmental concerns wouldn't even measure up.

Having said all this, I suppose one could make the case that remote-work-apps could advertise to "shift the conversation" amongst workers to demand remote-work for the sake of the environment, but I personally don't think anyone in America at least believes in this kind of grass-roots influence in business, that's too socialist.

I don’t understand who the advertisements are meant to reach as their audience?

The companies? They care about profit not the environment.

The employees? They are either already sold on remote work or don’t like remote work.

Whose mind is changed by being told the environmental benefits of remote work?

It needs more analysis to determine if it's actually a net positive on the environment. People may travel more in their day, live more remotely, houses (as far as I know) aren't as well built as offices and use more energy per sq ft during the day, etc.

Technically if you want to optimize emissions reductions, you should eliminate homes, not offices. If everyone lived in the office we would all use less energy!

Anyways, transportation for commuting is one of the smallest buckets of emissions. So if it is a net positive it's still not moving the needle in a meaningful way.

This one is still so relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

Oddly, it isn't quite that straight forward, is it? Specifically, you get some scale efficiencies for cities and office parks by having folks there. Especially in regards to getting food capabilities centralized. A cafeteria, I would think, uses less to feed a lot of people, than each of them using their own kitchen to store and prepare food.

That said, I do expect it is still ahead in most measures. Is a good question and I would love to see a comprehensive analysis.

Some companies simply don't care about the environmental benefits of remote work; they want their employees located together in brick and mortar offices. Also, and while I agree that remote work seems the more environmentally friendly of the two options, I am unaware of any study that has compared the carbon footprint of telecommuting with that of the traditional commute. Does anyone know of such a study?

Because of the amount of money parked in commercial real estate. Organizations that own office buildings tend to be immensely influential in local politics.

This is an answer to both “Why is remote work currently not advertised as a pro climate environment initiative?” and “Why won’t remote work ever be advertised as a pro climate environment initiative, ever, for the foreseeable future?”

In a word: Rent.

I’m just sample size = 1. I switched to telecommuting during the pandemic, which let me move away from the city. Instead of taking public transportation to the office and walking to the store, I now walk to the (home) office and take the car to the store.

So while I’m certainly spending a lot less time in total on transportation, the mode of transportation is much worse for the environment.

Can you give a properly researched article showing the environmental impact of commuting outweighs the environmental impact of working from home? My guess is that this won't always be true and will depend on the type and distance of commute as well as the additional heating/cooling demand required to keep multiple home offices habitable.

I've said it once, and I've said it again - learning nothing from COVID was a complete waste of a catastrophe.

"The answer is out there, Neo, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to."

I used to have a job that required a daily commute, but didn't require any travel.

I now have a remote job that I do at home, with an extremely modest amount of travel -- I see my teammates 2-3 times a year at conferences or meetups.

It turns out that flying, even very occasionally, is worse for the environment than driving, and that my "eco-friendly" remote job leaves a bigger carbon footprint than my commuting job. A single person's share of a single cross-country flight once a year can emit more carbon than an ENTIRE YEAR of car commuting.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...

The only downside to all of this remoteness is the non-programmer workforce going remote. I do think people that pick up the phone pre-pandemic should be picking up the phone post-pandemic. Whether that's from their home or not, I don't care.

What we get instead though, is ringing, ringing ringing. Can't get my power ordered. I can't get roofing ordered. Can't get call backs.

Things were more expedient pre-pandemic. I often do wonder too, is part of the reason company X is OUT of something isn't because the ship is late - or is it because the ordering person no longer sits in front of a giant pile of insulation and goes - oh crap, that is getting really low. I should order more. (And guess what happens if he calls to order more - ringing ringing ringing)

To be slightly nasty:

To be an environmental activist * requires a certain type of personality. The kind that thrives in groups and in public. Of course they wouldn't even think of working from home.

* or any kind of activist for a cause actually. But that would decrease the nastiness.

Because "Pro-Environment" messaging is neither about being preserving the environment, or about the environment. It's about co-opting the relevant ideal within the overton window to signal some form of ethically accepted form of compliance.

I asked myself the same thing and I'm afraid the effect is not as big as expected (in relation to other emissions).

From https://www.agora-verkehrswende.de/veroeffentlichungen/wende... For Germany:

The climate effects of home office were estimated for 40 percent of the workers, each with two home office days per week, were estimated to save 5.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

This corresponds to 18 percent of percent of the emissions from commuting to work or 4 percent of the of total passenger transport emissions (Büttner and Breitkreuz 2020).

Because many large businesses with lobbying power don't want to be potentially called out as anti environment. They want the freedom to treat it like an employment perk if/when they choose to support it.

I'm surprised corporations haven't already reframed it with stories like:

"Home energy usage SKYROCKETS as workers abandon the eco-friendly advantages of a shared work space"

Who is supposed to be such an advertiser and such an advertisee?

I have actually heard it talked about a lot as a pro environment thing - just much earlier in the pandemic. I have not seen huge advertising about it but that does not mean it is not highly talked about.

That being said you are totally right that Zoom should be advertising the crap out of this - Microsoft may have incentivize NOT to do this (if they want their own employees in the office) but for Zoom it seems like a no brainer.

Because it's not pro-environment, as you'd think.

More CO2 is generated by remote employees than those that go to work. The CO2 emissions generated by an office (including heating / AC / water / employee transportation - in EU it's mostly by subway / bus) are smaller compared to each individual employee CO2 emissions.

Don't have a source, but you can find CO2 calculators online.

Because people with money are much much better at marketing and propaganda than a disjoint group of employees from 100s of different companies

Not to mention saving lives!! If I remember correctly traffic fatalities dropped a lot after the bust in 2008 and many people got laid off.

In general I feel that the remote work is still massively underrepped. I get depression every time I open any of those remote work sites and 99% of the job posts are tagged with "us only".

There seem to be opportunities in other places (such as EU) around as well, but one has to search far and wide instead of just having them available in the easy-to-access sites.

While GHG emissions are not the only environmental metric, remote working (for most) likely results in a net increase of emissions.[0]

0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac3d3e/...

Corporate Mortgage Backed Securities

Idk, I thought it was mentioned in almost every article that discusses the pros and cons of remote work.

Not all jobs can be remote though, so i'm not sure why one would expect all of work to be remote. That makes as much sense as 'no remote work at all'.

Great point. I'm going to start sourcing that as part of the reason I'm remote only.

Maybe because it might cause psychological issues for people who can't easily connect online and corporations are pricks. I agree that choice would be good thing, but I'm not sure about advertising one as superior to the other.

Is there an environmental benefit if the energy saved commuting is used on something else? Example: If I spend $300 less on gas each month and then use that extra $3,600 at the end of the year to take a trip to Tahiti.

"No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting" is quite the statement. If your work force bikes or walks to work, pretty sure that has far lower energy requirements than having all of them telecommute.

Didn’t Buckminster Fuller talk of the holistic energy cost of going to work? Summarizing that it cost less energy if you factor externalities to just stay at home? I can’t remember exactly, but something along those lines…

Non remote business should pay more in taxes bc of damage done to the environment.

I keep arguing this.

Also with distracted driving becoming so much more of a problem, and accidents increasing even though we've got driving assist technologies, the workers are running personal risk of debilitating injuries.

I would be curious to know if remote work reduces overall VMT, or if commute VMT is replaced by higher VMT for daily tasks (if people move to Kansas or wherever, where things are spread out further).

With remote working you tend to have team-members more spread out. Bringing them together requires more travel. If this is by airplane it quickly cancels out the reduction in commute emissions.

What we are being told at my company is that the corporate building has all of these green technologies, so it’s more environmentally friendly to work there even taking into account commuting.

If I telecommuted: Pros: - my company wouldn’t need as much office space for me, but not none, so 80% space/energy savings, - also offset an 8 mile (x2 so 16mi) driving commute

Cons: - I’d probably make up those 16mi of commuting in other ways (errands, driving to a lunch time hike, etc) - I’d need more space at home, and consume more energy (prob not fully offsetting the savings from work, but a meaningful part) - I’d probably work remotely from other locations more, increasing my air travel footprint meaningfully (which I think puts this in the red) - I’d probably cook more at home (while cheaper, is probably more energy intensive than a commercial kitchen per meal?)

Doesn’t feel like a huge net savings

Because the power of environment is not greater than the power trips of management when they can see their direct reports bow and greet them in the hallways of their corpdoms.

Everybody preparing their own meal requires more energy.

Everybody heating their own workplace requires more energy.

In general: Anything you do alone is more resource intensive than a comparable group activity.

Probably because people get significantly less work done remotely… CEOs know this, multiple studies have shown this, and it’s been a lot of people’s experience as well.

I’m skeptical that the reduction in transportation outweighs the lost efficiency in having large amounts of people concentrated in single buildings.

When institutions are so clearly hypocritical on policies such as this, you have to ask yourself whether the entire premise is a fraud.

Because people don't actually care about the environment, the vast majority just say they do - until it's inconvenient to them.

A lot of places _are_ advertising it as a benefit.

What is more energy efficient? To heat or cool one 1000 people office or to heat or cool 1000 people's homes?

Never thought I'd see hacker news argue so forcefully for the metaverse yet here we are

Seriously. Not only do I only drive like 5 miles a week now I also only shower once a week!

Think about this from a business finance perspective. Companies have since the early 1900's built an economy around working in offices. Car manufacturers, car service and maintenance businesses, food service companies, commercial real-estate companies and oil and gas companies and many other sectors all have a stake in this game.

Then you have internal forces at play too. HR managers, and department managers don't look so useful when the majority of people never interact in real life. No matter how optimistic we look at the human condition, people have the desire to exercise power and control over others. With people working remote exercising power and control is harder. Additionally, you still have gen-x and boomers working, especially in management who have a different idea of work culture than millennials and gen-z. To the older generations working on-site is the only justifiable way to work. To them the notion of being at home for work is not real work.

There also appears to be a camp of management types who have seen evidence confirming that remote work doesn't work. They are going to stick to their position because they have evidence to support. I recently heard similar sentiments to Musk's take on remote work from Tim Pool, and a manager at my job. They are convinced that meaningful work can only happen in person.

So between those three main factors: Money, power, and bias of evidence the pitch for remote work being an environmental initiative gets drowned out. Really, makes you wonder if environmentalism is really that important for the business leadership class.

I personally believe work from home can be an amazing option for white collar work and for the right person. As a UI developer I love it. I don't get distracted by office stuff and get good flow often. I'm and expert at using online communication tools and desktop publishing tools so I can communicate my ideas and thoughts coherently remotely. However, I've seen some people not be able to manage themselves or have the skills to work from home.

Because it's so obvious it doesn't need advertising ;)

Sounds like you need to pitch a campaign or buy some billboards

needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices

I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).

I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.

Could it be climate change does not exist and was fabricated by mega corps and the politicians they control to drive social movements they find convenient and which make us poor but ignore social movements that could also help their made up problem but make us happier and wealthier perhaps ?

Yea, where's the "outrage"? Need more outrage. I mean, by golly, I have these *kiddos* who need their dad 24/7! What's with these young people who want to go into the office?

It's because the whole climate thing is a ruse to scare us into cbdc/surveillance/control.

Yes there's climate change, Yes there's human influence to it. And well sure as hell adapt to this slow moving challenge.

WFH is indeed advertised as pro environment. It just isn’t taking off very well for many.

Change is hard and re-thinking work as an entirely online activity requires a lot of change.

For some, their jobs which were fun before the pandemic now just suck because they don’t get to meet people face to face.

Some dread the long boring days WFH and spending time in back-to-back Zoom meetings where 90% of those attending have their camera off and do something else.

Some are frustrated because their coworkers are slacking off WFH. Others are frustrated because their productivity at home is a disaster.

But there is also a pro-environment factor of working in an office: In countries where buildings need heating, heating one office compound is more efficient than heating a hundred homes at the same time.

What makes you so sure that commuting is more environmentally harmful than datacenters full of hardware and the construction and transport of said hardware and mining of raw materials for the hardware?

Additionally, lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl.

I am not saying that's the case, but I don't buy that it's a strictly pro-environment win a-priori.

If anything commuting is the daily theft of an hour of everyone's life, more so for drivers. "Get an hour of your life back every day" should be all the marketing that's ever needed.