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It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions, so any company that claims to care about the environment and their future sh

• chrisseaton 7y ago
  > It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience... How many car journeys do I have to have saved to pay for one flight to the office every now and again?
  • tapland 7y ago
    About the distance of the flight.
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • marcosdumay 7y ago
      About the distance of the flight by bus. How does the efficiency of a car compares to a bus/plane? (Both are roughly on the same mark, larger planes are usually more efficient.) If you commute 10km each way every working day, you'll move nearly 3,000km on a year.
  • IggleSniggle 7y ago
    If you work remote anyway, take the train! (only partly joking)
    • icebraining 7y ago
      I've thought about this, the problem is the cost. My trip would cost 3-5 times more, which is hard to justify to the company. They'll probably just tell me they'll pay for those "CO2 compensation programs".
  • api 7y ago
    A fully loaded aircraft gets pretty good fuel economy per person, at least as good as a Prius. I've seen figures from 50-100mpg depending on aircraft and of course how fully loaded it is. So it's basically like driving a little less than the flight distance.
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • nameless912 7y ago
      Right, but (from what I remember from an article I read years ago) emissions from aircraft are worse, pound for pound of CO2, than those of a car because they're deposited directly into the upper atmosphere as opposed to at ground level. I don't remember exactly why, but it's worse because of its location rather than the actual amount.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    I'm a bit skeptical that remote/distributed work (as opposed to just WFH instead of going into a local office every day) nets out to be all that green. It's hard for me to factor out travel that would have happened anyway from travel that's specifically related to being on a distributed team. But I probably do something like 10K miles/year flying that wouldn't exist if the team were co-located.
  • notacoward 7y ago
    This is something I have some experience with. I work from home most of the time, except for travel across the US one week a month. I was concerned about my carbon footprint, so I ran some numbers. The result I got was that I was about 8% worse than someone with an uncongested 10-mile (one way) daily commute in a typical compact car. That guy driving a Ford Compensator thirty miles each way at peak hours is way worse. Nonetheless, I wish my number could be reduced still further. The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote. If the rest of your team is colocated somewhere else then you'll have to travel. If your team is spread all over but still relies on face to face meetings (e.g. planning sessions, "all hands" announcements, hackathons) then you'll still have to travel. If your job/role involves dealing with customers who aren't even slightly remote-friendly, you'll have to travel. If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. Most of these exceptions are not necessary. Unfortunately, most people and companies don't even try to avoid them. They just do what they've done, and the not-really-remote workers have to fly in.
    • gbrown 7y ago
      > If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. I really think we should be working to change this - conferences are huge wastes of resources IMHO. I usually see a handful of inspiring talks, which could just as easily have been delivered as webinars (which would also allow asynchronous viewing, involving a wider potential audience). Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        >Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me. And, really, the "hallway track" is the value of going to conferences. For the most part, if someone just goes to a conference to sit in breakout sessions, they're probably better off just watching video of the sessions (if they were filmed) or a webinar version of the content.
        • notacoward 7y ago
  • buboard 7y ago
    > Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience. I don't think that 's true in general though. Is that even remote work? There are now hundreds of companies who only meet for yearly retreats. and these are optional.
    • chrisseaton 7y ago
      Even the most remote of the remote workers I know will go into the office at least once a quarter or so. Four trans-oceanic flights is surely going to outweigh all but the most extreme car commutes.
      • icebraining 7y ago
        That's curious, this hasn't been my experience. Why are they needed physically at the office so often?
        • chrisseaton 7y ago
          To make in-person connections and to present and teach in-person. I don't think it's particularly contentious to say that these things often work better in-person, even as someone who thinks remote work is best and has been doing it my whole career. Once a quarter also probably doesn't seem like a lot to people who are going to a conference every month or so anyway.
          • icebraining 7y ago
            A conference every month! How do you get any work done? By teaching, do you mean workshops/classes? We generally mentor people, but never actually tried teaching. But do most developers in your company teach?
            • chrisseaton 7y ago
              I don't do that many conferences, but I know people who do. They do work at the conferences around meeting people and presenting their work. I find I'm more productive straight after a conference. Mentoring people, yes. For very difficult topics that's definitely easier in person. Everyone teaches to some degree yeah. How do you level people up without teaching them?
  • tharne 7y ago
    This has been my experience as well. The amount of flying done by most remote workers is astounding. If anything, remote workers have a bigger carbon footprint than your typical commuter from all the flying. The other thing I see is a lot of remote workers moving to very sparsely populated areas that are cheap to live in, but where they end up driving 40 minutes for groceries. There are lots of great benefits to remote work, but environmentalism (in most cases) is not one of them.
    • cableshaft 7y ago
      I (and everyone in my office, except the director, who flew once to go to corporate headquarters) have flown zero times in a year and a half of working remotely. It's not a guarantee that remote workers will necessarily do a bunch of flying. It depends on the culture of the workplace. We are able to get plenty done with conference calls and email. I can't speak for the management and executives above the director, though. They might do a decent amount of travel. But there's about 200 employees that aren't doing any travel at all for work, and only a handful of people in management above them. And from what I hear, it sounds like a lot of the other departments in the corporation don't do a whole lot of travel either.
    • icebraining 7y ago
      I'm curious, why are those remote workers flying? I've started working remotely this year, and only flown once, at the start of the project.
      • chrisseaton 7y ago
        Are you not flying anyway, to go to conferences and things?
        • ghaff 7y ago
          A lot of developers really don't travel a lot for work if they don't speak to customers much. And it's not uncommon that a developer/sysadmin may get to go to one conference a year or something like that. Certainly some people I work with, whether developers or other roles, are traveling all the time. But it's not everyone.
  • i_am_proteus 7y ago
    It seems like a hybrid model would be ideal: teams that work from home in a metro area, with one or two "meeting days" a week at an office (which can be 20-30% the size it would be with no work from home). This is something companies could incrementally adopt with existing employees.
    • defined 7y ago
      I think it depends on one's personality. I worked for some years using that hybrid model and really didn't like it. Now I work 99.9% from home and vastly prefer it. My only real gripe is that teleconferencing for meetings just doesn't work that well, because I find it hard to hear people that are not very close to the microphone, and background noise from the open-plan office in which the non-remote team works is very disruptive at times. Well, and that sometimes remote workers are sort-of-not-quite second-class citizens, probably because we aren't in the office for people to see every day.
  • blunte 7y ago
    For many of us, remote work means staying home all day and working. (Or sometimes, traveling somewhere nice and working.) But how many flights and how often is up to you. In my case, it's just 2-3 per year... and I would have probably made those flights anyway for a holiday.
  • ubermonkey 7y ago
    That has NOT been my experience, but mileage varies. I've worked for a virtual company -- no offices anywhere, everyone works at home -- for 12 years. The developers almost NEVER travel. The owner and I used to be on the road quite a bit (just like most software firms) -- say, through 2010 -- but then it seemed like all our clients and prospects kinda had the penny drop: they didn't NEED US on site to do implementations. GoToMeeting or Skype or WebEx or whatever was entirely sufficient, and saved a shitton of money too. I haven't visited a client site in over 3 years. I see my boss at 2 conferences a year. HE makes a few more trips -- partner conferences, a few sales trips -- but nothing like what it was in 07-10.
  • deleted 7y ago
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    • chrisseaton 7y ago
      > I suspect a plane puts out less CO2 per person than a car going to and from the same place. Err... yeah... except I don't drive from the UK to San Francisco. The relevant comparison is a twenty minute drive a day, vs flying inter-continental a few times a year.
  • UnpossibleJim 7y ago
    This is in the current remote work environment. If we (the royal we) could encourage a 3 or 4 day remote in and a single day commute (preferably on a bus, but that would be too much to ask for), it would still be a local community and not make air travel necessary. There can be varying shades of remote work, even allowing for a weekly stand up =)
  • fulafel 7y ago
    Sure, this can be done eco-friendlily or not. If you prioritize co2 emissions in the remote setup, you can decide that thete will be no flying.
  • clairegraham 7y ago
    Was this at a 100% remote company, or were you a remote worker at an in-office company? I've worked remote 15+ years and that much flying is abnormal in my experience. Some places do quarterly, but I found that rare too. A lot of them do an annual retreat, but it's often optional. Or sometimes we would do a mini-meetup at a developer conference. It also depends on the position. Most of the flying was for brainstorming sessions in the leadership / project team, but most of the team didn't need to be involved in those. I will also say I've always interviewed over either phone or google hangouts and I've never had to meet in-person before the offer. I've sometimes gone years without meeting the people I work with in-person.
• HorstG 7y ago
  There should simply be a heavy tax on all presence-required jobs, payable by the company. Suddenly, as soon as there is monetary incentive, things will work quite fine remotely, "concerns" be damned
  • dleslie 7y ago
    There is a monetary incentive: owning or leasing office space comes at a premium expense.
    • clarry 7y ago
      That's far from enough IME. And a remote employee might still need some place other than their home sofa to work so that cost isn't automatically removed just by moving people out of the "one office."
  • api 7y ago
    That's a great way to lose tons of manufacturing, skilled craftsmanship, assembly, repair, and service sectors jobs along with many people in the arts, cinema, music, and... well almost everything but coding, finance, and the CAD parts of engineering.
    • abakker 7y ago
      Came here to say the same thing. There remain a plurality of jobs that literally require physical access to tools, systems, cash registers, customers, etc. I agree that where possible, remote should be allowed/encouraged. I also think that for roles where that can't work, we should consider 4 day work weeks, or other non-commute or less commute strategies. But, to a great extent we are not going to eliminate the in-person nature of working with other people, and we probably shouldn't aim to all live in little bubbles. Source: I have been full time remote for 7 years. I estimate it saves me ~25k/year in direct and indirect costs + time.
  • brlewis 7y ago
    From the employee side, an easy-to-use calculator for commuting expenses could help. The monetary incentive is there for choosing a remote position, but people don't always know what it is, especially with car commuting.
• usaar333 7y ago
  > It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions, Heating or cooling your home can easily more than offset the emissions associated with driving. E.g. My car might consume 4 kwh round trip (20 miles); that's about an hour of running a typical home air conditioner.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • icebraining 7y ago
    Offices have to be heated and cooled too.
    • usaar333 7y ago
      Yes, but with high people density, it is much more efficient.
• bit_logic 7y ago
  It doesn't have to be as extreme as 100% remote. Most office jobs would be ok with a 3/2 split between in office and WFH. And everyone doing those days WFH would make a massive immediate difference in CO2 and other air pollution. Also less traffic on the roads. Government could easily encourage this with tax benefits for companies doing this. To fight climate change, I would prioritize this above any EV rebate or EV related program. This is such an easy and immediate win for climate change and reducing traffic. Even those not concerned about climate change can get behind reducing traffic.
• lm28469 7y ago
  > so any company that claims to care about the environment and their future should really be doing all they can The company that owns my office publicly boast about ecology and saving the planet all the time. Yet every single morning I come in to find the windows open and the heaters on, lights stay on all night, they heat the stairs to 30c degrees even though nobody ever use them, &c. It's always the same shit, they talk the talk but never walk the walk. Apple doing everything in its power to not let you repair your devices, not even replace consumables, is a prime example of that. 0 companies really give a shit about ecology outside of PR moves. Anyway, many people value office time to meet actual human beings. Commute isn't that bad if the public infrastructure is decent.
• refurb 7y ago
  It seems to me that remote work does a whole hell of a lot to reduce CO2 emissions Is that really true? When my wife started working from home, our utility bills went way up. Still need to heat/cool the place, lights are on, water is being used in the washroom and kitchen. It's probably far less efficient to have 1,000 employees all using utilities in their own homes than have them all in a handful of buildings.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    There's a good chance your home is more energy-efficient than an office building. This can go either way, and perhaps modern office buildings would win, but my experience with ridiculous behavior around heating and aircon provides a counterbalance. As for water use, I think people drink and use the restroom at the same rate, regardless of whether they're at home or in the office, so the only difference here is who's footing the bill - which is irrelevant in terms of emission reduction. On top of commute, if you work in an office, you also probably eat out or take delivery - both being arguably much more wasteful than eating at home.
    • Steltek 7y ago
      Don't forget to account for the total lifecycle in a building. Companies will fit out a new office space with company branding, furniture, etc. I suspect this happens far more often than myself making equivalent changes to my home's interior design. Which is to say, I don't move houses much and I'm not in the habit of arbitrarily rearranging partition walls.
• deleted 7y ago
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