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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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....

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-...

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.

Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too

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 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.

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

- 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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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 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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

Everybody heating their own workplace requires more energy.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.