As office workers stopped working in offices in 2020 and swapped their cubicles for living room sofas during the Covid-19 lockdown, many began to question the hours they had spent commuting to work. Could you have spent all those hectic mornings stuck in traffic getting things done? Life was often lonely for those stuck in their homes, but people found it something to appreciate as birdsong rang through the quiet streets. And the temporary decline in travel had the side effect of reducing global CO2 emissions many times over 7 percent in 2020 – good news in an otherwise miserable year.
Emissions recovered again in 2021, as people began to resume some of their normal activities, but offices were never the same. While remote work was rare before the pandemic, it is a rarity today. 28 percent of Americans work a “hybrid” schedulego to the office some days and 13 percent work remotely full-time.
Recent data suggests that remote work could boost companies’ plans to reduce their carbon emissions to zero, but companies appear not to be taking climate change into account when making decisions about the future of office work. “In the U.S., I’m sad to say it’s just not at the top of the priority list,” said Kate Lister, founder of consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics. “It rises up there and then falls back to the next shiny object.” Commuter trips fall under a company’s so-called operational obligation “Scope 3” Emissions, the indirect sources, the are regularly ignoredbut represent on average three quarters emissions from the business world.
According to this, a 10 percent increase in teleworking could reduce CO2 emissions by 192 million tons per year a study published in the journal Nature Cities earlier this month. That would reduce the country’s emissions the most polluting sector, transportation, by 10 percent. These findings are consistent with other peer-reviewed research: Switching to remote work instead of going into the office can reduce a person’s carbon footprint by 54 percent a study published in the journal PNAS last fall, even when accounting for non-commute trips and residential energy use.
“It seems like a very obvious solution to a very pressing and real problem,” said Curtis Sparrer, chief executive and co-founder of public relations agency Bospar, a San Francisco-based company whose employees have been working remotely since it was founded in 2015 “And I’m worried that this whole returning to office thing is getting in the way.”
Many companies require their employees to come to personal work regularly. Last year big tech companies like Google, AmazonAnd Meta told employees they had to return to the office three days a week or face consequences such as reduced chances of promotion. Even Zoom, the company that became known for its video conferencing platform during the pandemic, is hiring people who live within 50 miles of the office commute two days a week.
Of course, there are many benefits to going to the office to work with other people. Interacting with your colleagues in person gives you a social boost (without the awkward pauses in Zoom meetings) and is a compelling reason to take off your sweatpants in the morning. The problem from a climate change perspective is that most Americans tend to get in their cars to commute rather than ride their bikes or get on the bus. A current survey from Bospar found that two-thirds of Americans drive to work – mostly in gasoline-powered cars. Even though electric vehicle purchases are increasing, they still account for about 1 percent of the cars on the road.
The climate benefits quickly diminish when people are called into the office. According to the PNAS study by researchers at Cornell University and Microsoft, working from home two to four days a week reduces emissions by 11 to 29 percent compared to working full-time in the office. Working remotely just one day per week only reduced these emissions by 2 percent. Another important factor is that maintaining physical office spaces consumes a lot of energy as they need to be heated and cooled.
So should companies be allowed to claim that they are being more environmentally friendly if they force their employees to commute? According to Bospar’s poll, many Americans don’t believe that. Well over half of Millennials and Generation Z said it was hypocritical for companies to celebrate Earth Day while requiring employees to show up to work in person.
Sparrer refers to Disney, that celebrated Earth Month in April with a campaign to promote its environmental efforts ordered workers to come to the office four days a week last year. Meanwhile, Nike promoted its Earth Day collection “sustainable” leather shoes while its CEO, John Donahoe, argued that remote work stifles creativity. “In hindsight, it turns out that it’s really hard to make bold, breakthrough innovations and create a bold, breakthrough shoe on Zoom.” he told CNBC earlier this month.
“We are entering a period of magical thinking where people seem to think this is enough, but that is not the case,” Sparrer said. “And I’m frustrated that we’ve all had to experience what it’s like to work from home, and we know how it works and we know how to improve it.”
However, working from home could bring a lot Environmental challenges. Recent research examining pre-pandemic trends found that if 10 percent of the workforce worked remotely, U.S. transit systems would lose $3.7 billion each year, a 27 percent drop in fare revenue , according to the study conducted in Nature Cities by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida and Peking University in Beijing. Some experts worry that remote work could are pushing people to the suburbswhere the carbon footprint tends to be higher than in cities.
Currently, there are many workers who want to work full-time at home but are forced to go to the office, Lister said. She sees the mandates to return to office as the result of corporate management that wants to return to the old days. “As this generation retires,” she said, “I think a lot of these conversations will disappear.”
This story was originally published by Ground material and was produced by Ground material and published together with Fast company. Sign up for Grist’s Weekly newsletter here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Find out more at Grist.org.