Pirate's Cove

The Chinese coronavirus and authoritarian government officials pushed people into doing their jobs from home. Now the Cult of Climastrology is upset with this

Companies confront a new climate challenge: home offices

Tech and financial companies leading efforts to cut climate changing emissions are finding a new challenge from remote work: the CO2 spewing out of home offices.

A few companies have begun counting what happens when employees boot up computers at home, turn up gas furnaces and ignore the world’s most energy-efficient corporate campuses. It turns out that home setups popularized by the pandemic are eroding some of the climate benefit of abandoned commutes.

“Emissions didn’t go away,” said Amanda von Almen, head of emissions reduction at Salesforce.com Inc. “They just shifted to another area.”

Perhaps they shouldn’t have been shutting everything down, as so many studies have shown

While there are benefits to the climate from millions of employees not commuting when they work from home, the findings underscore that remote work is not a simple solution to cutting corporate emissions.

“Remote working has not delivered the environmental benefits that some people expected,” said Steve Sorrell, professor of energy policy at University of Sussex. “But they should probably have paid more attention to the decades of work in this area that suggest that environmental impacts may be less than expected.”

Bummer.

Climate experts say those solutions scratch the surface: After pouring billions of dollars into traditional offices decked with rooftop solar, bathed in natural lighting and equipped with water recycling, employers transitioning to hybrid work need clear plans to make every location just as green.

Or, they climate cult nags can mind their own f’ing business, and companies should maximize profit for their shareholders rather than acting as climate cult businesses

One roadblock to counting home office emissions is that there is no standard on how or what to count. Microsoft Corp, trying to solve the problem itself, concluded that remote staff work eight hours a day using a laptop, two monitors and three lightbulbs.

Hey, you nuts wanted people working from home rather than at the office, and now you want to dictate what our home offices look like? Piss off, cult nutjobs.