cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4470763
(link covers a 2021 study by Purdue, Yale, and MIT)
Some folks think teleworking is favorable to the environment on the basis that they avoid driving to work. IMO that’s quite far-fetched when you consider that a worksite with a capacity of ~1000 workers would consume much less energy than heating and cooling 1000 residential homes. Then you have account for the footprint attributed to heavy internet bandwidth demands.
Nothing beats cycling to work and working on-site. But if you are working from home, it’s worthwhile to try to attend non-video conferences. A presenter may have no choice in some cases but certainly you need not see everyone’s faces.
FWiW, these are steps to disable high-bandwidth frills:
Firefox
(disable animations)
- disable animations (non-CSS, non-GIF varieties):
about:config»toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled»true→false- disabling CSS animations needs these ad-hoc steps
- disabling animated GIFs (useless?):
about:config»image.animation_mode» (normal→none) or (normal→once, to just disable the play loops) Or for refined on-the-fly control install this plugin ⚠Disabling animated GIFs in Firefox may be useless. I get the impression animated GIFs are still fetched but simply not played automatically, thus bandwidth is still wasted.(disable still images)
about:config»permissions.default.image»1→2Chrome/Chromium
- Disabling animations- impossible (bug report from ~14 years ago still unresolved). Hence “stop using Chrome” in the title.
(disable GIF animations only)
Install this plugin first which only works sometimes; when it fails try this one.
(disable still images)
- Click the Customize and control Google Chrome menu button, which is the on the far-right side of the URL toolbar.
- Select Settings on the menu to bring up that tab.
- Click Privacy and security on the left side of Google Chrome.
- Select Site Settings to view the content options.
- Then click Images to bring up the options shown directly below.
- Select the Don’t allow sites to show images radio button.
I have deliberately spared readers from the source links to the above info because the information is buried in enshitified webpages with shenanigans like cookie popups that have no reject all option. Looks like this post is a bit enshitified itself since the details/summary HTML tags are broken here (they tend to be accepted on other Lemmy instances). If anyone knows the fix plz let me know. (reported)
I love when articles don’t bother to actually clarify the math.
That number is if everyone turned off their webcams, and is the amount across everyone.
Which only works out to like 80g per person.
Which is less than a couple minutes of driving.
You produce about 20x that running your oven for an hour.
That number is if everyone turned off their webcams, and is the amount across everyone.
Of course. You don’t video conference with yourself.
You seem to be saying each individual should make the individualized decision that their own contribution is insignificant, which leads you to a room full of people needlessly each transmitting their face and cummulatively emitting 1kg CO₂/hr.
The point is theyve taken “If you didnt drive to work” in terms of phrasing, but the number is if everyone stopped driving into work.
Which heavily inflates it.
You seem to be saying each individual should make the individualized decision that their own contribution is insignificant, which leads you to a room full of people needlessly each transmitting their face and cummulatively emitting 1kg CO₂/hr.
This is about the equivalent of 1 person cooking something in their oven, which is such a miniscule amount.
One personEach of the participants eating asmallmedium bag of nuts has a bigger footprint.One person eating a small bag of nuts has a bigger footprint.
Nonsense. Unless 1 person eats for 20 (2kg of nuts), you’re off by an order of magnitude. At least the math in your previous post was not dodgy (it just squandered social responsibility). Now you’re grasping.
BTW, as a general rule of thumb, you should never eat something bigger than your head. Eating a 2kg bag of nuts in one sitting would fail that.
I stand corrected, thats an extremely handy website, I thought mixed nuts had a much larger footprint not gonna lie.
I’ll fix my post.
The author assumes that the alternative to remote work is that everyone bikes to work (year round) and doesn’t heat/cool their homes when they’re unoccupied?
everyone bikes to work (year round)
There is never bad weather; only bad clothes.
When someone who fails to realize that drives a GHG-emitting car to work anyway, it’s obviously still lower emissions than heating and cooling a home for the day. (thus you’re wrong about assumptions… it is not in the premise that everyone cycle to work… the cycling option merely annihilates some claims)
doesn’t heat/cool their homes when they’re unoccupied?
Naturally. Not occupying the home sets the conditions by which sufficiently wise inhabitants can turn off the heating and cooling. It’s not a high bar of intelligence. If your workplace of ~1000 people is likely to have a large proportion of workers without that degree of wisdom, perhaps it’s not the most intellectually stimulating place to work. What kind workplace would this be? An Amazon warehouse? Teleworking is generally only an option for the kinds of careers that involve thinking. So I don’t imagine a realistic scenario that you claim – that many needlessly heat or cool a home all day long.
There is never bad weather; only bad clothes.
Yeah, but there aren’t any clothes I can buy to fix 80 years of car-centric housing and infrastructure.
As for “sufficiently wise” people turning off heat in their house from 9-5, my dog and plants will not appreciate a 45°F (7°C) house in the winter, nor a 100°F (38°C) house in the summer.
And yeah, a lot of my coworkers can’t be convinced to do much in the way of sustainable choices, and some are really smart! Intelligence and values are separate and you come off as condescending when you try to say your argument is flawless because anyone intelligent agrees with you.
If your goal is to make the planet better, you need to change people’s minds. You do that with empathy and meeting people where they are at, not decreeing that remote work is bad for the environment because in a hypothetical ideal work scenario where everyone already can cycle to work we it seems like it should reduce emissions.
Yeah, but there aren’t any clothes I can buy to fix 80 years of car-centric housing and infrastructure.
Luckily I have no premise that relies on avoiding regions with shitty civil engineers and lousy planning as far as where to live. I personally will not live in an uncyclable region but as I repeatedly said even if you drive to work it’s still insignificant compared to heating and cooling waste.
my dog and plants will not appreciate a 45°F (7°C) house in the winter, nor a 100°F (38°C) house in the summer.
Dogs do not need the level of heat that humans do. You need 5°C to prevent pipes freezing anyway and you can bump that up to ~10—13°C to keep a house dog comfortable (perhaps just in a small part of the house). The summer is a more notable problem for a dog, which should always have plenty of water all day. If it really reaches 38°C inside the house, that’d be an outlier case but indeed you would need to leave the cooling on – which might then make teleworking momentarily sensible at least until you figure out what’s wrong with your insulation and perhaps as well why your house does not have tree shade. Your choice of house plants implies you need to adapt (at least to the extent that you care). Certainly it’s unreasonable to heat and cool a house solely to accommodate incompatible plants. Plants that cannot survive indoor climates are unsuitable for your use-case.
I personally will not live in an uncyclable region
Maybe just be glad you have the freedom to choose a cyclable region and have a house insulated well enough to turn down the heating.
But in all the good spirits of internet discussions’ name: avoid assuming too much about what other people’s life conditions permit, or about their intelligence based on their workplace. None of these are worthy points for any discussion anywhere.
Of course your recommendations about insulation, tree shade, etc. are spot on technically, but only a few people have actually any choice about where they live or work. I know, we all have choice in a sense, but we are all trying to survive at same time. Assume everone is doing their possible (except SUV drivers).
Maybe just be glad you have the freedom to choose a cyclable region and have a house insulated well enough to turn down the heating.
It doesn’t do any good that one person has an insulated house. The problem is when you have 1000 teleworkers working from uninsulated homes as opposed to an office building with 1000 people. Office buildings are insulated while residential homes are often not. The energy waste of moving staff from an insulated office into individually heated homes is bad for everyone.
It’s also a false ecology because these people think they are doing the environment a favor by not driving.
or about their intelligence based on their workplace.
The (bogus) claim was:
The author assumes that the alternative to remote work is that everyone bikes to work (year round) and doesn’t heat/cool their homes when they’re unoccupied?
The CO₂ footprint of burning gas to commute to work is insignificant compared to the cost of heating and cooling individual homes all day long. The cycling option merely goes above and beyond to render the claim that teleworking is somehow climate-favorable absurd. Cycling is not a premise and it was not a necessary component to my thesis. In fact, I just muddied the waters by mentioning it.
The stupidity I referred to was the 2nd part of what I quoted-- the claim that people heat and cool unoccupied homes to a notable extent. If a workplace really has a significant number of staff who are heating and cooling unoccupied homes, then I still hold that such a workplace has a notable number of low intelligence workers. That’s hypothetical IMO, because most likely no such workplace exists. Most people have enough sense to not heat and cool an unoccupied house. That’s a safe assumption. I would need to see proof to the contrary.
None of these are worthy points for any discussion anywhere.
BeefPiano’s argument leads to a workplace full of fools. Surely you don’t have so many people foolish enough to heat and cool unoccupied homes. So it follows from that that it’s poor claim to make. It’s unlikely that people actually believe that a large number of people would do that, from which a workplace full of fools would manifest. Did someone walk away from that thinking beefPiano’s workplace was full of fools? Unlikely. You would only conclude that if you actually bought into beefPiano’s claim.
IOW, it’s not my stance that his workplace was low intelligence workers (that’s effectively his stance). I’m saying surely not. Surely people are sensible with their thermostats.
Of course your recommendations about insulation, tree shade, etc. are spot on technically, but only a few people have actually any choice about where they live or work.
I don’t believe that. Places like Cuba and N.Korea aside, most people have a choice where they work and where they live. Many (perhaps a majority) voluntarily make the poor choice to live and work far apart as they take for granted the convenience cars give them. Most particularly in the US. But that’s not the poor decision the thread is centered on – it’s the next poor decision: to telework (and worse, from an uninsulated house).
Note as well we are talking about careers where teleworking is possible. You might say a min. wage janitor who lives outside a high cost region and commutes is “trapped”, but teleworking is not even an option for janitors and other blue collar workers. We are talking white collar workers who generally earn well above living wages. They are not trapped and have both free choice of where to work and where to live.
There is never bad weather; only bad clothes.
Yes, you can ride in rain and cold weather, but we get ice storms, blizzards and powerful thunderstorms with very strong winds where I live, and clothes don’t help you not fall off the bike, or see where you’re going, or avoid drivers who have lost control of their car.
Not occupying the home sets the conditions by which sufficiently wise inhabitants can turn off the heating and cooling. It’s not a high bar of intelligence. If your workplace of ~1000 people is likely to have a large proportion of workers without that degree of wisdom, perhaps it’s not the most intellectually stimulating place to work. What workplace do you have in mind? An Amazon warehouse? Teleworking is generally only an option for the kinds of careers that involve thinking. So I don’t imagine a scenario where this is a problem.
Getting snooty about people’s jobs, over which they don’t always have much choice, isn’t going to win anyone over.
but we get ice storms, blizzards and powerful thunderstorms with very strong winds where I live
Every day? Do you think perhaps it makes sense to throw out the outlier weather extremes in outlier regions when talking generally about teleworking in a global forum? And as I said, you can still drive a car and it’s still lower GHG emissions than teleworking.
Getting snooty about people’s jobs, over which they don’t always have much choice, isn’t going to win anyone over.
You’ve misunderstood. You always have the choice to turn off your heating and cooling before leaving the house. Who doesn’t believe that, apart from BeefPiano? Please point out any employers who do not allow their staff to control their home’s thermostat before going to work.
BeefPiano’s absurd claim was that people are not generally wise enough to turn off the heating and cooling of unoccupied homes. It’s nonsense. It was a comically absurd claim and a good display confirmation bias – someone looking for any reason possible to rationalize their lifestyle and world view in resistance to accepting the opposing research because absorbing the reality requires them to rethink their position.
So BeefPiano tried to pitch the idea that people heat and cool their unoccupied homes while they are at work - on a noteworthy scale. Bizarre that this pitch worked on a permacomputing community.
To me, one of the values in the permacomputing movement is learning to think about computing as a precious and beautiful resource, one that we should use wisely and cherish.
Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time, in my opinion. Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean is one of the genuine marvels of modernity, for which I’m so grateful. So much compute gets wasted on explicitly antisocial behavior, like advertising, tracking, or LLM training. It’s good to know how much video conferencing uses, but I don’t think that this personal-responsibility style framing is that productive.
It’s like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there. It’s a systems-level framework, not a personal responsibility one.
Video calls are one of the absolute best uses of compute time
No, there really is little benefit to seeing everyone’s facial expression in a meeting apart (perhaps) from the presenter.
Being able to see my family on the other side of an ocean
The decision should be made on a case-by-case basis. Wholly ignoring the waste in all situations is not practicing permacomputing.
I don’t get much from seeing my overseas family on a daily basis. Text is far more important for keeping in touch with timezone differences. Voice is cheap w.r.t bandwith and goes quite far in conveying mood, thus voice is a decent medium. Video has some sparse benefit on rare occasions but it’s the most wasteful and the least useful.
It’s like telling permaculture people that tomato farming uses too many resources. The goal is to change the way we interact with the earth, so asking them to give up tomatoes is neither here nor there.
That’s a really poor analogy. Tomatoes do more for your diet than getting everyone’s realtime facial expressions in a meeting does for the productivity of a workplace meeting. It’s probably even counter-productive and distracting to have that needless information during a meeting. What is waste, if not a value judgement on the cost/benefit? Growing tomatoes is not wasteful in light of the benefits.
Reading this and your other comments here, you don’t seem interested in productive conversations. Why would you argue against a thing that I explicitly said was my opinion? That’s just arguing for its own sake.
I like seeing their faces. You don’t have to like it. Movements are about understanding that different things matter to different people, and working through that to find a productive and shared understanding, not telling people that their subjective experience is wrong.
I like seeing their faces. You don’t have to like it.
This is my point. Hence why I said case-by-case basis. What I object to is your stance that this research has no value can be wholly disregarded which you then try to support by a false analogy fallacy. It’s horseshit. It’s not permacomputing to disregard resource consumption.
I always turned the camera off during meetings anyway, and no one said anything thankfully. I don’t need people watching me if I have the option to prevent it. I don’t even like open plan offices, which I also had to deal with. Give me privacy, please. Either give me a door I can shut or let me work from home.
In your case, privacy and the environment are at odds.
I actually prefer the social connection of an open plan where I share an office with ~2—4 people. Would be prohibitively inconvenient to get up and leave the office or pick up a phone every time I wanted to pick someone’s brain very briefly. There’s usually a harmony that develops where office mates can autodetect when others need a disruption-free moment. Headphones also make a great “do not disturb” sign. Solo offices are depressing.
Coming in to the office doesn’t mean video conferencing isn’t used, as not everyone is located in the same city/country.
For each person that appears onsite, that’s one less bi-directional video stream.
