UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced changes to Britain’s plans for addressing the climate crisis that effectively water down earlier commitments by delaying targets and relaxing the energy transition timeline.
Sunak said the ban on sales of new gas-powered vehicles would be extended from 2030 to 2035, citing the “unacceptable costs” the energy transition had imposed on British households and a need to maintain the public’s approval of the path to net zero emissions, reported Reuters. The prime minister said he would also ease the transition from residential gas stoves to heat pumps.
“It cannot be right for Westminster to impose such significant costs on working people,” Sunak said, as The New York Times reported. “If we continue down this path we risk losing the consent of the British people.”
Sunak said his commitment to achieving net zero by 2050 had not changed, but that Britain would be able to slow its progress because it was already “so far ahead of every other country in the world,” reported Reuters.
Environmental activists and businesses said decarbonizing the economy offers a chance to increase economic growth and investments and create high-earning jobs.
But in order for that to happen, they say the government would need to give consumers and companies a predictable and stable environment.
Alok Sharma, who served as COP26 president, told the BBC that backtracking on net zero promises would be “incredibly damaging for business confidence,” as CNN reported. “Frankly, I really do not believe that it’s going to help any political party electorally which chooses to go down this path,” Sharma added.
“Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three,” said Lisa Brankin, chair of Ford UK, as reported by The New York Times.
Conservative Member of Parliament Chris Skidmore, who is the former chair of the government’s net zero review, told the BBC that Sunak risked making “the greatest mistake of his premiership,” warning that the UK could end up missing out on “growth, jobs and future prosperity.”
The opposition Labour Party said it was committed to the original target of 2030, Reuters reported.
Britain was the world’s first major economy to legally commit to net zero by 2050. Since 1990, emissions have been cut almost in half, with the closing of coal power plants and the success of offshore wind power.
“[D]elivering on net zero provides a benefit not a cost,” Skidmore told the BBC, as reported by The New York Times.
The United States is about to embark on an experiment inspired by one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. On Wednesday, the Biden administration authorized the creation of the American Climate Corps through an executive order. The program would hire 20,000 young people in its first year, putting them to work installing wind and solar projects, making homes more energy-efficient, and restoring ecosystems like coastal wetlands to protect towns from flooding.
The idea has been in the works for years. It was first announced in President Joe Biden’s early days in the White House in January 2021, tucked into a single paragraph in an executive order on tackling the climate crisis. At the time, it was called the Civilian Climate Corps — a reference to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933 to help the country survive the Great Depression, which was responsible for building hundreds of parks, including Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as well as many hiking trails and lodges you can find across the country today. Early versions of Biden’s trademark climate law that passed last year, the Inflation Reduction Act, included money for reviving the CCC. But that funding got cut during negotiations last summer with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and the program was assumed dead.
Now it’s back, with a name change. Biden’s executive order promises that the American Climate Corps “will ensure more young people have access to the skills-based training necessary for good-paying careers” in clean energy and climate resilience efforts. There are plans to link it with AmeriCorps, the national service program, and leverage several smaller climate corps initiatives that states have launched in California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington. However, the order didn’t provide details on what kind of funding the program is getting or how much workers will get paid. The White House also launched a new website where you can sign up to get updates about joining the program.
Reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps is widely popular, with 84 percent of Americans supporting the idea in polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication last year. Mark Paul, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, said the new name that swapped “Civilian” for “American” leans into patriotism in an effort to broaden the program’s appeal even further.
“I think that right now we are in a fight for the very soul of the nation,” Paul said. “President Biden and other Democrats are trying to brand climate [action] as not only good for the environment, but good for America. And I think that’s precisely what they are trying to convey with this name change, that climate jobs are good for the American people.”
The program could also be an attempt to appeal to young voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The administration drew criticism from climate activists when it approved the Willow oil project in northern Alaska in March after concluding that the courts wouldn’t allow them to block it. After that decision, polling from Data for Progress found that Biden’s approval ratings on climate change dropped 13 percent among voters between the ages of 18 to 29. The revival of the CCC has long been an item on progressives’ wish lists — back in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, reportedly sold Secretary of State John Kerry on making the program part of Biden’s platform during the 2020 presidential campaign.
“I am thrilled to say that the White House has been responsive to our generation’s demand for a climate corps and that President Biden acknowledges that this is just the beginning of building the climate workforce of the future,” Varshini Prakash, the director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, told reporters ahead of Biden’s announcement.
A group of Civilian Conservation Corps members plant seedlings on a clear-cut hillside in Oregon.
Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
To be sure, the American Climate Corps could run into problems. If it’s modeled off AmeriCorps, the jobs might not exactly qualify as “good jobs” — AmeriCorps members are more like volunteers who get a small stipend, often living close to the poverty line. The White House, for its part, is selling the program as a path to good careers. The administration “will specifically be focused on making sure that folks that are coming through this program have a pathway into good-paying union jobs,” said White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi on a call with reporters on Tuesday about the announcement. “We’re very keenly focused on that.”
The initiative could help bolster the ranks of workers like electricians, according to Zaidi, addressing the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can install low-carbon technologies like electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps. “We’re hopeful that the launch of the American Climate Corps will help accelerate training for a new generation of installers, contractors, and other tradespeople who are, at the end of the day, the ones who make these great ideas a reality,” Paul Lambert, co-founder and CEO of Quilt, a heat pump company in California, said in a statement to Grist.
With the goal of hiring 20,000 a year, the new program is much smaller than many activists had hoped: The original CCC employed 300,000 men in just its first three months (women were excluded until Eleanor Roosevelt’s “She-She-She” camps opened in 1934). Some progressives, like Ocasio-Cortez, were hoping a climate corps could employ 1.5 million people over five years. Assuming all goes well, the program could expand. Paul speculates that the Biden administration is starting small as “proof of concept to the American people to show that this program can work and that it is worthy of investment.”
If interest in the American Climate Corps is high, those 20,000 slots could fill up quickly. Among the 1,200 likely voters polled by Data for Progress two years ago, half of those under 45 said they’d consider joining, given the chance.
“I teach youth day in and day out, and one of the biggest problems we face right now is youth feeling like they don’t know what to do,” Paul said. “And now we have a program that the U.S. government is facilitating to point to and say, ‘You know, if you want to help, here’s one way that you can contribute to decarbonizing our nation.’”
The United Nations Climate Ambition Summit in New York today brings together what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the “first movers and doers” of the climate crisis with the goal of speeding up action on climate change by governments, local authorities, business and finance leaders and civil society ahead of November’s COP28 Climate Change Conference.
The Climate Ambition Summit’s list of 34 speakers conspicuously left out two of the world’s biggest polluters: the U.S. and China, reported Reuters.
The summit will be organized with three interrelated acceleration tracks in mind: ambition, credibility and implementation, a press release from the UN said.
“Our focus here is on climate solutions – and our task is urgent. Humanity has opened the gates of hell. Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods; sweltering temperatures spawning disease; and thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage. Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge,” Guterres said in his opening remarks at the summit. “If nothing changes we are heading towards a 2.8 degree temperature rise – towards a dangerous and unstable world. But the future is not fixed. It is for leaders like you to write it. We can still limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees. We can still build a world of clear air, green jobs, and affordable clean power for all.”
Speeches from leaders of countries that are responding to Guterres’ call to accelerate worldwide climate action, including Pakistan, Tuvalu, South Africa, Brazil, Canada and the European Union, are being featured at the summit, Reuters reported.
One of the summit’s goals is to inspire action from those countries and companies whose plans on climate are not in agreement with global climate targets.
“The path forward is clear,” Guterres said. “It has been forged by fighters and trailblazers – some of whom are with us today: Activists refusing to be silenced; Indigenous Peoples defending their lands from climate extremes; chief executives transforming their business models and financiers funding a just transition; mayors moving towards to a zero-carbon future; and governments working to stamp out fossil fuels and protect vulnerable communities. But if we are to meet the 1.5 degree limit and protect ourselves from climate extremes, climate champions, particularly in the developing world, need solidarity; they need support; and they need global leaders to take action.”
International financial institutions and non-member states that will have the opportunity to speak include the World Bank, Allianz, the International Monetary Fund, the State of California and the City of London, reported Reuters.
John Kerry, the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, will attend the summit, but will not be giving a speech, according to a spokesperson.
Selvin Hart, climate adviser to Guterres, told Reuters that the purpose of not including certain countries and companies was not to “embarrass” them, but to inspire action.
Leaders were selected to speak if they had proposals for updating the pre-2030 climate plan for their country; had updated targets for transitioning to net-zero energy emissions that committed to no new gas, oil or coal; had plans for the phasing out of fossil fuels; and had new climate adaptation or funding pledges.
“We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels,” Guterrez said in his opening remarks. “The proposed Climate Solidarity Pact calls on major emitters – who have benefitted most from fossil fuels – to make extra efforts to cut emissions, and on wealthy countries to support emerging economies to do so.”
The UN requires businesses, financial institutions and cities to have transition plans that are in line with the UN’s recommendations for integrity, along with targets for reducing emissions for 2025 that take indirect emissions into account, as well as plans for phasing out fossil fuels without relying on carbon offsets and committing to publicly advocate for climate action based on science.
“The Acceleration Agenda I proposed calls on governments to hit fast forward: So that developed countries reach net zero as close as possible to 2040, and emerging economies as close as possible to 2050 according to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. It also urges countries to implement a fair, equitable and just energy transition, while providing affordable electricity to all: By ensuring credible plans to exit coal by 2030 for OECD countries and 2040 for the rest of the world; by ending fossil fuel subsidies – which the IMF estimates reached an incredible U.S. $7 trillion in 2022; and by setting ambitious renewable energy goals in line with the 1.5 degree limit,” Guterres said.
A recent UN report said current emissions-cutting pledges were not enough to keep temperatures from going above the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, Reuters reported. An additional 20 gigatonnes of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would be needed before 2030, with net zero worldwide by 2050.
Guterres called on the world’s biggest polluters to step up and make up for the inequalities of the climate crisis, saying, “We need a transformation to rebuild trust.”
“The Acceleration Agenda also calls for climate justice,” Guterrez said. “Many of the poorest nations have every right to be angry. Angry that they are suffering most from a climate crisis they did nothing to create. Angry that promised finance has not materialized. And angry that their borrowing costs are sky-high.”
About half of all packaged goods found in grocery stores contain palm oil, because this product is versatile, grows efficiently for better yields and has low production costs. However, palm oil comes at a high cost to the environment, and its production is a leading cause of deforestation around the world.
As a potential alternative, researchers at Queen Margaret University (QMU) in Edinburgh, UK have developed PALM-ALT, which they found to not only be better for the environment but also a healthier substitute.
PALM-ALT is made from a byproduct of linseed (or flaxseed) production along with natural fiber and rapeseed oil. According to the researchers, it can be made locally at a global scale, including in the UK and within the EU. In response to a question from EcoWatch regarding PALM-ALT’s cost-competitiveness with palm oil, a PALM-ALT spokesperson said they are “unable to confirm costs until manufacturing partners have been arranged.”
PALM-ALT was made to substitute palm oil in baked goods, like cookies and cakes, without impacting characteristics like texture or flavor. It has a consistency similar to mayonnaise. The resulting substitute has 88% less saturated fat and 25% less fat overall compared to palm oil, according to the researchers.
The palm oil substitute is also about 70% better for the environment (based on carbon emissions) compared to palm oil, as the BBC reported.
Oil palm trees grow only in tropical areas, which has led producers to destroy native, tropical forests to build oil palm plantations. This has a number of negative impacts. It removes native plants, displaces wildlife and removes an effective carbon sink, the World Wildlife Fund explained. Tropical forests are typically burned to make way for the oil palm plantations, contributing to air pollution. Palm oil mills also produce liquid waste that pollutes soil, surface water and groundwater.
“Palm can only be harvested in rainforest areas of the globe, thousands of miles away from many of the countries that use the product,” Catriona Liddle, head of the Scottish Centre for Food Development and Innovation at Queen Margaret University, said in a statement. “Current production methods leading to deforestation of tropical rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia have led to the destruction of animals’ natural habitat, and high greenhouse gas emissions linked to its global transport. It is therefore essential to develop an alternative product, which works well for the food industry and helps reduce the world’s overreliance on palm.”
The researchers have patented PALM-ALT and its production process. As for next steps, in additional to finding manufacturing partners they are looking for food companies and other partners that want to replace palm oil with PALM-ALT in their products.
From California to Florida, homeowners have been facing a new climate reality: Insurance companies don’t want to cover their properties. According to a report released today, the problem will only get worse.
The nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation found that, while about 6.8 million properties nationwide already rely on expensive public insurance programs, that’s only a fraction of 39 million across the country that face similar conditions.
“There’s this climate insurance bubble out there,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street and a contributor to the report. “And you can quantify it.”
Each state regulates its insurance market, and some limit how much companies can raise rates in a given year. In California, for example, anything more than a 7 percent hike requires a public hearing. According to First Street, such policies have meant premiums don’t always accurately reflect risk, especially as climate change exacerbates natural disasters.
This has led companies such as Allstate, State Farm, Nationwide, and others to pull out of areas with a high threat of wildfire, floods, and storms. In the Southern California city of San Bernardino, for example, non-renewals jumped 774 percent between 2015 and 2021. When that happens, homeowners often must enroll in a government-run insurance-of-last-resort program where premiums can cost thousands of dollars more per year.
“The report shows that actuarially sound pricing is going to make it unaffordable to live in certain places as climate impacts emerge,” said David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University Northridge. He did not contribute to the report. “It’s startling and it’s very well documented.”
Russell says that what’s most likely to shock people is the economic toll on affected properties. When insurance costs soar, First Street shows, it severely undermines home values — and in some cases erodes them entirely.
The report found that insurance for the average California home could nearly quadruple if future risk is factored in, with those extra costs causing a roughly 39 percent drop in value. The situation is even worse in Florida and Louisiana, where flood insurance in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans could go from $824 annually to $11,296 and a property could effectively become worthless.
“There’s no education to the public of what’s going on and where the risk is,” said Porter, explaining that most insurance models are proprietary. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t make its flood insurance pricing available to the public — homeowners must go through insurance brokers for a quote.
First Street is posting its report online, and it also runs riskfactor.com, where anyone can type in an address and receive user-friendly risk information for any property in the U.S. One metric the site provides is annualized damage for flood and wind risk. Porter said that if that number is higher than a homeowner’s current premiums, then a climate risk of some kind probably hasn’t yet been priced into the coverage.
“This would indicate that at some point this risk will get priced into their insurance costs,” he said, “and their cost of home ownership would increase along with that.”
Wildfires are the fastest growing natural disaster risk, First Street reported. Over the next 30 years, it estimates the number of acres burned will balloon from about 4 million acres per year to 9 million, and the number of structures destroyed is on track to double to 34,000 annually. Wildfires are also the predominant threat for 4.4 million of the 39 million properties that First Street identified as at risk of insurance upheaval.
“You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns. They don’t belong there,” he said. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.”
First Street hopes that highlighting the climate insurance bubble allows people to make better informed decisions. For homeowners, that may mean taking precautions against, say, wildfires, by replacing their roof or clearing flammable material from around their house. Policymakers, he said, could use the information to help at-risk communities adapt to or mitigate their risk. In either case, Porter said, reducing threats could help keep insurance rates from spiking.
Ultimately, though, Russell says moving people out of disaster-prone areas will likely be necessary.
“Large numbers of people will need to be relocated away from areas that will be uninsurable.” he said. “There is a reckoning on the horizon and it’s not pretty.”
Fall in the U.S. is when three major sports leagues – football, basketball and hockey – start their seasons. Baseball also continues, and in the UK and Europe, some of the major soccer leagues like the Premier League have started their seasons as well. Additionally, college sports with larger budgets, like American football and basketball, have teams that travel by air.
With major sports comes major travel. And air travel is still a heavy contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, with some data saying it constitutes up to 12% of total global travel emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, air travel is heading in the wrong direction related to the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 goal.
Most professional sports rely on air travel to get to games. Between private planes, chartered flights and commercial flights, and because of the intensity of scheduling, there is no way around traveling by plane to meet league and TV scheduling requirements. On top of team travel, dedicated fans typically book flights to games that aren’t local enough to travel by car or bus.
So where do pro sports stand in terms of their carbon impact? Last year, the United Nations published a policy brief outlining the ways that sport can address climate change, by “raising awareness, influencing behaviors, and shrinking its carbon footprint.” The brief quoted a study that found the 2016 Rio Olympics was responsible for 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. The UN report recommended several actions: reducing the carbon footprint of buildings; compiling more data on the carbon footprint of sports; and using sports as a “tool for climate action.”
There are tangible examples of teams around the world taking action against climate catastrophe. In the English Premier League for soccer, a recent study by Sports Positive Leagues concluded that “we have probably seen one of the biggest leaps in progress from clubs across the board” in relation to sustainability and lessening impact on climate. This group, part of the Sports Positive network, measured such things as clean energy, energy efficiency, sustainable transport and single-use plastic reduction. Manchester United, a team in the Premier League that ranked third in the Sports Positive rankings, also announced they would buy carbon offsets against their recent travel to the U.S. The offsets that the team will use for its estimated 450 tons of CO2 emissions from its 2023 summer tour will be used at the Crow Lake Wind project in South Dakota.
In the U.S., just a few years ago the National Basketball Association (NBA) was the most polluting league of the four American sports leagues. But in 2022, the league reduced team travel mileage by about 2,000 miles per team. But it’s not just team travel – the overall carbon output is impacted by fans, the energy of the arena and the kind of materials, like single-serve plastic, used inside arenas. In April of 2022, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena — home to the Atlanta Hawks NBA team — received a TRUE Platinum certification from Green Business Certification Inc. for its efforts in reaching zero waste.
The most high-profile green sports event was the opening of Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena in 2021. The building is expected to receive a net-zero certification and purports to be the first net-zero carbon arena in the world, a claim that’s difficult to verify.
Other arenas are moving green: Sacramento’s Golden One Center is powered by 100% solar energy and uses 45% less water than required and is a LEED Platinum building. And Toronto’s arena uses deep-lake water cooling instead of air conditioning compressors. Other stadiums in the U.S. with significant climate initiatives include those in Philadelphia, Ohio State and Portland.
A recent news item out of Australia noted that the men’s national soccer teams in Australia purchased carbon offsets against their travel to the World Cup in Qatar. And the NFL’s Houston Texans have purchased offsets for this NFL season and two more from 1PointFive, a subsidiary of oil giant Occidental.
While such actions appear well-intentioned, however, carbon offsets have yet to be proven effective. A study from this year showed that 94% of forest offset credits did not offset any emissions. The Texans are purchasing their credits against the massive direct air carbon capture plant being built in the Permian Basin in Texas. These facilities haven’t even been built yet, and direct air carbon capture is a nascent technology that, some say, is more of a benefit to the fossil fuel companies than to the environment.
The Paris Olympics of 2024 is promising “to halve the emissions arising in relation to the Games, while offsetting even more CO2 emissions than we will generate.” A noble goal, to be sure, but as with all areas of the professional sports ecosystem, drastic improvements need to be made to make a dent in our warming climate.
In a new study, an international group of scientists with the World Weather Attribution initiative has concluded that climate change made the heavy rainfall that led to this month’s deadly Libyan floods up to 50 times more likely.
The first half of September brought extreme rainfall to several Mediterranean countries. On September 10, Libya was hit with disastrous flooding following torrential rainfall associated with Storm Daniel that caused 4,128 confirmed deaths with more than 10,000 still missing, a press release from World Weather Attribution said.
Following the devastating flooding in the Mediterranean, World Weather Attribution’s international team from the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom and the U.S. came together to assess how much the intensity and likelihood of the extreme rainfall were influenced by human-induced climate change.
“The severe flooding in Spain, Greece, Türkiye, Bulgaria and Libya was caused by very heavy rainfall that fell, in the case of Spain in less than 24 hours, whereas it lasted 24 hours in Libya and up to 4 days over Greece and Türkiye,” the press release said.
The scientists used computer and climate simulations to compare current weather events with those in a world where the climate was not 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, reported Reuters.
A warmer atmosphere is able to hold in more water vapor, which allows moisture to build up in clouds, causing increased rainfall. Climate change can also cause erratic weather patterns.
The research team found that climate change not only made the severe rainfall in Libya up to 50 times more likely, but as much as 50 percent more intense.
Most people in the north-eastern cities of Derna, Sousa, Benghazi and Al-Marj were not prepared for the amount of rainfall or levels of flooding Storm Daniel brought.
“In Libya, the volume of water and overnight timing of the dam failures made it so that anyone in the path of the water was at increased risk, not just those who are typically highly vulnerable,” the study said. “In addition to the lack of maintenance, the Al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams were built in the 1970s, using relatively short rainfall records, and may not have been designed to withstand a 1 in 600 year rainfall event.”
Better forecasting, warning systems and communication of the warnings to the general public, as well as updated infrastructure, are needed to help people in the region be better prepared for extreme and unprecedented weather events.
“In conjunction with improved emergency management capacity, impact-based forecasts may help to provide a clearer understanding of how the rainfall translates into potential impacts and could lead to improved warnings in the future,” the study said. “This disaster also points to the challenge of needing to design and maintain infrastructure for not just the climate of the present or the past, but also the future. In Libya, this means taking into account the long-term decline in average rainfall, and at the same time, the increase in extreme rainfall like this heavy rainfall event; a challenging prospect especially for a country plagued by crises.”
If you’re looking for ways to reduce your carbon emissions you could start by staying home for work. A new study by researchers from Cornell University and Microsoft has found that working remotely can have great benefits for the planet.
According to the study, compared to those who travel to an office for work, people who work remotely all the time could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 54 percent. Hybrid workers can reduce their carbon footprint by 11 percent when they work remotely two days a week and 29 percent when they spend four days working from home.
“The remote work has to be significant in order to realize these kind of benefits,” said Longqi Yang, an applied research manager at Microsoft and co-author of the study, as The Washington Post reported. “This study provides a very important data point for a dimension that people care a lot about when deciding remote work policy.”
The study, “Climate mitigation potentials of teleworking are sensitive to changes in lifestyle and workplace rather than ICT usage,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a model for the projected greenhouse gas emissions of U.S. remote, hybrid and office workers, the researchers used data on teleworking and commuting from Microsoft employees. They looked at five types of emissions, including energy use at home and in the office.
“Office energy use is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of onsite and hybrid workers, while non-commute-related travel becomes more significant as the number of remote work days increases,” the study said. “In contrast, the effects of remote and hybrid work on ICT usage have negligible impacts on the overall carbon footprint. This highlights that people should shift their focus from ICT usage to commute decarbonization, facility downsizing, and renewables penetration for office buildings to mitigate GHG emissions of remote and onsite work.”
The researchers found that travel not related to work increased for remote workers.
“People say: ‘I work from home, I’m net zero.’ That’s not true,” said Fengqi You, one of the authors of the study and a Cornell professor whose research is focused on systems engineering and data science, as reported by The Guardian. “The net benefit for working remotely is positive but a key question is how positive. When people work remotely, they tend to spend more emissions on social activities.”
Professor You pointed out that people’s homes are not always the most energy efficient, and office printers tend to be more energy efficient than printers used at home.
“While remote work shows potential in reducing carbon footprint, careful consideration of commuting patterns, building energy consumption, vehicle ownership, and non-commute-related travel is essential to fully realise its environmental benefits,” the study said.
Improved fuel economy due to less congestion at rush hour was an additional benefit of more remote work.
“To have a comprehensive plan for something like this, you’re looking at more than just the workplace, and obviously the other choices that people make in their life will also impact the emissions that they create and that organizations might create as well,” said John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at University of Toronto-Scarborough, as The Washington Post reported.
The study found that communications and information technology made up only a small portion of overall carbon emissions, so the focus of emissions reductions should be on using renewables for office temperature control and decarbonizing transportation.
“We’re not trying to predict the future, but I think the future is all up to us,” Yang said, as reported by The Washington Post. “This study tells people, if we want to be more carbon neutral in the future, what can we do now?”
