from Hacker News

Zoom has done more to reduce emissions than electric vehicles

by caaqil on 3/13/22, 2:04 AM with 19 comments

  • by cmeacham98 on 3/13/22, 3:39 AM

    This is attributing 100% of the difference between driving and not driving to work to zoom, which seems very very generous.

    Better title would be "Working from home has done more..."

  • by not2b on 3/13/22, 3:16 AM

    Rather, videoconferencing has. If there were no Zoom we would be using its competitors.

  • by thawaya3113 on 3/13/22, 8:50 AM

    Transportation in the US aid particularly bad, but I’m not convinced that there has been a reduction in overall energy usage due to WFH.

    For one thing, I haven’t seen any news outlet, or other source that I frequent, show that the US overall consumed less energy over the past 2 years.

    If WFH was truly saving us energy it would have shown up in the overall numbers somewhere, and if it did, I suspect that would have been very big news.

    And I can see mechanisms why WFH may not actually have led to an energy consumption decline.

    The biggest to me would be the fact that most Americans live in single family homes with poor insulation. These require a lot of energy for heating and cooling. As opposed to the almost certainly more energy conserving office building spaces most of these White collar workers work in.

    In addition, these office spaces are obviously cooling far less volume per capita than a home air conditioning system would have to for even 1-2 people working out of even the smallest apartment in a big city.

    And heating/cooling is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the US.

    That’s just 1. However, there’s probably other stuff. So, for example, WFH may not actually have reduced all that many trips. Because most people tend to run errands on their way back to work, and pick up food on their way to work at a drive in.

    If they’re continuing those habits, WFH means they may still be driving out to pick up breakfast in the morning (or even if they order in, someone’s driving), and taking the car out again to run the errands they used to. So they might be canceling out a ton of the saved commuting energy as well.

  • by civilized on 3/13/22, 3:49 AM

    Big business execs: "climate change is bad... but not bad enough for me to let people keep working remotely"

  • by athorax on 3/13/22, 3:14 AM

    More like the pandemic has...

  • by steeve on 3/13/22, 10:57 AM

  • by anm89 on 3/13/22, 7:07 PM

    Funny, I've been working remotely and and video chatting daily without zoom for 6 years but I guess Zoom is totally responsible for my entire work situation.

  • by voisin on 3/13/22, 4:04 PM

    What about heating or cooling hundreds of homes during the day vs heating or cooling a single office? Same with lighting (though less impactful).

  • by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf on 3/13/22, 2:36 PM

    It does stand to reason that not driving to work would be more efficient than any form of transport, even a bicycle.

  • by barbazoo on 3/13/22, 3:48 AM

    > If you truly want to reduce emissions, then you should be looking at changing the way people use transport (or avoiding it altogether) rather than merely improving the fuel source.

    On top of that, only 29% of emissions in the US come from transportation.

    https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

  • by m463 on 3/13/22, 3:32 AM

    Teams and its cpu/gpu usage will make the pendulum swing back.

    Seriously though, I wonder if there are some events that require really high fidelity/bandwidth that will be replaced by videoconferencing in the next few years.