Hello fellow enviros! This week I thought I would respond to @ecotrain's Question of the Week, "What things could we do differently to reduce climate change?"
While if anyone was looking for a comprehensive list of ways to help with all the specs attached, I would generally point them to Project Drawdown, which is a really cool project where they've calculated all the savings, both carbon and monetary when there is some, plus the cost to implement, etc., of doing various things, today I'm going to talk about something that I haven't seen much talk of yet and that wouldn't have really crossed my mind I think before the pandemic.
a little pandemic humor for y'all
Though a part of it does get mentioned in Drawdown under the "telepresence" listing, that is focused more on reducing business travel - ie, if you can Zoom that business meeting rather than fly across the country to rub elbows - then it cuts down on all those air traffic emissions and the like.
My extended riff on this is: fight the back-to-the-office movement.
As I'm sure y'all have seen, businesses are trying to force employees who have been able to work from home for the past two years back into the office. It's not only unsafe since the pandemic isn't over yet, and bad for morale because everyone knows damn well they can do those jobs from home since they've been successfully doing it for two years, but wasteful, environmentally. The general reasoning seems to be that companies and billionaires don't want to lose their investments in commercial real estate, which as you can imagine would crash hard if suddenly 2/3 (not a real estimate, that's just me spitballing) of the offices don't need to be there. Some people think it's about control and micromanaging, but they've been doing that from home too - complete with spyware on people's laptops, so I think it's more about the real estate market.
But what does this have to do with climate change? Well, we need to do some degrowth in order to stave off the worst of climate change, right? Eliminating unnecessary offices and all that goes into employees having to commute there IS degrowth. Degrowth that doesn't actually hurt anybody except some billionaires' investments ...and who doesn't want to do that? I mean, that's just a bonus. ;)
stillshot from one of my @faeriestories videos, Palate Cleanser
Those buildings can then be converted into housing, even with the current supply shortage, because it will take far fewer materials to change offices into homes than it does to build buildings from scratch, and then you even cut back on environmental costs there while you bring down the cost of housing. We have a housing shortage in the US, which I realize sounds mad when we literally have more empty houses than we do homeless people, but this site gives an explanation as to the logistics of it. While I do personally believe that the dinner rule should apply to housing - nobody gets seconds until everyone at least has their first serving - unless that becomes law or there's a mass squatting of rich people's vacation homes, the fact is that some rich people collect homes like normal people might collect shoes, and those houses aren't used for people who actually need them.
In addition to turning unneeded commercial real estate into needed housing, people working from home won't commute as much, so that means fewer cars are needed, fewer roads and road maintenance, fewer tires, less gas and oil changes, less runoff from the asphalt, etc.
People working from home also won't need separate office wardrobes, takeaway lunch as often, and other things like that so there can be a cut back in fast fashion waste, food waste, single use takeaway packaging, and all that.
Less consumption of all that goes into maintaining office space, such as cubicles and other office-specific furniture that you wouldn't have at home, absurdly cold air conditioning (if you've never worked in a US office, I promise, it's like 40 degrees colder inside than it is outside, and if you're cold like me you need sweaters and a blanket to sit at your desk), etc. There would likely be a big reduction in paper use, too, because if everyone is working at home then most documents are probably digital, and people aren't wastefully printing out copies of things for meetings or whatever from their home computers. Fewer printers, copiers, ink, etc. too.
I found this as a meme but I image searched and found the original art as a royalty free unlimited online use image too
So this is one way we could do degrowth without really hurting people. Not just not hurting people, but generally it would make for happier people, as most people prefer to work from home rather than commute across town and be stuck in an office with a micromanaging boss. The extroverts who want to go and be social at work can always work in a coffee shop if they really want to. And as this becomes more normal, there are already lots of apartments that have some kind of computer room/workspace/conference room for their tenants, and that might be more of a draw for apartments to make that a regular amenity like so many have a gym or a pool or something (my current apartment building has none of that, but I've gone through enough apartment listings to know it's a thing, especially for the fancy ones).
As I see it, fighting the back-to-office movement is a win for everyone except commercial real estate investors. And in case you think that might effect people's retirement or something, 89% of stocks are owned by the richest 10% of Americans, so it doesn't effect as many regular people as you think when the stock market takes a dive.
Obviously not every job can be done from home, but so many of them can, this seems like rather easy pickings to put a big dent in pollution, carbon emissions, waste, etc.
So there's my thoughts on ways to fight climate change! :)