by Pops » Wed 22 Sep 2010, 07:57:35
That sucks, telecommuting is one of my big fixes.
Here are my caveats to the universities caveats:
They point out that home energy use increases 30% by working from home, well yea, that's because you are home! My house wouldn't use much energy at all if I was never there. In our case my wife is home anyway so the increase is a light bulb and the power used by the machine to type here - I mean to work.
Perhaps there is some savings in hvac for a corral of cubicles at a new modern naturally lit highly efficient office building over a drafty old barn of a house, seems like that would be pretty hard to generalize about.
What is the net effect of buying online vs driving 10 miles to the specialty store I have wondered about. If we all bought just about the same things, all those things were delivered to the central warehouse by rail then delivered by truck to a local outlet within walking distance of our home, that would be ideal I guess - sort of like the plan Walmart has I'd guess.
Some part of online purchases probably originate just like above: rail-warehouse-truck-store but then turnaround and go just the opposite direction to the online buyers house - store-truck-big truck/jet-truck-home, just about a doubling of transport and lots more handling.
Like most everything else the problem isn't how we get what we get the problem is we get so much! Buying some thing online that you can't get locally, that is going to last 30 years, and maybe it's worthwhile from a carbon standpoint, a gift basket or tee shirt, maybe not so much.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)