The Green Argument for Telecommuting
Last week, oil prices hit another record high, topping $126 a barrel and leading to a new rash of stories about gasoline spurting over $4 a gallon. Coincidently, my company opened a DC office last week, meaning that I’ll be commuting (by car, rail and bike) at least part-time from now on. And that gave me plenty of time to think – while I sat in my car – about the green side of telecommuting.
I’ve spent time in this space talking about the selfish reasons why telecommuting works from a business point of view and enables better work-life balance, but the time has come to talk the trend seriously from an environmental perspective.
The folks at undress4success.com, a site focused on working from home, estimated that getting the 40 percent of Americans who could work from home off of the roads and into a home office would save 625 million barrels of oil a year, spare the atmosphere from 100 million tons of carbon dioxide and save us all $43 billion in gas costs.
You can take the analysis even further. Get people to teleconference and you have an impact on airplane emissions, and enough people working virtually means fewer buildings to power, heat and cool. But you don’t even have to go that far. Teleworking even one day every two weeks should theoretically cut gas usage by 10 percent, which is hardly marginal.
Yet despite the frenzied coverage of the steady rise in gas prices (and the growing coverage of environmentally friendly lifestyle changes), there has been little chatter about employers looking at telecommuting as a way of taking the burden off their employers and the planet. The exceptions — like the Virginia Department of Taxation — seem thrilled with the arrangement.
Since all of you tend to be great about looking for ways to both help the planet and promote work-life balance, I’m curious if anyone has used the green line of argument to push for more common-sense telecommuting options at work. Have you seen any employers become more open on this or — even better — moved to encourage working from home on environmental grounds?
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