Not really, for a couple reasons:

1) They have enough money to start initiatives, even geographically dispersed initiatives, independent from the state

2) They have a history of working hand-in-glove with the city of Seattle and the state of Washington; it can be hard to distinguish "What Microsoft is trying to do" from "What Washington state is trying to do" sometimes.

Companies can help a lot by locating their offices in places that enable less carbon intensive commuting, lobbying local government, supporting initiatives that promote density, and supporting local transit initiatives (example: [0]). When businesses speak up and say, local business needs workers to be able to commute without a car, our competitiveness will suffer without it and we will fall behind, that speaks to a large number of voters who don't respond to environmental appeals.

[0] https://www.kxan.com/news/downtown-austin-business-leaders-s...

Most corporate campuses are located such that public transportation cannot serve it well. They tend to be isolated islands surrounded by parking lots and grass land, with no through street that transit could take that would get from on place to another. Thus the only transit ends at their building, this is okay for a zoo or shopping mall where people come and go all day, but offices tend to be everyone arriving at the same time and then no riders, so to make it worth while to serve you all day you have to be on the way to someplace worth serving. If you are not on the way then people with a choice will prefer to drive just for the one time that the kid gets sick and they have to leave early. (note places where traffic is a problem are also places that are on the way to elsewhere)

Yep. Carbon initiatives like the Microsoft one will force them to rethink the wisdom of building corporate campuses.

> people with a choice will prefer to drive just for the one time that the kid gets sick and they have to leave early

This used to be a major (underestimated, in my opinion) issue, and I used to bring it up all the time as something that needed to be addressed before people who were accustomed to driving would voluntarily leave their cars at home, but I think Uber and Lyft solve it, full stop.

Uber and Lyft are not a good solution. I could every trip on them as worth a weeks worth of driving alone since you don't know where those drivers are driving (or sitting stopped waiting for a call) when you call them. If everyone is normally using transit they are okay - but then there should be all day service to the campus so you don't need them. (I will agree if you say I'm over counting their environmental costs - I do that to make a point that is often ignored)

Or allowing work from home.

Work from home is useful, but there are real advantages to face to face conversation.

On the other hand, if people work from home then more people will focus on improving the "work-from-home experience" and making the business more suited for working from home.

>>supporting initiatives that promote density

This is not going to help you with "speaks to a large number of voters who don't respond to environmental appeals"

There is a MASSIVE over lab in people that do don't respond to (government regulation based) environmental appeals AND have no desire to live in densely populated cities.

Speaking as one of those people, the idea of living in an area of high population density is a non-starter for me, my current area is about 2,000 people per square mile that that is FAR FAR too dense for me. living in Seattle or LA with a Population density of 4x time is something nightmares are made of, and NYC at about 13x that is just a total night terror....

When people who don't like big cities are voting on transit and density initiative, it's because they live in or on the fringes of a big city. Most likely they are there because the money to be made is more important to them than their dislike of cities. Ergo, when business leaders say transit and density are needed for further economic growth, that message appeals to a strongly held value.

That's fine, you keep doing you. Just done stop other people from living the way they want to.

There is one group politically that wants to prevent people from living they way they want, and it is not Rural people

Not sure what "rural" has to do with this, because nearly all land in the US is rural and it's super easy to find any sort of rural life one wants, in addition to it being super cheap.

However, there is a massive undersupply of dense living in the US, because it has been legislated out of existence, not because people don't want it.

And I would point out that many "rural" towns have fantastic dense living in their core, that allow people to walk for daily errands, etc.

The real enemy of density is not rural vs. urban, because these do not tough each other at all. The people who prevent density are the suburban enclaves that, through heavy and excessive regulation, prevent people from building anything except for single family residential sprawl for miles upon miles, necessitating a car for something as simple as getting a pint of cream.

Which is the way that many people want to live, which is great for them, and they should be allowed to do that! But we need to stop letting them say to others: "I don't want to live in density, so you shouldn't have the very option of it because the mere existence threatens me."

I've been fighting for smart density in my town for quite a while, and no rural person would ever oppose this, because they are not in town! And I think they realize that the more people in town, the fewer crowding into their rural life.

Why would an employees commute be out of the hands of the employer? Companies already provide incentives to help employees with commutes: public transit benefits, wfh days, shuttle services.

It seems especially obvious at the moment that companies could simply eliminate tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of commutes instantly by letting the vast majority of their employees wfh permanently (or much more frequently at least).

Additionally it'd probably be pretty easy to brainstorm a dozen more less common ideas/incentives companies could start trialing: pay people to take public transit instead of just subsidizing partial costs, have more satellite offices or pay for wework type space, a welcome packet that includes an option for a bicycle and fitness trainer, additional shuttle services, long term plans such as working with the government to invest in bicycle/public transit infrastructure, etc etc

Because I can just not use those services and take my car to work? Like large employers can dangle some pretty substantive carrots but I don't think courts would let them get away with any sticks.

>Like large employers can dangle some pretty substantive carrots but I don't think courts would let them get away with any sticks.

The courts already let them get away with it. There's nothing illegal about discriminating against people based on their commutes. The employer can do anything they want, up to and including termination (or refusal to hire someone in the first place).

Commute discrimination already happens, here's one article detailing research on the topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/inner-cit...

Here's another article about it: https://www.boston.com/news/jobs/2018/03/26/no-offer-because...

No, they choose their location, and some tech companies provide transportation. Facebook is even building their own employee housing.

Look at the Apple spaceship. It will require tons of employee driving.

Companies do provide credits towards cycling and FB does this for even tube in London, but that will be still limited based on location. Though you are right about the location bit, they should force the hand of the state by speaking with their foot, I guess fear of losing talent opportunity scares them.

> Facebook even builds their own employee housing.

I wasn't aware about this, where are they building these?

Menlo Park, and apparently Google’s up to something similar in San Jose: https://levels.io/facebook-city/

Meh, if the tech workers lived in the city it would just be "gentrification". There's no winning.

Isn't this the definitive cultural bubble? Jesus.

The FAANG companies are so rich and so big that they’re now providing some of the commuting infrastructure for their employees in the form of buses. They certainly have quite a lot more control over their employees commuting impact than most companies, even if it isn’t total control.

Well, the model is not designed as a target for companies. It's designed as a way to categorize indirect emissions. It's 100% Microsoft's decision to take the broadest possible definition of their carbon footprint to target.

Where a public transit alternative exists, employers can often create strong incentives by limiting or charging for parking and/or subsidizing public transit.

Google could provide electric vehicles from zero-carbon-emission sources, if they wanted to.

No such vehicle exists. All vehicles require carbon-intensive processes in their manufacturing.

That's pretty much everything. I feel like that's a cop-out. Just as you can't be neutral on a moving train, you can't manufacture anything that isn't carbon neutral. Something somewhere is going to do something bad to the environment. Where's the goal post and how fast is it moving?

Isn't that better than petrol or diesel cars?

The short answer is yes, the long answer is "it depends on your local electricity generation but probably still yes." There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.

'There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.'

This statement always throws me - did we just make a complete context-switch from talking about car emissions to talking about gas turbines? Or is "gas" being used to refer to petrol ("gasoline")? The subject of the previous post was clearly cars, but that sentence is talking about gas and coal, better re-read the entire statement several times to double-check the context!

I don't want to be rude and shit on peoples' language, but FFS I hate the shortening slang-version of "gasoline" so much. THAT WORD IS TAKEN, IT MEANS VAPOUR.

It might be a US-ism? I've never heard anyone in casual conversion call it gasoline or petrol. You would get weird looks if you called it gasoline.

"You fill up your gas tank at the gas station and get a gas can just in case you get low on gas before you can hit the next station to gas up."

Not hard to see how it's confusing - you call it gas but it's not a gas, it's a liquid.

But it’s just a case of a word with two meanings that depends on context. That’s like the least weird thing that happens in English.

“You call returned soldiers vets, but they don’t work with animals.”

I always found the acronym LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) funny for similar reasons.

The definition of the difference between gas and vapour is that a gas cannot be liquefied by pressure (so water vapour heated over ~374°C becomes a gas)