My emissions 100% went up with RW.
I moved to Wyoming from New York, bought a roomy house. bought a car for the first time and fly constantly. The quality of life is great. And I still drop into the office every few months. But it’s no environmental panacea.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/02/think-youre-in-your-car-mor...
Going off property prices, it’s not negligible. (And going off labour prices, RW is clearly anti-agglomerational [1].)
[1] https://econ.vt.edu/content/dam/econ_vt_edu/seminars/fall-20...
Even if full time rm is carbon negative, hybrid can be positive. Myself and many I know went from 10 min Daily commutes to 60+ min commutes 2-3 times a week.
The emissions of cars for the US is much higher than most people expect at 1.7 billion tons, while air conditioning is about 117 million tons. A/C also peak matches solar, which makes the emissions for it easier to cut.
Heat is harder to get numbers on, but I also think most oversized suburban houses are in the sunbelt these days, plus I don't think a home office swings it too much from the baseline heating to keep the pipes from freezing.
What?
To be clear: I’m not faulting people for this. But it’s an intuitive consequence of people moving their working space into their living space: having both means needing more room, which frequently means moving somewhere rural or suburban and driving more.
Then I got a remote job and realized I could save a fortune by moving to a rural house an hour away.
But when I _did_ need to go to Dublin, I was sometimes driving instead of riding a bike (though sometimes I took the train, but I was very careful to make this an option and my neighbours would usually drive to go to Dublin)
If I could’ve found a decent apartment in the city for the same price as my house, I likely would’ve opted for the apartment instead because being within walking distance of essentials and things to do is very compelling. Unfortunately there’s not much in US cities that can be had for the same price, and what little can isn’t pleasant to spend extended amounts of time in as one does with remote work.
This doesn’t have to be a problem. In Tokyo for instance there’s plenty of suitable apartments for a decent price, especially if you’re ok with downtown being a 20m train ride away. We don’t build our cities like that, though.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to other countries with better land use patterns, of course.