Working from home and meeting electronically save time and hassle, but the evidence that they reduce emissions is lackingAmid the chaos of this month's Tube strike, BT's marketing folk seized the moment by offering free demonstrations of its latest high-definition video conferencing software to show Londoners that there is another way – teleworking. Besides saving time and cutting out the hassle of
travel, working from home and meeting electronically are widely promoted as being two of the most promising areas where technology can help curb CO2 emissions. But are they?According to the IT industry, teleworking has the potential to reduce global CO2 emissions by as much as 260m tonnes by 2020. BT claims that in 2005, internal use of video conferencing allowed it to save more than 54,000 tonnes of CO2 by reducing the need for travel and face-to-face meetings. Similarly last year Cisco reckons it saved more than 47,000 tonnes of CO2.At first glance this seems to make sense. After all moving electrons across the world is always going to require less
energy than moving molecules and for this reason countless governments have endorsed teleworking as a laudable environmental solution.The trouble is there's very little concrete evidence to back this up. Existing studies tend to be carried out internally by the companies promoting the technology, with little transparency about how the figures were derived. What's more they often make rather bold assumptions. For example, they tend to focus on scenarios where employees telework full-time or spend only one day in the office. Many of the energy savings claimed come from businesses reducing the size of their premises significantly and rail operators scaling back their services to reflect this absentee workforce.These environmental savings evaporate if employees only work at home half the time or less, as do the arguments for smaller buildings and fewer trains. And in countries that operate efficient transport networks the ...
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