You really want to “go big and go green?“ Work at home just one day a week.
My analysis shows that working at home just one day alone worldwide would keep 275 million cars off the roads, save more than $2 billion in gas, stop more than 65 million pounds of pollution from being spewed into the air, and make workers probably much more productive. And that’s just one day of work at home. One. The power of one. You. Me. One car each. Multiplied.
What One Day Of Commuting Costs:
Worldwide car commuters 275
Total gallons of gas per day 413
Total pounds of pollutants 65
Commute miles per day 6,875
Total gas cost per day $2,063
all figures in millions (c) steve harmon
While investors and pundits point to ethanol as the Holy Grail of stopping global warming and carbon emissions, my analysis shows that if we just worked at home ONE DAY A WEEK, we would be much further ahead than ethanol could ever provide.
Multiply that one day times 4 and in a month we’ve just cut 260 million pounds of pollutants from the sky and saved more than $8 billion in gas costs — in just one month. In the wide picture look at annual impact: in one year more than 3 billion pounds of pollutants would NOT be spewed into our breathing air and we’d save $100 billion in gas we didn’t have to buy.
Now, not every worker may be able to work at home a day a week. But certainly information workers — and they comprise at least 60% of all workers in the United States and European Union, qualify.The impact to petrol prices would be immediate also. Further side benefits are less accidents as fewer people are commuting each week. Insurance costs go down. Stress levels from road rage and other car-induced problems also wane. And the biggest impact would be the stopping of polar ice melt as carbon and pollutants are reduced by 20% in one swoop.If you want to make a difference, let’s have a global work at home day each week. Get companies to adopt it as part of a carbon credits, carbon reduction program.With broadband prevalent there’s little logical reason to require 100 million of the world’s workers to get into their cars daily, drive 25 miles or more, spend 2 hours in traffic, only to sit in front of a computer in a cubicle and do the same work they can do at a similar computer in their home office.
If just one company, IBM with its 355,000 workers, did this, it would stop more than 83,000 pounds of pollutants from being emitted.
If Silicon Valley’s 100,000 workers worked at home one day a week it would save more than 1 million pounds of pollutants per year from the skies, save more than 7.2 million gallons of gas, and keep $30 million in commuters’ pockets from gas not bought, plus save every driver from sitting in traffic the equivalent of 4 whole days a year.
All from just one day a week working at home. Now that’s a green revolution. And it doesn’t require any new technology, corn fuel, no new laws to be passed, no fiddling and wiggling, no visits to Kyoto or Geneva, no funds to be raised. It just requires companies to get with the times and workers to benefit.
Al Gore, are you in? This is doable today.