Comment by _heimdall

Comment by _heimdall 4 days ago

That's a really difficult comparison to nail down and is heavily dependent on assumptions you make of the alternate reality you compare against.

Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely? Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for production costs? What power source is charging the cars?

sharemywin 4 days ago

I was curious to see what o1 thought:

Order of Magnitude Assessment

"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.

I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.

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_heimdall 4 days ago

Its interesting to see what an LLM might say here, but ultimately an algorithmic prediction of how a person would answer isn't worth much.
If sources are provided and the sources check out that's one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a likely human response to the question.
That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and quantify.

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sharemywin 4 days ago

it also said that about 17% of a persons carbon footprint is from commuting. not sure how accurate that is but I'm going to post it anyway.

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VBprogrammer 4 days ago

Yes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series analysis.

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_heimdall 4 days ago

That's totally fair and nothing wrong with that. It could turn out that centralizing workers in an office actually has a lower carbon footprint (if that's the primary goal).
Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.

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- maerF0x0 4 days ago
  
  There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
  For ever worker that wants to work remote even part time they have to have a home office. Homes already must have toilets, kitchens, AC or Heat as appropriate, etc. In addition a worker more or less always returns home, meaning their transportation to the office is the marginal excess. So commuting alone is a source of excess carbon.
  You cant tell me that a building AC/Heat is going to be so much more efficient over a home AC/heat that it erases the fact we double the footprint of office + kitchen/eating space + bathroom + lobby + call rooms (which are usually extra ontop of a desk) on and on.
  For all the offices I've worked in as a guide its incomprehensible that a home office wouldn't have a lower carbon footprint.
  
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  _heimdall 4 days ago
  
  > There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
  Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must return to the office, not that they're building new offices.
  As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how efficiency compares between residential and commercial but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient. They also are built to be much more durable, lowering inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant. There's also the question of energy source, commercial may have better access to renewable resources though again then you have to figure out how you went to model carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
  Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here, the details are very easy to get lost in.
  
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  maerF0x0 3 days ago
  
  > is more efficient
  I actually assume you're right about the relative efficiency (~bigger is more), but I disagree it's numerically enough to erase all the other inefficiencies of going to an office, especially the square footage multiplication. (It takes many times more sq ft to have an home+office than to just have a home)
  
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