https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
For those kind of business having full occupancy is more important than worker productivity.
Let me guess, you live in the West and don't need to worry about your family's basic needs being met?
There's no empirical basis for that statement, the people behind it have been making similar apocalyptic predictions for decades that never materialized, their models have no predictive power.
You're say things that even climate denialists aren't claiming are true.
So... Office workers commuting every day create food to put on people's table?
Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Oh.
It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).
In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.
From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.