Find out how much personal pollution you produce
Last time, we tried to muster up some enthusiasm for telework by highlighting the health risks of commuting to and working in the office.
Turns out, I didn’t need convincing, just a few more days in the office. On this, my seventh in a row, I got stopped for speeding on the Massachusetts Turnpike, am catching a cold (from all these people, no doubt), and my son, in place of his usual breakfast salutation barked, “See this shirt I’m wearing? I only wear it when nothing else is clean.”
If that’s not enough, our office manager just discovered my little secret – that my cube phone doesn’t work.
At least I’m holed up here for a good reason – working on closing the first issue of Network Life, The Expert’s Guide to the Connected Home, a new Network World quarterly supplement aimed at the 92% of readers who help friends and family buy, set up and maintain home network equipment. It debuts Nov. 29, and I need to be here to mark up the physical pages, which is much more efficient for the copy desk than e-mailing me PDF files at home.
One person who’s happy with all my cube-time is the boss. At last week’s annual editorial meeting, he pined for “the old days when companies were centralized and you were surrounded by colleagues. Damn these technology advances…”
One break-out group was charged with thinking up ways to improve remote communication. Most of our news reporters work at home, many are far flung. Some suggested the rest get on instant messenger, so we’ll try that. But the general sense was that we’re doing fine – or rather, we don’t communicate any worse for not being together.
Telework diehards would argue people lucky enough to choose how much time to spend in the office are obligated to work at home as much as possible, given polar bears are destined for extinction, according to a new report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. But does our obligation to planet and polar bear trump our obligation to boss and corporation?
If you struggle to find a link between commuting and melting the Artic Ice Cap, two Web sites – Airhead.org and TravelMatters.org – offer tools to help calculate the amount of pollution you personally produce.
The Web sites are run by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago anti-sprawl group devoted to creating “livable urban communities for everyone.”
Airhead’s calculator says I emitted 1,900 pounds of emissions last month; TravelMatters says I emitted 740 pounds, equal to 10, 20-pound bags of charcoal briquettes that will require 115 mature sugar maple trees to offset. One sugar maple offsets, or sequesters, 1.75 pounds of carbon per month, I now know.
