Work from home. Save the planet.

Posted by David Gewirtz @ April 20, 2010 @ 9:22 AM in ZDNET

Working from home is a strategic opportunity for the U.S.

For most of 2009, I spent the bulk of my time writing the book How To Save Jobs (you can download it for free here). I did a tremendous amount of research into both how we got where we are as a nation, and also issues impacting our success into the future.

One area I looked at was working from home. Working from home isn’t just a convenience or a way for businesses to save a few bucks on office space. Working from home is a strategic opportunity for the United States.

I spent a few months developing data models to determine if working from home could be good for America. The results I came up with were astounding:

Americans spend 36.9 billion hours a year, commuting
Americans drive 1.9 trillion miles commuting each year
Americans spend $255 billion just for the gasoline to commute
Americans consume 60.5 billion gallons of gasoline (the capacity of 1,298 Exxon Valdez tankers, fully loaded) each year to commute
Americans release 1.16 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide into the air while commuting.
By contrast, working from home can provide measurable strategic benefits:

We’d reduce our reliance on foreign oil
We’d reduce pollution
We’d reduce global warming
We’d regain billions of hours of productivity and family time
We’d save a ton of money
We’d reduce our costs for road construction and highway maintenance
We’d even probably reduce the number of latch-key kids
Working from home isn’t a new idea. Farmers, essentially, work from home. The settlers who traveled West in search of new opportunities put down roots and, in most cases, combined living and working into one holistic whole. Even the President of the United States works from home.

So, as you celebrate Earth Day, think about how a more formally supported national work-at-home policy could be transformative for America and Americans. It’s not just the money we’d save. It’s the time we’d get back and the fossil fuels we’d preserve.

When I tell you most people will breathe easier if we had a better work-from-home policy, it’s true — to the tune of 1.16 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere.

Now that’s Earth Day!