Atlassian says 'Don't #@!% the Planet' so it can keep making money Australian software house Atlassian has decided to share its sustainability practices in a booklet titled Don't #@!% the Planet*. Atlassian's plan is to reduce 90 percent of its emissions by 2040 and use carbon offsets to address the rest. The document is billed as "Stories, pointers, and lessons learned on our journey to a …
It's easy enough for software companies, their planet rogering is very limited anyway, and mostly addressable just by changing their electricity supplier. Let us know when major commercial farmers, steel and car manufacturers, electronics, plastics and recycling plants- you know, places that actually make stuff - start setting goals like this.
The best way to "save" the planet is to stop being greedy and cut down on things.
We dont need to travel or sit in cars/trains/buses for hours every day. commuting is a BAD idea. Kids used to walk to school before for example, but everyone has made up bullshit reasons why thats wrong. Theres an ungly amount of throwaway crap in all forms of industry from fast food to macdonalds happy meals to the packaging and more.
The answer is too slow down, its the simplest way and it will work , no technology promises and more.
I recently imagined how contemporary individuals would react if they were suddenly and irreversibly blinked back to some time between 1955-65. I suspect they might well thrive and grow in a world deprived of all our modern paraphernalia and peculiar ideas. A least they wouldn't be worried about the prospect of imminent nuclear conflict unlike their new contemporaries (save on CND subs. ;)
If you remembered sufficient 20th century history you wouldn't starve. Although some our latter day historical revisionists might well perish but even then more likely from a 20th C. half brick.
What set me on this line of thinking was a garden ornament left by the previous owner which, I happened to notice, resembled a small weeping angel. Guess what is going into the next kerbside waste collection.
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"Atlassian sees a need for staff travel, especially now that it allows full remote work."
Surely it's "even though"? People may be further out now and travel further but having to sit in traffic for 10+ hours a week to drive up the road in the beforetime were still emissions generated for the profit of the company
Let me guess - they didn't previously count as "their" emissions, because they didn't have to cover the travel under expenses? Convenient that.
Suspect some forced return to work to the office is actually greenwashing - "we cut our emissions by 80% by reattributing them to our employees".
> Surely it's "even though"?
Commuting to and from work for a normal onsite employee is not 'staff travel', as it occurs outside employment activities, therefore imposes no direct costs on the business. Getting to and from the initial location of carrying out work is a private expense of the employee, if you start work at 9am at the office and work there until 5pm, it is a private expense, a part of expectation of employment, that the employee get themselves there on their own time and at their own expense. However, if during that 9-5 window the employer changes the location of work, such that you have to travel to a second location (and then possibly back to the first location), that cost must be covered by the employer - whether re-imbursement of a taxi ride or a fuel allowance or a direct payment such as with a corporate credit card - thus it is 'staff travel'.
e.g. I'm at the office doing work at 10am, then a meeting is called for 2pm that is to occur in an office that's 20 minutes drive away, therefore as part of work I have to travel between 2 different work locations. So I take a taxi to the location of the meeting and put it on the corporate credit card. Then after the meeting I go back to the office where I started my day, and again place that taxi fare on the corporate credit card. The business has picked up those travel costs.
But mostly in-person work meetings occur within offices in the same building or immediately adjacent buildings which are a few minutes walk, therefore don't incur what would be a staff travel expense (whether re-imbursable or covered up-front by the business). However, if people are typically or often working at home, then many in-person meeting requirement would now be travelling for work purposes that would be an expense to the business, that is, during a single work cycle, you will be working from multiple places - start work at home, then at 11am travelling to another work location for work purposes - to attend that in-person meeting - then potentially travelling back to your other place of work, home, incurring yet another business expense.
edit: So many typo's.
Well, a quick Google doesn't suggest to me the phrase has a specific definition outside of airline or rail staff policies which wouldn't be relevant here, so doesn't suggest regular commuting to a fixed place of work isn't "staff travel" that I can see- I could well be wrong though.
But the rest is my point here, because the office is no longer the regular workplace and is expensed those emissions now suggest to me they are tracked and counting against the company.
So an employee formally driving 30miles every single day has no impact on a companies emissions, but now the same employee working from home travelling 100 miles once a year is a "problem" because they hurt the stats of the company. If this is true then the best thing a company could do to reduce their emissions is, ironically, the worst thing a company could do to affect emissions because it gets them moved off their books and becomes the employees emissions instead.
Possibly I'm reading too much into one throw away phrase, but if this is the case then the loophole needs closing.
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