Walls, Nelson, Safirova
Telecommuting and Environmental Policy
and a lower dollar figure could conceivably be sufficient to promote large-scale increases in
telecommuting.
6. Conclusions
In this paper we analyzed the results of the ecommute program. The program conducted pilot
projects in five US metropolitan areas to study the feasibility of trading mobile source emissions credits
created from telecommuting.
Mobile source emissions come from a large number of vehicles, each emitting a relatively small
amount, and as a result the costs of monitoring and verifying the emissions will greatly cut into the
efficiency benefits of an emissions trading regime. It is worth noting that in discussions about including
the transport sector in carbon cap-and-trade regimes, the focus has been upstream, for either fuel
producers or vehicle producers, rather than downstream, for drivers (Australian Bureau of Transport and
Communications Economics 1998). The reason, of course, is the significant administrative burden
associated with monitoring individual driving activity.
EPA requires that any emissions trades demonstrate environmental integrity by showing that the
reductions are surplus, permanent, quantifiable, and enforceable. In practice, the surplus requirement
brings emissions trading of telecommuting credits into conflict with other claims on telecommuting,
notably from local planning organizations seeking reductions in the transportation conformity process
and regional transportation plans, and from state environmental agencies seeking compliance in their air
quality plans.
The quantification protocols for activity-based vehicle emissions reductions are not well
developed and necessarily rely on a hypothetical baseline. Thus, the emissions reductions from
telecommuting, even in a carefully designed program like ecommute, will remain speculative when
compared with emissions reductions from continually monitored sources like power plants.
Furthermore, the administrative burdens associated with making sure that firms aren’t cheating and
claiming excess telecommuting are fairly high and might make the reductions difficult to enforce.
The above issues could conceivably be overcome. For example, a cost-effective technology
could emerge that would ease the monitoring of individual driving activity. Similarly, the Clean Air Act
could be amended or interpreted differently to ease the integrity requirements as they apply to mobile
sources and provide more latitude for trading of pollution credits generated from reduced driving
(although whether such changes are worth the reduced certainty of the reductions will be a subject for
debate).
But the most intractable issue is probably economic—the low value of the credit revenue. The
emissions reductions from a single avoided trip are not large. Given the range of estimates for the future
value of pollution credits, it is hard to see the potential revenue to firms being large enough to induce
large-scale changes in driving activity. It is possible that the low level of participation by employers in
the ecommute pilot programs is an indicatiin that companies knew the credits had very low value. From
the point of view of local planning organizations and state agencies looking to direct scarce public funds
to emissions reduction activities, in the short and medium term there are far more cost-effective uses for
the funds (if the measure is purely emissions reductions). This situation is likely to persist for the
foreseeable future.
The emissions characteristics of the vehicle fleet (particularly light-duty vehicles) are expected
to improve dramatically over the next 20 years, making per trip emissions reductions from
transportation demand management strategies still smaller. Figure 1 shows projected composite
emissions factors for light-duty gasoline vehicles over the next 20 years. Paradoxically, improvements
in vehicle technology will reduce the emissions benefits from each teleworked day. This already
showed up in the ecommute pilot programs where the data revealed that participants owned relatively
new and clean vehicles.
All of this is not to say that the government does not have any reason to promote
telecommuting. A large-scale increase in telecommuting could produce welcome emissions benefits for
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