The holistic approach

17.2 Create time to travel

It is clear that to make a positive impact and reduce climate change we need a change of mentality and a change of lifestyle. Have fewer children. Consume less. Eat sustainably. Don’t buy what we don’t need and don’t try to buy extra time, but instead try to enjoy the time we have. In the chapters above I wrote a few times that we need more time to enable us to travel slower and more sustainable. But how can we make more time available? For this, we might be willing to change the way we work. The Covid-19 pandemic for instance was a good exercise where people found that there were more ways the work could be done. One of the important things that can help us here is to change our mentality about work. Allow people to work less and allow those who want to take more extensive holidays. Some might want to travel twice a year for a month, while others might want to travel once a year for 6 to 10 weeks. If they can do so when it is too cold, or too warm at home this will save on their domestic use of electricity

Reducing the working week has been shown to enhance the work-life balance (Nassen and Larsson 2015; Kasser and Sheldon 2009; Eurofund 2013). For example, Hayden (1999) records how French employees reported overall improved quality of life when their working week was reduced to 35 hours. In another investigation, 400 Swedish employees who had their work time reduced to 6 h per day for 18 months, reported improved life satisfaction, health, and a more equal gender-balance on time spent on housework (Bildt (2007) cited in Nassen and Larsson (2015). Being able to spend more time with your family is also better for the development of the children and reduces crime committed by youth. If you ask people about the best memories from their youth, many will answer that the time spent with family and family holidays belong to some of their best childhood memories. A recent (November 2019) experiment from Microsoft showed a 40% increase in productivity when they went down from a 5-day workweek to a 4-day workweek. According to an article published in BBC Worklife reducing the amount of time we work could help to save the planet. The article talks about two international movements that call themselves Degrowth and Green Growth. Both movements agree that it’s better for the environment if we work less. They say that studies show that during National Holidays, the consumption of electricity goes down. This is likely because work spaces need less energy for heating and light. Where the Degrowth and Green Growth movements agree on shorter working weeks, both have different ideas about how to implement these shorter working weeks. According to the Degrowth movement, we shouldn’t only work less, but we need to earn less, consume less, and lead more frugal lives. The Green Growth movement believes it’s enough to just work less, but continue to receive the same salary.

You can argue that more people should work from home, but a study from the UK shows that this isn’t always the answer either. Of course, it will reduce the carbon footprint from traveling to and from work. It seems, especially in the winter, that people working from home tend to use more energy. The reason behind this is that they heat their whole house, instead of only the room where they work. This results in less efficient use of energy compared to heating an office full of working people. Another negative result of working at home is that it strongly decreases human interaction, which isn’t good for society. It is also counter productive for our creativity. An alternative can be to work two days a week from home and 3 days a week from your office. From school on we might already prepare children by going 4 days a week to school and study one day a week online from home. Other studies show that reducing the average number of hours worked per week can have both a scale effect and a compositional effect (Gough 2013). Hypothetically, due to the scale effect of fewer hours at work, the incomes should be reduced, and thus expenditures and consumption would also be expected to be reduced. With each person working less, there is the possibility of increasing the number of people employed and thus reducing inequalities. High levels of inequality are associated with low levels of well-being (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009), and, furthermore, meaningful work is generally found to be a positive factor in increasing well-being (Diener and Seligman 2004). Hence sharing the work may yield multiple benefits (Hayden 1999). The compositional effect can be explained as follows. With lower incomes and less time at work, people’s use of time outside work would be expected to change, as would the composition of their expenditure baskets. For example, rather than buying ready-meals, people may be more inclined to cook from raw ingredients. Now such changes in time and expenditure budgets might result in higher or lower carbon emissions. With more time to spend people might walk and cycle for short journeys rather than take the car. On the other hand, some people may drive further and more often to visit friends; the rebound effect. If we look at the statistics, there´s good evidence that lowering high and moderate incomes will, in general, result in lower carbon footprints.

The suggestion of reducing working hours to create more free time must be taken with an important warning concerning low-income groups. Currently, many low paid workers are struggling to meet their weekly household expenses (MacInnes et al. 2014; The Living Wage Commission 2014). Therefore reducing working hours should only be applied if it doesn’t lead to people earning less than the minimum income. If this can be accomplished, work-time reduction offers a promising way to reduce unemployment by sharing the work, leading to reduced inequalities, while at the same time offering high prospects of increasing well-being and reducing environmental burdens (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Victor 2008; Jackson 2009; Coote et al. 2010; Knight et al. 2013; Pullinger 2014; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). One way to accomplice this could be the use of sustained salaries.