It’s that time of year again. Time to review progress in 2019. At least as it relates to either telework and/or the environment. As with most things there is good news and bad news.
Telework
For telework/telecommuting it is mostly good news: more and more workers around the world — and their employers/clients — are accepting and adopting the idea of location independence. The number of bloggers about telework is also growing, especially in Spanish-speaking countries. As natural and unnatural disasters occur so, too, does the number of teleworkers if only temporarily.
Environment
On the environmental end the news is less cheery. Global warming is accelerating. Although the United States has reduced its rate of greenhouse gas production, China has not. The world added another fraction of a degree to the atmosphere’s temperature when it should be reducing it.
I had a personal brush with warming in the sense that a wildfire tried, but didn’t succeed, in burning down my home. All thanks goes to the tireless firefighters from a distant city who joined the locals in the California-wide battle against this year’s wildfires. The last such fire that threatened our house was 58 years ago but I expect that frequency to increase as global warming continues.
And it will continue. As you probably know, climate change is the greatest threat to the survival of many species, not just homo sap, since the last global extinction. So, rather than avoiding the truth, we would-be survivors need to face it and work to make the trend reverse itself.
The signs are positive. Greta Thunberg has grabbed the world’s attention. Companies and the financial industry are beginning to take the threat seriously even though governments are largely asleep at the switch. People are banding together to demand change. Unfortunately, other people are banding together to resist change. As I wrote in last month’s blog, there is stiction in the system but it is at last creaking forward.
So there is still time to avoid the worst effects of climate change. IF we act now. But the signs of activity are there now and we will see even more in 2020. Things are looking bad but also things are looking up.
Happy New Year!