That's totally fair and nothing wrong with that. It could turn out that centralizing workers in an office actually has a lower carbon footprint (if that's the primary goal).
Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.
There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
For ever worker that wants to work remote even part time they have to have a home office. Homes already must have toilets, kitchens, AC or Heat as appropriate, etc. In addition a worker more or less always returns home, meaning their transportation to the office is the marginal excess. So commuting alone is a source of excess carbon.
You cant tell me that a building AC/Heat is going to be so much more efficient over a home AC/heat that it erases the fact we double the footprint of office + kitchen/eating space + bathroom + lobby + call rooms (which are usually extra ontop of a desk) on and on.
For all the offices I've worked in as a guide its incomprehensible that a home office wouldn't have a lower carbon footprint.
> There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must return to the office, not that they're building new offices.
As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how efficiency compares between residential and commercial but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient. They also are built to be much more durable, lowering inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant. There's also the question of energy source, commercial may have better access to renewable resources though again then you have to figure out how you went to model carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here, the details are very easy to get lost in.
I actually assume you're right about the relative efficiency (~bigger is more), but I disagree it's numerically enough to erase all the other inefficiencies of going to an office, especially the square footage multiplication. (It takes many times more sq ft to have an home+office than to just have a home)
Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.