Do I really think this is true?

Is there a silver lining in all this COVID-19 stuff?

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/29/covid-19-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-oil/

“The COVID-19 pandemic is, among other things, a massive experiment in telecommuting,” observed Katherine Guyot and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution in a recent report. “Up to half of American workers are currently working from home, more than double the fraction who worked from home (at least occasionally) in 2017-2018.”

Many such workers, they also noted, had been largely unfamiliar with telecommuting technology when this grand experiment began, but have quickly mastered the necessary skills. Given little choice in the matter, high school and college students are also becoming more adept at telework as their schools shift to remote learning. Meanwhile, companies and colleges are investing massively in the necessary hardware and software for such communications and teaching. As a result, Guyot and Sawhill suggest, “The outbreak is accelerating the trend toward telecommuting, possibly for the long term.”

Any large increase in teleworking is bound to have a dramatic dual impact on energy use: people will drive less, reducing their oil consumption, while relying more on teleconferencing and cloud computing, and so increasing their use of electricity. “The coronavirus reminds us that electricity is more indispensable than ever,” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “Millions of people are now confined to their homes, resorting to teleworking to do their jobs.”