“Energy intensity when you’re traveling is actually 20 times per minute than when spent at home,” said Ashok Sekar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author on the story.

One of his co-authors, Eric Williams, an associate professor of sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology, made the point a different way. “This is a little tongue in cheek, but you know in ‘The Matrix’ everyone lives in those little pods? For energy, that’s great,” he said, because living in little pods would be pretty efficient. “In the Jetsons, where everyone is running around in their jet cars, that’s terrible for energy.”

But not everyone is persuaded by the study’s conclusion, and not just because living in a pod isn’t particularly appealing. The researchers reached their conclusions by analyzing data from The American Time Use Survey, which as its title suggests measures how Americans spend their time. It is how we know, for example, that American women spend more time engaging in most forms of housework than their male counterparts.

According to Bob Simon, a former staff director for the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, at least one problem is that the time use survey participants record only their primary activity within a given time span. If, for example, a participant is cooking and watching television at the same time, only the cooking activity is recorded. Or, if a participant is running errands (such as hitting the grocery store), over the course of their commute to work, that change in behavior isn’t recorded in the time use survey either.

But, according to Dr. Simon, that’s exactly what’s happening. “One of the things that’s changed is how people commute back and forth to work over the last decade or so,” he said, referencing a Department of Transportation report on commuting in the United States. “They’re adding more trips to their commute. They’re stopping to pick something up.” Fewer individual trips may be contributing to fewer miles driven.