iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 19h

The states that cut the carbon intensity of their power the most since the early 90s: Iowa -69% South Dakota -69% Nevada -64% Oklahoma -62% New Mexico -61% A few unexpected #CleanEnergyStripes

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

China added more solar generation in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A typical agentic AI session uses about 27x the energy of a typical chat session on the same model (heavy agentic sessions can go past 100x). New estimates out today for closed models like GPT and Claude from the Sustainable AI Group.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Electric vehicle sales outside China rose more than 35% this spring compared with a year earlier. Inside China, they fell more than 15%. New IEA data from March to June 2026.

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Reposted by John Bistline

Akshaya Jha @akshayaj.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

EPA projects $310 billion in savings over 2026–2047 from repealing power plant greenhouse gas rules due to less carbon capture spending, more use of efficient new gas plants, and later coal retirements. But its estimate excludes health and climate costs from additional pollution due to the repeal:

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Reposted by John Bistline

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 25/09/2026

This week, we published the first paper in the U.S. Climate Collection titled, "Research Priorities for Robust Climate Assessments in the United States". The paper was led by Melissa Kenney, @bobkopp.net, & me, with 175 authors helping outline climate risks. cee.engineering.cmu.edu/news/2026/09...

cee.engineering.cmu.edu

CMU faculty helps lead new efforts on climate assessment research

CMU faculty helps lead new efforts on climate assessment research - Civil and Environmental Engineering

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

102 GW: BloombergNEF's take on global gas turbine manufacturing capacity by 2030, up from 67 GW in 2025. A >50% capacity build in five years, following the data center buildout.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Watershed Climate Summit at NYCW was full of energy, literally and figuratively. The literal kind is almost three-quarters of global emissions, but many companies have no single owner for it. We’re building Watershed Energy Management to give it a home: watershed.com/energy

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Every hexagon = 500 MW of data center capacity. Line them up on a grid intensity map and you get a pretty clear picture of where America’s AI buildout is landing on dirty power, and where it isn't.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Solar just overtook wind for the first time in history. Wind took decades to get there. Solar took ten years to 10x its way past it.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Read our paper! I was honored to contribute to this effort, which had particle-accelerator levels of coordination across nearly 200 coauthors. Thanks to Melissa Kenney, @bobkopp.net, and @costasamaras.com for their leadership.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

43 of 50 states hit their peak energy CO2 emissions before 2010. Which state cut the most CO2 from energy since 1990? It's Ohio, down 61 million tons (CA is sixth).

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

DOE posting on “affordable, reliable, and secure” energy for the 2028 LA Olympics. Here’s the grid that will be doing it. By 2028, California’s fleet is 72% non-fossil. Solar and storage alone are 53%.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Wyoming and Kentucky are some of the dirtiest grids in the country. They also have data centers going up, both planned and operational. Nobody sited these for the climate.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Climate Week starts Monday. If you're in New York and want to compare notes on grid data, AI emissions, or just where to get decent coffee between meetings, say hi.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A single AI prompt is 34x dirtier on the worst state grid than the best.

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Reposted by John Bistline

ClimateFran @climatefran.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

New paper in Nature Climate Change today makes big improvements to 2 social cost of carbon damage sectors - labor productivity and agriculture Overall we find slightly lower mean SCC and much narrower uncertainty, mainly due to improved confidence around ag damages www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

New labour and agricultural damages improve climate cost estimates - Nature Climate Change

Heat stress reduces labour productivity, but economy-wide assessments are mostly missing. Using high-resolution projections and global economic modelling, the authors provide new cost estimates, and u...

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

In 1974, California and Texas had roughly the same installed power capacity (30 GW and 34 GW). Today, Texas has 243 GW, and California has 113. Watch where they split.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Data centers: “We use 17.4 billion gallons of water a year.” Agriculture: “That’s adorable.”

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

$6-44/ton to abate CO2 by moving off coal. Also cuts SO2 up to 98% and NOx up to 94%. If you're nostalgic for smog-era health outcomes, this is your moment.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Cocoa's carbon footprint can be over 90% land use change. For the industry, it's been 90%+ vibes and 10% agreement on methodology. Watershed and AdAstra are open-sourcing the dataset behind it, so everyone's finally measuring the same thing.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Interesting new paper: The 2008 crash didn't discriminate against clean tech, just against being a young firm. Clean tech just happened to be full of them, so when credit dried up, green patents dropped, too.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I expected the zip codes closest to airports to be the least valuable ones. Half the time, they're the most expensive in the entire metro.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Three gigawatt scale gas plants have been announced for U.S. data centers. Two of them would be larger than any power plant now operating in America. The third would rank third. Here's all 14,036 operating US plants, sorted by size.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Average cost of a World Bank policy report: about $180,000. Reports never downloaded a single time between 2008 and 2012: over 30% of 1,611. Back of envelope, that's roughly $93 million spent on paperwork nobody opened.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

About a fifth of the world's oil and a fifth of its LNG normally move through the Strait of Hormuz. Four decades of pipeline building means roughly a quarter of the oil can go another way. The share of the gas that can go another way is zero.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

A coalition of just 4 industries (steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers) covering ~20% of global GHG emissions could cut total global emissions by 1.5% and raise ~$200B/year. Important new article from an all-star team in Science today.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Stricter clean electricity accounting doesn’t always help. Interesting new study: under high demand elasticity, moving to hourly/regional matching can reduce or barely change emissions, because pricier claims just get skipped.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Watershed customers now manage more than 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2e. That's more than the annual emissions of France, the UK, Germany, and Italy combined.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Two numbers from a new Nature Comms degrowth paper, never compared in text: $50k world + stringent carbon price → ~2 °C $5-10k world + no carbon price → 2.3 °C (per-capita consumption in 2100, both figures theirs) Don't make me tap the "price carbon, keep the growth" sign.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The most underrated finding in the NYC congestion pricing data: Ambulances don't pay the toll, so total EMS travel time is down 63-70 seconds.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

"CDR deters mitigation" is mostly an imagined problem. I worked on modeling IRA, one of the largest climate policies ever. Nobody in the room said "let's ease off, DAC will save us in 2100." Panic over crowding out looks strange next to this chart, where it barely shows up.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

37% of all US wind capacity comes online in December. February gets 3.8%. Not a typo (the grid has a deadline).

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Before the war, 20% of all the oil the world burns each day passed through the 21-mile-wide Strait. That's not 20% of traded oil, but 20% of global demand. That's the number to keep in mind when you read anything about Hormuz.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Ask a frontier model for a product's carbon footprint in one shot: it lands within 2 times of the third-party-verified number 60-77% of the time. Ask the same model to decompose, map, extract, and sum: 37-58%. Making it show its work made it worse.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Please check our work, tell us where we‘re wrong, and gently insist we cite your paper somewhere in Chapter 11.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Seems bad. "Our findings indicate that the basis for rollback is riddled with inconsistencies and hard-to-justify assumptions, which may put it in legal jeopardy." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Correcting the logic behind the 2026 US vehicle emissions standard rollback

Correction of selective assumptions and inconsistent interpretations of evidence would overturn policy justification

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Pumpkin spice season is really nutmeg season. In 1667 the Dutch traded Manhattan to the English for a tiny nutmeg island in Indonesia. New York exists because someone really liked nutmeg.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Fossil fuels last out-generated clean power in Germany on April 14, 2026. That was 133 days ago (the record is 138).

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Cool new research on 167 U.S. cities: Uber and Lyft entry raised regional GDP per capita by ~2.9% and boosted unstable/gig-style employment by ~3.7%. Effects on total jobs and total earnings? Statistically indistinguishable from zero.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Tradeoffs everywhere: “Policies that favored photovoltaic expansion led to reductions in bird diversity, disproportionately affecting wealthier and nondesert regions, as well as widespread species.” 2,344 counties, 10 years of data.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Big scoop from @jael.bsky.social. 9.2 GW of new gas at a single site in Ohio is more capacity than any one of these has state-wide: Montana, South Dakota, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Two of my favorite energy thinkers in one room: www.cleaningup.live/ai-has-an-el... Liebreich+Mansoor spar on AI demand, land on the same answer: fix the queue, bring flexibility, and make sure ratepayers come out ahead. That’s the thesis of our Win-Win Watts paper: winwin.epri.com

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

By 2036, California’s electric vehicles will have more than 3x the power capacity of everything the state is planning to procure in utility-scale storage. Great new report from @ricoconnell.bsky.social.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, when New Mexico’s grid was still mostly coal. By 2031, current plans are 0% coal, 81% wind, solar, and storage. Every generator in the Land of Enchantment, mapped.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

9.2 GW of new gas at a single site in Ohio is more capacity than any one of these has state-wide: Montana, South Dakota, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Suspiciously well-timed: New work projects Earth’s hottest land spot averaging 56°C (133°F) annually by 2100. That’s the multi-model mean under SSP2-4.5, a moderate emissions scenario, not a high-emissions tail case.

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