Breezewood’s drone shot has been the internet’s go-to symbol of car dependent hellscape for over a decade. Standing here in person: it’s a Sheetz surrounded by an actual forest.
John Bistline
@bistline.bsky.social
Head of Science at Watershed | Energy systems modeling, economics, policy | IPCC, NCA, Stanford/CMU alum | Views my own
One AI chatbot prompt: less than 1% of a phone charge. One agentic AI workflow: enough to microwave a burrito for half an hour (please don't). Same "AI" but five orders of magnitude apart.
Take a guess which year the Indian Point nuclear reactors closed.
A global shift to healthy diets would shrink agricultural land by 274 million hectares by 2050. This would be the single largest contraction in over 2,000 years, bigger than the drop after Rome’s collapse or the Black Death combined.
The Inflation Reduction Act turned 4 today. One of its side effects nobody predicted: the U.S. now makes more EV batteries than it makes EVs.
For the same company with the same AI usage, one measurement method says 54 tons of CO2e, while another says 3. Both are “correct, which is the problem with how AI emissions get counted right now.
Breaking: U.S. Department of Energy discovers that solar panels do not work when the sun is not out.
Two AI systems can do the same task with a ~30x difference in electricity use. Many companies have no idea which one they're running. Our new open framework for measuring corporate AI emissions... and actually acting on them. 🧵
Insane paper: a Spanish city’s prayers for rain predicted actual rainfall for 200 years. Turns out it’s just drought hazard curves, the same math that tells you a heat wave is more likely to break the longer it runs.
Ask three sources what a single AI query emits, and you'll get answers that span orders of magnitude. Sustainability teams are being asked to account for AI emissions with no accepted way to do it. Tomorrow, we publish a framework to fix that.
Great day to wear my favorite apolitical shirt to the gym.
Nolan used an exactingly detailed ship, sailed it across Europe, then brought a replica to the same tank where they faked a T-Rex swimming. Practical effects snobbery has a ceiling, and that ceiling is Universal City.
Cherry picking a single hour on a fossil-heavy grid to make a point is as meaningless as cherry picking a single hour on a high-renewables one. A full year builds a better mental model of how a grid actually runs than any one hour.
Right now millions on the East Coast are getting a preview of what breathing bad air feels like. A new study looks at who breathes it by design. Net-zero pathways with more carbon removal leave ~30,000 more Americans dying from PM2.5 in 2050, concentrated in lower-income places.
Jevons strikes again: new paper on 30,000+ Chinese firms shows that adopting AI cuts a company’s carbon intensity 6.8% on average. Rebound effect eats 70% of it, so actual emissions only fall 2%.
Every corporate sustainability team is asking the same question: How do you measure AI’s carbon footprint? Spent months on this with AI providers and academic collaborators. Walking through an open accounting framework on July 23, live.
Everyone remembers Cash for Clunkers as a car sales program. It was really a pickup and SUV disposal program. 66% of everything destroyed was a Category 1 truck.
Gas prices jumped from $3.00 to $4.50 a gallon this year. Americans responded by buying more hybrids, not more EVs. New RFF analysis on why the “obvious” substitution didn’t happen.
Corporate clean power buying fell in 2025 for the first time in a decade. Our customers at Watershed went the other direction: $500M and counting, funded by pooling demand from companies too small to do these deals alone.
Housing costs rose $6,220/year since 2019. Electricity rose $480. Yet electricity is the one households keep hearing about. New LBNL data from Ryan Wiser’s team: electricity is 2.5% of the total increase in what Americans spend each year.
EVs are the marquee climate subsidy. They also have one of the lowest returns per dollar spent. New MVPF analysis: wind production tax credits deliver $5.87 in social benefit per $1 spent. Residential solar: $3.86. EV subsidies: $1.45.
Forget heat pumps. California’s central coast solved building energy use by being next to cold ocean water. Almost zero heating demand and almost zero cooling demand all year. Gotta upzone Big Sur.
The federal government is now paying utilities to keep coal plants open past retirement. This paper’s evidence says the people living near those plants are the ones paying twice: once in their utility bill, once by moving away from the pollution.
New MIT modeling: Over two-thirds of the clean electricity generation and emissions cuts under Biden’s climate law could survive under Trump’s rewrite moving forward. But falling costs aren’t a guarantee of future progress: permitting, fuel costs, and demand all matter.
Hormuz traffic is finally ticking up. 7-day average back to ~33/day after the June 17 MOU. Still about a third of normal for this time of year.
Some context on what you're looking at, and the idea behind it 🧵
John Bistline@bistline.bsky.social · last mo.Texas has no clean energy mandate. It just beat fossil fuels with wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro on 62% of days this year. Nobody told the grid to do this, just the market.
Texas has no clean energy mandate. It just beat fossil fuels with wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro on 62% of days this year. Nobody told the grid to do this, just the market.
New @energyinnovation.org study from me, @matthiasfripp.org and @michelle-solomon.bsky.social shows that clean energy can meet rapidly growing electricity demand, saving money and reducing the risk of fuel price spikes. Read here! #energysky energyinnovation.org/report/let-t...
Let The Sun In: Clean Energy Is The Cheapest Way To Meet Rising Demand
Meeting U.S. demand growth with fossil fuels will add $29.7 billion to customer bills per year by 2030, clean energy can do it for less.
energyinnovation.org