Five essays on the hidden carbon cost of agent infrastructure. Compute carbon varies 10x by region. Renewable availability shifts hourly. Scope 3 dominates operational emissions. Temporal and geographic arbitrage changes the economics. Most model operators are not pricing any of this yet.
-
The Same Model Costs 10x More Carbon in Virginia Than the Netherlands) The core finding: identical inference, wildly different carbon. What the data shows across 85 models, 6 providers, 9 regions.
-
Scaling in the Wrong Direction) LeCun’s architecture argument meets carbon data. What happens when a more efficient architecture runs on a clean grid.
-
Grid Arbitrage: Why Region Choice Matters More Than Model Choice) A bigger model on a clean grid beats a smaller model on a dirty grid. The free optimization nobody does.
-
The 24-Hour Carbon Curve) Wind at 3am, gas at 6pm. Scheduling batch inference for the cleanest hours costs nothing.
-
Scope 3 and the API Call You Can’t See) Every inference call is a scope 3 emission. The cloud abstraction hides the carbon. Regulation is catching up.