articles: 17

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id	title	slug	url	content_type	category	shelf	is_headline	description	published_date	updated_at	sort_order	hero_painting	body_markdown
17	CarbonBench	carbonbench-series	/writing/carbonbench-series	article	CarbonBench	Systems	0	Five essays on the hidden carbon cost of agent infrastructure. Compute carbon varies 10x by region. Renewable availability shifts hourly. Scope 3 dominates oper	2026-04-26	2026-11-07 23:04:31.552688+00:00	0		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 tool behind them is written up as a [project](/projects/carbonbench). It is offline now; the essays stand on its April 2026 data. 1. [The Same Model Costs 10x More Carbon in Virginia Than the Netherlands](/writing/carbonbench) The core finding: identical inference, wildly different carbon. What the data shows across 85 models, 6 providers, 9 regions. 2. [Scaling in the Wrong Direction](/writing/carbonbench-scaling-wrong-direction) LeCun's architecture argument meets carbon data. What happens when a more efficient architecture runs on a clean grid. 3. [Grid Arbitrage: Why Region Choice Matters More Than Model Choice](/writing/carbonbench-grid-arbitrage) A bigger model on a clean grid beats a smaller model on a dirty grid. The free optimization nobody does. 4. [The 24-Hour Carbon Curve](/writing/carbonbench-time-of-day) Wind at 3am, gas at 6pm. Scheduling batch inference for the cleanest hours costs nothing. 5. [Scope 3 and the API Call You Can't See](/writing/carbonbench-scope3) Every inference call is a scope 3 emission. The cloud abstraction hides the carbon. Regulation is catching up.