Ben Abraham

New year new thread for Newsletter posts! First up - Did PC gaming emissions grow in 2025? And, uuhhh, *how much* is Nvidia to blame? Read my short post below to find out. ⬇️ gtg.benabraham.net/did-pc-gamin...

Astonishing! During this morning's king tide, Miami crossed the threshold for "Major" flooding without a hurricane for the first time. This was the city's highest water level in 11 years, and 3rd-highest since 1994. Yellow highlights: 8 of 14 top spots are from king tides during the past 2 years.

🦬 Random records of a lifetime, 1846-1931 [actually 1932]. . [Source]

Shipping green iron or steel out of Australia is the most obvious market disintermediation move in the world, and would rip out 3% of global emissions. It'd be a positive move for the economic security of our trading partners as well.

A hazard of this job is regularly creating graphs that remind you of how insane the global economy is. How are we going to explain to future generations we used to ship a planetary body's worth of iron to China so it could ship it out as steel to the rest of the world?

NEW: "Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s," per new House Judiciary Dem report. Report has new allegation that Trump raped a 24-year-old and then promised the victim a visa & NYU admission, demanding she stay quiet.

The long-serving strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, has conceded defeat in an election that pitted him and his right-wing party against a diverse student-led opposition movement that spent two years protesting his government.

Lula winning is great for the planet, great for Brazil, and great for people who aren't revanchist assholes everywhere in the world, but let's not forget that it's also going to make some of the worst people on Earth extremely sad and mad. We should enjoy that, as a little treat.

A Lula win is great news for those of us who enjoy breathing air, and will probably save several species from extinction

Bolsonaro-friendly mayors appear to be sabotaging public transport on Election Day. Buses aren’t running in Lula-friendly areas, flights and ferries mysteriously canceled. Traffic lights have gone out and people’s power cut in Salvador, indigenous people’s travel restricted

Shame we demolished it for a quick buck.

18/ Millions marched in France today "The Anglo media seems to have lost all interest in covering the mass protests in France today because there was no rioting or looting, just boring legitimate demands from young people for decent education funding and an end to austerity." - @moshik_temkin

The toxicity that @ericlipton.nytimes.com and his colleagues have uncovered is everywhere but if you live in Texas, Louisiana, or Alabama pay special attention

Kudos to NBC New York for saying it without equivocation: "The US is to blame for the world falling behind in the fight against climate change."

I am calling on the dinner on my plate to partner with my knife and fork “to create positive change”

erm that’s a fact not a warning

Running a game on someone else's GPU sure is expensive. If only there was some sort of cheap consumer device that allowed for a fairly priced, one time purchase of a game that came with unlimited playtime...

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

We're excited to share our new climate change indicators tool, with interactive real-time visualizations and data. We hope to expand it, so please let us know what you'd like to see! ➡️ Global Indicators: www.climatecentral.org/tools/climat... ▶️ Local climate: www.climatecentral.org/climate-local

Last week, we joined NATO CCASCOE and the CDA Institute for the Montréal Climate Security Summit, hosting a side event ‘Low carbon pathways on the road to 5%’. We shared how deep decarbonisation is needed across militaries as NATO spending targets are set to drive emissions higher.

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First https://theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351/

A study in the South China Sea found that a deep-sea mining trial significantly disrupted the microbial ecosystem, altering nutrient cycling and energy flow. 🌊

Another adjacent @jdcmedlock.bsky.social essential hit

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

At this point if you want to protect public discourse you might as well advocate for putting one or several social media sites under public ownership

it's wild. in a time where it seems like everyone is trying to be a public intellectual, no one seems to even come close to this one guy for thoughtfulness and moral clarity

Europe wants to cap Chinese car exports to protect its own automakers, but for Africa and the wider Global South, this fight is a reminder that industrial powers defend free trade until Chinese competition threatens their own industries. buff.ly/frCefvj

An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox. bigwalk.game/xbox

Agree. An AI crash is almost inevitable, and following that policy rates will go down, perhaps all the way to zero, and longer rates will follow. (The hard question as always is when.)

EXTRAORDINARY MOST EXTREME EVENT IN ASIAN HISTORY Dozens of thousands of records are being smashed with up to 10C margin (! world record) everywhere from Turkey to Japan We are witnessing something beyond imagination. MINIMUMS >32C in Middle East, tropical Night in Central Asia

Have your energy bills gone up? New analysis from @greenpeace.be shows that compared to five years ago, fossil fuels cost households in Europe an extra €61.5 BILLION between March and August That's an extra bill of €50 per month per household, on average Gas is ruining Europe!

who could have possibly predicted this

‘At roughly 49%, AI’s share of the S&P 500's combined market capitalization exceeds the peak concentration of every episode shown except the nineteenth-century railroad boom.’ biancoresearch.substack.com/p/the-s-and-...

Photos: Gaza mothers endure endless lines as famine fears persist https://aje.news/r6by7h

“We cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won’t be felt by us,” she said. “The droughts, the bushfires, the floods are directly connected to greenhouse gases.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Matt Canavan's wife: oh for fuck's sake Matt, it's your daughter's wedding Matt Canavan [wearing the shirt]: what

“The anticipated financial worth of the founders – Oliver Curtis, who has spent time in prison for insider trading…” exCUSE me?!!!! www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

On this day in 2012, Gillard made sure that single mothers with kids over 8 were forced onto Newstart rather than the single parent payment, setting the living standards on those kids and the safety of their mother back. Years later Labor raised the age back to 14, not the original 16.

A Blue Sky After a Long Time

Holy shit. Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt it in Rust and released it as open source. Either all software is dead or the US copyright laws are about to receive an update. getartcraft.com/apps

this is great papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It's Nobel Prize week! Time for your annual reminder that 72 years after Alfred Nobel died, economists got Swedish bankers to endow an econ prize "in honor of Alfred Nobel," against Nobel's descendants' wishes. Media now pretend the econ prize is as newsworthy as the phys/chem/med/lit/peace prizes.

The cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy are staggering. This feels like cigarette producers touring oncology wards www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10...

The Victorian Energy Upgrades program now includes subsidies for residential ceiling insultation . "Victorians can access discounts of up to $1,500 in metropolitan Melbourne and $2,100 in regional Victoria." www.premier.vic.gov.au/cheaper-insu...

It's so wild to see repeats of the line that US gas exports are 'decarbonising the world'. Europe, the top destination for American gas exports, in on the verge of causing more power sector climate pollution from gas than from coal. Fossil fuels make climate worse ember-energy.org/data/electri...