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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, and FutureProof is back after a short summer break.
I’ve added a new section to the newsletter called The Stakes: one deliberately sobering climate story each edition, because all the clean-tech progress below means rather more when we keep sight of what we’re trying to prevent.
Highlights this week:
The Stakes: 1.5°C overshoot is becoming unavoidable, just as an extraordinary El Niño piles more heat onto an already hotter planet.
Climate: China’s solar capacity overtakes coal, while Turkmenistan finally starts plugging some of its enormous methane leaks.
AI: AI spots heart disease from an ECG in under two seconds, and Anthropic gives AI agents a standard for operating real-world machinery.
EVs: London’s cleaner streets help children’s lungs recover, EV batteries retain around 90% capacity after 150,000km, and electric heavy trucks outsell diesel in China.
Clean energy: The Vatican goes agrivoltaic, European wind accelerates, chefs ditch gas for induction, and US battery storage has its biggest quarter ever.
Podcasts: Julia Souder explains why long-duration storage now has a market-design problem more than a technology problem, while Asim Akram argues that digitised supply chains are being undermined by decidedly analogue maintenance.
I’ve also launched a new Research section on my website, turning hundreds of podcast conversations into evidence-led executive briefings on climate, energy and supply chains. The first three are already live and free to download, and I’m also exploring a limited number of sponsored research briefs with organisations that want to examine important topics in depth.
Right. The stakes are getting higher. Fortunately, so is the pace of change.
Let’s get into it.
The Stakes
1.5°C Is Slipping Away - Just as El Niño Hits the Accelerator
This feels like a fairly appropriate week to introduce The Stakes. The UN now says exceeding 1.5°C of long-term warming is essentially unavoidable, with even its most optimistic pathway peaking around 1.8°C before temperatures eventually come back down, while an El Niño potentially unmatched in a millennium is simultaneously loading still more heat into an already overheated climate system.
The 1.5°C conversation has fundamentally changed. UNEP is now talking about “overshoot, peak and decline”: get above 1.5°C, minimise how far and how long we stay there, then use deep emissions cuts and eventually net-negative emissions to bring temperatures back down.
Meanwhile, El Niño is becoming extraordinary. Pacific temperatures in the key Niño 3.4 region are already around 2.6°C above the rolling average, with models pointing to a possible peak near 4°C later this year - potentially making it the strongest El Niño in at least 1,000 years.
And the consequences aren't waiting politely for the models. Coral bleaching, disrupted fisheries, drought, floods, crop losses and increased hunger are already appearing, while 2027 is shaping up as an exceptionally hot year globally.
Why This Matters: The energy transition isn't an interesting technology upgrade we can take or leave: we're now trying to decarbonise while living through the consequences of the warming we've already caused, and every tenth of a degree we avoid from here matters.
Kismet: There is one genuinely encouraging wrinkle buried in all this: the newest generation of climate scenarios has substantially reduced the credible upper end of future warming because rampant coal growth now looks implausible, thanks partly to cheap solar, wind, batteries and existing climate policy. We’ve made enough progress to make some of yesterday’s nightmares less likely; nowhere near enough to make today’s situation comfortable. 👉 Links Inline
Climate
China’s Solar Just Overtook Coal. That’s Not a Typo.
China has crossed one of those energy-transition milestones that would have sounded faintly ridiculous a decade ago: solar is now its largest source of installed power capacity, overtaking coal, with 1,286GW of solar on the system. I’d resist declaring coal dead just yet, generation is what ultimately counts, but the direction of travel is becoming very difficult to miss.
Solar now represents 31.5% of China’s installed generating capacity, edging past coal for the first time.
Solar generation jumped 15.5% year-on-year in the first seven months of 2026 to 802.4TWh, although that still supplied only around one-eighth of China's electricity, an important reminder that capacity and actual generation are very different beasts.
There’s still plenty of plumbing to fix: grid constraints and renewable curtailment have actually allowed coal generation to rise recently, despite huge additions of wind, solar, hydro and storage. China increasingly has enough clean generation capacity; now it needs a power system capable of using all of it.
Why This Matters: The world’s largest electricity system has reached the point where solar hardware now outweighs coal hardware, and once the grid, storage and market rules catch up with that extraordinary build-out, the consequences for coal generation will be profound.
Kismet: China installed 93GW of solar in May 2025 alone, one month of construction that helps explain how a technology that barely registered on its power system 15 years ago has just overtaken coal. 👉 Full story here
Turkmenistan Is Finally Plugging Its Methane Super-Leaks
One of the world’s worst methane offenders has started fixing some of its most egregious leaks, after satellite monitoring exposed emissions so vast they were almost cartoonish. Turkmenistan has now stopped eight major leaks from corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares, still a small dent in a huge problem, but proof that satellite detection can translate into very real emissions cuts.
The UN’s methane-monitoring system sent 192 alerts to Turkmenistan over the past year; the country accounted for nine of the world’s 50 biggest detected mega-leaks.
Eight leaks have now been repaired, and the UN says Turkmenistan’s response rate is improving month by month.
Methane is particularly juicy climate low-hanging fruit: it traps far more heat than CO2 over the short term, but also leaves the atmosphere much faster, so plugging leaks can deliver relatively rapid climate benefits.
Why This Matters: Methane cuts are one of the fastest ways available to slow near-term warming, and this shows that satellites, transparency and international pressure can force action even in places where emissions were previously easy to ignore.
Kismet: The UN system uses AI to analyse data from more than a dozen satellites, meaning some of the cheapest climate wins available today are essentially being spotted from space before someone turns up with a wrench. 👉 Full story here
AI News
This is exactly the kind of AI story that gets my attention: an ECG - a century-old, cheap, routine test, can now be read by AI for signals of heart failure and valve disease that clinicians typically can’t see. In a 67,000-patient US trial, the system identified up to 81% of heart failure cases and 90% of valve disease cases, in less than two seconds.
The model was trained on millions of ECGs and looks for patterns buried beyond normal human interpretation.
It isn’t replacing echocardiograms or doctors; it’s acting as a fast triage layer, flagging high-risk patients so they can get definitive scans sooner.
Because roughly a billion ECGs are performed globally every year, this could be deployed at enormous scale without inventing an entirely new diagnostic workflow.
Why This Matters: This is AI at its best: taking a ubiquitous, inexpensive test and making it dramatically more useful, potentially catching serious disease earlier without adding months of delay or mountains of extra clinical workload.
Kismet: Researchers at the same cardiology congress also showed AI analysing five-second facial videos to detect signs of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, looks like your face may soon be submitting a medical report before you do. 👉 Full story here
Anthropic Wants AI Agents to Start Operating the Machines
Anthropic is previewing a Model Hardware Standard (MHS) that could let AI agents safely control everything from microscopes and liquid handlers to robotic arms and quantum-computing equipment. The interesting bit isn’t another clever chatbot trick; it’s an attempt to give AI a common language for interacting with the physical machinery of science and manufacturing.
MHS replaces bespoke hardware integrations, which can take weeks or months, with a common interface Anthropic says can cut setup to hours or even minutes.
Agents can coordinate several machines at once, monitor experiments, adjust parameters in real time and sometimes recover from equipment errors without human intervention.
Early trials span biotech, robotics and quantum computing, with Genentech, Doosan Robotics, QIAGEN, Universal Robots and others involved; Anthropic plans eventually to make the standard open source.
Why This Matters: AI becomes vastly more consequential once it can move beyond analysing information and start orchestrating physical processes, potentially accelerating laboratory research, manufacturing automation and scientific experimentation.
Kismet: In one test, Claude adjusted a laser, watched through a camera to see what happened, iterated until it understood the system, then wrote its own deterministic script so it could repeat the alignment without having to “think” through every step again.
👉 Full story here
Electromobility
London’s Clean-Air Zone Is Literally Helping Children’s Lungs Grow
Here’s a result I’d happily plaster across every city hall in Europe: after London introduced its Ultra Low Emission Zone, children’s exposure to traffic pollution fell sharply, and their lung growth accelerated enough to catch up with children in Luton, where no equivalent clean-air zone existed. Cleaner vehicles, fewer high-emitting cars and steadily greater electrification aren’t just abstract emissions wins; they’re showing up in children’s bodies.
The five-year study followed more than 3,400 children across 84 primary schools in London and Luton.
London children’s exposure to nitrogen dioxide fell more than twice as much as in Luton, while their lung capacity improved an extra 10ml per year.
The proportion of London children with clinically impaired lung function fell from 14% to 9%, and by the end of the study their lung development had caught up with the control group.
Why This Matters: Transport decarbonisation is often sold as climate policy, but cleaner streets also deliver an immediate public-health dividend - fewer tailpipes means healthier lungs, particularly for children who never chose to breathe the pollution in the first place.
Kismet: The most striking finding is that the damage wasn’t necessarily permanent: once pollution fell, children’s lungs effectively accelerated their growth and began making up lost ground. 👉 Full story here
State of health of the battery in my two year old EV
EV Batteries Apparently Didn’t Get the Memo About Wearing Out
One of the most persistent anti-EV talking points keeps colliding with awkward things called data: a new analysis of more than 500,000 battery tests found that most popular EVs still retain roughly 90% of their original usable battery capacity after 150,000km. Batteries do degrade, obviously, but for most drivers the evidence increasingly suggests the car will become old-fashioned long before the battery becomes useless.
Across 20 popular EV models, median battery health after 150,000km ranged from 87% to 94%; after 100,000km it was still between 88% and 95%.
Battery ageing varies substantially even between identical models, with climate, charging behaviour and battery size all influencing degradation.
That variability strengthens the case for standardised battery-health certificates in the used-EV market: mileage alone tells you surprisingly little about how much useful battery remains.
Why This Matters: If batteries routinely remain healthy well beyond 150,000km, one of the biggest perceived risks around buying both new and used EVs starts looking less like an engineering problem and more like an information problem.
Kismet: The study suggests an EV’s odometer may eventually matter less to used-car buyers than its battery-health report, potentially turning the humble state-of-health percentage into the electric era’s equivalent of checking under the bonnet.
The image above shows the state of health of the battery in my EV - a Kia EV3 is still at 100% after almost two years of ownership and driving. By comparison, my phone (iPhone 16 Pro) bought the same month is down to 93% state of health! 👉 Full story here
Electric Trucks Just Overtook Diesel in China
Electrification has well and truly escaped the car park. In June, fully electric heavy trucks took 44.7% of China’s market, beating diesel’s 41.1% share - while Europe’s buses are going electric, 350-tonne mining trucks are ditching diesel, and battery-electric aircraft are starting to leave the runway.
China just crossed a rather important line: Fully electric HGVs rose from 26% of sales in June 2025 to 44.7% a year later, overtaking diesel as the largest powertrain category for the month.
Europe’s buses are heading the same way: 60% of new EU city buses sold in 2025 were zero-emission, including 56% battery-electric, up from just 12% electric in 2019.
Why This Matters: Batteries are no longer nibbling around the edges of transport; they’re moving rapidly into buses, freight, mining and aviation — precisely the heavier applications critics have spent years insisting couldn’t be electrified.
Kismet: Heart Aerospace says its record-setting electric aircraft’s entire 27-minute maiden flight consumed about $5 worth of electricity, terrific news for airline economics, rather less comforting for anyone whose business model depends on selling jet fuel. 👉 Links Inline
Clean Energy
Let There Be Sunlight: The Vatican Goes Agrivoltaic
The Vatican is planning an 80–90MW agrivoltaic plant outside Rome that could make the Holy See fully electricity self-sufficient within two years, while still using the land for agriculture underneath the panels. Apparently “faith, hope and tracking solar” is now an energy strategy.
The project, expected to cost about €100 million, would be one of Italy’s largest agrivoltaic installations.
Solar panels would cover roughly 200 hectares, mounted high enough for crops to continue growing beneath them while benefiting from shade and reduced evaporation.
The plant will supply Vatican City, Vatican Radio and other Holy See-linked properties, with any surplus electricity fed into Italy’s grid.
Why This Matters: Agrivoltaics tackles two land-use problems at once, generating clean power without displacing agriculture and potentially helping crops cope better with heat and water stress.
Kismet: The Vatican started installing solar back in 2008 under Pope Benedict XVI, so this is less a conversion on the road to Damascus than a fairly determined scaling-up. 👉 Full story here
Europe’s Wind Build-Out Is Picking Up Speed Again
Europe added 8.8GW of new wind capacity in the first half of 2026, nearly a third more than in the same period last year, with Germany doing much of the heavy lifting and offshore wind connections accelerating sharply. After years of hand-wringing over permitting, supply chains and project economics, the numbers are finally moving in the right direction again.
Germany accounted for 39% of all new European wind capacity added in the first half of the year.
Offshore wind connections reached 2.1GW, roughly triple the amount connected in the same period last year.
Europe’s total installed wind capacity now stands at 311GW, having doubled over the past decade.
Why This Matters: Wind is already one of Europe’s core power sources, and faster deployment strengthens energy security, lowers exposure to imported fossil fuels and gives electrification more clean electricity to work with.
Kismet: Wind and solar together generated more electricity than fossil fuels across the EU last year for the first time, so this build-out is no longer about creating an alternative system; it’s about scaling the one that is increasingly becoming the system. 👉 Full story here
Chefs Are Discovering That Fire Isn’t a Food Group
Professional kitchens have clung to gas partly because flame looks and feels like “real cooking”. But a growing number of chefs are switching to induction and finding they can still hit the temperatures they need, while making kitchens dramatically cooler, quieter, cleaner and cheaper to run.
Swapping gas for induction can cut kitchen temperatures by as much as 10°C, because the hob heats the pan rather than dumping heat into the room.
One gastropub cut energy use by almost two-thirds, saving about £9,000 a year, with the retrofit expected to pay for itself within three years.
Even wok cooking survives the transition: chef Jeremy Pang says induction can reach 350–400°C and still deliver the “wok hei” flavour chefs traditionally associate with roaring gas burners.
Why This Matters: Electrification isn’t just about grids, cars and heat pumps; commercial kitchens are another stubborn fossil-fuel niche where induction can cut emissions while improving working conditions and operating costs.
Kismet: One Australian restaurant cut cooktop cleaning time from 24 minutes to 21 seconds after switching from gas to induction, reportedly saving more than AU$30,000 a year in labour alone. 👉 Full story here
Battery Energy Storage
Batteries Are Eating the Grid - and Cleaning Up Their Own Act
The US just installed a record 20.2GWh of battery storage in three months, while CATL - supplier of nearly four in every ten EV batteries globally, says all 20 of its operating battery plants are now carbon-neutral. Storage is scaling at industrial speed; now the industry is starting to tackle the emissions embedded in making the batteries themselves.
US battery installations reached 30.8GWh in the first half of 2026, up 23% year-on-year, with utility-scale systems accounting for about 18GWh of Q2’s record additions.
Batteries are already doing real grid work: US storage supplied more electricity during the first eight months of 2026 than during all of 2025, helping shift cheap daytime power into evening peaks.
CATL says its 20 battery plants now meet the ISO 14068-1 carbon-neutrality standard, but the harder job lies upstream: more than 80% of a battery’s lifecycle emissions come from its supply chain, which CATL now aims to decarbonise by 2035.
Why This Matters: Batteries are moving from useful grid accessory to core infrastructure, and cleaning up their manufacture makes the climate case stronger precisely as deployment accelerates.
Kismet: More than 10% of all US battery-storage capacity currently operating was installed in Q2 alone, three months adding a tenth of everything built before it is the sort of growth curve fossil-fuel incumbents tend not to enjoy looking at.
👉 Links Inline
Latest Tom Raftery news
New: Research
One thing I’ve been quietly building over the summer is a new Research programme on my website. I’m taking the hundreds of conversations in my Climate Confident and Resilient Supply Chain archives and turning them into evidence-led executive briefings, looking for recurring patterns, contradictory evidence, emerging signals and, importantly, where the evidence simply isn’t strong enough yet.
There are already three briefings available, covering long-duration energy storage, why supply-chain AI pilots fail to scale, and how to build resilience without simply piling on inventory and cost. They’re free to download, with no registration required.
Why This Matters: After years of interviewing people at the sharp end of climate, energy, technology and supply chains, I realised I was sitting on something more valuable than a podcast back catalogue: a longitudinal body of evidence about what actually works, what doesn’t, and why.
I’m also exploring a limited number of sponsored research briefs with organisations that want to examine a strategically important topic in depth, while keeping the analysis evidence-led and editorially credible.
Kismet: The archive started life as hundreds of individual conversations; increasingly, I’m finding that its real value appears when you stop treating the episodes individually and ask what 50 different experts collectively reveal about the same problem.
👉 Tom Raftery Research
Climate Confident:
The Energy Transition Has a Time Problem, and Storage Is the Answer
This week on Climate Confident, I spoke with Julia Souder, CEO of the Long Duration Energy Storage Council, about a deceptively simple problem: we’ve spent a century pricing energy by fuel, but renewable grids increasingly need us to price time. The technologies for storing energy for eight hours, 24 hours or even days increasingly exist; Julia’s argument is that the bigger bottleneck now is market design, finance and giving those assets a revenue model investors can actually bank.
Long-duration storage is already here. Julia points to 9.2GW of deployed global capacity, with flow batteries, thermal storage, gravity systems and other technologies moving from pilots into gigawatt-hour-scale projects.
China is treating storage as infrastructure, not an experiment. Julia visited operating projects where long-duration storage is already being used alongside coal plants, while provincial and national policies explicitly reward capacity, flexibility and resource adequacy.
The financing problem may now be bigger than the technology problem. Assets can operate for 30, 40 or 50 years with no fuel-price exposure, but electricity markets frequently compensate only a fraction of the services they provide, making perfectly viable infrastructure unnecessarily difficult to finance.
Why This Matters: As wind and solar become dominant sources of new generation, the question is shifting from whether we can produce enough clean electricity to whether we can move that electricity through time, and markets that learn to value duration could unlock an entirely new class of energy infrastructure.
Kismet: My favourite analogy from the conversation was that short-duration batteries are the fridge, while long-duration storage is the freezer and pantry - you absolutely need both, but asking one to do the other’s job is how dinner gets complicated.
🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Your Supply Chain May Be Digital. Your Maintenance Probably Isn’t.
This week on Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with Asim Akram, CEO of MultiSensor AI, about a resilience risk hiding inside warehouses, fulfilment centres and factories: companies have automated the assets that keep operations moving, while maintenance is still too often based on somebody walking around with a handheld device every few months. Degradation happens gradually; failure does not, and at high-throughput facilities, that gap can get painfully expensive very quickly.
Automation has moved resilience risk inside the building. Conveyors, motors, chillers, electrical panels and other critical assets can now become single points of failure in operations expected to run continuously.
Periodic inspection increasingly isn’t enough. Thermal, vibration and acoustic sensors can continuously track how equipment behaviour changes over time, potentially spotting deterioration before a threshold is crossed and allowing repairs during planned downtime.
Maintenance is becoming a revenue-protection function. An unexpected equipment failure can stop throughput, spoil perishables, delay orders and send customers elsewhere, turning what executives once saw primarily as maintenance spend into a business-continuity issue.
Why This Matters: We’ve spent enormous sums making supply chains faster and more automated, but resilience suffers if the machinery underneath that automation is still maintained using processes created for a slower, less digitised operating environment.
Kismet: Asim says the asset executives underestimate most is the humble motor, hardly the glamorous end of digital transformation, but seemingly quite capable of bringing all those expensive robots and clever software to an undignified halt.
🎧 Listen to the full episode
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Featured Chart(s)
Batteries are eating gas’ lunch in the Australian energy system!
EV’s growth is nothing short of stellar. Thankfully!
China continues to amaze!
US crude oil inventories are in trouble. Hence Venezuela!
Misc stuff
Climate deniers be like…
AI credits too expensive, just ask McDonalds to help!
Obligatory Trump Cartoons
LOL!
Yup!
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