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Hey everyone — and Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate. welcome to this week’s FutureProof: your Thursday jolt of climate, tech, and the occasional “wait… the Vatican just did what?”
This week delivered whiplash in the best possible way - progress popping up everywhere, even in places we’d written off.
The big five:
COP30 may have flopped, but 82 countries are now bypassing the sabotage and building a real fossil-phaseout roadmap themselves.
AI is now a wildfire-prevention tool, helping utilities spot the exact trees and poles most likely to ignite the next catastrophe.
Australia’s solar + storage hybrids are scaling so fast they’re now eating coal’s lunch and dinner.
AI went full arms race with Claude Opus 4.5, Google’s Nano Banana Pro, and ChatGPT’s new group chats landing in the same week.
EV momentum keeps building as European sales jump again and Chinese EVs quietly become the safest cars on the continent.
…and lots more below, including Formula E’s rise, the Vatican’s solar milestone, Scope 3’s expanding reach, and both of this week’s podcast deep dives.
As ever, FutureProof exists to remind you that the future isn’t doomed, it’s just arriving faster than the pessimists can update their scripts.
If last week felt fast, this one was a blur.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
COP30 flopped — but something far more important just happened
After another COP derailed by fossil fuel lobbyists - honestly, letting them shape climate policy is like asking a murderer to adjudicate their own trial, we finally saw a glimmer of real leadership emerge outside the UNFCCC circus.
Colombia and the Netherlands have announced they’ll co-host the world’s first international conference dedicated explicitly to phasing out fossil fuels. Not “transitioning.” Not “abating.” Not “responsibly managing.”
Actually phasing out.
And they’re hosting it in Santa Marta, a major Colombian coal port, which is either poetic, provocative, or both.
My take? This is what happens when COPs get so captured and compromised that countries start building alternative venues for actual progress.
Key Highlights
Conference set for 28–29 April 2026 in Santa Marta, a city central to Colombia’s coal exports, a deliberate statement of intent.
24 countries have already signed the new Belém Declaration, outlining minimum ambition for a just fossil fuel phase-out, including Ireland, Spain, Kenya, Fiji, Mexico, and Chile.
A rapidly growing coalition backs a Fossil Fuel Treaty: 18 nations, 140 cities, the WHO, 4,000+ organisations, 3,000+ scientists, and 101 Nobel laureates, momentum the COP process keeps failing to harness.
Why This Matters: Because if COPs are going to be sabotaged from the inside, someone needs to build a parallel process where fossil fuel companies aren’t allowed to referee the future.
Kismet: Santa Marta, now the launchpad for a fossil-free future, currently ships over 30 million tonnes of coal a year, meaning the phase-out summit will open within sight of the very product it seeks to wind down. 👉 Full story here
Oh, and in case you missed it, I had Tzeporah Berman, the Founder and Steering Committee Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative on the Climate Confident podcast earlier this year. If you missed it then, you can check it out now here.
AI versus Wildfire: utilities finally stop hoping for miracles
Wildfire liability has become so financially brutal that US and European utilities are now scrambling to deploy AI tools that literally spot which individual trees are about to attack their power lines, a surreal but painfully necessary adaptation to a climate that’s now throwing heat domes, flash droughts, and dying forests at us like a video game set to “hard mode.”
And honestly? It’s about time they used intelligence, artificial or otherwise, instead of waiting for the next Camp Fire-scale catastrophe to bankrupt another grid operator.
Key Highlights
AI startups like Overstory and Rhizome analyse satellite imagery and grid data to identify the exact trees, poles, and locations that pose the highest fire risk, enabling targeted fixes instead of felling based on gut, intuition, or schedules.
National Grid discovered its biggest wildfire risks weren’t in forests or cities, but in the suburbs, thanks to Rhizome’s gridFIRM model overturning years of wrong assumptions.
Climate change is killing trees in “new and different ways,” meaning maintenance plans that worked a decade ago are now obsolete as utilities face lawsuits and soaring insurance costs from massive fires.
Why This Matters: Because the cheapest wildfire is the one you prevent, and AI finally gives utilities a way to find the next spark before it becomes the next nation-scarring inferno.
Kismet: The Camp Fire, which bankrupted PG&E, ignited beneath a transmission tower where AI later revealed that simply clearing the brush under the tower would likely have prevented the entire disaster. 👉 Full story here
AI News
GPT-5 is now helping scientists solve problems humans couldn’t crack in decades
As a graduate scientist, I love coming across stories like this: researchers are now using GPT-5 not just to summarise papers or tidy up code, but to make actual scientific contributions, surfacing mechanisms in biology, tightening proofs in maths, and even pushing forward long-standing Erdős problems. This isn’t “AI writes your homework.” This is “AI helps push the frontier of human knowledge… in real time.”
Honestly, it feels like the early days of a scientific Cambrian explosion.
Key Highlights
Biology breakthrough: Scientists spent months trying to understand an obscure shift in immune cells, GPT-5 spotted the likely mechanism in minutes from an unpublished chart, then suggested an experiment that proved it right.
Decades-old maths puzzle solved: In a long-standing Erdős problem, researchers were stuck for years until GPT-5 proposed a missing structural insight about how a single “odd” number disrupts the whole set, the key to completing the proof.
Cross-field discovery engine: GPT-5 can now perform conceptual literature searches, linking new theorems to fields the authors hadn’t even considered - including sources in other languages and hidden corners of the literature.
Why This Matters: Because shaving months or years off scientific progress isn’t just “nice” - it compounds, accelerating breakthroughs in health, materials, energy, and everything else that keeps civilisation running.
Kismet: Fields Medalist Tim Gowers tested GPT-5 on his own research questions - and the model repeatedly found flaws in his constructions faster than his PhD students could, effectively becoming the world’s quickest mathematical peer-reviewer. 👉 Full story here
AI leapfrog continues: Anthropic drops Claude Opus 4.5 - and it’s a monster
Right, so after Gemini Pro 3 last week and GPT-5.1 barely catching its breath… Anthropic shows up and yeets another frontier model into the ring. Claude Opus 4.5 isn’t a tweak, it’s a full-on “oh, your benchmark looks lovely, mind if I smash it?” moment.
The model now outperforms every human candidate ever on Anthropic’s notoriously brutal software-engineering exam - and does it within their strict two-hour limit. That’s not incremental progress… that’s an engineering mic drop.
Key Highlights
Opus 4.5 beats all human candidates on a real software-engineering take-home test, excelling at multi-system debugging, reasoning under ambiguity, and high-pressure problem-solving.
It leads across 7 of 8 programming languages on SWE-bench Multilingual, and shows big jumps in reasoning, coding, maths, and long-running agentic tasks.
It’s also the most robustly aligned Claude model to date, significantly harder to break with prompt-injection attacks than any other frontier model tested.
Why This Matters: Because we’re now seeing weekly leaps, not yearly ones, and that pace is going to reshape how engineering, research, and even day-to-day knowledge work get done.
Kismet: One benchmark scored Claude Opus 4.5 as a “failure” because it solved an airline ticket problem too cleverly, upgrading the cabin first to legally unlock a route change the rules didn’t anticipate, outsmarting the benchmark designers themselves. 👉 Full story here
Google again: Nano Banana Pro lands — and image generation just levelled up... hard
Just when you think Google might pause for breath, they sling another upgrade into the AI arms race. Nano Banana Pro (yes, still the silliest name in frontier AI) drops this week as Gemini 3 Pro’s new image model - and it’s wild. This thing doesn’t just draw pretty pictures; it blends 14 images, renders multilingual text cleanly (finally), and even taps real-time Google Search to generate context-aware graphics on the fly.
It’s basically Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, Midjourney, ChatGPT Vision and a data visualisation engine… all fused together and running on rocket fuel.
Key Highlights
Gemini 3 Pro reasoning baked directly into image generation, enabling diagrams, infographics, and real-time grounded visuals, like pulling live weather data from Search to build pop-art layouts like the one above.
Accurate, multilingual text inside images, finally solving one of AI’s most persistent weak spots. Posters, mockups, calligraphy, long paragraphs, all rendered cleanly and legibly.
Professional-grade controls: local edits, lighting changes, camera angles, better compositing, 2K/4K output, and the ability to maintain consistency across five people and up to 14 input images in a single scene.
Why This Matters: Because AI image tools aren’t just for fun anymore - they’re becoming full creative workstations, compressing what used to take whole teams and hours into a few prompts and tweaks.
Kismet: Google quietly added a SynthID-powered feature that lets you upload an image and ask whether it was generated by Google AI, meaning Nano Banana Pro ships with its own built-in lie detector for deepfakes. 👉 Full story here
ChatGPT gets group chats - and suddenly AI becomes a social creature
And now for a curveball: OpenAI has launched group chats in ChatGPT. Yes… you can now drop AI into a WhatsApp-style group and let it help you plan trips, debate restaurants, settle arguments, or collaborate on school/work projects - all inside one shared conversation. It’s basically adding a hyper-informed, occasionally too-clever friend to the group, but one you can mute without drama.
I can’t decide whether this is brilliant, chaotic, or the start of a whole new genre of group dynamics… but it’s definitely interesting.
Key Highlights
Group chats let up to 20 people collaborate with ChatGPT in the same thread, planning trips, drafting outlines, comparing ideas, or making joint decisions.
GPT-5.1 Auto powers the responses, choosing the optimal model on the fly and supporting images, search, file uploads, generation, and dictation.
New social behaviours: ChatGPT can now decide when to stay quiet, react with emojis, and even reference participants’ profile pictures when generating personalised images.
Why This Matters: Because this turns ChatGPT from a solo tool into a shared workspace - and that shift could change everything from team meetings to family holiday planning.
Kismet: If someone under 18 joins a group chat, ChatGPT automatically downgrades everyone’s exposure to sensitive content - meaning a teenager can accidentally enforce content moderation on a whole group of adults. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
EVs in Europe are booming, no matter what certain newspapers want you to believe
Despite the doom-and-gloom headlines pushed by legacy auto lobbyists and the usual anti-EV brigade, the actual data is gloriously unambiguous: EV sales in Europe are soaring. October 2025 saw a 33% jump in all-electric car sales, giving BEVs a 20.6% market share across the EU, EFTA and UK. When a technology is cleaner, quieter, cheaper to run, and drives better… of course people buy more of it.
The fossil-fuel narrative is collapsing under the weight of its own wishful thinking.
Key Highlights
BEV sales in the EU alone surged 38.6% in October, rising from 14.4% to 18.9% market share year-on-year.
Across Europe (EU+EFTA+UK), EV sales jumped 32.9% to 225,399 BEVs sold in a single month, and 26.2% growth so far in 2025.
Spain smashed expectations with 90% growth in BEV sales, while Germany added sheer volume: 52,425 EVs sold in October alone, up nearly 50%.
Why This Matters: Because every percentage point of EV growth wipes out millions of litres of petrol and diesel demand, and signals that Europe’s transition is accelerating, not stalling.
Kismet: The Tesla Model Y - once Europe’s top seller, didn’t just miss the top 10 this month… it dropped out of the top 50 entirely, while BEV sales overall surged. A stark reminder that promoting fascism is a surefire way to kill a brand in Europe. 👉 Full story here
The safest cars in Europe? Chinese EVs — and it’s not even close
If you still hear people muttering that Chinese EVs are “cheap”, “unsafe”, or “poorly built”, you can now hand them something better than a counter-argument: Euro NCAP data. And the data is crystal clear, the safest cars on European roads right now are overwhelmingly Chinese-made electric vehicles.
The Leapmotor B10 shattered records with the highest occupant-safety score in Euro NCAP history, while four out of four Chinese models in the latest test batch earned full five-star ratings, outperforming big European names like BMW, VW and even the Volvo EX90.
EVs aren’t just cleaner, quieter, cheaper to run, and nicer to drive, they’re increasingly the safest metal you can sit your family in.
Key Highlights
Leapmotor B10 scored 93% adult and 93% child protection, the best combined occupant-safety score Euro NCAP has ever recorded.
All four Chinese EVs tested - from Leapmotor, Hongqi, BYD and NIO, received five stars, while several European models only managed four.
The overall Euro NCAP leaderboard still has the China-built Tesla Model 3 at the top, with NIO’s Firefly delivering the single highest occupant-protection score ever measured.
Why This Matters: Because safety sells, and this data torpedoes one of the last remaining myths used to undermine the EV transition.
Kismet: The Mercedes-Benz CLE, a brand famous for safety, scored lower than two Chinese EVs you’ve probably never heard of, marking a rare moment where the European luxury badge gets schooled in its own historic stronghold. 👉 Full story here
Formula E isn’t just the future of racing - it’s already overtaking the past
I’ll admit it: I’m biased. I was lucky enough to attend the 2019 Brooklyn Formula E finale, the sound, the speed, the atmosphere… utterly unforgettable. And what blows my mind is how far the sport has come since. Formula E has quietly grown into a 422-million-strong global fanbase, with younger, more diverse supporters, sharper acceleration than F1 (0–100kmph in 1.82 seconds!), and a carbon footprint five times smaller than Formula 1. That’s not “the future”, that’s a full-tilt present.
And the racing? Constant overtakes, attacking lines, chaotic energy, LED-lit cars, city circuits (cos electric!), and a tech pipeline that feeds directly into the EVs we’re all driving (or should be driving) on the road.
Key Highlights
Formula E’s 561 million-strong TV audience grew 17% last season, with the Mexico City E-Prix pulling in 46 million viewers, nearly matching F1’s Australian Grand Prix.
The tech transfer is real: Nissan increased the Leaf’s range by 181% during its first five years in Formula E; Porsche’s new electric Cayenne recovers the same regen power as a Gen3 Evo race car.
The racing is simply better: 2023’s Monaco E-Prix featured 116 overtakes on the same track where F1 managed just 22, helped by “Attack Mode”, the sport’s brilliant, Mario-Kart-style power-up system.
Why This Matters: Because Formula E is proving, on the road and the circuit, that electrification doesn’t limit performance; it unlocks it.
Kismet: When Formula E launched in 2014, the batteries couldn’t last a full race and drivers had to swap cars mid-event. A decade later, the next-gen Gen4 racers arriving in 2026–27 will have permanent AWD and 200+ mph top speeds, likely making them the fastest cars many F1 drivers will ever pilot. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
The Vatican just became the world’s first 100% solar-powered country — via agrivoltaics
Yes, the Vatican is tiny, but influence isn’t measured in square kilometres. And this week, the world’s smallest nation became the first fully solar-powered state, running entirely on electricity generated through agrivoltaics. That’s a remarkable signal from one of the most recognisable institutions on Earth: clean energy isn’t just viable, it’s now moral, practical, and scalable.
And the cherry on top? They did it in the smartest way possible - by pairing solar production with farming, increasing food yields while hitting net-zero electricity.
Key Highlights
The Vatican is now powered 100% by solar via its agrivoltaic farm in the extraterritorial zone of Santa Maria di Galeria, a 1,000-acre site hosting its radio facilities.
Agrivoltaics boost crop yields thanks to cooler, shaded microclimates, with studies showing increases from 3% (wheat in Germany) to over 100% (hot peppers in the US). Lettuce and strawberries thrive under the Vatican’s semi-transparent panels.
This makes the Vatican the 8th country to reach 100% renewable electricity, joining Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the DRC, but the first to do it with solar alone.
Why This Matters: Because if a sovereign state with global moral reach goes 100% solar, using a solution that also feeds people and boosts farmer incomes, it becomes a template others can no longer ignore.
Kismet: Canada could meet its entire electricity demand using less than 1% of its farmland with agrivoltaics, meaning the Vatican may have just accidentally pointed the way for some of the biggest countries on Earth. 👉 Full story here
Australia just proved it: solar + storage is now coming for coal’s lunch… and dinner
This one is delicious. In Australia, rooftop solar has already obliterated daytime demand so effectively that coal generators are being forced to bid below zero just to stay online. And now? A huge wave of big-solar-plus-big-battery hybrids is lining up to eat coal’s evening peak as well, the one meal the fossil generators thought they could still rely on.
The Tallawang hybrid (500 MW solar + 500 MW / 1,000 MWh battery) is just the opener. Dozens of these projects are in the pipeline, deliberately designed to shift solar power into dusk and night-time. In other words: they’re not competing with other solar. They’re competing with coal and gas at the exact hour those generators make their money.
Key Highlights
The Tallawang hybrid - 500 MW of solar plus a 500 MW / 1 GWh battery is Australia’s biggest solar-battery hybrid to date and part of more than two dozen hybrids now reshaping the grid.
Rooftop PV has crushed midday demand, forcing ageing coal plants to ramp up and down in ways “not believed possible hitherto” or even bid below zero to avoid shutting down.
Hybrids are now targeting the evening peak, thanks to falling battery costs and easier grid-connection rules, meaning they’ll “hoe into coal generators’ dinner” by delivering cheap solar power after sunset.
Why This Matters: Because this is the structural shift everyone’s been waiting for: solar no longer just dominates the day - with storage, it’s moving into the night, where the real fossil-fuel revenues live.
Kismet: The Cunderdin hybrid in Western Australia is already sending a third of its output to the grid after sunset, a feat unthinkable just a few years ago and a preview of what happens when 5 GW of these hybrids hit the grid. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
Scope 3 is coming for everyone, and tech companies serving fossil fuels are standing on a trapdoor
This week’s blog post of mine struck a nerve - because Scope 3 isn’t just expanding… it’s about to hit companies that consider themselves “clean”, especially those selling AI, cloud, ERP, CRM, robotics, analytics or consulting into the fossil-fuel sector. If your product helps an oil or gas client extract, drill, refine, transport, schedule, automate, or optimise carbon-intensive activity, regulators increasingly view that as enabled emissions, and it will show up in your reporting, not just theirs.
The walls aren’t closing. They’re expanding, and they’re capturing entire value chains.
Key Highlights
A SaaS firm discovered that 20% of its revenue came from oil & gas clients, whose use of the platform accelerated drilling and production - auditors flagged this as enabled emissions, making the SaaS company part of the fossil value chain.
Scope 3 is tightening everywhere: EU CSRD, ISSB/IFRS S2, and California SB-253 all require or strongly expect full value-chain reporting, and enabled emissions are being pulled into the frame.
Companies that think their own footprint is tiny are missing the real risk: their customers’ emissions may be 10–100× larger, and they may soon be held accountable for enabling them. Imagine the reputational destruction.
Why This Matters: Because Scope 3 is about to redraw the corporate map, and the companies with fossil-fuel clients will feel the first and hardest shockwaves.
Kismet: Financed emissions in the financial sector can run hundreds of times larger than operational emissions, meaning the “cleanest” firms on paper can, in reality, be the biggest polluters in the room. 👉 Full post here
Climate Confident:
Solar isn’t a product anymore, it’s a 25-year relationship, and that changes everything
This week’s Climate Confident dives into the quiet-but-massive business-model revolution reshaping commercial solar. The old world was simple: buy panels, hire a contractor, hope the thing works. The new world? Developers like REC Solar own the assets, carry the financial risk, guarantee performance, and only win when the customer wins — a shift that turns clean energy from a capital project into a long-term service relationship.
Scott Therien, who’s lived this evolution from EPC contractor to full IPP operator, lays it out plainly: the PPA model aligns incentives, kills the old CapEx headache, and forces developers to behave like partners, not vendors.
Key Highlights
The PPA shift changes all incentives: REC pays for the system, maintains it for 25-30 years, and only earns when it produces, meaning customers get cheaper, cleaner energy without touching CapEx.
Storage has become unavoidable: Solar + storage is now the optimisation engine for bills, resilience, and time-of-use pricing, and in markets like California, it’s essential to avoid unfavourable export rules.
Success vs failure comes down to one thing: organisations that know why they want solar - cost savings, sustainability, resilience, get great outcomes; those who treat it like a one-off procurement usually don’t.
Why This Matters: Because the energy transition isn’t just about technology, it’s about shifting who owns what, who carries the risk, and who is incentivised to deliver long-term performance.
Kismet: One of REC’s most successful solar projects doubled as a sheep-grazing site, where the panels stayed cool and clean, and the sheep produced better wool thanks to the shade. Renewable energy, now with premium textiles. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Heat, hidden risks, and AI: supply chains are heading into a new era, and most leaders aren’t ready
In this week’s episode Kevin Vranes from Worldly laid out something most boardrooms still haven’t clocked: the biggest climate risks in supply chains don’t start with storms, floods, or carbon taxes, they start with workers who simply can’t work. Rising heat stress in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, China… it’s already triggering absenteeism, collapsing productivity, and creating massive reputational and operational risk.
And that’s just the opener. We dove into disclosure rules tightening unevenly across jurisdictions, NGOs preparing to enforce what regulators don’t, the impossibility of tackling Scope 3 without Tier 2 and Tier 3 visibility, and the genuinely jaw-dropping way AI is about to compress weeks of sustainability analysis into seconds.
Key Highlights
Heat stress is emerging as one of the biggest overlooked supply chain risks, driving presenteeism, health impacts, productivity drops, and huge reputation exposure for brands sourcing from hot, humid regions.
Worldly is stitching together primary supplier data + climate science + policy signals + logistics intelligence, allowing brands to predict risk patterns and act before crises hit - something Kevin says would have taken humans “weeks of spreadsheet work” before.
Scope 3 remains an Everest because most emissions sit in Tier 2 and Tier 3 factories, places brands don’t directly control and struggle to access. Leading companies are now funding renewable retrofits, PPAs, and boiler replacements directly in supplier facilities.
Why This Matters: Because climate risk in supply chains has shifted from an abstraction to a physical constraint, and without high-quality data and proactive supplier engagement, resilience is now mostly luck.
Kismet: Kevin casually noted that apparel is decades ahead of most other sectors on Scope 3 - meaning industries like electronics and metals aren’t just behind… they’re about to discover risks apparel companies have been wrestling with since the early 2010s. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Andy Kohn, Founder & CEO of SCIP, and Aaron Thurlow, SVP Sales & Marketing for Caelux.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
Kudos to the Northern European countries for their embrace of fully electric buses!
And life expectancy by country - nice to see Ireland moving up the charts!
This one is self-explanatory!
This is phenomenal - but we need to do even more!
Misc stuff
I’ve seen various forms of this in the past, but it never ceases to amaze!
Another oldie but goodie - this time from Wales.
LOL!
Engage
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Finally, since being impacted by the tech layoffs, I'm currently in the market for a new role. If you know someone who could benefit from my tech savvy, sustainability, and strong social media expertise, I'd be really grateful for a referral.
If you have any comments or suggestions for how I can improve this newsletter, don’t hesitate to let me know. Thanks.
*** Be aware that any typos you find in this newsletter are tests to see who is paying attention! ***
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