Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s FutureProof - my Tech and Sustainability Digest. Another week has zoomed by. How did it get to be October already? Plenty of stories again this week. I hope you enjoy them.
As always this newsletter is dedicated to surfacing and sharing good news stories across tech and sustainability. If good news sounds like something you need, read on. And please share this newsletter with anyone/everyone else you feel could do with a little cheering up!
Now, on with the stories:
Climate
Holy Smokes! The Pope Just Roasted Climate Deniers
Pope Leo XIV didn’t mince words at the Raising Hope climate conference near Rome, slamming climate change deniers and warning that indifference is no longer an option. In a speech dripping with moral clarity (and more than a whiff of shade at Donald Trump), he called on citizens everywhere to push politicians harder and to answer honestly when God asks: “Did you care for creation?”
Pope Leo blasted those who mock climate science, stressing that warming impacts are “increasingly evident.”
He invoked Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, credited with helping shape the Paris Agreement, and doubled down on its urgency.
He urged citizens worldwide to pressure leaders ahead of COP30 in Brazil, framing climate action as both political and spiritual duty.
Why This Matters: When the head of a 1.3 billion–strong faith community frames climate inaction as a moral failure, it raises the stakes for leaders who keep dragging their feet.
Kismet: Vatican City already runs on 100% renewable electricity and was the first country in the world to make solar panels mandatory on all its buildings, making the Pope not just a preacher, but a practitioner of decarbonisation. 👉 Full story here
China’s Climate Pledge: Bold Step or Tepid Shuffle?
China has finally set an absolute emissions reduction target, promising to cut greenhouse gases 7–10% below peak by 2035. That’s historic, but experts say it’s still way off the pace for 1.5°C. Xi Jinping also pledged 3,600GW of wind and solar by 2035, but that’s actually a slowdown compared to the breakneck rollout happening right now.
First-ever economy-wide, all-gas emissions cap: 7–10% below peak by 2035, covering CO₂, methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases.
Renewables target: 3,600GW of wind & solar by 2035 - huge on paper, but slower than China’s recent growth rates.
Analysts warn the plan aligns closer to 3°C of warming, not the 1.5°C pathway science demands.
Why This Matters: China is the world’s largest emitter, so even modest shifts ripple globally, but without deeper cuts, the “great wall” blocking 1.5°C just got higher.
Kismet: In the first half of 2025, China’s CO₂ emissions actually fell, thanks to record solar installations so big they added more capacity in six months than the entire US grid has in total. 👉 Full story here
Want to Fight Climate Change? Forget Plastic Straws—Do This Instead
A new BBC Future deep-dive lays out the evidence: the most impactful personal climate actions aren’t about reusable cups or banning straws, they’re about flexing your climate superpowers. Think voting, pressuring your workplace, shifting your money out of fossil-heavy banks, and cutting back on flights if you’re a frequent flyer. Turns out, small lifestyle tweaks pale next to the systemic influence each of us wields as citizens, professionals, investors, consumers, and role models.
Voting, calling politicians, and joining climate groups deliver far more impact than any single eco-gadget.
Work matters: pushing your company to join the Science Based Targets Initiative or divesting pensions from fossil fuels can dwarf household carbon cuts.
Cutting back flights and meat consumption, for high-income earners especially, remains one of the most effective consumer choices.
Why This Matters: Most people underestimate their power, yet research shows less than 10% of the world’s population holds all five climate superpowers, and they could swing the needle dramatically if they actually used them.
Kismet: A Canadian study found that a single vote in the 2019 election was equivalent to preventing 34 tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year, so yes, ticking a box on a ballot paper can beat a lifetime of recycling plastic bottles. 👉 Full story here
AI News
Sora 2: Viral Hit or Pandora’s Box?
OpenAI launched Sora 2 with fanfare, calling it “the most powerful imagination engine ever built.” Within hours it rocketed to the #1 most downloaded app on iOS, but while it went viral, it also went completely off the rails. The first 24 hours saw Pikachu, Tony Soprano, and Ronald McDonald in surreal mashups, plus an entire “Sam Altman cinematic universe” where the CEO is caught shoplifting GPUs at Target. Disney has already pulled its IP, blocking Mickey and Darth Vader, but that hasn’t slowed the chaos.
Instant global smash: #1 on iOS downloads, but still unavailable in Spain (I tried!), and likely most other countries.
Users flooded it with copyrighted characters and public figures, exposing gaping legal and cultural questions.
Despite watermarks, the realism is so good that spotting AI fakes will become nearly impossible once videos leak outside Sora’s ecosystem.
Why This Matters: Sora 2 isn’t just a toy, it’s a seismic shift in media, making it harder than ever to separate fact from fabrication, and accelerating a future where trust in video evidence may evaporate.
Kismet: In early demos, Sora spat out eerily accurate scenes from Netflix’s Wednesday, same font, same character look, even though Netflix never gave OpenAI its data, showing how baked-in copyright mimicry already is. 👉 Full story here
Meet Periodic Labs: The Startup Building AI Scientists
Forget chatbots, Periodic Labs wants to build actual AI scientists. Backed by a16z, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt, the company is creating autonomous labs where AI can dream up hypotheses, run experiments, and generate real-world data, far beyond the limits of scraping the internet. Their moonshots include discovering room-temperature superconductors, fixing chip overheating, and even nudging along nuclear fusion.
Core idea: autonomous labs + AI models that design, test, and learn in the physical sciences.
Targets: new superconductors, better semiconductors, faster materials breakthroughs, everything from Moore’s Law to space travel.
Backers: a16z, Felicis, DST, Accel, NVIDIA’s VC arm, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, plus a star-studded advisory board of top physicists and chemists.
Why This Matters: If Periodic Labs pulls this off, we’re talking about compressing decades of trial-and-error science into years, accelerating breakthroughs in clean energy, computing, and beyond.
Kismet: The founders include veterans behind ChatGPT, DeepMind’s GNoME, and the invention of the neural attention mechanism, basically, the same brains that shaped modern AI now want to reinvent how science itself is done. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
EVs Surge in Europe While Petrol Cars Tank
The EU car market is flatlining overall, but electric mobility is booming. From January to August 2025, EV sales jumped nearly 25% year-on-year, with battery-electric cars now holding 15.8% market share. Petrol and diesel? They’re in freefall, down 19.7% and 25.7% respectively. Spain nearly doubled its EV sales, Germany rose 39%, and Italy grew 29%, while France lagged with a slight dip.
EV sales across the EU +24.8% (Jan–Aug 2025), with hybrids still topping buyer preference.
Petrol and diesel sales collapsing: –19.7% and –25.7%.
Chinese brands storming Europe: BYD up +244%, while Tesla’s EU sales slumped –42%.
Why This Matters: Europe’s car market is being reshaped in real time, homegrown champions are slipping, Chinese EVs are charging, and combustion engines are quietly heading for the scrapyard of history.
Kismet: China already leads the world in electrified buses, with over 600,000 deployed nationwide, meaning its EV dominance stretches far beyond passenger cars and deep into public transport. 👉 Full story here
California Now Has More EV Chargers Than Gas Nozzles
California just flipped the script on the so-called “charging problem”: the state now boasts 201,180 public and shared EV charging ports, 68% more than gasoline nozzles. Governor Newsom pointed out that 94% of Californians now live within 10 minutes of a charger, while ~800,000 home chargers are already humming away. And the number of chargers is only climbing. The kicker? As EVs grow and petrol demand collapses, the number of gas pumps will shrink, meaning in a few years it’ll be ICE drivers, not EV owners, anxiously hunting for somewhere to refuel.
EV chargers: 201,180 public/shared vs. shrinking petrol pumps, already +68% in favour of chargers.
Massive home charging base (~800k) plus surging rollout at workplaces, apartments, and public hubs.
Trucks: nearly 1 in 4 new sales are zero-emission, backed by 20,000+ heavy-duty charging/hydrogen points.
Why This Matters: California is showing what the tipping point looks like: charging infrastructure scaling up, petrol stations fading, and the “infrastructure problem” being quietly reassigned to fossil fuel cars.
Kismet: Trucks are only 6% of California’s vehicles but spew 35% of transport emissions, so electrifying them is like cutting the head off the carbon snake. 👉 Full story here
Busted: EV Batteries Aren’t Heading to Landfill - They’re Powering Festivals
Remember that tired old fossil-fuel talking point that EV batteries end up as toxic landfill? Total nonsense. In Australia, salvage auctions can’t shift written-off EVs fast enough - buyers are snapping them up purely for their high-powered batteries. These “second-life” packs are being repurposed for solar storage, off-grid power, and even music festivals. One punk event on the Sunshine Coast ran entirely on recycled EV batteries instead of noisy diesel gensets, with power to spare.
Demand for salvaged EV batteries has surged 200% year-on-year, spawning a whole new industry of second-life startups.
Repurposed packs already power solar systems, off-grid homes, and festivals, silent, clean, and far more powerful than standard home storage.
Even at 80% capacity, a retired EV battery still holds decades of usable life for less energy-intensive uses.
Why This Matters: EV batteries are fast becoming assets, not waste, extending their lifespan by 20 years or more while helping slash reliance on fossil generators.
Kismet: A single used EV battery can pack five times the punch of a typical home storage unit, making it the ultimate “second-hand” bargain in the clean energy transition. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Britain Quietly Smashes Its Clean Power Record
Great Britain has already run on 100% clean electricity for 87 hours in 2025, up from just 2.5 hours in 2021. At times this year, wind, solar, nuclear, biomass, and hydro together generated more than national demand, turning Britain into a net exporter of clean power. The longest single stretch so far? Fifteen hours straight on 25–26 May.
87 hours of 100% clean demand coverage this year (vs. 64.5 hours total in 2024).
Wind provided the lion’s share during these periods, 72% on average, with nuclear and solar backing it up.
At peak, Britain was exporting nearly 20% of demand to neighbours via interconnectors.
Why This Matters: Britain’s grid isn’t fully fossil-free yet, but these increasingly frequent all-clean windows show the 2030 target is within striking distance, and that renewables are already reliable backbone power.
Kismet: In 2021, the UK managed just 0.03% of its hours fully clean; in 2025 it’s up to 1.3%, a fifty-fold jump in four years. That’s what exponential transition looks like. 👉 Full story here
India Is Building a Solar Farm the Size of 16 Nuclear Reactors
Maharashtra is on track to complete the world’s largest decentralised solar project, 16,000MW, by March 2026. To put that in perspective, that’s about the same output as 16 full-scale nuclear reactors. The solar parks are being built within 5km of substations, cutting grid losses, supplying cheap daytime power for millions of farm pumps, and slashing consumer tariffs. With 650 billion rupees (about €7.2 billion) of private investment, this mega-build will also create 700,000 jobs and push India’s renewable share from 13% to 52% by 2030.
16,000MW decentralised solar = roughly 16 nuclear reactors worth of clean power.
Local siting near substations cuts transmission losses, bringing costs down to ~₹3 per kWh.
By 2030: +45,000MW capacity, 38,000MW from green energy, 700,000 new jobs, and cheaper tariffs.
Why This Matters: This project isn’t just record-breaking in size, it shows how solar, when decentralised and smartly integrated, can outpace fossil fuels and nuclear on cost, scale, and speed.
Kismet: Agriculture in Maharashtra guzzles 16,000MW daily for water pumps, the project is deliberately sized to match that demand, meaning farmers will literally be running on sunshine. 👉 Full story here
Science
Farming Metals: Genomines Raises $45M to Grow Nickel Instead of Mining It
French startup Genomines just closed a $45M Series A to scale its futuristic approach to metal extraction: growing it. Using genetically engineered “hyperaccumulator” plants, they farm nickel straight from the soil, no blasting, no open pits, no tailings ponds. The result? Battery-grade nickel at 40–50% lower cost, deployable in 1–2 years (instead of 12–17 for a traditional mine). Automakers like Hyundai and Jaguar Land Rover are already circling.
Phytoextraction tech: plants absorb nickel from soil, harvested and refined into battery metals.
2x yield improvements validated, with supply chain partners from automakers to refiners lining up.
$62M raised to date, backed by Engine Ventures, Forbion, and BPI France, funding large-scale demos and commercial contracts.
Why This Matters: The clean energy boom risks stalling on mining bottlenecks, Genomines could unlock new, fast, traceable, low-carbon supply chains for critical minerals.
Kismet: Unlike nickel mines that take up to 17 years to start producing, a Genomines “metal farm” can be planted and yielding in just two, quicker than growing your own apple orchard.
Thanks: Thanks to Resolve Partners David Scanlon - an avid reader of this newsletter for sending me this story. 👉 Full story here
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Latest Podcasts
Climate Confident:
Abate, Adapt, or Suffer: Lessons from a Nobel-Winning Climate Scientist
This week on Climate Confident, I sat down with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Yohe, one of the pioneers of framing climate change as a risk management problem. Gary has been at this since the early 1980s, long before climate was a mainstream conversation, and his message is brutally simple: our choices are to abate, adapt, or suffer. No magic fix, no silver bullets. Just managing risk, making course corrections, and preparing for the suffering we can’t avoid.
Gary’s framework: mitigation reduces likelihood, adaptation reduces consequences, and suffering is what remains, so resilience is key.
Insurance markets are already buckling under climate risks, leaving homes uninsurable and showing us what “unmanageable” really looks like.
Hope ≠ optimism: quoting Vaclav Havel, Gary stresses that hope is about doing the work because it matters, not because success is guaranteed.
Why This Matters: When one of the architects of climate economics tells you there are hard limits to what can be fixed, it’s a wake-up call for leaders to stop pretending incrementalism will cut it. (As I reminded Gary in our chat, climate scientist Kevin Anderson once put it starkly: there are no non-radical futures.)
Kismet: During Hurricane Sandy, Gary’s panel helped redesign New York’s flood evacuation plan, changes that likely saved 10,000 lives when the storm hit. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Sustainable Supply Chain:
From Excel Hell to AI Supply Chains: Dag Calafell on Smarter Manufacturing
In this week’s Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, I spoke with Dag Calafell, Director of Technology Innovation at MCA Connect, about how manufacturers can finally break free from the tyranny of Excel spreadsheets and move toward connected, AI-driven, waste-cutting supply chains. With 25 years in steel and automotive, Dag knows exactly where the inefficiencies hide, and how digital tools can expose and eliminate them.
Too many supply chains still run on disconnected systems and gut-feel forecasting, AI and data platforms can unlock visibility and accuracy.
Lean principles meet sustainability: eliminating waste means fewer defects, lower energy and water use, less transport, and less spoilage.
The future isn’t “lights-out” factories, it’s flexible, data-rich networks where humans and AI collaborate for resilience, speed, and lower carbon.
Why This Matters: Without connected data and continuous improvement, companies won’t just stay inefficient, they’ll stay blind to their true environmental footprint.
Kismet: Dag shared the wild story of Cadillac’s 7,000-mile “assembly line” for the Allanté - Detroit to Italy for bodywork, then flown back on 747s for final assembly. It’s a case study in waste so absurd it almost makes Excel look efficient. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Sherie Nelson, Senior Director of Responsibility & Wellness for Elior NA, and Ollie Taylor, Founder and Director of Marine Futures.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
TikToks!
As a bit of an experiment, I started publishing a series of one-minute Climate Myth Busting videos on TikTok in English and in Spanish.
Here’s an example of an English one
@tom.raftery Trump says renewables are a joke — too weak, too expensive. But Lazard’s 2025 data proves wind is 3¢/kWh, solar 4¢, hydro 5¢ — all cheaper... See more
And here’s the same one, this time in Spanish
@tom.raftery Trump dice que las renovables son un chiste — caras, débiles. Pero según Lazard 2025: eólica 3¢/kWh, solar 4¢, hidro 5¢ — todas más barata... See more
Featured Chart
As an Irish guy living in Spain, I gotta say the rates for Ireland are lower, and Spain are higher than I’d have honestly expected
Does correlation = causation after all? 😉
Misc stuff
You gotta sing along with this one!
Is this the world’s worst name for a urologist?
Poor Wilson - how quickly they forget!!!
Engage
If you made it this far, very well done! If you liked this newsletter, or learned something new, feel free to share this newsletter with family and friends. Encourage folks to sign up for it.
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! ***
And Finally
Is this what the chimps really thought of Jane Goodall? Gotta love Gary Larson!
