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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, and FutureProof is back.
This week, batteries get dramatically cheaper, electric trucks move into the mainstream, Australia keeps turning rooftops into power stations, and OpenAI gives AI an actual job.
Highlights this week:
The Stakes: Oceans absorb another record wallop of heat, Swiss glaciers keep disappearing, and El Niño-fuelled fires hit orangutan habitat in Indonesia.
Climate: Scientists use sound to lure coral back to damaged reefs, an autonomous vessel heads around Antarctica gathering climate data, and China’s climate strategy makes more sense once you decode the language.
AI: Timnit Gebru pushes back on AI-doom narratives, while OpenAI launches Dots, Anthropic rolls out Claude Sonnet 5.5, and Google unveils Gemini 4 Argon.
EVs: Electric driving keeps strengthening its cost advantage, while global electric-truck sales jump 75% and China starts electrifying heavy freight at serious scale.
Clean energy: Australia hits 80% wind and solar, European heat-pump sales rebound as electricity taxes fall, and grid-battery costs drop 45% in a year.
This edition, like last week’s, is in association with Attio. Not sure if it is a coincidence, but I also started using Attio myself this week - on the free plan, and for my first-ever proper attempt at using a CRM, and I have to say, I’m impressed. No-one is paying me to say this btw!
If anyone’s curious about how I’m finding it, feel free to get in touch.
Plenty happening. Let’s get into it.
Interestingly, the common thread this week is economics. Batteries, EVs, heat pumps and renewables are increasingly winning because they’re cheaper, less volatile and easier to scale, which is usually a much more powerful force than asking people to do the right thing.
The Stakes
The Climate System Is Sending Receipts
This week’s climate ledger is grimly consistent: the oceans absorbed a record 23 zettajoules of heat last year - almost 40 times humanity’s annual energy use, while Switzerland lost another 5.5% of its glacier ice in 2026, taking five-year losses to nearly 20%. Meanwhile, a supercharged El Niño is helping turn Indonesia’s drained peatlands into tinder, pushing already endangered orangutans into an ecological emergency.
The oceans are taking the hit: They absorb roughly 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, but that buffering service comes with hotter seas, accelerating sea-level rise, acidification and widespread ecosystem damage.
The Alps are coming apart: Swiss glaciers have lost 19.4% of their ice since 2021, with scientists now seeing glaciers hollowed out by internal meltwater channels and literally collapsing from within.
Climate meets habitat destruction: Indonesian fires have reached habitat containing 52% of Borneo’s orangutan population, with thousands potentially killed, injured or displaced as drought, drained peatlands and land-clearing fires collide.
Why This Matters: Climate change rarely arrives as one dramatic event; it compounds existing vulnerabilities - hotter oceans, disappearing ice, degraded forests, until systems that once absorbed shocks start amplifying them instead.
Kismet: One Swiss glacier monitored in extraordinary detail since the 1950s has lost 99% of its area in just 20 years, a scientific record of a landscape effectively disappearing in real time. 👉 Links Inline
Climate
Scientists Are Playing Coral Reefs Music - And It’s Working
This is one of those gloriously odd ideas that sounds faintly ridiculous right up until the data arrives: scientists are playing recordings of healthy reefs through underwater speakers to persuade coral larvae to settle on damaged reefs. And it works, settlement rates tripled on average in field trials, with some sites seeing an eightfold increase.
Coral larvae can detect underwater sound and use the noisy “orchestra” of a healthy reef as a cue that they’ve found somewhere worth settling.
Dead or badly degraded reefs go quiet, so researchers are recreating those soundscapes acoustically to lure new coral back.
Scientists are combining the technique with heat-tolerant corals, relocation to cooler waters and beneficial bacteria as reefs face increasingly frequent marine heatwaves.
Why This Matters: Cutting emissions remains the only long-term answer, but techniques like acoustic restoration could buy badly damaged reefs something they desperately need in the meantime: time.
Kismet: Coral larvae are microscopic, drifting specks with no ears as we’d recognise them, yet somehow they can “listen” to an entire underwater ecosystem and use its soundtrack to decide where to build a home. 👉 Full story here
This Solar-Powered Ocean Drone Is Circumnavigating Antarctica for Climate Science
I love this: a seven-metre autonomous vessel has set off on a 22,000km lap of Antarctica, powered by wind and solar, gathering climate data from some of the most hostile waters on Earth. It will spend up to nine months measuring how the Southern Ocean absorbs carbon, including through the polar winter, when crewed research ships rarely venture.
The Saildrone will measure CO₂ in the air and water alongside temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, wind and solar radiation.
Oceans absorb roughly one-third of human CO₂ emissions each year, with the Southern Ocean doing a disproportionately important share of the work.
This is the first of four autonomous vessels planned for the Southern, Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, dramatically extending the reach and duration of ocean monitoring without burning shiploads of fuel.
Why This Matters: If warming oceans start absorbing less of our CO₂, atmospheric concentrations could rise faster, so knowing whether that enormous natural carbon sink is weakening is rather important.
Kismet: The little vessel met eight-metre waves and 35-knot winds almost immediately after launch; looks like Antarctica decided the equipment test should begin before anyone had time to get comfortable. 👉 Full story here
China’s Climate Strategy Makes More Sense Once You Learn the Language
China is simultaneously the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter and the manufacturing engine behind solar panels, batteries and EVs, so deciphering what Beijing actually means by phrases such as “dual carbon”, “build before breaking” and the “new three” matters rather more than your average glossary. Carbon Brief’s guide reveals a transition that is highly deliberate: expand clean-energy capacity first, tighten control over carbon second, and increasingly make low-carbon industries part of China’s core economic strategy.
China’s “dual-carbon” goals commit it to peak CO₂ emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality across greenhouse gases by 2060.
“Build before breaking” captures a crucial feature of Chinese energy policy: construct enough low-carbon energy before retiring the fossil system it replaces, explaining why enormous renewable deployment can coexist with continued coal investment.
Solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and new-energy vehicles are officially China’s “new three” export industries; their exports reached $148bn in 2023, while clean-energy technologies accounted for more than 10% of China’s GDP in 2024.
Why This Matters: What happens to China’s energy system affects global emissions, but what happens to China’s clean-tech industries increasingly determines how cheaply the rest of the planet can decarbonise.
Kismet: China is shifting from controlling how much energy its economy consumes to controlling carbon itself, and after 2030 its policy framework is intended to put a binding cap on total CO₂ emissions rather than merely improving emissions per unit of GDP.
👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Probably Isn’t Going to Kill Us All. It May Just Keep Making Very Human Messes
One of AI’s fiercest critics, Timnit Gebru, has a rather different take on the apocalypse narrative: she argues that talk of “existential risk” is distracting us from the harms already happening - environmental costs, labour exploitation, opaque training data, bias, copyright disputes and people placing far too much faith in systems that can still be confidently wrong.
Gebru argues that claims of near-mythical AI power can conveniently serve the commercial interests of the very companies making them, while shifting regulatory attention away from today’s measurable problems.
She rejects the idea that current large language models genuinely “reason” in a human sense, pointing instead to pattern-matching systems whose apparent intelligence can collapse when benchmarks are altered.
Her preferred remedies are rather less cinematic than saving civilisation from rogue superintelligence: transparency about training data, documentation, stronger labour protections and enforcing existing consumer and competition laws.
Why This Matters: The AI debate gets far more useful once we stop treating hypothetical machine gods as the only risk worth discussing and start governing the systems actually being deployed today.
Kismet: One of Gebru’s sharpest points is almost embarrassingly mundane: while people debate superintelligence, hundreds of millions of humans are still manually labelling the data that makes supposedly autonomous AI possible. 👉 Full story here
OpenAI Gives AI a Job, Claude Gets Cheaper, and Gemini Goes Long
This week’s AI launches feel less like “new chatbot, slightly better benchmark” and more like a shift in what these systems are expected to do. OpenAI unveiled Dots, always-on agents that can work across thousands of apps; Anthropic made Claude Sonnet 5.5 dramatically faster and cheaper; and Google pushed Gemini 4 Argon deep into long-horizon coding, enterprise work and cybersecurity.
OpenAI’s Dots run on their own cloud computers, can connect to more than 4,000 apps, work across ChatGPT, Slack and Teams, and proactively handle tasks rather than waiting for prompts. They’re initially available on Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise plans in eligible markets — which, annoyingly for those of us in Europe, currently excludes the EEA.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and can cost up to 30% less per task, while coming close to Anthropic’s flagship Opus 5.5 on several real-world knowledge-work benchmarks. That price-performance curve is getting interesting very quickly.
Google’s Gemini 4 Argon pushes in another direction entirely: million-token outputs, long-running software engineering tasks, large codebase migrations, legal and financial work, and defensive cybersecurity. Internally, Google says Argon agents have already helped free hundreds of terabytes of data-centre memory.
Why This Matters: The AI race is moving from who has the cleverest chatbot to who can build systems that reliably complete substantial work - cheaply, persistently and with less babysitting.
Kismet: One OpenAI test user’s Dot noticed that he had forgotten to invoice a publication, prepared the invoice itself and sent it after approval, exactly the kind of tedious admin that could save self-employed people and small businesses enough time to justify the subscription. 👉 Links Inline
Electromobility
EVs Are Up to Nine Times Cheaper to Drive, and Electric Vans Can Save £2,400 a Year
I’ve been EV-only since 2018, so I’ve had years of anecdata telling me electric driving is dramatically cheaper, but the UK numbers are getting rather difficult to argue with. Carbon Brief calculates an EV charged overnight can cost just 2.3p per mile, versus roughly 20p for petrol or diesel, while Volkswagen says an electric van doing average mileage could cut annual fuel bills by about £2,400.
Petrol and diesel now cost roughly 20–21p per mile in the UK, while an EV on a cheap overnight tariff comes in at around 2.3p; even standard domestic electricity leaves EVs substantially cheaper.
Carbon Brief estimates the average UK EV driver is now saving around £1,200 a year on fuel compared with a petrol car.
For businesses, the gap can be even larger: Volkswagen calculates a van covering 13,190 miles a year could fall from roughly £2,770 in diesel to £369 in electricity - an 87% reduction, assuming access to cheap home or depot charging.
Why This Matters: EV economics are increasingly compelling for households and businesses alike, and every fossil-fuel price shock widens the operating-cost advantage of electrification.
Kismet: A van saving around £200 a month on energy costs starts turning electrification from an environmental decision into something finance departments can get enthusiastic about too. 👉 Full story here
The EV Revolution Has Reached 18-Wheelers too
Electric trucking is moving from pilot projects to proper scale. Global sales of medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks hit a record 158,000 in the first half of 2026, up 75% year-on-year, with China so far out in front that more than nine in ten electric trucks sold globally were bought there.
Electric trucks now account for over 40% of truck sales in China, as operators chase lower energy costs and protection from diesel-price shocks.
Adoption is spreading beyond China: electric trucks reached more than 10% of sales in Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, while Europe overall hit 5.5% in the first half of 2026.
The economics are becoming difficult to ignore. One Chinese driver says charging costs less than a third of what diesel used to, while one fleet operator expects to recover the higher purchase price of its electric HGVs in about two years.
Why This Matters: Heavy trucks burn enormous quantities of diesel, so electrifying freight cuts emissions, reduces exposure to volatile oil markets and starts chipping away at one of transport’s hardest-to-decarbonise sectors.
Kismet: China’s electric-truck boom is already big enough to affect national oil demand, Sinopec expects Chinese diesel consumption to fall by more than 10% this year, with truck electrification one of the forces driving that decline. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Australia’s Rooftops Are Quietly Becoming a Power Station
Australia has just pushed solar and wind to a record 80.4% of electricity demand on its main grid - with rooftop solar alone supplying more than half of all power for a spell around lunchtime. And households are still accelerating: rooftop installations jumped 35% in the first half of 2026, while home batteries are growing even faster.
More than 4.4 million Australian homes now have rooftop solar, out of roughly 11 million households.
Rooftop solar capacity has now overtaken the remaining capacity of Australia’s coal-fired power stations.
More than 250,000 home batteries were installed in the first half of 2026, up over 50% on the previous six months, helping shift daytime solar into evening demand.
Why This Matters: Australia is showing what happens when millions of households become generators, storage operators and eventually participants in a distributed power system rather than passive electricity consumers.
Kismet: Australia’s solar boom has reached the point where the problem on very sunny days is sometimes having too much electricity, with excess power being stored, curtailed or pushed into pumped hydro because the grid can’t always absorb it all.
👉 Full story here
Europe Is Discovering That Cheap Electricity Is an Energy Policy
Europe’s clean-energy transition is getting a useful reminder that economics beats exhortation: heat-pump sales rose 11% in the first half of 2026 as countries cut electricity taxes and fossil-fuel prices jumped, while Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg are now pushing the EU to lock in a 2040 renewables target to reduce dependence on imported energy.
Europeans bought 1.16 million heat pumps across 12 countries in the first half of the year, up from 1.05 million a year earlier, with lower electricity taxes helping adoption accelerate.
Germany now has heat pumps as its number-one newly installed heating technology, while countries where electricity remains heavily taxed relative to gas continue to lag.
Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg want the EU to set a formal 2040 renewables target, arguing that every fossil-fuel supply shock reinforces the case for producing more energy domestically from wind and solar.
Why This Matters: Electrification moves much faster when policy stops making electricity artificially expensive relative to fossil fuels, and Europe’s recent energy shocks are making that lesson increasingly hard to miss.
Kismet: In some European countries, electricity is still taxed so heavily that it costs four or five times as much as gas per unit of energy, essentially asking households to decarbonise while pricing the cleaner option out of reach. 👉 LinksInline
Energy Storage
Cheap Batteries Are Rewriting the Rules of Electricity
Grid batteries have moved from useful supporting act to one of the central technologies of the energy transition. Costs for large-scale battery packs fell 45% in a single year, global installed storage capacity is now 11 times higher than five years ago, and increasingly cheap storage is allowing wind and solar to deliver power long after the weather has stopped cooperating.
Large-scale battery installations are expected to grow another 40% this year, while China has built an extraordinary lead: Chinese manufacturers supply about 95% of the world’s grid-scale batteries.
The economics are beginning to redraw power markets. India recently procured 1GW of round-the-clock solar plus storage at a lower price than recent coal contracts, while a $6bn project in Abu Dhabi is being built to supply 1GW continuously from solar and batteries.
Battery technology itself keeps stretching: CATL has begun commercial deliveries of sodium-ion storage, while Envision has launched a system capable of providing up to 16 hours of power, versus roughly four hours for today’s standard lithium-ion systems.
Why This Matters: Cheap storage attacks one of the oldest arguments against renewables - that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and starts turning abundant variable electricity into dependable, around-the-clock power.
Kismet: China’s grid-battery capacity went from just 2.4GW in 2020 to more than 140GW by the end of 2025; that is less an adoption curve than a vertical take-off.
👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Stopping
Resilient Supply Chain:
You
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Kevin Vranes, Chief Product Officer of Worldly, and Scott Therien, Director of Strategic Partnerships for REC Solar.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
Petrol is expensive (diesel even moreso!) - Cause
EV sales are only going one direction - Effect
This is great to see!
As is this!
Misc stuff
Other names missing from here? I can think of Hilary, Valerie, Pat - Others?
Obligatory Trump Cartoon
Not a cartoon this time, but an example of Super Intelligence?
More cause and effect!
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
A nice moonrise photo I grabbed with my phone the other night in our neighbourhood!
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