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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, and FutureProof is back.
This week, Bloomberg’s oil columnist buys an EV, AI gets a $1.8 billion biology lab, South Australia closes in on 100% renewables, and climate science gets much better at assigning responsibility.
Highlights this week:
The Stakes: More than 34,600 heat deaths across Western Europe, climate shocks hitting girls and pregnancies hard, wildfire ash contaminating drinking water, and tropical forests absorbing less carbon.
Climate: Attribution science starts linking climate damage to individual fossil-fuel companies, while adaptation becomes a €500 billion industrial opportunity.
AI: A $1.8 billion push aims to build predictive models of biology, while Hark tries to give agentic AI its “Macintosh moment”.
EVs: Record European sales are being driven by high fuel prices and cheaper models, while electric trucks now beat diesel on cost in six major markets.
Clean energy: South Australia heads for 100% renewables, while Amazon communities replace diesel generators with solar and batteries.
Elsewhere: Coffee pods start losing the plastic.
Podcasts: Chris Zair on scaling enhanced rock weathering, and Patrick Van Hull on the hidden supply-chain risks buried in spreadsheets and workarounds.
Plenty happening. Let’s get into it.
Interestingly, the common thread this week is thresholds being crossed: EVs get cheaper, renewable grids stop looking experimental, carbon removal gets more financeable, climate damage gets more attributable, and AI starts moving beyond answers into action.
The Stakes
The Stakes: Climate Change Is Coming for Heat, Water, Pregnancy, Girls, and Forests
If anyone still needs a reminder that climate change isn’t one tidy environmental problem, this week supplied a fairly brutal one: record heat killed tens of thousands across Western Europe, wildfire ash poisoned drinking water in Spain, extreme heat is harming pregnancies, climate disasters are pushing more girls into child marriage and unintended pregnancy, and tropical forests are losing some of their ability to absorb our carbon. Climate risk increasingly looks less like a single crisis than a cascade of failures hitting health, water, ecosystems and society at the same time.
34,600+ heat deaths: Western Europe endured its hottest summer on record, with more than 34,600 heat-related deaths across five countries. Spain alone recorded 5,805 - its worst toll since monitoring began.
Human impacts spread far beyond temperature: Nearly three-quarters of maternity health workers surveyed across five countries reported rising heat-related complications in pregnant women, while a separate 50-country study linked climate shocks with increased child marriage, unintended pregnancy, violence and interrupted education for girls.
Nature’s safety net is weakening too: Heat, drought, wildfire smoke and ozone are reducing tropical forests’ ability to absorb CO₂. Meanwhile in Spain, heavy rain flushed wildfire ash into rivers and reservoirs, leaving communities dependent on emergency drinking water.
Why This Matters: Climate change is increasingly acting as a threat multiplier: it doesn’t simply make weather hotter or wetter, it pushes already-stressed health systems, communities and ecosystems closer to failure — often all at once.
Kismet: Amazon fires effectively hit the climate twice: they release CO₂ while burning, then ozone formed from their smoke damages surviving trees and reduces their subsequent carbon uptake by an amount equivalent to roughly 24% of the carbon released by the fires themselves. 👉 Links Inline
Climate
Climate Change Is Getting a Forensic Accountant
Attribution science is getting frighteningly good at answering the question fossil-fuel companies would rather keep fuzzy: who caused how much climate damage, and what did it cost? Researchers can now compare the real world with a counterfactual one without human-driven warming, then trace portions of the resulting damage back to specific corporate emissions, turning climate change from an abstract collective problem into something increasingly measurable, attributable and, crucially, litigable.
From weather to responsibility: Attribution models can estimate how much climate change increased the likelihood or severity of a heatwave, flood or other extreme event by comparing observations with a world stripped of human influence.
The numbers are getting very uncomfortable: One recent study estimated that emissions linked to the world’s top 111 fossil-fuel companies caused as much as $28 trillion in heatwave-related economic damage between 1991 and 2020.
The courtroom is the next frontier: More than 20 US municipal climate-damage cases are already under way, alongside state actions and the first wrongful-death lawsuit seeking to hold fossil-fuel companies liable for a death during an extreme heat event.
Why This Matters: Climate accountability changes dramatically once science can move the argument from “fossil fuels contributed to climate change” to “these emissions increased this damage by this much” - because that begins to look less like politics and rather more like evidence.
Kismet: The intellectual roots of modern attribution science trace back to a British climate scientist watching the Thames rise outside his house during a 2003 storm and wondering, essentially, “Could anyone ever be sued for this?” Two decades later, that speculative question is becoming an entire field of climate law. 👉 Full story here
It’s an Ill Wind: Climate Damage Becomes a €500 Billion Business
Europe’s worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires are creating an awkwardly large new growth market: Bloomberg Intelligence reckons EU and UK governments could spend around €500 billion over the next decade hardening infrastructure against climate impacts. The beneficiaries? Many of the same industrial firms already cashing in on AI and electrification because it seems like transformers, cooling systems and microgrids are having quite the decade.
Adaptation becomes industrial policy: Spending is shifting from cleaning up after disasters to reinforcing grids, buildings and critical infrastructure before they fail.
The technologies already exist: Microgrids, HVAC, backup power, building controls, underground cables and grid equipment can make hospitals, schools, homes and power networks substantially more resilient.
Investors have noticed: A basket of 64 European companies exposed to climate adaptation and mitigation has beaten the equal-weight Stoxx Europe 600 by an average 13 percentage points annually over the past five years.
Why This Matters: Climate adaptation is moving from worthy policy aspiration to a huge, investable industrial market - which should accelerate deployment even as the underlying reason for needing it remains thoroughly grim.
Kismet: Europe estimates it needs roughly €70 billion every year until 2050 for climate adaptation, yet of the EU Cohesion Fund’s €17.8 billion adaptation budget for 2021–26, only about €2.5 billion has actually been spent - the technology bottleneck may be less serious than the bureaucracy one. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Is Getting a $1.8 Billion Biology Lab
AI can already write code and generate video; now researchers want it to predict what living cells will do before anyone touches a pipette. Biohub, the US Department of Energy, NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Meta and others are committing $1.8 billion in funding, computing and measurement technology to create vast, open, AI-ready biological datasets, the raw material for models that could eventually simulate experiments digitally and accelerate disease research.
The data problem gets serious money: DOE is putting in more than $500 million over five years, while NIH is bringing datasets and infrastructure built through another $500 million-plus of previous investment.
Big AI joins big biology: Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are collectively investing $300 million through the Virtual Biology Initiative, while Biohub itself has committed $500 million.
The target is a virtual cell: Researchers ultimately want models sophisticated enough to predict how cells respond to drugs, genetic changes and other interventions - potentially eliminating huge numbers of slow, expensive laboratory experiments.
Why This Matters: The next big leap in AI may depend less on ever-larger language models than on creating entirely new scientific datasets, and if virtual biology works, drug discovery could become dramatically faster and more computational.
Kismet: Some of the new measurement systems involved can image millions to billions of cells in living tissue, while cryo-electron tomography can inspect structures inside cells at near-atomic resolution - biology is quietly generating the sort of training data AI researchers could previously only dream about. 👉 Full story here
Hark Wants to Replace the App Grid With an AI That Just Gets Things Done
Hark Pro has landed with a fairly audacious pitch: today’s chatbots are basically the command line, and what AI really needs is its Macintosh moment. The new interface mixes chat with proactive cards, personalised panels and cloud agents that can actually click through websites on your behalf - less “open app, tap buttons”, more “tell the computer what you want and let it get on with it”.
AI gets a GUI: Hark’s ex-Apple design lead Abidur Chowdhury argues that chatboxes are a primitive interface for AI, and wants Hark Pro to make agents feel more like an operating system than another chatbot.
It acts, not just answers: Hark’s “Handoff” system spins up cloud computers to perform tasks such as ordering food, checking into flights, handling approvals or researching services across multiple websites.
Proactive is the real bet: Connect email and other services and Hark starts surfacing actions before you ask - approvals waiting, receipts to upload, deliveries to authorise, parking to reserve and so on.
Why This Matters: If AI agents become reliable enough, the next big interface shift may be away from apps entirely - from humans learning software workflows to software learning what humans actually want done.
Kismet: Hark’s forthcoming hardware apparently won’t be a wearable, smart glasses or a humanoid robot, which rather delightfully leaves us with no clear idea what form its promised 2027 AI device will actually take. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Europe’s EV Boom Gets a Push From War, and Cheaper Cars
Europe’s EV market has suddenly found a potent combination: painfully expensive petrol and diesel, plus a wave of smaller, cheaper electric cars people actually want to buy. BEV sales hit record levels in 2026, and the shift is accelerating fast enough that even Bloomberg’s veteran oil columnist Javier Blas has just bought one - someone may need to go and defrost hell.
Sales are surging: 1.64 million BEVs were sold across the EU between January and August, up 45% year-on-year, while September’s BEV share hit a record 33% across 12 major European markets.
Affordability is finally improving: Nearly 40 new electric models launched in the first half of 2026, and sales of EVs starting below €25,000 are expected to be seven times higher than in 2024. Citroën is even reviving the 2CV as a sub-€15,000 EV.
War is making the economics harder to ignore: Diesel prices are up around 38% since the Iran war began, adding roughly €30 to a 50-litre fill. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné says high fuel prices are now actively “pushing customers to electrification”.
Why This Matters: EV adoption tends to accelerate when technology, policy and economics line up - and Europe now has all three, with cheaper cars arriving just as fossil-fuel volatility is making combustion more expensive.
Kismet: Blas’s own conclusion is more important than the anecdote: previous oil shocks permanently slowed oil-demand growth, and this one is arriving just as EVs are expected to reach roughly 29% of global car sales in 2026. 👉 Links Inline
Europe’s Electric Trucks Are Starting to Beat Diesel on Cost
China’s electric-truck boom has already shown what happens once battery trucks cross the economic threshold; Europe now looks poised to follow. A new analysis finds electric trucks already beat diesel on total cost of ownership in six of the EU’s nine biggest truck markets, with today’s diesel shock widening the gap sharply.
The economics have flipped in major markets: In the Netherlands, fleets could save up to €100,000 over five years by going electric; in Germany, up to €85,000.
Payback is getting surprisingly quick: In both countries, the higher upfront price of an electric truck can be recovered in roughly two years.
This is spreading fast: By 2030, electric trucks could be cheaper to operate than diesel in all nine markets studied, even as purchase subsidies are reduced.
Why This Matters: Freight decarbonisation accelerates dramatically once electric trucks stop being the cleaner option and become the cheaper one - particularly in an industry where fuel volatility goes straight through margins and into supply-chain costs.
Kismet: The competitive threat isn’t just diesel anymore: Chinese and US electric trucks are entering Europe at significantly lower purchase prices, meaning European truckmakers may find themselves squeezed from both directions at once. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
South Australia Quietly Wins the Energy Transition
A decade ago, critics warned South Australia’s renewables-heavy grid would collapse. Instead, renewables now supply around three-quarters of its electricity, the state is on track to exceed 100% renewable generation next year, the economy has kept growing, and wholesale power prices have remained broadly stable, which is pretty much the opposite of the catastrophe that was promised.
From 1% to 100% in two decades: Renewables are expected to go from roughly 1% of South Australia’s generation to more than 100% by the end of 2027, turning the state into a net exporter of clean electricity.
Storage changed the game: Grid batteries have gone from novelty to essential infrastructure, soaking up cheap solar and pushing power back onto the grid after sunset. Battery capacity in the state could soon overtake its remaining fossil-fuel generation.
The lights stayed on: Aside from a 2019 incident triggered by coal generator failures in neighbouring Victoria, there’s been no repeat of the blackout that critics once blamed on renewables.
Why This Matters: South Australia is no longer a theoretical case study in whether a highly renewable grid can work; it is increasingly a practical demonstration that it can, and that many of the loudest warnings were simply wrong.
Kismet: Solar is now so abundant that South Australian wholesale electricity prices have been negative for almost a third of daylight hours, and households can sign up for tariffs offering three free hours of electricity a day. 👉 Full story here
Solar Is Quietly Replacing Diesel Deep in the Amazon
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, communities that once depended on noisy, expensive diesel generators are switching to solar and batteries, and the benefits go well beyond cleaner electricity. In Nova Sociedade, solar now pumps drinking water for 36 families, while elsewhere it is powering clinics, schools, refrigeration and local businesses just as another El Niño threatens to bring severe drought.
Off-grid solar is scaling fast: Remote Amazon systems rose from just 105 in 2020 to more than 100,000 by 2026, with nearly all of them solar.
The gains are very practical: Solar is refrigerating vaccines, enabling telemedicine, keeping fresh food in schools, powering water pumps and preventing harvested açaí from spoiling.
It replaces a particularly bad incumbent: Many communities relied on diesel that had to be transported for hours by boat, was expensive, polluting and often only supplied electricity for part of the day.
Why This Matters: In remote regions, clean energy is increasingly less about abstract decarbonisation and more about resilience, health, water security and economic opportunity - exactly where climate impacts are already biting hardest.
Kismet: At one Amazon school, the biggest change wasn’t lower emissions or cheaper power. It was silence: once the diesel generator disappeared, the principal said they could finally hear the children and the birds. 👉 Full story here
Misc
Coffee Pods Lose the Plastic, Finally
I’m still firmly in the “grind the beans directly and skip the pod entirely” camp, but for people who value the convenience, and blessed quiet, of pod coffee, Keurig has come up with a far less guilt-inducing option. Its new AltaRounds are compressed coffee pucks wrapped in a seaweed-derived coating, with no plastic or aluminium capsule left behind.
They really are compostable: Keurig says AltaRounds can go straight into home compost, disintegrating within 12–16 weeks and fully biodegrading within six months.
That tackles a vast waste stream: More than 20 billion coffee pods are thrown away globally every year, while conventional recycling systems struggle with their tiny plastic and aluminium packaging.
There is one catch: You’ll need a new Keurig Alta machine, initially priced at around $500 - so reducing your waste seems to still requires buying another appliance, dammit!
Why This Matters: Single-use convenience isn’t going away, so redesigning disposable products so that the waste disappears harmlessly is far more useful than pretending everyone will suddenly give them up.
Kismet: Keurig didn’t actually invent the clever bit: it is licensing the seaweed-based coating technology from Switzerland’s CoffeeB, which has already been selling similarly naked little coffee balls without conventional capsules. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Can Crushed Rock Really Remove Billions of Tonnes of CO₂?
On this week’s Climate Confident, I spoke with Chris Zair, Director of Partnerships at UNDO, about enhanced rock weathering - spreading finely crushed silicate rock on farmland so natural weathering locks atmospheric CO₂ away for thousands of years. The chemistry is well understood; the fascinating problem now is proving, measuring and financing removal reliably enough to take it from clever science to something that can operate at climate scale.
Measurement is the bottleneck: Enhanced rock weathering happens in messy, open soils, and MRV can account for roughly half the cost of a project. UNDO’s new SAT-C sampling approach aims to make measurement repeatable across different soils, climates and field conditions.
The scale could be enormous: Depending on the rock, roughly 2–8 tonnes of silicate rock can ultimately remove a tonne of CO₂, and estimates put the theoretical global potential of enhanced rock weathering at around 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually.
Finance follows proof: More than 20,000 enhanced-rock-weathering credits have now been verified, and UNDO has begun securing debt finance against future carbon-removal contracts, an important shift from experimental science towards bankable infrastructure.
Why This Matters: Carbon removal will never reach gigatonne scale on chemistry alone; it needs credible measurement, repeatable operations and finance, and enhanced rock weathering is now beginning to assemble all three.
Kismet: UNDO worked with McLaren to develop a battery-powered soil auger for its measurement system sadly, Chris confirmed they have not yet thrown in any McLarens for the field teams to drive between farms. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Your Supply Chain Risk May Be Hiding in a Spreadsheet
On this week’s Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with Patrick Van Hull, whose career has taken him through Dell, Rio Tinto, Apple and CVS Health, about a surprisingly mundane source of fragility: documents, spreadsheets and manual workarounds. One inbound supply chain can involve 30+ documents, and if nobody really understands how those handoffs work, adding AI can simply automate the mess faster.
Workarounds quietly become infrastructure: An Excel file emailed back and forth with no audit trail or verification may start as a temporary fix, then become the process everyone depends on.
AI is not automatically the answer: Patrick’s test is simple: start with the outcome and the work itself, then decide whether the right tool is rules, RPA, machine learning, AI or something much simpler.
Frontline teams know where reality diverges from the process map: They understand the exceptions, manual fixes and “this is what we actually do when it breaks” behaviours that senior management often never sees.
Why This Matters: Supply-chain resilience depends as much on information flow as physical flow, and companies that automate broken workflows risk making failure faster, less visible and harder to unwind.
Kismet: Patrick’s favourite analogy for AI strategy is wonderfully brutal: asking “What should our AI strategy be?” is a bit like asking “What should our maths strategy be?” Useful tool, wrong starting question. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
El Niño is really heating up the sea - it is off the charts (literally, they had to redo the scale)
Renewables eating into the fossil fuel emissions
Handy chart - EV price vs range (shame it is missing a lot of EV models)
EV sales continuing their unstoppable rise
Misc stuff
Great to see EV sales increasing, as the grids are greening - win-win
I thought this was an interesting one. I’d live to know the story behind Greenland’s calling code though!
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.
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*** Be aware that any typos you find in this newsletter are tests to see who is paying attention! ***
And Finally
This one made me laugh!
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