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Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s FutureProof - your Thursday morning dose of tech, climate, and “did we all collectively miss the moment heavy-duty trucks went electric… overnight?”
COP30 is suddenly getting real: 82 countries are now pushing for an actual fossil-phaseout roadmap (only a decade late, but sure). And the Global South is sprinting ahead on clean energy so fast it’s making the “developed world” look like it’s buffering.
AI, meanwhile, went full arms race.
OpenAI quietly dropped GPT-5.1, Google fired back with Gemini 3, and NotebookLM got a brain transplant with Deep Research and proper file support. It’s chaos, but the productive kind.
Transport? Electrifying at warp speed.
China’s heavy-duty e-trucks are exploding in sales, EV battery-failure myths took another hammering, and Scotland repowered its first wind farm with 5× the capacity, recycling every blade along the way.
And science delivered a curveball:
Chinese researchers found a way to make plastics and rubber without fossil fuels. Yes, really.
Plus: this week’s Climate Confident dives into ecosystem restoration, and Resilient Supply Chain goes deep on Scope 3 reality in food systems.
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.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
82 Countries Just Told the Fossil Fuel Era to Pack Its Bags
I love this — at COP30, a wildly diverse coalition of 82 countries basically slapped a big “End of an Era” sign on fossil fuels and said, right, enough faffing about, let’s draw the actual map out of this mess. The U.S. didn’t show up (of course), but everyone from Sierra Leone to Ireland decided to push for a formal, global roadmap to phase out coal, oil, and gas - the closest thing yet to a coordinated exit plan from the biggest source of planetary trouble. You’d think this would be a no-brainer, right?
Key Highlights
82 nations from Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific demanded a concrete roadmap to ditch fossil fuels, a big escalation from the vague “transitioning away” pledge of 2023.
The U.S. is absent, now actively opposing fossil phase-downs after the shift in administration. That leaves a diplomatic vacuum others are clearly tired of tolerating.
Developing countries joined despite energy gaps, saying climate impacts already cost them more than fossil fuel expansion ever could, and that growth and climate action don’t have to be at war.
Why This Matters: A unified roadmap, even if hard-fought, turns the global fossil phaseout from a polite suggestion into something dangerously close to a norm.
Kismet: Vanuatu’s climate envoy backed the roadmap even while acknowledging Brazil is ramping up oil exploration, proof that political contradictions don’t stop climate diplomacy, but sometimes propel it. 👉 Full story here
The Global South Didn’t Wait — They Just Started Winning the Energy Transition
Bill McKibben’s latest is a glorious reality check: while rich countries sulk, stall, and generally behave like the energy transition is an optional group project they forgot to do, the developing world is, awkwardly for the “developed” world, racing ahead with record solar, wind, EVs, and grid-scale batteries. China is now holding emissions flat, Pakistan is drowning in cheap Chinese panels, India’s corporations are building polysilicon factories, Jordanian mechanics are turning “dead” EV batteries into solar-home storage, and parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are straight-up leapfrogging fossil fuels altogether. Meanwhile the U.S., led by Trump’s fossil-first relapse, is… shutting down climate science labs. Grim. Infuriating. But also wildly inspiring — because the rest of the world didn’t wait for permission.
Key Highlights
China’s renewables surge is now so massive it’s flattening national emissions, with 50 MW floating turbines, solar expansion on an industrial scale, and a renewables buildout “too vast for the human mind to grasp.”
Developing nations are leapfrogging fossil systems: Pakistan’s solar imports have exploded fivefold, India is building a polysilicon supply chain, Jordan is repurposing EV batteries for home storage, Brazil–Vietnam–Nigeria–Chile are electrifying faster than the West.
The rich world is backsliding: U.S. emissions are rising, methane is surging, NASA/NOAA climate monitoring is being dismantled, and half of all U.S. solar projects are endangered due to policy sabotage. Europe’s politics wobble, but Central Europe is quietly adding gigawatts of solar and storage.
Why This Matters: The world’s poorest nations, those who did the least to cause climate breakdown, are now proving the fastest path to prosperity is clean, cheap energy, leaving the “developed” world looking technologically sluggish and morally unserious.
Kismet: Jamaica’s rooftop solar users kept the lights, and fridges, on after a Category-5 hurricane flattened the grid, a quiet reminder that resilience often arrives long before political courage does 👉 Full story here
The Climate Playbook That Actually Works (And the One We Should Bin)
Every now and then, someone cuts through the noise with a list that isn’t hand-wringing, hydrogen-daydreaming, or “let’s wait for fusion” nonsense - and this week, Michael Barnard delivered exactly that. A proper, grown-up climate plan rooted in maths, engineering, and actual experience rather than vibes. Electrify everything. Overbuild renewables. Build grids that don’t wheeze like a Victorian radiator. Fix agriculture. And, my favourite, stop throwing money at tech that exists solely to keep fossil profits on life support.
Electrify absolutely everything because wasting 70–80% of your energy as heat is a mug’s game, and electricity turns that waste into ~15%.
Scale wind + solar like your life depends on it and yes, overbuild them; curtailment is a feature, not a bug.
Ignore the distractions SMRs, hydrogen-for-energy, and CCUS fantasy pipelines won’t save us; they only save the balance sheets of industries that should’ve bowed out years ago.
Why This Matters: This is the blueprint for a climate strategy that actually cuts emissions rather than simply lining lobbyists’ pockets.
Kismet: China has already reforested an area larger than France, while simultaneously building the world’s biggest HVDC grid, proving, awkwardly for the West, that scale and speed are choices, not miracles. 👉 Full story here
AI News
OpenAI Quietly Dropped GPT-5.1 — And It’s Shockingly Human
So OpenAI did that thing they do: casually whisper “small update” while dropping a model upgrade that basically rewires the conversational internet. GPT-5.1 is warmer, sharper, way better at following instructions, and now decides when to think hard versus firing back instantly, like a colleague who finally learned when to stop waffling. It’s rolling out first to paid users (of course), and the whole thing feels suspiciously like they’re edging us toward AI that behaves less like software and more like… an actual personality you tune like a radio.
Key Highlights
Two upgraded models - Instant and Thinking both now more conversational, more coherent, and better at sticking to the tone you set (Friendly, Professional, Candid, Quirky… the whole menu).
Adaptive reasoning lands in the “Instant” model, meaning it chooses when to think harder for complex queries, faster on the easy stuff, deeper on the gnarly bits. Big jump in maths + coding scores.
User-tunable personality settings let you adjust warmth, conciseness, structure, even emoji frequency, and changes now apply instantly across ongoing chats.
Why This Matters: OpenAI is inching toward AI that feels less like a tool and more like a configurable colleague, and that will reshape how millions of people work without even realising the ground is shifting beneath them.
Kismet: GPT-5.1’s new “Quirky” tone option exists because data showed a surprising percentage of users were already trying to teach their AI to be weird, apparently we humans can’t resist turning every new technology into a character. 👉 Full story here
Google Just Unleashed Gemini 3 — And It’s Their Loudest Swing at AGI Yet
Google clearly didn’t fancy letting OpenAI hog the week: Gemini 3 landed with the subtlety of a stadium firework, pitched as Google’s “most intelligent model ever,” and, depending on who you ask, their closest shot at AGI so far. This thing tops benchmarks across reasoning, maths, multimodal understanding, long-horizon planning, and, awkwardly for everyone else, “vibe coding.” And Google didn’t just launch a model, they launched an ecosystem: Search, Workspace, Cloud, developers, and even a new agentic platform called Antigravity. It’s Gemini everywhere, all at once.
Key Highlights
State-of-the-art across nearly every benchmark, including a breakthrough 1501 Elo on LMArena and PhD-level scores on Humanity’s Last Exam and GPQA Diamond (page 3). Gemini 3 Deep Think goes even higher.
Fully multimodal + deeply agentic, able to code apps, plan year-long tasks, navigate browsers, and handle multi-step workflows like inbox triage or booking services, via the new Gemini Agent.
Developer ecosystem overhaul, with Google launching Antigravity, a platform where agents literally operate your editor, terminal, and browser concurrently to build end-to-end software. This is full-fat autonomous coding.
Why This Matters: Gemini 3 isn’t just a model upgrade, it’s Google baking AI deeper into Search, Android, Workspace, and developer workflows, signalling an open declaration of the next phase of the AI arms race: agentic automation at planetary scale.
Kismet: Gemini 3 can analyse your pickleball form from video and generate a personalised training plan, proof that AGI might arrive not with a bang, but with unsolicited racket-sports coaching. 👉 Full story here
NotebookLM Just Grew a Brain: Deep Research + Docx + Sheets = Actual Superpowers
If you use Google’s NotebookLM, this week’s update is a proper leap. They’ve added Deep Research, which is basically a tireless research assistant that inhales hundreds of pages across the web, builds a structured briefing, cites everything, and then drops it straight into your notebook so you can keep working while it rummages away in the background. And, finally, NotebookLM escapes its PDF bubble: you can now pull in Sheets, Word docs, Drive URLs, images, and more. It’s edging closer to an actual research OS.
Key Highlights
Deep Research mode runs multi-step searches, creates a research plan, parses hundreds of sources, and produces a grounded report you can immediately import and build on.
Support for real-world file types now includes Sheets, Word (.docx), Drive URLs, images, and PDFs directly from Drive, no more downloading + re-uploading.
Runs in the background, letting you continue adding sources and generating Audio/Video overviews while it assembles your knowledge base.
Why This Matters: NotebookLM is quietly becoming the research companion academics, analysts, and journalists always wanted, but could never afford to hire.
Kismet: Deep Research can translate handwritten notes from an uploaded photo, meaning your messy meeting scribbles can now graduate into structured intelligence without shame. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Another Week, Another Study Proving EV Batteries Basically Don’t Die
Yet again, the data refuses to play along with the doomers. Recurrent’s latest battery-health analysis shows that modern EV packs almost never fail - like, statistically-irrelevant never. Across EVs sold since 2022, only 0.3% of batteries have been replaced outside major recalls. And from Gen-2 EVs onward (think Bolts, early Model 3s), replacements are almost exclusively down to manufacturer defects, not degradation. Translation: your EV battery is far more reliable than your phone, your laptop, or let’s be honest, most carmakers’ PR teams.
Key Highlights
Fewer than 4% of owners in Recurrent’s dataset have ever had a battery replaced, excluding recall-related swaps.
Generation matters: 2011–2016 EVs had an 8.5% replacement rate due to weaker thermal management, but for 2022+ EVs that number collapses to 0.3%.
Modern packs last 15+ years, with robust thermal systems, automatic preconditioning, and far better cell chemistry, and replacements (when needed) are increasingly cheap or warranty-covered.
Why This Matters: The “EV batteries don’t last” myth is collapsing under real-world data, and that’s huge for adoption, resale confidence, and killing off the last excuse fossil-era dealers cling to.
Kismet: One EV tech in the comments reported a remanufactured battery replacement cost just $2,000, shocking even the workshop, a sign of how fast pack repair economics are shifting. 👉 Full story here
China’s Truck Fleet Just Went Electric, And Global Diesel Demand Felt a Shiver
Heavy-duty transport, the bit everyone claimed was “too hard” to electrify and would use hydrogen, is flipping faster than anyone predicted. China’s electric truck sales have exploded from 9% in early 2024 to 22% in early 2025, with forecasts hitting 46% this year and 60% next. That’s not a trend line; that’s a cliff dive for diesel demand, and LNG isn’t faring much better. When the world’s second-largest trucking fleet electrifies at speed, global fuel markets notice, and panic slightly.
Key Highlights
Electric trucks already outsell LNG trucks, and diesel consumption in China fell 11% year-on-year, the largest drop since 2021, partly driven by the surge in e-trucks.
Cost crossover is arriving early: despite higher sticker prices, e-trucks save 10–26% over their lifetime thanks to efficiency and much cheaper energy.
China’s scaling machine is running hot: CATL is rolling out a 150,000-km battery-swap network for trucks, major cities are installing heavy-duty chargers, and exports of Chinese heavy-duty EVs are skyrocketing, up 73% annually to MENA and 46% to Latin America.
Why This Matters: The hardest-to-decarbonise sector just found its tipping point, and the ripple effects on global diesel, LNG, and trucking incumbents will be seismic.
Kismet: Rhodium Group estimates China’s electric trucks are already cutting oil demand by over a million barrels per day, more than the entire oil consumption of Belgium. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Three Climate Promises. Nearly 1°C of Avoided Heating. No New Tech Needed.
This one is almost maddeningly hopeful: according to fresh analysis at COP30, if countries simply did what they already promised, tripling renewables, doubling energy efficiency, and slashing methane, we’d shave 0.9°C off future warming. Nearly a full degree saved just by keeping our word. That alone would drag projected heating down from 2.6°C to roughly 1.7°C, putting 1.5°C back within touching distance. No miracle breakthroughs, no sci-fi carbon unicorns, just implementation. But that’s also the hard part.
Key Highlights
G20 action alone cuts 18bn tonnes of emissions by 2035, slowing warming by a third this decade and halving it by 2040.
Renewables are already booming China is surging, India hit its 2030 targets five years early, and global clean-energy investment topped $2tn last year (more than double fossil fuels).
Methane is the sticking point despite 150+ governments backing cuts, emissions keep rising due to underreporting and lax controls from the US, Russia, and China.
Why This Matters: The world doesn’t need new pledges, it needs action on the ones already signed; tripling renewables and doubling efficiency alone would force a rapid, irreversible decline in fossil fuel use by the mid-2030s.
Kismet: India’s early achievement of its renewable targets means one of the world’s largest coal users is now five years ahead of schedule in the race to ditch fossil fuels, a plot twist even seasoned analysts didn’t see coming. 👉 Full story here
Scotland’s First Wind Farm Just Got a Sequel — 5× the Power, Zero Waste
This is the kind of renewable story that makes the anti-wind brigade look like they’ve been shouting at clouds. Scotland’s first commercial wind farm, Hagshaw Hill, has been fully repowered after 30 years: the old 26 turbines are gone, replaced with just 14 modern turbines delivering five times the capacity, 79 MW, on the same hillside. And the best part? Every single original blade has been recycled into new construction materials instead of ending up in landfill.
Key Highlights
Repowering transforms the site from 16 MW to 79 MW, delivering far more energy with far fewer turbines.
All original blades recycled through Irish firm Plaswire, turning 1990s fibreglass into new low-carbon construction products, a direct rebuttal to wind turbine waste myths.
Community benefits amplified 26×, with nearly £400,000 per year now flowing into local towns for facilities, jobs, and long-term projects.
Why This Matters: Repowering isn’t just an upgrade, it’s proof that wind infrastructure matures like fine whiskey: more output, less footprint, and a circular economy baked straight into the process.
Kismet: The original 1995 blades will now literally become building materials, meaning those first-generation turbines will keep shaping Scotland’s landscape long after their bolts retired. 👉 Full story here
Science
A Fossil-Free Future for Plastic? Chinese Scientists Just Cracked the Chemistry
This is a properly big one: researchers in China have figured out how to make the building blocks of plastic and rubber, olefins, without using petroleum at all. Instead, they’ve engineered an iron-based catalyst that turns syngas (a mix of hydrogen + carbon monoxide from biomass, organic waste, or even coal) into olefins with nearly 50% higher efficiency than the best existing alternatives. And they do it by recycling the reaction’s own water by-product into more hydrogen, creating a tight little chemical loop that slashes waste, steam use, and CO₂ emissions.
Key Highlights
Iron-based catalyst boosts olefin production by ~50%, beating previous syngas-to-plastic attempts that lost efficiency through wasted hydrogen.
Hydrogen Atom Economy jumps dramatically, because the catalyst turns water by-product back into usable hydrogen, a closed-loop trick that cuts waste by 46%.
Process reduces steam, wastewater, and CO₂ emissions, offering an industrial pathway to plastics without needing petroleum feedstock.
Why This Matters: Plastics account for roughly 5%–7% of global oil demand, so a fossil-free route to core polymers could kneecap one of the petrochemical industry’s final strongholds.
Kismet: The catalyst ran continuously for 500 hours without degradation, an early sign this might not just be a lab curiosity, but a genuine industrial contender. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
The Most Messy Supply Chain on Earth Just Found a Way to Fix Scope 3
I wrote this after watching a neighbour in the hills near Seville flip through a paper notebook that basically was his farm’s data system, and realising most global supply chains aren’t that different. The whole post argues one thing: food companies are cracking Scope 3 in the hardest possible environment (millions of tiny, analogue suppliers), and the playbook they’re using is the one every other sector will eventually copy.
Key Highlights
Scope 3 is 70–95% of emissions in food, but most farm data sits in paper logs, local drives, or nowhere at all, making corporate reporting dangerously fictional.
eAgronom shows the future: machine-level data, satellite imagery, soil sampling, telemetry, anomaly detection, all stitched into verified, auditable upstream emissions data.
Incentives are the unlock: farmers only participate when they benefit, outcome payments, practice payments, lower reporting burdens, agronomy support; this logic will spread to cotton, steel, semiconductors, chemicals, and beyond.
Why This Matters: Food brands are inadvertently building the global blueprint for verifiable Scope 3 - digital, intermediated, incentive-aligned, and scalable across every industry.
Kismet: This post notes that eAgronom’s system could boost global agricultural emissions-reporting accuracy by up to 70%, simply by replacing guesswork with actual primary (machine) data. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Stopping Warming Isn’t Enough - Chad Frischmann Says We Need to Reverse It
This week’s Climate Confident episode goes straight for the jugular: Chad Frischmann, co-creator of Project Drawdown and one of the most compelling regenerative-systems thinkers, argues that climate action has lost the plot by obsessing over emissions cuts alone. His message is blunt and refreshing: we must eliminate emissions and supercharge ecosystems, or we don’t get a stable planet. And the best bit? These same solutions create healthier societies, stronger economies, and more resilient communities, the kind of cascading benefits policymakers keep wilfully ignoring.
Key Highlights
Stopping emissions is only half the job: the other half is restoring ecosystems so the natural carbon cycle can start doing real work again. Otherwise we’re sprinting with one leg.
Regenerative systems are not niche: they’re the blueprint for safer food, distributed clean energy, healthier communities, and long-term prosperity. Every sector has a regenerative path if it chooses to see it.
Entrenched interests remain the biggest blocker: not technology, not affordability, not public support; just a tiny group of incumbents clinging to quarterly profits over long-term survival.
Why This Matters: Chad reframes climate action as a systems redesign challenge, one where every solution generates multiple wins across health, livelihoods, biodiversity, and resilience, not just carbon.
Kismet: At one point Chad says he’d pick Gandalf as the global champion of regeneration, because the world desperately needs more leaders committed to destroying the “one ring” of extractive power rather than wielding it. And honestly, I love that. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
You Can’t Build a Resilient Supply Chain If the Soil Is Falling Apart
This week’s episode goes right to the root of resilience (see what I did there?). I sat down with Rhyannon Galea and Kristjan Luha from eAgronom, who are helping thousands of European farmers shift to regenerative agriculture and generate the primary, verifiable Scope 3 data food companies desperately need but can’t currently see. Their message is blunt: 70–95% of food-sector emissions live on farms companies don’t own, can’t trace, and haven’t engaged, and that’s exactly where climate resilience begins.
Key Highlights
Scope 3 in food is a monster: vast, opaque, multi-tiered, and often based on shaky averages because companies literally don’t know which farms supply them. eAgronom is fixing this with traceability, machine data, and farm-level digital twins.
Regenerative practices aren’t a vibe, they’re measurable: reduced tillage, soil cover, diversified rotations, and better soil carbon = higher water retention, improved yields, and genuine climate resilience in a world of violent weather swings.
Farmers only do this if they benefit: knowledge transfer, practice-based payments, outcome payments, and even future price premiums for low-emission crops. Incentives are the real unlock.
Why This Matters: Food-sector emissions are unmanageable without primary farm data, and regenerative agriculture is transforming resilience, profitability, and carbon outcomes at the same time.
Kismet: eAgronom’s enrolled farms are on track to sequester over 1 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, a number big enough to rival the yearly emissions of some small European countries.
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)
I mean, not much to say about this one, is there?
The rate of EV adoption is growing, but some countries still have a looooooong way to go - I’m especially looking at you Bulgaria - like wth dude?
Way to go Portugal 👏
Misc stuff
I can’t remember if I posted this one before, but it is really excellent, and if I did, enjoy it again!
Did Dr Pepper lose their licence?
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! ***
And Finally
The CIA has a sense of humour?
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