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Hey everyone, hope you’re well and running on something stronger than good intentions, because this week’s FutureProof arrived like it was late for its own meeting.
Climate policy lurched forward, AI levelled up again, EV momentum kept compounding, and clean energy pulled off several “wait… they did what?” moments.
The through-line? The transition isn’t creeping, it’s accelerating in places that used to drag their heels.
The big three:
Europe locked in a 2040 climate target that finally gives investors long-horizon certainty.
AI scaled from lab tools to population-level science, and into your glasses (eek!).
EVs surged globally while grid-scale batteries broke new records in Australia.
And that’s only the high-altitude view. Below we’ve got Zimbabwe floating solar on Lake Kariba, agrivoltaics boosting harvests, EV drivers refusing to go back to petrol, and China’s first-time buyers stampeding toward electric.
Plus supply chains drowning in paperwork, AI swooping in to fix it, and a website redesign on my end that turned “quick update” into a full architectural rebuild.
As ever, FutureProof is here to distil the noise into one clear message: the future didn’t ask for permission, it turned up locked and loaded.
Let’s get into it.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
Europe Finally Pulls the Climate Handbrake — A 90% Cut by 2040(!)
The EU has actually agreed to slash emissions 90% by 2040, a jaw-tightening number that feels like Brussels waking up after far too many snoozed alarms and saying, “Right, no more faffing about.” Sure, they softened it with a 5% drizzle of foreign carbon credits, but even so, this is one of the most audacious climate targets of any major economy, full stop . And critically, by planting a clear 2040 flag in the ground, Europe has just handed businesses and investors what they crave most: predictability. Direction of travel is no longer up for debate, capital can actually plan.
Key Highlights
A legally binding 90% emissions cut by 2040, with 85% required domestically and the final 5% covered via carbon credits abroad.
Months of political trench warfare finally yielded compromise between ambition (Spain, Netherlands, Sweden) and caution (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary).
Brussels delayed the new carbon price on fuels until 2028 to ease competitiveness concerns and get reluctant states on board.
Why This Matters: Because with a fixed 2040 target now locked in, Europe has provided the regulatory stability investors need to move billions into clean tech, energy, and infrastructure without wondering if the rug will be pulled next election cycle.
Kismet: The last time the EU set a long-term climate goal - the 2050 net-zero target, European clean-tech investment jumped by over 40% in the following three years, a reminder that certainty alone can be a climate accelerant. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Just Built 300,000 Virtual Cancer Patients - and My Jaw Is Still on the Floor
Microsoft’s new GigaTIME AI model can take an ordinary €10 pathology slide and conjure a virtual immunofluorescence twin packed with rich cellular detail that normally costs thousands to obtain - and then it scales that magic across 14,256 real patients to generate a virtual population of 300,000 tumour microenvironment maps. Precision oncology just went from “elite lab toy” to “finally scalable” overnight .
Key Highlights
GigaTIME translates cheap, routine H&E slides into high-resolution virtual mIF images across 21 protein channels, trained on 40 million cells.
Applied across Providence’s network, the model uncovered 1,234 statistically significant links between immune-cell behaviour and clinical biomarkers, many previously unknown.
External validation with 10,200 TCGA patients showed strong concordance, proving this isn’t a one-off lab curiosity - it generalises.
Why This Matters: Because scaling precision oncology research from hundreds of samples to hundreds of thousands is how we unlock therapies that actually work for real populations, not just well-funded trials.
Kismet: One of the quirks discovered: combining certain protein channels (like PD-L1 with Caspase-3) produced far stronger biomarker associations than analysing them separately - meaning AI is now spotting cooperative biological behaviours humans didn’t even know to look for. 👉 Full story here
Enterprise AI Has Officially Entered Its “Stop Messing Around” Phase
OpenAI’s new State of Enterprise AI report basically confirms what many of us suspected: companies aren’t dabbling anymore - they’re hard-wiring AI into the pipes of their business. Messaging volume is exploding, workers are saving nearly an hour a day, and the gap between AI-mature firms and everyone else is starting to look dangerously like the early days of cloud adoption all over again .
Key Highlights
Weekly ChatGPT Enterprise messages jumped 8×, and Custom GPT usage surged 19×, signalling that AI is now baked into repeatable workflows, not just ad-hoc prompts.
Workers report saving 40–60 minutes a day, with 75% saying the quality and speed of their work improved; coding tasks outside engineering grew 36%.
A yawning divide is opening: “frontier workers” send 6× more messages and extract far greater productivity gains, while frontier firms embed AI so deeply they generate 7× more messages to GPTs than their peers.
Why This Matters: Because the companies that treat AI as infrastructure - not novelty, are about to outpace competitors on productivity, product velocity, and customer experience in ways that will be brutal to catch up with.
Kismet: The report notes that OpenAI now releases a new capability every three days, meaning most organisations are already behind simply due to the speed of innovation - a reminder that AI-readiness is now a strategy, not an experiment.
👉 Full story here
Google Glass Is Back From the Dead - And This Time It Might Actually Matter
Yes, Google is really bringing smart glasses back in 2026. And unlike the original sci-fi fever dream, these new AI-powered specs are aimed squarely at the territory Meta has been quietly dominating: wearable AI assistants people actually use in public without shame. Google’s rolling out both audio-only Gemini glasses and in-lens display versions that show navigation, translations, and more — all built on Android XR and co-designed with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker .
Key Highlights
Google plans to launch its first AI glasses in 2026, with audio-only and display-equipped models - a direct challenge to Meta’s Ray-Ban success.
Hardware partners include Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker, signalling a push toward mainstream fashion rather than tech-geek nostalgia.
Sergey Brin claims the previous Google Glass failed partly due to immature AI and supply-chain limits - problems Google says it has now solved. Meta, meanwhile, has already proven demand with its surprisingly popular EssilorLuxottica-designed glasses.
Why This Matters: Because Google re-entering the wearables arena puts real competitive pressure on Meta - and accelerates the shift from “AI on your phone” to “AI on your face,” which is where the next big consumer platform battle will be fought.
Kismet: Buried in the announcement: Google also updated its Galaxy XR headset to work in planes and cars, meaning the company is literally prepping AI hardware for the moment we decide screens should follow us everywhere. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
EV Drivers Are Holding Firm - 97% Will Never Go Back
This one hits close to home for me. I knew within days of getting my first EV back in 2018 - charging it at home, powered by my own solar, that I would never go back to a fossil fuel car. Turns out, I wasn’t exactly an outlier. Zapmap’s latest survey of nearly 4,000 EV drivers shows 88% are satisfied with their car, and only 3% say they’d return to petrol. That number hasn’t budged in years because once you’ve driven electric, the idea of going back feels like reverting to dial-up Internet .
Key Highlights
88% of EV drivers are happy with their car - slightly higher than last year, and just 3% say they’d switch back to ICE.
Satisfaction with public charging has improved too, hitting 69/100, with 60% saying charging has gotten better thanks to more chargers and better reliability. (Over 13,000 new devices added since late 2024.)
The share of drivers using rapid charging hubs has doubled since 2022, rising from 34% to 70%, with giants like InstaVolt and Gridserve now becoming the preferred networks.
Why This Matters: Because real-world sentiment - not social-media noise, shows EV adoption is sticky: people who switch overwhelmingly stay, and growing confidence in the charging network accelerates the virtuous cycle.
Kismet: A detail buried in the survey: 70% of EV owners cite performance as a key reason for buying electric, up from 65% last year - proving the quiet truth that many come for the climate, but stay for the torque. 👉 Full story here
China’s First-Time Car Buyers Are Jumping Straight to EVs - And in Huge Numbers
China’s car market just sent a massive signal to the rest of the world: new drivers don’t want petrol; they want battery power. Bloomberg Intelligence’s latest survey shows 47% of first-time buyers plan to choose an EV, up from just 25% in February, a doubling in less than a year. And across all drivers, 52% say their next car will be electric. This isn’t a trend line; it’s a landslide .
Key Highlights
47% of first-time buyers now prefer a BEV, a jump from 25% earlier this year, driven by affordability, model diversity, and better charging.
For existing owners, 52% say their next car will be battery-powered, up from 34% in February, a stunning shift in replacement cycles.
China has already hit price parity between EVs and petrol cars, with tech-led brands like Huawei and Xiaomi giving local incumbents a sharp competitive edge.
Why This Matters: Because China - the world’s largest car market, is showing what happens when EVs are affordable, abundant, and fast to charge: first-time buyers skip fossil fuels entirely.
Kismet: BYD’s newest battery delivers 400 km of range in five minutes of charging, and CATL’s upgraded Shenxing cell hits 520 km in the same time, numbers that quietly erase the concept of “range anxiety” from EV vocabulary. 👉 Full story here
Germany May Have Just Unlocked the Battery That Makes Today’s EVs Look… Basic
Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute in Dresden have unveiled a solid-state lithium-sulfur battery that could make current lithium-ion packs feel like steam engines. Early lab tests are already clearing 600 Wh/kg, a staggering leap beyond today’s EV cells (a typical modern EV battery is roughly 180–280 Wh/kg, depending on chemistry), and if this scales, we’re suddenly talking about cars that drive twice as far, weigh less, cost less, and rely on cheap, abundant sulfur instead of complex nickel-manganese chemistry .
Key Highlights
Fraunhofer’s new Li-S design replaces unstable liquid electrolytes with solid materials, solving the long-standing polysulfide degradation problem.
Researchers have already exceeded 600 Wh/kg in the lab and are targeting ~550 Wh/kg commercially at under $86/kWh - a combination that would transform EV affordability.
The team used DRYtraec, a solvent-free manufacturing process that cuts production energy by 30% and fits existing lithium-ion production lines, meaning auto industry adoption could be far quicker than past battery breakthroughs.
Why This Matters: Because this isn’t just a new battery - it’s a pathway to EVs with long-haul range, lower costs, lighter bodies, safer chemistries, and dramatically reduced upstream emissions.
Kismet: The researchers note the same battery architecture could eventually power cars, drones, aircraft, and even portable devices - hinting that the “EV battery breakthrough” might end up rewriting far more than transport. 👉 Full story here
The Big EV Road Damage Myth? Completely Wrong, Says Modern Engineering
For years we’ve heard the tired refrain that EVs “damage roads more” because they weigh a few hundred kilos more than petrol cars. CleanTechnica’s deep dive absolutely torpedoes that idea - showing that modern pavement engineering simply doesn’t care about the weight differences between light-duty vehicles. The real culprits in road wear? Heavy trucks, dynamic tyre forces, pavement roughness, axle configuration, and environmental conditions, not whether your family car has a battery pack .
Key Highlights
The famous “Fourth Power Law” - often weaponised against EVs, came from a flawed 1950s Illinois test and does not hold for today’s roads or vehicles. Modern research (e.g., David Cebon, Cambridge) shows EV-vs-ICE weight differences are irrelevant at the pavement level.
Michigan allows 164,000-lb (74-ton) trucks, yet its highways don’t collapse, proving that axle configuration, dynamic loads, and pavement design matter far more than vehicle mass.
The real societal cost gap? ICE cars impose ~3× higher external costs (pollution, climate, health) than EVs, and fuel taxes don’t remotely pay for road upkeep. Roads are funded mostly from general taxation and tolls.
Why This Matters: Because policy should be based on physics, not vibes - and the physics say EVs don’t meaningfully damage roads, but they do eliminate tailpipe pollution and slash societal costs.
Kismet: China has already taken acceleration risk seriously by governing EVs to a 0–100 km/h default of five seconds unless drivers opt in to faster modes, a reminder that smart policy targets actual risk (speed + mass), not imaginary ones. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
The UK’s Grid Operator Just Said the Quiet Part Loud: Net-Zero Is the Cheapest Path
The UK’s National Energy System Operator has run the numbers - all the numbers, across investment, imports, climate damages, fuel prices, and system operations, and their conclusion is refreshingly blunt: the UK saves £36bn a year by actually hitting net-zero, compared to slowing down. That’s 1% of GDP back in the national pocket, not through magical thinking but through less fossil fuel, fewer climate disasters, and smarter domestic investment. “Falling behind” isn’t fiscally conservative, it’s fiscally reckless .
Key Highlights
NESO’s holistic transition (the net-zero-aligned pathway) is the lowest-cost scenario, saving £36bn per year versus a slower pathway, mainly from reduced fuel costs and avoided climate damages.
Even though the net-zero pathway requires upfront investment - especially in renewables, electrified heating, and grid upgrades, the total UK energy spend falls from 10% of GDP today to ~5% by 2050 across all scenarios. Net-zero simply does it cheaper.
Under net-zero, UK gas imports drop 78% by 2050, while in the “falling behind” world imports increase by 35%, locking Britain deeper into volatile global gas markets.
Why This Matters: Because the idea that climate action is “too expensive” collapses the moment you account for fossil fuel volatility, health impacts, climate damages, and energy security, the real-world stuff businesses and governments actually pay for.
Kismet: NESO quietly notes that EVs are expected to become cheaper to buy than petrol cars by 2027, flipping one of the biggest cost myths on its head before the decade is even out. 👉 Full story here
Solar Panels That Grow Food, And Make Farms More Profitable Too!
Agrivoltaics is one of those ideas that feels almost too elegant to be real: you put solar panels over crops, and suddenly the land produces electricity and more food, while using less water. A new IEEFA report shows just how powerful this approach can be - boosting yields in arid regions, cutting irrigation needs, and giving rural communities a new, reliable income stream from hosting solar without giving up farming. This is the kind of climate solution that makes you wonder why we didn’t scale it 20 years ago .
Key Highlights
Agrivoltaics increases crop yields in water-stressed regions by shading soil, reducing evaporation, and improving ecosystem health. (The report explicitly notes yield boosts tied to lower operating costs)
Water usage drops significantly, some farms see double-digit reductions in irrigation needs, a massive win as drought risk grows.
Installations are expanding fast: from 27,000 acres / 4.5 GW in 2020 to 62,000+ acres / 10 GW in 2024 - enough to power 1.5 million homes.
Why This Matters: Because agrivoltaics turns a land-use conflict into a land-use synergy, boosting farmer resilience, reducing water stress, and accelerating solar deployment without the political blowback.
Kismet: One nugget buried in the report: developers face fewer permitting battles when farms stay active - meaning agrivoltaics isn’t just good agronomy; it’s a stealth permitting accelerator. 👉 Full story here
Zimbabwe’s Mega Floating Solar Project Could Rewrite the Country’s Energy Future
Zimbabwe is taking a bold swing at its power shortages: a 600-megawatt floating solar plant on Lake Kariba — the world’s largest human-made reservoir. Construction starts in 2026, with on-land panels first and full floating arrays to follow once Zambia signs off. After years of crippling outages from drought-hit hydropower, this is exactly the kind of adaptive, climate-resilient infrastructure pivot you love to see .
Key Highlights
Phase one of the 600 MW project begins in Q2 2026; full completion expected by 2031 at a cost of $650 million.
Severe drought last year slashed Kariba’s hydropower generation from 1,050 MW capacity down to 550 MW, exposing the country’s dependence on rain-fed electricity.
Floating solar shields reservoirs from evaporation and produces more power thanks to natural cooling, a win–win for climate-stressed regions.
Why This Matters: Because floating solar is one of the smartest tools for climate adaptation: it stabilises grids hammered by drought, uses no extra land, and taps the cooling effect of water to increase efficiency.
Kismet: Africa already hosts several “floatovoltaic” pioneers, but if Zimbabwe pulls this off at 600 MW, it will become one of the largest floating solar installations on the planet, signalling a new frontier for emerging-market energy security. 👉 Full story here
Battery Storage
Australia Just Switched On a Grid Battery So Big It Can Bend the Curve of Summer Demand
Australia’s energy transition continues to sprint. The Melbourne Renewable Energy Hub - now officially online, is the largest operating battery on the National Electricity Market, clocking in at 600 MW and 1,600 MWh. Think of it as a giant solar-and-wind sponge sitting at the crossroads of major transmission lines, soaking up surplus cheap renewables by day and blasting it back out during those brutal summer evening peaks when air-cons roar to life and the grid groans. It’s a monster, in a good way.
Key Highlights
The project comprises three co-located 200 MW batteries, two with two hours of storage and one with four, totalling 600 MW / 1,600 MWh.
It beat New South Wales’ Waratah Super Battery to “largest operating grid battery” status thanks to last-minute transformer failures at Waratah during commissioning.
Built with 444 Tesla Megapacks and three Toshiba 500 kV transformers, the hub can support three renewable energy zones from a single strategic node on the network.
Why This Matters: Because every gigawatt-hour of storage strengthens the renewables-to-grid feedback loop: more batteries → more flexibility → more wind and solar → cheaper power → fewer excuses for gas.
Kismet: Buried in the story: engineers installed a world-first underground 500 kV cable to tie the battery into existing gas-insulated switchgear, a reminder that sometimes the real breakthroughs in clean energy are hidden in the wiring, not the headlines. 👉 Full story here
No New Blog Post This Week - Something Bigger Is In The Works
No fresh blog post from me this week, and for good reason. I’ve been buried (happily!) in a full redesign of my website. What used to be a simple blog has now grown into a full-fledged site with proper sections for podcasts, speaking, partnerships, and yes, the blog itself as just one part of the ecosystem.
It’s still a work in progress - scaffolding up, paint still drying, but if you fancy a peek, feel free to wander over and have a look. Just… be kind. There are still gremlins in the CSS and entire pages giving strong “under construction since 1998” energy.
More polished updates soon. 👉 Check the new website here
Resilient Supply Chain:
AI vs Paperwork: How Document Chaos Is Silently Breaking Supply Chains
This week’s episode of Resilient Supply Chain digs into a problem so mundane most leaders underestimate it, paperwork. Yet as Klippa co-founder Yeelen explains, missing HS codes, misfiled dangerous goods forms, or late customs documents can, and do, delay ships, ground flights, trigger fines, and blow up SLAs. Billions of documents move through supply chains every year, and manual workflows simply can’t keep up. AI can - if companies use the right models rather than giant, energy-hungry LLM hammers for every nail.
Key Highlights
Manual compliance work is exploding, driven by tightening regulations, and errors now routinely destroy shipments or delay vessels. (See his examples of packages destroyed or entire ships held due to faulty dangerous goods forms.)
Companies vastly underestimate admin volume: Klippa alone processes “hundreds of millions” of documents a year, while global supply chains run into the tens of billions - enough pages to circle the Earth multiple times.
Purpose-built AI models slash cost and carbon: automating HS code checks, preventing unnecessary returns, reducing idle ships burning fuel, and freeing staff for higher-value work. (Yeelen cites GLS avoiding unnecessary China–EU returns thanks to AI.)
Why This Matters: Because sustainability isn’t only about fuels and factories, it’s also about killing the invisible waste built into bad paperwork, slow compliance, and avoidable rework.
Kismet: If you lined up just 100 million documents end-to-end, they’d wrap around the planet once, and global supply chains process far more than that every year.
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Jared Spude, VP Transportation & Sustainability for Breakthrough, and Nicholas Ball, CEO of Xfuel.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
Unsurprisingly the number of Europeans wanting to travel to the US under the current administration has collapsed. Making Tourism Great Again?
If you hear people saying that we can’t switch to renewables, or Evs because of all the mining, show them this!
Global cumulative CO2 emissions
Misc stuff
The percentage of the population who have no religious beliefs in different regions of Spain - it’s interesting to see the variability
I get a lot of people approaching me offering to help me drive growth to my website/videos/podcasts. Many are as qualified as the example above, I suspect.
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
The impact of continental drift on certain tattoos over time, shouldn’t be underestimated
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