In partnership with
Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, the inbox is restless, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about follow-through. Less signalling. More systems actually changing shape.
The big five:
The Netherlands gets two headlines in one week: courts force climate accountability abroad, while Amsterdam bans fossil fuel ads at home. Law meets culture.
EVs cross a real line in Europe, outselling petrol cars for the first time, while satellites confirm cleaner air isn’t a promise anymore, it’s visible.
Clean energy investment hits $2.3 trillion, because capital keeps voting with spreadsheets, not slogans.
Europe turns the North Sea into a shared clean power engine, linking offshore wind at continental scale.
AI shifts deeper into infrastructure, from scientific research to browsers that now act on your behalf.
Also this week: a remote gold mine quietly runs on nearly all renewables, China positions itself to sell the cars of the future while others argue, and deforestation officially becomes a procurement problem, not a PR one.
Plus a new blog post on why poor ESG data is now a business liability, a Climate Confident episode on why Europe’s grid needs long-duration storage, and a Resilient Supply Chain deep dive on what deforestation-free supply chains actually look like in practice.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
Dutch Climate Justice Hits the Caribbean (And Actually Means It)
This one matters. A lot.
A Dutch court has ruled that the Netherlands discriminated against the people of the Dutch Caribbean island Bonaire by failing to protect them from climate impacts, while doing far more for citizens back in Europe. Same kingdom. Very different treatment. The judges were unimpressed.
The short version: climate adaptation is now officially a human rights issue, and courts are done with selective concern.
Highlights
A Hague court found the Dutch government breached European human rights law by failing to help Bonaire adapt to climate risks, while protecting mainland Netherlands.
The ruling orders the state to deliver a real adaptation plan for Bonaire and to set stronger, legally binding emissions targets
Judges rejected the “we’re doing better than others” defence, pointing to historical responsibility and capacity to act
Why This Matters: This locks in an important new precedent for governments who protect wealthy populations first and treat overseas territories as optional extras.
Kismet: The same Dutch courts that forced emissions cuts in 2015 have now helped trigger over 2,000 climate lawsuits worldwide, quietly turning climate policy into a courtroom sport governments keep losing. 👉 Full story here
Amsterdam Just Kicked Fossil Fuel Ads Out of the City
While courts are scolding the Dutch state for climate neglect abroad, Amsterdam is quietly doing something radical at home: banning fossil fuel advertising outright.
From May 1, the city becomes the first capital in the world to legally prohibit ads for fossil fuels and other high-carbon products across public spaces. Buses. Trams. Metro stations. Billboards. The lot.
And yes, the ad industry threw a late tantrum. It didn’t work.
Highlights
Amsterdam passed a legally binding ban on fossil fuel and meat advertising in public spaces, effective May 2026
Ads for flights, petrol and diesel cars, gas heating contracts, and meat products are all out. Corporate branding follows when contracts expire
Outdoor ad giant JCDecaux warned of “far-reaching consequences” hours before the vote. Councillors voted it through anyway
Why This Matters: Advertising doesn’t just sell products. It normalises behaviour. Amsterdam just said high-carbon consumption doesn’t get a free cultural pass anymore.
Kismet: The internal documents that doomed tobacco didn’t focus on cigarettes killing people. They focused on advertising creating social permission. Fossil fuel ads play the same role, just with a longer fuse and a bigger blast radius.
Two Dutch stories. Same week. One exposes the cost of delay. The other shows what follow-through looks like. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Gets Boring (In the Best Possible Way) and Science Wins
OpenAI has launched Prism, and it’s a strong signal that AI’s next phase isn’t chatty demos or novelty apps, but quietly shaving friction off serious work. In this case: scientific research.
Prism is a free, AI-native workspace for scientific writing and collaboration, built directly into a LaTeX environment and powered by GPT-5.2. No duct-taping chat windows to PDFs. No context loss. No tool-hopping fatigue.
This is AI moving from “helpful assistant” to infrastructure.
Highlights
Prism integrates drafting, equations, citations, literature search, and collaboration into a single cloud-based LaTeX workspace
GPT-5.2 operates inside the document, reasoning across structure, maths, references, and revisions in context
It’s free, supports unlimited collaborators, and removes the version-control pain that quietly drains research time
Why This Matters: Most scientific progress isn’t blocked by lack of ideas, but by process friction. Reducing that friction is how discovery scales.
Kismet: The last big productivity leap in science wasn’t a new theory. It was LaTeX itself. Prism is effectively LaTeX’s first serious upgrade in decades, and it comes with a reasoning engine attached. 👉 Full story here
Your Browser Just Became an Agent (Whether You Asked or Not)
Google has turned Chrome into something new: not just a place to visit the web, but a place where work gets done for you.
With Gemini 3 baked in, Chrome now offers a persistent AI side panel and a new auto browse mode that can handle multi-step online tasks end to end. Research, comparison shopping, form-filling, booking, chasing documents, even managing subscriptions. The boring parts of the internet are being delegated.
This is the agentic web, arriving via the world’s most used browser.
Highlights
Gemini 3 now runs in a Chrome side panel, helping summarise, compare, plan, and multitask across tabs without breaking flow
Auto browse lets Chrome execute multi-step tasks on your behalf, from travel planning to admin-heavy chores, with confirmation gates for sensitive actions
Deep integrations across Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Flights, Shopping and more blur the line between browsing and doing
Why This Matters: Once AI agents live inside the browser, the web stops being a maze of clicks and starts behaving like an interface for intent.
Kismet: The original web rewarded attention. The agentic web rewards outcomes. Sites optimised for clicks may quietly lose to sites optimised for task completion, and most publishers haven’t clocked that yet. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
EVs Aren’t Just Cleaner on Paper. Satellites Can See It Now
For years, EV sceptics have muttered that cleaner air from electric vehicles was theoretical, marginal, or too hard to prove. Satellites just ruined that talking point.
A new peer-reviewed study out of California shows a measurable, real-world drop in air pollution directly linked to EV uptake. Not models. Not assumptions. Actual nitrogen dioxide falling where EVs show up.
Turns out tailpipes mattered after all.
Highlights
Researchers linked EV adoption to the first statistically significant real-world drop in NO₂, a traffic-related pollutant tied to asthma and heart disease
Using high-resolution satellite data, they found every 200 EVs added cut local NO₂ by ~1.1% between 2019–2023
The signal held up even after controlling for COVID traffic changes, fuel prices, and work-from-home patterns
Why This Matters: This moves EV benefits from “long-term climate promise” to immediate public health dividend, especially for urban communities breathing the exhaust today.
Kismet: This study didn’t even count PM2.5 particles, the tiny pollutants most linked to cardiovascular deaths. EVs likely clean more harm out of the air than satellites can currently see. 👉 Full story here
For the First Time Ever, EVs Outsold Petrol Cars in the EU
No hype. No press conference. Just numbers doing their thing.
In December 2025, battery-electric cars sold more than petrol cars in the EU for the first time on record. Not hybrids. Not “electrified”. Pure EVs, beating pure petrol, in Europe’s biggest car market.
That’s not a trend. That’s a crossover.
Highlights
Battery-electric car registrations hit 217,898, up 51% year-on-year, overtaking petrol cars at 216,492, which fell 19%
EVs reached 17.4% of total EU car sales in 2025, up from 13.6% the year before, with Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France driving nearly two-thirds of demand
Petrol’s market share dropped sharply across all major EU markets, while cars that plug in grew far faster than any combustion category
Why This Matters: Once new tech outsells the old, the debate shifts from if to how fast the rest unwinds. Supply chains, dealerships, fuel demand, policy assumptions, all start recalibrating.
Kismet: This milestone arrived the same year several automakers publicly claimed “there’s no natural demand for EVs”. Turns out demand doesn’t need permission when the economics click. 👉 Full story here
While North America Argues, China Is Lining Up to Sell the EVs of Tomorrow
Trade wars make for great headlines. They also create vacuums. China is very good at filling those.
As the US and Canada stumble through tariff fights and policy whiplash, China is positioning itself to become the default supplier of affordable EVs across North America’s neighbours and beyond. Not through speeches. Through factories, supply chains, and cars people can actually buy.
Highlights
Canada slashed tariffs on Chinese-made EVs from 100% to 6.1%, opening the door to low-cost models just as US policy turns hostile to EV incentives
Chinese brands already dominate Mexico’s EV market, jumping from 24% share in 2023 to nearly 90% in 2025, led by BYD
US automakers risk becoming regional players while China scales globally, exporting not just vehicles but manufacturing momentum
Why This Matters: The EV transition isn’t slowing. It’s re-routing. Countries that delay, dither, or politicise electrification don’t stop it. They just stop benefiting from it.
Kismet: The countries arguing hardest about “protecting their auto industry” may soon find they’ve protected it into irrelevance. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
$2.3 Trillion Says the Energy Transition Is Still Very Much Alive
For anyone insisting clean capital has gone on strike, BloombergNEF just dropped a very large receipt.
Global investment in clean energy and electrified tech hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025. That’s not vibes. That’s deployment money, grid money, factory money, and “we expect returns” money.
Politics wobbled. Markets shrugged. Cheques cleared.
Highlights
Global energy transition investment rose 8% year-on-year to $2.3 trillion, the highest level ever recorded
$1.2 trillion went into renewables and power grids, while electrified transport pulled in $893 billion, driven mainly by Asia and Europe
Fossil fuel supply investment fell for the first time since 2020, as upstream oil and gas spending slowed
Why This Matters: Capital doesn’t care about speeches. It cares about costs, returns, and risk. Right now, clean energy keeps winning that argument.
Kismet: Even at a record $2.3 trillion, BloombergNEF says the world needs more than double that every year to hit net zero. Which means this isn’t the peak. It’s the warm-up. 👉 Full story here
Europe Is Turning the North Sea into a Giant Clean Energy Battery
This isn’t just another offshore wind farm. It’s a continent-scale power move.
The UK has joined nine other European countries in a plan to link offshore wind farms across the North Sea into what’s being billed as the world’s largest clean energy reservoir. Shared generation. Shared grids. Shared resilience. Oil basin to power basin.
This is what scale actually looks like.
Highlights
Ten countries, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, plan to jointly build 100GW of offshore wind, linked by high-voltage subsea interconnectors (1GW is roughly the output of a nuclear reactor)
Wind farms will connect to multiple countries at once, smoothing supply, cutting curtailment, and lowering system costs
The project could attract €1 trillion in offshore wind investment by 2040 and support tens of thousands of jobs
Why This Matters: This tackles the real clean-energy bottleneck: not generation, but coordination. Shared grids turn variable renewables into reliable infrastructure.
Kismet: The same North Sea that once powered Europe through oil and gas is now being re-engineered to power it through electrons. Same geography. Completely different future. 👉 Full story here
A Gold Mine Just Became One of the World’s Quietest Clean Energy Success Stories
This might be my favourite energy story of the week. No slogans. No subsidies-as-the-main-plot. Just maths.
A remote gold mine in Western Australia sourced almost 88% of its electricity from wind, solar, and batteries last quarter. Not because it wanted a green halo. Because trucking diesel hundreds of kilometres into the outback is wildly expensive, and renewables aren’t.
Off-grid changes everything.
Highlights
The Bellevue Gold mine averaged 87.8% renewable electricity over the last three months of 2025 using wind, solar, and battery storage
It ran for over 100 consecutive days with engines off, burning zero fossil fuels, hitting net-zero for Scope 1 and 2 emissions
The hybrid system combines 24 MW of wind, 27 MW of solar, and a 15 MW / 33 MWh battery, displacing diesel generators entirely for long stretches
Why This Matters: Remote, energy-intensive industries used to be diesel’s strongest defence. Now they’re becoming renewables’ strongest proof point.
Kismet: Mines were once symbols of extractive excess. Increasingly, they’re becoming testbeds for the clean energy systems that cities say are “too hard” to run. 👉 Full story here
Blog post
Why Poor ESG Data Is Now a Business Liability (And Scope 3 Is the Stress Test)
I wrote this earlier in the week after seeing the same pattern repeat itself across industries: companies passing ESG audits and still losing customers, capital, or insurance because the data underneath didn’t hold up when anyone looked closely.
The short version: ESG has stopped being a narrative exercise. It’s becoming operational infrastructure. And Scope 3 is where credibility either sharpens or collapses.
Highlights
Scope 3 emissions typically make up 75%+ of total footprints in most sectors, yet are still handled with proxies, averages, and crossed fingers
New regulation (CSRD), buyer scrutiny, and insurer behaviour are converging, turning weak ESG data into mispriced commercial risk
Companies treating ESG data like core business data are gaining resilience, while cosmetic reporting is quietly failing stress tests
Why This Matters: ESG failure no longer shows up as a bad score. It shows up as lost contracts, higher financing costs, and boards signing off on data they can’t really defend.
Kismet: In one case I reference, fixing a Scope 3 emissions hotspot also fixed a major logistics inefficiency. ESG didn’t slow the business down. It exposed where performance was already leaking. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Europe Doesn’t Have a Renewables Problem. It Has a Flexibility Problem.
This week on Climate Confident, I sat down with Oonagh O’Grady, VP of International Origination at Hydrostor, to unpack the quiet constraint now shaping Europe’s energy transition: we’re drowning in clean power at midday, short at sunset, and the grid isn’t built for abundance.
We get into why batteries alone won’t cut it once renewables push past ~40–50%, and why long-duration energy storage (8–24 hours) is becoming the missing backbone of a reliable, zero-carbon grid
Highlights
Why curtailment, negative prices, and grid instability are symptoms of a flexibility gap, not a renewables failure
How advanced compressed air energy storage works, and why it can provide inertia, stability, and black start services batteries can’t
What policymakers must get right now if Europe wants clean power that actually works in the 2030s
Why This Matters: Without long-duration storage, cheap renewables stay stranded. With it, Europe gets security, resilience, and lower system costs at scale.
Kismet: The same grid physics that caused the Iberian blackout are now quietly pushing policymakers toward storage solutions once dismissed as “too slow”. Reality has excellent timing. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Deforestation Is No Longer “Upstream”. It’s a Balance-Sheet Risk.
This week on the Resilient Supply Chain podcast, I spoke with Priscillia Moulin, Director of Strategy at MosaiX, about what deforestation-free supply chains actually look like once you leave the comfort of policies and PDFs.
Short version: forest risk is no longer “upstream”. It now sits squarely in procurement, compliance, and legal, with satellites, regulators, and buyers all watching the same plots of land.
Highlights
Interventions using satellite data, field investigations, and buyer pressure have helped avoid ~2 million hectares of deforestation, roughly the size of Slovenia
In some cases, deforestation stopped within days after a buyer engaged a supplier, no technology miracle required
Cutting suppliers loose often worsens outcomes, while engagement and recovery programmes can protect forests and livelihoods
Why This Matters: Deforestation has shifted from a CSR talking point to a regulated, auditable supply-chain risk with direct financial consequences for buyers.
Kismet: Most deforestation globally is legal under local law. Which means compliance alone won’t save forests, only informed purchasing decisions will. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to DrewMaggio from Highmark, and Gordon Zellner, CEO of Evergreen Trading.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
Another great example of correlation ≠ causation
I moved from 1,200 hours of sun a year to Andalusia which has close to 3,000 hours per year. That was definitely an upgrade! Similar in sunshine to Texas, just fewer Texans!
Misc stuff
LOL!
Ok, we’re deep in Dad joke territory at this stage!
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
It’s not often you see mattresses mating in the wild!
Start learning AI in 2026
Everyone talks about AI, but no one has the time to learn it. So, we found the easiest way to learn AI in as little time as possible: The Rundown AI.
It's a free AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest AI news, and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.
Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses — tailored to your needs.