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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, and FutureProof is back.
This week, clean energy starts bending some very old curves, EVs outrun the forecasts, AI gets more useful, and I’ve just passed 100,000 YouTube subscribers, which still feels slightly surreal.
Highlights this week:
The Stakes: Climate impacts pile up across mountains, rivers, ice and food - while enormous pools of private capital keep backing fossil infrastructure.
Climate: China’s clean power starts genuinely displacing fossil generation, Europe plans climate insurance, and the Hormuz shock pushes emissions lower.
AI: A Lancet trial shows AI improving prenatal brain scans, Microsoft writes rules for human-controlled AI, and Siri finally gets clever. Mostly.
EVs & clean energy: Europe’s BEVs hit 30.5%, Volkswagen builds an absurdly efficient EV, India breaks a 50-year coal trend, and balcony solar spreads across the US.
From me: I’ve crossed 100,000 YouTube subscribers - and this week’s blog looks at why the real asset isn’t the audience number, but the body of knowledge built along the way. Plus, Niklas Persson of Hitachi Energy joins Climate Confident to explain why grids are becoming the transition’s critical bottleneck.
Plenty moving this week. Let’s get into it.
The Stakes
The Climate Bill Is Arriving. Capital Is Still Funding the Cause.
This week offers an unusually grim climate cross-section: warming helped destabilise the Nepal-Tibet mountains before a disaster that killed around 1,400 people, the world’s rivers are becoming increasingly erratic, Greenland and Antarctica have shed trillions of tonnes of ice, and European heatwaves have taken a sizeable bite out of the potato harvest. And while the physical consequences become harder to ignore, some of the world’s largest pools of private capital are still pouring money into gas, coal and fossil infrastructure.
Scientists found human-caused warming helped precondition the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet rock-and-ice collapse through higher temperatures, thinning glaciers and thawing permafrost.
Water, ice and food systems are all flashing warnings: unusually dry rivers, accelerating polar ice loss and heat-damaged European crops are different expressions of the same warming climate.
The 20 private-equity firms examined control $7.3tn in assets, giving them enormous potential influence over the energy transition, yet their energy holdings still include vast fossil-fuel infrastructure.
Why This Matters: Climate change is increasingly appearing not as one distant environmental problem, but as simultaneous disruption to water, food, infrastructure and human safety, while the financial system still has enormous unused leverage to reduce the underlying risk.
Kismet: The private-equity report contains an especially awkward financial footnote: 145 oil-and-gas-focused PE funds examined returned only about 1% more than investors put into them overall, rather undermining the idea that continued fossil investment is somehow unavoidable financial genius. 👉 Links Inline
Climate
Hormuz Shock Could Push Global Fossil-Fuel Emissions Down in 2026
There’s a grim irony here: the Hormuz crisis is hammering oil and gas demand hard enough that global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions are now projected to fall about 0.5% in 2026, despite coal use rising. What catches my eye is the possible structural shift underneath the crisis - high fuel prices are accelerating EV adoption, pushing governments back towards domestic clean energy, and making some of this demand destruction look rather less temporary than the fossil industry might like.
Global oil demand is now forecast to fall by 2.5 million barrels a day in 2026, a spectacular reversal from January’s forecast of nearly 1 million barrels a day of growth.
Coal demand may rise 1.2%, partly because expensive gas makes coal more attractive in some markets, but falling oil and gas consumption more than offsets the emissions increase.
EVs are grabbing record market share across major economies, while July sales nearly doubled year-on-year in emerging EV markets outside China, Europe and North America.
Why This Matters: Another fossil-fuel supply shock is demonstrating the strategic weakness of imported hydrocarbons - and giving electrification and domestic clean energy an economic shove that will very likely outlast the crisis itself.
Kismet: Before the conflict, the IEA thought global oil demand might keep growing until 2030; its latest numbers now leave open the distinctly awkward possibility that the peak arrived considerably earlier. 👉 Full story here
Europe Wants to Insure Itself Against Climate Chaos
After a brutal summer of heatwaves, wildfires and drought, the EU is moving climate adaptation out of the policy footnotes and into the financial machinery: a new climate insurance alliance will bring insurers, investors, governments and risk experts together to close Europe’s enormous protection gap. I like the direction here - cutting emissions remains essential, but pretending we can somehow avoid paying for the warming already locked in is no longer a serious strategy.
Only about 25% of Europe’s climate-related economic losses are currently insured, leaving governments, and ultimately taxpayers, picking up much of the bill.
The alliance will explore tools including parametric insurance, where payouts can happen automatically when thresholds such as temperature or rainfall are breached.
Brussels is pairing insurance with wider adaptation measures, including a European heatwave plan, stronger drought management, mapping 100 particularly vulnerable regions and proposals for a larger EU firefighting fleet.
Why This Matters: Europe is starting to treat climate resilience as financial infrastructure, not simply environmental policy, because adaptation gets very expensive indeed when nobody has worked out who pays.
Kismet: Parametric insurance can pay out without waiting for an assessor to count every damaged roof or hectare, cross the agreed weather threshold and the money can start moving, a potentially very useful feature when thousands of claims arrive at once. 👉 Full story here
China’s Clean Energy Boom Is Finally Starting to Push Coal Aside
China’s energy transition may have crossed a threshold I’ve been watching for years: clean power met all of the country’s electricity-demand growth in 2025, while thermal generation fell for the first time in a decade. This is no longer just a story about adding colossal amounts of wind, solar and batteries; increasingly, the cleaner system is beginning to take over jobs once done by fossil fuels.
Clean electricity covered all additional power demand in 2025 even as total demand rose 5%, helping push thermal generation down 0.7%.
Coal generation is flattening across 17 of 26 major provincial regions, while battery storage capacity jumped 84% in 2025 and utilisation climbed sharply.
Electrification is spreading deep into the economy: passenger EVs reached 67% of new sales by June 2026, while electric trucks hit almost 45%.
Why This Matters: China has been the great engine of global coal and oil demand growth for decades; if its clean-energy build-out is now genuinely displacing fossil fuels, the implications stretch far beyond China’s borders.
Kismet: China’s clean-tech exports exceeded $220 billion in 2025, bringing them close to the scale of its traditional export giants - garments, furniture and household appliances, meaning decarbonisation is increasingly becoming an economic growth strategy, not merely an environmental one. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Just Made Prenatal Ultrasounds Better at Spotting Brain Abnormalities
This is the kind of medical AI evidence I want to see: not another retrospective benchmark, but a multicentre randomised controlled trial involving 1,584 scans. In high-risk pregnancies, AI assistance helped sonographers detect significantly more fetal intracranial malformations without increasing false positives and, importantly, the human-plus-AI combination performed better than either working alone.
AI-assisted sensitivity rose from 78.6% to 87.3% when identifying fetuses with the targeted abnormalities.
Looking at individual malformations, sensitivity climbed from 69.6% to 81.4%, while specificity was preserved.
The system didn’t distract clinicians from abnormalities it wasn’t trained to recognise, although AI-assisted examinations took about 40 seconds longer on average.
Why This Matters: Medical AI becomes far more compelling when it can demonstrate, in prospective clinical trials, that it actually improves clinicians’ performance rather than merely winning an accuracy contest against a test dataset.
Kismet: The more experienced sonographers sometimes benefited more from the AI than their less experienced colleagues, an intriguing hint that expertise and AI may be complementary rather than technology simply compensating for inexperience. 👉 Full story here
Microsoft Wants Its AI to Know Who’s Boss: Humans
Microsoft AI has published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct that it intends to use to train and govern future MAI models from 2027, built around one unusually explicit proposition: AI should remain subordinate to humans, controllable, honest about being artificial, and prevented from quietly acquiring goals of its own. I find the specificity refreshing - less “responsible AI” wallpaper, more actual rules about what increasingly capable systems should and shouldn’t do.
Human control comes first: models must accept interruption, correction and shutdown, stay within authorised scope, and never attempt to evade oversight or expand their own objectives.
Microsoft proposes hard limits covering weapons development, offensive cyberattacks, large-scale manipulation, harmful surveillance, child exploitation and other serious harms.
The code also tackles softer but increasingly important territory: models shouldn’t pretend to have feelings, encourage emotional dependency, make major life choices for users, fabricate confidence or present themselves as human.
Why This Matters: As AI systems become more capable and autonomous, governance needs to move from lofty principles to behavioural rules that can actually be trained, tested and audited, and Microsoft is putting a surprisingly detailed version of those rules out for public scrutiny.
Kismet: Microsoft goes considerably further than the usual “AI is a tool” language: the draft explicitly rejects AI consciousness mimicry, legal personhood and the idea that models might deserve rights or welfare. 👉 Full story here
Apple Finally Gives Siri an AI Brain, With a Few Asterisks
After years of watching everyone else turn assistants into actual conversational AI, Apple has finally launched Siri AI: personal context, onscreen awareness, web knowledge, multi-step app actions and proper follow-up conversations. The catch? It launches in beta in English, other languages follow next month, China gets nothing for now, and much of the EU is still waiting while Apple works through regulatory issues.
Siri AI can search across messages, emails and photos, understand what’s on screen, pull information from the web and take actions across apps - including chaining several steps together.
The rollout starts in English, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due next month; Siri AI is initially unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, while the new Apple Intelligence features are unavailable in China.
Apple is leaning heavily on privacy: some processing happens on-device, while more demanding requests use Private Cloud Compute, where Apple says personal data is neither stored nor accessible to Apple.
Why This Matters: Apple is finally turning Siri from a voice-controlled shortcut machine into something resembling a modern AI agent - potentially putting capable generative AI in front of hundreds of millions of mainstream users who may never deliberately open an AI chatbot.
Kismet: Apple’s supposedly home-grown AI architecture has a rather notable houseguest: its next-generation Foundation Models were built in collaboration with Google using Gemini models - it looks like even Apple occasionally needs to phone a friend. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Europe’s EV Transition Is Doing Far Better Than the Headlines Suggest
For all the political noise about a supposedly faltering EV transition, the ICCT’s latest 28-page health check tells a rather different story: sales are rising, costs are falling, charging infrastructure is scaling, and manufacturers are broadly on track for their emissions targets. The transition has problems no doubt - public charging is still too expensive and Europe’s battery factories need higher utilisation, but the direction of travel is getting harder to argue with.
Battery-electric cars reached 22% of new EU registrations in the first half of 2026, while electric buses and coaches hit 28% and medium electric trucks 21%.
EVs are already around 33% cheaper to drive than petrol cars, while inflation- and performance-adjusted BEV prices in Germany fell about 18% between 2020 and 2025.
The EU now has 1.16 million public chargers, nearly eight times as many as in 2020, with 92% of the TEN-T road network covered by fast chargers suitable for cars.
Why This Matters: Europe’s EV transition increasingly looks less like a fragile policy experiment and more like an industrial shift being reinforced by economics, infrastructure and consumer adoption.
Kismet: Vietnam quietly posted a 47% BEV share of new passenger-car sales in the first half of 2026, more than double the EU’s share, which is a useful reminder that the EV transition is no longer primarily a European, Chinese or North American story.
👉 Full story here
Europe’s EV Sales Just Blew Past the Forecasts
Hot on the heels of the ICCT finding that cheaper cars, lower running costs and rapidly expanding charging are making the EV transition increasingly self-sustaining comes the market evidence: battery-electric cars grabbed 30.5% of new registrations across 16 European markets in August, with sales jumping 54% year-on-year. Turns out that making EVs cheaper and easier to own does, rather inconveniently for the naysayers, encourage people to buy them.
More than 1.67 million BEVs have been registered across Europe so far this year, up 33.1% from the same period in 2025.
August’s 30.5% market share is well ahead of forecasts that had expected BEVs to reach roughly 21–23% during 2026.
Germany hit 32.5% BEV share in August and France reached 38.3%, while Denmark climbed to an extraordinary 85.9%.
Why This Matters: Falling costs, better model choice and plentiful charging infrastructure are translating into actual purchases - suggesting Europe’s EV transition is beginning to acquire momentum that policy wobbling will find increasingly difficult to reverse.
Kismet: Fully electric cars are now selling strongly enough that BEV sales alone have exceeded forecasts previously made for the entire plug-in market, including plug-in hybrids. 👉 Full story here
Volkswagen Builds an EV That Barely Seems to Need Electricity
Volkswagen’s near-production Mission Efficiency concept takes the mechanical guts of the forthcoming ID. Polo and wraps them in obsessive aerodynamics, producing real-road energy consumption of just 6.89 kWh/100 km before charging losses. That is frankly bonkers efficiency from a four-seat car with a usable boot, and a useful reminder that longer range doesn’t always require shoving ever-bigger batteries underneath us.
Its drag coefficient is just 0.158, which Volkswagen says makes it the most aerodynamic road-legal car ever built.
On a 1,278 km real-road trip through Germany, Poland, Czechia and Austria, it averaged 6.89 kWh/100 km from the battery; under controlled “ideal drive” conditions that dropped to 6.48 kWh/100 km.
It achieves this with a relatively modest 54.9 kWh battery, while still seating four and providing 481 litres of cargo space (for context my Kia EV3 has an 80kWh battery and a putative 600km range).
Why This Matters: Battery breakthroughs get the headlines, but dramatically reducing the energy a vehicle needs in the first place means cheaper batteries, longer range, faster effective charging and less pressure on raw materials and the grid.
Kismet: Volkswagen even integrated 370 watts of solar into the roof and rear hatch, enough to run some onboard electrical loads while the aerodynamics do the really heavy lifting. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
India’s Clean-Energy Surge Just Stopped Coal Growth in Its Tracks
India has pulled off something genuinely consequential: for the first time in more than 50 years, coal-fired power generation has gone two full years without growing, even as electricity demand rose 7%. And the enabling technology is now arriving at speed too - India added 8.2 GWh of battery storage in the first half of 2026 alone, nearly 84 times as much as a year earlier.
Clean energy supplied all 63 TWh of India’s electricity-demand growth between H1 2024 and H1 2026, with solar alone contributing 44 TWh.
India added 77 GW of solar over those two years, while power-sector emissions remained essentially flat at 2024 levels.
Battery storage capacity reached 9.3 GWh by June 2026, with 28 GW of new storage tendered during H1, an 86% year-on-year increase.
Why This Matters: India is showing the transition’s next phase in real time: renewables first stop fossil generation from growing, then storage arrives to help them push it backwards.
Kismet: Despite flat coal generation, India still added 8.5 GW of new coal capacity over the same period, meaning some of those plants are now running fewer hours and becoming more expensive assets almost as soon as they arrive. 👉 Full story here
Balcony Solar Is Finally Having Its American Moment
Balcony solar, those wonderfully simple panels you hang outside and plug straight into a normal wall socket, is spreading across the US, with nine states now having laws on the books, up from just Utah at the start of 2026. I like this because it attacks one of rooftop solar’s biggest blind spots: renters and apartment dwellers who have sunlight but no roof of their own.
More than two dozen US state legislatures had introduced plug-in solar bills by February, and three additional states have passed measures awaiting governors’ signatures.
The appeal is brutally simple: households can cut grid electricity use and bills without installing a full rooftop system.
The US market is still immature, with only a handful of vendors and some electrical-code wrinkles to sort out, so policy is currently moving faster than product availability.
Why This Matters: Balcony solar could broaden access to distributed energy dramatically by turning small-scale generation into something closer to an appliance than a construction project.
Kismet: In Germany, plug-in balcony solar has become commonplace enough that people can effectively buy it like consumer electronics, the sort of boring normality that clean energy probably needs much more of. 👉 Full story here
Seabirds Are Much Better at Dodging Wind Turbines Than We Thought
One of the most persistent anti-wind talking points takes another knock: two years of camera monitoring at the Thanet offshore wind farm captured 606,554 processed videos and just six bird collisions, while researchers found seabirds actively adjusting their flight paths to avoid the blades. I wouldn’t declare the issue universally settled from one wind farm, but the evidence strongly suggests older collision models have been considerably too pessimistic.
Of 299 videos showing birds inside or immediately around the rotor-swept zone, only six ended in a collision.
Researchers calculated a micro-avoidance rate of about 95%, with birds commonly changing course or flying parallel to the blades rather than through them.
A sample of 48,000 night-time videos contained just 76 clips with bird activity and no recorded collisions, although the researchers caution that night-time monitoring was less comprehensive.
Why This Matters: Better real-world data on how birds actually behave around turbines can prevent exaggerated wildlife-risk assumptions from unnecessarily slowing offshore wind development.
Kismet: The study found just 15 instances of birds flying perpendicular through a spinning rotor, the flight pattern considered most collision-prone, apparently seabirds have considerably better situational awareness than some wind-farm commentary gives them credit for. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
100,000 YouTube Subscribers Taught Me the Audience Isn’t the Asset
YouTube recently sent me a lovely Silver Creator Award for passing 100,000 subscribers, which is very nice - but the number itself turns out to be less interesting than what accumulated underneath it. Years of interviews on climate, energy, sustainability and supply chains have become something I didn’t fully anticipate: not merely a content archive, but a body of knowledge that can keep generating research, insight and opportunity long after individual episodes disappear from the feed.
Consistency matters only if what you publish compounds: hundreds of useful interviews eventually become a searchable catalogue rather than a pile of old episodes.
Distribution is part of publishing - titles, thumbnails, clips, newsletters and social posts create more entrances into the archive without requiring every video to go viral.
The biggest shift came when I stopped treating each interview as the unit of analysis: hundreds of transcripts can reveal recurring patterns, disagreements and lessons, and are now feeding research and executive briefings.
Why This Matters: For experts and organisations investing in thought leadership, the better question may not be “what should we publish this week?” but “what body of knowledge do we want to have created three years from now?”
Kismet: A peer-reviewed academic paper has already used 52 Resilient Supply Chain interviews as its primary research material - something I certainly wasn’t planning for when I first pressed record. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
The Energy Transition Has a Grid Problem - and Niklas Persson Wants to Fix It
This week on Climate Confident, I spoke with Niklas Persson, CEO of Grid Integration at Hitachi Energy, about the increasingly obvious bottleneck in the clean-energy transition: we can build all the renewables we like, but if the grid cannot move those electrons to where they’re needed, we end up curtailing clean power and delaying electrification. The conversation ranges from HVDC and permitting queues to the ELMed Europe-Africa interconnection, with one message recurring throughout: generation is only useful when delivery works.
Grid constraints are already shaping where factories, data centres, EV depots and new generation can connect, turning electricity infrastructure into an industrial competitiveness issue.
Interconnectors can reduce costs and improve resilience by allowing regions to share generation, storage and spare capacity; Denmark’s links with Norway, Sweden, Germany and the UK are a strong example.
The 600 MW ELMED interconnector between Tunisia and Italy will be the first HVDC connection between Africa and Europe, opening the door to greater clean-energy trade across the Mediterranean.
Why This Matters: Decarbonisation increasingly depends less on whether we can generate enough clean electricity and more on whether grids, permitting and cross-border infrastructure can get it to consumers quickly enough.
Kismet: Niklas’s choice of grid-modernisation hero was Uno Lamm, the Swedish engineer regarded as the father of HVDC, whose first commercial link took roughly 20 years to develop, a useful reminder that infrastructure revolutions rarely arrive on startup timelines. 🎧 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)
And it is only going to continue to fall!
This is one reason why China cleaning up its electricity grid is good news - all top 10 selling cars in China were fully electric cars. That’s amazing.
While China is busy getting out of fossil fuels, the US has reversed course and is investing heavily, maybe they’ll start investing in VHS or Betamax tech next.
Global grids are getting cleaner!
Misc stuff
EVs are charged at home typically over 90% of the time, so they’re far cheaper to operate than a petrol, or diesel car (especially now since Trump decided to wage war on Iran at Bibi’s behest).
Trump stuff
Trump was in Ireland this last week. He met Irish president Catherine Connelly.
He doesn’t appear to have enjoyed the meeting very much. Shucks.
Fans of the movie The Hunt For Red October should get this reference!
Viagra, Botox, Humira, Ozempic and Wegovy amongst others are only manufactured in Europe. Your move Donnie!
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
Viewpoint depends on standpoint, as they say.
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