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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, FutureProof is here, and this week has a distinct “that was not supposed to happen” flavour.
A war meant to project fossil power may be accelerating the shift away from it.
EVs are doing the inconvenient thing critics keep saying they won’t do.
AI is moving into medicine, iPhones, quantum chips, and, because dignity has left the building, sewers.
And Google? Google is debugging mosquitoes.
Highlights this week:
Energy shock: the fossil-fuel security argument takes another hit
EVs: sales, factories, and accessibility all move forward
Clean energy: batteries and green jobs keep getting harder to dismiss
AI: useful, weird, and occasionally subterranean
Science: mosquitoes get the Silicon Valley treatment
Podcasts: greenwashing gets serious, and supply chains meet decision latency
Some weeks whisper.
This one brought receipts, irony, and infected insects.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
Britain’s 2040 Climate Target Could Deliver an £865bn Economic Win
Britain has set out an 87% emissions reduction target by 2040, and the economic case is rather delicious: invest heavily in electrification, renewables, heat pumps and EVs, and reap an estimated £865bn in net benefits by 2050. The plan is not fully baked yet, because politics enjoys leaving the door open, but the direction is clear: fewer fossil imports, lower exposure to price shocks, cleaner air, and a grown-up shot at net zero.
Key Highlights
The UK’s seventh carbon budget would legally cap emissions for 2038-2042 and put the country on a path to cut emissions 87% below 1990 levels by 2040.
Government analysis says meeting the target would require around £880bn of investment over 25 years, but deliver £1.62tn in benefits, including £445bn in avoided fossil-fuel spending.
The big lever is electrification: more clean power, EVs, heat pumps, electrified industry, and less dependence on volatile imported oil and gas, humanity’s favourite recurring invoice from geopolitical chaos.
Why This Matters: This reframes net zero not as a luxury climate project, but as an economic resilience strategy: spend now to avoid fossil-fuel instability, climate damage, and yet another national conversation about why gas markets keep mugging households.
Kismet: Push the analysis out to 2060 and the net benefit roughly doubles to £1.52tn, because clean energy infrastructure keeps quietly paying back long after the political theatre has packed up and gone looking for a new culture war. 👉 Full story here
AI News
Microsoft Just Gave AI Three New Jobs: Doctor, Scientist, and Quantum Wrangler
Microsoft had a monster AI week, announcing seven new in-house MAI models, a Mayo Clinic collaboration on a healthcare-specific frontier model, and Majorana 2, a quantum chip it says became 1,000 times more reliable with help from agentic AI. I’m keeping one eyebrow raised, because corporate AI announcements now arrive dressed like minor religious events, but this is still a serious signal: AI is moving from chatbots into science, medicine, engineering, and the messy business of turning knowledge into action.
Key Highlights
Microsoft announced seven new MAI models across reasoning, coding, image generation, voice, and transcription, with a strong push into custom models tuned on an organisation’s own workflows.
The Mayo Clinic partnership aims to build a healthcare-specific frontier AI model using de-identified clinical data and Mayo’s longitudinal medical expertise, with Mayo owning the model.
Majorana 2, Microsoft’s next-generation quantum chip, reportedly delivers a 1,000-fold reliability improvement, with qubit lifetimes averaging 20 seconds and sometimes lasting up to a minute. In quantum computing, that is not a snack break. That is practically immortality.
Why This Matters: This isn’t just “AI writes better emails now, please clap”; it points to AI becoming infrastructure for discovery itself, helping researchers test ideas faster, clinicians reason through complex cases, and companies turn their own institutional knowledge into specialised intelligence.
Kismet: Microsoft says compute used to train frontier models has already increased by a factor of one trillion, and it expects another thousand-fold rise over the next three years, so yes, the data centre conversation is about to get spicy. 👉 Links inline
Apple Finally Finds the AI Button
Apple appears to be preparing its biggest Siri overhaul in nearly 15 years, with iOS 27 reportedly set to bring a chatbot-style Siri app, AI-powered search, screen awareness, personal-context reasoning, Camera app intelligence, natural-language shortcuts, and new AI photo tools. About time, frankly. Apple has been standing at the AI party like someone pretending not to hear the music, but this looks like a serious attempt to turn Siri from a glorified kitchen timer into something that can actually help.
Key Highlights
The revamped Siri could live inside the Dynamic Island, understand what’s on screen, use personal data, search the web with AI, and handle typed or spoken requests through a new “Search or Ask” interface.
Apple is reportedly building a dedicated Siri app to compete more directly with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, while also letting users route some queries to third-party AI services.
AI is also expected to spread into Camera, Photos and Shortcuts, with visual intelligence, image extension, reframing, grammar checking, AI wallpapers, and natural-language automations all on the table.
Why This Matters: If Apple gets this right, AI could move from being a separate app people open occasionally to something embedded across the device millions of people already use all day, which is far more powerful, and far more commercially dangerous for everyone else.
Kismet: The Camera integration may be the quiet tell here: Bloomberg notes it could help train users for visual AI ahead of future smart glasses or camera-equipped AirPods, meaning Siri may be less about the phone, and more about Apple’s next interface. 👉 Full story here
AI Has Entered the Sewer. And Annoyingly, It Makes Sense
SewerAI has secured a major strategic investment to scale its AI platform for inspecting, assessing, and rehabilitating aging underground infrastructure. Yes, SewerAI. I know. But once the giggling stops, this is exactly the kind of unglamorous digital plumbing cities badly need: faster inspections, better prioritisation, fewer failures, and less money poured into guesswork, which is appropriate, given the sector.
Key Highlights
SewerAI says its platform already supports data from more than 2,000 cities, manages over 30,000 miles of pipe, and has completed more than 850,000 NASSCO surveys through its AutoCode AI engine.
The investment, led by JMI Equity, will help expand tools for condition assessment, risk scoring, rehabilitation planning, regulatory reporting, and capital project prioritisation.
Customers include major municipal and utility players such as Houston, Phoenix and KC Water, all dealing with the cheery modern cocktail of aging assets, labour constraints, regulatory pressure, and infrastructure budgets that never quite stretch far enough.
Why This Matters: The sustainability transition is not just solar panels, batteries and shiny EVs; it is also the boring, buried infrastructure that keeps cities functioning, protects public health, reduces environmental risk, and stops municipal leaders discovering pipe failures the traditional way, via angry residents and unfortunate smells.
Kismet: SewerAI manages more than 30,000 miles of pipe data, which is longer than the circumference of the Earth, proving that even the planet’s hidden wastewater network is now being mapped, measured, and gently bullied by algorithms. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
China’s EV Makers Aren’t Knocking on Europe’s Door. They’re Building Factories Inside It
Chinese carmakers are rapidly expanding across Europe, with BYD, Geely, SAIC, Chery, Xpeng and Leapmotor all deepening their sales, factory, or partnership footprints. The sharp bit? Tariffs may slow imports, but they also make local production more attractive, and now Spain is emerging as one of the key landing zones for China’s EV industrial strategy.
Key Highlights
Chinese automakers grew from 6.7% of EU, UK and EFTA registrations in January-April 2025 to 10.2% in the same period of 2026.
SAIC, owner of MG, plans its first EU factory in Galicia, Spain, with around €200m in initial investment, about 1,000 direct jobs, and potential capacity of 120,000 cars a year.
BYD wants to produce all its European EVs locally by 2028, while Chery, Leapmotor, Xpeng and others are pursuing factories, joint ventures, or contract manufacturing across Spain, Austria and beyond.
Why This Matters: Europe’s car industry is no longer just facing cheaper Chinese EV imports; it is facing Chinese manufacturing, Chinese software, Chinese battery supply chains, and Chinese brands embedding themselves directly into Europe’s industrial base.
Kismet: Galicia’s proposed SAIC plant would sit in Ferrol, a port city better known for shipbuilding, which is a neat little symbol of the moment: Europe’s old industrial geography is being repurposed for the electric vehicle age, whether legacy automakers feel emotionally ready or not. 👉 Full story here
EV Sales Are Accelerating Because Petrol Keeps Punching People in the Wallet
EV demand is no longer just being pushed by climate concern or early-adopter enthusiasm; it is being pulled hard by economics. In the US, cheaper used EVs are bringing sceptical drivers across the line, in the UK battery-electric registrations jumped 31% in May, and in India, high fuel prices and tighter regulation are helping EVs break through the psychologically important 5% market-share threshold.
Key Highlights
In the US, used EV sales rose 17% in the first four months of the year, even as new EV sales fell sharply, with nearly 40% of used battery-electric cars on dealer lots priced below $25,000.
In the UK, battery-electric vehicles accounted for 27% of new registrations in May, with BEV registrations up 31% year-on-year while petrol and diesel fell.
In India, electric car sales grew 25% in the year to March 2026, EVs crossed 5% of the passenger-vehicle market, and adoption is already much higher in practical, high-use categories like two- and three-wheelers.
Why This Matters: The EV transition is moving from aspiration to arithmetic: when fossil fuel prices jump, running costs matter, and once used EVs become affordable, the market opens up far beyond wealthy early adopters and corporate fleets.
Kismet: India’s electric three-wheelers already account for more than 30% of sales in their category, a reminder that the global EV transition may be led less by luxury cars and more by the workhorse vehicles that quietly move people, parcels and livelihoods every day. 👉 Links Inline
Kia’s New EV Puts Accessibility in the Factory, Not the Afterthought Bin
Kia has unveiled the PV5 WAV Side Entry, a wheelchair-accessible electric van designed from the start for inclusive urban mobility. What caught my eye is that this isn’t an aftermarket bodge job with a ramp bolted on later; Kia is building accessibility into the vehicle production strategy itself, which is exactly how this should have worked years ago.
Key Highlights
The PV5 WAV Side Entry is a purpose-built wheelchair-accessible EV, making its European debut at Motability Scheme Live in Birmingham.
Kia says the vehicle uses a factory-led “Made-In-Plant” conversion approach, improving consistency, durability, safety integration, and scalability.
The side-entry ramp, described as a first for the small electric van segment, allows wheelchair users to board from the kerb, with flexible seating layouts for passengers and companions.
Why This Matters: Electrification only counts as progress if it includes people who are too often excluded from mobility design, and Kia’s PV5 WAV suggests accessible EVs could move from niche conversions to mainstream product planning.
Kismet: The side-entry design is not just about accessibility; it is also a clever urban design choice, because rear-entry wheelchair vehicles can be awkward or impossible to use when parked on crowded city streets, where space behind the vehicle is often measured in millimeters. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Australia’s Home Batteries Are Eating Gas for Dinner
Australia is showing what happens when rooftop solar, falling battery costs, and serious policy support collide: household batteries are being installed at extraordinary speed, evening gas demand is being squeezed, and electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. It’s not perfect, renters risk being left out and Australia’s fossil fuel exports remain an almighty climate contradiction, but this is still a glimpse of the distributed energy future arriving through the garage wall.
Key Highlights
Australia already has solar panels on around one in three homes, and household batteries are now scaling fast, with about 415,000 connected since last July.
Nearly 60% of household-scale battery capacity installed this financial year across almost 200 countries, excluding China, is expected to be in Australia.
Batteries are increasingly replacing gas during the evening peak, with gas-fired generation down 24% over one summer quarter compared with the year before.
Why This Matters: Home batteries turn households from passive bill-payers into active energy assets, cutting fossil fuel exposure, easing pressure on the grid, and making rooftop solar vastly more useful after sunset.
Kismet: Australia’s battery boom has become so rapid that more than 1,000 home batteries are being installed every day, while the government has already doubled its target to 2m systems by 2030 because its original forecast was apparently written by someone underestimating sunshine, savings, and human dislike of energy bills. 👉 Full story here
Britain’s Green Economy Is Now Too Big To Sneer At
The UK’s net zero economy is now worth more than £100bn a year, supports over a million jobs, pays above-average wages, and has nearly half a trillion pounds of investment waiting in the wings. Which makes the calls to scrap net zero look less like economic realism and more like trying to close the bakery because you dislike the smell of fresh bread.
Key Highlights
The net zero economy now contributes £105bn in gross value added, nearly 4% of UK economic output.
It supports around 1.1m jobs when supply chains and related businesses are included, with average wages topping £43,000, about 11% above the national average.
There is an estimated £455bn of potential energy infrastructure investment in the pipeline, driven by clean power, electrification and emissions reduction targets.
Why This Matters: Clean energy is no longer just a climate policy argument; it is an industrial strategy, a productivity story, a regional jobs engine, and a growing competitive advantage the UK would be impressively foolish to abandon.
Kismet: Each worker in the UK’s net zero economy generates nearly £120,000 a year for the wider economy, about one-and-a-half times the national average, which is awkward for anyone still pretending green jobs are decorative lifestyle accessories.
👉 Full story here
Science
Google Wants to Debug Mosquitoes. Literally.
Google’s Debug programme is seeking approval to release up to 32 million male mosquitoes carrying naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria in Florida and California, aiming to suppress the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that spread dengue, Zika and chikungunya. It sounds like someone lost a bet in a Silicon Valley brainstorming session, but the science is elegantly practical: male mosquitoes do not bite, and when these ones mate with wild females, the eggs do not hatch.
Key Highlights
Google’s Debug programme is seeking EPA approval to release up to 16 million mosquitoes in Florida first, followed by another 16 million in California the following year.
The mosquitoes carry Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacteria found in many insects, and the approach uses no pesticides, no toxins, and no genetic modification.
The target is Aedes aegypti, a disease-carrying mosquito species linked to dengue, Zika and chikungunya, and one of the more irritatingly successful little horrors on the planet.
Why This Matters: As pesticides become less effective and mosquito-borne diseases expand with warmer conditions, targeted biological control could offer communities a cleaner, more precise way to reduce disease risk without carpet-bombing ecosystems with chemicals.
Kismet: Only female mosquitoes bite, so Google’s “good bugs” are all male, meaning this entire plan hinges on millions of tiny winged bachelors flying into the dating pool and making reproduction fail at scale. 👉 Full story here
US-Israel War on Iran
Trump’s Iran War Just Became Clean Energy’s Best Sales Pitch
The US-Israel war on Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz into the world’s most expensive geography lesson, draining US oil stocks, pushing China to draw down reserves, and reminding every fuel-importing nation that fossil dependence is not energy security. The irony is vicious: a war wrapped in old-school petro-power may end up accelerating renewables, batteries, EVs, efficiency and electrification faster than any climate summit ever managed.
Key Highlights
The IEA expects global energy investment to hit $3.4tn in 2026, with around $2.2tn going into clean energy, grids, storage, efficiency and electrification, nearly twice the $1.2tn headed for fossil fuels.
US oil and petroleum product inventories have fallen to their lowest level since 2004, while China is cutting seaborne crude imports to decade-low levels and drawing on stockpiles instead of bidding aggressively into a panicked market.
Michael Liebreich argues this could trigger “Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0”, with countries racing to reduce exposure to oil and gas volatility after yet another fossil fuel shock, because apparently one crisis every few years was not enough of a hint.
Why This Matters: The core lesson is brutally simple: fossil fuels are global, volatile, militarised commodities, while solar panels, batteries, EVs, heat pumps and efficiency are domestic resilience tools that make countries harder to blackmail, shock, or bankrupt.
Kismet: Liebreich notes this is the 14th oil shock in 60 years, meaning the world experiences a major oil price shock roughly every four years, which is less an energy system and more a recurring hostage situation with refineries. 👉 Links inline
Climate Confident:
Greenwashing Just Got a Lot More Expensive
In this week’s Climate Confident, I spoke with Helen Neal about why sustainability communications now need the same rigour as financial reporting. The message was clear: vague net zero claims, glossy campaigns, and “trust us, we’re trying” language are running out of road, while green hushing is no safe harbour either.
Key Highlights
Companies need evidence-backed sustainability claims, with clearer data, tighter language, and third-party verification where possible.
Green hushing is risky too, because silence can erode trust with customers, employees, investors, and regulators.
AI can help check claims against regulations and spot weak language, but human oversight still matters, unless we’ve all decided hallucinated climate compliance is a reasonable business strategy. We have not.
Why This Matters: Sustainability communication is becoming a business-risk discipline, not a marketing side quest, and companies that connect credible data with honest storytelling will be far better placed than those still polishing fog.
Kismet: Helen made the point that the best companies don’t just put sustainability in a side department; they bake it into KPIs, board accountability, and even executive bonuses, because oddly enough, money still talks louder than laminated purpose statements. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Your Supply Chain Isn’t Slow. Your Decisions Are.
In this week’s Resilient Supply Chain episode, I spoke with Robbert de Looff from OMP about why traditional planning cycles are buckling under today’s volatility. His core point landed hard: if you don’t make the decision yourself, the decision gets made for you, usually by markets, competitors, weather, geopolitics, or some gloriously indifferent river.
Key Highlights
Robbert argues that supply chains need to move from process-centric planning to decision-centric planning, where teams know when to act, who needs to be involved, and what data is required.
Better forecasting still matters, but resilience increasingly depends on how fast companies respond when the forecast breaks, because it will. Repeatedly. With flair.
AI can help spot signals, run scenarios, and prepare options faster, but Robbert was clear that relationships, judgement, and final accountability should stay human.
Why This Matters: In a world of energy shocks, low river levels, raw material constraints, and sudden trade disruption, decision latency can hit service, margin, inventory, production efficiency, and customer trust before the next planning meeting has even found a calendar slot.
Kismet: Robbert’s example of the Rhine running low is a perfect reminder that supply chains are not just vulnerable to cyberattacks and wars; they can also be humbled by water levels, which is nature’s way of saying “nice optimisation model, shame about the river.” 🎧 Listen to the full episode
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All guests can still participate through the standard free publication route. But for organisations looking to increase reach, support a launch, build thought leadership, or accelerate publication timing, the page explains the available options and shares recent amplification results.
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Featured Chart(s)
The scale of global solar rollout is hard to comprehend!
Ukrainian drones are doing a magnificent job helping Russia on its path to net zero!
Misc stuff
According to this, I’m a Greek God, LOL!
I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I only worked 36 hours a week!
Looks like Brexit’s promise that Britain would finally get control of it’s borders may not have worked out as planned!
LOL!
Advanced!
Obligatory Trump Cartoon
Engage
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