In partnership with
Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, oil is misbehaving again, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about energy security getting electrified:
The Iran war is pushing solar, EVs, batteries, and home energy systems from “nice climate option” to “please make my bills and supply chains less fragile”.
NATO is backing renewables because diesel-dependent military logistics are, apparently, not the masterstroke some people imagined.
Spain is becoming one of Europe’s cheapest power markets as wind and solar push gas off the margin. Cheap clean power is now industrial policy with sunshine on top.
AI is getting useful in weird and wonderful ways: Google wants Android to become more agentic, Anthropic is gaining ground with businesses, and researchers used AI to find hidden planets in NASA data.
Plus: Cuba is proving you can’t blockade sunshine, Polestar is cutting the carbon baked into EV manufacturing, banks are starting to price emissions risk into lending, and Europe’s solar glut is screaming for storage.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
China and Europe Just Put a Price on Carbon Chaos
I love a good geopolitical plot twist: as the US doubles down on fossil fuels, the EU and China are teaming up with Brazil to build a global alliance around carbon pricing, because apparently someone in the room still needs to adult. The goal is to make carbon markets more transparent, interoperable, and credible, which sounds bureaucratic until you realise it could shape trade, investment, and industrial competitiveness for decades.
Key highlights:
The EU, China, and Brazil have launched a coalition to align carbon pricing systems globally.
The alliance is expected to include the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Turkey, and New Zealand.
China plans to shift its carbon market from intensity-based rules to an absolute emissions cap, while expanding coverage to sectors like petrochemicals and aviation.
Why This Matters: Carbon pricing is moving from climate-policy wonkery into hard-edged industrial strategy, and companies pretending this won’t affect trade, supply chains, or investment decisions are basically doing corporate yoga on thin ice.
Kismet: Even with the US federal government sitting this one out, California and Quebec can join the coalition as observers - proof that climate diplomacy now has side doors, back doors, and probably a service entrance marked “adults only.” 👉 Full story here
Banks Discover Climate Risk Has a Balance Sheet. Imagine That
Banks are increasingly being forced to treat climate risk not as glossy ESG garnish, but as credit risk sitting quietly inside their loan books, tapping its watch and asking awkward questions. This ties beautifully into my recent Resilient Supply Chain conversation with former banker Cynthia Lai, where we discussed why companies unable to measure emissions accurately may soon find the cost of capital becoming a lot less friendly.
Key highlights:
HSBC convened a private meeting with major UK banks including Barclays, Santander, NatWest, and Lloyds to discuss tougher climate-risk disclosure expectations.
Regulators want banks to factor climate exposure into expected credit losses, meaning climate risk could affect how lenders estimate borrower defaults.
Investors are pushing back, arguing there’s a mismatch between the climate risks they see and what banks are currently recognising in their financial models.
Why This Matters: This is where emissions data stops being a sustainability department problem and becomes a finance, risk, procurement, and supply chain problem, because if your lenders can’t see your transition plan, they may start pricing in the possibility that you don’t have one.
Kismet: ING has already applied a discretionary €47mn climate-risk adjustment to expected credit losses, while some UK banks are still effectively saying “nothing to see here,” which is less risk management and more accounting cosplay. 👉 Full story here
Oil’s Very Bad Year Is Electrification’s Unpaid Marketing Campaign
Global oil markets are doing that wonderfully fossil-fuel thing where supply shocks, war risk, damaged infrastructure, volatile prices, and demand destruction all arrive together wearing a trench coat labelled “energy security”. The IEA now expects oil demand to fall by 420,000 barrels per day in 2026, while global supply is projected to drop by 3.9 million barrels per day, and Russia, in an unexpected act of involuntary climate policy, has cut its oil and gas forecasts after sanctions, a weaker economy, and Ukrainian drone strikes on energy infrastructure.
Key highlights:
The IEA says global oil supply losses from Gulf producers have already exceeded 1 billion barrels, with more than 14 million barrels per day shut in due to the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
Demand is weakening too, especially in petrochemicals and aviation, as high prices, slower growth, and demand-saving measures start biting.
Russia has revised down oil and gas production and export forecasts through 2029, citing sanctions, drone attacks, and economic pressure. Net zero by drone. Who had that on the bingo card?
Why This Matters: Short term, this hurts: higher prices, tighter markets, ugly volatility; but longer term, every oil shock makes electrification, efficiency, renewables, storage, and cleaner industrial alternatives look less like climate virtue and more like basic economic self-defence.
Kismet: Ukraine’s drone campaign is doing something sanctions alone struggled to achieve: forcing Russia’s fossil fuel machine to spend more time repairing itself than confidently funding a war. Grim, effective, and not exactly the transition plan Moscow had in mind. 👉 Links Inline
AI News
Google Wants Your Phone to Stop Being a Phone and Start Being Your PA
Google is pushing Android from operating system into “intelligence system”, which is a fancy way of saying your phone may soon book things, fill forms, build shopping baskets, polish your rambling voice notes, and gently rescue you from your own app addiction. I’m torn between impressed and mildly alarmed, which is probably the correct emotional setting for 2026.
Key highlights:
Gemini Intelligence will automate multi-step tasks across Android apps, from ordering food to turning a grocery list into a delivery basket.
Chrome auto browse will let Gemini carry out web tasks such as booking appointments, reserving parking, or comparing content online.
Gboard’s new Rambler feature will turn messy spoken thoughts into cleaner text, even when switching between languages mid-sentence. Finally, technology catches up with how people actually talk.
Why This Matters: This is agentic AI moving out of the demo theatre and into everyday devices, which means the real battle is shifting from “who has the smartest chatbot?” to “who controls the operating layer where work, commerce, search, mobility, and attention all collide?”
Kismet: Google is also relaunching its laptop ambitions with new “Googlebooks”, complete with Android apps, Gemini features, and a “magic pointer” AI cursor, because apparently even the humble mouse now needs a career in consultancy. 👉 Full story here
Anthropic Just Overtook OpenAI Where the Money Lives
Anthropic has quietly done something rather significant: according to Ramp’s latest AI Index, it has passed OpenAI in paid business adoption for the first time. And because enterprise software markets normally move with the grace and urgency of a damp filing cabinet, this kind of reversal in a matter of months is genuinely eyebrow-raising.
Key highlights:
Anthropic adoption rose to 34.4% of businesses in April, while OpenAI fell to 32.3%.
Overall AI adoption among Ramp-tracked businesses crossed 50.6%, which suggests AI is no longer experimental furniture in the innovation lab.
Anthropic has reportedly quadrupled business adoption over the past year, while OpenAI’s business adoption barely moved.
Why This Matters:The enterprise AI race is shifting from hype to procurement, and once finance teams start comparing performance, reliability, switching costs, and token bills, brand momentum alone won’t save anyone.
Kismet: Some of the fastest-growing AI vendors on Ramp are inference platforms offering access to cheaper open-source models, meaning the next big threat to both Anthropic and OpenAI may not be each other, but CFOs discovering the AI bill and developing sudden religious feelings about cost control. 👉 Full story here
AI Just Found Dozens of Planets Hiding in Plain Starlight
This is the kind of AI story I love: not “please enjoy another chatbot doing meeting notes”, but astronomers using machine learning to sift through NASA’s TESS data and validate 118 exoplanets, including 31 newly detected worlds. Their RAVEN pipeline analysed observations from 2.2 million stars, spotting the tiny dips in light that suggest a planet passing in front of its sun, while filtering out the cosmic junk signals that would otherwise send researchers chasing shadows. Space science, but with less squinting. Progress.
Key highlights:
The University of Warwick team used its RAVEN AI pipeline to validate 118 planets and identify over 2,000 high-quality candidates.
The discoveries include ultra-short-period planets, rare “Neptunian desert” planets, and close-orbiting multi-planet systems.
RAVEN helps automate the whole workflow, from detecting possible planets to vetting false positives and statistically validating the strongest signals.
Why This Matters: AI is becoming a serious scientific instrument, helping researchers extract discovery from vast datasets that are far too large, noisy, and fiddly for humans to process manually without losing the will to live.
Kismet: The team found that “Neptunian desert” planets occur around just 0.08% of Sun-like stars, which means AI has now helped measure just how empty one of astronomy’s stranger planetary deserts really is. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Petrol Prices Are Doing EV Marketing Now
Nothing sells electric vehicles quite like petrol deciding to become a luxury product. From China to Ethiopia to the UK, the pattern is becoming brutally clear: when fuel prices spike and oil supply starts wobbling like a drunk shopping trolley, drivers begin noticing that electrons are cheaper, cleaner, and considerably less hostage to geopolitical chaos.
Key highlights:
In China, petrol car sales fell 37% year-on-year in April, while new energy vehicles reached 61.4% market share, with plug-ins taking 9 of the top 10 vehicle spots.
Africa imported 44,358 EVs from China in 2025, more than double the previous year, with Ethiopia leading after banning new petrol and diesel car imports.
In the UK, used battery EV sales jumped 32% in Q1, while new EV sales reportedly surged 59% in April as buyers looked to escape rising petrol costs.
Why This Matters: This is no longer just an environmental story; it is an energy-security, household-cost, industrial-competitiveness, and national-resilience story, because every oil shock makes EVs look less like a lifestyle choice and more like basic financial hygiene.
Kismet: Ethiopian EV owners now spend roughly $4 a month charging, compared with about $27 previously spent on fuel, which is a fairly persuasive argument when your national fuel import bill is measured in billions and your electricity is mostly renewable. 👉 Links Inline
Polestar Wants to Kill the Last Lazy Argument Against EVs
EVs are already far cleaner to drive than petrol cars, but Polestar is now going after the harder bit: the emissions baked into making them in the first place. The company cut its carbon footprint per vehicle by 7.3% last year, is chasing a net-zero car by 2035, and is leaning into recycled materials and cleaner supplier energy while much of the auto industry appears to be rediscovering the internal combustion engine like it’s a lost Victorian technology. Bless.
Key highlights:
Polestar cut vehicle-level carbon emissions by 7.3% last year, helped by its cleaner Polestar 4 SUV.
The Polestar 4 uses around 600 pounds of reused materials, about 12% of its total weight, including recycled steel, cobalt, battery materials, and interior fabrics.
More than one-third of power used by Polestar’s suppliers now comes from fossil-free sources, helping reduce the supply chain emissions that dominate EV manufacturing footprints.
Why This Matters: The strongest case for EVs gets even stronger when manufacturers tackle embedded carbon too, because cleaner vehicles should mean cleaner driving, cleaner supply chains, cleaner materials, and fewer excuses from people pretending petrol cars are somehow the environmental high ground.
Kismet: Polestar says sustainability is becoming less about moral virtue and more about business sense, which is exactly the shift climate tech needs: not “please buy this because it’s worthy”, but “buy this because it is cleaner, cheaper to run, better engineered, and increasingly required by regulators anyway. 👉 Full story here
AI Just Gave EV Batteries a Longer Life Without Slower Charging
This is one of those quietly brilliant EV advances that won’t get the hype it deserves, because apparently “software makes batteries last longer” is less exciting than another concept car with doors that open like a distressed beetle. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have developed an AI charging method that adapts fast charging to a battery’s age, chemistry, and health, extending battery life by almost 23% without adding meaningful charging time.
Key highlights:
The AI system adjusts charging current during fast charging based on the battery’s real-time condition and state of health.
Battery life increased by around 23% compared with standard charging methods, while charging time stayed essentially the same.
The approach could be delivered through vehicle battery-management software updates, though it still needs calibration across different battery types.
Why This Matters: Longer-lasting batteries mean better EV resale values, lower warranty costs, less pressure on critical raw materials, and another nail in the coffin of the increasingly ridiculous “but what about the battery?” objection.
Kismet: The AI is partly tackling lithium plating, a battery ageing problem where metallic lithium builds up where it shouldn’t, which sounds like electrochemical dandruff but can reduce capacity and, in worse cases, affect safety. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
NATO Discovers Renewables Are a Security Strategy
NATO is now openly backing renewables and other non-fossil energy sources as central to energy security, because relying on imported diesel and oil from unstable regions has, shockingly, proven to be a less-than-genius military strategy. The alliance’s energy security experts argue that solar, wind, electrification, alternative fuels, and better efficiency can make military operations more resilient, less dependent on vulnerable supply chains, and harder to disrupt.
Key highlights:
A NATO-backed study advises alliance members to ramp up renewables as a more secure alternative to imported oil and gas.
Simulations for future military camps found greener energy systems could cut imported fuel needs, improve energy efficiency by 20%, and boost energy autonomy by 35%.
The Iran war and Strait of Hormuz disruption have sharpened the point: fossil fuel dependence is a battlefield vulnerability, not a strength.
Why This Matters: When even military planners are treating clean energy as strategic infrastructure, the old “renewables are soft climate policy” argument starts looking less like realism and more like fossil-soaked nostalgia wearing camouflage.
Kismet: Norway has already used synthetic sustainable aviation fuel in an F-35 fighter jet, which means the clean energy transition has officially reached the “stealth aircraft running on future juice” stage of history. 👉 Full story here
Spain’s Cheap Clean Power Is Becoming an Economic Weapon
Spain has quietly gone from cautionary solar-policy tale to one of Europe’s cheapest wholesale electricity markets, which is quite the glow-up for a country once accused of getting renewables wrong. In the first four months of 2026, Spain’s average wholesale power price was just €44/MWh, compared with €127 in Italy, €103 in the UK, and €96 in Germany - and that matters not just for bills, but for factories, data centres, electrified transport, green hydrogen, and every industrial investor currently wondering where Europe’s energy future actually makes economic sense.
Key highlights:
Wind and solar supplied 44% of Spain’s electricity in Q1 2026, while fossil fuels fell to just 17%.
Gas set Spain’s wholesale electricity price in only 9% of hours in the first four months of 2026, down from roughly 55% in 2022.
Spain’s low wholesale prices are increasingly decoupling the country from fossil fuel volatility, though retail bills still depend on taxes, network charges, and system costs.
Why This Matters: Cheap renewable electricity is no longer just climate policy with a nice brochure; it is industrial strategy, cost-of-living relief, energy security, and a powerful inward-investment signal rolled into one very sunny, slightly bureaucratic Spanish package.
Kismet: Spain’s 2025 blackout was widely blamed on renewables before the evidence arrived, because apparently physics now has to wait behind hot takes; the later investigation pointed instead to voltage stability and grid management, meaning the lesson is not “less clean power”, but “modernise the grid properly”. 👉 Full story here
You Can’t Blockade Sunshine
It’s an ill wind that blows no solar panel, and Cuba’s brutal oil squeeze is now accelerating one of the fastest solar buildouts on the planet. The US can choke off fuel supplies, and Cuba’s grid is still in a dreadful state, but sunshine remains annoyingly difficult to sanction, which may be the most useful thing the laws of physics have done all week.
Key highlights:
Cuba’s solar and battery imports from China have soared, with solar panel imports rising from around $3m in 2023 to $117m in 2025.
China is helping Cuba build 92 solar parks by 2028, projected to add 2GW of solar capacity, enough to power more than 1.5 million homes.
Renewables now make up roughly 10% of Cuba’s electricity, up from around 3% in 2024, with a target of at least 24% by 2030.
Why This Matters: Energy independence is moving from slogan to survival strategy, and Cuba’s crisis shows that clean power is not just about emissions, it is about sovereignty, resilience, and escaping the geopolitical chokeholds baked into fossil fuel dependence.
Kismet: Cuba has reportedly installed around 1GW of solar in just 12 months, a huge leap for an island whose energy system has been battered by blackouts, ageing infrastructure, and the kind of political hostility that makes “free market energy security” sound like satire. 👉 Full story here
Energy Storage
Europe Has Too Much Solar and Not Enough Places to Put It
Europe has reached the deliciously awkward stage of the clean-energy transition where solar is so successful that we’re now wasting huge amounts of it because grids, markets, and storage haven’t caught up. The answer is not to slow solar, obviously, but to build the flexibility layer around it: batteries at utility scale, batteries in homes, smarter tariffs, stronger grids, and demand that moves when clean power is abundant instead of sulking expensively at teatime.
Key highlights:
Europe could waste around 40TWh of solar electricity in the coming months, enough to power Greater London for a year.
Co-located renewable-plus-battery projects in Europe are expected to grow from 6.3GW in 2025 to around 35GW by 2030, a jump of more than 450%.
Home batteries are becoming more attractive too, letting households store cheap solar or off-peak electricity and use it when prices spike, which is exactly the kind of domestic energy mischief I’d quite like to add to my own solar setup.
Why This Matters: The next phase of the energy transition is not just more generation; it is storage, flexibility, timing, and control, because clean electricity you cannot use is a wasted climate win, a wasted economic win, and a gift-wrapped excuse for fossil incumbents to mutter nonsense into microphones.
Kismet: Spain curtailed around 16% of its solar generation in the first quarter, roughly double the level a year earlier, which means my sunny corner of Europe is now producing the kind of problem every fossil fuel system wishes it had: too much cheap clean power at the wrong time. 👉 Links Inline
US-Israel War on Iran
The Iran War Is Turning Clean Energy Into Emergency Infrastructure
The US-Israel war on Iran is doing something fossil fuel lobbyists will absolutely hate: it is making solar, batteries, wind, and EVs look less like climate tech and more like survival kit. Across Asia, Europe, and Africa, fuel shocks are pushing households, businesses, and governments towards clean energy because, once again, fossil fuels have confused “energy security” with “please route my economy through a war zone”.
Key highlights:
In the Philippines, rooftop solar companies reported a 70% jump in weekly installations and a six-fold surge in customer inquiries since the war began.
In Britain, record wind and solar generation has avoided around £1.7bn of gas imports, cutting gas-fired power to record lows in March and April.
China’s clean-tech exporters are seizing the moment, with solar, battery, and EV exports rising sharply as countries scramble to reduce exposure to fuel imports.
Why This Matters: Every fossil fuel crisis becomes an accidental clean energy advert, reminding governments and businesses that renewables are not just cheaper and cleaner, they are also harder to blockade, ration, weaponise, or panic-buy.
Kismet: China exported 68GW of clean-tech products in March, roughly equivalent to Spain’s entire solar capacity, which is what happens when one country spends years building the factory floor of the energy transition while others argue about slogans.
👉 Links Inline
Latest blog post
Bad Carbon Data Is Becoming a Balance Sheet Problem
In my latest blog post, I argue that emissions data has quietly moved from sustainability reporting into the harder, colder world of finance, insurance, procurement, customer trust, and supply chain resilience. Bad data is no longer harmless; it is a risk signal, and if companies cannot produce credible emissions figures, banks, insurers, customers, and investors may increasingly fill in the blanks themselves. Rarely with charity.
Key highlights:
Supply chain emissions are often the main event: Scope 3 emissions can dwarf a company’s direct emissions, yet many firms still rely on averages, proxies, or data held together with hope and spreadsheet tape.
Banks and insurers are starting to treat poor emissions visibility as a risk issue, which could affect borrowing costs, insurance availability, and commercial credibility.
The practical answer is primary supplier data, better hotspot analysis, supplier segmentation, and embedding carbon into procurement, product design, and board-level decision systems.
Why This Matters: Emissions data is becoming the accounting layer of the energy transition, and companies that cannot measure credibly will struggle to prove, finance, insure, sell, hire, or defend their way through climate risk.
Kismet: As I’ve been arguing for a long time, the humble purchase order may become one of the most important climate tools in the enterprise, because if it carries product carbon data, supplier energy mix, recycled content, logistics mode, and assurance status, it quietly turns procurement into a decarbonisation engine. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
The Streetlight Just Got a Climate Upgrade
This week on Climate Confident, I spoke with Liam Ryan, CEO of Streetleaf, about something almost nobody thinks about until it fails: streetlights. It turns out solar-and-battery streetlighting can cut trenching, wiring, copper theft, maintenance delays, emissions, and grid dependence, while keeping communities lit during hurricanes, outages, and the general circus of modern infrastructure fragility. Sounds like they’d be ideal for Cuba, which is handy seeing as Streetleaf is based in nearby Florida!
Key highlights:
Streetleaf’s solar streetlights combine PV, battery storage, LED lighting, smart monitoring, and dark-sky-friendly design.
Because they don’t need trenching, cabling, or grid connections, they can be installed far faster than conventional streetlights.
During Florida hurricanes, Streetleaf lights stayed on while grid-connected lights and homes went dark, turning basic public lighting into resilience infrastructure.
Why This Matters: This is a reminder that decarbonisation isn’t only about glamorous megaprojects; sometimes it’s about quietly replacing overlooked infrastructure with cleaner, smarter, more resilient systems that just work.
Kismet: One of Liam’s teams found people eating dinner under Streetleaf’s solar lights during a blackout because they were the only lights still working in the neighbourhood, which is the moment a streetlight stops being urban furniture and becomes a community resilience resource. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
AI Agents Can Do the Paperwork. They Can’t Own the Consequences
This week on Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with Simon Bezrukov, Chief AI Officer at Bristlecone, about the real promise and real limits of AI in supply chain. We got past the agentic AI confetti cannon pretty quickly and into the harder questions: what should AI automate, what should it explain, what should it simulate, and what should it absolutely never decide alone?
Key highlights:
Agentic AI is powerful for workflows, replanning support, supplier comms, data gathering, and decision paperwork, but autonomy without guardrails can turn mistakes into high-speed corporate confetti.
LLMs are brilliant at explanation, retrieval, and making planning tools easier to use, but they are not optimisation engines and should not be treated as magical supply chain oracles.
Digital twins should model decisions, not reality itself; the best model is often the smallest one that leaders trust and actually use.
Why This Matters: AI will reshape supply chain resilience, but only if leaders combine automation with governance, critical thinking, domain expertise, and the humility to know where prediction stops and judgement begins.
Kismet: Simon’s sharpest line was that agents are great at doing the paperwork of decisions, but not yet great at owning the consequences, which may be the cleanest summary I’ve heard of why supply chain AI needs adult supervision, ideally before something expensive catches fire. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
BREAKING: Apple just enabled video for podcasts in its Apple Podcasts app, and both the Resilient Supply Chain, and Climate Confident podcasts are some of the first podcasts available in video format there. Go check them out, and let me know what you think!
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
We’re not doing too badly here in Spain with our energy transition!
If you hear someone arguing that “Our country is less than 1% of emissions” or similar, show them this.
Misc stuff
As a fan of the Damaged Detective genre (that’s a term I made up quite a while back), I love this!
Spain and Ireland - my two countries aren’t doing too badly!
When someone claims wind turbines kill birds (cats kill many orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines), remind them that fossil fuels kill far more birds than wind turbines.
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
Has science gone too far?
Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.
Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.
Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.