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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, oil is above $125, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about trust, or the sudden lack of it.
The US-Israel war on Iran has sent oil prices surging, exposed fossil fuel dependence as the security risk it always was, and pushed Europe to accelerate electrification, grids, and homegrown clean energy. Funny how quickly “expensive climate policy” becomes “basic economic defence” once the petrol bill starts screaming.
The big threads:
Fossil fuels look weaker. Not just dirtier. Weaker. Price shocks, supply chokepoints, inflation risk, and political fragility are doing more damage to their reputation than any climate campaign ever could.
AI is moving deeper into healthcare, from spotting pancreatic cancer early to helping clinicians with documentation, research, and decision support. Powerful, promising, and absolutely not something to deploy with the casual optimism of a software update.
EVs are surging globally, with oil volatility doing the sales pitch, while cheaper models and better specs keep making the old objections sound increasingly stale.
Plus: the first fossil fuel exit summit in Colombia, clean energy myths taking a data-heavy beating, tiny laser-powered “metajets” pointing awkwardly towards Alpha Centauri, and two podcast episodes, one on synthetic jet fuel with Dan Sutton, and one on why your carbon hotspot is probably not where you think it is with John Beath.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
The Fossil Fuel Exit Club Meets Without the Usual Spoilers
The first dedicated Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels summit in Santa Marta, Colombia, brought nearly 60 countries together to do what COP keeps fumbling: talk plainly about ending coal, oil, and gas. I had Tzeporah Berman of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty on Climate Confident last year setting the scene for exactly this conversation: climate policy can’t just manage demand, it has to tackle supply too, otherwise we’re just politely rearranging deckchairs while drilling new holes in the ship.
Key highlights:
France put dates on the table: coal by 2030, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050. Not entirely new policy, but bundled into a clearer fossil-fuel exit roadmap, which in climate diplomacy counts as progress.
This summit deliberately bypassed the COP consensus swamp, where fossil fuel producers can slow-walk language into soup. The US, Saudi Arabia and Russia were absent, which rather explains why people managed to have a useful conversation.
The process now continues: an expert panel will support governments with transition planning, Brazil is working on a voluntary global roadmap, and Tuvalu, with Ireland, is expected to host the next edition. Small islands leading the adults again. Naturally.
Why This Matters: This is a major signal that serious countries are starting to treat fossil fuel dependence as an economic, security, and climate liability, not some sacred industrial inheritance that must be preserved until the last lobbyist retires.
Kismet: The summit was held in Santa Marta, a Colombian coal port, which is almost too perfect: the fossil fuel phaseout conversation literally walked into coal’s house and started measuring the curtains. 👉 Full story here
Jailing Climate Protesters Is Going About As Well As You’d Expect
The UK’s crackdown on climate protesters appears to be doing the one thing governments presumably didn’t want: making activists more determined, less fearful, and possibly more willing to move from visible disruption to harder-to-police tactics. I discussed this very issue with veteran climate activist Jonathon Porritt on Climate Confident last year, after his own arrest at a climate protest, and his core argument feels painfully current here: criminalising conscience rarely extinguishes it; more often, it pressurises it.
Key highlights:
A study of 1,375 campaigners found repression can strengthen resolve, with people who had already been arrested, fined, surveilled, or jailed reporting less fear about future disruptive action. Governments tried “scare them off” and somehow invented “make them braver.” Inspired stuff.
UK climate protest policing is unusually aggressive: 17% of climate protests between 2019 and 2024 reportedly resulted in arrests, compared with an international average of 6.3%.
The public picture is more nuanced than ministers might like: while many Britons dislike disruptive groups such as Just Stop Oil, only 29% thought prison was the right punishment for disruptive, non-violent protest.
Why This Matters: If governments block lawful, visible routes for climate dissent while emissions keep rising, they risk turning protest from a public democratic pressure valve into something angrier, more alienated, and less predictable.
Kismet: The research was published in Nature Climate Change, which means the UK’s protest crackdown has now achieved the dubious honour of being bad politics, bad climate strategy, and peer-reviewed self-sabotage. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Spots One of the Deadliest Cancers Years Early
Pancreatic cancer is one of the nastiest diagnoses in medicine, with more than 85% of cases found too late for curative treatment and five-year survival around 10% globally, because apparently the human body needed one more design flaw. A new Mayo Clinic-led AI system may change that, spotting subtle signs in routine CT scans an average of 475 days before diagnosis, including cases where doctors had read the scans as normal.
Key highlights:
The AI system, called Redmod, correctly identified 73% of future pancreatic cancer cases, compared with about 39% for radiologists reviewing the same images.
Its edge was even bigger more than two years before diagnosis, detecting 68% of cases versus 23% for doctors. Not replacing clinicians, but definitely giving them a sharper pair of digital spectacles.
This could help flag high-risk patients earlier, especially older adults with warning signs such as unexplained weight loss or new-onset diabetes, though it still needs real-world prospective testing before hospitals start leaning on it routinely.
Why This Matters: For a cancer where timing is often the difference between surgery and palliative care, earlier AI-assisted detection could shift pancreatic cancer from a late-stage ambush to something medicine can actually fight.
Kismet: Steve Jobs died from a rarer pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour rather than the more common pancreatic ductal cancer studied here, but the shared lesson is brutal: with pancreatic disease, biology often moves silently long before medicine notices.
👉 Full story here
OpenAI Just Gave Doctors the AI Co-Pilot The Pitt Was Hinting At
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, free for verified US physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists, aimed at helping with clinical documentation, medical research, care consults, referral letters, prior authorisations, and the paperwork sludge quietly eating modern medicine. If you watched The Pitt, this feels very Dr Al Hashimi: an ER clinician seeing AI less as a shiny toy and more as a practical way to move faster, reduce cognitive overload, and keep humans focused on patients rather than forms, tabs, and bureaucratic mulch.
Key highlights:
AI use in clinical practice is already surging: OpenAI cites a 2026 AMA survey saying 72% of physicians now use AI in clinical practice, up from 48% last year.
The tool targets real clinical workflows: documentation, care consults, literature reviews, patient instructions, referrals, prior authorisation, and cited medical research from peer-reviewed sources.
OpenAI is also releasing HealthBench Professional, an open benchmark based on real clinician chat tasks across care consults, documentation, and medical research.
Why This Matters: Healthcare is drowning in admin and information overload, so AI that safely gives clinicians time back could improve care, reduce burnout, and make the human bits of medicine more human again.
Kismet: OpenAI says physician advisors tested 6,924 clinical conversations before release and rated 99.6% of responses as safe and accurate, which is either reassuring progress or the start of every hospital IT committee suddenly developing opinions about prompt engineering. 👉 Full story here
OpenAI Bets GPT-5.5 Can Handle Real Work
OpenAI’s just launched GPT-5.5 is less “ask me a question” and more “give me the horrible multi-step task you’ve been avoiding and I’ll try to carry it across the line,” with big claims around coding, research, document creation, data analysis, computer use, and agentic workflows. The more interesting bit for me isn’t the usual benchmark confetti, it’s the shift from AI as answer machine to AI as execution layer.
Key highlights:
GPT-5.5 is pitched as a stronger agentic work model, able to plan, use tools, check outputs, handle ambiguity, and keep going across messy tasks like debugging, research, spreadsheets, documents, and software workflows.
The performance claims are substantial: GPT-5.5 scores 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, 84.9% on GDPval, and 78.7% on OSWorld-Verified, all pointing to stronger real-world task execution rather than prettier autocomplete.
The enterprise question is trust, not cleverness: Futurum’s analysis notes that 68% of surveyed organisations are already at GenAI Stage 3 or higher, while reliability, hallucination control, privacy, governance, and integration remain the actual barriers. Which is irritatingly sensible.
Why This Matters: GPT-5.5 suggests the next AI battleground is no longer who writes the smoothest paragraph, but who can safely take on repeatable, complex, governed work inside real organisations without making a costly mess in a spreadsheet, codebase, or customer workflow.
Kismet: OpenAI says GPT-5.5 helped improve the infrastructure that serves it, including work that increased token generation speeds by over 20%, which means we have now reached the oddly circular stage where the AI is helping optimise the machinery that runs the AI. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Petrol Panic Sends EV Sales Soaring Globally
EV sales are accelerating across Europe, Asia, Australia, and emerging markets, helped by a familiar cocktail: higher petrol prices, better models, cheaper Chinese exports, and consumers realising that tying your mobility budget to oil geopolitics is, frankly, a bold lifestyle choice. The UK now has more than 2 million zero-emission vehicles on the road, Europe saw a sharp March jump, and markets from Singapore to South Korea to Australia are showing that electrification is shifting from niche enthusiasm to mainstream maths.
Key highlights:
EV demand jumped sharply in March: France, Germany and the UK sold 206,200 EVs, up 44% year on year, while South Korea more than doubled and Italy rose 67%.
The tipping point is spreading: EVs made up a quarter of global new car sales in 2025, with standout early-2026 shares including 56% in Singapore, 28% in Thailand, 21% in Indonesia, 30% in Uruguay, and 23% in the UK in March.
Australia may be moving faster than expected: one analysis suggests BEV sales could hit 75–80% of new car sales by 2029 or 2030 if the long-running growth trend continues, with 2026 already showing a stronger market share than 2025.
Why This Matters: The EV transition is increasingly being driven by economics, product availability, and energy security, not just climate policy, which makes it far harder for the usual fossil-fuel nostalgia merchants to slow it down with vibes and spreadsheet abuse.
Kismet: In Australia, one atmospheric chemist who switched to a BYD Dolphin and charges from rooftop solar reportedly cut transport costs from $100 a week to $4, which is less “green sacrifice” and more “why was I paying for combustion theatre?”
👉 Links inline
Cheap EVs Are Coming for Petrol’s Last Excuse
The old anti-EV comfort blanket, “they’re too expensive and don’t go far enough”, is getting rather threadbare. Volkswagen is pushing the new ID. Polo into Ireland from €19,885 after grants and VRT relief, while BYD’s new Seal 08 is boasting the kind of specs that used to belong to luxury fever dreams: up to 1,000 km CLTC range, 400 km added in five minutes, and 684 hp in the dual-motor version, because subtlety has apparently been discontinued.
Key highlights:
Affordable EVs are finally getting serious: VW’s ID. Polo starts under €20,000 in Ireland, with a 37kWh LFP battery, 329km range, and a more practical, familiar small-car package.
The specs race is moving fast: BYD’s Seal 08 pairs Blade Battery 2.0 with megawatt-level flash charging, targeting a 10–70% battery charge in five minutes and making “range anxiety” look increasingly like a fossil-era folk tale.
Legacy carmakers are being forced to respond: VW is sharing almost 80% of components across four small EVs from VW, Škoda and Cupra, all built here in Spain, saving about €650mn and aiming directly at Chinese competition.
Why This Matters: EV adoption gets a lot easier when the cars stop asking buyers to choose between affordability, range, charging speed, and practicality, which means the next phase of electrification may be won less by ideology and more by brutally obvious value.
Kismet: Volkswagen’s affordable EV fightback is being built in Martorell, near Barcelona, so one of Europe’s biggest answers to China’s EV surge is being assembled under the Spanish sun, not in Germany’s traditional car heartlands. 👉 Links inline
Mining’s Diesel Habit Just Met Its Electric Reckoning
Mining giant Fortescue’s Pilbara decarbonisation plan has plenty of moving parts, but the sharpest economic case is brutally simple: giant electric haul trucks can be much cheaper to run than diesel ones. After some expensive hydrogen detours, because apparently every transition needs a few ceremonial bonfires of capital, the real money now appears to be in electrifying the mining fleet, with analysis suggesting truck electrification could deliver enormous fuel savings and help the wider renewables plan stack up financially.
Key highlights:
Fortescue burns around 700 million litres of diesel a year across its Pilbara operations, with every 10 cents per litre movement in diesel prices affecting operating costs by about A$70m. That is not a fuel bill. That is a hostage note.
The electric truck maths is compelling: one estimate puts annual operating costs at about A$2.0m per diesel haul truck versus A$0.59m for a BEV, creating roughly A$1.4m in annual savings per truck.
Fleet-wide, the numbers get very interesting: replacing 360 haul trucks plus ancillary mining equipment could cost around A$2.4bn, but generate net annual savings of about A$800m, implying a simple payback of roughly three years.
Why This Matters: Mining electrification isn’t just a climate story; it’s an operating-cost, energy-security, and industrial-resilience story, because once diesel becomes volatile, expensive, and logistically awkward, electrons start looking less like virtue and more like hard-nosed finance.
Kismet: Battery-swapping mine trucks could double as a flexible energy resource, with spare packs acting as around 360MWh of distributed storage, meaning the mine’s “fuel system” starts behaving a bit like a grid asset. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Record Power Demand, Falling Fossil Use. Awkward.
Australia just gave us a lovely little energy-transition plot twist: hotter weather and hungry data centres pushed electricity demand to record highs, yet renewables and batteries still helped drive gas generation to its lowest quarterly level since 1999 and cut average wholesale prices. Meanwhile in Europe, CREA finds countries with cleaner power mixes are saving far more on bills than those still clinging to fossil fuels like it’s a business strategy rather than a recurring invoice from geopolitical chaos.
Key highlights:
Australia’s grid demand hit a record 25GW in Q1 2026, but rooftop solar helped absorb the extra load, while renewables reached 46.5% of generation across the national electricity market.
Batteries are starting to mug gas in broad daylight: large-scale battery capacity more than doubled over the past year, batteries tripled their daytime-to-evening shifting, gas generation fell 24%, and average wholesale prices dropped 12% year on year.
Europe is seeing the same logic at continental scale: CREA estimates the EU could save €5.8bn in 2026 from clean energy displacing expensive gas, while the five countries with the cleanest electricity mixes could save 58% more on bills than the five dirtiest.
Why This Matters: Clean energy is no longer just cutting emissions; it is actively weakening fossil fuels’ grip on electricity prices, energy security, and household bills, which is deeply inconvenient for anyone still pretending gas is the adult in the room.
Kismet: In Spain and Portugal, solar growth helped cut electricity-price sensitivity to gas shocks by 53% since 2022, meaning Iberia is quietly turning sunshine into economic shock absorbers. 👉 Links inline
Myths Busted: Solar Won’t Give You Cancer. Birds Can Dodge Turbines
Two of the more persistent clean-energy scare stories took a data-heavy kicking this week: solar farms are not toxic cancer factories, and wind turbines are not the avian death machines their critics love to imagine. Handy, really, because the planet is warming fast enough without us inventing new folklore about panels, inverters, and apparently suicidal birds.
Key highlights:
Solar’s health fears don’t stand up well: noise levels fall away quickly, EMF exposure near inverters is trivial compared with everyday appliances, and toxic materials in panels are tiny, sealed, and far less worrying than coal ash or abandoned oil and gas wells.
Solar is booming globally despite the nonsense: generation grew by 636TWh in 2025, up 30%, with new solar meeting around three-quarters of the world’s new energy demand. Not bad for something some people still discuss as if it were haunted glass.
Birds are better at avoiding turbines than expected: one German study tracked more than 4 million bird movements and found avoidance rates above 99.86%, while a separate Vattenfall/Spoor study tracked 137,000 birds and confirmed no actual collisions in its reviewed cases.
Why This Matters: Bad-faith myths slow down good infrastructure, and these studies matter because the energy transition needs genuine environmental scrutiny, not weaponised anxiety dressed up as local concern.
Kismet: At Aberdeen Bay, the pre-construction model predicted 8.54 bird collisions per turbine per year, but observed data suggested just 0.002 expected collisions across the study period, meaning the risk model may have overshot reality by nearly 7,000 times. 👉 Links inline
US-Israel War on Iran
Oil Hits $125, and Fossil Fuel Trust Goes Up in Smoke
The unnecessary US-Israel war on Iran is turning into a brutal reminder that fossil fuel “security” is often just geopolitical fragility with better branding. Brent crude surged past $125 a barrel, Daniel Yergin called the Hormuz crisis the “biggest energy disruption” he has ever seen, and Fatih Birol of the IEA says the damage is already done: governments will now rethink energy strategy, accelerate renewables, electrification, and nuclear, and trust fossil fuels less. Fancy that. Dependence on combustible liquids shipped through chokepoints can be risky. Who could possibly have foreseen this, apart from everyone paying attention?
Key highlights:
Oil markets are pricing in prolonged disruption: Brent hit $126.41, its highest level since 2022, after warnings that the blockade around Iran could last months, with analysts increasingly focused on inflation, recession, and stagflation risks.
The crisis goes far beyond petrol pumps: Yergin warned the shock also affects gas, fertiliser, helium, aluminium, petrochemicals, and Asian economies especially, because so much regional oil and LNG flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
Europe is moving from panic to structural response: the EU’s new AccelerateEU plan includes 44 actions to reduce exposure to fossil-fuel price shocks, including an electrification target, efforts to lower the electricity-to-fossil-fuel price ratio, grid upgrades, and faster deployment of homegrown clean energy.
Why This Matters: This feels like a genuine turning point because fossil fuels are no longer just dirty; they are visibly unreliable, inflationary, strategically dangerous, and politically explosive, while electrification increasingly looks like the boringly sensible escape hatch.
Kismet: Birol’s line that the global economy can be held hostage by a 50km strait may be the most damning energy-security sentence of the year, because it reduces a century of fossil-fuel strategy to one very expensive shipping bottleneck. 👉 Links inline
Science
Tiny Laser Jets Could Rewrite Space Travel
A Texas A&M team has demonstrated tiny light-propelled “metajets” that can be lifted and steered in three dimensions using lasers, with no physical contact and no onboard fuel, which is either elegant physics or space travel’s version of witchcraft with better peer review. It’s very early, very tiny, and very dependent on funding and optical power, but the long game is delicious: systems like this could one day help send lightweight probes towards Alpha Centauri in decades rather than geological eras.
Key highlights:
The metajets are micron-scale devices made from metasurfaces, ultrathin patterned materials that control how light bounces off them, transferring momentum and creating motion.
Unlike earlier optical propulsion approaches, this system enables full 3D manoeuvrability, meaning researchers can lift and steer the objects rather than merely shove them in one direction with light.
The technology is still lab-stage, tested in a fluid environment to offset gravity, but the team believes the same physics could scale if enough optical power can be delivered.
Why This Matters: If light propulsion can become controllable and scalable, it opens a path to spacecraft that don’t need to carry fuel for every manoeuvre, which is a rather useful trick when the destination is 4.37 light-years away and rockets are still glorified controlled explosions.
Kismet: The proposed Breakthrough Starshot concept imagined laser-driven probes reaching Alpha Centauri in about 20 years, meaning a civilisation that still loses luggage at airports is, somehow, inching towards interstellar postcards. 👉 Full story here
Podcasts
Climate Confident:
The Clean Jet Fuel Bet That Could Actually Beat Fossil Oil
In this week’s Climate Confident, I spoke with Dan Sutton, co-founder and CEO of Syntholene Energy, about a provocative idea: synthetic, carbon-neutral hydrocarbons made from water, captured carbon, geothermal heat, and electricity. The claim is not “aviation should magically electrify”, because physics is sitting in the corner laughing; it’s that drop-in synthetic jet fuel could become cheap enough to compete with fossil kerosene without needing permanent subsidy life support.
Key highlights:
Dan’s core argument is brutally practical: aviation needs energy-dense liquid fuels, and jet fuel moves absurd amounts of energy very quickly, which is exactly why decarbonising flight is such a pig of a problem.
Syntholene’s differentiator is thermal integration: geothermal heat plus solid oxide electrolysis could cut the cost of hydrogen, the biggest cost driver in synthetic fuels.
The timing matters: with fossil fuel supply chains looking shakier by the week, synthetic fuels are being reframed as climate tech, industrial strategy, and energy sovereignty all at once. Annoyingly sensible, really.
Why This Matters: If eSAF can move from “technically interesting but ruinously expensive” to “commercially credible”, aviation gets a serious decarbonisation pathway that doesn’t require grounding the global economy or waiting for battery-powered transatlantic flights from the land of unicorns.
Kismet: Dan noted that Iceland’s geothermal potential is so vast that tapping just 1% of its known super-hot rock resource could produce energy equivalent to roughly 2 billion barrels of oil a year, which is the sort of number that makes fossil fuels look less like destiny and more like a lack of imagination. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Your Carbon Hotspot Probably Isn’t Where You Think It Is
In this week’s Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with John Beath, CEO and Chief Technical Director of John Beath Environmental, about why so many companies chase visible sustainability gestures while missing the emissions elephant quietly tap-dancing through their supply chains. His point was wonderfully blunt: before you start changing materials, suppliers, packaging, logistics, or claims, measure the full footprint properly, because vibes remain a poor substitute for maths.
Key highlights:
The obvious fix is often not the meaningful fix: John shared the example of a huge office obsessing over styrofoam cups, while tiny thermostat changes could have had far greater impact.
Scope 3 and raw materials can dwarf factory emissions: one reusable water bottle footprint showed around 90% of cradle-to-grave impact came from raw materials, not manufacturing.
Measurement changes strategy: a solar panel manufacturer thought silicon was the problem, only to discover the aluminium frame was the real hotspot. Switching materials cut the product footprint in half.
Why This Matters: Supply chain sustainability only becomes strategic when companies stop polishing the visible bits and start using lifecycle data to make better decisions on materials, sourcing, waste, durability, transport, cost, and credible green claims.
Kismet: John’s clinical trials example was a belter: the drug manufacturing footprint was far smaller than the emissions from patients travelling repeatedly to trial sites, proving once again that carbon loves hiding in the boring operational details. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss upcoming episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
The price of oil since the US and Israel decided war was a good distraction from domestic issues.
In less than two decades, Norway has switched to full battery electric EVs.
And it is not just Norway, it is a global phenomenon.
Full EVs are better than plug-in hybrids, not just are they cleaner, but they’re also cheaper to buy, and to operate.
We still have a long way to go though in terms of decarbonisation.
Misc stuff
EVs are having a moment in the sun, for a nice change.
This one made me laugh!
This is a fascinating optical illusion - seemingly the colours in these two images are the same
Engage
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*** Be aware that any typos you find in this newsletter are tests to see who is paying attention! ***
And Finally
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