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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, global oil stocks are shrinking, and FutureProof is back.
A shorter edition this week because I’m snowed under on another project. Fewer stories. Less faff. Still plenty of signal.
This week is about fossil fragility meeting clean-tech momentum:
The Iran war is draining oil inventories, squeezing diesel and jet fuel, and making clean energy look less like climate virtue and more like risk management.
EVs passed 20 million sales in 2025, and the IEA says petrol and diesel car sales are only going to keep falling.
Wind and solar generated more electricity than natural gas globally in April, while China’s solar exports and e-scooter sales surge on fuel-price pain.
AI is getting more agentic, more physical, and more useful for science, while water-from-air tech, carbon data, and software escrow all point to the same thing: resilience is becoming operational.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
141 Countries Just Backed Climate Law. Guess Who Objected?
It’s awesome to see a bit of climate diplomacy with teeth, especially when 141 countries line up behind the International Court of Justice’s view that states have legal duties to tackle climate change, while several major fossil fuel powers shuffle awkwardly near the emergency exit. The vote may not magically close coal mines tomorrow, but it does strengthen the legal scaffolding beneath climate accountability.
Key Highlights
The UN General Assembly voted 141–8 to back the ICJ’s advisory opinion that countries have obligations to reduce fossil fuel use and address global warming.
Of course global supervillians the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others opposed the measure, which is about as subtle as an oil tanker doing a three-point turn in a coral reef.
Vanuatu led the resolution, giving Pacific island states another legal and diplomatic tool as rising seas turn “future risk” into present-tense geography.
Why This Matters: Climate action is increasingly moving from voluntary pledges and glossy reports into courts, legal duties, and state accountability, which changes the game for governments, fossil fuel producers, investors, and anyone still pretending this is a PR issue.
Kismet: More than a third of Tuvalu’s population has reportedly applied for a climate migration visa to Australia, a brutal reminder that for some countries, climate policy is no longer about adaptation plans but national survival. 👉 Full story here
Polluters Paid $107 Billion. Climate Finance Found Its Wallet
I do enjoy when climate policy stops whispering politely from the corner and starts collecting actual money: carbon pricing raised a record $107 billion in 2025, as more countries made emitters pay through carbon taxes and emissions trading systems. It’s still nowhere near enough, obviously, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Key Highlights
Governments raised $107 billion from carbon pricing in 2025, up 2% on 2024, with emissions trading systems now doing most of the heavy fiscal lifting.
Direct carbon pricing now covers 29% of global greenhouse gas emissions across 87 implemented policies, with India, Japan, Mauritania, Serbia, and Viet Nam among the newest movers.
The average carbon price has doubled over the past decade, rising from about $10/tCO₂e in 2016 to nearly $21/tCO₂e in 2026, largely driven by emissions trading systems.
Why This Matters: Carbon pricing is shifting from worthy climate theory into serious economic infrastructure, creating market signals, public revenue, and policy pressure that make pollution look less like an externality and more like what it always was: an unpaid bill.
Kismet: The really spicy bit? The World Bank estimates fossil fuel subsidies still exceeded $900 billion in 2025, meaning governments are effectively charging polluters with one hand while quietly handing fossil fuels a much larger biscuit with the other. 👉 Full story here
AI News
Google Just Turned AI From Chatbox Into Co-Worker
Google’s annual I/O event had some interesting announcements. They felt less like “here are some shiny AI toys” and more like a quiet platform shift: AI is moving from answering questions to planning, creating, monitoring, coding, editing, verifying, and poking reality with a stick to see what happens. I’m excited, mildly alarmed, and reminded once again that the future rarely asks permission before rearranging the furniture.
Key Highlights
Gemini 3.5 Flash is now Google’s default model in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, aimed at faster agentic workflows, coding, multimodal reasoning, and long-horizon tasks that used to consume days, weeks, and quite possibly someone’s will to live.
Gemini Spark and Google’s new Search agents push AI into proactive territory, monitoring information, managing tasks, connecting with Gmail, Docs, Slides and other apps, and working in the background under user direction.
The most important bits may be less flashy: Google announced new science tools for hypothesis generation, computational discovery and literature analysis, while also expanding SynthID and content verification so people can ask whether images, video or audio were AI-generated or edited.
Why This Matters: AI is shifting from a conversational layer into infrastructure for work, research, media creation, search, and trust, which means businesses should stop treating it as a productivity toy and start thinking seriously about governance, skills, verification, and competitive advantage.
Kismet: Google says SynthID has already watermarked over 100 billion images and videos and 60,000 years of audio, which is both impressive and faintly ridiculous, because apparently we are now measuring synthetic media in geological listening time. 👉 Links Inline
AI Is Leaving the Screen and Growing Wheels, Arms, and Bad Ideas
The next AI wave won’t just sit in a chatbot waiting for us to type badly structured prompts into it like civilisation’s final exam. Counterpoint Research expects 145 million physical AI devices to ship between 2025 and 2035, as robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, sensors, edge computing and generative AI start merging into machines that can perceive, decide, and act in the real world.
Key Highlights
Physical AI shipments, including vehicles, robots and drones, are forecast to reach 145 million units cumulatively between 2025 and 2035.
Service robots are expected to drive the biggest robotics volumes, with use cases across logistics, warehouses, hospitality, healthcare, cleaning, security and agriculture.
Humanoid robots remain early-stage, but installations are projected to exceed 100,000 units by 2028, growing sevenfold versus 2025.
Why This Matters: AI is moving from screens into supply chains, farms, hospitals, factories and streets, which means the next productivity leap will depend as much on sensors, chips, connectivity, safety and deployment models as on clever software.
Kismet: The compute story may be the sleeper issue here: as mechanical costs fall, the “brain” of physical AI systems could take a bigger share of total cost, quietly shifting value from hardware bodies to semiconductors, edge AI, fleet software and connectivity. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
EVs Hit 20 Million Sales. Petrol’s Peak Is in the Rear-view Mirror
I love an IEA report that quietly walks in, drops a market bomb, and leaves the fossil lobby pretending not to hear it: electric car sales passed 20 million in 2025, making up one in four new cars globally, and the IEA expects that to rise to 23 million in 2026. Europe is now the fastest-growing major EV market, because when oil gets expensive, and EVs get cheaper, good things happen.
Key Highlights
Global electric car sales grew 20% in 2025, exceeding 20 million, with EVs reaching 25% of all new car sales worldwide.
The IEA expects sales to hit 23 million in 2026, or 28% of the global car market, with Europe projected to grow fastest among major markets.
The global EV fleet avoided around 1.7 million barrels of oil demand per day in 2025, and EV oil displacement is on track to reach around 5 million barrels per day by 2030.
Why This Matters: EVs are no longer a niche climate technology; they are now an oil-demand, industrial-policy, consumer-savings, and energy-security story rolled into one very inconvenient package for anyone still betting the farm on petrol and diesel.
Kismet: The IEA says sales of internal combustion engine cars never return to their 2017 peak in any of its scenarios, which is a wonderfully quiet way of saying the old car market is dead. It just hasn’t realised it yet. 👉 Full story here
China’s E-Scooters Are Riding the Oil Shock Into Europe
And now an awesome transport story where the smallest vehicles carry the biggest strategic signal: Yadea, the world’s largest maker of electric scooters and motorcycles, says overseas sales are tracking 70% higher than 2025, as oil shocks make petrol two-wheelers look increasingly like little noise machines powered by bad geopolitical choices. Now the Chinese group is eyeing London, Paris, and a new factory in Hungary.
Key Highlights
Yadea is seeing a major overseas sales surge across Southeast Asia and South America, with customers asking for faster shipments as fuel prices rise.
The company plans to expand aggressively in Europe, targeting cities such as London and Paris, and intends to build a factory in Hungary as demand grows.
Battery-powered vehicles made up only about 15% of the global two-wheeler market last year, leaving a vast runway for growth outside China.
Why This Matters: Two-wheel electrification is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most practical ways to cut oil use, urban air pollution, and household fuel exposure, especially in dense cities where a car is often a wildly over-engineered answer to a short trip.
Kismet: Yadea says a scooter with a 4kWh battery could power basic household appliances during outages, meaning the humble e-scooter is quietly mutating from transport device into mini resilience asset. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Wind And Solar Just Beat Gas. Globally.
This story matters because it shifts the argument from ambition to evidence: in April 2026, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time ever. Together they delivered 22% of global electricity, versus 20% from gas, proving that renewables are no longer merely “the future” but increasingly the thing keeping the lights on.
Key Highlights
Wind and solar generated a record 531 TWh globally in April 2026, beating gas generation at 477 TWh.
Combined wind and solar output grew an estimated 13% year-on-year, with gains in China, the EU, UK, US, Australia, Chile, and Brazil.
Ember says the milestone reflects a longer-term structural shift, not a short-term reaction to the Middle East energy crisis, though the crisis has made the case for homegrown clean power even stronger.
Why This Matters: This is a huge signal that renewables are weakening the strategic case for imported gas, especially for countries tired of having their electricity prices jerked around by fossil fuel volatility, war, and the charming reliability of global commodity markets.
Kismet: Five years earlier, in April 2021, gas generation was almost exactly the same as in April 2026, but wind and solar had more than doubled from 245 TWh to 531 TWh, which is what disruption looks like when it arrives wearing a grid connection. 👉 Full story here
Water
This Startup Wants To Make Drinking Water From Thin Air
Here’s one of those stories that sounds like sci-fi until the hose starts filling a glass: Atoco has unveiled a shipping-container-sized atmospheric water harvester that uses metal-organic frameworks to pull H₂O molecules from air and produce up to 4,000 litres of drinking water a day. The catch is pricing: the company hasn’t disclosed machine costs yet, and says the water could cost a few cents per litre, which is more than desalinated water.
Key Highlights
Atoco’s system uses MOFs to capture water molecules from the atmosphere, including in arid, low-humidity regions.
The production model is aimed at data centres, hospitals, and critical infrastructure, with an off-grid version for communities currently reliant on trucked-in water.
The company expects to make and sell 200 units in 2027, but says expressions of interest already exceed planned production capacity.
Why This Matters: Water security is fast becoming an energy, climate, data-centre, public-health, and geopolitical issue all at once, so decentralised clean water production could become a serious resilience tool rather than a shiny lab trick with a press release attached.
Kismet: An ounce of MOF material can contain the surface area of a football pitch, which is the kind of nanoscale weirdness that makes “pulling water from air” sound less like magic and more like chemistry showing off. 👉 Full story here
US-Israel War on Iran
Oil Supply Is Tightening. Clean Tech Is Sprinting
This is the energy transition with the polite mask ripped off: the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have exposed just how fragile fossil dependence really is, with oil inventories draining fast, refined fuels tightening, and prices primed for another ugly jump. Meanwhile, demand for the alternatives is already moving: China’s solar exports rose 60% year-on-year in April, and BloombergNEF says repeated energy shocks could accelerate renewables, batteries, and electrification as countries try to unhook themselves from imported fossil chaos.
Key Highlights
The IEA warned that commercial oil inventories are depleting rapidly, with only several weeks left, while strategic reserve releases have helped but are “not endless”.
The FT says the world has been consuming about 6 million barrels per day more crude than it is producing, with diesel and jet fuel markets looking especially vulnerable.
Chinese solar cell exports jumped 60% in April and were up 43% over the first four months of 2026, even after export tax rebates ended, suggesting the energy shock is already strengthening demand for clean tech.
Why This Matters: Energy security is no longer a separate argument from decarbonisation; the same technologies that cut emissions - solar, wind, batteries, EVs, demand flexibility, also reduce exposure to oil chokepoints, fuel-price spikes, and geopolitical blackmail dressed up as market volatility.
Kismet: BloombergNEF now expects solar to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2032, with global energy storage rising from 220 GW in 2025 to 2,000 GW by 2035; the fossil fuel system may have triggered its own replacement cycle, which is almost poetic, if one can ignore the smoke. 👉 Links Inline
Latest blog post
Ireland’s Nuclear Debate Has A Grid Problem
In this blog post, I make the case that Ireland’s nuclear debate is asking the wrong question: the issue isn’t whether nuclear can generate clean electricity, but whether it fits a small island grid with deep demand valleys, big wind swings, outage risks, and urgent near-term needs. Ireland doesn’t need a magic reactor-shaped distraction; it needs grid buildout, storage, interconnection, flexible demand, smarter data centres, and renewables deployed at actual speed rather than at “committee has concerns” speed.
Key Highlights
Ireland’s winter peak hit 7,148 MW in 2024, but its minimum summer night demand fell to just 3,095 MW, making even a 1 GW reactor an awkwardly large lump in the system.
Nuclear outages don’t vanish because a spreadsheet finds them inconvenient; Ireland would still need backup, storage, flexibility, and interconnection to cover a major reactor going offline.
Data centres consumed 22% of Ireland’s metered electricity in 2024, so the smarter debate is not “ban them” or “build nuclear for them”, but make large loads act as grid assets, not passive energy hoovers.
Why This Matters: Ireland’s energy challenge is urgent, but urgency is not a licence to pick the slowest, costliest, least flexible tool when faster, modular, cleaner options already match the grid Ireland actually has.
Kismet: Ireland once posted iodine tablets to every household in case of a nuclear accident abroad, which is a rather vivid reminder that energy policy is never just engineering; it comes with memory, politics, fear, and the occasional packet of thyroid medication in a kitchen drawer. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Carbon Data Is Becoming Permission To Sell
This Climate Confident episode gets into a shift that deserves far more attention: sustainability data is moving from annual-report theatre into the transaction itself. I spoke with Stephen Jamieson, CMO for SAP Sustainability, about product carbon footprints, digital product passports, CBAM, packaging rules, AI agents, and why “we used an average emissions factor from a dusty spreadsheet” may soon be a commercial liability, not a reporting shortcut.
Key Highlights
Carbon data is becoming an operating condition for doing business, especially as digital product passports begin with batteries and expand into metals, fashion, and other sectors.
AI could either accelerate short-term financial optimisation or, if sustainability data is properly embedded, keep carbon, recycled content, water, and supply chain risk inside core business decisions.
Stephen’s sharpest warning: the biggest climate data mistake companies make is assuming average databases are good enough for real climate decisions.
Why This Matters: If carbon compliance, resilience, product design, finance, and supply chain planning start sitting in the same decision systems, sustainability stops being a side function and becomes part of how companies win, lose, price, source, launch, and stay in market.
Kismet: The phrase that stuck with me is “permission to sell”, because the future of climate data may not be about prettier ESG reports at all, but whether your product is legally and commercially allowed through the door. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Your Software Supplier Fails. Now What?
This week’s Resilient Supply Chain episode tackles a risk many leaders quietly file under “probably fine” until the lights go out: critical software and cloud services can fail, deteriorate, vanish, or become impossible to support, and outsourcing the service does not mean outsourcing responsibility. I spoke with Wayne Scott of Escode about software escrow, cloud concentration, stressed exit planning, and why resilience leaders need to ask a brutally simple question: if a critical provider failed tomorrow, could we keep operating?
Key Highlights
Wayne explains software escrow as the practical “spare parts and instruction manual” for critical software, holding the source code, documentation, build instructions, and testing needed to keep a service running if the supplier collapses.
The real risks are not just cyberattacks; supplier failure, service deterioration, concentration risk, cloud dependency, and fourth-party exposure can all create operational disruption before anyone has time to assemble a crisis committee.
His most practical advice: ask your suppliers how you would keep using their service if they no longer existed, and ask internally whether escrow or stressed exit planning is part of your resilience control framework.
Why This Matters: Supply chain resilience now includes digital dependency resilience; if your finance, logistics, procurement, customer, or operational systems depend on fragile software suppliers or hidden cloud layers, your supply chain may be one unsupported platform away from a very expensive lesson.
Kismet: Wayne’s analogy is hard to shake: buying mission-critical SaaS without an exit plan is like buying a car that disappears if the manufacturer goes bust, which sounds absurd until you realise companies do the software equivalent every day. 🎧 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)
As someone who is chronically on time, I struggle with this!
If someone tells you that rates of autism have increased at the same rate as vaccinations, feel free to share this graph with them!
Or this one
Or this one
Or this one!
Misc stuff
If you’re looking for somewhere not drowning in tourists, perhaps consider the Baltic states, and definitely avoid Spain!
Handy comparison chart.
Engage
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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
Pronunciation of the letter R in different countries!
Someone just spent $236,000,000 on a painting. Here’s why it matters for your wallet.
Late last year, a Klimt sold for the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.
An outlier sure, but it wasn't a fluke. U.S. auction sales grew 23.1% in 2025. The $1-5mm segment even grew 40.8% YoY.
Meanwhile, Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok said to expect ‘zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.’
Each environment is unique, but after dot-com, post war and contemporary art grew about 24% annually for a decade. After 2008, about 11% for 12 years.
It’s also had near-zero correlation with the S&P 500 since ‘95.*
Now, Masterworks lets you invest in shares of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.
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28 sales to date.
Net annualized returns on sold works held 12 months+ like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.
Shares can sell quickly, but my subscribers can skip the waitlist:
*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.