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Hey everyone,
As ever, FutureProof exists to remind you that the future isn’t doomed, it’s just arriving faster than the pessimists can update their scripts.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
Europe’s Green Endgame Gets Real: 90% Cuts, and a Massive Grid Cash Call
The EU has just done two things that matter far more than another round of climate speeches: it locked in a legally binding 2040 target to cut emissions by 90%, and it’s lining up a new infrastructure fund to help pay for the wires, grids, and backbone kit the energy transition actually runs on. Europe is admitting the obvious, decarbonisation without capital is theatre, and targets without transmission are just decorative numerals.
The EU’s 2040 climate target is now effectively baked in, setting a legally binding path toward a 90% emissions cut by 2040 and keeping the bloc on course for net zero by 2050.
Brussels is preparing a new Strategic Infrastructure Investment Fund, with the European Investment Bank expected to help kick-start financing for the grids and networks needed to support a renewables-heavy system.
The price tag is eye-watering: the European Commission estimates green transition investment needs could hit €695 billion a year in the 2031-2040 period. But that it still far cheaper than doing nothing!
Why This Matters: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the energy transition doesn’t fail because of a lack of solar panels or wind turbines, it fails when policymakers forget that grids are the system, not the footnote.
Kismet: Europe’s electricity grid is often described as the largest machine on Earth, which means this story isn’t just about climate policy, it’s about rebuilding the biggest piece of infrastructure humans have ever stitched together. 👉 Links Inline
China’s Next Five-Year Plan Is a Climate Rorschach Test
China’s new five-year plan looks, at first glance, like a steady vote of confidence in clean energy, with strong backing for solar, EVs, storage and the wider low-carbon industrial machine. But squint a bit and the contradictions snap into focus: more clean tech, yes, but still no hard coal phase-down timeline, because apparently the world’s biggest clean-energy buildout still comes with a fossil-fuel comfort blanket.
China set a new target to cut carbon intensity by 17% between 2026 and 2030, while also raising the share of non-fossil energy in total consumption to 25%.
The plan keeps the door wide open for more clean-energy expansion, explicitly backing industries including solar, EVs, hydrogen, and new-energy storage.
Coal is still hanging around in the script, with the plan talking about “promoting the peaking” of coal and oil use, but without offering a date for when that peak actually arrives.
Why This Matters: China matters more than anyone else in the climate story, so when it doubles down on clean energy while refusing to fully let go of coal, that tension doesn’t just shape its future, it bends the global curve.
Kismet: China’s clean-energy sectors were estimated to drive more than a third of the country’s GDP growth in 2025, which means climate action there is no longer just an environmental story, it’s industrial policy with a power cord attached. 👉 Full story here
Britain’s Coal Era Is Dead, and Net Zero Is Starting to Look Like the Cheap Option
The UK’s emissions fell again in 2025, with coal use collapsing to levels not seen in roughly 400 years, which is both extraordinary and a bit humiliating for a fuel that once ran the empire. Better still, a fresh climate analysis makes the bigger point plain: net zero is not some expensive act of national self-denial, it is one of the best shields the UK has against future fossil-fuel price shocks.
UK greenhouse-gas emissions fell 2.4% in 2025 to their lowest level in more than 150 years, helped by coal dropping to a 400-year low and gas demand hitting its lowest point since 1992.
Oil demand also fell even as traffic rose, thanks in part to around 700,000 new EVs, electric vans, and plug-in hybrids hitting UK roads in 2025.
The UK’s Climate Change Committee found that if another fossil-fuel price spike hits around 2040, household energy bills could jump 59% without further decarbonisation, but by only 4% on a credible path to net zero.
Why This Matters: This is the bit the anti-climate crowd keep pretending not to hear: clean energy is no longer just about emissions, it is about resilience, lower exposure to geopolitical nonsense, and a far less fragile economy.
Kismet: Coal use in the UK is now so low that you have to go back to around 1600 to find comparable levels, meaning Britain has effectively exited the fuel that once powered the Industrial Revolution and is now being outcompeted by cables, batteries, and basic economics. 👉 Links Inline
AI News
AI Is Going After Biology’s Hardest Boss Fights
Two of the messiest bottlenecks in medicine, figuring out maddeningly elusive protein structures and finding treatments for diseases long labelled incurable, are suddenly looking a lot less immovable thanks to AI. What’s changing is speed, yes, but more importantly reach: researchers can now search chemical and biological possibility space at a scale that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab developed AQuaRef, an AI-and-quantum-powered tool that can generate much higher-precision protein structures, including for proteins that have historically been notoriously difficult to map.
AI is also accelerating drug discovery for some of the nastiest medical challenges around, including Parkinson’s, antibiotic-resistant infections like MRSA and gonorrhoea, and thousands of rare diseases.
In one case, researchers used AI to screen more than 45 million chemical structures, uncovering promising antibiotic compounds in a fraction of the time traditional methods would take.
Why This Matters: This is where AI stops being a parlour trick for generating bland emails and starts becoming genuinely civilisation-grade useful, helping science move faster against diseases that have resisted decades of human effort.
Kismet: More than 95% of rare diseases still have no approved treatment, which means even modest AI-driven gains here could open the door to one of the biggest quietly overlooked leaps in modern medicine. 👉 Links Inline
OpenAI Wants AI to Think Harder, and Teach Better
OpenAI’s latest pair of announcements point in the same direction: more capable models for serious work, and more useful interfaces for actual learning rather than answer-spitting. GPT-5.4 is being positioned as a stronger model for complex professional tasks, while ChatGPT’s new maths and science features turn abstract concepts into interactive visual explanations, which is a far better use of AI than helping people write another soul-deadening “circling back” email.
GPT-5.4 is OpenAI’s new frontier model for complex professional work, with a stronger emphasis on multi-step reasoning, tool use, and handling harder real-world tasks.
OpenAI also launched interactive visual explanations for more than 70 core maths and science concepts, showing formulas, variables, and relationships changing in real time.
The combined signal is clear: AI firms are shifting from novelty demos towards products built for deeper cognition, whether that means solving harder work problems or helping students actually understand what they’re learning.
Why This Matters: This is AI maturing, slowly, awkwardly, and with the usual hype cloud overhead, from a machine that gives answers into one that can increasingly support reasoning and learning.
Kismet: One of the strangest effects of interactive learning tools is that they can make difficult subjects feel easier without actually dumbing them down, which is rare enough in education tech to qualify as borderline miraculous. 👉 Links Inline
AI Just Found Firefox Flaws Faster Than Humans, Which Is Both Brilliant and Slightly Terrifying
Anthropic’s work with Mozilla is one of those stories that lands with a thud once you think it through: Claude found 22 Firefox vulnerabilities in just two weeks, including 14 high-severity ones, in a browser that is open source, heavily audited, and has had security researchers combing through it for decades. Firefox even has a long-running bug bounty programme, which makes this less a story about AI helping out and more a warning that machine-speed exploit hunting has arrived.
Claude Opus 4.6 uncovered 22 Firefox vulnerabilities in a two-week collaboration with Mozilla, 14 of them rated high severity.
Firefox is open source and has been scrutinised for years by external researchers, internal teams, and bounty hunters, which makes the speed and yield here especially striking.
Claude also showed early signs of being able to move from finding bugs to helping craft primitive exploits, which is precisely the bit that should keep security teams awake.
Why This Matters: If AI can rapidly surface serious vulnerabilities in one of the world’s most examined open-source codebases, then less mature, less audited software is about to have a very bad time.
Kismet: Bug bounties were built on the assumption that human curiosity was the limiting factor; AI changes that equation entirely, because now the bounty hunter doesn’t get tired, bored, or distracted by lunch. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
BYD May Have Just Buried the “But Charging Takes Too Long” Argument
BYD’s new second-generation Blade Battery looks like one of those moments when a whole anti-EV talking point starts collapsing in real time: up to 1,000km of range in some models, and charging from 10% to 97% in as little as nine minutes. But the bigger story is not just the battery. It is that China is pairing battery advances with the kind of grid and charging build-out that turns technical progress into real-world adoption, while much of the West is still arguing with itself about who signs off the substation paperwork.
BYD says its new Blade Battery 2.0 can deliver more than 1,000km of range in some vehicles, with ultra-fast charging that can take the battery from 10% to 97% in around nine minutes.
The company is backing that up with megawatt-scale charging, because a fast-charging battery is only transformative if the infrastructure exists to use it.
That is the real strategic edge: China is not innovating in isolation, it is building the surrounding system, from chargers to grid capacity, to make those innovations usable at scale.
Why This Matters: The lesson here is bigger than BYD: the EV race is no longer just about who makes the best car or battery, but who can build the infrastructure fast enough to make electrification feel effortless.
Kismet: Britain built its first national electricity grid in just seven years, which is a rather awkward historical reminder that today’s infrastructure paralysis is not inevitable, it is a policy choice. 👉 Full story here
From Europe to Australia, Fleet Electrification Is Turning Into a Spreadsheet Problem, Not a Culture War
Two very different stories from opposite ends of the planet land in exactly the same place: when companies and freight operators actually do the maths, electric fleets start looking less like a sustainability gesture and more like the financially sane choice. Whether it’s European corporate vans or Australian long-haul road freight, the pattern is now hard to ignore: lower fuel costs, lower maintenance, faster payback.
A new European analysis found that switching corporate fleets from fossil-fuel vehicles to EVs could cut total operating costs by as much as 50%, with diesel-to-electric vans alone delivering savings of roughly 15% to 40%.
In Australia, analysis of the Sydney-Melbourne freight corridor found full electrification of road freight could pay back in under four years, or in less than three if you count only the incremental cost difference.
The heavy-duty case is getting stronger fast: electric trucks capable of hauling 60 tonnes with 450km-plus range already exist, megawatt charging is here, and fuel costs can be about one-third of diesel, especially as diesel costs are now rocketing as a consequence of the attacks on Iran.
Why This Matters: Fleet electrification is shifting from “green ambition” to plain old economic logic, and once that happens, adoption tends to accelerate whether the comment section likes it or not.
Kismet: Corporate fleets account for around 60% of new car sales in Europe, which means the fastest way to transform the vehicle market may not be persuading households at all, but flipping the spreadsheets inside company transport departments. 👉 Links Inline
The EV That Took a Missile Blast and Didn’t Burn
This is not a lab test or a glossy safety demo. A BYD Atto 3 sitting a metre, or two from a missile impact near Jerusalem took the shockwave, shrapnel, and brutal force of the blast, yet its cabin stayed intact, its doors still opened, and crucially, the battery did exactly what good EV batteries are supposed to do in a catastrophe: absolutely nothing dramatic.
Five people were inside the vehicle at the time. The driver suffered moderate injuries, while the other occupants had light injuries or shock, despite the car being found right beside the impact crater.
Reports and photos indicate the passenger cell remained structurally intact and the doors could still be opened, allowing evacuation without cutting into the car.
Most striking of all, the high-voltage battery showed no signs of thermal runaway, smoke, or fire, which rather undermines the tired myth that EVs are uniquely prone to going up in flames.
Why This Matters: It’s one extreme real-world case, not a controlled comparison, but it is still a powerful reminder that modern EV safety is about far more than crash ratings: battery chemistry and structural design can make the difference between survivable damage and a far worse outcome. How well would a car with a tank full of highly flammable fuel have fared?
Kismet: Lithium iron phosphate batteries, the kind used in BYD’s Blade Battery, are inherently more thermally stable than nickel-rich chemistries, which is one reason safety engineers take them so seriously even before the marketing people start hyperventilating. 👉 Full story here [in Spanish]
Clean Energy
Solar’s Winning Everywhere: From German Grids to African Rooftops to America’s Power Mix
Solar is no longer the promising technology of the future. It is the blunt economic fact of the present, slashing costs in Germany, dominating new power additions in the US, and giving households in poorer regions access to electricity without waiting for governments or utilities to get their act together. This is what real disruption looks like: not flashy, just relentless.
The US added 43GW of new solar capacity in 2025, making solar the country’s biggest source of new power for the fifth straight year, while solar and storage together accounted for 79% of new capacity added.
In Germany, a run of unusually strong March solar output pushed more than 40GW into the grid at midday for five straight days, helping cap electricity prices even as fossil fuel markets were being rattled by Middle East tensions.
Globally, solar now accounts for roughly three-quarters of all new power plant capacity, with falling panel and battery costs making it viable not just for rich-country grids, but for homes, clinics, and schools in places long failed by traditional electrification.
Why This Matters: Solar is becoming the rare climate solution that wins on emissions, economics, energy security, and energy access all at once, which is probably why the fossil crowd suddenly look so twitchy.
Kismet: Solar panel prices have fallen by more than 99% since 1975, which means one of the most powerful decarbonisation tools on Earth got cheap enough to become a grassroots technology, not just an industrial one. 👉 Links Inline
Oil Is Spiking Again. Renewables Look Smarter by the Hour
The fallout from the US and Israeli attacks on Iran is doing what fossil-fuel crises always do: sending oil prices surging, rattling markets, and reminding businesses that dependence on volatile fuel shipped through geopolitical chokepoints is a terrible operating model. And the really damning part? Oil pushed above $100 a barrel despite the IEA ordering the largest emergency release of fossil fuels in its history, which tells you just how brittle and panic-prone the old energy system still is.
Oil surged back above $100 a barrel as Iran’s retaliation widened the economic fallout across the region, dragging energy markets back into panic mode.
The IEA responded with the largest emergency release of strategic reserves in its history, and even that was not enough to stop prices punching higher.
Clean-energy analysts are once again making the same point: every additional unit of solar, wind, storage, and electrification reduces exposure to exactly this kind of geopolitical price shock.
Why This Matters: This is the lesson business leaders should have learned years ago: renewables are not only a climate play, they are a hedge against the economic absurdity of a fuel system that needs emergency stock dumps just to try to remain semi-functional.
Kismet: Strategic oil reserves were built to protect economies from extreme supply shocks, but every time they are used at record scale they also reveal something awkward, namely that while fossil fuels are sold as providing reliability, local clean power is not just low-carbon infrastructure, it actually delivers geopolitical risk management. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
Why Oil Wars Keep Proving Renewables Are Safer
In my latest blog post, I make the case that wars and oil shocks keep exposing the same ugly truth: fossil fuel dependence is not energy security, it is structural vulnerability with a PR team. The Strait of Hormuz is just the latest reminder that renewables, storage, and electrification are not only cleaner, they are calmer, cheaper, and much harder to weaponise.
I argue that fossil fuels are not merely a climate problem, they are a macroeconomic instability machine, with every conflict or shipping disruption sending costs rippling across transport, food, industry, and inflation.
The post highlights how roughly a fifth of global oil flows through Hormuz, while renewables sidestep that entire risk model because sunshine and wind do not need tankers, insurance, or naval escorts.
I also look at why this matters strategically for China, Europe, and everyone else: the countries that electrify faster and build more local clean energy will cut risk as well as emissions.
Why This Matters: This is the real energy security argument for renewables, and it is getting harder to ignore every time the fossil fuel system has another geopolitical meltdown.
Kismet: One of the smartest lines in the piece is also the simplest, the best barrel in a crisis is the one you no longer need. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Why Repressing Climate Activists Won’t Work
In this week’s Climate Confident podcast, I sat down with Professor Dana Fisher to unpack climate activism, state repression, and why public pressure still sits at the heart of meaningful climate progress. It’s a sharp, timely conversation about what happens when governments crack down, fossil fuel interests tighten their grip, and ordinary people decide they’re not having it.
Dana argues that repression may slow movements briefly, but over time it tends to backfire, hardening resolve and drawing more people into action as the climate crisis worsens.
We explored how climate activism is increasingly being folded into a broader democratic resistance, especially in the US, where climate, immigration, civil rights, and authoritarianism are becoming harder to separate.
The episode also digs into why science alone is not enough, and why public mobilisation, diverse tactics, and local collective action are still essential to shifting policy and power.
Why This Matters: This episode gets to the heart of a critical truth: climate progress does not begin in boardrooms or parliaments, it begins when enough people make inaction politically impossible.
Kismet: One of the most striking insights from the conversation is that over 95% of people Dana surveyed at legally permitted protests support nonviolent civil disobedience by organisations, even if they would never glue themselves to anything personally. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Better Safety Dashboards Don’t Always Mean Safer People
In this week’s Resilient Supply Chain podcast, I spoke with John Dony of the What Works Institute and Mike Swain of Evotix about a stubborn, uncomfortable truth: many safety dashboards are improving while serious injuries and fatalities barely budge. We dug into why traditional metrics often measure performance theatre rather than real risk, and where AI may help, if the data, governance, and trust are actually there.
We explored why reductions in minor incidents do not automatically translate into fewer serious injuries or fatalities, especially in complex contractor-heavy environments like construction, agriculture, and broader supply chains.
John and Mike made the case that many firms still over-rely on lagging indicators, while missing the human and systemic factors that drive harm, things like fatigue, stress, poor communication, weak reporting cultures, and badly designed workflows.
We also looked at where AI could genuinely help, particularly in predictive analytics and risk detection, but only if organisations get serious about data quality, governance, and keeping humans firmly in the loop.
Why This Matters: If companies keep measuring what is easy instead of what is dangerous, they will keep getting prettier dashboards without materially safer workplaces.
Kismet: One of the most revealing ideas in the episode is that rising incident reports are not always bad news. Sometimes they are the first sign that reality has finally started making it into the system. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Nishith Rastogi, Founder and CEO of Locus, and Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
This is impressive seeing as most EV charging is done at home.
Australia is well behind Europe in terms of % electricity generated by renewables, and is even behind the US, but not for long likely given how steeply its % of renewables is increasing.
Yes another reason renewables trounce fossil fuels!
Wow - there’s quite the variation here. A lot of this has to be down to wholesale electricity prices, which are influenced by how much fossil fuels/renewables are in your mix, obviously.
Misc stuff
For those who say charging an EV takes too long…
A real world comparison of two similar vehicles - one internal combustion, the other EV. This is using the California grid average of 0.2265kg CO2/kWh. The average in Spain today, for example is 0.081 kg CO2/kWh, so that would produce a far more favourable outcome yet again for the EV. And better again if you can charge it off your own solar panels!
How to solve the problem in the Strait of Hormuz. You would merely need 17,000 fuel trucks per day and you’re good. Simple, see? 😉
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
A rare internal combustion sheep. Most are now fully electric!
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