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Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s FutureProof - your Thursday morning boost of tech, climate, and “did China just build a wind turbine big enough to frighten Godzilla?”
It’s a ridiculous week for climate and energy news, the kind you only get when COP30 and the IEA’s World Energy Outlook collide like overcaffeinated policy wonks at a plenary session. Brazil’s playing host to the most consequential COP in years, the IEA just confirmed the fossil era is wheezing toward an early retirement (unless politicians actively sabotage their own energy plans), and China keeps dropping clean-energy plot twists like it’s trying to speedrun the transition.
But that’s only half the story.
AI had another turbocharged week - Google unveiled TPUs that make yesterday’s chips look steam-powered, Fei-Fei Li declared spatial intelligence the next frontier, and McKinsey’s new survey revealed that everyone is “doing AI”… and almost nobody is doing it well. Meanwhile, the UK’s EV market just hit a historic crossover point, Australia did the same, and quantum computing quietly took a giant leap forward.
And yes, the latest Climate Confident and Resilient Supply Chain episodes both landed this week too, each with big, very real implications for how we decarbonise and how we keep supply chains upright in a messy world.
So grab a coffee (or whatever fuels your sense of possibility) - here’s what’s ahead:
COP30 opens with a long-overdue truth offensive
WEO25 confirms fossil fuels peak this decade
China’s clean-energy rocket boosters fire again
AI gets faster, stranger, and occasionally smarter
EVs flip entire national markets
Wind turbines enter the kaiju era
Quantum computing takes another step toward usefulness
And supply chain resilience gets real about batteries, failures, and foresight
As ever, FutureProof is here to remind you that the future isn’t doomed - it’s just moving faster than the headlines can keep up.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
The COP of Truth: When World Leaders Finally Admit the Internet Is Melting the Planet
I love this - COP30 opens with Lula basically saying “enough of the gobshites”, and suddenly we’ve got countries formally committing to tackling climate disinformation for the first time in UN history. About time. The fossil-fuel-funded outrage machine has been running around unchecked for a decade, seeding chaos like it’s planting season.
Key Highlights
12 countries - including Brazil, Spain, Germany, and Canada have signed a declaration to fight climate disinformation and protect information integrity.
A UN-backed Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change launched at COP30, targeting the surge in online smears, greenwashing, and climate denial.
Disinformation attacks around COP spiked 267% between July and September, with climate obstruction groups working overtime to polarise societies and sabotage global cooperation.
Why This Matters: Because you can’t solve a crisis when half the planet is being deliberately misled about the existence, causes, or urgency of that crisis.
Kismet: Research shows that just 1% of accounts are responsible for nearly 30% of climate disinfo online - a handful of digital arsonists lighting fires the rest of us have to put out. 👉 Full story here
China’s Emissions Just Hit an 18-Month Plateau — And the Reason Why Might Shock You
China’s CO₂ emissions have been flat or falling for a year and a half, a trend driven not by wishful thinking, but by record-shattering solar and wind builds, a collapse in cement and steel demand, and a quiet EV revolution that’s now eating oil demand alive.
Key Highlights
Solar output up 46% and wind up 11% in Q3 - clean power covered almost 90% of new electricity demand.
Transport oil use fell 5%, but the chemical sector surged, pushing total oil consumption up 2%.
China added 240 GW of solar and 61 GW of wind in the first nine months of 2025 - putting it on track for another world-record year.
Why This Matters: Because the world’s largest emitter may now be peaking early, and if China bends the curve, global maths change fast.
Kismet: China is now installing more solar capacity every three months than the entire world did annually a decade ago, a scale so vast it’s visible from space in NASA’s night-time imagery. 👉 Full story here
AI News
SiriGoogle Just Dropped a TPU That Makes Yesterday’s Chips Look Like Steam Engines
Google’s new Ironwood TPUs (specialised processors for AI) are now the company’s fastest, most energy-efficient silicon ever - delivering 10× the peak performance of TPU v5p and powering everything from frontier model training to planet-scale inference, while the new Arm-based Axion VMs slash costs for the everyday workloads that keep AI systems alive behind the curtain.
Key Highlights
Ironwood TPUs: 4× better performance per chip for both training and inference vs. TPU v6e, with superpods that scale to 9,216 TPUs, linked by 9.6 Tb/s interconnect and a staggering 1.77 PB of shared HBM.
Axion N4A & C4A: New Arm-based VMs offering up to 2× better price-performance than x86, with early adopters reporting 30–60% efficiency gains across real workloads.
Deep software-hardware co-design means nearly plug-and-play switching between GPUs and TPUs, with up to 96% lower time-to-first-token via GKE’s new inference gateway.
Why This Matters: Because AI demand is exploding faster than data centres can be built, and this kind of silicon efficiency is the only way to keep the whole ecosystem from collapsing under its own power bills.
Kismet: A single Ironwood superpod moves more data per second than every global internet exchange point combined did in the year 2000. 👉 Full story here
Everyone’s Using AI… But Almost Nobody Knows What They’re Doing Yet
All those TPU’s and McKinsey’s global survey shows that 88% of organisations now use AI somewhere - but two-thirds are still stuck in pilot purgatory, poking at shiny tools without redesigning a single workflow. Meanwhile, a tiny 6% “AI elite” are eating everyone’s lunch by treating AI as transformation, not tinkering.
Key Highlights
62% of companies are experimenting with AI agents - but fewer than 10% have scaled them in any function.
Only one-third of organisations have scaled AI across the enterprise; high performers are three times more likely to redesign workflows instead of bolting AI onto broken processes.
AI is boosting innovation (64%) and customer satisfaction, but only 39% report any EBIT impact, and most of that is <5%.
Why This Matters: Because AI only creates real value when leaders stop chasing demos and start rebuilding how work happens.
Kismet: The “AI high performers” are three times more likely to have senior leaders personally using AI every day - proving, once again, that culture beats compute.
👉 Full story here
Fei-Fei Li Says LLMs Are Basically Fancy Parrots, And Spatial Intelligence Is What Comes Next
Famed AI researcher Fei-Fei Li drops a barn-burner of an essay arguing that today’s AI - brilliant with words, hopeless with the real world, is about to hit its next frontier: spatial intelligence, the foundation for robots that can move, tools that can imagine in 3D, and AI systems that understand physics, space, and cause-and-effect rather than just autocomplete reality.
Key Highlights
LLMs are powerful but fundamentally ungrounded: they can write poems but can’t estimate distance, rotate objects, or navigate a room with a chair in it.
Spatial intelligence requires “world models” - generative, multimodal, and interactive systems that can simulate and reason about 3D environments with physical consistency.
Fei-Fei’s lab and World Labs have built Marble, the first world model that can generate coherent interactive 3D worlds from multimodal prompts, a preview of AI that understands space, physics, and purpose.
Why This Matters: Because the next wave of AI won’t just write your emails - it will design buildings, help discover new materials, power home robots, and unlock scientific breakthroughs that language-only models simply cannot reach.
Kismet: The essay points out that a half-billion years ago, spatial intelligence emerged before language - meaning evolution solved “world modelling” long before words, and AI may now be retracing the same path in reverse. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Australia Just Hit a Tipping Point: Petrol Cars Dip Below 70% for the First Time Ever
Australia’s car market just crossed an historic line - internal combustion sales have fallen below 70% for the first time on record, as EVs and hybrids surge and drivers quietly vote with their wallets for cleaner, cheaper-to-run cars.
Key Highlights
EVs hit 9.7% of new car sales in Q3 - the highest share ever, with 29,298 BEVs sold in just one quarter.
Combined hybrid + PHEV sales soared too, while petrol car sales dropped to 210,458, down sharply from earlier in the year.
States like the ACT are already below 50% petrol share, while NSW and Victoria hover around 68%, signalling a national shift despite patchy incentives.
Why This Matters: Because Australia, long considered a laggard, is now entering its S-curve moment, proving that when cleaner cars become affordable and available, the market moves fast.
Kismet: If current growth rates continue, Australia could pass 1 million electrified vehicles on the road before 2027, a milestone no analyst was predicting even three years ago. 👉 Full story here
UK Petrol Cars Just Lost Their Crown — EVs Outsold Them for the First Time Ever
The UK car market just crossed a line it can’t uncross: in October, electric cars overtook petrol for the first time in history, with BEVs grabbing 26.25% of registrations while petrol collapsed nearly 36% year-on-year. The future didn’t arrive politely - it kicked the door in.
Key Highlights
31,997 BEVs sold in October - a 5.5% rise, pushing them above petrol (31,882), which fell off a cliff at –35.7%.
Add PHEVs and suddenly 40% of all cars sold came with a plug, in a shrinking market that punished every fossil segment.
The UK’s ZEV mandate is pulling the industry apart: Tesla, BYD, VW, Geely, and BMW are in massive credit surplus, while Stellantis, Nissan, Toyota, JLR, Ford, and Mercedes are deep in the red.
Why This Matters: Because this is the moment the UK’s EV transition stopped being a forecast and became a fact, and the laggards now face real financial consequences, not just bad press.
Kismet: Nearly half of Renault’s UK sales in October were fully electric - a ratio so extreme it mirrors Norway’s EV trajectory from a decade ago, right before their exponential takeoff. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
The IEA Just Quietly Confirmed the Fossil Fuel Era Is Ending — Even If Politicians Are Throwing Tantrums
The IEA’s new World Energy Outlook 2025 lands right in the middle of COP30 - and the message is unmissable: clean energy is accelerating so fast that coal is peaking now, oil peaks around 2030, and gas follows in 2035… unless governments actively sabotage their own stated policies. Imagine needing to abandon your climate plans to keep fossil fuels alive. That’s where we are.
Key Highlights
Under countries’ stated policies (the IEA’s STEPS), coal has peaked, oil peaks before 2030, and gas levels off by 2035 - a full, structural decline across all three fossil fuels.
Clean energy explodes: solar +344%, wind +178%, and nuclear +39% by 2035, with renewables overtaking oil as the world’s largest energy source in the early 2040s.
The Trump administration forced the IEA to reintroduce a “current policies” scenario (CPS) - a world where countries abandon their climate plans. In that case, warming hits 2.9°C and fossil demand keeps rising.
Why This Matters: Because the only way fossil fuels avoid a peak this decade is if governments actively choose failure - the economics, technology, and momentum of clean energy are doing the heavy lifting regardless of politics.
Kismet: The IEA now says the world is adding so much solar each year that by 2030 the annual additions alone will exceed the total installed solar capacity of the entire planet in 2020, a ten-year expansion so fast it practically breaks exponential charts. 👉 Full story here
China Didn’t Just Join the Clean Energy Race — It Started Lapping Everyone (While the US Pulled a Nokia)
This Economist piece reads like a geopolitical plot twist: China is now the world’s renewable-energy superpower, building solar, wind, batteries and EVs on a scale no other country can even simulate - just as the US has executed the most self-sabotaging about-turn since Nokia doubled down on Symbian the same year Apple unveiled the iPhone and Google dropped Android. One player is rewriting the future; the other is nostalgically polishing the past.
Key Highlights
China’s clean-tech build-out is so vast that its domestic actions alone can bend the global emissions curve - while its exports of green tech now earn more than the US makes exporting fossil fuels.
Chinese premiere Xi has pledged a 7–10% cut in emissions between peak and 2035, plus 3,600 GW of wind and solar, more than six times America’s current total capacity.
China has already surpassed its Paris renewable targets early, and its emissions peak is happening now or has already happened, driven by industrial-scale solar, wind and EV adoption.
Why This Matters: Because one superpower is treating clean energy as the next industrial revolution, while the other risks becoming the Symbian OS of global climate leadership: dominant in the past, irrelevant in the future.
Kismet: By 2035, China’s annual renewable additions could exceed the entire installed power capacity of India today - a single year out-building a whole nation’s grid.
👉 Full story here
China Just Built a Wind Turbine So Big It Makes the Statue of Liberty Look Like a Garden Gnome
China is now testing a 50 MW floating wind turbine - the largest ever conceived, with two colossal rotors spinning on a single Y-shaped tower like some mad hybrid of engineering brilliance and anime mecha design. Each rotor alone is the size of a skyscraper; together they’re designed to shrug off typhoons and pump out double the power of today’s biggest turbines.
Key Highlights
The new 50 MW two-headed turbine doubles the capacity of the current world record (26 MW), dwarfing even China’s giant 16 MW prototype already operating in typhoon zones.
Each blade is 145 metres long - about three times the height of the Statue of Liberty, and the platform can rotate 360° like a weather vane to stay stable in extreme winds.
Scaling this fast is unheard of: the industry usually grows turbine capacity by 2–3 MW per year, but Ming Yang just jumped 20 MW in one go.
Why This Matters: Because offshore wind is about to leap into a new era of mega-machines - fewer turbines, more power, lower costs, deeper waters, and a pathway to mind-bending clean-energy scale.
Kismet: One of these 50 MW beasts could power an entire town - and five of them could generate more electricity than the whole Irish wind fleet did in 2010. 👉 Full story here
Quantum
Quantum Just Hit Its ‘iPhone Moment’ — and It’s Called Helios
Quantinuum has unveiled Helios, a quantum computer with 48 logical, error-corrected qubits from just 98 physical ones, a ratio so efficient it makes other quantum machines look like they’re held together with duct tape and wishful thinking. And crucially, this one isn’t just a lab demo: it’s built to run algorithms today that will scale into the fault-tolerant machines coming later this decade.
Key Highlights
Helios delivers 48 logical qubits, a world-leading 2:1 ratio of physical-to-logical qubits - compared with the dozens-to-hundreds-to-one ratios common elsewhere.
Quantinuum’s roadmap targets hundreds of logical qubits by 2029 with their next-gen Apollo system, nudging the industry toward real commercial impact.
A new programming language, Guppy, lets companies build algorithms on Helios that will automatically scale to future hardware, a huge step in reducing quantum “rewrite fatigue”.
Why This Matters: Because quantum computing is finally stepping out of the “cool science fair exhibit” era and into the “solve problems no classical system can touch” era - with finance, chemistry, and materials science all standing on the brink.
Kismet: Helios’s 48 logical qubits pack more stable computational power than the entire global fleet of quantum computers had combined just five years ago.
👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
One Dead Scanner, One Million-Euro Meltdown — Why Resilience Starts With the Small Stuff
I wrote this piece because the tiniest device in your warehouse - a scanner, a printer, a battery with notions, can freeze an entire multimillion-euro supply chain faster than any geopolitical shock. Resilience isn’t an aspiration; it’s a discipline built from the ground up, one battery health check at a time.
Key Highlights
Unplanned downtime in logistics can cost €500k–€5M+ per hour, yet fewer than half of organisations have any predictive maintenance in place.
6.3 billion connected supply-chain devices exist today, and data shows the number-one failure mode is the battery, not the hardware.
Circular design and predictive tools stretch device life by 30%, cut operating costs by 15–25%, and dramatically reduce e-waste and carbon.
Why This Matters: Because resilience doesn’t live in the boardroom - it lives in that one scanner battery that silently decides whether your whole operation keeps moving or collapses.
Kismet: If global logistics extended device lifespans by just a single year, we’d avoid 2.4 million tonnes of CO₂e - the same as grounding every short-haul flight in Europe for a week. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
The Industrial Boiler Hasn’t Changed Since 1867 — Until Now
This week on Climate Confident (and yes, eagle-eyed fans of the pod - the podcast has a fresh new look), I dive into one of industry’s most invisible, least discussed, but biggest climate problems: steam. And Addison Stark from AtmosZero is electrifying it with a drop-in heat pump solution that slices energy use in half and kicks combustion to the curb.
Key Highlights
Industrial steam drives half of all process heat and produces 2.25 gigatonnes of CO₂ every year, yet most boilers still look like 19th-century hardware.
AtmosZero’s heat-pump boiler delivers the same high-pressure steam using 50% less electricity than resistive electric boilers, finally making clean industrial heat economically sane.
Their first unit is already running at New Belgium Brewing, proving this isn’t climate theory, it’s climate practice, with global manufacturers already queuing up.
Why This Matters: Because industrial heat has been slapped with the “hard to abate” label for years, but electrifying steam is a trillion-euro climate wedge hiding in plain sight.
Kismet: Swapping every ageing steam boiler in US manufacturing for a heat-pump system like this would cut emissions equivalent to taking every American pickup truck off the road twice. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Resilience Isn’t About Robots - It’s About the Tech No One Ever Mentions
This week on the Resilient Supply Chain podcast, I sat down with Taylor Smith (Honeywell) and Elton Saunders (Peak Technologies) to dig into the unsexy but utterly critical backbone of modern logistics: device health. And yes, this is the episode that proves your biggest operational risk isn’t a cyberattack, a flood, or a missing microchip. It’s the battery inside a handheld scanner someone dropped behind a pallet last Thursday.
Key Highlights
Downtime used to be a nuisance; now it’s a business risk driven by 15-minute delivery expectations and warehouse labour churn of 50–100% a year.
The number-one failure mode? Batteries. Not screens, not network issues, just the humble battery sabotaging global supply chains one depleted cell at a time.
AI is finally entering the device world: predicting battery failure 30 days in advance, spotting dodgy software updates instantly, and detecting when a camera lens on an automated tunnel is getting dusty before it ruins barcodes.
Why This Matters: Because resilience doesn’t start with grand strategies, it starts with whether your frontline workers have working kit at the start of their shift.
Kismet: Across global logistics, simply managing device lifecycles properly would avoid enough downtime to save more money annually than the entire drone-delivery industry has raised in the last decade. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Coming Soon to the podcasts
In the coming episodes I will be talking to Kristjan Luha & Rhyannon Galea of eAgronom, and Chad Frischmann, CEO of RegenIntel.
Don’t forget to follow the podcasts in your podcast app of choice to ensure you don’t miss any episodes.
Featured Chart(s)
Norwegian EV sales (full BEV, not hybrids), reached 97% of new car sales in August this year!
The cost of building nuclear reactors - even in China, where the costs are lower than most anywhere else, are still orders of magnitude higher than renewables.
One of my favourite Venn diagrams
And yes, everything in the universe is hydrogen or helium - everything else (you included) is a mere rounding error!
Misc stuff
Fans of a certain cop show will get this one!
People of a certain age will get this one (and there may be a strong overlap between the people who get this one and the previous image!)
This one made me chuckle!
Inspirational thought for the day!
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
“…or you will be placed under the rest” - is this the worst gift card scam attempt ever?
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