In partnership with
Hey everyone, hope you’re well and already mentally half-checked out for the holidays, because this week’s FutureProofshowed up determined to empty the inbox before the year does.
Climate progress kept stacking up quietly, AI had another “this is getting serious” week, EV myths took a beating, and clean energy delivered a few more how is this still controversial? moments.
The through-line?
The transition isn’t pausing for year-end reviews. It’s locking in gains while everyone else is busy arguing about last decade’s talking points.
The big three:
Climate action notched real wins, from emissions decoupling to adaptation measures that accept reality and save lives.
AI crossed another line, moving from clever tools to background infrastructure for research, language, and creation.
Clean energy undercut fossil fuels yet again, with coal fading, heat pumps scaling up, and batteries turning problems into assets.
And that’s just the high-altitude view. Below, we’ve got China quietly doing more to kill coal than any political speech, EVs booming in emerging markets, warranties finally burying battery FUD, cities heating whole districts with giant heat pumps, and data centres realising diesel generators are the weakest link in the chain.
Plus my latest blog post on why dispatchable solar is now the cheapest new power you can build, and fresh episodes of Climate Confident and Resilient Supply Chain digging into shipping fuels and freight emissions hiding in plain sight.
As ever, FutureProof is here to filter the noise into one clear signal: the future didn’t slow down for the holidays.
This is the last edition until the New Year, so thanks for reading, sharing, and sticking with me through 2025. Wishing you a calm end to the year and a properly recharged start to 2026.
Let’s get into it.
And here are this week’s stories:
Climate
Quietly Winning While the Headlines Scream Doom
I loved this piece because it does something radical. It notices progress. While the algorithm mainlines catastrophe, 2025 quietly delivered real climate and nature wins that actually matter. Renewables overtook coal, forests stabilised, oceans gained protection, wildlife bounced back, and the law finally sharpened its teeth. Progress didn’t shout. It just kept working.
Key highlights
Clean energy crossed a line: Renewables overtook coal globally, with China driving the surge and even seeing emissions fall for the first time.
Nature got legal and literal protection: The High Seas Treaty entered force, the world’s largest marine protected area was created, and Amazon deforestation hit its lowest level in 11 years.
Wildlife and justice made comebacks: Green turtles were downgraded from endangered, tiger numbers doubled in India, and the ICJ opened the door to climate litigation between nations.
Why This Matters: Because climate progress doesn’t usually arrive with fireworks. It arrives via compounding gains, legal shifts, and boring-but-decisive infrastructure changes that quietly bend the curve.
Kismet: The ICJ ruling that could reshape global climate accountability began as a student-led campaign, proving once again that the most disruptive force in climate policy is not power. It’s persistence. 👉 Full story here
Growth Without Guilt Is Now a Thing
This one matters. A lot. A major new analysis shows the long-repeated claim that “economic growth requires rising emissions” has quietly collapsed across most of the global economy. The Paris Agreement didn’t just set targets, it rewired incentives, and the data now shows growth and carbon are finally learning how to live separate lives.
Key highlights
Decoupling is now the norm: Countries representing 92% of global GDP have broken the link between economic growth and consumption-based emissions.
It’s not just rich countries: Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, South Africa, and others are growing while cutting emissions, undermining the “development vs climate” excuse.
China is the hinge point: Emissions growth has slowed sharply, plateaued over the past 18 months, and may already have peaked.
Why This Matters: Because this torpedoes one of the fossil industry’s favourite talking points: that climate action kills growth. The evidence now says the opposite.
Kismet: End-of-century warming projections have fallen from 4°C to 2.6°C since Paris, largely because markets believed the policy signal. Psychology moved capital, and capital moved physics. 👉 Full story here
Spain Admits the Obvious: Heat Is Now a Public Health Emergency
This one hit close to home. Literally! After a summer that felt less like “heatwaves” and more like a single unbroken furnace, Spain is finally scaling adaptation, announcing a national network of climate shelters so people have somewhere safe to cool down when next summer rolls in.
Key highlights
Climate shelters go national: Public buildings like libraries, museums, sports centres, and malls will offer air-conditioned refuge, free water, and seating.
This is about survival, not comfort: Over 3,800 heat-related deaths were recorded in Spain in 2025, up 88% year-on-year.
Adaptation is broadening: The plan also includes funding for flood prevention and wildfire mitigation in small towns.
Why This Matters: Because mitigation alone won’t save lives already on the line. Climate adaptation is now basic civic infrastructure, as essential as hospitals or fire services.
Kismet: Seville, where I’m based, and one of Europe’s hottest cities, has become a global reference point for heat adaptation policy, quietly exporting know-how on shade, cooling, and urban design while the rest of the continent catches up. 👉 Full story here
AI News
AI Just Leapt Forward. Twice. And It’s Starting to Feel… Unfair
OpenAI dropped two updates back-to-back this week that together mark a real shift. GPT-5.2 quietly redefines what “knowledge work” even means, while the new ChatGPT Images turns rough photos into polished, brand-ready visuals with unsettling ease. I tested the latter on my own podcast photo asking ChatGPT Images to place me in a modern podcast studio with the Climate Confident branding in the background. The results, as you can see above, speak for themselves.
Key highlights
GPT-5.2 is a productivity multiplier: It now matches or beats human experts on ~71% of professional knowledge tasks, from spreadsheets to code, at a fraction of the time and cost.
Long-context and vision jumped again: GPT-5.2 can reason across hundreds of thousands of tokens and understand complex visuals like dashboards and diagrams far more reliably.
Images got seriously practical: ChatGPT Images can make precise edits while preserving lighting, composition, and identity, ideal for branding, marketing, and content creation.
Why This Matters: Because this isn’t “AI as a toy” anymore. It’s AI collapsing the distance between idea, execution, and finished output, which reshapes who can create, analyse, and compete.
Kismet: The biggest disruption here isn’t creativity. It’s latency. When insight, design, and production collapse into a single conversational loop, entire job categories quietly lose their friction. 👉 Full stories here, and here
Google Quietly Turned AI Into Infrastructure
While the AI hype cycle screams about chatbots, Google shipped two deeply consequential updates that feel… structural. One makes serious research programmable. The other dissolves language barriers in real time, without locking you into specific hardware. This is AI sliding into the background and becoming useful.
Key highlights
Gemini Deep Research goes agentic: Google opened up its autonomous research agent via an API, letting developers embed multi-step, citation-backed research directly into apps.
Research at machine scale: The agent plans, searches, identifies gaps, and re-searches autonomously, delivering hours-to-days of human research in minutes.
Translation without hardware handcuffs: Gemini-powered live speech-to-speech translation now works across Android and iOS, with specific headphone requirements, preserving tone, cadence, and context.
Why This Matters: Because this is what AI looks like when it stops being a demo and starts being plumbing: research that compounds, and communication that finally ignores borders.
Kismet: Google’s Deep Research benchmark, DeepSearchQA, doesn’t reward speed or fluency. It rewards completeness. In other words, the future of AI research isn’t about sounding smart, it’s about not missing things. 👉 Full stories here, and here
Electromobility
BYD Just Nuked the “Dead Battery” Myth
This is how you kill EV misinformation. BYD has extended its battery warranty in Europe to 8 years or 250,000 km, a move that directly undercuts the tired claim that EV batteries die after 3–5 years. If you drive a lot, this is the reassurance people have been waiting for.
Key highlights
Market-leading coverage: 250,000 km is nearly 60% more mileage than the standard EV battery warranty in Europe.
High-mileage friendly: This targets taxi drivers, fleet operators, and anyone racking up serious kilometres.
Chemistry matters: BYD’s LFP Blade Battery is built for long cycle life and durability, not fragile range chasing.
Why This Matters: Because warranties signal confidence. This move makes EV longevity tangible and pulls the rug out from under one of the fossil lobby’s favourite scare stories.
Kismet: Even assuming conservative degradation, BYD’s own cycle-life data implies close to a million kilometres of usable battery life. The warranty isn’t bold. It’s cautious. 👉 Full story here
EVs Aren’t a Luxury Toy. They’re a Leapfrog Technology.
This new report from Ember calmly demolishes another stubborn myth: that electric vehicles are only for rich countries or wealthy buyers. In 2025, the real EV momentum is coming from emerging markets, where affordability, energy security, and clean air matter more than brand prestige. And the data is emphatic.
Key highlights
The global tipping point arrived: Over 25% of all new cars sold globally in 2025 were electric, up from under 3% just six years ago.
Emerging markets are leading, not following: Viet Nam (~40%), Thailand (>20%), Indonesia (15%), Brazil, Mexico and India now outperform the US and Japan on EV adoption.
Leapfrogging economics: EVs slash fuel costs and fossil fuel imports even on dirty grids, because efficiency beats ideology every time.
Why This Matters: Because the energy transition isn’t being driven by luxury consumption. It’s being driven by cold economics, public health, and countries choosing not to stay hooked on oil.
Kismet: Ethiopia banned imports of petrol and diesel cars in 2024. Within a year, 60% of new car sales were electric. Turns out policy, not income, was the real barrier. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Coal’s Last Stand Is Losing
This is one of those quietly decisive energy stories. Even with political theatre trying to prop coal up in the US, the maths simply isn’t cooperating. According to the IEA, China’s falling coal demand alone will more than cancel out any short-term coal bump elsewhere. The centre of gravity has moved.
Key highlights
China flips the global equation: Coal demand in China is now expected to decline by 2027, cutting 126Mt from forecasts and outweighing US policy-driven increases.
Renewables are doing the crowding out: China’s rapid wind, solar, and nuclear build means clean power will meet all new electricity demand this decade.
Structural decline in Europe and India: Europe continues its coal phaseout, while India’s coal growth has been downgraded as renewables bite.
Why This Matters: Because coal doesn’t die by announcement. It dies when grids stop needing it. That tipping point has arrived in the world’s largest coal market.
Kismet: By 2030, renewables are set to supply nearly half of China’s electricity. The country that once defined coal demand may end up being the reason it peaked. 👉 Full story here
Heat Pumps, But Make Them City-Sized
This is decarbonisation without vibes, just pipe diameter. Across Europe, giant heat pumps are replacing coal boilers and quietly solving urban heating at scale. Not pilot projects. Not prototypes. Entire districts.
Key highlights
Coal plants, repurposed: In Mannheim, Germany, two 82.5MW heat pumps will replace a coal plant, drawing heat from the Rhine to warm 40,000 homes.
District heating on steroids: Denmark and Finland are rolling out 150–170MW systems, supplying up to a third of citywide heating demand.
Grid-friendly by design: Massive hot-water storage lets operators run heat pumps when power is cheap and renewables are abundant.
Why This Matters: Because heating is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, and this proves the solution already exists, scales, and uses infrastructure cities already have.
Kismet: The compressors driving these mega heat pumps are adapted from oil and gas equipment. Fossil hardware, finally doing something useful. 👉 Full story here
Energy Storage
AI’s Power Hunger Just Found a Cleaner Fix
Data centres are exploding in size, load, and political patience. Traditionally, that meant diesel generators lurking in the background. This piece lays out a quieter alternative: co-locating large battery systems with data centres to smooth demand, stabilise grids, and cut emissions without waiting a decade for new transmission.
Key highlights
Batteries as grid shock absorbers: Storage can respond instantly to AI training spikes, preventing voltage swings that stress grids and damage equipment.
Faster connections, fewer fossil backups: On-site batteries can substitute for grid upgrades, letting data centres come online years earlier.
The market is already moving: Texas added 4.4GW of battery storage in 2024, and major operators are pairing storage with new AI facilities.
Why This Matters: Because the AI boom doesn’t have to lock in another generation of diesel infrastructure. Batteries turn data centres from grid bullies into grid partners.
Kismet: In some cases, batteries are now cheaper than waiting for transmission upgrades. The fastest way to build new digital infrastructure isn’t more wires. It’s more storage. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
My Latest: The Solar Asterisk Just Died
I wrote this because a quiet threshold has been crossed, and a lot of energy commentary hasn’t caught up yet. Solar isn’t just cheap anymore. Paired with today’s batteries, it’s now dispatchable and, crucially, the cheapest new power you can build in much of the world. The old “but it’s intermittent” line finally ran out of road.
Key highlights
The numbers flipped: Utility-scale batteries are now coming in around $125/kWh all-in, pushing dispatchable solar to roughly $76/MWh.
This isn’t theory: These costs are based on real auctions in Italy, Saudi Arabia, and India, not PowerPoint optimism.
Batteries are infrastructure now: Storage isn’t just shifting energy, it’s doing grid stabilisation, congestion relief, and capacity at the same time.
Why This Matters: Because once clean power becomes cheap and reliable, fossil fuels stop being a “bridge” and start being a liability.
Kismet: The biggest barriers left aren’t technical. They’re regulatory and political. Solar didn’t just get cheaper. It grew up. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
New Climate Confident: Decarbonising Shipping Without Waiting for Miracles
This week on Climate Confident, I sat down with Nicholas Ball, CEO and founder of XFuel, to talk about one of the hardest climate problems out there: shipping. Not future ships. Not speculative fuels. But what can cut emissions now, using the infrastructure we already have.
Key highlights
Waste into fuel, at scale: XFuel turns oily sludges and other hard-to-handle waste streams into drop-in marine fuels with up to 85% lifecycle emissions savings.
No new engines, no new ports: These fuels meet existing fossil standards, meaning ships can use them immediately without retrofits.
Economics first, ideology last: Nicholas is blunt. If a solution costs 3-5× fossil fuel, it won’t scale. Price parity is the real climate lever.
Why This Matters: Because shipping won’t decarbonise on PowerPoint timelines. Drop-in fuels that work with today’s ships may be the fastest way to bend the emissions curve in a sector that moves 90% of global trade.
Kismet: Roughly 1–3% of all ship fuel becomes oily sludge, often dumped or burned for no value. Turning that waste into clean fuel is less “innovation theatre” and more climate judo. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
New Resilient Supply Chain: The Cheapest Emissions Cuts Are Hiding in Plain Sight
This week on Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with Jared Spude, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Breakthrough, about why freight emissions aren’t a technology problem so much as a planning, data, and incentives problem. Spoiler: a lot of carbon reduction is sitting inside decisions companies already make every day.
Key highlights
Freight is the blind spot: Empty miles, poor routing, and mode choice account for a huge share of avoidable emissions, yet often escape senior attention.
Cost and carbon can align: Optimising loads, routes, backhauls, and carrier choice routinely cuts emissions andcosts.
Data beats ambition: The companies making progress aren’t chasing silver bullets, they’re stacking small, measurable wins using granular, consumption-based data.
Why This Matters: Because Scope 3 freight emissions won’t be solved by waiting for perfect trucks or perfect policy. They’ll be solved by better decisions, made faster, with the data most companies already have.
Kismet: Only 14% of shippers screen carriers for clean tech today. The competitive advantage isn’t just lower emissions, it’s being early while everyone else is still arguing about costs. 🎧 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)
These two charts of UK car sales data show EVs are doing really well in terms of new car sales.
You know the saying “Follow the money…”
It’s a virtuous circle!
Misc stuff
‘Tis the season - language learners will appreciate this one
Tech support humour!
I’m sorry, what pies now?
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
In case you were unaware!
Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.