Trump 0–1 Economics, EVs Overtake Petrol, and Meta Reads Minds

Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, FutureProof is back.

This week’s title is doing World Cup duty: Trump 0–1 Economics, EVs Overtake Petrol, and Meta Reads Minds.

Because while politics keeps trying to foul the clean-tech transition, markets, consumers, courts, and batteries keep playing on.

Highlights this week:

I’ll be watching Spain vs Austria closely tonight. Ireland didn’t qualify, so I’ll be shouting for my adopted home country.

Vamos España. Politely, of course. Mostly.

Let’s get into it.

China’s latest energy plan is one of those “read it twice, spit out the tea” moments: by 2030, it wants half of all electricity to come from non-fossil sources, wind and solar to supply 30% of generation, and new energy storage to hit a frankly chunky 300GW. Yes, coal is still skulking around in the background, doing its national-security comfort-blanket act, but the direction of travel is blindingly obvious: China is building the wiring, storage, markets, and industrial muscle for a power system where clean electricity becomes the main event, not the garnish.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because China is not simply adding renewables; it is redesigning the energy-industrial stack around clean power, storage, grid flexibility, electrification, green manufacturing, and AI-era demand - which means the climate story is also a competitiveness story, a supply chain story, and a “who owns the next industrial century?” story.

Kismet: China’s plan even name-checks space-based power stations as a future innovation area, which sounds faintly like Bond-villain infrastructure until you remember that space solar has been seriously studied for decades - because apparently the energy transition was not already ambitious enough down here on Earth. 👉 Full story here

A Paris court has told TotalEnergies it has six months to tighten its climate policies and account for the emissions created when customers actually burn its oil and gas - which is rather inconvenient if your business model depends on pretending the fire stops being your problem once the invoice clears. The ruling did not force production cuts or block new fossil projects, so this is not the judicial hammer campaigners wanted, but it does drag consumer emissions into France’s corporate duty of vigilance law. And that is a serious crack in the wall.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because Scope 3 emissions — the great corporate “nothing to see here” cupboard - are moving from voluntary disclosure theatre into legal accountability territory, and fossil fuel firms should probably start sweating more than Paris did during the heatwave.

Kismet: The ruling landed during a major European heatwave, with Paris restricting access to the Eiffel Tower and Louvre - an almost too-perfect bit of climate-era stage direction, as if reality briefly hired a satirist. 👉 Full story here

Aviation has been enjoying one of climate policy’s weirdest loopholes: fly Stockholm to Frankfurt and the carbon price bites; fly Frankfurt to Shanghai and suddenly we’re all meant to believe offsetting pixie dust will sort it out. Now the European Commission appears ready to challenge CORSIA, the aviation sector’s global offsetting scheme, and bring more flights back under the EU’s carbon pricing system - cue airline panic, diplomatic muttering, and the faint sound of lobbyists spilling espresso across Brussels.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because aviation cannot keep hiding long-haul emissions behind offset schemes while every other sector is asked to decarbonise in the real world, with real money, real technology, and real accountability.

Kismet: The EU tried this back in 2012 and backed down after pressure from Beijing and Washington - so this is less a new fight than Brussels reopening an old suitcase, finding it still full of diplomatic snakes, and deciding to zip it back up later. 👉 Full story here

The UN has launched its first global independent scientific assessment of AI, and the message is blunt: the technology could turbocharge progress on health, food, education, climate, and disaster response - but without shared rules, it could also deepen inequality, supercharge fraud and disinformation, and leave governments frantically chasing a machine already halfway down the motorway. Add in a new AI for Good commission bringing tech CEOs and world leaders to the same table, and we may - whisper it carefully - be seeing the beginning of grown-up global AI governance, rather than another round of PowerPoint-flavoured optimism soup.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because AI governance is no longer a nerdy standards debate; it is becoming a development issue, a security issue, a labour-market issue, a climate issue, and quite possibly the next great geopolitical fault line.

Kismet: One of the more delicious ironies here is that the UN may find its most practical win in helping the 2.2 billion people still without internet access - because before AI can “change everything”, a fair chunk of humanity still needs the basic luxury of getting online. 👉 Full story here

Anthropic had a busy week: Claude Sonnet 5 arrives with stronger agentic chops, a 1M-token context window, better coding and tool-use performance, and adaptive thinking switched on by default - while Claude Science turns the model into something closer to a research co-worker than a fancy autocomplete machine. The interesting bit is not “new model goes brrr”; it is the move from chatbox to workbench, where Claude can analyse scientific literature, run code, manage compute, generate reproducible figures, and even have a reviewer agent checking citations and calculations before some poor PhD student discovers the error at 2am.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because AI is edging from “help me write a paragraph” into “help me run a research workflow”, and that shift could compress parts of scientific discovery from months of tool-wrangling into something much closer to an interactive, auditable, computational conversation.

Kismet: The quiet sting in the tail: Sonnet 5 uses a new tokenizer that can turn the same text into roughly 30% more tokens, so even when the sticker price looks unchanged, the meter may be spinning a little faster - AI progress, meet invoice archaeology. 👉 Links Inline

Meta has unveiled Brain2Qwerty v2, an AI system that can decode brain activity into sentences using non-invasive MEG recordings - no skull-opening required, which is the sort of sentence that starts as medical miracle and ends somewhere near dystopian shareholder deck. To be fair, the target use case is genuinely powerful: helping people with brain injuries communicate again. But when Meta says it can translate noisy neural signals into coherent text, part of me hears “assistive breakthrough”, and another part of me quietly starts wrapping my thoughts in tinfoil!

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because non-invasive brain-to-text could become life-changing assistive technology for people who cannot speak or type - but it also raises awkward, urgent questions about consent, neural privacy, medical data, and who gets to sit between your brain and the machine.

Kismet: The system still required participants to be actively typing while wearing a bulky MEG device, so no, Meta cannot yet read your idle thoughts across the room - though I’d still avoid thinking anything spicy near a lab-grade helmet, just on principle. 👉 Full story here

Cursor has launched a native iOS app in public beta, letting developers launch, steer, and review AI coding agents from their phone - which means “I’ll just check one thing” can now mutate into “I accidentally shipped a pull request while boiling pasta.” The bigger story is that coding is drifting away from the sacred laptop altar and towards always-on cloud agents: you describe the task, Cursor runs it locally or in isolated cloud environments, produces demos, screenshots, logs, and diffs, then politely asks whether you’d like to merge. Terrifyingly convenient. Conveniently terrifying.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because software development is shifting from “write code at a machine” to “delegate work to autonomous agents wherever you happen to be”, which changes developer productivity, incident response, code review, and probably everyone’s already-fragile work-life boundaries.

Kismet: Cursor says teams are already using agents with MCPs to query Datadog logs and summarise Slack activity - so the phone in your pocket is inching towards becoming a tiny command centre for code, ops, support, and organisational gossip.
👉 Full story here

Europe’s grand wobble over its 2035 combustion-engine ban has run smack into an awkward fact: EV sales are suddenly looking “spectacular”, especially in Germany, France, and Italy, where rising fuel prices have made petrol loyalty feel less like nostalgia and more like an expensive personality disorder. Brussels had already proposed softening the 2035 rule from a full 100% CO₂ cut to 90%, but with EV demand surging, the political case for watering the policy down now looks a lot flimsier, noisier, and faintly oil-stained.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because Europe’s car industry does not need another decade of policy jazz-hands; it needs a clear signal to invest, scale, and compete before Chinese EV makers eat its lunch, dessert, and possibly the cutlery.

Kismet: The surge appears partly linked to higher oil and fuel prices after the US-Israeli war with Iran - a reminder that nothing sells the energy transition quite like fossil-fuel geopolitics doing its usual flaming shopping-trolley routine. 👉 Full story here

For the first time ever in the UK, more new battery electric vehicles were sold over a 12-month period than petrol cars - 516,490 BEVs versus 504,010 petrol cars - which rather dents the “nobody wants EVs” line being lovingly polished by parts of the car lobby. Yes, hybrids are still the biggest category, and yes, the market is messy, noisy, and policy-sensitive, but the direction is obvious: petrol is sliding, EVs are climbing, and the zero-emissions vehicle mandate is looking less like bureaucratic fantasy and more like a market accelerant doing exactly what it said on the tin.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because the UK car market is crossing from early-adopter enthusiasm into structural shift territory - and weakening the ZEV mandate now would be like taking stabilisers off a child’s bike just before they start cycling properly, then blaming gravity.

Kismet: The tiny green stripe on UK numberplates marks pure EVs, not hybrids - so the quiet visual signal of the transition is literally driving around in traffic every day, one thin strip of policy theatre at a time. 👉 Full story here

Delhi is going hard at transport pollution with a new EV policy that combines carrots, sticks, and a very unsubtle message to petrol rickshaws, scooters, motorbikes, small trucks, and older cars: your days are numbered, lads. Residents can get more than $1,000 to scrap an old car and switch to an EV, electric two-wheelers get cash support, EV buyers avoid road tax and registration fees, and from 2028 the city will only register electric two-wheelers - because when vehicle fumes are helping turn a city’s air into a respiratory obstacle course, half-measures start to look morally threadbare.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because Delhi is targeting the vehicles that actually dominate its roads - scooters, rickshaws, motorbikes, and small commercial vehicles - rather than pretending that a few shiny premium EVs will fix toxic urban air.

Kismet: The justice bit is the awkward bit: one rickshaw driver said he wants cleaner air but fears losing income to charging delays and battery worries - a sharp reminder that climate policy only works at scale when the people doing the switching are not left holding the bill, the queue, and the risk. 👉 Links Inline

The current US administration may be trying to shove fossil fuels back into the spotlight, but the electricity market appears to have mislaid the memo: solar, wind, and battery storage made up more than 90% of new US power capacity in both 2024 and 2025. Demand is rising, data centres are hungry, electrification is gathering speed, and when the grid needs new electrons quickly and cheaply, renewables keep turning up like the annoyingly competent person in the meeting who actually read the spreadsheet.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because policy can slow the transition, confuse investors, and waste time, but it cannot easily repeal cheap, fast-to-build energy economics - and right now renewables plus storage are increasingly the practical answer to America’s demand crunch.

Kismet: Coal production in the US has fallen by more than 40% over the last decade, not because everyone suddenly became a climate monk, but because market forces, health concerns, and cleaner alternatives quietly ate its lunch. 👉 Full story here

China’s clean-tech bet is moving from industrial strategy to financial strategy, and that is where this gets properly interesting: green power costs are forecast to fall so far that generation, storage, and transmission could come in around 0.3 yuan per kWh, while China’s total installed power capacity has hit a record 4.01 billion kilowatts. Cheap solar, cheap storage, huge manufacturing capacity, and low-cost renminbi finance? That is no longer just climate policy. That is export strategy wearing a hard hat.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because China is stitching together clean technology, cheap capital, and developing-world infrastructure demand into one integrated offer — and western economies still treating green industry as a culture-war footnote may wake up to find the next energy system financed, manufactured, and maintained elsewhere.

Kismet: Pakistan’s first green-and-social panda bond raised Rmb1.75bn, helped by multilateral guarantees, at a coupon of just 2.5% — far below a recent dollar bond at nearly 7%, which is a fairly persuasive reminder that geopolitics often follows the cheapest money in the room. 👉 Links Inline

Britain has just given provisional backing to 16 long-duration electricity storage projects, including the first major new pumped hydro schemes in Great Britain for more than 40 years - because, astonishingly, a grid stuffed with wind and solar works better when you can store the good stuff for later. The timing is deliciously unsubtle: a heatwave strained the system, gas plants and solar farms lost efficiency, wind speeds sagged, demand rose, and Britain ended up paying eye-watering prices for imported power. Storage, suddenly, looks less like “nice-to-have infrastructure” and more like the difference between a clean grid and a very expensive national shrug.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because clean power systems do not fail because renewables are weak; they fail when grids are built without enough flexibility, storage, transmission, and market design to move cheap clean electricity from “available now” to “needed later”.

Kismet: The old Dinorwig plant in Wales, known as “Electric Mountain”, can ramp up fast enough to power almost 2 million homes in seconds - proof that sometimes the sexiest grid technology is a big wet hill with excellent timing. 👉 Full story here

US homeowners installed a record 673MW of battery storage in the first quarter of 2026, even as residential solar took a hit after the federal tax credit vanished - which is a lovely little reminder that energy economics has more plot twists than a prestige TV finale. The action has shifted to states like California, Hawaii, Texas, and Arizona, where high electricity prices, clever tariffs, and targeted incentives are turning home batteries from “nice gadget for the energy nerds” into “why would I waste my rooftop electrons at noon when I can use or sell them later?”

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because home batteries are turning households into flexible grid assets, not passive electricity consumers - and that changes resilience, peak demand, grid economics, and the politics of distributed energy.

Kismet: One Dallas-area installer says battery uptake has flipped from roughly three batteries per ten solar systems to eight out of ten homeowners choosing storage - which is not a trend, it is the market clearing its throat loudly. 👉 Full story here

This Australia battery story lands beautifully after yesterday’s Climate Confident episode with my former SAP colleague, and now independent energy advisor, Gavin Mooney (see below for more), because we spent a lot of that conversation talking about exactly this: Australia is not just adding renewables; it is learning how to make them dispatchable. The government has selected 15 battery storage projects totalling 4.2GW / 16.1GWh, enough to help power evening demand for more than 3.7 million households - which is what happens when a country with obscene amounts of sun and wind finally starts building the cupboard to store the good stuff.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because Australia is showing how a renewables-heavy grid moves from “cheap when the sun shines” to “reliable when people actually need power” - and batteries are the hinge between those two worlds.

Kismet: The government has already opened another tender targeting a further 4GW / 16GWh of dispatchable clean energy, which suggests Australia is not treating batteries as grid garnish; it is making them part of the main course. 👉 Full story here

As mentioned above, this week’s Climate Confident episode featured my former SAP colleague Gavin Mooney, now an independent energy transition advisor in Australia, and the conversation landed right on the nerve of the moment: electrification is no longer just a climate story, it is an energy-security strategy with solar panels, home batteries, EVs, tariffs, psychology, and diesel dependence all tangled together in one glorious, slightly sweaty, grid-shaped knot. What struck me most was Gavin’s point that Australia may be a living lab for the rest of us - rooftop solar everywhere, batteries accelerating faster than expected, virtual power plants bumping into human behaviour, and fossil-fuel dependence looking less like convenience and more like strategic exposure with a price tag.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because the energy transition is becoming less about abstract emissions targets and more about who controls their energy, who absorbs price shocks, who has flexibility, and who remains hostage to imported fossil fuels when geopolitics starts throwing furniture around the room.

Kismet: Gavin’s sharpest line may have been the simplest: “No one can turn off the sun. No one can stop the wind blowing.” Variable, yes. Interruptible by foreign policy chaos? Not so much. 🎧 Listen to the full episode

This week’s Resilient Supply Chain episode took me into the gloriously unglamorous, margin-saving trenches of fulfilment with Leo Rodriguez, VP at River Plate Inc., a Southern California 3PL handling e-commerce, retail, warehousing, distribution, freight logistics, kitting, and assembly. What I loved about this conversation is that Leo made resilience sound less like crisis theatre and more like discipline: clean item setup, accurate carton data, early 3PL involvement, compliant workflows, and making sure the physical warehouse reality actually matches the system reality. Revolutionary stuff. Apparently “just ship it” is not a strategy. Who knew?

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: This matters because supply chain resilience is often built in the boring bits - product setup, data quality, packaging choices, carrier rules, inventory discipline, and refusing to let yesterday’s workaround become tomorrow’s operating model.

Kismet: Leo’s most useful warning was brutally practical: a box that cubes beautifully in a container can still destroy your margin if it is oversized or overweight for the retail or parcel channel it eventually has to serve - supply chain elegance, mugged by cardboard physics. 🎧 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.

Ukraine are doing an admirable job of helping Russia with its decarbonisation goals. Omsk has gotta feel a little worried at this point. Can’t be long now…

A combination of reduced emissions from cars, and the smoking ban in the workplace has seen a huge drop in healthcare costs associated with poor air quality in Ireland.

You can’t beat economics!

China is becoming the world’s first electrostate

This is what exponential looks like - from this week’s Climate Confident guest Gavin Mooney!

And we don’t need to replace all the world’s current energy use with renewables. Just one third of it. Fully two thirds of today’s energy use is lost to inefficiencies which wouldn’t occur when using clean energies.

Given the season that’s in it, I enjoyed this one

Reasons to own a Range Rover

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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! ***

Was Claude really the best name for Anthropic’s model?

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