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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, oil is humiliating itself again, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about consequences.
Trump’s Iran war was meant to project strength. Instead, it’s helping China, boosting EV sales, and pushing Europe faster towards electrification. A fossil-fuel-first strategy is turning into a surprisingly effective sales campaign for batteries, solar, and electric transport.
The big threads:
War is making EVs, solar, batteries, and electrification look less like climate virtue and more like economic self-defence.
China is winning because it spent the last decade building the industries this moment rewards.
AI keeps moving from novelty to consequence, from drug discovery to cyber defence to leaner models.
Clean energy keeps spreading into harder corners of the economy, from homes and grids to mines and industry.
Plus: a quietly beautiful science story from Japan, my latest blog post on passive cooling, a new Climate Confident episode on food waste as a systems problem, and a new Resilient Supply Chain episode on why bad carbon data could start costing companies real money.
The latest Climate Confident bonus episode drops tomorrow for all Climate Confident+ subscribers.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
Japan’s Emissions Hit a Record Low. Quietly, That’s a Big Deal.
Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions fell to their lowest level since records began, dropping 1.9% in fiscal 2024. I think this is more significant than it might first appear because it shows that even a heavily industrialised economy, and one still carrying the long shadow of Fukushima, can keep pushing emissions down through a mix of cleaner power and lower industrial energy use.
Key Highlights
Japan’s total greenhouse gas emissions fell to 1.046 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, the third straight annual decline and the lowest since records began in 1990/91.
Industrial emissions dropped 2.5%, transport emissions fell 1.6%, and household emissions were down 0.7%, though commercial and services emissions ticked up slightly.
Cleaner electricity helped: renewables made up 23.1% of power generation and nuclear rose to 9.4%, while thermal power fell to 67.5%.
Why This Matters: Japan is still far from its 2030 target, but this is a reminder that emissions cuts at scale do happen when cleaner electricity steadily displaces fossil generation and efficiency starts doing real work instead of just appearing in PowerPoint decks.
Kismet: Japan’s 2024 emissions were down 24.9% from 2013 levels. That matters because 2013 was the post-Fukushima fossil-fuel peak, so this is not just incremental progress, it is Japan clawing its way back from an energy shock that once looked like it might derail climate progress for years. 👉 Full story here
New Section: US-Israel War on Iran Implications
Oil Demand Crashes, Europe Electrifies, and the IEA Gets a Nudge
The most revealing twist in the US-Israel war on Iran may be this: higher oil prices are not rescuing oil, they’re suppressing demand and accelerating the case for electrification. I think that’s the real story here. The old fossil-fuel promise of “energy security” is once again collapsing under the slightest geopolitical stress, while Europe is responding not by doubling down on fuels, but by moving faster towards electricity, grids, heat pumps, and cleaner power.
Key Highlights
The IEA says global oil demand fell 3.4% in March and is expected to drop again in April to 100.4 million barrels a day, its lowest level in more than three years, as soaring prices, supply shortages, and disrupted air travel hammered consumption.
A group of sixteen energy and geopolitics experts has urged the IEA to go beyond emergency reserve releases and temporary restraint measures, and instead push much harder on structural fixes like wind, solar, electrification, and efficiency.
The EU is preparing measures to cut electricity taxes, set an electrification target, accelerate smart grids, and scale technologies like heat pumps and geothermal, explicitly to reduce exposure to future fossil-fuel shocks.
Why This Matters: This war is turning into a brutal live demonstration that fossil-fuel dependence is not resilience, it is vulnerability with a lobbyist budget. Electrification is starting to look less like climate policy and more like basic economic self-defence.
Kismet: Since the start of the conflict, the EU’s fossil-fuel import bill has reportedly risen by more than €22 billion. That is a staggering reminder that every delayed heat pump, EV, grid upgrade, or industrial electrification project has a price tag, and sometimes geopolitics sends the invoice immediately. 👉 Links Inline
China’s Wins the US-Israel War on Iran!
Here’s the grotesque irony: a fossil-fuel-first US administration has helped trigger an energy shock that is cutting oil and gas demand, making electrification more attractive, and strengthening the country best positioned to profit from that shift, China. China is taking some pain on fossil imports, yes, but the bigger arc bends in its favour because it already dominates the industries the rest of the world now needs more urgently: batteries, solar, storage, and EVs. Xi must be delighted!
Key Highlights
Chinese clean-tech firms are already seeing upside from the Gulf energy shock, with Ningbo Deye expecting first-quarter profit to rise by as much as 70% and Chinese EV and hybrid exports more than doubling in March to a record 349,000 units.
China’s broader strategic positioning looks strong because it already accounts for more than 70% of global EV manufacturing and roughly 85% of battery cell production, giving it a huge advantage as countries respond to fuel shocks by leaning harder into electrification.
China is not untouched by the war: crude imports fell 2.8% year-on-year in March and gas imports fell 11%, but those disruptions may end up reinforcing the country’s long-term clean-energy logic rather than weakening it.
Why This Matters: The strategic own goal here is extraordinary: by weaponising fossil-fuel geopolitics, Washington has made fossil dependence look even riskier and handed China’s clean-tech sector a fresh global sales pitch.
Kismet: One analyst compared this moment to the 1970s oil shock, when Japan gained global market share by selling fuel-efficient cars into a world suddenly terrified of oil prices. This time, the likely winner is not Japan. It is China, and the products are EVs, batteries, and storage. 👉 Links Inline
AI News
Amazon Wants to Turn Drug Discovery into a Feedback Loop
Amazon is making a serious play in life sciences with Amazon Bio Discovery, an AI-powered system designed to help researchers generate, test, and refine drug candidates far faster than the usual glacial slog. I’m intrigued because this is not just “AI for science” as vague corporate wallpaper, it is an attempt to stitch models, lab work, and iteration into one usable workflow.
Key Highlights
Amazon Bio Discovery gives scientists access to specialised biological foundation models, plus an AI agent that helps them choose models, design experiments, and evaluate candidates using natural language instead of code-heavy workflows.
The platform includes a built-in “lab-in-the-loop” cycle, where promising candidates can be sent directly to lab partners like Twist Bioscience and Ginkgo Bioworks for synthesis and testing, with results fed back into the system for the next round.
In work with Memorial Sloan Kettering, Amazon says the system helped design nearly 300,000 novel antibody molecules and compressed a process that normally takes up to a year into weeks.
Why This Matters: If this works as advertised, it could lower one of the biggest barriers in biotech: not lack of ideas, but the painfully slow handoff between computation, experimentation, and learning.
Kismet: One of the most interesting bits here is not the model library, it is the workflow design. Amazon is effectively productising the scientific method as a software loop, which is a far bigger ambition than merely giving researchers a clever chatbot. 👉 Full story here
OpenAI’s Cyber Move Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
A week after Anthropic’s Mythos raised eyebrows, OpenAI has effectively replied: yes, these models are getting good enough at cyber work that access now needs tiers, vetting, and a bit less of the old “just ship it” bravado. What caught my eye is that OpenAI isn’t merely talking about safer AI, it’s building a more permissive cyber-specific model for verified defenders, which tells you the capability jump is real.
Key Highlights
OpenAI is expanding its Trusted Access for Cyber programme and introducing GPT-5.4-Cyber, a version of GPT-5.4 fine-tuned for defensive cybersecurity work with fewer refusal boundaries for legitimate use cases.
Access will be restricted to vetted defenders, security vendors, organisations, and researchers, while Axios reports OpenAI is also preparing a separate cybersecurity product for a small set of partners.
OpenAI says Codex Security has already helped identify and fix over 3,000 critical and high-severity vulnerabilities, and GPT-5.4-Cyber adds capabilities such as binary reverse engineering for analysing compiled software without source code(!)
Why This Matters: The AI labs are now treating frontier cyber capability less like a fun benchmark and more like controlled dual-use infrastructure, which is a rather large signal that the defensive upside is real, but so is the risk of handing digital bolt-cutters to everyone with a login.
Kismet: The most interesting parallel came from a security expert quoted by Axios, who said staggered AI release looks a lot like responsible vulnerability disclosure in software security. That is a fascinating shift: frontier model launches are starting to resemble coordinated disclosure of dangerous exploits. 👉 Full story here
MIT’s New AI Trick Cuts the Bloat Mid-Training
One of the more refreshing AI stories this week comes from MIT, where researchers have found a way to make certain AI models slim themselves down while they’re still being trained. I like this because it pushes back against the lazy assumption that better AI must always mean more chips, more power, more cost, and more industrial-scale electricity gulping.
Key Highlights
MIT researchers developed CompreSSM, a technique that compresses state-space AI models during training, instead of building a huge model first and trimming it later.
The method identifies which parts of a model matter after only about 10% of training, then removes the dead weight so the remaining 90% runs as a smaller, faster model.
On benchmarks, compressed models kept nearly the same performance while training up to 1.5 times faster, and on the Mamba architecture the team reported roughly 4x training speedups while staying competitive.
Why This Matters: If techniques like this scale beyond niche model families, they could chip away at one of AI’s ugliest trade-offs: the idea that progress must come bundled with ever-rising compute bills and energy demand.
Kismet: The clever bit is not just the pruning, it is when the pruning happens. Instead of treating efficiency as a post-production clean-up job, CompreSSM treats it as part of learning itself, which is a subtle but potentially very important shift in how future AI systems get built. 👉 Full story here
Gemini Lands on Mac, and the Desktop AI Wars Get More Interesting
Google has brought the Gemini app to macOS as a native desktop app, which sounds minor until you realise what it really means: AI assistants are moving out of the browser and planting themselves directly in your workflow. That matters because the next battle is not just about model quality, but about who becomes the easiest AI to summon when you’re mid-task and mildly allergic to context switching.
Key Highlights
Gemini is now available as a native macOS app for users on macOS 15 and up, globally, and at no cost.
The app can be launched from anywhere with the Option + Space shortcut, making it a persistent desktop assistant rather than just another tab begging for attention.
Users can share a window or local files with Gemini for context-aware help, and Google is pitching it as a tool for everything from summarising charts to generating images with Nano Banana and videos with Veo.
Why This Matters: The real competition in AI is shifting from “who has the smartest model?” to “who is closest to the moment of need?”, and native desktop presence is a very serious answer to that question.
Kismet: The most telling line in Google’s post is that this release is just the foundation for a more personal, proactive and powerful desktop assistant. Translation: the app is not the product, the desktop is. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Petrol Spikes, EV Sales Jump. Funny That.
The US-Israel War on Iran war has delivered yet another reminder that EVs are not just cleaner, they’re a hedge against fossil-fuel chaos. As petrol and diesel prices surged across Europe, buyers did exactly what you’d expect rational people to do when oil markets start behaving like a toddler with a flamethrower: they looked for the exit ramp.
Key Highlights
Europe saw a record March for EV sales, with battery-electric and plug-in hybrid registrations up 37% year on year to nearly 540,000 vehicles, helping drive the first month of global EV sales growth this year.
Online marketplaces across Europe reported a sharp jump in interest: Germany’s Mobile.de saw more than 50% more EV enquiries in March versus February, while France’s La Centrale reported a 160% increase in EV searches between early March and early April.
Austria hit a record 8,206 EV registrations in March, up almost a third year on year, even after government measures to soften fuel-price pain.
Why This Matters: Every oil shock ends up doing free marketing for EVs, because nothing clarifies the value of electrification quite like watching petrol prices jump every time a chokepoint sneezes.
Kismet: One French marketplace executive said this crisis is creating one of the first moments when consumers are really becoming aware of total cost of ownership. That’s huge, because once drivers start comparing lifetime running costs instead of sticker prices alone, the argument shifts decisively. 👉 Links Inline
China Cashes In on the EV Surge It Spent a Decade Building
The big EV winner from this latest oil shock is obviously China. While fuel-price panic is pushing more drivers towards EVs, Chinese carmakers are turning that shift into export growth at speed because, unlike some governments who spent the last decade chanting about “energy dominance”, China actually did the hard yards on batteries, supply chains, manufacturing scale, and affordable EVs.
Key Highlights
China’s exports of new energy passenger vehicles, including EVs and plug-in hybrids, surged more than 140% year on year in March, with EV and hybrid exports hitting a record 349,000 units.
In the UK, Chinese brands grabbed 15% of new car sales in March, up from 7.4% a year earlier, and if Chinese-owned western marques are included, that rises to roughly 20%.
BYD alone accounted for about a third of China’s March EV and hybrid exports, while brands such as BYD, Geely, Chery, Omoda and Jaecoo continue gaining ground across Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Why This Matters: This is what industrial strategy looks like when it compounds: an oil shock arrives, consumers reconsider combustion, and the country with scale, price, and product readiness is sitting there waiting with the keys.
Kismet: One Chinese auto industry official explicitly compared this moment to the 1970s oil crisis, when Japanese carmakers used fuel efficiency to seize global share. The difference now is that China is doing it with EVs, and on a much larger industrial base. 👉 Links Inline
Clean Energy
US Renewables Just Beat Gas. Even This White House Couldn’t Stop That.
For one full month in March, renewables generated more electricity on the US grid than natural gas, which is a proper milestone, not least because it happened while the administration has been doing its level best to throw sand in the gears. It’s only one month, yes, but it tells a bigger story: solar and wind are no longer niche supplements, they’re increasingly the fastest, easiest way to add power to a grid that badly needs more of it.
Key Highlights
In March 2026, US renewables produced more electricity than natural gas across an entire month for the first time ever, according to Ember data cited by Canary Media.
Emissions-free electricity, including renewables and nuclear, supplied more than half of US power in March, only the third time that has happened over a full month.
The shift is being driven largely by surging solar, steady wind growth, and the awkward fact that gas plants remain hard to build because of supply-chain bottlenecks, while solar, wind, and batteries continue to dominate new capacity additions.
Why This Matters: The administration can sneer at clean energy all it likes, but grids run on economics, build times, and physics, not culture war nonsense, and right now renewables are winning on all three.
Kismet: One of the most important lines in the piece is that renewables are gaining share while overall electricity demand is rising. That means clean power is not merely displacing old generation at the margins, it is taking a bigger slice of a growing system, which is how real transitions happen. 👉 Full story here
Britain’s Rooftop Solar Boom Is Back
As UK energy bills rise again, households are turning to rooftop solar with renewed urgency, and honestly, it’s hard to blame them. When fossil-fuel volatility keeps mugging family budgets, the appeal of making your own electricity starts to look less like green virtue and more like basic household risk management.
Key Highlights
Octopus Energy said solar panel sales were up 50% after the war pushed oil and gas prices higher, while the Financial Times reported a 54% rise in solar panel sales in the first three weeks of March compared with the same period in February.
EDF said residential solar sales were running at double last spring’s rate, as households tried to get ahead of higher bills and the next Ofgem price-cap reset in July.
The UK already has more than 22GW of installed solar capacity, and recent sunny days pushed British solar output to record levels, even sending power prices negative at points as midday generation surged.
Why This Matters: Every spike in fossil-fuel prices is teaching the same lesson: households do not want “energy markets”, they want stability, and rooftop solar is starting to look like one of the few ways to buy some.
Kismet: The really interesting twist is that Britain may soon get plug-in solar kits in supermarkets, including compact balcony or garden systems already popular in Germany. That could turn solar from a major home upgrade into something much closer to an everyday retail purchase. 👉 Full story here
Even Mining Is Discovering Diesel Is a Terrible Idea
Even one of the world’s traditionally dirtiest, hardest-to-abate sectors is moving towards renewables and battery storage, which tells you something important: this is no longer about green branding, it’s about operational logic. Remote mines have long depended on diesel because they sit miles from any grid, but that model is starting to look expensive, volatile, and increasingly obsolete.
Key Highlights
Fortescue has begun deploying large-scale battery storage in Western Australia, with an initial 250MWh BYD system already delivered and plans for up to 5GWh by 2030, which would be the largest in Australia.
Mining companies are increasingly pairing renewables with battery energy storage systems to reduce diesel use, cut costs, and provide reliable power at remote sites far from national grids.
Battery costs have fallen by about 20% a year over the last decade, helping make storage economically competitive, while firms like Sandvik are even offering miners battery-as-a-service models.
Why This Matters: When mining companies start deciding that batteries, solar and smarter power management beat diesel generators, that is not a niche climate story, it is a signal that electrification economics are reaching some very stubborn corners of the real economy.
Kismet: One of the more fascinating details here is that old EV-style mine vehicle batteries can get a second life in stationary storage once they are no longer ideal for mobile equipment. Even mining is starting to look a bit more circular. 👉 Full story here
Science
A 1,200-Year Climate Record Gets a New Guardian
This is one of those quietly beautiful science stories that sneaks up on you. Prof Yasuyuki Aono, whose work turned Japan’s cherry blossom records into one of the world’s longest seasonal climate datasets, died last year, but the 1,200-year record looks set to continue after another researcher stepped forward to carry it on.
Key Highlights
Aono built an extraordinary record of mountain cherry blossom peak flowering dates in Kyoto stretching back to 812, making it one of the world’s longest climate-linked seasonal datasets.
His data showed cherry blossoms flowering progressively earlier in recent decades, with 2021 and 2023 marking the earliest peak bloom dates in the full record.
After fears the record would end with Aono’s death, a researcher in Japan has now offered to continue observing the same species in the same location, preserving the scientific value of the series.
Why This Matters: This is climate science at its most human and most powerful: a millennium of cultural memory, historical detective work, and modern observation stitched together into a dataset that shows, unmistakably, how the seasons are shifting.
Kismet: Aono reportedly taught himself old forms of Japanese so he could read centuries-old festival and archive records and reconstruct bloom dates. That is such an absurdly brilliant level of scientific dedication that it deserves its own blossom season. 👉 Full story here
Latest blog post
Why Passive Cooling Is Finally Getting the Attention It Deserves
In my latest blog post, I argue that passive cooling is moving from nice-to-have to strategic necessity. In a hotter, more electrified, more volatile world, letting buildings soak up heat and then throwing ever more energy at the problem is not smart design, it’s expensive denial.
Key Highlights
I make the case that passive cooling is one of the most practical and underused ways to cut cooling loads, reduce emissions, improve resilience, and protect margins as heat intensifies and energy volatility returns.
The post lays out why this matters now: cooling demand is rising fast, electricity systems are under more strain, and even ordinary building cooling is contributing heavily to future power demand growth.
I also stress that passive cooling is not one silver bullet, but a family of measures, from reflective roofs and shading to insulation, thermal mass, ventilation, and better envelopes, which need to be matched to the asset, climate, and load profile.
Why This Matters: Too many organisations are still treating cooling as an HVAC procurement problem when it is really a heat-gain, resilience, and operating-cost problem first.
Kismet: One of the sharpest points in the post is that data centres may grab headlines, but ordinary cooling demand in homes, offices, warehouses, and public buildings is still the bigger, more underappreciated story. That’s where a lot of the real leverage sits. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Food Waste Isn’t a Kitchen Problem. It’s a Systems Problem
In the latest episode of Climate Confident, I spoke with Olaf van der Veen, co-founder of Orbisk, about how AI and computer vision can help commercial kitchens cut food waste by tackling the real issue: bad forecasting, poor process design, and operational blind spots. What I liked about this conversation is that it reframes food waste from a guilt-soaked leftovers story into something far more interesting, and far more fixable, namely margins, data, control, and systems thinking.
Key Highlights
Olaf argues that around 70% of food waste in one early restaurant study never even reached a plate, meaning the biggest waste often comes from overproduction, overstocking, and poor back-of-house processes rather than customer behaviour.
Orbisk’s system uses a camera above the bin and a scale underneath it to track what food is being wasted, when, and why, helping kitchens spot recurring patterns like overproduced buffet items or poorly timed prep.
The business case is strong: Olaf says some clients see returns of up to 20x, and in one example a hotel discovered buffet waste was so high it could have paid for two and a half extra chefs just by switching weekend service away from buffet format.
Why This Matters: Food waste is one of those rare climate problems where cutting emissions, cutting costs, improving operations, and sometimes even improving guest satisfaction can all happen at the same time, which frankly is rude levels of efficiency.
Kismet: One of the smartest lines in the episode is Olaf’s point that kitchens often buy 120% of the food needed to serve 100% of guests. Reduce that to 105%, and the difference is not abstract sustainability virtue, it is pure recovered margin. 🎧 Listen to the full episode
Resilient Supply Chain:
Bad Carbon Data Will Cost You Real Money
In the latest episode of Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with Cynthia Lai, a former banker turned executive coach and board advisor, about a shift too many supply chain leaders still haven’t clocked: emissions data is moving from sustainability reporting into credit risk and insurance pricing. That means poor Scope 1 and 2 data, or no data at all, can start pushing up borrowing costs, insurance premiums, and risk ratings.
Key Highlights
Cynthia explains that banks and insurers increasingly treat emissions data as a risk signal, because their own financed and insured emissions now fall under growing regulatory scrutiny in markets including Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and California.
If companies cannot provide credible emissions figures, banks and insurers may use proxy data or industry averages instead, and that usually means being treated as a higher-risk customer.
One of Cynthia’s most practical recommendations is an 80/20 approach: identify the top 20% of suppliers driving 80% of emissions exposure, start there, and build a credible transition plan before your financiers start filling in the blanks for you.
Why This Matters: This is where carbon reporting stops being a compliance exercise and starts becoming a resilience issue, because once weak data affects access to finance and insurance, it is no longer optional admin.
Kismet: One of the more important points Cynthia makes is that this could mature to something close to financial-reporting rigour within three to five years. That is not a distant “someday” problem. That is already on the horizon and accelerating. 🎧 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 we saw above, renewables are even winning in the US despite the administration’s best efforts!
This is great to see. The UK stopped all use of coal for electricity generation last year.
Sales of EVs are on an exponential curve. If you’re not driving an EV by now, why not?!
Misc stuff
The Air & Space Museum exhibits were a little underwhelming!
Cruel. Funny, but cruel!
The dog lover in me means I couldn’t skip this one!
Engage
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*** Be aware that any typos you find in this newsletter are tests to see who is paying attention! ***
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