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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, oil is humiliating itself again, and FutureProof is back.
This week is about backfire.
Trump’s war on Iran was meant to project strength. Instead, it’s doing a superb job of reminding everyone that fossil fuels are not security, they’re exposure with a marketing budget. Oil spikes, supply chains wobble, governments panic, and suddenly EVs, renewables, storage, and electrification start looking less like climate virtue and more like basic strategic sense.
The big threads:
The war on Iran is pushing households, businesses, and governments towards EVs, solar, batteries, and electric kit as fossil price shocks do their usual charming work.
AI keeps moving from novelty to consequence, from cyber models too dangerous to release, to tools that can spot heart failure years before it hits.
Clean energy keeps scaling anyway, with Britain smashing solar records, offshore wind pushing ahead, and emerging economies finding they may be able to skip the fossil detour entirely.
Electrification is spreading into harder and stranger places too, from shipping and passive cooling to farms, warehouses, and rooftops quietly becoming resilience infrastructure.
Plus: Artemis II reminds us that wonder and geopolitical nonsense can coexist quite happily; my latest blog post lays out why fossil fuel dependence is a terrible business model; and this week’s Climate Confident episode is on passive cooling and why it may be one of climate tech’s most underrated fixes.
And speaking of the podcasts, the latest Climate Confident episode is out now, while a new bonus episode of Resilient Supply Chain drops tomorrow for all Resilient Supply Chain+ subscribers.
Let’s get into it.
Climate
Climate Education Just Turned NSFW
I’m not sure “OnlyFans meets climate literacy” was on anyone’s 2026 bingo card, but here we are. Adam McKay’s team has launched a new video series using sex-positive, deliberately provocative short-form content to explain solar power, fossil finance, and oil industry deception, which is either a stroke of messaging genius or a sign that conventional climate communication has failed so badly it had to take its top off.
Key Highlights:
The new series, Headline Newds, is being released via YouTube, Instagram, and OnlyFans, with actor Megan Prescott and others fronting ultra-short climate explainers.
The first episode focuses on solar energy, while upcoming instalments target fossil-fuel-financing banks and oil industry disinformation.
The project comes from Yellow Dot Studios, the non-profit founded by Adam McKay, and is explicitly designed to use provocation to break through public apathy.
Why This Matters: Climate communication has a distribution problem, not just an information problem, and this is a very 2026 attempt to solve it by meeting distracted audiences exactly where they already are.
Kismet: One of the upcoming episodes reportedly names fossil-fuelling banks while a dominatrix paddles a man in a pig mask, which may be the most visually accurate metaphor for climate finance anyone has produced in years. And of course that episode is called, Spank Banks! 👉 Full story here
Fossil Fuels Aren’t Energy Security. They’re Permanent Exposure
This piece makes the point I’ve been banging on about for years: fossil fuels don’t provide stability, they manufacture volatility. If your energy system depends on fuels that must be extracted, shipped through conflict-prone bottlenecks, and bought again tomorrow, you don’t have security, you have institutionalised chaos.
Key Highlights:
The article argues that the war on Iran has once again exposed how fossil fuel dependence leaves countries vulnerable to geopolitical shocks, inflation, and food insecurity.
It makes the case that doubling down on fossil fuels in response to price chaos is economically irrational, because it locks countries into repeated crises.
It points instead to renewables, modern grids, storage, and EVs as the way to cut exposure, lower costs, and build real energy sovereignty.
Why This Matters: The real contrast isn’t fossil fuels versus climate action, it’s instability infrastructure versus resilience infrastructure.
Kismet: One of the smartest lines in the piece is also one of the simplest: sunlight and wind don’t need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a rather awkward fact for anyone still confusing fuel dependency with security. 👉 Full story here
Btw, scroll down for a special report on the impacts of the war on Iran
Hawaii Wants Big Oil to Pay the Climate Bill
Hawaii is advancing a bill that would let insurers sue fossil fuel companies for climate disaster losses, and honestly, it’s about time. If oil majors helped fuel the crisis (pun intended), misled the public for decades, and kept cashing the cheques while the damages mounted, the idea that they should help cover the cost no longer looks radical, it looks overdue.
Key Highlights:
Hawaii’s proposed bill, SB 1166, would give insurers the right to sue fossil fuel firms to recover losses from climate-fuelled disasters.
The backdrop is brutal: Kona low storms have already caused more than $2 billion in damages and losses, while the 2023 Maui wildfires caused at least $14 billion in losses.
The legal strategy leans on fraud and deception, drawing a parallel with past litigation against tobacco and opioid companies.
Why This Matters: Climate litigation is shifting from symbolic pressure to financial consequence, and that could become one of the most powerful tools yet for forcing accountability onto fossil fuel companies.
Kismet: The really interesting twist is that insurers may prove more dangerous to Big Oil than activists ever were, because they speak the one language courts, markets, and executives all understand fluently: itemised losses. And they typically have deeper pockets than activists! 👉 Full story here
AI News
Anthropic Built a Hacker Supermodel, Then Locked It Away
Anthropic says its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview can find and exploit software vulnerabilities at a level beyond almost all human experts, which is why it’s not releasing it publicly. Instead, it has launched Project Glasswing, a defensive alliance with firms like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, CrowdStrike, NVIDIA, and others to hunt down and patch critical flaws before the bad actors get there first.
Key Highlights:
Anthropic says Mythos has uncovered thousands of high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, plus other critical software.
In examples Anthropic shared, Mythos found a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD, a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg, and chained Linux kernel vulnerabilities to escalate from normal access to full machine control.
Through Project Glasswing, Anthropic is giving restricted access to partners and over 40 additional organisations, committing up to $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in donations to open-source security efforts.
Why This Matters: This is one of the clearest signs yet that frontier AI is no longer just automating knowledge work, it is beginning to reshape the balance between cyber defence and cyber offence at infrastructure scale.
Kismet: The name Glasswing comes from a butterfly with transparent wings, which is oddly perfect, because the whole point here is that the most dangerous vulnerabilities, like the most dangerous technologies, often hide in plain sight. 👉 Full story here
Microsoft Fires Back with Three AI Models of Its Own
Microsoft has launched three in-house AI models for transcription, voice generation, and image creation, and the subtext is hard to miss: it wants to compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and the rest of the frontier crowd, not just host them. More interestingly, it’s pitching these models as faster, cheaper, and efficient enough to help justify the mountain of AI infrastructure spend investors have started side-eyeing.
Key Highlights:
Microsoft unveiled MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, all built in-house and released through Microsoft Foundry and its new MAI Playground.
The company claims its transcription model beats OpenAI, Google, and others on multilingual accuracy benchmarks, while using half the GPUs of state-of-the-art rivals.
Microsoft says the teams behind some of these models were fewer than 10 engineers, and that this is just the start of a broader push towards AI self-sufficiency and eventual independence from OpenAI.
Why This Matters: This is Microsoft signalling that the next phase of the AI race won’t just be about who has the best partner, but who can build the best models, cheapest, at hyperscale, inside their own walls.
Kismet: The most quietly disruptive detail here may be the team size: if genuinely world-class models can be built by groups smaller than many startup founding teams, the economics and geography of AI competition may be about to get a lot weirder. 👉 Full story here
Oxford’s AI Could Spot Heart Failure Five Years Early
Researchers at Oxford have developed an AI tool that can predict heart failure risk up to five years before it happens, using routine cardiac CT scans to detect warning signs in fat around the heart that humans can’t see. In a study of 72,000 patients, it achieved 86% accuracy, which makes this look a lot less like hype and a lot more like genuinely useful medicine.
Key Highlights:
The AI tool analyses routine cardiac CT scans and identifies hidden signs of inflammation and unhealthy fat around the heart.
It was trained and validated on 72,000 patients across nine NHS trusts in England and predicted five-year heart failure risk with 86% accuracy.
Patients in the highest-risk group were 20 times more likely to develop heart failure than those in the lowest-risk group, with about a one in four chance within five years.
Why This Matters: This is what useful AI looks like, turning routine medical imaging into earlier intervention, better triage, and potentially far better outcomes for millions at risk of serious heart disease.
Kismet: The really striking part is that the signal comes from fat around the heart rather than the heart muscle itself, which is a neat reminder that biology, like infrastructure and politics, often hides its biggest warnings in the bits humans weren’t paying enough attention to. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
The War on Iran Is Selling EVs Better Than Any Ad Campaign
The war on Iran has sent oil prices soaring and fuel costs with them, and that’s pushing more drivers towards EVs from the US to Europe to Asia. It’s a brutal reminder that every petrol car is effectively a subscription to geopolitical chaos, while EVs, offer something fossil fuels never can: an escape route.
Key Highlights:
In the US, used EV sales in Q1 were up 12% year-on-year and 17% quarter-on-quarter, while surging petrol prices helped reignite interest in going electric.
In Europe, EV interest jumped sharply: UK EV leasing enquiries rose 36%, Germany’s mobile.de saw EV searches rise from 12% to 36%, and used EV demand climbed strongly in France too.
US charging networks are expanding to meet renewed demand, with 605 public high-speed charging stations added in Q1, up 34% from a year earlier, bringing the total to nearly 13,500.
Why This Matters: The war on Iran is exposing, yet again, that oil dependence is not resilience but vulnerability, and every fuel shock makes electrification look less like climate policy and more like basic self-preservation.
Kismet: The really awkward truth for oil boosters is that some of the best EV marketing in history has been done not by carmakers, but by petrostate brinkmanship and a chokepoint called Hormuz. 👉 Full story here
CATL Wants to Electrify the Seas
CATL, already the world’s biggest EV battery maker, is now going after shipping, with batteries already deployed on about 900 vessels and plans to build out marine battery supply chains, swap systems, and port partnerships. Deep-sea shipping still has serious technical hurdles, but for ports, rivers, coastal routes, and other nearshore use cases, maritime electrification is starting to look a lot less fanciful and a lot more inevitable.
Key Highlights:
CATL says it will “spare no effort” to electrify parts of the global shipping fleet, and has already deployed batteries on around 900 ships, mostly smaller vessels near China’s coast, ports, and rivers.
The company is expanding its marine unit, investing in battery R&D, and working with ports and governments to build marine battery infrastructure and vessel battery-swapping models.
Fully battery-powered deep-sea shipping still faces major constraints around energy density, safety, and cost, so hybrid approaches are likely to dominate first.
Why This Matters: Shipping is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, so every part of it that can be electrified, especially short-range and port-based operations, matters more than people think.
Kismet: CATL’s founder originally studied marine engineering before moving into electronics, so in a strange way this whole push into battery-powered shipping is less a corporate pivot than a very large, very profitable wheel going full circle. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Emerging Economies Can Skip the Fossil Detour
Ember’s new the electric fast-track for emerging markets report argues that many emerging economies no longer need to follow the old fossil-heavy path to development because solar, batteries, and electric end-use tech have become cheap enough to offer a faster, more modular route to prosperity. In other words, the billion people the fossil system left behind may now be reachable not by catching up to the past, but by jumping straight past it. The analysis is produced by Ember in partnership with the Climate Vulnerable Forum.
Key Highlights:
Ember says 46% of CVF nations, measured by electricity demand, have already overtaken the US in solar uptake, while about 51% have surpassed it in electrification.
In 8 out of 10 CVF countries, cumulative solar imports since 2017 are at least three times higher than official installed-capacity statistics suggest, implying the shift is moving faster than national data captures.
CVF countries that are net fossil-fuel importers spent $155 billion on those imports in 2024, while Ember argues falling electrotech costs now make solar, batteries, and electrified end-use cheaper and more practical for many of these markets.
Why This Matters: This reframes the energy transition completely: for many emerging economies, electrification is no longer the expensive climate option, but the cheaper development option.
Kismet: One of the sharpest lines in the report is that the real leap may not be from petrol to electric, but from no bike to e-bike, which is a much better reminder of what disruption actually looks like when you stop viewing the world through rich-country assumptions. 👉 Full story here
Britain’s Renewables Boom Is Starting to Bite
The UK has just smashed its solar record twice in two days, approved its biggest-ever solar farm, and seen record wind and solar generation save roughly £1 billion in gas imports in a single month. Add in progress on Hornsea 3, set to become the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, and Britain suddenly looks a lot less like a country dabbling in renewables and a lot more like one building an actual exit from fossil dependence.
Key Highlights:
Britain set new solar generation records on consecutive days, hitting 14.1GW and then 14.4GW, as the government approved the Springwell project in Lincolnshire, now set to be the UK’s largest solar farm.
Carbon Brief analysis found record wind and solar generation in March 2026 avoided the need for gas imports worth about £1 billion, while gas-fired generation fell to its lowest level ever recorded for March.
Offshore, Hornsea 3 has connected its first subsea export cable; once complete, the 6GW project is expected to supply clean electricity to over 3.3 million UK homes.
Why This Matters: The UK is showing that renewables are no longer just a climate story, they are now an energy security story, a price stability story, and increasingly a national resilience story too.
Kismet: The quietly wild detail is that the UK grid operator is reportedly preparing to run the grid with no gas at all for short periods as soon as this summer, which would have sounded fanciful not very long ago and now just sounds like Tuesday. 👉 Full story here
Space
Artemis II Just Made Space History. The Politics Stayed Earthbound.
Artemis II has completed its record-setting lunar flyby, with its four astronauts travelling 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the Apollo 13 record and giving us fresh Earthrise moments half a century after the last crewed moon missions. But alongside the wonder sits a harder question: whether this renewed moon push is a triumph of science and human curiosity, or the opening act of a new space race dressed up as inspiration.
Key Highlights:
Artemis II’s crew became the farthest-travelled humans in history, going 4,111 miles farther from Earth than Apollo 13 in 1970.
The mission included a 40-minute communications blackout as Orion passed behind the moon, along with observations of lunar surface targets and an emotional Earthrise experience for the crew.
While the mission captures real scientific wonder, it also sits inside a revived geopolitical and commercial space race, with serious questions about priorities, militarisation, and resource exploitation.
Why This Matters: Artemis II reminds us that space exploration can still expand human perspective, but it also forces us to ask whether we’re reaching for the stars to better understand Earth, or just exporting our rivalries beyond it.
Kismet: Christina Koch’s reflection that “everything we need, Earth provides” may turn out to be the most important payload Artemis II brought home, because the most powerful thing about going to the moon is sometimes being reminded not to wreck the planet you started from. 👉 Full story here
War on Iran
Special Report: The War on Iran Is the Best Argument Yet for Ending Fossil Fuel Dependence
If anyone still needed proof that fossil fuels are a terrible foundation for a modern economy, the war on Iran has now provided it in neon. This crisis is not only a climate disaster in slow motion, it is a live demonstration of what happens when energy systems depend on fuels that must be extracted, shipped through chokepoints, and bought again tomorrow at whatever price geopolitics decides. The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the most dangerous points of failure in the global economy, and the consequences are now spilling well beyond oil traders and diplomats into inflation, industrial disruption, public budgets, and household energy bills.
What’s striking is how quickly the whole world has gone into emergency mode. Carbon Brief found that at least 60 countries have already introduced nearly 200 measures in response to the crisis, from fuel tax cuts and subsidies to rationing, transport restrictions, and campaigns to curb demand. That is the real tell. Supposedly “secure” fossil energy has once again required governments to scramble, subsidise, intervene, and distort markets just to keep the lights on and the traffic moving. This is not resilience. It is crisis management masquerading as energy policy.
There is, unhelpfully but predictably, a short-term coal wobble. Some countries are delaying coal phaseouts or squeezing more output from old plants as gas prices surge and supply risks bite. We are seeing that in parts of Asia and Europe. But the more important story is the one beneath the panic. This war should accelerate the shift to renewables, storage, electrification and, in some cases, nuclear, because governments and consumers are being reminded in real time that imported fossil fuels mean permanent exposure to events you do not control. Even Fatih Birol at the IEA expects a renewed push for renewables, EVs and nuclear, while warning that the geopolitical risk premium on energy is likely to stay higher than before the conflict.
That matters because the economics have shifted. Solar panel prices fell by nearly 70% between early 2022 and the end of 2025, and battery prices are down 36% since 2022. Those are not marginal improvements. They fundamentally change the conversation. When fossil prices spike, clean technologies no longer look like the expensive ethical option. They look like insurance. Or better than insurance, really, because they do not just protect against volatility, they reduce your exposure to it altogether. Patrice Geoffron makes this exact point in Le Monde, arguing that decarbonised technologies now carry an “insurance value” because they offer predictable energy costs without the constant threat of fuel disruption.
And this is no longer theoretical. Bloomberg’s reporting shows consumers responding already, with interest rising in EVs, rooftop solar, induction stoves and heat pumps across multiple markets. One of the most revealing examples is Pakistan. A quarter of households there now use solar in some form, and that quiet, bottom-up rooftop boom is helping shield millions from the worst of the crisis. Since 2018, Pakistan’s solar growth has helped save more than $12 billion in fuel imports, and solar’s share of the country’s energy mix jumped from 2.9% in 2020 to 32.3% in 2025. It is messy, unequal, and far from complete, but it is still a vivid case study in what energy security actually looks like: not more dependence on volatile imported fuels, but more locally generated electricity.
The macroeconomic damage is real and spreading. Axios reports that the UN now expects global growth to slow from 2.9% in 2025 to 2.6% this year even without further escalation, while global merchandise trade growth could slump sharply as energy and supply chain disruptions ripple outward. The EU, meanwhile, has warned the crisis will not be short-lived. That matters because even if the fighting eases, infrastructure damage, supply uncertainty, and elevated risk premiums do not just vanish. Once markets are reminded how fragile fossil supply chains are, that lesson tends to linger.
So the real takeaway here is brutally simple. The war on Iran is not an argument for more fossil fuel production, more LNG terminals, or more lock-in. It is the opposite. It is another reminder that fossil fuels fail on three fronts at once: they destabilise the climate, they destabilise economies, and they destabilise politics. The energy transition is not just still necessary. It is more urgent than ever. Not because it is virtuous, though it is. Because it is safer, cheaper, and more strategically sane. Every solar panel, battery, EV, heat pump, and electrified rail line is now doing double duty: cutting emissions and reducing exposure to geopolitical lunacy. As a species we seem to love waiting for the house to catch fire before checking where the exits are. But at least this time, the exits are a lot closer.
Why This Matters: The war on Iran is exposing the fossil fuel system for what it really is: a climate liability, an economic liability, and a national security liability all at once.
Kismet: The most surprising twist in all of this may be that one of the clearest energy-security success stories right now is not coming from a rich country with a grand masterplan, but from millions of Pakistanis who simply put solar on their roofs and, in doing so, accidentally built a national resilience strategy from the bottom up. 👉 Links inline
Latest blog post
Why Fossil Fuels Are a Terrible Business Model
In my latest blog post, I hit on this there again - fossil fuels aren’t just a climate problem, they’re a business risk. Every war, chokepoint, price spike, and supply shock keeps proving the same point: fossil fuel dependence means recurring exposure, while clean power, storage, electrification and stronger grids offer a path to something steadier, cheaper, and more resilient.
Key Highlights:
The piece argues that fossil fuels are not the “safe” option, but a standing source of economic and geopolitical instability.
I make the case that renewables, storage and electrification are now as much about energy security and resilience as they are about emissions.
I also highlight my latest Climate Confident+ bonus episode, where I go deeper on why fossil fuels are instability in a bottle and why the energy transition matters more than ever.
Why This Matters: The energy transition is no longer just a climate imperative, it’s increasingly the smarter economic and strategic choice too.
Kismet: The sharpest shift in the piece is this: the real divide is no longer fossil versus green, but recurring fuel exposure versus owned electric infrastructure. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
Passive Cooling Might Be Climate Tech’s Most Underrated Fix
This week on Climate Confident, I spoke with Rob Atkin, co-founder and CEO of Pirta, about passive cooling and why it may be one of the most practical climate solutions hiding in plain sight. As temperatures rise and air conditioning already accounts for around 15% of global electricity demand, the case for smarter materials that reduce heat, cut costs, and ease grid strain is getting a lot harder to ignore.
Key Highlights:
Rob explains how Pirta’s passive cooling coatings are designed to reflect more of the solar spectrum than conventional white paint, helping surfaces stay cooler and reducing the need for air conditioning.
The commercial lesson is blunt and useful: sustainability doesn’t sell itself. Customers want ROI, whether that means lower cooling bills, better worker productivity, or improved resilience.
The conversation also digs into where passive cooling could matter most first, from warehouses and affordable housing to agriculture, substations, data centres and even rail infrastructure.
Why This Matters: Cooling is becoming a business-critical issue, and solutions that cut heat without adding more power demand could become far more important than most leaders realise.
Kismet: One of the most revealing lines in the episode is that the real product isn’t just cooler paint, it’s resilience in a tin, which is not a bad place for climate tech to end up. 🎧 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)
We’re not doing too badly here in Spain when it comes to electricity prices, thanks in large part to the amount of renewables in our genmix.
Ireland comes out well always in measurements of education
And it places 7th globally in terms of democracy too.
Huge surging interest in EVs off the back of the war on Iran.
Misc stuff
LOL!
Two of the many shots taken from Artemis II this week - many more are available on NASA’a Artemis II Flickr page.
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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.
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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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I don’t seem to recall this Bond character!
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