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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, oil markets are panicking again, and so it’s time for FutureProof.

This week is about systems cracking:

  • Trump’s Iran war is accelerating EV sales, heat pumps, batteries, and renewable investment faster than some climate policies ever managed.

  • Toyota, after years of lobbying against tougher EV rules, is finally embracing battery-electric vehicles because the market has stopped waiting for it.

  • AI just outperformed doctors in emergency-room triage using an already ageing model. The newer ones are considerably better.

  • Batteries are rapidly becoming the backbone of modern grids, crushing fossil fuel peaker economics and making renewable-heavy systems far more resilient.

Plus: Amsterdam bans meat ads, shipping emissions may finally face a global carbon price, Australia’s grid keeps humiliating fossil fuel doomers, and both of my podcasts are now available in video on Apple Podcasts.

Let’s get into it.

Climate

Santa Marta Didn’t Just Talk Fossil Fuels. It Drew the Escape Routes

I covered Santa Marta last week while the conference was still in motion, but now it has wrapped, the story has sharpened: this wasn’t just another climate gathering producing warm adjectives and a PDF nobody will read. It ended with nearly 60 countries backing voluntary fossil-fuel exit roadmaps, three practical workstreams on planning, finance and trade, and a clear signal that the phaseout conversation is moving from whether to how. About time, frankly. The planet has been waiting while diplomats discovered verbs.

Key highlights:

  • Nearly 60 countries left Santa Marta with a push to develop national and regional roadmaps for phasing out coal, oil and gas, with Tuvalu and Ireland (yay!) now set to co-host the next summit in 2027.

  • The final outcomes focused on three workstreams: concrete fossil-fuel exit planning, reforming financial systems including debt and subsidies, and tackling carbon-heavy trade dependencies.

  • A new science panel for the global energy transition was launched, aiming to give countries faster, more practical, country-specific advice than the glacial pace of traditional climate processes. Glaciers, sadly, being rather on-brand here.

Why This Matters: Santa Marta matters because it moved fossil fuels from the polite margins of climate diplomacy into the centre of the room, where they belong, preferably under strong lighting and without a lobbyist holding the microphone.

Kismet: One of the most telling details? France became the first developed country to publish a fossil-fuel exit roadmap during the summit, which makes this less a symbolic gathering and more the start of a competitive “who actually has a plan?” moment.
👉 Full story here

Shipping’s Free Ride on Climate Pollution May Finally Be Ending

After years of stalling, lobbying, procedural ambushes, and enough diplomatic drama to make Eurovision look restrained, countries at the IMO have kept alive plans for the world’s first global carbon pricing system for shipping emissions. It’s not fully done yet, but the important thing is this: the framework survived coordinated attempts by fossil fuel states and shipping interests to gut it. Which, in climate politics, increasingly counts as progress.

Key highlights:

  • The proposed IMO “Net-Zero Framework” would introduce the first global carbon fee on greenhouse gas emissions, forcing ships exceeding emissions limits to pay into a fund supporting cleaner fuels and developing economies.

  • The framework survived another bruising round of negotiations despite opposition from the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and major fossil-fuel-aligned shipping interests, with supporters including the EU, Pacific island states, Brazil, Kenya, Australia and others.

  • Shipping currently produces around 3% of global emissions, and the framework would gradually tighten fuel carbon-intensity standards while helping accelerate investment in cleaner shipping fuels like green ammonia and other zero-emissions alternatives.

Why This Matters: Shipping has spent decades being the climate equivalent of an invisible giant, moving 80% of global trade while largely escaping meaningful emissions rules. If this framework survives final negotiations later this year, that loophole finally starts closing.

Kismet: One of the stranger twists here is that Liberia and Panama, tiny countries most people associate with flags of convenience rather than climate diplomacy, effectively hold outsized power because roughly a third of the world’s commercial shipping fleet is registered under their flags. Globalisation really did build the weirdest possible governance structures and then acted surprised when they became a problem. 👉 Full story here

Amsterdam Just Put Burgers in the Same Category as Fossil Fuels

Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to ban public advertising for both fossil fuel products and meat. Which is… remarkable. A few years ago, even suggesting that burgers had climate implications got you treated like you’d insulted someone’s grandmother. Now one of Europe’s most influential cities is lumping beef ads in alongside SUVs and cheap flights. Cultural shifts happen slowly, then all at once, then somebody on LinkedIn calls it woke tyranny.

Key highlights:

  • Since 1 May, Amsterdam has removed public adverts for meat products, airlines, petrol cars and fossil-fuel-linked products from billboards, tram stops and metro stations.

  • The city says the move aligns public advertising with its climate targets, including becoming carbon neutral by 2050 and halving local meat consumption over the same period.

  • Campaigners explicitly compare the move to restrictions on tobacco advertising, arguing that what societies permit in public spaces shapes what people see as normal and aspirational.

Why This Matters: This isn’t really about billboards. It’s about redefining what cities consider socially acceptable to promote in public spaces, and quietly shifting high-carbon consumption from “normal lifestyle choice” to “public health and climate risk”.

Kismet: Amsterdam’s meat ads reportedly accounted for just 0.1% of outdoor advertising spend, meaning this move is far more culturally significant than economically disruptive. Sometimes the fiercest political battles are fought over symbols because everyone understands symbols are where tomorrow’s norms get built. 👉 Full story here

AI News

Stanford’s AI Reality Check: Bigger, Faster, Thirstier

Stanford’s latest AI Index report reads less like a victory lap for Silicon Valley and more like a warning flare wrapped in benchmark charts. AI is exploding into every corner of the economy at breakneck speed, but the report also lays bare the mounting costs: soaring energy demand, declining transparency, job disruption, and an arms race increasingly dominated by a handful of hyperscalers and chipmakers. Funny how every tech revolution eventually discovers electricity and geopolitics exist.

Key Highlights

  • Generative AI adoption hit 53% in just three years, faster than the internet or PCs ever managed, while AI tools are now estimated to deliver $172 billion annually in value to US consumers alone.

  • AI’s environmental footprint is ballooning. Stanford estimates Grok 4’s training emissions at over 72,000 tonnes of CO₂e, while AI data centre power demand now rivals the electricity consumption of New York State at peak load.

  • Productivity gains are real, especially in coding and customer support, but there’s a sting in the tail: employment among US software developers aged 22–25 dropped nearly 20% in a year, even as older developers held steady.

Why This Matters:This report confirms that AI is no longer an emerging technology story, it’s rapidly becoming an infrastructure, labour, energy, and industrial policy story all at once.

Kismet: One of the more fascinating nuggets in the report? Smaller, highly optimised AI models are increasingly matching or beating vastly larger systems. In other words, AI may be entering its “renewables moment”, where efficiency improvements start mattering as much as brute-force scale. An awkward development for companies currently trying to pave half the planet with data centres. 👉 Full story here

AI Just Beat Doctors in the ER. Using an Already Outdated Model

A Harvard-led study published in Science found that OpenAI’s o1 preview model matched or outperformed experienced physicians in emergency-room triage, diagnosis, and treatment planning tasks. The really wild part? o1 preview is already an older-generation reasoning model. Which means the frontier models arriving now are likely even stronger. We really picked an interesting decade to understaff hospitals.

Key Highlights

  • Researchers from Harvard and Stanford found the AI matched or exceeded doctors across multiple ER decision-making tasks, especially during early triage when information was limited.

  • The model performed particularly well on rare diseases and highly complex diagnostic cases that often challenge experienced clinicians.

  • Researchers stressed this is about augmenting doctors, not replacing them, with AI acting as a powerful second-opinion system to reduce missed diagnoses and clinician burnout.

Why This Matters: If AI can reliably improve triage and diagnostic accuracy, this could become one of the most important real-world deployments of AI anywhere, especially in overstretched healthcare systems.

Kismet: The study used a text-only model with no access to scans, X-rays, ECGs, or live patient interaction. Future multimodal systems will. That’s where this starts getting genuinely transformative. 👉 Full story here

IBM and Oracle Just Declared War on Enterprise AI Fragmentation

This one matters because it signals where enterprise AI is actually heading: not toward shiny standalone copilots, but toward deeply integrated operational systems stitched across ERP, cloud, security, infrastructure, ESG, and automation layers. IBM and Oracle expanding their 40-year partnership might sound about as exciting as reading a procurement manual in an airport lounge, but strategically this is huge. The real AI battle is shifting from chat interfaces to enterprise plumbing. Glamorous, I know.

Key Highlights

  • IBM and Oracle are integrating AI, hybrid cloud, automation, and operational systems more tightly, including new links between Oracle Fusion ERP and IBM Maximo for finance, procurement, assets, and facilities management.

  • IBM’s Envizi ESG platform is being deployed as a SaaS offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, bringing sustainability reporting directly into enterprise operational and financial environments.

  • The partnership also expands “agentic AI” capabilities via IBM watsonx Orchestrate, enabling AI agents to work across Oracle and non-Oracle systems and data sources.

Why This Matters: Enterprise AI adoption has largely stalled at the pilot stage because corporate data is fragmented across incompatible systems. This partnership is really about creating the connective tissue AI needs to become operationally useful at scale.

Kismet: One subtle but fascinating angle here is the inclusion of ESG data directly alongside operational and financial systems. Sustainability reporting is quietly evolving from a compliance exercise into a core enterprise data layer that AI agents will increasingly optimise against in real time. The spreadsheet era is dying very, very slowly. 👉 Full story here

Electromobility

Toyota Finally Realises the Future Has a Plug

After years of lobbying against stronger EV policies while insisting hybrids and hydrogen would somehow indefinitely delay battery-electric reality, Toyota appears to have finally noticed what Chinese automakers, European regulators, and physics have been saying for years: EVs are the future. The world’s biggest carmaker more than doubled EV sales in Q1 2026 and is rapidly expanding its lineup, largely because Chinese competitors have made standing still commercially suicidal. Funny how markets succeed where climate diplomacy often struggles.

Key Highlights

  • Toyota more than doubled EV sales year-on-year to over 79,000 vehicles in Q1 2026, helped by seven new models and a growing global EV lineup.

  • Analysts now believe 2026 could mark the start of Toyota’s genuine “full electric shift”, even as several rivals scale back EV ambitions.

  • Toyota is accelerating EV investment in the US and China, including deeper collaboration with Chinese suppliers and EV giant BYD to better compete in the world’s most important EV market.

Why This Matters: Toyota’s shift matters because when the world’s largest automaker fully commits to EVs, supply chains, charging networks, battery manufacturing, and consumer expectations all accelerate with it.

Kismet: Perhaps the most revealing detail is that Toyota’s next-generation EV platform, arriving next year, will finally be fully battery-optimised from the ground up. Which means even Toyota now implicitly admits that designing EVs as modified combustion cars was never the long-term answer. The skateboard architecture wins eventually. Physics remains undefeated. 👉 Full story here

Trump’s Iran War Is Accidentally Selling More EVs

One of the most predictable consequences of blowing up stability in an oil-producing region is… people suddenly remembering they’d quite like not to depend on oil-producing regions. European automakers are reporting a sharp surge in EV demand following the spike in petrol and diesel prices triggered by the Iran conflict, with buyers increasingly seeing EVs not as climate virtue-signalling, but as protection against geopolitical stupidity. Which, to be fair, is exactly what energy independence has always been about.

Key Highlights

  • Renault says EV enquiries jumped 42% after fuel prices surged, with the Renault 5 becoming the UK’s bestselling EV in April.

  • Petrol prices have risen over 24p per litre and diesel over 46p since the Iran war began, sharply increasing fuel costs for drivers across Europe.

  • EV sales across Europe nearly doubled year-on-year in March, reaching roughly a quarter of all new car sales, with automakers including Volvo and Stellantis reporting growing momentum.

Why This Matters: Every oil shock accelerates electrification because EVs fundamentally weaken the link between transport and geopolitical chaos. That’s not just climate policy anymore. It’s economic resilience.

Kismet: The irony here is exquisite: politicians trying to revive fossil fuels through nationalism and conflict may end up accelerating the very transition they oppose by reminding consumers how absurd it is to power daily transport with globally traded combustible liquids controlled by unstable geopolitics. History has a vicious sense of humour. 👉 Full story here

The EV Revolution Is Coming for Trucks, Too

One of the most persistent anti-EV myths has been that electrification only works for small passenger cars. Meanwhile, in the real world, electric trucks, garbage trucks, port vehicles, buses, and heavy commercial fleets are quietly scaling because fleet managers care about maths, not culture wars. China’s electric truck sales tripled last year, while cities worldwide are rapidly electrifying garbage fleets because diesel stop-start vehicles are practically perfect candidates for batteries. Turns out regenerative braking is useful. Who could possibly have predicted this except engineers for the last 20 years?

Key Highlights

  • Electric trucks now account for roughly 20% of China’s truck market after sales tripled in 2025, helped by soaring diesel prices and improving battery economics.

  • BloombergNEF projects electric heavy-duty commercial vehicles could reach 63% of new sales in China by 2035.

  • Electric garbage trucks are rapidly scaling globally because they operate on predictable local routes, return to depots nightly, slash fuel and maintenance costs, and dramatically reduce urban noise and pollution.

Why This Matters: Heavy-duty transport was supposed to be one of the “hardest sectors to decarbonise”. Instead, many commercial vehicle categories are proving easier to electrify than expected because the economics increasingly make operational sense before climate benefits are even counted.

Kismet: One of the funniest unintended consequences of electric garbage trucks is that residents are suddenly discovering the loudest part of waste collection was never actually the bins. It was the diesel engine screaming its way through thousands of stop-start cycles every week. Cities are about to get noticeably quieter. 👉 Links Inline

Clean Energy

Renewables Just Crashed Another Fossil Fuel Excuse

For years, fossil fuel advocates insisted renewables were “fine when the sun shines”, as though nobody in the energy sector had ever heard of batteries, grid flexibility, or combining wind and solar. Now IRENA has dropped a report showing that round-the-clock renewable electricity, using combinations of solar, wind, and battery storage, is already beating fossil fuels on cost in several markets. Quietly. Relentlessly. And with none of the geopolitical drama of oil tankers trying not to explode in strategic chokepoints. Human civilisation really did build an entire global economy around setting ancient liquids on fire and hoping shipping lanes stayed calm. Extraordinary behaviour.

Key Highlights

  • IRENA found that 91% of newly commissioned utility-scale renewable capacity globally is now cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternative.

  • In China, firm solar-plus-storage systems are already delivering electricity below the cost of new coal and gas generation, with some projects hitting costs as low as USD 30/MWh.

  • Battery storage costs have collapsed by 93% since 2010, helping make 24/7 renewable electricity commercially viable in an increasing number of markets.

Why This Matters: The debate is shifting from “Can renewables replace fossil fuels?” to “How quickly can grids, policy, and infrastructure keep up with economics that are now moving decisively in renewables’ favour?”

Kismet: One of the more delicious ironies buried in the report is that fossil fuel price volatility itself is now helping renewables win faster. The more geopolitical chaos disrupts oil and gas markets, the more valuable fixed-cost solar, wind, and storage become because sunlight stubbornly refuses to care about the Strait of Hormuz.
👉 Full story here

Australia’s Grid Is Going Full Mad Max… But With Batteries Instead of Petrol

Australia’s renewable transition is accelerating so fast that even the sheep are getting involved. New figures show renewables supplied a record 46.5% of electricity in Australia’s National Electricity Market in Q1 2026, while coal and gas generation kept sliding backwards into the sort of decline fossil fuel lobbyists keep insisting isn’t happening. Meanwhile, Australians are installing home batteries at a pace that’s honestly becoming faintly ridiculous. In the best possible way.

Key Highlights

  • Renewables supplied 46.5% of Australia’s National Electricity Market electricity in Q1 2026, up 4% year-on-year, while wholesale electricity prices fell 12%.

  • Australian households and businesses installed around 1.65 GWh of battery storage in a single month, equivalent to roughly 19% of the battery capacity China added during the same period.

  • Coal-fired generation dropped to a new quarterly low, while gas generation fell 24% year-on-year to its lowest quarterly average since 1999.

Why This Matters: Australia is becoming a real-world demonstration that high renewable penetration, distributed batteries, and falling fossil generation can coexist without the grid collapsing into the apocalyptic chaos routinely predicted by professional outrage merchants on television.

Kismet: One of my favourite details in this story is that Australia’s rooftop battery boom is now happening at such scale that ordinary households are effectively deploying storage at rates comparable to major national grid programmes elsewhere. Tiny suburban energy traders quietly eating the fossil fuel industry’s lunch.
👉 Full story here

Britain’s Nuclear Debate Is Quietly Shifting

My former SAP colleague and keen FutureProof reader Timo Elliot sent me this fascinating new YouGov polling on attitudes to nuclear energy in the UK, and it shows something important: public opinion is moving. Forty years after Chernobyl, Britons now support nuclear power by 51% to 29%, with support rising sharply in recent years as energy security and electrification become harder to ignore.

Personally, I think nuclear absolutely has a place in a clean energy system. But it’s also hard to escape the economics and timelines here: modern reactors typically take well over a decade to build and cost staggering amounts of money, while solar, wind, and batteries can often be deployed in 1-2 years and keep getting cheaper. So yes, nuclear likely has a role. But a marginal one. The heavy lifting in the transition will still overwhelmingly come from renewables.

Key Highlights

  • Britons now support nuclear power by 51% to 29%, a major shift from near-even division just a few years ago.

  • 37% of Britons want the UK to get more of its electricity from nuclear energy, versus 23% who want less.

  • Support for renewables remains even stronger, with 67-73% wanting more offshore wind, hydro, tidal, and solar generation.

Why This Matters: The energy debate is maturing. Increasingly, the real question isn’t “nuclear or renewables?” but how quickly countries can build enough clean electricity to replace fossil fuels before physics and geopolitics both become even less forgiving.

Kismet: One of the most striking findings was the enormous gender divide: 74% of British men support nuclear power, compared to just 30% of women. Energy policy turns out to be as much about psychology and trust as engineering and electrons.
👉 Full story here

US-Israel War on Iran

Trump’s Oil War Is Becoming Renewables’ Biggest Sales Pitch

The US-Israel war on Iran may end up doing something decades of climate campaigning struggled to achieve: convincing governments, investors, and ordinary consumers that fossil fuel dependence is fundamentally a security risk. Oil markets are edging toward panic, LNG supply chains look frighteningly fragile, and suddenly heat pumps, EVs, solar, batteries, and grid upgrades are no longer being framed as “green virtue”. They’re being framed as insulation from geopolitical chaos. Which they are.

Key Highlights

What fascinates me most is that this transition is increasingly being driven less by climate morality and more by brutally practical economics and security logic. Solar, batteries, EVs, and electrification are winning because people prefer stable domestic energy to depending on whether tankers can safely pass through a narrow geopolitical chokepoint without somebody launching drones at them.

And perhaps the greatest irony of all: Donald Trump’s attempts to revive fossil fuels may end up accelerating the global shift away from them.

Why This Matters: Energy transitions accelerate when incumbents stop looking safe. The Iran war has reminded the world that renewables don’t just cut emissions, they reduce exposure to geopolitical instability, fuel-price shocks, and authoritarian petrostates.

Kismet: In March, for the first time ever, the US generated more electricity from renewables than from gas. Under Trump. History has an absolutely vicious sense of humour. 👉 Links Inline

Battery Storage

Batteries Are Becoming the Operating System for Clean Energy

For years, critics claimed renewables couldn’t work without fossil fuels backing them up. Batteries appear to have taken that personally. They’re now moving from “interesting technology” to absolutely essential grid infrastructure, reshaping electricity markets in real time. Quietly. Efficiently. Ruthlessly.

Key Highlights

Why This Matters: Batteries don’t just store electricity. They make renewables more valuable, grids more stable, electricity cheaper, and fossil fuel peaker plants increasingly obsolete.

Kismet: Germany is expected to spend up to €3.7bn this year curtailing excess renewable electricity because it lacks enough storage. Which is basically the energy equivalent of throwing away food because you forgot to buy a fridge.
👉 Links Inline

Latest Podcasts

Climate Confident:

Your House Shouldn’t Try to Kill You During a Heatwave

This week on Climate Confident, I spoke with about passive houses, resilient buildings, and why the future of climate adaptation may start with something surprisingly unglamorous: airtight walls and really good windows.

And honestly? The more we talked, the more obvious it became that most modern buildings are absurdly inefficient. We’ve normalised draughts, mould, noise, massive energy bills, and homes that become unliveable during outages, heatwaves, or wildfires. Passive House flips that entire logic on its head.

Key Highlights

  • Passive House buildings can reduce heating and cooling demand by up to 90% through airtight construction, insulation, mechanical ventilation, and high-performance windows.

  • Darren explained how passive homes are proving dramatically more resilient during wildfires, blackouts, heatwaves, and cold snaps because they retain temperature far longer and prevent embers entering buildings.

  • We also discussed how poor-quality housing quietly drives health problems, noise pollution, energy poverty, and poor indoor air quality, especially in lower-income urban communities.

Why This Matters: Buildings account for roughly 40% of emissions globally. But increasingly, building performance is also becoming a climate adaptation, resilience, public health, and energy affordability issue all at once.

Kismet: One of my favourite lines from Darren was that most people are “used to being bullied by their buildings.” Once you notice how much energy, comfort, and health conventional buildings waste, you really can’t unsee it. 🎧 Listen to the full episode

Resilient Supply Chain:

The Future of Global Trade May Depend on a Barcode Scan

This week on Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with about cross-border e-commerce, tariffs, final-mile delivery, and why the humble scan event may be one of the most underrated technologies in modern logistics.

Because behind every “your parcel will arrive tomorrow” promise sits a staggeringly complex choreography of customs, warehouses, trucks, tracking events, and last-mile handoffs. And increasingly, consumers expect international deliveries to feel as seamless as local ones. Which is mildly insane when you think about it.

Key Highlights

  • James explained how rising consumer expectations, fuelled by Amazon, Shein, and Temu, are forcing cross-border logistics networks to deliver internationally in days rather than weeks.

  • We discussed how tariffs and geopolitical tensions are reshaping fulfilment strategies, pushing companies toward more localised warehousing and regional inventory positioning.

  • The conversation also explored how digitisation, real-time tracking, lockers, EV delivery fleets, and newer delivery players like DoorDash are rapidly transforming final-mile logistics.

Why This Matters: Supply chain resilience increasingly depends less on physical movement alone and more on visibility, data quality, and the ability to adapt dynamically when disruptions hit.

Kismet: One of my favourite insights from James was that future logistics may feel less like “shipping” and more like software orchestration. The parcel still moves physically, of course. But increasingly, the real product is certainty. 🎧 Listen to the full episode

🎥 One More Thing…

Apple approved both Climate Confident and Resilient Supply Chain for video podcasts today.

Which means if you follow either show on the Apple Podcasts app, you can now watch the episodes as well as listen to them.

Apparently my face was considered an acceptable trade-off for decarbonisation and supply chain resilience. A bold call by Apple’s review team, frankly.

From the YouGov survey mentioned above, a fascinating breakdown of preferred energy source b political affiliation in the UK. Reform, far-right, ultra-nationalist xenophobes are the party with the highest preference for coal and nuclear, and the lowest for renewables!

Man, look at those Chinese grow - nutrition is a helluva drug!

Those right-wing extremists are really showing all the other extremists up.

Misc stuff

This made me laugh

Would you use this as your Zoom/Teams background?

And in honour of May the 4th falling this week

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

Spoiler: This is NOT how sales predictions work!

The ops hire that onboards in 30 seconds.

Viktor is an AI coworker that lives in Slack, right where your team already works.

Message Viktor like a teammate: "pull last quarter's revenue by channel," or "build a dashboard for our board meeting."

Viktor connects to your tools, does the work, and delivers the actual report, spreadsheet, or dashboard. Not a summary. The real thing.

There’s no new software to adopt and no one to train.

Most teams start with one task. Within a week, Viktor is handling half of their ops.

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