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Hey everyone, it’s Thursday, and so FutureProof is back.
The title of the newsletter this week is: Trump’s War Boosts Renewables (again), Australia Hoards Sunshine, and ChatGPT Finds Its Voice
Because fossil fuels are once again proving they come with refineries, choke points, tankers, sanctions, missiles, and geopolitical chaos baked in - while renewables, batteries, EVs, and smarter AI regulation keep looking annoyingly sensible.
Highlights this week:
Climate: the next UN chief gets a climate scorecard, Tencent backs agroforestry carbon removals, and oil’s “energy security” pitch takes another spectacular wallop
AI: GPT-5.6 arrives, ChatGPT gets a more natural voice, Illinois puts guardrails around frontier AI, and SAP’s Sophia Mendelsohn explains why AI is infrastructure, not magic software
EVs: electric trucks edge closer to Europe, Tata expands India’s EV push, and Chinese automakers start winning in markets where they once barely registered
Clean energy & storage: balcony solar gathers momentum, Africa’s solar boom accelerates, Morocco thinks big, and Australia’s battery subsidy sends rooftop solar roaring back
Blogs & podcasts: I break down my two-podcast production workflow, and Climate Confident tackles AI, data centres, Scope 3, procurement, and sustainability governance before the concrete sets
Good luck to everyone whose team is still alive in the World Cup. I’ll be watching tomorrow’s Spain vs Belgium game closely. Ireland, naturally, are contributing moral clarity from the sofa.
Vamos España. Respectfully. Mostly.
Let’s get into it..
Climate
UN Boss Race Gets A Climate Scorecard, And Oof, Some Candidates Brought Notes
The job of UN secretary general has quietly become one of the world’s loudest climate megaphones, and Carbon Brief has taken a scalpel to the 2027 candidates’ records. Some arrive with serious climate-finance chops, some with human-rights firepower, some with nuclear talking points, and one or two with enough geopolitical baggage to make the whole thing feel less like succession planning and more like diplomatic speed-dating in a thunderstorm.
Key Highlights
Six candidates have been nominated so far to replace António Guterres when he steps down at the end of 2026, with Latin America and the Caribbean heavily represented.
Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, María Fernanda Espinosa and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett all bring varying degrees of climate, finance, justice, Indigenous rights or diplomacy experience.
Rafael Grossi’s climate pitch leans heavily nuclear, while Macky Sall’s record is complicated by oil-and-gas expansion, governance concerns, and African Union pushback.
Why This Matters: The next UN chief will not write national climate policy, but they can set the moral temperature, convene power, shame laggards, push finance, and keep climate from being quietly filed under “too difficult, please ignore”.
Kismet: In 80 years, the UN has never had a woman secretary general - and four of the six current candidates are women, which makes this race both a climate test and a rather overdue HR correction. 👉 Full story here
Tencent Buys Tree Credits, And The Carbon Market Gets Slightly Less Dodgy
Carbon credits remain the climate aisle where optimism, accounting gymnastics, and corporate self-forgiveness occasionally bump trollies, but Tencent’s new 10-year deal for 300,000 agroforestry removal credits in Indonesia looks more interesting than the usual “we planted some vibes” nonsense. The Sulawesi project is designed to restore degraded land, store carbon, rebuild soil, support biodiversity, and give farmers crops worth more than the credits themselves - which, frankly, is where these schemes either become useful climate infrastructure or decorative spreadsheet confetti.
Key Highlights
Tencent will buy 300,000 carbon-removal credits from Thryve.Earth’s agroforestry project in Sulawesi, its first such deal outside China.
Google and McKinsey are also buying credits from the same project, with Google’s 260,000-credit deal now its largest carbon removal offtake agreement to date.
The project mixes sugar palm, timber, papaya, avocado, coffee, bananas, chilli and corn to store carbon while creating farmer income beyond the credit revenue.
Why This Matters: Carbon credits are rightly scrutinised, but if buyers demand durable, verified removals tied to real land restoration and local livelihoods, the market could start looking less like corporate indulgences and more like practical climate finance.
Kismet: Indonesia only reopened its carbon market to foreign buyers less than a year ago after a moratorium, so this deal is also an early test of whether the country can turn forest protection into exportable climate value without turning it into another paperwork rodeo. 👉 Full story here
AI News
GPT-5.6 Lands Today, Because Apparently AI Needed A Faster Treadmill
OpenAI is releasing GPT-5.6 today, with three new flavours - Sol for heavyweight reasoning, Terra for everyday work, and Luna for faster, cheaper tasks, because naming models like database migrations was clearly no longer dramatic enough. The interesting bit is not just performance in coding, biology, and cybersecurity; it is the staggered release, safety scrutiny, and US government involvement, which tells us frontier AI is now being treated less like software and more like strategic infrastructure with a chat box attached.
Key Highlights
GPT-5.6 arrives in three tiers: Sol, the flagship model; Terra, the balanced workhorse; and Luna, the lower-cost speedster.
OpenAI says Sol improves agentic coding, biology workflows, and cybersecurity tasks, while adding deeper reasoning and an “ultra” mode using subagents for complex work.
The release was initially held back for a limited preview with trusted partners following US government engagement, before wider availability began rolling out.
Why This Matters: Frontier AI is moving from clever autocomplete to operational machinery, and that raises sharper questions for business leaders about governance, cyber risk, cost, productivity, and who gets access to the sharpest tools first.
Kismet: OpenAI says it spent more than 700,000 A100-equivalent GPU hours on automated red-teaming for GPT-5.6 - which is a gloriously absurd way of saying they used a small mountain of compute to teach the system how people might try to break it before the internet had a proper go. 👉 Full story here
OpenAI Gives ChatGPT A Voice That Finally Stops Talking Over You
OpenAI’s new GPT-Live voice system is aimed squarely at the awkward bit of AI conversation: the weird pauses, clumsy interruptions, and that faint “customer-service bot trapped in a biscuit tin” energy. By letting the model listen and speak at the same time, while quietly handing harder questions to frontier models in the background, ChatGPT Voice starts to feel less like dictation with ambition and more like a genuinely fluid human-AI interface.
Key Highlights
GPT-Live uses a full-duplex architecture, meaning it can listen, pause, respond, interrupt gracefully, or stay quiet while the user thinks.
It can delegate harder tasks such as web search, reasoning, and more complex work to frontier models behind the scenes while keeping the conversation moving.
GPT-Live is rolling out globally in ChatGPT Voice, with GPT-Live-1 for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini for Free users.
Why This Matters: Voice may become the most natural interface for AI at work, in cars, in factories, in field service, and in homes, but only if it stops behaving like an over-caffeinated call centre intern.
Kismet: Full-duplex is the same basic idea that makes ordinary phone calls feel natural rather than walkie-talkie weird, so in a very real sense, AI voice is finally catching up with technology your granny already understood. 👉 Full story here
Illinois Tells Big AI To Show Its Homework, And About Time Too
Illinois has signed SB 315, the AI Safety Measures Act, and for once “AI regulation” does not appear to mean a strongly worded PDF left to gather dust in a policy drawer. The law forces major AI developers to disclose safety practices, report serious incidents, protect whistleblowers, and submit to independent third-party audits, which is exactly the sort of grown-up oversight you need when models are sprinting from clever assistant to critical infrastructure with delusions of omnipresence.
Key Highlights
Illinois says SB 315 is the strongest AI safety, transparency, and accountability law in the US.
The law targets the largest advanced AI developers, requiring risk disclosure, safety incident reporting, compliance processes, and worker protections.
It also makes Illinois the first US state to require regular independent third-party safety audits of covered AI systems.
Why This Matters: AI innovation without accountability is just speed with a blindfold on, and Illinois is showing that serious safeguards can sit beside commercial ambition rather than smother it in committee-speak.
Kismet: Anthropic backed the bill, which is notable because when one of the companies building frontier AI asks for external checks, it rather punctures the lazy “all regulation kills innovation” chant. 👉 Full story here
Electromobility
Electric Trucks Just Found Their Petrol Station Moment, And Diesel Should Be Sweating
Electric trucks were supposed to be the awkward bit of transport electrification, too heavy, too slow to charge, too much hassle for freight operators who quite reasonably prefer moving goods to babysitting plugs. But China has already pushed electric heavy-truck sales to around 30%, CATL has 2,000 battery-swapping stations, and now CATL plus Octopus want to bring the model to Europe with 30 UK swap stations by 2035, because apparently “range anxiety” looks rather different when the battery can be swapped faster than a diesel fill-up and the spreadsheet starts purring.
Key Highlights
Around 30% of heavy trucks sold in China last year were electric, helped by better batteries, fast charging, and battery swapping.
CATL and Octopus are forming “Swaptopus” to build 30 battery-swapping stations in the UK by 2035.
FT/Lex calculations suggest the vehicle cost is still higher than diesel, but energy costs could be lower, around 40p/km for swapped electricity versus 57p/km for diesel.
Why This Matters: Freight operators are hard-nosed economic animals, so if electric trucking wins on total cost and uptime, oil demand does not gently decline — it gets mugged in a lay-by.
Kismet: Trucking accounts for roughly 17% of current oil demand, so battery swapping for lorries may end up doing more damage to oil markets than another shiny electric SUV ever could. 👉 Full story here
Tata’s New Sierra EV Turns “Base Model” Into A Battery-Powered Flex
Tata Motors has launched the Sierra.ev in India, and the interesting bit is not just that this is its seventh passenger EV - it is that even the entry-level version looks surprisingly well-specced, with a 63kWh battery, rear-wheel drive, 235bhp, 315Nm of torque, and a certified 566km range. Starting at Rs. 18.79 lakh (around €17,200), the Sierra.ev suggests Indian manufacturers are no longer treating EVs as compliance baubles or urban novelty pods, but as proper mass-market machines with range, kit, heritage, and a bit of swagger. Finally.
Key Highlights
Tata’s Sierra.ev starts at Rs. 18.79 lakh and becomes the company’s seventh passenger EV in India.
The base Pure variant gets a 63kWh battery, single rear motor, 235bhp, 315Nm of torque, and a certified 566km range.
Even the entry model includes a 12.3-inch touchscreen, 10.25-inch driver display, OTA updates, cruise control, air purifier, six airbags, rear camera, and a thicket of safety systems.
Why This Matters: India’s EV transition will not be won by expensive halo cars; it will be won when local manufacturers make practical, desirable, long-range electric vehicles feel normal, available, and economically sane.
Kismet: The original Tata Sierra was a 1990s lifestyle SUV with cult nostalgia baked into its boxy bones, so relaunching it as an EV is basically India’s auto industry doing a reboot, but this time with OTA software updates and no tailpipe. 👉 Full story here
China’s EVs Storm Markets Where It Used To Barely Register, And Oil Prices Kindly Held The Door
Chinese EV makers are no longer just winning at home; they are now muscling into markets where Chinese cars once had all the brand pull of a damp brochure, helped by deep battery supply chains, brutal manufacturing speed, sharp pricing, and - cheers, Donald - oil prices doing a marvellous impersonation of an EV salesperson. June NEV wholesale sales in China hit an estimated 1.51 million, up 22% year-on-year, while Chinese brands have started overtaking Japanese rivals in places like Europe and South Korea, which is the sort of market reordering legacy carmakers used to dismiss right up until it started eating their lunch.
Key Highlights
China’s new-energy passenger vehicle wholesale sales reached an estimated 1.51 million in June, up 22% year-on-year and 12% month-on-month.
High oil prices, stronger supply, and exports are pushing more consumers and markets towards Chinese NEVs.
Chinese passenger car brands outsold Japanese brands by market share in Europe in May, while China also surpassed Japan in South Korea’s imported car market in April.
Why This Matters: This is what industrial strategy looks like when it compounds: batteries, software, manufacturing scale, exports, and geopolitics all converging into a global EV push that is increasingly hard for legacy automakers, and oil producers, to ignore.
Kismet: Chinese EV expansion is not just about exports anymore: BYD is building in Hungary, SAIC in Thailand, and Chery through a joint venture in Spain, so the next phase may look less like “Made in China” and more like “Made everywhere by Chinese supply chains”. 👉 Full story here
Clean Energy
Balcony Solar Goes Mainstream, And Fossil Fuel Lobbyists May Need A Lie Down
Balcony solar, the plug-in, renter-friendly, “stick it on the balcony and annoy your utility” version Gavin Mooney and I talked about on last week’s Climate Confident, is suddenly getting legislative momentum in the US, and I am here for the domestic energy rebellion. These small portable systems can plug into household outlets, offset grid power, pair with batteries, move house with you, and, crucially, let renters and apartment dwellers join the solar party without needing a roof, a solicitor, three engineers, and a blood sacrifice to the permitting gods.
Key Highlights
Balcony solar systems are plug-in solar panels that can hang from balconies or sit on patios, yards, driveways, or other sunny spots.
US states including Utah, Maine, Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, New Hampshire, and potentially New York and New Jersey are moving to legalise or simplify plug-in solar.
New laws aim to stop utilities, landlords, homeowner associations, and local authorities from blocking small systems, while safety standards from UL are catching up.
Why This Matters: This is clean energy decentralisation in its most gloriously awkward form: small, visible, portable, affordable solar that gives households more control over bills and makes energy independence feel normal rather than niche.
Kismet: Germany already has more than one million balcony solar installations, which means the revolution may not arrive with a giant power plant ribbon-cutting, but with someone clipping panels to a railing while their neighbour mutters about aesthetics. 👉 Full story here
Africa’s Solar Boom Is No Longer A Theory, It’s Arriving In Containers
Africa’s clean energy story is starting to look less like donor-conference wallpaper and more like a full-blown power shift, from Morocco’s vast Noor solar complex near Ouarzazate to WeLight’s planned $650m mini-grid expansion across Nigeria, Congo, Madagascar, Mali and beyond. The neat bit is the two-track revolution: giant national projects for industrial ambition, and distributed solar-plus-storage for homes, farms, shops and villages that have spent far too long being mugged by diesel prices and unreliable grids.
Key Highlights
Morocco’s Noor solar complex produces 580MW, enough for roughly 1m homes, and sits at the heart of the country’s push for 52% renewable electricity by 2030.
Africa imported 15GW of Chinese solar panels in the 12 months to June 2025, up 60%, with records set across 20 countries.
WeLight, Africa’s largest solar mini-grid operator, plans a $650m expansion and wants to reach one million connections by 2030.
Why This Matters: Reliable, affordable clean power is not just an emissions story in Africa; it is an industrialisation story, a health story, a food-processing story, a jobs story, and, above all, an energy-sovereignty story.
Kismet: Sierra Leone’s solar panel imports in 2025 were equivalent to 61% of the country’s entire annual electricity usage, which is the sort of statistic that makes “incremental change” sound embarrassingly underdressed. 👉 Stories Inline
Australia’s Battery Subsidy Just Rebooted Rooftop Solar, And Coal Is Having A Rough Morning
Australia’s home battery subsidy is doing exactly what Gavin Mooney and I talked about on Climate Confident last week: turning rooftop solar from “nice panels, shame about the evening peak” into a far more useful household energy system. In the first five months of 2026, Australians installed 7.7GWh of home batteries, more than the previous six years combined, and that storage rush is now dragging rooftop solar back into record-breaking territory, because once people can keep their own sunshine for dinner-time, the old coal-and-grid-delay excuses start looking awfully underpowered.
Key Highlights
Australia’s home battery installs from January to May exceeded the previous six years combined, helped by a federal subsidy programme now worth A$7.2bn over four years.
Rooftop solar additions are forecast to hit a record 4GW in 2026, up 41% and above the previous 2021 peak.
Coal-fired power output has fallen for 10 straight months as rooftop solar and home storage eat into demand.
Why This Matters: This is a glimpse of the grid future hiding in plain sight: millions of homes acting as generation, storage, and flexibility assets, cutting bills while easing pressure on transmission bottlenecks.
Kismet: Australia’s energy market operator reckons pooled home batteries could avoid A$5bn in grid-scale battery investment, which is a deliciously weird sentence: your neighbour’s garage battery may be quietly cancelling a power plant spreadsheet somewhere. 👉 Full story here
War and Fossil Fuels’ Instability
Oil’s Security Pitch Just Exploded, Again, In Omsk And Hormuz
Two wars are now making the same brutal point from opposite ends of the map: fossil fuels are not “secure energy”, they are flammable geopolitics with pipelines, ports, tankers, refineries, choke points, sanctions, drones, and Donald Trump-shaped accelerants attached. Russia’s fuel crisis, triggered by Ukrainian strikes on refineries, and renewed US-Iran chaos around the Strait of Hormuz both show why renewables, batteries, heat pumps and electrification are not just cleaner, they are harder to bomb, harder to blockade, and vastly less useful to autocrats with a map and a grievance.
Key Highlights
Ukraine has hit Russian refineries at unprecedented scale, with attacks helping drive Russia into its worst fuel crisis in decades and forcing a diesel export ban.
Since early 2026, Russian refineries have reportedly been struck at least 194 times, while more than half of Russia’s regions have imposed limits on fuel sales.
Renewed US-Iran conflict is making the Strait of Hormuz dangerously unstable again, threatening a waterway that carried around a fifth of global oil supplies before the war.
Why This Matters: Energy security is no longer about owning more fossil fuel assets; it is about reducing exposure to brittle, centralised, combustible supply chains that collapse into price spikes the moment someone launches a drone or says something deranged on television.
Kismet: Russian horse breeders are reportedly seeing renewed interest because in parts of Russia a horse is becoming cheaper to keep than a car, which is a sentence that really should be carved above the entrance to the Museum of Fossil Fuel Hubris. 👉 Links Inline
Latest blog post
The Interview Is Not The Work, It’s The Raw Material
My latest blog post pulls back the curtain on how I produce two professional podcasts every week without relying on (too much!) adrenaline, panic, or the traditional Sunday-night sacrifice to the content gods. The real engine is the workflow: guest vetting, prep, recording, editing, artwork, audio clean-up, metadata, hosting, YouTube packaging, and a rhythm steady enough to keep Resilient Supply Chain and Climate Confident shipping like clockwork.
Key Highlights
Resilient Supply Chain now has 510+ episodes, while Climate Confident has passed 280.
Together, the shows have generated more than 550,000 audio downloads and 600,000 YouTube views.
The workflow uses a mix of Descript, Auphonic, Canva, Buzzsprout, YouTube, solid hardware, guest preparation, and ruthless consistency.
Why This Matters: Podcasting at scale is less about heroic creativity and more about repeatable operations, which is awkwardly unglamorous, but also how trust, quality, and audience growth actually compound.
Kismet: The oddest discovery is that podcasting has taught me as much about supply chains as supply chains have taught me about podcasting: flow matters, bottlenecks bite, and resilience is built before something breaks. 👉 Full story here
Climate Confident:
AI Is Not Magic Software, It’s A Data Centre With Opinions
On this week’s Climate Confident, I spoke with Sophia Mendelsohn, who leads SAP’s Global Sustainability Platform, about the awkward physical reality hiding beneath AI’s shiny interface: land, water, power, heat, waste, and infrastructure at colossal scale. Her argument is sharp and timely - sustainability teams must stop arriving after deployment with a carbon mop and start shaping AI procurement, governance, supplier data, and investment decisions before the system hardens into expensive bad habits.
Key Highlights
Sophia argues that AI’s capabilities are inseparable from data centres, and data centres are inseparable from land, water, energy, heat, and community impact.
Sustainability teams should move beyond reporting and bring their skills in resource constraints, stakeholder engagement, and social licence directly into AI governance.
AI can help companies model Scope 3 baselines, supplier impacts, climate risk, product footprints, packaging choices, and financial exposure before volatility quietly becomes normal.
Why This Matters: AI will reshape business decision-making, but unless sustainability is built into those decisions from the start, companies risk scaling resource demand, community backlash, Scope 3 exposure, and governance debt at machine speed.
Kismet: Sophia’s champion for sustainable AI at scale was Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy - which feels about right, because this is one of those moments where clever tools desperately need wiser adults in the room.
🎧 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)
Everytime you see or hear a headline about EV sales collapsing, remember this graph!
Our global energy supply is getting greener (we still have a looooong way to go, but the trend is definitely in the right direction)
And, as an Irish man, I gotta be a bit proud on how well Ireland is doing here. My adopted country of Spain, on the other hand “needs to work harder” as many of my school report cards used to asy!
Misc stuff
This tracks!
I did chuckle at this one!
Uh huh!
This one hits close to home!
Obligatory Trump Cartoons
Trump’s interference in the World Cup on behalf of the US team led to some great bursts of humour. Three of the best that I saw above.
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
Took me a second!
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