If you want the full breakdown — climate, AI, clean energy, EVs, science, supply chains — this week’s FutureProof is live.
Free, every Thursday.
Link: newsletter.tomraftery.com/p/clean-ener...

All of this - the climate signals, the AI leaps, the energy tipping points, points in one direction:
The future isn’t slowing down.
It’s accelerating.
And the incumbents who still think they have time… don’t.

Plus: EV battery-failure myths took another beating.
Modern packs don’t die.
They barely fail at all.
The data is now overwhelming, despite the internet’s chronic inability to accept good news.

And Scotland repowered its first commercial wind farm with 5× the output and recycled every single blade.
When people say “what about turbine waste?” - just send them this.

On the science front?
Chinese researchers figured out how to make plastics and rubber without fossil fuels.
A genuinely fossil-free chemical route.
That one made me blink twice - petrochemicals have always been the “final boss.”

Oh, and NotebookLM got a serious upgrade.
Deep Research. Docx + Sheets support. Drive ingest.
I’ve been waiting years for a tool that can actually handle messy research workflows.
This one… might be the first.

And then AI decided to have a full-blown arms race.
OpenAI quietly drops GPT-5.1.
Google comes back with Gemini 3, their loudest swing at AGI yet.

Two different visions of the future colliding in real time, and both reshaping how we work faster than the policy folk can catch up.

Then the Global South stepped in and showed the rest of us how it’s done.
Solar, wind, EVs, grid storage - leapfrogging like their lives depend on it (because they do).

Meanwhile the “developed” world is still debating whether to hold the map the right way up.

At COP30, 82 countries now want a real fossil phaseout roadmap.
Not vague commitments. Not “transitioning away.”
An actual timeline to wind fossil fuels down.

Honestly? I didn’t expect Brazil’s COP to be the one forcing clarity - but here we are.

This week’s FutureProof newsletter is basically the energy-transition equivalent of a plot twist.
Everywhere you look, something that was “impossible” five minutes ago… isn’t.

The full article digs into the lessons for every sector - climate, cost, security, resilience.

Read it here 👉 tomraftery.com/2025/11/17/w...

And let me know:
Where is your supply chain’s “farm-level data gap”?

If your Scope 3 accounting relies on averages, you’re not decarbonising.
You’re estimating.

It’s not just ag.
Think electronics, apparel, chemicals.
Same multi-tier mess.
Same upstream opacity.

Food is teaching us something big:
Scope 3 requires data intermediaries.
Platforms that sit between brands and suppliers, stitching the chain back together.

And here’s the key:
Suppliers only share data if they benefit.
So incentives matter: payments, knowledge transfer, lower reporting burden.

Their approach is a blueprint for every industry:
• Tractor + harvester telemetry
• Satellite data
• Soil modelling
• Automated verification
No surveys. No guesswork.

This week on Resilient Supply Chain, I spoke with eAgronom about a deeper issue:
How do you get trusted, primary emissions data from suppliers who live far upstream?

70-95% of emissions in food lie on farms the brand doesn’t own, doesn’t control… often can’t even name.
Yet this is the data CSRD, SBTi, and investors now demand.