Climate Change and the Energy Revolution

(5 minute read)

Could global warming eventually destroy all life on Earth?

Several readers have written to me asking versions of that question. They see the heatwaves sweeping across Europe, the increasingly destructive wildfires, the floods, droughts and violent storms, and wonder whether humanity has already pushed the planet beyond the point of recovery.

It’s not an unreasonable fear.

Europe is now warming more than twice as quickly as the global average, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth. At least 95% of Europe experienced above-average temperatures during 2025, while a heatwave near the Arctic Circle lasted three weeks and pushed temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius.

Places that once seemed protected by their northern location are beginning to experience temperatures that would have been extraordinary only a generation ago.

Wildfires are becoming more destructive. Rainfall is becoming less predictable. Some areas receive too little water for months, then far too much in a matter of hours. Towns flood, crops fail, forests burn and insurance companies quietly conclude that some homes are no longer worth insuring.

These are no longer warnings about what might happen in 2076. They are happening now. Does that mean the Earth is dying?

Put simply: No.

Earth has been much hotter before, and life did not merely survive. It flourished.

Scientists recently identified a fossil discovered in Antarctica as part of a titanosaur, one of the family of long-necked dinosaurs that included the largest animals ever to walk on land.

Think about that for a moment.

Antarctica, which today is buried beneath kilometers of ice, once had forests large enough to support dinosaurs measuring six or seven meters long. Seventy million years ago, enormous animals were walking among jungle trees in a place where today an unprotected human being could freeze to death within minutes.

The planet will survive global warming. Life will survive it too. The more difficult question is whether millions of individual species will survive, where human beings will be able to live, and what happens to civilization while the climate changes around us.

Previous periods of warming often unfolded over thousands or millions of years. Plants evolved. Animals migrated. Coastlines changed. Some species adapted and others disappeared.

Today, significant warming is taking place over decades.

Cities cannot migrate. Ports cannot move inland easily. Hundreds of millions of people cannot simply abandon their countries without political consequences. Farms, reservoirs, railways and entire national economies have been built around climatic conditions that we assumed would remain broadly stable.

That assumption is beginning to fail.

Some regions will become hotter and more difficult to farm. Others will suffer increasingly severe water shortages. Low-lying countries and coastal cities will spend enormous sums defending themselves from rising seas.

Human beings will respond as they always have when their homes can no longer support them.

They will move.

This may become one of the greatest political consequences of climate change.

People will leave regions where crops repeatedly fail, water becomes scarce or temperatures become intolerable. Many will head north towards Europe, Canada and other relatively temperate areas.

Some countries will welcome additional workers, particularly as their own populations age and birth rates fall. Others will resist large-scale immigration. Borders will become more heavily defended. Governments may use force to prevent people entering.

Climate change will not only change the weather. It may change elections, borders, alliances and wars.

Yet there is another side to this story, and it receives far less attention.

The same energy revolution that may help slow global warming could also make parts of the world safer.

For most of human history, energy was something nations had to find and control. Coal existed beneath particular regions. Oil lay beneath particular deserts and seas. Gas travelled through pipelines controlled by governments that could increase prices or turn off the supply.

Nations built empires to obtain resources. They formed alliances to protect them. They invaded countries and fought wars partly to control them.

Oil influenced the outcome of the Second World War. It helped shape decades of conflict in the Middle East. More recently, European dependence upon Russian gas gave Moscow enormous economic and political leverage.

Renewable energy changes that relationship.

Sunlight does not have to be mined in Saudi Arabia, loaded onto a tanker and carried halfway around the world. Wind does not have to pass through a Russian pipeline. The energy is all around us.

That may eventually prove almost as important as its effect on the climate.

Most countries possess some source of renewable power. Sunny countries can use solar panels. Windy nations can build turbines. Mountainous regions can produce hydroelectricity. Volcanic areas can draw heat from beneath the ground. Coastal nations may eventually make greater use of waves and tides.

No country will become completely independent. Solar panels require minerals. Batteries require factories. Electricity networks cross borders.

Even so, a world in which most nations produce much of their own power could be less vulnerable to blockades, energy blackmail and sudden disruptions in supply. It could also remove one of history’s most persistent reasons for going to war.

Solar power is expanding more quickly than almost anyone predicted.

During 2025, global solar generation increased by approximately 600 terawatt-hours. That was the largest annual increase ever recorded for almost any source of electricity. Solar power now provides more than 8% of the world’s electricity. Three years ago, it was less than 4%

What has changed dramatically is how much electricity we receive for our money.

Panels have become more powerful, reliable and much cheaper to manufacture. Large solar projects in 2026 can produce electricity for a tiny fraction of what the same amount of power would have cost during the early years of the technology.

This means solar power is no longer restricted to deserts and tropical countries.

Germany has installed enormous amounts of it. Britain produces useful solar electricity despite our famous supply of clouds. Panels are becoming worthwhile across northern Europe, Canada and many other places that nobody would confuse with the Sahara.

The sun does not need to shine brilliantly all day. The panels simply need to become cheap enough and effective enough.

Britain offers a striking example of how quickly the transition is happening. During the first three months of 2026, renewables produced more than half of the country’s electricity. Wind output rose sharply, while fossil fuels supplied less than one-third of energy demand.

Within my lifetime, Britain has moved from an electricity system dominated by coal to one in which renewable power can provide the majority of our electricity for an entire quarter.

That is an extraordinary transformation.

There are still serious problems. Solar panels do not work at night. Wind turbines produce less power when the air is still. Britain consumes more energy during dark winter evenings, precisely when solar production is at its weakest.

The answer will not be one miraculous invention. It will be a combination of many.

Batteries are improving. Some currently store electricity for a few hours, while newer designs may store it for several days. Excess power can pump water uphill and release it through turbines later. It can produce hydrogen, heat enormous underground stores or charge millions of electric vehicles.

Countries can also exchange electricity.

When winds are strong in Britain, we may send surplus power to Europe. When Norway’s reservoirs are full, hydroelectricity can travel in the opposite direction. A larger international grid could eventually move electricity across countries and continents, following the sun, wind and demand.

Artificial intelligence will help coordinate that system.

AI will certainly consume a great deal of electricity itself. Global data-centre demand is expected to more than double by 2030, reaching approximately 945 terawatt-hours, slightly more electricity than Japan currently uses.

That is a genuine problem. Yet it is only half the story.

AI can predict tomorrow’s wind and sunshine more accurately, allowing power companies to prepare for changes in supply. It can decide when millions of batteries should charge, identify damaged equipment before it fails and move electricity around a network in ways that would be impossible for human controllers to calculate quickly enough.

It may also design better batteries, more efficient solar panels and lighter wind turbines by examining millions of possible materials and designs.

AI consumes energy. It may also help us waste far less of it.

Much of the energy we produce today never performs useful work. It disappears through poorly insulated buildings, inefficient engines, traffic jams, old machinery and electricity networks that cannot move power to where it is needed.

Improving efficiency is less exciting than inventing a fusion reactor, but it may achieve more during the next twenty years.

A heat pump, for example, can often provide three or four units of heat for every unit of electricity it consumes. Electric motors waste far less energy than petrol engines. Better insulation can reduce the amount of power required to heat a home for decades.

Nuclear power will probably remain part of the answer too.

Modern nuclear stations produce enormous quantities of dependable electricity without releasing carbon dioxide during operation. Smaller reactors may eventually be manufactured in factories rather than constructed individually as vast and expensive national projects. Whether they will become cheap enough remains uncertain.

Fusion is even more exciting.

It uses the process that powers the Sun, potentially producing immense amounts of energy without burning fossil fuels. Scientists have already achieved fusion reactions that released more energy than the lasers delivered directly into the fuel.

That was a historic achievement.

Unfortunately, producing one successful reaction in a laboratory is not the same as operating a power station. The entire facility still consumed far more electricity than the reaction produced.

Fusion is no longer fantasy. It is not yet an electricity supply either.

Commercial fusion may arrive during the 2040s or 2050s. It may take longer. Predictions that fusion is only thirty years away have been made for approximately seventy years.

Then there is an idea that still sounds as though it belongs in one of my books.

Solar power from space.

Solar panels in the correct orbit could receive sunlight almost continuously. There would be no clouds, bad weather or conventional night. The electricity would be transmitted to large receiving stations on the ground, probably using microwaves.

The principle works. The economics do not. At least, not yet.

A space-based power station might stretch several kilometers across and require thousands of tons of equipment. Robots would need to assemble and maintain it in orbit.

NASA has studied possible systems using SpaceX Starship launches. Even if the cost of a launch eventually fell to $10 million, dramatically below the $100 million assumption used in its central model, the resulting electricity would still struggle to compete with solar panels and wind turbines built on Earth.

SpaceX and its competitors are developing reusable rockets. Launch costs are falling. Robots are becoming more capable. If humanity begins constructing large factories, stations and habitats in orbit, space-based solar power may become a practical addition rather than an isolated project. It possesses one enormous advantage. It could generate clean electricity almost twenty-four hours a day.

Other ideas sound even more extraordinary.

Scientists have proposed giant sunshades in space that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth. Machines may remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. Advanced geothermal systems could drill deep enough to provide reliable heat almost anywhere. Vast artificial islands might produce hydrogen using offshore wind.

Some of these ideas will fail. Some will prove too expensive. Others may become so ordinary that our grandchildren will wonder why we ever doubted them.

As a science fiction writer, I find that possibility irresistible. Return to the Galaxy includes orbital sunshields and energy harvested in space. I created them as technologies from a distant future.

Perhaps that future is not quite as distant as I thought.

None of this means technology will automatically save us.

Some climate damage is already unavoidable. Governments will make mistakes. Companies will protect their own interests. People will resist changes that inconvenience them. Promising technologies will fail or arrive decades later than predicted.

But I do not believe we are doomed. Earth will survive. Life will survive.

The real battle is over how much damage humanity suffers, how many species disappear and what kind of world we leave behind.

For thousands of years, nations fought because energy existed somewhere else.

The next great change may be that energy arrives wherever the sun shines and the wind blows.

By 2076, electricity may come from roofs, deserts, oceans, deep beneath our feet and perhaps even from enormous solar stations circling far above the Earth.

We are not doomed.

Global warming will cause serious damage. Some coastlines will retreat. Some species will disappear. Millions of people may be forced to leave places where their families have lived for generations.

But this is not a battle we are powerless to fight.

Every solar panel, wind turbine, nuclear reactor and improved battery reduces the amount of fossil fuel we need to burn. Every more efficient building, vehicle and electricity grid reduces the amount of energy we waste. Every advance in carbon removal brings us closer to repairing some of the damage already done.

The first victory will come when humanity stops adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than the planet can absorb, allowing temperatures broadly to stabilize. The second may come decades or centuries later, when we remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to begin lowering them again.

That future is not guaranteed. We will have to invent it, invest in it and fight for it.

But humanity has spent its entire history confronting dangers that appeared overwhelming. Again and again, we found a way through.

I believe we will do so once more.

Climate change may become one of the greatest tests our civilization has ever faced.

It may also become one of our greatest victories.

Till next time,

Brian

BA Gillies

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