(tranquil music) - Work never really stabilized.

It's always going through transitions, but there are eras where it seems to go faster than others.

- [Narrator] By the third decade of the 21st century, energy costs returned to center stage.

Our work remained dependent on petroleum, natural gas, and coal.

In 2023, inflation skyrocketed, in part, the result of higher energy prices.

A year earlier, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the ensuing war exposed the fragility of the interconnected economy.

Russia was the largest gas producer in the world, and gas shortages swept the globe.

Some of the nations that had relied on Russia for energy, like Germany, questioned their policies, and at the same time, governments struggled to promote an energy transition away from fossil fuel to solve climate change.

The energy workforce struggled to adapt amidst this chaos.

- The history of energy is a history of energy additions.

Most people do not remember that gasoline they used to literally dump into rivers, 'cause it was a useless byproduct.

We were pulling oil outta the ground, because we were making kerosene to light our homes.

Before kerosene, there was whale oil.

We used to have a global fleet of thousands of whaling ships emptying out the world's oceans of the largest mammals on the planet so that we could bring them back and render the fat down and use it to burn oil in our homes, right?

So thankfully, we have transitioned away from that and the whales are recovering and that's good.

At home, most estimates say we've picked up a day of chores that we were all doing, and I mean you can think about it, picking up years of your life that used to be spent washing clothes, and doing dishes, and cooking that have been so condensed due to energy and modern appliances.

- Energy transitions have happened many times over the last few centuries, as we use coal instead of wood, for example, or the rise of oil instead of coal.

- The energy transition we're talking about today is different.

We are talking here about a rather breathtaking energy transition.

- If we look at energy transitions historically, because it takes 50 to 80 years for a transition to happen, it doesn't affect one person's career so much necessarily.

Now, for a variety of national security, economic, and environmental reasons like climate change, there is a desire to use policy to accelerate the transition.

- We've actually really never transitioned away from any of the historical sources of energy.

We still use wood to heat a lot of people's homes and in some cases, to heat whole power plants.

Like in the United Kingdom where they do that using American hardwood.

For the first time, there's now a conversation about taking out whole categories of energy production and replacing them, so transitioning the energy economy, that would be a first.

That would be something that is quite disruptive to the hundreds of millions of people who make their livelihood in the traditional sources in the energy economy.

- [Narrator] This is "Power Trip: The Story Of Energy."

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