To Be or Not to Be — On Climate Change & Electrification (I)
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I. Global warming
For roughly two centuries the modern economy has run on a single, astonishing bargain: dig up ancient sunlight, burn it, and convert the energy released into motion, heat, light and growth. It worked. It lifted billions out of subsistence, compressed distances, and built the industrial civilisation we inhabit. It also produced an invoice, and that invoice is now being presented.
Carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion has pushed atmospheric CO₂ to concentrations unseen for millions of years, and global average temperature has already breached 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels in recent years. The consequences are no longer model projections on a conference slide; they are the news. Heatwaves, droughts, supercharged rainfall, retreating glaciers, coral bleaching, rising seas.
And right now a specific and extraordinary event is unfolding. In September 2026 a super El Niño formally developed in the equatorial Pacific — an "eastern-type" event whose warm centre sits off the coast of South America. The World Meteorological Organization has said the probability that it persists into February 2027 is close to 100%, and that sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific are set to reach record levels during October–December, peaking around December. China's National Climate Centre has assessed that this may become the strongest El Niño since systematic monitoring began in 1951; some forecasters put the peak anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region at around 3.2–3.5 °C, well beyond the 2.8 °C of previous record events.
El Niño is not caused by climate change — it is a natural oscillation. But it is now arriving on top of an already anomalous baseline, and that is what makes the combination dangerous. Expect record global temperatures in 2027, when the event's full warming is felt. Expect disrupted monsoons, floods in some basins and drought in others, crop failures in palm oil, coffee, rice and sugar, marine heatwaves, and severe stress on water and power systems across the Americas, Asia and Oceania. Commodity analysts are already pricing 30–40% increases in some vegetable oils. This is the near-term face of the climate problem: not a distant abstraction, but a harvest, a floodplain, a grid, a hospital.
II. The blood of the economy
Here lies the difficulty. The very substance driving this crisis is also the blood of the modern economy — and blood is hard to replace.
Oil is not merely a fuel. It is a feedstock: plastics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, asphalt, lubricants, synthetic fibres — the whole petrochemical tree. It remains the champion of liquid energy density, which is why it still powers nearly all aviation and most ocean shipping. It underwrites the logistics of global trade and, through diesel and fertiliser, the price of food. It also employs an enormous number of people. According to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Employment 2025 report, global energy employment reached about 76 million in 2024. Within that, oil and gas production and distribution accounted for roughly 12.4 million jobs, about two-thirds of them — some 8 million — in oil supply alone. Add indirect and induced employment across services, refining, transport, petrochemicals and fuel retail, and livelihoods touched by the hydrocarbon economy run into the tens of millions worldwide. In the United States, one industry analysis counted nearly 19.3 million jobs supported when direct, indirect and induced effects are included. In China, the relevant jobs counted more than 3 million.
The companies sitting atop this system hold vested interests of historic scale. Their assets — wells, pipelines, refineries, tanker fleets, booked reserves — represent trillions of dollars of capital. Their business models, pension obligations, and (in many producing states) entire national budgets depend on continued demand. It is hardly surprising that the industry spent decades questioning climate science; it is equally unsurprising that it has since rebranded — modest renewable portfolios, "energy transition" advertising, net-zero pledges with distant horizons — while capital expenditure on new oil and gas continues. Several of the largest majors have recently trimmed clean-energy spending again, citing weak prices and shareholder pressure. The question is genuinely hard to answer.
III. To be electrified, or not to be electrified?
Should nations and companies choose electrified alternatives for transport in the air, on land and at sea? What do individuals do next?
On land, the argument is largely settled. Battery-electric passenger vehicles are already cost-competitive over their lifetime in many markets, cleaner at the tailpipe, quieter, and increasingly charged by grids that are themselves decarbonising. Electric two- and three-wheelers dominate new sales across much of Asia. Urban buses, delivery vans and short-haul trucks electrify readily. Even heavy trucking is moving, with batteries and overhead-wire systems for regional freight and hydrogen reserved for the longest, coldest routes. The honest answer here is: yes, electrify. The remaining barriers — charging infrastructure, grid capacity, battery supply chains — are engineering and investment problems, not questions of principle.
At sea, electrification is partial but real. Ferries, harbor craft, inland barges and short-sea routes are electrifying rapidly; battery-hybrid ferries already operate in Norway, China and elsewhere. Deep-sea shipping cannot run on batteries alone — the energy-density gap is simply too large. The realistic path is a mix: electric and hybrid propulsion in port and coastal waters, then green methanol, ammonia, hydrogen and wind-assist for the open ocean. Electrifying the port itself — shore power, electric cargo handling, onshore charging — is a large and immediate prize.
In the air, we must be humble. Batteries carry perhaps a fortieth of the energy per kilogram of jet fuel. Electric flight is viable for trainers, air taxis and short regional hops, and progress there is genuine. Long-haul aviation will not be electrified in any foreseeable decade. Sustainable aviation fuels, hydrogen airframes for medium range, and above all demand management and honest carbon pricing are the levers. Claiming that electrification will solve aviation overstates the case and cheapens credibility everywhere else.
And the workers? This is the strongest objection raised against transition, and it deserves an answer rather than a slogan. The IEA data suggest that, on net, this is not a job-destroying event. In 2024 the electricity sector — generation, transmission, distribution and storage — became the largest employer in energy for the first time, overtaking fuel supply. Nearly three-quarters of the 5.4 million energy jobs added since 2019 were in electricity. Electric vehicle manufacturing and battery production alone added close to 800,000 jobs in 2024, and in China roughly 40% of auto-manufacturing employment is now EV- and battery-related. What is required is a just transition: retraining, regional support for communities built around a single refinery or coalfield, and candor about the fact that some jobs will not translate one-for-one.
IV. The answer
"To be electrified or not to be electrified" is, in the end, not truly a binary. The real question is not whether, but where and how we can make it sustainable and environment-friendly.
Electrify what electrifies well — road transport, urban mobility, short-sea shipping, ports, heating — and do it quickly, because the technology is ready and the delay is now measured in lives and harvests. For the hard sectors — long-haul aviation, deep-sea shipping, heavy industry — pursue the honest alternatives instead of pretending batteries will arrive in time. And remember that electrification is only as clean as the grid behind it: an electric car charged on unabated coal is a partial solution, not a full one.
The oil economy gave us the modern world. It also gave us a super El Niño forming over a warmed planet. The choice before nations and companies is not between prosperity and sacrifice. It is between managing a transition deliberately — with retraining, investment and foresight — or having one imposed by storms, droughts, stranded assets and collapsing harvests.
Hamlet's tragedy was paralysis: an intellect that could foresee every consequence and therefore acted on none. Ours would be the same, only with a rising thermometer attached. Electrification is not here to replace 100% vehicles, ships and aircrafts powered by internal combustion engines (it can not), but to offer another option; they simply coexist. To be electrified or not? Maybe everyone of us has a different answer.