Humanity's ambition must be to "usher in the electric age to replace the industrial age," Dr Alan Finkel says.
Dr Finkel spoke at University of Newcastle on Thursday in conversation with Dr Jessica Allen.
The event, held at the University Gallery at Callaghan campus, marked the Hunter launch of his latest book, Powering Up: Unleashing the Clean Energy Supply Chain.
The former chief scientist of Australia and Silicon Valley entrepreneur told the Newcastle Herald that oil, coal and gas need to be replaced with electricity to "break the back of global emissions".
"That's the single most important thing we can do to tackle global warming because energy from fossil fuels is responsible for about three quarters of global emissions," he said.
He said 8 per cent of global emissions of carbon dioxide come from steelmaking with "a huge quantity of metallurgical coal".
"Virtually all of that can be replaced by using clean electricity for heat, instead of coal, and clean hydrogen as the chemical to make green iron and green steel."
He said clean hydrogen can also be used to "synthesise jet fuel to have a zero emissions aviation industry".
"That is the holy grail. You can't run a large aeroplane with 400 passengers from Sydney to San Francisco on batteries and you never will," he said.
"The jet fuel we have today is made from distillation of oil. It's fantastic, so if we can synthesise it in a carbon neutral fashion by using electricity to make hydrogen, then we solve the problem of emissions from the aviation sector."
He said the bad news was that "emissions continue to go up, but we might be getting to the hump".
"We're now seeing substantial penetration of solar and wind technology. It's increasing at a rapid rate."
His book also examines where the energy revolution's finance will come from.
"We're not talking about billions, forget billions. In my book, we only talk about trillions," he said.
In the book, Dr Finkel explains how nations can remove the barriers that prevent them "transforming from petrostates to electrostates".
He believes if governments, investors, industry and consumers "get this right over the next three decades, history will judge us as the generation who ushered in the electric age and helped to save the planet".
To get there, he writes that the world will need "forests of wind farms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky".
"Think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert. What we have now has to be scaled up by a factor of 20."
He says this transformation will need "mining on a massive scale to extract the minerals needed for batteries and solar panels".
But the mining needs to be done "ethically, responsibly and equitably".
"How do you make sure the cobalt going into the battery for your electric car came from a country like Australia or Morocco, rather than Congo?
"In Congo, there are no rights for the miners and 35,000 children as young as six are employed as child labour. It's horrible."
He wrote the energy revolution would also need "giant factories to build the parts for towering wind turbines" and "untold miles of high voltage transmission lines" to power the mines and factories and "24-hour buzz of civilisation".
