Professor Brian Cox travels from the fossils of the Burgess Shale to the sands of the oldest desert in the world to show how light holds the key to our understanding of the whole universe, including our own deepest origins. To understand how light holds the key to the story of the universe; you first have to understand its peculiar properties. Brian considers how the properties of light that lend colour to desert sands and the spectrum of a rainbow can lead to profound insights into the history and evolution of our universe. Finally, with some of the world's most fascinating fossils in hand, Brian considers how but for an apparently obscure moment in the early evolutionary history of life, all the secrets of light may have remained hidden. Because although the universe is bathed in light that carries extraordinary amounts of information about where we come from, it would have remained invisible without a crucial evolutionary development that allowed us to see. Only because of that development can we now observe, capture and contemplate the incredible wonders of the universe that we inhabit.

The most important story of our time. 2022 is set to be a year of unprecedented climate chaos across the planet. As the world’s leading climate scientists issue new warnings about climate change and the soaring cost of fuel highlights the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels – how did we get here?
The first part tells The story of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change more than four decades ago. Scientists who worked for the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, reveal the warnings they sounded in the 1970s and early 1980s about how fossil fuels would cause climate change – with potentially catastrophic effects. Drawing on thousands of newly discovered documents, the film goes on to chart in revelatory and forensic detail how the oil industry went on to mount a campaign to sow doubt about the science of climate change, the consequences of which we are living through today

Over the last years, the world has experienced an energy revolution, driven by an urgent need to green the grid and save life on Earth as we know it. 50 years ago, a devastating oil crisis kicked off an energy revolution. The world set course to cut the costly habit of burning fossil fuels. With the urgent new threat of a changing climate, the drive to unleash the power of the sun, earth and wind has accelerated into a race for humanity's survival. Change is taken place but, is it happening fast enough to secure our future? Technologies are right here, right now, and they will enable the transition to 100% renewables, because winning the energy race means a win for the entire world.

A new force threatens our perfect planet. In the past, five mass extinction events were caused by cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. It was not the lava or ash that wiped out life, but an invisible gas released by volcanoes: carbon dioxide. Almost every part of modern life depends on energy created by burning fossil fuels, and this produces CO2 in huge amounts. Humans are changing our planet so rapidly, it’s affecting earth’s life support systems: our weather, our oceans and the living world. The greatest change to be made is in how we create energy, and the planet is brimming with natural power that can help us do just that. It’s these forces of nature - the wind, the sun, waves and geothermal energy - that hold the key to our future.
Through compelling animal-led stories and expert interviews, we discover how CO2 is destabilising our planet. We meet rescued orphaned elephants in Kenya, victims of ever worsening droughts, and join ocean patrols off the coast of Gabon fighting to save endangered sharks. In the Amazon, we witness wildlife teams saving animals in the shrinking forests, and in San Diego we enter a cryogenic zoo preserving the DNA of endangered species before they become extinct.

The meteoric rise of renewable energy has consequences for our electricity supply. While coal and gas fired power stations can generate electricity whenever you need it, renewables are intermittent by nature. So we need a backup plan for when the wind stops or the sun goes down.
All over the world, engineers and scientists are racing to solve one key problem; how to safely and efficiently store electricity at a huge scale but at a low cost. The quest is producing some truly remarkable ideas and this episode details three of them.

Even as the science grew more certain, the oil industry continued to block action to tackle climate change in the new millennium. In a revelatory interview, Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush's former environment chief, tells the story of how the industry successfully lobbied President Bush to reverse course on his campaign promise to regulate carbon emissions.
Tensions grew between two of the world's biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil and BP, after the latter publicly called for action to tackle climate change. The election of Barack Obama provided hope for supporters of climate action, but the billionaire Koch brothers made an effort to block the new president's attempts to pass climate change legislation, and climate denialism became the mainstream position of the Republican Party. A lawyer who worked for Koch brothers through this period speaks on camera for the first time.