How would life be without thermal energy?

How would life on earth be different if the amount of energy available were 2x what it is now?

• Energy as defined by kinetic/mechanical/potential/etc energy, not the layman "energy" which would imply a spastic world.

• Answer:

  The apocalypse.  If the available energy on Earth were truly twice as high, I'd hope we'd ignore at least 50% of it.  Truly doubling the energy on Earth is equivalent to doubling its mass, and could be pretty catastrophic besides no matter what we do, depending on the type of energy you mean. The kinds of energy you might mean: Thermal Energy:  A lot of us would die of heat stroke.  Global warming causes mass extinction if the temperature increases by some small fraction (of order 1 to 10's of Kelvin), if you double the thermal energy of the planet, we'd increase the mean temperature by about 300 Kelvin.  Fortunately, most of that energy would dissipate into space pretty quickly, but people who couldn't get into an air conditioned basement, cave, mine, or large body of water in 10 minutes or so would probably die.  If all the Earth's energy were doubled in Thermal energy, we'd all be dead instantly; the Earth would be a giant autoclave for more than long enough to sterilize it. Chemical Energy:  Say we double the amount of oil + gas + coal, etc.  Hopefully, we just leave it in the ground.  Otherwise, global warming is twice as bad.  If we doubled the energy of the Earth by adding these things, sources of energy like oil would be the majority component of the Earth's crust.  That'd be a pretty unstable crust, and I'm imagining earthquakes and tons of sinkholes.  Maybe we could use coal as a construction material; our houses would be pretty sooty. Potential (mass) Energy:  This would be the best case scenario, where we just double the amount of mass on the planet, in roughly the elemental proportions we have now.  Winds would be stronger, and we'd all weigh twice as much (stairs would tax olympic athletes, and many-story buildings might collapse, not that anyone would want to live in them).  But probably society would survive. Now, you might have meant to ask "What if the amount of free energy, energy available to power our cars, houses, and electronics, were doubled?"  Well, probably not much in the USA at least, except electricity rates might be a little* lower.  No one here makes many decisions (aside from maybe the thermostat settings) based on the cost or availability of electricity, because we can basically produce as much as we need.  That's not true indefinitely, but it's true now, and almost certainly still true if we increase our demand by a factor of 10-100.  You could have also meant that the net available power on the planet doubled.  That would essentially mean we'd have two suns, and the surface of the planet would be pretty uncomfortable except at night in dry climates.  Though if we built enough solar panels we'd survive through climate control. *Not much lower, since electricity generation doesn't have a huge profit margin, so it can't really go down much lower than it is already, unless you mean to double the available energy by magically instantiating mountains of oil barrels next to power plants.    In fact, it could actually increase the cost of electricity, since presumably the doubling of available energy wouldn't immediately double the demand, and so some of it will go to waste (and the amount that doesn't would have to cost more to cover the cost of the wasted power).