Human energy expenditure in the Anthropocene (starting ~1950CE) is ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), and exceeds all human energy expended across the prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (at ~14.6 ZJ), largely through the combustion of fossil fuels. The global warming effect during the Anthropocene is more than an order of magnitude greater still. Global human population and their productivity and energy consumption are highly correlated and with most changes impacting the global environment: number of large dams; shrimp farming; industrial production of plastic, cement, ammonia, copper, gypsum, salt, iron, steel, sulfur, helium, aluminum; mineral species; atmospheric gases (CO2, N2O, CH4); terrestrial freshwater budgets; and surface temperatures, sea levels, and ice masses. This extraordinary outburst of energy and productivity demonstrates how it is that the Earth System in the past 70 years has departed from its Holocene state, forcing abrupt physical, chemical and biological changes to the Earth’s stratigraphic record that can be used to justify the proposal for naming a new epoch – the Anthropocene.