Know any 5th graders?  Hard to believe but they’ll celebrate high school graduation in 2025!  Now, imagine Prof. Tony Seba* world-renowned author, educator and Stanford University instructor giving the commencement address.  It might go something like this.

            “Graduates – congratulations for having been born into a singularly unique 18-year period in the history of humankind.  What’s so unusual about these 18 years?  When you were born, a widely-viewed climate change documentary film had just been released.  Suddenly, the potentially devastating climatic effects of burning fossil fuels become a reality to millions of Earth’s inhabitants.  It was a concept so overwhelming that addressing it seemed nearly impossible.  Fossil fuels powered practically everything.  How would we possibly prosper without them?

             But as you know, we’re well on our way to doing so.  And you’ve had a front row seat as the solution unfolded.  Just as you developed from early childhood through your pre-teens and now into early adulthood, so too, a new clean energy system matured.

            Your parents experienced a similar bold transformation. Theirs was in communication and information.  Imagine, when they were children they were taught “computer skills” with humongous “desktop” computers that required manual input on a keyboard.  When they were about your age the smart phone era began permitting instant communication and information anytime anywhere.  Landline phones and printed encyclopedia sets became obsolete.  And now, how primitive they seem compared to the technology we’re blessed with in 2025. 

            The same type of “market disruption” happened with clean energy during your lifetime.  As a young child, you may remember the novelty of seeing a neighbor install solar panels or of riding in a hybrid car that was partially battery powered.  But like the computer, solar energy generation and battery storage technology grew exponentially.  As you began high school in 2021 we reached an energy “tipping point.”  That’s when local solar-plus-battery-storage energy systems world-wide became less expensive than ANY centrally generated and transmitted energy source.  Industrial scale energy generation and transmission became obsolete.  Like smart phones, this clean energy paradigm is sweeping the globe powering homes and vehicles.   As you celebrate your graduation, the last internal combustion engine factory is shuttering its doors.

            Over the course of your lifetime a frightening, seemingly insurmountable energy challenge is being met with clean energy right here, on the only home you’ll ever know where you’re forever…Earthbound.”

   *Learn more -  www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM

            Dewey Droppe was having the time of his life as stormy winds hurled him across the Midwest.  With trillions of his buddies Dewey wreaked havoc on Louisville in a deluge that caused extensive flooding during the wettest February ever recorded. Then it was down the storm drain and out into the raging Ohio River.  Dewey washed down the Mississippi and spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. What a ride! 
 
            Lounging there for a few days, Dewey waited to get picked up by the Gulf Stream when the excitement would begin again.  Sure enough, a few days later he felt that tentative tug and was drawn toward the current.  “Oh boy! Now for a speedy ride around Florida, up the Eastern Seaboard, and into the icy climes of the Arctic Ocean,” he mused.
 
            But after a day or so, Dewey knew something was wrong; he was barely moving at all.  The anticipated rush of droplets all jostling ahead of one another was more like a molasses slick languidly lolling toward the Florida coast.  
 
            “What’s going on?” Dewey wondered when suddenly… SWOOSH!  Without warning, Dewey was scooped aboard a passing ship, ogled under a microscope, and shelved inside a beaker.  Even more strange, as chance would have it, the crew members were asking themselves that very same question – why was this normally swift current moving so slowly?
 
           The oceanographers aboard this research vessel were investigating the mysteriously slowing North Atlantic Current and wondering if it had anything to do with extreme weather events like the recent Louisville storms.  Dewey learned that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is the “conveyor belt” of the ocean that exchanges warm equatorial water with cold water from the Arctic.  But today this temperature exchange is happening at a lower rate than any time in the past few thousand years most likely because of the torrent of fresh water melting off the Greenland ice sheet.  If the slowing continues and reaches a tipping point, the AMOC could simply shut down with potentially dramatic and unwelcome changes in the climate.
 
           “So this lazy current and the increase of extreme weather events ARE connected!  A warming atmosphere accelerates both of them,” Dewey realized. “Seems like these humans could save themselves a lot of grief by taking action to slow that warming.  After all, this is their only home where they’re forever…Earthbound.”

           Joe ambled to the trash can, deposited his lunch sack, and ceremoniously tossed in the banana he decided not to eat.  That simple act precipitated a teachable moment that, I dare say, imprinted an indelible lesson on a classroom full of students.
            Joe was a 4th grader in tiny Chiniak School, 41 miles down the gravel road from the city of Kodiak, Alaska where Karen and I taught.  Infuriated by that wasteful act, Karen applied her ire to the white board where she sketched out the journey that lowly banana had taken.  From a tree somewhere in Central America to a shipping facility then trucked to some seaport.  Up the west coast to Seattle then shipped to Anchorage for a barge ride to the Kodiak dock.  By truck to the Safeway grocer, tastefully displayed, purchased by Joe’s dad, driven to Chiniak, and packed into Joe’s lunch only to have this precious commodity cavalierly tossed aside without a second thought.
            We can excuse a 10-year old’s unwitting use of a resource, but (spoiler alert – this is about you and me!) our “adult” resource-use slate isn’t all that clean either.  Get this.  Almost 2/3s of the energy used in the U.S. to generate electricity vanishes before a single watt reaches our homes, businesses, and factories.  All because of “conversion loss.”  That is, the transmission and then the conversion of electricity to the proper voltage and such so it’s accessible for our use. 
           More than half of U.S. electrical generation still comes from burning greenhouse gas producing coal and natural gas.  So we’re expelling all those fumes, and only about 1/3 of that energy reaches our homes as electricity.  It’s an environmentally expensive commodity similar to Joe’s banana.  Yet it’s so easy for all of us (and I’m not excluding myself here) to frivolously expend that remaining precious 1/3.  We may not be so different than that ill-informed 10 yr. old after all.
            What to do?  Look around.  If we all treated that electricity as the precious commodity it is, we’d find simple ways to lower our homes’ electrical usage.  (Check out - www.bchydro.com/21tips)
          Beyond that, imagine clean, renewable energy locally generated and distributed using cost-competitive technology that’s already available.  We’d cut the 60% energy loss down to single digits.   After all, our resources are too precious to waste, here where we’re forever…Earthbound.