What I’ll Tell My Granddaughter About Energy and Earth Day

Previously published by the Grand Junction Sentinel.

This summer, I’ll meet my first grandchild – a granddaughter. I’ve been thinking about what I’ll tell her one day about a moment I lived through in 2016, when nearly every nation on Earth came together and made a promise about the future.

Earth Day 2016 celebrated the Paris Agreement, an unprecedented act of global cooperation. For the first time, wealthy nations and developing ones, historic rivals and longtime allies, agreed on a common framework to address climate change. The accord sent a powerful signal to markets, to innovators, and to the next generation: the world was paying attention, and it was willing to act together.

I’ll tell her it was genuinely remarkable. Not perfect – no global accord ever is – but remarkable. The commitment it generated helped turn clean energy from a distant promise into an economic force.

I’ll also tell her that it got harder.

Ten years on, that sense of global alignment has frayed. The United States dropped its commitments. Energy policy now swings with political control. And some of the early promises of rapid transformation ran into hard realities: inflation, tariffs, permitting bottlenecks, and the sheer physical difficulty of building energy infrastructure at scale.

In Western Colorado, we are mourning a year without winter and facing a spring without water, stark reminders of what’s at stake. For those of us who connect our warmer, drier landscape to energy policy, this moment can feel disheartening.

Take another look, though, and you’ll see that the energy system itself has been transformed in ways that would have been hard to imagine in 2016.

Clean energy is now cheaper. Costs have fallen 90% for battery storage, 80% for utility-scale solar, and 40% for onshore wind since 2010. These aren’t government mandates. They’re market realities. Utilities and corporations are investing because, in many cases, it’s the lowest-cost, lowest-risk option available. 42% of Colorado’s electricity consumption came from low-carbon sources last year, double that of ten years ago.

Fossil fuels remain deeply embedded in our energy system. The Iran war has reinforced both their strategic value and their risks. In Colorado, utility commissions are approving new natural gas capacity and extending coal plant licenses to ensure reliable power during demand spikes and severe weather. This isn’t failure – it’s the complex, unglamorous work of managing a grid that we all depend on.

Closing the gap between ambition and infrastructure takes time. Big goals require big buildout. The early ambition of Paris was necessary to spark that buildout. The hard, incremental work happening now is what delivers.

The story of the past ten years isn’t one of failure or success. It’s a story of starting something genuinely difficult and pressing forward, through setbacks, toward a worthy goal.

When I tell my granddaughter about this moment, I won’t tell her we had all the answers. I’ll tell her that people who cared about the future tried to act on that care, ran into the limits of politics and physics and human nature, and kept going anyway. That the nations of the world came together in a way they never had before. They planted seeds, and some of those seeds grew into a new energy economy that’s still taking shape.

Earth Day comes every year, but the ten-year marks are different. In 2016, the world made a promise. In 2026, that promise is being tested. By the time my granddaughter is old enough to understand this, it will be Earth Day 2036.

The energy system she inherits is being built right now – imperfectly, incrementally, but unmistakably. And I’m helping to plant the seeds. That’s a story worth telling her.