I think most five year olds know more or less how plants work. Plants absorb sunlight through their leaves, convert that to nutrients inside the plant, and pass those on to Earth through their roots.
Lilke this, plants convert the energy of the sun to everything we know.
But before the plant formed leaves, it had to do the work of sucking the energy it needed to grow itself from Earth, again in the form of nutrients.
In this first part of its life, the energy flow through the plant was upwards.
At the point it forms leaves, the energy flow via nutrients changes, from upwards to downwards.
Like this, every plant pays back an energy overdraft from the Earth, that it needed to grow to the point if first formed leaves. It pays back many thousands of times to Earth what it first took out.
Earth pays a little energy out, and gets a lot back from every plant, in the form of nutrients.
Humanity has always taken energy out, never paid it back, for thousands of years.
So we as a species are actually in energy debt to the planet, like every plant was when it first formed leaves, only much bigger.
And now we formed our first leaves. Those are the solar panels and farms all over Earth.
The mechanism we use to pull our energy out of the planet is money, with business for profit forcing the work of extraction.
Money is our equivalent of nutrients in the plant.
The leaves we formed have already done some work, reducing the money a lot of people needed to pay for utlities bills, chargning cars etc. This is economic activity, but no money has yet been issued to monetise that business.
This is like the leaves of the plant absorbing the energy of the sun, but the plant failing to issue nutrients for the energy recieved by the leaves from the sun.
If the plant never issues nutrients, it has to die of energy starvation, because it can no longer pull energy up from Earth, it has done all the work it can, to pull up the energy needed to form leaves.
We are at the same stage of development, but we are failing to issue money on the energy being received and put to use from solar.
So we are dying as a species, until that money is issued.
We should notice that anything born goes through a similar change, it removes dependence for energy from its mother host, moving to the energy of the environment of its mother.
We each did this when we were born, birds do it when they break out of their eggs, its the natural outcome of being born, to move to the energy of the environment.
Earth is our mother host, the energy of the sun is the energy of the environment.
We are looking at being born as a species. There are a lot of forces at work that don't want us to be born, but I am sure we will get over that.
Anyhow, I hope this helps. It only scratches the surface of the work I've done since starting on it from related PhD candidate work seven years ago, after a long career already as a Systems Engineer in industry. I gave all that up to do this, because I knew there was no future at all for any of us, if the system stays unfixed.
The plant of humanity might never be born. Consider me a midwife if you prefer, it doesn't matter to me, as long as we do what needs to be done, to get this overdue baby born and on its feet, and starting to pay back its energy debt to the planet.
It will be a very different, much richer world we see next, assuming we are successful.
The alternative is unthinkable.
