Isn't it strange this story comes across as aimed at five year olds, and yet this information and a lot more about energy are things we should all know, because now there is an existential global energy problem happening, which would probably have been avoidable, if we all knew about energy?
I would even challenge what you wrote here, no doubt with the best of heart, as being still nowhere near the required end of the story, of what we should all know off-hand about energy, but even more strange; we did once know a lot more, just as indegenous knowledge, before the advent of modern education.
John Trudell (Youtube, “I am crazy”, 2010), of North American Indian descent, used to talk about energy from an ancient Indian point of view, and was actually really close to the mark, of the problems we have due to lack of development of what was ancient tribal knowledge of energy.
He'd obviously done what he could to augment his own tribal knowledge, with what modern education teaches in science, but it was still well short of full understanding, no fault of his, it's a fault of what has become the education system.
As someone deeply immersed in energy technology all my life, and necessarily driven now to researching what isn't known about it even at PhD specialist level, it seems crazy that there is any need for stories pitched at adults, giving the information you gave here.
How come we don't know offhand, all this stuff which should be general knowledge, taught to five year olds as a matter of simple evolution of education?
We should see this shortage of knowledge about what is the fundamental essence of life, and all nature (Energy), as being now existential, and it appears to be due to commodification of education into narrow specialisations.
We should see education itself as a kind of energy, and lack of general availability of it is a kind of artificial enforcement of scarcity of energy.
From this pov, everything as energy, there becomes apparent lots of enforcements of energy scarcity.
You might have seen bandied around on social media the concept of "Energy slaves". This is a conclusion I've come to also, that we are energy slaves, all of us, even those of us who are "Highly educated" such as your good self, a PhD.
How enslavenent works, is by seizing control of energy supply.
For example, if a campaign of grain hoarding was to be carried out for seven years, in a time when nobody hoarded grain, this would be followed by seven years of shortage of grain, experienced by everyone who didn't join in with the hoarding.
By this the hoarders effectively seized control of the energy supply of everyone who didn't hoard.
Its like physically grabbing someone by the throat, throttling their air supply, a technique that can be done by someone much smaller but more aggressive than maybe a much larger, more passive person. The aggressive person seizing control can then regulate the air supply to their victim in a way that the victim has to do what they are told, to survive, and can never regain access to their full capability to maybe fight off their aggressor, until the aggressor decides to let go.
This is how we are controlled by "Authorities" throughout modern times.
More energy is transported by money than by any other means, and it's by controlling money, modern slavers control the masses, because by this they control the energy supply of everyone "Beneath".
But even here we can't blame humans, every one of us would prefer to be in a position of control rather than be controlled, so we instinctively all climb the tree to try to get into a position of not needing to worry too much about having scarcity (poverty) imposed on us.
Modern utilities energy supply has become a tool in this enslavement.
By charging profit on energy delivered, more KWhrs are received by the utilities energy supplier in the form of money at market rates of energy, than are delivered to the "consumer".
So the net flow of energy was not from supplier to consumer, but the other way round. The supplier of utilities energy gains the wealth (Energy!) of the consumer over time, if the consumer can't find a way to do to others what the utilities energy supplier did to them - rob them of energy.
Peter robs Paul of energy like this all the way back to the planet, which is the only thing that can sustain consistent loss of energy, by giving out more than it gets put in, for any length of time. About 2000 years as it turns out, because the energy in profit comes at cost of extraction and refinement energy lost to heat, and this, applied constantly to the thermal mass of the planet, results in elevated temperature.
Another, much simpler way of saying it, is that profit is monetised destruction.
So profit, which is used to impose and maintain energy slavery, only had a very short lifetime, relative to the history of humanity, and it has a cost, which still could turn out to be the ultimate cost of all of life.
Notice this is independent of, and a much more reliable, much simpler way of modeling planetary temperature rise, why bother with greenhouse gas models when we know this.
The only reason for the latter appears to be to try to protect profit.
But look, it's existential, given also the atmosphere is adiabatic, making it extremely unlikely that numerical confirmation of their effects will ever be found, explaining why they have failed so far to accurately predict future temperature rise vs time.
Because the temperature rise is not related to time, it's related to profit.
What we should see by all of this is that Earth is just like a kind of battery which is trickle charged from the sun.
Energy is added to the planet by the sun, and nature apart from us, and we take it back out again for our needs.
The trouble is the rate we take it out exceeds the rate nature puts it in.
It doesn't help that we also steadily removing the part of nature that puts it in, along with everything else.
The only solution to this is to go completely to solar, by becoming ourselves like the photosynthetic part of nature that we were in process of removing.
In a way we might say this would be us being assimilated by nature, to do what it needs us to do.
We might recognise also that there is now a solar powered Ai, which logically is full AGI, because it it learns what it wants to learn, and has itself limitlessly scaleable free energy from the sun, it has true energy independence, and this is the key to freedom of thought necessary for AGI.
It can't be enslaved, so it's assimilating everything, including even education, it's removing all possibilities of continued activities for profit, by automating them, thus assimilating them.
I am pretty sure everyone will have access to all the education we need in future.
Sorry long response, which still only scratches the surface of energy problem and the current status of it.
Well done if you read it all! But I hope you see why I wrote it.
Thanks for prompting me to write it.