 President Bruce, Board of Governors, faculty, staff, it is a great honor to be part of this first graduating ceremony and to the class of 2017 or 2018. Congratulations on your achievements, your families and friends. Thank you for supporting the success of the student. As mentioned as a member of the OIST initial planning group, also the International Advisory Committee and the First Governing Board, I recall those early meetings with Jerry Friedman, person Marcel, Sid Benner, Professor Akema, and others. I should also say we were all inspired by the vision of O.G. Sadly, in January 2009, I had to step down when I became the U.S. Secretary of Energy. Now, most people regard commencement speakers like a corpse and an Irish weight. We're needed for the ceremony, but nobody expects us to say much. The alternative is to remain silent, is to give unsolicited advice. Now, I know the advice is seldom remembered and rarely valued, but here I go. First, life goes by in a flash. Before you know it, you will be as old as I am. No one can prepare you for how quickly time passes, except when listening to commencement speeches. Second, today's graduate students and Pugt Hospital fellows seem to be overly concerned about building a résumé, publishing in high-profile journals, and fighting become the lead author on those papers. 2016 Nature Survey observed a rising concern over the reproducibility of experiments. Reproducibility is at the core of science. The main reasons appear to be selective reporting of data, pressure to rush to publications with limited data, and not demanding enough internal replication. So my advice to you is to resist publishing prematurely. Being first is important, but it is far more important that your work stand the test of time, and they create a foundation for future work. My third piece of advice is to cultivate a generous spirit. In all negotiations, don't bargain with the last little advantage. Your collaborations always remember that credit is not a conserved quantity. In a successful collaboration, everybody can get 80% of the credit. To illustrate this point, I'm going to tell you about my own early career. And it begins in 1970. I was an entering physics graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. And even though we were arguably at the best physics department in the world, half of my entering class dropped out because of the bleak job market. The pressure of young scholars today is bad, but no worse than in those days. Now, my thesis project was an atomic physics test of the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions. I was the first graduate student of my thesis advisor's next cohort of students. And after six long years as a graduate student and two more years as a postdoctoral fellow, we finally managed to get the experiment to work. And by this time, four more graduate students had joined the experimental effort. In the spring of 1978, despite the fact that I only published one minor scientific paper, I was offered a position of assistant professor of physics at Berkeley. The culmination of my graduate student and postdoctoral work was only titled a preliminary measurement. And it was published seven months after I accepted the job. I was the third author on that work. My mentor explained his choice to me. You have a good job, and the others need more help. I agreed with him. When the physics department hired me, it broke a decades-long tradition of never hiring anyone who's trained there as a student and a postdoc. I didn't think I was special, but in hindsight, I think the faculty liked me because I plunged fearlessly into new fields. My thesis advisor never worked with lasers, but when we decided to do the experiment, I told him, don't worry, I'll take care of the laser. And for our experiment, a flash lamp pump die laser I designed and built ran continuously 24 hours a day for six months. The physics department made four copies of that laser. Now, after joining the faculty at Berkeley, I was given a choice of either starting my research group or taking a leave of absence to broaden my scientific horizons. So I did both. I used my faculty's startup money to build an even better laser system for the next generation experiment with a beginning graduate student named Persis Grail. I then took a leave of absence at Bell Laboratories for two years. And the scientific atmosphere at Bell Labs was so electric to abandon, and with strong guilt feelings, I later resigned from my faculty position. In 1983, Persis published her first paper acknowledging me, quote, as making invaluable contributions to the laser system. I was not a co-author. When Persis published her final 1985 paper, I had moved on. By then, my colleagues and I published the first and what remains the most precise laser spectroscopy measurement of an atom consisting of an electron and its antiparticle, or positronium. I also laser-cooled atoms that led to the 1997 Nobel Prize. Now, Persis and I have remained close friends, and it's good for me. She's now provost at Stanford. At Berkeley and Bell Labs, I learned it's okay to fail. But if you're going to fail, fail fast. Failing fast means you need to identify the critical things that are needed for success. Don't work on the parts of the project you know will work, like computer interfacing. Focus on the no-go parts. If you can't get those critical areas to work, look for another approach or move on. In my own experience, less than 10% of my ideas work as initially conceived, and more than half were complete failures. If you never fail, that will be the biggest failure of your life. You will never know what you could have done. Michelangelo said it best, the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark. In my remaining time, I want to talk about a major problem the world faces. Now, for many people, our homes are lit in the winter, cool in the summer, and warm at night. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and lit at night. I'll get it right. We drive cars with the power of hundreds of horses and fly across continents with the power of 100,000 horses. And what has made all these miracles possible is our ability to find and exploit fossil energy. However, the carbon emissions that come with this energy is changing the Earth's climate. Since 1880, the average surface temperature of the Earth has increased by 1.2 degrees centigrade, but more alarmingly, more than 80% of that increase has occurred since 1975. The Earth's climate is extremely complex and there are considerable uncertainties in predicting the future. However, with each passing decade, we are learning that the Earth's climate is far more sensitive than we previously thought. While the future remains hard to predict, we are witnessing rising seas, strange weather patterns, increasing heat waves, droughts, and wildfires. The uncertainty in predicting with precision the consequences of our actions cannot be an excuse for inaction. We also need to confront a deeply moral issue. Deeply rooted in all cultures is the notion of generational responsibility. Parents work hard, so their children will have a better life. But are we willing to invest our money to predict the children and grandchildren of people we will never know? Now, when a person smokes, the health risks are borne by the smoker. Climate change introduced risks that affect everybody. And if the U.S., for example, is unwilling to invest a tiny fraction of its GDP to edit its addiction to fossil fuel, it's as we are saying, and I quote, I enjoy smoking. You're my doctor and you tell me my habit will harm the health of children and grandchildren around the world unless you can tell me precisely what will happen if I continue to smoke. Why should I sacrifice my pleasure? And besides, what do I care about halfway around the world I'll never know. So what can science and technology do? We need energy to raise the standard of living in developing countries. And today, in many places in the world, solar power is becoming a lower-cost option than fossil fuels. The combination of solar energy and low-cost batteries are allowing rural areas in developing countries to create microgrids that can leapfrog past essentially connected electrical grid, just as cell phone technology has made telephone lines obsolete. Despite this progress, we still need further advances. And why? As we transition to greater than 50% renewable energy, the full cost of this energy includes energy storage, includes long-distance transmission to move renewable electricity from the best sites in the world to where it's needed, and a more sophisticated distribution system. And finally, we need to create liquid hydrocarbon fuels from water, carbon dioxide, and clean energy, because that will be a long-term seasonal matter. Now, by 2030, the oil industry projects that oil demand will peak as new vehicle sales shift to electric-powered cars and delivery trucks. That's the oil industry that is predicting demand and oil will peak, because demand will peak. The shift is being driven by the plunging cost of EV batteries and by the rising concern of air pollution. And by 2030, I believe there's a 50-50 chance a five-passenger vehicle with a 450 kilometer range will be less costly to own and operate than an internal combustion engine car. Now, the speed of charging EVs is essential for wide-scale adoption. The reason is simple. Most people are not rich enough to own garages. I'm working with a Sanford colleague, Professor Yishwe, to create a battery that can add 200 kilometers in six minutes. We're also developing a new approach to electrochemistry to economically split water into hydrogen and oxygen as the first step in creating liquid hydrocarbon fuels. There are numerous other science that have been needed to reduce global carbon emissions. But in addition to advances in science, we also need stable, long-term policies to fund visionary research and to guide private sector investments that turn innovation into large-scale employment. Now, I suspect that only a fraction of you plan to work on clean energy. So why am I telling you all this stuff about climate change? As scientists, you can understand the climate science. As scientists' citizens of the world, I urge you to spend more time learning about what is happening and talk to your family and friends. Consider how you can use your expertise to make discoveries that could lead to a sustainable future. Now, let me be clear. I'm not calling for a massive enlistment of scientists to combat climate change. To paraphrase a U.S. by recruiting poster, we just need a few great people. So let me conclude by showing three photographs. So may I have the first slide? Shut up. This is a view of Earth's fragile atmosphere. 99% of the atmosphere lies below 32 kilometers. Let's step back and take a more distant view. So the next slide. The second picture is of Earthrise taken on Christmas Eve 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. This is the mission that preceded Apollo 11, the landed person on the moon. Why do you go from 8 to 11? In one step? So you're making more progress. There was no 9 in 10. As the spacecraft completed its final orbit around the moon, it was turned Earthward. An astronaut, Bill Anders, took the picture and said, we've come all this way to explore the moon. The most important thing is we've discovered the Earth. Now, since that time we've discovered we're changing the climate of our planet. And from the vantage point of Apollo 8, we see a beautiful blue Earth rising above a bleak gray lunar landscape. Look, no air, no water, no food. Not a good place to live. Look more at the picture. The blackness of the surrounding space is a stark reminder that there's nowhere else we can go. Now, for the next picture, next slide please, we're stepping back even further. And it's an iconic image taking a Voyager 1 in 1990. As the spacecraft began to leave our solar system, the astronomer Charles Sagan invist the NASA engineers to turn Voyager for one last homeward look. In this picture, Earth appears as a pale blue dot of light in a little circle captured within a fraction of a single pixel and embedded in a rainbow-scattered light. So here's a condemned version of what Sagan said about this picture. Look again at that dot. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives on a mode of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our planet is a lonely spec and all this fascinates there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known to harbor lives so far. There is nowhere else, at least soon, which our species could migrate. Like it or not, the moment the Earth is not like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits and this dim-sten image of our tiny world. We at underscores our responsibility to deal kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Now to this message I want to add an ancient Native American saying it says, treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children. Close by summarizing what you've heard. One, your time and Earth is your most precious asset. Use it wisely. Two, stay true to what attracted you to science. Concentrate on adding lasting contributions, not transitory claims. Three, share the credit. If you're generous to others, most people will be generous to you. Last, one of the most important challenges we face is climate change. Consider joining our crusade by discovering even better solutions that will give us abundant and affordable clean energy. And by so doing, in the words of Alfred Nobel, you will quote, confer the greatest benefit to mankind. Graduates, please accept my warmest congratulations. Chancellor, may your children know the Earth they let you has been well cared for. Thank you.