Thinking Big

President Obama is reportedly considering a standard for automakers which would require cars to get 56 miles per gallon. An article suggests that for the cost of building a nuclear reactor we could retrofit 1.6 million homes for energy efficiency, thereby saving the amount that the nuclear reactor would generate, and in the process create many more jobs. It doesn’t point out that the jobs would be temporary.

That’s what passes for "thinking big" today. It’s nothing of the sort. These are small minds thinking inside the box. There is absolutely nothing new in either of those ideas.

Thinking small, mere tinkering with what we have, is not going to solve the problems that face this planet. This kind of thinking is not going to allow 7 billion people to live on a planet that was probably designed to house, maybe, 4 billion people.

Instead of a “retrofit,” a word meaning backward thinking, for existing homes we should be looking at ways to design our cities in a whole new paradigm which redefines the need and manner of transportation and the use of energy. We need a lifestyle in which it doesn’t matter how many miles per gallon a car gets because we don’t use cars much, if at all. We need thinking which is the difference between oxen and the John Deere tractor. Our society is dying here, and to avoid being in the box we need to think outside of it.