Carbon Neutral Island

There is a great article in the New Yorker about the topic that will increasingly demand more of our attention whether we do anything about it or not - global warming. It's both about an island in Denmark that is carbon neutral and a thought experiment in Switzerland with the purpose of determining how much power humans should use to curb our impact and how to actually accomplish this. While theory can give us direction the actual undertaking will be challenging:

“The problems of the twenty-first century are a different kind of problem,” he went on. “And I think our society will be measured according to the solution of this new kind of problem, which cannot be solved with the same recipe as the flight to the moon, or the Manhattan Project. It’s a qualitative difference—a paradigm change in the role of science for our society.” He continued, “The difficult thing is what I call ‘constructed Switzerland.’ You in America could call it ‘constructed United States’—the buildings and how they are built, but also where they are built and, even more important, the roads, the railroads, the lines for energy, for wastewater, and so on. It’s not economically feasible to replace everything in one instant.”

In most of the world our infrastructure was not designed with energy efficiency in mind - hence the necessity of a paradigm change towards designing our world around efficiency. Don't paradigms only exist because of change?