Billions and Trillions When the Hirsch Report says that we will need trillions of dollars to fix our energy problem, it doesn't really sound so bad. Hey, money can fix it! We have heard so many large numbers, that they don’t make any difference to us any more. The numbers “billion” and “trillion” are thrown around so much that we just don’t seem to think much about it. The numbers are not shocking to us, because we have heard these references over and over again on television and in the press. Experts use the word “desensitized” to describe how we feel about the numbers. So what? What’s the difference? It’s just a billion, it’s just a trillion. Don’t worry about it. That kind of thinking is what got us where we are, and what will be our eventual undoing. At this point, we have little or no perspective about what a billion dollars is, or what a trillion dollars is, and what those number really represent. To fully comprehend our situation, it is important that we gain the right perspective about the importance of those numbers. It sounds easy and trite to say that a billion dollars is 1,000 million dollars, and that a trillion dollars is 1,000 billion dollars (or a million, million dollars). It still doesn’t mean much to us. How about this? A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it, and looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000. CNN recently ran a story called “Trillion is the new Billion.” In their story they try to help us understand the enormity of the numbers. The CNN story quotes Senator Mitch McConnell, "To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born,
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