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DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? for CAT 2024 is part of CAT preparation. The Question and answers have been prepared according to the CAT exam syllabus. Information about DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? covers all topics & solutions for CAT 2024 Exam. Find important definitions, questions, meanings, examples, exercises and tests below for DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer?.

Solutions for DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? in English & in Hindi are available as part of our courses for CAT. Download more important topics, notes, lectures and mock test series for CAT Exam by signing up for free.

Here you can find the meaning of DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? defined & explained in the simplest way possible. Besides giving the explanation of DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer?, a detailed solution for DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? has been provided alongside types of DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? theory, EduRev gives you an ample number of questions to practice DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question based on it.The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy. My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space. These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.It is clearly a scientific fact that the worlds regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed as a result of the global warming produced by the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). But science does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work out for ourselves, through public reasoning and politics, the implications of scientific facts for what we have reason to value, and what to do about them. As well as incorporating the full range of our ethical concerns and values (sensibility) such a debate requires further facts about how our socio-economic institutions interact with the environmental mechanisms (sense). Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.It is often said, and very plausibly, that climate change is difficult for human minds and political institutions to grasp and act on because it’s global scale and long-term (inter-generational) and complex causal mechanisms present a perfect moral storm (e.g. Stephen Gardiner). One way of dealing with such difficult problems is to moralise them, and this seems to be the strategy currently favoured by mainstream environmentalists. Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it? Morality in this sense concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws. On this model, ones carbon footprint is a moral crime (against the planet presumably) which one should feel guilty about and strive to reduce. As of course are other peoples carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones.In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of Chinas one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.Para phrase the line:Relying on the natural scientific account alone leads us to fixate on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and climate sensitivity, while drastically simplifying the human side.a)The human side of the climate change debate has been severely devalued by the scientific account of the situation.b)The minute details in the scientific account of climate change take up far too much energy to be of any consequence.c)The human side of the problem is far bigger than the scientific account of climate change and this needs to be given more importance.d)Relying on scientific data alone for evaluating climate change can blinker our vision by making us focus on only one side of the problem.Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? tests, examples and also practice CAT tests.