CAT Exam  >  CAT Questions  >  DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage a... Start Learning for Free
DIRECTIONS for 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 world's 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, one's 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 people's 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 China's 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. The author would agree with which of the following statements:
I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.
II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.
III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.
  • a)
    I & II
  • b)
    II & III
  • c)
    I & III
  • d)
    All of the above
Correct answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer?
Verified Answer
DIRECTIONSfor the question:Read the passage and answer the question ba...
Statement I can be inferred from the lines: It is clearly a scientific fact that the world's 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.
Statement II can be inferred from the lines: Climate change is thus simplified and personalised as a simple ‘values’ choice: Are you for the planet or against it?
Statement III can be derived from the lines: The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness.
View all questions of this test
Explore Courses for CAT exam

Similar CAT Doubts

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 (sens e). 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 rhetori c). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.What does the author refer to when he mentions pragmatism and perspective?

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 (sens e). 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 rhetori c). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.Q.When the author says, ‘ones carbon footprint is a moral crime’, he is highlighting

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 (sens e). 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 rhetori c). 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.

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an eco philosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an eco philosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.Which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?

Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City’ (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism. Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival’ (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such ‘anthropocentrism’ is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an eco philosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed ... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20)More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. Ecocritics ask questions such as - What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is nature writing? Indeed, what is meant by the word ‘nature’? Should the examination of place be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? What can other disciplines - such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology - contribute?William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival' (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy: that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the latter to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In later, 'second wave' ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological-historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed... Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research. In the mid-eighties, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction.By comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20). More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function - thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise - of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”.What does the word ‘anthropocentrism’ refer to in this passage?

Top Courses for CAT

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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer?
Question Description
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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect 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.The author would agree with which of the following statements:I. The speed at which the climate change is being witnessed presently has not been seen before.II. Climate change arguments are often dumbed down to the simplistic levels of a yes or no question.III. Climate change cannot be confined to a narrow framework based on righteousness.a)I & IIb)II & IIIc)I & IIId)All of the aboveCorrect answer is option 'D'. Can you explain this answer? tests, examples and also practice CAT tests.
Explore Courses for CAT exam

Top Courses for CAT

Explore Courses
Signup for Free!
Signup to see your scores go up within 7 days! Learn & Practice with 1000+ FREE Notes, Videos & Tests.
10M+ students study on EduRev