Direction: These questions are based on the information given below: Our…
2024
Direction: These questions are based on the information given below: Our current approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically because negotiations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the current approach is also flawed technologically. Many countries are now setting ambitious carbon cutting goals ahead of global negotiations. Let us imagine that the world ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say, we decide to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by three-quarters by the year 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies the technological problem to meet this goal, non-carbon based sources of energy would have to be astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than that was in the year 2000. These figures were calculated by economists of a foreign university. Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requires nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking this challenge seriously. If we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near significant enough to make non-carbon based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness. Sadly, during the international negotiations, the focus is on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting emissions are sufficient to achieve the goals. Politicians will base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly and dangerously misplaced. Economists examine the state of non-carbon based energy today - nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal and find that, taken together, alternative energy sources would get us less than halfway towards a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way towards stabilisation by 2100. We need many times more non-carbon based energy than which is currently produced. Yet the needed technology will not be ready in terms of scalability or stability. In many cases, there is still a need for the most basic research and development. We are not even close to getting this revolution started. Current technology is so inefficient that to take just one example, if we were serious about wind power, we would have to blanket most countries with wind turbines to generate enough energy for everybody, and we would still have the massive problem of storage. We don't know what to do when the wind does not blow. Policy makers should abandon fraught carbon reduction negotiations and instead make agreements to invest in research and development to get this technology to the level where it needs to be. According to the author, why are the international negotiations barely a solution to the problem of global warming?
- A.
Many countries fail to confine to the carbon-cut norms as set in these negotiations.
- B.
These negotiations put emphasis on the amount of carbon to be cut and not on the ways in which it can be done.
- C.
Recent research on the carbon-cut methods is overlooked by the politicians.
- D.
Such negotiations produce dominance of powerful countries over the others, thereby hampering their industrial development.
Attempted by 3 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Concept: A question asking for the author's stated reasoning requires locating the exact sentence where the author names a cause or flaw, then matching it to the option that paraphrases that specific idea — not any statement merely related to the passage's broader theme.
Application: In the fourth paragraph the author writes, “Sadly, during the international negotiations, the focus is on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so.” This is the author's stated flaw with the negotiations: they emphasise the target quantity of carbon to cut, not the method of achieving it.
Countries failing to adhere to carbon-cut norms is not stated anywhere in the passage; the passage is about negotiation priorities, not compliance failure.
Research being overlooked by politicians does not match either; the passage says politicians assume breakthroughs will happen by themselves, which is about misplaced faith in future technology, not about ignoring existing research.
Powerful countries dominating others is also unsupported; the passage calls negotiations fraught and divisive but never attributes this to domination or hampered industrial development.
Result: Only the amount-versus-method distinction is explicitly stated by the author as the flaw in the negotiations, so that is the correct answer.