American Language Programm (стр. 2 )

So there will be plenty of new jobs.

We should face the fact, though, that such consolations will be of little comfort to the man or woman who is put out of work in the prime of life, since he or she will have no guaranteed getting one of those better jobs—if any job at all. The only certainty for these unemployed is that their painfully acquired working skills and experience will never again be wanted.

The other fact we must face is that, sadly, there is very little chance that any of us will see any real benefit from all our environmental efforts right away.

It is impossible for us to make things instantly better, no matter what we do. We can't. The best we can achieve is to prevent them from getting unspeakably worse. The damage to the ozone layer won't go away; in fact, It will increase, at least for a time, no matter how hard we work to limit it. Nor will the global warming stop, nor will our destroyed soil and water return at once.

Even so simple and local a thing as cleaning up a body of water won't produce immediate results that we can see. If you somehow manage to make your nearest lake sparkly clean, it won't stay that way. It will soon be contaminated again by airborne pollution unless a great many other people, living hundreds or thousands of miles away, also act.

Indeed, in the case of some very highly polluted rivers, the first effects9 of a cleanup may make them look worse than ever before. As the cleaner waters begin to dissolve out the accumulated sediments of generations at the bottom of the riverbed, lumps and clumps of filthy pollution are likely to break free and float away on the surface.

And the final, in some ways the scariest, consequence of environmental action we must face is the ripple effect from the inevitable economic changes.

Let's take a deep breath, brace ourselves10 and do that now.

Let's suppose that tomorrow the American government decides to put the necessary environmental measures into effect at once. Congress passes the necessary bills, and the President signs them into law.

Let's say that in that first legislative bundle are such relatively moderate, preliminary measures as a total ban on all CFCs. a fifty-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline to cut consumption, a stiff requirement that the cars of the near future average 50 miles per gallon, a three-cent tax on every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by the burning of fossil fuel, and even a cutback on military excesses by abandoning a dozen new weapons systems, phasing out many bombers, missiles, tanks and warships, reducing troop levels, and closing many military bases.

For starters, can you imagine what that kind of simultaneous bad news about autos, oil companies, public utilities, and defense manufacturers—the bluest of blue chips11—will do to the stock market? The October 1987 one-day drop of more than 500 points in the Dow-Jones averages12 (which meant that one-fifth of the dollar value of every American stock investment disappeared in a single day) would look like a minor "technical correction" by comparison. Even the Great Crash of October 192913 might pale alongside that sudden fall.

Can you imagine what the loss of all those Jobs—many of them very high-paying jobs, too—would do to the national unemployment figures?

As long as we're making our blood run cold with worst-case scenarios, try imagining, too, the consequences that will inevitably follow as some of these suddenly unemployed homeowners can no longer meet their mortgage14 payments and are foreclosed;15 as upper-middle-class families, accustomed to having considerable disposable incomes16 but now jobless, stop buying new cars, TV sets. VCRs, household appliances, clothing and furniture—cut back on travel and vacations—begin to sell off their own accumulated savings, in the form of stocks, bonds and mutual funds, so that they can meet their living expenses... and thus further contribute to the plunging market?

Can you imagine a Congress voting for, and a President signing, laws that will do all that to the economy?

And even if we can stretch our imaginations that far, so that we can persuade ourselves that the United States would be willing to take the first dose17 of this unpleasant medicine, what about the rest of the world?

For that may be the hardest part of all. If it seems that it will be difficult for America to change, consider what those changes mean for most of the other 140-odd18 countries in the world.

The environmental problem is not an equal-opportunity threat.

For example, the effects of global warmup—even severe warmup accompanied with the whole panoply of ills like high sea-level rise and violent weather—aren't going to affect everybody in the world to the same degree. Florida may have to worry about how high the ocean tides will rise. Switzerland has no such fear. If the American midwest suffers crop losses from a radical climate change, the Sahel,19 for instance, may actually find that in the changing precipitation20 patterns their own climate has Improved.

In that event, what should we expect? Can we ask the Sahelians to join with us in preventing what will actually for them be a blessing? And if we do ask, will they agree? Will they, for instance, display enough charity to overlook the fact that we, not they, are the ones who have actually created the problem?

To make a difficult problem even more complicated, it is unfortunately true that some parts of the human race may find themselves better off with a limited amount of global warming. It is also true that, as in the case of the Sahel, a good many of those areas are presently impoverished and indeed desperate in the face of the living conditions they now endure. How do we persuade those people to cooperate? It is a good deal to ask of any nation that it turn down a possible improvement in its own miserable lot for the sake of keeping our comparatively fortunate one from getting worse.

Even for Third World countries which would not benefit from the climate changes, we can't realistically expect them to stay undeveloped simply because it suits our convenience.

Some moralists might raise that as a question in ethics: Do we Americans have any right to ask an African. Asian, or Latin American peasant to foreswear any hope of ever owning a car or a dishwasher, or of flying in a jet plane? But as a practical matter, whether moral considerations would let us do that or not we won't have the privilege of making that decision.

Whether or not we ask them to abstain, few Third World people are going to be willing to abandon their hopes of making their own lives better for the prospect of some abstract future good—not while they can see every day, on their little black-and-white village television sets, that the rest of us are enjoying copious quantities of these things already.

It is not merely peasants who will be less than overjoyed at the prospect of making economic sacrifices. Some highly industrialized societies are in similar straits, If not worse ones.

The most conspicuous of them are the nations of Eastern Europe. Miraculously and wholly unexpectedly, they threw off the state Communism that ruled them for nearly half a century. It wasn't entirely ideology that caused that astonishing revolution. The desire for free speech, free elections, and all the other freedoms certainly played a part. But most of all, the driving force was simply a hunger for a better life—for better food, more conveniences, more of all worldly goods—for, In short, the good life of material well-being that Communism had promised and so abjectly failed to provide.

We have already seen that the Industries of the countries of the former Warsaw Pact21 are notoriously the dirtiest and most destructive in the world, and the ones most In need of reform for all our sakes.

And yet, if it comes to a choice between either cleaning their industries up or, alternatively, producing more goods for the people of those countries—as it surely will at least in the short term—which way do you think they will decide? For that matter, which way would you decide?

What we have here, In effect, is one more example of the unhappy economic principle which Garrett Hardin calls "the tragedy of the commons."22

Hardin expresses it in an allegory, which goes like tills: In a certain village twenty families live, and they share a common greensward23 which can pasture their household milk cows. The commons is just big enough to support exactly twenty cows. As long as each family puts just one cow out to pasture there, there will be plenty of grass for all of them, and all will have milk.

That's a good steady-state arrangement, as long as it stays that way.

If, however, one family puts two cows there, none of the cows will get quite enough to eat. The difference won't be large. None of the animals will starve, but their straitened diet means that each one of them will produce a little less milk each day. The total volume of milk the village's cows produce altogether will be pretty much the same, but It will be divided by twenty-one instead of by twenty.

What's the effect of this change?

It's an immoral one: selfishness triumphs. The selfish family that has put an extra cow on the common now has nearly twice as much milk as it had before... but each of the other families has to get along with a little less.

So, seeing this, enlightened self-interest causes each of the other families to put in a second cow as well…

And the ultimate effect is that now there are forty cows on a pasture that can't support more than twenty. It isn't just a matter of lowered milk yields now. After a while the whole herd starves to death.

Each family, you see, has acted rationally according to its own best understanding of what will serve its interests. The tragedy that results is that the effect of all this "rational" individual behavior has collectively ruined them all.

In just the same way, a cooperative strategy for dealing with the assaults on our global environment will promote the general good. . . but it may be to the advantage of some nations and some individuals to act contrary to it.

That's the cheating problem in a nutshell.

Country X will well understand that it, along with all the rest of the world, is threatened by increasing carbon dioxide emissions. . . but its leaders may reason that if everybody else does the no doubt difficult and expensive things necessary to deal with the problem, the relatively small damage that will be done to the environment by the Xians won't make any real difference. Therefore X can coast along in the good, old-fashioned, high-polluting way—and be able to outcompete the rest of the world in the price of their export manufactures while they do it, since they won't have to pay the bill for the sacrifices.

How can we deal with that?

We can start by trying to persuade every country in the world to sign appropriate treaties, of course. But then what do we do if some countries cheat, or refuse to sign in the first place? Do we declare war on them?

The longer we look at the problems, the harder they seem. The only thing that spurs us on to try to solve them is that we don't have a choice: the costs of not solving the problems are even higher.

Comprehension and Discussion

A. Circle the correct answer. If the answer is false, tell why.

1.  The writers say that unless we change our profligate ways, large-scale change is inevitable.

True False

Good company managers will know how to change to other products when the products they make are less in demand.

True False

The writers admit that if we make changes in our life-style to help the environment, some people will be hurt and some of them will never recover.

True False

Although it isn't possible to make environmental conditions better very soon, by working to clean up the world and by making changes in how we live, there will be improvement.

True False

В. Answer the following questions as completely as possible.

1.  Briefly explain how actions that are good for the environment could have negative effects and how these negative effects can be turned into positive ones. Explain the general idea first, and then give examples to prove the ideas.

2.  Explain, in your own words, how the environmental problem is not an "equal-opportunity threat" and what consequences this inequality has.

3.  What different reasons are given that would make it difficult to ask Third World countries to cooperate in plans to help stop global warming? Give as many as possible.

4.  How does the "tragedy of the commons" relate to environmental pollution?

5.  The writers state that we should try to persuade every country in the world to sign treaties to protect the environment. Then they ask, "what do we do if some countries cheat, or refuse to sign in the first place?" What is your opinion? What should or can be done in this case? What can be done to insure that all countries follow international agreements concerning the environment?

6.  A number of ethical issues are brought up in this reading. Does a country have the right to pass legislation that may put people out of work for the sake of an effect on the environment that may be conjectural? Do rich countries have the right to expect poor countries to sacrifice when the poor countries might actually benefit from climate changes? Or do rich countries have the right to ask poor countries to give up technologies which helped make the rich countries rich in the first place? What is your opinion on these questions or any others you can think of relating to this topic?

Vocabulary Practice p.304

Complete the sentences below with the correct words from the following lists. You may have to use different word forms and tenses. Do not use a word more than once.

Sentence 1-5	Sentence 6-10
abjectly pale myriad foreswear contaminate profligate flourish straits diversify infrastructure	coast allegory copious drain panoply spur notorious yield phase out conspicuous

1.  One of the problems with ecological issues is that when a country uses materials or methods that pollute the environment, the ________ does not just stay in that country. Pollution does not respect borders.

2.  Even many of the developed countries are in very serious economic (a.)_______ these days. The (b.) _________ social problems of the cities require a great deal of money to overcome. In addition, the long-neglected (c.) ________ has to be repaired or replaced before it is too late.

3.  However, the economic problems of the developed countries (a.) ________ by comparison with those of many developing nations. Many people in Third World countries are living in (b.) _________ poverty. Is it fair for developed societies which, by comparison, are (c.) _________ to ask poorer ones to sacrifice?

4.  Poor countries contend that it is the (a.) ________ of the rich countries that has caused most of the environmental problems. Consequently, the rich have no right to ask the poor to (b.) _________ the use of the same technology which the rich used to become rich.

5.  The poor countries say that if we want them to cut down on the use of fossil fuel and to ________ the types of fuel they use, we should help them financially.

6.  During the Cold War, (a.) _________ amounts of money were spent for a (b.) ________ of weapons. Opponents of this spending felt that too much money was being (c.) ________ away from the serious social problems of the country.

7.  Some people feel it is necessary for world peace to maintain these weapons. Others feel that it is time to ________ many of the weapons and to use the savings for social or environmental problems.

8.  It is well-known that the United States is the most (a.) ________ consumer of energy in the world. Americans are (b.) ________ for their love of large cars, low-priced gasoline, central heating, and air-conditioning.

9.  Environmentalists feel that some action must be taken now, that if we just (a.) ________, the earth may run out of time. They contend that although the investment may be expensive, the (b.) ________ will be worth the expense.

10.  Governments do not often make or change policy based on the type of (a.) ________ presented by Asimov and Pohl Unfortunately, it usually takes a major disaster to (b.) _______ governments on to action.

Discussion and Writing p.308

Discuss the following topics, first in pairs or small groups and then with the teacher and the entire class. After your discussion, pick one (or more) of the topics and write an essay about it.

What steps should governments take to implement actions that will help the environment and slow down global warming? Be realistic in your recommendations; take into account economics, employment, and politics. Do poor countries have an obligation to take measures to help slow down global warming even if it seems they will not be adversely affected by it? Should rich countries do anything to give poor countries an incentive to take these measures? Two of the reasons given for not making drastic changes in the production of different types of machinery to make them more energy efficient, such as developing battery-driven automobiles on a large scale, are that it would be too expensive and it would have far-reaching effects on the economy and on employment. Defend or oppose this position. Asimov and Pohl admit that "it may be to the advantage of some nations and some individuals to act contrary to" a cooperative strategy for dealing with problems in the environment. What can international organizations do to encourage countries to follow international environmental guide lines? What can be done if some countries cheat or refuse to cooperate? Summarize the problem of global warming. What are its causes? What is being done and what else can be done about it? What do you think will happen in the future? Discuss the issue of developed countries with a decreasing rate of population growth but a very high rate of energy use per capita vs. Developing countries with an increasing rate of population growth but a low rate of energy use. What is the responsibility of each in protecting the environ­ment?

Word List

Below is a list of the new words, and their different forms, presented in this chapter.

Noun	Verb	Adjective	Adverb
		abject	abjectly
allegory		allegorical	allegorically
alteration	alter
	coast
conjecture	conjecture	conjectural
conspicuousness		conspicuous	conspicuously
contamination	contaminate
copiousness		copious	copiously
		crucial	crucially
diversification	diversify
drain	drain
embarkation	embark
enhancement	enhance
	flourish
	foreswear
ineptness		inept	ineptly
infrastructure
intimidation	intimidate
intrigue	intrigue
		myriad
notoriousness		notorious	notoriously
notoriety
	offset
	pale
panoply
	phase out
profligacy		profligate	profligately
spur	spur
straits
	swamp
	tackle
	(un)tangle
viability		viable
yield	yield

Chill out.
Stop fighting over global warming -- here's the smart way to attack it.