Environmentalist: Efforts to attain an overall reduction in carbon use by convincing people to focus on their personal use of fossil fuels cannot achieve that goal. Even if most people changed their behavior, changes in personal use of fossil fuels cannot produce the needed reductions in carbon use. Only government policies can produce change on the required scale.
The environmentalist's argument requires assuming which one of the following?
Convincing most people to focus on their personal use of fossil fuels would not lead to their successfully pressuring the government into implementing policies that reduce carbon use.
This is necessary. If this isn’t true, then convincing people to focus on personal use will lead to government policies that reduce carbon use. This is the very thing that the author has said personal use cannot accomplish, so, the argument is destroyed.
The calculations needed to determine how best to minimize one's personal use of fossil fuels are too difficult for individuals to carry out on their own.
It doesn’t matter how difficult minimizing personal use is. Whether people can do it on their own or not, the argument is unaffected.
Efforts to convince people to focus on reducing their personal use of fossil fuels have been made only by those who are not currently involved in framing government policy.
It doesn’t matter who has been trying to convince people to reduce personal use. Negated, (C) would say that some of the people trying to convince others to reduce personal use are involved in government policy. This doesn’t harm the argument.
It is easier to convince the government to change its policies on carbon use than to convince people to reduce their personal use of fossil fuels.
Like (B), we are not concerned with the difficulty level of any of the things we’re discussing. It could be more difficult to convince the government, and that would have no effect on the argument.
People who are concerned about environmental issues are more likely to support political candidates who support environmental issues.
We aren’t talking about political candidates. Irrelevant.