Environmentalist: Conclusion 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. Support Even if most people changed their behavior, changes in personal use of fossil fuels cannot produce the needed reductions in carbon use. Support Only government policies can produce change on the required scale.
Convincing people to reduce their personal use of fossil fuels cannot achieve an overall reduction in carbon use, because only government policy can do that.
The environmentalist established a requirement for carbon reduction (government policy), and then pointed to something else entirely (personal use) and said that it cannot lead to carbon reduction. But why not? Supposedly, because personal use is not the same as government policy. That is true, but the fact that personal use doesn’t fulfill the requirement of government policy doesn’t mean that the requirement has been failed. Those things can coexist.
Phrased differently: What if the change in personal use somehow leads to government policy, and so was ultimately the cause of carbon reduction? We need to know that this is impossible.
Note: This is a difficult assumption to identify. You may need to rely on negation, armed only with the inference that personal use does not negate government policy.
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.
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