申論題

III. Discourse
    Everybody faces choices every day that carry a climate cost. Do we turn the lights on in the morning, or is the light of daybreak sufficient for finding matching socks? Do we feast on bacon and eggs for breakfast, or will a bowl of oatmeal suffice? There is much talk these days about the need to lead lower-carbon lifestyles. There is also lots of finger-pointing going on. However, who is truly walking the climate walk?The carnivore who doesn’t fly? The vegan who travels to see family abroad? If nobody is without carbon sin, who gets to cast the first lump of coal? If all climate advocates were expected to live off the grid, eating only what they grow themselves and wearing only the clothes they’d knitted from scratch, there wouldn’t be much of a climate movement.    19   
    We don’t need to ban cars； we need to electrify them. We don’t need to ban burgers； we need climate-friendly beef. To spur these changes,we need to put a price on carbon, to incentivize polluters to invest in these solutions. Though air accounts for only a paltry 2% of global emissions, I doubt whether or not climate scientists should fly consuming far more than 2% of my Twitter timeline.    20    We have a job to do, after all. Still, a single scientist choosing to never fly again is not going to change the system. Purchasing carbon offsets for lights is a viable means of decarbonizing your air travel； nevertheless, the true solution, pricing carbon, requires policy change.
    There is a long history of industry-funded “deflection campaigns” aimed to divert attention from big polluters and place the burden on individuals.   21   Nonetheless, to force Americans to give up meat, travel or other things central to the lifestyle they’ve chosen to live is politically dangerous. It plays right into the hands of climate-change deniers whose strategy tends to be to portray climate abettors as freedom- hating totalitarians.
      22   We need systematic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care. The good news is that we have tactics to bring environmentally friendly options to fruition: pricing carbon emissions and creating incentives for renewable energy and reduced consumption. By putting a price on carbon, people can actually make money by reducing emissions, selling their services to
corporations that are always looking for ways to cut costs. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of Americans when there’s a dime to save! A price on carbon needs to be designed so that marginalized communities most at risk from climate impacts aren’t adversely impinged
on economically.   23   We need change not merely at the breakfast table but at the ballot as well.
(A) Meaningful change rarely happens with the galvanizing force of influential individuals.
(B) Swinging into action is important, which is indeed something we should all champion.
(C) Corporate commitments to sustainable growth and net-zero emissions are on the rise nowadays.
(D) This is why we really need political change at every level, from local leaders to federal legislators all the way up to the President.
(E) Unfortunately, sometimes doing science means traveling great distances, and we don’t always have the time or luxury to take slower low-
carbon options.
(AB) The bigger issue is that focusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of
the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds
of global carbon emissions.
(AC) That level of sacrifice is unacceptable to most people.

23.