80
.
Passage Four
If environmental trends continue on a positive track, some day children may ask, “Mommy, what was pollution?” But between that day and ours stands the environmental problem: global warming. Fighting an artificial greenhouse effect is the greatest of environmental challenges, because the cure will not be possible unless almost every nation on the Earth participates.
Will global warming cause harm? Some computer models suggest the world might warm by 5 degrees or more during this century, which might be dangerous. Melting polar ice could raise sea levels, while global warming might cause more intense storms and disrupt the weather patterns that bring rain to agricultural regions. Computer models are just a guess, of course, but when the farming areas that we all depend upon for food rely on current temperatures, rolling the dice (骰子) with the climate cannot be wise. Yet today the United States has no national law regulating greenhouse gases.
There are methods to reduce global warming. For instance, individuals can make lifestyle changes. Replace an SUV with a regular car; an SUV gives off 100 tons of greenhouse gases over its lifetime, which is far more than a car does. Moderate your use of home heating and air conditioning, most of which is powered by fossil fuels, and upgrade appliances to energy-saving models. Besides, emissions (排放) trading is a good measure. In 1990, rising levels of acid rain were considered an emergency problem. Congress passed an emissions-trading program, which allowed industrial managers to buy and sell permits to emit a limited amount of pollutants that cause acid rain. The acid-rain trading program created a financial motivation to invent technology to reduce acid rain; if a factory or power plant cut its emissions below the limit, it could sell the extra credits at a profit. Once there was money to be made by reducing acid rain, human creativity came into play. The results were spectacular.
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