Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The only effective way to encourage energy conservation is by increasing prices of gasoline and electricity. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
你是否同意以下观点？提高油价和电费是罕有的有效的鼓励节约能源的方法。请用具体的理由和事例来说明。
It is my personal belief that if products and/or services are easy to get and inexpensive to buy, most people will abuse and overuse them. Take fast food, for example. If you go to a McDonald's, you can get a huge amount of food at a relatively cheap price. Thus,many people eat copious amounts of such “fast” food and become seriously overweight.
On the other hand, if you go to a very expensive upscale restaurant, you will be more likely to relish small portions of delicious food. The higher the price, the more careful people seem to be about how much they consume. This is particularly true for such commodities as electricity and gasoline.
In the typical modern household, there is a constant battle between the parents and the children to conserve electricity. Children appear to be blithely ignorant of the monthly cost of having living room lights and electrical appliances. Their parents, however, are the ones who actually pay the utility bills, and so they are often deeply concerned about whether or not the family is saving or wasting electrical power. If we go back to an even earlier generation-those people who grew up during the Great Depression-we find an even stronger reluctance to splurge on today's modern conveniences. Without serious increases in the price of utilities, how will the young people of today feel about conserving energy when they themselves are part of the older generation?
There is a distinct correlation between high gas prices and the number of people who take public transportation. When gas prices go up, so do bus rider number. Unlike Americans, drivers in Europe have long had to pay extremely high prices for petrol （nearly US $10 a gallon）； thus, countries like England and Germany have built extensive public transportation systems, from subways to trains to buses, and many more people in London and Munich “ride the rails” rather than drive their own cars. Currently,Americans are paying around $3 a gallon, so there is little incentive for them to curtail their own driving in favor of taking a bus.
It would be nice to think that we could encourage people to conserve energy by just asking them to do so, or by making appeals to them based on our shared humanity. But history has shown that general incentives do not work; personal profit is always moreattractive. If we go ahead and raise the price of gasoline or electricity to astronomical levels, will people still insist on driving three blocks to the store or leaving the lights on all night long? I think not.
