Hi i need help with this question
identify a key term from either paragraph that you want to focus on. Using
evidence from both passages, explain what the key term means for Klein and how
it fits in to her essay. Then, explain the significance of the key term and
what it means to you.
Passage 1
The start of 1989 felt to so many in the environmental movement like a
momentous juncture, as if the thawing of the Cold War and the warming of the
planet were together heling to birth a new consciousness, one in which
cooperation would triumph over domination, and humility before nature’s
complexity would challenge technological hubris.
As governments came together to debate responses to climate change,
strong voices from developing countries spoke up, insisting that the core of
the problem was the high-consumption lifestyle that dominated in the West. In
a speech in 1989, for instance, India’s President R. Venkataraman argued
that the global environmental crisis was the result of developed countries’
“excessive consumption of all materials and through large-scale
industrialization intended to support their stlyes of life.” If wealthy
countries consumed less, then everyone would be safer.
But not only would the Western consumer lifestyle survive intact, it
would grow significantly more lavish, with credit card debt per household
increasing fourfold between 1980 and 2020. Simultaneously, that voracious
lifestyle would be exported to the middle and upper classes in every corner of
the globe?including, despite earlier protestations, India, where it would
wreak environmental damage on a scale difficult to fathom. (214)
Passage 2
While it is true that renewable technologies hold tremendous promise to
lower emissions, the kinds of measures that would do so on the scale we need
involve building vast new electricity grids and transportation systems, often
from the ground up. Even if we started construction tomorrow, it would
realistically take many years, perhaps decades, before the new systems were up
and running. Moreover, since we don’t yet have economies powered by clean
energy, all that green construction would have to burn a lot of fossil fuels
in the interim?a necessary process, but one that wouldn’t lower our
emissions fast enough. Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start
immediately. That means that if we wait for what Bows-Larkin describes as the
“whiz-bang technologies” to come online “it will be too little too late.”
So what to do in the meantime? Well, we do what we can. And what we can
do?what doesn’t require a technological infrastructure revolution?is to
consume less, right away. Policies based on encouraging people to consume
less are for more difficult for our current political class to embrace than
policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green
just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer
goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all our eggs in the
green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are
safely within market logic?indeed, they encourage us to go out and buy more
new, efficient, green cars and washing machines. (225)