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E1A Essay Quiz 1 Sept 30 – Sample Student Answers
QUESTION
In your opinion, why does Bill Gates call for an “Energy Miracle”—and not
just an “Energy Solution”—in his 2016 Annual Letter? In your personal
opinion as a reader, does Gates’ choice of the word “miracle” make his overall
argument more (or less) convincing? Why? Support your answer with
plenty of brief quotes and examples from Gates’ letter.
ANSWER #1
In my opinion, Gates calls for an "Energy Miracle" in his
2016 Annual Letter because he is realistic about the
magnitude of reducing carbon emissions to zero but is not
allowing the size of the issue to be an excuse for inaction.
His use of the term miracle rather than solution
communicates to me an attractive honesty. He is not
sugarcoating the sobering facts about climate change, and
his use streamlined mathematical equation at once both
summarizes the energy crisis and demands a a
miracle. The 2015 statistic that the world emitted 36 billion
tons of carbon dioxide to produce energy was particularly
effective in illustrating urgency. "It’s worth remembering,
because it will come in handy... someone may tell you they
know how to remove 100 million tons of carbon per year.
That sounds like a lot, but if you do the math—100 million
divided by 36 billion—you’ll see that they’re talking about 0.3
percent of the problem". As a reader, he is not letting me get
away from the reality of facts. Climate change is not a
passive, unwelcome guest that a quick fix solution can do
away with. It is a skulking and life-threatening behemoth that
will require effective collaboration, time, and creativity on the
borderline of crazy to tackle. In a word, an energy "miracle".
It has become common today particularly among my
generation to dismiss the possibility of miracles. Gates' use
of the word miracle in his argument compels me with the
power of hope combined with the power of focused hard
work. I am drawn to his argument, because I am drawn to
the audacity of his expectation to see a miracle manifest. It's
a word that challenges me to broaden my perspective and to
turn my eyes away from inward dwelling or naval gazing,
and towards participation in a greater vision. "I’ve seen
miracles happen before. The personal computer. The
Internet. The polio vaccine. None of them happened by
chance. They are the result of research and development
and the human capacity to innovate". Ultimately, Gates is not
daunted by the monstrous issue of climate change, and he
invites me as a reader into his anticipation of a miracle.
Though it took 40 decades for oil to go from being 5 percent
to 25 percent of the world's energy supply, Gates is so
optimistic that he makes this prediction: "Within the next 15
years—and especially if young people get involved—I expect the
world will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our
planet and power our world".
ANSWER #2:
Note: This answer contains some truly impressive
background research, but lacks a brief preview
of the entire answer right up front in paragraph
one.
QUESTION
In your opinion, why does Bill Gates call for an “Energy Miracle”—and not
just an “Energy Solution”—in his 2016 Annual Letter? In your personal
opinion as a reader, does Gates’ choice of the word “miracle” make his overall
argument more (or less) convincing? Why? Support your answer with
plenty of brief quotes and examples from Gates’ letter.
" In short, we need an energy miracle."- In his 2016 annual letter, Bill Gates
attempts to respond to a question uttered by some "high school students in
Kentucky" about what "superpower" he wished he had. In response Mr.
Gates stated that he wished to have "more energy" and proceeds to explain
this statement in a lengthy essay forming a section of this annual letter. He
begins by calling on all his readers to "imagine, for a minute, life without
energy," evoking a sense of empathy within us for the "1.3 billion people"
who have yet to "access" this "miracle." Following this, Mr. Gates utters a
very noble statement that he wishes to "help the poorest people" "find a
cheap, clean source of energy" in order to improve their lives, reasoning that
throughout "history" much of life's delights have been made possible by the
availability of "energy." Unfortunately, Mr.Gates hopes to "transform the
lives of millions" by making "energy" accessible to all clashes with the evergrowing concern of climate change. Currently, the vast majority of the
Earth's energy is derived from the combustion of fossil fuel, all of which
produce the unwanted side-effect of increasing the levels of "CO2" in the
atmosphere thus propagating the incidence of global warming. Recognizing
this dilemma, Mr. Gates sums up the crux of his passage, stating that we
would need an "energy miracle"; a way of providing energy without
unwanted bonus of CO2 , the solution to which he believes lies in the
advancement of technology. [Good summary but you have not yet begun to
answer my question...]
Google defines a solution as "a means of solving a problem or a difficult
situation" whilst claiming that a "miracle" meant an "improbable
development" with "welcome consequences". I certainly, believe that the use
of the word "miracle" takes away from the overall impact of Mr. Gates'
essay. [OK now you answered it, but you need to preview/list briefly the
main reasons you feel it "takes away" from his argument.]
I, personally believe that Mr. Gates' solution to climate change, although
noble, places far too great of an emphasis on technology. In the words of
Duncan Green, the strategic adviser of Oxfam GB, Mr.Gates' annual letter
"offers" a "technocrat's charter- a parallel universe in which new tech will
solve ill health, climate change, illiteracy and just about everything else."
With an exuberant sense of optimism Mr.Gates even proceeds to predict that
within "15 years" " the world will discover a clean energy breakthrough"
that is capable of saving this planet. On my part, I believe this to be an
excessive amount of positivism, completely ignorant of the roles which
factors like domestic politics, the conditions of the states and of its citizens
plays in the development of a country. As Mr. Green would say "is it OK to
airbrush out the messiness of real developing countries, turning them into an
imaginary peaceful, low income recipients of technology?" I believe that it is
not, and Mr. Gates oversimplification of the matter could very much be the
thing which prompts the failure of his ideas. [Wow nice job with
background research! That's an extremely pointed and poignant critique!]
In 2015, Bill Gates' annual letter states his incentives to use science and
technology to improve access to vaccines, it was widely criticized as being
far too idealistic and simplistic. David McCoy, a public health researcher a
the University of London, claims that there has been "very little" in the way
of any "independent evolution" towards achieving Mr. Gates' aims. Mr.
McCoy's statements emphasizes the difficulties of achieving any significant
progress in any department if this progress were to rely on a single
propellant, in this case technology. It appears far too trusting Mr. Gates to
believe that "his foundation" with its solely "technological style of
addressing" (Yojana Sharma, writer at scidev.net) matters can be expected to
account for a global solution. Relying completely on technology or science
to come up with these life-changing "breakthroughs" is a recipe for disaster,
or at least a very slow road to a solution. This is a statement that Mr. Gates
himself had confirmed in October 2015 when he stated that he "was pretty
naive" in terms of calculating "'how long" the "process" of solving a global
issue would take through the means of an "invention". So, is it right for Mr.
Gates to cheerfully predict a paradigm shifting "invention" to occur within
the next "15 years"? In my opinion, this time frame appears to be too
narrow, and I am skeptical that a single discovery in technology could bring
about the major change of bringing the world's CO2 emissin rates down
from "36 billion tons" to "zero".
Although I do understand the origins of Mr. Gates faith towards technology,
having witnessed the growth of the "internet", I do believe that this faith is
morphing into something quite blinded from reality. Looking back at his
preceeding annual letters it is obvious that Mr. Gates has maintained the
same structure to his essays. Like last year when he started with a general
illustration of the problem of health, leading up to a solution related to
vaccinations before then proceeding to a call of action in which he
encourages people to have a continued and unwavering faith that science
will deliver a miraculous solution to this health epidemic within a limited
time frame. This is very similar to what Mr.Gates is doing in his "More
Energy" essay, except now he urges us to place our faith in technology. I
believe, that in this respect, Mr. Gates has failed to learn from his
foundation's "history" or being to reliant on a single facet of education to
deliver a solution. With his plethora of experience shouldn't he be
abandoning this method bound to fail?
In conclusion, I believe that deep within his heart, Mr. Gates realizes the
improbability of an epic discovery being made alone through technology,
and that is why he has chosen to use the word "miracle". I do believe that his
choice of this description has made his argument far less convincing and
points towards his inability to see the shortcomings of the method he
chooses to solve these global problems. [So all you really need to do is "flip
the essay" to put this succinct statement of the problem right up front]
This essay presents a detailed and creative critique of Gates’ position. That
said, I’d prefer the “main answer” appear immediately in paragraph one,
instead of waiting until paragraph #2.
In my opinion, Bill Gates calls for an “Energy Miracle” and not just an
“Energy Solution” to emphasize the magnitude of the challenge that finding
a solution would be. As he himself admits, “The challenge we face is big,
perhaps bigger than many people imagine.” Furthermore, due to the fact that
every day more and more CO2 is being released into the environment, he
warns that “time is not on our side.” As such, merely calling for an “Energy
Solution” would not adequately convey the gravity of the situation or just
how difficult it would be to find a solution. Indeed, discovering a solution
within the time frame that we have – “by the end of this century” – would be
nothing short of an “Energy Miracle.”
However, in my personal opinion as a reader, I feel that by using the term
“miracle” in his letter, weakens his overall argument by making it seem out
of reach. To be sure, he specifies that when he says “miracle,” he does not
mean “something that’s impossible” because he has “seen miracles happen
before.” He goes on to list the personal computer, the internet, and the
vaccine for polio, and explains that they were not inventions by chance but
rather “the result of research and development and the human capacity to
innovate.” But that has little to do with the possibility, let alone plausibility,
of “miracles.” Of the three examples that he gave, only the polio vaccine
was created under time pressure and a pressing need for an immediate
solution. Both the internet and the personal computer, while certainly being
marvelous inventions that greatly improved the standard of living in our
world, were not answers to problems that, if unsolved, would result in a
catastrophic consequence. Had the internet and the personal computer only
been invented decades later than they were, humanity as a whole would
simply have advanced more slowly. There was no sense of urgency for those
inventions, unlike the CO2 problem. [That's a very creative and smart
critique!]
Furthermore, he claims that reducing CO2 emissions by half – something that
we do not even currently have a solution to – “wouldn’t be enough… No, we
need to get all the way down to zero.” He also admits that “energy research
and the transition to new energy sources takes a long time. It took four
decades for oil to go from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to 25
percent.” And that was for something that already existed, not something
that had yet to be discovered! Yet, in spite of this, he goes on to make an
incredulous prediction that “Within the next 15 years… I expect the world
will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and
power our world” – a bold but sadly unconvincing statement that is backed
up by poor little other than sheer optimism. In fact, even if what he says is
true, the fact that “Governments have a big role to play” makes his optimism
even more puzzling. Gates seems to be completely taking for granted the
fact that the governments of other nations share the goals of the U.S. in this
endeavor. [...or that the U.S. Government shares this goal in any serious way
either.] Yet again another belief that seems to be completely grounded in
fantasy, as he does not bring any examples to indicate that the governments
of those nations would be onboard with such a major overhaul to their
infrastructures and national budgets.
None of this even begins to address the issue that there are many countries in
the world whose economies depend largely on the profits from oil exports
and natural resources. Would they be onboard with a project that would
likely hurt them financially and cause them to lose their clout on the world
stage, or would they oppose it? Gates ends off his letter on an extremely
optimistic note saying “A cheap, clean source of energy would change
everything. Imagine that.” Unfortunately, much of this seems doomed to
remain exactly that, an imagination. While he has certainly said much of the
urgency of the situation, his letter does little to convince me of the viability
of his plan.
ANSWER #3:
NOTE: this answer contains a strong and creative critique of Gates’ position
– although it needs a bit of polishing in the intro paragraph to preview these
points (and perhaps more brief quotes and examples to summarize Gates):
In his 2016 Annual Letter, Bill Gates uses the phrase “Energy Miracle”
rather than “Energy Solution” in order to more strongly assert the challenges
our generation must face to find the ideal energy source that is, as he
describes himself, “cheap and clean”. In his letter, Gates begins by
addressing high school students about the presumably unknown existence of
people in poor living conditions without access to energy sources like
electricity. He goes on to explain that in order for these people to have
access to developed countries’ “benefits and opportunities that come with
power…we need to find a way to get them cheap, clean energy”. Backed by
scientific research, Gates claims that through his formula P*S*E*C = C02,
the variable that would allow the greenhouse gas C02 from aggravating
climate change issues and making the poorest families suffer even more, is
to find a “miracle” invention that will eliminate carbon emissions to zero. In
my opinion Bill Gates’, use of the word “miracle” to describe the type of
energy we need to find makes his overall argument about being able to help
the poor with clean energy less convincing.
Bill Gates reports seeing how people in countries including Nigeria
and Tanzania live in pitiful situations of poverty and writes, “I like to think
about what an energy miracle like that would mean in a slum I once visited”.
He emphasizes the dramatically less developed life-style people there live in
compared to that of people in developed Western countries. In my opinion,
Gates has a point in encouraging our generation to urgently look for ways to
come up with a zero carbon emission system to halt climate change.
However, I cannot clearly see how clean energy would be the “miracle” that
would help us succeed in the primary goal Gates’ asserts, which is that of
helping the poor. Gates takes Nigeria as a basic example. It is important to
remember that Nigeria is ranked thirteenth in the world for countries who
hold and produce the largest resources of oil production. However, their
unstable economic and political situation makes it so that wealth from their
source of oil is not used to benefit their own people. The “energy miracle”
that Gates claims would allow Nigerians to “run hospitals, light up schools,
and use tractors to grow more food” is instead used to exploit the countries
people and benefit the economies of already developed countries. In
Tanzania, a leader in the resource of Gold in Africa and also the country
from which Gates shows a photo of a girl “doing her homework by
candlelight”, is home to children who do not even go to school, but work in
Gold mines. In other words, the “energy miracle” Gates claims will be
difficult to find seems even more “miracle” and idealistic in nature because
for me, it doesn’t fully address the question of why are these people already
poor in a generation where energy in the form of oil is already cheap
compared to how much newly invented clean energy will be? Gates makes
too much of an idealized connection between clean energy and helping the
poor. Furthermore, Gates’ use of the word “miracle” automatically makes
me think that changing the way those countries are integrated into our
current capitalistic and consumer-based society seems much to idealistic for
him to even consider.
Here’s a well-organized answer that provides a strong defense of Gates’
position. But aren’t the “strong, rich” people precisely the ones Gates’ is
counting on? I could have used a bit more explanation of this point.
Bill Gates demands an “energy miracle” because that is what our planet
needs. We no longer have the luxury of waiting around for the smart, rich
people of the world to solve the growing problem of climate change. By
laying out the problems we, as a species, are up against and being honest
about what it will take to combat them, he puts forth an extremely
convincing and rousing call to action from any and everyone who has any
stake at all in the future of our planet.
We have been feeling the effects of climate change for a while now. The
Earth is getting hotter every year, thousands of animal and plant species are
going extinct, and places like California have not had a “normal” year of
rain for many years. Things are only continuing to get worse, and scientists
say, “...that to avoid these dramatic long-term changes to the climate, the
world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent by 2050, and
eliminate them entirely by the end of the century.”
Below is Gates’ equation for calculating the amount of CO2 produced by the
world:
The goal is to get the amount of CO2 produced to equal zero. P (world
population) is going up, S (services used per person) is going up, E (energy
needed to provide those services) is going down but can never reach zero, so
C (carbon produced to produce the energy) is what desperately needs to
become zero. We have made some great strides towards this goal, with “new
green technologies [that] are allowing the world to produce more carbon-
free energy from solar and wind power.” Some (naysayers) would argue that
this existing technology is enough, and we just need to work on getting
things like solar panels and wind farms all around the world, but Gates
claims otherwise. He argues that, while solar and wind power are great, they
are not enough, because “solar and wind power are reliable energy sources
so long as the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. But people still need
dependable energy on cloudy days, at nighttime, and when the air is still.”
He also points out that the energy produced on a really sunny day can’t be
saved to use on a cloudy one, because no battery exists that would be able to
store so much energy. Solar and wind alone could never be enough to power
the world without the use of fossil fuels. With such a small amount of time
to make a huge change to the way we power our world and so little idea how
we’re going to do that, there is no other option we have than to rely on an
“energy miracle”.
Some might say that calling for an “energy miracle” will discourage people
from working to come up with an answer to our energy problem, but I
disagree. I feel that by being honest with the readers about the gravity of the
situation that we, the inhabitants of Planet Earth, are in, Gates earns a huge
amount of credibility and provides a very convincing argument. By citing
examples like the invention of the personal computer, Internet, and the polio
vaccine, he disproves the notion that “miracle” = impossible. Gates even
lays out exactly what we need to do in order to make this miracle happen.
He calls for a “massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas—
even ones that might sound a little crazy…”, and provides a couple of
examples of some “crazy” ideas already in the works- “new ways to make
solar and wind power available to everyone around the clock”, “a possible
way to use solar energy to produce fuel”, or “batteries the size of swimming
pools with huge storage capacity”. One crucial point he makes is that the
governments of countries all around the world need to invest and focus on
research into clean energy. The government plays a large role in
technological advancement and scientific research, and he urges them to
make research into clean energy one of their top priorities. Perhaps the most
important and motivating part of Gates’ letter comes at the bottom, where he
urges young people like myself and my classmates in this English class to
play our part in creating this “energy miracle”. Gates reminds us that this
problem is our problem to solve, and that we are the ones who will inherit a
dying planet if we fail to act soon. He says that by getting educated and
speaking out about any ideas we have on how to solve the energy crisis, we
can be the ones to create the energy miracle that the planet desperately
needs. I know how determined and persistent the members of my generation
are, and I have seen how willing we are to rally behind one another to
promote our cause. If we can make combating climate change our #1
mission, I know that we will be the ones to discover the “clean energy
breakthrough” that “will save our planet and power our world.”