GMAT Essays (AWA)

“It is unrealistic to expect individual nations to make, independently, the sacrifices necessary to conserve energy. International leadership and worldwide cooperation are essential if we expect to protect the world’s energy resources for future generations.”

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.


My Response :

I strongly believe that International leadership and worldwide cooperation are essential to protect the world’s energy resources. No doubt, that collective effort will indirectly require participating nations to make individual sacrifices, but it is highly unrealistic to expect them do so without global consensus. There are several reasons for this viewpoint.

First, all nations don’t consume equal amount of energy resources. The developed countries such as USA and UK consume almost five times the energy resources consumed by developing countries such as India and China. Therefore, even if, developing country such as India attempts to reduce energy consumption, it might have only negligible effect without an equivalent effort from developed countries.

Second, it is human nature to become undisciplined without external control and there is no such evidence that this law won’t apply to nations. After all a nation is nothing but a group of people. Hence, until and unless, there is a governing body asking nations to curb their energy consumption and to conserve energy resources, it is highly unlikely that nations will do so.

Third, energy consumption is even more difficult for a developing country. Any developing country requires more energy consumption because of increasing industrialization. In this situation, it is unlikely that such nations will make efforts at cost of their growth. Therefore, an International organization should come forth, consider the ever changing global economy , taking into account the necessity of growth for developing nations, determine how much individual effort is required form each nation ,and make sure that all nations stick to the plan.

In sum, we should not expect nations to make independent efforts for energy conservation. Instead, global leadership and cooperation is required to conserve energy resources for our future generations.