essay - GMAT: Argument 34

The following appeared in an editorial from a magazine produced by an organization dedicated to environmental protection:

In order to effectively reduce the amount of environmental damage that industrial manufacturing plants cause, those who manage the plants must be aware of the specific amount and types of damage caused by each of their various manufacturing processes. However, few corporations have enough financial incentive to monitor this information. In order to guarantee that corporations reduce the damage caused by their plants, the federal government should require every corporation to produce detailed annual reports on the environmental impact of their manufacturing process, and the government should impose stiff financial penalties for failure to produce these reports.

Discuss how well reasoned . . .etc.

Answer:
The author asserts that the federal government should require corporations to submit annual reports regarding environmental dameges that the manufacturing process in their plants could cause. Besides, if a corporation fails to do that, the government should impose financial penalty on the corportion. The assumption that he bases his argument on is that environmental damage is caused by corporate management's unawareness of their plants' manufacturing processes harming the damage. His argument, however, has serious flaws and thereby is weak.

First, the solution that he deduced from his argument is too indirect to accomplish the ultimate target, which is to preserve environment. I mean, just requiring corporations to submit annual reports on their manufacturing processes is not enough to protect environment. For instace, despite corporate management's awareness of the manufacturing process, without conclete corrective actions such as improving the plant's desposing process, submitting reports makes no sense.

Second, although his plan says that corporations need to submit the report annually, I believe that it is not enough from a time point of view. I mean, in today's fact-changing world, the timing can't catch up most of changes that occur on corporations' manufacturing processes. For instance, during the period, a lot of plants could be built and they could emitted huge hazardous byproducts.

In conclusion, he fails to make his plan convincing for reasons that I mentioned above. To strengthen the idea, he must clarify a clear link between his plan and the outcome (the outcome must be targeted on environmental preservation), and consider more appropriate timeframe that the government requires any action of corporations.