Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Companies and individuals, rather than the government, should pay to clean up pollution in proportion to the amount of pollution they have produced.
Use reasons and specific examples or details to support your opinion.
Example Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh: 谢振礼 托福范文 16503
Pollution from human activities has been an increasing threat to public health, and thus a question arises about who should be responsible for repairing the damage done to the environment. To deal with this problem, the government, instead of directly footing the bills to clean up the messes, should play the role to make sure that there are laws in place to stop the situation from becoming worse. By way of collecting green taxes and pollution fines, the"trouble-makers" reasonably identified should be forced to take prevention and remediation measures at the same time.
To begin with, it is important for companies and individuals to be keenly aware that most pollution can be prevented. Prevention matters to avoiding pollution at its source in the sense that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The good news is that prevention would be much less costly than cure when it comes to reducing pollution. One thing that the government should do is to introduce pollution prevention programs to effectively control air, water and soil pollution. When the prevention plans are well carried out, pollution as a a threat does not have to be inevitable. Of course, an adequate budget is required to make a difference; and, for that matter, the money should come from the private sectors, rather than from the public funding.
Cleaning up pollution is a difficult task due in part to its potential costs, and again the question is who should pay? It can been seen that, in many parts of the world, pollution has already been too big a problem to deal with, but unfortunately it seems as though it were nobody's business. As an analogy to this mentality, "everybody seems to want to eat at the government's table but nobody seems to want to do the dishes." Applying to the polluter-pays principle, it is only right that companies and individuals, and not the government, should be accountable for the expenses of the environmental cleanup in proportion to the amount of pollution they have produced. What the government should do is to make polluters feel the burden of environmental costs: the more serious pollution they have caused, the more money they must pay. In practice, apart from its prevention programs to reverse the worsening situation, only by resorting to law-enforcement can the government make polluters pay to clean up pollution.
In conclusion, what with prevention and what with cure, the government is expected to collect financial resources in order to shoot pollution troubles. It is not the job of the government to pay to clean up pollution, but it is the responsibility of polluters who must have their shares of spending. So, those who think that the government should pay the bills, think again. (Essay created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh ielts360toefl@163.com )
