Example of Argument Essays

Dear Students,

Below are some rather different type of argument essays that focuses on the writer's point of view, which are used as argument points. I've noticed that most of you use your point of view to write your argument essays. However, take note of how the authors use relevant evidence to support their point of views.


The Environmental Crisis is Not Our Fault

I am as responsible as most eco-citizens: I bike everywhere; I don't own a car; I recycle newspapers, bottles, cans and plastics; I have a vegetable garden in the summer; I buy organic products; and I put all vegetable waste into my backyard compost bin, probably the only on in all of Greenwich Village. But I don't at the same time believe that I am saving the planet, or in fact doing anything of much consequence about the various eco-crises around us. What's doing the same it would make any but the slightest difference.

Leave aside ozone depletion and rain forest destruction - those are patently corporate crimes that no individual actions can remedy to any degree. Take, instead, energy consumption in this country. (here the author gave statistical evidence). Individual energy use, in sum, was something like 28% of total consumption. Although you and I cutting down on energy consumption would have some small effect (and should be done), it is surely the energy consumption of industry and other large institutions such as government and agribusiness that needs to be addressed first. And it is industry and government that must be forced to explain what their consumption is for, what is produced by it, how necessary it is, and how it can be drastically reduced.

The point is that the ecological crisis is essentially beyond "our" control, as citizens or householders or consumers or even voters. It is not something that can be halted by recycling or double-pane insulation. It is the inevitable by-product of our modern industrial civilization, dominated by capitalist production and consumption and serviced and protected by various institutions of government, federal to local. It cannot possibly be altered or reversed by simple individual actions, even by the actions of the millions who took part in Earth Day - and even if they all went home and fixed their refrigerators and from then on walked to work. Nothing less than a drastic overhaul of this civilization and an abandonment of its ingrained gods - process, growth, exploitation, technology, materialism, anthroprocentricity and power - will do anything substantial to halt our path to environmental destruction, and it's hard to see how life-style solutions will have an effect on that.

What I find truly pernicious about such solutions is that they get people thinking they are actually making a difference and doing their part to halt the destruction of the earth: "There, I've taken all the bottles to the recycling center and used y string bag at the grocery store; I guess that'll take care of global warming." It is the kind of thing that diverts people from the hard truths and hard choices and hard actions, from recognition that they have to take on the larger forces of society - corporate and governmental - where true power, and true destructiveness, lie.

And to the argument that, well, you have to start somewhere to raise people's consciousness, I would reply that this individualistic approach does not in fact raise consciousness. It does not move people beyond their old familiar liberal perceptions of the world. Congressperson solutions, and it does not begin to provide them with a new vocabulary and modes of thought necessary for a true change of consciousness. We need, for example, to think of recycling centers not as the answer to our waste problems, but as a confession that the system of packaging and production in this society is out of control. Recycling centers are like hospitals; they are the institutions at the end of the cycle that take care of problems that would never exist if ecological criteria had operated at the beginning of the cycle. Until we have those kinds of understandings, we will not do anything with consciousness except reinforce it with the same misguided ideas that created the crisis.

Second Example:
Myths We Wouldn’t Miss

There are tall tales and legends. There are fables and apocryphal stories. And there are myths – a number of which we would like to see disappear. Here are some myths that would not be missed:

MYTH: Offshore drilling would be an ecological disaster.
Truth is, there hasn’t been a serious spill in US waters resulting from offshore drilling operations in more than twenty years – and even that one, in Santa Barbar Channel in 1969, caused no permanent damage to the environment.

This is why we always have suck a problem with the reasoning of those who call for moratoriums or outright bans on such activity while the nation continues to import foreign oil. The fact is, oil industry offshore drilling operations cause less pollution than urban runoff, atmospheric phenomena, municipal discharges or natural seeps.

Why this nation will choose not to drill for oil and not to provide the jobs, profits and taxed such activity would mean for the American economy when there are no better alternatives is a mystery we hope puzzles others as much as it does us.

MYTH: America is a profligate waster of energy
The myth makers like to throw around numbers that read like this; with only 5% of the world’s population, the US uses about 25% of the world’s energy. But ours is a big country – three thousand miles from one ocean to the next. Transportation accounts for more than 60% of US oil use. We could probably cut down if we moved everybody into one corner of the country, but where is the waste?

If certainly isn’t the automobiles that are inefficient. They are twice as efficient as the ones we used twenty years ago. If American drivers use more gasoline than their counterparts in Europe and Japan, it may just have something to do with the country’s size.

In fact, proof of the country’s size may be in our economic output – and may also hold a clue as to why we use the energy we do. Despite having only 5% of the world’s population, America may indeed use 25% of the world’s energy. However, according to the latest statistics. We also produce about 25% of the world’s goods and services. Again, where’s the waste?….

MYTH: Conservation is the answer to America’s energy problems.

No doubt about it, we all need to be careful of the amount of envergy we use. But asa long as this nation’s economy needs to grow, we are going to need energy to fuel that growth.

For the foreseeable future, there are no viable alternatives to petroleum as the major source of energy, especially for transportation fuels. Let’s face it. Over the past twenty years we have learned to conserve – in our factories, our homes, our cars. We probably can – and should – do more. But soncervvation and new exploration should not be mutually exclusive, because even without an increase in energy consumption, we are using up domestic reserves of oil and gas and must replace them. For the good of the economy, those reserves should be replace with new domestic production , to the extent economically possible. Otherwise, the only solutions would be additional imports or no growth. And stifling growth would be a gross disservice to the people for whom such growth would provide the opportunity for a better life.

Simply put, America is going to need some evergy for all its people.

And that is no myth