Demery-Eddins Aff

The energy that reaches our homes and schools and places of employment does not arrive out of thin air, pure electricity to meet our basic needs.  It is produced by corporations with an incentive to maximize profit and minimize risk, to produce that energy with as low a cost as possible, often without regard to the human costs associated with energy production.  The natural byproducts of energy and materials produced from fossil fuel create pollution that poisons the air, the water, and the soil.  The effects of this pollution are not felt equally, however.  Communities of color and working class communities bear the disproportionate brunt of toxic chemicals and harmful pollutants that are the inevitable result of energy produced from fossil fuels.  We present the community of Mossville Louisiana as an example of the carnage inflicted by environmental injustice.  

Subra, July 2007, Wilma Subra served as vice-chair of the EPA National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology (NACEPT). “Industrial Sources of Dioxin Poisoning in Mossville, Lousiana” www.loe.org/images/content/100423/mossville.pdf )
Mossville is a historic, African American community………………….. can be passed on to fetuses and infants during pregnancy and lactation. 

In particular, unincorporated communities are the hardest hit – these communities lie outside of major cities and do not have any direct political representation.  As a result, major corporations participate in a toxic free for all as the lack of political oversight means there is nothing to stop companies from locating their factories in the backyards of people of color, resulting in far higher rates of disease and death among these communities.

July 25th 2007, Adrin Appel has written for IPS since 2006 about U.S. domestic issues, including the environment, politics and economics. Formerly a politics reporter in Washington, D.C., she now reports from Boston. “Health-Us- Tiny Town Demands Justice in Dioxin Poisoning” http://www.ipsnews.net/2007/07/health-us-tiny-town-demands-justice-in-dioxin-poisoning/

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found levels of the dioxin compound vinyl chloride in the air in Mossville ………………….…Wilma Subra, hired by the environmental organization to do an independent analysis of any dioxin pollution in Mossville.

This marginalization of communities of color and working class communities does not happen by accident.  It is the result of both action AND inaction by the United States federal government.  In the status quo, the government’s priorities are aligned with corporations over citizens; profits over people.  It is not just the policies that the government enacts, but the very way that it approaches the question of environmental justice and environmental decision-making. The federal government unequally enforces environmental law, leaving communities of color with disproportionately less protection than white communities. 

Robert D. Bullard, Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University; Paul Mohai, Prof at School of Natural Resources and the Environment at Umich; Robin Saha, Assistant Prof of Environmental Studies at University of Montana; Beverly Wright, prof at school of Communication at Northwestern University, 38 Envtl. L. 377 (2008), Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: Why Race Still Matters after all of These Years, Hein Online, MV
Despite progress in research, planning, and policy,……………………. .pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger."

Energy policy, economic incentives, and the toxic poisoning of minority communities are all linked.  The environmental injustice surrounding energy production, pollution, and consumption form a web of modern colonialism and injustice.  Without a shift in focus and approach from the federal government, including how it incentivizes production and extraction of energy, this racist injustice will continue to destroy the lives of those left behind.

Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D, Environmental Justice Resource Center,_Clark Atlanta University, 7/2/08, “POVERTY, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING HEALTHY AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES” http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html [BGB
The United States is the dominant economic and military force in the world today………………………The most polluted communities are also the communities with crumbling infrastructure, economic disinvestment, deteriorating housing, inadequate schools, chronic unemployment, high poverty, and overloaded health care systems.


Colonial racism is the precondition to the right to kill – the process whereby the state can prioritize life, can decide whose lives are worth saving and whose are expendable for the greater good is rooted in racist ideology that normalizes violence as an essential function.  The idea that we need to risk the death of some or else suffer the possibility of harm to the rest of the population – that in letting some be sick we can ensure that the rest are healthy – is a relationship of war that guarantees the inevitability and the perpetuation of violence. 

Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, p. 254-257 Trans. David Macey, MV

What in fact is racism………………except by activating the theme of racism.

Thus the plan: The United States federal government should substantially increase financial incentives for the production of solar energy in the United States by shifting all tax incentives for fossil fuel production in unincorporated communities to incentives for solar production, and providing all necessary financial incentive to companies to convert toxic and fossil fuel facilities in unincorporated communities and communities of color into solar energy production.

Contention 2: A Framework for Justice
The role of the ballot in this debate is as a statement of who best works to create environmental justice and challenge the marginalization of communities of color. Energy policy today allows for racism and oppression on communities of color and class as the focus of the federal government is how to best maximize production of energy regardless of its effect on communities.  We reorient ourselves towards the way we think about the role of policy and challenge the way the United States federal government goes about energy production by instead focusing on the effect these policies have on the lives of individuals.  

This debate should not be about a weighing of the long term benefits or short term disadvantages of federal government action.  This debate should be about the critical practice and pedagogy that we create in the classroom space to consider issues of governmental policy and its effect on the world.  We do not roleplay as the United States federal government.  Rather, we advocate as students and activists that the government must change their policy.  

The negative is welcome to run their disadvantages or counterplans, but they will not function as a negation of the 1AC.  The status quo is replete with examples of policymakers justifying the decimation of communities of color by reference to specific limits necessary to qualify as pollution or imagined threats to corporate welfare.  The ludicrous claims constructed out of fragments of newspaper articles are part and parcel of our current refusal to acknowledge the basic dignity of communities afflicted by environmental injustice, and so do not disprove the central claims of the affirmative.  
You should vote for who best creates environmental justice instead of who best solves for abstract wars that never happen. This is a better way to view communities of color and challenge racial practices that affect real people’s lives through energy policy.  Our refusal to help them is a denial of their humanity that must be stopped. Voting affirmative is a statement of solidarity demanding that the United States federal government substantially change its energy policy, and shows these people we talk about that the USFG stands by their side instead of standing upon them.

A political strategy based in educational practice and examination of the lives of affected individuals is crucial to solvency.  These discourses are often overshadowed by appeal to economics or politics on a large scale while ignoring the local and very real effects on concrete individuals.  Continuing an approach that relies on discourses of large political and economic effects over the examination of particular places results in failure – the affirmative engagement with local politics is a critical first step
David A. Gruenewald, is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Washington State University.  “The best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place
Currently, educational concern for local space is overshadowed……… . Its practices and purposes can be connected to experiential learning, contextual learning,

Conversation about government policy and how it conceptualizes citizens is a critical first step to challenging racism.  Before considering long term consequences of particular actions, we must first discuss the need for a reorientation of government policy.   The affirmative’s engagement with environmental justice, search for a new perspective on government action, and discussion of race based politics is uniquely valuable and necessary for any challenge of these issues.
Economist Finds Environmental Injustice Across Country Conner Milner, November 23, 2010 http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/united-states/economist-finds-environmental-injustice-across-country-46374.html
The U.S. history of environmental injustice spans decades. ………………find successful solutions through economic, social, and political action.

The classroom in particular is a critical space of dialog – our discussion of these issues as debaters and students and activists is a critical space for engagement and works to solve real world problems. Only the affirmative advocacy risks moving outside of the debate and into the lives of the people we advocate for.
Melanie, Associate Professor and Chair, Anthropology & Sociology @ Adelphi University, Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a “Post-Racial” World, p. 235-236, MV
Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, has been quoted ………………….. to perhaps redefine their allegiances and reconfigure their notion of "who's to blame."