| 1 | 10/03/2012 | Tournament: UNI | Round: 1 | Opponent: | Judge: Hargraves, 12
Steve Hargreaves @CNNMoney August 9, 2012: 7:12 AM ET, Nuclear waste issues freeze permits for U.S. power plants, http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/news/economy/nuclear-plants-waste/index.htm
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The U.S. government said it will
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be stored on-site at nuclear plants, where it’s currently stored.¶ Plan: The Department of Energy should guarantee loans for companies to build Integral Fast Reactors The Namibian, 12
http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1-http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1, 2-13-12
ONE of Australia’s foremost nuclear energy proponents has put the Australian uranium exploration and mining
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generation systems and recycle all of their future uranium intakes, he said. The problem is that the current rate of development for the IFRs is slow and will take decades before they are a market forceFair Disclosure, 12
FD (Fair Disclosure) Wire, August 3, 2012 Friday, Q2 2012 Lightbridge Corporation Earnings Conference Call – Final, * Gary Sharpe Lightbridge Corporation - Head-IR * Seth Grae Lightbridge Corporation - President and CEO * Jim Malone Lightbridge Corporation - Chief Nuclear Fuel Development Officer * Andrey Mushakov Lightbridge Corporation - EVO-International Nuclear Ops
SETH GRAE: And let me just add that the focus is on water-
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in the world and the new reactors that are being built and planned. Now is the key time to restart the IFR which solves waste, the economy, creates jobs, environmental leadership and global warmingKirsch, 9 ~Steve; an American serial entrepreneur who has started six companies: Mouse Systems, Frame Technology Corp., Infoseek, Propel, Abaca, and OneID. Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. November 25, http://skirsch.wordpress.com/~~ Congress should add a provision to the climate bills to authorize %243B to have
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the IFR specifically and will support the building of an IFR demo reactor. Because IFRs can be retrofitted into coal plants and use the same infrastructure they will take the place of coal plants —and jumpstarts the whole industrySalmon, 9
Felix Salmon JUNE 23, 2009, Nuclear power: Going fast, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/
PRISM is GE’s name for an integral fast reactor, or IFR, and it’s
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to achieve ambitious carbon-emission reduction targets than many people currently think. IFRs are the only thing that solve warming – we displace coal plants which is the lynchpin of solving warming and getting massive polluters like China on board Kirsch 8 ~Steve Kirsch; August 10, 2008; A nuclear power plant design invented at Argonne National Lab 24 years ago has none of the drawbacks of conventional nuclear plants; http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm-http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm AnthonyOgbuli~ I first heard about the IFR on August 4, 2008, in
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if you look at the facts and the science rather than the words. Plan spillsover – Trilateral Agreement with Japan and FranceJAEA, DOE, and CEA 10 ~The Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives of the French Republic, The Japan Atomic Energy Agency, The United States Department of Energy; Joint Statement on Trilateral Cooperation in the area of Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors; October 4th 2010~ Cooperation on sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) technology among the Japan Atomic
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safety analyses, and implications of SFRs for management of used nuclear fuel. Global warming is real and happening; 5 reasonsNWF 12 (July 2012, National Wildlife Federation, http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx-http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx) JD
No longer is global warming something only facing future generations. Changes to our climate
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as low-lying areas are inundated with saltwater. It’s anthropogenic and scientific consensus goes aff.Lewandowsky and Ashley 2011 (Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Studies at the University of Western Australia, and Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of New South Wales, June 24, 2011, "The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong on climate change," http://goo.gl/u3nOC)
But despite these complexities, some aspects of climate science are thoroughly settled. We
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the 19th century, pre-dating even Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria. Monbiot 2008, ~George, "Big oil’s big lie," visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford Brookes (planning) and East London (environmental science). He has honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews and the University of Essex and an Honorary Fellowship from Cardiff University, June 23, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/23/climatechange.carbonemissions~~ Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how,
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sale to the highest bidder. The awful truth is that sometimes it is Dyer 2009 (Gwynne Dyer, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former Senior Lecturer-C:\wiki\Senior_Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst-C:\wiki\Royal_Military_Academy_Sandhurst, "Climate Wars,")
There is no need to despair. The slow-feedback effects take a long
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so let us focus here on how to stop it rising past 450. ===Scenario 1: Ice Age === Warming causes alterations in the North Atlantic current and stops the ocean conveyor belt causing an ice age quicklyABC News 2007 ("New northern ice age could send refugees to Australia", http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/05/2052408.htm)
A NU paleoclimatologist Timothy Barrows and his fellow researchers used a new dating technique that
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feel the effects almost immediately and certainly within a century," he said. Thompson 7 - MA from GA Tech
Andrea Thompson, Graduate from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2004 and a Master’s in the same subject in 2006. 2007, http://www.livescience.com/environment/070830_gw_quakes.html
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that
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volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions," McGuire said. Causes an ice age
NASA 98
~http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/eos/volcanoes.pdf~~ Volcanoes and Global Climate Change, Earth Science Enterprise Series/ May
The eruption of a super volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet
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only really noticeable over billions rather than millions of years," Sparks said. Jaworowski, ’4 ~Zbigniew Jaworowski is chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. He was a principal investigator of three research projects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of four research projects of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has held posts with the Centre d’Etude Nucleaires near Paris; the Biophysical Group of the Institute of Physics, University of Oslo; the Norwegian Polar Research Institute and the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo (hes qualed), "The Ice Age is Coming", Winter 03-04, 7/16/08, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf~~
It is difficult to predict the advent of the new Ice Age—the time when continental glaciers will start to cover Scandinavia, Central and Northern Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, Chile, and Argentina with an ice layer hundreds and thousands of meters thick; when mountain glaciers in the
Himalayas, Andes, and Alps, in Africa and Indonesia, once again will
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doomsday prophecies of the proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Adam 8, PhD in chemical engineering, 2008
(David. Environmental correspondent for the Guardian. Food price rises threaten global security – UN. April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/09/food.unitednations)
Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN’s top
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years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises. Its already begun, the harsh summer has put Soybean supplies and prices on the brinkDes Moines Register, June 29, 2012
Supply fears send soybean prices soaring Sales in May were the second-largest on record, spiking worries about tight stocks. Jun 29, 2012 , http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120630/BUSINESS01/306300031/0/news/?odyssey=nav%7Chead
"Soybeans are going to be the story of the summer," said Sal
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weather concerns for the U.S., this fall will be tight." Bloomberg, 12
Alan Bjerga and Whitney McFerron - Feb 17, 2012, U.S. Exporters Make Record Single-Day Soybean Sale to China
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html-http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html,
Soybean exporters in the U.S., the world’s top shipper, sold 2
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more meat, increasing the need for the oilseed to make livestock feed. Dr. Wong and Dr. Huang , March 12
John Wong, Yanjie Huang, China’s Food Security and Its Global Implications China: An International Journal, Volume 10, Number 1, March 2012, pp. 113-124 (Article), is Professorial Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore and Yanjie Huang (eaihuan@nus.edu.sg) is Research Assistant at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.
China’s soybean market can be singled out as the only case where imports have substituted for domestic production. The country consumed 60 million tons of soybeans in 2009, only a quarter of which were produced domestically. This begs the question whether soaring soybean imports will pose a threat to China’s grain security. Apparently, an over-reliance on imported soybeans does "violate" the principle of self-sufficiency and pose some challenges to food security. American Interest 4/29
April 29, 2012, Uh Oh: World Food Prices Spike As Soy Harvest Collapses, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/29/uh-oh-world-food-prices-spike-as-soy-harvest-collapses/
Among the things we watch here at Via Meadia are trends in world food prices
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be hungry. 2012 could be even more… interesting than we thought. Renxing 05 - Epoch Times staffwriter
~San, "CCP Gambles Insanely to Avoid Death (Part I)" http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html-http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html~~
"In any event, we, the CCP, will never step down from
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cling to life. And that is the theme of the "speech." China is critical to world food security-lack of Chinese food security would lead to worldwide hunger and starvationAnthea Webb, Director of the World Food Program in China, China Daily, "WHY CHINA IS CRUCIAL TO WORLD FOOD SECURITY" May 15, 2008, Lexis
For us, it is very hard to predict now how bad the impact of
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support - to developing countries which are still struggling with poverty and hunger. TAMPA TRIBUNE 96, staff, January 20, 1996, LN.
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are
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-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food. Bellard et al 2012 (Ce ́line Bellard, Cleo Bertelsmeier, Paul Leadley, Wilfried Thuiller and Franck Courchamp, "Impacts of climate change on the future of Biodiversity," Ecology Letters, 15: 365–377, online)
Ecologists are developing a better understanding of the mechanisms by which species and ecosystems can
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climate change, to develop other predictive approaches and to go beyond predictions. Young 2010 (Dr Ruth Young, PhD specialising in coastal marine ecology. 2-9-2010, "Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important", http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/Biodiversity/Biodiversity-what-and-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they
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on this planet possible and that our protection of Biodiversity maintains this service. ====Independently, Warming causes human extinction====
Tickell, ’8
(Oliver, Climate Researcher, The Gaurdian, "On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction", 8-11, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/11/ climatechange)
We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told
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warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth. Rising sea levels from climate change will force massive migrations—inducing instability and state failure across the globeRajan, 10
Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, "The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change," Ethics %26 International Affairs 24, No. 3, 9/20/2010, only accessible on some exclusive database Does humanity have a moral obligation toward the estimated millions of individuals who will be
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on higher ground in advance of disaster. ¶ WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE Climate migration causes war and instabilityPaul J. Smith, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, "Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response," Foreign Policy Research Institute, Fall 2007, https://transnet.act.nato.int/WISE/FSE/FuturesPap/ClimateCha0/file/_WFS/%20Orbis2—climate%20change%20and%20mass%20migration.pdf Another consideration related to climate change is the problem of¶ weak or failed states
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¶ able to restore order or mitigate the underlying causes of state failure. Specifically leads to South Asian war
Tay and Paungmalit, 10Simon Tay and Phir Paungmalit, Singapore Institute of International Affairs, "Climate Change and Security In the Asia-Pacific," Conference Paper Prepared for the 2nd Tokyo Seminar on Common Security Challenges, 26 March 2010, google • Climate Change Impacts and Displacement of People¶ Environmentally induced displacement and migration are
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¶ slowly coming to the forefront of security discussion scenario around the world. Landay 2k (Jonathan S. Landay, National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, KNIGHT RIDER NEWS SERVICE, March 10, 2000, p. online)
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea,
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taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international nonproliferation regime. Cerutti 7, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, 2007 (Furio Cerutti, "Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming." Lexington Books. p. 31)
The second feature of the impasse is irreversibility, which is peculiar to the worst
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different approach, which will be looked into in the last three chapters. Climate Change is the greatest threat to human extinction. Far more likely to cause extinction than any war scenarios – intervening actors and weapons are more about precision than magnitudeThe New York End Times 2006 http://newyorkendtimes.com/extinctionscale.asp) We rate Global Climate Change as a greater threat for human extinction in this century
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monitor war separately. However we also need to incorporate the dangers here . Cerutti, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, 2007
(Furio Cerutti, "Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming." Lexington Books. p. 112-113)
In ethical terms the inertia phenomenon burdens on us a still greater responsibility towards future
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, cheap skepticism on present knowledge versus reasonable preoccupation with it is another." |
| 2 | 10/03/2012 | Tournament: UMKC | Round: Round 8 | Opponent: Minnesota | Judge: C. Stone
Advantageproliferation The US nuclear industry is on the slide in the SQ, expanding our nuclear industry is key to our non-proliferation leadershipWSJ, 12
Jay Solomon, SW, WSJ, Jan 25, 12, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181213674309478.html ¶ U.S. officials involved in the policy review said the Obama administration
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foreign suppliers rather than developing the technologies needed to produce the fuel themselves. Domenici 2012 (Energy and Infrastructure Program, Energy Project, Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Global Nuclear Energy Markets, A Report of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Nuclear Inititative. Pete Domenici and Warren Miller, July 2012, http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Leadership%20in%20Nuclear%20Energy%20Markets.pdf-http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Leadership in Nuclear Energy Markets.pdf) JD
In addition, policy makers and the public must understand the clear linkages that exist
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issues of vital interest to our long-term energy and national security. Dr. Charles Ferguson, Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown, 9
Charles D. Ferguson, 6-17-2009, is the Philip D. Reed senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), is also an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University, Testimony to Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, "Advancing Technology for Nuclear Fuel Recycling: What Should Our Research, Development, and Demonstration Strategy Be?." http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/FergusonTestimonyJune172009.pdf-http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/FergusonTestimonyJune172009.pdf U.S. leadership is essential for charting a constructive and cooperative international course
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hearing on recycling or reprocessing of spent fuel and nuclear waste management strategies. Rublee ’8 - Professor of Government and World Affairs @ University of Tampa
~Maria Rost Rublee, "Taking Stock of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime: Using Social Psychology to Understand Regime Effectiveness," International Studies Review, 22 Aug 2008, Volume 10, Issue 3, Pages 420-450WileyInterScience~ However, I would argue that before the United States (or any other country
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the ’’influence’’ mechanisms fostered by it that the papers turns to next. (Former Emory debater and NDT Champion), "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter?," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 53 Number 2, April 2009 pg. 234-257~ Learning as states gain experience with nuclear weapons is complicated. While to some extent
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likely costs of conflict, in the short term, nuclear proliferation is likely Cimbala ’8 – Professor of Political Science @ Pennsylvania State University –¶ Brandywine ~Stephen J. Cimbala, "Anticipatory Attacks: Nuclear Crisis Stability in Future Asia," Comparative Strategy, Volume 27, Issue 2 March 2008, pages 113 – 132Informaworld~
The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia presents a complicated mosaic of possibilities in this
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be inaccurate guides to the avoidance of war outside of Europe.19 Unchecked nuclear spread will cause global nuclear war – shorter flight times and lack of second strike capacity.Cimbala 2008
(Stephen, Political Science Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, March, "Anticipatory Attacks: Nuclear Crisis Stability in Future Asia" Comparative Strategy, Vol 27 No 2, p 113-132, InformaWorld)
The spread of ballistic missiles and other nuclear-capable delivery systems in Asia,
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might be inaccurate guides to the avoidance of war outside of Europe.19 |
| 11/09/2012 | Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 8 | Opponent: UCO AM | Judge: Nick Watts
Warming
Mining turn
Need to restart the IFR—solves accidents, waste, mining, and warming
Collins, 12
The Virginian-Pilot(Norfolk, VA.) August 26, 2012 Sunday The Virginian-Pilot Edition At the core of our energy needs by donaldluzzatto A. BARTON HINKLE BY GAIL COLLINS Pg. B9
URANIUM MINING, aside from the damage it
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, and they actually reduce existing nuclear waste. IFRs solve waste and proliferation
The Guardian Limited, 12
Guardian Unlimited July 20, 2012 Friday
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technology BYLINE: Mark Halperguardian.co.uk
Sir Richard Branson is urging the US government
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risk of making nuclear weapons from the material. 2AC Politics DA Romney will win now – most recent polls
Witt 10/6 (Ryan, http://www.examiner.com/article/polls-show-substantial-bump-for-mitt-romney-after-debate, Polls show substantial bump for Mitt Romney after debate)
The most definitive poll comes from Rasmussen Reports
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Obama by three points according to Rasmussen’s data.
Romney is the new national leader
Sherfinski 10/6 (David, New polls show Romney overtakes Obama in Colorado, nationally, http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/oct/6/new-polls-shows-romney-overtake-obama-colorado-nat/)
Elsewhere, a new national poll from Clarus
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conducted Thursday — the day after the debate.
Romney has surpassed Obama on all key issues
Sullivan 10/5 (Andy, Reuters, Romney gains ground on Obama after strong debate, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-pollbre8931e4-20121004,0,3106458.story)
Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney gained ground on
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health insurance program for the elderly and disabled.
Romney will dominate the battleground states
Chambers 10/5 (Dean. Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama: New poll numbers in three key swing states, http://www.examiner.com/article/mitt-romney-vs-barack-obama-new-poll-numbers-three-key-swing-states)
New poll numbers released today by two different
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and get elected our next president in November. Loan guarantees for nuclear power enjoy bipartisan support, and will swing Ohio
Korte 12 (Gregory, 4/27, Politics stands in the way of nuclear plant's future, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2012-04-13/usec-centrifuges-loan-guarantees/54560118/1)
Three dozen 43-foot-tall centrifuges
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this application move forward now," said another. No link- we do not use Obama funding already appropriated to DOE or it links to their CP Independents will support a pro-nuclear candidate
Morris 12 (Bob, 6/11, Independent Voters Can Help Make Reliable Energy a Campaign Issue, http://ivn.us/2012/06/11/independent-voters-reliable-energy-campaign-issue/)
The electrical grid in the U.S
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energy a major issue for both presidential candidates. Independent voters are empirically the key internal link
Killian 12 (Linda, a Washington journalist and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2/2, 4 Types of Independent Voters Who Could Swing the 2012 Elections, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/4-types-of-independent-voters-who-could-swing-the-2012-elections/252363/) Even as independent candidates continue to struggle,
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that control both candidate selection and the agenda. Energy is irrelevant – the public doesn’t pay attention
Wood 12 (Elisa, 8/8, What Voters don’t know about energy, http://energy.aol.com/2012/08/08/what-voters-don-t-know-about-energy/?icid=related2)
More than half of Americans cannot name one
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deny the project a presidential permit in January. One policy won’t impact environmental turnout
Neil Munro, Daily Caller, 8/30/2011, Obama still has green energy vote for 2012, dailycaller.com/2011/08/30/obama-still-has-green-energy-vote-for-2012/?print=1
But there’s little evidence so far that progressives’
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], but I’m afraid he won’t,” said Zarlin Turn: The plan will be spun as job creation.
Ling, NYT Staff Writer, ‘9
[Katherine, New York Times, 5
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.S. nuclear waste problem in France?”, AND
Published, RCM]
The outgoing Bush administration tested the political reaction
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site, a sort of "energy park."
Energy isn’t important right now – economy and foreign policy outweigh
Babington and Baskt 9/15 (Charles and Brian, AP, With 7 weeks to go, Obama-Romney race still tight, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/09/15/3532164/with-7-weeks-to-go-obama-romney.html#storylink=cpy)
Republicans and Democrats agree the election probably will
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, and it's unclear when it will recede.
presidential permit in January. Romney won’t attack Iran – destroys his domestic agenda
Frum, 8-30, contributor at NewsWeek and CNN, 8-30-2012
David, “Why Romney Won’t Fight Iran
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(JW PRE) But leave aside the question of the sources
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Romney is a vote for an Iran war?
It's true that Mitt Romney has pledged to
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has said similar things, although less emphatically.
If elected, though, here's the briefing Romney will face:
He'll be told that Iranian nuclear sites are
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that last a very large-scale undertaking.
When he gets this briefing, Romney will
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interest rates too, choking off economic recovery."
How will he react to those thoughts?
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have shifted as he has neared the presidency.
But Romney will have no escape from the
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still say yes. It's just deeply implausible.
And it seems likely that similar calculations will
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to avoid the George W. Bush path. AT: Cap K Perm- Do both Total rejection of capitalism fragments resistance – the perm solves best
J.K. Gibson-Graham, feminist economist, 1996, End of Capitalism
One of our goals as Marxists has been
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visible as a denial of diversity and change. Perm solves – only using capitalism to fight capitalism can be effective
Monthly Review, March 1990, v. 41, no. 10, p 38
No institution is or ever has been a
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the margin of success for that very effort.
No link-
No internal link- Vague Alts bad- makes neg moving target and impossible to argue against which kills educational depth in debate- justifies severance perms and new 1AR strategies- This is an independent reason to vote Alt can’t solve The negative has no coherent alternative – we must focus on fixing individual problems, but rejecting the entire system with nothing clear in mind to replace it Norbert 03 [Johan Norberg, Fellow at
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Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 98] Capitalism is not a perfect system, and
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suggest that another system could do as well? Environmental problems are global and require global cooperation
Jim Chen, Professor of Law at the
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, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217
The most serious environmental problems involve "the
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but to essential life-supporting ecological systems." Open markets result in more sustainable environments – statistics prove
Ana Eiras, Economic Policy Analyst for Latin
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.cfm, accessed 8/24/03
Moreover, the United States is an example
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high as those of countries with closed economies. Case outweighs- Because environmental extinction is irreversible policymakers cannot take the risk based on simple uncertainty over the science
Cerutti 7, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, 2007 (Furio Cerutti, “Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming.” Lexington Books. p. 31)
The second feature of the impasse is irreversibility
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be looked into in the last three chapters. Util Good Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard.
Uyl and Rasmussen, profs. of philosophy
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, “Reading Nozick”, p. 244) Rand has spoken of the ultimate end as
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-that is the standard for moral evaluation. FAILURE TO ENGAGE THE STATE RISKS THE WORST EVILS OF Policy
SPANIER, 1990
(John – ph.d. from
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, Games Nations Play, p. 115) Whether the observer personally approves of the "
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and avoid the catastrophe of a nuclear war.
Alt can’t solve warming and even if it
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evidence says that decrease carbon emissions must happen now Counterplan
Perm do both Counterplan has no net benefit – still spends 3 billion dollars and increases nuclear power it links to politics just as much as we do Counterplan links to politics worse – they read public doesn’t want new reactors we retrofit coal plants they build an independent IFR Perm do the counterplan and then the plan Perm do the counterplan it’s just plan minus – our IFRs would be a demonstration CONDO BAD – ONE CONDO ADVOCACY SOLVES ALL
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THE ARGUMENT AND THE TEAM KEY TO ARGUMENT RESPONSIBILITY AGENT CPS BAD – SKEWS GROUND AND STRATEGY
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NET BENEFIT AS A DA SOLVES ALL THEIR OFFENSE Loan guarantees are critical to nuclear power construction investors won’t finance construction without them.
Adams, ‘8
[Theodore G., physicist T.G. Adams & Associates, Buffalo News, “Federal loan guarantees key to nuclear plant construction,” http://www.buffalonews.com/248/story/365369.html]
With America’s greenhouse-gas emissions increasing daily, it is time to stimulate the use of nuclear energy. Only then will we be able to deal with the challenges of atmospheric pollution and climate change, while meeting our nation’s growing need for electricity.¶ Electricity companies plan to build more than 30 new nuclear power plants in the United States, but few, if any, are likely to get beyond the drawing- board stage until the government provides loan guarantees. Because high up-front costs have made nuclear plant construction potentially risky, Wall Street investors say federal loan guarantees are needed in the event that unanticipated delays from intervention or litigation drive up the cost of construction, as happened during the 1980s. Federal loan guarantees are critical to jumpstart the industry creates momentum and lowers costs substantially.
Totty, ‘8
[Michael, WSJ, “The case
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6-30, ABI/INFORM Global]
But that's misleading on a number of levels
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to meet the demand, lowering the price. Government investment key – necessary to mitigate risks from government regulations.
Selyukh 10 (Alina, Staff Writer, “Nuclear waste issue could be solved, if...”, 8-17-10, Reuters, AND
) Since the U.S. agency declared
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risks," he said of the regulatory regime.
Government investment necessary – provides appropriate risk mitigation and shortens the timeframe for completion.
IAEA 8 (International Atomic Energy Agency, “Spent Fuel Reprocessing Options”, August 2008) With the expected high costs and significant risks
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tax credits, etc.) with government entities. |
| 11/09/2012 | Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 1 | Opponent: Wake BC | Judge: John Lawson
DODCP Our interpretation is that the neg only gets agent counterplans that utilize the action of a single agent acting independently-
A.) Predictability- key to check combinations of actors that do not exist in the literature base- leads to an explosion of aff burden
B.) Illogical- nobody in position to choose that action as a logical opportunity cost of the plan- means it is not real world
C.) Infinite regression- justifies a million different agents acting in a single counterplan- eliminates all advantage ground- no advantage is that intrinsic to the plan Agent counterplans are a voter- they’re stale education and steal the whole 1ac Perm: Do both- agency shields the link to politics Perm: Do the counterplan- USFG includes agencies- plan doesn’t exclude possibility of agency action, so it’s not severance
Black’s Law Dictionary 90
6th Edition, p. 695. In the United States, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in addition to administrative agencies. In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and county governments, and city and township governments. Congress will rollback- president won’t protect or it links to politics
Rodriguez ‘10
Christina Rodriguez, Professor of Law at NYU, Duke Law Journal, “Constraint Through Delegation: The Case of Executive Control Over Immigration Policy,” 2010
If the president controls an agency, the agency’s rules are likely to be in line with the president’s preferences, such that even if Congress objects to the agency’s rules and attempts to pass legislation overturning them, the chances of a presidential veto are high, unless there is a transition in administration. In the context of an independent agency or commission, where the president’s views are less likely to be in line with the agency’s views, a congressional move to overturn agency regulations is less likely to be met with a presidential veto.
The counterplan undercuts accountability to the public
Rodriguez ‘10
Christina Rodriguez, Professor of Law at NYU, Duke Law Journal, “Constraint Through Delegation: The Case of Executive Control Over Immigration Policy,” 2010
But even if delegation successfully introduces greater flexibility into the system, policymakers must still weigh that flexibility against the potential loss of accountability or responsiveness to public opinion (as opposed to responsiveness to changing empirical circumstances). As discussed in more detail in Section C below, this concern for accountability justifies building congressional controls into the model, and may also determine the choice between creating an executive agency or an independent commission. But the more important points at this stage are not only that the administrative process has its democratic side, 72 but also that a key question implicated in the design of regulatory structures is how to identify the optimal balance between insulation and political control, given that the structures should also promote efficiency and effectiveness. 73 In other words, as advanced in Part I, accountability is important, but policymakers must balance that value not only with the need for a more data-driven policy, but also with rule-of-law values that require more than appealing to the public’s immediate preferences.
Accountability is critical to prevent extinction
Diamond 95
Larry Promoting Democracy in the 1990’s http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty No spillover No commericialization DOD still links to politics CSS CP
Perm do both
Counterplan doesn’t solve the aff – has to elimate coal emission to solve – only IFRs do that
CCS efforts are too expensive and no one wants to build it
The Economist, 09
(March 5, 2009, “The illusion of clean coal”, http://www.economist.com/node/13235041, 7/29/12, atl) “FACTORIES of death” is how James Hansen, a crusading American scientist, describes power stations that burn coal. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, producing twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does when it is burned. That makes it a big cause of global warming. But some of the world's biggest economies rely on coal. It provides almost 50% of America's and Germany's power, 70% of India's and 80% of China's. Digging up coal provides a livelihood for millions of people. And secure domestic sources of energy are particularly prized at a time when prices are volatile and many of the big oil and gas exporters are becoming worryingly nationalistic. It is hard to see how governments can turn their backs on such a cheap and reliable fuel. There does, however, seem to be a way of reconciling coal and climate. It is called carbon capture and storage (CCS), or carbon sequestration, and entails hoovering up carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and other big industrial facilities and storing it safely underground, where it will have no effect on the atmosphere. The technologies for this are already widely used in the oil and chemical industries, and saltwater aquifers and depleted oilfields offer plenty of promising storage space. Politicians are pinning their hopes on clean coal: Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, among others, are keen on the idea. But CCS is proving easier to talk up than to get going (seearticle). There are no big power plants using it, just a handful of small demonstration projects. Utilities refuse to make bigger investments because power plants with CCS would be much more expensive to build and run than the ordinary sort. They seem more inclined to invest in other low-carbon power sources, such as nuclear, solar and wind. Inventors and venture capitalists, in the meantime, are striving to create all manner of new technologies—bugs for biofuels, revolutionary solar panels, smart-grid applications—but it is hard to find anyone working on CCS in their garage (although some scientists are toying with pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air instead of from smokestacks: see Technology Quarterly in this issue). Several green pressure groups, and even some energy and power company bosses, think that the whole idea is unworkable. With the private sector sitting on its hands, Western governments are lavishing subsidies on CCS. Some $3.4 billion earmarked for CCS found its way into America's stimulus bill. The European Union, which already restricts greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme, unveiled further incentives for CCS last year. Britain, Australia and others have also vowed to help fund demonstration plants partly because they reckon the private sector is put off by the huge price-tag on a single CCS power plant, and also in the belief that the cost of CCS will fall with experience. Burning cash The private sector, however, is reluctant to fork out not just because of the upfront cost of power plants, but also because, tonne for tonne, CCS looks like an expensive way of cutting carbon. The cost of it may fall, but probably not by much, given the familiarity of the technologies it uses. Politicians should indeed encourage investment in clean technologies, but direct subsidies are not the way to do it. A carbon price or tax, which raises the cost of emitting carbon dioxide while leaving it up to the private sector to pick technologies, is the better approach. CCS is not just a potential waste of money. It might also create a false sense of security about climate change, while depriving potentially cheaper methods of cutting emissions of cash and attention—all for the sake of placating the coal lobby. A CO2 leakage would kill marine life – pH fluctuation wipes out plankton, bacteria, and bottom-dwelling plants Robert Socolow, BA in physics from Harvard, PhD in Theoretical High Energy Physics from Harvard, published author, co-principal investigator of Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, Sept. 1997, “Fuels Decarbonization and Carbon Sequestration: Report of a Workshop”, Princeton University, http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/research/Integration/Papers/decarbonization.pdf Effects on marine organisms and marine ecosystems of injection of carbon dioxide into the deep ocean have been little studied. The most significant impacts will come indirectly, from the lowered pH that results when additional carbon dioxide is added to seawater. Depending on the method of release, pH can be expected to vary from as low as 4 very near the injection point, to its ambient value of about 8. Zooplankton, bacteria, and bottom-dwelling plants and animals living at the depth of injection would be the principal organisms affected. Cross apply Young evidence that causes extinction Sequestration bad – 4 warrants Soren Anderson, department of Economics at the University of Michigan, and Richard Newell, Energy and Natural Resources Division in the District of Columbia, 6/8/04, “Prospects for Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Vol 29, pg 109-142, http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.energy.29.082703.145619 Despite the large potential capacity, the negative environmental effects of ocean storage are the most uncertain of the storage options and seem likely to be the highest. The primary issue would be the increased acidity of the ocean, with potential effects such as corrosion of organisms with calcium carbonate shells or skeletal structures. One should keep in mind, however, that the ocean will eventually absorb about 90% of present-day atmospheric emissions anyway, also leading to increased acidity. But direct injection would also lead to more rapid and localized effects. If injected CO2 is sufficiently dispersed, as could occur from a deeply towed pipeline, then mortality of marine organisms could, in principle, be largely avoided. The high concentrations of CO2 needed for shallow-water injection could lead to significant increases in acidity over several kilometers (12) and could have serious adverse impacts on marine organisms. For most methods, however, acidity would increase primarily at depths of 1000 meters or greater, with potentially less serious environmental effects if the CO2 remains in the deep ocean where there is a lower abundance of marine organisms. Nonetheless, Siebel & Walsh (75) find evidence that deep-sea organisms are highly sensitive to even modest pH changes, indicating that small perturbations in CO2 or pH may have important consequences for the ecology of the deep sea and for the global biogeochemical cycles dependent on deep-sea ecosystems. Brewer et al. (76) suggest that deep-ocean sequestration may be a solution with long residence time, but not permanent and not without ecological consequences of hydrate volume expansion and dissolution. Caldeira (77) and Johnston & Santillo (60) identify two primary concerns with ocean sequestration: leakage of stored carbon into the atmosphere; and unknown consequences on marine organisms of elevated CO2 concentrations, reduced ocean pH, and trace pollutants injected along with industrial CO2. Huessemann et al. (78) evaluate the potential effects of ocean CO2 storage on marine nitrogen chemistry, suggesting that lower pH would inhibit nitrification and ammonia oxidation, which would cause accumulation of ammonia that could change phytoplankton abundance and community structure and cause unpredictable eutrophication.
2AC Politics DA Romney will win now
Felsenthal 10/5 (Mark, Obama touts jobs report as he seeks to lift campaign, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/05/us-usa-campaign-idUSBRE88N13D20121005)
Crucially, the report showed the U.S. workforce was expanding. In some recent months, the unemployment rate had ticked downward largely because many Americans had given up on looking for work. Data showed that employers added 114,000 jobs in September.¶ After the debate in Denver, Romney gained ground on Obama and is now viewed positively by 51 percent of voters, the first time he has enjoyed a net positive in the U.S. presidential race, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday found.
Romney will win – he’s riding post-debate momentum
Hunt and Thomas 10/5 (Kasi and Ken, AP, Romney trying to seize momentum post-debate, http://www.freep.com/article/20121005/NEWS15/121005013/Romney-trying-seize-momentum-post-debate-)
Republican Mitt Romney is trying to ride a wave of momentum from a strong debate performance against President Barack Obama and reset the presidential campaign as the government releases new unemployment data providing the latest update on the nation's economy.¶ Obama, seeking to rebound from a subpar debate performance, is accusing Romney of being dishonest about how his policies would affect the tax bills of middle-class families and the Medicare benefits of retirees — a squabble that has even injected Big Bird into the race.¶ "I just want to make sure I've got this straight: He'll get rid of regulations on Wall Street, but he's going to crack down on 'Sesame Street'?" Obama said Thursday in Madison, Wis., referring to Romney's statement in the debate that he would cut a federal subsidy for PBS, which airs "Sesame Street." ''Thank goodness somebody's finally cracking down on Big Bird."¶ Nearly a month before Election Day, both campaigns were seeking to move on from the first presidential debate to gain any possible advantage in a tight election. Romney emerged from Wednesday's debate energized, while Obama said the televised encounter showed areas where his Republican rival was not being candid with voters. Romney will win – he claimed the center and weakened the Democratic base
VOA News 10/5 (Romney’s Resurgence, http://blogs.voanews.com/2012-election/2012/10/05/romneys-resurgene)
Mitt Romney came through when he had to. Gone was the Republican presidential candidate who got to the right of all his rivals through first quarter of 2012. Instead, we got the guy who resembled that moderate gubernatorial candidate from Massachusetts back in 2002, the Republican who was able to win in a liberal state and cut deals with a Democratic legislature.¶ There is no way around this for Obama supporters. Mr. Romney gave a dominating performance in the Denver debate that managed to put President Obama’s economic record front and center as the key issue in the campaign. Mr. Romney was aggressive and took his case directly to the people and, at times, the president during the debate. But he never crossed the line into personal attacks that might have sparked sympathy for Mr. Obama.¶ As for the president, Democrats were wondering who actually showed up at the debate and will the same guy show up on October 16th when the next debate is held at Hofstra University in New York. It seemed as though the president was overly coached not to get negative with Mr. Romney — so much so that he looked like a listless shell of his former self and made no real attempt to push back. Independents will support a pro-nuclear candidate
Morris 12 (Bob, 6/11, Independent Voters Can Help Make Reliable Energy a Campaign Issue, http://ivn.us/2012/06/11/independent-voters-reliable-energy-campaign-issue/)
The electrical grid in the U.S. needs upgrading, not just because it’s aging but also so it can handle increasing amounts of renewable energy. As a country we are transitioning away from coal and towards renewables, with natural gas temporarily filling the void left by coal plants that are shutting down. Nuclear energy can produce prodigious amounts of power. But more than a few nuclear power plants are way past their prime or experiencing serious problems. Where will our new energy come from? We need a national discussion about this brought to the forefront yet it is unlikely to happen because the two parties are so polarized. However, independent voters can and should make energy a major issue for both presidential candidates. Independent voters are empirically the key internal link
Killian 12 (Linda, a Washington journalist and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2/2, 4 Types of Independent Voters Who Could Swing the 2012 Elections, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/4-types-of-independent-voters-who-could-swing-the-2012-elections/252363/) Even as independent candidates continue to struggle, across the country the ranks of independent voters who think the parties care more about winning elections than about solving the nation's problems are swelling. Their number, along with their disaffection with the two-party political system, is growing exponentially. About 40 percent of all American voters now call themselves independents, a bigger group than those who say they are either Democrats or Republicans and the largest number of independent voters in 70 years. In some states, independents now are a majority of the voters.¶ Every election since World War II has been determined by voters in the middle. They elected Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The margin by which Obama carried the independent vote in crucial swing states around the country was one of the significant factors in his victory and will undoubtedly be critical to whether or not he is reelected.¶ The Republican victories in the 2010 midterm election were also decided by these voters. Independents supported Democrats by 18 points in 2006. But driven by their concern about the nation's economy and strong opposition to Democratic spending and health-care initiatives, they supported Republican congressional candidates in 2010 by the overwhelming margin of 56 to 38 percent, a 36-point swing from 2006.¶ But despite their critical role in general election outcomes, the independent voters have little to say about whom the parties select to run for office. In half the states in the country the primary process is closed to them. An electoral system that all Americans pay for with their tax dollars is run solely by and for the two major political parties. Which means the American electoral system is not fully democratic.¶ After the primaries are over, politicians need the independent voters to win and woo them with attention in November. But once they have their victory or to use the vernacular get what they want, independent voters are forgotten as quickly as a one-night stand. Democratic and Republican office holders are beholden to their base supporters, the special interests who donate time and money to them and the parties that control both candidate selection and the agenda. Turn: The plan will be spun as job creation.
Ling, NYT Staff Writer, ‘9
[Katherine, New York Times, 5-19-2009, “Is the solution to the U.S. nuclear waste problem in France?”,
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/05/18/18climatewire-is-the-solution-to-the-us-nuclear-waste-prob-12208.html?pagewanted=all Published, RCM]
The outgoing Bush administration tested the political reaction to reprocessing in 2006 and found 11 communities that showed interest in having a reprocessing facility. The approach promised high-paying jobs for hosting a regional intermediate highly radioactive nuclear waste site, a sort of "energy park." Energy isn’t important right now – economy and foreign policy outweigh
Babington and Baskt 9/15 (Charles and Brian, AP, With 7 weeks to go, Obama-Romney race still tight, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/09/15/3532164/with-7-weeks-to-go-obama-romney.html#storylink=cpy)
Republicans and Democrats agree the election probably will be decided on Obama's jobs-and-economy record. Both campaigns are gearing up for the new week by trying to shift the focus back to that issue. But foreign policy leaped to the forefront in recent days when protesters attacked U.S. diplomats and missions in the Middle East, and it's unclear when it will recede.
presidential permit in January.
NSA Trade-OFF Non-unique – IFRs coming now that;s the Fair Disclosure evidence No link we get workers from Japan and France- Trilateral Agreement
Warming leads to disease spread
Stern 7 – Professor of Economics and Government
Nicholas Stern, Head of the British Government Economic Service, Former Head Economist for the World Bank, I.G. Patel Chair at the London School of Economics and Political Science, “The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review”, The report of a team commissioned by the British Government to study the economics of climate change led by Siobhan Peters, Head of G8 and International Climate Change Policy Unit, Cambridge University Press, pg. 74-76
Climate change will increase worldwide deaths from malnutrition and heat stress. Vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever could become more widespread if effective control measures are not in place. In higher latitudes, cold-related deaths will decrease. Climate-sensitive aspects of human health make up a significant proportion of the global disease burden and may grow in importance.46 The health of the world’s population has improved remarkably over the past 50 years, although striking disparities remain .47 Slum populations in urban areas are particularly exposed to disease, suffering from poor air quality and heat stress, and with limited access to clean water. In some tropical areas, temperatures may already be at the limit of human tolerance. Peak temperatures in the Indo-Gangetic Plain often already exceed 45°C before the arrival of the monsoon .48 In contrast, in northern latitudes (Europe, Russia, Canada, United States), global warming may imply fewer deaths overall, because more people are saved from cold-related death in the winter than succumb to heat- related death in the summer (Figure 3.7; more detail in Chapter 5).49 In cities heatwaves will become increasingly dangerous, as regional warming together with the urban heat island effect (where cities concentrate and retain heat) leads to extreme temperatures and more dangerous air pollution incidents (see Box 6.4 in Chapter 5). Climate change will amplify health disparities between rich and poor parts of the world. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that climate change since the 1970s is already responsible for over 150,000 deaths each year through increasing incidence of diarrhoea, malaria and malnutrition, predominantly in Africa and other developing regions (Figure 3.8).50 Just a 1 °C increase in global temperature above pre-industrial could double annual deaths from climate change to at least 300,000 according to the WHO.51 These figures do not account for any reductions in cold-related deaths, which could be substantial .52 At higher temperatures, death rates will increase sharply, for example millions more people dying from malnutrition each year. 53 Climate change will also affect health via other diseases not included in the WHO modelling.54 The distribution and abundance of disease vectors are closely linked to temperature and rainfall patterns, and will therefore be very sensitive to changes in regional climate in a warmer world. Changes to mosquito distributions and abundance will have profound impacts on malaria prevalence in affected areas. This will be particularly significant in Africa, where 450 million people are exposed to malaria today, of whom around 1 million die each year. According to one study, a 2°C rise in temperature may lead to 40 – 60 million more people exposed to malaria in Africa (9 – 14% increase on present-day), increasing to 70 – 80 million (16 – 19%) at higher temperatures, assuming no change to malaria control efforts.55 Much of the increase will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, including East Africa. Some studies suggest that malaria will decrease in parts of West Africa, e.g. taking 25 – 50 million people out of an exposed region, because of reductions in rainfall. 56 Changes in future exposure depend on the success of national and international malaria programmes. Such adaptations are not taken into account in the estimates presented, but the effectiveness of such programmes remains variable. 57 Climate change will also increase the global population exposed to dengue fever, predominantly in the developing world, e.g. 5 – 6 billion people exposed with a 4°C temperature rise compared with 3.5 billion people exposed with no climate change. 8 Health will be further affected by changes in the water cycle. Droughts and floods are harbingers of disease, as well as causing death from dehydration or drowning.59 Prolonged droughts will fuel forest fires that release respiratory pollutants, while floods foster growth of infectious fungal spores, create new breeding sites for disease vectors such as mosquitoes, and trigger outbreaks of water-borne diseases like cholera. In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Honduras recorded an additional 30,000 cases of malaria and 1,000 cases of dengue fever. The toxic moulds left in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina continue to create health problems for its population, for example the so-called “Katrina cough”. No impact – diseases evolve to be more mild and humans evolve past vulnerabilities. Achenbach 3 (Joel, Washington Post Staff Writer, "Our Friend, the Plague," Nov, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0311/resources_who.html) Whenever a new disease appears somewhere on our planet, experts invariably pop up on TV with grave summations of the problem, usually along the lines of, "We're in a war against the microbes"—pause for dramatic effect —"and the microbes are winning." War, however, is a ridiculously overused metaphor and probably should be bombed back to the Stone Age. Paul Ewald, a biologist at the University of Louisville, advocates a different approach to lethal microbes. Forget trying to obliterate them, he says, and focus instead on how they co-evolve with humans. Make them mutate in the right direction. Get the powers of evolution on our side. Disease organisms can, in fact, become less virulent over time. When it was first recognized in Europe around 1495, syphilis killed its human hosts within months. The quick progression of the disease—from infection to death—limited the ability of syphilis to spread. So a new form evolved, one that gave carriers years to infect others. For the same reason, the common cold has become less dangerous. Milder strains of the virus—spread by people out and about, touching things, and shaking hands—have an evolutionary advantage over more debilitating strains. You can't spread a cold very easily if you're incapable of rolling out of bed. This process has already weakened all but one virulent strain of malaria: Plasmodium falciparum succeeds in part because bedridden victims of the disease are more vulnerable to mosquitoes that carry and transmit the parasite. To mitigate malaria, the secret is to improve housing conditions. If people put screens on doors and windows, and use bed nets, it creates an evolutionary incentive for Plasmodium falciparum to become milder and self-limiting. Immobilized people protected by nets and screens can't easily spread the parasite, so evolution would favor forms that let infected people walk around and get bitten by mosquitoes. There are also a few high-tech tricks for nudging microbes in the right evolutionary direction. One company, called MedImmune, has created a flu vaccine using a modified influenza virus that thrives at 77°F instead of 98.6°F, the normal human body temperature. The vaccine can be sprayed in a person's nose, where the virus survives in the cool nasal passages but not in the hot lungs or elsewhere in the body. The immune system produces antibodies that make the person better prepared for most normal, nasty influenza bugs. Maybe someday we'll barely notice when we get colonized by disease organisms. We'll have co-opted them. They'll be like in-laws, a little annoying but tolerable. If a friend sees us sniffling, we'll just say, Oh, it's nothing—just a touch of plague. Disease burns out before it can cause extinction – lethal viruses will kill their hosts too fast. Understanding Evolution 7 (Website on Evolution from UC Berkeley, "Evolution from a virus's view," December, http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/071201_adenovirus) Since transmission is a matter of life or death for pathogen lineages, some evolutionary biologists have focused on this as the key to understanding why some have evolved into killers and others cause no worse than the sniffles. The idea is that there may be an evolutionary trade-off between virulence and transmission. Consider a virus that exploits its human host more than most and so produces more offspring than most. This virus does a lot of damage to the host — in other words, is highly virulent. From the virus's perspective, this would, at first, seem like a good thing; extra resources mean extra offspring, which generally means high evolutionary fitness. However, if the viral reproduction completely incapacitates the host, the whole strategy could backfire: the illness might prevent the host from going out and coming into contact with new hosts that the virus could jump to. A victim of its own success, the viral lineage could go extinct and become an evolutionary dead end. This level of virulence is clearly not a good thing from the virus's perspective. Diseases strong enough to cause quick deaths kill their hosts too fast to spread rapidly. Lafee 9 (“Viruses versus hosts: a battle as old as time”, SCOTT MAY 3, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/may/03/1n3virus01745-viruses-versus-hosts-battle-old-time/?uniontrib) Generally speaking, it's not in a virus's best interest to kill its host. Deadly viruses such as Ebola and SARS are self-limiting because they kill too effectively and quickly to spread widely. Flu viruses do kill, but they aren't considered especially deadly. The fatality rate of the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic was less than 2.5 percent, and most of those deaths are now attributed to secondary bacterial infections. The historic fatality rate for influenza pandemics is less than 0.1 percent. Humans make “imperfect hosts” for the nastiest flu viruses, Sette said. “From the point of view of the virus, infecting humans can be a dead end. We sicken and die too soon.” T |
| 11/10/2012 | Tournament: Wake | Round: 2 | Opponent: WSCU | Judge:
Edelman K Perm: Do the plan and abandon reproductive futurity
That solves the k. Even if security and risk calculation are flawed, engaging in them creates discourse of social welfare and promotes a democratic civic culture that checks political exclusion and loss of value to life
Loader – Criminology Prof at Oxford – 7
(Civilizing Security, Pg. 5)
Faced with such inhospitable conditions, one can easily lapse into fatalistic despair, letting events simply come as they will, or else seek refuge in the consolations offered by the total critique of securitization practices – a path that some critical scholars in criminology and security studies have found all too seductive (e.g. Bigo 2002, 2006; Walters 2003). Or one can, as we have done, supplement social criticism with the hard, uphill, necessarily painstaking work of seeking to specify what it may mean for citizens to live together securely with risk; to think about the social and political arrangements capable of making this possibility more rather than less likely, and to do what one can to nurture practices of collective security shaped not by fugitive market power or by the unfettered actors of (un)civil society, but by an inclusive, democratic politics. Social analysts of crime and security have become highly attuned to, and warned repeatedly of, the illiberal, exclusionary effects of the association between security and political community (Dillon 1996; Hughes 2007). They have not, it should be said, done so without cause, for reasons we set out at some length as the book unfolds. But this sharp sensitivity to the risks of thinking about security through a communitarian lens has itself come at a price, namely, that of failing to address and theorize fully the virtues and social benefits that can flow from members of a political community being able to put and pursue security in common. This, it seems to us, is a failure to heed the implications of the stake that all citizens have in security; to appreciate the closer alignment of self-interest and altruism that can attend the acknowledgement that we are forced to live, as Kant put it, inescapably side-by-side and that individuals simultaneously constitute and threaten one another’s security; and to register the security-enhancing significance and value of the affective bonds of trust and abstract solidarity that political communities depend upon, express and sustain. All this, we think, offers reasons to believe that security offers a conduit, perhaps the best conduit there is, for giving practical meaning to the idea of the public good, for reinventing social democratic politics, even for renewing the activity of politics at all. Perm: do the plan and take ecstasy as an experimental consideration of the future.
Perm: do the plan and criticize futurism in all other instances
A breeds attitudes of superiority that rationalize all forms of domination over human and non-human beings – this root causes all their queer oppression arguments
De Jonge 4 (Eccy de Jonge, lecturer in philosophy at Middlesex University, Spinoza and Deep Ecology, 2004, Ashgate: Aldershot, Hampshire, England, page 14-15.) When it comes to the environment, however, no one supposes that there is any particular negative attribute of nature that humans lack - nature is simply 'passive', animals are simply ‘brutes’, whilst human beings are active and compassionate. Here, however, anthropocentrism has free rein, for if human beings are never passive, they are always in control, and thus responsible – even if victims. Likewise, if human beings are never brutish, then all human acts of domination, at least over the non-human world, can be justified by invoking a principle of sufficient reason. This shows how an unquestioning acceptance of anthropocentrism – human superiority – is able to conceal certain human negative qualities (for example passivity or cruelty) while creating a bias towards other qualities (for example reason over emotion). This has led to certain attributes being used to justify an attitude of superiority. As a result, the essence of humanity has been left obscure. We should thus ask whether or not anthropocentrism is self-defeating - both aiming at and preventing itself from identifying a human essence. If anthropocentrism is not essential to the human condition, yet has played a key role in human evolution, then what does it mean to be human? The underlying problem with defining `humanity' is not easily dismissed in the context of anthropocentrism, for any discernible attributes that can be made to privilege the human condition, for example rationality, self-awareness and so on, exclude not only non-human beings but also certain human beings: imbeciles, infants and the senile." But a strong anthropocentrist could retort that bar infants (who in any case normally develop to become rational), there is still a `normal' criterion for defining humanity which certain human beings fail to meet: that is, we all know and understand what it means to be healthy and to develop normally, regardless of those who `fail to fit'. However, we do not need to define ourselves in any particular way to uphold an attitude of anthropocentrism; we need only see ourselves as more advanced than others, where advancement is judged according to a human trait or attribute which other beings lack. Indeed, if it were so easy to dismiss, anthropocentrism would not be an issue. Therefore, if anthropocentrism is to be attacked, it must be attacked on the grounds that human-centredness is problematic not merely for the non-human world but equally for humanity. In which case, we need to conceive of a world where the domination of nature and the domination of humankind are recognized as inextricably linked. There Edelman evidence is indicates that their alternative should not be prioritized over violence. They concede 100% of case which means in the face of violence you should prioritize
Queerness is defined by its ties to the future. Experimentally considering the future allows us to reimagine identity and oppressive structures
Muñoz 9 prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU (José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity)
Conclusion
“Take Ecstasy with Me” WE MUST VACATE the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present. In this book I have argued that queerness is not yet here; thus, we must always be future bound in our desires and designs. The future is a spatial and temporal destination. It is also another place, if we believe Heidegger, who argued that the temporal is prior to the spatial. What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination. Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy. The title of this conclusion is lifted from indie pop stars the Magnetic Fields. Sung by the wonderfully languid Stephen Merritt, the band’s leader, the song and its titular request could certainly be heard as a call to submit to pleasures both pharmaceutical and carnal. And let us hope that they certainly mean at least both those things. But when I listen to this song I hear something else, or more nearly, I feel something else. A wave of lush emotions washes over me, and other meanings for the word ecstasy are keyed. The gender-neutral song’s address resonates queerly and performs a certain kind of longing for a something else. Might it be a call for a certain kind of transcendence? Or is it in fact something more? The Magnetic Fields are asking us to perform a certain “stepping out” with them. That “stepping out” would hopefully include a night on the town, but it could and maybe should be something more. Going back through religion and philosophy we might think of a stepping out of time and place, leaving the here and now of straight time for a then and a there that might be queer futurity Saint Theresa’s ecstasy, most memorably signaled in Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture, has served as the visual sign of ecstasy for many 185 186 Conclusion Christians. The affective transport chiseled in her face connotes a kind of rapture that has enthralled countless spectators. It represents a leaving of self for something larger in the form of divinity. Plotinus described this form of ecstasy as God’s help to reach God and possess him. In Plotinus, God reaches man beyond all reason and gives him a kind of happiness that is ecstasy.’ In seminar XX, Lacan looks to Bernini’s sculpture as the most compelling example of what he calls the Other or feminine jouissance. 2 Ecstasy and jouissance thus both represent an individualistic move outside of the self. These usages resonates with the life of the term ecstasy in the history of philosophy. Ekstasis, in the ancient Greek (exstare in the Latin), means “to stand” or “to be out outside of oneself;’ ex meaning “out” and stasis meaning “stand” Generally the term has meant a mode of contemplation or consciousness that is not self-enclosed, particularly in regard to being conscious of the other. By the time we get to phenomenology especially Heidegger, we encounter a version of being outside of oneself in time. In Being and Time Heidegger reflects on the activity of timeliness and its relation to ekstatisch.3 Knowing ecstasy is having a sense of timeliness’s motion, comprehending a temporal unity, which includes the past (having-been), the future (the not-yet), and the present (the making- present). This temporally calibrated idea of ecstasy contains the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality, a thing that is not the linearity that many of us have been calling straight time. While discussing the Montreal-based band Lesbians on Ecstasy, Halberstam points to their mobilization of queer temporality through their thought experiment of imagining lesbian history as if it were on ecstasy. Here they certainly mean the drug MDMA, but they also mean an ecstatic temporality As Halberstam explicates, their electronic covers of earnest lesbian anthems remake the past to reimagine a new temporality.4 The “stepping out” that the Magnetic Fields song’s title requests, this plaintive “Take Ecstasy with Me,” is a request to step out of the here and now of straight time. Let us briefly consider the song’s invitation, located in its lyrics. It begins with a having-been: “You used to slide down the carpeted stairs / Or down the banister / You stuttered like a Kaleidoscope / ‘Cause you knew too many words / You used to make ginger bread houses / We used to have taffy pulls.” After this having-been in the form of fecund romanticized childhood is rendered, we here the song’s chorus, which contains this invitation to step out of time with the speaker! singer: “Take ecstasy with me, baby / Take ecstasy with me’ When we first hear this invitation it seems like it is merely a beckoning to go back to this idealized having-been. But then the present (the making-present) is invoked in the song’s next few lines, lines that first seem to be about further describing the mythic past but on closer listening telegraph a painful instant from the present: “You had a black snow mobile / We drove out under the northern lights / A vodka bottle gave you those raccoon eyes / We got beat up just for holding hands.” Did the vodka give the song’s addressee raccoon eyes? Or was it the bottle deployed in an act of violence? Certainly we know that the present being described in the song is one in which we are “beat up just for holding hands” At this point we hear the lyrical refrain differently “Take ecstasy with me, baby / Take ecstasy with me:’ The weird, quirky pop song takes on the affective cadence of a stirring queer anthem. (A cover of this song by the electronic dance act chk chk chk did briefly become a dance-floor anthem.) Take ecstasy with me thus becomes a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional, a time that is not queerness. Queerness’s time is the time of ecstasy. Ecstasy is queerness’s way. We know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together, as the Magnetic Fields request. That means going beyond the singular shattering that a version of jouissance suggests or the transport of Christian rapture. Taking ecstasy with one another, in as many ways as possible, can perhaps be our best way of enacting a queer time that is not yet here but nonetheless always potentially dawning. Taking ecstasy with one another is an invitation, a call, to a then-and- there, a not-yet-here. Following this book’s rhythm of cross-temporal comparison, I offer lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop’s invitation to her staunch spinster mentor Marianne Moore to “come flying”: Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying, to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come flying. The next few lines describe the river that the two poets would traverse, the multitude of flags they would behold on ships. Bishop refers to Moore’s signature three-cornered Paul Revere hat and her pointy black shoes, making the address all the more personal and highlighting Moore’s own queer extravagance. They would “mount” the magical sky with what Bishop calls a natural heroism. Our queer dynamic duo would then fly over “the accidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large:’ This flight is a spectacle of queer transport made lyric. Each stanza closes with the invitation to come flying. The last two stanzas are especially poignant for my thesis: With dynasties of negative constructions darkening and dying around you, with grammar that suddenly turns and shines like flocks of sandpipers flying, please come flying. Come like a light in the white mackerel slcy, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.6 It is important to note that the poem’s last few lines announce the flight’s destination as not determinedly spatial but instead as temporal: “this fine morning:’ Kathryn R. Kent has written carefully about the complicated cross-generational bond between the two women that eventually led to a sort of disappointment when Moore’s mother (with whom she lived) became an overarching influence in her life and overwhelmed the identificatory erotics between the two great poets.7 (As I have maintained, disappointment is a big part of utopian longing.) Kent explains the ways in which Bishop’s work signaled a queer discourse of invitation that did not subsume the other but was instead additive. Two other queer ghosts who float over the bridge are Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, both of whom wrote monumental poems about the bridge and what it represented. Bishop and Moore were both conversant about that work and the queer intertext that was being rendered. One can perhaps also decipher the living presence of writer Samuel R. Delany hovering. He is the author of “Atlantis: A Model 1924,” a haunting story that meditates on his own family history as it is interlaced with Crane’s biography and his relationship with the Brooklyn Bridge.8 The point is that the poem itself is poised at a dense connective site in the North American queer imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge and crossing the river, arguably both ways, represents the possibility of queer transport, leaving the here and now for a then and there. Thus, I look at Bishop’s poem as being illustrative of a queer utopianism that is by its very nature additive, like the convergence of past, present, and future that I have discussed throughout this book. This convergence is the very meaning of the ecstatic. The poem, like the pop song, is also a unique example of the concrete utopianism for which I am calling. Bishop does not overly sugarcoat the invitation; she clearly states that there are “dynasties of negative constructions / darkening and dying around you:’ But this invitation, this plea, is made despite the crushing force of the dynasty of the here and now. It is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better. Cruising Utopia can ultimately be read as an invitation, a performative provocation. Manifesto-like and ardent, it is a call to think about our lives and times differently, to look beyond a narrow version of the here and now on which so many around us who are bent on the normative count. Utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the political imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political becoming. These pages have described aesthetic and political practices that need to be seen as necessary modes of stepping out of this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter. From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality. Edelman has it entirely backwards. Queerness requires futurity. Their framework closes off the possibility of altering the present, thereby crushing social change and naturalizing hetero-normativity
Muñoz 6
José Esteban, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, PMLA, v121, n3, May, p. 825-826
I have chosen to counter polemics that argue for antirelationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity. At the 2005 MLA panel, in recent essays, and in my forthcoming book Cruising Utopia, I respond to the assertion that there is no future for the queer by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity. Queerness is always on the horizon. Indeed, for queerness to have any value whatsoever, it must be considered visible only on the horizon. My argument is therefore interested in critiquing the ontological certitude that I understand to accompany the politics of presentist and pragmatic contemporary gay identity. This certitude is often represented through a narration of disappearance and negativity that boils down to another game of fort-da. My conference paper and the forthcoming book it is culled from have found much propulsion in the work of Ernst Bloch and other Marxist thinkers who did not dismiss utopia. Bloch found strident grounds for a critique of a totalizing and naturalizing idea of the present in his concept of the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer-conscious enabled a critical hermeneutics attuned to comprehending the not yet here. This temporal calculus deployed the past and the future as armaments to combat the devastating logic of the here and now, in which nothing exists outside the current moment and which naturalizes cultural logics like capitalism and heteronormativity. Concomitantly, Bloch has also sharpened our critical imagination’s emphasis on what he famously called “a principle of hope.” Hope is an easy target for antiutopians. But while antiutopians might understand themselves as critical in the rejection of hope, they would, in the rush to denounce it, miss the point that hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia that is nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present. My turn to Bloch, hope, and utopia chal¬lenges theoretical insights that have been stunted by the lull of presentness and by various romances of negativity and that have thus become routine and re¬soundingly anticritical. Failure to evaluate responsibility for the future denies any collective social change
Grossberg 3
Lawrence, Professor of Communication Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, “Cultural studies, the war against kids, and the re-becoming of US modernity,” Postcolonial Studies, 6:3, 346-347
The war on kids is about erasing the future as a burden on the present. Or better, it is about changing the very mode by which the future functions, for the future is itself necessary to the possibility of an individualizing identity built on labour and citizenship. The rejection of kids as the core of our common national and social identity is, at the same time, a rejection of the future as an affective investment. Increasingly, the future is defined as either indistinguishable from the present35 (and therefore as the servant of the present rather than vice versa), or apocalyptically (as radically other than the present, without any continuity). To put it simply, the claim that we are no longer responsible to/for our children (because they no longer deserve it) ‘signifies’, if you will, that the present is no longer responsible to the future. On the contrary, in the re-imagined modernity, the future is to be held responsible to the present. We may be witnessing the attempt to reinvent the individual and the relationship of individuality to the forces that produce reality and are producing our collective futures, and the emergence of a new and distinct mode of individualization and (as)sociation. This ‘revolution’ involves economic, political, ideological, social, theoretical, cultural and media vectors, all together, and their multiple articulations. It is what brings together new conservative, neo-conservative and neo-liberal groups, and sometimes other constituencies, however temporarily. What is at stake is the production of a new modernity and of the impossibility of those conceptions of agency which have sustained us for centuries. This new modernity would seem to negate the very reality, and even the possibility, of the social or, more accurately, of social agency. What we are witnessing, what I have been trying to describe and imagine, is the production of a new context, a new modernity, out of the old. This production seems to require and seek the negation of many forms of individual and collective agency, including the very possibility of imagining alternative futures, of imagining the future as always holding open the possibility of alternatives. That is, the attack on kids is about the relationship between individuality and time. It is a struggle to change our investment in and the possibility of imagining the future. And it is, as Bauman says, a struggle about escaping from the present.36 Because as long as you believe in the future, there’s always an escape route, there’s always a way to get from here to there. And as long as there’s an escape route, there is always a possibility of a community defined in opposition to the present. This struggle against modernity (in the name of a new modernity) must negate the possibility of imagination, of the imaginative power of the future. And in fact, the new modernity seems to demand that we deny the importance of the future. But if we are to take back control of our present, if we are to take back the possibility of imagining the future, we must somehow return to kids—all over the world—the possibility of embodying hope for themselves (without once again imposing on them the burden that they embody hope for us as well). We must also claim hope for ourselves as intellectuals. I recognize that my argument may stretch one’s credulity, but I want to defend myself by agreeing with my good friend Meaghan Morris, who has suggested, ‘Things are too urgent now to be giving up our imagination’.37 I want to suggest that there is no other way except imaginatively to make sense of what is going on and that, in the end, it is precisely our ability to imagine that is at stake in the current political struggle.
Futurity is key to new social orders which are less oppressive
Bateman 6
R. Benjamin, Doctoral candidate in English, University of Virginia, “The Future of Queer Theory,” Minnesota Review, Spring, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml
Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's politics is insufficiently radical. After all, Butler has been criticized, like Edelman, for trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern argot and for failing to offer a viable model of political agency. To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and Foucaultian commitments constrain her ability to posit a stable political agent and to conceive a politics that would radically oppose, rather than merely reinforce or marginally reinflect, a dominant cultural order. But in her recent work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has turned to the "question of social transformation" (the title of UG's tenth chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social transformation "…is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living" (219). Lest she be accused of nominalism, Butler stresses the importance of real bodies in forging such a vocabulary: "…the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation" (217). While Edelman rejects the future as a site of social reproduction, Butler prizes it as a space of uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon which competing and perhaps unforeseeable claims will be made and new social orders elaborated. Butler's model offers queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's, not simply because it confers agency upon social actors and highlights the social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes the liberal inclusiveness for which Edelman faults it. Butler's queer world is not one in which the dominant order remains stable as it incorporates, or ingests, peripheral sexualities into its fold. Rather, it is one in which the periphery remakes the center, rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or "American" or "queer." Thus, queers do not simply enter society on heterosexuality's terms; they recast such terms, seizing upon instabilities in signification to elaborate previously unarticulated and perhaps unanticipatable ways of life. Edelman's point that 'queer' names "the resistance of the social to itself" (2002) combats the very anti-futurism he endorses; in this formulation, queerness functions as the force that prevents a particular social order from coinciding with itself, from congealing into a futureless nightmare. Queer, then, might denote the instability of all norms and social orders, their intrinsic capacity for change. No link: Edelman assumes a false dichotomy – People can grasp meaning within the spectacle without wholescale rejection.
Kaus and Giles ‘89
Sidney Kraus is a professor in the Department of Communication at Cleveland State University and Dennis Giles is also in the Department of Communication at Cleveland State University. Reviewed work(s):
Constructing the Political Spectacle by Murray Edelman Source: Political Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 517-525 Published by: International Society of Political Psychology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791366
Perhaps most disheartening is Edelman's cynical view that political par- ticipation is a "narrow focus" on politics, and only reinforces what he criti- cizes about the polity. Here again, Edelman does not make clear what effect voting turnout would have on "decisive change" were it increased substan- tially in elections. Edelman seems to be arguing that political language, as now practiced and perceived, lulls voters into satisfaction with the status quo. Voting does not change society and make for better individual well-being. If voters (and presumably non-voters) were cognizant of the "long odds against substantial change" they would "help shape effective strategies" or long-term change. Those strategies, however, would be more effective when "coupled with the recognition that art, science, and culture construct politi- cal thought and action rather than simply coexisting with them" (p. 130). "Reality," as Edelman regards it, is disguised (not described) by lan- guage. He concedes that his "... perspective offers a difficult analytic challenge because entities do not remain stable while you study them and subjects and objects are continuously evolving constructions of one another" (p. 2). Edel- man cautions us to be skeptical about, and be "liberated" from political texts or discourse; to look for "multiple and contradictory realities"; and to exa- mine other discourse, different "social situations and ... historical contexts" (pp. 128-129). But implicit in his discussion is the view that the public lacks the ability to "read" and use a political spectacle in terms of their own in- terests. Edelman sees the deception of linguistic practice, the fraudulent ba- sis of political constructions, while assuming that all those who are not duped by the system must, like himself, necessarily reject it. Between these two poles lies a whole world of "negotiated" political interaction which struggles for truth within self-interest-but the terms are not mutually exclusive. Edelman’s criticism of childrearing completely ignores recent changes in reproductive science
Balasopoulos 06 (Antonis, Assistant Professor in English Studies at the University of Cyprus, Journal of American Studies, “Evolution and ‘the Sex Problem’: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism”, proquest)
Edelman’s book takes obvious pleasure in provocation, stylistically indulging in the ironic hermeneutics it methodologically advocates with at times infelicitous results (an excess of largely gratuitous verbal punning and a partiality for highly convoluted syntax are cases in point). More disconcertingly, No Future involves a vision of queer subjectivity that is so strongly invested in transvaluating the homophobic linkage of homosexuality with a ‘‘ culture of death ’’ that it ends up ignoring the complexity and diversity of what has historically constituted queer (lesbian and transgender as well as gay) politics. Missing, for instance, is a serious and sustained attempt to engage with the multiple transformations the concepts of reproduction and parenthood have undergone in the last two decades, partly as a result of the interventions of queer theory itself. Equally absent is any analytical concern with the cultural and representational resonances of the queer child – a figure that certainly complicates the book’s one-dimensional treatment of the image of besieged childhood, while making apparent the unreflectively eclectic and historically untheorized nature of Edelman’s choice of primary texts. The effect of such exclusions – a highly repetitive account of texts that are treated as virtually interchangeable – is particularly troubling from a theoretical standpoint. For though Edelman’s argument largely rests on a theoretical distinction between an ideologically normative and a radically destabilizing kind of repetition compulsion, his analytical practice makes the difference between them less than obvious. Paying the reader diminishing dividends with each page, No Future bulldozes its way from Plato to the Victorians and from Hitchcock to Judith Butler by unwaveringly locating the same Manichean conflict between reproductive ideology and its queer negation, a struggle to the death between monolithic and unchanging absolutes. To declare No Future a timely work is hence not an unambiguous compliment; for its timeliness comes at the cost of intellectual surrender to the increasingly polarized and disconcertingly fundamentalist climate of American politics in the present. NO LINK – THE AFFIRMATIVE IS CONCERNED WITH BIRTH AND the CHILD INSOFAR AS THEY CAN INFLUENCE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION WHICH IS DISTINCT FROM SEXUAL REPRODUCTION. EDELMAN’S CONFLATION OF THE TWO FOR-CLOSES REFORM.
Brenkman 2002
John , Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 176
For Edelman the image of the child-as-future is more than a powerful trope in the political discourse of the moment. It in effect defines the political realm: "For politics, however radical the means by which some of its practitioners seek to effect a more desirable social order, is conservative insofar as it necessarily works to affirm a social order, defining various strategies aimed at actualizing social reality and transmitting it into the future it aims to bequeath to its inner child" (19). The burden of this argument is that a genuinely critical discourse cannot arise via the marking or symbolizing of the gap between the present and the future. Such symbolizing has indeed been the defining feature of modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment's philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats. Jürgen Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, defines modern time-consciousness itself as a taking of responsibility for the future. Edelman sees in such a time-consciousness an inescapable trap. For him any such political discourse or activity steps into "the logic by which political engagement serves always as the medium for reproducing our social reality" (26). Certainly the political realm—whether viewed from the perspective of the state, the political community and citizenship, or political movements—is a medium of social reproduction, in the sense that it serves the relative continuity of innumerable economic and non-economic institutions. But it is not simply a mechanism of social reproduction; it is also the site and instrument of social change. Nor is it simply the field of existing power relations; it is also the terrain of contestation and compromise. Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social reproduction and sexual reproduction. Here too he takes a fundamental feature of modern society, or any society, and absolutizes it. Sexual reproduction is a necessary dimension of social reproduction, almost by definition, in the sense that a society's survival depends upon, among many other things, the fact that its members reproduce. Kinship practices, customs, religious authorities, and civil and criminal law variously regulate sexual reproduction. However, that is not to say that the imperatives of social reproduction dictate or determine or fully functionalize the institutions and practices of sexual reproduction. The failure to recognize the relative autonomy of those institutions and practices underestimates how seriously feminism and the gay and lesbian movement have already challenged the norms and institutions of compulsory heterosexuality in our society. They have done so through creative transformations in civil society and everyday life and through cultural initiatives and political and legal reforms. The anti-abortion and anti-gay activism of the Christian Right arose, in response, to alter and reverse the fundamental achievements of these movements. Turn – queer parents – The aff’s conception of queerness obscures the possibilities of the sinthomosexual. By rejecting reproduction, they obscure the entire experience of lesbian motherhood, preventing a paradigmatic shift out of reproductive futurism
Fontenot 6
Andrea, Book Review: No Future,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006) 252-6, Project Muse
Lee Edelman's latest work continues the project began in Homographesis (1994) of tracing the confounding way that queerness is figured in representation as a structuring absence and arriving, even more pointedly this time, at the conclusion that "queerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural position determined by the imperative of figuration" (24). Edelman's contribution with No Future to this deconstructive thread of queer theory—a terrain shared by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Diana Fuss among others—is a frank, unflinching, and sustained assessment of the problematic politics (or not) that such a theory figures or, perhaps more appropriately, the impossible politics that [End Page 252]such a queer figure would theorize. In the form of a bracing polemic, he argues, in short, that queer theory stands fundamentally opposed to politics, all politics. Queerness, as it is figured in cultural representation, effectively constitutes the limit of politics, by virtue of the fact that it becomes visible only when posed in opposition to the social fantasy of a reproductive future that provides the foundation to all political visions, regardless of the particular moral values of their divergent programs. Thus, Edelman insists that just as "queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one," so too queer theory can only disrupt politics not produce them (17). In the place of politics, Edelman offers a discourse of ethics, calling upon queer theory to resist all attempts to sanitize or valorize sexuality but insist instead on its complete, and profoundly disruptive, unintelligibility. In No Future, Edelman gives us a highly nuanced and culturally specific account of how and why the disruptive negativity inherent in sexuality is figured onto the queer, ultimately naming "reproductive futurism"—rather than a vague idea of identity itself—as antithetical to the queer. Though at times it seems that he also naturalizes the association of the death drive with homosexuality, in his most lucid moments he returns to the heart of his argument: that it is in the figure of the queer that we find the trace of the death drive but that this figuration is always projected from elsewhere in a futile attempt to quarantine and suppress the death drive. To somehow correct this negative representation is impossible because queer sex can never be made to stand for life—stripped of the pretense of reproduction, queer sex is always exposed as "just fucking" and, as such, reveals the face of sexuality that the culture at large works so hard to conceal. Though queer families with children abound in our communities, and though nothing predisposes particular queer individuals to resist the appeal of futurity, we/they are made nonetheless to figure civil society's undoing through the perversion of the future. Thus, for Edelman, "The burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing fantasy of realizing, in an always indefinite future, Imaginary identities foreclosed by our constitutive subjection to the signifier" (17). In chapter 1, "The Future is Kid Stuff," Edelman calls our attention to how powerfully all political visions of the future are invested in "the Imaginary form of the Child" (14). When advocates of reproductive choice use the same rhetoric as their antichoice opponents, claiming the value of their struggle lies in the future freedom of our daughters and sons—in other words, when even abortion must make peace with the baby in order to survive—then we know that the [End Page 253]political reach of the child is total. Following Lauren Berlant, Edelman identifies this new era in "the fascism of the baby's face" (75). Just as the queer is made to carry the burden of the ego-threatening negativity of sexuality, the child is made to figure a sutured wholeness, immune from the disruptive force of jouissance. Edelman is careful, however, to remind us that by responding to his call to fill its own figural shoes in opposition to reproductive futurism, queer theory will not produce a "more perfect social order" (4). Rather than remake the social order to accommodate queerness (as Judith Butler suggests in Antigone's Claim), Edelman argues that "queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as social reality" (6). To justify queer theory as producing social value would be to accept reproductive futurism's command that only that which can be made transparent, straight, be allowed to survive. Buying into reproductive futurism demands not only the deferment of jouissance but an ethics of endless deferral that is capable of untold brutality, rationalizing any sacrifice, no matter how violently antilife. It is clearly more than rhetorical flourish that leads Edelman to identify as fascist what lies behind recent deployments of the baby's face, evoking perhaps the Frankfurt School conclusion that what was eliminated after World War II was not fascism but its opposition. However important queer theory's role of exposing the lie of the fantastic future promised by sociality, its inability to offer a solution—a future free from the negativity that always undermines social relations—means that it can never be cast as the savior or hero but rather must be imaged only in a series of villains who "disindentif[y] from the promise of futurity" (27). Such villains include A Christmas Carol's Scrooge, the sadistic Leonard (Martin Landau) from North by Northwest, and the eponymous leads in The Birds, a grouping that Edelman holds together with the term sinthomosexuality, an admittedly awkward neologism introduced in chapter 2. Borrowing from Lacan's revival of the dead signifier meaning symptom, "sinthome" names the radically intransigent particularity of a given subject's template for enjoyment (35). If the fantasy of meaning promised by the future can be understood as a grand gesture—the grandest of all—to finally fill the lack of the Other, then sinthomosexuality is that "fantasy turned inside out" (34–5). In each of these narratives, with the notable exception of The Birds, sinthomosexuals are forced to participate in reproductive futurism or be written out of the story. As resistant as we may be to claim as one of our own the thoroughly unsexy Scrooge, an icon for capitalist greed, Edelman argues that Scrooge's real crime is his status outside, and therefore in opposition to, reproductive futurism as figured in the text by Tiny Tim. Edelman reveals that these narratives [End Page 254]manufacture the threat of the sinthomosexual in order to have a place upon which to project the death drive they can never acknowledge in operation within the social itself. If, as the saying goes, "it takes a village to raise a child," then it takes a sinthomosexual too (45). While sinthomosexuality lends specificity to the cultural figuring of queerness, it does so at the expense of intelligibility; like queer itself, it denotes a structural positioning rather than a stable content. Chapters 3 and 4 take up the problematic of queer visibility and intelligibility that has become central to both queer theory and queer activism in the wake of identity politics. Edelman engages at length Judith Butler's contribution to this question in Antigone's Claim where she attempts to mediate the impasse between "legitimate and recognizable" subject positions and the oblivion of non-identity by proposing a catachresistic, provisional ontology. Ultimately, Edelman rejects her bid for "new schemes of intelligibility" (qtd. on 105) in favor of a more strict Lacanian understanding of sexuality as the limit of intelligibility, as "that which marks the subject as unknowable" (qtd. on 107). Particularly in The Birds, Edelman locates the question of intelligibility in a broader question about the nature (or naturalness) of humanity: "Rather than expanding the reach of the human, as in Butler's claim for Antigone, we might, with Leonard or the birds, insist on enlarging the inhuman instead—or enlarging what, in its excess, in its unintelligibility, exposes the human itself as always misrecognized catachresis" (152). Thus, the queer is called to figure not just an antifuture, a human death, but to embody all the excess expunged to even register as human in the first place, which leaves the sinthomosexual to situate "his ethical register outside the recognizably human" (101). Edelman's acceptance of the cultural logics linking death and homosexuality may seem hard to swallow: not only does he ask us to commit political suicide, he systematically refuses the fantasy of an afterlife, of an alternative future. However bleak this may seem, Edelman's work envisions for queer theory something much more powerful than politics. In identifying the broad nexus of forces that participate in reproductive futurism, Edelman enables queer theory to be a voice of resistance to the dominant political order in a more comprehensive way than any issue or identity based politics could contain. Indeed, the challenge he puts forth is for queer theory to more effectively channel the dissonant and disruptive effect of sexuality rather than distance ourselves from it. From my perspective it is not the negativity of his theory that constitutes its weakness. Rather, it is his failure to imagine the sinthomosexual in more diverse terms and his unwillingness to recognize possibilities for allegiance with [End Page 255]others who suffer under reproductive futurism's grip on our political culture. It is not just that his examples happen to all be white middle-class childless men—something we may excuse as product of the cultural register he chooses to investigate—but that his entire imagining of the scope of the sinthomosexual is limited; his exclusive use of "he" to denote queers and sinthomosexuals alike is only one manifestation. Though he illuminates the intricate displacements and disavowals required to figure the homosexual's difference in terms of their narcissistic love of sameness (see 56–60), he nonetheless ignores the differences that exist among those positioned under the sign "homosexual." This becomes a weakness for his analysis in the section where he deconstructs Jean Baudrillard's nauseating jeremiad, "The Final Solution," a treatise against "artificial insemination" and the "global extermination" of meaning it portends (64–65). Edelman dedicates six wonderfully reasoned pages to exposing Baudrillard's outrage at the imminent vanishing of sexual difference (and thus, for Baudrillard, difference at all) as a homophobic response to the way that the possibilities of sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex reveal the always already meaninglessness of sex, even in the heterosexual pairing (60–66). What Edelman misses here, though, is an opportunity to show another face of the figure of the sinthomosexual. In Baudrillard's paranoid reaction to new technologies of reproduction, it is not the gay male who is evoked but rather the lesbian mother, that most notorious beneficiary of this desexualized reproduction. Were Edelman to entertain this difference, he would find that she is figured in much the same terms as her male counterpart: imperiling both the child she would bear and the future that the Child is meant to guarantee, despite the efforts of some lesbian mothers to trade on the capital of reproductive futurism to purchase civil rights. By simply dismissing queer parents as "comrades in reproductive futurism" (19), capable only of contributing to the homophobic scapegoating of the sinthomosexual, he ignores their possibility as allies on the frontier between the Child and children, between the future and tomorrow. Regardless of these omissions, however, Edelman has certainly articulated a new direction for queer theory, making No Future required reading both within the field and beyond.
This takes out and outweighs the case – ignoring the queer mother makes rampant homophobia inevitable
Wove 92
Maxine, Invisible Women in Invisible Places, Arch. & Comport. / Arch. & Behav., Muse
This invisibility reflects and is reflected in the heterosexist biases in our litera- ture, including the literature on "women and environments", in which Lesbians are rarely, if ever, mentioned and then only in passing. We are neither part of the generic category of "women" nor are we identified as a particular group of women with particular needs. Yet, we are not the only people who are made invisible (Bradley & Wolfe, 1987). In our case, an unraveling of heterosexist bias raises particular ques- tions. Some may be applicable to invisible others; some may be specific to who we are and how we lead our lives. In our case, heterosexist bias has led to a consideration of women primarily in relation to men and children, most often in nuclear family ar- rangements. Apparently we are neither the housed nor the homeless, we do not use public transportation nor do we work inside or outside the home. This bias has led to an understanding of the "home" as the primary site of identity formation and place at- tachment and to a lack of focus on environments outside the home which are not workplaces. It has also desexualized peoplelenvironment relationships. The current re- search speaks to these biases and demonstrates how consciousness about them can change the understanding of peoplelenvironment relationships. The call for no future is premised on white colonialism and perpetuates sexual exceptionalism
Smith 10 (Andrea, Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008) and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005). She is also a cofounder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.,” Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” GQL: Volume 16, Number 1-2, Muse, VR) In addition, while both "tradition" and "the future" must be critically engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed. As with identity, the notion of a tradition-free subject simply reinstantiates the notion of a liberal subject who is free from past encumbrances. As Elizabeth Povinelli's work suggests, the liberal subject articulates itself as an autological subject that is completely self-determining over and against the "genealogical" subject (i.e., the indigenous subject) trapped within tradition, determined by the past and the future.32 Essentially then, this call for "no future" relies on a primitivizing discourse that positions the [white] queer subject in relation to a premodern subject who is locked in history. The "Native" serves as the origin story that generates the autonomous present for the white queer subject. [End Page 48] As Jasbir Puar notes, this articulation of queerness as "freedom from norms" actually relies on a genocidal logic of biopower that separates those who should live from those who must die.33 That is, for the queer subject to live under Edelman's analysis, it must be freed from genealogical, primitivist subjects who are hopelessly tied to reproductive futures. This impulse is similar to Warner's juxtaposition of a transgressive queer subject with the racialized subject trapped within identity and ethnic organization. Puar terms this tendency a "sexual exceptionalism" that mirrors U.S. exceptionalism, in which a white queer subject reinscribes a U.S. homonormativity by positioning himself/herself in an imperialist relationship to those ethnic subjects deemed unable to transgress. "Queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse. . . . 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism's authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family."34 If we build on Silva's previously described analysis, we can see that the Native queer or the queer of color then becomes situated at the "horizon of death" within a "no futures" queer theory: such individuals must free themselves from their Native identity and community to become fully self-determined subjects. They must forgo national self-determination for individual self-determination; they cannot have both. Racialized subjects trapped within primitive and pathological communities must give way to modern queer subjects. Puar's analysis of biopower suggests that modern white queer subjects can live only if racialized subjects trapped in primitive and unenlightened cultures pass away. For instance, some LGBT organizations (as well as feminist organizations) supported the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because the bombing would supposedly free queer people from the Taliban. Apparently, throwing bombs on people frees them. But of course, it was not actually queer people in Afghanistan who were the real subject of liberation —rather, modern queer subjects in the United States could live only if a sexually savage Afghanistan were eliminated. To quote Puar: "Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and defiant populations targeted for death (queerness as population)."35 Meanwhile, as Puar, Silva, and Povinelli imply, the white queer subject, despite its disavowals, is firmly rooted in a past, present, and future structured by the logics of white supremacy —it is as much complicit in, as it is transgressive of, the status quo. Rather than disavow traditions and futures, it may be more politically efficacious to engage them critically. [End Page 49] The "no future" framework also tends to presume a linear time frame, the normativity of which has been challenged by many Native scholars, particularly Vine Deloria.36 He and others argue that indigenous epistemologies do not necessarily presume a temporal distance between the past, present, and future. For example, at the 2005 World Forum on Theology and Liberation held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated they know another world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past, and future become co-present, thereby allowing us to engage in what the Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer calls a radical remembering of the future.37 Native traditions can allow Native communities to remember their nations as not necessarily structured through hierarchy, oppression, or patriarchy. These remembrances should be critically interrogated and not romanticized. Also, Native communities today cannot replicate their precolonial formations because Native nations are and always have been nations that change and adapt to the surrounding circumstances. However, our understanding that it was possible to order society without structures of oppression in the past tells us that our current political and economic system is anything but natural. While these visions may be critiqued for being utopian or romanticizing, their importance today is not so much that they were true of all Native communities or that Native communities were perfect. Rather, the fact that any memories of alternative social organization exist at all helps denormalize our current social structure. If we lived differently before, we can live differently in the future. Or to quote Muñoz, "A look toward the past . . . critiques the present and helps us envision the future."38 Edelman's intervention is important because any struggle must look at how a "fight for the future" can reinstantiate inequality in the present. In fact, as I have noted elsewhere, many indigenous struggles have directly taken on this critique, arguing that a deferred future was creating an intolerable present for those engaged in the struggle.39 But at the same time, not all futures are created equal, and futures themselves can be queered. The Child can be the phantasm that ensures the status quo, or the Child can be the nit that undoes it, or the Child can be both. EDELMAN’S REJECTION OF QUEER REPRODUCTION REPRODUCES EXCLUSION BY REGULATING FEMINIZED, REPRODUCTIVE BODIES TO THE PERIPHERY. LEGITIMIZES INDIFFERENCE AND EXTERMINATION.
FRAIMAN, 2003
Susan, Cool Men and the Second Sex, pg 132-133
The problem with this is not only that it conflates the female body, maternity, and heteronomativity but also that it posits, on the other side, a queerness unpolluted by procreative femininity or, as Edelman says defiantly, “outside the cycles of reproduction.” Here Edelman makes use of parallel clauses to underscore the equation between those “choosing to stand” apart from reproduction and those “choosing to stand” by the side of AIDS sufferers. Elsewhere in “Kid Stuff” progeny-free queerness is represented by the Tom Hanks character in Philadelphia and by the autobiographical gay male “I” who steps forward, momentarily, to gloss a billboard against the grain of its pro-child message. Observing that the child is tendered in opposition at once to abortion and to queer sexualities, the speaker would refuse “the compulsion to embrace our own futurity in the privileged form of the child and thereby to imagine the present as pregnant with the child of our identification”; instead, he challenges us to embrace abortion, to eradicate the poignant optimism of pregnancy. Within such a stark binary schema, what remains unthinkable is queer pregnancy, queerness within the cycles of reproduction, queer women with biological children whether from hooking, marriage, or artificial insemination—or, for that matter, queer men with kids genetically their own. The elision of these figures whose depiction would flout the logic of AIDS-versus-pregnancy is evident at two moments in particular, when Edelman acknowledges gay liberal demands for the right to adopt children (in a different register from his own case against the figurative child). In the first instance, he mentions lesbians and gay men working for the right “to adopt and raise children of their own”; in the second he invokes “the children we’d as eagerly fly to China or Guatemala in order to adopt”. My interest here is not in the merits of campaigns for gay “normalization” and marriage rights but rather in Edelman’s suppression of procreative queerness even as he brings up lesbian and gay parenting. By tying this firmly and exclusively to adoption, Edelman keeps the category of queerness apart from the feminized, reproductive body, which is imagined as scarcely any closer or more familiar than China or Guatemala. THE ALTERNATIVE CEEDS POLITICS TO THE RIGHT - Their move to deny the efficacy of all political engagement for queers MISIDENTIFIES the contingency of today’s CHRISTIAN Right with the ever-present political order.
Brenkman 2002
John , Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 176
How then to analyze or theorize this struggle? A motif in Edelman's analysis takes the rhetoric and imagery of the Christian Right and traditional Catholicism to be a more insightful discourse than liberalism when it comes to understanding the underlying politics of sexuality today. I think this is extremely misguided. The Right does not have a truer sense of the social-symbolic order than liberals and radicals; it simply has more reactionary aims and has mobilized with significant effect to impose its phobic and repressive values on civil society and through the state. The Christian Right is itself a "new social movement" that contests the feminist and gay and lesbian social movements. To grant the Right the status of exemplary articulators of "the" social order strikes me as politically self-destructive and theoretically just plain wrong. Utilitarianism first
Nye 86 [Joseph S. Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs; 1986; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46STRONG]
Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"?74 How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, "is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival. When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else. Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning. |
| 11/11/2012 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
Environmental racism is manifested by global warming, which has unevenly caused indigenous suffering for generations
Krakoff, 08 (Sarah, Associate Dean of Research Colorado Law, also Law Professor at Colorado Law School, “American Indians, Climate Change, and Ethics for a Warming World,” Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Colorodo Law, 85 Den., U.L. Rev. 865 (2008)) AFL American Indian tribes [indigenous nations] and people have contributed very little to the causes of global warming, yet for geographic, cultural, and demographic reasons, they stand to suffer disproportionately from global warming’s negative effects. A recent study, Native Communities and Climate Change, prepared by the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado Law School, documents that these effects include, among others, threats to traditional hunting and gathering, destruction of tribal [indigenous] villages in Alaska, increased pressure on tribal [indigenous] reserved rights to water in the arid Southwest, and inundation of reservation lands in Florida.2 The disproportion between tribal [indigenous] contributions to global warming and the negative impacts on tribes [indigenous nations] qualifies this as an environmental justice issue. 3 As the Native Communities and Climate Change Report suggests, a complex of legal rights, in conjunction with Congress’s moral obligation government to take action to address these impacts.4 Yet as important as it is to highlight its environmental justice aspects, global warming’s spatial and temporal dispersions render it a global and intergenerational collective action problem that is not susceptible to typical environmental justice solutions. Global warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases (methane, nitrous oxide, various hydrofluorocarbons, various perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride) that trap heat that would otherwise be reflected back into the atmosphere.5 The atmosphere is a global commons; no matter where in the world you are, your emissions contribute to its increasing insulating properties. Further, the atmosphere cannot be compartmentalized. For example, the fact that the United States has the highest historical greenhouse gas emissions6 does not mean that our atmosphere is “thicker” and that we will suffer from global warming proportionately more than other countries. The spatial dispersion also means that reductions in one part of the globe can be rendered meaningless by increases in another part of the globe. If the total parts per million of CO2 continue to rise overall, it doesn’t matter where the parts come from. This spatial dispersion feature of global warming means that disparate effects from climate change cannot be redressed by targeting the emitters closest to the affected area. Furthermore, disparate effects cannot even be redressed by targeting only the biggest emitters. The commons aspects of climate change require all emitters to be part of a collective solution. These spatial collective action features are what prompt politicians to adopt the line: “Why should we reduce our emissions if China will soon render our efforts meaningless?”7 While there are many appropriate rejoinders to this, including the imperative of moral leadership and the necessity of the United States leading the way in terms of technological solutions, the do-nothing position has, to date, prevailed as a matter of national policy. Every instance of racism must be rejected
Memmi, Professor of Sociology at University of Paris, 2000 (Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris , Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165) JG The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. |
| 11/11/2012 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
SQ would destroy US/ROK relations we have two internal links:
First, US blockage of South Korean Pyroprocessing
Hibbs, Senior Associate Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 10
Global Insider: U.S.-South Korea Nuclear Agreement¶ The Editors, on 29 Nov 2010, Global Insider¶ South Korea and the United States recently began a review of their bilateral nuclear energy agreement that expires in 2014. In an e-mail interview, Mark Hibbs, senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nuclear Policy Program, discussed U.S.-South Korea civil-nuclear cooperation. http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/7171/global-insider-u-s-south-korea-nuclear-agreement, ¶ WPR: What is driving the current South Korean effort to renegotiate the agreement, and what objections does the United States have?¶ Hibbs: South Korean firms intend to continue reactor-building with U.S. partners, both in Korea and abroad, but if the current agreement is not replaced with a new one in 2014, this cooperation would halt. But, as was previously the case for Japan, since South Korea's original nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States was concluded, Seoul has mastered nuclear-plant design, equipment manufacture, and construction, and wants this development reflected in new diplomatic and commercial arrangements. ¶ Separately, South Korea wants the United States to allow it to extract and reuse uranium and plutonium from its spent nuclear fuel. Under the terms of the current agreement, the United States has stood in the way of this on longstanding nonproliferation-policy grounds and because the United States fears an escalation of tension with North Korea. In 1992, both Koreas agreed to refrain from reprocessing spent fuel or enriching uranium. Some South Koreans argue that this agreement was nullified when North Korea tested nuclear weapons and began enriching uranium. The United States disagrees.¶ WPR: What implications does this negotiation have for broader U.S.-South Korean relations?¶ Hibbs: South Korea is a firm U.S. ally. It will be very difficult for the United States to deny South Korea's bid for what it calls "peaceful nuclear sovereignty" without damaging the overall bilateral relationship and incurring South Korean resentment that Washington's ultimate trump card was its military and political leverage over the small country. South Korea argues that the United States has afforded more generous terms to the European Union and, especially, Japan. ¶ Also, in 2008, South Korea and other nuclear-supplier states-party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty accommodated a U.S. request and lifted nuclear trade sanctions against India, a country outside the NPT with nuclear weapons. This permitted a U.S.-India nuclear cooperation agreement, which allows India to reprocess its U.S.-origin spent fuel, to enter into force. ¶ In 2004, it was revealed that South Korean scientists had engaged in experiments to enrich uranium that were not reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 2008, the IAEA concluded that all nuclear activities in South Korea were for peaceful use. This appears to underscore South Korea's claims that it is an advanced, developed country and a responsible nuclear state with too much to lose in its relationships with others, including the United States, should it try to develop nuclear weapons.¶ Second, US/South Korea Nuclear agreement
Tae-ho, 12
US opposes South Korea’s attempts to use pyro-processing for nuclear power. Posted on : Jul.25,2012 12:13 KST, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/544157.html, Gary Saymore, White House National Security Council coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction policy¶ Seoul seeking to reprocess spent fuel to solve storage dilemma ¶ By Kwon Tae-ho, Washington correspondent South Korea is currently claiming the right to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel to solve the problem of storing spent fuel, but the US is opposed, saying this could hurt international nuclear non-proliferation.¶ White House National Security Council coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction policy Gary Saymore mentioned Seoul’s interest in pyro-processing while meeting journalists after a bilateral meeting to discuss the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul and future steps.¶ Saymore noted South Korea’s highly developed nuclear power industry, but also said it could purchase enriched uranium from the United States or France.¶ Currently, South Korea imports 20% to 30% of the uranium used in its nuclear power plants from the United States, and the rest from Europe.¶ Saymore said Washington saw no need for South Korea to use highly enriched uranium for civilian energy generation.¶ South Korea produces around 700 tons a year of spent nuclear fuel as waste from the power generation process. This waste must be kept in temporary storage facilities on the plant sit according to the terms of an agreement with the US. To address this issue, it is working on plans for applying the new technique of “pyro-processing” to process spent fuel, which would dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste without giving cause for concerns about plutonium extraction. The South Korean government claims this is only the recycling of spent fuel, not the development of pure plutonium for nuclear weapons.¶ But the US opposes this, stating that pyro-processing could also be used to extract plutonium.¶ Signed in 1974, the two countries’ nuclear energy agreement will be in effect until 2014. Currently, Washington and Seoul are in discussions on amending its terms prior to then.¶ Saymore said a resolution would be reached before 2014. He added that officials in Washington and Seoul are currently working to maintain the two countries’ peaceful cooperation on the matter of nuclear energy. US rejection of South Korean nuclear ambitions ensures break-out
NYT, 11
CHOE SANG-HUN¶ South Korea and U.S. Differ on Nuclear Enrichment¶ Published: December 5, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/world/asia/south-korea-and-us-differ-on-nuclear-enrichment.html?pagewanted=all Where nuclear energy is concerned, South Korea wants the United States to treat it not as a junior ally but as a “global player” and “business partner.” (Westinghouse Electric is part of a South Korean-led consortium that has a $20 billion contract to build four reactors for the United Arab Emirates.) The country will play host in March to a global nuclear security meeting in a bid to demonstrate its commitment to nonproliferation.¶ But American experts say Washington sees a very different role in nonproliferation for South Korea.¶ “South Korea is viewed as a role model” for countries that Washington hopes will pursue nuclear energy without resorting to enrichment or recycling, said Miles A. Pomper, senior researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “South Korea would be better off to stay on the same path than follow the role model of North Korea.”¶ South Korea may have lingering American suspicions to dispel. It embarked on a short-lived nuclear arms program in the early 1970s. In 2004, it admitted that its scientists had dabbled in reprocessing in 1982 and enrichment in 2000 without notifying the government. Earlier this year, some conservative columnists and activists called for South Korea to consider acquiring nuclear weapons, since the North Koreans appear unlikely to abandon theirs.¶ Seoul says it will do no such thing. Yet public opinion has sometimes favored that option — especially at times when the Americans have been seen as overbearing, or as wavering in their commitment to South Korea’s defense. In a survey conducted by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in March, with tensions still high after North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island last year, nearly 69 percent of respondents supported developing nuclear weapons.¶ Washington wants South Korea to adhere to a 1992 agreement it signed with North Korea that prohibits enrichment and reprocessing, even though North Korea’s activities since then have made the agreement obsolete. Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul, accused Washington of “nonproliferation Orientalism” — that is, prejudicial distrust of a loyal ally and disregard of its sovereign national interest.¶ “We must divorce the 1992 agreement,” he said. “At the same time, so that the Americans won’t have any doubt, we must declare that we will never marry a nuclear weapon.”¶ South Korea Break out would lead to massive break-outs world wide Olsen, ’07
[“PDP Hosts WMD Workshop on Heading Off a Nuclear Proliferation Cascade” Robin Olsen. June 20, 2007] If South Korea or Japan made the decision to develop nuclear weapons, this choice would be visible to outside observers, thereby creating an uncomfortable period of time where the world would know their intentions but they would not yet have the weapons. Participants also considered how proliferation decisions in one country might be linked to those made by others. Participants generally agreed that North Korea's nuclear future would be linked to Japan's decisions, and that if South Korea or Japan were to develop nuclear weapons, the other country would likely follow suit. Most participants agreed that Taiwan's policies are not linked to these developments, but that its dependence on the United States and the likelihood that any weapons effort would be detected at any early stage are major factors in its nuclear calculus. Finally, the possibility of a unified Korea possessing nuclear weapons raised a number of interesting questions, and most agreed that this scenario would spark reactions in China. Finally, participants discussed how a potential East Asian cascade might impact Latin America, particularly Venezuela and Brazil. They also considered how countries' decisions about developing nuclear weapons might be influenced by the United States' own nuclear. Nuclear Tsunami Cirincione 2K
[Joseph Cirincione, Foreign Policy, Spring 2000 “Asian Nuclear Reaction Chain,” http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=632] But those who claim to be reinventing arms control for the 21st century are turning their backs on history. As far back as the early 1960s, policymakers warned that the true threat to the United States was not only that third-world despots might acquire the bomb but that advanced industrial countries might do so. Kennedy's Warning Nuclear weapons in "the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable," President John F. Kennedy warned, would create "the increased chance of accidental war and an increased necessity for the great powers to involve themselves in what otherwise would be local conflicts." Kennedy understood what many today seem to forget: Rather than attempt just to limit the spread of advanced-weapons technology, policy makers must seek to build political firewalls that preclude the need for nuclear arms, so that even nuclear-capable nations would choose not to develop or deploy such weapons. Unfortunately, these firewalls are now crumbling in much of the world - particularly in Asia, where declining faith in arms control is prompting advanced and developing countries alike to contemplate the acquisition or development of nuclear weapons. Like neutrons splitting from an atom, one nation's actions may trigger reactions throughout the region, which in turn stimulate additional actions. Asian nations form an interlocking nuclear reaction chain that vibrates dangerously with each new development. Breeding Reactions South Asia is the region most likely to see the combat use of nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan - two nuclear-armed nations sharing a common border and a history of aggression - are developing new missiles and crafting nuclear-deployment doctrines. The disputed Kashmir region, the cause of two past wars between these nations, remains a frightening flash point. But it is Japan that may well be the critical element in this chain. In 1998, the Japanese were caught by surprise when the Indian-Pakistani tit-for-tat nuclear tests suddenly doubled the number of Asian nuclear-weapon states. Many Japanese were disturbed by how quickly the world accepted India and Pakistan's de facto status as new nuclear powers. This was not the bargain Japan had agreed to when - after a lengthy internal debate - it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1976. North Korea's launch of a long-range Taepo Dong missile in August 1998 further agitated Japanese policymakers, stirring new debates over security policies. Then-Vice Defense Minister Shingo Nishimura argued that Japan "ought to have aircraft carriers, long-range missiles, long-range bombers. We should even have the atomic bomb." Mr. Nishimura was forced to resign over his comments, but if nuclear-weapon deployments increase in Asia, Japan may well conclude that its security is best served by building its own nuclear arsenal. And Japanese withdrawal from the NPT would almost certainly trigger the collapse of the treaty. Finally, there are two new emerging risks in Asia: Russia faces the prospect of fragmentation into separate, nuclear-armed states, while the possible unification of Korea - although solving one set of problems - could create a single country with nuclear ambitions and capabilities. If these new nations find themselves in a world with an increasing number of nuclear-weapon states, they may well opt to join the club. Wishful Thinking In this environment, it would be foolish to let the nonproliferation and arms- reductions treaties unravel, thereby disarming the US of its most effective weapons for fighting nascent nuclear threats. Some critics, such as Henry Kissinger, argue that the US can pick and choose which particular arms treaties it finds most advantageous. Unfortunately, an arms control a-la-carte strategy will not work - the non-proliferation regime functions only as an integrated whole. Taking elements we don't like out of the regime structure starts a dangerous round of Jenga, the tabletop game where blocks are sequentially removed from a wooden tower until the whole structure collapses. Provocative US actions, such as the deployment of national missile defense, could well set in motion a chain of events that diplomacy will be powerless to stop. Only by expanding the resources devoted to international negotiations and leading by example in reducing nuclear dangers can the US hope to prevent a nuclear tsunami from sweeping out of Asia. The impact is extinction
Victor A Utgoff 2 (Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis) Survival Vol 44 No 2 Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions, p. 87-90 In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations. All your proliferation good arguments are wrong—they are based on flawed Cold war models of the European theatre—proliferation in Asia or the Middle East will spark a nuclear war—accidental or intentional Cimbala ‘8 – Professor of Political Science @ Pennsylvania State University –¶ Brandywine [Stephen J. Cimbala, “Anticipatory Attacks: Nuclear Crisis Stability in Future Asia,” Comparative Strategy, Volume 27, Issue 2 March 2008, pages 113 – 132Informaworld]
The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia presents a complicated mosaic of possibilities in this regard. States with nuclear forces of variable force structure, operational experience, and command-control systems will be thrown into a matrix of complex political, social, and cultural crosscurrents contributory to the possibility of war. In addition to the existing nuclear powers in Asia, others may seek nuclear weapons if they feel threatened by regional rivals or hostile alliances. Containment of nuclear proliferation in Asia is a desirable political objective for all of the obvious reasons. Nevertheless, the present century is unlikely to see the nuclear hesitancy or risk aversion that marked the ColdWar, in part, because the military and political discipline imposed by the Cold War superpowers no longer exists, but also because states in Asia have new aspirations for regional or global respect.12 The spread of ballistic missiles and other nuclear-capable delivery systems in Asia, or in the Middle East with reach into Asia, is especially dangerous because plausible adversaries live close together and are already engaged in ongoing disputes about territory or other issues.13 The Cold War Americans and Soviets required missiles and airborne delivery systems of intercontinental range to strike at one another’s vitals. But short-range ballistic missiles or fighter-bombers suffice for India and Pakistan to launch attacks at one another with potentially “strategic” effects. China shares borders with Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan; Russia, with China and North Korea; India, with Pakistan and China; Pakistan, with India and China; and so on. The short flight times of ballistic missiles between the cities or military forces of contiguous states means that very little time will be available for warning and attack assessment by the defender. Conventionally armed missiles could easily be mistaken for a tactical nuclear first use. Fighter-bombers appearing over the horizon could just as easily be carrying nuclear weapons as conventional ordnance. In addition to the challenges posed by shorter flight times and uncertain weapons loads, potential victims of nuclear attack in Asia may also have first strike–vulnerable forces and command-control systems that increase decision pressures for rapid, and possibly mistaken, retaliation. This potpourri of possibilities challenges conventional wisdom about nuclear deterrence and proliferation on the part of policymakers and academic theorists. For policymakers in the United States and NATO, spreading nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in Asia could profoundly shift the geopolitics of mass destruction from a European center of gravity (in the twentieth century) to an Asian and/or Middle Eastern center of gravity (in the present century).14 This would profoundly shake up prognostications to the effect that wars of mass destruction are now passe, on account of the emergence of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and its encouragement of information-based warfare.15 Together with this, there has emerged the argument that large-scale war between states or coalitions of states, as opposed to varieties of unconventional warfare and failed states, are exceptional and potentially obsolete.16 The spread of WMD and ballistic missiles in Asia could overturn these expectations for the obsolescence or marginalization of major interstate warfare. For theorists, the argument that the spread of nuclear weapons might be fully compatible with international stability, and perhaps even supportive of international security, may be less sustainable than hitherto.17 Theorists optimistic about the ability of the international order to accommodate the proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in the present century have made several plausible arguments based on international systems and deterrence theory. First, nuclear weapons may make states more risk averse as opposed to risk acceptant, with regard to brandishing military power in support of foreign policy objectives. Second, if states’ nuclear forces are second-strike survivable, they contribute to reduced fears of surprise attack. Third, the motives of states with respect to the existing international order are crucial. Revisionists will seek to use nuclear weapons to overturn the existing balance of power; status quo–oriented states will use nuclear forces to support the existing distribution of power, and therefore, slow and peaceful change, as opposed to sudden and radical power transitions. These arguments, for a less alarmist view of nuclear proliferation, take comfort from the history of nuclear policy in the “first nuclear age,” roughly corresponding to the ColdWar.18 Pessimists who predicted that some thirty or more states might have nuclear weapons by the end of the century were proved wrong. However, the Cold War is a dubious precedent for the control of nuclear weapons spread outside of Europe. The military and security agenda of the ColdWar was dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. Ideas about mutual deterrence based on second-strike capability and the deterrence “rationality” according to American or allied Western concepts might be inaccurate guides to the avoidance of war outside of Europe.19 |
| 11/11/2012 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
Obama ending all hopes of Yucca has sent the industry looking for a new place to store waste
Alvarez, 10
Robert Alvarez, Five Reasons NOT to Invest in Nuclear Power, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-alvarez/five-reasons-not-to-inves_b_465585.html, February 17, 2010 11:37 AM
Meanwhile, Obama has pulled the rug out from under the nuclear industry by terminating funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada. After nearly 30 years of trying, disposal of high-level radioactive waste is proving to be extremely difficult. So Obama has convened a "blue ribbon" panel of experts to go back to the drawing board and recommend what to do two years from now.¶ The accumulation of spent power-reactor fuel is expected to double at reactor sites and poses new safety issues, which will be the reality for several decades to come. Spent fuel pools currently contain about four times what their original designs envisioned and may be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than reactors. In 2004, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that drainage of water from a spent fuel pond by an act of malice could lead to a catastrophic radiological fire. One thing is certain. Republicans and Democrats do not want to restart a national radioactive waste dump selection process that's guaranteed to anger voters before the 2012 elections and beyond.¶ Nuclear Energy is an intriguing idea until you start to think about it. Without another option—nuclear waste will be stored on Goshute land
Burr, 11
The Salt Lake Tribune¶ August 19, 2011 Friday¶ Matheson fears high-level N-waste could head to Utah¶ BYLINE: By Thomas Burr The Salt Lake Tribune¶ SECTION: POLITICS; News; State¶ LENGTH: 557 words¶
Washington » The plan to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste in Utah's west desert could again surface after a federal panel suggested finding a temporary home for the spent fuel now piling up at reactors across the country.¶ The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future says in a draft report that a near-term solution for disposing of the waste would be to ship it to one or more temporary holding sites in the United States while Congress wrestles with finding a final burial site.¶ The only site currently licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for such use lies 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.¶ "My concern is the waste comes here," Rep. Jim Matheson said Wednesday. "That opportunity, which we assumed at one point we had closed off, it's not closed off anymore."¶ Congress and the Bureau of Land Management had halted a previous plan to park some 40,000 tons of nuclear waste at the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians reservation, though a federal judge overturned two key Interior Department decisions that Utah officials had believed would block the waste from being stored on the land in Tooele County.¶ Officials with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of energy companies that had pitched the idea of using Skull Valley, did not return calls Wednesday.¶ Matheson wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu arguing that the Blue-Ribbon Commission should drop the idea of shipping waste to a temporary site since "temporary" could end up lasting far more than a century.¶ Plus, Matheson says, the better plan would be for nuclear plants to store their own waste on-site until there's a permanent plan.
The dumping of nuclear waste on Native Americans is not accidental it is a government designed form of colonization and genocide which threatens the entire planet
Brook, 98[Daniel Brook, “Environment Genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Jan., 1998, Vol. 57, pp. 105-106, Nalepka]
GENOCIDE AGAINST NATIVE AMERICANS continues in modern times with modern techniques. In the past, buffalo were slaughtered or corn crops were burned, thereby threatening local native populations; now the Earth itself is being strangled, thereby threatening all life. The government and large corporations have created toxic, lethal threats to human health Yet, because “Native Americans live at the lowest socioeconomic level in the U.S.” (Glass, n.d., 3), they are most at risk for toxic exposure. All poor people and people of color are disadvantaged, although “[f]or Indians, these disadvantages are multiplied by dependence on food supplies closely tied to the land and in which [toxic] materials…have been shown to accumulate” (ibid.). This essay will discuss the genocide of Native Americans through environmental spoliation and native resistance to it. Although this type of genocide is not (usually) the result of a systematic plan with malicious intent to exterminate Native Americans, it is the consequences of activities that are often carried out on and near the reservations with reckless disregard for the lives of Native Americans.¶ One very significant toxic threat to Native Americans comes from government and commercial hazardous waste sitings. Because of the severe poverty and extraordinary vulnerability of Native American tribes, their land have been targeted by the U.S. government and the large corporations as permanent areas for much of the poisonous industrial by-products of the dominant society. “Hoping to take advantage of the devastating chronic unemployment, pervasive poverty and sovereign status of Indian Nations”, according to Bradley Angel, writng for the international environmental organization Greenpeace, “the waste disposal industry and the U.S. government have embarked on an all-out effort to site incinerators, landfills, nuclear waste storage facilities and similar polluting industries on Tribal land” (Angel 1991, 1).¶ In fact, so enthusiastic is the United States government to dump its most dangerous waste from “the nation’s 110 commercial nuclear power plants” (ibid., 16) on the nation’s “565 federally recognized tribes” (Aug 1993, 9) that it “has solicited every Indian Tribe, offering millions of dollars if the tribe would host a nuclear waste facility” (Angel 1991, 15: emphasis added). Given the fact that Native Americans tend to be so materially poor, the money offered by the government of the corporations for this “toxic trade” is often more akin to bribery or blackmail than to payment for services rendered. In this way, the Mescalero Apache tribe in 1991, for example, became the first tribe (or state) to file an application for a U.S. Energy Department grant “to study the feasibility of building a temporary [sic] storage facility for 15,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel” (Akwesasne Notes 1992, 11). Other Indian tribes, including the Sac, Fox, Yakima, Choctaw, Lower Brule Sioux, Eastern Shawnee, Ponca, Caddo, and the Skull Valley Band of Goshute, have since applied for the $100,000 exploratory grants as well (Angel 1991, 16-17).¶ This is a form of genocide
Batur 7
Pinar Batur¸Professor of Sociology at University of Texas, 2007, “Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide” As capitalism expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and challenger of the ”the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism [division of the universe into opposites of good and evil] goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes” (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new ”geography of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans. |
| 11/11/2012 | Tournament: Wake | Round: 7 | Opponent: Darmouth | Judge:
The US nuclear industry is on the slide in the SQ, expanding our nuclear industry is key to our non-proliferation leadership
WSJ, 12
Jay Solomon, SW, WSJ, Jan 25, 12, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181213674309478.html ¶ U.S. officials involved in the policy review said the Obama administration concluded that most countries wouldn't be willing to follow the U.A.E. model, and that insisting on it would hurt American interests.¶ ¶ They said Washington risked losing business for American companies seeking to build nuclear reactors overseas, and could greatly diminish its ability to influence the nonproliferation policies of developing countries.¶ ¶ "Nuclear trade carries with it a critical nonproliferation advantage in the form of consent rights, along with other opportunities to influence the nuclear policies of our partners," the State Department's and Energy Department's top nonproliferation officials, Ellen Tauscher and Daniel Poneman, wrote Congress this month.¶ ¶ U.S. companies once controlled at least 50% of the world market for building nuclear reactors. This share has dwindled to around 20%, U.S. officials say, with Russian, French and South Korean companies gaining dominance.¶ ¶ "To the extent we lose market share, we lose nonproliferation controls and hurt national security," said a senior U.S. official involved in the policy review.¶ ¶ U.S. officials said the Obama administration is pursuing a range of other tools to ensure that developing countries seek to purchase nuclear fuel from foreign suppliers rather than developing the technologies needed to produce the fuel themselves. A robust domestic industry is critical to signal U.S. leadership on non-proliferation norms.
Domenici 2012 (Energy and Infrastructure Program, Energy Project, Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Global Nuclear Energy Markets, A Report of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Nuclear Inititative. Pete Domenici and Warren Miller, July 2012, http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Leadership%20in%20Nuclear%20Energy%20Markets.pdf) JD
In addition, policy makers and the public must understand the clear linkages that exist between a strong domestic industry and competitive U.S. nuclear suppliers on the one hand and U.S. leadership in international nuclear markets and nonproliferation issues on the other hand. America’s history of global leadership in this technology area was built on many different factors, including the domestic industry’s extensive operating experience, the influence of the highly-respected NRC, technology advances achieved through domestic research and development programs, and a sustained commitment to nonproliferation principles. Maintaining excellence in each of these areas is the only way to assure continued U.S. leadership—both technologically and diplomatically—on nuclear issues of vital interest to our long-term energy and national security. US nuclear leadership is key to global non-proliferation
Dr. Charles Ferguson, Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown, 9
Charles D. Ferguson, 6-17-2009, is the Philip D. Reed senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), is also an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University, Testimony to Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, “Advancing Technology for Nuclear Fuel Recycling: What Should Our Research, Development, and Demonstration Strategy Be?.” http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/FergusonTestimonyJune172009.pdf U.S. leadership is essential for charting a constructive and cooperative international course to prevent nuclear proliferation. An essential aspect of that leadership involves U.S. policy on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The United States has sought to prevent the spread of reprocessing facilities to other countries and to encourage countries with existing stockpiles of separated plutonium from reprocessing facilities to draw down those stockpiles. The previous administration launched the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which proposed offering complete nuclear fuel services, including provision of fuel and waste management, from fuel service states to client states in order to discourage the latter group from enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel—activities that would contribute to giving these countries latent nuclear weapons programs. The current administration and the Congress seek to determine the best course for U.S. nuclear energy policy with the focus of this hearing on recycling or reprocessing of spent fuel and nuclear waste management strategies.
Over 40 countries could quickly breakout. Rublee ‘8 - Professor of Government and World Affairs @ University of Tampa
[Maria Rost Rublee, “Taking Stock of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime: Using Social Psychology to Understand Regime Effectiveness,” International Studies Review, 22 Aug 2008, Volume 10, Issue 3, Pages 420-450WileyInterScience] However, I would argue that before the United States (or any other country) gives up on the NPT and associated nuclear nonproliferation regime, we should take full account of not only the regime’s failures, but also its successes. Indeed, the success of the NPT is in many ways more surprising than its recent failures: for almost four decades, almost all states in the international system chose to forgo nuclear weapons, and in some cases, even gave them up. Numerous reports in the 1960s warned that the number of new nuclear states could reach as high as 20 in a few decades (The Bomb 1965:53). Instead, the count by 2008 is only four: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.2 The fact that so many states abstained from nuclear weapons tells us to look closely at the nuclear nonproliferation regime. What role has it played in encouraging nuclear forbearance? With the risk of nuclear theft or accidents increasing with each new nuclear weapons state, the international community needs all the help it can get in discouraging nuclear proliferation. This is especially important given the growing numbers of ‘‘latent nuclear states,’’ those with the ‘‘necessary industrial infrastructure and scientific expertise to build nuclear weapons on a crash basis if they chose to do so’’ (Sagan 1996:56). In 2004, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated that over 40 countries were ‘‘nuclear latent states’’. Given the high stakes, we need to better understand how and in what ways the NPT has actually helped discouraged nuclear proliferation. In doing so, we can also understand the mechanisms through which international regimes work to influence policymakers. So what about the NPT—if anything—has led to such a stunning record of nonproliferation? Certainly, a number of authors have tackled the topic of how the NPT contributes to halting nonproliferation. What tends to be missing, however, is a systematic and theoretically grounded way to assess the NPT’s utility. In this article, I propose such a framework, drawing from social psychology. Within the social psychology literature, scholars agree that persuasion and influence happen through distinct, recognizable mechanisms. I argue that the influence of the nuclear nonproliferation regime of state elites could be understood through the lens of social psychology.3 In other words, I propose taking social psychology’s framework for how attitudes and behavior change, and applying it to the NPT. I do so through a three-step process. I first break apart ‘‘nuclear forbearance’’ (or compliance with the NPT) into three different outcomes identified by the social psychology literature: persuasion (behavior resulting from genuine transformation of preferences), social conformity (behavior resulting from the desire to maximize social benefits and ⁄ or minimize social costs, without a change in underlying preferences), and identification (behavior resulting from the desire or habit of following the actions of an important other). Next, I investigate the different mechanisms through which the international social environment exerts influence on policymakers: creating a ‘‘list’’ effect in which those in noncompliance are obviously in a small minority, linking nuclear nonproliferation to other strongly held values, establishing a public record of state commitment which makes it hard for a state to withdraw, and more. Finally, I assess the utility of the framework by examining the case of Japan: to what extent does it help us understand Japanese nuclear decision-making? I conclude with some thoughts on how this framework could be applied in a number of different issue areas in international relations. Because the framework is drawn from social psychology, it should be applicable to more than just nuclear proliferation. To what extent is it useful to understand compliance with international regimes as three different outcomes (persuasion, identification, and conformity)? Do the mechanisms work in other issues areas? Are some mechanisms more potent in specific issue areas, or perhaps in different types of regimes (for example, regimes formalized through treaties, informal regimes, track-two diplomacy, etc.)? While my immediate focus is how this framework helps us to understand nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation, it could provide fertile ground for research across a number of different fields. What is Nuclear Forbearance? Almost all states have both ratified and adhered to the NPT, giving up nuclear weapons and exercising ‘‘nuclear forbearance.’’ One may think that this nuclear forbearance means these states have permanently given up the nuclear option, and if the NPT is weakened, these states’ nuclear decision-making would not change. That would be the case if these states were ‘‘persuaded’’—that is, they have internalized the message of the NPT and no longer need the treaty to exist for them to adhere to its precepts. However, this outcome of ‘‘persuasion’’ is not the only type of nuclear forbearance possible. It could be that the elite are forgoing nuclear weapons due to ‘‘conformity’’—to gain social prestige and ⁄ or avoid social costs. In this case, if the NPT collapsed, the social costs and benefits associated with it may no longer exist, potentially leading to a reassessment of a state’s nuclear posture. Or, leadership could be following the lead of an important ‘‘other’’—the outcome of identification. If the important ‘‘other’’ helped to weaken the NPT, then leadership may no longer be as concerned about adhering to the treaty. While the behavioral outcome is currently the same—nuclear forbearance—the attitude and motivation behind the behavior is not. This unpacking of nuclear forbearance is based on social psychology. Alastair Iain Johnston (2001) has taken the field considerably forward by his identification from the social psychology literature of two methods of behavior change: persuasion and social influence. Johnston argues that in addition to transformation of state interests (persuasion), multilateral institutions can also exert, or provide a forum through which members exert, ‘‘social influence’’—essentially, a social version of material carrot-stick factors that states include in cost-benefit calculations. Roughly, ‘‘persuasion’’ can be characterized as ‘‘I now see that X is better than Y’’ and ‘‘social influence’’ can be characterized as ‘‘I think Y is correct (or I like Y better), but since everyone else says X, I will do X so I don’t rock the boat’’ (Johnston 2001). Social rewards for conformance with institutional norms include backpatting; for nonconformance, shaming. Social influence, then, is a cost-benefit calculation made with social factors, whereas persuasion is true preference change (Kelman 1958). This is an important point: constructivists often construe the effect of multilateral institutions as that of changing a state’s conception of its national interest. While that is an important effect to investigate, it is also crucial to recognize that this is not the only ‘‘nonmaterial’’ way through which states’ behavior may change. In other words, it does not have to be all-or-nothing: either states transform their attitudes and behavior (validating constructivism) or they don’t (validating realism). Constructivism allows us to explore ways in which the social milieu created by regimes can influence state behavior without ‘‘converting’’ them. Social conformity is one conceptualization of this influence short of conversion. Another example is the cooperative process documented by Dalia Dassa Kaye (2001) in her study of the Middle East peace process, which she shows to help states gain common understandings without necessarily wholesale transformation of state preferences. Distinguishing between full-fledged persuasion and social conformity is critical to nuclear policymaking. As Ariel Levite (2002) argues, some states that have adhered to the NPT may actually be engaged in ‘‘nuclear hedging’’—that is, not actively engaging in nuclear weapons development but maintaining capacity to develop them quickly if desired. On the surface, what looks like NPT compliance and what seems to indicate persuasion may better be described as social conformity. This paper argues, however, that our model of persuasion and influence needs to be more detailed to provide a robust guide in our exploration. First, instead of the term ‘‘social influence,’’ I propose the use of ‘‘social conformity’’ to signal outward acceptance with private rejection, because in social psychology literature, this is the terminology most often used. Beyond this terminology issue, I argue that, in addition to persuasion and social conformity, we must also include ‘‘identification’’ as a method of behavioral change. Identification takes place when an actor wants to be like another, and so changes his or her actions to mimic those they admire. It can take place when a friend agrees with another friend, not because he has really changed his mind, but because it is important to a significant other. Herbert Kelman (1958:51) defines identification in this way: Identification can be said to occur when an individual accepts influence because he wants to establish or maintain a satisfying self-defining relationship to another person or group. This relationship may take the form of classical identification, in which the individual takes over the role of the other, or it may take the form of a reciprocal role relationship. The individual actually believes in the responses which he adopts through identification, but their specific content is more or less irrelevant. He adopts the induced behavior because it is associated with the desired relationship. Identification falls between outright persuasion (where preferences have changed) and social conformity (where preferences have not changed). In fact, while identification can be an influence outcome between individuals, it is a common result from group membership. Called ‘‘ingroup identification,’’ Marilynn Brewer and R. J. Brown (1998:561) note that ‘‘when a collection of individuals believe that they share a common in-group membership, they are more likely to act in the interest of collective welfare than are individuals in the same situation who do not have a sense of group identity.’’ In contrast to social conformity (which is strategic and motivated by straightforward utility maximization), identification is based on an affective desire to create, maintain, or strengthen a relationship. Why is it important to include identification as a third method of behavioral change? After all, models are theoretical constructs that help us understand reality, not chart it out in full detail. However, mechanisms that produce original policy results should be included in models. That is, if the behavior change mechanism of identification leads to different policy results than persuasion and social influence, then it should be included. A current example from the nonproliferation arena will illustrate. Over the past decade, the United States has backed away from some of its obligations in the nonproliferation regime: a continued push for new nuclear weapons, public declaration of the decision to continue designing and computer-testing new nuclear weapons, and a decision to employ a limited ballistic missile defense system. Some also argue that the Bush administration’s proposed nuclear agreement with India undermines the basis of the NPT by encouraging nuclear trade with a state that refuses to sign the NPT. If an ally of the United States’ (call this state Ally X) had initially followed the United States lead on nuclear nonproliferation due to persuasion, Ally X would remain persuaded, and thus would likely express disappointment, as well as encourage the United States to get back on course. If, however, another ally’s behavior was based on identification with the United States (call this state Ally Y), then which United States would it identify with: the United States of action or rhetoric? Identification is also important because even if the United States works to uphold the nonproliferation regime, the fact that Washington maintains nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons—and almost 60% of them are operational— may send the message that to be powerful, a country needs nuclear armaments (United States Profile 2007). In addition, because in reality states are not unitary actors, the distinctions between persuasion, conformity and identification likely play out in domestic politics. In fact, each of the influence outcomes could be represented by some segment of society interested in nuclear policy. One example would be nongovernmental organization (NGOs) and activists are ‘‘persuaded’’ that nuclear weapons are detrimental to state prestige and identity, policy wonks in the diplomatic core ‘‘identify’’ with their Western allies, and members of the military bow to ‘‘social conformity.’’ In each case, the behavior is the same: nuclear forbearance. The reasons behind the actions are different, however, and material or social changes could lead to behavioral changes. A short narrative of how different domestic factions might play out in Ally X and Ally Y will illustrate. This description is not meant to describe any two countries, but rather simply highlight what differently influenced groups might look like with regard to nuclear policy, and how they might react to US behavior. In the case of Ally X and Ally Y (both confronted by the US’s changing behavior with regard to the nuclear nonproliferation regime), Ally X’s nuclear policy could be supported by a coalition of civil servants in a bureaucracy that has supported the NPT for many years, political appointees who believe in nonproliferation, and antinuclear activists with embedded ties to the policymaking apparatus—all of whom are ‘‘persuaded.’’ The United States’ current actions probably would inspire disappointment, resentment, disgust—but a change of heart is not likely because these actors are genuinely persuaded of the merits of nonproliferation. However, other elements in that government and state—those who support nonproliferation because of identification or social conformity—will likely have a different reaction. Those who believe their state should forgo nuclear weapons due to the negative diplomatic effects any other position would have, might rethink their position in light of the US’s stance, as well as the ineffectual response to North Korea’s nuclear test in October 2006. In the short run, it is not likely that the state’s behavior would change, but in the long run, those persuaded may change their minds or may lose ground to growing ranks of those who disagree. In the case of Ally Y, where nuclear policy is guided by identification with the United States, confusion is likely to result, based on gap between US rhetoric and actions. How do you behave when the one you have patterned yourself after starts to do something different from what they have said all along? Depending on the strength of the persuaded and conforming segments, and the result of any internal struggle between them, the state could move more definitively against nuclear acquisition or could move toward exploring the nuclear option. In short, understanding that nuclear forbearance is actually the result of three separate attitudes—and that undermining the NPT could undermine commitment to nuclear nonproliferation with two of the three attitudes—leads to the conclusion that undermining the NPT could lead to a wave of nuclear proliferation among states we assumed would never think about the nuclear option again. In other words, the value of the NPT cannot be evaluated without assessing the extent to which it has helped to prevent proliferation. How specifically does the NPT do this? I posit that it has created an international social environment that influences elite decision-making through a number of specific and distinct mechanisms. Without the NPT, those mechanisms fall apart. It is to this social environment and the ‘‘influence’’ mechanisms fostered by it that the papers turns to next. Nuclear latency poses a unique risk. Rapid prolif risks nuclear war. Horowitz ‘9 – Professor of Political Science @ University of Pennsylvania [Michael Horowitz (Former Emory debater and NDT Champion), “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 53 Number 2, April 2009 pg. 234-257] Learning as states gain experience with nuclear weapons is complicated. While to some extent, nuclear acquisition might provide information about resolve or capabilities, it also generates uncertainty about the way an actual conflict would go—given the new risk of nuclear escalation—and uncertainty about relative capabilities. Rapid proliferation may especially heighten uncertainty given the potential for reasonable states to disagree at times about the quality of the capabilities each possesses.2 What follows is an attempt to describe the implications of inexperience and incomplete information on the behavior of nuclear states and their potential opponents over time. Since it is impossible to detail all possible lines of argumentation and possible responses, the following discussion is necessarily incomplete. This is a first step. The acquisition of nuclear weapons increases the confidence of adopters in their ability to impose costs in the case of a conflict and the expectations of likely costs if war occurs by potential opponents. The key questions are whether nuclear states learn over time about how to leverage nuclear weapons and the implications of that learning, along with whether actions by nuclear states, over time, convey information that leads to changes in the expectations of their behavior—shifts in uncertainty— on the part of potential adversaries. When a new state acquires nuclear weapons, how does it influence the way the state behaves and how might that change over time? Although nuclear acquisition might be orthogonal to a particular dispute, it might be related to a particular security challenge, might signal revisionist aims with regard to an enduring dispute, or might signal the desire to reinforce the status quo. This section focuses on how acquiring nuclear weapons influences both the new nuclear state and potential adversaries. In theory, systemwide perceptions of nuclear danger could allow new nuclear states to partially skip the early Cold War learning process concerning the risks of nuclear war and enter a proliferated world more cognizant of nuclear brinksmanship and bargaining than their predecessors. However, each new nuclear state has to resolve its own particular civil–military issues surrounding operational control and plan its national strategy in light of its new capabilities. Empirical research by Sagan (1993), Feaver (1992), and Blair (1993) suggests that viewing the behavior of other states does not create the necessary tacit knowledge; there is no substitute for experience when it comes to handling a nuclear arsenal, even if experience itself cannot totally prevent accidents. Sagan contends that civil–military instability in many likely new proliferators and pressures generated by the requirements to handle the responsibility of dealing with nuclear weapons will skew decision making toward more offensive strategies (Sagan 1995). The questions surrounding Pakistan’s nuclear command and control suggest there is no magic bullet when it comes to new nuclear powers’ making control and delegation decisions (Bowen and Wolvén 1999). Sagan and others focus on inexperience on the part of new nuclear states as a key behavioral driver. Inexperienced operators and the bureaucratic desire to “justify” the costs spent developing nuclear weapons, combined with organizational biases that may favor escalation to avoid decapitation—the “use it or lose it” mind-set— may cause new nuclear states to adopt riskier launch postures, such as launch on warning, or at least be perceived that way by other states (Blair 1993; Feaver 1992; Sagan 1995).3 Acquiring nuclear weapons could alter state preferences and make states more likely to escalate disputes once they start, given their new capabilities.4 But their general lack of experience at leveraging their nuclear arsenal and effectively communicating nuclear threats could mean new nuclear states will be more likely to select adversaries poorly and to find themselves in disputes with resolved adversaries that will reciprocate militarized challenges. The “nuclear experience” logic also suggests that more experienced nuclear states should gain knowledge over time from nuclearized interactions that helps leaders effectively identify the situations in which their nuclear arsenals are likely to make a difference. Experienced nuclear states learn to select into cases in which their comparative advantage, nuclear weapons, is more likely to be effective, increasing the probability that an adversary will not reciprocate. Coming from a slightly different perspective, uncertainty about the consequences of proliferation on the balance of power and the behavior of new nuclear states on the part of their potential adversaries could also shape behavior in similar ways (Schelling 1966; Blainey 1988). While a stable and credible nuclear arsenal communicates clear information about the likely costs of conflict, in the short term, nuclear proliferation is likely
All your proliferation good arguments are wrong—they are based on flawed Cold war models of the European theatre—proliferation in Asia or the Middle East will spark a nuclear war—accidental or intentional Cimbala ‘8 – Professor of Political Science @ Pennsylvania State University –¶ Brandywine [Stephen J. Cimbala, “Anticipatory Attacks: Nuclear Crisis Stability in Future Asia,” Comparative Strategy, Volume 27, Issue 2 March 2008, pages 113 – 132Informaworld]
The spread of nuclear weapons in Asia presents a complicated mosaic of possibilities in this regard. States with nuclear forces of variable force structure, operational experience, and command-control systems will be thrown into a matrix of complex political, social, and cultural crosscurrents contributory to the possibility of war. In addition to the existing nuclear powers in Asia, others may seek nuclear weapons if they feel threatened by regional rivals or hostile alliances. Containment of nuclear proliferation in Asia is a desirable political objective for all of the obvious reasons. Nevertheless, the present century is unlikely to see the nuclear hesitancy or risk aversion that marked the ColdWar, in part, because the military and political discipline imposed by the Cold War superpowers no longer exists, but also because states in Asia have new aspirations for regional or global respect.12 The spread of ballistic missiles and other nuclear-capable delivery systems in Asia, or in the Middle East with reach into Asia, is especially dangerous because plausible adversaries live close together and are already engaged in ongoing disputes about territory or other issues.13 The Cold War Americans and Soviets required missiles and airborne delivery systems of intercontinental range to strike at one another’s vitals. But short-range ballistic missiles or fighter-bombers suffice for India and Pakistan to launch attacks at one another with potentially “strategic” effects. China shares borders with Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan; Russia, with China and North Korea; India, with Pakistan and China; Pakistan, with India and China; and so on. The short flight times of ballistic missiles between the cities or military forces of contiguous states means that very little time will be available for warning and attack assessment by the defender. Conventionally armed missiles could easily be mistaken for a tactical nuclear first use. Fighter-bombers appearing over the horizon could just as easily be carrying nuclear weapons as conventional ordnance. In addition to the challenges posed by shorter flight times and uncertain weapons loads, potential victims of nuclear attack in Asia may also have first strike–vulnerable forces and command-control systems that increase decision pressures for rapid, and possibly mistaken, retaliation. This potpourri of possibilities challenges conventional wisdom about nuclear deterrence and proliferation on the part of policymakers and academic theorists. For policymakers in the United States and NATO, spreading nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in Asia could profoundly shift the geopolitics of mass destruction from a European center of gravity (in the twentieth century) to an Asian and/or Middle Eastern center of gravity (in the present century).14 This would profoundly shake up prognostications to the effect that wars of mass destruction are now passe, on account of the emergence of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and its encouragement of information-based warfare.15 Together with this, there has emerged the argument that large-scale war between states or coalitions of states, as opposed to varieties of unconventional warfare and failed states, are exceptional and potentially obsolete.16 The spread of WMD and ballistic missiles in Asia could overturn these expectations for the obsolescence or marginalization of major interstate warfare. For theorists, the argument that the spread of nuclear weapons might be fully compatible with international stability, and perhaps even supportive of international security, may be less sustainable than hitherto.17 Theorists optimistic about the ability of the international order to accommodate the proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in the present century have made several plausible arguments based on international systems and deterrence theory. First, nuclear weapons may make states more risk averse as opposed to risk acceptant, with regard to brandishing military power in support of foreign policy objectives. Second, if states’ nuclear forces are second-strike survivable, they contribute to reduced fears of surprise attack. Third, the motives of states with respect to the existing international order are crucial. Revisionists will seek to use nuclear weapons to overturn the existing balance of power; status quo–oriented states will use nuclear forces to support the existing distribution of power, and therefore, slow and peaceful change, as opposed to sudden and radical power transitions. These arguments, for a less alarmist view of nuclear proliferation, take comfort from the history of nuclear policy in the “first nuclear age,” roughly corresponding to the ColdWar.18 Pessimists who predicted that some thirty or more states might have nuclear weapons by the end of the century were proved wrong. However, the Cold War is a dubious precedent for the control of nuclear weapons spread outside of Europe. The military and security agenda of the ColdWar was dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. Ideas about mutual deterrence based on second-strike capability and the deterrence “rationality” according to American or allied Western concepts might be inaccurate guides to the avoidance of war outside of Europe.19 Key to overall tech competitiveness- Maintains US workforce and tech edge
Fleischmann 2011
(Chuck, Representative from the 3rd District in Tennessee, “Small Modular Reactors Could Help With U.S. Energy Needs”, American Physical Society, Vol. 6, No. 2, October 2011, http://www.aps.org/publications/capitolhillquarterly/201110/backpage.cfm, accessed 8-1-12, RSR)
The timely implementation of small reactors could position the United States on the cutting edge of nuclear technology. As the world moves forward in developing new forms of nuclear power, the United States should set a high standard in safety and regulatory process. Other nations have not been as rigorous in their nuclear oversight with far reaching implications. As we consider the disastrous events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, it is imperative that power companies and regulatory agencies around the world adequately ensure reactor and plant safety to protect the public. Despite terrible tragedies like the natural disaster in Japan, nuclear power is still one of the safest and cleanest energy resources available. The plan to administer these small reactors would create technologically advanced U.S. jobs and improve our global competitiveness. Our country needs quality, high paying jobs. Increasing our competitive edge in rapidly advancing industries will put the United States in a strategic position on the forefront of expanding global technologies in the nuclear arena.
Otherwise – status based great power conflict is inevitable – relative lead key to prevent global conflict
Wohlforth 2009 William C. Wohlforth (a professor of government at Dartmouth College) 2009 “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War” Project Muse
Second, I question the dominant view that status quo evaluations are relatively independent of the distribution of capabilities. If the status of states depends in some measure on their relative capabilities, and if states derive utility from status, then different distributions of capabilities may affect levels of satisfaction, just as different income distributions may affect levels of status competition in domestic settings. 6 Building on research in psychology and sociology, I argue that even capabilities distributions among major powers foster ambiguous status hierarchies, which generate more dissatisfaction and clashes over the status quo. And the more stratified the distribution of capabilities, the less likely such status competition is. Unipolarity thus generates far fewer incentives than either bipolarity or multipolarity for direct great power positional competition over status. Elites in the other major powers continue to prefer higher status, but in a unipolar system they face comparatively weak incentives to translate that preference into costly action. And the absence of such incentives matters because social status is a positional good—something whose value depends on how much one has in relation to others.7 “If everyone has high status,” Randall Schweller notes, “no one does.”8 While one actor might increase its status, all cannot simultaneously do so. High status is thus inherently scarce, and competitions for status tend to be zero sum.9 I begin by describing the puzzles facing predominant theories that status competition might solve. Building on recent research on social identity and status seeking, I then show that under certain conditions the ways decision makers identify with the states they represent may prompt them to frame issues as positional disputes over status in a social hierarchy. I develop hypotheses that tailor this scholarship to the domain of great power politics, showing how the probability of status competition is likely to be linked to polarity. The rest of the article investigates whether there is sufficient evidence for these hypotheses to warrant further refinement and testing. I pursue this in three ways: by showing that the theory advanced here is consistent with what we know about large-scale patterns of great power conflict through history; by [End Page 30] demonstrating that the causal mechanisms it identifies did drive relatively secure major powers to military conflict in the past (and therefore that they might do so again if the world were bipolar or multipolar); and by showing that observable evidence concerning the major powers’ identity politics and grand strategies under unipolarity are consistent with the theory’s expectations. Puzzles of Power and War Recent research on the connection between the distribution of capabilities and war has concentrated on a hypothesis long central to systemic theories of power transition or hegemonic stability: that major war arises out of a power shift in favor of a rising state dissatisfied with a status quo defended by a declining satisfied state.10 Though they have garnered substantial empirical support, these theories have yet to solve two intertwined empirical and theoretical puzzles—each of which might be explained by positional concerns for status. First, if the material costs and benefits of a given status quo are what matters, why would a state be dissatisfied with the very status quo that had abetted its rise? The rise of China today naturally prompts this question, but it is hardly a novel situation. Most of the best known and most consequential power transitions in history featured rising challengers that were prospering mightily under the status quo. In case after case, historians argue that these revisionist powers sought recognition and standing rather than specific alterations to the existing rules and practices that constituted the order of the day. In each paradigmatic case of hegemonic war, the claims of the rising power are hard to reduce to instrumental adjustment of the status quo. In R. Ned Lebow’s reading, for example, Thucydides’ account tells us that the rise of Athens posed unacceptable threats not to the security or welfare of Sparta but rather to its identity as leader of the Greek world, which was an important cause of the Spartan assembly’s vote for war.11 The issues that inspired Louis XIV’s and Napoleon’s dissatisfaction with the status quo were many and varied, but most accounts accord [End Page 31] independent importance to the drive for a position of unparalleled primacy. In these and other hegemonic struggles among leading states in post-Westphalian Europe, the rising challenger’s dissatisfaction is often difficult to connect to the material costs and benefits of the status quo, and much contemporary evidence revolves around issues of recognition and status.12 Wilhemine Germany is a fateful case in point. As Paul Kennedy has argued, underlying material trends as of 1914 were set to propel Germany’s continued rise indefinitely, so long as Europe remained at peace.13 Yet Germany chafed under the very status quo that abetted this rise and its elite focused resentment on its chief trading partner—the great power that presented the least plausible threat to its security: Great Britain. At fantastic cost, it built a battleship fleet with no plausible strategic purpose other than to stake a claim on global power status.14 Recent historical studies present strong evidence that, far from fearing attacks from Russia and France, German leaders sought to provoke them, knowing that this would lead to a long, expensive, and sanguinary war that Britain was certain to join.15 And of all the motivations swirling round these momentous decisions, no serious historical account fails to register German leaders’ oft-expressed yearning for “a place in the sun.” The second puzzle is bargaining failure. Hegemonic theories tend to model war as a conflict over the status quo without specifying precisely what the status quo is and what flows of benefits it provides to states.16 Scholars generally follow Robert Gilpin in positing that the underlying issue concerns a “desire to redraft the rules by which relations among nations work,” “the nature and governance of the system,” and “the distribution of territory among the states in the system.”17 If these are the [End Page 32] issues at stake, then systemic theories of hegemonic war and power transition confront the puzzle brought to the fore in a seminal article by James Fearon: what prevents states from striking a bargain that avoids the costs of war? 18 Why can’t states renegotiate the international order as underlying capabilities distributions shift their relative bargaining power? Fearon proposed that one answer consistent with strict rational choice assumptions is that such bargains are infeasible when the issue at stake is indivisible and cannot readily be portioned out to each side. Most aspects of a given international order are readily divisible, however, and, as Fearon stressed, “both the intrinsic complexity and richness of most matters over which states negotiate and the availability of linkages and side-payments suggest that intermediate bargains typically will exist.”19 Thus, most scholars have assumed that the indivisibility problem is trivial, focusing on two other rational choice explanations for bargaining failure: uncertainty and the commitment problem.20 In the view of many scholars, it is these problems, rather than indivisibility, that likely explain leaders’ inability to avail themselves of such intermediate bargains. Yet recent research inspired by constructivism shows how issues that are physically divisible can become socially indivisible, depending on how they relate to the identities of decision makers.21 Once issues surrounding the status quo are framed in positional terms as bearing on the disputants’ relative standing, then, to the extent that they value their standing itself, they may be unwilling to pursue intermediate bargaining solutions. Once linked to status, easily divisible issues that theoretically provide opportunities for linkages and side payments of various sorts may themselves be seen as indivisible and thus unavailable as avenues for possible intermediate bargains. The historical record surrounding major wars is rich with evidence suggesting that positional concerns over status frustrate bargaining: expensive, protracted conflict over what appear to be minor issues; a propensity on the part of decision makers to frame issues in terms of relative rank even when doing so makes bargaining harder; decision-makers’ [End Page 33] inability to accept feasible divisions of the matter in dispute even when failing to do so imposes high costs; demands on the part of states for observable evidence to confirm their estimate of an improved position in the hierarchy; the inability of private bargains to resolve issues; a frequently observed compulsion for the public attainment of concessions from a higher ranked state; and stubborn resistance on the part of states to which such demands are addressed even when acquiescence entails limited material cost. The literature on bargaining failure in the context of power shifts remains inconclusive, and it is premature to take any empirical pattern as necessarily probative. Indeed, Robert Powell has recently proposed that indivisibility is not a rationalistic explanation for war after all: fully rational leaders with perfect information should prefer to settle a dispute over an indivisible issue by resorting to a lottery rather than a war certain to destroy some of the goods in dispute. What might prevent such bargaining solutions is not indivisibility itself, he argues, but rather the parties’ inability to commit to abide by any agreement in the future if they expect their relative capabilities to continue to shift.22 This is the credible commitment problem to which many theorists are now turning their attention. But how it relates to the information problem that until recently dominated the formal literature remains to be seen.23 The larger point is that positional concerns for status may help account for the puzzle of bargaining failure. In the rational choice bargaining literature, war is puzzling because it destroys some of the benefits or flows of benefits in dispute between the bargainers, who would be better off dividing the spoils without war. Yet what happens to these models if what matters for states is less the flows of material benefits themselves than their implications for relative status? The salience of this question depends on the relative importance of positional concern for status among states. Do Great Powers Care about Status? Mainstream theories generally posit that states come to blows over an international status quo only when it has implications for their security or material well-being. The guiding assumption is that a state’s satisfaction [End Page 34] with its place in the existing order is a function of the material costs and benefits implied by that status.24 By that assumption, once a state’s status in an international order ceases to affect its material wellbeing, its relative standing will have no bearing on decisions for war or peace. But the assumption is undermined by cumulative research in disciplines ranging from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that human beings are powerfully motivated by the desire for favorable social status comparisons. This research suggests that the preference for status is a basic disposition rather than merely a strategy for attaining other goals.25 People often seek tangibles not so much because of the welfare or security they bring but because of the social status they confer. Under certain conditions, the search for status will cause people to behave in ways that directly contradict their material interest in security and/or prosperity.
Prefer our internal link – explains the last five centuries of global hegemons
Drezner 2001 Daniel Drezner (professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University) 2001 “State structure, technological leadership and the maintenance of hegemony” http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/tech.pdf
In this decade, proponents of globalization argue that because information and capital are mobile, the location of innovation has been rendered unimportant.6 While this notion has some popular appeal, the globalization thesis lacks theoretical or empirical support. Theoretically, even in a world of perfect information and perfect capital mobility, economists have shown that the location of technological innovation matters.7 Empirically, the claims of globalization proponents have been far-fetched. Capital is not perfectly mobile, and increased economic exchange does not lead to a seamless transfer of technology from one country to another.8 The location of innovation still matters. Long-cycle theorists have paid the most attention to the link between technological innovation, economic growth, and the rise and fall of hegemons.9 They argue that the past five hundred years of the global political economy can be explained by the waxing and waning of hegemonic powers. Countries acquire hegemonic status because they are the first to develop a cluster of technologies in leading sectors. These innovations generate spillover effects to the rest of the lead economy, and then to the global economy. Over time, these ‘technological hegemons’ fail to maintain the rate of innovations, leading to a period of strife until a new hegemonic power is found.
Solves escalation of global hotspots- retrenchment causes bickering internationally over leadership and prevents cooperation
Brzezinski 2012 Zbigniew K. Brzezinski (CSIS counselor and trustee and cochairs the CSIS Advisory Board. He is also the Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C. He is cochair of the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council. He is a former chairman of the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee. He was a member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968; chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign; director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976; and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign. From 1977 to 1981, Dr. Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of U.S.-China relations and for his contributions to the human rights and national security policies of the United States. He was also a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council–Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987–1988), and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987–1989). In 1988, he was cochairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he was cochairman of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach. Dr. Brzezinski received a B.A. and M.A. from McGill University (1949, 1950) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1953). He was a member of the faculties of Columbia University (1960–1989) and Harvard University (1953–1960). Dr. Brzezinski holds honorary degrees from Georgetown University, Williams College, Fordham University, College of the Holy Cross, Alliance College, the Catholic University of Lublin, Warsaw University, and Vilnius University. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards) February 2012 “After America” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/after_america?page=0,0
For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes. While a sudden, massive crisis of the American system for instance, another financial crisis would produce a fast-moving chain reaction leading to global political and economic disorder, a steady drift by America into increasingly pervasive decay or endlessly widening warfare with Islam would be unlikely to produce, even by 2025, an effective global successor. No single power will be ready by then to exercise the role that the world, upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, expected the United States to play: the leader of a new, globally cooperative world order. More probable would be a protracted phase of rather inconclusive realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers, in a setting of international uncertainty and even of potentially fatal risks to global well-being. Rather than a world where dreams of democracy flourish, a Hobbesian world of enhanced national security based on varying fusions of authoritarianism, nationalism, and religion could ensue. RELATED 8 Geopolitically Endangered Species The leaders of the world's second-rank powers, among them India, Japan, Russia, and some European countries, are already assessing the potential impact of U.S. decline on their respective national interests. The Japanese, fearful of an assertive China dominating the Asian mainland, may be thinking of closer links with Europe. Leaders in India and Japan may be considering closer political and even military cooperation in case America falters and China rises. Russia, while perhaps engaging in wishful thinking (even schadenfreude) about America's uncertain prospects, will almost certainly have its eye on the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Europe, not yet cohesive, would likely be pulled in several directions: Germany and Italy toward Russia because of commercial interests, France and insecure Central Europe in favor of a politically tighter European Union, and Britain toward manipulating a balance within the EU while preserving its special relationship with a declining United States. Others may move more rapidly to carve out their own regional spheres: Turkey in the area of the old Ottoman Empire, Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere, and so forth. None of these countries, however, will have the requisite combination of economic, financial, technological, and military power even to consider inheriting America's leading role. China, invariably mentioned as America's prospective successor, has an impressive imperial lineage and a strategic tradition of carefully calibrated patience, both of which have been critical to its overwhelmingly successful, several-thousand-year-long history. China thus prudently accepts the existing international system, even if it does not view the prevailing hierarchy as permanent. It recognizes that success depends not on the system's dramatic collapse but on its evolution toward a gradual redistribution of power. Moreover, the basic reality is that China is not yet ready to assume in full America's role in the world. Beijing's leaders themselves have repeatedly emphasized that on every important measure of development, wealth, and power, China will still be a modernizing and developing state several decades from now, significantly behind not only the United States but also Europe and Japan in the major per capita indices of modernity and national power. Accordingly, Chinese leaders have been restrained in laying any overt claims to global leadership. At some stage, however, a more assertive Chinese nationalism could arise and damage China's international interests. A swaggering, nationalistic Beijing would unintentionally mobilize a powerful regional coalition against itself. None of China's key neighbors India, Japan, and Russia is ready to acknowledge China's entitlement to America's place on the global totem pole. They might even seek support from a waning America to offset an overly assertive China. The resulting regional scramble could become intense, especially given the similar nationalistic tendencies among China's neighbors. A phase of acute international tension in Asia could ensue. Asia of the 21st century could then begin to resemble Europe of the 20th century violent and bloodthirsty. At the same time, the security of a number of weaker states located geographically next to major regional powers also depends on the international status quo reinforced by America's global preeminence and would be made significantly more vulnerable in proportion to America's decline. The states in that exposed position including Georgia, Taiwan, South Korea, Belarus, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, and the greater Middle East are today's geopolitical equivalents of nature's most endangered species. Their fates are closely tied to the nature of the international environment left behind by a waning America, be it ordered and restrained or, much more likely, self-serving and expansionist. A faltering United States could also find its strategic partnership with Mexico in jeopardy. America's economic resilience and political stability have so far mitigated many of the challenges posed by such sensitive neighborhood issues as economic dependence, immigration, and the narcotics trade. A decline in American power, however, would likely undermine the health and good judgment of the U.S. economic and political systems. A waning United States would likely be more nationalistic, more defensive about its national identity, more paranoid about its homeland security, and less willing to sacrifice resources for the sake of others' development. The worsening of relations between a declining America and an internally troubled Mexico could even give rise to a particularly ominous phenomenon: the emergence, as a major issue in nationalistically aroused Mexican politics, of territorial claims justified by history and ignited by cross-border incidents. Another consequence of American decline could be a corrosion of the generally cooperative management of the global commons shared interests such as sea lanes, space, cyberspace, and the environment, whose protection is imperative to the long-term growth of the global economy and the continuation of basic geopolitical stability. In almost every case, the potential absence of a constructive and influential U.S. role would fatally undermine the essential communality of the global commons because the superiority and ubiquity of American power creates order where there would normally be conflict. None of this will necessarily come to pass. Nor is the concern that America's decline would generate global insecurity, endanger some vulnerable states, and produce a more troubled North American neighborhood an argument for U.S. global supremacy. In fact, the strategic complexities of the world in the 21st century make such supremacy unattainable. But those dreaming today of America's collapse would probably come to regret it. And as the world after America would be increasingly complicated and chaotic, it is imperative that the United States pursue a new, timely strategic vision for its foreign policy or start bracing itself for a dangerous slide into global turmoil. The risk of extinction from nuclear war trumps every impact—reducing numbers of weapons is key to decrease the risk Sandberg, Matheny, and Ćirković ‘8, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University; PhD candidate in Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and special consultant to the Center for Biosecurity at UPitt Medical Center; senior research associate at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade and assistant professor of physics at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and Montenegro (Anders, Jason G, and Milan M., How can we reduce the risk of human extinction? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9/9, http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-human-extinction) ¶ The risks from anthropogenic hazards appear at present larger than those from natural ones. Although great progress has been made in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, humanity is still threatened by the possibility of a global thermonuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter. We may face even greater risks from emerging technologies. Advances in synthetic biology might make it possible to engineer pathogens capable of extinction-level pandemics. The knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to engineer pathogens are more accessible than those needed to build nuclear weapons. And unlike other weapons, pathogens are self-replicating, allowing a small arsenal to become exponentially destructive. Pathogens have been implicated in the extinctions of many wild species. Although most pandemics "fade out" by reducing the density of susceptible populations, pathogens with wide host ranges in multiple species can reach even isolated individuals. The intentional or unintentional release of engineered pathogens with high transmissibility, latency, and lethality might be capable of causing human extinction. While such an event seems unlikely today, the likelihood may increase as biotechnologies continue to improve at a rate rivaling Moore's Law.¶ ¶ Farther out in time are technologies that remain theoretical but might be developed this century. Molecular nanotechnology could allow the creation of self-replicating machines capable of destroying the ecosystem. And advances in neuroscience and computation might enable improvements in cognition that accelerate the invention of new weapons. A survey at the Oxford conference found that concerns about human extinction were dominated by fears that new technologies would be misused. These emerging threats are especially challenging as they could become dangerous more quickly than past technologies, outpacing society's ability to control them. As H.G. Wells noted, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."¶ Such remote risks may seem academic in a world plagued by immediate problems, such as global poverty, HIV, and climate change. But as intimidating as these problems are, they do not threaten human existence. In discussing the risk of nuclear winter, Carl Sagan emphasized the astronomical toll of human extinction:¶ A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a typical time period for the biological evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill "only" hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential lossincluding culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.¶ There is a discontinuity between risks that threaten 10 percent or even 99 percent of humanity and those that threaten 100 percent. For disasters killing less than all humanity, there is a good chance that the species could recover. If we value future human generations, then reducing extinction risks should dominate our considerations. Fortunately, most measures to reduce these risks also improve global security against a range of lesser catastrophes, and thus deserve support regardless of how much one worries about extinction. These measures include:¶ Removing nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert and further reducing their numbers;¶ Placing safeguards on gene synthesis equipment to prevent synthesis of select pathogens;¶ Improving our ability to respond to infectious diseases, including rapid disease surveillance, diagnosis, and control, as well as accelerated drug development;¶ Funding research on asteroid detection and deflection, "hot spot" eruptions, methane hydrate deposits, and other catastrophic natural hazards;¶ Monitoring developments in key disruptive technologies, such as nanotechnology and computational neuroscience, and developing international policies to reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents.
Pyroprocessing solves proliferation
Princeton, 6
http://blogs.princeton.edu/chm333/f2006/nuclear/05_reprocessing/possible_methods_of_reprocessing/
One advantage of the pyroprocessing technique is that it does not use water. Water is easily contaminated and not easily cleaned up. The fuel also contains a large percentage of actinides, which makes the fuel useable in reactors but difficult to make nuclear weapons from. The PUREX process separates out the actinides from the uranium and plutonium, which creates more dangerous nuclear waste. Pyroprocessing is more compact than aqueous processes, which allows on-site reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods. This will eliminate the need for the transportation and security of the hazardous waste. |
| 01/06/2013 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
Observation: 1 Inherency Hargraves, 12
Steve Hargreaves @CNNMoney August 9, 2012: 7:12 AM ET, Nuclear waste issues freeze permits for U.S. power plants, http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/news/economy/nuclear-plants-waste/index.htm
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The U.S. government said it will
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be stored on-site at nuclear plants, where it’s currently stored.¶ Plan: The United States federal government should provide loan guarantees for companies to demonstrate, develop, and build Integral Fast Reactors Observation: 2 Solvency The Namibian, 12
http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1-http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1, 2-13-12
ONE of Australia’s foremost nuclear energy proponents has put the Australian uranium exploration and mining
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generation systems and recycle all of their future uranium intakes, he said. The problem is that the current rate of development for the IFRs is slow and will take decades before they are a market forceFair Disclosure, 12
FD (Fair Disclosure) Wire, August 3, 2012 Friday, Q2 2012 Lightbridge Corporation Earnings Conference Call – Final, * Gary Sharpe Lightbridge Corporation - Head-IR * Seth Grae Lightbridge Corporation - President and CEO * Jim Malone Lightbridge Corporation - Chief Nuclear Fuel Development Officer * Andrey Mushakov Lightbridge Corporation - EVO-International Nuclear Ops
SETH GRAE: And let me just add that the focus is on water-
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in the world and the new reactors that are being built and planned. Yanosek 12 Kassia, entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and a private equity investor in the energy sector as a principal at Quadrant Management and Founder of Tana Energy Capital LLC, " Financing Nuclear Power in the US", Spring, energyclub.stanford.edu/index.php/Journal/Financing_Nuclear_Power_by_Kassia_Yanosek
Over the course of the last decade, it appeared that concerns about carbon emissions
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of tax credits and loan guarantees provided in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Peskoe 12 ~[Ari Peskoe, associate in the law firm of McDermott Will and Emery LLP and focuses his practice on regulatory, legislative, compliance, and transactional issues related to energy markets, 4-20-2012, "A Solution Looking For a Problem: Building More Nuclear Reactors after Vogtle," The Electricty Journal, vol 25 issue 3, Science Direct~] Given the checkered history of reactor construction projects,56 private lenders are understandably skittish
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would likely cover much of the liabilities associate with a nuclear disaster.64 Loan Guarantees will send a signal to private investors ensuring massive investment
Scott, 10
Michael Scott, former senior advisor at the Department of Treasury and partner and managing director at Miller Buckfire %26 Co as well as head of the firm’s U.S. Government Advisory practice, 4-20-2010, "Statement of Michael D. Scott" Testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the House of Representatives, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg65123/pdf/CHRG-111hhrg65123.pdf
The Federal Credit Reform Act is designed to calculate the net¶ present value of
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is fully compensated for as measured by the Federal Credit Reform¶ Act. Now is the key time to restart the IFR which solves waste, the economy, creates jobs, environmental leadership and global warmingKirsch, 9 ~[Steve; an American serial entrepreneur who has started six companies: Mouse Systems, Frame Technology Corp., Infoseek, Propel, Abaca, and OneID. Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. November 25, http://skirsch.wordpress.com/~~] Congress should add a provision to the climate bills to authorize %243B to have
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the IFR specifically and will support the building of an IFR demo reactor. Because IFRs can be retrofitted into coal plants and use the same infrastructure they will take the place of coal plants —and jumpstarts the whole industrySalmon, 9
Felix Salmon JUNE 23, 2009, Nuclear power: Going fast, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/
PRISM is GE’s name for an integral fast reactor, or IFR, and it’s
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to achieve ambitious carbon-emission reduction targets than many people currently think. IFRs are the only thing that solve warming – we displace coal plants which is the lynchpin of solving warming and getting massive polluters like China on board Kirsch 8 ~[Steve Kirsch; August 10, 2008; A nuclear power plant design invented at Argonne National Lab 24 years ago has none of the drawbacks of conventional nuclear plants; http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm-http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm AnthonyOgbuli~] I first heard about the IFR on August 4, 2008, in
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if you look at the facts and the science rather than the words. Plan spillsover – Trilateral Agreement with Japan and FranceJAEA, DOE, and CEA 10 ~[The Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives of the French Republic, The Japan Atomic Energy Agency, The United States Department of Energy; Joint Statement on Trilateral Cooperation in the area of Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors; October 4th 2010~] Cooperation on sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) technology among the Japan Atomic
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safety analyses, and implications of SFRs for management of used nuclear fuel.
Advantages Advantage 1: Climate Change
The mechanics Global warming is real and happening; 5 reasonsNWF 12 (July 2012, National Wildlife Federation, http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx-http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx) JD
No longer is global warming something only facing future generations. Changes to our climate
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as low-lying areas are inundated with saltwater. It’s anthropogenic and scientific consensus goes aff.Lewandowsky and Ashley 2011 (Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Studies at the University of Western Australia, and Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of New South Wales, June 24, 2011, "The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong on climate change," http://goo.gl/u3nOC)
But despite these complexities, some aspects of climate science are thoroughly settled. We
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the 19th century, pre-dating even Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria. Dyer 2009 (Gwynne Dyer, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former Senior Lecturer-C:wikiSenior_Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst-C:wikiRoyal_Military_Academy_Sandhurst, "Climate Wars,")
There is no need to despair. The slow-feedback effects take a long
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so let us focus here on how to stop it rising past 450.
Scenario 1: Ice Age Warming causes alterations in the North Atlantic current and stops the ocean conveyor belt causing an ice age quicklyABC News 2007 ("New northern ice age could send refugees to Australia", http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/05/2052408.htm)
A NU paleoclimatologist Timothy Barrows and his fellow researchers used a new dating technique that
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feel the effects almost immediately and certainly within a century," he said. Thompson 7 - MA from GA Tech
Andrea Thompson, Graduate from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2004 and a Master’s in the same subject in 2006. 2007, http://www.livescience.com/environment/070830_gw_quakes.html
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that
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volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions," McGuire said. Causes an ice age
NASA 98
~[http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/eos/volcanoes.pdf~~] Volcanoes and Global Climate Change, Earth Science Enterprise Series/ May
The eruption of a super volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet
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only really noticeable over billions rather than millions of years," Sparks said. Jaworowski, ’4 ~[Zbigniew Jaworowski is chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. He was a principal investigator of three research projects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of four research projects of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has held posts with the Centre d’Etude Nucleaires near Paris; the Biophysical Group of the Institute of Physics, University of Oslo; the Norwegian Polar Research Institute and the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo (hes qualed), "The Ice Age is Coming", Winter 03-04, 7/16/08, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf~~]
It is difficult to predict the advent of the new Ice Age—the time when continental glaciers will start to cover Scandinavia, Central and Northern Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, Chile, and Argentina with an ice layer hundreds and thousands of meters thick; when mountain glaciers in the
Himalayas, Andes, and Alps, in Africa and Indonesia, once again will
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doomsday prophecies of the proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Adam 8, PhD in chemical engineering, 2008
(David. Environmental correspondent for the Guardian. Food price rises threaten global security – UN. April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/09/food.unitednations)
Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN’s top
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years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises. Its already begun, the harsh summer has put Soybean supplies and prices on the brinkDes Moines Register, June 29, 2012
Supply fears send soybean prices soaring Sales in May were the second-largest on record, spiking worries about tight stocks. Jun 29, 2012 , http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120630/BUSINESS01/306300031/0/news/?odyssey=nav%7Chead
"Soybeans are going to be the story of the summer," said Sal
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weather concerns for the U.S., this fall will be tight." Bloomberg, 12
Alan Bjerga and Whitney McFerron - Feb 17, 2012, U.S. Exporters Make Record Single-Day Soybean Sale to China
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html-http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html,
Soybean exporters in the U.S., the world’s top shipper, sold 2
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more meat, increasing the need for the oilseed to make livestock feed. Dr. Wong and Dr. Huang , March 12
John Wong, Yanjie Huang, China’s Food Security and Its Global Implications China: An International Journal, Volume 10, Number 1, March 2012, pp. 113-124 (Article), is Professorial Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore and Yanjie Huang (eaihuan@nus.edu.sg) is Research Assistant at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.
China’s soybean market can be singled out as the only case where imports have substituted for domestic production. The country consumed 60 million tons of soybeans in 2009, only a quarter of which were produced domestically. This begs the question whether soaring soybean imports will pose a threat to China’s grain security. Apparently, an over-reliance on imported soybeans does "violate" the principle of self-sufficiency and pose some challenges to food security. American Interest 4/29
April 29, 2012, Uh Oh: World Food Prices Spike As Soy Harvest Collapses, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/29/uh-oh-world-food-prices-spike-as-soy-harvest-collapses/
Among the things we watch here at Via Meadia are trends in world food prices
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be hungry. 2012 could be even more… interesting than we thought. Renxing 05 - Epoch Times staffwriter
~[San, "CCP Gambles Insanely to Avoid Death (Part I)" http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html-http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html~]
"In any event, we, the CCP, will never step down from
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cling to life. And that is the theme of the "speech." China is critical to world food security-lack of Chinese food security would lead to worldwide hunger and starvationAnthea Webb, Director of the World Food Program in China, China Daily, "WHY CHINA IS CRUCIAL TO WORLD FOOD SECURITY" May 15, 2008, Lexis
For us, it is very hard to predict now how bad the impact of
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support - to developing countries which are still struggling with poverty and hunger. TAMPA TRIBUNE 96, staff, January 20, 1996, LN.
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are
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-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food. Scenario 3: Biodiversity Bellard et al 2012 (Ce ́line Bellard, Cleo Bertelsmeier, Paul Leadley, Wilfried Thuiller and Franck Courchamp, "Impacts of climate change on the future of Biodiversity," Ecology Letters, 15: 365–377, online)
Ecologists are developing a better understanding of the mechanisms by which species and ecosystems can
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climate change, to develop other predictive approaches and to go beyond predictions. Young 2010 (Dr Ruth Young, PhD specialising in coastal marine ecology. 2-9-2010, "Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important", http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/Biodiversity/Biodiversity-what-and-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they
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on this planet possible and that our protection of Biodiversity maintains this service. ====Independently, Warming causes human extinction====
Tickell, ’8
(Oliver, Climate Researcher, The Gaurdian, "On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction", 8-11, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/11/ climatechange)
We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told
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warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth. Rising sea levels from climate change will force massive migrations—inducing instability and state failure across the globeRajan, 10
Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, "The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change," Ethics %26 International Affairs 24, No. 3, 9/20/2010, only accessible on some exclusive database Does humanity have a moral obligation toward the estimated millions of individuals who will be
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on higher ground in advance of disaster. ¶ WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE Climate migration causes war and instabilityPaul J. Smith, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, "Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response," Foreign Policy Research Institute, Fall 2007, https://transnet.act.nato.int/WISE/FSE/FuturesPap/ClimateCha0/file/_WFS/%20Orbis2—climate%20change%20and%20mass%20migration.pdf Another consideration related to climate change is the problem of¶ weak or failed states
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¶ able to restore order or mitigate the underlying causes of state failure. Specifically leads to South Asian war
Tay and Paungmalit, 10Simon Tay and Phir Paungmalit, Singapore Institute of International Affairs, "Climate Change and Security In the Asia-Pacific," Conference Paper Prepared for the 2nd Tokyo Seminar on Common Security Challenges, 26 March 2010, google • Climate Change Impacts and Displacement of People¶ Environmentally induced displacement and migration are
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¶ slowly coming to the forefront of security discussion scenario around the world. Landay 2k (Jonathan S. Landay, National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, KNIGHT RIDER NEWS SERVICE, March 10, 2000, p. online)
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea,
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taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international nonproliferation regime.
Cerutti 7, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, 2007 (Furio Cerutti, "Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming." Lexington Books. p. 31)
The second feature of the impasse is irreversibility, which is peculiar to the worst
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different approach, which will be looked into in the last three chapters. Climate Change is the greatest threat to human extinction. Far more likely to cause extinction than any war scenarios – intervening actors and weapons are more about precision than magnitudeThe New York End Times 2006 http://newyorkendtimes.com/extinctionscale.asp) We rate Global Climate Change as a greater threat for human extinction in this century
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monitor war separately. However we also need to incorporate the dangers here . |
| 01/06/2013 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
Observation: 1 Inherency Hargraves, 12
Steve Hargreaves @CNNMoney August 9, 2012: 7:12 AM ET, Nuclear waste issues freeze permits for U.S. power plants, http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/news/economy/nuclear-plants-waste/index.htm
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The U.S. government said it will
AND
be stored on-site at nuclear plants, where it’s currently stored.¶ Plan: The United States federal government should provide loan guarantees for companies to demonstrate, develop, and build Integral Fast Reactors Observation: 2 Solvency The Namibian, 12
http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1-http://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=28%26tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=94241%26no_cache=1, 2-13-12
ONE of Australia’s foremost nuclear energy proponents has put the Australian uranium exploration and mining
AND
generation systems and recycle all of their future uranium intakes, he said. The problem is that the current rate of development for the IFRs is slow and will take decades before they are a market forceFair Disclosure, 12
FD (Fair Disclosure) Wire, August 3, 2012 Friday, Q2 2012 Lightbridge Corporation Earnings Conference Call – Final, * Gary Sharpe Lightbridge Corporation - Head-IR * Seth Grae Lightbridge Corporation - President and CEO * Jim Malone Lightbridge Corporation - Chief Nuclear Fuel Development Officer * Andrey Mushakov Lightbridge Corporation - EVO-International Nuclear Ops
SETH GRAE: And let me just add that the focus is on water-
AND
in the world and the new reactors that are being built and planned. Yanosek 12 Kassia, entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and a private equity investor in the energy sector as a principal at Quadrant Management and Founder of Tana Energy Capital LLC, " Financing Nuclear Power in the US", Spring, energyclub.stanford.edu/index.php/Journal/Financing_Nuclear_Power_by_Kassia_Yanosek
Over the course of the last decade, it appeared that concerns about carbon emissions
AND
of tax credits and loan guarantees provided in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Peskoe 12 ~[Ari Peskoe, associate in the law firm of McDermott Will and Emery LLP and focuses his practice on regulatory, legislative, compliance, and transactional issues related to energy markets, 4-20-2012, "A Solution Looking For a Problem: Building More Nuclear Reactors after Vogtle," The Electricty Journal, vol 25 issue 3, Science Direct~] Given the checkered history of reactor construction projects,56 private lenders are understandably skittish
AND
would likely cover much of the liabilities associate with a nuclear disaster.64 Loan Guarantees will send a signal to private investors ensuring massive investment
Scott, 10
Michael Scott, former senior advisor at the Department of Treasury and partner and managing director at Miller Buckfire %26 Co as well as head of the firm’s U.S. Government Advisory practice, 4-20-2010, "Statement of Michael D. Scott" Testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the House of Representatives, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg65123/pdf/CHRG-111hhrg65123.pdf
The Federal Credit Reform Act is designed to calculate the net¶ present value of
AND
is fully compensated for as measured by the Federal Credit Reform¶ Act. Now is the key time to restart the IFR which solves waste, the economy, creates jobs, environmental leadership and global warmingKirsch, 9 ~[Steve; an American serial entrepreneur who has started six companies: Mouse Systems, Frame Technology Corp., Infoseek, Propel, Abaca, and OneID. Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. November 25, http://skirsch.wordpress.com/~~] Congress should add a provision to the climate bills to authorize %243B to have
AND
the IFR specifically and will support the building of an IFR demo reactor. Because IFRs can be retrofitted into coal plants and use the same infrastructure they will take the place of coal plants —and jumpstarts the whole industrySalmon, 9
Felix Salmon JUNE 23, 2009, Nuclear power: Going fast, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/
PRISM is GE’s name for an integral fast reactor, or IFR, and it’s
AND
to achieve ambitious carbon-emission reduction targets than many people currently think. IFRs are the only thing that solve warming – we displace coal plants which is the lynchpin of solving warming and getting massive polluters like China on board Kirsch 8 ~[Steve Kirsch; August 10, 2008; A nuclear power plant design invented at Argonne National Lab 24 years ago has none of the drawbacks of conventional nuclear plants; http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm-http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm AnthonyOgbuli~] I first heard about the IFR on August 4, 2008, in
AND
if you look at the facts and the science rather than the words. Plan spillsover – Trilateral Agreement with Japan and FranceJAEA, DOE, and CEA 10 ~[The Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives of the French Republic, The Japan Atomic Energy Agency, The United States Department of Energy; Joint Statement on Trilateral Cooperation in the area of Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors; October 4th 2010~] Cooperation on sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) technology among the Japan Atomic
AND
safety analyses, and implications of SFRs for management of used nuclear fuel.
Advantages Advantage 1: Climate Change
The mechanics Global warming is real and happening; 5 reasonsNWF 12 (July 2012, National Wildlife Federation, http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx-http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Happening-Now.aspx) JD
No longer is global warming something only facing future generations. Changes to our climate
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as low-lying areas are inundated with saltwater. It’s anthropogenic and scientific consensus goes aff.Lewandowsky and Ashley 2011 (Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Studies at the University of Western Australia, and Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of New South Wales, June 24, 2011, "The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong on climate change," http://goo.gl/u3nOC)
But despite these complexities, some aspects of climate science are thoroughly settled. We
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the 19th century, pre-dating even Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria. Dyer 2009 (Gwynne Dyer, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former Senior Lecturer-C:wikiSenior_Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst-C:wikiRoyal_Military_Academy_Sandhurst, "Climate Wars,")
There is no need to despair. The slow-feedback effects take a long
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so let us focus here on how to stop it rising past 450.
Scenario 1: Ice Age Warming causes alterations in the North Atlantic current and stops the ocean conveyor belt causing an ice age quicklyABC News 2007 ("New northern ice age could send refugees to Australia", http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/05/2052408.htm)
A NU paleoclimatologist Timothy Barrows and his fellow researchers used a new dating technique that
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feel the effects almost immediately and certainly within a century," he said. Thompson 7 - MA from GA Tech
Andrea Thompson, Graduate from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2004 and a Master’s in the same subject in 2006. 2007, http://www.livescience.com/environment/070830_gw_quakes.html
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that
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volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions," McGuire said. Causes an ice age
NASA 98
~[http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/eos/volcanoes.pdf~~] Volcanoes and Global Climate Change, Earth Science Enterprise Series/ May
The eruption of a super volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet
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only really noticeable over billions rather than millions of years," Sparks said. Jaworowski, ’4 ~[Zbigniew Jaworowski is chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. He was a principal investigator of three research projects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of four research projects of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has held posts with the Centre d’Etude Nucleaires near Paris; the Biophysical Group of the Institute of Physics, University of Oslo; the Norwegian Polar Research Institute and the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo (hes qualed), "The Ice Age is Coming", Winter 03-04, 7/16/08, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf~~]
It is difficult to predict the advent of the new Ice Age—the time when continental glaciers will start to cover Scandinavia, Central and Northern Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, Chile, and Argentina with an ice layer hundreds and thousands of meters thick; when mountain glaciers in the
Himalayas, Andes, and Alps, in Africa and Indonesia, once again will
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doomsday prophecies of the proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Adam 8, PhD in chemical engineering, 2008
(David. Environmental correspondent for the Guardian. Food price rises threaten global security – UN. April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/09/food.unitednations)
Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN’s top
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years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises. Its already begun, the harsh summer has put Soybean supplies and prices on the brinkDes Moines Register, June 29, 2012
Supply fears send soybean prices soaring Sales in May were the second-largest on record, spiking worries about tight stocks. Jun 29, 2012 , http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120630/BUSINESS01/306300031/0/news/?odyssey=nav%7Chead
"Soybeans are going to be the story of the summer," said Sal
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weather concerns for the U.S., this fall will be tight." Bloomberg, 12
Alan Bjerga and Whitney McFerron - Feb 17, 2012, U.S. Exporters Make Record Single-Day Soybean Sale to China
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html-http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-02-17/china-soybean-import-tops-one-day-record-as-ties-with-u-s-growers-expand.html,
Soybean exporters in the U.S., the world’s top shipper, sold 2
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more meat, increasing the need for the oilseed to make livestock feed. Dr. Wong and Dr. Huang , March 12
John Wong, Yanjie Huang, China’s Food Security and Its Global Implications China: An International Journal, Volume 10, Number 1, March 2012, pp. 113-124 (Article), is Professorial Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore and Yanjie Huang (eaihuan@nus.edu.sg) is Research Assistant at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.
China’s soybean market can be singled out as the only case where imports have substituted for domestic production. The country consumed 60 million tons of soybeans in 2009, only a quarter of which were produced domestically. This begs the question whether soaring soybean imports will pose a threat to China’s grain security. Apparently, an over-reliance on imported soybeans does "violate" the principle of self-sufficiency and pose some challenges to food security. American Interest 4/29
April 29, 2012, Uh Oh: World Food Prices Spike As Soy Harvest Collapses, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/29/uh-oh-world-food-prices-spike-as-soy-harvest-collapses/
Among the things we watch here at Via Meadia are trends in world food prices
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be hungry. 2012 could be even more… interesting than we thought. Renxing 05 - Epoch Times staffwriter
~[San, "CCP Gambles Insanely to Avoid Death (Part I)" http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html-http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html~]
"In any event, we, the CCP, will never step down from
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cling to life. And that is the theme of the "speech." China is critical to world food security-lack of Chinese food security would lead to worldwide hunger and starvationAnthea Webb, Director of the World Food Program in China, China Daily, "WHY CHINA IS CRUCIAL TO WORLD FOOD SECURITY" May 15, 2008, Lexis
For us, it is very hard to predict now how bad the impact of
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support - to developing countries which are still struggling with poverty and hunger. TAMPA TRIBUNE 96, staff, January 20, 1996, LN.
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are
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-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food. Scenario 3: Biodiversity Bellard et al 2012 (Ce ́line Bellard, Cleo Bertelsmeier, Paul Leadley, Wilfried Thuiller and Franck Courchamp, "Impacts of climate change on the future of Biodiversity," Ecology Letters, 15: 365–377, online)
Ecologists are developing a better understanding of the mechanisms by which species and ecosystems can
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climate change, to develop other predictive approaches and to go beyond predictions. Young 2010 (Dr Ruth Young, PhD specialising in coastal marine ecology. 2-9-2010, "Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important", http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/Biodiversity/Biodiversity-what-and-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they
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on this planet possible and that our protection of Biodiversity maintains this service. ====Independently, Warming causes human extinction====
Tickell, ’8
(Oliver, Climate Researcher, The Gaurdian, "On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction", 8-11, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/11/ climatechange)
We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told
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warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth. Rising sea levels from climate change will force massive migrations—inducing instability and state failure across the globeRajan, 10
Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, "The Ethical Implications of Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change," Ethics %26 International Affairs 24, No. 3, 9/20/2010, only accessible on some exclusive database Does humanity have a moral obligation toward the estimated millions of individuals who will be
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on higher ground in advance of disaster. ¶ WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE Climate migration causes war and instabilityPaul J. Smith, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, "Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response," Foreign Policy Research Institute, Fall 2007, https://transnet.act.nato.int/WISE/FSE/FuturesPap/ClimateCha0/file/_WFS/%20Orbis2—climate%20change%20and%20mass%20migration.pdf Another consideration related to climate change is the problem of¶ weak or failed states
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¶ able to restore order or mitigate the underlying causes of state failure. Specifically leads to South Asian war
Tay and Paungmalit, 10Simon Tay and Phir Paungmalit, Singapore Institute of International Affairs, "Climate Change and Security In the Asia-Pacific," Conference Paper Prepared for the 2nd Tokyo Seminar on Common Security Challenges, 26 March 2010, google • Climate Change Impacts and Displacement of People¶ Environmentally induced displacement and migration are
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¶ slowly coming to the forefront of security discussion scenario around the world. Landay 2k (Jonathan S. Landay, National Security and Intelligence Correspondent, KNIGHT RIDER NEWS SERVICE, March 10, 2000, p. online)
Few if any experts think China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea,
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taboo against using nuclear weapons and demolish the already shaky international nonproliferation regime.
Cerutti 7, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, 2007 (Furio Cerutti, "Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming." Lexington Books. p. 31)
The second feature of the impasse is irreversibility, which is peculiar to the worst
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different approach, which will be looked into in the last three chapters. Climate Change is the greatest threat to human extinction. Far more likely to cause extinction than any war scenarios – intervening actors and weapons are more about precision than magnitudeThe New York End Times 2006 http://newyorkendtimes.com/extinctionscale.asp) We rate Global Climate Change as a greater threat for human extinction in this century
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monitor war separately. However we also need to incorporate the dangers here . MIT Technology Review, 1-2, Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change¶ In a letter to President Obama, the editors of MIT Technology Review argue that addressing climate change must take top priority in the next four years.¶ January 2, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508841/dear-mr-president-time-to-deal-with-climate-change/ Amid the crises and battles, both predictable and unforeseeable, that you will face
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not done over the next four years, it will be too late. |
| 01/06/2013 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge: Companies seek lower income communities to site nuclear power plants because they are eager for economic growth.
Lazarus ’92
Richard J. Lazarus Professor of Law, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri PURSUING "ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE": THE DISTRIBUTIONAL EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION SPRING, 1992 87 Nw. U.L. Rev. 787
n88. In commenting on a public utility company’s decision to site a nuclear power
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See Austin %26 Schill, supra note 14, at 69, 70. The aff is not an attempt to dictate what marginalized communities need – rather it questions the current method of siting potentially risky power sources. Closing the neoliberal distance between decision makers and the impacts of their decision gets at the heart of why these siting problems occur. We cannot wait for people to do the right thing.Yamamoto and Lyman 1
Eric K, Hawaii Law School law prof., and Jen-L W, UC Berkeley visiting law prof., University of Colorado Law Review, 72 U. Colo. L. Rev. 311, Spring, p. 311-313, ln
The framework, however, at times also undercuts environmental justice struggles by racial and indigenous communities because it tends to foster misassumptions about race, culture, sovereignty, and the importance of distributive justice. Those misassumptions sometimes lead environmental justice scholars and activists to miss what is of central importance to affected communities.
The first misassumption is that for all racialized groups in all situations, a hazard-free physical environment is their main, if not only, concern. n47-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937 Environmental justice advocates foster this notion by placing emphasis on "high quality environments" n48-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937 and the adverse health effects caused by exposure to air pollutants and hazardous waste materials.
~[*321~] Not all facility sitings that pose health risks, however,
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long-range goals beyond the re-siting of polluting facilities. n49-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937
For example, as Native communities endeavor to ameliorate conditions of poverty and social dislocation
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about environmentalists who sometimes treat them as mascots for the environmental cause. n52-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937
The established framework also assumes that fair distribution of physical burdens is the primary,
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in political access and power, and "white flight.’" n56-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937
The established framework’s prescription of the public’s role is also limited. Under the pluralist model, since "preferences are defined by the relative power of self-interested subjects~[,~] they may be distorted by existing inequalities, poorly construed as a result of exclusion and unequal political clout or prove simply unethical." n57-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937 Since "environmental justice challenges reside in an ethical dimension beyond" n58-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937 utilitarian choices, the pluralism model cannot resolve all problems associated with environmental racism.
~[*323~] The civic republican model may seem "intuitively better equipped to
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, social, and cultural context and power disparities within a community. n61-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348080173825%26returnToKey=20_T15565693953%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-20.92817.33560959937 Current siting strategies for nuclear power plants create epistemological distance between governmental and corporate decision makers and the disadvantaged communities where the plants are built.Kevin ’97
Daniel Kevin is an environmental analyst at the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
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THEORIES AND REMEDIES 8 Vill. Envtl. L.J. 121 1997
Conflicts over LULU siting can be lessened by lowering the number of LULUs that must
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to operate in wealthier, non-minority areas." n203-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348092058274%26returnToKey=20_T15567034340%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-23.806187.506591058 ~[*157~]
Preferential siting in white communities can be justified in several ways. It can be
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larger share of LULUs should be sited in non-minority neighborhoods. n204-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348092058274%26returnToKey=20_T15567034340%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-23.806187.506591058
Probably more important than theoretical justifications, however, are bureaucratic and political considerations.
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incentives for project managers to favor siting in non-minority areas. n206-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348092058274%26returnToKey=20_T15567034340%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-23.806187.506591058
Depending upon the evolution of laws, regulations and court cases, incentives could also
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attractive than would otherwise be the case if solely technical criteria were employed. This distance between decision makers and disenfranchised communities has created an energy apartheid – ensuring that poor minority communities bear the worst of the risks of energy while receiving few benefits.Bullard ’11
Robert D. Bullard is the Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston. Dismantling Energy Apartheid in the United States February 9th, 2011 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/02/dismantling-energy-apartheid-in-the-united-states/-http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/02/dismantling-energy-apartheid-in-the-united-states/
Recent proposals to jump-start the nuclear power industry have php?option=com_content%26view=article%26id=3557:obamas-nuclear-energy-proposal-sparks-debate-among-black-environmentalists%26catid=51:national%26Itemid=114 and environmental
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at a site near org%2Fwiki%2FWaynesboro%2C_Georgia%26ei=nNbqTOO1EIP6lwet1cGcCw%26usg=AFQjCNG_ntWN4RSMs-BkM3GDHtBFpuj22A(62.5% black).
Much more research is needed on energy apartheid nationally. More policy analysis is needed
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Americans and "dirty energy" targeted for poor and people of color.
Our aspx demands that clean, green, and renewable energy be made
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not get left behind or on the sideline of a clean energy future. Anthony ’95
Carl Anthony is the Executive Director of the Urban Habitat Program and the chair of the East Bay Conversion Reinvestment Commission Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: Freedom from Annihilation Is a Human Right Spring Summer 1995 http://urbanhabitat.org/node/945-http://urbanhabitat.org/node/945
Nuclear weapons are tools of a conquering, violent culture. Racism at domestic and
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excesses of racism, human aggression, and technology-gone-berserk. The nuclear industry drives siting decisions. Upper socioeconomic neighborhoods cause too much political trouble and land is too expensive. The desire for an easy and efficient process papers over the violence done to low income and minority communities when risky technology is placed in their neighborhoods without their involvement.
Foster ’98
Sheila Foster Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law ARTICLE: Justice from the Ground Up: Distributive Inequities, Grassroots Resistance, and the Transformative Politics of the Environmental Justice Movement 86 Calif. L. Rev. 775 July 1998
Although the siting process does not produce the structured inequalities in communities such as Chester
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such communities seriously, and decision-makers often ignore them altogether. n104-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348092116478%26returnToKey=20_T15567037690%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-23.98712.21379808204
The hazardous waste siting process begins with the private sector choosing an appropriate site for
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resistance due to their subordinate socioeconomic, and often racial, status. n108-http://www.lexisnexis.com/lnacui2api/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true%26rand=1348092116478%26returnToKey=20_T15567037690%26parent=docview%26target=results_DocumentContent%26tokenKey=rsh-23.98712.21379808204
The state both mediates and legitimizes the dependence of private decision-makers on structural
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to the hazard," but rather that "the hazard comes to them." Advocating building nuclear plants in privileged areas places us in the role of the writer activist – opening up space for disenfranchised communities to resist and be heard.
Nixon ’11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 40-42)
In 2009, amidst the global economic crash, Matt Taibbi memorably depicted Goldman Sachs
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, in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci, has called "undefeated despair."" Market forces alone cannot explain the environmental justice problems with nuclear sites, only bringing epistemological questions to the fore can create reflexivity
Rodrik ’11
(Dan, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, "Occupy the classroom?", 16 Dec 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121494147161362.html) Consider the global financial crisis. Macroeconomics and finance did not lack the tools needed
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better analysts of the real world. Nor does it make them more popular Social invisibility causes extinction – produces background of structural violence that makes conflict and environmental collapse inevitable
Szentes ’8
Tamás Szentes, a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest. "Globalisation and prospects of the world society" 4/22/08 http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a
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mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment. Answers no root cause- because there is no root cause we must be attentative to structural inequality of all kinds because it primes people for broader violence- our impact is about the scale of violence and the disproportionate relationship between that scale and warfare, not that one form of social exclusion comes first
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ’4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) This large and at first sight "messy" Part VII is central to this
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including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). There is no reason to evaluate their disad scenarios-capitalism produces insecurity and makes global conflict inevitable- it creates massive social upheaval by transferring wealth from poor to rich, which spills over and drives international crisesGoodman in 9, James, Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, Rethinking Insecurity War and Violence, edited by Grenfell and James, http://www.scribd.com/doc/68230825/4/Global-capitalism-and-the-production-of-insecurity
The shrouding of Guernica is symbolic of a deep contradiction in the US mission to
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first charting insecurity dilemmas in theWar on Terror. <44-45> And nuclear power is safe –we are not advocating hurting privileged communities just sharing the risks. Safeguards solve and no environmental damage in the US
John Gray. Associate at Perkins Coie. Choosing the nuclear option: the case for a strong regulatory response to encourage nuclear energy development. 41 Ariz. St. L.J. 315-348 (2009).
Additionally, multiple standard safeguards prevent Chernobyl-like nuclear meltdowns in the United States
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plane crashes; this final safeguard makes Chernobyl-like damage impossible. n105
Incentive theory cannot divorce itself from questions of epistemology – our criticism is a precursor to understanding how actors respond to stimuli such as incentives
Mercer 2005 (Jonathan, Prof of Poli Sci at University of Washington, "Rationality and Psychology in International Politics", International Organization, Volume 59, Issue 1, pp. 77-106, Jstor, HC)
Behaviorists thought they eliminated the mind from their explanations, for they focused on what
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and beliefs, one cannot know what "works" as an incentive. Epistemology questions the totalizing truths in the world. These methods are critical to productive politics. In a world without the alternative, even the small advantages claimed by plan won’t fundamentally disrupt the power system in the SQ.
Jensen 2004 (Casper Bruun, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Communication and ACTION for Health Research Project, Simon Fraser University, "A Nonhumanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention", Configurations, Volume 12, Issue 2, Project Muse)
Epistemology is generally seen to concern itself with investigating the foundations of certain knowledge.
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for the conceptualization of science, technology, society, and their interrelationships. |
| 03/25/2013 | Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the Slave and the Savage, the demand for the end of America itself. This cry, born out of the belly of slave ships and the churning vertigo of constitutive genocide, exposes the grammar of the Affirmative’s calls for larger institutional access as a fundamental fortification of White Settler and Slave Master civil society by its diversionary focus on the ethicality of the policies and practices of the United States as opposed to the a priori question its very existence. This silence of the Status Quo’s assumptive logic renders them unaccountable to the revolutionary political ontology of Redness and Blackness and thereby sets the stage for the various dramas of conflictual relationships i.e. class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights, etc. that are made possible by the antagonism between Settler and Savage, Master and Slave.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5]
WHEN i WAS a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a
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foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows. While the afterlife of slavery is far from an abstraction in the lived reality of blackness, recourse to the sociological empirics of suffering already codifies the category of “exploitation” as the base grammar of suffering, ignoring the gratuitousness of anti-black violence and enshrining the call for more public policy as the limit point of our revolutionary demands. This elides the way in which civil society is parasitic on The Middle Passage and thus how Humanity itself can only be constituted in opposition to the fundamentally anti-Human position of the slave. It is this libidinal economy of anti-blackness which exists as the condition of possibility for the violence of the world.
Wilderson 2010
[Frank B., again, dude straight up MURKED white supremacists like buk buk, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 10-11]
Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on
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occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer. Vote Affirmative because freedom is an illusion created by the shackles of civil society – Our advocacy is to destroy the Government we must burn it to the ground
Farley 5 – Boston College [gender-modified words denoted by brackets]
(Anthony, “Perfecting Slavery”, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp, dml) What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in
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the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling. Life will not change for the better absent an assault on the establishment. That doesn’t mean we will live to enjoy the fruits of the revolution but it DOES mean that we should pursue revolutionary suicide because death is inevitable and this is the only one worth pursuing.
Huey P. Newton 1973, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Revolutionary Suicide, pages 2-6 Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading, is a spiritual
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fruits. That would be a contradiction. The reality will be grimmer. If our affirmative leads to violent revolution, that most definitely solves
George Jackson1972, Revolutionary, Blood in My Eye, pages 59-62 The enemy culture, the established government, exists first of all because of
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is no possibility of an establishment government ever overcoming a determined internal enemy. Their calls to prevent wars just gloss over the ongoing living apocalypse for people of color.
Rodriguez 2008, (Dylan, Associate Professor at University of California Riverside, " WARFARE AND THE TERMS OFENGAGEMENT," in Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex, p.93-100.) We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state
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, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood." Policy is only going to come after our radical abolitionist pedagogy starts to go into effect.
Dylan Rodriguez, D Rod Will Make Ya Jump, “Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position”, Radical Teacher, Number 88, Summer 2010, p. 7-19
Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than an
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is significantly dependent on our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity. |
