Maisch-Morgan Aff

Plan

The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on offshore natural gas production in the United States.
1AC Prices

Natural gas prices are low now but spikes in demand are inevitable
Larry Spears (writer for Resource Investor) July 20, 2012 "These Natural Gas Stocks Will Bounce Back" http://www.resourceinvestor.com/2012/07/20/these-natural-gas-stocks-will-bounce-back?t=commodities
But prices for this plentiful alternative fuel are just beginning to turn higher after a
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– would also bolster natural gas prices and prospects for natural gas companies.

Demand outweighs now – plan is key to balance supply increases
Kane, 8/6 senior reporter for Hartford Business Journal (Brad Kane, Hartford Business Journal, 6 August 2012, "Booming demand for natural gas pushes up prices," http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120806/PRINTEDITION/308039977)//CC
The demand for natural gas nationwide and in Connecticut increased drastically over the last couple
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In 2013, we forecast increases in total consumption while production remains flat."

Otherwise, the price spike will be quick and massive
Finger, 7/27 Forbes contributor (Richard Finger, Forbes, 27 July 2012, "Natural Gas Is Heading Higher: More Data," http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardfinger/2012/07/27/more-data-natural-gas-is-heading-higher/)//CC
So when, not if, gas reaches %245.00 undoubtedly many drilled
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upon us. %248.00 gas is coming, so prepare.
 

Crushes manufacturing
Baker Institute, ’8 (Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, Baker Institute Policy Report, January 2008, "Natural Gas in North America: Markets and Security," http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/30064519/study-lift-u-s-drilling-restrictions-avoid-international-lng-cartel-http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/30064519/study-lift-u-s-drilling-restrictions-avoid-international-lng-cartel)CC
Already, the United States has seen some industry sectors move offshore in response to
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of the U.S. petrochemical industry as feedstock costs become prohibitive.

Low prices lock in a manufacturing renaissance – draws companies back to the US
Jim Motavalli (Staff Writer for the New York Times specializing in Environmental journalism) April 2012 "Natural Gas Signals a ’Manufacturing Renaissance’" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/business/energy-environment/wider-availability-expands-uses-for-natural-gas.html?_r=1%26pagewanted=all-http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/business/energy-environment/wider-availability-expands-uses-for-natural-gas.html?_r=1%26pagewanted=all
The rapid development of shale gas technology has helped reduce energy imports and, in
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of new jobs and a greater investment in U.S. plants." 

Otherwise a complete collapse in domestic R%26D is inevitable
Michael Lind (policy director of New America’s Economic Growth Program and a co-founder of the New America Foundation) and Joshua Freedman (program associate in New America’s Economic Growth Program) April 2012 "Value Added: America’s Manufacturing Future" http://growth.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Lind,%20Michael%20and%20Freedman,%20Joshua%20-%20NAF%20-%20Value%20Added%20America%27s%20Manufacturing%20Future.pdf-http://growth.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Lind, Michael and Freedman, Joshua - NAF - Value Added America%27s Manufacturing Future.pdf
Manufacturing, R%26D and the U.S. Innovation Ecosystem Perhaps the
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might not find employment if R%26D were offshored along with production.

Scenario 1 is the Economy
Economic shocks are inevitable – strong domestic manufacturing is key to economic resilience and retaining our innovation leadership
Michael Ettlinger (the Vice President for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, former director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network of the Economic Policy Institute) and Kate Gordon (the Vice President for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. Most recently, Kate was the co-director of the national Apollo Alliance, where she still serves as senior policy advisor. Former senior associate at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy) April 2011 "The Importance and Promise of American Manufacturing" http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/04/pdf/manufacturing.pdf-http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/04/pdf/manufacturing.pdfManufacturing is critically important to the American economy. For generations, the strength of our country rested on the power of our factory floors—both the machines and the men and women who worked them. We need manufacturing to continue to be a bedrock of strength for generations to come. Manufacturing is woven into the structure of our economy: Its importance goes far beyond what happens behind the factory gates. The strength or weakness of American manufacturing carries implications for the entire economy, our national security, and the well-being of all Americans. Manufacturing today accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. economy and about 11 percent of the private-sector workforce. But its significance is even greater than these numbers would suggest. The direct impact of manufacturing is only a part of the picture. First, jobs in the manufacturing sector are good middle-class jobs for millions of Americans. Those jobs serve an important role, offering economic opportunity to hard-working, middle-skill workers. This creates upward mobility and broadens and strengthens the middle class to the benefit of the entire economy. What’s more, U.S.-based manufacturing underpins a broad range of jobs that are quite different from the usual image of manufacturing. These are higher-skill service jobs that include the accountants, bankers, and lawyers that are associated with any industry, as well as a broad range of other jobs including basic research and technology development, product and process engineering and design, operations and maintenance, transportation, testing, and lab work. Many of these jobs are critical to American technology and innovation leadership. The problem today is this: Many multinational corporations may for a period keep these higher-skill jobs here at home while they move basic manufacturing elsewhere in response to other countries’ subsidies, the search for cheaper labor costs, and the desire for more direct access to overseas markets, but eventually many of these service jobs will follow. When the basic manufacturing leaves, the feedback loop from the manufacturing floor to the rest of a manufacturing operation—a critical element in the innovative process—is eventually broken. To maintain that feedback loop, companies need to move higher-skill jobs to where they do their manufacturing. And with those jobs goes American leadership in technology and innovation. This is why having a critical mass of both manufacturing and associated service jobs in the United States matters. The "industrial commons" that comes from the crossfertilization and engagement of a community of experts in industry, academia, and government is vital to our nation’s economic competitiveness. Manufacturing also is important for the nation’s economic stability. The experience of the Great Recession exemplifies this point. Although manufacturing plunged in 2008 and early 2009 along with the rest of the economy, it is on the rebound today while other key economic sectors, such as construction, still languish. Diversity in the economy is important—and manufacturing is a particularly important part of the mix. Although manufacturing is certainly affected by broader economic events, the sector’s internal diversity—supplying consumer goods as well as industrial goods, serving both domestic and external markets— gives it great potential resiliency. Finally, supplying our own needs through a strong domestic manufacturing sector protects us from international economic and political disruptions. This is most obviously important in the realm of national security, even narrowly defined as matters related to military strength, where the risk of a weak manufacturing capability is obvious. But overreliance on imports and substantial manufacturing trade deficits weaken us in many ways, making us vulnerable to everything from exchange rate fluctuations to trade embargoes to natural disasters.

Economic collapse causes global nuclear war
Friedberg and Schoenfeld, 2008  [Aaron, Prof. Politics. And IR @ Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon Institute, and Gabriel, Senior Editor of Commentary and Wall Street Journal, "The Dangers of a Diminished America" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html-http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html~]
Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world’s financial architecture
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of these countries seek to divert attention from internal travails with external adventures.

Prefer our impacts – strong statistical backing
Royal 10 – Jedediah Royal, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, 2010, "Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises," in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-214
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict
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popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force.  

Scenario 2 is Hegemony
Manufacturing key to overall military superiority and deterrence
Mackenzie Eaglen et al (American Enterprise Institute, Rebecca Grant, IRIS Research, Robert P. Haffa, Haffa Defense Consulting, Michael O’Hanlon, The Brookings Institution, Peter W. Singer, The Brookings Institution, Martin Sullivan, Commonwealth Consulting, Barry Watts, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments) January 2012 "The Arsenal of Democracy and How to Preserve It: Key Issues in Defense Industrial Policy
Yet there are severe challenges that could result to the nation’s security interests even with
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questions to ensure these capabilities are not lost in a matter of years.

U.S. hegemonic decline causes global great-power war, collapses trade and spreads economic nationalism and protectionism
Zhang %26 Shi 11 – Yuhan Zhang, researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Lin Shi, Columbia University, independent consultant for the Eurasia Group and consultant for the World Bank, January 22, 2011, "America’s decline: A harbinger of conflict and rivalry," East Asia Forum, online: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/01/22/americas-decline-a-harbinger-of-conflict-and-rivalry/

This does not necessarily mean that the US is in systemic decline, but it
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forecast in a future that will inevitably be devoid of unrivalled US primacy.

1AC Warming

Natural gas overwhelmingly reduces emissions – leads to clean tech development and sequestration
Schrag 12—Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Ph.D. in geology from UC Berkeley (Daniel P., Daedalus, 141.2, Spring 2012, Is Shale Gas Good for Climate Change?, Academic OneFile, RBatra)
Is the natural gas boom good for climate change mitigation, independent of other environmental
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in a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of nearly a factor of three.

Natural gas’s net GHG emissions are negative – this assumes methane release
Abby W. Schachter (Writer for the Weekly Standard and the New York Post) June 2012 "We’ve got to become energy independent to slow terrorism-fracking is the key" http://www.zimbio.com/Fracking+Lawsuits/articles/2ymubk5GzT3/ve+got+become+energy+independent+slow+terrorism-http://www.zimbio.com/Fracking+Lawsuits/articles/2ymubk5GzT3/ve+got+become+energy+independent+slow+terrorism
As for Howarth’s research on fracking’s carbon footprint, his conclusions were quickly debunked by
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rules—once its experts have had sufficient time to study the issue.

Independently, lifting the moratorium is key to developing the tech to extract methane hydrates – independently solves dependence
US Chamber of Commerce, no date (Institute for 21st Century Energy, Chamber of Commerce, no date given (website registered 2011), "Immediately Expand Domestic Oil and Gas Exploration and Production," http://www.energyxxi.org/immediately-expand-domestic-oil-and-gas-exploration-and-production)//CC-http://www.energyxxi.org/immediately-expand-domestic-oil-and-gas-exploration-and-production)//CC
Another potential source of significant amounts of domestic natural gas is methane hydrates, an
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gas on the OCS also acts to thwart work to develop methane hydrates.

Methane hydrates will inevitably be released – tech developments key to solve runaway warming
Embleton, ’8 Author of "Oilephant Down: Canada at the end of Cheap Oil". Owner Yahoo Group "RunningOnEmptyCA", author of blog oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com. Thirty years experience in computer systems, much of it in the oil and petrochemical industry. Lifetime member of Mensa Canada. Ten years experience in health food industry (Richard Embleton, Energy Bulletin, 5 December 2008, "Methand Hydrates: What are they thinking?" http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47505)//CC-http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47505)//CC
A chunk of methane ice exposed to the air and ignited will burn until all
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extremely worrying to anyone who accepts the validity of the global warming theory.

And, methane hydrates make the difference between solving and runaway warming
RC, ’5 (RealClimate, Realclimate.org, 12 December 2005, "Methane hydrates and global warming," http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/methane-hydrates-and-global-warming/)//CC
The other possibility for our future is an increase in the year-in,
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and failure in avoiding ’dangerous’ anthropogenic climate change. That’s scary enough.

Warming is real and causes extinction
Morgan 9 – Professor of Current Affairs @ Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea (Dennis Ray, "World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human civilization and possible extinction of the human race", Futures, Volume 41, Issue 10, December 2009, Pages 683-693, ScienceDirect)

As horrifying as the scenario of human extinction by sudden, fast-burning nuclear
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Russian roulette while time increasingly stacks the cards against our chances of survival?

1AC Solvency

Status quo locks 98% of offshore natural gas production
Pyle 7/10 (Thomas J., July 10, 2012, "Energy Department sneaks offshore moratorium past public; Jobs and oil-supply potential are shut down," The Washington Times, lexis)
While the Obama administration was taking a victory lap last week after the 5-
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the above" president is responsible for increased production and reduced oil import.

It is directly responsible for all-time production lows
Hastings, 7/23 (Rep. Doc Hastings, The Hill, 23 July 2012, "President Obama’s offshore drilling plan must be replaced," http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/239529-president-obamas-offshore-drilling-plan-must-be-replaced)//CC
The president’s plan only offers 15 lease sales limited to the Gulf of Mexico and
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to keep the United States’ energy resources under lock-and-key.

That doubles production
Baker Institute, ’8 (Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, Baker Institute Policy Report, January 2008, "Natural Gas in North America: Markets and Security," http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/30064519/study-lift-u-s-drilling-restrictions-avoid-international-lng-cartel-http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/30064519/study-lift-u-s-drilling-restrictions-avoid-international-lng-cartel)CC
As might be expected, the lower requirements for LNG under this scenario stem from
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0.10 tcf by 2015 and 0.93 tcf by 2025.

Plan expands production – kick starts nearly 100 new projects
Paul Hillegeist et al (President and COO at Quest Offshore Resources, Inc, Sean Shafer, Project Director, Andrew Jackson, Project Manager, Leslie Cook , Senior Research Consultant) December 2011 "The State of the Offshore U.S. Oil and Gas Industry" http://energytomorrow.org/images/uploads/Quest_2011_December_29_Final.pdf
If drilling permits going forward were to be issued at pre‐moratorium rates,
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to the nation in terms of energy security, employment and government revenue.

Otherwise,  unpredictable regulatory shifts will crush predictability and timing of projects
Curry L. Hagerty (Specialist in Energy and Natural Resources Policy at the Congressional Research Service) June 15, 2010 "Outer Continental Shelf Moratoria on Oil and Gas Development" http://crs.ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/10Jul/R41132.pdf
One legacy of congressional moratoria is their impact on the timing of possible OCS development
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restrictions were defensible in the absence of more permanent alternatives for similar leasing prohibitions