Elechyan-Parker Neg

1nc Shell - Executive Order CP
Text: Citing Executive Authority, the President of the United States of America should sign an executive order _

Observation 1: Not Topical—not legislation

Observation 2: Solves the case and doesn’t link to politics
Empirically, executive orders are used to increased domestic energy production.
Warrick & Eilperin ’04 [Joby and Juliet, Staff Writers, Washington Post, "Old and Gas Hold the Reins in the Wild West; Land-Use Decisions Largely Favor Energy Industry", The Washington Post, 9/25]

While the annual number of new leases by oil and gas companies is down from historic highs in the mid-….. permits faster of was blamed for an unusually high number resignations in some BLM offices, according to agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. 

XO shields the president from politics – Congress will ensure this, particularly in the arena of energy production.  
Sovacool & Sovacool ’09 [Ben and Kelly, Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is a Research Fellow in the Energy Governance Program at the Centre on Asia and Globalization, Sovacool is a Senior Research Associate at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.  Article: Preventing National Electricity-Water Crisis Areas in the United States, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law]

The courts and Congress, in other words, do not want to deal with potentially controversial issues. …………the constraints faced by environmental and energy related legislation and Supreme Court rulings. 

Prez Powers Net Benefit

Maintaining the power of the chief executive is more important now than any time in history.
Rudalevlige ‘12 [Andrew, Professor at Dickenson, "The contemporary presidency: executive orders and presidential unilateralism", Source:Presidential Studies Quarterly. 42.1 (Mar. 2012), pg.138]

None of this should be taken as recommending a shift away from the gains made using an institutional…………….., and of executive power more generally. The conceptual shift and evidence presented here, I hope, take one small step in that direction. 

US power is inevitable, but presidential power is key to maintain global economic stability and wildfire wars across the planet. Solves almost every potential conflict.
South China Morning Post ‘00 [12/11/00, Position of Weakness, Pg. 19]

A weak president with an unclear mandate is bad news for the rest of the world. For better or worse, the person who ………….the use of US power in a way that heightens conflict. There are very few conflicts in the world today which can be solved without US influence. The rest of the world needs the United States to use its power deftly and decisively. Unfortunately, as the election saga continues, it seems increasingly unlikely that the next US president will be in a position to do so.

1nc Debt Ceiling

A. Congress will reach a compromise on the debt ceiling – but Obama will have to use his authority to get it done.
The Hill 1/2/13 [Mark Wasson, McConnell suggests early February deadline for passage of debt-ceiling bill,http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/275257-mcconnell-demands-quick-debt-ceiling-bill]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pivoted Wednesday from the "fiscal cliff" to the fight over raising the debt ceiling. McConnell, who brokered the New Year’s Eve deal to turn off most of the fiscal cliff’s tax increases with Vice President Biden, called on the Senate to pass a debt-ceiling compromise by early February. “Washington’s credit card has reached its limit again, and the Senate majority must act on legislation early in February — rather than waiting until the last minute, abdicating responsibility and hoping someone else will step in once again to craft a last-minute solution for them,” McConnell said. The U.S. reached its $16.4 billion credit limit on Dec. 31. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has begun to shuffle obligations around to avoid a default on the debt, but those measures can only be used for a matter of weeks. For the GOP, the debt-ceiling fight comes at an opportune time. They are eager to trade in a losing hand in the fiscal cliff fight — where tax increases were set to take effect automatically — to what it sees as a winning hand on entitlement reforms and the deficit. McConnell made clear that an increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by big spending cuts. In 2011, the GOP won $2.1 trillion in spending reductions in exchange for a debt ceiling increase of an equal amount. “Now that the House and Senate have acted in a bipartisan way to prevent tax increases on 99 percent of the American people, Democrats now have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to join Republicans in a serious effort to reduce Washington’s out-of-control spending,” McConnell said. President Obama has vowed he will not negotiate over the borrowing limit again. “While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed,” Obama said on Tuesday night. But McConnell said the debt ceiling increase gives Obama an opportunity to fulfill his promise to pursue a "balanced" approached to cutting the deficit. Given that the fiscal cliff deal generates more than $600 billion in tax revenue, McConnell said, it's time for the president to look at the other side of the ledger. “The president claims to want a balanced approach to solve our problems. And now that he has the tax rates he wants, his calls for ‘balance’ mean he must join us in our efforts to achieve meaningful spending and government reform,” he said. 

B. Energy debates cost capital
Addison 12—Associate Editor of E & P Magazine [Velda, Logjam Between Congress, Administration Hobbles Oil Policy, http://blogs.epmag.com/rebecca/2012/06/27/logjam-between-congress-administration-hobbles-oil-policy/]

The continued bickering between Congress and the administration of President Barack Obama continues to be a major stumbling block for the industry.
The list of industry projects and initiatives that are being undermined grows on a daily basis. These projects include offshore leasing, the Keystone XL Pipeline, hydraulic fracturing, and exporting LNG. It would be nice, I suppose, to assume that this only happens with Democrats in the White House and Republicans in Congress. But given how many different administrations from both parties have tried to create a national energy policy and how all of those efforts have foundered, it is obvious that partisanship continues to impact policy to the detriment of the country — not just between political parties but also between regions of the country, and consumers and producers. During this administration, more than others, the partisanship seems to be much more bitter and divisive.  How will the country be able to overcome such rancor? Why has it been so hard to generate an energy policy given the importance of energy in every country?
Those are questions we may never answer, but we at least need to come close. It is interesting to watch other countries be clear on energy policy. Perhaps being the largest energy user in the world and expecting that energy will always be there has tainted our way of looking at a policy aimed at keeping the US running.
With competition increasing for the remaining energy supplies and environmental considerations driving fuel choices, it would seem that having an energy policy would be even more important in today’s world. Given our reliance on information technology and its need for energy to keep going, we may be headed for a different kind of logjam that we may not be ready to unravel. What if the power plants were idled and the computers shut down? Would that make it important enough to finally devise an energy policy? I would be interested in hearing some solutions to this problem. We do need an energy policy, and we can’t wait for an emergency to create it.
C. Failure to raise the debt ceiling causes global economic catastrophe.
Slate.com 1/2/13 [Obama Tells Congress He Will Not Tolerate Another Debt-Ceiling Debacle,http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/01/02/fiscal_cliff_obama_warns_congress_he_will_not_have_debt_ceiling_debate.html]

In a brief address Tuesday night, President Obama saluted the passage of a fiscal cliff deal that the White House had negotiated with the Senate. Then he fired a warning shot at Congressional Republicans, saying he won't tolerate another down-to-the-wire battle over the debt ceiling this spring. "I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they've already racked up," he said. "If Congress refuses to give the U.S. government the ability to repay these bills on time, the consequences for the global economy would be catastrophic—far worse than a fiscal cliff." He concluded by calling for a 2013 marked by "a little bit less drama, a little bit less brinksmanship," and suggested the government "not scare the heck out of folks quite as much" the next time it has a major fiscal debate. Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner released a statement saying, "Now the focus turns to cutting spending." 

D. Economic decline, in the context of this current economic crisis, leads to nuclear war.
O’Donnell ‘9 [2-26, Sean, “Will this recession lead to World War III?” Baltimore Republican Examiner, www.examiner.com/republican-in-baltimore/will-this-recession-lead-to-world-war-iii, accessed 9/20/11]

Could the current economic crisis affecting this country and the world lead to another world war? The answer may be found by looking back in history. One of the causes of World War I was the economic rivalry that existed between the nations of Europe. In the 19th century France and Great Britain became wealthy through colonialism and the control of foreign resources. This forced other up-and-coming nations (such as Germany) to be more competitive in world trade which led to rivalries and ultimately, to war. After the Great Depression ruined the economies of Europe in the 1930s, fascist movements arose to seek economic and social control. From there fanatics like Hitler and Mussolini took over Germany and Italy and led them both into World War II. With most of North America and Western Europe currently experiencing a recession, will competition for resources and economic rivalries with the Middle East, Asia, or South American cause another world war? Add in nuclear weapons and Islamic fundamentalism and things look even worse. Hopefully the economy gets better before it gets worse and the terrifying possibility of World War III is averted. However sometimes history repeats itself. 

*1nc Human-centrism*

A. Their appeal to political action reinforces human-centric politics.
Dell’Aversano ‘10 [Carmen, “the love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the human-animal bond” journal for critical animal studies, volume III issue 1 and 2, 2010]

And reciprocally, everything that concerns animals, however well-founded and urgent, by definition cannot make its way into political discourse. If the child is ―the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning‖ (Edelman 12), the animal, as the prop for the performance of ―dehumanization‖, is the locus of the permanent denial of all meaning and relevance. If, as Edelman writes, queerness names the side of those not ‗fighting for the children‘, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism. […] [while] queerness, by contrast, figures […] the place of the social order‘s death drive […] queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social (Edelman 2004: 3) nothing could be queerer than the love for animals, which, by its very nature, which entails a serious and irrevocable commitment to the dismantling of the performances and devices on which social order as such rests, ―marks the ‗other‘ side of politics: […] the side outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism‘s unquestioned good‖ (Edelman 2004: 7). It is thus no coincidence that the fetish of the Child should be omnipresent in the many-sided polemic against animal rights. In public debates, anti-vivisection activists are routinely asked by experimenters whether they would rather kill a mouse or a child (the answer is, of course, neither); and every time the subject of animal rights is brought up not merely as a topic of academic discussion but in appeals for practical or Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 1/2, 2010 (ISSN1948-352X) 106 financial support, the most common form of refusal invariably brings up starving children as the more appropriate recipients of concern and aid. That the people who give this kind of answers do nothing whatsoever to relieve the plight of children in need does not matter rhetorically: what does matter is that the appeal for children ―is impossible to refuse […] this issue, like an ideological Möbius strip, only permit[s] one side‖ (Edelman 2004 2).. And any animal queer human can, from systematic and bitter personal experience, agree with Edelman that this is ―oppressively political […] insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought‖ (Edelman 2004 2). The emotions, feelings, thoughts and actions which make up the fabric of life for an animal queer person decentre the human and humanity from their positions as the taken-for granted subjects, and implicitly but powerfully question reproductive futurism. What Edelman calls the ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity, by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of human relations (Edelman 2004: 2) is shattered by an animal queer perspective. In its animal incarnation, more than in any other of its innumerable avatars, ―[t]he queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance […] to every social structure or form‖ (Edelman 2004 4)‖. And the real reason why liberalism grants a place to ―the queer‖ in its LGBT incarnation but marginalizes, ridicules, represses and murders animal queer is that the denial and repression of ―the queerness of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer‖ (Edelman 2004 27) are perfectly compatible with a civil rights perspective on same-sex love, but utterly incompatible with animal rights. An animal queer perspective is indeed [i]ntent on the end, not the ends, of the social, [...] insists that the drive toward that end, which liberalism refuses to imagine, can never be excluded from the structuring fantasy of the social order itself. (Edelman 2004: 28) The ―deliberate[...] severing of us from ourselves‖ that Edelman (5) mentions as the hallmark of queer is implicit in the love for an animal. Animal queer severs us from Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 1/2, 2010 (ISSN1948-352X) 107 ourselves because it decentres our perspective: suddenly, other values, other interests, other feelings, though incommensurable and unimaginable, become equivalent to our own. The queerest expression of this attitude in the animal rights field (or, for that matter, anywhere, at least as far as I know...) is VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which unwittingly but appropriately takes up Edelman‘s challenge that ―Queerness should and must redefine such notions as ―civil order‖ through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity‖ (Edelman 2004 16-17) and embodies the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead [which] would depend on us taking seriously the place of the death drive […] and insisting […] that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of those fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future. (Edelman 2004 31) The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement Motto: ―May we live long and die out‖ VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It‘s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. [...] As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.[...] When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth‘s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature‘s ―experiments‖ have done throughout the eons. It‘s going to take all of us going. At first glance, some people assume that VHEMT Volunteers and Supporters must hate people and that we want everyone to commit suicide or become victims of mass murder. It‘s easy to forget that another way to bring about a reduction in our numbers is to simply stop making more of us. Making babies seems to be a blind spot in our outlooks on life. (http://www.vhemt.org/) Instead of worshipping the Child as the guarantee of our own eternity in a future where progress will always confirm we were right, VHEMT calls for a voluntary and lucid renunciation of the Child both as a symbol and as a reality, and for restoring the beauty, glory and holiness of the planet by returning it to its rightful, non-human, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 1/2, 2010 (ISSN1948-352X) 108 owners, the ones who kept it for half a billion years without making a mess of it. The mission of VHEMT actualizes what Edelman wrote about: ―the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability‖ (Edelman 2004 9). In envisioning a world where no opposition to the social will be necessary, because the social will no longer be a possibility, VHEMT radically refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child [and therefore] must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the order of futurism on which meaning always depends. (Edelman 2004: 11) Because of its refusal of any ―identification both of and with the Child as the pre-eminent emblem of the motivating end, though one endlessly postponed, of every political vision as a vision of futurity‖, VHEMT is the most coherent and most radical incarnation of ―a queer oppositional politics‖ (Edelman 2004: 13). 

B. We must deny the urge to align ourselves with their human-centric politics – it is an all or nothing question.
Dell’Aversano ‘10 [Carmen, “the love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the human-animal bond” journal for critical animal studies, volume III issue 1 and 2, 2010]

A real ―oxymoronic community of difference‖, embracing not only all possible variants of ―gender trouble‖ but also the queering of the human-animal barrier, would not need to teach anybody anything, because it would have made violence unthinkable, since the human oppression of non-human animals is not a peripheral case of no political relevance but, as Zimbardo‘s own analysis of ―dehumanization‖ shows, the archetype, model and training ground of all forms of oppression and injustice.xxvi In this respect animal queer, more than any form of queer, radically threatens the very foundations of human society as we know it, since taking it seriously, not simply as another interesting category for academic analysis but as an ethical and political imperative, implies doing everything we can to dismantle the linguistic, conceptual and performative apparatus which makes all kinds of violence and oppression possible. In animal queer the dichotomy between liberation theory and civil right politics, which has been discussed at length in queer literature,xxvii has no substance: crossing the line dividing our species from the other ones means eradicating the very categories of thought needed to conceive of inequality and injustice. If the definition of queer politics is radical opposition to the established social order as such, and the measure of success of queer political action is the extent to which it smashes the system, then animal rights activism is the queerest possible form of political action, because it is structurally incompatible with continuing to live the way the system expects us to. The reason why animal queer is structurally and intrinsically subversive, and why it is perceived as radically threatening, and is, accordingly, ruthlessly marginalized, by all forms of cultural and political discourse, is that it replaces sameness with otherness as the criterion of emotional, social and political inclusion: whoever supports animals, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 1/2, 2010 (ISSN1948-352X) 101 fights for animals, loves an animal loves, supports and fights not for the self but for the other (―the wholly other that they call animal […]Yes, the wholly other, more other than any other, that they call an animal‖, as Derrida 1999 380 would put it), and knows in advance that no middle ground will ever be found, no assimilation will ever be possible, that in one, one hundred or one million years animals will be just as puzzling, as foreign, as alien to all that we can be and understand as they are now. If true love is felt not for the self but for the Other, and if ―[a]imer l‘autre, c‘est préserver son étrangeté, reconnaître qu‘il existe à côté de moi, loin de moi, non avec moi‖xxviii (Bruckner & Finkielkraut 1977 256), then love in its animal queer form is indeed the purest, most coherent and most radical form of love, and as such it has the potential not to reform society or to facilitate social ―progress‖ but to replace it with the unthinkable, with something radically contradicting all assumptions, expectations and definitions, to create the possibility of a happiness we can‘t even imagine, because to fathom it we would already have to be different from what we are, to have moved beyond ourselves. 

C. Vote neg to reject the 1ac —maintaining the human-non-human binary dooms them to endless cycles of subordination and violence.
Best ’07, Associate Professor, Departments of Humanities and Philosophy University of Texas, El Paso [Steven, Charles Patterson, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust New York: Lantern Books, 2002, 280 pp]

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the environmental determinism approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in human history, as well as how the human exploitation of animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, and environmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call “animal standpoint theory” is that animals have been key driving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social life, and history overall. More specifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal. In this context, Charles Patterson’s recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal standpoint in a powerful form with revolutionary implications. The main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that the human domination of animals, such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago with the rise of agricultural society, was the first hierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for patriarchy, slavery, warfare, genocide, and other systems of violence and power. A key implication of Patterson’s theory is that human liberation is implausible if disconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism  a speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchal relationship privileging superior humans over inferior animals and reduces animals to resources for human use  collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions. Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profound connections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In Part II, he shows how these connections exist not only in the realm of ideology – as conceptual systems of justifying and underpinning domination and hierarchy – but also in systems of technology, such that the tools and techniques humans devised for the rationalized mass confinement and slaughter of animals were mobilized against human groups for the same ends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes how personal experience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to an insular identity and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of Nazi evil and its tragic experience, others recognized the profound similarities between how Nazis treated their human captives and how humanity as a whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt vegetarianism, to become advocates for the animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed by universal compassion for all suffering and oppressed beings. The Origins of Hierarchy "As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals. Patterson’s thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to the domination over other humans. It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over humans brings about alienation from the natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal to “dominate” nature. In the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically don’t even mention human domination of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or significance. In Patterson’s model, however, the human subjugation of animals is the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all other systems of domination such as include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. As he puts it, “the exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples.” Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means. Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. “Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species,” Patterson writes, “our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them.” Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims – Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates – with opprobrious terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.” Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. The connections are clear: “For a civilization built on the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the `lower’ and more degraded the human victims are, the easier it is to kill them.” Thus, colonialism, as Patterson describes, was a “natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.” For just as humans had subdued animals with their superior intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white race had proven its superiority by bringing the “lower races” under its command. There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moral worth. The arguments European colonialists used to legitimate exploiting Africans – that they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans in ability to reason – are the very same justifications humans use to trap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from humans was also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerous other groups from “humanity.” The oppression of blacks, women, and animals alike was grounded in an argument that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought, alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white, western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color, animals) is deficient in rationality in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed and treated as inferior, subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of skin color, and the sexist mentality splits men and women into greater and lower classes of beings, the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the biological continuum into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, and sexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a violent human supremacism  namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise or, more generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind. 

Environmental Racism K

A. There is false sense of urgency constructed by their aff and inherent in the political nature of their response that must be abandoned prior to any ‘fix.’ Their attempt at modernization without addressing the effects of environmental displacement on communities of color makes the replication of these spaces inevitable.
White’02, Assistant Professor of Sociology at RISD [Damien Finbar, “A Green Industrial Revolution? Sustainable Technological Innovation in a Global Age,” Environmental Politics, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2002, p. 1-26]

A second area of general difficulties need to be addressed through the new political economy of space and time [Harvey, 1990, 1996; Smith, 1990; Lash and Urry, 1994; Urry 200; Castells, 2000a, 1997, 2000b; Massey, 1999]. David Harvey [199: 182-4] has argued that an increasingly important manner in which capital deals with crises of over-accumulation is through temporal or spatial displacement. If we relate and slightly adjust these ideas (following Dryzek [1987]) it would seem evident that further problems in addressing environmental questions presently arise from the (increasingly) narrow temporal horizons of global neo-liberalism. Tensions clearly do exist between the temporal horizons of business (often limited to the end of the year balance sheet), the horizons of politicians (invariably limited to the election cycle) or even the emergence of instantaneous ‘timeless time’ as a property of informational capitalism [Castells, 2000a] and the much longer temporal horizons or ‘glacial time’ [Urry, 2000] that many environmental problems need to be addressed within (for example, global warming, biodiversity loss, the disposal of nuclear waste). If we turn to the related issue of the ‘spatial fix,’ a defining feature of the new global order according to Urry [2000], Castells [2000a] and Harvery [1990, 1996] is the manner in which it has increasingly given rise to various mobilities. An aspect of this has been the much noted growing mobilities of people, ideas, images, capital and objects around the glod and the broader resulting phenomena of ‘time-space compression’ [Harvey, 1990]. Many of these developments, of course, have been tremendously exciting, liberating and indeed helped generate both a sense of the ‘global environment’ and perhaps opened possibilities for an alternative democratic ‘globalisation from below.’ The reverse side of this though has been the greater liquidity and mobility of capital, waste, toxics, hazards and concurrent the growing capacities for the spatially shifting ecological degradation. Following this, as Dryzek [1987, 1997] has argued, questions clearly need to be asked concerning the extent to which affluent countries, regions, cities, localities are embarking on ecological modernization projects are achieving these ends by transferring their environmental externalities to poor countries, regions, cities or sectors of cities and localities? While much has been made by contrarian thinkers of late about environmental improvements occurring in certain cities, certain sectors of cities or even in advanced states across certain indicators, the question of environmental displacement is rarely mentioned. Yet, within urban areas in the USA, growing evidence accumulated by the US environmental justice movement [Faber et al., 1998] suggests that displacement of environmental bads from affluent white middle class areas to low income and ethnic neighbourhoods has been an endemic feature of the capitalist production of space, place and nature [Smith, 1990] over the twentieth century in the US. The complex geography of environmental displacement occurring between affluent cities in the ‘spaces of flows’ and poorer areas left behind in the ‘spaces of places’ [Castells, 2000a] is an area which needs much greater analysis, since as Swatterthwaite has noted …the fact [is] that businesses and consumers in wealthy cities can maintain high levels of environmental quality in and around the city (and the nation in which it is located) by importing all the good whose fabrication implies high environmental costs. Thus, goods that involve high levels of energy, water and other resource use and generally involve dirty industrial processes with high volumes of waste (included hazardous waste) and hazardous conditions for the workforce, are imported [Swatterthwaite, 1997:223].

B. The “pockets” of space and people left behind by their policies are a byproduct of the colonial mindset of environmental progress – this exercise of power, no matter what the intention, is a manifestation and perpetuation of environmental racism.
Bullard ’08 [Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D, Environmental Justice Resource Center,_Clark Atlanta University, 7/2/08, “POVERTY, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING HEALTHY AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES” http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html]

The United States is the dominant economic and military force in the world today. The American economic engine has generated massive wealth, high standard of living, and consumerism. This growth machine has also generated waste, pollution, and ecological destruction. The U.S. has some of the best environmental laws in the world. However, in the real world, all communities are not created equal. Environmental regulations have not achieved uniform benefits across all segments of society. [2] Some communities are routinely poisoned while the government looks the other way. People of color around the world must contend with dirty air and drinking water, and the location of noxious facilities such as municipal landfills, incinerators, hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities owned by private industry, government, and even the military.[3] These environmental problems are exacerbated by racism. Environmental racism refers to environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Environmental racism is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions. Environmental racism combines with public policies and industry practices to provide benefits for the countries in the North while shifting costs to countries in the South. [4] Environmental racism is a form of institutionalized discrimination. Institutional discrimination is defined as "actions or practices carried out by members of dominant (racial or ethnic) groups that have differential and negative impact on members of subordinate (racial and ethnic) groups." [5] The United States is grounded in white racism. The nation was founded on the principles of "free land" (stolen from Native Americans and Mexicans), "free labor" (African slaves brought to this land in chains), and "free men" (only white men with property had the right to vote). From the outset, racism shaped the economic, political and ecological landscape of this new nation. Environmental racism buttressed the exploitation of land, people, and the natural environment. It operates as an intra-nation power arrangementespecially where ethnic or racial groups form a political and or numerical minority. For example, blacks in the U.S. form both a political and numerical racial minority. On the other hand, blacks in South Africa, under apartheid, constituted a political minority and numerical majority. American and South African apartheid had devastating environmental impacts on blacks. [6] Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations. Increased globalization of the world's economy has placed special strains on the eco-systems in many poor communities and poor nations inhabited largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially true for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber, and minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives, cheapest labor, and highest profit. The struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and the Africans in the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by Shell Oil refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is repeated for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous people in Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil refineries. The companies may be different, but the community complaints and concerns are very similar. Local residents have seen their air, water, and land contaminated. Many nearby residents are "trapped" in their community because of inadequate roads, poorly planned emergency escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of plant explosions and accidents. The Bhopal tragedy is fresh in the minds of millions of people who live next to chemical plants. The 1984 poison-gas leak at the Bhopal, India Union Carbide plant killed thousands of peoplemaking it the world's deadliest industrial accident. It is not a coincidence that the only place in the U.S. where methyl isocyanate (MIC) was manufactured was at a Union Carbide plant in in predominately African American Institute, West Virginia. [8] In 1985, a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the hospital. Institutional racism has allowed people of color communities to exist as colonies, areas that form dependent (and unequal) relationships to the dominant white society or "Mother Country" with regard to their social, economic, legal, and environmental administration. Writing more than three decades ago, Carmichael and Hamilton, in their work Black Power, offered the "internal" colonial model to explain racial inequality, political exploitation, and social isolation of African Americans. Carmichael and Hamilton write: The economic relationship of America's black communities . . . reflects their colonial status. The political power exercised over those communities go hand in glove with the economic deprivation experienced by the black citizens. Historically, colonies have existed for the sole purpose of enriching, in one form or another, the "colonizer"; the consequence is to maintain the economic dependency of the "colonized." [9] Institutional racism reinforces internal colonialism. Government institutions buttress this system of domination. Institutional racism defends, protects, and enhances the social advantages and privileges of rich nations. Whether by design or benign neglect, communities of color (ranging from the urban ghettos and barrios to rural "poverty pockets" to economically impoverished Native American reservations and developing nations) face some of the worst environmental problems. The most polluted communities are also the communities with crumbling infrastructure, economic disinvestment, deteriorating housing, inadequate schools, chronic unemployment, high poverty, and overloaded health care systems. 

C. We must take every opportunity to reject racism in all of its manifestations.
Barndt ‘91, co-director of Crossroads (a ministry to dismantle racism), (Joseph, Dismantling Racism, p. 155-156)
To study racism is to study walls.  We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons.  The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike.  It shackles the victimizers as well as the victim.  The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God intends for us.  The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhumane, and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power, privelege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison, will inevitably destroy us all.  But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled.  We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom.  Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed.  You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism.  The danger point of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near.  The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and colonialism, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a point of no return.  A small and predominately white minority of the global population derives its power and priveleges from the sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color.  For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.