Grid Overview

Wind produces enough power to solve emissions, and does not affect the environment around them

Charles Q. Choi, 9/10

is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets. “Studies Show Wind Power's Massive Potential” http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content/studies-show-wind-powers-massive-potential/782, accessed 9/28/12,WYO/JF

There is enough energy for people to reap from the wind to meet all of the world's power demands without radically altering the planet's climate, according to two independent teams of scientists. Wind power is often touted as environmentally friendly, generating no pollutants. It is an increasingly popular source of renewable energy, with the United States aiming to produce 20 percent of its electricity by wind power by 2030. Still, there have been questions as to how much energy wind power can supply the world, and how green it actually is, given how it pulls energy from the atmosphere. To learn more, climate scientist Katherine Marvel at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Calif., and her colleagues developed a global climate model that analyzed how wind turbines would drag on the atmosphere to harvest energy from winds at the planet's surface and higher altitudes. Historically, people have built wind turbines on the ground and in the ocean, but research suggests kite-borne turbines could generate more power from steadier, faster high-altitude winds. Adding wind turbines of any kind slows winds, and Marvel and her colleagues found that adding more than a certain amount of turbines would no longer generate more electricity. Still, their simulations suggest that at least 400 terawatts -- or 400 trillion watts of power -- could be generated from surface winds, and more than 1,800 terawatts could be extracted from winds throughout the atmosphere. In comparison, people globally currently use about 18 terawatts of power. Simulating a century's worth of amped-up wind-energy production suggests that harvesting maximum power from these winds would have dramatic long-term effects on the climate, triggering major shifts in atmospheric circulation. "However, it's important to understand that these amounts are far, far bigger than current or projected global energy demand," Marvel said. In contrast, extracting enough wind energy to satisfy current global power demands would only have minimal climate effectssss, as long as wind turbines were spread out. Doing so might affect surface temperatures by about 0.1 degree Celsius and affect average precipitation by about 1 percent. Independent from Marvel's research, atmospheric scientist Mark Jacobson at Stanford University in Calif. and wind power researcher Cristina Archer at the University of Delaware, in Newark, used a 3-D computer model that analyzed interactions between the atmosphere, land and oceans on a global scale, including factors such as chemistry and water-vapor content. They estimated the amount of energy turbines with hubs located a conventional height of 330 feet off the ground could extract, based on manufacturer data on how turbines convert wind to power. They also simulated turbines 6 miles above the ground, the typical altitude of the jet stream. They found the amount of wind power available at the height of most modern wind turbines before the point of diminishing returns is about 80 terawatts on all continents minus Antarctica and near their shores, and more than 250 terawatts if wind turbines could be placed across the entire surface of the planet, including the oceans. At heights of the jet stream, about 380 terawatts appears available. The numbers of both teams are not exactly comparable, in part because Jacobson and Archer looked at extracting energy at specific heights in the atmosphere, whereas Marvel and her colleagues looked more at the atmosphere as a whole. "The two teams obtained similar conclusions using two different approaches, which gives us even more confidence about our results," Archer said. More realistically, Jacobson and Archer found that 4 million 5-megawatt turbines operating on the planet's surface could supply as much as 7.5 terawatts of power without significant negative impacts on the climate. This is more than half the world's power demands in 2030, optimistically assuming that all energy is converted to clean energy by then. The researchers suggest half these turbines be placed in the ocean, while the others would require a little more than 0.5 percent of the Earth's land surface -- about half the area of Alaska. Virtually none of this area would need to be used solely for wind, but could for instance also serve as farmland, ranchland or wildlife preserves. Spreading out these ground-based turbines in windy locations worldwide such as the American plains and the Sahara would increase efficiency by keeping them from stealing wind energy from each other, and would reduce their overall environmental impact. Both these models assume wind turbines can be installed anywhere and everywhere, without regard to social, environmental, or financial considerations, such as how much 4 million wind turbines might cost, or how so many turbines might impact migrating birds. While these researchers focused on the global climate effects of very large-scale wind power, more study is needed. Archer said the findings suggest that even heavy use of wind power is likely a smart, safe and clean way to generate energy. "There is still a lot of interesting work to be done on local and regional climatic consequences of wind," Marvel said. Marvel and her colleagues detailed their findings online Sept. 9 in the journal Nature Climate Change. Jacobson and Archer published their research online Sept. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both teams will present their work at the Airborne Wind Energy Conference on Sept

Ports Overview

Assessing Chinese motivation is possible and epistemologically useful---

Joseph K. Clifton 11,

Claremont McKenna College “DISPUTED THEORY AND SECURITY POLICY: RESPONDING TO “THE RISE OF CHINA”,” 2011, http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164&context=cmc_theses

First, motives can be known. Mearsheimer is correct in observing that assessing motives can be difficult, but this does not mean that the task is impossible. There clearly are ways of finding out information about the goals of states and the means with which they plan to achieve them. One of the most important roles of intelligence analysts, for example, is to determine state interests and expected behavior based on obtained information. The possibility that information may be flawed should not lead to a rejection of all information. People make decisions based on less than perfect knowledge all of the time. This ability to know motives extends to future motives, because an analyst can use information such as historical trends to observe consistencies or constant evolutions of motives. Prediction of the future is necessarily less certain in its accuracy, but the prediction can still be made.104¶ Second, even if there is still some uncertainty of motives, the rational response is not to assume absolute aggression. Assuming aggressive motive in a situation of uncertainty ignites the security dilemma, which could actually decrease a state’s security. Mearsheimer calls this tragic, but it is not necessary. An illustrative example is Mearsheimer’s analysis of the German security situation were the United States to withdraw its military protection. Mearsheimer argues that it would be rational for Germany to develop nuclear weapons, since these weapons would provide a deterrent, and it would also be rational for nuclear European powers to wage a preemptive war against Germany to prevent it from developing a nuclear deterrent. 105 This scenario is not rational for either side because it ignores motives. If Germany knows that other states will attack if it were to develop nuclear weapons, then it would not be rational for it to develop nuclear weapons. And if other states know that Germany’s development of nuclear weapons is only as a deterrent, then it would not be rational to prevent German nuclear development. The point is that the security dilemma exists because of a lack of motivational knowledge, so the proper response is to try to enhance understanding of motives, not discard motivational knowledge altogether. Misperception is certainly a problem in international politics, but reducing misperception would allow states to better conform to defensive realist logic, which results in preferable outcomes relative to offensive realism. 106¶ Assessing motives is vital in the case of the rise of China, because mutually preferable outcomes can be achieved if China is not an aggressive power, as offensive realism would have to assume, but is actually a status quo power with aims that have limited effect on the security of the U.S. and other potentially affected countries. I do not mean here to claim with certainty that China is and will always be a status quo power, and policymakers likely have access to more intentional information than what is publicly known. At the very least, valuing motivational assessments empowers policymakers to act on this knowledge, which is preferable because of the possibility of reducing competition and conflict.

American hard power remains unmatched in capability and weaponry-no country can go head to head with it and win

Kagan 2012

[Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, The World America Made, 2012 uwyo//amp]

Military capacity matters, too, as early-nineteenthcentury China learned and Chinese leaders know today. As Yan Xuetong recently noted, "Military strength underpins hegemony."86 Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America's relative military capacity—at least not yet. Americans currently spend roughly $600 billion a year on defense, more than the rest of the other great powers combined.87 They do so, moreover, while consuming around 4 percent of GDP annually, a higher percentage than the other great powers but in historical terms lower than the 10 percent of GDP that the United States spent on defense in the mid-1950s or the 7 percent it spent in the late 19805. The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat, and would defeat any competitor in a head-tohead battle. American naval power remains predominant in every region of the world. By these military and economic measures, at least, the United States today is not remotely like Britain circa 1900, when that empire's relative decline began to become apparent. It is more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power. It is possible to imagine a time when this might no longer be the case, but that moment has not yet arrived.

Withdrawal creates Middle East vacuum, massive Sunni-Shia war and wildfire proliferation—and there’s no regional balancer so OSB would fail

Starobin 6

[Paul, editior of National Journal, The National Journal, “Beyond Hegemony”, 12.2.2006, p. lexis]

Still, if stability in a multipolar world is to depend on big-power police forces taking care of business in their own 'hoods, who would perform that function in the Middle East, the planet's most turbulent region? No question is more vexing. For centuries the region has been under the sway of outside powers, from the Ottoman Empire to the French, British, and American empires. America's departure would leave a vacuum. Among Middle Eastern Muslim countries, neither Egypt nor Iran, the two most populous states, has the status of an accepted power broker; nor does Saudi Arabia, which has the biggest bank account and is the cradle of Islam but whose monarchy suffers in the region from popular dislike of its historically close security relationship with the United States. Given sharp regional tensions between Sunni and Shiite sects, it is conceivable that a civil war, spilling outside of Iraq, would have to be fought to settle top-dog status. vvvPerhaps a rough balance could be achieved in a grouping pitting a nuclear-armed Israel against a nuclear-armed Islamic country, such as Iran. But it is likely that if Persian Iran gains nukes, then Arab countries like Algeria, Egypt, and Syria will try to match that feat, Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said at a recent roundtable at the New America Foundation in Washington. (He skirted comment on my question of how the Saudis would react; some analysts believe that the Saudis might seek protection under Pakistan's nuclear umbrella.) It is understandable why countries like France and Russia, chafing at America's global dominance, view a multipolar world as a desirable one. But would a multipolar world ever be stable? "I don't think stability exists anywhere, except in death," Merry, the former diplomat, said.

Middle East war goes nuclear

Steinbach in 2

[John, DC Iraq Coalition, “Israeli Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Threat to Peace,” http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2002/03/00_steinbach_israeli-wmd.htm, accessed 4/19/04]

Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability."(41) and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum (and the) next war will not be conventional."(42) Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major (if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (43) (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon - for whatever reason - the deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration." (44)

K

FW

First, F/W: Our interpretation is the ballot is a yes/no referendum on the aff’s plan-

RTP: a: Predictibility- prevents negs from linking generically, b. skews the debate into an abstract direction that prevents focus on the implications of plan action

Governmental policy focus key to education-

Crist 4

(Eileen, Professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology, “Against the social construction of nature and wilderness”, Environmental Ethics 26;1, p 13-6, http://www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/crist/againstsocialconstruction.pdf)

Yet, constructivist analyses of "nature" favor remaining in the comfort zone of zestless agnosticism and noncommittal meta-discourse. As David Kidner suggests, this intellectual stance may function as a mechanism against facing the devastation of the biosphere—an undertaking long underway but gathering momentum with the imminent bottlenecking of a triumphant global consumerism and unprecedented population levels. Human-driven extinction—in the ballpark of Wilson's estimated 27,000 species per year—is so unthinkable a fact that choosing to ignore it may well be the psychologically risk-free option. Nevertheless, this is the opportune historical moment for intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences to join forces with conservation scientists in order to help create the consciousness shift and policy changes to stop this irreversible destruction. Given this outlook, how students in the human sciences are trained to regard scientific knowledge, and what kind of messages percolate to the public from the academy about the nature of scientific findings, matter immensely. The "agnostic stance" of constructivism toward "scientific claims" about the environment—a stance supposedly mandatory for discerning how scientific knowledge is "socially assembled"[32]—is, to borrow a legendary one-liner, striving to interpret the world at an hour that is pressingly calling us to change it.

LUKE

Securitization is inevitable.

Trombetta, 08

[“The Securitization of the Environment and the Transformation of Security”, Maria Julia Trombetta

Delft University of Technology, March 19th ’08 http://turin.sgir.eu/uploads/Trombetta-the_securitization_of_the_environment_and_the_transformation_of_security.pdf//uwyokb]

Second, within the School’s framework, desecuritization cannot be possible. Securitization in fact can be inescapable, the unwanted result of discussing whether or not the environment is a security issue. As Huysmans has noticed, the performative, constitutive approach suggested by the speech act theory implies that even talking and researching about security can contribute to the securitization of an issue, even if that (and the practices associated with it) is not the desired result. “The normative dilemma thus consists of how to write or speak about security when the security knowledge risks the production of what one tries to avoid, what one criticizes: that is, the securitization of migration, drugs and so forth.”(Huysmans 2002: 43) When the understanding of security is the problematic one described by the CopS, research itself can become a danger. This captures a paradox that characterizes the debate about environmental security. As Jon Barnett has showed in The Meaning of Environmental Security (2001) the securitization of the environment can have perverse effects and several attempts to transform environmental problems into security issues have resulted in a spreading of the national security paradigm and the enemy logic, even if the intentions behind them were different. Barnett has argued that “environmental security is not about the environment, it is about security; as a concept, it is at its most meaningless and malign”(2001: 83) in this way, he seems to accept the ineluctability of the security mindset or logic evoked by securitization. However, his suggestion of promoting a “human centered” understanding of security, in which environmental security is not about (national) security but about people and their needs, within the securitization logic, cannot escape the trap he has described. Why, in fact, should the sort of his claim be different from that of similar ones?

Standing reserve is good

Bostrom 3

PhD from the London School of Economics (Nick, 2003, “Transhumanism FAQ”, http://www.paulbroman.com/myspace/Transhumanism_FAQ.txt) \

Population increase is an issue we would ultimately have to come to grips with even if healthy life-extension were not to happen. Leaving people to die is an unacceptable solution. A large population should not be viewed simply as a problem. Another way of looking at the same fact is that it means that many persons now enjoy lives that would not have been lived if the population had been smaller. One could ask those who complain about overpopulation exactly which people’s lives they would have preferred should not have been led. Would it really have been better if billions of the world’s people had never existed and if there had been no other people in their place? Of course, this is not to deny that too-rapid population growth can cause crowding, poverty, and the depletion of natural resources. In this sense there can be real problems that need to be tackled. How many people the Earth can sustain at a comfortable standard of living is a function of technological development (as well as of how resources are distributed). New technologies, from simple improvements in irrigation and management, to better mining techniques and more efficient power generation machinery, to genetically engineered crops, can continue to improve world resource and food output, while at the same time reducing environmental impact and animal suffering. Environmentalists are right to insist that the status quo is unsustainable. As a matter of physical necessity, things cannot stay as they are today indefinitely, or even for very long. If we continue to use up resources at the current pace, without finding more resources or learning how to use novel kinds of resources, then we will run into serious shortages sometime around the middle of this century. The deep greens have an answer to this: they suggest we turn back the clock and return to an idyllic pre-industrial age to live in sustainable harmony with nature. The problem with this view is that the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic. It was a life of poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk, superstitious fears, and cultural parochialism. Nor was it environmentally sound – as witness the deforestation of England and the Mediterranean region, desertification of large parts of the middle east, soil depletion by the Anasazi in the Glen Canyon area, destruction of farm land in ancient Mesopotamia through the accumulation of mineral salts from irrigation, deforestation and consequent soil erosion by the ancient Mexican Mayas, overhunting of big game almost everywhere, and the extinction of the dodo and other big featherless birds in the South Pacific. Furthermore, it is hard to see how more than a few hundred million people could be maintained at a reasonable standard of living with pre-industrial production methods, so some ninety percent of the world population would somehow have to vanish in order to facilitate this nostalgic return. Transhumanists propose a much more realistic alternative: not to retreat to an imagined past, but to press ahead as intelligently as we can. The environmental problems that technology creates are problems of intermediary, inefficient technology, of placing insufficient political priority on environmental protection as well as of a lack of ecological knowledge. Technologically less advanced industries in the former Soviet-bloc pollute much more than do their advanced Western counterparts. High-tech industry is typically relatively benign. Once we develop molecular nanotechnology, we will not only have clean and efficient manufacturing of almost any commodity, but we will also be able to clean up much of the mess created by today’s crude fabrication methods. This would set a standard for a clean environment that today’s traditional environmentalists could scarcely dream of.

Managerialism key to avert nuclear conflict that would preclude solvency for the alt

Dyer, 04

[http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1230-05.htm Gwynne Dyer December 30, 2004 is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 papers worldwide. This is an abridged version of the last chapter in his updated book, War, first published in 1985. His latest book is Future: Tense. The Coming Global Order, published by McClelland and Stewart. by the Toronto Star The End of War Our Task Over the Next Few Years is to Transform the World of Independent States into a Genuine Global Village by Gwynne Dyer]

War is deeply embedded in our history and our culture, probably since before we were even fully human, but weaning ourselves away from it should not be a bigger mountain to climb than some of the other changes we have already made in the way we live, given the right incentives. And we have certainly been given the right incentives: The holiday from history that we have enjoyed since the early '90s may be drawing to an end, and another great-power war, fought next time with nuclear weapons, may be lurking in our future. The "firebreak" against nuclear weapons use that we began building after Hiroshima and Nagasaki has held for well over half a century now. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new powers is a major challenge to the stability of the system. So are the coming crises, mostly environmental in origin, which will hit some countries much harder than others, and may drive some to desperation. Add in the huge impending shifts in the great-power system as China and India grow to rival the United States in GDP over the next 30 or 40 years and it will be hard to keep things from spinning out of control. With good luck and good management, we may be able to ride out the next half-century without the first-magnitude catastrophe of a global nuclear war, but the potential certainly exists for a major die-back of human population. We cannot command the good luck, but good management is something we can choose to provide. It depends, above all, on preserving and extending the multilateral system that we have been building since the end of World War II. The rising powers must be absorbed into a system that emphasizes co-operation and makes room for them, rather than one that deals in confrontation and raw military power. If they are obliged to play the traditional great-power game of winners and losers, then history will repeat itself and everybody loses. Our hopes for mitigating the severity of the coming environmental crises also depend on early and concerted global action of a sort that can only happen in a basically co-operative international system. When the great powers are locked into a military confrontation, there is simply not enough spare attention, let alone enough trust, to make deals on those issues, so the highest priority at the moment is to keep the multilateral approach alive and avoid a drift back into alliance systems and arms races.

Globalized technological thought is good. Rejecting technological thought also rejects technological innovation and dooms us to extinction. This also defends our ontology

Heaberlin, 4 – nuclear engineer, led the Nuclear Safety and Technology Applications Product Line at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Scott, A Case for Nuclear-Generated Electricity, p. 31-40)

Well, then let's not do that, huh? Well, no, not hardly, because without that use of fertilizers we couldn't produce the food to feed the population. We just couldn't do it. Here are some comparisons." If you used no fertilizers or pesticides you could get 500 kilograms of grain from a hectare in a dry climate and as much as 1000 kilograms in a humid climate. If you got organic and used animal manure as fertilizer, assuming you could find enough, you might get as much as 2000 kilograms per hectare. For a sense of scale, the average in the United States, where recall we only get half the food value to hectare as the intensively farmed Chinese crop land, we get about 4500 kilograms per hectare on the average. In serious cornfields with fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, the value is 7000 kilograms per hectare. Modern mechanized, chemically supported agriculture produces 7 to 14 times the food that you would get without those advantages. Even the best organic farming would produce only 30 to 45% of the food value you would get from the same sized chemically fertilized farm, and that is assuming you could get the manure you needed to make it work. In very stark terms, without the chemically enhanced farming we would have probably something like one-fifth the food supply we have now. That means four-fifths the population would not be fed, at least as we are organized now. So, no, just giving up on fertilizers is not in the deal. However, we could get the hydrogen and energy from sources other than natural gas. Nuclear energy could be used to provide electricity to extract hydrogen from water and produce the process heat required to combine the hydrogen and nitrogen from the air. That is just a thought to stick in your mind. While we are looking at energy use in agriculture, here are a few more numbers for you.10 If you look at the energy input into agriculture and the energy you get out, you see some interesting facts. By combining the energy used to make fertilizers and pesticides, power irrigation, and run the farm machinery in the United States, we use about 0.7 kcal of fossil fuel energy for each 1 kcal of food we make. This doesn't include the energy needed to process and transport the food. In Europe where they farm more intensely, the amount of energy out is just about the same as energy in. In Germany and Italy the numbers are 1.4 and 1.7 kcal energy input to each 1 kcal output respectively. The point is you need energy to feed people, well at least a lot of people. Which gets us back to Cohen and his question. One of the studies he examined looked at a "self-sustaining solar energy system." For the United States, this would replace all fossil energy and provide one-fifth to one-half the current energy use. The conclusion of the study was that this would either produce" a significant reduction in our standard of living ... even if all the energy conservation measures known today were adopted" or if set at the current standard of living, "then the ideal U.S. population should be targeted at 40-100 million people." The authors of that study then cheerfully go on to point out that we do have enough fossil fuel to last a least a century, as long as we can work out the pesky environmental problems. So, you can go to a "self-sustaining" energy economy as long as you are willing to shoot between 2 out of 3 and 6 out of 7 of your neighbors.And this is a real question. The massive use of fossil fuel driven agriculture to provide the fertilizers and pesticides, and power the farm equipment, is a) vitally important to feed everyone, and b) something we just can't keep up in a business-as-usual fashion. Sustainable means you can keep doing it. Fossil energy supplies are finite; you will run out some time. Massive use of fossil energy and the greenhouse gases they produce also may very well tip the planet into one of those extinction events in which a lot of very bad things happen to a lot of the life on the earth. O.K. to Cohen's big question, how many people can the earth support? What it comes down to is that the "Well, it depends" answer depends on • what quality of life you will accept, what level of technology you will use, and • what level of social integration you will accept.We have seen some of the numbers regarding quality of life. Clearly if you are willing to accept the Bangladesh diet, you can feed 1.8 times more people than if you chose the United States diet.If you choose the back-to-nature, live like our hearty forefathers, level of technology, you can feed perhaps one-fifth as many people as you can with modern chemical fertilized agriculture. The rest have to go. And here is the tough one. You can do a lot better, get a lot more people on the planet, if you just force a few things. Like, no more land wasted in growing grapes for wine or grains for whiskey and beer. No cropland used for tobacco. No more grain wasted on animals for meat, just grain for people. No more rich diets for the rich countries, share equally for everyone. No more trade barriers; too bad for the farmers in Japan and France, those countries would just have to accept their dependence on other countries for their food. It is easy to see that at least some of those might actually be a pretty good thing; however, the kicker is how do you get them to happen? After all, Mussolinill did make the trains run on time. How could you force these things without a totalitarian state? Are you willing to give up your ability to choose for yourself for the common good? It is not pretty, is it?

Cohen looked at all the various population estimates and concluded that most fell into the range of 4 to 16 billion. Taking the highest value when researchers offered a range, Cohen calculated a high median of 12 billion and taking the lower part of the range a low median of 7.7 billion. The good news in this is 12 billion is twice as many people as we have now. The bad news is that the projections for world population for 2050 are between 7.8 and 12.5 billion. That means we have got no more than 50 years before we exceed the nominal carrying capacity of the earth. Cohen also offers a qualifying observation by stating the "First Law of Information," which asserts that 97.6% of all statistics are made up. This helps us appreciate that application of these numbers to real life is subject to a lot of assumptions and insufficiencies in our understanding of the processes and data.

However, we can draw some insights from all of this. What it comes down to is that if you choose the fully sustainable, non-fossil fuel long-term options with only limited social integration, the various estimates Cohen looked at give you a number like 1 billion or less people that the earth can support. That means 5 out of 6 of us have got to go, plus no new babies without an offsetting death.

On the other hand, if you let technology continue to do its thing and perhaps get even better, the picture need not be so bleak. We haven't made all our farmland as productive as it can be. Remember, the Chinese get twice the food value per hectare as we do in the United States. There is also a lot of land that would become arable if we could get water to it. And, of course, in case you need to go back and check the title of this book, there are alternatives to fossil fuels to provide the energy to power that technology.

So given a positive and perhaps optimistic view of technology, we can look to some of the high technology assumption based studies from Cohen's review. From the semi-credible set of these, we can find estimates from 19 to 157 billion as the number of people the earth could support with a rough average coming in about 60 billion. This is a good time to be reminded of the First Law of Information. The middle to lower end of this range, however, might be done without wholesale social reprogramming. Hopefully we would see the improvement in the quality of life in the developing countries as they industrialize and increase their use of energy. Hopefully, also this would lead to a matching of the reduction in fertility rates that has been observed in the developed countries, which in turn would lead to an eventual balancing of the human population.

The point to all this is the near-term future of the human race depends on technology. If we turn away from technology, a very large fraction of the current and future human race will starve. If we just keep on as we are, with our current level of technology and dependence on fossil fuel resources, in the near term it will be a race between fertility decrease and our ability to feed ourselves, with, frankly, disaster the slight odds-on bet. In a slightly longer term, dependence on fossil fuels has got to lead to either social chaos or environmental disaster. There are no other end points to that road. It doesn't go anywhere else.

However, if we accept that it is technology that makes us human, that technology uniquely identifies us as the only animal that can choose its future, we can choose to live, choose to make it a better world for everyone asssssnd all life. This means more and better technology. It means more efficient technology that is kinder to the planet but also allows humans to support large numbers in a high quality of life. That road is not easy and has a number of ways to screw up. However, it is a road that can lead to a happier place, a better place. Two Concluding Thoughts on the Case for Technology Two more points and I will end my defense of technology. First, I want to bring you back from all the historical tour and all the numbers about population to something more directly personal. Let me ask you two questions. What do you do for a living? What did you have for breakfast? Don't see any connection between these questions or of their connection to·the subject of technology? Don't worry, the point will come out shortly. I am just trying to bring the idea of technology back from this grand vision to its impact on your daily life. Just as a wild guess, your answer to the first question was something that, say 500 years ago, didn't even exist. If we look 20,000 years ago, the only job was" get food." Even if you have a really directly socially valuable job like a medical doctor, 20,000 years ago you would have been extraneous. That is, the tribe couldn't afford you. What, no way! A doctor could save lives, surely a tribe would value such a skill. Well, sure, but the tribe could not afford taking one of their members out of the productive /I getting the food" job for 20 years while that individual learned all those doctor skills. If you examine the "what you do for a living" just a bit I think you will see a grand interconnectedness of all things. I personally find it pretty remarkable that we have a society that values nuclear engineers enough that I can make a living at it. Think about it. Somehow what I have done has been of enough value that, through various taxpayer and utility ratepayers, society has given me enough money for food and shelter. The tribe 20,000 years ago wouldn't have put up with me for a day. You see, that is why we as humans are successful, wildly successful in fact. We work together. "Yeah, sure we do," you reply, " read a newspaper lately?" Well, O.K., we fuss and fight a good deal and some of us do some pretty stupid and pretty mean things. But the degree of cooperation is amazing if you just step back a bit. O.K., what did you have for breakfast: orange juice, coffee, toast, maybe some cereal and milk? Where do these things come from? Orange juice came from Florida or California. Coffee came from South America. Bread for the toast came perhaps from Kansas; cereal, from the Mid-West somewhere. The jam on the toast may have come from Oregon, or maybe Chile. Milk is probably the only thing that came from within a hundred miles of your breakfast table. Think about it. There were hundreds of people involved in your breakfast. Farmers, food-processing workers, packaging manufacturers, transportation people, energy producers, wholesale and retail people. Perhaps each one only spent a second on their personal contribution to your personal breakfast, but they touch thousands of other people's breakfasts as well. In turn, you buying the various components of your breakfast supported, in your part, all those people. They in turn, in some way or another, bought whatever you provide to society that allowed you to buy breakfast. Pretty amazing, don't you think? Now when you look at all that, think about what ties all the planetwide interconnection, Yep, you guessed it: technology. Without technology, you get what is available within your personal reach, and what you produce is available only to those who are near enough that you can personally carry it to them on your own two feet. Technology makes our world work. It gives you personally a productive and socially valuable way to make both a living and to provide your contribution to the rest of us.

I want you to stop a minute and really think about that. What would your life be like without technology? Could you do what you currently do? Would anyone be able to use what you do? Would anyone pay you for that? "But I am a school teacher," you say, "of course, they would pay me!" Are you sure? Why do you need schools if there is no technology? All I need is to teach the kid how to farm and how to hunt. Sons and daughters can learn that by working in the fields along with their parents. See what I mean?

Now, I have hopefully reset your brain. Sure, you are still going to be hit with daily "technology is bad" messages. Hopefully, you are a bit more shielded against that din, and you have been given some perspective to balance that message and are prepared to see the true critical value of technology to human existence. The point is that technology is what makes us human. Without it, we are just slightly smarter monkeys.

You may feel that 6 billion of us are too many, and that may very well be. I personally don't know how to make that value decision. Which particular person does one select as being one of the excess ones?

However, the fact is that there are 6 billion of us, and it looks like we are headed for 10 to 12 billion in the next 50 years, Without not only the technology we have, but significantly better and more environmentally friendly technology, the world is going to get ugly as we approach these numbers,

On the other hand, with the right technologies we can not only support those numbers, we can do it while we close the gap between the haves and have-nots. We can make it a better place for everyone. It takes technology and the energy to drive it. Choosing technology is what we have to do to secure the evolutionary selection of us as a successful species, Remember, some pages back in discussing the unlikely evolutionary path to us, I said we are not the chosen, unless. Unless we choose us. This is what I meant. We are totally unique in all of evolutionary history. We humans have the unique ability and opportunity to choose either our evolutionary success or failure. A choice of technology gives us a chance. A choice rejecting technology dooms us as a species and gives the cockroaches the chance in our place. Nature doesn't care what survives, algae seas, dinosaurs, humans, cockroaches, or whatever is successful. If we care, we have to choose correctly. As an aside, let me address a point of philosophy here. If any of this offends your personal theology, I offer this for your consideration. Genesis tells us God gave all the Earth to humanity and charged us with the stewardship thereof. So it is ours to use as well as we can. That insightful social philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli put it this way in 1501:

"What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything Himself."

O.K., you are saying, "I give." You have beaten the socks off me. Technology is good; technology is the identifying human trait and our only hope. But what is this stuff about choosing technology or not? Technology just happens doesn't it? I mean, technology always advances, it always has, so why the big deal? Well, that is my last point on technology. It doesn't always just happen, and people have chosen to turn away from technology. In what might have seemed at the time to be a practical social decision, huge future implications were imposed on many generations to come. It has happened. Let me take you on one more trip through history. I think you will find it enlightening. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explores the question of why the European societies came to be dominate over all the other human cultures on earth. It is a fascinating story and provides a lot of insight into how modern societies evolved. In moving through history, he comes across a very odd discontinuity. He observes that if you came to earth from space in the year 1400 A.D., looked around, and went home to write your research paper on the probable future of the earth, you would clearly conclude the Chinese would run the entire planet shortly. Furthermore, you could conclude they would do it pretty darn well. If those same extraterrestrial researchers were to pop into their time machine and come back to earth in any year from say 1800 to now, they would be totally amazed to see China as a large, but relatively backward, country, struggling to catch up with their European and American peers. To understand the significance of this, you have to go on that research trip with the extraterrestrials and look at China before 1400. In The Lever af Riches, Joel Mokyr dedicates one chapter looking at the comparisons of technology development in China to that in Europe. He lists the following as technology advantages China had in the centuries before 1400: • Extensive water control projects, alternately draining and irrigating land, significantly boosting agricultural production • Sophisticated iron plow introduced sixth century B.C. • Seed drills and other farm tools, introduced around 1000 A.D. • Chemical and organic fertilizers and pesticides used • Blast furnaces and casting of iron as early as 200 B.C., not known in Europe until fourteenth century • Advanced use of power sources in textile production, not seen in Europe until the Industrial Revolution • Invention of compass around 960 A.D. • Major advances in maritime technology (more in a bit on this) • Invention of paper around 100 A.D. (application as toilet paper by 590 A.D.). In the year 1400 AD., China was a world power, perhaps the only true world power. Their technology in agriculture, textiles, metallurgy, and maritime transportation were far in advance of any other country. They had a strong central government and a very healthy economy. Their naval strength provides a real insight into the degree of this dominance. Dr. Diamond sends us to an extremely readable book When China Ruled the Seas-The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-1433 by Dr. Louise Levathes. Dr. Levathes takes us on an inside tour of the Chinese empire during these years. She focuses on the great treasure fleets that China set forth in these early years of the fifteenth century. In her book she has a wonderful graphic that overlays a Chinese vessel of the treasure fleet (-1410) with Columbus's St. Maria (1492). At 85 feet in length and three masts, the St. Maria is dwarfed by the nine-masted, 400-foot-long Chinese vessel. The Chinese sailed fleets of these magnificent vessels throughout oceans of South Asia, to India, and even as far as the eastern coast of Africa. With this naval domination China claimed tribute from Japan, Korea, the nations of the Malay Archipelago, and various states within what is now India. Through both trade and the occasional application of military force, China provided an enlightened and progressive direction for all the nations within this sphere of influence. If two princes in India were fighting over a throne, it was the recognition, or lack thereof, from the Chinese emperor that decided who would rule. Setting a policy of religious inclusion and tolerance, the Chinese engaged the Arabian traders and calmed religious disputes within Asia.With applications of power sources in textiles and advanced metallurgy, the Chinese were in the same position in 1400 as the British were in 1750, ready to launch into the Industrial Revolution. They traded with nations thousands of miles from home with vast, sophisticated shipping fleets. They were poised to extend this trade all the way to Europe and perhaps find the New World by going east instead of the European's going west in search of the rich Chinese markets.

But if we pop into that extraterrestrial time machine and drop into China in 1800, we find a technologically backward nation, humbled by a relatively small force of Europeans with "modern" military technology who wantonly imposed their will on the Chinese. The Chinese have been struggling to catch up with European and American technology ever since and so far not quite being able to do that. The domination of China by the Japanese during World War II shows how complete the turnaround was. In 1400 Japan was but one of many vassal states huddled about the feet of the Imperial Chinese throne. In 1940 the Japanese military crushed the Chinese government while marching on to control much of South Asia.

What could have happened to turn this clear champion of technology, trade, enlightened leadership with all its advantages over both its neighbors and yet-distant foreign competitors into such a weak, backward giant? Mokyr goes through a pretty complete list of potential causes. He looks at diet, climate, and inherent philosophical mindset rejecting each as a credible actor mainly on the bases that all of these conditions were present during the period of technological and economic growth as well as the subsequent stagnation. Therefore, these were not determining factors in the turnabout. In the end he concludes, as does Diamond and Levathes, that it was just politics. Yep, that is right. It was good, old human politics. Dr. Levathes gives us a delightful insider's view of the personalities and politics of Imperial progressions during this critical time period. To make a short story of it, the party that had been in control during the expansionist period supported the great treasure fleets, commerce with foreign nations, use and expansion of technology, and a rather harsh control of the rival party. The rival party was based on Confucian philosophy that preached a rigid, inward-looking, controlled existence. When the Confucian party gained control of the throne, they had their opportunity to push back on the prior ruling party that had oppressed them so harshly for so long. And they did. They wanted nothing to do with foreigners; we have all we need at home, here in China, they said. The fleet was disbanded and the making of ocean-going vessels forbidden. Technology was no longer "encouraged." Again, their position was what we have is good enough, stop with all this new nonsense. Over a period of just a few years, the course of the entire nation was shifted from what would have appeared to be a bright future as the leading power in the world to a large, but relatively insignificant, backwater, rich in history and culture, but all backward looking to a former glory.

That was it. A shift in the political agenda. At the time, to the leaders in control, one that made sense. Focus at home, use what you have now, create order, discipline, control. In 50 years Japanese pirates controlled the coast of China, and the former ruler of the seas from Asia to Africa could not get out of their harbors safely. So, you see if the "technology is bad" message gets incorporated into too many of our daily decisions, we can turn from our bright future into something else. The difference is that this time the stakes are much higher than they were in fifteenth century China. If we, in the developed nations, make the wrong choices, we doom all of humanity by our folly. It is not just that we miss the potential bright future, we miss the chance to avoid the combined human population growth and resources exhaustion disaster coming at us like a runaway train. Technology is the only way to prevent that train wreck. We can hear the siren's call of anti-technology, come back to nature and let the train run us down in a bloody mess, or we can try our best to use technology wisely and win free to make a better life for everyone.

Perm do both

Perm—do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alt—if the alt solves the squo, the perm solves the link

Perm do the plan and then the alt.

Turn –environmental destruction is a disad to the alt

Foster 98

(1998, John Bellamy Foster, a member of the Board of the Monthly Review Foundation, teaches sociology at the University of Oregon and is coeditor of Organization & Environment, Monthly Review, April, findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_/ai_20931195, da 2/10, mat)

[T]he postulation of a planetary ecological crisis, the very idea that the planet is somehow `vulnerable' to human action or that we can actually destroy the earth, repeats in negative form the hubristic claims of those who aspire to planetary domination. The subtext is that the earth is somehow fragile and that we need to become caring managers or caring physicians to nurse it back from sickness into health.... Against this it is crucial to understand that it is materially impossible for us to destroy the planet earth, that the worst we can do is to engage in material transformations of our environment so as to make life less rather than more comfortable for our own species being, while recognizing that what we do also does have ramifications (both positive and negative) for other living species....Politically, the millenarian and apocalyptic proclamation that ecocide is imminent has had a dubious history. It is not a good basis for left politics and it is very vulnerable to the arguments long advanced by [Julian] Simon and now by [Greg] Easterbrook, that conditions of life (as measured, for example, by life expectancy) are better now than they have ever been and that the doomsday scenario of the environmentalists is far-fetched and improbable.1 Aside from the purely rhetorical flourishes—the use of such terms as "millenarian" and "apocalyptic" which because of the sense of religious fatalism associated with them imply something irrational in character (the wrath of God, the second coming) which has little to do with the arguments of most environmentalists—this can be taken as a serious criticism not only of The Vulnerable Planet but of ideas that have common currency in environmental circles. It is noteworthy that this same criticism, of being "apocalyptic," has frequently been leveled at such figures as Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner—indeed at almost all figures who have contributed anything of importance to understanding the modern ecological crisis.2 Naturally, some phrases utilized in the environmental discussion—such as Silent Spring, The Closing Circle, Earth in the Balance, The End of Nature, and The Vulnerable Planet—are metaphorical, and while pointing to real concerns are not to be taken too literally. When it comes to actual argument, though, most analysts attempt to present an accurate portrayal of the real dimensions of the problem. Thus the opening sentences of Chapter One of The Vulnerable Planet convey the exact sense in which the title of that work is to be understood: "Human society has reached a critical threshold in its relation to the environment. The destruction of the planet, in the sense of making it unusable for human purposes, has grown to such an extent that it now threatens the continuation of much of nature, as well as the survival and development of society itself." It might have been added that the survival of the human species was also in doubt as a result of these very same processes.