Aff Enviro Justice

Northwestern 08 Zarefsky Juniors
Energy Equality Patrick, Max, John, and Dan
Energy Equality
Energy Equality.......................................................................................................................... .................1

1AC (1/14).............................................................................................................................................. .....6
1AC (2/14).............................................................................................................................................. .....7
1AC (3/14).............................................................................................................................................. .....8
1AC (4/14).............................................................................................................................................. .....9
1AC (5/14)........................................................................................................................................... ......10
1AC (6/14)....................................................................................................................................... ..........11
1AC (7/14)........................................................................................................................................... ......12
1AC (8/14)........................................................................................................................................... ......13
1AC (9/14)........................................................................................................................................... ......14
1AC (10/14)........................................................................................................................................ .......15
1AC (11/14).................................................................................................................................... ...........16
1AC (12/14)........................................................................................................................................ .......17
1AC (13/14)........................................................................................................................................ .......18
1AC (14/14)........................................................................................................................................ .......19
Case Extensions............................................................................................................................... ..........20
Inherency Extension + Impact............................................................................................... ....................21
Inherency Ext/A2: Renewables Now........................................................................................... ..............25
Inherency Extension........................................................................................................... .......................26
Inherency Extension - Environment.......................................................................................................... .28
Inherency Extension – Equality................................................................................................. ................30
Inherency Extension - Inequality.............................................................................................. .................31
Inherency Extension – North/South Divide......................................................................... ......................33
1 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension – Exploitation.............................................................................................. .............34
Oil Addiction Adv: Timeframe Ext................................................................................................ ............35
Oil Addiction Bad: Environment........................................................................................ .......................36
Oil Addiction Bad: Laundry List..................................................................................... ..........................37
Oil Addiction Bad: Nigeria Proves................................................................................... .........................38
Oil Addiction Bad: Mexico Proves.......................................................................................... ..................39
Oil Addiction Bad: Mexico Proves.......................................................................................... ..................40
Oil Addiction Bad: Environment........................................................................................ .......................41
Oil Addiction Bad – Generic..................................................................................................................... .42
Oil Addiction Bad – Militarism........................................................................................ .........................43
Oil Addiction Bad – Environment.................................................................................. ...........................44
Oil Addiction Bad – Exploitation............................................................................................................. ..45
Culture Advantage Ext......................................................................................................................... ......46
Eco-Imperialism Advantage Ext............................................................................................... .................47
Eco-Imperialism Advantage Ext............................................................................................... .................48
Solvency Ext – Subsidy Switch Key...................................................................................................... ....49
Solvency Ext – Global Cooperation....................................................................................................... ....50
Solvency Ext – Screwing Big Oil Key.................................................................................................. .....51
Solvency Ext – Subsidies...................................................................................................................... .....52
Solvency Ext – Alt Energy.................................................................................................................... .....53
Solvency Ext – Alt Energy Solves Colonialism........................................................................... ..............54
Solvency Ext – Generic....................................................................................................... ......................55
2AC K Answers............................................................................................................................ .............56
2AC Non-Policy K Alts............................................................................................................. ................57
2AC Capitalism K.......................................................................................................... ...........................58
2AC Digger K......................................................................................................................................... ...59
2AC Digger K......................................................................................................................................... ...60
2AC Global Local K....................................................................................................................... ...........61
2AC Global Local K....................................................................................................................... ...........62
2AC Anthropocentrism K........................................................................................................ ..................63
2AC Sustainability K – A2: Just a word........................................................................... .........................64
2AC Sustainability K...................................................................................................................... ...........65
2AC North/South K................................................................................................................... ................66

2AC CP Answers..................................................................................................................... ..................69
2AC Non-US CP (1/3).................................................................................................................. .............70
2AC Non-US CP (2/3).................................................................................................................. .............71
2AC Non-US CP (3/3).................................................................................................................. .............72
2AC Multi-Actor CP................................................................................................................................. .73
2AC Multi-Actor CP................................................................................................................................. .74
2AC Tradeable Permits CP......................................................................................................... ...............75
2AC Cap and Trade CP........................................................................................................................... ...81
2AC States CP (1/2).............................................................................................................................. .....82
2AC States CP (2/2).............................................................................................................................. .....83
2AC Disadvantage Answers............................................................................................ ..........................84
2AC Econ DA – Case T/ DA.................................................................................................. ...................85
2AC Econ DA – Case T/ DA................................................................................................ ....................86
2AC Econ DA – No Turns Case................................................................................................................ .87
2AC Politics/Econ DA......................................................................................................................... ......88
2AC Politics/Econ DA......................................................................................................................... ......89
2AC Federalism DA.............................................................................................................. ....................90
2AC Energy Prices DA (1/2)............................................................................................ .........................91
2AC Energy Prices DA (2/2)............................................................................................ .........................92
2AC Utilitarianism Answers......................................................................................................... .............93
Util Bad – Frontline (1/7).................................................................................................. ........................94

Util Bad – Frontline (7/7)............................................................................................... .........................100
2AC Util/Growth Good................................................................................................. ..........................101
2AC Responsibility Extension.................................................................................................... .............102
2AC Responsibility Extensions..................................................................................... ..........................103
2AC Responsibility Extension.................................................................................................... .............105
2AC Extra-T.......................................................................................................................... ..................109
2AC Extra-T...................................................................................................................... ......................110
Martin.............................................................................................................................. ........................111
Cuomo.............................................................................................................................. .......................112
Chaloupka..................................................................................................................................... ...........113
Chaloupka..................................................................................................................................... ...........114
Chaloupka..................................................................................................................................... ...........115
Chaloupka..................................................................................................................................... ...........117
Negative Arguments............................................................................................................................... ..119
North/South K.......................................................................................................................................... 120
North/South K.......................................................................................................................................... 121
Responsibility Answers........................................................................................................................... .122
Alternate Causality – Corruption........................................................................................... ..................123
Solvency Answers................................................................................................................................. ...124
No Solvency.................................................................................................................... ........................128
No Solvency.................................................................................................................... ........................129
No Solvency.................................................................................................................... ........................130
Efficiency K – Link........................................................................................................... ......................132
No Solvency/Int. Actor CP............................................................................................. .........................133
Colonialism Good........................................................................................................................... .........135
Dirk Moses 08, (Senior Lecturer Department of History, University of Sydney), Theoretical Paper:
Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies........................................................ ........................135


1AC (1/14)
Contention One: ECONOMIES OF DESTRUCTION
THE U.S. IS ENGAGING IN ENVIRONMENTALISM LITE- CONSERVATION WITHOUT

DECREASED CONSUMPTION, AND CARBON CUTS WITHOUT CHANGING ENERGY
PRACTICES – FREQUENT USE OF THE TERMS OF “SUSTAINABILITY” WITHOUT ANY
MEANINGFUL ACTION HAD SANITIZED THE BLATANT REFUSAL TO END OUR
FIDELITY TO THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY, AND RAMPANT DESTRUCTION OF THE
PERIPHERY IN THE SEARCH OF FOSSIL FUELS AND RAPID PLANETARY DESTRUCTION
Dipak Chatterjee 08, EzineArticles.com Expert Author and ambassador of India to the EU,
Environmental Sustainability - A Mirage?
Bottom line: the word “Sustainability” has been continuously used so freely. If it is a sustained effort to
cure today for a better tomorrow, what have we done for the immediate present? Every result of a
meeting, every conclusion of a summit, has been filled with redundant usage of vague terminologies as
“efforts will be taken”, “control will be exercised”, “reduction in population growth” etc. It has been
interspersed with blame games. But never has any one body pointedly answered the specific question
of “How”? It is about time, that we did this, unless everyone of us living today, every government in
power, and every responsible organization wish to be accountable for the total extinction of the human
species on earth

1AC (2/14)
THIS IS MOST OBVIOUS IN THE KYOTO DEBATES- TOUTED AS THE GLOBAL ENERGY
MESSIAH IT IS IN ACTUALITY AN EXCUSE TO CONTINUE CONSUMING FOSSIL FUELS
AT A ‘SUSTAINABLE’ RATE WITHOUT FUNDAMENTALLY REORGANIZING THE
ENERGY ECONOMY- MARKET RATIONALITY WON OUT OVER SUSTAINABILITY
LARRY LOHMANN, works with the Corner House, a small research and solidarity organisation in the
UK, During the 1980s he lived and worked in Thailand, most of the time with non-governmental
organisations., ‘5 ( Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and
Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation”, Science as Culture
Vol. 14, No. 3, 203–235, September 2005)
In the early 1990s, parties to the UNFCCC had dozens of approaches to choose from for reducing flows
of fossil carbon into the above-ground dump. One was to begin phasing out national and international
subsidies and military backing for fossil fuel extraction, while subsidizing energy conservation and non-
carbon energy and supporting local movements against fossil fuel extraction, fossil-dependent industries,
airport expansion and so forth. Another was to develop or revive low- or non-carbon technologies on a
regional basis, reversing trends of declining research and development into non-nuclear, non-carbon
energy alternatives, with an eye ultimately to gaining competitive advantage over remain- ing heavily
fossil-dependent corporate structures. Still another was to institute dump-use taxes, possibly combined
with reparations to be paid by past over-users to under-users. A further option was to assign a restricted
amount of nontradable property in the global carbon dump to each country, instituting penalties for dump
theft. A fifth approach was to auction space in the global carbon dump to private owners. A sixth was to
create a trust to sell rights in the dump to polluters and distribute revenue to communities or individuals.
And so on The Kyoto Protocol’s framers passed over these possibilities and others. Instead they to
translate public concern about climate change into greenhouse gas emissions permit and credit prices.
The earth’s carbon dump would gradually be made economically scarce through limits on its use imposed
by states. A market would be built for the new resource by creating and distributing tradable legal rights
to it. Bargaining would then generate a price that would reflect the value society placed on carbon dump
use and ‘denote the financial reward paid to reduce ... emissions’. Emitters who found ways of using the
dump more efficiently could profit by selling their unused rights in it to more backward producers.
Emitters could also develop new dumps. The market would ‘help society find and move along the least-
cost pollution-reduction supply curve’ (Sandor et al., 2002, p. 57). As the former Executive Secretary of
the UNFCCC has recently noted, this approach was ‘made in the USA’ (Zammit Cutajar, 2004). Pressure
from the Clinton government set in motion a politics which eventually prevailed over European and
Southern objections to carbon dump trading (Grubb et al., 1999). Also significant was support from some
Northern corporations for a scheme that, unlike taxation and auctioning, distributed free property rights in
a hitherto ‘open access’ global dump to Northern countries, roughly in proportion to how much they were
already (over)using it. Traders and bankers hoped to set up new carbon exchanges in London, Chicago,
Sydney, Amsterdam, Leipzig and elsewhere. Environmental groups, too, threw in their lot with the
tradable permits approach on the theory that it was the only way to get a climate treaty approved
(Vedantam, 2005). By the time the second George Bush pulled out of Kyoto in 2001 (much to the
consternation of US companies hoping to profit from the carbon trade, such as Enron), the approach had
become internationally entrenched even though much of its original political raison d’etre had
vanished. Its environmentalist backers were left in the odd position of having to champion an agreement

1AC (3/14)
(Lohmann 05 continued)
written largely by the US for US purposes on the basis of US experience and US economic thinking, but
which no longer had US support. But the anomaly was quickly forgotten. Journalists and
environmentalists alike soon came to treat any criticism of the treaty not as directed against US-style ‘free
market’ environmentalism but, ironically, as playing into the hands of US oil interests and as endorsing a
do-nothing position. Behind the US push for a tradable permits framework for Kyoto lay a complicated
political and intellectual history—now also mostly lost to environmentalist consciousness. One aspect of
this history was a controversial tradition in economics theorized in the mid-twentieth century work of
Ronald Coase (1960, 1988). Coase believed that it was an anachronism, and irrational, to treat pollution
as an externality that could only be internalized through regulation or taxation, or as something for which
one could be liable for damages or which had to be reduced whatever the cost. To do so, he thought,
would be to fail to ‘optimize’ pollution so that it maximized overall social welfare. Like many
economists, Coase tended to identify this welfare with ‘total product’—a foreshortened and unstable
object synthesized through commensurating and reconceptualizing goods and harms. In this context, the
rational approach to pollution was to integrate it into a market calculus by creating rights to pollute
as tradable ‘factors of production’. In a market without transaction costs and with perfect information,
and inhabited by properly calculating, maximizing economic agents, these rights would automatically be
bargained into the hands of those who could produce the most wealth from them, resulting in the greatest
good for the greatest number. But since, as Coase stressed, such a market is only a figment of the
imagination, in reality the state and the courts would have to lend a hand not only by creating these rights
but also by pushing them in the direction of those who could make the most from them. In theory, Coase
conceded, optimization of pollution could also be achieved through a tax that penalized losses to ‘total
product’. But he rejected such a tax as being impossible to calculate. Coase’s theory was modified by
tradable environmental permit theorists (Dales, 1968; HahnandStavins,1995; Barnes,2001)and enriched
by US experience with markets in allowances for the emission of sulphur dioxide and other pollutants
(Ellerman et al., 2000, 2003). Like many other economic theories, the model echoed the Lockean claim
that rights to property should go to those who could add the most exchange value to it, ‘improve’ it, or
produce the most from it in commerce—a justification used beginning in the early seventeenth century for
seizing land both from conquered peoples in the English colonies and from commoners in England itself
(Wood, 2002). This view of property survives, in coded form, in the widespread but questionable beliefs
that tradable permit systems such as Kyoto’s are a ‘lowercost’, ‘more efficient’, ‘more innovation-
producing’ or ‘more growth-promoting’ alternative to other forms of regulation or coordination (Cole,
2002; Driesen, 2003). The notion that progress in climate mitigation can be measured by calculating
carbon efficiency per unit of Gross DomesticProduct—commensurating climate stability with an
abstract, aggregated economic good—belongs to the same family of ideas

1AC (4/14)
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION LOOMS AND WE HAVE DONE NOTHING. IF WE DO
NOT ACT NOW IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN THAT THE PLANET AS WE KNOW IT WILL BE
DESTROYED. THE WORLD IS ON ITS WAY TO “GLOBAL GROUND ZERO”
Ross Gelbspan 07, American writer and activist, triple crisis conference (of the international
forum on globalization)
In short, big coal and big oil have essentially privatized truth. They have demonized the U.S.
in the eyes of the rest of the world. And given the impacts of climate change in poor countries, they are
making a mockery of our basic instincts of human solidarity.
The implications of continued inaction are frightening. A growing body of evidence indicates
we have already entered into an era of runaway climate change. Given the recklessness of the fossil fuel
lobby, it seems only a matter of time before we go over the cliff, enter a state of collective free-fall
and crash-land at global ground zero.

1AC (5/14)
THE HEGEMONY ON TRUTH HELD BY BIG OIL AND COAL MAKES RECURRING
NATURAL DISASTERS LIKE HURRICANE KATRINA, CROP DESTRUCTION, AND
CONFLICT INEVITABLE- ONLY A SUSTAINED COMMITMENT TO ALTERNATIVE
ENERGY WILL CONFRONT THE EFFECTS OF HYPER AFFLUENCE
Today, a mere 19 years later, scientists are telling us that we are approaching -- or are already at --
a point of no return in terms of staving off climate chaos. That is an incredibly short period of time --
the blink of an eye historically speaking -- for such enormous changes in these massive planetary
systems. The second point -- which presents one of the most difficult aspects of the challenge -- has to do
with lagtimes and feedbacks. Carbon dioxide stays up in the atmosphere for about 100 years. So many of
the impacts we are already seeing are probably the result of emissions we put up in the 1970s and 1980s
-- just as China and India were beginning to ramp up their surge of coal-fired industrialization. This
makes it virtually inevitable that we will see more events of the magnitude of Katrina and the
European heat wave of 2003. The final point involves the extreme sensitivity of the Earth's systems to just
a tiny bit of warming. As you know, the glaciers are melting, the deep oceans are heating, violent weather
is increasing, the timing of the seasons is changing and all over the world plants, birds, insects, fish and
animals are migrating toward the poles in search of stable temperatures. And all that has resulted from
one degree of warming. And for context we are looking forward to a century of four to 10 degrees more
heat. On the military front, eleven admirals and generals recently declared climate change a major threat
to our national security as disruptions trigger more conflict in countries whose crops are destroyed by
weather extremes, whose land is going under to rising sea levels and whose borders are overrun by
environmental refugees. What we need is a rapid worldwide switch to non-carbon energy wind, solar,
tidal and wave power and, ultimately, hydrogen fuels. And we need it yesterday. Contrary to the
propaganda of big coal and big oil, that does not mean we will all have to sit in the dark and ride bicycles.
Those sources can give us all the energy we need in ways that could make the human enterprise far more
compatible with the requirements of a stable species home -- even as it liberates us from the excesses of
our own self-destructive hyperaffluence.

1AC (6/14)
Contention Two: ECO-IMPERIALISM
THE REFUSAL TO SHIFT TO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY ISNT JUST A BUREAUCRATIC

QUESTION- IT ENABLES AN ECONOMY FOUNDED ON ON-GOING GENOCIDE
CREATING A GLOBAL COLONY OF DESTRUCTION
Terry Tamminen 06, Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy
Program at the New America Foundation, Lives Per a Gallon pg 1.
Great beasts, fantastically shaped, armored skin. Lumbering giants that ceaselessly roam the land
to plunder every natural resource within their grasp, devouring the weak, the slow. Their breath is hot,
cloying, steeped in deliberate destruction and death.
Jurassic Park? A lost colony of tyrannosaurs left over from 65 million years ago? No, it's any
modern U.S. city and the inexorable daily stampede of steel machines on rivers of asphalt, belching toxic
fumes that foul the lives of every living being, a beast that kills as surely as the senseless, serrated teeth of
a T. rex.
Yet According to a growing body of evidence, petroleum-powered transportation is about to fade to black.
We have profited much from the Oil Age, but for years have chosen to ignore its limitations and its true
cost. Like an aging actor, the Oil Age will yield to players of greater gifts who even now wait in the wings
to make welcome entrances, if we are smart enough to give the cue.

1AC (7/14)
RESOURCE INEQUITIES ARE AT THE ROOT OF CHRONIC REGIONAL AND
INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT, AND SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE AGAINST HUNDREDS OF
MILLIONS OF DISPOSSESSED PEOPLES- THE UNITED STATES HAS AN ETHICAL
OBLIGATION COMMIT TO DECREASED ENERGY CONSUMPTION- INACTION IS AN ACT
OF AGGRESSION**
William Rees and Laura Westra, Professor at the University of British Columbia and Professor Emerita
(Philosophy) University of Windsor, 2003
(“When Consumption does Violence: Can there be Sustainability and Environmental Justice in a
Resource-limited World?” From Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, ed. Julian
Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, Bob Evans, pp 115-117)
Early in July 2000 a mountain of rubbish, swollen and lubricated by recent heavy rains, collapsed in Payatas (Manila), the Philippines. The
resultant avalanche of slimy debris engulfed many adjacent shacks and shanties killing outright 218 of the desperate people who lived in and on
the refuse. An equivalent number were listed as missing under the garbage. A horrified world watched on television as dozens of people stumbled
around and choked on sludge that threatened to bury them. For many viewers who had never heard the term ‘environmental injustice’, the
concept would never be a mere metaphor or intellectual wordplay. Real human beings who had been reduced to scavenging in garbage, were
ultimately killed by it. This local example of eco-injustice is a graphic symbol of the environmental violence that strikes hardest against those
whom Vandana Shive terms the ‘absolutely poor’ (Shiva, 1989). These most vulnerable of the human family already suffer the worst effects of
degraded landscapes and polluted air, water and crops, and are also the most exposed to the ravages of climate change and the potential spread of
(particularly tropical) disease. Ten thousand people died when hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years, slammed into Central
America in 1998. Worldwide, more than 120,000 people were killed in 1998-99 (including 50,000 when a supercyclone struck Orissa, in India)
and millions more lost their homes (Abramovitz, 2001). According to the International Red Cross World Disasters Report, singular events in
1998, such as Hurricane Mitch and the El Nino weather phenomenon, plus declining soil fertility and deforestation, killed thousands and drove a
record 25 million people from the countryside into crowded, under-serviced shanty towns around the developing world’s fast-growing cities
(IRC, 1999). This represents 58 percent of the world’s refugees. For the first time, people fleeing violent weather events and ecological decay
outnumbered political refugees. While ‘the 1990s set a new record for disasters worldwide’ (Abramovitz, 2001, p123), it is unlikely that the world
has yet seen the worst. The IRC report predicts that developing countries in particular will continue to be hit by super-disasters driven by human-
induced atmospheric and climatic change, ecological degradation, and rising population pressures. Significantly, it is becoming increasingly
difficult to distinguish environmental from sociopolitical refugees. Resource scarcity and the degradation of ecosystems can
exacerbate the chronic inequality among social groups, thus heightening the threat of both civic strife
and international conflict. Various authors have documented the violent tensions that emerge from ecological decay as desperate
people compete for shrinking land and resource supplies, particularly in developing countries (Gurr, 1985, Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994, Homer-
Dixon et al, 1993, Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998). We have argued, that given the dominant values of ‘Western’ industrial society and the structure
of the prevailing economic development model, and the incidence and intensity of both ecological and social violence
against the defenseless are likely to increase, possible dramatically. With the expansions of humanity’s
ecological footprint further beyond carrying capacity, we can expect global ecological change to
accelerate. Hundreds of millions of additional desperately impoverished people will be forced from
the land only to be exposed to the appalling living conditions of the barrios and favelas surrounding
many cities in the developing world in coming decades. Thus, even as things stand, the social and
ecological vulnerability that comes with dismal economic prospects virtually guarantees that gross
ecological injustice will be a defining characteristic of world development in the 21st century. The
situation will deteriorate further if fallout from the events of 11 September leads to extended war or other
manifestations of geopolitical chaos. We have also made the case that material consumption, particularly
consumption be the economically privileged, is the ‘forcing mechanism’ for global ecological change.
Incipient resource scarcities represented by everything from the collapse of fish stocks, through the decline of water tables, to the depletion of
readily accessible petroleum reserves can be traced mainly to the overwhelming demand of Northern consumers. Similarly, ‘industrial countries
are responsible for more than 90 per cent of the 350 million metric tons of hazardous waste produced globally each year’ (Sachs, 1995, pp36-37).
Wealthy cities are, of course, the principal loci of both production and consumption. As McGranahan et al (1996, p109) put it, the largest

contributors to global environmental problems are the affluent, ‘living preponderantly in the urban areas of the North’. Consumption in developed
world cities alone accounts for 65 per cent of the world’s resource use and waste production (Rees, 1999). These findings are
ethically and morally charged. In effect, they mean that at the limits of biophysical carrying capacity,
routine acts of non-essential consumption ultimately translate into acts of violent harm against the
1AC (8/14)
(Rees and Westra 03 continued)
poor and racial minorities. There is, of course, no intent to hard and wealthy consumers who are
ignorant of the distant systemic consequences of their material habits might be excused for their seeming
moral inertia. But once we raise to collective consciousness the link between consumption/pollution and
eco-violence, society has an obligation to view such violence in the appropriate light. Not acting to
reduce or prevent eco-injustice would convert erstwhile blameless consumer choices into acts of
aggression. In this light we need to move beyond analyzing what might constitute ‘just garbage’ (Wenz, 1995) on a case by case basis; we
must instead acknowledge that unnecessary waste produced in affluence countries has the capacity, directly or indirectly, to harm the innocent.
Careless consumption and the negligent disposal of the resultant garbage is fundamentally unjust and
increasingly tends to blur the fine line between the trash and the trashed (Mills, 2000). In short, global
society has a moral imperative ‘… to devise systems which ensure that those responsible for making
environmental demands assume the main responsibility for the consequences of their activity – they should
not expect other people, other species and other places to absorb the associated costs of environmental and social breakdown’ (Haughton, 1999,
p65). Over-consuming nations (and individual over-consumers) must come to terms with the fact that the
ancient concept of gluttony-as-deadly-sin has acquired new modern meaning.

1AC (9/14)
Contention Three- CULTURE
OUR ADDICTION TO OIL IS THREATENING THE EXISTENCE OF INDIGENOUS ALASKAN

CULTURES. RENEWABLE ENERGY IMPLIMENTATION IS NECESSARY TO CREATE THE
CAPACITY FOR CULTURAL SOVEREIGNITY
Becky Warren, “Alaska’s Villages Face a Critical Energy Transition”, Life More Natural is an online
collection of environmental articles by scholars and environmental analysts,
http://lifemorenatural.com/?p=199, January 25th 2008
Fairbanks, Alaska- Climate and rapid social change collectively pose numerous challenges for the
viability of Alaska’s rural indigenous communities. Central amongst these challenges is the continued
provision of heat and electricity in an environment of rising oil prices and uncertain global energy
security. Transportation complications generated by increasing coastal storms and melting permafrost
create further challenges for communities that depend upon oil for their heat and electricity needs. Many
rural Alaskan communities are presently confronting the prospect that they will not survive if any one of
the above factors diminishes their capacity to import oil and gas. This level of vulnerability amounts to a
crisis, which must be integrated into community and cross-level institutional dialogue at once. (See also:
Sustainable Energy, Huslia Style) The United Nations Development Program reports that nearly two billion people do not have access to electricity, a figure which has
barely changed in the last twenty years. For many who have electricity, such as those in Alaska’s rural villages, the price of fuel used for electricity, heat and
transportation, coupled with the high price paid for dependency on distant markets, is increasingly unbearable. The value of the natural environment lost to destructive
mining, drilling, and polluting, largely due to fossil fuel extraction and combustion, is incalculable. As developing countries and international organizations seek to
expand modern energy services in efforts to compete in industrialized markets and to alleviate poverty, the integration of clean energy technologies, policy, and
education is critical for the reduction of human caused greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. My decision to pursue graduate work at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks stems from my commitment to the integration of scientific research, public policy, and renewable energy technologies in the reduction of greenhouse
gas emissions and the sustainable management of social-ecological systems. I believe that current systems of energy provision and consumption are at the root of
global crises such as climate change, environmental degradation, war over scarce resources, and high levels of mortality and suffering in areas that do not yet have
access to electricity. My lifelong focus on sustainability started in earnest at Santa Clara University and further as a student researcher in Kenya. I left SCU for a
semester to study International Environment and Development at American University in Washington, DC. From there, I traveled to Kenya for a three-week field
study, which folded into a five-month self-designed study of environment and development projects at multiple levels within the Kenyan socio-political hierarchy.
Working with scientists in the Wetlands Programme at the Centre for Biodiversity, National Museums of Kenya, I studied bird habitat in overgrazed lake systems and
met with community groups throughout rural Kenya to learn about issues of sustainability. More recently, I have served on the board of the Denali Citizens Council in
Alaska, and I have completed coursework in solar panel design and installation. I intend to return to Kenya and elsewhere with the knowledge that I will gain in my
academic investigation and my work with Alaskan villages, prepared to assist in the implementation of sustainable, renewable energy systems. At UAF, I am creating
a course of study in energy policy and development that will allow me to examine the current state of energy use and security in rural Alaska villages. It’s my hope
that this work will assist these communities as they move to successfully transition to sustainable, independent power generation. To start, I will assess the current
state of energy in rural villages by interviewing stakeholders at local, regional, state, and federal levels. The primary questions I will be asking in this assessment are:
What are the energy concerns and who is enumerating them? Who is responding to these concerns, and how are they responding? Are there energy vulnerabilities that
have not yet been identified? What solutions, both private and institutional, have been considered or implemented, and how promising or effective are these
responses? What are the challenges that remain for rural Alaska villages in reducing their energy vulnerability and increasing their resilience? I will then conduct an
examination of the institutional frameworks available to rural Alaska communities that seek alternatives to their increasingly expensive and dependent power
production methods. Finally, I will look at the success and relevance of a number of alternative energy projects that are either available to or already implemented in
rural Alaska communities. Renewable energy projects are expensive and complex, requiring participation and financial commitments from individuals and
renewable energy technologies along with well-developed, cross-scale
governments alike. My hypothesis in this study is that
frameworks for their installation and continued operation, provide the opportunity for rural Alaska
communities to establish energy independence, thereby increasing their resilience in a rapidly changing
world. I also believe that if rural Alaska villages are going to survive the challenges they face, everyone,
from individual community members to the highest levels of government, must work together to bring
about change.

1AC (10/14)
THE PRESERVATION OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES ARE CRUCIAL TO OUR COLLECTIVE
EXISTENCE BECAUSE THEY OFFER DIVERSITY AND INSIGHT THAT CAN’T BE FOUND
WITHIN OUR CURRENT VIOLENT MODES OF THOUGHT.
Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Professor at the United Nations University, 1990, The Ethnic Question, pg. 73
The struggle for the preservation of the collective rights of culturally distinct peoples has further
implications as well. The cultural diversity of the world’s peoples is a universal resource for all
humankind. The diversity of the world’s cultural pool is like the diversity of the world’s biological gene
pool. A culture that disappears due to ethnocide or cultural genocide represents a loss for all humankind.
At a time when the classic development models of the post-war era have failed to solve the major
problems of mankind (poverty, unemployment, the environment, etc.), people are again looking at so-
called traditional cultures for at least some of the answers. This is very clear, for example, as regards
agricultural and food production, traditional medicine, environmental management in rural areas,
construction techniques, social solidarity in times of crisis, etc. The world’s diverse cultures have much to
offer our imperiled planet. Thus the defence of the collective rights of ethnic groups and indigenous
peoples cannot be separated from the collective human rights of all human beings.

1AC (11/14)
PLAN: The United States federal government should shift fossil fuel subsidies to sustainable
renewable energy in the United States.

1AC (12/14)
Contention Four: SUSTAINABLE ACCOUNTABILITY
We must confront ecological threats head on. The US is the single most important nation to take the
first step towards alternative energy, once we act others will follow.
Harris 2K3
{Paul, professor of international and environmental studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, “Fairness,
Responsibility and Climate Change”, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 17, EbscoHost, dan}
No country, however, bears more responsibility than the United States. With about one-twentieth of the
world's population, the United States produces about one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases. Much
of that comes from arguably frivolous and certainly nonessential activities, whereas most of the emissions
of the world's poor are due to activities necessary for survival or achieving basic living standards. The
United States therefore has a heavy responsibility to act on this problem, and insofar as it fails to do
so other industrialized countries-least of all developing countries-are much less likely to take necessary
actions.4 Yet after learning of the reality of global warming, the United States and other developed
countries have done almost nothing to prevent it, and they are doing very little to mitigate its future
effects on those who will be most harmed and are least responsible-the world's poor. They are also in only
the earliest stages of helping the world adapt to inevitable climatic changes.

1AC (13/14)
IN ORDER TO INCENTIVIZE SUSTAINABLE RENEWABLE ENERGY IT IS NECESSARY TO
SHIFT FEDERAL SUBSIDIES FROM FOSSIL FUEL- ENSURES A UNIFORM TRANSITION
TO CLEAN ENERGY
Ross Gelbspan, Former Reporter for the Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Climate Change
author, 2007
(June 18, 2007. “To Paths for the Planet,”

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=6487&method=full, accessed
7/20/08)
BP Solar created the country's largest fully integrated solar power plant in Maryland and recently the
company committed an additional $70 million to expand the facility. Two years ago the chairman of
Shell, Ron Oxburgh, shocked the industry when he acknowledged that the threat of climate change makes
him "really very worried for the planet." In early March 2007, both Shell and BP announced major
investments in wind energy in the United States.
But privately many oil company chiefs say they are torn between the realities of an increasingly turbulent
climate and the competitive dynamics of their own industry. In background discussions with me several
years ago, the top executives of six major oil companies all acknowledged the dangers of climate change.
None denied the kind of massive and abrupt changes we may soon be encountering (although few were
willing to acknowledge the likelihood of what scientists label a "worst-case scenario").
To a person, each of these top oil executives said essentially the same thing. They are aware of the
problem, but they are unable to act unilaterally. One executive summed it up by saying: "If I put lots of
money into solar, my company will be undercut by ExxonMobil. My company will lose market share. Its
stock price will drop. And I'll be out of a job." (Because all these conversations were conducted on an off-
the-record basis, the executives insisted on anonymity both for themselves and their companies.)
The only way out of this impasse, according to these executives, was summed up by one oil company
CEO: "We need the governments of the world to regulate us so we can all make the transition [to clean
energy] in lockstep. If we are all regulated to make these changes simultaneously, we can do it without
any one company losing market share to the competition."
Predictably, these executives refused to go on the record in their support for binding rules. As one
executive winked at the end of an interview, "If you ask me to go public on the need for government
regulation, I'll swear this conversation never happened and that I never saw you before in my life." One
exception, Lord Browne, the CEO of BP, candidly admitted in his recent piece in Foreign Affairs: "The
business sector cannot succeed in isolation. Harnessing business potential requires fair and credible
incentives to drive the process of innovation and change. In responding to global warming, that role must
fall to the government."

1AC (14/14)
MEANINGFULLY SUPPORTING A SUSTAINABLE RENEWABLE ENERGY ECONOMY IS
NECESSARY TO CONFRONT THE EQUITY GAP BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND
THE GLOBAL SOUTH- THE PLAN’S DEMAND CREATES A MOMENT OF GLOBAL
SOLIDARITY
I do believe a plan of this type -- regardless of the details -- would create millions of jobs,
especially in developing countries. It could begin to turn impoverished and dependent countries into
trading partners. It could begin to reverse the obscene and widening gap between the world's
wealthy and poor nations. And it would jump the renewable energy industry into being a central,
driving engine of growth of the global economy. Ultimately, it could bring the people of the world
together around a common global project that could transcend traditional alliances and antagonisms --
even in today's profoundly fractured, degraded and combative world. Stepping back to a wider-angle
view: The economy -- like it or not -- is becoming truly globalized. The globalization of
communications now makes it possible for any person to communicate with anyone else around the
world. That is a truly breathtaking development. And since it is no respecter of national boundaries, the
global climate makes us one. If I could envision one positive outcome from our current situation, it would
be that the coming traumas will catalyze a transformation of our most basic values. We hear much about
Islamic and other foreign fundamentalisms. But there is virtually no self-awareness that we, in the U.S.,
are blindered by our own free-market fundamentalism with its magical belief in the divine power of
markets. Clearly any solution to the climate crisis must be global. It is equally clear that it requires a
reversal or our current relationship to this de-facto corporate state which has reduced our human roles to
little more than agents for the movement of money. We need to take political control of these engines
of production by revoking the constitutional fiction of corporate personhood and enacting a citizen-
mandated set of regulations that directs corporate productivity into the service of a more
sustainable, global and, most emphatically, more equitable world.

Case Extensions

Inherency Extension + Impact
Bush has shelved issues of sustainable energy to instead pursue policies that encourage destructive
consumption and the expansion of technocapitalism, sacrificing the well-being of the poor in the
global south.
Richard Kahn, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North
Dakota, January 2003
(Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the Age of Ecological Calamity.
Freire Online Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1.)
II. The Present Moment as Such: Planetary Environmental Crisis, Mass Oppression and the Dizzy Heights
of Global Capitalism
In his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel begins by documenting the terrible legacy of human
resource degradation (and its consequence for humanity) that spans the thirty-odd years that have now
elapsed since the first Earth Day and the release of the Club of Rome's benchmark economic treatise The
Limits to Growth.
Echoing the findings of eminent environmental and ecological groups and personages such as The Union
of Concerned Scientists, Edward O. Wilson, and Peter Raven, the picture that emerges from Kovel's work
is that of an institutionalized, transnational, phase-changing neo-liberalism that is loosed as a cancer upon
the Earth, a form of “endless growth” political economy that is literally overproducing and consuming the
planet to death in the attempt to stave off its own demise. [5] Wholly without precedent, human
population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by 2.5 billion people. Similarly, markets
have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve themselves. The use
and extraction of “fossil fuel” resources like oil, coal, and natural gas – the non-renewable energy
stockpiles -- followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of
warnings about the consequences inherent in their over-use and extraction, and this has led to a
corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming.
Likewise, tree consumption for paper products doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of
the planet's forests disappearing, while in the oceans, global fishing also doubled. Further, since the end of
the 1960's, half of the planet's wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly
half of the Earth's soils have been agriculturally degraded. [6]
All these trends are increasing and most are accelerating. [7] Even during what amounts to a current
economic downturn, markets and development continue to flow and evolve, the globalization of
technocapital fueling yet another vast reconstruction and hegemonic reintegration of the myriad planetary


(Kahn 03 continued)
political, economic, and socio-cultural forces into a futuristic “network society.” [8] Over the last thirty
years then, humanity has exploded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one which has led to an
exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology,
but which has also had devastating effects upon the planetary eco-system. Perhaps most telling has been
the parallel tendency over this time period towards mass extinction for the great diversity of species
deemed non-human, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions existing
within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to coin this age of
technocapitalism as the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures in the last thirty
years such as the planet had not seen during the previous sixty-five million. [9]
But, lest we make the mistake of thinking that our present globalization crisis unfolds along the simple
lines of human flourishing and resource wasting, it should be noted that even as world gross economic
product has nearly tripled since 1970, these gains have been pocketed by a relatively few advanced
capitalist nations at the expense of the poor. [10] Recently, the United Nations Development Programme
issued its Human Development Report 1999 which found that the top twenty percent of the people living
in advanced capitalist nations have eighty-six percent of the world gross domestic product, control
eightytwo percent of the world export markets, initiate sixty-eight percent of all foreign direct investment,
and possess seventy-four percent of the communication wires. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of
the people hailing from the poorest nations represent only about one percent of each category
respectively.
[11] The divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly
doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000. Much of this
is directly related to a series of loans begun by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in the
1990's, which ultimately increased Third World debt by a factor of eight compared with preglobalization
figures. [12]
So, as approximately 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than
$2 per day, the dizzy heights of global technocapitalism have been unfortunate indeed for nearly half of
the human population. [13] Globalization has been especially torturous upon poor women and children,
who are denied basic human rights en masse and who, in the attempt to combat their situations of mass
starvation and homelessness, enter by the millions each year into the relations of slave-labor and the
horrors of the global sex trade. Even more tragically, millions of additional poor (many of whom are
women and children) have been violently pressed into the circumstance of outright slavery! Thus, when
this is properly related to the conditions fostered upon the Third World by the explosion of transnational
capitalist development over the last few decades, we can agree with the critical feminist Rhonda Hammer


(Kahn 03 continued)
that these very same cultural, economic and political practices by the hegemonic powers constitute a form
of global “family terrorism” meant to oppress those most in need of help. [14]
New advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for grave exacerbations of
widespread poverty and environmental destruction; and in many ways, the exploitation of the
environment and of the poor by the rich has come to be integrated so as to be part of one process -- the
globalization of technocapitalsm. [15] Interestingly, it was only very recently, in Johannesburg, South
Africa, at the U.N.'s World Summit for Sustainable Development, that the plight of the poor and of
species everywhere was again expressed as being a result of the sort of “unsustainable development” that
has been the planetary norm over the last thirty years. However, sadly, due to pressure by the Bush
administration and by other world powers, the conservation of the environment was essentially shelved as
a policy agenda and the prescription for poor nations was, ironically, even more transnational capitalist
development, market expansion, and resource extraction. [16] Kofi Annan ended the summit by
proclaiming, “This is not the end. It's the beginning.” [17] But, in fact, the W.S.S.D. was but the latest in a
30-year lineage of world summits stretching back across the recent history of globalization, to the first of
its kind in Stockholm. As we can see then, Annan's promise of change is more appropriately interpreted as
a curse.
The present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is estimated to utilize somewhere
between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the planet. As population
continues to rise toward 9 billion people and living standards increase in commensurate measure, it is
calculated that to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070 would entail technical advances capable of
enabling 60 times as much production and consumption as presently afforded, while only generating
onehalf to one-third the amount of present resource and environmental cost. [18] Yet, according to the
U.N.'s own UNEP GEO-3 report, released just prior to the summit, a vision of continued growth of this
kind is consonant only with extinction; either great changes are made in global lifestyle now or an
irrevocable crisis will descend upon the planet by 2032. [19]

The environmental problem threatens the future of nature and humanity, however this
problem cannot be addressed with blame games and imperialist ideology.
Prakash Karat, Member of the Polit Bureau, CPI(M) At the International Workshop On the
Future of Socialism in the 21st Century, Havana, 21 to 23 October, 1997
The world is faced with a serious threat to the ecology which threatens life and nature on the
planet. The ecological problem and the environmental degradation is of global proportions and
affects the future of humanity. To recognise this threat is one thing but to pose it as an issue
which transcends class and argue for a theory of inter-dependence with imperialism as
Gorbachev did is another thing altogether. It is true that Marxists, particularly in the third world,
have not paid sufficient attention to developing a comprehensive analysis to deal with the
question of ecology and environment. At the same time it is wrong to claim that Marxism
precludes a proper understanding of the issue of environment given its "productionist bias". A
careful reading of Marx and Engels shows that the whole basis of their philosophical
understanding was that man is part of nature and his being and life is organically related to
nature. As Marx wrote in 1844 "Man lives from nature i.e. nature is his body, and he must
maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's mental and physical
life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature".
Engels wrote about how the division between town and country affects nature. However in the
19th century Marx and Engels could not have envisaged the global threat to ecology which
developed over a sustained period of capitalist development with its profit driven plundering of
nature.

Inherency Ext/A2: Renewables Now

No transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy will occur within 50 years.
Jeffrey Chow, Research Assistant at Resources for the Future, Raymond J. Kopp, Senior Fellow and
Director, Climate and Technology Policy Program, and Paul R. Portney, President and Senior Fellow at
Resources for the Future, 2003
(“Energy Resources and Global Development”

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5650/1528?ijkey=OglyLJ1KUwVf2&keytype=ref&siteid
=sci, Science 28 November 2003: Vol. 302. no. 5650, pp. 1528 – 1531, accessed 7-21-2008)
Will the world make a transition to alternative, more renewable sources of energy? The simple answer is
yes, if only because, in time, supplies of fossil fuels will become too costly. For the next 25 to 50 years,
however, this seems not to be a likely prospect. With energy choices driven by relative prices, fossil fuels
will dominate energy use for many years to come. These fuels remain relatively inexpensive, and they are
supported by a very broad and long-lived infrastructure of mines, wells, pipelines, refineries, gas stations,
power plants, rail lines, tankers, and vehicles. Very powerful political constituencies exist worldwide to
ensure that investments in this infrastructure are protected.

Inherency Extension
Action to stop Climate Change is resounding at the grass-roots level, however, industrial nations
continue to resist any action. Roberts and Parks 2007
{J. Timmons (Professor Environmental Change Institute Oxford), Bradly C. (Senior Researcher at The
Center for International Policy Research at the College of William and Mary), A Climate of Injustice,
2007, MIT Press, p. 133, dan}

Inherency Extension

Inherency Extension - Environment
The current Northern approach to the environment has neglected the South and placed additional
stress on the environment
Carmen Gonzalez 01, B.A. in Print Journalism Beyond Eco-Imperialism: An Environmental Justice
Critique Of Free Trade, 78 University of Denver Law Review 979
Northern environmentalists have typically adopted a technocratic approach to environmental protection,

emphasizing global management of the environment based on scientific principles while neglecting
Southern aspirations for social justice, cultural rights, self-determination and democracy…. Southern
environmentalists have charged that Northern development policies and consumption patterns are the
primary causes of resource depletion and global pollution and that the world economic order has
institutionalized Southern poverty, which places additional stress on the environment.

Inherency Extension
Our use of foreign resources personifies the ideology that we have towards foreigners- we
exploit their resources in order to be able to keep our-(we can have our cake and eat
YOURS too). Roberts and Parks 2007
{J. Timmons (Professor Environmental Change Institute Oxford), Bradly C. (Senior Researcher at The Center for International
Policy Research at the College of William and Mary), A Climate of Injustice, 2007, MIT Press, p. 166, dan}

Inherency Extension – Equality
The question of environmental equity is one based on inequalities fostered through our exploitation
of the Global South. Evans et al 2k3
{ Bob (Professor of Sustainable Cities Research at Northumbria University), Julian Agyeman (Assistant
Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University), Robert Doyle Bullard(Ware
Professor of Sociology at Clark Atlanta University),Just Sustainabilities, 2003, p. 19, dan}

Inherency Extension - Inequality


Inherency Extension – North/South Divide
The United States consumption of finite resources causes a North-South divide in which the Global
North heavily exploits the South’s resources
The second myth underlying the media image of environmental imperialism is that the North is a global
leader in environmental protection. It follows from this myth that the North's efforts to
incorporate environmental protection into the international trade regime are designed to protect
the global ecosystem by elevating the environmental standards of developing countries. While
the North in general and the United States in particular have made significant progress in the
protection of the domestic environment during the last three decades, the North's role with
respect to the global environment is far more problematic….
Environmentalists have pointed out that the North's consumption patterns can only be maintained
through the appropriation of the natural resources (timber, petroleum, metals, agricultural
commodities, biodiversity) and waste sinks (forests, waste disposal facilities) of the South… The
researchers found that the Netherlands, United States, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, United
Kingdom, Japan, and Israel were among the highest per capita importers of natural capital. In
other words, these countries utilized far more natural capital (both natural resources and waste
sinks) than they possessed. …
The ability of the North to internalize the benefits of economic growth while shifting the environmental
externalities to the South, and to the global commons, has masked the limits of the North's growth-
oriented development model. Proponents of the North's development model argue that free trade
promotes economic growth and thereby provides developing countries with the financial means to
increase expenditures on environmental protection. This model assumes that economic growth is a
positive-sum game and that it is possible for all countries to achieve the level of development of the
North. However, as the ecological footprint study illustrates, natural resources are finite, and over-
consumption by one country requires under-consumption
by another. The North is living far beyond its ecological means, and the South cannot "catch up"
without exceeding the limits of the global ecosystem. Because it is impossible for both North and
South to be net importers of ecological goods and services, economic growth can no longer be
viewed as the solution to the problem of poverty and environmental degradation in the South.
Ecological economists have warned that the global economy is rapidly approaching the limits of
the global ecosystem's ability to sustain continued economic expansion. Far from lifting all
boats, the rising tide of globalization threatens to burst through the banks.

Inherency Extension – Exploitation
Local ecosystems have reached their limits the United states consumerist addiction has caused us to
plunder and exploit the other for natural resources and increased economic production.
Globalization has obscured the fact that the ecological limits of local ecosystems have already been
exceeded because production and consumption are physically separated…. The separation between
production and consumption creates disincentives to the conservation of local resources and the inability
to assess or manage distant sources of supply. This problem is exacerbated by the failure of commodity
prices to incorporate ecological damage and human health costs incurred in the production process. As a
result, all countries maximize global resource exploitation, which increases total economic production
and accelerates the depletion of natural resources.

Oil Addiction Adv: Timeframe Ext

The United State’s Oil Addiction must be ended now-the rate of climate change demands an
immediate cessession in subsidies
Despite a number of inventive plans to curb the warming and cut energy use, we are brought up
short by the speed with which the climate is changing. The peril is compounded by the unconscionable
failure of the US mainstream press -- which has been passively complicit in both the escalating climate
crisis and the diplomatic powder keg waiting to be ignited by the coming squeeze on oil.
Let me offer three large gauge observations about what we are really facing in the climate crisis.
The first is its speed. Global warming has blindsided all of us. It didn't even surface as an issue in the
public arena until 1988. That was the year the UN first began to put in place the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. That same year, NASA Scientist Jim Hansen went before Congress to testify that
"global warming is at hand. Today, a mere 19 years later, scientists are telling us that we are approaching -- or are already at -- a point
of no return in terms of staving off climate chaos. That is an incredibly short period of time -- the blink of an eye historically speaking -- for such
enormous changes in these massive planetary systems. The second point -- which presents one of the most difficult aspects of the challenge --
has to do with lagtimes and feedbacks. Carbon dioxide stays up in the atmosphere for about 100 years. So many of the impacts we are already
seeing are probably the result of emissions we put up in the 1970s and 1980s -- just as China and India were beginning to ramp up their surge of
coal-fired industrialization. This makes it virtually inevitable that we will see more events of the magnitude of Katrina and the European heat
wave of 2003. The final point involves the extreme sensitivity of the Earth's systems to just a tiny bit of warming. As you know, the glaciers are
melting, the deep oceans are heating, violent weather is increasing, the timing of the seasons is changing and all over the world plants, birds,
insects, fish and animals are migrating toward the poles in search of stable temperatures. And all that has resulted from one degree of warming.
And for context we are looking forward to a century of four to 10 degrees more heat. On the military front, eleven admirals and generals
recently declared climate change a major threat to our national security as disruptions trigger more conflict in countries whose crops are
destroyed by weather extremes, whose land is going under to rising sea levels and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees. What
we need is a rapid worldwide switch to non-carbon energy wind, solar, tidal and wave power and, ultimately, hydrogen fuels. And we need it
yesterday. Contrary to the propaganda of big coal and big oil, that does not mean we will all have to sit in the dark and ride bicycles. Those
sources can give us all the energy we need in ways that could make the human enterprise far more compatible with the requirements of a stable
species home -- even as it liberates us from the excesses of our own self-destructive hyperaffluence. Today, as the urgency of the
situation becomes increasingly vivid, people are scrambling to focus on other approaches -- any other
approaches -- to avoid confronting the central take-home message: we can no longer keep burning coal
and oil. For example, we see lots of renewed attention given to various forms of carbon trading. The
unfortunate truth is that we can not finesse nature with accounting tricks.

Oil Addiction Bad: Environment
Environmental Exploitation creates extreme pollution and lasting impacts on the health of
the exploited.
African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology 08, Vol. 2 (1), Exploration and
Environmental Exploitation
Fast forward to 2008 – the biggest issues surrounding exploration and environmental exploitation
today, is of course mining for resources, be it petroleum, diamonds, gold, or other precious
metals and minerals. Africa is a very likely a net supplier of resources to other parts of the world.
If environmental damage is included in the assessment of resource imbalance, the price of
exploration will continue for generations to come. Somewhat ironically, according to the United
States Geological Survey (USGS), there are more than 1,500 active mines in three major clusters
in Africa. Most of the mines also provide essential employment, and as such, they are near
regions of heavy settlement and high population densities. Thus, any environmental and
ecological consequences associated with mining also have the potential to have lasting impacts
on human health. One need not search too far or too deeply to find evidence of health impacts of
exploration and mining in Africa. The lead mining and processing facility in Kabwe, Zambia was
recently recognized as one of the ten worst polluted sites in the world. As far back as 1902,
exploitable deposits of zinc and lead were discovered in the copper belt of Zambia, and the
Kabwe mine operated for nearly a century, leaving a legacy of extreme environmental pollution
in its wake

Oil Addiction Bad: Laundry List
Oil extraction from the third world causes poverty, violence, and threatens bio-diversity and social
livelihood.
Worgu (WORGU STANLEY OWABUKERUYELE) 2k, Lund University LUMES Program Lund,
Sweden..
The Niger Delta communities have remained grossly socio-economically underdeveloped and pauperised
amidst the immense oil wealth owing to systematic dis-equilibrium in the production exchange
relationship between the state, the Trans-national companies and the people. Enormous money had been
derived from oil export but the area has been subjected to severe land degradation, socio-economic
disorganisation, increasing poverty, misery, military occupation and bloody violence. Pegg 1999, p 14.
Oil extraction has impacted most disastrously on the socio-physical environment of the Niger Delta oil
bearing communities massively threatening the fragile subsistent peasant economy and bio-diversity and
hence their entire social livelihood and very survival. The oil producing communities have basically
remained dependent and underdeveloped, persistently dis-empowered, socio-culturally marginalised and
psychologically alienated. The wealth derived from oil resource exploitation and exports benefit directly
only the operators of the oil industry and the bureaucrats in government.

Oil Addiction Bad: Nigeria Proves
Oil exploitation is fueled by capitalism and causes extreme social conflict – Nigeria Proves
Worgu (WORGU STANLEY OWABUKERUYELE) 2k, Lund University LUMES Program Lund,
Sweden..
Nigeria like most other less developed countries in the early part of the 70's, were engaged in intensive
natural resource exploitation as a way of stimulating economic growth. It was projected by several
multilateral funding organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)and the World Bank that
export drive of primary resource materials will eventually lead to economic growth and subsequently a
significant reduction in the level of poverty. The projection was that the long-term gain of such a process
would set the stage for a sustained economic development.
As at 1976, about 10 years from the start of the oil export drive. Figures available from the Federal Office
of Statistics stated that oil has come to account for about 14% of the nation's gross domestic product
(GNP) of Nigeria. 95% of the total export and over 80% of government annual revenue. Total export
peaked at two million barrels of crude oil per day with price range of $18-$22 per barrel. This created
more opportunity for the development of new oil fields, increase granting of mining licenses and the
intensive exploitation of oil mineral resources in the Niger Delta.
The multinational oil companies made huge investments in the oil sector, which was quite technological
and capital intensive. New laws were made which includes the petroleum act of 1969 and the land use
Decree/Act of 1978. This legislation regulated community access to communal or open access land and
they were primarily promulgated to restrict access to such land, while at the same time making it possible
for the Multinational investors to have unrestricted access to explore for oil unchallenged even on sacred
land.
These changes have led to a series of social conflict between the community people and the State/Oil
companies as will be discussed later.

Oil Addiction Bad: Mexico Proves
Oil Exploitation creates corruption, and serious environmental problems - Mexico proves.
Human Rights Delegation in 1996, reporters and activists, report on Human rights and
environment in tabasco
The state of Tabasco on the Gulf Coast of Mexico is experiencing an ecological and political
crisis stemming from more than two decades of intense and reckless exploitation of the state`s
petroleum reserves by Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico`s national oil company. Tabasco,
whose subsoil contains enormous riches, is the second largest petroleum producing state in
Mexico. Nevertheless, many of its people live in extreme poverty. In this traditionally
agricultural state, ecological damage has deprived many who depend on farming and fishing for
their livelihoods without providing alternative economic opportunities. This situation, combined
with state and national governments unaccountable to oversight or ecological watchdog groups,
has led to great suffering. Mexico`s enormous external debt and growing dependence on the U.S.
government and financial institutions give the problems of Tabasco an international dimension as
well, perhaps best illustrated by the Mexican government`s current plan to sell to foreign
investors its long nationalized secondary petrochemical facilities, which produce raw chemicals
for plastics and other products. Mexico, in the throes of a profound economic crisis, has become
increasingly dependent on oil revenues (even as these revenues are being directly deposited to
the U.S. Treasury as security on the $21 billion emergency loan made to Mexico in 1995). Due to
stagnation in the price of oil, the only way to increase these revenues is to increase production.
Such an increase is being implemented in Tabasco and in the nearby states of Veracruz, Chiapas,
Campeche and Tamaulipas. Currently, nearly 85 percent of Mexico`s oil exports go to the U.S.
The state of Tabasco on the Gulf Coast of Mexico is a crossroads for important local and
international trends. The governor of Tabasco, Roberto Madrazo of the ruling PRI party, is under
investigation by the Federal Attorney General`s office (PGR) for campaign finance fraud. In the
1994 campaign he used more than 60 times the legal amount of campaign funds Q some seventy
million dollars in a state with just five million people. Governor Madrazo is also facing demands
from a popular movement made up of peasants and indigenous people who have seen their fields,
coastal waters and livelihoods damaged by the largely unaccountable national petroleum
industry. In February, 1996, a community-based civil resistance campaign began to block access
roads to key petroleum extraction and refining sites at points where they passed through
municipalities that have sustained the most serious environmental damages. The demonstrators
demanded compensation for environmental damage and a halt to further destruction. State Police
responded with force, driving protesters from bridges and other blockade points with baton
charges and tear gas. More than one hundred demonstrators were arrested and jailed. This
situation prompted Global Exchange and four Mexican non- governmental

organizationsQCitizens Movement for Democracy (MCD), Human Rights Committee of Tabasco
(CODEHUTAB), Asociacion Ecologica Santo Tomas and Servicio, Paz y JusticiaQ to organize
and send representatives on a fact-finding delegation to Tabasco. The delegation also
Oil Addiction Bad: Mexico Proves
included representatives from Servicio Internacional para la Paz (SIPAZ), Peaceworkers, the
French organization `Working Together for Human Rights`, and the New York Committee for
Democracy in Mexico. We spoke with local biologists, physicians and human rights experts. We
also visited communities impacted by oil extraction and refining, met with leaders of the
growing protest movement, spoke with government officials and interviewed officials of
PEMEX. The following report is based on interviews, testimony and documentation obtained
during this visit.

Oil Addiction Bad: Environment
It is over consumption not the depletion of natural resources or pollution control that is the greatest
threat to the global environment
Carmen Gonalez 01, B.A. in Print Journalism Beyond Eco-Imperialism: An Environmental Justice
It is the overconsumption of the North that poses the greatest threat to the global environment while
imposing the environmental costs on the South. Environmental law has traditionally emphasized pollution
control and protection of natural resources while ignoring the ultimate cause of pollution and resource
degradation: the overconsumption of the planet's resources…. Moreover, efforts to regulate domestic
consumption have thus far focused on the quality of consumption (improving product design to reduce
environmental impacts during production, use,or disposal) rather than the quantity of consumption (the
total amount of products consumed).While it is important to address both issues, gains in the quality of
consumption can quickly be eroded by the everexpanding quantity of products consumed. For example,
today's automobiles are far more fuelefficient (with the exception of sport utility vehicles, popularly
known as SUV's) and far less polluting than in the past. However, the increase in both the total number of
automobiles and the total miles driven has outpaced the efficiency gains

Oil Addiction Bad – Generic

Our oil addiction has caused us to lose the ethic of care that is crucial to preventing global suffering
and extinction. Only reorienting ourselves away from this prioritization of greed can solve.
Kim Carlyle and Sandra Lewis, Environmental and Political Analysts, “Addressing our Dependence on
Fossil Fuels”, May 2003, Friends Journal
Most of us have reaped the benefits of an economy powered by fossil fuel. There is no need to list the
wonders, comforts, conveniences, and prosperity wrought by this century-long dependence. But we can
no longer ignore the extreme costs. We are on a collision course with ecological reality.
Our ethical base also leads us to question the justice of our consumption habits, and our compassion leads
us to take action to prevent suffering. It is well known that we in the United States, with about 4.7 percent
of the world's population, use about 25 percent of the world's energy and contribute almost 25 percent of
the heat-trapping gases. In all countries, the effects of fossil fuel extraction, production, and combustion,
and the burdens of a degraded environment fall disproportionately upon the most vulnerable and helpless:
the poor, the sick, the elderly, and future generations.
It's time for us not just to realize, but also to act upon the fact that our dependence on fossil fuels puts us
in direct conflict with core values embodied in Friends Testimonies of Integrity, Peace, Simplicity,
Equality, and Community. As Friends, we place great value on ethics, compassion, and love, and we show
respect for the sacredness of God's Creation. Our love for one another can lead us to protect the ecological
systems that support our community of life. Our respect for the sacredness of life and the natural systems
that sustain it must lead us to work to prevent their violation and desecration.

Oil Addiction Bad – Militarism
Oil addiction has created a monster fed by the seeds of militarism – our nations actions are based
off of slavery, consumption and destruction
Recent events have shed glaring light on the dark side of our nation's dependence on fossil fuel.
Destruction of the World Trade Center towers is but one of its most dramatic manifestations. War with
Iraq may well be another.
U.S. foreign policy is now driven largely by our dependence on oil. Our government maintains a global
military presence to ensure the flow. It makes deals that support oppressive governments and overlooks
gross violations of human rights to feed our country's habit.
One glaring example of human rights abuse in the oil industry is the slave labor that was used in Burma to
construct a pipeline for U.S.-based Unocal in the 1990s. Terry Collingsworth, in the Fall/Winter 2002–3
Open Society News, wrote: "Working with the big American oil company Unocal to build a pipeline in the
1990s, the Burmese government used its security forces to enslave rural inhabitants for days and weeks at
a time. Villagers were forced at gunpoint to work on the pipeline for days on end without food and water.
Those who failed to work enough were often beaten or killed." The International Labor Rights Fund and
the Center for Constitutional Rights have separately brought lawsuits against Unocal on behalf of these
Burmese villagers charging that the oil company, with the help of the Burmese government, knowingly
used forced labor. Jury trials for both cases were scheduled for February 2003.
To ensure our access to oil, we train and arm factions like the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then we look
the other way when these weapons are used to enforce despotic rule. (MoveOn.Org Link. Energy and War
—November 20, 2002)
Testifying before Congress in 1999, General Anthony Zinni said that the Gulf Region, with its huge oil
reserves, is of "vital" and "long-standing" interest to the U.S. Since the end of World War II, a major goal
of U.S. strategic doctrine is to ensure that we have "free access" to these reserves through both military
and economic means.
The George W. Bush administration has built its public case for war against Iraq on the dangers posed by
Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and on Saddam Hussein's malevolence and his human
rights violations. Many knowledgeable observers, however, agree that a core issue driving U.S. policy is a
desire to exercise control over Iraqi oil reserves. (GlobalPolicy.Org Link)
Gross inequalities of wealth and power among nations fueled by huge disparities in the use of fossil fuels
sow the seeds of war. Our Peace Testimony calls on us to work to take away the occasion of war. Ending
our dependence on fossil fuel has become an essential expression of this testimony

Oil Addiction Bad – Environment
US addiction to fossil fuels is causing the violent destruction and decimation of our environment
Our use of fossil fuels is devastating the Earth, destroying cultures, and endangering human health. To
discover and recover oil, roads are slashed through rainforests, drilling sites contaminate fresh water and
soil, leaky pipelines spill millions of gallons of crude oil on wildlife and pristine tundra, and indigenous
people are pushed to the brink of extinction. The temporary influx of cash upsets economies, corrupts
governments, and concentrates wealth among a few. Oil refineries pollute the air, soil, and water of the
impoverished communities that surround them. The extraction of coal devastates entire communities as it
removes mountaintops, destroys watersheds, and leaves behind 100,000,000-gallon toxic slurry ponds.
The combustion of coal and oil are responsible for soot, ground-level ozone, acid rain, and an increase in
climate-changing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Air pollution exacerbates respiratory illness especially for
asthmatic children and the elderly, is responsible for the decline of our eastern hardwood forests, and has
poisoned most of the lakes in the northeast U.S. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the
U.S. contributes about 25 percent of the climate-changing gases, and yet the U.S. government has
withdrawn from international negotiations to address worldwide human-induced climate change.
(WorldWatch.Org Link)
The true costs of fossil fuels are staggering and cannot be measured in dollars alone. The administration's
proposals to expand fossil fuel production and increase our dependence on them, as described in the
President's National Energy Policy of 2001, are politically corrupt, ecologically and economically
dangerous, and morally bankrupt.

Oil Addiction Bad – Exploitation
As a result of capitalism a divide between the North and South has been created which spawns
global poverty, hunger, and disease. Capitalism, Imperialism, and Exploitation must end now.
Prakash Karat, Member of the Polit Bureau, CPI(M) At the International Workshop On the Future of
Socialism in the 21st Century, Havana, 21 to 23 October, 1997
As we approach the next century, the world experienced the enormous development of the productive
forces, the successive waves of the scientific and technological revolution and for the first time an
abundance of material goods which can end want and deprivation for the whole of humanity. In contrast
to this possibility, the bulk of the world's population lives in hunger, poverty and disease. Capitalism is a
system which has resulted in such a sharp divide. For the true emancipation of humanity, class exploi-
tation and imperialism must end. The currents against such exploitation are reasserting themselves
amongst different sections of the working people in various parts of the world. As long as this struggle for
human emancipation remains, Marxism will provide the nourishing springs for analysis and for
revolutionary movements to transform the world.

Culture Advantage Ext

DECREASING FUNDING FOR FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION IS NECESSARY TO
RESPONSIBLY ADDRESS THE NEEDS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES
UN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL, ‘8
(APRIL, http://un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4950.doc.htm)
KANDI MOSSETT, Indigenous Environmental Network, underscored how fossil fuel extraction
threatened indigenous cultures and environmental systems and contributed to climate change in the lands
where indigenous peoples had lived for centuries. Today the outer continental shelf of Alaska was being
targeted by petroleum companies with support from the United States Government. Meanwhile, Alaska
was touted in national climate change discussions as the “canary in the mine”. Fossil fuel
exploration continued in the United States under the guise of homeland security, but it was proceeding at
the expense of indigenous peoples. In Canada, the Cree nation had requested a moratorium on
development of tar sands, but the Canadian Government was not listening and had no regard for the rights
of its indigenous peoples who had the most to lose. In light of that, the Forum should call on the United
Nations to convene an emergency meeting to investigate the role of the petroleum industry in climate
change, and address issues relating to the right to food, security, as well as indigenous human rights.

Eco-Imperialism Advantage Ext

These unsustainable fossil fuel practices are a war on the global south- environmental action and
inaction is a political act designed to condemn racially and economically marginalized citizens to
bare life
Newell, James Martin Fellow at the Centre for the Environment at Oxford University, 2005
(“Race, Class, and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality,” Global Environmental Politics Vol.5
No.3 August 2005, pp.70-94)
Whereas racism is rarely invoked in the explicit sense it was in colonial times, as a mechanism for
justifying extraction, violence and segregation, there is contemporary evidence of continued racism in the
consequences of environmental action and inaction, intervention and neglect. These are structural
outcomes in so far as access, entitlements and life expectancy continue to be strongly shaped by people’s
racial identities. Most pertinently, the racial dimension of environmental inequality surfaces around the
question of who has rights to environmental protection and who bears the burden of waste and pollution.
The French government received global condemnation for its program of nuclear testing in the Paciªc
(Mururoa atoll) in 1995,21 but arguably the neocolonial arrogance it manifested runs deeper than many
would care to admit. The recent controversy surrounding genetically modified (GM) food aid brought
many of these issues to the surface once more.22 The US government accused countries such as Zambia
of committing crimes against humanity by refusing to accept GM food aid when its people were starving.
The assumption seemed to be that the hungry lose their rights to exercise choice and, in this context, that
starving people should be willing to trial a controversial, some would say under-tested, technology. Food
aid maize from the US containing genetically modiªed organisms (GMOs) was reportedly sent to Bolivia
in 2002, disregarding the fact the country had a moratorium in place on the import of GM crops. The
GMOs found in the Bolivian aid contained StarLink corn that was not approved in the US for human
consumption, though it was approved for animal feed. What was revealing was the fact that when traces
of StarLink were found in the US food supply, it was immediately removed from the US market, yet no
such effort was made to remove maize sent to Bolivia as food aid.23 The export of GM food aid to
Africa, where many governments were similarly opposed to accepting GM crops, led The Ecologist to
summarize the situation on its front cover in the following stark terms: “Eat shit or die? America gives
Africa a choice.”24 The social organization of environmental hazard and the political distribution of
risk also manifest strong racial dimensions. The environmental racism literature provides convincing
evidence of disproportionate exposure of poorer communities of color to the most hazardous forms of
environmental pollution. It was in the aftermath of the Warren County protests that the concept of
“environmental racism” was first advanced by the civil rights activist, Dr. Benjamin Chavis. According
to Chavis, environmental racism refers to: Racial discrimination in environmental policy making and the
unequal enforcement of the environmental laws and regulations. It is the deliberate targeting of people-of-
color communities for toxic waste facilities and the official sanctioning of a life-threatening presence of
poisons and pollutants in people-of-color communities.25 This literature looks at the links between
choices that are made about the location of hazardous production processes and the racial and social
profile of communities where those processes are to be based.26 It suggests that minority and/or low
income communities are disproportionately overburdened with hazardous waste sites, incinerators,
petrochemical plants, lead contamination, dirty air and contaminated drinking water. Figure 1 provides a
sample of the many studies that have reached such conclusions. Underscoring the importance of

conscious intent rather than random process, work on environmental racism also shows that communities
of color are often targeted by firms processing potentially hazardous materials because they anticipate a
more compliant workforce that can be paid lower wages and where they expect political resistance to be
Eco-Imperialism Advantage Ext

(Newell 05 continued)
less forthcoming.27 A 1984 report for the California Waste Management Board suggested that residents
least likely to oppose waste developments would be “rural communities, poor communities,
communities whose residents have low educational levels . . . and whose residents were employed in
resource-extractive jobs.”28 The Cerrell report, a strategy manual for industries needing to set up
polluting facilities such as incinerators, whose aim was to “assist in selecting a site that offers the least
potential of generating public opposition” reached similar conclusions. Its recommendations were: 1)
avoid middle and higher income neighborhoods 2) target communities that are less well educated 3)
target conservative or traditional communities preferably with fewer than 25,000 residents 4) target rural
or elderly communities 5) target areas whose residents are employed in resource extractive jobs like
mining, timber or agriculture. Even if the developments are unwelcome, impoverished communities
generally lack the financial and technical resources necessary to resist environmentally hazardous
facilities. They also have less access to traditional remedies to ameliorate those burdens under
environmental and civil rights laws than do their wealthier neighbors.29 The consequence of these
practices is much higher levels of exposure to toxics and subsequently higher levels of illnesses among
minority communities, as illustrated by the cases outlined in Figure 1.

Solvency Ext – Subsidy Switch Key

Subsidies solve for a refocus from fossil fuels to alternative energies.
Ross Geldspan, Leading Journalist on Climate Change and Pulitzer Prize winner, 2004
(“Toward a Global Energy Transition,” January, 2004.

http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&q=cache:V9XvNW-
7OvsJ:www.fpif.org/pdf/petropol/ch5.pdf+%22ethic+of+sustainability%22+and+%22renewable+energy
%22, accessed 7/18/08)
Subsidy Switch Could Lead to Fuel Switch
The United States currently spends more than $20 billion a year to subsidize fossil fuels. The aggregate
subsidies for fossil fuels in industrial countries has been estimated at $200 billion a year.
The deep oceans are warming, the tundra is thawing, the glaciers are melting, infectious diseases are
migrating, and the timing of the seasons has changed. All that has resulted from only one degree of
warming. We are proposing that in the industrial countries those subsidies be withdrawn from fossil fuels
and equivalent subsidies be established for renewable energy sources. A small portion of the U.S.
subsidies must be used to retrain or buyout the nation’s approximately 50,000 coal miners. But the lions’
share of the subsidies would still be intended for the major oil companies to retrain their workers and re-
tool to become aggressive developers of fuel cells, wind farms, and solar systems. In other words, we
envision the subsidies as a tool to help oil companies transform themselves into renewable energy
companies.

Solvency Ext – Global Cooperation

The switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy offers a unique opportunity for the US to foster
international cooperation.
Josef Braml, editor-in-chief of the Yearbook on International Relations at the German Council on Foreign
Relations, 2007
(The Washington Quarterly - Volume 30, Number 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 117-130)
Political and public scrutiny of the security, economic, and environmental costs of the current U.S. energy
policy compels the United States to embark on an alternative path toward a more efficient homegrown
supply of renewable energy. Brookings Institution scholar David Sandalow suggests that "[a]n unusual
political consensus and game-changing technologies give the next president a rare opportunity to address
several of the nation's most important security, environmental, and economic challenges."41 The future
president and other political leaders, recognizing the critical mass of support that has emerged among the
American public, should aggressively move forward on lessening U.S. dependence on traditional fuels.
The worldwide interest in renewable energies creates a unique chance for the United States to reclaim
world leadership, spearheading international cooperation to solve the energy conundrum. Unlike limited
fossil fuels, renewable forms of energy are to a large degree the result of unlimited and mobile brain
power. Although U.S. hard power seems to have lost its effectiveness in securing America's energy
security and economic prosperity, its technological and political leadership potential still holds a
promising alternative for the next president, who would even be more likely to gain that office by
promoting renewable energy alternatives as part of their campaign to seek an end to the U.S. addiction to
oil. [End Page 128]

Solvency Ext – Screwing Big Oil Key
In order to eliminate imperialism we must eliminate the capitalist monopolies that exploit the third
world such as the oil industry.
Prakash Karat, Member of the Polit Bureau, CPI(M) At the International Workshop On the Future of
Socialism in the 21st Century, Havana, 21 to 23 October, 1997
Imperialism is not about to disappear in the 21st century. The theoretical advance made by Marxist-
Leninist analysis of the growth of monopoly capitalism resulting in the rise of modern imperialism has to
be carried forward to take stock of the new developments in the last two decades of the 20th century. An
important phenomenon is the highly mobile international finance capital which shifts from one part of the
world to the other in search of quick profits. This international flow of capital is a major factor for the
intensified exploitation of the third world and also the high rates of unemployment prevailing in the
advanced capitalist countries. The harmful consequences of speculative financial flows are being
witnessed currently in the currency crisis which has gripped the South-East countries which are held up as
a "model" for the third world to follow.

Solvency Ext – Subsidies
Shifting fossil fuel subsidies solves emissions.
Mona L. Hymel, Professor of Law, James E Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2007
(“Globalisation, Environmental Justice, and Sustainable Development: The Case of Oil,” Macquarie Law
Journal (2007) Vol 7)
For example, Americans use six times more energy than the worldwide average and seventy times more
energy than a Bangladeshi. If Americans increased their energy efficiency to that of the Western
Europeans and Japanese, energy costs would drop by US$100-US$200 billion per year. 97 Moreover, if
the US eliminated fossil fuel subsidies, CO2 emissions would decline to 16 per cent below 1990 levels by
2010, surpassing the Kyoto target by a sizable margin.

Solvency Ext – Alt Energy

Alternative energy subsidies empirically solve for fossil fuel consumption
Jeffrey Chow, Research Assistant at Resources for the Future, Raymond J. Kopp, Senior Fellow and
Director, Climate and Technology Policy Program, and Paul R. Portney, President and Senior Fellow at
Resources for the Future, 2003
(“Energy Resources and Global Development”

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5650/1528?ijkey=OglyLJ1KUwVf2&keytype=ref&siteid
=sci, Science 28 November 2003: Vol. 302. no. 5650, pp. 1528 – 1531, accessed 7-21-2008)
The environmental costs of fossil, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy consumption could drive the world
toward alternative sources before scarcity becomes a significant issue. Government programs to reduce
the negative environmental impacts of fossil fuel production and consumption have the same effect as
scarcity-induced price increases, and would stimulate (or mandate) new energy technologies that increase
efficiency, mitigate pollution, and substitute for fossil energy. Policy mechanisms to achieve these ends
include environmental standards, fuel and emission taxes, subsidies for renewable energy production,
mandated diversified energy portfolios, and emission permit–trading schemes. In the United States and
elsewhere, several of these policies (such as regulated limits, emission fees, and tradable permits) have
been successfully implemented to reduce noncarbon air pollution, improve air quality, and reduce acid
rain (21–24).

Solvency Ext – Alt Energy Solves Colonialism

A SWITCH TO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IS NECESSARY TO COMBAT ENERGY
COLONIALISM
WRM (WORLD RAINFOREST MOVEMENT) NO DATE
http://www.wrm.org.uy/publications/briefings/CCC.html, ACCESSED 7.22.08
The way to reduce the use of fossil fuels is to replace them as quickly as possible with
environmentally-friendly sources of energy. Such a solution is technically feasible, but very powerful
forces --such as the oil industry-- and a number of industrialized-country governments are opposing this
approach, claiming it to be too expensive.
However, given that the public is increasingly concerned over climate change, those same forces and
governments need to give the world a positive message to the effect that they are dealing with the
problem. In 1997, industrialized-country governments finally committed themselves to reduce emissions
in the Kyoto Protocol of the Climate Change Convention. Although those commitments were far from the
emission cuts needed to adequately address the problem, they were at least something. But they
simultaneously invented the ingeniously-named "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM) in order to
avoid compliance with even those insufficient commitments.
This mechanism is far from "clean" and is in fact both a licence to pollute and a new form of
colonialism: instead of cutting emissions at source, it allows Northern industries to "compensate for"
emissions by implementing projects in other countries. Some of the possible projects involve vast tracts
of tree plantations that would allegedly act as "carbon sinks". A U.S. senior official candidly told Reuters:
"If you remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere through carbon sinks then that is the same as
avoiding a ton of emissions through fossil fuels" and added that "by counting how much carbon is
absorbed through forests and farmland, the pressure would be greatly reduced on U.S. companies to cut
emissions and other gases." And that's the objective of the CDM: not to reduce emissions but to reduce
pressures to cut emissions, particularly in the North.
However, what the earth needs is precisely the opposite. The transfer of carbon from fossil fuels to the
atmosphere cannot go on indefinitely. Some 4,000 billion tonnes of carbon in fossil fuels are still under
the earth's surface, which is more than ten times the amount of carbon stored in forests. Adding as little as
few hundred billion tons of this to the air would likely result in a climatic disaster. What's thus needed
first and foremost is to prevent the extraction and use of those fossil fuels by replacing them with clean,
renewable and low impact energy sources and energy efficiency measures. Such would be the meaning --
at least from a climate perspective-- of a Clean Development Mechanism. Climate negotiators have
perverted the meaning of those words to create a CDM which is in fact only a Carbon Dealers' Market,
through which some will economically benefit at the expense of the world's climate.

Solvency Ext – Generic

Increasing alternative energy incentives, while decreasing the economic feasibility of fossil fuels is
key to stop our addiction and create a renewable economy
Now is the time for Friends to speak out for energy policies that are environmentally sound, socially just,
and economically feasible. Such policies would explicitly aim at eliminating our dependence on fossil
fuels and would include strategies, timetables, and investments required to achieve this goal. As a nation,
we need to pursue this with the urgency and priority we once gave to other great national goals such as
landing a man on the moon.
Clean, renewable technologies (wind, solar, etc.) are currently available. We'll need more research and
investment in emerging technologies (such as fuel cells powered by hydrogen from the electrolysis of
water) to make them economically feasible. Renewable sources of energy should be phased in through
promotion and subsidy for clean power, increasing emissions restrictions, and decreasing support for dirty
power. The policy must provide for a transition to these new technologies that would include retraining of
work forces and education of the general public.
Sane policies must account for the environmental, social, and moral consequences of the energy we use. It
is up to us to hold our political leaders accountable for enacting such policies.

2AC K Answers

2AC Non-Policy K Alts

1. ALTERNATIVE IS THE STATUS QUO- EMPTY USE OF WORDS LIKE “SUSTAINABILITY”
WITHOUT A SUSTAINED DEBATE ON THE NITTY-GRITTY ISSUES OF IMPLEMENTATION
AND THE “HOW” OF ENVRONMENTAL JUSTICE- THE PLAN BREAKS FREE FROM THE
HOLD BIG FOSSIL FUEL AND BIG OIL HAS ON OUR COLLECTIVE IMAGINATIONS BY
EMBRACING THE POSSIBILITY OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY- EXTINCTION IS
INEVITABLE WITHOUT THIS CALL- CHATTERJEE
2. ALT HAS NO SOLVENCY
a. PROPOGANDA- CURRENT POLICIES OF ENERGY ARE DICTATED BY

COMPANIES WITH A MONOPOLY ON TRUTH. THE ALTERNATIVE FAILS TO
CHALLENGE THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY, AND REINSCRIBES THE
METHODOLOGY THE AFFIRMATIVE DISMANTLES.- GELBSPAN
b. POLITICAL/GOVERNMENT ACTION KEY- INCENTIVES ARE NECESSARY TO
DRIVE THE SHIFT TO RENEWABLES- REJECTION/VOTING NEGATIVE LEAVES
IN PLACE THE MARKET DYNAMICS THAT GUARANTEE ECO-VIOLENCE-
GELBSPAN
c. TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP- THE PLANS DEMAND
FOR EQUITY MOBILIZES GLOBAL ALLIANCES AGAINST CORPORATE
GLOBAL TAKEOVER, AND CREATES MOMENTUM FOR POLITICAL
MOVEMENTS FOR EQUITY- GELBSPAN

2AC Capitalism K
The Environmental Movement in the United States must be accepted in order to repeal capitalism,
save rights, and save the native population.
Brett Clark 02 , University of Oregon, the indigenous environmental movement in the united states.
Organization & Environment, Vol. 15, No. 4, 410-442 (2002) Publications
Social movement theory emphasizes the importance of resource mobilization and the strategic political
processes of struggles within a society. Although it yields useful insights into the dynamics involved in a
struggle, social movement theory ultimately is too narrow to grapple with all social struggles. The
indigenous environmental movement breaks the mould, revealing unconsidered historical forces and
variables involved in social struggles. The economic dynamics of capitalism and the history of internal
colonialism must be incorporated into an account of the evolution of the indigenous environmental
movement. Struggles over treaty rights and sovereignty are unique to the Native population, making their
movement one of the most powerful and effective groups for protecting the environment. Although the
indigenous environmental movement is connected to other environmental movements, the Native struggle
remains fundamentally grounded in a challenge to the whole of society, as presently constituted, as they
fight for the survival of their nations and ways of life.

2AC Digger K
Perm solves- The environment is not a commodity to be owned- no one country will be able to or
should head up a global movement. Human Rights Quarterly 1995
{ Jay Schulkin and Paul Kleindofer , “Equity Decisions: Economic Development and Environmental
Prudence”, Human Rights Quarterly 1995 v. 17.2, muse, Dan}
Common resources are being consumed at rates that decrease their collective value and use; if they
belong to no one, will any one care? The ozone layer does not belong to anyone. And we have been
forced to care. We are in the midst of responding collectively to a commons dilemma. The [End Page
391] positive result is that as one increases citizenship and responsibility through the implementation of
programs like the Montreal Protocol, the global commons--the air that we breathe, the ozone layer that
shields us from the sun, the weather that nurtures our crops, etc.--increasingly becomes our shared place.
Environmental responses, correcting wrongs while promoting positive rights, and maintaining the global
commons while balancing efficiency with equity, are among the exciting consequences of the Montreal
Protocol and the Environmental Fund.
The Environmental Fund, as Barber Conable, the former president of the World Bank has noted, is a
vehicle to get people cooperating. As he observes, it is the poor people of this planet who suffer from
"environmental degradation." 16 The burden is on all of us to promote thinking about the future where
norms of cooperative ownership with regard to the environmental commons are invoked. Common bonds
that include others as decisionmakers and that foster the sharing of information and keeping one's
promises are routes toward cooperative behavior. Cooperation also depends on equity and efficiency.
Cooperation works best when the majority is satisfied with the distribution, when few feel envy, and
when the worst off are rendered better off. 17
No doubt a perception of well-being lies at the heart of equity considerations, and facilitates cooperation.
Politics and economics are part of well-being; but so are health, religion, and family. Cultural values in
this regard vary dramatically. Cooperation occurs, because it serves the majority's interest. Of course,
shortsightedness is a present danger and an alluring fact.
Trust is also an important factor for cooperative behavior. 18 Recipient nations need to trust that donor
nations are sincere in their commitment to righting these environmental wrongs, and to working closely
together. We look to cooperate--perhaps more than is realized--until we are disappointed. The CFC
context is serious enough to warrant cooperation. Nonetheless, mistrust exacerbated by moral hazard will
inevitably appear. This can impact the efficiency of the phase-out of the CFCs, in addition to the equity
issues of fair distribution. While there is some room for tit-for-tat or game theoretic responses, 19 what we
want to induce is greater cooperation, which again will be country specific.
We cooperate and share the environmental burden. We do so because the incentives for all parties are in
place to eliminate CFC use, while working to promote economic development for the disadvantaged. The
[End Page 392] allocation of resources will depend on need and merit; equity judgements will take these
factors into account. They are perfectly compatible with efficiency issues. Of course moral hazards and

cheating will emerge, and do, ad nauseam. This is circumvented by monetary incentives, industrial
obligations, political and social agreements, and mechanisms for checking or documenting the actual
phase-out.
2AC Digger K
The climate is right for downsizing our conception of development; more is not always better. We realize
that, at least some of the time. But gluttony is an omnipresent factor. More and more does not result in
satiation or satisfaction, and wanting more becomes like a bad addiction.
Why shouldn't the developing world have what we have had, use what we have used, and exploit what we
did? They cannot because our science says that they cannot without endangering us all. Whatever our
political persuasions, the environmental pressure is on; alternative ecological-economic strategies are
being implemented. Maturity is currently what is most necessary. This means moving beyond
egocentrism towards a consideration of others. Moral rules that dictate an enlarged participatory moral
space with consequences and compensation factored into the enlarged equity function are partly what we
are after.
The implications for policy are that such moral notions as those outlined tend to foster cooperation. They
act as glue in facilitating social action. In this regard sending off the right kinds of semiotics, or meanings,
are fundamental for cooperation. And cooperation helps us to express some of our shared values.
Environmental-economic cooperation speaks to the sacrifices one makes on an individual and social
basis. It reveals a fragile good.

2AC Global Local K

The United States must spearhead the transition to sustainable energy; our action locally helps
everyone globally. Our environment is on a fine line of destruction and we must act now, to preserve
the earth and preserve basic human rights.
Ross Gelbspan 07, American writer and activist, "Linking Local and Global" On Receiving the 2007
'Climate Hero' Award from Clean Water Action
How do we -- in the most immediate and compelling way possible -- make the links between the
local and global? How do we get people to understand that if we were to change our energy diet from
coal and oil -- to one based on wind, sun, tides and waves -- that would not only be good for our own
health. It would also be a boon to people halfway around the world whose crops are destroyed by weather
extremes, whose homelands are going under from rising sea levels and whose borders are being overrun
by environmental refugees.
One invaluable lesson we take from Clean Water Action is that none of us can accomplish much
alone. Lee and Cindy have done an extraordinary job in creating a culture in which their activists keep
their egos in their back pockets. As a result, Clean Water Action has spearheaded some coalitions and
joined others to secure some truly impressive achievements at the State House that no group acting alone
could ever have accomplished.
That kind of collaboration is especially needed for the climate crisis. I know the prospect is
frightening -- but this might help. Global warming is not just the mother of all issues. Its solution
contains the seeds for solutions to lots of other major problems facing us.
I think if we were to address the climate issue in all its dimensions, it would bring home to
everyone the fact that we are living on a planet with limits and we are bumping up against those limits. I
think a program to rewire the world with clean energy starting with the U.S. -- would, in very short order,
lead to closed-loop industrial processes, mandatory reuse and recycling, the adoption of environmental
accounting in the way we calculate our wealth and, ultimately, to a whole new ethic of sustainability that
would transform our practices and institutions in ways we can only dream about today.
But time is not our ally. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, the world is closing in on
us in ways that make the distinction between local and global seem increasingly less relevant. The
economy is becoming truly globalized. The globalization of communications makes it possible today for
anyone to communicate with anyone else anywhere in the world. (That is a breathtaking historical
development. It could easily lead to the emergence of global networks of local activists. And who knows
where that could lead?) And, of course, the global climate makes us all one. But while the world is
changing around us, our way of thinking is not keeping pace. At one level, we are still bogged down by a
stale and outdated nationalism which, in reality, we long ago outgrew.
It's time to realize that our identity comes far more from our common biological roots than from
our different geographical ones. That implies the outlines of a world in which on the most pedestrian
level -- we eat locally and regionally grown food and take our energy from decentralized sources that are
best suited to their natural surroundings. On the level of social organization, it implies a world in which

most governance decisions are made at the local, grassroots level through some kind of consensual
democracy with a few specific areas of governance taking place at a global level. In that spirit, I believe
that in today's highly fractured, combative and contaminated world, the mission of groups like Clean
2AC Global Local K

(Gelbspan 07 continued)
Water Action goes well beyond clean air and water. A clean environment is about far more than
protecting endangered species, reducing toxic substances and containing the "dead zones" that keep
spreading around our shorelines. A clean environment is a basic human right. And without it, all the other
human rights for which we have worked so hard will end up as withered and grotesque caricatures of
some of our deepest aspirations.

2AC Anthropocentrism K
Ecological debt is not an anthropocentric notion- our obligation is to future generations and other
species as well.
Karin Mickelson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, 2005
(“Leading towards a level playing field, repaying ecological debt, or making environmental space: three
stories about international environmental cooperation,”
http://www.ohlj.ca/archive/articles/43_12_mickelson.pdf, accessed 7.15.08)
At first glance, the notion of ecological debt may appear to be deeply anthropocentric; the talk of
resources and appropriation seems to assume that the only limitations on human exploitation of nature are
the rights and interests of other humans. This is not the case. Joan Martinez-Alier, the best known
academic commentator on the concept, has pointed out that there is an ecological debt owed to future
generations and to other species.59 While frequently mentioned, this variety of ecological debt has clearly
not been given priority. The emphasis on the rights of the peoples of the South is understandable given the
origins of the concept, but it is also consistent with approaches to environmental ethics that highlight the
human and social dimensions of environmental problems, such as social ecology, environmental justice,
and eco-feminism.

2AC Sustainability K – A2: Just a word

A2- Just a Word
CITE/TAG?
Just as principles for sustainable development enable an understanding of the backgrounds which
individuals bring to sustainability (values, ethics and knowledges), the concepts underlying sustainable
development provide the lenses through which the concepts can be viewed. As Figure 2.1 illustrates, the
concepts of time, space and capital enable us to take a closer look at how sustainable development is
framed in different contexts. Of these time is perhaps the most transparent element of ‘sustainable’
development, emphasizing the notion of futurity (baker 2004), with Lele (1991), noting that the term
‘sustainability simply refers to durability. Turner (1992) develops this notion by referring to the
intergenerational nature of sustainable development, which as we have seen from an ethical perspective,
necessitates providing future generations with the same level of opportunities and resources that current
generations experience. Apart from the ethical connotations of these issues (see Moffatt 1996 and Turner
1993) this notion of sustainability is an intergenerational context presents specific problems to both
policy-makers and ourselves as individuals. As Meadows et al. (1972) highlighted (see figure 1.1), our
human perspective to consider how out own lifestyles and activities will impact on future generations is
highly problematic.
This temporal problem is also reflected by spatial concerns. Since the global concerns
surrounding sustainable development have emerged, the emphasis on the global dimension of sustainable
development has slowly been replaced by local interpretations and policies. This addresses Meadows et
al.’s (1972) second concern, that our ability to appreciate impacts on natural environment reduces when
we move beyond the local scale.

2AC Sustainability K
It is inherently true that we exploit the under-developed and developing in our greed for natural
resources – this mindset makes us miss the big picture that we are also responsible for
environmental destruction and we must stop our consumer oriented lifestyle.
Dipak Chatterjee 08, EzineArticles.com Expert Author and ambassador of India to the EU,
Environmental Sustainability - A Mirage?
In the light of the definitions of Sustainability indicated earlier, the consumer-oriented lifestyle is best
analyzed through a Social Practices Approach to Environment. We have been pushing the blame of an
ever-increasing population for an Environmental crisis towards under-developed and developing nations
so far. Apart from the fact that our home ground is also no lesser evil in this respect, there is a bigger
problem of our consumer-oriented lifestyle that is contributing substantially to killing the existing Natural
resources and has become an important issue to be addressed to reach the goal of sustainability.

2AC North/South K
The term South does not foster an extension of racist ideas- the “South” does not carry the moral
baggage like the term “Third World”. Glyn and Bhaskar1995
{Andrew (fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), Vinit (ecological author), North, the South, and the
Environment, p. 5}

THE DEMAND FOR RENEWABLE UNIFIES DIVERGENT MOVEMENTS AND UPHOLDS
OUR OBLIGATION TO FUTURE GENERATIONS
Andrew Dobson, Professor at Keele University, 2003
(“Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability: Ne’er the Twain Shall Meet?” From Just
Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, ed. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, Bob Evans,
pp 93-94)
The difficulties associated with working up the idea of ‘justice to the environment’ are based, I think, on
the fact that while the sustainability and environmental justice movements are both concerned with the
environment, they have very different objectives in respect of it. The sustainability movement is
concerned to preserve and/or to conserve the non-human natural environment, while the environmental
justice movement aims to divide up the worked environment (particularly the bad bits of it) more fairly.
Sustainability is about preservation and/or conservation; justice is about distribution. While the former
might be a precondition for the latter, this is only so at such a high level of generality as to be meaningless
in respect of drawing any determinate (indeed, sustainability is also a precondition for injustice, as I
pointed out earlier). And I have said enough about the putative functionality of justice for sustainability to
indicate that I regard that relationship to be under-explored and unproven and, in any case, only likely to
be true under quite circumscribed empirical and theoretical conditions.
I suggested above that there are three ways in which the languages of justice and sustainability might be
brought together: (a) the environment as something to be distributed, (b) justice as functional for
sustainability and (c) ‘justice to the environment’. I have argued that in none of these cases is it evident
that the songs of justice and sustainability come from the same hymn sheet, and that we should therefore
expect movements for justice and sustainability to bicker at least as often as they bond. In conclusion,
though, I do think that there is one area where the languages convincingly converge – and this is the
area of intergeneration justice. In discussing the prospects for the idea of ‘justice to the environment’
above, I gave the example of biodiversity and suggest that, for proponents of justice to environment,
species loss is unjust not because it is unfair to humans but because it is unfair to the species that are lost.
This only works as an argument from justice, though, if we can convincingly say that species other than
the human species can be regarded as legitimate recipients of justice. As we saw, this view is a contested
one.
But while species loss may not be unjust in respect of the present generation of humans (since we have
the theoretical opportunity to engage with them before they go), it might be regarded as unjust in respect
of future generations of humans who will be deprived of such an opportunity. If the idea of
intergenerational justice makes sense (and this is less contested than the idea of justice to other species,
but contested nevertheless), then one understanding of what it might involve is the fair distribution of
opportunities across the generations. Opportunities are, in turn, a function of the availability of ‘stuff’

(Dobson 03 continued)
through which opportunities might be realized. This is why in the context of non-renewable resources
that intergenerationally just strategy is to invest, now, in alternative resources that will do the same
job – and therefore provide the same opportunities- as those that are running down. The argument for
conserving biodiversity is the same. Species loss in the present deprives future generations of the
opportunity to ‘enjoy’ the species that are lost. Species loss amounts, therefore, to an intergenerationally
unjust distribution of opportunity. By these lights the objectives of justice (as equal distribution of
opportunities) and sustainability (as the preservation of biodiversity) are the same.

2AC CP Answers

2AC Non-US CP (1/3)

1. CP solves none of the aff:
a. Responsibility- The CP refuses the U.S. obligation to confront our inequitable use of resources an
on-going eco imperialism- means there will be continual cycles of aggression agains the global south
and overconsumption ensuring extinction- westra and chatterjee
b. Modeling- The symbol of US action is key to establish momentum for a global shift in energy
practices- cp fails to access the climate adv- Harris
c. Cooperation- the US admitting guilt and confronting Big Oil and Coal creates a unique moment
for a global dialogue on energy policy to occur- short circuits the cycles of hostility that guarantee
conflict escalation- Gelbspan and westra
d. Indigenous movements- the CP sacrifices Alaskan indigenous peoples by leaving U.S. fossil fuel
subsidies intact- guarantees a cultural genocide that threatens the existence of humanity-
stavenhagen and warren
2. Perm do both- we get double solvency
3. The switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy offers a unique opportunity for the US to foster
international cooperation.
Josef Braml, editor-in-chief of the Yearbook on International Relations at the German Council on Foreign
Relations, 2007
(The Washington Quarterly - Volume 30, Number 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 117-130)
Political and public scrutiny of the security, economic, and environmental costs of the current U.S. energy
policy compels the United States to embark on an alternative path toward a more efficient homegrown
supply of renewable energy. Brookings Institution scholar David Sandalow suggests that "[a]n unusual
political consensus and game-changing technologies give the next president a rare opportunity to address
several of the nation's most important security, environmental, and economic challenges."41 The future
president and other political leaders, recognizing the critical mass of support that has emerged among the
American public, should aggressively move forward on lessening U.S. dependence on traditional fuels.

2AC Non-US CP (2/3)

The worldwide interest in renewable energies creates a unique chance for the United States to reclaim
world leadership, spearheading international cooperation to solve the energy conundrum. Unlike limited
fossil fuels, renewable forms of energy are to a large degree the result of unlimited and mobile brain
power. Although U.S. hard power seems to have lost its effectiveness in securing America's energy
security and economic prosperity, its technological and political leadership potential still holds a
promising alternative for the next president, who would even be more likely to gain that office by
promoting renewable energy alternatives as part of their campaign to seek an end to the U.S. addiction to
oil. [End Page 128]
4. Even when compared to China and India, Americans consistently consume more energy than
other countries-guarantees continued climate impacts
Podobnik 2k2
{Bruce, Department of Sociology, Lewis and Clark College, Journal of World-Systems research, viii, 2,
Spring 2002, 252–274, Special Issue on Global Inequality}
Turning to a more focused analysis of the present situation, we again find that countries exhibit very
divergent patterns of energy consumption. As shown in Figure 3, the average citizen in the United States
consumes five times as much as the world average, ten times as much energy as a typical person in
China, and over thirty times more than a resident of India. Even in such major oil exporting nations as
Venezuela and Iran, per capita consumption of commercial energy resources is less than one half and one
quarter of the US average, respectively. A starker illustration of these inequalities is captured in the
estimation that around 40 percent of the world’s population—over 2 billion people—still has no regular
access to commercial energy products in their homes (World Energy Council 2002).
5. (UN/EU/Multi-actor CP only) Programs of joint intervention are bad- five reasons.
Nikhat Jamal Qaiyum, Research Associate at the Center for Science and Environment, No Date
(“Carbon Debt,” in Jubilee South Journal, http://www.jubileesouth.org/journal/carbon.htm accessed

7/18/08)
There remain several serious problems with JI.
Firstly, there is the economic question. Accepting this scheme would mean that the developing countries
would be letting industrialised countries use up their cheap options for reducing emissions. Once they
have reached high levels of energy efficiency, industrialised countries would have no economic incentive
to invest in developing countries. They would rather invest in their own countries. And if global warming
is still a threat - as it would be because industrialised countries have not taken any action at home - then
there will be pressure on developing countries to cut back on CO2 emissions on their own. And then the
costs of cutting back on CO2 emissions will be very high. And at that stage, in the absence of any agreed
framework, industrialised countries would not provide any support to the developing countries.

2AC Non-US CP (3/3)

Secondly, there is the question of practicality. The JI strategy raises several technical issues. How will we
know that a new technology is being sold to us because it is coming to us as an effort to reduce global
warming or simply because it is coming to us as a matter of common practice in international trade which
brings us newer and more efficient technologies? There is also the fear that companies could use the garb
of JI to dump experimental technologies onto developing countries, which within normal economic
calculations would be unviable in these countries.
Thirdly, even if some of these problems can be sorted out, JI will, nonetheless, demand an extraordinary
level of governance so that interference in the economic processes of a country will increase. Every such
project will have to be screened to ensure that technological dumping is not taking place and developing
countries do not become "technological guinea pigs." Most importantly, accepting JI without a
simultaneous acceptance of the per capita entitlement principle, means accepting a few dollars today in
return for leaving the country’s future development open to unjust pressures.
Fourthly, there is the moral question. JI would make economic sense mostly in the industrial sector. But
the industrial sector mainly benefits the richer sections in developing countries like India, and not the
poor in that country. Therefore, if any JI has to be undertaken, then the projects must be such that they
benefit the poor in the South - like afforestation or watershed development for the benefit of rural
communities or agricultural development in backward areas. The more wood and agricultural biomass is
produced, the more CO2 will be taken out of the atmosphere.
Finally, JI schemes would force developing countries to compete amongst themselves. The US and
several international agencies, including the World Bank were pushing for an approach that combined the
idea of the Norwegian type of JI and emissions trading. Under such a scheme, an agency like the World
Bank could work with developing countries to prepare a portfolio of projects which industrialised
countries can pick from, pay for the extra cost incurred in saving the CO2 that would have otherwise not
been saved, and take credit for it. Those schemes that offer the cheapest CO2 reduction would obviously
be most likely to be picked.
To many, particularly in the South, JI is nothing but a concept of tradeable emissions - under the
command and control of the industrialised countries. It represents shifting the principal responsibility for
adequate carbon reductions within Annex-I or industrialised countries to cheaper options in the South.
Some call this the win-win option. But, Southern NGOs have been strongly opposed to this proposal in
the absence of any global property right system over the global commons. They view JI as a short-term
arrangement where industrialised countries are looking for short-term gains. Such a scheme would mean
that the developing countries would use up their cheap options for reducing emissions and not even get
the credit for it in the global balance sheet of emissions. Therefore, JI can only be permitted if there is a
long-term agreement on the principle of per capita emissions rights of all people in the world.

2AC Multi-Actor CP
Programs of joint intervention are bad- five reasons.
Nikhat Jamal Qaiyum, Research Associate at the Center for Science and Environment, No Date

7/18/08)
There remain several serious problems with JI.
Firstly, there is the economic question. Accepting this scheme would mean that the developing countries
would be letting industrialised countries use up their cheap options for reducing emissions. Once they
have reached high levels of energy efficiency, industrialised countries would have no economic incentive
to invest in developing countries. They would rather invest in their own countries. And if global warming
is still a threat - as it would be because industrialised countries have not taken any action at home - then
there will be pressure on developing countries to cut back on CO2 emissions on their own. And then the
costs of cutting back on CO2 emissions will be very high. And at that stage, in the absence of any agreed
framework, industrialised countries would not provide any support to the developing countries.
Secondly, there is the question of practicality. The JI strategy raises several technical issues. How will we
know that a new technology is being sold to us because it is coming to us as an effort to reduce global
warming or simply because it is coming to us as a matter of common practice in international trade which
brings us newer and more efficient technologies? There is also the fear that companies could use the garb
of JI to dump experimental technologies onto developing countries, which within normal economic
calculations would be unviable in these countries.
Thirdly, even if some of these problems can be sorted out, JI will, nonetheless, demand an extraordinary
level of governance so that interference in the economic processes of a country will increase. Every such
project will have to be screened to ensure that technological dumping is not taking place and developing
countries do not become "technological guinea pigs." Most importantly, accepting JI without a
simultaneous acceptance of the per capita entitlement principle, means accepting a few dollars today in
return for leaving the country’s future development open to unjust pressures. Fourthly, there is the moral
question. JI would make economic sense mostly in the industrial sector. But the industrial sector mainly
benefits the richer sections in developing countries like India, and not the poor in that country. Therefore,
if any JI has to be undertaken, then the projects must be such that they benefit the poor in the South - like
afforestation or watershed development for the benefit of rural communities or agricultural development
in backward areas. The more wood and agricultural biomass is produced, the more CO2 will be taken out
of the atmosphere. Finally, JI schemes would force developing countries to compete amongst themselves.
The US and several international agencies, including the World Bank were pushing for an approach that
combined the idea of the Norwegian type of JI and emissions trading. Under such a scheme, an agency
like the World Bank could work with developing countries to prepare a portfolio of projects which
industrialised

2AC Multi-Actor CP
(Qaiyum continued)
countries can pick from, pay for the extra cost incurred in saving the CO2 that would have otherwise not
been saved, and take credit for it. Those schemes that offer the cheapest CO2 reduction would obviously
be most likely to be picked.
To many, particularly in the South, JI is nothing but a concept of tradeable emissions - under the
command and control of the industrialised countries. It represents shifting the principal responsibility for
adequate carbon reductions within Annex-I or industrialised countries to cheaper options in the South.
Some call this the win-win option. But, Southern NGOs have been strongly opposed to this proposal in
the absence of any global property right system over the global commons. They view JI as a short-term
arrangement where industrialised countries are looking for short-term gains. Such a scheme would mean
that the developing countries would use up their cheap options for reducing emissions and not even get
the credit for it in the global balance sheet of emissions. Therefore, JI can only be permitted if there is a
long-term agreement on the principle of per capita emissions rights of all people in the world.

2AC Tradeable Permits CP

Tradeable Permits fail- lack of enforcement.
Heidi Bachram, Associate Researcher at the Transnational Institute at Oxford, 2004 (“Climate Fraud and
Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases,” Capitalism Nature Socialism Vol. 15, No. 4,
December 2004)
While many hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in setting up emissions
trading schemes all over the world (the UK government alone has spent UK
£215 million on its trial trading scheme), virtually no resources are being channeled
into their regulation. This imbalance can only lead to an emissions market dangerously
reliant upon the integrity of corporations to file accurate reports of emissions
levels, and reductions. In practice, corporations such as PricewaterhouseCoopers
are acting as both accountants for and consultants to polluting firms, and as verifiers
of emission reduction projects. Some entrepreneurial firms such as CH2M Hill and
ICF Consulting are also offering consultancy and brokerage as well as verification
services. These potential conflicts of interest were at the heart of scandals relating
to Enron and Arthur Andersen, who were both pioneers in emissions trading.
Opportunities for fraud abound as the poorly regulated emissions markets
develop. This is inevitable in the laissez-faire environment in which emissions trading
is conducted. In the first year of the UK’s trial emissions trading scheme in 2002,
Environmental Data Services (ENDS) exposed the main corporations involved
in the scheme as having defrauded the system. They found that three chemical
corporations had been given over £93 million in “incentives” by the UK government
for their combined commitments to reduce pollution by participating in the voluntary
trading scheme. However, the corporations had already achieved their promised

reductions under separate compulsory EU-wide regulations. ENDS estimated that
one corporation, DuPont, could make a further £7 million from the market value of
the “carbon” credits generated.9 Therefore the corporations had received millions
of UK taxpayers’ money for doing nothing. This was only highlighted by the independent
work of the ENDS service inasmuch as no government monitoring of the scheme
revealed these instances of fraud. No subsequent action was taken by the government
to respond to these revelations.

Tradeable permits are neo-colonialist and reinforce environmental injustice towards the global
south.
Heidi Bachram, Associate Researcher at the Transnational Institute at Oxford, 2004
(“Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New
Trade in Greenhouse Gases,” Capitalism Nature Socialism Vol. 15, No. 4, December 2004)
The Centre for Science and the Environment India observes that so-called
carbon-fixing projects are in reality opening the door to a new form of colonialism,
which utilizes climate policies to bring about a variation on the traditional means
by which the global South is dominated.13 In particular this trend is seen in the
use of monoculture plantations which allegedly “sequester” or remove CO2 from
the atmosphere. Scientific understanding of the complex interactions between the
biosphere (trees, oceans, and so on) and the troposphere (the lowermost part of the
atmosphere) is limited. Further, there is scientific consensus that the carbon stored
above-ground (i.e. in trees) is not equivalent to the carbon stored below-ground
(i.e. in fossil fuels). Therefore there is no scientific credibility for the practice of
soaking-up pollution using tree plantations.14 Yet entrepreneurial companies such
as FACE International are charging ahead with plantations while propagating the
idea that consumers need not change their lifestyles. This new logic dictates that all
that need be done is to become “carbon neutral” by planting trees. The majority of
these projects are being imposed upon the South.


Emissions trading not only fails, it fuels the status quo logic of consumption and exploitation that
our authors criticize.
(“Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases,” Capitalism Nature
Socialism Vol. 15, No. 4, December 2004)
In the best case scenario that emissions trading is strictly regulated, it is still unlikely
to achieve even the woefully inadequate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. This would be true even if the US joined the rest of
the major polluting countries in ratifying the Protocol. Yet should a foolproof monitoring
system be put in place, the whole system would lose its appeal of being cheap
and unchallenging for corporations, and so any attempt to introduce such methods will
be strongly opposed. Furthermore, the neo-liberal trends in international trade make it
unlikely that emissions markets will ever be tightly regulated. The strategy and tactics
of emissions trading have been adorned with the rationale of neo-liberal ideology;
they have become so institutionalized in international forums that regulatory initiatives
are unlikely to be proposed from within their circles.
Yet even if emissions trading were adequately regulated, the reality is that the
trading in pollution best serves the needs of those with the most to lose from resolving
the climate crisis. As climate change exposes fundamental flaws in the current world
order, only the most challenging responses will have any prospect of success. Transnational fossil fuel
corporations and the governments of industrialized countries will not concede power willingly. That is
why emissions trading is being used to distract
attention away from the changes that are urgently needed. In this way corporations

and government are able to build the illusion of taking action on climate change
while reinforcing current unequal power structures. Emissions trading therefore
becomes an instrument by means of which the current world order, built and founded
on a history of colonialism, wields a new kind of “carbon colonialism.”
As with the colonialism of old, this new colonizing force justifies its interference
through moral rhetoric. As the colonizers seek to resolve climate change, they conveniently “forget” the
true source of the problem. With the looming climate crisis
and the desperate need for action, the resulting course recommended by corporations
and government is not analyzed critically. The debate is transformed, shifting the
blame onto the poor masses of the global South. Lost in this discourse is the reality
that the world’s richest minorities are the culprits who have over-consumed the planet
to the brink of ecological disaster. Instead of reducing in the rich countries, a carbon
dump is created in the poor countries. Thus rich countries can continue in their
unequal over-consumption of the world’s resources.


Tradeable permits fail - they are bought out by richer countries reinscribing global energy
inequities
Nikhat Jamal Qaiyum, Research Associate at the Center for Science and Environment,
No Date

7/18/08)
A full-blown system of tradeable permits would involve placing a cap on emissions; creation of permits
or entitlements that create a right for their owner on a predetermined (per capita) emission rule. Countries
can then further allocate permits to emitters within their borders - for free or in exchange of payments;
and the total pollution quota distributed in this way equals the pollution ceiling. After the distribution,
each country would hold a finite number of entitlements. Countries with high emission levels (the
industrialised countries) will not possess entitlements sufficient to continue their activities at previous
emission levels, and will be forced either to reduce their pollution to the level allowed by permit
allocation, or to purchase permits from other countries who have surplus permits (developing countries in
this case) or who can reduce their pollution more cheaply and sell unused entitlements at a profit. Overall,
this system provides an economic incentive to the high-level polluters to reduce their emissions.xcv
Despite the theoretical appeal of such an international entitlements trading scheme, there are a number of
practical difficulties, which must be addressed before such a scheme could be implemented. While
institutional issues have been concerns for academic debates on the feasibility of tradeable permit
schemes, it is short-term political issues that have truly torpedoed any prospects of immediately
implementing a version of this concept. In particular, what is to some a strength - that the requirement of
permit allocation enables equity issues to be addressed directly - is to a large extent a weakness, in the
context of political battles over resources and the allocation of blame.xcvi
The efficiency of the tradeable permit scheme is premised on competitive market conditions. However,
such a market may well not be competitive. In the case of carbon emissions, it is all too easy to see that
permits to emit carbon would rapidly accumulate in the richest countries, while the developing world
would soon be in a position of having to try and buy back permits from the richer countries in order to
develop. Since the 'price’ might well escalate with time as global targets are tightened, the result could be
very regressive, perpetuating the existing international economic order.xcvii
The INC Secretariat has noted that matters relating to tradeable permits might leave developing countries
in an extremely unfavourable economic position unless the initial allocation of permits was weighted in
their favour. A tradeable permit scheme in the absence of an entitlement allocation would blur the
differentiation of responsibilities by creating a "right to pollute" that can be purchased by those with the
highest level of income. Hence, irrespective of the post-trading outcome, the initial allocation remains
politically contentious.

2AC Cap and Trade CP

Tradeable permits fail internationally
Ross Geldspan, Leading Journalist on Climate Change and Pulitzer Prize winner, 2004
(“Toward a Global Energy Transition,” January, 2004.

http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&q=cache:V9XvNW-
7OvsJ:www.fpif.org/pdf/petropol/ch5.pdf+%22ethic+of+sustainability%22+and+%22renewable+energy
%22, accessed 7/18/08)
However, internationally, the cap-and-trade system breaks down on several counts. It is not enforceable
and is plagued by irreconcilable equity disputes between the countries of the North and South.
Virtually all poor countries would love to go solar; virtually none can afford it.
Industrial and developing countries are at odds over allocating emission rights. The industrial nations par-
ticipating in the Kyoto process determined that each country’s emission rights would be based on its 1990
levels to protect their economies. By contrast, develop-ing countries contend that only a per capita
allocation is fair. But if the emission quota for each U.S. citizen were the same as for each citizen of
India, that would decimate the U.S. economy.
Another equity issue was articulated by the late Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre for Science and
Environment in New Delhi. Agarwal criticized the provisions in the Kyoto Protocol that allow industrial
nations to buy limitless amounts of cheap emission reductions in developing countries and to bank them
indefinitely into the future. This means that when developing nations eventually become obligated to cut
their own emissions (under a subsequent round of the Kyoto Protocol), they will be left with only the
most expensive options. This clearly constitutes a form of environmental colonialism.
International carbon trading cannot be the primary vehicle to propel a worldwide energy transition. Even
if all the problems with monitoring, enforcement, and equity could be resolved, it could at best, be used as
a fine-tuning instrument to help countries meet the final 10 to 15% of their obligations.
We simply can’t finesse nature with accounting tricks.

2AC States CP (1/2)
1. Federalism is founded on the sacrifice of America’s marginalized subaltern- it is a means of

shifting responsibility for ecological justice causing the impacts building now.
Daniel R Faber and Deborah McCarthy, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern
University and Debbie McCarthy Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Charleston, 2003
(“Neo-liberalism, Globalization and the Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Linking Sustainability and
Environmental Justice” From Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, ed. Julian
On the other hand, increased rates of environmental exploitation are being achieved by such measures as:
extracting greater quantities of natural resources of greater quality more quickly and at less cost; cutting
production costs by restoration; adopting new production processes (such as biotechnology in agriculture)
that increase productivity but are also more polluting or destructive of the environment; and so forth.
American business is producing these results through a general assault on the past gains of the ecology
movement and a general offensive upon the policies and programs that make up the environmental
protection state. The result is increased dumping of ever more toxic pollution into the environment,
particularly in poor working-class neighborhoods and communities of color; more destructive extraction
of raw materials from this country’s most unique and treasured landscapes, especially Native land and
natural resources belonging to other subaltern groups; a deterioration in consumer product safety (and
attempts to limit corporate liability for defective or damaging products); the disappearance of ever more
natural species and habitats; suburban sprawl; and a general assault on those programs and policies
designed to protect the environment. In short, to sustain the process of capital accumulation and higher
profits in the new global economy, American capital is increasingly relying on ecologically unsustainable
forms of production which disproportionately impact communities of color and lower income
members of the working class-sectors, which are underrepresented in the traditional environmental
movement.
For instance, under the devolution policies of ‘new federalism’ and the rhetoric of ‘states-rights’,
governmental responsibilities are being shifted from the federal government to the states. The neo-liberal
hope is that many states will neglect their responsibilities to engage in bidding wars with other states to
attract capital to their home regions by offering more favorable investment conditions, including less
worker and environmental regulation and enforcement (ie to aid in efforts at cost minimization). One
reason that economic problems in the northern ‘rust belt’ are deeper than in most of the rest of the country
has been the disproportionate relocation of capital to the ‘sun-belt’ in search of cheaper labor, lower taxes
and real estate costs and less stringent environmental regulations. Increased capital mobility is thus a
primary mechanism by which American business is restructuring itself to minimize costs. Hence, the
political-economic power base since the 1980’s has shifted to the south (through such figures as Carter,
Perot, Bush, Clinton, and Gore) and west (Reagan, Cheney and McCain).
2. PERM DO BOTH
3. THE US DEFINES ITS DESTRUCTIVE ENERGY PRACTICES ON AN INTERNATIONAL

SCALE, AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE KYOTO TREATY. THE ONLY TRUE REVERSAL OF

THIS DAMAGING MINDSET CAN COME FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT- THATS
LOHMANN
2AC States CP (2/2)
4. SOLVENCY DEFICIT- THE US HAS TO STEP UP AS AN INTERNATIONAL MODEL. THIS

IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING OTHER NATIONS FROM CONTINUING THE
DECIMATION OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH. STATE ACTION HAS NO HISTORY OF BEING
MODELED AND SO CANNOT ACCESS OUR IMPACTS- THATS HARRIS
5. CULTURE – OUR CURRENT OIL ADDICTION IS THREATENING THE VERY EXISTENCE

OF ALASKAN INDIGENOUS CULTURE FOR TWO REASONS.
A. AS WARMING GETS WORSE THE PERMAFROST BEGINS TO THAW, THUS

DESTROYING THE SUPPLY LINES THAT TRIBES RELY UPON FOR SUSTENANCE AND
ENERGY.
B. THE PRICE OF OIL INCREASING CAUSES EVEN MORE DIFFICULTY TO FUEL

RESERVATIONS.
A LOSS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURE MUST BE PREVENTED BECAUSE IT IS CRUCIAL TO

OUR COLLECTIVE EXISTENCE – IT PROVIDES US WITH INSIGHT THAT IS NECCESARY
TO STEER AWAY FROM THE VIOLENT LOGIC OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM IN
THE STATUS QUO.
COUNTERPLAN CAN’T SOLVE BECAUSE ONLY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS

JURISDICTION OVER RESERVATIONS, STATES HAVE NO EFFECT
Office of Congressional & Intergovernmental Affairs, 2000
{“American Indian & Alaska Native Tribal Government Policy, <http://www.ci.doe.gov/indianbk.pdf>,
2000}
This Policy sets forth the principles to be followed by the Department of Energy (DOE) to ensure an
effective implementation of a government to government relationship with American Indian and Alaska
Native tribal governments. This Policy is based on the United States Constitution, treaties, Supreme
Court decisions, Executive Orders, statutes, existing federal policies, tribal laws, and the dynamic
political relationship between Indian nations and the Federal government1. The most important doctrine
derived from this relationship is the trust responsibility of the United States to protect tribal sovereignty
and self-determination, tribal lands, assets, resources, and treaty and other federally recognized and
reserved rights. This Policy provides direction to all Departmental officials, staff, and contractors
regarding fulfillment of trust obligations and other responsibilities arising from Departmental actions
which may potentially impact American Indian and Alaska Native traditional, cultural and religious
values and practices; natural resources; treaty and other federally recognized and reserved rights

2AC Disadvantage Answers

2AC Econ DA – Case T/ DA

Renewables key to solving the economy – laundry list
Despite the horrendous problems cited above, the future need not be bleak. A number of studies have
shown that energy conservation and the use of renewable sources of energy would in fact stimulate
the economy:
1) A World Wildlife Fund study, "Clean Energy: Jobs for America's Future," indicates that energy
efficiency policies and development of renewable energy resources could result in 700,000 new jobs
in the U.S. over the next nine years and 1.3 million new jobs by 2020. (WorldWildlifeFund.Org Link
To Acrobat PDF File)
2) A report from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) entitled "The 2002 Farm Bill:
Revitalizing the Farm Economy through Renewable Energy Development," shows that developing
our nation's on-farm renewable energy resources (bioenergy, wind, solar, and geothermal) has the
potential to boost farmer income, create jobs in rural communities, diversify our nation's energy
market, and protect our environment.
3) A Department of Energy study, "Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future," reports that a government-
led program to encourage energy efficiency could reduce growth in electricity demand by 20 to 47
percent in the U.S.—a savings equivalent of 265 to 610 300-megawatt power plants.(Ornl.Gov
Link;CleanEnergy.Org Link; Ems.Org Link )
In fact, if the U.S. does not invest in the new technologies, it could be left in the technological
development dust as other countries cash in on the boom.

2AC Econ DA – Case T/ DA

Even in current society, a reduction of emissions can result in a larger economy.
Roberts and Parks 2007
Center for International Policy Research at theCollege of William and Mary), A Climate of Injustice,

2AC Econ DA – No Turns Case

THE NEG IS AN APOLOGIST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL COLONIALISM- ARGUMENTS FOR
ECONOMIC “STABILITY” ARE BASED ON THE NECESSITY OF GLOBAL INEQUALITY
WITH NO BASIS IN FACT
Duncan McLaren, Chief Executive, Friends of the Earth Scotland, 2003
(“Environmental Space, Equity and the Ecological Debt” From Just Sustainabilities: Development in an
Unequal World, ed. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, Bob Evans, p. 26)
In practice, even whether (not merely how) we should actively seek to reduce international inequalities in
resource consumption is still a topic of political debate. The evidence of global environmental limits such
as climate stability adds a new urgency to this debate. But many economists are unconcerned by
inequalities in income and resource consumption and some even see them as necessary to the effective
functioning of the economy. Inequalities increase overall savings and thus investment, or provide
incentives, they argue (see for example Galor and Tsiddon, 1994 or Birdsall and Graham, 1999). But such
arguments translate economic dogmas from the national scale – where inequalities can at least
theoretically be argued to encourage economic effort and risk taking – to the international, where there is
no evidence for the relevance of such arguments.
Others raise practical concerns. Even were there moral reasons to reduce inequalities, they say,
developing countries have little scope to consume more resources so it would not matter if the North
continues to take the lion’s share. Such apologists for environmental colonialism are generally more
concerned about population growth as a driving force of environmental damage, rather than consumption
levels. And although content to raise the specter that resource limits might lead to real falls in per capita
consumption for the world’s poorest people, few actively support reducing consumption in richer
countries to allow business critics who cite the potential economic (and, with remarkable hypocrisy,
social) impacts of cutting resource use in the North as reason s to delay, or entirely avoid action. This
ignores the historical evidence that increased resource consumption rates in developing countries are
associated with declining population growth rates – as part of a complex process involving increased
economic security, greater equality between the sexes and improved education (see for example Mazur,
1994)

2AC Politics/Econ DA
THE NEGATIVE’S DEMAND FOR SHORT TERM POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY IS A
DELIBERATE ASSAULT ON THE SUBALTERN, SACRIFICING THEIR LONG TERM
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
Not all citizens, however, equally bear the ‘externalized’ social and ecological costs of the assaults by
American business. In order to bolster profits and competitiveness, companies typically adopt strategies
for the exploitation of nature that are not only economically ‘efficient’ but politically ‘expedient’ (that
offer the path of least social resistance). The less political power a community of people commands, the
fewer resources a community possesses to defend itself; the lower the level of community awareness and
mobilization against potential ecological threats, the more likely they are to experience arduous
environmental and human health problems at the hands of capital and the state. In the US (as elsewhere in
the world), it is the most politically oppressed segments of the population, or the subaltern –
dispossessed peoples of color, industrial laborers, the underemployed and the working poor (especially
women), rural farmers and farm workers, and undocumented immigrants – whom are being selectively
victimized to the greatest extent by corporate practices (Johnston, 1994, p11; see also Agbola and Alabi,
Chapter 13). The disenfranchised of America are serving as the dumping ground for American
business, a fact that is often blatantly advertised. A 1984 report by Cerrell Associates for the California
Waste Management Board, for instance, openly recommended that polluting industries and the state
locate hazardous waste facilities in ‘lower socio-economic neighborhoods’ because those communities
had a much lower likelihood of offering political opposition (Roque, 1993, p25-28). In this respect, the
prosperity of the American business community is predicated on specific forms of unsustainable
production that disproportionately impact oppressed peoples of color and the working poor.
It is now clear that the economic crisis tendencies of the 1970s-1980s have become increasingly displaced
to the realm of nature in the 1990s-2000s, assuming the form of ecological crisis tendencies; while the
short term economic health of the salariat and corporate owners is being increasingly secured through
the long term sacrifice of the environmental health of the subaltern – peoples of color and the poor
(including developing world peoples). In this respect, the process of global economic restructuring, which
neo-liberalism has helped facilitate, is thus responsible for the deterioration in ecological and
working/living conditions of the poor and people of color. The increased hardships of both the subaltern
and their environment are thus two sides of the same political-economic coin and are now so dialectically

2AC Politics/Econ DA
(Faber and Mccarthy 03 continued)
related (if not essential) to each other as to become part of the same historical process. As a result, the
issues of sustainable development and social/environmental justice have surfaced together as in no other
period in world history. This chapter will explore the challenges confronting the environmental justice
movement as it tries to forge a truly participatory ecological democracy capable of building a more just
and sustainable society.

2AC Federalism DA
Federalism is founded on the sacrifice of America’s marginalized subaltern- it is a means of shifting
responsibility for ecological justice.
On the other hand, increased rates of environmental exploitation are being achieved by such measures as:
extracting greater quantities of natural resources of greater quality more quickly and at less cost; cutting
production costs by restoration; adopting new production processes (such as biotechnology in agriculture)
that increase productivity but are also more polluting or destructive of the environment; and so forth.
American business is producing these results through a general assault on the past gains of the ecology
movement and a general offensive upon the policies and programs that make up the environmental
protection state. The result is increased dumping of ever more toxic pollution into the environment,
particularly in poor working-class neighborhoods and communities of color; more destructive extraction
of raw materials from this country’s most unique and treasured landscapes, especially Native land and
natural resources belonging to other subaltern groups; a deterioration in consumer product safety (and
attempts to limit corporate liability for defective or damaging products); the disappearance of ever more
natural species and habitats; suburban sprawl; and a general assault on those programs and policies
designed to protect the environment. In short, to sustain the process of capital accumulation and higher
profits in the new global economy, American capital is increasingly relying on ecologically unsustainable
forms of production which disproportionately impact communities of color and lower income
members of the working class-sectors, which are underrepresented in the traditional environmental
movement.
For instance, under the devolution policies of ‘new federalism’ and the rhetoric of ‘states-rights’,
governmental responsibilities are being shifted from the federal government to the states. The neo-liberal
hope is that many states will neglect their responsibilities to engage in bidding wars with other states to
attract capital to their home regions by offering more favorable investment conditions, including less
worker and environmental regulation and enforcement (ie to aid in efforts at cost minimization). One
reason that economic problems in the northern ‘rust belt’ are deeper than in most of the rest of the country
has been the disproportionate relocation of capital to the ‘sun-belt’ in search of cheaper labor, lower taxes
and real estate costs and less stringent environmental regulations. Increased capital mobility is thus a
primary mechanism by which American business is restructuring itself to minimize costs. Hence, the
political-economic power base since the 1980’s has shifted to the south (through such figures as Carter,
Perot, Bush, Clinton, and Gore) and west (Reagan, Cheney and McCain).

2AC Energy Prices DA (1/2)

1. THE NEGATIVE’S DEMAND FOR SHORT TERM POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY IS A
DELIBERATE ASSAULT ON THE SUBALTERN, SACRIFICING THEIR LONG TERM
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
Not all citizens, however, equally bear the ‘externalized’ social and ecological costs of the assaults by
American business. In order to bolster profits and competitiveness, companies typically adopt strategies
for the exploitation of nature that are not only economically ‘efficient’ but politically ‘expedient’ (that
offer the path of least social resistance). The less political power a community of people commands, the
fewer resources a community possesses to defend itself; the lower the level of community awareness and
mobilization against potential ecological threats, the more likely they are to experience arduous
environmental and human health problems at the hands of capital and the state. In the US (as elsewhere in
the world), it is the most politically oppressed segments of the population, or the subaltern –
dispossessed peoples of color, industrial laborers, the underemployed and the working poor (especially
women), rural farmers and farm workers, and undocumented immigrants – whom are being selectively
victimized to the greatest extent by corporate practices (Johnston, 1994, p11; see also Agbola and Alabi,
Chapter 13). The disenfranchised of America are serving as the dumping ground for American
business, a fact that is often blatantly advertised. A 1984 report by Cerrell Associates for the California
Waste Management Board, for instance, openly recommended that polluting industries and the state
locate hazardous waste facilities in ‘lower socio-economic neighborhoods’ because those communities
had a much lower likelihood of offering political opposition (Roque, 1993, p25-28). In this respect, the
prosperity of the American business community is predicated on specific forms of unsustainable
production that disproportionately impact oppressed peoples of color and the working poor.
It is now clear that the economic crisis tendencies of the 1970s-1980s have become increasingly displaced
to the realm of nature in the 1990s-2000s, assuming the form of ecological crisis tendencies; while the
short term economic health of the salariat and corporate owners is being increasingly secured through
the long term sacrifice of the environmental health of the subaltern – peoples of color and the poor
(including developing world peoples). In this respect, the process of global economic restructuring, which
neo-liberalism has helped facilitate, is thus responsible for the deterioration in ecological and
working/living conditions of the poor and people of color. The increased hardships of both the subaltern
and their environment are thus two sides of the same political-economic coin and are now so dialectically
related (if not essential) to each other as to become part of the same historical process. As a result, the
issues of sustainable development and social/environmental justice have surfaced together as in no other
period in world history. This chapter will explore the challenges confronting the environmental justice
movement as it tries to forge a truly participatory ecological democracy capable of building a more just
and sustainable society.

2AC Energy Prices DA (2/2)

2. THE DISAD IS ENSNARED WITHIN THE LOGIC OF THE STATUS QUO AND
REACCESSES CASE IMPACTS- PRIORITIZING THE WELL BEING OF INDUSTRIES OVER
THE NEED FOR ENERGY EQUALITY MAINTAINS GLOBAL SACRIFICE.
3. THE NEG IS AN APOLOGIST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL COLONIALISM- ARGUMENTS

FOR ECONOMIC “STABILITY” ARE BASED ON THE NECESSITY OF GLOBAL
INEQUALITY
Duncan McLaren, Chief Executive, Friends of the Earth Scotland, 2003
(“Environmental Space, Equity and the Ecological Debt” From Just Sustainabilities: Development in an
Unequal World, ed. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, Bob Evans, p. 26)
In practice, even whether (not merely how) we should actively seek to reduce international inequalities in
resource consumption is still a topic of political debate. The evidence of global environmental limits such
as climate stability adds a new urgency to this debate. But many economists are unconcerned by
inequalities in income and resource consumption and some even see them as necessary to the effective
functioning of the economy. Inequalities increase overall savings and thus investment, or provide
incentives, they argue (see for example Galor and Tsiddon, 1994 or Birdsall and Graham, 1999). But such
arguments translate economic dogmas from the national scale – where inequalities can at least
theoretically be argued to encourage economic effort and risk taking – to the international, where there is
no evidence for the relevance of such arguments.
Others raise practical concerns. Even were there moral reasons to reduce inequalities, they say,
developing countries have little scope to consume more resources so it would not matter if the North
continues to take the lion’s share. Such apologists for environmental colonialism are generally more
concerned about population growth as a driving force of environmental damage, rather than consumption
levels. And although content to raise the specter that resource limits might lead to real falls in per capita
consumption for the world’s poorest people, few actively support reducing consumption in richer
countries to allow business critics who cite the potential economic (and, with remarkable hypocrisy,
social) impacts of cutting resource use in the North as reason s to delay, or entirely avoid action. This
ignores the historical evidence that increased resource consumption rates in developing countries are
associated with declining population growth rates – as part of a complex process involving increased
economic security, greater equality between the sexes and improved education (see for example Mazur,
1994)
4. WE ACCESS AND TURN THEIR IMPACT. REES AND WESTRA EXPLAIN THAT THE
ENERGY INEQUALITY CREATED BY THE CURRENT NORTH SOUTH DIVIDE IS THE
ROOT CAUSE OF ALL VIOLENCE BECAUSE IT HAS DISASTROUS ECOLOGICAL AND
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES THAT SYSTEMICALLY BUILD IN MASSIVE DESTRUCTION.

2AC Utilitarianism Answers

Util Bad – Frontline (1/7)

1. THIS IS THE LANGAUGE OF BIG FOSSIL FUEL NOT A STANDARD FOR THE COMMON
GOOD- THE DEMAND FOR STRINGENT COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS IS WHAT PREVENTS
A MEANINGFUL SHIFT TO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY AND SYSTEMATICALLY
SACRIFICES THE WORLDS MARGINALIZED - THAT’S LOHMANN AND WESTRA
2. OUR IMPACTS OUTWEIGH- GLOBAL EXTINCTION IS INEVITABLE ABSENT

REORIENTING OUR ENERGY POLICY- THEIR CLAIM THAT THE AFF IS NOT
“UTILITARIAN” IS JUST ANOTHER MOVE TO STYMIE DEBATE ON THE “HOW” OF
ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY- THAT’S CHATTERJEE
3. NO LINK TO THEIR OFFENSE- WE CAN STILL CALCULATE IN THE WORLD OF THE

AFFIRMATIVE- ITS JUST A QUESTION OF HOW – WE DEMAND A SHIFT TO LONG
TERM, MORE HUMAN-CENTERED ANALYSIS-THAT’S CHATTERJEE


4. THE REFUSAL OF ETHICS IS THE BASIS OF ECO-VIOLENCE- A MEANINGFUL
DEMAND FOR U.S. RESPONSIBILITY IS CRITICAL TO END THE OIL ADDICTION
Brown 2k2
{Donald A., Director Pennsylvania Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy, 2002,
American Heat}


(Brown 2002 continued)


THE DEMAND FOR UTILITARIANISM IS AN ETHNO-CENTRIC ONE WHICH JUSTIFIES
INACTION IN THE FACE OF GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL HARM
Brown 2k2
American Heat


(Brown 2002 continued)


Utilitarian methodology is unsuitable for environmental issues.
Brown 2k2
American Heat, dan}


Util is a bankrupt framework in which only the elite are protected. While the United States has
profited off the exploitation of fossil fuels, the people most hurt by its effects are not in the Global
North. People in these countries will experience multiple impacts to a much higher degree than we
will in the United States because their economic status makes adaptation nearly impossible.
BROWN, ‘2
{Donald A., Director Pennsylvania Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy, 2002}

2AC Util/Growth Good

THE DOMINANT DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM IS THE BASIS OF PLANETARY
DESTRUCTION, SPIRITUAL WASTE, AND BROAD-BASED VIOLENCE AGAINST THE
POOR- THEIR EVIDENCE IS PROPOGANDA FROM AN ELITE TRYING TO MAINTAIN
THEIR POWER
Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, Bob Evans, p 107)
To summarize, the dominant ‘development’ paradigm has brought us to the point where sustained material
growth destroys ecosystems, impoverishes the planet, diminishes the human spirit and visits violence
upon whole poor communities. But it also further enriches a powerful minority, mainly the already
wealthy – and this poses a major barrier to change. Those who benefit most from the prevailing
development model are isolated by distance and wealth from its negative consequences. Their feedback
from ‘development’ is all positive. Since in the real world wealth is very much equated with power, those
who would ‘save the world’ will have to overcome the resistance of those who perceive that their interest
lie with the status quo. The increasing pace and scale of human-induced ecological change underscores
the urgency of this task.

2AC Responsibility Extension

The global north is using energy at a rate not seen in the global south, and the global north is
effectually responsible for most of the green-house gases in the atmosphere.
Podobnik 2k2
While many people in the developing world struggle to gain access tomodern energy technologies,
citizens and companies in the global north are generally consuming energy resources at an unsustainable
rate. The high levels of energy use found in wealthy countries are the source of most of the green-
house gases emitted into the atmosphere today.[8] In contrast, most citizens in the global south
produce relatively modest energy-related greenhouse emissions.Since these gases remain in the
atmosphere for long periods of time, it should also be noted that nations of the developed north have
emitted most of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere over
the last two centuries.

2AC Responsibility Extensions

Even if there are other polluters, the US is responsible for a massive over-extension of its per capita
share.
Suzanne Jeffery, Staff Reporter for the Socialist Worker, 2008
(“Climate Chaos and the Global South,” February 6, 2008. The Socialist Worker Online.
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14069, accessed 7.23.2008)
The attitude of Gordon Brown is not markedly different. Comments about British obligations are usually
preceded with the reassuring statistics that Britain accounts for only 2 percent of global emissions.
What does not make the same kind of headline news is the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per
person (per capita) in China and India.
It is important to look at per capita emissions because they paint a very different picture of the real
contribution played by the average person in poorer countries.
Put simply, India emits 1.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person, China 3.5 tonnes, Britain 9.6 tonnes and
the US a whopping 20.2 tonnes per person. The global average is 4.2 tonnes – much higher than both
India and China.
The UN Human Development Report last year pointed out that the US state of Texas has higher emissions
than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and that 19 million people in New York state have a bigger carbon
footprint than 766 million people in the world’s poorest 50 countries.
To ignore per capita emissions in favour of total emissions per country also overlooks the way in which,
in a globalized economy, Western multinationals have played a central role in the rapid growth of the
Chinese and Indian economies.

The growth in India and China in particular is one that Western corporations have hugely benefited from
and have consciously driven in a scramble for cheap labour and markets.
The global South is being disproportionately affected by global warming as a result of the
irresponsible North.
Professor Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin
Forest Ecosystem, “Climate; the World Ignores Change at its Own Peril”, December 19, 2007, The
Nation, Africa News.
THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change estimates that temperatures will rise by
1.8° to 4° C this century. A less stable climate will bring massive ecological and economic
challenges.
Already, we see that droughts, floods, hurricanes and heat waves are becoming more common. Will
we watch as catastrophic disruption to Earth's environment and its people occurs on an unimaginable
scale? Or will we change course and work together to mitigate the effects of global warming?
For the global South, and especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury. Arresting the
world's warming and protecting and restoring our natural systems are issues of life and death for
much of the world's population.
In its recent report forecasting the effects of global warming on Africa, the IPCC predicts that the
volume in rivers will fall as temperatures rise, making it harder to access clean water. Some regions
will receive more rain, allowing cultivation of new crops.
BUT OTHERS, ESPECIALLY in southern and western Africa, will become drier, fuelling
desertification. As rainfall patterns shift, the IPCC estimates that by 2100, crop revenues could fall
by 90 per cent, devastating Africa's small-scale farmers. Climate change will also create new malaria
zones, affecting 80 million people.
Resource scarcity made worse by global warming, will cause conflicts to flare up. We see this in
Darfur, where unscrupulous leaders have used clashes over resources to stir up massive violence.
Africa's greenhouse gas emissions are negligible compared to the industrialised world's, and those of the
emerging economic giants of China and India, yet those of us living in the southern hemisphere are likely
to be most affected by global warming.

2AC Responsibility Extension
There is a massive gap in the amount of emissions per capita between an American and a person
from the Global South- we contribute more than industrial powerhouses like China and India.
Roberts and Parks 2007
Center for International Policy Research at the College of William and Mary), A Climate of Injustice,


Shifting blame to other emitters like India and China is an excuse for inaction produced by status
quo rulers, and stops us from taking effective action to correct the moral wrongs of our
environmental policy.
Suzanne Jeffery, Staff Reporter for the Socialist Worker, 2008
(“Climate Chaos and the Global South,” February 6, 2008. The Socialist Worker Online.
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14069, accessed 7.23.2008)
It’s crucial to reject the misinformation of our rulers, who seek to blame others in order to obscure their
own role or to provide a cover for their own inaction. Putting the onus on China and India to stop climate
change assumes that the West has already taken action. In fact emissions across the Western countries
continue to grow.
The destruction of our environment is occurring because of the economic priorities of our system. It is
because of the drive for profit inbuilt into the world economy, and those driving and benefiting from it are
the rich of the world – wherever they locate themselves.
The answers in India and China both to climate change and development are the same as they are the
world over – economic and social organization based on need and environmental sustainability not blind
competition in the pursuit of profit.
We should not be lining up to blame the ordinary people of India and China for climate change.
Instead we should be ready to make common cause with those around the world suffering the
consequences of an environmentally unsustainable system and struggling to challenge it.

Even when compared to China and India, Americans consistently consume more energy than other
countries. Podobnik 2k2
Turning to a more focused analysis of the present situation, we again find that countries exhibit very
divergent patterns of energy consumption. As shown in Figure 3, the average citizen in the United States
consumes five times as much as the world average, ten times as much energy as a typical person in
China, and over thirty times more than a resident of India. Even in such major oil exporting nations as
Venezuela and Iran, per capita consumption of commercial energy resources is less than one half and one
quarter of the US average, respectively. A starker illustration of these inequalities is captured in the
estimation that around 40 percent of the world’s population—over 2 billion people—still has no regular
access to commercial energy products in their homes (World Energy Council 2002).

Miscellaneous

2AC Extra-T
1. We meet- We directly increase incentives, Gelbspan indicates that the only way we can have any
effective incentives is through practically banning the incentives for fossil fuels.
2. Counter-interpretation- Incentives can be both positive or negative

American Heritage Dictionary, 06 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/incentive)
n. Something, such as the fear of punishment or the expectation of reward, that induces action
or motivates effort.
3. We meet our Counter Interpretation: In order to induce action in the realm alternative energy it
is necessary to shift fossil fuel subsides to alternative energy subsides.
4. Prefer our counter-interpretation
a. Fairness: Under their definition there could be no effective plan because they exclude
effective incentives.
b. Real World: I don’t talk down to my parents because I have an incentive to avoid
punishment meaning it can be positive or negative.
5. The way that incentives work now is that we prioritize the slow, economically stable transition
that their interpretation demands. This is exactly what is causing the environmental destruction,
suffering, and massive inequality because we prioritize the view of what’s best for the economy
instead of radically shifting to a more meaningful viewpoint.
6. No resolutional basis – It just demands that we increase incentives, doesn’t mandate that we must
provide new money.
7. Counter-Interpretation: alternative energy incentives must trade off with the traditional energy
incentives in place now.
8. Prefer this over their interpretation
A. Prevents 2AC clarification - tons of affs will claim the effect of our plan, just phrase
their plans in vaguer ways that make for worse debates in which the negative has to argue against a
moving target.

2AC Extra-T
B. Gives neg more ground – cutting fossil fuel subsidies makes big business angry which
gives negs huge politics and Bizcon links
C. Education – Creates more meaningful topic education since it forces teams to actually
develop arguments of traditional vs. modern energy. The tradeoff divides up the ground evenly.
9. Preventing us from having debates about viability of shifting subsidies is what prevents
meaningful public debate. This makes us complicit and seeds the power to big business and
corporations which outweighs their fairness concerns because it begins to access our case impacts in
the real world. That’s Gelbspan.

Martin
Focusing on nuclear war as the terminal impact will prevent real solutions to nuclear war by
isolating antiwar movements and concentrating power in the hands of the elites.
Martin – 1984 (Brian, Research Associate Dept. of Mathematics, Australian National University,
“Extinction Politics” SCIENTISTS AGAINST NUCLEAR ARMS NEWSLETTER UPDATE, No. 16,
May, p. 5-6, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/84sana1.html)
A related factor linked with nuclear extinctionism is a belief that nuclear war is the most pressing issue
facing humans. I disagree, both morally and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has
become the most important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the
actuality of massive suffering and millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can
justifiably take precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war. Nuclear war may
be the greatest threat to the collective lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the poor,
nonwhite Third World peoples, other issues are more pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to
nuclear war as an issue is to assume that nuclear war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major
social institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply
embedded in such structures - as I would argue[9] - then to try to prevent war without making common
cause with other social movements will not be successful politically. This means that the antiwar
movement needs to link its strategy and practice with other movements such as the feminist movement,
the workers' control movement and the environmental movement. A focus on nuclear extinction also
encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop nuclear war, since there seems no other
means for quickly overcoming the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article about nuclear
winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to the presidents of the United States and of the
Soviet Union.[10] But if war has deep institutional roots, then appealing to elites has no chance of
success. This has been amply illustrated by the continual failure of disarmament negotiations and appeals
to elites over the past several decades. Just about everyone, including generals and prime ministers, is
opposed to nuclear war. The question is what to do about it. Many people have incorporated doomsday
ideas into their approaches. My argument here is that antiwar activists should become much more critical
of the assumptions underlying extinction politics.

Cuomo
Their impact framework assumes a world where the “problem of war” is being addressed in the
status quo—this ignores the structural violence going on now masking the militarism that produces
that problem—turning their disads
Cuomo, 1996 (Chris, Hypatia 11.4, “War is not just an event: reflections on the significance of everyday
violence,” http://www.ccuomo.org/War23.htm)
Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into
the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses.
For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-
based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained
resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as
givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the
absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those
whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of
militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only
regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis
control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability
of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters
drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep
resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as
necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-
sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military
institutions and other militaristic agents of the state.

Chaloupka
Political action taken under the threat of the Mushroom cloud conditions individuals to
repress life and negate its positive aspects
William Chaloupka '92, Professor and Chair of Political Science, PH.D. in Political science,
Knowing Nukes pg 37-38
In nuclearism, two related effects gather beneath the image of such seemingly progressive goals
as arms control. First, the focus on survival that informs antinuclearism reflects a narrow view of
life, overshadowing almost any potential reconstuction of the processes that actually constitute
that life. To rephrase another Foucauldian position, nuclear technology does not merely repress
life and negate prospects; it forms practices that actively shape what life will be. The second
effect follows from the first. Under the sign of "survival," all sorts of surveillance, discipline, and
convert operations can positively act to reshape that self (and along with it, social life). Unless
we assume a psychological (rather than political) mechanism, we cannot then say that the fear or
trauma of thinking about nuclearism necessarily induces a certain paralysis, or inability to act.
The reluctance to politicize problems is always already present in a society that medicalizes,
psychologizes, or otherwise professionalizes every worry. Under the nuclear umbrella, that
reluctance expands. The cult of the expert-- always a depoliticizing ploy -- accumulates when the
experts can produce such extravagant displays as the mushroom cloud. In turn, those experts
remind us that new forms of surveillance are obviously "called for" by the new common facts of
our social life. "Verification" -- the new euphemism for surveillance -- is now unanimously
endorsed. Even critics of militarism answer qualms about verification with an obvious
commitment to the hyperverification promised by efficient, omnipresent spy satellites. Rather
than taking offense at such devices, arms control advocates praise them as the precondition for
"trust."

Chaloupka
Nuclear War rhetoric leads to politics of governmental control through self disciplining
Knowing Nukes pg 39

Chaloupka
Nuclear rhetoric is used to justify control surveillance, disciplinary control, and

annihilation of populations

Knowing Nukes Pg 16

Chaloupka
Nuclear war rhetoric creates a self fulfilling prophecy in which the fear of nuclear war
encourages proliferation and war itself.
Knowing Nukes pg 61-62


Negative Arguments

North/South K
Their notion that we should view the problem as a dilemma between North and South is
fundamentally flawed. This ideology is grounded in the false premise that the South is not to blame
at all – which prevents addressing the roots of the problem.
Peter J. Newell is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
He has published widely on the political economy of the environment, “Race, Class, and the Global
Politics of Environmental Inequality”, August 2005, MIT Press,
It is increasingly unhelpful to view global environmental politics, either in terms of the ecological change
processes which it seeks to manage (issue-based analysis) or the institutions that are constructed (regime
analysis) in terms of generic categories of North and South, as Marian Miller’s work made clear. When
the focus moves from reading politics from geography in this way to focus on intra and transnational
social and economic divisions, looking for example at “Souths in the North” and “Norths in the South,”1
we have an entry point for assessing the importance of race and class to inequality in global
environmental politics. This shift obliges us to relate inequalities within societies to economic injustices
between them. From an historical materialist perspective, as Wood argues, the class polarizations of
capitalism that have been associated with the North-South divide increasingly also produce “the
impoverishment of so-called ‘under-classes’ within advanced capitalist countries.”2 Indeed, working class
communities are regarded as convenient depositories of the social and environmental hazards of industrial
activity because those communities, as Bullard and Wright suggest, have a “third view of development—
that is, any development is better than no development at all.”3 Given these patterns, it becomes more
helpful to look at those social groups that generate most and benefit most from wasteful and destructive
patterns of resource exploitation as well as those groups that suffer the worst consequences of global
environmental change and the social injustices that it serves to compound. This provides us with a clearer
sense of who resists progressive policy change and why, and who suffers most and is in need of the
greatest protection.
Analysis of this sort can provide a useful point of departure for constructing counter-hegemonic coalitions
around social movement or policy based interventions that are better placed to protect the rights of poorer
and more vulnerable groups.

North/South K
Discourse of the North/South divide is fundamentally flawed in that it homogenizes populations –

and so should be rejected
Adekson, Adedayo. "Problematising the Seeming North-South 'Divide': A Theoretical and

Empirical Overview" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association,
Town & Country Resort and Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA, Mar 22, 2006 Online
<PDF>. 2008-06-27 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p100208_index.html>
Arguably, instead of witnessing a discernible divide between the ‘North’ and ‘South’ in
the post-Cold War era, in which issues evident in one of these regions are not readily
apparent in the other, we are wrestling with a more complicated conundrum. Whilst
highlighting and deconstructing this fact, it is critical to recognise the patent reality that
the terms ‘North’ and ‘South’, like their antecedents (‘East’ and ‘West’), are mere
constructions. What makes the careless usage of ‘North’ and ‘South’ rather problematic
is its seemingly all-encompassing orientation, which often does not account for
peculiarities, idiosyncrasies and similarities within and between the two blocs, and
wittingly or unwittingly assumes that one can neatly and precisely attribute certain
features to the North and South respectively. This untoward exercise is akin to Said’s
(1979) still-prescient caution concerning Orientalism, i.e. the wholesale and prevalent
ascription of positive values to the North and negative characteristics to the South. In
actuality, the situation on the ground is far more complex, with so-called Southern traits
evident in the North and vice versa. A far more useful typology would be one that
grapples with the manner in which manifestations of globalisation, such as migration and
the presence of ‘Southern’ diasporas in the most unlikely ‘Northern’ countries, porous
borders (particularly in areas where ‘poor’ countries are adjacent to ‘rich’ ones), and
cultural homogenisation amidst unyielding ‘local traditions’, among others, have
rendered previously-held views somewhat shallow, and make the putative ‘clash of
civilisations’ perhaps a figment of the imagination of certain scholars and ‘Northern’
politicians on the one hand, and a potentially-potent ideology that could be employed and
politicised to justify destabilising policies. Owing to the foregoing, the aim of this paper
is to grapple with the utilisation of ‘North’ and ‘South’ in academic and popular
discourses, reveal how the reputed distinction between the two represents a new kind of
Orientalism, and concomitantly emphasise the multifaceted relationships between and
within nations.

Responsibility Answers
The West is not the culprit – advanced societies are too environmentally conscious to damage
the environment.
The New York Times, November 2, 2007 Friday Correction Appended, Section E; Column 0;
Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; EXHIBITION REVIEW 'WATER: H2O = LIFE'; Pg.
27, 1574 words, By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
What about Western modernity and technology? Are they culprits, as the exhibition so often implies?
Sometimes, surely, but there are also unmentioned examples of premodern activities that have
altered environments with as much finality as a modern dam. Some historians have suggested that
misuse of irrigation systems by ancient Southwestern American Indians salinized the soil, turning it
barren. Failures to rotate crops or excessive clearing of trees may have altered the terrain of the
ancient Near East. Meanwhile today's technologically advanced societies are so hyperconscious of
environmental effects that their enterprises have the potential to become the most efficient and least
damaging.
Many of the exhibition's implicit assumptions allow little room for such considerations. The usual
suspects are lined up and familiar prescriptions offered, as if a morality tale were being recounted.
Other forms of environmental villainy and accomplishment are not fully acknowledged. The
notorious draining of the Aral Sea in southwest Asia, for example, is called an ''irrigation story''
caused by farmers growing water-hungry cotton in the middle of the desert. Unmentioned is that the
problem began in the Stalin era by Soviet demands for cotton. Tyranny rather than foolhardy farmers
created the disaster.

Alternate Causality – Corruption
Alternate Causality to oil addiction – domestic corruption
Corruption in U.S. institutions has been a major force in hindering an appropriate response to our growing
dependence on fossil fuels. Nothing illustrates this link better than the rise and fall of Enron. Enron
flourished in Texas and then nationally under government policies and subsidies bought and paid for by
the fossil fuel industrial complex. While the Bush administration and other politicians have tried to
disassociate themselves from the debacle, the close ties between Enron and the administration are well
documented. Bush named CEO Kenneth Lay to his transition team, where he worked with Vice President
Dick Cheney on national energy policies, and some 50 former Enron executives, lobbyists, lawyers, or
significant shareholders ended up working for the Bush administration.
In the last presidential election, George W. Bush was the number one recipient of campaign contributions
from the oil and gas industry, and Enron was the top contributor in this group, with Exxon Mobil second.
Large sums from the utilities industry also fed Bush's campaign. In his two years of fundraising to pay for
his run for president, he received more money from electric utilities than any other federal candidate in
the past decade.
The fingerprints of Enron and other corporate interests are evident throughout the administration's energy
proposals. These proposals were embodied in legislation that stalled in the last session of Congress, but
are certain to be resurrected this year.
The Enron story exposes a stunning lack of integrity—blatant and insidious—among leaders in
government, industry, financial institutions and the media. It challenges us to confront deep threats to
democracy itself that are associated with our dependence on fossil fuel. Our Testimony on Integrity calls
us to act against these threats.

Solvency Answers
Simply shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables fails- it leaves the companies intact and
they continue to act in environmentally destructive ways.
(“Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases,” Capitalism Nature
Socialism Vol. 15, No. 4, December 2004)
One alternative to corporate-led schemes such as emissions trading is government regulation. This can
include taxation, penalties for polluting, and imposed technological “fixes,” such as scrubbers and filters
on smokestacks. Such an approach has been successfully adopted in Iceland (where 99 percent of
electricity comes from geothermal sources) and Costa Rica (where 92 percent of energy comes from
renewables). Additionally, government fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks could be withdrawn and
subsidies for small-scale renewables increased instead. However, there are problems with this approach as
well. In Iceland, one of the main producers and distributors of renewable energy is the oil giant Shell.
Although the product has changed from fossil fuels to renewables, the corporation is still the same. The
power dynamic remains; often the renewable investments of large fossil fuel corporations are another
tactic in a cleverly planned “greenwash” campaign to improve their public image. Additionally the failure
to challenge corporate monopolies in the renewable energy sector could stifle diversity and innovation as
was shown when comparing developments in The Netherlands and Germany. In the Netherlands,
subsidies for the solar industry in the 1990s were concentrated on Shell and eco-consultants Ecofys. This
limited the number of solar panel firms to just a few main players and Shell gained a virtual monopoly in
solar panel installation. In contrast, German subsidies were distributed more fairly across different sized
firms. By 2002 there were over 300 companies involved in supplying solar panels.30 Even a future where
wind and solar are the main source of energy still fails to challenge underlying patterns of consumption
and does not guarantee that transnational corporations will suddenly behave in an environmentally or
socially just way.

Solvency Answers
LUMPING SUSTAINABILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE TOGETHER DILUTES THE

AIMS OF BOTH MOVEMENTS- TAKES OUT SOLVENCY
p 82)
I have come to the reluctant conclusion that social justice and environmental sustainability are not always
compatible objective. Assertions to the contrary are more often, I think, based on wishful thinking than on
clear-sighted analysis or hard empirical evidence. This conclusion is ‘reluctance’ because from a political
point of view I can see tremendous benefits in marrying environmental sustainability and social justice.
These terms act as ciphers for a debate that is as old as the contemporary environmental movement itself:
can there be a rapprochement between ‘red’ and ‘green’? In the terms of this chapter ‘social justice’ stands
for ‘red’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ stands for ‘green’. Ever since the collapse of ‘actually existing
socialism’ and the practically concomitant rise of the contemporary environmental movement, activists
and theorists on the progressive left have been assessing the possibility of green and red coming together
in a way that might challenge the global hegemony of liberal capitalism. My own view, based both on
theoretical considerations and on observation of real-life attempts at coalition initiatives – both in the
highest reaches of government as in contemporary Germany and in the movement politics of civil society
– is that rapprochements will only ever be temporary and transient. This is simply, yet crucially, because
reds and greens have fundamentally different objectives. Indeed I think that to expect socialists and
environmentalists to form a common cause is as unrealistic as to expect liberals and socialists to make a
common cause: the differences between reds and greens are of the same structural ideological order as
those between liberals and socialists. This is to say that the differences between them are not merely
tactical, but strategic: their objectives differ in fundamental ways. It is against this broad background that
the debate regarding the compatibility of social justice and environmental sustainability must be seen.

Solvency Answers
No forms of renewable energy can provide energy for electricity- we’ll still depend on fossil fuels.
H. W. Whittington, is Professor of Electrical Power Engineering in the. Department of Electronic and

Electrical Engineering at the University of. Edinburgh, 2002
(Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 360, No. 1797,
Carbon, Biodiversity, Conservation and Income: An Analysis of a Free-Market Approach to Land-Use
Change and Forestry in Developing and Developed Countries (Aug. 15, 2002), pp. 1653-1668. Jstor.org)
3. Conclusions The provision of a realistically priced and reliable supply of electricity which has due
regard to environmental targets is a complex task. New technologies will make a contribution, but only
after the relevant economic analysis. Fiscal instruments are increasingly being used to encourage the
industry to adopt specific solutions: these must be accompanied by the necessary regulatory changes to
give market steers to developers. However, at this stage it would be unwise to attempt to pick a winner
from the list of contenders. Those responsible for balancing environmental imperatives with security of
supply must be aware of the complicated interaction between these two features and economics.
Renewable energy, at first sight, offers an attractive option for electricity production with reduced GHG
production. However, effective management of all prospective renewable-energy installations will need,
above all, a technical assessment of the range of exploitation strategies; for example, a comparison may
be made between local production of, say, hydrogen and the more traditional transmission of electricity.
Such resources will have to compete with others in any national, or grid, system and detailed economic
analysis to determine the approach to deployment which best fits the trading regime into which the energy
will be sold. Consideration will also be necessary to determine how best to control the introduction of this
radically new resource such that it does not attract punitive cost overheads before the technology reaches
commercial maturity. In terms of the different renewable options available, wind energy can be seen as a
short-to-medium-term replacement as thermal plant closes. However, for wind energy to be successful,
the network will have to be modified to absorb additional renewable capacity, but it has a massive
potential for generating electricity that cannot be ignored. Globally, hydroelectricity is currently the
largest developed source of renewable electricity, but future large-scale projects will probably be limited
to the less-developed world: the best schemes in the developed countries have already been exploited.
Wave and tidal can be looked as medium- to long-term generators of electricity, as their respective
industries are not as mature as competing renewable resources. Municipal solid-waste combustion and
landfill-gas technologies can be seen as a short-term generation solution. The waste is located near to the
high demand areas where the network can cope with the extra capacity. Agriculture and forestry waste can
be seen as a means of generating electricity for rural areas, which depend on imports from high
generation areas. Despite all that has been said above, nuclear power is proven and could take its place in
any future generation portfolio. Unfortunately, there exists suspicion and mistrust of the technology,

mainly surrounding waste management and radioactivity release. Unless this is overcome, the lack of
confidence engendered by this public mistrust may result in few, if any, new nuclear power stations being
built.

No Solvency
THE AFF’S INCENTIVE MODEL ONLY ADDRESSES THE SYMPTOMS OF INEQUITY
LEAVING IN PLACE THE STRUCTURES THAT PRODUCE SUBSTANDARD LIVING
CONDITIONS FOR THE POOR
It is now clear that the traditional environmental movement has become so fragmented, parochial and
dominated by single-issue approaches that its capacity to champion fundamental social and institutional
changes needed to address America’s ecological crisis is greatly diminished. As stated by Pablo Eisenberg
(1997, pp331-341), ‘although we know that our socio-economic, ecological, and political problems are
interrelated, a growing portion of our nonprofit world nevertheless continues to operate in a way that fails
to reflect this complexity and connectedness’. In this respect, if the traditional environmental movement
continues to conceive of the ecological crisis as a collection of unrelated problems, and if the reigning
paradigms are defined in the neo-liberalist terms of a minimally regulated capitalist economy, then it is
possible that some combination of regulations, incentives and technical innovations can keep pollution
at tolerable levels for many people of higher socio-economic status. Poorer working-class communities
and people of color who lack the political-economic resources to defend themselves will continue to
suffer the worst abuses. If, however, the interdependency of issue is emphasized, so that environmental
devastation, ecological racism, poverty, crime and social despair area ll seen as aspects of a multi-
dimensional web of a larger structure crisis, then a transformative ecology movement can begin to be
invented (Rodman, 1980).
It is precisely this single-issue orientation that the environmental justice movement is coming to challenge
by developing broad-based coalitions that are pushing for comprehensive approaches to community,
national and global problems. The struggle for environmental justice is not just about distributing
environmental risks equally (ie distributive environmental justice) but about preventing them from being
produced in the first place so that no one is harmed at all (ie productive environmental justice). The
struggle for environmental justice must be about the politics of corporate power and capitalist production
per se and the elimination of the ecological threat, not just the ‘fair’ distribution of ecological hazards via
better government regulation of inequities in the marketplace. And while increased participatory
democracy by popular forces in governmental decision-making and community planning is desirable (if
not essential), and should be supported, it is, in and of itself, insufficient for achieving true sustainability
and environmental justice. What is needed is a richer conception of ecological democracy.

No Solvency
From this perspective organizing efforts against procedures that result in an unequal distribution of
environmental problems (distribution inequity) cannot ultimately succeed unless environmental justice
activists continue to address the procedures by which the environmental problems are produced in the
first place (procedural inequity) (Lake, 1996, p169). Any effort to rectify distributional inequities without
attacking the fundamental processes that produced the problems in the first place focuses on symptoms
rather than causes and is therefore only a partial, temporary, and necessarily incomplete and
insufficient solution. What is needed is an environmental justice politics for procedural equity that
emphasizes democratic participation in the capital investment decisions through which environmental
burdens are produced then distributed. As Michael Heirman (1996, p120) has observed, ‘If we settle for
liberal procedural and distributional equality, relying upon negotiation, mitigation and fair-share
allocation to address some sort of disproportional impact, we merely perpetuate the current production
system that by its very structure is discriminatory and non-sustainable’. Productive environmental justice
can only be achieved in a sustainable economic system - a post-capitalist society in which material
production and distribution is democratically planned and equitable administered according to the needs
of both present and future members of society.
Rather than existing as a collection of isolated organization fighting defensive ‘not-in-my-backyard’

battles (as important as they may be), the environmental justice movement must continue to evolve into a
political force capable of challenging the systemic causes of social and ecological injustices as they exist
‘in everyone’s backyard’. It is precisely this distinction between distributional environmental justice
versus productive environmental justice that many in the movement are now beginning to address in a
more systematic fashion. Only by bringing about what Barry Commoner (1990) calls ‘the social
governance of the means of production” – a radical democratization of all major political, social and
economic institutions – can humanity being to gain control over the course of its relationship with nature.
Such a program for social governance would require that the institutions of workplace and local direct
democracy, the initiatives of popular-based social and environmental movements be sublated into a
genuine ecological democracy (O’Connor, 1992, p1-5).
The challenge confronting the environmental justice movement is to help forge a truly broad-based
political movement for ecological democracy. While the traditional environmental movement has played
a critical and progressive role in stemming many of the worst threats posed to the health of the planet and
its inhabitants, the movement is now proving increasingly unable to institute more sustainable and
socially just models of development in the face of neo-liberalism, globalization and the economic
restructuring of US and international capitalism. And as unsustainable practice and environmental
injustices intensify across the principles of ecological democracy will become more pressing. Just as in
the 1930s, when the labor movement was forced to change from craft to industrial unionism so today does
it appear to many that labor needs to transform itself from industrial unionism into an international
conglomerate union, inclusive of women and all racial/ethnic peoples, just to keep pace with the
restructuring of international capital. And just as in the 1960’s, when the environmental movement
changed from a narrowly based conservation/preservation movement to include the middle class (and
some sectors of the white working class), so today does it seem to many that it needs to change from

No Solvency
single-issue local and national struggles to a broad-based multi-racial international environmental justice
movement. We must work in solidarity to promote strong unions, environmental justice movements and
worker health and safety standards throughout the rest of the world in order to protect local initiatives and
gains. This historic task now confronts the environmental justice movement.

Sustainability K – Alt Solvency
THE ALTERNATIVE SOLVES THE AFF- INTERROGATING THE RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND SUSTAINABILITY CREATES THE
POSSIBILITY FOR MORE LONG-LASTING, SECURE COALITIONS
pp 90-91)
Let me recall, then, a remark I made in commenting on Figure 4.2. There I said that in the context of
environmental sustainability understood as the sustaining of critical natural capital, ‘our intuition is that
not only is social justice compatible with the sustaining of critical natural capital, but that social justice
demands the sustaining of critical natural capital and it’s fair sharing around the community of justice’.
Now it should be clear that this bold conclusion is reached at the cost of assuming that the principle of
social justice in question is ‘need.’ By its very nature critical natural capital is a fundamental human need,
and therefore ‘distribution according to need’ suggest that this basic need be equally satisfied. But what if
the principle of social justice in question is not need but, say, desert? Can we say that critical natural
capital is equally deserved? This seems counter-intuitive, in part because the principle of desert is usually
used to justify inequalities of distribution, but also because the term has to purchase on the thing being
distributed. This is what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’, and I shall follow up the important
implications of this point in the paragraph after next.
For the moment, though, it should be clear that our apparently one-dimensional, if still complex, question
of whether social justice is compatible with environmental sustainability has many more ramifications
than appear at first sight. This is much more than a merely theoretical interest. The implications for
policy-makers are profound. The view in government in the UK at present, for instance, seems to be that
policies for social justice, in the international arena, will result automatically in greater environmental
sustainability. This belief is exemplified in the activities of the Department for International Development
which has plenty to say about international justice but is virtually silent on environmental sustainability,
in the mistaken belief that more of the former will necessarily produce more of the latter. Similarly, a
more nuanced understanding of the relationship between social justice and environmental
sustainability would make for more realistic coalition-building in ‘civil society’. Spats between the
Sierra Club and the environmental justice movement in the US would seems less surprising, for example,
and disagreements could be more carefully negotiated with a view to building longer lasting, more
secure and more realistic coalitions.

Efficiency K – Link
THE AFF’S CLAIM TO BE A “RADICAL” DEPARTURE FROM TRADITIONAL FOSSIL FUEL

FUNDAMENTALISM WHILE SECURING THE ECONOMY RAMPS UP UNSUSTAINABLE
CONSUMPTION
There has, in fact, been a great increase in high-sounding rhetoric and a flurry of environmental
legislation in various countries around the world. However, economic growth remains the focal item on
the political agenda. Even Principle 2 of the 1992 “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development’,
while recognizing the need for humans to live in harmony with nature, emphasizes that, ‘States have, in
accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign
right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies…’
provided that domestic economic activities don’t damage other states or areas beyond the limits of
national jurisdiction (UNCED, 1992). Such assertions of the inalienable right to develop, however
qualified, may be politically necessary to achieve international agreement on soft-law affective
environment and development. However, they remain ecologically naïve and functionally ineffective in
protecting either local resource or global life support systems.
One the one hand then, the world appears to be wakening to the reality of the ecological crisis. On the
other, we remain in deep denial of the extent of the value shift and behavioral transition needed to avoid
disaster. Conventional ‘sustainable development’ doctrine insists that there is no inherent conflict
between the economy and the environment – with improved management and technology, the world
should be able to eat its economic cake and have the environment too (see also Blowers’ critique of
ecological modernization in Chapter 3).
Such optimism might even be justified under strictly specified conditions but these conditions cannot
emerge from contemporary development models. In present circumstances, demand for nature’s ‘goods
and services’ will continue to climb exponentially. For the first time, however, we can anticipate
significant shortfalls in supply. There simply isn’t enough ‘nature to go around under prevailing growth-
bound ‘development’ assumptions.

No Solvency/Int. Actor CP
A GLOBAL RESPONSE IS KEY TO ADDRESS GLOBAL ECO-VIOLENCE- SINGLE ACTORS

CANNOT ACHIEVE SUSTAINABILITY ALONE
As discouraging as it may seem, the behavior described in Gurr’s bleak prognosis may well reflect some
fundamental human trait. Earlier in human biological and social evolution, selfish retrenchment during
periods of relative scarcity may have conferred survival value on individuals and groups practicing such
behavior. Simple behaviors such as hoarding and suspicions of unlike peoples, as well as more complex
human traits such as discrimination and outright racism (including eco-racism), may have their roots in
the deep shadows of human bioevolution. In the modern world, however, any advantage of such crudely
self-interested behavior would likely be dissipated. Today, the sheer scale of human activity renders us all
dependent on the continued integrity of ‘common-pool’ resources and global life-support systems. The
fates of the world’s disparate peoples and nations are becoming inextricable bound together.
In effect, then, global sustainability represents the ultimate public good-common property problem, a
problem that can be solved only through mutual constraint practiced out of mutual self-interest. This, in
turn, requires an unprecedented level of international agreements on instruments to restrain actions of
individuals and nations that would threaten the global commons. The simple fact is that no country can
achieve sustainability alone, no mater how just its social policies or how much it manages to shrink its
domestic ecological footprint. Indeed, under the remorseless logic of the commons, individual self-
restraint is ‘unprofitable and ultimately futile unless one can be certain of universal concurrence’ (Ophuls
and Boyan, 1992, pp198-99).
Thus we seem to have reached a stage in human evolution when survival value may well accrue more to
cooperative than to competitive behavior. It is therefore more than a little dispiriting that the prevailing
development paradigm encourages both individuals and nations to behave as self-interested utility
maximizers with insatiable material demands. The inevitable result on a finite planet is competitive over-
exploitation, growing inequity and looming ecological chaos that threatens us all. If the world
community cannot resolve the intra and interregional tensions caused by ecological decay and social
injustice through some from of extended compassion, reason or at least more enlightened self-interest- by

any means other than through sheer material growth- the prospects for sustainability are indeed fatally
compromised.

Colonialism Good
Their ideology is bankrupted - a world in which the United States industrializes and colonizes the
Third World can actually prevent genocide once and for all.
Dirk Moses 08, (Senior Lecturer Department of History, University of Sydney), Theoretical Paper:
Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies
This approach dovetails neatly with the implicit modernization theory in comparative Genocide Studies:
genocides occur in societies—“failed states,” we often hear today (eg. Harff, 2003)—that have
experienced perverted modernizations. Had they followed the western, preferably the North American,
road to modernity, it is implied, they would not have become totalitarian states and perpetrated genocide
on their own or neighboring populations. Leaving aside the fact that this rosy view ignores the fate of the
Native Americans, it can be identified as an American version of what we historians of Germany
recognize immediately as the now highly suspect Sonderweg approach to comparative historical
sociology.
Either way the US and, more generally, the West, is regarded as the redeeming power in world affairs,
whether as the agent of liberalization or as the cavalry that rescues victims from genocidal elites and their
militias in the “Third World.” When Mark Levene suggested otherwise at the fourth biennial
“International Association of Genocide Scholars” conference at the University of Minnesota on June 10,
2001, he was rebuked by leaders in the field with the epithets that he was anti-American, “ideological,”
and such heresies. Yet how ideological is a position that wants to ignore the genocidal foundation of
settler colonies like the US and Australia, and question the theodicy that the westernization of the globe
will lead to a world in which genocide has been banished?

Aff Enviro Justice

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Aff Enviro Justice

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Northwestern 08 Zarefsky Juniors

Energy Equality Patrick, Max, John, and Dan

Energy Equality.......................................................................................................................... .................1

1 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

2 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

3 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

4 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

5 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Contention One: ECONOMIES OF DESTRUCTION

THE U.S. IS ENGAGING IN ENVIRONMENTALISM LITE- CONSERVATION WITHOUT

6 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Vol. 14, No. 3, 203–235, September 2005)

7 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

8 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

9 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

10 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

THE REFUSAL TO SHIFT TO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY ISNT JUST A BUREAUCRATIC

11 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

12 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

13 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

OUR ADDICTION TO OIL IS THREATENING THE EXISTENCE OF INDIGENOUS ALASKAN

14 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

15 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

16 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

17 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

(June 18, 2007. “To Paths for the Planet,”

18 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

19 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

20 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension + Impact

21 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension + Impact

22 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension + Impact

23 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension + Impact

24 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Ext/A2: Renewables Now

(“Energy Resources and Global Development”

25 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

26 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

27 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension - Environment

Northern environmentalists have typically adopted a technocratic approach to environmental protection,

28 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

29 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension – Equality

30 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension - Inequality

31 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

32 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension – North/South Divide

33 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Inherency Extension – Exploitation

34 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Oil Addiction Adv: Timeframe Ext

35 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Oil Addiction Bad: Environment

36 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Oil Addiction Bad: Laundry List

37 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Oil Addiction Bad: Nigeria Proves

38 “…And getting caught in the rain…”

Oil Addiction Bad: Mexico Proves