Pick and choose impacts modules you like – the 1NC includes a standard environment / warming impact.

Growth Bad Core

1NC Stuff

*1NC – Shell Even massive economic decline has zero chance of war Robert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425

Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited , it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict , it will not make war thinkable .

Growth’s unsustainable and causes extinction because of physical demands on space, water, forests, and habitat---tech can’t solve because collapse of ecosystem services is irreversible David Shearman 7, Emeritus professor of medicine at Adelaide University, Secretary of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and an Independent Assessor on the IPCC; and Joseph Wayne Smith, lawyer and philosopher with a research interest in environmentalism, 2007, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 153-156

Hundreds of scientists writing in Millennium Assessment and other scientific reports pronounce that humanity is in peril from environmental damage. If liberal democracy is to survive it will need to offer leadership, resolve, and sacrifice to

address the problem. To date there is not a shred of evidence that these will be provided nor could they be delivered by those at the right hand of American power. Some liberal democracies that recognize that global warming is a dire problem are trying but nevertheless failing to have an impact on greenhouse emissions. To arrest climate change, greenhouse reductions of 60 to 80 percent are required during the next few decades. By contrast the Kyoto Protocol prescribes reductions of only a few percent. The magnitude of the problem seems overwhelming, and indeed it is. So much so, it is still denied by many because it cannot be resolved without cataclysmic changes to society. Refuge from necessary change is being sought in tech nological advances that will allow fossil fuels to be used with impunity, but this ignores the kernel of the issue. If all humanity had the ecological footprint of the average citizen of Australia or the United States, at least another three planets would be needed to support the present population of the world.2 The ecological services of the world cannot be saved under a regime

of attrition by growth economies that each year use more land, water, forests, natural resources, and habitat. Tech nological advances cannot retrieve dead ecological services .The measures required have been discussed and documented for several decades. None of them are revolutionary new ideas. We will discuss the main themes of a number of important issues such as the limits to growth, the separation of corporatism and governance, the control of the issue of credit (i.e., financial reform), legal reform, and the reclaiming of the commons. Each of these issues has been discussed in great depth in the literature, and a multitude of reform movements have been spawned. Unfortunately, given the multitude of these problems and the limited resources and vision of the reformers, each of the issues tends to be treated in isolation. From an ecological perspective, which is a vision seeking wholeness and integration, this is a mistake. These areas of reform are closely interrelated and must be tackled as a coherent whole to bring about change. Banking and financial reform is, for example, closely related to the issue of control and limitation of corporate power, because finance capital is the engine of corporate expansion. The issue of reclaiming the commons and protecting the natural environment from corporate plunder is also intimately connected to the issue of the regulation of corporate power. In turn this is a legal question, and in turn legal structures are highly influenced by political and economic factors. Finally, the issue of whether there are ecological limits to growth underlies all these issues. Only if an ecologically sustainable solution can be given to this totality of problems can we see the beginnings of a hope for reform of liberal democracy. And even then, there still remains a host of cultural and intellectual problems that will need to be solved. The prospects for reform are daunting, but let us now explore what in principle is needed.THE LIMITS TO GR OWTHOur loving marriage to economic growth has to be dissolved. The dollar value of all goods and services made in an economy in one year is expressed as the gross domestic product (GDP). It is a flawed measurement in that it does not measure the true economic and social advance of a society,3 but it is relevant to our discussion here for most of the activities it measures consume energy. Each country aims for economic growth, for every economy needs this for its success in maintaining employment and for the perceived ever-expanding needs of its populace. Politicians salivate about economic growth, it is their testosterone boost. Most would be satisfied with 3 percent per annum and recognize that this means that the size of the economy is 3 percent greater than the previous year. On this basis the size of the economy doubles every 23 years. In 43 years it has quadrupled. Now in 23 years let us suppose that energy needs will also double in order to run this economy. Therefore if greenhouse emissions are to remain at today’s level, then approximately half the energy requirements in 23 years’ time will have to be alternative energy. The burgeoning energy requirements of the developing countries have not yet been included in these considerations. To date, these countries have been reluctant to consider greenhouse reductions saying that they have a right to develop without hindrance, and in any case the developed countries are responsible for most of the present burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not difficult to calculate therefore that

there is no future for civilization in the present cultural maladaptation to the growth economy . Sustainable economic growth is an oxymoron . These arguments about doubling time apply to all other environmental calculations. Other forms of pollution that arise from the consumer society will also increase proportionally to growth, the human and animal wastes, mercury, the persistent organic pollutants, and so on. And even if some of these are ameliorated, others will arise from the activities of

the burgeoning population. Science tells us that we have already exceeded the capacity of the earth to detoxify these.

In advocating a no-growth economy it has been shown in many studies that beyond the basic needs of health, nutrition, shelter, and cultural activity, which can be provided with much less income than Westerners presently enjoy, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness or well-being. A no-growth economy4 would supply the essentials for life and happiness . Human and economic activity fuelling the consumer market would be severely curtailed and the resources redeployed to truly sustainable enterprises, basic care and repair of the environment, conservation of energy, and the manufacture of items and systems that support these needs. The standard of living as measured at present (again by flawed criteria) will fall, but there may be no alternative . The fundamental question is how can a transition be made under a liberal democracy that has consumerism and a free market as its lifeblood?

Now is better than later—causes a stable transition to a peaceful society and stops extinctionBarry 8 – President and Founder of Ecological Internet, Ph.D. in Land Resources from U-Wisconsin-Madison (Glen, “Economic Collapse And Global Ecology”, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm)

Humanity and the Earth are faced with an enormous conundrum -- sufficient climate policies enjoy political support only in times of rapid economic growth. Yet this growth is the primary factor driving greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental ills . The growth machine has pushed the planet well beyond its ecological carrying capacity, and unless constrained, can only lead to human extinction and an

end to complex life. With every economic downturn , like the one now looming in the United States, it becomes more difficult and less likely that policy sufficient to ensure global ecological sustainability will be embraced. This essay explores the possibility that from a biocentric viewpoint of needs for

long-term global ecological, economic and social sustainability; it would be better for the economic collapse to come now rather than later . Economic growth is a deadly disease upon the Earth, with capitalism as its

most virulent strain. Throw-away consumption and explosive population growth are made possible by using up fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems. Holiday shopping numbers are covered by media in the same

breath as Arctic ice melt, ignoring their deep connection. Exponential economic growth destroys ecosystems and pushes the biosphere closer to failure . Humanity has proven itself unwilling and unable to address climate change and other environmental threats with necessary haste and ambition. Action on coal, forests, population, renewable energy and emission reductions could be taken now at net benefit to the economy. Yet, the losers -- primarily fossil fuel industries and their bought oligarchy -- successfully resist futures not dependent upon their deadly products. Perpetual economic growth, and necessary climate and other ecological policies, are fundamentally incompatible . Global ecological sustainability depends critically upon establishing a steady state economy, whereby production is right-sized to not diminish natural capital. Whole industries like coal and natural forest logging will be eliminated even as new opportunities emerge in solar energy and environmental restoration. This critical transition to both economic and ecological sustainability is simply not happening on any scale . The challenge is how to carry out necessary environmental policies even as economic growth ends and consumption plunges. The natural response is going to be liquidation of even more life-giving ecosystems, and jettisoning of climate policies, to vainly try to maintain high growth and personal consumption. We know that humanity must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% over coming decades. How will this and other necessary climate mitigation strategies be maintained during years of economic downturns, resource wars, reasonable demands for equitable consumption, and frankly, the weather being more pleasant in some places? If efforts to reduce emissions and move to a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is assured. Bright greens take the continued existence of a habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this is possible in a time of economic collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow humanity to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies. It may be better for the Earth and humanity's future that economic collapse comes sooner rather than later , while more ecosystems and opportunities to return to nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching -- part Great Depression, part African famine. There will be starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance returns to the Earth. Most people have forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet there is some justice, in that those who have lived most lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes from and that ecology is the meaning of

life. Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately survive to prosper again . Human suffering -- already the norm for many, but hitting the currently materially affluent -- is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. We are a couple decades at most away from societal strife of a much greater magnitude as the Earth's biosphere fails . Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover while emerging better for it; or our total collapse can be a final, fatal death swoon. A successful revolutionary response to imminent global ecosystem collapse would focus upon bring ing down the Earth's industrial economy now . As society continues to fail miserably to implement necessary changes to allow creation to

continue, maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is economic sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks.

Collapse now causes shift to small, sustainable societiesLewis 2k Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization”

With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller , autonomous, local and regional civilizations , cultures, and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global industrial civilization, First and Third World peoples won't have the material resources , biological capital,

and energy and human resources to re-establish global industrial civilization . Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their environments . Those societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.

1NC – Oceans ImpactEconomic growth is driving multiple processes that guarantee total collapse of ocean ecosystems—risks extinction by 2050Clark & Clausen, 8 (*Brett Clark, Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, University of Utah, Assistant Professor of Sustainability, Environmental Humanities Graduate Program and Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program, University of Utah, **Rebecca Clausen, teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, Monthly Review, 2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August) / “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem”, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem, jj)

Turning the Ocean into a Watery GraveThe world is at a crossroads in regard to the ecological crisis. Ecological degradation under global capitalism extends to the entire biosphere. Oceans that were teeming with abundance are being decimated by the continual intrusion of exploitive economic operations. At the same time that scientists are documenting the complexity and interdependency of marine species, we are witnessing an oceanic crisis as natural conditions, ecological processes, and nutrient cycles are being undermined through overfishing and transformed due to global warming.The expansion of the accumulation system, along with technological advances in fishing, have intensified the exploitation of the world ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch); extended the spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market; and disrupted metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean. The quick-fix solution of aquaculture enhances capital’s control over production without resolving ecological contradictions.It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated, that “ short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of natural wealth .”44 Capital is driven by the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term profits provide the immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature, which may entail time scales of a hundred or more years. Such requirements stand opposed to the immediate interests of profit.The qualitative relation between humans and nature is subsumed under the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-larger scale. Marx lamented that to capital, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.”45 Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs, and the circulation of capital—not the diminishing conditions of existence. Capital subjects natural cycles and processes (via controlled feeding and the use of growth hormones) to its economic cycle. The maintenance of natural conditions is not a concern. The bounty of nature is taken for granted and appropriated as a free gift.As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating:For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself….In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature itself].46An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is being undermined.To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygen-poor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the loss of marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean.

Coupled with industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year 2050 .47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.

Oceans are unique—existential riskCoyne and Hoekstra 7—*professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at University of Chicago, AND **Hoekstra, John L. Loeb Associate Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology @atHarvard,( Jerry Coyne, and Hopi E, 9/24 “The Greatest Dying”)

Aside from the Great Dying, there have been four other mass extinctions, all of which severely pruned life's diversity. Scientists agree that we're now in the midst of a sixth such episode. This new one, however, is different - and, in

many ways, much worse. For, unlike earlier extinctions, this one results from the work of a single species, Homo sapiens. We are relentlessly taking over the planet, laying it to waste and eliminating most of our fellow species. Moreover, we're doing it much faster than the mass extinctions that came before. Every year, up to 30,000 species disappear due to human activity alone. At this rate, we could lose half of Earth's species in this century. And,

unlike with previous extinctions, there's no hope that biodiversity will ever recover , since the cause of the decimation - us - is here to stay.     To scientists, this is an unparalleled calamity, far more severe than global warming, which is, after all, only one of many threats to biodiversity. Yet global warming gets far more press. Why? One reason is that, while the increase in temperature is easy to document, the decrease of species is not. Biologists don't know, for example, exactly how many species exist on Earth. Estimates range widely, from three million to more than 50 million, and that

doesn't count microbes, critical (albeit invisible) components of ecosystems. We're not certain about the rate of extinction, either; how could we be, since the vast majority of species have yet to be described? We're even less sure how the loss of some species will affect the ecosystems in which they're embedded, since the intricate connection between organisms means that the loss of a single species can ramify unpredictably.     But we do know some things. Tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate of 2 percent per year. Populations of most large fish are down to only 10 percent of what they were in 1950. Many primates and all the great apes - our closest relatives - are nearly gone from the wild.     And we know that extinction and global warming act synergistically. Extinction exacerbates global warming: By burning rainforests, we're not only polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) but destroying the very plants that can remove this gas from the air. Conversely, global warming increases extinction, both directly (killing corals) and indirectly (destroying the habitats of Arctic and Antarctic animals). As extinction increases, then, so does global warming, which in turn causes more extinction - and so on, into a downward spiral of destruction.     Why, exactly, should we care? Let's start with the most celebrated case: the rainforests. Their loss will worsen global warming - raising temperatures, melting icecaps, and flooding coastal cities. And, as the forest habitat shrinks, so begins the inevitable contact between organisms that have not evolved together, a scenario played out many times, and one that is never good. Dreadful diseases have successfully jumped species boundaries, with humans as prime recipients. We have gotten aids from apes, sars from civets, and Ebola from fruit bats. Additional worldwide plagues from unknown microbes are a very real possibility.     But it isn't just the destruction of the rainforests that should trouble us. Healthy ecosystems the world over provide hidden services like waste disposal, nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, and oxygen production. Such services are best rendered by ecosystems that are diverse. Yet, through both intention and accident, humans have introduced exotic species that turn biodiversity into monoculture. Fast-growing zebra mussels, for example, have outcompeted more than 15 species of native mussels in North America's Great Lakes and have damaged harbors and water-treatment plants. Native prairies are becoming dominated by single species (often genetically homogenous) of corn or wheat. Thanks to these developments, soils will erode and become unproductive - which, along with temperature change, will diminish agricultural yields. Meanwhile, with increased pollution and runoff, as

well as reduced forest cover, ecosystems will no longer be able to purify water; and a shortage of clean water spells disaster.     In many ways, oceans are the most vulnerable areas of all. As overfishing eliminates major predators , while polluted and warming waters kill off phytoplankton, the intricate aquatic food web could collapse from both sides. Fish, on which so many humans depend, will be a fond memory. As phytoplankton vanish, so does the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. (Half of the oxygen we breathe is made by phytoplankton, with

the rest coming from land plants.) Species extinction is also imperiling coral reefs - a major problem since these reefs have far more than recreational value: They provide tremendous amounts of food for human populations and buffer coastlines against erosion.

1NC – War ImpactGrowth causes warTrainer 2 Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales (Ted, If You Want Affluence, Prepare for War, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 2, EBSCO)

If this limits-to-growth analysis is at all valid, the implications for the problem of global peace and conflict and security are clear and savage. If we all remain determined to increase our living standards, our level of production and consumption, in a world where resources are already scarce, where only a few have affluent living standards but another 8 billion will be wanting them too, and which we, the rich, are determined to get richer without any limit, then nothing is more guaranteed than that there will be increasing levels of conflict and violence. To put it another way, if we insist on remaining affluent we will need to remain heavily armed. Increased conflict in at least the following categories can be expected. First, the present conflict over resources between the rich elites and the poor majority in the Third World must increase, for example, as ‘development’ under globalisation takes more land, water and forests into export markets. Second, there are conflicts between the Third World and the rich world, the major recent examples being the war between the US and Iraq over control of oil. Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US intervened, accompanied by much high-sounding rhetoric (having found nothing unacceptable about Israel’s invasions of Lebanon or the Indonesian invasion of East Timor). As has often been noted, had Kuwait been one of the world’s leading exporters of broccoli, rather than oil, it is doubtful whether the US would have been so eager to come to its defence. At the time of writing, the US is at war in Central Asia over ‘terrorism’. Few would doubt that a ‘collateral’ outcome will be the establishment of regimes that will give the West access to the oil wealth of Central Asia. Following are some references to the connection many have recognised between rich world affluence and conflict. General M.D. Taylor, US Army retired argued ‘... US military priorities just be shifted towards insuring a steady flow of resources from the Third World’. Taylor referred to ‘… fierce competition among industrial powers for the same raw materials markets sought by the United States’ and ‘… growing hostility displayed by have-not nations towards their affluent counterparts’.62 ‘Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and poor nations over their share of the world product; within the industrial world over their share of industrial resources and markets’.63 ‘That more than half of the people on this planet are poorly nourished while a small percentage live in historically unparalleled luxury is a sure recipe for continued and even escalating international conflict . ’64 The oil embargo placed on the US by OPEC in the early 1970s prompted the US to make it clear that it was prepared to go to war in order to secure supplies. ‘President Carter last week issued a clear warning that any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf would lead to war.’ It would ‘… be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States’.65 ‘The US is ready to take military action if Russia threatens vital American interests in the Persian Gulf, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Brown, said yesterday.’66 Klare’s recent book Resource Wars discusses this theme in detail, stressing the coming significance of water as a source of international conflict. ‘Global demand for many key materials is growing at an unsustainable rate. … the incidence of conflict over vital materials is sure to grow. … The wars of the future will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods. … resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the global security environment.’67 Much of the rich world’s participation in the conflicts taking place throughout the world is driven by the determination to back a faction that will then look favourably on Western interests. In a report entitled, ‘The rich prize that is Shaba’, Breeze begins, ‘Increasing rivalry over a share-out between France and Belgium of the mineral riches of Shaba Province lies behind the joint Franco– Belgian paratroop airlift to Zaire. … These mineral riches make the province a valuable prize and help explain the West’s extended diplomatic courtship …’68 Then there is potential conflict between the rich nations who are after all the ones most dependent on securing large quantities of resources. ‘The resource and energy intensive modes of production employed in nearly all industries necessitate continuing armed coercion and competition to secure raw materials.’69 ‘Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and poor nations over their share of the world product, within the industrial world over their share of industrial resources and markets …’70 Growth, competition, expansion … and war Finally, at the most abstract level, the struggle for greater wealth and power is central in the literature on the causes of war. ‘… warfare appears as a normal and periodic form of competition within the capitalist world economy. … world wars regularly occur during a period of economic expansion . ’71 ‘War is an inevitable result of the struggle between economies for expansion .’72 Choucri and North say their most important finding is that domestic growth is a strong determinant of national expansion and that this results in competition between nations and war.73 The First and Second World Wars can be seen as being largely about imperial grabbing. Germany, Italy and Japan sought to expand their territory and resource access. Britain already held much of the world within its empire … which it had previously fought 72 wars to take! ‘Finite resources in a world of expanding populations and increasing per capita demands create a situation ripe for international violence . ’74 Ashley focuses on the significance of the quest for economic growth. ‘War is mainly explicable in terms of differential growth in a world of scarce and unevenly distributed resources … expansion is a prime source of conflict. So long as the dynamics of differential growth remain unmanaged, it is probable that these long term processes will sooner or later carry major powers into war.’75 Security The point being made can be put in terms of security. One way to seek security is to develop greater capacity to repel attack. In the case of nations this means large expenditure of money, resources and effort on military preparedness. However there is a much better strategy; i.e. to live in ways that do not oblige you to take more than your fair share and therefore that do not give anyone any motive to attack you. Tut! This is not possible unless there is global economic justice. If a few insist on levels of affluence, industrialisation and economic growth that are totally impossible for all to achieve, and which could not be possible if they were taking only their fair share of global resources, then they must remain heavily armed and their security will require readiness to use their arms to defend their unjust privileges. In other words, if we want affluence we must prepare for war. If we insist on continuing to take most of

the oil and other resources while many suffer intense deprivation because they cannot get access to them then we must be prepared to maintain the aircraft carriers and rapid deployment forces, and the despotic regimes, without which we cannot secure the oil fields and plantations. Global peace is not possible without global justice, and that is not possible unless rich countries move to ‘The Simpler Way’.

Causes extinction by 2025Chase-Dunn, Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems, and Podobnik, Assistant Professor in the Department of

Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College, 99(Christopher and Bruce, The Future of Global Conflict, ed. Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, pg 43)

While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer when the influence of long-term economic cycles is taken into account. As an extensive body of research documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the 50 to 60 year business cycle known as the Kondratieff wave (K-wave) has been in synchronous operation on an international scale for at least the last two centuries. Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on war severity, Goldstein (1988) demonstrates that there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the number of battle deaths per year for the period 1495-1975. Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in a systematic fashion, Goldstein’s research suggests that severe core wars are much more likely to occur late in the upswing phase of the K-wave. This finding is interpreted as showing that, while states always desire to go to war, they can afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with sufficient resources . Modelski and Thompson (1996) present a more complex

interpretation of the systemic relationship between economic and war cycles, but it closely resembles Goldstein’s hypothesis. In their analysis, a first economic upswing generates the economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a bid for hegemony; a second period of economic growth follows a period of global war and the establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here, again, specific economic upswings are associated with an increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war. It is widely accepted that the current K-wave , which entered a downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will reach its apex around 2025. It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony, already unraveling, will have been definitively eroded. This convergence of a plateauing economic cycle with a period of political multicentricity within the core should, if history truly does repeat itself, result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core powers. Although both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global war can (somehow) be avoided, other theorists consider that the possibility of such a core war is sufficiently high that serious steps should be taken to ensure that such collective suicide does not occur .

1NC – Water Wars ImpactGrowth causes water wars and scarcity Speth 2008 Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school. Former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University . Former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. .Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black JD, Yale. (James Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Gigapedia, 32-34)

First, there is the crisis of natural watercourses and their attendant wetlands. No natural areas have been as degraded by human activities as freshwater systems. Natural water courses and the vibrant life associated with them have been extensively affected by dams , dikes, diversions, stream channelization, wetland filling and other modifications , and, of course, pollution. Sixty percent of the world’s major river basins have been severely or moderately fragmented by dams or other construction. Since 1950 the number of large dams has increased from 5,700 worldwide to more than 41,000. Much of this activity is done to secure access to the water, but power production, fl ood control, navigation, and land reclamation have also been important factors. As freshwater is diverted from natural sources, ecosystems dependent on that water suff er, including aquatic systems, wetlands, and forests. About half the world’s wetlands have been lost , and more than a fi fth of known freshwater species have already been driven to extinction.41 The second crisis is the crisis of freshwater supply. Human demand for water climbed sixfold in the twentieth century, and the trend continues today. Humanity now withdraws slightly over half of accessible freshwater, and water withdrawals could climb to 70 percent by 2025.42 Meeting the world’s demands for freshwater is proving problematic. About 40 percent of the world’s people already live in countries that are classified as “water stressed,” meaning that already 20 to 40 percent of the available freshwater is being used by human societies. Projections indicate that the percentage of people living in water-stressed countries could rise to 65 percent by 2025.43 A large portion of freshwater withdrawals, about 70 percent, goes to agriculture. Since 1960, acreage under irrigation has more than doubled. A special problem is occurring in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia where tens of millions of tubewells are depleting “fossil” groundwaters. The New Scientist reports that “hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land turned to desert.”44 Overall, according to a study by top water specialists from around the world, world demand for water could double by 2050 .45 “At the worst,” the New York Times reported, “a deepening water crisis would fuel violent conflicts, dry up rivers and increase groundwater pollution. . . . It would also force the rural poor to clear ever-more grasslands and forests to grow food and leave many more people hungry.”46 Last, there is the crisis of pollution. Pollutants of all types are discharged into the world’s waters in enormous quantities, reduc ing the capacities of bodies of water to support life in the water and to support human communities. Contamination denies a large portion of the world’s population access to clean water supplies. About a billion people, a fi fth of the world’s population, lack clean drinking water; 40 percent lack sanitary services. The World Health Organization calculates that each year about 1.6 million children die from diseases caused by unsafe drinking water and lack of water for sanitation and hygiene.47 Water supply issues will become increasingly prevalent in the United States. Freshwater withdrawals per capita from surface and groundwaters in the United States are twice that of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) as a whole. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that if current American water use remains constant at a hundred gallons per person per day, thirtysix states will face water shortages by 2013 . As a result, humanity’s “fi rst need” will soon be privatized. Investors are moving into a water related market that is estimated to be worth at least $150 billion in the United States by 2010. “Water is a growth driver for as long and as far as the eye can see,” a Goldman Sachs water analyst told the New York Times in 2006.48

Extinction Barlow 8 National chairperson of The Council of Canadians. Co-founder of the Blue Planet Project. Chairs the board of Washington-based Food & Water Watch and is also an executive member of the San Francisco–based International Forum on Globalization and a Councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council. She is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates. Served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly (Maude, The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, 25 February 2008, http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_global_water_crisis_and_the_coming_battle_for_the_right_to_water)

The three water crises – dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of water – pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival . Together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, the water crises impose some life-or-death decisions on us all. Unless we collectively change our behavior, we are heading toward a world of deepening conflict and potential wars over the dwindling supplies of freshwater – between nations, between rich and poor, between the public and the private interest, between rural and urban populations, and between the competing needs of the natural world and industrialized humans. Water Is Becoming a Growing Source of Conflict Between Countries Around the world, more that 215 major rivers and 300 groundwater basins and aquifers are shared by two or more countries, creating tensions over ownership and use of the precious waters they contain. Growing shortages and unequal distribution of water are causing disagreements, sometimes violent, and becoming a security risk in many regions. Britain’s former defense secretary, John Reid, warns of coming “water wars.” In a public statement on the eve of a 2006 summit on climate change, Reid predicted that violence and political conflict would become more likely as watersheds turn to deserts, glaciers melt and water supplies are poisoned. He went so far as to say that the global water crisis was becoming a global security issue and that Britain’s armed forces should be prepared to tackle conflicts, including warfare, over dwindling water sources. “Such changes make the emergence of violent conflict more, rather than less, likely,” former British prime minister Tony Blair told The Independent. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign.” The Independent gave several other examples of regions of potential conflict . These include Israel, Jordan and Palestine, who all rely on the Jordan River, which is controlled by Israel; Turkey and Syria , where Turkish plans to build dams on the Euphrates River brought the country to the brink of war with Syria in 1998, and where Syria now accuses Turkey of deliberately meddling with its water supply; China and India, where the Brahmaputra River has caused tension between the two countries in the past, and where China’s proposal to divert the river is re-igniting the divisions; Angola, Botswana and Namibia , where disputes over the Okavango water basin that have flared in the past are now threatening to re-ignite as Namibia is proposing to build a threehundred- kilometer pipeline that will drain the delta; Ethiopia and Egypt , where population growth is threatening conflict along the Nile; and Bangladesh and India, where flooding in the Ganges caused by melting glaciers in the Himalayas is wreaking havoc in Bangladesh, leading to a rise in illegal, and unpopular, migration to India.

1NC – Terror ImpactGrowth causes terrorism Cronin 3 Senior Associate at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War (Audrey Kurth, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, Project MUSE)

The objectives of international terrorism have also changed as a result of globalization. Foreign intrusions and growing awareness of shrinking global space have created incentives to use the ideal asymmetrical weapon, terrorism, for more ambitious purposes. The political incentives to attack major targets such as the United States with powerful weapons have greatly increased. The perceived corruption of indigenous customs, religions, languages, economies, and so on are blamed on an international system often unconsciously molded by American behavior. The accompanying distortions in local communities as a result of exposure to the global marketplace of goods and ideas are increasingly blamed on U.S .- sponsored modernization and those who support it. The advancement of technology, however, is not the driving force behind the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies, despite what some have assumed. Instead, at the heart of this threat are frustrated populations and international movements that are increasingly inclined to lash out against U.S.-led globalization. As Christopher Coker observes, globalization is reducing tendencies toward instrumental violence (i.e., violence between states and even between communities), but it is enhancing incentives for expressive violence (or violence that is ritualistic, symbolic, and communicative). The new international terrorism is [End Page 51] increasingly engendered by a need to assert identity or meaning against forces of homogeneity, especially on the part of cultures that are threatened by, or left behind by, the secular future that Western-led globalization brings. According to a report recently published by the United Nations Development Programme, the region of greatest deficit in measures of human development—the Arab world—is also the heart of the most threatening religiously inspired terrorism. Much more work needs to be done on the significance of this correlation, but increasingly sources of political discontent are arising from disenfranchised areas in the Arab world that feel left behind by the promise of globalization and its assurances of broader freedom, prosperity, and access to knowledge. The results are dashed expectations, heightened resentment of the perceived U.S.-led hegemonic system, and a shift of focus away from more proximate targets within the region. Of course, the motivations behind this threat should not be oversimplified: Anti-American terrorism is spurred in part by a desire to change U.S. policy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions as well as by growing antipathy in the developing world vis-à-vis the forces of globalization. It is also crucial to distinguish between the motivations of leaders such as Osama bin Laden and their followers. The former seem to be more driven by calculated strategic decisions to shift the locus of attack away from repressive indigenous governments to the more attractive and media-rich target of the United States. The latter appear to be more driven by religious concepts cleverly distorted to arouse anger and passion in societies full of pent-up frustration. To some degree, terrorism is directed against the United States because of its engagement and policies in various regions. Anti-Americanism is closely related to antiglobalization, because (intentionally or not) the primary driver of the powerful forces resulting in globalization is the United States. Analyzing terrorism as something separate from globalization is misleading and potentially dangerous. Indeed globalization and terrorism are intricately intertwined forces characterizing international security in the twenty-first century. The main question is whether terrorism will succeed in disrupting the [End Page 52] promise of improved livelihoods for millions of people on Earth. Globalization is not an inevitable, linear development, and it can be disrupted by such unconventional means as international terrorism. Conversely, modern international terrorism is especially dangerous because of the power that it potentially derives from globalization—whether through access to CBNR weapons, global media outreach, or a diverse network of financial and information resources.

Nuclear war Hellman 8—professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. PhD from Stanford. (Martin, The Odds for Nuclear Armageddon, Spring 2008, http://www.nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf)

The threat of nuclear terrorism looms much larger in the public’s mind than the threat of a full-scale nuclear war , yet this article focuses primarily on the latter. An explanation is therefore in order before proceeding. A terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon would be a catastrophe of immense proportions: “A 10-kiloton bomb detonated at Grand Central Station on a typical work day would likely kill some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars in direct economic damage. America and its way of life would be changed forever.” [Bunn 2003, pages viii-ix]. The likelihood of such an attack is also significant. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has estimated the chance of a nuclear terrorist incident within the next decade to be roughly 50 percent [Bunn 2007, page 15]. David Albright, a former weapons inspector in Iraq, estimates those odds at less than one percent, but notes, “We would never accept a situation where the chance of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1% .... A nuclear terrorism attack is a low-probability event, but we can’t live in a world where it’s anything but extremely low-probability.” [Hegland 2005]. In a survey of 85 national security experts, Senator Richard Lugar found a median estimate of 20 percent for the “probability of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the

next 10 years,” with 79 percent of the respondents believing “it more likely to be carried out by terrorists” than by a government [Lugar 2005, pp. 14-15]. I support increased efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, but that is not inconsistent with the approach of this article. Because terrorism is one of the potential trigger mechanisms for a full-scale nuclear war , the risk analyses proposed herein will include estimating the risk of nuclear terrorism as one component of the overall risk. If that risk, the overall risk, or both are found to be unacceptable, then the proposed remedies would be directed to reduce whichever risk(s) warrant attention. Similar remarks apply to a number of other threats (e.g., nuclear war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan).

1NC – Ag Diversity ImpactGrowth kills agricultural diversity Chen 2k Professor of Law and Vance K. Opperman Research Scholar, University of Minnesota Law School (Jim, Globalization and Its Losers, Winter 2000, 9 Minn. J. Global Trade 157, Lexis)

Like America, the impulse toward species conservation "was born in the country and moved to the city." 296 Our awareness of extinction began on the farm. The opening chapter of The Origin of Species explored variation in domesticated plants and animals. 297 As industrialization forced smaller farms to fold or consolidate, entire landraces, varieties, and breeds vanished. The biological crisis of Darwin's England has spread to the rest of the globe. Agriculture's shallow genetic pool is being drained at a breakneck pace "as human population and economic pressures [*205] accelerate the pace of change in traditional agricultural systems." 298 Globalization portends dire consequences for ag ricultural biodiversity. Rural communities preserve rare animal breeds and plant varieties in situ. Over many generations, traditional foraging and agrarian communities have amassed volumes of ethnobiological knowledge . 299 The world's untapped ethnobiological knowledge, "if gathered and catalogued, would constitute a library of Alexandrian proportions." 300 Much of this knowledge, locked as it is in endangered languages, will be irretrievable if linguistic diversity continues to decline . 301

Extinction Mulvany 1 senior policy adviser at Practical Action. Chair of the UK Food Group. Has been a trustee of Oxfam, Action Aid and CIIR and adviser to many other international NGOs. He was a founder editorial board member of Development in Practice journal. Masters degree from Oxford University and is a chartered member of the Institute of Biology AND Rachel Berger climate change Policy Advisor with Practical Action (Patrick, Agricultural Biodiversity: Farmers Sustaining the Web of Life, http://practicalaction.org/docs/advocacy/fwn_bio-div_briefing.pdf)

Agricultural biodiversity embraces the living matter that produces food and other farm products, supports production and shapes agricultural landscapes. The variety of tastes, textures and colours in food is a product of agricultural biodiversity. This biodiversity is the result of the interaction by smallholder farmers, herders and artisanal fisherfolk with other species over millennia. Selecting and managing these for local nutritional, social and economic needs has produced the agricultural bio diversity on which humanity depends . Food production systems need to be rooted in sustaining agricultural biodiversity so that farmers everywhere can continue to provide food and livelihoods and maintain life on Earth . STRENGTH IN DIVERSITY At a time of unprecedented changes in society, population and the environment, agricultural biodiversity also provides some security against future adversity, be it from climate change, war , industrial developments, biotechnological calamities or ecosystem collapse. There is greater strength in diversity than in susceptible uniformity. A diversity of varieties, breeds and species will ensure that there will continue to be agricultural production whatever the threat, and hidden in the genetic code of today's crop plants and livestock are many invisible traits that may become useful in confronting future challenges.

1NC – Biodiversity ImpactGrowth causes biodiversity loss --- ensures extinction --- prefer our impacts --- they’re irreversibleChen 2k Professor of Law and Vance K. Opperman Research Scholar, University of Minnesota Law School (Jim, Globalization and Its Losers, Winter 2000, 9 Minn. J. Global Trade 157, Lexis)

Globalization marks the end of an epoch . Not merely an epoch in the colloquial sense, but an epoch in the geological sense. The spread of Homo sapiens around the earth has brought about mass extinctions and related ecological changes on a scale not seen since the Cretaceous period. In its evolutionary impact, comprehensive human colonization of the planet easily outclasses an ice age, or even twenty. 1 The previous geological event of comparable magnitude ushered out the dinosaurs; the one before that, the mass extinction that closed out the Permian period, nearly ended the terrestrial tenure of what we arrogantly call "higher" life forms. 2 In the last 600 million years of geological history, only five previous extinction spasms

have taken place. 3 We are living -- or perhaps more accurately, dying -- through the sixth. 4 "Half the world's species will be extinct or on the verge of extinction" by the end of the twenty-first century. 5 In environmental

terms, globalization merely continues what humanity has been doing since the glaciers last retreated: subdue every niche within its reach. 6 [*159] The spectacle of mass extinction gives rhetorical ammunition to all opponents of globalization -- not just environmentalists, but also those who resist free trade as a threat to labor standards, cultural independence, religious values, declining languages, agricultural self-sufficiency, and the like. Just as the global expansion of a single "Terminator" primate species has sparked the Holocene epoch's ecological holocaust, the emergence of a global society threatens a host of human institutions . Where a geological clock once marked the entrance and exit of species, an accelerated human stopwatch now tracks the rise and fall of regimes, religions, languages, and civilizations. Time and chance happen to them all. 7 The extinction metaphor describes not only a natural world in ecological cataclysm, but also a human society buffeted by changes of unprecedented

scope and seemingly relentless acceleration. In this dual sense, globalization is nothing short of the end of the world . 8 So apocalyptic an assertion deserves nothing less than the most grandiose of intellectual frameworks. I

will examine globalization through a Darwinian lens, in the hope that an application of natural evolution as "universal acid" will "eat[] through just about every traditional concept, and leave[] in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways." 9 In economic, cultural, and environmental realms, globalization unleashes the same Darwinian dynamics of adaptation, natural selection, and extinction. But the natural world and human society do differ fundamentally. For natural species, extinction truly is forever. The ecosystems they inhabit will not recover in any time frame that humans can meaningfully contemplate. Human institutions, by contrast, are much more readily preserved and revived. To the extent that globalized society must choose, it should systematically favor the environment over jobs and even culture. One final observation bears notice. Received wisdom in American intellectual circles distrusts almost any extension of evolutionary metaphors and analogies outside the strictly biological [*160] domain. 10 And not altogether without reason, for "social Darwinism" has a sorry history. 11 But I shall persist. If nothing else I hope that a creative infusion of Darwinian reasoning may foster more fruitful analysis of the interlocking economic, political, cultural, and environmental issues raised by globalization. Perhaps such a step "holds the seed of a new intellectual harvest, to be reaped in the next season of the human understanding." 12

Loss of biodiversity outweighs all other impactsTobin, ’00 (Richard, professor of political science at SUNY-Buffalo, The Expendable Future, p. 22

Norman Meyers observes, no other form of environmental degradation “is anywhere so significant as the fallout of species.” Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is less modest in assessing the relative consequences of human-caused extinctions. To Wilson, the worst thing that will happen to earth is not economic collapse, the depletion of energy supplies, or even nuclear war . As frightful as these events might be, Wilson reasons that they can “be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing…that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by destruction of natural habitats.

1NC – Disease ImpactDevelopment makes global pandemics inevitable---causes extinctionKrepinevich 9 (Andrew, President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Distinguished Visiting Professor @ George Mason's School of Public Policy, Congressional Consultant on Military Affairs, PhD Harvard, "7 Deadly Scenarios," February)Over the past several decades the world has experience a wave of globalization , far surpassing the great surge that swept over the globe in the years leading up to World War I. The growth of the world economy---facilitated by lower trade barriers, global supply chains, international financial networks, and global communication---has yielded many benefits, including increased wealth and great economic efficiencies. It has also yielded an unprecedented level of mobility ---in the movement of capital, goods, and services, in people (including migration) , and last but not least, in disease. For nearly a century the world has been spared the specter of mass deaths induced by a killer disease. The last great global pandemic occurred at the end of World War I, when the misnamed Spanish influenza killed an estimated 20 million people---including nearly 700,000 Americans---before it ran its course. To a significant degree, the spread of influenza was aided and abetted by the world war, which saw the armed forces of many nations on the move from their home countries to other parts of the world. Even then, however , human mobility and trade were far more constrained than they are today, when every year millions of passengers pass through U.S. airports alone. There have been several canaries in humanity's mine shaft, warn ing of impending disaster . According to the scientific community, the world has been overdue for some form of pandemic. On occasions too numerous to count, members of the medical profession have stated that " it is not a matter of if such an event will occur, but when ." As the World Health Organization met in Geneva in the summer of 2009, health officials were citing the "near-misses" the world had recently experienced with the AIDS virus, tuberculosis, and avian flu (commonly referred to as bird flu), and warned that, absent a major effort to improve the globe's public health system, humanity's good fortune could not---and would not---last . But the issue has to struggle to get on the global agenda. Here in America the 2008 presidential campaign (which began in early 2007) was dominated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader problem of militant Islam, rising energy prices, a falling economy, and growing concerns about global warming. Neither public health concerns over a pandemic nor the country's illegal alien problem appeared prominently on the political radar screen. Call them the "stealth" issues---the ones that we failed to detect.

1NC – Ozone / Oxygen ImpactGrowth causes oxygen and ozone collapse Alteri 2k Miguel, Ph.D in Entomology, Division of Insect Biology, U.C. Berkeley http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~agroeco3/modern_agriculture.html

The specialization of production units has led to the image that agriculture is a modern miracle of food production. Evidence indicates, however, that excessive reliance on monoculture farming and agroindustrial inputs, such as capital-intensive technology, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, has negatively impacted the environment and rural society. Most agriculturalists had assumed that the agroecosystem/natural ecosystem dichotomy need not lead to undesirable consequences, yet, unfortunately, a number of "ecological diseases" have been associated with the intensification of food production. They may be grouped into two categories: diseases of the ecotope, which include erosion, loss of soil fertility, depletion of nutrient reserves, salinization and alkalinization, pollution of water systems, loss of fertile croplands to urban development, and diseases of the biocoenosis, which include loss of crop, wild plant, and animal genetic resources, elimination of natural enemies, pest resurgence and genetic resistance to pesticides, chemical contamination, and destruction of natural control mechanisms. Under conditions of intensive management, treatment of such "diseases" requires an increase in the external costs to the extent that, in some agricultural systems, the amount of energy invested to produce a desired yield surpasses the energy harvested (4). The loss of yields due to pests in many crops (reaching about 20-30% in most crops), despite the substantial increase in the use of pesticides (about 500 million kg of active ingredient worldwide) is a symptom of the environmental crisis affecting agriculture. It is well known that cultivated plants grown in genetically homogenous monocultures do not possess the necessary ecological defense mechanisms to tolerate the impact of outbreaking pest populations. Modern agriculturists have selected crops for high yields and high palatability, making them more susceptible to pests by sacrificing natural resistance for productivity. On the other hand, modern agricultural practices negatively affect pest natural enemies, which in turn do not find the necessary environmental resources and opportunities in monocultures to effectively and biologically suppress pests. Due to this lack of natural controls, an investment of about 40 billion dollars in pesticide control is incurred yearly by US farmers, which is estimated to save approximately $16 billion in US crops. However, the indirect costs of pesticide use to the environment and public health have to be balanced against these benefits. Based on the available data, the environmental (impacts on wildlife, pollinators, natural enemies, fisheries, water and development of resistance) and social costs (human poisonings and illnesses) of pesticide use reach about $8 billion each year (5). What is worrisome is that pesticide use is on the rise. Data from California shows that from 1941 to 1995 pesticide use increased from 161 to 212 million pounds of active ingredient. These increases were not due to increases in planted acreage, as statewide crop acreage remained constant during this period. Crops such as strawberries and grapes account for much of this increased use, which includes toxic pesticides, many of which are linked to cancers (6) . Fertilizers, on the other hand, have been praised as being highly associated with the temporary increase in food production observed in many countries. National average rates of nitrate applied to most arable lands fluctuate between 120-550 kg N/ha. But the bountiful harvests created at least in part through the use of chemical fertilizers, have associated, and often hidden, costs. A primary reason why chemical fertilizers pollute the environment is due to wasteful application and the fact that crops use them inefficiently. The fertilizer that is not recovered by the crop ends up in the environment, mostly in surface water or in ground water. Nitrate contamination of aquifers is widespread and in dangerously high levels in many rural regions of the world. In the US, it is estimated that more than 25% of the drinking water wells contain nitrate levels above the 45 parts per million safety standard. Such nitrate levels are hazardous to human health and studies have linked nitrate uptake to methaemoglobinemia in children and to gastric, bladder and oesophageal cancers in adults (7) . Fertilizer nutrients that enter surface waters (rivers, lakes, bays, etc.) can promote eutrophication, characterized initially by a population explosion of photosynthetic algae. Algal blooms turn the water bright green, prevent light from penetrating beneath surface layers, and therefore killing plants living on the bottom. Such dead vegetation serve as food for other aquatic microorganisms which soon deplete water of its oxygen , inhibiting the decomposition of organic residues, which accumulate on the bottom. Eventually, such nutrient enrichment of freshwater ecosystems leads to the destruction of all animal life in the water systems. In the US it is estimated that about 50-70% of all nutrients that reach surface waters is derived from fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers can also become air pollutants, and have recently been implicated in the destruction of the ozone layer and in global warming. Their excessive use has also been linked to the acidification/salinization of soils and to a higher incidence of insect pests and diseases through mediation

of negative nutritional changes in crop plants (8). It is clear then that the first wave of environmental problems is deeply rooted in the prevalent socioeconomic system which promotes monocultures and the use of high input technologies and agricultural practices that lead to natural resource degradation. Such degradation is not only an ecological process, but also a social and political-economic process (9) . This is why the problem of agricultural production cannot be regarded only as a technological one, but while agreeing that productivity issues represent part of the problem, attention to social, cultural and economic issues that account for the crisis is crucial. This is particularly true today where the economic and political domination of the rural development agenda by agribusiness has thrived at the expense of the interests of consumers, farmworkers, small family farms, wildlife, the environment, and rural communities (10).

Ozone decline causes extinctionGreenpeace, 1995. “Full of Homes: The Montreal Protocol and the Continuing Destruction of the Ozone Layer,” http://archive.greenpeace.org/ozone/holes/holebg.html.

When chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina first postulated a link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone layer depletion in 1974, the news was greeted with scepticism, but taken seriously nonetheless. The vast majority of credible scientists have since confirmed this hypothesis . The ozone layer around the Earth shields us all from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without the ozone layer, life on earth would not exist . Exposure to increased levels of ultraviolet radiation can cause cataracts, skin cancer, and immune system suppression in humans as well as innumerable effects on other living systems. This is why Rowland's and Molina's theory was taken so seriously, so quickly---the stakes are literally the continuation of life on earth.

Oxygen collapse causes extinctionTatchell 8 human rights activist, internally quotes ecologists (Peter, 8/13, The oxygen crisis, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/13/carbonemissions.climatechange

Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it

could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis. I am not a scientist, but this seems a reasonable concern. It is a possibility that we should examine and assess. So, what's the evidence? Around 10,000 years ago, the planet's forest cover was at least twice what it is today, which means that forests are now emitting only half the amount of oxygen . Desertification and deforestation are rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources. The story at sea is much the same. Nasa reports that in the north Pacific ocean oxygen-producing phytoplankton concentrations are 30% lower today, compared to the 1980s. This is a huge drop in just three decades. Moreover, the UN environment programme confirmed in 2004 that there were nearly 150 "dead zones" in the world's oceans where discharged sewage and industrial waste, farm fertiliser run-off and other pollutants have reduced oxygen levels to such an extent that most or all sea creatures can no longer live there. This oxygen starvation is reducing regional fish stocks and diminishing the food supplies of populations that are dependent on fishing. It also causes genetic mutations and hormonal changes that can affect the reproductive capacity of sea life, which could further diminish global fish supplies.

1NC – Toxificiation ImpactGrowth causes a global toxification crisis—risks extinctionEhrlich, 13 (Paul R.Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich , Department of Biology, Stanford University, Simplicity Institute Report 13a, 2013 , “CAN A COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION BE AVOIDED?” http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/EhrlichPaper.pdf, jj)

Another possible threat to the continuation of civilization is global toxification . Adverse symptoms of exposure to synthetic chemicals are making some scientists increasingly nervous about effects on the human population [77–79]. Should a global threat materialize, however, no planned mitigating responses (analogous to the ecologically and politically risky ‘geoengineering’ projects often proposed to ameliorate climate disruption [80]) are waiting in the wings ready for deployment. Much the same can be said about aspects of the epidemiological environment and the prospect of epidemics being enhanced by rapid population growth in immune-weakened societies, increased contact with animal reservoirs, high-speed transport and the misuse of antibiotics [81]. Nobel

laureate Joshua Lederberg had great concern for the epidemic problem, famously stating, ‘The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program’ [82, p. 40]. Some precautionary steps that should be considered include forbidding the use of antibiotics as growth stimulators for livestock, building emergency stocks of key vaccines and drugs (such as Tamiflu), improving disease surveillance, expanding mothballed emergency medical facilities, preparing institutions for imposing quarantines and, of course, moving as rapidly as possible to humanely reduce the human population size. It has become increasingly clear that

security has many dimensions beyond military security [83,84] and that breaches of environmental security could risk the end of global civilization.

1NC – North / South Gap ImpactTurn – North-South Wealth Gap

Growth causes itTrainer 11 [real-world economics review, issue no. 57 “The radical implications of a zero growth economy”, Ted Trainer, Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Australia, 2011]

The wider context The gross unsustainability of consumer-capitalist society is only the first of two crushing arguments against its acceptability. The other is to do with the extreme and brutal injustice built into the global economy, and without which we in rich countries could not have such high material living standards. The global economy delivers most of the world’s resource wealth, e.g., oil, to the rich countries. It does this simply because it is a market system and in a market most scarce and valuable things go to the rich, because they can pay most for resources and goods. The same principle ensures that the development taking place in the Third World is little more than development that will enrich the corporations from the rich countries, Third World elites and the people who shop in rich world supermarkets. The global economy totally ignores the needs and the rights of people and ecosystems. It allows, guarantees, that 850 million people starve while 600 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year and most of the best land in many hungry countries is devoted to export crops. Conventional development, i.e., development determined by market forces and profit, is therefore clearly a form of plunder – it puts the productive capacity of the Third World into enriching us not them. Conventional development theory and practice are based on the idea of “growth and trickle down”, i.e., the assumption that if we all enthusiastically pursue growth within the market place then this will be the best way to raise the Third World to satisfactory living standards. What a delight for the very rich! “No need to think about redistributing existing wealth, or producing what’s needed rather than what’s profitable…just produce whatever most enriches the already rich and wealth will trickle down to enrich all.” This is to say we should be content with an approach to development which delivers almost all of the Third World’s produced wealth to us in rich countries while a tiny fraction of it benefits Third World people. The greatest blind spot in this conventional development theory and practice is that its goal is utterly impossible. The discussion above makes clear that there is no possibility of the Third World developing to be like the rich countries or to have rich world “living standards”; there are nowhere near enough resources for that.

Extinction and another warrant for unsustainabilityLown, ’96 [Bernard, MD Co-Founder, IPPNW, http://www.ippnw.org/, Crude Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Terrorist Threat]

Nuclear apartheid cannot endure. The stimulus to proliferation derives largely from an inequitable world order and the growing economic divide between rich and poor countries. One fifth of the world lives on the edge of subsistence. At a time of potential abundance, more people are hungry than ever before. We end the century with far more desperately poor, illiterate, homeless, starving, and sick than we began. Nowhere are the inequities more in evidence than in the health sector. Eight hundred million people are without any health care at all. One-third of the world’s population lives in countries whose health care expenditures are far less than $12 per person per year (the bare minimum recommended by the World Bank) while the industrialized North spends more than $1,000 for health per person annually. Recent UN figures indicate that from 1960 to 1990, per capita income rose eight-fold in the North while increasing only half as much in the deprived lands of the South. This divide is likely to widen further while accelerating over-consumption in the North and burgeoning population pressures in the developing countries. As vital raw materials, scarce minerals, fossil fuels, and especially water become depleted, Northern affluence will be sustained by imposed belt tightening of impoverished multitudes struggling for mere subsistence. This is an agenda for endless conflict and colossal violence. The global pressure cooker will further superheat by the ongoing worldwide information revolution that exposes everyone to the promissory note of unlimited consumption, there by instilling impatience and igniting more embers of social upheaval. If desperation grows, the deprived will be tempted to challenge the affluent in the only conceivable way that can make an impact, namely by going nuclear. Their possession enables the weak to inflict unacceptable damage on the strong. Desperation and hopelessness breed religious fundamentalism and provide endless recruits ready to wreak vengeance, if necessary by self immolation in the process of inflicting unspeakable violence on others. A nuclear bomb affords “the cheapest and biggest bang for the buck.” No blackmail is as compelling as holding an entire city hostage. No other destructive device can cause greater societal disruption or exact a larger human toll. Terrorists will soon raise their sights to vaporizing a metropolitan area rather than merely pulverizing a building.

Terrorism sparks global nuclear warSpeice, ‘6 [Patrick, J.D. Candidate 2006, Marshall-Wythe School of Law, College of William and Mary, “NEGLIGENCE AND NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION: ELIMINATING THE CURRENT LIABILITY BARRIER TO BILATERAL U.S.-RUSSIAN NONPROLIFERATION ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS,” William & Mary Law Review, Feb, l/n]

The potential consequences of the unchecked spread of nuclear knowledge and material to terrorist groups that seek to cause mass destruction in the United States are truly horrifying. A terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be devastating in terms of immediate human and

economic losses. 49 Moreover, there would be immense political pressure in the U nited States to discover the perpetrators and retaliate with nuclear weapons, massively increasing the number of casualties and potentially triggering a full-scale nuclear conflict . 50 In addition to the threat posed by terrorists, leakage of nuclear knowledge and material from Russia will reduce

the barriers that states with nuclear ambitions face and may trigger widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. 51 This proliferation will increase the risk of nuclear attacks against the United States [*1440] or its allies by hostile states, 52 as well as increase the likelihood that regional conflicts will draw in the United States and escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. 53

Prolif causes extinctionUtgoff, Deputy Director at Institute for Defense Analysis, 2 [Victor, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, Survival, “Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions” 2002 p. 87-90]

Further, the large number of states that became capable of building nuclear weapons over the years, but chose not to, can be reasonably well explained by the fact that most were formally allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Both these superpowers had strong nuclear forces and put great pressure on their allies not to build nuclear weapons. Since the Cold War, the US has retained all its allies. In addition, NATO has extended its protection to some of the previous allies of the Soviet Union and plans on taking in more. Nuclear proliferation by India and Pakistan, and proliferation programmes by North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all involve states in the opposite situation: all judged that they faced serious military opposition and had little prospect of establishing a reliable supporting alliance with a suitably strong, nuclear-armed state. What would await the world if strong protectors, especially the United States, were [was] no longer seen as willing to protect states from nuclear-backed aggression? At least a few additional states would begin to build their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver

them to distant targets, and these initiatives would spur increasing numbers of the world’s capable states to follow suit . Restraint would seem ever less necessary and ever more dangerous. Meanwhile, more states are becoming capable of building nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Many, perhaps most, of the world’s states are becoming sufficiently wealthy, and the technology for building nuclear forces continues to improve and spread. Finally, it seems highly likely that at some point, halting proliferation will come to be seen as a lost cause and the restraints on it will disappear. Once that happens, the transition to a highly proliferated world would probably be very rapid. While some regions might be able to hold the line for a time, the threats posed by wildfire proliferation in most other areas

could create pressures that would finally overcome all restraint. Many readers are probably willing to accept that nuclear proliferation is such a grave threat to world peace that every effort should be made to avoid it. However, every effort has not been made in the past, and we are talking about much more substantial efforts now. For new and substantially more burdensome efforts to be made to slow or stop nuclear proliferation, it needs to be established that the highly proliferated nuclear world that would sooner or later evolve without such efforts is not going to be acceptable. And, for many reasons, it is not. First, the dynamics of getting to a highly proliferated world could be very dangerous. Proliferating states will feel great pressures to obtain nuclear weapons and delivery systems before any potential opponent does. Those who succeed in outracing an opponent may consider preemptive nuclear war before the opponent becomes capable of nuclear retaliation. Those who lag behind might try to preempt their opponent’s nuclear programme or defeat the opponent using conventional forces. And those who feel threatened but are incapable of building nuclear weapons may still be able to join in this arms race by building other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological weapons. Second, as the world approaches complete proliferation, the hazards posed by nuclear weapons today will be magnified many times over. Fifty or more nations capable of launching nuclear weapons means that the risk of nuclear accidents that could cause serious damage not only to their own populations and environments, but those of others, is hugely increased. The chances of such weapons failing into the hands of renegade military units or terrorists is far greater, as is the number of nations carrying out hazardous manufacturing and storage activities. Worse still, in a highly proliferated world there would be more frequent opportunities for the use of nuclear weapons. And more frequent opportunities means shorter expected times between conflicts in which nuclear weapons get used, unless the probability of use at any opportunity is actually zero. To be sure, some theorists on nuclear deterrence appear to think that in any confrontation between two states known to have reliable nuclear capabilities, the probability of nuclear weapons being used is zero.’ These theorists think that such states will be so fearful of escalation to nuclear war that they would always avoid or terminate confrontations between them, short of even conventional war. They believe this to be true even if the two states have different cultures or leaders with very eccentric personalities. History and human nature, however, suggest that they are almost surely wrong. History includes instances in which states ‘known to possess nuclear weapons did engage in direct conventional conflict. China and Russia fought battles along their common border even after both had nuclear weapons. Moreover, logic suggests that if states with nuclear weapons always avoided conflict with one another, surely states without nuclear weapons would avoid conflict with states that had them. Again, history provides counter-examples Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 even though it saw Israel as a nuclear power at the time. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and fought Britain’s efforts to take them back, even though Britain had nuclear weapons. Those who claim that two states with reliable nuclear capabilities to devastate each other will not engage in conventional conflict risking nuclear war also assume that any leader from any culture would not choose suicide for his nation. But history provides unhappy examples of states whose leaders were ready to choose suicide for themselves and their fellow citizens. Hitler tried to impose a ‘victory or destruction’’ policy on his people as Nazi Germany was going down to defeat. And Japan’s war minister, during debates on how to respond to the American atomic bombing, suggested ‘Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” If leaders are willing to engage in conflict with nuclear-armed nations, use of nuclear weapons in any particular instance may not be likely, but its probability would still be dangerously significant. In particular, human nature suggests that the threat of retaliation with nuclear weapons is not a reliable guarantee against a disastrous first use of these weapons. While national leaders and their advisors everywhere are usually talented and experienced people, even their most important decisions cannot be counted on to be the product of well-informed and thorough assessments of all options from all relevant points of view. This is especially so when the stakes are so large as to defy assessment and there are substantial pressures to act quickly, as could be expected in intense and fast-moving crises between nuclear-armed states. Instead, like other human beings, national leaders can be seduced by wishful thinking. They can misinterpret the words or actions of opposing leaders. Their advisors may produce answers that they think the leader wants to hear, or coalesce around what they know is an inferior decision because the group urgently needs the confidence or the sharing of responsibility that results

from settling on something. Moreover, leaders may not recognize clearly where their personal or party interests diverge from those of their citizens. Under great stress, human beings can lose their ability to think carefully. They can refuse to believe that the worst could really happen, oversimplify the problem at hand, think in terms of simplistic analogies and play hunches. The intuitive rules for how individuals should respond to insults or signs of weakness in an opponent may too readily suggest a rash course of action. Anger, fear, greed, ambition and pride can all lead to bad decisions. The desire for a decisive solution to the problem at hand may lead to an unnecessarily extreme course of action. We can almost hear the kinds of words that could flow from discussions in nuclear crises or war. ‘These people are not willing to die for this interest’. ‘No sane person would actually use such weapons’. ‘Perhaps the opponent will back down if we show him we mean business by demonstrating a willingness to use nuclear weapons’. ‘If I don’t hit them back really hard, I am going to be driven from office, if not killed’. Whether right or wrong, in the stressful atmosphere of a nuclear crisis or war, such words from others, or silently from within, might resonate too readily with a harried leader. Thus, both history and human nature suggest that nuclear deterrence can be expected to fail from time to time, and we are fortunate it has not happened yet. But the threat of nuclear war is not just a matter of a few weapons being used. It could get much worse. Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressures to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.’ Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other’s cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and

armoured attacks on the other. Escalation of violence is also basic human nature . Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants before hand. Intense and blinding anger is a common

response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread prolif eration is likely to lead to a n occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons , and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

1NC – Endocrine Disruption ImpactGrowth causes endocrine disruption and extinctionDouthwaite 99 — council member of Comhar, the Irish government's national sustainability council and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. Visiting lecturer at the University of Plymouth —ED By Ronaldo Munck andDenis O'Hearn (Richard, Critical development theory: contributions to a new paradigm, GoogleBooks, 158)

A third reason that the world economy is unsustainable is that some of the chemicals it employs mimic human hormones and disrupt the body’s endocrine s ystem. As a result, the sperm counts of European men have been falling at 3 per cent per year since these chemicals came into use after the Second World War (Swan a al. 1997). The same chemicals are also causing increases in testicular and breast cancer (European Workshop 1996) and are causing fewer boys to be born relative to girls . Moreover, a higher proportion of these boys than ever before have defective genitals . In short, the world economic system is undermining humanity’s ability to reproduce itself . If the human race is not sustainable then neither is its economic system .

1NC – OverpopulationGrowth leads to overpopulationHickerson, ’09 (Jeremy, Statesman Journal, Economic growth might be bad, as well, 5/4/09, AD: 7/6/09 nexis)

I couldn't agree more with the April 29 letter from David Ellis, "Population growth might be bad." I suggest " Economic growth might be bad." In both cases, it depends on where you're at in the spectrum of the physical limits of your environment. For the population issue, experts concluded in the 1970s that we were nearing our planet's population limit (see the 1972 "The Limits to Growth" report to the Club of Rome). The idea that economic growth might not be desirable is just an extension of the population growth discussion. Continual economic growth depends on a growing population to supply more labor and more consumers. Likewise, a continually growing population depends on economic growth to provide jobs. Overpopulation implies economic growth is no longer good, though it remains a necessity for some of the undeveloped world. So if we can't have an economy based on continual growth, what should we do? (See Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy.") We must only manufacture what we need and end marketing ploys aimed at getting people to buy new gadgets; dismantling the economy we have known and beginning a totally different way of life. This can't be accomplished solely by the free market.

ExtinctionKolankiewicz, ’10 [Leon, environmental scientist and national natural resources planner, masters in environmental planning from U of British Columbia, worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Dept of Environmental Conservation, U Wash, U New Mexico; Policy Brief #10-1, "From Big to Bigger How Mass Immigration and Population Growth Have Exacerbated America's Ecological Footprint." Progressives for Immigration Reform, http://www.progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/2010/03/05/from-big-to-bigger-how-mass-immigration-and-population-growth-have-exacerbated-americas-ecological-footprint/]

In essence, if we American “Bigfeet” do not opt for a different demographic path than the one we are treading now, Ecological Footprint analysis indicates unequivocally that we will continue plodding ever deeper into the forbidden zone of Ecological Overshoot, trampling our prospects for a sustainable future. Incidentally, we would also be trampling the survival prospects for many hundreds of endangered species with which we share our country. These birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, butterflies, mussels, and other taxa are menaced with extinction by our aggressive exploitation of nearly every ecological niche, nook, and cranny. In nature, no organism in overshoot remains there for long. Sooner or later , ecosystem and/or population collapse ensues. Are we humans, because of our unique scientific acumen, immune from the laws of nature that dictate the implacable terms of existence to all other species on the planet ? Our political, economic, and cultural elites seem to think so, and en masse, we certainly act so. Yet ironically, many scientists themselves believe otherwise: that all-too-human hubris, unless checked by collective wisdom and self-restraint, will prove to be our undoing, and that civilization as we know it may unravel. 44

One now is ten in the crunchEhrlich, ’74 (Paul, biology professor at Stanford, 6/16/1974, “Peasants Know Perfectly Well Where Their Babies Come From: Misconceptions” New York Times, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, p241)

Furthermore, there are other pernicious fallacies in “what we as Americans can do about the worlds population problem” game. Let’s start with a fallacy that the author helped to create –the idea that we might successfully pressure governments of developing countries into launching effective population control programs. In the first edition of our book “The Population Bomb,” it was suggested that the United States try to use its food aid as a lever to get recalcitrant governments moving on population control programs. The logic then (as today) was impeccable. If you deluded people into thinking that either the US could (or would) supply food in perpetuity for any number of people, you were doing evil. Sooner or later, population growth would completely outstrip the capacity of the United States or any

other nation to supply food. For every 1,000 people saved today , perhaps 10,000 would die when the crunch came. Simply sending food to hungry nations with population explosions is analogous to a physician prescribing aspirin as the treatment for a patient with operable cancer – in deferring something unpleasant, disaster is entrained. Yes, send food – but insist that population control measures be instituted. But despite the logic, no one in the US Government paid the slightest heed to that suggestion (or to related proposals by William and Paul Paddock in their 1968 book, “Famine—1975!”), and the point is now moot, since we have no more surplus food.

1NC – MoralityEvery species should have equal consideration – ending growth is a moral imperativeBarry, ’10 (Glen, PhD in Land Resources from UW-Madison and President and Founder of Ecological Internet, “The Rights of Earth,” http://www.ecoearth.info/blog/2010/07/earth_meanders_the_rights_of_e.asp, bgm)

The Rights of Earth and all creatures will surely be the next great expansion of revealed truth and natural law. The non-human world – the air, water, land, oceans and their plants and wildlife – provide the living context for all biological existence including, for now, humans. Together these ecosystems, organisms and their ecological processes and patterns combine to create Gaia – a living, self-regulating organism – who’s right to exist is independent of human notions of value. That is birds, plants, trees, wildlife, wetlands and other ecosystems have intrinsic value; and a right to exist independent of human needs and wants. The disease that permeates the human condition is to continue viewing Gaia as mere resources for consumption, rather than being acknowledged as the ecosystems that make all life and the Rights of Man possible. This state of enraged human ecocide must end immediately at all costs. Humans are entirely dependent upon Earth for every aspect of our existence. Continued ignorance, greed, fear, or just giving up because we are overwhelmed are not options. Each of us is now called to be the greatest of the great generations and save Earth from ourselves, by granting and enforcing her rights. Earth has the right to continue evolving. It has the right to be free from human geoengineering technology that further destroys creation. Earth has the right to not have its skin – natural terrestrial ecosystems – peeled from its body. Water – the Earth’s blood – has the right to flow freely creating the conditions for life. Earth has a right to bounteous oceans, to be toxic free, to not drown in carbon and nitrogen. Earth has the right to have it's human load lightened, so that it may heal, and to be ecologically restored to its original condition.

2NC Top Level Extensions

2NC – Economy Defense Economic collapse doesn’t cause war---that’s Jervis---if the current downturn didn’t cause global war then the factors cited in their evidence aren’t sufficient to cause hot wars. Decline predisposes countries to cooperation --- there’s no rational incentive to fight.

No chance of war from economic decline---best and most recent data Daniel W. Drezner 12, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf

The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars , arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict , there were genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global public disorder.

The aggregate data suggests otherwise , however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has constructed a “Global Peace

Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012 report is that “The average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 20 07 .”38 Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis – as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict ; the secular decline

in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker concludes, “the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected.”40None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind; expecting a standard “V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the post-2008 global economy as in a state of “contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,” however. Given the severity, reach and depth of the 20 08 financial crisis , the proper comparison is with Great Depression . And by that standard, the outcome variables look impressive . As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This

Time is Different: “that its macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II – and not even worse – must be regarded as fortunate.”42

**No conflicts resulted from the recession – disproves the impactBarnett 9—senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC (Thomas, The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis, 25 August 2009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary

predictions of , and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how

globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. No ne of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine)

predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an

almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar

picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements.

Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state- on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to

one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends . And with the United States effectively tied down

by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: •No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); •The usual frequency maintained in civil

conflicts (in all the usual places); •Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); •No great improvement or

disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); •A modest scaling back of

international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and •No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and

investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis . Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's

major economies remain governed by center -left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to

say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade

order.

**History proves Ferguson 6— Laurence A. Tisch prof of History at Harvard. William Ziegler of Business Administration at Harvard. MA and D.Phil from Glasgow and Oxford (Niall, “The Next War of the World,” September/October 2006, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/the_next_war_of_the_world.html)

Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise

of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered . Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by

fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than

the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.

Robust studies prove Miller 2k – Professor of Management, Ottawa (Morris, Poverty As A Cause Of Wars?, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG4draft1.htm)

Thus, these armed conflicts can hardly be said to be caused by poverty as a principal factor when the greed and envy of leaders and their hegemonic ambitions provide sufficient cause. The poor would appear to be more the victims than the perpetrators of armed conflict. It might be alleged that some dramatic event or rapid sequence of those types of events that lead to the exacerbation of poverty might be the catalyst for a violent reaction on the part of the people or on the part of the political leadership who might be tempted to seek a

diversion by finding/fabricating an enemy and going to war. According to a study undertaken by Minxin Pei and Ariel Adesnik of the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace, there would not appear to be any merit in this hypothesis. After studying 93 episodes of economic crisis in 22 countries in Latin America and Asia in the years since World War II they concluded that Much of the conventional wisdom about the political

impact of economic crises may be wrong... The severity of economic crisis - as measured in terms of inflation and

negative growth - bore no relationship to the collapse of regimes. A more direct role was played by political variables such as ideological polarization,

labor radicalism, guerilla insurgencies and an anti-Communist military... (In democratic states) such changes seldom lead to an

outbreak of violence (while ) in the cases of dictatorships and semi-democracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression

(thereby using one form of violence to abort another.

Econ collapse saps resources from military aggression Bennett 2k – PolSci Prof, Penn State (Scott and Timothy Nordstrom, Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ebsco)

Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military competition between

states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy. In a “guns versus butter” world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry. However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways

to alleviate active problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be

forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with the United States.

No geopolitical effectsBlackwill 2009 – former US ambassador to India and US National Security Council Deputy for Iraq, former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (Robert D., RAND, “The Geopolitical Consequences of the World Economic Recession—A Caution”, http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP275.pdf)

Did the economic slump lead to strategic amendments in the way Japan sees the world? No. Did it slow the pace of India’s emergence as a rising great power? No. To the contrary, the new Congress-led government in New Delhi will accelerate that process. Did it alter Iran ’s

apparent determination to acquire a nuclear capability or something close to it? No. Was it a prime cause of the recent domestic crisis and instability in Iran

after its 2009 presidential election? No. Did it slow or accelerate the moderate Arab states intent to move along the nuclear path? No. Did it affect North

Korea’s destabilizing nuclear calculations? No. Did it importantly weaken political reconciliation in Iraq? No, because there is almost none in any case. Did it slow the Middle East peace process? No, not least because prospects for progress on issues between Israel and the Palestinians are the most unpromising in 25 years.

Did it substantially affect the enormous internal and international challenges associated with the growth of Jihadiism in Pakistan? No. But at the same time, it is important to stress that Pakistan, quite apart from the global recession, is the epicenter of global terrorism and now represents potentially the most dangerous

international situation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Did the global economic downturn systemically affect the future of Afghanistan? No. The fact that the United States is doing badly in the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with the economic deterioration. As Henry Kissinger observes, “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” And NATO is not winning in Afghanistan. Did it change in a major way the future of the Mexican

state? No. Did the downturn make Europe, because of its domestic politics, less willing and able over time to join the U.S. in effective alliance

policies? No, there will likely be no basic variations in Europe’s external policies and no serious evolution in transatlantic relations. As President Obama is experiencing regarding Europe, the problems with European publics in this regard are civilizational in character, not especially tied to this recession—in general, European publics do not wish their nations to take on foreign missions that entail the use of force and possible loss of life. Did the downturn slow further EU

integration? Perhaps, at the margin, but in any case one has to watch closely to see if EU integration moves like a turtle or like a rock. And so forth. To be clear, there will inevitably be major challenges in the international situation in the next five years. In fact, this will be the most dangerous

and chaotic global period since before the 1973 Middle East war. But it is not obvious that these disturbing developments will be primarily a result of the global economic problems. It is, of course, important to be alert to primary and enduring international

discontinuities. If such a convulsive geopolitical event is out there, what is it? One that comes to mind is another catastrophic attack on the American homeland. Another is the collapse of Pakistan and the loss of government control of its nuclear arsenal to Islamic extremists. But again, neither

of these two geopolitical calamities would be connected to the current economic decline. Some argue that, even though geopolitical changes resulting from the current global economic tribulations are not yet apparent, they are occurring beneath the surface of the international system and will become manifest in the years to come. In short, causality not perceptible now will become so. This subterranean argument is difficult to rebut. To test that hypothesis, the obvious analytical method is to seek tangible data that demonstrates that it is so. In short, show A, B, and/or C (in this case, geopolitical transformations caused by the world slump) to have occurred, thus substantiating the contention. One could then examine said postulated evidence

and come to a judgment regarding its validity. To instead contend that, even though no such data can be adduced, the assertion , nevertheless, is true because of presently invisible occurrences seems more in the realm of religious conviction than rigorous analysis . But it is worth asking, as the magisterial American soldier/statesman George Marshall often did, “Why might I be wrong?” If the global economic numbers continue to decline next year and the year after, one must wonder whether any region would remain stable— whether China would maintain internal stability, whether the United States would continue as the pillar of international order, and whether the European Union

would hold together. In that same vein, it is unclear today what effect, if any, the reckless financial lending and huge public debt that the United States is accumulating, as well as current massive governmental fiscal and monetary intervention in the American economy, will have on U.S. economic dynamism, entrepreneurial creativity, and, consequently, power projection over the very long term. One can only speculate on that issue at present, but it is certainly worth worrying about, and it is the most important “known unknown”27 regarding this subject.28 In addition, perhaps the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on China is more fragile than posited here, and possibly Pakistan and Mexico are much more vulnerable to failed-state outcomes primarily because of the economic downturn than

anticipated in this essay. While it seems unlikely that these worst-case scenarios will eventuate as a result of the world

recession, they do illustrate again that crucial uncertainties in this analysis are the global downturn’s length and severity and the long-term effects

of the Obama Administration’s policies on the U.S. economy. Finally, if not, why not? If the world is in the most severe international economic crisis since the 1930s, why is it not producing structural changes in the global order? A brief

answer is that the transcendent geopolitical elements have not altered in substantial ways with regard to individual nations in the two years since the economic crisis began. What are those enduring geopolitical elements? For any given country, they include the following: • Geographic location, topography, and climate. As Robert Kaplan puts it, “to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate.”29 In this connection, see in particular the works of Sir Halford John Mackinder and his The Geographical Pivot of History (1904)30, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890).31 • Demography—the size, birth rate, growth, density, ethnicity, literacy, religions, migration/emigration/ assimilation/absorption, and industriousness of the population. • The histories, foreign and defense policy tendencies, cultural determinants, and

domestic politics of individual countries. • The size and strength of the domestic economy. • The quality and pace of technology. • The

presence of natural resources. • The character, capabilities, and policies of neighboring states. For the countries that matter most in the global order, perhaps

unsurprisingly, none of these decisive variables have changed very much since the global downturn bega n, except

for nations’ weaker economic performances. That single factor is not likely to trump all these other abiding geopolitical determinants and therefore produce international structural change. Moreover, the fundamental power relationships between and among the world’s foremost countries have also not altered , nor have those nations’ perceptions of their vital national

interests and how best to promote and defend them. To sum up this pivotal concept, in the absence of war, revolution, or other extreme international or

domestic disruptions, for nation-states, the powerful abiding conditions just listed do not evolve much except over the very long term, and thus neither do countries’ strategic intent and core external policies— even, as today, in the face of world economic trials. This point was made earlier about Russia’s enduring national security goals, which go back hundreds of years. Similarly, a Gulf monarch recently advised—with respect to Iran—not to fasten on the views of President Ahmadinejad or Supreme Leader Khamenei. Rather, he counseled that, to best understand contemporary Iranian policy, one should more usefully read the histories, objectives, and strategies of the Persian kings Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, who successively ruled a vast empire around 500 BC.32

The American filmmaker Orson Welles once opined that “To give an accurate description of what never happened is the proper

occupation of the historian.” 33 Perhaps the same is occasionally true of pundits . ■

2NC Overview – Warming / Environment ImpactGrowth causes extinction via environmental collapse and warming – extend Barry – we’re already exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity, only an abrupt collapse can solve because technological advances can’t retrieve ecological services that are already dead

Warming outweighs nuclear war –

a. Certainty Hanson et al, ‘7 [J (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), “Dangerous human-made interference with climate,” http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/7/2287/2007/acp-7-2287-2007.pdf]

These stark conclusions about the threat posed by global climate change and implications for fossil fuel use are not yet appreciated by essential governing bodies, as evidenced by ongoing plans to build coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture and sequestration. In our view, there is an acute need   for science to inform society about the costs of failure to address   global warming, because of a fundamental difference   between the threat posed by climate change and most prior   global threats.   In the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and   United States, a crisis could be precipitated only by action of   one of the parties. In contrast, the present threat to the planet   and civilization , with the United States and China now the principal players (though, as Fig. 10 shows, Europe also has a large responsibility), requires only inaction in the face of   clear scientific evidence of the danger . 

b. Magnitude Hunter, ‘3 [Bob, Foudner of Greenpeace, Thermageddon: Countdown to 2030, p. 58-9]

Even though, from the beginning, Rachel Carson had warned of worldwide chemical fallout patterns, the individuals who were most sensitive to her message believed (some still do) it must be possible to find a haven or refuge outside The System, somewhere beyond the reach of the thrashing tails of the dying urban dinosaurs. The back-to-the-land movement, with its flurry of communes being set up as close to the end of the road as possible, in remote valleys or on the shores of isolated bays, was a reenactment of the North American pioneer stage, embodying the same spirit of independence and naive faith in Utopia. A fantasy existed that even a nuclear war was survivable if you lived far enough away from any big cities and you had a supply of seeds, some solar panels, iodine pills, a gun, and a copy of The Whole Earth Catalogue. And it was true, should the nuclear exchange be limited , that it was just possible there would be survivors out in the bush and the countryside, somewhat unscathed. In the face of a truly drastic climate flip of the ecosystem, unfortunately, there ultimately will be no safe , remote places left anywhere. The Pacific Northwest's coniferous forests are expected to last longer than boreal forests, as rising temperatures turn the glacial moraine into a frying pan, but with climate itself affected, everything - everywhere - is affected. The skies and air and water of even Walden Pond are already degraded and slipping further. If the sudden global heating we have triggered does indeed activate an ice age, there will be no place in the entire northern hemisphere to hide. In the worst-case situation, a runaway greenhouse effect, there would be no place on Earth , period. The fantasy of escaping to an organic farm is no longer a reasonable, let alone viable, option. A better, more realistic hope, by the time my grandson is my age, will be to head out into space. Good luck making the final crew list, Dexter.

c. Reversibility Dunpont, ‘8 [Alan, Professor of International Security at U-Sydney, Jun, “The Strategic Implications of Climate Change,” Survival, Volume 50, Issue 3]

War has customarily been considered the main threat to international security because of the large number of deaths it causes and the threat it poses to the functioning and survival of the

state. Judged by these criteria, it is clear that climate change is potentially as detrimental to human life and economic and political order as traditional military threats.57 Environmental dangers, such as climate change , stem not from competition between states or shifts in the balance of power; rather, they are human-induced disturbances to the fragile balance of nature. But the consequences of these disturbances may be just as injurious to the integrity and functioning of the state and its people as those resulting from military conflict. They may also be more difficult to reverse or repair.

d. Warming causes global nuclear warfare and breaks down international cooperationDyer 9 – PhD in ME HistoryGwynne, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former @ Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Climate WarsTHIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT, peering through a glass darkly, to understand the politics and the strategies of the potentially apocalyptic crisis that looks set to occupy most of the twentyfirst century. There are now many books available that deal with the science of climate change and some that suggest possible approaches to getting the problem under control, but there are few that venture very far into the grim detail of how real countries experiencing very different and, in some cases, overwhelming pressures as global warming proceeds, are likely to respond to the changes. Yet we all know that it's mostly politics, national and international, that will decide the outcomes. Two things in particular persuaded me that it was time to write this book. One was the realization that the first and most important impact of climate change on human civiliza tion will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply . Eating regularly is a non- negotiable activity, and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be "reasonable" about it. Not all of them will be in what we used to call the "Third World" -the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The other thing that finally got the donkey's attention was a dawning awareness that, in a number of the great pow ers, climate change scenarios are already playing a large and increasing role in the military planning process. Rationally, you would expect this to be the case, because each country pays its professional military establishment to identify and counter "threats" to its security, but the implications of their scenarios are still alarming. There is a probability of wars, including even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise two to three degrees Celsius . Once that happens, all hope of international cooperation to curb emissions and stop the warming goes out the window .

2NC – nuke war no cause extinctionNuclear war doesn’t cause extinction Socol 2011 Yehoshua (Ph.D.), an inter-disciplinary physicist, is an expert in electro-optics, high-energy physics and applications, and material science and Moshe Yanovskiy, Jan 2, “Nuclear Proliferation and Democracy”, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/nuclear_proliferation_and_demo.htmlNuclear proliferation should no longer be treated as an unthinkable nightmare; it is likely to be the future reality. Nuclear weapons have been acquired not only by an extremely poor per capita but large country such as India, but also by even poorer and medium-sized nations such as Pakistan and North Korea. One could also mention South Africa, which successfully acquired a nuclear arsenal despite economic sanctions (the likes of which have not yet been imposed on Iran). It is widely believed that sanctions and rhetoric will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and that many countries, in the Middle East and beyond, will act accordingly (see, e.g., recent Heritage report). Nuclear Warfare -- Myths And Facts The direct consequences of the limited use of nuclear weapons -- especially low-yield devices most likely to be in the hands of non-state actors or irresponsible governments -- would probably not be great enough to bring about significant geopolitical upheavals. Casualties from a single 20-KT nuclear device are estimated [1] at about 25,000 fatalities with a similar number of injured, assuming a rather unfortunate scenario (the center of a large city, with minimal warning). Scaling the above toll to larger devices or to a larger number of devices is less than linear. For example, it has been estimated that it would take as many as eighty devices of 20-KT yield each to cause 300,000 civilian fatalities in German cities (a result actually achieved by Allied area attacks, or carpet-bombings, during the Second World War). A single 1-MT device used against Detroit has been estimated by U.S. Congress OTA to result in about 220,000 fatalities. It is anticipated that well-prepared civil defense measures , based on rather simple presently known techniques, would decrease these numbers by maybe an order of magnitude (as will be discussed later). There is little doubt that a nation determined to survive and with a strong sense of its own destiny would not succumb to such losses . It is often argued that the fallout effects of even the limited use of nuclear weapons would be worldwide and would last for generations. This is an

exaggeration . The following facts speak for themselves. -- In Japan, as assessed by REFR, less than 1,000 excess cancer cases (i.e., above the natural occurrence) were recorded in over 100,000 survivors over the past sixty years -- compared with about 110,000 immediate fatalities in the two atomic bombings. No clinical or even sub-clinical effects were discovered in the survivors' offspring. -- In the Chernobyl area, as assessed by IAEA, only fifteen cancer deaths can be directly attributed to fallout radiation. No radiation-related increase in congenital formations was recorded. Nuclear Conflict -- Possible Scenarios With reference to a possible regional nuclear conflict between a rogue state and a democratic one, the no-winner (mutual assured destruction) scenario is probably false. An analysis by Anthony Cordesman, et al. regarding a possible Israel-Iran nuclear conflict estimated that while Israel might survive an Iranian nuclear blow, Iran would certainly not survive as an organized society. Even though the projected casualties cited in that study seem to us overstated, especially as regards Israel, the conclusion rings true. Due to the extreme high intensity ("above-conventional") of nuclear conflict , it is

nearly certain that such a war, no matter its outcome, would not last for years, as we have become accustomed to in current low-intensity

conflicts. Rather, we should anticipate a new geo-political reality: the emergence of clear winners and losers within several days , or at most weeks after the initial outbreak of hostilities. This latter reality will most probably contain fewer nuclear-possessing states

than the former.

No nuke winter – studiesSeitz 2011 (Russell, Harvard University Center for International Affairs visiting scholar, “Nuclear winter was and is debatable,” Nature, 7-7-11, Vol 475, pg37)Alan Robock's contention that there has been no real scientific debate about the 'nuclear winter' concept is itself debatable (Nature 473,

275–276; 2011). This potential climate disaster , popularized in Science in 1983, rested on the output of a one- dimensional model that was later shown to overestimate the smoke a nuclear holocaust might engender. More refined estimates, combined with advanced three-dimensional models (see http://go.nature.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/kss8te), have dramatically reduced the extent and severity of the projected cooling. Despite this, Carl Sagan, who co-authored the 1983 Science paper, went so far as to posit “the extinction of Homo sapiens” (C. Sagan Foreign Affairs 63, 75–77; 1984). Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an

exercise in mythology . George Rathjens of the M assachusetts I nstitute of T echnology protested: “Nuclear winter is the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory ,” (see http://go.nature.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/yujz84) and climatologist Kerry Emanuel observed that the subject had “ become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity” (Nature 319, 259; 1986). Robock's single-digit fall in temperature is at odds with the subzero (about −25 °C) continental cooling originally projected for a wide spectrum of nuclear wars. Whereas Sagan predicted darkness at noon from a US–Soviet nuclear conflict, Robock projects global sunlight that is several orders of magnitude brighter for a Pakistan–India conflict —

literally the difference between night and day. Since 1983, the projected worst-case cooling has fallen from a Siberian deep freeze

spanning 11,000 degree-days Celsius (a measure of the severity of winters) to numbers so unseasonably small as to call the very term 'nuclear winter' into question .

Any risk of extinction outweighs everything ***Nick Bostrom (professor of philosophy at Oxford) July 2005http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/44

Now if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point. Not very much. So that ’s equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count currently living people . The current generation. One percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that’s a large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into exist ence if we blow ourselves up then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could you know eventually colonize a chunk of the universe the virgo supercluster maybe it will take us a hundred million years to get there but if we go extinct we never will. Then even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number 10 to the power of 32 so if you take into account future generations as much as our own every other moral imperative or philanthropic cause just becomes irrelevant . The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk , because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve . Even if you just look at the current people and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct it should still be a high priority

2NC – Unsustainable / Collapse Inevitable ExtensionEconomic growth is unsustainable – that’s Shearman – consensus of scientists agree growth is pushing humanity past environmental thresholds – it would take three planet Earths to supply the amount of food, water, and land that humans are using – tech doesn’t solve because ecological services are already past the tipping point

Prefer our evidence:

A) Newest studies prove—NASA votes negAhmed, 3/14/14 (Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. 3/14/14, The Raw Story, “NASA: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/14/nasa-industrial-civilization-headed-for-irreversible-collapse/, jj)

A new study sponsored by NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution . Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common.” The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication

in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation: “The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to

the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex , and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.” By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy. These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features : “ the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.” Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both: “…

accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it

by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.” The study challenges those who argue that tech nology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency: “Tech nological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that , absent policy

effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use .”

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from “increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput,” despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of

the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: “…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.” Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.” In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical

collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).” Applying

this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that: “While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.” However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation. The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth: “Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.” The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business – and consumers – to recognise that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural

changes are required immediately. Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies –

by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years . But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.

B) Timeframe is 2050Trainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, “A Limits to Growth Critique of the Radical Left”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LimitsToGrowthCritiqueofRadicalLeftSimplicityInstitute.pdfThe basic 'limits to growth" perspective¶ The crucial beginning point for this critique is the claim that the radical left fails to grasp the nature and significance of the global sustainability crisis. Because the magnitude and seriousness of the predicament are not recognized adequately thinking about solutions and alternatives, and the transition to them, is fundamentally mistaken.¶ Over some fifty years a weighty "limits to growth" case has accumulated, but even in green circles there is insufficient appreciation of its strength and implications. Rich world per capita levels of resource consumption and ecological impact, along with the global aggregates, are now far beyond levels that that are sustainable or that could be made sustainable. When the magnitude and nature of the overshoot is grasped it is evident that the problems cannot be solved without historically unprecedented structural and cultural change, on a scale and at a pace that few would regard as possible to achieve. Consider the following few considerations.¶ The "footprint" index sums up the magnitude of the overshoot. To provide the average Australian with food, settlement area, water and energy now requires about 8 ha of productive land. (WWF, 2009.] If by 2050 9 billion people were to have risen to the present Australian "living standard", and the planet's amount of productive land remains the same as it is today (surely to be an invalid assumption), the amount available per capita would be 0.8 ha. In other words Australian's today are using 10 times the amount that would be possible for all to use. ¶ Many other measures could be quoted to confirm the grossly unsustainable nature of the present situation. To this must be added the consequences of the fundamental commitment within consumer-capitalist societies, i.e., to ceaseless growth in production, consumption, "living standards", trade, investment and GDP. If a world population of 9 billion people were to rise to the GDP per capita Australians would have in 2050 given 3% p.a. growth in our present "living standards", then total world economic output would be approaching 20 times its present volume. The commitment to growth is clearly absurdly impossible, and suicidal. ¶ These and other figures from within the limits to growth case are well known but their significance is not generally recognized. The main point is to do with the magnitude of the problems. The overshoot is far too great to be dealt with within or by a society committed to affluence or growth, whether capitalist or "socialist". A sustainable society cannot be defined other than in terms of levels of resource use, production, consumption and GDP that are a small fraction of present rich world or global levels, and that do not increase over time. The above figures indicate that the fraction is likely to be in the region of one-tenth of present Australian per capita levels. 

C) Ecological overshoot —multiple indicators prove we are destroying key planetary life support systems and resource production has already peaked

Rees, 14 (William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 2014, “Avoiding Collapse” https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf, jj)

The overarching premise of this paper is that human-induced global change represents a new context for development planning that cannot safely be ignored. Global ecological and socio-economic trends should now be major considerations in reframing even local planning strategies. Indeed, I argue that meaningful consideration of global trends would generate a whole new approach to sustainability planning at every spatial scale. It also represents a more hopeful way forward than anything under consideration today. But prior to outlining the core elements of such an agenda, a brief summary of the compelling need for a new approach is necessary.While denialists have managed to befuddle popular understanding, there is solid scientific consensus that the world is in ecological overshoot, i.e. that the human enterprise exceeds the long-term carrying capacity of Earth.1 Environmental and earth scientists have shown that human demands on the ecosphere exceed its regenerative capacity and that global waste sinks are overflowing. The accumulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is perhaps the best-known example, but is just one symptom of humanity’s frontal assault on the ecosphere — climate is changing , the oceans are acidifying , fresh waters are toxifying , the seas are overfished , soils are eroding , deserts are expanding , tropical forests are shrinking, biodiversity is plummeting . The growth of the human enterprise continues at the expense of depleting self-producing natural capital and polluting life support systems.2 Moreover, for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the world economy is also facing shortages of essential non-renewable resources. Global extraction of conventional petroleum had peaked by 20063 and current consumption can be maintained only by exploiting ever-more-difficult-to extract and expensive crude from the seabed, or “tight” oil from ancient shale and tar-sands deposits (and it is questionable how long even this can last).4By 2008, 63 of the 89 depletable mineral resources that sustain modern industrial economies had become globally scarce as revealed by diminishing returns to exploration and dramatically rising prices.5 As the impacts of resource exploitation and excess consumption exceed safe planetary boundaries,6 Homo sapiens’ remarkable evolutionary success morphs into ecological dysfunction that threatens the survival of global civilization.

2NC – Mindset Shift FrontlineDedevelopment would be peaceful and effective – extend Lewis – it causes a transition to small, sustainable societies – ecological balance will be restored as what was for centuries before industrialization

Even if they win the transition is violent – that’s irrelevant if we win collapse and extinction are coming in the status quo – dedevelopment is the world’s only shot at survival – try or die

Dedevelopment works:

Yes mindset shift—history proves, and their evidence doesn’t account for how scarcity will motivate behavioral changeTrainer, 12 (Ted Trainer, Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Futures, Volume 44, Issue 6, August 2012, Pages 590–599, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?” DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.020, jj)Kropotkin and Tolstoy stressed this grass-roots perspective, recognising the irrelevance of striving for state power. The remarkable achievements of the Spanish Anarchist collectives in the 1930s were the work of “ordinary” people in whom the necessary ideas and values had been developed over many previous decades, enabling them to quickly and effectively organise local control when the opportunity came [19].- There will be no significant change while the supermarket shelves remain well stocked . Only serious scarcity will jolt people into action. If/when a petroleum shortage impacts it will concentrate minds wonderfully. But when it comes the window of opportunity could be brief and risky. If things deteriorate too far too fast there could easily be too much chaos for sense to prevail and for cooperative local alternative systems to be organised.

- The increasing difficulties of consumer-capitalist society will force us towards small, local economies whether we like it or not . Local farm, jobs and cooperative systems and frugal ways will tend to be set up as petroleum dwindles and transport and travel become too costly.

Collapse exposes the hollowness of consumer societyRees, 14 (William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 2014, “Avoiding Collapse” https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf, jj)

In this light, the citizens of market democracies may well be blindsided by a socially constructed bias toward capitalist values and market ideology, which combines with innate behavioural conservatism in a formidable barrier to societal transformation. The fate of global civilization may therefore rest on humanity’s penchant for self-delusion in the face of harsh reality. People’s learned or “soft-wired” cognitive barriers can be broken down, but this requires acknowledgement of the problem and significant effort on the part of the individual — or

an external shock powerful enough to shatter the treasured illusion.

Desire irrelevant --- collapses forces transitionLewis 2k Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization”

A more hopeful cause of the collapse of global industrial civilization is a global economic collapse “financial crises have become increasingly common with the speed and growth of global capital flows.” The financial crises caused by the 1994 collapse of the Mexican peso, the 1997 Asian financial panic, the 1998 Russian financial panic, and the 1998 bailout of Long Term Capital Management by the United States Federal Reserve and Global Banks are all examples of recent financial crises that greatly stressed the global financial system. During

the 1997 Asian financial crisis, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said, “There was a moment when I thought it could have come undone.” He was, of course, referring to the global financial system. A global depression caused by a financial panic could finally undermine the entire structure of globalization . With the loss of trillions of dollars of paper money, First World elites would find that they don’t have the funds to bail out Third World countries a nd banks, and even bail their own banks and corporations out. With the loss of trillions of dollars, the global economy would come to a grinding halt and there wouldn’t be the collective resources or the will to restart it. Of course, these are the precise sorts of crises that lead to World Wars and military conflict. No matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies and/or through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, global industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for wealth, natural resources, energy, and ecosystem services aren't sustainable.

Elites won’t preserve the system—economic constraints will force them to follow the lead of developing countriesLewis 00 [Chris Lewis,. PhD American Studies Univ of Colorado Boulder. “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization,”]With the withdrawal of underdeveloped countries from the global economy within the next 30 to 50 years, the developed countries will face continual material, ecological, and energy shortages that will force them to downscale their economies. The First World will, ironically, be forced to follow the lead of the Third World and create local and regional economies that are sustainable and self-sufficient. In many instances, nations will breakup, forming smaller polities tied together by ethnic, religious, or social bonds. If these polities and nations take responsibility for helping their peoples survive the hardship and suffering imposed by the devolution of the global industrial civilization and economy, then they will be better able to reduce the real threat of mass death and genocide that will arise from the collapse of global industrial civilization.

--Shows people how growth betrayed them which shatters the fantasy of limitless growthKassiola, 90 (Joel Jay, The Death of Industrial Civilization: The Limits to Economic Growth and the Repoliticization of Advanced Industrial Society, Pg. 171-172)

Therefore, it is essential to emphasize that the end or death of industrial civilization will not necessarily bring the apocalyptic termination of life on earth! It will mean the end of the world, but only one world; it could mean merely the end of a particular (and defective) social order ! For people who have absorbed its worldview uncritically and completely, and furthermore, who have adjusted successfully to the resulting social structure and values, the impending loss of a civilization does appear to be terrifying. They will experience the death of the only desirable-and for the industrial elite, self-serving-world they know as a totally destructive, and therefore traumatic, phenomenon rather than what it actually is: the passing of a specific, elite-benefitting world that indeed can and should be transformed. When the flaws of a social order are understood, and its fantastic elements and promises (like industrialism's unlimited economic growth) are recognized and appreciated for what they are- impossible dreams preserving the ruling group's control and benefits-they should be cast aside. The loss of social fantasies causes immediate despair but the mourning period, for their death should be temporary and surmountable . As both Slater and Harman emphasize, such despair is both appropriate and necessary to the achievement of social and individual transformation.

--Trauma forces behavioral changeDjordjevic 98 – Interdisciplinary Minor in Global Sustainability Senior Seminar University of California, Irvine, (Johnny, March,

“Sustainability,” http://www.dbc.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/djordj98.html)

Max Weber believed in the power of an idea. This political theorist discussed how Calvinism was one idea that perpetuated the rise of capitalism. Few people ever

examine the power of an idea, but if one examines and contemplates this theory, a realization comes across: that ideas drive society . The key premise is

that some values of our society must be altered in order to avert catastrophic consequences. The way of life in developed

countries is "the origin of many of our most serious problems"(Trainer, 1985). Because developed countries have high material living standards and consume massive quantities of all resources, "hundreds of millions of people in desperate need must go without the materials and energy that could improve their conditions while these resources flow into developed countries, often to produce frivolous luxuries"(Trainer, 1985). People's way of life seems to be a glaring example of values leading to high rates of personal consumption of resources and the waste of these same materials. In addition to overconsumption, the services used to supply our society with goods, (examples of these goods would be food, water, energy, and sewage services.) tends to be wasteful and expensive. Production is organized in such a way, (usually highly centralized) that travel becomes an enormous burden. Another

consideration is that our population is expected to increase to rise to eleven billion within the next half century. Considering the mineral and energy resources needed in the future, these estimates must also include the consumption of a population almost doubled from its current status and these same figures must include an expected increase in the affluence of developed countries. "If we are willing to endorse

an already affluent society in which there is continued growth on this scale,(american resource use increasing 2% each year), then we are assuming that after 2050 something like 40 times as many resources can be provided each year as were provided in the 1970's, and that it is in order for people in a few rich countries to live in this superaffluent way while the other 9.5 billion in the world do not"(Trainer, 1985).

The environment is in danger from our pursuit of affluence. Serious worries come from predictions about the atmosphere. The

burning of fossil fuels will raise temperatures and result in climatic effects. Rising temperatures could have horrific effects. First of all, food production could seriously be imperiled even by increases of only one degree celcius. If the temperature should increase by five degrees

scientists predict the coastal island nations would be submerged and possibly trigger the next ice age . Another environmental concern deals with the soil. Our agricultural practices disregard the value of recycling food waste. Also, the use of pesticides and chemicals in

agriculture lead to the poisoning of the soil and topsoil loss through erosion. Yields per acre for grain are falling and "we do not produce food in ways that can be continued for centuries"(Trainer, 1985). Even more disturbing is the deforestation of rainforests. This results in the extinction of many species, concentration of carbon dioxide, the loss of many potential medical breakthroughs, and possibly the disruption of rainfall. Opponents of the deforestation fail to realize that our expensive way of life and greedy economic system are the driving forces. "Nothing can be achieved by fighting to save this forest or that species if in the long term we do not change the economic system which demands ever-increasing production and consumption of non-necessities"(Trainer, 1985). There also lies a problem in the Third World. Developed countries high living standards

and quest for an ever-increasing quality of life lead to Third World poverty and the deprivation of the Third World's access to its own resources. As Third World countries get deprived of materials, the developed world consumes and imports over half of their resources. A few developed countries seem to be consuming the globe's resources and this consumption rate is always increasing. "The rich must live more

simply that the poor may simply live"(Trainer, 1985). The Third World is exploited in many ways. One way is that the best land in a developing country is used for crops exported to developed countries, while citizens of the Third World starve and suffer. Another way is the poor working conditions of the Third World. A third exploitation can be overlooked but no less disgusting; "The world's greatest health problem could be simply by providing water for the perhaps 2.000 million people who now have to drink form rivers and wells contained by human and animal wastes. Technically it is a simple matter to set up plants for producing iron and plastic pipes. But most of the world's iron and plastic goes into the production of luxurious cars, soft-drink containers, office blocks and similar

things in rich countries"(Trainer, 1985). The threat of nuclear war and international conflict rises with countries of all kinds entranced with the logic and idea of materialism. Perhaps the most dangerous and likely chances for a nuclear conflict arise from

the competition for dwindling resources by developed countries. Similar events can be seen all across the globe. Major superpowers get themselves involved in domestic matters not concerning them, providing arms and advice to try and obtain the inside track on possible resources. International tension will rise in the competition for resources and so will the "ever-increasing probability of nuclear war"(Trainer, 1985). As developed countries pursue affluence they fail to see the inherent contradiction in this idea; as growth is the quest, the quality of life will decrease. For a healthy community, there exists a list of non-material conditions which must be present, "a sense of purpose, fulfilling work and leisure, supportive social relations, peace of mind, security from theft and violence, and caring and co-operative neighborhoods"(Trainer, 1985). And as developed countries think their citizens are the happiest in the world, "In most affluent societies rates of divorce, drug-taking, crime, mental breakdown, child abuse, alcoholism, vandalism, suicide, stress, depression, and anxiety are increasing"(Trainer, 1985).

Despite all the gloomy facts and sad stories, there is a solution, to create a sustainable society . Rather than being greedy and only thinking about the self, each individual must realize the impacts of his/her selfish tendencies, and disregard their former view of the world. One must come into harmony with what is really needed to survive, and drawn a strict distinction between what is necessity and what is luxury. Not every family needs three cars, or five meals a day or four telephones and two refrigerators.Countries do not need to strive for increasing growth, less materials could be imported/exported and international tension could be greatly reduced. The major problems seem not to step from the determination of what a sustainable society is,

but on how to get people to change their values. This task is not an easy one. People must be forced to realize the harmful and catastrophic consequence s lie in their meaningless wants and greed. The problem of cognitive dissonance is hard to overcome, but it is not impossible.

The solution to this dilemma lies in castastrophe. The only event that changes people's minds is social trauma or harm. The analogy is that a person who refuses to wear a seat belt and one day gets thrown through his/her windshield will remember to wear the seat belt after the accident . The logic behind this argument is both simple and

feasible. So the question of dissonance is answered in part, but to change a whole society obviously takes a bigger and more

traumatic event to occur. An economic collapse or ice age would trigger a new consciousness leading to a sustainable society.

2NC – Now Better Than LaterCollapse now is better than later – that’s Barry – ecosystem disruption and carbon emissions are accelerating on a daily basis, there is a linear disad to delaying the inevitable – collapsing now is preferable because it will leave us more time to manage the transition and halt ecosystem breakdowns

Dedev now is key to a soft landingSpangenberg, 10 (Joachim H. Spangenberg, Sustainable Europe Research Institute SERI Germany e.V., Vorsterstr. 97-99, D-51103 Cologne, Germany, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 18, Issue 6, April 2010, Pages 561–566, “Growth, Recession or Degrowth for Sustainability and Equity?” accessed online via Science Direct, jj)

Humanity has a stark choice: either act with foresight, and thus create the conditions for a “soft landing”, or turn a blind eye on the problems and face a future of scarcity and conflict. Then humanity will find itself in trouble time and again, and the old recipes will worsen the problem instead of providing solutions. Economics must change, and reinvent itself to adapt to the real world, to transform itself from a part of the problem into an element of the solution. Developing degrowth macro economics would be a substantial part of this process.

Economic collapse inevitable --- now’s better than laterMacKenzie 8 [Debora, Are We Doomed, New Scientist, Vol. 197 Issue 2650, p32-35, 4p, 4 May 2005, EBSCO)

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic. Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later? A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can---we must---act now to keep disaster at bay. History is not on our side . Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about saving civilisation," he says. Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of Utah , Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies. If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew. Diminishing returns There is , however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human

efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity , Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour---or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare---diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says. To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population , more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage , more information to juggle---and, ultimately, less bang for your buck. Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses . What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group. Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart. Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get is mounting and although global is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving---the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking . "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable." Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised. "To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point. This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised. Things are not that simple , says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't." As connections increase , though , networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate : the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood." The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together---and move people, materials, information, money and energy---amplify and transmit any shock ," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other." For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters. Credit crunch Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous." "A networked society behaves like a

multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear---it may not even be predictable---which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place---something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions---an insect outbreak, fire or drought---can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest. Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns---just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy. "This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse . Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points---which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?" Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

Collapse inevitable – key to avert extinction – delay causes exponentially more deathsMcPherson 10 [Guy McPherson is professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for 20 years. His scholarly efforts have produced nine books and well over 100 articles, and have focused for many years on conservation of biological diversity, 8-16-10, “A review before the exam,” http://guymcpherson.com/2010/08/a-review-before-the-exam/]

I’ve written all this before, but I have not recently provided a concise summary. This essay provides a brief overview of the dire nature of our predicaments with respect to fossil fuels. The primary consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction stem from two primary phenomena: peak oil and global climate change. The former spells the end of western civilization, which might come in time to prevent the extinction of our species at the hand of the latter.

Global climate change threatens our species with extinction by mid-century if we do not terminate the industrial economy soon. Increasingly dire forecasts from extremely conservative sources keep stacking up. Governments refuse to act because they know growth of the industrial economy depends (almost solely) on consumption of fossil fuels . Global climate change and energy decline are similar in this respect: neither is characterized by a politically viable solution.

There simply is no comprehensive substitute for crude oil. It is the overwhelming fuel of choice for transportation, and there is no way out of

the crude trap at this late juncture in the industrial era. We passed the world oil peak in 2005 , which led to near-collapse of the world’s industrial economy several times between September 2008 and May 2010. And we’re certainly not out of the economic woods yet.

Crude oil is the master material on which all other depend. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot produce uranium ( which peaked in 1980), coal (which peaks within a decade or so), solar panels , wind turbines , wave power, ethanol,

biodiesel, or hydroelectric power. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot maintain the electric grid. Without abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil, we cannot maintain the industrial economy for an extended period of time. Simply put, abundant supplies of inexpensive crude oil are fundamental to growth of the industrial economy and therefore to western civilization. Civilizations grow or die. Western civilization is done growing.

Not only is there no comprehensive substitute for crude oil, but partial substitutes simply do not scale. Solar panels on every roof? It’s too late for that. Electric cars in every garage? It’s too late for that. We simply do not have the cheap energy requisite to propping up an empire in precipitous decline. Energy efficiency and conservation will not save us, either, as demonstrated by the updated version of Jevons’ paradox, the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.Unchecked, western civilization drives us to one of two outcomes, and perhaps both: (1) Destruction of the living planet on which we depend for our survival, and/or (2) Runaway greenhouse and therefore the near-term extinction of our species. Why would we want to sustain such a system? It is immoral and omnicidal. The industrial economy enslaves us, drives us insane, and kills us in myriad ways. We need a living planet. Everything else is less important than the living planet on which we depend for our very lives. We act as if non-industrial cultures do not matter. We act as if non-human species do not matter. But they do matter, on many levels, including the level of human survival on Earth. And, of course, there’s the matter of ecological overshoot, which is where we’re spending all our time since at

least 1980. Every day in overshoot brings us 205,000 people to deal with later. In this case, “deal with” means murder.

Shall we reduce Earth to a lifeless pile of rubble within a generation? Or shall we heat the planet beyond human habitability within two generations? Or shall we keep procreating as if there are no consequences for an already crowded planet? Pick your poison, but recognize it’s poison. We’re dead either way.Don’t slit those wrists just yet. This essay bears good news.Western civilization has been in decline at least since 1979, when world per-capita oil supply peaked coincident with the Carter Doctrine regarding oil in the Middle East. In my mind, and perhaps only there, these two events marked the apex of American Empire, which began about the time Thomas Jefferson — arguably the most enlightened of the Founding Fathers — said, with respect to native Americans: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” It wasn’t long after 1979 that the U.S. manufacturing base was shipped overseas and we began serious engagement with Wall Street-based casino culture as the basis for our industrial economy. By most economic measures, we’ve experienced a lost decade, so it’s too late for a fast crash of the industrial economy. We’re in the midst of the same slow train wreck we’ve been experiencing for more than a decade, but the train is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Meanwhile, all we want to discuss, at every level in this country, is the quality of service in the dining car.

When the price of crude oil exhibits a price spike, an economic recession soon follows. Every recession since 1972 has been preceded by a spike in the price of oil, and direr spikes translate to deeper recessions. Economic dominoes began to fall at a rapid and accelerating rate when the price of crude spiked to $147.27/bbl in July 2008. They haven’t stopped falling, notwithstanding economic cheerleaders from government and corporations (as if the two are

different at this point in American fascism). The reliance of our economy on derivatives trading cannot last much longer, considering the value of the derivatives — like the U.S. debt — greatly exceeds the value of all the currency in the world combined with all the gold mined in the history of the world .

Although it’s all coming down, as it has been for quite a while, it’s relatively clear imperial decline is accelerating. We’re obviously headed for full-scale collapse of the industrial economy , as indicated by these 40 statistics. Even Fortune and CNN agree economic collapse will be complete soon, though they don’t express any understanding of how we arrived at this point or the hopelessness of extracting ourselves from the morass.

Collapse is inevitable but triggering it soon is critical to avoid extinction through environmental destruction.John Cobb,   2006 . Professor Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology. “Democratizing the Economic Order,” The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God, p. 95-6.

Financial capitalism may be even more dependent on growth, and if expansion ceases, it may be seriously upset. Problems internal to financial capitalism may combine with problems generated by increasing national debt to make it impossible for the  United States to continue to fund its imperial expansion. This is especially true because of the dependence of the United States on other countries and their citizens to fund the debt. The falling value of the dollar may make investments in U.S. securities less attractive to outsiders. The economic future of the United States is precarious. How should we evaluate the prospect of such a collapse ? From the point of view of the long-term prospects of the earth as a whole, it is one of the more hopeful scenarios. It is a way to end American imperial expansion . But that, too, needs to be set in a still wider context. It will slow down the suicidal human degradation of the natural environment . One reason for opposing imperial policy is that it runs counter to the global adjustments so clearly required to avoid ecological catastrophe. The collapse of the present order is inevitable. The global economy, especially with the added burden of enormous use of resources for military purposes, is radically unsustainable. It is rapidly exhausting the earth’s resources and polluting the environment . Its effects on the climate and weather patterns are still unpredictable in detail, but all the likely scenarios are frightening. Humanity does not have a century to reorder its affairs. Unless the present course of development is derailed fairly soon, the resulting ecological collapse will be far more terrible than a financial collapse.

It’s linear—delaying collapse ensures a hard landingBarry 10 — President and Founder of Ecological Internet. Ph.D. in "Land Resources" from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development" also from Madison, and a Bachelor of Arts in "Political Science" from Marquette University (Glen, Resisting Global Ecological Change, 5 January 2010)

The human family faces imminent and (Copenhagen would suggest) inevitable collapse of the biosphere – the thin layer of life upon an otherwise lifeless planet – that makes Earth habitable. Marshes and rivers and forests and fish are far more than resources – they and all natural ecosystems are a necessity for humanity’s existence upon Earth. A few centuries of historically unprecedented explosion in human numbers and surging, albeit inequitable, consumption and resultant resource use, ecosystem destruction and pollution; is needlessly destroying being for all living things. Revolutionary action such as ending coal use, reforming industrial agriculture and protecting and restoring old forests and other natural ecosystems, is a requirement for the continuation of shared human being.Earth is threatened by far more than a changing atmosphere causing climate change. Cumulative ecosystem destruction – not only in climate, but also water, forests, oceans, farmland, soils and toxics -- in the name of “progress” and “development” -- threatens each of us, our families and communities, as well as the Earth System in total and all her creatures. Any chance of achieving global ecological sustainability depends urgently upon shifting concerns regarding climate change to more sufficiently transform ourselves and society to more broadly resist global ecological change. Global ecological, social and economic collapse may be inevitable, but its severity, duration and likelihood of recovery are being determined by us now. It does not look good as the environmental movement has been lacking in its overall vision, ambition and implementation.The growing numbers of ecologically literate global citizens must come forward to together start considering ecologically sufficient emergency measures to protect and restore global ecosystems. We need a plan that allows humans and as many other species as possible to survive the coming great ecological collapse, even as we work to soften the collapse, and to restore to the extent practicable the Earth’s ecosystems. This mandates full protection for all remaining large natural ecosystems and working to reconnect and enlarge biologically rich smaller remnants that still exist. It is time for a hard radical turn back to a fully functioning and restored natural Earth which will require again regaining our bond with land (and air, water and oceans), powering down our energy profligacy, and taking whatever measures are necessary to once again bring society into balance with ecosystems. 

This may mean taking all measures necessary to stop those known to be destroying ecosystems for profit. As governments dither and the elite profit, it has become dreadfully apparent that the political, economic and social structures necessary to stop human ecocide of our and all life’s habitats does not yet exist. The three hundred year old hyper-capitalistic and nationalistic growth machine eating ecosystems is not going to willingly stop growing. But unless it does, human and most or all other life will suffer a slow and excruciating apocalyptic death. Actions can be taken now to soften ecological collapse while maximizing the likelihood that a humane and ecologically whole Earth remains to be renewed.

2NC A2: Tech Solves – FrontlineGrowth necessitates warming – only dedev can solve – tech can’t solve because advances just leads to faster consumptionSiegel 9 (Lee, Is Global Warming Unstoppable? Theory Also Says Energy Conservation Doesn't Help, 22 November 2009, http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=112009-1)

In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions---the major cause of global warming---cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. "It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett , an associate professor of atmospheric sciences . Garrett's study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online this week. The study---which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization---indicates: •Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption. •Throughout history, a simple physical " constant "---an unchanging mathematical value---links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity , adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. •"Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power production capacity annually---approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day," Garrett says. "Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy ." Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a "Heat Engine" Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: "I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute." "I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem," Garrett says. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have." Garrett treats civilization like a "heat engine" that "consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy," he says. "If society consumed no energy, civilization would be worthless," he adds. "It is only by consuming energy that civilization is able to maintain the activities that give it economic value. This means that if we ever start to run out of energy, then the value of civilization is going to fall and even collapse absent discovery of new energy sources." Garrett says his study's key finding "is that accumulated economic production over the course of history has been tied to the rate of energy consumption at a global level through a constant factor." That "constant" is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, "each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption," Garrett says. Garrett tested his theory and found this constant relationship between energy use and economic production at any given time by using United Nations statistics for global GDP (gross domestic product), U.S. Department of Energy data on global energy consumption during1970-2005, and previous studies that estimated global economic production as long as 2,000 years ago. Then he investigated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions. "Economists think you need population and standard of living to estimate productivity," he says. "In my model, all you need to know is how fast energy consumption is rising. The reason why is because there is this link between the economy and rates of energy consumption, and it's just a constant factor." Garrett adds: "By finding this constant factor, the problem of [forecasting] global economic growth is dramatically simpler. There is no need to consider population growth and changes in standard of living because they are marching to the tune of the availability of energy supplies." To Garrett, that means the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to change soon because our energy use today is tied to society's past economic productivity . "Viewed from this perspective, civilization evolves in a spontaneous feedback loop maintained only by energy consumption and incorporation of environmental matter," Garrett says. It is like a child that "grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more." Is Meaningful Energy Conservation Impossible? Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use. "Making civilization more energy efficient simply allows it to grow faster and consume more energy," says Garrett. He says the idea that resource conservation accelerates resource consumption---known as Jevons paradox---was proposed in the 1865 book "The Coal Question" by William Stanley Jevons, who noted that

coal prices fell and coal consumption soared after improvements in steam engine efficiency. So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn't matter? "I'm just saying it's not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production . If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn't be any pretense that it will make a difference." Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower. An Inevitable Future for Carbon Dioxide Emissions? Garrett says often-discussed strategies for slowing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming include mention increased energy efficiency, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don't emit carbon dioxide, including nuclear, wind and solar energy and underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. Another strategy is rarely mentioned: a decreased standard of living , which would occur if energy supplies ran short and the economy collapsed, he adds. "Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic," says Garrett. "Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option." "The problem is that, in order to stabilize emissions , not even reduce them , we have to switch to non-carbonized energy sources at a rate about 2.1 percent per year . That comes out to almost one new nuclear power plant per day ." "If society invests sufficient resources into alternative and new, non-carbon energy supplies, then perhaps it can continue growing without increasing global warming," Garrett says. Does Garrett fear global warming deniers will use his work to justify inaction? "No," he says. "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization."

Studies prove—tech can’t solve because of Jevon’s ParadoxAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)

The central message of the analysis so far is that efficiency gains that take place within a growth-orientated economy tend to be negated by further growth , resulting in an overall increase in resource and energy consumption, or at least no reduction. Technologies that increase labour productivity, for example, are rarely converted into less labour input; instead of allowing for less work, productivity gains tend to ‘rebound’ as more overall production (Norgard, 2009). Similarly, developments in the design of commodities that allow for less material or energy inputs end up reducing the cost of production, but cheaper production reduces the price of the commodity, generally resulting in increased consumption. Furthermore, capital investments in technology (R&D) are generally driven by the need for a ‘return on investment’, meaning that the technologies that are developed are generally the ones that maximize profits (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). These are the types of dynamics by which the potential ecological benefits of efficiency gains are lost.In order to take advantage of efficiency gains – that is, in order for efficiency gains to actually reduce resource and energy consumption to sustainable levels – what is needed is an economics of sufficiency; an economics that directs efficiency gains into reducing ecological impacts rather than increasing material growth. Sufficiency is a concept that is entirely absent from the paradigm of conventional growth economics, but once the limits of technology (and thus the limits to growth) are recognised, it becomes clear that embracing an economics of sufficiency is absolutely necessary if we are to create an economic model that is ecologically sustainable (Alexander, 2012a; Goodman, 2010; Herring, 2009).

Modern industrial society is fundamentally unsustainable—technology can’t solve.Milbrath 3 — Lester W. Milbrath, Director Emeritus of the Research Program in Environment and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo, 2003 (“Envisioning a Sustainable Society,”

Explorations in Environmental Political Theory: Thinking About What We Value, edited by Joel Jay Kassiola, Published by M.E. Sharpe, ISBN 0765610523, p. 40-41)If we persist on our current trajectory, we can expect, as already mentioned, that we will double human population within fifty years. We will triple or quadruple world economic output. That will lead to swift depletion of the world’s resources and to the emission of such a torrent of pollutants that the planet’s ecosystems cannot assimilate them. Most seriously, we are likely to change the pattern of the planet’s biogeochemical systems with all of the terrible consequences that I already have mentioned. We are likely to seek technological solutions to those problems, but it is my considered opinion that trying to solve societal problems with more and better technology will fail. We will belatedly and painfully learn that most socioeconomic problems are not amenable to a technological fix, and, moreover, that the environmental crisis is not a technological problem but is based on our values (see introduction to this volume).Not only has modern industrial society created this crisis, but in my judgment, it is not capable of producing a solution. It is blinded to the existence of the crisis and disabled in trying to avoid it by the values it pursues. Think of the values upheld as good in contemporary political discourse: economic growth, consumption, efficiency, productivity, jobs, competitiveness, taking risks, power, winning. Societies pursuing those goals cannot avoid depleting their resources, cannot avoid degrading nature, cannot avoid poisoning life with wastes, and cannot avoid upsetting biospheric systems. Will we thoughtfully transform our society to a sustainable mode, or will we stubbornly refuse to change and have change forced upon us by the [end page 40] collapse of society’s fundamental underpinnings? Resisting change will make us victims of change. I repeat for emphasis, resisting change will make us victims of change.

2NC A2: Transition WarsCollapse prevents lashout – nobody will be the foot soldiers without payChris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity, ed Dobkowski and Wallimann, p 56-57It is also entirely possible that the global economy is already so fragile that developed countries cannot afford to engage in these neocolonial wars, especially if they do not do it as a global block of developed nations through the United Nations. The desperate struggle among competing modern empires to maintain their resource pipelines into the underdeveloped world will only further undermine global civilization. Warring nations’ attempts to cripple their enemies by denying access to their economies and resources will only hasten the collapse of the global economy. No matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies or through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, or both modern industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for energy, natural resources, and ecosystem services are not sustainable. The current collapse of economies and states in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that this global collapse is already occurring. The inability of the U nited S tates and the U nited N ations in the 1990s to solve the economic and political problems that exacerbate conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that the developed countries might be under such economic and political stress that they cannot afford to use the political or military capital necessary to force recalcitrant nations and peoples to remain within the global industrial economy . Although many would argue that the massive death and suffering caused by these conflicts must be stopped, it could be that this death will be less than if the First World intervened and tried to force Third World countries to remain within global civilization. Attempts to intervene in these growing regional conflicts, on the basis of liberal internationalism and global civilization, will backfire and cause only more suffering. In fact, these interventions will further accelerate the collapse of global civilization.

Transition wars are unlikely and the chance of reaching sustainable society outweighs any risk Trainer 2 - Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Ted, “Debating the Significance of the Global Eco-village Movement: A Reply to Takis Fotopoulos” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002)

However I am not convinced the transition must inevitably involve overt conflict, let alone violence.  It probably will, but it is conceivable that as conditions deteriorate and as the existence of a more sensible way becomes more evident , and as access to it increases as a result of Eco-village building, there will be a more or less peaceful shift to The Simpler Way. Again I do not think this is very likely, but it is   possibility to   be worked for . Nothing is foregone in heading down that path, on the understanding that in time it might become clear that overt confrontation might have to be accepted.  The longer we can grow while avoiding confrontation the less likely that we will be crushed if it does occur. However the issue is of no practical importance at this point in time. Whatever conclusion one comes to on it our best strategy here and now is to plunge into establishing and spreading the new ways. It will be a long time before it will be evident whether or not we must contest those   who have power now, or whether they will lose their power in a collapse of the present resource-expensive infrastructures and of legitimacy.

Sustainability

Unsustainable / Collapse InevitableGrowth is unsustainable – only a transition solvesAlexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdfEvidence continues to mount that industrial civilization, driven by a destructive and insatiable growth imperative, is chronically unsustainable, as well as being grossly unjust. The global economy is in ecological overshoot, currently consuming resources and emitting waste at rates the planet cannot possibly sustain (Global Footprint Network 2013). Peak oil is but the most prominent example of a more general situation of looming resource scarcity (Klare, 2012), with high oil prices having a debilitating effect on the oil-dependent economies which are seemingly dependent on cheap oil to maintain historic rates of growth (Heinberg, 2011). At the same time, great multitudes around the globe live lives of material destitution, representing a vast, marginalized segment of humanity that justifiably seeks to expand its economic capacities in some form (World Bank, 2008). Biodiversity continues to be devastated by deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction (United Nations, 2010), while the global development agenda seems to be aiming to provide an expanding global population with the high- impact material affluence enjoyed by the richest parts of the world (Hamilton, 2003). This is despite evidence crying out that the universalization of affluence is environmentally unsupportable (Smith and Positano, 2010; Turner, 2012) and not even a reliable path to happiness (Lane, 2001; Alexander, 2012a). Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the increasingly robust body of climate science indicating the magnitude of the global predicament (IPCC, 2013). According to the Climate Tracker Initiative (2013: 4), the world could exceed its 'carbon budget' in around 18 years, essentially locking us into a future that is at least 2 degrees warmer, and threatening us with 4 degrees or more. It is unclear to what extent civilization as we know it is compatible with runaway climate change. And still, almost without exception, all nations on the planet - including or especially the richest ones - continue to seek GDP growth without limit, as if the cause of these problems could somehow provide the solution. If once it was hoped that technology and science were going to be able decouple economic activity from ecological impact, such a position is no longer credible (Huesemann and Huescmann, 2011). Technology simply cannot provide any escape from the fact that there are biophysical limits to growth. Despite decades of extraordinary technological advance, which it is was promised would lighten the ecological burden of our economies, global energy and resource consumption continues to grow, exacerbated by a growing population, but which is primarily a function of the growth-orientated values that lie at the heart of global capitalism (Turner, 2012). ¶ Against this admittedly gloomy backdrop lies a heterogeneous tradition of critical theorists and activists promoting what could be called a 'deep green' alternative to the growth-orientated, industrial economy. Ranging from the radical simplicity of Henry Thorcau (1983), to the post-growth economics of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al, 1972; 2004), and developing into contemporary expressions of radical reformism (Latouche, 2009; Heinberg, 2011; Jackson, 2009), eco-socialism (Sarkar, 1999; Smith, 2010), and eco-anarchism (Bookchin, 1989; Holmgren, 2002; Trainer; 2010a), this extremely diverse tradition nevertheless agrees that the nature of the existing system is inherently unsustainable. Tinkering with or softening its margins - that is, any attempt to give capitalism a 'human face' - is not going to come close to addressing the problems¶ we, the human species, arc confronted with. What is needed, this tradition variously maintains, is a radically alternative way of living on the Earth - something 'wholly other' to the ways of industrialization, consumerism, and limitless growth. However idealistic or utopian their arguments might seem, the basic reasoning is that the nature of any solutions to current problems must honestly confront the magnitude of the overlapping crises, for else one risks serving the destructive forces one ostensibly opposes. 

Growth cannot escape the logic of consumption – only a transition solvesTrainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, Energy Policy journal, “Some inconvenient theses”, http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Energy%20Policy-Trainer-some%20inconvenient%20theses.pdf9. The problem cannot be solved...in or by consumer society¶ These inconvenient theses present some elements within a strong case against the possibility of finding technical solutions, ¶ not just to problems within the oil and gas domain, but to the general problem of the global sustainability predicament. (The core thesis in Trainer (2010) is that the problems cannot be fixed... within or by consumer society.) Sociological arguments could be added, for instance to do with the rising levels of dissatisfaction, depression, inequality and social breakdown generated by the prioritising of affluence and growth. The logic of the need for huge and radical structural change is clearest with respect to economic growth; if sustainability requires levels of resource production and consumption that are not just stable but must be far lower than at present, then it is not possible to solve the fundamental problems unless the growth commitment is completely abandoned. But that is only one element in the overall challenge which calls for historically unprecedented system change which jettisons some of the basic drivers of Western culture.10. TSW...T1NAThe Simpler Way project involves the following basic claims. The first is that the limits case shows convincingly that global problems cannot be solved within or by a society that is committed to affluent lifestyles, economic growth or allowing market forces to determine 'development'. These are the main factors causing the alarming sustainability and justice problems. The second argument is that there is an alternative, a Simpler Way which would defuse the problems and could be quickly and easily built...if that was the goal. A third claim is that The Simpler Way would enable a far higher quality of life for all. including people in rich countries today. Finally there is the claim that there is no other way. The problems are basically being generated by the quest for limitless affluence, which is not possible for all. so a sustainable and just world cannot be conceived other than in terms of frugal but sufficient material living standards within basically localised economies under mostly participatory democratic control by local assemblies, and within zero-growth economies operating at far lower levels of GDP per capita than rich countries have today (for the detail see Trainer. 2010, 2011).The dollar, energy and footprint costs of living in settlements of the kind envisaged indicate that remarkable reductions could be achieved, probably to under 10% of those typical of rich countries today. Given this dramatically reduced scale energy demand could be met entirely by renewable sources. 

It would take 80 planets to sustain projected increases in consumptionAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)Needless to say, ecosystems are trembling under the pressure of one ‘developed world’ at the existing size. Who, then, could seriously think our planet could withstand the equivalent of an 80-fold increase? The very suggestion is absurd, and yet this very absurdity defines the vision of the global development agenda. It is the elephant in the room. If we make the rough estimation that the developed world, on its own, currently consumes the earth’s entire sustainable biocapacity (Vale and Vale, 2013), then an 80- fold increase would imply that in 70 years we would need 80 planets in order to sustain the global economy. We only have one planet, of course, and its biocapacity is already in decline.At this stage the techno-optimist may wish to interject and insist that in this scenario, which forecasts GDP growth into the future, we can expect that there would be efficiency improvements, such that the

impact of global growth would be less than projected above. There would be efficiency improvements, indeed, meaning that the impact could be significantly less than projected above. For example, a recent study (Wiedmann et al, 2013) shows that with every 10% increase in GDP, the material footprint of economies ‘only’ increase by 6%. But based on that estimate of decoupling, we would still need 48 planets worth of biocapacity. Accordingly, even if these figures are overstated by an order of magnitude, the point would remain that efficiency gains could not possibly be expected to make the projected amount of GDP growth sustainable. The levels of decoupling required would simply be too much (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011; Trainer, 2012). To think otherwise is not being ‘optimistic’ but ‘delusional’.Even based on more conservative numbers, the decoupling required would be unattainable. For example, Tim Jackson (2009) has done the arithmetic with respect to carbon emissions, envisioning a scenario in which current Western European incomes grow at 2% and by 2050 nine billion people share that same income level. In this more moderate scenario, the global economy still grows 15 times. Jackson shows that in order to meet the IPCC’s carbon goal of 450ppm, the carbon intensity of each dollar of GDP must be 130 times lower than the average carbon intensity today. This means carbon intensities must fall 11% every year between now and 2050. By way of context, carbon intensities have declined merely 0.7% per year since 1990 (Jackson, 2009: 79). When these numbers are understood, one can only conclude that techno-optimism is not a scientifically credible position but is instead a ‘faith’ without foundation.According to the latest IPCC report (2013), if the world is to have a 50% chance of keeping warming to less than 2 degrees (the so-called ‘safe’ level), no more than 820- 1445 billion tones of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can be emitted during the rest of this century. Based on existing yearly emissions, this ‘carbon budget’ is going to be used up in 15-25 years, and that is assuming no growth in emissions. If existing trends of growth in emissions continue, that budget will be used up even sooner. The question, therefore, must not be: ‘How can we make the growth model sustainable?’ The question should be: ‘What economic model is sustainable?’ And the answer, it seems, must be: ‘Something other than the growth model.’

Growth is unsustainable—we are already in overshoot—dedev key to prevent environmental collapse, warming, resource depletion and warTrainer, 12 (Ted Trainer, Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Futures, Volume 44, Issue 6, August 2012, Pages 590–599, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?” DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.020, jj)

There is now an overwhelming case that ecological, resource and cohesion problems cannot be solved by or within consumer-capitalist society. This is because, firstly the magnitude of the problems is now too great, and secondly because the problems are being generated by the systems and processes that are built into the foundations of this society. The fundamental cause of the problems including the destruction of the environment , the deprivation and “underdevelopment” of the Third World, resource depletion , conflict and war , and the breakdown of social cohesion, is over-production and over-consumption.Levels of material affluence are far too high to be kept up for long or to be spread to all the world's people. It is important to grasp the magnitude of the over-shoot.•If the probably 10 billion people we will have on earth within about 40 years were to use resources at the per capita rate of the rich countries, annual resource production would have to be about 8 times as great as it is now [2].•Several resources are already scarce, including water, land, fish, and a number of minerals. Oil and gas are likely to be in decline soon, and largely unavailable in the second half of the century. Coal supply could peak within three decades [3].•Recent “Footprint” analysis indicates that it takes 8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy, settlement area and food for one person living in Australia [4]. If 10 billion people were to live as

Australians do about 80 billion ha of productive land would be needed. However that is about 10 times all the available productive land on the planet.•The most disturbing argument is to do with the greenhouse problem. In the near future it is likely to be agreed that in order to stop the carbon content of the atmosphere rising to dangerous levels we must totally eliminate emissions of CO2 by 2050 (Hansen says 2030) [5] and [6]. Geo-sequestration cannot enable this, if only because it can only capture about 85% of the 50% of emissions that come from stationary sources such as power stations [7].These kinds of facts and figures make it abundantly clear that rich world material “living standards” are grossly unsustainable , far beyond levels that can be kept up for long or spread to all people. We are not just somewhat beyond sustainable levels of resource consumption, we have already overshot by a factor of 5–10. Many people, especially within green and left circles are familiar with the above facts and figures but seem not to grasp their significance. The magnitude of the overshoot requires enormous reductions that cannot be made within or by consumer-capitalist society.The above figures are to do with to the present situation, but that does not define the problem we face. At least 3% per annum economic growth is demanded and usually achieved in this society. If Australia had 3% p.a. increase in output to 2050 and by then all 10 billion people expected had risen to the material living standards Australians would have, every year the world's economy would be producing almost 20 times as much as it does today. Yet the present level is grossly unsustainable. The mainstream seems to be completely unaware of the magnitude of these implications of its current material “living standards”, let alone those of its commitment to growth.

Growth’s unsustainable---raising world consumption levels to current Western standards guarantees ecological collapse Ulrich Witt 11, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena, Germany, 2011, “Sustainability and the Problem of Consumption,” https://papers.econ.mpg.de/evo/discussionpapers/2011-16.pdf

A good part of the human kind today enjoys what by historical standards are affluent consumption opportunities. Average per capita consumption has in many places grown way beyond what was – in view of “nature’s parsimony” (as Ricardo once put it) – not even dared to be hoped for in earlier times. The soaring quantitative growth of consumption was made possible by tech nical progress, injected into human production processes via capital accumulation. Labor productivity thus grew, i.e. the value of labor rose relative to the value of the natural resources processed with labor’s help. As a result, human claims on materials, biomass, energy, atmosphere, and space that serve consumption directly or indirectly expanded ever since . The consequence is a seriously increasing environmental stress , degradation, and resource depletion . Due to the ignorance of the complex ecological system the threats implied have for long gone unnoticed (Faber, Manstetten, and Proops 1992). At least since the Brundtland report (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development 1987; for a more recent assessment see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) the problems are, however known to the general public. The environmental impact has so far been caused mainly by expanding consumption in the developed economies, representing the lesser fraction of the world population. (In the U.S., for example, consumer expenditures grew in real terms by no less than 500% over just hundred years from 1901 to 2000, see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report 991,2006). If per capita consumption were to unfold similarly for the rest of the world population – as all developmental policies propagate and aim to support – environmental damages would multiply . Without decisive changes being made , global environmental stability and the long-term quality of life on this planet

are going to be severely threatened . It is a pressing question, therefore, what can be done to make a transition to consumption patterns that are sustainable.

Growth unsustainable because resource depletion from water to minerals to oil – tech can’t solveTrainer 11 [real-world economics review, issue no. 57 “The radical implications of a zero growth economy”, Ted Trainer, Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Australia, 2011]

Before offering support for these claims it is important to sketch the general “limits to growth” situation confronting us. The magnitude and seriousness of the global resource and environmental problem is not generally appreciated . Only when this is grasped is it possible to understand that the social changes required must be huge, radical and far reaching. The initial claim being argued here (and detailed in Trainer 2010b) is that consumer-capitalist society cannot be reformed or fixed; it has to be largely scrapped and remade along quite different lines. The “limits to growth” case: An outline The planet is now racing into many massive problems, any one of which could bring about the collapse of civilization before long. The most serious are the destruction of the environment, the deprivation of the Third World, resource depletion, conflict and war, and the breakdown of social cohesion. The main cause of all these problems is over-production and over-consumptio n – people are trying to live at levels of affluence that are far too high to be sustained or for all to share. Our society is grossly unsustainable – the levels of consumption, resource use and ecological impact we have in rich countries like Australia are far beyond levels that could be kept up for long or extended to all people. Yet almost everyone’s supreme goal is to increase 1 material living standards and the GDP and production and consumption, investment, trade, etc., as fast as possible and without any limit in sight. There is no element in our suicidal condition that is more important than this mindless obsession with accelerating the main factor causing the condition. The following points drive home the magnitude of the overshoot. • If the 9 billion people we will have on earth within about 50 years were to use resources at the per capita rate of the rich countries , annual resource production would have to be about 8 times as great as it is now. • If 9 billion people were to have a North American diet we would need about 4.5 billion ha of cropland , but there are only 1.4 billion ha of cropland on the planet. • Water resources are scarce and dwindling . What will the situation be if 9 billion people try to use water as we in rich countries do, while the greenhouse problem reduces water resources. • The world’s fisheries are in serious trouble now, most of them overfished and in decline. What happens if 9 billion people try to eat fish at the rate Australian’s do now? • Several mineral and other resources are likely to be very scarce soon, including gallium , indium , helium , and there are worries about copper, zinc, silver and phosphorous. • Oil and gas are likely to be in decline soon, and largely unavailable in the second half of the century. If 9 billion were to consume oil at the Australian per capita rate, world demand would be about 5 times as great as it is now. The seriousness of this is extreme, given the heavy dependence of our society on liquid fuels. • Recent "Footprint" analysis indicates that it takes 8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy, settlement area and food for one person living in Australia. (World Wildlife Fund, 2009.) So if 9 billion people were to live as we do about 72 billion ha of productive land would be needed. But that is about 10 times all the available productive land on the planet. • The most disturbing argument is to do with the greenhouse problem. It is very likely that in order to stop the carbon content of the atmosphere rising to dangerous levels CO2 emissions will have to be totally eliminated by 2050 (Hansen says 2030). (Hansen, 2009, Meinschausen et al., 2009.) Geosequestration can’t enable this, if only because it can only capture about 85% of the 50% of emissions that come from stationary sources like power stations. These kinds of figures make it abundantly clear that rich world material “living standards” are grossly unsustainable. We are living in ways that it is impossible for all to share. We are not just a little beyond sustainable levels of resource consumption -- we have overshot by a factor of 5 to 10. Few seem to realise the magnitude of the overshoot, nor therefore about the enormous reductions that must be made.

Overpopulation makes growth unsustainable – dedev solvesAlexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf2.3. Overpopulation¶ What exacerbates the ecological and humanitarian crises outlined above is the fact that, according to the United Nations, global human population is expected to exceed nine billion by mid-century and reach ten billion toward the end of the century [UNDSEA, 2011]. Obviously, this

will intensify greatly the already intense competition over access to the world's limited natural resources and it will put even more pressure on Earth's fragile ecosystems. It is of the utmost importance that population stabilizes as soon as¶ possible and is significantly reduced in some equitable manner. But we have known about the 'population bomb' for many decades and still it continues to explode, albeit at a slowing pace. We need either new strategies here or much greater commitment to existing strategies [and probably both). But even if humanity somehow managed to stabilize population at once and thereby avoid the expected increases, the global economy would nevertheless remain in gross ecological overshoot. The primary task, therefore - given we have the population we have - must be to reduce the ecological impact of our economic activity, partly by exploiting all appropriate technologies, and partly by stabilizing and reducing population over time, but mainly by reimagining 'the good life' beyond consumer culture and learning how to step more lightly on the planet [Alexander, 2011a; 2009). This means giving up the destructive dream of 'consumer affluence.' The developed nations certainly cannot lecture the developing nations about how expanding populations are putting immense strain on Earth's ecosystems while at the same time indulging in ever-higher levels of consumption. Accordingly, if the developed nations are serious about reducing global impact on the environment, as they claim they are, then before looking overseas they must first show the world that they are prepared to step more lightly themselves. Overpopulation is too easily used as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from the more fundamental problem of overconsumption.

Economic growth is fundamentally unsustainable: resource depletion, consumption levels, and environmental destruction.Trainer 7 — Ted Trainer, Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales, 2007 (“We can't go on living like this,” On Line Opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate, April 20th, Available Online at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp? article=5754, Accessed 07-15-2008)We say we want to save the environment, and to have peace, and to eliminate poverty. And we do - but only until we see what this requires.The fundamental cause of the big global problems threatening us now is simply over-consumption. The rate at which we in rich countries are using up resources is grossly unsustainable. It’s far beyond levels that can be kept up for long or that could be spread to all people. Yet most people totally fail to grasp the magnitude of the over-shoot.The reductions required are so big that they cannot be achieved within a consumer-capitalist society. Huge and extremely radical change to very systems and culture are necessary.Several lines of argument lead to this conclusion, but I’ll note only three.Some resources are already alarmingly scarce, including water, land, fish and especially petroleum. Some geologists think petroleum supply will peak within a decade. If all the world’s people today were to consume resources at the per capita rate we in rich countries do, the annual supply rate would have to be more than six times as great as at present, and if the population of 9 billion we will have on earth soon were to do so it would have to be about ten times as great.Second, the per capita area of productive land needed to supply one Australian with food, water, settlements and energy, is about 7-8 ha. The US figure is closer to 12 ha. But the average per capita area of productive land available on the planet is only about 1.3 ha. When the world population reaches 9 billion the per capita area of productive land available will be only 0.8 ha. In other words in a world where resources were shared equally we would all have to get by on about 10 per cent of the present average Australian footprint.Third, the greenhouse problem is the most powerful and alarming illustration of the overshoot. The scientists are telling us that if we are to stop the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere from reaching twice the pre-industrial level we must cut global carbon emissions, and thus fossil fuel use, by 60 per cent in the short term, and more later.If we cut it 60 per cent and shared the remaining energy among 9 billion people each Australian would have to get by on less than 5 per cent of the fossil fuel now used. And that target, a doubling of atmospheric CO2, is much too high to be safe. We’re now 30 per cent above pre-industrial levels and already seeing disturbing climatic effects.These lines of argument show we must face up to enormous reductions in rich world resource use, perhaps by 90 per cent, if we’re to solve the big global problems. This is not possible in a society that’s committed to the affluent lifestyles that require high energy and resource use.Now all that only makes clear that the present situation is grossly unsustainable. But this society is fundamentally and fiercely obsessed with raising levels of production and consumption all the time, as fast as possible, and without any limit. In other words our supreme, sacred, never-questioned goal is economic growth. We’re already at impossible levels of production and consumption but our top priority is to go on increasing them all the time.

Prefer our sustainability arguments: we might be wrong about one factor, but the likelihood that we are wrong about all factors is exceedingly small.Gowdy 98 — John M. Gowdy, Professor of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1998 (“Biophysical Limits to Industrialization: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century," The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, Published by Syracuse University Press, ISBN 0815627440, p. 65-66)Among physical scientists, and among biologists and ecologists in particular, the view is widely held that the current level of human activity is unsustainable. Various biophysical indicators suggest that our species is pushing the limits of the ability of the planet to support us. According to calculations by Vitousek and others (1986), human activity, directly and indirectly, expropriates about 40 percent of the potential terrestrial products of photosynthesis. Exhaustive calculations by Kraushaar and Ristinen (1993), based on solar energy flow, conversion efficiencies, and many other factors, estimate that the planet has enough arable land to support a population of 10 billion. The human population is now approaching 6 billion and still growing rapidly. Economic activity, particularly burning fossil fuels and the destruction of forests, [end page 65] has pushed atmospheric CO2 to the highest levels since a period of global warming some 125,000 years ago. Atmospheric CO2 is expected to increase from its preindustrial level of 270 ppm to 600 ppm by the middle of the twenty-first century raising global temperatures by 350 to 7°C and raising sea levels by 1 to 2 meters by thermal expansion alone (Manabe and Stouffer 1993). Even if there are no surprises, such as a sudden climate flip from one steady sate to another, the rise in temperature caused by higher atmospheric CO2 levels will have serious consequences for the ability of the human population to feed itself. In the view of many biologists, the most serious environmental problem is biodiversity loss. According to F. 0. Wilson (1992) the current catastrophic loss of biodiversity represents the sixth major extinction of life on earth that has occurred during the 570-million-year history of complex life on the planet. He estimates that by the middle of the next century more than 20 percent of existing species will disappear.Each of the above calculations and observations may be disputed. The likelihood, however, that they are all fundamentally wrong is virtually zero. From many different perspectives it is clear that we are pushing the limits of the ability of the biophysical world to support the continued expansion of the use of natural resources and of the assimilative capacity of the environment. Evidence from many sources leads us to the conclusion that industrial production will be drastically reduced because of constraints on energy and resource use arising from supply constraints and environmental limits. It is increasingly likely that sometime in the next century the “industrialization project” (Wallimann 1994) will come to a halt with unforeseen but probably negative consequences for our species. What are the prospects for getting off the industrial growth path before social disintegration and mass death is inevitable?

Unsustainable – ComplexityComplex societies are prone to collapseVail 5 – Jeff Vail, attorney at Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP in Denver, Colorado specializing in litigation and energy issues, former intelligence officer with the US Air Force and energy infrastructure counterterrorism specialist with the US Department of the Interior, April 28, 2005, “The Logic of Collapse,” online: http://www.jeffvail.net/2005/04/logic-of-collapse.html

But despite the declining marginal returns, society is not capable of reducing expenditure , or even reducing the growth in expenditure. I discuss this at length in A Theory of Power, but the basic fact is that society is —at its very root— an evolutionary development that uses a continual increase in complexity to address social needs —and to ensure its own survival. So, as societies continue to invest more and more in social complexity at lower and lower marginal rates of return, they become more and more inefficient until eventually they are no longer capable of withstanding even commonplace stresses . They collapse. ¶ This may seem too deterministic—after all, it suggests that all societies will eventually collapse. While that may cause our inherent sense of hubris to perk up for a moment, we should remember that this equation fits our data quite well—every civilization that has ever existed has, in fact, collapsed. Our present global civilization is, or course, the sole exception. A look back at the contemporary chroniclers of history shows that every “great” civilization thinks that they are somehow different , that history will not repeat with them—and their hubris is shared with gusto by members of the present global civilization.¶ Of course, as discrete empires and societies grow ever more cumbersome they do not always collapse in the spectacular fashion of the Western Roman Empire. If they exist in a “peer-polity” situation—that is, they are surrounded by competitors of similar levels of complexity—then they will tend to be conquered and absorbed. It is only in the case of a power vacuum—like the Chacoans or Western Romans—that we witness such a spectacular loss of complexity. In the “modern” world, we have not witnessed such a collapse as we exist in a global peer-polity continuum. When the Spanish empire grew too cumbersome the British were there to take over, and the mantel has since passed on to America, with the EU, China and others waiting eagerly in the wings. In the modern world there can no longer be an isolated collapse—our next experience with this will be global.¶ In fact, the modern civilization continuum has existed for so long without a globa l collapse because we have managed to tap new energy sources —coal, then oil—each with a higher energy surplus than the last. This has buoyed the marginal return curve temporarily with each discovery, but has not changed the fundamental dynamics of collapse.¶ Perhaps we should take a step back and look at collapse in general. Our psychological investment in the “goodness” of “ high -civilization” leads to the commonly held conclusion that collapse is bad —and that to advocate it would be irrational. But from a purely economic point of view, collapse actually increases the overall benefit that social complexity provides to society for their level of investment. It makes economic sense. In the graph above, C3-B1 and C1-B1 provide the same benefit to society—but for dramatically different support burdens required to maintain their respective levels of complexity. C1-B1 is a much more desirable location for a society than C3-B1, so collapse from C3-B1 to C1-B1 is actually a good thing. With the growing burden of today’s global society, the global inequality and injustice that seems to grow daily, collapse is beginning to make economic sense. In fact, an entire philosophical movement, Primitivism, has sprung up dedicated to convincing the world that a “C1-B1”, hamlet society is in fact a far better place. ¶ Despite the growing logic of collapse, in today’s peer-polity world that option does not exist except on a global scale. Today we have 3 options: ¶ 1. Continue business as usual, accepting declining marginal returns on investments in complexity (and very soon declining overall returns) until an eventual, inevitable collapse occurs globally . Continuation of present patterns will continue the escalating environmental damage, and will continue to grow the human population, with population levels in increasing excess of the support capacity of a post-collapse Earth (i.e. more people will die in the collapse).¶ 2. Locate a new , more efficient energy source to subsidize marginal returns on our investments in complexity. This does not mean discover more oil or invent better clean coal technology—these, along with solar or wind power still provide lower marginal returns than oil in the heyday of cheap Saudi oil. Only the development of super-efficient fusion power seems to provide the ability to delay the decline of marginal returns any

appreciable amount, and this will still serve to only delay and exacerbate the eventual return to option #1. ¶ 3.

Precipitate a global collapse now in order to reap the economic benefits of this action while minimizing the costs of the collapse that will continue to increase with the complexity and population of our global civilization. When combined with a strategy to replace hierarchy with rhizome, as outlined in A Theory of Power, Chapter 9, this may even represent a long-term sustainable strategy.¶ Whoa. Am I seriously suggesting the triggering of a global collapse? For the moment I’m just suggesting that we explore the idea. If, after deliberation, we

accept the totality of the three options as outlined above, then triggering collapse stands as the only responsible choice. It is—admittedly—a choice that is so far outside the realm of consideration of most people (who are strongly invested in the Myth of the West) that they will never take it seriously. But critically, it does not necessarily require their consent…¶ These may seem like the ramblings of a madman. But in the late Western Roman Empire, there is a fact that is simply not taught today because it is too far outside our tolerance for things that run counter to the Myth of the West: The citizens of Rome wanted to end the Empire, to dissolve its cumbersome structure, but could not reverse its pre-programmed course. Many—perhaps most—welcomed the invading barbarians with open arms.¶ So should collapse be triggered now, or should we wait as long as possible? If we accept the inevitability of collapse, then it should be triggered as soon as possible, as the cost of implementing a collapse strategy is continually growing…¶ Throughout history, when collapse has occurred, it has been a blessing. The mainstream continues to cling to the beliefs that collapse will be a terrible loss, and that it is not inevitable. Even with all of our cultural brain-washing, do we really have so much hubris as to hold on to the tired mantra that “this time, in our civilization, things will be different”?

Unsustainable – Tipping PointsEarth’s on the verge of crossing vital ecological tipping points---years of inter-disciplinary study create an overwhelming scientific consensus Mark Swilling 12, Professor, Sustainability Institute and School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, programme coordinator of the Sustainable Development Programme in the School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, project leader of the Centre for the Transdisciplinary Study of Sustainability and Complexity, and Academic Director of the Sustainability Institute, 2012, “So what is so unsustainable about the global economy?,” Continuing Medical Education, Vol. 30, No. 3, p. 68-71

Seven globally significant, mainstream documents will , in one way or another, shape the way our generation sees the world which we need to change . These are as follows:

• Ecosystem degradation . The United Nations (UN ) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment , compiled by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries and released in 2005 (with virtually no impact beyond the environmental sciences), has

confirmed for the first time that 60% of the ecosystems upon which human systems depend for survival are degraded.7

• Global warming . The broadly accepted reports of the I ntergovernmental P anel on C limate C hange

confirm that global warming is taking place due to release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases caused by, among other things,

the burning of fossil fuels, and that if average temperatures increase by 2˚C or more this is going to lead to major ecological and socio-economic changes, most of them for the worse, and the world’s poor will experience the most destructive

consequences .17

• Oil peak . The 2008 World Energy Outlook, published by the International Energy Agency, declared the ‘end of cheap oil’.18

Although there is still some dispute over whether we have hit peak oil production or not, the fact remains that mainstream perspectives now broadly agree with the once vilified ‘ peak oil’ perspective (see www.peakoil.net). Even the major oil companies now agree that oil prices are going to rise and alternatives to oil must be found sooner rather than later. Oil accounts for over 60% of the global economy’s energy needs. Our cities and global economy depend on cheap oil and changing this means a fundamental rethink of the assumptions underpinning nearly a century of urban planning dogma.• Inequality. According to the UN Human Development Report for 1998, 20% of the global population who live in the richest countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditure, whereas the

poorest 20% account for 1.3%.19 Only the most callous still ignore the significance of inequality as a driver of many threats to social cohesion and a decent quality of life for all.

• Urban majority. According to generally accepted UN reports, the majority (i.e. just over 50%) of the world’s population was living in urban areas by 2007.6 According to the UN habitat report entitled The Challenge of Slums, one billion of the six billion people who live on the planet live in slums or, put differently, one-third of the world’s total urban population (rising to over 75% in the least developed countries) live in slums or what we refer to in South Africa as informal settlements.20• Food insecurity. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development21 is the most thorough global assessment of the state of agricultural science and practice that has ever been conducted. According to this report, modern industrial , chemical-intensive agriculture has caused significant ecological degradation which, in turn, will threaten food security in a world in

which access to food is already highly unequal and demand is fast outstripping supply . Significantly, this report confirmed that ‘23% of all used land is degraded to some degree’.21• Material flows. According to a 2011 report by the International Resource Panel (http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel), by 2005 the global economy depended on 60 billion tonnes of primary resources (biomass, fossil fuels, metals and industrial and construction minerals) and 500 exajoules of energy, an increase of 36% since 1980.22

The above trends combine to conjure up a picture of a highly unequal urbanised world, dependent on rapidly degrading ecosystem services , with looming threats triggered by climate change, high

oil prices, food insecurities and resource depletion. This is what the mainstream literature on unsustainable development is worried about. This marks what is now increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene – the era in which humans have become the primary force of historico-geophysical evolution.23

Significantly, although these seven documents are in the policy domain they reflect the outcomes of many years of much deeper research on global change by scientists and researchers working across disciplines

and diverse contexts on all continents. Although this process of scientific inquiry leading to policy change is most dramatic with respect to climate science,24 it is also true for the life sciences that fed into the outcomes expressed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the resource economics that has slowly established the significance of rising oil prices and, most recently, of all the rise of

material flow analysis (more on these later). The rise of our ability to ‘ see the planet’ has given rise to what Clark

et al. have appropriately called the ‘second Copernican revolution’ . 25 The first, of course, goes back to the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus in 1530, but only ‘proven’ a century later by Galileo, who established by observation that Copernicus was correct when he claimed that the sun rather than Earth was the centre of the universe. This brilliant act of defining the planetary system through observation was a – perhaps the – defining moment that paved the way for the Enlightenment and the industrial epoch that followed. Clark et al. date the second Copernican revolution to the meeting in 2001 when delegates from over 100 countries signed the Amsterdam Declaration which established the ‘Earth-System Science Partnership’.25 The logical outcome of this profound paradigm shift is an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of what Rockstrom et al. have called our ‘planetary boundaries’ which define the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ . 26 The significance of the Rockstrom article is that it

managed to integrate, for the first time, the quantifications of these ‘planetary boundaries’ that had already been established by

various mono-disciplines. These included some key markers, such as not exceeding 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; extracting 35 million tonnes of nitrogen from the atmosphere per year; an extinction rate of 10; global freshwater use of 4 000 km3 per year, and a fixed percentage of global land cover converted to cropland.26 Without the ‘second Copernican revolution’ a new science appropriate for a more sustainable world and the associated ethics would be unviable.

A2: Sustainable – Green TechRenewables can’t sustain humans – too many obstacles-Sun doesn’t always shine and wind doesn’t always blow-high cost prevents investment-renewables can’t replace oilTrainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, Energy Policy journal, “Some inconvenient theses”, http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Energy%20Policy-Trainer-some%20inconvenient%20theses.pdf4. Renewable energy cannot save us¶ The widespread acceptance of the 'Peak Oil* thesis in recent years, which can be taken as a general position on the future availability of oil and gas. has bolstered one of the most powerful technical fix assumptions: viz. that renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels, thereby eliminating the problem of climate change, and enabling abundant energy. Many impressive reports have claimed to show that this is possible, and easily afforded. Hardly any academic literature has questioned the faith. It is not surprising that all Green agencies and political movements appear to accept it enthusiastically.¶ Over several years this author has published a series of attempts to analyse the potential and limits of renewable energy. Earlier attempts were hampered by challengeable assumptions and inadequate data but their adequacy has improved. The current version of the approach (Trainer. 2012a) is considerably more persuasive than the initial efforts. It is not likely to be advanced until experience with increasing renewable penetration into supply systems accumulates and until better data on output and costs becomes available, especially for solar thermal power.¶ The focal concern in these analyses has been the implications of the intermittency of sun and wind for quantities of redundant plant required, and the resulting total system capital cost. It is not uncommon for Europe to experience little or no solar or wind energy for 1 to 2 weeks in winter, during which time demand peaks. Oswald. Raine and Ashraf-Ball, (2008) document such an event in February 2006 and several others do so for other regions. During these periods the contributions that the wind or solar sectors normally make must be made by others. If for instance the back-up system is biomass-gas- electricity generation then the amount of this plant required at times might have to be sufficient to meet all demand except for hydroelectric system, while a large amount of wind and solar plant sits idle. The crucial question is whether the amounts of redundant plant required to cope with the winter supply task can be afforded. Here is an indication of the negative case detailed in Trainer (2012a). ¶ The assumptions made, for working purposes are as follows. World energy demand doubling by 2050, 33% reduction in overall energy demand due to conservation and efficiency advances.15% energy loss where very long distance transmission (plus local distribution) applies, embodied energy costs for wind. PV and solar thermal of 5%. 15% and 10%. plant lifetimes of 20 years for wind and 35 years for PV and solar thermal. 60% of transport electrified, a 67% reduction in energy consumption for electric vehicles. 50% efficiency of conversion from electricity to hydrogen gas and its distribution and storage. Central Australian location for PV and solar thermal. PV efficiency 15%. winter wind capacity 38%. 16% efficiency for central receiver solar thermal plant with 6h storage. 42% efficiency of ethanol production from biomass, the equivalent of a 700 million ha global biomass harvest plus another one-third from wastes, adding to 50 EJ p.a. of ethanol, and long term future capital costs per kW(p) of fully installed wind. PV and solar thermal plant of $1500, S2700 and S4390.¶ Four strategies are explored. The first is aimed at meeting the non-electrical energy demand and overcoming the intermittency and storage problem by use of hydrogen. The system capital cost comes to approximately 10% of the 2011 global GDP and is more than 14 times the early 2000s ratio of rich country energy investment to GDP (i.e.. for building and maintaining plant, as distinct from purchase of energy) (Pfuger. 2004: Bird. 2003).¶ This figure would be far below the actual cost because several important system components could not

be included mainly due to lack of data, including the cost of the long distance transmission lines from desert locations of PV and solar thermal, the probable 40% increase in cost for construction in remote areas (Lovegrove et al.. 2012). the biomass and hydro components, and the cost of the hydrogen production, distribution storage and regeneration component including storage to meet energy demand through several continual days. ¶ Strategy 2 assumes dropping the hydrogen provision and supplying 68% of demand in the form of electricity. This reduces the capital cost sum by 23%. However this strategy is not viable as it does not provide for getting through big gap events.¶ Strategy 3 briefly explores use of biomass for back up purposes. This involves a severe limit set by the relatively low probable global biomass yield combined with the low efficiency of electricity generation from biomass, and another very large redundancy problem. ¶ Strategy 4 explores the possible use of the heat storage capacity' of solar thermal systems to overcome intermittency problems. Again the limits quickly become evident Plant being built at present include c. 6 h storage but to supply through a 4 day period of little or no solar radiation would require 16 times as much. If solar thermal was normally contributing one-third of supply but at times was called upon to contribute 100% of it for 4 days the storage capacity multiple would have to be in the region of 50. The event Oswald. Raine and Ashraf-Ball documents lasted around 14 days, not 4.¶ The case therefore seems to be a strong one. It is not an argument against transitioning to renewable energy, which is a crucial step in The Simpler Way vision discussed below. It is an argument against the possibility of running energy-intensive consumer societies on renewables.

Green tech doesn’t solve and growth will outpace efficiency gains – collapse is inevitable absent de-developmentAlexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf2.1.Ecological Overshoot and the Limits of Technology¶ The ecological footprint of the global economy now exceeds the sustainable carrying ¶ capacity of the planet by 50%, and overall things continue to get worse (Global¶ FootprintNetwork,2012). Old growth forests continue to be cut down at alarming rates;¶ Fresh water is getting scarcer; fish stocks and biodiversity more generally continue to ¶ decline; top soil continues to erode; the climate continues to change and become less ¶ stable; and overall the pollution and wastes from human economic activity continue to ¶ degrade the ecosystems upon which all life depends (seegenerally,Brown,2011).While¶ this is hardly news, the full implications of our predicament are typically grossly under ¶ estimated. The mainstream view on how to achieve sustainability is to exploit science¶ and technology in order to produce more cleanly and efficiently, thereby decoupling¶ economic activity from its destructive environmental impacts. But despite decades of ¶ extraordinary technological advance, the overall impacts of economic activity continue ¶ ¶ to increase (Jackson, 2009: Ch 4). To be sure, human beings are getting better at¶ producing commodities more cleanly and efficiently, but we are also producing more ¶ commodities, and it turns out that those production increases outweigh the efficiency¶ gains in production, leading to an overall increase in the impacts of economic activity,¶ not a decrease. Efficiency without sufficiency is lost. We must always remember that¶ technology is a two edged sword, in the sense that it provides us with tools both to ¶ protect and destroy the natural environment, and human beings are exploiting both ¶ forms enthusiastically, especially the latter. Technology might give us solar panels and¶ electric cars, for example, but it also gives us the ability to cut down rain forests easily,¶ empty the oceans, and drill for oil in thousands of feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.¶ Granted, technology never ceases to amaze, but the very awe it evokes seduces ¶ many into faithfully investing it with limitless powers. When we actually do the math, ¶ however, the impossibility of a technological fix to environmental problems becomes ¶ perfectly clear. If the developed nations were to grow their economies at a modest 2%¶

overcoming decades and by 2050 the poorest nations had caught up–which more or¶ less seems to be the

goal of development – then by that stage the global economy, ¶ which is already in ecological overshoot, would be almost 15 times larger than it is ¶ today (Jackson,2009:81). This means, for example, that if we are to meet the moderate¶ emissions targets of the IPCC (2007) then the carbon intensity of global economic ¶ out put must be 130 times lower than it is today, requiring 11% reductions every year. ¶

Even with the unprecedented technological advances of recent decades, the efficiency¶ improvements over the period 1990-2007 were merely 0.7% per year (Jackson,2009:¶ 79). These hard numbers ought to shatter the faith of techno-optimists. They show that¶ it is delusional to think that technology alone is going to be able to solve the ecological ¶ crises we face, because the extent of absolute decoupling required is simply too great ¶ (Trainer,2012a). Humanity must exploit appropriate technologies at every opportunity,¶ of course, but first and foremost what is needed is a new mode of economy, one that ¶ recognizes and accepts that growth-based, energy-intensive consumer societies are ¶ grossly unsustainable and certainly not universalisable.

Green tech can’t make growth sustainableTed Trainer, Simplicity Institute Report, 12e, 2012, “CAN RENEWABLE ENERGY SUSTAIN CONSUMER SOCIETIES? A NEGATIVE CASE, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/CanRenewableEnergySustainConsumerSocietiesTrainer.pdf 9. Conclusions¶ The total investment sum arrived at above is considerably less than that derived in Trainer [112], but the derivation is much more soundly based mainly due to recent access to more confident estimates of output and future capital costs. The general conclusion supported by this discussion is that the capital costs for a totally renewable global energy supply would be far beyond affordable. This means that greenhouse and energy problems cannot be solved by action on the supply side, i.e., by technical developments which promise to provide quantities taken for granted in energy- intensive societies. This general "limits to growth" perspective is that these and the ¶ 14¶ other major global problems can only be solved by action on the demand side, i.e., by moving to ways, values, institutions and systems which greatly reduce the need for materials, energy and ecological resources. ¶ It should be stressed that the 700 EJ/y supply target would give the world’s expected 10 billion people by 2050 a per capita energy consumption of 70 GJ/y, which is around only one-third of the present Australian level. Thus if renewable sources were to provide all the world's people in 2050 with the present Australian per capita energy consumption, the supply target would have to be three times that taken in this exercise.¶ This analysis is not an argument against transition to full reliance on renewable energy sources. It is only an argument against the possibility of sustaining high energy societies on them. Trainer [113] and [114] detail the case that the limits to growth predicament cannot be solved by technical reforms to or within consumer-capitalist society and that there must be radical social transition to some kind of ’Simpler Way.’ This vision includes developing mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies, abandoning the growth economy, severely controlling market forces, shifting from representative to participatory democracy, and accepting frugal and cooperative lifestyles. Chapter 4 of Trainer [115] presents numerical support for the claim that footprint and energy costs in the realm of 10% of those in present rich countries could be achieved, based on renewable energy sources. Although at this point in time the prospects for making such a transition would seem to be highly unlikely, the need to consider it will probably become more evident as greenhouse and energy problems intensify. It is not likely to be considered if the present dominant assumption that high energy societies can run on renewable energy remains relatively unchallenged.

A2: Sustainable – Tech Solves – Jevon’s ParadoxTech fails without reductions in consumptionAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)Reducing the ecological impacts of developed nations, however, cannot be achieved simply through the application of technology. As well as using technologies to reduce the impact of economic activity, what is also required is that typical levels of consumption and production in developed nations go down. This can be achieved partly by cultural change, through which people practice ‘voluntary simplicity’ by exchanging superfluous consumption for more free time (Burch, 2012; Alexander, 2012c). But such cultural change needs to be supported and facilitated by structural changes that support an economics of sufficiency (see, e.g., Alcott, 2008; Trainer, 2010; Alexander, 2011; van den Bergh, 2011).

Tech innovations and efficiency gains get reinvested into limitless consumption—that exacerbates ecological overshootAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)

This paper has reviewed the evidence in support of techno-optimism and found it to be wanting . This is significant because it debunks a widely held view, even amongst many environmentalists, that ‘green growth’ is a coherent path to sustainability. Perhaps it would be nice if affluence could be globalised without damaging the planet. It would certainly be less confronting than rethinking cultural and economic fundamentals. But there are no credible grounds for thinking that technology is going to be able to protect the environment if economic growth is sustained and high consumption lifestyles continue to be globalised. The levels of decoupling required are simply too great. More efficient growth in GDP, therefore, is not so much ‘green’ as slightly ‘less brown’ (Czech, 2013: Ch 8), which is a wholly inadequate response to the crises facing humanity.We have seen that as nations get richer, their overall ecological footprints and carbon emissions tend to rise, from which it follows that the argument that higher GDP will produce sustainable economies entirely lacks evidential foundation. The central problem is that in a growth-orientated economy, efficiency gains are almost always reinvested into increasing production and consumption, not reducing them . These rebound effects have meant that the overall impact of economies tends to increase, even though technology has produced many efficiency gains in production. In other words, technological advancement has produced relative decoupling, but little or no absolute decoupling. The latter is obviously what is needed, however, given that the global economy is in gross ecological overshoot (Turner, 2012).Since there are no reasons to think that more efficient growth is going to reduce humanity’s ecological footprint within sustainable bounds, it follows that we must consider alternative models of economy – alternative models of progress – even if these challenge conventional economic wisdom. To draw on the Einsteinian dictum: we cannot solve our problems using the same kinds of thinking that caused them. Among other things, this implies taking population stabilisation and reduction policies much more seriously (Alcott, 2012), but even if population were to be stabilised today, the global economy would remain in gross ecological overshoot. All appropriate technologies must also be exploited – this paper does not argue otherwise – it only maintains that technology is not going to be able to

solve environmental problems when the application of technology is governed by a growth imperative . Accordingly, this paper has argued that what is needed for true sustainability (as opposed to ‘greenwash’) is a transition to a fundamentally different kind of economy – an economy that seeks sufficiency rather than limitless growth. This may not be a popular message, and it may already be too late for there to be a smooth transition beyond the growth model (Gilding, 2011). But on a finite planet, there is no alternative. The sooner the world realises this, the better it will be for both people and planet.We must embrace life beyond growth before it embraces us.

“Rebound effects” negate benefits to tech advancesAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)

The evidence reviewed clearly indicates that there has been significant relative decoupling in recent decades, but little or no absolute decoupling – certainly not at the

global level. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, perhaps, because one might ordinarily think that efficiency gains (which produce

relative decoupling) would lead to absolute decoupling. In other words, it is plausible to think that as the world gets better at producing commodities more efficiently, the absolute impacts of our economic activity would naturally decline . But this assumption has not played out in reality . As will now be explained, one of critical reasons it has not played out is because of what are known as ‘rebound effects’, or the ‘Jevons Paradox’ (Alcott, 2005; Polimeni et al 2009; Owen, 2012).

The Jevons Paradox acquires its name from the classical economist William Stanley Jevons, who was the first to formalise the idea that efficiency gains would not necessarily lead to a reduction in resource consumption, and could even lead to increased consumption. Writing at a time when there was increasing concern over England’s diminishing coal reserves, Jevons (1865) noted that the more efficient steam engines were not reducing but actually increasing the consumption of coal. This was because the new technologies being developed made the engines more accessible and affordable to more people, thus increasing the demand on coal resources even as engines became more efficient. He formalised his view by stating: ‘It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth’ (Jevons, 1865: 103). What are the dynamics of this paradox and to what extent does it exist?The Jevons Paradox is generally discussed in the scholarly literature with reference to the notion of ‘rebound effects’ (Herring and Sorrell, 2009; Alcott and Madlener,

2009). A ‘rebound effect’ is said to have occurred when the benefits of efficiency improvements are partially or wholly negated by consumption growth that was made possible by the efficiency improvements. For example, a 5% increase in energy efficiency may only reduce energy consumption by 2% if the efficiency improvements incentivise

people to act in more energy-intensive ways (meaning 60% of anticipated savings are lost or ‘taken back’). In other words, efficiency improvements can provoke behavioural or economic responses (‘rebounds’) that end up reducing some of the anticipated benefits of the efficiency improvements. When those rebounds are significant enough they can even lead to increased resource or energy consumption, which is sometimes called ‘back-fire’ (or the Jevons Paradox). As will now be explained, there are three main categories of rebound effects – direct rebounds, indirect rebounds, and a macroeconomic or economy-wide rebound.

A direct rebound occurs when an efficiency gain in production results in increased consumption of the same resource (Khazzoom, 1980; Frondel et al, 2012). For example, a more fuel-efficient car can lead to people drive more often, or further, since the costs of fuel per kilometre have gone down ; a more efficient heater can lead people to warm their houses for longer periods or to hotter temperatures, since the relative costs of heating have gone down; energy efficient lighting can lead people to leave the lights on for longer, etc. (Sorrell, 2009). Because efficiency generally reduces the price of a commodity (since it makes production less resource-intensive or time-intensive), this incentivises increased consumption, meaning that some or all of the ecological benefits that flow from efficiency gains are often lost

to increased consumption. An indirect rebound occurs when efficiency gains lead to increased consumption of some other resource. For example, insulating one’s home might reduce the annual consumption of energy for electricity, but the money saved from reduced energy costs is often spent on other commodities that require energy (e.g. a plane flight or a new

television). This can mean that some or all the energy saved from insulating one’s house is actually consumed elsewhere, meaning overall energy dependence can stay the same or even increase.

A macro-economic or economy wide rebound is the aggregate of direct and indirect rebounds. New technologies can create new production possibilities, or make existing production possibilities accessible to more people, thus stimulating economic growth. The result is that efficiency-promoting technologies often facilitate the consumption of more energy and resources even as energy and resource intensities reduce, as Jevons observed long ago.While the basic mechanism of rebound effects is widely acknowledged, and, indeed, beyond dispute , there is an ongoing debate over the magnitude of the various rebound phenomena. Some argue that the macro-economic rebound actually exceeds the energy or resource savings (Polimeni et al 2009; Hanley et al, 2009; Owen, 2012), suggesting that efficiency improvements, designed to reduce overall consumption, sometimes actually ‘backfire’ and lead to increased consumption. This would cast into grave doubt the presumed value of efficiency improvements, at least in some circumstances. Other theorists are more circumspect (Herring and Sorrell, 2009), suggesting at the very least that the case for ‘backfire’ is unclear. It is also the case that rebounds generally differ according to context and type of rebound, and assessing the degree of rebound also depends on the methodological assumptions used when studying them.Direct rebounds are estimated to range generally in the vicinity of 10-30% (Sorrell, 2009: 33), meaning that typically 10-30% of the expected environmental benefits of efficiency gains are lost to increased consumption of the same resource. In some circumstances, direct rebounds can be 75% or higher (Chakravarty et al, 2013). Indirect rebounds are somewhat harder to measure, but are generally thought to be higher than direct rebounds, and estimates of macro-economic rebound range from 15%-350% (Dimitropoulos, 2007). The huge range here again points to differences in methodological assumptions. Without entering into the intricacies of the complex empirical and theoretical debates, it is fair to say that despite the uncertainties, there is broad

agreement that rebound effects exist and that they are significant. The benefits of technology are almost always less than presumed, and in fact, at times efficiency improvements can lead to more, not less, resources being consumed overall.

What seems to be far less widely appreciated, however, is that when efficiency gains occur within a paradigm of growth economics, there is little to no chance of absolute decoupling occurring (Herring, 2009; Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011; Trainer, 2012). This is partly due to rebound effects, and partly due to the inherent structure of growth economics. It will now be shown that in order to achieve the absolute decoupling required for sustainability, efficiency gains must be governed, not by an imperative to grow, but by an economics of sufficiency.

Tech failsTrainer, 12 (Ted Trainer, Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Futures, Volume 44, Issue 6, August 2012, Pages 590–599, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?” DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.020, jj)

2.1. “ But technical advance will make it all possible ”The common response to the general “limits” claim is that technical advances can solve the problems enabling us to go on living with ever increasing “living standards”. Green agencies can be among the front ranks of those claiming technical solutions already exist and attributing the continuation of the problems to the failure of politicians to implement them. People on the left are similarly inclined to assume that when capitalism has been eliminated “everyone can have a Mercedes.”However it is easily shown that the overshoot is far too great for any plausible technical advances to be able to reduce the problems to tolerable proportions. Perhaps the best known “technical fix” optimist, Amory Lovins, claims that we could at least double global output while halving the resource and environmental impacts, i.e., we could achieve a “Factor Four” reduction [8]. But it is easily shown that this would be nowhere near sufficient to solve the problems.Let us assume that present global resource and ecological impacts must be halved (although much more than that is needed). It has been explained above that if we in rich countries average 3% growth, and 10 billion rose to the living standards we would then have by 2050, total world output would be about 20 times as great as it is today. It is not remotely plausible that technical advance will make it possible to multiply total world economic output by 20 while halving impacts, i.e., enable a Factor 40 reduction?The most powerful yet unexamined tech-fix assumption is that renewable energy sources can be substituted for fossil fuels, thereby enabling abundant energy affluence while eliminating the greenhouse and other problems. A case against this faith is detailed in Trainer [9]. (For an updated summary see Trainer [10].) To indicate its strength consider the following few figures re biomass sources of liquid fuel.

We will probably be able to derive 7 tonnes of biomass per ha from very large scale production, and 7 GJ of ethanol per tonne of biomass. Thus it would take 2.6 ha to produce the 128 GJ each Australian uses each year as liquid fuel, i.e., oil plus gas. If 10 billion people were to live as we do now we would need 26 billion ha of forest…on a planet that has only 13 billion ha of land. Trainer [9] presents a detailed numerical derivation concluding that the quantities of renewable energy plant needed if all world energy is to be provided by renewable would require the present ratio of global energy investment to GDP to be multiplied by at least 10.This does not mean we should forget about renewables. They are the sources we should be moving to full dependence on as soon as possible. But they cannot fuel a consumer society for all. They would have to be part of The Simpler Way (discussed below).

Tech fails—their authors are biasedRobert Jensen, professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, 9/1/10, “A World In Collapse?”, http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_world_in_collapse/,

I think not only leftists, but people in general, avoid these realities because reality is so grim. It seems overwhelming to most people, for good reason. So, rather than confront it, people find modes of evasion . One is to deny there’s a reason to worry , which is common throughout the culture. The most common evasive strategy I hear from people on the left is “technological fundamentalism”—the idea that because we want high-energy/high-tech solutions that will allow us to live in the style to which so many of us have become accustomed, those solutions will be found. That kind of magical thinking is appealing but unrealistic, for two reasons. First, while the human discoveries of the past few centuries are impressive, they have not been on the scale required to correct the course we’re on; we’ve created problems that have grown beyond our capacity to understand and manage. Second, those discoveries were subsidized by fossil-fuel energy that won’t be around much longer, which dramatically limits what we will be able to accomplish through energy-intensive advanced technology. As many people have pointed out, technology is not energy; you don’t replace energy with technology. Technology can make some processes more energy-efficient, but it can’t create energy out of thin air.

A2: Reforms SolveReforms and tinkering can’t solve—complete dedev is key—anything less is rearranging deck chairs on the titanicTrainer, 12 (Ted Trainer, Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Futures, Volume 44, Issue 6, August 2012, Pages 590–599, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?” DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.020, jj)

The point of the foregoing sketch has been to make clear the magnitude, nature and cause of the global predicament. These do not seem to be well understood even among environmental agencies and activists. Because the amounts of producing and consuming going on in the world are already many times beyond levels that might be sustainable, the goal must be not just to establish a steady state economy, but to get to an economy in which production, consumption, investment, trade and GDP are small fractions of their present quantities. Secondly it is clear that the causes of the predicament lie in some of the fundamental structures and commitments of consumer-capitalist society. Such a society cannot be fixed; it must be largely scrapped if the many serious problems they cause are to be solved.4.2. Implications for the form a satisfactory society must takeIf the foregoing argument is sound then it follows that what is required is far greater social change than Western society has undergone in several hundred years. The first implication to be considered below is that the changes associated with de-growth will permeate just about the whole of society, i.e., they will require the scrapping or remaking of many central institutions and systems. The second implication is to do with the general form that a satisfactory society must take. It will be argued the crucial general principles follow logically and indisputably from the foregoing diagnosis of our situation.4.3. Growth is integral to the systemIt is a mistake to think of getting rid of growth as a kind of component replacement task, as if the growth element in this society can be taken out and a non-growth element put in its place. Growth is integral to the system. Most of the system's basic structures and mechanism are driven by growth and cannot operate without it. Growth is not like a faulty air conditioning unit in a house, which can be removed leaving the rest of the house to function more or less the way it did before. Consider the following organic connections, integration and far-reaching implications.•If there is to be no growth then there can be no interest payments. If more has to be paid back than was lent or invested, then the total amount of capital to invest will inevitably grow over time. The present economy literally runs on interest payments of one form or another. An economy without interest payments would have to have totally different ways of carrying out many processes.•Therefore almost the entire finance industry has to be scrapped, and replaced by arrangements whereby money is made available, lent, invested etc., without increasing the wealth of the lender. That is incomprehensible to most current economists, politicians and ordinary people.•Among related problems is how to provide for old age, when this cannot be done via superannuation schemes relying on returns on investment?•The present economy is literally driven by the quest to get richer; this motive is what gets options searched for, risks taken, construction and development underway, etc. The most obvious alternative is for these actions to be motivated by a collective effort to work out what society needs, and organise to produce and develop those things. However this involves an utterly different world view and driving mechanism. We would have to find another way to ensure innovation, entrepreneurial initiative and risk taking when people cannot look forward to getting richer from their efforts. (This is not necessarily a difficult problem; see [2], and the Parecon proposals of Albert [11].)•In a zero growth economy there can be no concept of profit. The income from transactions would in general have to equal the costs, or again wealth would accumulate. Thus there would have to be

“subsistence” economies; i.e., systems in which people come to the “market place” with goods and services of a certain “value” and leave with other goods and services of the same “value”. “Markets” would be for exchange and distribution, not for making, accumulating, money over time.•The problem of inequality would become acute and would demand attention. It could no longer be defused by the assumption that “the rising tide will lift all boats”. In the present economy growth “legitimises” inequality and defuses the problem. Extreme inequality is not a major source of discontent because it can be said that economic growth is raising everyone's “living standards”.•If there is to be no growth there can be no role for the market mechanism. Many who oppose growth do not seem to realise this. The market is about maximising; i.e., people go into the market to make as much money as possible. In as zero-growth economy the hidden hand which adjusts supply, demand and price in a market economy can no perform those functions because that hand can only seek outcomes which increase wealth. In other words there is an inseparable relation between growth, the market system and the accumulation imperative that defines capitalism. If we must cease growth we must scrap the market system.•The above changes could not be made unless there was also a profound cultural change, involving nothing less than the complete abandonment of any concern with gain. For more than two hundred years Western society has been focused on the quest to get richer, to accumulate wealth and property. This is what drives all economic activity, including the innovation and developmental firms undertake, and the behaviour of individuals and firms in the market, and it is the supreme principle of national policy.But the logically inescapable point here is that in a zero-growth economy there could be no place whatsoever for this psychological motive or economic process. People would have to be concerned to produce and acquire only that stable quantity of goods and services that is sufficient for a satisfactory quality of life, and to seek no increase whatsoever in savings, wealth, possessions etc. It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this cultural transition from the mentality that is typical in consumer society and that has been dominant in Western culture for a long time.The argument to this point has been that these are among the huge and easily overlooked implications of de-growth, because growth is not an isolated element that can be dealt with without remaking the rest of society. It is not that this society has a growth economy; it is that this is a growth society.If this diagnosis of the situation is valid, our task is far more daunting than most green and left people imagine. Most greens seem to be seeking only to reform a system that would still deliver affluent living standards and economic growth via market forces. Many on the left at least realise that radical system change is required, but the left has a strong tendency to think that the changes do not need to go beyond getting rid of capitalist control. It is assumed that then the same old industrialised and centralised systems can be run in much the same way but distributing the product more equitably and enabling high material living standards for all. The above account of our situation rules out such thinking. (For a detailed discussion of these themes see Trainer [2].)

Policymakers won’t make necessary adjustments—threatens extinctionRanders, 12 (JORGEN RANDERS is a Professor at BI Norwegian Business School. He is a co-author of The Limits to Growth and its two sequels, Foreign Affairs, 91.5 (Sep/Oct 2012): 163-175, “Is Growth Good? Resources, Development, and the Future of the Planet/Lomborg Replies” accessed online via ProQuest, jj)

The fundamental message of The Limits to Growth was that the world is small, and that if we want to live well and long on a small planet, we need to limit our ecological footprint. The sad fact is that despite the study's warnings, humans are already overwhelming the earth's carrying capacity. Today, humans emit twice as much greenhouse gases per year as the world's oceans and forests can absorb. This so-called overshoot cannot last . If human society does not reduce the size of its footprint, the ecological systems that underpin its well-being will collapse. The world must now either accept long-term chaos for the sake of short-term comforts or make short-term sacrifices for

the sake of long-term comforts. Unfortunately, around the world and particularly in market democracies, decision-makers too often disregard long-term consequences.The Limits to Growth was supposed to help humanity make wiser policy choices. It warned that it was necessary to take action before distant problems became immediate crises and to spend on solutions while the sailing was still smooth. But the world's elites feared that such a change in the status quo would end both economic growth and their own privileged positions. And so the critics of The Limits to Growth instead tried to deny the problems it addressed and attacked the messenger.Rather than joining in the critical effort to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions, Lomborg revives a number of straw men and inaccurate claims about what The Limits to Growth said. The study did not predict that oil and other resources would run out before 2000. It did not assume that population and GDP would grow exponentially; their growth rates vary and were computed as an outcome of other drivers in the model. Nor did The Limits to Growth state that air pollution could or would kill humanity. Rather, it tried to estimate how strong the effect of persistent long-term pollutants would be on human health and food production. In other words, the study did not simply forecast the end of the world as we know it; it encouraged a wise human response to create a sustainable world.Lomborg's assessment of the present state of affairs is even more troubling. He sees a world that is well on its way toward solving its environmental crisis and cites the progress that it has made in curbing air pollution. But by ignoring emissions of carbon dioxide, Lomborg overlooks the single greatest long-term threat to the environment. Emissions of carbon dioxide matter much more than those of shorter-lived pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, since those are washed out of the atmosphere in weeks. Carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years, and emitting it causes lasting damage to the planet's climate.In my recent book and Club of Rome report, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, I argue that emissions of greenhouse gases will cause the world's temperature to rise to two degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times by 2052. In the following decades, the world will be three degrees Celsius warmer and probably warm enough to trigger a further and uncontrollable increase in the global average temperature caused by the gradual melting of the tundra. In short, this future is unpleasantly similar to the "persistent pollution scenario" from The Limits to Growth, with carbon dioxide as the persistent pollutant.The rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be the critical factor that shapes the future of life on earth . These emissions could easily be reduced if humanity decided to take action. But held back by myopic decision-making, humanity will not likely change its behavior. In modern, democratic market economies, investments mainly flow to what is profitable, not to what is needed. And regulators, who could in principle consider both economic growth and larger social needs, do not receive the necessary political mandates from shortsighted voters who want low taxes and cheap prices. Society can address the environment's problems only if it regains some control over the flow of investments.

A2: Resources InfiniteTheir args only account for resource sustainability---growth’s unsustainable because of waste byproducts of resource use---makes collapse of the growth economy structurally inevitable John Harte 12, Professor of Ecosystem Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, September/October 2012, “Alarmism is Justified,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 5, p. 169-175

In his essay, Bjørn Lomborg begins by criticizing the notion that the primary constraint on economic growth is the finiteness of resources, as if that remains the belief of the scientific community. Environmental scientists have long recognized, however, that the main limit to growth is not running out of resources but rather

running out of space for the byproducts of that growth . Humans are filling the world's atmosphere with greenhouse gases , tainting its aquifer and surface water with deadly pollutants , eroding its soils , and allowing damaging toxics to build up in human bodies.Obsessed with the numerical accuracy of projections made decades ago in The Limits to Growth, Lomborg ignores the importance of that study's qualitative insights, still valid today, concerning the interconnections between humanity and the natural world. The book illustrated

the many ways in which increases in the human population and consumption levels undermine the sustainability of human society , including through pollution, the depletion of both renewable and nonrenewable resources, and industrial production. Lomborg also ignores some of the study's accurate quantitative insights: recent analyses by scientists show that The Limits to Growth was eerily correct in at least some of its most important projections. In a reexamination of the study, the ecologists Charles Hall and John Day showed that if a timeline were added to the book's predictions with 2000 at the halfway point, "then the model results are almost exactly on course some 35 years later in 2008."The Limits to Growth countered the blissful ignorance of many economists and business magnates who wanted to believe in the convenient pipe dream of unlimited growth, denying the finiteness of the natural environment. Many policymakers did understand the value of the study, however, and tried to inculcate its basic concepts into our civilization, but without success. The scientific community thus still has educational work to do, and finishing it is essential to securing a future for our civilization.WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYSLomberg promotes numerous misconceptions in his essay. Bemoaning The Limits to Growth's results as neither "simple nor easy to understand," Lomborg fails to grasp what many reputable scientists and policymakers have long known: that predicting the details of complex phenomena is difficult. In that light, The Limits to Growth was just a first stab at analyzing the elaborate dynamics that cause continued economic growth to threaten the sustain-ability of human society.Lomborg further displays scientific ignorance when he talks about pesticides. His estimate of 20 U.S. deaths annually from pesticides ignores both the ecological harm they cause and the human health problems, including cancer, hormone disruption, and neurological effects, associated with pesticide exposure. His argument that DDT is a cheap, effective solution to malaria overlooks the ability of mosquitoes, like other pests, to evolve resistance. Pesticides can be valuable tools when used as scalpels, but when they are used as bludgeons, the evolution of resistance often undoes their efficacy. This is why many epidemiologists fear that society is regressing from the happy era of working antibiotics.

Lomborg also perpetuates the denial of the multiple ways in which civilization is underpinned by a healthy environment . Yes, we can continue to expand into previously untapped arable land , but only at the cost of undermining the giant planetary ecosystems that assure humanity will have clean air, clean water, and a sustainable and benign climate. Yes, we can forgo recycling and grow plantations for paper, but only at the expense of biodiversity. Indeed, as increasing population growth and overconsumption degrade the environment, none of the economic growth that Lomborg hopes for will be possible . Moreover, the capacity of society and its institutions to maintain , let alone improve, the quality of life -- a capacity that Lomborg takes for granted -- will be at risk.

Resources already peaking, delaying collapse causes cataclysmHeinberg 6/16/14 (Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of ten books, including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth, 16 June, 2014, Counter Currents, “Want To Change The World? Read This First” http://www.countercurrents.org/heinberg160614.htm, jj)

Now, however, our still-new infrastructural regime based on fossil fuels is already showing signs of winding down. There are two main reasons. One is climate change: carbon dioxide, produced in the

burning of fossil fuels, is creating a greenhouse effect that is warming the planet. The consequences will be somewhere between severe and cataclysmic . If we continue burning fossil fuels, we’re more likely to see a cataclysmic result, which could make continuation of industrial agriculture, and perhaps civilization itself, problematic. We do have the option to dramatically curtail fossil fuel consumption in order to avert catastrophic climate change. Either way, however, our current infrastructure will be a casualty. The second big reason our fossil fuel-based infrastructure is endangered has to do with depletion. We’re not running out of coal, oil, or natural gas in the absolute sense, but we have extracted these non-renewable resources using the best-first, or low-hanging fruit, principle. With oil, the most strategically important of the fossil fuels (because of its centrality to transportation systems), we have already reached the point of diminishing returns. Compared to a decade ago, the global petroleum industry has more than doubled its rate of investment in exploration and production, while actual rates of global crude oil production have flat-lined. Costs of production are rising, and drillers are targeting geological formations that were formerly considered too problematic to bother with. With oil, the fate of the world’s economy appears to hang on the outcome of a race between technology and depletion: while industry spokespeople and media pundits tend to cheer new technology such as hydraulic fracturing, persistently high oil prices and soaring production costs suggest that depletion is in fact pulling ahead. Similar diminishing-returns limits with coal and natural gas production will likely be encountered within the next decade, both in the US and the world as a whole. At a bare minimum, climate change and fossil fuel depletion will force society to change to different energy sources, giving up reliance on energy-dense and controllable coal, oil, and gas in favor of more diffuse and intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar. This in itself is likely to have enormous societal implications. While electric passenger cars running on power supplied by wind turbines and solar panels are feasible, electric airliners, container ships, and 18-wheel trucks are not. Distributed electricity generation from renewables, together with a decline in global shipping and air transport, may favor less globalized and more localized patterns of economic and political organization. However, we must also consider the strong likelihood that our looming, inevitable shift away from fossil fuels will entail a substantial reduction in the amount of useful energy available to society. Wind and sunlight are abundant and free, but the technology used to capture energy from these ambient sources is made from nonrenewable minerals and metals. The mining, manufacturing, and transport activities necessary for the production and installation of wind turbines and solar panels currently require oil. It may theoretically be possible to replace oil with electricity from renewables in at least some of these processes, but for the foreseeable future wind and solar technologies can best be thought of as fossil fuel extenders. Nuclear power, with its unbreakable reliance on mining and transport, is likewise a fossil fuel extender—but a far more dangerous one, given unsolved problems with accidents, nuclear proliferation, and waste storage. When the construction and decommissioning of power plants, and the mining and processing of uranium are all taken into account, nuclear power also offers a relatively low energy return on the energy invested (EROEI) in producing it. Relatively low energy returns-on-investment from both nuclear and renewable energy sources may themselves result in societal change. The EROEI of fossil fuels was extremely high in comparison with that of energy sources previously available. This was a major factor in reducing the need for agricultural field labor, which in turn drove urbanization and the growth of the middle class. Some renewable sources of energy offer a better EROEI than firewood or agricultural crops, but none can compare with coal, oil, and gas in their heyday. This suggests that the social consequences of the end of cheap fossil energy may include a partial re-ruralization of society and a shrinking of the middle class (the latter

process is already beginning in the United States). With less useful energy available, the global economy will fail to grow, and will likely enter a sustained period of contraction . Increased energy efficiency may cushion the impact but cannot avert it. With economies no longer growing, our current globally dominant neoliberal political-economic ideology may increasingly be called into question and eventually overthrown. While energy is key to society’s infrastructure, other factors require consideration as well. Fossil fuels are depleting, but so are a host of additional important resources, including metals, minerals, topsoil, and water. So far, we have made up for depletion in these cases by investing more energy in mining lower grade ores, by replacing soil nutrients with commercial fertilizers (many made from fossil fuels), and by transporting water, food, and other goods from places of local abundance to regions in which those materials are scarce. This strategy has increased the human carrying capacity of our planet, but it is a strategy that may not work much longer as energy itself becomes scarcer. Further alterations in the links between the environment and society will arise from climate change. Even assuming that nations undertake dramatic reductions in carbon emissions soon, cumulative past emissions virtually guarantee continued and increasing impacts that will include rising sea levels and worsening droughts and floods. By mid-century, hundreds of millions of climate refugees may be in search of secure habitat. There are optimistic ways of viewing the future, based on assumptions that fossil fuels are in fact abundant and will last another

century or more, that new nuclear power technologies will be more viable than current ones, that renewable energy sources can be scaled up quickly, and that likely impacts of climate change have been overestimated. Even if one or more of these assumptions turns out to be correct, however, the evidence of declining returns on energy and financial investments in oil extraction cannot be disregarded. An infrastructure shift is underway. Considering oil’s role in industrial agriculture, this shift will undoubtedly and profoundly impact our food system—and food (which is our most basic energy source, from a biological perspective) is at the core of every society’s infrastructure. Whether or not optimistic assumptions are valid, we probably face an infrastructural transformation at least as significant as the Industrial Revolution. But the error bars on energy supplies and climate sensitivity include more pessimistic

possibilities. Once useful fossil energy supply rates begin to falter, this could trigger an unwinding of the global financial system as well as international conflict . It is also possible that the relationship between carbon emissions and atmospheric temperatures is non-linear, with Earth’s climate system subject to self-reinforcing feedbacks that could result in a massive die-off of species, our own included. Choose your assumptions—optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between. In any case, this is a big deal.

Tech can’t change resource limitationsGreer 6/16/ 10 (John Michael Greer is a certified Master Conserver, an organic gardener, a scholar of ecological history, an internationally renowned blogger, and an award-winning Peak Oil author. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, “Waiting for the Millennium, Part Two: The Limits of Magic,” http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/waiting-for-millennium_16.html)

That’s of crucial importance just now, because the thing that most people in the industrial world are going to want most in the very near future is something that neither a revitalization movement nor anything else can do. We are passing from an age of unparalleled abundance to an age of scarcity , economic contraction, and environmental payback . As the reality of peak oil goes mainstream and the end of abundance becomes impossible to ignore, most people in the industrial world will begin to flail about with rising desperation for anything that will bring the age of abundance back. Even those who insist they despise that age and everything it stands for have in many cases already shown an eagerness to cling to as many of its benefits as they themselves find appealing. The difficulty, of course, is that the end of the age of abundance isn’t happening because of changes in consciousness; it’s happening because of the laws of physics. The abundance we’ve all grown up thinking as normal was there only because a handful of nations burned their way through the Earth’s store of fossil carbon at breakneck speed. Most of the fossil fuel reserves that can be gotten cheaply and quickly have already been extracted and burnt; the dregs that remain – high-sulfur oil, tar sands, brown coal, and the like – yield less energy after what’s needed to extract them is taken into account, and impose steep ecological costs as well ; renewables and other alternative energy resources have problems of their own, and have proved unable to take up more than a small fraction of the slack. These limitations are not subject to change, or even to negotiation ; they define a predicament that we will all have to live with, one way or another, for a very long time to come.

Innovation already peaked – it’s rate will decline even as population increasesAdler ‘5 (Robert, science writer and author @ New Scientist, “Entering a dark age of innovation, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616)

But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead. His study will be published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. It's an unfashionable view. Most futurologists say technology is developing at exponential rates. Moore's law, for example, foresaw chip densities (for which read speed and memory capacity) doubling every 18 months. And the chip makers have lived up to its predictions. Building on this, the less well-known Kurzweil's law says that these faster, smarter chips are leading to even faster growth in the power of computers. Developments in genome sequencing and nanoscale machinery are racing ahead too, and internet connectivity and telecommunications bandwith are growing even faster than computer power, catalysing still further waves of innovation. But Huebner is confident of his facts. He has long been struck by the fact that promised advances were not appearing as quickly as predicted. "I wondered if there was a reason for this," he says. "Perhaps there is a limit to what technology can achieve." In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population , using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him. Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873

and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915 . The period between 1873 and 1915 was certainly an innovative one. For instance, it included the major patent-producing years of America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, including the incandescent bulb, electricity generation and distribution grids, movie cameras and the phonograph. Medieval future Huebner draws some stark lessons from his analysis. The global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology", Huebner says. Extrapolating Huebner's global innovation curve just two decades into the future, the innovation rate plummets to medieval levels . "We are approaching the 'dark ages point', when the rate of innovation is the same as it was during the Dark Ages," Huebner says. "We'll reach that in 2024."

A2: Population Growth DecreasingIrrelevant Sulston, 12 (Sir John Edward Sulston FRS is a British biologist. He is a joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. As of 2012 he is Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, AUGUST 30, 2012, Foreign Affairs, “Growth, Interrupted” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138089/john-sulston/growth-interrupted, jj)

As Lomborg points out, the global population growth rate has slowed since the late 1960s. But the trend line disguises regional disparities . The least developed countries have the highest fertility rates, and the more developed countries (and increasingly countries in Asia and Latin America) have the lowest. The poorest countries are thus neither experiencing nor benefiting from declining population growth rates . The combination of a rising global population and increasing overall material consumption cannot be sustained on a planet with finite resources . As both have continued to spike, the world has started to experience adverse effects, including climate changes that have reduced crop yields in some areas and growing numbers of species extinctions. Population, moreover, is not only about the sheer amount of people. Changes in age structure, migration, and urbanization present challenges to human health, well-being, and the environment. And those are driven not only by economic development but also social, cultural, and environmental factors. Countries with different cultures and socioeconomic statuses have transitioned from high to low birth and death rates at different speeds. Demographic changes and consumption patterns create several pressing challenges. As Lomborg observes, those living in absolute poverty in the developing world cannot afford the basic resources they need to live. Economic development and increased material consumption among this group are therefore essential. But eliminating poverty means reducing global inequality, which should be achieved through economic expansion only where it is needed, not necessarily through the current model of global economic growth.

EXT – Yes Peak OilTheir evidence doesn’t assume declining energy production – only a mindset shift solveAlexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf2.5. Expensive Oil and other Energy Issues¶ Even if the world never chooses to question the growth paradigm - which seems the most likely scenario - the peaking of crude oil suggests that the era of global growth is coming to an end nevertheless (Heinberg, 2011; Rubin, 2012]. While there is still debate about the exact timing of peak oil, it is now widely accepted that crude oil production, if  ¶ it has not already peaked, will peak sometime in the foreseeable future, and then, after a corrugated plateau, enter terminal decline. Since oil demand is expected to keep on rising, however, the reduction of oil supply will inevitably lead to sharply increasing oil prices (Hirsch et al, 2010). This dynamic is already well underway, with the price of oil multiplying several times during the last decade or so. There are of course vast reserves of non-conventional oil still available in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela, and in the shale oil deposits in the United States and elsewhere, but these non-conventional reserves have a far lower energy return on investment (Murphy and Hall, 2011), making them much more expensive and slower to produce. Accordingly, the issue is not that human beings will ever run out of oil; the issue is that we have already run out of cheap oil. ¶ This is hugely significant because oil is not just another commodity - it is the lifeblood of industrial civilization. This is evidenced by the fact that the world currently consumes around 90 million barrels every day (1EA, 2010a). When the costs of oil increase significantly, this adds extra costs to transport, mechanized labor, plastics, and industrial food production, among many other things, and this pricing dynamic sucks discretionary expenditure and investment away from the rest of the economy, causing debt defaults, economic stagnation, recessions, or even longer-term depressions. That seems to be what we are seeing around the world today, with the risk of worse things to come (Tverberg, 2012a).¶ Moreover, as Ted Trainer (2012b) and others have argued, renewable energy, even if it were embraced whole-heartedly and on a global scale, would never be able to sustain the expansion of complex, energy-intensive consumer societies, especially with the global population growing. If this diagnosis is basically correct, it provides further grounds for thinking that the growth paradigm has no future. I hasten to add that this is not an argument against renewable energy. The climate science is very clear that we must abandon fossil fuels as far as possible and as soon as possible (e.g. Hansen et al, 2008). But the limitations of renewable energy do suggest that we cannot respond to climate change by embracing renewables and have a growth-based economy. ¶ Furthermore, nuclear energy's potential to provide the energy required to maintain growth economies is fiercely debated. What is beyond debate, however, is that nuclear energy also has a long list of limitations, time lags, dangers, and huge financial costs, and ever since Fukushima the prospects of a nuclear renaissance have looked very slim indeed. At best nuclear energy would only assist in decarbonizing the economy to some extent, but it would not solve the myriad other ecological and social problems inherent to the growth paradigm, and could well exacerbate some of them. Accordingly, nuclear provides no escape from the limits to growth. What is needed is a transition to renewable energy systems, but this implies a civilization with much lower social complexity, and with very different structures and non-affluent lifestyles. We cannot run an industrial civilization on renewables, and an industrial civilization powered by nuclear (if that is even feasible) remains unsustainable due its underlying growth imperative.¶ Whether the transition beyond growth occurs voluntarily or is imposed by force of biophysical limits remains to be seen. It scarcely needs remarking that a planned, voluntary transition would be the desired path (see Alexander, 2012b).

Peak oil is real – most recent studies proveHines 12 [“Climate change policy: Oil's tipping point has passed”, Sandra, University of Washington, activist, social worker, and oil prospector, February 1, 2012]

That’s the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels. “Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change,” says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. The “tipping point” for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says Murray, who compared world crude oil production with world prices going back to 1998. Before 2005, supply of regular crude oil was elastic and increased in response to price increases. Since then, production appears to have hit a wall at 75 million barrels per day in spite of price increases of 15 percent each year. “As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand,” the co-authors wrote. “Others have remarked on this step change in the economies of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged more firmly in the minds of policy makers.” J Murray, U of Washington/D King, U of Oxford/Nature Source: US Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook 2011 For those who argue that oil reserves have been increasing, that more crude oil will be available in the future, the co-authors wrote: “The true volume of global proved reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and appear to be exaggerated. More importantly, reserves often take 6 - 10 years to drill and develop before they become part of the supply, by which time older fields have become depleted.” Production at oil fields around the world is declining between 4.5 percent and 6.7 percent per year, they wrote. “For the economy, it’s production that matters, not how much oil might be in the ground,” Murray says. In the U.S., for example, production as a percentage of total reserves went from 9 percent to 6 percent in the last 30 years. “We’ve already gotten the easy oil, the oil that can be produced cheaply,” he says. “It used to be we’d drill a well and the oil would flow out, now we have to go through all these complicated and expensive procedures to produce the oil.”

A2: Tar Sands/ShaleThose fail – multiple reasonsHines 12 [“Climate change policy: Oil's tipping point has passed”, Sandra, University of Washington, activist, social worker, and oil prospector, February 1, 2012]

The same is true of alternative sources such as tar sands or “fracking” for shale gas, Murray says, where supplies may be exaggerated and production is expensive. Take the promise of shale gas and oil: A New York Times investigative piece last June reported that “the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells.” Production at shale gas wells can drop 60 to 90 percent in the first year of operation, according to a world expert on shale gas who was one of the sources for the commentary piece. Murray and King built their commentary using data and information from more than 15 international and U.S. government reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, reports from groups such as the National Research Council and Brookings Institution and association findings. Stagnant oil supplies and volatile prices take a toll on the world economy. Of the 11 recessions in the U.S. since World War II, ten were preceded by a spike in oil prices, the commentary noted. “Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth,” the co-authors wrote. “If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either.” Calculations from the International Monetary Fund, for example, say that to achieve a 4 percent growth in the global economy in the next five years, oil production must increase about 3 percent a year. “Yet to achieve that will require either an heroic increase in oil production, ... increased efficiency of oil use, more energy-efficient growth or rapid substitution of other fuel sources,” according to the commentary.

Collapse Good / Solvency

2NC FramingEven if collapse is risky, continued growth is more dangerous—we only need to win a small risk of our turnsMeyercord 1 (Ken, The Ethic of Zero Growth, http://www.zerogrowth.org/ZeroGrowth.htm)

Do we need an alternative to growth? Many signs - from ozone depletion through land degradation to declining sperm counts - suggest we do. But a faith in growth is so intrinsic a part of our psyches we would have to be "born again" to abandon it. Our political-economic entities and personalities make such an icon of it, the most profound revolution in human history would be necessary to redirect our societies. On the other hand, the unimaginably high stakes in the worst case scenario - the very survival of our species - cry out that, if an error is to be made in choosing between continued growth and an end to growth, we should err on the side of caution. The doomsayers, after all, only have to be right once.

Collapse Good / Works--Worth the riskLewis 2k—prof, U Colorado, Boulder. Ph.D. (Chris, Global Industrial Civilization: The Necessary Collapse, http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/ecology/lewglo.pdf) The First World's failure to modernize and civilize the world should be seen not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. With the increasing recognition of the inability of

development to resolve the economic and political contradictions it creates, whether you call it sustainable or not, peoples and communities will be once

again forced to draw on   their own cultures, histories, religions, and intimate knowledge of their  local  environments   to improve their lives and ensure a "reasonable life" for their children. For most of history, successfully adapting to changing local and regional environments was the fundamental challenge

facing human societies. The only alternative   we now have is to recognize   the very real, imminent collapse of global industrial civilization .Instead of seeing this collapse as a tragedy, and trying to put "Humpty-Dumpty" back together again, we must see it as a real opportunity to solve some of the basic economic, political, and social problems created and exacerbated by the development of global

industrial civilization since the 1600s. Instead of insisting on coordinated global actions,  we should encourage self sufficiency   through the creation of local and regional economies and trading networks (Norgaard 1994). We must help political and economic leaders understand that the more their countries are tied to the global economic system, the more risk there is of serious economic and political collapse. The First World's effort to impose the WTO and globalization on the rest of the world in the 1990s and early 2000s is a last-ditch effort to keep global industrial civilization from unraveling. Who knows, but the recent collapse of the WTO Third Ministerial meeting in Seattle in November 1999, the Jubilee 2000 movement to cancel all Third World debt, and increasing challenges to World Bank and IMF policies might be harbingers of this global collapse. Indeed, we are witnessing the increasing collapse of global industrial civilization. My guess is that

sometime between 2030   and 2050 we will see its final collapse. In the case of the collapse of Mayan civilization, those city-states and regions in Central America that were not as dependent on the central Mayan civilization, economy, and trade were more likely to survive its collapse. Those city-states who were heavily dependent on Mayan hegemony destroyed themselves by fighting bitter wars with other powerful city states to maintain their declining economic and political

dominance (Weatherford 1994). Like the collapse of Mayan and Roman civilizations, the collapse of   global civilization will cause mass death and suffering as a result of the turmoil created by economic and political collapse. The more dependent nations are on the   global economy, the more   economic, political, and social chaos they will experience when it breaks down. In conclusion, the only

solution to the   growing political and economic chaos caused by the collapse   of global industrial civilization  is to encourage   the uncoupling of nations and regions from the global industrial economy. Unfortunately, millions will die in the wars

and economic and political conflicts created by the accelerating collapse of global industrial civilization.But we can be assured that, on the basis of the

past history of the collapse of regional civilizations such as the Mayan and the Roman Empires, barring global nuclear war, human societies   and

civilizations will   continue to exist   and develop  on a smaller ,   regional scale. Yes, such civilizations will be violent , corrupt, and

often cruel, but, in the end, less so than our current   global industrial civilization, which is abusing   the entire planet and threatening the

mass death and suffering of all its peoples and the living, biological fabric of life on Earth. The paradox of global economic development is that although it creates massive wealth and power for First World elites, it also creates massive poverty and suffering for Third World peoples and societies. The failure of global

development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about its collapse. This collapse will cause millions   of peopleto suffer and die

throughout the world, but   it should, paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies. Indeed, the collapse of   global industrial civilization is necessary for   the future, long-term survival   of human beings. Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn a lot from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on Earth. 

And, policy makers will learn from past mistakes and shift towards local solutionsLewis 2k Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization”

The only alternative we now have is to recognize the very real imminent collapse of global industrial civilization . Instead of seeing this collapse as a tragedy, and trying to put "Humpty Dumpty" back together again, we must see it as a real opportunity to solve some of the basic economic, political, and social problems created and exacerbated by the development of global industrial civilization since the 1600s. Instead of insisting on coordinated global actions, we should encourage self- sufficiency t hrough the creation of local and regional economies and trading networks.(Norgaard 1994) We must help political and economic leaders understand that the more their countries are tied to the global economic system, the more risk there is of serious economic and political collapse. The First World’s effort to impose the WTO and globalization on the rest of the world in the 1990s and early 2000s is a last ditch effort to keep global industrial civilization from unraveling. Who knows, the recent collapse of the WTO Third Ministerial meeting in Seattle in November 1999, the Jubilee 2000 movement to cancel all Third World debt, and increasing challenges to World Bank and IMF policies, might be a harbinger of this global collapse. We are witnessing the increasing collapse of global industrial

civilization. My guess is that sometime between 2010 and 2050 we will see its final collapse. In the case of the collapse of Mayan civilization, those city-states and regions in Central America that were not as dependent on the central Mayan civilization, economy, and trade were more likely to survive its collapse. Those city-states who were heavily dependent on Mayan hegemony destroyed themselves by fighting bitter wars with other powerful city-states to maintain their declining economic and political dominance.(Weatherford 1994) Like the collapse of Mayan and Roman civilization, the collapse of global civilization will cause massdeath and suffering as a result of the turmoil created by economic and political collapse. The more dependent nations are on the global economy, the more economic, political, and social chaos they will experience when it breaks down. Once global industrial civilization collapses, humanity won't have the material, biological, and energy and human resources to rebuild it. This must be the real lesson that nations and polities learn from this global collapse. If they try to rebuild unsustainable regional o r even international economies, it will only cause more suffering and mass- death. In conclusion, the only solution to the growing political and economic chaos caused by the collapse of global industrial civilization is to encourage the uncoupling of nations and regions from the global industrial economy. Efforts to integrate Third World countries into this global economy through sustainable development programs such as Agenda 21 will only further undermine the global economy and industrial civilization. Globalization must end, or it will bring down the global industrial civilization that spawned it. Unfortunately, millions will die in the wars and economic and political conflicts created by the accelerating collapse of global industrial civilization. But we can be assured, on the basis of the past history of the collapse of regional civilizations such as the Mayan and the Roman empires, that, barring global nuclear war, human societies and civilizations will continue to exist and develop on a smalle r , regional scale. Yes, such civilizations will be violent, corrupt, and often cruel, but, in the end, less so than our current global industrial civilization, which is abusing the entire planet and threatening the mass-death and suffering of all its peoples and the living, biological fabric of life on Earth. The paradox of global economic development is that although it creates massive wealth and power for modern elites, it also creates massive poverty and suffering for underdeveloped peoples and societies. The failure of global development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about its collapse. This collapse will cause millions of people to suffer and die throughout the world, but it should, paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies. The collapse of global civilization is necessary for the future, long-term survival of human beings. Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn much from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on earth.

Collapse of the economy now spurs a transition to sustainable societiesLewis 98 (Chris H, PhD in American Studies, Instructor in American Studies @ University of Colorado, Former Visiting Professor of History @ Indiana University, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Modern Industrial Civilization," The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, Published by Syracuse University Press, ISBN 0815627440, p. 45-46)

I will argue that we are witnessing the collapse of global industrial civilization . Driven by individualism, materialism, and the endless pursuit of wealth and power, the modern industrialized world’s efforts to modernize and integrate the world politically, economically , and culturally since World War II are only accelerating this global collapse . In the late-twentieth century, global development leaves 80 percent of the world’s population outside the industrialized nations’ progress and affluence (Wallimann 1994). When the modern industrialized world collapses, people in the underdeveloped world will continue their daily struggle for dignity and survival at the margins of a moribund global industrial civilization. With the collapse of the modern world, smaller, autonomous, local and regional civilizations , cultures, and polities will emerge . We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global civilization, modern peoples will not have the material resources , biological capital, and energy to reestablish global civilization. Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their [end page 44] environments . For

the societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.

Yes Mindset ShiftMindset shift will occur – 4 reasonsAlexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf5. THE AMBIGUOUS CHARGE OF UTOPIANISM¶ 'This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.' - R.W. Emerson¶ With the notion of a sufficiency economy now broadly sketched out, and some issues about the transition raised for consideration, it may be worthwhile stepping back from the analysis to consider the vision as a whole. This should provide a new perspective and perhaps raise new issues that deserve attention. One objection that can be easily anticipated is that the notion of a sufficiency economy, as I have described it, is fundamentally utopian in its outlook, and in this section I will respond to this objection briefly.¶ 4.1. Four Responses¶ The charge of utopianism can be dealt with in at least the following four ways. First , if the charge is meant to imply that the goal of economic sufficiency, as opposed to economic growth, is unrealistic, then there is a sense in which that charge must be ¶ 24¶ turned on its head. It is limitless growth on a finite planet that is unrealistic. After all, what could be more utopian, in the pejorative sense, than the neoclassical growth model which takes as 'given' certain non-physical parameters (e.g. market price, preferences, technology, wealth distribution, etc.) but on that basis purports to be independent of the biophysical laws of nature? Recognizing the biophysical (and other] limits to growth may indeed require a radical new approach to how economies are structured, as I have argued it does; but this would be in recognition of certain realities, not in any attempt to transcend them.  ¶ In a second sense, however, the charge of utopianism should be embraced, not as an indictment, but as a defense. ‘Without the hypothesis that a different world is possible/ Genevieve Decrop has recently stated, 'there can be no politics, but only the administrative management of men [sic] and things' [as quoted in Latouche, 2009: 32). In this sense, the sufficiency economy is indeed a utopian vision, arising out of a defiant faith that a different world is possible. But as Serge Latouche [2009: 32) has aptly explained with respect to the degrowth movement, ‘Far from representing a flight of fancy, it is an attempt to explore the objective possibility of its implementation/ With a nod to Latouche, the sufficiency economy described above should be understood in similar terms. Imagining the alternative is the first step toward its realization. ¶ But there is a third sense in which the sufficiency economy is not utopian at all - not if 'utopia' refers to that which does not and could never exist. Granted, there is no economy that resembles closely the one described above, which is of a growth economy that has gone through the transition to sufficiency. Nevertheless, almost all the features of the sufficiency economy do find reflection in existing economies in the developed world [and elsewhere). Indeed, real-world examples of sufficiency in practice are everywhere bubbling beneath the surface, threatening to expand into the mainstream; some are in the process of doing so, albeit slowly. For example, there are nascent movements based on notions such as voluntary simplicity, eco-villages, permaculture, transition towns, slow food, degrowth, steady-state economics, etc., all of which can be understood to be exemplifying the practice of sufficiency in disparate but overlapping ways. What this indicates is that a sufficiency economy is not at all a utopian fantasy, but rather an embryonic, fragmented reality struggling away beneath the existing economy, trying to replace that economy with something fundamentally different It is easy to forget that social movements constantly surprise us, often moving from tiny subcultures to the cultural mainstream with startling speed. Rather than despair, we should proceed on the assumption that more surprises could still lie in store of us.  ¶ Finally , some might claim that the sufficiency economy is utopian - again, in the pejorative sense - for the reason that it posits a transformation of economy that relies on a cultural embrace of low-

consumption lifestyles of sufficiency, or rather lifestyles of 'voluntary simplicity,' as the phrase is more widely known. Human beings are essentially consumers with insatiable material desires, the objection might run, and the sufficiency economy will never voluntarily emerge because voluntary simplicity asks people to act against their personal interests. Any response to this point should begin with the social critique of consumer culture, which would be based on the large and robust body of hedonics research ratifying what many people, perhaps, know intuitively, namely, that 'beyond a certain threshold, more material wealth is a poor substitute for community cohesion, healthy relationships, a sense of purpose, connection with nature, and other dimensions of human happiness' (Talberth, 2008: 21j. Since the evidence suggests that many people in affluent societies are above such a 'threshold/ there are strong grounds for thinking that reducing consumption in such cases would actually increase personal happiness. Relying on the expansion of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement would be more problematic, of course, if voluntary simplicity were a living strategy founded solely upon altruism, or if it implied sacrificing personal well-being for the sake of ecological health. But plainly its foundations are less demanding. Although many in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement are indeed motivated by humanitarian and ecological concerns, ¶ the most promising sign for the expansion of the movement lies in the fact that almost all those who practise simplicity report being happier in their lifestyle choice, despite a voluntary reduction or restraint in income and consumption (Alexander and Ussher, 2012]. A utopian theory of economic transformation seems much less utopian, I would suggest - as would any theory of social reorganisation - when it is based upon a living strategy that is demonstrably in people's best interests, including their own happiness.¶ For all these reasons, 1 contend that the sufficiency economy is not utopian in any problematic sense. The prospects of its imminent realization, I admit, seem slim; and certainly it will depend on human beings working relatively well together as the challenges ahead intensify. But human beings share a universal desire to work toward a better life, and if that energy can be harnessed and the transition wisely negotiated, then the sufficiency economy will be quite achievable. Seemingly impossible things have happened before.

Mindset shift arguments miss the boat – if growth is unsustainable, it is try or die for de-developmentTrainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, “A Limits to Growth Critique of the Radical Left”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LimitsToGrowthCritiqueofRadicalLeftSimplicityInstitute.pdfUtopian dreaming? The Simpler Way vision is obviously easily criticized for being unrealistic and assuming more than humans are capable of. This misses the point. If the general analysis of the unsustainability and irremediable injustice of consumer-capitalist society sketched above is correct then The Simpler Way has to be the ultimate goal, whether or not the chances of ¶ achieving it seem remote. Yes the kind of citizen it would require might seem to be quite different to most people in consumer-capitalist society, but that just defines the task for revolutionaries. The kinds of things the Spanish anarchists did cannot be done unless there are many good cooperative, conscientious, responsible citizens. We either enable the required vision and values, or we will not make it through the coming time of troubles.

Transition will be hard but the consumption mindset is already shiftingTrainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, Energy Policy journal, “Some inconvenient theses”, http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Energy%20Policy-Trainer-some%20inconvenient%20theses.pdf

This vision retains a role for centralised states (much reduced), for (some) large enterprises such as steel works and railways systems, some but very little international trade, an increased investment in socially desirable high-tech R and D, and for private farms and firms, mostly at the micro level of family businesses and community' cooperatives. ¶ It hardly needs to be said that at present the prospects for transition to this way are highly unlikely. However there is rapidly increasing interest in elements within it, evident especially in the Global Eco-village (GEN. 2011) and The Transition Towns Movement (2009).

Yes Movements 2NCMovements against growth nowSpeth 8 — Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school. Former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University . Former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. .Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black JD, Yale. (James Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Gigapedia, 83) The seriousness of looming environmental threats is slowly sinking in, driven largely by the climate issue but also informed by the outpouring of serious books and articles pointing out that various breakdowns and collapses are actually possible. In the right hands, crises and calamities related to environment can generate positive change, as Hurricane Katrina could have. We can also see the beginnings of social change in the efforts of some consumers to downshift and go green, in the anti-corporate-abuse stirrings of some communities, and in the proliferation of initiatives involving new forms of business ownership and management. Polls suggest that the public is distressed by runaway materialism, and there are signs that student activism is reawakening and that faith communities are taking up environmental causes. Religion can help us see that the challenges we face are moral and spiritual and that sin is not strictly individual but is also social and institutional, and it can call us to reflection, repentance, and resistance. And there is growing strength in the worldwide social movement described by Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest. From huge nonprofits to home-based causes, the groups in this movement are emerging as a creative and influential global force. And, of course, there is the hope that springs from today’s young people. We see their commitment in the demand for the greening of our colleges and universities and in the growing student activism and political mobilization. Concerns have been expressed that they are the “quiet generation,” too on-line, but climate threats and social justice issues are now spurring a new, activist youth-led movement for change.

Movement to localization now—economic collapse causes mass transitionTrainer 3 — Senior Lecturer, University of New South Wales (Ted, The Present Scope of the Global Alternative Society Movement, http://ssis2.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D67.The-GASM.html)

Although a minor phenomenon at presen t, it can be confidently predicted that this paradigm shift will accelerate in coming years given the pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it painfully obvious to more and more people that the old values and systems will not provide well for all.

Building new systems. Much more impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative settlements and systems. As Ife says, "At the grassroots level...increasing numbers of people in different countries are experimenting with community -based alternatives, such as local economic systems , community-based education, housing co-operatives...a community-based strategy based on principles of ecology and social justice is already emerging, as a result of the initiative of ordinary people at grass-roots level, who are turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995, p. 99.)

According to Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away from the waste , pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p. 405.) The agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to reinforce local economies and its video Local Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London works to promote local economic development, with a special interest in bujilding local

quality of life indicators and in establishing local currencies. Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative

community initiatives. "Everywhere people are waking up to the realities of their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning to recognise that their economies’ resources and socio-political participations must be regrounded in their local and regional communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures are re-emerging in the midst of the

market system that are spontaneously generated social protections to normatively re-embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities everywhere are on the front lines of what might well be characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for absentee owners vs creating healthy communities that are good places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5 million people now take regular part in a rainbow economy of community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p. 27.) Friberg and Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz., those holding "post materialist" values, and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz and Schwarz discuss the many alternative settlements they visited on a recent world tour. They say that these people "...hope that the tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually supplant the norms of unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in revolution but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is that small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an articulate

and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream." (p. 2.) "They think the empire will eventually disintegrate ...In anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be prepared ." (p. 3.) Living Lightly

people "...can only hope to prevail through their own example and the gradual erosion of the dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high living standards for a high quality of life." (p. 165.) Living

Lightly people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy and want to set up viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

Third world movements exist tooTrainer 2k, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, (Ted, What Should We Do? Build Eco-Villages)

Possibly even more impressive than developments in rich countries are those in the Third World where many have long since realised that conventional development will never solve their problems. (Trainer, 1995a.) There is now a large development literature dealing with this recognition and the attempts to pioneer a "people-centred" development strategy which makes local

resources available to local people to devote directly to meeting their needs via relatively simple systems and standards under their own control. (Trainer, 1995a.) The basic principle is of course not new, owing much to Gandhi, but it can be argued that we are witnessing a surge of interest in it now given the failure of conventional development. "...a new pattern of development is taking place at community and village level in rural areas of he Third World. In the spirit of self-reliance, numerous 'grassroots' groups have decided to take charge of their own development in rural villages throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. (Schneider, 1988, p. xi.) Similar generalisations and cases are given by Galtung, (1980, p. 162), Shiva, et al, (1997), Rist, Rahnema and Esteva, (1992), Holmberg and Timberlake, (1991), Burkey, (1993), Ekins, (1992, pp. 100-108), Chopra, (1989), Lang and Hines, (1993), Ife, (1995, p. 95), Page, (1995), Craig, (1995), Higginbotham, (1995), Goldsmith, (1998), Esteva and Prakash, (1996), Amon, (1994), Korten, (1990), Human Settlements Program, (1994), Rich, (1994),

Pereira and Seabrook, (199,) Marglen, (1998), Elgin and LeDrew, (1997). The magnitude of the movement is suggested by a table Brown presents indicating thousands of grassroots organisations in several countries, e.g., an estimated 12,000 organisations in India 8,000 villages in Sri Lanka , and 100,000 Christian Base Communities in Brazil. (Brown 1989, p. 157.) He describes Indian mobilisation of "...massive work teams to do everything from building road networks to draining malarial ponds...." (p. 156.) Green says "...local communities all over sub-Saharan Africa are forming self-reliance groups to eliminate hunger and save their environments by diversifying cereal, fruit and vegetable crops and building community fields, village granaries, and anti-salination structures. No one knows how many groups there are. In Kenya alone figures of 16,000 to 25,000 groups have been quoted." (1990, p. 49.) Mies and Shiva give a similar account of self-reliant village development in Maharashtra, saying that throughout India there are "... many thousands of examples of alternative practice." (1993, p. 160.) These movements "...radically reject the industrialised countries' prevailing model of capitalist-patriarchal development. ...they...want to preserve their subsistence base intact, under their own control." A similar account of the Zapatistas approach to local development is given in the Fourth World Bulletin, 3, 2. (1990, p. 49.) The Zapatistas strenuously reject integration into mainstream Mexican society and are fighting for local autonomy and self-government. "The Zapatista model may well be the model for a new world order..." Mies and Shiva say the people who "...actively participate in such movements radically reject the industrialised countries’ prevailing model of capitalist-patriarchal development...they want to preserve their subsistence base intact, under their own control." They discuss the resolutions of the 1989 African conference entitled Alternative Development Strategies which endorsed "...people-centred development, planned disengagement from international capitalism, regional food self-sufficiency, development from below, concentration on small and medium sized enterprises, and self-reliance. They conclude that "...catching up development ...is neither possible nor desirable." (Mies and Shiva, 1993;, p. 302.) Possibly most impressive of all is the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka which involves some 3 million people and 7000 full time

employees in 8000 villages in communal efforts to meet basic needs using local resources and simple technologies. (Ekins, 1992, p. 100.) Esteva and Prakash (1996) say many Third World people are "delinking", they are "...starting to protect themselves ...by rooting themselves more firmly in their soils , their local commons, cultural spaces that belong to them and to which they belong." They refer to "a proliferation of localised initiatives." (1996, p. 25.) Foutopoulos says, "... a whole series of recent initiatives and struggles have developed in both the South and the North, which represent...attempts by local people to reclaim the political process and to re-orient it within the local community." (1997, p. 133.) Most of these initiatives are small but Auroville and Ananda Nargar are very large scale developments in India, within the general eco-village model. Auroville extends over 2600 acres and includes many villages. Some of the most impressive pictures I have ever seen are of Auroville land initially little more than red sand but 20 years later heavily forested after the planting of literally millions of trees. Ananda Nargar is more like a city. It covers 110 square km, has 23 agricultural research centres, many large biogas generators, 65 bee keeping operations and many industries including building, food, clothing, medicines and paper.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the potential significance of the shift taking place in Cuba towards alternative agricultural strategies. With the downfall of the USSR Cuba lost its sugar export market and therefore has since been unable to import fuel for agriculture. It has been forced to facilitate local and urban agriculture along Permaculture lines, especially using minimal inputs of energy and artificial fertilisers, and developing small scale localised systems. There are now hundreds of community gardens and commons in Havana. There is also a very poor town in

Ecuador that has planted 1500 fruit trees along its streets. (International Permaculture Journal, 44, 5.) Permaculture teams have assisted in the establishment of these projects. The development of alternative agriculture in Cuba could be one of the most significant developments in the history of the Third World because if these initiatives succeed they will demonstrate to oppressed people everywhere that there is an alternative path to conventional growth and trickle down development, one that is not a form of capitalist development independent of transnational corporations etc., but one that conceives of development in terms of

local people meeting local needs. As with the initiatives in the rich world, most of these Third World developments are not clearly based on any crtitical theory. In fact most hardly involve any theory at all. Rist says, "These many ways of rejecting ‘development’ do not add up to ac ‘theory’ that could be contrasted to others..." (Rist, 1997, p. 245.)

Yet most are contributing to a potentially highly subversive movement.n They involve people a) cooperatively b) using the resources around themselves to c) develop simple arrangements that will d) enable them to produce for themselves most of the things they need for asatisfactory quality of life . The core concept is the highly self-sufficient and cooperagive village existing in a sustainable relationship with its local environment. All these elements flatly contradict capitalist development.

A2: Human NatureThe growth-mindset is a social construct, not human natureRees, 14 (William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 2014, “Avoiding Collapse” https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf, jj)

Contemplating wholesale relocalization after decades of rhetoric on the inevitability of global integration makes it appear the most daunting of tasks. However, there is nothing ordained or sacred about contemporary globalization . It is purely a social construct, the product of many human minds, laboriously negotiated global and regional agreements and arguably designed mostly to serve the interests of capital and the corporate sector. It can therefore be deconstructed and replaced. A global network of largely self-reliant bioregional subsystems based on the principles described above would ensure a more economically secure, ecologically stable and socially equitable future for the majority of the world’s people. If each such interlinked bioregion managed to stabilize its domestic population and conserve adequate per-capita stocks of natural capita, the aggregate effect would be global sustainability.

Not hard-wired for growth – we’re inherently empatheticRifkin 10 [Jeremy, masters degree in international affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, January 2010, Huffington Post, “The Empathic Civilization': Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic-civilization_b_416589.html]The problem runs deeper than the issue of finding new ways to regulate the market or imposing legally binding global green house gas emission reduction targets. The real crisis lies in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behavior of world leaders--assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era. The Enlightenment thinkers--John Locke, Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet et. al.--took umbrage with the Medieval Christian world view that saw human nature as fallen and depraved and that looked to salvation in the next world through God's grace. They preferred to cast their lot with the idea that human beings' essential nature is rational, detached, autonomous, acquisitive and utilitarian and argued that individual salvation lies in unlimited material progress here on Earth. The Enlightenment notions about human nature were reflected in the newly minted nation-state whose raison d'être was to protect private property relations and stimulate market forces as well as act as a surrogate of the collective self-interest of the citizenry in the international arena. Like individuals, nation-states were considered to be autonomous agents embroiled in a relentless battle with other sovereign nations in the pursuit of material gains. It was these very assumptions that provided the philosophical underpinnings for a geopolitical frame of reference that accompanied the first and second industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. These beliefs about human nature came to the fore in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown and in the boisterous and acrimonious confrontations in the meeting rooms in Copenhagen, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of humanity and the planet. If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed. It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being. Recent discoveries in brain science and child developmen t , however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths about human nature. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons--the so-called empathy neurons--that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another's situation as if it were one's own. We are , it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows . Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggest s that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains . The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species.

This argument is profoundly ignorantMiller, ’99 (Will, Professor of Philosophy at Vermont University, “Social Change and Human Nature,” Monthly Review, 50(9), http://www.monthlyreview.org/299mill.htm)

It is not without reason that economics has come to be known as the dismal science. Mainstream economists since Adam Smith have assumed that

all human relations are ultimately those of the marketplace, of buying and selling, of control and exploitation of the suffering,

vulnerability and desperation of others. The current dominance of private property relations—where land, resources and tools are

exclusively controlled by a small minority of individuals for their private perpetual reward—is projected backward over the whole span of human history . However useful this projection may be for justifying existing market society, it is strikingly poor anthropology, dubious history, and third-rate psychology. But it seems actual human history has had a much different bent . For our first few hundred thousand years on this planet —

according to current evidence—humans lived in small groups organized around mutually beneficial social relations , with resources held in common as social property. Social equality and voluntary divisions of labor endured for millennia as the basis for human communal life . With essentially social incentives, everyone who could contributed to the commonwealth for the use of all. In the long sweep of this history the emergence of dominant classes—chiefs, kings, aristocracies of birth and wealth—is a very recent event, perhaps no more than

10,000 years ago, or less, depending on which culture is considered. From time to time, small human communities organized in such communal ways continue to be 'discovered ,' communities that have been spared being "civilized" by conquest at the hands of more "advanced" class societies.

A2: Dedev = Anarchy Dedev doesn’t reject the stateTrainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, Energy Policy journal, “Some inconvenient theses”, http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Energy%20Policy-Trainer-some%20inconvenient%20theses.pdfThis vision retains a role for centralised states (much reduced), for (some) large enterprises such as steel works and railways systems, some but very little international trade, an increased investment in socially desirable high-tech R and D, and for private farms and firms, mostly at the micro level of family businesses and community' cooperatives. ¶ It hardly needs to be said that at present the prospects for transition to this way are highly unlikely. However there is rapidly increasing interest in elements within it, evident especially in the Global Eco-village (GEN. 2011) and The Transition Towns Movement (2009).

A2: Trade GoodDedev not incompatible with international tradeRees, 14 (William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 2014, “Avoiding Collapse” https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf, jj)

Let’s be clear that rebalancing does not mean abandoning international trade. Trade does provide an important buffer in the event of domestic shortages caused by drought or disaster; it is necessary to acquire vital goods that cannot be produced locally. In any event, some countries and regions with large ecological deficits will remain highly trade-dependent at least until their populations fall to more sustainable levels. The rule for resilient local economies should be: export only true ecological surpluses (no net loss of productive natural capital) and import only important commodities that cannot reasonably be sourced at home. “Trade if necessary, but not necessarily trade” serves as convenient shorthand.

Environment Impact Extensions

Growth Bad – Warming / Environment

Growth Bad – General Growth is unsustainable and the Earth’s carrying capacity has already been exceeded—only slowing growth prevents biosphere collapse and extinctionBarry 5/17/14 (Dr. Glen Barry is an internationally recognized environmental advocate, scientist, writer and technology expert, MAY 17, 2014, Earth Blog: Deep Ecology for Global Ecological Sustainability by EcoInternet, “On Overpopulation and Ecosystem Collapse” http://ecointernet.org/2014/05/17/on-overpopulation-and-ecosystem-collapse/, jj)

The global ecological system is collapsing and dying under the cumulative filth of 7 billion people INEQUITABLY devouring their ecosystem habitats. It is impossible to avoid global ecosystem collapse if humanity continues to breed like bunnies; tolerates exorbitant inequality, abject poverty and conspicuous overconsumption; and destroys the ecosystems and climate that – rich or poor – are habitat for all of us. As I have written previously and will write again, the human family either comes together to address converging

ecology, rights, and injustice crises – largely brought on by inequitable overpopulation – or faces global ecological collapse and the end of being . It is not possible to go from 1 to 7 billion people in 135 years – while still growing exponentially – without profound impacts upon natural ecosystems that provide air, water, food and livelihoods. If you don’t understand this, you are uneducated, dumb, and/or indoctrinated; you need to study ecology and get out and see the world. Or go and look at an overgrazed cow pasture and extrapolate. Merging climate, food, water, ocean, soil, justice, poverty, and old-growth forest crises – all which are to some degree caused by inequitable overpopulation – are destroying ecosystems and threaten to pull down our one shared biosphere. Earth has lost 80% of her old-growth forests, 50% of her soil, 90% of the big fish – and many water, land, and ocean ecosystems, as well as atmospheric stability, as human population has soared more than sevenfold. The human family is living far beyond its means, devouring natural capital principal and ravaging its own ecosystem habitats, which can only end in ecological, social and economic collapse. Earth’s carrying capacity has been exceeded , and we must equitably and justly bring down

human population and consumption inequity or else face global ecosystem collapse. We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth will sort it out herself by killing billions; as we possibly pull down the biosphere with us, ending most or even all life, during a prolonged collapse. Earth is not designed for 7 billion people (and growing), some of them destroying ecosystems globally as they live in opulence, others more locally through their grinding poverty and need to survive. Overpopulated, inequitable, unjust human industrial growth ravages ecosystems; destroying all that is natural, indigenous and good, heralding a brief era of opulence for some and abject misery for many, before collapsing the biosphere and causing the end of being for all. Together the human family must find a way to first limit and then reduce human population to

avoid collapsing the biosphere. Infinite economic growth in a finite world is impossible; either we embrace a steady state economy together, or we die.

We’re all doomed, tech doesn’t solveAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)

Science and technology have continued to play a central role in the development of civilisation. Through their advancement human beings have been able to produce electricity, cure diseases, spilt the atom, travel into space, invent computers and the internet, and map the human genome, among an unending list of other things that often seem like miracles. Notably, these scientific and technological advancements have also assisted in the unprecedented expansion of our productive capacities, primarily through harnessing the energy in fossil fuels and developing machines to augment human labour. This has allowed many people, primarily in the developed nations, to achieve lifestyles of material comfort that would have been unimaginable even a few generations ago. Increasingly all seven billion people on the

planet seem set on achieving these high consumption lifestyles for themselves, and at first consideration the universalisation of affluence indeed seems a coherent and plausible path of progress. But however awesome the advancement of science and technology has been as a means of raising material living standards, there are also well-known social and environmental dark sides that flow from this mode of development. Economic activity depends on nature for resources, and as economies and populations have expanded, especially since the industrial revolution, more pressure has been placed on those natural resources, ecosystems, and waste sinks. Today, we face a series of overlapping crises owing to the heavy burden our economies are placing on the planet (Meadows et al, 2004; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013). According to the best available evidence, the global economy now exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet by 50% (Global Footprint Network, 2013), with deforestation , ocean depletion , soil erosion , biodiversity loss , pollution , water shortages , and climate change being just a sample of these acute, unfolding problems (Rockstrom, et al, 2009; Brown, 2011). The latest publication from the IPCC (2013) reiterates the immense challenge of climate change in particular, with the necessity of rapid emissions reductions becoming ever more pressing as carbon budgets continue to shrink through lack of committed action. At the same time, great multitudes of people around the planet still live in material destitution, and global population continues to grow (UNDSEA, 2012), suggesting the environmental burden is only going to be exacerbated as the global development agenda – the goal of promoting growth in global economic output – is pursued into the future (Turner, 2012). Technological optimists believe, however, that just as the application of technology has been a primary cause of environmental problems, so too does it provide the primary solution (Lovins, 1998; Lovins, 2011; Lomborg, 2001). From this view, humanity will be able to solve environmental problems primarily through technological advancement, while continuing to focus attention on economic growth (see, e.g. Grantham Institute, 2013). By implementing this approach it is widely believed we will be able to eliminate global poverty and raise living standards for all, without destroying the necessary ecosystems services that sustain life as we know it. There can be no doubt that this promise of technology is seductive – material abundance for all, while solving environmental problems. But is this promise credible? If not, what are the implications? This paper presents an evidence-based critique of such techno-optimism, arguing that the vision of progress it promotes is unrealisable due to the limits of technology and the inherent structure of growth economics. The focus of this critique, however, is not on the techno-wizardry that holds up desalination plants as the solution to water shortages, genetically modified foods as the solution to global hunger, or geoengineering as the solution to climate change, etc., important though those critiques are (see Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011; Hamilton, 2013). Rather, the present focus is on the subtler faith that many people place in ‘efficiency’ as the environmental saviour. Techno-optimism, in this sense, can be broadly defined as the belief that science and technology will be able to solve the major social and environmental problems of our times, without fundamentally rethinking the structure or goals of our growth-based economies or the nature of Western-style, affluent lifestyles. In other words, technooptimism is the belief that the problems caused by economic growth can be solved by more economic growth (as measured by GDP), provided we learn how to produce and consume more efficiently through the application of science and technology. Proponents of this view argue that advancements in knowledge and design, in conjunction with market mechanisms, will mean that we will be able to decouple our economic activity from environmental impact, thus avoiding the implication that economic growth has biophysical limits. Should any resource get scarce, it is assumed that ‘free markets’ and high prices will incentivise more exploration or the development of substitute resources (see, e.g., Simon and Kahn, 1984; Beckerman, 2002). Rather than questioning growth economics, then, this dominant school of thought advocates ‘green growth’ or ‘sustainable development’ (see Purdey, 2010).

This general perspective defines the present era more than any other, but the evidence reviewed below shows that the vision is profoundly flawed.The critical analysis begins in Section 2 by placing techno-optimism in theoretical context. It is important to understand the structure of techno-optimism and see why it forms a central part of the ideology of growth. In Section 3, the notion of an Environmental Kuznets’s Curve (EKC) is outlined and considered. This hypothesis holds that environmental harm tends to increase in early stages of industrialisation, but as economies get richer and their technologies develop, environmental impact tends to decrease. The evidence for this position is reviewed and analysed, and it is shown that the EKC hypothesis is generally without substance. At least, the EKC has to be qualified so heavily that it essentially disappears. In Sections 4 and 5 the notion of ‘decoupling’ is examined, and this analysis is used to explain why efficiency improvements have not produced sustainable economies despite extraordinary technological advancements in recent decades. It turns out efficiency improvements have not often been able to keep up with continued economic and population growth – largely due to ‘rebound effects’ – meaning that overall environmental impact continues to grow, despite efficiency improvements. Section 6 unpacks the arithmetic of growth to expose how unrealistic techno-optimism really is. In the concluding sections the implications of the analysis are discussed. The central conclusion of this critique is that technology cannot and will not solve environmental problems so long as it is applied within a growth-based economic model . In order to take advantage of efficiency gains, which are without doubt an essential part of the transition to a just and sustainable world (von Weizsacker et al, 2009), it is argued that a value-shift is required away from growth economics toward a ‘post-growth’ or ‘steady state’ economy based on material sufficiency. The nature of this alternative is briefly outlined, although the purpose of this paper is primarily diagnostic rather than prescriptive.

Growth causes pollution that threatens survivalHarte, 12 (JOHN HARTE is Professor of Ecosystem Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. MARY ELLEN HARTE is a biologist and columnist who writes on climate change and population. Foreign Affairs, 91.5 (Sep/Oct 2012): 163-175, “Is Growth Good? Resources, Development, and the Future of the Planet/Lomborg Replies” accessed online via ProQuest, jj)

In his essay, Bjørn Lomborg begins by criticizing the notion that the primary constraint on economic growth is the finiteness of resources, as if that remains the belief of the scientific community. Environmental scientists have long recognized, however, that the main limit to growth is not running out of resources but rather running out of space for the byproducts of that growth. Humans are filling the world's atmosphere with greenhouse gases, tainting its aquifer and surface water with deadly pollutants, eroding its soils, and allowing damaging toxics to build up in human bodies.Obsessed with the numerical accuracy of projections made decades ago in The Limits to Growth, Lomborg ignores the importance of that study 's qualitative insights, still valid today, concerning the interconnections between humanity and the natural world. The book illustrated the many ways in which increases in the human population and consumption levels undermine the sustainability of human society, including through pollution, the depletion of both renewable and nonrenewable resources, and industrial production. Lomborg also ignores some of the study's accurate quantitative insights: recent analyses by scientists show that The Limits to Growth was eerily correct in at least some of its most important projections. In a reexamination of the study, the ecologists Charles Hall and John Day showed that if a timeline were added to the book's predictions with 2000 at the halfway point, "then the model results are almost exactly on course some 35 years later in 2008."The Limits to Growth countered the blissful ignorance of many economists and business magnates who wanted to believe in the convenient pipe dream of unlimited growth, denying the finiteness of the natural environment. Many policymakers did understand the value of the study, however, and tried to inculcate its basic concepts into our civilization, but without success. The scientific community thus still has educational work to do, and finishing it is essential to securing a future for our civilization.WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYS

Lomberg promotes numerous misconceptions in his essay. Bemoaning The Limits to Growth's results as neither "simple nor easy to understand," Lomborg fails to grasp what many reputable scientists and policymakers have long known: that predicting the details of complex phenomena is difficult. In that light, The Limits to Growth was just a first stab at analyzing the elaborate dynamics that cause continued economic growth to threaten the sustainability of human society.Lomborg further displays scientific ignorance when he talks about pesticides. His estimate of 20 U.S. deaths annually from pesticides ignores both the ecological harm they cause and the human health problems, including cancer, hormone disruption, and neurological eaects, associated with pesticide exposure. His argument that DDT is a cheap, effective solution to malaria overlooks the ability of mosquitoes, like other pests, to evolve resistance. Pesticides can be valuable tools when used as scalpels, but when they are used as bludgeons, the evolution of resistance often undoes their efficacy. This is why many epidemiologists fear that society is regressing from the happy era of working antibiotics.Lomborg also perpetuates the denial of the multiple ways in which civilization is underpinned by a healthy environment. Yes, we can continue to expand into previously untapped arable land, but only at the cost of undermining the giant planetary ecosystems that assure humanity will have clean air, clean water, and a sustainable and benign climate. Yes, we can forgo recycling and grow plantations for paper, but only at the expense of biodiversity. Indeed, as increasing population growth and overconsumption degrade the environment, none of the economic growth that Lomborg hopes for will be possible. Moreover, the capacity of society and its institutions to maintain, let alone improve, the quality of life-a capacity that Lomborg takes for granted- will be at risk.Lomborg retells the story of how the biologist Paul Ehrlich, the physicist John Holdren, and one of us lost a bet in 1990 after the economist Julian Simon wagered that the prices of a number of commodities would drop over a ten-year period. But had the bet been extended a few more years, the scientists would have won, because the prices of those commodities had, on average, risen. Simon later challenged ecologists to a new set of bets on the future; Ehrlich and the climatologist Stephen Schneider accepted the challenge and picked 15 environmentally significant trends, such as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the amount of biodiversity on the planet. To our surprise, once he recognized the trends, Simon saw the writing on the wall and promptly backed out of the bet; he would have lost more than $10,000. Indeed, the limitations on the human enterprise extend beyond minerals. World hunger is increasing, as is the cost of basic food staples. The temporary advances of the environmental movement, such as the creation of more ecological reserves to protect biodiversity, are proving less and less effective faced with the sheer weight of further population growth and increasing consumption.

Growth Bad – WarmingGrowth is unsustainable and causes warming –robust studiesAsici ‘13Ahmet, Professor of Business @ Istanbul Technical University, Ecological Indicators Vol. 24, January, pg. 324-333, “Economic growth and its impact on environment: A panel data analysis”, Science Direct5. Concluding remarks¶ Our results suggest that there is a positive relationship between income per capita and per capita pressure on nature. The effect is much stronger in middle-income countries than in low and high-income countries. After controlling for various covariates, institutional and structural, the positive effect still continues to hold. Our conclusions are fairly robust to the inclusion of these covariates, and to the inclusion and exclusion of countries from the sample. The regression results shed doubts on the environmental sustainability of the growth process especially in middle-income countries. Increasing prosperity leads more consumption and thereby more pressure on nature especially in the form of CO2 damage and mineral depletion. However, we found an opposite effect on forestry resources. The institutional quality, as measured by the extent of enforceability of rule of law, has a significant negative effect on the pressure on nature along with our expectations. Our results suggest that increasing trade has a negative impact on environment and this finding clearly can be taken as a support for race-to-the-bottom hypothesis. Although the formulation of MDGs clearly demonstrates that economic growth and environmental protection are mutually reinforcing, there are serious doubts on our ability in decoupling of economic growth from pressure on nature in absolute terms (Moldan et al., 2011). Our results support those studies indicating that the current economic growth paradigm is unsustainable especially in middle-income countries. Given the increasing importance of these countries as recipients of FDI flows and as producers in the global supply chain, achieving environmental sustainability without jeopardizing the other determinants of human welfare continues to be a big challenge that has to be confronted.

Best scientific models prove growth makes extinction-level warming inevitable---only dedev solvesDr. Minqi Li 10, Assistant Professor Department of Economics, University of Utah, “The 21st Century Crisis: Climate Catastrophe or Socialism” Paper prepared for the David Gordon Memorial Lecture at URPE Summer Conference 2010 The global average surface temperature social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning (Section 6).

The global average surface temperature is now about 0.8°C (0.8 degrees Celsius) higher than in pre-industrial times. Under the current trend, the world is on track towards a long-term warming between [4 and 8 degrees Celsius] 4°C and 8°C. At this level of global warming, the world would be in an extreme greenhouse state not seen for almost 100 million years, devastating human civilization and destroying nearly all forms of life on Earth (Conner and McCarthy 2009). The scientific community has reached consensus that the current global warming results from the excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) emitted by human economic activities. 1 The capitalist historical epoch has been characterized by the explosive growth of material production and consumption. The massive expansion of the world economy has been powered by fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Since 1820, the world economy has expanded by about seventy times and the world emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burning have increased by about sixty times (see Figure 1). At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change concluded in Copenhagen in December 2009, the world’s governments officially committed to the objective of limiting global warming to no more than 2°C. However, according to the “Climate Action Tracker,” despite the official statement, the national governments’ current pledges regarding emission reduction in fact imply a warming of at least [3 degrees] 3°C by the end of the 21st century with more warming to come in the following centuries (Climate Action Tracker 2010). In reality, all the major national governments are committed to infinite economic growth and none of them is willing to consider any emission reduction policy that could undermine economic growth. This is not simply because of intellectual ignorance or lack of political will. The pursuit of endless accumulation of capital (and infinite economic growth) is derived from the basic laws of motion of the capitalist economic system. Without fundamental social transformation, human

civilization is now on the path to self-destruction . The next section (section 2) reviews the basic scientific facts concerning the climate change crisis. Without an end to economic growth, it is virtually impossible for meaningful climate stabilization to be achieved (section 3). However, both capitalist enterprises and states are constantly driven to expand production and consumption. The system of nation states effectively rules out a meaningful global political solution to the climate change crisis (section 4). The climate change crisis is but one of several long-term historical trends that are now leading to the structural crisis of capitalism (section 5). The resolution of the crisis and the survival of humanity require the building of a fundamentally different social system that is based on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning (section 6).

Continued growth guarantees extinction via climate change.Milbrath 3 — Lester W. Milbrath, Director Emeritus of the Research Program in Environment and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo, 2003["Envisioning a Sustainable Society," Explorations in Environmental Political Theory: Thinking About What We Value, edited by Joel Jay Kassiola, Published by M.E. Sharpe, ISBN 0765610523, p.39-40)Our use of resources and discharge of wastes more than doubles with each doubling of the human population. Those growth rates cannot help but force a great transformation. Growth simply cannot continue for two reasons: More than half the resources in the earth’s crust have been consumed and scattered, and there simply will not be sufficient resources for all those new humans, even at present consumption rates.Even more important, the emission of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons) is beginning to change the way the biosphere works. Scientists estimate that the earth will warm three to five degrees Celsius in the next seven decades, perhaps sooner (with even more heating up predicted in the most recent research findings in 2001). That will be sufficient to change climate patterns. We cannot be sure that the climate will change gradually and then settle down into a new pattern; it is likely to oscillate unpredictably and bring unexpected catastrophe. You have probably read predictions of good farmland turning to desert, devastating floods, rising sea levels, killer hurricanes. Climate change and loss of the ozone layer will injure ecosystems all over the planet and reduce their productivity at the very time all those new humans will be looking for sustenance.Equally devastating, climatic instability would destroy the confidence people need in order to invest. People will not be sure that they could ever live in the house they would like to build. Entrepreneurs would have little confidence that their business could get supplies or that their goods would have a market. Investors would fear that their stocks, bonds, and loans would become worthless. Young people would not know how to plan for a career. If the climate oscillates unpredictably, we will become victims of our own success. Be forewarned: Chaos in climate patterns means economic catastrophe.By just doing what we have been doing every day, we are unintentionally [end page 39] conducting a giant planetary experiment to see how far we can perturb biospheric systems before they change their patterns and drastically change everything about our lives. By being single-mindedly successful at doing what society expects of us, we have created a civilization that is headed for breakdown. We are facing a massive transformation of modern society that we cannot avoid. We should change the direction of our society now before we find out the answer to that unintended experiment. In Earth time we have less than one second to make the necessary changes. Either we learn to control our growth in population and in economic activity or nature will control it for us. Remember, nature’s solution is death.

Uniqueness – Environment Collapsing – A2: Environment Improving

Environment collapsing now—multiple indicatorsBeinecke, 12 (FRANCES BEINECKE is President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Foreign Affairs, 91.5 (Sep/Oct 2012): 163-175, “Is Growth Good? Resources, Development, and the Future of the Planet/Lomborg Replies” accessed online via ProQuest, jj)

Today, a new set of images reveals the hazards not of economic growth per se but of the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. These are not predictions from a 40-year-old report but measurements of real developments. Right now, 90 percent of the world's large fish, such as tuna, swordfish, and marlin, have disappeared thanks to overfishing . This is alarming not just for the sake of the species themselves but also for industry and food supplies: the National Ocean Economics Program reports that between 1997 and 2007, California's commercial fishing revenues dropped by 43 percent because fish stocks were plummeting. Meanwhile,

90 percent of West Africa's rain forests have been destroyed , and between 2000 and 2005 alone, the world lost rain-forest acreage equal to the size of Germany. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 23 percent over the last 50 years , driving climate change and intensifying such extreme weather events as the 2010 floods in Pakistan, which affected 20 million people, and the 2011 floods in Thailand, which caused more than $45 billion in damage.

A2: Wealth Key To Environmental Protection [Kuznets Curve]Wealth not key to environmental protectionAlexander, 14 (* Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne. He is also research fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity Institute, Post Carbon Pathways, Working Paper Series, WP1/14 January 2014, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost” http://www.postcarbonpathways.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1_Critique_of_Techno_Optimism.pdf, jj)

Even in those limited cases where the EKC can be shown to exist, it is far too simplistic to suggest that this is solely or primarily because a nation has become rich. Often it can be shown that environmental improvements are associated with new laws, policies, or institutions (see Magnani, 2001). This raises the question of whether such improvements were due to increases in GDP, as the EKC hypothesis holds, or simply due to better regulations. It could not credibly be argued that getting rich is the only relevant variable . Reductions in harm do not happen automatically when nations become rich. Policies are usually needed – such as regulations about factory pollution, land use, the fuel efficiency of cars, or the treatment of rivers – and it is at least arguable that the regulations could have been produced at much lower levels of income and achieved the same or even more positive environmental outcomes.Perhaps the most damming criticism of the EKC hypothesis, however, comes from the ecological footprint analysis (White, 2007; Caviglia-Harris et al, 2009; Wang et al, 2013; Global Footprint Network, 2013). The EKC, if valid, would suggest that nations should seek growth in GDP if they want to reduce their environmental impact. But when this extraordinary claim is considered in the context of ecological footprint analysis, the hypothesis is simply and obviously wrong. The US is the richest nation on the planet, but if the US way of life was globalised we would need more than four times the biocapacity of Earth (Global Footprint Network, 2013). On that basis, who could possibly argue that environmental degradation decreases as wealth grows? For a further example, take Australia – another of the richest nations – which has the highest per capita carbon footprint in the OECD and one of the highest in the world (Garnaut, 2008: Ch. 7). This strongly suggests that the EKC hypothesis is embraced for political reasons, not scientific foundation.Even the somewhat less resource-intensive ‘western European’ nations – the so-called ‘green’ economies like Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden – are grossly exceeding their ‘fair share’ of the planet’s biocapacity (Vale and Vale, 2013). We would need approximately three planets if the Western European way of life was globalised, and that is assuming no population growth (Global Footprint Network, 2013). So even if there were an EKC, the ‘turning point’ in the curve would be occurring much too late in the process of development to validate anything like the conventional development path. Accordingly, the argument that sustainability will arrive when the entire world gets rich or ‘developed’ is patently wrong, and it is intellectually irresponsible to pretend otherwise (White, 2007). It is a view that simply lacks any evidential foundation.In sum, one must not get caught up in the smoke and mirrors of isolated studies that show certain aspects of environmental damage or pollution have declined as a nation has gotten richer. Such analyses totally miss the bigger picture, which is that it would be ecologically catastrophic if the entire world tried to become affluent as a means of environmental protection (Turner, 2012; Smith and Positano, 2010). If the EKC hypothesis sounds too good to be true, that is because, on the whole, it is false.

No empirical evidence for the curveMikkelson, 13 (Professor Gregory Mikkelson, from the Department of Philosophy and School of Environment at McGill University, October 29, 2013, “Is economic growth good for biodiversity? A critical response by Professor Mikkelson” http://quantdary.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/is-economic-growth-good-for-biodiversity-a-critical-response-by-professor-mikkelson/, jj)

In a September 14th, 2013 “special report”, writers for the Economist argue that although past economic growth has brought life on Earth to the brink of mass extinction, future economic growth will solve this little problem. Because the evidence tells so strongly against this the sis, I dub it, and the arguments made on its behalf, the Economist’s “special fantasy”. Corrected for inflation, the world economy more than doubled between 1980 and 2005. Meanwhile, the global average population size

of wild vertebrate species declined by around 30% (Living Planet Report 2012). The deleterious effect of growth on biodiversity shows up also as a correlation, after correcting for other variables, between GDP/capita and the number of threatened species in different countries (Sustainability 5:432). This correlation would be even stronger, but for the fact that rich countries “export” so much of their ecological damage to poor countries, e.g., by importing products, such as “coffee, tea, sugar, textiles, fish and other manufactured items” that have “a biodiversity footprint that is larger abroad than at home” (Nature 486:109). Some of the Economist writers implicitly acknowledge this phenomenon, but none of them address it in any serious way.

And they argue – but present no direct evidence – that biodiversity is faring better in rich countries than in poor. The depletion and pollution of nature quantified by the “ecological footprint” – a key environmental indicator not mentioned in any of the Economist articles – sheds light on the connection between economic growth and biodiversity loss. Between 1980 and 2005, the total ecological footprint of humanity rose by two fifths, to nearly 1.5 Earth’s worth of regenerative and assimilative biocapacity. Technological efficiency improved, in the sense that the ecological

footprint of a dollar of GDP declined by a bit more than a third. But the aforementioned more-than-two-fold growth in GDP far outpaced this decline. As the resulting “overshoot” of our planet’s ability to sustain us in the long term climbs ever higher, it bodes ill for our fellow species as well. Through both consumption and investment, the rich contribute far more, per capita, to this global overshoot than do the poor. How does the Economist sustain its special fantasy about growth and biodiversity? Many of its arguments ascribe to economic growth virtues that it makes no obvious contribution to. For example, the improvement in technological efficiency discussed above probably drove per-capita GDP growth more than vice versa. Other arguments correctly attribute certain virtues to growth, but fail to acknowledge their eclipse by the harm caused by that growth. For example, it is true that countries with higher GDP/capita generally have lower rates of population growth. But in few, if any, cases has population growth slowed enough to offset the environmental damage caused by ramping up per-capita production and consumption in the first place. Perhaps the most perverse aspect of the special fantasy is that it rests, in turn, upon another fantasy that empirical evidence has utterly refuted. This is the idea, invoked several times in the Economist articles, that nature is a “luxury good”. For a luxury good, the rich would be willing to pay a greater proportion of their income than would the poor. But it seems that all studies of willingness to pay for environmental protection – and in particular, biodiversity conservation – show exactly the opposite: the poor care more about nature, i.e., will to pay proportionally more to protect it, than the rich do. In technical terms, “the income elasticity of willingness to pay is less than one” (Environmental and

Resource Economics 43:137). Closely associated with the myth of nature as a luxury good is the idea of an “environmental Kuznets curve” (EKC). The Economist’s special fantasy is an application of this general idea, which their article “The Effects of Growth: The Long View” states as follows: There appears to be an environmental version of the Kuznets curve, which describes the relationship between prosperity and inequality in an inverted U-shape. At the early stages of growth, inequality tends to rise; at the later stages it falls. Similarly, in the early stages of

growth, biodiversity tends to suffer; in the later stages it benefits. The funny thing (as if mass extinction could be funny) is that the weight of evidence contradicts even the original Kuznets curve: inequality has risen, not fallen, over the past several decades in most of the richest countries. In “Extinction: Dead as a Moa” the Economist states that the number of known bird and mammal extinctions has declined a bit over the same period, from 7 in the 1980′s to 3 in the 2000′s. I hope this is true. But taking into account orders of magnitude more data, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reports that birds, mammals, and other well-studied groups like amphibians and corals “are moving towards increased extinction

risk”, not away from it. The only study to date that has found non-monotonic relationships between GDP/capita and biodiversity loss shows the opposite of an EKC for most kinds of species, i.e., a non-inverted U-shape in which extinction risk first falls, but then rises, with GDP/capita (Conservation Biology

15:1021). The Economist’s idea that economic growth is good for biodiversity thus indeed proves to be fantasy, founded on half-truths and still other, deeper fantasies clung to by mainstream economists in order to save their growth-obsessed ideology.

Prefer Studies 2NCOnly our data accounts for the Kuznets curveBagliani et al 2008 – I don’t know Italian, but they look qualled, plus it’s peer reviewed IRES, Istituto di Ricerche Economico Sociali, Piemonte, Via Nizza, Torino, Italy, bDipartimento di Studi Sociali, Università di Brescia (Marco Bagliani, Giangiacomo Bravo, Silvana Dalmazzone, Ecological Economics, 65.3, “A consumption-based approach to environmental Kuznets curves using the ecological footprint indicator”)

The analysis proposed in this paper leads to conclude that, when using the ecological footprint as dependent variable to investigate the relationship between economic growth and the environment, one does not find evidence in favour of an inverted-U behaviour . As a whole, rather than the decoupling of impact from GDP per capita, the scenario supported by our statistical evidence is one of an unbounded growth of environmental pressure as GDP per capita rises. In the OLS and WLS regressions on the non-logarithmic models, a cubic functional form is always the one with the best fit. The only exception is in the OLS analysis of the single EF components, where one case (energy EF) shows evidence of an inverted U-

shape. The analysis on the logarithmic specification , where the prevailing model is always linear, reinforces these results . The nonparametric regression as well shows a monotonically increasing behaviour of environmental degradation vs. GDP per capita. Ours adds to the large number of recent studies that do not find support for the EKC hypothesis (e.g. Azomahou et al., 2006; Deacon and Norman, 2006; Richmond and Kaufmann, 2006) in contrast with, among many, Panayotou (1993), Grossman and Krueger (1995), Paudel et al.

(2005), Mazzanti et al. (2006). In our results, the absence of EKCs may derive from the fact that consumption -based indicators like the ecological footprint account for the displacement of environmental damage away from high income countries. It is a hint that the change in the composition of production often advocated as a drive behind the EKC can take place also through

a change in the localization of supply — not only through changes in technology and in the composition of demand. The localization of supply is modified by importing a large share of the goods whose production employs polluting technologies as well as of the biomass required as

nutrition by human population, and by de-localizing dirty national production processes to low income countries by foreign direct investments. For instance, Mayer et al. (2005) argued that the forest protection policies adopted in Finland and other European countries in recent decades, without a simultaneous decrease in the domestic consumption of wood, resulted in a dramatically increased logging pressure on Russian forests . Similar trends are evidenced by Berlik et al. (2002) for USA's demand for wood, and Schütz et al. (2004) on the spatial distribution of global consumption and extraction of natural resources. National environmental policies may result in a simple export of environmental pressures with no net gain in the overall conservation of nature. Our concern is not arguing the superiority of one or the other between consumption and production-based approaches. Production-based and consumption-based indicators, both useful depending on the aim of the analysis, simply imply a different choice on where to ascribe the responsibility for the generation of environmental impact. Rather, we aim at drawing the attention to the different conclusions stemming from the two approaches when applied to testing an EKC hypothesis. The crucial difference between them is the fact that a

consumption-based approach captures the potential delocalisation effects that remain hidden in production-based analyses. In order to claim that economic growth is the road to a clean environment one would need empirical evidence on the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income and consumptionbased environmental indicators, condition that would guarantee

an actual reduction in environmental impact. In our study, the absence of an inversion in trend in ecological footprint when GDP per capita rises appears to indicate that indefinite economic growth within a clean environment cannot be achieved simultaneously by the whole planet , since it can only work locally until there are countries whose environment is allowed to deteriorate.

These studies are betterBerrens et al 2006 – professors at the University of NM (Mozumder, Berrens, Bohara, The Journal of Developing Areas, 39.2, “Is there an environmental Kuznets curve for the risk of biodiversity loss?”, Project MUSE)

A variety of evidence indicates that we are losing our biodiversity stock much faster than ever before , and

this has generated worldwide concern for biodiversity loss. It is argued that the global extinction spasm is resulting in the extermination of species at a rate 100 to 1000 times greater than in pre-human times (e.g., see Pimm et al. 1995). Ecological economists argue that even from a utilitarian point of

view, continuing to drive vast numbers of species to extinction may be an unwise course of action (Costanza et al. 1997; Daily et al. 1997). Nevertheless, various sources debate the need to restrict economic growth (Beckerman 1992; Sisk et al. 1994; Mangel 1996). Thus, precise empirical evidence regarding the biodiversity-growth linkage (the EKC relationship) can provide helpful insights to

this policy debate. We contribute to the existing EKC literature on biodiversity in a number of ways: (1) We consider a set of multivariate biodiversity indices that are composed of stock, pressure and response variables , as supported in the

conservation biology literature (Reyers et al.1998); (2) In addition, these indices account for species, genetic and ecosystem diversity, rather than relying on simple counts of selected species ; (3) These indices are all risk-based measures; (4) Finally, unlike previous EKC studies based on single or selected species, we demonstrate that our key result is robust to a variety of specifications (e.g., inclusion of additional control variables that may impact the income-biodiversity risk relationship). Since the stock of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the world (Mittermeier

1988), EKC studies considering mere stock variables (e.g. counts of endangered species) do not provide a complete and reliable investigation of biodiversity risk . The existing status of biodiversity risk is largely dependent on the interplay of stock, pressure and response variables. Other common exercises to treat one or more species counts as a measure of overall biodiversity also give a very limited picture of a complex risk. Biodiversity, a joint outcome of species, genetic and ecosystem diversity provides society with important benefits, including: economic benefits, (both direct and indirect); aesthetic benefits; scientific and ethical knowledge; as well as insurance against future uncertainties in natural and human systems. While there are numerous examples of known economic and aesthetic benefits of biodiversity, ecologists and bio-scientists fre-quently make the argument that more is unknown than known. While the true composite value of biodiversity may be uncertain, a risk-based measure is preferred for economic policy design compared to the absolute counts of animals or species. Given that at both the global and national levels protective resources may be insufficient (Lake 1996), then setting preservation priorities for biodiversity conservation must be based on the exposed risk (Reyers et al.1998), not on the simple counts of animals or species. In closing,

biodiversity loss is widely considered as a critical global environmental issue for the twenty-first century. A primary concern, by ecologists and others, is that biodiversity losses may be irreversible after crossing critical thresholds (irreparable damage to ecosystem functioning, or complete extinction of collections of species can be the examples), thus restricting the

ability to mitigate or substitute. If true, then the irreversible , non-shiftable negative externality caused by human activity to this complex global public good leaves very limited room to yield an EKC relationship. In consonance with

such arguments, and using several multivariate cross-country indices that represent the most comprehensive and precise measure of biodiversity risk, we find no evidence for an EKC relationship for biodiversity risk. Rather than passively relying on simple economic growth to somehow protect biodiversity, it seems clear that national and international interests will have to take direct policy actions (e.g., international treaties and protocols). But, that is not to say that economic incentives cannot play a crucial role in the design of such institutions and actually achieving such development protections.

A2: Environmental ResiliencyGrowth kills natural resiliencyBooth 1998 – former assistant professor of economics at Marquette (Douglas, “The environmental consequences of growth: Steady-state economics as an alternative to ecological decline”, page 10, Google Books)

With its continuous creation of new industries that cause new kinds of environmental disturbances, the economic growth process can easily disrupt ecosystem services. Global warming induced by excessive C02 emissions can cause damage and destruction to both natural and anthropogenic ecosystems (Abraharnson l989). Excessive liquid waste emissions can overload the nutrient recycling capacity of aquatic ecosystems, inhibiting their ability to function and support a diversity of life (Welch 1992). Acid rain and other forms of air pollution can harm the health of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (Gould 1985). Deforestation and poor agricultural practices can cause soil erosion in amounts that exceed the capacity of ecosystems to produce new soils. The conversion of natural to anthropogenic ecosystems can reduce biodiversity and, as a consequence, the range of chemicals and drugs that can be potentially extracted from nature. Destruction of wetlands can reduce the supply of clean water, diminish biodiversity, and increase flooding (Erlich et al. 1977). The reduction of natural habitat as a consequence of logging or land development can reduce wildlife populations and cause species extinctions. All such events together reduce tangible and intangible human benefits that derive from ecosystems. The central argument of this book is that forces leading to economic growth cause the kinds of environmental disturbances just described. The global economy is prone to growth while the global ecosystem is stable in terms of gross productivity and its capacity to provide ecosystem services. While ecosystems individually are subject to disturbance and change, at a global level there is no known natural growth trend in global ecosystem productivity or capacity for service provision. Thus, as the global economy expands, it places increasing demands and stresses on the global ecosystem, reducing its ultimate capacity to serve the human species.

Scientific consensusNovacek and Cleland, 1 American Museum of Natural History, Research in the Biology Dept. at Stanford, Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, The current biodiversity extinction event, p. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/10/5466

There is consensus in the scientific community that the current massive degradation of habitat and extinction of many of the Earth's biota is unprecedented and is taking place on a catastrophically short timescale. Based on extinction rates estimated to be thousands of times the background rate, figures approaching 30% extermination of all species by the mid 21st century are not unrealistic (1-4), an event comparable to some of the catastrophic mass extinction events of the past (5, 6). The current rate of rainforest destruction poses a profound threat to species diversity (7). Likewise, the degradation of the marine ecosystems (8, 9) is directly evident through the denudation of species that were once dominant and integral to such ecosystems. Indeed, this colloquium is framed by a view that if the current global extinction event is of the magnitude that seems to be well indicated by the data at hand, then its effects will fundamentally reset the future evolution of the planet's biota .

Bio-D key to resilience---species loss snow ballsMills ’10 (Stephanie, renowned author and lecturer on bioregionalism, ecological restoration, community eco-nomics, and voluntary simplicity, “Biodiversity: Peak Nature?” Post Carbon Institute, pg11 , jj)

Given the gravity of the wounds to the planet’s ecosys-tems, future ecosystems are unlikely to resemble those that enlivened Earth during the Cenozoic era, when mammals and flowering plants came to dominance. Still, humanity will need to learn how to reinhabit

post-Cenozoic ecosystems and to participate in them rather than living at their expense . Natural history is the original festival calendar. The sustainable cultures to come are likely to take their diets, occupations, themes, calendars, and boundaries from their natural surroundings, just as cultures did before imperialism, industrialization, and globalization. The more bio-diversity that remains in our terrains, the more pos-sibilities there will be for discovery, inspiration, and resilience i n this geologic era of our doing. In the Sky Islands wildlands of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, several hopeful ventures in evolutionary diplomacy are under way. Some ranch-ers are restoring creeks in these rugged grasslands, rein-troducing extirpated species from Sonoran mud turtlesto prairie dogs, modifying their range-stocking and grazing practices, and, in some cases, also reintroduc-ing predators like Mexican wolves, mountain lions, and exceedingly rare jaguars. The ranchers know what’s at stake: “The loss of one species is usually an indicator of an ecosystem out of balance and a larger domino effect to come , to which cattle will also ultimately fall vic-tim.”56More than just a good business or environmen-tal decision, the Sky Islands ranchers’ actions represent a cultural shift toward appreciating that the land’s natural biodiversity has intrinsic value and can ulti-mately add economic value to diversified ranch or farm operations. These foresighted ranchers understand that by shedding the stockman’s historic hostility to preda-tors and managing their lands regeneratively they are strengthening the greater ecosystem on which their livelihood depends.

Eco system recovery will take more than 10 million years – risks total extinction in the short termMills ’10 (Stephanie, renowned author and lecturer on bioregionalism, ecological restoration, community eco-nomics, and voluntary simplicity, “Biodiversity: Peak Nature?” Post Carbon Institute, pg 13, jj)

Naked new volcanic islands born out of the spread-ing seafloor by and by receive bird, plant, spider, and insect colonists that multiply and are eaten or simply die—all becoming soil to host more variations of form and greater diversity. We can take some comfort from such patterns. Life wants to live. Recovering from mass extinctions is nothing new for planet Earth, although it may take 10 million years or so for such a richly diverse community of organisms to evolve again. For our part, and for the sake of the world to come, we must become a constituency for wild nature and do everything within our power to mitigate the extinction crisis we are caus-ing (see box 8.2).

Growth Bad – Oceans

EXT – Growth Kills OceansGrowth is causing massive disruptions of marine biodiversity—this outweighs resiliencyClark & Clausen, 8 (*Brett Clark, Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, University of Utah, Assistant Professor of Sustainability, Environmental Humanities Graduate Program and Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program, University of Utah, **Rebecca Clausen, teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, Monthly Review, 2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August) / “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem”, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem, jj)

The intensified extraction of fish from already stressed oceanic ecosystems—fueled by capital accumulation and the free appropriation of nature—has resulted in significant consequences to the metabolic interactions between marine trophic levels. Marine scientists note that the removal of 100 million metric tons (which includes both capture and aquaculture) of fish from the world ocean will lead to long-term, large- scale disruptions in marine ecology . Of direct concern are “species level effects,” in particular the removal of target and non-target marine

life. Continued harvest of fish species to population levels that are below the sustainable numbers required for reproduction will eventually lead to extinction.

The orange roughy, for example, began to be commercially exploited ten years ago. This fish lives to be 150 years old and only begins to reproduce at age 25. By continually removing the oldest fish first, the industry has depleted the population of reproducing adults. (Harvesting this fish generally results in the destruction of

coral forests.) The orange roughy species is now threatened with extinction. As mentioned earlier, the depletion of fish stock for commercial fishing in coastal waters led to the capture of fishes in the deep sea—such as

roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, spiny eel, spinytail skate, and blue hake—subjecting them to the dictates of the market, driving them to the point of extinction.21

Industrialized capitalist fishing allows for vast quantities of target fish to be harvested at once . At the same time, it leads to an immense amount of non-target marine life—bycatch—being captured .

Bycatch are commercially unviable species, thus they are seen as waste. The “trash fish” are often ground up and thrown back into the ocean. Part of the bycatch includes juveniles of the target fish, which, if the mortality is increased among this population, undercuts the success

of recovery. Obviously, the populations of the discarded species are negatively affected by this practice, furthering the depletion of marine life. The most wasteful operation is trawling for shrimp. The capture and discarding of bycatch disrupts the habitats and trophic webs within ecosystems. The scale of the disruption is quite significant . It is estimated that an average of 27 million tons of fish are discarded each year in commercial fisheries around the world, and that the United States has a .28 ratio of bycatch discard to landings.22

Species extinction is the direct impact of overfishing, which is in part driven by the pursuit of capital accumulation and is facilitated by the technological innovations that are employed for this particular purpose, in what has become known as a “race for fish.”23 Capitalist practices are creating a loss of marine biodiversity and undermining the resiliency of marine ecosystems . Valiela states, “The magnitude of

the fishing harvest and the examples of major alterations to marine food webs by predator removal suggest that effects of fishing are ecologically substantial at large spatial scales.” The “major alteration to marine food webs” due to overexploitation provides the clearest example of ecological degradation in the metabolic processes of the ocean.24Fishing Down the Food ChainEqually disrupting, but less apparent than species effects, are the ecosystem effects caused by fishery exploitation, especially “fishing down the food chain.”25 As overfishing depletes the most commercially viable top predators (i.e., snapper, tuna, cod, and swordfish), competition drives commercial fishers to begin harvesting species of lower trophic levels. The downward shift is global, according to the model

analysis of UN statistics describing worldwide catches of fish over a forty-year time span. If this quest is pursued to its logical end, scientists warn it will lead to the wholesale collapse of marine ecosystems . Fishing down the food chain erodes the base of marine biodiversity and undermines the biophysical cornerstone of

ocean fisheries. The recent discoveries of marine trophic interactions suggest that the lower trophic levels of marine food webs provide an integral and complex foundation—disrupting this base undermines the metabolic cycle of energy flows within marine ecosystems.Overfishing of lower trophic levels has shortened the food chain and sometimes has removed one or more of the “links,” increasing the system’s vulnerability to natural and human induced stresses. For example, in the North Sea the cod population has been so depleted that fishermen are now harvesting a lower trophic species called pout, which the cod used to eat. The pout eat krill and copepods. Krill also eat copepods. As the pout are commercially harvested, the krill population expands and the copepod population declines drastically. (In other areas of the ocean, krill are captured and used as an animal-feed additive, hindering the recovery of the whales that depend upon them for food.) Because copepods are the main food of young cod, the cod population cannot recover from initial fisheries exploitation.26Fishing down the food chain illustrates how capture fisheries organized under competitive market conditions and the drive to accumulate capital are dismantling the marine ecological system that has been developing for millions of years. In addition, fishing for lower trophic level species deceptively masks marine fish extraction, as millions of tons of fish are harvested each year from the oceans. People continue to be provided with seafood on their menus, never realizing the full impact of overfishing the top predators. Fishing down the food chain, due to overfishing in the higher tropic levels, depletes the food resources on which predatory fishes depend. As noted earlier, marine predatory species are extremely vulnerable to losses of prey.Collapse of Coastal Marine EcosystemsThe previous examples demonstrate how species extinction decreases the resiliency of trophic level interactions.

Even more problematic, however, is the widespread collapse of entire ecosystems resulting from overfishing. Historical data suggests that species and population declines due to overfishing are direct preconditions for the collapse of entire coastal ecosystems. The collapse of whole-scale ecosystems not only threatens the ecological resiliency of the marine environment, but also disrupts

the human populations that rely on the coastal ecosystem for subsistence or livelihoods. “Overfishing and ecological extinction predate and precondition

modern ecological investigations and the collapse of marine ecosystems in recent times, raising the possibility that many more marine ecosystems may be vulnerable to collapse in the near future.”27

Kelp forests, coral reefs, seagrass beds, and estuaries are examples of coastal ecosystems that have collapsed in parts of the world due to overfishing and other forms of environmental degradation. These ecosystems provide complex habitats for a multitude of species and often are the foundation of many local fishing communities. For example, the kelp forests of the Gulf of Maine experienced severe deforestation and widespread reductions in the number of trophic levels due to the population explosion of sea urchins, the primary herbivores that eat kelp. The following account details such a sequence of events:Atlantic cod and other large ground fish are voracious predators of sea urchins. These fishes kept sea urchin populations small enough to allow persistence of kelp forests despite intensive aboriginal and early European hook-and-line fishing for at least 5000 years. New mechanized fishing technology in the 1920s set off a rapid decline in numbers and body size of coastal cod in the Gulf of Maine….Kelp forests disappeared with the rise in sea urchins due to removal of predatory fish.28In other words, industrial fishing operations intensified the exploitation of marine ecosystems, transforming natural conditions.A number of human activities are leading to the collapse of coral reefs. Overfishing is one of the causes. Deforestation is another. Clearing forests leads to muddy rivers filled with sediment, which moves downstream and smothers coral reefs. But the main force driving massive destruction of coral reefs is global warming. The increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to a warming and increase in the acidity of ocean water. As a result, multicolored, healthy coral reefs filled with a rich abundance of biodiversity are being bleached and turned into gray-white

skeletons. Without radical changes to the social metabolic order, the death of the world’s coral reefs could take place within a few decades. When coral reefs die, the fauna dependent upon them also die.29 Natural conditions, everywhere, are being transformed by the social metabolic order of capitalism. A general progression of environmental degradation accompanies this system of growth, creating ecological crises in the conditions of life.The most recent changes to coastal ecosystems caused by overfishing involve microbial population explosions. The microbial loop has been found to be more sophisticated and complex than ever expected. Population explosions of microbes are responsible for increasing eutrophication, diseases of marine species, toxic bloom, and even diseases such as cholera that affect human health.30 Chesapeake Bay is now a bacterially dominated ecosystem with a trophic structure unrecognizable from that of a century ago. This rapid and drastic change in ecosystem composition is due to the overfishing of suspension feeders that filtered microbes out of the water column. Bacterial domination of Chesapeake Bay and the deforestation of kelp beds in the Gulf of Maine serve as two examples of how depletion of top predators leads to the collapse of entire ecosystems.

Growth guarantees collapse of ocean biodiversity via over-fishing, acidification and pollutionBradbury, 12 (Roger Bradbury, an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian National University, July 13, 2012, The New York Times, “A World Without Coral Reefs” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-reefs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems , neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation . There will be remnants here and there,

but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be. Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem. What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.” Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists. This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals. But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on

the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them. Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth , so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years . In short,

these forces are unstoppable and irreversible . And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us.

Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades. Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves . Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective international action on emissions. We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients, particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury. This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly

damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed. What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom , as the remains of the limestone

reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.

Economic growth is destroy ocean biodiversity in a plethora of ways—causes total collapse within our lifetimesVogl, 3/19/14 (Drs. Robert & Sonia Vogl, President and Vice President, Illinois Renewable Energy Association, March 19, 2014, Rock River Times, “Ocean apocalypse: Data-based trends suggest looming disaster” http://rockrivertimes.com/2014/03/19/ocean-apocalypse-data-based-trends-suggest-looming-disaster/, jj)

Jeremy Jackson, respected ocean researcher, gave a presentation to the Naval War College called “Ocean Apocalypse” that makes the case that the ocean is changing and we have caused it. It can be seen as a 1-1/2 hour video on YouTube. Dr. Jackson, a senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and professor of oceanography emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, foresees disaster, based on current environmental trends. The video is a grim reminder of the extent of damage coming from our way of life, including, but beyond that, of climate change. Jackson sees our environmental problems as social, economic and political, with all of us contributing to them as we enjoy our existing lifestyle. The major adverse impacts on the ocean are from overfishing, pollution and climate change. Fish biomass has been systematically reduced over the last 100 years. Global fishing removes the protein source from a billion poor people. The most dramatic collapse is that of the once-abundant cod fishery along the Atlantic coast. Trawling for shrimp scrapes the ocean bottom, reducing productivity. Ocean pollution from garbage, sewage and toxins adds to the problem. Birds such as albatrosses have been found dead along shorelines, their stomachs filled with cans and plastic. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is similar in size to Lake Erie and primarily results from fertilizer runoff from Midwest cornfields. In 2001, there were 150 dead zones in the oceans; by 2013, they increased to 400 with no signs of decreasing. The arctic ice caps are expected to be gone within 10 to 30 years. With the melting of sea ice, some polar bears are staying on land feeding at garbage dumps. The pH of the oceans has fallen, slowing calcium fixation in coral, clams and oysters, threatening their existence. The average temperature of the sea has increased. As the water warms, it slows the descent of lighter surface water to the depth characteristic of ocean turnover, limiting the upwelling of nutrients essential for fish food. One sign of hope is that Hurricane Sandy has crystalized a determination in New York and New Jersey to tackle the challenge of climate change. Within the lifetime of a child born today, rising sea levels are expected to permanently cover south Florida. An oil executive informed Jackson that they are already hiring a Dutch engineer to study the possibility of the Louisiana shoreline moving inland to Baton Rouge, La. The extent of the damage would be exceedingly costly and beyond the ability of insurance firms to cover it. Jackson sees climate change as the greatest security threat facing the U.S. and the globe, and organized his presentation to alert the public to the need to change our economy. Continuous economic growth is not sustainable .

Oceans Impact EXTPreserving US marine ecosystems is key to human survival Craig 03—Associate Dean for Environmental Programs @ Florida State University [Robin Kundis Craig, “ARTICLE: Taking Steps Toward Marine Wilderness Protection? Fishing and Coral Reef Marine Reserves in Florida and Hawaii,” McGeorge Law Review, Winter 2003, 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155

Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values—the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide—coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. n856 Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. n857 More generally, "ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms , carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements." n858 In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life .

Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable." n859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. [*265] Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. n860Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. n861 Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness.However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." n862 At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea—and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring—even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever we can— especially when the U nited States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world .

Relative probability analysis proves—can’t gamble on oceansKunich 5 – Professor of Law @ Roger Williams University School of Law [John Charles Kunich, “ARTICLE: Losing Nemo: The Mass Extinction Now Threatening the World's Ocean Hotspots,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 2005, 30 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 1

On the other hand, there is an unimaginable cost from failing to preserve the marine hotspots if they contain numerous species of high value at great risk of extinction. We could cost ourselves and our posterity untold advancements in medicine, therapies, genetic resources, nutrients, ecosystem services, and other areas, including perhaps a cure to a global health threat that might not materialize until

centuries from now... truly a "grave error" of the first order . [*128] But if we sit on the sidelines and fail to

invest in hotspots preservation, and we "get lucky" (few species, low value, small extinction risk), our only gain is in the form of saving the money and effort we could have spent on the hotspots. Even if this amounts to several billion dollars a year, it is a small benefit compared to the incalculably catastrophic losses we could suffer if we guess wrong in betting on the inaction option.¶ The Decision Matrix actually under-represents the extent to which the rational decision is to invest in hotspots preservation. Because the Decision Matrix, in tabular form, devotes equal space to each of the sixteen possible combinations of extreme variable values, it can mislead readers into thinking that each of the sixteen outcomes is equally probable. This is most emphatically not the case. Some of these results are far more probable than others. This problem of apparent equality of disparate results is of the same type as a chart that depicts a person's chances of being fatally injured by a

plummeting comet on the way home from work on any given day. There are only two possible results in such a table (survives another day, or killed by meteor), and they would occupy an equal amount of tabular space on the printed page, but the probability of the former outcome is, thankfully, much higher than the likelihood of the latter tragic event.¶ As explained in this Article, it is much more likely that there are numerous, even millions, of unidentified species currently living in the marine

hotspots than that these hotspots are really not centers of profuse biodiversity. It is also very probable that the extinction threat in our oceans is real , and significant , given what we know about the horrific effects wrought on coral reefs and other known marine population centers by overfishing, pollution, sedimentation, and other human-made stressors.

n525 Recent discoveries have revealed very high rates of endemism in small areas such as seamounts, which are extremely vulnerable to trawl damage. n526 Even in the deep ocean areas, there is evidence that new technologies are making it both a possibility and a reality to exploit the previously unexploitable biodiversity in these waters via [*129] demersal fishing/trawling, to devastating effect. n527 Only a truly Orwellian brand of doublethink could label as progress the development of fishing methods that do to the benthic habitats what modern clearcutting has done to so many forests, only on a scale 150 times as severe, but it is this "progress" that has brought mass extinction to the seas. n528 However, there is also the positive side, in light of the large numbers of marine species and habitat types, including life forms adapted to extraordinary niches such as hydrothermal vents and the abyss. That is, it would be surprising if there were not highly valuable genetic resources, natural medicines, potential sources of food, and other boons waiting to be discovered there.¶ Therefore, the results that are linked to high, rather than low, values of each of the three variables are far more probable than the converse outcomes. In terms of probabilities, it is much more likely that either a "first order grave error" or "first order jackpot" will occur than a "lucky wager" or an "unused insurance" result. In fact, all of the combinations with either two or three "high" values of the variables are significantly more probable that any of the combinations with two or three "low" variable values. This means that the tilt in favor of betting on the hotspots is much more pronounced than is apparent from a cursory glance at the Decision Matrix. The extreme results are far likelier to fall in favor of hotspots preservation than the opposit e .

War Impact Extensions

War Impact – Offense

Growth Bad – WarMore evidence that growth increases the probability and magnitude of major conflictKlare 2001—Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College (Michael, The next great arms race, Foreign Affairs. New York: Summer 1993. Vol. 72, Iss. 3; pg. 136, 17 pgs, ProQuest)

Clearly the growing military potential of the Pacific Rim countries is closely tied to their rapid growth in economic power. Propelled in most cases by an export-driven industrial strategy, these countries have achieved impressive gains in GNP over the past two decades, while the economies of most other nations have declined. Between 1978 and 1989 the combined GNP of China, Japan and the so-called little tigers--the newly industrialized countries (NICS) of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand--increased by 166 percent, from $1.5 trillion to $4 trillion, while the total GNP of the world increased by only 109 percent. The steady rise in GNP in these

countries has provided their governments with access to increased economic resources, which many have chosen to invest in the

expansion and modernization of military infrastructures. Total military spending by Japan and the six NICS rose from $31.7 billion in 1979 to $51-4 billion in 1989, an increase of 62 percent.(1) More recent data suggest that military spending by these countries, excluding Indonesia, continued to rise in the early 1990s (see map).(2) Although reliable data on China's military outlays are difficult to acquire (because so much of it is hidden in nonmilitary accounts), available information suggests that such spending declined slightly in the mid-1980s but has soared since 1989, rising by 1O to 15 percent in each of the past three years. In all of these countries, moreover, increased military spending has been accompanied by stepped-up purchases of imported weapons and increased investment in domestic arms production capabilities. The burgeoning economic power of the Pacific Rim countries is related to their military potential in other significant ways. As trading nations that are highly dependent on seaborne commerce for imports and exports, these countries naturally have a strong interest in the free movement of maritime trade--an interest that is manifest in their growing investment in naval forces. Japan, for instance, is building four or more Aegis-class destroyers, plus a fleet of modern frigates and submarines; Taiwan has ordered six Lafayette-class frigates from France and is building eight PFG-class frigates under license from the United States; Singapore is building five Type-62 corvettes under license from Germany; Malaysia has ordered two missile frigates from Britain; Thailand has acquired six Jianghu-class frigates from China; and Indonesia has purchased 39 former East German naval vessels (including 12 guided missile corvettes) from Germany. To finance continued economic

growth these countries seek to harvest the oil and fishing resources of their offshore territories; and because the

boundaries of these offshore regions--or "exclusive economic zones" (EEZs)--are in many cases overlapping and contested, there is a growing risk of territorial conflict. This risk is most acute in the case of the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos, two groups of islands in the South China Sea that are subject to competing claims by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Because the islands are thought to sit astride vast oil reserves, each country has resisted efforts by the others to claim and occupy the islands, and each has periodically sent naval vessels into the area to assert its respective claim--on some occasions producing armed clashes. More recently, China has built a military airstrip (capable of accommodating its 27 fighters) and naval facilities on Woody Island in the Paracels. Economic growth in the

Pacific Rim is closely tied to technological development, and this too has significant military implications. To sustain their economic growth into the 21st century, many countries have invested in the development of modern electronics, communications and aerospace industries. While the products of these industries are intended for civilian markets, these technologies also have significant military uses--especially the development of hightech weapons of the sort used with such dramatic effect in the Persian Gulf conflict. As these industrial efforts mature, therefore, the Pacific Rim countries will be in a strong position to manufacture advanced military systems and components. Of course, the nations of the Pacific Rim will not benefit equally from the accumulation of wealth and technology in the region. Some, like Cambodia, North Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam, have benefited very little from the economic growth of the 1980s and are not likely to make significant gains in the near future; others, like China and Indonesia, have generated significant pockets of prosperity but still retain large reservoirs of poverty and underdevelopment. This disparity in the distribution of wealth could itself prove a significant source of conflict, especially when the divide between rich and poor coincides with ethnic or religious differences, or when disputed territories (such as the Paracel and Spratly islands) may provide significant sources of future wealth. As memory of the Cold War recedes, and with it fear of the Soviet Union (and its successor states), regional security concerns will increasingly be shaped by worry over the potential military threat posed by China and Japan, the two most powerful nations in the area, and by other regional antagonisms. China has recently increased its military spending and appears to be placing greater emphasis on preparation for regional conflict--an emphasis that has understandably generated anxiety in neighboring countries, especially Taiwan. These two states have greatly increased their bilateral trade and have initiated direct political consultations, but neither one has repudiated its historical claim to the territory of the other and both have increased their investment in military preparedness. Indeed, the China-Taiwan nexus probably constitutes the most vibrant arms market in the world today, with leaders of both countries signing multibillion-dollar contracts for the acquisition of modern weapons. By agreeing to sell F-16s to Taiwan, the United States has emboldened other Western suppliers-notably France and Germany--to offer late-model aircraft and warships to Taipei despite threats of economic retaliation by Beijing. The Chinese, for their part, have been taking advantage of hard times in Russia by acquiring a wide range of sophisticated Soviet weapons at rock-bottom prices; among the items mentioned in recent reports of Chinese bargain hunting are MiG-31 interceptors, Tu-22 bombers, T-72M main battle tanks, A-50 airborne warning and control planes, and S-300 ground-based antiballistic missiles. Equally worrisome is Beijing's military buildup on Hainan and Woodylsland, signaling an inclination to dominate the South China Sea area by force rather than to negotiate shared control with other claimants to the Spratly and Paracel chains. From this perspective, China's recent acquisition of long-range aircraft and in-flight refueling technology from the former Soviet Union is considered particularly menacing. Should Beijing continue to acquire advanced weapons and technologies at its current pace, it will undoubtedly spur neighbors such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to accelerate their own arms-acquisition efforts and to place further emphasis on the development of high-tech arms industries. While Japan has publicly eschewed any intention of building up a large, offensively oriented military capacity, its neighbors retain such traumatic memories of the Japanese conquest and occupation during World War II that any sign of increased military activity by Japan inevitably generates anxieties throughout the region. Thus, Tokyo's recent decisions to send (noncombatant) peacekeeping forces to Cambodia--the first overseas deployment of Japanese troops since World War II--has provoked much concern in Southeast Asia. Also worrisome to some

neighbors is Japan's planned procurement of large tank-transport ships and long-range transport aircraft--acquisitions that suggest an interest in power projection capabilities of a sort the Japanese have not possessed since 1945. Should Tokyo proceed with these plans, it will surely rekindle fears of Japanese expansionism thereby spark increased arms spending by other Pacific Rim nations. Regional tensions have also been fed by North Korea's apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons and its continuing refusal to open suspect nuclear facilities to international inspection. Although Pyongyang's nuclear activities are of greatest concern to South Korea and the United States (which still stations 35,000 troops in Korea), they also menace other countries in the area, especially Japan, and are an added spur to regional arms buildups. No other Pacific Rim countries pose a threat on a scale comparable to China, Japan and North Korea, but other regional rivalries abound and are contributing to the widespread increases in military spending. With 700,000 troops, the Vietnamese army remains a potent military force, and is often cited by Thailand as a justification for its continuing arms buildup. Similarly, the military buildup in Malaysia evokes understandable concern in neighboring Singapore, as does the steady improvement in Indonesian capabilities. AU of these rivalries are balanced by growing trade and political links within the region, but are nevertheless likely to figure in the long-term security planning of Pacific Rim states. For all of these reasons, the Pacific Rim nations are likely to continue the expansion and modernization of their military capabilities in the years ahead. These enhancements will take several forms. First is the development of modern naval and ground forces with a significant capacity for power projection--that is, the ability to project military power to neighboring countries or to offshore locations. Second is the importation of modern weapons and combat-support systems. Third is the development of domestic military industries. And for some countries, this process could entail a fourth dimension: the development or enhancement of weapons of mass destruction and their associated delivery systems. No doubt the most significant development in military organization is the transformation of the Chinese military from a large manpower-intensive force with relatively obsolete equipment to a smaller but much better equipped force. The total strength of the People's Liberation Army has dropped from approximately four million troops in the mid-1980s to roughly three million today, while more money has been channeled toward the development and production of modern missiles, air and naval craft In 1985 China's Central Military Commission directed the PLA to shift its primary strategic focus from preparation for all-out war with the U.S.S.R. to preparation for regional conflicts on China's periphery. In line with this shift, the Chinese are upgrading their power projection capabilities and have deployed additional forces at bases in Zhanjiang on the southern coast and on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. While the total strength of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces is likely to remain quite modest (under 250,000 soldiers), reflecting both internal and external concerns over the possible revival of Japanese militarism, the SDF is acquiring increasingly capable equipment and, under pressure from the United States, has extended its maritime defensive screen to 1,000 nautical miles from the main islands. Taiwan and South Korea are also placing greater emphasis on their long-range air and naval capabilities, procuring hundreds of new combat planes from the United States and building dozens of new frigates and destroyers. North Korea, unable to compete with South Korea in high-tech conventional arms due to its financial straits and the collapse of the U.S.S.R., appears to have placed greater emphasis on the development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. In the southern area, regional powers--notably Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand--are developing modern multiservice military forces with significant power projection capabilities. These countries had until recently emphasized the counterinsurgency capabilities of their militaries and thus lagged behind the northern powers (China, Japan, Taiwan and the two Koreas) in the development of modern air and naval forces. To make up for this deficiency and to enhance their capacity for power projection these countries are investing in the development of "blue water" navies (that is, forces capable of oceanic rather than merely coastal operation) as well as in the formation of mobile combat forces and long-range bomber/attack squadrons. Characteristic of these efforts are plans by Malaysia to acquire two modern frigates (with more likely to follow) from Britain and to create a division-sized rapid deployment force equipped with mobile artillery and antitank weapons. Singapore is also constructing a bluewater navy (to be organized around the Type-62 corvettes now being built) and, like Malaysia, is creating a division-sized RDF. Meanwhile, Thailand is modernizing its navy and air force and building new air and naval facilities on its southeastern coast, giving Bangkok a greater military presence in the South China Sea. Indonesia is also expanding its blue-water naval capabilities and, like Singapore and Thailand, has ordered F-16 fighters from the United States. To equip their new forces and to enhance the combat capabilities of existing units, the Pacific Rim countries are buying significant quantities of modern weapons and support systems. Total spending on imported arms by the major Pacific Rim powers (China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the two Koreas) rose from an average of $2.5 billion per year in 1979-81 to $4.6 billion in 1987-89 (in current dollars), an increase of 84 percent.(3) More recent arms import statistics are not yet available, but press reports from the region suggest that the trend toward ever-increasing levels of weapons spending has continued into the 1990s. The data on arms transfers also indicates that many of the Pacific Rim countries are acquiring sophisticated radar and electronic gear, airborne reconnaissance and patrol planes and other high-tech equipment. Military officials in these countries are acutely aware of the impact of modern technology on combat operations and are determined to provide their forces with as much high-tech equipment as their budgets will allow. Thus Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have all purchased E-2C Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft from the United States (Japan will also acquire two Boeing E-767 Airborne Warning and Control System planes in 1998), and both Taiwan and Japan have drawn on domestic and imported technology to develop advanced radar systems of their own. HOME-MADE WEAPONS To a greater degree than in any other arms importing area of the Third World, acquisitions in the Pacific Rim have been accompanied by "offset" agreements entailing the transfer of military technology from supplier to recipient and by direct government investment in military research and development and production. All the NICS, plus China, Japan and North Korea, are now producers of at least some military equipment, and many have invested considerable resources in the establishment of modern naval and aerospace production facilities. As a result these countries are becoming increasingly self-sufficient in the production of advanced weapons systems and, in some cases, have emerged as major arms exporters. The development of domestic arms industries by emerging industrial powers is not unique to the Pacific Rim area. What makes the situation in the region so significant, however, is the combination of growing economic resources with which to pursue these plans and the emergence in many of these countries of civilian industries with considerable scientific and technological expertise. Because the more advanced Pacific Rim countries are able to finance their military endeavors through growing trade

surpluses and can draw upon domestic firms for necessary technical know-how, they are likely to outstrip all other Third World producers in the early 21st century and to move much closer to the advanced industrial powers. Currently the Pacific Rim countries with the most elaborate arms production capabilities are China and Japan. China has long produced a wide variety of military equipment, much of it based on Soviet designs of the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years the Chinese have attempted to upgrade their equipment with imported technology and have begun to produce missiles and electronic systems of a relatively modern design. Some of this technology has come from the West, through both licit and illicit channels.(4) Recently, China has sought to benefit from economic hardship in Russia by buying Soviet weapons and technology at bargain-basement prices. Japan, although not normally known as a major arms producer, has become self-sufficient in many combat systems and is producing a host of advanced weapons under license from the United States. South Korea's defense expenditures rose from about $10.6 billion in 1990 to an estimated $12.4 billion in 1992, an increase of 17 percent, and are expected to rise by similar amounts in the years to follow. Moreover, the proportion of its defense budget devoted to research and development is scheduled to grow steadily throughout the 1990s, from 1.5 percent in 199O to 3 percent in 1996 and 7 percent at the beginning of the next century. These funds will be used to develop indigenous military-technological capabilities and to attract foreign technology through arms-related offset programs. Ultimately, Seoul seeks to become self-sufficient in the production of basic combat systems and to rely on domestic sources for all but the most advanced technologies. Taiwan's development plans look much like South Korea's, spurred by a similar goal of achieving self-sufficiency in the production of all but the most sophisticated weapons systems by the year 2000. As in South Korea, Taiwanese defense spending is expected to rise in the years ahead, with much of this increase devoted to the enhancement of indigenous research and development and production capabilities. To promote greater self-reliance in the development of military-related technologies, Taipei has funneled vast sums into government laboratories and private research and development firms and has financed the education of thousands of Taiwanese scientists and engineers--many of them at advanced educational institutions abroad, especially the United States. Although similar to the South Korean arms program in many respects, the Taiwanese effort differs from South Korea's in the degree to which it relies on government facilities rather than private firms. Hence, the design and development of the aircraft and missiles is largely the responsibility of the government-owned Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, while the actual production of such systems is performed by the air force's Aero Industry Development Center. Similarly, major ship construction is conducted by the state-owned China Shipbuilding Corporation. After China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan the most ambitious arms production endeavors in the Pacific Rim area are to be found

in Indonesia and Singapore. Since the mid-1970s the Indonesian government has devoted considerable resources to the development of a domestic aerospace and shipbuilding capacity. Until now these firms have concentrated on the acquisition of foreign technology through licensing and coproduction ventures; like South Korea and Taiwan, however, Indonesia is increasing its investment in military research and development and seeks to become more self-reliant in the development of key military technologies. Singapore, in line with its policy of promoting export-oriented industrial growth, has developed a diversified defense industry with a strong research and development base. As in Taiwan, the state has played a key role in the development and management of domestic arms firms. Major projects at present include the overhaul and modernization of military aircraft, assembly of Italian S-211 jet trainers and French AS-332 Super Puma helicopters, and licensed production of German Type-62 missile corvettes. In addition to producing arms for domestic use, Singaporean companies also assemble and manufacture a wide variety of military systems for export. Given the current limitations of their scientific-industrial infrastructures, Indonesia and Singapore are not likely to achieve the high degree of military self-sufficiency expected of South Korea and Taiwan in the early 21st century. The same, of course, can be said for Malaysia and Thailand. Nevertheless, these countries are enjoy ing high levels of economic growth and are placing greater emphasis on the development of high-tech industries. If these trends continue for another 1O or 15 years, many of these countries will be capable of producing a wide variety of modern weapons with substantial indigenous design input.

Impact Calculus---Magnitude—increased capabilities mean wars are worse in the upswingModelski & Thompson 96 [professor of political science, professor of political science, George and William, Leading Sectors and World Powers, pg 20-22]

Goldstein (1985, 1987, 1988, 1991a) has probably contributed more than anyone else to reviving the question of how wars and prosperity are linked . His 1988 analysis went some way in summarizing many of the arguments concerning economic long waves and war. His 1991 analysis is one of the more sophisticated empirical studies to emerge after nearly a century of controversy (spatiotemporal boundaries: world system from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). The basic perspective that emerges from his analyses, outlined in figure 2.2, sees economic upswings increas ing the probability of severe wars . Severe wars usher in a phase of stagnation from which the world economy eventually recovers leading to another resurgence of robust economic growth. Goldstein’s analysis suggests that this process has gone on since at least 1495. Economic upswings create economic surpluses and full war chests . The ability to wage war makes severe wars more likely . Severe wars, in turn, consume the surpluses and war chests and put an end to the growth upswing. Decades are required to rebuild. While there may be some gains registered in terms of resource mobilization for combat purposes, these gains are offset by the losses brought about by wartime distortions and destruction. Goldstein is careful to distinguish between production and prices. Prices, in his view, are functions of war. Other things being equal, the severity of the war greatly effects the rate of war-induced inflation—in other words, the greater the severity, then the higher the rate of inflation. When prices rise, real wages decline. Yet he also notes that production (production waves are said to precede war/price waves by some ten to fifteen years) is already stagnating toward the end of the upswing. This phenomenon is explained in terms of demand increases outstripping supply. As a result, inflation occurs. The lack of clarity on this issue may be traceable to the lack of specification among innovation, investment, and production. Cycles in innovation and investment are viewed as reinforcing the production long wave. Increases in innovation facilitate economic growth but growth discourages further innovation. Investment increases on the upswing but, eventually, over investment results. Investors retrench and growth slows down as a consequence. What is not exactly specified is whether innovation, investment, war, or some combination of the three processes is responsible for ending the upswing. Goldstein also raises the question of how these economic/war cycles impact the distribution of capabilities among the major powers. War severity increases capability concentration . Relative capabilities then begin a process of diffusion as they move toward equality among the major powers. Another bout of severe war ensues and the cycle repeats itself. In addition to war, differential rates of innovation and production influence relative capability standings. Presumably, all three factors share some responsibility for generating the fluctuations in capability concentration.

We outweigh on probability and magnitude---wars during growth are more likely and worseMager 86 [Nathan, economist, The Kondratieif Waves, p 197-8]

The overall trend of the economy shapes perceptions as to its strength and direction. In a hull market, "experts" are almost uniformly optimistic; in a bear market the owlish analysts almost universally suggest caution. It is during the upward swings , soon after a trough and just before a peak,

that wars become more likely . It should be noted that peak wars are the result of a different kind of socioeconomic psychological pressure and have quite different economic results than trough wars. Nations become socially and politically unsettled after a long period of boom and expansion , perhaps because in their final stages, peoples' expectations begin to outrun actual growth in the general level of prosperity. War then becomes the ultimate destination. Inasmuch as all nations arc attempt ing to expand simultaneously , the intense competition for resources and markets leads eventually to military confrontations , which become contagious.

One explanation suggested is that during trough wars the public is still largely concerned with private considerations and their own wellbeing. They tend to be less interested in international disputes, world crusades, or campaigns involving large investment of cash, effort, and the nervous energy needed to pursue projects to a conclusion. Trough wars tend to be short . They are more a matter of choice and sudden decision by the stronger power. Inasmuch as peak wars are the result of frustration of expectations {usually with economic

elements), peak wars tend to be more desperate, more widespread, and more destructive .

2NC – Boehmer High rates of economic growth makes conflict escalation more likely – increases resolve of leadersBoehmer 10 (Charles, professor of political science at the University of Texas – El Paso and Ph.D. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict: 1875-1999,” Defence and Peace Economics, June, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pg. 249-268)The theory set forth earlier theorizes that economic growth increases perceptions of state strength , increasing the likelihood of violent interstate conflicts. Economic growth appears to increase the resolve of leaders to stand against challenges and the willingness to escalate disputes. A non-random pattern exists where higher rates of GDP growth over multiple years are positively and significantly related to the most severe international conflicts , whereas this is not true for overall conflict initiations. Moreover, growth of military expenditures, as a measure of the war chest proposition, does not offer any explanation for violent interstate conflicts. This is not to say that growth of military expenditures never has any effect on the occurrence of war, although such a link is not generally true in the aggregate using a large sample of states. In comparison, higher rates of economic growth are significantly related to violent interstate conflicts in the aggregate. States with growing economies are more apt to reciprocate military challenges by other states and become involved in violent interstate conflicts. The results also show that theories from the Crisis-Scarcity perspective lack explanatory power linking GDP growth rates to war at the state level of analysis. This is not to say that such theories completely lack explanatory power in general, but more particularly that they cannot directly link economic growth rates to state behavior in violent interstate conflicts. In contrast, theories of diversionary conflict may well hold some explanatory power, although not regarding GDP growth in a general test of states from all regions of the world across time. Perhaps diversionary theory better explains state behaviors short of war, where the costs of externalizing domestic tensions do not become too costly, or in relation to the foreign policies of particular countries. In many circumstances, engaging in a war to divert attention away from domestic conditions would seemingly exacerbate domestic crisis conditions unless the chances of victory were practically assured. Nonetheless, this study does show that domestic conflict is associated with interstate conflict. If diversionary conflict theory has any traction as an economic explanation of violent interstate conflicts, it may require the study of other explanatory variables besides overall GDP growth rates, such as unemployment or inflation rates. The contribution of this article has been to examine propositions about economic growth in a global study. Most existing studies on this topic focus on only the United States, samples of countries that are more developed on average (due to data availability in the past), or are based on historical information and not economic GDP data. While I have shown that there is no strong evidence linking military expenditures to violent interstate conflicts at the state level of analysis, much of the remaining Growth-as-Catalyst perspective is grounded in propositions that are not directly germane to questions about state conflict behavior, such as those linking state behavior to long-cycles, or those that remain at the systemic level. What answer remains linking economic growth to war once we eliminate military expenditures as an explanation? Considering that the concept of foreign policy mood is difficult to identify and measure, and that the bulk of the literature relies solely on the American historical experience, I do not rely on that concept. It is still possible that such moods affect some decision-makers. Instead, similar to Blainey, I find that economic growth, when sustained over a stretch of years, has its strongest effect on states once they find themselves in an international crisis. The results of this study suggest that states such as China, which have a higher level of opportunity to become involved in violent interstate conflicts due to their capabilities, geographic location, history of conflict, and so on, should also have a higher willingness to fight after enjoying multiple years of recent economic growth. One does not have to assume that an aggressive China will emerge from growth. If conflicts do present themselves, then China may be more likely to escalate a war given its recent national performance.

Prefer our study – others are not empirical, lack coherent definitions, and don’t specify duration of growthBoehmer 10 (Charles, professor of political science at the University of Texas – El Paso and Ph.D. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict: 1875-1999,” Defence and Peace Economics, June, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pg. 249-268)

The literature cited above is quite diverse concerning units of analysis, theories, research methods, and data. One study such as this cannot re-examine all the potential hypotheses therein. However, this paper offers some general critiques across the literature. First, most of the studies at the systemic level of analysis are either difficult to substantiate empirically, such as providing evidence that long cycles are actually 'cycles' endogenous to the global economy and not simply statistical random walks (Beck, 1991), or are theoretically imprecise concerning mechanisms and processes . Some work in this area lacks agency, linking periodicities of economic cycles to individual states. Second, most of the studies that focus on foreign

policy moods lack a well-developed conception of 'mood'. How could we best identify such a variable and does it extend equally to leaders and those in society? Third, most of these studies from both perspectives are unspecific about the duration of growth and its effects on conflict. Shorter-term growth rates are often undifferentiated from longer-term economic development. Some studies simply use one-year lags of economic growth while others measure growth over several years using moving averages, whereas others focus on long waves or cycles of more than a decade. There are important theoretical distinctions in such choices.

Economic growth makes conflicts more likely to escalate – inflates perceptions of strength and chance of victoryBoehmer 10 (Charles, professor of political science at the University of Texas – El Paso and Ph.D. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict: 1875-1999,” Defence and Peace Economics, June, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pg. 249-268)

The theory of economic growth and conflict presented here rests on the basic assumption that growth is indicative, or perceived to be a sign, of successful state performance. Blainey (1988) states that economic growth is a source of national optimism, although optimism is a difficult concept to measure across states without using standardized opinion data (across time and space) and I hence do not adopt it here. In comparison, GDP growth is a measure of national performance. Leaders of states are evaluated on the domestic conditions of their state by those that keep them in power, no matter how large that group may be. States that are growing may be perceived to be performing well, possibly even becoming more powerful or prosperous than in the past. Still, states often experience economic growth, whereas violent interstate conflicts are rare events. I do not argue that economic growth is a general and direct source of conflict between states. I contend instead that growth acts as a catalyst, pouring fuel on fires where conflicts have already commence d . Economic growth should influence the perceptions state leaders have about iheir state's performance. I argue that economic growth acts as a catalyst for violent interstate conflicts by increasing the willingness of states to use military force in foreign policy, particularly to reciprocate militarized threats and uses of force or to escalate conflicts in a violent manner. Most and Starr (1989: 22) define willingness as "the willingness to choose (even if the choice is no action), and to employ available capabilities to further some policy option over others." Most and Starr situate willingness against a background of 'opportunity'. Naturally, not all states have the same opportunity to realistically choose policies that lead to interstate violence or war , at least with an equal chance of victory. Hence, the opportunity for war varies for states. Later I will present control variables for conflict opportunities but for now will note that some factors increase or decrease opportunity, and are important here. Our goal must be to isolate and control for opportunity variables. First, states that are major powers will have a higher capability of sustaining war and foreign policies that increase the chance of international conflict globally. Second, states with fewer neighbors are less likely to be involved in conflicts compared to those with many neighbors . In summary, economic growth is not a simple and direct cause of war or lesser conflicts because it affects the willingness of leaders in certain contexts that change from state to state and over time. Economic growth is an indicator to leaders that their state may be strong and may win international conflicts, although this may be more perception than fact. Iraq's GDP growth averaged 16% between 1974 and 1979 before Saddam Hussein' s regime initiated the Iraq-Iran War in 1980, although the war became an eight-year struggle of attrition nonetheless. Turning back to the Chinese example, policy-makers may view Chinese growth through different lenses. Those that are Realists, pessimistic, or generally fearful of Chinese power may see such growth in GDP and military expenditures as a threat, whereas others that are Liberal may see the creation of an economy of scale and increasing economic interaction with the West that has resulted in a booming economy. Predictions of future bellicose Chinese foreign policy must be evaluated against a background of opportunity. As China develops, it may face fewer severe conflicts, which threaten war with its main trading partners, and also with its bordering states with whom there may be competing territorial claims, although as a major power it faces a higher potential for conflict compared with a state such as Slovakia or Costa Rica. In addition, its proximity to numerous other states means there are more potential rivals or enemies compared with what New Zealand, for example, faces in its neighborhood. The point here is to make it clear that war need not be a result of economic growth but that when growth does contribute to interstate violence it does so by serving as a catalyst of willingness against a backdrop of opportunities. Chinese leaders may be less likely to back away from violent interstate conflict if a crisis occurs during a period of economic growth than they would before economic growth, and this risk is higher for China because its major power status and region provide more opportunities relative to most other states.

Growth encourages saber rattling, cyclical violence, and misperception of power that enables bellicosityBoehmer 2010 – PhD in political science from Penn State, professor at UTEP, also teaches research methods and econometrics (5/14, Charles R., Defence and Peace Economics, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict”, http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/991862__922235442.pdf)

The earliest literature predicting that economic growth leads to war dates back nearly a century. The basic theme advanced is that economic growth expands war-making capability. This is known as the ‘war-chest proposition’. Nikolai Kondratieff (1926) associated the frequency of war and other social upheavals to ‘long-cycles’ in the global economy of roughly 25 year phases of economic growth followed by contractions of similar length. Scholars in economics and political science have theorized that the power capabilities of states, particularly the major powers, also follow cycles (but not necessarily Kondratieff cycles) (Doran, 1983, 1985; Doran and Parsons, 1980), result in power transitions as states growing in power surpass states that had been at the top of the international power hierarchy (Organski and Kugler, 1980), or more generally relate to economic expansion (Kuznets, 1966; Choucri and North, 1975). Some scholars have provided evidence supporting Kondratieff’s claim that expansions in the global economy increase the frequency or severity of international conflicts (Hansen, 1932; Väyrynen, 1983; Goldstein, 1988; Mansfield, 1988; Pollins, 1996; Pollins and Murrin, 1999). However, studies that argue long cycles affect the behavior of individual states without direct observation of state behavior commit an ecological fallacy. It is possible that the foreign policies of most states could be unaffected by periodicities or patterns at the systemic level of analysis. This study, in contrast, studies the effect of economic growth at the state (monadic) level of analysis. Blainey’s (1988) analysis suggests that the ‘war chest’ theme can be generalized to the state level of analysis. Kennedy (1987) also offers a historical discussion of the war chest theme to explain the rise and fall of major powers.Some studies argue that it is not increases in military capabilities from economic growth alone that raise the risk of conflict but also a higher willingness to use such capabilities by directly affecting the decision-making process. Some scholars argue that growth leads to ‘optimism’ or bellicose foreign policy ‘moods’ (Kondratieff, 1926; MacFie, 1938; Klingberg, 1952, 1983; Kuznets, 1966; Väyrynen, 1983; Holmes, 1985; Elder and Holmes, 1985; Blainey, 1988; Holmes and Keck, 1999; Pollins and Schweller, 1999). The studies by Klingberg, Holmes and his associates, and Pollins and Schweller (1999), investigate foreign policy moods in the American case and find that war and other disputes are more likely to occur when the American economy is in growth phases. Two studies avoid the ecological fallacy mentioned above by linking American foreign policy to Kondratieff cycles (Pollins and Schweller, 1999; Holmes and Keck, 1999). To directly test this proposition cross-nationally is difficult given that public opinion data are limited, especially for non-democratic regimes, which could lead to sample bias.However, Blainey’s theory can in part be generalized to the state level of analysis and is hence most relevant to this study. Blainey argues that economic growth perverts perceptions of power, leading states to be more optimistic about their chances of victory in international contests. “While there may be no clear pattern to war, one ‘clue’ we have is that optimism abounds at their onset” (Blainey, 1988: 41). Economic growth increases optimism that states will triumph in international crises, leading to a heightened risk of war. Blainey attempted to be systematic in his review of history using informal case studies or examples to support his hypothesis, although few studies have undertaken a similar test using quantitative data. Hence, this study seeks to test Blainey’s proposition, which is most appropriate at the monadic level of analysis.

Probability—growth makes the escalation of all conflicts more likely by vindicating risky behaviorBoehmer 2010 – PhD in political science from Penn State, professor at UTEP, also teaches research methods and econometrics (5/14, Charles R., Defence and Peace Economics, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict”, http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/991862__922235442.pdf)

The theory of economic growth and conflict presented here rests on the basic assumption that growth is indicative, or perceived to be a sign, of successful state performance. Blainey (1988) states that economic growth is a source of national optimism, although optimism is a difficult concept to measure across states without

using standardized opinion data (across time and space) and I hence do not adopt it here. In comparison, GDP growth is a measure of national performance. Leaders of states are evaluated on the domestic conditions of their state by those that keep them in power, no matter

how large that group may be. States that are growing may be perceived to be performing well, possibly even becoming more powerful or prosperous than in the past.

Still, states often experience economic growth, whereas violent interstate conflicts are rare events. I do not argue that economic growth is a general and direct source

of conflict between states. I contend instead that growth acts as a catalyst, pouring fuel on fires where conflicts have already commenced. Economic growth should influence the perceptions state leaders have about their state’s performance. I argue that economic growth

acts as a catalyst for violent interstate conflicts by increasing the willingness of states to use military force in foreign policy,

particularly to reciprocate militarized threats and uses of force or to escalate conflicts in a violent manner. Most and Starr (1989: 22) define willingness as “the willingness to choose (even if the choice is no action), and to employ available capabilities to further some policy option over others.” Most and Starr situate willingness against a background of ‘opportunity’. Naturally, not all states have the same opportunity to realistically choose policies that lead to interstate violence or war, at least with an equal chance of victory. Hence, the opportunity for war varies for states. Later I will present control variables for conflict opportunities but for now will note that some factors increase or decrease opportunity, and are important here. Our goal must be to isolate and control for opportunity variables. First, states that are major powers will have a higher capability of sustaining war and foreign policies that increase the chance of international conflict globally. Second, states with fewer neighbors are less likely to be involved in conflicts compared to those with many neighbors. In summary, economic growth is not a simple and direct cause of war or lesser conflicts because it affects the willingness of leaders in certain contexts that change from state to state and over time. Economic growth is an indicator to leaders that their state may be strong and may win international conflicts, although this may be more perception than fact. Iraq’s GDP growth averaged 16% between 1974 and 1979 before Saddam Hussein’s regime initiated the Iraq–Iran War in 1980, although the war became an eight-year struggle of attrition nonetheless. Turning back to the Chinese example, policy-makers may view Chinese growth through different lenses. Those that are Realists, pessimistic, or generally fearful of Chinese power may see such growth in GDP and military expenditures as a threat, whereas others that are Liberal may see the creation of an economy of scale and increasing economic interaction with the West that has resulted in a booming economy. Predictions of future bellicose Chinese foreign policy must be evaluated against a background of opportunity. As China develops, it may face fewer severe conflicts, which threaten war with its main trading partners, and also with its bordering states with whom there may be competing territorial claims, although as a major power it faces a higher potential for conflict compared with a state such as Slovakia or Costa Rica. In addition, its proximity to numerous other states means there are more potential rivals or enemies compared with what New Zealand, for example, faces in its neighborhood. The point here is to make it clear that war need not be a result of economic growth but that when growth does contribute to interstate violence it does so by serving as a catalyst of willingness against a backdrop of opportunities. Chinese leaders may be less likely to back away from violent interstate conflict if a crisis occurs during a period of economic growth than they would before economic growth, and this risk is higher for China because its major power status and region provide more opportunities relative to most other states.Based on the rationale above, I do not predict that economic growth makes it more likely that states will initiate militarized conflicts with other states, or that it increases their overall conflict propensity. Economic growth appears dangerous in those situations where states are already involved in a conflict by making it more likely that a state will reciprocate or escalate conflicts. Considering that war is a suboptimal outcome (Gartzke, 1999), states would not risk escalating conflicts to violence or war if they have reason to believe that they may lose. Hubris may lead states into conflicts that turn deadly by providing an increased willingness to fight or even distorting and inflating leaders’ perception of state strength. States often march off to war thinking that the war will be short and that their side will prevail (Blainey, 1988); I suspect economic growth increases this resolve to stand against challenges from other states and to escalate crises.

Finland went to war with the USSR because of its refusal to acquiesce to territorial demands made by the Soviets. The Soviets initiated

war in 1939 after their GDP grew by 8.9% in the prior five years. The Finnish economy had grown by 6.6% over the same period. Hungary stood its ground by reciprocating Soviet threats that escalated to war in 1956. Hungarian growth had been 5.5% over the prior five years and Soviet GDP

growth was just short of 5% over the same period. Similarly, Ethiopia was willing to reciprocate hostilities initiated by Eritrea, resulting in

war, after experiencing 6.6% growth in the five years prior to 1988. The Football War between El Salvador and Honduras may not have occurred if the GDP growth rates of both states had not each grown on average by 6% in the five years prior to 1969. Of course, economic growth may not necessarily be a good indicator of state strength or the prospects of victory in any given case; there may be a distinct gap in the actual probability of victory in a crisis relative to the perceived probability, for which economic growth may serve as one indicator prone to error. Leaders may nonetheless use GDP growth as an indicator and be more resolved to stand their ground and thus escalate a crisis.

Decline Good – Prevents WarEconomic growth leads to conflict—decline causes cautionEland ’11 – Ivan Eland, American defense analyst and author. He is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. Global Warming, Environmental Threats, and U.S. Security: Recycling the Domino Theory, Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives, edited by Patrick J. Michaels, pg. 115, jj

Yet to recap, the academic literature has cast doubt on even the¶ idea that resource scarcity contributes to intrastate instability and¶ conflict. And remembering the quote from Bernard Brodie, conflict¶ tends to arise when bellies are full rather than empty. Research has¶ confirmed that revolutions and increases in terrorism usually occur¶ when the economy is improving , not declining, but expectations rise¶ faster than economic

progress . In fact, when countries experience a ¶ decline in their economic fortunes , they may very well conclude¶ that violence and war are a luxury they can’t afford . As noted pre¶ viously, most migrations don’t end in violence, and migrations often¶ benefit both the immigrants and the recipient society. So all of the¶ quotes above have very little to back them up in the way of evidence.¶ Such casual and a priori assertions litter the utterances of the old¶ guard security community on the security threats arising from¶ global warming.

Economic decline solves great power warBennett and Stam 2003 – *Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University, **Associate Professor in the Government Department at Dartmouth (D. Scott and Allan, University of Michigan Press, “The Behavioral Origins of War”, Chapter 5, http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/0472098446-ch5.pdf)

Consistent with Goldstein’s (1988) arguments, we find periods of system-wide economic growth associated with increased risks of disputes escalating to all levels of disputes, including those involving the use of force and large-scale war. In table 5.16, we see that across all conflict categories, the increases in risk are generally of similar magnitude, with a 40 to 100 percent increase in the odds of conflict involving force during periods of economic upswing compared to periods of downswing. Only the probability of having disputes without the use of any force appears to drop slightly. A somewhat discouraging finding is that the associated increase in risk appears strongest for disputes escalating to war, where the risk of such conflicts appears to be 80 to 100 percent higher than the baseline risk of wanThese results stand in contrast to debates in the 1980s and early 1990s over relative versus absolute gains. Regime theorists such as Krasner and Keohane argued that states, when concerned with absolute (as compared to relative) gains, would be less conflict prone. This set off a long-running debate about the nature of states' preferences, which in the end devolved to a discussion of whether there was really any distinction between the two, with the most rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrating that even absolute gains could only be measured in some context, a relative one (Powell 1991). Our results suggest that there is something of a Faustian trade-off between economic gains and the likelihood of war during periods of sustained economic growth through- out the system, periods with absolute gains for all (or most) states, the incidence of war increases and rather dramatically so .

EXT – K WavesWorse wars in the upswingGoldstein, ’88 (Joshua S., professor of International Relations at American University, Long Cycles, pg 29)

Kondratieff’s response to Trotsky’s argument was that Trotsky “takes an idealist point of view.”17 New markets and resources are drawn into the capitalist system “not by accident, but in face of the existing economic preconditions.” That is, the internal dynamics of capitalism shape the long wave, which in turn shapes the superstructural factors such as innovation and war that Trotsky called “external.” Specifically, Kondratieff argued that “during the recession . . . an unusually large number of important discoveries and inventions in the technique of production and communication are made, which, however, are usually applied on a large scale only at the beginning of the next long upswing” ([1926] 1935:111). Likewise, “the most disastrous and extensive wars and revolutions occur” on the upswing of the long wave (p. 111), because long-term economic expansion aggravates the international struggle for markets and raw materials while domestically sharpening the struggle over the distribution of the fruits of that economic growth ([1928] 1984:95). Wars, revolutions, and innovations are thus products , not causes, of the long wave.

K waves theory is valid. This will kill everyoneChase-Dunn and Podobnik 1999 – *distinguished professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems, **Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College (Christopher and Bruce, “The Future of Global Conflict”, ed. Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, p. 43)

While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer when the influence of long-term economic cycles is taken into account. As an extensive body of research documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the 50 to 60 year business cycle known as the Kondratieff wave ( K-wave) has been in synchronous operation on an international scale for at least the last two centuries . Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on war severity, Goldstein (1988) demonstrates that there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the number of battle deaths per year for the period 1495-1975. Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in a systematic fashion, Goldstein’s research suggests that severe core wars are much more likely to occur late in the upswing phase of the K-wave. This finding is interpreted as showing that, while states always desire to go to war, they can afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with sufficient resources. Modelski and Thompson (1996) present a more complex interpretation of the systemic relationship between economic and war cycles, but it closely resembles Goldstein’s hypothesis. In their analysis, a first economic upswing generates the economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a bid for hegemony; a second period of economic growth follows a period of global war and the establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here, again, specific economic upswings are associated with an increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war. It is widely accepted that the current K-wave , which entered a downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will reach its apex around 2025 . It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony, already unravelling, will have been definitively eroded. This convergence of a plateauing economic cycle with a period of political multicentricity within the core should , if history truly does repeat itself, result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core powers . Although both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global war can (somehow) be avoided, other theorists consider that the possibility of such a core war is sufficiently high that serious steps should be taken to ensure

that such collective suicide does not occur (Chase-Dunn and O’Reilly, 1989; Goldfrank, 1987).

EXT – Growth Causes TerrorismEconomic growth kills human rights and motivates terrorism—oppressive regimes who support the free market.Trainer, ’02 [Ted, Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales, “If you want affluence, prepare for War,” Democracy & Nature: The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, July, Vol. 8 Issue 2, p. 281-299]  

The crucial role of oppression within the empire is made clear in the following  quotes.   To maintain its levels of production and consumption … the US must   be assured of getting increasing amounts of the resources of poor   countries. … This in turn requires strong support of unpopular and   dictatorial regimes which maintain political and police oppression   while serving American interests, to the detriment of their own poor  majorities. If on the other hand Third World people controlled their  own political economies … they could then use more of their resources  themselves … much of the land now used to grow export cash crops …  would be used to feed their own hungry people for example.58  It is in the economic interests of the American corporations who   have investments in these countries to maintain this social structure   (whereby poor masses are oppressed and exploited by local elites). It is  to keep these elites in power that the United States has … provide d  them with the necessary military equipment, the finance and training .59  The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America … will  not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly  afraid … the rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich  include a great many US companies and individuals, which is why the  United States has provided the guns …60  With the explosion of neoliberalism onto the global scene since the 1970s, the   need for physical force to maintain the empire has been greatly reduced. Now the  new rules of the global economy do the job very effectively. As has been  explained, the Structural Adjustment Packages and the laws being introduced to  govern trade, investment and provision of services force all countries to facilitate  uncontested access for rich world corporations to almost all resources, regions  and markets. Gunboats are no longer so necessary and less often do nations need  to be conquered or ruled via a client regime. If a few men in suits soon finally  establish the neoliberal agenda as the only set of rules governing the world  economy no nation will be able to resist and if that exclusive agenda continues to  be taught to economics students no one will want to.  To summarise, the global economy is grotesquely unjust. A few have high   material living standards primarily because of the economic arrangements that   deliver most of the world’s wealth to them and seriously deprive billions of   people. If access to the world’s resources was allocated more justly people in rich  countries could not have anywhere near the affluent lifestyles they do have. We  could not be so rich if we did not operate an empire and maintaining our empire  involves a great deal of grabbing, repression and terror.  It should not need to be said that none of this is to justify the actions of  11 September. It is about understanding why things like that happen. In my view  ‘terrorist ’ actions by oppressed people are neither morally nor strategically  desirable; they are in general not even likely to contribute to desirable outcomes  for those people. Although in certain situations violence may be the only means  to eliminate oppression, I do not see it as having a central role in the liberation of  the Third World from rich world domination. The transition strategy I advocate is necessarily non-violent (i.e. it cannot succeed if it involves violence), and indeed  is subject to attack from the Left for its deliberate avoidance of confrontation .61  The broader context; peace vs affluence  There is little evidence on the precise motivation behind the 11 September attacks   on the World Trade Center. It is not possible to say whether they derived  primarily from fundamentalist religious concerns or from awareness of global  economic injustice and the long history of appalling treatment of Islamic people s   by the West. There is at least some indication that the former elements are central  in bin Laden’s thinking. However even if those attacks were not responses to the  imperial situation the point of the foregoing discussion is that they are the sorts of   acts which must be expected given the existence, nature and functioning of the   empire.   If we are determined to maintain, let alone increase the rich world’s high  material ‘living standards ’ and its commitment to ever-increasing levels of  economic turnover then we must maintain the empire. We cannot have these  living standards unless we get much more than our fair share of the world’s  resource wealth. Therefore these living standards are incompatible with global   economic justice or with enabling all Third World people to use their own  resources to meet their own needs. It is a zero growth game; if all that land  growing our export crops was diverted to growing basic foods for Third World  people we would get far less coffee and pork. If more of their labour was to go  into producing things they need we would get fewer cheap shirts and TV sets.  There are no where near enough resources for all people to rise to our affluence  so if we are going to maintain our levels of material consumption they will have  to go on getting a miniscule share and go on seeing most of their resources flow  to us.

War Impact – Defense

A2: War ImpactGreat Recession disproves the impact – cooperation is likelyKahler ‘13Miles, Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations IR/PS and Distinguished Professor of Political Science @ UC San Diego, “Politics in The New Hard Times”, Chapter 1: “Economic Crisis and Global Governance: The Stability of a Globalized Word”, pp. 32, Google BooksThe Great Recession and the Persistence of International Economic Cooperation¶ When the global economic crisis began in 2008-9, intergovernmental cooperation and the authority vested in global intergovernmental institutions had not kept up with rapid integration of the world economy. Markets were regarded as stable and market actors as stabilizing; self-regulation or limited regulation became the new norm. Given the thinness of global governance in the face of a transformed international economy, one might have predicted that a global economic and financial crisis would produce a failure of international cooperation as great as that of the early 1930s. Instead, when the crisis began in 2007 and deepened in late 2008, politicians for the most part reached for familiar solutions, encouraged by existing international institutions. Cooperative behavior dominated during a period of deep economic distress and uncertainty. In the face of crisis, existing global institutions have been strengthened, and modest institutional innovations have been promoted. Economic crisis was not transformed into a crisis or turning point in global governance.

A2: Diversionary WarDiversionary theory is crap---180 empirics disprove itGelpi 97 (Christopher, Center for International Affairs @ Harvard, "Democratic Diversions," Sage)

Students of international politics have often argue d that state leaders initiate the use of force internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author contends that these arguments concerning relationship between domestic unrest and international conflict are not supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on the incentives state leaders have to use external force as a diversionary tactic without considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic unrest. It is hypothesized that democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention by using force internationally. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders are expected to repress the unrest directly, and these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally. An analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international crises between 1948 and 1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of the analyses and their implications for the literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing literature on democratic peace are discussed.

For realTir and Singh ‘13Jaroslav, PhD from the University of Illinois and Professor of Political Science @ the University of Colorado, Shane P., Assistant Professor of International Affairs @ the University of Georgia, “Is It The Economy or Foreign Policy Stupid? The Impact of Foreign Crisis on Leader Support”, Conclusion¶ This study has begun to align what we know about incumbent support from the comparative and American politics literatures with insights from international relations scholarship. Our use of individual-level leader approval and incumbent voting data paints a more nuanced picture of the effects of foreign crises than can be found in previous cross-national works relying on macro-level outcome variables. While foreign adventures generally help the leader improve his or her standing with the public, there are limits to this helpfulness. When contrasted with the option of doing nothing, the leader’s optimal strategy seems to be to become involved in a crisis. In game-theoretic terms, diverting represents a weakly dominant strategy. ¶ Importantly, with more fine-grained (that is. individual-level) data, we are able to detect nuances in how the public responds to foreign crises. This helps shed light on why foreign uses of force may ultimately produce differing macro-level outcomes for the incumbent and why macro-level studies may be reaching inconsistent conclusions.’¶

That the diversionary scholarship reports decidedly mixed results is thus very much in line with our observation that foreign crises offer leaders some, but not overwhelming , benefits.

Diversionary theory is wrong – assumes public support and can’t explain why leaders initiate conflictArena and Bak ‘13Philip Arena is an Assistant Professor of International Politics, Daehee Bak is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University, Foreign Policy Analysis, October, “Diversionary Incentives, Rally Effects, and Crisis Bargaining”, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fpa.12025/fullThere are two theoretical problems with traditional diversionary accounts. The first is that they are strictly monadic. They identify an incentive for the leader of one state to seek out conflict with another state. That itself is not enough to explain why conflict would occur. ¶ The strategic conflict avoidance claim represents an attempt to address this. It holds that would-be targets of diversionary conflict will deny vulnerable leaders opportunities to use force. However, proponents of strategic conflict avoidance do not explain precisely how states go about avoiding conflicts.16 If it is possible to avoid conflict without giving anything up, why does conflict ever occur? If avoiding conflict necessarily entails altering one's behavior in a way that would not otherwise be attractive, why should we assume that potential targets are necessarily willing to do so? ¶ The second problem with

traditional diversionary accounts is that they implicitly assume that the public is likely to approve of transparently politically motivated behavior. It is not at all clear why we should assume that they would do so. In fact, Colaresi (2007) develops a signaling model to explain public responses to crises and concludes leaders will experience rallies only in the absence of conditions that would lead the public to assume that the leaders behavior was politically motivated. He then analyzes US presidential approval for the postwar era and finds, consistent with the model, that rallies are least likely to occur when presidents are most likely to benefit from them politically. He even finds that presidents can experience anti-rallies, or significant decreases in approval, if they enter into crises under particularly suspicious conditions.¶ For this literature to advance, it is important to address these shortcomings. A persuasive account linking the rally effect to international conflict must allow for strategic interaction and must not assume that leaders benefit from rallies under conditions in which they have been historically unlikely to experience them.

Diversionary power has no explanatory power – threats of force prevent conflictArena and Bak ‘13Philip Arena is an Assistant Professor of International Politics, Daehee Bak is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University, Foreign Policy Analysis, October, “Diversionary Incentives, Rally Effects, and Crisis Bargaining”, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fpa.12025/fullWe began with the puzzle of why, despite conditions in the United States appearing to be ripe for a diversionary conflict, Libya bombed Sudan in the spring of 1984. This incident highlights a general puzzle: We have little consensus about whether and how diversionary incentives affect the incidence of international conflict. ¶ The answer to this puzzle, we think, is that there's no real reason to have expected the United States to act forcefully here or for Libya to go out of its way to avoid provoking the United States. That is, we think the case serves as a nice illustration of the limited explanatory power of traditional diversionary accounts and the strategic conflict avoidance perspective. To illustrate the problems with these arguments, we analyzed a general model of crisis bargaining in which we addressed the most prominent shortcomings of previous arguments. We focused upon a desire to exploit the rally effect rather than an incentive to signal competence; we assumed leaders only benefit from the rally effect when their behavior was not transparently politically motivated; and we treated both states as strategic actors. The model suggested that when one leader's hold on power is secure and the other's is extremely sensitive to rally effects, which is probably not true for many leaders, it is possible that the latter will not need to engage in diversionary conflict because they will be able to rely on implicit threats of war to coerce the former into initiating a low-level dispute against them. This expectation stands in stark contrast to both traditional diversionary arguments and strategic conflict avoidance.

No empirical support for diversionary theory -assumes public is aware of changes in the economy-assumes public blames leader for poor economic performance-empirical ev doesn’t support connection between diversion and economic performance-public punishes leaders for diverting to a foreign crisis/starting a warFeeney ‘12Norris Thomas, PhD in political science and Associate Professor of Political Science @ the University of Tennessee, “Deciding to Divert: Domestic and International Sources of Constraints on Leader Decision-making”, http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2737&context=utk_graddissFor many diversionary researchers, abandoning indicators of overt unrest altogether is ¶ preferred through the use of proxy measures for public dissatisfaction that are less threatening to ¶ leadership and regime survival. Morgan and Bickers (1992) argue that by the time domestic ¶ conditions deteriorated to the level of overt demonstrations of dissatisfaction, the window of ¶ opportunity for diversion may have closed. One set of possible indicators of domestic unrest or ¶ dissatisfaction that has been proposed as an

alternative to overt measures of unrest are measures ¶ of economic conditions. The variety of these indicators and the inconsistent results reflect the ¶ overall picture of the diversionary literature as a body of work where replacing measures at times seems favored over attempts to address potential theoretical shortcomings. GDP growth, ¶ inflation, and unemployment are most frequently used, either alone or in combination.4¶ ¶ Like the broader diversionary literature, analyses that use economic indicators, even ¶

under highly restrictive conditions, as factors related to diversion offer contradictory results. The ¶ selection of economic indicators such as unemployment, inflation5¶ , and GDP growth as measures of unrest has not proven to be consistently useful in explaining diversion. Further, the use of economic indicators requires a pair of large assumptions. First, the public is aware of and ¶ notices often small overall changes in the performance of the state’s economy as a whole. The ¶ second assumption made is that the public necessarily blames the leader rather than some other ¶ force that may impact the economic performance of a state (such as the legislature, foreign ¶ powers, international shocks, etc.). The literature that separates parliamentary systems into ¶ majority-party, minority-party, and coalition-majority types suggests that the assigning of blame ¶ for deteriorating economic conditions is not so clear-cut. Related to this, such an assumption also requires researchers to hold that leaders are unable to guide public opinion by cueing the ¶ public on where to assign blame. ¶ While in American politics, we often boil presidential election down to the line: “It’s the ¶ economy, stupid”, the empirical evidence linking economic indicators to diversionary behavior is ¶ as scattershot as the empirical results in diversionary literature as a whole. Further, Meernik and ¶ Waterman argue: “While this hypothesis makes intuitive sense, it would seem to fail a more ¶ commonsense test ” (Meernik and Waterman 1996, 579). More recent research finds that ¶ democratic leaders are actually punished at the polls by engaging in risky foreign adventures ¶ while the economy is performing sub-optimally (Williams et al. 2010), drawing the conclusion ¶ that the public punishes leaders who appear to be ignoring economic policy in times of economic ¶ stress.

Studies proveWeeks ‘12Jessica L., Assistant Professor & Trice Family Faculty Scholar @ the University of Wisconsin, The American Political Science Review, “Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict”, ProQuestIn contrast to selectorate theory, a second line of argument focuses not on coalition size, but rather on the fact that different authoritarian regimes have different sources of "infrastructural power," defined as "institutions to help manage elite factionalism and curb mass dissent" (Lai and Slater 2006, 114). This argument is built on two core assumptions. First, it assumes that leaders start international conflicts primarily as a way to deflect attention from domestic troubles. Second, it assumes that military-led regimes have less infrastructural power than party-based regimes. Combining these assumptions implies that military regimes are more likely to use (diversionary) force, because it meets their need for domestic support and legitimacy (117). 5¶ However, existing scholarship casts doubt on both of these assumptions. First , diversionary gambles typically only make sense when the leader is highly insecure (Downs and Rocke 1994). This condition probably does not hold often enough to drive overall levels of dispute initiation, even if it can explain isolated cases. Moreover, potential targets of diversion may deliberately avoid conflict, thus short-circuiting the mechanism (Clark 2003; Leeds and Davis 1997; Smith 1996). Perhaps for these reasons, empirical evidence that diversionary motives drive patterns of conflict initiation is at best mixed. 6¶ Second , even if diversion is common enough to explain variation in belligerence, it is not clear that infrastructural power would cause military regimes to engage in diversion more frequently than other types of regimes. Democracies and civilian autocracies also suffer the crises of legitimacy that supposedly motivate diversion, particularly in tough economic times. In fact, some argue that because democratic leaders lack

other options for stabilizing their rule, diversionary war is most common in democracies (Gelpi 1997). 7 Given these issues, it is unsurprising that studies have failed to find evidence that military regimes engage in more diversionary force than civilian regimes. Indeed, recent empirical work on diversion in authoritarian regimes finds that it occurs most frequently in single-party regimes (Pickering and Kisangani 2010).

Other regimes won’t initiate diversionary warsPowell ‘12Jonathan M., Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Relations @ Nazarbayev University, “Regime Vulnerability and the Diversionary Threat of Force”, http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/58/1/169.fullThe ruling coalition has been dealt with most explicitly in the context of authoritarian diversion by Pickering and Kisangani (2010) and Nicholls, Huth, and Appel (2010). The political incentive theory of the former predicts that autocrats will be more belligerent when the distance between available resources to provide patronage and the amount spent on patronage becomes small. They conclude that authoritarian regimes with the largest winning coalitions, single-party states should be the most likely to utilize international conflict in times of economic crisis due to the strains that their coalition size puts on patronage resources. Though theoretically compelling, their analysis fails to find robust support for their theory of “despotic diversions.” One potential explanation is the lack of vulnerability in one-party regimes, which has been found to be among the most stable in existence (Geddes 1999; Hadenius and Teorell 2007). As Pickering and Kisangani (2010, 479) note, “the military’s subservient state within the hierarchy is almost always well established” in single-party regimes. The chances for a coup, then, are minimal , calling into question the claim that single-party states should have the incentive to attempt diversionary actions, even during a time of crisis. Nicholls, Huth, and Appel (2010) have more directly argued that opposition from within the ruling coalition was a major determinant of Japanese foreign policy following the establishment of the Imperial Diet. Diversion, they argued, would be more likely when leadership was actively rejecting demands from other elites. I similarly contend that we must look specifically at the likelihood of a credible movement to unset them, specifically through a coup.

Diversionary war theory is falseBoehmer, 07 – political science professor at the University of Texas (Charles, Politics & Policy, 35:4, “The Effects of Economic Crisis, Domestic Discord, and State Efficacy on the Decision to Initiate Interstate Conflict”)

This article examines the contemporaneous effect of low economic growth and domestic instability on the threat of regime change and/ or involvement in external militarized conflicts. Many studies of diversionary conflict argue that lower rates of economic growth should heighten the risk of international conflict. Yet we know that militarized interstate conflicts, and especially wars, are generally rare events whereas lower rates of growth are not. Additionally, a growing body of literature shows that regime changes are also associated with lower rates of economic growth. The question then becomes which event, militarized interstate conflict or regime change, is the most likely to occur with domestic discord and lower rates of economic growth? Diversionary theory claims that leaders seek to divert attention away from domestic problems such as a bad economy or political scandals, or to garner increased support prior to elections. Leaders then supposedly externalize discontented domestic sentiments onto other nations, sometimes as scapegoats based on the similar in-group/out-group dynamic found in the research of Coser (1956) and Simmel (1955), where foreign countries are blamed for domestic problems. This process is said to involve a “rally-round-the-flag” effect, where a leader can expect a short-term boost in popularity with the threat or use of force (Blechman, Kaplan, and Hall 1978; Mueller 1973). Scholarship on diversionary conflict has focused most often on the American case1 but recent studies have sought to identify this possible behavior in other countries.2 The Falklands War is often a popular example of diversionary conflict (Levy and Vakili 1992). Argentina was reeling from hyperinflation and rampant unemployment associated with the Latin American debt crisis. It is plausible that a success in the Falklands War may have helped to rally support for the governing Galtieri regime, although Argentina lost the war and the ruling regime lost power. How many other attempts to use diversionary tactics, if they indeed occur, can be seen to generate a similar outcome? The goal of this article is to provide an assessment of the extent to which diversionary strategy is a threat to peace. Is this a colorful theory kept alive by academics that has little bearing up on real events , or is this a real problem that policy makers should be concerned with? If it is a strategy readily available to leaders, then it is important to know what domestic factors trigger this gambit.

Moreover, to know that requires an understanding of the context in external conflict, which occurs relative to regime changes. Theories of diversionary conflict usually emphasize the potential benefits of diversionary tactics, although few pay equal attention to the prospective costs associated with such behavior. It is not contentious to claim that leaders typically seek to remain in office. However, whether they can successfully manipulate public opinion regularly during periods of domestic unpopularity through their states’ participation in foreign militarized conflicts—especially outside of the American case—is a question open for debate. Furthermore, there appears to be a logical disconnect between diversionary theories and extant studies of domestic conflict and regime change. Lower rates of economic growth are purported to increase the risk of both militarized interstate conflicts (and internal conflicts) as well as regime changes (Bloomberg and Hess 2002). This implies that if leaders do , in fact, undertake diversionary conflicts, many may still be thrown from the seat of power —especially if the outcome is defeat to a foreign enemy. Diversionary conflict would thus seem to be a risky gambit (Smith 1996). Scholars such as MacFie (1938) and Blainey (1988) have nevertheless questioned the validity of the diversionary thesis . As noted by Levy (1989), this perspective is rarely formulated as a cohesive and comprehensive theory, and there has been little or no knowledge cumulation. Later analyses do not necessarily build on past studies and the discrepancies between inquiries are often difficult to unravel. “Studies have used a variety of research designs, different dependent variables (uses of force, major uses of force, militarized disputes), different estimation techniques, and different data sets covering different time periods and different states” (Bennett and Nordstrom 2000, 39). To these problems, we should add a lack of theoretical precision and incomplete model specification. By a lack of theoretical precision, I am referring to the linkages between economic conditions and domestic strife that remain unclear in some studies (Miller 1995; Russett 1990). Consequently, extant studies are to a degree incommensurate; they offer a step in the right direction but do not provide robust cross-national explanations and tests of economic growth and interstate conflict. Yet a few studies have attempted to provide deductive explanations about when and how diversionary tactics might be employed. Using a Bayesian updating game, Richards and others (1993) theorize that while the use of force would appear to offer leaders a means to boost their popularity, a poorly performing economy acts as a signal to a leader’s constituents about his or her competence. Hence, attempts to use diversion are likely to fail either because incompetent leaders wil l likewise fail in foreign policy or people will recognize the gambit for what it is . Instead, these two models conclude that diversion is likely to be undertaken particularly by risk-acceptant leaders. This stress on a heightened risk of removal from office is also apparent in the work of Bueno de Mesquita and others (1999), and Downs and Rocke (1994), where leaders may “gamble for resurrection,” although the diversionary scenario in the former study is only a partial extension of their theory on selectorates, winning coalitions, and leader survival. Again, how often do leaders fail in the process or are removed from positions of power before they can even initiate diversionary tactics? A few studies focusing on leader tenure have examined the removal of leaders following war, although almost no study in the diversionary literature has looked at the effects of domestic problems on the relative risks of regime change, interstate conflict, or both events occurring in the same year.3

Low growth makes politicians cautious—they don’t want to risk war because it makes them vulnerableBoehmer, 07 – political science professor at the University of Texas (Charles, Politics & Policy, 35:4, “The Effects of Economic Crisis, Domestic Discord, and State Efficacy on the Decision to Initiate Interstate Conflict”)

Economic Growth and Fatal MIDs The theory presented earlier predicts that lower rates of growth suppress participation in foreign conflicts , particularly concerning conflict initiation and escalation to combat. To sustain combat, states need to be militarily prepared and not open up a second front when they are already fighting, or may fear, domestic opposition. A good example would be when the various Afghani resistance fighters expelled the Soviet Union from their territory, but the Taliban crumbled when it had to face the combined forces of the United States and Northern Alliance insurrection. Yet the coefficient for GDP growth and MID initiations was negative but insignificant. However, considering that there are many reasons why states fight, the logic presented earlier should hold especially in regard to the risk of participating in more severe conflicts. Threats to use military force may be safe to make and may be made with both external and internal actors in mind, but in the end may remain mere cheap talk that does not risk escalation if there is a chance to back down. Chiozza and Goemans (2004b) found that secure leaders were more likely to become involved in war than insecure leaders, supporting the theory and evidence presented here. We should find that leaders who face domestic opposition and a poor ly performing economy shy away from situations that could escalate to combat if doing so would compromise their ability to retain power .

Even if diversionary conflicts occur they won’t escalate.D. Scott Bennett and Timothy Nordstrom, February 2000. Department of Political Science Professors at Pennsylvania State. “Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ebsco.

When engaging in diversionary actions in response to economic problems, leaders will be most interested in a cheap, quick victory that gives them the benefit of a rally effect without suffering the long-term costs (in both economic and popularity terms) of an extended confrontation or war . This makes weak states particularly inviting targets for diversionary action since they may be less likely to respond than strong states and because any response they make will be less costly to the initiator. Following Blainey (1973),a state facing poor economic conditions may in fact be the target of an attack rather than the initiator. This may be even more likely in the context of a rivalry because rival states are likely to be looking for any advantage over their rivais. Leaders may hope to catch an economically challenged rival looking

inward in response to a slowing economy. Following the strategic application of diversionary conflict theory and states' desire to engage in only cheap conflicts for diversionary purposes, states should avoid conflict initiation against target states experiencing economic problems.

A2: Protectionism2008 disproves, small impact, and institutions solveKahler ‘13Miles, Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations IR/PS and Distinguished Professor of Political Science @ UC San Diego, “Politics in The New Hard Times”, Chapter 1: “Economic Crisis and Global Governance: The Stability of a Globalized Word”, pp. 35, Google BooksAlthough discriminatory and protectionist trade measures taken during the Great Recession ran counter to G-20 pledges made in November 2008 and April 2009, their import should not be exaggerated. Most of the measures taken did not violate either bilateral trade agreements or the rules of the existing international trade regime. The WTO remained a secure bulwark against many forms of trade policy backsliding. Most of the sectors involved were hardly central to global trade or to national economies: these were "classic” cases of protectionism directed by import-competing sectors against their more competitive (and often state-guided) rivals. Given the depth of the recession, protectionist measures were surprising in their limited scope; they did not approach sectoral protection of such key sectors as automobiles or semiconductors during the 1980s. Equally important, most governments were willing to deal with commercial conflicts through the accepted dispute settlement procedures of the WTO.

Protectionism and diversionary war theories have been discreditedMoisés Naím 10, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, January/February 2010, “It Didn’t Happen,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/it_didnt_happen?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

Just a few months ago, the consensus among influential thinkers was that the economic crisis would unleash a wave of geopolitical plagues . Xenophobic outbursts, civil wars , collapsing currencies, protectionism , international conflicts , and street riots were only some of the dire consequences expected by the experts. It didn't happen. Although the crash did cause severe economic damage and widespread human suffering, and though the world did change in important ways for the worse -- the International Monetary Fund, for example, estimates that the global economy's new and permanent trajectory is a 10 percent lower rate of GDP growth than before the crisis -- the scary predictions for the most part failed to materialize. Sadly, the same experts who failed to foresee the economic crisis were also blindsided by the speed of the recovery. More than a year into the crisis, we now know just how off they were. From telling us about the imminent collapse of the international financial system to prophecies of a 10-year recession, here are six of the most common predictions about the crisis that have been proven wrong: The international financial system will collapse. It didn't. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac crashed, as Citigroup and many other pillars of the financial system teetered on the brink, and as stock markets everywhere entered into free fall, the wise men predicted a total system meltdown. The economy has "fallen off a cliff," warned investment guru Warren Buffett. Fellow financial wizard George Soros agreed, noting the world economy was on "life support," calling the turbulence more severe than during the Great Depression, and comparing the situation to the demise of the Soviet Union. The natural corollary of such doomsday scenarios was the possibility that depositors would lose access to the funds in their bank accounts. From there to visions of martial law imposed to control street protests and the looting of bank offices was just an easy step for thousands of Internet-fueled conspiracy theorists. Even today, the financial system is still frail, banks are still failing, credit is scarce, and risks abound. But the financial system is working , and the perception that it is too unsafe to use or that it can suddenly crash out of existence has largely dissipated. The economic crisis will last for at least two years and maybe even a decade. It didn't. By fall of 2009, the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan had begun to grow again, and many of the largest developing economies, such as China, India, and Brazil, were growing at an even faster pace. This was surely a far cry from the doom-laden -- and widely echoed -- prophecies of economist Nouriel Roubini. In late 2008 he warned that radical governmental actions at best would prevent "what will now be an ugly and nasty two-year recession and financial crisis from turning into a systemic meltdown and a decade-long economic depression." Roubini was far from the only pessimist. "The danger," warned Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff, another distinguished economist, in the fall of 2008, "is that instead of having a few bad years, we'll have another lost decade." It turned out that radical policy reactions were far more effective than anyone had expected in shortening the life of the recession.

The U.S. dollar will crash. It didn't. Instead, the American currency's value increased 20 percent between July 2008 and March 2009, at the height of the crisis. At first, investors from around the world sought refuge in the U.S. dollar. Then, as the U.S. government bailed out troubled companies and stimulated the economy with aggressive public spending, the U.S. fiscal deficit skyrocketed and anxieties about a dollar devaluation mounted. By the second half of 2009, the U.S. currency had lost value. But devaluation has not turned out to be the catastrophic crash predicted by the pessimists. Rather, as Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf noted, "The dollar's correction is not just natural; it is helpful. It will lower the risk of deflation in the U.S. and facilitate the correction of the global 'imbalances' that helped cause the crisis." Protectionism will surge. It didn't. Trade flows did drop dramatically in late 2008 and early 2009, but they started to grow again in the second half of 2009 as economies recovered. Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization, had warned that the global financial crisis was bound to lead to surges in protectionism as governments sought to blame foreigners for their problems. "That is exactly what happened in the 1930s when [protectionism] was the virus that spread the crisis all over the place," he said in October 2008, echoing a widely held sentiment among trade experts. And it is true that many governments dabbled in protectionism, including not only the U.S. Congress's much-derided "Buy American" provision, but also measures such as increased tariffs or import restrictions imposed in 17 of the G-20 countries. Yet one year later, a report from the European Union concluded that "a widespread and systemic escalation of protectionism has been prevented ." The protectionist temptation is always there, and a meaningful increase in trade barriers cannot be ruled out. But it has not happened yet. The crisis in rich countries will drag down developing ones. It didn't. As the economies of America and Europe screeched to a halt during the nightmarish first quarter of 2009, China's economy accelerated, part of a broader trend in which emerging markets fared better through the crisis than the world's most advanced economies. As the rich countries entered a deep recession and the woes of the U.S. financial market affected banking systems everywhere, the idea that emerging economies could "decouple" from the advanced ones was widely mocked. But decouple they did. Some emerging economies relied on their domestic markets, others on exports to other growing countries (China, for example, displaced the United States last year as Brazil's top export market). Still others had ample foreign reserves, low exposure to toxic financial assets, or, like Chile, had taken measures in anticipation of an eventual global slowdown. Not all developing countries managed to escape the worst of the crisis -- and many, such as Mexico and Iran, were deeply hurt -- but many others managed to avoid the fate of the advanced economies. Violent political turmoil will become more common. It didn't. Electorates did punish governments for the economic hard times. But this was mostly in Europe and mostly peaceful and democratic. "There will be blood," prophesied Harvard historian Niall Ferguson last spring. "A crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political [conflict] ... It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable." No, it turns out: They aren't .

A2: Instability, Regime ChangeEconomic crisis doesn’t lead to instability—statistical studies side strongly negativeCarothers, Carnegie researcher, 9—*vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, **junior fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (*Thomas Carothers, **Julia Brower, 4/28/2009, “Will the International Economic Crisis Undermine Struggling Democracies?”, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://carnegieendowment.org/2009/04/27/will-international-economic-crisis-undermine-struggling-democracies/dc0)

In the great majority of past cases, economic crisis did not lead to regime change . In fact, it often did

not even lead to a change of government.¶ In the most comprehensive article on this topic, Minxin Pei and David Adesnik (2000) examine the political effects of 93 economic crises —defined as an annual inflation rate greater than 15 percent, and stagnant or negative annual GDP growth—in Asia and Latin America between 1945 and 1998. Contrary to what might be expected, they find that economic crisis contributed to regime change in only 30 cases . Six of these cases fit the model of an immediate Suharto-style regime collapse; in the rest, regime change occurred after a time lag of about eighteen to 30 months. Perhaps most surprising, however, is their finding that in only about 18 of the remaining 63 cases did economic crisis lead even to a change in government.¶ What explains these findings? Pei and Adesnik speculate that three factors might be at work. First, the timing has to be right for economic crises to have an observable political impact . In about one-fifth of the cases with no change, the economic difficulties had ended prior to the next election . Second, in ten of the cases, the economic crisis was overshadowed by an existing political crisis. Finally, economic crises were less likely to produce regime change during the 1980s and 1990s than in the previous two decades. That this trend coincides with the most recent wave of democratization in Latin America and Asia is no coincidence, and leads to the second major finding of the research.

A2: Interdependence Solves WarTrade doesn’t solve war May 5—Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Principal Investigator for the DHS. (Michael, “The U.S.-China Strategic Relationship,” September 2005, http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2005/Sep/maySep05.asp)

However important and beneficial this interdependence may be from an economic point of view, it is not likely to be a significant factor for strategic stability. Famously, economists before World War I sounded clear warnings that Europe had become economically interdependent to an extent that war there would ruin Europe. The war was fought nevertheless, Europe was duly ruined, and the ensuing political

consequences haunted Europe to the end of World War II. Other cases exist. Modern war has been an economic disaster. Economic realities, including economic interdependence, play little role in whether a country goes to war or not. Economic myths certainly do and they usually affect strategic stability quite negatively. This is another reason why domestic perceptions matter: they determine which myths are believed

Quantity of trade has no correlation with conflictPeterson 13. (Timothy M., PhD from University of Missouri and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University. “Dyadic Trade, Exit Costs and Conflict.” March 13, 2013. Journal of Conflict Resolution. Sage.)

Despite the fact that exit costs are intrinsic elements of both liberal and realist theories linking trade to conflict, the vast majority of empirical studies testing this relationship measure trade as the extent of interaction (dyadic trade flows, often weighted by gross domestic product [GDP] or total national trade). This modeling decision tends to follow from practical considerations, given that measures of trade interaction are easily available.2 However, because these blunt measures ignore the exit costs associated with cutting off trade relations, they are limited in their explanatory power. For example, a larger volume of dyadic trade may not equate with a larger incentive to avoid conflict (as adherents of the peace through trade hypothesis contend) if one or both dyad members can easily reroute lost trade flows to alternative markets; conversely, smaller volumes of trade may be pacifying if both trade partners cannot reap equivalent gains with third parties. Similarly, large trade volumes may not raise concerns for vulnerability if interrupted trade would be easily replaced. Given that measures of trade interaction are not well suited to answering research questions regarding the costs of cutting off trade, these measures have instead facilitated a second strand of liberal theory, which links trade to peace through increasing information flows that accompany economic interaction, reducing the information asymmetries that lead to conflict (Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2001; Gartzke 2003; Morrow 1999; see also Fearon 1995).

Economic interdependence makes nations go to warCopeland, ’96(Dale Professor -Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, "Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations," http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/copeland.htm]Realists turn the liberal argument on its head, arguing that economic interdependence not only fails to promote peace, but in fact heightens the likelihood of war.(8) States concerned about security will dislike dependence, since it means that crucial imported goods could be cut off during a crisis. This problem is particularly acute for imports like oil and raw materials; while they may be only a small percentage of the total import bill, without them most modern economies would collapse. Consequently, states dependent on others for vital goods have an increased incentive to go to war to assure themselves of continued access of supply. Neorealist Kenneth Waltz puts the argument as follows: actors within a domestic polity have little reason to fear the dependence that goes with specialization. The anarchic structure of international politics, however, makes states worry about their vulnerability, thus compelling them "to control what they depend on or to lessen the extent of their dependency." For Waltz, it is this "simple thought" that explains, among other things, "their imperial thrusts to widen the scope of their control."(9) For John Mearsheimer, nations that "depend on others for critical economic supplies will fear cutoff or blackmail in time of crisis or war." Consequently, "they may try to extend political control to the

source of supply, giving rise to conflict with the source or with its other customers." Interdependence, therefore, "will probably lead to greater security competition."(10)

Interdependence causes war -- states seek resources to prevent dependency during crisis. Copeland, ’96(Dale Professor -Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, "Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations," http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/copeland.htm]

Realists turn the liberal argument on its head, arguing that economic interdependence not only fails to promote peace, but in fact heightens the likelihood of war.(8) States concerned about security will dislike dependence, since it means that crucial imported goods could be cut off during a crisis. This problem is particularly acute for imports like oil and raw materials; while they may be only a small percentage of the total import bill, without them most modern economies would collapse. Consequently, states dependent on others for vital goods have an increased incentive to go to war to assure themselves of continued access of supply. Neorealist Kenneth Waltz puts the argument as follows: actors within a domestic polity have little reason to fear the dependence that goes with specialization. The anarchic structure of international politics, however, makes states worry about their vulnerability, thus compelling them "to control what they depend on or to lessen the extent of their dependency." For Waltz, it is this "simple thought" that explains, among other things, "their imperial thrusts to widen the scope of their control."(9) For John Mearsheimer, nations that "depend on others for critical economic supplies will fear cutoff or blackmail in time of crisis or war." Consequently, "they may try to extend political control to the source of supply, giving rise to conflict with the source or with its other customers." Interdependence, therefore, "will probably lead to greater security competition."(10) This modern realist understanding of economic interdependence and war finds its roots in mercantilist writings dating from the seventeenth century. Mercantilists saw states as locked in a competition for relative power and for the wealth that underpins that power.(11) For mercantilists, imperial expansion - the acquisition of colonies - is driven by the state's need to secure greater control over sources of supply and markets for its goods, and to build relative power in the process. By allowing the metropole and the colonies to specialize in production and trade of complementary products (particularly manufactured goods for raw materials), while ensuring political control over the process, colonies "opened up the possibility of providing a system of supply within a self-contained empire."(12) In this, we see the underpinning for the neorealist view that interdependence leads to war. Mercantilist imperialism represents a reaction to a state's dependence; states reduce their fears of external specialization by increasing internal specialization within a now larger political realm. The imperial state as it expands thus acquires more and more of the characteristics of Waltz's domestic polity, with its hierarchy of specialized functions secure from the unpredictable policies of others. In sum, realists seek to emphasize one main point: political concerns driven by anarchy must be injected into the liberal calculus. Since states must be primarily concerned with security and therefore with control over resources and markets, one must discount the liberal optimism that great trading partners will always continue to be great trading partners simply because both states benefit absolutely. Accordingly, a state vulnerable to another's policies because of dependence will tend to use force to overcome that vulnerability.

Free trade causes war—WWI an overwhelming list of wars based on trade assymetry prove that interdependency theory is a flawed generalizationDenney and Gleason, 12 – Steven Denney, master’s candidate at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University. He received his BA in Political Science from Harding University; Brian Gleason, master’s candidate at the Gradate School of International Studies, Yonsei University. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (“ The Political Economy of Trade Policy: A Realist Perspective,” Yonsei University, 5/31/12, http://sinonk.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/the-political-economy-of-trade-policy-steven_c_denney-brian_d_gleason.pdf) Realists differ from liberal understanding of interdependency through trade. They do not dismiss the argument that interdependency can be a means to increasing the wealth of a state. They do, however, emphasize that dependency on another state creates vulnerability . This is a consequence of the structural effect of anarchy in the international system. The anarchic structure of the international system forces states to consider their vulnerability vis-à-vis other states; vulnerability compels states to seek ways in which to control the level of dependence on other states . 5 When a state perceives its level of vulnerability has increased to an unacceptable level because of unfavorable trading relationships, war may become a viable, rational option. War as a viable option is buttressed by the basic assumption that in a state of anarchy, security is

the highest priority. This is because the nature of the political system forces states to prioritize strategic and political priorities, namely security, over economic concerns. The liberal approach that war is less likely in situations of high trade interdependency cannot be sustained.6 The top priority for states in the international system is protecting and advancing their national interests. As indicated above, the number one priority in the list of competing national interests is security. 7 By what method or mechanism states choose to achieve security is the main point of contention between realists and liberals, particularly regarding the nexus between trade and security. As stated above, liberals believe that trade and interdependency create conditions conducive to peace and stability by making the opportunity costs of war too high, whereas realists believe that high levels of trade and interdependency increase vulnerability which may actually lead to conflict. Moreover, realists emphasize that when economic and security concerns conflict, economic concerns are relegated to a level of secondary importance . Despite macro-level quantitative support for “commercial liberalism,” 8 more nuanced, context-specific analysis finds that strategic factors are more important than economic concerns. 9 It is far too simple and naive to assume that peace and security will naturally follow from an increase in trade leading to interdependence; political concerns play too great a role in a state’s strategic calculus. 10 For a modern approach to the realist position regarding the interaction between political and economic interests in trade, Jonathan Kirshner’s realist interpretation is appropriate. 11 Kirshner, like Copeland, finds the liberal position lacking the necessary concern for security that the realist approach provides, namely that “states must anticipate the possibility of war.” 12 As stated above, this is a core assumption that affects the way realists perceive the interaction between political and economic concerns. Thus, the constant threat of war forces states to prioritize security concerns. The “state will often diverge markedly from the sum of particular interests within society, and the state will act to defend its interests.” The divergence of the state shows the primacy of security in a state’s myriad national interests, which supersedes other concerns and can, at times, lead states “to make economic sacrifices in order to further international political and strategic goals .” 13 Kirshner’s analysis illuminates the priority of security concerns, a core assumption of the realist position, which prioritizes political and strategic goals over economic concerns. The implications behind the notion that the state may make economic sacrifices for political and strategic goals will be more fully addressed in the sections that follow. For now it is sufficient to say that the realist position paints a more accurate picture of state behavior and explains the interaction between economic and political concerns that is downplayed or ignored by the liberal position. From here, this paper will narrow its approach by focusing on the nature of asymmetric trading relationships . First, a more specific theoretical framework will be established by showing the theoretical value of Albert Hirschman’s theory on the relationship between trade and national power and how this theory has been reinterpreted by Jonathan Kirshner. 3. A Hirschmanesque Strategy Now that the liberal-realist debate has been entertained, a more specific theoretical approach can be made based on the realist approach to understanding the nexus between trade and security as it applies to asymmetric trading relationships. Aside from accepting the basic assumptions of the realist position, much of this paper’s theoretical foundation is found in Albert Hirschman’s seminal work National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. 14 Hirschman’s analysis of German interwar trading relationships with southeastern European states is instrumental to understanding the nexus between trade and security by focusing on the motives behind the trading relationship. As stated in the introduction, this will provide a theoretical understanding of why states trade in asymmetric relationships. In short, Hirschman finds that during the interwar period Germany used its asymmetric trading relationships with the smaller states of southeastern Europe to control the terms of trad e. Specifically, Germany sought to increase its total supply of imported goods and to make it difficult for states to dispense of trade with Germany or shift its trading relationship to another countr y . 15 The motive behind Germany’s asymmetric trading relationships was to increase political leverage over her trading partner s . From Hirschman’s point of view, trade (economics) and national power (political and strategic concerns) are inextricably linked. Specifically, trade, according to Hirschman, is used as an instrument to increase national power. In asymmetrical trading relationships, economic interests are not thrown to the wayside; they are, however, relegated to a status of secondary importance. Hirschman’s theory thus falls within the realm of the realist approach to asymmetric trading relationships. 16 Hirschman’s theory is fundamental to understanding asymmetric trading relationships. However, there is much more to Hirschman’s story than is provided by Hirschman in his book. To provide a modern interpretation of Hirschman’s classical theory, Kirschner will once again be brought to center stage

Interdependence and nukes won’t prevent war – loss of autonomy, access to resources, and cost of warGilpin 81 (Robert, scholar of international political economy and the professor emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School “War and Change in World Politics,” pp.1-49, http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~olau/ir/archive/gil2.pdf)

In this chapter Gilpin attempts to refute the claims of some scholars that somefundamental change is occurring in the international system. He identifies three frequentlycited arguments: the invention of nuclear weapons , the development of interdependence , andthe advent of an international society through global consciousness and the identification ofworld-wide problems. He argues that these developments have done little to remove the possibility of war. Firstly nuclear weapons have made hegemonic war more costly, but not eliminated war. Instead limited wars continue while the threat of nuclear war is made all too frequently, with the accompanying risk that things could get out of control. It is even possible that hegemonic war could take place without the use of nuclear weapons. Second, interdependence will not bring an end to war while states are still prepared to advance their interests at the expense of others and global interests . Furthermore, levels of interdependence can have a destabilizing effect as states become increasingly concerned with a loss of autonomy, access to resources and markets and the price of interdependence. Furthermore, interdependence has done little for international equality, a result which is not likely to promote peace. Finally, the growing consciousness of global problems (particularly the limits-to-growth) and the use of science to solve them, will not override states self-interest. Indeed theresource shortages identified by these problems will tend to bring out the worst in states.The development of technology may just make the demand for resources more acute. Theidea that a unified humanity may bring an end to war fails because a unified humanity doesnot exist. The human race is divided by race, religion and wealth, and increasingly bynationality as state fragmentation continues

All “interdependent” relationships are not the same – assumptions of a universal level of vulnerability ignore real world structures of powerHulsman et al 3 (John, PhD, Research fellow in European affairs at the Heritage Foundatiion’s Davis Institute, Joshua Bridwell and Eric Hamilton, “The Myth of Interdependence,” August 20, http://nationalinterest.org/article/the-myth-of-interdependence-2412)

As realization of this phenomenon increases, it is disturbingly common for analysts to develop false conclusions based upon a superficial understanding of globalization. Perhaps the most prevalent and beguiling mirage of all is the notion of a universal "interdependence." Implicit in the arguments of interdependence proponents is the premise that interdependence affects all nations to roughly the same extent --that it acts as a blanket phenomenon, restraining all that are involved to the same degree. Clearly this is not true. Consider this hypothetical. Would Australian foreign policy have been affected if it had strenuously opposed America's efforts in Iraq? Would Canberra have been likely to abrogate the ANZUS treaty because of its people's opposition to the Iraq war? Hardly, as Australia undoubtedly benefits from the American military alliance serving as life insurance in the volatile Asian region. Would it be likely to impose an embargo on the U.S.? Nonsense, as it greatly benefits from trade with America. In fact the opposite is true: it has long been a goal of Australian foreign policy to secure a free trade agreement (FTA) with Washington --Iraq war or no. Would Australia refuse to continue closely sharing intelligence with America? Impossible, as the Bali bombing illustrated that Canberra is a major target of Al-Qaeda, along with the United States. Or would certain Australian diplomats simply snub Americans at cocktail parties? For in the end, that is what "disapproval" with America often amounts to. While interdependence does mean that there is always mutual vulnerability , in the case of the U.S. and Australia (and indeed in every case), this is not the salient feature of the relationship . Rather, Australia's far greater dependence on the U.S. conditions foreign policy decision-making at the highest levels --but not necessarily the other way around. The Wilsonian habit of misunderstanding the nature of interdependence is far from an esoteric error. For despite what many foreign policy practitioners believe, policy outputs flow naturally

from first principle intellectual assumptions. By overrating the universal impact of interdependence theory, Wilsonians naturally see the present order as fundamentally multipolar, and devise policies to fit this ‘reality. ' Unfortunately, the real world does not correspond to their assessment, thus dooming their policy initiatives to failure. In the turbulence of a changing world order, one particular paradigm has been almost totally neglected. Ironically, we have abandoned realism-the one doctrine that can best navigate our role in the uni-multipolar world we find ourselves in. For, if we hold that the attempt to remake our global history of conflict and chaos into a hopeful future of peaceful order is but an illusion, then we must accept the anarchic nature of our world and attempt to live in it as best we can. Specifically, we must create policies that recognize and place our national interest above all other priorities. This reality is largely reinforced by the current nature of interdependence. The Wilsonian view suggests it binds all states with equivalent strength, while the realist outlook allows that interdependence in the economic arena is very much part and parcel of the modern world, but does not in fact affect all states equally. As illustrated by the U.S.-Australia hypothetical, a power hierarchy characterizes interdependence. Countries that possess the preponderance of power are able to significantly influence the policy outcomes of weaker states (assuming such states do not perceive overriding security/geopolitical concerns). Such will it ever be.

A2: Capitalist Peace TheoryCapitalism makes war inevitable --- reject their scholarshipAris I. Trantidis, 2009, MPhil/PhD student, London School of Economics and Political Science, War, democracy and capitalism, http://www.psa.ac.uk/2009/pps/Trantidis.pdf, jj

Causal spuriousness, however, may run the other way around. It can be said that democracies foster open private market economies which in turn allow the development of economic ties between nations. It can be argued that the constructive effect of international trade and of economic interdependency rests on democratic governments pursuing policies of relatively open markets, as these have been perceived as maximising welfare. At the same time, they abstain from developing closer ties with those authoritarian regimes which democracies perceive as aggressive and threatening. Understandably there is less trade with autocratic countries which are not ‘free market’ and ‘open to trade’ economies.

Capitalist peace theory and democratic peace theory share the common position that both they both have been in disagreement with key realist assumptions. Robert Keohane (1983) summarises three assumptions, which form part of the ‘hard core’ of the realist approach: 1) states are the most important actors in the international system, 2) international relations can be analyzed as if states are unitary rational actors, and 3) states calculate their interests in terms of power, as an end in itself or as a necessary means to other ends. In the realist archetype, peace reflects a balance of power between nations or alliances, or result from the presence of a hegemonic power, whose power and resources enable it to impose its ‘peace’ on its own terms. Rosato has argued about post-World War II peace that ‘one potential explanation is that democratic peace is in fact an imperial peace based on American power. The democratic peace is essentially a postWorld War II phenomenon restricted to the Americas and Western Europe. The United States has been the dominant power in both these regions

since World War II and has placed an overriding emphasis on regional peace (2003:599). Capitalist peace theory has also been undermined by numerous historical observations prior to American hegemony of capitalist countries fighting bitter wars despite their trade links during the 19th century up to the second half of the 20th century .

The debate is far from closed . The departure of democratic peace theory and capitalist peace theory from realism is that they both look inside the state for institutions, norms and actors which largely define foreign policy. They also explore links between domestic actors across nations on the basis of shared values, shared norms, and common interests. In this sense, they are both closer to methodological individualism. According to methodological individualism groups become actors when organised and acting under shared perceptions of common interest. Actors are motivated for collective action upon calculation of expected costs and benefits. Before taking state preferences as given, it is thus useful to trace the preferences of these groups and the ways they are shaping the domestic process of decisionmaking. Implicitly or explicitly democratic peace theory and capitalist peace theory point to two levels of analysis related to the formation of national preferences: processes embedded within states, and linkages between states as well as underlying transnational connections between social and economic groups across states. Opposite to the capitalist peace theory stands the Marxist view of war. The assumption of Marxist arguments is that capitalist states represent the interests of the ruling class , the bourgeoisie, which wants to extend the exploitation of the labour class at home and abroad . According to conventional Marxist thought, war is the product of competition among capitalist states and their bourgeois elites for the expansion and intensification of exploitation of labour and material resources. The concept of imperialism describes the alleged tendency of great powers to launch wars in order to territorially expand the exploitation of resources , human and material, beyond the boundaries of the nation state. To explain why war between democracies had been rarer post World War II, Marxist accounts have come close to the realist argument and put forward concepts such as ‘empire’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘dependency’ (Negri and Hardt, 2000). Next to the realist emphasis on power, Marxist accounts have put emphasis on hierarchical relations linking the advanced economies with the rest of the world by means of economic power as much as by the use of force. There are a number of challenges the four schools of thought have confronted. C apitalist p eace t heory has been asked to address the fact that civil war and domestic war-like conflicts are more frequent today, and occur among groups or regions closely tied in economic exchange. For instance, elected leaderships in Yugoslavia fought a series of bitter wars by fuelling nationalism in their ethnic groups despite the fact that they had resided in ethnically mixed and economically interdependent constituencies. Democratic peace theory has to address why civil wars have often occurred between groups whose leaderships had enjoyed high degree of legitimacy, and were often elected. In particular, leaderships in ethnic civil war have been able to mobilise domestic groups into violent acts and conflict. On other occasions, ethnic and social divisions have been contained within the institutions in place, or have been tackled by peaceful institutional change establishing a modus vivendi that has secured peace and stability. This is raising doubts on whether class or ethnic divisions trigger conflict irrespective of how the preferences of these groups have been shaped by the opportunity sets available to them.

Capitalist growth makes war inevitableTrainer, ’07 [Ted, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales, “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society”, p. 125-159]

If all nations go on trying to increase their wealth , production, consumption and "living standards" without limit in a world of limited resources , then we must expect increasing armed conflict . Rich-world affluent lifestyles require us to be heavily armed and aggressive, in order to guard the empire from which we draw more than our fair share of resources. Many people within the Peace Movement fail to grasp that

there is no possibility of a peaceful world while a few are taking far more than their fair share and the rest aspire to live as the rich few do . If we want to remain affluent we should remain heavily armed, so we can prevent others from taking "our" oil fields etc. (For a detailed argument see Trainer, 2002.)

A2: Violence DownViolence up because of cap and growthHadley, History Today editor, 2011(Kathryn, “Alarming increase in wars”, 7-12, http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/07/alarming-increase-wars, jj)

New research by Professors Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick and Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University has revealed that between 1870 and 2001, the frequency of wars between states increased steadily by 2% a year on average. Between 1870 and 1913, the frequency of ‘pairwise’ conflicts (the numbers of pairs of countries involved in conflicts) increased on average by 6% per year. The frequency of wars increased by 17% per year in the period of the First and Second World Wars, and by 31% per year during the Cold War. In the 1990s, the frequency of wars between states rose by 36% per year . Professor Mark Harrison explained how: ‘The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars,

the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.’ The graph below illustrates this increase in pairwise conflicts. It only includes wars between states and does not include civil wars. Conflicts range from full-scale

shooting wars and uses of military force to displays of force (sending warships and closing borders, for example). Although Harrison and Wolf’s study does not measure the intensity of violence, it reflects the readiness of governments to settle disputes by force.According to Harrison and Wolf, this increase in the frequency of pairwise conflicts can be explained by two principal

factors: economic growth and the proliferation of borders. The number of countries has thus almost quadrupled since 1870, rising from 47 countries in 1870 to 187 in 2001.Harrison continued: ‘More pairs of countries have clashed because there have been more pairs. This is not reassuring: it shows that there is a close connection between wars and the creation of states and new borders.’Looking specifically at the countries that have initiated disputes, the study shows that there is no tendency for richer countries (defined by a higher GDP per head) to make more frequent military interventions than others. The readiness to engage in war is spread relatively uniformly across the global income distribution.Thinkers of the Enlightenment believed, and many political scientists still believe today, that the political leaders of richer and more democratic countries have fewer incentives to go to war. Over the course of the twentieth century, on the whole, countries have become richer, more democratic and more interdependent . Yet , Harrison and Wolf’s study disproves the theory that as GDP increases countries are less likely to engage in warfare. In Harrison’s view, political scientists have tended to focus too much on preferences for war (the ‘demand side’) and have ignored capabilities (the ‘supply side’). Although increased prosperity and democracy should have lessened the incentives for rulers to go to war, these same factors have also increased the capacity of countries to go to war. Economic growth has made destructive power cheaper. It is also easier for modern states to acquire destructive power because they able to tax more easily and borrow more money than ever before.

Mark Harrison concluded that: ‘ The very things that should make politicians less likely to want war – productivity growth, democracy, and trading opportunities – have also made war cheaper . We have more wars, not because we want them, but because we can.’

Other Impacts

Disease

Growth Bad – DiseaseFailure to dedevelop ensures global pandemics and extinctionFrank Ryan, M.D., 1997, virus X, p. 366

How might the human race appear to such an aggressively emerging virus? That teeming, globally intrusive species, with its transcontinental air travel, massively congested cities , sexual promiscuity, and in the less affluent regions — where the virus is most likely to first emerge — a vulnerable lack of hygiene with regard to food and water supplies and hospitality to biting insects' The virus is best seen, in John Hollands excellent analogy, as a swarm of competing mutations, with each individual strain subjected to furious forces of natural selection for the strain, or strains, most likely to amplify and evolve in the new ecological

habitat.3 With such a promising new opportunity in the invaded species, natural selection must eventually come to dominate viral behavior. In time the dynamics of infection will select for a more resistant human population. Such a coevolution takes rather longer in "human" time — too long, given the ease of spread within the global village. A rapidly lethal and quickly spreading virus simply would not have time to switch from aggression to coevolution . And there lies the danger . Joshua Lederbergs prediction can now be seen to be an altogether logical one. Pandemics are inevitable . Our incredibly rapid human evolution , our overwhelming global needs , the advances of our complex industrial society, all have moved the natural goalposts. The advance of society , the very science of change, has greatly augmented the potential for the emergence of a pandemic strain. It is hardly surprising that Avrion Mitchison, scientific director of Deutsches Rheuma Forschungszentrum in Berlin, asks the question: "Will we survive!” We have invaded every biome on earth and we continue to destroy other species so very rapidly that one eminent scientist foresees the day when no life exists on earth apart from the human monoculture and the small volume of species useful to it. An increasing multitude of disturbed viral-host symbiotic cycles are provoked into self-protective counterattacks. This is a dangerous situation. And we have seen in the previous chapter how ill-prepared the world is to cope with it. It begs the most frightening question of all: could such a pandemic virus cause the extinction of the human species ?

Globalization enables epidemic spread—our turn outweighs their turn BGH 2006 – Board on Global Health is concerned with advancing the health of populations worldwide. This involves addressing developing country health issues, enhancing the United States role in global health, and addressing health issues that have implications for U.S. health policy (Workshop Summary, Forum on Microbial Threats, “The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control: Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities”)

Globalization is by no means a new phenomenon ; transcontinental trade and the movement of people date back at least 2,000 years, to the era of the ancient Silk Road trade route. The global spread of infectious disease has followed a parallel course . Indeed, the emergence and spread of infectious disease are, in a sense, the epitome of globalization. By Roman times, world trade routes had effectively joined Europe, Asia, and North America into one giant breeding ground for microbes . Millions of Roman citizens were killed between 165 and 180 AD when smallpox finally reached Rome during the Plague of Antoninus. Three centuries later, the bubonic plague hit Europe for the first time (542–543 AD) as the Plague of Justinian. It returned in full force as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when a new route for overland trade with China provided rapid transit for flea infested furs from plague-ridden Central Asia. Even before the development of world trade routes, however, human pathogens had experienced two major bonanzas. First, when people lived as hunter-gatherers, they were constantly on the move, making

it difficult for microbes to keep up with their human hosts. Once people started living as farmers, they began residing in larger numbers in the same place—and were in daily contact with their accumulating feces—for extended periods of time. Second, the advent of cities brought even larger numbers of people together under even worse sanitary conditions. In the Middle Ages, when people threw human waste out their windows in England, they were said to be “blessing the passerby.”Now, two millennia later, human pathogens are experiencing yet another bonanza from a new era of globalization characterized by faster travel over greater distances and worldwide trade. Although some experts mark the fall of the Berlin Wall as the beginning of this new era, others argue that it is not so new. Even a hundred years ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the tremendous impact of increased trade and travel on infectious disease was evident in the emergence of plague epidemics in numerous port cities around the world. As Echenberg (2002) notes, plague epidemics in colonial African cities were closely tied to the increased communication, travel, and trade that accompanied the advent of the steamship . The economic and social impacts of these epidemics were profound. In Johannesburg, in what is now South Africa, the occurrence of plague led to the relocation of black residents in an effort to remove what the white colonists believed was the source of the disease. At about the same time, the influenza pandemic killed many millions of people worldwide. Thus the current era of globalization is more properly viewed as an intensification of trends that have occurred throughout history. Never before have so many people moved so quickly throughout the world, whether by choice or force. Never before has the population density been higher, with more people living in urban areas. Never before have food, animals, commodities, and capital been transported so freely and quickly across political boundaries. And never before have pathogens had such ample opportunity to hitch global rides on airplanes, people, and products .

Growth causes disease spread and mutationHamburg 2008 – MD, FDA Commissioner (Margaret, "Germs go global", http://healthyamericans.org/assets/files/GermsGoGlobal.pdf)

Globalization, the worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and communications integration, has impacted public health significantly. Technology and economic interdependence allow diseases to spread globally at rapid speeds . Experts believe that the increase in international travel and commerce, including the increasingly global nature of food handling, processing , and sales contribute to the spread of emerging infectious diseases.47 Increased global trade has also brought more and more people into contact with zoonosis -diseases that originated in animals before jumping to humans. For example, in 2003, the monkeypox virus entered the U.S. through imported Gambian giant rats sold in the nation’s under-regulated exotic pet trade. The rats infected pet prairie dogs, which passed the virus along to humans.48 International smuggling of birds, brought into the U.S. without undergoing inspection and/or quarantine, is of particular concern to public health experts who worry that it may be a pathway for the H5N1 “bird flu” virus to enter the country.Lower cost and efficient means of international transportation allow people to travel to more remote places and potential exposure to more infectious diseases. And the close proximity of passengers on passenger planes, trains, and cruise ships over the course of many hours puts people at risk for higher levels of exposure. If a person contracts a disease abroad, their symptoms may not emerge until they return home , having exposed others to the infection during their travels. In addition, planes and ships can themselves become breeding grounds for infectious diseases.The 2002-2003 SARS outbreak spread quickly around the globe due to international travel. SARS is caused by a new strain of coronavirus, the same family of viruses that frequently cause the common cold . This contagious and sometimes fatal respirator y illness first appeared in China in November 2002. Within 6 weeks, SARS had spread worldwide, transmitted around the globe by unsuspecting travelers. According to CDC, 8,098 people were infected and 774 died of the disease.49SARS represented the first severe, newly emergent infectious disease of the 21st century.50 It illustrated just how quickly infection can spread in a highly mobile and interconnected world. SARS was contained and controlled because public health authorities in the communities most affected mounted a rapid and

effective response.SARS also demonstrated the economic consequences of an emerging infectious disease in closely interdependent and highly mobile world. Apart from the direct costs of intensive medical care and disease control interventions, SARS caused widespread social disruption and economic losses . Schools, hospitals, and some borders were closed and thousands of people were placed in quarantine. International travel to affected areas fell sharply by 50 70 percent. Hotel occupancy dropped by more than 60 percent. Businesses, particularly in tourism-related areas, failed. According to a study by Morgan Stanley, the Asia-Pacific region’s economy lost nearly $40 billion due to SARS.51 The World Bank found that the East Asian region’s GDP fell by 2 percent in the second quarter of 2003.52 Toronto experienced a 13.4 percent drop in tourism in 2003.53

Pandemics Impact 2NCExtinction – doesn’t assume mutationYu 2009 (5/22, Victoria, Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, "Human extinction: the uncertainty of our fate", http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/spring-2009/human-extinction-the-uncertainty-of-our-fate)

A pandemic will kill off all humans . In the past, humans have indeed fallen victim to viruses. Perhaps the best-known case was the bubonic plague that killed up to one third of the European population in the mid-14th century (7). While vaccines have been developed for the plague and some other infectious diseases, new viral strains are constantly emerging — a process that maintains the possibility of a pandemic-facilitated human extinction.Some surveyed students mentioned AIDS as a potential pandemic-causing virus. It is true that scientists have been unable thus far to find a sustainable cure for AIDS, mainly due to HIV’s rapid and constant evolution. Specifically, two factors account for the virus’s abnormally high mutation rate: 1. HIV’s use of reverse transcriptase, which does not have a proof-reading mechanism, and 2. the lack of an error- correction mechanism in HIV DNA polymerase (8). Luckily, though, there are certain characteristics of HIV that make it a poor candidate for a large-scale global infection: HIV can lie dormant in the human body for years without manifesting itself, and AIDS itself does not kill directly, but rather through the weakening of the immune system. However, for more easily transmitted viruses such as influenza, the evolution of new strains could prove far more consequential . The simultaneous occurrence of antigenic drift (point mutations that lead to new strains) and antigenic shift (the inter-species transfer of disease) in the influenza virus could produce a new version of influenza for which scientists may not immediately find a cure. Since influenza can spread quickly, this lag time could potentially lead to a “global influenza pandemic,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (9). The most recent scare of this variety came in 1918 when bird flu managed to kill over 50 million people around the world in what is sometimes referred to as the Spanish flu pandemic. Perhaps even more frightening is the fact that only 25 mutations were required to convert the original viral strain — which could only infect birds — into a human-viable strain (10).

Agriculture

Industrial Ag BadAgribusiness causes extinction – no check on resource depletionIkerd '8 [John. Prof of Ag Economics @ U of Missouri. Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture. 2008]

These were the consequences of progress, so we were told. The agricultural establishment has boasted loudly that ever‐fewer farmers have been able to feed a growing nation with an ever‐decreasing share of consumer income spent for food. The increases in economic efficiency have been impressive, but what about the human costs. Economists have totaled up tremendous savings for consumers from lower food costs, but they have never bothered to place a value on the lives of farm families that have been destroyed by the loss of their farms, their way of life, and their heritage . They have never bothered to consider the value of the lives of rural people – with roots in rural schools, churches, and businesses—who were forced to abandon their communities as farm families were forced off the land. The human costs of cheap food have been undeniably tremendous, but since they couldn’t be measured in dollars and cents, they have gone uncounted . The ecological costs of cheap food, likewise not measurable in dollars and cents, also have gone uncounted, and thus largely ignored. Today, only the most diehard industrialists bother to deny that we have degraded the productivity of the land through erosion and contamination, and that we have polluted the natural environment with agricultural chemicals – in our never‐ending pursuit of cheaper food. Certainly, we had soil erosion in the “dust bowl” days, but we were making great strikes in soil conservation before the dawning of industrial in the late 1940s. In spite of stepped up soil conservation efforts of the 1990s, American farms still are losing topsoil at rates far exceeding rates of soil regeneration. Feeble efforts to control soil loss through reduced tillage leave farmers increasingly reliant on herbicides that pollute our streams and groundwater and that disrupt or destroy the biological life in the soil. All life on earth is rooted in the soil. As farmers destroy the natural productivity of the land, they are destroying the ability of the earth too support life. We are destroying the future of humanity to make agriculture more efficient. What is the value of the future of humanity? Are we in fact willing to risk the future of human life on earth just so we can have cheap food?

Industrial Ag Not Sustainable 2NCGlobalized ag is economically impotent – makes collapse inev Ikerd '8[John. Prof of Ag Economics @ U of Missouri. Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture. 2008, Pg 256]To be economically viable, a sustainable food system must facilitate harmonious relationships among people and between people and their natural environment. The inherent diversity of nature and of humanity must be reflected in diversity of the economy. Although potential gains from specialization are real, such gains are based on the premise that people and resources are inherently diverse , with unique abilities to contribute to the economy. Competitive capitalism is based on the premise that individual entrepreneurs make individual decisions and accept individual responsibility for their actions. If globalization is allowed to destroy the boundaries that define the diversity of nature and people, then it will destroy both the efficiency and sustainability of the economy . A real cost of globalization to humanity will increase the loss of economic viability.

Corporate agriculture commodifies animals and encourages toxic chemicals that poison consumers and the waterEdwards 9 (Lin, writer @ Helium, peer-reviewed journalist, “How corporate farming impacts the environment” http://www.helium.com/items/1318664-end-corporate-agriculture-and-agribuisiness)

Corporate agriculture encourages monocultures, and monocultures are totally unnatural and unsustainable without outside inputs. Unnatural systems encourage pests , diseases and weeds, and also make catastrophic crop failures possible . The corporate solution is chemicals: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and so on. The list is endless. Toxic chemicals poison the soil and the water, and they also leave residues on the surfaces (and inside) of the foodstuffs, and poison the consumers as well. Not only that, but these unnatural monocultures also need the input of endless fertilizers, which actually strip the soil of nutrients, and which end up in the waterways where they cause algal blooms. Cruelty to Animals Corporate agriculture regards animals as units of production , and could not care less about their welfare. The fact that animals such as cows, sheep and chickens are sentient beings that experience pain and suffering much as we do does not register with corporate agriculture , which sees these creatures only in dollar terms. This is not only bad for the animals, but also for the environment. Keeping chickens or cows in confined spaces, for example, means their waste products are also confined and accumulated, and this has negative impacts on the environment. Keeping animals in unnaturally cramped spaces also means an increase in stress and disease for the animals. The corporate agriculture response? Drugs and hormones. The Alternatives There are many alternatives to corporate agriculture that do not cost the earth . Perhaps the best is permaculture, which advocates species diversity and growing food where the people are. Other alternatives are forest gardens and organic gardening. Any of these alternatives have a beneficial effect on the environment, and they enhance the world around them rather than destroying it.

Dedev Solves 2NCDiversified local agriculture solves – increases health overallFeenstra 97 (Gail, Coordinator @ UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program, “What is Sustainable Agriculture? http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/Concept.htm)

Diversity. Diversified farms are usually more economically and ecologically resilient. While monoculture

farming has advantages in terms of efficiency and ease of management, the loss of the crop in any one year could put a farm out of business and/or seriously disrupt the stability of a community dependent on that crop. By growing a variety of crops, farmers spread economic risk and are less susceptible to the radical price fluctuations

associated with changes in supply and demand.  Properly managed, diversity can also buffer a farm in a biological sense. For example, in

annual cropping systems, crop rotation can be used to suppress weeds, pathogens and insect pests. Also, cover crops can have stabilizing effects on the agroecosystem by holding soil and nutrients in place , conserving soil moisture with mowed or standing dead mulches, and by increasing the water infiltration rate and soil water holding capacity . Cover crops in orchards and vineyards can buffer the system against pest infestations by increasing beneficial arthropod populations and can therefore reduce the need for chemical inputs. Using a variety of cover crops is also important in order to protect against the failure of a particular species to grow and to attract and sustain a wide range of beneficial arthropods. Optimum diversity may be obtained by integrating both crops and livestock in the same farming operation. This was the common

practice for centuries until the mid-1900s when technology, government policy and economics compelled farms to become more specialized. Mixed crop and livestock operations have several advantages. First, growing row crops only on more level land and pasture

or forages on steeper slopes will reduce soil erosion. Second, pasture and forage crops in rotation enhance soil quality and reduce erosion; livestock manure, in turn, contributes to soil fertility. Third, livestock can buffer the negative impacts of low rainfall periods by consuming crop residue that in "plant only" systems would have been considered crop failures. Finally, feeding and marketing are flexible in animal production systems. This can help cushion farmers against trade and price fluctuations and, in conjunction with cropping operations, make more efficient use of farm labor.  

Local agriculture solves and we control uniqueness – current practices and fertilizers are pushing soils to the point of no returnMorley 9 (Robert, writer @ TheTrumpet.com, “Farming our Way to Famine” http://www.thetrumpet.com/?q=5848.4210.0.0)

The era of cheap and abundant food is drawing to a close . America’s soils are facing a crisis. This last year, Iowa—the corn basket of America—was ravaged by some of the worst soil erosion in its history. The New York Times called the rainstorms of last June “catastrophic.” They created gullies 200 feet wide. Ten percent of Iowa’s cropland suffered “severe” erosional damage during just this one event. As catastrophic as the flooding was, it was made much worse because of America’s everyday farming practices, which often promote soil erosion. In some areas, topsoil has been reduced to practically nil. Back in the mid-1980s, Norman Berg, the former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service, said that one third of America’s “really good cropland” was suffering net soil loss, with some of it eroding at 10 times the sustainable limit . And although some progress has been made with low- and no-till techniques, most farming techniques continue to force the land. Removing vegetation cover promotes erosion. And it doesn’t take massive floods to steal away the soil. Each and every day, exposed cropland steadily allows more soil to be washed away into lakes and rivers during normal rain events. Massive monoculture farming operations plant the same crops year after year after year, depleting the soil of vital nutrients. Animals have been taken off the farms. To maintain productivity, farmers dump increasing amounts of pesticides and fertilizers on the land. Meanwhile, the natural, healthy soil-dwelling microbes get chemically burned. Soils are so damaged that little would grow if not for pesticides and fertilizers. Fertilizers may have pushed yields up for a while, but they will only work for so long. Each year a little more is required. Now some scientists wonder if we are reaching a tipping point. But is it too late? Even if poor farming techniques were halted, soils would take many years to fully recover—if they ever could. America is facing the same agricultural problems that many other societies have faced—and we are destroying our soils even faster. The only difference is that America was blessed with some of the most fertile and extensive soils in the world to begin with, so we have been able to get away with greater

abuse. But, just as the Bible prophesied in passages such as Leviticus 26:19-20, that agricultural prosperity is being stripped away. Did you know, however, that the Bible also talks about very specific agricultural practices that would prevent soil erosion and degradation, yet promote superior yields? Some recent studies have already illustrated that organic farming techniques can produce yields that are comparable to and even greater than those produced by conventional methods . And that does not take into account all biblically described practices.

A2: GMGM crops fail—lower yieldsAP ‘8[The Assc Press. 10/26/8. Lexis]Can they feed the world? Almost certainly not. Despite all the hype, present GM varieties actually have lower yields than their conventional counterparts. The seeds are expensive to buy and grow, so wealthy developing-world farmers would tend to use them and drive poor ones out of business, increasing destitution. The biggest agricultural assessment ever conducted – chaired by Professor Robert Watson, now Defra's chief scientist – recently concluded that they would not do the job.

Tech decreases yield – GM seeds not sustainableHo ‘4[Dr Mae. Institute of Science in Society (UK). www.i-sis.org.uk, 2004]AS: If GM can help feed 800 million people around the world who suffer malnutrition, isn't its development a moral imperative? MWH: That is a wicked lie perpetrated by the pro-GM brigade in the mainstream press, using hunger and poverty and moral blackmail to promote the industry. There are indeed hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world who are too poor to buy food, and they can be helped today if the political will is there. India alone has 320 million who go to bed hungry every night, while more than 60 million tonnes of food grains are stacked away to rot in the open or in the go-downs. In neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan too, food silos are bursting while their poor people starve.GM cannot help the poor, it is very likely to make it worse for them because GM seeds are patented, and farmers are not allowed to save seeds for replanting or exchange as they have been doing for thousands for years. The GM crops need lots of fertilizers and herbicides that the poor can never afford to buy.

Prefer our peer reviewed evidence to their agricultural lobbyists – studies prove small farming is best for yieldsHo ‘4[Dr Mae. Institute of Science in Society (UK). www.i-sis.org.uk, 2004]No increase in yield s; on the contrary GM soya decreased yields by up to 20 percent compared with non-GM soya [4], and up to 100 percent failures of Bt cotton have been recorded in India [6]. New studies confirmed these findings. Research from the University of Kansas found a 10 percent yield drag for Roundup Ready soya [9] that required extra manganese applied to the soil to make up the yield deficit. A team of scientists from the USDA and the University of Georgia found growing GM cotton in the US could result in a drop in i ncome by up to 40 percent [10, 11] (Transgenic Cotton Offers No Advantage, SiS 38)

A2: High Yield Ag GoodTurn//agricultural collapse inevitable – focus on high yield stops the transitionIkerd ’97 [John. Prof of Ag Econ @ U of MO. www.missouri.edu.ikerdj/papers/today-f.htm 1997]

Fantasy #4. Population, consumption, and production are the results of separate and largely independent decisions of human societies. Mr. Avery projects human population trends, consumption trends, and production trends as if there were no relationships among the three. In fact there is abundant evidence that such trends are highly interrelated if not inseparable. When people give no conscious consideration to future generations, history suggests they will exploit their resource base -- either through increased per capita consumption or increased population. There is no conceivable way the earth can support as many people as humanity might choose to procreate at any level of consumption to which they might aspire. No one can possibly know with any degree of certainty how many people the earth can sustain or what level of per capita consumption is sustainable. The one thing we do know is that population and consumption cannot expand indefinitely . Avery's "high-yield" agriculture , at best, can do no more than delay the inevitable day when we must find acceptable ways to balance production , population, and consumption . At that time, the earth may be capable of sustaining far fewer people than it could sustain with today's resource base. Fantasy #5. Research on High-Yield Farming is the best bet for a sustainable agriculture. The successful pursuit of a "high-yield" agriculture might allow humanity to ignore its responsibility for conserving our resource base, protecting our environment, and building a more responsible society for another 50 years. If so, at that time we quite likely will be faced with twice as many people, a seriously depleted natural resource base, and an exploding world population. If we wait 50 years to get serious about agricultural sustainability, it just might be too late . Desperate and starving people, historically, have destroyed their resource base and in so doing have destroyed their civilizations. Apparently, such is the nature of being human. The current period of agricultural plenty gives us a window of opportunity to develop new and better ways to farm. We need to explore a wide range of alternatives for sustaining "people" through agriculture -- including the people who farm and live in rural communities. We can't afford to bet our scarce public research dollars on any single approach to the future agriculture , certainly not on the fantasies of Mr. Avery's High-Yield Farming.

High yield ag is a myth Ikerd ’97 [John. Prof of Ag Econ @ U of MO. www.missouri.edu.ikerdj/papers/today-f.htm 1997]

Farmers need to realize that Mr. Avery's fantasies are no more capable of saving wildlife, feeding people , or generating farming profits than are fantasies of "eco-activists." Fantasy #1: A sustainable agriculture won't sustain people . Mr. Avery dismisses all credible definitions of sustainable agriculture and chooses his own: "low-yield farming." He infers that sustainable agriculture advocates would consider starvation of half the human population to be an acceptable strategy for sustainability. He is wrong. All of the many credible definitions of sustainable agriculture include statements such as: "a sustainable agriculture must be productive, must provide for the food and fiber needs of society, must meet the needs of the current generation, must be economically viable and socially just, or must be capable of maintaining its productivity and value to human society." Avery chooses to ignore all these credible definitions of sustainable agriculture and instead creates his own definition -- one which he can easily attack.

A2: Industrial Ag More Efficient( ) Small farms more efficient – your lit is biased and based on market exploitation Ikerd ‘7[John. Prof of Ag Econ @ U of MO. “CAFOs and the Future of Agriculture” web.missouri.edu, Sept 07]There is some validity in these arguments, but a lack of competitiveness doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as economic inefficiency . Many of the family hog farms displaced by CAFOs were actually more economically efficient than the CAFOs that displaced them. When CAFOs began to take over hog production, actual farm records data from all of the major agricultural universities indicated that one ‐ third to one ‐ half of independent hog producers at that time had lower production costs than did the typical CAFO s. CAFOs were able to gain a significant share of the hog market, by displacing the “less efficient” one‐third to one‐half of independent hog producers. They were more efficient than some independent producers, but certainly not all and probably not even most. Virtually all hog CAFO operations were either owned by or under contract to large hog slaughter and pork processing corporations. These corporations then were both suppliers and buyers of hogs. Once they controlled a significant share of the hog market, they were able to manipulate market prices, driving the prices offered to the remaining independent hog farmers to less than $10/cwt. in 1998, the lowest in nearly 30 years. The corporate operations didn’t care how low live hog prices went because they made up any losses in production through larger profit margins in their processing and marketing activities. Retail pork prices barely budged as live hog prices fell. This is the basic process by which “more efficient” independent hog farmers were driven out of business by “less efficient” CAFO operations . This is not economic efficiency; this is economic exploitation. CAFOs are not the natural economic evolution of family farms they are a fundamentally different kind of predatory corporate business.

( ) More ev – no correlation between size and efficiency Strange ‘8[Marty. Policy Director of the Rural School and Community Trust. Family Farming: A New Economic Vision, Pg 79. 2008]It should be emphasized that a farm can be inefficiently operated at any size if it combines resources in impractical ways. A farm that produces fewer bushels of corn per dollar expended because it uses too much land and not enough fertilizer might be just as inefficient as one that uses too much labor and too little machinery, regardless of the number of bushels each actually produces. But there is a theoretically optimum combination of inputs producing an optimum volume of output. That is the solution to the efficiency puzzle. What happens beyond that point of peak efficiency if the farm continues to grow? Once the lowest cost per unit of production is achieved, further expansion may result in higher costs per unit. Farms can get less efficient as they grow. This is called diseconomy of size, the downside of efficiency. Diseconomy may occur primarily because of the human factor in production. As farms become larger, making use of more land and machinery, it becomes necessary to add hired labor. Even under optimal conditions of goodwill between management and labor, the fact is that there is a cost involved in communicating instructions between those who make decisions and those who must implement them. That cost is worth paying only when the farmer hasn’t enough time to do the work, such as when extra labor is needed to harvest perishable crops at the right time. Ask any farm manager: the farm operated by the one who makes the decisions has an advantage over the one in which management must direct labor.

A2: No Alternative To Industrial AgMany alternatives Ikerd '8 [John. Prof of Ag Economics @ U of Missouri. Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture. 2008, Pg 133]

The first principle of sustainable farm economics is the pursuit of enlightened self ‐ interest , which recognizes the individual, interpersonal, and spiritual dimensions of self. This principle is reflected in nearly all of the most popular postindustrial approaches to farm management , including holistic resource management, biodynamic farming, permaculture, and organic farming. The three part goal of holistic management – forms of production, quality of life, and future landscapes – is just a different way of stating the economic, social, and ecological dimensions of sustainability. Biodynamic farming is about feeding the spirit as well as the body. Permaculture is about building a permanent, sustainable agriculture to support a permanent human society. The purpose of true organic farming is to support a permament society , as much a philosophy of life as a means for making a living. In all these approaches to farm management, economic objectives are balanced with social and ecological objectives. The overall goal is to achieve a higher quality of life through harmony and balance among things economic, ecological, and social, rather than through maximization or minimization of anything .

More ev – global trends prove there’s an alternative to agribusinessGillespie ‘7 [Gil. Dept of Soc @ Cornell. Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability, 2007, Pg 68]

The very restructuring of the food system along more global lines , however, simultaneously exposes vulnerabilities in that system and creates opportunities for relocalization (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002). The current renaissance of farmers’ markets can be seen as a logical response by food producers and consumers to such globalizing trends in the food system. With increasing consolidation and coordination across the conventional food supply chain, smaller farms often lose access to mainstream globally ‐ oriented markets for their commodities. Similarly, small‐scale food processors generally experience difficulties in getting their

products into large conventional supermarket chains. Consequently, lacking opportunities , both small ‐ scale and beginning farmers have sought an alternative in farmers’ markets, which offer a relatively low ‐ risk market outlet that can yield a steady, though typically modest, income strength

A2: Transition UnfeasibleShift to sustainable farming is feasible – now is key to avoid backlashIkerd '8 [John. Prof of Ag Economics @ U of Missouri. Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture. 2008, Pg31]It can be done. Many organic and sustainable farmers today produce just as much per acre as their industrial counterparts ; they just have to put more of themselves into the production process. It will not take more land but it will take more farmers – more thinking, innovative, creative, caring farmers . It will also take more caring food consumers who are willing to pay the full ecological and social costs of sustainable food production. And it will take more independent food processors and distributors willing to work with farmers and consumers t o build a more sustainable food system. And all of this will take time. So now is the time to get serious about creating the kind of agriculture that America must have to survive, after fossil energy.

Poverty

A2: Inequality DecreasingProgress has been declining since the 70s – GDP statistics are flawed and only new economic system solves(F.Y.I.; GPI = genuine progress indicator)Costanza et al ‘13Robert, leading ecological economist and Professor of Public Policy @ the Crawford School of Public Policy @ the Australian National University, “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress”, Science Direct8. Conclusion¶ It is increasingly recognized that GDP was never designed as a measure of economic welfare and GDP growth is no longer an appropriate national policy goal (Costanza et al., 2009 and Stiglitz et al., 2010). GPI, while certainly not perfect, is a far better approximation of economic welfare than GDP. By assembling GPI estimates and other indicators for 17 countries representing 53% of the global population, we have been able to show significant trends and differences, and to estimate a global GPI. By this measure, economic welfare at the global scale has not been improving since 1978. ¶ If we hope to achieve a sustainable and desirable future, we need to rapidly shift our policy focus away from maximizing production and consumption (GDP) and towards improving genuine human well-being (GPI or something similar). This is a shift that will require far more attention to be paid to environmental protection, full employment, social equity, better product quality and durability, and greater resource use efficiently (i.e., reducing the resource intensity per dollar of GDP). These changes are clearly within our grasp, and are underway in several countries and regions. Alternative measures of progress, like GPI, are useful to help chart and guide the course if appropriately used and understood.

A2: Growth Solves PovertyGrowth exacerbates povertyRees, 14 (William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, June 2014, “Avoiding Collapse” https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf, jj)

And there is an attendant social problem. The litany of ecological damage and resource scarcity is largely the result of production and consumption to satisfy just the wealthiest 20 per cent of the world’s population. At purchasing power parity exchange rates, this privileged elite enjoys more than 70 per cent per cent of global income (i.e. consumption) while the poorest 20 per cent survive on a paltry 2 per cent, less than $1.25 per person per day. If these data are not sufficient to underscore chronic gross inequity, consider that the wealthiest 61 million individuals — less than 1 per cent of the human population — enjoy the same income as the poorest 3.5 billion, 56 per cent of the population.7 While recent decades have seen a reduction in the proportion of people in abject poverty, mostly in China, progress is glacial . Ortiz and Cummins8 estimate that it would take more than 800 years for the bottom billion to reach 10 per cent of global income at current rates of improvement. Meanwhile, the absolute number of impoverished has never been greater. In 2005, 40 per cent of the human family — 2.6 billion people, which is more than the entire population of Earth in the early 1950s — lived on less than $2 daily. Chronic poverty and egregious inequality are the roots of social upheaval and arguably as much barriers to sustainability as is ecological decay.

Growth can’t solve poverty Alexander ‘12Dr. Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Problems @ the University of Melbourne in Australia and founder of the Simplicity Collective, “The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning A Prosperous Way Down”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheSufficiencyEconomy3.pdf2.2.PovertyamidstPlenty¶ The fact that the global economy is already in ecological overshoot is even more¶ challenging when we bear in mind that in the poorest parts of the world today great¶ multitudes are living lives oppressed by extreme poverty (World Bank, 2009). The¶ global challenge, therefore, in terms of humanitarian justice and ecological¶ sustainability, can be stated as follows: The human community must find a way to raise ¶ the material standards of living of the worlds poorest people –who surely have a right¶ to develop their economic capacities in some form– while at the same time reducing ¶ humanity’s overall ecological footprint (Meadowsetal,2004:p.xv). What is clear is that¶ the current tickle down approach to poverty alleviation is neither working nor ¶ ecologically sustainable , as evidenced by a report from the New Economics Foundation¶ (WoodardandSimms,2006).This study shows that between 1990 and 2001,for every ¶ $100 of growth in the worlds average in come per capita, merely $0.60 contributed to ¶ reducing poverty below the $1 per day line. This means that to achieve $1 of poverty ¶ reduction at that ratio, an extra $166 of global production and consumption is required. ¶ Not only do these figures expose global growth as an extremely inefficient means of¶

Reducing poverty, it also implies that the amount of growth needed to alleviate poverty ¶ would be , without question, environmentally unsupportable. Accordingly, we must find ¶ ¶ a new path to poverty alleviation beyond the conventional development agenda, one ¶ based on equitable distribution and new structures, not limitless growth.

Space

2NC – A2: SpaceColonization not feasible – no livable planets or transportation and can’t coexist with environmentBrown ’06 [Paul, PhD and internationally renowned neuroscience, “Notes from a Dying Planet”, p. 42]

Earth is the only planet that we know has life. However, astronomers have found many planets orbiting distant stars. Possibly enough planets are sufficiently like Earth for intelligent beings to exist elsewhere. But don’t count on them for help. They’re too far away. If our planet becomes unlivable, we don’t have the option of colonizing another planet or surviving on space ships. We don’t have the technology to move large numbers of people off this planet. Anyway, we don’t even know how to keep a few humans alive in a closed, artificial environment for more than a few months, or live in harmony on what was once a roomy and comfortable planet.

The logic of growth will follow us to space – we will destroy our space ecosystems – extinction is inevitableTort, ’05 (Julien, UNESCO, Working paper for the Ethical Working Group on Astrobiology and Planetary Protection of ESA (EWG) July 28, 2005“Exploration and Exploitation: Lessons Learnt from the Renaissance for Space Conquest” http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6195&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=-465.html)

The scenario in which extraterrestrial room is used as a response to the degradation of the terrestrial environment also leads us to the second question that may be asked when considering the parallel between the conquest of the West and the exploration of space. While the possibility of colonizing celestial bodies may seem distant, it diverts attention from terrestrial issues in a very real way. The paradigm of the accumulation of Capital is profoundly bound to the pollution and the overexploitation of natural resources. Likening space exploration to the discovery of America may then be misleading and dangerous. There is –most probably— no new earth to be discovered through space conquest and it is, so far, unlikely that any relief can come from outer space for environmental pain. Furthermore, even if the possibility of human settlements on other celestial bodies was likely, would it still be right to neglect the terrestrial environment, with the idea that we can go and live elsewhere when we are done with this specific planet (again a scenario that science fiction likes: see for example the end of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation)? In a way, the presentation of space as a new area for conquest and expansion tends to deny that the model of the limitless exploitation of natural resources is facing a crisis.

Asteroids aren’t a threatCarl Sagan, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell

University, 1994, Pale Blue Dot, p. 313

Civilization-threatening impacts require bodies several hundred meters across , or more. (A meter is about a yard; 100 meters is roughly the length of a football field.) They arrive something like once every 200,000 years. Our civilization is only about 10,000 years old , so we should have no institutional memory of the last such impact. Nor do we.

EXT – No Space ColNo colonization – reproduction and techBloxham, ’11 (Andy Bloxham, more like Bloxham and eggs if you ask me, assistant editor for The Telegraph (UK), “Sex in space tough, says Nasa,” The Telegraph, 2/14, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8322776/Sex-in-space-tough-says-Nasa.html, bgm)

Researchers at the agency's Ames Research Centre in California found that without effective shielding on spacecraft, powerful proton particles would probably sterilise any female embryo conceived in deep space. They also concluded that male fertility was likely to be negatively affected, with the particles damaging the sperm count. Given that travel to distant planets is likely to take decades, centuries or longer, this could make any mission to colonise other environments a non-starter. The scientists noted that space shield technology is currently not sufficiently advanced to offer enough protection from this type of radiation. Dr Tore Straume, a radiation biophysicist at the centre, said: "The present shielding capabilities would probably preclude having a pregnancy transited to Mars."The DNA which manages the development of all the cells in the body is particularly susceptible to the kinds of radiation found in space. Studies on animals have shown that exposure to ionising radiation can kills egg cells in a female foetus as far on as the second or third trimester . Dr Straume added: "One would have to be very protective of those cells during gestation, during pregnancy, to make sure that the female didn't become sterile so they could continue the colony."

No political willBBC 7 (“Will we ever send humans to Mars?” 10-5-07. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7021303.stm)

A manned mission to Mars would probably use a so-called split-mission architecture, for which cargo is sent first and astronauts are sent later on a faster spacecraft. This would reduce fuel costs and the journey time. Onboard systems that recycle air and water could cut down on "storables" that would need to be taken on the journey. Scientists are also looking at whether a Mars crew could grow some of their own food. Spacecraft with nuclear propulsion. Image: Nasa. Nasa has carried out studies on nuclear propulsion systems CO2 could even be collected from the Martian atmosphere and broken down to make methane (CH4) - a potential rocket propellant for the return journey. But much more work needs to be done before the dream of humans setting foot on another planet can be realised. And, perhaps, the strong incentive required for governments to commit resources is still lacking. "I've been inspired by the Apollo missions since I was a child. So for me, the very idea of a person going to Mars - the exploration part of this - is enough ," says Scott Hovland. "But then, I'm not the person paying for it."

No spacecolCoates 2009 – former adjunct professor at George Washington University, President of the Kanawha Institute for the Study of the Future and was President of the International Association for Impact Assessment and was President of the Association for Science, Technology and Innovation, M.S., Hon D., FWAAS, FAAAS, (Joseph F., Futures 41, 694-705, "Risks and threats to civilization, humankind, and the earth”, ScienceDirect)

Some prominent scientists as well as numerous science fiction writers have frequently written about an escape of humankind from our planet to another planet [2]. This is highly unlikely for two reasons. Under the assumption that there is no special or unimaginable scientific discovery made between now and the time we would like to depart, departing the Earth for survival is not in the cards. First is the question of how many people are necessary to start a new colony or to keep a colony going. If we assume two

thousand or more, we get a sense of the needs in launching such an interstellar venture. If we just look at interstellar travel in our own galaxy, we are confronted with the multi-generational time that it would take. Stars tend to be close from one point of view, twinkling in the sky, but from the point of view of travel, far distant. It may well take 200–250 years at eight-tenths the speed of light to reach a sun-like star with the appropriate size and satellites similar to Earth, Venus or Mars. If the crew had to travel for 250 years, it would imply a great stockpile of embryos ready to be grown into humans. Technology is not quite ready yet with the artificial womb, but that, by no means, is something to overlook. Another possibility would be to reproduce in the usual way, during travel, keeping in mind that one would want to have the travelers as much like each other at the end as at the beginning of the flight. Genetic tools would come into play in selecting who mates with whom or what egg fits the then current gap. Having gotten to a target, the question then confronting the interstellar travelers is what to do and how to do it. No matter what the resources are, unless it is an already lush planet like the Earth —lush with life, lush with forms of life—the travelers may have to start like pioneers, from scratch. That raises the question of what raw materials , machinery , devices, and training in use of those devices should be stored on board. It is getting to be a mighty big space craft.The notion of escaping to another world by a flight to another planet, under the best of circumstances, borders on the extremely unlikely, shading off into the impossible, in terms of the total global population and of what we know, assuming no extreme discoveries or capabilities like teleportation.

Muscle and bone sensitivity make it impossiblePotember, Bryden, and Shapiro , Researchers for the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, 2001 (Dr. Richard S., Dr. Wayne A., and Dr. Jay R., “Analysis of bone metabolism biomarkers and countermeasures using time of flight mass spectrometry,”

Exposure to reduced gravity during space travel profoundly alters the loads placed on bone and muscle. Astronauts lose muscle mass and strength while in space . Exercise countermeasures are so important that other activities may not be given enough time. The data from humans in space indicates a very rapid atrophy of skeletal muscle. After 5- day flights, mean cross-sectional areas of muscle fibers were 11 and 24% smaller in type I and II fibers. These changes occurred even though countermeasures were undertaken by astronauts. There is a need to measure pharmacological, hormonal and growth factor biomarkers and to develop in-depth knowledge of molecular mechanisms for complex interplay between muscle atrophy and bone demineralization. We are evaluating the technical feasibility for evaluating the following biomarkers by TOF-MS: growth hormone, insulin-like growth factors (IGF-I), glucocorticoids: cortisol (which may play a central role in the early stages of muscle atrophy), and 3-methylhistidine (breakdown product of muscle proteins). Exposure to microgravity rapidly leads to osteopenia due to increased bone resorptio n and decreased bone formation. Studies with Skylab and Russian crews demonstrated 1.0-1.6%/month mean losses of bone mass from the spine, femur, neck, and pelvis, increasing the risk of fracture. Also of concern is the lack of evidence that bone loss is fully reversible on return to earth. Progress in developing effective countermeasures to demineralization depends on increased understanding of how the complex biochemical systems that modulate bone turnover response to pharmacological and stress-induced interventions.

EXT – Growth Turns SpaceSpace technology will make the resource crisis worseDickens, ’10 (Peter, Professor of Sociology – University of Brighton and Cambridge, UK, “The Humanization of the Cosmos – To What End?”, Monthly Review, 62(6), November, 6-6, http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/the-humanization-of-the-cosmos-to-what-end)

The general point is that the vision of the Space Renaissance Initiative, with its prime focus on the power of the supposedly autonomous and inventive individual, systematically omits questions of social, economic, and military power. Similarly, the Initiative’s focus on the apparently universal benefits of space humanization ignores some obvious questions. What will ploughing large amounts of capital into outer space colonization really do for stopping the exploitation of people and resources back here on earth? The “solution” seems to be simultaneously exacerbating social problems while jetting away from them. Consumer-led industrial capitalism necessarily creates huge social divisions and increasing degradation of the environment. Why should a galactic capitalism do otherwise? The Space Renaissance Initiative argues that space-humanization is necessarily a good thing for the environment by introducing new space-based technologies such as massive arrays of solar panels. But such “ solutions” are again imaginary . Cheap electricity is most likely to increase levels of production and consumption back on earth. Environmental degradation will be exacerbated rather than diminished by this technological fix .

**Space Impact TurnsSpace exploration will cause environmental exploitation, nuclear annihilation, arms races, and epidemicsGagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, 1999 (Bruce K., “Space Exploration and Exploitation,” http://www.space4peace.org/articles/scandm.htm)We are now poised to take the bad seed of greed, environmental exploitation and war into space . Having shown such enormous disregard for our own planet Earth, the so-called "visionaries" and "explorers" are now ready to rape and pillage the heavens. Countless launches of nuclear materials, using rockets that regularly blow up on the launch pad, will seriously jeopardize life on Earth. Returning potentially bacteria-laden space materials back to Earth , without any real plans for containment and monitoring, could create new epidemics for us. The possibility of an expanding nuclear-powered arms race in space will certainly have serious ecological and political ramifications as well. The effort to deny years of consensus around international space law will create new global conflicts and confrontations.

Space exploration causes asteroid terrorism – extinctionClifford E. Singer, professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, Spring 2001, Swords and Ploughshares, http://www.acdis.uiuc.edu/homepage_docs/pubs_docs/S&P_docs/S&P_XIII/Singer.htmHowever the technology to build isolated extraterrestrial settlements naturally brings along with it another potentially powerful technology– the ability to move sizeable asteroids . Back in 1979 it was shown that this is not as difficult as one might at first think. The requisite technique is to land a spacecraft on one asteroid, dig up material and throw it the path of another asteroid that will approach nearby, and perturb the orbit of that asteroid until it passes nearby another large object. Once an asteroid or comet makes a controlled approach near any planet but Mercury or Pluto, then it can easily be directed near or at the earth at enormous velocity. Fortunately for our hypothetical descendants here destroying all human life on earth by asteroid impact would likely require moving objects with a diameter in excess of ten kilometers. While there are many of these, the required orbit perturbation would require a lot of lead-time and work and could be very difficult to motivate and conceal. Nevertheless with contributions from this technology a dispute between the earth and a handful of its fragile far-flung offspring in space that is carried to the extreme could conceivably lead to human extinction . Only when settlements in space are sufficiently numerous or far flung would such a possibility effectively be ruled out, primarily by physical considerations

MISC

Authors

A2: Gartzke/Interdependence Solves ConflictInterdependence doesn’t prevent conflict – Gartzke’s analysis is flawedHan ‘12Zhen, Masters in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”, http://elk.library.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=15. Findings ¶ The coefficients of all models are reported in Table 3. The coefficients of time splines are ¶

not reported in this section. Please refer to the appendix A for the coefficients of time variables. ¶ Model 1 replicates Model 5 of Gartzke’s capitalist peace paper100. A major difference between ¶ the findings of Model 1 and Gartzke’s capitalist peace Model 5 is that, Model 1 of this paper ¶ shows that higher level of financial market openness is positively associated with more conflict, ¶ while Gartzke finds his market openness index is negatively associated with more conflict101. As ¶ Dafoe points out, Gartzke’s finding can be damaged by the missing values in his market ¶ openness variable, and the temporal dependence and cross-sectional dependence are not properly ¶ controlled 102. Model 1 pays close attention to these problems, and finds that, at least in this ¶ period, market openness is positively associated with more conflicts. As the data of this paper ¶ focuses on a different time period, this result does not suggest Gartzke is wrong, but further ¶ explanation of why market openness is positively associated with more conflict is necessary.

Gartzke ignores historical examples which do not fit his thesis – interdependence causes conflictHan ‘12Zhen, Masters in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”, http://elk.library.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=1On the commercial peace side, this paper finds some evidence to support H5 and H6. Financial liberalization is positively associated with conflicts, and Model 4 suggests that this ¶ destabilizing effect can be explained by market fluctuations caused by large capital inflows. As ¶

discussed in the finding section, these findings shall not be viewed as directly against Gartzke’s ¶

Capitalist Peace arguments, but they raise interesting questions for future research. Why ¶ financial liberalization was negatively associated with conflicts from 1950 to 1992 (the period ¶ studied by Gartzke), and why liberalization becomes positively associated with conflicts from ¶ 1990 to 2001? One can go further to challenge Gartzke by asking whether it is proper to test the ¶ correlation between liberalization and conflicts under the Bretton Woods system, when ¶ liberalization has not yet been widely accepted till later in the 1980s. Combining the findings ¶ from this paper and the critics to Gartzke from Dafoe and Choi111, I am more inclined to the ¶ argument that the risk of having economic and political crises has increased in the era of ¶ liberalization. And then, more questions can be asked: What are the institutions which constrain ¶ the negative impact of liberalization and facilitate positive impact? What are the causal links ¶ connecting economic crises with political crises? What are the conditions to control the damage ¶ of economic crisis and prevent social and political unrest?

Han ‘12Zhen, Masters in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”, http://elk.library.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=1

The opportunity cost of war can increase as the interdependence between states—facilitated ¶ by economic interactions—increases ¶ 49¶ . However, interdependence can also increase the ¶ vulnerability of being the target of attack50. In order to secure its resource supply, a powerful and ¶

highly dependent state might act aggressively to a weak state which produces the raw material. ¶ By emphasizing the opportunity cost argument, Gartzke introduces financial market ¶ integration as a causal factor of peace into the commercial peace model51¶ . He argues that, under ¶ financial liberalization, the cost of war has been further increased as the damage to the financial ¶ markets easily spread to other nations and cause significant cost to many nations52¶ . On the other ¶ hand, global financial markets provide new tools for nations to gain profit, further reducing the ¶ cost of trade 53¶ . An argument associated with this idea is the peace caused by economic ¶ development, which can be facilitated by increasing foreign capital investments ¶ 54. However, ¶ economists have argued that financial liberalization does not always facilitate development. ¶ Broner and Ventura find that liberalization often leads to short-run development in a capital-poor ¶ state, but once the state becomes less capital-poor, liberalization can lead to a capital out-flow, as ¶ newly-accumulated domestic capital evade risks by escaping to developed countries with better ¶ financial institutions, thus hindering further development 55¶ . ¶ The second causal mechanism of commercial peace theory works at the domestic level. ¶ International commercial ties can empower ―peace-loving‖ sectors, and these peace-loving sectors can lobby the state to adopt peaceful policies56. Domestic sectors related to tradable ¶ goods often benefit from international trade; in order to maintain the benefits of trade, the sectors ¶ of tradable goods will lobby the state to maintain peaceful relations with other countries. ¶

However, this peace-lobby factor seems to be more effective in democracies than autocracies. In ¶ other words, the ―peace-loving sector‖ variable interacts with other domestic institutional ¶ variables. On the other hand, since the cost of international trade is often concentrated within ¶ some small groups, these protectionist groups are better organized and more efficient at lobbying ¶ the state. Therefore, it might be over optimistic to predict that the ―peace-loving‖ group will ¶ easily prevail in the policy making. ¶ Extending this domestic factor argument to the financial market, one can argue that the ¶ nature of financial integration can possibly mitigate this pacifying causal mechanism. The cost ¶ caused by commodity trade is often not limited within a small group, but a financial crisis often ¶ creates severe income shocks for the whole society. As the history of the great depression shows, ¶ economic crises can leads to protectionism and xenophobia57. On the other hand, whether ¶ financial liberalization can empower a peace-loving sector is also conditioned by domestic ¶ institutions. While there is positive evidence showing that increasing foreign direct ¶ investment(FDI) reduces the chance of conflicts58¶ , case studies on the impact of the increasing ¶ FDI in Rwanda and Sierra Leone show that increasing FDI inflows unevenly benefits local ¶

warlords more than citizens, enhancing their fighting capacities and increasing the chance of ¶ conflicts in these states59. If the peace-loving groups can have significant impact on national policy, one can expect states which are more integrated into the international market to develop similar policy interests, such as more market liberalization. Therefore, this positive feed-back process makes states with similar interests less likely to fight each other60 . However , states can adopt the same market liberalization policy for different reasons. Doyle rightly points out that market integration can lead to more conflicts if states wish to strengthen their material strength through trade, and economic integration will produce peace if states just want to exchange for their own well being61 . The third causal mechanism is socialization theory. Market integration provides more forums allowing national policy makers to meet, thus policy transparency can be increased, and misinterpretations, which can lead to more conflicts, are reduced62 . Similar policy interests can also be developed through the socialization processes63 . However , Waltz argues that as the number of contracts increases through international market integration, the number of contract default will also increase64; therefore, socialization under globalization can work in a negative way and make conflicts more likely. On the other hand, the socialization effect caused by financial market integration can be limited, as the highly professionalized nature of financial markets creates interactions only within

a small group of experts. Chewieroth suggests that state leaders often have little to say in the norm building of international financial structure, and the self-interested bureaucrats of IMF and other international financial organizations have a significant impact on financial liberalization 65 .

A2: LomborgGrowth’s unsustainable and locks in warming which guarantees extinction---Lomborg’s wrong Jorgen Randers 12, Professor of Climate Strategy at BI Norwegian Business School, September/October 2012, “It’s a Small World,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 5, p. 167-169

The fundamental message of The Limits to Growth was that the world is small, and that if we want to live well and long

on a small planet, we need to limit our ecological footprint. The sad fact is that despite the study's warnings, humans are already overwhelming the earth's carrying capacity . Today, humans emit twice as much greenhouse gases per year as the world's oceans and forests can absorb. This so-called overshoot cannot last . If human society does not reduce the size of its footprint , the ecological systems that underpin its well-being will collapse . The world must now either accept long-term chaos for the sake of short-term comforts or make short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term comforts . Unfortunately, around the world and particularly in market democracies, decision-makers too often disregard long-term consequences .

The Limits to Growth was supposed to help humanity make wiser policy choices. It warned that it was necessary to take action before distant problems became immediate crises and to spend on solutions while the sailing was still smooth. But the world's elites feared that such a change in the status quo would end both economic growth and their own privileged positions. And so the critics of The Limits to Growth instead tried to deny the problems it addressed and attacked the messenger.Rather than joining in the critical effort to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions, Lomborg revives a number of straw men and inaccurate claims about what The Limits to Growth said. The study did not predict that oil and other resources would run out before 2000. It did not assume that population and GDP would grow exponentially; their growth rates vary and were computed as an outcome of other drivers in the model. Nor did The Limits to Growth state that air pollution could or would kill humanity. Rather, it tried to estimate how strong the effect of persistent long-term pollutants would be on human health and food production. In other words, the study did not simply forecast the end of the world as we know it; it encouraged a wise human response to create a sustainable world.Lomborg's assessment of the present state of affairs is even more troubling . He sees a world that is well on its way toward solving its environmental crisis and cites the progress that it has made in curbing air pollution. But by ignoring emissions of carbon dioxide , Lomborg overlooks the single greatest long-term threat to the environment . Emissions of carbon dioxide matter much more than those

of shorter-lived pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, since those are washed out of the atmosphere in weeks. Carbon dioxide has a half-life of 100 years, and emitting it causes lasting damage to the planet's climate.In my recent book and Club of Rome report, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, I argue that emissions of greenhouse gases will cause the world's temperature to rise to two degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times by 2052. In the following decades, the world will be three degrees Celsius warmer and probably warm enough to trigger a

further and uncontrollable increase in the global average temperature caused by the gradual melting of the tundra. In short, this future is unpleasantly similar to the "persistent pollution scenario" from The Limits to Growth, with carbon dioxide as the persistent pollutant.

The rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be the critical factor that shapes the future of life on earth . These emissions could easily be reduced if humanity decided to take action. But held back by myopic decision-making, humanity will not likely change its behavior. In modern, democratic market economies , investments mainly flow to what is profitable, not to what is needed . And

regulators , who could in principle consider both economic growth and larger social needs, do not receive the necessary political mandates from shortsighted voters who want low taxes and cheap prices . Society can address the environment's problems only if it regains some control over the flow of investments.

A2: RoyalAnd – he concludes negRoyal ‘10 (Jedediah Royal, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, 2010, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises,” in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer)

CONCLUSION The logic of ECST supports arguments for greater economic interdependence to reduce the likelihood of conflict . This chapter does not argue against the utility of signalling theory. It does, however, suggest that when considering the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises, ECST logic is dubious as an organising principle for security policymakers. The discussion pulls together some distinct areas of research that have not yet featured prominently in the ECST literature. Studies associating economic interdependence, economic crises and the potential for external conflict indicate that global interdependence is not necessarily a conflict suppressing process and may be conflict-enhancing at certain points. Furthermore, the conditions created by economic crises decrease the willingness of states to send economic costly signals , even though such signals may be most effective during an economic crisis. These two points warrant further consideration in the debate over ECST and, more broadly, theories linking interdependence and peace. The debate takes on particular importance for policymakers when considering the increasingly important US-China relationship and the long-term prospects for peace in the Asia-Pacific. Recent US policy towards China, such as the ‘responsible stakeholder’ approach, assumes that greater interdependence with China should decrease the likelihood for conflict. Some have even suggested that the economic relationship is necessary to ensure strategic competition does not lead to major war (see, e.g., Kastner, 2006). If US or Chinese policymakers do indeed intend to rely on economic interdependence to reduce the likelihood of conflict, much more study is required to understand how and when interdependence impacts the security and the defence behaviour of states. This chapter contributes some thoughts to that larger debate. NOTES I. Notable counterarguments include Barbieri (1996). Gowa (I994), and Levy and Ali I998 . 2.‘ Offi<):ial statements have focused on this explanation as well. See, for example, Bernanke (2009). 3. For a dissenting study. see Elbadawi and Hegre (2008). 4. Note that Skaperdas and Syropoulos (2001) argue that states will have a greater incentive to arm against those with which it is interdependent to hedge against coercion. This argument could be extended to include protectionism in extreme cases. Creseenzi (2005) both challenges and agrees with Copeland’s theory by suggesting that a more important indicator is the exit costs involved in terminating an economic relationship. which could be a function of the availability of alternatives. 5. There is also substantial research to indicate that periods of strong economic growth are also positively correlated with a rise in the likelihood of conflict . Pollins (2008) and Pollins and Schweller (I999) provide excellent insights into this body of literature.

at: Gleditsch and Pickering

Harrison and Wolf ‘13AbstractWe show that the frequency of bilateral militarized conflicts between independent states has indeed been rising steadily over the last century. We show that this finding is not driven by any selection bias in our data but a fact that needs to be explained. Finally we highlight our main contribution, namely that state formation and the capacity to fight are at the heart of the observed upward trend in conflicts.

In ‘The frequency of wars’, we maintained: ‘The frequency of bilateral militarized conflicts among independent states has risen steadily over 131 years’.1 Gleditsch and Pickering argue: ‘Harrison and Wolf's claim is incorrect … their findings primarily arise as a likely artefact of their uncritical use of the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data’.2 Based on their conclusion that our premise is faulty, Gleditsch and Pickering also take issue with the implications we draw for the economic history of conflict among states.

We welcome the effort to explain our findings away, which sets a necessary test of robustness. We accept some criticisms. We chose to use the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) dataset provided by the Correlates of War project.3 We should have given more consideration to the merits and demerits of alternative datasets, and to what we mean by war and the demarcation between wars and militarized interstate disputes of various levels. At the same time we stand by the spirit in which we conceptualized violence among states, and we will show that this spirit is well represented in our data, which our critics have wrongly caricatured. We will show that our findings survive the tests that our critics have posed.

It is fast becoming an orthodoxy among political scientists that the global appetite for organized violence is in long-term decline.4 As we emphasized in our original contribution, there is much in this from which we do not dissent. We acknowledged that ‘Many indicators of interstate conflict have been flat or declining for decades or longer. This includes the number of wars in each year since 1816, the number of military fatalities in each year since 1946, and the annual probability of bilateral interstate conflict since 1950. In the most recent years … the downward trends have continued’.5 We also noted a decline in the bilateral probability of conflict since 1945.

But this was the beginning rather than the end of our story. Our argument reflects a complex world. There is progress in international affairs, but progress is double-edged. Each advance has its price. There are good reasons to associate democratization and liberalization with a more peaceful globe, but national self-determination and long-distance trade appear to have multiple effects, heightening some war risks while others have fallen. The pairwise probability of conflict has fallen; the number of country pairs has risen by more than enough to offset this. Models of the world that treat state formation as exogenous and ignore its role in spreading conflict are oversimplified. We argue that they fail to predict an important fact: ‘One indicator has moved persistently in the wrong direction’; ‘the frequency of bilateral militarized conflicts among independent states has risen steadily over 131 years’.6 Approaches that neglect this are analytically incomplete, because they omit important supply-side factors in interstate violence.

IGleditsch and Pickering start from ‘a common underlying definition of interstate war as armed conflict between two states involving at least 1,000 battle-deaths’.7 They argue that most events in our data fall

short of war, could never lead to war, and in many cases are trivial: they do not amount to interstate conflict in any meaningful sense.

Here we make two points. First, war is conflict; even if not all conflicts are wars, observations of low-intensity conflicts are valuable and should contribute to our understanding of war. Second, ‘low-intensity’ does not mean trivial.

In the MID3 data events are coded by their intensity from level 1 (no action) through 2 (threat of force), 3 (display of force), and 4 (use of force), to 5 (war). We drew the line to include events of level 3 and above; level 3 is defined by ‘show of force’, ‘alert’, ‘nuclear alert’, ‘mobilization’, ‘fortify border’, or ‘border violation’.8 We accept that every field has its technical terms and we see that we violated a norm in using the term ‘war’ when ‘conflict’ or ‘dispute’ would have been more precise. At the same time we see a future in which we will learn to measure and analyse ‘a continuum of violence from organized crime through civil conflict to interstate warfare’.9 Just as violent behaviour evolves across a continuum of conflict types, it also evolves up and down a continuum of conflict intensities. As economists we are interested in the commonality of conflictual behaviour among states more than in the typology of differences.

Gleditsch and Pickering maintain that the events in our data that fall short of war are trivial; they are not on the same continuum as real war. ‘In particular’, our critics argue:

the ‘use of force’ category in the MID data (that is, level 4) includes events such as fishing disputes where one country's coastguard seizes a vessel from another state. Only 313, or about 20 per cent, of the 1,553 MIDs that involved ‘use of force’ entail any recorded fatalities. Therefore, MIDs considered to include ‘use of force’ hardly correspond to what most people have in mind when they talk about interstate wars.10

We refute this as follows. While some fishing disputes are included at level 4 (‘use of force’), coastguard or policing actions are not typical, and it is wrong to conclude that most disputes at this level are one-sided or bloodless. Of 1,553 level 4 disputes, 844 (or more than half) are recorded as involving reciprocal action; action by one state is followed by counteraction on the part of another. Moreover, the level 4 disputes that lack recorded casualties or reciprocal action include a number of events that most historians would classify as acts of war without question: for example, the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet occupations of the Baltic states are recorded as level 4 events with no casualties (or none recorded) and no reciprocal action. As for fatalities, in these cases (and many others), a lack of recorded casualties is just a lack of records.

Moving closer to the present, we can analyse the more detailed narratives of level 4 disputes that transpired between 1992 and 2001. Of the 164 disputes described in this category, we can find the word ‘fish’ or ‘boat’ in 49 entries (or 30 per cent) but the word ‘border’ appears in 74 entries (nearly half); we can find the words ‘troop’, ‘soldier’, ‘forces’, ‘attack’, ‘bomb’, ‘shot’, or ‘kill’ in 109 entries (or two-thirds). Thus the general tenor of these events is darker and more ominous than Gleditsch and Pickering imply.

It would also be wrong to conclude that all level 3 conflicts (‘display of force’) are trivial. Of the 119 disputes recorded in this category between 1992 and 2001, only nine involved ‘fish’ or ‘boat’; the word ‘border’ appears in 58 entries (again, nearly half); we can find the words ‘troop’, ‘soldier’, ‘forces’, ‘attack’, ‘bomb’, ‘shot’, or ‘kill’ in 67 entries (more than half). Some of these developed into very violent conflict (ID 4083, for example, at the Kenyan-Ugandan border), or had grave potential to do so (ID 4281, China versus Taiwan).

Conflict is negative-sum interaction, even if it is not a war. Dramatic events can be hard to explain because they are rare. Precisely because low-intensity events occur more frequently, we can hope to find regularities among them that are not apparent from the more salient events. Costly exercises of military force, even those that are mainly symbolic, that are designed to inform international relations by intimidating the adversary, and so to shift the balance of bargaining power, are relatively frequent and should be of interest. From the point of view of trade versus war, even low-intensity disputes signal a state's willingness to risk the two-sided gains from cooperation and impose a deadweight loss in order to extract a possible one-sided gain from conflict.

IIGleditsch and Pickering are right, and we acknowledge, that most events in our data fall short of ‘war’. Compared with 107 events that reach level 5, we have 1,553 events of level 4 and 569 of level 3 (another 103 are excluded at level 2). As we have explained, the reader should be comfortable with this degree of inclusivity. At the same time it is useful to know how our findings are affected by the variation in intensity. We show this in two ways. Figure 1 reproduces our original time plot of pairwise conflicts; the area shaded grey is the contribution of level 3 disputes, so the profile of the white area below it represents disputes at levels 4 and 5.In figure 1 the considerable annual volatility tends to obscure the implications of changing composition by intensity. Figure 2 shows decadal averages normalized for the total number of disputes in the dataset (including those of level 2 that we did not use) in each period. It shows that disputes of lower intensity were more prevalent in the late nineteenth century, the 1920s, and the last decade of the twentieth century. This is certainly of interest. It confirms that full-scale wars declined as a proportion of all inter-state disputes over the twentieth century. It also shows that even in the last decade of the twentieth century the proportion of disputes of lower intensity (levels 2 and 3) remained below that of the late nineteenth century. As we have argued, none of this detracts from our findings.

IIIGleditsch and Pickering suggest that there are three selection biases in our data. The first arises from the way the Militarized Interstates Disputes dataset codes conflicts of different intensity; as result, they maintain, trivial events will have been overrepresented:

One implication of the MID coding rules is that more severe events are likely to give rise to fewer ‘disputes’. Hence, they will be given systematically less weight in Harrison and Wolf's count of disputes. In particular, large scale wars such as the First World War and Second World War constitute a single event in the COW MID dataset (IDs 257 and 258 respectively). By contrast, less serious militarized disputes such as those over the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately five square kilometres of land … are held to constitute 12 separate events.11

We refute this as follows. If it were the case, our original time plot (figure 1) would show a reduction in the number of conflict events around the times of the two world wars. Instead, it shows what anyone would expect to see: two spikes of violence. One reason for this is the presence in the data of many level 4 and 5 events that are associated with each world war. The Second World War, for example, is represented by both ID 258 and at least 30 related conflicts starting from the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937 and ending with Mongolia's entry into the war. The 30 conflicts include the Soviet annexations in Poland and the Baltic in 1939/40; the number would rise to 36 if we included the various foreign interventions in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the Soviet border wars with Japan (in north China) and Finland in 1939 and 1940. All of these events are rightly in our data. As previously noted, some of them are graded level 4 rather than 5 although any historian would surely count them as acts of war.

The other reason why our data show a spike is because ID 258, although a single event, involved many countries and therefore rates highly when counting pairwise conflicts. We count pairwise because we are interested in state formation; when each new state is formed, a new potential is created for conflict with the existing set of country pairs. Of course most of those potential conflicts are never realized, but some are; of those, most remain at a low level, but some do not. That is why we count pairwise. It may be true, as Gleditsch and Pickering point out, that ‘the distribution of the number of wars is not particularly skewed’, but the number of country pairs does have a skew and we use logs in charting them for this reason.12

The aggregate number of pairs in the Second World War can be counted up as follows. On a first pass, seven Axis countries fought 18 countries that were either Allies or victims of Axis aggression, making 126 pairs; 17 more pairs are added when France changed to the side of the Axis; plus 12 more pairs when Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania changed sides the other way, making a total of 155 pairwise conflicts. Of course these conflicts were not all contemporaneous and every country did not actually fight every other country (but alliance resources were actually or potentially fungible). For these reasons we see no particular risk that our data underrepresent more serious disputes.

The Spratly Islands lie at the other extreme. As Gleditsch and Pickering point out, disputes over the Spratlys contribute 12 events to our data, five of them rated at level 4. Twelve would be too many compared with two world wars, but, as we have shown, the world wars contribute many times that number of events. Besides, although only ‘an archipelago in the South China Sea constituting approximately five square kilometres of land’, the Spratlys are a far from trivial issue. ‘Long a zone of contention among a number of littoral states’, The Economist wrote recently, ‘the South China Sea is fast becoming the focus of one of the most serious bilateral disputes between America and China’.13

Gleditsch and Pickering argue that the MID3 dataset is affected by two other biases. Both, they maintain, lead to underrepresentation of disputes in the early period, and these bias upward our estimate of the rising trend in the data. One source is the concept of a world system of states that had diplomatic relations with the European powers, on which the MID3 data are based. This system did not become truly global until the 1920s, so that some ‘extrasystemic conflicts’ before this period are omitted.14 We acknowledge this. We note that this source of underrepresentation was diminishing by the 1870s when our story starts. We also note that we can drop data from the period 1870 to 1914 altogether and still find the upward trend in level 4 and 5 events.

The last remaining bias that our critics suggest is at work is that ‘lower-level militarized disputes tend to be severely undercounted the further back we go in time, due to systematic differences in the availability of sources’.15 This is plausible—yet it is directly contradicted by the evidence of figure 2 which shows that lower level disputes are more, rather than less, prevalent in the data as we go back into the nineteenth century.

IVWe have defended our findings; what do they imply? Our critics do not seriously address our main contribution. This is that state formation is at the heart of many conflicts yet remains neglected in many empirical studies of conflict and war. Moreover, when new states are formed they acquire sovereignty, which is the capacity to decide between peace and war with their neighbours. A historical perspective that goes beyond the temporal and conceptual limits of the available quantitative datasets to include the early modern period of European history strongly suggests that state formation, democratization, commercialization, and industrialization have interacted with conflict and have had multiple effects on the frequency of conflict, some of which were positive.

In the Kantian literature, democracy and free trade change values and incentives in such a way that peace is more likely to be preferred to war. We do not deny the Kantian channels. But evidence also supports the existence of other channels that flow oppositely. Historically, state formation has been tied to national self-determination and so to nation-building, promoted through nationalist adventures. State formation has also been tied to the growth of state capacity, including fiscal capacity to mobilize resources for military purposes. Falling trade costs have disproportionately promoted long distance trade; in turn, this has reduced the cost of disrupting cross-border trade with close neighbours. A growing economic literature on state capacity introduces the supply side factors in conflict that political science has tended to ignore.16 A convergence of these literatures would seem to offer great opportunities.

In our article we noted specifically a long-run decline in the relative cost of destructive power. In response, Gleditsch and Pickering note that ‘most researchers dispute that there is any simple direct relationship between the costs of armaments and the risk of conflict’.17 So would we; it is not what we argue. As economists, we might think of trade between two countries (a positive sum game) and conflict (a negative sum game) as alternatives. If that is the choice, then one factor among others is the time trend in cost of the war technology relative to the trade technology. Even if war technology costs are changing at the same rate for all countries, moreover, countries A and B could respond differently to a common change in conflict costs if they faced different marginal trade costs.

Our critics go further when they accuse us of neglecting the full costs of war, including ‘the destruction caused by war and the opportunity costs of violent conflict’, adding ‘Any serious analysis of conflict must consider how the full costs of war shape the incentive of actors, and their incentives to reach alternative solutions to contentious issues without the use of violence’.18 In other words, they maintain, because we left out the dimension of increasing destructive power, we omitted an important factor biasing national choices in favour of peace. But we did not leave it out; the basis of our argument was exactly that ‘destructive power … has risen even faster than unit costs’.19 We had in mind (but did not articulate) that, as destructive power increases, it raises issues that have been well known since the time of Kahn and Schelling: the advantage of moving first can increase, deterrence and punishment of aggression can lose credibility, and the strategic balance that frames peaceful negotiation can be destabilized.20

VConcluding their comment, Gleditsch and Pickering contend that we have fallen prey to the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy states that in the presence of heterogeneity it can be misleading to predict the attributes of a member of some group from the group mean.21 But this exactly inverts our argument. We want to shift the focus to the issue of group formation: given that individual attributes affect individual behaviour, mean behaviour in the system must reflect both the attributes of heterogeneous individuals and the process that selects individuals for system membership.

We write that according to ‘the longstanding traditions of western political and philosophical thinking on the future of war, the spread of democracy should crowd war out of the global community. Whoever else they fight, the evidence is compelling that “Liberal or democratic states do not fight each other” ’.22 In other words, we understand and accept the importance of heterogeneity among the membership of the international system. We go on to emphasize the selection aspect: if new entities are created within the system, and new entities change the likelihood of interstate conflict, then that should be of interest.

A simple example shows how. In the decade from 1992 to 2001 there were on average 187 countries, of which 92—just over half—were non-democracies. There were also 38 pairwise conflicts a year of level 3 or above, each involving at least one non-democracy. If the probability of conflict between democratic pairs is roughly zero, then the annual probability of conflict within any given pair involving at least one non-democracy was 0.3 per cent, which is a historically low level and certainly does not sound like much.

In this context, what would be the impact of creating one more country? Assume that conflict probabilities are independent (so conflicts are not serially related, and the fact that new states are often formed through conflict does not increase their immediate conflict probabilities). Then, if the new country was a non-democracy, it would create 187 new country pairs, each of which has an annual conflict probability at level 3 or higher of 0.3 per cent. Across 187 pairs this makes a probability of the new country being involved in one pairwise conflict of 1 − (1 − 0.003)187 = 43 per cent in one year, or 99.6 per cent over a decade.

Even if the new state is a democracy, it joins a world in which it must interact with 92 non-democracies. Across the 92 new pairs that include one non-democracy, the probability of one pairwise conflict is still 1 − (1 − 0.003)92 = 24 per cent in one year, or 94 per cent over a decade.

In our view of global society, the formation of new states has been promoted by processes that we (with most others) would generally wish to welcome: productivity growth, democracy, globalization, and the break-up of empires. National self-determination is a universal value, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. Yet the formation of new states is clearly a source of increasing conflict in global society, and has been promoted by the very things that have underpinned an increasingly democratic and liberalized global order.

New evidence demands to be either explained or explained away. We welcome our critics' efforts to explain our evidence away. As scholars should, they ask whether our work is robust. We have shown that it is. Our evidence has not been explained away. That is why we have tried to explain it.

A2: MerliniMerlini’s not an impact cardCesare Merlini 11, nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Institute for International Affairs, May 2011, “A Post-Secular World?”, Survival, Vol. 53, No. 2

Two scenariosTwo neatly opposed scenarios for the future of the world order illustrate the range of possibilities , albeit at the risk of oversimplification. The first scenario entails the premature crumbling of the post-Westphalian system. One or more of the acute tensions apparent today evolves into an open and traditional conflict between states, perhaps even involving the use of nuclear weapons. The crisis might be triggered by a collapse of the global economic and financial system, the vulnerability of which we have just experienced, and the prospect of a second Great Depression, with consequences for peace and democracy similar to those of the first. Whatever the trigger, the unlimited exercise of national sovereignty, exclusive self-interest and rejection of outside interference would likely be amplified, emptying, perhaps entirely, the half-full glass of multilateralism, including the UN and the European Union. Many of the more likely conflicts, such as between Israel and Iran or India and Pakistan, have potential religious dimensions. Short of war, tensions such as those related to immigration might become unbearable. Familiar issues of creed and identity could be exacerbated. One way or another, the secular rational approach would be sidestepped by a return to theocratic absolutes, competing or converging with secular absolutes such as unbridled nationalism.One symptom that makes such a scenario plausible has become visible. Many commentators have identified anger or anxiety as a common driver of the Tea Party movement in the United States and the rise of xenophobic parties in Europe, perhaps stemming from a self-perception of decline. Anger (directed towards the neo-colonialist or pro-Israeli West or – especially recently – domestic authoritarian regimes) has also been associated with grievances in the Middle East, following the failure of earlier reformist and secular movements.10 Despite relative popular optimism, anger can also be detected in Asia, hand in hand with chauvinism and a sense of lack of appropriate recognition by others, stemming from a self-perception of rising influence and power.

The opposite scenario contemplates not an unprecedented era of peace

and prosperity, but rather continuity in the international system, withfurther consolidation rather than rupture. Current conflicts and those most likely to emerge from existing tensions are contained, thanks to diplomaticor coercive instruments, and major wars are avoided. Economic and financialgive-and-take is kept under control and gives way to a more stableglobal game, including increased safeguarding of public goods such asthe health of the planet. This scenario does not entail the United Nationsbecoming a global government, nor the European Union turning into afully fledged federation, nor the various ‘Gs’ becoming boards of a globalcorporation. But these international organisations, reformed to improverepresentativeness and effectiveness, would remain to strengthen the ruleof law globally.A major factor in the unfolding of this scenario might be the trend towards increased societal interaction, or even empathy. But there is also a risk that this transformation might lead to chaos. Domestically, civil society could become a challenge to the legitimacy and effectiveness of parliaments in representative democracies or an excuse for authoritarian repression. Internationally, governance may become more difficult if states are not fully in control. However, social revolutions driven by advances in science and technology (particularly telecommunications and the Internet) and improvements in the status of women worldwide (access to the labour market and above all control over reproduction), may also gradually enhance transnational relations and understanding and privilege a conciliatory approach to human relations over a confrontational one, with obvious but not radical differences from nation to nation.11

Misc

Growth Kills V2LGrowth mindset kills value to life – a transition and focus on sufficiency solves Trainer ‘14Ted, conjoint lecturer in the School of Social Sciences @ the University of New South Wales, Energy Policy journal, “Some inconvenient theses”, http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Energy%20Policy-Trainer-some%20inconvenient%20theses.pdf11. Abundant energy would not be good for us anyway¶ A foundation belief underlying Western culture has been that more is better. Progress has been thought of largely in terms of becoming more able to produce and perform. Engineers and scientists are among the most ardent devotees, dedicating their lives to finding more productive technologies and firmly believing this inevitably contributes to progress and human emancipation. Those seeking to derive more oil and gas from increasingly ¶ difficult sources tend to provide good examples of this well- intentioned but rarely questioned world view. ¶ However there is now increasing realisation that there might be peaks and sweet spots on some curves, and diminishing returns thereafter. A certain finite amount of food, or exercise or cleanliness is ideal, and one can have too much. For decades Daly (2008) has been pointing out that economic growth is now generating more costs than benefits, and a number of agencies are documenting the way rising GDP is being accompanied by declining quality of life indices (Eckersley. 2004: Speth. 2001: Jackson. 2009). The "downshifting'', slow food, and Voluntary Simplicity movements are among initiatives identifying the good life with reduced consumption and more attention given to non-material sources of life satisfaction. ¶ If abundant energy' enabled all work to be eliminated, and nutritional needs to be met by taking a pill, would that enhance the quality of life? Humans need “work*, things to do, purpose, and in my view our welfare would be maximised if most of the limited supply of food, goods and services we need were produced by hand crafts. The best way to get a house is not by ordering one to be laser-printed but by enjoying slowly building it by hand with friends, from mud. We have known for centuries how to make perfectly satisfactory housing, food, clothing, pottery, music, community. conversation and entertainment.¶ Sometimes when the books are kept properly it becomes evident that technical advance is not good for us. Global welfare is not likely to be increased by the development of an ultra cheap car all Indians can afford. Did finding out how to make nuclear weapons improve our situation? Some African tribes have decided not to adopt the settled agriculture their neighbours have moved to. It makes sense to consider carefully the degree to which we should embrace whatever technology makes possible and often the wise choice is an earlier and simpler way.¶ What would be the effects of a break through which provided abundant energy' to consumer society? It would be used to provide everyone with a private helicopter, take holidays in space, process ore grades at crustal abundance, and hunt down the last shrimp in the sea... and greatly increase the GDP. For 20 years it has been pretty clear that as rich countries increase the GDP measures of the quality of life either do not rise or actually fall (Alexander. 2012: Speth. 2001).  ¶ When it comes to the personal and social domain there is a strong case that wealth impoverishes. It easily preoccupies, corrupts and debauches, increases greed, and undermines the capacity to appreciate. Poorer people tend to be more generous than richer people. (Eisenstein, 2012 p. 22.) Frugal circumstances tend to produce sharing and mutual care. Illich (1974) pointed to the tendency for increasingly energy-intensive ways beyond a low level to worsen equity and disadvantage. When travel is by foot, donkey or bicycle all can travel, but when it is by car or aircraft many cannot afford to. UN indices of welfare show a similar pattern, reaching relatively satisfactory levels at quite low income levels and barely improving after that The pursuit of ever-higher "living standards’ and GDP has been accompanied by an epidemic of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, family breakdown, and suicide. These are “spiritual" problems and are not likely to be reduced by the provision of more energy. The main causes of the deterioration in social cohesion are to do with increasingly individualistic and

acquisitive ways enabled by prioritising greater consumption of energy and resources. The solutions are to be found in moving to better ideas, values and social systems. ¶ At the core of TSW vision is the realisation that only low levels of material consumption are necessary or desirable, and that beyond a low minimal level the quality of life is maximised by focussing on non-material goals. For instance in some alternative communities people only need to "work" for money 1 day a week and can spend the rest engaged in art and craft, community ¶ working bees, committees, education, festivals etc. Increasing their dollar incomes or the amount of energy available to them would not add to their quality of life. Consumer culture is about maximising income, status, wealth, technical sophistication, complexity. scale, output and GDP. The focal concern of the simpler way is what is sufficient or good enough. In my view a good quality of life for all requires a high level of frugality, self-sufficiency, localism, and mutual interdependence and cooperation.¶ This is not an argument against sophisticated technology, nor against the quest for more oil and gas. It is an argument that to assume that these are crucial in solving our problems is to have misunderstood what the problems are.

K Alt Solvency

Trainer, 12 (Ted Trainer, Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Futures, Volume 44, Issue 6, August 2012, Pages 590–599, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?” DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.020, jj)We do not have to get rid of consumer-capitalist society before we can begin to build the new society. At this point in time fighting directly against the system is not going to contribute much to fundamental change. (Sometimes it is necessary to fight against immediate threats.) The way to transcend the consumer-capitalist system in the long run is to ignore it to death, i.e., to turn away from it as much as is possible and to start building its replacement and persuading people to come across. As the Anarchists say, we must work to “Prefigure” the good society here and now within the old, and thereby develop the required vision in more and more people.-The main target, the main problem group, the basic block to progress, is not the corporations or the capitalist class. They have their power because people in general grant it to them. The problem group, the key to transition, is people in general. If they came to see how extremely unacceptable consumer-capitalist society is, and to see that The Simpler Way is the path to liberation, then the present system would be quickly abandoned. The battle is therefore one of ideology or awareness. The task is to help people to see that radical change is necessary and attractive, so that they enthusiastically set about building the new local economies.