DISAD

Regional Overview on DISAD

By putting a cap and trade plan into effect, the af would be heavily reducing the United States

foreign oil dependence, which in turn would sink the oil-backed US dollar and strip the US of its

hegemonic status. By significantly increasing the price of carbon in the US, the USs imports of

oil will drastically decrease over the next two decades, meaning that the price of oil across the

globe will fall, leading to, mutually assured destruction, as a dollar without oil behind it is not a

strong dollar, leading to a worldwide financial crash. This could ultimately lead to conflicts

between nations with nuclear warheads, meaning nuclear war is a possibility if a cap and trade

plan is to be put into effect. Because of this the Neg is currently winning in regards to impact.

1. They say we are trapped in a status quo mindset. There is nothing wrong with the status
quo. If catastrophe were to occur, simply apply our Tol 14 evidence about humans being
adaptable to disastrous situations
Regardless, catastrophe will not occur if our counterplan is put into effect, which solves
just as well as the afs plan without the global escalation impact

2. The neg says other countries will see the US as an example for reducing our emissions.
There is nothing saying that other countries will act this way.
3.
4. Neg talks about potential catastrophic events due to warming, at Katrina like levels.
While Katrina was a catastrophe and led to a tragic loss of human life, it is also a perfect
example of how in its wake America and humanity in general was able to come together,
persevere through tragedy and rebuild.
5. Yes, the UK was once at the top of the world, and then they stepped down as America
took over. Why should we even risk the idea of losing that hegemony when the neg
presents a perfectly good plan to fight climate change without this risk

WARMING

1. We are not planning on not doing anything to fight climate change. We have a counter
plan with a net gain over the af.
2. Phasing out leaded gas is not equivocal to eliminating US Oil dependancy all together.
3. Cross reference our Vince 13 source. Reducing or even stopping carbon emissions is
not enough Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, there is enough carbon
 dioxide in the atmosphere - and it is such a persistent, lasting gas that
temperatures will continue to rise for a few hundred years.
Markets for carbon emission will be rigged and have been rigged by corporate

interests

Biello 14 (David, Environment and Energy Editor at Scientific American, award-winning

journalist, and writer for Yale e360, Gaming Carbon Must End to Solve Global Warming,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gaming-carbon-must-end-to-solve-global-

warming/)

The idea of charging rent for using the sky as a dump is not new. It first popped up

in 1920. Arthur Pigou, a top economist at the University of Cambridge, proposed taxing

companies for the amount of pollution they emitted into the atmosphere. Pigou speculated

that forcing companies to pay for the use of the air would discourage pollution, just as sin

taxes on alcohol or tobacco discourage drinking and smoking. The idea never really caught

on outside of academic circles, perhaps because even high sin taxes have failed to completely

cure bad habits. Other economists floated similar ideas over time, but it was the late Ronald

Coase, a British-born economist who ended up teaching the dismal science at University of

Chicago Law School, who first proposed the idea of assigning legal rights to pollute.

Polluters would be given (or sold) the right to pollute. Victims of the pollution, whether

individuals or corporations or governments, could then purchase these rights to keep the

polluters from polluting. A market would spring up and eventually reveal a level of pollution

and cost acceptable to both the polluting company and societyan economically optimal

level of pollution. Ownership would promote stewardship. In 1991 Coase was awarded the

Nobel Prize for this insight and throughout the 1990s environmental markets took hold in
the U.S. to address everything from acid rain to water pollution. But the most ambitious

effort to implement Coase's theory came in the effort to reduce the cost of cutting

greenhouse gas pollution: international treaties to combat climate change, such as the Kyoto

Protocol, built in trading as a key component. To help the Kyoto process along, the World

Bank set up investment funds in the early years of the 21st century dedicated solely to

developing projects that could produce carbon credits. Each credit represented a specified

reduction in CO2 that could then be sold to companies or countries with emission reduction

problems. The new credits would help cancel out the pollution spewed by industry. Projects

included new tree plantations, switching from coal burning to less-polluting fuels, and the

destruction of ultrapowerful greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons. What happened

instead was that Chinese companies cornered the market on both making and destroying

such HFCs, reaping millions of dollars in profit. Companies were set up specifically to create

HFC, only so that they could be paid to destroy the chemicals. An analysis by researchers at

Stanford University found that as much as two thirds of all the emission reductions sold in

this global carbon market were fake. The problem with Coase's pollution markets is that they

can be gamed. Financial schemes Gaming was less of an issue when the European Union set

up its Emissions Trading Scheme, in part because it followed the U.S. experience in trading

the pollution that caused acid rain and had direct government oversight. But a different flaw

emerged. In the U.S. power-plant owners traded allowances to emit sulfur dioxide under an

overall cap, and acid rainforming pollution was reduced at a low overall cost. In the ETS

national governments gave allowances to emit carbon dioxide to various companies that

pollute a lot. Swayed by lobbying, the bureaucrats in charge handed out too many. European
utilities and other industries reaped millions of Euros from the free allowances while

enjoying an overall cap that allowed pollution to continue to rise. This scheme to reduce

greenhouse gases failed to cut pollution, among other problems. European leaders are now

calling for a cull of excess allowances to partially fix the problem. Another solution to the

challenge of carbon markets has been to charge polluters for allowances in the first place, to

ensure that the public reaps some gain from granting the right to pollute a common good

like the air. In the cap-and-trade market that encompasses nine northeastern and mid-

Atlantic states in the U.S.the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiativeauctions of such

allowances have raised nearly $1 billion, more than two thirds of which has been invested in

energy-efficiency programs or rebates or subsidies for clean energy. In California, which has

its own separate program, a portion of allowance auction proceeds was used to deliver a $35

credit on every state resident's electricity bill this past April. The magic of markets cannot

accomplish everything, however. A pollution market cannot eliminate pollution, for what

then would be left to trade? Markets also cannot offer justice: The burden of bad air falls

disproportionately on the poor, who cannot afford to move away from major pollution

sources such as oil refineries or coal-fired power plants or pay not to be polluted. Such

markets also require continual oversight by government, both to ensure that polluters are

only emitting what they say they are emitting but also that they actually have the allowances

for that level of emissionsan oversight that is often lacking. And, like most markets,

pollution markets are not truly free, distorted by the whims of government. As any trader,

even a Communist one, can tell you, a market set up by fiat can be closed by fiat. The U.S.

Acid Rain Program begun in 1995the best example yet of how the cap-and-trade idea can
worksaw allowance prices drop from more than $1,500 to less than $1 based on changes

first proposed by the Bush administration. And acid rain may be less but it has not gone

away.

Green paradox climate policy empirically increases emissions use it or lose it

incentives

Sinn, Econ Professor @ University of Munich, 15

(Hans-Werner, The Green Paradox: A Supply-side View of the Climate Problem, CESIFO

WORKING PAPER NO. 5385, )

The climate problem is one of mankinds biggest challenges. Averting disaster requires

nothing less than worldwide collective policy action. However, policies that ignore the laws

of economics may prove futile, if not downright counterproductive. In particular, policies

aimed at reducing future demand for fossil fuels could backfire by inducing resource owners

to bring forward their extraction plans, thus accelerating global warming. I have called this

behaviour the Green Paradox. Economists and policymakers alike long overlooked the

possibility of a Green Paradox because the behaviour of resource owners played no specific

role in the economics of climate change. Although it has long been recognized that the

anthropogenic carbon accumulating in the atmosphere is basically the same as the carbon

taken from the ground and that, except for sequestration, no technical devices exist that

could change the proportions accumulating in the sea, biomass and atmosphere, this has

rarely been incorporated into climate models or addressed by policymakers in the past.

Instead the focus was on the demand side of the market. It was thought that to mitigate the
climate problem, it would be effective and sufficient to require better insulation of homes, to

extract higher mileage from car engines, to subsidize green energy through tariffs, to morally

discredit fossil fuel consumption, to tax the use of fossil fuels, or to subsidize the

development of green technologies, because it was taken for granted that supply would

follow demand. Resource suppliers were perceived to be like car producers, facing flat

marginal cost curves and producing what is demanded at given prices. However, unlike cars,

fossil resources sold in the market are already there (i.e., in the earths crust), and thus cannot

be produced in the normal sense of the word. Extraction and exploration costs are

typically small relative to user costs. This means that we cannot assume that the supply

reactions of resource owners will be elastic.

Industry will sue within hours of the plans announcement undermines solvency

Faber, Law Prof @ Berkeley, 16

(Dan, Why Does Industry Always Attack New Rules?, http://legal-

planet.org/2016/08/28/why-does-industry-always-attack-new-rules/, )

It seems like every time EPA makes a move, industry says its another job-killing power grab

by the government and files court challenges within about an hour of EPAs action. But

why? The rule often survives judicial review, so industry spends millions on lawyers and gets

nothing in return. Its true that industry does often win at least part of its challenge, and it

sometimes gets a temporary stay that buys it time. But stays are rare in the D.C. Circuit,

where many challenges are brought, and often industry wins on only minor points. And yet

many of the same companies are trying to build a public image as environment friendly, yet
they fight to the death over efforts to clean up the environment. Furthermore, industry is

always saying that what it really wants is certainty, so why prolong the uncertainty with

litigation. Admittedly, its an exaggeration to say that industry always protests. For instance,

industry welcomed an important new EPA rule last week setting fuel efficiency standards for

new heavy trucks. It helped that the cost savings from using less fuel greatly outweighed the

upfront cost of the improved trucks. But consider the headline for this story: A Rare

Agreement on Climate Rules. Obviously, there are many situations where a rule is

extremely costly, industry has a strong chance of knocking it out, and the only rational

economic decision is to challenge it. But this isnt always true, so youd expect to see at least

a few more cases where industry just goes along, if only to build a friendlier relationship with

regulators. No doubt the reasons are complex, including some degree of emotional

resistance to regulation, but industrys violent resistance to almost all rules may have two

other explanations. The first set of explanations stem from the fact that industry is not

monolithic. It consists of many separate businesses. They face different compliance costs,

and the fact that many industry members have only a mild objection to some regulation

doesnt keep suit from being brought by the exceptions. There can also be different

industries involved utilities at this point are generally ok with the EPA mercury rule, but

the coal industry isnt. Second, there are what economists call agency costs. Going along

with an EPA rule may be in the companys interest, but it might be in the interest of

executives to fight the rule. They might be afraid that shareholders will misunderstand the

companys economic interests, or they may be able to get credit for fighting the rule while

the legal costs are not transparent to shareholders. The same is true of trade associations,
which may want to get credit for fighting rules even if the rules arent especially bad for the

industry. Especially if at least some firms are fighting a rule, executives may face pressure

from poorly informed shareholders to fall into line. And trade associations may have

interests or groups like the Chamber of Commerce may have interests in building

reputations for aggressiveness

that do not necessarily correspond to the interests of most of their members. These factors

apply to all kinds of regulation. There is one characteristic of EPA regulations that probably

make the problem worse. Although EPA issues rules, permitting and enforcement are

primarily state responsibilities. This gives industry an incentive to build cooperative

relationships with state regulators, but diminishes their incentives to do so at the federal

level. These factors apply to all kinds of regulation. There is one characteristic of EPA

regulations that probably make the problem worse. Although EPA issues rules, permitting

and enforcement are primarily state responsibilities. This gives industry an incentive to build

cooperative relationships with state regulators, but diminishes their incentives to do so at the

federal level. One problem with industrys reflexive resistance to all new regulations is that it

misleads the public about the economic impact of the regulations. (Or perhaps this is an

intended result rather than a side-effect?) Retrospective studies show that on average the

governments estimates of costs on average are either on the high side or about right,

depending on the study. Yet industry often predicts catastrophic costs from new regulations

that simply never materialize. Many lawyers have had the experience of doing filings for

firms claiming widespread economic disaster from a regulation, only to find that when the
regulation takes effect their clients quietly and painlessly comply. Indeed, companies not

uncommonly tell courts and regulators that a regulation would be catastrophic while telling

investors that it wont be a problem. Perhaps some kind of sanction is in order for this type

of unethical conduct.