1NR

PTX
 1NR - Impact Calc – Warming
Warming outweighs on three levels
a. magnitude – warming is guaranteed cause extinction and it’s irreversible which
triggers the death of everyone on the plant, that outweighs any impact the aff can
present
b. probability – the overwhelming scientific consensus agrees with our impact –
thousands of studies prove warming will be catastrophic
c. timeframe – the time to act is now – the more we wait the worse things get and the
more irreversible things become pushing us away from crucial tipping points
 1NR – T/C – Racist Warming
Communities of color who are least responsible for causing warming will be the most
vulnerable to its worst effects
Newkirk, 18 (Vann R. Newkirk, Vann R. Newkirk II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers
politics and policy, and the host of the podcast Floodlines., 2-28-2018, accessed on 9-17-2020, The
Atlantic, "Environmental Racism is Real, According to Trump's EPA",
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-trump-administration-finds-that-
environmental-racism-is-real/554315/)

“Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east.” Marvin Gaye wasn’t an environmental scientist, but his 1971 single “Mercy
Mercy Me (The Ecology)” provides a stark and useful environmental analysis, complete with warnings of overcrowding and climate change. The
song doesn’t explicitly mention race, but its place in Gaye’s What’s Going On album portrays a black Vietnam veteran, coming back to his
segregated community and envisioning the hell that people endure. Gaye’s prophecies relied on the qualitative data of storytelling—of long-
circulated anecdotes and warnings within black communities of bad air and water, poison, and cancer. But those warnings
have been
buttressed by study after study indicating that people of color face disproportionate risks from pollution,
and that polluting industries are often located in the middle of their communities . Late last week, even as the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those

disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study
indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air.
Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people
living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites
tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.” The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and
manmade microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile
fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was
named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it’s been named by the EPA as a contributor to
several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and
severity, low birth weights, and high blood pressure. As the study details, previous works
have also linked disproportionate
exposure to particulate matter and America’s racial geography. A 2016 study in Environment International found
that long-term exposure to the pollutant is associated with racial segregation, with more highly segregated
areas suffering higher levels of exposure . A 2012 article in Environmental Health Perspectives found that overall levels of
particulate matter exposure for people of color were higher than those for white people. That article also provided a breakdown of just what
kinds of particulate matter counts in the exposures. It found that while differences in overall particulate matter by race were significant,
differences for some key particles were immense. For example, Hispanics
faced rates of chlorine exposure that are more
than double those of whites. Chronic chlorine inhalation is known for degrading cardiac function. The conclusions from scientists at
the National Center for Environmental Assessment not only confirm that body of research, but advance it in a top-rate public-health journal.
They find that black
people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter than white people , and that
Hispanics had about 1.2 times the exposure of non-Hispanic whites . The study found that people in poverty had
about 1.3 times more exposure than people above poverty . Interestingly, it also finds that for black people, the proportion
of exposure is only partly explained by the disproportionate geographic burden of polluting facilities, meaning the magnitude of emissions from
individual factories appears to be higher in minority neighborhoods. These findings join an ever-growing body of literature that has found that
both polluters and pollution are often disproportionately located in communities of color. In some places,
hydraulic-fracturing oil wells are more likely to be sited in those neighborhoods . Researchers have found the
presence of benzene and other dangerous aromatic chemicals to be linked to race. Strong racial disparities are suspected in the prevalence of
lead poisoning. It
seems that almost anywhere researchers look, there is more evidence of deep racial
disparities in exposure to environmental hazards. In fact, the idea of environmental justice—or the degree
to which people are treated equally and meaningfully involved in the creation of the human environment
—was crystallized in the 1980s with the aid of a landmark study illustrating wide disparities in the siting
of facilities for the disposal of hazardous waste. Leaders in the environmental-justice movement have posited—in places as
prestigious and rigorous as United Nations publications and numerous peer-reviewed journals—that environmental racism exists as the inverse
of environmental justice, when environmental risks are allocated disproportionately along the lines of race, often without the input of the
affected communities of color. The idea of environmental racism is, like all mentions of racism in America, controversial. Even in the age of
climate change, many people still view the environment mostly as a set of forces of nature, one that cannot favor or disfavor one group or
another. And even those who recognize that the human sphere of influence shapes almost every molecule of the places in which humans live,
from the climate to the weather to the air they breathe, are often loathe to concede that racism is a factor. To many people, racism often
connotes purposeful decisions by a master hand, and many see existing segregation as a self-sorting or poverty problem. Couldn’t the presence
of landfills and factories in disproportionately black neighborhoods have more to do with the fact that black people tend to be
disproportionately poor and thus live in less desirable neighborhoods? But last week’s study throws more water on that increasingly tenuous
line of thinking. While it lacks the kind of complex multivariate design that can really disentangle the exact effects of poverty and race, the
finding that race has a stronger effect on exposure to pollutants than poverty indicates that something beyond just the concentration of
poverty among black people and Latinos is at play. As the study’s authors write:
“A focus on poverty to the exclusion of race
may be insufficient to meet the needs of all burdened populations.” Their finding that the magnitude of
pollution seems to be higher in communities of color than the number of polluters suggests, indicates that
regulations and business decisions are strongly dependent on whether people of color are around. In other
words, they might be discriminatory. This is a remarkable finding, and not only because it could provide one more policy linkage to
any number of health disparities, from heart disease to asthma rates in black children that are double those of white children. But the study
also stands as an implicit rebuke to the very administration that allowed its release. Under the guidance of President Trump and Administrator
Scott Pruitt, the EPA has begun to walk back already anemic federal environmental-justice work, putting a stop to some civil-rights
investigations and replacing or firing many of the scientists with deep technical knowledge of the subject. Last year, facing cuts to the
environmental-justice program that seem likely to continue, former assistant associate administrator Mustafa Santiago Ali resigned. Further
changes to move the offices of environmental justice into a policy office staffed by Pruitt hires promise to further reduce the autonomy of life-
long environmental-justice staffers and reduce the effectiveness of their work. More broadly, with a defiant stance against climate and
environmental science, Trump and Pruitt have begun a rollback of environmental protections. Pruitt appears to be dismantling Clean Air Act
provisions at every turn, and while Trump’s promises to save the coal industry have produced no real policy in his first year, there are still
opportunities in 2018 and beyond. And while all these actions in the aggregate will likely increase the amount of particulate matter in the air for
everyone, the White House’s own research shows what Marvin Gaye saw 47 years ago: The burden will be increased most on people of color.
 1NR - ! – Warming
Warming guarantees extinction
Dr. Yew-Kwang Ng 19, Winsemius Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University, Fellow
of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Member of Advisory Board at the Global Priorities
Institute at Oxford University, PhD in Economics from Sydney University, “Keynote: Global Extinction and
Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective Altruism”, Global Policy, Volume 10, Number 2, May 2019,
pp. 258–266

Catastrophic climate
change Though by no means certain, CCC causing global extinction is possible due to
interrelated factors of non-linearity, cascading effects, positive feedbacks, multiplicative factors, critical
thresholds and tipping points (e.g. Barnosky and Hadly, 2016; Belaia et al., 2017; Buldyrev et al., 2010; Grainger, 2017; Hansen and
Sato, 2012; IPCC 2014; Kareiva and Carranza, 2018; Osmond and Klausmeier, 2017; Rothman, 2017; Schuur et al., 2015; Sims and Finnoff, 2016;
Van Aalst, 2006).7 A possibly imminent tipping point could be in the form of ‘an abrupt ice sheet collapse
[that] could cause a rapid sea level rise’ (Baum et al., 2011, p. 399). There are many avenues for positive
feedback in global warming, including: • the replacement of an ice sea by a liquid ocean surface from melting
reduces the reflection and increases the absorption of sunlight, leading to faster warming; • the drying of forests
from warming increases forest fires and the release of more carbon; and • higher ocean temperatures may
lead to the release of methane trapped under the ocean floor, producing runaway global warming. Though there
are also avenues for negative feedback, the scientific consensus is for an overall net positive feedback
(Roe and Baker, 2007). Thus, the Global Challenges Foundation (2017, p. 25) concludes, ‘The world is currently completely
unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of CCC’. The threat of sea-level rising from global
warming is well known, but there are also other likely and more imminent threats to the survivability of
mankind and other living things. For example, Sherwood and Huber (2010) emphasize the adaptability limit to
climate change due to heat stress from high environmental wet-bulb temperature. They show that ‘even
modest global warming could ... expose large fractions of the [world] population to unprecedented heat
stress’ p. 9552 and that with substantial global warming, ‘the area of land rendered uninhabitable by heat
stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level’ p. 9555, making extinction much more likely and the
relatively moderate damages estimated by most integrated assessment models unreliably low. While imminent extinction is very
unlikely and may not come for a long time even under business as usual, the main point is that we cannot rule it out. Annan and
Hargreaves (2011, pp. 434–435) may be right that there is ‘an upper 95 per cent probability limit for S [temperature
increase] ... to lie close to 4°C, and certainly well below 6°C’. However, probabilities of 5 per cent, 0.5
per cent, 0.05 per cent or even 0.005 per cent of excessive warming and the resulting extinction
probabilities cannot be ruled out and are unacceptable. Even if there is only a 1 per cent probability that
there is a time bomb in the airplane, you probably want to change your flight. Extinction of the
whole world is more important to avoid by literally a trillion times.
 1NR – U – Overview
We’re ahead on the uniqueness debate – the AP 4-13 evidence says democrats are
unified are determined to pass a bill now –
There’s no answer to this
Manchin will support reconciliation now
Washington Post 4-10, "Manchin again becomes the center of attention on Biden’s infrastructure plan,"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/manchin-again-becomes-the-center-of-attention-on-bidens-
infrastructure-plan/2021/04/10/f1205e86-99ff-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html

The president has signaled his willingness to negotiate with Republicans and with Manchin. If the
stimulus bill is any guide, the president soon will begin to meet with moderates from both parties to
explore whether there is common ground on a subject — rebuilding the nation’s aging infrastructure — that has long
enjoyed at least rhetorical support across the ideological spectrum. Biden sat down with some Republicans at the
beginning of the stimulus debate. The Republicans countered the president’s $1.9 trillion plan with a
roughly $618 billion proposal. Biden concluded that he and the Republicans were far apart and didn’t
believe that prolonged negotiations would change that. He moved on, corralled Democrats such as
Manchin by satisfying their concerns and pushed the bill through on a party-line vote under the terms
allowed by reconciliation. That is the model that many Democrats hope will be used on infrastructure.
Manchin is now very much on the minds of administration officials as they begin to develop their strategy to pass the infrastructure
measure, with some discussions focused on what Manchin might want and how he might be accommodated. Substantively, he has not put
down many markers, though he has said he could live with a 25 percent corporate tax rate, roughly in the
middle of the current 21 percent rate and the 28 percent rate Biden has proposed. Right now, his is a process argument. But he will likely have
more changes in the details of the plan, as well, and administration officials are prepared for that. Meanwhile, fellow Democrats are trying to
understand what political considerations might be motivating Manchin, beyond his stated preference for bipartisanship, and how, ultimately,
that will affect his decision-making on infrastructure. When he writes, as he did, “If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,” his
colleagues note that there is much in the Biden plan that would be good for a state like West Virginia. Manchin
is testing the
patience of some Democrats, but many recognize this is part of the price of working in an evenly divided
Senate and they are reluctant to criticize him openly. They know that there is probably no other Democrat who could win a
Senate race in West Virginia and that home-state considerations are important. So Manchin has some maneuvering room to
try to show that his approach can still work, but it is not unlimited. Manchin has made clear he prefers to try to get back to a
time when that worked. In fact, that did work as recently as a few months ago, when Manchin and other moderates were the driving forces
that helped enact a $900 billion package of economic assistance in the waning days of the Trump presidency. The difference is that, in that
case, Democrats were prepared to vote for a package that would be signed by a Republican president. Few people would disagree that it is
better to gain bipartisan support, if possible, when enacting major legislative packages or changes. But in today’s polarized environment, and
particularly with Republicans dug in against Biden’s agenda, the prospects for that are remote. Even those Democratic senators who generally
favor trying to find bipartisan compromise, Manchin notwithstanding, doubt there are anything close to 10 GOP votes for the kind of
infrastructure package Biden has proposed and perhaps even fewer Republicans willing to vote to repeal or significantly roll back President
Donald Trump’s tax cuts. What other Democrats are asking is: What happens if Manchin’s efforts to find a bipartisan
compromise prove to be a dead end? What will he do then? Democrats who closely read his op-ed say that, while he came out
firmly against changing the filibuster, he left himself wiggle room on reconciliation. “I think he recognizes that this
(reconciliation) is an existing feature of the Senate and would distinguish between that and changing the
filibuster,” said a Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the state of play.
 1NR – L – O/V
There’s no way the aff can not link to the aff - the plan passes CJR which cases
moderates to infight within the party because they don’t want to appear soft on crime
– that’s the wilkins ev. That causes them to rebel against the stimulus bill in order to
appeal to “bipartisanship”
This is especially true for their aff – abolishing the police would cause an intra-party
split and moderates like manchin would turn away from the party – the Raju and
Zaslav ev. that even activist calls to weaken policing derails the democrats agenda
He fights the plan despite the 50-50 split, but fiat causes him to fail and incites a party-
switch out of frustration
Litan, 20 (Robert E. Litan, "Who will hold the most power in the next Senate?", Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/11/16/who-will-hold-the-most-power-in-the-next-
senate/, 11-16-2020, Accessed 1-8-2021)//ILake-JQ

In the Senate, amidst growing political polarization, Manchin has bucked the tide, standing as one of few senators still
on the lookout for bipartisan compromises to issues. Through 2018, Manchin more frequently voted for rather than
against Trump-supported initiatives, though he did oppose the 2017 Trump tax cut, and efforts to repeal or cut back the
Affordable Care Act which President Biden wants to expand with a public option. Like Biden, Manchin has come out strongly
against efforts to “defund the police.” And to progressives’ ire, Manchin recently has said he would oppose “crazy
stuff”—prominently citing as an example any proposals to expand the size of the Supreme Court. To be sure, there is a bloc of
progressive senators wanting expansive legislation on each of the matters central to the Biden-Harris
legislative agenda: pandemic-related fiscal stimulus, climate change, infrastructure investment (much of it tied to mitigating or
adapting to climate change), and addressing systemic racism—not just in the criminal justice system, but in housing and
economic opportunity as well. But even if these senators stick together on every detail, if any legislation goes too
far, Manchin can block it, which brings him back to being the deciding vote on all of the Biden-Harris
legislative agenda if the two Georgia Democrats win their Senate races.

There’s a huge intra-party split over police defunding.

Josiah Bates 20, staff at Yahoo News, “As ‘Defund the Police’ Splits the Democratic Caucus, Criminal
Justice Activists Are Already Wary of Biden Administration,” Yahoo, 11-14-2020,
https://news.yahoo.com/defund-police-splits-democratic-caucus-193002555.html

For many Americans, one of the more pressing domestic issues a Biden-Harris administration needs to
tackle upon their inauguration in January is that of criminal justice and police reform. A hot-button issue during
much of the presidential campaign, calls for action at the federal level have been at the front of public consciousness since the killing of George
Floyd in May.

In recent months, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have both been outspoken on this year’s outpouring of
racial turmoil, with Biden calling for “racial justice” in a taped segment during Floyd’s funeral in June. Harris has also spoken critically of high-
profile incidents of police violence against Black civilians.

But for community leaders and activists in cities where many of this year’s high-profile incidents of police violence took place, what they want
from a Biden administration and what they are expecting are two starkly different things. In terms of meaningful legislation, their expectations
are not very high.

“I don’t see systemic change coming from the new administration,” Devren Washington, an organizer and activist in Philadelphia tells TIME.
“It’ll be a hard fight to get any top-down reforms from the Biden administration when it comes to policing.”
The issue has already become a cause of contention within the Democratic party since Election Day. With
Democrat candidates
falling short in many congressional races, some lawmakers have argued terms like “defund the police”
negatively impacted moderate incumbents’ chances. Most notably, House Majority Whip James Clyburn
has said that the term is “killing our party.”

Progressive members of the party, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have pushed back, arguing that those failures were a
result of poor campaigning and noting the relevance of police reform to many communities and districts who turned out in large numbers for
Biden.

The intra-party divide among lawmakers mirrors a larger cultural split. “Policing across the nation is one of the reasons why
we’re so divided,” Keturah Herron, an organizer with the Kentucky American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says. “[The Biden-Harris
administration] has to take immediate action to help heal communities that have been overburdened by over-policing. Police officers have to
be held to a higher standard than regular citizens.”

“If we’re talking about criminal justice reform, then show some justice,” adds Marjaan Sirdar, an activist in Minneapolis, where George Floyd
was killed, says. “We’re here because people have been denied justice.”

Herron, Sirdar and many others want to see more federal prosecutions of police officers who commit crimes and civil rights violations, more
investigations into local police departments for systemic wrongdoing and a mandate for leaders in the federal government to better engage
with residents and activists in communities that are victimized by police violence.

“[Biden] really needs to consult meaningfully with civil rights groups, lawyers, activists and advocates who have been working on these
problems for a very long time,” Professor Michael Avery, the former president of the National Police Accountability Project says. “It’s time for
their voices to be heard.”

And activists also worry that, even if the Biden administration championed bold legislation to address systemic issues, a Republican-led Senate
would stymie any “progressive” laws. The GOP is “a great opposition party and they will jam up the Democrats. They will prevent any sort of
progress” says Sirdar. “The Democrats have proven that they are unable to fight [back].”

Biden himself has stated publicly that he does not agree with “defunding the police.” Instead, he has proposed
giving police departments more money to invest in training, technology and community policing. He does believe that officers should have a
medical professional with them when they are called for certain emergencies, like mental health incidents similar to that which precipitated the
recent police killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia.
 I/L
Infastructure is key to mitigate the impact of climate change
Goldfuss and DeGood, 19 (Christy Goldfuss and Kevin DeGood, Christy Goldfuss, former managing
director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), rejoined American Progress as the
organization’s senior vice president for Energy and Environment Policy. As managing director, Goldfuss
helped develop and implement the Obama administration’s environmental and energy policies,
including the Climate Action Plan, then-President Barack Obama’s major initiative to combat climate
change. She co-chaired the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience and identified priorities for
protecting the country against the worst impacts of climate change., Kevin DeGood is the director of
Infrastructure Policy at American Progress. His work focuses on how highway, transit, aviation, and
maritime policy affect America’s global competitiveness, access to opportunity for diverse communities,
and environmental sustainability., 9-3-2019, accessed on 3-19-2021, Center for American Progress,
"Reducing Carbon Pollution Through Infrastructure - Center for American Progress",
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2019/09/03/473980/reducing-carbon-
pollution-infrastructure/)

Electric energy-generating wind turbines are seen on a wind farm in the San Gorgonio Pass area in
California on Earth Day, April 22, 2016.

Investing in clean energy, transportation, buildings, industrial innovation , and more could cut more than
800 million metric tons of carbon pollution in 2030.

This report contains a correction.

Elected officials often raise infrastructure as a rare area in which legislative progress may be possible in
the current political environment. Democratic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S.
Senate have voiced their support for putting Americans to work by modernizing the nation’s crumbling
infrastructure. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of passing a $1 trillion infrastructure
package, but he has governed quite differently. Trump has repeatedly called for deep cuts to federal
infrastructure programs—including a cut of $159 billion over 10 years for highways and transit—and
encouraged state and local governments to privatize public assets.1

Democratic leaders in Congress have been clear that they expect any infrastructure legislation to include
measures that will help address climate change. In December 2018, then-House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi (D-CA) pledged that “when Democrats take the gavel, we will rebuild America with clean energy,
smart technology and resilient infrastructure.”2 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
published an op-ed vowing there would be “No deal on infrastructure without addressing climate
change.”3 The two leaders reportedly reiterated those points in a meeting with President Trump in the
spring of 2019.4

Climate change presents an urgent challenge to the United States and the world. From 2016 through
2018, extreme weather events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and floods cost the United States more than
$450 billion.5 According to scientists, the effects of climate change have made many of these events more
severe. Higher sea surface temperatures resulting from climate change contributed to the strength and
historic rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the greater Houston area in 2017, while hotter,
drier summers have made wildfires such as the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in California,
bigger and more destructive.6 Addressing climate change and protecting communities from its effects
will involve changing where and how infrastructure gets built—and what kind of infrastructure is
supported by direct federal spending.

In January, a Center for American Progress report argued that any infrastructure bill should address
climate change not just by strengthening public infrastructure’s resilience to climate impacts, but also by
funding infrastructure projects that yield measurable, ambitious reductions in the greenhouse gas
emissions that are responsible for driving those impacts.7 The report also argued that setting an
emissions reduction target as part of an infrastructure bill would help achieve that goal. CAP has also
consistently argued that federal infrastructure legislation should focus primarily on direct investment
opportunities and not on tax credits or public-private partnership approaches. The overwhelming
majority of infrastructure needs are not well suited to alternative procurement approaches for a
number of reasons; many critical infrastructure needs, including in the environmental space, will not
produce a reliable stream of revenue that can be used to repay project financing, for instance.

Focusing on direct spending approaches to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate
change would represent a significant shift in how Congress considers both infrastructure and climate
legislation. Over the past several decades, when Congress has debated legislation related to mitigating
the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, that discussion has centered on various market
mechanisms—such as carbon prices or cap-and-trade programs—that would drive down emissions by
increasing the economic cost of carbon pollution. Policies to accelerate the adoption of clean and
renewable energy solutions, from wind and solar tax credits to carbon capture and sequestration
technology, have largely been adopted through changes to the tax code. Meanwhile, relatively little
direct federal spending today is aimed explicitly at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, whether through
infrastructure or other programs.

Investment solves the impact to warming---it’s sufficient to prevent climate change

from undermining global political and economic stability
Eric Harris Bernstein 16, Senior Program Associate at the Roosevelt Institute, et al., 11/16/16,
“Transformative Infrastructure Investment and American Competitiveness,”
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Transformative.Infrastructure.Investment.pdf

Scientists believe existing and emerging technologies hold the power to minimize the costs of climate change
and preserve the foundations of global economic and political stability . But to ensure this, we need to
muster the will and foresight to develop and implement carbon emission-reducing technologies now, and we need to
do it on a large scale.35 Doing so will mean we can not only meet our obligations under the Paris climate accords but
also position ourselves as a leading seller and servicer of efficient energy technologies on a global scale.

Estimates of the current and potential size of the global green technology sector vary widely, but all suggest an international market of several
trillion dollars over the next two decades, and many multiples of that over the course of the 21st century.36 Unfortunately, as
in other
infrastructure arenas, our continuing reliance on private parties to make publicly beneficial investments
has failed us on green tech. It is simply not economically rational for individual people, households, or firms to incur costs to prevent
climate change. But if these investments are not made, we will all suffer. In this sense, the world’s climate is the ultimate
public good. National investment can further fuel innovation in green technologies, which will help the U.S. be
competitive in this growing sector globally. But to succeed, we need to invest with both scale and speed. Accordingly, we propose game-
changing public investments in commercial and industrial building retrofits, in a power grid that produces
radically lower carbon emissions, in more efficient roads and air transport systems, and in alternative fuels and vehicles
with high fuel efficiency.i These investments will create good jobs and position the United States as the leader of a
global technological revolution, which will help revive U.S. manufacturing, and – perhaps most importantly—
place us on a trajectory to meet the carbon reduction goals we must in order to avoid catastrophe.