SJDI Student Wave—Climate Change

Racism Affirmative
Aff
Race K aff
 AC
US has had largest contribution to pollution and bears little of the negative
consequences- obligation to do something.
Gillis and Popovich 17 JUSTIN GILLIS and NADJA POPOVICH “The U.S. Is the Biggest Carbon
Polluter in History. It Just Walked Away From the Paris Climate Deal”, JUNE 1, 2017
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-biggest-carbon-polluter-in-
history-will-it-walk-away-from-the-paris-climate-deal.html>

The United States, with its love of big cars, big houses and blasting air-
conditioners, has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric
carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet. “In cumulative terms, we certainly own this problem more
than anybody else does,” said David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California, San Diego. Many
, President
argue that this obligates the United States to take ambitious action to slow global warming. But on Thursday

Trump announced the United States would withdraw from a 195-nation

agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015. The decision to walk away from the
accord is a momentous setback, in practical and political terms, for the effort to address climate change. An American exit could
prompt other countries to withdraw from the pact or rethink their emissions pledges, making it much harder to achieve the
It means the United States —
agreement’s already difficult goal of limiting global warming to a manageable level.

the country with the largest, most dynamic economy — is giving up a leadership
role when it comes to finding solutions for climate change. “It is immoral,” said
Mohamed Adow, who grew up herding livestock in Kenya and now works in
London as a leader on climate issues for Christian Aid, a relief and development
group. “The countries that have done the least to cause the problem are
suffering first and worst.” Some backers of the agreement argued that the large
American role in causing climate change creates an outsize responsibility to
help fight it, including an obligation to send billions of dollars abroad to help
people in poorer countries. The Obama administration pledged $3 billion to an international fund meant to aid the
hardest-hit countries. Only $1 billion of that had been transferred to the fund by the time President Trump took office on Jan. 20. On
Thursday, he pledged to walk away from the balance of the commitment, though Congress may have the last word. Mr. Trump
argued that meeting the terms of the Paris accord would strangle the American economy and lead to major job losses. Many in the
manufacturing and fossil fuel industries lobbied for the United States to leave the pact, but corporate opinion has been deeply split.
Leaving the Paris deal was a central Trump campaign pledge. While the United States is historically responsible for more emissions
than any other country, it is no longer the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gases. China surpassed the United States a
decade ago, and its emissions today are about double the American figure. Some of China’s emissions are from the production of
But the United States has been burning coal, oil
goods for the United States and other rich countries.

and natural gas far longer, and today the country, with just over 4 percent of
the world’s population, is responsible for almost a third of the excess carbon
dioxide that is heating the planet. China is responsible for less than a sixth. The
28 countries of the European Union, taken as a group, come in just behind the
United States in historical emissions. China has four times as many people as
the United States, so the Chinese still burn far less fossil fuel on average than
Americans — less than half as much, in fact. The typical American also burns
roughly twice as much as the average person in Europe or in Japan, and 10
times as much as the average person in India.
Climate denial sustains environmental racism which destroys communities
around the world
Guenther 18 [Genevieve Guenther [Lecturer at Eugene Lang College]; 4-24-2018; "The Racism
of Climate Denial," Public Seminar; http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/04/the-racism-of-
climate-denial/]

Climate justice demands we acknowledge that the fossil-fuel economy

distributes its costs unequally across racial lines . For example, race, not poverty, is
correlated with exposure to PM 2.5, a health-damaging particle produced by
the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change itself, the planetary effect of fossil-fuel
consumption, also affects people unequally across racial lines. When droughts,
floods, and storms hit African-American and Latinx communities the
government does not help them rebuild, but rather withholds resources and aid
by “privatizing recovery.” Yet climate injustice and systemic racism intersect not only in the stark miseries of
climate-change disasters. They also overlap in the normalized, complacent climate denial that sustains the fossil-fuel economy. To
see how, consider that the goal of climate denial is to produce uncertainty. Uncertainty in science means a variety of things:
ambiguity, imprecision, indeterminism, and so on. In climate science specifically, uncertainty means something like recognizing a
range of possibilities. So, for instance, according to the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
value of Earth’s climate sensitivity ranges from 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, with 3 degrees Celsius being the most likely value. (Climate
sensitivity defines how much the Earth’s temperature will rise at equilibrium once the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
doubles.) 2 degrees of warming is, of course, the soft goal of the Paris Agreement. 3 degrees of warming is catastrophic. 4.5 degrees
is civilization-ending. The difference between Earth’s temperature during the last Ice Age and now is around 4.5 degrees Celsius,
and we are behaving in a way that will raise our planet’s temperature that
much again in our lifetimes. In geological terms, we are heating ourselves up
cataclysmically fast. Asteroid-impact fast. The uncertainty of climate sensitivity
– its range of possibilities – includes some very bad futures, even leaving aside
the futures we haven’t anticipated yet. In finance and the military, this kind of uncertainty is considered a
tremendous risk and, as such, something that requires more hedging than would an entirely certain outcome. Which is to say, this
kind of uncertainty requires that we attempt to prevent the possible worst-case scenario, an apocalyptic 4.5 degrees Celsius of
Climate deniers obscure this risk-
warming, because it’s a real possibility among other real possibilities.

management sense of uncertainty. Instead they activate the popular

connotation of the word and attempt to make people feel doubtful or
indecisive; what you feel at a restaurant when you’re uncertain about whether
to order, say, the chicken or the fish, and you tell the server to take everyone
else’s order and come back to you. The climate deniers want to make the general public feel that we as a
global community don’t know what to order. They want us to feel that we don’t know enough

about climate change to demand that our governments enact policies that will
help transform our energy system and halt global warming . In short, they are trying to
deceive us – and their lies are dangerous. The world’s most vulnerable people are already losing

their jobs, losing their homes, and losing their lives to climate change. Yet we
continue to burn fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow , even though we already have the
technology that could get us to 80% decarbonization immediately. So why do we not take the experience of

the current victims of climate change both as a call for aid now , and as evidence of what
climate change will do to us all if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels immediately? Part of the answer is surely that most stories about
When those stories are
climate change are not about people at all, but about places or objects like air or ice.

released by scientific agencies, media editors don’t understand their

significance. For instance, at the end of February it was announced by researchers that the Arctic was 20 degrees Celsius
(36F) above normal. Still most media outlets devoted little if any time to the event. Imagine expecting to go outside into 50°
Fahrenheit weather, into a brisk Fall day, and instead opening your door and getting hit by a blast of hot summer air! That’s the stuff
of horror movies. Yet it’s happening. And it’s happening during the Arctic winter, no less, when the sun never rises over the polar
horizon to warm the day. All that heat is excess energy in the climate system circulating where it hasn’t been since before human
beings emerged on this planet; before billions of people started to live on coasts that were then submerged under water and will be
submerged again if the ice melts. As far as I could tell, all that heat over the ice received no media coverage except from climate
But the larger answer to the
journalists, for whose audience the melting Arctic is probably not unexpected news.

question of why stories about the effects of climate change on vulnerable

communities are not universally understood as evidence for the reality and the
danger of climate change is that the dynamic of racial othering still structures
political identifications in America. Many white Americans, when they see
African Americans forced to move from their homes in New Orleans after
Katrina, never to return; or Puerto Ricans still without power and running water
almost six months after Maria; or farmers in southern India forced to migrate
from their farms in order to stave off starvation; or children in Aleppo dying in a
war fomented in part by Syrian climate refugees unable to find employment in
cities; even then, many white Americans think “that has nothing to do with me
… that’s not going to happen to me.” Our current political formation – the legacy of white
supremacy and colonialism, the ascendance of neoliberal capitalism – is both produced by and reproduces
a geographical and conceptual devaluing of racialized bodies. To maintain that devaluing in
the face of a planetary crisis requires that those with economic and racial privilege deny that

climate change will affect them. The denial is not necessarily avowed, of course, because it’s a
symptom of a diseased racial system that says poor, brown, and black lives
don’t matter. But if that system were upended, privileged white subjects would
understand themselves as implicated in the climate suffering of marginalized
communities, both as the cause of that suffering – as the great producers and
consumers in the fossil-fuel economy – and as fellow victims of the climate
disasters that will come for us all if we do not decarbonize now. In other words, racial
justice enables climate truth and climate truth demands racial justice. All anyone has to do to see the evidence – the certain
Those lives matter. They
evidence – of climate change is to look at its effects on poor lives, on brown lives, on black lives.

matter in themselves and they matter as front-line victims on a global

battlefield occupied by every last one of us. For in the end, there is only one
climate. There is only one planet. And there is only us.
North American racism has justified nonaction on climate change
Godfrey 12 Godfrey, Phoebe C. "Introduction: Race, Gender & Class and Climate Change." Race, Gender & Class 19, no. 1/2
(2012): 3-11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43496857.(GvineMT) *Phoebe C. Godfrey is an Assistant Professor in Residence in
Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests are highly eclectic but are currently focused on critical feminist
pedagogy and the intersections of R/G/C and climate change. She is co-editing a book tentatively titled World Turning: Race ,
Gender, Class and Global

Christine Shearer in " The Social Construction of Alaska Native Vulnerability to Climate Change " (based on her newly released book
Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, 20 1 1 , reviewed in this journal) adeptly demonstrates that the social, economic and political
the effects of GCC are "not inherent
attributes of a community / people that shape their vulnerability to

characteristics, they are historically and socially produced, and are unevenly
distributed both across nations and within nations." Her analytically complex
case study of the Alaska Native village of Kivalina, which must relocate due to
climate change, enables her to raise vital questions such as, "How does climate
change emerge from and feed into existing social inequalities?" and "How are
vulnerable communities in 'developed' nations similarly and differently
impacted?" In order to answer these questions, she first situates her case study in the literature on development, political
ecology, and environmental justice while recognizing the "role of nation, class, gender, and race in shaping social and environmental
inequalities, leading up to a climate justice framework and movement." Given that the residents of Kivalina are Alaskan Natives,
In fact,
Shearer also goes into detail on how historically they have been socially, economically and politically marginalized.

the area that became the town of Kivalina was only a seasonal hunting ground
but the U.S government forced people to live there, offering them a small
school and medical center in exchange. She then turns to her empirical research
that includes formal interviews with residents, government personnel, reviews
of government documents and other sources that combined paint a thorough
and complex picture of the tragic structural failures that result when so-called
attempts to address the environmental results of GCC, don't also address the
salient issues of social inequality . Kari Marie Norgaard in " Privilege , Denial and the Construction of
Innocence : Resources in the Cultural Tool Kit" (based on her newly released book Living in Denial: Climate Change , Emotions and
Political Economy , 2011, reviewed in this journal) proposes and exposes the "inverse relationship between concern and
contribution" for GCC / its proposed effects and the degrees to which race, gender and class denote social, economic and political
privilege. In other words, those individuals, group and or nations that have and continue to contribute higher carbon emissions are
the least likely to show concern or to take responsibility. As such, some of her central questions are "Why do privileged
people with knowledge of climate science fail to take action on global
warming?" "what is the significance of their constructions of risk and concern in reproducing transnational power relations
along the lines of race, gender and class?" and to bring the issue home to all who benefit from privilege "why are so

many of us in the Global North so willing to ignore climate change in our daily
lives?" To answer these questions and others, Norgaard draws upon ethnographic observation and interviews she did in a rural
community in Western Norway from June 2000 to June 2001. Rachel Hallum-Montes in '" Para el Bien Común ' Indigenous Women 's
Environmental Activism and Community Care Work in Guatemala " adds to the complexity of an intersectional analysis by taking
what she refers to as an "'eco- intersectional perspective to examine the motivations and strategies that guide indigenous women's
environmental activism in Guatemala." She analyzes interviews she did with 33 indigenous Kaqchikel women, all of whom worked
with Alliance for International Reforestation (AIR), a non-profit organization that since 1997 has worked with indigenous farmers in
Guatemala to establish community- based reforestation programs, given that from 1990 through 2005, Guatemala lost 17.1 percent
of its forest cover (FAO, 2005). She analyzes their personal stories to illustrate the ways "that gender, race, and
class figured prominently in women's decisions to become environmental
activists." Some of the questions that guide her inquiry into the motivations and strategies that guide the women's activism are
"How and why did this group of indigenous women decide to begin community- based reforestation projects with the help of AIR?"
and "How do they articulate their environmental activism through the lenses of gender, race, and class?" To answer these questions
and others, she seeks to illuminate the links between interlocking systems of power and privilege in regards to both environmental
degradation and environmental activism. Milton Takei in " Racism and Global Warming: The Need for the Richer Countries to Make
Concessions to China and India " uses Pierre Bourdieu 's concept of habitus (unconscious predispositions) as a theoretical framework
Given that
to explain why racism might lead some people / governments to act or not act on the global warming crisis.

North America is the largest contributor to GCC our historical and current
conceptions of race are very important. Takei uses Howard Winant (2004)
notion of evaluating racism in terms of "consequences," not "intentions or
belief," enabling the focus to be on the current GCC crisis, as opposed to any
hubris about international solidarity. His argument is that a central insight to
understanding North America's refusal to address, or to take any responsibility
for GCC, is a result of our racism reflected both structurally and individually. As
such, North American racism functions as a form of habitus and shapes
international, as well as intranational relations . Takei 's point is extremely important and although he
doesn't analyze gender, making it fully intersectional, his essay is included here because of his focus on institutional racism to explain
the failure of North America to take any steps in actually reducing emissions or in even addressing its existence. In fact, in Nagel,
Dietz, and Broadbent's 2008 report 'racism' is only mentioned twice - once by two different contributors - and in one of the times it
is preceded by the term 'environmental,' which can obscure all the other institutionalized forms of racism, even as it attempts to
bring attention to the environment.

US has had largest contribution to pollution and bears little of the negative
consequences- obligation to do something.
Gillis and Popovich 17 JUSTIN GILLIS and NADJA POPOVICH “The U.S. Is the Biggest Carbon
Polluter in History. It Just Walked Away From the Paris Climate Deal”, JUNE 1, 2017
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-biggest-carbon-polluter-in-
history-will-it-walk-away-from-the-paris-climate-deal.html>

The United States, with its love of big cars, big houses and blasting air-
conditioners, has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric
carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet. “In cumulative terms, we certainly own this problem more
than anybody else does,” said David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California, San Diego. Many
, President
argue that this obligates the United States to take ambitious action to slow global warming. But on Thursday

Trump announced the United States would withdraw from a 195-nation

agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015. The decision to walk away from the
accord is a momentous setback, in practical and political terms, for the effort to address climate change. An American exit could
prompt other countries to withdraw from the pact or rethink their emissions pledges, making it much harder to achieve the
It means the United States —
agreement’s already difficult goal of limiting global warming to a manageable level.

the country with the largest, most dynamic economy — is giving up a leadership
role when it comes to finding solutions for climate change. “It is immoral,” said
Mohamed Adow, who grew up herding livestock in Kenya and now works in
London as a leader on climate issues for Christian Aid, a relief and development
group. “The countries that have done the least to cause the problem are
suffering first and worst.” Some backers of the agreement argued that the large
American role in causing climate change creates an outsize responsibility to
help fight it, including an obligation to send billions of dollars abroad to help
people in poorer countries. The Obama administration pledged $3 billion to an international fund meant to aid the
hardest-hit countries. Only $1 billion of that had been transferred to the fund by the time President Trump took office on Jan. 20. On
Thursday, he pledged to walk away from the balance of the commitment, though Congress may have the last word. Mr. Trump
argued that meeting the terms of the Paris accord would strangle the American economy and lead to major job losses. Many in the
manufacturing and fossil fuel industries lobbied for the United States to leave the pact, but corporate opinion has been deeply split.
Leaving the Paris deal was a central Trump campaign pledge. While the United States is historically responsible for more emissions
than any other country, it is no longer the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gases. China surpassed the United States a
decade ago, and its emissions today are about double the American figure. Some of China’s emissions are from the production of
But the United States has been burning coal, oil
goods for the United States and other rich countries.

and natural gas far longer, and today the country, with just over 4 percent of
the world’s population, is responsible for almost a third of the excess carbon
dioxide that is heating the planet. China is responsible for less than a sixth. The
28 countries of the European Union, taken as a group, come in just behind the
United States in historical emissions. China has four times as many people as
the United States, so the Chinese still burn far less fossil fuel on average than
Americans — less than half as much, in fact. The typical American also burns
roughly twice as much as the average person in Europe or in Japan, and 10
times as much as the average person in India.
Climate change has extraordinarily detrimental effects to developing countries
and poor communities of color.
Lim 18 National Union of Students “Climate change, racism, and climate justice” February 2018
https://sustainability.nus.org.uk/articles/climate-change-racism-and-climate-justice

In Bangladesh, research shows that the entire country could be underwater by

2100 - with some predicting the majority could be underwater by 2050. In Flint, a majority black city in
the US in which almost half of the population lives below the poverty line, a
water crisis has led to fatal health conditions caused by toxicity. Palestinians
are faced with water scarcity - exacerbated by climate change - and those in
Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, face restrictions on
their water use. Consistently, the areas hit by the most extreme weather -
floods in Houston, USA or Nigeria, mudslides in Sierra Leone, or hurricanes in
the Caribbean - are home to communities of colour and poor communities . Climate
change -related issues in the UK disproportionately harm poor, Black and Brown communities, too. Research shows that in England
deprived communities, which have a disproportionate number of people
the most

of colour, face higher air pollution levels. Air pollution is linked to many forms of ill health, including
higher risk of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, especially for more vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly. A
recent study showed that black people in London account for 13.3% of the population, but 15.3% of the people exposed to nitrogen
dioxide levels that breach EU limits . For as long as global inequalities continue to widen, and
those countries affected by colonialism are the whim of their former colonial
powers for aid, for as long as Black and Brown people are forced to flee their
homes as a result of climate change, only to be met with borders, for as long as
we face the disproportionate impact of climate change here and around the
world - the climate crisis is a racist crisis.
Thus the advocacy: The United States ought to implement a carbon tax
That would create retributive justice that holds polluters accountable for
environmental injustice
Paterson 1 Principles of justice in the context of global climate change by: Matthew Paterson edited by: Urs Luterbacher,
Detlef F. Sprinz In International Relations and Global Climate Change (2001), pp. 119-126
http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files/sites/admininst/shared/doc-professors/luterbacher%20chapter
%206%20106.pdf(GvineMT) Matthew Paterson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Ottawa. He has been
researching climate change politics since 1989. He wrote the first book in political science focused solely on climate politics, Global
Warming and Global Politics (1996), which is still widely used as a key text to understanding climate change politics. His book
Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), has won the prestigious
International Political Economy Book Prize.

The implications of retributive justice are fairly clear, and represent an

important strand in policy debates on climate change. The implications are
twofold. First, it is reflected in the “polluter pays” principle. In climate
negotiations, this has come through in proposals both for carbon taxes, and
more specifically in an international context, tradable permit systems. At Kyoto in
1997, negotiators agreed to adopt such a system, although its specific form is still being developed. In this context, there is (at least
superficially) a close fit between concerns of justice and concerns of economic efficiency. Similarly, such joint concerns underlie
proposals for differentiation of commitments. Principles of Justice and Global Climate Change 123 Second, retributive justice raises
questions of compensation. It follows from the responsibility-based principle and relates to Shue’s first question. The Alliance of
Small Island States (AOSIS) advocated in the negotiations the establishment of a fund, to be provided by those who have caused
global climate change, to compensate those who have suffered as a consequence. This suggestion, however, has hitherto been
ignored by most states and is reduced in the FCCC to the provision: “The developed country Parties . . . shall also assist the
developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to
those adverse effects” (FCCC 1992, Article 4(4)). Perhaps perversely, questions of compensation have also been raised by OPEC
countries. They argue that since implementation of the FCCC will impose disproportionate costs on them, they should be
compensated for any such losses (Kassler and Paterson 1997).2 Concerning distributive justice, most of the literature concerning
equity in climate negotiations and justice in general argues that justice requires policy responses that significantly address existing
international inequalities (e.g., Shue 1999). The general political theory literature argues this most clearly. The climate change
literature, being more policy oriented, tends to favor an equal per capita emissions position as the most equitable solution.
However, it is considered, at least in the short term, to be politically infeasible. Thus a mixture of the egalitarian with the
“comparable burdens” position is advocated (e.g., Grubb et al. 1992, 321; Young 1991): emissions are to be distributed over time in
a fashion that moves from the existing distribution toward an egalitarian one. However, an egalitarian position (at least in the sense
that radical reductions in existing inequalities are advocated) is still seen as the primary implication of justice; the “comparable
burdens” position is seen as a consequence of practical politics. This argument in favor of at least a significantly more egalitarian
world leads to a number of conclusions on how to address equity concerns in relation to global climate change. Two practical
There is
questions arise in this context. The first is the distribution of emissions reductions and the costs associated with them.

a clear consensus that the primary costs should be borne by industrialized

countries, and the “historical responsibility” argument has been invoked most
often in climate negotiations. 124 Matthew Paterson This is also reflected in the
FCCC, especially Article 3(1) on the principle of “common but differentiated
responsibilities,” and in the division within Article 4 between obligations of all
parties and obligations to limit emissions for the developed-country parties .
Conflict has arisen over the fair allocation of emissions over the longer term; developing countries, and some commentators (e.g.,
Agarwal and Narain 1990; Bertram 1992; Epstein and Gupta 1990; Grubb 1989; Krause, Koomey, and Bach 1989) have argued that
long-term emissions should be allocated on an equal per capita basis. While this position is explicitly rejected by most industrialized-
country negotiators as unjust (because of the immediate burden it may place on them) and by many commentators as politically
impractical (because of the objections of powerful states), it remains the most persuasive argument on ethical grounds. Indeed
objections to it as a basic principle have subsided to an extent (practical objections nevertheless remain), enabling some to go on to
specify in detail how the emissions levels of industrialized and developing countries may converge over time (e.g., Jepma and
Munasinghe 1998; Meyer 1994; Shukla 1999). The second question raised in the negotiations concerns “financial resources and
technology transfers.” The implications of justice involve substantial financial and technological transfers from North to South, to
assist developing countries in minimizing the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions during phases of accelerated economic
growth. By way of example, Grubb puts likely North-South transfers to address global warming at $100 billion per year (Grubb 1990,
287). This magnitude of transfers envisioned is not uncommon. The argument is justified on the basis that Northern countries have
caused global climate change, and any actions by the South must be conditional on financial and technological assistance from the
North (see FCCC 1992, Article 4(7)). However, in practice, it has been much more conflictual. While accepting, in principle, that this
would be a just distribution of the burden, Northern countries have, in practice, refused to provide anything more than nominal
sums. On the institutional side, however, significant advances have been made with the emergence of systems and mechanisms
such as Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism, which may provide for new financial resources and
technology transfers in the future (see chapters 2, 11–13), both of which can be said to reflect acceptance of principles of Principles
of Justice and Global Climate Change 125 justice that reduction of international inequalities is a necessary consequence of justice in
A fairly strong consensus exists among analysts that one of the
climate negotiations.

most practical ways of addressing both these former questions is to devise a

system of tradable permits for greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Grubb 1989).
This would enable an egalitarian principle of the distribution of emissions to be
matched with minimizing the costs to the North of meeting reduction targets,
and would also facilitate North-South financial and technological transfers. It has the advantages, too, of meeting the concerns of
economists and policy makers for efficiency in implementing obligations.

The plan accepts the demands of communities of color

Roberts 16 – David, writes about climate and energy for Vox, “The left vs. a carbon tax,”
11/6/18, https://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-washington

Who decides what a carbon tax should do for low-income communities and
communities of color? Behind the revenue question are deeper and more sensitive questions: What’s good for low-income
communities? What’s good for communities of color and labor? And most importantly, who decides? It is
this last question, often unspoken but never distant, that most poisoned relations between the alliance and CarbonWA. CarbonWA believes that its
approach is better for low-income communities and communities of color than the alliance alternative of reinvesting the revenue. The sustainability
think tank Sightline argues that because of demographic differences, California’s approach of "targeting clean-energy investments geographically"
won’t work as well in Washington to reach people in need. The sales tax cut plus WFTR approach will help more people. Alliance groups disagree. But

From the point of view of, say, communities of color, there

their objections to I-732 also run deeper.

was one group of environmentalists working with them through the

painstaking process of coming to consensus in an area of policy that was new to
many of them. Those environmentalists were considering new perspectives and
reconsidering long-held policy preferences — doing the work. Another group of
environmentalists was presenting them with a fait accompli, asking them to sign on to a policy that a roomful of mostly white wonks had determined
was in their best interests. Bauman and others involved in CarbonWA object to this characterization. "We did our best to reach out to anyone that we
could possibly find," Bauman says. "Did we reach out to everybody? No, in large part because we were mostly a volunteer grassroots organization.
There were some groups we just didn't know about. There were some groups that we tried to talk to and were blocked by some folks who are now
criticizing us for not talking to social justice groups." Bauman mentions outreach to the Washington Budget and Policy Center, a progressive policy
shop. "Do they count as a social justice group? Yes. Do they count as a community-of-color group, maybe not." Bauman shrugs. "Depends on your

definition, I suppose." (WBPC is a source of excellent analysis, but, no, it does not count as a community-of-color group.) Either way, state
social justice groups did not feel consulted . "Rather than engaging with these communities," wrote Rich Stolz and
De'Sean Quinn of environmental justice group OneAmerica, "I-732 organizers patronized and ignored concerns raised by these stakeholders." White
people who work with other white people — and the white people who write about them — tend to slough off this critique. What matters, they insist,

is the effect of the policy, not the historical accident of who wrote it down. Bauman points to a set of policy
demands posted by Black Lives Matter . Among them: "shift from sales taxes to
taxing externalities such as environmental damage ." Also: "Expand the earned income tax credit."
"Well," Bauman says, "we did both those things, right?" But communities of color want more than for

mostly white environmental groups to take their welfare into account. Most of
all, affected groups want some say in what constitutes their welfare . "All of us want to be
included from the beginning of any decision," says Schaefer. "We don't want to be told after the fact, ‘Hey, by the way, we decided all this stuff for
you.’"
 Framework
We have a moral obligation to take direct policy stances in opposition to
climate change and denial – now is key
Lynas 17 [(Mark, Writer on climate change and visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science at Cornell University) “Now we have a
moral duty to talk about climate change,” CNN, 08/31/2017] SJDI

Officials as senior as Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, have

suggested that now -- during a natural disaster -- is not the time to raise the
divisive and highly politicized issue of global warming. But if not now, when? After
the waters subside, the news crews pack up, and the long task of rebuilding begins, the world's
attention inevitably moves on.

Watching Trump tour the flooded areas, I was reminded of his Rose Garden press conference
less than three months ago announcing the US withdrawal from the Paris climate
treaty. In that act of wanton international vandalism, Trump was helping condemn
millions more people to the threat of intensified extreme events in future
decades.

It is not politically opportunistic to raise this issue now. Instead we have a moral duty not
to accept the attempted conspiracy of silence imposed by powerful political and
business interests opposed to any reduction in the use of fossil fuels . We owe
this to the people of Texas as much to those of Bangladesh and India, and Niger --
which was also struck by disastrous flooding this week.

Climate disasters demonstrate our collective humanity and interdependence.

We have to help each other out -- in the short term by saving lives and in the longer term
by cutting greenhouse gases and enhancing resilience, especially in developing countries.
No, of course climate change did not "cause" Harvey in any singular sense. Nor does smoking
definitively "cause" any individual case of lung cancer. Smoking increases the risk of cancer, just
as increased global warming increases the risk of extreme rainfall events.

This is not scientifically controversial. There is a straightforward physical relationship

between a warming atmosphere and extreme rainfall potential.

Hotter air can hold more water vapor. And hotter water can provide the fuel for more intense
tropical storms.

Yes, the vagaries of the weather played a part. Harvey stalled close enough to the Texas coast to
continue drawing in tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico that was supercharged with moisture.

But the climate change fingerprint is undeniable, too. Sea surface temperatures across the Gulf
on August 23, just before Harvey made landfall in Texas, were ominously warm, 1.5 to 4 degrees
Celsius (2.7 to 7.2 F) hotter than the average of a few decades ago. These warm waters helped
Harvey develop from a mere tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours.

If disasters ever have a silver lining, it is that they bring us together. Witness how ordinary
people risked their lives to save others as the floodwaters rose around Houston. These were not
unusual heroes; they were just normal people doing what they knew was right.

In life-threatening situations our human empathy swamps our day-to-day divisions of politics,
nationality or religion. In South Asia, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is
already supporting 200,000 people in direst need of food and shelter.

Somehow, we need to find a way to extend our capacity to empathize and

support each other across political and social divides in the long term. If climate
change remains as politically toxic as it is today in America, we will never be
able to address it properly.

We all have a duty to confront denial and speak out. If we fail, the Harveys, Katrinas
and Sandys of the future will be even worse than the storms we experience today. And in the
future, as now, each subsequent climate disaster will just be "news." Surely we can do better
than that.

Imagining alternative futures for climate change through the lens of specific
actions is the most effective pedagogy for organizing change and combatting
climate denial
Hall 15 (9/25, Shane Donnelly, doctoral candidate in the University of Oregon’s Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy
Program, graduate teaching fellow with the University of Oregon’s Teaching Effectiveness Program and teaches courses in both the
Environmental Studies Program and the Department of English, coeditor of Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental
Humanities with Stephen Siperstein and Stephanie LeMenager, “Learning to Imagine the Future: The Value of Affirmative
Speculation in Climate Change Education,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 2,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.2.2.004)

Creatively imagining the future in a world with a changed climate is one way of
fostering and testing a student’s depth of understanding climate change . The
summary for policy makers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change periodic
assessment reports lists projections of the impacts of climate change in the form of succinct
paragraphs, scatter plot graphs, or tables. This technical, enumerated presentation is effective in
describing the synthesis of data, but the sheer magnitude of the changes these kinds of reports
suggest challenges a reader’s ability to conceptualize the full extent of what such changes in
the world’s climate will entail. What does it mean that greater than 40 percent of terrestrial species may face extinction if business
continues as usual through the year 2100? What would stronger hurricanes and higher grain prices feel like to someone living in the
Pacific Northwest or West Africa or northern Europe? To articulate a plausible response to these questions requires a student to
creatively embody a world that does not yet (and may not ever) exist. This imaginative embodiment forces
students to confront and digest the disturbing emotions Norgaard outlines as
central to climate denial .
Beyond engaging the emotional understandings of specific elements of
scientific concepts through creative, future-oriented writing , these exercises can
also link specific outcomes of climate change to the historic processes that are
producing these results. To creatively imagine what a future world may look like
in its particulars forces one to take a historical perspective that joins an imagined yet

plausible future to the equally difficult to imagine past and present. A student
who can imagine the potential ramifications of climate change and present
these consequences as plausible to a reader has constructed an unknowable yet
verisimilar world based on the student’s scientific and cultural understanding
of climate change. Creative-writing assignments that require a student to articulate a future vision of a world with a
changed and changing climate are useful for fostering and measuring a student’s ability to connect the reality of climate change to
historical economic, political, and social processes as well as to ethical considerations.

What value does imagining the future hold for climate change pedagogy in
higher education? My intuition and experience as a teacher tell me that having students creatively
construct potential futures fifty to one hundred years from now produces a number of
pedagogical benefits for those institutions and organizations committed to
overcoming climate denial . Students are seldom asked to imagine the world as they think it should be. By
creatively narrating possible futures, students exercise an open-ended, seldom-
used form of creativity called “affirmative speculation.
In their 2012 anonymous manifesto, Speculate This!, the Uncertain Commons differentiates “firmative speculation” from
“affirmative speculation.” They assert, “Speculation is a form of knowledge” that
“potentiates” different futures and presents relationships that bring about
these futures .8 To the Uncertain Commons, the world is “shaped by practices of
speculation,” such as “risk analysis, financial arbitrage, technological
forecasting, and forward-looking institutions.” 9 In short, “speculation is [their] zeitgeist.” Yet
these kinds of dominant speculative institutions practice a “firmative mode of
speculation . . . which seeks to pin down, delimit, constrain and enclose” the
future.10
Firmative speculation uses current trends and measurements to “extend the present forward into the future and backward into the
past” in such a way that the future is jeopardized and sterilized in service of profit maximization and risk management in the
present.11 Firmative speculation yokes the future to the service of the economic present, managing and exploiting the future to
maintain the current mechanisms and distributions of power.

Affirmative speculation, on the other hand, “functions and thrives by

concerning itself with an uncertainty that must not be reduced to manageable
certainties.”12 The value of this affirmative speculation lies in its potential to
open up futures that can undo and redo how we perceive and act in the
present :

By definition, affirmative speculation lives by thinking in the vicinity of the

unthinkable (rather than by asserting that the unthinkable is in principle always thinkable, knowable, calculable, and so on).

As a mode of radical experimentation with the future , it experiments with

those futures that are already here and now and yet are different from the
here and now .13

If we accept the premise that humanely adapting to climate change requires

imaginative solutions that radically break from unsustainable, carbon-intensive,
economic development that has characterized modernity , then it seems to
follow that students should gain proficiency and confidence in exploring the
boundaries of their imaginations that we expect to furnish innovative
adaptations to climate change . And further, if we accept the Uncertain Commons’ argument that affirmative
speculation undercuts the predatory, firmative speculation that forecloses possible futures, any affirmative speculation may be of
instrumental worth in understanding and productively coping with climate change.

We are only responsible for whether the plan itself is a moral action
Harris 08 (Alex, J.D. Stanford University, Harvard University Bachelors (magna cum laude),
Practicing Appellate and Constitutional Law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, former Adjunct
Analyst at The Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Philosopher's Corner: The Principle of
Intervening Action”, https://cei.org/blog/philosophers-corner-principle-intervening-action,
August 15, 2008, ak.)

Gewirth takes the position that we are solely responsible for the morality of our own
actions in two senses. First, only we are responsible for the acts we commit , even if someone
else's action caused us to act as we did. (For example, if a woman's husband cheated on her and she, upon finding out, grew enraged
and killed his lover, she - not he - would bear sole responsibility.) Second, we are only responsible for our
own actions, even if they lead to other actions . Thus, we have a preeminent duty
to never act immorally, even if doing so would preclude others from taking
even more immoral actions . Gewirth contends that never violating the negative rights of
another "is an obligation so fundamental that it cannot be overridden even to
prevent evil consequences from befalling some persons." He clarifies with an example. Imagine that a
group of terrorists kidnaps a woman and offers her son a choice: he must
torture his mother or they will blow up a city with a nuclear weapon . Gewirth
argues that the son has a primary duty to not violate the rights of his mother ,
whereas he is not the actor who is blowing up the city - the terrorists are the moral
agents responsible for that action, not the son. If the son had the choice, he would pick neither. His duty is to
never violate rights; the only way to fulfill this is to not torture his mother. Gewirth argues: "It would be unjustified to violate the
mother's right to life in order to protect the rights to life of the many other residents of the city. For rights cannot be
justifiably protected by violating another right." PIA is the only consistent,
justifiable moral theory of consequences . First, one should note that only PIA sets a non-
arbitrary limit on the string of effects that can factor into the moral calculation .
PIA says that no consequences of other actions can count; the only other non-
arbitrary standard says that all consequences in the chain must count . One
cannot claim that I am responsible for only, say, the first four other actions
resulting from my action. One must either consider only my actions or all
resulting actions . Thus, if the destruction of the city by terrorists actually ended
up preventing more rights violations by , say, staving off a Malthusian population
crunch that would result in mass starvation and world war, then the
consequentialist position has to endorse the terrorists' action .
Consequentialists have to count every effect in the chain, even in the absurdly
far-off future, to determine whether an action is moral . This fact, of course, does not by itself
constitute a reason to reject consequentialism in favor of PIA, but it does suggest that PIA is the only reasonable
interpretation of the requirement of non-consequentialism . It also suggests an
implausible feature of consequentialism . I went on to demonstrate how the libertarian principle of self-
ownership supports PIA and why people cannot be responsible for all effects of
their actions: Since we are born owning ourselves and nothing else , controlling
our mind and body and no one else's, it makes perfect sense that we should be
responsible for only the actions that we ourselves commit . Some could argue that we should
be responsible for the results of these actions. PIA states that we are. If a person gets a wrecking ball and knocks over a building,
which then falls and crushes twenty people, the person is to some degree responsible for those results. But this is not the case if
someone else's action intervenes, because another moral agent is the more proximate cause of the effects; she has stepped into the
When you act upon a rock that you hurl at an
line of causation to take the moral responsibility.

enemy's face, you are responsible for the effects of the rock for two reasons: first, you
are using force upon the rock; secondly, the rock has no agency over the effects
it causes. The rock, by the fact that it has no agency of its own, is merely your tool, an extension of your agency. But
neither of these reasons holds for using non-coercive measures that result in a
person's action. As long as one does not use coercion to compel another to
commit a rights-violating action, one has not reduced that other person's
agency. Possessing full agency, the person is morally responsible for the totality of her
actions; thus no one else can assume any portion of that responsibility . You
are not responsible for anyone else's free actions and no one else is
responsible for yours . If the son were somehow partially responsible for the
terrorists blowing up the city, that would necessarily diminish, by whatever fraction of
responsibility the son assumed, the terrorists' responsibility for that action . They would not be wholly

responsible, because the son had caused their action. But this must not be the case; the terrorists
must be held totally responsible for the destruction of the city. Consequentialists ask, "Which set of rights-
violations do you endorse: the torture of the mother, or the deaths of the millions?" Gewirth responds that PIA endorses neither.

PIA gives the terrorists complete responsibility for their actions, and
emphatically condemns them, in a way that no other position is capable of .
Only PIA is capable of giving rights their supreme status by proclaiming that
they may never be violated for any reason, including preventing future rights-
violations .
1AR
 1AR – States CP
SNA action kills international messaging and solvency
Rose 8 [Carol M. Rose (Yale Law School); 1-1-2008; “Federalism and Climate Change: The Role of the States in a Future Federal
Regime - An Introduction”; Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 1730;
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2769&context=fss_papers] SJDI

Climate change seems far too vast a subject to engage state and local actors in
any significant way. Global warming and greenhouse gas control, sea level alterations and polar ice melts-as a practical
matter, all these climate-related issues have international repercussions on a scale

that state and local actors seldom address . As a legal matter, there are other impediments: the
Constitution charges the federal government, rather than the states and
localities, with managing our relations with other countries . No doubt this pattern exists
because in international matters, the federal government is expected to present a unified
national position, unimpeded by the fragmentation that would arise from
provincial state and local interference . Nevertheless, in the current absence of the
federal government's participation in international climate change efforts,
states and local governments have begun to fill the void . The pieces in this Symposium examine
these efforts by states and local actors. While the authors address diverse issues and take widely differing approaches, many touch
on three common themes, and it is upon those themes that I wish to dwell briefly in this Introduction. The first theme asks whether
state and local actors-the entities that Richard Stewart calls "sub-national actors," or SNAs-will actually have any impact on global
SNA efforts are unlikely
climate change. The answers given here are mixed. The consensus among the authors is that

to have any major direct impact on climate change, particularly on emissions

reductions. The largest and most active of the state actors is California, with an economy that would be eighth in the
world if California were an independent nation.2 Yet, as Kirsten Engel and David Adelman point out, California's proposed emission
standards would reduce global carbon dioxide production less than 1%. 3 If even big,
powerful California could make only a paltry contribution to greenhouse gas cutbacks, it might seem that other SNAs would be
equally ineffective in reducing global warming through direct emission controls, even in the aggregate.

Fed key – patchwork regulations kill solvency

Sovacool and Cooper 8 [Benjamin K. Sovacool (Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool currently teaches in the Government and International
Affairs Program at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, VA. He is a former Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Network for New Energy Choices in New York, NY. Dr. Sovacool recently
completed work on a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Electric Power Networks Efficiency and Security Program investigating the social
impediments to distributed and renewable energy systems. He also served as a Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy
Research, where he assessed renewable energy issues for the state of Virginia) and Christopher Cooper (Christopher Cooper is the Executive Director of
the Network for New Energy Choices (“NNEC”), a national nonprofit organization committed to reforming U.S. energy policy to expand the energy
choices of American consumers. Working with a growing coalition of nonprofit groups, municipal officials, business leaders and academics, NNEC
promotes creative ideas for financing community-based energy projects and advocates for progressive utility policy reform); “CONGRESS GOT IT
WRONG: THE CASE FOR A NATIONAL RENEWABLE PORTFOLIO STANDARD AND IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY”; 7/25/2008;
https://www.law.uh.edu/eelpj/publications/3-1/03SovacoolCooper.pdf] SJDI

The problem, however, is that none of the existing state RPS mandates are
alike. For example, Wisconsin has set its RPS target at 2.2% by 2011, while Rhode Island is shooting for 16% by 2020.22 In
Maine, fuel cells and high efficiency cogeneration count as “renewable,” while
the standard in Pennsylvania includes coal gasification and non-renewable
distributed generation.23 Iowa, Minnesota, and Texas set purchase requirements based on installed capacity, while
many other states make it a function of electricity sales .24 Minnesota and Iowa have voluntary
standards, while Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania all levy different noncompliance fees.25 States

vary in their targets, definitions of eligible resources, purchase requirements,

REC trading schemes, and compliance mechanisms, among other things .26 If
America’s interstate highway system were structured like our renewable
energy market, drivers would be forced to change engines, tire pressure, and
fuel mixture every time they crossed state lines.
stakeholders and investors must not simply grapple
Amid this complex morass of regulations,

with inconsistencies. In addition, they are forced to decipher vague and often
contradictory state statutes.27 In Connecticut, for example, the state Department of Public Utility Control
originally exempted two of the state’s largest utilities from RPS obligations because the description of “electric suppliers” in the
These exemptions created uncertainty over whether the statute
statute was unclear.28

would be enforced against any utilities at all.29 Hawaii’s standard contained so

much “wiggle room” that it was unclear even to its own advocates whether it
applied to most of the state’s utilities.30 Such ambiguity has lead to “wide disagreements among parties in
regulatory proceedings” about how to enforce some state RPS mandates.31

The complexity of state-based RPS statutes is compounded by uncertainty over the duration of many state RPS programs.
Stakeholders trying to plan investments in state renewable energy markets are
tormented with unknowns.32 For instance, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island will review and potentially
modify their RPS schemes in 2008, 2009, and 2010, respectively.33 Hawaii’s standard expressly allows for its requirements to be
waived if they prove to be “too costly” for retail electric providers and consumers.34 Moreover, Arizona, New Mexico, and Maine
may terminate their RPS programs entirely.35
 1AR – Econ
Decline from warming is inevitable – only an orientation that is willing to put
end the excesses of wealthy nations can create progress
Hickel 15 [(Jason, Anthropologist at the London School of Economics) “Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-
develop’ rich countries,” The Guardian, 09/23/2015] SJDI

Growth has been the main object of development for the past 70 years, despite
the fact that it’s not working. Since 1980, the global economy has grown by
380%, but the number of people living in poverty on less than $5 (£3.20) a day has
increased by more than 1.1 billion. That’s 17 times the population of Britain. So much for the
trickle-down effect.

Orthodox economists insist that all we need is yet more growth. More progressive
types tell us that we need to shift some of the yields of growth from the richer segments of the
population to the poorer ones, evening things out a bit. Neither approach is adequate. Why?
Because even at current levels of average global consumption, we’re
overshooting our planet’s bio-capacity by more than 50% each year.

In other words, growth isn’t an option any more – we’ve already grown too much.
Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at
breakneck speed. And the hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost
entirely to overconsumption in rich countries.

Right now, our planet only has enough resources for each of us to consume 1.8
“global hectares” annually – a standardised unit that measures resource use and waste. This
figure is roughly what the average person in Ghana or Guatemala consumes. By contrast,
people in the US and Canada consume about 8 hectares per person, while Europeans
consume 4.7 hectares – many times their fair share.

What does this mean for our theory of development? Economist Peter Edward argues that
instead of pushing poorer countries to “catch up” with rich ones, we should be
thinking of ways to get rich countries to “catch down” to more appropriate
levels of development. We should look at societies where people live long and
happy lives at relatively low levels of income and consumption not as basket
cases that need to be developed towards western models, but as exemplars of
efficient living.

How much do we really need to live long and happy lives? In the US, life expectancy is 79
years and GDP per capita is $53,000. But many countries have achieved similar
life expectancy with a mere fraction of this income. Cuba has a comparable life
expectancy to the US and one of the highest literacy rates in the world with GDP per capita of
only $6,000 and consumption of only 1.9 hectares – right at the threshold of ecological

sustainability. Similar claims can be made of Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and
Tunisia.

Yes, some of the excess income and consumption we see in the rich world yields improvements
in quality of life that are not captured by life expectancy, or even literacy rates. But even if we
look at measures of overall happiness and wellbeing in addition to life
expectancy, a number of low- and middle-income countries rank highly. Costa
Rica manages to sustain one of the highest happiness indicators and life expectancies in the
world with a per capita income one-fourth that of the US.

In light of this, perhaps we should regard such countries not as underdeveloped,

but rather as appropriately developed. And maybe we need to start calling on
rich countries to justify their excesses.
The idea of “de-developing” rich countries might prove to be a strong rallying cry in the global
south, but it will be tricky to sell to westerners. Tricky, but not impossible. According to recent
consumer research, 70% of people in middle- and high-income countries believe
overconsumption is putting our planet and society at risk. A similar majority also
believe we should strive to buy and own less, and that doing so would not compromise our
happiness. People sense there is something wrong with the dominant model of
economic progress and they are hungry for an alternative narrative.
The problem is that the pundits promoting this kind of transition are using the wrong language.
They use terms such as de-growth, zero growth or – worst of all – de-development, which are
technically accurate but off-putting for anyone who’s not already on board. Such terms are
repulsive because they run against the deepest frames we use to think about human progress,
and, indeed, the purpose of life itself. It’s like asking people to stop moving positively thorough
life, to stop learning, improving, growing.

Negative formulations won’t get us anywhere. The idea of “steady-state” economics is a step in
the right direction and is growing in popularity, but it still doesn’t get the framing right. We
need to reorient ourselves toward a positive future, a truer form of progress.
One that is geared toward quality instead of quantity. One that is more
sophisticated than just accumulating ever increasing amounts of stuff, which doesn’t
make anyone happier anyway. What is certain is that GDP as a measure is not going to get us
there and we need to get rid of it.

Perhaps we might take a cue from Latin Americans, who are organising alternative visions
around the indigenous concept of buen vivir, or good living. The west has its own tradition of
reflection on the good life and it’s time we revive it. Robert and Edward Skidelsky take us down
this road in his book How Much is Enough? where they lay out the possibility of interventions
such as banning advertising, a shorter working week and a basic income, all of which would
improve our lives while reducing consumption.

Either we slow down voluntarily or climate change will do it for us. We can’t go
on ignoring the laws of nature. But rethinking our theory of progress is not only
an ecological imperative , it is also a development one. If we do not act soon,
all our hard-won gains against poverty will evaporate, as food systems collapse
and mass famine re-emerges to an extent not seen since the 19th century.
Friends, we gather at a time when the people of the Caribbean, who have already
suffered so much from Hurricane Irma, are facing yet another ordeal from
Hurricane Maria. And I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that our hearts go out to them
this evening, as well as to the millions of people still reeling from Hurricane Irma in the southern
United States.

Crisis doesn’t cause war – austerity, strategic reassessment, new leadership and
international cooperation encourage conciliation instead of conflict –historical
analysis.
Clary 15 – Christopher Clary, former International Affairs Fellow in India at the Council on
Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University, Adjunct Staff
Member @ RAND Corporation, Security Studies Program @ MIT, country director for South
Asian affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, former Research Fellow @ the Harvard
Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, former research associate
in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, BA from
Wichita State University and an MA from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, 2015 (“Economic
Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Political Science Department Research Paper No. 2015-‐8, “Economic
Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597712)

Do economic downturns generate pressure for diversionary conflict ? Or might

downturns encourage austerity and economizing behavior in foreign policy ? This
paper provides new evidence that economic stress is associated with
conciliatory policies between strategic rivals. For states that view each other as military threats, the biggest
step possible toward bilateral cooperation is to terminate the rivalry by taking
political steps to manage the competition. Drawing on data from 109 distinct
rival dyads since 1950, 67 of which terminated, the evidence suggests rivalries
were approximately twice as likely to terminate during economic downturns
than they were during periods of economic normalcy . This is true controlling for
all of the main alternative explanations for peaceful relations between foes
(democratic status, nuclear weapons possession, capability imbalance, common enemies, and international systemic changes), as well as many other
possible confounding variables. This research questions existing theories
claiming that economic downturns are associated with diversionary war, and
instead argues that in certain circumstances peace may result from economic troubles . Defining and Measuring
Rivalry and Rivalry Termination I define a rivalry as the perception by national elites of two states that the other state possesses conflicting interests and presents a military
threat of sufficient severity that future military conflict is likely. Rivalry termination is the transition from a state of rivalry to one where conflicts of interest are not viewed as
being so severe as to provoke interstate conflict and/or where a mutual recognition of the imbalance in military capabilities makes conflict-causing bargaining failures unlikely. In
other words, rivalries terminate when the elites assess that the risks of military conflict between rivals has been reduced dramatically. This definition draws on a growing
quantitative literature most closely associated with the research programs of William Thompson, J. Joseph Hewitt, and James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl.1 My
definition conforms to that of William Thompson. In work with Karen Rasler, they define rivalries as situations in which “[b]oth actors view each other as a significant
politicalmilitary threat and, therefore, an enemy.”2 In other work, Thompson writing with Michael Colaresi, explains further: The presumption is that decisionmakers explicitly
identify who they think are their foreign enemies. They orient their military preparations and foreign policies toward meeting their threats. They assure their constituents that
they will not let their adversaries take advantage. Usually, these activities are done in public. Hence, we should be able to follow the explicit cues in decisionmaker utterances
and writings, as well as in the descriptive political histories written about the foreign policies of specific countries.3 Drawing from available records and histories, Thompson and
David Dreyer have generated a universe of strategic rivalries from 1494 to 2010 that serves as the basis for this project’s empirical analysis.4 This project measures rivalry
termination as occurring on the last year that Thompson and Dreyer record the existence of a rivalry.5 Why Might Economic Crisis Cause Rivalry Termination ?

Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1)
Economic crises lead to austerity pressures, which in turn incent leaders to
search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2) Economic crises also encourage
strategic reassessment , so that leaders can argue to their peers and their
publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state.
This can lead to threat deflation , where elites attempt to downplay the
seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic
crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization, a process that is
postponed during periods of economic normalcy . (4) Economic crises increase the
political and economic benefit from international economic cooperation .
Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased investment from
abroad during periods of economic trouble . This search is made easier if
tensions are reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select
leaders who are perceived as capable of resolving economic difficulties,
permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign policy views.
Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will
prefer conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy .
This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice.
 1AR - Cap K
Capitalism is on a zero-growth trajectory now – it overcomes ecological damage
and inequality – the aff causes spiking natural resource demand that destroys
the environment
Saunders ’16 (Harry Saunders – Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute and managing
director of Decision Processes Incorporated, International Expert on energy efficiency and
consumption. “Does Capitalism Require Endless Growth?” Summer 2016,
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-6/does-capitalism-require-endless-growth)
But it is important to distinguish these challenges from the sweeping claims made originally by Sweezy, Magdoff, and Foster and
repeated today by prominent intellectuals and activists such as Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. In the pages that follow, I will
demonstrate that both neoclassical growth theory and empirical evidence suggest that capitalist
economies do not require endless growth but are rather much more likely to evolve

toward a steady state once consumption demands of the global population have been
satisfied. Those demands demonstrably saturate once economies achieve a certain level of
affluence. For these reasons, a capitalist economy is as likely as any other to see stable and

declining demands on natural resources and ecological services. Indeed, with the right
policies and institutions, capitalist economies are more likely to achieve high living

standards and low environmental impacts than just about any other economic
system.
1.

From the window of his Manchester home in the mid-1840s, Marx’s colleague and contemporary Friedrich Engels looked out on a horrifying microcosm of what was happening in England and throughout the newly industrializing world — a stark imbalance between
the luxurious wealth of capital owners and the miserable poverty of the workers they employed. Marx himself had witnessed firsthand this same imbalance, and over several decades of intense study came to propose that a core flaw of capitalism resides in excessive
claims placed by privately owned capital as against labor on the economic value created by their combination.

Herein lay the fundamental contradiction, in Marx’s view, which would bring an end to capitalism. As capitalists invested in ever-newer technologies, Marx predicted that their dependence on labor would decline. As this occurred, returns to labor in the form of
earned wages would decline. If there were no return to households for their labor, there would be no income with which to consume goods produced by capital owners, nor savings that households might reinvest in new capital. An economic system in which
declining returns to labor due to technological change immiserated most households was a system in which the market for goods sold by capital owners could not long survive.

Notably, Marx did not dispute the necessity of capital for producing what households need, only who in society need control this resource. The problem, as Marx saw it, was that the surplus value created by labor was being unfairly conscripted by capital owners.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, a number of prominent analyses have suggested that Marx’s prophecy is perhaps coming true. MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee5 in recent years have suggested that continuing automation and
rising labor productivity threaten mass unemployment, a problem foreseen by Keynes in 1930.6 Thomas Piketty, in his much-lauded book Capital in the Twenty-first Century7, finds that returns to capital have exceeded real economic growth in the industrialized
world in recent decades, attributing that shift to ever-increasing concentration of limited capital in the hands of the few.

The economist Robert Gordon8,9 finds that growth rates slow dramatically as societies become wealthier. The growth associated with the enormous rise in economic productivity and output associated with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies cannot
be sustained as societies shift from industrial to post-industrial economies. Meanwhile, Paul Mason and others in the “post capitalism" movement contend that “an economy based on the full utilization of information cannot tolerate the free market.”10 His
argument is that capitalist corporations will not prove capable of capturing value from the technology they deliver, value adequate to sustain them over time.

Before considering whether these various challenges to advanced capitalist economies portend their collapse, it is important to note what none of these analyses suggest, which is that capitalism’s unquenchable demand for growth has run up against fundamental
biophysical limits. If anything, these analyses suggest the opposite: that the limits to continuing growth in capitalist economies are social or technological, not biophysical. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, and Piketty, through technically different mechanisms, ultimately
raise concerns that center around the immiseration of labor. Whether due to technological change, growing returns to capital, or both, all three centrally focus on declining wages and employment as the central challenge that threatens robust and equitable growth
in capitalist economies.

Mason, conversely, projects that technological change threatens returns to capital. The commodification of everything — material goods, knowledge, and information — ultimately brings with it an end to profits and hence both capital accumulation and capital
reinvestment.11 Gordon, meanwhile, observes that there is simply no further techno-economic revolution that can replicate the one-time boost in economic productivity that comes with the shift from agrarian to industrial economies.12 If there is a common theme
in these challenges to capitalist economies it is that all find their way, to one degree or another, back to Marx, not Malthus. The long-term challenge for capitalist economies, these analyses suggest, is too little growth, not too much.

2.

The headwinds facing advanced industrial economies — stagnant growth and rising inequality — tell us something about the
prospects for low- or zero-growth capitalist economies. Gordon’s analysis suggests that industrialized
economies in relatively short order achieve a “satisficing” level of household
consumption. Once that level is achieved, and once societies have built out the basic
infrastructure of modernity — cities, roads, electrical grids, water and sewage systems, and
the like — the growth rates characterized by the early stages of industrialization cannot be
sustained by the knowledge and service sectors that increasingly dominate post-industrial societies.

World Bank data clearly show this. Economic growth rates decline as countries become
richer. Growth in GDP per capita in OECD countries slowed from an average of about 3 percent per year in the period 1961–1985
to about half of that in the period 1986–2014.13 Gordon’s analysis is supported not only by the long-term slowing of growth in
industrialized economies but also by saturating household consumption in those economies. According to the World Bank, OECD
growth in real household consumption per capita (consumption of both goods and services) has shown steady decline each decade
from around 3 percent per year in the 1970s to around 1 percent per year since 2000.14
Brynjolfsson and McAfee, and Piketty, suggest that declining returns to households from their labor will drive worsening inequality and stagnant or declining wages. But that does not imply a declining material standard of living. The same technology gains and capital
mobility that have eroded the power of labor in developed world labor markets have also persistently reduced the real prices of goods and services, making them ever more affordable.

Even as nominal wage growth has slowed or stagnated in the US and other advanced developed economies, households are able to buy more with less of their incomes. This is because the cost of goods and services has grown even more anemically, inflation nearly
disappearing in these countries over the same time period, meaning wages have grown in real terms. OECD data show that real wages OECD-wide have grown by about 1 percent per year between 2000 and 2014, including real growth in the United States, the
United Kingdom, France, and Germany.15 Growth in the Scandinavian economies (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland) has exceeded this.16

This is true even at the bottom of the income distribution. Virtually all low-income homes in the United States today boast a refrigerator, modern heating and cooling, and electricity. Large majorities have dishwashers, washers and dryers, computers, cable
television, and large-screen displays. Consumer goods and services once considered luxuries in the United States and other developed countries are today widely available and utilized by all citizens. That is mostly because home appliances and other goods today cost
a small fraction, measured in the work time necessary to purchase them, of what they did thirty years ago.17,18

Of course, rising economic inequality raises a range of concerns beyond those related to access to goods and services. Higher rates of inequality may threaten social mobility, social cohesion, and perhaps even democratic governance. Even so, inequality appears to
decline as nations industrialize and become wealthier. In rich Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark), inequality has essentially halved since World War II.19 Declines recently are less impressive in the United States, United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe20,
but, nonetheless, inequality remains reliably lower than in most developing economies21, where aggressive but still insufficient capital formation in the presence of large labor forces tends to result in higher levels of inequality.

Moreover, increased capital mobility has driven declining inequality between countries,

even as it may be worsening inequality within them. Thanks to global trade and
international supply chains, firms have become increasingly able to locate production facilities
in the developing world, where labor with the requisite skills can be employed at lower wages .

As might be expected, labor in industrialized countries is not happy with this turn of events. But the
result has been a
long-term convergence of wages between producing and consuming countries, declining
inequality globally, and a dramatic decline in absolute levels of poverty . The ILO reports that
between 2000 and 2011, real average wages approximately doubled in Asia.22 In Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Africa they also rose substantially, well above the developed
world average23, while in developed economies they increased by only about 5 percent, far
below the world average24, leading to what leading ILO observer Patrick Belser has dubbed
“the great convergence”25 — a dynamic that was incidentally predicted many decades ago on
theoretical grounds by famed economist Paul Samuelson.26 Meanwhile, according to the
World Bank, the global share of people living on less than $1.90 per day (the World Bank definition of
extreme poverty) fell from 44 percent in 1981 to 13 percent in 2012 .27

Taken together, then, the dynamics transforming the global economy, while not without
challenges, paint an interesting picture of slowing growth

, converging global incomes , falling cost , and saturating demand for goods and
services. Should these dynamics hold, it is not hard to imagine a future in which the global
economy gravitates toward a prosperous and equitable zero-growth economy
placing relatively modest demands on the biocapacity of the planet . But getting from here to there will
require a number of further conditions.
3.

For a capitalist economy to flourish without economic growth, population stabilization is a necessary condition. This condition is, of course, not limited to the capitalist model. It is implausible that any alternative to the capitalist model could deliver zero economic
growth with a persistently growing global population.
The second critical precondition for a steady state capitalist economy is that everyone must achieve a satisfactory level of consumption. This second precondition, in contrast to the first, is arguably unique to the capitalist model. The fundamental characteristic of
capitalist economies, that which sets them apart from centrally managed socialist economies, is that capitalism, formally defined, is the economic system where the means of production resides in the hands of households.

By households, of course, I mean private individuals. Some households own more capital than others, but most households in capitalist economies own some capital, whether as shareholders in public corporations, owners or investors in privately held businesses,
beneficiaries of pension funds, or holders of corporate bonds. Irrespective of which particular households own it, all capital formation in a capitalist economy originates from households, be it directly or indirectly. In a capitalist economy, households run the show,
both as producers and — as we shall see next — consumers. All else being equal, households decide how much they spend and how much they save, how much they work, and how much leisure time they wish to have.

So long as there remains significant pent-up demand for work and consumption, those choices are limited. Households that don’t earn enough to consume all the goods they need don’t have a choice of whether or not to save or whether or not to work. But once
those needs are met, work, consumption, savings, and leisure become a matter of choice. Households will work as much as they need to consume and save as much as they need or want.

In an economy wherein households have globally realized a level of physical consumption they deem “satisficing,” aggregate consumption will precisely match individual household preferences among consumption, savings, and leisure time. For this reason, a steady
state economy cannot be achieved in a capitalist economy until such time as households in the aggregate have deemed themselves to have achieved sufficient goods and services consumption.

This is an outcome that in many parts of the world may not be so far away. In the rich Scandinavian countries, households today already forfeit significant added earnings in favor of increased leisure time. According to the OECD, the number of annual hours worked
per employed worker has declined substantially in the 14-year period from 1999 to 2013 (0.2%–0.3%/year in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and the US; 0.5%/year in Germany) while real wages in these countries have increased by about 1.3%/year over the
same period.29

So long as consumption is unsaturated, labor is in surplus, and capital is scarce globally, growth will be required to meet pent-up demand for goods and services. Once that demand is met, however, either because wages have risen sufficiently to achieve satisficing
levels of consumption, or the cost of goods and services has declined sufficiently to achieve the same outcome, continuing aggregate growth is no longer required, or likely.

4.

If there is a problem with this picture, it is the issue raised by Mason and the post-capitalists. Why would anyone continue to invest in capital when returns have fallen to zero? The answer brings us back to the central role of households in capitalist economies. Given
the means to do so, most households in capitalist economies forgo some consumption in order to save, allowing some of the economy’s production to be directed toward the creation of new physical capital to replace or grow the existing capital in place instead of
consuming all production in the present period.

Savings behavior by households, it turns out, is not driven by the returns that households expect, but rather by their desire to save for retirement. As demonstrated by Franco Modigliani and colleagues30 (work, not incidentally, that won Modigliani a Nobel Prize),
households working toward retirement want made available to them financial resources to carry them through their post-retirement life without working, so they save for this. Even if they receive no positive return on the savings they have set aside, they will
nonetheless be able to draw on them.

Why invest rather than just stuffing savings under a mattress? Because even in a zero-growth economy, returns to capital are not always zero. When the supply of physical capital supported by household savings declines, returns to capital rise, inducing households
to raid their mattresses and invest their savings in the hope of getting more back for retirement than they put in. Eventually, the system adjusts itself and capital returns again fall to zero (on average, economy wide).

The result, then, is that in a zero-growth economy, households provide all the new capital
needed for producers to replace capital stock that has deteriorated (depreciated) out of the
system, but no more. There is no need to grow the capital stock in a zero-growth economy,
just to sustain and refresh it. Household savings for retirement accomplish exactly this.
But what about producers? Why continue to build replacement capital if the expected returns are zero? Again, because expected
returns to replacement capital will not always be zero, even when average returns are. When investment in new capital falls, capital
stock in the production economy falls as well, and with that employment falls, because the productive capacity of the economy
shrinks. Lower output and lower wages in turn create new opportunities for profitable investment in new capital stock and increased
employment. In
a zero-growth economy, household savings invested match replacement capital
needs, economy-wide capital returns on average approach zero, and production and
consumption continue apace, neither growing nor declining.

Theoretically, then, there is no particular reason that capitalist economies must collapse
without growth. Empirically, a range of trends suggest that growth rates slow as societies
become wealthier, not because labor becomes immiserated but rather for the opposite
reason, because demand for goods and services saturates .

The aff is the antithesis of neoliberal market efficiency

Andrew and Kaidonis 10 [(Jane Andrew, Mary A. Kaidonis, Brian Andrew, Faculty of Economics and Business,
Building H69, University of Sydney, School of Accounting and Finance, University of Wollongong, Australia) Carbon tax: Challenging
neoliberal solutions to climate change; Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 611–618]

that neoliberal ideology has come to dominate environmental

In this paper, we argue

policy, and this ideology is reinforced in emerging ETS or carbon markets . The choice
of ETS, given the extensive evidence that an ETS does not work well to deliver environmental benefits, is difficult to understand
Further, there is little evidence to support the idea
without invoking the role of neoliberal ideology.

that an ETS is superior to a tax-based approach to carbon abatement, given the

reliance on government to establish infrastructure for ETS or carbon trading .
The inclusion of tax as a central feature of public policy directly challenges the
neoliberal ideology which favors small government, lower taxes and the
facilitation of free market management of emerging social or environmental
problems. The introduction of a new tax is often seen as a problem for any government, though an ETS with permits sold by
government is a de facto tax and this is likely to be easier to promote in the current ideological context than an actual new tax. Tax
policy acknowledges the role of market economics; yet it has not been featured in the recent public policy debate as a viable
Taxing of carbon pollution is an approach that makes different
alternative to an ETS.

assumptions about the role of regulators and it enables cooperatively planned

investment in the social, environmental and economic future of a nation
(Beder, 2008a). An environmentally sustainable path must challenge the
foregrounding of growth oriented markets in all social and environmental
policy (Beder, 2002a,b,c; Latouche, 2005, referred to by Fournier, 2008). This enables us to challenge
economic thinking which involves ‘colonizing our imagination’ and encourages
us to challenge new institutional arrangements that seek to ‘sustain the
unsustainable’ (Fournier, 2008, p. 529), since under a carbon tax the locus of
discretion is perceived to be with the government and this is the antithesis of
neoliberal ideology.
Perm do both – a carbon tax can be accompanied by social redistribution
Kenis and Lievens 15 [(Kenis, Anneleen. & Lievens, Matthias, Division of Geography, KU Leuven, Belgium & Center for
Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium) 2015. The Limits of the Green Economy: From reinventing capitalism to
repoliticising the present. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY; Routledge] WJ

That does not mean that any type of carbon tax should be dismissed . It is
posible to conceive of carbon taxes that are accompanied with social
redistribution. The well-known climate scientist James Hansen argues in favour of a ‘tax and dividend’
system, for example (Hansen 2009). The idea is to impose a tax on fos- sil fuels, whereby
the proceeds are distributed amongst the population, in order to compensate
for the fact that companies, which have to pay the tax, will pass on the cost to
consumers. Since it is expected that the majority of people have a lower carbon footprint than average, the yield per
individual would be higher than the higher price that companies impose due to
the tax. Of course, the rela- tion between income and energy use is not perfectly linear, as poor people often are obliged to
make use of inefficient apparatuses, for example. It is important to take that into account and to add correcting measures. If

implemented in a good way, such a tax would be relatively easy to organise,

and could potentially benefit lower social classes .
Of course, a carbon tax cannot be the only element in a strategy for a low-carbon
society. Corrections of the price mechanism will never be sufficient, and are
sub- ject to all of the possible problems we discussed before . To realise real and
demo- cratic change, a deliberate and rapid reorganisation of major social infrastructures and
institutions will be needed. Still, incentives via the tax regime can, under certain
conditions, provide an additional stimulus to move in the right direction . It is
important to study and judge all such proposals on the basis of their concrete
social, political and ecological merits and effects.
Neg
 Framing
The role of the ballot is to determine if the consequences of the aff’s politics are
good or bad
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Washington
University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318

reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows

Second,

opponents to elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy
are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances
create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available
alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle . Thus, the
"principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider
the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness
has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just , independent
of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional
equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but]
can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between
Critics may point
laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression.

out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial
disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in framing the debate in purely ideological
terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and
make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive
measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness.
Meaningful policy debate is replaced by ideological exchange, which further
exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment .