Lawrence Free State Persinger Racy Neg 02 Heritage Hall Quarters

Open Source — HH — Quarters
OFF
1
Protectionism resides in the resolute incoherence of the law: The constitutive nature
of the right to water that produces the humanist subject of Man by fueling the civic
notion that to create a “habitable space” we must engage in the concretization of a
politics of purity that builds on narratives of egalitarianism that render queer life
invasion of the domestic.
Stanley 21 (Eric A. Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley. They are also affiliated with the Haas LGBTQ Citizenship
Research Cluster and the Program in Critical Theory. Stanley received a Ph.D. in the History of
Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and previously taught in the
Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Atmospheres of
Violence,” https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1421-8_601.pdf)//LFS—AP
We are living in a time of lgbt inclusion. This is evidenced, at least in the United States, by the legal expansion of
marriage, lesbian and gay military recruitment, and the proliferation of lgbt characters in popular visual
culture. Against the narrative arc of rainbow progress that proclaims that these changes mark a radical shift in the social, Atmospheres of
Violence argues that inclusion, rather than a precondition of safety, most properly names the state’s violent
expansion.8 I do this by attending to a wicked archive of murders, the ongoing hiv/aids pandemic,
suicide notes, incarceration, police video footage, and other ephemera of attack. These scattered cases, when
that anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an
read together, build my claim
aberration of, modernity. Related, rather than imagining the law as the mechanism through which
relief from such harm might be offered, it is one of its methodologies of proliferation. Following the
ungovernable, we are asked to release the fantasy of reform ing these same institutions, here the law and by
extension the state, that have caused and continue to cause destruction, not simply in effect but as their
aim. Such abdication also recalls the interplay between the horizon, as José Muñoz might have it, and horizontalism. Here the
pragmatism of the present is smashed in the name of a life we might survive . This shuttling between description
and experience remains the tension that holds the possibility of transformation. To this end, I write through the pedagogies of direct action that
remind us how disciplinary power’s force resides in its resolute incoherence. My ambivalence, then, rises as both a
procedural commitment to the dangerous task of representing violence and a defense against the counterrevolution of public policy, with its
offer of salvation outside the thickness of struggle. However, this unease
does not emanate from a confusion toward the
kinds of worlds I hope grow and those that must be obliterated, nor from a belief that study is in
contradiction to action, but from the turbulent insight gleaned from this collective planning. 9 The time of lgbt
inclusion is also a time of trans/queer death. From the phenomenological vault of nonexistence lived as
quotidian withdrawal, to the gory details of gratuitous harm—the archive engulfs. Nonetheless, anti-trans/
queer violence is written as an outlaw practice, a random event, and an unexpected tragedy. Dominant
culture’s drive to dissolve the scope and intensity of this violence is expected. Yet mainstream lgbt politics also colludes in this disappearance in
exchange for recognition, however partial and contingent. Through this privatization, meaning the continued trafficking in a belief that things
might be any other way while leaving the social intact, the enormity of anti-trans/queer violence is vanished.10 Thinking
violence as
individual acts versus epistemic force works to support the normative and normalizing structuring of
public pain. This is to say, privatizing anti-trans/queer violence is a function through which the social and its
trauma are whitewashed, heterosexualized, and made to appear gendernormative. This relegation of
anti-trans/queer violence, which always appears in the syntax of race, casts the human—the referent
for cis white mourning— as emblematic. While mainstream lgbt politics clamors for dominant power through a reproduction of
the teleological narrative of progress, it also reproduces the idea that anti-trans/queer violence is an aberration of democracy— belonging only
to a shadowed past, and increasingly anachronistic.11 This privatization
of violence also compels through the managed
translation of cultures of attack into personal incidents. At the center of this privatization is the figure
of the human that produces itself as the sole beneficiary of rights before the law. The human’s singularity
the mechanism of protection
comes into relief against its ability to trade the many with the particular. In contrast, rights,
from the state’s discipline, are assumed to be the province of all. Yet by reading the anterior
magic of the law, it is not so much, or at least not only, that humans (alone) have rights. It is the
conditional enactment (granting of rights) that constitutes the human as benefactor of its own
creation. This recursive logic is important as it troubles the deployment of equality under a system of
law imagined and maintained, at the atomic level, as exclusion. This double lie of formal equality is
necessary for the law to lay claim to, and act as arbiter of, what might be called justice. The law, then, is a
systematic and systematizing process of substitution where the singular and the general are shuttled
and replaced to inform a matrix of fictive justice. Consequently, for the law to read anti-trans/queer
violence as a symptom of civil society, justice would demand the dismantling of its own
administration.12 Against the law, the constitutive possibility evidenced by trans/queer generativity—its
disruptive worlding—guides my own attachments. Yet this striking capacity resides within the context of
a state that always seeks its managed liquidation. Or, to put it another way, while people who do
identify as trans and/or queer figure largely in this text, I make no claim about identification other than
that sexuality and gender, as nodes of power, are formed in and as a relationship to racialized violence. I
say this in an attempt to stall a misreading that might claim I have something definitive to say about trans/queer or otherwise lgbt people. In
contrast to such generalizations about identity, this is a study of the shattering power that threatens, and at times erupts
into the
deadly force that not only kills but makes life unlivable—an atmosphere of violence.13 Here, violence
takes on a set of shifting definitions—it appears sometimes as the force that ends life, and at other
times it is the only way life might unfold. This is to suggest that what gets called violence under a
regime of racialized and gendered terror can also yield the terrain that allows for safe passage out—a
leap that freedom fighters invite us to take. I focus on scenes of harm where my explicit stake is in ending
those iterations in the name of a more habitable planet , yet I also resist the idea that all forms of violence
are interchangeable. This line of thought renders minoritized defense as equal to the mechanisms of the settler state. Or, this
equivocation produces community resistance as indistinguishable from genocide. Under such logic,
which we might also call legal equality, all instances of force appear undifferentiated, while survival is
castigated. Indeed, equality concretizes the structuring antagonism that produced it in the
first place, which means subjugation becomes intensified. This is another way to tell the story of the New
Jersey 4, a group of Black lesbians who were strangled and punched by a straight man in New York City’s West Village. In the aftermath of the
night’s events, it was he who declared it “a hate crime against a straight man” and was awarded restitution, while the four women were
sentenced to prison for the crime of surviving.14 If
the privatization of anti-trans/queer violence delineates not only
what constitutes injury but also what redress might approximate, then this is also one of the ways state
violence is made ordinary. Further, while I’m attentive to what is more generally understood as state violence, the ways individual acts, like the audience attacking Sylvia, collect up in the name of authority also calls for an expansion of what
demarcates those borders. As a material concept, the state remains important because, as Karl Marx reminds us, “It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination in the heaven of their fancy. . . . Only political
superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life.”15 While this definition accounts, in part, for Marx’s optimism toward the state form as a vehicle for redistribution, that optimism
decomposes under the weight of difference as it is instrumentalized through racial capitalism’s accumulative drive. Moreover, the parameters of “civil life” as the domain of the human
in turn produce the fiction of the state that distributes it. As anarchists like Kuwasi Balagoon saw in
nationalism, and Frantz Fanon discerned in his analysis of colonialism, the state is fashioned from singularities, yet the structure maintains the
racialized, gendered, and classed demands that enable its appearance as an intelligible force.16 Further, the
state relies on this theo-
juridical genealogy to lay claim to its own inevitability. We are under the administration of the state
because we are its subjects; we are subjects because we reside under the state’s rule. Through this tautology,
the state is not something external to the social but is civil society’s collective projection. This
relationship between those held by the state (perhaps most importantly as exclusion, or negative value) and the state form might be
called, by Michel Foucault and others, normativity. Yet just as the state is able to maintain itself through adjustment and absorption,
normativity too is defined not exclusively by its rigidity but through its flexibility. While this argument allows
us to see how power’s methodologies are strikingly incoherent, their impacts remain rather predictable. Indeed, those categories most
viciously subjected to violence have persisted since the moment of settler contact and chattel slavery,
yet the tools administering this cruelty are ever adapting, which is among the reasons for their
endurance.17 Thus, I work to apprehend, as might be expected, direct attacks—the personal or group acts committed against specific
people where consistency and similarity build a frequency of shared destruction that undoes the assumed singularity of their actors. Through
an attention to the phenomenology of these murders, we are able to push against the narrative that argues these are random acts that express
in tandem with these direct attacks is a paradigmatic neglect,
nothing beyond the will of their instigators. However,
where rhythms of restriction that might not reveal
perhaps akin to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “organized abandonment,”
themselves as such forcefully reduce one’s capacity toward the world.18 This includes the anti-Black
distribution of hiv/aids, imprisonment, houselessness, and other practices that do not simply impact
populations but forge such a totalizing power that they radically constrict not only life chances but life
itself. This structuring antagonism offers a method for considering violence as a generalized field of
knowledge that maintains this collective undoing, lived as personal tragedy, of those lost to modernity.
Yet violence also remains a tactic of communal interdiction, anticolonial struggle, and trans/queer
flourishing against an otherwise deadly world.19
Protection internalizes the notion of sustainability that arose from the conservation
project of the 20th century that marks the birth of the naturalization of the White
Nuclear Family in water politics. This anti-queer atmosphere of resource enclosure
was born from white outrage at immigrants where fear of resource scarcity became
greater than ever. As the state closed in to conserve streams from fear of toxic
pollution, the racial and queer Other was marked as toxic body that must be expelled
via purification.
Alaimo 12 (Stacy Alaimo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is
author of Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space and editor (with Susan Hekman)
of Material Feminisms, “Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and
Unknown Futures”)//LFS—AP
JUST A FEW LINES FROM JORIE GRAHAM'S POEM "SEA CHANGE" EVOKE ANXIETY ABOUT UNPREDICTABLE FUTURES THAT ARRIVE TOO SOON,
IN need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make
things, systems, standards of living "sustainable." Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and
having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I
have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the
United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its
tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore
Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as "manufacturing plants for wood," epito- mizing the utilitarianism
of the conservation movement of the Pro- gressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth
century Pinchoťs deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive
women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader "municipal housekeeping" movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as "turning yesterdays
roast into tomorrows hash." Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as
conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National
Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to
be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great
conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully
and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home,
conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer’s
wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70). The frenzy in the United
States to conserve at the turn of the twentieth century was in part driven by the desire to mark the
country’s resources as belonging to some groups and not others, as waves of immigrants came ashore.
The current mushrooming of the term sustainability may also be fueled by antiimmigration fervor as
well as by the desire to entrench systemic inequalities during a time of economic instability. At the start
of the twenty-first century, antiimmigration movements focusing on the southwestern border are
complemented by anxious glances toward the east, as the economies of China, East Asia, and India
expand. Fear lurks behind the proliferating, sanitized term sustainability, as news reports worry that
economies, national debts, personal debts, the housing market, food systems, the Euro zone, and all
manner of more trivial matters are not sustainable. Although the concept of sustainability emerges in part from economic
theories that critique the assumption that economic prosperity must be fueled by continual growth, the term is frequently invoked
in economic and other news stories that do not in any way question capitalist ideals of unfettered
expansion.1 Like conservation, sustainability has become a plastic but potent signifier, meaning, roughly, the ability to
somehow keep things going despite the economic and environmental crises that, we fear, may render this impossible. John P. O’Grady points
out the irony here: “That nothing stays the same is the very basis of history [and] evolutionary theory.” Thus, “there
is no ecological
justification for the idea of sustainability” (3). The discursive success of the signifier—in business,
science, academics, and popular culture—leads one to suspect that it may be serving a psychological
function in the social consciousness. Although Slavoj Žižek, in Living in the End Times, does not dwell on sustainability, he
analyzes the mechanisms that allow us to maintain ourselves psychologically while an apocalypse gallops toward us. For example, we
“know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really
happen” (328). Disciplining Movements, Academic Disciplines, and Knowledges Even as the movement for more
sustainable universities, businesses, cities, states, and households is a positive development, in that
the systematic attempt to reduce energy and water usage, reduce waste, use less toxic products, and
shrink carbon footprints is nothing to dismiss, we may well ask how it is that environmentalism as a
social movement became so smoothly co- opted and institutionalized as sustainability. The discourse of
sustainability, cleansed of its association with “tree huggers” and articulated to a more technocratic, apolitical domain, is more palatable for
academic institutions, governments, and businesses. While it would be politically awkward for colleges and universities to ally themselves with
environmentalism per se, 858 institutions of higher education are members of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education (“AASHE Member Directory”). On
university campuses such things as environmental management
systems, denied by the Environmental Protection Agency as “a set of processes and practices that
enable an organization to reduce its environmental impacts and increase its operating efficiency,”
complement the growing faculty management systems in which—in Texas universities, at least—academic labor
not only must become more “efficient” but also must be measured in ever more “exact” and
quantitative ways. Not surprisingly, this new “gospel of efficiency” (see Hays) values the disciplines that can fix
things—engineering, the sciences, and maybe architecture. Who has time for philosophical questions,
social and political analyses, historical relections, or literary musings when the world is rapidly heating
up and “resources” are running out? As I spoke with faculty and staff members across campus, in my role as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee, it became clear that (1) people were genuinely surprised that an English professor knew (useful) things and (2) people assumed the humanities were irrelevant for the serious business of sustainability. The humanities may be dismissed
outright when it comes to the “triple bottom line,” of profit, people, and planet. The fact that the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University drafted a white paper entitled Contributions of the Humanities to Issues of Sustainability suggests these contributions require explanation. Describing the first of seventeen contributions, this convincing document asserts that the humanities are crucial for understanding and solving environmental crises, since “humanists and humanities research” “[c]hallenge reliance upon the authority of ‘nature’ or ‘science’ in
order to address problems that in their origin and solution are primarily social and cultural” (Kitch, Adamson, et al.). Gert Goeminne would agree with this assertion. In “Once upon a Time I Was a Nuclear Physicist: What the Politics of Sustainability Can Learn from the Nuclear Laboratory,” Goeminne argues that expert- focused technological determinism, embedded in a discourse of ecological modernization, now acts to marginalize the issues of human choice involved in putting sustainability into efect and to downplay deliberation over the socio- cultural practices,
behaviours, and structures such choice involves. As a result of this technoscientific focus, the need for accordant social change is removed from view, which makes sustainability all the less likely to occur in practice. (20) This technological focus obscures power differentials, political differences, and cultural values, for it relies on an epistemology that divides subject from object, knower from known, promising, in Donna Haraway’s words, a view from “nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally” (191). The technoscientific perspective is even more disturbing when
considered against the alternative epistemologies of “popular epidemiologists” and “ordinary experts” that have emerged from environmental justice and environmental- health movements.2 As citizens with little or no scientiic background take samples and analyze data gleaned from their own communities, science is shown to be a politically embedded practice that is too important to be let to the experts. Environmental- justice and environmental- health movements, people with multiple chemical sensitivities, domestic- carbon- footprint analysts, and environmental
activists of all sorts practice DIY (do- it- yourself) science and challenge traditional models of scientific distancing, objectivity, and authority. The chemically sensitive move through the world using their own bodies as monitoring devices; tree sitters in the Pacific Northwest from their vantage points hundreds of feet in the air assess how clearcutting leads to mudslides; dolphin advocates on the Texas coast monitor the behavior, communication, and kinship patterns of cetaceans (Alaimo, Bodily Natures, ch. 5 [113–40]; Tree- Sit). These modes of knowledge are embedded,
. Even
as the practices of sustainability foster the recognition that nearly everything one
passionate, and purposeful—the mirror image of scientific objectivity
does has environmental effects, the epistemological stance of sustainability, as it is linked to systems
management and technological fixes, presents a rather comforting, conventional sense that the problem
is out there, distinct from one’s self. Human agency and master plans will get things under control. The
epistemological ruptures I discuss in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, on the other hand, emerge from the
recognition that one’s
very self is substantially interconnected with the world. Since the material self
cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific,
and substantial, what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject enters a swirling landscape of
uncertainty where practices and actions that were once not even remotely ethical or political matters
suddenly become the very stuff of the crises at hand (20). These trans- corporeal epistemologies are uncertain, experimental, amateurish, contingent, and engaged. Rosi Braidotti embraces the possibilities of the concept of sustainability, arguing that it stands for “a regrounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of
responsibility and ethical accountability for the environments she or he inhabits” (137). Braidotti infuses sustainability with a Deleuzian sense of becoming: “The ethical subject of sustainable becoming practices a humble kind of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro- practices of everyday life: simple strategies to hold, sustain and map out thresholds of sustainable transformation” (278). This positive sense of transformative micro- practices is countered by Žižek’s condemnation of such activities as purchasing organic food, as yet another mode of disavowal: “I know very well
that I cannot really influence the process which may lead to my ruin (like a volcanic eruption), but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something, even if I know it is ultimately meaningless” (424). Between Braidotti’s humble yet utopian sense of transformation and Žižek’s impotent activities of disavowal dwell the less exuberant and less certain practices of environmental- justice and environmental health activists and amateur practitioners, who recognize that their own bodily existence is caught up in material agencies that
are difficult to discern and oten impossible to escape. While the epistemological stance of sustainability offers a comforting sense of scientific distancing and objectivity, trans- corporeal subjects are often forced to recognize that their own material selves are the very stuff of the agential world that they seek to understand. The literary and popular genre of the “material memoir,” for example, most notably Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic, transforms autobiography into an examination—often scientific—of how the self is coextensive with the environment (Alaimo, Bodily
Natures 85– 112). Similarly, while the promotion of, say, sustainable seafood assumes that there are marine creatures one can consume without threatening their continued existence or being harmed oneself, the activist ilm A Shared Fate documents how mercury and PCBs not only kill massive numbers of marine mammals but also threaten humans who eat dolphins and whales or eat the fishes that dolphins and whales consume. The video reveals that Hardy Jones, who had devoted his life to protecting cetaceans from slaughter, ends up suffering from the same form of
cancer that is killing them, since his own body carries high levels of mercury and other heavy metals. An appeal to sustainability would be a rather abstract and ineffectual gesture for this drama, which demands, at the least, more stringent movements and measures to prevent staggering amounts of mercury and toxic chemicals from entering the oceans.
Extinction has and is already happening — their representations of futural warming

make them complicit in present racialized crisis of culture lost to the global parasite of
the European human settler.
Ahuja 15 [Neel Ahuja, associate professor of postcolonial studies in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at UNC; “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions”; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; 21:2–3, 2015; http://ahuja.web.unc.edu/files/2013/08/Ahuja-
GLQ.pdf] ALo
To Kill Softly Media

representations of climate change struggle to grasp the enormity of killing. The
planetary scale of carbon amplification, its association with expanding bodies and displaced destruction,
coincides with a spectacular trauma of extinction : ecologically violent uses of land, chemicals, and carbon are accelerating
the sixth major extinction event in earth’s history. This “event” (if we can stomach the cool rendering of mass death as a singularity) will commit
18–35 percent of extant animal and plant species to extinction by 2050.19 Perhaps
one million species will disappear, and
countless billions of living bodies will be denied the conditions of life or prematurely killed. Climate-
related disasters are accelerating threats to already precarious lifeways: Inuit nations face melting Arctic
ice; Maldivians and other islanders lose ground to rising seas; vulnerabilities to infectious disease grow
with shrinking water supplies; the world’s agrarian poor face crop diseases, drought, desertification, and
food price instability; and all countries face increased weather disasters. The large number of people
who depend on subsistence agriculture are already living outside the ecological “boundary parameters”
that enabled the rise of modern human societies. 20 In this sense, we are already living the future of
extinction. The planetary present—not some speculative future—exhibits a staggering scale of
“reproductive failure,” human and nonhuman. Yet small bodies and intimate environments often get
lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its seventeenth-century origins in English, the term atmosphere has signaled the fluid
medium of above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration as a space of geology and life, and a background that forges exchange between
social and physical processes. Atmospheres can surround big and small bodies, and can shift as bodies entangle and disentangle spatially. With
industrial pollution, lower atmospheric space abounds with plumes of toxic gases (methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as
noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous oxide and ozone) that unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as we encounter a busy street, a power
plant, or a factory farm. In addition to rising to heights where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil and water, returning unpredictable
flows of toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These toxicities— often concentrated in poor and minority communities—contribute to
childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers. In an account of living with toxic sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel
Chen describes navigating and transforming unpredictable atmospheres and their conjoined affective and spatial entanglements. The
improvisational strategies for prophylaxis—such as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle emissions on a busy street—
inevitably conjure public surveillance. “Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask,” writes Chen, “I am perceived as a walking symbol of
contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of repulsion.”21 Chen’s account points to how the materiality of everyday air
pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to Renisa Mawani, might itself be understood as an
atmospherics rather than a “social construction.” Drawing on Fanon’s accounts of race and atmosphere, Mawani explores
“race as an affective movement, a force rather than a thing, a current that reconstitutes and reassembles itself in response to its own internal
rhythms and to changing social and political conditions.”22 If race is not simply a phenotypic characteristic but an ecology of affective
movement and exchange, the effects of carbon pollution— disability, disease, forced migration, and sometimes death—can catalyze the
emergence of xenophobic fears about economic and ecological interconnection. Racialized climate reporting draws affective
power from senses of pervasive and inescapable environmental pollution. Michael Ziser and Julie Sze detail the
persistent geopolitical and racial fears driving US responses to climate change. Contrasting the sentimental domestication of
the (white) polar bear in US media with persistent fears of the cross-Pacific migration of Chinese air
pollution, Ziser and Sze argue that climate discourses conjure earlier racial panics about “yellow peril” and
obscure primary US responsibility for contemporary and historical emissions.23 While such reporting
contributes to an atmosphere of fear and crisis, the everyday physicality of climate processes inscribes
fear at the site of the skin. Atmosphere names a space of unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle
violences—a space at once geophysical and affective, informed by yet exploding representation, a space
where the violences of late-carbon liberalism subtly reform racialized sensoria through shifting scales of
interface. To explore this further I suggest that we think with mosquitoes, mosquitoes both figural and real, mosquitoes
that bite, migrate, and feed on various bodies. These are parasites like those in Narayan’s vision of gay plague; they are
also strange kin in a warming atmosphere. Mosquitoes excite colonial tropes in environmental discourse
—from anthropophagic consumption (feeding on humans) to visions of tropical contagion. 24 In the
vampiric image of female mosquitoes’ blood feasts—required for their sexual reproduction—there is a
counterpoint to the “carnivorous virility” that Carla Freccero attributes to liberal humanist visions of the
subject. A small body becomes a predator of the human, forcing strange ecologies of attraction and feeling even as it poses risks of debility
and death.25 But the parasite turns out to be feeding on a parasite. Alongside the mosquito, a universalized,
waste-expelling human settler appears as the ultimate atmospheric parasite in neoliberal climate
discourse. Michel Serres puts the point about scale this way: “The human parasite is of another order relative to that of the animal parasite:
the latter is one, the former a set; the latter is time, the former, history; the latter is a garden, the former, a province; to destroy a garden or a
world.”26 An organic imperialist, the human colonizes ecologies, time, and thought itself —an entire
lifeworld. In the hands of late-carbon liberalism’s human settler, killing takes a form both massive and
casual. This figuration is based on some daunting facts of extinction. The everyday activities of carbon-dependent industrial living connect
one’s bodily consumption and waste to the “stranger intimacies” of a shared atmosphere, slowly threatening other far-flung bodies, human and
nonhuman.27 The effects of waste may kill softly, enmeshed in the deep time and circuitous space of “slow
violence,” a “largely unintentional ecocide.” 28 From this vantage, beyond its invocation of xenophobic
rhetorics of shape-shifting, virality, and contagion, the parasite suggests a problem of knowledge about
agency and causality. For this is a human defined by waste rather than by romantic marks of sentience,
feeling, or intentionality. To gloss Berlant, inhabiting late-carbon liberalism produces myths, icons, and
feelings that may be “profoundly confirming” despite binding a person or world to situations of
“profound threat.”29 Rather than settle comfortably into the assumption of species-derived power—of the destructive and universal
human geological agency of “the Anthropocene”—we might say that to recognize that life is ambiently queer is to divest from spectacular
temporalities of crisis and transcendence that infuse queer theory and environmentalism alike. Queering in this sense emerges by tracing an
affective materiality that interrupts anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign stance of negation in
relation to Law, including the law of compulsory reproduction. Thus I interpret “queer inhumanism” as an account of interspecies entanglement
and reproductive displacement, an inquiry into the unrealized lifeworlds that form the background of the everyday. This
requires
thinking askance the human and thinking death, animality, and vulnerability in an age of many
extinctions—extinctions of taxonomized species, to be sure, but also more subtle orchestrations of
racial precarity and quiet obliterations of histories that could have been. In a time of extinctions,
lateral reproduction suggests not some transcendent space of queer negation—or worse, an acceptance of Narayan’s logic of plague
—but a problem of rethinking our casual reproduction of forms of ecological violence that kill quietly,
outside the spectacular time of crisis.
That makes death a past, present, and future horizon for the Othered subject.
Puar 7 (Jasbir Puar is professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, “Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”)//LFS—AP
In 1992, Judith Butler, faulting Foucault’s The History of Sexuality for his ‘‘wishful construction: death
is effectively expelled from
Western modernity, cast behind it as a historical possibility, surpassed or cast outside it as a non-
Western phenomenon,’’ asks us to revaluate biopolitical investment in fostering life from the vantage
point of homosexual bodies that have been historically cathected to death, specifically queer bodies afflicted
with or threatened by the hiv pandemic. For Foucault, modern biopower, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, is the
management of life—the distribution of risk, possibility, mortality, life chances, health, environment,
quality of living—the differential investment of and in the imperative to live. In biopower, propagating
death is no longer the central concern of the state; staving off death is. Cultivating life is coextensive
with the sovereign right to kill, and death becomes merely reflective, a byproduct, a secondary effect of
the primary aim and efforts of those cultivating or being cultivated for life. Death is never a primary
focus; it is a negative translation of the imperative to live, occurring only through the transit of fostering
life. Death becomes a form of collateral damage in the pursuit of life. This distancing from death is a
fallacy of modernity, a hallucination that allows for the unimpeded workings of biopolitics. In ‘‘Society
Must Be Defended’’ Foucault avers, ‘‘Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life, as in an epidemic. Death was
now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and
weakens it.’’ Butler, transposing the historical frame of Foucault’s elaboration of biopower onto the context of contemporary politics of life
and death, notes the irony of Foucault’s untimely death in 1984 due to causes related to aids, at that time an epidemic on the cusp of its
exponential detonation. Thus, Butler’s 1992 analysis returns bodies to death, specifically queer bodies afflicted with or threatened by the hiv
virus. With a similar complaint, albeit grounded in the seemingly incongruous plight of colonial and neocolonial occupations, Achille Mbembe
redirects our attention from biopolitics to what he terms ‘‘necropolitics.’’ Mbembe’s analysis foregrounds death decoupled
from the project of living—a direct relation to killing that renders impossible any subterfuge in a
hallucinating disavowal of death in modernity—by asking, ‘‘Is the notion of biopower sufficient to
account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the
fight against terror, makes the murder of its enemy its primary and absolute objective?’’ For Foucault,
massacres are literally vital events; for Mbembe, they are the evidence of the brutality of biopower’s incitement to
life. For a millisecond, we have an odd conflation and complicity, rendering necropolitical death doubly displaced: first by biopolitical antennae
of power, and second by the theorist who describes them. Laboring in the service of rational politics of liberal
democracy, biopolitical scopes of power deny death within itself and for itself ; indeed, death is denied
through its very sanction. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault, himself ensnared in the very workings of biopolitics, a disciplinary
subject of biopolitics, denies death within biopolitics too. However, in ‘‘Society Must be Defended,’’ he contends that the ‘‘gradual
disqualification of death’’ in biopolitical regimes of living stigmatizes death as ‘‘something to be hidden away. It has become the most private
and shameful thing of all (and ultimately, it is now not so much sex as death that is the object of a taboo).’’ This privatization of death,
Foucault indicates, signals that in the quest to optimize life, ‘‘power no longer recognizes death. Power
literally ignores death.’’ Mbembe’s ‘‘death-worlds’’ of the ‘‘living dead,’’ on the other hand, may cohere
through a totalizing narrative about the suffocation of life through the omnipotent forces of killing. In
the face of daily necropolitical violence, suffering, and death, the biopolitical will to live plows on,
distributed and redistributed in the minutiae of quotidian affairs not only of the capacity of individual
subjects but of the capacity of populations: health, hygiene, environment, medicine, reproduction and
birthrates (and thus fertility, child care, education), mortality (stalling death, the elongation of life), illness (‘‘form, nature, extension,
duration, and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population’’ in order to regulate labor production and productivity), insurance,
security. These ‘‘technologies of security’’ function to promote a reassuring society, ‘‘an overall
equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers,’’ and are thus implicated in
the improvement of the race through purification, and the reignition and regeneration of one’s
race. While questions of reproduction and regeneration are central to the study of biopolitics, queer scholars have been oddly averse to the Foucauldian frame of biopolitics, centralizing instead The History of Sexuality through a focus on the critique of psychoanalysis and the repressive hypothesis, implicitly and often explicitly delegating the study of race to the background. Rey Chow notes the general failure of scholars to read sexuality through biopower as symptomatic of modernist inclinations toward a narrow homosexual/heterosexual
identitarian binary frame that favors ‘‘sexual intercourse, sex acts, and erotics’’ over ‘‘the entire problematic of the reproduction of human life that is, in modern times, always racially and ethnically inflected.’’ I would add to this observation that the rise of the centrality of The History of Sexuality in queer studies has been predominantly due to interest in Foucault’s disentanglement of the workings of the ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’ and his implicit challenge to Freudian psychoanalytic narratives that foreground sexual repression as the foundation of subjectivity. (In other
words, we can trace the genealogic engagements of The History of Sexuality as a splitting: scholars of race and postcoloniality taking up biopolitics, while queer scholars work with dismantling the repressive hypothesis. These are tendencies, not absolutes.) It is also the case, however, that scholars of race and postcoloniality, despite studying the intersections of race and sexuality, have only recently taken up questions of sexuality beyond the reproductive function of heterosexuality. While Chow’s assessment of western proclivities toward myopic renditions of sexuality is
persuasive, the relegation of the sexual purely to the realm of (heterosexual) reproduction seems ultimately unsatisfactory. In the case of Chow’s project, it allows her to omit any consideration of the heteronorms that insistently sculpt the parameters of acceptable ethnics. Moreover, nonnormative sexualities are rarely centered in efforts elaborating the workings of biopolitics, elided or deemed irrelevant despite the demarcation of perversion and deviance that is a key component of the very establishment of norms that drive biopolitical interests. Many accounts
of contemporary biopolitics thus foreground either race and state racism or, as Judith Butler does, the ramification of the emergence of the category of ‘‘sex,’’ but rarely the two together. In this endeavor I examine the process of disaggregating exceptional queer subjects from queer racialized populations in contemporary U.S. politics rather than proffer an overarching paradigm of biopolitical sexuality that resolves these dilemmas. By centering race and sexuality simultaneously in the reproduction of relations of living and dying, I want to keep taut the tension between
holding the two concepts together suggests a

biopolitics and necropolitics. The latter makes its presence known at the limits and through the excess of the former; the former masks the multiplicity of its relationships to death and killing in order to enable the proliferation of the latter. The distinction and its attendant tensions matter for two reasons. First,
need to also attend to the multiple spaces of the deflection of death, whether it be in the service of the
optimization of life or the mechanism by which sheer death is minimized. This bio-necro collaboration
conceptually acknowledges biopower’s direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the
optimization of life, and necropolitics’ nonchalance toward death even as it seeks out killing as a primary
aim. Following Mbembe, who argues that necropolitics entails the increasingly anatomic, sensorial, and tactile
subjugation of bodies—whether those of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay or the human waste of
refugees, evacuees, the living dead, the dead living, the decaying living, those living slow deaths—it
moves beyond identitarian and visibility frames of queerness to address questions of ontology and
affect. Second, it is precisely within the interstices of life and death that we find the differences between
queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and the racialized queernesses that emerge through
the naming of populations, thus fueling the oscillation between the disciplining of subjects and the
control of populations. Accountable to an array of deflected and deferred deaths, to detritus and decay, this deconstruction of the
poles of bio- and necropolitics also foregrounds regeneration in relation to reproduction. We can complicate, for instance, the centrality of
biopolitical reproductive biologism by expanding the terrain of who reproduces and what is reproduced, dislodging the always already implicit
heterosexual frame, interrogating how the production of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and even queer work in the service of the
management, reproduction, and regeneration of life rather than being predominantly understood as implicitly or explicitly targeted for death.
Pressing Butler on her focus on how queers have been left to die, it is time to ask: How
do queers reproduce life, and Which
queers are folded into life? How do they give life? To what do they give life? How is life weighted,
disciplined into subjecthood, narrated into population, and fostered for living? Does this securitization of
queers entail deferred death or dying for others, and if so, for whom?
The alternative is to refuse the 1AC in favor of denaturalizing the conditions for the
atmosphere of violence. In the affirmation of denaturalization, we favor becoming the
toxic body that reorients the figures of environmentalism toward toxic world building
in the lens of queer ecology.
Davis 15 (Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The
New School, She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists,
humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes,
“Plastic Progeny: The Plastiphere and Other Queer Futures,” https://heathermdavis.com/bio-cv/)//LFS—
AP
So then what does this leave us with? How do we think through increasingly queer futurities that might usefully threaten the Symbolic or social order, but that are also interfering with the biological continuance of life? In other words, how do we make the social order more queer while
mitigating the destruction to life forms and queer forms of life? What kinds of allegiances might be made, or affordances found, both in a nonreproductive future, and in asserting a kind of feminist futurity away from this apocalyptic nihilism that subtends Edelman’s argumentation? For
here, despite how much I agree, viscerally, with Edelman and wish to align myself on the side of the complete destruction of the social order of which he speaks, when this queerness passes over into the realm of the biological, it is harder to uphold. The figure of the child necessarily does
this work in Edelman’s thought, merging the literal continuance of the species with a political futurism, but extending this outward (which, of course, was not his intention) to the most rapidly occurring mass extinctions the earth has ever seen (Glavin 2007, Kolbert 2014) seems ethically
The extinctions that we are currently facing project

untenable. This is because this kind of nihilistic imaginary does the work of upholding the social order rather than acting in opposition to it.
“no future” asymmetrically. The privileged, white, heteronormative, reproductive couple that becomes
the figure of the political future that Edelman wishes to foreclose, or at least not participate in, seems [End Page 242] to
become more powerful under the current conditions of toxicity, rather than less. It seems important then to be able to
imagine a future that acknowledges non-reproductivity and extinction while working to build queer, feminist realities for as long as humans
may exist. For, as Jordana Rosenburg writes, one worries that such “futural” imaginaries and apocalyptic aphrodisiacs are fundamentally
conditioned by the legacy of the Cold War excision of revolutionary thought from the thinking of the horizon. Thus, rather than imagining a
world in which the horrors of instrumental reason (with its attendant racist, eugenic, and exploitative logics) are directly confronted—and give
way to a costewardship of/with the earth—the only possible outcome is extinction: of the species, of cognition, of
the problem of the socius tout court. I wholeheartedly agree with the open political horizon that Rosenburg insists upon;
however, in the face of rampant species extinction and the prediction of drastic human loss of life under
the conditions of increasing chemical toxicity coupled with climate change a whole-hearted celebration
of futurity seems naive. What is incredibly important in her position is the articulation that the move toward extinction is happening
differentially, increasing the urgency to address social and political matters. In other words, the evacuation of the space of the
future, rendered through the figure of extinction, enacts a different valence to Edelman’s queerness,
replacing it with a “no future” that refuses to acknowledge the slow suffering that has already begun.
For, it may not really be the threat of the end that is an actual threat. Slow suffering and pain are far
more terrifying than the clean break that “no future” implies. In the recorded deaths of sea creatures by
plastic, the fish Frilund caught might have received a mercy killing. Being eaten by a fisherman, and
therefore experiencing a death that was relatively quick, seems preferable to the slow starvation that
would otherwise have been the fish’s fate. It might be difficult to say what a fish feels, but I can’t imagine that having one’s
stomach full of plastic, slowly starving to death, could, in any body, be anything but painful. The figure of apocalypse, then, seems
far preferable to a world of slow decay. Without abandoning the political refusal that is necessarily entwined with Edelman’s
project, I want to think through what kinds of queer affordances might be possible that work to skew the social. How, in other words, to think
about slow decline, a kind of gerontology, or crip [debility] theory for the current biosphere? Mel Chen’s recent work on animacy and in
particular on toxicity provides a useful starting point. Toxicity
provides the advantage of not positing the possibility of
a radical split, or a clean end. Toxicity is about a [End Page 243] kind of futurity that struggles to be
hopeful, but is certainly not apocalyptic. Instead, toxicity, and the figure of queerness that she puts forth,
recognize and privilege mutation, sickness, and the permutation of the body by its outside. Chen writes, “I
suggest that queering is immanent to animate transgressions, violating proper intimacies (including
between humans and nonhuman things)” (2012, 11). Extinction, or non-reproductivity, under this rubric
cannot be neatly sealed off. Understood from this perspective, queerness allows for an ecological
understanding that we are not impenetrable. Rather, we are composed of what surrounds us . Our
bodies are permeable, they cross over in ways that resist categorization. The (heteronormative)
assumption of the inviolability of the body is part of the foundational logic that allows for the
bioaccumulation of toxins in the environment and in our bodies in the first place. Chen writes, This
internalization, even privatization, of immunity helps to explain the particular indignation that toxicity evokes, since it is understood as an
unnaturally external force that violates (rather than informs) an integral and bounded self. This is what Cohen calls the “apotheosis
of
the modern body,” the abandonment of human’s integral relation to their environments and the
insistence of a radical segregation of self and world fueled by a bellicose antagonism. (2012, 195) To give up
on the fantasy of extermination or apocalypse is also to give up the radical segregation of the world
and its “bellicose antagonism.” Instead, toxicity forces us to reveal the ways in which we are multiply
composed—of plastic, of toxins, of queer morphologies. The fiction of independence and impenetrability, Chen is quick to
point out, is one that only a few bodies can bear. In fact, most of us already have a deep knowledge of the ways in which these categories are
breaking down, and have never adequately functioned in the first place. For those who can afford it, this knowledge
of the
permeability of the body, and particularly to toxins, often results in the attempt to barricade bodies off
from their surrounds. Barricading is precisely what underpins the logic of the emergence of plastics in
the world to begin with, the fantasy that we can seal ourselves off from the outside world, providing a
pure, clean surface that will preserve and protect. In seeking to refashion the molecular structure of organic and inorganic
compounds, we believed so much in our own hubris that we seemed surprised to encounter negative consequences. But so many of us already
know that this is a fantasy that can no longer be sustained. Now that we are increasingly being impinged upon to acknowledge the porosity of
our bodies, we need to find ways of living with toxicity , for it is certainly not going away. Here, Chen’s analysis of the
relationship of toxicity to queer productivity is instructive: [End Page 244] I would be foolish to imagine that toxicity stands in for “utopia” given the explosion of resentful, despairing, painful,
screamingly negative affects that surround toxicity. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to deny the queer productivity of toxins and toxicity, a productivity that extends beyond an enumerable set of
addictive or pleasure-inducing substances, or to neglect (or, indeed, ask after) the pleasure, the loves, the rehabilitation, the affections, the assets that toxic conditions induce. (2012, 211)
Additionally, in our current moment, we might not want to neglect the queer productivity of new forms of life, such as that found on the plastisphere. For we have no idea
what may die off in the next couple of hundred years, but some kind of life will definitely continue. In a
world increasingly marked by toxicity and rapid climate change the processes of evolution, both cultural
and biological, seem to propose rather queer solutions. Instead of completely balking in horror,
retreating to eco(hetero)normativity, or seeking the refuge of perfectly contained apocalyptic
narratives, might there be a way to live with this toxicity, coupled with its “despairing, painful,
screamingly negative affects” and an acknowledgment that there might be something interesting and
productive in a future where sex and gender increasingly morph, and where reproduction slows ? In fact,
might the proliferation of queer toxicities provide new avenues of biological proliferation ? For, as Bagemihl
writes, “the capacity for behavioral plasticity —including homosexuality—may strengthen the ability of a
species to respond ‘creatively’ to a highly changeable and ‘unpredictable’ world” (1999, 251). Just as
plastics are inadvertently creating all kinds of new worlds, such as the plastisphere, in order to
address the current situation ethically, we must also learn to accept all kinds of strange life forms,
human and nonhuman, toward which we generate care, compassion, and commitment. We must learn from
queer subjects to build worlds of familial care that are not bound by biology. We need to generate a sense of responsibility
for our nonhuman progeny, these strange new forms of microbial life, while at the same time
recognizing that their existence is predicated on the extinguishment of multiple other forms of life:
humans, animals, plants, and bacteria alike. Evolution “allows a temporality of extinction in which no life-form can be
considered normative, necessary or particularly worthy” (Colebrook 2012, 7–8), and there is certainly a necessary, queer lesson to be learned in
this approach. But, as
Colebrook and others have called for, when an economic system dependent on
petrochemical proliferation is what is fueling this evolution, we who are deeply enmeshed and
implicated in these systems need to take account of our queer children, these strange new bacterial
communities, and our monstrous murders, the massive species deaths, and the deaths of the poor from
climate change. [End Page 245] For the nihilistic, apocalyptic, or masculinist techno-fantasies of the future
will only lead us to the continued reproduction of the social order. To acknowledge that the future will
be queer, in the sense of completely disruptive, means finding a way to live with toxicity, extinction, and
without the reassurance of the open horizon of the future. Toxicity provides a (re-)solution to the
question of what to do with the ambivalence of queerness only to the extent that it does not represent
a choice: it is already here, it is not a matter of queer political agency so much as a queered political
state of the present. … Nevertheless, an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity seems to have the power to turn a
lens on the anxieties that produce it and allow for a queer knowledge production that gives some
means for structural remedy while not abandoning a claim to being just a little bit “off.” (Chen 2012, 220)
The lessons of queer social structures, of families not based on biology, and lives not necessarily
afforded protection from the state or other institutions of power, might be instructive in facing both our
non-filial human progeny, and a world filled with increasing uncertainty. Instead of biological children, our
plasticized, microbial progeny will offer a decidedly queerer world.
ON
1NC — AT: Warming
The Renewables advantage:
Climate does not cause extinction — scientific consensus.
Kerr et al. 19 – Dr. Amber Kerr, Energy and Resources PhD at the University of California-Berkeley,
known agroecologist, former coordinator of the USDA California Climate Hub. Dr. Daniel Swain, Climate
Science PhD at UCLA, climate scientist, a research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research. Dr. Andrew King, Earth Sciences PhD, Climate Extremes Research Fellow at the University of
Melbourne. Dr. Peter Kalmus, Physics PhD at the University of Colombia, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Lab. Professor Richard Betts, Chair in Climate Impacts at the University of Exeter, a lead
author on the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in
Working Group 1. Dr. William Huiskamp, Paleoclimatology PhD at the Climate Change Research Center,
climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. [Claim that human civilization
could end in 30 years is speculative, not supported with evidence, 6-4-2019,
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-
context-james-felton/]
Scientists who reviewed IFLScience’s story found that it failed to provide sufficient context for this report—differentiating, for example,
between speculative claims and descriptions of peer-reviewed research. In particular, the story’s headline (“New Report Warns ‘High
Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End’ Within 30 Years”) misrepresents the report as a
likely projection rather than an exploration of an intrinsically unlikely worst case scenario.
See all the scientists’ annotations in context.
REVIEWERS’ OVERALL FEEDBACK
These comments are the overall assessment of scientists on the article, they are substantiated by their knowledge in the field and by the
content of the analysis in the annotations on the article.
Amber Kerr, Researcher, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California, Davis:
The content of the IFLScience article is mostly an accurate representation of the contents of the Breakthrough report, but the article
tends to gloss over important caveats and probabilities that are given in the report. The least accurate part of the
IFLScience article is the headline, which is an outright misrepresentation of the report. The article title states that there is, overall, a “high
probability” of human civilization coming to an end in 30 years. This is extremely misleading. What the
Breakthrough report actually says is that, in the most unlikely, “long-tail” biophysical scenario where climate
feedbacks are much more severe than we expect, THEN there is a high likelihood of human civilization coming to
an end. But the report authors explicitly state that this “high-end scenario” is beyond their capacity to
model or to quantitatively estimate.
Daniel Swain, Researcher, UCLA, and Research Fellow, National Center for Atmospheric Research:
The article uncritically reproduces claims from a recent report released by an Australian thinktank regarding the purported “end of human
civilization” due to climate change over the next 30 years. While
there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change
will pose increasingly existential threats to the most vulnerable individuals in society and to key global ecosystems,
even these dire outcomes aren’t equivalent to the “annihilation of intelligent life,” as is claimed in the report.
Andrew King, Research fellow, University of Melbourne:
The report this article is based on describes a scenario which is unlikely, but several aspects of what is included in the report are likely to
worsen in coming decades, such as the occurrence of deadly heatwaves. The conclusion of a high likelihood that human
civilisation will end is false, although there is a great deal of evidence that there will be many damaging
consequences to continued global warming over the coming decades.
Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
I don’t think it’s so easy to discount the essential warning of this report. However, it would have been stronger if the authors were more careful
not to mention the unsupported concept of near-term human extinction, and the unsupported probabilistic claim that there is a “high
likelihood” of their 2050 scenario which includes the collapse of civilization. I
do not understand why non-scientist writers
(neither report author is a scientist) feel a need to exaggerate sound scientific findings, when those findings are already
quite alarming enough. I feel that humanity should undertake urgent climate action just as the report authors do, but I feel that
misrepresenting the science is unhelpful and unnecessary.
Richard Betts, Professor, Met Office Hadley Centre & University of Exeter:
This is a classic case of a media article over-stating the conclusions and significance of a non-peer reviewed report that itself had already
overstated (and indeed misrepresented) peer-reviewed science – some of which was already somewhat controversial. It appears that there was
not a thorough independent check of the credibility of the message.
Notes:
[1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations.
[2] Each evaluation is independent. Scientists’ comments are all published at the same time.
ANNOTATIONS
The statements quoted below are from the article; comments are from the reviewers (and are lightly edited for clarity).
New Report Warns “High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End” Within 30 Years
The headline overstates the conclusions of the report (which is already overdoing things). The reports says it presents a scenario, and under
that scenario and all the assumptions within it, the report claims that there is a “high likelihood of human civilization coming to and end” – but
even then, the report itself does not give the end of civilisation within 30 years. The
process supposedly leading ultimately to collapse
begins around 2050 but takes a long time to take effect. Also the processes themselves are not well-
grounded in science, as they over-interpret published work.
A new report has warned there’s an existential risk to humanity from the climate crisis within the coming decades, and a ‘high
likelihood of human civilization coming to an end’ over the next three decades unless urgent action is taken.
This is hyperbole. The scenario constructed in this report does not have a “high likelihood” of occurring in part because it requires a
confluence of circumstances coming together. While it’s certainly true that climate change will be damaging to society and the environment
and many of the consequences will be severe this does not equate to a high likelihood of civilisation coming to an end.
The “report” is not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It’s from some sort of “think tank” who can basically write what they like. The report itself
misunderstands / misrepresents science, and does not provide traceable links to the science it is based on so it cannot easily be checked
(although someone familiar with the literature can work it out, and hence see where the report’s conclusions are ramped-up from the original
research).
This requires us to work towards avoiding catastrophic possibilities rather than looking at probabilities, as learning from mistakes is
not an option when it comes to existential risks.
The report focuses on possible scenarios very much on the extreme end of what could happen but then claims
there’s a “high likelihood” of human civilisation ending. These two statements don’t fit together.
With that in mind, they propose a plausible and terrifying “2050 scenario” whereby humanity could face irreversible collapse in just
three decades.
Not to downplay the seriousness of what humanity is facing, but the report in fact doesn’t make this claim. While scientists do expect many of
the changes to the Earth system due to global heating to be “irreversible,” and while this should be extremely concerning to any reasonable
person, it is different than “irreversible human collapse” which, if you think about it, needs unpacking.
Their analysis calculates the existential climate-related security risk to Earth through a scenario set 30 years into the future.
No, the report’s authors have merely read (or possibly seen without actually reading) a few of the scariest papers they could find,
misunderstood (or not read properly) at least one of them, and presented unjustified statements.
posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity that may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or
permanently and drastically curtailing its potential.
As I climate scientist, I am unaware of any scientific research that suggests changes in Earth’s climate capable of “annihilating intelligent life”
over the next 30 years.
There is plenty of evidence that climate change will pose increasingly existential threats to the most vulnerable individuals in society; to low-
lying coastal cities and island nations; to indigenous cultures and ways of life; and to numerous plant and animal species, and perhaps even
entire ecosystems.
Such consequences are well-supported by the existing evidence, are already starting to emerge in certain regions, and should be of paramount
concern. But even these very dire outcomes aren’t equivalent to the “end of human civilization,” as is claimed in the report.
There is no scientific basis to suggest that climate breakdown will “annihilate intelligent life” (by which I
assume the report authors mean human extinction) by 2050.
However, climate breakdown does pose a grave threat to civilization as we know it, and the potential for mass suffering on a scale perhaps
never before encountered by humankind. This should be enough reason for action without any need for exaggeration or misrepresentation!
A “Hothouse Earth” scenario plays out that sees Earth’s temperatures doomed to rise by a further 1°C (1.8°F) even if we stopped
emissions immediately.
This word choice perhaps reveals a bias on the part of the author of the article. A temperature can’t be doomed. And while I certainly do not
encourage false optimism, assuming that humanity is doomed is lazy and counterproductive.
Fifty-five percent of the global population are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions beyond that which
humans can survive
This is clearly from Mora et al (2017) although the report does not include a citation of the paper as the source of that statement. The way it is
written here (and in the report) is misleading because it gives the impression that everyone dies in those conditions. That is not actually how
Mora et al define “deadly heat” – they merely looked for heatwaves when somebody died (not everybody) and then used that as the definition
of a “deadly” heatwave.
North America suffers extreme weather events including wildfires, drought, and heatwaves. Monsoons in China fail, the great rivers
of Asia virtually dry up, and rainfall in central America falls by half.
Projections of extreme events such as these are very difficult to make and vary greatly between different
climate models.
Deadly heat conditions across West Africa persist for over 100 days a year
The deadly heat projections (this, and the one from the previous paragraph) come from Mora et al (2017)1.
It should be clarified that “deadly heat” here means heat and humidity beyond a two-dimension threshold where at least one person in the
region subject to that heat and humidity dies (i.e., not everyone instantly dies). That said, in my opinion, the projections in Mora et al are
conservative and the methods of Mora et al are sound. I did not check the claims in this report against Mora et al but I have no reason to think
they are in error.
1- Mora et al (2017) Global risk of deadly heat, Nature Climate Change
The knock-on consequences affect national security, as the scale of the challenges involved, such as pandemic disease outbreaks, are
overwhelming. Armed conflicts over resources may become a reality, and have the potential to escalate into nuclear war. In the
worst case scenario, a scale of destruction the authors say is beyond their capacity to model, there is a ‘high likelihood of human
civilization coming to an end’.
Willem Huiskamp, Postdoctoral research fellow, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:
This is a highly questionable conclusion. The reference provided in the report is for the “Global Catastrophic Risks 2018” report from the
“Global Challenges Foundation” and not peer-reviewed literature. (It is worth noting that this latter report also provides no peer-reviewed
evidence to support this claim).
Furthermore, if it is apparently beyond our capability to model these impacts, how can they assign a ‘high likelihood’ to this outcome?
While it is true that warming of this magnitude would be catastrophic, making claims such as this without evidence serves only to undermine
the trust the public will have in the science.
It seems that the

eye-catching headline-level claims in the report stem almost entirely from these knock-on
effects, which the authors themselves admit are “beyond their capacity to model.” Thus, from a scientific
perspective, the purported “high likelihood of civilization coming to an end by 2050” is essentially personal
speculation on the part of the report’s authors, rather than a clear conclusion drawn from rigorous assessment of
the available evidence.
So there is only a “high likelihood” in the scenario that the report’s authors have constructed here. They do not say that their scenario itself is
“highly likely” (in fact they say it is a “sketch”) – so the headline of this article is not justified.
The most recent IPCC report lays out a future if we limit global heating to 1.5°C instead of the Paris Agreement’s 2°C.
The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth pointing out that the underlying report criticizes the IPCC for being too “reticent” and
gives an erroneous example: it claims that mean global temperatures will accelerate beyond the IPCC’s projections since human
greenhouse gas emissions are themselves accelerating. Emissions ARE accelerating exponentially, leading to exponential CO2 atmospheric
fraction increase, but exponential growth in CO2 fraction leads to linearly increasing global mean temperature.
By 2050 there’s a scientific consensus that we reached the tipping point for ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic well
before 2°C (3.6°F) of warming
This is somewhat unclear phrasing from the report. Although studies have shown it is possible that the threshold for the Greenland
Ice
Sheet tipping point may be lower than 2C global warming (relative to pre-industrial), there is not currently a scientific
consensus that this is where the threshold is. It seems to authors’ scenario is that scientists living in 2050 have reached the
consensus that the tipping point has been passed by that time, but that’s different – again it’s part of the scenario and does not support the
“end of civilisation by 2050” headline.
Microalgae fails—the problem is not lack of wastewater recycling the main barriers
are dewatering process and lipid extraction— even if they solve it takes too long and
emits too much Co2
Veeramuthu and Ngamcharussrivichai 20 Ashokkumar Veeramuthu, National Cheng Kung
University, and Chawalit Ngamcharussrivichai. Ph.D. Professor of Chemical Engineering, Department of
Chemical Technology, Chulalongkorn University, Potential of Microalgal Biodiesel: Challenges and
Applications. No Publication, Published: March 21st 2020 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/71530
da: 10-9-2021 PBM East
3. Current challenges in microalgal biofuels In the present scenario, rapid

population growth and extensive fossil fuel usage
increase the energy demand and significant environmental-related problems, which lead to global warming.
Therefore, researchers have seriously searched for an alternative and sustainable solution to overcome those issues. In this context, microalgae
are considered a promising candidate for an alternative fuel source and an excellent option for cleansing the environment. The previous studies
have shown that the cost of biodiesel produced from microalgae is estimated at $20.53 and $9.84 per gallon using a PBR and open raceway
pond cultivation method, respectively. This shows that microalgal biodiesel is a promising avenue for sustainable energy production. From the
literature survey, it is clearly noted that even though several microalgal species are available for biodiesel production, only a few algal species
are considered as the best choice because of its quality and quantity of lipid accumulation. Raja et al. [32] reported that, on earth, more than
25,000 microalgal species are available; however, only a few species are in use. At present, the utilization
of microalgae as a
feedstock for the production of bioenergy and bioproducts still faces a lot of limitations and challenges,
and we must be addressing these issues by improving the technologies from laboratory scale to commercial scale. The most critical problems
are to improve the algal biomass productivity, dewatering and biomass productivity, pretreatment and
extraction, and biodiesel production. Despite several advanced technologies are availab le for a large-scale
biomass production and lipid conversion into biodiesel, still, microalgal biodiesel is too costly since the cultivation
system design requires temperature and growth limiting condition control (viz., CO2, water sources, nutrient
source, and optimization). The other most crucial obstacle is biomass dewatering because this process is energy-
intensive and so costly. Generally, in a large-scale algal cultivation, the closed PBR system is more expensive than the open raceway
ponds. The PBR system also faces major operating challenge s, such as overheating and fouling, due to gas
exchange limitation. In microalgal cultivation, open ponds, especially mixed raceway ponds, are much cheaper to be built and operated and are
easily scaled up to several hectares, which make them the right choice for commercial-scale biomass production. About 95% of commercial
microalgal biomass production is performed using open raceway ponds even for high value-added bioproducts, which sell for prices over a
hundred/thousand dollars. Nevertheless, the open cultivation methods meet several limitations, mainly due to contaminations by other
microalgal species, algal grazers, fungi, amoeba, etc., and temperature. A literature survey revealed that though hundreds of research papers
were published, still now, no proper
information is available on cultivation designs, operations, yields, and
other important aspects at the commercial level [33]. A major bottleneck in microalgal biofuel production is the high capital
and operating costs. However, several research studies have focused on microalga-based biofuels, still, there is a vast technological gap that
was found during commercialization. In a large-scale biomass production, there is a large demand for water, CO2, nitrogen, and phosphorous,
which is believed as another major hurdle. The wastewater can be utilized as a source of nutrients; nonetheless, there is a serious concern on
contamination by bacteria, pathogens, and chemical compounds presenting in wastewater. Earlier studies reported that 0.16 kg of nitrogen and
0.022 kg of phosphorous are required for producing 1 liter of algal oil [34]. Besides, for producing 1-liter algal oil, the microalgae need 3.5–9.3
kg of CO2, which implies that algae utilize a large amount of CO2 for its growth and biomass production . Another
major challenge is algal lipid extraction prior to biodiesel production. In this part, after biomass drying, the lipid extraction
using expensive solvents significantly increases the production cost . Many researchers are searching for significantly
advanced technologies without drying or solvent extraction of the algal slurry in order to reduce the biomass pretreatment cost. The
biodiesel production based on current methods is expensive since it requires neat lipid feedstock, free from free fatty
acids (FFA), and water. For this kind of extraction technique, the biomass must be dried; however , biomass drying is another
important process, and it requires a higher cost. To reduce the FFA content of lipid feedstock, the esterification process is
carried out via either acidic or enzymatic route; however, this process is still at the research stage. The esterification through the enzymatic
process using lipases may be considered as the best choice because it has added advantage of running even at low temperatures. Nonetheless,
the primary issue in this method is glycerol formed as a by-product, which can inhibit the lipase activity. Some researchers demonstrated that
using methyl acetate, as a substrate instead of methanol, avoids glycerol formation and lipase inhibition since triacetin is generated as a by-
product [35].
India and China thump.

Hua & Dorvak ’21 — Sha, environment reporter; Phred, senior Asia reporter; (April 22, 2021; “China,
India Complicate Biden’s Climate Ambitions”; Wall Street Journal; https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-
india-complicate-bidens-climate-ambitions-11619116604; //LFS—SR)
China and India, both with huge and growing appetites for energy, will play outsize roles in efforts to
curb greenhouse gas emissions as the world seeks to come up with more ambitious targets on climate change.
The two countries are similar in many ways. They have massive populations topping 1.3 billion, and both are
heavy users of coal, the worst fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions. China alone consumed more than
half of the world’s coal in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency. India is currently a distant No. 2 with 11% of the
global share, but its share is expected to rise to around 14% by 2030.
Both countries’ leaders, who have signaled they don’t want to be seen as acting at the behest of the U.S., argued at the virtual two-
day climate summit hosted by the White House, which began Thursday, that their nations should shoulder different
responsibilities than developed nations in the fight against climate change.
Unilateral policy is circumvented and exacerbates degradation in the short-term.

Ritter & Schopf ’13 — Hendrik, Research Assistant, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg; Mark,
postdoctoral researcher @ the Chair of Public Economics, University of Hagen, PhD in Economics summa
cum laude from the University of Paderborn, MSc in Economics from the University of Magdeburg; (July
23, 2013; “Unilateral Climate Policy: Harmful or even Disastrous?”; Center for International Economics;
Working Paper No. 2013-05; http://groups.uni-paderborn.de/wp-wiwi/RePEc/pdf/ciepap/WP62.pdf;
//LFS—SR)
There are several reasons why public

policies against global warming can have effects contrary to their intended
aims. Carbon leakage can lead to intratemporal and intertemporal shifts in greenhouse gas emissions from the
abating countries to the non-abating countries. Even within the abating countries, emissions might only be
shifted intertemporally rather than there being an actual emission reduction for any abatement policies
other than binding and persistent quantity restrictions. Resource owners may feel threatened by
ambitious climate objectives and shift their extraction to the present so as not to be left with the bulk of their mineral
deposits. Furthermore, previously untouched resources may become valuable reserves and may be extracted
sooner or later due to possible price rises in coal, oil, and other fossil fuels. We integrate a marginal extraction cost which is
increasing in present, future, and cumulative supply into Eichner & Pethig’s (2011) model. Through this, the cumulative fossil fuel extraction
becomes endogenously determined. In our model, the qualitative results concerning the weak green paradox remain unaltered and the
elasticities of demand still play an important role (see equations (33) and (37)). But if the emissions cap is tightened in the first period, the
condition for its occurrence is strengthened due to the physical user cost in real terms (see equation (33); these are smaller than one). And if
the emissions cap is tightened in the second period, not only the user cost but also the elasticities of supply in the second period play an
important role for the condition for the occurrence of the weak green paradox (see equation (37)).
Offshoring thumps.
Hakes ’21 — Jay, US energy policy export, former Administrator of the US Energy Information
Administration and Director for Research and Policy for President Obama’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil
Spill Commission; (Climate change is a global challenge that requires a global perspective”; Changing
America; https://thehill.com/changing-america/opinion/562332-climate-change-is-a-global-challenge-
that-requires-a-global; //LFS—SR)
As a result, rich
countries, oblivious to the damage they inflict elsewhere, may tilt toward adapting to climate change
rather than revamp existing energy systems with massive carbon emissions. Countries with fewer resources of their own do not
have sufficient resources to adapt. This disparity makes it hard to forge binding international agreements. So far, voluntary arrangements like
the 2015 Paris Agreement have had to carry the load.
Other implications of a global pollutant like carbon involve a wonky policy concept called “leakage” – a term used decades
ago by economists like Nobel Prize-winning William Nordhaus. For example, the
U.S. economy has become more reliant on
the growth of services industries as the manufacturing sector shrunk. We still use manufactured products,
but there is a greater likelihood that they are made somewhere else, like China or Mexico. In such cases, U.S. emissions from
industrial activities do not disappear; they “leak” to their new locations.
From a climate perspective, the offshoring of manufacturing reduces U.S. emissions of carbon below what they would have been otherwise.
However, this cutin national emissions has little effect on global emissions or accumulations. Since carbon is a global
pollutant, the impacts of climate on the United States will be roughly the same, whether the goods it uses are produced
at home or abroad.

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Open Source — HH — Quarters

Extinction has and is already happening — their representations of futural warming

To Kill Softly Media

holding the two concepts together suggests a

The extinctions that we are currently facing project

REVIEWERS’ OVERALL FEEDBACK

Amber Kerr, Researcher, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California, Davis:

[1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations.

Andrew King, Research fellow, University of Melbourne:

Andrew King, Research fellow, University of Melbourne:

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Andrew King, Research fellow, University of Melbourne:

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

1- Mora et al (2017) Global risk of deadly heat, Nature Climate Change

It seems that the

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

3. Current challenges in microalgal biofuels In the present scenario, rapid

India and China thump.

Unilateral policy is circumvented and exacerbates degradation in the short-term.

There are several reasons why public

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