Dedev

DeDev
1NC
1NC Dedev
Economic collapse is inevtiable – peak oil, food and structural instabilities make
growth unsustainable. Collapse now causes a shift to localized economies. Further
growth causes catastrophic failure
Korowicz 11 – (5/14/11, David, physicist and human systems ecologist, the director of The Risk/Resilience
Network in Ireland, a board member of FEASTA (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability), “In the world,
at the limits to growth,”http://www.feasta.org/2011/05/14/in-the-world-at-the-limits-to-growth/)
Yet our feet of clay are that our economy and civilisation exist only by virtue of resource flows from our
environment. The only laws in economics are the laws of physics, everything else is contingent,
supposition or vanity. An economy, growing in size and complexity, is firstly a thermodynamic system
requiring increasing energy flows to grow and avoid decay. Waste, be it greenhouse gasses or landfill is
also a natural outcome of such a thermodynamic process. News from Elsewhere It’s been part of the
background noise for over half a century, warnings about resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, soil erosion
or climate change. But impacts were always on the imaginative horizon. Sometime, far enough into the
future to be re-assuring to a species that evolved with a clear preference for the short-term. Or on the
hinterland between our safe European home and the barbarian other, where starvation, environmental
disasters, angry mobs and crazy despots have always demanded our attention, at least while on TV. Yes
we can! Yes we can! - chanted the posse of teenagers following Al Gore through a pavilion in Poznan,
Poland for the annual gathering of climate policy acronyms. When not distracted by the ever-present,
we’ve responded to these warnings with treaties and laws, technology and exhortation. Of course, every
ecological indicator kept getting worse. And we kept on about treaties and laws, and break-through
technologies. Our mythic world-views gave us the shared faith that we may not be there yet, but we
could, once a brilliant scheme is in place, a climate law passed, technologies adopted, evil bankers
restrained, or once people just realised our predicament. Yes We Can! Yes We Can! Indeed, we could
transcend our grubby selfishness and short-termism so we tied together the belief that we could will
ecological sustainability and global equity. Still, our resource and environmental sink demands keep
increasing, ecological indicators decline and inequality rises. The reality is that we are locked into an
economy adapted to growth, and that means rising energy and resource flows and waste. By lock-in, we
mean that our ability to change major systems we depend upon is limited by the complexity of
interdependencies, and the risk that the change will undermine other systems upon which we depend.
So we might wish to change the banking or monetary system, but if the real and dynamic consequences
lead to a major bank freeze lasting more than a couple of days we will have major food security risks,
massive drops in economic production, and risks to infrastructure. And if we want to make our food
production and distribution more resilient to such shocks, production will fall and food prices will need
to be higher, which will in the short-to-medium term drive up unemployment, lead to greater poverty,
and pose even greater risks to the banking system. It is an oxymoron to say we can do something
unsustainable forever. How would you know if we were approaching a limit, the end of growth? By
warnings? Listen. By the great and the good, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, saying “Ladies & gentleman
we have a really big problem!”? Politicians and civil servants, the IMF and the OECD, all missed the
credit crisis of 2007, despite having expertise in the area and an abundant historical literature about
asset bubbles. They embody the dogmatism of the age, they are a pivot point about which are world-
views are confirmed. They mirror the authority of the court of Pope Urban VIII, stuffed with astronomer-
astrologers, the economists of their age, confirming the earth centric universe against Galileo and
Copernicus before him. What the Galileos of today are saying is that we are at or near the peak of global
oil production now. That as affordable oil declines, the global economy must contract. That we do not
have the time, nor resources to keep the economy growing by substituting for oil with efficiency
measures, renewable or nuclear energy, or technology. That talk of an electric car future, advanced IT-
renewable energy convergent infrastructure, and global super-grids is a fancy. The most obvious
problem with focusing on this vision at the horizon is that you don’t see that the ground is opening up
beneath your feet. We will not get to that horizon because all the things you need to get there-
monetary and financial systems, purchasing power and economies of scale, production systems,
infrastructure and global trust networks-will be undermined by the convergence of a peak of global oil
production, a peak of food production, and a giant credit bubble. The ground will open up, we will fall,
and our visions will fall further and further from our grasp. They are saying that global food production is
hitting an array of ecological constraints, while population growth and changing diets are driving up
demand. They note that current food production is massively subsidised through fossil fuel inputs, and
that as those inputs become less available, and people become poorer due to economic contraction,
food productivity and access will be undermined. In totality, we are at the edge of an evolving systemic
crisis. Peak oil and food constraints are likely to undermine the stability of our integrated globalised
economy. The core pillars of that economy: critical infrastructure, production flows, economies of scale,
the financial and monetary system, behavioural adaptation, resource access and energy flows-are likely
to begin forcing contagious failure. The driving force of this failure is likely to be the fastest and most
unstable process-the impact of energy and food constrained economic growth, and an already
vulnerable monetary and financial system dependent upon continuing growth. Tightening binds
Whatever of Ireland’s economic woes, the real debt bubble is global. The debt relative to GDP is far
greater now in the US, UK, and much of Europe, than it ever was leading up to the great depression. Like
many countries we responded to our debt bubble with more debt, we just shifted it onto the sovereign
or the printing press. The indebted world, even without oil and food price rises is straining at the limits
of debt servicing and credibility. Yet it is demanding even more credit, while its ability to service the
debt is being undermined by debt deflation, austerity, rising job losses, and defaults. The bank lenders of
that money can only lose so much before they are too are insolvent. Rising food and energy prices are
driving the deflationary forces even harder. And if central banks misinterpret the cause of food and oil
price rises, and raise interest rates, the deflationary pressures risk becoming cyclonic. The cost of
essentials and debt servicing rise, while income declines. Discretionary spending will collapse, job losses
and defaults rise, income will declines further. This re-enforcing spiral of decline will increase, and
spread to more and more countries. The fear of contagion from peripheral Eurozone defaults are not
merely that they could topple French, UK, and German banks, but that this could bring down US banks
and effectively shut down the global financial system in very short shift. The destabilising force is not
just that the banks are already in a precarious position, but a monstrous pile of derivative contracts
worth ten to twenty times the global economy that hangs over the financial system. Some of those
contracts are effectively insurance against default. If bank defaults start spreading, then other banks and
the shadow financial system will be forced to cover obligations on default, or increase premiums on
their insurance. This may cause a fire-sale of assets, whereby the banks bluff is called, and they are
shown to have values far below what is required for solvency. What everybody wants and needs is a
sudden and explosive increase in the production of real goods and services (GDP) to make their
continual debt requirements serviceable. But that,even were it remotely possible, would require a big
increase in oil flows through the global economy, just as global oil production has peaked and begins its
decline. It cannot happen. This means that the global financial system is essentially insolvent now. The
only choice is default or inflation on a global scale. It mean banks are insolvent, because their assets
(loans) cannot be repaid; or they can be solvent (assuming appropriate action taken) but their
depositors cannot redeem their deposits at anything like their real value. It means the vast overhang of
stocks and bonds, including pensions, and insurance cannot be realised in real goods. It means our
monetary systems, dependent on fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and interest can only collapse.
High oil and food prices are essentially probing the limits of the stability of the globalised economy. They
will probe until there is a major collapse in global economic production. At which point our energy prices
may fall, but our real income and purchasing power will fall faster. And markets will discover this truth
quicker than monetary authorities and governments. Its expression will be in deeper and deeper
economic stresses and major systemic banking collapses. Official responses will become more and more
impotent, as their fundamental economic and policy tools no longer work, and their patina of control
becomes hollow. If and when banking system contagion spreads to supply-chain contagion we may face
existential challenges. Even were we to have the perfect monetary and financial system, without debt
and well controlled, peak oil and food would present an unprecedented shock. As incomes shrunk while
essentials such as food and energy become more expensive, non-discretionary spending would be
squeezed out. In the developed world, non-discretionary goods and services are just about all we
produce. So the result would still be mass unemployment. Our critical infrastructure would still be
increasingly vulnerable for various reasons, and monetary instability would still destabilise supply-
chains. Facing Ourselves & Facing Our Future We are at the beginning of a process in which our world-
views crash against a fundamentally unstable financial system and ecological constraints. A time where
we will learn that what was, will never return; and what was expected, can never be. We are facing a
time of loss and uncertainty. A time of bank-runs, lost savings and pensions, of mass unemployment,
electricity and mobile phone black-outs, of hunger and empty super-market shelves. A localised
economy will no longer be something environmentalists aspire to develop; rather it will be forced upon
us as bank failures, monetary uncertainty, and lost purchasing power sever links in the web of the global
economy. But we no longer have indigenous economies to fall back upon. The gap between
expectations and what can be realised is historically a major source of popular anger, and can ignite a
cycle of fear, blame, violence, scape-goating, and authoritarian leadership from either left or right. It can
give the avaricious the power and cover to appropriate wealth that might better be used for collective
welfare. Yet who gave us the right to our expectations? They were built on the semi-blind self-
organisation of a complex human society over generations. They were built on deep threads of human
behaviour-competition and cooperation, mating selection and status-that result from our evolution over
the history of life on earth. They were built on the deposits of ancient sunlight hidden below the Earth’s
surface, the minerals in soil, and the global climate that provided the stability for our species to flourish.
As a species there is no one to blame, unless we cling to the delusion that we are the displaced God who
transcended our own ecology. Yes, we can and will build a largely local economy out of the ruins of a
collapsed globalised one. It will be a much poorer one and one where we will have lost much of what we
take for granted. It can also provide a good life, where our basic needs are met, where meaningful lives
can be lived, and a rich texture of experience found.
Best scientific models prove growth makes extinction-level warming inevitable---only

dedev solves
Dr. Minqi Li 10, Assistant Professor Department of Economics, University of Utah, “The 21st Century
Crisis: Climate Catastrophe or Socialism” Paper prepared for the David Gordon Memorial Lecture at
URPE Summer Conference 2010 The global average surface temperature social ownership of the means
of production and society-wide planning (Section 6).
The global average surface temperature is now about 0.8°C (0.8 degrees Celsius) higher than in pre-
industrial times. Under the current trend, the world is on track towards a long-term warming between [4
and 8 degrees Celsius] 4°C and 8°C. At this level of global warming, the world would be in an extreme
greenhouse state not seen for almost 100 million years, devastating human civilization and destroying
nearly all forms of life on Earth (Conner and McCarthy 2009). The scientific community has reached
consensus that the current global warming results from the excessive accumulation in the atmosphere
of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) emitted by
human economic activities. 1 The capitalist historical epoch has been characterized by the explosive
growth of material production and consumption. The massive expansion of the world economy has been
powered by fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Since 1820, the world economy has expanded by
about seventy times and the world emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burning have increased
by about sixty times (see Figure 1). At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change concluded in
Copenhagen in December 2009, the world’s governments officially committed to the objective of
limiting global warming to no more than 2°C. However, according to the “Climate Action Tracker,”
despite the official statement, the national governments’ current pledges regarding emission reduction
in fact imply a warming of at least [3 degrees] 3°C by the end of the 21st century with more warming to
come in the following centuries (Climate Action Tracker 2010). In reality, all the major national
governments are committed to infinite economic growth and none of them is willing to consider any
emission reduction policy that could undermine economic growth. This is not simply because of
intellectual ignorance or lack of political will. The pursuit of endless accumulation of capital (and infinite
economic growth) is derived from the basic laws of motion of the capitalist economic system. Without
fundamental social transformation, human civilization is now on the path to self-destruction. The next
section (section 2) reviews the basic scientific facts concerning the climate change crisis. Without an end
to economic growth, it is virtually impossible for meaningful climate stabilization to be achieved (section
3). However, both capitalist enterprises and states are constantly driven to expand production and
consumption. The system of nation states effectively rules out a meaningful global political solution to
the climate change crisis (section 4). The climate change crisis is but one of several long-term historical
trends that are now leading to the structural crisis of capitalism (section 5). The resolution of the crisis
and the survival of humanity require the building of a fundamentally different social system that is based
on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning (section 6).
1NC War Offense
Growth makes war inevitable
Trainer 2002 – senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales (Ted, Democracy & Nature, 8.2, "If
you want affluence, prepare for war", EBSCO)
If this limits-to-growth analysis is at all valid, the implications for the problem of global peace and conflict and security are clear and savage. If
we all remain determined to increase our living standards, our level of production and consumption, in a world where
resources are already scarce, where only a few have affluent living standards but another 8 billion will be wanting
them too, and which we, the rich, are determined to get richer without any limit, then nothing is more guaranteed than that there will be
increasing levels of conflict and violence. To put it another way, if we insist on remaining affluent we will need to remain heavily armed.
Increased conflict in at least the following categories can be expected. First, the present conflict over resources between the rich elites and
the poor majority in the Third World must increase, for example, as ‘development’ under globalisation takes more land, water and
forests into export markets. Second, there are conflicts between the Third World and the rich world, the major recent examples being the war between
the US and Iraq over control of oil. Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US intervened, accompanied by much high-sounding rhetoric
(having found nothing unacceptable about Israel’s invasions of Lebanon or the Indonesian invasion of East Timor). As has often
been noted, had Kuwait been one of the world’s leading exporters of broccoli, rather than oil, it is doubtful whether the US would have been so eager to come to its
defence. At the time of writing, the US is at war in Central Asia over ‘terrorism’. Few would doubt that a ‘collateral’ outcome will be the establishment of regimes
that will give the West access to the oil wealth of Central Asia. Following are some references to the connection many have recognised between rich world affluence
and conflict. General M.D. Taylor, US Army retired argued ‘... US military priorities just be shifted towards insuring a steady flow of resources from the Third World’.
Taylor referred to ‘... fierce competition among industrial powers for the same raw materials markets sought by the
United States’ and ‘... growing hostility displayed by have-not nations towards their affluent counterparts’.62 ‘Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing,
between rich and poor nations over their share of the world product; within the industrial world over their share of industrial resources and markets’.63 ‘That more
than half of the people on this planet are poorly nourished while a small percentage live in historically unparalleled luxury is a sure recipe for continued and even
escalating international conflict.’64 The oilembargo placed on the US by OPEC in the early 1970s prompted the US to make it
clear that it was prepared to go to war in order to secure supplies. ‘President Carter last week issued a clear warning that any attempt to gain
control of the Persian Gulf would lead to war.’ It would ‘... be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States’.65 ‘The US is ready to
take military action if Russia threatens vital American interests in the Persian Gulf, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Brown, said
yesterday.’ 66 Klare’s recent book Resource Wars discusses this theme in detail, stressing the coming significance of water as a source of international conflict.
‘Global demand for many key materials is growing at an unsustainable rate. ... the incidence of conflict over vital materials is sure to grow. ... The wars of the future
will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods. ... resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the
global security environment.’67 Much of the rich world’s participation in the conflicts taking place throughout the world is driven by the determination to back a
faction that will then look favourably on Western interests. In a report entitled, ‘The rich prize that is Shaba’, Breeze begins, ‘Increasing rivalry over a share-out
between France and Belgium of the mineral riches of Shaba Province lies behind the joint Franco– Belgian paratroop airlift to Zaire. ... These mineral riches make the
province a valuable prize and help explain the West’s extended diplomatic courtship ...’68 Then there is potential conflict between the rich nations who are after all
the ones most dependent on securing large quantities of resources. ‘The resource and energy intensive modes of production employed in nearly all industries
necessitate continuing armed coercion and competition to secure raw materials.’69 ‘Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and poor nations
over their share of the world product, within the industrial world over their share of industrial resources and markets ...’70 Growth, competition, expansion ... and
war Finally, at the most abstract level, the
struggle for greater wealth and power is central in the literature on the causes
of war. ‘... warfare appears as a normal and periodic form of competition within the capitalist world economy. ... world wars regularly occur during a period of
economic expansion.’71 ‘War is an inevitable result of the struggle between economies for expansion.’72 Choucri and North say their most important finding is that
domestic growth is a strong determinant of national expansion and that this results in competition between nations and war.73
The First and Second World Wars can be seen as being largely about imperial grabbing. Germany, Italy and Japan sought to expand their
territory and resource access. Britain already held much of the world within its empire ... which it had previously fought 72 wars to take! ‘Finite resources in a world
of expanding populations and increasing per capita demands create a situation ripe for international violence.’74 Ashley focuses on the significance of the quest for
economic growth. ‘War is mainly explicable in terms of differential growth in a world of scarce and unevenly distributed
resources ... expansion is a prime source of conflict. So long as the dynamics of differential growth remain unmanaged, it is probable that these long term
processes will sooner or later carry major powers into war.’75 The point being made can be put in terms of security. One way to seek security is to
develop greater capacity to repel attack. In the case of nations this means large expenditure of money, resources and effort on military
preparedness. However there is a much better strategy; i.e. to live in ways that do not oblige you to take more
than your fair share and therefore that do not give anyone any motive to attack you. Tut! This is not possible unless
there is global economic justice. If a few insist on levels of affluence, industrialisation and economic growth that are totally impossible for all to achieve, and which
could not be possible if they were taking only their fair share of global resources, then they
must remain heavily armed and their
security will require readiness to use their arms to defend their unjust privileges. In other words, if we want
affluence we must prepare for war. If we insist on continuing to take most of the oil and other resources
while many suffer intense deprivation because they cannot get access to them then we must be prepared to maintain
the aircraft carriers and rapid deployment forces, and the despotic regimes, without which we cannot
secure the oil fields and plantations. Global peace is not possible without global justice, and that is not
possible unless rich countries move to ‘The Simpler Way’.
K-waves prove—causes nuclear war

Chase-Dunn 1996 – distinguished professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, director of the Institute for
Research on World-Systems (1/23, Christopher, "Conflict among core states",
http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/c-d&hall/warprop.htm)
Late in the K-wave upswing (i.e. in the 2020s), the world-system schema predicts a window of
vulnerability to another round of world war. This is when world wars have occurred in the past.
Intensified rivalry and competition for raw materials and markets will coincide with a multipolar
distribution of military power among core states. The world-system model does not predict who the
next hegemon will be. Rather it designates that there will be structural forces in motion that will favor
the construction of a new hierarchy. Historical particularities and the unique features of the era will
shape the outcome and select the winners and losers. If it were possible for the current system to
survive the holocaust of another war among core states, the outcome of the war would be the main
arbiter of hegemonic succession. While the hegemonic sequence has been a messy method of selecting
global "leadership" in the past, the settlement of hegemonic rivalry by force in the future will be a
disaster that our species may not survive. It is my concern about this possible disaster that motivates
this effort to understand how the hegemonic sequence has occurred in the past and the factors affecting
hegemonic rivalry in the next decades. What are the cyclical processes and secular trends that may
affect the probability of future world wars? The world-system model is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1:
Factors influencing the probability of future core wars This model depicts the variables that I contend
will be the main influences on the probability of war among core states. The four variables that raise the
probability of core war are the Kondratieff cycle, hegemonic decline, population pressure (and resource
scarcity) and global inequality. The four variables that reduce the probability of core war are the
destructiveness of weaponry, international economic interdependency, international political
integration and disarmament. The probability of war may be high without a war occurring, of course.
Joshua Goldstein's (1988) study of war severity (battle deaths per year) in wars among the "great
powers" demonstrated the existence of a fifty-year cycle of core wars. Goldstein's study shows how this
"war wave" tracks rather closely with the Kondratieff long economic cycle over the past 500 years of
world-system history. It is the future of this war cycle that I am trying to predict. Factors that Increase
the Likelihood of War Among Core States The proposed model divides variables into those that are
alleged to increase the probability of war among core states and those that decrease that probability.
There are four of each. Kondratieff waves The first variable that has a positive effect on the probability
of war among core powers is the Kondratieff wave -- a forty to sixty year cycle of economic growth and
stagnation. Goldstein (1988) provides evidence that the most destructive core wars tend to occur late in
a Kondratieff A-phase (upswing). Earlier research by Thompson and Zuk (1982) also supports the
conclusion that core wars are more likely to begin near the end of an upswing. Boswell and Sweat's
(1991) analysis also supports the Goldstein thesis. But several other world-system theorists have argued
that core wars occur primarily during K-wave B-phases. This disagreement over timing is related to a
disagreement over causation. According to Goldstein states are war machines that always have a desire
to utilize military force, but wars are costly and so statesmen tend to refrain from going to war when
state revenues are low. On the other hand, statesmen are more likely to engage in warfare when state
revenues are high (because the states can then afford the high costs of war). Boswell and Sweat call this
the "resource theory of war." Those who predict that core wars will be more frequent and destructive
during a K-wave downturn (Frank, 1982; Bergesen 1985; and Goldfrank 1987) generally assume that
economic competition among firms and states is greater during a downturn, and so states are driven to
employ military means in their competition with one another in such periods. Goldstein argues that
economic competition is also very great during periods of economic expansion.
1NC War Defense
Collapse doesn’t cause war
a) History proves
Ferguson 6— Laurence A. Tisch prof of History at Harvard. William Ziegler of Business Administration at Harvard. MA and D.Phil from Glasgow and Oxford
(Niall, “The Next War of the World,” September/October 2006, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/the_next_war_of_the_world.html)
What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of
Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed.
fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe
only after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such
regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the
century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe
economic crises were not followed by wars.
b) Robust studies prove

Miller 2k – Professor of Management, Ottawa (Morris, Poverty As A Cause Of Wars?, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG4draft1.htm)
Thus, these armed conflicts can hardly be said to be caused by poverty as a principal factor when the greed and envy of leaders and their hegemonic ambitions provide sufficient cause. The
poor would appear to be more the victims than the perpetrators of armed conflict. It might be alleged that some dramatic event or rapid sequence of those types of events that lead to the
exacerbation of poverty might be the catalyst for a violent reaction on the part of the people or on the part of the political leadership who might be tempted to seek a diversion by
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
finding/fabricating an enemy and going to war. According to a study undertaken by Minxin Pei and Ariel Adesnik of
After studying 93 episodes of economic crisis in 22 countries in Latin America

there would not appear to be any merit in this hypothesis.
and Asia in the years since World War II they concluded that Much of the conventional wisdom about the political impact of economic
crises may be wrong... The severity of economic crisis---as measured in terms of inflation and negative growth---bore no
relationship to the collapse of regimes. A more direct role was played by political variables such as ideological polarization, labor radicalism, guerilla insurgencies and an
anti-Communist military... (In democratic states) such changes seldom lead to an outbreak of violence (while) in the cases of
dictatorships and semi-democracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby using one form of violence to
abort another.
c) Econ collapse saps resources from military aggression

Bennett 2k – PolSci Prof, Penn State (Scott and Timothy Nordstrom, Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries,
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ebsco)
Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military competition between states
requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up
important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy . In a “guns versus butter” world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to
pay the expenses associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by
ending a rivalry. However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active problems.
Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic situation
sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the
pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a
rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no
longer compete economically with the United States.
d) Diversionary theory is false

Boehmer 2007 – political science professor at the University of Texas (Charles, Politics & Policy, 35:4,
“The Effects of Economic Crisis, Domestic Discord, and State Efficacy on the Decision to Initiate
Interstate Conflict”, WEA)
This article examines the contemporaneous effect of low economic growth and domestic instability on the threat of regime change and/ or involvement in external
militarized conflicts. Many studies
of diversionary conflict argue that lower rates of economic growth should heighten
the risk of international conflict. Yet we know that militarized interstate conflicts, and especially wars, are generally rare events whereas lower
rates of growth are not. Additionally, a growing body of literature shows that regime changes are also associated with lower rates of economic growth. The question
then becomes which event, militarized interstate conflict or regime change, is the most likely to occur with domestic discord and lower rates of economic growth?
Diversionary theory claims that leaders seek to divert attention away from domestic problems such as a
bad economy or political scandals, or to garner increased support prior to elections. Leaders then supposedly externalize discontented domestic sentiments
onto other nations, sometimes as scapegoats based on the similar in-group/out-group dynamic found in the research of Coser (1956) and Simmel (1955), where
foreign countries are blamed for domestic problems. This process is said to involve a “rally-round-the-flag” effect, where a leader can expect a short-term boost in
popularity with the threat or use of force (Blechman, Kaplan, and Hall 1978; Mueller 1973). Scholarship on diversionary conflict has focused most often on the
American case1 but recent studies have sought to identify this possible behavior in other countries.2 The Falklands War is often a popular example of diversionary
conflict (Levy and Vakili 1992). Argentina was reeling from hyperinflation and rampant unemployment associated with the Latin American debt crisis. It is plausible
that a success in the Falklands War may have helped to rally support for the governing Galtieri regime, although Argentina lost the war and the ruling regime lost
power. How many other attempts to use diversionary tactics, if they indeed occur, can be seen to generate a similar outcome? The goal of this article is to provide
an assessment of the extent to which diversionary strategy is a threat to peace. Is
this a colorful theory kept alive by academics that
has little bearing upon real events, or is this a real problem that policy makers should be concerned with? If it is a strategy readily available to
leaders, then it is important to know what domestic factors trigger this gambit. Moreover, to know that requires an understanding of the context in external
conflict, which occurs relative to regime changes. Theories of diversionary conflict usually emphasize the potential benefits
of diversionary tactics, although few pay equal attention to the prospective costs associated with such behavior. It is
not contentious to claim that leaders typically seek to remain in office. However, whether they can successfully manipulate public
opinion regularly during periods of domestic unpopularity through their states’ participation in foreign militarized conflicts—especially outside of the
American case—is a question open for debate. Furthermore, there appears to be a logical disconnect between diversionary theories and extant studies of
domestic conflict and regime change. Lower rates of economic growth are purported to increase the risk of both militarized interstate conflicts (and internal
conflicts) as well as regime changes (Bloomberg and Hess 2002). This implies that ifleaders do, in fact, undertake diversionary conflicts,
many may still be thrown from the seat of power—especially if the outcome is defeat to a foreign enemy. Diversionary
conflict would thus seem to be a risky gambit (Smith 1996). Scholars such as MacFie (1938) and Blainey (1988) have nevertheless questioned the validity of the
diversionary thesis. As noted by Levy (1989), this perspective is rarely formulated as a cohesive and comprehensive theory, and
there has been little or no knowledge cumulation. Later analyses do not necessarily build on past studies and the discrepancies between inquiries are often difficult
to unravel. “Studies have used a variety of research designs, different dependent variables (uses of force, major uses of force, militarized
disputes), different estimation techniques, and different data sets covering different time periods and different states” (Bennett and Nordstrom 2000,
39). To these problems, we should add a lack of theoretical precision and incomplete model specification. By a lack of theoretical precision, I am referring to the
linkages between economic conditions and domestic strife that remain unclear in some studies (Miller 1995; Russett 1990). Consequently, extant studies are to a
degree incommensurate; they offer a step in the right direction but do not provide robust cross-national explanations and tests of economic growth and interstate
conflict. Yet a few studies have attempted to provide deductive explanations about when and how diversionary tactics might be employed. Using a Bayesian
updating game, Richards and others (1993) theorize that while the use of force would appear to offer leaders a means to boost their popularity, a poorly performing
economy acts as a signal to a leader’s constituents about his or her competence. Hence, attempts to use diversion are likely to fail either
because incompetent leaders will likewise fail in foreign policy or people will recognize the gambit for
what it is. Instead, these two models conclude that diversion is likely to be undertaken particularly by risk-acceptant leaders. This stress on a heightened risk of
removal from office is also apparent in the work of Bueno de Mesquita and others (1999), and Downs and Rocke (1994), where leaders may “gamble for
resurrection,” although the diversionary scenario in the former study is only a partial extension of their theory on selectorates, winning coalitions, and leader
survival. Again, how often do leaders fail in the process or are removed from positions of power before they can even initiate diversionary tactics? A few studies
focusing on leader tenure have examined the removal of leaders following war, although almost no study in the diversionary literature has looked at the effects of
domestic problems on the relative risks of regime change, interstate conflict, or both events occurring in the same year.3
Alexander
Dedevelopment would be peaceful and effective – extend Lewis – it causes a
transition to small, sustainable societies – ecological balance will be restored as what
was for centuries before industrialization
They can win transition wars, the post-collapse order might be worse, and the benefits
of the chance of transitioning to a post-growth system still outweigh – this card ends
the debate
Alexander 14 (Dr. Samuel, lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of
Melbourne, and research fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute; and Jonathan Rutherford,
Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Middlesex, 2014, “The Deep Green Alternative:
Debating Strategies of Transition,” Simplicity Institute, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/The-Deep-Green-Alternative.pdf)
As industrial civilisation continues its global expansion and pursues growth without apparent limit, the
possibility of economic, political, or ecological crises forcing an alternative way of life upon humanity
seems to be growing in likelihood (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013). That is, if the existing model of global
development is not stopped via one of the pathways reviewed above, or some other strategy, then it
seems clear enough that at some point in the future, industrial civilisation will grow itself to death
(Turner, 2012). Whether 'collapse' is initiated by an ecological tipping point, a financial breakdown of an
overly indebted economy, a geopolitical disruption, an oil crisis, or some confluence of such forces, the
possibility of collapse or deep global crisis can no longer be dismissed merely as the intellectual
playground for 'doomsayers' with curdled imaginations. Collapse is a prospect that ought to be taken
seriously based on the logic of limitless growth on a finite planet, as well as the evidence of existing
economic, ecological, or more specifically climatic instability. As Paul Gilding (2011) has suggested,
perhaps it is already too late to avoid some form of 'great disruption'. Could collapse or deep crisis be
the most likely pathway to an alternative way of life? If it is, such a scenario must not be idealised or
romanticised. Fundamental change through crisis would almost certainly involve great suffering for
many, and quite possibly significant population decline through starvation, disease, or war . It is also
possible that the 'alternative system' that a crisis produces is equally or even more undesirable than
the existing system. Nevertheless , it may be that this is the only way a post-growth or post-industrial
way of life will ever arise. The Cuban oil crisis, prompted by the collapse of the USSR, provides one such
example of a deep societal transition that arose not from a political or social movement, but from sheer
force of circumstances (Piercy et al, 2010). Almost overnight Cuba had a large proportion of its oil
supply cut off, forcing the nation to move away from oil-dependent, industrialised modes of food
production and instead take up local and organic systems - or perish. David Holmgren (2013) has
recently published a deep and provocative essay, 'Crash on Demand', exploring the idea that a relatively
small anti-consumerist movement could be enough to destabilise the global economy which is already
struggling. This presents one means of bringing an end to the status quo by inducing a voluntary crisis,
without relying on a mass movement. Needless to say, should people adopt such a strategy, it would be
imperative to 'prefigure' the alternative society as far as possible too, not merely withdraw support from
the existing society. Again, one must not romanticise such theories or transitions. The Cuban crisis, for
example, entailed much hardship. But it does expose the mechanisms by which crisis can induce
significant societal change in ways that, in the end, are not always negative. In the face of a global
crisis or breakdown, therefore, it could be that elements of the deep green vision (such as organic
agriculture, frugal living, sharing, radical recycling, post-oil transportation, etc.) come to be forced upon
humanity, in which case the question of strategy has less to do with avoiding a deep crisis or collapse
(which may be inevitable) and more to do with negotiating the descent as wisely as possible. This is
hardly a reliable path to the deep green alternative, but it presents itself as a possible path.
Collapse forces transition and mindset shift to be unavoidable – it’s not a question of
solvency or a matter of degrees
Perhaps a more reliable path could be based on the possibility that, rather than imposing an alternative
way of life on a society through sudden collapse, a deep crisis could provoke a social or political
revolution in consciousness that opens up space for the deep green vision to be embraced and
implemented as some form of crisis management strategy. Currently, there is insufficient social or
political support for such an alternative, but perhaps a deep crisis will shake the world awake. Indeed,
perhaps that is the only way to create the necessary mindset. After all, today we are hardly lacking in
evidence on the need for radical change (Turner, 2012), suggesting that shock and response may be
the form the transition takes, rather than it being induced through orderly, rational planning, whether
from 'top down' or 'from below'. Again, this 'non-ideal' pathway to a post-growth or post-industrial
society could be built into the other strategies discussed above, adding some realism to strategies that
might otherwise appear too Utopian. That is to say, it may be that only deep crisis will create the social
support or political will needed for radical reformism, eco-socialism, or eco-anarchism to emerge as
social or political movements capable of rapid transformation. Furthermore, it would be wise to keep
an open and evolving mind regarding the best strategy to adopt, because the relative effectiveness of
various strategies may change over time, depending on how forthcoming crises unfold. It was Milton
Friedman (1982: ix) who once wrote: 'only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When
that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.' What this
'collapse' or 'crisis' theory of change suggests, as a matter of strategy, is that deep green social and
political movements should be doing all they can to mainstream the practices and values of their
alternative vision. By doing so they would be aiming to 'prefigure' the deep green social, economic, and
political structures, so far as that it is possible, in the hope that deep green ideas and systems are alive
and available when the crises hit. Although Friedman obviously had a very different notion of what ideas
should be 'lying around', the relevance of his point to this discussion is that in times of crisis, the
politically or socially impossible can become politically or socially inevitable (Friedman, 1982: ix); or,
one might say, if not inevitable, then perhaps much more likely.
The post-growth paradigm is gaining critical mass – paradigm shifts can be incredibly
rapid once they reach key thresholds
Despite the dominance of this growth model of progress around the world, it has never been without
its critics, and as this paper will outline, there are reasons to think that grounds for opposition are
growing in number, strength, and sophistication. It was the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn
(1962), who argued that paradigm shifts in the natural sciences occur when the existing paradigm finds
itself increasingly unable to solve the critical problems it sets for itself. As anomalies increase in
number and severity, the need for an alternative paradigm becomes clearer, and eventually a new
paradigm is developed that can solve more problems than the old one. At that stage a paradigm shift is
set in motion, and over time the new paradigm becomes accepted and the old one loses its influence,
sometimes quite abruptly. In much the same way, this paper proposes that a paradigm shift in
macroeconomics is underway , with a post-growth economic framework threatening to resolve
critical anomalies that seem irresolvable from within the existing growth paradigm . We will see that a
growing array of theorists, from various disciplinary backgrounds, are questioning the feasibility and
even the desirability of continuous growth, especially with respect to the most highly developed
regions of the world. Increasingly there is a call to look ‘beyond growth’ (see, e.g., Costanza et al, 2014;
Kubiszewski et al, 2013; Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi, 2010), on the grounds that growth may now be
causing the problems it was traditionally hoped to solve. Not only can it be argued that a post-
growth paradigm shift is in progress , it seems the fundamental importance of this shift lies in the fact
that it is in relation to progress . That is, it is changing the very nature of what ‘progress’ means.
Global economic collapse forces consumer behavioral change that’s sufficient to avoid
global climate tipping points
David Holmgren 13, founder of Holmgren Design Services, an environmental design and consulting
firm, inventor of the Permaculture system for regenerative agriculture, 2013, “Crash on Demand:
Welcome to the Brown Tech Future,” Simplicity Institute report, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/CrashOnDemandSimplicityInstitute.pdf
My argument is essentially that radical, but achievable, behaviour change from dependent consumers
to responsible self reliant producers, (by some relatively small minority of the global middle class) has a
chance of stopping the juggernaut of consumer capitalism from driving the world over the climate
change cliff. It maybe a slim chance, but a better bet than current herculean efforts to get the elites to
pull the right policy levers (whether by sweet promises of green tech profits or alternatively threats
from mass movements shouting for less consumption).
My argument suggests this could happen by reducing consumption and capital enough to trigger a
crash of the fragile global financial system. This provocative idea is intended to increase understanding
while taking the risk that the argument could turn people away from permaculture as positive
environmentalism, and brand me a lunatic, if not a terrorist. That risk is an analogy for the massive risks
that humanity now faces, where all options have unintended consequences and that normal,
apparently sensible, behaviour is just as likely to lead to disaster as the most apparently mad
schemes. Even mainstream 'responsible' proposals for saving us from climate chaos could also crash
the financial system. In times of tumultuous change, small events may trigger big changes we can't
control; a key understanding from the permaculture principle Creatively Use and Respond to Change.
2NC Top Level
2NC Warming Turns War
Warming causes global nuclear warfare and breaks down international cooperation
Dyer 9 – PhD in ME History
Gwynne, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former @ Senior Lecturer in War
Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Climate Wars
THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT, peering through a glass darkly, to understand the politics and the strategies
of the potentially apocalyptic crisis that looks set to occupy most of the twentyfirst century. There are
now many books available that deal with the science of climate change and some that suggest possible
approaches to getting the problem under control, but there are few that venture very far into the grim
detail of how real countries experiencing very different and, in some cases, overwhelming pressures as
global warming proceeds, are likely to respond to the changes. Yet we all know that it's mostly politics,
national and international, that will decide the outcomes. Two things in particular persuaded me that it
was time to write this book. One was the realization that the first and most important impact of climate
change on human civilization will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a
non-negotiable activity, and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be "reasonable"
about it. Not all of them will be in what we used to call the "Third World" -the developing countries of
Asia, Africa and Latin America. The other thing that finally got the donkey's attention was a dawning
awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate change scenarios are already playing a large
and increasing role in the military planning process. Rationally, you would expect this to be the case,
because each country pays its professional military establishment to identify and counter "threats" to its
security, but the implications of their scenarios are still alarming. There is a probability of wars, including
even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise two to three degrees Celsius. Once that happens, all hope of
international cooperation to curb emissions and stop the warming goes out the window.
2NC A2 Nuke War
Nuclear war does not cause extinction or turn warming
Seitz 6 Former Presidential science advisor and keynote speaker at international science conferences, December 20 2006 (Russell, holds multiple patents and degrees from Harvard and
MIT, “The ‘Nuclear Winter’ Meltdown,” http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2006/12/preherein_honor.html, accessed October 18, 2007)
"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions

on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84.
But that "evidence" was never forthcoming. 'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer
except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan predicted
"the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and the world froze in
the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Last year, Sagan's cohort tried to reanimate the ghost in a
machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary
scenarios on a modern interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways
than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations that they do not reproduce the
apocalyptic results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model." The
subzero 'baseline case' has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling- grey skies do not a
Ragnarok make. What remains is just not the stuff that End of the World myths are made of .
2NC Extinction First
Any risk of extinction outweighs everything ***
Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford, July 2005
(Nick, Transcribed from by Packer, 4:38-6:12 of the talk at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/44, accessed 10/20/07)
Now if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage
point. Not very much. So that’s equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count currently living
people. The current generation. One percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that’s a
large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if
we blow ourselves up then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could you know eventually colonize
a chunk of the universe the virgo supercluster maybe it will take us a hundred million years to get there
but if we go extinct we never will. Then even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk
could be equivalent to this astronomical number 10 to the power of 32 so if you take into account future
generations as much as our own every other moral imperative or philanthropic cause just becomes
irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk, because even the
tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve.
Even if you just look at the current people and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct
it should still be a high priority.
2NC Ethics Impact
Ethical imperative to reject growth
Trainer, 96 (Ted, University of New South Wales, “Towards a Sustainable Economy”, Jon Carpenter
Oxford Publishing, pages 79-80)
The need for a moral economy Clearly, a major problem with our economic theory and practice is that they leave little
place for morality. Many extremely important decisions affecting people's welfare are made without
reference to what would be morally acceptable. They are made solely on the basis of what will make
most money. It has been argued above that there are many other, usually much more important factors, such as what things humans need, what
developments would build better cornrnunities and political systems, what would preserve cultural uniqueness, and especially what would maximise ecological
sustainability. Decisions which maximise returns to owners of capital often have adverse effects in several or
all of these areas, yet in our economy this factor is allowed to determine what is done. No other
economic system humans have ever developed has functioned in this way. All previous economies
ensured that 'moral' factors, such as social customs setting a 'just price', were the main determinants of
economic activity. Market forces and the profit motive were typically given little or no role. Our present economic system and the theory which underlies
it obscure the great misery they cause. They deceive us into accepting grossly inhuman consequences. Several sections of this
book explain how our economic system is the main factor producing the hunger and deprivation suffered by hundreds of millions of people. Yet this causal
connection is not well understood, because we
have been led to believe that the market system is natural, efficient and
desirable, and that it 'rewards factors of production in proportion to their contributions'. This prevailing
ideology leads most people to believe that we are not exploiting the Third World and we are not causing
hunger; we are only trading with them, investing and doing normal business. As Bookchin says, ' ... our
present economy is grossly immoral... The economists have literally "demoralised" us and turned us into
moral cretins'. I Similarly, economic theory claims that when an item becomes scarce its price rises
automatically, as if this is a law of nature independent of human will. In fact, the price rises only because
individual sellers eager to maximise their income put it up as quickly as they can. Our economic theory obscures the
fact that it is not scarcity but human greed which makes prices rise. Above all, economic theory leads us to think that the supremely important goal is to 'get the
economy going', to stimulate growth. The
fact that this siphons wealth to the rich, deprives the poor, develops the
wrong industries and in the Third World starve millions is obscured. The conserver economy sketched in Chapter 12 allows the
market a role, but only a minor one, and it ensures that much weight is given to considerations to do with what is good for people, societies and ecosystems
2NC Growth Bad Mods
Agriculture
Growth kills agricultural diversity
Chen 2000 – law professor and Opperman Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota (Jim,
"Globalization and its losers", 9 Minn. J. Global Trade 157, Lexis)
Like America, the impulse toward species conservation "was born in the country and moved to the city." n296 Our awareness of extinction began on the farm. The
opening chapter of The Origin of Species explored variation in domesticated plants and animals. n297 Asindustrialization forced smaller farms to
fold or consolidate, entire landraces, varieties, and breeds vanished. The biological crisis of Darwin's England has spread to the
rest of the globe. Agriculture's shallow genetic pool is being drained at a breakneck pace "as human population and
economic pressures [*205] accelerate the pace of change in traditional agricultural systems." n298 Globalization portends dire
consequences for agricultural biodiversity. Rural communities preserve rare animal breeds and plant varieties in situ. Over many
generations, traditional foraging and agrarian communities have amassed volumes of ethnobiological knowledge. n299 The world's untapped
ethnobiological knowledge, "if gathered and catalogued, would constitute a library of Alexandrian proportions." n300
Much of this knowledge, locked as it is in endangered languages, will be irretrievable if linguistic diversity continues to
decline. n301
Extinction
Mulvany and Berger 2001 – *chair of the Ford Group, senior policy advisor at Practical Action, Oxfam
trustee, member of the Institute of Biology, **climate change Policy Advisor with Practical Action
(Patrick and Rachel, "Agricultural biodiversity: farmers sustaining the web of life",
http://practicalaction.org/docs/advocacy/fwn_bio-div_briefing.pdf)
Agricultural biodiversity embraces the living matter that produces food and other farm products,
supports production and shapes agricultural landscapes. The variety of tastes, textures and colours in
food is a product of agricultural biodiversity. This biodiversity is the result of the interaction by
smallholder farmers, herders and artisanal fisherfolk with other species over millennia. Selecting and
managing these for local nutritional, social and economic needs has produced the agricultural
biodiversity on which humanity depends. Food production systems need to be rooted in sustaining
agricultural biodiversity so that farmers everywhere can continue to provide food and livelihoods and
maintain life on Earth. STRENGTH IN DIVERSITY At a time of unprecedented changes in society,
population and the environment, agricultural biodiversity also provides some security against future
adversity, be it from climate change, war, industrial developments, biotechnological calamities or
ecosystem collapse. There is greater strength in diversity than in susceptible uniformity. A diversity of
varieties, breeds and species will ensure that there will continue to be agricultural production whatever
the threat, and hidden in the genetic code of today's crop plants and livestock are many invisible traits
that may become useful in confronting future challenges.
Disease
Growth causes disease spread and mutation
Hamburg 2008 – MD, FDA Commissioner (Margaret, "Germs go global",
http://healthyamericans.org/assets/files/GermsGoGlobal.pdf)
Globalization, the worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and communications
integration, has impacted public health significantly. Technology and economic interdependence allow
diseases to spread globally at rapid speeds. Experts believe that the increase in international travel and
commerce, including the increasingly global nature of food handling, processing, and sales contribute to
the spread of emerging infectious diseases.47 Increased global trade has also brought more and more
people into contact with zoonosis -diseases that originated in animals before jumping to humans. For
example, in 2003, the monkeypox virus entered the U.S. through imported Gambian giant rats sold in
the nation’s under-regulated exotic pet trade. The rats infected pet prairie dogs, which passed the virus
along to humans.48 International smuggling of birds, brought into the U.S. without undergoing
inspection and/or quarantine, is of particular concern to public health experts who worry that it may be
a pathway for the H5N1 “bird flu” virus to enter the country.
Lower cost and efficient means of international transportation allow people to travel to more remote
places and potential exposure to more infectious diseases. And the close proximity of passengers on
passenger planes, trains, and cruise ships over the course of many hours puts people at risk for higher
levels of exposure. If a person contracts a disease abroad, their symptoms may not emerge until they
return home, having exposed others to the infection during their travels. In addition, planes and ships
can themselves become breeding grounds for infectious diseases.
The 2002-2003 SARS outbreak spread quickly around the globe due to international travel. SARS is
caused by a new strain of coronavirus, the same family of viruses that frequently cause the common
cold. This contagious and sometimes fatal respirator y illness first appeared in China in November 2002.
Within 6 weeks, SARS had spread worldwide, transmitted around the globe by unsuspecting travelers.
According to CDC, 8,098 people were infected and 774 died of the disease.49 SARS represented the first
severe, newly emergent infectious disease of the 21st century.50 It illustrated just how quickly infection
can spread in a highly mobile and interconnected world. SARS was contained and controlled because
public health authorities in the communities most affected mounted a rapid and effective response.
SARS also demonstrated the economic consequences of an emerging infectious disease in closely
interdependent and highly mobile world. Apart from the direct costs of intensive medical care and
disease control interventions, SARS caused widespread social disruption and economic losses. Schools,
hospitals, and some borders were closed and thousands of people were placed in quarantine.
International travel to affected areas fell sharply by 50 70 percent. Hotel occupancy dropped by more
than 60 percent. Businesses, particularly in tourism-related areas, failed. According to a study by
Morgan Stanley, the Asia-Pacific region’s economy lost nearly $40 billion due to SARS.51 The World Bank
found that the East Asian region’s GDP fell by 2 percent in the second quarter of 2003.52 Toronto
experienced a 13.4 percent drop in tourism in 2003.53
Extinction
Yu 2009 (5/22, Victoria, Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, "Human extinction: the
uncertainty of our fate", http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/spring-2009/human-extinction-the-uncertainty-of-
our-fate)
A pandemic will kill off all humans. In the past, humans have indeed fallen victim to viruses. Perhaps the
best-known case was the bubonic plague that killed up to one third of the European population in the
mid-14th century (7). While vaccines have been developed for the plague and some other infectious
diseases, new viral strains are constantly emerging — a process that maintains the possibility of a
pandemic-facilitated human extinction. Some surveyed students mentioned AIDS as a potential
pandemic-causing virus. It is true that scientists have been unable thus far to find a sustainable cure for
AIDS, mainly due to HIV’s rapid and constant evolution. Specifically, two factors account for the virus’s
abnormally high mutation rate: 1. HIV’s use of reverse transcriptase, which does not have a proof-
reading mechanism, and 2. the lack of an error-correction mechanism in HIV DNA polymerase (8).
Luckily, though, there are certain characteristics of HIV that make it a poor candidate for a large-scale
global infection: HIV can lie dormant in the human body for years without manifesting itself, and AIDS
itself does not kill directly, but rather through the weakening of the immune system. However, for more
easily transmitted viruses such as influenza, the evolution of new strains could prove far more
consequential. The simultaneous occurrence of antigenic drift (point mutations that lead to new strains)
and antigenic shift (the inter-species transfer of disease) in the influenza virus could produce a new
version of influenza for which scientists may not immediately find a cure. Since influenza can spread
quickly, this lag time could potentially lead to a “global influenza pandemic,” according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (9). The most recent scare of this variety came in 1918 when bird flu
managed to kill over 50 million people around the world in what is sometimes referred to as the Spanish
flu pandemic. Perhaps even more frightening is the fact that only 25 mutations were required to convert
the original viral strain — which could only infect birds — into a human-viable strain (10).
Endocrine
Growth causes endocrine disruption and extinction
Douthwaite 99 — council member of Comhar, the Irish government's national sustainability council and
a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. Visiting lecturer at the University of Plymouth —ED By Ronaldo
Munck andDenis O'Hearn (Richard, Critical development theory: contributions to a new paradigm,
GoogleBooks, 158)
A third reason that the world economy is unsustainable is that some of the chemicals it employs mimic
human hormones and disrupt the body’s endocrine system. As a result, the sperm counts of European
men have been falling at 3 per cent per year since these chemicals came into use after the Second World
War (Swan a al. 1997). The same chemicals are also causing increases in testicular and breast cancer
(European Workshop 1996) and are causing fewer boys to be born relative to girls. Moreover, a higher
proportion of these boys than ever before have defective genitals. In short, the world economic system
is undermining humanity’s ability to reproduce itself. If the human race is not sustainable then neither is
its economic system.
Environment
2NC Environment Overview
First, nuclear war does not cause extinction or turn warming
Seitz 6 Former Presidential science advisor and keynote speaker at international science conferences, December 20 2006 (Russell, holds multiple patents and degrees from Harvard and
MIT, “The ‘Nuclear Winter’ Meltdown,” http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2006/12/preherein_honor.html, accessed October 18, 2007)
"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions

on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84.
But that "evidence" was never forthcoming. 'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer
except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan predicted
"the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and the world froze in
the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Last year, Sagan's cohort tried to reanimate the ghost in a
machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary
scenarios on a modern interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways
than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations that they do not reproduce the
apocalyptic results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model." The
subzero 'baseline case' has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling- grey skies do not a
Ragnarok make. What remains is just not the stuff that End of the World myths are made of.
Second, any risk of extinction outweighs everything

Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford, July 2005
(Nick, Transcribed from by Packer, 4:38-6:12 of the talk at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/44, accessed 10/20/07)
Now if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage
point. Not very much. So that’s equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count currently living
people. The current generation. One percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that’s a
large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if
we blow ourselves up then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could you know eventually colonize
a chunk of the universe the virgo supercluster maybe it will take us a hundred million years to get there
but if we go extinct we never will. Then even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk
could be equivalent to this astronomical number 10 to the power of 32 so if you take into account future
generations as much as our own every other moral imperative or philanthropic cause just becomes
irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk, because even the
tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve.
Even if you just look at the current people and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct
it should still be a high priority.
Third, warming turns the case—it breaks down international structures and causes
war
Dyer 9 – PhD in ME History
Gwynne, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former @ Senior Lecturer in War
Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Climate Wars
THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT, peering through a glass darkly, to understand the politics and the strategies
of the potentially apocalyptic crisis that looks set to occupy most of the twentyfirst century. There are
now many books available that deal with the science of climate change and some that suggest possible
approaches to getting the problem under control, but there are few that venture very far into the grim
detail of how real countries experiencing very different and, in some cases, overwhelming pressures as
global warming proceeds, are likely to respond to the changes. Yet we all know that it's mostly politics,
national and international, that will decide the outcomes. Two things in particular persuaded me that it
was time to write this book. One was the realization that the first and most important impact of climate
change on human civilization will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a
non-negotiable activity, and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be "reasonable"
about it. Not all of them will be in what we used to call the "Third World" -the developing countries of
Asia, Africa and Latin America. The other thing that finally got the donkey's attention was a dawning
awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate change scenarios are already playing a large
and increasing role in the military planning process. Rationally, you would expect this to be the case,
because each country pays its professional military establishment to identify and counter "threats" to its
security, but the implications of their scenarios are still alarming. There is a probability of wars, including
even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise two to three degrees Celsius. Once that happens, all hope of
international cooperation to curb emissions and stop the warming goes out the window.
2NC Growth Causes Warming
a) Historical trends
Farnish, environmental writer and activist and founder of Green Seniors, 3/17/2008
(Keith, “Global Recession: Global Breathing Space,” http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2008/03/17/global-
recession-global-breathing-space/)
Was it just my imagination, or did I hear a small ripple of applause from the forests, the wetlands and
the glaciers, as the news of the collapse of Bear Stearns leaked into the public realm? There are many
precursors of economic collapse; one is the sudden upturn in the price of gold, another is a rise in the
little known “skyscraper index” — both of which signal the move by the wealthy to invest their money
into things that may hold their value longer than pieces of electronic data whizzing around the networks
of the world’s investment banks and clearing houses. No one will be surprised that Bear Stearns’
collapse means recession is imminent, and the investors are popping Prozac like cups of coffee. And
that ripple of applause? It’s because with recession comes a drop in consumer spending, a reduction in
the number of goods being made and moved around the world, a slump in the sale of houses, vacations,
big cars, air conditioning, patio heaters: a downturn in the carbon engine that has, for the last three
decades been driving the global temperature inexorably upwards as the amount of money swilling
around in the consumer economy keeps growing. Recession stops greenhouse gases being emitted.
This is no piece of environmental wishful thinking. While researching A Matter Of Scale, I discovered
that the link between global trade and carbon emissions was closer than I had ever suspected.
b) Studies
Foley, staff writer for the AP, October 9 2007
(http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/C/CLIMATE_CHANGE?
SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-10-09-10-11-24, accessed October 20
2007)
Worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level of greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous
threshold scientists had not expected for another decade, according to a leading Australian climate
change expert. Tim Flannery told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that an upcoming report by the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will contain new data showing that the level of climate-
changing gases in the atmosphere has already reached critical levels. Flannery is not a member of the
IPCC, but said he based his comments on a thorough review of the technical data included in the panel's
three working group reports published earlier this year.
c) Scientific consensus
Cohen 2010 – columnist for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas and Energy Bulletin (2/2,
Dave, Peak Watch, “Economic Growth and Climate Change – No Way Out?”)
*note: Tim Garrett – associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah; Vaclav Smil –
Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba
Historical data suggest that only recessions decrease anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Otherwise, if the global
economy is growing, so are emissions. The consensus view, which I have called The Radical Hypothesis, presumes that at some
future inflection point, the global economy will continue to grow while emissions shrink. Since nothing
in our experience suggests the Radical Hypothesis is correct, and in so far as knowledgeable people can agree that it will
be very hard to achieve the technological breakthroughs required to stabilize CO2 in atmosphere at acceptable levels (e.g. 450 ppmv), the most
plausible way to achieve such targets, all else being equal, is a planned, orderly contraction of the global economy. Mankind would endeavor
to both decarbonize the energy inputs to the economy and decrease those inputs. This implies that the global economy, as modeled
by Tim Garrett, would be shrinking. The mere assumption that technological progress will be sufficient to achieve the desired
does not guarantee success. This assumption, like the future economic growth that depends on it, is
stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
incontrovertible only because of the faith placed in it, i.e. it must be accepted without proof or
verification. It is all well & good to say with great conviction that "failure is not an option" but in the real world, failure is definitely a possibility, so
risks grow. Worse yet, unquestioning faith in the impossibility of failure retards efforts achieve the necessary (but still unrealized) technologies required to reduce emissions, for if
technological progress—Pielke, et. al call this "spontaneous" innovation—is guaranteed (i.e. comes "for free"), we need not try very hard to make
technological progress happen. What I have called The Assumption of Technological Progress should be tossed out in so far as it is no longer in humanity's best interests to maintain it. In a "peak oil" scenario, CO2 emissions from
conventional oil will remain flat or decrease sometime in the next decade and beyond. In so far as historical experience suggests that anthropogenic emission must be growing if the economy is, this implies a shrinking global
economy. Specifically, the lack of a consistent (high & rising) oil price signal, combined with our inability to quickly & seamlessly switch to non-conventional liquids (from coal, the oil sands, etc.) to meet growing future demand,
business-as-usual (BAU)—the standard growth story assumed by economists,

implies that economic growth will be negative or unstable in such a scenario. Thus,
climate researchers and others—will be disrupted for an extended period of time in a "peak oil" scenario. If the global economy will be in
recession or prone to recession as conventional oil supplies decrease, emissions will very likely be further reduced during the transition to other liquid fuels sources. Ken Caldeira's counter-intuitive view that "peak oil" is not a
climate savior, at least over the next few decades, does not survive close scrutiny. A new UK report from the The New Economics Foundation goes even further in the wrong direction, arguing that "peak oil" makes BAU scenarios
worse. Just as Caldeira does, the NEF assumes, but does not closely examine, a painless transition to non-conventional liquids fuels from fossil sources. In his response to Dangerous Assumptions, the University of Manitoba's Vaclav
Why argue about plausible rates of future energy-efficiency

Smil emphasized that Long-range energy forecasts are no more than fairy tales.
improvements? We have known for nearly 150 years that, in the long run, efficiency gains translate into
higher energy use and hence (unless there is a massive shift to non-carbon energies) into higher CO2 emissions. The speed of transition from a predominantly fossil-
fueled world to conversions of renewable flows is being grossly overestimated: all energy transitions are multi-
generational affairs with their complex infrastructural and learning needs. Their progress cannot substantially be accelerated either by wishful thinking or by
government ministers’ fiats... China, the world’s largest emitter of CO2, has no intention of reducing its energy use: from 2000 to 2006 its coal consumption rose by nearly 1.1 billion
tonnes and its oil consumption increased by 55%. Consequently, the rise of atmospheric CO2 above 450 parts per million can be prevented only by an
unprecedented (in both severity and duration) depression of the global economy, or by voluntarily adopted and strictly observed limits on absolute energy use. The first is highly probable; the
second would be a sapient action, but apparently not for this species. Although I agree in the main with Smil's conclusions, I have argued that his Either-Or proposition yields similar outcomes. If humankind were to voluntarily
adopt and strictly observe limits on absolute energy use, the global economy would shrink according to the limits imposed, as implied in Tim Garrett's work. Moreover, Smil's reference to Jevon's Paradox (1st paragraph) also
coincides with Tim Garrett's conclusion that greater energy efficiency merely stimulates greater energy consumption supporting more economic growth and higher CO2emissions (unless accompanied by a massive, but at present
putting the breaks on economic growth appears to be the only

unrealistic, decarbonization of the energy supply). For now, and in the "foreseeable" future,
practical way out of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, this solution is politically impossible, a circumstance which is
reinforced by economists' incontestable, unshakable belief that economic growth will continue in all future emissions (energy) scenarios. This conclusion rests upon the equally incontestable, unshakable Assumption of
Technological Progress. I will end by quoting climate activist George Monbiot. This passage is taken from the introduction to his book Heat. The introduction is called The Failure of Good Intentions. Two things prompted me to
write this book. The first was something that happened in May, 2005, in a lecture hall in London. I had given a talk about climate change, during which I argued that there was little chance of preventing runaway global warming
unless greenhouse gases were cut by 80 per cent. The third question stumped me. "When you get your 80 per cent cut, what will this country look like?" I hadn't thought about it. Nor could I think of a good reason why I hadn't
thought about it. But a few rows from the front sat one of the environmentalists I admire and fear the most, a man called Mayer Hillman. I admire him because he says what he believes to be true and doesn't care about the
consequences. I fear him because his life is a mirror in which the rest of us see our hypocrisy. "That's such an easy question, I'll ask Mayer to answer it." He stood up. He is 75 but he looks about 50, perhaps because he goes
everywhere by bicycle. He is small and thin and fit-looking, and he throws his chest out and holds his arms to his sides when he speaks, as if standing to attention. He was smiling. I could see he was going to say something
outrageous. "A very poor third-world country." The inescapable conclusion in 2010 is that continued economic growth at near 20th century rates in the 21st century is incompatible with
taking positive, effective steps to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, such assumptions are not compatible with a near-term peak in the conventional oil
supply. Our species faces unprecedented challenges in this new century. Our response to those challenges will define Homo sapiens in ways we never had to come to grips
with during the Holocene (roughly the last 10,000 years) or before that in the Pleistocene. The problems we face in this century are unique, even on geological time-scales extending far into the past beyond the
200,000-year-old Human experience on Earth. Both our limitations and our abilities, such as they are, will be displayed in the bright, harsh light of the energy & climate
outcomes in the 21st century. Regardless of who we pretend to be, our response to these challenges will tell us who we really are.
Sustainability
2NC Sustainability Overview
a.) Energy demands
Trainer 11 (Ted, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales, “Why the
world can't rely on renewable energy if we want to remain affluent,” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?
article=12070, bgm)
The point is, there isn’t one. If the question is how can we provide the energy to keep going the energy-
intensive, growth and market driven societies we have in rich countries today, let alone to enable the
continuous and limitless pursuit of ever-increasing affluent living standards, then the answer is that it
cannot be done. For decades many of us have been trying to get the mainstream to grasp that this quest
is suicidal. We Australians now have a productive land footprint that is ten times as big as would be
possible for all people in 2050. It is precisely the mania for affluence and ever-greater levels of
production, consumption and GDP that is causing all the big global problems, most obviously resource
depletion, Third World deprivation, the greenhouse problem, the destruction of the environment, and
international conflict. Such a society cannot be fixed. For instance you cannot reform a growth-based
society so that it can have a zero growth economy, let alone one producing at a small fraction of present
levels. Sustainability is not achievable without scrapping and replacing several of the fundamental
structures of this society. For fifty years mainstream society has refused to face up to this case, and their
delusion has been strongly reinforced by the unexamined faith that renewable energy can be
substituted for carbon fuels and enable us all to go on pursuing affluence and growth.
b.) Metal and mineral peaks

Heinberg 11 (Richard, teaches at the Core Faculty of New College of California, on the Board of Advisors of the
Solar Living Institute and the Post Carbon Institute, “Earth's Limits: Why Growth Won't Return - Metals & Other
Minerals,” 3/15, http://www.postcarbon.org/article/278435-earth-s-limits-why-growth-won-t-return, bgm)
Without metals and a host of other non-renewable minerals, industrial economies could not function.
Metals are essential for energy production; for making factory tools, transportation vehicles, and
agricultural machinery; and for building the infrastructure of highways, pipes, and power lines that
enables modern civilization to function. Hi-tech electronics industries rely on a host of rare metallic and
non-metallic minerals ranging from antimony to zinc. All are depleting, and some are already at
economically worrisome levels of scarcity. In principle, there is no sustainable rate of extraction for non-
renewable resources: every instance of extraction represents a step toward “running out.” During the
twentieth century, though, new mining technologies enabled commercially available supplies of most
minerals to increase substantially. Ore qualities gradually declined as the low-hanging fruit disappeared,
but this trend was countered by the investment of increasing amounts of cheap energy in mining and
refining. Globalization also helped, as users of non-renewable resources gained access to virgin deposits
in countries where labor costs for mining were minimal. Resource substitution and recycling likewise
played their parts in keeping mineral and metal prices low and generally declining.[1] That price trend
seems to have reversed. During the past decade, production rates for many industrially important non-
renewable resources have leveled off or, in some cases, begun to decline, while prices have risen.[2]
Several recent articles, reports, and studies highlight the predicament of depleting mines, declining ore
quality, and rising prices.[3] Data from the U.S. Geological Survey shows that within the U.S. many
mineral resources are well past their peak rates of production.[4] These include bauxite ( whose
production peaked in 1943), copper (1998), iron ore (1951), magnesium (1966), phosphate rock (1980),
potash (1967), rare earth metals (1984), tin (1945), titanium (1964), and zinc (1969).[5] As Tom Graedel
at Yale University pointed out in a 2006 paper, “Virgin stocks of several metals appear inadequate to
sustain the modern ‘developed world’ quality of life for all of Earth’s people under contemporary
technology.”[6]
c.) China growth
Heinberg 11 (Richard, teaches at the Core Faculty of New College of California, on the Board of Advisors of the
Solar Living Institute and the Post Carbon Institute, “The China Bubble: Economic Growth’s Last Stand?” 6/6,
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/350809-the-china-bubble-economic-growth-s-last, bgm)
China is no more able to sustain perpetual growth than any other nation. The only questions, really, are
when its growth will stall, and by what pace and to what degree its economy will contract. The property
bubble is likely to be China’s biggest short-term problem, and it could have knock-on effects on the
nation’s banking system. The bubble could start to deflate as soon as next year, or the year after. Beijing
will do what it can to prop up growth and tamp down social strain, and this could buy another couple of
years—though there is no guarantee that the effort will succeed. Over the longer haul (the next 2-10
years), China’s greatest vulnerabilities are in the areas of energy, demographics, and the environment
(water, climate, and agriculture). By the period 2016 to 2020, problems in these areas will accumulate and
become mutually exacerbating, and it will eventually be impossible for China’s leaders to plug all the
leaks in the dike. Already, China’s social structure is stressed, as can be seen from the many regional
rebellions that take place each year (but that go mostly unreported in world media). This is the main
reason the central government is ruthless with respect to press and Internet freedoms and other civil
liberties. Talk to a businessperson from China and you may hear how the continued expansion of the
Chinese economy is inevitable and unstoppable. But peer beneath the surface and you will see roiling,
boiling ferment. We have discussed China at some length, not only because it has become the world’s
second-largest national economy and is the world’s foremost energy user, but because it is emblematic.
India, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are each pursuing somewhat different paths toward the
same grail of rapid economic growth, but their strategies and vulnerabilities are sufficiently similar that
an understanding of China’s predicament provides useful context for gauging these other countries’
prospects. China is likely the site of world economic growth’s last stand. This nation, together with the
other Asian “tigers,” comprises the main engine of expansion that remains after the faltering of the older,
more established economies in North America and Europe. When China sputters, the quickening slide of
the global economy will be clear and obvious to everyone.
A2: No Impact to Delay
It’s linear---the longer we wait, the worse the collapse will be---independently causes
extinction from other sources of environmental destruction
Barry 10—President and Founder of Ecological Internet. Ph.D. in "Land Resources" from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, a Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development"
also from Madison, and a Bachelor of Arts in "Political Science" from Marquette University (Glen,
Resisting Global Ecological Change, 5 January 2010)
The human family faces imminent and (Copenhagen would suggest) inevitable collapse of the biosphere
– the thin layer of life upon an otherwise lifeless planet – that makes Earth habitable. Marshes and rivers
and forests and fish are far more than resources – they and all natural ecosystems are a necessity for
humanity’s existence upon Earth. A few centuries of historically unprecedented explosion in human
numbers and surging, albeit inequitable, consumption and resultant resource use, ecosystem
destruction and pollution; is needlessly destroying being for all living things. Revolutionary action such
as ending coal use, reforming industrial agriculture and protecting and restoring old forests and other
natural ecosystems, is a requirement for the continuation of shared human being. Earth is threatened by
far more than a changing atmosphere causing climate change. Cumulative ecosystem destruction – not
only in climate, but also water, forests, oceans, farmland, soils and toxics -- in the name of “progress”
and “development” -- threatens each of us, our families and communities, as well as the Earth System in
total and all her creatures. Any chance of achieving global ecological sustainability depends urgently
upon shifting concerns regarding climate change to more sufficiently transform ourselves and society to
more broadly resist global ecological change. Global ecological, social and economic collapse may be
inevitable, but its severity, duration and likelihood of recovery are being determined by us now. It does
not look good as the environmental movement has been lacking in its overall vision, ambition and
implementation. The growing numbers of ecologically literate global citizens must come forward to
together start considering ecologically sufficient emergency measures to protect and restore global
ecosystems. We need a plan that allows humans and as many other species as possible to survive the
coming great ecological collapse, even as we work to soften the collapse, and to restore to the extent
practicable the Earth’s ecosystems. This mandates full protection for all remaining large natural
ecosystems and working to reconnect and enlarge biologically rich smaller remnants that still exist. It is
time for a hard radical turn back to a fully functioning and restored natural Earth which will require
again regaining our bond with land (and air, water and oceans), powering down our energy profligacy,
and taking whatever measures are necessary to once again bring society into balance with ecosystems.
This may mean taking all measures necessary to stop those known to be destroying ecosystems for
profit. As governments dither and the elite profit, it has become dreadfully apparent that the political,
economic and social structures necessary to stop human ecocide of our and all life’s habitats does not
yet exist. The three hundred year old hyper-capitalistic and nationalistic growth machine eating
ecosystems is not going to willingly stop growing. But unless it does, human and most or all other life
will suffer a slow and excruciating apocalyptic death. Actions can be taken now to soften ecological
collapse while maximizing the likelihood that a humane and ecologically whole Earth remains to be
renewed.
Transition
2NC Transition Overview
Collapse now causes shift to small, sustainable societies
Lewis 2k Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the
Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization”
With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller, autonomous, local and regional civilizations,
cultures, and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely
accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional
polities. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is
working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global industrial civilization, First and Third World peoples
won't have the material resources, biological capital, and energy and human resources to re-establish
global industrial civilization. Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and
ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their
environments. Those societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people
so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.
Desire irrelevant --- collapses forces transition

Lewis 2k Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the
Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization”
A more hopeful cause of the collapse of global industrial civilization is a global economic collapse
“financial crises have become increasingly common with the speed and growth of global capital flows.”
The financial crises caused by the 1994 collapse of the Mexican peso, the 1997 Asian financial panic, the
1998 Russian financial panic, and the 1998 bailout of Long Term Capital Management by the United
States Federal Reserve and Global Banks are all examples of recent financial crises that greatly stressed
the global financial system. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin
said, “There was a moment when I thought it could have come undone.” He was, of course, referring to
the global financial system. A global depression caused by a financial panic could finally undermine the
entire structure of globalization. With the loss of trillions of dollars of paper money, First World elites
would find that they don’t have the funds to bail out Third World countries and banks, and even bail
their own banks and corporations out. With the loss of trillions of dollars, the global economy would
come to a grinding halt and there wouldn’t be the collective resources or the will to restart it. Of course,
these are the precise sorts of crises that lead to World Wars and military conflict. No matter how it
collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies and/or
through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources,
global industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for wealth, natural resources, energy, and
ecosystem services aren't sustainable.
A2: Elite Backlash/Takeover
Elites will adapt to the transition
Kassiola 90 (Joel Kassiola, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, 1990, The Death of
Industrial Civilization, p.194)
Moreover, as a result of disappointment, Wildean tragedy, and value erosion, the postindustrial elite (the
current members of the beneficiary class within the dominant, postindustrial social paradigm and
structure) might come to a realization unique in history. The elite, postindustrial consciousness may be
shocked into change by increasingly conspicuous limits to growth as well as by the profoundly
challenging nature of the limits-to-growth literature: the futility, insecurity, and disaster looming in our
foreseeable future (unlike the predicted long-range disaster of our sun burning up in several billion years),
and a future filled with the preoccupation of seeking to maintain their relative advantages and ceaselessly
fend off all of the others seeking to replace them. The enjoyment of the elite’s present success seems
short-lived, unstable, and increasingly inadequate relative to both the concern and effort expended in
attaining such “success” in the first place, and the rising costs of maintaining their celebrated position on
top.
Creates a Mindset Shift
The pain of collapse sensitizes and modifies our conscious
Kassiola 90 (Joel, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, 1990, The Death of Industrial Civilization, p.
174-5)
Nevertheless, change of consciousness alone is not sufficient to bring about a successful social
transformation; such consciousness change must lead to effective political action. As Orwell understood,
the former is necessary to the latter. However, as Slater and Marcuse both emphasize, before any
change in either consciousness or social life can occur, there must be recognition of a problem, of
negative outcomes (such as servitude), of a dilemma necessitating a choice, or, I would add, of the
fantastic and manipulatory nature of our postindustrial social goods. Successful social remedies to
postindustrial ailments require recognition of conditions demanding treatment. To continue the medical
analogy, a social analogue to pain is needed to sensitize us to the presence of some disorder. No matter
how shocking and disorienting the initial recognition may be, we must not succumb to the temptation
(as some individuals do regarding threats to their own health) of burying our heads in the sand and
practicing denial. We may view the actual limits to growth, the scholarly literature providing evidence
and demanding social change, and the social movements for postindustrial transformation—the latter
two emerging in the 1970s—as performing the political equivalent of warning signs of a medical malady:
in need of early and extensive treatment.
Realizations of limits of growth shatter current industrial mindset

Kassiola 90 (Joel, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, 1990, The Death of Industrial Civilization, p.
196)
To sum up the main thrust of this chapter, I believe that the current industrial crisis centering on the
limits to growth can be instrumental in getting citizens of advanced industrial societies to recognize the
erroneous nature of the dominant postindustrial social paradigm, its way of life, and values. As a
consequence, this crisis will stimulate these citizens to be conscious of their society’s deficiencies
inspiring the destruction of the limitless growth illusion as well as the illusory materialist reductionism of
humanity, society, and politics. What I have in mind here is that the entire growth-addictive conceptual
apparatus that supports postindustrial society, the industrial ideology containing the Hobbesian
conception of humanity, liberalism, materialism, and competitiveness—all must be destroyed as well.
Such a cleansing process will pave the way to begin the necessary transformation of postindustrial society
to a transindustrial one; one not burdened by these weaknesses that are potentially fatal to our planet and
all of its inhabitants.
Answers
AT Tech --- Alexander
Tech’s not sufficient to make global industrial civilization environmentally sustainable
Evidence continues to mount that industrial civilisation, driven by a destructive and insatiable growth
imperative, is chronically unsustainable, as well as being grossly unjust. The global economy is in
ecological overshoot, currently consuming resources and emitting waste at rates the planet cannot
possibly sustain (Global Footprint Network 2013). Peak oil is but the most prominent example of a more
general situation of looming resource scarcity (Klare, 2012), with high oil prices having a debilitating
effect on the oil-dependent economies which are seemingly dependent on cheap oil to maintain historic
rates of growth (Heinberg, 2011). At the same time, great multitudes around the globe live lives of
material destitution, representing a vast, marginalised segment of humanity that justifiably seeks to
expand its economic capacities in some form (World Bank, 2008). Biodiversity continues to be
devastated by deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction (United Nations, 2010), while the
global development agenda seems to be aiming to provide an expanding global population with the
high-impact material affluence enjoyed by the richest parts of the world (Hamilton, 2003). This is
despite evidence crying out that the universalisation of affluence is environmentally unsupportable
(Smith and Positano, 2010; Turner, 2012) and not even a reliable path to happiness (Lane, 2001;
Alexander, 2012a). Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the increasingly robust body of climate science
indicating the magnitude of the global predicament (IPCC, 2013). According to the Climate Tracker
Initiative (2013: 4), the world could exceed its 'carbon budget' in around 18 years, essentially locking us
into a future that is at least 2 degrees warmer, and threatening us with 4 degrees or more. It is unclear
to what extent civilisation as we know it is compatible with runaway climate change. And still, almost
without exception, all nations on the planet - including or especially the richest ones - continue to seek
GDP growth without limit, as if the cause of these problems could somehow provide the solution. If
once it was hoped that technology and science were going to be able decouple economic activity from
ecological impact, such a position is no longer credible (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011).
Technology simply cannot provide any escape from the fact that there are biophysical limits to
growth. Despite decades of extraordinary technological advance, which it is was promised would
lighten the ecological burden of our economies, global energy and resource consumption continues to
grow, exacerbated by a growing population, but which is primarily a function of the growth-orientated
values that lie at the heart of global capitalism (Turner, 2012). Against this admittedly gloomy backdrop
lies a heterogeneous tradition of critical theorists and activists promoting what could be called a 'deep
green' alternative to the growth-orientated, industrial economy. Ranging from the radical simplicity of
Henry Thoreau (1983), to the post-growth economics of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al, 1972; 2004),
and developing into contemporary expressions of radical reformism (Latouche, 2009; Heinberg, 2011;
Jackson, 2009), eco-socialism (Sarkar, 1999; Smith, 2010), and eco-anarchism (Bookchin, 1989;
Holmgren, 2002; Trainer; 2010a), this extremely diverse tradition nevertheless agrees that the nature of
the existing system is inherently unsustainable. Tinkering with or softening its margins - that is, any
attempt to give capitalism a 'human face' - is not going to come close to addressing the problems we,
the human species, are confronted with. What is needed, this tradition variously maintains, is a
radically alternative way of living on the Earth - something 'wholly other' to the ways of
industrialisation, consumerism, and limitless growth. However idealistic or Utopian their arguments
might seem, the basic reasoning is that the nature of any solutions to current problems must honestly
confront the magnitude of the overlapping crises, for else one risks serving the destructive forces one
ostensibly opposes.
A2: XYZ Solves (Must Read)
Draw a line here—all their arguments assume that growth is linear, not exponential—
the rate of economic growth is constantly increasing, so adaptation and building tech
and regulation are doomed since we can’t stabilize the population fast enough
Bartlett, Prof @ Colorado, 4 [Dr. Albert Bartlett is a Physics Professor Emeritus at the. University of
Colorado at Boulder, “Dr. Albert Bartlett on Compounding,”
http://www.chrismartenson.com/dr_albert_bartlett]
*gender modified
Now there's something else that’s very important: the growth in any doubling time is greater than the
total of all the preceding growth. For example, when I put eight grains on the 4th square, the eight is
larger than the total of seven that were already there. I put 32 grains on the 6th square. The 32 is larger
than the total of 31 that were already there. Every time the growing quantity doubles, it takes more
than all you’d used in all the proceeding growth. Well, let’s translate that into the energy crisis. Here’s
an ad from the year 1975. It asks the question “Could America run out of electricity?” America depends
on electricity. Our need for electricity actually doubles every 10 or 12 years. That's an accurate reflection
of a very long history of steady growth of the electric industry in this country, growth at a rate of around
7% per year, which gives you doubling every 10 years. Now, with all that history of growth, they just
expected the growth would go on, forever. Fortunately it stopped, not because anyone understood
arithmetic, it stopped for other reasons. Well, let's ask “What if?” Suppose the growth had continued?
Then we would see here the thing we just saw with the chess board. In the ten years following the
appearance of this ad, in that decade, the amount of electrical energy we would have consumed in this
country would have been greater than the total of all of the electrical energy we had ever consumed in
the entire proceeding history of the steady growth of that industry in this country. Now, did you realize
that anything as completely acceptable as 7% growth per year could give such an incredible
consequence? That in just ten years you'd use more than the total of all that had been used in all the
proceeding growth? Well, that's exactly what President Carter was referring to in his speech on energy.
One of his statements was this: he said, “In each of those decades (1950s and 1960s) more oil was
consumed than in all of (hu)mankind's previous history.” By itself that's a stunning statement. Now you
can understand it. The president was telling us the simple consequence of the arithmetic of 7% growth
each year in world oil consumption, and that was the historic figure up until the 1970s. There's another
beautiful consequence of this arithmetic. If you take 70 years as a period of time—and note that that's
roughly one human lifetime—then any percent growth continued steadily for 70 years gives you an
overall increase by a factor that's very easy to calculate. For example, 4% per year for 70 years, you find
the factor by multiplying four twos together, it's a factor of 16. A few years ago, one of the newspapers
of my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, quizzed the nine members of the Boulder City Council and asked
them, “What rate of growth of Boulder's population do you think it would be good to have in the coming
years?” Well, the nine members of the Boulder City council gave answers ranging from a low of 1% per
year. Now, that happens to match the present rate of growth of the population of the United States. We
are not at zero population growth. Right now, the number of Americans increases every year by over
three million people. No member of the council said Boulder should grow less rapidly than the United
States is growing. Now, the highest answer any council member gave was 5% per year. You know, I felt
compelled, I had to write him a letter and say, “Did you know that 5% per year for just 70 … ” I can
remember when 70 years used to seem like an awful long time, it just doesn't seem so long now.
(audience laughter). Well, that means Boulder's population would increase by a factor of 32. That is,
where today we have one overloaded sewer treatment plant, in 70 years, we'd need 32 overloaded
sewer treatment plants. Now did you realize that anything as completely all-American as 5% growth per
year could give such an incredible consequence in such a modest period of time? Our city council people
have zero understanding of this very simple arithmetic. Well, a few years ago, I had a class of non-
science students. We were interested in problems of science and society. We spent a lot of time learning
to use semi-logarithmic graph paper. It's printed in such a way that these equal intervals on the vertical
scale each represent an increase by a factor of 10. So you go from one thousand to ten thousand to a
hundred thousand, and the reason you use this special paper is that on this paper, a straight line
represents steady growth. Now, we worked a lot of examples. I said to the students, “Let’s talk about
inflation, let’s talk about 7% per year.” It wasn't this high when we did this, it's been higher since then,
fortunately it's lower now. And I said to the students, as I can say to you, you have roughly sixty years
life expectancy ahead of you. Let’s see what some common things will cost if we have 60 years of 7%
annual inflation. The students found that a 55-cent gallon of gasoline will cost $35.20; $2.50 for a movie
will be $160; the $15 sack of groceries my mother used to buy for a dollar and a quarter, that will be
$960; a $100 suit of clothes, $6,400; a $4000 automobile will cost a quarter of a million dollars; and a
$45,000 home will cost nearly 3 million dollars. Well, I gave the students these data (shows overhead).
These came from a Blue Cross, Blue Shield ad. The ad appeared in Newsweek magazine and the ad gave
these figures to show the cost escalation of gall bladder surgery in the years since 1950, when that
surgery cost $361. I said, “Make a semi logarithmic plot, let’s see what's happening.” The students found
that the first four points lined up on a straight line whose slope indicated inflation of about 6% per year,
but the fourth, fifth, and sixth were on a steeper line, almost 10% inflation per year. Well, then I said to
the students, “Run that steeper line on out to the year 2000, let’s get an idea of what gall bladder
surgery might cost,” and this was, 2000 was four years ago—the answer is $25,000. The lesson there is
awfully clear: if you're thinking about gall bladder surgery, do it now. (audience laughter) In the summer
of 1986, the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion
people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well, your reaction to 1.7% might be to say “Well, that's so
small, nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year.” So you calculate the doubling time, you find it’s
only 41 years. Now, that was back in 1986; more recently in 1999, we read that the world population
had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7%
to 1.3% per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population
today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year. Now, if this current modest 1.3%
per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter
on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of
the earth in just 2400 years. Well, we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make
for a cute cartoon; the caption says, “Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive
offer for your square.” There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population
growth is going to happen. Now, we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it,
it’s going to happen. Whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not, it’s absolutely certain.
People could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore, today’s high birth
rates will drop; today’s low death rates will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will
certainly be in a time short compared to 780 years. So maybe you're wondering then, what options are
available if we wanted to address the problem. In the left hand column, I’ve listed some of those things
that we should encourage if we want to raise the rate of growth of population and in so doing, make the
problem worse. Just look at the list. Everything in the list is as sacred as motherhood. There's
immigration, medicine, public health, sanitation. These are all devoted to the humane goals of lowering
the death rate and that’s very important to me, if it’s my death they’re lowering. But then I’ve got to
realise that anything that just lowers the death rate makes the population problem worse. There’s
peace, law and order; scientific agriculture has lowered the death rate due to famine—that just makes
the population problem worse. It’s widely reported that the 55 mph speed limit saved thousands of lives
—that just makes the population problem worse. Clean air makes it worse.
A2: Tech Solves – Generic
Growth makes adaptation and tech development impossible—growth happens too
fast
Barry, PhD ecologist, 7—President and Founder of Ecological Internet, PhD in Land Resources from the U of Wisconsin-Madison, MSc in Conservation
Biology and Sustainable Development from U of Wisconsin-Madison, BA in political science from Marquette U (Glen, May, “Earth Prophecy - And the way out”, New
Paradigm Journal, http://www.newparadigmjournal.com/May2007/earthprophecy.htm, AL)
The ecological foundation of being is failing. And as a result here is just a sampling of what we can expect. The effects of human
consumption and fossil fuel use are going to spawn tremendous climate feedbacks. The Amazon, Congo and Asia/Pacific
rainforests (those that remain) will largely die releasing their carbon. Melting permafrost and ocean methane
hydrates, along with heat absorbing open Arctic waters, will further consolidate and ensure run-away climate change of such
magnitude that adaptation is futile .
Tech fails – it can’t be developed fast enough

Martenson 9 [PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke University, and an MBA from Cornell University. A
fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, former VP of Pfizer and SAIC, “Copenhagen & Economic Growth -
You Can't Have Both,” Dec 24, http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51229]
The idea of salvation via the electric plug-in car or other renewable energy is a fantasy . The reality is that any new
technology takes decades to reach full market penetration, and we haven't even really begun to
introduce any yet. Time, scale, and cost must be weighed when considering any new technology's
potential to have a significant impact on our energy-use patterns. For example, a recent study concluded that another 20
years would be required for electric vehicles to have a significant impact on US gasoline consumption.
Meaningful Numbers of Plug-In Hybrids Are Decades Away The mass-introduction of the plug-in hybrid electric car is still a few decades
away, according to new analysis by the National Research Council. The study, released on Monday, also found that the next generation of plug-in hybrids could
require hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies to take off. Even then, plug-in hybrids would not have a significant
impact on the nation’s oil consumption or carbon emissions before 2030. Savings in oil imports would
also be modest, according to the report, which was financed with the help of the Energy Department. Twenty to thirty years is the
normal length of time for any new technology to scale up and fully penetrate a large market. But this study, as
good as it was in calculating the time, scale, and cost parameters of technology innovation and penetration, still left out the issue of resource scarcity. Is there
enough lithium in the world to build all these cars? Neodymium? This is a fourth issue that deserves careful consideration, given the
scale of the overall issue. But even if we did manage to build hundreds of millions of plug-in vehicles, where would
the electricity come from? Many people mistakenly think that we are well on our way to substantially
providing our electricity needs using renewable sources such as wind and solar. We are not. Renewable
timetable is a long shot Al Gore's well-intentioned challenge that we produce "100 percent of our electricity from
renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years" represents a widely held delusion that we can't afford to
harbor. The delusion is shared by the Minnesota Legislature, which is requiring the state's largest utility, Xcel Energy, to get at least 24 percent of its energy from
wind by 2020. One of the most frequently ignored energy issues is the time required to bring forth a major
new fuel to the world's energy supply. Until the mid-19th century, burning wood powered the world. Then coal gradually surpassed wood into
the first part of the 20th century. Oil was discovered in the 1860s, but it was a century before it surpassed coal as our largest energy fuel. Trillions of
dollars are now invested in the world's infrastructure to mine, process and deliver coal, oil and natural
gas. As distinguished professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba recently put it, "It is delusional to think that the United States
can install in a decade wind and solar generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power plants
that took nearly 60 years to construct." Texas has three times the name plate wind capacity of any other state — 8,000-plus megawatts. The
Electric Reliability Council of Texas manages the Texas electric grids. ERCOT reports that its unpredictable wind farms actually supply just a little more than
700 MW during summer power demand, and provide just 1 percent of Texas' power needs of about 72,000 MW. ERCOT's 2015 forecast
still has wind at just more than 1 percent despite plans for many more turbines. For the United States, the Energy Information Administration is forecasting wind
and solar together will supply less than 3 percent of our electric energy in 2020. Again it turns out that
supplanting even a fraction of our current electricity production with renewables will also take us
decades. And even that presumes that we have a functioning economy in which to mine, construct,
transport and erect these fancy new technologies. Time, scale, and cost all factor in as challenges to
significant penetration of new energy technologies as well. So where will all the new energy for economic growth come from? The
answer, unsurprisingly, is from the already-installed carbon-chomping coal, oil, and natural gas infrastructure. That is the implicit assumption that lies behind the
calls for renewed economic growth. It's The Money, Stupid As noted here routinely in my writings and in the Crash Course, we
have an exponential
monetary system. One mandatory feature of our current exponential monetary system is the need for perpetual growth.
Not just any kind of growth; exponential growth. That's the price for paying interest on money loaned into existence. Without
that growth, our monetary system shudders to a halt and shifts into reverse, operating especially poorly
and threatening to melt down the entire economic edifice. This is so well understood, explicitly or implicitly, throughout all the
layers of society and in our various institutions, that you will only ever hear politicians and bankers talking about the "need" for growth. In fact, they are correct; our
system does need growth. All debt-based money systems require growth. That is the resulting feature of loaning one's money into existence. That's the long and the
short of the entire story. The growth may seem modest, perhaps a few percent per year ('That's all, honest!'), but therein lies the rub. Any continuous percentage
growth is still exponential growth. Exponential growth means not just a little bit more each year, but a constantly growing amount each year. It is a story of more.
Every year needs slightly more than the prior year - that's the requirement. The Gap Nobody
has yet reconciled the vast intellectual
and practical gap that exists between our addiction to exponential growth and the carbon reduction
rhetoric coming out of Copenhagen. I've yet to see any credible plan that illustrates how we can grow
our economy without using more energy. Is it somehow possible to grow an economy without using more energy? Let's explore that concept
for a bit. What does it mean to "grow an economy?" Essentially, it means more jobs for more people producing and consuming
more things. That's it. An economy, as we measure it, consists of delivering the needs and wants of people in ever-larger
quantities. It's those last three words - ever-larger quantities - that defines the whole problem. For example,
suppose our economy consisted only of building houses. If the same number of houses were produced each year, we'd say that the economy was not growing. It
wouldn't matter whether the number was four hundred thousand or four million; if the same number of new homes were produced each year, year after year, this
would be considered a very bad thing, because it would mean our economy was not growing. The same is true for cars, hair brushes, big-screen TVs, grape juice,
and everything else you can think of that makes up our current economy. Each year, more needs to be sold than the year before, or the
magic economic-stimulus wands will come out to ward off the Evil Spirits of No Growth. If our economy were to grow at the same rate as the population, it would
grow by around 1% per year. This is still exponential growth, but it is far short of the 3%-4% that policymakers consider both desirable and necessary. Why the gap?
Why do we work so hard to ensure that 1% more people consume 3% more stuff each year? Out of Service It's not that 3% is the right number for the land or the
people who live upon it. The target of 3% is driven by our monetary system, which needs a certain rate of
exponential growth each year in order to cover the interest expense due each year on the already
outstanding loans. The needs of our monetary system are driving our economic decisions, not the needs
of the people, let alone the needs of the planet. We are in service to our money system, not the other
way around. Today we have a burning need for an economic model that can operate tolerably well without growth. But ours can't, and so we actually find
ourselves in the uncomfortable position of pitting human needs against the money system and observing that the
money system is winning the battle. The Federal Reserve exists solely to assure that the monetary system has what it needs to function. That is
their focus, their role, and their primary concern. I assume that they assume that by taking care of the monetary system,
everything else will take care of itself. I think their assumption is archaic and wrong. Regardless, our primary
institutions and governing systems are in service to a monetary system that is dysfunctional. It was my having this outlook, this lens, more than any other, that
allowed me to foresee what so many economists missed. Only by examining the system from a new, and very wide, angle can
the enormous flaws in the system be seen. Economy & Energy Now let's get back to our main problem of economic growth and energy use
(a.k.a. carbon production). There is simply no way to build houses, produce televisions, grow and transport grape juice, and market hair
brushes without consuming energy in the process. That's just a cold, hard reality. We need liquid fuel to extract,
transform, and transport products to market. More people living in more houses means we need more
electricity. Sure, we can be more efficient in our use of energy, but unless our efficiency gains are exceeding the
rate of economic growth, more energy will be used, not less. In the long run, if we were being 3% more efficient in our use of fuel
and growing our economy at 3%, this would mean burning the same amount of fuel each year. Unfortunately, fuel-efficiency gains are well
known to run slower than economic growth. For example, the average fuel efficiency of the US car fleet (as measured by the CAFE
standards) has increased by 18% over the past 25 years, while the economy has grown by 331%. Naturally, our fuel consumption has grown, not fallen, over that
time, despite the efficiency gains. So the bottom line is this: There
is no possible way to both have economic growth (as we've
known it in the past) and cut carbon emissions. At least not without doing things very differently.
Tech creates more consumption
Foster 11 (John Bellamy. co-editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
“Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem,” Volume 62, Issue 08, January,
http://monthlyreview.org/2011/01/01/capitalism-and-degrowth-an-impossibility-theorem, bgm)
An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the
promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox,
according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation
but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment.5 The unavoidable
conclusion—associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not
just those connected directly to the European degrowth project—is that there needs to be a drastic
alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution. As Marxist economist
Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: “Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the
environment to bear the [economic and population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the
adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has
already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal,
not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries.”6 Given that wealthy
countries are already characterized by ecological overshoot, it is becoming more and more apparent
that there is indeed no alternative, as Sweezy emphasized, but a reversal in the demands placed on
the environment by the economy. This is consistent with the argument of ecological economist
Herman Daly, who has long insisted on the need for a steady-state economy. Daly traces this
perspective to John Stuart Mill’s famous discussion of the “stationary state” in his Principles of
Political Economy, which argued that if economic expansion was to level off (as the classical
economists expected), the economic goal of society could then shift to the qualitative aspects of
existence, rather than mere quantitative expansion.
All their authors are biased

Trainer 7 [Ted, Senior Lecturer in School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales, “Renewable Energy
Cannot Sustain A Capitalist Society”, ebsco]
There is an overwhelmingly powerful, never questioned, assumption that all these problems can and will be solved by moving
to renewable energy sources. That is, it is generally believed that sources such as the sun and the wind can replace fossil fuels,
providing the quantities of energy that consumer society will need, in the forms and at the times that they are needed.
Surprisingly, almost no literature has explored whether this is possible. Unfortunately in the task of assessing the validity of this
dominant assumption we have not been helped by the people who know most about the field, the renewable energy
experts. They have a strong interest in boosting the potential of their pet technology and in not drawing
attention to its weaknesses, difficulties and limits. Exaggerated, misleading, questionable and
demonstrably false claims are often encountered in the promotional literature. Minor technical advances
which might or might not become significant in the long run are announced as miraculous solutions. Doubts regarding the
potential of renewable technologies are rarely if ever heard from within these fields. This enthusiasm is
understandable in view of the need to attract public support and research funding, but it means that
contributions by those most familiar with these fields to the critical assessment of the potential and limits of renewables are
quite rare. In developing the following review, considerable difficulty has been encountered from people hostile
to having attention drawn to the weaknesses in their technologies and proposals (including threats of legal
action if data they have provided in personal communications is used). Sources eager to provide information tend to dry up
when they realize that limits are being explored. In addition some of the crucial information will not be made public
by the private firms developing the new systems. For example it is almost impossible to get information
on actual windmill output in relation to mean wind speeds at generating sites.
A2: Infinite Resources
Unintended consequences—every technology creates another problem—even with
unlimited energy we’d still go extinct some other way
MacKenzie, citing Meadows, 12—science consultant for New Scientist magazine (Deborah, 1/10/2012, “Boom and doom: Revisiting prophecies of collapse”, The
New Scientist, http://newscientist1.blogspot.com/2012/01/boom-and-doom-revisiting-prophecies-of.html, AL)
Yet the Limits team had tested this. In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited , non-polluting nuclear
energy - which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials - and a doubling in the
reserves of nonrenewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed
when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reductions were added as well: this time, the
crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding in higher farm yields and better birth control
helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck, driven by the continuing rise of industry.
Whatever the researchers did to eke out resources or stave off pollution, exponential growth was
simply prolonged, until it eventually swamped the remedies . Only when the growth of population and
industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise in relative prosperity.
The crucial point is that overshoot and collapse usually happened sooner or later in World3 even if very
optimistic assumptions were made about, say, oil reserves. "The general behaviour of overshoot and
collapse persists, even when large changes to numerous parameters are made," says Graham Turner of
the CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences lab in Crace, Australia.
A2: Aff Solves Warming
Deep-seated change is required at every level of society – insufficient solutions like
the plan only deter necessary changes
Dr. Barry, PhD in Land Resources from UW-Madison and President and Founder of Ecological Internet,
1/5/2008
(“Time To Stop The Greenwashing,” http://www.countercurrents.org/barry050108.htm)
The Earth and all species including humans are threatened with imminent ecological ruin. You should be afraid, very
afraid. Yet real hope remains that fundamental social change can avert looming failure of global
ecosystems. The biggest current obstacle to such change is that now that everyone, every product and every business claims to be "green"; we have been
diverted from urgent, adequate ecological change required to secure being. Many mainstream (and some "radical") environmentalists, most businesses and
essentially all
governments are greenwashing -- misleading the public regarding the environmental benefits
of their practices, policies and products. Certified FSC logging destroys ancient forests, climate and water. Coal is unlikely to ever be clean as existing plants
emit into the atmosphere, and sequestration is unproven. Biofuels hurt the environment, geo-engineering will destroy remaining natural processes, and buying
more stuff is rarely good for the environment. It is time to stop the greenwashing. After two decades of successfully
raising awareness
regarding climate change, forest protection and other challenges to global ecological sustainability; increasingly my time is spent
reacting to dangerous, insufficient responses that fail to address root causes of ecological decline, provide a
false sense of action, and frequently consolidate and do more environmental harm. Many "greenwash" to make money,
some to be perceived as effective advocates, while others believe incremental progress without changing the system is the
best that can be done. Yet all are delaying policies necessary simply to survive. The greatest obstacle to
identifying, refining, espousing and implementing policies required to maintain a habitable Earth may come from
"environmentalists" proposing inadequate half-measures that delay and undermine the rigorous work
that must be done to bring humanity back into nature's fold. Sufficient policies required to save the Earth are massive in
scope and ambition. Deep-seated change is required in how we house, feed and clothe ourselves; in our
understanding of acceptable livelihoods and happy lives; and in our relationship with the biosphere and each other. To maintain a livable
Earth there is no alternative to less people and consumption, a smaller and restorative economy, and an end to
cutting natural vegetation and burning fossil fuels.
Answers to Growth Turns
A2: Tech Good
Tech good isn’t offense—technology is still possible post dedevelopment
The logically inescapable implication from the foregoing discussion is that global peace cannot be
achieved before there has been a vast and historically unprecedented transition to ‘The Simpler Way’.
The accelerating global predicament cannot be remedied until social, economic, political and cultural
systems based on competitive individualism, acquisitiveness, affluence and growth are abandoned and
replaced by ways of life based on production to meet needs rather than profits, high levels of individual
and local self-sufficiency, co-operation, participation, mutual assistance and sharing, and above all on
willing acceptance of materially simple lifestyles within zero-growth national economies.76 This does
not mean hardship and deprivation; indeed it can be argued that high levels of simplicity, self-sufficiency
and co-operation are the necessary conditions for a high quality of life, as well as for global justice and
ecological sustainability. Nor does it mean absence of sophisticated technology and research. It does
mean a landscape made up mostly of small towns and villages within comfortable distance of small cities
by public transport, with relatively little heavy industry, travel and transport, international trade or big
firms. Most ‘government’ would have to be carried out through small local participatory assemblies.
Because large sectors of the present economy would no longer be necessary, the overall amount of
work for monetary income would probably be reduced by two-thirds, enabling a much more relaxed
pace of life. There would be no need to reduce the sophistication and quality of research and technology
within socially desirable fields. Needless to say The Simpler Way would require the abandonment of an
economy in which profit and the market are the major determinants of production, consumption or
development, and it would require a steady state or zero growth overall economy. Most difficult would
be the radical changes in values.
A2: Growth Solves Biotech
Only de-dev solves
The Independent 05 [“The Solution to Famine in Africa is Organic Farming Not GMOs,” Posted 6/27/05,
pg. http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/famine062705.cfm]
Hungry for an alternative Tewolde Berhan believes that organic farming is the only real solution to famine in Africa. Sally J Hall
meets the quiet but formidable Ethiopian who has become a thorn in the side of the GM foods lobby 27 June 2005 Organic farming is a slow-to-grow, low-yield
industry favoured by middle-class parents who have the time and money to meander the overpriced aisles of Waitrose, deliberating over wild rocket or white
asparagus. Right? Wrong, says Tewolde Berhan. He thinks organic farming could be the solution to Ethiopia's famines. The chief of the country's
Environment Agency has worked his way through academia and government to become one of the world's most influential voices in the biotechnology
field. Berhan believes that, properly applied, this approach could save the lives of many of the thousands of Africans
who die every day as a result of hunger and poverty. He maintains that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) remove
control from local farmers. He speaks for a growing number who believe that Africa should return to natural, sustainable methods of agriculture
better suited to its people and environment. Can one man hope to stand against governments and the huge multinationals? Visiting London, Berhan appears to be a
frail - if nattily dressed - sexagenarian. But our conversation reveals his determination, intelligence and encyclopedic memory, combining to create an indomitable
force. Asked why bad harvests seem to have a greater impact on Ethiopia than its neighbours, he has a simple yet stark response. "It's largely because of the lack of
infrastructure," he says. "The road system in Ethiopia has doubled in the past 10 years, but is still very poor. "Ethiopia is still an agrarian society, and there isn't one
such country that hasn't had famines," he adds. "The reasons are clear: some years you have plenty and others not enough. If you don't have the technological and
financial capacity and the infrastructure to store in good years, you can't make provision for the bad. People here depend entirely on the crops they produce in their
fields, so when one season fails, the result is famine." Born in 1940, Berhan graduated in 1963 from Addis Ababa University and took a doctorate at the University of
Wales in 1969. Later posts as dean of science at Addis Ababa, keeper of the National Herbarium and director of the Ethiopian Conservation Strategy Secretariat kept
him in touch with the agricultural needs of Ethiopia's people. In 1995, he was made director general of the Environmental Protection Authority of Ethiopia, in effect
becoming the country's chief scientist in agriculture. A strong critic of GMOs, he's a powerful voice in lobbying on food safety. His most notable triumph came in
negotiations on biosafety in Cartagena, Colombia in 1999. Berhan acted as chief negotiator for a group of southern hemisphere countries. He helped to secure an
agreement to protect biosafety and biodiversity, while maintaining respect for the traditional rights of the Third World population, gained against strong opposition
from the European Union and North America. So why is organic farming the answer? Given low yields, poor soil and drought, you'd think that industrial farming
would help Ethiopia to maximise production. Not so, Berhan says. "Organic
farming deviates little from the natural environment
in supplying nutrients to crops. We've developed the ability to change things in a big way and, without considering the consequences, we create
disasters. Look at what happened with DDT. "Organic farming disturbs nature as little as possible and reduces those risks.
Intensive farming has led to the exacerbation of pests and disea es, and loss of flavour in food." These views are at odds with
the "conventional" industry. Tony Combes, the director of corporate affairs for Monsanto UK, a big player in the GM market, says: "Going organic isn't the way to
increase yields. But then, neither is going totally GM. Farmers need solutions suitable for local predicaments. This means choosing from a range of options - organic,
conventional and GM. If yields can be increased, that surplus can be sold." Berhan is undeterred. He has persuaded the Ethiopian government to let him
demonstrate his ideas in the Axum area of Ethiopia. Old field-management techniques have been resurrected, while methods new to the area, like compost-making,
have been successful. Those who think organic farming means low yields will be surprised by Berhan's evidence. "When well managed, and as
fertility
builds over years, organic agriculture isn't inferior in yield. Now, farmers don't want chemical fertilisers.
They say, 'Why should we pay for something we can get for free?'" Berhan expresses gratitude for the West's famine-relief
efforts, but he has reservations. "When countries want to help, they may not know how, so the intention has to be appreciated. But if you go beyond the intention
and begin to dictate terms, it becomes more sinister. In times of shortage, making food aid available is helpful - for that year. If you keep making it available, you
discourage production." He believes there are times when food aid can be more about control by Western governments than assistance. "The feeling is strong that
this is deliberate. I attended a meeting where farmers from the USA were present. I told them a story I'd read about how rice production in Liberia was depressed
because of cheap imports from the USA. The American farmers said this was a deliberate policy by the US State Department to make countries dependent on them
for food. "I began to investigate and discovered that, while the EU has abandoned its policy of providing food aid, initially sending money so that food can be bought
locally, the US still insists it will only give food in kind. This makes me feel those farmers were right." Berhan insists on the necessity of further trials for GM crops,
and believes extreme caution should be used in their growth and trade. His application for a visa to attend talks in Canada on GM labelling was turned down earlier
this year, suggesting that his influence is feared. "We were finalising the labelling of grain commodities," he says. "A compromise had been reached in 2000 for
labelling to say, 'This product may contain GMOs,' but we wanted to toughen it up, to say, 'This product contains these GMOs,' and to list them." He also contests
that GMOs give higher yield. "This is mainly hype. So far, there's not one GM crop that produces higher yields per
acre than conventional crops. They offer an economical advantage to farmers as they can apply herbicide in large
doses and not have to worry about weeds: that's all."
People can’t eat—money is a pre-requisite. The green revolution happened 40 years

ago but people still starve
Drago 6 (Tito, “Hunger Due to Injustice, Not Lack of Food,” Inter Press Service, October 16 2006, pg.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_3162.cfm]
MADRID, Oct 16 (IPS) - Millions of people die of hunger-related causes every year. However, that is not because of actual shortages of
food, but is a result of social injustice and political, social and economic exclusion, argue non-governmental
organisations that launched a campaign in Spain on World Food Day Monday. Oct.16 was established as World Food Day in 1979 by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO), commemorating the agency's Oct. 16, 1945 founding date. Monday also marked the first day of Anti-Poverty Week, which will
include events in Spain and around the world to raise awareness of the issue. FAO's slogan for World Food Day this year is "Invest in Agriculture for Food Security".
But NGOs argue that the problem is not a lack of food production, but of the injustice surrounding access to and use of foods. Theo Oberhuber, head of the Spanish
environmental NGO Ecologists in Action (EEA), told IPS that enough
food is produced in the world to cover the needs of
everyone, so that no one would have to go hungry. But, he added, there are two problems that stand in the way of this. The first is that a
large part of all food, whether agricultural products or food obtained from oceans or rivers, goes towards feeding livestock "whose
meat and by-products are consumed mainly in the countries of the industrialised North." The second, he
said, is social injustice. In many countries, the majority of the population cannot afford food, "not even food of lesser
quality."
Their biotech solutions won’t be accepted

Hickey & Mittal 03 – Program Coordinator @ Pesticide Action Network North America & Co-director of
the Institute for Food and Development Policy [Ellen Hickey and Anuradha Mittal, Voices from the
South: The Third World Debunks Corporate Myths on Genetically Engineered Crops, A joint project of
Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy and Pesticide Action Network North America, May
2003]
For proponents of genetically modified food, these are dark times. Led by Zambia, and recently followed
by India, more and more countries in the Global South are spurning genetically modified (GM) food aid,
and questioning the wisdom of a corporate-controlled food system. Zambia is the mouse that roared. A
country facing widespread famine, Zambia refused genetically contaminated food aid from the U.S.,
after a review by its scientists of studies on GM foods showed insufficient evidence to demonstrate its
safety. Pg. 1
A2: Growth Solves Democracy
Economic growth fuels fast power transitions and democratic revolutions that
undermine governance
Rodrik 2011 – professor of political economy at Harvard (2/13, Dani, “Economic growth is not enough”,
www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/937726--economic-growth-is-not-enough)
Perhaps the most striking finding in the United Nations’ recent 20th anniversary Human Development Report is the outstanding
performance of theMuslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here was Tunisia, ranked sixth among 135
countries in terms of improvement in its Human Development Index (HDI) over the previous four decades, ahead of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, and India. Not
far behind was Egypt, ranked 14th. The HDI is a measure of development that captures achievements in health and
education alongside economic growth. Egypt and(especially) Tunisia did well enough on the growth front, but where
they really shone was on these broader indicators. At 74, Tunisia’s life expectancy edges out Hungary’s and
Estonia’s, countries that are more than twice as wealthy. Some 69 per cent of Egypt’s children are in school, a ratio that matches
much richer Malaysia’s. Clearly, these were states that did not fail in providing social services or distributing the
benefits of economic growth widely. Yet in the end it did not matter. The Tunisian and Egyptian people were, to paraphrase
Howard Beale, mad as hell at their governments, and they were not going to take it anymore. If Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Egypt’s
Hosni Mubarak were hoping for political popularity as a reward for economic gains, they must have
been sorely disappointed. One lesson of the Arab annus mirabilis, then, is that good economics need not always mean good
politics; the two can part ways for quite some time. It is true that the world’s wealthy countries are almost all democracies. But
democratic politics is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for economic development over a period of
several decades. Despite the economic advances they registered, Tunisia, Egypt, and many other Middle Eastern countries
remained authoritarian countries ruled by a narrow group of cronies, with corruption, clientelism and
nepotism running rife. These countries’ rankings on political freedoms and corruption stand in glaring contrast to their rankings on development
indicators. In Tunisia, Freedom House reported prior to the Jasmine revolution, “the authorities continued to harass, arrest, and imprison journalists and bloggers,
human rights activists, and political opponents of the government.” The Egyptian government was ranked 111th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s
2009 survey of corruption. And of course, the converse is also true: India has been democratic since independence in
1947, yet the country didn’t begin to escape of its low “Hindu rate of growth” until the early 1980s. A
second lesson is that rapid economic growth does not buy political stability on its own, unless political institutions are allowed to
develop and mature rapidly as well. In fact, economic growth itself generates social and economic mobilization, a
fundamental source of political instability. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington put it more than 40 years ago, “social and
economic change — urbanization, increases in literacy and education, industrialization, mass media
expansion — extend political consciousness, multiply political demands, broaden political participation.” Now add social media such as
Twitter and Facebook to the equation, and the destabilizing forces that rapid economic change sets into motion can
become overwhelming. These forces become most potent when the gap between social mobilization and the quality of political institutions widens.
When a country’s political institutions are mature, they respond to demands from below through a combination of accommodation, response and representation.
The events
When they are underdeveloped, they shut those demands out in the hope that they will go away — or be bought off by economic improvements.
in the Middle East amply demonstrate the fragility of the second model. Protesters in Tunis and Cairo were not demonstrating about
lack of economic opportunity or poor social services. They were rallying against a political regime that they felt was insular, arbitrary and corrupt, and that did not
allow them adequate voice. A political regime that can handle these pressures need not be democratic in the western
sense of the term. One can imagine responsive political systems that do not operate through free elections and competition among political parties. Some would
point to Oman or Singapore as examples of authoritarian regimes that are durable in the face of rapid economic change. Perhaps so. But the only kind of political
system that has proved itself over the long haul is that associated with western democracies. Which brings us to China. At the height of the Egyptian protests,
Chinese Web surfers who searched the terms “Egypt” or “Cairo” were returned messages saying that no results could be found. Evidently, the Chinese government
did not want its citizens to read up on the Egyptian protests and get the wrong idea. With the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement ever present,
China’s leaders are intent on preventing a repeat. China is not Tunisia or Egypt, of course. The Chinese government has experimented with local democracy and has
tried hard to crack down on corruption. Even so, protest has spread over the last decade. There were 87,000 instances of what the government calls “sudden mass
incidents” in 2005, the last year that the government released such statistics, which suggests that the rate has since increased. Dissidents challenge the supremacy
The Chinese leadership’s gamble is that a rapid increase in living standards and
of the Communist Party at their peril.
employment opportunities will keep the lid on simmering social and political tensions. That is why it is so
intent on achieving annual economic growth of 8 per cent or higher — the magic number that it believes
will contain social strife. But Egypt and Tunisia have just sent a sobering message to China and other
authoritarian regimes around the world: don’t count on economic progress to keep you in
power forever.
Growth doesn’t create democracy or liberalization

Rachman 2011 – chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, former writer for The Economist,
edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections (1/3, Gideon, “Think again: American decline”,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/think_again_american_decline?page=0,3, WEA)
Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as
a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World
Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty
create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side." There were two
important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would
inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would
inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out. In
1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years
later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at
phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to
choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state
could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to
China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal
freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation." In fact, China managed to combine
censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The
confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon
of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed
down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the
world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist
Party. And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life
easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies
are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not
agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree
with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a
more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar
vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books
and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.
Collapse doesn’t hurt democracy

Brower and Carothers 2009 – *fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie
Endowment, **vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founder
and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program (Julia and Thomas, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, “Will the International Economic Crisis Undermine Struggling Democracies?”,
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=23031, WEA)
As the global economic crisis unfolds, many observers are wondering what political effects it will have around the world. Will it produce significant amounts of
political instability? Will its damaging political effects fall especially hard on the many weak or struggling democracies in the world, thereby producing a reversal of
democracy’s gains of recent decades? To help deepen these discussions empirically, it
is useful to consider the findings of research on the
political effects of other economic crises of recent decades. Of course drawing clearcut lessons from the complex past record of
economic crises is a difficult and necessarily tentative undertaking. And no matter how sophisticated such research is, broader, subtle long-term changes in global
economics and politics can mean that patterns from the past may not hold in the future. Nevertheless, existing research offers important insights about the amount
of instability that might occur—including whether it may consist more of changes of government or changes in systems of government—as well as whether
democratic or authoritarian governments will suffer more. Three
important findings emerge from the research: 1. In the great
majority of past cases, economic crisis did not lead to regime change. In fact, it often did not even lead
to a change of government. In the most comprehensive article on this topic, Minxin Pei and David Adesnik (2000) examine the political
effects of 93 economic crises—defined as an annual inflation rate greater than 15 percent, and stagnant or negative
annual GDP growth—in Asia and Latin America between 1945 and 1998. Contrary to what might be expected, they find that economic crisis contributed to
regime change in only 30 cases. Six of these cases fit the model of an immediate Suharto-style regime collapse; in the rest, regime change occurred after a time lag
of about eighteen to 30 months. Perhaps most surprising, however, is their finding that in only about 18 of the remaining 63 cases did
economic crisis lead even to a change in government. What explains these findings? Pei and Adesnik speculate that three factors
might be at work. First, the timing has to be right for economic crises to have an observable political impact. In
about one-fifth of the cases with no change, the economic difficulties had ended prior to the next election. Second, in ten of the cases, the economic
crisis was overshadowed by an existing political crisis. Finally, economic crises were less likely to produce regime change during the
1980s and 1990s than in the previous two decades. That this trend coincides with the most recent wave of democratization in Latin America and Asia is no
coincidence, and leads to the second major finding of the research. 2. Democracies
have been more resilient against the destabilizing effects of
economic crises than nondemocratic regimes (except for one-party authoritarian regimes). Several authors have found that democracies
weather
economic crises more effectively than authoritarian regimes, including Remmer (1996), who focuses on South America between
1944 and 1994, and Haggard (2000), who focuses on the Asian financial crisis. Pei and Adesnik (2000) again provide the most systematic evidence for this
conclusion. Of the 40 economic crises that occurred in democratic countries, sixteen led to changes of government and only ten resulted in regime change. In
contrast, of the 34 crises that occurred in restricted democracies and military regimes, half led to regime collapse. The one exception to this trend lies with one-
party authoritarian regimes (as opposed to softer authoritarian regimes), which proved to be invulnerable to economic crisis. None of the ten crises observed by Pei
and Adesnik led to a change of government or regime in such countries. Democracy’s
advantage lies in the flexibility that
institutionalized opportunities for political change provide. Regular elections offer citizens a much
simpler means of punishing politicians for the economic crisis than regime change. Citizens can also
distinguish between institutions and politicians. Surveys of citizens of former communist regimes in Eastern Europe during
economic crises have found that they still support democracy because they have negative memories of authoritarian regimes and value
having political choice (Duch 1995). In nondemocratic regimes, regime change may be the only means to obtain a change of policy. Their legitimacy is also much
more likely to be heavily performance-based.
Democracy doesn't prevent wars—history and theory prove

Schwartz and Skinner '01 Thomas and Kiron K (Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University, associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon University);
December 22, 2001; “The Myth of Democratic Peace”; JAI Press; ORBIS
Here we show that neither the historical record nor the theoretical arguments advanced for the purpose
provide any support for democratic pacifism. It does not matter how high or low one sets the bar of
democracy. Set it high enough to avoid major exceptions and you find few, if any, democracies until the
Cold War era. Then there were no wars between them, of course. But that fact is better explained by
NATO and bipolarity than by any shared form of government. Worse, the peace among the high-bar
democracies of that era was part of a larger pacific pattern: peace among all nations of the First and
Second Worlds. As for theoretical arguments, those we have seen rest on implausible premises. Why,
then, is the belief that democracies are mutually pacific so widespread and fervent? The explanation
rests on an old American tendency to slip and slide unawares between two uses of the word
"democracy": as an objective description of regimes, and as a term of praise--a label to distinguish friend
from foe. Because a democracy (term of praise) can do no wrong--or so the thinking seems to run--at
least one side in any war cannot be a democracy (regime description). There lies the source of much
potential mischief in foreign policy. The Historical Problem Democratic pacifism combines an empirical
generalization with a causal attribution: democracies do not fight each other, and that is because they
are democracies. Proponents often present the former as a plain fact. Yet regimes that were
comparatively democratic for their times and regions have fought each other comparatively often--
bearing in mind, for the purpose of comparison, that most states do not fight most states most of the
time. The wars below are either counter-examples to democratic pacifism or borderline cases. Each is
listed with the year it started and those combatants that have some claim to the democratic label.
American Revolutionary War, 1775 (Great Britain vs. U.S.) Wars of French Revolution (democratic
period), esp. 1793, 1795 (France vs. Great Britain) Quasi War, 1798 (U.S. vs. France) War of 1812 (U.S.
vs. Great Britain) Texas War of Independence, 1835 (Texas vs. Mexico) Mexican War, 1846 (U.S. vs.
Mexico) Roman Republic vs. France, 1849 American Civil War, 1861 (Northern Union vs. Southern
Confederacy) Ecuador-Columbia War, 1863 Franco-Prussian War, 1870 War of the Pacific, 1879 (Chile
vs. Peru and Bolivia) Indian Wars, much of nineteenth century (U.S. vs. various Indian nations) Spanish-
American War, 1898 Boer War, 1899 (Great Britain vs. Transvaal and Orange Free State) World War I,
1914 (Germany vs. Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and U.S.) Chaco War, 1932 (Chile vs. Argentina)
Ecuador-Peru, 1941 Palestine War, 1948 (Israel vs. Lebanon) Dominican Invasion, 1967 (U.S. vs.
Dominican Republic) Cyprus Invasion, 1974 (Turkey vs. Cyprus) Ecuador-Peru, 1981 Nagorno-Karabakh,
1989 (Armenia vs. Azerbaijan) Yugoslav Wars, 1991 (Serbia and Bosnian-Serb Republic vs. Croatia and
Bosnia; sometimes Croatia vs. Bosnia) Georgia-Ossetia, 1991 (Georgia vs. South Ossetia) Georgia-
Abkhazia, 1992 (Georgia vs. Abkhazia and allegedly Russia) Moldova-Dnestr Republic, 1992 (Moldova vs.
Dnestr Republic and allegedly Russia) Chechen War of Independence, 1994 (Russia vs. Chechnya)
Ecuador-Peru, 1995 NATO-Yugoslavia, 1999 India-Pakistan, 1999
A2: Growth Solves Disease
Growth causes disease spread and mutation
Hamburg 2008 – MD, FDA Commissioner (Margaret, "Germs go global",
http://healthyamericans.org/assets/files/GermsGoGlobal.pdf)
Globalization, the worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and communications
integration, has impacted public health significantly. Technology and economic interdependence allow
diseases to spread globally at rapid speeds. Experts believe that the increase in international travel and
commerce, including the increasingly global nature of food handling, processing, and sales contribute to
the spread of emerging infectious diseases.47 Increased global trade has also brought more and more
people into contact with zoonosis -diseases that originated in animals before jumping to humans. For
example, in 2003, the monkeypox virus entered the U.S. through imported Gambian giant rats sold in
the nation’s under-regulated exotic pet trade. The rats infected pet prairie dogs, which passed the virus
along to humans.48 International smuggling of birds, brought into the U.S. without undergoing
inspection and/or quarantine, is of particular concern to public health experts who worry that it may be
a pathway for the H5N1 “bird flu” virus to enter the country.
Lower cost and efficient means of international transportation allow people to travel to more remote
places and potential exposure to more infectious diseases. And the close proximity of passengers on
passenger planes, trains, and cruise ships over the course of many hours puts people at risk for higher
levels of exposure. If a person contracts a disease abroad, their symptoms may not emerge until they
return home, having exposed others to the infection during their travels. In addition, planes and ships
can themselves become breeding grounds for infectious diseases.
The 2002-2003 SARS outbreak spread quickly around the globe due to international travel. SARS is
caused by a new strain of coronavirus, the same family of viruses that frequently cause the common
cold. This contagious and sometimes fatal respirator y illness first appeared in China in November 2002.
Within 6 weeks, SARS had spread worldwide, transmitted around the globe by unsuspecting travelers.
According to CDC, 8,098 people were infected and 774 died of the disease.49 SARS represented the first
severe, newly emergent infectious disease of the 21st century.50 It illustrated just how quickly infection
can spread in a highly mobile and interconnected world. SARS was contained and controlled because
public health authorities in the communities most affected mounted a rapid and effective response.
SARS also demonstrated the economic consequences of an emerging infectious disease in closely
interdependent and highly mobile world. Apart from the direct costs of intensive medical care and
disease control interventions, SARS caused widespread social disruption and economic losses. Schools,
hospitals, and some borders were closed and thousands of people were placed in quarantine.
International travel to affected areas fell sharply by 50 70 percent. Hotel occupancy dropped by more
than 60 percent. Businesses, particularly in tourism-related areas, failed. According to a study by
Morgan Stanley, the Asia-Pacific region’s economy lost nearly $40 billion due to SARS.51 The World Bank
found that the East Asian region’s GDP fell by 2 percent in the second quarter of 2003.52 Toronto
experienced a 13.4 percent drop in tourism in 2003.53
Our general growth bad arguments mean the medical tech their ev cites won’t be
implemented properly since all scientific ventures are tainted by the pursuit of profit
Globalization enables epidemic spread—our turn outweighs their turn

BGH 2006 – Board on Global Health is concerned with advancing the health of populations worldwide.
This involves addressing developing country health issues, enhancing the United States role in global
health, and addressing health issues that have implications for U.S. health policy (Workshop Summary,
Forum on Microbial Threats, “The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control:
Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities”)
Globalization is by no means a new phenomenon; transcontinental trade and the movement of people
date back at least 2,000 years, to the era of the ancient Silk Road trade route. The global spread of
infectious disease has followed a parallel course. Indeed, the emergence and spread of infectious
disease are, in a sense, the epitome of globalization. By Roman times, world trade routes had effectively
joined Europe, Asia, and North America into one giant breeding ground for microbes. Millions of Roman
citizens were killed between 165 and 180 AD when smallpox finally reached Rome during the Plague of
Antoninus. Three centuries later, the bubonic plague hit Europe for the first time (542–543 AD) as the
Plague of Justinian. It returned in full force as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when a new
route for overland trade with China provided rapid transit for flea infested furs from plague-ridden
Central Asia. Even before the development of world trade routes, however, human pathogens had
experienced two major bonanzas. First, when people lived as hunter-gatherers, they were constantly on
the move, making it difficult for microbes to keep up with their human hosts. Once people started living
as farmers, they began residing in larger numbers in the same place—and were in daily contact with
their accumulating feces—for extended periods of time. Second, the advent of cities brought even larger
numbers of people together under even worse sanitary conditions. In the Middle Ages, when people
threw human waste out their windows in England, they were said to be “blessing the passerby.”Now,
two millennia later, human pathogens are experiencing yet another bonanza from a new era of
globalization characterized by faster travel over greater distances and worldwide trade. Although some
experts mark the fall of the Berlin Wall as the beginning of this new era, others argue that it is not so
new. Even a hundred years ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the tremendous impact of
increased trade and travel on infectious disease was evident in the emergence of plague epidemics in
numerous port cities around the world. As Echenberg (2002) notes, plague epidemics in colonial African
cities were closely tied to the increased communication, travel, and trade that accompanied the advent
of the steamship. The economic and social impacts of these epidemics were profound. In Johannesburg,
in what is now South Africa, the occurrence of plague led to the relocation of black residents in an effort
to remove what the white colonists believed was the source of the disease. At about the same time, the
influenza pandemic killed many millions of people worldwide. Thus the current era of globalization is
more properly viewed as an intensification of trends that have occurred throughout history. Never
before have so many people moved so quickly throughout the world, whether by choice or force. Never
before has the population density been higher, with more people living in urban areas. Never before
have food, animals, commodities, and capital been transported so freely and quickly across political
boundaries. And never before have pathogens had such ample opportunity to hitch global rides on
airplanes, people, and products.
Extinction genetically impossible and empirically disproven

Posner 2005 (Richard A., Judge U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit, Professor Chicago School of Law,
January 1, 2005, Skeptic, Altadena, CA, Catastrophe: Risk and Response,
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4150331/Catastrophe-the-dozen-most-
significant.html#abstract)
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its
existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been
enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to
destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter
in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their
hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its
spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause
the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people
lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious
disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure:
the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time. That the human race has not yet been destroyed by germs created or made more lethal by modern
science, as distinct from completely natural disease agents such as the flu and AIDS viruses, is even less reassuring. We haven't had these products long enough to
be able to infer survivability from our experience with them. A recent study suggests that as immunity to smallpox declines because people am no longer being
vaccinated against it, monkeypox may evolve into "a successful human pathogen," (9) yet one that vaccination against smallpox would provide at least some
protection against; and even before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox did not wipe out the human race. What is new is the possibility that science,
bypassing evolution, will enable monkeypox to be "juiced up" through gene splicing into a far more lethal pathogen than smallpox ever was.
Lethal diseases burn out fast—Ebola proves

Morse, 4 (Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Helth Preparedness, at the Mailman School of Public
Health of Columbia University, 04
ActionBioscience.org, “Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: A Global Problem", 2004,
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/morse.html, [Zheng])
ActionBioscience.org: How do infectious diseases become pandemic? Morse: A pandemic is a very big
epidemic. It requires a number of things. There are many infections that get introduced from time to
time in the human population and, like Ebola, burn themselves out because they kill too quickly or they
don’t have a way to get from person to person. They are a terrible tragedy, but also, in a sense, it is a
lucky thing that they don’t have an efficient means of transmission. In some cases, we may inadvertently
create pathways to allow transmission of infections that may be poorly transmissible, for example,
spreading HIV through needle sharing, the blood supply, and, of course, initially through the commercial
sex trade. The disease is not easily transmitted, but we provided, without realizing it, means for it to
spread. It is now pandemic in spite of its relatively inefficient transmission. We also get complacent and
do not take steps to prevent its spread.
A2: Growth Solves Medical Tech
Our general growth bad arguments mean the medical tech their ev cites won’t be
implemented properly since all scientific ventures are tainted by the pursuit of profit
A2: Growth Solves Nanotech
This evidence just says advances in the nanotech industry is key, sustainable living
doesn’t preclude this—it just means we live in a world of better resource allocation,
tech can still exist
They can’t access nanotech:
A) Timeframe
Nanowerk 07 (11/14, Nanowerk Spotlight: “Nanotechnology investing - understanding the technology
and accepting the time frames are key.” http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=3294.php)
Probably not much help for an individual investor, who depends on publicly traded stocks for his investment, but an interesting guidance for professional investors
in early stage companies,Dr. James M. Tour has published an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Nanotechnology Law & Business ("Nanotechnology: The
Passive, Active and Hybrid Sides—Gauging the Investment Landscape from the Technology Perspective") where he describes a tool to pigeonhole a specific
nanotechnology in order to gauge its commercialization horizon (0–5 years vs. 15–50 years vs. 7–12 years) based on the nanotechnology type: a passive, active or
hybrid nanotechnology, respectively. Tour is the Chao Professor
of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of
Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University and is also Director of Rice University’s Carbon
Nanotechnology Laboratory in the Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. Tour's basic premise is that investors are (or at least
should be) proficient in assessing the business aspects of prospective investments in technology companies. Often though, especially with nascent and emerging
fields like nanotechnologies, the technology horizon assessment remains illusive. By grouping different nanotechnologies into "passive", "active" and "hybrid"
nanotechnologies he sets out to define categories that might be helpful to get a better grip on assessing a
technology's time horizon with regard to commercialization. Some of his comments might also somewhat deflate the balloons of
proponents of revolutionary, molecular manufacturing type nanotechnology. While he doesn't say it won't happen, he adds several decades to the
more optimistic forecasts that are out there. "The truly exciting developments in nanotechnology, the
ones that are science fiction-like in vision, are often 30-50 years away, or even 100 years out, so my suggestion
is to invest elsewhere unless you have a dynasty-like horizon and the capital to sustain the vision at each round throughout the century" Tour tells
Nanowerk. "Our research in the area of passive nanotechnology has shown that the simple addition of a nanomaterial to a host matrix can have a profound
effect on the behavior of the overall composite structure, and applications are foreseeable in the near-term. The active nanotechnological
components, which require far greater control, afford exciting laboratory demonstrations but their
utility is generally far off. The hybrid systems, that enhance known complex platforms, are intermediate in horizon."
Other technology proves—the time frame is decades

Nanotechbuzz 06 (1/25, “Nanotechnology funding and the $18 billion pair of pants.”
http://www.nanotechbuzz.com/50226711/nanotechnology_funding_and_the_18_billion_pair_of_pants
.php)
Their conclusions are generating a buzz in the nanotech community, especially among potential
investors. But what the headlines don't address is the extremely long lag time between government
funding of a university lab project and the commercialization of resulting products. The report covers
less than ten years, and if you look at the development of any large-scale technology (electronics,
computers, wireless, etc.) it' s not uncommon to find a much longer lag between initial investment in
the lab and commercialization in the marketplace.
B) Shoddy implementation
Ajayan 06 (P.M., Henri Burlage Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 12/15.
Interviewed by Yogesh K Upadhyaya. “'Nanotech holds key to the future'.”
http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/dec/15inter.htm)
What are the obstacles in applying the technology for commercial use? There is always going to be a lag time between research
and development of new technologies. Almost all big technologies (e.g. silicon electronics, lasers) have gone through this period of incubation
before blossoming into commercial products. What differs here is that nanotechnology has a much broader profile and the lead
time could vary depending on what specific area we are targeting with nanotech. This will also dictate
the factors limiting the use of nanotech. Manufacturing, cost, integration issues, and competing
technologies could all be limiting factors to the fast implementation of nanotech in commercial products. In some
cases, science and integration issues are being worked out for nanoscale components (e.g. performance metrics for use of carbon nanotubes as interconnects
replacing copper or interfacial engineering needed to produce high strength nanotube polymer composites). Engineering and assembly of nanostructured building
blocks to make mesoscale architectures that can be integrated into practical use is another challenge. More
research will be needed to
address such issues. In some cases, manufacturing and costs are the main impediments and scale up of
processes to obtain bulk amounts of material remain the bottleneck. For example, large scale manufacturing
of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still challenging even after more than a decade of research and
development in this area.
C) Manufacturing shortfalls
John P. Mello Jr.; 3-1-05; “Breakthrough in Solar Power Nanotech?” TechNewsWorld
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40971.html
The use of nanotechnology allows very thin solar panels to be created. "They'll be very lightweight, and
they'll be able to mass print them onto rolls like newspaper and then just roll it out on rooftops," Fried
explained. The big challenge for the makers of these products, though, will be manufacturing, according
to ABI'sOzbek. "What's imperative is developing a cost efficient manufacturing process, which
companies such as Nanosolar need to provide," he told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "A recent defense
contract will provide a significant opportunity to Nanosolar to develop and showcase its technology, but
it will be competing against other start up companies such as Konarka and Nanosys and large companies
such as GE in developing printable cells," he added.
A2: Growth Solves Peak Oil
De dev is key to solve peak oil
Trainer 97 – Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (The death of the oil economy. Earth Island
Journal, 10410406, Spring97, Vol. 12, Issue 2)
A new report on world oil resources, World Oil Supply 1930-2050 (Campbell and Laherre, Petroconsultants Pry. Ltd., 1995), concludes that
the planet's oil supplies will be exhausted much sooner than previously thought. The report, written for oil industry
insiders and priced at $32,000 per copy, con-dudes that world oil production and supply probably will peak as soon as the year 2000 and will decline to half the peak
level by 2025. Large and permanent increases in oil prices are predicted after the year 2000. Industry experts assumed in the past that oil resources would last 50
years, based on calculations that simply divided estimated reserves by the present annual use. But this method of prediction failed to account for an increase in
If everyone on Earth were to consume petroleum at the per capita rate of industrialized
Third World oil use.
countries, it would require a five-fold increase in current oil production to meet the demand. If, by 2060,
the world's population reaches the expected 11 billion mark and all were to consume as much energy as the average Australian does now, annual worldwide oil
production would need to be increased about 30 times. It seems that the oil companies and oil exporting countries have been fibbing. It is in their interest to
state that remaining resources are in good shape, because their business agreements limit them to pumping and selling a proportion of their remaining resources.
In fact, the rate of oil discovery is falling sharply. The world consumes 23 billion barrels a year, but the oil industry finds only 7 billion barrels a year. Economists
argue that scarcity will result in price increases, making it more profitable to access poorer deposits. That seems plausible only if one thinks only about dollar costs.
The fact is, as an oil field ages, increasing amounts of energy must be exerted to pump the oil out. The cost of this energy must be subtracted from the total value of
the energy in the oil retrieved. According to a 1992 study, these two curves actually will intersect around the year 2005. Beyond that point, the energy required to
find and extract a barrel of oil will exceed the energy contained in the barrel. There is reason to believe that the oil industry is well aware of oil field depletion. No
new supertankers have been built for 20 years, while interest in squeezing oil from shale deposits seems to be growing. What, then, is the solution to our acute
Natural gas resources are about as limited as petroleum, and gas use recently has been growing at
energy problem? There isn't one.
Relying on nuclear energy to provide 11 billion people with First World living
a rate of 9 percent per year.
standards would require a system of 250,000 giant breeder reactors using around 1 million tons of plutonium. The
tremendous amount of energy necessary to build fusion reactors (if they ever could work on a commercial scale) would
guarantee a far worse greenhouse problem than what we face already. Even then, fusion power could supply perhaps only 2030 years of
energy for an affluent 11 billion people. There is no question that we should convert to renewable energy sources as quickly as possible, but even "clean" energy is
There is not enough plant matter to fuel the
not capable of bringing the Western world's energy-intense way of life to all people.
world's transport fleet. To supply 11 billion people with the number of cars used by people in rich countries would demand 10 times as much fuel as
used today. Because the wind does not blow all the time, wind-energy never will be able to contribute more than 5-30 percent of the world's present electricity
demand. And a popular proposal to meet Northern Europe's winter energy demands by utilizing solar collectors in the Sahara desert fails to acknowledge that
A person living in a First World city requires the
about 95 percent of the collected energy would be lost in transmission and conversion.
equivalent of about 4.5 hectares (11.1 acres) of productive land for food, water, housing and goods (as well as
carbon sinks to soak up the carbon dioxide produced by their energy use). Applying this "ecological footprint" standard to Australia shows that Sydney needs an
area of productive land 35 times as big as the city to sustain itself. For
11 billion people to live like people in Sydney, we'd need
about 50 billion hectares (124 billion acres) of productive land -- around six times all the productive land on the planet. By the
year 2060, if the world maintained a mere 3 percent annual economic growth rate and all the world's people were to benefit equally, world economic output would
have to increase to 80 times its current rate. These limits-to-growth themes have been debated in academic circles for more than 30 years, but they almost never
We must almost entirely scrap the prevailing model of a competitive, growth economy
appear in the mass media.
and adopt materially simple economies that stress cooperation and participatory control. Above all, we must move to a
steady-state or zero-growth economy. There is now a global ecovillage movement pioneering the development of new settlements
that are required for sustainability. Hopefully, the coming "mother of all oil shocks" finally will get all this
on the public agenda.
A2: Growth Solves Poverty
A localized economy would eliminate unemployment, poverty, and inequality
Trainer 9 (Ted, Faculty of Arts, University of N.S.W., “WE MUST MOVE TO THE SIMPLER WAY:
AN OUTLINE OF THE GLOBAL SITUATION, THE SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY,
AND THE TRANSITION TO IT.”, April 29, http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/TSWmain.html)
There is no chance of making these changes if we retain the present economic system. The fundamental
concern in a satisfactory economy would simply be to apply the available productive capacity to
producing what all people need for a good life, with as little bother, resource use, work and waste as
possible. Most obviously there would have to be far less production and consumption going on, and there
would have to be no growth. Market forces and the profit motive might have a place in an acceptable
alternative economy, but they cannot be allowed to continue as major determinants of economic affairs.
The basic economic priorities must be decided according to what is socially desirable (democratically
decided, mostly at the local level via participatory local assemblies, not dictated by huge and distant state
bureaucracies -- what we do not want is centralised, bureaucratic, authoritarian, big-state "socialism").
However, much of the economy might remain as a (carefully monitored) form of private enterprise
carried on by small firms, households and cooperatives, so long as their goals were not profit
maximisation and growth. The goals of enterprises would be to provide their owners and workers with
satisfying livelihoods, and to provide things the town needs. Market forces might operate within regulated
sectors. For example there could be local market days enabling individuals and families to sell small
amounts of garden and craft produce. The new economy must be mostly made up of many small scale,
local economies, so that most of the basic items we need are produced close to where we live, from local
soils, forests and resources, by local skill and labour. Things like fridges and stoves would come from
regional factories a little further away. Very few items, including steel, would be moved long distances,
and very little would be transported from overseas. (Perhaps items such as computers and high-tech
medical equipment.) Much of the new local economy would not involve money. Many goods and
services would come “free” from the commons and cooperatives run by our voluntary committees and
working bees, and would come to us via barter and the giving away of surpluses. However we would ha
e town banks and business incubators to enable us to set up the ventures we need, via zero interest loans
and grants. When we eliminate the huge amount of unnecessary production, and shift much of the
remainder to backyards and local small business and cooperatives and into the non-cash sector of the
economy, most of us will need to go to work for money in an office or a mass production factory only 1
or 2 days a week. In other words it will become possible to live well on a very low cash income, and
therefore to work at a relaxed pace, because we will only want to produce what is sufficient. We could
spend the other 5 or 6 days working/playing around the neighbourhood doing many varied and interesting
and useful things everyday. Unemployment and poverty could easily be eliminated. (There are none in
the Israeli Kibbutz settlements). We would have neighbourhood work coordination committees who
would make sure that all who wanted work had a share of the work that needed doing. Far less work
would need to be done than at present. (In consumer society we probably work three times too hard!)
We would not tolerate anyone being left without a livelihood; a worthwhile contribution. There would be
many co-operatives, just groups of people with common needs, e.g., child-minding, house building, or
bee keeping, who come together to share ideas, labour and good will to develop and run things. In
general co-ops are far more efficient and productive than private firms. The town would assist co-
operatives to provide necessary goods, using working bee labour and interest-free loans.
Growth causes poverty and massive resource disparities

Rich countries are taking most of the world’s resource production. Their per capita resource consumption is about 20 times the average of the poorest half of the
world’s people. That they are consuming far more than their fair share is evident in many measures; for example, to provide a North American lifestyle requires
approximately 12 ha of productive land, but the per capital average amount of productive land on the planet is only 1.2 ha. The
rich squander
resources on affluent living standards and frivolous luxuries while billions live in poverty. Many of these resources
are drawn from the Third World. Much of the productive capacity of the Third World has been allocated to the production of commodities and manufactured goods
for the benefit of the corporations and banks in the rich countries, who own the plantations and factories, and of the people who shop in rich world supermarkets.
Very little of the benefit goes to the poor majority in the Third World. Shirt makers in Bangladesh are paid 15 cents an hour.2 In other
words, the development that has taken place is almost totally inappropriate to the needs of most Third World people. It has been development in
the interests of the rich. The crucial point about ‘development’ is to do with options foregone. It is easy to imagine forms of development that are far
more likely to meet the needs of people, their society and their ecosystems but these are prohibited by conventional/ capitalist development. Needs would
be most effectively met if people were able to apply their available resources of land, forest, fisheries, labour, skill and
capital to the production of basic items such as food and shelter. This is precisely what normal
conventional /capitalist development prevents, because it ensures that the available resources and the
productive capacity are drawn into the most profitable ventures, which means mostly into producing
relatively luxurious items for export to richer people. Compare the capacity of a worker to feed his family on the 15 cents an hour wage earned in a
shirt factory, spent on food imported from a rich country, with the approximately four hours per week
required by a home gardener to produce all the vegetables a family requires.3 The global economy is therefore an
imperial system, one in which there is a net flow of resources and wealth from the poor to the rich and the resources the poor majority of people once had have
been taken from them and now produce mostly for the benefit of the rich few. These
unjust distributions and the inappropriate
development are primarily due to the market mechanism. Economic activity and especially development
are not determined by reference to the needs of humans, societies and ecosystems. In the present
global economy they are determined mostly by market forces. The inevitable result is that the rich get
almost all of the valuable resources (because they can pay most for them) and that almost all of the
development that takes place is development of whatever rich people want (because that is most
profitable, i.e. will return most on invested capital). It is in other words a capitalist economic system and
such a system ensures that the few who own most of the capital (most is now owned by about 1% of the
world’s people) will only invest it in ventures that are most likely to maximise profits, and therefore in
ventures which produce for those people with most ‘effective demand’, i.e. rich people. No other forms
of development are undertaken, hence much of the productive capacity of Tuvalu or Haiti lies idle
because people with capital can make more money investing somewhere else. Thus conventional
development is only the kind of development that results when what is developed is left to be
determined by whatever will most enrich those few with capital competing in a market situation. The
inevitable result is development in the interests of the rich, i.e. those with the capital to invest and those
with most purchasing power. The global economy now works well for perhaps less than 10% of the
world’s people, i.e. the upper 40% of the people in rich counties, plus the tiny Third World elites.
Conventional development is, in other words, a form of plunder. It takes most of the world’s wealth,
especially its productive capacity and allocates it to the rich few, and it takes much of this from billions
of people who are so seriously deprived that 1200 million people are malnourished and tens of
thousands die every day. Again the core point is that there are far better options; it is possible to
imagine other forms of development in which the resources and the productive capacity of Third World
people are fully devoted to production by the people of the things they most urgently need.
Growth drives the rich/poor gap which guarantees collapse and colossal suffering
Lewis 2000 – PhD, University of Colorado, quoting UN figures (Chris, “The paradox of global
development and the necessary collapse of global industrial civilization”, http://www.cross-
x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)
By creating the specter of vast, untold wealth and freedom in the First World and massive, desperate
poverty and despair in the Third World, global development is creating the contradictions that will
undermine global industrial civilization. On the one hand, global economic integration, which is known
as globalization, is creating spectacular wealth and progress for the twenty percent who live in the
developed world, but, on the other hand, it is creating massive poverty and social unrest for the eighty
percent who live in the underdeveloped world.(Barnet and Cavanagh 1994) Between 1960 and 2000,
rather than shrinking, the income gap between the rich and the poor actually grew. According to the
1999 UN Human Development Report, in 1960, the richest 20 percent of the world earned 30 times as
much income as the poorest 20 percent, 60 times as much income in 1990, and 74 times as much
income by 1997. This UN report also reported that the richest 20 percent of the world consumes 86
percent of the World Gross Domestic Product, the middle 60 percent consume just 13 percent, and the
poorest 20 percent consume just 1 percent of the world GDP. In 2000, according to the World Bank, a
sixth of the world’s people produced 78 percent of the world’s goods and services and received 78
percent of the world’s income, while three-fifths of the world’s people in the poorest 61 countries
receive 6 percent of the world’s income. At the United Nations World Summit for Social Development in
March 1995, James Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, noting that the
income gap between the rich and poor had doubled over the last 30 years, said: "This widening gulf
breeds despair and instability. It imperils our world."(Crossette 1995:A6) Despite this growing inequality
between the developed and the developing worlds, aid to developing nations has been shrinking and
will continue to do so. Industrial nations and the major international lending institutions are asking
developing nations to invest more of their own money to meet basic needs. (Crossette 1995:A6) But
how can they afford to do this given the increasing burden of debt-servicing? By 1999 the total external
debt of developing countries was 2.5 trillion. In order to pay off that debt, developing countries paid
almost $300 billion in debtservice payments in 1999. The “Jubilee 2000 Coalition” called on First World
countries and banks to cancel the unpayable debts of the world’s poorest countries. Instead of
becoming developed, some Third World leaders charged that they were becoming even poorer, and
even more dependent on shrinking foreign aid. (Escobar 1995) Indeed, most people in the world are
living on the margins of development. Threequarters of the world's population lives in the 130 poorer
countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and the majority of the population do not have either
steady jobs or secure income.(Barnet and Cavanagh 1994:179) In Global Dreams, Richard Barnet and
John Cavanagh (1995:22) argue that there is a growing struggle between "the forces of globalization and
the territorially based forces of local survival seeking to preserve and to redefine community." Barnet
and Cavanagh (1995: 429) conclude that "local citizens' movements and alternative institutions are
springing up all over the world to meet basic economic needs to preserve local traditions, religious life,
cultural life, biological species, and other treasures of the natural world, and to struggle for human
dignity." This increasing conflict between the demands of global industrial civilization and diverse
peoples and cultures to protect their way of life and local autonomy is further evidence that the modern
industrial world is collapsing.
Wealth disparity has increased MASSIVELY since the boom of first world growth,
correlation and history disprove the argument
Douthwaite 97 economist employed by Jamaica and Montserrat (Richard “Good Growth Bad Growth”
http://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM27/Growth.html)
The gap between rich and poor has widened in the so-called developing countries as well. In Thailand,
for example, where, in the two decades before the 1997 crash, very rapid growth had taken place, the
ratio of share of income of the richest 10 per cent to the poorest 10 per cent rose from 17 times to 38
times. The gap between rich and poor countries is growing too. During the past three decades, the
poorest 20 per cent of countries have seen their share of global income decline from 2.3 per cent to 1.4
per cent. As a result, the ratio of the income of the richest 20 per cent of countries to the poorest 20 per
cent has more than doubled. It rose from 30:1 to 61:1 . In more than a hundred countries, the average
income per person in 1995 was lower than it had been fifteen years previously, according to the 1996
Human Development Report. More than a quarter of humanity 1.6 billion people were worse off despite
the fact that between 1960 and 1993, total global income had increased six-fold. Three incontestable
conclusions can be drawn from all this. The first is that the growth process is making life worse for a
significant proportion of the world's population and no better for all but a tiny minority of the rest. The
second is that those who argue that existence of widespread poverty makes growth necessary are either
blissfully ignorant of what the process is currently doing or are cynically manipulating us for their own
selfish ends. A fairer distribution of wealth and income would be a far more effective way of dealing
with poverty than growth in its present form. And the third conclusion? That opposing the present
pattern of growth by standing firm against the erosion of income levels, social structures and the
environment that globalisation is bringing about is, quite literally, a matter of life and death for millions
of people
A2: Growth Solves Resource Wars
Growth will lead to global resource wars
These multiples underline the magnitude of the overshoot. Sustainability will require enormous reductions in the volume of
rich world production and consumption. Yet its supreme goal is economic growth, i.e. to increase the levels of production and consumption
and GDP, constantly, rapidly and without any limit. That the absurdity of this is never recognised in conventional economic and political circles defies
understanding.
If we in rich countries average 3% economic growth to 2070 and by then all the world’s people had risen to the
‘living standards’ we would have by then, the
total world economic output would be 60 times as great as the present
grossly unsustainable level. If this limits-to-growth analysis is at all valid, the implications for the problem of global peace
and conflict and security are clear and savage. If we all remain determined to increase our living
standards, our level of production and consumption, in a world where resources are already scarce, where
only a few have affluent living standards but another 8 billion will be wanting them too, and which we, the rich, are determined to get richer without any limit,
then nothing is more guaranteed than that there will be increasing levels of conflict and violence. To put it another
way, if we insist on remaining affluent we will need to remain heavily armed. Increased conflict in at least the following
categories can be expected. First, the present conflict over resources between the rich elites and the poor majority in the Third World must increase, for example, as
‘development’ under globalisation takes more land, water and forests into export markets. Second, there are conflicts between the Third World and the rich world,
the major recent examples being the war between the US and Iraq over control of oil. Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US intervened, accompanied by much high-
sounding rhetoric (having found nothing unacceptable about Israel’s invasions of Lebanon or the Indonesian invasion of East Timor). As has often been noted, had
Kuwait been one of the world’s leading exporters of broccoli, rather than oil, it is doubtful whether the US would have been so eager to come to its defence. At the
time of writing, the US is at war in Central Asia over ‘terrorism’. Few would doubt that a ‘collateral’ outcome will be the establishment of regimes that will give the
West access to the oil wealth of Central Asia. Following are some references to the connection many have recognised between rich world affluence and conflict.
General M.D. Taylor, US Army retired argued ‘... US military priorities just be shifted towards insuring a steady flow of resources from the Third World’. Taylor
referred to ‘… fierce competition among industrial powers for the same raw materials markets sought by the United States’ and ‘… growing hostility displayed by
have-not nations towards their affluent counterparts’.62 ‘Struggles
are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and
poor nations over their share of the world product; within the industrial world over their share of industrial resources and markets’.63
‘That more than half of the people on this planet are poorly nourished while a small percentage live in historically unparalleled luxury is a sure recipe for continued
and even escalating international conflict.’64 The
oil embargo placed on the US by OPEC in the early 1970s prompted the
US to make it clear that it was prepared to go to war in order to secure supplies. ‘President Carter last week issued a
clear warning that any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf would lead to war.’ It would ‘… be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United
States’.65 ‘The US is ready to take military action if Russia threatens vital American interests in the Persian Gulf, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Brown, said
yesterday.’66 Klare’s recent book Resource Wars discusses this theme in detail, stressing the coming significance of water as a source of international conflict.
‘Global demand for many key materials is growing at an unsustainable rate. … the incidence of conflict
over vital materials is sure to grow. … The wars of the future will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods. …
resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the global security
environment.’67 Much of the rich world’s participation in the conflicts taking place throughout the world is driven by the determination to back a faction
that will then look favourably on Western interests. In a report entitled, ‘The rich prize that is Shaba’, Breeze begins, ‘Increasing rivalry over a share-out between
France and Belgium of the mineral riches of Shaba Province lies behind the joint Franco– Belgian paratroop airlift to Zaire. … These mineral riches make the province
a valuable prize and help explain the West’s extended diplomatic courtship …’68 Then
there is potential conflict between the rich
nations who are after all the ones most dependent on securing large quantities of resources. ‘The resource and
energy intensive modes of production employed in nearly all industries necessitate continuing armed coercion and competition to secure raw materials.’69
‘Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and poor nations over their share of the world product, within the industrial world over their share of
industrial resources and markets …’70
A2: Growth Solves Terror
Growth causes terrorism
Cronin 2003 – senior associate at the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War (Audrey,
International Security, 27.3, "Behind the curve: globalization and international terrorism",
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/257/behind_the_curve.html, WEA)
The objectives of international terrorism have also changed as a result of globalization. Foreign
intrusions and growing awareness of shrinking global space have created incentives to use the ideal
asymmetrical weapon, terrorism, for more ambitious purposes. The political incentives to attack major
targets such as the United States with powerful weapons have greatly increased. The perceived
corruption of indigenous customs, religions, languages, economies, and so on are blamed on an
international system often unconsciously molded by American behavior. The accompanying distortions
in local communities as a result of exposure to the global marketplace of goods and ideas are
increasingly blamed on U.S.- sponsored modernization and those who support it. The advancement of
technology, however, is not the driving force behind the terrorist threat to the United States and its
allies, despite what some have assumed. Instead, at the heart of this threat are frustrated populations
and international movements that are increasingly inclined to lash out against U.S.-led globalization. As
Christopher Coker observes, globalization is reducing tendencies toward instrumental violence (i.e.,
violence between states and even between communities), but it is enhancing incentives for expressive
violence (or violence that is ritualistic, symbolic, and communicative). The new international terrorism is
[End Page 51] increasingly engendered by a need to assert identity or meaning against forces of
homogeneity, especially on the part of cultures that are threatened by, or left behind by, the secular
future that Western-led globalization brings. According to a report recently published by the United
Nations Development Programme, the region of greatest deficit in measures of human development—
the Arab world—is also the heart of the most threatening religiously inspired terrorism. Much more
work needs to be done on the significance of this correlation, but increasingly sources of political
discontent are arising from disenfranchised areas in the Arab world that feel left behind by the promise
of globalization and its assurances of broader freedom, prosperity, and access to knowledge. The results
are dashed expectations, heightened resentment of the perceived U.S.-led hegemonic system, and a
shift of focus away from more proximate targets within the region. Of course, the motivations behind
this threat should not be oversimplified: Anti-American terrorism is spurred in part by a desire to change
U.S. policy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions as well as by growing antipathy in the developing
world vis-à-vis the forces of globalization. It is also crucial to distinguish between the motivations of
leaders such as Osama bin Laden and their followers. The former seem to be more driven by calculated
strategic decisions to shift the locus of attack away from repressive indigenous governments to the more
attractive and media-rich target of the United States. The latter appear to be more driven by religious
concepts cleverly distorted to arouse anger and passion in societies full of pent-up frustration. To some
degree, terrorism is directed against the United States because of its engagement and policies in various
regions. Anti-Americanism is closely related to antiglobalization, because (intentionally or not) the
primary driver of the powerful forces resulting in globalization is the United States. Analyzing terrorism
as something separate from globalization is misleading and potentially dangerous. Indeed globalization
and terrorism are intricately intertwined forces characterizing international security in the twenty-first
century. The main question is whether terrorism will succeed in disrupting the [End Page 52] promise of
improved livelihoods for millions of people on Earth. Globalization is not an inevitable, linear
development, and it can be disrupted by such unconventional means as international terrorism.
Conversely, modern international terrorism is especially dangerous because of the power that it
potentially derives from globalization—whether through access to CBNR weapons, global media
outreach, or a diverse network of financial and information resources
Growth is root cause of terrorism

The crucial role of oppression within the empire is made clear in the following quotes. To maintain its levels of production and
consumption … the US must be assured of getting increasing amounts of the resources of poor
countries. … This in turn requires strong support of unpopular and dictatorial regimes which maintain
political and police oppression while serving American interests, to the detriment of their own poor majorities. If on the other hand Third World
people controlled their own political economies … they could then use more of their resources themselves … much of the land now used to grow export cash crops
… would be used to feed their own hungry people for example.58 It
is in the economic interests of the American corporations who
have investments in these countries to maintain this social structure (whereby poor masses are
oppressed and exploited by local elites). It is to keep these elites in power that the United States has … provide d them with the necessary
military equipment, the finance and training .59 The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America … will not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums
unless they are terribly afraid … the
rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great many US companies and
individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns …60 With
the explosion of neoliberalism onto the global scene since the
1970s, the need for physical force to maintain the empire has been greatly reduced. Now the new rules of the global
economy do the job very effectively. As has been explained, the Structural Adjustment Packages and the laws being introduced to govern trade, investment and
provision of services force all countries to facilitate uncontested access for rich world corporations to almost all resources, regions and markets. Gunboats are no
longer so necessary and less often do nations need to be conquered or ruled via a client regime. If a few men in suits soon finally establish the neoliberal agenda as
the only set of rules governing the world economy no nation will be able to resist and if that exclusive agenda continues to be taught to economics students no one
will want to. To summarise, the
global economy is grotesquely unjust. A few have high material living standards
primarily because of the economic arrangements that deliver most of the world’s wealth to them and
seriously deprive billions of people. If access to the world’s resources was allocated more justly people in rich countries could not have
anywhere near the affluent lifestyles they do have. We could not be so rich if we did not operate an empire and maintaining our empire involves a great deal of
grabbing, repression and terror. It should not need to be said that none of this is to justify the actions of 11 September. It is about understanding why things like
that happen. In my view ‘terrorist ’ actions by oppressed people are neither morally nor strategically desirable; they are in general not even likely to contribute to
desirable outcomes for those people. Although in certain situations violence may be the only means to eliminate oppression, I do not see it as having a central role
in the liberation of the Third World from rich world domination. The transition strategy I advocate is necessarily non-violent (i.e. it cannot succeed if it involves
violence), and indeed is subject to attack from the Left for its deliberate avoidance of confrontation .61 The broader context; peace vs affluence There is little
evidence on the precise motivation behind the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center. It is not
possible to say whether they derived primarily from fundamentalist religious concerns or from awareness of global economic injustice and
the long history of appalling treatment of Islamic peoples by the West. There is at least some indication that the former
elements are central in bin Laden’s thinking. However even if those attacks were not responses to the imperial situation the point of the foregoing discussion is
that they
are the sorts of acts which must be expected given the existence, nature and functioning of the
empire. If we are determined to maintain, let alone increase the rich world’s high material ‘living standards ’ and its commitment to ever-increasing levels of
economic turnover then we must maintain the empire. We cannot have these living standards unless we get much more than our fair share of the world’s resource
wealth. Therefore these
living standards are incompatible with global economic justice or with enabling all
Third World people to use their own resources to meet their own needs. It is a zero growth game; if all that land growing our export crops
was diverted to growing basic foods for Third World people we would get far less coffee and pork. If more of their labour was to go into producing things they need
we would get fewer cheap shirts and TV sets. There are no where near enough resources for all people to rise to our affluence so if we are going to maintain our
levels of material consumption they will have to go on getting a miniscule share and go on seeing most of their resources flow to us.
Growth necessitates domination that causes terrorism—even if their turns are true,
they don’t assume the destructive US empire that globalization causes
Again, there is an extensive literature documenting these and many other cases.43 Herman and O’Sullivan present a table showing that in recent decades the
overwhelming majority of terrorist actions, measured by death tolls, have been carried out by Western states. ‘State
terror has been immense, and the West and it’s clients have been the major agents.’44 Any serious student of international relations or US foreign policy will be
clearly aware of the general scope and significance of the empire that rich countries operate, and of the human rights violations, the violence and injustice this
involves. Rich
world ‘living standards’, corporate prosperity, comfort and security could not be sustained at anywhere near current levels
without this empire, nor without the oppression, violence and military activity that keep in place conventional
investment, trade and development policies.
It should therefore be not in the least surprising that several hundred million people more or less hate the rich Western nations. This
is the context in
which events like those of 11 September must be understood. It is surprising that the huge and chronic injustice, plunder,
repression and indifference evident in the global economic system has not generated much greater hostile reaction from the Third
World, and more eagerness to hit back with violence. This is partly explained by the fact that it is in the interests of Third World rulers to acquiesce in conventional
development strategies.
The US position
Given the foregoing documentation it hardly needs to be added that in the modern era the USA is by far the greatest practitioner of terrorism in the world. Again
space permits no more than a brief selection from the many summary statements to this effect.
‘TheUS has rained death and destruction on more people in more regions of the globe than any other nation in the period since the Second World War ... it
has employed its military forces in other countries over 70 times since 1945, not counting innumerable instances of
counter insurgency operations by the CIA.’45 ‘... the US state has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself.’46 The
US ‘... is the greatest source of terror on earth’.47
‘The greatest source of terrorism48 is the US itself and some of the Latin American countries.’49
‘... the US is itself a leading terrorist state.’50 ‘There are many terrorist states, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international
terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame.’51
‘We are the target of terrorists because in much of the world our government stands for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation. ... We
are the
target of terrorists because we are hated. ... And we are hated because our governments have done
hateful things. ... Time after time we have ousted popular leaders who wanted the riches of the land to be shared by the people who worked it. ... We are
hated because our government denies (democracy, freedom, human rights) to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational
corporations.’52
‘In 1998 Amnesty International released a report that made it clear that the US was ‘at least as responsible for extreme violation of human rights around the globe
as—including the promotion of torture and terrorism and state violence—as any government or organisation in the world.’53
‘From any objective standpoint, Israel and the United States more frequently rely on terrorism, and in forms that inflict far greater quantums of suffering on their
victims than do their opponents.’54
That this has been clearly understood for decades by critical students of American Foreign Policy is evident in the following quotes from the late 1970s and early
1980s. ‘... the US and its allies have armed the elites of the Third World to the teeth, and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training. ... Hideous
torture has become standard practice in US client fascist states. ... Much of the electronic and other torture gear, is US supplied and great numbers of ...
interrogators are US trained ...’.55
“Many of the world’s most brutal dictatorships “... are in place precisely because they serve US interests in a joint venture with local torturers at the expense of
their majorities”.’56
After documenting supply of aid to 23 countries guilty of ‘human rights abuses’, Trosan and Yates say, ‘Without US help
they would be hard pressed to contain the fury of their oppressed citizens and US businesses would find it difficult to flourish’.
Whenever their people have rebelled and tried to seize power, thereby threatening foreign investments, the USA has on every occasion actively supported
government repression and terror, or has promoted coups to overthrow popular governments.57
A2: Growth Solves Space
Growth isn’t key—our alternate society isn’t necessarily backwards, we just question
excessive consumption
Since colonies would rely on earth we necessarily link turn this

Globus 2 (Dr. Ruth Globus, NASA Ames Research Center. “Space Settlements: A Design Study” Chapter 3
- Human Needs In Space.
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/75SummerStudy/Chapt3.html)
For communities of 10,000 people there is little hope of achieving self-sufficiency as measured by lack or
absence of trade. There have been studies of sociology, economics, and geography which indicate the degree to which various specialities can be
sustained. Colin Clark, one of the world's distinguished students of economic organizations, reports (ref. 45) that cities need populations of 100,000 to 200,000 in
order to provide "an adequate range of commercial services....". Moreover, populations
of 200,000 to 500,000 are required to
support broadly-based manufacturing activity. A small settlement in space, of less than 100,000 people,
would necessarily require continuing support from Earth. There is little possibility that such a settlement
can be sustained without a steady and sizable movement of materials and information between Earth
and the colony. Because of high demands on material productivity, ordinary business services such as banking, insurance,
bookkeeping, inventory control, and purchasing would very likely remain on Earth. Management of the
transportation system, and sales and delivery of products would be Earth based. The highly
technological and specialized services of medicine, higher education and even of those branches of
science and engineering not used in the day-to-day life of the colony would come from Earth. A community of
10,000 cannot conceivably support a large research university or a large medical center. Communities of this size on Earth do not encompass much social and
cultural variety, and their major productive activities are usually limited in kind and number. To point up the lack of diversity that may reasonably be expected,
Economies of scale for
consider how many and what variety of religious organizations and sects might be expected in a space colony of size 10,000.
communities suggest an optimal size well above that of the early settlement in space.
No political will
BBC 7 (“Will we ever send humans to Mars?” 10-5-07.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7021303.stm)
A manned mission to Mars would probably use a so-called split-mission architecture, for which cargo is
sent first and astronauts are sent later on a faster spacecraft. This would reduce fuel costs and the
journey time. Onboard systems that recycle air and water could cut down on "storables" that would
need to be taken on the journey. Scientists are also looking at whether a Mars crew could grow some of
their own food. Spacecraft with nuclear propulsion. Image: Nasa. Nasa has carried out studies on
nuclear propulsion systems CO2 could even be collected from the Martian atmosphere and broken
down to make methane (CH4) - a potential rocket propellant for the return journey. But much more
work needs to be done before the dream of humans setting foot on another planet can be realised.
And, perhaps, the strong incentive required for governments to commit resources is still lacking. "I've
been inspired by the Apollo missions since I was a child. So for me, the very idea of a person going to
Mars - the exploration part of this - is enough," says Scott Hovland. "But then, I'm not the person paying
for it."
No spacecol
Coates 2009 – former adjunct professor at George Washington University, President of the Kanawha
Institute for the Study of the Future and was President of the International Association for Impact
Assessment and was President of the Association for Science, Technology and Innovation, M.S., Hon D.,
FWAAS, FAAAS, (Joseph F., Futures 41, 694-705, "Risks and threats to civilization, humankind, and the
earth”, ScienceDirect, WEA)
Some prominent scientists as well as numerous science fiction writers have frequently written about an escape of humankind from our planet to
another planet [2]. This is highly unlikely for two reasons. Under the assumption that there is no special or unimaginable scientific discovery made between
now and the time we would like to depart, departing the Earth for survival is not in the cards. First is the question of how many people are
necessary to start a new colony or to keep a colony going. If we assume two thousand or more, we get a
sense of the needs in launching such an interstellar venture. If we just look at interstellar travel in our own galaxy, we are
confronted with the multi-generational time that it would take. Stars tend to be close from one point of view, twinkling in the
sky, but from the point of view of travel, far distant. It may well take 200–250 years at eight-tenths the speed of light to reach a sun-like star with the appropriate
size and satellites similar to Earth, Venus or Mars. If the crew had to travel for 250 years, it would imply a great stockpile of embryos ready to be
grown into humans. Technology is not quite ready yet with the artificial womb, but that, by no means, is something to overlook. Another possibility would be to
reproduce in the usual way, during travel, keeping in mind that one would want to have the travelers as much like each other at the end as at the beginning of the
flight. Genetic tools would come into play in selecting who mates with whom or what egg fits the then current gap. Having gotten to a target, the question then
confronting the interstellar travelers is what to do and how to do it. No matter what the resources are, unless it is an already lush
planet like the Earth—lush with life, lush with forms of life—the travelers may have to start like pioneers, from
scratch. That raises the question of what raw materials, machinery, devices, and training in use of those devices
should be stored on board. It is getting to be a mighty big space craft. The notion of escaping to another world by a flight to another planet,
under the best of circumstances, borders on the extremely unlikely, shading off into the impossible, in terms of the total global
population and of what we know, assuming no extreme discoveries or capabilities like teleportation.
Muscle and bone sensitivity make it impossible

Potember, Bryden, and Shapiro, Researchers for the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins
University, 2001 (Dr. Richard S., Dr. Wayne A., and Dr. Jay R., “Analysis of bone metabolism biomarkers
and countermeasures using time of flight mass spectrometry,”
Exposure to reduced gravity during space travel profoundly alters the loads placed on bone and muscle.
Astronauts lose muscle mass and strength while in space. Exercise countermeasures are so important
that other activities may not be given enough time. The data from humans in space indicates a very
rapid atrophy of skeletal muscle. After 5- day flights, mean cross-sectional areas of muscle fibers were
11 and 24% smaller in type I and II fibers. These changes occurred even though countermeasures were
undertaken by astronauts. There is a need to measure pharmacological, hormonal and growth factor
biomarkers and to develop in-depth knowledge of molecular mechanisms for complex interplay
between muscle atrophy and bone demineralization. We are evaluating the technical feasibility for
evaluating the following biomarkers by TOF-MS: growth hormone, insulin-like growth factors (IGF-I),
glucocorticoids: cortisol (which may play a central role in the early stages of muscle atrophy), and 3-
methylhistidine (breakdown product of muscle proteins). Exposure to microgravity rapidly leads to
osteopenia due to increased bone resorption and decreased bone formation. Studies with Skylab and
Russian crews demonstrated 1.0-1.6%/month mean losses of bone mass from the spine, femur, neck,
and pelvis, increasing the risk of fracture. Also of concern is the lack of evidence that bone loss is fully
reversible on return to earth. Progress in developing effective countermeasures to demineralization
depends on increased understanding of how the complex biochemical systems that modulate bone
turnover response to pharmacological and stress-induced interventions.
A2: Growth Solves Water Wars
Continued growth and consumption guarantees violent conflicts over clean water
Speth 2008 – JD Yale, law professor, Carter's environmental advisor, former head of the UN's largest
agency for international development, former chairman of the of the Council on Environmental Quality,
NRDC co-founder (James, "The bridge at the end of the world: Capitalism, the environment, and crossing
from crisis to sustainability", p. 6-9, Gigapedia)
It has been said that there are alternative sources of energy, but there are no alternatives to water.
There are several dimensions to what has correctly been called the world water crisis.40
First, there is the crisis of natural watercourses and their attendant wetlands. No natural areas have been
as degraded by human activities as freshwater systems. Natural water courses and the vibrant life associated with
them have been extensively affected by dams, dikes, diversions, stream channelization, wetland filling and
other modifica tions, and, ofcourse, pollution. Six percent of the world's major river basins have been severely or moderately fragmented by dams or other
construction. Since 1950 the number of large dams has increased from 5,700 worldwide to more than 41,000. Much of this activity is done to secure access to the
water, but power production, flood control, navigation, and land reclamation have also been important
factors. As freshwater is diverted from natural sources, ecosystems dependent on that water suffer, including aquatic systems, wetlands, and forests. About
half the world's wetlands have been lost, and more than a fifth of known freshwater species have
already been driven to extinction.41 The second crisis is the crisis of freshwater supply. Human demand for water climbed
sixfold in the twentieth century, and the trend continues today. Humanity now withdraws slightly over
half of accessible freshwater, and water withdrawals could climb to 70 percent by 2025.42 Meeting the world's
demands for freshwater is proving problematic. About 40 percent of the world's people already live in countries that are classified as "water stressed," meaning that
already 20 to 40 percent of liate pressures the available freshwater is being used by human societies. Projections
indicate that the
percentage of people living in water-stressed countries could rise to 65 percent by 2025 .43 A large
portion of freshwater withdrawals, about 70 percent, goes to agriculture. Since 1960, acreage under irrigation has more
than doubled. A special problem is occurring in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia where tens of millions of tube wells are depleting "fossil" ground waters. The
New Scientist reports that "hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land turned to desert.,,44 Overall, according
to a study by top water
specialists from around the world, world demand for water could double by 2050.45 "At the worst," the New York
Times reported, "a deepening water crisis would fuel violent conflicts, dry up rivers and increase groundwater pollution.... It would
also force the rural poor to clear ever-more grasslands and forests to grow food and leave many more people hungry."46 Last, there is the crisis of pollution.
Pollutants of all types are discharged into the world's waters in enormous quantities, reducing the
capacities of bodies of water to support life in the water and to support human communities. Contamination
denies a large portion of the world's population access to clean water supplies. About a billion people, a fifth of the world's
population, lack clean drinking water; 40 percent lack sanitary services. The World Health Organization calculates that each year about 1.6
million children die from diseases caused by unsafe drinking water and lack of water for sanitation and hygiene.47 Water supply issues will become increasingly
prevalent in the United States. Freshwater withdrawals per capita from surface and ground waters in the United States are twice that of the OECD (Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development) as a whole. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that if current American water use
remains constant at a hundred gallons per person per day, thirtysix states will face water shortages by
2013. As a result, humanity's "first need" will soon be privatized. Investors are moving into a water related market that is estimated to be worth at least $15°
billion in the United States by 20IO. "Water is a growth driver for as long and as far as the eye can see," a Goldman Sachs water analyst told the New York Times in
2006. 48
Answers to Warming Answers
A2: Adaptation Solves
Their defense doesn’t assume the rate of growth—it will happen too fast and
overwhelms adaptation
Barry, PhD ecologist, 7—President and Founder of Ecological Internet, PhD in Land Resources from the U of Wisconsin-Madison, MSc in Conservation
Biology and Sustainable Development from U of Wisconsin-Madison, BA in political science from Marquette U (Glen, May, “Earth Prophecy - And the way out”, New
Paradigm Journal, http://www.newparadigmjournal.com/May2007/earthprophecy.htm, AL)
The ecological foundation of being is failing. And as a result here is just a sampling of what we can expect. The effects of human
consumption and fossil fuel use are going to spawn tremendous climate feedbacks. The Amazon, Congo and Asia/Pacific
rainforests (those that remain) will largely die releasing their carbon. Melting permafrost and ocean methane
hydrates, along with heat absorbing open Arctic waters, will further consolidate and ensure run-away climate change of such
magnitude that adaptation is futile .
A2: Alt Causes
Growth is the root cause
Godhaven 9 (Merrick, environmental writer and activist, “Swapping technologies fails to address the
root causes of climate change,” July 15, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-
green/2009/jul/15/technofix-climate-change)
Technology is part of the solution to climate change. But only part. Techno-fixes like some of those in
the Guardian's Manchester Report simply cannot deliver the carbon cuts science demands of us
without being accompanied by drastic reductions in our consumption. That means radical economic
and social transformation. Merely swapping technologies fails to address the root causes of climate
change. We need to choose the solutions that are the cheapest, the swiftest, the most effective and
least likely to incur dire side effects. On all counts, there's a simple answer – stop burning the stuff in the
first place. Consume less. There is a certain level of resources we need to survive, and beyond that
there is a level we need in order to have lives that are comfortable and meaningful. It is far below what
we presently consume. Americans consume twice as much oil as Europeans. Are they twice as happy?
Are Europeans half as free? Economic growth itself is not a measure of human well-being, it only
measures things with an assessed monetary value. It values wants at the same level as needs and, while
it purports to bring prosperity to the masses, its tendency to concentrate profit in fewer and fewer
hands leaves billions without the necessities of a decent life. Techno-fixation masks the incompatibility
of solving climate change with unlimited economic growth. Even if energy consumption can be reduced
for an activity, ongoing economic growth eats up the improvement and overall energy consumption still
rises. We continue destructive consumption in the expectation that new miracle technologies will
come and save us. The hope of a future techno-fix feeds into the pass-it-forward, do-nothing-now
culture typified by targets for 2050. Tough targets for 2050 are not tough at all, they are a decoy. Where
are the techno-fix plans for the peak in global emissions by 2015 that the IPCC says we need? Even
within the limited sphere of technology, we have to separate the solutions from the primacy of profit.
We need to choose what's the most effective, not the most lucrative. Investors will want the maximum
return for their money, and so the benefits of any climate technologies will, in all likelihood, be sold as
carbon credits to the polluter industries and nations. It would not be done in tandem with emissions
cuts but instead of them, making it not a tool of mitigation but of exacerbation. Climate change is not
the only crisis currently facing humanity. Peak oil is likely to become a major issue within the coming
decade. Competition for land and water, soil fertility depletion and collapse of fisheries are already
posing increasing problems for food supply and survival in many parts of the world. Technological
solutions to climate change fail to address most of these issues. Yet even without climate change, this
systemic environmental and social crisis threatens society, and requires deeper solutions than new
technology alone can provide. Around a fifth of emissions come from deforestation, more than for all
transport emissions combined. There is no technological fix for that. We simply need to consume less of
the forest, that is to say, less meat, less agrofuel and less wood. Our level of consumption is inequitable.
Making it universal is simply impossible. The scientist Jared Diamond calculates that if the whole world
were to have our level of consumption, it would be the equivalent of having 72 billion people on earth.
With ravenous economic growth still prized as the main objective of society by all political leaders the
world over, that 72 billion would be just the beginning. At 3% annual growth, 25 years later it would be
the equivalent of 150 billion people. A century later it would be over a trillion. Something's got to give.
And indeed, it already is. It's time for us to call it a crisis and respond with the proportionate radical
action that is needed. We need profound change – not only government measures and targets but
financial systems, the operation of corporations, and people's own expectations of progress and success.
Building a new economic democracy based on meeting human needs equitably and sustainably is at
least as big a challenge as climate change itself, but if human society is to succeed the two are
inseparable. Instead of asking how to continue to grow the economy while attempting to cut carbon,
we should be asking why economic growth is seen as more important than survival.
Studies prove it is human induced

Alley 10 Professor of Geoscience @ Penn State (Richard, Authored Over 200 Refereed Scientific Papers,
“CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE; COMMITTEE: HOUSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; SUBCOMMITTEE:
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT,” CQ Congressional Testimony, 11/17, Lexis)
Background on Climate Change and Global Warming. Scientific assessments such as those of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States (e.g., National Research Council, 1975; 1979; 2001; 2006; 2008; 2010a;
2010b), the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
have for decades consistently found with increasingly high scientific confidence that human activities are
raising the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that this has a warming
effect on the climate, that the climate is warming as expected, and that the changes so far are small
compared to those projected if humans burn much of the fossil fuel on the planet. The basis for expecting
and understanding warming from CO2 is the fundamental physics of how energy interacts with gases in
the atmosphere. This knowledge has been available for over a century , was greatly refined by military research after World
War II, and is directly confirmed by satellite measurements and other data (e.g., American Institute of
Physics, 2008; Harries et al., 2001; Griggs and Harries, 2007). Although a great range of ideas can be found in scientific papers
and in statements by individual scientists, the scientific assessments by bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences
consider the full range of available information. The major results brought forward are based on multiple
lines of evidence provided by different research groups with different funding sources, and have
repeatedly been tested and confirmed. Removing the work of any scientist or small group of scientists
would still leave a strong scientific basis for the main conclusions. Ice Changes. There exists increasingly
strong evidence for widespread, ongoing reductions in the Earth's ice, including snow, river and lake ice,
Arctic sea ice, permafrost and seasonally frozen ground, mountain glaciers, and the great ice sheets of
Greenland and Antarctica. The trends from warming are modified by effects of changing precipitation and
of natural variability, as I will discuss soon, so not all ice everywhere is always shrinking. Nonetheless, warming is important in the
overall loss of ice, although changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulation in response to natural or human causes also have contributed and will continue
to contribute to changes. The most recent assessment by the IPCC remains relevant (Lemke et al., 2007). Also see
the assessment of the long climatic history of the Arctic by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program
(CCSP, 2009), showing that in the past warming has led to shrinkage of Arctic ice including sea ice and
the Greenland ice sheet, and that sufficiently large warming has removed them entirely.
A2: Doesn’t Cause Extinction
a) Destroys the global oxygen supply
Dr. Brandenberg, Physicist (Ph.D.) and Paxson a science writer ’99 – John and Monica, Dead Mars
Dying Earth p. 232-3
The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with global warming that puts more catalytic ice
crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations’
heartlands. The seas rise, the tropics roast but the media networks no longer cover it. The Amazon
rainforest becomes the Amazon desert. Oxygen levels fall, but profits rise for those who can provide it in
bottles. An equatorial high pressure zone forms, forcing drought in central Africa and Brazil, the Nile
dries up and the monsoons fail. Then inevitably, at some unlucky point in time, a major unexpected
event occurs—a major volcanic eruption, a sudden and dramatic shift in ocean circulation or a large
asteroid impact (those who think freakish accidents do not occur have paid little attention to life or
Mars), or a nuclear war that starts between Pakistan and India and escalates to involve China and
Russia . . . Suddenly the gradual climb in global temperatures goes on a mad excursion as the oceans
warm and release large amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide from their lower depths into the
atmosphere. Oxygen levels go down precipitously as oxygen replaces lost oceanic carbon dioxide.
Asthma cases double and then double again. Now a third of the world fears breathing. As the oceans
dump carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect increases, which further warms the oceans, causing them
to dump even more carbon. Because of the heat, plants die and burn in enormous fires which release
more carbon dioxide, and the oceans evaporate, adding more water vapor to the greenhouse. Soon, we
are in what is termed a runaway greenhouse effect, as happened to Venus eons ago. The last two
surviving scientists inevitably argue, one telling the other, “See! I told you the missing sink was in the
ocean!”Earth, as we know it, dies. After this Venusian excursion in temperatures, the oxygen disappears
into the soil, the oceans evaporate and are lost and the dead Earth loses its ozone layer completely.
Earth is too far from the Sun for it to be the second Venus for long. Its atmosphere is slowly lost—as is
its water—because of ultraviolet bombardment breaking up all the molecules apart from carbon
dioxide. As the atmosphere becomes thin, the Earth becomes colder. For a short while temperatures are
nearly normal, but the ultraviolet sears any life that tries to make a comeback. The carbon dioxide thins
out to form a thin veneer with a few wispy clouds and dust devils. Earth becomes the second Mars—red,
desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.
b) Causes the planet to explode

Chalko 4 [Tom J. Chalko , MSc, PhD, 30 October, (http://nujournal.net/core.pdf)]
The heat generated inside our planet is predominantly of radionic (nuclear) origin. Hence, Earth in its
entirety can be considered a slow nuclear reactor with its solid ”inner core” providing a major
contribution to the total energy output. Since radionic heat is generated in the entire volume and cooling can only occur at the surface, the highest
temperature inside Earth occurs at the center of the inner core. Overheating the center of the inner core reactor due to the so-called
greenhouse effect on the surface of Earth may cause a meltdown condition, an enrichment of nuclear
fuel and a gigantic atomic explosion. Summary: Consequences of global warming are far more serious than previously imagined. The REAL danger
for our entire civilization comes not from slow climate changes, but from overheating of the planetary
interior. Life on Earth is possible only because of the efficient cooling of the planetary interior - a process
that is limited primarily by the atmosphere. This cooling is responsible for a thermal balance between the heat from the core reactor, the heat from the Sun
and the radiation of heat into space, so that the average temperature on Earth’s surface is about 13 degrees Celsius. This article examines the possibility of overheating and the ”meltdown” of
the solid planetary core due to the atmospheric pollution trapping progressively more solar heat (the so-called greenhouse effect) and reducing the cooling rate of the planetary interior. The
most serious consequence of such a ”meltdown” could be centrifugal segregation of unstable isotopes in the molten part of the spinning planetary core. Such segregation can ”enrich” the
nuclear fuel in the core to the point of creating conditions for a chain reaction and a gigantic atomic explosion. Will Earth become another ”asteroid belt” in the Solar system? It is common
knowledge (experiencing seasons) that solar heat is the dominant factor that determines temperatures on the surface of Earth. Under the polar ice however, the contribution of solar heat is
minimal and this is where the increasing contribution of the heat from the planetary interior can be seen best. Rising polar ocean temperatures and melting polar ice caps should therefore be
the first symptoms of overheating of the inner core reactor. While politicians and businessmen debate the need for reducing greenhouse emissions and take pride to evade accepting any
the process of overheating the inner core reactor has already begun - polar oceans have become
responsibility,
warmer and polar caps have begun to melt. Do we have enough imagination, intelligence and integrity
to comprehend the danger before the situation becomes irreversible? There will be NO SECOND
CHANCE...
A2: Irreversible
Only limited warming is inevitable---now is key to preventing irreversible increases
Patrick Moriarty 10 Ph.D.1, Department of Design, Monash University and Damon Honnery Ph.D.2,
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Monash University "Why Technical Fixes Won’t
Mitigate Climate Change" Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 8, 1921-1927.
journalofcosmology.com/ClimateChange107.html
Since the Industrial Revolution, the planet has warmed about 0.76 ºC, and because of thermal inertia
of the oceans, a further 0.6 ºC is unavoidable. Yet avoiding dangerous anthropogenic climate change
could require us to limit the total temperature rise to 2 ºC above pre-industrial, as adopted by the
European Union (Meinshausen et al. 2009). Clearly, if this value is accepted, drastic action is needed
either to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere, or to somehow
counterbalance the positive ‘forcing function’ from GHG increases.
It's not too late to solve the worst of warming

Romm 9 | Fellow @ American Progress (Joe, Fellow @ American Progress, " Is it just too damn late?
Part 1, the Science," Oct 8, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2009/10/08/204710/it-is-not-too-damn-late-
part-1-the-science/?mobile=nc)
It’s not too late to avert the worst impacts of human-caused global warming. In fact, it’s not too late to
stabilize total warming from preindustrial levels at 1.5°C — or possibly less. But the U.S. must pass a
comprehensive climate and clean energy bill, leading to a major global deal, to give us a plausible
chance of getting on the necessary emissions pathway. From a scientific perspective, a major new study
(subs. req’d, discussed below) is cause for some genuine non-pessimism, concluding “Near-zero CH4
growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from
permafrost and CH4 hydrates.” The media and others want to move quickly from denial to despair,
because both perspectives justify inaction, justify maintaining our grotesquely unsustainable behavior,
justify sticking with the global Ponzi scheme in the immoral delusion we can maintain our own personal
wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning. I have, however, received a
number of queries from progressives about the meaning of this somewhat misleading Washington Post
article, “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase,” which begins: Climate
researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even
if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of
change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations
Environment Program…. Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP
report’s scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if
industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The
increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of
warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change. I don’t think the basic story
should be a surprise to regular readers of this blog. We’re in big, big trouble, and we’re not yet politically
prepared to do what is necessary to avert catastrophe — as I’ve said many times. But that is quite
different from concluding it’s too late and we’re doomed. The WashPost story is about the Climate
Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator — the C-ROADS model. It “translates complex climate
modeling into readily digestible predictions” and “is being adopted by negotiators to assess their
national greenhouse-gas commitments ahead of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen,” as
explained in a recent Nature article (subs. req’d, excerpted here). As one of the leading C-ROADS
modelers — my friend Drew Jones — explained in his blog, the Post headline could have easily been:
“New Analysis Shows Growing Commitment to a Global Deal Will Help Stabilize Climate.” The first thing
to remember is that the major developed countries, including China or India, haven’t agreed to cap their
emissions, let alone to ultimately reduce them. Until that happens, no model of global commitments is
going to keep us anywhere near 2°C (3.6F). Second, people forget that the 1987 Montr©al protocol
would not have stopped the atmospheric concentration of ozone-destroying chemicals from rising
forever. And yet we appear to have acted in time to save the ozone layer. Third, people also seem to
forget that the United States government led by President Bush’s father, and including the entire
Senate, agreed that we would tackle global warming the same way — with the rich countries going first.
I have no doubt that China will ultimately agree to a cap (see “Peaking Duck: Beijing’s Growing Appetite
for Climate Action“). Indeed, if a shrinking economy-wide cap on GHGs similar to the House bill or draft
Senate bill ends up on Obama’s desk in the next few months, then the international community will
almost certainly agree on a global deal, which will include China sharply reducing its business-as-usual
growth path. Then in the next deal in a few years, China will, I expect, agree to a cap no later than 2025.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is an important issue that I will treat in a multipart series. People
seem to view this question of “Is it too late?” as if it were primarily a scientific issue, but that is because
they have internalized their preconceptions about what is politically possible in terms of clean energy
deployment in this country and around the world. There is no evidence scientifically that it is too late to
stabilize at 350 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, at 1.5°C total planetary warming
from preindustrial levels. Nor is there any scientific evidence that we can’t afford to overshoot 350 ppm
— as we already have — for a period of many decades.
A2: Ice Age Turns
No uniqueness – no impending ice age now.

Thompson ’08 [Andrea, Live Science, Jun 12, “Could Waning Sunspots Bring On New Ice Age?”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,366061,00.html]
No impending ice age Though there is debate about how and whether the Maunder minimum actually
caused the Little Ice Age, scientists have proposed a few hypotheses as to how it could have done so.
One idea springs from the fact that the sun emits much more ultraviolet radiation when it is covered in
sunspots, which can affect the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere. The other is that when the sun is active,
it produces tangled magnetic fields that keep out galactic cosmic rays. Some scientists have proposed
that a lack of sunspots means these cosmic rays are bombarding Earth and creating clouds, which can
help cool the planet's surface. But these ideas aren't yet proven, and anyway, the sun's contribution is
small compared to volcanoes, El Niño and greenhouse gases, Hathaway notes. Even if there were
another Maunder minimum, he says, we would still suffer the effects of greenhouse gases and the
Earth's climate would remain warm. "It doesn't overpower them at all," Hathaway said.
15,000 years at best

The Times, June 10, 2004
But though the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago, scientists do not believe another is on the way. The
interglacial most similar to our own, which began about 430,000 years ago, lasted for 28,000 years,
suggesting that the current benign conditions will extend long into the future. Dr Wolff said that the
results dismissed arguments that global warming could benefit humanity by heading off a looming ice
age. "If people say to you that increasing greenhouse gases is a good thing, because otherwise we'd go
into an ice age, you can say categorically that we wouldn't," he said. "Left to nature's own devices, we'd
have another 15,000 years at least. Another ice age is not imminent."
Warming will cause an ice age

a.) Polar caps melting
Thom Hartmann (Political Analyst) Jan 20 2004 “How Global Warming May cause the Next Ice Age,”
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm
While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al
Gore's recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke
fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look
at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere - a sudden shift
into a new ice age. What they're finding is not at all comforting. In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh
water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the
northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North
America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as
short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age"
of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters,
droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world.
b.) Ice core drilling proves
Leigh Dayton (Science Writer) 2004 The Australian
IN the latest Hollywood blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, the world is plunged into a sudden and
deadly ice age because humanity tossed too many "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. Now, new
evidence from the longest ice core ever drilled from Antarctica provides compelling evidence that we're
racing towards an icy future. And it's thanks to modern global warming and the climate instability it can
trigger. A consortium of researchers from eight nations, led by Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey
in Cambridge, has retrieved a core from the 3km-thick ice at a site known as Dome C in East Antarctica.
The core reveals in remarkable detail what the climate of Earth was like over the past 740,000 years.
Writing in the journal Nature, Dr Wolff and his colleagues with the European Project for Ice Coring in
Antarctica (EPICA) report they have discovered the telltale signs of eight ice ages in that period of time.
The new work adds to studies of other Antarctic ice cores, finding that four climate cycles, glacial to
inter-glacial to glacial, occurred over the past 430,000 years. According to the team, preliminary analysis
of the core shows conditions at the end of one of those early ice ages were similar to conditions at the
end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. That earlier warm inter-glacia period lasted 28,000 years.
Given the temperature and atmospheric similarities between that period and today, the EPICA scientists
conclude we'd be headed for another balmy 16,000 years "without human intervention". Today, levels
of the key greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are escalating rapidly. The gases, produced
mainly by burning fossil fuels and other industrial activities, reflect light back towards Earth, triggering
global warming. Ironically, warming can set off a chain of atmospheric, oceanic and climatological
changes that can trigger a sudden climate switch ... and a new ice age.
A2: Ag Turns
Warming will destroy agriculture.
Schwartz & Randall ’03 [Peter (Chair of the Global Business Network) & Doug (Co-head of same thing),
Oct, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,”
http://www.grist.org/pdf/AbruptClimateChange2003.pdf]
The changing weather patterns and ocean temperatures affect agriculture, fish and wildlife, water and
energy. Crop yields, affected by temperature and water stress as well as length of growing season fall by
10-25% and are less predictable as key regions shift from a warming to a cooling trend. As some
agricultural pests die due to temperature changes, other species spread more readily due to the dryness
and windiness – requiring alternative pesticides or treatment regiments. Commercial fishermen that
typically have rights to fish in specific areas will be ill equipped for the massive migration of their prey.
With only five or six key grain-growing regions in the world (US, Australia, Argentina, Russia, China, and
India), there is insufficient surplus in global food supplies to offset severe weather conditions in a few
regions at the same time – let alone four or five. The world’s economic interdependence make the
United States increasingly vulnerable to the economic disruption created by local weather shifts in key
agricultural and high population areas around the world. Catastrophic shortages of water and energy
supply – both which are stressed around the globe today – cannot be quickly overcome.
Warming will destroy water supplies, which is key to agriculture.

Schilesinger ’07 [Michael, University of Illinois Professor, Human-Induced Climate Changes: An
Interdisciplinary Assesment]
The impacts in water, Figure 9.5, follow the same general pattern seen in energy (Figure 9.3). As
warming proceeds, the damages are expected to increase over time. Water becomes very valuable with
warming because agricultural and urban demands for water increase while the supply of available water
generally declines. Precipitation varies greatly across regions and climate models. However, with greater
evapotranspiration and more rapid melting of winter snows, watershed systems are predicted to have
less available water even with small precipitation increases. Systems can adapt to these changes by
storing more water and allocating the water efficiently across users, but these public adaptations will
require effective governmental coordination and funding (Mendelsohn, 2000).
Warming destroys global agriculture.

Africa News ’07 [Sep 13, “Africa: Continent’s Agriculture to Suffer Most From Global Warming, Study
Says,” Lexis]
World agriculture faces a serious decline within this century due to global warming unless emissions of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are substantially reduced from their rising path, and
developing countries will suffer much steeper declines than high-income countries, according to a new
study by a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute. Developing
countries, many of which have average temperatures that are already near or above crop tolerance
levels, are predicted to suffer an average 10 to 25 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the
2080s, assuming a so-called "business as usual" scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to
increase, according to the study. Rich countries, which typically have lower average temperatures, will
experience a much milder or even positive average effect, ranging from an 8 percent increase in
productivity to a 6 percent decline. Individual developing countries face even larger declines. India, for
example, could see a drop of 30 to 40 percent. Some smaller countries suffer what could only be
described as an agricultural productivity collapse. Sudan, already wracked by civil war fueled in part by
failing rains, is projected to suffer as much as a 56 percent reduction in agricultural production potential;
Senegal, a 52 percent fall. China, further from the equator than most developing countries, could escape
major damage on average, although its south central region would be in jeopardy. The picture is similar
in the United States, with projected reductions of 25 to 35 percent in the southeast and the
southwestern plains but significant increases in the northern states. Overall, agricultural productivity for
the entire world is projected to decline from levels otherwise reached by between 3 and 16 percent by
2080s as a consequence of global warming. The damages would continue to deepen in the following
century in the face of still greater warming. The projections are the work of William Cline, a joint senior
fellow at CGD and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Cline is a pioneer in the study of
the economic impact of global warming, having published an early comprehensive study of the issue in
1992. "Some analysts have suggested that a small amount of global warming could actually increase
global agricultural productivity. My work shows that while productivity may increase in a minority of
mostly northern countries, the global impact of climate change on agriculture will be negative by the
second half of this century," Cline said. "There might be some initial overall benefit to warming for a
decade or two but because future warming depends on greenhouse gas emissions today if we delay
action it would put global agriculture on an inexorable trajectory to serious damage," he added.
A2: SO2 turn
SO2 acts like other radiative green house gases and increases the climate
temperature.
Smith ’01 [Steven, Science Direct, Jun, “Global and regional anthropogenic sulfur dioxide emissions,”
online]
A knowledge of the time-evolving spatial details of sulfur dioxide emissions is vital for a number of
reasons: understanding the processes leading to acid deposition; estimating the atmospheric sulfur
dioxide and sulfate aerosol loadings for pollution studies; and estimating sulfate aerosol loadings as a
climate forcing agent. In all such studies, it is almost essential to have emissions data on a regular
latitude–longitude grid and desirable to have data that resolve the seasonal cycle.Here, we have used a
variety of methods and data sources to derive, first, a detailed regional and gridded data set for 1990.
This was then extended to give corresponding regional data for 1980, 1985, 1995 and 2000. The results
were then compared with other emissions estimates.Our results show that global-total emissions have
varied little over 1980–2000 (±3 TgS/year). Regionally, however, there have been major changes,
summarized in Table 4. The percentage contribution to global emissions from countries around the
North Atlantic basin (United States, Canada and Europe) has declined substantially over recent decades
while the contribution from Asia has increased. The net effect is a shift from an emissions pattern
centered around the North Atlantic to one dominated by Asia. This shift is expected to continue over
coming decades (Smith et al., 2000 and Nakicenovic).These results, and their extension into the future,
have important consequences for acid precipitation and pollution, as demonstrated by regional analyses
(Alcamo; Foell and National). The main application of the global data set produced here, however, lies in
coupled sulfur-chemistry/climate modeling. In the climate context, sulfur dioxide emissions are
important both in understanding the past and in predicting the future. The emissions estimates
produced here form the base data for globally gridded scenarios of future sulfur dioxide emissions
(Smith et al., 2000). These scenarios have been used to produce projections for the present and future
climate including self-consistent atmospheric sulfur chemistry (Dai et al., 2000).To 1990, the net
radiative forcing due to sulfur dioxide-derived sulfate aerosols has been around −1.1 W/m2 (Shine et al.,
1996) due to the sum of direct (clear sky) and indirect (cloud albedo) effects. While sulfate aerosol
forcing is subject to large uncertainties, a value of −1.1 W/m2 implies that sulfate aerosols have offset
almost half of the radiative effect of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Regionally, the offsetting
effect has been much greater (e.g., Taylor; Mitchell and Kiehl). Sulfate aerosols have, therefore,
substantially modified the pattern of climate response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.
SO2 causes a more carbonized, warmer planet.

Minard ’07 [Anne, Master of Science from NAU, Dec 20, “Sulfur Dioxide Kept Ancient Mars Ocean
Flowing,” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071220-mars-ocean.html]
Sulfur dioxide "provides a potential explanation of early Martian warmth," Halevy said.It also explains
"... the absence of carbonates, the existence of clays on ancient Martian surfaces, [and] the abundance
of sulfates and the acidic conditions later in Martian history."On Earth sulfur dioxide rapidly oxidizes and
then leaves the atmosphere—often as acid rain.But on an early, oxygen-free Mars, the gas would remain
longer, the authors say.Volcanically produced sulfur dioxide could have even played the same role on
Earth about to 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, when no carbonate rocks were deposited.
War
Offense
2NC Causes War Overview
Growth causes outward focus
Boehmer 2010 – PhD in political science from Penn State, professor at UTEP, also teaches research
methods and econometrics (5/14, Charles R., Defence and Peace Economics, “Economic Growth and
Violent International Conflict”, http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/991862__922235442.pdf, WEA)
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The theory set forth earlier theorizes that economic growth increases perceptions of state strength,
increasing the likelihood of violent interstate conflicts. Economic growth appears to increase the resolve of leaders to
stand against challenges and the willingness to escalate disputes. A non-random pattern exists where higher rates of GDP growth over
multiple years are positively and significantly related to the most severe international conflicts, whereas this is not true for overall conflict initiations. Moreover,
growth of military expenditures, as a measure of the war chest proposition, does not offer any explanation for violent interstate conflicts. This is not to say that
growth of military expenditures never has any effect on the occurrence of war, although such a link is not generally true in the aggregate using a large sample of
states. In comparison, higher rates of economic growth are significantly related to violent interstate conflicts in the aggregate. States with growing economies are
more apt to reciprocate military challenges by other states and become involved in violent interstate conflicts. The results also show that theories from the Crisis-
Scarcity perspective lack explanatory power linking GDP growth rates to war at the state level of analysis. This is not to say that such theories completely lack
explanatory power in general, but more particularly that they cannot directly link economic growth rates to state behavior in violent interstate conflicts. In contrast,
theories of diversionary conflict may well hold some explanatory power, although not regarding GDP growth in a general
test of states from all regions of the world across time. Perhaps diversionary theory better explains state behaviors short of
war, where the costs of externalizing domestic tensions do not become too costly, or in relation to the foreign policies of particular countries. In many
circumstances, engaging in a war to divert attention away from domestic conditions would seemingly exacerbate domestic crisis conditions unless the chances of
victory were practically assured. Nonetheless,
this study does show that domestic conflict is associated with
interstate conflict. If diversionary conflict theory has any traction as an economic explanation of violent
interstate conflicts, it may require the study of other explanatory variables besides overall GDP growth
rates, such as unemployment or inflation rates.
We outweigh on probability and magnitude---wars during growth are more likely and
worse—K waves prove
Mager 86 [Nathan, economist, The Kondratieif Waves, p 197-8]
The overall trend of the economy shapes perceptions as to its strength and direction. In a hull market,
"experts" are almost uniformly optimistic; in a bear market the owlish analysts almost universally
suggest caution. It is during the upward swings, soon after a trough and just before a peak, that wars
become more likely. It should be noted that peak wars are the result of a different kind of
socioeconomic psychological pressure and have quite different economic results than trough wars.
Nations become socially and politically unsettled after a long period of boom and expansion, perhaps
because in their final stages, peoples' expectations begin to outrun actual growth in the general level of
prosperity. War then becomes the ultimate destination. Inasmuch as all nations arc attempting to
expand simultaneously, the intense competition for resources and markets leads eventually to military
confrontations, which become contagious. One explanation suggested is that during trough wars the
public is still largely concerned with private considerations and their own wellbeing. They tend to be less
interested in international disputes, world crusades, or campaigns involving large investment of cash,
effort, and the nervous energy needed to pursue projects to a conclusion. Trough wars tend to be
short. They are more a matter of choice and sudden decision by the stronger power. Inasmuch as peak
wars are the result of frustration of expectations {usually with economic elements), peak wars tend to
be more desperate, more widespread, and more destructive.
Causes Arms Races
Specifically, growth causes arms races, which makes all wars more deadly
Chase-Dunn and O’Reilly 89 (Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and
Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside, and
Kenneth O’Reilly, Professor of History at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, 1989, in War in the
World System, p. 48)
In McNeill’s analysis of military technology and military organization, the competition among sovereign
states for scarce resources is a constant, but the availability of resources to engage in warfare and to fund
arms races is an upward trend sustained by the growth of industrial production in the context of the world
market. The increasing availability of resources for war and the application of scientific research and
development and national education systems to military technology lead to escalation of rounds of
competition for superior arms capabilities among core states. The development of new communications
and transportation technologies increases the speed at which information about changes in military
technology diffuses among competing states, further driving the trend toward more expensive and more
destructive weapons.
21x More Likely
Upswings are twenty-one times deadlier than downswings
Goldstein 88 (Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor of International Relations, American University, 1988,
Long Cycles, pp. 244-248)
The connection between economic phase periods and wars is investigated in several ways. Levy’s “great
power wars” (class 2, above) are categorized (table 11.4) according to the economic phase period in
which the war “mainly” fell (see definitions above, p. 239). Thirty-one wars occurred during upswings,
twenty-seven during downswings, and six seriously overlapped phase periods (see also table 11.5, column
7). Thus hardly any more wars occurred on the upswing phases than the downswings. But in total battle
fatalities (severity), except for the 1575—94 upswing, there is a clear alternation between upswing and
downswing phases. More severe wars occurred during upswing phases. I have tabulated six war
indicators by phase period (table 11 .5).26 The first indicator (col. 3) derives from the list of fatalities
(table 11.4), here expressed as an average annual fatality rate in each phase.27 This indicator is also
displayed as a bar chart in figure 11.3. With the exception of the (low-fatality) upswing of 1575—94,
fatalities follow the pattern of upswings and downswings throughout the 481-year span of the data. Up
through 1892, the average annual fatality rate was six times higher on upswings than on downswings; if
the twentieth century is included, it is twenty-one times higher on upswings than downswings.
Categorizing the same fatality data “strictly” by phase period (col. 4),28 in conjunction with the method
just discussed, points to sensitivities to the exact dating of turning points. Not surprisingly, the main effect
is on the twentieth century’s two world wars, each overlapping one to two years into an adjacent phase.
The results also show the weakest correlation to be in the period 1495—1620. Nonetheless, the fatality
rate on upswings is still more than four times higher than on downswings for both 1495—1892 and 1495
—1975. The greater severity of war on long wave upswings, then, is a very strong and consistent
correlation.29
Defense
No Resources
Economic collapse prevents military functions
Duedney 91 (Daniel, Hewlett Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society – Princeton University, “Environment
and Security: Muddled Thinking?”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April)
Poverty wars. In a second scenario, declining living standards first cause internal turmoil, then war. If groups at all levels of
affluence protect their standard of living by pushing deprivation on other groups, class war and revolutionary upheavals could result. Faced with
these pressures, liberal democracy and free market systems could increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining
minimum order.9 If authoritarian regimes are more war-prone because they lack democratic control, and if revolutionary regimes are war-prone
because of their ideological fervor and isolation, then the world is likely to become more violent. The record of previous depressions supports the
proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic expectations contribute to international conflict. Although initially
compelling, this scenario has major flaws. One is that it is arguably based on unsound economic theory. Wealth is
formed not so much by the availability of cheap natural resources as by capital formation through savings and more efficient production. Many
resource-poor countries, like Japan, are very wealthy, while many countries with more extensive resources are poor. Environmental constraints
require an end to economic growth based on growing use of raw materials, but not necessarily an end to growth in the production of goods and
services. In addition, economic decline does not necessarily produce conflict. How societies respond to economic decline may
largely depend upon the rate at which such declines occur. And as
people get poorer, they may become less willing to spend
scarce resources for military forces. As Bernard Brodie observed about the modern era, “The predisposing factors to
military aggression are full bellies, not empty ones .” The experience of economic depressions over the last two centuries
may be irrelevant, because such depressions were characterized by under-utilized production capacity and falling resource prices. In the
1930s increased military spending stimulated economies, but if economic growth is retarded by environmental constraints, military spending will
exacerbate the problem.
Collapse solves war—no resources

Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 99 (Christopher Chase-Dunn, Director of the Institute for Research on
World-Systems, University of California-Riverside, and Bruce Podobnik, Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College, 1999, in The Future of Global
Conflict, ed. Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, p. 43)
While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer
when the influence of long-terni economic cycles is taken into account. As an extensive body of research
documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the 50 to 60 year business cycle known as the Kondratieff
wave (K-wave) has been in synchronous operation on an international scale for at least the last two
centuries. Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on war severity, Goldstein (1988) demonstrates that
there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the number of battle deaths per year for the period 1495-
1975. Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in a systematic fashion,
Goldstein’s research suggests that severe core wars are much more likely to occur late in the upswing
phase of the K-wave. This finding is interpreted as showing that, while states always desire to go to war,
they can afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with sufficient resources.
Modelski and Thompson (1996) present a more complex interpretation of the systemic relationship
between economic and war cycles, but it closely resembles Goldstein’s hypothesis. In their analysis, a
first economic upswing generates the economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a
bid for hegemony; a second period of economic growth follows a period of global war and the
establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here, again, specific economic upswings are associated with
an increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war. It is widely accepted that the current K-wave, which
entered a downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will
reach its apex around 2025. It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony, already
unravelling, will have been definitively eroded. This convergence of a plateauing economic cycle with a
period of political multicentricity within the core should, if history truly does repeat itself, result in the
outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core powers. Although
both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global war can (somehow)
be avoided, other theorists consider that the possibility of such a core war is sufficiently high that serious
steps should be taken to ensure that such collective suicide does not occur (Chase-Dunn and O’Reilly,
1989; Goldfrank, 1987).
Studies
There is no causal relationship between the economy and conflict—the best study
proves—this card is better than Royal
Brandt and Ulfelder 11—*Patrick T. Brandt, Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University, is an
Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Social Science at the University of Texas at Dallas.
**Jay Ulfelder, Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, is an American political scientist
whose research interests include democratization, civil unrest, and violent conflict. [April, 2011,
“Economic Growth and Political Instability,” Social Science Research Network]
These statements anticipating political fallout from the global economic crisis of 2008–2010 reflect a
widely held view that economic growth has rapid and profound effects on countries’ political stability.
When economies grow at a healthy clip, citizens are presumed to be too busy and too content to engage
in protest or rebellion, and governments are thought to be flush with revenues they can use to enhance
their own stability by producing public goods or rewarding cronies, depending on the type of regime
they inhabit. When growth slows, however, citizens and cronies alike are presumed to grow frustrated
with their governments, and the leaders at the receiving end of that frustration are thought to lack the
financial resources to respond effectively. The expected result is an increase in the risks of social unrest,
civil war, coup attempts, and regime breakdown. Although it is pervasive, the assumption that countries’
economic growth rates strongly affect their political stability has not been subjected to a great deal of
careful empirical analysis, and evidence from social science research to date does not unambiguously
support it. Theoretical models of civil wars, coups d’etat, and transitions to and from democracy often
specify slow economic growth as an important cause or catalyst of those events, but empirical studies
on the effects of economic growth on these phenomena have produced mixed results. Meanwhile, the
effects of economic growth on the occurrence or incidence of social unrest seem to have hardly been
studied in recent years , as empirical analysis of contentious collective action has concentrated on
political opportunity structures and dynamics of protest and repression. This paper helps fill that gap by
rigorously re-examining the effects of short-term variations in economic growth on the occurrence of
several forms of political instability in countries worldwide over the past few decades. In this paper, we
do not seek to develop and test new theories of political instability. Instead, we aim to subject a
hypothesis common to many prior theories of political instability to more careful empirical scrutiny. The
goal is to provide a detailed empirical characterization of the relationship between economic growth
and political instability in a broad sense. In effect, we describe the conventional wisdom as seen in the
data. We do so with statistical models that use smoothing splines and multiple lags to allow for
nonlinear and dynamic effects from economic growth on political stability. We also do so with an
instrumented measure of growth that explicitly accounts for endogeneity in the relationship between
political instability and economic growth. To our knowledge, ours is the first statistical study of this
relationship to simultaneously address the possibility of nonlinearity and problems of endogeneity. As
such, we believe this paper offers what is probably the most rigorous general evaluation of this
argument to date. As the results show, some of our findings are surprising. Consistent with conventional
assumptions, we find that social unrest and civil violence are more likely to occur and democratic
regimes are more susceptible to coup attempts around periods of slow economic growth. At the same
time, our analysis shows no significant relationship between variation in growth and the risk of civil-war
onset, and results from our analysis of regime changes contradict the widely accepted claim that
economic crises cause transitions from autocracy to democracy. While we would hardly pretend to have
the last word on any of these relationships, our findings do suggest that the relationship between
economic growth and political stability is neither as uniform nor as strong as the conventional wisdom(s)
presume(s). We think these findings also help explain why the global recession of 2008–2010 has failed
thus far to produce the wave of coups and regime failures that some observers had anticipated, in spite
of the expected and apparent uptick in social unrest associated with the crisis.
A2: Diversionary Theory
Diversionary theory is false---180 empirics disprove it
Gelpi 97 (Christopher, Center for International Affairs @ Harvard, "Democratic Diversions," Sage)
Students of international politics have often argued that state leaders initiate the use of force
internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author contends that these
arguments concerning relationship between domestic unrest and international conflict are not
supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on the incentives state leaders have to use
external force as a diversionary tactic without considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic
unrest. It is hypothesized that democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention
by using force internationally. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders are expected to repress the
unrest directly, and these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally. An
analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international crises between 1948 and
1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of the analyses and their implications for the
literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing literature on democratic peace are discussed.
Low growth makes politicians cautious—they don’t want to risk war because it makes
them vulnerable
Boehmer 2007 – political science professor at the University of Texas (Charles, Politics & Policy, 35:4,
“The Effects of Economic Crisis, Domestic Discord, and State Efficacy on the Decision to Initiate
Interstate Conflict”, WEA)
Economic Growth and Fatal MIDs
The theory presented earlier predicts that lower rates of growth suppress participation in foreign
conflicts, particularly concerning conflict initiation and escalation to combat. To sustain combat, states
need to be militarily prepared and not open up a second front when they are already fighting, or may
fear, domestic opposition. A good example would be when the various Afghani resistance fighters
expelled the Soviet Union from their territory, but the Taliban crumbled when it had to face the
combined forces of the United States and Northern Alliance insurrection. Yet the coefficient for GDP
growth and MID initiations was negative but insignificant. However, considering that there are many
reasons why states fight, the logic presented earlier should hold especially in regard to the risk of
participating in more severe conflicts. Threats to use military force may be safe to make and may be
made with both external and internal actors in mind, but in the end may remain mere cheap talk that
does not risk escalation if there is a chance to back down. Chiozza and Goemans (2004b) found that
secure leaders were more likely to become involved in war than insecure leaders, supporting the theory
and evidence presented here. We should find that leaders who face domestic opposition and a poorly
performing economy shy away from situations that could escalate to combat if doing so would
compromise their ability to retain power.
Diversionary wars don’t escalate

Bennett and Nordstrom 2k
D. Scott, Ph.D., The U of Michigan, Distinguished prof of Political Science, and Timothy, Associate prof. Director of
Graduate Studies @ U of Mississippi, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 44, No.1, Feb, pp. 33-61
When engaging in diversionary actions in response to economic problems, leaders will be most interested in a
cheap, quick victory that gives them the benefit of a rally effect without suffering the long-term costs (in both economic and
popularity terms) of an extended confrontation or war. This makes weak states particularly inviting targets for diversionary action since they
may be less likely to respond than strong states and because any response they make will be less costly to the initiator. * Following Blainey (1973), a state
facing poor economic conditions may in factbe the target of an attack rather than the initiator. This may be
even more likely in the context of a rivalry because rival states are likely to be looking for any advantage over their rivals. Leaders may hope to
catch an economically challenged rival looking inward in response to a slowing economy. * Following the strategic application of
diversionary conflict theory and states' desire to engage in only cheap conflicts for diversionary purposes, states should avoid conflict initiation against target states
experiencing economic problems.
When growth collapses, leaders just focus more on the internal economy
Bennett and Nordstrom 2000 – Department of Political Science at Penn State (Scott and Timothy,
Journal of Conflict Resolution, “Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in
Enduring Rivalries,” February 2000, EBSCO)
INTERNAL CONDITIONS AND EXTERNAL BEHAVIOR: IMPROVEMENTS
By coming at externalization from the substitutability perspective, we hope to deal with some of the
theoretical problems raised by critics of diversionary conflict theory. Substitutability can be seen as a particular problem of model specification where
the dependent variable has not been fully developed. We believe that one of the theoretical problems with studies of externalization has been a lack of attention to
that it is
alternative choices; Bueno de Mesquita actually hints toward this (and the importance of foreign policy substitution) when he argues
shortsighted to conclude that a leader will uniformly externalize in response to domestic problems at
the expense of other possible policy choices (1985, 130). We hope to improve on the study of
externalization and behavior within rivalries by considering multiple outcomes in response to domestic
conditions."n particular, we will focus on the alternative option that instead of externalizing, leaders
may internalize when faced with domestic economic troubles. Rather than diverting the attention of the
public or relevant elites through military action, leaders may actually work to solve their internal
problems internally. Tying internal solutions to the external environment, we focus on the possibility
that leaders may work to disengage their country from hostile relationships in the international arena to
deal with domestic issues. Domestic problems often emerge from the challenges of spreading finite
resources across many different issue areas in a manner that satisfies the public and solves real
problems. Turning inward for some time may free up resources required to jump-start the domestic
economy or may simply provide leaders the time to solve internal distributional issues. In our study, we will
focus on the condition of the domestic economy (gross domestic product [GDP] per capita growth) as a source of pressure on leaders to externalize. We do this for a
number of reasons. First, when studying rivalries, we need an indicator of potential domestic trouble that is applicable beyond just the United States or just
advanced industrialized democracies. In many non-Western states, variables such as election cycles and presidential popularity are irrelevant. Economics are
important to all countries at all times. At a purely practical level, GDP data is also more widely available (cross-nationally and historically) than is data on inflation or
unemployment. 6 Second, we believe that fundamental economic conditions are a source of potential political problems to which leaders must pay attention.
Slowing growth or worsening economic conditions may lead to mass dissatisfaction and protests down the road; economic problems may best be dealt with at an
we in fact believe that it may
early stage before they turn into outward, potentially violent, conflict. This leads us to a third argument, which is that
be more appropriate in general to use indicators of latent conflict rather than manifest conflict as
indicators of the potential to divert. Once the citizens of a country are so distressed that they resort to
manifest conflict (rioting or engaging in open protest), it may be too late for a leader to satisfy them by
engaging in distracting foreign policy actions. If indeed leaders do attempt to distract people's attention, then if protest reaches a high
level, that attempt has actually failed and we are looking for correlations between failed externalization attempts and further diversion.
A2: Interdependence Solves War
Growth doesn’t solve war
John Mearsheimer 1, American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Tragedy of
Great Power Politics, 370-371
There are problems with this perspective, too." In particular, there is always the possibility that a serious
economic crisis in some important region, or in the world at large, will undermine the prosperity that
this theory needs to work. For example, it is widely believed that Asia's "economic miracle" worked to
dampen security competition in that region before 1997, but that the 1997-98 financial crisis in Asia
helped foster a "new geopolitics."24 It is also worth noting that although the United States led a
successful effort to contain that financial crisis, it was a close call, and there is no guarantee that the
next crisis will not spread across the globe. But even in the absence of a major economic crisis, one or
more states might not prosper; such a state would have little to lose economically, and maybe even
something to gain, by starting a war. A key reason that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in
August 1990 was that Kuwait was exceeding its oil production quotas (set by the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC) and driving down Iraq's oil profits, which the Iraqi economy
could ill-afford.25 There are two other reasons to doubt the claim that economic interdependence
makes great-power war unlikely. States usually go to war against a single rival, and they aim to win a
quick and decisive victory. Also, they invariably seek to discourage other states from joining with the
other side in the fight. But a war against one or even two opponents is unlikely to do much damage to a
state's economy, because typically only a tiny percentage of a state's wealth is tied up in economic
intercourse with any other state. It is even possible, as discussed in Chapter 5, that conquest will
produce significant economic benefits. Finally, an important historical case contradicts this perspective.
As noted above, there was probably about as much economic interdependence in Europe between 1900
and 1914 as there is today. Those were also prosperous years for the European great powers. Yet World
War I broke out in 1914. Thus a highly interdependent world economy does not make great-power war
more or less likely. Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other
goal, including prosperity.
Interdependence doesn’t solve war

GOLDSTONE 2007 (P.R., PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a member of the
Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a non-resident research
fellow at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, Georgetown University, AlterNet, September 25,
http://www.alternet.org/audits/62848/?page=entire)
Many hope trade will constrain or perhaps pacify a rising China, resurgent Russia, and proliferation-
minded Iran, as it well may. Nonetheless, any prudent analysis must incorporate caveats drawn from
states' particular political economy of security policy. In non-democratic states, however important
global markets may be to the economy in aggregate, elites will be most sensitive to sectoral interests of
their specific power base. This mismatch can cause systematic distortions in their ability to interpret
other states' strategic signals correctly when genuine conflicts of interest emerge with a nation more
domestically constrained. Leadership elites drawn from domestic-oriented, uncompetitive, or non-
tradable constituencies will tend to discount deterrent signals sent by trading partners whose own
domestic institutions favor those commerce-oriented interests, believing such interests make partners
less likely to fulfill their threats. For example, one reason the BJP government of India decided to
achieve an open nuclear weapons capability was that its small-business, domestic-oriented heart
constituency was both less vulnerable to trade sanctions and less willing to believe that the US would
either impose or long sustain such sanctions, given its own increased economic interests in India.
Sometimes, deterrent signals may not be sent at all, since one nation's governing coalition may include
commerce-dependent groups whose interests prevent state leaders from actually undertaking
necessary balancing responses or issuing potent signals of resolve in the first place; the result can be
fatally muddled strategy and even war -- as witness the series of weak attempts before the First World
War by finance-dominated Britain to deter "Iron and Rye"-dominated Germany. The emergence of truly
global markets makes it all the less plausible under most circumstances that a revisionist state will be
unable to find some alternative source of resources or outlet for its goods. Ironically, the more the
international economy resembles a true global marketplace rather than an oligopolistic economic
forum, the less likely it would appear that aggressors must inevitably suffer lasting retaliatory cut-offs in
trade. There will always be someone else with the capability to buy and sell.
Interdependence does not solve war—both world wars disprove this

COPELAND 1996 (Dale, Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the
University of Virginia, International Security, Spring)
Liberals argue that economic interdependence lowers the likelihood of war by increasing the value of
trading over the alternative of aggression: interdependent states would rather trade than invade. As
long as high levels of interdependence can be maintained, liberals assert, we have reason for optimism.
Realists dismiss the liberal argument, arguing that high interdependence increases rather than
decreases the probability of war. In anarchy, states must constantly worry about their security.
Accordingly, interdependence - meaning mutual dependence and thus vulnerability - gives states an
incentive to initiate war, if only to ensure continued access to necessary materials and goods. The
unsatisfactory nature of both liberal and realist theories is shown by their difficulties in explaining the
run-ups to the two World Wars. The period up to World War I exposes a glaring anomaly for liberal
theory: the European powers had reached unprecedented levels of trade, yet that did not prevent them
from going to war. Realists certainly have the correlation right - the war was preceded by high
interdependence - but trade levels had been high for the previous thirty years; hence, even if
interdependence was a necessary condition for the war, it was not sufficient. At first glance, the period
from 1920 to 1940 seems to support liberalism over realism. In the 1920s, interdependence was high,
and the world was essentially peaceful; in the 1930s, as entrenched protectionism caused
interdependence to fall, international tension rose to the point of world war. Yet the two most
aggressive states in the system during the 1930s, Germany and Japan, were also the most highly
dependent despite their efforts towards autarchy, relying on other states, including other great powers,
for critical raw materials. Realism thus seems correct in arguing that high dependence may lead to
conflict, as states use war to ensure access to vital goods. Realism's problem with the interwar era,
however, is that Germany and Japan had been even more dependent in the 1920s, yet they sought war
only in the late 1930s when their dependence, although still significant, had fallen.

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Best scientific models prove growth makes extinction-level warming inevitable---only

K-waves prove—causes nuclear war

b) Robust studies prove

After studying 93 episodes of economic crisis in 22 countries in Latin America

c) Econ collapse saps resources from military aggression

longer compete economically with the United States.

d) Diversionary theory is false

"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions

"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions

Second, any risk of extinction outweighs everything

business-as-usual (BAU)—the standard growth story assumed by economists,

Why argue about plausible rates of future energy-efficiency

putting the breaks on economic growth appears to be the only

b.) Metal and mineral peaks

Desire irrelevant --- collapses forces transition

Realizations of limits of growth shatter current industrial mindset

Tech fails – it can’t be developed fast enough

All their authors are biased

People can’t eat—money is a pre-requisite. The green revolution happened 40 years

Their biotech solutions won’t be accepted

Growth doesn’t create democracy or liberalization

Collapse doesn’t hurt democracy

Democracy doesn't prevent wars—history and theory prove

Globalization enables epidemic spread—our turn outweighs their turn

Extinction genetically impossible and empirically disproven

Lethal diseases burn out fast—Ebola proves

They can’t access nanotech:

Other technology proves—the time frame is decades

Growth causes poverty and massive resource disparities

Growth is root cause of terrorism

Since colonies would rely on earth we necessarily link turn this

Muscle and bone sensitivity make it impossible

Studies prove it is human induced

b) Causes the planet to explode

It's not too late to solve the worst of warming

No uniqueness – no impending ice age now.

15,000 years at best

Warming will cause an ice age

Warming will destroy water supplies, which is key to agriculture.

Warming destroys global agriculture.

SO2 causes a more carbonized, warmer planet.

Collapse solves war—no resources

Diversionary wars don’t escalate

Interdependence doesn’t solve war

Interdependence does not solve war—both world wars disprove this

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