2AC

AT – Vagueness
Counter Interpretation: we meet the affirmative only has to provide the stock issues
within the case, everything else is extra things we could provide

Cross ex checks abuse, they could have asked for all those things and we gave answers
for most of those, if they were confused about something they should have asked they
never once in cx mentioned funding or agent of action
No abuse, there is no evidence that we have harmed ANY neg ground with this, if
there was any way we used those to spike out of a DA or argument then yeah that can
be warranted, but we have not, there is no abuse in round, do not vote for the neg on
this

At – Reasons to prefer

Judge vagueness doesn’t destroy solvency, in the 1AC we only have to provide the stock issues that’s the
affirmative burden we don’t have to require plan planks, its just extra if the affirmative feels like it

AT – Grounds

Judge there is no grounds on this, in their grounds it says that you wouldn’t be able to run an ECON
Disad yet judges look at what disad they run they ran an economy advantage we clearly aren’t limiting
the negatives ground here

AT – Voters
A priori – stock issues are the priority priori means it’s the first priority we are having stock issues as the
top priority in the 1AC

Stock issue – we specified the things that they said that the negative needed in cross examination theres
no need for the negative to be running this

Fairness – the affirmative is completely fair it isn’t a moving target whatsoever since we clarified our
funding, agent of action ext. they can now hold It against us we can no longer change our answer on
them
So judges you should vote for the affirmative on the vagueness argument purely because cross
examination checks abuse, and if you payed attention during cross examination youll notive that the
2NC asked my partner was their interpretation needed so meet
 At – ECON
First to respond to their Li ’21 UQ card we have one response
Decline coming – small businesses not growing --- they are critical

Roberts 1/18/21
(Lance, Author of Real Investment Advice PRO. Unique, unbiased and contrarian real investment
advice,” pg online @ https://seekingalpha.com/article/4399488-nfib-survey-sends-strong-warning-
small-cap-stocks//um-ef)

Currently, many analysts expect a massive economic boom in 2021. While stimulus may lead to a short-
term boost in consumption, the impact of higher taxes, more regulations, and weak employment
growth will suppress consumption longer term. In September 2019, I wrote "NFIB Survey Trips Economic
Alarms". Of course, it was just a few short months later the U.S. economy fell into the deepest recession
since the "Great Depression." The latest NFIB survey is sending a strong warning to investors piling into
small-cap stocks. While the mainstream media overlooks the NFIB data, they really shouldn't. There are
currently 30.7 million small businesses in the United States. Small businesses (defined as fewer than 500
employees) account for 99% of all enterprises, employ 60 million people, and account for nearly 70% of
employment. The chart below shows the breakdown of firms and jobs from the 2019 Census Bureau
Data. Despite all the headlines about Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Tesla
(NASDAQ:TSLA), and others, small businesses drive the economy, employment, and wages. Therefore,
what the NFIB says is relevant to what happens in the economy. NFIB Shows Confidence Drop In
December, the survey declined to 95.9 from a peak of 108.8. Notably, many suggest the drop was
"politically driven" by conservative owned businesses. While there was indeed a drop following the
election, the decline continues what started in 2018. As I discussed when the index hit its record high
previously: "Record levels of anything are records for a reason. It is the point where the sustainability of
activity cannot be increased further. Therefore, when a 'record level' is reached, it is NOT THE
BEGINNING, but rather an indication of the MATURITY, of a cycle." That point of "exuberance" was the
peak of the economy. Before we dig into the details, let me remind you this is a "sentiment" based
survey. Such is a crucial concept to understand as "Planning" to do something is a far different factor
than actually "doing" it. An Economic Boom Will Require Participation Currently, many analysts expect a
massive economic boom in 2021. The basis of those expectations is massive "pent-up" demand when
the economy reopens. I would agree with that expectation had there been no stimulus programs or
expanded unemployment benefits. Those inflows allowed individuals to spend during a recession where
such would not usually be the case. Those artificial inputs dragged forward future or "pent-up"
consumption into the present. However, the NFIB survey also suggests much the same. Small
businesses are susceptible to economic downturns and don't have access to public markets for debt or
secondary offerings. As such, they tend to focus heavily on operating efficiencies and profitability. If
businesses were expecting a massive surge in "pent up" demand, they would be doing several things to
prepare for it. Such includes planning to increase capital expenditures to meet expected demand.
Unfortunately, those expectations peaked in 2018 and are lower again. There are important implications
to the economy since "business investment" is a GDP calculation component. Small business capital
expenditure "plans" have a high correlation with real gross private investment. The plunge in "CapEx"
expectations suggests business investment will drop sharply next month. As stated, "expectations" are
very fragile, and reality is often quite different. Employment To Remain Weak If small businesses think
the economy is "actually" improving over the longer term, they would also be increasing employment.
Given business owners are always optimistic, over-estimating hiring plans is not surprising. However,
reality occurs when actual "demand" meets its operating cash flows. To increase employment, which is
the single most considerable cost to any business, you need two things: Confidence the economy is
going to continue to grow in the future, which leads to; Increased production of goods or services to
meet growing demand. Currently, there is little expectation for a strongly recovering economy. Such is
the requirement for increasing employment and expanding capital expenditures.

Then to answer the well water soloutions 18 card we have two responses
Fracking has cost the country billions, renewables are cheaper - now is key
Sharon Kelly 20, 1-25-2020, "After a Decade of Fracking, Billions of Dollars Lost and a Climate in Crisis,"
Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/after-a-decade-of-fracking-billions-of-dollars-lost-and-a-climate-
in-crisis/ //mecr

As 2020 begins, the impacts of climate change have become increasingly clear around the world. The new year started amid
devastating wildfires, tied to the worst droughts Australia has experienced in hundreds of years, which encircled much of the continent. So far, 29 people have been
reported dead. A University of Sydney professor estimated the number of animals killed likely tops one billion.

Today’s climate impacts have been shaped heavily by actions taken during the last 10 years, particularly in
the U.S., where the climate benefits of coal power plant retirements were undermined by the rise of
natural gas. Global carbon emissions had leveled off in the middle of the last decade, but began to climb again in 2017, breaking records
anew each year since.

Over the past decade, as the climate crisis worsened, hundreds of drilling rigs dotted both the Permian Basin’s desert expanses in Texas and the
Marcellus Shale’s Appalachian hills, grinding through rock to reach oil and gas trapped in brittle shale deep underground. In that time, the U.S. smashed

global records for the production of oil and gas — two of the three fossil fuels most responsible for the ongoing climate crisis.

And at the same time, the last decade’s rush to drill continued to prove spectacularly unprofitable. The year 2020 arrived amid tens of
billions of dollars in new fiscal write-downs and losses for oil drillers and fracking firms. Moody’s observed that oil and gas debt defaults represented

91 percent of the country’s total corporate debt defaults during the next-to-last fiscal quarter of the decade.
As the new decade starts, it’s worth taking stock of the last decade’s rush to drill and frack for oil and gas and to consider what we now know
about how the costs of climate change have begun piling up at increasing rates over the past 10 or so years.

Crossing Into One-Degree Warming

The past decade was the warmest on record, according to two analyses by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that were released on January 15.

“These trends are the footprints of human activity stomping on the atmosphere,” Gavin A. Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, told The New York Times. “We know that this has been driven by human activities.”

In 2017, the world on average reached one full degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of human-induced warming
above pre-industrial levels, NASA reports.

And the 2010s saw previously unfamiliar weather-related terms like “thundersnow,” “polar vortex,” and “bombogenesis” popularized, as well
as a host of climate-linked firsts and rarities.
The U.S. experienced its first recorded full-blown EF-3 tornado made of — and by — wildfire during 2018’s Carr fire in California. While so-called
“fire whirls,” or narrow vortices, aren’t all that uncommon during wildfires, 2018’s unprecedented “firenado” was 1,000 feet wide and tossed
vehicles aloft, sent a steel shipping container flying a half-mile, and killed a Redding, California, firefighter.

It was the decade when scientists discovered huge mysterious craters opening in fields of Russian and Alaskan permafrost. Researchers soon linked the craters to
both a thawing Arctic and the release of methane and carbon previously locked in the frozen landscape. Amid the Arctic thaw, building foundations sank while trees
and cemetery gravestones began to tilt and lean as the world’s permafrost began shedding its permanence .

The 2010s brought evidence that even familiar principles of physics can operate in unfamiliar ways in a climate-changed
world. In Phoenix, Arizona, June temperatures climbed so high that commercial airplanes were grounded amid concern that their wings could not generate the
lift that makes manned flight possible.

The decade also saw some of the most catastrophic storms to ever strike along the Atlantic Coast, including four of the five most
damaging hurricanes in U.S. history. “For all United States hurricanes, Katrina (2005) is the costliest storm on record,” a 2018 National Hurricane Center
analysis found, using inflation-adjusted figures. “Hurricane Harvey (2017) ranks second, Hurricane Maria (2017) ranks third, Hurricane Sandy (2012) ranks fourth,
and Hurricane Irma (2017) ranks fifth.”

As the decade ended, the deadly Hurricane Dorian — a storm so powerful some called for the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to be
extended to describe it as a “Category 6” storm — stalled over Great Abaco and Grand Bahama island with horrific consequences.

Between 1980 and 2019, climate and weather disasters wreaked billion-dollar damages 258 times in the United States, causing over $1.75
trillion in damages, NOAA reported this month. And those events are occurring more often. “2019 is the fifth consecutive year (2015-2019) in which 10
or more billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events have impacted the United States,” the agency wrote. “Over the last 40 years (1980-2019), the years with
10 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events include 1998, 2008, 2011-2012, and 2015-2019.”

Fourteen million people were impacted by the Midwest’s “great flood of 2019,” as The New York Times put it in September last year. That flood
besieged those along the banks of the Mississippi for an even longer duration than the 1927 floods that led to laws giving the Army Corps of
Engineers flood control authority over the river.

And the 2010s also brought a sharp increase in damages from smaller individual incidents, the insurance industry reports, with insurers linking
that growth to the emerging impacts of a changing climate. “The data show total insured losses from natural catastrophes are up from less than
$7 billion a year in the 1970s to between $29.3 billion and $143.4 billion a year from 2010 to 2018,” Reuters reported in September 2019. “In
2018, 62 percent of all natural catastrophe insurance claims came from secondary perils” like hail storms, flash floods, and wildfires, rather than
“primary perils” like hurricanes and earthquakes.

Drilling and Fracking Hundreds of Thousands of New Oil and Gas Wells

This was also the decade that brought documentary viewers the first images of tap water that could be lit on fire, as Gasland, released in 2010,
displayed footage from homes near gas drilling where water became so contaminated with methane and other pollutants that, far from
extinguishing fire, what flowed from the faucet could ignite into one.

An oil and gas drilling wave swept across the U.S., even as the impacts of climate change were
increasingly palpable and deadly. Much of the drilling frenzy was unleashed by a combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling
that allowed oil companies to wring fossil fuels from dense shale rock underlying huge swaths of the nation.

That drilling rush not only brought contaminated drinking water supplies, it also accelerated climate
change. At the start of the decade, scientists had warned of the hazards of shale gas in particular. In 2011, scientists
Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea published their landmark peer-reviewed study showing that methane leaks from the natural gas industry — particularly from shale

gas production — could be so severe that burning natural gas for power could be worse than burning coal .
In many cases, state and federal regulators nonetheless facilitated and encouraged the rush to drill. “You wouldn’t always know it, but
[American energy production] went up every year I was president,” former President Barak Obama, who served from 2009 to 2017, said at an
event in Houston in November last year.

The past 10 years left the U.S. pockmarked with hundreds of thousands of new oil and gas wells.

During the decade spanning 2009 to 2019, oil and gas drillers received new permits for roughly 430,000
wells nationwide, including new wells and so-called “workovers,” used to extend the life of a well, according to data from WellDatabase.com reviewed by
DeSmog.
At least 42,000 of those wells were later listed as canceled or suspended and a drilling date was unavailable for many other wells, leaving their
status unclear.

Drillers put drill bit to ground at roughly 245,000 new oil and gas wells nationwide between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2019,
WellDatabase reports, meaning that the 2010s brought roughly a quarter million or more new oil and gas wells to the U.S. landscape.

Shale gas represented 16 percent of total U.S. gas production as the decade began. By 2019, over 80 percent of U.S. gas came from shale wells,
according to the Energy Information Administration.

More than 113,000 new wells targeting shale formations were drilled between 2009 and 2019 and produced oil or gas from two dozen shale
regions, or “plays,” nationwide, the Welldatabase.com data shows. Detailed information was unavailable for tens of thousands of additional
wells drilled over the decade.

Drillers generated over 861 billion gallons of wastewater from those shale wells drilled during the past decade, the data shows. That’s roughly
enough to give every person living in the U.S. in 2009 their own 11-foot round swimming pool filled with wastewater four feet deep.

And that’s only a small slice of the oil and gas industry’s total production of toxic waste — add in the wastewater from older wells and new
conventional wells and nearly a trillion gallons a year of wastewater flows from the oil and gas industry , according to
a new Rolling Stone investigation, which highlights that the industry’s “brine” is not only often toxic and laden with corrosive salts but can also
be radioactive.

And climate-warming methane pollution linked to all that oil and gas production soared. In a 2019 study, the researcher
Robert Howarth found that methane concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere since 2008 were “rapidly rising.”

“This recent increase

in methane is massive,” Howarth said in a statement accompanying his research. “It’s globally significant. It’s
contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”
A ‘Lost Decade’ for Profits From Fossil Fuels

This past decade also brought unprecedented upheaval in the economics of energy. Coal — the fossil fuel at the foundation of the industrial
revolution, long regarded as dirty but cheap — was out-competed by natural gas throughout the 2010s.

In 2011, the country’s capacity to generate power from coal peaked at nearly 318 gigawatts — and then rapidly tumbled to 257 gigawatts in
2017, according to the Energy Information Administration. Natural gas largely displaced coal.

“The United States surpassed Russia in 2011 to become the world’s largest producer of natural gas and surpassed Saudi Arabia
in 2018 to become the world’s largest producer of petroleum,” the Energy Information Administration reported in 2019. “Last year’s increase in the United
States was one of the largest absolute petroleum and natural gas production increases from a single country in history.”

But even as drillers churned out extraordinary amounts of natural gas, driving prices to historic lows, they never figured out how to make that
drilling profitable.
As DeSmog has documented, shale drillers started the decade making spectacular promises to investors — but failed on the delivery. Shale gas
would be so cheap companies could make money even if gas prices plunged, analysts predicted, and others forecast that shale oil could be
produced for as little as $5 a barrel.

Instead, companies racked up huge debts and massive write-downs even as production soared. A seeming paradox emerged, where debt-fueled
energy companies churned out ever-growing amounts of oil and gas, but failed entirely at making their backers rich in the process, resulting in what some called the
industry’s “lost decade.”

“The 2010s was a lost decade for shares of U.S. energy companies overall,” Reuters reported in December. “Volatile commodity prices amid
growing supply, poor financial performance, and disfavor from some investor groups all contributed to the energy sector’s transformation from
investor darling to investor outcast.”

In 2011, The New York Times highlighted warning signs inside the oil and gas sector that the economics of shale were unworkable. “‘Money is
pouring in’ from investors even though shale gas is ‘inherently unprofitable,’ an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment
company, wrote to a contractor in a February [2011] email. ‘Reminds you of dot-coms,’” a front-page New York Times article reported.

The end of the decade saw EQT, the nation’s largest natural gas producer, announce that their assets were worth $1.8 billion less than
previously described. That was the result, the company said, of low gas prices and “changes to our development strategy.” Oil giant Chevron
wrote down $11 billion in assets in December and fracking giant Schlumberger reported a $10 billion loss for 2019.
Over the same time, renewable energy began to become cost competitive — even against natural gas’s historic low prices.

That’s a shift that could have extraordinary implications for the coming years, as the most polluting energy sources are no longer also the
cheapest.

three quarters of the power capacity that companies plan to add in the U.S. this coming
In January, the Energy Information Administration reported that more than

year will overwhelmingly come from wind and solar power . Those wind and solar projects will add over three times as much new capacity as is expected from
natural gas additions. Over 70 percent of those natural gas plants are planned in the gas-producing states of Pennsylvania, Texas, California, and Louisiana, the Energy Information
Administration added.

“The analysis presents compelling evidence that 2019 represents a tipping point,” the Rocky Mountain Institute concluded in reports released last September, “with the economics
now favoring clean energy over nearly all new U.S. gas-fired generation.”
Shale investors aren’t the only ones who see the 2010s as a “lost decade.” Public policy debates over the past several decades were often
consumed with well-funded efforts to confuse the public on climate change and to question the reliability of climate science — but now we
know that even models from the 1970s proved to be astoundingly accurate, Scientific American reported in December.

The failure to look at climate change head on was acknowledged by Florida’s Republican officials in remarks that made national news last
October, coming from a state where a 2015 Miami Herald investigation found state officials had been forbidden to use the term “climate
change.”

“We lost a decade,” Republican state senator Tom Lee said at a hearing examining sea-level rise and other impacts that a warming climate will
have on the low-lying state’s infrastructure.

As the 2020s begin, climate scientists and world experts are warning that — if there ever had been — now, there’s no time to
spare.

Fracking is not only bad for the environment, it is also bad for the economy—So plan
is key to save the economy
Paul galley 2012 (Paul Gallay is the president and Hudson Riverkeeper. Riverkeeper is a 45-year-old,
member-supported organization devoted to the protection of the Hudson River and the drinking water
supply of nine million New Yorkers.

https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking-a-bad-bet-for-the-environment-and-economy-1881567766.html)
As New York considers new hydrofracking regulations that would allow companies to drill an estimated 48,000 gas wells across the rural
countryside, many see the pitched battle over the state's fracking plan as a tug-of-war between the
environment and the
economy. In reality, both will suffer if the frackers get their way . Riverkeeper, the organization I lead, is devoted to
protecting the Hudson River and the drinking water supply for nine million New Yorkers. We originally engaged with this issue to protect New
York City's drinking water, but the risks go far beyond one watershed, even one so important it serves the nation's largest city. The risks posed
by hydrofracking are dead serious. Those YouTube clips that show people lighting their drinking water on fire? They're not isolated cases: Duke
University recently proved that drinking
water wells near hydrofracking sites have 17 times more methane than
wells not located near fracking. Fracking operations have
generated billions of gallons of radiation-laced toxic
wastewater that we can't manage properly and forced families to abandon their homes because of
dangerous levels of arsenic, benzene and toluene in their blood. Fracking's caused earthquakes in Ohio
and Oklahoma, ozone in Wyoming that out-smogs L.A. and a 200 percent increase in childhood
asthma in parts of Texas. A top federal scientist admits we just don't know enough about all the different ways fracking can make us
sick. Given this parade of horribles, it's no surprise that environmentalists aren't alone in warning against New York's rush to frack—dozens of
counties and towns in the Empire State have imposed moratoriums or bans on fracking. It's also no surprise that only 13 percent of New
Yorkers polled by Quinnipiac College believe that fracking is safe for the environment. Yet, the frackers are still icing champagne, in anticipation
of a thumbs-up later this year. They know that a whopping 30 percent of all New Yorkers are so worried about the economy they want fracking
to happen whether or not it's safe for the environment. You've got to wonder what those folks would say if they knew that fracking has
so many drawbacks it would leave New York in worse economic shape, not better. Road maintenance alone
will cost communities up to $375 million, according to a draft report by the state Department of
Transportation, since each well generates about 4,000 extra heavy truck trips. Many local officials and businesspeople warn that
fracking will erode New York's all-important tourism sector, by "creating an industrial landscape that far outlives the
profitability of gas extraction." Studies show that drill-friendly communities do worse than others in personal
income, employment growth, economic diversity, educational attainment and ability to attract
investment. Then there are the risks to private property and real estate. Several major national lenders refuse to grant mortgages to
homeowners with gas leases; fracking puts as much as $670 billion in secondary mortgage debt at risk. What's truly scary is that state
officials have ignored all this evidence about hydrofracking's potential to ruin our economy . The state did
prepare an Economic Assessment Report on fracking, with the help of a consultant. But, it appears that the consultant was asked to study only
the economic benefits of fracking, as the report spends a scant seven pages dismissing concerns about fracking's negative economic impact, in
terms so superficial they'd make a booster blush, while devoting 250 pages to fracking's supposed benefits. New York is one of the few states
yet to give in to the frackers. That could change within months—unless Gov. Andrew Cuomo pays heed to the tens of thousands of his
constituents who have already spoken out against fracking, and the tens of thousands more who are expected to do so before the public
comment period closes Jan. 11. If Gov. Cuomo does give fracking the green light, watch out. The drillers are going to have one hell of a party,
and we New Yorkers will end up with the hangover. However, if our famously rational governor thinks this one through, he can avoid disaster.
The facts show that hydrofracking doesn't just destroy air and water quality, undermine community
character and make people sick. Fracking would also do serious harm to New York's economy. Net-net,
fracking is simply a bad bet. No question that America needs a sustainable energy plan, but fracking is neither safe nor
sustainable nor good for the economy. Those who say it is are selling snake oil, not natural gas.
At – Solvency