OFF

The United States federal government should

- substantially increase funding and development of desalination technology
and infrastructure sufficient to solve water scarcity
- institute a national program of research, knowledge transfer, and assistance in
developing agricultural capacity abroad
- invest in the development of agricultural infrastructure and clean irrigation
programs
- substantially increase investment in smart microgrids via a diverse portfolio
tailored to installations, including energy sources for on-site generation, backup
capacity, energy efficiency, storage, and accelerated implementation of the
SPIDERS project
- substantially increase its construction of constructed wetlands
- Increase research and development of broadband technology
- Subsidize smaller companies and regulate monopolistic practices of larger US
Broadband companies
- Pursue public-private partnerships with Broadband tech firms located in
Japan, Taiwan, and Europe
New innovations allow for the widespread reliance on desalination for water
security
TRT World 2021 TRT, Turkish News Agency, citing Sergio Salinas, a professor of Water Supply
Engineering at the IHE Delft Institute and Manish Kumar, a professor in the Department of Civil,
Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, “Is desalination the answer to global
freshwater scarcity?” January 25, 2021 https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/is-desalination-
the-answer-to-global-freshwater-scarcity-43561 DMR
New research has the potential to reduce the costs of desalination, making a life-saving resource
more accessible. But without a shift in the way we think about “theoretically infinite” resources, freshwater access will remain
a challenge. “If climate change mitigation is about energy, adaptation is about water,” writes anthropologist Gokce Gunel. The
former aims to curtail the drivers of climate change, while the latter aims to manage its actual or expected impacts by adjusting
social, ecological, and economic systems. By far, one of the most discussed aspects of climate change is the fate of freshwater, and
its accessibility. Many headlines have heralded global wars over freshwater, and the Dutch government has even funded the
development of an online tool that can predict the likelihood of water-related conflict. Though large-scale international conflict over
water is unlikely, the effects of water stress and scarcity are very real. Already, over 2 billion people on the globe live in countries
experiencing high water stress, and two-thirds of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least a month
during the year. By 2030, 700 million people could be displaced by intense water scarcity. In addition to drinking water, freshwater is
important for agriculture and sanitation; poor water and sanitation facilities lead to health problems for nearly half of the population
in developing countries, and is associated with 80 percent of disease, according to the Global Water Institute. In many countries, the
extraction of renewable resources has perhaps exceeded the natural renewal capacity of aquifers, and this is only expected to
increase because the population is going to increase. By 2050, we will be about 9.7 to 10 billion inhabitants [on earth], which is a
huge demand, not only for the water sector but also for food and energy. [...] And of course with the improving economies in many
countries, it will mean that industries will demand more water. The household level and per capita demand will also increase. Dr.
Salinas, IHE Delft It is no surprise then, that considerable scientific inquiry and international efforts revolve around the question of
freshwater access and distribution. Researchers in the US have recently made a discovery that could make
desalination - the process of removing salt and other impurities from water - 30 to 40 percent
more efficient, and therefore potentially cheaper and more accessible . Since saltwater makes up over 97
percent of the globe’s water supply, desalination, an ancient and reliable method of freshwater production, and one that can be
integrated into existing water systems with minimal health risks, seems like an obvious answer to the existential question of
freshwater access. “What desalination does, with all its problems and its expense is, it creates a local source of
water. So if you're near the ocean or if you have access to groundwater, or if you have access to wastewater, you can create clean
water,” Manish Kumar, a professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, tells TRT
World. There are currently two commonly used methods of desalination: thermal and membrane-based. The first method entails
boiling water and collecting the vapor, while the second, known as reverse osmosis desalination, forces water through a membrane
to separate water from salt and other impurities. Both methods are energy and capital intensive, but for many regions, Kumar
explains, “it's perhaps the only choice.” Kumar is one of the co-leaders of the research whose findings could make desalination more
efficient. The academic research team, along with DuPont Water Solutions, solved a decades-long puzzle
regarding understanding how water actually moves through the membranes. “In the last 40 years [of
membrane technology]...all the innovation was done in the dark. Now we have a much more rational
understanding of what can be done to make it better...so that this becomes much more efficient
instead of trying thousands of different things and hoping that something would work.” According to Jeffrey Wilbur, manager of the
reverse osmosis membrane chemistry research group at DuPont Water Solutions, over the next few years, DuPont, which makes
various desalination and water purification products, will look to use this discovery alongside their other tools. Membrane-based
desalination technology is cheaper, easier, and more energy efficient compared to thermal-based methods. However, it remains a
costly option, may require complicated cost engineering, and demands specially-trained personnel for technical issues. Currently,
most the biggest market for desalination technologies is the Gulf region, which accounts for 70 percent of all desalination plants in
the world, spread out primarily between Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain. Desalination helps produce about
80 percent of the total drinking water in GCC states. “Technologies like this and advances like ours will really lead to
its more widespread use throughout the developing world,” Kumar adds. There are currently about 20,000
desalination plants around the world as of 2018, according to the International Desalination Association. In addition to industrial and
agricultural use, it provides about 300 million people with drinking water. According to Sergio Salinas, a professor of Water Supply
Engineering at the IHE Delft Institute, an institution that works to help build capacity in the water sector in developing countries,
desalination is not the primary solution for providing drinking water, but a technical and sustainable solution to help alleviate water
stress and scarcity in arid regions. “We can start by making more sustainable use of the demand for water,” he tells TRT World. “We
can start actually by saving water, by increasing the productivity of water in agriculture and industry, and by minimising and reducing
the leakages in distribution networks.” He explains that there are cities and regions where 30 to 60 percent of treated water is lost
during distribution. He adds that recycling water in industry, or water reuse in agriculture (which accounts for approximately 70
percent of freshwater use), and the transport of water are other sustainable options for freshwater use. Finally, both Kumar and
Salinas add that the desalination of brackish water (which is less salty than seawater) and wastewater reuse should be prioritised
over the oceans and seas for freshwater resources. Environmental concerns In addition to its monetary costs, the detrimental
environmental impact associated with desalination technologies is also an issue. First, both kinds of desalination, particularly
thermal desalination, require a lot of energy. In Gulf countries, this energy is supplied through fossil fuels, which lead to the emission
of greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming. There is a new movement toward solar-powered desalination, and other
renewable sources to meet the energy demand. Second, desalination produces excess brine - about 1.5 litres of brine for every 1
litre of freshwater produced - as well as toxic contaminants from the desalination process, which is usually dumped back into the
ocean. When not done properly, it creates a high-salinity environment. Alongside increased temperatures in certain areas, this
process decreases the oxygen in the water, killing marine life, and affecting the food chain. As time goes on, the increasingly salty
water will also be more expensive to turn into freshwater. Salinas underlines the importance of capacity development, particularly in
developing contexts. "[It's important] so that when these kind of desalination projects need to be implemented locally, the water
professionals are also able to run and operate these plants. That's very relevant for the sustainability of these kind of projects," he
says. (Reuters) Third, sucking of seawater can also cause marine organisms to get caught in the intake screen, and injured or killed as
a result. For these reasons, according to some experts, it’s eventually going to become impossible to use, and economically unviable,
particularly for Gulf states, where it is most heavily used. While Salinas agrees that there are many challenges posed by desalination,
there are also as many sustainable solutions to address them. “There
are many guidelines on the national level, but also
from the UN, that propose steps for performing environmental impact of desalination plants,” he explains. “In
many cases countries are very strict, like in the case of Australia and the United States where they have
implemented and considered desalination plants. They have a very careful assessment of the potential impacts and also of the
monitoring of the of the impacts of the plants that have been constructed” The social, economic, and ecological
realities around desalination show that it could be a key feature for the future of freshwater
access, but it has to be managed sustainably within the greater framework of freshwater management. According to Gunel, this
hasn’t been the case, at least in the Gulf region. There, she argues, rather than opening eyes to the destructive reality of human-led
freshwater depletion, desalination, or, “the man-made character of water leads to a celebration of water’s interminable abundance;
more of it can always be manufactured, regardless of the environmental conditions of the region.” On the other hand, in places like
India, a solar-power desalination plant provides a more environmentally-friendly source of water, while also providing jobs for local
women.
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Mexico will say yes to a binational water bank - certainty is key and the bank
solves
MARIA MILANES, International Lawyer, J.S.D International Water Resource Law, Master of
Water Law, University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, [Management of Transboundary
Water Resources under Scarcity A Multidisciplinary Approach] 2017
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/9896

This new proposed international legal and institutional framework presents a solution to
manage groundwater along the US–Mexico border region. In addition, specific policies based on
the international framework would provide flexibility for each subregion as well as security for
stakeholders and protection for the environment. This new regulation was simulated with a
specific policy in a subregion, the LRGV, where the results are very positive. Even if this new
approach is different at first; the reality is that the current management of groundwater along
the US–Mexico border is not working. Therefore, a new regulation adapted to the current
circumstances of climate change and population growth must be applied. The development of a
binational water bank is the best potential solution to allocate water along the US–Mexico
border. Water banks have been demonstrated to be an effective and efficient mechanism to
encourge transfers and promote conservation. The success of this tool is due to the
establishment of a capable and flexible legal framework where an institution has authority to
regulate based on social, physical, and economic circumtances as well as setting a fixed price
that avoids uncertainty and risk. In addition, banks are more politically accepted than private
markets. Both the United States and Mexico have developed water banks to allocate their water
resources. This shows the potential willingness to agree to a binational water bank at some
point in the future.

Market solutions drives small famers to ‘water mafia.’ Prices in Uniqueness

Felbab-Brown 20 (Vanda Felbab-Brown Director - Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors Co-
Director - Africa Security Initiative Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy,
and Technology. Brookings, 10/26/20.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/10/26/not-dried-up-us-mexico-water-
cooperation/)tjf

On the Mexican side, the politics were hotter and more surprising. Although a populist
nationalist politician, President López Obrador not only maintained his approach of yielding to
the United States on issue after issue, but also criticized and dismissed the protesting Mexican
farmers and blamed the social strife on “big agriculture.” Big agriculture in Mexico is indeed a
notorious thief of water, failing to pay water dues and depleting water in Mexico over allocated
quotas. But small Mexican farmers are hurting from water stress and often have no voice in
water policy decisions.

Unlike in the United States where both surface and ground water is owned by many entities
(including state and local governments) and private actors (including individual and corporate
land owners), in Mexico, water is owned by the Mexican state. The extremely complex system of
water rights and their wide variation across jurisdictions on the U.S. side create lengthy and
often difficult policymaking and enforcement tangles, but they also force water decision-making
processes that involve consultation and problem-solving with all stakeholders. On the Mexican
side, water decision-making is set by one institution – Comisión Nacional del Agua (Conagua) –
and is heavily centralized, top-down, and insufficiently consultative and respectful of the
interests of the varied stakeholders. As a result, some Mexican farmers do not even know that
the 1944 treaty exists or what it says: Instead, they talk of water belonging to all.

Systematically ignoring the needs of small Mexican farmers can thrust them into the hands of
“water mafias” — criminal groups that siphon off water in particular localities and illegally sell it
at inflated prices to industries, big agriculture, and marginalized users, whether slum residents
or small farmers. Such water mafias operate from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and the
Middle East to Latin America. In Mexico, water theft has been more disorganized, but large
Mexican criminal groups, particularly those with experience in oil theft and illegal sale of
gasoline, can easily expand into water theft and smuggling.

Expansion of Cartel strength causes Mexican State Failure

Grinberg 19 (Alexander Grinberg is an officer in the U.S. Army. Strategy Bridge, 2/4/19.
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/2/4/is-mexico-a-failing-state)tjf

Mexico is a fragile state, and without action, faces the risk of becoming a failing, or worse, a
failed state. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines a fragile state
as one that is “unable or unwilling to perform the functions necessary for poverty reduction, the
promotion of development, protection of the population and the observance of human rights.”
In 2009, U.S. Joint Forces Command released a statement expressing concerns over Mexico,
highlighting the potential even then for a total collapse. At the time, then-President Felipe
Calderón responded to the report, stating it was entirely false; allegedly, he even wanted
President Obama to release a statement to that effect. In August 2018, the State Department
released a do-not-travel warning for five of the thirty-two Mexican states. Many other states are
still considered dangerous, and the U.S. State Department has advised American tourists caution
if not total reconsideration. The warning indicates a lack of stability and control on the
government’s part in the region. The Mexican government is in a prolonged state of civil war
with various cartels, and the state is losing. Rampant corruption from the local to federal level
breaks down the fundamental principal-agent relationship between the government and its
population, encouraging locals to turn to militias for protection. The militias are, in part, a result
of widespread corruption as well as the Mexican military’s deterioration. Mexico’s military faces
large numbers of desertions, while measures to provide security for its population continue to
fail. The United States should continue to treat Mexico as a welcome economic partner but
accept that Mexico is a fragile state, and thus a serious security risk. The drug war in Mexico is
escalating, and it is creating a spillover effect in the United States. In the United States, the
majority of the concern from the Mexican drug war focuses on its impact on the opioid
epidemic, a growing topic in both countries. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control,
the total economic burden for opioid misuse, often leading to heroin abuse, is $78.5 billion a
year. CNN reported that from 2002 to 2016 the number of heroin users increased from 404,000
to 948,000, a 135% increase. The opioid epidemic is part of the drug war in Mexico, where
violence spills over. Demand in the United States for narcotics profit drug trafficking
organizations and money is then laundered back to the cartels who use these funds to purchase
weapons in order to take more territory or assert control in Mexico. The spillover effect is
hurting both the United States and Mexico. Assistant Secretary Brownfield, representing the
State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, noted in a
2017 teleconference that an estimate of 90-94% of all “heroin consumed in the U.S. comes from
Mexico.” While 90% of cocaine samples seized in the U.S. in 2015 originated from Columbia, the
cartels smuggle them through Mexico to the U.S. While drugs flow into the U.S. from Mexico,
illegal arms are trafficked back into Mexico, fueling the violence. A 2009 report from the U.S.
Government Accountability Office noted that approximately 87% of firearms seized in Mexico
over the past five years could be traced back to the United States. Stratfor disputes this claim,
arguing the number of weapons in the figure were those submitted by Mexican authorities to
the ATF and successfully traced. The figure did not include the total number of weapons seized.
Even if Stratfor’s claim is true and the actual percentage is less than 12%, it is still a concerning
number, indicating American arms and associated illegal arms trafficking contribute to the
violence and corruption in Mexico. Corruption in Mexico affects public services and industry,
negatively impacting the economic well-being of its citizens. A 2016 World Economic Forum
Global Competitiveness Report noted bribery and corruption could increase business costs in
Mexico by 10%. Even tax administration is affected, and a 2014 Reuter’s report states that
Mexico has one of the weakest tax revenues in the 34-nation Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development. According to the report, “Crime, corruption and tax evasion
drained $462 billion from Mexico’s economy in 2011, trailing only China and Russia.” Corrupted
tax revenue creates a cyclical effect where the government cannot afford to pay for necessary
services or even its military. Corruption increases the cost for basic necessities and thus further
incentivizing farmers and other vulnerable populations to support the narco-economy.
Kleptocracy creates an environment that economically incentivizes farmers to support illegal
economies and allows these farmers to fall victim to the cartels . A December 2018 New York
Times article covering the trial of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán’s trial discussed various
testimonies in the courtroom that highlighted Mexican corruption at very high levels of office.
Mr. Guzman’s testimony supported other reports of widespread corruption throughout
Mexico’s government at both state and federal levels. Rural farmers fall victim to cartels,
because the Mexican government cannot protect them. Stuart Ramsay, a correspondent for Sky
News, traveled to Mexico to report on Mexico’s continuing drug war. Many of the interviewed
farmers admitted that economic incentives to support a narco-economy , in conjunction with
death threats, overruled legal crop farming. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a British journalist for
Channel 4 News, traveled to Cancun to discuss the current state of Mexico’s drug war. Part of
his report showcased the cartel’s ability to murder with near impunity farmers who resisted. The
inability of the police to combat this form of terror explains why farmers tend not to resist.
Farmers who do resist, typically through an ad hoc militia, add further chaos into an already
unstable situation. Max Weber theorized on the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as a
fundamental tenet of the modern state, and militias challenge this legitimacy—they degrade the
state’s ability to maintain order, and they disrupt the basis of a social contract between the
state and its society. These militias are a symbol in that they challenge the state as the sole
entity with the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The rise of militias and Mexico’s
inability to make gains in securing territory against the cartels suggest the Mexican government
is no longer in control over parts of its country. One might consider the growth of local militias
within Mexico’s rural areas as a way forward, but they are dangerous and indicate the Mexican
government cannot defend its citizens. Mexican militias operate outside of the law, and many
create their own rules on how to protect their towns. While some militias work with their
communities and achieve some level of peace, others act with more questionable methods. In a
2016 Al Jazeera report, journalists recorded militias who patrolled towns and even stopped
Mexican police at gunpoint. The police did not resist as they were ordered to present
documentation, weapon serial numbers, and a reason for movement. The power dynamic
changed. Along with the militias, the Mexican government is struggling to sustain its armed
forces.

Extinction
Manwaring 05 – adjunct professor of international politics at Dickinson

(Max G., Retired U.S. Army colonel, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivarian Socialism, and
Asymmetric Warfare, October 2005, pg. PUB628.pdf)

President Chávez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most
dangerous long-term security challenge facing the global community today. The argument in
general is that failing and failed state status is the breeding ground for instability, criminality,
insurgency, regional conflict, and terrorism. These conditions breed massive humanitarian
disasters and major refugee flows. They can host “evil” networks of all kinds, whether they
involve criminal business enterprise, narco-trafficking, or some form of ideological crusade such
as Bolivarianismo. More specifically, these conditions spawn all kinds of things people in general
do not like such as murder, kidnapping, corruption, intimidation, and destruction of
infrastructure. These means of coercion and persuasion can spawn further human rights
violations, torture, poverty, starvation, disease, the recruitment and use of child soldiers,
trafficking in women and body parts, trafficking and proliferation of conventional weapons
systems and WMD, genocide, ethnic cleansing , warlordism, and criminal anarchy. At the same
time, these actions are usually unconfined and spill over into regional syndromes of poverty,
destabilization, and conflict.62 Peru’s Sendero Luminoso calls violent and destructive activities
that facilitate the processes of state failure “armed propaganda.” Drug cartels operating
throughout the Andean Ridge of South America and elsewhere call these activities “business
incentives.” Chávez considers these actions to be steps that must be taken to bring about the
political conditions necessary to establish Latin American socialism for the 21st century.63 Thus,
in addition to helping to provide wider latitude to further their tactical and operational
objectives, state and nonstate actors’ strategic efforts are aimed at progressively lessening a
targeted regime’s credibility and capability in terms of its ability and willingness to govern and
develop its national territory and society. Chávez’s intent is to focus his primary attack politically
and psychologically on selected Latin American governments’ ability and right to govern. In that
context, he understands that popular perceptions of corruption, disenfranchisement, poverty,
and lack of upward mobility limit the right and the ability of a given regime to conduct the
business of the state. Until a given populace generally perceives that its government is dealing
with these and other basic issues of political, economic, and social injustice fairly and effectively,
instability and the threat of subverting or destroying such a government are real.64 But failing
and failed states simply do not go away. Virtually anyone can take advantage of such an
unstable situation. The tendency is that the best motivated and best armed organization on the
scene will control that instability. As a consequence, failing and failed states become
dysfunctional states, rogue states, criminal states, narco-states, or new people’s democracies. In
connection with the creation of new people’s democracies, one can rest assured that Chávez
and his Bolivarian populist allies will be available to provide money, arms, and leadership at any
given opportunity. And, of course, the longer dysfunctional, rogue, criminal, and narco-states
and people’s democracies persist, the more they and their associated problems endanger global
security, peace, and prosperity.65
 OFF
The United States federal government ought to conduct a prior, binding,
genuine consultation with the 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado
River Basin over whether to implement a water banking framework governing
Colorado River Basin in the U.S
The United States federal government should only implement a water banking
framework governing Colorado River Basin in the U.S if it is approved as a result
of the consultation, and adhere with any requested modifications.
Failure to incorporate indigenous claims in CRB risk assessment decks certainty
of cooperative treaty and exacerbates indigenous disposition
Trudeau 3/1 - [Christine Trudeau, (Trudeau is an enrolled citizen of the Prairie Band
Potawatomi Nation in Mayetta, Kansas. She currently serves as Treasurer Executive Board
Member on the Native American Journalists Association's Board of Directors. Managing Editor
for the Indigenous Investigative Collective (IIC) project Covering Covid-19 in Indian Country and
was recently (2021-2022) the Contributing Editor for High Country News' Indigenous Affairs
Desk, managing Catena grant-funded coverage of natural resources), 3/1/22, "Tribes negotiate
for a fairer future along the Colorado River," No Publication,
https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/indigenous-affairs-colorado-river-tribes-neogiate-for-a-fairer-
future-along-the-colorado-river]//MLee

It is difficult to imagine more extreme conditions for negotiating a monumental water compact,
but that’s where we find ourselves. A pandemic, now entering its third year, has economically
and culturally stressed communities up and down the river. A drought, now in its second
decade, has sapped the Colorado River of its once-dependable snowpack and thus its water
flow. And America’s history of excluding Indigenous nations from river management talks,
now in its second century, has left tribes with little time and few options to ensure that their
people have the permanent homeland so many in Indian Country are seeking to rebuild.

Standing squarely in the middle of these ongoing crises is Daryl Vigil, water administrator for the
Jicarilla Apache Nation and co-facilitator of the Water and Tribes Initiative. Vigil has been at the
forefront of Indigenous water rights in the U.S. for nearly a quarter-century. During a recent
conversation with HCN, as he took stock of the renegotiations from his home in Dulce, New
Mexico, Vigil offered an urgent yet calming reminder: The tough place Indigenous nations are in
isn’t new; what is new is that they finally have the opportunity to do something about it.

High Country News: Tribes have been fighting for decades to fortify their position as water and
drought policy leaders. What does that mean in the simplest terms?

Daryl Vigil: (The) Biden administration has made some incredible commitments, verbally. Some
of these processes still need to be built (while) imagining ourselves, tribal sovereigns, as
partners in helping to create that. There is no formally recognized institutional place for tribal
sovereigns to say we’re trying to participate in the policymaking process for the Colorado
River. That place does not exist.
There’s an assumption that the seven (Colorado River) Basin states and the federal government
are going to speak and protect and advance tribal water rights. That’s just fantasy. And so,
where we’re at right now is incredibly critical — talking about creating a new framework of
operational management for the Colorado River Basin as a whole.

HCN: In the past, you’ve spoken about the core ideological differences in how the tribes and the
U.S. value water on the Colorado River, between viewing water as a delivery system and
addressing matters issue by issue, versus addressing the cultural, environmental, traditional
values of the river. Were you able to integrate those two mindsets in negotiations?

DV: The structure doesn’t accommodate that at all. With the Water and Tribes Initiative, in
2019, we did a tribal water study, and not wanting to let the momentum drop after two years in
the last administration, (we) really wanted to get a feel of where our people are. So we’ve
created a document called Toward a Sense of the Basin, the result of close to 100 interviews
that we did across the basin: tribes, NGOs, Mexico, agriculture groups, municipalities, water
providers, the federal government. What we found when we asked the first question, “What is
your personal and professional relationship to the river?” almost consistently, across the board,
everybody wanted to see a healthy, living, sustainable Colorado River. That was revealing,
because it showed that people really do value those things. That was a huge part of the work
(of) the Ten Tribes Partnership through the Tribal Water Study and their mission to educate,
collaborate and communicate about tribal water rights in the Colorado River Basin.

Everybody wanted to see a healthy, living, sustainable Colorado River. That was revealing,
because it showed that people really do value those things.

HCN: What’s on the horizon for the Water and Tribes Initiative?

DV: Part of what we’ve done is to inform the broader base and engage in a series of policy
briefs. We developed a document that listed the current status of all the 30 tribal sovereigns in
the Colorado River Basin (showing) the history (and) where they’re at now. Another policy brief
we’re working on is around “flexible tools.” We started this particular policy brief almost two
years ago and called it “Water Sharing,” but the (political) climate really wasn’t conducive to
have that conversation then. Now it is. We’re saying, “ Let us have access to those flexible
tools.” Things like forbearance agreements, water banking, interstate marketing, compensated
forbearance, access to conservation programs.

People don’t understand what is happening in the Upper Basin. There’s almost half a million
acre-feet of unused tribal entitlement that’s just going down the river for free that we don’t get
compensated for, and nobody wants to address that issue. (At the Bureau of) Reclamation,
that’s the big elephant in the room right now. They don’t want to address this because that’s
been their security all this time, and that somebody else gets to utilize that unused entitlement
as some problem-solving issue, that’s just got to stop. All we’re asking for is (to) either be
compensated for those things, or to acknowledge that we’re going to put those to development.
And therein lies the collapse of a conversation, because they say, “Well, no, if the tribes develop
that half a million acre-feet in the Upper Basin, what’s going to happen?” It will be that the tribe
actually gets to use its own water.
HCN: What does the lease agreement between the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the state of New
Mexico mean for economic development?

DV: Jicarilla just recently completed a transaction two years in the works with the state of New
Mexico and The Nature Conservancy. Jicarilla is going to lease water to the state of New Mexico
for the strategic water reserve. And we had to create that from scratch, because we were no
longer able to lease a huge portion of our water from Navajo Dam because of shutting down
coal-fired power generation. And so we were able to create this transaction that actually
empowers the sovereign-to-sovereign relationship between the state and the tribe — the first
of its kind.

Each year for the last three years, we’ve had about 25,000 acre-feet of water flowing down the
river without any compensation, without any credit, and no ability to develop that in any shape
or form given the geographics of where our water is stored. Two years later, two water
evaluations and a whole bunch of engagement and work (later), we were able to pull that off.

HCN: How are tribes holding up under the current drought contingency plans, and are you
optimistic about good outcomes when the Colorado River Interim Guidelines expire in 2025?

DV: It’s not written anywhere that we’re on an equal basis to be able to participate in all the
federal subgroups of the drought response operation agreement, like the state is. So no matter
how much they say they’re going to take (tribes) into account, we can’t count on that. We need
something more formal, absolutely pushing the federal government to make sure that they
understand what we’re saying, because we keep telling them what we want, and they keep
coming back doing the “What do you want?” Hopefully, (we’re) making some headway in that
process. I have a direct line of communication with the Upper Basin regional director, and these
connections and these relationships are absolutely vital, because they didn’t exist before. And
my hope is that once we build those relationships (on) a real human level, it’s a lot easier to
execute policy.

Understanding that there hasn’t been a good track record but being incredibly hopeful and
optimistic that people will do the right thing — I think that’s the spirit that tribes are bringing to
the table. It’s touched me so much. I’m part Jemez and Zia Pueblo, and I was listening to the
governor at Acoma Pueblo talk about the sacredness of water and the springs that they go to
still to get water, and sometimes when those springs haven’t produced very much, they’ll leave
it for everything else to drink out of that. So they’ll go thirsty, so other life-forms can get what
they need. That is just so beautiful to me.

HCN: A lot has been covered in the news around the drought and the Colorado River Basin in the
last year, particularly as it concerns the projected snowpack and water flow for the coming
years. What do you think is still missing from that conversation?

DV: The (1922 Colorado River) Compact called for equal distributions of (the river’s) 16.5 million
acre-feet. That (number) was based on, it’s been acknowledged, false hydrology. They went with
a higher number. We’re still trying to operate on the premise that the (river’s water flow) is
going to support these complex compact obligations in terms of the deliveries, and it can’t. And
so there’s talk about, “What is a realistic number?” (It) kind of shifts to (about) 12 million acre-
feet. That’s what we need to divvy up. And if we’re going to divvy up that, tribes absolutely need
to be at that policymaking table.

I think there’s finally a recognition of the need to create that certainty by the inclusion of
tribes, and it’s taken 10 years of yelling and screaming and doing whatever we need to do. This
has to be driven by the tribes themselves — and (the) investments; the momentum that’s taken
place in terms of our participation. Every time tribes have participated in any of these processes,
it’s been meaningful, it’s been impactful, it’s been a positive thing.
 OFF
Increasing protection means increasing ‘permitting’ not ‘prevention’
VICTORIA COLANGELO, 20 – legal expert on mitigation banks and CWA section 404
permitting, former President of the Florida Association of Mitigation Bankers, CEO of the
Mitigation Banking Group Inc., and appointee to the Seminole County Parks and Preservation
Advisory Committee. **A mitigation bank is a type of aquatic resource area established under
the CWA for the purpose of providing compensation for resources permitted under Section 404.
(“THE NAVIGABLE WATERS PROTECTION RULE UPDATE” JULY 6, 2020,
https://mitigationbankinginc.com/navigable-waters-protection-rule-update-by-victoria-
colangelo/ //DH

Under the Clean Water Act (CWA), “protection” does not mean “prevention” of development, it
means “permitting”, because landowners planning for projects that impact “navigable waters” must
first get approval from The Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) and/or a state agency. Landowners have to reduce
impacts and then mitigate for wetland loss by restoring wetlands of equal or greater hydrologic value by purchasing
mitigation credits, doing on-site or off-site mitigation.

Violation – they don’t expand CWA permitting

That’s a voter for limits and ground – anything else massively explodes the
topic and decks links to core generics – makes neg prep untenable
 OFF
Securitizing US-Sino Competition increases the risk of wars. Rejecting the
affirmative is the only mechanism for peaceful rise
Kimiayjan and Romero 22 (Pouyan Kimiayjan is a Research Associate at the Institute for
Peace & Diplomacy. He writes op-eds and policy briefs, hosts expert panels, and provides
foreign policy analysis to various media outlets, including for The Hill Times, The Responsible
Statecraft, and the National Interest. Pouyan’s research mainly concerns Canadian foreign policy
in the Asia Pacific, West Asia, and Europe. Johnsen Romero is a Policy Research Assistant at the
Institute for Peace & Diplomacy and a Yenching Scholar at Peking University. He has previously
served as a Policy Analyst for the Canadian Foreign Ministry. The National Interest, 1/15/22.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/securitized-competition-china-working-against-america-
199279)tjf

The occasional rhetoric of non-confrontation aside, the threat perceptions of policymakers in

Washington and Beijing are normalizing an existential contest for the twenty-first century.
Instead of strengthening existing economic partnerships in the Asia Pacific region, the U.S.
foreign policy establishment is more willing than ever to rally allies and lean on security
partnerships—such as AUKUS—to buttress the rules-based international order it has
traditionally led. As China has risen to be an economic powerhouse in its own right, the United
States has consistently resorted to “securitization” as a policy of choice. The militarization of
Washington’s posture in the Pacific predates Biden and his immediate predecessor. Much
overlooked is the Obama administration’s once-touted “pivot” to Asia and its aim to reassign
U.S. defense priorities to the region. On one hand, the “pivot” meant an increase in U.S. military
spending and additional U.S. Navy assets in the region; on the other, China began ramping up its
own military spending as well as its island-building efforts to secure its claims and trade routes
in the South China Sea. Consequently, the regional military buildup can exacerbate tensions in
several turbulent theatres. For instance, the prevailing security dilemma among the two powers
can further escalate military tensions over Taiwan, sparking a conflict with disastrous
consequences for regional stability and the world economy. Overstating security as the
framework for competing with Beijing has ramifications: Washington risks not only squandering
the political capital that could address economic rivalry but miscalculating the degree to which
economic decisionmaking becomes securitized. As a recent white paper from the Institute for
Peace & Diplomacy observes, “heeding the reality of multipolarity and ceasing to see the rivalry
from a militarist prism would allow the U.S. to capitalize on the rules-based system it has
carefully orchestrated to rebuild.” Meanwhile, the United States has neglected multilateral
economic arrangements in the region. Beijing recently filed an application to join the
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) that
Washington abandoned. Japan, the agreement’s largest economy, has reservations about
securitizing its relations with China given its geographic proximity and trade ties with Beijing.
Tokyo, however, is open to a more coordinated economic strategy to counter China’s growing
influence in the region and hopes for the Biden administration to rejoin the CPTPP, a policy
prescription that could foster healthier economic competition. The Biden administration has so
far refused to return to the CPTPP that it partly designed to contain Beijing’s economic clout.
Meanwhile, China and much of the Asia Pacific have signed onto the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership (RCEP)—a fifteen-member free trade agreement that will tighten regional
interdependence at the expense of non-members. Once RCEP is implemented, further economic
integration will bring the Asia Pacific closer into China's orbit and enable the Asia Pacific's largest
economy to exercise greater influence over the pact’s rules and arrangements from within. In
other words, an overemphasis on security has produced a U.S. strategy that is increasingly
incompatible with the economic basis of Sino-American competition . It is vital for China’s
competitors to forge a more robust, multi-vectored economic agenda that would
counterbalance those regional arrangements wherein they have ceded policy influence to
Beijing. Moving forward, American support for such initiatives could be key to their impact and
sustainability. A more thoughtful grand strategy that takes geo-economic realities seriously can
coexist with policies that address legitimate security concerns including China’s ascendancy in
strategic industries. For instance, New Zealand has carefully tightened its telecom regulations to
address security concerns around 5G networks. At the same time, Wellington successfully
upgraded its free trade agreement with Beijing this year. Other U.S. partners could strike a
similar balance between security and economic imperatives, but it is the latter where U.S.-China
competition is most acute. Using ideology and negative public opinion to lower the risk
threshold and securitize Sino-American relations are recipes for escalation and dangerous zero-
sum framing of competition. The prevalence of fear-based politics only ensures that the two
countries cast each other as existential threats, increasing the prospect of armed conflict while
sidelining the real economic drivers of the competition which guide how the rest of Asia both
engages and competes with China. Instead, the United States must utilize economic competition
to counterbalance China, fostering global economic growth while avoiding the dangerous
implications of security competition.
Advantage 1
 no grid !—1nc
No widespread blackouts—That's not how the grid works
Koerth 18 – Maggie, senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight, citing Bill Lawrence, vice
president and chief security officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and
Candace Suh-Lee, who leads a cybersecurity research team at the Electric Power Research
Institute, a nonprofit research and development lab, " Hacking The Electric Grid Is Damned
Hard", FiveThirtyEight, 8/13/2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hacking-the-electric-
grid-is-damned-hard/ JHW
The nightmare is easy enough to imagine. Nefarious baddies sit in a dark room, illuminated by the green glow of a computer screen.
Meanwhile, technicians watch in horror from somewhere in the Midwest as they lose control of their electrical systems. And,
suddenly, hundreds of thousands, even millions of Americans are plunged into darkness. That scene was evoked in recent weeks as
federal security experts at the Department of Homeland Security warned that state-sponsored hackers have targeted more than
American elections — they’re after the electric grid, too. They’ve gotten “to the point where they could have thrown switches,” a
DHS official told The Wall Street Journal. Both DHS and the FBI have linked these attacks to Russia — which was already pinned as
the culprit in two attacks that shut down power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine two Decembers in a row, in 2015 and
2016. It’s all very urgent — a high-risk crisis that must be solved immediately. But, surprisingly, some electrical system experts are
thinking about it in a different way. Cyberattacks on the grid are a real risk, they told me. But the worst-case scenarios
we’re imagining aren’t that likely. Nor is this a short-term crisis, with risks that can be permanently solved. Bringing down
the grid is a lot harder than just flicking a switch , but the danger is real — and it may never go away.
Representatives from two nonprofit organizations — both of which play large roles in how the electric grid is regulated and
maintained — said it
is easier to imagine disaster scenarios than create one . “There’ve been some
very sensational books out there about the grid going dark because someone’s got their finger ready over a
mouse and everything is going to turn off at the same time,” said Bill Lawrence, vice president and chief security officer at the North
American Electric Reliability Corporation, the regulatory authority that sets and enforces technological standards for utility
companies across the continent. “The
grid does not work that way.” Our electric infrastructure is chock-
full of both redundancies and regional variations — two things that impede widespread sabotage.
That’s not to say that the grid isn’t under attack. Lawrence acknowledged that there is interest in “trying to hurt us from a distance.”
But he emphasized there have not yet been any successful attacks — meaning hackers haven’t caused
any blackouts. The division of Homeland Security that collects reports of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure has not yet
published its incident report numbers for 2017. Organizations report incidents on a voluntary basis, so these numbers may not
reflect all incidents. They’ve been poking at our critical infrastructure for a long while. Incident reports published by the Industrial
Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team — a division of Homeland Security that does training and responds to
cyberattacks on critical infrastructure — suggest that electricity, oil and natural gas infrastructure have been routinely targeted for
years.1 There are dozens of these attacks reported to ICS-CERTS annually. However, it would be difficult for these
attacks to lead to wide-scale blackouts, according to Lawrence and Candace Suh-Lee, who leads a cybersecurity
research team at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research and development lab. And that’s true even if
hackers do eventually succeed in taking control of some electric systems . It helps that the North
American electric grid is both diverse in its engineering and redundant in its design. For instance, the Ukrainian attacks are
often cited as evidence that hundreds of thousands of Americans could suddenly find themselves in the dark because of
hackers. But Lawrence considers the Ukrainian grid a lot easier to infiltrate than the North American
one. That’s because Ukraine’s infrastructure is more homogeneous , the result of electrification happening
under the standardizing eye of the former Soviet Union, he told me. The North American grid, in contrast, began as
a patchwork of unconnected electric islands, each designed and built by companies that weren’t coordinating with
one another. Even today, he said, the enforceable standards set by NERC don’t tell you exactly what to buy or how to build. “So
taking down one utility and going right next door and doing the same thing to that
neighboring utility would be an extremely difficult challenge,” he said. Meanwhile, the electric grid
already contains a lot of redundancies that are built in to prevent blackouts caused by common
problems like broken tree limbs or heat waves — and those redundancies would also help to
prevent a successful cyberattack from affecting a large number of people. Suh-Lee pointed to an August
2003 blackout that turned the lights off on 50 million people on the east coast of the U.S. and Canada. “When we analyzed it, there
was about 17 different things lined up that went wrong. Then it happened,” she said. Hackers
wouldn’t necessarily have
control over all the things that would have to go wrong to create a blackout like that. In contrast, Suh-
Lee said, scenarios that sound like they should lead to major blackouts … haven’t . Take the 2013
Metcalf incident, where snipers physically attacked 17 electric transformers in Silicon Valley. Surrounding neighborhoods
temporarily lost power, but despite huge energy demand in the region, “the big users weren’t even aware Metcalf had happened,”
she said. Difficult isn’t the same as impossible, Suh-Lee told me. Depending on where an attack happened and how people
responded, you could get the stuff of our nightmares. Lawrence repeatedly invoked the phrase “knock on wood” as he talked about
the possibility of infiltrations of electric infrastructure turning into real-world blackouts. That’s why there’s a lot of effort going into
research, monitoring and preparation for cyberattacks. Lawrence’s
team, for instance, is gearing up for an event
that’s held every other year and is sort of like war games for the electric grid. And the
Department of Energy is planning a similar event, focused on figuring out what it takes to reboot
after a hacker-caused blackout. But that preparation doesn’t mean we’ll eventually solve this problem, either, Suh-Lee
said. If the chances of a cinematic disaster are low, the chances of a theatrical hero on a white horse riding in to save the day are
even lower. Making the grid stronger and more resilient also means making it more digital — the work that’s being done to improve
the infrastructure has also created new opportunities for hackers to break in. And the risk of attack is here to stay. Security
improvements are “never going to completely eliminate the risk,” she said. “The risk is out there and people will find a new way to
attack.” We’ll be living with cyber threats to the grid for the rest of our lives.
 no warming ! --- 1NC
Intervening actors check
Sebastian FARQUHAR ET AL. 17, Project Manager at FHI responsible for external relations,
M.A in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford; John Halstead, Global Priorities
Project; Owen Cotton-Barratt, Research Associate in the FHI at the University of Oxford, Lecturer
in Mathematics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford; Stefan Schubert, PhD in philosophy, Researcher at
the Centre for Effective Altruism; Haydn Belfield, Academic Project Manager, Centre for the
Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Director of Research
at FHI [“Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance,” Future of Humanity Institute, University of
Oxford, Global Priorities Project 2017,
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf]

The most likely levels of global warming are very unlikely to cause human extinction.15 The
existential risks of climate change instead stem from tail risk climate change – the low probability of
extreme levels of warming – and interaction with other sources of risk. It is impossible to say with confidence at what point
global warming would become severe enough to pose an existential threat. Research has suggested that warming of
11-12°C would render most of the planet uninhabitable,16 and would completely devastate agriculture.17 This
would pose an extreme threat to human civilisation as we know it.18 Warming of around 7°C or more could potentially produce
conflict and instability on such a scale that the indirect effects could be an existential risk, although it is extremely uncertain how
likely such scenarios are.19 Moreover, the timescales over which such changes might happen could mean
that humanity is able to adapt enough to avoid extinction in even very extreme scenarios. The
probability of these levels of warming depends on eventual greenhouse gas concentrations. According to some experts, unless
strong action is taken soon by major emitters, it is likely that we will pursue a medium-high emissions
pathway.20 If we do, the chance of extreme warming is highly uncertain but appears non-negligible. Current concentrations of
greenhouse gases are higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years,21 which means that there are significant
unknown unknowns about how the climate system will respond. Particularly concerning is the risk of positive feedback loops, such
as the release of vast amounts of methane from melting of the arctic permafrost, which would cause rapid and disastrous
warming.22 The economists Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman have used IPCC figures (which do not include modelling of
feedback loops such as those from melting permafrost) to estimate that if we continue to pursue a medium-high emissions pathway,
the probability of eventual warming of 6°C is around 10%,23 and of 10°C is around 3%.24 These estimates are of course highly
uncertain. It
is likely that the world will take action against climate change once it begins to impose
large costs on human society, long before there is warming of 10°C. Unfortunately, there is significant
inertia in the climate system: there is a 25 to 50 year lag between CO2 emissions and eventual warming,25 and it is expected that
40% of the peak concentration of CO2 will remain in the atmosphere 1,000 years after the peak is reached.26 Consequently, it is
impossible to reduce temperatures quickly by reducing CO2 emissions. If
the world does start to face costly
warming, the international community will therefore face strong incentives to find other ways to
reduce global temperatures.
 No Resource Wars---1NC
No correlation between resources and war
Atkins, 16—PhD Candidate in Energy, Environment & Resilience at the University of Bristol
(Ed, “Environmental Conflict: A Misnomer?,” http://www.e-ir.info/2016/05/12/environmental-
conflict-a-misnomer/, dml)

The economic and strategic importance of oil and other non-renewable resource is indisputable.
Yet the globalised character of international commerce has resulted in many nations ceasing to
perceive resource dependency as a threat to autonomy or survival (Deudney, 1990). This
interdependence has resulted in the decreased likelihood of inter-state conflict over control of
resources, due to the price shocks these actions could propel across the system and the
increasingly technological developments (Lipschutz and Holdren, 1990). Such dynamics are well
illustrated by the 1973 oil crisis (Dabelko and Dabelko, 1993). Although the move by the
Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) to restrict exports resulted in
record price rises and the transformation of the international sphere, thus illustrating the
economic relevance of resources, it did not result in international violent conflict. Furthermore,
Le Billon (2001) has stated that the spectre of resource scarcity has resulted in the escalation of
socioeconomic innovation and economic diversification – with the market mechanisms of
contemporary capitalism creating an important impediment to conflict. In Botswana and
Norway, minerals and oil, respectively, have been mobilised to ensure peaceful development
rather than violent confrontation (Le Billon, 2001). Furthermore, in many cases potential
scarcity has resulted in increased inter-state cooperation due to the shared interest in
continued supply. The continued sanctity of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, between Pakistan
and India, is an important example, with the spirit of cooperation over water resources
enduring despite increased political tensions between the two nations (Wolf, 1998).

Water trading banks increases economic market power of Consolidated

Agriculture
Bruno and Sexton 20 (Ellen M. Bruno is an assistant cooperative extension specialist in the
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California, Berkeley.
Richard J. Sexton is a distinguished professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource
Economics at University of California, Davis. The American Journal of Agricultural Economics,
Volume102, Issue3 May 2020 Pages 884-910
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajae.12031)tjf

The existing literature on surface water trading (e.g. Sunding et al. 2002; Hagerty 2019) provides
little guidance to regulators and stakeholders in understanding how groundwater markets may
operate, as most surface water trades have been through bilateral negotiations between water-
supply organizations, whereas groundwater rights are likely to be in the hands of individual
landowners and limited by the hydrologic connectivity of the basin over which they operate.
This article has been devoted to understanding the essential economic factors that will impact
emergent groundwater markets. Our theoretical model, when expressed in its linear form,
described a groundwater trading equilibrium in terms of six market parameters that can be
expressed as pure numbers: the heterogeneity of demand for groundwater across users (α), the
price elasticity of groundwater demand (η), the total allowable extraction defined relative to the
open-access equilibrium (X0), the irrigation efficiency (δ), the price elasticity of groundwater
supply (ɛ), and the degree of buyer (θ) or seller (ξ) market power. We argued that buyer or seller
market power could be a key consideration in many groundwater trading markets due to their
restricted geographic coverage and barriers to entry , high and increasing concentration among
producers and processor-shippers for many industries, and relative lack of impediments to
formation of buyer or seller coalitions. Results from applying a flexible oligopoly-oligopsony
model to groundwater trading showed that either buyer or seller power had limited impacts on
the overall gains to trade but that even relatively modest buyer or seller power could tilt the
gains from trade significantly in the direction of the entities exercising the power. We applied
the model to the Coachella Valley in California where we were able to obtain Coachella-specific
estimates for each of the model's parameters except for market power. Given the basin-wide
reduction in groundwater pumping of 20% needed to achieve sustainability of the basin, we
estimated that the economic benefits with perfectly competitive trade are 36% greater than
that under a “command-and-control” scenario where pumping is restricted but trade is not
allowed. Simulations that varied market conditions showed that the gains from trade remained
large over a reasonable range of parameter values, meaning results are likely to generalize to
other basins where trading might occur. Given evidence that the presence of buyer or seller
power has only a minor impact on the overall gains from trade, concerns over market power
should not constitute a compelling argument to avoid trading. However, distributional impacts,
which may be considerable, may impact some stakeholders' incentives to support or oppose a
trading regime. The majority of the gains from trade accrue to the players with market power;
these will tend to be large operations that may also wield considerable political influence.
Nonetheless, both buyers and sellers will benefit overall from trade even with severe market
power. Concerns about market power may be better directed at the initial allocation of permits
among players, because the closer the initial allocation is to the efficient outcome, the less are
the impacts of market power.

Industrial ag collapse is inevitable because of declining efficiency – transition to

sustainable farming now is key to solve a laundry list of existential threats AND
global food crises – turns case.
Nafeez Ahmed, 1-6-2020, [Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist,
international security scholar, policy expert, film-maker, strategy & communications consultant,
and change activist. "West’s ‘Dust Bowl’ Future now ‘Locked In’, as World Risks Imminent Food
Crisis", Resilience https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-06/wests-dust-bowl-future-now-
locked-in-as-world-risks-imminent-food-crisis/ //DMcD]

We haven’t even touched upon many other critical elements of the crisis : such as the catastrophic
decline in bee populations among other pollinators, which according to the UN Food & Agricultural
Organisation (FAO) is driven by a combination of intensive industrial farming practices, including mono-
culture (growing one crop in one area, as opposed to cultivating crop mixtures or rotating different crops), excessive
pesticide and fertilizer use, pollution and climate change; or soil erosion under industrial
practices, which by 2050 may by itself reduce up to 10 percent of crop yields according to the FAO; or the
declining efficiency and increasing production costs of fossil fuel inputs into industrial
agriculture, which is not only driving carbon emissions to dangerous levels, but means that
industrial agricultural production is bound to becoming increasingly expensive and inefficient
over time. The mounting evidence on the coming global food crisis demonstrates how ineffective and
piecemeal our current approaches are . We still think and act in entrenched disciplinary and sectoral silos, and even our
scientific assessments are extremely narrow — largely capable of focusing on only one dimension of the crisis at a time, and
incapable of comprehending their synergistic consequences. When viewed together it’s clear that the
coming decades will
see escalating converging pressures on the global food system which will increase the
probability of breakdowns year on year — and this will be the case even as we attempt to transition to something
better. The transition to sustainable agroecological methods means much less emphasis on
machines and fossil fuels, and more emphasis on people. A study in November published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food
Systems by a team of US food science experts, calls for recognition that “fossil fuel- and chemical-intensive management” must be
replaced “with knowledge-intensive management.” Translation: this means that “the greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture
may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with ecologically-skilled people, and doing so in ways that create and
support desirable rural livelihoods.” This is why, according to US biologist and farmer Dr Jason Bradford, President of the Board of
the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), the future is rural. Bradford also authored a PCI report with this title earlier this year. We
cannot
feed the world within the current food system, he told me, because its goal is to “maximize profit
instead of stewarding the earth and enhancing ecosystem services .” In other words, the coming
global food crisis is the symptom of a deeper problem, of an entire economic paradigm which is slowly
unravelling. In the future, therefore, a viable new food system will “be much more locally oriented, rely
much more on labour as a factor of production , and cut out a lot of the energy intensity in the
current system that goes into food processing and packaging,” said Bradford. We are also likely to see a need to
transform urban spaces into food-producing regions , amidst greater migration to rural areas. We could see “a
reinvigoration of smaller cities in areas of high biocapacity, for instance, the rural midwest of America, plus more people actually
engaged in productive activities who live in rural places,” Bradford said. The central point is that “cities are not where anything
materially important comes from and so will always be dependent upon rural hinterlands for the flow of goods into them and the
places where waste must eventually end up.” How exactly this plays out only time will tell, but Bradford sees a future
of more
local production, a growth of rural areas as well as more urban farming — one in which more consumers
take control of, and get involved in, producing food sustainably. For the food industry, nonprofits, entrepreneurs,
policymakers and ordinary citizens, these are the issues we need to reflect on and innovate in. Perhaps the most important
lesson from all this is that the coming global food crisis is symptomatic of the fact that our global
industrial systems are deeply out of sync with the natural world . The new agroecological farming
systems we should nurture instead, according to the Frontiers study, will be ones that “mimic natural
ecosystems, creating tightly coupled cycles of energy, water, and nutrients.” The current structure of the global
food system is part of an extreme, reductionist materialist paradigm which is degrading natural
ecosystems to keep maximising profits year-on-year : it operates in service to a way of being and
a worldview which fetishises endless material growth for the benefit of a tightening minority . As
we approach end of century, we will continue to see evidence of the self-destruction of this failed
paradigm. Developing new, sustainable approaches to food production and distribution is one of
the key entry-points into the emergence of a new , post-materialist paradigm designed to
regenerate planetary ecosystems, meet human needs, and support wellbeing. Along the way, the breakdown of the old
food system is bound to generate certain unavoidable consequences. These could cause significant harm to many, both in poorer
developing nations, and richer industrial countries — but it is still
not too late to avert the worst possibilities and
build resilience to what is coming. We need to start now.
Advantage 2
 1NC Innovation High
U.S. innovation is high and globally dominant
Wolf ’21 [Martin; April 27; Chief Economics Commentator, M.A. in Economics from Oxford
University; Financial Times, “China is wrong to think the US faces inevitable decline,”
https://www.ft.com/content/8336169e-d1a8-4be8-b143-308e5b52e355]

The Chinese elite are convinced that the US is in irreversible decline. So reports Jude Blanchette of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, a respected Washington-based think-tank. What has been happening in the US in
recent years, particularly in politics, supports this perspective. A stable liberal democracy would not elect Donald Trump — a man
lacking all necessary qualities and abilities — to national leadership. Nevertheless, the notion of US decline is
exaggerated. The US retains big assets, notably in economics.

For one and half centuries, the US has been the world’s most innovative economy. That has
been the basis of its global power and influence. So how does its innovative power look today? The
answer is: rather good, despite competition from China.

Stock markets are imperfect. But the

value investors put on companies is at least a relatively impartial
assessment of their prospects. At the end of last week, 7 of the 10 most valuable companies in the
world and 14 of the top 20, were headquartered in the US.

If it were not for Saudi Arabian oil, the five most valuable companies in the world would be US
technology giants: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook. China has two valuable technology
companies: Tencent (at seventh position) and Alibaba (at ninth). But those are China’s only companies
in the top 20. The most valuable European company is LVMH at 17th. Yet LVMH is just a collection of established luxury
brands. That ought to worry Europeans.

When we look only at technology companies, the US has 12 of the top 20; China (with Hong Kong but
excluding Taiwan) has three; and there are two Dutch companies, one of which, ASML, is the largest manufacturer of
machines that make integrated circuits. Taiwan has the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest
contract computer chipmaker, and South Korea has Samsung Electronics.

Life sciences are another crucial sector for future prosperity. Here there are seven European companies
(with Switzerland and the UK included) in the top 20. But the US has seven of the top 10, and 11 of the top 20 .
There is also one Australian and one Japanese company, but no Chinese businesses.

In sum, US
companies are globally dominant and nearly all the most valuable non-US firms are
headquartered in allied countries.
 1NC No 5G Impact
Losing in 5G is harmless.
John Tanner 19, Editor of Disruptive Asia, Former Editor-In-Chief and Global Technology Editor
at Telecom Asia, Two Degrees in Telecommunications, “US Memo Claims China Could Use 5G To
Kill People, Maybe”, Disruptive Asia, 1/8/2019, https://disruptive.asia/memo-china-5g-kill-
people/

ITEM: A former Trump administration official is circulating a memo claiming China could weaponize 5G
if its market dominance isn’t checked.
How does one weaponize 5G, you may ask? According to the memo author – retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding,
who used to sit on the National Security Council – you do it by selling your 5G gear cheap enough to ensure it’s installed in every 5G
network in the world, then make use of secret back doors to wreak international havoc, reports Bloomberg:

Spalding in his memo paints a future headed toward domination by China. Eventually, alternatives to its network
technology won’t exist, because other suppliers won’t be able to compete with government-subsidized offerings from
Huawei and fellow Chinese gear maker ZTE Corp., Spalding said.

Once China controls the market for internet-connected devices, it will be able “to weaponize cities,”
Spalding said in the memo: “Think of self-driving cars that suddenly mow down unsuspecting pedestrians. Think of drones that
fly into the intakes of airliners.”

Well. Yes. Think.

If you’re wondering, Spalding

is the same person who put together a memo and presentation last year
that proposed a similar idea on the grounds that Chinese dominance of 5G was tantamount to
China attempting to reinvent the global internet as a platform designed to enable Chinese cyber espionage and
cyber attacks on US networks.

Which is silly, because that’s not really how 5G or the internet work.

I haven’t read the new memo (which hasn’t been made public), but based on the Bloomberg report, Spalding’s concept of
weaponized 5G sounds both silly and paranoid.
That’s not to say that China doesn’t engage in cyber espionage and hacking against US targets. Of course it does – it has done for
years, just as the US has been doing likewise to China and … well, just about everyone, really.

And sure, it’s technically possible that China could secretly leverage Huawei or ZTE network gear to control every 5G network on
earth, hoover up personal data and turn cars and drones into robo-assassins. (It’s also technically possible that once Alexa, Siri,
Bixby, Cortana and Google Assistant become smart enough, they’ll become sentient, team up to form an AI hive mind called Skynet
and kill us all.)

But Spalding’s scenario doesn’t hold up if you look closely. For a start, it seems to depend on the
premise that (1) Huawei and ZTE will literally become the only commercially viable alternatives
for buying 5G solutions (which is highly unlikely), and (2) there will be no possible way for
regulators, law enforcement agencies or telcos to vet 5G gear for possible spyware capabilities before
installing it (also highly unlikely).

The other main assumption here seems to be that autonomous cars, drones and the rest of the Internet of
Things will either be manufactured by Huawei (or run Huawei software), or have crap security, zero
encryption and no failsafes whatsoever. The latter may be possible given the state of IoT security today,
but in that case Chinese hackers wouldn’t need Chinese gear in everyone’s networks to pull off
such an attack. They certainly haven’t needed it up to now.
Again, I don’t have a copy of the full memo, and it might contain details that make this sound more plausible than the ones included
in the Bloomberg report. But I’m reasonably sure that of
all the things China plans to do with 5G, turning self-
driving cars into murderbots is not one of them.
 1NC Solvency
Scenario makes no sense—US is not key—if we lose to China then they still
innovate which solves the terminal impact
 1NC Tech Hegemony Turn
US tech hegemony will be co-opted by ultra-nationalism--makes the US a rogue
superpower. Turns existential threats
Beckley 20 (MICHAEL BECKLEY is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University,
Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author
of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. Foreign Policy,
Nov/Dec/2020. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-06/illiberal-
american-century-rogue-superpower)tjf

THE SAGGING LIBERAL ORDER Aging and automation will likely make the United States
stronger—but they are unlikely to shore up the sagging U.S.-led liberal order. In liberal
democracies across the world, public support for that order has long rested on rising incomes
for the working class, which in turn were largely the result of growing populations and job-
creating technologies. The postwar baby boom produced scores of young workers and
consumers, and the assembly line provided them with stable jobs. But today, populations across
the democratic world are aging and shrinking, and machines are eliminating jobs. The basic
bargain—work hard, support the liberal system, and trust that a rising economic tide will lift
all boats—has broken down. Nationalism and xenophobia are filling the void . The outlook is
more dire than many people realize. Over the next 30 years, the working-age populations of the
United States’ democratic allies will shrink by 12 percent, on average, making sustained
economic growth almost impossible. Meanwhile, the senior populations of these countries will
expand by 57 percent, on average, and their average spending on pensions and health care will
double as a share of GDP. These countries will not be able to borrow their way out of the
resulting fiscal mess, because they already carried debts equal to 270 percent of GDP, on
average, before the COVID-19 pandemic plunged their balance sheets further into the red.
Instead, they will have to cut entitlements for the elderly, slash social spending for the young,
raise taxes, or increase immigration—all of which would likely produce political backlashes.
Rapid automation will intensify the economic turmoi l. History has shown that technological
revolutions create prosperity in the long run but force some workers into lower-wage jobs or
unemployment in the short run—and the short run can last generations. For the first 70 years
of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, from 1770 to 1840, average wages stagnated and
living standards declined, even as output per worker grew by nearly 50 percent. The gains from
mass mechanization during this time were captured by tycoons, whose profit rates doubled.
Across the developed world today, machines are once again eliminating jobs faster than
displaced workers can retrain for new ones, wages for low- and middle-skill workers are
stagnating, and millions of people—especially men without college degrees—are dropping out
of the workforce. Many economists expect these trends to persist for several decades as labor-
replacing technologies currently in development—such as robotic cars, stores, warehouses, and
kitchens—are widely adopted. Sluggish growth, enormous debts, stagnant wages, chronic
unemployment, and extreme inequality are bound to breed nationalism and extremism. In the
1930s, economic frustrations caused many people to reject democracy and international
cooperation and to embrace fascism or communism. Today, ultranationalists are ascendant
across the democratic world—and not just in fledgling democracies in eastern Europe. In
Germany, for example, a right-wing nationalist party, Alternative for Germany, now holds the
third-largest number of seats in the parliament, and cases of neo-Nazi infiltration in the military
and the police have multiplied alarmingly. The United States’ task of leading the liberal world
order will grow harder as nationalists gain power and raise tariffs, close borders, and abandon
international institutions. A ROGUE SUPERPOWER Faced with flailing allies and a divided and
apathetic public, the United States might start acting less like the head of a grand coalition and
more like a rogue superpower—an economic and military colossus lacking moral
commitments, neither isolationist nor internationalist, but aggressive, heavily armed, and
entirely out for itself. In fact, under Trump, it already seems to be headed in that direction.
During Trump’s time in office, some U.S. security guarantees have started to look like protection
rackets, with the president musing that allies should pay the costs of hosting U.S. troops plus a
50 percent premium. The Trump administration has taken to enforcing trade deals with
unilateral tariffs rather than working through the World Trade Organization. Trump has largely
abandoned the goal of democracy promotion and has downgraded diplomacy, gutting the State
Department and handing ever more responsibility to the Pentagon. The U.S. military is changing,
too. Increasingly, it is a force geared for punishment rather than protection. The Trump
administration has downsized permanent U.S. deployments on allied territory, replacing them
with roving expeditionary units that can steam overseas, smash targets, and then slink back over
the horizon. Many of Trump’s critics decry these changes as not just unwise but also somehow
un-American. But Trump’s approach appeals to many Americans today and aligns with their
preferences regarding the United States’ role in the world. If these conditions persist, the best-
case scenario for American leadership may involve Washington adopting a more nationalist
version of liberal internationalism. The United States could retain allies but make them pay
more for protection. It could sign trade agreements, but only with countries that adopt U.S.
regulatory standards; participate in international institutions but threaten to leave them when
they act against U.S. interests; and promote democracy and human rights, but mainly to
destabilize geopolitical rivals. Alternatively, the United States might exit the global order
business altogether. Instead of trying to reassure weaker nations by supporting international
rules and institutions, the United States would deploy every tool in its coercive arsenal—
tariffs, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, cyber-espionage, and drone strikes—to wring the
best deal possible out of both allies and adversaries. There would be no enduring partnerships
based on common values—just transactions. U.S. leaders would judge other countries not by
their willingness to help solve global problems or whether they were democracies or
autocracies but only by their ability to create American jobs or eliminate threats to the U.S.
homeland. Most countries, according to these criteria, would be irrelevant. The United States
might start acting less like the head of a grand coalition and more like a rogue superpower.
American commerce could steadily shift to the Western Hemisphere and especially to North
America, which already accounts for a third of U.S. trade and a third of global GDP. At a time
when other regions face setbacks from aging populations and rising automation, North America
is the only region with all the ingredients necessary for sustained economic growth: a huge and
growing market of wealthy consumers, abundant raw materials, a mix of high-skill and low-cost
labor, advanced technology, and peaceful international relations. U.S. strategic alliances,
meanwhile, might still exist on paper, but most would be dead letters. Washington might
retain only two sets of regular partners. The first would include Australia, Canada, Japan, and
the United Kingdom. These countries are strategically arrayed across the globe, and their
militaries and intelligence agencies are already integrated with Washington’s. All but Japan
boast growing working-age populations, unlike most other U.S. allies, and thus have the
potential tax bases to contribute to U.S. missions. The second group would consist of places
such as the Baltic states, the Gulf Arab monarchies, and Taiwan, which share borders with or sit
in close proximity to U.S. adversaries. The United States would continue to arm these partners
but would no longer plan to defend them. Instead, Washington would essentially use them as
buffers to check Chinese, Iranian, and Russian expansion without direct U.S. intervention.
Outside of those partnerships, all of Washington’s alliances and relationships—including NATO
and its connections with longtime allies such as South Korea—would be negotiable. The United
States would no longer woo countries to participate in multilateral alliances . Instead, other
countries would have to bargain on a bilateral basis for U.S. protection and market access.
Countries with little to offer would have to find new partners or fend for themselves. What
would happen to the world if the United States fully embraced this kind of “America first”
vision? Some analysts paint catastrophic pictures. Robert Kagan foresees a return to the
despotism, protectionism, and strife of the 1930s, with China and Russia reprising the roles of
imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Peter Zeihan predicts a violent scramble for security and
resources, in which Russia invades its neighbors and East Asia descends into naval warfare.
These forecasts may be extreme, but they reflect an essential truth: the postwar order,
although flawed and incomplete in many ways, has fostered the most peaceful and prosperous
period in human history, and its absence would make the world a more dangerous place .
Thanks to the U.S.-led order, for decades, most countries have not had to fight for market
access, guard their supply chains, or even seriously defend their borders. The U.S. Navy has kept
international waterways open, the U.S. market has provided reliable consumer demand and
capital for dozens of countries, and U.S. security guarantees have covered nearly 70 nations.
Such assurances have benefited everyone: not just Washington’s allies and partners but also its
adversaries. U.S. security guarantees had the effect of neutering Germany and Japan, the main
regional rivals of Russia and China, respectively. In turn, Moscow and Beijing could focus on
forging ties with the rest of the world rather than fighting their historical enemies. Without U.S.
patronage and protection, countries would have to get back in the business of securing
themselves and their economic lifelines. Such a world would see the return of great-power
mercantilism and new forms of imperialism . Powerful countries would once again try to reduce
their economic insecurity by establishing exclusive economic zones, where their firms could
enjoy cheap and secure access to raw materials and large captive consumer markets. Today,
China is already starting to do this with its Belt and Road Initiative, a network of infrastructure
projects around the world; its “Made in China 2025” policy, to stimulate domestic production
and consumption; and its attempts to create a closed-off, parallel Internet. If the United States
follows suit, other countries will have to attach themselves to an American or a Chinese bloc—or
forge blocs of their own. France might seek to restore its grip on its former African colonies.
Russia might accelerate its efforts to corral former Soviet states into a regional trade union.
Germany increasingly would have to look beyond Europe’s shrinking populations to find buyers
for its exports—and it would have to develop the military capacity to secure those new far-flung
markets and supply lines, too. Such a world would see the return of great-power mercantilism.
As great powers competed for economic spheres, global governance would erode. Geopolitical
conflict would paralyze the UN, as was the case during the Cold War. NATO might dissolve as
the United States cherry-picked partners. And the unraveling of the U.S. security blanket over
Europe could mean the end of the European Union, too, which already suffers from deep
divisions. The few arms control treaties that remain in force today might fall by the wayside as
countries militarized to defend themselves. Efforts to combat transnational problems—such as
climate change, financial crises, or pandemics—would mimic the world’s shambolic response
to COVID-19, when countries hoarded supplies, the World Health Organization parroted Chinese
misinformation, and the United States withdrew into itself. The resulting disorder would
jeopardize the very survival of some states. Since 1945, the number of countries in the world
has tripled, from 46 to nearly 200. Most of these new states, however, are weak and lack
energy, resources, food, domestic markets, advanced technology, military power, or defensible
borders. According to research by the political scientist Arjun Chowdhury, two-thirds of all
countries today cannot provide basic services to their people without international help. In
short, most countries depend critically on the postwar order, which has offered historically
unprecedented access to international aid, markets, shipping, and protection. Without such
support, some countries would collapse or be conquered. Fragile, aid-dependent states such as
Afghanistan, Haiti, and Liberia are only some of the most obvious high-risk cases. Less obvious
ones are capable but trade-dependent countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South
Korea, whose economic systems would struggle to function in a world of closed markets and
militarized sea-lanes.
 1NC No China Tech Leadership
Chinese tech leadership limited—does not shift strategic balance
Li and Tong 21 (Daitian Li is an Assistant Professor at the University of Electronic Science &
Technology of China. He is an affiliated researcher with the China Institute for Science &
Technology Policy at Tsinghua University. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration &
Management from Bocconi University. Tony W. Tong is a Professor of Strategy &
Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado. HBR, 2/18/21.
https://hbr.org/2021/02/is-china-emerging-as-the-global-leader-in-ai)tjf

By many indicators, China is now on the global frontier of AI in terms of technological

development and market applications. The unique technological, market, policy environments
that Chinese firms face in the emerging AI sector have given them a window of opportunity to
catch up with global leaders rapidly. But, paradoxically, while China may have caught up in
record time, the conditions that have allowed it to do so may impede its further development in
AI. For example, given the open science nature of AI and the advantages of being quick
followers, Chinese firms often lack strong incentives to invest in developing core AI technologies.
Unlike in Western developed economies where companies are the primary holders of AI
patents, in China, the majority of AI patents are filed by universities and research institutes,
most of which are government owned or sponsored. However, university-industry linkages in
China are relatively weak, and technology transfer remains rather limited. Overall, although
aggregate AI research outputs (e.g., scientific publications, patents) are rising rapidly in China,
truly original ideas and breakthrough technologies are lacking. Further, the uncertain business
environment in China, coupled with the huge market for AI products and Chinese consumers’
enthusiasm to adopt them, leads companies and investors to favor applied AI research that can
bring quick money instead of more basic research that promises to have long-lasting impacts. At
a more fundamental level, the research culture in China needs a great deal of improvement, as
many researchers have highlighted. On the policy front, the relaxed regulatory environment has
proved to be a double-edged sword. While some firms are bold enough to take advantage of
such environment by aggressively pushing different AI applications to markets, others feel
frustrated as they don’t know what is allowed due to such policy uncertainty. The chairman of
Suzhou Blue Amber Medi-Tech, a medical device company, lamented that this uncertainty has
led his company to decide to not touch any data that might fall into certain gray areas (e.g., use
of personal health data for other commercial purposes). “Our current thinking is that if we don’t
need to touch the data, we will not touch it. … But, if we do not touch the data, a significant part
of the value [of the data] is not realized. So, from our company’s point of view, we do hope that
the government will make the regulations clear sooner.” Today, the global business and
technology environments face a set of political uncertainties. These include the U.S.-China trade
war and heightened conflicts over intellectual property rights, the deglobalization movement,
increasing protectionism, and so forth. These challenges will have an immediate impact on
China’s further catching-up in AI, but their long-term influences on the rate and direction of
China’s AI innovation remain to be seen. In the meantime, regardless of such uncertainties, the
coopetition between the U.S. and China in the AI space will continue for many years to come.
 1NC No Impact
Chinese tech leadership is peaceful and key to solving all global problems.
Shen Yamei 18, Deputy Director and Associate Research Fellow of Department for American
Studies, China Institute of International Studies, 1-9-2018, "Probing into the “Chinese Solution”
for the Transformation of Global Governance," CAIFC,
http://www.caifc.org.cn/en/content.aspx?id=4491

As the world is in a period of great development, transformation and adjustment, the

international power comparison is undergoing profound changes, global governance is
reshuffling and traditional governance concepts and models are confronted with challenges. The
international community is expecting China to play a bigger role in global governance, which has
given birth to the Chinese solution. A. To Lead the Transformation of the Global Governance System. The “shortcomings” of the
existing global governance system are prominent, which can hardly ensure global
development. First, the traditional dominant forces are seriously imbalanced. The US and
Europe that used to dominate the global governance system have been beset with structural problems , with their economic development stalling, social
contradictions intensifying, populism and secessionism rising, and states trapped in internal strife and differentiation. These countries have not fully reformed

and adjusted themselves well, but rather pointed their fingers at globalization and resorted to
retreat for self-insurance or were busy with their own affairs without any wish or ability to
participate in global governance, which has encouraged the growth of “anti-globalization” trend
into an interference factor to global governance . Second, the global governance mechanism is
relatively lagging behind. Over the years of development, the strength of emerging economies
has increased dramatically, which has substantially upset the international power structure, as
the developing countries as a whole have made 80 percent of the contributions to global
economic growth. These countries have expressed their appeal for new governance and begun
policy coordination among themselves, which has initiated the transition of global governance form “Western governance” to “East-West joint governance”, but
the traditional governance mechanisms such as the World Bank, IMF and G7 failed to reflect
the demand of the new pattern, in addition to their lack of representation and inclusiveness.
Third, the global governance rules are developing in a fragmented way, with governance deficits
existing in some key areas. With the diversification and in-depth integration of international interests, the domain of global governance has continued to expand, with actors
multiplying by folds and action intentions becoming complicated. As relevant efforts are usually temporary and limited to specific

partners or issues, global governance driven by requests of “diversified governance” lacks

systematic and comprehensive solutions. Since the beginning of this year, there have been risks
of running into an acephalous state in such key areas as global economic governance and
climate change. Such emerging issues as nuclear security and international terrorism have
suffered injustice because of power politics. The governance areas in deficit, such as cyber
security, polar region and oceans, have “reversely forced” certain countries and organizations
to respond hastily. All of these have made the global governance system trapped in a dilemma
and call urgently for a clear direction of advancement. B. To Innovate and Perfect the International Order. Currently, whether the developing
countries or the Western countries of Europe and the US are greatly discontent with the existing international order as well as their appeals and motivation for changing the order are unprecedentedly strong. The
US is the major creator and beneficiary of the existing hegemonic order, but it is now doubtful that it has gained much less than lost from the existing order, faced with the difficulties of global economic

Although the developing countries as represented by China

transformation and obsessed with economic despair and political dejection.

acknowledge the positive role played by the post-war international order in safeguarding peace,
boosting prosperity and promoting globalization, they criticize the existing order for lack of
inclusiveness in politics and equality in economy, as well as double standard in security,
believing it has failed to reflect the multi-polarization trend of the world and is an exclusive
“circle club”. Therefore, there is much room for improvement. For China, to lead the transformation of the global governance
system and international order not only supports the efforts of the developing countries to
uphold multilateralism rather than unilateralism, advocate the rule of law rather than the law of
the jungle and practice democracy rather than power politics in international relations , but also
is an important subject concerning whether China could gain the discourse power and
development space corresponding to its own strength and interests in the process of innovating
and perfecting the framework of international order. C. To Promote Integration of the Eastern and Western Civilizations. Dialog among civilizations,
which is the popular foundation for any country’s diplomatic proposals, runs like a trickle moistening things silently. Nevertheless, in the existing international system

guided by the “Western-Centrism”, the Western civilization has always had the self-righteous
superiority, conflicting with the interests and mentality of other countries and having failed to
find the path to co-existing peacefully and harmoniously with other civilizations . So to speak,
many problems of today, including the growing gap in economic development between the
developed and developing countries against the background of globalization, the Middle East
trapped in chaos and disorder, the failure of Russia and Turkey to “integrate into the West”,
etc., can be directly attributed to lack of exchanges, communication and integration among
civilizations. Since the 18th National Congress of CPC, Xi Jinping has raised the concept of “Chinese Dream” that reflects both Chinese values and China’s pursuit, re-introducing to the world the
idea of “all living creatures grow together without harming one another and ways run parallel without interfering with one another”, which is the highest ideal in Chinese traditional culture, and striving to shape
China into a force that counter-balance the Western civilization. He has also made solemn commitment that “we respect the diversity of civilizations …… cannot be puffed up with pride and depreciate other
civilizations and nations”; “facing the people deeply trapped in misery and wars, we should have not only compassion and sympathy, but also responsibility and action …… do whatever we can to extend assistance

China will rebalance the international pattern from a more inclusive

to those people caught in predicament”, etc.

civilization perspective and with more far-sighted strategic mindset, or at least correct the
bisected or predominated world order so as to promote the parallel development of the Eastern
and Western civilizations through mutual learning, integration and encouragement. D. To Pass on China’s
Confidence. Only a short while ago, some Western countries had called for “China’s responsibility” and made it an inhibition to “regulate” China’s development orientation. Today, China has

become a source of stability in an international situation full of uncertainties. Over the past 5
years, China has made outstanding contributions to the recovery of world economy under
relatively great pressure of its own economic downturn. Encouraged by the “four confidences”,
the whole of the Chinese society has burst out innovation vitality and produced innovation
achievements, making people have more sense of gain and more optimistic about the national development prospect. It is the heroism of the ordinary Chinese to overcome difficulties and realize
the ideal destiny that best explains China’s confidence. When this confidence is passed on in the field of diplomacy, it is expressed as: first, China’s posture is seen as more forging ahead and courageous to
undertake responsibilities ---- proactively shaping the international agendas rather than passively accepting them; having clear-cut attitudes on international disputes rather than being equivocal; and extending
international cooperation to comprehensive and dimensional development rather than based on the theory of “economy only”. In sum, China will actively seek understanding and support from other countries
rather than imposing its will on others with clear-cut Chinese characteristics, Chinese style and Chinese manner. Second, China’s discourse is featured as a combination of inflexibility and yielding as well as
magnanimous ---- combining the internationally recognized diplomatic principles with the excellent Chinese cultural traditions through digesting the Chinese and foreign humanistic classics assisted with

the Chinese solution is more practical

philosophical speculations to make “China Brand, Chinese Voice and China’s Image get more and more recognized”. Third,

and intimate to people as well as emphasizes inclusive cooperation, as China is full of confidence
to break the monopoly of the Western model on global development, “offering mankind a
Chinese solution to explore a better social system”, and “providing a brand new option for the
nations and peoples who are hoping both to speed up development and maintain
independence”. II.Path Searching of the “Chinese Solution” for Global Governance Over the past years’ efforts, China has the ability
to transform itself from “grasping the opportunity” for development to “creating opportunity”
and “sharing opportunity” for common development, hoping to pass on the longing of the
Chinese people for a better life to the people of other countries and promoting the
development of the global governance system toward a more just and rational end. It has
become the major power’s conscious commitment of China to lead the transformation of the
global governance system in a profound way. A. To Construct the Theoretical System for Global Governance. The theoretical system of global governance has
been the focus of the party central committee’s diplomatic theory innovation since the 18th National Congress of CPC as well as an important component of the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics for
a new era, which is not only the sublimation of China’s interaction with the world from “absorbing and learning” to “cooperation and mutual learning”, but also the cause why so many developing countries have
turned from “learning from the West” to “exploring for treasures in the East”. In the past 5 years, the party central committee, based on precise interpretation of the world pattern today and serious reflection on
the future development of mankind, has made a sincere call to the world for promoting the development of global governance system toward a more just and rational end, and proposed a series of new concepts
and new strategies including engaging in major power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, creating the human community with common destiny, promoting the construction of new international relationship
rooted in the principle of cooperation and win-win, enriching the strategic thinking of peaceful development, sticking to the correct benefit view, formulating the partnership network the world over, advancing
the global economic governance in a way of mutual consultation, joint construction and co-sharing, advocating the joint, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security concept, and launching the grand

The Chinese solution composed of these contents, not only fundamentally different
“Belt and Road” initiative.

from the old roads of industrial revolution and colonial expansion in history, but also different
from the market-driven neo-liberalism model currently advocated by Western countries and
international organizations, stands at the height of the world and even mankind, seeking for
global common development and having widened the road for the developing countries to
modernization, which is widely welcomed by the international community. B. To Supplement and Perfect the Global
Governance System. Currently, the international political practice in global governance is mostly problem-

driven without creating a set of relatively independent, centralized and integral power
structures, resulting in the existing global governance systemcharacterized as both extensive
and unbalanced. China has been engaged in reform and innovation, while maintaining and
constructing the existing systems, producing some thinking and method with Chinese
characteristics. First, China sees the UN as a mirror that reflects the status quo of global
governance, which should act as the leader of global governance, and actively safeguards the
global governance system with the UN at the core. Second, China is actively promoting the
transforming process of such recently emerged international mechanisms as G20, BRICS and
SCO, perfecting them through practice, and boosting Asia-Pacific regional cooperation and the development of economic globalization. China is also promoting the construction of regional security mechanism
through the Six-Party Talks on Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, Boao Forum for Asia, CICA and multilateral security dialog mechanisms led by ASEAN so as to lay the foundation for the future regional security
framework. Third, China has initiated the establishment of AIIB and the New Development Bank of BRICS, creating a precedent for developing countries to set up multilateral financial institutions. The core of the
new relationship between China and them lies in “boosting rather than controlling” and “public rather than private”, which is much different from the management and operation model of the World Bank,

Thus,
manifesting the increasing global governance ability of China and the developing countries as well as exerting pressure on the international economic and financial institution to speed up reforms.

in leading the transformation of the global governance system, China has not overthrown the
existing systems and started all over again, but been engaged in innovating and perfecting ;
China has proactively undertaken international responsibilities , but has to do everything in its
power and act according to its ability. C. To Reform the Global Governance Rules. Many of the problems facing global
governance today are deeply rooted in such a cause that the dominant power of the existing
governance system has taken it as the tool to realize its own national interests first and a
platform to pursue its political goals. Since the beginning of this year, the US has for several times requested the World Bank, IMF and G20 to make efforts to mitigate
the so-called global imbalance, abandoned its commitment to support trade openness, cut down investment projects to the middle-income countries, and deleted commitment to support the efforts to deal with

On the contrary,
climate change financially, which has made the international systems accessories of the US domestic economic agendas, dealing a heavy blow to the global governance system.

the interests and agendas of China, as a major power of the world, are open to the whole world,
and China in the future “will provide the world with broader market, more sufficient capital,
more abundant goods and more precious opportunities for cooperation”, while having the
ability to make the world listen to its voice more attentively. With regard to the subject of global
governance, China has advocated that what global governance system is better cannot be
decided upon by any single country, as the destiny of the world should be in the hands of the
people of all countries. In principle, all the parties should stick to the principle of mutual
consultation, joint construction and co-sharing, resolve disputes through dialog and differences
through consultation. Regarding the critical areas, opening to the outer world does not mean building one’s own backyard, but building the spring garden for co-sharing; the “Belt and
Road” initiative is not China’s solo, but a chorus participated in by all countries concerned. China has also proposed international public security

views on nuclear security, maritime cooperation and cyber space order, calling for efforts to
make the global village into a “grand stage for seeking common development” rather than a
“wrestling arena”; we cannot “set up a stage here, while pulling away a prop there”, but
“complement each other to put on a grand show”. From the orientation of reforms, efforts should be made to better safeguard and expand the
legitimate interests of the developing countries and increase the influence of the emerging economies on global governance. Over the past 5 years, China has attached importance to full court diplomacy, gradually
coming to the center stage of international politics and proactively establishing principles for global governance. By hosting such important events as IAELM, CICA Summit, G20 Summit, the Belt and Road
International Cooperation Forum and BRICS Summit, China has used theseplatforms to elaborate the Asia-Pacific Dream for the first time to the world, expressing China’s views on Asian security and global
economic governance, discussing with the countries concerned with the Belt and Road about the synergy of their future development strategies and setting off the “BRICS plus” capacity expansion mechanism, in
which China not only contributes its solution and shows its style, but also participates in the shaping of international principles through practice. On promoting the resolution of hot international issues, China
abides by the norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and insists on justice, playing a constructive role as a responsible major power in actively promoting
the political accommodation in Afghanistan, mediating the Djibouti-Eritrea dispute, promoting peace talks in the Middle East, devoting itself to the peaceful resolution of the South China Sea dispute through
negotiations. In addition, China’s responsibility and quick response to international crises have gained widespread praises, as seen in such cases as assisting Africa in its fight against the Ebola epidemic, sending
emergency fresh water to the capital of Maldives and buying rice from Cambodia to help relieve its financial squeeze, which has shown the simple feelings of the Chinese people to share the same breath and fate
with the people of other countries. D. To Support the Increase of the Developing Countries’ Voice. The developing countries, especially the emerging powers, are not only the important participants of the
globalization process, but also the important direction to which the international power system is transferring. With the accelerating shift of global economic center to emerging markets and developing

As the biggest developing country

economies, the will and ability of the developing countries to participate in global governance have been correspondingly strengthened.

and fast growing major power, China has the same appeal and proposal for governance as other
developing countries and already began policy coordination with them, as China should comply
with historical tide and continue to support the increase of the developing countries’ voice in
the global governance system. To this end, China has pursued the policy of “dialog but not
confrontation, partnership but not alliance”, attaching importance to the construction of new
type of major power relationship and global partnership network, while making a series
proposals in the practice of global governance that could represent the legitimate interests of
the developing countries and be conducive to safeguarding global justice, including supporting
an open, inclusive, universal, balanced and win-win economic globalization; promoting the
reforms on share and voting mechanism of IMF to increase the voting rights and representation
of the emerging market economies; financing the infrastructure construction and industrial
upgrading of other developing countries through various bilateral or regional funds; and helping
other developing countries to respond to such challenges as famine, refugees, climate change
and public hygiene by debt forgiveness and assistance.