1

Interp and violation. ‘Fiscal Redistribution’ requires tax extraction AND social
transfer---the plan’s only deficit spending.
Altorfer-Ong 7, Ph.D., Economic History Department, London School of Economics and Political
Science (Stefan Altorfer-Ong, 2007, “State-Building without Taxation. The Political Economy of
Government Finance in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Bern,” London School of Economics and
Political Science, University of Kansas Libraries, ProQuest)

IV Fiscal Redistribution (Structural Analysis)

IV-1 Introduction and Chapter Contents

This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the structure of Bernese state finance for two sample years and complements the overview of long-term trends discussed
in the previous chapter (III). The remainder of this section defines the term fiscal redistribution and outlines the analytical framework used, as far as it differs from
the one featured in the previous chapter. I will subsequently explain the data, selection criteria and conversion of transactions in kind into monetary values (Section
IV-2). The body of the chapter represents an empirical analysis of fiscal redistribution by nature of transaction (Section IV-3), as well as by state function, economic
sector and region (Section IV-4). The fiscal burden, including extraction through the militia system, will be covered in a separate Section (IV-5). A conclusion will
consolidate the most important findings.

I will begin with a definition of fiscal redistribution to avoid misunderstandings about the scope of my analysis. In
modern-day economics, fiscal redistribution is normally understood as the amount of money that is
taxed from the rich and used for social transfer payments to the poor by comparing a pre-tax income
distribution with the post-tax situation. For my analysis of eighteenth-century Bernese state finance, I understand fiscal
redistribution in a broader sense as the way in which a state extracts revenue and spends it as
expenditure. The pattern which ensues determines how resources that would have been used for different purposes in the absence of a fisc end up being
redirected by the state. Other than many studies of fiscal history that focus on revenue and taxation in particular, my definition

explicitly includes expenditure as well. In short, I define fiscal redistribution as the effect of accumulated
revenue and expenditure by the government.

Vote neg:
Limits---there’s an infinite amount of transfer-only mechanisms exploding the neg
research burden
Ground---taxes ensure controversy and large change from the status quo, both key to
neg ground.
2
The judge is an educator – The ballot is referendum on scholarship – The 1ac is a
research project submitted to the judge and the RFD is the judges view on our
participation in an academic setting that is meant to teach us something. The role of
the ballot is to vote for the debater with a better ontological approach to the world.
Ontological questions are priori – we must have the correct approach to a set of
material problems otherwise our individual attempts at solution are doomed to fail.
Thomson 16, (Iain, Professor of Philosopher – University of New Mexico, “Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are, Inquiry, 44(3) p.260-262,
http://www.unm.edu/~ithomson/HeidOntEd.pdf ) How can Heidegger’s understanding of ontological education help us restore
substance to our currently empty guiding ideal of educational ‘excellence’, and in so doing provide the
contemporary university with a renewed sense of unity, not only restoring substance to our shared
commitment to forming excellent students, but also helping us recognize the sense in which we are in
fact all working on the same project? The answer is surprisingly simple: By re-essentializing the notion of excellence.
Heidegger, like Aristotle, is a perfectionist; he argues that there is a distinctive human essence and that the good life, the

life of ‘excellence’ (arete), is the life spent cultivating this distinctively human essence. For Heidegger, as we have seen,
the human ‘essence’ is Dasein, ‘being-there’, that is, the making-intelligible of the place in which we find ourselves, or, even more simply, world disclosing. For a world-

disclosing being to cultivate its essence, then, is for it to recognize and develop this essence, not only
acknowledging its participation in the creation and maintenance of an intelligible world, but actively
embracing its ontological role in such world disclosure. The full ramifications of this seemingly simple insight are profound and revolutionary.57
We will restrict ourselves to brie y developing the two most important implications of Heidegger’s re-essentialization of excellence for the future of the university. Heidegger’s

ontological conception of education would transform the existing relations between teaching and
research, on the one hand, and between the now fragmented departments, on the other. Thus, in effect,
Heidegger dedicates himself finally to redeeming the two central ideals which guided the formation of the modern university: Teaching and research should be

harmoniously integrated and the university community should understand itself as committed to a
common substantive task.58 How does Heidegger think he can help us finally achieve such ambitions? First, his conception of ‘teaching’
would reunite research and teaching, because when students develop the aforementioned ‘insight
into essence’, they are being taught to disclose and investigate the ontological presuppositions which
underlie all research, on Heidegger’s view. For today’s academic departments are what he calls ‘positive sciences’; that is, they all rest on ontological
‘posits’, ontological assumptions about what the class of entities they study are. Biology, for example, allows us to understand the logos of the bios, the order and structure of living beings.
Nevertheless, Heidegger asserts, biology proper cannot tell us what life is.59 Instead, biology takes over its implicit ontological understanding of what life is from the metaphysical
understanding governing our Nietzschean epoch of enframing. (When contempor- ary philosophers of biology claim that life is ‘a self-replicating system’, they have unknowingly adopted the
basic ontological presupposition of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, according to which life is ultimately the eternal recurrence of will to power, that is, sheer will-to-will, unlimited self-

The same holds

augmentation.)60 Analogously, psychology can tell us a great deal about how consciousness (the psyche) functions, but it cannot tell us what consciousness is.

true for the understanding of ‘the corporeality of bodies, the vegetable character of plants, the
animality of animals, and the humanness of humanity’ within physics, botany, zoology, and
anthropology, respec- tively; these sciences all presuppose an ontological posit, a pre-understanding of
the being of the class of entities they study.61 Heidegger’s ontologically reconceived notion of teaching
is inextricably entwined with research, then, because ontological education teaches students to
question the very ontological presuppositions which guide research, thereby opening a space for
understanding the being of the entities they study otherwise than in enframing’s ontologically
reductive terms. Heidegger’s reconceptualization of education would thus encourage revolutionary transformations in the
sciences and humanities by teaching students to focus on and explicitly investigate the ontological
presuppositions which implicitly guide research in each domain of knowledge . Despite such revolutionary goals, Heidegger
thought that his ontological reconceptualization of education could also restore a substantive sense of

unity to the university community, if only this community could learn ‘to engage in [this ‘reflection on
the essential foundations’] as reflection and to think and belong to the university from the base of this
engagement’.62 From its founding, one of the major concerns about the modern university has been how it could maintain the unity of structure and purpose thought to be
definitive of the ‘University’ as such. German Idealists like Fichte and Schelling believed that this unity would follow

organically from the totality of the system of knowledge. But this faith in the system proved to be far less influential on posterity than
Humboldt’s alternative ‘humanist’ ideal, according to which the university’s unity would come from a shared commitment to the educational formation of character. Humboldt’s famous idea

the university would be responsible for forming fully-cultivated

was to link ‘objective Wissenschaft with subjective Bildung’;

individuals, a requirement Humboldt hoped would serve to guide and unify the new freedom of
research. Historically, of course, neither the German Idealists’ reliance on the unity of research nor Humboldt’s emphasis on a shared commitment to the educational formation of
students succeeded in unifying the university community. In effect, however, Heidegger’s re-ontologization of education would combine (his versions of) these two strategies. The university
community would be united both by its shared commitment to forming excellent individuals (where excellence is understood in terms of the ontological perfectionism outlined above) and
by the shared recognition on the part of this community that its members are all committed to the same substantive pursuit: The ultimately revolutionary task not simply of understanding
what is, but of investigating the ontological presuppositions implicitly guiding all the various elds of knowledge. Heidegger thus believed that ontological education, by restoring substance
to the notion of excellence and so teaching us ‘to disclose the essential in all things’, could finally succeed in ‘shattering the encapsulation of the sciences in their different disciplines and
bringing them back from their boundless and aimless dispersal in individual fields and corners’.
The world is fundamentally phenomenological – Our being is Dasein – a being-in-the-
world that has constitutive re-orientations towards identity, ethics, speech, and
death. Hornsby No Date, Hornsby, R. (no date) What Heidegger Means by Being-In-The-World, What Heidegger means by being-in-the-world. Available at:
https://royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html (Accessed: 28 August 2023). //Scopa Martin Heidegger’s main interest was to raise the issue of Being, that is, to make sense of our capacity
to make sense of things. Additionally he wished to rekindle the notion that although difficult to understand, this issue was of utmost importance (Dreyfus 1991). Heidegger’s study, however,

was of a specific type of Being, the human being, referred to by Heidegger as ‘Dasein’, which literally means ‘Being-there’ (Solomon 1972). By using the expression Dasein, Heidegger
called attention to the fact that a human being cannot be taken into account except as being an existent in the

middle of a world amongst other things (Warnock 1970), that Dasein is ‘to be there’ and ‘there’ is the world. To be human is
to be fixed, embedded and immersed in the physical, literal, tangible day to day world
(Steiner 1978). The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of what Heidegger meant by ‘Being-in-the-world’. Heidegger was concerned that philosophy should

be capable of telling us the meaning of Being, of the where and what Dasein is. Heidegger
postulated that, the world ‘is’, and that this fact is naturally the primordial phenomenon and the

basis of all ontological inquiry. For Heidegger the world is here, now and everywhere around us. We are totally immersed
in it, and after all, how could we be anywhere ‘else’? Husserl had previously spoken of a ‘Lebenswelt’ (life-world) to stress the solidness of the human encapsulation within reality, but
Heidegger’s ‘grounding’ was more complete. Heidegger articulated this entrenchment with the composite, In-der-welt-sein (a ‘Being-in-the-world’, a ‘to-be-inthe-world’) (Steiner 1978). For
Heidegger, “Dasein is an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being.” And further, “Dasein exists. Furthermore, Dasein is an entity which in each case I
myself am. Mineness belongs to any existent Dasein, and belongs to it as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible.” (1) For Heidegger, Dasein may exist in either one

Dasein’s character needs to be understood a-

of two modes, (authenticity or inauthenticity), or it is modally undistinguished, but

priori as being ‘grounded’ in the state of Being that he called ‘Being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1962). ‘Being-in-the-
world’, for Heidegger stood for a unitary phenomenon and needed be seen as a whole. However, Heidegger was aware that the expression had several components to its structure. There was
the duty to examine the ontological structure of the ‘world’ and define its ‘in-the-world-ness’. Also, the identity of the ‘Who’ that is within the mode of Dasein’s average everydayness needs to
be sought out, and, the ontological establishment of ‘Being-in’ needs to be proposed (Heidegger 1962). Heidegger was concerned with Dasein’s distinctive method of being-in, which is at
variance with the manner in which one object can be in another (Dreyfus 1991). In Being and Time Heidegger wrote; “What is meant by “Being-in”? Our proximal reaction is to round out this
expression to “Being-in” ‘in the world’”, and we are inclined to understand this Being-in as ‘Being in something’ ….as the water is ‘in’ the glass, or the garment is ‘in’ the cupboard. By this ‘in’
we mean the relationship of Being which two entities extended ‘in’ space have to each other with regard to their location in that space……Being-present-at-hand-along-with in the sense of a
definite location relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being, are ontological characteristics which we call ‘categorial’. For Heidegger, these types of ‘categorial’ Beings
belong to entities whose kind of Being is not Dasein. Heidegger continued that, on the other hand, Being-in is an existentiale state of Dasein’s Being and it cannot be thought of in terms of the
Being-present-at-hand of a corporeal Thing ‘in’ an entity which is present at hand. Heidegger went on to say, “ ‘Being-in’ is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which

the notion of existential identity and

has its Being-in-the-world as its essential state.” According to Steiner (1978), “Heidegger is saying that

that of world are completely wedded. To be at all is to be worldly. The everyday is the enveloping wholeness of
being.” It is the convening of ‘Dasein’ and the ‘world’ which gives definition to both, and the solidness of these terms is covered thinly by the English word ‘facticity’ (Steiner 1978). Heidegger

The multiplicity of
wrote; “Dasein’s facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always dispersed [zerstreut] or even split itself up into definite ways of Being-in.

these is indicated by the following examples: having to do with something, producing

something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something,
giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing,
interrogating, considering, discussing, determining…. All these kind ways of Being-in have concern (‘Bersorgen’) as their kind of
Being.” Heidegger (1962) used the term ‘concern’ as an ontological term for an existentiale to select the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world because he felt that the Being of Dasein
itself was to be revealed as ‘care’ (Sorge) and that because Being-in-the-world fundamentally belongs to Dasein, its Being concerning the world is fundamentally concern. Concern is the
temporal meaning which Beingin-the-world has for human beings and it is the time configuration of human life which is the identical concern which human beings have for the world. If human
beings had no concept of time they would have no reason to be engaged or implicated in the world in a human way. It is the awareness of temporality which establishes that the relationship
that human beings have with the world is through concern (Warnock 1970). Not everything is possible for every human being. Every person’s options are limited in one way or another and

Choices are made in the

‘concern’ is a way that humans can decide what decision could be the correct one in order to move from one condition to another.

world in which humans exist surrounded by other humans. Human beings are
characterised by uniqueness, one from another, and this uniqueness gives rise to a set
of possibilities for each individual. All human beings are continually oriented towards their own
potential, among which are the possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existence. If, whilst moving forward, the standards and beliefs and
prejudices of society are embraced, individuals may fail to differentiate themselves
from the masses. This, Heidegger regarded as living an ‘inauthentic’ existence (Warnock 1970). For Heidegger,
Authentic existence can only come into being when individuals arrive at the
realisation of who they are and grasp the fact that each human being is a distinctive entity. Once human beings realise
that they have their own destiny to fulfill, then their concern with the world will no longer be
the concern to do as the masses do, but can become an ‘authentic’ concern to fulfill
their real potentiality in the world (Warnock 1970). Heidegger described the self of everyday Dasein as the ‘they-self’, “which we distinguish from the authentic Self –
that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way [eigens ergriffenen]. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘they’, and must first find itself.” And
further “If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein
are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.” Heidegger (1962) said that deliberation on
these matters have brought about a solid understanding of Dasein bringing the average everydayness of Being-in-the-world into view. Heidegger felt that the all-determining focal point of our
Being-in-the-world was going unnoticed because the daily realities of our existence are so trite and numerous but, for Heidegger, ‘knowing’ was 8/28/23, 11:46 AM What Heidegger Means by
Being-in-the-World https://royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html 3/6 a kind of Being and Dasein only discovers itself when it comprehends reality. Knowledge is not an inexplicable bound
from subject to object and return (Steiner 1978), “But no sooner was the ‘phenomenon of knowing the world’ grasped than it got interpreted in a ‘superficial’, formal manner. The evidence for
this is the procedure (still customary today) of setting up knowing as a ‘relation between subject and Object’ – a procedure in which there lurks as much ‘truth’ as vacuity. But subject and
Object do not coincide with Dasein and the world.” Heidegger (1962) said that a principle task was to reveal that knowing has a phenomenal character of a Being which is in and towards the
world. Knowing is the possession of those human-Things which are able to know and is an internal characteristic of those entities. Heidegger expanded upon this by saying that knowing is a
‘concern’ and to know something, even with little interest, is a tangible kind of Being-in-the-world. In fact for Heidegger, even forgetting modifies the primordial Being-in and even as
knowledge did not create the world nor forgetting destroy it, it follows that Dasein only realises itself when it grasps reality (Steiner 1978). Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the
world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture.

Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a
world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone (Steiner 1978). Heidegger wrote;
“This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the ‘thrownness’ of this entity into its
‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the ‘there’. The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.” No biology of
parentage can answer the question of whence we came into Being. Neither do we know toward what end our existence has been projected, apart from our position in relation to death. Yet for
Heidegger, it is this twofold mystery that makes the ‘thrown’state of human life the more absolute and tangible. Human kind is ‘delivered over’ to a total, all-encompassing ‘thereness’ and
Dasein must occupy this presentness and take it up into its own existence. Heidegger wished to emphasise the unmistakable ‘thereness’ of the world into which we are thrown (Steiner 1978).
The world into which our Dasein is thrown has others in it, and the existence of others is totally indispensable to its facticity of Being-there. Understanding of others in the world and the

Being-in-the-world is a being-with,
association of the ontological status of others with our own Dasein is, in itself, a form of Being. Heidegger said that

and that the understanding of the presentness of others is to exist. However, being-
with presents the possibility of comprehending our own Dasein as an everyday Being-
with-one-another where we may come to exist not on our own terms, but only in
reference to others. In so doing, we eventually come to not be ourselves, and surrender our existence to a formless ‘Theyness’ or alterity (Steiner 1978). For Heidegger,
the ‘belonging to others’ is a drastic irresponsibility because the ‘they’ deprives the particular Dasein of its own

accountability by making every decision and judgement for it. The ‘they’ can do this most easily because it can always
be said that ‘they’ were responsible for such and such. Heidegger said that this passivity creates the alienated self, the ‘Man’

who is fatally disburdened of moral autonomy and, therefore, of moral responsibility.

This ‘Man’ can know no ethical guilt. Heidegger called this the ‘self of everyday Dasein’ or the ‘they-self’, the total opposite of the solid singularity of a Dasein which has grasped itself. This
crucial distinction was important for Heidegger as it is the distinction between an authentic and an inauthentic human existence (Steiner 1978). Inauthentic Dasein does not live as itself but as
‘they’ live. In fact, for Heidegger, it barely exists at all and it exists in a state of fear [Furcht](Steiner 1978). This fear is distinct from anxiety [Angst]. Fear could be experienced when a threat to
our life, signifying our situation is recognised, but anxiety is experienced in the face of nothing in particular in our situation (Warnock 1970). According to Warnock (1970), anxiety is that which
drives us to swamp ourselves in the insignificant, the common and in all of the elements of an inauthentic existence. However, Steiner (1978), wrote that fear is a part of a trite communal
reaction whereas anxiety [Angst] is 8/28/23, 11:46 AM What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World https://royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html 4/6 “that which makes problematic,
which makes worthy of our questioning, our Being-in-the-world. Angst is one of the primary instruments through which the ontic character and context of everyday existence is made
inescapably aware of, is rendered naked to, the pressures of the ontological. And further, Angst is a mark of authenticity, of the repudiation of the ‘theyness’.” Upon close investigation,
Steiner’s interpretation is closer to Heidegger’s meaning surrounding Angst than is Warnock’s. Heidegger wrote that an understanding of Being belongs to the ontological structure of Dasein,
and he proposed that there is an understanding state of mind in which Dasein is disclosed to itself. Heidegger sought a simplified way of disclosure to bring the structural totality of Being to
light and he hypothesized that the state of mind that would satisfy his requirements, was the state of anxiety. Taking the phenomenon of falling as his departure point and distinguishing
anxiety from fear, Heidegger wrote; “As one of Dasein’s possibilities of Being, anxiety – together with Dasein itself as disclosed in it – provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping

Dasein’s primordial totality of Being.” Steiner (1978) offers a demarcation in that, a further aspect of Dasein, as argued by Heidegger, is that Dasein is grounded in
language; Being-in-the-world expresses itself in discourse. Furthermore, he made a distinction between ‘Rede’, ‘the
speech of Dasein’ and ‘Gerede’, ‘talk’. He avoided the triteness of using the term ‘idle chatter’ for ‘talk’ because it was far too reassuring for what he wanted to say. For Heidegger, ‘talk’

had lost its primary relationship-of-being toward the talked about entity and all that
‘talk’ was doing was to ‘pass words along’ or, to ‘gossip emptily’, fostering illusions of
understanding that have no real comprehension. Dasein-with-others takes place in an
echo chamber of nonstop bogus interaction, with no cognition as to what is being
communicated (Steiner 1978). The differences between authentic and inauthentic lives were contrasted by Heidegger through the agencies of fear set against anxiety,
‘speech’ contrasted with ‘talk’, genuine wonder opposed to mere novelty. Each disparate category
comes about as an expected outcome of the complete antithesis between the self-possession of true Dasein and the collective lack of perception of an existence carried out in terms of
‘oneness’ and ‘theyness’. Heidegger denoted this latter state as ‘Verfall’ (‘a falling away from’ ‘a cadence into decline’). Heidegger was careful to point out that the condition of ‘Verfallensein’
(a fallen state) is not sinful, nor is the term meant to cast a moral value judgement. Heidegger wrote; “Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic
potentiality for Being its self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. ‘Fallenness’ into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity
and ambiguity. Through the Interpretation of falling, what we have called the ‘inauthenticity’ of Dasein may now be defined more precisely. On no account however do the terms ‘inauthentic’
and ‘non-authentic’ signify ‘really not’, as if in this mode of Being, Dasein were altogether to lose its Being. ‘Inauthenticity’ does not mean anything like Beingno-longer-in-the-world, but
amounts rather to quite a distinctive kind of Being-inthe-world – the kind which is completely fascinated by the ‘world’ and by the Dasein-with of Others in the ‘they’. Not-Being-its-self [Das
Nicht-es-selbst-sein] functions as a positive possibility of that entity which, in its essential concern, is absorbed in a world. This kind of not-Being has to be conceived as that kind of Being which
is closest to Dasein and in which Dasein maintains itself for the most part.” For Heidegger then, ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘fallenness’ are not mere mishaps or erroneous options. Rather they are
essential components of existence, because Dasein is always Dasein-with and a Beingin-the-world into which we have been thrown. Acceding to the enticement of living a mundane existence
is simply a part of existing itself. ‘Fallenness’ was a positive for Heidegger in the sense that there must be ‘inauthenticity’, ‘theyness’, and ‘talk’, for Dasein to become aware of its loss of self
and strive for its return to authentic Being. ‘Verfall’ turns out to be the completely essential prerequisite towards the repossession of self, the struggle toward true Dasein (Steiner 1978).
Dasein is committed to searching out the authentic via the inauthenticity of its Being-in-the-world and Heidegger said that authentic existence is not something which floats above everyday
fallingness. He 8/28/23, 11:46 AM What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World https://royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html 5/6 postulated that a proper instrument is needed for
seizing the everydayness and he said that that instrument is ‘care’ [Sorge]. Because in the condition of inauthenticity we ‘fall away from ourselves’, Heidegger said that we simultaneously fall
into a frenetic busyness and an emptiness that gives rise to a sense of the uncanny. As we flap about feeling ‘homeless’ our everyday familiarity is shattered (Steiner 1978). It is uncanniness
that declares the pivotal moments in which Angst brings Dasein face to face with the terrible freedom of deciding whether to remain in inauthenticity or to endeavor to attain selfpossession.
‘Sorge’ is the means of transcendence beyond being Dasein-with and Dasein-in to become Dasein-for and Sorge must be a ‘care for’ many things. These things include a concern for others, a
care for the ready-to-hand, but in principle Sorge is a caring for the presentness and obscurity of Being itself (Steiner 1978). Heidegger said; “When Dasein ‘understands’ uncanniness in the
everyday manner, it does so by turning away from it in falling; in this turning away, the ‘not-at-home’ gets ‘dimmed down’. Yet the everydayness of this fleeing shows phenomenally that
anxiety, as a basic state of mind, belongs to Dasein’s essential state of Being-inthe-world, which, as one that is existential, is never present-at-hand but is itself always in a mode of factical
Being-there – that is, in the mode of a state of mind.” For Heidegger, it is Sorge that signifies a mans existence and makes it meaningful. To be-in-the-world in an authentic existential pretext is

Angst reveals
to be ‘careful’. Heidegger concluded that ‘care’ is the primordial state of Being as Dasein strives towards authenticity (Steiner 1978). Finally, Heidegger said that

to Dasein the opportunity of fulfilling itself in a fervent ‘freedom towards death’ . This
freedom has been released from the delusions of the ‘they’ to become accurate, certain of itself, and anxious. The temporality of Dasein is

solidified by the awesome certainty that all Being is a Being-toward-death and that, “The ‘end’ of
Being-in-the-world is death.” Heidegger wrote; “Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands

before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This is a possibility in which the

issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-theworld. Its death is the possibility of no-longer being-able-to-be-there. If
Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time
the uttermost one.” In the first division of “Being and Time”, Heidegger worked out his account of Being-in-the-world and used it to ground an insightful evaluation of long-established ontology

human beings are never directly in the world except by way of being in
and epistemology. For Heidegger,

some particular circumstance; it is Dasein that is Being-in-the-world (Dreyfus 1991).

Western ontology is founded upon a paradoxical relation that marks blackness as
nothingness – The world operates via definition by opposition, and the Being defines
its existence in relation to the difference of blackness as non-being. This metaphysical
holocaust casts blackness into a state of existence as the object of nothingness that
justifies all attempts to eliminate it from the world. Warren 18, Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror Blackness,
Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018. //Scopa What is this Negro? Negro as black being; Negro as nothing. We return endlessly to this metaphysical question and the
tension of the copula (the “is-ness” of a [non]being) that sets the metaphysical inquiry into motion. Perhaps this question cannot be answered with apodictic certainty, since the Negro is
neither a proper object of knowledge nor a proper referent (catachresis). What we can propose, however, is that function, or utility, re- quires an instrument, and instruments are invented for
the purpose of fulfilling the agenda of utility. I have suggested thus far that the Negro serves the function of embodying metaphysical nothing(ness) for modernity— a weighty, burdensome,
and dangerous function. The world needed a being that would bear the unbearable and live the unlivable; a being that would exist within the interstice of death and life and straddle Nothing

An antiblack world desires to obliterate black as

and Infinity. The being invented to embody black as nothing is the Negro.

nothing—nothing as the limitation of its dominance—so that its schematization,

calculation, and scientific practices are met unchecked by this terrifying hole, nothing. With the Negro,
metaphysics can triumph over this nothing by imposing black(ness) onto the Negro and
destroying the Negro. The Negro is invented precisely to be destroyed—the delusion of metaphysics is that it will overcome nothing through its destruction and
hatred of the Negro. The Negro, then, is both necessary and despised. But it is important to remember that this Negro, the cipher of meta- physics, is the invention of a desperate world.

The Negro is not a human being that is simply mistreated, but is, instead, an invention
designed to embody a certain terror for the world. I say this because thinking in this way will require us first to discard naturalism
and the conflation of human being with black being. This is a difficult task because of the ruse of resemblance (the Negro looks human, so must be one). But as Lindon Barrett taught us,
modernity produces “anthropomorphic uncertainty” by which “racial blackness overwhelmingly disappoints the modern resemblance of the human, signaling instead the unleashing of the

inhuman that specifies the ‘human’ population of the modern state.”23 Biological and visual resemblance does not render the
Negro a human being—these are nothing more than ontic illusions. Ontologically and metaphysically, the Negro is anything but human.

Hortense Spillers might call this an “altered human factor.” In describing the transport of Africans to Europe, she suggests that they

embodied a radical otherness and alterity for the European self. “Once the ‘faithless,’ indiscriminate of the three
stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they become an altered human factor. . . . The altered human factor renders an alterity to European Ego, an invention, or ‘discovery’

Once on European soil (and in the hold of the

as decisive in the full range of its social implications as the birth of a newborn.”24

ship), the African ceases to exist and instead becomes “other,” an alteration of
humanity. Something new emerges with the transport of the African. The African becomes black being and secures the
boundaries of the European self—its existential and ontological constitution—by
embodying utter alterity (metaphysical nothing). Meta- physics gives birth to black being through various forms of antiblack vio-
lence, and this birth is tantamount to death or worldlessness. The invention, emergence, and birth of black being are not causes for celebration, however, since this invention is pure
instrumentality and function (not the existential freedom, self-actualization, or sacred natality of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example).25 Black being follows a different trajectory

Its birth is death—death as nothing, death as the Negro, death as black- ness,
than the celebrated human being of metaphysics and ontology.

death as the abyss of metaphysics . It is also important to reiterate that black being and African existence are not synonymous, although we might argue that
African existence is transformed into black being through violence, transport, and rituals of humiliation and terror. Bryan Wagner clarifies the distinction: Perhaps the most important thing we

Africa and its

have to remember about the black tradition is that Africa and its diaspora are older than blackness. Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather,

diaspora become black during a particular stage in their history . . . blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery . . . blackness is an indelibly
modern condi- tion that cannot be conceptualized apart from the epochal changes in travel, trade, labor,

consumption, industry, technology, taxation, war- fare, finance, insurance,

government, bureaucracy, communication, science, religion and philosophy that were together
made possible by the European system of colonial slavery. . . . To be black is to exist in exchange without standing in the modern world system.26 To “exist in exchange without standing” is
pure instrumentality, a being that is not human being, but something other, something unlike what modernity had known before. The disjuncture between being and black being is the gulf of
metaphysical and ontological violence. Black being, then, does not originate from Africa but is invented in a (non)temporality that we might call the transatlantic slave trade. Put differently,

African existence is an identity, whereas black being is a structural position or

instrumentality.27 Identities circulate within the symbolic of humanity; they are discourses of the human (or genres of man, if we follow Sylvia Wyn- ters). Identities provide
symbolic covering for the human and differentiate his/her existence, or mode of being, from other human beings. A struc- tural position, on the other hand, ruptures the logics of symbolic
identity and constitutes function or instrumentality. Black being is a structural position and not an identity because it exists, or is invented, precisely as an anchor for human identity (human
self adequation); the anchor is an inclusive exclusion and subtends human identity but is not incorporated into it. To be positioned structurally and not symbolically means that structural
existence is a preconditioned instrument for the maintenance of the symbolic—the symbolic here meaning the signs, symbols, and re- lationalities of the world itself. A structural position is
pure use value (or function), and it lacks value outside its utility and the antiblack symbolic that determines the matrix of value (axiology). This, of course, is in con- tradistinction to human
being, whose ultimate value resides outside the matrix of symbolism and into the esoteric or the horizon of Being-as- event. Black being is the zero-degree position of nonvalue but, paradox-
ically, is all too valuable because it enables the very system that excludes it (it is valued because of its utter valuelessness). Thus, black being is not birthed into presence through the generosity
of Being, contrary to the ge- nealogy of human being articulated by Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example; black being is introduced as the execration of Being; its ultimate withholding of
generosity, freedom, and care. Moreover, the distinction between African existence and black being is the site of onticide, or a murderous ontology. What I am suggesting is that black being is
the execration of Being because it emerges through a death sentence, through the death of African existence (“existence” is the best we can do grammatically because of the double bind of
the copula formulation inherent in language). Black being is the evidence of an onti- cidal enterprise. Ronald Judy describes this as “thanatology.” In describing the coming-into-being of
Equiano (an African captive transformed into black being, or the Negro), Judy suggests that the death of African mate- riality and the African symbolic body (or existence) provides the condi-

tion of possibility for the transformation. In short, black being emerges through the murder of African existence and
not its generosity: The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Africa. Writing the slave narrative is thus a thanatology, a writing of annihilation that applies the
taxonomies of death in Reason (natural law) to enable the emergence of the self-reflexive consciousness of the Negro . . . writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is
an interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, with- out agency, without thought. The muted African body is
overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that which has overwritten itself and so become the representation of the very body it sits on.28
Judy’s argument here is that the Negro is thought to gain a sense of subjectivity by displaying Reason through writing, since writing is pre-figured as the ultimate sign of Reason, and Humanity,
within an antiblack symbolic order. But to gain this subjectivity, this Negro-ness, he must first kill the African body (African existence). But, I would argue, if reason and humanity are the
purported payoffs for a murder, then the Negro has indeed been defrauded. For displaying reason through writing (slave narratives and otherwise) has not folded the Negro into the family of

Writing, reading, philosophizing,

the human [Mitsein] or rendered him a subject—there is nothing the Negro can do to change its structural position.

and intellectualizing have all failed as strategies to gain inclusion into human
beingness (despite the hopeful insistence of black human- ists). Instead, the Negro remains the nothing that metaphysics depends on to maintain its coherence. With the death of
African existence, the Negro, or black being, is indeed nothing or nothing that translates into any recognizable ontology. To say that the Negro is nothing is also to say that the Negro lacks
ontological ground. The human being grounds its ontology in the beautiful relation between Being and Dasein (or the “space of existence,” as Heidegger would call it). Black being, however,
lacks any legitimate ground, outside the oppressive logics of use value, for its being. Since it emerges through the execration of Being and not the gift of Being, it can lay recourse neither to
Being nor to a primordial relation (since this primordial relation has been annihilated or murdered as the condition of its existence). I would also suggest that the Negro is not responsible for
this murder. Metaphysics (or the world and its symbolics) systemically murders this relationality, so that to be born black within modernity is to have always already been the material effect of
an ontological murder. In other words, antiblackness is the systematic and global death of this primordial relation, and whether the Negro attempts to write him/herself into existence or not,
this death has already occurred. When it comes to the Negro, subjectivity is a fraudulent hoax or ruse. What do I mean by the “execration of Being”? I simply mean the death or obliteration of
African existence. This obliteration provides the necessary condition for the invention of the Negro, or black being—black as metaphysical nothing or groundless existence. One anchors one’s
existence in this primordial relation, but the Negro is precisely the absence of such relationality, a novelty for modernity (or a “new ontology,” as Frank Wilderson would describe it). The Negro

is born into absence and not presence. We can also describe this death of a primordial relation as a “metaphysical holocaust,” following Franz
Fanon and Frank Wilderson. For Fanon, “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man . . . the black
man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man . . . his metaphysics, or less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they are based, were wiped out because they
were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”29 Ontology provides intelligibility and understanding for the human be- ing because she is embedded
in a primordial relation with Being (as free- dom and care). We can describe the entire field of ontology as the history, evolution, and maintenance of the various customs and resources that
the human being needs to secure this relation. But “ontology . . . does not permit us to understand the being of the black man” because ontology is intended to preserve the customs and
resources of human beingness and not black being. We will always experience tensions, contradictions, and impasses if we attempt to gain intelligibility for black being from a field that
excludes it by necessity—because blackness is outside ontology as this nothing but most intimately situated within ontology as its condi- tion of possibility (its inclusive exclusion). Ontology,
then, does not pro- vide the resources to understand this paradoxical thing—blackness is the abyss of ontology.30 But what is worse is that the customs and resources that once served as
grounding for African existence were wiped out. This wiping out of the ontological resources to ground this primordial relation is the thanatology or onticide of African being.31 This
metaphysical holo- caust is the execration of Being—it is a particular process of producing black being through the murder of African existence.32 The execration of Being also conveys Being’s
curse and denouncement of the Negro as black (I would also suggest that the pseudo-theological term Hamitic curse is a variation of this execration in a different register). Rather than thinking
of Being as having abandoned us and that this aban- donment can be addressed through temporality, thinking anew, and a renewed relation (as is the position of Heidegger and neo-
Heideggerians), the execration of Being is beyond abandonment. It indexes the obliteration of the relation to Being and the absolute irreconcilability between the Negro as black and Being.
Thus, the nothing that black being incarnates is not a celebratory portal or opening up onto Being for blacks—as if reject- ing metaphysical thinking will reunite us, as it were, with Being as
noth- ing.33 This only works for the human (and the “black is not a man” within an antiblack metaphysics, as Fanon insists).34 The essence of black suffer- ing, then, is this very execration, to
inhabit permanently the “zone of non- being,” as Fanon might call it. This zone is a spatiotemporality without a recognizable name or grammar within the philosophical tradition. The problem
of black being is precisely the inhabitation of an execrated con- dition. This is the new ontology that modernity brings into the world—a being that is not one (available equipment in the guise
of human form). Black being is paradoxical—it is a metaphysical entity that is invented to illumine something beyond metaphysics, a nothing that metaphysics hates and needs. Within the
Negro, metaphysics wages its war against the nothing that terrorizes its power and hegemony. This, again, explains why the Negro is black, to return to Alain David’s proper metaphysical
question. The Negro is black because the Negro is the physical manifestation of an ontological puzzle: black as nothing. The field of ontometaphysics does not have the resources to explain
nothing; in fact, it works earnestly to forget and avoid it. This is because the field of ontometaphysics is really the imposition of metaphysical prerogatives and investments. Given this
arrangement of resources, nothing is not a proper object of knowledge within ontology as metaphysics because it cannot be explained through its episteme (put differently, the incorporation
of nothing would destabilize the metaphysical episteme). Or, to echo Fred Moten, “Blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another.”35 This is to suggest that the problems of nothing
are transposed onto the Negro, since it is embodied nothing within an antiblack world. When Fanon suggests that the civilization “imposed itself” on the Ne- gro, I interpret this to mean that
the imposition is an ontometaphysical imposition; the Negro does not have ontological resistance because of the metaphysical imposition of black and nothing. Furthermore, we can describe
the “two frames of reference,” as Fanon would call it, within which the Negro has had to place himself as “nothing” and “black” in an antiblack world. This imposition is the execration of Being
or the meta- physical holocaust that produces black being. For nothing and the terror that it brings to metaphysics can only manifest itself through this holo- caust; and this wiping out is not an
event of the past, but is a condition of the world. The world needs it to continue. Antiblackness is the name for the continuous destruction of this primordial relation and the structural position
of the Negro as black and nothing. Hortense Spillers also proffers a phenomenological iteration of this metaphysical violence that is very useful to think alongside Fanon’s meta- physical
holocaust and the imposition of black and nothing: But I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and
liberated positions. In that sense, before the “Body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape con- cealment under the brush of discourse or the
reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard
this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narra- tive, then
we mean its seared, divided ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.” Although Spillers borrows the concepts of “flesh” and “body” from the traditions of
phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and theology, she repur- poses them to understand the modern invention of black being. I would suggest that “flesh” and “body,” read through this register,
are philosoph- ical allegories, or metaphors, for the execration of Being. The flesh, here, is the primordial relation that antiblackness works tirelessly to destroy. For Spillers, the flesh is a
“primary narrative.” This primary narrative is the grounding of African existence, the various customs and resources that provide the proper understanding of this existence—what is wiped out
during the metaphysical holocaust that we can call the “transatlantic slave trade.” The body, however, emerges from the ashes of this holocaust. It is not strictly corporeality (or physicality),
but the signification of noth- ing that the black body comes to mark in an antiblack symbolic (or, as Spillers describes it, “a category of otherness”). Thus, high crimes against the flesh are the
murderous operations that set modernity into motion and produce the black body (or black being); these crimes are murders that the discourses of crime and punishment can only approach,
but re- main unintelligible within its precincts. These crimes are ongoing, and since the guilty party is the world itself, redress or justice is impossible. The flesh, the primary narrative, is the
ground of an African existence that is irrecoverable within an antiblack world—it is “seared, divided ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole,” or “escaped overboard.” This, in essence, is
the execration of Being. It is the primordial relation between the African and Being that is ripped apart, seared, and severed; this oblit- erated relation is the high crime against the flesh. We
come to another understanding of black being: it is the offspring of an obliterated primary narrative that we can call the flesh. Spillers’s “flesh” and Judy’s “African body” are thus synonymous
articulations of this primordial relation. In this schematic, the body is a metaphor for instrumentality or abject use value. Spillers suggests that this body “is reduced to a thing, to being for the
captor.” With the death of African existence (the flesh) an oppres- sive mode of existence is imposed on the Negro. This existence is unlike human being. The human being’s mode of existence

is to be for itself, and this being for itself is the structure of care between Dasein and Being. Black being is invented, however, precisely to secure
the human’s mode of existence. Reading Spillers’s metaphysical schema through Heidegger’s, we could suggest that the black body or this “thing, being
for the captor,” is invented to serve as the premier tool or equipment for human being’s existential project (and I would argue that this equipment is not equiva- lent in form to the human,
even if the structure of tool-being, as Graham Harman would call it, provides a general explanatory frame).37 In other words, the mode of existence for black being is what Heidegger would
call “availableness.” Availableness is “the way of being of those entities which are defined by their use in the whole.”38 To exist as “a thing, being for the captor” is to inhabit a mode of
existence dominated by internecine use and function. Black being, then, is invented not just to serve the needs of eco- nomic interest and cupidity, but also to fulfill the ontological needs of
the human. This thing is something like Heidegger’s equipment—an object that when used with such regularity becomes almost invisible, or trans- parent, to the user (blackness is often
unthought because the world uses it with such regularity; antiblackness is the systemization of both the use of blackness and the forgetting/concealment of black being). Utility eclipses the
thing itself. We must, then, understand antiblackness as a global, systemic dealing with black bodies, as available equipment. Heidegger considers dealings the way the Being of entities, or
equipment, is revealed phenomenologically through the use of this equipment. Antiblack deal- ings with black bodies do not expose the essential unfolding, or essence, of the equipment;
rather, the purpose of antiblack dealings is to system- ically obliterate the flesh, and to impose nothing onto that obliterated space—care and value are obsolete in this encounter.39
Therefore, equip- ment structure is predicated on the premier use of blacks within the net- work of equipment. In other words, black use cuts across every equip- mental assignment, making it
the ultimate equipment. Why does black equipment cut across all assignments, and why is it the tool Dasein relies on to commence its existential journey? We might say the answer to these
difficult questions is that the essence of black equipment is nothing— being is not there. If Heidegger assumes that equipment will reveal its being through its usage, then he did not anticipate
the invention of the Negro— equipment in human form, embodied nothingness. Using black equip- ment reveals existence but not being (existence as non-being for Greek philosophers,
according to Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics). This puzzle is what black philosophy must investigate, must think through, to understand the continuity of antiblackness. Spillers
describes black being as a “living laboratory,” and we can con- ceptualize this laboratory as the source of availableness for modernity. A living laboratory is a collection of instruments for
carrying out ontologi- cal experimentation, or the construction of the human self. Black beings constitute this irresistible source of availableness for the world. Saidiya Hartman meditates on
the ontological utility of black being for the hu- man when she states: The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be
explained in part by the fungability of the slave—that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity—and by the extensive

the fungability of the

capacities of property—that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently,

commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection
of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body
of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.40

Instruments, tools, and equipment are interchangeable/replaceable; this is starkly different from
human being, whose existential journey in the world renders it incalculable and unique. When I
suggest that black being is pure function or utility, I mean precisely the way this being is used as a site of projection for the human’s desires, fantasies, and onto- logical narcissism. The body
that Spillers presents is a necessary invention because it is through the human’s engagement with instruments (tools and equipment) that the human comes to understand the self. To be for
the human is to serve as the empty vessel for the human’s reflection on the world and self. In short, what I am suggesting is that black being is invented as an instrument to serve the needs of
the human’s ontological project. This use, or function, exceeds involuntary labor and economic interest. It is this particular antiblack use that philosophical discourse has neglected. The Negro,
as invention, is the dirty secret of ontometaphysics. If we follow Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as Dasein (being there) and thrown into the world, then black being emerges as
a different entity: the Negro is precisely the permanence of not being there [Nicht Da Sein], an absence from ontology, an existence that is not just gone away (as if it has the potential to
return to being there) but an exis- tence that is barred from ever arriving as an ontological entity, since it is stripped of the flesh.41 To assert that black being is not of the world is to suggest,
then, that black being lives not just outside of itself, but outside of any structure of meaning that makes such existence valuable. Black being is situated in a spatiotemporality for which we lack
a grammar to capture fully. Spillers’s body, then, is the symbolic and material signifi- cation of absence from Being. To be black and nothing is not to serve as an aperture of Being for the
Negro; rather, it is to constitute something inassimilable and radically other, straddling nothing and infinity. The Ne- gro is the execration of Being for the human; it is with the Negro that the
terror of ontology, its emptiness, is projected and materialized. This is the Negro’s function. Inventing the Negro is essential to an ontometaphysical order that wants to eradicate and
obliterate such ontological terror (the terror of the nothing); and since ontometaphysics is obsessed with schematization and control, it needs the Negro to bear this unbearable burden, the
exe- cration of Being. To return to our proper metaphysical question “How is it going with black being?,” we can say that neither progressive legislation nor political movements have been able
to transform black being into hu- man being, from fleshless bodies to recognized ontologies. Spillers also seems to preempt the question when she states, “Even though the cap- tive
flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter . . . it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement,

This onticide, the

as [the flesh] is ‘mur- dered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.”42

death of the flesh/African existence, continues impervious to legal, historical, and

political change. This is to say that the problem of black being, as both a form of ontological terror for the human and a site of vicious strategies of obliteration, remains. To
ask the (un)asked question “How is it going with black being?” is to inquire about the resolution of the problem of black and nothing, ontometaphysically, as it imposes itself onto the Negro.
The answer to the Negro Question, then, is that the ritualistic and repetitive murder of the flesh, the primordial relation, is absolutely necessary and indispensable in an antiblack world. And

as long as the world exists, this murder must continue.

The demand for renewables views the world beyond the US as a standing reserve of
minerals and labor to be extracted at the lowest cost – the aff is not a demand for
clean energy, it is a demand for a clean United States at the cost of environments,
workers, and resources abroad as we continue to view Africa and its inhabitants as
non-human and justifying infinite racism – turns case. Stein 19, Stein, R. (2019) The Dark Side of Green Technology,
The Dark Side Of Green Technology | Newgeography.com. Available at: https://www.newgeography.com/content/006230-the-dark-side-of-green-technology (Accessed: 10 November
2023). //Scopa When you consider the push for electrical vehicles (EVs) to replace gas and diesel combustion transports on our roadways, the carbon footprint valuation appears quite

extraction of
attractive. The batteries that power those EV’s are however dependent on exotic minerals to function which exposes the dark side of green technology. The mere

the exotic minerals cobalt and lithium used in the batteries of EV’s present social
challenges, human rights abuse challenges, and environmental challenges. Hazardous working
conditions where the workers make such meager wages they live in abject poverty. Moreover, they are regularly exposed to out of control pollution and countless other environmental issues

cobalt of which 60% is sourced from one country, the Democratic Republic
which cannot be ignored. The key minerals used in today’s batteries are

of the Congo (DRC), and lithium of which more than 50% is sourced from the Lithium Triangle

in South America, which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Today 20% of cobalt is mined by hand. Amnesty International has documented children
and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels, at risk of fatal accidents and
serious lung disease. The cobalt mined by children and adults in horrendous conditions in the DRC in Africa is entering the supply chains of some of the world’s biggest
brands. The richest most powerful companies in the world are still making excuses for not

investigating their supply chains. Even those that are investigating are failing to
disclose the human rights risks and abuses they find. As demand for rechargeable batteries grows, companies have a
responsibility to prove that they have ethical supply chains, a priority when implementing green policies, and are not profiting from the misery of miners working in terrible conditions like
those in the DRC. The energy solutions of the future must not be built on human rights abuses. When a company has contributed to, or benefited from, child labor or adults working in
hazardous conditions, it has a responsibility to remediate the harm suffered. This means working with other companies and the government to remove children from the worst forms of child

labor and support their reintegration into school, as well as addressing health and psychological needs.One of today’s biggest environmental
problems caused by our endless hunger for the latest “smart” devices that are made
from the chemicals manufactured out of deep earth minerals/fuels, is a growing
mineral crisis, particularly the minerals needed to make the batteries that power these devices. There are additional environmental concerns related to those rare earth metals.
In recent years, rare earth metals like lithium have been imported in greater quantities from

China, which has been able to lower its prices enough to now monopolize the industry .
One of the reasons China could sell lithium so cheaply is because it widely ignores environmental safeguards during

the mining process. In the Bayan Obo region of China, for example, miners remove topsoil and extract the gold-flecked metals using acids that enter the groundwater,
destroying nearby agricultural land. Even the normally tight-lipped Chinese government has admitted to rare earth mining abuses in some provinces. Battery production

causes more environmental damage than carbon emissions alone. Consider dust,
fumes, wastewater and other environmental impacts from cobalt mining in the DRC;
and toxic spills from lithium mining in South America, which can alter ecosystems and
hurt local communities; a heavily polluted river due to nickel mining in Russia; or air
pollution in northeastern China. Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by
lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage. An estimated 11

million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries will flood our markets by 2025, without
systems in place to handle them. Energy is more than just electricity from cobalt and lithium minerals used in batteries. Electricity alone, especially
intermittent electricity from renewables, has not, and will not, run the economies in the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the energy demands of the military, airlines, cruise
ships, supertankers, container shipping, medications, vaccines, and trucking infrastructures. The intermittent electricity from wind, solar, or batteries CANNOT supply the thousands of products
from petroleum that are demanded by every transportation infrastructure, electricity generation, medications, cooling, heating, manufacturing, agriculture, and virtually all the products that
are the basis of everyone’s standard of living across the globe. As the world scrambles for more clean electrical energy, the environmental impact of locating and extracting all the lithium
and/or cobalt required to enable and sustain the transformation could become a serious issue in its own right. The electrical energy solutions of the future must not be built on human rights
abuses or on non-existent environmental regulations.
Black folk are always excluded from the realm of politics and are wanderers within its
borders without land or space to claim – the 1ac assumption that black people can
exist in a federal jobs gurantee, but the intentionally exclusion of them means their
impacts are targeted to black people in the US – turns case. Warren 18, Warren, Calvin L. Ontological
Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018. //Scopa The response, then, could also be read as juxtaposing two grammars— the political/juridical and the

ontological—to articulate the dilemma of black being within these two registers of existence. The “alien, disfranchised and degraded class” is an index of
political violence, but the nothing interposes the ontological register. Neither register provides safe haven or existential (biofuturistic) possibility for black being. If the
human can at least make recourse to the ontological, the primordial relation, to ground being against political violence, black being is unable to find any resolution in the ontological, as the

ontological does not provide an explanation for its being—if we follow Fanon. The free black is the sign of a double violence, an
onticide, on two registers of existence that would provide value and meaning for being. This fundamental lack of value and meaning is the crisis, or urgency, that the Negro Question
is designed to invoke. We get a sense of this in another submission to The African Repository: “Introduced among us by violence, notoriously ignorant, degraded and miserable, mentally

the [free blacks] wander

diseased, broken spirited, acted upon by no motive to honorable exertions, scarcely reached in their debasement by heavenly light

unsettled and unbefriended through our land, or sit indolent, abject and sorrowful, by
the streams which witness their captivity.”53 This wandering assumes a metaphorical and literal instantiation, since black
being, lacking grounding in both ontology and politics/law, moves and floats
throughout the world, without a proper place or any geography that could be
identified as home. The free black, unbefriended, indolent, “abject,” and “sorrowful,” lacks political constituency
that is recognized by politics and law (as Justice Roger Taney argued) and is situated in an abyss that is “scarcely reached . . . by heavenly light”
(i.e., the Negro as black metaphysically). Another author, keen to this movement, describes it this way in The African Repository: “They [free blacks] remain as a floating body in our midst,

the effects of climate at the North, or foreign emigration at

drifting, as the census table shows, hither and thither, as

the East, or prejudices at the South, repel it from the points . It is an interesting subject of investigating to watch the
movements of the colored population, and ascertain where they are tending and whither they will find a resting place [emphasis mine].”54 The “floating body” is an allegorical sign of the
nothing that lacks form or placement within a political/ontological landscape (a sign of formless- ness). It floats “hither and thither” in the interstitial crevices of existence, without a resting
place. A certain liquidity marks the existence of the free black, and the Census attempts to capture something that is difficult— the problem of black being. The conjoining of the words free
and black, the domain of the human and the domain of the ontological instrument, opens up this problem discursively and presents it as an incessant movement between established

The North, South, East, and West are not only geographical regions in the United
properties (or the “in-between” as Nahum Chandler would call it).

States, regions that have either barred free blacks from entry or made their residence miserable ,

but also alle- gories of livability and the world itself. To eksist outside oneself and the world means that one lacks a

space of life, meaning, and futurity. Black being is barred from cartographies of
livability in much the same way the free black is excluded from states and localities .55 We
must also remember that this floating body is also a form of ter- ror, ontological terror. For nothing terrorizes the human by rendering the metaphysical infrastructure fallible; its claim to truth

A
is secured only though tremendous violence— antiblack violence. We can read the danger that the free black presents to antebellum culture as particular terror for the human.

contributor to The African Repository urges readers to contend with this danger: In order to estimate
correctly the magnitude of the evil, which will come upon us, unless we take steps in
time to arrest the danger, we need only consider the paid increase of the black population in the
United States since 1800 . . . the free blacks are also increasing with fearful rapidity, especially in the Southern states. We should not shut our eyes to the danger
until it comes upon us in all its fearfulness, but with a wise foresight and manly resolution we should now take the necessary steps to avoid it. It is our duty, then, to commence an early and
energetic and systematic movement to prevent the danger . . . it is evident that we must devise some scheme to get clear of the free black population, which is becoming an incubus upon all

we can, if we will commence in time, get rid of them at but little

the states. . . . Tennessee at this time, has not a very large free black population, and

expense, but if we defer the matter much longer the evil will grow upon us in a fearful
manner.56 This danger assumes a theological and ethical dimension, an evil of tremendous magnitude. For the contributor, the increase in the free black population is a danger to the
nation—black presence and danger assume a pernicious interchangeability in this calculus. The objective is for the nation to get rid of them before the danger grows. Part of the contribu- tor’s

Removing the free black presence from U.S.

thinking is embedded in the strategy of relocation—in particular, the colonization scheme.

soil becomes an ethical and theological imperative, since this presence threatens to
destroy the nation, a political eschatology in which blackness is refigured as the end of
days, the end of the order of things. But what about the black presence is so threatening? It seems that freedom and blackness are incompatible
concepts for many antebellum thinkers; in particular, blacks are incapable of bearing the burden of freedom. This incompatibility unravels society and produces blacks that are “notoriously
ignorant, degraded and miserable, mentally diseased, broken spirited, and acted upon by no motive to honorable exertions.” What the contributor is intimating is that the transmogrification
between ontological instrument (or equipment) and the human is a destructive enterprise, since it defies the function of black being in modernity. Reading the contributor, it is almost as if
emancipation creates monsters from within the laboratory of culture (or what Hortense Spillers would call the “cultural vestibular- ity”). And the ethical and theological implication of this
monstrosity can only be captured through the sign of evil. Sylvia Wynter remarks that the Negro must stand in for “all that is evil” to provide the axiological and theological grounding for the
human, along skin difference.57As available instrument, without flesh or ontological resistance, the Negro stands at the threshold between heaven and hell, a position without any ethical or
moral equivalent—a nothing within the symbolic of ethics, morality, or theology. It is this position, as the wretched threshold, that constitutes the evil the contributor imagines. The nation,
then, must excise the danger to restore itself. What the author describes as an evil is the ontological function of black being: to absorb the anxieties, the violation of sacred boundaries, and the
execration of Being.
The discursive structure of the 1ACs apocalyptic rhetoric is founded upon and
propagates multiple forms of anti-blackness via white epistemes, protagonist
saviorism, erasure, and exploitation. Mitchell and Chaudhury 20, Mitchell, A. and Choudhury, A. (2020) Worlding
beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘The world’: White apocalyptic visions ..., SAGE. Sage Publishers. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0047117820948936 (Accessed: January 18,

2023). //Scopa Discourses that predict the imminent ‘end of the world’ are not as universal as they often claim to be. The
futures they fear for, seek to protect and work to construct are rooted in a particular set of global

social structures and subjectivities: whiteness. Whiteness is not reducible to skin pigmentation, genetics or genealogy. It is a set
of cultural, political, economic, normative, and subjective structures derived from
Eurocentric societies and propagated through global formations such as colonization
and capitalism. These multi-scalar structures work by segregating bodies through the inscription of racial difference, privileging those they recognize or construct as ‘white’4
and unequally distributing harms to those that they do not.5 Whiteness is also a form of property that accrues benefits

– including material, physical, and other forms of security – and pervasive forms of
power, across space, time, and social structures. Due in part to its trans-formation through long-duration, global patterns of violence
and conquest, whiteness takes unique forms wherever and whenever it coalesces, so it should not be treated as universal – despite its own internal claims to this status. Most of

the leading contributors to mainstream ‘end of the world’ discourses discussed in this
article are rooted in Euro-American cultural contexts, and in particular in settler colonial and/or imperial states such as the
United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. As such, the forms of whiteness they embody are linked to

particular histories of settlement, frontier cultures, resource-based imperialisms, genocides of Indigenous communities, histories of slavery, and modes of anti-

Blackness. Whiteness is remarkable in its ability to render itself invisible to those who possess and benefit from it. Many, if not most, of the (often liberal humanitarian) authors of
‘end of the world’ discourses seem unaware of its integral influence on their thinking, and would almost certainly be horrified at the thought of their work entrenching racialized injustices. We
are not suggesting that these authors espouse explicit, intentional and/or extreme racist ideals, on which much public discussion by white people of racism tends to focus.7 Nor do we wish to
homogenize or present as equivalent all of the viewpoints discussed in this paper, which display a range of expressions of whiteness and levels of awareness thereof.8 On the contrary, we
work to center broad, everyday, structural ways in which underlying logics of whiteness and white supremacy frame and permeate mainstream paradigms and discourses, including those
identified as liberal, humanitarian, or progressive. Even amongst white people who consciously and explicitly disavow racism, unconscious, habitual, normalized, structurally-embedded
assumptions circulate, and are reproduced in ways that perpetuate race as a global power structure. This includes one of the authors of this paper (Mitchell), who, as a white settler, continues
to benefit from and participate – and thus ‘invest’ – in structures of whiteness, and therefore has a continual responsibility to confront them (although total divestment is not possible).12

The ‘habits’ of racism are reflected strongly in the way that contemporary ‘end of the
world’ narratives frame their protagonists: those attributed with meaningful agency
and ethical status in the face of global threats; those whose survival or flourishing is prioritized or treated as a bottom line when
tradeoffs are imagined and planned; and, crucially, those deemed capable of and entitled to ‘save the
world’ and determine its future. This is expressed in several key features of the genre, including its domination by white thinkers; the forms of
subjectivity and agency it embraces; and the ways it contrasts its subjects against BIPOC communities. First, contributors to fast-growing fields

like the study of ‘existential risk’ or ‘global catastrophic risk’ are overwhelmingly
white. As we will see, almost all of the authors identified by the literature review on which this paper is based, and certainly the most influential thinkers in the field, are white. For
example, the seminal collection Global Existential Risk, 14 which claims to offer a comprehensive snapshot of this field, is edited

by two white male Europeans (Nick Bostrom and Milan Circovic) and authored by an almost entirely
white (and all-male) group of scholars. Likewise, the most senior positions within influential
think tanks promoting the study of ‘existential risk’, such as the Future of Humanity Institute, the Cambridge
Center for the Study of Existential Risk and Humanprogress.org, are dominated by
white men, with few exceptions.15 Another expression of this tendency toward epistemic whiteness is found in the habit, prominent amongst white academics, of citing all or
mostly-white scholars, which entrenches a politics of citation that privileges whiteness and acknowledges only some intersectionalities as relevant.17 As mentioned above, Mitchell’s (2017)18
work offers an example of this tendency: while it engages critical, feminist, and queer postapocalyptic visions written by white authors, it does not center BIPOC perspectives or knowledge

systems. These examples do not simply raise issues of numerical representation, nor can whiteness necessarily be dismantled simply by altering these ratios. More importantly, all-
white or majority white spaces create epistemes in which most contributors share
cultural backgrounds, assumptions, and biases that are rarely challenged by
alternative worldviews, knowledge systems or registers of experience . In such epistemes the perceived
boundaries of ‘human thought’ are often elided with those of Euro-centric knowledge. For example, influential American settler journalist David Wallace-Wells19 contends that there exists no
framework for grasping climate change besides ‘mythology and theology’. In so doing, he ignores centuries of ongoing, systematic observation and explicit articulations of concern by BIPOC
knowledge keepers about climactic change. The bracketing of BIPOC knowledges not only severely limits the rigor of discourses on global crises, but also, as bi-racial organizer and thinker

it smuggles normative judgments that ‘turn

adrienne maree brown20 argues, it produces distorted outcomes. 313 For instance,

Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims’ into
apparently ‘objective’ claims. Similarly, the influential work of Black American criminologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore21 demonstrates how white imaginaries of
the threat posed by BIPOC bodies has produced the massive global penal complex and the radically unequal distribution of life chances. In short, imaginaries create worlds, so it matters greatly

Further, emerging narratives of the ‘end of the world’ explicitly

whose are privileged, and whose are excluded.

center figures of whiteness as their protagonists – as the survivors of apocalypse, the

subjects capable of saving the world from it, and as those most threatened . In these discourses,
‘survivors’ are framed as saviors able to protect and/or regenerate and even improve Western forms of
governance and social order by leveraging resilience, scientific prowess, and
technological genius. For example, the cover of American settler scientists Tony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadley’s book Tipping Points for
Planet Earth features a stylized male ‘human’ whom they identify as former California governor Jerry Brown (a powerful white settler
politician) holding the earth back from rolling over a cliff .22 Similarly, presenting a thought experiment about the planet’s future,

Homer-Dixon23 asks his readers to imagine ‘an average male – call him John’ (in fact, the most popular male name globally at the time of writing was

Mohammed). This is followed by images of a Caucasian male dressed in safari or hiking gear – both

emblematic of symbols colonial conquest24 – tasked with choosing from two forks on a path, as imagined by white American poet Robert
Frost. This image of rugged masculine whiteness, embodied in physical strength, colonial prowess, and the ability to dominate difficult landscapes is mirrored in his framing of his former co-
workers on oil rigs in the Canadian prairies25 as models of resilience. Similarly, American settler science writer Annalee Newitz26 proposes the Canadian province of Saskatchewan as a ‘model
for human survival’, based on her perceptions of the resilience, persistence and collaborative frontier attitudes of its people. Saskatchewan is a notoriously racist part of Canada, in which
violence against Indigenous people continues to be integral to its white-dominated culture27 – yet this polity and its culture are held up by Newitz as a model of ‘human’ resilience. By

these discourses not only normalize and obscure the

imagining subjects in whom whiteness is elided with resilience and survival,

modes of violence and oppression through which perceived ‘resilience’ – or, in blunt terms, preferential access to survival – is
achieved. They also work to displace the threat of total destruction ‘onto others who are seen as lacking the resourcefulness of the survivor’.28 In addition,
many ‘end of the world’ narratives interpellate subjects of white privilege by assuming
that readers are not (currently) affected by the harms distributed unequally by global
structures of environmental racism. For instance, Barnosky and Hadley29 (italics ours) state, ‘if you
are anything like we are, you probably think of pollution as somebody else’s problem . . .
you probably don’t live near a tannery, mine dump or any other source of pollution’. For many people of color, living near a source of

pollution may be nearly inescapable as a result of structural-material discrimination,

including zoning practices and the accessibility of housing.30 Viewing ecological harms as ‘someone else’s problem’ is a privilege afforded to those who have never been forced contemplate
the destruction of their communities or worlds.31 At the same time, these authors – along with many others working in the genre – invoke narratives akin to ‘all lives matter’ or 314
International Relations 34(3) ‘colour-blindness’32 that erase unequal distributions of harm and threat. For instance, during their international travels for scientific research and leisure,
Barnosky and Hadley (italics ours) describe a dawning awareness that ‘the problems we were writing about. . . were everybody’s problems. . .no one was escaping the impacts. . . including us’.
They go on to frame as equivalent flooding in Pakistan that displaced 20million people and killed 2000 with the inconveniences caused by the temporary flooding of the New York subway

In addition, they cite evidence of endocrine disruption in American girls caused

system in 2012.

by pollution, stating that the youngest of the cohort are African American and Latina
but that ‘the most dramatic increase is in Caucasian girls’ 33 (italics ours). In this framing, even though BIPOC children
remain most adversely affected, white children are pushed to the foreground and framed as more

urgently threatened in relative terms. These comparisons background the disproportionate burden of ecological harm born by BIPOC, and reflect a
 The ‘all lives matter’ logic employed here constructs ‘a
stark calculus of the relative value of white and BIPOC lives.

universal human frailty’ in which responsibility for ecological threats is attributed to

‘humans’ in general, and the assignment of specific culpability is avoided . While Newitz avers that
‘assigning blame [for ecological harm] is less important than figuring out how to. . . survive’,35 we argue that accurately attributing responsibility is crucial to opening up futures in which it is

Preoccupation with the subjects

possible to dismantle the structural oppressions that unequally distribute harms and chances for collective survival.

of whiteness in ‘end of the world’ discourses is also reflected in the framing of BIPOC
communities as threats to the survival of ‘humanity’. These fears are perhaps most simply and
starkly expressed in anxieties over population decline within predominantly white
countries, paired with palpable fear of rising birth rates amongst BIPOC communities. Chillingly, such fears are often connected to the
mere biological survival of BIPOC, and the reproductive capacities of Black and Brown
bodies – especially those coded as ‘female’, and therefore ‘fertile’ within colonial gender binaries.36 For instance, in his treatise on ‘over’-
population, American settler science writer Alan Weisman addresses the ‘problem’
raised by the likely significant increase of survival rates (especially amongst children) as a result of widely-available cures for illnesses
such as malaria or HIV. Since, he avers, it would be ‘unconscionable’ to withhold these vaccines, Weisman suggests that malaria and HIV
research funding should also promote family planning – that is, control of BIPOC fertility – since ‘there’s

no vaccine against extinction’.37 Here, BIPOC survival and reproductivity is literally – even if not strictly
intentionally – framed as an incurable disease that could culminate in ‘extinction’ . Although some of these
discussions examine total growth in human populations globally,38 much of this research focuses on relative population sizes, usually of BIPOCmajority places to those inscribed as white. For
instance, British doctor John Guillebaud predicts a ‘birth dearth’ in Europe while likening ‘unremitting population growth’ in other parts of the world to ‘the doctrine of the cancer cell’.39
Although these regions are described in various ways throughout the genre – for instance, as ‘poor’ or ‘developing’, the areas slated for growth are almost always BIPOC-majority. For example,
Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny (italics ours) argues that Europe’s population is steadily shrinking ‘while nearby populations explode’.40 Drawing on Demeny’s work, HomerDixon warns
of a future 3:1 demographic ratio between North Africa/West Asia and 315 Europe, along with 70% growth in Bangladesh, 140% growth in Kenya, and a doubling of the populations of Iraq,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Directly after sharing these statistics, he appends a list of international news reports referring to, for example, clashes between Indigenous communities in
Kenya, riots in Shanghai, and murder rates in Mexico.41 In so doing, he directly juxtaposes BIPOC population growth with stereotypes of violence and ‘incivility’. BIPOC are often represented in

narratives as embodiments of ecological collapse and threat, embedding the

these

assumption that ‘black people don’t care about the environment’,42 and that the
global ‘poor’ will always prioritize short-term economic needs above ecological
concerns. This belief is reflected in travelogue-style descriptions of ecological devastation, including Barnosky and Hadley’s musings, while on holiday in Utah, that the ancient
Puebloan society collapsed because they had run out of water – a situation which they project onto future Sudan, Somalia, and Gaza. In addition, they diagnose the fall of what they call the
‘extinct’ Mayan community to overpopulation and over-exploitation of resources – despite the survivance43 of over 6million Mayan people in their Ancestral lands and other places at the time
of writing.44 These descriptions chime with the common refrain on the part of settler states that BIPOC are unable to care properly for their land, even in the absence of conflicting data. This

constructed ignorance allows those states to frame BIPOC territories as ‘wasteland’

awaiting annexation or improvement, or as dumping grounds for the externalities of
capitalism.45 What’s more, the use of BIPOC communities as cautionary tales for planetary destruction strongly suggests that the redistribution of
global power, land ownership, and other forms of agency toward BIPOC structures
would result in ecological disaster.
The alternative is an ontological revolution – a rejection of the metaphysical world
that’s sustained through anti-blackness in favor of a nihilistic embrace of the spirit,
rather than the human. Warren 18, Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018.
//Scopa Perhaps what I am suggesting constitutes an ontological revolution , one that will

destroy the world and its institutions (i.e., the “end of the world,” as Fanon calls it). But these are our options, since the
metaphysical holocaust will continue as long as the world exists. The nihilistic
revelation, however, is that such a revolution will destroy all life—far from the freedom dreams of the political idealists or the
sobriety of the pragmatist. The important task for black thinking (philosophizing, theorizing, theologizing, poeticizing) is to imagine black existence

without Being, humanism, or the human. Such thinking would lead us into an abyss. But we must face this abyss—its terror
and majesty. I would suggest that this thinking leads us into the spirit, something exceeding and
preceding the metaphysical world. We are still on the path to developing a phenomenology of black spirit, but it is an important enterprise. I will continue
this work in subsequent writing, but I can say for now, the aim is to shift emphasis from the human toward the spirit. The spirit enables one to endure

the metaphysical holocaust; it is not a solution to antiblackness. The spirit will not transform an antiblack world
into some egalitarian landscape—the antiblack world is irredeemable. Black nihilism must rest in the crevice between the impossibility of transforming
the world and the dynamic enduring power of the spirit. In the absence of Being there is spirit. Heidegger understands spirit commingled with Being, and the question of Being (“How is it going
with Being?”) “is the spiritual fate of the West.”3 Heidegger is both correct and incorrect. The spiritual degradation, routinized violence, and suffering around the globe is a consequence of
Being and its hegemonic, Eurocentric violence. So, for humans to continue to ask the question of Being is to perpetuate a spiritual violence of black torment. The answer to misery is not Being;

it is only by obliterating Being by dis(re)placing Heidegger’s question with “How is

rather,

it going with black being?” that we can have access to the spirit . Being is enmity to the spirit. Contending with
black as nothing will set us on this spiritual path. Along this path, we can experience something akin to Ashon Crawley’s concept of breath (without the promises of universal hu- manism), as
the possibility for thinking and breathing otherwise (we can push this thought to its limits and suggest that for black thinking, spiritual breath and thinking are “identical” rather than thinking

Continuing to keep hope that

and being). 4 Black studies will have to disinvest our axiological commitments from humanism and invest elsewhere.

freedom will occur, that one day the world will apologize for its antiblack brutality and
accept us with open arms, is a devastating fantasy. It might give one motivation to
fight on, but it is a drive that will only produce exhaustion and protest fatigue. What is the solution? What should we
do? How do we live without metaphysical schemes of political hope, freedom, and hu- manity? I would have to suggest that there are no solutions to the problem of antiblackness—there is
only endurance. And endurance cannot be reduced to biofuturity or humanist mandates. Endurance is a spiritual practice with entirely different aims. Ontological Terror seeks to challenge

Let our thinking lead

metaphysical and postmetaphysical solutions. The paradigm of the free black teaches us that such solutions sustain the metaphysical holocaust.

us into the “valley of the shadow of death,” and once there we can begin to imagine
an existence anew.
The 1AC represent the ontological view of humanity as the shaper of earth in which
we turn the natural world into a standing reserve of resources that exist for human
consumption – turns case. Only our re-orientation can solve their impacts – our
methods are fundamentally incompatible. Zwier and Blok 17, Zwier, J. and Blok, V. (2017) (PDF) saving earth:
Encountering Heidegger’s philosophy of technology ..., ResearchGate. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318705015_Saving_Earth_Encountering_Heidegger’s_Philosophy_of_Technology_in_the_Anthropocene (Accessed: 26 October 2023). //Scopa If

“saving power” associated with

the Anthropocene is radically ambiguous with respect to the danger of Enframing, this implies that Heidegger’s consideration of the

Enframing (1977, 28) must be reoriented. How does Heidegger understand the saving power? Like the essence and danger of

technology, the saving power is ontological. It therefore neither consists in renouncing

technology (cf. Heidegger, 1969, 53), nor in the production of “safer” or better technologies (e.g., greener,
smarter, more democratic etc.). Rather, the saving power concerns the awareness of human existence as responsive to

the call of being, meaning that Enframing is perceived as an epochal mode of appearance to which our managerial encounter with the world is already responsive. In citing
Hölderlin’s words “But where the danger is, grows the saving power also” (1977, 28), Heidegger considers the two in concert, which is to say that in the dangerous “frenzied-ness” and

“irresistibility of ordering” (1977, 33), we are offered a chance to experience Enframing as the epochal mode of appearance that tends to hide its own epochality in indifference. In
recognizing this, we can become perceptive to how the mode of appearance of
Enframing involves a withdrawal insofar as the possibility of a different mode of
revealing remains hidden. We can experience this withdrawal, for instance, in our contemporary tendency towards indifferent responsiveness when we find
ourselves disposed to regard both the old windmill and modern turbine indifferently as energy resources (cf. §3.1). Or, with specific regard to the Anthropocene, we can

experience this withdrawal in our selfevident notion of human existence as planetary

manager when we recognize how both “conservative” reactions to the ecological
demand (e.g., mitigation) as well as “progressive” reactions (e.g., geoengineering) are
already and self-evidently disposed towards management (cf. Baskin 2015, 21; cf. §1). The saving power then means that
we become perceptive of this withdrawal, which entails resistance to being
indifferently absorbed in managerially attending to the standing-reserve, thus gaining
a glimpse at the possibility of a wholly different mode of revealing (cf. Heidegger 1977, 31–33). In other words,
the saving power consists in being responsive to the call of being as the “challenging forth” belonging to Enframing (cf. §2.3) whilst remaining attentive to the presently withdrawn possibility of

saving power of Enframing solely involve the ontological level,

a different call. Now, for Heidegger, the danger and

meaning that the rise of a different mode of appearance is not dependent on human interactions with ontic things (e.g.,
producing greener Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology technologies), but depends on the call of being (Heidegger 1969, 52; cf. 1977, 28). Since our interactions with things on the

human made solutions to the ecological demand of

ontic level are already responsive to a call on the ontological level (cf. §2.3),

the Anthropocene (e.g., sequestering carbon) indifferently adhere to Enframing

insofar as they remain oriented towards planetary management (cf. §1). Accordingly, when Heidegger considers
the saving power, he turns away from solutions pertaining to ontic dangers and instead calls for an attitude of “releasement” (1969, 54). Releasement means,

first, not viewing things “only in a technical way” (1969, 54), which we can understand as resisting indifferent myopism with respect
to the standing-reserve. Secondly, releasement acknowledges the importance of technologies into

our life, whilst simultaneously leaving them outside. This offers a glimpse at how technologies are “dependent on something
higher” (1969, 54), which is to say dependent on an epochal mode of appearance that already structures our encounter with technologies (cf. §2.1). Thirdly, rather than denouncing
technologies as meaningless instruments, releasement takes heed of how “the meaning pervading the technological world hides itself” (1969, 55, translation modified), where this meaning
can be understood as the withdrawn possibility of a different world or different way of revealing.15 In this way, Heidegger’s thinking concerning releasement is consistent with his relinquishing

occurrences at the ontic level

of the ontic in favor of the ontological (cf. §2.2) and also demonstrates his unidirectional relating of the two, meaning that

(e.g., developing greener technologies) never carry over to the ontological level (which
already structures our managerial encounter with such technologies).
And, we control root cause of existential crises. Christion 19, Christion, Tim. MOTIVATING COLLECTIVE ACTION IN
RESPONSE TO AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT: CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY IN A CLIMATE-CHANGING WORLD. 2019, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/24554/

Christion_oregon_0171A_12399.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. //Scopa In my view,phenomenology is distinctive in the tradition of Western thought as a

medium between the disciplined commitment to phenomena motivating scientific
investigation and the pursuit of meaningful comprehension motivating philosophical
reflection. Arguably, this ambition culminates in the lifeworld concept originally developed by Edmund Husserl. But more importantly for present purposes, confronting the
challenges of collectivizing ethical motivation on climate change from a lifeworld perspective affords philosophical entry to the problems identified in the previous chapter. This meso-level
approach holds promise as an account of the ways in which the institutions analyzed by Jamieson and Gardiner are intersubjectively embodied by different communities of collective

It is precisely at this intersubjective level of collective identity, I submit, that cultural

experience.

and social institutions find mutual reinforcement in the face of systemic climate
change. This is precisely why they function so powerfully as existential barriers to a problem-
driven response. In this connection, a lifeworld analysis of the socio-cultural challenges of climate response suggests a kind of existential crisis in the making that, in important respects, seems
quite novel on the stage of human history. However, to the extent that the lifeworld concept marks a significant turn from the traditional logic of Western thought confounded by the

paradoxes of 135 inaction, it’s important to first introduce Husserl’s phenomenology in some depth as an appropriate philosophical alternative.58 Lifeworld identity and
experience, to begin with, is multi-layered. It is sociocultural in historical evolution and intersubjective in comprehension, yet sensitive to structural differences in collective experience and
motivation. As such, it can be said that this concept mediates the socio-cultural generality of historical existence and the local specificity of material conditions motivating group and personal
experience more concretely. Hence, as I explain in further in the final chapter when bringing in MerleauPonty, the lifeworld expresses something like a background/foreground relation that,
depending on context, can be relatively steady (conservative) over time or else evolve quite dynamically. Perhaps the most important point to be made here with respect to the climate issue
concerns the normative quality of self-evidence or reification of things in the “foreground” of experience afforded by the “background” of lifeworld existence. It is precisely against the

structures hidden in background that things appear immediately and intuitively

pregiven

obvious to “everybody” in one’s experience, as opposed to the products of conscious

reflection or interpretation. This self-evidence is what enables people to live and communicate together in a world of real things, but things that are normatively contextualized
according to the socio-cultural institutions affording common meaning to existence more generally. In addition to being multi-layered in structure, lifeworld identity is also multifaceted in
expression. That is, the normative background structures of lifeworld 58 Taking the time to offer this philosophical introduction is also important considering the consequential influence
Husserl’s lifeworld phenomenology had on Heidegger and especially Merleau-Ponty, who I also rely on to philosophically reformulate the collective action problem on climate change. 136
identity that give experience its pregiven comprehension find expression across multiple domains of everyday life. Husserl, for instance, could analyze perception, consciousness, behavior,
thought, etc., as different expressions of a given lifeworld. With respect to spatial perception, for instance, the lifeworld constitutes the unnoticed background against which things show up in
experience as noticeable—sensible, meaningful, intelligible. A cube, to take Husserl’s example, is perceived as a three-dimensional whole (against the background of lifeworld experience) even
though the physical object itself can only present three of its six facets to the senses at any given time. Considering what Husserl calls “time-consciousness,” moreover, the lifeworld enables
one to make sense of situations in the present against a temporal background that connects past experiences to future ideals and possibilities worth striving for. With respect to behavior, the
lifeworld is the passive background of habituated predispositions against which intentional activity takes place in response to the contingencies of a given situation. And reflection, to take a
final example, takes form against a pre-conceptual background of sensibilities. All things considered, then, it could also be said that these background relations embody the ingrained cultural
assumptions and social practices against which people make comprehensive sense of the world and their lives in it. By enabling people to “naturally” make sense of things across multiple
domains, the normative coherence and continuity structured by this socio-cultural background makes experience reliable and directs existence smoothly. This lifeworld coherence speaks
directly to Heidegger’s (1962) formulation of “being-in-the-world,” and this is precisely what affords the ontological security needed to live with confidence and purpose. 137 With respect to
consciousness, there is something like an inverse relation between the immediacy of everyday experience (lived in the “natural attitude”) and the institutionalized background structures that
give life this normative quality of selfevidence. In some ways, the more obvious that things are in everyday life, the more concealed are the intersubjective background structures that make
this self-evidence possible—and vice-versa. This inverse relation between self-evidence and socio-cultural background assumptions is more noticeable when observed from a distance (as when
considering indigenous societies from one’s perspective in industrial society or pondering ancient Pagan or medieval Christian cultures of the distant past from the standpoint of modernity).

the most general structures affording lifeworld coherence/identity in the

Now one of

industrialized world responsible for climate change concerns socio-cultural

assumptions about ‘nature’ and the human relationship to it. Indeed, different lifeworld
assumptions about nature strongly inform different relations to the world of collective
experience more broadly. Hence, from the modern perspective basic to the industrial world, the pre- or non-modern traditions mentioned above may seem obviously “wrong” or
inconceivable largely to the extent that they are founded on very different lifeworld assumptions about nature. Speaking quite generally, there’s a sense in which Pagans and indigenous
peoples have tended to focus human existence on more organic relations to nature (relations of belonging) while otherworldly Christian traditions have tended to focus human existence on

Citizens of the modern secular world of industrialism, by

the supernatural realm beyond nature (relations of transcendence).

contrast, tend to focus human existence on instrumental relations to nature for the sake of

maximizing material production (relations of dominion). Although all three founding lifeworld assumptions about nature and the human relation to it
continue to find expression in the industrialized world, the latter relation is certainly the more hegemonic and thus selfevident one (particularly within privileged demographics). In most
situations, for example, a detailed and well-researched argument isn’t needed to push “sensible” market-based technological solutions to climate change, but proposals that question
economic growth and consumerism would struggle to find an ear regardless of supporting arguments. Arguably, as a background foundation structuring one’s everyday being in the world,

this controlling or domineering orientation to nature is at once the lifeworld relation

most concealed in self-evidence and the most responsible for systemic problems like climate change. This
point, I contend, is essential to understanding climate change as an existential threat to lifeworld identity in the industrialized world responsible for it.
 3
The United States federal government should delegate to randomly selected citizen
oversight juries the authority to make final, binding determinations of policy regarding
[adopting a federal climate jobs gurantee], including the permissibility of individual
distributive exceptions, in adversarial proceedings featuring evidentiary presentations
by unbiased expert witnesses supporting the case made by each side
Delegating specific, narrow policy questions to citizen juries solves the case and
demonstrates an effective model for participatory governance that spills over broadly
Schulson & Bagg 19, Michael Schulson, freelance journalist; and Samuel Bagg, Departmental
Lecturer, Politics and International Relations, and Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics, Nuffield
College, Oxford University, 7/19/19, “Give Political Power to Ordinary People,”
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/give-political-power-to-ordinary-people-sortition /jpb

In response to the mounting public anger about inequality and the climate crisis in the United States, the left has seized
the initiative, proposing higher taxes on the rich to fund transformative government programs like Medicare for
All and the Green New Deal. But parallel concerns about the domination of government institutions by
unaccountable technocrats and wealthy elites—a danger that could derail all those plans—have so far failed to
generate a similar stream of ambitious proposals.

A strong, radically democratic vision for the left must combine advocacy of growing state power with demands
for more effective citizen oversight and participation . The left needs more than good policy. It needs
serious, creative proposals for how to drain the swamp.

Our broken campaign finance system is a longstanding target of progressive ire. And as Republican state legislatures have made increasingly
aggressive moves to entrench minority rule, many people are beginning to see a broader defense of democratic integrity as a crucial part of any
left agenda. Yet most of the attention of reformers has been limited to the electoral process—perhaps because we tend to assume that getting
“our people” into office will solve the problem.

It won’t. Elitecapture of the state extends far beyond the influence of large donors on elections. Ever since the original
New Deal gave birth to the modern administrative state, powerful private interests have sought to make it work in their favor. They
have often been successful, influencing everything from state and federal legislative agendas to international
treaties and arcane regulatory rulings. As a result, corporations—and the plutocrats who run them—are often able to
neutralize or coopt the very agencies designed to keep them in check.

Sometimes, this results in highly publicized disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the 2008 financial crisis, both of
which were widely blamed on regulators in thrall to the industries they were tasked with overseeing. In the wake
of crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, more recently, critics noted that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had actually
outsourced its responsibility to perform safety evaluations to none other than Boeing itself.

More often, however, the effects

of capture are less spectacular, taking the form of U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) guidelines that advantage large industrial farms, or Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rulings that privilege
the interests of telecom giants over their customers. Even when rulemaking is not obviously captured by any particular corporate or industry
interest, an isolated technocratic elite is bound to become removed from the concerns of ordinary people.

We cannot expect to avert the dangers of capture and corruption simply by hiring smarter experts or electing fresh-
faced representatives with noble intentions. A changing of the guard is not enough. Truly transformative reforms must
be motivated by a robustly democratic vision, in which ordinary citizens are empowered to hold
government officials accountable and break self-perpetuating cycles of capture. And one promising way to move toward
that goal is sortition, or the assignment of political power through lotteries.

The use of randomly selected citizen councils to protect fragile institutions of self-government dates back to
classical Greece and medieval Italy. There are promising recent precedents from Canada and Ireland as well. And as the limits of electoral
representation become more apparent, interest in lottery-based alternatives is growing rapidly among political theorists. So far, though,
sortition has received virtually no extended treatment in mainstream U.S. political discourse. That needs to
change.
Americans already have a familiar, traditional model of sortition in the trial jury system. Every day, courts across the country use lotteries to
generate a pool of potential jurors, who are then sorted—admittedly through less-than-random methods—into panels that judge fellow
citizens.

Randomly selected juries reflect all the shortcomings of the people who serve on them. Their principal advantage, however, is that
they are resistant to certain forms of manipulation. Because ordinary citizens selected more or less at random
have nothing at stake in the outcome of most trials, their judgment can be trusted to be relatively impartial. And
because their participation is limited to a particular case, they are relatively immune to outside influence.
They do not become entrenched in their positions, so they are not susceptible to the kinds of distorting incentives facing
career politicians, government officials, and judges.

Those same advantages would apply outside the courtroom. Popular election and meritocratic appointment have distinct
advantages as methods of distributing political office, but they are also inevitably subject to influence by those with concentrated power
through lobbying, campaign contributions, career incentives, and a host of subtler means. By contrast, councils
consisting of
randomly selected citizens would be more resistant to these pressures. Oversight juries empowered to
scrutinize important government decisions could therefore exert a meaningful check on the power of
wealth in a wide range of contexts.

This is what sets sortition apart from more familiar technocratic fixes to the problems of capture. The random
selection process inserts a
blind break that interrupts
all of the normal channels of influence. It ensures that participants are mostly
ordinary people without strong pre-existing loyalties. And it gives real decision-making power to
members of marginalized groups that are normally excluded from politics.
What would this look like in practice? Consider the merger approval process, which is opaque to the vast majority of us but generates intense
lobbying pressure from corporate actors with billions of dollars on the line. According to Tim Wu and other legal scholars, this regulatory
process has succumbed to capture and corruption for decades, permitting the rise of monopolistic corporations like Google and Facebook.

To grapple with this problem, an incoming Democratic Congress might demand that whenever the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decides to
approve a merger deal worth more than $1 billion, it has to submit that decision to a citizen oversight jury. The jury would hear cases for both
sides—just like a trial jury—and then choose to approve the merger, reject it outright, or send it back to the FTC for further review. The process
would invite public scrutiny on decisions that affect the lives of millions.

Other state and federal agencies would also benefit from the regular scrutiny of a citizen jury. Imagine
democratic participation in the rules that permit the use of complex financial instruments like derivatives,
oversight over defense contracts, or scrutiny over Federal Reserve rulings. The idea is not that ordinary citizens know better
than experts or have the ability to channel some pure Will of the People. Rather, their role would be to force policymakers to demonstrate to a
plausibly neutral audience how their decisions benefit ordinary people.

In that vein, citizen oversight juries could also be powerful tools for improving election regulations at the state level, reining in the excesses of
gerrymandering and helping to prevent situations like the debacle in Georgia last November, when a gubernatorial candidate was tasked with
overseeing his own election. Especially now that federal courts are forbidden from doing so, citizen oversight juries should wield veto power
over districting decisions. More generally, they should review election policy and scrutinize interactions between lobbyists and legislators—
precisely the sort of tasks that officials elected under the current system are unlikely to perform.

Citizen oversight could even play an important role at the municipal level. Juries could review policies in police departments or sheriff’s offices,
or plans to give large tax incentives to corporations—as in the recent failed deal between Amazon and New York City.
Finally, councils
of randomly selected citizens could help set the agenda for elected legislatures. They could
draft agenda items and force legislatures to vote on issues they are unlikely to pursue because they are
politically risky (such as criminal justice reform), unpopular among donors (financial regulations), or invisible to the wealthier people who
dominate our political system (payday lending).

None of these institutions need eliminate experts from decision-making. As in criminal trials, jurors on an oversight council
would be given sufficient time in a sufficiently deliberative context to get a handle on a discrete, specific
question. Experts would help them understand the question and the stakes, but the adversarial format
would ensure that jurors aren’t hoodwinked, and citizens themselves would have the final say.

As in criminal cases, this process will sometimes misfire, and special interests may find ways to influence juries. No
system is perfect,
and the specific details of a sortition-centered citizen oversight model would require a lot of work—and some
experimentation—to pin down. But given how badly the current system is failing, that work and
experimentation should not scare us off. Citizen oversight councils offer a radically democratic process to hold policymakers
accountable to the public interest.

The model of sortition that we’re imagining has radical ambitions, but it is also pragmatic, and has promising real-world
precedents. In 2003, for instance, the province of British Columbia randomly selected 160 citizens and convened a Citizens’ Assembly to set
the agenda on the question of electoral reform. The citizens heard from a range of experts and policy advocates, helped host public hearings,
and deliberated during weekend sessions at a special facility in Vancouver. They reviewed systemic problems with the provincial election
system and debated possible solutions. At the end of the process, they proposed a new, customized single transferable vote system for
elections in the province. Their proposal was approved by 58 percent of voters in a province-wide referendum—just shy of the 60 percent
required to pass. But the experiment was radical—and, for many of the people who witnessed it, deeply moving.

More recently, the Irish Parliament brought together ninety-nine randomly selected citizens to prepare a public report about five social issues,
including whether the country should reconsider its longstanding ban on abortion—a high-voltage issue that the leadership class had been
hesitant to touch. At the end of the process, the assembly pushed for parliament to take up abortion anyway, endorsing a much more liberal
policy than anyone expected. Analysts of Irish politics have widely credited the assembly with helping to bring about the 2018 referendum that
legalized abortion in the country.

These are the most high-profile recent cases, but they are hardly the only ones. In the past decade, municipalities across Canada have started
using citizen reference panels, selected by lottery, to provide input on major city planning questions and other complex municipal decisions. In
the lead up to the election of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador last year, his MORENA party selected a number of candidates
for its parliamentary list by lot. And just in the last few months, national initiatives employing sortition have been announced in Belgium and
Scotland.

These preliminary steps only scratch the surface of sortition’s full political potential, but they have generated significant momentum behind the
idea. It’s
time to put it on the agenda in the United States, where it has potential for broad political appeal.
An emphasis on citizen oversight addresses conservative concerns about an unaccountable
bureaucracy. At the same time, it answers widespread calls among liberals and the left to defend democratic
integrity.
Sortition need not await the arrival of a deep blue wave in Congress. Citizen oversight juries can and should be implemented at local and state
levels immediately. Doing so will help to ameliorate the effects of capture on the ground, while familiarizing people with the practice and
serving as a trial run for federal implementation.

Far more than a policy fix, sortition is a profound rejoinder to an era of distant, managerial state power and spectator-sport politics.
Neoliberal dogma asserts that we only have two choices: either we get rule by unaccountable
technocrats, or we get the conspiracy theorizing and indiscriminate mistrust of all expertise peddled by the populist
right. Oversight juries reject this false choice. Instead, they model a healthier relationship between experts
and ordinary people, in which both have a crucial role to play.
Organized parties and competent bureaucrats are a necessary foundation for any realistic vision of left politics. But sometimes, justice requires
that we blind ourselves to faction and rank. Though a citizen oversight movement will never resolve democracy’s challenges all on its
own, it can help to weaken the grip of concentrated wealth on our political system. And unlike so many supposed
solutions to our present travails, it casts ordinary people, rather than elites, in the role of democracy’s saviors .

Participatory governance reform’s necessary to address a slew of existential threats

Ingemar Elander 22, senior professor in politics at Örebro University, 1/28/22, “Urban Renewal,
Governance and Sustainable Development: More of the Same or New Paths?,” Sustainability, 14, 1528,
https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031528 /jpb

Humanity seems to have been thrown into a ‘perfect storm’ of several huge challenges such as global warming,
accelerating extinction of species, the corona pandemic and uncontrollable migration streams caused by
fossil fuel emissions, overexploitation of natural resources, extreme weather, viruses, and ethnic and religious
conflicts. On top of this, there are even signs that liberal democracy is in crisis, far from the days when it
was proclaimed irreversibly hegemonic [1]. The challenges mentioned are, by many scientists, some world leaders and a
broader audience, considered existential threats in need of urgent action, that is ‘securitization’ [2]. As the causes, effects and adequate

reactions upon these threats are contested, there are no given solutions how to ‘de-securitize’ them, neither one by one, no less together. In other words, it is

ultimately a question of how government and governance configurations globally, at various levels and settings,

choose to decide on the road forward. Although world leaders in the Global North have been desperately fertilizing their economies with
heaps of money to recover the still largely fossil-dependent ‘Great Acceleration’, there are in this ‘critical juncture’ also windows of opportunity

to enter new paths. How do urban public institutions and actors in market and civil society respond to these crises? Do
they only try to reinvent old ideas and practices, or do they search for healthier, more sustainable, democratic
and just ways of handling major threats and risks?
Case
 ADV—Turn
Extinction is inevitable in industrial society.
1] Unsustainable.
Corey J. A Bradshaw et al (16 other people), January 13, 2021, frontiers in conservation science,
“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future”,
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full] mc

Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life . But the mainstream
is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization (Ceballos et al., 2015; IPBES, 2019; Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020; WWF, 2020). While suggested solutions abound (Díaz et al., 2019), the current scale of their
implementation does not match the relentless progression of biodiversity loss (Cumming et al., 2006) and other existential threats tied to the continuous expansion of the human enterprise (Rees, 2020). Time delays between ecological deterioration and socio-economic penalties, as with
climate disruption for example (IPCC, 2014), impede recognition of the magnitude of the challenge and timely counteraction needed. In addition, disciplinary specialization and insularity encourage unfamiliarity with the complex adaptive systems (Levin, 1999) in which problems and their
potential solutions are embedded (Selby, 2006; Brand and Karvonen, 2007). Widespread ignorance of human behavior (Van Bavel et al., 2020) and the incremental nature of socio-political processes that plan and implement solutions further delay effective action (Shanley and López,
2009; King, 2016). We summarize the state of the natural world in stark form here to help clarify the gravity of the human predicament. We also outline likely future trends in biodiversity decline (Díaz et al., 2019), climate disruption (Ripple et al., 2020), and human consumption and
population growth to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come. Finally, we discuss the ineffectiveness of current and planned actions that are attempting to address the ominous erosion of
Earth's life-support system. Ours is not a call to surrender—we aim to provide leaders with a realistic “cold shower” of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future. Biodiversity Loss Major changes in the biosphere are directly linked to the growth of human
systems (summarized in Figure 1). While the rapid loss of species and populations differs regionally in intensity (Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017, 2020; Díaz et al., 2019), and most species have not been adequately assessed for extinction risk (Webb and Mindel, 2015), certain global trends are

obvious. Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has been halved (Erb et al., 2018), with a corresponding loss of >20% of its original biodiversity (Díaz et al., 2019),

>700 documented vertebrate

together denoting that >70% of the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo sapiens (IPBES, 2019). There have been and ~600 plant (Díaz et al., 2019) (Humphreys et al.,

2019) species extinctions with many more species

over the past 500 years, gone extinct unrecorded clearly having (Tedesco et al., 2014). Population sizes of vertebrate
species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades (WWF, 2020), with certain population clusters in extreme decline (Leung et al., 2020), thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species (Ceballos et al., 2020). Overall,
perhaps 1 million species are threatened with extinction in the near future out of an estimated 7–10 million eukaryotic species on the planet (Mora et al., 2011), with around 40% of plants alone considered endangered (Antonelli et al., 2020). Today, the global biomass of wild mammals is

<25% of that estimated for the Late Pleistocene (Bar-On et al., 2018), while insects are also disappearing rapidly in many regions (Wagner, 2020; reviews in van Klink et al., 2020). Freshwater and marine environments
have also been severely damaged . Today there is <15% of the original wetland area globally than was present 300 years ago (Davidson, 2014), and >75% of rivers >1,000 km long no longer flow freely along their entire course (Grill

two-thirds of the oceans have been compromised

et al., 2019). More than to some extent by human activities (Halpern et al., 2015), live coral cover on reefs has halved in <200 years (Frieler et al.,
2013), seagrass extent has been decreasing by 10% per decade over the last century (Waycott et al., 2009; Díaz et al., 2019), kelp forests have declined by ~40% (Krumhansl et al., 2016), and the biomass of large predatory fishes is now <33% of what it was last century (Christensen et al.,
2014). With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined. These include inter alia reduced carbon sequestration (Heath et al., 2005; Lal, 2008), reduced pollination (Potts et al., 2016), soil degradation (Lal, 2015), poorer water and air
quality (Smith et al., 2013), more frequent and intense flooding (Bradshaw et al., 2007; Hinkel et al., 2014) and fires (Boer et al., 2020; Bowman et al., 2020), and compromised human health (Díaz et al., 2006; Bradshaw et al., 2019). As telling indicators of how much biomass humanity has
transferred from natural ecosystems to our own use, of the estimated 0.17 Gt of living biomass of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth today, most is represented by livestock (59%) and human beings (36%)—only ~5% of this total biomass is made up by wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and
amphibians (Bar-On et al., 2018). As of 2020, the overall material output of human endeavor exceeds the sum of all living biomass on Earth (Elhacham et al., 2020). Sixth Mass Extinction A mass extinction is defined as a loss of ~75% of all species on the planet over a geologically short
interval—generally anything <3 million years (Jablonski et al., 1994; Barnosky et al., 2011). At least five major extinction events have occurred since the Cambrian (Sodhi et al., 2009), the most recent of them 66 million years ago at the close of the Cretaceous period. The background rate

today's extinction
of extinction since then has been 0.1 extinctions million species−1 year−1 (Ceballos et al., 2015), while estimates of rate are orders of magnitude greater (Lamkin and Miller, 2016). Recorded vertebrate extinctions since the 16th century

—the mere tip of the true extinction iceberg—give a rate of extinction of 1.3 species year−1, which is >15 times the background rate
conservatively (Ceballos et al., 2015). The IUCN estimates that some 20% of all species are in

danger of extinction over the next few decades, which greatly exceeds the background rate. That we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now
scientifically undeniable (Barnosky et al., 2011; Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017). Ecological Overshoot: Population Size and Overconsumption The global human population has approximately doubled since 1970, reaching nearly 7.8 billion people today
(prb.org). While some countries have stopped growing and even declined in size, world average fertility continues to be above replacement (2.3 children woman−1), with an average of 4.8 children woman−1 in Sub-Saharan Africa and fertilities >4 children woman−1 in many other
countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Yemen, Timor-Leste). The 1.1 billion people today in Sub-Saharan Africa—a region expected to experience particularly harsh repercussions from climate change (Serdeczny et al., 2017)—is projected to double over the next 30 years. By 2050, the world
population will likely grow to ~9.9 billion (prb.org), with growth projected by many to continue until well into the next century (Bradshaw and Brook, 2014; Gerland et al., 2014), although more recent estimates predict a peak toward the end of this century (Vollset et al., 2020).

Large population size and continued growth leads to are implicated in many societal problems. The impact of population growth, combined with an imperfect distribution of resources, massive

700–800 million people are starving and 1–2 billion are micronutrient-malnourished and
food insecurity. By some estimates,

unable to function fully, with prospects of many more food problems Large in the near future (Ehrlich and Harte, 2015a,b).

populations and their continued growth are also drivers of soil degradation and biodiversity loss (Pimm et al., 2014).

More people means that more synthetic compounds and dangerous throw-away plastics (Vethaak and
Leslie, 2016) are manufactured, many of which add to the growing toxification of the Earth (Cribb, 2014). It also increases chances of

pandemics (Daily and Ehrlich, 1996b) that fuel ever-more desperate hunts for scarce resources (Klare, 2012). Population growth is also a factor in many social ills, from crowding and joblessness, to deteriorating infrastructure and bad governance (Harte, 2007). There is
mounting evidence that when populations are large and growing fast, they can be the sparks for both internal and international conflicts that lead to war (Klare, 2001; Toon et al., 2007). The multiple, interacting causes of civil war in particular are varied, including poverty, inequality, weak
institutions, political grievance, ethnic divisions, and environmental stressors such as drought, deforestation, and land degradation (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1999; Collier and Hoeer, 1998; Hauge and llingsen, 1998; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Brückner, 2010; Acemoglu et al., 2017). Population
growth itself can even increase the probability of military involvement in conflicts (Tir and Diehl, 1998). Countries with higher population growth rates experienced more social conflict since the Second World War (Acemoglu et al., 2017). In that study, an approximate doubling of a
country's population caused about four additional years of full-blown civil war or low-intensity conflict in the 1980s relative to the 1940–1950s, even after controlling for a country's income-level, independence, and age structure. Simultaneous with population growth, humanity's
consumption as a fraction of Earth's regenerative capacity has grown from ~ 73% in 1960 to 170% in 2016 (Lin et al., 2018), with substantially greater per-person consumption in countries with highest income. With COVID-19, this overshoot dropped to 56% above Earth's regenerative

between January and August 2020, humanity consumed as much as Earth can renew in the
capacity, which means that

entire year (overshootday.org). While inequality among people and countries remains staggering, the global middle class has grown rapidly and exceeded half the human population by 2018 (Kharas and Hamel, 2018). Over 70% of all people currently live in countries
that run a biocapacity deficit while also having less than world-average income, excluding them from compensating their biocapacity deficit through purchases (Wackernagel et al., 2019) and eroding future resilience via reduced food security (Ehrlich and Harte, 2015b). The consumption
rates of high-income countries continue to be substantially higher than low-income countries, with many of the latter even experiencing declines in per-capita footprint (Dasgupta and Ehrlich, 2013; Wackernagel et al., 2019).

2] Tech.
Sterling 18 Bruce Sterling, 6-1-2018, "When Nick Bostrom says “Bang”," WIRED,
[https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/06/nick-bostrom-says-bang/] winky

4.1 Deliberate misuse of nanotechnology In a mature form, molecular nanotechnology will enable the construction of bacterium-scale self-replicating
mechanical robots that can feed on dirt or other organic matter [22-25]. Such replicators could eat up the biosphere or destroy it by other means such as by poisoning it, burning it, or blocking
out sunlight. A person of malicious intent in possession of this technology might cause the extinction of intelligent life on Earth by releasing such nanobots into the environment.[9] The technology to produce a
destructive nanobot seems considerably easier to develop than the technology to create an effective defense against such an attack (a global nanotech immune system, an “active shield” [23]). It is therefore likely that there will be
a period of vulnerability during which this technology must be prevented from coming into the wrong hands. Yet the technology could prove hard to regulate, since it doesn’t require rare radioactive isotopes or large, easily
identifiable manufacturing plants, as does production of nuclear weapons [23]. Even if effective defenses against a limited nanotech attack are developed before dangerous replicators are designed and acquired by suicidal regimes
or terrorists, there will still be the danger of an arms race between states possessing nanotechnology. It has been argued [26] that molecular manufacturing would lead to both arms race instability and crisis instability, to a higher
degree than was the case with nuclear weapons. Arms race instability means that there would be dominant incentives for each competitor to escalate its armaments, leading to a runaway arms race. Crisis instability means that
there would be dominant incentives for striking first. Two roughly balanced rivals acquiring nanotechnology would, on this view, begin a massive buildup of armaments and weapons development programs that would continue
until a crisis occurs and war breaks out, potentially causing global terminal destruction. That the arms race could have been predicted is no guarantee that an international security system will be created ahead of time to prevent
this disaster from happening. The nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR was predicted but occurred nevertheless. 4.2 Nuclear holocaust[winter] The US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But
would an all-out nuclear war really exterminate humankind? Note that: (i) For there to be an existential risk it suffices that we can’t be sure that it wouldn’t. (ii) The climatic effects of a large nuclear war are not well known (there is
the possibility of a nuclear winter). (iii) Future arms races between other nations cannot be ruled out and these could lead to even greater arsenals than those present at the height of the Cold War. The world’s supply of plutonium
has been increasing steadily to about two thousand tons, some ten times as much as remains tied up in warheads ([9], p. 26). (iv) Even if some humans survive the short-term effects of a nuclear war, it could lead to the collapse of

We’re living in a simulation and it gets

civilization. A human race living under stone-age conditions may or may not be more resilient to extinction than other animal species. 4.3

shut down A case can be made that the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation should be given a significant
probability [27]. The basic idea behind this so-called “Simulation argument” is that vast amounts of computing power may become available in the future (see e.g. [28,29]), and that it could be used, among other
things, to run large numbers of fine-grained simulations of past human civilizations. Under some not-too-implausible assumptions, the result can be that almost all minds like ours are simulated minds, and that we should therefore
assign a significant probability to being such computer-emulated minds rather than the (subjectively indistinguishable) minds of originally evolved creatures. And if we are, we suffer the risk that the simulation may be shut down at
any time. A decision to terminate our simulation may be prompted by our actions or by exogenous factors. While to some it may seem frivolous to list such a radical or “philosophical” hypothesis next the concrete threat of nuclear
holocaust, we must seek to base these evaluations on reasons rather than untutored intuition. Until a refutation appears of the argument presented in [27], it would intellectually dishonest to neglect to mention simulation-

shutdown as a potential extinction mode. 4.4Badly programmed superintelligence When we create the first superintelligent entity [28-34], we might make a mistake and give it goals
mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a
that lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could

supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the
solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question . (For
further analysis of this, see [35].) 4.5 Genetically engineered biological agent With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become

possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality [36]. Dangerous
viruses can even be spawned unintentionally, as Australian researchers recently demonstrated when they created a modified mousepox virus with 100% mortality while trying to design a contraceptive virus for mice for use in pest
control [37]. While this particular virus doesn’t affect humans, it is suspected that an analogous alteration would increase the mortality of the human smallpox virus. What underscores the future hazard here is that the research
was quickly published in the open scientific literature [38]. It is hard to see how information generated in open biotech research programs could be contained no matter how grave the potential danger that it poses; and the same
holds for research in nanotechnology. Genetic medicine will also lead to better cures and vaccines, but there is no guarantee that defense will always keep pace with offense. (Even the accidentally created mousepox virus had a
50% mortality rate on vaccinated mice.) Eventually, worry about biological weapons may be put to rest through the development of nanomedicine, but while nanotechnology has enormous long-term potential for medicine [39] it

carries its own hazards. 4.6 Accidental misuse of nanotechnology (“gray goo”) The possibility of accidents can never be completely ruled out. However, there are many ways of
making sure, through responsible engineering practices, that species-destroying accidents do not occur. One could avoid using self-replication; one could make nanobots dependent on some rare feedstock chemical that doesn’t
exist in the wild; one could confine them to sealed environments; one could design them in such a way that any mutation was overwhelmingly likely to cause a nanobot to completely cease to function [40]. Accidental misuse is
therefore a smaller concern than malicious misuse [23,25,41]. However, the distinction between the accidental and the deliberate can become blurred. While “in principle” it seems possible to make terminal nanotechnological
accidents extremely improbable, the actual circumstances may not permit this ideal level of security to be realized. Compare nanotechnology with nuclear technology. From an engineering perspective, it is of course perfectly
possible to use nuclear technology only for peaceful purposes such as nuclear reactors, which have a zero chance of destroying the whole planet. Yet in practice it may be very hard to avoid nuclear technology also being used to
build nuclear weapons, leading to an arms race. With large nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert, there is inevitably a significant risk of accidental war. The same can happen with nanotechnology: it may be pressed into serving

carries unavoidable risks of serious accidents. In some situations it can even be strategically
military objectives in a way that

advantageous to deliberately make one’s technology or control systems risky, for example in order to
make a “threat that leaves something to chance” [42]. 4.7 Something unforeseen We need a catch-all category. It would be foolish to be confident that we have already
imagined and anticipated all significant risks. Future technological or scientific developments may very well reveal novel ways of destroying the world. Some foreseen hazards (hence not members of the current category) which
have been excluded from the list of bangs on grounds that they seem too unlikely to cause a global terminal disaster are: solar flares, supernovae, black hole explosions or mergers, gamma-ray bursts, galactic center outbursts,
supervolcanos, loss of biodiversity, buildup of air pollution, gradual loss of human fertility, and various religious doomsday scenarios. The hypothesis that we will one day become “illuminated” and commit collective suicide or stop
reproducing, as supporters of VHEMT (The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement) hope [43], appears unlikely. If it really were better not to exist (as Silenus told king Midas in the Greek myth, and as Arthur Schopenhauer argued
[44] although for reasons specific to his philosophical system he didn’t advocate suicide), then we should not count this scenario as an existential disaster. The assumption that it is not worse to be alive should be regarded as an
implicit assumption in the definition of Bangs. Erroneous collective suicide is an existential risk albeit one whose probability seems extremely slight. (For more on the ethics of human extinction, see chapter 4 of [9].) 4.8

Physics disasters The Manhattan Project bomb-builders’ concern about an A-bomb-derived atmospheric conflagration has contemporary analogues. There have been speculations that future high-energy
particle accelerator experiments may cause a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state that our part of the cosmos might be in,
converting it into a “true” vacuum of lower energy density [45]. This would result in an expanding bubble of total destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed of light, tearing all matter apart as it

or create a mini black hole that

proceeds. Another conceivability is that accelerator experiments might produce negatively charged stable “strangelets” (a hypothetical form of nuclear matter)

would sink to the center of the Earth and start accreting the rest of the planet [46]. These outcomes seem to be impossible given our best current physical theories. But the reason we do the experiments is
precisely that we don’t really know what will happen. A more reassuring argument is that the energy densities attained in present day accelerators are far lower than those that occur naturally in collisions between cosmic rays
[46,47]. It’s possible, however, that factors other than energy density are relevant for these hypothetical processes, and that those factors will be brought together in novel ways in future experiments. The main reason for concern
in the “physics disasters” category is the meta-level observation that discoveries of all sorts of weird physical phenomena are made all the time, so even if right now all the particular physics disasters we have conceived of were
absurdly improbable or impossible, there could be other more realistic failure-modes waiting to be uncovered. The ones listed here are merely illustrations of the general case.

Concede their impact- nuke war is devastating and destroys civilization.

BUT Isolated islands survive.
Turchin and Green 18 [Alexey Turchin – Scientist for the Foundation Science for Life Extension in
Moscow, Russia, Founder of Digital Immortality Now, author of several books and articles on the topics
of existential risks and life extension. Brian Patrick Green – Director of technology ethics at the Markkula
Center for Applied Ethics, teaches AI ethics in the Graduate School of Engineering at Santa Clara
University. <MKIM> “Islands as refuges for surviving global catastrophes”. September 2018.
[https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/FS-04-2018-0031/full/html?
fullSc=1&mbSc=1&fullSc=1] winky
One of the most attractive islands for long-term survival of global risks is the French archipelago of Kerguelen in the southern Indian Ocean. Kerguelen’s

main Grand Terre Island has the following attractive features for long-term survival: It is
very remote from any other constant human settlements; for
example, is it 3,000 km from the island of Reunion. The Kerguelen Islands lie outside the main trade lines, so the probability of
a random ship arriving there is low. The islands are inside the circumpolar Antarctic current, and they are surrounded by strong

winds (the “Roaring Forties” and “Furious Fifties”), which will not accidentally bring any ships from further north. A return trip from
Reunion to Kerguelen by ship takes 28 days. The islands do not have an airport, so they cannot be reached by air, and they are too

remote for helicopter travel. While Easter Island is even more remote from other human settlements, it is more populated and more often accessed
by ships and planes. The intense and isolating wind circulation around the South Pole could increase the time required for ash or

radioactive clouds from the northern hemisphere to reach the South Polar Region. But the Kerguelen Islands are also not too close to the
South Pole: they are at the equivalent latitude as southern Germany; thus, they get quite a bit of sunlight The Kerguelen Islands have a
stable but cold climate, with temperatures above freezing most of the time. The main island has edible vegetation and many
edible animals, including 3,000 sheeps. The island is very large, approximately 7,000 km2 , and it has many deep gulfs and
fjords that could be used as harbors. The main island has high mountains (over 1,000 m) with an ice cap which could
provide fresh water. Nearby ice-free mountains hundreds of meters high could provide protection against tsunamis.
The highest mountain is volcanic, and was active 100,000 years ago (Weis et al., 1998). However, residual
geothermal heat could provide heating and energy for a refuge. The main island has a continuous population
of only about 45 people, who live at a scientific station. Scientists who are selected for long expeditions are more organized
and educated than random people, so they may be better prepared for survival. Such a scientific base will not be a
military target in case of war. There are several other South Ocean islands similar to Kerguelen, like South
Georgia, Auckland Island and Macquarie Island (Schalansky, 2010).

Solves winter.
They continue Turchin and Green 18 [Alexey Turchin – Scientist for the Foundation Science for Life
Extension in Moscow, Russia, Founder of Digital Immortality Now, author of several books and articles
on the topics of existential risks and life extension. Brian Patrick Green – Director of technology ethics at
the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, teaches AI ethics in the Graduate School of Engineering at Santa
Clara University. <MKIM> “Islands as refuges for surviving global catastrophes”. September 2018.
[https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/FS-04-2018-0031/full/html?
fullSc=1&mbSc=1&fullSc=1] winky
Different types of possible catastrophes suggest different scenarios for how survival could happen on an island. What is important is that the island should have properties which protect against the specific dangers of particular
global catastrophic risks. Specifically, different islands will provide protection against different risks, and their natural diversity will contribute to a higher total level of protection: Quarantined island survives pandemic . An island

could impose effective quarantine if it is sufficiently remote and simultaneously able to protect itself, possibly using military ships and air defense. Far northern aboriginal people survive an ice
age. Many far northern people have adapted to survive in extremely cold and dangerous environments, and under the right circumstances could potentially survive the return of an ice age. However, their cultures are
endangered by globalization. If these people become dependent on the products of modern civilization, such as rifles and motor boats, and lose their native survival skills, then their likelihood of surviving the collapse of the outside
world would decrease. Therefore, preservation of their survival skills may be important as a defense against the risks connected with extreme cooling. Remote polar island with high mountains survives brief global warming of
median surface temperatures, up to 50˚C. There is a theory that the climates of planets similar to the Earth could have several semi-stable temperature levels (Popp et al., 2016). If so, because of climate change, the Earth could

in this climate, some regions of

transition to a second semi-stable state with a median global temperature of around 330 K, about 60˚C, or about 45˚C above current global mean temperatures. But even

Earth could still be survivable for humans, such as the Himalayan plateau at elevations above 4,000 m, but below 6,000 (where oxygen
deficiency becomes a problem), or on polar islands with mountains (however, global warming affects polar regions more than equatorial regions, and northern island will experience more effects of climate change, including
thawing permafrost and possible landslides because of wetter weather). In the tropics, the combination of increased humidity and temperature may increase the wet bulb temperature above 36˚C, especially on islands, where sea
moisture is readily available. In such conditions, proper human perspiration becomes impossible (Sherwood and Huber, 2010), and there will likely be increased mortality and morbidity because of tropical diseases. If temperatures

later returned to normal – either naturally or through climate engineering – the rest of the Earth could be repopulated. ‘‘Swiss Family Robinsons’’ survive on a tropical island, unnoticed by a
military robot ‘‘mutiny’’. Most AI researchers ignore medium-term AI risks, which are neither near-term risks, like unemployment, nor remote risks, like AI superintelligence. But a large drone army – if one were produced – could
receive a wrong command or be infected by a computer virus, leading it to attack people indiscriminately. Remote islands without robots could provide protection in this case, allowing survival until such a drone army ran out of

inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, near the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, are
batteries, fuel, ammunition or other supplies: Primitive tribe survives civilizational collapse. The

hostile and uncontacted. The Sentinelese survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami apparently unaffected
(Voanews, 2009), and if the rest of humanity disappear, they might well continue their existence without

change. Tropical Island survives extreme global nuclear winter and glaciation event. Were a nuclear, bolide impactor or volcanic “winter” scenario to unfold, these islands
would remain surrounded by Warm Ocean, and local volcanism or other energy sources might provide heat, energy and
food. Such island refuges may have helped life on Earth survive during the “Snowball Earth” event in Earth’s distant past (Hoffman et al.,
1998). Remote island base for project “Yellow submarine”. Some catastrophic risks such as a gamma ray burst, a global nuclear war with high radiological contamination or multiple pandemics

might be best survived underwater in nuclear submarines (Turchin and Green, 2017). However, after a catastrophe, the submarine with survivors would eventually need a place
to dock, and an island with some prepared amenities would be a reasonable starting point for rebuilding civilization. Bunker on remote island. For risks which include multiple or complex catastrophes, such as a bolide impact,

extreme volcanism, tsunamis, multiple pandemics and nuclear war with radiological contamination, island refuges could be strengthened with bunkers. Richard Branson
survived hurricane Irma on his own island in 2017 by seeking refuge in his concrete wine cellar (Clifford, 2017). Bunkers on islands would have higher survivability compared to those close to population centers, as they will be

neither a military target nor as accessible to looters or unintentionally dangerous (e.g. infected) refugees. These bunkers could potentially be connected to water sources by
underwater pipes, and passages could provide cooling, access

Solves famine.
David Denkenberger et al. 17, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Global Catastrophic
Risk Institute. 1-5-2017. “Feeding everyone if the sun is obscured and industry is disabled”
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420916305453] winky
For combined sun blocking and industrial failure scenarios, the reduced output of conventional agriculture would present a threat of causing mass starvation. This study showed that one

solution in the short term is extracting edible calories from killed leaves using distributed mechanical processes. Then a constrained food web could be
formed where part of the remainder from this could be fed to chickens, and the rest coupled with leaf litter could have mushrooms grown on it. A second
group of solutions is growing mushrooms on dead trees and the residue going to cellulose digesting animals

such as cattle and rabbits. Typically, in these catastrophes the sun is not blocked completely, so some agriculture would be possible based off of existing farming

in extreme environments (e.g. growing UV and cold tolerant crops in the tropics). Furthermore, the cooling climate would cool the

upper layer of the ocean, causing upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean water. This would facilitate
algae growth in the ocean, feeding fish; retrofitting of ships to be sail powered could enable significant fishing. The results of this study show these solutions
could enable the feeding of everyone given minimal preparation, and this preparation should be a high priority now.

Tech outweighs.
Di Minardi 20, MA Political Science at Boston College, 10-15-20, “The grim fate that could be ‘worse
than extinction’,” [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201014-totalitarian-world-in-chains-artificial-
intelligence] winky
What would totalitarian governments of the past have looked like if they were never defeated? The Nazis operated with 20th Century technology and it still took a
world war to stop them. How much more powerful – and permanent – could the Nazis have been if they had beat the US to the atomic bomb? Controlling the most
advanced technology of the time could have solidified Nazi power and changed the course of history.

When we think of existential risks, events like nuclear war or asteroid impacts often come to mind. Yet there’s one
future threat that is less well known – and while it doesn’t involve the extinction of our species, it could be just as bad. It’s called the “world in
chains” scenario, where, like the preceding thought experiment, a global totalitarian government uses a novel technology to lock a

majority of the world into perpetual suffering. If it sounds grim, you’d be right. But is it likely? Researchers and philosophers are beginning to ponder
how it might come about – and, more importantly, what we can do to avoid it. Existential risks ( x-risks) are disastrous because they lock humanity

into a single fate, like the permanent collapse of civilisation or the extinction of our species. These catastrophes
can have natural causes, like an asteroid impact or a supervolcano, or be human-made from sources like nuclear war or climate change. Allowing one to happen would be “an abject end to the
human story" and would let down the hundreds of generations that came before us, says Haydn Belfield, academic project manager at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the

existential
University of Cambridge. Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, believes that the odds of an

catastrophe happening this century from natural causes are less than one in 2,000, because humans
have survived for 2,000 centuries without one. However, when he adds the probability of human-made
disasters, Ord believes the chances increase to a startling one in six. He refers to this century as “the precipice” because the risk of
losing our future has never been so high. Researchers at the Center on Long-Term Risk, a non-profit research institute in London, have expanded upon x-risks with the even-more-chilling

s-risks” are defined as “suffering on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding all

prospect of suffering risks. These “

suffering that has existed on Earth so far.” In these scenarios, life continues for billions of people, but the quality is so low
and the outlook so bleak that dying out would be preferable. In short: a future with negative value is worse
than one with no value at all. This is where the “world in chains” scenario comes in. If a malevolent group or government suddenly gained
world-dominating power through technology, and there was nothing to stand in its way, it could lead to an extended
period of abject suffering and subjugation. A 2017 report on existential risks from the Global Priorities Project, in conjunction with FHI and the Ministry for
Foreign Affairs of Finland, warned that “a long future under a particularly brutal global totalitarian state could arguably be worse

than complete extinction”. Singleton hypothesis Though global totalitarianism is still a niche topic of study, researchers in the field of existential risk are increasingly
turning their attention to its most likely cause: artificial intelligence. In his “singleton hypothesis”, Nick Bostrom, director at Oxford’s FHI, has explained how

a global government could form with AI or other powerful technologies – and why it might be impossible to overthrow.
He writes that a world with “a single decision-making agency at the highest level” could occur if that agency

“obtains a decisive lead through a technological breakthrough in artificial intelligence or molecular nanotechnology”. Once in charge, it
would control advances in technology that prevent internal challenges, like surveillance or autonomous weapons,
and, with this monopoly, remain perpetually stable. If the singleton is totalitarian, life would be bleak. Even in the countries with the strictest regimes,
news leaks in and out from other countries and people can escape. A global totalitarian rule would eliminate even these small seeds of

hope. To be worse than extinction, “that would mean we feel absolutely no freedom, no privacy, no
hope of escaping, no agency to control our lives at all", says Tucker Davey, a writer at the Future of Life Institute in Massachusetts, which focuses
on existential risk research. “In totalitarian regimes of the past, [there was] so much paranoia and psychological suffering

because you just have no idea if you're going to get killed for saying the wrong thing,” he continues. “And now imagine that
there's not even a question, every single thing you say is being reported and being analysed.” “We may not yet have the technologies to do this,” Ord said in a recent
interview, “but it looks like the kinds of technologies we’re developing make that easier and easier. And it seems plausible

that this may become possible at some time in the next 100 years.”

Future Tech also risks infinite torture which outweighs death

Turchin and Denkenberger 18 {Turchin is a researcher at the Science for Life Extension
Foundation; Denkenberger is with the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) @ Tennessee State
University, Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). 5-3-2018. “Classification of Global
Catastrophic Risks Connected with Artificial Intelligence.”}//JM

6.4. AI that is programmed to be evil We could imagine a perfectly aligned AI, which was deliberately programmed to be bad by its creators.
For example, a hacker could create an AI with a goal of killing all humans or torturing them. The Foundational Research Institute suggested the notion
of s-risks, that is, the risks of extreme future suffering, probably by wrongly aligned AI (Daniel 2017 ). AI may even upgrade humans to make them feel

more suffering, like in the short story “I have no mouth but I must scream” (Ellison 1967). The controversial idea of “Roko’s Basilisk” is that a future AI may torture people who did
not do enough to create this malevolent AI. This idea has attracted attention in the media and is an illustration of “acausal” (not connected by causal links) blackmail by future AI (Auerbach
2014). However, this cannot happen unless many people take the proposition seriously.

Can’t rebuild.
John Jacobi 17. [Leads an environmentalist research institute and collective, citing Fred Hoyle, British
astronomer, formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, coined the term “big bang,” recipient of
the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
University. 05-27-17. “Industrial Civilization Could Not Be Rebuilt.” The Wild Will Project.
[https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2017/05/27/industrial-civilization-not-rebuilt/] winky

If industrial civilization collapsed, it probably could not be rebuilt. Civilization would

A suggestion, for the sake of thought:

exist again, of course, but industry appears to be a one-time experiment. The astronomist Fred Hoyle, exaggerating
slightly, writes: It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high

intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as

this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however
competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology . This is a one-
shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned . The same will be true of other
planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. Hoyle overstates all the limits we actually have to worry about, but
there are enough to affirm his belief that industry is a “one-shot affair.” In other words, if industry collapsed then no matter how quickly

scientific knowledge allows societies to progress, technical development will hit a wall because the
builders will not have the needed materials. For example, much of the world’s land is not arable, and some of
the land in use today is only productive because of industrial technics developed during the agricultural
revolution in the 60s, technics heavily dependent on oil. Without the systems that sustain industrial
agriculture much current farm land could not be farmed; agricultural civilizations cannot exist there, at
least until the soil replenishes, if it replenishes. And some resources required for industrial progress, like
coal, simply are not feasibly accessible anymore. Tainter writes: . . . major jumps in population, at around A.D. 1300, 1600, and in the late eighteenth
century, each led to intensification in agriculture and industry. As the land in the late Middle Ages was increasingly deforested to provide fuel and agricultural space for a growing population,

Coal was
basic heating, cooking, and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. A shift to reliance on coal began, gradually and with apparent reluctance.

definitely a fuel source of secondary desirability, being more costly to obtain and distribute than wood,
as well as being dirty and polluting. Coal was more restricted in its spatial distribution than wood, so
that a whole new, costly distribution system had to be developed. Mining of coal from the ground was
more costly than obtaining a quantity of wood equivalent in heating value, and became even more
costly as the 54 most accessible reserves of this fuel were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper,
until groundwater flooding became a serious problem. Today, most easily accessible natural coal
reserves are completely depleted. Thus, societies in the wake of our imagined collapse would not be able to
develop fast enough to reach the underground coal. As a result of these limits, rebuilding industry
would take at least thousands of years — it took 10,000 years the first time around. By the time a
civilization reached the point where it could do something about industrial scientific knowledge it
probably would not have the knowledge anymore. It would have to develop its sciences and
technologies on its own, resulting in patterns of development that would probably look similar to historical patterns. Technology today depends on levels of complexity that
must proceed in chronological stages. Solar panels, for example, rely on transportation infrastructure, mining, and a regulated division of labor. And historically the process of developing into a
global civilization includes numerous instances of technical regression. The natives of Tasmania, for example, went from a maritime society to one that didn’t fish, build boats, or make bows

Rebuilding civilization would also be a bad idea. Most, who are exploited by rather than benefit
and arrows.

from industry, would probably not view a rebuilding project as desirable. Even today, though citizens of first-world nations live
physically comfortable lives, their lives are sustained by the worse off lives of the rest of the world. “Civilization . . . has operated two ways,” Paine writes, “to make one part of society more
affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.” Consider the case of two societies in New Zealand, the Maori and the Moriori. Both are now
believed to have originated out of the same mainland society. Most stayed and became the Maori we know, and some who became the Moriori people settled on the Chatham Islands in the
16th century. Largely due to a chief named Nunuku-whenua, the Moriori had a strict tradition of solving inter-tribal conflict peacefully and advocating a variant of passive resistance; war,
cannibalism, and killing were completely outlawed. They also renounced their parent society’s agricultural mode of subsistence, relying heavily on hunting and gathering, and they controlled
their population growth by castrating some male infants, so their impact on the non-human environment around them was minimal. In the meantime, the Maori continued to live agriculturally
and developed into a populated, complex, hierarchical, and violent society. Eventually an Australian seal-hunting ship informed the Maori of the Moriori’s existence, and the Maori sailed to the
Chathams to explore: . . . over the course of the next few days, they killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others, killing most of them too over
the next few years as it suited their whim. A Moriori survivor recalled, “[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep . . . [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes
underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and eaten – men, women, and children indiscriminately.” A Maori conqueror explains, “We took
possession . . . in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed, and others we killed – but what of that? It was in
accordance with our custom.” Furthermore, we can deduce from the ubiquitous slavery in all the so-called “great civilizations” like Rome or Egypt that any attempt to rebuild a similar
civilization will involve slavery. And to rebuild industry, something similar to colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade would probably have to occur once again. After all, global chattel
slavery enabled the industrial revolution by financing it, extracting resources to be accumulated at sites of production, and exporting products through infrastructure that slavery helped
sustain. So, if industrial society collapsed, who would be doing the rebuilding? Not anyone most people like. It is hard to get a man to willingly change his traditional way of life; even harder

most in
when his new life is going into mines. And though history demonstrates that acts like those of the Maori or slave traders are not beyond man’s will or ability, certainly

industrial society today would not advocate going through the phases required to reach the industrial
stage of development.

Nuclear war causes nuclear winter and industrial decline which solves warming.
Sorin Adam Matei, in Matei.org, 3-26-2012 [Professor of Communication at Purdue University -
studies the relationship between information technology and social integration. He published papers
and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, and Foreign
Policy. "A modest proposal for solving global warming: nuclear war",
http://matei.org/ithink/2012/03/26/a-modest-proposal-for-solving-global-warming-nuclear-war/, 1-2-
2017] recut ahs naruto
We finally have a solution for global warming. A discussion on the board The
Straight Dope about the likely effect of a nuclear war
brought up the hypothesis that a nuclear war on a large scale could produce a mini-nuclear winter. Why? Well, the dust
and debris sent into the atmosphere by the conflagrations, plus the smoke produced by the fires started
by the explosions would cover the sun for a period long enough to lower the temperature by as much as
40 degrees Celsius for a few months and by up to 2-6 degree Celsius for a few years. One on top of the other, according to this
Weather Wunderground contributor, who cites a bona fide research paper on nuclear winter, after
everything would settle down we would be back to 1970s temperatures . Add to this the decline in industrial
production and global oil consumption due to industrial denuding of most large nations and global
warming simply goes away. I wonder what Jonathan Swift would have thought about this proposal?