Chicago Debate League 2013/14 Core Files
NC Frontline: Harms – Environment 143
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1NC Frontline: Harms – Environment 1431) No impact to species loss – surviving species will adapt, and species go extinct all the time. FORBES, 12 [Viv, Chairperson of The Carbon Sense Coalition, former guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers;” Species Extinction is Nothing New,” 6/04, http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/articles-news/47086. 6/4/12] As the global warming bubble deflates, another scare is being inflated – species extinction. Naturally the professional alarmists present this as a brand new threat, caused by man’s industry. However, species extinction, like climate change, is the way of the world. It was not carbon dioxide that entombed millions of mammoths and other animals in mucky ice from Iceland to Alaska. It was not steam engines that wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of other species who had dominated the Earth for 180 million years. There were no humans to blame for the Great Permian Extinction when over 90% of all life on Earth was destroyed – animals, plants, trees, fish, plankton even algae disappeared suddenly. Sadly, history shows that it is the destiny of most species to be destroyed by periodic natural calamities or competition from other species. Earth’s history is a moving picture, not a still life. No species has an assured place on Earth. Some species can adapt and survive – those unable to adapt are removed from the gene pool. Earth’s periodic species extinctions are usually associated with widespread glaciation, volcanism, earth movements and solar disruptions. Most geological eras have closed with such calamitous events. Random and more localised species extinctions are caused by rogue comets. But global warming and abundant carbon dioxide have never featured as causes of mass extinctions. Because of Earth’s long turbulent history, most species surviving today are not “fragile”. Every one of them, including humans, is descended from a long line of survivors going back to the beginnings of life on Earth. 2) Corn production technology is becoming cleaner and more efficient. MUELLER AND KWIK, 13 [Steffen, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Chicago; John, Dominion Energy Services; “2012 Corn Ethanol: Emerging Plant Energy and Environmental Technologies” 4/29, http://ethanolrfa.org/page/-/PDFs/2012%20Corn%20Ethanol%20FINAL.pdf?nocdn=1] The study shows that at the bio-refinery level modern energy and processing technologies such as sophisticated heat integration, combined heat and power technologies, variable frequency drives, advanced grinding technologies, various combinations of front and back end oil separation, and innovative ethanol and DDG recovery have further reduced the energy footprint of the corn ethanol production process. Our work includes an assessment of over 50% of operating dry grind corn ethanol plants. On average, 2012 dry grind plants produce ethanol at higher yields with lower energy inputs than 2008 corn ethanol. Furthermore, significantly more corn oil is separated at the plants now which combined with the higher ethanol yields results in a slight reduction in DDG production and a negligible increase in electricity consumption. Note that this assessment is a snapshot across all ethanol plant technologies, co‐product drying practices, and geographic locations. The table below summarizes the results. 1NC Frontline: Harms – Environment 1443) Planting corn does not trade off with other crops because corn fertilization is efficient enough to provide additional crop yields. MUELLER AND KWIK, 13 [Steffen, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Chicago; John, Dominion Energy Services; “2012 Corn Ethanol: Emerging Plant Energy and Environmental Technologies” 4/29, http://ethanolrfa.org/page/-/PDFs/2012%20Corn%20Ethanol%20FINAL.pdf?nocdn=1] The study also looks at new technologies that have recently been adopted and further increase the efficiency during the corn production phase of the corn ethanol pathway. For example, over the last several years higher corn yields have also increased the amount of corn stover and additional plant material produced by modern hybrids. As a result growers have started to remove corn stover for use as animal feed in nearby feedlot operations. Consequently, acres producing corn for ethanol and DDG animal feed now also produce a second animal feed at the front end of the process in the form of stover feed. Other efficiency improvements during the corn production phase include more accurate and targeted delivery of chemicals and agricultural inputs, as well as corn hybrids that contain enzymes resulting in reduced processing energy and increased ethanol yields at the biorefinery level. 1NC Frontline: Harms – Environment 1454) Developing economies like China and India are more key to emissions than the U.S. DUTTA AND RADNER, 12 [Prajit, Professor of Economics at Columbia University; Roy, Professor of Business at New York University; “Capital growth in a global warming model: will China and India sign a climate treaty?” http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~rradner/publishedpapers2/113CapitalGrowth2012.pdf] Global climate change (CC) has emerged as the most important environmental issue of our times and, arguably, the one with the most critical long-run import. The observed rise in temperatures and variability of climate—the hot summers in Europe and the United States, the increased frequency of storms and hurricanes including Katrina, the melting of the polar ice-caps and glaciers on Asian mountain-tops threatening to dry the rivers that water that continent, the rise in sea levels—have all placed the problem center-stage. Since the climate change problem involves a classic “commons” that irrespective of the source of greenhouse gas emissions it is the common stock of it that affects the global climate, it can only be solved by an international effort at reaching agreement. For such an agreement to get carried out, however, it has to align the incentives of the signatory nations so that countries will, in fact, carry out their promises. At the same time, to meaningfully contain emissions an agreement has to be signed by all the major emitting countries, both developed and developing, and they have to commit to possibly deep cuts in emissions now and in the future. In other words for an agreement to be effective, it has to balance two competing forces—large enough cuts that make a difference to the climate that are yet “small enough” that countries will not cheat on their promises. And herein lies the rub. Since emissions are tied to economic activity, countries that are growing the fastest, such as China and India, are reluctant to sign onto emission cuts that they fear will compromise their growth. They point, moreover, to the “legacy effect” that the vast majority of existing greenhouse gas stock was accumulated in the last 100 years due to the industrialization of the West—and the per capita numbers— that per person their citizens contribute a fraction of the per capita emissions from the United States and the European Union. They argue, therefore, that they should not be asked to clean up a problem not of their making. On the other hand, leaving these countries out of a climate change treaty is simply not going to solve the problem since their growth path of emissions is high, China’s total emissions are already on par with the United States and unless the emissions of the developing world are reduced they will rapidly out-strip those of today’s developed economies and make it impossible to solve the climate change problem. 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