Kuznets Curve Indicates Growth Leads a Good Environment

Growth leads to carbon sequestration

The link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic prosperity is no different. Using data from the United States, Professor Robert McCormick finds that "higher GDP reduces total net [greenhouse gas] emissions." He goes a step further by performing the complex task of estimating net U.S. carbon emissions. This requires subtracting carbon sequestration (long-term storage of carbon in soil and water) from carbon emissions. Think of it this way: When you build a house, the wood in it stores carbon. In a poor country that wood would have been burned to cook supper or to provide heat, thus releasing carbon into the atmosphere. McCormick shows that economic growth in the United States has increased carbon sequestration in many ways, including improved methods of storing waste, increased forest coverage, and greater agricultural productivity that reduces the acreage of cultivated land. Because rich economies sequester more carbon than poor ones, stored carbon must be subtracted from emissions to determine an economy's net addition to greenhouse gas emissions. McCormick's data show that "rich countries take more carbon out of the air than poorer ones" and that "the growth rate of net carbon emission per person will soon be negative in the United States." Put differently—richer may well be cooler. Global-warming policy analysts agree that greenhouse gas regulations such as those proposed at Kyoto would have negative impacts on the economy. Therefore, as McCormick warns, we should take great care that regulations in the name of global warming "not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."

That solves warming

Carbon capture and storage, also called carbon sequestration, traps carbon dioxide after it is produced and injects it underground. The gas never enters the atmosphere. The practice could transform heavy carbon spewers, such as coal power plants, into relatively clean machines with regard to global warming. ''The notion is that the sooner we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the sooner we'll be able to tackle the climate problem,'' said Sally Benson, executive director of the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and professor of energy resources engineering. ''But the idea that we can take fossil fuels out of the mix very quickly is unrealistic. We're reliant on fossil fuels, and a good pathway is to find ways to use them that don't create a problem for the climate.'' Carbon capture has the potential to reduce more than 90 percent of an individual plant's carbon emissions, said Lynn Orr, director of GCEP and professor of energy resources engineering. Stationary facilities that burn fossil fuels-such as power plants or cement factories-would be candidates for the technology, he said. Capturing carbon dioxide from small, mobile sources, such as cars, would be more difficult, Orr said. But with power plants comprising 40 percent of the world's fossil fuel-derived carbon emissions, he added, the potential for reductions is significant. Not only can a lot of carbon dioxide be captured, but the Earth's capacity to store it is also vast, he added.

2AC Renewables Solve

Renewables Solve – Key to Reducing Emissions

Wasserman, 4-16 [Harvery Wasserman, Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Graduate from American University, 4-16-2014, UN Panel: Renewables, Not Nukes, Can Solve Climate Crisis, The Progressive, http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187639/un-panel-renewables-not-nukes-can-solve-climate-crisis]

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has left zero doubt that we humans are wrecking our climate. It also effectively says the problem can be solved, and that renewable energy is the way to do it, and that nuclear power is not. The United Nations’ IPCC is the world’s most respected authority on climate. This IPCC report was four years in the making. It embraces several hundred climate scientists and more than a thousand computerized scenarios of what might be happening to global weather patterns. The panel’s work has definitively discredited the corporate contention that human-made carbon emissions are not affecting climate change. To avoid total catastrophe, says the IPCC, we must reduce the industrial spew of global warming gasses by 40-70 percent of 2010 levels. Though the warning is dire, the report offers three pieces of good news. First, we have about 15 years to slash these emissions. Second, renewable technologies are available to do the job. And third, the cost is manageable. Though 2030 might seem a tight deadline for a definitive transition to Solartopia, green power technologies have become far simpler and quicker to install than their competitors, especially atomic reactors. They are also far cheaper, and we have the capital to do it. The fossil fuel industry has long scorned the idea that its emissions are disrupting our Earth’s weather. The oil companies and atomic reactor backers have dismissed the ability of renewables to provide humankind’s energy needs. But the IPCC confirms that green technologies, including efficiency and conservation, can in fact handle the job---at a manageable price. “It doesn’t cost the world to save the planet,” says Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist who led the IPCC team. The IPCC report cites nuclear power as a possible means of lowering industrial carbon emissions. But it also underscores considerable barriers involving finance and public opposition. Joined with widespread concerns about ecological impacts, length of implementation, production uncertainties and unsolved waste issues, the report’s positive emphasis on renewables virtually guarantees nuclear’s irrelevance. Some climate scientists have recently advocated atomic energy as a solution to global warming. But their most prominent spokesman, Dr. James Hansen, also expresses serious doubts about the current generation of reactors, including Fukushima, which he calls “that old technology.” Instead Hansen advocates a new generation of reactors. But the designs are untested, with implementation schedules stretching out for decades. Financing is a major obstacle as is waste disposal and widespread public opposition, now certain to escalate with the IPCC’s confirmation that renewables can provide the power so much cheaper and faster. With its 15-year deadline for massive carbon reductions the IPCC has effectively timed out any chance a new generation of reactors could help. And with its clear endorsement of green power as a tangible, doable, affordable solution for the climate crisis, the pro-nuke case has clearly suffered a multiple meltdown. With green power, says IPCC co-chair Jim Skea, a British professor, a renewable solution is at hand. “It’s actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living.”

2AC AT: Collapse Solves

Econ collapse doesn’t solve warming – [try or die for growth]

Elliot 8, Larry, economics editor at the Guardian [“Can a dose of recession solve climate change?” August 24^th, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/25/economicgrowth.globalrecession]

This may strike some as a strange way of looking at things. Sure, the global economy is slowing. But what's so bad about that? Is it, in fact, bad news that the world economy will no longer grow at its recent rate of 5% a year? And if the answer to that question is "no", wouldn't it be good news if this modest retrenchment was turned into a full-blown slump? Indeed, why stop there? Shouldn't those who fear for the future of the planet pursue something akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s? It's an interesting thought. Logically, if the obsession with growth at all costs has increased emissions to the point where rising temperatures pose a threat to mankind's existence (as many experts believe) then a prolonged period of slow or negative growth will limit the damage to the environment. At the very least, it would provide a breathing space to come up with an international agreement on how to tackle the problem. There are many reasons why it is not quite as simple as that. My rudimentary understanding of the science of climate change is that concentrations of greenhouse gases have been building up over many decades, and you can't simply turn them off like a tap. Even a three- or four-year 1930s-style global slump would have little or no impact, particularly if it was followed by a period of vigorous catch-up growth. On a chart showing growth since the dawn of the industrial age 250 years ago, the Great Depression is a blip. Similarly, Britain's trade deficit always comes down in recessions because imports go down, but then widens again once the economy returns to its trend rate of growth. Politically, recessions are not helpful to the cause of environmentalism. Climate change is replaced by concerns about unemployment and stimulating growth. To be fair, politicians respond to what they hear from voters: Gordon Brown's survival as prime minister depends on how well his package of economic measures is received, not on what he does or doesn't do to limit greenhouse gases. Looking back, it is clear that every advance in the green movement has coincided with period of strong growth - the early 1970s, the late 1980s and the first half of the current decade. It was tough enough to get world leaders to make tackling climate change a priority when the world economy was experiencing its longest period of sustained growth: it will be mightily difficult to persuade them to take measures that might have a dampen growth while the dole queues are lengthening. Those most likely to suffer are workers in the most marginal jobs and pensioners who will have to pay perhaps 20% of their income on energy bills. Hence, recession does not offer even a temporary solution to the problem of climate change and it is a fantasy to imagine that it does. The real issue is whether it is possible to challenge the "growth-at-any-cost model" and come up with an alternative that is environmentally benign, economically robust and politically feasible. Hitting all three buttons is mightily difficult but attempting to do so is a heck of a lot more constructive than waiting for industrial capitalism to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Korowicz concludes aff – Dedev will never be able to solve warming – sure GhG emissions go down but so does are adaptive capacity to the climate change that would continue – in an effort to survive we’d start unsustainably using resources in our localities and damage the ecosystem beyond repair

Korowicz, ’14 - David Korowicz is a physicist who studies the interactions between economics, energy, climate change, food security, supply chains, and complexity. David is an independent consultant. He was a ministerial appointment to the council of Comhar, Ireland’s sustainable development commission. He was head of research at The Ecology Foundation, and is on the executive committee of Feasta, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability: a Think Tank, (David, “How to be Trapped: An Interview with David Korowicz”, Resilience, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-19/how-to-be-trapped-an-interview-with-david-korowicz)//Roetlin

You don’t believe then in a kind of steady-state non growing economy? Steady-state from where we are now is, according to many ecological indicators, way in overshoot. So if there were to be something like a sustainable steady-state economy it would be in terms of resource consumption far below where we are now. Far, far below. And how do we get there? For all sorts of reasons the possibility of a controlled orchestrated de-growth to some viable steady-state position is probably deluded in the extreme. I’ll just point to one thing, such a view tends to embody the confusion that because the globalised economy is human-made it is therefore designed, understandable and controllable – humans can do this in niches, but the emergent structure of multiple niches interacting on many scales over time is not. This mirrors the sort of argument made famous by William Paley in his Natural Theology who said that the existence of living organisms proved the existence of a divine creator/ designer by analogy with how the finding of a watch would lead one to believe in the existence of an intelligent watchmaker. Half a century later Darwin and then his followers showed that natural selection could do emergent design without a controller- the ‘blind’ watchmaker in Richard Dawkins words. But as believers in Man’s progress we seem to have taken on the role that Paley once ascribed to god- that is, as the creators of the complex globalised economy it is therefore designable and controllable and potentially perfectible if only the right people and ideas were in the cockpit. We find all sorts of confusion arising from this when attempts are made to take linguistic dominion over the economy by confusing complex interdependent emergence with intentional design (as in, the economy is capitalist/ neoliberal/ socialist, or, we need to change ‘the monetary architecture’). So even without getting into details about irreversibility in complex systems or the myriad practical problems with a controllable de-growth, the power of the belief in its possibility seems, to me at least, to represent Titanic hubris. That said, a disorderly de-growth/collapse would bring us to a new era where we would end up with a much reduced capacity to access and use resources and dump waste. But we’d still have to respond to problems and that would generally require whatever energy and resources were at hand. For example, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would likely nose-dive, a good thing of course, although the effects of climate changes would continue to get worse because of lags in the climate system while our adaptive capacity compared to today would have been shattered. Thus the real cost of climate change would escalate beyond our ability to pay quite suddenly and much faster than conventional climate-economic models would suggest. The danger here is that in a state of poverty and forced localization our attempts to respond to such emergent stress and crises mean we start undermining our local environments and their on-going capacity to support us. So any form of steady-state economy in the foreseeable future is inherently problematic.

Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2014 -> pages -> Michigan7 -> attachments

Download 1.08 Mb.

Share with your friends: