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1AC Advantage – Hydrogen EconomyContention Two: The “Economy”a. Status quo economies ensure food, water and energy shortages – this will destabilize the planet by 2030.The Guardian ‘9 (Citing Professor John Beddington from Imperial College London, “World faces 'perfect storm' of problems by 2030, chief scientist to warn,” 18 March 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/mar/18/perfect-storm-john-beddington-energy-food-climate)-mikee A "perfect storm" of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions, the UK government's chief scientist will warn tomorrow. In a major speech to environmental groups and politicians, Professor John Beddington, who took up the position of chief scientific adviser last year, will say that the world is heading for major upheavals which are due to come to a head in 2030. He will tell the government's Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster that the growing population and success in alleviating poverty in developing countries will trigger a surge in demand for food, water and energy over the next two decades, at a time when governments must also make major progress in combating climate change. "We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same time frame," Beddington told the Guardian. "If we don't address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages," he added. Food prices for major crops such as wheat and maize have recently settled after a sharp rise last year when production failed to keep up with demand. But according to Beddington, global food reserves are so low – at 14% of annual consumption – a major drought or flood could see prices rapidly escalate again. The majority of the food reserve is grain that is in transit between shipping ports, he said. "Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food. At the same time, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water. "There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected," Beddington said. "You can't think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together." Before taking over from Sir David King as chief scientist last year, Beddington was professor of applied population biology at Imperial College London. He is an expert on the sustainable use of renewable resources. b. Specifically, water shortages cause global war.Goldenberg ’14 (Suzanne, US environment correspondent of the Guardian. She has won several awards for her work in the Middle East, and in 2003 covered the US invasion of Iraq from Baghdad, “Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war,” The Observer, Saturday 8 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-water-shortages-threat-terror-war)-mikee Already a billion people, or one in seven people on the planet, lack access to safe drinking water. Britain, of course, is currently at the other extreme. Great swaths of the country are drowning in misery, after a series of Atlantic storms off the south-western coast. But that too is part of the picture that has been coming into sharper focus over 12 years of the Grace satellite record. Countries at northern latitudes and in the tropics are getting wetter. But those countries at mid-latitude are running increasingly low on water. "What we see is very much a picture of the wet areas of the Earth getting wetter," Famiglietti said. "Those would be the high latitudes like the Arctic and the lower latitudes like the tropics. The middle latitudes in between, those are already the arid and semi-arid parts of the world and they are getting drier." On the satellite images the biggest losses were denoted by red hotspots, he said. And those red spots largely matched the locations of groundwater reserves. "Almost all of those red hotspots correspond to major aquifers of the world. What Grace shows us is that groundwater depletion is happening at a very rapid rate in almost all of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world." The Middle East, north Africa and south Asia are all projected to experience water shortages over the coming years because of decades of bad management and overuse. Watering crops, slaking thirst in expanding cities, cooling power plants, fracking oil and gas wells – all take water from the same diminishing supply. Add to that climate change – which is projected to intensify dry spells in the coming years – and the world is going to be forced to think a lot more about water than it ever did before. The losses of water reserves are staggering. In seven years, beginning in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lost 144 cubic kilometres of stored freshwater – or about the same amount of water in the Dead Sea, according to data compiled by the Grace mission and released last year. A small portion of the water loss was due to soil drying up because of a 2007 drought and to a poor snowpack. Another share was lost to evaporation from lakes and reservoirs. But the majority of the water lost, 90km3, or about 60%, was due to reductions in groundwater. Farmers, facing drought, resorted to pumping out groundwater – at times on a massive scale. The Iraqi government drilled about 1,000 wells to weather the 2007 drought, all drawing from the same stressed supply. In south Asia, the losses of groundwater over the last decade were even higher. About 600 million people live on the 2,000km swath that extends from eastern Pakistan, across the hot dry plains of northern India and into Bangladesh, and the land is the most intensely irrigated in the world. Up to 75% of farmers rely on pumped groundwater to water their crops, and water use is intensifying. Over the last decade, groundwater was pumped out 70% faster than in the 1990s. Satellite measurements showed a staggering loss of 54km3 of groundwater a year. Indian farmers were pumping their way into a water crisis. The US security establishment is already warning of potential conflicts – including terror attacks – over water. In a 2012 report, the US director of national intelligence warned that overuse of water – as in India and other countries – was a source of conflict that could potentially compromise US national security. The report focused on water basins critical to the US security regime – the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Mekong, Jordan, Indus, Brahmaputra and Amu Darya. It concluded: "During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States." Water, on its own, was unlikely to bring down governments. But the report warned that shortages could threaten food production and energy supply and put additional stress on governments struggling with poverty and social tensions. Some of those tensions are already apparent on the ground. The Pacific Institute, which studies issues of water and global security, found a fourfold increase in violent confrontations over water over the last decade. "I think the risk of conflicts over water is growing – not shrinking – because of increased competition, because of bad management and, ultimately, because of the impacts of climate change," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. There are dozens of potential flashpoints, spanning the globe. In the Middle East, Iranian officials are making contingency plans for water rationing in the greater Tehran area, home to 22 million people. Egypt has demanded Ethiopia stop construction of a mega-dam on the Nile, vowing to protect its historical rights to the river at "any cost". The Egyptian authorities have called for a study into whether the project would reduce the river's flow. Jordan, which has the third lowest reserves in the region, is struggling with an influx of Syrian refugees. The country is undergoing power cuts because of water shortages. Last week, Prince Hassan, the uncle of King Abdullah, warned that a war over water and energy could be even bloodier than the Arab spring. The United Arab Emirates, faced with a growing population, has invested in desalination projects and is harvesting rainwater. At an international water conference in Abu Dhabi last year, Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan said: "For us, water is [now] more important than oil." c. Independently, Food shortages cause extinctionCribb ‘10 [Julian, principal of JCA, fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences, “The Coming Famine: The¶ Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It”, pg 10] The character of human conflict has also changed: since the early 1990S, more wars have been triggered by disputes over food, land, and water than over mere political or ethnic differences. This should not surprise US: people have fought over the means of survival for most of history. But in the abbreviated reports on the nightly media, and even in the rarefied realms of government policy, the focus is almost invariably on the players—the warring national, ethnic, or religious factions—rather than on the play, the deeper subplots building the tensions that ignite conflict. Caught up in these are groups of ordinary, desperate people fearful that there is no longer sufficient food, land, and water to feed their children—and believing that they must fight ‘the others” to secure them. At the same time, the number of refugees in the world doubled, many of them escaping from conflicts and famines precipitated by food and resource shortages. Governments in troubled regions tottered and fell. The coming famine is planetary because it involves both the immediate effects of hunger on directly affected populations in heavily populated regions of the world in the next forty years—and also the impacts of war, government failure, refugee crises, shortages, and food price spikes that will affect all human beings, no matter who they are or where they live. It is an emergency because unless it is solved, billions will experience great hardship, and not only in the poorer regions. Mike Murphy, one of the world’s most progressive dairy farmers, with operations in Ireland, New Zealand, and North and South America, succinctly summed it all up: “Global warming gets all the publicity but the real imminent threat to the human race is starvation on a massive scale. Taking a 10—30 year view, I believe that food shortages, famine and huge social unrest are probably the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. I believe future food shortages are a far bigger world threat than global warming.”2° The coming famine is also complex, because it is driven not by one or two, or even a half dozen, factors but rather by the confluence of many large and profoundly intractable causes that tend to amplify one another. This means that it cannot easily be remedied by “silver bullets” in the form of technology, subsidies, or single-country policy changes, because of the synergetic character of the things that power it. d. Oil dependence breeds global conflict.Glaser ‘11 (Professor of Political Science and International Relations Elliot School of International Affairs The George Washington University, “ Reframing Energy Security: How Oil Dependence Influences U.S. National Security,” August 2011, http://depts.washington.edu/polsadvc/Blog%20Links/Glaser_-_EnergySecurity-AUGUST-2011.docx,) Oil dependence could reduce a state’s security if its access to oil is vulnerable to disruption and if oil is necessary for operating the state’s military forces. Vulnerable energy supplies can leave a state open to coercion—recognizing that it is more likely to lose a war, the state has a weaker bargaining position and is more likely to make concessions.1 Closely related, if war occurs the state is more likely to lose. Conflict that is influenced by this mechanism is not fundamentally over the oil;2 rather, when states already have incentives for conflict, the oil vulnerability influences their assessment of military capabilities and in turn the path to war. Recognizing this type of danger during the Cold War, U.S. planning to protect its sea lanes of communication with the Persian Gulf was motivated partly by the importance of insuring the steady flow of oil that was necessary to enable the United States to fight a long war against the Soviet Union in Europe. During the Second World War, Japan’s vulnerability to a U.S. oil embargo played an important role in destroying Japan’s ability to fight.3 This type of threat to the U.S. military capabilities is not a serious danger today because the United States does not face a major power capable of severely interrupting its access to key supplies of oil. In contrast, China does face this type of danger because its oil imports are vulnerable to disruption by the U.S. Navy. Protecting access to oil threatens other states—an access-driven security dilemma The vulnerability of a state’s access to oil supplies could reduce its security via a second, more complicated mechanism—if the state’s efforts to protect its access to oil threaten another state’s security, then this reduced security could in turn reduce the state’s own security. The danger would follow standard security-dilemma logic, but with the defense of oil supply lines replacing the standard focus on protection of territory. In the most extreme case, a state could try to solve its import vulnerability through territorial expansion. In less extreme cases, the state could deal with its vulnerability by building up military forces required to protect its access to oil, which has the unintended consequence of decreasing its adversary’s military capability and signaling that the state’s motives are malign, which decreases the adversary’s security, which leads the adversary to build up its own military forces.4 Just as protecting a distant ally can require a state to adopt an offensive capability, protecting access to oil can require offensive power-projection capabilities. Thus, a state’s need to protect its access to oil could create a security dilemma that would not otherwise exist. Conflict fueled by this security dilemma need not be over oil or access to oil; by damaging political relations the security dilemma could prevent the states from resolving political disputes and avoiding the escalation of crises. Here again, the United States does not currently face this type of danger; this is largely because the military status quo currently favors the United States, which relieves it from having to take provocative actions. In contrast, China’s efforts to protect its access to oil could be more provocative and generate military competition with the United States. Oil makes territory increasingly valuable In this type of case, a state places greater value on owning territory because the territory contains energy resources that are increasingly valuable. The greater value of territory can increase competition between states, because the benefits of success grow relative to the costs of competition, for example, the costs of arming. For similar reasons, the greater value of territory increases the probability that crises over territory will lead to war instead of negotiated compromises, as states are more willing to run the risks of fighting.5 This type of conflict is the classic resource war, which is the path by which oil is most commonly envisioned leading to conflict.6 We can also hypothesize that the probability of conflict is greater when territorial boundaries are contested and the political status quo is ambiguous. Because the norm of state sovereignty is now widely held, states are less likely to launch expansionist wars to take other states’ territory. However, when boundaries are not settled, states are more likely to compete to acquire territory they value and will compete harder when they value it more.7 In addition, unsettled boundaries increase the possibilities for boundedly rational bargaining failures that could lead to war. There are two basic paths via which a state could become involved in this type of oil conflict. The more obvious is for the state to be a claimant in the dispute and become directly involved in a territorial conflict. The second is likely more important for the United States—an alliance commitment could draw the state into a resource conflict that initially began between its ally and another state.8 The state would not have energy interests of its own at stake, but intervenes to protect its ally. Along this path, energy plays an important but less direct role in damaging the state’s security, because although energy interests fuel the initial conflict, they do not motivate the state’s intervention.9 A later section explores the possibility of conflict between China and Japan in the East China Sea, with the United States drawn in to protect Japan and consequently involved in a war with China. When a state’s economy depends heavily on oil, severe supply disruptions might do sufficiently large economic damage that the state would use military force to protect its prosperity. A state this suffers this vulnerability risks not only suffering the damage that could be inflicted by a supply disruption, which might be the by-product of unrelated domestic or international events, but also risks being coerced by an adversary. Consequently, states will want to be confident that their ability to import oil will be uninterrupted and will pursue policies to ensure secure access. e. OTEC solves all three shortages.Finney ‘8 (Karen Anne, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario. “Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion,” Guelph Engineering Journal, (1), 17 - 23. ISSN: 1916-1107. ©2008.) VI. Other Uses For OTEC Technology OTEC systems are not just limited to just producing electricity and because of the unique design of these power stations are potentially available to tackle other ventures in combination with electricity to offset some of the expenses associates with OTEC. A. Fresh water production Desalination is just one of the effective potential products that could be produced via OTEC technology. Fresh water can be produced in open-cycle OTEC plants when the warm water is vaporized to turn the low pressure turbine. Once the electricity is produced the water vapor is condensed to make fresh water (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). This water has been found to be purer then water offered by most communities as well it is estimated that 1 MW plant could produce 55 kg of water per second. This rate of fresh water could supply a small coastal community with approximately 4000 m3/day of fresh water (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). This water can also be used for irrigation to improve the quality and quantity of food on coastal regions especially where access to fresh water is scarce. B. Air conditioning and Refrigeration Once cold water pipes are installed for an OTEC power plant the cold water being pumped to the surface can be used for other projects other then to provide the working fluid for the condenser. One of these uses is air conditioning and refrigeration. Cold water can be used to circulate through space heat exchangers or can be used to cool the working fluid within heat exchangers (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). This technology can be applied for hotel and home air conditioning as well as for refrigeration schemes. C. Aquaculture and Mariculture Another possibility for taking advantage of OTEC plants is the use of the water pipes to harvest marine plants and animals for the purpose of food. This proposition is still under investigation however it is proposed that seawater life including salmon, abalone, American lobster, flat fish, sea urchin and edible seaweeds could be harvested for ingestion using the cold water pipes that would be readily available from the OTEC power plants (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). Mariculture is another possibility that is currently being researched that would take advantage of the cold deep ocean water being transferred to the oceans surface. This water contains phytoplankton and other biological nutrients that serve as a catalyst for fish and other aquatic populations (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). This water could serve to increase native fish populations through the recycling of trace nutrients that would not be otherwise available. D. Coldwater Agriculture Because the coastal areas suitable for OTEC are in tropic regions there is a potential to increase the overall food diversity within an area using the cold water originating from the deep ocean. It has been proposed that burying a network of coldwater pipes underground the temperature of the ground would be ideal for spring type crops like strawberries and other plants restricted to cooler climates (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). This would not only supply the costal populations with an increased variety of food but reduce the cost of transport of cooler climate foods that would otherwise have to be shipped. VII. Environmental Impacts Overall proposed OTEC technologies have many potential benefits to the environment. OTEC is a source of clean, renewable energy and harnesses the seawater for electricity generation which is an abundant and is almost unlimited. The use of OTEC also ensures that a reliable able and constant power output would be supplied as it is not depended on certain climate conditions or fossil fuels. OTEC does not discharge any CO2 and due to the deep water mixing with the upper layers of the ocean actually helps to grow phytoplankton, algae and coal which may lead to an increase on CO2 fixation. Environmental concerns associated with OTEC systems have been brought up. One major concern is with the closed-loop and hybrid systems that depend on a low boiling point working fluid (ammonia or chlorine) to facilitate in heat exchange (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). These potentially harmful substances could leak into the ocean if the pipes were ever damaged. Another problem would be the habitat disruption in the ocean due to the installation of the pipes (Takahashi and Trenka, 1996). Although OTEC does present potential issues that may be negative to the environment, with proper designing, research and care the negative impacts can be reduced or avoided. VIII. Conclusion Ocean thermal energy conversion is a potential source of renewable energy that creates no emissions. The main advantages of OTEC is that the method is fuel free, has a low environmental impact, can supply pure water for both drinking and agriculture, can supply refrigeration and cooling and can provide a coastal community with reliable energy. The disadvantages include high capital cost, potential for hostile ocean environment during construction and use and an overall lack of familiarity with OTEC technology (Thomas, 1993). There have been several analyses of the feasibility of full-scale implementation of OTEC. While some of these investigations are contradictory to each other, research with actual mini OTEC plants is proving that OTEC systems will one day become a feasible, efficient and renewable source of energy. f. OTEC efficiently produces hydrogen – enables a transition to a hydrogen economy.Huang & Oney ‘3 (Joseph Huang and Stephen Oney, July. Senior Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Professor of Ocean &. Resources Engineering, University of Hawaii and PhD., executive vice present of OCEES. “Revisit Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion System,” http://www.springerlink.com/content/n864l3217156h045/fulltext.pdf.) Perhaps the largest contribution to human society and the global environment that OTEC will have is as the supplier of hydrogen for the impending hydrogen economy. The huge energy reservoir in the tropical ocean available via the OTEC process will require a transportable form of that energy to allow access by the energy demand centers in the temperate zone. The most attractive and versatile transportable energy form is hydrogen. There are natural synergies between OTEC and hydrogen production, especially liquid hydrogen (LH2), which other renewables such as wind and solar do not possess. These include: • Full and efficient utilization can be made of the investment in production capacity because OTEC is available 24 hours per day and 365 days per year. This is in contrast to most renewable energy systems such as wind, waves, tide, direct solar and photovoltaics. Also, OTEC systems cannot exhaust the resource at the location where they are installed – in contrast to oil, natural gas, geothermal or even hydroelectric (the reservoir eventually silts up); • The efficient production of hydrogen by electrolysis requires very pure water for the KOH solution. A small part of the OTEC process can be used to produce this pure water from the surface seawater, resulting in high efficiency electrolysis; • Liquefying hydrogen by the Claude process requires an efficient heat sink to minimize process energy. The Claude process, which cools compressed hydrogen gas with liquid nitrogen prior to expansion through a Joules-Thompson valve to complete the liquefaction process, requires a significant heat sink to maintain liquid nitrogen temperatures (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Technology 1989). The cold seawater that is used in the OTEC process could provide this efficient heat sink; • Liquid hydrogen is most efficiently transported by ocean tanker. The off-shore OTEC hydrogen plant is already located on the transport medium and therefore would result in the lowest cost for transport to market. From a global perspective, ocean transport distances of OTEC derived LH2 are much shorter than our present system of oil transport from the Middle East around Africa to North America or Europe or from the Middle East around India and the Malay Peninsula to Japan. The successful development of a global hydrogen economy will undoubtedly have to involve the largest renewable energy resource in the world – the tropical ocean. OTEC technology is the best way to tap into this virtually limitless thermal reservoir to produce hydrogen to support the impending hydrogen economy. Offshore OTEC plants, utilizing techniques already developed for accessing deep water oil fields, can be adapted to produce and liquefy hydrogen and ensure a sustainable supply of hydrogen from an environmentally benign, renewable resource for future generations. g. Hydrogen economy solves nuclear warGresser & Cusumano ‘5 (Julian James A., March/April. Chairman of Alliances for Discovery org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating breakthrough discoveries and founder and retired chairman of Catalytica Inc., former research director for Exxon, and currently vice chairman of the World Business Academy. “Hydrogen and the New Energy Economy,” The Futurist, Ebsco.) Today, oil supplies 40% of the world’s energy needs and 90% of its transportation requirements. Global economic growth over the next 15 years will increase petroleum’s share of energy generation to 60%, most of this demanded by the transportation sector when the number of cars increases from 700 million to 1.25 bil- lion. The annual economic growth rate of rapidly industrializing nations such as China (10%) and India (7%) will greatly intensify the pressure, while at the same time proven reserves will continue to be drawn down at four times the rate of new discoveries. If the world were constant and only the demand for oil increased— without the concomitant decrease in production that we project—a signif- icant rise in the price of oil could be managed solely as an energy supply problem as it was in the 1980s. But the world has become far riskier and uncertain, and the coming sharp spikes in the price of oil could have severe impacts. For one thing, the world’s financial, economic, energy, environmental, and other systems have become increasingly integrated. If the integrity or robustness of any of these systems is significantly compromised, the stresses may well be rapidly transferred to other systems, leading to global chaos. A sharp rise in the price of oil will also fall most heavily on the most impoverished countries and the poorest people in industrialized soci- eties, substantially increasing their suffering. Systems based on suffer- ing of this magnitude eventually become unstable. The systemic chaos ensuing from this predicted oil crisis could pose psychological trauma because throughout most of human history the rate of change has proceeded in a linear, if not entirely orderly, way. Today in virtually every sector of the industrialized world, the rate of change is becoming exponential. We are poorly adapted psychologically and emotionally for this shift and will be prone to panic in times of crisis. Such panic could quickly escalate to catastrophe, with weapons of mass destruction now widely avail- able, inexpensively produced, and easily deployed. That possibility is all the more threatening as the num- ber of terrorist groups actively seek- ing to acquire these weapons and to cause havoc, murder, and mayhem multiplies. When tightly coupled systems become as stressed as they currently are, and when these stresses do not abate, but rather compound as now seems likely, there is a tendency for these systems to reach a tipping point—when a single event, though not catastrophic in itself, has the potential to unleash a cascade of disorder and turbulence. Most policy makers overlook the oil-price tipping point because they do not appear to understand—from a systems perspective—the linkage of oil prices to other destabilizing trends. Currently, more than 20% of the world’s oil is in the hands of nations known to sponsor terrorism, and are under sanctions by the United States and/or the United Nations. As a re- sult, oil-producing nations in the Middle East will gain an influence on world affairs previously unthink- able by energy and political strate- gists. These nations will continue to increase their arms, leading to greater instability in that region and worldwide. Massive wealth will flow to terrorist organizations as the free world indirectly rewards their sponsors through the purchase of oil at increasingly higher prices. Fixed supplies, stalled discoveries, and sharply increased consumption will drive prices in the near future to an oil-price tipping point. The wisest way to anticipate and mitigate this risk would be to implement an immediate “quantum jump” into energy conservation and hydrogen development. This will help us avoid, or at least minimize, the dislocations of the oil-price tip- ping point, while achieving an orderly and smooth transition to a Hydrogen Economy in later stages of the program. To be sure, even this quantum jump strategy will likely require 15 to 20 years to achieve broad displacement of current oil sources by hydrogen. Download 147.8 Kb. Share with your friends:
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