Extension: Peak OilFamine

Extension: Peak OilFamine

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘4

(Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, p. 22) [Bozman]
The consequences for global food production will be no less dire. Throughout the 20th century, food production expanded dramatically in country after country, with most of this growth attributable to energy inputs. Without fuel-fed tractors and petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, it is doubtful that crop yields can be maintained at current levels.

AT: Genetic Engineering Solves Food Shortages

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5

(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 197) [Bozman]
As for the genetic engineering of food crops: the technology is risky and likely to have serious unintended environmental or health consequences that could more than wipe out whatever short-term benefits it may offer. Moreover, it will not substantially reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Hegemony Module

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5

(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 218-219) [Bozman]
Regional rivalries and long-term strategy: Even without competition for energy resources, the world is full of conflict and animosity. For the most part, it is in the United States? interest to prevent open confrontation between regional rivals, such as India and Pakistan, Israel and Syria, and North and South Korea. However, resource competition will only worsen existing enmities. As the petroleum production peak approaches, the US will likely make efforts to take more direct control of energy resources in Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Caspian Sea, Africa and South America ? efforts that may incite other nations to form alliances to curb US ambitions. Within only a few years, OPEC countries will have control over virtually all of the exportable surplus oil in the world (with the exception of Russia?s petroleum, the production of which may reach a second peak in 2010, following an initial peak that precipitated the collapse of the USSR). The US ? whose global hegemony has seemed so complete for the past dozen years ? will suffer an increasing decline in global influence, which no amount of saber rattling or bombing of ?terrorist? countries will be able to reverse. Awash in debt, dependent on imports, mired in corruption, its military increasingly overextended, the US is well into its imperial twilight years.
B. Nuclear war.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Former Assist Prof of Poli Sci at Columbia, Spring, ‘95

(The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2; Pg. 84)
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

Extension: Peak Oil Collapses Hegemony

Paul Roberts, Journalist, Finalist for the National Magazine Award, ‘4