The Rate Debate Slowing

AT: Resource Wars

First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.

This volume asserts that while resource scarcity and environmental degradation may well constitute sources of conflict, political dispute, and mismanagement between states, they may also be the impetus for coop- eration, coordination, and negotiation between them. While the volume recognizes both sides of the resource scarcity and environmental degra- dation coin, the cooperative relationship is of particular interest and scrutiny. Indeed, conflict frequently motivates cooperation, and resource scarcity and environmental degradation are important elements of this relationship. Generally, the authors in this volume maintain that increasing scarcity and degradation induce cooperation across states. To that Solve Extent, we provide a different perspective than that of the resource wars argument made with regard to particular natural resources such as oil, freshwater, minerals, and fisheries. Yet beyond this claim, the volume systematically explores the intricacies and nuances of this scarcity and degradation contention across a set of additional resources and environmental prob- lems, which may merely motivate political conflicts such as climate change, ozone depletion, oceans pollution, transboundary air pollution, and biodiversity conservation. In particular, and in line with the collec- tive action school, the volume investigates the notion that as scarcity and degradation worsen, interstate cooperation becomes difficult to achieve since it may be too costly to manage the degradation or there is simply too little of the resource to share (Ostrom 2001). Similarly, low levels of scarcity may depress cooperation as there is less urgency to organize and coordinate. Scarcity and degradation levels, in other words, should matter in explaining the intensity of cooperation.

AT: Arctic War

Russia will cooperate on arctic – they don’t want conflict and will work through international organizations

Shuster 10 (Simon Shuster, “The Race for Arctic Oil: Is Russia Ready to Share?” Sept. 27, 2010, www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2021644,00.html#ixzz1x4fGS8Fk)

Russia's leaders have never been coy about their designs on the Arctic. In recent years, their message has been clear: We want a a big, fat slice of it, including the seas of oil and gas underneath, and we are ready to defend our claim. The country expressed its intentions blatantly in August 2007, when a Russian lawmaker planted a flag on the seabed at the top of the world, and a year later, when President Dmitri Medvedev told his top generals at a meeting that defending Russia's interests in the Arctic was nothing less than "their direct duty to posterity." Which is why so many of the world's Arctic decisionmakers were amazed last week when they were called to a forum in Moscow to hear a very different message. Russia wants the Arctic to be "a zone of peace and cooperation," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told them. But could he possibly be serious? Many observers, including a large portion of the guests at the Sept. 23 forum, say the rhetoric is welcome, but the world will have to wait and see. For now, no one is rushing to dismantle the huge military capacities all of the Arctic countries — the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway (all members of NATO) and Russia — have been building north of the Arctic Circle. Ebbing and swelling over the past half-century, the intensity of this militarization has largely depended on Russia's assertiveness over the years. (See pictures of the Arctic.) It began, of course, at the height of the Cold War, when the Arctic was studded with more nuclear weapons than virtually any other part of the world. Then, in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Empire approached its collapse, the military build-up tapered off and began to decline after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his famous Murmansk speech in October 1987 in which he said the Arctic should become "a zone of peace and fruitful cooperation." When Gorbachev used that phrase, it meant something very different from how Putin used it last week. By the end of the 1980s, Russia was financially incapable of waging an arms race in the polar regions. With no more threat from the Russians, the four other Arctic powers began to let their northern militaries lapse. Attitudes changed after 2001, when soaring oil prices put jets beneath the Russian economy and Putin's government began allocating billions to its Arctic infrastructure. Canada and other Arctic states responded with a greater focus on military spending in the north. At the same time, it became obvious to everyone that the polar ice caps were melting fast and the potential for drilling for and shipping oil and gas in the Arctic would soon be considerable. The northern powers were suddenly facing the last great energy frontier, with a quarter of the world's untapped reserves in the Arctic — more than 400 billion bbl. of oil and oil-equivalent natural gas — and the scramble to claim it began. (See pictures of the rise and fall of Gorbachev.) By the end of 2014, the U.N. will receive competing claims for parts of the Arctic from Canada, Denmark and Russia, which are using seabed samples to try to prove that the oil-rich regions are extensions of their continental shelves and therefore belong to them. But even though the U.N. will rule on whether the science behind these claims is accurate (it already rejected a Russian claim in 2001 based on poor evidence), it is not the job of the U.N. to delineate borders. That will be up to the countries themselves, and that is where things might get sticky. A hopeful sign on this front came on Sept. 15, when Russia and Norway settled an Arctic border dispute that had been festering for four decades. The agreement came in the lead-up to last week's forum in Moscow, "The Arctic — Territory of Dialogue," and was seen as part of Russia's push to shed its image as the Arctic aggressor. "We're at a transition," says Paul Berkman, professor of Arctic Ocean geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. "Russia, from the perspective of the West, had been the difficult entity and is now inviting the international community to participate." The reasoning behind Russia's change of tune is both pragmatic and political. A gentler approach to Arctic policy is in line with Medvedev's broader effort to win over the West, as symbolized by his budding friendship with President Obama. (Remember the french fries they shared at Ray's Hell Burger in June?) And as Russia realizes, exploiting the energy wealth of the Arctic will be much harder if the region gets mired in conflict. "In the absence of stability, none of the energy opportunities are possible," says Berkman.

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