Destruction causes cascading effects – no adaption
Santos 99 (Miguel, Environmental Crisis, p. 35-36)
In addition, natural forests provide recreation and unique scientific beauty while at the same time serving as the basis for natural communities that provide life support to organisms (including people). As mentioned, one vital by-product of plant photosynthetic activity is oxygen, which is essential to human existence. In addition, forests remove pollutants and odors from the atmosphere. The wilderness is highly effective in metabolizing many toxic substances. The atmospheric concentration of pollutants over the forest, such as particulates and sulfUr dioxide, are measurably below that of adjacent areas (see Figure 2.3). In view of their ecological role in ecosystems, the impact of species extinction may be devastating. The rich diversity of species and the ecosystems that support them are intimately connected to the long-term survival of humankind. As the historic conservationist Aldo Leopold stated in 1949, “The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television or radio, but the complexity of the land organisms... To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” An endangered species may have a significant role in its coimnunity. Such an organism may control the structure and functioning of the community through its activities. The sea otter, for example, in relation to its size, is perhaps the most voracious of all marine mammals. The otter feeds on sea mollusks, sea urchins, crabs, and fish. It needs to eat more than 20 percent of its weight every day to provide the necessary energy to maintain its body temperature in a cold marine habitat. The extinction of such keystone or controller species from the ecosystem would cause great damage. Its extinction could have cascading effects on many species, even causing secondary extinction. Traditionally, species have always evolved along with their changing environment. As disease organisms evolve, other organisms may evolve chemical defense mechanisms that confer disease resistance. As the weather becomes drier, for example, plants may develop smaller, thicker leaves, which lose water slowly. The environment, however, is now developing and changing rapidly, but evolution is slow, requiring hundreds of thousands of years. If species are allowed to become extinct, the total biological diversity on Earth will be greatly reduced: therefore, the potential for natural adaptation and change also will be reduced, thus endangering the diversity of future human life-support systems.
Cap Bad---Environment---A2: No Impact---Resiliency Most qualified and recent evidence disproves – biodiversity loss undermines resilience and redundancy – past coping ability doesn’t disprove and even small increases in disruption threaten to cross invisible threshold levels and trigger abrupt system collapse
Resilience Alliance, 14 – Resilience Alliance is a research organization comprised of scientists and practitioners from many disciplines who collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems. The body of knowledge developed by the RA, encompasses key concepts of resilience, adaptability and transformability and provides a foundation for sustainable development policy and practice, RA is highly adaptable and able to seek out opportunities for new ways of learning about and applying resilience theory. RA members are leaders in the ecological and social sciences, covering a range of disciplinary expertise Our work fortifies a paradigm shift in natural resource management from top-down, command-and-control optimization (the MSY paradigm), to the promotion of resilience and self-organization We have extensive experience engaging stakeholders involved in resource management and planning processes in an Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM) framework as well as in the developing area of adaptive governance RA members have in-depth knowledge of social-ecological systems in Australia, Africa, South East Asia, South America, the USA and Europe, in a variety of terrestrial and aquatic systems used for both production and conservation, RA is supported by an international network of member institutions that includes universities, government, and non-government agencies. The Board of Directors includes a representative from each member organization. An Executive Director oversees the administrative structure of the Alliance, a Science Leader directs the research program, and a Senior Research Fellow co-ordinates collaborative research synthesis, communications, and outreach, http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/resilience
Resilience Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. Humans are part of the natural world. We depend on ecological systems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live from the local to global scale. Resilience is a property of these linked social-ecological systems (SES). "Resilience" as applied to ecosystems, or to integrated systems of people and the natural environment, has three defining characteristics: The amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure The degree to which the system is capable of self-organization The ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation CATASTROPHIC SHIFTS IN ECOSYSTEMS The amount of resilience a system possesses relates to the magnitude of disturbance required to fundamentally disrupt the system causing a dramatic shift to another state of the system, controlled by a different set of processes. Reduced resilience increases the vulnerability of a system to smaller disturbances that it could previously cope with. Even in the absence of disturbance, gradually changing conditions, e.g., nutrient loading, climate, habitat fragmentation, etc., can surpass threshold levels, triggering an abrupt system response.When resilience is lost or significantly decreased, a system is at high risk of shifting into a qualitatively different state. The new state of the system may be undesirable, as in the case of productive freshwater lakes that become eutrophic, turbid, and depleted of their biodiversity. Restoring a system to it's previous state can be complex, expensive, and sometimes even impossible. Research suggests that to restore some systems to their previous state requires a return to environmental conditions well before the point of collapse. Coral reefs are spectacular marine ecosystems known for their diversity of eye-pleasing fish and corals. In the Caribbean, overfishing and increased nutrient loading from land water run-off is believed to be responsible for declines in herbivorous fish populations which allowed the sea urchin Diadema antillarum, to dominate the coral reefs. In 1981 a hurricane severly damaged the coral reefs. The sea urchin continued to graze on the algae which allowed the coral to recolonize the reefs. In subsequent years the urchin was hit hard by a pathogen and as a consequence, was no longer in a position to control the algae. Fleshy brown algae came to dominate the reefs. The adult algae that now covers the reefs are largely unpalatable to the remaining herbivores, which serves to keep the reefs in this state of algal dominance. HOW IS RESILIENCE LOST? The resilience of social-ecological systems depends largely on underlying, slowly changing variables such as climate, land use, nutrient stocks, human values and policies. Resilience can be degraded by a large variety of factors including: loss of biodiversity toxic pollution inflexible, closed institutions perverse subsidies that encourage unsustainable use of resources a focus on production and increased efficiences that leads to a loss of redundancy HOW IS RESILIENCE ENHANCED? Natural systems are inherently resilient but just as their capacity to cope with disturbance can be degraded, so can it be enhanced. The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. For example, in a grassland ecosystem, several different species will commonly perform nitrogen fixation, but each species may respond differently to climatic events, thus ensuring that even though some species may be lost, the process of nitrogen fixation within the grassland ecosystem will continue. Similarly, when the management of a resource is shared by a diverse group of stakeholders (e.g., local resource users, research scientists, community members with traditional knowledge, government representatives, etc.), decision-making is better informed and more options exist for testing policies. Active adaptive management whereby management actions are designed as experiments encourages learning and novelty, thus increasing resilience in social-ecological systems.
Cap Bad---VTL Routing of capitalism in education is particularly key to value to life
Lamelas Paz 16 (Gabriela, socialist Argentinian politician. “Public Education in Capitalism: A Marxist Perspective”, 10/31/16. http://www.leftvoice.org/Public-Education-in-Capitalism-A-Marxist-Perspective, 6/22/17)//JM
*Translated, by Tatiana Cozzarelli
In a class based society education is class based According to Lenin, “The more cultured the bourgeois state, the more subtly it lied when declaring that schools could stand above politics and serve society as a whole. In fact the schools were turned into nothing but an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. They were thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois caste spirit. Their purpose was to supply the capitalists with obedient lackeys and able workers...We say that our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy” He also says, “The bourgeoisie themselves, who advocated this principle, made their own bourgeois politics the cornerstone of the school system, and tried to reduce schooling to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, to reduce even universal education from top to bottom to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, of slaves and tools of capital. They never gave a thought to making the school a means of developing the human personality.” The bourgeoisie sees knowledge as part of their own monopoly and tries to convert it into an instrument of their domination. Lenin affirms that only the wealthy receive a “quality” education, but the education for the poor and working class is merely training for work. It in no way has the goal of making people “the true owners of their lives.” “The true owners of their lives” has both literary and profound meanings. To the working class and to the poor, access to education is not only important but necessary. In order to accomplish the true liberation of the working class and oppressed sectors of society, we must profoundly break with our separation and the separation of our children from the huge arsenal of scientific, technical, philosophical, economic and historic knowledge that humanity has developed throughout history.
Cap Bad---VTL---A2: Cap Works Simplistic focus on GDP insufficient to value to life and ignores rising inequality, inadequate correlation of happiness to growth, and ecological limits
Jackson 9 ---- Tim, ecological economist and professor of sustainable development (Surrey), Professorial Fellow to the Economic and Social Research Council, “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet,” London: Earthscan, http://www.ipu.org/splz-e/unga13/prosperity.pdf
At the heart of the book lies a very simple question. What can prosperity possibly look like in a finite world, with limited resources and a population expected to exceed 9 billion people within decades?* Do we have a decent vision of prosperity for such a world? Is this vision credible in the face of the available evidence about ecological limits? How do we go about turning vision into reality? The prevailing response to these questions is to cast prosperity in economic terms and to call for continuing economic growth as the means to deliver it. Higher incomes mean increased choices, richer lives, an improved quality of life for those who benefit from them. That at least is the conventional wisdom. This formula is cashed out (almost literally) as an increase in the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. The GDP is broadly speaking a measure of 'economic activity' in a nation or region.* As we shall see later, there are good grounds to question whether such a crude measure is really sufficient. But for now it's a fair reflection of what is meant, in broad terms, by rising income. A rising per capita GDP, in this view, is equivalent to increasing prosperity.* This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why GDP growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world for most of the last century. Such a response clearly still has an appealing logic for the world's poorest nations. A meaningful approach to prosperity must certainly address the plight of the I billion people across the world who arc living on less than S1 a day — half the price of a small cappuccino in Starbucks.6 But does the same logic really hold for the richer nations, where subsistence needs are largely met and further proliferation of consumer goods adds little to material comfort? How is it that with so much stuff already we still hunger for more? Might it not be better to halt the relentless pursuit of growth in the advanced economies and concentrate instead on sharing out the available resources more equitably? In a world of finite resources, constrained by strict environmental limits, still characterized by * islands of prosperity* within 'oceans of poverty',7 are ever-increasing incomes for the already-rich really a legitimate focus for our continued hopes and expectations? Or is there perhaps some other path towards a more sustainable, a more equitable form of prosperity? We'll come back time and again to this question and explore it from a variety of different perspectives. But it's worth making quite clear here that to many economists the very idea of prosperity without growth is a complete anathema. Growth in the GDP is taken for granted. Reams and reams have been written about what it's based on, who's best at making it happen and what to do when it stops happening. Far less is written about why we might want it in the first place. But the relentless quest for more that lurks within the conventional view of prosperity is not without some claim to intellectual foundation. In short, the reasoning goes something like this. The GDP counts the economic value of goods and services exchanged on the market. If we're spending our money on more and more commodities it's because we value them. We wouldn't value them if the)' weren't at the same time improving our lives. Hence a continually increasing per capita GDP is a reasonable proxy for a rising prosperity. Bui this conclusion is odd precisely because prosperity isn't obviously synonymous with income or wealth. Rising prosperity isn't self-evidently the same thing as economic growth. More isn't necessarily better. Until quite recently, prosperity was not cast specifically in terms of money at all; it was simply the opposite of adversity or affliction." The concept of economic prosperity — and the elision of rising prosperity with economic growth — is a modern construction. And it's a construction that has already come under considerable criticism. Amongst the charges against it is that growth has delivered its benefits, at best, unequally. A fifth of the worlds population earns just 2 per cent of global income. The richest 20 per cent by contrast earn 74 per cent of the worlds income. Huge disparities — real differences in prosperity by anyone's standards — characterize the difference between rich and poor. Such disparities are unacceptable from a humanitarian point of view. They also generate rising social tensions: real hardships in the most disadvantaged communities which have a spill-over effect on society as a whole.' Even within the advanced economics, inequality is higher than it was 20 years ago. While the rich got richer, middle-class incomes in western countries were .stagnant in real terms long before the current recession. Far from raising the living standard for those who most needed it, growth let much of the world's population down over the last 50 years. Wealth trickled up to the lucky few. Fairness (or the lack of it) is only one of the reasons to question the conventional formula for achieving prosperity. Another is the growing recognition that, beyond a certain point at least, continued pursuit of economic growth doesn't appear to advance and may even impede human happiness. Talk of a growing 'social recession' in advanced economies has accompanied the relative economic success of the last decade.10 Finally, and perhaps most obviously, any credible vision of prosperity has to address the question of limits. This is particularly true of a vision based on growth. How — and for how long — is continued growth possible without coming up against the ecological limits of a finite planet?
Rejecting current, unsustainable growth is a decision rule – squo is an unethical orientation towards future generations
Jackson 9 ---- Tim, ecological economist and professor of sustainable development (Surrey), Professorial Fellow to the Economic and Social Research Council, “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet,” London: Earthscan, http://www.ipu.org/splz-e/unga13/prosperity.pdf
Prosperity is about things going well for us: in accordance with our hopes and expectations.2 ‘How’s life?’ we ask each other. ‘How are things?’ Everyday exchanges convey more than casual greeting. They reveal a mutual fascination for each other’s well-being. Wanting things to go well is a common human concern. It’s understood that this sense of things going well includes some notion of continuity. We aren’t inclined to think that life is going swimmingly, if we confidently expect things to fall apart tomorrow. ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks. Filing for bankruptcy tomorrow.’ Such a response wouldn’t make sense. There is a natural tendency to care about the future. There is a sense too in which individual prosperity is curtailed in the presence of social calamity. That things are going well for me personally is of little consolation if my family, my friends and my community are all in dire straits. My prosperity and the prosperity of those around me are intertwined. Sometimes inextricably. Writ large, this shared concern translates itself into a vision of human progress. Prosperity speaks of the elimination of hunger and homelessness, an end to poverty and injustice, hopes for a secure and peaceful world. And this vision is important not just for altruistic reasons bur often too as reassurance that our own lives are meaningful. It brings with it a comforting sense that things are getting better on the whole — rather than worse — if not always for us then at least for those who come after us. A better society for our children. A fairer world. A place where those less fortunate will one day thrive. If I cannot believe this prospect is possible, then what can I believe? What sense can I make of my own life? Prosperity in this sense is a shared vision. Echoes of it inhabit our daily rituals. Deliberations about it inform the political and social world. Hope for it lies at the heart of our lives. So far so good. But how is this prospect to be attained? Without some realistic way of translating hope into reality, prosperity remains an illusion. The existence of a credible and robust mechanism for achieving prosperity matters. And this is more than just a question of the machinery of doing well. The legitimacy of the means to live well is part of the glue that keeps society together. Collective meaning is extinguished when hope is lost. Morality itself is threatened. Getting the mechanism right is vital. One of the key messages of this book is that we're failing in that task. Our technologies, our economy and our social aspirations are all mis-aligned with any meaningful expression of prosperity. The vision of social progress that drives us — based on the continual expansion of material wants — is fundamentally untenable. And this failing is not a simple falling short from Utopian ideals. It is much more basic. In pursuit of the good life today, we are systematically eroding the basis for well-being tomorrow. We stand in real danger of losing any prospect of a shared and lasting prosperity. But this book isn't a rant against the failings of modernity. Nor is it a lament on the inevitability of the human condition. There are undoubtedly some immutable constraints on our prospects for a lasting prosperity. The existence of ecological limits to human activity maybe one of these. Aspects of human nature may turn out to be another. Taking heed of these constraints is central to the spirit of this investigation. The overriding aim of this book is to seek viable responses to the biggest dilemma of our times: reconciling our aspirations for the good life with the constraints of a finite planet. The analysis in the following pages is focused on finding a credible vision of what it means for human society to flourish in the context of ecological limits.
Cap Unsustainable The system’s doomed – multiplicity of factors – err negative, all their pro-growth evidence is epistemologically flawed
-Resources, environmental footprint, rising population, peak oil, credit bubbles
Alexander 13 ---- Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs (University of Melbourne, Australia), Founder of the Simplicity Institute, “Ted Trainer and the Simpler Way: A Sympathetic Critique,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 25:2, 95-111
The Global Predicament Trainer’s vision of The Simpler Way can only be understood in relation to his diagnosis of the global situation, which arises out of the “limits to growth” analysis (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 2004). While the figures and statistics on resource depletion and environmental degradation are well known (e.g., MEA 2005), Trainer maintains that their significance is not generally acknowledged or fully understood. The global economy, he argues, is far beyond the levels of resource and energy use that can be maintained for much longer (Global Footprint Network 2012), let alone extended to all people. Add to this situation the fact that the global human population is expected to increase to nine billion in the next few decades, and the magnitude of our problems becomes clear. “Our way of life”, he concludes, “is grossly unsustainable” (Trainer 2010a, 19). To make matters worse, there is also a mounting body of evidence indicating that the richest nations are experiencing a breakdown of social cohesion and a stagnating quality of life (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Lawn and Clarke 2010; Lane 2000), which implies that even if we could globalize and sustain consumer societies over the long term, we may not want to (Alexander 2009, 2011a).1 [CONTINUES TO FOOTNOTE] Trainer dedicates very little attention to the issue of overpopulation, which many will consider a significant weakness to his position. However, even if the world’s population stopped growing today (at 7 billion), the planet would remain dangerously overburdened by high consumption lifestyles, so focusing primarily on consumption has some justification [END OF FOOTNOTE] The problems, however, do not end there. In addition to the ecological and social issues just noted, Trainer joins many ecological economists (e.g., Daly 1996) in highlighting the absurdity of the prevailing attitudes toward economic growth. The growth project continues to define the global development agenda (Purdey 2010), despite evidence indicating that the existing global economy is already exceeding the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet (Global Footprint Network 2012). Although the intricacies of the critique cannot be detailed here, the growth project faces additional challenges from those who argue that the peaking of oil and the bursting of credit bubbles are in the process of undermining the very possibility of continued growth (Heinberg 2011; Alexander 2011b). In line with much socialist theory, the moral that Trainer draws from this analysis is that the affluence enjoyed in rich counties is built on a global economic system that is, at its core, patently unjust. It is a system that enables the rich countries to take far more than their fair share of the world’s resources, while depriving the poorest countries of the resources needed to live even a minimally decent existence. Not only that, rich nations work hard to entrench and maintain their empires using coercive aid contributions, trade power, “structural adjustment packages” and, whenever necessary, military force (Trainer 2010a, ch. 5 and 8). For all these reasons, among others discussed below, Trainer concludes that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed; it has to be replaced. While Trainer is hardly alone in making that claim, the following sections show that he builds upon it in original ways.
Cap Unsustainable---A2: Market Self-Correcting Markets aren’t self-correcting – any solution is short-term and creates instability – Credit-default swaps prove
Woodruff citing Soros 8 ---- Judy, Syndicated reporter for Bloomberg/CNN/NBC/PBS, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, B.S. in political Science (Duke), “The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros,” 5/15, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/15/the-financial-crisis-an-interview-with-george-soro/
Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it’s generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three. Each time, it’s the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them. There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.
Cap Unsustainable---A2: Plan Solves Any pragmatic efforts are counter-productive to the movement – waste limited time and resources on structurally capitalist state
Alexander 13 ---- Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs (University of Melbourne, Australia), Founder of the Simplicity Institute, “Ted Trainer and the Simpler Way: A Sympathetic Critique,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 25:2, 95-111
Trainer’s analysis begins with what is essentially a Marxist critique of the capitalist state and proceeds to offer what amounts to a fundamentally anarchist solution. The Marxist line of thinking holds that the capitalist state is essentially an instrument of capital, which functions mainly to promote and secure the interests of the rich and powerful, at the expense of almost everyone else (Marx 1983). The primary aim of state capitalism is capital expansion, plain and simple. Although framed in slightly differently terms, Trainer is largely sympathetic to this critical understanding of state capitalism, and with good reason. It certainly seems to be the case that governments in capitalist societies (and increasingly elsewhere) are under the undue influence of corporate interests (e.g., Tham 2010), and treat economic growth as their primary and overriding concern (Hamilton 2003). Accordingly, appealing to those governments to create a more egalitarian, zero-growth economy seems more or less doomed to failure. This type of analysis of the state prompted Marx (and the orthodox Left more generally) to argue that radically changing society requires taking control of the state for socialist purposes—by way of violent revolution, if necessary. This is where Trainer parts company with Marxism and shifts to the anarchist camp. While he agrees that capitalism cannot be fixed, he argues that the state is so bound up in the values, structures and mechanisms of growth that the imperative to grow is essentially a necessary element of all states, not merely capitalist states. Generally speaking, Marx and the orthodox Left never considered this to be a problem, because they too were firmly situated within the growth model. After all, they hoped to take control of the state but then distribute the proceeds of continued growth more equitably (cf. Foster 2000, exploring “eco-Marxism”). If Trainer is correct, however, and all states are inextricably committed to growth, then advocates of a zero-growth economy should not waste their time lobbying governments to advance their cause. Indeed, as a matter of strategy, he argues that advocates of a zero-growth economy must essentially ignore state capitalism to death by setting about building the alternative economy themselves, without expecting any help from the state (and probably receiving a lot of resistance from it). More radically still, Trainer even maintains that “the Green Politics goal of parliamentary solutions, [is] mistaken and useless now” (2010a, 13), perhaps even “counter-productive” (256), on the assumption that the state will never voluntarily dissolve the structures of growth that drive ecological degradation. We have limited time, resources and energies, Trainer argues, so we should not waste them running for office or even campaigning for the Greens, because the state will be either unwilling or unable to help us. Advocates of zero growth should just get active in their local communities and begin building the new society amongst the grassroots, here and now. This is the sense in which Trainer positions himself as an anarchist.
Cap Unsustainable---A2: Tech Solves Bidirectionality means tech insufficient – Increases in efficiency also increase consumption, thereby erasing benefits
Motesharrei 14 ---- Safa, Bachelor degrees in Engineering and Physics (Maryland), Masters in Physics and Mathematics (Maryland), Research Assistant at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics/Public Policy (Maryland), This report was co-written with Eugenia Kalnay (meteorologist and a Distinguished University Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at Maryland), “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies,” National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, 3/19, http://www.sesync.org/sites/default/files/resources/motesharrei-rivas-kalnay.pdf
It is frequently claimed that technological change can reduce resource depletion and therefore increase carrying capacity. However, the effects of technological change on resource use are not unidirectional. Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use. These are associated with the phenomena referred to as the Jevons Paradox, and the "Rebound Effect" [Polimeni et al., 2008; Greening et al., 2000; Ruth. 2009]. For example, an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency tends to enable increased per capita vehicle miles driven, heavier cars, and higher average speeds, which then negate the gains from the increased fuel-efficiency. In addition, technological advances can enable greater resource extraction and throughput, which then appears as increases in the productivity of other factors of production. As Daly points out, much of the increase in productivity in both agriculture and industry in the last two centuries has actually come from increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput [Daly. 1991]. A decline in the price of a resource Is usually thought to reflect an increase in the abundance of that resource, but in fact, it often reflects that the resource is simply being extracted more rapidly. Rather than extend carrying capacity, this reduces it. Over the long-term, per capita resource-use has tended to rise over time despite dramatic technological advances in resource efficiency. Thus, the sign and magnitude of the effect of technological change on resource use varies and the overall effect is difficult to predict. Therefore, in this generation of HANDY, we assume that the effects of these trends cancel each other out. The model will be developed further to allow the rates of these technology-induced trends to be adjusted in either direction.
A2: No Impact---Low Level Violence Structural violence sets the stage for the worst forms of violence – social exclusion is the largest proximal cause of mass violence- creates everyday consent for genocide by legitimizing hierarchy
Scheper-Hughes ‘4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
A2: Turn---Cap Good---Space Capitalism does nothing for space exploration—there’s a massive delay and safety issues
Thompson 17 - Loren Thompson, writes about national security, especially its business dimensions, focuses on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding present positions, he was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. He has also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University, 17 ("Capitalism In Space: The Beguiling Myth Market Forces Can Fix Everything," Forbes, 3-16-2017, Available Online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2017/03/16/capitalism-in-space-the-beguiling-myth-market-forces-can-fix-everything/#2515fc171af3, Accessed on 7-9-2017 //JJ)
That is not the way Washington has historically preferred to run either its civil or its military space programs. NASA and the Air Force (which leads military space efforts) traditionally have been deeply engaged in all aspects of their suppliers' businesses -- partly because of the risks involved, and partly because they didn't trust private companies to always make the right choices. Zimmerman contends SpaceX and a bevy of other upstarts such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are showing there is a better way to do business, if government will just get out of the way.
This viewpoint has been with us since the early days of the republic, and finds voice whenever Washington tries to do something big using taxpayer money. Most of the time, I share it. But because my own think tank gets money from the two biggest traditional launch providers, Boeing and Lockheed Martin -- Lockheed is also a consulting client -- I've had plenty of opportunity in recent years to compare the rhetoric of both sides with their actual performance.
Zimmerman offers a series of complex comparisons purporting to do just that, but he doesn't cite hardly any numbers to support his case. So let's fill in a few details about how SpaceX, the leading non-traditional supplier of launch-services, has actually performed. United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture that is SpaceX's main competitor for government launches, has never lost a payload in 117 launches. SpaceX has lost two missions in just the last two years, in both cases due to design features in its launch vehicle.
No doubt about it, SpaceX prices are low -- but it isn't the model of market-driven responsiveness that Zimmerman would have you believe. On average, its launches are over two years late, and the unlaunched missions it is carrying in its backlog on average are nearly three years late. When 2016 began, the company was projecting over 20 launches during the year. It actually performed eight successful launches, not counting a mission destroyed on the launch pad, and a grand total of two of them were on time -- the rest were late.
You can see where that might be a problem for the Air Force if the payload being launched was a high priority such as a missile-warning or spy satellite. But there's no danger of SpaceX causing a problem there, because it can't actually lift heavy payloads into high orbits. It says it will bolster its lift capacity by developing a "heavy" version of its Falcon rocket, but it has been promising to launch since 2012 and the first launch still hasn't happened. Author Zimmerman treats Falcon Heavy like it's a real thing, but I'll bet this is the sixth consecutive year it doesn't launch.
And then there's the matter of safety. Companies typically achieve low prices by taking out cost, but much of the overhead associated with space efforts goes into assuring the safety of missions. When you leave it to market forces to decide what stays in and what gets taken out of vehicle designs and launch procedures, risk can easily creep into the tradeoffs. A NASA advisory panel warned that it wasn't a good idea to let SpaceX boost its rocket performance by loading supercooled fuel while astronauts were already aboard. Last year a routine test of that procedure blew up a rocket on the launch pad.
A2: Turn---Cap Good---War Capitalist peace theory is flawed
Schneider 17 (Gerald, department of politics and management at the University of Konstanz. “Capitalist Peace Theory: A Critical Appraisal”, May 2017. http://politics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-314#notes, 7/7/17)//JM *CPT: Captialist peace theory
The “varieties of capitalism” through which the capitalist peace thesis is articulated make it hard to establish which particular feature of the economic organization of a state renders political relationships less important and appeases them as a consequence of this. The plethora of mechanisms that have been proposed finds its real-life correspondence in the many forms capitalism takes in reality, ranging from exploitive Manchester capitalism to capitalist social democratic welfare states that add to the freedom of economic interaction a safety net for the less skilled and less privileged. Critics of CPT contend that the competing explanations are often not sufficiently different from competing liberal theories (Schneider & Gleditsch, 2010; Schneider, 2014a). Proponents of alternative liberal schools of thought, “commercial liberalism” or the “democratic peace,” similarly maintain that trade, foreign direct investment, and democratic institutions are key attributes of a peaceful society. I argue as a first qualification of CPT that its proponents should base their approach on a narrow definition of capitalism if they strive to establish properly how open economies, rather than other liberal causes of peace, reduce the risk of political violence. I accordingly differentiate, similarly to McDonald (2009; see also Schneider, 2014a), between the internal and the external openness of an economy. While the latter refers in macroeconomic terms to trade and capital account openness, the former stresses the freedom entrepreneurs and investors enjoy in a lightly regulated economy in which the government sees its main function in the protection of property rights. Internal economic freedom and the accompanying rule of law are, in this perspective, necessary prerequisites for a capitalist organization of the economy and differentiate it from predatory forms of state-market relations. Most, but not all capitalist economies, are also what Rosecrance (1986) called “trading states.” As the example of the People’s Republic of China shows, there is, however, no perfect match between the internal and the external openness of an economy (Wagner, 2010). This is the reason why this article exclusively focuses on the pacifying contribution of internal economic freedom that governments protect and encourage. I therefore disregard the security implications of rapacious forms of “capitalism”. Economies that are only externally open, but that disregard the rule of law domestically, are not sufficiently liberal to qualify as “capitalist.” Classic definitions of capitalism stress along these lines the extent to which capital and other productive resources are owned by private people and the profits these “capitalists” try to reap. According to Weber (1958, p. 17), “[C]apitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise [emphasis in original].” Current contributions to CPT do not, as indicated, rely on such a minimalist definition of capitalism, rendering it difficult to establish which facet of a country makes them more peaceful both internally and externally.1 A second problem with the extant literature boils down to the observation that extant theories do not sufficiently explore how the wealth possibly created through a capitalist organization of the political leaders renders political leaders reluctant to use armed force. Unless one adopts a crude Marxist approach and perceives governments to be the lackeys of the capitalist class, it is the government and not Wall Street or its functional equivalents around the world that calls the shots in this regard. The lack of proper micro-foundations of the approach is all the more severe as the riches that economic openness allegedly provokes can also be used for military purposes. The relationship between development and conflict is thus indefinite (Schneider, 2014a). A third and related criticism focuses on the incomplete nature of the approach. Advocates of the CPT approach often do not differentiate between the level of economic freedom and changes towards it. This has the consequence that capitalist peace theories shy away from addressing the distributional effects that transitions to economic openness create (Bussmann, Schneider, & Wiesehomeier, 2005; Bussmann & Schneider, 2007). This neglect is especially grave in light of the classic interpretations of capitalism by Marx (Kliman, 2015) and Schumpeter (1942) who both stressed risk taking and the alternation between economic expansion and contraction as defining features of capitalism. This article addresses these challenges after an introduction of the historical literature that has disputed whether capitalism is a source of conflict or of peace.
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