Tifia increases solve the aff—make infrastructure projects easier to fund
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- No Solvency – Won’t Work in U.S.
- No Solvency – No Transition
- No Solvency – Not Fast Enough
- No Solvency – Alt Causes
- High Speed Rail Unneeded – Cars are Becoming Efficient
- High speed rail projects won’t get funded – Cost overruns are 45% higher than originally predicted
- Warming Not Anthropogenic
HighSpeed RailNo SolvencyInvestment in high-speed rail will only be a wasteJulian, Hoover Institution research fellow, 10 (Liam, April 1, 2010, The Trouble with High-Speed Rail. Policy Review, Issue 160, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/5296 , AD 6/27/12p. 4, LP) Obama has also been criticized by those who see trouble in the breadth of his high-speed rail ambitions. Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told U.S. News and World Report, "The advice was, pick one or two corridors and invest wisely." But instead, the administration is "spreading the peanut butter thinly all over the place." Other commentators have pointed out that the speedy trains that work in parts of Europe and Asia won't work in a vast United States, with its dispersed inhabitants. Robert Samuelson noted in a Washington Post column on the subject that the population density of Japan, for instance, is 880 people per square mile, while in America, there are just 8 6 people per square mile. Can the Obama administration counter the naysayers with numbers and data? No, it cannot. For high-speed rail is simply an imprudent and inefficient answer to an unreal American transportation need. One has only to look at the history and development of the nation's most-advanced, Obama-touted high-speed rail projects — in Florida and California — to see that the administration's plan is merely a high-speed way to waste untold billions. No Solvency – Won’t Work in U.S.No solvency – High speed rail will not work in the US - geographyDovell, Council on Foreign Relations, 12 (Elizabeth, 3-7-12, Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S. Rail Infrastructure”, http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-rail-infrastructure/p27585, accessed 6-29-12, LP) William J. Mallett, transportation policy specialist at the Congressional Research Service, notes: "I'm not convinced high-speed rail is the answer to some people's prayers, because the geography of the United States is different than Europe… a high-speed rail network that covers the whole country is probably not feasible." Countries with HSR generally have higher population densities, smaller land areas, and lower rates of car ownership than the United States. No Solvency – No TransitionNo transition – air travel is more efficientNagarajan, private investor, 10 (Ravi, July 27, 2010, Seeking Alpha, "High Speed Rail May Threaten Freight Rail Renaissance ," http://seekingalpha.com/article/216596-high-speed-rail-may-threaten-freight-rail-renaissance, accessed 6-30-12, CM) America is a vast country and rail travel will never be a feasible alternative to air travel for trips longer than 800 miles even with trains capable of 200 mile per hour operating speeds. Except for a subset of travelers who especially dislike air travel, most consumers will select the mode of transportation that offers an attractive balance between cost and time requirements. Air travel is relatively inexpensive within the continental United States. For a hypothetical 800 mile trip, state of the art high speed rail running on a dedicated track at 200 miles per hour with four stops lasting five minutes each would require roughly four and half hours compared to less than two hours in the air. Even adding the time required to commute from city centers to the airport, air travel likely wins. No Solvency – Not Fast EnoughUS’s high speed rail is extremely slowThe Economist, 10 (July 22, 2010, The Economist, "High-speed railroading," http://www.economist.com/node/16636101, accessed 6-30-12, CM) California’s plans were given a boost by Barack Obama’s stimulus package last year. This earmarks a lump sum of $8 billion, plus $1 billion a year, to help construct fast rail corridors around America (see map). Such lines are common in Europe, Japan and, increasingly, China, yet the only thing at all like them in America is Amtrak’s Acela service from Boston via New York to Washington, DC. It rarely reaches its top speed of 150mph (240kph) and for much of the way manages little more than half that, because the track is not equipped for higher speeds. Acela, like virtually all trains run by publicly owned Amtrak, has to use tracks belonging to freight railways, whose trains trundle along at 50mph; passenger trains must stick below 80mph. Despite the excitement of railway buffs and the enthusiasm of environmentalists, high-speed rail in America is likely to mean a few more diesel-electric intercity trains at 110mph, not swish electric expresses going nearly twice as fast. No Solvency – Alt CausesToo many alt causes to solve – passenger rail can’t competeSamuelson, Washington Post Columnist, 11 (Robert J., February 14, 2011, Washington Post, "High-speed rail is a fast track to government waste," http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/13/AR2011021302203.html, accessed 6-30-12, CM) The reasons passenger rail service doesn't work in America are well-known: Interstate highways shorten many trip times; suburbanization has fragmented destination points; air travel is quicker and more flexible for long distances (if fewer people fly from Denver to Los Angeles and more go to Houston, flight schedules simply adjust). Against history and logic is the imagery of high-speed rail as "green" and a cutting-edge technology. It's a triumph of fancy over fact. Even if ridership increased fifteenfold over Amtrak levels, the effects on congestion, national fuel consumption and emissions would still be trivial. Land-use patterns would change modestly, if at all; cutting 20 minutes off travel times between New York and Philadelphia wouldn't much alter real estate development in either. Nor is high-speed rail a technology where the United States would likely lead; European and Asian firms already dominate the market. High Speed Rail Unneeded – Cars are Becoming EfficientHigh speed rail isn’t needed – cars are becoming more efficientO'Toole, Cato Institute Senior Fellow, 11 (Randal, February 14, 2011, National Review, "High-Speed Pork Faster trains will produce almost no new mobility," http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259618/high-speed-pork-randal-otoole#, accessed 6-30-12, CM) Nor will high-speed rail offer any environmental benefits. The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train. While it takes a lot of energy to move trains 150 miles per hour or more, autos are getting cleaner and more energy-efficient every year, so by 2025 the average car will be greener than the most efficient train. Won’t Be FundedHigh speed rail projects won’t get funded – Cost overruns are 45% higher than originally predictedJulian, Hoover Institution research fellow, 10 (Liam, April 1, 2010, The Trouble with High-Speed Rail. Policy Review, Issue 160, p. 12, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/5296 , AD 6/27/12, LP) Nonetheless, the Obama administration pushes onward, encouraging states such as Florida and California to concoct bogus high-speed rail plans and then dispersing billions of dollars to them. All the while, nobody has an accurate idea of what these scattered high-speed systems will actually cost the country, all-total, in the end. History shows that official construction estimates are usually lowballed big-time. A 1990 evaluation by the U.S. Department of Transportation of 10 major American rail transit projects found that their average cost overrun was about 50 percent; the real costs of seven of the ten projects were between 30 and 100 percent higher than their original estimates. A 2003 study carried out at Aalborg University in Denmark evaluated 258 transport infrastructure projects completed in 20 nations on five continents between 1927 and 1998. It found that the costs of nine out of ten projects were underestimated, and that for rail, actual expenses were some 45 percent higher than predicted. Ridership projections are typically way overshot, too, though not as whoppingly so as in Florida and California. Warming Not AnthropogenicAnd it’s not anthropogenicWatson, Editor for Infowars.net, 9 (Steve, 2/27/09, citing a report conducted by the Japan Society of Energy and Resources, the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, Infowars.net, “Top Japanese Scientists: Warming Is Not Caused By Human Activity,” http://www.infowars.com/top-japanese-scientists-warming-is-not-caused-by-human-activity/, Accessed: 7/1/12, GJV) A major scientific report by leading Japanese academics concludes that global warming is not man-made and that the overall warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century onwards has now stopped. Unsurprisingly the report, which was released last month, has been completely ignored by the Western corporate media. The report was undertaken by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER), the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields. The JSER acts as a government advisory panel, much like the International Panel on Climate Change did for the UN. The JSER’s findings provide a stark contrast to the IPCC’s, however, with only one out of five top researchers agreeing with the claim that recent warming has been accelerated by man-made carbon emissions. The government commissioned report criticizes computer climate modeling and also says that the US ground temperature data set, used to back up the man-made warming claims, is too myopic. In the last month, no major Western media outlet has covered the report, which prompted British based sci-tech website The Register to commission a translation of the document. Section one highlights the fact that Global Warming has ceased, noting that since 2001, the increase in global temperatures has halted, despite a continuing increase in CO2 emissions. The report then states that the recent warming the planet has experienced is primarily a recovery from the so called "Little Ice Age" that occurred from around 1400 through to 1800, and is part of a natural cycle. The researchers also conclude that global warming and the halting of the temperature rise are related to solar activity, a notion previously dismissed by the IPCC. "The hypothesis that the majority of global warming can be ascribed to the Greenhouse Effect is mistaken." the report’s introduction states. Kanya Kusano, Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC) reiterates this point: "[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonic increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis," Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, cites historical data to challenge the claim that very recent temperatures represent an anomaly: "We should be cautious, IPCC’s theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with CO2 is nothing but a hypothesis. " "Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth… The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken." Akasofu concludes. The key passages of the translated report can be found here. The conclusions within the report dovetail with those of hundreds of Western scientists, who have been derided and even compared with holocaust deniers for challenging the so called "consensus" on global warming. The total lack of exposure that this major report has received is another example of how skewed coverage of climate change is toward one set of hypotheses. This serves the agenda to deliberately whip up mass hysteria on behalf of governments who are all too eager to introduce draconian taxation and control measures that won’t do anything to combat any form of warming, whether you believe it to be natural or man-made. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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