Carbon Pipelines Negative T
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- Consumption K
- The impact is extinction
- The alternative is to: reject the affirmative and approach the 1ac harms from the angle of consumption
***Carbon Pipelines Negative***TPipelines not TIPipelines are not transportation infrastructure – they are legally defined as energy infrastructureUS Chamber of Commerce 10 United States Chamber of Commerce, “Transportation Performance Index – Summary Report”, http://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/lra/files/LRA_TPI%20_Summary_Report%20Final%20092110.pdf Step 1 – Definition: Transportation Infrastructure
General Definition: Moving people and goods by air, water, road, and rail. Technical Definition: The fixed facilities―roadway segments, railway tracks, public transportation terminals, harbors, and airports―flow entities―people, vehicles, container units, railroad cars―and control systems that permit people and goods to traverse geographical space in a timely, efficient manner for an intended purpose. Transportation modes include highway, public transportation, aviation, freight rail, marine, and intermodal. Note that pipeline infrastructure is not included in this definition. For purposes of the Infrastructure Performance Index it is considered an element of energy infrastructure. Consumption K1ncThe affirmative’s production-oriented approach to environmental degradation is unethical and legitimates unending consumption patternsLack 11 – MA in Environmental Politics, MSc in Hydroecology, 25 years of professional work experience, as a geologist and hydrogeologist, in both public and private sectors, Fellow of the Geological Society Martin, “What’s wrong with Clean Coal?,” http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/category/carbon-capture-and-storage/ The concept of Clean Coal is almost certainly an invention of the marketing departments of coal mining companies (analagous to “safe cigarettes“). In most cases, coal-burning power stations have already cleaned-up their act as much as they can (as a result of the 30-yr old UN Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) – which continues to help humanity minimise the effects of acid rain). Therefore coal cannot be made any cleaner than it already is! Similarly, the idea of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is almost certainly a ruse to make the continuance of “business as usual” seem acceptable and, the truly remarkable thing is that, governments around the world seem to have been duped by it. However, in addition to this, it would be inherently dangerous because, in order to be an effective mitigation strategy, the burried CO2 must never escape (see my earlier posts ‘The tough guide to climate denial‘ and ‘Five questions for Chris Huhne‘). Why is this so hard for our politicians to grasp? Why do they continue to insist that coal-burning power stations are acceptable? When we discovered that airborne asbestos dust was dangerous, we stopped mining it. When we discovered that inhaling smoke was dangerous, most of us stopped smoking. Now that our governments know (or at least they claim they know) that CO2 emissions endanger our stable climate, why are they falling over themselves to find ways to permit the continuance of business as usual? Could it be that, as Hansen suggests, the fossil fuel lobby is just too powerful? But I digress… This week I intend to look at Coal, Gas, Oil, and the alternatives to fossil fuels, to examine our options. However, my focus today was supposed to be CCS because it is not a mitigation strategy, it is not even an attempt to tackle the cause of the problem. On the contrary, it is an attempt to treat the symptoms; and it is an abdication of our responsibility for causing the problem. The solution to littering is not to employ more litter-pickers, it is to educate people to make them better citizens who do not despoil their environment. When the early European settlers of North America began to move west in search of new lands and new opportunities, a Frontier mentality was understandable. However, to retain such an attitude today is socially unacceptable and morally irresponsible: When you live in a wilderness, it is probably safe to treat a passing river as your source of drinking water, washing room, and toilet. However, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a Mumbai slum, this will almost certainly contribute to causing your premature death. As a parent, I had to learn to discriminate between childish irresponsibility and disobedience. However, if, as a species, we go down the CCS route (and/or pursue many of the other forms of geo-engineering) as a solution, we will be crossing the line from one to the other: That is to say, now that we know (or at least the vast majority accept that we know) that burning fossil fuels is changing our global climate, to find ways to excuse our behaviour rather than modify it is no longer just irresponsible; it is morally reprehensible. It is, as Hansen has said, a gross case of intergenerational injustice. Production oriented economics are unsustainable – only an analytical re-orientation can break the cycle of destructionPrincen 2 – Professor of Natural Resources @ U of Michigan Thomas, Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, where he also co-directs the Workshop on Consumption and Environment, Michael Maniates, Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science at Allegheny College, and Ken Conca, professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, “Confronting Consumption,” Confronting Consumption, Chapter 2 The difficulty in conducting such a transformative research agenda, I submit, Lies in two facts. One is the reluctance or inability of social sci-entists to ground their theorizing in the biophysical, a problem I only touch on here.' A second is the fact that the economic strands of the various disciplines focus on production. Economic sociology concerns itself with issues of labor and management, economic history with the rise of industrialism, economic anthropology with subsistence provi-sioning, and political economy with the political effects of increasing trade, finance, and development. Consumption is nearly invisible. These strands of research adopt the position of the dominant social discipline— economics—and accept consumption as a black box, as simply what people do at the end point of material provisioning, as the reason for all the "real stuff" of economic activity, that is, production. The economy produces goods and goods are good so more goods must be better. There is little reason to investigate consumption, except to estimate demand functions. Consumers, after all, will only purchase what is good for them and producers, as a result, will only produce what consumers are willing to pay for. When the prevailing social concern was insufficient production, short-ages of food and shelter for a growing population, inadequate investment and risk taking, this stress on production was understandable.2 It is also understandable when natural resource abundance and unending waste-sink capacity, at home or abroad, could be safely assumed. But today, such an ecologically "empty world" cannot be reasonably assumed. Humans are stressing ecosystem services and causing irreversible declines around the world, on land and water and in the atmosphere. What's more, the contemporary economic system is stressing societies at the in-dividual, family, community, and national levels. The biophysical and social trends are unsustainable and cannot be corrected through more tinkering—that is, more environmental improvement. Under these conditions, one must ask if the exclusive focus on pro-duction might itself contribute to abuse of resources, to the neglect of serious environmental change, especially change entailing irreversibilities and the diminution of ecosystem services, and to societal stress. One must at least ask if the predilection for environmental improvement might obscure, indeed, help drive, serious environmental change and do so by promoting production, since enhanced production, however im-plicit, is the overriding normative goal of the economic strands of the social sciences. This chapter is an attempt to point in an alternative direction, what I term the consumption angle. The task is straightforward in the initial stages of conceptualizing: reject the production angle, adopt its polar opposite, the consumption angle, and play out its implications. The re-sult is to show how the consumption angle raises questions outside the production angle. The first step, however, is to play out the nature of the production angle and its associated "environmental improvement” approach and show how they neglect throughput and irreversibility issues. Before proceeding, however, it is worth noting that, although such initial conceptualization is, in many ways, straightforward, the more operational it becomes the trickier it gets, as will be evident in the hypo-thetical example at the end of this chapter. This trickiness, I suspect, is not due so much to the difficulties of constructing an alternative logic, one grounded in the biophysical, as it is to the hegemony of the produc-tion angle. When the idea of production as the core of economic activity is pervasive, problems in the economy (like ecosystem decline and com munity deterioration) are logically construed as indeed, production prob-lems, problems to be solved with more or better production. If more, even better, production makes only marginal improvements, if it increases risk or material throughput,3 it only postpones the day of reckoning. Contradictions mount and risks proliferate. The challenge is to push beyond the production angle, to chart an analytic perspective that at once eschews the production orientation and raises difficult questions about excess resource use. The Production Angle The coincidence of a production angle on economic matters and an "improvement" perspective on environmental matters is not accidental. When economic activity or, most broadly, humans' material provision-ing, is preponderantly production oriented, the only logical way to deal with problems of production—for example, pollution or deforestation— is to "produce better." If automobiles are polluting, manufacturers produce catalytic converters. If they are consuming too much gasoline, manufacturers produce more efficient engines. If traffic is congested, planners produce more roadway and traffic signals. If suburban growth exceeds population growth, "smart growth" is pursued. If flooding destroys property, engineers build better levees. If aquifers are being drawn down, agriculturalists sink deeper wells. If a fish stock is being depleted, distributors develop markets for "trash species." If slash piles left after a logging operation create visual blemishes or a fire hazard, processors make particleboard out of the slash. In all these examples, the operation is "improved," made more efficient, or the impacts are softened. But the fundamental problem is skirted or displaced in time or space. Pollutants cannot exceed absorptive capacity. Suburban growth is still growth—that is, the conversion of farmland to residential and commercial use while previously used land is left abandoned and degraded. Aquifers are still "mined" unless their extraction rate is below their regeneration rate. Aquatic systems are still disrupted, possibly irreversibly, if one species after another is fished out. And so on. What is more, the production angle pervades all sectors of modern in-dustrial society, not just the industrial. Consider the position of a major environmental NGO in the United States, the Natural Resources Defense Council, with respect to gas guzzling, private transportation trends, and the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska: "It is time to ask what kind of energy policy this country really needs. Sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are getting as little as 12 miles to the gallon. By making small improvements in the fuel economy of SUVs and other light trucks, we could save ten to forty times the estimated oil holdings of the entire reserve."4 The prevalence of the production angle on economic and environ¬mental issues and the inadequacy of this perspective for dealing with "full-world," ecologically constrained conditions, suggest the need for an alternative perspective. The tack taken here is to develop a perspective centered on production's apparent flip side, consumption. This perspective maintains the focus on economic issues—that is, on the appropriation of resources for human benefit. To do so, I characterize two approaches. One is to retain the prevailing production-consumption, supply-demand dichotomy where consumption is largely wrapped up in the black box of consumer sovereignty. Certainly extensive study has been carried out on consumption within microeconomics (consumer theory) and marketing, and, in recent years, growing literatures have emerged in sociology, anthropology, and social history.5 What has been missing in these lines of work, though, is explicit analysis of the exter¬nalities of consumption. How do decisions of consumers, individually and collectively, contribute to the displacement of costs in space and time? How do personal lives change as expression, identity, and status shift to purchasing and display? How does the polity change as democracy is increasingly defined as a vote in the marketplace?6 In addition to the neglect of externalities, these literatures have largely ignored the role of power, whether it be the power some actors marshal over consumers or the power, potential or realized, consumers marshal to counter exist¬ing practices. Consumption all too often is treated as a passive process, indeed, merely a natural result of "real economics," namely, production and its variants of growth, investment, trade, and innovation. The second approach to developing the consumption angle is to flip the production angle entirely around, to stand it on its head and construe all economic activity as "consuming," as using up, as degrading. This approach pushes the analytic gaze to the opposite extreme from that of the prevailing production angle where goods are good and more goods are better. As will be seen, this approach lends itself to an ecological conception of economic activity, where consideration of environmental impact is not just an add-on but is integral to the analysis. Goods may be good but cautious consuming is better.7 The impact is extinctionEhrenfeld 5 – Professor of Ecology @ Rutgers David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2, EBSCO The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization—climate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including pathogens (plant, animal, and human)—are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981), I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our alleged control is science fiction; it doesn’t work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today’s complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system’s processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental—events that we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray, giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, “There is nothing in today’s global market that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world’s diverse societies.” The result, Gray states, is that “The combination of [an] unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions” has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own people.... It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations. Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said much the same thing in 1995: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” How much more powerful these statements are if we factor in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable; some are not. For the non- human residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands (Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusual—rare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom line—concern for its condition must trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilization’s very real social problems cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here ( Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But such needed developments will not be sufficient—or may not even occur— without corresponding social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor. The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelated—any attempt to treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), “the ultimate challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualities we humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making.” If change does not come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainter’s (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social weight? It is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global trade and especially global finance (Daly & Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that some of the damage to our environment—species extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species introductions, and some climatic change— will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together, and this can be a task that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious. Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations, whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share. The alternative is to: reject the affirmative and approach the 1ac harms from the angle of consumptionPrincen 2 – Professor of Natural Resources @ U of Michigan Thomas, Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, where he also co-directs the Workshop on Consumption and Environment, Michael Maniates, Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science at Allegheny College, and Ken Conca, professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, “Confronting Consumption,” Confronting Consumption, Chapter 1 Given our dissatisfaction with prevailing, fragmentary approaches to consumption and its externalities, we seek an alternative perspective, a new angle on the consumption problem. We highlight here three critical themes as a provisional framework: emphasis on the social embeddedness of consumption; attention to the linkages along commodity chains of resource use that shape consumption decisions; and stress on the hidden forms of consuming embedded in all stages of economic activity. These themes stand in contrast to the ‘‘production angle’’ and its underlying assumption of an economy with ever-expanding throughput of material and energy in the human system—an assumption that exists as if ecological, psychological, and social capacity were infinitely malleable and extendable. From our ‘‘consumption angle,’’ we assume just the opposite: that there are fundamental biophysical, psychological, and social limits that can be ignored or stretched or disguised only in the short term and only at increasing social, political, and economic cost. From the production angle, ever-increasing production is logical; displacement of costs onto others in time and space is normal competitive behavior. From the consumption angle, ever-increasing throughput and displacement of costs is ultimately destructive and self-defeating. In highlighting the dangers of exceeding social capacity and risking ecological overshoot, our intent is to question underlying assumptions, to stimulate thought, and to point to new forms of intervention. 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. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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