Read the 2AC frontline, pick a couple of add-ons to economic growth that you feel comfortably defending. You will probably need some other impact files, such as more extensive warming and environment defense.
Growth Good
2AC / Frontlines 2AC – Frontline <<>> Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
Hillebrand, Kentucky diplomacy professor, 2010(Evan, “Deglobalization Scenarios: Who Wins? Who Loses?”, Global Economy Journal, Volume 10, Issue 2, ebsco)
A long line of writers from Cruce (1623) to Kant (1797) to Angell (1907) to Gartzke (2003) have theorized that economic interdependence can lower the likelihood of war. Cruce thought that free trade enriched a society in general and so made people more peaceable; Kant thought that trade shifted political power away from the more warlike aristocracy, and Angell thought that economic interdependence shifted cost/benefit calculations in a peace-promoting direction. Gartzke contends that trade relations enhance transparency among nations and thus help avoid bargaining miscalculations. There has also been a tremendous amount of empirical research that mostly supports the idea of an inverse relationship between trade and war. Jack Levy said that, ―While there are extensive debates over the proper research designs for investigating this question, and while some empirical studies find that trade is associated with international conflict, most studies conclude that trade is associated with peace, both at the dyadic and systemic levels‖ (2003, p 127). There is another important line of theoretical and empirical work called Power Transition Theory that focuses on the relative power of states and warns that when rising powers approach the power level of their regional or global leader the chances of war increase (Tammen, Lemke, et al, 2000). Jacek Kugler (2006) warns that the rising power of China relative to the United States greatly increases the chances of great power war some time in the next few decades. The IFs model combines the theoretical and empirical work of the peace-through-trade tradition with the work of the power transition scholars in an attempt to forecast the probability of interstate war. Hughes (2004) explains how he, after consulting with scholars in both camps, particularly Edward Mansfied and Douglas Lemke, estimated the starting probabilities for each dyad based on the historical record, and then forecast future probabilities for dyadic militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars based on the calibrated relationships he derived from the empirical literature. The probability of a MID, much less a war, between any random dyad in any given year is very low, if not zero. Paraguay and Tanzania, for example, have never fought and are very unlikely to do so. But there have been thousands of MIDs in the past and hundreds of wars and many of the 16,653 dyads have non-zero probabilities. In 2005, the IFs base year—the last year of the data base and the starting year for all simulations—the average probability across the 183 countries represented in the model of a country being involved in at least one war was estimated to be 0.8%, with 104 countries having a probability of at least 1 war approaching zero. A dozen countries8, however have initial probabilities over 3%. The globalization scenario projects that the probability for war will gradually decrease through 2035 for every country—but not every dyad--that had a significant (greater than 0.5% chance of war) in 2005. The decline in prospects for war stems from the scenario’s projections of rising levels of democracy, rising incomes, and rising trade interdependence—all of these factors figure in the algorithm that calculates the probabilities. Not all dyadic war probabilities decrease, however, because of the power transition mechanism that is also included in the IFs model. The probability for war between China and the US, for example rises as the power9 of China rises gradually toward the US level but in these calculations the probability of a China/US war never gets very high.10 Deglobalization raises the risks of war substantially. In a world with much lower average incomes, less democracy, and less trade interdependence, the average probability of a country having at least one war in 2035 rises from 0.6% in the globalization scenario to 3.7% in the deglobalization scenario. Among the top-20 war-prone countries, the average probability rises from 3.9% in the globalization scenario to 7.1% in the deglobalization scenario. The model estimates that in the deglobalization scenario there will be about 10 wars in 2035, vs. only 2 in the Globalization Scenario11. Over the whole period, 2005-2035, the model predicts four great power wars in the deglobalization scenario vs. 2 in the globalization scenario.12 Winners and Losers Deglobalization in the form of reduced trade interdependence, reduced capital flows, and reduced migration has few positive effects, based on this analysis with the International Futures Model. Economic growth is cut in all but a handful of countries, and is cut more in the non-OECD countries than in the OECD countries. Deglobalization has a mixed impact on equality. In many non-OECD countries, the cut in imports from the rest of the world increases the share of manufacturing and in 61 countries raises the share of income going to the poor. But since average productivity goes down in almost all countries, this gain in equality comes at the expense of reduced incomes and increased poverty in almost all countries. The only winners were a small number of countries that were small and poor and not well integrated in the global economy to begin with—and the gains from deglobalization even for them were very small. Politically, deglobalization makes for less stable domestic politics and a greater likelihood of war. The likelihood of state failure through internal war, projected to diminish through 2035 with increasing globalization, rises in the deglobalization scenario particularly among the non-OECD democracies. Similarly, deglobalization makes for more fractious relations among states and the probability for interstate war rises.
Draws in great powers
Liu Qing 11, Director of the Department for American Studies and an associate research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, May 20, 2011, “Existing and Emerging Threats to International Security: A View from the United Kingdom,” online: http://www.nuclearsecurityproject.org/publications/deterrence-its-past-and-future-panel-one
Financial and economic crisis begets political turmoil and drives destabilization on national, regional and global scales.¶ The current financial and economic crisis results in direct loss in wealth. A recent report by the Asian Development Bank suggests the crisis has already obliterated approximately $50 trillion in asset value worldwide - the equivalent of roughly a year of global economic output. Ultimately, the effects of the crisis spark destabilization, geopolitical tensions with far-reaching impacts.¶ We have already seen political reactions in public demonstrations in a diverse list of countries including both developed countries and developing countries. Some countries and key regions even suffer from unrests brought on by the crisis. Some unrests are taking the form of regime changes and social turmoil.¶ The crisis eats away at the foundations of stable governments. Job losers are angry at the “haves” and the failure of the government. The resentment produces social tensions. Governing parties lose political credibility, and opposition groups seek to use the crisis as a wedge issue or to mobilize support for their anti-government views. As a consequence, viable states become weaker; weaker states become failed states; failed states cause rifts and potential conflicts.¶ The weakening of states can produce instability that spills across borders. Opportunistic neighbors intend to make use of the political and economic weakness in those nations, and find excuses to intervene in their neighbour’s politics. Some wish to produce distractions from their own crises; some try to take control of neighboring territories. In order to respond to some of the geopolitical consequences caused by the crisis, some global powers may be involved into regional turmoil through military, aid or other forms of intervention. These actions eventually would worsen the regional security situation.
Growth’s sustainable—no risk of scarcity or collapse
John H. Matthews 12, and Frederick Boltz, Center for Conservation and Government, Conservation International, June 2012, “The Shifting Boundaries of Sustainability Science: Are We Doomed Yet?,” PLOS Biology, http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001344
Humans have long caused irreparable harm to ecosystems, driven species to extinction, and have in turn endured major shifts in biogeochemical cycling. We agree that such incidents are avoidable and unacceptable and that the magnitude of current trends must not be dismissed. Humans have also developed ingenious and novel ways of making resource use far more efficient or exploiting new types of resources. Obvious developments here include the invention of agriculture and the domestication of wild plant and animal species, of course, but humans have also been innovative in energy development (wood, wind, coal, petroleum, hydropower, biofuels, geothermal, biogen, nuclear, solar, and wave power), the development of synthetic chemical fertilizers in the 19th century, and the discovery of modern antibiotics in the 20th century. Other innovations have been organizational, such as the development of cities in the Levant and east and south Asia, the birth of modern experimental science, and the transition from family-tribal-moeity structures to multiple scales of governance (including corporate, national, international, and global government structures and institutions).
Some responses to economic and environmental change defy the longstanding predictions of overpopulation concerns, such as the widespread trend towards declining birthrates as living standards increase [32], though the relationship between per capita energy consumption and population growth is complex [33]. While Burger and colleagues point to increasing energy consumption over the past few centuries, they disregard important shifts in the sources of energy in progressive economies [1]; the expansion of low-carbon energy sources in China, Brazil, the European Union, and other regions in recent decades marks a critical transition, and a shift from coal-fired sources of power to hydropower or wind mark very significant transformations, with important implications for ecological footprints. For example, over 98% of Norway's electricity is derived from hydropower [34], about 20% of Brazil's transport fuels consumption is derived from renewable biofuels [35], while China has installed to date about 61 GW of windpower, or roughly three times the generation potential of the Three Gorges Dam [36]. The development of a global environmental movement is also notable in this context, as signified by both the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (attended by over 100 heads of state and 172 governments) as well as its planned 2012 successor conference, the Rio+20 Summit, in addition to important milestones achieved under the UN biodiversity and climate conventions (i.e., the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity [UNCBD] and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC]).
While these and other innovations in organization, efficiency, and technology have had unintended side effects, they also resulted in major transitions in human survivorship, resource extraction efficiency, and social and cultural organization. They were also largely unanticipated or very difficult to predict for most observers prior to their invention. Taken together, humans have demonstrated great creativity in how we use technological, social, and cultural “tools” to solve resource limitations.
Not Doomed (Yet) Top
Our “adjustments” to the view of sustainability science presented by Brown and colleagues [1] are not meant to obscure or downplay absolute declines in resources such as economically valuable metals and agriculturally productive land, our heedless approach to anticipated tipping points in greenhouse gas accumulation, and ecosystem transformation and species extinction. The availability of natural resources is less of a problem than absolute limits in the Earth's ability to absorb the different outputs of economic activities, while maintaining conditions necessary for human productivity, much less the survival of humans and other species. Anthropogenic climate change is perhaps the most prominent example of these new scarcities and emerging “limits to growth.” Indeed, we attribute great merit to these cautionary appeals and to the evidence of Earth system thresholds. We argue for positive responses in behavior, technological progress, and economic realignments commensurate with the challenge of fulfilling human needs while maintaining an Earth system suitable for the long-term survival of humans and other species.
The authors ask, Can the Earth support even current levels of human resource use and waste production, let alone provide for projected population growth and economic development? They answer their question with little doubt: “There is increasing evidence that modern humans have already exceeded global limits on population and socioeconomic development, because essential resources are being consumed at unsustainable rates” [1]. We agree that our present consumptive trajectory risks surpassing perceived planetary boundaries in the safe operating space for humanity (c.f. [11]). We argue that these risks merit a paradigm shift, a global transformation—and that this paradigm shift is underway. We believe that the transition from relatively static approaches to sustainability to flexible green economies embedded in dynamic, variable ecosystems will prove to be a critical intellectual shift for humans this century.
There are reasons for cautious optimism. It is no accident that the modern synthesis of payments for ecosystem services crystallized in the developing world in Costa Rica when the scarcity of ecosystem goods and services from forest conversion was recognized as a social and economic threat [37]. Revolutionary approaches to water management such as dynamic environmental flows have evolved to address both climate variability and absolute shifts in Tanzania's precipitation regime (http://www.iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/esaro/what_we_do/water_and_wetlands/prbmp_esaro/). A global policy and economic transformation attributing value to standing forest has emerged with the development of “REDD+” incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, particularly in tropical forests (c.f. [38]). Many developing countries understand that Western models of development are inappropriate if not impossible to achieve. We believe that these and other positive trends are both accelerating and permeating local, national, and global economies quickly and permanently.
No mindset shift and lack of growth turns all their offense
Mead, 12 --- Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College (7/28/2012, Walter Russell, “The Energy Revolution 4: Hot Planet?” http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/07/28/the-energy-revolution-4-hot-planet/)
Capitalism is not, Monbiot is forced to admit, a fragile system that will easily be replaced. Bolstered by huge supplies of oil, it is here to stay. Industrial civilization is, as far as he can now see, unstoppable. Gaia, that treacherous slut, has made so much oil and gas that her faithful acolytes today cannot protect her from the consequences of her own folly. Welcome to the New Green Doom: an overabundance of oil and gas is going to release so much greenhouse gas that the world is going to fry. The exploitation of the oil sands in Alberta, warn leading environmentalists, is a tipping point. William McKibben put it this way in an interview with Wired magazine in the fall of 2011: I think if we go whole-hog in the tar sands, we’re out of luck. Especially since that would doubtless mean we’re going whole-hog at all the other unconventional energy sources we can think of: Deepwater drilling, fracking every rock on the face of the Earth, and so forth. Here’s why the tar sands are important: It’s a decision point about whether, now that we’re running out of the easy stuff, we’re going to go after the hard stuff. The Saudi Arabian liquor store is running out of bottles. Do we sober up, or do we find another liquor store, full of really crappy booze, to break into? A year later, despite the success of environmentalists like McKibben at persuading the Obama administration to block a pipeline intended to ship this oil to refineries in the US, it’s clear (as it was crystal clear all along to anyone with eyes to see) that the world has every intention of making use of the “crappy liquor.” Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record. Nevertheless, the future of the environment is not nearly as dim as greens think. Despairing environmentalists like McKibben and Monbiot are as wrong about what the new era of abundance means as green energy analysts were about how much oil the planet had. The problem is the original sin of much environmental thought: Malthusianism. If greens weren’t so addicted to Malthusian horror narratives they would be able to see that the new era of abundance is going to make this a cleaner planet faster than if the new gas and oil had never been found. Let’s be honest. It has long been clear to students of history, and has more recently begun to dawn on many environmentalists, that all that happy-clappy carbon treaty stuff was a pipe dream and that nothing like that is going to happen. A humanity that hasn’t been able to ban the bomb despite the clear and present dangers that nuclear weapons pose isn’t going to ban or even seriously restrict the internal combustion engine and the generator. The political efforts of the green movement to limit greenhouse gasses have had very little effect so far, and it is highly unlikely that they will have more success in the future. The green movement has been more of a group hug than a curve bending exercise, and that is unlikely to change. If the climate curve bends, it will bend the way the population curve did: as the result of lots of small human decisions driven by short term interest calculations rather than as the result of a grand global plan. The shale boom hasn’t turned green success into green failure. It’s prevented green failure from turning into something much worse. Monbiot understands this better than McKibben; there was never any real doubt that we’d keep going to the liquor store. If we hadn’t found ways to use all this oil and gas, we wouldn’t have embraced the economics of less. True, as oil and gas prices rose, there would be more room for wind and solar power, but the real winner of an oil and gas shortage is… coal. To use McKibben’s metaphor, there is a much dirtier liquor store just down the road from the shale emporium, and it’s one we’ve been patronizing for centuries. The US and China have oodles of coal, and rather than walk to work from our cold and dark houses all winter, we’d use it. Furthermore, when and if the oil runs out, the technology exists to get liquid fuel out of coal. It isn’t cheap and it isn’t clean, but it works. The newly bright oil and gas future means that we aren’t entering a new Age of Coal. For this, every green on the planet should give thanks. The second reason why greens should give thanks for shale is that environmentalism is a luxury good. People must survive and they will survive by any means necessary. But they would much rather thrive than merely survive, and if they can arrange matters better, they will. A poor society near the edge of survival will dump the industrial waste in the river without a second thought. It will burn coal and choke in the resulting smog if it has nothing else to burn. Politics in an age of survival is ugly and practical. It has to be. The best leader is the one who can cut out all the fluff and the folderol and keep you alive through the winter. During the Battle of Leningrad, people burned priceless antiques to stay alive for just one more night. An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people. Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away. Nor will they vote George Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power. They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them. But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed. We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure. A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them. As China gets richer, the Chinese want cleaner air, cleaner water, purer food — and they are ready and able to pay for them. A Brazil whose economic future is secure can afford to treasure and conserve its rain forests. A Central America where the people are doing all right is more willing and able to preserve its biodiversity. And a world in which people know where their next meal is coming from is a world that can and will take thought for things like the sustainability of the fisheries and the protection of the coral reefs. A world that is more relaxed about the security of its energy sources is going to be able to do more about improving the quality of those sources and about managing the impact of its energy consumption on the global commons. A rich, energy secure world is going to spend more money developing solar power and wind power and other sustainable sources than a poor, hardscrabble one. When human beings think their basic problems are solved, they start looking for more elegant solutions. Once Americans had an industrial and modern economy, we started wanting to clean up the rivers and the air. Once people aren’t worried about getting enough calories every day to survive, they start wanting healthier food more elegantly prepared. A world of abundant shale oil and gas is a world that will start imposing more environmental regulations on shale and gas producers. A prosperous world will set money aside for research and development for new technologies that conserve energy or find it in cleaner surroundings. A prosperous world facing climate change will be able to ameliorate the consequences and take thought for the future in ways that a world overwhelmed by energy insecurity and gripped in a permanent economic crisis of scarcity simply can’t and won’t do. Greens should also be glad that the new energy is where it is. For Monbiot and for many others, Gaia’s decision to put so much oil into the United States and Canada seems like her biggest indiscretion of all. Certainly, a United States of America that has, in the Biblical phrase, renewed its youth like an eagle with a large infusion of fresh petro-wealth is going to be even less eager than formerly to sign onto various pie-in-the-sky green carbon treaties. But think how much worse things would be if the new reserves lay in dictatorial kleptocracies. How willing and able would various Central Asia states have been to regulate extraction and limit the damage? How would Nigeria have handled vast new reserves whose extraction required substantially more invasive methods? Instead, the new sources are concentrated in places where environmentalists have more say in policy making and where, for all the shortcomings and limits, governments are less corruptible, more publicly accountable and in fact more competent to develop and enforce effective energy regulations. This won’t satisfy McKibben and Monbiot (nothing that could actually happen would satisfy either of these gentlemen), but it is a lot better than what we could be facing. Additionally, if there are two countries in the world that should worry carbon-focused greens more than any other, they are the United States and China. The two largest, hungriest economies in the world are also home to enormous coal reserves. But based on what we now know, the US and China are among the biggest beneficiaries of the new cornucopia. Gaia put the oil and the gas where, from a carbon point of view, it will do the most good. In a world of energy shortages and insecurity, both the US and China would have gone flat out for coal. Now, that is much less likely. And there’s one more reason why greens should thank Gaia for shale. Wind and solar aren’t ready for prime time now, but by the time the new sources start to run low, humanity will have mastered many more technologies that can used to provide energy and to conserve it. It’s likely that Age of Shale hasn’t just postponed the return of coal: because of this extra time, there likely will never be another age in which coal is the dominant industrial fuel. It’s virtually certain that the total lifetime carbon footprint of the human race is going to be smaller with the new oil and gas sources than it would have been without them. Neither the world’s energy problems nor its climate issues are going away any time soon. Paradise is not beckoning just a few easy steps away. But the new availability of these energy sources is on balance a positive thing for environmentalists as much as for anyone else. Perhaps, and I know this is a heretical thought, but perhaps Gaia is smarter than the greens.
And, alternatives to growth kill hundreds of millions and cause global conflict—we can’t “turn off” the economy.
Barnhizer 6 — David R. Barnhizer, Emeritus Professor at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, 2006 (“Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream": The Decisionmaking Realities of Business and Government,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (18 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 595), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
The scale of social needs, including the need for expanded productive activity, has grown so large that it cannot be shut off at all, and certainly not abruptly. It cannot even be ratcheted down in any significant fashion without producing serious harms to human societies and hundreds of millions of people. Even if it were possible to shift back to systems of local self-sufficiency, the consequences of the transition process would be catastrophic for many people and even deadly to the point of continual conflict, resource wars, increased poverty, and strife. What are needed are concrete, workable, and pragmatic strategies that produce effective and intelligently designed economic activity in specific contexts and, while seeking efficiency and conservation, place economic and social justice high on a list of priorities. n60
The imperative of economic growth applies not only to the needs and expectations of people in economically developed societies but also to people living in nations that are currently economically underdeveloped. Opportunities must be created, jobs must be generated in huge numbers, and economic resources expanded to address the tragedies of poverty and inequality. Unfortunately, natural systems must be exploited to achieve this; we cannot return to Eden. The question is not how to achieve a static state but how to achieve what is needed to advance social justice while avoiding and mitigating the most destructive consequences of our behavior.
Economic growth is vital to effectively confront every global problem—additional resources are needed.
Silk 93 — Leonard Silk, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Pace University, Senior Research Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute on the United Nations at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and former Economics Columnist with the New York Times, 1993 (“Dangers of Slow Growth,” Foreign Affairs, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
Like the Great Depression, the current economic slump has fanned the firs of nationalist, ethnic and religious hatred around the world. Economic hardship is not the only cause of these social and political pathologies, but it aggravates all of them, and in turn they feed back on economic development. They also undermine efforts to deal with such global problems as environmental pollution, the production and trafficking of drugs, crime, sickness, famine, AIDS and other plagues.
Growth will not solve all those problems by itself. But economic growth – and growth alone – creates the additional resources that make it possible to achieve such fundamental goals as higher living standards, national and collective security, a healthier environment, and more liberal and open economies and societies.
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