Impact Defense Core

Economy
Agriculture

International agriculture subsidies artificially drive down global crop prices
and devastate global marketbiggest alt cause
Clay, 13-- Jason Clay is the senior vice president of market transformation at WWF-US(
Jason, August 8
th
, 2013, The Guardian Professional, Are agricultural subsidies causing
more harm than good?, http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
business/agricultural-subsidies-reform-government-support)//IK
At the World Trade Organisation's Doha Round in 2001, many developing nations
including Brazil, China and India opposed agricultural subsidies in the US and EU.
They argued the high subsidies were artificially driving down global crop
prices, unfairly undermining small farmers and maintaining poverty in
many developing countries. What a difference 12 years makes. In that time,
developing countries have grown their own agricultural subsidies rapidly. And those in
BRIIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and China) have increased the fastest.
China's agricultural subsidies, estimated at $160bn (103bn) in 2012, now dwarf those
in the US ($19bn) and EU ($67bn) combined. Brazil's agricultural subsidies have
doubled in just three years, and now total about $10bn, according to a recent
government report. And in India, price supports for wheat and rice grew by 72% and
75%, respectively, between 2005-06 and 2010-11, significantly exceeding those in the US.
If done well, these rapidly developing countries' agricultural investments could support
innovation and help build a stronger middle class, feed the hungry, produce surpluses
for export and pull millions of the rural poor out of poverty and into better lifestyles. But
such spending must be very targeted and short term. For example, a subsidy could be
used to support the adoption of technologies or practices that are not common with
producers. But, once proven to be cost effective, the subsidies should be removed. In
general, subsidies should be employed to change behaviour and solve specific problems
rather than to serve as a long-term crutch for producers. If not, it will stifle innovation
and make producers both less competitive and more dependent on government. On our
finite planet, where natural resources are increasingly hard to come by, it's important for
producers to focus on doing more with less. Subsidies tend to reduce incentives
for producers to boost efficiency and shift their focus from crops to farming
subsidies. As a result, many end up doing less with more. For example, India
subsidises the cost of energy to pump water for agriculture, which encourages producers
to pump more water than they need. This has made Indian producers among the world's
least efficient water users. Given that food and water are in short supply, a more effective
way to run the system would be to support those who produce more food with less water.
Global subsidies may also lead producers to overuse fertilisers or pesticides, which can
result in soil degradation, groundwater depletion and other negative environmental
impacts. In addition, agricultural subsidies and price supports can also distort global
commodity markets, affecting the global economy, and affect national security, food
security and poverty. As per-capita incomes and consumption increase globally, the last
thing we need are market distortions that send producers unclear signals about food
prices and global demand. Unless handled carefully, agricultural subsidies could
undermine efforts to promote efficiency and more sustainable agriculture.
And that, in turn, could make many people reluctant to invest in sustainability at all.
What we need, now more than ever, are producers who invest in efficiency, innovation
and sustainability. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, an increasing number of
producers defend subsidies and seek to maintain or even increase them. To change this
situation, governments first need to wake up to the long-term implications of
agricultural subsidies. It is advisable for them to be more wary. After all, many
developing countries still struggle to provide basic services such as clean air and water,
education, public services, infrastructure and healthcare for ageing populations. Within
the context of these competing needs, we need to ensure that any agricultural subsidies
increase productivity, efficiency and global competitiveness. Otherwise, it will be
increasingly difficult to justify supporting one segment of the population when so many
other priorities remain unfunded. We've come a long way since the Doha launch, in
terms of global economic growth and the increase in global per-capita GDP. Many BRIIC
and developing countries have led the way. Now we need to take a hard look to assess
whether agricultural subsidies are the best way to address food security and other basic
human needs. Global economic progress requires a recalibration of how we approach
today's challenges. Agricultural subsidies can be a blunt instrument that can impede
progress and slow economic growth if they're wielded without precision and a specific
cut-off date. We'll only succeed in protecting our planet and our food
security if we change how we think about subsidies and how we use them.


No impact - Squo solves
Resurreccion 13 [Lyn. Science Editor for Business Mirror. Crop Biotechnology: A
Continuing Success Globally The Business Mirror, 2/23/13 ]
CROP biotechnology has been achieving continuing success globally as the number of
farmers who use it and the farms planted to biotech crops are increasing, recording 17.3
million farmers who planted the crops in 170.3 hectares in 28 countries in 2012, Dr.
Clive James, chairman of the board of directors of the International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), said on Thursday. James said the
trend in crop biotechnology is in favor of developing countries, which compose 20 of the
28 countries that adopt the technology. Another significant development, he said, was
that for the first time developing countries planted more biotech crops in 2012, with 52
percent, against the developing countries 48 percent. They registered equal production
in 2011. This, James said, was contrary to the perception of critics that biotech crops are
only for the developed countries and would not be adopted by developing countries. The
increase in biotech farms in 2012 recorded a growth rate of 6 percent, or 10.3 million
hectares more from 160 million hectares in 2011, James told a select group of journalists
at a hotel in Makati City when he announced the results of the ISAAA report Global
Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops for 2012. James said this development
was remarkable because it recorded a 100-fold increase in biotech crop hectarage in
the 17th year of its adoptionfrom 1.7 million hectares in 1996, when it was first
commercialized. It also reflects the confidence of farmers in the technology. They make
their decision on the second year [on the technology they use] based on the performance
of the first year, he said. He noted that of the 17.3 million farmers, 15.5 million, or 90
percent, are resource-poor, thereby helping farmers increase their income. He said
biotech contributed to economic gains of $100 billion from 1996 to 2011, half of this was
from reduced production cost, such as less pesticide sprays, less plowing and fewer labor,
and the other half was from increased production per hectare. Increased production,
James said, resulted in increase in farmers income and more money in their pockets.

Ag labor shortages are exaggerated
Martin 7 (Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the
University of California, Davis, 07, Farm Labor Shortages: How Real? What Response?
http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back907.html)
News reports and editorials suggest widespread farm labor shortages. The
Los Angeles Times described a nationwide farm worker shortage threatening to leave
fruits and vegetables rotting in fields.1 The Wall Street Journal in a July 20, 2007,
editorial claimed that farmers nationwide are facing their most serious labor shortage
in years. The editorial asserted that 20 percent of American agricultural products
were stranded at the farm gate in 2006, including a third of North Carolina
cucumbers, and predicted that crop losses in California would hit 30 percent in 2007.
The Wall Street Journal editorial continued that, since growers can only afford to pay
so much and stay competitive, some U.S. growers are moving fruit and vegetable
production abroad. The New York Times profiled a southern California vegetable grower
who rented land in Mexico to produce lettuce and broccoli because, the grower asserted:
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I did that [raise U.S. wages] I would raise
my costs and I would not have a legal work force.2 These reports of farm labor
shortages are not accompanied by data that would buttress the anecdotes,
like lower production of fruits and vegetables or a rise in farm wages as
growers scrambled for the fewer workers available. There is a simple
reason. Fruit and vegetable production is rising, the average earnings of
farm workers are not going up extraordinarily fast, and consumers are not
feeling a pinch the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables has averaged about $1 a day
for most households over the past decade.

Failing agriculture infrastructure causes high food prices
UN Committee on Transport 8 United Nations Economic and Social Council,
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSION FOR ASIA AND THE PACIFIC,
TRANSPORT AND POVERTY: FROM FARM TO MARKETEXTENDING THE REACH
OF LOGISTICS, http://www.unescap.org/ttdw/ct2008/ctr_2e.pdf
SUMMARY Recent increases in the price of food and concerns over its availability and
access to it have focused attention on overcoming problems related to the transport of
agricultural food products. Rising transport costs can account for up to two
thirds of food prices. In addition, spoilage between farm and market as a result of
inadequate transport, storage and processing render a large share of perishable food
unusable, which is having a major impact on the poorer segment of communities in the
region. While food trades are increasingly complex and some countries have put in place
advanced logistics solutions, the majority of the countries in Asia and the Pacific have yet
to establish the infrastructure and institutional frameworks needed to ensure the
efficient, seamless transport of foods from farm to market. This document contains a
preliminary investigation of the way transport and logistics impact the sustainable
development of the food industry and identifies issues that need to be further addressed
at the national and regional levels. Delegations may wish to share their experiences and
progress and discuss challenges concerning food transport and logistics. The Committee
may also wish to propose further research that could be presented to the Forum of Asian
Ministers of Transport in 2009 as the basis of a regional exchange of experiences to
enhance the availability of and access to food through improved transport and logistics.
INTRODUCTION 1. Recent soaring food prices have brought the agricultural food
industry into the international spotlight. Table 1 shows the dramatic increase in the
cereal export prices of the main suppliers to the Asian region. While prices in major
grain trades increased by some 50-70 per cent between mid-2007 and mid-2008, those
for rice, the main staple food in Asia, nearly tripled over the same period of time.
Although the food market situation differs from country to country and future
development remains highly uncertain, a report by the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations suggests that food prices are likely to remain high in
the years to come. 2. Transport and logistics account for a large part of final
food prices and increasing oil and energy costs have made this topic even
more relevant. Despite the high share of transport costs and the increased incidence of
food spoilage in the process of transport and storage, questions of food transport and
logistics have not been addressed in a comprehensive and coherent manner at the
international level. A report by the United States Government Accountability Office in
April 2007 showed that transport and other overhead costs consumed 65 per cent of
United States food aid dollars, mainly due to rising fuel prices. 2 3. Inadequate logistics
systems not only increase costs but also impact the availability of food to consumers.
According to a report by the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, Chinas cold storage
capacity is estimated to cover only 20-30 per cent of demand. A lack of controlled
atmosphere and refrigeration equipment leads to spoilage losses of up to 33 per cent of
perishable food. 3 In India, various research studies by the Economic Times Intelligence
Group and the Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency reveal that large
quantities of grain are wasted due to improper handling and storage, pest infestation,
poor logistics, inadequate storage and a lack of transport infrastructure. 4 4.
Furthermore, adequate infrastructure and access to transport services are
prerequisites for the development of sustainable food trade, and requirements
are becoming increasingly complex in importing countries and regions as more countries
move into sophisticated trading in fresh fruit and vegetables, meat or fish at the domestic
or international levels.
Aff cant solve - climate change collapses agriculture
Lewis 13 Instructor of Mass Communication at Frostburg State (Thomas A, USDA
Report Foresees Collapse of Agriculture, 2-8-13, The Daily Impact,
http://www.dailyimpact.net/2013/02/08/usda-foresees-collapse-of-agriculture) //AD

A new US Department of Agriculture report looking only at the threat of climate change
implies that industrial agriculture will be on its knees in 25 years. Were going to end up
in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively
impact crop production, said Jerry Hatfield, lead author of the study. In fact, we saw
this in 2012 with the drought. Ever the cheerleader for industrial agriculture, the USDA
insists that corporate farmers will be fine for a couple dozen years as long as they
increase irrigation, use genetically modified, drought-resistant seeds and move. After
that time frame, however, the USDA report the third annual Climate Assessment
Report, just released in draft form for public review throws up its hands and admits
that escalating temperatures will stunt crops, reduce yields, stimulate weeds and insects,
overheat food animals, foster disease and worst of all reduce profitability. In other
words, it will be the end of the world as they know it. Okay, thats snide. The report states
flatly that within 25 years the cumulative effects of global warming will become a threat
to the security of the United States. The report [summarized in USA Today] is
remarkable on two counts. First, of course, is that the cheerleaders are losing their
cheery confidence that we will somehow win this game. Second is how pessimistic they
become when looking at only one set of threats. According to the report, one way to fight
climate change, which already has half the country locked in a vicious drought, is to
increase irrigation. Right. And their likely advice to the millions who will be starving
when the water runs out and the crops fail: you should eat more. What about topsoil loss,
which continues to accelerate despite billions spent on conservation half-measures?
What about the rise of pesticide-resistant weeds, bugs and bacteria? What about the
poisoning of rivers and lakes, and the dead zones in the oceans? Add all these effects to
the reports slender survey and its hard to imagine getting through 25 years before it
gets serious. Still, can we expect Big Ag to change its ways now that its own team has
issued a report as brutal in its outlook as this one? Hardly. Because the same government
that paid for the report gives them cheap insurance against crop failure. Cheap crop
insurance like cheap flood insurance is a product so ruinous to the insurer that no
private company will touch it.


Aluminum
No impact to aluminum only 1% of the TOTAL GDP
Aluminum Association NO date (Aluminum Association, Facts at a Glance,
http://www.aluminum.org/aluminum-advantage/facts-glance)
75 percent of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today.
Infinitely recyclable and highly durable, 75 percent of all aluminum ever produced is still
in use today. Aluminum is 100 percent recyclable and retains its properties indefinitely.
Aluminum is one of the only materials in the consumer disposal stream that more than
pays for the cost of its own collection.
Aluminum can absorb twice the crash energy of steel.
Pound for pound, aluminum absorbs twice the crash energy of steel and performs as well
in an accident. Aluminum crash rails fold up like an accordion, which dissipates and
directs energy away from the vehicles occupants. Aluminum also provides advantages in
stopping distance, handling and performance.
Aluminum can be merged with special films to create flexible packaging.
Increasingly, aluminum foil is being merged with flexible films to create lightweight,
flexible packages. This technology allows the packaging to expand to the shape of their
contents then contract as the product is consumed.
Aluminum foil provides a complete barrier to light, oxygen, moisture and bacteria.
Aluminum foil provides a complete barrier to light, oxygen, moisture and bacteria. For
this reason, foil is used extensively in food and pharmaceutical packaging. Aluminum foil
is also used to make aseptic packaging. This type of packaging enables storage of
perishable goods without refrigeration.
Aluminum roofs reflect up to 95 percent of sunlight.
Aluminum is superior to steel and iron in its ability to reflect the infrared (heat) rays of
the sun. Roofs made from aluminum reflect up to 95 percent of the solar energy that
strikes them, dramatically improving energy efficiency. Aluminum is a key component in
LEED-certified green buildings.
Aluminum wire and conduit does not spark.
Unlike wire conduit made from steel, rigid aluminum does not spark, resists corrosion
and will not rust. These properties of aluminum are vitally important for electrical
applications within coal mines, grain elevators and refineries (where the sparking can
lead to catastrophic outcomes).
Aluminum-intensive cars save 44 million tons of CO2 emissions.
Independent studies have confirmed that aluminum has a 20 percent smaller life cycle
CO2 footprint than steel. And compared with todays steel cars, a fleet of aluminum
vehicles saves the equivalent of 44 million tons of CO2 emissions.
An aluminum can becomes a new can in less than 60 days when it is recycled.
When you recycle a can, it can be back on the shelf in as little as 60 days in a continuous
recycling loop. Every minute,113,000 aluminum cans are recycled. The high value of
aluminum means that can recycling programs have enabled charitable organizations to
earn funds and support projects for decades.
Builders have safely used aluminum wiring for more than 40 years.
The National Electrical Code has permitted the use of aluminum wire since 1901, a mere
four years after the first recognized national electrical code was published in 1897. AA-
8000 aluminum conductors have more than 40 years of reliable field installations.
NASAs next space vehicle will be built with aluminum.
The Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) will serve as NASAs next-generation
space exploration vehicle. Lockheed Martin chose aluminum-lithium for construction of
the primary structures of the spacecraft.
Recycling aluminum saves more than 90 percent of the energy needed to make new
aluminum.
Recycling aluminum saves more than 90 percent of the energy that would be needed to
create a comparable amount of the metal from raw materials. Tossing away an aluminum
can wastes as much energy as pouring out half of that cans volume of gasoline. Nearly 75
percent of all aluminum produced is still in use today.
The 2015 Ford F-150 will feature an all-aluminum body, shedding 700 lbs.
Ford releases the all-aluminum-body F-150 in 2015. The truck will shed 700 pounds
(approximately 15 percent of the vehicles body weight) by using of high-strength,
military-grade aluminum. This weight reduction will allow Ford to meet new demands
for fuel economy and sets the stage for fleet-wide efficiency improvements.
The aluminum industry directly employs more than 155,000 workers.
More than 155,000 workers are directly employed in the aluminum industry. For each
aluminum industry job, an additional 3.3 employment positions are created elsewhere in
the economy. In total, 672,000 U.S. jobs are created by the production, processing and
use of aluminum.
The aluminum industry generates more than $65 billion a year in direct economic
impact.
The U.S. aluminum industry generates more than $65 billion a year in direct economic
impact. When all suppliers and related business functions are taken into
account, the industry drives $152 billion in economic impactnearly 1
percent of GDP.
The aluminum industry's carbon footprint has declined nearly 40% since 1995.
Voluntary environmental efforts mean that aluminum made in North America is more
sustainable today than ever before. Energy required to produce new aluminum is down
more than a quarter since 1995 and the industrys carbon footprint is down nearly 40
percent.

No impact efforts are being taken to keep prices at a sustainable rate
Seeking Alpha 13 (Alcoa and the Future of the Aluminum Production Industry
Seeking Alpha,
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1645342-alcoa-and-the-future-of-the-aluminum-
production-industry

Aluminum (JJU) is an interesting commodity because it can be recycled repeatedly
without losing quality and has unique characteristics that make it ideal for many
industries. Before 1886, when aluminum could not be smelted on a large scale, the metal
had been more valuable than gold (GLD). Now, with electrolytic reduction (the process
of smelting aluminum), aluminum can be produced on a large scale, but it requires large
amounts of electricity. While the energy necessary to smelt aluminum has decreased 70%
in the last century, electricity still remains a key variable cost in aluminum production.
Alcoa (AA), the third-largest aluminum producer, projects that the global aluminum
demand will grow by 7% in 2013. The main problem facing the aluminum producing
industry, however, is its overcapacity; currently there is an excess of 12 million tons of
worldwide aluminum inventory. The World Aluminum Congress contends that to solve
this problem, the aluminum industry will have to close at least 3 million tons of capacity
immediately. Rusal, the second largest aluminum producer, projects that the current
trajectory of production cuts will cause the price of aluminum to rise to more than
$2,000 per ton up from $1,835 per ton in May.
Though the entire industry has been struggling to remain profitable, its concerted effort
to reduce production and the U.S. Congress's recent efforts to investigate aluminum
price manipulation by investment banks such as Goldman Sachs will help increase
profits for aluminum producers. Alcoa is in the best position to benefit from increased
aluminum demand because of its high-margin ancillary business, manufacturing
engineered aluminum products. Tim Ghriskey of Solaris Asset Management said, "Alcoa
continues to show they can cut costs and will be a survivor. This is a company that
remains profitable and strong despite the tough environment."
Additionally, our algorithm predicts that Alcoa's stock will increase in the three-month
time horizon. With the aluminum production industry at a longtime low, I believe that
Alcoa is in the best position to take advantage of the growing demand, lower artificial
price premium, and impending increased aluminum prices.
The Major Players and Markets
Though there are many smaller regional producers: the five largest aluminum producers
in the world are Rio Tinto Alcan, Rusal, Alcoa, Chalco (ACH), and Norsk Hydro. China is
by far the largest market for aluminum and snippets of news on shifts in China's demand
often have big effects on the price of aluminum. Chalco is a large, but regional Chinese
aluminum producer, whereas the other four producers all have international presences.
Rio Tinto (RIO) is a large mining conglomerate, but its aluminum production is only a
small component of its business; therefore, Rio Tinto's stock is barely influenced by
aluminum pricing and news. Alcoa and Chalco are the only major aluminum producers
listed on the NYSE; Alcoa is also included in the DJIA.
Competitiveness
Competitiveness terminally screwed aff cant solve manufacturing/energy
Gopinath and Diez 7-24 - Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a
visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a research associate with the
National Bureau of Economic Research, and a World Economic Forum Young Global
Leader, **economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (Gita, Federico, The
Onshoring Myth, Project Syndicate, 7-24-14, http://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/federico-d-ez-and-gita-gopinath-refute-claims-that-the-us-
is-experiencing-a-significant-return-of-manufacturing) //AD

The decade that preceded the 2008 financial crisis was marked by massive global trade
imbalances, as the United States ran large bilateral deficits, especially with China. Since
the crisis reached its nadir, these imbalances have been partly reversed, with Americas
trade deficit, as a share of GDP, declining from its 2006 peak of 5.5% to 3.4% in 2012,
and Chinas surplus shrinking from 7.7% to 2.8% over the same period. But is this a
temporary adjustment, or is long-term rebalancing at hand?
Many have cited as evidence of more durable rebalancing the onshoring of US
manufacturing that had previously relocated to emerging markets. Apple, for example,
has established new plants in Texas and Arizona, and General Electric plans to move
production of its washing machines and refrigerators to Kentucky.
Several indicators suggest that, after decades of secular decline, Americas
manufacturing competitiveness is indeed on the rise. While labor costs have increased in
developing countries, they have remained relatively stable in the US. In fact, the real
effective exchange rate (REER), adjusted by US manufacturing unit labor costs, has
depreciated by 30% since 2001, and by 17% since 2005, suggesting a rapid erosion of
emerging markets low-cost advantage and giving Americas competitiveness a
substantial boost.
Moreover, the shale-gas revolution in the US that took off in 2007-2008 promises to
reduce energy costs considerably. And Americas share of world manufacturing exports,
which declined by 4.5 percentage points from 2000 to 2008, has stabilized and even
increased by 0.35 percentage points in 2012.
Upon closer inspection, however, the data for 1999-2012 present little evidence of
significant onshoring of US manufacturing. For starters, the share of US domestic
demand for manufactures that is met by imports has shown no sign of reversal. In fact,
the offshoring of manufacturing increased by 9%.
This trend holds even for those sectors dominated by imports from China, where labor
costs are on the rise. Indeed, for sectors in which Chinese imports accounted for at least
40% of demand in 2011, the import share has increased at a faster pace than it has for
manufacturing overall.
Furthermore, if relative labor costs are an important driver of Americas terms of trade
(the relative price of exports in terms of imports), more labor-intensive sectors should
have experienced a larger decline. But the data provide little evidence of this.
The only solid evidence of an increase in US competitiveness stems from the sharp rise in
output of shale gas. Industries with large energy requirements, like chemical
manufacturing, have experienced a much smaller increase in import share than less
energy-intensive industries like computers and electronic products. This suggests that
energy-intensive sectors are more likely to experience onshoring.
More broadly, the data on US domestic production seem to be inconsistent with the
behavior of the REER and its suggestion of a significant increase in competitiveness. To a
large extent, this discrepancy reflects a low and delayed exchange-rate pass-through into
US import prices, linked to Americas unique advantage of having more than 90% of its
imported goods priced in its own currency, with dollar prices remaining unchanged for
ten months at a time. Even conditional on prices being renegotiated, the pass-through is
quite low, with a 10% depreciation of the dollar appearing as a cumulative 3% increase in
import prices after two years. The disconnect between Americas terms of trade and the
far more volatile REER is also consistent with low and delayed exchange-rate pass-
through.
The evidence is clear: Claims that manufacturing is returning to the US simply do not
hold water. Of course, given that the increase in emerging economies labor costs and the
decline in American energy prices are recent developments, import shares could begin to
decline in a few years. But, with that outcome far from certain, the US cannot rely on a
rapid increase in manufacturing competitiveness to underpin its economic recovery.

Competitiveness is overwhelmingly sustainable
Zakaria 8 - Newsweek editor, IR badass (Fareed, The Future of American Power,
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63394/fareed-
zakaria/the-future-of-american-power) //AD

This difference between the United States and Britain is reflected in the burden of their
military budgets. Britannia ruled the seas but never the land. The British army was
sufficiently small that Otto von Bismarck once quipped that were the British ever to
invade Germany, he would simply have the local police force arrest them. Meanwhile,
London's advantage over the seas -- it had more tonnage than the next two navies put
together -- came at ruinous cost. The U.S. military, in contrast, dominates at every level -
- land, sea, air, space -- and spends more than the next 14 countries combined,
accounting for almost 50 percent of global defense spending. The United States also
spends more on defense research and development than the rest of the world put
together. And crucially, it does all this without breaking the bank. U.S. defense
expenditure as a percent of GDP is now 4.1 percent, lower than it was for most of the
Cold War (under Dwight Eisenhower, it rose to ten percent). As U.S. GDP has grown
larger and larger, expenditures that would have been backbreaking have become
affordable. The Iraq war may be a tragedy or a noble endeavor, but either way, it will not
bankrupt the United States. The price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan together -- $125
billion a year -- represents less than one percent of GDP. The war in Vietnam, by
comparison, cost the equivalent of 1.6 percent of U.S. GDP in 1970, a large difference.
(Neither of these percentages includes second- or third-order costs of war, which allows
for a fair comparison even if one disputes the exact figures.) U.S. military power is not
the cause of its strength but the consequence. The fuel is the United States' economic and
technological base, which remains extremely strong. The United States does face larger,
deeper, and broader challenges than it has ever faced in its history, and it will
undoubtedly lose some share of global GDP. But the process will look nothing like
Britain's slide in the twentieth century, when the country lost the lead in innovation,
energy, and entrepreneurship. The United States will remain a vital, vibrant economy, at
the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology, and industry. In trying to
understand how the United States will fare in the new world, the first thing to do is
simply look around: the future is already here. Over the last 20 years, globalization has
been gaining breadth and depth. More countries are making goods, communications
technology has been leveling the playing field, capital has been free to move across the
world -- and the United States has benefited massively from these trends. Its economy
has received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, and its companies have
entered new countries and industries with great success. Despite two decades of a very
expensive dollar, U.S. exports have held ground, and the World Economic Forum
currently ranks the United States as the world's most competitive economy. GDP growth,
the bottom line, has averaged just over three percent in the United States for 25 years,
significantly higher than in Europe or Japan. Productivity growth, the elixir of modern
economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, a full percentage point higher
than the European average. This superior growth trajectory might be petering out, and
perhaps U.S. growth will be more typical for an advanced industrialized country for the
next few years. But the general point -- that the United States is a highly dynamic
economy at the cutting edge, despite its enormous size -- holds. Consider the industries
of the future. Nanotechnology (applied science dealing with the control of matter at the
atomic or molecular scale) is likely to lead to fundamental breakthroughs over the next
50 years, and the United States dominates the field. It has more dedicated "nanocenters"
than the next three nations (Germany, Britain, and China) combined and has issued
more patents for nanotechnology than the rest of the world combined, highlighting its
unusual strength in turning abstract theory into practical products. Biotechnology (a
broad category that describes the use of biological systems to create medical,
agricultural, and industrial products) is also dominated by the United States. Biotech
revenues in the United States approached $50 billion in 2005, five times as large as the
amount in Europe and representing 76 percent of global biotech revenues.
Manufacturing has, of course, been leaving the country, shifting to the developing world
and turning the United States into a service economy. This scares many Americans, who
wonder what their country will make if everything is "made in China." But Asian
manufacturing must be viewed in the context of a global economy. The Atlantic
Monthly's James Fallows spent a year in China watching its manufacturing juggernaut
up close, and he provides a persuasive explanation of how outsourcing has strengthened
U.S. competitiveness. What it comes down to is that the real money is in designing and
distributing products -- which the United States dominates -- rather than manufacturing
them. A vivid example of this is the iPod: it is manufactured mostly outside the United
States, but most of the added value is captured by Apple, in California.

Competitiveness resilient despite recession
Scott 09 - reporter in BusinessWeek's London bureau (Mark, Competitiveness: The
U.S. and Europe Are Tops, Business Week, 5-19-09,
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2009/gb20090519_222765.htm)
//AD

The global financial crisis seemingly shifted economic power away from hard-hit
Western countries such as the U.S. and Britain to cash-rich emerging economies such as
India and China. But while the West is limping along today, economic power may shift
back when growth resumes. Why? Among the nations of the world, developed countries
still enjoy considerable advantages in fundamental economic competitivenesswhether
based on the quality of their infrastructure and educational systems or the sophistication
of their business laws and bureaucracy. That's the conclusion of the 2009 World
Competitiveness Yearbook, an annual report published by IMD business school in
Lausanne, Switzerland. Based on a detailed analysis of economic output, government
and business efficiency, skills, and infrastructure, the researchers ranked 57 of the
world's economies to determine which are best placed to succeed in the 21st century
economic race. Topping the list for the 16th consecutive year, unchanged from its No. 1
ranking in the 2008 report, was the U.S.despite a tough economic situation and rising
unemployment. With its world-class higher-education system, enormous and diverse
economy, and powerful infrastructure, the U.S. continues to be the world's biggest
economic engine and top destination for foreign direct investment.

No risk of losing competitiveness
Koba, 11 senior editor at CNBC (Mark, American Economic Decline? Exaggerated,
CNBC, 9/12/2011,
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44271677/American_Economic_Decline_Exaggerated)
//RGP
With a recent ratings downgrade, chronic unemployment, a growing budget deficitand a
political system that seems determined to self-destruct, it might appear that the U.S. is
losing its grip as the world's top economic power. But analysts say that despite the
laundry list of troublesand predications of an American declinethe country is far
from losing its ranking as the number one economy on the globe. "The U.S. economy is
the largest in the world, and the country has one of the highest average incomes in the
world," says Matthew Rafferty, professor of economics in the Quinnipiac University
School of Business. "There are few countries that are likely to rival the U.S. in the near
future." "I don't see U.S. power being eclipsed in the short term or even medium term,"
says Usha Haley, professor of international business at Massey University in Auckland,
New Zealand. "The U.S. has problems of course, but the demise of the USA is much
exaggerated." What's keeping the U.S. afloat in a sea of economic woes, analysts say, is
what's kept it upright in the pastinnovation and the ability to produce. "Silicon Valley
is still the world leader in technology, and Wall Street is still the center of the financial
world and of capitalism itself," says Charles Sizemore, CFA and editor of the Sizemore
Investment Letter. "And we're manufacturing more today than we did in the 1970s. It's
just with less labor." Even in spite of a slowing economy, as shown in the gross domestic
product (GDP), the U.S. is still ahead of other countries. Compared to the U.S., most of
the major industrialized nations' percentage of GDP is less than half that of the U.S.

Alt cause to competitiveness decline education cuts
Flannery, 12 staff writer (Mary Ellen, U.S. Competitiveness Undermined By Cuts in
Higher Education, NEA Today, 5/11/2012, http://neatoday.org/2012/05/11/u-s-
competitiveness-undermined-by-cuts-in-higher-education/) //RGP
When state and federal lawmakers invest in public higher education, it pays off not just
for those college degree-earning students, who will earn much more money over their
lifetimes, but also for their country, which will enjoy billions of dollars in additional
revenues, concludes a recent report.
Unfortunately, the United States hasnt made that investment, especially not in recent
years as state budgets for public higher education are slashed and federal college
affordability programs attacked, and now we are falling dangerously behind our global
competitors, write the authors of The Credential Differential, a report released last
month by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), an organization that seeks to
improve the lives of low-income people. Right now the nation is losing ground and
falling far behind, warned Vickie Choitz, CLASP senior policy analyst. Without more
attention to and investment in increasing post-secondary credentials, the nation will
leave billions of dollars on the revenue. In countries like Korea and Japan, more than
half of young adults have college degrees, compared to 41 percent in the United States.
And those leading countries are on track to increase their attainment rates to 60 percent
by 2020. In order to stay in the race, CLASP analysts estimate that the United States
would have to award an additional 24 million college degrees or credentials by 2025. (At
the current rate, were on track to produce just about 300,000 more.) But its extremely
unlikely well ever catch up in the global marketplace, unless state and federal lawmakers
take a hard look at their priorities. Its harder than ever to get a college degree in this
country. The cost of tuition increases 5 to 7 percent every year, and because of decreasing
public funding, many of our public colleges and universities are turning away students
and closing programs. In Florida, for example, Gov. Rick Scott recently signed into law a
state budget that swipes $300 million from state colleges and universities. In response,
the University of Florida (UF) announced plans to dismantle its computer-science
department, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, to save $1.4 million.
Lets get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of
engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?
writes Forbes commentator Steven Salzberg. I think this move is shockingly short-
sighted. The University of Florida is moving backwards while the rest of the world moves
ahead. The CLASP report includes a state-by-state Return on Investment Dashboard
Tool, shows Florida could generate $3.5 billion more if it could increase its degree-
attainment rate to 60 percent. (Instead, last year, Florida cut its investment in public
higher education by 12 percent. The budget for its flagship university, UF, has been
slashed 30 percent over the past six years.) And Florida isnt alone. Consider
Pennsylvania, where Gov. Tom Corbett has proposed a more than 50 percent cut to 18
state-supported colleges and universities. If approved, its likely several campuses would
close, programs would be shuttered, and students turned away. This is the most
irrational public policy Ive ever seen in my life, said state Sen. Daylin Leach. It simply
doesnt make sense for Pennsylvanias fiscal health to continue cutting public higher
education. The CLASP state-by-state analysis shows that annual per capita income in the
Keystone State is projected to decrease over the next few decadesand state revenues
also are falling to the tune of $214 million by 2025. But if it could produce more college
graduates, Pennsylvania could generate $1.6 billion instead. The bottom line is, even in
these tough economic times when there are difficult fiscal decisions to be made,
increasing credential attainment pays off for individuals, their families, states and the
country, CLASPs Choitz said.
Chemical Industry
Uniqueness
Chemicals are high and growing now
Hurston, 12/7/13 Senior Director, Member Communications and Marketing,
American Chemistry Council [ACC] (Patrick, U.S. Chemical Industry Poised for
Dynamic Expansion; Set to Outpace Overall U.S. Economy, American Chemistry,
http://www.americanchemistry.com/Media/PressReleasesTranscripts/ACC-news-
releases/US-Chemical-Industry-Poised-for-Dynamic-Expansion-Set-to-Outpace-
Overall-US-Economy.html)//IS
American chemistry is back in the game, said Dr. Kevin Swift, ACCs chief economist.
After a decade of lost competitiveness, American chemistry is reemerging as a growth
industry. Were seeing growing end-use markets; strengthening employment; surging
exports; and an influx of tremendous capital investment. Put simply, the U.S. is now the
most attractive place in the world to invest in chemical manufacturing, he added. Swift
pointed to several key points to illustrate the turnaround in the industry: Over the next
five years production is expected to grow by almost 25 percent, pushing industry
shipments to $1 trillion by 2018; For the first time since 1999, the U.S. chemical industry
is seeing job growth; Shale gas and the surge in natural gas liquids supply has helped
moved the U.S. from being a high-cost producer of key petrochemicals and resins to
among the lowest cost producers; globally. As a result, exports are surging. The industry
has gone from a chemicals trade deficit to a surplus, this year expected to be about $2.8
billion, and by 2018 reaching nearly $30 billion, from almost $300 billion in total
exports; Capital investment is exploding. Beginning in 2010, as chemical
manufacturers began recovering from the Great Recession there has been double digit
growth in capital spending including equipment upgrades and efficiency investments.
Over the next five years we are likely to see more than $60 billion in domestic
investment.

Chemical industry is growing now most recent predictive evidence
Westervelt, 4/14/14 editor-in-chief at ChemWeek.com (Robert, Outlook 2014:
Looking forward, ChemWeek, http://www.chemweek.com/lab/Outlook-2014-Looking-
forward_57898.html)//IS
US chemical makers are firmly back in the game thanks to the cost advantage enabled
by low-cost shale feedstocks, according to Swift. US chemical production is expected to
rise 2.5% in 2014 and 3.5% in 2015, Swift says. Following a decade of lost
competitiveness, American chemistry is reemerging as a growth industry, Swift says. US
chemicals production will grow strongly through the second half of the decade, as the
nearly $100 billion in new chemical investment announced since 2010 comes online.
During the second half of the decade, US chemistry growth is expected to expand at a
pace over 4%/year on average, a rate that exceeds that of the overall US economy, Swift
says. The total value of shipments will advance at a slightly stronger pace than
production, with shipments values set to exceed $1 trillion in 2018, up from $789 billion
in 2013, ACC says. The forecast growth rates are the highest for industry in more than 20
years. Excluding pharmaceuticals, US [chemical] growth has averaged less than
1%/year since the early 1990s, says Martha Gilchrist Moore, ACCs senior
director/policy analysis and economics. This is going to be a real step-up from that
level. US chemicals production excluding pharmaceuticals was up 3.2% in 2013, and
growth is expected to slow to 2.6% in 2014. Specialties and agricultural chemicals will
drag down the rate in 2014 after advancing strongly the two years prior. Basic chemicals
are expected to grow 2.4% in 2014, up from 1.2% in 2013. Chemicals production growth
excluding pharmaceuticals will be 3.5% in 2015, 3.8% in 2016, and 4.0% in 2019,
according to ACC estimates. US exports will ramp up sharply as production comes
online. Exports of chemicals will grow 6.6% in 2014, to $205 billion, and a further 7.6%
in 2015. Excluding pharmaceuticals, the surplus in chemicals trade will grow to $67.5
billion by 2018, up from $42.7 billion in 2013, an average of 9.6%/year. The expansion is
also reversing the industrys falling employment trend. Employment in the chemical
industry will have grown by 1.3% in 2013 and continue to expand through 2018, ACC
says. This growth contrasts with the continuous decline in industry employment between
1999 and 2011.ROBERT WESTERVELT


Resilient
The chemical industry is resilient
Picker and Kathfer, 1/1/09 editors for the Journal of Business Chemistry, Journal
of Business Chemistry (Stefan and David, January 2009, "Discussing challenges in the
chemical industry for five years", Journal of Business Chemistry,
http://www.businesschemistry.org/article/?article=27)//IS

Five interesting years of the Journal of Business Chemistry (JoBC) have passed and
many more are hopefully lying ahead of us, with the 6th volume currently in your hands.
The JoBC is read throughout the world. Even though the `sectorial` focus seems quite
narrow concentrating on the chemical and related industries the overall approach of
the JoBC is rather broad and interdisciplinary. As chemistry is interwoven with a
multitude of rapidly progressing fields, many topics from nano- or biotechnology to
pharmaceuticals and materials have also been covered. Management topics from
innovation and portfolio management to REACH regulation and investments have been
analyzed and discussed.
The scientific literature had not provided a platform to discuss interdisciplinary topics of
science and business in the chemical industry before. The JoBC has tried to fill this gap
and to provide such a platform for academic as well as practitioner-oriented discussions
on hot topics in the related sectors. The field of chemistry itself becomes more and more
interdisciplinary as the boundaries between industrial sectors and sciences are fading
away. This trend provides tremendous opportunities but also challenges for practitioners
and academics alike and thus creates the need for discussion forums like journals and
conferences on how to stay on top or get to the top in a world of radical changes.
This will likely be even more so the case in the near future, with an omnipresent financial
and economic crisis around us, that yet has to unfold its total impact. As a large supplier
for most of the highly affected industrial sectors, the chemical industry and all its
partners are facing challenging and turbulent times. Measures to cut costs, shrinking
markets and severe restructurings will be the effect. However, we are confident that the
chemical industry will, in the end, be strengthened. Whatever risks and opportunities
the chemical industry will face, the need for a discussion platform on business chemistry
issues will only increase. The JoBC hopes it can help to share best practice examples and
provide detailed academic analyses of how to act and react in an era of fundamental
change.
In the light of these effects, which will be likely to affect all of the firms in the chemical
and related industries, we are happy to present in this issue articles on the more
traditional branches (like the chemical and the pharmaceutical industry) as well as on
more recently established areas (e.g. biotechnology or biopharmaceuticals).

Chemicals Bad
The chemical industry is killing bees were on the brink now the impact
is agricultural collapse
Greenpeace, 13 (Greenpeace, Bees in Crisis, 2013,
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/genetic-engineering/Bees-in-
Crisis/)//IS
"In the last four years, the chemical industry has spent $11.2 million on a PR initiative to
say it's not their fault, so we know whose fault it is." Jon Cooksey, writer, director:
How to Boil a Frog. The honey bee, responsible for 80 percent of pollination worldwide,
is disappearing globally. Why and why do bees matter? This is no marginal species loss.
Honey bees wild and domestic perform about 80 percent of all pollination
worldwide. A single bee colony can pollinate 300 million flowers each day. Grains are
primarily pollinated by the wind, but the best and healthiest food fruits, nuts, and
vegetables are pollinated by bees. Seventy out of the top 100 human food crops, which
supply about 90 percent of the world's nutrition, are pollinated by bees. We know what is
killing the bees. Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical
companies claim. The systemic nature of the problem makes it complex, but not
impenetrable. Scientists know that bees are dying from a variety of factors pesticides,
drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficit, air pollution, global heating, and so forth.
The causes of collapse merge and synergise, but we know that humanity is the
perpetrator, and that the two most prominent causes appear to be pesticides and habitat
loss. Worker bees (females) live about 6 weeks in summer, and several months in the
winter. Colonies produce new worker bees continuously during the spring and summer,
and then reproduction slows during the winter. Typically, a bee hive or colony will
decline by 5-10% over the winter, and replace those lost bees in the spring. In a bad year,
a bee colony might lose 15-20% of its bees. In the US, winter losses have commonly
reached 30-50% and in some cases more. In 2006, David Hackenberg, a bee keeper for
42 years, reported a 90% die-off among his 3,000 hives.US National Agriculture
Statistics show a honey bee decline from about 6 million hives in 1947 to 2.4 million
hives in 2008, a 60% reduction. The number of working bee colonies per hectare
provides a critical metric of crop health. In the US, among crops that require bee
pollination, the number of bee colonies per hectare has declined by 90% since 1962. The
bees cannot keep pace with the winter die-off rates and habitat loss. Pesticides and bees
Biologists have found more than 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly
"pesticide cocktail" according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The
chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont, and Monsanto shrug their
shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They
advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world's farmers is
profitable. Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agri-business
converts grasslands and forest into mono-culture farms, which are then contaminated
with pesticides. To reverse the world bees decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and
destructive agricultural system.

Bee collapse causes extinction agricultural and biodiversity collapse
Franco, 3/31/14 a vice chair of parliament's biodiversity, climate change and
sustainable development intergroup (Gaston, Bees are essential link in biodiversity
preservation," The Parliament,
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/articles/news/bees-are-%E2%80%98essential-
link%E2%80%99-biodiversity-preservation)//IS **modified for gendered language**
The bee is an essential link in the preservation of biodiversity. The reproduction of over
80 per cent of plant species in the world depends primarily on bees. More specifically, 35
per cent of the worlds food production would be threatened by a scarcity of bees. In
economic terms, the impact of pollinators represents approximately 10 per cent of
agriculture turnover globally. Bees also play an environmental watchdog role as they
signal the chemical degradation of the environment in which they live. While the media
is focused on the essential nature of domestic bees, a study published in February 2013
in Science Magazine confirms that wild bees are around twice as effective as their
counterparts at pollination. In fact, an increase in visits from wild bees increases fruiting
twice as much as the same increase with visits from domestic bees. Whether wild or
domestic, we cannot live without bees. This is why supporting scientific research is
paramount to bee health. We know that bee mortality is multi-factorial. Thus, the
presence of parasites such as Varroa and Nosema, diseases such as American foulbrood
or European foulbrood, poor beekeeping and farming practices, pesticides, pollution, not
to mention nutritional deficiencies (especially pollen) are some key factors in the
weakness and mortality phenomena which the global bee population has been facing for
many years. However, other avenues remain to be explored. In a report dated 13 March
2014, the European food safety agency called upon the creation of a European research
network to develop a global approach in the evaluation of stress factors which affect the
health of bees. In addition, to address the problem of excess mortality, adequate training
for beekeepers (who are mainly amateurs) is necessary, as well as disseminating best
practices, integrating bee health into the veterinary curriculum and providing curriculum
specialisation in this field. Concrete measures should be implemented in our regions,
particularly rural areas, in order to preserve bees and their habitats. It is also important
to involve citizens in this debate through information campaigns and awareness for the
general public on issues related to bee health. Europe has also understood that the issue
goes far beyond honey production. Without pollen cultures, the whole agricultural
system falters. As Albert Einstein said, If the bee disappears from the surface of the
Earth, [humanity] would have no more than four years left to live.

Double bind either US chemicals are high now or US chemical expansion
will collapse European chemicals thats key to their manufacturing
Ryan, 3/10/14 covers manufacturing, technology, the Port and logistics for the
Houston Business Journal (Molly, The U.S. could eat all of Europes chemical industry,
Ineos CEO proclaims, The Houston Business Journal,
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/morning_call/2014/03/the-u-s-could-eat-all-of-
europe-s-chemical.html?page=all)//IS

While the U.S. chemical industry is thriving, especially along the Gulf Coast, Europes
chemical industry is on its deathbed, said Jim Ratcliffe, chairman of Ineos, a
Switzerland-based chemical company with significant Houston-area operations.
In an open letter to Jos Barroso, president of the European Commission, Ratcliffe
predicted much of (the European chemical industry) will face closure within the next 10
years.
Ineos, which has multiple Houston-area manufacturing sites as well as its U.S. olefins
and polymers headquarters in League City, said that in the last three years, the
companys profits in Europe have dropped by 50 percent, but in the U.S., profits have
tripled.
If this situation continues, Ratcliffe said European jobs will suffer. And, based on the
more than $100 billion of planned U.S. chemical investment, it is highly probable that
these jobs will move to America. Many of them will move to the Gulf Coast and Houston,
a rapidly growing global chemical hub.
Chemicals literally find their way into all walks of life; they are omnipresent, Ratcliffe
wrote. They are in our watches, our deodorants, our iPhones, cars, clothes and Nike
shoes. Without a chemical industry, all of the above manufacturers in Europe are
potentially put at a disadvantage.
The primary reason why chemical companies are losing profits in Europe and backing
out of the country is because of energy and feedstock prices. While energy is expensive in
Europe, Ratcliffe explained that cheap natural gas and natural liquids, which are used as
chemical feedstock, from U.S. shale plays are making the U.S. an ideal place to do
business.
Ineos has already made significant investments in Houston to take advantage of shale.
Its olefins and polymers division expanded ethylene capacity at its Chocolate Bayou
complex near Alvin. Also, in July 2013, this same division said it formed a memorandum
of understanding with South Africa-based Sasol to pursue a joint venture to manufacture
high-density polyethylene in North America. And, not that long ago, in 2006, Ineos
made a major commitment to expand its business operations in League City.
Although Ineos has made these commitments to the U.S. and to Houston, at the same
time, Ratcliffe said he does not want to completely give up on the European chemical
industry. In his letter that he is encouraging the European Commission to take urgent
steps to protect Europes chemical industry.

Alt causes to bee collapse parasites, viruses, and habitat destruction
Carrington, 6/7/12 head of environment at the Guardian (Damian Honeybee
decline linked to killer virus, The Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/07/honey-bees-virus-varrora-
destructor-mites)//IS
The deadly link between the worldwide collapse of honeybee colonies and a bloodsucking
parasite has been revealed by scientists. They have discovered that the mite has
massively and permanently increased the global prevalence of a fatal bee virus. The
varroa mite's role means the virus is now one of the "most widely distributed and
contagious insect viruses on the planet", the researchers warned. Furthermore, the new
dominance of the killer virus poses an ongoing threat to colonies even after beekeepers
have eradicated the mites from hives. Varroa destructor has spread from Asia across the
entire world over the past 50 years. It arrived in the UK in 1990 and has been implicated
in the halving of bee numbers since then, alongside other factors including the
destruction of flowery habitats in which bees feed and the widespread use of pesticides
on crops. Bees and other pollinators are vital in the production in up to a third of all the
food we eat, but the role the mites played was unclear, as bacteria and fungi are also
found in colonies along with the viruses.


China Economy
No econ collapse - Chinese economic reforms prove resiliency
Hui 4/16/14 editor of Xinhuanet, the official website of Xinhua News Agency
(Lu, News Analysis: Chinese economy resilient enough to refute
unwarranted worries, Xinhua News, Google,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2014-04/16/c_133267489.htm)
The slowdown of the world's second largest economy has prompted some concerns, but
many of those worries are unwarranted in view of China's commitment to economic
restructuring.
Official data released Wednesday by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics showed
that China's GDP grew by 7.4 percent year on year to 12.8213 trillion yuan (2.08 trillion
U.S. dollars) in the first quarter.
Some analysts claimed that China would turn back to stimulus and give up reform as a
result of the slowdown. Some others even argued that the Chinese economy would slide
down uncontrollably into an abyss and doom its trading partners.
"By using its old trick of spending its way to growth, the mainland runs the risk of falling
deeper into its complicated structural problem," said Geogre Chen, a columnist with the
Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
As a matter of fact, such voices, eloquent as they may sound, cannot dim the outlook of
the Chinese economy, whose future is decided by nothing but the combination of the
country's economic policy and fundamentals.
Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said
recently that the Chinese economy will not see a rapid dip and that the Chinese
government is serious and determined to implement the reform.
President of the World Bank (WB) Jim Yong Kim also said recently that despite the
recent slowdown the Chinese government's resolve to restructure its economy is
impressive.
"The risk is not slower growth," said Markus Rodlauer, the IMF's mission chief for China
and deputy director of the fund's Asia and Pacific Department. "The risk is that growth is
not allowed to slow."
"A series of economic policies ... show that China's new leaders mean business with their
commitment to reform," said Forbes in an article published on its website last week.
The Chinese officials in charge also responded to allay the worries. Chinese Vice Finance
Minister Zhu Guangyao said on the sidelines of the IMF and WB's spring meetings in
Washington that China will not roll out a massive stimulus package just for short-term
gains.
"The message that China is determined to endure short-term economic pain to press
ahead with structural reforms is likely to encourage economists who say China needs to
move quickly to wean its economy from runaway credit, over-investment and excess
capacity," said a Wall Street Journal article published Saturday on its website.
In terms of RMB's exchange rate, Lagarde defended China, saying that the latest
increasing fluctuation of the yuan is a step towards the currency's internationalization,
rather than the so-called deliberate depreciation.
Experts say that as China carries on its reform, the ongoing economic slowdown should
be taken by the international community as a necessary step in the restructuring of its
economy for further development, rather than as any signal of stagnation or even
shrinking.


Chinese growth is sustainable investor confidence, exports, and sales
Hong, Day, Hong 7/2/14 Shanghai bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal
and Dow Jones Newswires
(Shen, Matt, Nicole, Solid Chinese Data Drive Global Rallies, Wall Street
Journal, Google, http://online.wsj.com/articles/markets-tied-to-china-get-a-lift-
1404300011)
Financial markets from Hong Kong to New York are getting a lift from upbeat economic
data out of China that is bolstering the outlook for global growth.
Stock markets in both developed and emerging markets have rallied this week, helped by
indications of rising manufacturing activity in China, the world's second-largest
economy. Hong Kong shares hit their highest level for the year on Wednesday, and major
U.S. stock indexes were on track to reach record highs.
Commodities markets and some currencies have also gotten a boost, as investors bet that
China's appetite for raw materials will stay resilient. Copper on Wednesday posted its
biggest one-day gain since May. China is the world's biggest consumer of the metal, and
its orders help buoy the economies of big commodities producers such as Australia and
Brazil.
Many markets were rattled earlier in the year by worries that China's slowing growth
would turn into a "hard landing," creating a drag on economic activity around the world.
But the Chinese government's recent support measures, including targeted credit easing,
more spending on railways and business tax breaks, have helped boost investors'
confidence.
"There's a recognition that there's still pretty decent economic activity happening in
China," said David Ruff, a portfolio manager with Forward Management LLC in San
Francisco. "It's such an important market. It just impacts everything."
Mr. Ruff said he has been adding to his investments in Japan's Fujitec Co. 6406.TO -
0.19% , an elevator and building equipment maker with a large presence in China, as well
as Chinese energy and infrastructure firms.
In addition to factory output, other gauges of the Chinese economy have shown
improvement, including exports, industrial production and retail sales.
China's rapid growth in the last decade made it both a driver and barometer of global
economic activity. The country's economic data are among the most closely monitored by
economists and investors.
To be sure, few investors are banking on a surge in China's growth. Worries persist that
tremors in the country's system of unofficial lenders or property market could hinder the
broader economy.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index gained 0.4% to 2059.42 Wednesday but is
still down 2.7% since the start of this year. China's stock market has, at times, been an
inaccurate barometer of the country's economy over the past two decades as the
dominance of retail investors makes trading more speculative and short-term in nature.
As well, foreign money managers face restrictions when investing in mainland shares.
"There are certainly signs of a recovering economy but a lot of people are divided over
how sustainable all this is," said Amy Lin, senior analyst at Capital Securities. 6005.TW
+0.44% "As long as China's housing market continues to undergo a downward
correction, it's hard for people to be extremely optimistic about the economic outlook."
Still, the recent economic data have been enough to spur investors to increase their
exposure to China.
In Hong Kong, the benchmark Hang Seng Index, which is made up mostly of Chinese-
listed companies, hit its highest level of the year on Wednesday, rising 1.6% to 23549.62.
The index has risen 8.3% since early May. The Hong Kong dollar climbed to the top end
of its trading band overnight for the first time since 2012.
In New York, investors attributed a modest rise in shares in part to the solid Chinese
economic data and market gains there. By late afternoon, the S&P 500 was up 0.1%,
trading near a record high, after gaining 0.7% this week.
Australia's currency jumped to a seven-month high against the U.S. dollar on Tuesday,
up 5.8% on the year, although it gave back much of those gains on Wednesday.
Analysts say stronger growth in China also is supporting emerging-market currencies
whose countries are closely linked to China's economy.
"Growth in China is starting to gain some momentumwhich supports most emerging
markets," said Mark McCormick, a currency strategist at Crdit Agricole in New York.
Colombia's economy is sensitive to Chinese demand for oil and coal, and the Colombian
peso has strengthened 3.8% against the dollar this year, jumping to a 13-month high on
Wednesday.
Even the Chilean peso, which has suffered this year from slowing Chilean growth and
waning Chinese demand for Chile's copper, has recovered 2.1% against the dollar in the
past two months, although it is still down 5.3% for the year.

Chinas economy is resilient empirics proves
Roach 2/21/14 - faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of
Morgan Stanley Asia
(Stephen, The Chinese economy is moving on, and so must America's,
South China Morning Post, Google, http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-
opinion/article/1432477/chinese-economy-moving-and-so-must-americas)
Once again, all eyes are on China. Emerging markets are being battered early this year,
as perceptions of resilience have given way to fears of vulnerability. And hand-wringing
over China is one of the major reasons.
Of course, US Federal Reserve tapering has also been a trigger. But the China factor
looms equally large. Long-standing concerns about the dreaded hard landing in the
Chinese economy have once again intensified. If China falls, goes the argument,
reverberations to other emerging markets and the rest of the global economy will be
quick to follow.
While generalisations are the norm in the throes of most crises, in the end,
differentiation pays. Such has long been the case with China. China was Asia's most
resilient economy during the wrenching pan-regional crisis of the late 1990s and it could
turn out to be just as tough today. Yes, the Chinese economy is now slowing, but the
growth downshift is not well understood. A slowdown is actually a welcome
development.
There continues to be a superficial fixation on top-line Chinese gross domestic product
growth - dwelling on a 10 per cent growth machine that has slowed into the 7 to 8 per
cent zone. The knee-jerk reaction presumes that this downshift is but a prelude to more
growth disappointments to come - especially in light of fears over a long-standing list of
China disaster stories, from social unrest and environmental catastrophes to housing
bubbles and shadow banking blow-ups.
While none of these concerns should be dismissed out of hand, they're not the source of
the current slowdown. At work, instead, is a long-awaited rebalancing of the Chinese
economy - a major shift from export- and investment-led growth to a model much more
reliant on consumer spending and services. Indeed, last year, the Chinese services sector
actually overtook the combined shares of manufacturing and construction as the largest
segment in the economy.
Long dependent on 10 per cent Chinese growth, the US in particular and the world in
general is not prepared for the slower growth that will emerge with an increasingly
consumer- and services-led China.
China's export-led growth miracle couldn't have achieved its extraordinary success
without the external demand from the American consumer. China also relied heavily on
the US dollar to anchor its undervalued currency to boost export competitiveness.
The US, for its part, drew greatly on cheap goods made in China to boost the purchasing
power of consumers; it also relied on surplus Chinese savings to help fill the void of the
world's largest shortfall of domestic saving and took advantage of China's voracious
demand for US Treasury securities to help fund budget deficits and subsidise American
interest rates.

No impact - Chinese economy is stabilizing
Rabinovitch 4/1/14 journalist at The Economist
(Simon, Factory output points to stabilisation in Chinese economy,
Financial Times, Google, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9c55c7d2-b93e-11e3-a189-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz36zwMTYCP)
Chinese factory activity remained steady in March, a tentative sign that the economy is
stabilising and easing pressure on the government to prop up growth.
The official purchasing managers index for manufacturing, a survey that is seen as a
leading indicator for industrial growth, edged up to 50.3 from 50.2 in February. A
reading above 50 signals an expansion of activity, so factory growth appears to have
improved moderately month on month
This is the first time since November that the PMI has risen, indicating that our
countrys manufacturing sector is steady overall and trending in a positive direction, the
national statistics bureau said.
The Chinese economy has been sluggish this year, as tighter credit weighs on investment,
property sales weaken and the governments anti-corruption campaign takes a toll on
consumption. Fears of a deeper slide have fuelled calls for Beijing to deploy a stimulus-
style push to keep the economy on track, but the resilient PMI makes such intervention
less urgent.
The government has maintained a growth target of about 7.5 per cent this year, the
same as 2013. Whereas China exceeded the target last year, notching up 7.7 per cent
growth, it is expected to fall short this year. The consensus forecast of 7.4 per cent
growth would be Chinas weakest since 1990.
All of the key sub-indices that comprise the PMI strengthened somewhat in March.
Output rose to 52.7 from 52.6 in February; new orders climbed to 50.6 from 50.5; and
employment increased to 48.3 from 48.
Analysts noted that the figures were still low by seasonal standards and that choppier
water could yet lie ahead. Domestic demand and production activities may have
stabilised in March but a notable recovery is yet to be seen, said Lu Ting with Bank of
America Merrill Lynch.
The stable, if slow, expansion of the official PMI contrasts with the weakening of the
HSBC China PMI. The HSBC survey for March fell to 48.0, signalling contraction and the
lowest since November 2011. The official PMI covers a broader range of enterprises,
including more large state-owned companies.
Even with the stabilisation of the PMI, the government still appears set to take a range of
measures to support growth. Increasing downward pressure on the economy should not
be neglected, Li Keqiang, Chinas premier, said last week. We have policies in store to
counter economic volatility.
The central bank has guided money market rates lower than they were in the latter half
of 2013, a strategy that could help reduce funding costs for companies. The government
has hinted that it is willing to accelerate investment on public projects such as railway
construction. And analysts have speculated that Beijing could take bolder steps for
example, cutting the level of reserves that banks must set aside against deposits.
Yet the government has also insisted that it wants to rein in debt and push through
deeper structural reforms to allow market forces more sway over the economy. These
objectives make a full-scale stimulus unlikely and many analysts have taken them to
mean that Beijing is willing to tolerate slower growth this year than in the past.
The tentative beginning of debt deleveraging has already started to roil Chinas financial
system. The bond market suffered its first true default in March, banks have more than
doubled their write-offs of bad loans, and a small rural lender suffered a brief bank run
last week.
In the latest sign of market strains, Chinas small high-yield bond market experienced its
first default when Xuzhou Zhongsen Tonghao, a construction materials company, failed
to pay interest on Rmb180m ($29m) of bonds, local media reported on Tuesday.

Chinese economic collapse will not trigger revolts proactive government,
civilian tolerance
Pakulski, 10 Dean of Arts and Professor of Sociology at the University of Tasmania
(January, Jan, Social Inequality and Conflict beyond Class: Developments in
Contemporary China, Canadian Center of Science and Education, ProQuest)//schnall

4. Implications for China China's market reforms accompany the rapid growth, declining
poverty and the widening material inequality, combined with new forms of lifestyle
inequalities (Young 2007, Xubei and Nong 2009). These inequalities are likely to be
exacerbated by the financial and economic crisis that brings the inevitable increase of
unemployment and poverty. Moreover, the crisis hits after the long period of sustained
growth, widening opportunities, rising prosperity, increasing security and some
liberalization. This may look like a 'Marxist scenario' heralding class polarization and
mobilization fuelled by egalitarian resentments and directed against the urban rich as
well as the party-state elite (rural poor vs urban rich, workers vs 'cadres'). However, as
argued above, such wide class-like mobilizations are unlikely, incompatible with the
theoretical framework outlined above, and counter to the developments of the last three
decades in Eastern Europe. For a start, the Chinese elite, mindful of the disruptive
legacies of previous class-like Cultural Revolution is unlikely to allow for such
mobilizations - they would destroy the achievements of recent reforms. Moreover, the
Chinese leadership seems relaxed about widening income gaps - perhaps justifiably so
because the 'disparities', while wide and possibly increasing, seem to be in line with most
developing nations (as well as the USA). The UN Human Development Reports estimate
that China's income gaps are narrower than those of about 30 'leaders' in the inequality
league. Moreover, the distribution of wealth (assets) in China remains relatively
egalitarian - well below the comparable levels in the developing nations, including India,
Brazil and Russia (as well as the USA). (Note 9) Also the scope of poverty, commonly
regarded as a foundation and a 'trigger' of mass resentments, has not been wide, though
the recent crisis may increase the poverty levels in rural areas and in less developed
regions. More importantly, in a truly Durkheimian fashion, Chinese society shows a
widespread tolerance for income inequality, in fact, among the strongest tolerance in the
developing world. (Note 10) This seems to be in line with the general conclusion drawn
from studies of social perceptions of inequality: 'Ordinary people do not believe in the
equal distribution of income, at least not in any country for which we have good
evidence. Far from it: they believe in a great deal of inequality, inequality arising in good
part from what they see as legitimate rewards to education, occupational achievement,
and job performance.' (Kelly and Evans 2009:20). Popular desires for prosperity,
security ('sufficiency') opportunity and rights seem to displace expectations of egalitarian
redistribution. The issues of distributive justice and exploitation are, at best, the
background factors in mass public concerns, even in rural areas typically prone to
egalitarian resentments. (Note 11) The economic downturn, especially when
accompanied by large unemployment, may fuel resentments in rural areas and trigger
local protests. (Note 12) The downturn is likely to affect mainly the 'rural-urban migrant
workers' most of whom, even when temporarily laid off, will move back to native villages.
However, these resentments are unlikely to encompass the 'strategic' urban strata, and
they are not likely to turn protests into a mass reformist movement. (Note 13) The
central authorities look well prepared for the downturn, both economically (the large
surplus makes it possible to mount a massive 'stimulus package' and welfare reform) and
politically (emphasis on social stability and national unity). The economic 'disparities'
are systematically 'managed' and played down by the leaders who frequently quote the
most famous prediction of Deng Xiaoping: 'Some will get rich, others will follow'. (Note
14) Even if fewer people than expected follow the rich, and - following the economic
downturn, some sink back into poverty - the central authorities are unlikely to be
blamed. Unlike the Polish communist elites in the 1970s and 80s, the leaders in
contemporary China are not seen as failures. Nor are they seen as 'foreign'. On the
contrary, they are seen as defenders of Chinese interests in the situation when the
economic downturn, and the hardship it brings, are widely blamed on the West. Thus in
contrast to Poland on the eve of Solidarity mobilisation, nationalist passions in China are
harnessed by the central authority and used for defusing (or re-directing) resentments.
The Chinese elite takes credit for growth, spread of prosperity and international
elevation, and avoids the blame for economic woes. It also looks strong and united
around the reformist program that stresses social stability as the key condition of
prosperity and national strength ('harmonious society').

Chinese growth is declining but there is no impact the economy is resilient
and its not key to global growth
Pettis, 13 CNN specialist (Michael, Will China's economy crash? CNN, 7/29/2013,
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/29/opinion/pettis-china-economy/) //RGP

(CNN) -- After many years of euphoria over China's rapid growth and the country's
apparently inevitable rise to global economic dominance, the China story has taken a
serious turn for the worse. China, it now seems, is about to collapse, and along the way it
may well bring the world economy down with it. Fortunately, the new story may be as
muddled as the old one. China's economic model has relied heavily on investment and
debt. It shouldn't be a surprise that after many years of tremendous growth driven at
first by badly needed investments, Chinese spending on infrastructure and
manufacturing capacity is slowing down. During the same period, debt levels surged as
borrowed money poured into more highways, airports, steel mills, shipyards, high-speed
railways, and apartment and office buildings than the country could productively use. A
few economists predicted as far back as 2006 that China would face a serious debt
problem. By 2010, it became obvious even to the most excited of China bulls that this
was indeed happening. To protect itself from the risk of a debt crisis, China must bring
spending to a halt. Beijing now wants to rebalance the economy away from its excessive
reliance on investment and debt, and to increase the role of consumption as a driver of
growth. But this cannot happen except at lower growth rates. So what happens next --
will China collapse? Probably not. A financial collapse is effectively a kind of bank run,
and as long as government credibility remains high, banks are guaranteed and capital
controls are maintained, it is unlikely that China will experience anything like a bank
run. What is far more likely is that in the coming years, China's gross domestic product
growth rate will continue to decline as the country focuses on stimulating consumption.
Growth rates during the administration of President Xi Jinping are unlikely to exceed 3%
to 4% on average if the economic rebalancing is managed well. Will the slower growth
rate be a disaster for China? Certainly, it would be huge departure from the growth rate
of roughly 10% a year for nearly three decades. Would much lower growth rates create
high unemployment and huge dislocations for the economy? Some are worried about
such scenarios. But the Chinese economy has so far shown a lot of resilience despite
passing storms such as the global financial crisis. Beijing has huge challenges ahead.
China's growth has been a boon to large businesses, the state, the powerful and the
wealthy elite. What the Chinese government needs to do is recalibrate growth so that
average household incomes can rise and consumers have more money to spend. This will
not be easy to pull off, but there are positive signs. Xi's government seems determined to
make the necessary changes, even at the expense of much slower growth. Even if GDP
growth declines but average Chinese household income grows at 5% to 6% a year, it
would put China in the right direction. As for the rest of the world, there's no reason to
panic over China's economic slowdown. Contrary to popular beliefs, China is not the
global engine of growth; it is merely the largest arithmetic component of global growth.
What drives global growth is demand. China, with a large trade surplus, is not a net
provider of demand to the world. What matters to the world, in other words, is not how
fast China grows but rather, how its trade with foreign partners evolves. If China
rebalances in an orderly way, its imports of manufactured goods and services should rise
faster than its exports. This will be good for the world. What's more, manufacturing
industries around the world that lost out to China in the export business will benefit.
When wages rise for Chinese workers -- so that they have more money to buy goods and
services at home -- it means other developing countries will have a chance to compete for
exports if they offer lower labor wages. There is no doubt that Beijing has a long road
ahead in terms of managing a huge economy, but as of now there should be nothing
surprising or unexpected about the slowing growth of China. It will probably benefit the
Chinese people and the global economy.

No impact - Chinese economy resilient
China Daily, 14 authoritative provider of information, analysis, comment and
entertainment to global readers with a special focus on China (3/14, More confidence
needed in Chinese economy: overseas media, China Daily,
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2014-03/14/content_17346890.htm)//schnall
Concern has resurfaced in recent months that data pointing to softening Chinese
manufacturing activity indicate the world's second largest economy may be headed for a
hard-landing. However, the 7.5 percent growth target set by the Chinese government for
2014 helped stabilize market expectations, especially on overseas markets, foreign media
reported. French newspaper Le Figaro said it was reassuring to the international
community that a major engine of the global economy maintained steady growth. Cora
Jungbluth, a project manager at Bertelsmann Foundation, said a growth rate of 7.5
percent was still quite an aggressive target, considering the global and domestic
economic situation. "We set a proper range for China's economic operation, and that is
to say, we worked to ensure that GDP growth and employment would not slide below the
lower limit, and inflation would not exceed the upper limit," Chinese Premier Li Keqiang
told a press conference Thursday after the annual parliamentary session ended.
However, as some analysts pointed out, a booming world economy not only requires
steady growth in China, but also the cooperation of other countries. The structural
problems facing the emerging economies should not be exploited by the developed ones
as excuses to offload their responsibilities in reform, and it is unfair to expect the
emerging economies to over-exert themselves in order to drive the world, according to
some analysts. Li Guangrong, chairman of Tehua Investment Holding Co Ltd, said the
remodeling of the world needed the efforts of different countries, as well as an
international relations and regulation system focused on collaboration and mutual
benefit. Yet, China indeed faces deep-rooted structural imbalances, and the factors that
might lead to a structural slowdown are emerging. The question as to how to manage the
risks while retaining the growth momentum has become the concern of overseas media.
A comment piece published in English newspaper The Financial Times said China
eventually would re-balance its economy and turn to a more sustainable mode. The
sooner the transformation started, the smaller the risks would be in the process, it said.
Justin Yifu Lin, economist and former chief economist and senior vice president of the
World Bank, in an article on the Financial Times' Chinese website, wrote it was not
unexpected China's economy was slowing. Compared to other countries, China had
performed better when exposed to the same external shock. The Chinese economy
enjoyed a late-developing advantage, by which China could transform its potential to
solid growth through persistent technological innovation and industry upgrade, Lin said.
In Li's government work report earlier this month, he mentioned using innovation to
support and lead economic structural improvement and upgrading, pushing China's
industry to a higher position in the global value chain. As the structural adjustment
continues, the domestic demand it releases will bring more opportunity to the world and
provide more benefit. As some foreign scholars pointed out, the international
community should learn to tale a more positive and sensible view of the Chinese
economy. What China and the rest of the world are engaging in is not a zero-sum game,
but a win-win situation. Pessimistic views of the Chinese economy is a misreading and
misjudgment of the country's economic situation and of no help to the global market and
economy.

Florida Economy

Its increasing now
Benn, 4/18 Staff Writer at the Miami Herald (Evan, Florida leads nation in new job
creation 4/18/2014 http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/18/4066931/florida-leads-
nation-in-new-job.html)//gingE
Miami-Dade and Broward counties each created 5,000 jobs in March, contributing to
Floridas nation-leading total of 22,900 new jobs, according to government data released
Friday. But more people are looking for jobs, which contributed to Miami-Dades
seasonally adjusted unemployment rate ticking up to 7.3 percent last month from 7.0
percent in February. Statewide, Floridas unemployment rate increased to 6.3 percent
from 6.2 percent in February. The number of unemployed people in Florida increased by
17,000 in March to 606,000. The good news: Miami-Dade and Broward have added
57,900 jobs since March 2013, and the state is up 225,100 jobs from a year ago. Miami-
Dades 32,900 newly added jobs since last March represents a 3.1 percent increase and is
the second-largest gain in the state, behind Orange County (Orlando). Floridas
economic turnaround continued in March, with significant growth in private-sector jobs,
high job demand, and an increasing employment reflecting renewed confidence among
job seekers, Jesse Panuccio, executive director of the states Department of Economic
Opportunity, said in a statement. These positive trends are the result of sound economic
policy in Florida. The U.S. unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in March. Browards
non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained steady at 5.5 percent (analysts
revised Browards February rate to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent). In South Florida and
throughout the state, the construction and hospitality-industry sectors have posted
significant job gains in the past year, as have white-collar sectors like financial activities
and professional and business services. Fundamentally, todays report confirms the
story that weve been telling: Floridas economy really is firing on all cylinders
now, said Mekael Teshome, a PNC Bank economist who covers Florida. The economic
drivers for the state are clearly in recovery mode, like housing, tourism, consumer
spending. In South Florida, you also have a robust global economy that is contributing to
Floridas rebound gaining steam. The rebound has allowed Miamis Apollo Bank to
steadily add lenders and bankers in recent years, swelling its employee ranks from 40 to
60. Apollo president Richard Dailey said the banks growth mirrors that of South
Floridas economy. We think that growth is going to continue for us here in Miami, he
said. Our main focus is on South Florida business lending. As we make progress, were
better able to service the local business community. Floridas 22,900 new jobs in March
were less than the 34,400 private-sector jobs added in February (revised from 33,400),
the biggest one-month gain since October 2010. March was the 44th consecutive month
of positive job growth after the state lost jobs for three straight years. Marchs job
creation number brings more good news for Florida families, Gov. Rick Scott said in a
statement. This means that more than 20,000 more Floridians will be able to provide
for their families. Businesses in the state are continuing to create jobs a total of
563,900 jobs since December 2010. Our improving economy is evidence that our policies
are working, and we will continue to work until every Floridian that wants a job can get a
job. At 9.58 million people, the states overall labor pool also grew last month. An
increase in the labor pool people with jobs plus those seeking ones helps explain
why jobs went up but unemployment rates showed upticks, Teshome said. The small
increase in the unemployment rate doesnt worry me too much, he said. If anything,
thats an indication of an improving economy. Discouraged workers are heartened to see
job gains, and they enter back into the labor force.

Florida economic collapse inevitable
Trigaux 14 (Robert, Impact of climate change on Florida economy could be huge, Times
Business Columnist, May 7, 2014, http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/impact-
of-climate-change-on-florida-economy-could-be-huge/2178761, JZG)
Yes, climate change is about the environment. But it's also about the economy. Extensive
media coverage of the 829-page federal climate change report released this week largely
chronicles the threats already experienced: rising seas, hotter summers and dwindling
water assets. Little attention was paid to how those threats could damage our vulnerable
economy, especially to Tampa Bay and Florida. The impact might be severe and land
sooner than we might think. The scientific report, the "National Climate Assessment,"
points out how Floridians with jobs ranging from coastal planners and insurance agents
to home builders and tourism executives already are dealing with the early effects of
climate change. South of the Tampa Bay region in Charlotte County, transportation
officials are looking beyond typical "smart growth" plans that concentrate growth in
urban centers. They also embrace "resilient growth" plans to steer development away
from areas vulnerable to rising seas. Record-setting state tourism also could fall prey.
"Some of Florida's top tourist attractions, including the Everglades and Florida Keys, are
threatened by sea level rise," the report states. It estimates tourism losses of $9 billion by
2025 and $40 billion by the 2050s. Here's something we already see: Homes in lower-
lying areas are becoming economic pariahs. As flooding increases, tougher construction
rules keep raising home prices. Already volatile flood insurance costs will spur migration
away from coastlines in the coming decades. Even if only half of these forecasts occur, we
might be in a world of economic hurt. What to do? We could adopt "hard" approaches
and build pricey seawalls and levees. We could pursue "soft" methods by elevating more
structures or using natural barriers such as wetlands. Or, the report says, we could
retreat from the vulnerable parts of the state. Florida and Tampa Bay also face the threat
of saltwater intrusion that can pollute sources of drinking water. That could prompt
more reser-voirs and even more desalination plants such as the $158 mil-lion Apollo
Beach unit that took seven years to function. The National Climate Assessment estimates
that more than $1 trillion of the nation's property and structures are "at risk of
inundation" if sea levels rise 2 more feet. "Roughly half of the vulnerable property value
is located in Florida," the report warns, with Tampa Bay among places most likely to get
soaked. By 2100, if seas rise 4 feet, look for a cumulative cost of $325 billion to the U.S.
economy in responding to widespread flooding, the report says. Florida's portion of that
bill? Try $130 billion. How is Florida's leadership dealing with this? Too many take the
approach they take on many of the state's complex matters: They deny the problem
exists. Or they're happy to let the next generation sweat the details.
Floridas economy is resilient
Clark 07 (Anthony, Florida's economy resilient, Sun business editor, July 8, 2007,
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20070708/BUSINESS/707080303, JZG)
It will take a lot more than higher fuel costs and more foreclosures to send Florida's
economy into recession, according to the latest economic forecast from the University of
Central Florida. Those factors have slowed the state's economic expansion, but not really
hurt it, the forecast concludes. "It looks like it will take a combination of negative shocks
to precipitate the next recession, such as a housing slowdown combined with one or
more of the following: $100 per barrel oil, a large interest rate spike due to slowdown in
capital flows from the rest of the world or inflation taking root," said Sean Snaith,
director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at UCF. The Gainesville
metropolitan area is expected to see one of the lowest average quarterly unemployment
rates in the state over the next three years at 2.8 percent, the report says. The average
growth rate will be 5.8 percent over that period. Professional and business services
should experience the strongest growth at 4.7 percent, followed by leisure at 2.2 percent
and trade, transportation and utilities at 1.9 percent.
German Energy Dependence
Europe dependency inevitable and the aff cant overcome alt causes
EA, 14 EurActiv, European news agency (07/05/2014 G7 wants to end dependence
on Russian gas http://www.euractiv.com/sections/energy/g7-wants-end-dependence-
russian-gas-301968)//gingE
Europe will be remain dependent on Russian gas for years, ministers from the Group of
Seven industrial nations said yesterday (6 May), condemning the use of energy as a
weapon of political coercion. "I don't know anyone in the world who could tell us how
Europe's dependency on importing Russian gas can be changed in the short term,"
German Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel told reporters. Meeting in Rome
as the crisis in Ukraine intensified, G7 energy ministers said they were "extremely
concerned about the energy security implications of developments in Ukraine as a
consequence of Russia's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity." They
promised to improve energy efficiency, develop a broader mix of energy supplies -
including liquefied natural gas (LNG), renewables and new gas pipelines - and to invest
in strengthening the existing supply network infrastructure. But there were no
immediate alternatives, they admitted. US shale gas was not expected to aid Europe until
at least the end of the decade, when it could be imported from tankers as LNG. Both Italy
and France restated their support for the South Stream pipeline project, which will bring
gas from Russia into Europe bypassing Ukraine - while also declaring the need to build
up alternative channels. A third of the EU's gas imports is from Russia, with almost half
of that passing through Ukraine, which is in another pricing dispute with Russian gas
exporter Gazprom, its third in the past decade. The final statement from the meeting
concentrated on the need to diversify sources of energy and build up gas infrastructure
and interconnectivity. "We are committed to initiate a systemic and enduring step
change to improve energy security at national, regional and global levels," the ministers
said. Sanctions No decisions were taken on whether or not to toughen the targeted
sanctions, which have already been applied against members of the Russian elite. That
will be left to foreign ministers and heads of government. However US Energy Secretary
Ernest Moniz said that if the situation in Ukraine continued to escalate, G7 leaders could
"move forward, as they have agreed, in terms of elevating sanctions, particularly, at some
point, moving towards sectorial sanctions." Tough rhetoric from Britain and the United
States contrasted with a greater emphasis on diplomacy from Germany. British Energy
Minister Ed Davey said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had "crossed a line" and
that the G7 meeting had taken a "strategic decision that we will face up to the use by
Russia of energy as a weapon". Germany's Gabriel said that any solution to the long term
problem of energy security in Europe would have to rely on dialogue. "Pure technical
changes in the energy market will not be enough. The process needs to be
accompanied by diplomacy and politics and agreement on contracts between partners,"
he said. With political action unlikely to produce any quick solution, countries like Italy,
which relies almost completely on imported energy, are looking at widening its supply
sources. In addition to South Stream, Rome has been placing increasing importance on
completing the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) to bring Azeri gas to Italy and is also
looking at developing a gas link with the east Mediterranean area. Italy is also looking to
develop at least three more LNG terminals on top of the three it has to take shale gas
from North America, but U.S. export terminals will not be ready soon. "A first project
will be ready to start at the end of 2015 while another 6 terminals are planned but won't
be ready till the end of the decade," U.S. Energy Secretary Moniz said. "The process
however does not determine where the shipments will go," he added.

Decreasing dependence now
Oliver, 6/16 Staff writer at the Financial Times (Christian, 6/16/14 Germany backs
EU energy target to ease dependence on Russia gas
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c32fbebe-f555-11e3-91a8-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz37kZfaLlT)//gingE
Germany is throwing its weight behind a tough new target to cut EU energy consumption
in a further sign of how the crisis in Ukraine is prodding Europe to try to ease its
dependence on Russian gas. In documents submitted to the EU, Germany argued that a
binding target for energy efficiency would offer the right impetus to overhaul the
continents energy infrastructure. Denmark and Germany are leading the push for a
robust energy savings target, which diplomats say would require EU countries to burn 30
to 35 per cent less fuel in 2030 than they were expected to consume in projections from
2007. As the EUs biggest economy, Germanys support for such a measure is vital if it is
to win adoption. The EU has for months been debating whether to agree such a target,
with the European Commission, the EUs executive arm, seeking to hammer out its
position in the coming days. Earlier this year, several countries had been cool towards
the idea. But the Ukraine crisis and the prospects of a Russian supply cut appear to have
shifted the discussion. Gnther Oettinger, the EUs energy commissioner, said that the
mood was changing as countries agonised about their dependence on imported gas. At a
recent conference on Europes energy security, Mr Oettinger said that energy efficiency
had for too long been a subject for Sundays, not for Mondays or Tuesdays. Denmark
argues that the goal would help ensure a high security of energy supply. If agreed, a
target on energy savings would form part of an EU package on energy and climate rules
for 2030, which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation must be finalised
by October. Much of the debate in Brussels focuses on mathematical models estimating
the percentage of gas imports that could be reduced following higher levels of efficiency.
According to a draft of the commissions estimates, a 25 per cent target is expected to
reduce EU gas imports by 9 per cent, while a 35 per cent target would cut gas imports by
33 per cent by 2030. The EU already has a 20 per cent energy efficiency target as part of
its broader 2020 climate goals but it is only voluntary. To meet a mandatory target, EU
countries would have to overhaul building standards, insulation, heating networks,
lighting and electricity grids. Energy efficiency is considered the most cost-effective way
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Germany has made it a key component of its exit
from nuclear energy. The country is aiming for a virtually carbon neutral building stock
by 2050, and big cuts to energy consumption in the transport sector.
Russias dependent on Germany
Morris, 14 lead author of German Energy Transition (Craig, Closer look at German
energy dependence on Russia 04 Mar 2014 http://energytransition.de/2014/03/closer-
look-at-german-energy-dependence-on-russia/)//gingE
Germany imports a lot of natural gas and oil from Russia. In fact, Russia makes up
around a third of Germanys total natural gas supply. But in 2012, natural gas only made
up around 21 percent (statistics in German) of German energy supply from 2000-2012
(in terms of primary energy). Imports of Russian natural gas thus constitute seven
percent of German energy supply. Oil makes up around a third of German energy supply.
Slightly more than a third of this oil is imported from Russia, so add on another 12-13
percent. Germany also gets roughly a quarter of its hard coal from Russia, with hard coal
coming in at a little over 12 percent of primary energy supply on average in the past five
years so add on another three percent, and Germany gets roughly 22-23 percent of its
primary energy from Russia. That makes Russia Germanys single largest energy
supplier. The figure floated on social media is closer to 40 percent dependency. Does that
make Germany dependent on Russia, or Russia dependent on Germany? In recent years,
the dispute between Russia and Ukraine has drawn a lot of attention, but one fact has
been overlooked the Ukrainians do not have to pay market prices. Russia offers
Ukraine a friendship discount, which was recently a third of the price countries like
Germany are willing to pay. In the current conflict, Russia is once again using this
discount to its advantage. But if the Russians lose the Germans as customers, they lose a
client paying top dollar. Its quite possible that the current conflict will lead to gas
supplies to the EU via Ukraine being cut off completely for a time, though Germany has
had its own direct gas pipeline under the North sea for the past few years. Depending on
what facilities are in place for international shipping, Germany and the EU will simply
switch to other sources on international markets something more easily done for oil
than natural gas. The share of natural gas in space heating has increased over the years
in Germany and is now nearly 50 percent, with heating oil still coming in close to 30
percent. In contrast, electricity only covered 5.4 percent of heat demand in 2012. The
current crisis in Ukraine is therefore unlikely to affect Germanys nuclear phaseout
because nuclear only provides electricity. Source: BDEW Some nuclear proponents seem
to think that Germanys nuclear phaseout has made it more dependent on Russian gas,
but nuclear is only used to generate electricity, and as the official statistics for gross
power production in Germany show the share of natural gas was down by 1.6 percentage
points in 2013 to a mere 10.5 percent, considerably lower than the 14.1 percent in 2010
(before Merkels nuclear phaseout in 2011). Should energy supplies slow down, Russia
might suffer more than the EU, which can try to source supplies elsewhere. But lost sales
revenue through Ukraine really is lost for the time being, and economic warfare against
Russia has already begun.
Hydrogen Economy
Alt Causes
Alt Causes to a Hydrogen Economy
Martin and Grasman 06 (Kevin, Scott, engineering experts at the IIEA Feasibility
Study for Hydrogen Economy Infrastructures,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/abicomplete/docview/192459275/447
D2475A78B4FAFPQ/9?accountid=14667)
A sustainable hydrogen energy industry is key if an environmentally and economically
stable world is to evolve in the future. The establishment of a hydrogen economy is a
multifaceted challenge with three general areas needing to be addressed: physical,
economic and policy. Some of the physical concerns include geography, technology and
environmental impact. For example, the use of a hydrogen generation technique in one
region might not be the "best" option in another region. Studies need to be undertaken to
evaluate the combination of generation technologies and transportation methods to
determine which system should be utilized. Consumer cost for hydrogen and capital
costs for development of the infrastructure are some of the economic items which need
to be determined. These variables are key to a successful transition from a petroleum-
based economy. A viable initial system must provide hydrogen at a competitive price,
while utilizing a low initial investment infrastructure to encourage investment. The
interaction between stakeholders and regulations are chief among the various policy
issues that must be addressed. Government and organization officials must provide
standards to provide assurance to equipment manufactures that propriety designs will be
accepted in the future.
Hydro Econ Fails
A Hydrogen economy is impossible, its too dangerous
Rifkin, 02 (12/2/02, Jeremy, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and
author of The Hydrogen Economy, The Hydrogen Economy,
http://www.emagazine.com/archive/171)
Nonetheless, there are some who speculate that hydrogen is simply too dangerous
to ever be safely used for cars. Peter Voyentzie of Danbury, Connecticut's Energy
Research Corporation, which makes large stationary fuel cell power plants, is skeptical
about automotive applications. "Hydrogen is a strange beast," he says. "It's the smallest
molecule, and it leaks out of everything. You also can't see it burn. In a car, it has to
remain stable through collisions and constant agitation. That's a lot to expect."
Hydrogen economy fails- slow transition and environmental sacrifices
Stavros 03 (Richard, Executive editor at the Public Utilities Fortnightly, 3/1, Playing
high-stakes hydrogen chess
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/abicomplete/docview/213207261/DFB
6F4FDB6244D27PQ/10?accountid=14667)
The dream of a hydrogen economy is a seductive dream, and President Bush in his State
of the Union address and in follow-up speeches pulled on America's collective
heartstrings. In announcing his initiative to fund $1.2 billion overall and new spending of
$720 million over five years to develop technology and infrastructure to produce
hydrogen fueled cars, he called on us to imagine a futuristic America. He asked us to
imagine a society that drives in environmentally friendly vehicles and is so
technologically enlightened it harnesses the power of the sun (fusion power) to produce
all the necessary hydrogen to fuel those cars. Not to mention, in the president's words,
"One of the greatest results of using hydrogen power, of course, will be energy
independence for this nation ... [which] will make future citizens less dependent on
foreign sources of energy." Certainly, there are powerfully patriotic ideas interwoven
into this hydrogen initiative. But while the president should be commended for
providing leadership on this issue, there are a number of tradeoffs--environmental
sacrifices and choices that may have to be made if some of the technologies he plans to
develop are not realized. Will America be able to live with those choices? Fusion Power.
The Hydrogen Plan's Achilles' Heel Bush asks us "to imagine a world in which our cars
are driven by hydrogen and our homes are heated from electricity from a fusion power
plant." The president believes the hydrogen produced in fusion power plants could
create a market for the commodity. Certainly, fusion power plants are a bigger part of a
future hydrogen complex than the president may be ready to admit. Otherwise,
America's current energy mix may not be able to support a hydrogen infrastructure
without increasing environmental emissions, or commodity prices. Furthermore, there is
some debate as to whether the Department of Energy is taking the right track as far as
fusion is concerned (see Public Utilities Fortnightly, Feb. 1, 2003, "Fusion Power: The
Burning Issue"). That is why a trade-off may be required. For example, Bush's hydrogen
economy plan touches every piece of the American energy complex. In his Feb. 6 speech,
he said, "First, hydrogen can be produced from domestic sources -- initially, natural gas;
eventually, biomass, ethanol, clean coal, or nuclear energy." In calling for natural gas,
the president calls all utility companies that seek, produce or distribute natural gas to the
table. There is no doubt that natural gas is a good, environmentally friendly choice, but
how expensive is the commodity likely to become if it needs to meet the demand of
millions of automobiles? Last year, Dr. Henry Linden offered a counterpoint to my
investigation to electrolytic hydrogen (Feb. 15, 2002, "Let's Be )) Rational About
Hydrogen as a Vehicular Fuel ). Linden called for packaged natural gas steam reformers
in the early stages of the hydrogen infrastructure's development. Down the line, he
would like to see high-tech renewables producing the hydrogen. Furthermore, he sees
coal gasification as a transition plan to build lead-time to develop sustainable, climate-
friendly energy technologies. "A promising alternative would be to gasify coal and lignite
to hydrogen, and use this hydrogen as the transition fuel for central and distributed
power generation, and surface and air transport," wrote Linden (Nov. 15, 2002,
"Bridging the Carbon Gap") Natural gas can be part of the solution, but it will have to
work in concert with other fuels. Electrolytic Hydrogen: Only If Clean Coal Is Really
Clean In President Bush naming dean coal and nuclear energy as supporting the
hydrogen complex, it can be inferred that electric utilities could be part of the answer to
the production and transportation question by producing electrolytic hydrogen. In
February 2002, when I first investigated this issue, I found a study by Virginia-based
Directed Technologies that spoke of the generation mix needed to support a hydrogen
infrastructure (Feb. 1, 2002 "Forgetting Someone, Mr. Secretary?"). I think it bears a
review. According to Directed Technologies-assuming that off-peak electricity could be
purchased at 4 cents/kWh-- electrolyzers could provide lower-cost hydrogen for small
fuel cell automobile fleets or for public fueling stations during the early phases of fuel cell
vehicle (FCV) penetration. The problem, according to the report, is that electrolytic
hydrogen has one major barrier in the United States: over 55 percent of all U.S.
electricity is generated from coal. Using electrolytic hydrogen would actually double
greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional gasoline operation, using the
average marginal U.S. grid generation mix, the report says. "[Yet], as the electrical
generation grid moves to increased use of renewable electricity and/or nuclear power,
the FCV powered by electrolytic hydrogen will eventually be superior to even an FCV
running on hydrogen from natural gas," says the report. Directed Technologies actually
analyzed the grid generation mix that would result in greenhouse gas parity for the FCV
running on electrolytic hydrogen compared to conventional gasoline operation. But
achieving this parity may take a long time. Directed Technologies points out that the
DOE's Energy Information Administration does not project significant growth in
renewables and nuclear until 2020. The company predicts it might not happen for at
least three decades.
Hydrogen is an inefficient energy carrier would result in net higher ghg
emissions
Shinnar 04 (Reuel, Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University,
November, Demystifying the Hydrogen Myth,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/abicomplete/docview/221544056/4E4
D1ADC06294BD7PQ/3?accountid=14667)
In the 1970s, the first H^sub 2^ mirage col-, lapsed after costing $7 billion dollars to the
U.S. and another $6 billion to Europe and Japan. So why the continued fervent interest?
And why do we take this mirage so seriously that we expend valuable resources? The
term "H^sub 2^ economy" is a misnomer. Our present economy is based on fossil fuels
with a small contribution from nuclear energy. H^sub 2^ is an inefficient energy carrier,
not an energy source. For the next foreseeable 20-30 years, we will still depend on fossil
fuels, so what use would H^sub 2^ achieve? Conversion of fossil fuels to H^sub 2^
inherently involves a large irreversible energy loss. The best lower heating value (LHV)
efficiency of a H^sub 2^ plant from natural gas is 65%, and of a coal plant is 55%. There
is no available energy conversion device based on H^sub 2^ that has a sufficiently large
advantage to compensate for this loss, and conversion of nuclear or solar electricity to
H^sub 2^ makes no sense. The electricity alone to produce one million BTU would be
about $50, while its market value as hydrogen would be only $16. It is also claimed that
the hydrogen economy would allow carbon to be sequestered. Almost all coal is burned
in power plants. We have the technology to build gasifier power plants where the CO can
be shifted to hydrogen and the CO2 removed. If we go down this road, the carbon can be
sequestered, if we can find a place to put it, but it has no relevance to the hydrogen
economy. The hydrogen doesn't go anywhere outside the power plant. Electricity is a
much more efficient energy source than fuel. In a hybrid car, the gasoline creates the
electricity with an efficiency of 35%. In general, we need, on a BTU basis, only a half to
one third as much electricity as fossil fuel. So, converting nuclear or solar electricity on a
mass basis to H^sub 2^ is a thermodynamic crime and technical insanity. Any use of
H^sub 2^ as a substitute for a fossil fuel will increase our dependence on imported oil
and gas, as well as increase global emissions. And, no research can change the second
law of thermodynamics. The ill effects of H^sub 2^ can be seen from two examples. One
is the General Motors (GM) hydrogen car - the so-called clean car. If H^sub 2^ is
generated by electrolysis of water, which means to a large extent from coal, its overall
efficiency is 10% in H^sub 2^ cars vs. 35% in conventional vehicles. H^sub 2^-powered
cars would increase both greenhouse and smog-forming emissions by a factor of five - a
strange definition of clean energy. It violates all safety instructions presently used in the
industry, and H^sub 2^ is the most dangerous fuel. By fitting a H^sub 2^ car with a
properly designed release valve and a delayed detonator, it becomes an undetectable
suicide bomb, at least four times as large as a suicide bomber can carry. There are only
two ways to address the problems of global emissions and energy independence - reduce
fuel consumption and build thermal solar and nuclear plants. Eliminating gasguzzling
SUVs and forcing everybody to buy a hybrid car would reduce gasoline consumption by a
factor of three. The only purpose of the H^sub 2^ car that I can see is to divert the
attention from this solution. The second and the only long-term option is to switch to
solar and nuclear energy. The U.S. in the southwest has enough sun for all its present
energy needs. We have the technology (thermal solar energy with storage) ready to do so
in a way that fits the needs of the grid, and we could gradually start today. Most of our
energy needs can be met with much higher efficiency by direct use of electricity. Even for
private cars, a hybrid car with a plug-in battery good for 50 miles would reduce gasoline
consumption by 80%, and more than 90% compared to present cars. In an electric
economy, this 10% could be supplied by bio-based gasoline. The crisis in our society Why
is the H^sub 2^ myth so persistent? I believe it fulfills a deep psychological need. We are
a society that has for the last 10 years discussed and computed the potential reduction of
global warming by switching from coal to natural gas. But, in the last 6 years, when gas
prices increased, we closed several gigawatts of combined-cycle power plants, and
replaced them with coal-fired power plants. Now, we are faced with global warming. The
U.S. is capable of solving these problems for the next 100 years at an affordable cost. We
have the technology, but lack the will to face the costs. Elected officials from both
political parties are not willing to allocate funds for tax incentives or subsidies that would
make these solutions possible. Instead, we have created a fantasy, that, through research,
the costs will become so low that the free market will adopt solutions that require no
subsidies or government intervention. Regrettably, this is not realistic. Furthermore,
when energy prices increase sufficiently, we will no longer have the 20-yr lead time
required to make solar and nuclear energy our major sources of power. Basic research
can create new ideas, and DOE has an excellent record on basic research. However, its
mandate is not basic research, but rather technology development that the free market
can adopt, which is not a realistic goal. So, since its mandate is not feasible, DOE has
created a fantasyland in which learning curves can achieve the impossible and the ideas
that are most unlikely to succeed become the most attractive. Even a $3 billion/yr
research program is inexpensive when compared with the expense of meaningful work.
Money for research faces much less opposition and gets strong vocal support from the
grant-seeking professional community. Fantasy fuel cells Take, for instance, fuel cells.
The number of "creative" new uses for fuel cells is impressive and still growing. One
example is to use them in combined cycle power plants to increase efficiency to 80%.
Since conversion to H^sub 2^ has an efficiency of 65%, this idea is clearly a nonstarter.
If one wants to design efficient combined cycle power plant, the only problem is the cost,
with no penalties for emissions, and both global and conventional pollution.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells Wont work Not Efficient
McGlaun 3/22/2013 A Freelance Automotive and Technology Journalist (Shane,
VW CEO Says That Hydrogen Fuel Cells Have Failed to Live up to Promises, Daily
Tech,
http://www.dailytech.com/VW+CEO+Says+That+Hydrogen+Fuel+Cells+Have+Failed+
to+Live+up+to+Promises/article30189.htm)

A few years ago there were a number of automotive manufacturers putting serious
money into hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. These vehicles promised to have a driving range
similar to a conventional gasoline-powered automobile, but produce no emissions to
pollute the atmosphere. However, the vehicles faced several daunting challenges,
including the lack of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure and the fact that hydrogen is highly
flammable and difficult to store. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn stated this week
that hydrogen fuel cells have failed to live up to promises and are unlikely to
become an efficient and cost-effective way to power cars in the near future.
Winterkorn said, "I do not see the infrastructure for fuel cell vehicles, and I do not see
how hydrogen can be produced on large scale at reasonable cost. I do not currently see a
situation where we can offer fuel cell vehicles at a reasonable cost that consumers would
also be willing to pay." While Volkswagen doesn't see a near-term future with hydrogen
vehicles, other manufacturers continue to move forward with the technology. Mercedes-
Benz reached a deal with Ford and Nissan-Renault with a goal of selling the first
production fuel-cell vehicle starting in 2017. Back in 2010, a study was published
predicting 670,000 fuel cell powered vehicles would be sold annually within a decade. So
far, that prediction doesn't seem likely to come true.
Hydrogen Economy fails No Infrastructure
Mulliken 1/29/2012 President of Green Energy News (Bruce, WHERES THE
HYDROGEN ECONOMY? (FIND IT IN DISTRIBUTED POWER.), Green Energy News,
http://www.green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2012/20120015.html)

It wasnt too many years ago that many thought the U.S., and perhaps the world, was on
track to be fueled by hydrogen. Hydrogen and fuel cells seemed a suitable replacement
for petroleum fuels and internal combustion engines. Hydrogen packs plenty of energy.
Cars and trucks would have the same get-up and go as running on gasoline or diesel fuel.
With big enough tanks, fuel cell powered vehicles would have the same range per fill-up
as conventional vehicles, but could also have unlimited range with hydrogen dispensed
from pumps in a network of filling stations. And, big oil would be more than happy to
provide hydrogen keeping them in fueling business. It all sounded pretty good
until reality and other technologies struck. --- A hydrogen economy would
have needed its own expensive fueling infrastructure. Think hundreds of
billions of dollars to build it. Who would pay? Big oil wouldnt do it without
government help but government wasnt all that interested. --- Hydrogen is everywhere
but has to be extracted. The cheapest way to get hydrogen was (and still is today) from
natural gas, so the notion that fuel cell vehicles produced only water, well, vaporized.
Extracting hydrogen from natural gas takes energy, plus when hydrogen is removed from
natural gas the remainder is carbon dioxide (and an few other things) exactly what was
trying to be avoided. --- Other clean vehicle technologies picked up steam.
Gasoline and diesel-electric hybrids gained popular acceptance. Lithium-ion batteries
suddenly got much better thanks to the computer industry. Nearly as quickly as batteries
improved, battery-electric vehicles poised to stage a comeback. (Battery electric vehicles
had gotten shoved aside by the flirtation with a hydrogen economy.) --- The economic
crash of 2007-2008 didnt help hydrogen commercialization and research.
Hydrogen Economy is economically infeasible
Zyga 12/11/2006 Writes for Phys.org (Lisa, Why a hydrogen economy doesn't make
sense, Phys.org, http://phys.org/news85074285.html)

The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water,
abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production
of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are
increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are
today, says Bossel. There is a lot of money in the field now, he continues. I think
that it was a mistake to start with a Presidential Initiative rather with a thorough
analysis like this one. Huge sums of money were committed too soon, and now even
good scientists prostitute themselves to obtain research money for their students or
laboratoriesotherwise, they risk being fired. But the laws of physics are eternal and
cannot be changed with additional research, venture capital or majority votes. Even
though many scientists, including Bossel, predict that the technology to establish a
hydrogen economy is within reach, its implementation will never make economic sense,
Bossel argues. In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own
source of energy, i.e. with ("green") electricity from the grid, he says. For this reason,
creating a new energy carrier is a no-win solution. We have to solve an energy problem
not an energy carrier problem." A wasteful process In his study, Bossel analyzes a
variety of methods for synthesizing, storing and delivering hydrogen, since no single
method has yet proven superior. To start, hydrogen is not naturally occurring, but must
be synthesized. Ultimately, hydrogen has to be made from renewable electricity by
electrolysis of water in the beginning, Bossel explains, and then its energy content is
converted back to electricity with fuel cells when its recombined with oxygen to water.
Separating hydrogen from water by electrolysis requires massive amounts of electrical
energy and substantial amounts of water. Also, hydrogen is not a source of energy, but
only a carrier of energy. As a carrier, it plays a role similar to that of water in a hydraulic
heating system or electrons in a copper wire. When delivering hydrogen, whether by
truck or pipeline, the energy costs are several times that for established energy carriers
like natural gas or gasoline. Even the most efficient fuel cells cannot recover these losses,
Bossel found. For comparison, the "wind-to-wheel" efficiency is at least three times
greater for electric cars than for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Another headache is
storage. When storing liquid hydrogen, some gas must be allowed to evaporate for safety
reasonsmeaning that after two weeks, a car would lose half of its fuel, even
when not being driven. Also, Bossel found that the output-input efficiency cannot be
much above 30%, while advanced batteries have a cycle efficiency of above 80%. In every
situation, Bossel found, the energy input outweighs the energy delivered by a factor of
three to four. About four renewable power plants have to be erected to deliver the
output of one plant to stationary or mobile consumers via hydrogen and fuel cells, he
writes. Three of these plants generate energy to cover the parasitic losses of the
hydrogen economy while only one of them is producing useful energy. This fact, he
shows, cannot be changed with improvements in technology. Rather, the one-quarter
efficiency is based on necessary processes of a hydrogen economy and the properties of
hydrogen itself, e.g. its low density and extremely low boiling point, which increase the
energy cost of compression or liquefaction and the investment costs of storage.
Japan Economy
No impact - Japan economy will keep declining not key to the world
economy
Panda 5-1 Ankit Panda is Associate Editor of The Diplomat. He was previously a
Research Specialist at Princeton University where he worked on international crisis
diplomacy, international security, technology policy, and geopolitics. He is a graduate of
Princetons Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. (Ankit,
5/1/2014, World Bank: India Overtakes Japan as World's Third Largest Economy, The
Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/world-bank-india-overtakes-japan-as-
worlds-third-largest-economy/)
In a sliver of good economic news during an Indian election that is widely focused on
economic growth, the World Bank announced in a report on Tuesday that India
overtook Japan as the worlds third largest economy in terms of purchasing
power parity (PPP). According to the World Banks International Comparison Program
(ICP) data, India holds a 6.4 percent share of global GDP on a PPP basis. The United
States remains in first place with a 17.1 percent share and China trails it at 14.9
percent. Japan, while still the worlds third largest economy in nominal terms, holds a
4.8 percent share of global wealth.
The ICPs data is from 2011. Overall, India went from 10th place in 2005 to 3rd place in
2011. The United States remained the worlds largest economy, but it was
closely followed by China when measured using PPPs. India was now the worlds third
largest economy, moving ahead of Japan, the report noted. Because economies
estimate their GDP at national price levels and in national currencies, those GDPs are
not comparable. To be compared, they must be valued at a common price level and
expressed in a common currency, the report explains, outlining the justification for a
PPP-based comparative look at world GDPs. In exchange rate terms that is, when all
the national currencies are converted into U.S. dollars at current exchange rates the
Indian economy remains about a third of Japans in size, comparable to the Russian or
Canadian GDPs.
PPP is particularly important in the study of poverty levels and quality of life across
countries as it adjusts for price changes across national economies. PPP, for example, is
used by the World Bank in its poverty threshold of $1.25 per day per person. Given that a
dollar can buy more in some countries and less in others, PPP-based comparative
analyses allow for comparisons between economies. For India, the bad news is that its
GDP per captia in PPP terms still ranks the country 127 out 199 a reminder that the
country has much to do in combating poverty. The largest economies were not the
richest, as shown in the ranking of GDP per capita. The middle-in-come economies with
large economies also had large populations, setting the stage for continued growth, the
report noted.
The World Banks report has been widely featured in the Indian media and is a morale-
improving piece of news for a country that has been besieged by high inflation, stagnant
growth, corruption, and other economic ills in the past year. Narendra Modi, the
Bharatiya Janata Partys candidate for prime minister in the ongoing election and the
front-runner, rose to popularity primarily because voters see him as a candidate capable
of transforming Indias economy for the better. Modi has frequently held up his
(debatable) economic achievements in his home state of Gujarat, where he was chief
minister, and has claimed that he would transfer that model of governance to India as a
whole.
No impact Japans economy is resilient and new policies solve
Associated Press 6-30 (Associated Press, 6-30-2014, Japan May data show economy
slowing but resilient,
http://bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2014/06/japan_may_data_show
_economy_slowing_but_resilient)
TOKYO Japan's economy is slowing following a sales tax hike but not as badly as some
economists feared, according to two business surveys released Tuesday.
The central bank's quarterly business confidence survey showed sentiment falling for the
first time in 18 months in April-June. But the decline in the index, to 12 from 17 in
March, was less than feared.
The index, which is a measure of the percentage of companies reporting positive
conditions versus those reporting negative conditions, is expected to rise to 15 in
September.
Demand has waned following a rush of purchasing to beat the tax hike. Automakers and
retailers were the industries hardest hit by the April 1 increase in the sales tax to 8
percent from 5 percent.
Meanwhile a monthly manufacturing index by Markit Economics showed an
improvement to 51.5 in June from 49.9 in May. A reading above 50 shows expansion in
activity as seen by purchasing managers.
"The implementation of the sales tax in April looks to have had only a temporary effect
on Japanese manufacturers," said Amy Brownbill, an economist at Markit. But she noted
that employment growth slowed for the first time since October.
Other data released earlier showed that housing starts and household spending fell in
May while industrial output grew less than expected.
Japan's economy was the one of the best performing in the industrial world in the first
three months of the year, growing 6.7 percent from the year before. The tax hike is
expected to cause a contraction in the economy for the April-June quarter.
Housing starts fell 15 percent in May from the year before, the government reported.
Construction starts have slowed since hitting a peak in October last year.
Much of the growth in demand before the sales tax was raised was attributed to
construction of new homes. Now, many lots that were cleared of older buildings last year
remain idle due to the fall-off in construction. The tax increase is part of measures aimed
at containing Japan's vast public debt.
Household spending fell 8 percent in May, the sharpest drop in three years, following a
surge in spending early in the year. The consumer price index climbed 3.4 percent, the
fastest pace since the oil shock in 1982, as 10 percent higher rates for electricity and a
hike in the sales tax pushed costs sharply higher.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has championed an economic strategy aimed at breaking
Japan free of years of deflation. The theory is that companies and households will spend
more now if they expect things to cost more in the future due to inflation.
Last week, Abe released the latest iteration of reforms he is proposing to help sustain
growth and boost competitiveness, vowing to trim the country's massive public debt and
spur companies to spend more and diversify their employment practices.
But for most families struggling to get by on incomes that have been falling since 1997,
wages must rise to increase or keep purchasing power constant. Despite some of the
biggest wage increases in years for employees at some of the biggest companies, such as
Toyota Motor Corp., income of salaried households dropped a real 4.6 percent from the
year before in May, to an average 421,117 yen (about $4,160), the eighth straight monthly
decline.
Similar to the "jobless recovery" in the U.S., Japan's rebound so far has mostly boosted
the hiring of temporary or contract workers, as rising prices and tax hikes eat into
consumer purchasing power. Wage increases have been limited mostly to bonuses or to
specific categories of workers, most of whom are contract or freelance employees in areas
such as trucking and construction.

No impact- economy is resilient recent polls prove
Kajimoto 6-18 contributer and reporter for Reuters (Tetsushi, Jun 18, 2014, Japan
business mood suggests economy resilient after sales tax hike, Reuters,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/18/japan-economy-tankan-
idUST9N0OU05P20140618)

TOKYO, June 19 (Reuters) - Confidence of Japanese manufacturers held steady in June
while the service-sector mood rebounded from the prior month, a Reuters poll
showed, further signs of resilience in the economy despite the pain of a
sales tax hike that took effect weeks ago.
The Reuters Tankan - which strongly correlates with the Bank of Japan's key tankan
quarterly survey - showed manufacturers' morale is seen improving in September, while
the service-sector mood is expected to worsen but hover at relatively high levels.
The monthly poll of 400 major manufacturers and service-sector firms, of which 260
replied during the June 2-16 period, suggests that the BOJ's tankan due July 1 may show
the impact of the April sales tax hike could be limited.
That would be encouraging to the central bank, which argues Japan can overcome a drop
in domestic demand after the sales tax rose to 8 percent from 5 percent.
It expects the economy to resume a moderate recovery from around summer as exports -
a weak spot in the economy - gradually recover.
Compared with three months ago, the Reuters Tankan's sentiment index for
manufacturers inched up and that for service-sector firms fell slightly, pointing to
relatively steady readings in the BOJ's quarterly tankan.
While companies face a decline in domestic demand after the tax hike, some also
complained about lack of strength in external demand, particularly China and other
emerging Asia.
"The expansionary trend is continuing for our business as a decline in demand after the
tax hike has been smaller than expected. However, demand from Asia and China has
been slow," a transport equipment firm said in the Reuters Tankan.
A retailer said: "Our business condition has worsened due to the pullback in demand
after the sales tax hike, although the decline was within expectations."
The BOJ left monetary policy steady last week and offered a more upbeat view on
overseas growth, signalling confidence that the economy is on track to meet its inflation
target next year without additional stimulus.
The last BOJ tankan showed in April that the business mood edged up in the March
quarter, but both big manufacturers and non-manufacturers expected conditions to
worsen in June.
In the Reuters Tankan, the index of sentiment among manufacturers stood at plus 19,
unchanged from May, and up 1 point from three months ago. At plus 29, the service-
sector gauge was up 8 points from May but down 2 points from March.
Indexes are calculated by subtracting the percentage of pessimistic responses from
optimistic ones. A positive reading means optimists outweigh pessimists.
The index for manufacturers is seen edging up to plus 21 in September, while the service-
sector gauge is expected to fall to plus 25, with optimists still far outnumbering
pessimists.
Among manufacturers, industries such as electric machinery and oil refinery led the
gains, while sectors including cars and steel were a drag.
At service-sector companies, confidence at retailers rebounded to plus 25 in June from -
9 in the prior month, and it is expected to improve further to plus 30 in September,
underlining firm domestic demand. (Editing by Kim Coghill)
Impact is inevitable low economic growth will continue
White and Kajimoto 2-17 (Stanley and Tetsushi, 2-17-2014, Japans economy
grows at slower pace, raises stakes for Abenomics Business Day Live,
http://www.bdlive.co.za/world/asia/2014/02/17/japans-economy-grows-at-slower-
pace-raises-stakes-for-abenomics)

TOKYO Japans economy grew at a much slower pace than expected at the end of last
year, posing a challenge to policymakers as massive government stimulus efforts showed
few signs of sparking momentum in consumption and exports.
The data showing disappointing private consumption, business investment and
shipments came as the Bank of Japan (BoJ) met to review its ultra-easy policy, with
markets widely expecting the central bank to hold firm to the current pace of bond-
buying stimulus.
However, pressure is likely to mount on the BoJ and the government to do more in
coming months, especially if a planned sales tax hike in April proves more damaging to
growth than expected.
The Cabinet Office said on Monday that the economy grew 0.3% in the fourth quarter,
well below the median estimate for a 0.7% increase, and followed 0.3% growth in July-
September.
It was the fourth successive quarter of growth, which is the best run for the worlds third-
largest economy in more than three years.
Economists still expect that growth will accelerate in the current quarter as shoppers buy
more goods before the tax hike, but any further disappointments could increase the need
for further fiscal and monetary stimulus.
"I am not so concerned about domestic demand given a buying rush ahead of a sales tax
hike in April will play out more strongly in the current quarter," said Taro Saito, senior
economist at NLI Research Institute. "Whats more worrying is sluggish exports despite
long-expected impact of a weak yen on boosting external demand."
Export growth has remained sluggish over recent quarters, partly reflecting softer
demand in Asian markets, though some of it also underlined the shift by Japanese
companies of their manufacturing plants to offshore centres.
The weak external sector is a worry for Japan especially as the initial burst of momentum
created by Prime Minister Shinzo Abes unprecedented monetary and fiscal
expansionary policies start to fade.
After decades of lacklustre growth, during which time China overtook Japan as the
worlds second-biggest economy, Mr Abe swept to power in December 2012 with a bold
plan to end deflation and strengthen economic reforms.
His policies, dubbed Abenomics, helped Japans economy speed past many of its Group
of Seven counterparts in the first half of last year, but the latest data will raise doubts
about Mr Abes strategy.
Japans benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average opened higher but then fell 0.4% as the
slower than expected growth weighed on sentiment. It has since rebounded 0.3%. On an
annualised basis, Japans economy grew 1%, below the median estimate for a 2.8% rise
and 3.2% annualised growth in the US in the same quarter, the Cabinet Office data
showed.
Slackening momentum
Capital expenditure, a weak link in Japans rebound so far, rose 1.3% in October-
December. This marked the quickest growth in two years but was still less than the
median forecast for a 1.9% gain.
The data add to recent signs of slackening momentum in the economy, including from a
closely watched leading indicator of capital expenditure that suggests companies could
turn more cautious this year due to worries about consumer spending.
In the fourth quarter, private consumption, which makes up about 60% of the economy,
grew 0.5% from the third quarter. That was less that the median estimate for 0.7% in
October-December, suggesting that a spurt in demand ahead of the sales tax hike is not
as strong as anticipated.
The government will increase the sales tax in April to 8% from 5%, and consumers have
been buying cars, homes and durable goods before the tax increase.
Some companies have indicated they are willing to raise salaries during annual wage
negotiations with labour unions held in the spring, which is an important barometer of
whether Mr Abes economic policies are working.
Still, some economists worry wage gains will not be strong enough to support consumer
spending after the tax hike takes effect.
"Optimists say the last time the sales tax was raised in 1997, consumption stumbled not
because of the tax hike but because of a financial crisis," said Takumi Tsunoda, senior
economist at Shinkin Central Bank Research Institute. "But at that time, wages were
growing 1.5%. Today wages are up just 0.4%. So the negative impact on consumers real
purchasing power will be bigger this time."
External demand subtracted 0.5 percentage points from growth, versus the median
estimate for a 0.4-percentage-point subtraction. The negative contribution is due partly
to Japans expanding domestic demand, which is boosting imports.
However, some economists worry that net exports could subtract from growth this year
as companies continue to look for low-cost places outside Japan to produce their goods,
which means they ship less from Japan.
Recent turmoil in emerging markets have also raised concerns about an external shock
harming shipments.
BoJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda has dismissed the need for additional monetary easing
as consumer prices are headed toward its 2% inflation target and as overseas economies
recover.
At its policy review on Tuesday, the BoJ is widely expected to maintain its commitment
of increasing base money at an annual pace of 60-trillion to 70-trillion ($585bn-
$683bn) the worlds biggest money-printer after the US Federal Reserve started to
trim back its own stimulus programme since January.



Jet Fuel
Jet fuel prices down
Times of India, 14 (Jun 2, 2014 Jet fuel price cut by 1.8%, non-subsidized LPG by Rs
23.50
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Jet-fuel-price-cut-by-1-8-
non-subsidized-LPG-by-Rs-23-50/articleshow/35958492.cms)//gingE
NEW DELHI: Jet fuel prices have been cut by 1.8 per cent and rates of non-subsidized
cooking gas (LPG) by Rs 23.50 per cylinder after the rupee's appreciation lowered import
costs. The price of jet fuel, also known as aviation turbine fuel (ATF), at Delhi was cut by
Rs 1,285.89 per kilolitre, or 1.81 per cent, to Rs 69,747.98 per kilolitre, according to
Indian Oil Corp, the nation's largest fuel retailer. This is the third reduction in jet
fuel rates since April. Declining international oil prices and the strengthening of the
rupee against the US dollar have made imports cheaper. In Mumbai, jet fuel costs Rs
71,940.36 per kilolitre as against Rs 73,306.89 per kilolitre previously, IOC said. The
rates vary because of differences in local sales tax or VAT. Jet fuel constitutes over 40 per
cent of an airline's operating costs and the price cut will ease the financial burden of
cash-strapped carriers. No immediate comments were available from airlines on the
impact of the price cut on passenger fares. Separately, the price of non-subsidized LPG,
which customers buy after using up their quota of 12 subsidized cylinders, was cut by Rs
23.50 per cylinder, the fifth straight reduction in rates since February. Each non-
subsidized 14.2kg cooking gas cylinder will now cost Rs 905, down from Rs 928.50, in
Delhi. The rates were cut on February 1 by Rs 107 from Rs 1,241 per cylinder to Rs
1,134, by Rs 53.5 per cylinder in March to Rs 1,080.50, by Rs 100 to Rs 980.50 in April
and by Rs 52 last month. A subsidized LPG cylinder in Delhi costs Rs 414. Non-domestic
LPG rates were increased by a steep Rs 220 per cylinder at the beginning of the year but
have now been cut in line with softening international rates. IOC said losses on LPG have
come down to Rs 432.71 per subsidized cylinder from Rs 449.14 in the previous month.
The loss was Rs 762.50 in January. The three fuel retailers IOC, Hindustan Petroleum
Corp and Bharat Petroleum Corp revise jet fuel and non-subsidized LPG prices on the
first of every month, based on the average international prices in the preceding month.
Manufacturing

Manufacturing increasing now and economic recovery is self-sustaining
Johnson 1-2 (Steven C., Jan 2, 2014 , Manufacturing growth hits 11-month high:
Markit, Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/02/us-usa-economy-pmi-
idUSBREA010HF20140102#)
(Reuters) - U.S. manufacturing ended the year on a high note, growing in December at
its fastest pace in 11 months, while the rate of job growth was the swiftest since March,
an industry report showed on Thursday.
Financial data firm Markit said its final U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index
rose to 55.0 last month, beating November's 54.7 reading and an initial December
estimate of 54.4. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.
A solid increase in output, for which the index rose to its highest mark in 21 months of
57.5 from 57.4 in November, boosted growth in the sector and increased demand for
plants and machinery.
"This tells us that business spending is picking up on the back of rising confidence,
which adds to the sense that the recovery is (becoming) more self-sustaining,"
said Markit chief economist Chris Williamson.
The pace of hiring increased, with the employment sub-index rising to 54.0, its best
showing in nine months, from 52.3 in November. Williamson said the index suggests
manufacturing jobs are being created at a rate of about 20,000 per month.
Signs of strength in both the manufacturing and services sector as well as stronger job
growth across the economy contributed to the Federal Reserve's decision in December to
begin slowing its monthly bond purchases. That program, which the Fed began 15
months ago, was designed to keep long-term interest rates low and boost hiring and
growth.

Manufacturing increasing now no risk of the impact
Toor 1-29 - Amar joined The Verge in April 2012. He previously worked as an editor for
Engadget, and before that, as a writer for Switched. He has also worked as a consultant
at the OECD in Paris and at Miramax in Santa Monica. (Amar, Obama announces six
high-tech hubs in bid to win the future of manufacturing, The Verge,
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5356756/obama-calls-for-high-tech-
manufacturing-hubs-state-of-the-union)
President Barack Obama last night announced plans to create six high-tech
manufacturing hubs in the US, as part of his administration's push to spur domestic job
growth. The president outlined the proposal during his fifth State of the Union address
Tuesday evening, though details on the new centers remain thin.
In pushing for more domestic high-tech manufacturing, Obama echoed last year's State
of the Union speech, in which he lauded his administration's efforts to create a 3D
printing lab and training center in Youngstown, Ohio. Earlier this month, he announced
a second manufacturing institute in Raleigh, North Carolina, which will develop more
energy-efficient semiconductor technologies for cars and consumer electronics. The
president didn't specify where the six centers proposed last night will be located, or what
industries they will focus on, though he said congressional support could help launch
even more hubs in the future.
"GET THOSE BILLS TO MY DESK AND PUT MORE AMERICANS BACK TO WORK."
"We ... have the chance, right now, to beat other countries in the race for the next wave of
high-tech manufacturing jobs," Obama said Tuesday. "Tonight, I'm announcing we'll
launch six more this year. Bipartisan bills in both houses could double the number of
these hubs and the jobs they create. So, get those bills to my desk and put more
Americans back to work." The announcement drew applause and some standing ovations
from members of Congress.
Several tech companies have begun moving operations back to the US in recent months.
Apple brought some Mac manufacturing back to the US last year a move that earned
Obama's praise during last year's State of the Union while Google-owned Motorola has
also begun manufacturing its Moto X smartphone domestically. Some foreign companies
are following the move, as well; last week, Taiwan-based Foxconn revealed that it is
considering manufacturing some large displays in the US, after devoting $40 million to
developing robotic technologies in Pennsylvania.
Obama hopes to see more manufacturing hubs in the future, though significant
expansion would require congressional support. Last year, the president called upon
Congress to invest $1 billion in a network of 15 advanced manufacturing centers, with the
hope of expanding that number to 45 over the next decade. The North Carolina center
announced this month was supported by $70 million in federal funds, under a public-
private partnership with 18 businesses and six universities.
"I don't want the next big job creating discovery, the research and technology, to be in
Germany, or China, or Japan," the president said this month during a speech at North
Carolina State University. "I want it to be right here in the United States of America."
Manufacturing is high now new jobs and increased efficiency in
companies prove
Arnold 13 Chris Arnold has focused on the housing bubble and its collapse and he's
reported on problems within the nation's largest banks that have led to the banks
improperly foreclosing on thousands of American homeowners. For this work, Arnold
earned a 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for the special series, The Foreclosure
Nightmare. He's also been honored with the Newspaper Guild's 2009 Heywood Broun
Award for broadcast journalism. He was chosen by the Scripps Howard Foundation as a
finalist for their National Journalism Award, and he won an Excellence in Financial
Journalism Award from N.Y. State's society for CPA's. (Chris, December 26, 2013,
Manufacturing 2.0: Old Industry Creating New High-Tech Jobs, NPR News,
http://www.npr.org/2013/12/20/255721505/manufacturing-2-0-old-industry-creating-
new-high-tech-jobs)

Unlike the smoky, eardrum-damaging factories of yesterday, today's manufacturing is
going high-tech. That can mean more robots and automated machines than workers. But
companies like Machine Inc. in Stoughton, Mass., are still growing and hiring.
As the U.S. economy continues to recover, it has been getting some help from an
unexpected place. After decades of massive job losses, manufacturing firms have
been steadily creating jobs many of them well-paying. One particularly bright
spot is a new generation of high-tech manufacturers.
At a company called Machine Inc. in Stoughton, Mass., a hulking computer-controlled
milling machine is making an intricate aerospace component. "It goes in as an aluminum
block, and finishes up as a completed manifold," says Richard Mileika, the company's
founder. What used to be that aluminum block is now a precisely shaped component
with eight different holes in it to channel oxygen inside an airplane.
One thing stands out right away at the factory: There are more machines and robotic
arms working away on the factory floor than there are actual people running this
equipment. And that's a big part of why this company can exist.
To compete with cheaper labor abroad, U.S. manufacturing has gotten more
productive. That means it's been making more stuff with fewer workers. Actually, at
lunch and overnight there are no people at all on the floor just machines doing the
work.
"That is our weapon for being competitive whether it's local competitors or global
being flexible and being productive," Mileika says.
But even as lean and mean as this operation is, Mileika has been buying more machines
and hiring more workers.
He's expanded his workforce by 30 percent from where it was just before the recession
hit. And, he says, "we see growth over the next year." Mileika says he'd like to hire more
people especially if he could find workers with the skills to run this equipment. Skilled
workers like that are in short supply. And manufacturers like this one are working with
local community colleges or vocational schools to try to train more workers more
quickly.
A Turnaround In Manufacturing?
Since 2010, U.S. manufacturers have added 665,000 jobs. Now some economists
say that doesn't mean much. Manufacturing lost nearly 7 million jobs in the 30 years
before that, so historically this could be just a blip. They expect job losses will soon
continue in the long, sad story about the decline of manufacturing jobs in America.
But others aren't so sure that's the right way to look at it.
U.S. Manufacturing Employees, By Year
"I think that's an old story," says Barry Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern
University in Boston. He's been studying the 7,000 manufacturing businesses in
Massachusetts, surveying hundreds of them and making site visits to dozens.
"We're seeing a new, almost renaissance in manufacturing," he says. Bluestone says
manufacturers are learning new technologies, and new manufacturing technologies are
being developed at major universities. Nanotechnology, for example, holds great promise
for cutting-edge U.S. manufacturing firms, he says.
From Pink Flamingos To Heart Pumps
Bluestone says he's seen many companies transform themselves into high-tech
competitive operations, whereas before they used to make much lower-tech products
in one case it was lawn ornaments. "The pink flamingos that were made in Leominster,
Mass., the plastics capital of New England. .. . Well, that same company is now making
medical equipment," he says.
While many higher-tech firms are growing, other less-competitive firms are dying. And
the government projects U.S. manufacturing jobs overall will decline a bit by 2020.
At the same time, though, a lot of manufacturing workers are older and getting ready
to retire. "There are millions of jobs that will open up in manufacturing as the current
workforce retires," Bluestone says. Many of the manufacturers he's talked to "tell us their
No. 1 issue is where will the skilled workers come from to replace those that are retiring
today," he says.
For Manufacturing Jobs, Workers Brush Up On Math
Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is not as bullish as
Bluestone. He thinks there are still a lot of less-competitive manufacturing firms that
could be in trouble. But he says manufacturing jobs do tend to pay well and so they
have a bigger impact on the economy than many other types of work.
Moretti says that one job in manufacturing ultimately creates 1.6 additional jobs in local
services outside the manufacturing sector.
Those higher paid, high-tech manufacturing jobs have an even bigger effect several
times bigger, Moretti says. So if those "advanced manufacturing" firms continue to grow
and hire more workers, that could provide at least some boost to the U.S. economy.

US Manufacturing resilient increasing production, employment, exports
Blackden 12 US Business Editor for the Daily Telegraph (Richard, Americas
manufacturers show resilience in face of European slowdown, The Telegraph, 1/3/12,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/8990253/Americas-
manufacturers-show-resilience-in-face-of-European-slowdown.html) //BD
A widely-watched index of manufacturers activity from the Institute for Supply
Management climbed to 53.9 last month from 52.7 in November. Separate measures of
production, employment, new orders and exports also jumped, as the first US economic
data of the year underlined the resilience of the sector. The figures are the latest
evidence that the worlds biggest economy has rebounded from the trough reached in the
summer, when a reading of 50.6 on the index raised fears that the US was sliding back
into recession. A reading of more than 50 on the index signals expansion. The overall
message of the report suggests durability ahead for US production in the face of
likely external headwinds, said Steve Weiting, an economist at Citigroup. A
measure of export orders jumped to 53 from 52, as demand in Asia helped compensate
for a weakening in orders from Europe. Encouragement was also taken from a decline in
the ISMs inventory index to 47.1 from 48.3 in November, signalling that stronger should
demand should feed straight through to higher production.
Oil Shocks

No impact to oil shocks - adaptation.
Ro 6/30, Staff writer for Business Insider, quotes the Executive Director of Morgan
Stanley and the Senior Economist for the US, based in New York, (Sam, June 30, 2014,
Oil Price Shocks Aren't As Harmful As They Used To Be, Business Insider,
http://www.businessinsider.com/impact-of-oil-price-shock-2014-6)//HH

Oil is a critical source of energy. In the past, a major oil price shock meant devastation
for economic growth.
"Our obsession with oil prices comes with good reason," writes Morgan Stanley
economist Ellen Zentner. "Abrupt and sharp increases in oil prices have played a key role
in precipitating recessions in 1973-75, 1980-81, 1990-91, 2001 and 2008-09."
Recent turmoil in Iraq has sent oil prices much higher. But economists aren't ready to
freak out just yet.
"Over time, however, those shocks to the relative price of oil have spurred innovations
that have led to a more efficient use of energy inputs," continued Zentner. "Alongside
growing use of other energy inputs, those innovations have reduced the world economys
dependence on oil."
Zentner presented this chart showing how a decreasing amount of energy has been
needed to generated a dollar's worth of GDP in the world.
It may not be immediately intuitive how this could be.
Zentner offers a more micro level example that anyone who's been in a car can
appreciate.
US households have also adjusted consumption patterns over time. When gasoline prices
rise, drivers tend to reduce mileage in response and/or seek out more fuel efficient
vehicles. This altered behavior, coupled with shifting demographic factors and a slow
labor market recovery since the financial crisis, has weighed on vehicle miles driven and
lessens the aggregate impact of price increases at the pump. In the 12 months ended May
2014, average vehicle miles driven remained below the previous peak (reached in
November 2007) for a 76th straight month. In 1990, consumers devoted 3.8% of total
consumption to motor fuels. By 2013, that share had fallen to 2.3% (Exhibit 3).
Here's her chart. It shares a similar downward slope as the chart above.
It's certainly worth noting that innovation isn't just about fuel efficiency. Technological
developments have enabled U.S. oil drillers to extract fossil fuels from shale in North
Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere using unconventional methods. Indeed,
thanks to the shale boom, we might not even see Middle East-triggered oil price spikes
we've seen in past.

US oil production solves the impact.
Dodge 7/22, Staff writer for the Energy Collective, quotes the Vice Chairman of IHS,
and cites the U.S. Energy Information Association, (Edward, July 22, 2014, Daniel
Yergin: US Oil Output Helping Avert Crisis, The Energy Collective,
http://theenergycollective.com/jared-anderson/434471/daniel-yergin-us-oil-output-
helping-avert-crisis)//HH

Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize winning author and Vice Chairman of global consulting firm
IHS spoke at the 2014 EIA Conference in Washington D.C. on Monday. EIA, the U.S.
Energy Information Association is the statistics arm of the federal Department of Energy
and the conference featured leading figures from industry, academia and government.
Yergin stated emphatically that if not for the recent domestic boom in tight oil
production the U.S. would be in trouble. Im convinced were it not for whats
happened these last few years wed be looking at an oil crisis, he said. Wed have
panic in the public. Wed have angry motorists. Wed have inflamed congressional
hearings and wed have the U.S. economy falling back into a recession.
He went on to say that recent increases in domestic oil and gas production are turning
unconventional oil and gas resources into conventional resources. U.S. natural gas
production is up 34% since 2005 and crude oil production is up 66% since 2008.
Recoverable reserves have doubled and world oil resources are re-balancing. U.S. oil
production is at 8.3 million barrels per day production and could get to 14.4 million b/d.

Impact is empirically denied - price spikes havent caused conflict and prices
are stable now.
Martin 7/18, Staff writer for Forbes, cant disagree with facts, (Richard, July 18, 2014,
Amid Global Turmoil, Oil Prices Surprisingly Stable, Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/pikeresearch/2014/07/18/amid-global-turmoil-oil-prices-
surprisingly-stable/)//HH

The world has entered a zone of maximum upheaval. From the Atlas Mountains of
North Africa to the Hindu Kush, in Afghanistan, the Middle East is in flames. The
destruction of a Malaysian airline over Ukraine, almost certainly shot down by Russian-
backed separatist rebels, threatens war in the Black Sea region. Libya is being torn apart
by competing militias, while parts of Iraq are under assault by the murderous Islamist
force known as ISIS. Syria remains a bloody horror show, and Israeli troops have
launched a ground invasion of Gaza. At no time since the terror attacks of 2001 has the
world seen such conflict and instability.
So why arent oil prices higher?
Prices spiked briefly after the news on July 17 that Malaysian Air flight 17, en route from
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from
eastern Ukraine. U.S. oil futures rose $1.99 a barrel, up 2% on the New York Mercantile
Exchange, to reach nearly $104. That was the largest one-day jump since June 12, when
ISIS launched its offensive in Iraq, according to The Wall Street Journal. But markets
quickly calmed: the next day, benchmark crude had retreated below $103 a barrel on the
NYME. The shocks of recent days had caused a tremor across world petroleum markets,
At any given point of time, global financial markets are always at risk from geopolitical
disturbances, but this time around nobodys losing sleep over it, wrote Malini Bhupta in
the Business Standard, Indias leading economic newspaper, in a column headlined
Markets shrug off geopolitical risks as oil prices remain stable.
Before the latest outrage in Ukraine, oil prices had actually been easing: in mid-July U.S.
crude fell below $100 a barrel for the first time since May. Thats not to say that prices
arent high; as Steve LeVine, of Quartz, points out, geopolitical disturbances have
removed around 3.5 million barrels of oil a day from world markets since last fall, and if
the world were a more stable and peaceful place, oil prices would likely be well below
$100 a barrel. But given the current unrest, a price per barrel of $125, or higher, would
not be startling.
The ability of the market to absorb multiple shocks and keep prices relatively stable is an
indication of structural changes that have taken place in recent years.
Awash in Conflict, and Oil
According to Liam Denning, writing in The Wall Street Journals Heard on the Street
column, the forward curve the price of oil scheduled for delivery months or years in
the future, based on the trade in futures contracts has flipped in recent weeks, meaning
that prices for contracts nearer in time are now lower than those further out. When the
curve slopes upward like that, its an indication that supplies are plentiful. The global oil
market no longer looks quite so panicked about Iraq, commented Denning.
More broadly, the worlds supply of oil has been climbing for years, and continues to do
so despite the current crises. Whats more, the sources of that supply have diversified;
the Middle East no longer has as a dominant role in world production as it did 10 or even
5 years ago.




Pakistan Economy
Pakistan economy growing despite multiple problems
TOI, 14 Times of India (Pakistan economy outlook improved despite terrorism and
energy problems, 7/19/2014,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Pakistan-economy-outlook-
improved-despite-terrorism-and-energy-problems/articleshow/38686785.cms) //RGP
KARACHI: Despite problems of terrorism and energy crisis, the economic outlook of
Pakistan improved last fiscal with inflation remaining in single digit and foreign
remittances showing a rise, the State Bank of Pakistan said today. Pakistan follows a
financial year beginning July 1-June 30. Unveiling its bi-monthly monetary policy for the
new fiscal, the Bank kept the key interest rate unchanged at 10 per cent and forecast a
CPI inflation rate of 7.5-8.5 per cent during the year. Governor State bank, Ashraf
Mehmood Wathra told a news conference that despite the problems of energy crisis and
terrorism in the country the economic outlook had improved in the last fiscal year. This
he said was due to improved foreign remittances, better tax returns and reduced
government borrowing from the banks. "But more tax reforms have to be undertaken to
overcome the budget deficit and also improve the overall economic scenario," he said.
Wathra said the government borrowing from banks had decreased in the last fiscal year
while private sector had availed loans of 329 billion rupees during the period. This was a
positive indicator of development taking place in private sector. He said that rate of
inflation remained below 10 percent in the last fiscal year and was expected to remain
unchanged in next two months. He said the foreign remittances had increased in the last
six months with forex reserves with the central bank at USD 9.6 billion.

Pakistan economy growing Moodys assessment creates investor
confidence
Business Reporter, 14 (Pakistan economy: Moody's assessment green signal to
investors: PCJCCI chief, 7/22/2014, http://www.brecorder.com/business-a-
economy/189/1204933/) //RGP
Pak-China Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Shah Faisal Afridi
termed the current assessment of Pakistan's economy by "Moody's" as a green signal to
the international investors for investing in Pakistan, which will also strengthen Chinese
Investors' confidence in Pakistan. Commenting on Moody's assessment, President
PCJCCI said the government has met 10 of 17 structural benchmarks to set the economy
on track for achieving further improvements. He observed that upward rating has, in
fact, resulted from successful and timely completion of the IMF aided programs,
improvements in the external liquidity position and infrastructure advancement that
eventually had led the economy to a higher growth trajectory. He was of the view that
positive trends of Pakistan's economy as identified by an independent and credible
international source like Moody's would help grow foreign investors confidence on
present government's policies relating to the trade and industry in the country. He added
that Moody had appreciated energy sector reforms and improvement measures to be
introduced by the present government of Pakistan along with privatisation of the state-
owned enterprises, which shows that no matter how much pessimist you are about
Pakistan and its economy or future in general; or no matter how much resentment you
brew for the current Pakistani government, one cannot deny authenticity and validity of
Moody's. Moody's is the bond credit rating business which is respected all over the globe,
and when it says positive or negative, the world believes. Shah Faisal Afridi said Moody's
positive and stable outlook means that government of Pakistan is very well capable of
supporting its banks as well as paying its loans back, which means that the interlink
between banks and government is transparent and stable putting the risk profile at low
and investment options highly stable and profitable. He said this is the third bullish
assessment of Pakistan's economy by a significant institutional player, after the other
two coming from the International Monetary Fund and the State Bank over the past two
weeks. He said the G-8 and other developed countries get Moody's research and market
prediction to invest and provide loans and project funding at international level.
Therefore, the positive opinion given by Moody's on Pakistan's economy is a good omen
for foreign investment including the investment coming from China, he added.
Pakistan economy is growing even if it isnt alt causes prevent solvency
World Bank, 14 Pakistan Development Update: Economy Gradually Improving,
4/9/2014, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/04/09/pakistan-
dvelopment-update-economy-gradually-improving) //RGP
Pakistans economy is at a turning point, says the World Banks bi-annual Pakistan
Development Update, launched today. Growth recovery is underway, with projected GDP
growth approaching four percent, driven by dynamic manufacturing and service sectors,
better energy availability, and early revival of investor confidence. Inflation is steady at
7.9%. The fiscal deficit is contained at around six percent of GDP due to improved tax
collection and restricted current and development expenditure. The current account
deficit remains modest, at around one percent of GDP, supported by strong remittances
and export dynamism, and the external position is slowly improving since monetary and
exchange rate policies switched gear towards rebuilding reserves last November.
Economic activity is gradually improving says the report. Preliminary data for Fiscal
Year 2014 (July 2013-June 2014) shows economic growth is picking up, driven mainly by
services and manufacturing. Acceleration in growth of large-scale manufacturing came
from strong performance of agro-based industries, iron and steel, construction, and
external demand-driven cotton yarn- and fabrics-based textiles. Agriculture appears
slightly below target owing to unfavorable weather conditions. On the demand side,
growth continues to be driven by private consumption. However, private investment
recovery is mild; and much of this is inherited from the crowding out of private-sector
credit by government borrowing, which grew at close to nil in FY13. Loose fiscal stance
being corrected A significant correction is taking place to ensure sustainability. Pakistan
is on track to meet a fiscal deficit target of 5.8% of GDP in FY14. However revenue
collection is slightly below target. On the expenditure side, energy-related subsidies have
been reduced with tariff adjustments. However, while the government dealt with the
stock of the circular debt, resulting in reduced load-shedding in the first months of the
year, circular debt is re-emerging. Public investment constrained by lack of fiscal space
and any commitment to reduce the fiscal deficit remains contained. Public debt
remains above the 60% of GDP allowed by the Fiscal Responsibility Law, and justified by
security reasons. As large fiscal deficits have been financed increasingly through
domestic borrowing, rollover risk has increased. External financing available to the
government is scarce, but expected to improve in the last two quarters. The external
position is fragile but strengthening. The current account deficit was small, at around 1
percent of GDP by end-FY13 and remains so. In contrast, net official foreign exchange
reserves have risen to 1.1 month of imports, up from a low of 20 days at the end of
November 2013. This is due in part to the fact that since the second quarter of FY14, the
State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) increased its policy rate and has started to purchase dollars
on the spot market, turning decisively toward rebuilding the external position. Three
sources of risk Three sources of risk appear worrisome. Pakistan imports more than it
exports, the latter being constrained by low productivity and competitiveness, limited
access to reliable energy, and cumbersome business regulations. Political events keep
FDI flows and private investment low, which also affects foreign reserves. An uncertain
political environment undermines investor confidence and depresses economic activity.
The troubled domestic energy sector continues to endure a long-due complex inheritance
on its circular debt which, contrary to the governments plans, might affect the
magnitude of fiscal adjustment. However, Pakistans Emerging Markets Bonds Index
Plus (EMBI+) risk spread keeps declining from the high levels shown at the start of the
new administration last year. Market confidence in the governments program is bearing
fruit, as the EMBI has almost halved from 1,011 basis points in March 2013 to around
468 basis points as of March 26, 2014. The government intends to benefit from it and
return to the international markets with the placement of a $500 million-$1 billion
Eurobond in the fourth quarter of the current fiscal year.

Protectionism
No protectionism trade is universally popular
Stokes, 14 director of global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center (Bruce,
U.S. isolationism isn't protectionism, CNN, 1/14/2014,
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/14/u-s-isolationism-isnt-
protectionism/) //RGP
Isolationism is not protectionism. And confusing the two can create a false impression of
the trajectory of U.S. global engagement in the year ahead. New polling data showing
that the American public is turning inward, preoccupied with domestic affairs and less
interested in international engagement, is not evidence of a rise in U.S. economic
protectionism, with its grave consequences for global business. Indeed, even as their
doubts grow over the future U.S. geopolitical role, Americans say that the benefits from
U.S. participation in the global economy outweigh the risks. And even as they harbor
doubts about the impact of trade agreements on wages and jobs, public support for
closer trade and business ties with other nations stands at its highest point in more than
a decade. The Obama administrations disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan, its
leading from behind in Libya and its reluctance to become involved in the Syrian civil
war all reflect a broad public reassessment of Americas future security role in the world.
But the White Houses pursuit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership, two unprecedented trade deals, equally reflect
Americans newfound acceptance of the importance or at least inevitability of U.S.
economic integration with the rest of the world. Still, 2014 could well prove to be a year
when the United States is less globally engaged geopolitically, even while it is more
engaged economically. Americans say that the country does too much to solve world
problems, and increasingly they want their leaders to pay more attention to problems at
home. About half the public see the United States as overextended abroad, according to a
recent Pew Research Center survey. When asked to describe why they feel this way,
nearly half cite problems at home, including the economy, which they say should get
more attention instead. More from GPS: Americans see declining U.S. prestige And such
skepticism about international engagement has increased. Currently, about half the
public says the United States should mind its own business internationally and let other
countries get along the best they can on their own. Such public international ennui has
waxed and waned at various times in recent history, most notably after the Vietnam War.
But this is the most lopsided split in favor of the U.S. minding its own business in the
nearly 50 years this question has been asked. Yet the American public expresses no such
reluctance about U.S. involvement in the global economy. About three-in-four
Americans say that growing trade and business ties between the United States and other
countries are good for the nation. And such support for increased trade and business
connections has increased 24 percentage points since 2008. Moreover, at a time of deep
partisan divides on many issues, Americans are united in endorsing global economic
engagement. Solid majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents describe
increased international trade and business ties as good for the U.S. By more than two-to-
one, Americans also see more benefits than risks from greater involvement in the global
economy. This includes large majorities across education and income categories, as well
as most Republicans, Democrats and independents. To be sure, the public has worries
about globalization. A 2010 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of the
public said free trade agreements lead to job losses. And a plurality said that free trade
deals lower wages. Nevertheless, majorities wanted to increase trade with both Europe
and Japan the principal participants in the current transatlantic and transpacific trade
negotiations. And Americans are of two minds about foreign investment. Amid forecasts
of massive new Chinese investment in the United States over the next decade, a majority
says that more foreign companies setting up operations in the United States would
mostly help the economy. But nearly three-quarters think that the economy would be
hurt if more U.S. companies move their operations abroad. So what does all this suggest?
The prophecies of Americas retreat from the world are premature. Americans may want
a less forward-leaning geopolitical posture in the world, but they still support greater
U.S. global economic engagement with it.
No impact to protectionism
Kanellos, 11 staff writer (Michael, Why Protectionism Works, Greentech,
1/12/2011, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/why-protectionism-works)
//RGP
Politicians and some trade groups have begun to lobby the U.S. to pursue trade sanctions
against China. At the same time, they warn that U.S. retaliatory trade barriers will cause
the price of solar panels and other technologies to rise, create economic inefficiencies
and slow innovation. If you don't believe in free trade and the market system, then you
can look to North Korea for a roadmap for economic development, one person told me.
On the other hand, executives like Bill Watkins, CEO of LED manufacturer Bridgelux,
says Buy American provisions remain one of the best and simplest ways to grow the
market. Think of it for a second. What if the federal government created a fund that
would pay communities to upgrade their streetlights to LEDs with a caveat that 60
percent of the equipment came from U.S.-based facilities? Energy consumption would be
reduced, municipalities would see their power bills decline, and the fund could be paid in
part through the tax revenues coming from those booming lighting and construction
firms. Everybody, potentially, wins. This debate is further fueled by the fact that nearly
everyones opinion gets colored by a subjective worldview. Is the government an
encroaching evil or the people that keep rat droppings out of burger meat? See the
comments: the issue arouses emotions. Personally, I come down on the side of
experimental protectionism. We should try Buy American and Buy Local standards, and
in a few years' time, pick which ones work best, if any. We have some with the ARRA and
the DoD has imposed some already. Oil and coal get subsidies. Whats the worse that
could happen? An uptick to 9.8 percent unemployment? Here are the traditional bullet
points why: 1. Everyone Else Does It. Does China play fair under WTO rules? Does
Europe? Does anyone reading this enjoy a thriving export business in Japan? Look
around the globe and you will find policies directed at building economies through
industrial subsidies and limiting contracts to local suppliers that arguably run afoul of
trade agreements. "In Michigan, we will give you the whole factory, land included,"
Michael Eckhart of ACORE said in October. "In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we asked [China]
to become more efficient. The darn thing is, is that they did it and we got left in the dust.
When I am wearing my U.S. hat, I say this is a threat. But when I wear my renewables
hat, I have to say this is the best thing that ever happened." We already give out stimuli.
Buy American provisions can further level the playing field. 2. We Need Middle-Class
Job Growth. A few years back, a well-known investor suggested to me that displaced IT
workers could find new careers in elder care. It reminded me of a summer job a friend
once had. It involved applying Tucks Medicated Pads (for cooling relief!) to a woman in
a terminal care facility. Is this really the kind of opportunity you want to bequeath to the
upcoming generation? 3. IP Jobs Cant Employ Everyone. The oft-heard prescription for
economic recovery is that Americans should aspire to high value jobs with a heavy
emphasis on intellectual property. Unfortunately, not everyone is smart enough, or has
the time, to get a PhD in biochemistry. IP firms dont employ massive numbers, either.
The countries held up as paragons of the IP model -- Finland, Israel, Singapore, Taiwan -
- have somewhat small populations. 4. Buyers Have Freedom. Most of these laws do not
put restrictions on individuals or private organizations. They only require federal, state
or local agencies buy a certain percentage of their products and services from U.S.
suppliers. Why cant the Department of Defense choose its vendors? Free trade
advocates mistakenly imply that price should be the only determining factor when
picking a vendor. Instead, buyers can use any criteria -- good of the community, real
estate tax benefits, longstanding relationships -- they like this side of outright bribery. If
the DoD thinks a sound economy begets national security, so be it. 5. Its Not That
Mystifying. Late last year, Suntech Power Holdings, the large Chinese solar maker,
opened a module assembly facility in Arizona. Why? To qualify under Buy in America
statutes. The company also selects U.S. polysilicon, one of our strongest exports, to do
the same. Meanwhile, A-Power Technologies, a Chinese wind turbine maker, is building
a factory in Nevada for the same reasons. Dialight hailed a decision this week that limits
lighting projects sponsored by ARRA money to U.S. manufacturers. Dialight comes from
the U.K. but has a U.S. subsidiary. People can figure out how to make it work. 6. Wall
Street Will Comply. Investors and venture capitalists, when faced with more government
restrictions, will walk away from energy, some claim.



Recessions dont cause protectionism newest data proves
Rose 12 - professor of international business and trade at the Haas School of Business
(Berkeley)(Andrew, PROTECTIONISM ISNT COUNTER CYCLIC (ANYMORE)
National Bureau of Economic Research May 2012,
http://www.nber.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/papers/w18062.pdf]
The goal of this short empirical paper is to show that protectionism has not been
countercyclic since the Second World War. This result is robust; I use eighteen
measures of protectionism, seven measures of the business cycle, and a variety of
controls, in an annual postwar panel of data spanning more than sixty countries over
thirty years. This result seems natural; it is exemplified by the absence of any dramatic
outbreak of protection associated with the Great Recession of 200809. But this result is
also striking; as a stylized fact, acyclic protectionism is grossly inconsistent with the
literature. Any of the theoretical studies of the determinants of protectionism that relies
on this false generalization (five are sketched above) may therefore be of limited interest.
If the profession wants to understand the determinants of protectionism it should do so
from a solid empirical footing. I use a historical panel going back 140 years to show that
protectionism was probably counter cyclic earlier, though it is hard to be definitive
because there is little quality data of relevance before WWII. I have been unsuccessful in
explaining why protectionism is no longer countercyclic; there is little support for any
hypothesis that can be quantified. In contrast to more recent times, before WWI tariffs
contributed greatly to the national treasury, there was no GATT, and the gold standard
ruled. Recent data indicate that protectionist policies of countries with differing fiscal
situations react similarly to business cycles, as do those of countries inside/outside the
GATT/WTO, those with fixed/floating exchange rates, small/large countries, and
open/closed countries. If there has been a shift in the cyclicality of protectionism since
WWII, its hard to be sure why. This topic awaits further research. Perhaps, just perhaps,
the switch in the cyclicality of protectionism if there has indeed been one is a
triumph of modern economics. After all, there is considerable and strong consensus
among economists that protectionism is generally bad for welfare.35 And there is no
doubt that economists are aware and actively involved in combating countercyclic
protectionism; this was especially visible during the Great Recession, which saw the
successful launch of Global Trade Alert in June 2009.36 If and its a big if the efforts
of the economic profession are part of the reason that protectionism is no longer
countercyclic, then the profession deserves a collective pat on the back. But in that case
the profession should also consider setting its sights higher. If economists have helped
reduce the cyclicality of protectionism, then perhaps they should focus on simply
reducing protectionism.

Newest studies prove protectionism is cyclical recessions wont cause
protectionism
Rose 12 - professor of international business and trade at the Haas School of Business
(Berkeley)(Andrew, PROTECTIONISM ISNT COUNTER CYCLIC (ANYMORE)
National Bureau of Economic Research May 2012,
http://www.nber.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/papers/w18062.pdf]
The entire politicaleconomy literature without exception (to the best of my knowledge),
agrees that protectionism is countercyclic. The abstract of Bagwell and Staiger (2003)
begins Empirical studies have repeatedly documented the countercyclical nature of
trade barriers; for support, they provide citations of eight papers which all conclude
that the average level of protection tends to rise in recessions and fall in booms. Rodrik
(1995, p. 1486) states That the average tariff level tends to rise in recessions is a robust
finding in the literature Costinot (2009, p. 1011) states One very robust finding of the
empirical literature on trade protection is the positive impact of unemployment on the
level of trade barriers. The same pattern can be observed across industries, among
countries, and over time McKeown (1984, p. 215) states: That tariff levels and
economic growth rates tend to move in opposite directions is a venerable piece of
conventional wisdom. As early as 1879, Gustav Schmoller, the famous economist of the
German historical school, noted that, The times of boom, of increasing exports, of new
openings of overseas markets, are the natural free trade epochs, while the reverse is true
in times of foreign slumps, of depressions, of crisis.1 Most of the literature that studies
the determinants and incidence of protectionism is cross sectional in nature.2 That is, it
addresses questions like Why do certain industries/areas/interest groups receive
protectionism, while others do not? Perhaps the most prominent recent example is
Grossman and Helpman (1994), a seminal paper which has generated a number of
empirical tests, including Goldberg and Maggi (1999) and Gawande and Bandyopadhyay
(2000). By way of contrast, the focus of this paper is on the timeseries variation of
protectionism; I ask How does protectionism respond to business cycle fluctuations?
Received Wisdom The literature provides evidence that protectionism was countercyclic
before the Second World War. Hansen (1990) uses American preWWII data and shows
that (p. 539) During economic recessions, the federal government posted taxes [tariffs]
4.69 percentage points higher than it did during expansions. Gallarotti (1985) supports
her theory of countercyclic protectionism using pre WWI data from Germany, the UK
and the USA; McKeown (1984) uses similar data to support his closely related theory.
Magee and Young (1987) find that tariffs rise with unemployment using standard
regression techniques and data from twentiethcentury American presidential
administrations. Bohara and Kaempfer (1991a) use American data from 1890 to 1970.
They estimated a VAR that includes: a) the real trade balance; b) the log of
unemployment; c) the growth of real GNP; d) inflation; and e) the growth rate of the
average tariff on dutiable imports. They conclude that there is significant Granger
causality to tariff levels from all variables except the trade balance. Curiously, their
impulse response functions have signs that are sensible in the very short run (meaning
that higher unemployment and lower GDP are associated with higher tariffs), but are
reversed within a few years. Bohara and Kaempfer (1991b) use comparable data but with
a 3variable VAR, excluding the trade balance and inflation. In this context they find no
significant effect of unemployment on tariffs, and they also find that higher growth is
associated with higher tariffs. A handful of papers use postwar timeseries data to link
protectionism to the state of the macroeconomy. Takacs (1981) uses annual American
data between 19491979 on instances when the USITC is petitioned for a temporary
tariff, quota or other kind of protection. She finds that the use of the escape clause is
not correlated with cyclic (or trend) measures of economic activity. Feinberg (2005)
finds weak evidence of cyclicality in American antidumping petitions, especially outside
steel. Grilli (1988) uses 18 annual observations for both the EC and the USA between
1969 and 1986, and two measures of protectionism, the log of import penetration and
petitions for antidumping, subsidy countervailing and safeguard actions. He is able to
link these to the log real exchange rate and the growth in industrial production (for the
US) or the change in unemployment (for the EC). Grilli uses 2SLS with a Cochrane
Orcutt procedure, a time trend and dummy variables; he finds evidence of counter cyclic
movement in nontariff barriers. This is a heavily parameterized approach, long on
assumptions and short on sensitivity analysis and data. Knetter and Prusa (2003) find a
linkage between antidumping filings and macroeconomic factors. They use multilateral
and bilateral data for Australia, Canada, the EU and the USA between 1980 and 1998.
Their particular focus is the real exchange rate; they find that appreciation increases
filings significantly. They also find that the effect of the threeyear growth in real GDP is
insignificant in multilateral data, but significantly negative in bilateral data. Finally,
Bown and Crowley (2012) use data for five major economies to estimate the effects of
macroeconomic fluctuations on protectionism. They exploit a recent quarterly bilateral
data set that is disaggregated by product. While their main focus is on the
responsiveness of temporary trade barriers to foreign growth, they find evidence that
protection is countercyclic, especially for the United States and Australia. I take the
latter two findings seriously and consider antidumping and other temporary trade
barriers further below. Still, the evidence of countercyclic postwar protectionism seems
less than overwhelming. I start by exploiting the data set tabulated in the data appendix
of Magee and Young (1987). This provides series for the natural logarithm of the
American tariff and unemployment rates (among other variables), averaged over
presidential administrations between 1904 and 1984. I provide time series plots of these
series in the topleft graph of Figure 1. The graph immediately below is a scatter plot of
the tariff (on the ordinate) against unemployment (on the abscissa). This shows a
positive relationship over the whole period; countercyclic protection. The sample is split
into two in the scatter plots to the right. Above, the data show a positive relationship
between 1906 and 1942; high unemployment in the 1930s tends to coincide with high
tariffs. This relationship is strikingly reversed in the graph below which scatters tariffs
against unemployment for the period between 1946 and 1982. 3 Since World War Two,
high American unemployment seems to coincide with low American tariffs;
protectionism seems to be, if anything, cyclic.
This finding is not particularly sensitive. The census bureau provides annual data on
American duties (measured as a percentage of dutiable imports) between 1869 and 1997,
when the series was discontinued. This can be compared to (the natural logarithm of
American) real GNP, taken from the BEA and extended back by Balke and Gordon.3 The
raw series on duties and GNP are plotted in the top left graph of Figure 2; NBER
recessions are also marked on the GNP plot.4 Both duties and aggregate output trend
strongly; accordingly, detrended series for both duties and output (after plainvanilla
double exponential univariate detrending) are plotted beneath.5 The scatterplots on the
right show again that the relationship between the two series seems to be different before
and after the end of the Second World War. Before WWII, detrended GNP and
protectionism are negatively correlated; business cycle upturns tend to coincide with
lower protectionism.6 However, as can be seen in the lowerright scatterplot, this
relationship is reversed after WWII when business cycle peaks and high duties appear
together.7

2008 proves trade war wont happen
Zappone 12 staff writer [Chris, 'Murky protectionism' on the rise - but no trade war
Sydney Morning Herald 1/10/12 <http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-
business/murky-protectionism-on-the-rise--but-no-trade-war-20120110-1pt3t.html>]
At the outset of the global financial crisis, the worlds leaders pledged to resist calls to
shield their local economies in order to prevent a trade war that could further damage
global growth. Four years on, with China slowing, Europe heading into recession and a
political environment soured by successive financial crises, the question arises: how long
will policymakers be able to resist those calls for more protectionism? Free trade is
going to be under pressure, said Lowy Institute international economy program director
Mark Thirlwell. Since 2007-08 the case for moving to greater trade liberalisation has
got tougher and the demands for protection have increased. Only last week, China,
which is grappling with a slowdown, raised the prospect of a trade war with the
European Union in response to the EU's implementation of a carbon emissions tax on air
travel to and from Europe. Earlier last month China imposed tariffs up to 21 per cent on
US-made cars, affecting about $US4 billion imports a year. Advertisement Across the
Pacific, US politicians in the throes of an election year with 8.5 per cent unemployment
have issued more strident calls for China to play by the rules and allow the yuan to
appreciate faster against the US dollar. The US has also asked the World Trade
Organisation to probe China's support for its solar panel industry and the restrictions
Beijing has placed on US poultry imports. In fact, the most recent WTO data shows that
the number of trade restrictive measures enacted by members rose 53 per cent to 339
occurrences over the year to October. Yet the WTO admits that the motives behind the
spate of actions arent always simply to protect local jobs. Not all measures categorised
as trade restrictive may have been adopted with such an intention, the body said. In
Brazil, for example, the steep rise in the value of its currency, the real, has sparked a
torrent of car imports into the country - similar to the online-overseas shopping boom in
Australia. Brazil has in turn put a one-year provisional 30 per cent increase on auto
imports, to counterbalance the effects of their strong currency. In the US, China and
Australia, infrastructure spending measures contain buy local requirements to stoke
domestic growth, not necessary punish foreign businesses. The federal government in
September streamlined its anti-dumping system that eases the way for companies to ask
for investigations into imported goods that come in below market value to Australia.
Again, well within the rules. What weve seen is a gradual ratcheting up of trade
intervention, said Mr Thirlwell, amounting to what he calls murky protectionism or
government intervention through support for industries or complaints to global trade
authorities. To date, observers such as Mr Thirlwell say most countries have remained
remarkably resistant to throwing up significant trade barriers. For example, in
November, the US, Australia and seven other Asian-Pacific nations including Japan,
outlined the plan for an ambitious multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership trade block
worth 40 per cent of the worlds trade, in an effort to increase the flow of cross-border
goods and investment. Japan, China and South Korea are also in the later stages of
negotiation over a free trade deal between those three nations. Australian National
University international trade lecturer John Tang doesnt believe the world is on the edge
a new round of protectionism. I dont see a general sea change towards protectionism
for major trading blocks but that may be because so much of the industrialised world is
relying on developing countries to sustain their exports, he said. Nevertheless, a shift in
the political reality of the US, China or elsewhere could change that, he said. Washington
DC-based Brookings Institution fellow Joshua Meltzer said that if the euro zone broke
up, elevating the crisis to a new stage, nations may switch to much more protective
measures. I wouldnt go so far to say the global economy is so integrated that we could
never have anything that would approach a trade war, said Washington DC-based
Brookings Institution fellow Joshua Meltzer. But I dont think were on that track.

Protectionism wont happen institutional and legal factors
Molinuevo 10 - trade policy expert [Martin, Protectionism in services during the
global crisis a (trade) war in shallow trenches? United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and the Pacific 2010]
The analysis of the measures taken during the 2008-2009 global economic
crisis suggests that, when in it comes to international trade and investment
in services, the scenario of a global trade war or restrictive measures, has
not really ever become a real one. Clearly, the crisis seems to have granted
the opportunity to some countries to give in to protectionist pressures,
particularly in industries where such pressures are traditionally strong,
such as automobiles, machinery industries and agriculture. To that end,
Governments have resorted to measures that tend to be poorly covered by
the international legal framework, such as subsidies schemes and
government procurement. With regard to international trade and
investment in services, the analysis suggests that a number of economic,
legal and institutional factors complement each other to create strong
incentives against a general surge of protectionism. These elements, indeed,
de facto eliminate from the domestic regulatory capacity a number of
instruments that would allow Governments to protect domestic industries
and isolate them from the global economy. In such a legal, economic and
institutional context, a trade war seems unlikely. The above findings
confirm the general perception that international trade in services remains
an area which is less accessible to direct governmental intervention. While
in the area of trade in goods, the Governments have a number of
instruments to affect particular, chosen goods, at their disposal. When it
comes to trade in services, regulatory action for individual sectors tends to
be more costly and less readily available, which acts as a disincentive for the
introduction of protectionist measures. National policymakers are better
equipped to focus on the development of general legal frameworks, leaving
sector-specific matters to be developed by specialized agencies with
expertise in the individual sector. In the negotiating context, this translates
into a need for trade and foreign ministries to maintain close contacts with
specific regulatory agencies. Another implication relates to the
strengthening of the multilateral trading system, and highlights apparent
contradictions between negotiations and actual policy needs. The above
observations suggest that services generate less protectionist pressures than
trade in goods. Yet, at the multilateral level, a number of developing
countries seem reluctant to advance in international commitments in this
area. This may in part be due to particular regulatory concerns associated
with certain services industries. However, more active discussions on trade
and investment in services in multilateral negotiations would sustain the
international trading rules and would enhance coherence of the system, in
particular vis--vis the proliferation of preferential trade agreements. The
regulatory developments on trade and investment in services observed
during the crisis also have strong implications for two matters on the
multilateral agenda on services disciplines. Some Asian WTO Members have
devoted significant efforts to gather support for the introduction of a special
safeguard mechanism under GATS, with limited success. Such an
instrument seems to offer few advantages for regulators for the defense of
domestic services in emergency situations. Indeed, no measure taken
during the economic crisis was aimed in that direction, not even in the
financial sector. Trade negotiators would hence be well advised to consider
whether an emergency mechanism, that does not seem to attract major
interest from their own regulators in times of economic crisis, is worth
investing such negotiating capital in. Conversely, the most popular
emergency measure resorted to during the crisis, subsidies, has received
little interest at the multilateral table. However, the GATS disciplines on
non-discrimination do apply to state aid measures. The regulatory practice
during the global crisis has shown that emergency subsidies, temporary
in nature, can prove a valuable instrument in times of crisis (i.e. promoting
trade and investment rather than restricting it). WTO Members may draw
on this experience in developing joint rules that would ensure that subsidies
remain a valuable tool in the policy options for Governments in times of
crises, while setting limits to the discriminatory and distortive effects that
they may bring about.


No U.S.-China trade war debt checks
Wachman 9 writer for The Guardian
[Richard, Trade: nightmare of a US-China protectionist war The Guardian 3/7/2009
<http://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/08/protectionism-global-economy-
internationaltrade>]
If things turn sour between America and China, a slump in world trade would be
accompanied by a financial markets meltdown too horrible to contemplate. When
America, not to mention the rest of the developed world, has run up ever larger debts in
the wake of the bailout of the banks, China has become ever more important as a
potential acquirer of US government bonds. If China stopped funding the US budget
deficit, "the system would collapse and the US economy would be toast", according to
David Williams at Capital Economics. But as its biggest creditor, it is hardly in China's
interest to see the dollar's value ripped to shreds: one result would be that China's $1.95
trillion of foreign currency reserves would collapse in value, wrecking the Chinese
economy. And, with exports accounting for 40% of China's GDP, the stability of world
markets is as vital for Beijing as for Washington. In other words, the economic balance of
power is such that each side can rely on mutually assured destruction.

REM Shortage
Squo Solves
Squo solves REM shortage new mines, stockpiles, recycling, and
alternatives
Piesing 7/31/13 freelance journalist (Mark, Rare-earth mineral substitutes could
defeat Chinese stranglehold, Wired, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-
07/31/race-for-rare-earth-minerals)//IS
However, in the end, he says, "everyone reacts to it. Mines open. Companies stockpile.
People try and recycle it or find alternatives, like nanomaterials." China's control is, he
believes, "particularly vulnerable" to innovation. So with US government support the
Mountain Pass rare-earth mine in California, which is sitting on top of about 13 percent
of the world's supply, has just reopened, after closing in 2002 when the price of the
elements fell too low. Mines are also starting production in such countries as Australia
and Canada. Even once-defunct Cornish tin mines are now reopening thanks to the
presence of rare materials such as indium in their tin deposits. In the US the Department
of Energy is sponsoring 13 other research projects like Laura Lewis's to find synthetic
replacements for rare-earth materials. Professor Lewis says that because rare-earth
elements were "messy to dig up and required strong, damaging acids to separate
elements from the rocks the world was very happy to have it restricted to China and not
in their own country". Now she is under pressure to "invent the material right now" and
at the same face the "daunting challenge" of working out how to manufacture the new
material before the research has even been finished.

Recycling solves now
Business Wire, 11/07/13 (Business Wire, Cutting-Edge Technology Shows Potential
for New Revenue Streams,
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20131113005124/en/Cutting-Edge-
Technology-Shows-Potential-Revenue-Streams#.U8bwTfldXpQ)//IS
Researchers in China have discovered a way to recycle rare earth elements from
wastewater. Rare earth elements are essential for high-tech applications like cell phones
and green technologies. Reports have shown Chinese researchers are closer to
understanding how effective a nanomaterial called nano-magnesium hydroxide, which
can remove metals and dyes from wastewater, would be in removing diluted rare earth
elements as well. With this new technology, supplies of metals like terbium, used in
magnets and superconductors, and dysprosium, could last another 30 years. Attempts
to recycle them so far have not been cost effective, with a major challenge being that the
elements are usually very diluted in wastewater. "We are doing our due diligence by
following late stage R&D findings of these emerging markets and preparing to
commercialize economically scalable results," GTSO CEO Paul Watson said. "This
technology from China is particularly intriguing because extracting rare earths from
wastewater is a game changer that can bring considerable economic benefits."

More REM mines opening now solves demand
Peixe, 8/1/13 (Joao, US Begins Mining Rare Earth Elements after more than 10
Years, OilPrice.com http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Begins-
Mining-Rare-Earth-Elements-after-more-than-10-Years.html)//IS
Before the 1990s the US produced enough rare earth elements to meet most of its
growing demand, however new regulations, and growing competition from China saw
their domestic production decline, and by 2000 the US was entirely reliant on imports,
with 94% of the international market supplied by China. But China has restricted
supplies in recent years, sending prices soaring by 400% between 2005 and 2011, and
creating tension between China and the US, EU, and Japan. The National Resource
Council then warned the government that growing demand in China could lead to falling
supplies on the global market, which could negatively affect the US manufacturing
sector, so, after more than a decade rare earth mines are beginning to reopen. In 2012
Molycorp resumed mining at its Mountain Pass mines in California, and plans to boost
production this year to 19,050 tonnes of rare earth oxide a year, enough to meet 10% of
global demand.

More REM mines opening now
Davis, 2/28/14 reporter for the South Jersey Times (Phil, Geologists enter Rowan
partnership to tackle rare earth minerals, South Jersey Times,
http://www.nj.com/gloucester-
county/index.ssf/2014/02/rowan_geologists_enter_partnership_to_tackle_rare_earth
_minerals.html)//IS
The Chinese were able to produce these things cost-effectively, and they didnt care
about their environment, said Bonfiglio. [Congress] concluded that we have plenty of
rare earth minerals here, so why are we allowing the Chinese to take advantage of us?
Domestically, there is only one company that currently mines and processes rare earth,
Molycorp Inc., based in Greenwood Village, Colo. Lanix is planning to open its first mine
recovery plant in Yavupai County, Ariz., with development to commence in a matter of
weeks. If the measure is signed into law, it could open the door for more companies like
Bonfiglios to venture into the field of rare earth minerals and create their own
processing plants. Bonfiglio entered the field with Lanix Explorations and began the
partnership with Rowan in December 2013, inviting university faculty and students to
begin studying effective ways to analyze potential rare earth mineral sites, with the hope
of eventually creating a processing plant to produce those minerals for commercial use.
Students take part in the analysis section of the process, identifying what minerals could
potentially be extracted from mining and excavation sites, while also collaborating with
Lanix about developing the technology to do so. While most of the process would
typically involve employees with a university degree in chemistry, opening up a
processing plant in New Jersey once their research is complete could bring
manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Russia Economy
Russian economic collapse inevitable
Herszenhorn, 14 NYT staff writer (David, Russia Economy Worsens Even Before
Sanctions Hit, New York Times, 4/16/2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/world/europe/russia-economy-worsens-even-
before-sanctions-hit.html) //RGP
MOSCOW Margarita R. Zobnina, a professor of marketing here, has been watching the
Russian economys gathering woes with mounting alarm: friends who have moved
abroad with no plans to return; others who put off new business ventures because of
rising uncertainty. Meanwhile, Ms. Zobnina and her husband, Alexander, also a
professor, have rented a safe deposit box to hold foreign cash as a hedge against the
declining ruble. Most shocking, she says, is that her local grocery is now selling
anchovies packed in sunflower oil rather than olive oil, an obvious response to the
soaring cost of imports. That really freaks me out, she said. While the annexation of
Crimea has rocketed President Vladimir V. Putins approval rating to more than 80
percent, it has also contributed to a sobering downturn in Russias economy, which was
in trouble even before the West imposed sanctions. With inflation rising, growth
stagnating, the ruble and stock market plunging, and billions in capital fleeing the
country for safety, the economy is teetering on the edge of recession, as the countrys
minister of economic development acknowledged on Wednesday. Mr. Putin, who just
lavished $50 billion on the Sochi Olympics, also must now absorb the costs of integrating
Crimea, which economists and other experts say has its own sickly economy and
expensive infrastructure needs. The economic costs have been masked by recent patriotic
fervor but could soon haunt the Kremlin, as prices rise, wages stall and consumer
confidence erodes. Mr. Horvat said that he had lived in Russia through defaults in 1991,
1993 and 1998 and that he expected another one. I am not long in Russia, he said,
invoking the financial term for betting on a rising stock, neither in my portfolio, nor in
life. Given the recent turmoil, a catastrophe has been averted so far largely because the
price of oil has remained stubbornly high, at nearly $110 per barrel of Brent crude on
Wednesday, even as production steadily rises in the United States. For now, that has
kept the federal budget in decent shape with still no deficit projected for the year. But
even without a shock, it is not clear how Russia will manage to climb out of the current
quagmire. Stagflation is among the most confounding economic problems that policy
makers can face, and officials here seem flummoxed, with the Central Bank, Finance
Ministry and Economics Ministry urging contradictory steps. Last month, the bank
raised its key interest rate to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to combat inflation and support
the ruble, a step that could slow growth. Meanwhile, the Economics Ministry, worried
about growth, favors borrowing and government spending as a stimulus and to reduce
capital flight, a possibly inflationary strategy that is opposed by the Finance Ministry,
which wants to keep debt low and reserve funds available to weather any unexpected
drop in oil prices. All of them have their clear priorities, and they stick to their
priorities, said Alexei Deviatov, the chief economist for Uralsib Capital, an investment
bank here, and there is very little coordination between these authorities. While
Russian and global investors and businesses have been moving billions of dollars out of
Russia to places perceived as less risky, it is not just money that is fleeing. Ms. Zobnina,
who teaches at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said that one of her
classmates had left for the United States after college 10 years ago, and that another
friend followed three years ago to pursue a Ph.D., with no plans to return. Still another
friend, a journalist, moved to London last summer with her husband and three children.
Ms. Zobnina, 32, said that she and her husband, 30, were thinking about finding posts in
Europe or the United States, and for now were keeping their savings in dollars and euros.
In an interview, she conceded that putting cash in a safe deposit box hardly amounted to
sophisticated financial planning, particularly for two economics professors. Its
absolutely not rational to prefer safe box than deposit because you lose interest, she
said. But in this unpredictable situation, when the ruble is falling and banks are
unstable and who knows when well be cut off from the global financial system or
which bank will be next to be closed its better to have this small bird in hand. Even
before the Crimean episode, and the resulting imposition of sanctions by the West,
Russias $2 trillion economy was suffering from stagflation, that toxic mix of stagnant
growth and high inflation typically accompanied by a spike in unemployment. In Russia,
joblessness remains low, but only because years of population decline have produced a
shrunken, inadequate labor force. In recent weeks, international and Russian banks have
slashed their growth projections for 2014, with the World Bank saying the economy
could shrink by 1.8 percent if the West imposes more sanctions over Ukraine. By some
accounts, more than $70 billion in capital has fled the country so far this year and the
main stock market index fell by 10 percent in March and a dizzying 3 percent just on
Tuesday over fears of greater Russian involvement in Ukraine. This is our fee of sorts
for conducting an independent foreign policy, Aleksei L. Kudrin, a former Russian
finance minister, said at a recent investor conference in Moscow. He added that the
sanctions and the fallout from Mr. Putins foreign policy moves would drain hundreds of
billions of dollars from the national economy and strangle growth for the remainder of
the year. But Mr. Kudrin, who quit his post in a dispute over the Kremlins economic
policies, said the population had yet to confront the full bill, which he predicted would
grow as a result of the steep costs of absorbing Crimea, a geographically isolated
peninsula. Society has not yet seen the final result, and that will be when this puts the
brakes on real incomes, he said. For now, society accepts this fee. From a textbook
perspective, the deep-rooted ills in Russias economy have been clear for years: The
decade-long skyrocketing in energy prices that buoyed Mr. Putins popularity has
flatlined, exposing the countrys dangerous over-reliance on revenues from oil and
natural gas. Efforts to diversify into manufacturing, high technology and other sectors
have failed, and officials have been unable, or unwilling, to stop the rampant, corrosive
corruption that scares off foreign investors.


Russian econ declining now
The Economist, 14 (Tipping the scales, 5/3/2014,
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21601536-crisis-ukraine-
hurting-already-weakening-economy-tipping-scales) //RGP
WESTERN measures against Russiaasset freezes and visa restrictions aimed at people
and firms close to Vladimir Putinmay be pinpricks, but the crisis in Ukraine has
already taken its toll on Russias economy and financial markets. Capital flight in the
first three months of 2014 is thought to exceed $60 billion. The stockmarket is down by
20% since the start of the year and the rouble has dropped by 8% against the dollar.
Worries about the devaluation feeding through to consumer prices have prompted the
central bank to yank up interest rates, from 5.5% at the start of March to 7.5%. The IMF
reckons the economy is in recession; this week it cut its growth forecast for 2014 from
1.3% to 0.2%. Despite these upsets, Russia appears to hold strong economic as well as
military cards. It provides 24% of the European Unions gas and 30% of its oil. Its grip on
Ukraines gas and oil consumption is tighter still. That makes it hard for the West to
design sanctions that do not backfire. Russias public finances are also much healthier
than those of many of the countries against which it is pitted over Ukraine. The budget
deficit was 1.3% of GDP last year, whereas it stood at 3.3% for the EU. Government debt
amounted to a mere 13% of GDP, compared with 87% in the EU. Among emerging
economies, Russia appears to have stout defences to withstand external pressure. New
estimates of GDP evaluated at purchasing-power parity exchange rates from the World
Bank (see article) show that in 2011 it was the sixth-biggest economy in the world on this
measure, only just behind Germany. Thanks to its huge energy exports, Russias current
account is in surplus, forecast by the IMF to be 2.1% of GDP in 2014. In contrast
countries like Turkey and South Africa, which took a battering earlier this year as
investors worried about fragile emerging economies, are projected to run deficits of 6.3%
and 5.4% respectively. A long history of such surpluses has enabled Russia to amass
impressive foreign-exchange reserves, which stood at $486 billion in March. According
to the IMF these reserves are four times as high as its external-financing requirement
the rollover of external debt less the current-account balancein 2014. Turkeys reserves
cover only half of its requirement. Despite these strengths, however, the Russian
economy is far from invulnerable. Not all the reserves are available for intervention,
since $175 billion are earmarked in two wealth funds which cushion the budget and
cover future pension spending. If capital flight continues at its current rate, the central
bank will face a harsh choice: it can either expend its reserves to keep the rouble stable or
allow the currency to drop, which will add to inflation and could precipitate a domestic
banking crisis. The risk posed by capital flight is all the more acute because the economy
is already ailing. The long boom that once seemed to justify its inclusion in the BRICsa
group of big, fast-growing emerging economies whose other members were Brazil, China
and Indiais over. In the decade until the financial crisis of 2008, Russian output raced
ahead at an average 7% a year, boosted by surging oil and gas prices. But the recovery
after the 2009 recession was less impressive, with growth averaging 4% in 2010-12. Even
before the IMFs gloomy revision, growth had already slowed to a crawl (see chart).
While growth has slowed in the past 18 months, inflation has stayed high. Though the
falling rouble contributed to the recent rise to 6.9% in March, a more fundamental
reason why inflation remains a problem is that the economy is operating at full capacity.
The labour market is tight, with the unemployment rate just 5.4%. Russias decade of
outperformance was possible in part because the preceding collapse after the demise of
communism was so extreme. That left ample spare capacity to be brought back into use.
Eliminating former wasteful methods of production and applying modern technologies
and managerial techniques provided further scope for a sustained burst of rapid catch-
up growth.


Russian collapse inevitable
Evans-Pritchard, 14 International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph, has
covered world politics and economics for 30 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin
America (Ambrose, Russia's economic crisis deepens as EU readies fresh sanctions over
Ukraine, The Telegraph, 7/1/2014,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10939504/Russias-economic-crisis-
deepens-as-EU-readies-fresh-sanctions-over-Ukraine.html) //RGP
The collapse of Ukraines ceasefire has shattered hopes for a quick end to the crisis in the
Donbass, setting off fresh capital flight from Russia and raising the spectre of further
Western sanctions against Russian companies. Markets were caught off guard as
Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko launched air strikes and an artillery barrage against
rebels, pleading that he had no choice after they killed 27 Ukrainian servicemen. We will
attack and we will liberate our land. The end of the ceasefire is our response to terrorists,
rebels, looters, he said. The International Monetary Fund said the conflict risks deep
damage to Russias economy, starving it of foreign funds and knowhow. Geopolitical
tensions have brought the Russian economy to a standstill. "Russias actions in Crimea
have increased the uncertainty of doing business in Russia and are having a chilling
effect on investment. Capital outflows could reach $100bn (58.3bn) in 2014. "This
comes at a crucial moment when the old growth model based on energy has been
exhausted, it said. Russia never fully recovered from the 2008-09 crash and was in
trouble before Ukraines crisis erupted. The IMF expects growth to fall to 0.2pc this year,
with risks starkly to the downside. Russias central bank chief Elvira Nabiullina said
capital flight was playing havoc with exchange rate policy. Rouble stability is impossible
unless we slow capital outflows, she said. The currency fell for the third session on
Tuesday, dropping 0.8pc to 34.32 against the dollar. The EU is holding the Kremlin
accountable for the failed ceasefire. Its ambassadors agreed yesterday to intensified
preparations for new sanctions, effectively cocking the gun. German finance minister
Wolfgang Schuble said further measures would hurt Europe but insisted that violations
of international law cannot stand. A strategy paper from Angela Merkels Christian
Democrat Party called for a complete change in policy, deeming it impossible to work
with the Kremlin so long as Vladimir Putin is in charge. Diplomats say the next round
will see more Stage 2 measures against companies rather than sectoral assaults on the
energy industry or the financial system. Tim Ash, from Standard Bank, said: Its very
difficult for the US and the EU not to do anything: the Donbass cant be mothballed like
Northern Cyprus. It is Ukraines industrial heartland. The mere threat of fresh action
already risks blighting Russias efforts to develop oil and gas fields in the Arctic, and to
explore for shale, because of the dependence of foreign capital and technology. The IMF
said Russias external debt has jumped from $467bn to $746bn in five years, reaching
30pc of GDP. The Achilles Heel is corporate debt, with Rosneft, Gazprom, and Russian
Railways facing large redemptions over the next two years. Aluminium giant Rusal has
sought restructuring of $3.6bn of debt. Firms must refinance $10bn a month in foreign
debt, yet Russias bond market is mostly closed. Even though many corporations appear
to have enough buffers, close monitoring of systemic risks remains warranted, said the
IMF. Diplomats say the Kremlin is fully aware of the economic risks but the prospect of
Ukraine slipping out of Russias orbit is a larger matter. Mr Putin showed no sign of
backing down yesterday, invoking Peter the Greats push for a Black Sea coastline. I
want everyone to understand. Our country will continue to defend the rights of Russians
abroad, and to use our entire arsenal, he said. The fresh violence is a reminder that the
geo-strategic issues run deep, with Russia now fixed on a course likely to cause years of
friction with the West. Russia has been shielded so far by high oil prices, with
disruptions in Iraq and Libya pushing Brent crude to $112 a barrel. Energy makes up
two-thirds of Russias exports and a third of budget revenues. The IMF said the states
non-oil budget balance has gone from a surplus to a deficit of 12pc of GDP in barely a
decade, while non-oil exports have collapsed from 22pc to 8pc of GDP. The country is a
textbook case of the Dutch disease. After letting the rest of the economy atrophy it is
acutely vulnerable to any future oil glut, a serious possibility as the US shale boom
spreads abroad and Iran returns to the global economy.

Steel Prices
US Steel Prices falling-Cheap chinese exports are flooding the market
Hargreaves 6/2- private long-term investor and investment writer (Rupert, US Steel
Could Have Farther to Fall, The Motley Fool,
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/us-steel-could-have-further-to-
fall.aspx)//WK
US Steel (NYSE: X ) was one of the great trades of 2013. The company's shares jumped
more than 60% on a winning combination of higher steel prices and lower costs as a
result of management's aggressive restructuring plan. However, that was last year.
Unfortunately, this year has not started off well for the company. So far, US Steel's
shares have fallen nearly 19% this year, thanks to a perfect storm of events, and it would
appear that things are only going to get worse for the company as the year goes on.
Here's the problem: The price of hot-rolled coil steel, HRC for short, is currently sitting
at a premium of more than $200/mt to Chinese prices here in the U.S. Meanwhile,
Chinese steel exports are currently at multi-year highs as construction rates slow within
the country, but steel mills continue to run at full capacity. Specifically, during the first
three months of this year Chinese steel exports totaled more than 6 million tons; that's
up around 30% year on year. It seems as if export volumes are only going to rise from
here on out as the Chinese construction market is contracting; property sales fell 8%
during April of this year, and new construction starts fell 22%. All in all, Chinese
construction, which consumes around 50% of Chinese steel output, has slumped. China
consumes around 50% of the world's steel. What's more, historically, whenever U.S.
HRC prices have traded at a premium to Chinese prices, they have collapsed back down
to Chinese prices within a time frame of a few months. With this in mind, it would seem
as if US Steel's earnings are set for a downgrade. Further, if Chinese steel exports are
running at an all-time high, US Steel could report a fall in demand throughout the year
as customers turn to cheaper Chinese suppliers. Steel is usually cheaper to produce
within China due to lower labor costs. All in all, this implies that US Steel's earnings
could be set for a downgrade. Whatever the case, it's likely that there will be some
volatility in earnings going forward. Still, the company has managed to shave about $300
million of the cost base during the past year, equivalent to around $2 per share in
earnings. With Chinese steel exports flooding the global marketplace, US Steel's peer,
Nucor (NYSE: NUE ) , is also likely to suffer. Nucor reported consensus-beating earnings
in the first quarter due to higher steel prices, mainly a result of US Steel's troubles.
Nucor reported net income of $111 million, or $0.35 a share during the first quarter,
excluding one-offs; income came in at $0.41, beating consensus of $0.38. Construction
spending within the U.S. expanded 9.1% during the first few months of this year, and US
Steel failed to benefit, as cold weather on the Great Lakes slowed delivery of iron ore to
its largest mill. There were also accidents during March, which forced the company to
close some operations. Nucor's main business is to melt scrap metal in furnaces to sell to
customers, ideal when the price of new steel is high, as it has been within the US during
the past few quarters. However, with the supply of steel from China on the rise, and the
prospect of depressed steel prices on the horizon, Nucor could see demand slump. And it
seems as if analysts are forecasting a harder time for Nucor ahead. Since January, Wall
Street estimates for 2014 earnings have been continually downgraded from around $3
per share to $2.35 -- that's a 22% slump. Things could get a lot worse for Nucor if the
influx of new, cheap steel from China continues. All in all, Chinese steel demand is
falling, but production is rising, and Chinese steel mills are flooding the global
marketplace with cheap steel. This is going to impact US Steel's earnings going forward,
and it's likely that the company's year, which got off to a bad start, will only get worse.

US Steel prices falling-cheap imports and massive global supply
Beschloss 6/6- Economist, executive advisor to the Harris Bank of Chicago (Morris,
US Steel Makers Call for Import Tariffs to Ward Off South Korean Imports, The Desert
Sun,
http://www.desertsun.com/story/money/industries/morrisbeschlosseconomics/2014/0
6/06/us-steel-makers-call-for-import-tariffs-to-ward-off-south-korean-
imports/10091915/)//WK
Although U.S. steel producers generally have indicated strong demand so far this year,
especially in the pipe and tube related to the oil and natural gas sector, U.S. Steel,
Americas largest producer, has demanded federal action to restrain imports from South
Korea. So far, 2014's January through April shipments from that highly productive
Southeast Asian industrial nation have reached almost 900,000 tons, a 73% jump from
the first quarter of 2013. U.S. Steel indicated that it would be shutting plants in Texas
and Pennsylvania, blaming what they considered were subsidized South Korean
government arrangements, which allowed imported steel to be offered at discounts up to
20%. Previous complaints by U.S. Steel were filed with the U.S. Trade Commission back
in February, but were considered not valid. Supporting the U.S. Steel position is Russian-
owned TMK IPSCO, which is among the largest U.S. producers of lucrative tubular steel.
TMK is simultaneously threatening plant shutdowns, charging similar government
subsidized discounts by South Korea. The hard-pressed U.S. steel industry, once the
worlds mightiest, has been overtaken by massive expansion in China, India, Russia and
even such European steelmakers as tiny Luxemburg. Despite the sharply increased
demand for steel this year, engendered by piping system expansion, and the accelerating
need for steel engendered by the almost unlimited surge of oil and natural gas fracking,
have been outpaced by an overwhelming global steel industry that is today brimming
with an over-capacity of 500 million tons. But even such a potentially explosive growth,
capacitated by U.S. energy development, has been overridden by world imports, which
have the ability to satisfy Americas booming demand, with thousands of tons to spare.
This is acknowledged by $4.7 billion worth of steel imports for the oil and gas industries
alone last year. This caused prices for energy-related steel to fall by 2.4% during 2014's
first quarter, even though demand increased 22%, according to the OCTG Situation
Report, which compiles data on the steel industry. Even though steel prices in general
have been weakening, tubular steel for shale fracking remains far more profitable than
hot-rolled coil, which is used in cars and appliances. While U.S. steel makers
substantially increased capacity in the last five years to accommodate higher demand
from energy companies, they didnt count on the requisite volume and acceptable quality
levels available from South Korea and China. According to distributors primarily
involved with pipe for horizontal drilling for hydraulic fracking developments which
require more than twice the tons of pipe used in conventional vertical drilling, this is
becoming more difficult to acquire in a timely fashion. Latest information from the U.S.
Energy Information Agency, indicates this trend of longer availability time, and higher
future pricing is sure to manifest itself in the second half of 2014, as fracking expansion
is now estimated to accelerate.

Steel prices falling-cheap Chinese steel and low iron prices
Haflich 6/17- correspondent for the American Metals Market(Frank, Steel Scrap
Prices Could Plummet: WSD, American Metal Market,
http://www.amm.com/Article/3352970/Steel-scrap-prices-could-plummet-
WSD.html)//WK
Global steel scrap prices could "plummet" in the coming months due to sluggish export
demand and pressure from lower-priced iron ore and coke, according to two World Steel
Dynamics Inc. (WSD) analy sts. "We believe the price of scrap in the next four to five
months can drop by $50 per tonne," Peter F. Marcus said at the Steel Success Strategies
XXIX conference in New Y ork sponsored by AMM and WSD. Marcus and Karlis M.
Kirsis, managing partners at Englewood Cliffs, N.J.-based WSD, cited a number of
"pricing anomalies"inconsistent relationships between steel and related products
they maintain are "not sustainable." One of these is the "huge steel scrap premium" over
iron ore and coking coal thats resulted in a major price disadvantage for mini-mills. "A
mini sheet mill in the U.S. has a cost of $57 5 per ton, (with) lower-cost integrated mills
just below $500 per ton" for hot-rolled bands, Marcus said. Moreover, they pointed out
that export offer prices by iron-ore-based Chinese mills for reinforcing bar and wire
rodat $450 and $485 per tonne, respectivelyare lower than the approximately $560
per tonne that scrap-dependent rebar and rod mills in other exporting countries, such as
Turkey and South Korea, need to break even. Marcus and Kirsis estimated that the cost
of iron ore and coke delivered to Chinese steelmakers blast furnaces is about $247 per
tonne, approximately $120 per tonne less than the U.S. shredded scrap price. They noted
that scrap exports from the United States and Japan are down this year. Marcus and
Kirsis also pointed to an "inexorable" rise in Chinas reservoir of obsolete scrap thats
expected to increase from 64 million tonnes in 2013 to 99 million tonnes in 2017 .
Another anomaly , they said, is a slab price of about $535 per tonne delivered to the Far
East thats only about $10 per tonne less than the current price for hot-rolled band f.o.b.
port of export, resulting in independent hot-strip mills being "disintermediated"or
driven out of the supply chain.

US Steel Prices Falling-Increased Imports and Global Surplus
Rudarakanchana 14- correspondent for the International Business Times covers
commodities and companies (Nat, Cheap Foreign Steel Drives Heavy U.S. Imports In
January, International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/cheap-foreign-steel-
drives-heavy-us-imports-january-1548374)//WK
Cheap foreign steel, especially from China, has pushed U.S. steel imports up for a recent
brief surge and dented confidence among domestic steel producers, the Wall Street
Journal reports. Steel imports are expected to hit 3.2 million tons in January, up 23
percent from a year ago, as price differences between U.S. and Chinese steel rose to $159
per ton. At this time last year, U.S. steel cost $19 less than Chinese steel, according to
market analysis firm CRU Group. Its the largest first-quarter import order Ive seen in
the last five years, one unnamed steel trader told the Wall Street Journal. That trader
brokers steel purchases between U.S. buyers and foreign sellers. The surge in imports
could impact confidence in major U.S. steel producers like United States Steel Corp.
(NYSE:X), AK Steel Holding Corp. (NYSE:AKS) and ArcelorMittal USA Inc., which all
report earnings within the next two weeks. Price-wise, the average U.S. price for a
benchmark hot-rolled coil is $676, up 10 percent from a year ago. That compares with
the Chinese benchmark price of $540 per ton. Even with shipping costs factored in,
foreign steel can end up being 10 percent cheaper, according to Midland Steel
Warehouse Corp.s Howard Allen. Steel producer CEOs have long complained that
foreign countries dump steel at artificially low prices into U.S. markets. They have
requested trade tariffs. South Korea, China and Japan are major exporters of steel to the
U.S. U.S. steel shipments have dipped slightly from 2012 levels, according to the
American Iron and Steel Institute. U.S. steel imports, for all steel products, were worth
$26.6 billion from January 2013 to November 2013, according to U.S. Census Bureau
statistics. China has a healthy steel surplus, which it ships off to countries including
South Korea and Southeast Asian countries, according to the U.S. Department of
Commerce. Chinese steel exports rose to 54.9 million tons from January to November
2013, up from 48.7 million tons a year before. In contrast, the U.S. has a steel trade
deficit of about 1.5 million metric tons, meaning it imports more than it exports. Steel is
used in cars, industrial machinery, the energy sector, and construction, among other
applications. China has steadily imported more iron ore, steels key raw material input,
and has exported more steel, in the past three years. Many analysts expect global
and U.S. steel prices to fall this year, driven by global oversupply. Overall U.S.
imports for January to November 2013, the latest period covered by official data, fell 4.4
percent from 2012, and averaged 2.4 million tons per month in 2013.


US Economy
Uniqueness
Economy on the rebound job growth and manufacturing
Mutikani 7-14 economist and research correspondent (Lucia, U.S. economy gaining
traction despite weak housing, Reuters, 7-14-14,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/17/us-usa-economy-
idUSKBN0FM1FQ20140717) //AD

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell
last week, pointing to sustained momentum in the economy even as home building fell
for a second straight month in June.
The economy's improving fortunes were underscored by another report on Thursday
showing manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region accelerated to its highest level
in nearly 3-1/2 years this month.
"We should focus on jobless claims data. The labor market is tightening, firms are not
cutting workers and people are finding jobs," said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff
Economic Advisers in Holland, Pennsylvania.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted
302,000 for the week ended July 12, the Labor Department said. Economists had
forecast first-time applications for jobless aid rising to 310,000.
The four-weak average of claims, considered a better gauge of labor market trends as it
irons out week-to-week volatility, hit its lowest level in seven years.
In a separate report the Commerce Department said groundbreaking on new homes
declined 9.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual 893,000 unit-pace in June, a nine-
month low.
The drop was led a 29.6 percent plunge in starts in the South, which prompted
economists to take the home building slump with a grain of salt, especially against the
backdrop of a strengthening labor market.
"It would be a mistake to presume what was an uneven June starts report signals a
turn to something more nefarious," said Eric Green, chief economist at TD Securities in
New York.
Economists had expected starts to rise to a 1.02 million-unit rate. Housing is struggling
to get back on track since stalling in late 2013 after a rise in mortgage rates. But there
are glimmers of hope.
While permits fell 4.2 percent in June to a 963,000 unit-pace, single family permits - the
largest segment of the market - hit their highest level since November. Permits are now
running ahead of starts, which suggests a pick-up in building activity in the months
ahead.
A survey on Wednesday showed confidence among single-family home builders touched
a six-month high in July, amid optimism over sales.
Prices for U.S. Treasury debt were trading higher, while the dollar was little changed
against a basket of currencies. U.S. stocks were weaker, with the PHLX housing index
falling about one percent.
MANUFACTURING HUMMING
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said this week that while she was concerned about
housing, she did not believe it would hold back the economy's recovery. The
economy contracted sharply in the first quarter, but has since rebounded with second-
quarter growth estimates topping a 3 percent annual pace.
While home building will probably not help the economy, manufacturing should
continue to play a leading role.
In a third report, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said its business activity index
rose to 23.9 in July, its highest since March 2011, from 17.8 in June.
Any reading above zero indicates expansion in the region's manufacturing. New orders
scaled a 10-year high, with factory employment also accelerating.
The claims data covered the survey week for July nonfarm payrolls. It suggested another
month of solid job gains after June's hefty 288,000 increase.
Employment has grown by more than 200,000 jobs in each of the last five months, a
stretch not seen since the late 1990s.
Yellen cautioned this week that the Fed could raise interest rates sooner and more
rapidly than currently envisioned if the labor market continued to improve faster than
anticipated by policymakers.
Economists currently do not expect the U.S. central bank to start raising interest rates
before the second half of 2015. The Fed, which is wrapping up its monthly bond buying
program, has kept overnight lending rates near zero since December 2008.

Economy heating up this summer ;)
Zibel and Portlock 7-16 (Alan, Sarah, U.S. Economy Heating Up During Summer,
Wall Street Journal, 7-16-14, http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-economy-heating-up-
during-summer-1405533636) //AD

Economic activity in recent weeks got back on track after a rough start to the year, with
the labor market gaining strength and facing worker shortages in some areas, according
to the Federal Reserve's latest survey of regional conditions.
Manufacturing, consumer spending, tourism were all seen as bright spots, while housing
was mixed around the country. It was the second-straight "beige book" survey, which
covered a period from late May through early July, to report "moderate" or "modest"
expansion in all districts.
"This report is consistent with our expectation of a pickup in growth in the second
quarter after a weather-related contraction" at the start of the year, wrote Barclays
economist Michael Gapen. Amid signs of an improving economy, many economists have
upgraded their estimates for second-quarter growth. Most projections now hover around
a 3% annual pace, after a first-quarter contraction of 2.9%.
Stronger growth was seen in the New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas and San
Francisco regions, with "modest" expansion in the rest of the country. In the Boston and
Richmond, Va., districts, local economies were still expanding but at a slower pace than
seen earlier in the year.
The labor market was a particular source of strength in the report, with some employers
reporting they were having a hard time finding truck drivers as well as skilled
construction workers. Net job growth has exceeded 200,000 for five straight months,
boosting spending at retailers.
In congressional testimony Tuesday and Wednesday, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen
referenced the job-market improvements. She defended keeping interest rates low but
gave some hints to earlier-than-planned rate hikes if the labor market continues its quick
improvement.
"If the labor market continues to improve more quickly than anticipated by the [Fed],"
she told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, "then increases in the federal-funds
rate target likely would occur sooner and be more rapid than currently envisioned." The
Fed has held its benchmark short-term rate near zero since late 2008.
The report comes ahead of the Fed's policy-making committee meeting set for July 29-
30.
Fed officials cited numerous good signs for the economy, inducing a robust corn and
soybean crops in the Chicago area, stronger attendance at Broadway theaters in New
York, increased reservations for campgrounds in Montana and higher starting salaries
for San Francisco area workers.
Negative signs included slower sales for Philadelphia-area furniture retailers and
sluggish casino revenue in Mississippi.
The view of the housing market was also weaker, with the Boston, New York and St.
Louis banks reporting that home sales were down from last year's levels. Construction
increased in several districts, but demand for properties was tepid in parts of the
country.
Across the country, some indicators of future demand were stronger. Fed officials found
growth in professional services such as technology, health-care consulting, advertising
and engineering. Transportation was also up since the previous survey, led by demand
for trucking and rail services.

Resilient
Econ resilient
E.I.U. 11 (Economist Intelligence Unit Global Forecasting Service, 11/16/11,
http://gfs.eiu.com/Article.aspx?articleType=gef&articleId=668596451&secID=7) //AD

The US economy, by any standard, remains weak, and consumer and business sentiment
are close to 2009 lows. That said, the economy has been surprisingly resilient in the face
of so many shocks. US real GDP expanded by a relatively robust 2.5% in the third quarter
of 2011, twice the rate of the previous quarter. Consumer spending rose by 2.4%, which is
impressive given that real incomes dropped during the quarter (the savings rate fell,
which helps to explain the anomaly.) Historically, US consumers have been willing to
spend even in difficult times. Before the 2008-09 slump, personal spending rose in every
quarter between 1992 and 2007. That resilience is again in evidence: retail sales in
September were at a seven-month high, and sales at chain stores have been strong.
Business investment has been even more buoyant: it expanded in the third quarter by an
impressive 16.3% at an annual rate, and spending by companies in September on
conventional capital goods (that is, excluding defence and aircraft) grew by the most
since March. This has been made possible, in part, by strong corporate profits. According
to data compiled by Bloomberg, earnings for US companies in the S&P 500 rose by 24%
year on year in the third quarter. All of this has occurred despite a debilitating fiscal
debate in Washington, a sovereign debt downgrade by a major ratings agency and
exceptional volatility in capital markets. This reinforces our view that the US economy,
although weak, is not in danger of falling into a recession (absent a shock from the euro
zone). US growth will, however, continue to be held back by a weak labour marketthe
unemployment rate has been at or above 9% for 28 of the last 30 monthsand by a
moribund housing market.

US not key
US not keyglobal economies decoupling and past crises disprove
Caryl 10 Editor at Foreign Policy and Newsweek, Senior Fellow of the CSIS at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Christian, Crisis? What Crisis? 4/5/10,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/05/crisis_what_crisis?print=yes&hide
comments=yes&page=full) //AD

We went through a terrifying moment back in the fall of 2008. The financial system in
the United States was imploding. It was impossible to predict how the effects would
ripple through the rest of the world, but one outcome seemed inevitable: Developing
economies were going to take a terrible hit. There was just no way they could escape the
maelstrom without seeing millions of their citizens impoverished. Many emerging-
market countries did experience sharp drops in GDP. Their capital markets tanked.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
sounded downright apocalyptic: "All this will affect dramatically unemployment, and
beyond unemployment for many countries it will be at the roots of social unrest, some
threat to democracy, and maybe for some cases it can also end in war." The Economist
recently noted, "The Institute of International Finance (IIF), a think-tank in Washington,
DC, forecast that net private capital flows into poor countries in 2009 would be 72%
lower than at their peak in 2007, an unprecedented shrinkage." Virtually everyone
expected to see the countries that had benefited so dramatically from growth in the years
leading up to the crisis to suffer disproportionately in its wake. An entirely rational
assumption -- except it hasn't turned out that way at all. To be sure, there were far too
many poor people in the world before the crisis, and that still remains the case. Some 3
billion people still live on less than $2.50 a day. But the global economic crisis hasn't
added appreciably to their ranks. Just take China, India, and Indonesia, Asia's three
biggest emerging markets. Although growth in all three slowed, it never went into
reverse. China's robust growth through the crisis has been much publicized -- but
Indonesia's, much less conspicuously. Those countries, as well as Brazil and Russia, have
rebounded dramatically. The Institute of International Finance -- the same people who
gave that dramatically skepticism-inducing estimate earlier -- now says that net private
capital flows to developing countries could reach $672 billion this year (double the 2009
amount). That's less than the high point of 2007, to be sure. But it still seems remarkable
in light of the dire predictions. In short, the countries that have worked the hardest to
join the global marketplace are showing remarkable resilience. It wasn't always this way.
Recall what happened back in 1997 and 1998, when the Thai government's devaluation
of its currency triggered the Asian financial crisis. Rioting across Indonesia brought
down the Suharto government. The administration of Filipino President Joseph Estrada
collapsed. The turbulence echoed throughout the region and into the wider world,
culminating in the Russian government default and August 1998 ruble devaluation.
Brazil and Argentina trembled. The IMF was everywhere, dispensing advice and
dictating conditions. It was the emerging markets that bore the brunt of that crisis. So
what's different this time around? The answers differ from place to place, but there are
some common denominators. Many of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) learned
vital lessons from the trauma of the late 1990s, hence the IMF's relatively low-key profile
this time around. (The fund has been most active in Africa, where they still need the help
-- unless you count Greece, of course.) Many emerging economies entered the 2008-
2009 crisis with healthy balance sheets. In most cases governments reacted quickly and
flexibly, rolling out stimulus programs or even expanding poverty-reduction programs.
Increasingly, the same countries that have embraced globalization and markets are
starting to build social safety nets. And there's another factor: Trade is becoming more
evenly distributed throughout the world. China is now a bigger market for Asian
exporters than the United States. Some economists are talking about "emerging market
decoupling." Jonathan Anderson, an emerging-markets economist at the Swiss bank
UBS, showed in one recent report how car sales in emerging markets have actually been
rising during this latest bout of turmoil -- powerful evidence that emerging economies no
longer have to sneeze when America catches a cold. Aphitchaya Nguanbanchong, a
consultant for the British-based aid organization Oxfam, has studied the crisis's effects
on Southeast Asian economies. "The research so far shows that the result of the crisis
isn't as bad as we were expecting," she says. Indonesia is a case in point: "People in this
region and at the policy level learned a lot from the past crisis." Healthy domestic
demand cushioned the shock when the crisis hit export-oriented industries; the
government weighed in immediately with hefty stimulus measures. Nguanbanchong says
that she has been surprised by the extent to which families throughout the region have
kept spending money on education even as incomes have declined for some. And that,
she says, reinforces a major lesson that emerging-market governments can take away
from the crisis: "Governments should focus more on social policy, on health, education,
and services. They shouldn't be intervening so much directly in the economy itself." This
ought to be a big story. But you won't have much luck finding it in the newspapers --
perhaps because it runs so contrary to our habitual thinking about the world economy.
The U.N. Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank recently published
a report that attempts to assess what effect the crisis will have on the world's progress
toward the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, benchmarks that are supposed to be
achieved by 2015. At first glance the report's predictions are daunting: It states that 21
million people in the developing world are "at risk" of slipping into extreme poverty and
warns that the goals are unlikely to be met. Many experts wonder, of course, whether the
V-shaped crisis we've witnessed so far is going to turn into a W, with another sharp
downturn still to come. Some argue that the Great Recession's real damage has yet to be
felt. Yet the report also contains some interesting indications that this might not be the
case. "The global economic crisis has been widely predicted to affect international
migration and remittances adversely," it notes. "But as the crisis unfolds, it is becoming
clear that the patterns of migration and remittances may be more complex than was
previously imagined." In other words, these interconnections are proving to be much
more resilient than anyone might have predicted earlier. As the report notes, receipts of
remittances have so far actually increased in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan,
Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Perhaps migrant workers -- those global experts in
entrepreneurship and risk-taking -- know something that a lot of the rest of us don't. So
why should we care? Anirudh Krishna, a Duke University political scientist who studies
poverty reduction, says that there's a moral to the story: "Certainly cutting countries and
people off from markets is no longer a sensible thing to do. Expanding those
connections, bringing in a larger part of a talent pool into the high-growth sector -- that
is what would make most countries grow faster and more individuals climb out of
poverty." Echoing Nguanbanchong, he argues that governments are well-advised to
concentrate on providing their citizens with education and health care -- the great
enablers in the fight for social betterment. Microfinance and income subsidy programs
can fill important gaps -- as long as they aim to empower future entrepreneurs, not
create cultures of entitlement. This is not to say the outlook is bright on every front, of
course. As the Economist noted, the number of people facing hunger recently topped 1
billion, the highest since 1970. The reason for that has more to do with the 2007-2008
spike in food prices than with the financial crisis. (Remember how the price of rice shot
up?) We are still a long way from conquering poverty. There is still a huge -- and in some
cases growing -- gap between the world's rich and poor. Yet how remarkable it would be
if we could one day look back on the 2008-2009 crisis as the beginning of a more
equitable global economy.



Environment/Weather
Algal Blooms
Alt Causes
Alt causes wastewater treatment, ag runoff, and natural causes
Jackson, 7/11/14 columnist for the Sandusky Register (Tom, Farm runoff termed
major cause of algal blooms, Sandusky Register,
http://www.sanduskyregister.com/article/5866136)//IS
Rick Stumpf, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist, said
Detroit's wastewater treatment plant often is cited as a major source of problems.
Blooms are not seen in the Detroit River, he said. Adam Rissien, director of agricultural
and water policy for the Ohio Environmental Council, said that Thursday's forecast
shows that state officials need to regulate the use of farm fertilizer more closely. "Our
legislators and administrators need to level the playing field and stop giving the
agriculture industry a free pass. First they need to stop the practice of spreading manure
on frozen and snow-covered ground," Rissien said in a statement his organization issued
Thursday. "Regulators continue to allow farms to spread manure as fertilizer in late fall
and winter months onto land that is frozen or snow covered. However, heavy fall and
spring rains wash much of the manure off the land and into waterways before it even
reaches the soil," he said. Stumpf said that in contrast to algal bloom problems that
afflict other parts of the country, such as the red tide in the Gulf of Mexico, the problem
in Lake Erie's Western Basin is solvable. Scientists know that if the phosphorus load in
Lake Erie is significant reduced, the problem will go away, he said. In contrast, many
algal blooms in other parts of the U.S. have natural causes and there's little anyone
can do about them, he said.


Squo Solves
Status quo solves recent tech developments
University of Wollongong, 7/11/14 The University of Wollongong in Australia
(Capturing Phosphorous from Sewage Waste solves Dual Problem, University of
Wollongong, http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW165270.html)//IS
A team of researchers from the University of Wollongong has led the way in overcoming
a demanding environmental challenge by capturing potentially harmful phosphorus
from sewage waste and delivering clean water. If released into natural waterways,
phosphates can cause harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen conditions that can
threaten to kill fish. Meanwhile, there is a high demand for phosphorous for use as an
agricultural fertilizer. The UOW research-led team has now designed a system that could
help solve both of these problems. It captures phosphorus from sewage waste and
delivers clean water using a combined osmosis-distillation process.

Tech solves and blooms are natural
Blanch, 3/21/13 Producer at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Desley, New
way to control algal blooms, Radio Australia,
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/innovations/new-way-
to-control-algal-blooms/1103668)//IS
DESLEY BLANCH : Australian technology is cleaning up lakes and rivers in more than
twenty countries and its all due to Grant Douglas, a geochemist who invented a way to
control algal blooms which can devastate aquatic ecosystems. London Olympics
organisers called on the Phoslock technology to clean up Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park
before some swimming events. Dr Grant Douglas had been working on water quality at
CSIRO, Australias national science agency, for more than ten years when he focused his
research on algal blooms, one of the biggest problems that face rural and urban aquatic
environments. Phoslock immobilises phosphorus, a major nutrient that drives algal
blooms, sources of which come from fertiliser, catchment sediments and sewage. DR
GRANT DOUGLAS : Algal blooms I think its important to say first off are a natural
part of any ecosystem. Before man was around algal cells were blooming or algal was
blooming. But really the problem around them is that they have increased in both
frequency and magnitude in a range of aquatic systems, lakes and rivers and the like, and
thats primarily due to the increasing amount of nutrients in these systems.

Anti-biotic Resistance
Squo Solves
Status quo solves anti-biotic diversification
Fumento, 5 - senior fellow at the Hudson Institute (Michael, Scripps Howard News
Service, June 23, 2005, lexis
http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/)//gingE

On June 17 the FDA approved New Jersey-based Wyeth Pharmaceutical's Tygacil,
primarily intended for skin infections and abdominal wounds. It's especially useful
against the common and drug-resistant bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, better known as
"staph." But it's a true broad-spectrum drug, applicable against a host of different
bacteria - so much so that doctors can feel confident in administering it as a first-line
treatment even if they have no idea what germ - or germs - they're up against. Tygacil is
the first antibiotic approved in a new class called glycylcyclines, expressly developed to
bypass the mechanisms that made bacteria resistant to the tetracycline family of drugs.
The major drawback of Tygacil is that it must be administered intravenously, yet that's
also a plus. Perhaps the main reason bugs develop resistance to antibiotics is that
doctors overprescribe the drugs. They hand out pills like Pez candy because patients
demand it. But patients don't demand IVs; therefore limiting usage of Tygacil and
probably greatly forestalling the day when it too leads to resistant strains. But Tygacil is
not alone in new and forthcoming antibiotics designed to tell germs: "Resistance is
futile!" The injectable Cidecin from Cubist of Lexington, Mass., also targeted at nasty
hospital infections, may soon receive FDA approval. Just four days before the approval of
Tygacil, the FDA also gave the green light to Pfizer's Zmax, an important new
formulation of an older antibiotic. Zmax is administered with merely one dose rather
than given over a period of seven to 10 days - an all guns blazing assault on bacteria that
cause sinusitis and pneumonia. "An antibiotic taken just once can address compliance
issues and may minimize the emergence of antibiotic resistance," Dr. Michael
Niederman, Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital
in Mineola, New York notes in a Pfizer press release. New Jersey-based Johnson &
Johnson has two different broad-spectrum drugs in late-stage testing that are designed
to overcome antibiotic resistance, ceftobiprole and doripenem. The Holy Grail of anti-
bacterial drugs is one to which bugs cannot become resistant. One step in that direction
may be further development of bacteriophages (Greek for "bacteria eaters".) These are
viruses that attach to the bacterial surface and inject their DNA, which replicates until
the bacterium explodes. These phages evolve just as bacteria do. The same forces that
select for resistant bacteria also select for viruses that overcome that resistance.
Current treatment effectively curtails resistant bacteria growth
Morran 1/15/2013-PHD, NIH postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, research
recently featured on BBC (Levi, Averting the Approaching Apocalypse, Nothing In
Biology.org, http://nothinginbiology.org/2013/01/15/averting-the-approaching-
apocalypse/, DM)

A paper by Quan-Guo Zhang and Angus Buckling (2012) takes an experimental evolution
approach to begin addressing this issue empirically. In search of a different strategy for
curbing the evolution of antibiotic resistance in their experimental populations of the
bacterial species Pseudomons flourences, Zhang and Buckling treated their bacterial
populations with either antibiotics, a bacteriophage or phage (a virus that attacks
bacteria), or a combination of the antibiotic and phage. Zhang and Buckling predicted
that the combination treatment might be more effective than either antibiotics or phage
alone because the combination treatments should better reduce bacterial population
sizes and limit their response to selection (Alisky et al. 1998, Chanishvili 2001, Comeau
2007). Additionally, bacterial mutations that confer resistance to antibiotics generally do
not also confer resistance to phage, so evolution of resistance to the combination
treatments would likely require at least two mutations, and thus require more time to
evolve resistance than the other treatments (Chanishvili 2001, Kutateladze 2010).
Zhang and Buckling evolved their bacterial populations under the 3 different treatments
(in addition to a control in which they allowed the bacterial populations to grow under
normal conditions) for 24 days. A total of 24 replicate populations were exposed to each
treatment. After 24 days of bacterial evolution none of the replicate populations exposed
to control conditions or phage went extinct (Figure 1). In contrast, 12 of the replicate
populations exposed to only the antibiotic were extinct while 23 of the populations
exposed to combination treatment went extinct (Figure 1). Therefore, the combination
treatment was the most effective treatment for killing the bacteria. However, that single
population that survived the combination treatment could mean trouble. Intense natural
selection, like that imposed by the combination treatment, could have produced a super-
strain of the bacteria. Creation of a super-strain, in this case a strain resistant to both
the antibiotic and phage with little cost of maintaining such resistance, would be
troubling because the antibiotic-phage combination treatment strategy would have only
accelerated the arms race rather than curbing it. However, in many cases the evolution of
resistance comes with fitness costs, like significantly reduced growth rates in absence of
the antibiotic or phage. These fitness costs are thought to stop the spread of some
antibiotic resistant strains simply because the strains cannot successful compete with
strains in nature when the antibiotic is not present. Zhang and Buckling tested the
fitness of their surviving populations in competition with the ancestral bacterial
population that represents the starting point for evolution in this experiment. They
found that in a short term loans scenario, only the control bacteria increased in fitness
relative to the ancestor when competed under control conditions (Figure 2). More
importantly, they observed that the fitness of the single surviving population from the
combination treatment was less than half of the ancestors fitness in the absence of
antibiotic and phage (Figure 2). Therefore, the antibiotic plus phage treatment resulted
in the extinction of 23 out of 24 bacterial replicate populations, while the lone surviving
population was far from being a super-strain. The ability of the surviving bacterial
populations to grow under normal conditions was assessed relative to their ancestral
bacterial population. Here, any deviation from 0 is indicative of evolutionary change (a
change from the ancestor population). Control populations increased in fitness
under normal growth conditions, while populations exposed to either phage
or antibiotic exhibited reduced fitness. Most importantly, the population that
survived the combined treatment of antibiotic and phage evolved greatly reduced fitness
under normal conditions (Zhang and Buckling 2012).
No Impact
No major impacts from anti-biotic extinction
Urrutia 2/7/2014-a PhD candidate in Health Policy, Ethics Concentration, at Harvard
University, holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of
Pennsylvania (Julin, The bright side of antibiotic resistance, Harvard Law,
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/02/07/the-bright-side-of-antibiotic-
resistance/, DM)

But bacteria dont care. Theyre (still) here, theyre (always) evolving, get used to it. I say
that because I dont believe were going to be able to keep discovering new
classes of antibiotics ad infinitumalthough I certainly hope Im wrong. But if Im
not, it means that were only ever going to have so many treatment options, and that the
bugs are eventually going to become resistant to all of them (although probably not in
our lifetime). What then? And what do we do until then? Lets start with the first one,
since post-apocalyptic scenarios are always fun: Medicine will certainly have to change.
Hospitals will become very, very dangerous places (much more than they already are!)
Theres going to be much stronger and urgent pressure to reduce hospital stays and
readmissions to the absolute minimum, and most patient care will have to be shifted to
community and home settings. Health systems will have to go through major structural
transformations to improve prevention. GPs, primary-care specialists, and allied
healthcare professionals will become much more important and esteemed members of
the healthcare professions. The notion that individual health is highly interdependent
will become a part of popular culture. Funnyapart from the first part about hospitals
becoming (more) dangerous, none of these sound all that terrible. In fact, theyre all
changes I would very much like to see in my lifetime, bacterial apocalypse or not. It
sounds like we would save a lot of lives, avoid a lot of suffering, and spend a lot less
money doing it. It certainly makes me wonder why we arent doing a lot of those post-
apocalyptic things now (i.e. way before the apocalypse.) We should probably also be
trying harder to prevent resistance, even if it does happen to be true that its battle we
will eventually lose. For example, we should make a bigger effort to identify germ sheds
and bacterial breeding grounds, and we should be making an even bigger effort to
eliminate them. (One would think that the imperative to eliminate them is an obvious
corollary of the imperative to identify them, but weve known for a long time that
overcrowded prisons are a major source of super-bugs, and yet we still seem quite
pleased to have overcrowded prisons proliferating I guess corollaries just arent very
popular nowadays.) However, the idea that we will not be able to keep our drugs
effective forever suggests that there are certain things we should not be doing in the
name of stewardship. For example, we should not withhold antibiotics from patients
for whom they are currently a life-saving or suffering-ending option simply because
doing so might save/help other patients tomorrow. (Again, to me this seems like a line
out of Deep Thoughts by Captain Obvious, but millions are currently dying from lack of
access to antibiotics that are still effective for their conditions, and I suspect that
stewardship could become a way of justifying that.) To summarize: Antibiotic
resistance is a scary thing. Last summer I would probably have lost a loved one due to a
ruptured appendix (i.e. due to a failure of early detection, which is part of primary care).
Peritonitis is a serious condition even now, but it would most likely have been fatal if the
bugs that hit her had been resistant to the antibiotics we have available. I dont like
antibiotic resistance one bit. But at least it serves to remind us that there are better
approaches to healthcare that could be realized within our lifetime, and at least it does
not give us any reason to deny each other proper care and consideration if we happen to
get sick today.
No need for antibiotic diversification now
Salyers and Whitt, 5 - Microbiology professors at the U of Illinois (Abigail and Dixie,
Revenge of the Microbes: how bacterial resistance is undermining the antibiotic miracle,
p 38)//gingE

If we lose antibiotics, will we return to a truly pre-antibiotic era? Before considering this
question, lets define what we mean by lose. Although there are now some strains of
bacteria that are pan-resistant or resistant to virtually all available antibiotics, these
strains are still in the minority. Most disease-causing bacteria remain susceptible
to at least a few antibiotics. There even seem to be some bacteria, such as Streptoccus
pyogenes (the cause of strep throat and a common cause of wound and bloodstream
infections), Chlamydia trachomatis (the cause of a gonorrhea-like infection that can
cause infertility and ectopic pregnancy), and Treponema pallidum (the cause of syphilis),
that have remained steadfastly susceptible to most antibiotics. Scientists do not know
why this is, and we may be in for some unpleasant surprises in cases like these if these
bacterial slow learners finally catch up with the rest of the class, but for now it appears
that some serious diseases would still be treatable. Even in the case of bacterial species
that are noted for resistance to antibiotics, there are some strains that have remained
susceptible to most antibiotics. There may be an important lesson in this. Why would the
incidence of resistant strains within a species rise to, say 60% and then level off, leaving
40% of strains persistently susceptible? This is a phenomenon scientists dont
understand, but such trends have been observed. Instead of focusing exclusively on
strains that are becoming resistant to antibiotics, perhaps scientists ought to be paying
some attention to those strains that seem not to have gotten onto the resistance
bandwagon. In any event, there will probably not be a total loss of antibiotics. This is not
to say that the situation will not be grim, but it may not become completely hopeless.
Alt Cause
Alt Cause - Pharmaceuticals
Khazan 2/5/2013 Writer for the WA Post (Olga, How fake drugs cause the spread of
untreatable TB in developing countries, Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/how-fake-drugs-
cause-the-spread-of-untreatable-tb-in-developing-countries/)

But simply stopping the flood of fake drugs into each country wont entirely fix the
problem, the authors say, because theres a difference between drugs that are designed to
deceive patients and those that are simply poorly made or stored. Creating a so-called
falsified medicine, which has little or no active ingredient, can be considered a criminal
act. But then there are the drug companies that make mistakes, pills that are stored
improperly, mislabeled bottles or sloppy compounding, among other potential errors.
Often, these bad drugs are just poorly made or poorly stored, Bate said. If all you do is
beef up customs, youre not going to deal with the legal substandard products on the
market. To catch bad batches of drugs, Bate recommends trying a tactic similar to the
international communitys response to fake malaria drugs setting up strong donor and
in-country facilities to test the medicines before theyre sold. Right now, most TB
doctors are just assuming that theres not a problem with medicines, he said. If
someones not reacting, they keep giving them the drug in hopes it will start working.
Alt cause Animal Husbandry
WHO 2013 World Health Organization, part of the UN (Antimicrobial Use, WHO,
http://www.who.int/drugresistance/use/Antimicrobial_Use/en/index.html)

Worldwide, the bulk of antimicrobials administered are not consumed by patients, but
rather are given to animals, including cattle, sheep, chicken, and fish, for purposes of
food production. Antimicrobials are used: 1. to treat disease in sick animals; 2.
prophylactically to avoid disease in animals at high risk; and 3. most controversially as
growth promoters in order to raise larger animals for the same amount of animal feed
and investment. In addition to their use in animal husbandry, antimicrobial additives are
used in companion animals (including pets), plant agriculture (fruits, vegetables, and
orchids, etc.), and industrial applications (oil pipelines, industrial paints). The use of
immense quantities of antimicrobials in food production and the unintended wide
release of antimicrobials into the environment through animal and human sewage and
runoff water from agricultural sites has public health consequences, most clearly
seen in resistant zoonotic bacteria associated with foodborne disease in humans. Of great
concern, though of uncertain qualitative and quantitative import is the potential passage
of resistance genes from bacteria of animal origin to human pathogens.
Coral Reefs
No impact to coral reefs - The environment can withstand shocks like global
warming
Goklany 8 Writer for Cato Think Tank and Author of The Improving State of the
World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner
Planet (Indurt, 4-17, The Remarkable Resilience of Nature,
http://www.cato.org/blog/remarkable-resilience-nature)
How often have you heard that coral reefs are fragile and would be wiped out by global
warming? If you google fragile coral reefs (without the quotes) youll get 493,000 hits.
So imagine my surprise on stumbling on a news report titled, Marine life flourishes at
Bikini Atoll test site. The report tells us: It was blasted by the largest nuclear weapon
ever detonated by the United States but half a century on, Bikini Atoll supports a
stunning array of tropical coral, scientists have found. In 1954 the South Pacific
atoll was rocked by a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the
explosives dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion shook islands more than 100 miles
away, generated a wave of heat measuring 99,000F and spread mist-like radioactive
fallout as far as Japan and Australia. But, much to the surprise of a team of research
divers who explored the area, the mile-wide crater left by the detonation has
made a remarkable recovery and is now home to a thriving underwater
ecosystem. 99,000 degrees Fahrenheit! By comparison the upper-bound estimate for
global warming is a puny global temperature increase of 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit (less in
the ocean). So even if global warming wipes out life on earth, global warming
catastrophists can take comfort that nature will, as it inevitably must, reassert itself.
Some, convinced that humanity is the problem, may even welcome such an outcome
no humans, but plenty of nature (over time). [Fifty-four years later at Bikini Atoll,
recovery is not complete. Perhaps 28 percent of coral species may still be absent.]
Coral Reefs Resilient
Foley 1-15 - writer for Nature World News
(James A. Foley, 2014, Surprising Resilience Against Acidification Observed in Palau
Coral Reefs http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5655/20140115/surprising-
resilience-against-acidification-observed-palau-coral-reefs.htm)

Researchers working in the Western Pacific island nation of Palau have made some
unexpected discoveries about coral reefs there that may lead to new insights on the
organisms' resistance to ocean acidification. Writing in the journal Geophysical Research
Letters, the scientists report that the reefs around Palau are thriving amid
shockingly high levels of acidification. "We had no idea the level of acidification
we would find. We're looking at reefs today that have levels that we expect for the open
ocean in that region by the end of the century," said lead study author Kathryn
Shamberger, a chemical oceanographer who was a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) at the time of the research. Increasing levels of of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are contributing to a changing ocean chemistry. The
ocean absorbs atmospheric CO2, which causes a chemical reaction that lowers the pH of
seawater, making it more acidic. The acidification process also removed carbon ions
from the water that are typically needed by reefs to support growth. In both laboratory
tests and real-world scenarios, low pH seawater has been shown to cause negative effects
on coral reefs including low species diversity, slowed growth rates, more algae growth
and greater susceptibility to erosion. In the study, Shamberger and her colleagues
describe the processes that lead to the increased acidification documented in waters
around Palau as well as the surprising find that the coral reefs in those waters
are showing a remarkable resiliency to the acidification. Contrary to
expectations set by previous studies of coral reefs and low pH seawater, the reefs around
Palau show unexpected diversity and health. The unusual finding may have implications
for other coral reef systems in oceans around the world. "When you move from a high pH
reef to a low pH neighboring reef, there are big changes, and they are negative changes,"
said WHOI biogeochemist Anne Cohen, a co-author on the paper and lead principal
investigator of the project. "However, in Palau where the water is most acidic, we
see the opposite. We see a coral community that is more diverse, hosts more
species, and has greater coral cover than in the non-acidic sites. Palau is the
exception to the places scientists have studied." The researchers found that at every reef
around the island the low pH of the water was caused by shell-building done by
organisms living in the water, a process called calcification, which removes carbonate
ions from seawater. The shell-building organisms also add CO2 to the water as they
breathe. "Calcification and respiration are continually happening at these sites while the
water sits there, and it allows the water to become more and more acidic. It's a little bit
like being stuck in a room with a limited amount of oxygen - the longer you're in there
without opening a window, you're using up oxygen and increasing CO2," Shamberger
said. Continuing her analogy, Shamberger said without fresh air coming through that
window, it gets harder and harder for life to thrive. But in the case of the Palau coral
reefs, the opposite was happening. "What we found is that coral cover and coral diversity
actually increase as you move from the outer reefs and into the Rock Islands, which is
exactly the opposite of what we were expecting," she said.
Alt causes to coral reef pollution adaptation key
Bradbury 12 - an ecologist who does research in resource management at Australian
National University (Roger Bradbury, A World Without Coral Reefs NY Times, July 13,
2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-
reefs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each
of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs;
together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal,
but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion that
there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem. What we hear
instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis a view endorsed by coral reef scientists,
amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain
forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as
existentially threatened but salvageable. The message is: There is yet hope. Indeed,
this view is echoed in the consensus statement of the just-concludedInternational
Coral Reef Symposium , which called on all governments to ensure the future of coral
reefs. It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists. This is
less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments dont want to be
blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth,
and scientists often dont see the reefs for the corals. But by persisting in the false belief
that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the
fallout from their collapse. Money isnt spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone
on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be
to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and
services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by
transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isnt spent to make
the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on
coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than
the rate of the processes killing them. Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have
two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line
with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second,
they have extreme inertia there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less
than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is
these two features acceleration and inertia that have blindsided us. Overfishing can
bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs
together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Paulys lab at the
University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating
even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs
worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades. Ocean
acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves. Corals
can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of temperature and
acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are acidifying as they absorb
increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-
Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals will be pushed outside their
temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective international
action on emissions. We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients,
particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the
open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just cant survive
in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that
will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less
certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force
reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury. This is not a story that gives me any
pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster
for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the
Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry
of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries
like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly
damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot
spots of biodiversity are destroyed. What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard
ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of
microbial life soaking up the suns energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish
grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the
Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish
evolved. Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to
succumb to the Anthropocene the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we
need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to
understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this
magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.


Alt Causes
Tons of alt causes to coral collapse and its inevitable
Lewis, 7/2/14 Digital News Producer at Al Jazeera (Renee, Caribbean coral reefs
could disappear within a few decades, Al Jazeera
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/2/coral-reef-caribbean.html)//IS
Macroalgae can lead to virulent diseases in reefs and can release toxins that cause coral
bleaching or death. Coral bleaching occurs when a reef becomes stressed and its
symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae that lives in its tissue breaks down
leaving the white calcium carbonate skeleton visible. Invasive species, including foreign
diseases, are another major factor identified by the report that has led to coral reef die-
off. An unidentified pathogen during the 1960s and 1970s led to the mass mortality of
sea urchins. The disease was likely introduced via foreign boats, as it came as the same
time as an increase in shipping and began just miles from the entrance of the Panama
Canal, according to the report. The study said tourism could have a negative effect on the
reefs when there are not proper environmental protections in place, adding that
locations with more visitors and no regulations have less coral cover. Though ocean
warming and climate change have played a role in coral reef die-off in other areas of the
world, in the Caribbean, researchers found only a weak correlation. But they cautioned
that ocean acidification caused by climate change will likely compromise corals in the
future. Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs
would continue their decline, Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and IUCNs
senior adviser on coral reefs, said in a press release. We must immediately address the
grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts.

More alt causes tourism, dredging, overfishing, and pollution
Plumer, 7/7/14 Senior Editor of Vox (Brad, Caribbean coral reefs could disappear
within a few decades, Vox, http://www.vox.com/2014/7/7/5876909/caribbean-coral-
reefs-could-disappear-within-a-few-decades)//IS
In almost all regions, heavy tourism seems to be damaging coral reefs. And the big
problem here actually isn't from tourists going snorkeling among reefs. Instead, most of
the damage comes from sediment and nutrient run-off from hotels, roads, and golf
courses, as well as the dredging of harbors to make way for giant yachts and cruise ships.
(There are only a few places where coral reefs have thrived despite heavy tourism, such
as Bermuda likely due to strict protections.) Overfishing is another major factor
particularly of the parrotfish. The report notes that coral reefs that have suffered from
overfishing are less likely to recover after hurricanes and large storms. The report also
mentions two smaller factors. Coastal pollution has increased in countries like Belize,
although there hasn't been much work linking pollution to increases in coral disease.
What's more, warmer ocean temperatures due to climate change appear to have been a
factor in coral bleaching and the spreading of disease in regions like Puerto Rico and the
Florida Keys. So far, however, this hasn't been a major factor.

Specifically, tourism and overfishing tip the balance
Griffith-Mumby, 5/13/13 the EU-funded project Future of Reefs in a Changing
Environment (FoRCE) Project Manager (Rosanna, Coral Collapse can be avoided,
researchers say, Jamaican Observer,
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/environment/CORAL-COLLAPSE-can-be-avoided--
researchers-say_14240382)//IS
Human impacts, however, including pollution, overfishing of parrot fish, and climate
change tip the balance towards erosion, which means the reef habitat could be totally
eroded, leaving a flat, barren habitat in its place, the professor added. "People benefit by
reefs having a complex structure -- a little like a Manhattan skyline but underwater.
Coral reefs provide nooks and crannies for thousands of species and provide the habitat
needed to sustain productive reef fisheries. They're also great fun to visit as a snorkeller
or diver. "[But] if we carry on the way we have been, the ability of reefs to provide
benefits to people will seriously decline," Mumby warned.


Squo Solves
Status quo coral restoration projects solve and theyre the only possible way
Marsa, 4/22/14 Contributing editor of Discovery, former staff writer and syndicated
columnist at the Los Angeles Times, winner of the June Roth Memorial Award for
Medical Journalism in 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2013, and a Donald Robinson Award for
Investigative Journalism in 2010, both from the American Society of Journalists and
Authors. (Linda, How to Fix a Coral Reef, Yahoo News, http://news.yahoo.com/fix-
coral-reef-193701905.html)//IS
Were now working at an ecologically meaningful scale with thousands of genetically
diverse strains of coral re-deployed in the wild every year, says Diego Lirman, a marine
biologist at the University of Miami. But were realisticits virtually impossible to
rescue entire reefs through simple restoration. What we can do is accelerate the reefs
natural recovery processes. We make a brief stop at the coral nurseries off French Louie
Caye, where Carne loads two large plastic tubs with the long, spiky branches of staghorns
that she breaks off from the thicket of corals sprouting on their artificial frames. Then we
head over to Laughing Bird Caye. Here in the reef-filled waters surrounding the cayea
picture-perfect acre-and-a-half sliver of gleaming white sands, coconut palms, and
mangroves, with a cluster of picnic tables where diving and snorkeling expeditions
congregate for lunchthe restorations results are most evident. Interspersed with the
teeming marine life of the reef, next to the boulder-size brain corals, the delicate sea
grasses, the fluttery sea fans, and the fire corals, are dozens of colonies of nursery-grown
corals: majestic outcroppings of fully grown elkhorns, with leafy branches extending five
feet or more, and the massive domes of staghorns, which look like giant mums with their
white-tipped tendrils. Roughly 80 percent of the corals we transplant survive, says
Carne as she sits on the boat deck. Sloshing around in the water-filled plastic tubs, she
uses diving weights to break up the staghorn branches into pieces about an inch or two in
length. Then we push each of the spiny fragments between strands of rope, seeding the
ropes length with dozens of pieces. They look like giant rock candy necklaces. The ropes
are then woven through metal frames sitting on the sea floor. Within the year, they will
be overgrown with healthy staghorns, and Carne will come back to break some off and
seed it elsewhere on the reef. Weve triggered a cascade of destruction with climate
change, says Les Kaufman, a professor of biology at Boston University who specializes
in reef restoration. But by tweaking that system at even a tiny scale, and learning
through projects like this about how reefs recover, we might be able to engage their
natural healing mechanisms with enormous multiplier effects. That is what were hoping
the coral nurseries can accomplish.


Deforestation
Squo solves
Status quo protected areas solve deforestation
Erickson, 13 Senior Public Relations Representative, University of Michigan News
Service (Jim, Good News Blog: Protected areas successfully prevent deforestation in
Amazon rainforest, Rights + Resources, University of Michigan, 3-14-13,
http://www.rightsandresources.org/news/good-news-blog-protected-areas-successfully-
prevent-deforestation-in-amazon-rainforest/)//AD

Strictly protected areas such as national parks and biological reserves have been more
effective at reducing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest than so-called sustainable-
use areas that allow for controlled resource extraction, two University of Michigan
researchers and their colleagues have found. In addition, protected areas established
primarily to safeguard the rights and livelihoods of indigenous people performed
especially well in places where deforestation pressures are high. The U-M-led study,
which found that all forms of protection successfully limit deforestation, is scheduled for
online publication March 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The
lead author is Christoph Nolte, a doctoral candidate at the U-M School of Natural
Resources and Environment. Co-authors include Arun Agrawal, a professor of natural
resources at SNRE.Perhaps the biggest surprise is the finding that indigenous lands
perform the best when it comes to lower deforestation in contexts of high deforestation
pressure, Agrawal said. Many observers have suggested that granting substantial
autonomy and land rights to indigenous people over vast tracts of land in the Amazon
will lead to high levels of deforestation because indigenous groups would want to take
advantage of the resources at their disposal.This study shows that based on current
evidence such fears are misplaced, he said.Preventing deforestation of rainforests is a
goal for conserving biodiversity and, more recently, for reducing carbon emissions in the
Brazilian Amazon, which covers an area of nearly 2 million square miles. After making
international headlines for historically high Amazon deforestation rates between 2000
and 2005, Brazil achieved radical reductions in deforestation rates in the second half of
the past decade. Although part of those reductions were attributed to price declines of
agricultural commodities, recent analyses also show that regulatory government policies
including a drastic increase in enforcement activities and the expansion and
strengthening of protected-area networks all contributed significantly to the observed
reductions.In their study, the U-M researchers and their colleagues used new remote-
sensing-based datasets from 292 protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, along with a
sophisticated statistical analysis, to assess the effectiveness of different types of protected
areas. They looked at three categories of protected areas: strictly protected areas,
sustainable use areas and indigenous lands. Strictly protected areas state and national
biological stations, biological reserves, and national and state parks consistently
avoided more deforestation than sustainable-use areas, regardless of the level of
deforestation pressure.
No impact
Studies are wrong
Wang, 9 Science and technology journalist (Ucilia, Deforestation: Not So Bad for the
Climate? Green Tech Media, 11/4,
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/deforestation-not-so-bad-for-the-
climate)//AD

An oft-quoted figure to demonstrate amount of emissions caused by deforestation is an
exaggeration, according to a research published by journal Nature Geoscience. A 2007
report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said destroying forests
in places such as Brazil had contributed 20 percent of the manmade carbon dioxide
emissions. The figure became widely used to stress the importance of forest protection.
But new research by Guido van der Werf at the VU University of Amsterdam shows that
the figure should be around 12 percent (see his research page). Van der Werf said the
IPCC report used wrong or outdated data. Specifically, the international team of
scientists who worked on that report used figures that exaggerated the rate of tropical
forest destruction. He told the U.K. Guardian: "It's a tough message because everybody
would like to see forests better protected and it is difficult to tell them that carbon
dioxide emissions are less important than assumed. Still, the good news of lower
emissions is no bad news for the forests."

Forests are resilient
Thompson et. al., 9 *Canadian Forest Service, **The Australian National University
and The Fenner School of Environment and Society, ***USDA Forest Service), and
****Canadian Forest Service). (Ian Brendan Mackey Steven McNulty Alex Mosseler ,
"Forest Resilience, Biodiversity, and Climate Change, Secretariat of the CBD Technical
Series on Biological Diversity, 2009, http://www.cbd.int/doc/publications/cbd-ts-43-
en.pdf) //AD

Forests are generally resistant to change, that is, they change little within bounds as a
result of non-catastrophic disturbances, such as chronic endemic insect herbivory or
minor blowdown and canopy gaps created by the death of individual or small groups of
trees. Forests may also be resistant to certain environmental changes, such as weather
patterns over time, owing to redundancy at various levels among functional species (as
discussed further below, redundancy refers to the overlap and duplication in ecological
functions performed by the diversity of genomes and species in an ecosystem).
Ecosystems may be highly resilient but have low resistance to a given perturbation. For
example, grasslands are not resistant, but are highly resilient, to fire. However, most
well-developed forests, especially primary old forests, are both resilient and resistant to
changes (e.g., Holling 1973, Drever et al. 2006).

No impact or scenario for forest collapse
Wigmore, 5 quoting biogeography professor at London University who edits the
Journal of Biogeography and a Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace (6/9, Barry, New
York Post, Posted at Cheat Seeking Missiles, date is date of post,
http://cheatseekingmissiles.blogspot.com/2005/06/stop-global-whining-2.html) //AD

"One of the simple, but very important, facts is that the rainforests have only been
around for between 12,000 and 16,000 years. That sounds like a very long time but, in
terms of the history of the earth, it's hardly a pinprick. "Before then, there were hardly
any rainforests. They are very young. It is just a big mistake that people are making.
"The simple point is that there are now still - despite what humans have done - more
rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago." "This lungs of the earth business is
nonsense; the daftest of all theories," Stott adds. "If you want to put forward something
which, in a simple sense, shows you what's wrong with all the science they espouse, it's
that image of the lungs of the world. "In fact, because the trees fall down and decay,
rainforests actually take in slightly more oxygen than they give out. "The idea of them
soaking up carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen is a myth. It's only fast-growing young
trees that actually take up carbon dioxide," Stott says. "In terms of world systems, the
rainforests are basically irrelevant. World weather is governed by the oceans - that great
system of ocean atmospherics. "Most things that happen on land are mere blips to the
system, basically insignificant," he says. Both scientists say the argument that the cure
for cancer could be hidden in a rainforest plant or animal - while plausible - is also based
on false science because the sea holds more mysteries of life than the rainforests. And
both say fears that man is destroying this raw source of medicine are unfounded because
the rainforests are remarkably healthy. "They are just about the healthiest forests in the
world. This stuff about them vanishing at an alarming rate is a con based on bad
science," Moore says.


AT: Biodiversity Impact
Biodiversity claims exaggerated no extinction from deforestation
Rothbard and Rucker, 97 (David Rothbard and Craig Rucker, Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow, The rainforest issue: Myths and facts CFACT Briefing Paper
#102. http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=5&idarticle=214) //AD

Another important fact, according to Sedjo and Clawson, relates to a study done by the
Food and Agriculture Organization and U.N. Environmental Programme by J.P. Lanly.
Lanly is Forest Coordinator for the UNEP/FAO Tropical Resources Assessment Project
and his study "indicates that [of the roughly 7 million acres worldwide per year] the
undisturbed or "virgin" broadleaved closed forests have a far lower rate of deforestation
than the total, being only 0.27 percent annually as compared with 2.06 percent annually
for logged over secondary forest. This figure indicates that deforestation pressure on the
more pristine and generally more genetically diverse tropical forests is quite low."
Further, "these findings are in sharp contrast to the conventional view that the tropical
forests are `disappearing at an alarming rate' and suggest that concerns over the
imminent loss of some of the most important residences of the world's diverse genetic
base, based on rates of tropical deforestation, are probably grossly exaggerated." (Simon,
Rational Readings, p.746) Sedjo and Clawson also said "While the local effects of rapid
deforestation may be severe, the evidence does not support the view that either the world
or the tropics are experiencing rapid aggregate deforestation. Furthermore, the evidence
shows that current rates of deforestation are quite modest in much of the world's virgin
tropical forests, for example those of the Amazon; and therefore they are probably in
little danger of wholesale destruction in the foreseeable future." (Eco-Sanity, p.90)
Sandra Brown, professor of forestry at U. of Illinois and Ariel Lugo, project leader at the
U.S. Forest Service's Institute of Tropical Forestry in Puerto Rico also studied available
data and "concluded the `dangerous' misinterpretation and exaggeration of the rate of
deforestation has become common." As for the amount of deforestation in relation to
total forest area, Thomas Lovejoy, then of the World Wildlife Fund, offered a low
projection of 50% deforestation between 1980 and 2000 in Latin America and a high of
67%. The source for this was a set of satellite photos taken in 1978 and reported in the
Washington Post to show that "as much as one-tenth of the Brazilian Amazon has been
razed." But according to Fulbright scholar and ecologist Robert Buschbacher working in
Brazil, the Landsat photos "concluded that 1.55 percent of the Brazilian portion of the
Amazon has been deforested." "On the basis of this and other evidence, Buschbacher
says, `Because of a relatively low percentage of forest clearing and the remarkable
capacity of the forest to recover its structure...the threat of turning the Amazon into a
wasteland is exaggerated.'
AT: Amazon
Amazon is resilient empirics and studies
*secret c02 ag card
WCR, 10 World Climate Report ("Amazon Rainforest Resiliency," WCR, 9-20-10,
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/09/20/amazon-rainforest-
resiliency/) //AD

In 2005, Mother Nature conducted an experiment for us by producing a substantial
drought in the Amazon; the drought peaked in intensity during July to September of that
year with the hardest hit part of the Amazon occurring in the central and southwestern
portions of Amazonia. Saleska et al. used satellite-based measurements and much to
their surprise, they found that forest canopy greenness over the drought-stricken areas
increased at a highly significant rate. They conclude that These observations suggest
that intact Amazon forests may be more resilient than many ecosystem models assume,
at least in response to short-term climatic anomalies. Next up is an article in a recent
issue of the Journal of Vegetation Science by seven scientists from Panama, Brazil, and
California; the piece is entitled Long-term variation in Amazon forest dynamics and
therefore must contain horrible news about the state of the rainforest, right? Wrong!
Laurance and her team conducted five different surveys of the forest in a protected area
50 miles north of Manaus in the central Amazon; they made these measurements
between 1981 and 2003. Getting right to the bottom line, they report that Forest
biomass also increased over time, with the basal area of trees in our plots, which
correlate strongly with tree biomass, rising by 4% on average. They then add The suite
of changes we observedaccelerating tree growth and forest dynamism, and rising
biomasslargely accords with findings from other long-term, comparative studies of
forest dynamics across the Amazon Basin. They state One of the most frequent
explanations for such findings is that forest productivity is rising, possibly in response to
increasing CO2 fertilization or some other regional or global driver(s), such as increasing
irradiance or rainfall variability. We are partial to the increasing CO2 explanation, and
it is worth noting that the first sentence in the Conclusions section in their abstract
clearly states The increasing forest dynamics, growth, and basal area observed are
broadly consistent with the CO2 fertilization hypothesis. Our third recent article was
written by three scientists from Brazil and Germany and it appeared in Global
Biogeochemical Cycles. Lapola et al. begin noting that Tropical South America
vegetation cover projections for the end of the century differ considerably depending on
climate scenario and also on how physiological processes are considered in vegetation
models. To investigate the future of the vegetation of the Amazon, the team created a
numerical Potential Vegetation Model that could be coupled with global climate
models. As seen in their figure below (Figure 1), the vegetation model appears to
accurately replicate the current vegetation in the region. When they simulated climate
change in the future and they included the CO2 fertilization effect, the vegetation was
largely unchanged. Without the CO2 fertilization effect, the rainforest all but disappears
under their expected change in climate. And if the climate does not change much and the
CO2 fertilization effect is realized, the rainforest expands considerably.

Amazon resilient new studies
Heffernan, 9 freelance science writer covering environment and energy (Olive,
"Tropical forests unexpectedly resilient to climate change," Nature, 3-10-13,
http://www.nature.com/news/tropical-forests-unexpectedly-resilient-to-climate-
change-1.12570) //AD

Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric
greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that
predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling
potential outcomes of climate change. In the most extensive study of its kind1, an
international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as-usual emissions on
the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central America,
Asia and Africa through to 2100. They compared the results from 22 different global
climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes. In all but one
simulation, rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century. Robust
rainforest The study provides robust evidence for the resilience of tropical rainforests,
says lead author Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UKs Centre for Ecology
and Hydrology in Wallingford. But uncertainties remain, he adds. For one, it remains
difficult to predict how climate will change regionally. Moreover, each global climate
model represents climate somewhat differently. The single simulation that predicted
biomass loss for the Amazonian and Central American rainforests in the current study
used a model called HadCM3, developed by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.
That same model produced the earlier prediction that climate change would lead to
massive forest die-off in the Amazon2. Climate scientist Peter Cox at the University of
Exeter, UK, was one of the authors on the earlier study and is also involved in the new
one. He explains that, unlike other climate models, HadCM3 predicts extreme drying
over the Amazon basin in the future, which changes the outcome for the forests there.
But in the light of new data and of improved modelling, the drying now seems a lot less
probable. Scientists are more confident in the predictions from current studies, he says,
as they are based on many more, and much more sophisticated, models. This has been a
big issue in science for many years, says forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad, who directs the
Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San Francisco, and the emerging view is
that there is less sensitivity in tropical forests for climate-driven dieback.

De-Oxygenation

Warming is the internal link to De-Oxygenation, it is not an external impact.
EUR Oceans 10, a collective group of about 50 scientists focusing on global warmings
effects on the oceans, (September 11, 2010, EUR-OCEANS Conference - Ocean
deoxygenation and implications for marine biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems,
http://www.eur-oceans.eu/conf-oxygen)//HH

This conference aims to bring together biological, biogeochemical, and physical
oceanographers to discuss the issue of deoxygenation in the world ocean and its
implications for ocean productivity, nutrient cycling, carbon cycling, and marine
habitats. A serious consequence of global warming that is increasingly gaining
importance is the decrease of the dissolved oxygen content of the world ocean.
Deoxygenation and extension of the Oxygen Minimum Zones (OMZs) are predicted
because oxygen is less soluble in warmer waters and also because the changing oceanic
stratification and circulation will reduce the supply of O2 to the ocean interior. However,
the biogeochemical contribution due to the O2 consumed by the aerobic processes (e.g.
remineralization, nitrification) remains to be quantified. This deoxygenation in
subsurface waters will have widespread consequences due to the role O2 plays in the
biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and other important elements such as P, Fe,
Mn, S, etc.. O2 is instrumental to all aerobic life and sublethal and lethal O2 thresholds
vary greatly between marine organisms. OMZs are key regions in the climatic gases
budgets: O2, CO2, N2O, CH4, halogenous compounds...



Disasters
No solvency
Disaster response fails state interruption
Wachsmuth, 10/28/13 an urban planner and a PhD candidate in sociology at New
York University. (David, How Local Governments Hinder Our Response to Natural
Disasters, The Atlantic, http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/10/how-local-
governments-hinder-our-response-natural-disasters/7362/)//IS
Unfortunately, there was little successful inter-jurisdictional coordination in the
aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. New York City's Office of Emergency Management was
theoretically responsible for coordinating the different city agencies. But it was quickly
sidelined by the Mayor's Office. The result was a haphazard approach that led to some
notable failures with respect to evacuations and the safety of public housing
residents. On a larger scale, emergency managers from New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut, and Pennsylvania created a Regional Catastrophic Planning Team for
precisely this kind of emergency. But when the storm hit, the RCPTs plans stayed on the
shelf, particularly in New York City. As one NYC emergency manager described it to me,
"The federal government spent millions of dollars on [the regional plan] andwe did
not do anything. All the planning and all the dollars that were spent on regional planning
[and] not once did we open the book to say, 'Let's do it this way.'"

Squo Solves
RAPID solves in the status quo
Santos, 7/7/14 Staff Writer at Devex (Lean A., A 'rapid' response to disasters,
climate change
Devex, https://www.devex.com/news/a-rapid-response-to-disasters-climate-change-
83819)//IS
Its more costly for the government to react [to disasters] than preparing for them. It is
much better to invest and build back better, faster and safer, Lesley Cordero, a top
official with the Philippine governments Haiyan rehabilitation office, said at the launch
of the Resilience and Preparedness for Inclusive Development program by the Philippine
Climate Change Commission. RAPID is the latest step in global disaster risk reduction
efforts since the so-called Tacloban Declaration published after the Asia-Europe meeting
in Manila in June, which contains new provisions on DRR and is widely expected to
compose the bulk of the post-2015 Sendai DRR framework to be finalized next year.
Disasters have disrupted social and economic development worldwide, making DRR a
priority area of focus for the aid community. According to the World Bank, disasters
have cost the world almost $4 trillion since 1980 an amount that could have been
earmarked for wider development programs. Thats why a proactive program like RAPID
can save time, money and lives in the long-run, according to Ewen McDonald, deputy
secretary at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which now oversees
the countrys aid program. A single disaster can undermine many years of hard work. It
sets back any incremental progression that we've made in development objectives and
goals, McDonald said at the event, citing that every dollar spent on DRR is equivalent to
up to $10 spent on disaster response efforts.

Disease (general)
No impact - Status quo solves anti-biotic diversification
Fumento, 5 - senior fellow at the Hudson Institute (Michael, Scripps Howard News
Service, June 23, 2005, lexis
http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/)//gingE

On June 17 the FDA approved New Jersey-based Wyeth Pharmaceutical's Tygacil,
primarily intended for skin infections and abdominal wounds. It's especially useful
against the common and drug-resistant bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, better known as
"staph." But it's a true broad-spectrum drug, applicable against a host of different
bacteria - so much so that doctors can feel confident in administering it as a first-line
treatment even if they have no idea what germ - or germs - they're up against. Tygacil is
the first antibiotic approved in a new class called glycylcyclines, expressly developed to
bypass the mechanisms that made bacteria resistant to the tetracycline family of drugs.
The major drawback of Tygacil is that it must be administered intravenously, yet that's
also a plus. Perhaps the main reason bugs develop resistance to antibiotics is that
doctors overprescribe the drugs. They hand out pills like Pez candy because patients
demand it. But patients don't demand IVs; therefore limiting usage of Tygacil and
probably greatly forestalling the day when it too leads to resistant strains. But Tygacil is
not alone in new and forthcoming antibiotics designed to tell germs: "Resistance is
futile!" The injectable Cidecin from Cubist of Lexington, Mass., also targeted at nasty
hospital infections, may soon receive FDA approval. Just four days before the approval
of Tygacil, the FDA also gave the green light to Pfizer's Zmax, an important new
formulation of an older antibiotic. Zmax is administered with merely one dose rather
than given over a period of seven to 10 days - an all guns blazing assault on bacteria that
cause sinusitis and pneumonia. "An antibiotic taken just once can address compliance
issues and may minimize the emergence of antibiotic resistance," Dr. Michael
Niederman, Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital
in Mineola, New York notes in a Pfizer press release. New Jersey-based Johnson &
Johnson has two different broad-spectrum drugs in late-stage testing that are designed
to overcome antibiotic resistance, ceftobiprole and doripenem.
The Holy Grail of anti-bacterial drugs is one to which bugs cannot become resistant. One
step in that direction may be further development of bacteriophages (Greek for "bacteria
eaters".) These are viruses that attach to the bacterial surface and inject their DNA,
which replicates until the bacterium explodes. These phages evolve just as bacteria do.
The same forces that select for resistant bacteria also select for viruses that overcome
that resistance.

No impact - No need for antibiotic diversification now
Salyers and Whitt, 5 - Microbiology professors at the U of Illinois (Abigail and Dixie,
Revenge of the Microbes: how bacterial resistance is undermining the antibiotic miracle,
p 38)//gingE

If we lose antibiotics, will we return to a truly pre-antibiotic era? Before considering this
question, lets define what we mean by lose. Although there are now some strains of
bacteria that are pan-resistant or resistant to virtually all available antibiotics, these
strains are still in the minority. Most disease-causing bacteria remain susceptible
to at least a few antibiotics. There even seem to be some bacteria, such as Streptoccus
pyogenes (the cause of strep throat and a common cause of wound and bloodstream
infections), Chlamydia trachomatis (the cause of a gonorrhea-like infection that can
cause infertility and ectopic pregnancy), and Treponema pallidum (the cause of syphilis),
that have remained steadfastly susceptible to most antibiotics.
Scientists do not know why this is, and we may be in for some unpleasant surprises in
cases like these if these bacterial slow learners finally catch up with the rest of the class,
but for now it appears that some serious diseases would still be treatable. Even in the
case of bacterial species that are noted for resistance to antibiotics, there are some
strains that have remained susceptible to most antibiotics. There may be an important
lesson in this. Why would the incidence of resistant strains within a species rise to, say
60% and then level off, leaving 40% of strains persistently susceptible?
This is a phenomenon scientists dont understand, but such trends have been observed.
Instead of focusing exclusively on strains that are becoming resistant to antibiotics,
perhaps scientists ought to be paying some attention to those strains that seem not to
have gotten onto the resistance bandwagon. In any event, there will probably not be a
total loss of antibiotics. This is not to say that the situation will not be grim, but it may
not become completely hopeless.

Intervening actors prove that theres no chance of a pandemic -
Zakaria 9Editor of Newsweek, BA from Yale, PhD in pol sci, Harvard. He serves on
the board of Yale University, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral
Commission, and Shakespeare and Company. (Fareed, The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed
Is Good, 13 June 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935)
NoteLaurie Garrett=science and health writer, winner of the Pulitzer, Polk, and
Peabody Prize
It certainly looks like another example of crying wolf. After bracing ourselves for
a global pandemic, we've suffered something more like the usual seasonal
influenza. Three weeks ago the World Health Organization declared a health
emergency, warning countries to "prepare for a pandemic" and said that the
only question was the extent of worldwide damage. Senior officials prophesied
that millions could be infected by the disease. But as of last week, the WHO had
confirmed only 4,800 cases of swine flu, with 61 people having died of it.
Obviously, these low numbers are a pleasant surprise, but it does make one
wonder, what did we get wrong? Why did the predictions of a pandemic turn
out to be so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it would
have been difficult to ignore major international health organizations and
governments when they were warning of catastrophe. I think there is a broader
mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can
describe it in great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we
can rarely anticipate the human response to that crisis. Take swine flu. The
virus had crucial characteristics that led researchers to worry that it could
spread far and fast. They describedand the media reportedwhat would
happen if it went unchecked. But it did not go unchecked. In fact, swine flu was
met by an extremely vigorous response at its epicenter, Mexico. The Mexican
government reacted quickly and massively, quarantining the infected
population, testing others, providing medication to those who needed it. The
noted expert on this subject, Laurie Garrett, says, "We should all stand up and
scream, 'Gracias, Mexico!' because the Mexican people and the Mexican
government have sacrificed on a level that I'm not sure as Americans we would
be prepared to do in the exact same circumstances. They shut down their
schools. They shut down businesses, restaurants, churches, sporting events.
They basically paralyzed their own economy. They've suffered billions of dollars
in financial losses still being tallied up, and thereby really brought transmission
to a halt." Every time one of these viruses is detected, writers and officials bring
up the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 in which millions of people died.
Indeed, during the last pandemic scare, in 2005, President George W. Bush
claimed that he had been reading a history of the Spanish flu to help him
understand how to respond. But the world we live in today looks nothing like
1918. Public health-care systems are far better and more widespread than
anything that existed during the First World War. Even Mexico, a developing
country, has a first-rate public-health systemfar better than anything Britain
or France had in the early 20th century.
Disease is all hype
Lind, 11 - Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America
Foundation (Michael, March/April 2011, So Long, Chicken Little, Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/so_long_chicken_little?page=0,5)/
/gingE

There's nothing like a good plague to get journalists and pundits in a frenzy. Although
the threat of global pandemics is real, it's all too often exaggerated. In the last few years,
the world has experienced two such pandemics, the avian flu (H5N1) and swine flu
(H1N1). Both fell far short of the apocalyptic vision of a new Black Death cutting huge
swaths of mortality with its remorseless scythe. Out of a global population of more than 6
billion people, 8,768 are estimated to have died from swine flu, 306 from avian flu.
And yet it was not just the BBC ominously informing us that "the deadly swine flu
cannot be contained." Like warnings about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the
good done by mobilizing people to address the problem must be weighed against the
danger of apocalypse fatigue on the part of a public subjected to endless Chicken Little
scares.

No impact - Disease wont lead to extinction
Posner, 5 - senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (Richard A, 2005,
Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about
them. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-130930466.html)//gingE

Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the
200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is
on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black
Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human
race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they
are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the
germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus,
wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its
spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race.
The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race
is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people
lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite
wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The
reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics
can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS
pandemic. And there is always a lust time.
That the human race has not yet been destroyed by germs created or made more lethal
by modern science, as distinct from completely natural disease agents such as the flu and
AIDS viruses, is even less reassuring. We haven't had these products long enough to be
able to infer survivability from our experience with them. A recent study suggests that as
immunity to smallpox declines because people am no longer being vaccinated against it,
monkeypox may evolve into "a successful human pathogen," (9) yet one that vaccination
against smallpox would provide at least some protection against; and even before the
discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox did not wipe out the human race. What is
new is the possibility that science, bypassing evolution, will enable monkeypox to be
"juiced up" through gene splicing into a far more lethal pathogen than smallpox ever
was.

Burn out means that diseases wont spread
Morse, 04 - PhD, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness (Stephen, May
2004, Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: A Global Problem,
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/morse.html)//gingE

Morse: A pandemic is a very big epidemic. It requires a number of things. There are
many infections that get introduced from time to time in the human population and, like
Ebola, burn themselves out because they kill too quickly or they dont have a way to get
from person to person. They are a terrible tragedy, but also, in a sense, it is a lucky thing
that they dont have an efficient means of transmission. In some cases, we may
inadvertently create pathways to allow transmission of infections that may be poorly
transmissible, for example, spreading HIV through needle sharing, the blood supply,
and, of course, initially through the commercial sex trade. The disease is not easily
transmitted, but we provided, without realizing it, means for it to spread. It is now
pandemic in spite of its relatively inefficient transmission. We also get complacent and
do not take steps to prevent its spread.
Some diseases spread very efficiently and quickly.
A disease like influenza is a different story. It spreads very efficiently from person to
person. The right strain of influenza with the right combination of biological properties
to spread well and be novel to the human population and also perhaps to come at the
right time in the right place could make it easily pandemic.
So, there are many ways to become a pandemic. Luckily, its not an easy thing to do.

The differences among individuals make it impossible for a disease to wipe
out humanity
Sowell, 1 Fellow at Hoover Institution (Thomas, March 5, Jewish World Review, The
Dangers of Equality,
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell030501.asp)//gingE

A sense of smell is just one of innumerable things that can differ greatly from one person
to the next. Moreover, many of these differences are essential to the survival and
progress of the human race.
People have different vulnerabilities and resistances to a variety of diseases. That is why
one disease is unlikely to wipe out the human species, even in one place. An
epidemic that sweeps through an area may leave some people dying like flies while
others remain as healthy as horses.
There are children who are years late in beginning to talk and yet who end up scoring
over the 90th percentile on math tests. Then there are other children whose speech is so
precocious that they sound like little geniuses when you hear them talk -- and yet they
have trouble subtracting two from four or tying their own shoelaces -- and always will.
Individuals differ radically from one another in all sorts of skills, interests and talents.
What all this means is that the capabilities of the human race vastly exceed the
capabilities of even the brightest and the best individuals.
When the brightest and the best take over making decisions for other people, usually
through the power of government, those decisions are likely to be based on less
knowledge, experience and understanding than when ordinary people make their own
individual decisions for themselves.
The anointed may know more than the average person, but far less than all the ordinary
people put together.
Scientists who study the brain say that some abilities develop greatly at the expense of
other abilities. Socially as well, some talents are developed by neglecting others. Concert
pianists seldom have a college education, because the demands of the two things are just
too great.
Therefore, for both biological and social reasons, the only way for everyone to be equal
would be for them to be equal at a lower level of ability than what some people are
capable of in some things and other people are in other things.
In other words, if everyone were equal in their many capabilities, the whole species
would be no more capable or insightful or resistant to diseases than one individual. Our
chances of surviving or progressing would be a lot less than they are now. Even the
enjoyment we get from watching Tiger Woods play golf or Pavarotti sing would be lost,
for we would all be mediocrities in golf and singing and a thousand other things.

Disease modeling checks extinction
Schwartz, 9 - American Physical Society, (Ira, Fluctuations in epidemic modeling -
disease extinction and control Physical Society, 2009 APS March Meeting, March 16-
20, 2009, abstract #D7.003 http:
adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009APS..MAR.D7003S)//gingE

The analysis of infectious disease fluctuations has recently seen an increasing rise in the
use of new tools and models from stochastic dynamics and statistical physics. Examples
arise in modeling fluctuations of multi-strain diseases, in modeling adaptive social
behavior and its impact on disease fluctuations, and in the analysis of disease extinction
in finite population models. Proper stochastic model reduction [1] allows one to predict
unobserved fluctuations from observed data in multi-strain models [2]. Degree
alteration and power law behavior is predicted in adaptive network epidemic models
[3,4]. And extinction rates derived from large fluctuation theory exhibit scaling with
respect to distance to the bifurcation point of disease onset with an unusual exponent
[5]. In addition to outbreak prediction, another main goal of epidemic modeling is one of
eliminating the disease to extinction through various control mechanisms, such as
vaccine implementation or quarantine. In this talk, a description will be presented of the
fluctuational behavior of several epidemic models and their extinction rates. A general
framework and analysis of the effect of non-Gaussian control actuations which enhance
the rate to disease extinction will be described. In particular, in it is shown that even in
the presence of a small Poisson distributed vaccination program, there is an
exponentially enhanced rate to disease extinction. These ideas may lead to improved
methods of controlling disease where random vaccinations are prevalent.

No extinction - Not in the diseases interest.
Marx 98AIDS Research Facility at Tulane University (Preson and Ross MacPhee,
1998, How did Hyperdisease cause extinctions?
http://www.amnh.org/science/biodiversity/extinction/Day1/disease/Bit2.html])
It is well known that lethal diseases can have a profound effect on species' population
size and structure. However, it is generally accepted that the principal populational
effects of disease are acute--that is, short-term. In other words, although a species many
suffer substantial loss from the effects of a given highly infectious disease at a given time,
the facts indicate that natural populations tend to bounce back after the period of
high losses. Thus, disease as a primary cause of extinction seems implausible.
However, this is the normal case, where the disease-provoking pathogen and its host
have had a long relationship. Ordinarily, it is not in the pathogens interest to
rapidly kill off large numbers of individuals in its host species, because that
might imperil its own survival. Disease theorists long ago expressed the idea that
pathogens tend to evolve toward a "benign" state of affairs with their hosts, which means
in practice that they continue to infect, but tend not to kill (or at least not rapidly). A very
good reason for suspecting this to be an accurate view of pathogen-host relationships is
that individuals with few or no genetic defenses against a particular pathogen will be
maintained within the host population, thus ensuring the pathogen's ultimate survival.
Impact is empirically denied small pox, black plague, and AIDS prove
Bostrom 02Director of Department of Philosophy at Yale and a Professor at Future
of Hamunity Institute (Nick, 2002, Existential Risks Analyzing Human Extinction
Scenarios and Related Hazards, http://research.lifeboat.com/risks.htm)
Risks in this sixth category are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is
useful to distinguish them from other risks. We have not evolved mechanisms, either
biologically or culturally, for managing such risks. Our intuitions and coping strategies
have been shaped by our long experience with risks such as dangerous animals, hostile
individuals or tribes, poisonous foods, automobile accidents, Chernobyl, Bhopal, volcano
eruptions, earthquakes, draughts, World War I, World War II, epidemics of influenza,
smallpox, black plague, and AIDS. These types of disasters have occurred many
times and our cultural attitudes towards risk have been shaped by trial-and-error in
managing such hazards. But tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected,
in the big picture of things from the perspective of humankind as a whole even the
worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea
of life. They havent significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or
happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species.


Earthquakes
No impact to earthquakes and theyre decreasing overall
Rice, 14 USA Today weather correspondent (Doyle, Recent quakes probably not
related
April 3, 2014 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/04/02/chile-panama-
california-earthquake/7217141/)//gingE
Recent earthquakes in Chile, Panama and Southern California have people wondering. ...
Are they related? Expert say it's unlikely. "The odds are overwhelming that they're not
related," said John Vidale, a seismologist with the University of Washington-Seattle,
about the deadly magnitude-8.2 quake near Chile late Tuesday and the magnitude-5.8
quake near Panama on Wednesday. The two quakes are too far apart more than 2,000
miles to be connected with each other, Vidale said. "There's no way that last month's
Los Angeles quakes were related" to the ones this week in Central and South America, he
said. What all the quakes do share in common is their location along the notorious "Ring
of Fire," the world's greatest earthquake belt, according to the U.S. Geological Survey
(USGS). Also known as the "circum-Pacific seismic belt," the ring is found along the rim
of the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand to Chile. It's where 81% of the world's largest
earthquakes occur. This includes the catastrophic quake and resulting tsunami in Japan
that killed thousands of people in 2011. "There is no evidence of linkages in activity
between different regions around the Ring of Fire," said Robert Muir-Wood, a scientist
with RMS, a catastrophe modeling firm. The quakes also are probably not
harbingers of a bigger one to come. "Most quakes have about a 5% chance of being
followed by a bigger quake, most of the time just a little bigger," Vidale said. Chances of a
bigger quake in these areas do not reach alarming levels, he said, "with the exception of
Chile, where even aftershocks could be damaging and a bigger earthquake might be
catastrophic." The 8.2 quake near Chile Tuesday evening was unusually strong, Vidale
said. "This earthquake is of a size that happens somewhere about once a year," Muir-
Wood said. "The location is no particular surprise the Chile subduction zone is the
world's most active, and northern Chile has not seen really big subduction zone
earthquakes for some decades, unlike southern Chile." A subduction zone is a place
where two plates of the Earth's crust come together, one riding over the other. Chile is
one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries because the Nazca tectonic plate just
off the coast in the Pacific Ocean plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the
towering Andes mountains to ever-higher elevation. Nowhere along this fault is the
pressure greater than in far northern Chile. Despite the recent spate of quakes, Muir-
Wood said, "activity overall has been quieter since 2011." Worldwide, there are roughly
4,000 earthquakes each day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, most small and
undetectable. The quakes in the Los Angeles area last month were not that strong.
"California has gone for an unusually long period without a significant earthquake loss,"
Muir-Wood said. On average, Southern California gets about 10,000 earthquakes each
year, many too small to be felt, according to the USGS. That's more than 27 a day.
New tech checks the impact
Duey, 12 - member of SEG and serves on the advisory board for the Reservoir
Characterization Project, an industry-funded consortium at the Colorado School of
Mines (Rhonda, February 1, 2012 Warning System Mitigates Earthquake Damage
http://www.epmag.com/item/Warning-System-Mitigates-Earthquake-
Damage_95279)//gingE
Early warning system analyzes seismic waves to anticipate tremors. Recent devastating
earthquakes have spurred research into warning systems that can give people a chance to
get to higher ground. But their usefulness is limited not only by the speed at which
earthquakes and resulting tsunamis occur, but also by the methods by which warnings
are transmited, primarily telephone systems and the Internet. Weir-Jones Engineering
Ltd. provides a different kind of early warning system, one that is deployed locally at
sites that are susceptible to earthquake damage. In the oil and gas industry, this includes
onshore and offshore production facilities and transmission lines, where ground
movement can have devastating consequences. According to a USGS report, the 1994
Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, Calif., caused a gas line to rupture, and the gas
was ignited by the ignition system on a nearby truck, causing a massive fire. The
government of British Columbia (BC) judged the Weir-Jones system so effective that it
elected to install the system on the George Massey Tunnel south of Vancouver to prevent
motorists from being trapped beneath the river during an earthquake. Workers place
equipment to detect earthquakes near the George Massey Tunnel in Vancouver, BC.
(Images courtesy of Weir-Jones Engineering Group) The genesis Founded in 1971, the
Weir-Jones Engineering Group specialized in vibration monitoring, running burst tests
on line pipe in northern Alberta. These tests are destructive and only last a few
milliseconds, so you dont get an opportunity to rerun the test if you dont get the data
the first time around, said Iain Weir-Jones, company president. The data acquisition
systems have to be super-reliable and very quick. Early on, company personnel took
measurements, did some engineering work, and turned the data over to their clients.
Most of what we did was tell people like metallurgists or pipeline designers or chemical
engineers what their systems were doing so they could modify them and change process
parameters, he said. It became apparent that, although our expertise was in collecting
information, there were a number of areas where it would be useful to collect
information for events in an automated manner. The goal was to remove the human
factor and analyze the data in real time. We started developing systems which had, for
want of a better word, innate intelligence, he explained. Ultimately, the company
began developing systems that could monitor vibration patterns and determine whether
or not they were threatening. This became the genesis of the earthquake early warning
system (EEWS). Instead of monitoring mechanical vibration, the system listens to
vibrations in the earths subsurface. It works on a premise that is familiar to
geophysicists the time difference between compressional (P) and shear (S) wave
arrivals. The system senses the arrival of P waves, which travel faster than S waves and
can be indicative of a major quake. If we pick up the P wave reliably, quantify it, and
determine whether it is the precursor of a potentially damaging S wave, then weve got a
time lead before the arrival of the S wave, he said. How it works The subsurface is a
noisy place, so redundant sensors are needed to validate the P-wave arrival. Typically
these sensors are placed about 1 km (0.6 miles) apart. When two or more sensors pick up
a P-wave signature, the P-wave arrival is validated. The system then studies the
amplitude and frequency of the signature. If the signature is determined to be valid and
confirms the incoming S wave will cause damage, the system triggers the alarms that
have been put in place. In the case of the Massey Tunnel, warning signs are turned on,
and the tunnel is closed until the danger is past. The EEWS also takes into account the
design characteristics of the structures being protected. New building codes along the
west coast of North America ensure structures can withstand certain ground motion.
The threshold level at a brand new high-rise would not necessarily be the same as a 30-
year-old facility, he said. We tailor the criteria based on the design characteristics of
the structure. Weir-Jones said that everything from P-wave detection to estimating
damage risk takes about one-third of a second and requires no human intervention. He
added that a facility 200 km (120 miles) from the epicenter of an earthquake might have
only a 15-second window between the P arrival and the S arrival. You dont have a huge
amount of time, but its enough time to shut down compressors, bring elevators to the
lobby, close tunnels, and shut off big natural gas pipelines, he said. Weir-Jones
emphasized his systems are not to be confused with regional earthquake warning
networks. The facility-specific systems we are building are hardwired and provide
instantaneous response with no lost time, he said. The George Massey Tunnel is
equipped with an earthquake early warning system that will close the tunnel to protect
motorists from being trapped under the river. At the reservoir scale Not surprisingly, this
type of system also is being used to monitor producing fields. Were looking at
vibrations caused not by massive earthquakes but by small induced earthquakes,
microseismic events, and were looking for the energy releases caused by strata
movement associated with the depletion of the reservoir, he said. This is helpful in a
number of applications: Delineating production zones; Fracture monitoring; EOR
techniques; Heavy oil production-related deformations; Casing deformation; Natural gas
storage; Waterflooding; Carbon sequestration; Geothermal reservoirs; and Subsurface
waste disposal. Weir-Jones Engineering provided the equipment and supplies for two of
the largest permanent passive micro-seismic monitoring systems in the world, for
Imperial Oil at Cold Lake, Alberta, and for Canadian Natural Resources in its cyclic
steam stimulation field. The company also developed the worlds first integrated
microseismic monitoring system using dedicated radio frequency links between a master
and multiple slave stations. The system uses GPS-based time referencing for
synchronization across the entire system. Other installations have included a
multichannel, permanently installed system for continuously monitoring the progress of
a COsequestration project and an 800-channel permanent passive microseismic
monitoring system in Saudi Arabia. The company also has streamlined its borehole
installation, working with Imperial Resources to develop a cost-effective technique for
installing custom triaxial packages in deep boreholes using coiled tubing and cement
injection and with Encana on a technique to install small-diameter triaxial packages in
the annular space between the casing and the wall of the borehole for low-noise
installations in producing wells.
Drilling and earthquakes arent related
News OK, 13 (September 9, 2013 Seismologist: Fracking doesn't cause earthquakes
http://newsok.com/seismologist-fracking-doesnt-cause-
earthquakes/article/feed/588526/?page=1)//gingE
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) Human activity associated with oil and gas production
can sometimes cause earthquakes, but the problem is not hydraulic fracturing, a
seismologist from the University of Texas told researchers gathered for a two-day
conference on Marcellus shale-gas drilling. When the rare quakes do occur, they're
typically linked to the disposal of drilling fluids in underground injection wells, Cliff
Frohlich said Monday at West Virginia University. And the vast majority of injection
wells don't cause quakes, either, he said. Frohlich cited six earthquakes since 2008 in
Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio and Oklahoma, ranging from magnitude 3.3 to
magnitude 5.7. Their locations show that human-caused earthquakes are
geographically widespread and geologically diverse, but "very rare," given the amount
of petroleum produced and the amount of waste being disposed of. Why some injection
wells cause earthquakes and others don't remains unclear, he said. Frohlich hypothesizes
that quakes occur when a "suitably oriented" fault lies near an injection site. "Hydraulic
fracturing almost never causes true earthquakes," he told the group gathered for the
National Research Council workshop. "It is the disposal of fluids that is a concern." Texas
has 10,000 injection wells, Frohlich said, and some have been in use since the 1930s.
That effectively makes the state a giant research lab for the shale-gas drilling issues now
facing Appalachian states including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. If
injection wells were "hugely dangerous," he said, "we would know." "Texas would be
famous as a state that just rocks with major earthquakes," Frohlich said. "That is not
true." WVU is hosting the conference through Tuesday for the National Research
Council, which is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences. WVU Vice
President for Research Fred King says the reports that the workshop will generate should
be available before the start of West Virginia's legislative session in January and could
help guide future regulatory discussions. Frohlich urged policymakers to consider
cultural and population differences if they are weighing regulation aimed at minimizing
the risk of earthquakes through either the spacing between or monitoring of injection
wells. "There's places in West Texas you could have a 5.2 earthquake and it wouldn't
bother anyone," he said. "If you're going to operate in urban areas, I think you need to
invest in incredibly stringent regulations. But in other areas, you probably don't." WVU
Chief of Staff Jay Cole said the university has a special obligation to help industry and
government identify critical issues as shale-gas development grows and to identify
questions that remain to be answered. The workshop features representatives of industry
and government, including the National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Geological
Survey and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as researchers from 12
universities. Ray Boswell, technology manager for natural gas technology programs at
Morgantown's national lab, said drillers tapping the Marcellus are producing more gas
even as they sink fewer wells, and are outpacing production estimates made by the U.S.
Energy Information Administration. The region's reserves, he said, can easily sustain
strong production through 2040. Joseph Frantz, vice president of engineering for the
Texas-based oil and gas producer Range Resources, said technology is allowing drillers
to create more efficient operations on smaller physical footprints. Deep horizontal wells
today disturb only 1 percent of the surface on a 1,000-acre site, he said, compared with
19 percent disruption with conventional vertical wells set 1,000 feet apart.

Fracking doesnt cause earthquakes
McGrath, 13 - Environment correspondent, BBC News (Matt, 9 April 2013 Fracking
'not significant' cause of large earthquakes http://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-22077230)//gingE
New research suggests that fracking is not a significant cause of earthquakes that can be
felt on the surface.
UK scientists looked at quakes caused by human activity ranging from mining to oil
drilling; only three could be attributed to hydraulic fracturing. Most fracking events
released the same amount of energy as jumping off a ladder, the Durham-based team
said. They argue that the integrity of well bores drilled for fracking is of much greater
concern. The research is published in the Journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology .
Start Quote Hydraulic fracturing is not really in the premier league for causing felt
seismicity... Prof Richard Davies Durham University In recent years, hydraulic
fracturing has become a significant means of recovering oil and gas that is too tightly
bound into rock formations to be recovered by normal drilling. Fracking, as it is called,
utilises a mixture of water, sand and chemicals pumped underground at high pressure to
crack open sedimentary rocks and release the fuels within. Earth movers But opponents
of fracking have long been concerned that the process could induce earthquakes such as
the one that occurred near a shale gas operation in Lancashire in 2011. Now researchers
from Durham University's Energy Institute say that the pumping of fracking liquid does
indeed have the potential to reactivate dormant fault lines. But they say that compared to
many other human activities such as mining or filling reservoirs with water, fracking is
not a significant source of tremors that can be felt on the surface. Earthquakes There are
thousands of earthquakes each day, most too small to be detected without equipment
Earthquakes are usually caused by the motion of tectonic plates over the viscous mantle
beneath The Shaanxi earthquake of 1556 is the deadliest on record - killing nearly one
million What causes earthquakes? "We've looked at 198 published examples of induced
seismicity since 1929," Prof Richard Davies from Durham told BBC News. "Hydraulic
fracturing is not really in the premier league for causing felt seismicity. Fundamentally it
is is never going to be as important as mining or filling dams which involve far greater
volumes of fluid." The researchers detailed just three incidences of earthquakes created
by fracking - one each in the US, the UK and Canada. The biggest at Horn River Basin in
Canada in 2011 had a magnitude of 3.8. "Most fracking related events release a negligible
amount of energy roughly equivalent to, or even less than someone jumping off a ladder
onto the floor," said Prof Davies.



Everglades
The Everglades isnt a hotspot No Impact
Jensen 4/6/2012 - Writes for Wetland Ecologist, an information sharing news source
(Meika, The Issue of Biodiversity in the Florida Everglades, Wetecol,
http://wetecol.blogspot.com/2012/04/issue-of-biodiversity-in-florida.html)

Should you decide to take up the study of the Everglades, you may be surprised to
learn that the Everglades are not especially diverse in terms of the species it
holds. This differs from other ecological hotspots like the Amazon or coral reefs that
have thousands of unique species living in them. And while conservation efforts can
routinely emphasize the importance of biodiversity in threatened habitats, including the
Everglades, the relative lack of diversity might be key to the wetlands survival. A
familiar benefit linked to a diverse ecosystem is the potential for new knowledge, since
nature may already have developed a solution to medical problems that science has
failed to solve, or may not even have identified yet. Some of the most promising medical
discoveries have come from wildlife in the worlds most endangered habitats. Many of
these habitats contain species that cannot be found anywhere else, due to their
dependence on the delicate environments where they live. This image is linked to
regions such as the Amazon basin, which benefit from a warm, humid climate and, until
recently, virtually no human interference. The Everglades were never so lucky,
with a subtropical environment relatively few nutrients that mostly arrived
through rainfall. The wetlands are dominated by the iconic sawgrass and spikerush
that gave the "River of Grass" its name.
No impact Biodiversity isnt key to the Everglades
ENN 8/10/1999 Environmental News Network (Low biodiversity key to Everglades
survival, CNN,
http://edition.cnn.com/NATURE/9908/10/biodiversity.enn/index.html)

Biodiversity may be the buzzword of the day, but there's far more to conservation than
sheer numbers of species, say Florida researchers. A report published in the August
issue of Conservation Biology suggests that less truly is more in the wetland prairies of
the Florida Everglades. Here, the report argues, low biodiversity is intrinsic to the
ecosystem's uniqueness and so should be preserved. "The choice of
conservation areas solely on biodiversity may systematically bias the process against
such habitats," said author of the report Joel Trexler, a scientist at Florida International
University in Miami. Generally habitats with low nutrients have low biodiversity,
Trexler says. The Everglades have low biodiversity due to low levels of nutrients, which
enter the ecosystem primarily from rain. "The Everglades is an ecosystem with fairly
low biodiversity in some groups like freshwater fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. There
are several reasons for this: the region's recent geologic history, its isolation at the tip of
a long peninsula, its low diversity of aquatic habitats, and because of low nutrient levels.
" The fact that the Everglades have low nutrient levels makes them particularly
susceptible to nutrient pollution, says Trexler. The main source of nutrient pollution
there is high-phosphorus runoff from the Everglades Agricultural Area, the northern
third of the historic 3,000-square mile marsh that was drained for agriculture in the
early 1900s. Everglades The report identifies the naturally low levels of nutrients and
the patterns of aquatic plants and animals that thrive under such conditions, as a
characteristic quality of the Everglades. "We demonstrated that those patterns are lost
when nutrient pollution enters the Everglades. We suggest that these types of ecosystem
patterns may be overlooked by criteria commonly used to identify locations worthy of
conservation," Trexler said. A specific example of the importance of low nutrients in the
Everglades is found in the presence of the dense floating mats of algae called
periphyton. Trexler notes that the Everglades has among the highest biomass per unit
area of algae (important primary producers) of any ecosystem that has been studied.
However, these mats are composed of species that thrive in low-nutrient conditions. The
extensive algal mats are a characteristic of the Everglades that contribute to making it a
unique ecosystem. "In an unusual twist of textbook ecological patterns, the Everglades
has high biomass of primary producers (the periphyton), but unusually low biomass of
aquatic invertebrates and fishes that might consume those primary producers. When
nutrient pollution enters the ecosystem, the algal mats disappear, but the biomass of
aquatic animals actually increases," Trexler said. He points out that aspects of the
Everglades that the public would identify as important to conserve, such as rookeries of
the wading birds that feed on small fishes and invertebrates, ultimately depend on
ecological processes like the delicate balance between periphyton and small aquatic
animals that live there. "Decisions about ecosystem conservation must involve
consideration of a wider range of characteristics than previously incorporated to avoid
overlooking or changing the unique characteristics of such systems," Trexler said.
Status quo triggers the impact Invasive species
Collier 1/31/2012Professional journalist that specializes in science and the natural
world (Dave, "Invasive Burmese Pythons are devastating native mammal populations in
the Everglades, Earth Times, http://www.earthtimes.org/nature/burmese-pythons-
everglades-invasive-species/1796/)

Invasive species such as the grey squirrel in the UK or the rabbit in Australia have caused
untold damage to the native flora and fauna of their new homes. Guam in the South
Pacific had a problem so severe that the brown tree snake almost destroyed all local bird
populations on the island and Florida has had one particular invasive species that is
causing concern. The Burmese python is one of the largest snakes in the world and is
indigenous to Southeast Asia. With lengths often over 3.5 metres, it is a formidable
predator. While it prefers rodents, it is not averse to attacking animals as large as deer.
Despite its reputation (or perhaps because of it), it is quite a popular pet, and when
owners have started having problems looking after them they have often been released
into the wild. The Florida Everglades National Park offers an ecosystem similar in many
ways to the Asian tropical rainforests that would naturally be their homes. This
favourable environment has led to a thriving population that studies have shown
has placed a significant burden on the biodiversity of the area. A study led by
Michael Dorcas, of Davidson College, and published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, has highlighted the main issues caused. Comparing road-kill
surveys carried out before 2000 with those done between 2003 and 2011, alarming
decreases were seen for some mammals, with bobcat observations decreasing by 87.5%,
raccoon and opossum observations decreasing by over 98% and rabbits completely
absent from the recent surveys. The surveys also noted that the declines went hand-in-
hand with increases in Burmese pythons. Areas without significant populations of the
invasive species saw smaller changes in mammal numbers and areas free of pythons saw
mammal numbers unchanged from previous surveys. Anecdotal evidence points to
similar declines with tourists and local experts reporting severe drops in sightings of
small mammals that had previously been abundant in the national park and reports of
"nuisance raccoon incidents" vanishing after 2005. The researchers suggested some
theories as to why the impact has been so great and it seems that it may be a
combination of factors. These might include the foraging grounds of the small mammals
being the preferred hunting grounds of the pythons and also the fact that the Everglades
National Park had been free of snakes large enough to predate mammals of this size until
the recent establishment of breeding populations approximately 11 years ago. There are
additional worries that this work did not cover, including the possibility that bird
numbers have been similarly affected.

Fish Shortages

Fishing regulations are getting better and the Magnuson-Stevens Act
prevents overfishing.
Plumer 5/8, Senior editor at Vox, cites reports by NOAA and NRDC, (Brad, May 8,
2014, How the US stopped its fisheries from collapsing,
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5669120/how-the-us-stopped-its-fisheries-from-
collapsing)//HH

We hear a lot of grim stories about overfishing and the decline of fisheries around the
world. Bluefin tuna is vanishing. Chilean sea bass is dwindling. Pretty soon, it sometimes
seems like, all that'll be left is the jellyfish.
So it's worth highlighting a country that has actually done a lot to curtail overfishing and
rebuild its fisheries in the past decade the United States.
Back in the 1980s and '90s, many fisheries in the US were in serious trouble. Fish
populations were dropping sharply. Some of New England's best-known groundfish
stocks including flounder, cod, and haddock had collapsed, costing the region's
coastal communities hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the picture has improved considerably in the last decade, thanks in part to stricter
fishing regulations. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) released its annual fisheries update for 2013 and the news was encouraging.
Yes, progress has been uneven. About one-fifth of assessed stocks are still overfished.
But on the whole, US fisheries are steadily recovering.
US fisheries are recovering with a few glaring exceptions
Back in 1999, NOAA listed 98 stocks as "overfished." Today, that's down to 40. What's
more, 34 previously depleted fish stocks have now been "rebuilt" meaning that they've
rebounded to a level that supports the maximum sustainable yield.
Those numbers improved again between 2012 and 2013:
This rebound has been a boon to the fishing industry: US commercial fishermen caught
9.6 billion pounds of seafood in 2012, the second highest total in more than a decade
(2011 was the highest year).
The rebound in US fisheries was also noted last year in a separate study by the Natural
Resources Defense Council, which studied 44 key fish stocks that had been seriously
depleted and found that about 64 percent showed significant signs of recovery.
The study did point out some glaring exceptions. A few regions were struggling to rebuild
their fish stocks: New England, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South Atlantic. In New
England, certain types of cod, flounder, and white hake simply weren't recovering. (More
on this below.)
There are also a bunch of unknowns here: NOAA only assesses about 230 of the 478
types of fish that are under regulation. Steve Murawski, a former scientist at the National
Marine Fisheries Service, told me in an interview last year that assessments are
complicated and expensive so NOAA has to "triage" by focusing on the most
economically important species.
Still, most experts struck a note of guarded optimism on the state of US fisheries. "There
are still a lot of areas where we'd like to see progress, especially in New England," Ted
Morton, director of the US oceans program at the Pew Charitable Trusts told me. "But
overall we're on the right track."
How Congress cracked down on overfishing
So how did this all happen? Many scientists and conservation groups point to efforts by
Congress to tighten the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs fisheries management in
federal waters.
That law was originally written back in 1976 to help promote the US fishing industry. But
it worked so well that many fisheries were fished hard in the ensuing decades leading
to a decline in the overall number of fish being caught by the early 1990s:
The rise and fall of U.S. fishing in the 1980s and 1990s:
So, in 1996, lawmakers added strict conservation measures to the law, requiring that
overfished stocks be rebuilt within 10 years. Then, in 2006, Congress made this
requirement even more concrete individual regions had to impose hard catch limits on
areas that were being overfished, starting in 2010.

Their impact is all hype and fishing practices are improving.
Plumer 12, Senior editor at Vox, quotes a marine biologist at the University of
Washington, and cites a 2012 report by NOAA, (Brad, September 23, 2012, Can the U.S.
win the battle against overfishing?,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/23/can-the-u-s-win-
the-battle-against-overfishing/)//HH

We've written before about "the end of fish." This is the rather apocalyptic warning,
promoted by ecologists like Daniel Pauly, that humans are severely over-exploiting the
ocean for fish, and, if we're not careful, stocks of key species like tuna will soon collapse.
Then it's lumpy jellyfish sandwiches for everyone.
But it's worth reiterating that the end of fish can be avoided, as even Pauly has pointed
out. While plenty of countries are guilty of relentless over-fishingsouthern Europe and
China often get mentioned as key culpritsthere are several nations that have worked
hard to improve their fisheries management practices over the years. Iceland. New
Zealand. Australia. And the United States. "The U.S. is actually a big success story in
rebuilding fish stocks," says Ray Hilborn, a marine biologist at the University of
Washington.
One place to see that progress is in a new annual report from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which found that the U.S. seafood catch was at a
17-year high last year, thanks to policies to rebuild domestic fisheries. Commercial
fishermen caught 10.1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, up 22.6 percent from 2010.
That haul was worth $5.3 billion. NOAA cited the increase as evidence that U.S. fish
populations were slowly recovering.


Flooding
Disaster Defense
Federal disaster relief fails lack of strategic vision
Mener 07 University of Pennsylvania, Department of Political Science (Andrew,
Disaster Response in the United States of America: An Analysis of the Bureaucratic and
Political History of a Failing System, UPenn College of Arts and Sciences; CUREJ -
College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, 2007,
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=curej) //AD

While the disaster response system may be adequate in small-scale disasters when a
handful of agencies must coordinate, as I embarked on this research project I became
astonished by our nations striking lack of preparedness. Disasters often strike with
limited or no warning, and by definition they result in large-scale death, destruction, and
mass hysteria. They often have long-lasting and large-scale economic, political, and
psychological effects. While individual disasters may not be predictable, we can be
assured that another disaster will occur in the not too distant future. It may come in the
form of a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, or other natural disaster; or, it may be the
result of an intentional human act such as war, terrorism, bioterrorism, or some yet
unforeseen destructive act. The American public and political officials have a choice.
They can continue, however illogical, to live in denial that another destructive event is
forthcoming, or they can learn from the past and finally create a political and
bureaucratic system capable of curtailing destructive effects. Despite having responded
to thousands of natural disasters and numerous terrorist attacks, at present the United
States government at the federal, state, and local levels is exceedingly unprepared to
handle the immediate aftereffects of disasters. The federal government has created
numerous large bureaucracies and congressional panels as well as generated hundreds of
official reports each of which purports to detail appropriate disaster response guidelines.
Nonetheless, the improvements since the first disaster response plan was implemented
during World War I are not palpable. During the most recent major Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita despite having significant advanced notice of the impending natural
disaster as well as years of investigative reports warning about the fragility of the New
Orleans levy system, the disaster response system failed the citizens of Louisiana and the
Gulf Coast. That the system requires repair is not debatable. The questions which remain
are how the current system came to be, what our expectations of the system should be,
and how we ought to shock the political bureaucracy into action to repair the obviously
ailing system. Changes to this point have consistently stemmed from the conviction that
failure was a result of poor leadership, poor individual decisions, and inexperience.
These improvements stemmed from the obvious fact that the system would work better
if each participating organization were better equipped, better trained, and more highly
funded. However, while these shortcomings contribute to the inefficiencies, the
consistent failure of the system under different personal leaderships, points to a systemic
cause for the failure. Criticism must look at the overall system and the environment in
which it functions to develop a practical, appropriate, and affordable strategic plan. The
government must replace its tendency to fund random acts of preparedness1 with a
carefully outlined strategic plan that is sensitive to American political traditions, yet still
effective

Plan cant solve Katrina proves
Mener 07 University of Pennsylvania, Department of Political Science (Andrew,
Disaster Response in the United States of America: An Analysis of the Bureaucratic and
Political History of a Failing System, UPenn College of Arts and Sciences; CUREJ -
College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, 2007,
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=curej) //AD

Most Americans, when asked who is to blame for the failed emergency response to
Hurricane Katrina, will probably point to the federal government, in general, and to
FEMA, in specific. FEMA is to blame for many of the failures; however, the problems are
much more systemic and far more widespread than most people realize or care to admit.
Most agencies provided many extraordinary services during Hurricane Katrina but failed
to deliver others. During the first day of the storm, there was extreme confusion over the
situation in New Orleans. Even though the levees were considered vulnerable in a storm
of this magnitude, there was limited information about whether or not the levees had
actually failed. Local first responders were responsible for surveying the damage and
relaying that information to state and federal officials. However, due to equipment
damage, personnel shortages, and communication system malfunctions, state and
federal officials were unable to ascertain the severity of the situation. All parties knew the
situation was bad but there was very little information to suggest just how bad. The
White House and the Select Bipartisan Committee reports both comment that the
condition of the levees was uncertain during the first day. According to the White House
report, at 9:12 a.m. on August 29 there was a report of a break in the levee system.
However, the White House later received information indicating that the flooding was
caused by water flowing over the top of the levee system and that there was no break. At
6 p.m. the White House was informed that the levee system was not breached, and at 9
p.m. FEMA Director Michael Brown said on national television that the levee system had
not been breached. It was not until the next morning that it became clear to federal
officials that there were hundreds of breaches in the levee system and that most of New
Orleans was under water.75 Only when the severity of the damage was clear, did
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declare Hurricane Katrina to be an
Incident of National Significance. According to the National Response Plans Glossary of
Terms, an Incident of National Significance is: An actual or potential high-impact event
that requires a coordinated and effective response by an appropriate combination of
Federal, State, local, tribal, nongovernmental, and/or private-sector entities in order to
save lives and minimize damage, and provide the basis for long-term community
recovery and mitigation of activities.76 Since there was little doubt, even before the
severity of the damage was clear, that Hurricane Katrina would meet this definition, the
delay in making this declaration has been widely criticized. In reality, however, even if
Secretary Chertoff had made the declaration and a federal coordinating officer had been
appointed earlier, it is unlikely that the federal response would have been altered
substantially. Even with a federal coordinating officer in place, the federal official still
would not have known what assistance the state needed since local first responders were
unable to obtain and relay that information.77 Nevertheless, it is possible that the mere
declaration of an Incident of National Significance would have increased FEMAs ability
to coordinate with other agencies by raising the profile of the event. In addition to
declaring an Incident of National Significance, however, Secretary Chertoff could have
declared a Catastrophic Event. A Catastrophic Event is defined in the National Response
Plans Catastrophic Event Annex as: Any natural or manmade incident, including
terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption
severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national moral,
and/or government functions. A catastrophic event could result in sustained national
impacts over a prolonged period of time; almost immediately exceeds resources normally
available to State, local, tribal, and private-sector authorities in the impacted area; and
significantly interrupts governmental operations and emergency services to such an
extent that national security could be threatened78 Of particular importance in a
Catastrophic Event is the realization that state and local resources will be completely
overwhelmed almost instantly. Such a declaration would have permitted the federal
government to preposition supplies in the disaster region. In theory, this would have
been extraordinarily important since the federal government is technically not permitted
to preposition supplies before an official disaster declaration is requested by the state
governor and certified by the president. In reality, however, FEMA ignored this
regulation and prepositioned supplies without the required authorizations. Thus,
although this extraordinary declaration would have raised the profile of the event and
may have led to additional prepositioning of supplies and personnel, it is not clear if it
would have significantly altered the federal response.79Following the storm, when
officials were finally able to survey the damage, it was concluded that approximately
300,000 homes were destroyed or uninhabitable.80 FEMA, in an attempt to assist these
families and others, distributed direct financial assistance to between 1.4 and 1.7 million
households.81 This was an extraordinary effort. However, the system for distributing
this money was seriously flawed. In an attempt to make the money available as quickly
as possible, FEMA distributed 2.5 million debit cards worth $2,000 each to evacuees.
However, 900,000 of these cards went to people with fake addresses and $24 million
worth of cards were given out without any reasonable accountability.82 In its review of
the federal governments response to Hurricane Katrina, the General Accounting Office
noted the need to more carefully balance quick action with appropriate protections
against fraud. The GAO cited examples of unduly slow action due to administrative
procedures and unjustifiably fast action that resulted in excessive fraud.83


Hurricanes
In offshore wind v2 7wk BEJFR
Hard data over 100 years proves major hurricanes are only decreasing
Taylor, 9/5/2012 - staff writer at Forbes who specialized in energy and environment
issues.
(James, Don't Believe The Global Warmists, Major Hurricanes Are Less Frequent,
Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/05/dont-believe-the-global-
warmists-major-hurricanes-are-less-frequent/)
When Hurricane Isaac made landfall in southern Louisiana last week, the storm
provided a rare break in one of the longest periods of hurricane inactivity in U.S. history.
Seeking to deflect attention away from this comforting trend, global warming alarmists
attempted a high-profile head fake, making public statements that the decline in recent
hurricane activity masked an increase in strong, damaging hurricanes.
The hurricanes that really matter, that cause damage, are increasing, John Abraham, a
mechanical engineer on the staff of little-known University of St. Thomas in St. Paul,
Minnesota, told Discovery News.
Normally, of course, the subjective global climate opinions of a mechanical engineer at
an obscure Minnesota university wouldnt be national news. However, global warming
alarmists put Abraham forward as the point man for their self-proclaimed Climate
Science Rapid Response Team. But hey, if Abraham is the best they can do, so be it.
Abraham says major hurricanes are the only ones that really matter, and that major
hurricanes are increasing. If that is indeed so, then we might have a cause for concern.
Lets go straight to the data to find out if major hurricanes are indeed increasing.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) provides information on major U.S. hurricanes
during the past 100-plus years. According to the NHC, 70 major hurricanes struck the
United States in the 100 years between 1911 and 2010. That is an average of 7 major
hurricane strikes per decade. What are the trends within this 100-year span? Lets take a
look.
Lets split the 100-year hurricane record in half, starting with major hurricane strikes
during the most recent 50 years.
During the most recent decade, 2001-2010, 7 major hurricanes struck the United States.
That is exactly the 100-year average.
During the preceding decade, 1991-2000, 6 major hurricanes struck the United States.
That is below the 100-year average.
During the decade 1981-1990, 4 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is
substantially below the 100-year average, and ties the least number of major hurricanes
on record.
During the decade 1971-1980, 4 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is
substantially below the 100-year average, and ties 1981-1990 as the two decades with the
least number of major hurricanes.
During the decade 1961-1970, 7 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is
exactly the 100-year average.
Incredibly, not a single decade during the past 50 years saw an above-average number of
major hurricanes not a single decade!
Now lets look at the preceding 50 years in the hurricane record, before the alleged
human-induced global warming crisis.
During the decade 1951-1960, 9 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is above
the 100-year average.
During the decade 1941-1950, 11 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is
substantially above the 100-year average.
During the decade 1931-1940, 8 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is above
the 100-year average.
During the decade 1921-1930, 6 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is
slightly below the 100-year average.
During the decade 1911-1920, 8 major hurricanes struck the United States. That is above
the 100-year average.
Global warming alarmists and mechanical engineers at obscure Minnesota universities
may lie, but the objective data do not lie. During the past 5 decades, an average of 5.6
major hurricanes struck the United States. During the preceding 5 decades, and average
of 8.4 major hurricanes struck the United States.
The hurricanes that really matter, that cause damage are not increasing. Hard,
objective data show exactly the opposite. Indeed, during the past 4 decades, the time
period during which global warming alarmists claim human-induced global warming
accelerated rapidly and became incontrovertible, the fewest number of major hurricanes
struck during any 40-year period since at least the 1800s.
Oh, and during the first two years of this current decade exactly zero major hurricanes
struck the United States.
Global warming alarmists better hope we start seeing a rash of major hurricanes pretty
soon if this is not going to be the quietest decade on record. Until and unless that
happens, the objective data show the Climate Science Rapid Response Team is actually
the Climate Science Rapid Propaganda Team.
But hey, if thats the best they can do, so be it.
No impact no trends due to lack of conclusive data
Webster et al. 2005. - Dr. Peter Webster of Georgia Tech, holds a Ph.D. from MIT and
has received the most prestigious award issued by the American Meteorology Society--
the Carl Gustav Rossby Research award. Dr. Greg Holland of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, is a hurricane expert. He earned his Ph.D. in 1983 at Colorado
State as a student of Dr. Bill Gray, and has authored over 100 hurricane-related journals
articles or book chapters. One of the other co-authors, Dr. Judith Curry, is the Chair of
the Georgia Tech School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. (Peter J., Judith A., H.R
Chang, Greg J. Holland. Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity
in a Warming Environment. Science, Vol. 309, No. 5742. Pages 1844-1846.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1844.full)
In summary, careful analysis of global hurricane data shows that, against a background
of increasing SST, no global trend has yet emerged in the number of tropical storms and
hurricanes. Only one region, the North Atlantic, shows a statistically significant increase,
which commenced in 1995. However, a simple attribution of the increase in numbers of
storms to a warming SST environment is not supported, because of the lack of a
comparable correlation in other ocean basins where SST is also increasing. The
observation that increases in North Atlantic hurricane characteristics have occurred
simultaneously with a statistically significant positive trend in SST has led to the
speculation that the changes in both fields are the result of global warming (3).
Protection against hurricanes already being done and solves the impact
Fischetti 1/26/12 - senior editor at Scientific American who covers energy,
environment and sustainability issues. (Mark, New Orleans Protection Plan Will
Rely on Wetlands to Hold Back Hurricanes, Scientific American, Google Scholar,
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/01/26/new-orleans-protection-
plan-will-rely-on-wetlands-to-hold-back-hurricanes/)
More than six years after Hurricane Katrina plowed into New Orleans and the
Mississippi River delta, a plan has finally emerged to protect the area from future
storms. It relies heavily on the restoration of wetlands to cut down high surges of ocean
water like those that flooded the city in 2005somewhat of a surprise, considering past
efforts focused on levees and seawalls.
Last week, after prolonged deliberations over competing plans between state and federal
agencies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and cities and parishes (counties), the
states Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority released the Louisiana
Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. If all its provisions are carried out,
the work would require $50 billion over 50 years.
The plan includes maps of what the states refurbished delta would look like from the air
by 2061. It also shows maps of the wetlands that would disappear by 2061 (see image
below), as well as the extent of flooding that storms such as Katrina would bring, if the
projects arent built. Southern Louisiana has lost 1,883 square miles of wetlands during
the past 80 years, an area three-quarters the size of Delaware, largely because of erosion
that has been catalyzed by hundreds of miles of manmade navigation channels and oil
and gas pipeline canals. Most of that land will not be regained. But if the plans projects
succeed, by 2042 the state would begin to gain more land annually than it loses, and by
2061 it would gain an average of about 2.5 square miles a year.
Several major strategies make up the bulk of the plan (see example below). Along the
outer edge of the torn-up coast, furthest from New Orleans, former barrier islands that
have been worn to thin wisps of land would be broadened with sandy sediment, mostly
dredged from the ocean bottom and conveyed through pipelines. Natural ridges of land
along the coast would be strengthened in similar fashion. Together, the islands and
ridges would form a dotted line around southeastern Louisiana that can cut down storm
surges. They would not all connect, so wind-driven water could still find its way through,
but the many segments would break up the incoming wavefront into chaotic eddies
flowing in conflicting directions that would at least partially cancel out one another.
Closer inland, large areas of wetlands that are severely tattered or nearly gone would be
reconstituted. Large openings, called diversions, would be cut in the levees that line the
winding Mississippi River, as well as the Atchafalaya River to its west. Gates would be
inserted, which would allow freshwater and sedimentthe lifeblood of marshy terrain
to wash down into the wetlands when the river is running high. Decades ago the delta
had thick, robust marshes and swamps that began behind the barrier islands and ran
back for miles and miles to where towns and cities had sprouted. The vast marshes could
absorb large storm surges, turning them into the equivalent of mild high tides by the
time they reach metropolitan areas. Healthy wetlands also gradually dilute the salt from
seawater, so it doesnt kill plants that grow in fresher water closer to firm land, a
mechanism that has further eroded todays struggling regions.
Portion of New Orleans protection plan: better levees (purple), breakwaters (orange
lines, top), refurbished wetlands (brown dotted areas), gates in Mississippi River levees
to divert sediment and freshwater to sustain those wetlands (circles), and rebuilt barrier
islands (orange dots, bottom).
Close to New Orleans, of course, levees would continue to be raised and connected, and
breakwaters would also be erected along certain shorelines that are close to populated
areas. Numerous homes and businesses would be raised or floodproofed. And some
houses in areas that were destroyed by Katrina and are at the greatest risk for future
flooding would simply be bought and removed, and the land left vacant.
These strategies strongly echo three different protection plans that experts had
recommendations back in early 2006, which Scientific American detailed in an article
before the infighting between stakeholders widened. As it was then, restoring wetlands
remains a controversial strategy, yet the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is
clearly relying on it; the biggest chunk of money designated in the plan is $17.9 billion to
improve thousands of acres in numerous locations.
Sediment and freshwater are needed to build and maintain wetlands; spring flooding by
the Mississippi River is largely what built the vast stretches to begin with, until levees
raised along the river prevented the annual overflows. Much of the initial rebuilding will
be done by dredging sediment from nearby channels and pumping it into needed spots,
but the diversions are important for supplying new sediment, freshwater and nutrients
to the areas year after year.
Some interest groups, notably fishers, have already expressed opposition to the
diversions, most recently on Monday during the first of three consecutive days of public
meetings about the plan (the full comment period ends February 25). They claim that the
inflows of freshwater will chase shrimp, crabs and certain fish that prefer brackish water
further out to sea, harm spawning grounds or oyster beds, or impede the fishers ability
to harvest the seafood. They also claim that two small, experimental diversions that have
been running for at least a decade have failed to actually rebuild land. Studies by
scientists have shown improvements in those places, however, although land has not
always be regained at the rates initially predicted. Even if the planned diversions do
work, it will be many years before large, healthy marshes returnyears during which,
proponents hope, no Katrinas come blowing in.
In the meantime, lessons learned while rebuilding the Mississippi delta could prove
valuable across the U.S. The country has more than 30,000 miles of levees, and as much
as 70 percent of them can no longer be trusted because of long-term erosion or poor
construction, according to a 2010 report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Protective retrofitting to homes solves the impact
HSS 13 - science society in Rhode Island - based solely on published
scientific research and is a result of the Hurricanes: Science and Society
project. All content has undergone thorough peer review by a panel of
scientific experts. (Current and Emerging Technologies of Hurricane Protection,
University of Rhode Island, Google Scholar,
http://www.hurricanescience.org/society/risk/currentandemergingtech/)
The science of hurricane protection has evolved significantly over the past decade, fueled
by an intensely destructive period of hurricane activity. The decade of 1996 to 2005 was
the one of the most destructive decades in the last century with total hurricane damage
of $198 billion.
Another factor driving the advancement of hurricane protection technologies was the
2000 International Residential and Commercial Building Codes, which for the first time
required the use of impact-resistant windows, doors and other components for homes
built in hurricane-prone areas. Subsequent editions of the International Building Codes
are adopted every 3 years.
A key focus of the modern building code is the exterior of the building, also known as the
building envelope. New homes built in Florida within an area where 120 mph winds or
greater are expected must have exterior impact protection. Examples of impact
protection include impact-resistant windows, hurricane shutters and reinforced doors.
Other code changes for 120 mph wind zones include mandatory roof straps that connect
the roof of a home through cables all the way to a basement or concrete slab. The
building code community is now looking more closely at energy codes and how they
interact with building codes to ensure that homes built in the future can provide energy
efficiency and impact protection at the same time.
Throughout the United States, the prevailing building codes come from the International
Code Council (ICC). The ICC was established in 1994 as a non-profit organization
designed to consolidate regional codes in the U.S. into a single international code to help
ensure uniform building safety around the world. Fifty states and the District of
Columbia have adopted the I-Codes at the state or jurisdictional level. Federal agencies
including the Architect of the Capitol, General Services Administration, National Park
Service, Department of State, U.S. Forest Service, and the Veterans Administration also
enforce the I-Codes. The Department of Defense references the I-Codes for constructing
military facilities, including those that house U.S. troops, domestically and abroad.
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands enforce one or more of the I-Codes. Florida is
considered a leader in building code requirements, and therefore, it is prominently
referenced in this section.
While the development of the modern building code has progressed, millions of homes
and commercial buildings in the U.S. were built before the adoption of modern building
codes, placing them at great risk for hurricane damage. Technologies exist today to allow
older buildings to be retrofitted to become more hurricane resistant. These technologies
include reinforcing gabled roofs, creating secondary water barriers in roofs, and
installing hurricane straps and clips to ensure a roof stays in place despite high winds.
Major government programs have been launched in recent years to promote widespread
retrofits to protect existing homes against hurricanes. Through the My Safe Florida
Home program, tens of thousands of Floridians received free home wind inspections to
determine what steps could be taken to strengthen homes against hurricanes and earn
insurance premium discounts. A similar program was launched in South Carolina and
other hurricane prone states are now considering similar initiatives. Key retrofits
supported by the My Safe Florida Home program include:
Improving the strength of a roof deck attachment.
Creating a secondary water barrier to prevent water intrusion.
Improving the survivability of a roof covering.
Bracing gable-end walls.
Reinforcing roof-to-wall connections.
Enhancing window and door protection
In addition to the My Safe Florida Home program, the State of Florida has published a
Hurricane Retrofit Guide. Homeowners and contractors interested in learning about
building or retrofitting a hurricane-resistant home that exceeds current minimum
building code requirements can consult the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH)s
Blueprint for Safety Program or the Institute for Business and Home Safetys (IBHS)
Fortified for Safer Living Program.
Applied scientific research is taking place on multiple fronts to give engineers, inventors
and entrepreneurs new data with which to develop the next generation of hurricane
protection products.
Examples of this research include:
The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) has built a state-of-the-art, multi-peril
applied research and training facility on a 90-acre parcel of land in Chester County,
South Carolina. The mission of the facility will be to identify and promote effective
methods of property loss reduction and prevention. The facility will be able to subject
two story structures to controlled testing that will simulate hurricane conditions. Real-
world application of IBHS scientific research findings will lead to more durable,
sustainable communities. Research findings also will provide an objective, sound
foundation for development of solid public policy (such as enhanced building codes).
In addition to the soon-to-be-opened IBHS facility, other state-of-the-art hurricane
research is already taking place on many fronts. At Florida International University, the
Renaissance Re Wall of Wind is a cutting-edge weather risk research facility designed to
replicate hurricane conditions in a controlled laboratory environment. This has provided
scientists and engineers the ability to study the effects of Category 4 winds and rain on
full-scale residential structures and building components. The Wall of Wind consists of 6
modular steel rectangular units housing Chevrolet ZZ502 Big Block crate engines. Each
engine drives 2 counter-rotating 80 inch propellers, creating a cross-sectional windfield
24 feet wide and 16 feet high.
At the University of Florida (UF), a 2800 hp, 8-fan Hurricane Simulator capable of
replicating turbulent wind and rain on a full-size low-rise structure has been
constructed. This allows researchers to produce a controlled, full-scale hurricane in a
laboratory setting and investigate the performance-based wind engineering of residential
structures. This then provides a direct measurement of the cost-effectiveness of pre- and
post-construction mitigation measures. Researchers conduct destructive testing of actual
residential structures, both as-built and with wind resistant retrofits installed. Testing
on-site, as-built complete structural systems allows the inclusion of factors not readily
duplicated in a laboratory, such as aging and variations in materials, practice, and
quality of construction. The measured failure loads are related to the wind speeds and
turbulence characteristics required to generate these loads. The outcomes of the testing
provide a vulnerability rating for homes of varying age and construction as a function of
wind speed and surrounding terrain. The reduced vulnerability provided by various
retrofit strategies is rated in terms of wind speed as well. Destructive tests are designed
to evaluate the capacities of structural materials, sub-systems, and connections.
Individual fasteners (e.g., sheathing nails) are tested, as well as sub-systems such as the
uplift capacity of sheathing panels. Toe-nailed and strapped roof-to-wall connections,
wall-to-foundation anchorage, missile impact, and a variety of other component
capacities have been tested.
UF researchers are also looking at green roofs (vegetative roofs) to assess the
availability and variety of these roofing systems, and to also identify methods for wind
uplift test protocols for vegetative roof systems. Architects, building owners, and
governing code officials are concerned about how the roof systems will withstand both
normal and storm-force winds. The lack of rigorous test methods and resultant data
increases uncertainty surrounding the performance of green roof systems in high wind
environments. Additionally, UF has conducted shutter impact experiments where
researchers subjected steel and aluminum storm panel shutters to impact from concrete
roof tiles commonly used in hurricane prone regions. The tests were then repeated using
lumber, providing a comparison of performance as a function of debris type.
Research findings will surely accelerate a number of promising developments on the
hurricane protection technology front. Among them:
Retrofit Product Expansions
Product improvements specific to retrofit are advancing to make retrofitting to code
easier for the homeowner. Innovations such as the current development of a new bracket
for roof systems will allow roofers to install hurricane-resistant roof clips on trusses
without the hassle or expense of having to bring in a separate building contractor to
oversee installation, which currently requires removal of the existing plywood. Instead
this product will allow the roofer to install the brackets directly through the existing
plywood saving time and money. Homeowners can also buy more do-it-yourself kits for
various opening protection products, which are lighter and easier to store than ever
before. (for more information, please see My Safe Florida Home)
Water intrusion has continued to be a problem for even many code approved opening
protection technologies. New products are being developed that address the serious
water intrusion issue as code bodies consider more stringent requirements for
minimizing water intrusion during a hurricane. For example, a new window with an
integrated inside shade system that significantly reduces the risk of water intrusion
and provides the convenience to the homeowner of securing hurricane protection from
inside the home, has been recently approved by the Florida Building Code. This system
relies on a rigid frame, standard glass, and an integrated high-impact synthetic shade
that, when deployed from the inside of the building, locks into place. If the windows
glass is broken during a storm, the patented system will continue to prevent wind, water
and airborne debris from entering the building, even with repeated impact.
Tilt and Turn windows from Europe, which also provide for significant reduction of
water intrusion, are being introduced into the U.S. Casement windows and picture
windows also offer higher levels of water resistance. While there are some windows in
residential structures that do not open, especially in high rise condo towers, many
windows in homes open and close which leads to greater water intrusion problems.
Among the products that offer superior water resistance are PVC-based pull-down
shutter systems. These systems, which are installed permanently and require pre-storm
deployment, cover the entire window opening, allowing significantly less water to
penetrate around window seals or other small openings. A variation of this shutter
system that offers better water resistance than standard metal or plywood shutters is the
flexible PVC-based panel shutter. These lightweight shutters are not permanent,
however, and require installation prior to a storm.
Green Building Technologies Merging with Impact Protection
Green Building is a rapidly expanding movement that is gaining tremendous momentum
with consumers. Energy codes will continue to become more stringent and many
consumers are anxious to make their homes greener. The government also has begun
rebate programs to help entice homeowners to upgrade to these more energy efficient
products. This presents a logical partnership for green and disaster resistant
technologies as retrofitting should address both green and mitigation. The intersection of
these two construction technologies will cause challenges, and yet also fuel great
opportunity. One challenge is that many green products, such energy-generating
reflective roof panels, are not hurricane resistant and are more expensive to replace
when damaged by high winds. However, many mitigation product manufacturers are
already addressing enhanced energy requirements which will create a whole new product
offering of green and fortified products in the future. (for more information, please see
the US Green Building Council)
For example, impact-resistant windows and doors are already offering double-paned
insulating glass and new advancements in technology will continue. Spray foam
adhesives which have been used for exceptional roof insulation since the 1990s are
realizing the enhanced hurricane protection this product provides by helping to secure a
roof to the internal building structure and creating a second water barrier, should be roof
be blown off.

Invasive Species

The destruction of invasive species is arbitrary and unnecessary
Winograd, 11 Nathan J. Winograd is an American author, animal advocate, and
director of the No Kill Advocacy Center in Oakland, California. (Nathan J. January 11
th
,
2011, There Are No Alien Species on Planet Earth,
http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=4809)//IK
They were beautiful. A row of Monterey Cypress trees that lined a path to the ocean.
They provided respite from the winds, a home for birds, shade, and oxygen in exchange
for our CO2. They were part of the walking trails at Fort Funston in San Francisco and
every time we reached them, the dogs would get excited. They would start vocalizing and
surging ahead. They knew. Because the trees, or at least I liked to believe the trees,
foretold of what was to come: The ocean was within reach. There was sand to kick up,
balls to chase, water to frolic in. I dont know if the trees meant anything to the dogs, but
I loved those trees. And they exist no more. Each and every one was cut down, leaving a
row of stumps, an ugly scar on the beautiful seascape of one of San Franciscos open
space treasures. They were not cut down by loggers trying to profit from their timber.
They were not cut down to make chairs or tables or copy paper or toilet tissue. They were
cut down by so-called environmentalists. They were killed by those whose mission was
supposed to be their protection. According to the local chapter of the Audubon Society,
the trees were not native and had to be destroyed. Invasion Biologists believe that
certain plants or animals should be valued more than others if they were at a particular
location first. When the species that were there first are competing for habitat with a
species that came later, they assert that the latter should be eradicated. In championing
such views, the movement paradoxically has embraced the use of traps, poisons, fire, and
hunting, even when these cause harm, suffering, and environmental degradation. And
the destruction of a beautiful tree lined path to the sea. In Fort Funston, it was not long
before the dogs were unwelcome. Before the birds declined in number. Before the plants
were ripped out and the rabbits disappeared. What was left was row after row of
caution tape, telling people to keep out. In San Francisco, on the Channel Islands, all
across the United States, plants and animals are being trapped, poisoned, hunted,
burned, and destroyed by people who claim the mantel of environmentalism; by groups
like the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club. And it is getting
worse and increasingly violent, both in rhetoric (fish they dont value are called missiles
with fins) and in deeds. When Illinois spent $3,000,000 dumping tons of chemicals
into Lake Michigan to kill one fish, and ended up killing hundreds of thousands of
others, the Natural Resources Defense Council cheered. Even the science writer for the
New York Times has weighed in, suggesting mass killing and the eating of animals that
do not pass the arbitrary litmus test of worthiness by environmentalists. In a losing
battle to return North America to a mythical state that existed before European
colonization, they are proposing a slaughter with no end. Is this really what
environmentalism should be? And is this the best we can aspire to when we examine
what our role should be in relation to the other species of plants and animals who inhabit
our planet? To assert that the world must remain as it is today and to act on that
assertion by condemning to death those species who threaten that prevailing order, does
not reject human interference in the natural world, it reaffirms it. Simply because we are
suddenly aware, as never before in our history, that change is occurring and that our
presence on Earth has influenced that change, does not mean that suddenly, through
that awareness, we can somehow stop it. Nor should we want to. An authentic
environmentalism would not advocate that humans seek out and destroy living things for
simply obeying the dictates of the natural world, such as migration and natural selection.
It would not condone the killing of those plants and animals who find themselves in
parts of the world where, for whatever arbitrary reasonbe they economic, commercial,
or aestheticsome humans do not want them to be. An authentic environmentalism
would recognize that such determinations are not for us to make, because in seeking to
undo what nature inevitably does, we merely exacerbate suffering, killing and the
destruction of natural places we claim to oppose, with no hope of ever gaining the ends
we seek. It is to declare an unending war on nature and our home. When we rip out
plants, when we spray toxic herbicides and pesticides, when we poison, electrocute and
booby-trap natural habitats to kill those species merely acting in accordance with nature,
we not only destroy habitats and beautiful natural places, we put all living creatures,
including ourselves, in danger as well. And just as disturbing, we open the floodgates of
expression to our darker natures, by teaching others disdain and suspicion of the
foreign and reverence for the familiar and the native. The same forces of nature
which created the world we live in today are shaping it even now. They always have, and
they always will. Our actions, and our presence, being as much a part of that system as
any other living thing that ever was, will shape and mold how that future will look. That,
too, is inevitable. Yet there is no compelling reason to assert that any one outcome would
be more preferable than any other. Why is the starling less worthy of life and compassion
than the spotted owl? Why does the carp swimming gracefully in a Japanese Zen garden
inspire peace and serenity, but when swimming with the same grace and beauty in Lake
Michigan, such horror, disdain, and scorn? Because some humans among us say it is so?
Because they impact narrow aesthetic or commercial interests? As perhaps the most
intelligent and without a doubt the most resourceful species yet to evolve on our planet,
humans have a moral obligation to ensure that we use our unique abilities for good, and
not harm. We are obligated to consider how our actions impact the other earthlings who
share our home. And to determine, with all of our gifts of intellect and compassion, how
we can meet our needs in the most generous and considerate means possible. Sadly, as a
species, we have yet to comprehensively and collectively determine how we might do
this. But that, in truth, is our most solemn duty, and the end every environmentalist
should be seeking. On a tiny planet surrounded by the infinite emptiness of space, in a
universe in which life is so exceedingly rare as to render every blade of grass, every insect
that crawls, and every animal that walks the Earth an exquisite, wondrous rarity, it is
breathtakingly myopic, arrogant, and quite simply inaccurate to label any living thing
found anywhere on the planet which gave it life as alien or non-native. There is
simply no such thing as an invasive species. We must turn our attention away from the
futile effort to hold or return our environment to some mythic state of perfection that
never existed toward the meaningful goal of ensuring that every life that appears on this
Earth is welcomed and respected as the glorious, cosmic miracle it actually is.
Alt causes to invasive speciesregulations have empirically failed to solve
Smart, 13 Reporter at Times Colonist (Victoria) (Amy, Times Colonist (Newspaper),
Victoria, British Columbia, September 1
st
, 2013, Invasive species; How they got here,
and what we can do, LexisNexis)//IK
When one of the world's worst invasive species, the Argentine ant, showed up along Oak
Bay Avenue this summer, it joined a legion of other aliens making themselves
comfortable on Vancouver Island. The tiny insects drew attention for their international
fame - they now exist on every continent except Antarctica - but there are many more
species that don't get as much notice. The Capital Region Invasive Species Partnership, a
local branch of the Coastal Invasive Species Committee, has identified 78 invasive plant
species alone as priorities. Sixty-six of those have already established themselves in the
region, and another 12 species are likely to establish if introduced. In a capital city with
an international airport, seaports and plenty of visitors and new migrants each year,
controlling the spread of alien species has to happen locally, according to the experts.
"Victoria is a gateway to the rest of Vancouver Island - there are lots of entry points," said
Rachelle McElroy, executive director of the Coastal ISC, a nonprofit body that works with
municipalities across Vancouver Island and the coastal mainland to reduce the impact of
invasive species. Being a "garden city" doesn't help: rogue seeds, insects and other
organisms make their way in soil packs and other plant material - including both the
Argentine ant and the more common European fire ant, notorious for its bite. "We also
have a long growing season and such a good climate; plants just want to grow," McElroy
said. And the diversity of ecosystems in the area, ranging from freshwater and coastlines
to urban areas and rainforests, means many organisms can find a suitable place to stay,
according to Gail Wallin, executive director of the Invasive Species Council of B.C. But
favourable conditions aren't totally at fault. While some invasive species sneak in
undetected on boat hulls and tires, more than 60 per cent have been introduced
intentionally, she said. Some plant milk thistle for its healing properties, but fail to
prevent the flowers from seeding and spreading, McElroy said. The American bullfrog
was introduced by someone harvesting frogs' legs, Wallin said. Scotch broom spread as
far as the northwestern B.C. city of Terrace, after a Scot famously planted it on his Sooke
farm in 1850. "People want to have a similar garden as they had back home, so they'll
bring the seeds over and plant them in the garden," McElroy said. "That sense of home is
associated with a lot of these foreign, alien plants.'" Not all invasive species are created
equal. The Coastal ISC ranks new species according to their negative impacts. "You want
to be looking at negative impacts in terms of environmental, social and economic
impact," McElroy said. Giant hogweed, for example, poses a threat to human health.
Contact with the plant's sap can lead to third-degree burns. "That creates quite a health
hazard if it's in a public park. You don't want kids playing around that," she said. Same
goes for the spurge laurel, which she said killed a young girl in Nova Scotia with its toxic
berries. And don't let the dainty yellow flowers of tansy ragwort fool you: It can inspire a
fatal chemical reaction in horses, cattle and goats if it is accidentally mixed in hay. Other
species pose economic threats by damaging crops and property values. Victoria Pest
Control supervisor Kurtis Brown said most of the calls his company receives regarding
invasive insects concern structural damage. Rats are other common culprits - he referred
to them as "probably the world's worst invasive" for their widespread and historical role
in damaging food sources. McElroy gave the example of fire ants as insects that cause
both economic and social damage. "They bite and sting, they can swarm your legs and
they respond to any vibrations. So it basically makes your yard unusable." But most of
the damage done by alien species is directed at the natives they compete with. Invasives
such as the Argentine ant are known for outcompeting native species, ultimately
replacing them. Didymo, or "rock snot," is a species of gelatinous, yellowish-brown algae
that first appeared in 1989 on central Vancouver Island. "That's one we see in our
streams that can reduce food sources for other fish," McElroy said. Public interest is a
powerful thing, and the good news is that it's increasing around invasive species,
according to Wallin. Media coverage can help, such as the buzz that surrounded the
northern snakehead fish, the quirky amphibious interloper found in Burnaby's Central
Park lagoon in 2012. The "Frankenfish" hype resulted in important amendments to the
Controlled Alien Invasive Species Regulation, she said, which makes it illegal to bring
certain species into the province. New aquatic invasive species, including the snakehead
fish and zebra mussels, are now classified as too dangerous. And a new B.C. Prohibited
Weed list was published the same year. "There are more legal tools and there's more
public awareness," Wallin said. The tricky part, however, is follow-through, according to
McElroy. The Weed Control Act, for example, requires land-occupiers to manage noxious
weeds on their property. (Noxious weeds, as defined by the act, are typically non-native
plants that have been introduced to the province without the insect predators and plant
pathogens that help keep them in check in their native habitats.) "By law, if you have an
invasive plant that's registered, you have to manage it," she said. "Unfortunately, there
isn't much enforcement and that's where municipalities come in." Despite the efforts of
co-ordinating bodies such as CRISP and the Coastal ISC, municipal responses to invasive
species vary widely, she said. Also, potentially invasive plant species are still legally sold
through nurseries, so the best the co-ordinating bodies can do is encourage gardeners to
prevent them from reproducing. From Wallin's perspective, however, the biggest
difficulty is changing behaviour. "The big challenge, which I think is really critical, is
having people be more informed about the actions they're taking so they can take more
responsible actions." The Invasive Species Council of B.C.'s strategy focuses on creating
responsible habits, rather than tackling specific species. The "clean, drain, dry" method,
for example, teaches boaters how to take care of boating equipment in a way that reduces
the chance of introducing species like quagga mussels and zebra mussels, which have
been destructive in the Great Lakes. "When you tell a class to sneeze in their sleeves,
you're not saying, 'Now H1N1 is here,' you're just saying the right behaviour is to sneeze
in your sleeve," Wallin said. Others are working to highlight the benefits of native-plant
species. The Capital Regional District, for example, offers native-plant gardening
workshops, where they introduce participants to both native-and invasive-plant species,
teach them how to eradicate the invasives, and discuss the best native species to plant in
your garden. "You might live in a rocky outcrop that's dry, but someone else might live
on the seashore, so there's quite a range in terms of what's appropriate," said Deborah
Walker, demand management coordinator for the parks and environmental-services
department. But the overall move, as dictated by the provincial government, is toward
targeting the species we still have a chance of fighting. The "Early Detection Rapid
Response" strategy focuses on those plant species that have popped their heads, have a
high chance of spreading, but haven't yet. The idea is to target species such as knotweed
over the already prolific scotch broom. "I think those of us who have been dealing with
invasive species over the years, we've gotten smarter and more strategic," said Marilyn
Fuchs, regional parks environmental-conservation specialist. Wallin mirrored her
thoughts. "We won't ever be able to get rid of all the invasive species," she said. "You
cannot chase species-by-species. You have to change the pathways."
Invasive species are inevitablerecombinant ecology means that they will
adapt to and benefit environments
Ruhren, 12 Scott Ruhren (sruhren@asri.org) is senior director of conservation at The
Audubon Society of Rhode Island. He also teaches ecology as an adjunct professor at the
University of Rhode Island. (Scott, Copyright 2012, Invasive Species Reconsidered,
from Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes, and
Approaches to Management. Ian D. Rotherham, Robert A. Lambert, eds. Earthscan,
2011. 352 pp., illus. $99.95 (ISBN 9781849710718 cloth),
http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/3/305.full)//IK
I often feel that conservationists are either whole-hearted optimists or doom-and-gloom
pessimists about the state of the world. As a steward of our natural heritage, I try to
protect the native biota, and although I generally strive to be hopeful, I do encounter
species, ecosystems, and topics that threaten my optimism about rare-species protection
and habitat management. Ever present and extremely varied, invasive species are the
second major threat to worldwide biological diversity after habitat alteration and
destruction, and there is no shortage of controversy over their impact and our
responsibility (or lack of it) regarding this phenomenon. I stand somewhere between the
two entrenched camps representing opposing viewsthe first, that invasive species are
inevitable and to be tolerated; the other, that every effort should be taken to eradicate
them. I recognize that certain established invasive species will likely not be eradicated
andyesthat they should even be tolerated. I must balance the cure with the
symptoms. The ecology of invasionthe pros and cons of invasive-species management,
as well as the evaluation of treatmentsis a healthy, if not rigorous, debate, and the
books Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes, and
Approaches to Management and Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions enter this debate
in different ways. Even the basic terminology is part of the discussion. Weed and invasive
do not always convey the same origin or impact, and scientists have tried to comply with
the politically correct terms of nonindigenous, alien, and nonnative. In Weed Ecology in
Natural and Agricultural Systems (2003), Barbara D. Booth and her colleagues made a
valiant effort toward terminological neutrality, although, as researchers in agricultural
systems, they eventually circled back to weed ecology. Judging from the terminology
used in these later two books, our changes in perception are reflected in our vocabulary.
How to efficiently yet effectively manage invasive plants and animals has been the
subject of much research. As a scientist, I avoid a one-strategy-fits-all mentality, but I
also bristle at the unsubstantiated criticisms of the applied efforts toward invasive-
species eradication. I am not a blind convert to the ivory tower approach to invasion
research, but I also know that the spread of misinformation can travel faster than kudzu
in North Carolina on a warm day. Although both books are admirable scholarly
treatments of this broad topic, editors Ian D. Rotherham and Robert A. Lambert have
made the more overt attempt to address alternative views toward invasion ecology. In
Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals, they dissect the subtleties of perceptions
and attitudes and examine the approaches by some to control proliferation. Although it
is inextricably linked to many ecological issues, the human element is difficult to
examine objectively using traditional scientific methods. Therefore, I also admire the
Herculean efforts of Rotherham and Lambert to cover the subjective aspects of the issue
in their book. In a particular graduate course, I once learned about conservation without
any direct discussion of specific species. The concept was discussed, instead, using world
economic theory, anthropology, and human culture. This approach broadened my
perspective of the issue, and I am reminded of this in the way that Rotherham and
Lambert address the concept of invasive species. They argue that invasion ecology
research and the actions toward invasive species are based on human bias and
perception. It is sobering to be reminded that what is considered an acceptable species
continues to change over the years. According to Rotherham and Lambert, invasive
species will have increasingly important roles and functions in future landscapes. This
is the concept of recombinant ecology, a slowly growing viewpoint in European ecology,
and specialists in the field as well as resource managers facing invasions should read this
material.

Marine BioD
Alt Causes
Cant solve without addressing alt causes
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

A WAY FORWARD
Governments and societies have come to expect much less from the sea. The base lines of
environmental quality, good governance, and personal responsibility have plummeted.
This passive acceptance of the ongoing destruction of the seas is all the more shameful
given how avoidable the process is. Many solutions exist, and some are relatively simple.
For example, governments could create and expand protected marine areas, adopt and
enforce stronger international rules to conserve biological diversity in the open ocean,
and place a moratorium on the fishing of dwindling fish species, such as Pacific bluefin
tuna. But solutions will also require broader changes in how societies approach
energy, agriculture, and the management of natural resources. Countries will have to
make substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, transition to clean energy,
eliminate the worst toxic chemicals, and end the massive nutrient pollution in
watersheds.
These challenges may seem daunting, especially for countries focused on basic survival.
But governments, international institutions, nongovernmental organizations, scholars,
and businesses have the necessary experience and capacity to find answers to the oceans
problems. And they have succeeded in the past, through innovative local initiatives on
every continent, impressive scientific advances, tough environmental regulation and
enforcement, and important international measures, such as the global ban on the
dumping of nuclear waste in the oceans
So long as pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification remain concerns only for
scientists, however, little will change for the good. Diplomats and national security
experts, who understand the potential for conflict in an overheated world, should realize
that climate change might soon become a matter of war and peace. Business leaders
should understand better than most the direct links between healthy seas and healthy
economies. And government officials, who are entrusted with the publics well-being,
must surely see the importance of clean air, land, and water.
The world faces a choice. We do not have to return to an oceanic Stone Age. Whether we
can summon the political will and moral courage to restore the seas to health before it is
too late is an open question. The challenge and the opportunity are there.


Several factors make ocean decline inevitable
--- Pollution
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

LAYING WASTE
The oceans problems start with pollution, the most visible forms of which are the
catastrophic spills from offshore oil and gas drilling or from tanker accidents. Yet as
devastating as these events can be, especially locally, their overall contribution to marine
pollution pales in comparison to the much less spectacular waste that finds its way to the
seas through rivers, pipes, runoff, and the air. For example, trash -- plastic bags, bottles,
cans, tiny plastic pellets used in manufacturing -- washes into coastal waters or gets
discarded by ships large and small. This debris drifts out to sea, where it forms epic gyres
of floating waste, such as the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which spans
hundreds of miles across the North Pacific Ocean.
The most dangerous pollutants are chemicals. The seas are being poisoned by
substances that are toxic, remain in the environment for a long time, travel
great distances, accumulate in marine life, and move up the food chain. Among the
worst culprits are heavy metals such as mercury, which is released into the atmosphere
by the burning of coal and then rains down on the oceans, rivers, and lakes; mercury can
also be found in medical waste.
Hundreds of new industrial chemicals enter the market each year, most of them
untested. Of special concern are those known as persistent organic pollutants, which are
commonly found in streams, rivers, coastal waters, and, increasingly, the open ocean.
These chemicals build up slowly in the tissues of fish and shellfish and are transferred to
the larger creatures that eat them. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
have linked exposure to persistent organic pollutants to death, disease, and
abnormalities in fish and other wildlife. These pervasive chemicals can also adversely
affect the development of the brain, the neurologic system, and the reproductive system
in humans.

--- Climate change will wreck critical sectors of marine environment
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

IN HOT WATER
As if all this were not enough, scientists estimate that man-made climate change will
drive the planets temperature up by between four and seven degrees Fahrenheit over the
course of this century, making the oceans hotter. Sea levels are rising, storms are getting
stronger, and the life cycles of plants and animals are being upended, changing
migration patterns and causing other serious disruptions.
Global warming has already devastated coral reefs, and marine scientists now foresee the
collapse of entire reef systems in the next few decades. Warmer waters drive out
the tiny plants that corals feed on and depend on for their vivid coloration. Deprived of
food, the corals starve to death, a process known as bleaching. At the same time, rising
ocean temperatures promote disease in corals and other marine life. Nowhere are these
complex interrelationships contributing to dying seas more than in fragile coral
ecosystems.
The oceans have also become more acidic as carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere
dissolves in the worlds water. The buildup of acid in ocean waters reduces the
availability of calcium carbonate, a key building block for the skeletons and shells of
corals, plankton, shellfish, and many other marine organisms. Just as trees make wood
to grow tall and reach light, many sea creatures need hard shells to grow and also to
guard against predators.
On top of all these problems, the most severe impact of the damage being done to the
oceans by climate change and ocean acidification may be impossible to predict. The
worlds seas support processes essential to life on earth. These include complex
biological and physical systems, such as the nitrogen and carbon cycles; photosynthesis,
which creates half of the oxygen that humans breathe and forms the base of the oceans
biological productivity; and ocean circulation. Much of this activity takes place in the
open ocean, where the sea and the atmosphere interact. Despite flashes of terror, such as
the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, the delicate balance of nature that
sustains these systems has remained remarkably stable since well before the advent of
human civilization.
But these complex processes both influence and respond to the earths climate, and
scientists see certain recent developments as red flags possibly heralding an
impending catastrophe. To take one example, tropical fish are increasingly migrating
to the cooler waters of the Arctic and Southern oceans. Such changes may result in
extinctions of fish species, threatening a critical food source especially in developing
countries in the tropics. Or consider that satellite data show that warm surface waters
are mixing less with cooler, deeper waters. This reduction in vertical mixing separates
near-surface marine life from the nutrients below, ultimately driving down the
population of phytoplankton, which is the foundation of the oceans food
chain. Transformations in the open ocean could dramatically affect the earths climate
and the complex processes that support life both on land and at sea. Scientists do not yet
fully understand how all these processes work, but disregarding the warning signs could
result in grave consequences.

--- Destruction of habitats from commercial development
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

DESTROYING THE EARTHS FINAL FRONTIER
Yet another factor driving the decline of the oceans is the destruction of the habitats that
have allowed spectacular marine life to thrive for millennia. Residential and
commercial development have laid waste to once-wild coastal areas. In
particular, humans are eliminating coastal marshes, which serve as feeding grounds and
nurseries for fish and other wildlife, filter out pollutants, and fortify coasts against
storms and erosion.

--- Destructive fishing practices
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

TEACH A MAN TO FISH -- THEN WHAT? Another cause of the oceans decline is that
humans are simply killing and eating too many fish. A frequently cited 2003 study in the
journal Nature by the marine biologists Ransom Myers and Boris Worm found that the
number of large fish -- both open-ocean species, such as tuna, swordfish, and marlin,
and large groundfish, such as cod, halibut, and flounder -- had declined by 90 percent
since 1950. The finding provoked controversy among some scientists and fishery
managers. But subsequent studies have confirmed that fish populations have indeed
fallen dramatically. In fact, if one looks back further than 1950, the 90 percent figure
turns out to be conservative. As historical ecologists have shown, we are far removed
from the days when Christopher Columbus reported seeing large numbers of sea turtles
migrating off the coast of the New World, when 15-foot sturgeon bursting with caviar
leaped from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, when George Washingtons Continental
army could avoid starvation by feasting on swarms of shad swimming upriver to spawn,
when dense oyster beds nearly blocked the mouth of the Hudson River, and when the
early-twentieth-century American adventure writer Zane Grey marveled at the enormous
swordfish, tuna, wahoo, and grouper he found in the Gulf of California. Today, the
human appetite has nearly wiped those populations out. Its no wonder that stocks of
large predator fish are rapidly dwindling when one considers the fact that one bluefin
tuna can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars at market in Japan. High prices -- in
January 2013, a 489-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold for $1.7 million at auction in Tokyo
-- make it profitable to employ airplanes and helicopters to scan the ocean for the fish
that remain; against such technologies, marine animals dont stand a chance. Nor are
big fish the only ones that are threatened. In area after area, once the long-lived
predatory species, such as tuna and swordfish, disappear, fishing fleets move on to
smaller, plankton-eating fish, such as sardines, anchovy, and herring. The
overexploitation of smaller fish deprives the larger wild fish that remain of their food;
aquatic mammals and sea birds, such as ospreys and eagles, also go hungry. Marine
scientists refer to this sequential process as fishing down the food chain. The problem is
not just that we eat too much seafood; its also how we catch it. Modern industrial fishing
fleets drag lines with thousands of hooks miles behind a vessel, and industrial trawlers
on the high seas drop nets thousands of feet below the seas surface. In the process, many
untargeted species, including sea turtles, dolphins, whales, and large sea birds (such as
albatross) get accidentally captured or entangled. Millions of tons of unwanted sea life is
killed or injured in commercial fishing operations each year; indeed, as much as a third
of what fishermen pull out of the waters was never meant to be harvested. Some of the
most destructive fisheries discard 80 to 90 percent of what they bring in. In the Gulf of
Mexico, for example, for every pound of shrimp caught by a trawler, over three pounds of
marine life is thrown away.
Number of other alt causes too
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

Relatively new problems present additional challenges. Invasive species, such as lionfish,
zebra mussels, and Pacific jellyfish, are disrupting coastal ecosystems and in some cases
have caused the collapse of entire fisheries. Noise from sonar used by military systems
and other sources can have devastating effects on whales, dolphins, and other marine
life. Large vessels speeding through busy shipping lanes are also killing whales. Finally,
melting Arctic ice creates new environmental hazards, as wildlife habitats disappear,
mining becomes easier, and shipping routes expand.

Nutrients and fertilizer for farming wreck ocean environment and cause
dead zones
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

Then there are the nutrients, which increasingly show up in coastal waters after being
used as chemical fertilizers on farms, often far inland. All living things require nutrients;
excessive amounts, however, wreak havoc on the natural environment. Fertilizer that
makes its way into the water causes the explosive growth of algae. When these
algae die and sink to the sea floor, their decomposition robs the water of the
oxygen needed to support complex marine life. Some algal blooms also produce
toxins that can kill fish and poison humans who consume seafood.
The result has been the emergence of what marine scientists call dead zones -- areas
devoid of the ocean life people value most. The high concentration of nutrients flowing
down the Mississippi River and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico has created a seasonal
offshore dead zone larger than the state of New Jersey. An even larger dead zone -- the
worlds biggest -- can be found in the Baltic Sea, which is comparable in size to
California. The estuaries of Chinas two greatest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, have
similarly lost their complex marine life. Since 2004, the total number of such aquatic
wastelands worldwide has more than quadrupled, from 146 to over 600 today.
Destructive fishing practices are destroying marine ecosystems
Sielen, 13 --- Senior Fellow for International Environmental Policy at the Center for
Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Nov/Dec 2013, Alan B., Foreign Affairs, The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences
of Oceanic Destruction, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-
sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas, JMP)

Hidden from view but no less worrying is the wholesale destruction of deep-ocean
habitats. For fishermen seeking ever more elusive prey, the depths of the seas have
become the earths final frontier. There, submerged mountain chains called seamounts --
numbering in the tens of thousands and mostly uncharted -- have proved especially
desirable targets. Some rise from the sea floor to heights approaching that of Mount
Rainier, in Washington State. The steep slopes, ridges, and tops of seamounts in the
South Pacific and elsewhere are home to a rich variety of marine life, including large
pools of undiscovered species.
Today, fishing vessels drag huge nets outfitted with steel plates and heavy rollers across
the sea floor and over underwater mountains, more than a mile deep, destroying
everything in their path. As industrial trawlers bulldoze their way along, the surfaces of
seamounts are reduced to sand, bare rock, and rubble. Deep cold-water corals, some
older than the California redwoods, are being obliterated. In the process, an
unknown number of species from these unique islands of biological diversity -- which
might harbor new medicines or other important information -- are being driven extinct
before humans even get a chance to study them.
Resilient
Marine ecosystems are resilient no system collapse
Kennedy 2 Victor Kennedy, PhD Environmental Science and Dir. Cooperative
Oxford Lab (Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate Change, Pew Center
on Global Climate Change, Available Online:
http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/marine_ecosystems.pdf, Accessed: 09/02/2013)

There is evidence that marine organisms and ecosystems are resilient to environmental
change. Steele (1991) hypothesized that the biological components of marine systems are
tightly coupled to physical factors, allowing them to respond quickly to rapid
environmental change and thus rendering them ecologically adaptable. Some
species also have wide genetic variability throughout their range, which may allow for
adaptation to climate change.
Marine Biodiversity is resilient
ITOPF, 10 - International Tanker Owners Federation Ltd. (February 2010, Recovery,
http://www.itopf.com/marine-spills/effects/recovery/)//gingE

Marine organisms have varying degrees of natural resilience to changes in their habitats.
The natural adaptations of populations of animals and plants to cope with environmental
stress, combined with their breeding strategies, provide important mechanisms for
coping with the daily and seasonal fluctuations in their habitats and for recovering from
predation and other stochastic events.
Some natural phenomena can be highly destructive. The short-term power of hurricanes
and tsunamis can easily be appreciated, as can the damage they cause. The cyclical El
Nio phenomenon has major long-term consequences for marine organisms, seabirds
and marine mammals throughout the entire Pacific Ocean. Organisms suffer under such
onslaughts, but after what is often severe disruption and widespread mortality, the
marine populations re-establish themselves over a period of time and this process
constitutes natural recovery.
An important reproductive strategy for many marine organisms is the production of vast
numbers of eggs and larvae which are released into the plankton and are widely
distributed by currents. This mechanism has evolved to take maximum advantage of
available space and resources in marine habitats and to deal with e.g. predation. In some
cases, only one or two individuals in a million actually survive through to adulthood.
A less common reproductive strategy that is generally restricted to long-lived species that
do not reach sexual maturity for many years is to produce relatively few, well-developed,
offspring. These species are better adapted to stable habitats and environments and as a
result, their populations are likely to take much longer to recover from the pressures of
localised mortality e.g. the effects of an oil spill.
Whilst there may be considerable debate over what constitutes recovery, there is a
widespread acceptance that natural variability in systems makes getting back to the exact
pre-spill condition unlikely, and most current definitions of recovery focus on the re-
establishment of a community of plants and animals which are characteristic of the
habitat and are functioning normally in terms of biodiversity and productivity.

Methane Seepage -- Cold Vents

Methane seepage and global warming are unrelated.
Berndt et al. 14, Scientists citing data by GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean
Research Kiel, and MARUM - Center for Marine Environmetnal Sciences in Bremen, (C.,
January 2, 2014, Methane hydrates and global warming,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140102142008.htm)//HH

Off the coast of Svalbard methane gas flares originating from gas hydrate deposits at
depth of several hundred metres have been observed regularly. A new study conducted
by an international team under the leadership of scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz
Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and MARUM -- Center for Marine Environmental
Sciences in Bremen shows, that the observed outgassing is most likely caused by natural
processes and can not be attributed to global warming.
The study has been recently published in the scientific journal Science.
Methane hydrates are fragile. At the sea floor the ice-like solid fuel composed of water
and methane is only stable at high pressure and low temperature. In some areas, for
instance in the North Atlantic off the coast of Svalbard, scientists have detected gas flares
regularly. The reasons for their occurrence were still unclear but one hypothesis was that
global warming might cause the dissolution of gas hydrates. Over the past years,
comprehensive investigations by an international team of researchers led by scientists
from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now shown that it is very
likely that the gas flares are caused by natural processes.
"In 2008, when we observed the outgassing of methane for the first time, we were
alarmed," reports Professor Christian Berndt, lead author of the study from GEOMAR.
"The gas originates from depths where the hydrates should normally be stable. But we
knew that a relatively small warming might melt the hydrates," Berndt explains. Thus,
the key question was to find out what causes the outgassing. Step by step, several
expeditions that took place in the following years helped to solve the mystery.
One of the most obvious assumptions was that the increasing global warming has already
extended into these regions of the North Atlantic. However, the investigations partly
carried out with the German research submersible JAGO, pointed clearly to natural
causes. "On one hand, we have found that the seasonal variations in temperature in this
region are sufficient to push the stability zone of gas hydrates more than a kilometre up
and down the slope," Professor Berndt explains. "Additionally, we discovered carbonate
structures in the vicinity of methane seeps at the seafloor," Dr. Tom Feseker from
MARUM adds. "These are clear indicators that the outgassing likely takes place over very
long time periods, presumably for several thousand years," Feseker continues.


We are not near the threshold for runaway methane, despite the potential
Clarke Jr., 2010 Former Aide to president Carter [Thomas, Environmental
lawyer and Former aide to president carter, Arctic seafloor is leaking methane
http://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/environmental/b/environmental-law-
blog/archive/2011/04/11/natural-gas-development-poses-a-risk-of-enhancing-ghg-
emissions-due-to-quot-leakage-quot-note-new-studies.aspx A.S.
Although the Siberian seafloor sediments are spewing much more methane than
previously thought, they are still only providing a small fraction of the estimated 440
million tons of methane gas emitted to the atmosphere each year. Nevertheless, the
release of a sizeable fraction of the carbon trapped in these sediments would lead to
warmer atmospheric temperatures, which would in turn cause more methane to be
released. Even though we are far from the disaster that visited the Earth during the
Permian extinction, the best scientific evaluation of that event was that the coup d' grace
was administered by the sublimation of the methane hydrates in the oceans, which drove
the average temperature up to the point where most life of Earth was extinguished.
Thus, many climate scientists are very concerned that if temperature increases to a point
where the existing methane hydrates begin to defrost, then the Earth is in for a true
disaster of Biblical proportion. We are far from that point at present, but anytime one
sees seafloor methane starting to gasify, there is cause for concern.

No solid proof initial extinction was caused by methane
Kristof, 2006 columnist for New York Times [Nicholas April 18, 2006 The Big
Burp Theory of the Apocalypse - New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2006/04/18...nion/18kristof.html&tnt
email0=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print (2 of 3)4/18/2006 6:13:35 AMThe Big Burp
Theory of the Apocalypse - New York Times
To be sure, some experts are skeptical. Daniel Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard, doubts
that methane hydrates were the culprit 55 million years ago. For starters, he says, the
theory doesn't offer a good explanation of the initial change that melted the methane
hydrates. For all the uncertainty, there is an important point here: The history of climate
shows that it does not evolve slowly and gracefully, it lurches. There are tipping points,
and if we trigger certain chain reactions, then our leaders cannot claim a mulligan. They
could set back our planet for, say, 10 million years.

Methane bursts will not cause warming the best studies prove
Lutter, 2010 -- ecologist, zoologist, and contributor to the World Ocean
Review [Stephan Lutter, 2010, Climate Change Impacts on Methane Hydrates -- The
World Ocean Review Company] http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-
chemistry/climate-change-and-methane-hydrates/
Other, more sensitive models predict that methane hydrates at great water depths are
not threatened by warming. According to these models, only the methane hydrates that
are located directly at the boundaries of the stability zones would be primarily affected.
At these locations, a temperature increase of only 1 degree Celsius would be sufficient to
release large amounts of methane from the hydrates. The methane hydrates in the open
ocean at around 500 metres of water depth, and deposits in the shallow regions of the
Arctic would mainly be affected. In the course of the Earths warming, it is also expected
that sea level will rise due to melting of the polar ice caps and glacial ice. This inevitably
results in greater pressure at the sea floor. The increase in pressure, however, would not
be sufficient to counteract the effect of increasing temperature to dissolve the methane
hydrates. According to the latest calculations, a sea-level rise of ten metres could slow
down the methane-hydrate dissolution caused by a warming of one degree Celsius only
by a few decades. A wide variety of mathematical models are used to predict the
consequences of global warming. The results of the simulations are likewise very
variable. It is therefore difficult to precisely evaluate the consequences of global warming
for the gas hydrate deposits, not least of all because of the large differences in the
calculations of the size of the present-day gas hydrate deposits. One major goal of the
current gas hydrate research is to optimize these models by using ever more precise
input parameters. In order to achieve this, further measurements, expeditions, drilling
and analyses are essential.

Methane doesnt cause warming it dissolves before it reaches the surface
Harris 14 Award-winning journalist covered climate change for decades
Richard Arctic Methane Bubbles Not As Foreboding As Once Feared January 06, 2014
News article http://www.npr.org/2014/01/06/260265279/arctic-methane-bubbles-not-
as-foreboding-as-once-feared

AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: A few years ago, European researchers caused a stir when
they discovered streams of methane bubbles rising from the Arctic seabed. The bubbles
were caused by an ice-like material breaking apart as the seawater warmed up. Scientists
fear that the warming of the oceans could be triggering the release of methane gas. The
problem? Methane can actually speed up global warming. NPR's Richard Harris has the
latest on this story. RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: The biggest worry about climate
change is some natural system can reach a tipping point, where something stable like
methane locked up in an ice-like material on the seafloor suddenly becomes unstable.
Christian Berndt and his colleagues discovered worrisome streams of methane gas
erupting from ice-like material called gas hydrates off the coast of Norway's Svalbard
Islands in 2008, so they knew they had to go back for a closer look. In 2012, they
explored the area with a two-person mini-sub. CHRISTIAN BERNDT: First, we did
some reconnaissance dives to look at nature of the sediments and at the site where the
gas was coming out. HARRIS: And during those dives, they discovered some mineral
deposits on the sea floor. They pulled up samples and realized that they had been formed
by previous bursts of escaping methane, including releases 8,000 yeas ago, 3,000 years
ago and 500 years ago. BERNDT: We can see that this bubbling at that site must have
been active for a long time. So that means this bubbling cannot be just caused by
new climate change. HARRIS: Berndt, in Kiel, Germany, is the lead author of a
paper in the latest Science magazine that details their discoveries. It's reassuring news
because it means that the bubbles near Svalbard aren't signs of a tipping point. But
Carolyn Ruppel, who heads research on gas hydrates for the U.S. Geological Survey, says
there's a huge amount of methane locked up in these hydrates around the world. There's
no sign now of a runaway meltdown as the ocean gradually warms. But still, she says,
these icy materials are sensitive to temperature change. CAROLYN RUPPEL: Any time
those waters may warm a little bit, you can break those down and potentially produce
methane that then can come out of the seafloor. HARRIS: In fact, Ruppel says small
amounts of methane are emerging from hydrates along the continental shelves
worldwide. As it turns out, though, most of the methane dissolves in the seawater
long before it can bubble up to the surface. RUPPEL: Our theory right now is
that very little of that methane actually makes it to the atmosphere. So we're not talking
necessarily here about a direct input of methane from the sea to the atmosphere.
HARRIS:

Methane never reaches the atmosphere subduction zones are too deep
Oskin 13 Staff writer for live science
Becky Earthquakes Burp Up Methane Bubbles News article
http://www.livescience.com/38488-earthquakes-trigger-methane-release.html

Another caveat is that big subduction zone earthquakes are rare, striking only once a
year or less on average. However, no one knows if a sizable shaker is needed to release
methane gas from seafloor sediments, or smaller earthquakes can unleash bubbles. And
there is evidence of even bigger seafloor gas blowouts just east of New Zealand's
subduction zone, including giant circular pockmarks 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in
diameter. But subduction zone trenches are also deep, which means the gases
unleashed during earthquakes may never reach to the surface. The sediments sampled at
the Makran ridge were more than 9,100 feet (2,800 meters) deep. "Methane released at
these water depths doesn't make it to the atmosphere," said Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the
U.S. Geological Survey's Gas Hydrates Project in Woods Hole, Mass. "It's dissolved in the
water column or it can be oxidized by microbes in the water column," said Ruppel, who
was not involved in the study. Yet even if methane from earthquakes doesn't reach the
atmosphere, scientists are still interested in understanding how methane seeps and
methane hydrates contribute to the ocean's total carbon levels. (Methane eventually is
converted into carbon dioxide in the ocean and the atmosphere.) The new study could
help modelers better predict contributions from seafloor methane sources. [Watch:
Tracking an Ocean of Carbon] "What we care about is the integrated global [methane]
flux out of the seafloor into the ocean and we don't begin to know what that number is,"
Ruppel said.


Natural Disasters

In the ocean drones aff the impact is based off of climate change
Status quo solves NGA is creating a new database to map natural disasters
Maxwell 1-8 writer for GIS Lounge (Rebecca, Jan 1, 2014, Predicting Natural
Disasters and Humanitarian Crises through GIS, GIS Lounge,
http://www.gislounge.com/predicting-natural-disasters-humanitarian-crises-gis/

On November 8, 2013, Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippine islands leaving a
toll of enormous destruction in its wake. The mega storm led to the deaths of other
6,000 people and the displacement of over three million people. The storm Haiyan is the
deadliest storm to hit the Philippines on record, and it has produced an untold amount
of human suffering. Even now, two months later, people in the Philippines are still trying
to rebuild their lives as more humanitarian aid flows into the country. According to the
BBC, the relief effort is just getting started, however, with estimates that the country will
need help for several more years to come.
In response to Typhoon Haiyan and other humanitarian emergencies around the world,
the U.S. military is doing its part to better predict these challenges through the use of
digital mapping. A couple weeks after Haiyan caused so much devastation, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also known as NGA, announced its plans to create a
global geographic intelligence database for humanitarian crises. This database would
combine both detailed maps of the world with information about demographics, weather
patterns, and overall trends. The function of this new database is to enable better
predictions and analysis of humanitarian crises because of natural disasters, political
conflicts, and general instability in certain regions.
The NGA is a Pentagon agency that supplies geospatial intelligence to the U.S. military,
policy makers, intelligence operators, and even first responders. Through this new GIS
database project, called Project GeoAnalytics, the NGA wants to create a data-rich map
that takes into account not only the physical characteristics of certain locations around
the globe but also include supplementary information about its people and the political
situation. The GIS data is one of several mapping projects being worked by the NGA. The
agency is already in the process of creating a digital map of the entire globe that is
constantly updated as well as producing a map of the oceans topography for better
submarine navigation.
Not only could these maps lead to better prediction and analysis of
humanitarian crises but they could have other uses. For example, military planners
could better define future terrorist threats in certain regions. The database could also
help planners identify those areas that are at risk for instability because of
environmental factors, such as droughts and famine, or political and social changes.
Consequently, Project GeoAnalytics could identify likely U.N. humanitarian missions
because of these different problems and, moreover, assist the planning of these aid
responses. One of the NGAs objectives with the project is is offer both short-term and
long-term forecasts for global.
In the end, this new mapping project from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
could get more charitable aid to those regions of the world that need it and do it quicker.
The NGA has already been active in the humanitarian efforts in the Philippines in the
aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. Maps from the NGA have been used to show damage done
to roads and ports in order to help aid groups find the best routes. The maps have also
been used to find the locations of hospitals and other landmarks damaged by the storm.
Doing so has provided relief groups with ideas on what structures and services need to
repaired or replaced. With improved responses, people affected by these disasters could
get the help they need to rebuild and move on with their lives.
Current GPS monitoring solves and prevents the impacts
Destiche 1-13 Writer at FieldLogix - The #1 Green GPS Fleet Tracking Company
Content Writer, SEO at Media Reps. (Aurielle, January 13, 2014, GPS System Predicts
Earthquakes, Other Natural Disasters, FieldLogix,
http://www.fieldtechnologies.com/gps-system-predicts-earthquakes-natural-disasters/)

Southern California is testing the efficacy of a GPS System in predicting natural disasters
such as earthquakes and flooding. The GPS receivers are linked to a network that
analyzes information in real time and that information can identify natural disasters
before they happen.
Researcher Yehuda Bock from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography located in La
Jolla, CA, explains: By adding small, inexpensive sensor used in popular electronic
devices to existing GPSwe can greatly enhance our response to natural hazards, such as
earthquakes, tsunamis, severe weather, and flooding. Bock continues, Our system
improves on the traditional seismic monitoringby estimating the ground motions and
permanent displacements.
In addition to providing authorities a few extra minutes to notify the public of an
impending natural disaster, like an earthquake, the GPS system can estimate structural
damage from ground displacement. The GPS receivers are also equipped with pressure
and temperature sensors for meteorological monitoring.
In July, the GPS system was used to track a monsoon across Southern California. With
the real-time data provided by the GPS receivers, meteorologists forecasted a flash flood
and warned at-risk residents.
Currently, there are 17 enhanced GPS stations in operation with high hopes to add
sensors to the other 550 located on the west coast.
Japan solves current satellite technology uses 3D views of Earth to predict
natural disasters
Riee 2-27 - Doyle Rice has covered weather and climate for USA TODAY since 2004.
(Doyle, Feb. 27, 2014, New weather satellite to take 'CAT' scans of storms USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/26/weather-satellite-launch-
japan/5813531/)

A new weather satellite slated to be launched Thursday in Japan will take
unprecedented three-dimensional views of rainstorms and hurricanes. It
also will capture for the first time by a satellite views of falling snow.
"Just like a doctor uses CAT scans and X-rays to diagnose what is happening in the
human body, this satellite uses its measurements to diagnose the internal structures of
precipitation," said Dalia Kirschbaum, research physical scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Launch is scheduled for a one-hour window that opens at 1:37 p.m. ET Thursday from
Tanegashima Island, a tiny island off the southern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of
Japan's four big islands.
Known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, it is an international
effort led by NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) "to measure
rain and snowfall over most of the Earth several times a day."
The satellite will be used for long-term climate research and live weather forecasting,
said Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist with NASA. "It will set a new
standard for precipitation measurements from space."
The cost of the mission to NASA is $933 million.
The GPM will work with an international fleet of satellites to tally rainfall every three
hours. It will give scientists a new look into clouds and storms and improve predictions
of droughts, floods, landslides and other natural disasters.
"It should be in use by the middle of spring," Jackson said, "well in time for the 2014
Atlantic hurricane season."
The GPM is built upon the success of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM),
Jackson said, a satellite launched in 1997 that measures moderate and heavy rainfall in
the tropics.
"The GPM mission will help advance our understanding of Earth's water and energy
cycles, improve the forecasting of extreme events that cause natural
disasters, and extend current capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to
directly benefit society," NASA said in a news release.
The satellite was built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. One of the main
instruments aboard the satellite, the "microwave imager," was built by Ball Aerospace
and Technologies of Boulder, Colo.
"Whether it's raining or snowing we all want to know when, where and how much,"
according to Kirschbaum. "Especially after a winter that has brought snowstorms that
have wreaked havoc up and down the East Coast and the South; and in California, where
the lack of rain and snow is leading to historic droughts."
New NASA satellites solve can easily predict extreme weather
Kingery 3-5 - Senior Science Communications Specialist for the Pratt School of
Engineering at Duke University, (Ken, March 5, 2014, Tuning NASA's Newest Weather
Satellite to Improve Forecasts, Duke University,
http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/tuning-nasas-newest-weather-satellite-improve-
forecasts
**edited for abelist language//we dont endorse abelist language

After Atlanta was paralyzed (decimated) by a rare snowstorm, many fingers were pointed
assigning blame for the resulting traffic catastrophe, including at least one aimed at
imprecise weather predictions.
The governor of Georgia said that they thought the heavier snowfall was going to be
south of the city, said Ana Barros, professor of civil and environmental engineering at
Duke University. But theres a lot of uncertainty in those predictions because we dont
really understand the fine details of complex storm systems. We dont know how to
model these processes at high spatial resolutions.
This summer, Barros and her colleagues will conduct the first field mission with a new
satellite system intended to fill in those knowledge gaps. On Feb. 27, NASA and JAXA
Japans national space agencylaunched the core satellite for their new Global
Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center.
GPM is an international satellite mission designed to provide more detailed
measurements of rain and snow over a wider range of the globe than previously possible.
Not only will the satellite have more precise instrumentation than its
predecessors; its orbit will allow researchers to study rainfall at higher latitudes at higher
spatial and temporal resolutions. The data it collects will help unify measurements made
by partner satellites and add to sciences understanding of how weather works.
Before meteorologists can start plugging the new data in to their weather models,
however, researchers have to make sure they can accurately interpret the GPM
measurements. The upcoming field mission, based in the mountains of western North
Carolina and led by Duke engineers, will help achieve this by comparing satellite
readings with those taken simultaneously from multiple aircraft and ground sensors.
Besides calibrating the new satellite, the campaign will help improve how precipitation
processes are represented in forecast calculations. It will also provide data and inform
models used to address critical water management issues in mountainous regions.
The campaign that we are running will obtain very high-resolution data of precipitation
and the microphysics of storm systems in mountainous regions, said Barros. The end
goal is to improve weather predictions and climate models.
Between May 1 and June 15, measurements will be taken on the ground and by two
aircraft flying at different altitudes to compare with the newly launched GPM satellite.
The data collected will help calibrate the new satellites sensors for the rest of its long-
term mission to study complex weather phenomena.
The campaign will also be the first of its kind in mountainous regions that, according to
Barros, are home to complex rain patterns that are one of the biggest challenges in
remote sensing. The Great Smoky Mountains get their name from microdroplet rain
patterns that are difficult for satellites to probe with their sensors.
After the initial field campaign ends on June 15, the two participating aircraft will move
on to other missions, but Barros and her team will continue taking data from the new
satellite and the extensive ground sensor network they have built until the effective end
of the hurricane season.
When we first started in 2007, there were only two rain gauges reliable for these kinds
of studies above 3,200 feet in the whole eastern United States, said Barros. Now, for
this experiment, we have more than 100. Its taken a long time to get here, but weve had
a lot of help along the way.
Weve been working with a handful of non-governmental organizations along with
water authorities, planning commissions," Barros said, "and literally dozens of
independent entities, including the Haywood Community College, the Haywood Electric
Membership Cooperation, Wilson College, UNC-Asheville, Maggie Valley Water District,
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, ABTech, and even local landowners and
landmarks, like Joeys Pancake House, who have been very supportive of our field work.
Current satellite technology solves key to effective weather predictions
NASA Status Report 13 (NASA Status Report, July 19, 2013, New Weather Satellite
Will Result in More Timely and Accurate Weather Forecasts Space Ref Earth Today,
http://spaceref.com/earth/new-weather-satellite-will-result-in-more-timely-and-
accurate-weather-forecasts.html)

The GOES-R Magnetometer Engineering Development Unit made an important
development in the construction of the spacecraft recently after completing a successful
boom deployment test at an ATK facility in Goleta, Calif.
The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite - R Series advanced spacecraft
and instrument technology will result in more timely and accurate weather
forecasts. It will improve support for the detection and observations of meteorological
phenomena and directly affect public safety, protection of property, and ultimately,
economic health and development.
The magnetometer boom will deploy after the GOES-R spacecraft launches, separates
from its launch vehicle and undergoes a series of orbit-raising maneuvers. The
magnetometer will provide measurements of the space environment magnetic field,
which controls charged particle dynamics in the outer region of the magnetosphere.
These particles pose a threat to spacecraft and human spaceflight.
"First deployment is always exciting, and all the dynamic effects involved in the stowing
and deploying need to be understood and characterized," said Monica Todirita,
instrument manager for the magnetometer on the GOES-R Project at NOAA's National
Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, Silver Spring, Md. "With first
deployment we proved that the design principle of the magnetometer boom for our
application is functional and reliable."
GOES-R will be more advanced than NOAA's current GOES fleet. The satellites are
expected to more than double the clarity of today's GOES imagery and
provide more atmospheric observations than current capabilities with more
frequent images.
"In geosynchronous orbit, Earth's magnetic field can go through huge variations;
sometimes nearly doubling in strength and at other times reversing direction. GOES-R
will monitor these variations and enable forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather
Prediction Center to better predict the consequences of geomagnetic storms," said
Howard Singer, chief scientist, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, Colo.
NOAA manages the GOES-R Series Program through an integrated NOAA-NASA
program office, staffed with personnel from NOAA and NASA, and co-located at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NOAA's mission is to understand and predict changes in Earth's environment, from the
depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal
and marine resources.

Ocean Acid
Ocean acidification not happening now and theres no impact
Eschenbach, 11 - B.A. Psychology, Sonoma State University (Willis, The Ocean Is Not
Getting Acidified December 27, 2011 http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/27/the-
ocean-is-not-getting-acidified/)//gingE

Theres an interesting study out on the natural pH changes in the ocean. I discussed
some of these pH changes a year ago in my post The Electric Oceanic Acid Test. Before
getting to the new study, let me say a couple of things about pH. The pH scale measures
from zero to fourteen. Seven is neutral, because it is the pH of pure water. Below seven is
acidic. Above seven is basic. This is somewhat inaccurately but commonly called
alkaline. Milk is slightly acidic. Baking soda is slightly basic (alkaline). The first thing
of note regarding pH is that alkalinity is harder on living things than is acidity. Both are
corrosive of living tissue, but alkalinity has a stronger effect. It seems counterintuitive,
but its true. For example, almost all of our foods are acidic. We eat things with a pH of 2,
five units below the neutral reading of 7 but nothing with a corresponding pH of 12,
five units above neutral. The most alkaline foods are eggs (pH up to 8) and dates and
crackers (pH up to 8.5). Heck, our stomach acid has a pH of 1.5 to 3.0, and our bodies
dont mind that at all but dont try to drink Drano, the lye will destroy your stomach.
Thats why when you want to get rid of an inconvenient body, you put lye on it, not acid.
Its also why ocean fish often have a thick mucus layer over their skin, inter alia to
protect them from the alkalinity. Acidity is no problem for life compared to alkalinity.
Next, a question of terminology. When a base is combined with an acid, for example
putting baking soda on spilled car battery acid, that is called neutralizing the acid. This
is because it is moving towards neutral. Yes, it increases the pH, but despite that, it is
called neutralizing, not alkalizing. This same terminology is used when measuring
pH. In a process called titration, you measure how much acid it takes to neutralize an
unknown basic solution. If you add too much acid, the pH drops below 7.0 and the
mixture becomes acidic. Add too little acid, and the mixture remains basic. Your goal in
titration is to add just enough acid to neutralize the basic solution. Then you can tell how
alkaline it was, by the amount of acid that it took to neutralize the basic solution.
Similarly, when rainwater (slightly acidic) falls on the ocean (slightly basic), it has a
neutralizing effect on the slightly alkaline ocean. Rainwater slightly decreases the pH of
the ocean. Despite that, we dont normally say that rainwater is acidifying the ocean.
Instead, because it is moving the ocean towards neutral, we say it is neutralizing the
ocean. The problem with using the term acidify for what rainwater does to the ocean
is that people misunderstand what is happening. Sure, a hard-core scientist hearing
acidify might think decreasing pH. But most people think Ooooh, acid, bad, burns
the skin. It leads people to say things like the following gem that I came across
yesterday: Rapid increases in CO2 (such as today) overload the system, causing surface
waters to become corrosive. In reality, its quite the opposite. The increase in CO2 is
making the ocean, not more corrosive, but more neutral. Since both alkalinity and
acidity corrode things, the truth is that rainwater (or more CO2) will make the ocean
slightly less corrosive, by marginally neutralizing its slight alkalinity. That is the problem
with the term acidify, and it is why I use and insist on the more accurate term
neutralize. Using acidify, is both alarmist and incorrect. The ocean is not getting
acidified by additional CO2. It is getting neutralized by additional CO2. With that as
prologue, let me go on to discuss the paper on oceanic pH. The paper is called High-
Frequency Dynamics of Ocean pH: A Multi-Ecosystem Comparison (hereinafter
pH2011). As the name suggests, they took a look at the actual variations of pH in a host
of different parts of the ocean. They show 30-day snapshots of a variety of ecosystems.
The authors comment: These biome-specific pH signatures disclose current levels of
exposure to both high and low dissolved CO2, often demonstrating that resident
organisms are already experiencing pH regimes that are not predicted until 2100. First,
they show the 30-day snapshot of both the open ocean and a deepwater open ocean
reef: I note that even in the open ocean, the pH is not constant, but varies by a bit over
the thirty days. These changes are quite short, and are likely related to rainfall events
during the month. As mentioned above, these slightly (and temporarily) neutralize the
ocean surface, and over time mix in to the lower waters. Over Kingman reef, there are
longer lasting small swings. Compare the two regions shown in Fig. 1 to some other
coral reef snapshots of thirty days worth of continuous pH measurements. There are a
couple of things of note in Figure 3. First, day-to-night variations in pH are from the CO2
that is produced by the reef life as a whole. Also, day-to-night swings on the Palmyra reef
terrace are about a quarter of a pH unit which is about 60% more than the projected
change from CO2 by the year 2100. Moving on, we have the situation in a couple of
upwelling areas off of the California coast: Here we see even greater swings of pH, much
larger than the possible predicted change from CO2. Remember that this is only over the
period of a month, so there will likely be an annual component to the variation as well.
Again we see a variety of swings of pH, both long- and short-term. Inshore, we find even
larger swings, as shown in Figure 6. Again we see large pH changes in a very short
period of time, both in the estuary and the near-shore area. My conclusions from all of
this? First, there are a number of places in the ocean where the pH swings are both
rapid and large. The life in those parts of the ocean doesnt seem to be bothered by either
the size or the speed these swings. Second, the size of the possible pH change by 2100 is
not large compared to the natural swings. Third, due to a host of buffering mechanisms
in the ocean, the possible pH change by 2100 may be smaller, but is unlikely to be larger,
than the forecast estimate shown above. Fourth, I would be very surprised if were still
burning much fossil fuel ninety years from now. Possible, but doubtful in my book. So
from this effect as well, the change in oceanic pH may well be less than shown above.
Fifth, as the authors commented, some parts of the ocean are already experiencing
conditions that were not forecast to arrive until 2100 and are doing so with no ill
effects. As a result, Im not particularly concerned about a small change in oceanic pH
from the change in atmospheric CO2. The ocean will adapt, some creatures ranges will
change a bit, some species will be slightly advantaged and others slightly disadvantaged.
But CO2 has been high before this. Overall, making the ocean slightly more neutral will
likely be beneficial to life, which doesnt like alkalinity but doesnt mind acidity at all.

Impact is exaggerated
Ridley, 10 PhD in Zoology, visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
(Matt, June 15, 2010, Threat From Ocean Acidification Greatly Exaggerated,
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1106-matt-ridley-threat-from-ocean-
acidification-greatly-exaggerated.html)//gingE

Lest my critics still accuse me of cherry-picking studies, let me refer them also to the
results of Hendrikset al. (2010, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 86:157). Far from
being a cherry-picked study, this is a massive meta-analysis. The authors observed that
warnings that ocean acidification is a major threat to marine biodiversity are largely
based on the analysis of predicted changes in ocean chemical fields rather than
empirical data. So they constructed a database of 372 studies in which the responses of
44 different marine species to ocean acidification induced by equilibrating seawater with
CO2-enriched air had been actually measured. They found that only a minority of studies
demonstrated significant responses to acidification and there was no significant mean
effect even in these studies. They concluded that the world's marine biota are more
resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions identifying
ocean acidification as a major threat to marine biodiversity and that ocean acidification
may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st centuryBiological processes
can provide homeostasis against changes in pH in bulk waters of the range predicted
during the 21st century. This important paper alone contradicts Hoegh-Gudlbergs
assertion that the vast bulk of scientific evidence shows that calcifiers are being heavily
impacted already. In conclusion, I rest my case. My five critics have not only failed to
contradict, but have explicitly confirmed the truth of every single one of my factual
statements. We differ only in how we interpret the facts. It is hardly surprising that my
opinion is not shared by five scientists whose research grants depend on funding
agencies being persuaded that there will be a severe and rapid impact of carbon dioxide
emissions on coral reefs in coming decades. I merely report accurately that the latest
empirical and theoretical research suggests that the likely impact has been exaggerated.

Ocean acidification too complex to predict
Idso, 12 - director of environment science Peabody Energy, PhD Geography ASU
(Craig, The Unsettled Science of Ocean Warming and Acidification, CO2 Science Vol.
15, No. 19, May http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N19/EDIT.php )//gingE

The world's climate alarmists would have us believe that they know all they need to know
about earth's climate system and its biological ramifications to justify an unbelievably
expensive and radical restructuring of the way the industrialized world both obtains and
utilizes energy. But is this really so? In an eye-opening "perspective" article published a
couple of years ago in the 9 December 2009 issue of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, three researchers from the Marine
Biogeochemistry Section of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany,
describe their assessment of various possible responses of the global ocean's seawater
carbonate system, plus its physical and biological carbon pumps, to ocean warming and
associated changes in vertical mixing and overturning circulation, as well as the closely-
allied phenomena of ocean acidification and carbonation. All of these phenomena,
many of which are nonlinear and extremely complicated, are interlinked; and Riebesell
and his colleagues thus conclude, from their objective review of the pertinent scientific
literature, that the magnitude and even the sign of the global ocean's carbon cycle
feedback to climate change are, in their words, "yet unknown." They note, for example,
that "our understanding of biological responses to ocean change is still in its infancy."
With respect to ocean acidification, in particular, they write that the impact it will have
on marine life "is still uncertain," and that the phenomenon itself is but "one side of the
story," the other side being what they call "ocean carbonation," which, as they describe it,
"will likely be beneficial to some groups of photosynthetic organisms." Thus, they write
that "our present understanding of biologically driven feedback mechanisms is still
rudimentary," and that with respect to many of their magnitudes, "our understanding is
too immature to even make a guess." What is more, they imply that even what we do
think we know could well be wrong, because, as they elucidate, "our present knowledge
of pH/CO2 sensitivities of marine organisms is based almost entirely on short-term
perturbation experiments, neglecting the possibility of evolutionary adaptation."

Ocean acidification is beneficialits also slow and stable
Codling, 11 - major in microbiology, molecular biology (Jo, Ocean Acidification a
little bit less alkalinity could be a good thing, Sept. 11,
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/09/ocean-acidification-a-little-bit-less-alkalinity-
could-be-a-good-thing/)//gingE

Alarming fears about unrealistic ocean pHs Some ocean pHs studied were so extreme
they are only seen on Star Trek Studies of how marine life copes with less alkaline
conditions include many experiments with water at pH values in a range beyond
anything that is likely on planet Earth they go beyond the bounds of whats possible.
There are estimates that the pH of the ocean has shifted about 0.1 pH unit in the last 200
years, yet some studies consider the effects of water that is shifted by 2 or even 4 entire
pH units. Four pH units means 10,000 fold change in the concentration of hydrogen
ions). Thats a shift so large, its not going to occur in the next few thousand years, even
under the worst of the worst case scenarios by the most sadistic models. Indeed, its
virtually impossible for CO2 levels to rise high enough to effect that kind of change, even
if we burned every last fossil, every tree, plant microbe, and vaporized life on earth. (Yet
still someone thought it was worth studying what would happen if, hypothetically, that
happened. Hmm.) 1103 studies on acidification say theres no need to panic CO2
science has an extraordinary data base of 1103 studies of the effects of acidification on
marine life. They reason that any change beyond 0.5 pH units is far far beyond the
realms of reality even if you are concerned about coral reefs in the year 2300 (see Tans
2009). Even the IPCCs highest end scenario A2 estimate predicts a peak change in the
range of 0.6 units by 2300. Many of the headlines forecasting Death to Reefs come
from studies of ocean water at extreme pHs that will never occur globally, and that are
beyond even what the IPCC is forecasting. Some headlines come from studies of
hydrothermal vents where CO2 bubbles up from the ocean floor. Not surprisingly they
find changes to marine life near the vents, but then, the pH of these areas ranges right
down to 2.8. They are an extreme environment, nothing like what we might expect to
convert the worlds oceans too. Marine life, quite happy about a bit more CO2? Studies
of growth, calcification, metabolism, fertility and survival show that, actually, if things
were a little less alkaline, on average, marine life would benefit. There will be winners
and losers, but on the whole, using those five measures of health, the reefs are more
likely to have more life on and around them, than they are to shrink. Studies of
acidification of marine life in oceans calcification, growth, survival, Figure 12. Percent
change in the five measured life characteristics (calcification, metabolism, growth,
fertility and survival) vs. decline of seawater pH from its present (control treatment)
value to ending values extending up to the beginning pH value of "the warped world of
the IPCC" for all individual data points falling within this pH decline range. How can
this be? First, marine life evolved under conditions were most of the time the world was
warmer and had more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does today. Second, like life above
the water, life-below-water is based on carbon, and putting more carbon into the water is
not necessarily a bad thing. That said, the dots in the graph above represent study
results, and the ones below zero tell us there will be some losers, even though there will
be more winners (above zer0). Thirdly, watch out for some of the more devastating
headlines which also come from studies where researchers changed the pH by tossing
hydrochloric acid into the tank. Chlorine, as they say, is not the same as the gas nature
breathes CO2. (The strange thing about the studies with hydrochloric acid, is that it
doesnt seem to be bad as we might have expected nonetheless, it seems like a dubious
practice to use in studying the health of corals.) The bottom line: Yes, we should watch
and monitor the oceans careful. No, there is no chance the Great Barrier Reef will be
gone in the next 100 years: 1103 studies show that if the worlds oceans were slightly less
basic then marine life as a whole will be slightly more likely to grow, survive, and be
fertile. That doesnt mean we should torch coal seams for the fun of it, but it does mean
we can afford to hold off on the oceanic panic for a century or so while we figure out how
to make solar and wind power work ( in the event that we might need them, and in the
event that they might work).

Ocean acidification is a myth and rising CO2 levels benefit marine lifeat
the very least, they adapt
Taylor, 10 - senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of
Environment and Climate News (James M., Ocean Acidification Scare Pushed at
Copenhagen, Feb 10
http://www.heartland.org/publications/environment%20climate/article/26815/Ocean_
Acidification_Scare_Pushed_at_Copenhagen.html)//gingE

With global temperatures continuing their decade-long decline and United Nations-
sponsored global warming talks falling apart in Copenhagen, alarmists at the U.N. talks
spent considerable time claiming carbon dioxide emissions will cause catastrophic ocean
acidification, regardless of whether temperatures rise. The latest scientific data,
however, show no such catastrophe is likely to occur. Food Supply Risk Claimed The
United Kingdoms environment secretary, Hilary Benn, initiated the Copenhagen ocean
scare with a high-profile speech and numerous media interviews claiming ocean
acidification threatens the worlds food supply. The fact is our seas absorb CO2. They
absorb about a quarter of the total that we produce, but it is making our seas more
acidic, said Benn in his speech. If this continues as a problem, then it can affect the one
billion people who depend on fish as their principle source of protein, and we have to
feed another 2 to 3 billion people over the next 40 to 50 years. Benns claim of
oceans becoming more acidic is misleading, however. Water with a pH of 7.0 is
considered neutral. pH values lower than 7.0 are considered acidic, while those higher
than 7.0 are considered alkaline. The worlds oceans have a pH of 8.1, making them
alkaline, not acidic. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations would make the oceans
less alkaline but not acidic. Since human industrial activity first began emitting carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere a little more than 200 years ago, the pH of the oceans has
fallen merely 0.1, from 8.2 to 8.1. Following Benns December 14 speech and public
relations efforts, most of the worlds major media outlets produced stories claiming
ocean acidification is threatening the worlds marine life. An Associated Press headline,
for example, went so far as to call ocean acidification the evil twin of climate change.
Studies Show CO2 Benefits Numerous recent scientific studies show higher carbon
dioxide levels in the worlds oceans have the same beneficial effect on marine life as
higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have on terrestrial plant life. In a 2005
study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, scientists examined trends in
chlorophyll concentrations, critical building blocks in the oceanic food chain. The French
and American scientists reported an overall increase of the world ocean average
chlorophyll concentration by about 22 percent during the prior two decades of
increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. In a 2006 study published in Global Change
Biology, scientists observed higher CO2 levels are correlated with better growth
conditions for oceanic life. The highest CO2 concentrations produced higher growth
rates and biomass yields than the lower CO2 conditions. Higher CO2 levels may well
fuel subsequent primary production, phytoplankton blooms, and sustaining oceanic
food-webs, the study concluded. Ocean Life Surprisingly Resilient In a 2008 study
published in Biogeosciences, scientists subjected marine organisms to varying
concentrations of CO2, including abrupt changes of CO2 concentration. The ecosystems
were surprisingly resilient to changes in atmospheric CO2, and the ecosystem
composition, bacterial and phytoplankton abundances and productivity, grazing rates
and total grazer abundance and reproduction were not significantly affected by CO2-
induced effects. In a 2009 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, scientists reported, Sea star growth and feeding rates increased with water
temperature from 5C to 21C. A doubling of current [CO2] also increased growth rates
both with and without a concurrent temperature increase from 12C to 15C. Another
False CO2 Scare Far too many predictions of CO2-induced catastrophes are treated by
alarmists as sure to occur, when real-world observations show these doomsday scenarios
to be highly unlikely or even virtual impossibilities, said Craig Idso, Ph.D., author of the
2009 book CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs. The phenomenon of CO2-induced
ocean acidification appears to be no different. What we observe in nature is not
supported by theoretical projections, because numerous studies have shown that the net
impact of twentieth century increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature has not been
anywhere near as catastrophically disruptive to Earths marine organisms as climate
alarmists suggest it should have been. And every month more and more research
confirms that marine life will likely successfully adapt to, or even benefit from, the
modest increase in atmospheric CO2 and temperature projected to occur in the future,
Idso explained. As for why this is the way marine organisms respond, no one knows for
certain, but it is probably because calcification is a biologically driven process that can
overcome physical-chemical limitations which in the absence of life would appear to be
insurmountable, Idso said. We have got to realize that rising atmospheric CO2
concentrations are not the bane of the biosphere but an invaluable boon to the planets
many life forms, marine life included.
Overfishing


Fish stocks are recovering globally
King 13 Gannett Washington Bureau, staff writer for USA Today (Ledyard King,
5/2/13, Fish populations continue rising,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/02/fish-populations-
increasing/2130569/)//twontwon
WASHINGTON Fish populations off America's coasts continued to rebound last year,
a trend government officials attribute largely to widening catch limits and other scientific
management methods. Red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, yellowtail flounder off
southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest
were among stocks upgraded by the government based on fish counts that showed
significant growth in 2012. The report on the status of improving stocks was issued
Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors fish
populations in federal waters between three and 200 miles off the U.S. coast.

European fish stocks are growing peer reviewed studies
Gray 13 staff contributor to Foodnavigator.com citing Current Biology findings
(Nathan Gray, 7/19/13, European fish stocks set to recover: study,
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/European-fish-stocks-set-to-recover-
Study)//twontwon
Many of the major European fish stocks in the northeast Atlantic are now being fished
sustainably and, given time, should continue to recover, according to a new report. The
findings, published in Current Biology, may come as surprisingly good news amid
widespread criticism that the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy is failing, said
the researchers behind the study. "Contrary to common perception, the status of our fish
stocks is improving," explained Paul Fernandes of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
"Many of our stocks are not overfished; nature now needs to take its course for these fish
to rebuild their populations." However, Robin Cook from the University of Strathclyde,
Scotland, added that industry and policy makers should still be aware that low fishing
pressures need to be maintained until stocks recover. "This is only the first step," said
Cook. "Now we need to see numbers increase as a result of continued low fishing
pressure."

Consensus concludes theres no overfishing
SSC 13 sustainable seafood coalition (12/20/13, Fish stock exploitation levels
decline, http://sustainableseafoodcoalition.org/news/fish-stock-exploitation-levels-
decline/)//twontwon
Fish stock exploitation levels decline December 20, 2013 / News Exploitation of fish
stocks in the Northeast Atlantic has significantly declined over the last ten
years. This is the conclusion of scientists at the annual meeting of the International
Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) Advisory Committee (ACOM), held this
month in Copenhagen. ACOM supplies scientific advice on coastal and ocean
management. They analysed historical trends for 85 fish stocks in the Northeast Atlantic
since 1960, looking at factors like fishing pressure (how many fish are removed by
fishing) and stock size. The scientists found fish stocks have begun to recover over the
last ten years and there has been less fishing pressure. By reducing fishing pressure in
the short term, fish populations are more likely to recover to higher levels which can lead
to higher profitability in the long run. The declines in fishing pressure may have
stemmed from increasing fuel costs, changing markets or reductions in catch limits.
Improving stocks The report shows cod stocks have improved in the Baltic Sea, the
Barents Sea and the seas around Iceland. Herring in the Baltic, the North Sea and the
Norwegian Sea have also started to improve and are being harvested in line with targets
set by policy makers. However, these improvements are not universal for all fish stocks.
Fishing pressure may be decreasing on average, but ICES still advises that catches of
some stocks should be minimised.

Fish stocks high now quotas solve best studies prove
STV 13 STVNews (STV, 7/18/13, Fish stocks on way back to healthy levels as quotas
take effect, http://news.stv.tv/north/233368-fish-stocks-on-way-back-to-healthy-
levels-as-quotas-take-effect/)//twontwon
Most fish stocks are no longer in crisis and should return to healthy levels if current
fishing quotas are maintained, scientists have said. Researchers at the universities of
Aberdeen and Strathclyde found that the general trend in fish populations was better
now that at any time since the 1960s. Some species, notably cod, were still being over-
exploited, but the study concluded that the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy
appeared to be working. "Contrary to common perception, the status of our fish stocks
is improving," said Dr Paul Fernandes, of the University of Aberdeen, who co-led the
study. "Many of our stocks are not over-fished; nature now needs to take its course for
these fish to rebuild their populations." The scientists analysed data on millions of fish
collected both from fishing and research vessels, and fish markets. More than 60% of
fish stocks in an area covering the Atlantic shelf and North, Baltic and Celtic seas were
now being fished sustainably. The researchers said they were surprised by the number of
stocks that had improved since fishing pressure was reduced at the start of the 21st
century. Co-author Dr Robin Cook, from the University of Strathclyde, said: "We should
be aware that low fishing pressure needs to be maintained until stocks recover.
"This is only the first step. Now we need to see numbers increase as a result of
continued low fishing pressure."

Fish stocks are recovering galunggong proves
Corpuz and Crisostomo 13 information officers at Pamalakaya (Gerry Albert
Corpuz and Rances Crisostomo, 2013, Good news for improving galunggong fish stocks
in Palawan, http://savethephilippinecoralreefs.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/good-
news-for-improving-galunggong-fish-stocks-in-palawan/)//twontwon
The fisherfolk can catch as much as 20 kilos of galunggong per fishing trip using simple
and sustainable fishing gear. And the bounty is enjoyed by the communities who are able
to buy galunggong for P 40 per kilo in Puerto Princesa which is very low compared to the
P 100 per kilo of galunggong sold in Metro Manila. Imagine the huge displacement this
proposal would bring to the fisher people and ordinary folks of Palawan and Region IV-A
of Southern Tagalog, Pamalakaya and Anakpawis partylist added. The DA and BFAR
officials argued that the proposed ban would be an offshoot of the fish ban the agencies
imposed last year in Zamboanga Peninsula for sardines. They said the ban on fishing
sardines last year resulted to increase of commercial fisheries caught with 228,303
metric tons (MT) of sardines in the first quarter of 2013, which is 5 percent higher than
the 217,431 MT caught in the same period the year before. Alcala said the closed season
on catching galunggong would help expand current stocks and reduce imports in the
long run. If implemented, the ban would cover the fish-rich Malampaya Sound and some
municipalities in Palawan, including Quezon town.
Fishing pressures declining
Fernandes and Cook 13 Prof. Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences @
University of Aberdeen, Prof Dept. Mathematics and Statistics @ University of
Strathclyde (Paul G. Fernandes and Robert M. Cook, 8/5/13, Reversal of Fish Stock
Decline in the Northeast Atlantic, http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/abstract/S0960-9822(13)00707-0)//twontwon
Fishing pressure on northern European fish stocks has reduced continuously since
the turn of the century In 2011, for the first time, the majority of assessed stocks were
fished sustainably Declines in pressure were associated with the effort controls of the
2002 reforms Challenges remain for the recovery of many cod stocks, especially the
need to prevent discarding Summary Analyses of global fish stocks paint a mixed picture
of success, with some holding fishery management responsible for the poor status of
many stocks [13] or predicting widespread collapse [1, 4]. Some suggest a stable [5] or
improving situation [6] in certain jurisdictions. The debate is particularly polarized in
the European Union, where the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has been criticized for
failing to protect stocks [2, 710], while others argue that a rebuilding process is
underway [11, 12]. We show that substantial change in stock trends occurred in the area
around the turn of the century: since then, the fishing pressure (as measured by the
exploitation rate) has reduced continuously and there have been increases in biomass,
demonstrating the potential for stock recovery. In 2011, for the first time, the majority of
assessed stocks, where reference points are defined, were fished sustainably. The
reductions in fishing pressure were associated with declines in fishing effort. The last
reform of the CFP, in 2002, introduced effort control as part of more enforceable
management measures, which were also based on longer-term plans. Further reforms to
the CFP are currently being developed, so it is important, when correcting its
weaknesses, to also acknowledge and build on the success of a major reduction in the
fishing pressure on European fish stocks.
Fish populations are recovering the rate is faster than ever
Kaufman 12 staff writer at New York Times specializing in politics and policy (Leslie
Kaufman, 5/14/12, A Rebound for 6 Fish Populations,
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/a-rebound-for-6-fish-
populations/)//twontwon
A record six populations of fish returned to healthy levels in 2011, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported to Congress on Monday. NOAAs
Fisheries Service said the count showed that controversial and often unpopular catch
limits imposed by the government have been working. Among the rebuilt populations are
the Bering Sea snow crab, the summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast, the haddock
in the Gulf of Maine, the Chinook salmon along the Northern California coast, the coho
salmon off Washington State and the Pacific widow rockfish, the Fisheries Service said.
Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, NOAA must
report annually on the state of fish stocks in waters within 200 miles of the coast, and
depleted stocks must be rebuilt to healthy levels. Scores of fish species have been in
serious decline since the 1980s, largely because of overfishing. Altogether, 27 fish stocks
have been returned to health in the last 11 years, the agency said. Lee Crockett, director
of federal fisheries policy for the Pew Environmental Group, called the reports findings
encouraging. It is a demonstration that the sacrifices are showing results, he said.
NOAA said there were other signs that overall fish stocks were improving. In 2011, 79
percent of fish populations assessed 174 of 219 were not overfished or were above
levels that would require a program to restore them to health, up from 77 percent the
previous year, it reported. When a fish stock is assessed at a healthy level, fishermen are
allowed to increase their catch, but in many cases only to a degree. Given that fishermen
often find the catch limits financially burdensome, a push is under way in Congress to
amend the Magnuson-Stevens act to allow more exemptions from catch limits Mr.
Crockett contends that it is far too soon to soften the law, which was passed in 1976 and
has twice been amended To be deemed rebuilt, fish stocks only have to be 40 percent of
their historical levels, he noted. Our message is this law is working, so lets leave it alone
and let it work, Mr. Crockett said.

No impact-- Overfishing is hyped up by eco-scientists
Cohen 12 (Dave, writer for television, radio and a columnist for The Huffington Post,
Exaggerated Claims About Over-Fishing Of The
Oceans?,http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/04/exaggerated-claims-about-
over-fishing-of-the-oceans.html) //J.N.E
I was investigating peak wild-caught fish recently when I stumbled across Our Oceans
Can't Survive Fishing Madness by Gareth Morgan and Geoff Simmons, authors of Hook,
Line and Blinkers, an in-depth look at fishing off New Zealand. I was particularly struck
by this passage. Scientists disagree over the size of the overfishing problem. Getting
reliable catch data is hard enough, data on fish populations is a lot more difficult - we
can't see them, and they move around. You may recognise some of the more alarmist
claims that most large fish populations are 10 per cent of their original size and that
the oceans could collapse by 2046. [My note: They meant 2048.] More reliable stock
assessments show that around a third of all fisheries are now overfished - in a state
where the annual catch is a lot less than what could have been achieved, and worse - still
falling. But even this data has its problems - it is only available for a handful of fisheries,
and we often don't know what the original state of the fish population was so estimating
the true sustainable yield is impossible. But what everyone can agree on is that the
tragedy of the commons still exists in the global fishery, and that the only way around
this problem is to manage our fisheries... Alarmist claims? WTF? You see, I am one of
the people making these "alarmist" claims. Those claims are based on a paper which
appeared in Science called Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services
(2006). The lead author was Boris Worm of the Department of Biology at Dalhousie
University, Halifax. Here's a graph from the paper. Worm_06_collapsed_taxa Fig. 3.
Global loss of species from large marine ecosystems (LMEs). (A) Trajectories of
collapsed fish and invertebrate taxa over the past 50 years (diamonds, collapses by year;
triangles, cumulative collapses). Data are shown for all (black), species-poor (<500
species, blue), and species-rich (>500 species, red). (B) Map of all 64 LMEs, color-coded
according to their total fish species richness. Morgan and Simmons refer to "more
reliable stock assessments" which show that only about a third of all fisheries are
overfished, not the nearly 70% shown by the black triangles in the graph shown. What's
going on here? We get some of the story from Global Fisheries Declines Less Steep Than
Earlier Reports, Study Says. A new study by U.S. researchers says that recent estimates
of declining global fish stocks, including a 2006 report predicting a general collapse by
2048 without significant changes to fisheries management, were overstated because they
relied on a flawed methodology. While earlier calculations were based on the amount of
fish caught, the new report, published in the journal Conservation Biology, says
calculations based on the estimated biomass of available stocks provides a more accurate
assessment of the state of global fisheries. The earlier study by researchers at the
University of British Columbia calculated that 70 percent of fish stocks had peaked and
were now declining as a result of overharvesting, and that 30 percent of species had
fallen to 10 percent of earlier numbers. Trevor Branch, a professor at the University of
Washington and lead author of the new study, says an assessment based on biomass data
reveals that, at most, 33 percent have been overharvested, and about 13 percent have
collapsed. While Branch said those numbers are still a cause for significant concern, he
said the findings suggest that fisheries management has helped stabilize fish stocks in
most regions. It turns out there is an academic dispute between Trevor Branch (and
supportive colleagues) and Boris Worm (and his supportive colleagues). We get some
details from One Fish, Two Fish, False-ish, True-ish, published at the New York Times
Green blog on May 1, 2011. It's worth reading because the devil is always in the details.
The new study takes issue with a recent estimate that 70 percent of all stocks have been
harvested to the point where their numbers have peaked and are now declining, and that
30 percent of all stocks have collapsed to less than one-tenth of their former numbers.
Instead, it finds that at most 33 percent of all stocks are over-exploited and up to 13
percent of all stocks have collapsed. Its not that fisheries are in great shape, said Trevor
Branch, the lead author of the new study; its just that they are not as badly off as has
been widely believed. In 2006, a study in the journal Science predicted a general collapse
in global fisheries by 2048 if nothing were done to stem the decline. OK, that's a brief
review of what I've told you so far. Let's get to the nub. The work led by Dr. Branch is
another salvo in a scientific dispute feud might be a better word that pits Dr. Branch
and his co-author Ray Hilborn at the University of Washingtons School of Aquatic and
Fisheries Sciences and their allies against scientists at the University of British Columbia
and their partisans. The latest paper argues that the methodology resulting in the most
dire estimates, derived from records of the amount of fish caught, is not as accurate as
data from the more broadly based United Nations assessment, based on the estimated
biomass of available stocks of individual species. When the catch-based approach was
applied to data on 234 global fish stocks from 1950 to 2006, it showed that 68 percent of
all fisheries were either over-exploited (46 percent) or collapsed (22 percent) by the end
of that period, while none were increasing. By contrast, when an assessment is based on
an estimate of biomass, it showed that 28 percent of fisheries were either over-exploited
(15 percent) or collapsed (13 percent). The second method also indicated 24 percent of
the stocks were increasing. Fish_catch_versus_stocks Flawed methodology? Let's look at
flawed methodologies. But Dirk Zeller, a scientist at the University of British Columbia
who is on the other side of the debate, doesnt buy all of Dr. Branchs arguments. Yes, he
said, using fish stock data is preferable to using catch data. But if reliable fish stock data
is only available in developed countries like the United States or Australia where
fisheries management is reasonably well developed what good is it in determining
what is happening in the rest of the world? Dr. Zeller said that Dr. Branch and his
University of Washington colleague Ray Hilborn had taken a stand in some previous
papers that if you look at fish stocks that have formal stock assessment processes, you
find that many of them not all are relatively healthy. Thats valid. Where their
argument falls down is that they extrapolate that pattern to global fisheries, and then say
global fisheries arent doing that bad, he said. They totally ignore the fact that all of
Asia, all of South America, all of Africa are not included. Dr. Zeller added that 234
stocks are a tiny subset of thousands of species currently being fished, not a sample from
which one can derive broad conclusions. Whoops! Dr. Branch and friends used a too-
small sample, and then extrapolated it to the rest of the world. They couldn't include
data from the ocean waters adjacent to all of Asia, all of South America, and all of Africa
because it does not exist. In these areas of the world, fisheries management can hardly be
said to exist, and thus there is no good data for fish stocks (as opposed to fish landings).
[Zeller's] University of British Columbia colleague Daniel Pauly, who has objected to Dr.
Branchs work on other other occasions, is blunter. The school of fisheries around
Branch and Hilborn are now contesting everything that seems to be established, he said
in an interview. The point is not whether you use catches or estimates of biomass
inferred from other data. The point is that you make proper inferences"... I have no
argument with the point that with stocks that are well managed you can have sustainable
fisheries, Dr. Zeller said. He pointed out that he and Dr. Pauly have adjusted their
online database to reflect a critique by Dr. Branch that their analysis had given short
shrift to rebounding fish stocks. But he does maintain that data from catches are more
applicable on a global scale than other data sets. Perhaps you are tired of this seemingly
academic dispute, so I'll cut off the discussion now and make a few remarks of my own.
When I say the world's fisheries are likely to have completely collapsed by 2048, I am not
talking out my ass. I am making that claim based upon the best available science. That is
not an "alarmist" claim. It is based on valid inferences from what is known about wild-
caught fish landings, aka. peak fish. But there a deeper level of perception and insight
available here. Unless well-established human behaviors were to change in wholly
unexpected ways in the future, we will to overfish the oceans until almost the fish species
there are either commercially extinct, and therefore unexploitablethis is the more
likely outcome for most speciesor physically extinct, meaning gone forever. We've got
this one Earth. We've got this one set of oceans. That's all we've got. This is not an
academic dispute. We're talking about the ultimate fate of humanity and most of the
Earth's living organisms. Only on Planet Stupid would this debate even be taking place.
Denial is not going to fix the problem. This is how Felicity Barringeryes, that is her
nameconcluded her New York Times article. Even without the aid of mathematical
modeling, it is possible to predict that fish population debates themselves will remain
sustainable for some time to come. A clever ending, worthy of somebody named Felicity.
If only 50%, not 33% or 70%, of the world's marine fisheries have collapsed or are over-
exploited, it appears to be only a matter of time before humankind "achieves" 100% of
the fisheries, so what difference does it make? So don't call Worm's or Pauly's views of
the oceans alarmist. None of this would be happening if humankind could take its
collective head out of its collective ass. No doubt Felicity is right. Humans will be
debating "fish population" questions right up to the time when such debates make no
difference at all because at that point, catching a fish in the ocean will be a cause for
much celebration.
No overfishing problem now.
Hilborn 11, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington,
(Ray, April 14, 2011, New York Times, Let Us Eat Fish, accessed 6/25/14,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html?_r=2&)//HH
THIS Lent, many ecologically conscious Americans might feel a twinge of guilt as they
dig into the fish on their Friday dinner plates. They shouldnt. Over the last decade the
public has been bombarded by apocalyptic predictions about the future of fish stocks
in 2006, for instance, an article in the journal Science projected that all fish stocks could
be gone by 2048. Subsequent research, including a paper I co-wrote in Science in 2009
with Boris Worm, the lead author of the 2006 paper, has shown that such warnings were
exaggerated. Much of the earlier research pointed to declines in catches and concluded
that therefore fish stocks must be in trouble. But there is little correlation between how
many fish are caught and how many actually exist; over the past decade, for example,
fish catches in the United States have dropped because regulators have lowered the
allowable catch. On average, fish stocks worldwide appear to be stable, and in the United
States they are rebuilding, in many cases at a rapid rate. The overall record of American
fisheries management since the mid-1990s is one of improvement, not of decline.
Perhaps the most spectacular recovery is that of bottom fish in New England, especially
haddock and redfish; their abundance has grown sixfold from 1994 to 2007. Few if any
fish species in the United States are now being harvested at too high a rate, and only 24
percent remain below their desired abundance. Much of the success is a result of the
Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which was signed into law 35
years ago this week. It banned foreign fishing within 200 miles of the United States
shoreline and established a system of management councils to regulate federal fisheries.
In the past 15 years, those councils, along with federal and state agencies, nonprofit
organizations and commercial and sport fishing groups, have helped assure the
sustainability of the nations fishing stocks. Some experts, like Daniel Pauly of the
University of British Columbia Fisheries Center, who warns of the end of fish, fault the
systems used to regulate fisheries worldwide. But that condemnation is too sweeping,
and his prescription closing much of the worlds oceans to fishing would leave
people hungry unnecessarily. Many of the species that are fished too much worldwide
fall into two categories: highly migratory species that are subject to international fishing
pressures, and bottom fish like cod, haddock, flounder and sole that are caught in
mixed fisheries, where it is impossible to catch one species but not another. We also
know little about the sustainability of fish caught in much of Asia and Africa. The
Atlantic bluefin tuna is emblematic of the endangered migratory species; its numbers are
well below the target set by the International Commission for the Conservation of
Atlantic Tunas, and the catches in the Eastern Atlantic are too high. Many species of
sharks also fall into this category. Because these stocks are fished by international fleets,
reducing the catch requires global cooperation and American leadership. But not all
highly migratory fish are in danger; the albacore, skipjack and yellowfin tuna and
swordfish on American menus are not threatened. Managing the mixed fisheries in
American waters requires different tactics. On the West Coast, fish stocks have been
strongly revived over the past decade through conservative management: fleet size
reductions, highly restrictive catch limits and the closing of large areas to certain kinds of
nets, hooks and traps. Rebuilding, however, has come at a cost: to prevent
overharvesting and protect weak species, about 30 percent of the potential sustainable
harvest from productive species (those that can be harvested at higher rates) goes
untapped. A similar tradeoff is going on in New England, where the management
council, made up of federal and state representatives, restricts the harvesting of bottom
fish like cod and yellowtail flounder in both the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, off
Cape Cod. In trying to rebuild the cod, regulators have had to limit the catch of the much
more abundant haddock, which are caught in the same nets. The Magnuson Act
regulating federal fisheries has been successful, but it needs to be revised. The last time it
was reauthorized, in 2006, it required the rebuilding of overfished stocks within 10
years. That rule is too inflexible and hurts fishing communities from New England to
California. A better option is to give the management councils greater discretion in
setting targets and deadlines for rebuilding fish stocks. We are caught between the desire
for oceans as pristine ecosystems and the desire for sustainable seafood. Are we willing
to accept some depleted species to increase long-term sustainable food production in
return? After all, if fish are off the menu, we will likely eat more beef, chicken and pork.
And the environmental costs of producing more livestock are much higher than
accepting fewer fish in the ocean: lost habitat, the need for ever more water, pesticides,
fertilizer and antibiotics, chemical runoff and dead zones in the worlds seas. Suddenly,
that tasty, healthful and environmentally friendly fish on the plate looks a lot more
appetizing.
Fish stocks are healthy long term trends
Economist 12 The Economist (5/26/12, Plenty more fish in the sea,
http://www.economist.com/node/21555960) //twontwon
FOR American fish, this is a good time to be alive. On May 14th the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that a record six federal fisheries
returned to health last year. After a decade of similar progress, 86% of America's
roughly 250 federally monitored commercial fish stocks were not subject to overfishing;
79% were considered healthy. This is also good for American fishermen. Commercial
and recreational fishing generates an estimated $183 billion a year and supports over
1.5m full-time or part-time jobs. Rebuilding America's 45 remaining over-exploited fish
stocks, NOAA estimates, could generate an extra $31 billion a year and half a million
jobs. That is a tribute to America learning a simple truththat scientists, not fishermen
or politicians, should decide how many fish can be caughtand enforcing this with
simple rules. It has taken a while. America's main fishery law established the importance
of scientific quotas in 1976. Yet this was routinely ignored because of poor science and
weak enforcement, abetted by influential fishermennotably in New England, which
was built on once-rich Atlantic cod and haddock fisheries. The Massachusetts House of
Representatives contains a conspicuous symbol of this: the Sacred Cod, a 200-year-old
fish of solid pine, hanging from its ceiling.

Squo solves fisheries are strong global analysis proves were not
overfishing
Allan 6 Professor of Natural Resources and Environment @ umich, Ph.D. in Zoology
(David Allan, 1/4/6, World Fisheries: Declines, Potential and Human Reliance,
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/fisheries/fisheries
.html) //twontwon
To fish our waters more sustainably, we need to know what the sustained maximum
yield is. One theoretical estimate puts the estimated annual production at 240 million
metric tons. The estimated annual harvest is half of this: 100-120 mmt. The
current annual harvest is about 100 mmt. Not all areas of the ocean are equally
productive (Figure 5). As you can see from this figure, the coastal margins such as
mangroves and saltmarshes are much more productive relative to their volume than the
open ocean. Therefore, to accurately estimate the maximum yield of the ocean, we must
look at the zones separately. The estimate used above was obtained by dividing the ocean
into three zones: open ocean, coastal areas, and upwelling areas. The estimate for the
productivity of each of the three zones was estimated based on three values: primary
plant production, food chain length, and food chain efficiency. To further understand the
relationship these values and productivity, you may want to review some lectures from
last semester: The Flow of Energy: Primary Production explains how primary production
is estimated in marine waters, and The Flow of Energy: Higher Trophic Levels discusses
ecological efficiency of the food chain and the loss of energy with each trophic transfer
(the "10% Rule").

Phytoplankton decline
OTEC aff its an add-on

Theres not really a terminal impact to this biod is the terminal impact of
the advantage/add-on
No impact to phytoplankton and increased temperatures are actually net
better
Zimmerman No date - SCDNR Marine Resources Research Institute (L.,
Phytoplankton, NERRS NOAA,
http://nerrs.noaa.gov/doc/siteprofile/acebasin/html/biores/phyto/pytext.htm)
Photosynthesis is the process by which solar energy is converted to chemical energy. This
process usually involves the production of carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water
with the release of oxygen as a byproduct. Phytoplankton contain several different types
of pigments which aid in the photosynthetic process. These pigments include:
chlorophylls a and b (green), carotenoids (yellow and orange) and phycobilins (red and
blue). The different divisions of phytoplankton are based partly on the types of pigments
found in their cells.
Phytoplankton experience the greatest productivity when they encounter their optimal
light and nutrient conditions. With adequate nutrients, phytoplankton growth and
productivity increases with increasing light levels until a certain light level is reached. At
this point photosynthesis is at a maximum (Pmax) and further photosynthesis is
inhibited with increasing light levels. Phytoplankton can only photosynthesize in the
photic zone {short description of image}, which is limited to the maximum depth to
which light can penetrate the ocean. Nutrients are often depleted in the photic zone
because of utilization by phytoplankton and other organisms. The optimal depth for
maximum production is reached when the light limiting effects of vertical mixing are
balanced out by the benefits of advection into nutrient-rich bottom waters (Yentsch
1981). Seasonal changes in the length of the day also influence phytoplankton
production, especially in mid and high latitudes. Phytoplankton abundance and biomass
greatly increase during the summer months in higher latitudes because of the increased
amount of light.
Effect of Temperature
Phytoplankton reproduction rates are closely linked to temperature. The maximum rate
of cell division doubles for each 10C increase in temperature. The upper limit
of growth is therefore determined by temperature (Harris 1986). Several phytoplankton
species (e.g. the diatom, Skeletonema costatum), however, increase assimilation rates of
nutrients at lower temperatures and subsequently increase biomass (Goldman 1977).
Coincidentally, S. costatum is often found in marine coastal waters during winter
(Goldman 1977). The different responses to temperature exhibited by phytoplankton
species can lead to a strong seasonal change in species composition and biomass.
No net loss of phytoplankton they can adapt and move towards the poles
National Science Foundation 12 (National Science Foundation, Warmer future
oceans could cause phytoplankton to thrive near poles, shrink in tropics, October 25,
2012, Science Daily,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121025161747.htm)

In the future, warmer waters could significantly change ocean distribution of populations
of phytoplankton, tiny organisms that could have a major effect on climate change.
Reporting in this week's online journal Science Express, researchers show that by the
end of the 21st century, warmer oceans will cause populations of these marine
microorganisms to thrive near the poles and shrink in equatorial waters.
"In the tropical oceans, we are predicting a 40 percent drop in potential diversity, the
number of strains of phytoplankton," says Mridul Thomas, a biologist at Michigan State
University (MSU) and co-author of the journal paper.
"If the oceans continue to warm as predicted," says Thomas, "there will be a sharp
decline in the diversity of phytoplankton in tropical waters and a poleward shift in
species' thermal niches--if they don't adapt."
Thomas co-authored the paper with scientists Colin Kremer, Elena Litchman and
Christopher Klausmeier, all of MSU.
"The research is an important contribution to predicting plankton productivity and
community structure in the oceans of the future," says David Garrison, program director
in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded
the research along with NSF's Division of Environmental Biology.
"The work addresses how phytoplankton species are affected by a changing
environment," says Garrison, "and the really difficult question of whether adaptation to
these changes is possible."
The MSU scientists say that since phytoplankton play a key role in regulating
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and therefore global climate, the shift could in turn
cause further climate change.
Phytoplankton and Earth's climate are inextricably intertwined.
"These results will allow scientists to make predictions about how global warming will
shift phytoplankton species distribution and diversity in the oceans," says Alan Tessier,
program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology.
"They illustrate the value of combining ecology and evolution in predicting species'
responses."
The microorganisms use light, carbon dioxide and nutrients to grow. Although
phytoplankton are small, they flourish in every ocean, consuming about half of the
carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
When they die, some sink to the ocean bottom, depositing their carbon in the sediment,
where it can be trapped for long periods of time.
Water temperatures strongly influence their growth rates.
Phytoplankton in warmer equatorial waters grow much faster than their cold-
water cousins.
With worldwide temperatures predicted to increase over the next century, it's important
to gauge the reactions of phytoplankton species, say the scientists.
They were able to show that phytoplankton have adapted to local
temperatures.
Based on projections of ocean temperatures in the future, however, many phytoplankton
may not adapt quickly enough.
Since they can't regulate their temperatures or migrate, if they don't adapt, they could be
hard hit, Kremer says.
"We've shown that a critical group of the world's organisms has evolved to do well under
the temperatures to which they're accustomed," he says.
But warming oceans may significantly limit their growth and diversity, with far-reaching
implications for the global carbon cycle.
"Future models that incorporate genetic variability within species will allow us to
determine whether particular species can adapt," says Klausmeier, "or whether they will
face extinction."

No impact phytoplankton are resilient best studies prove
Underwater Times 6 (Underwater Times, February 18, 2006, Scientist:
Phytoplankton bounce back from abrupt climate change; 'pretty resilient', Underwater
Times, http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=71058614203


STATE COLLEGE, Pennsylvania -- The majority of tiny marine plants weathered the
abrupt climate changes that occurred in Earth's past and bounced back, according to a
Penn State geoscientist.
"Populations of plankton are pretty resilient," says Dr. Timothy J. Bralower,
head and professor of geoscience.
Bralower looked at cores of marine sediments related to thousands of years of
deposition, to locate populations of these plankton during three periods of abrupt
climate change. These abrupt changes were caused either by Oceanic Anoxic Events
during the middle Jurassic to late Cretaceous when the oceans became uniformly
depleted of oxygen or by a warming event in the early Paleocene around 55 million years
ago.
Marine sediment cores contain calcareous plankton single-celled organisms with a
coating or shell of calcium carbonate as fossils. These tiny photosynthesizing plants
float in the ocean and move with the currents. They are around 10 micrometers in size,
about half the width of a human hair. Anything bigger than phytoplankton eat them.
Eventually, their calcium carbonate shell falls to the ocean floor to become part of the
sediment.
The factors that were altered in the upper marine environment during the abrupt climate
change events included increases in temperature and changes in thermal structure,
changes in salinity and alkalinity, and changes in nutrient patterns and trace elements.
"In every case, changes in surface habitats resulted in transient plankton communities,"
Bralower told attendees at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. "Although we have a poor understanding of ancient plankton
ecology, it appears that extinctions were selective and targeted more
specialized and often deeper-dwelling species."
For example, about 55 million years ago there was a warming event that geologists call
the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum. During that time, there were mass extinctions
of organisms living on the ocean floor, but surface phytoplankton populations dipped
and for the most part came back. During this event one genus of phytoplankton -
Fasciculithus which had about five species went extinct.
"We do not have anything like Fasciculitus in the oceans today," says Bralower. "But,
these organisms were probably highly specialized and existed in a very narrow ecological
niche. The other thing is that, as soon as some group disappears, another
species comes in to occupy that niche." About 120 million years ago, during an
episode of oxygen depletion another genus inhabiting surface waters Nannococus
which also had about five species, went extinct. Otherwise only a few species here and
there were unable to survive these abrupt changes. However, on the ocean floor during
these same times, mass extinctions occurred.
Other extinctions, such as that at the Cetaceous Tertiary boundary (K/T) that caused the
demise of the dinosaurs, are thought to be caused by other than abrupt climate changes.
The K/T event had mass extinctions on land and in the upper portions of the oceans, but
not on the ocean floors.
During the abrupt climate changes that Bralower investigated, the temperature of the
oceans changed about 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of 1,000 years.
"This rate of change in ocean temperature is probably slower than what is happening
today in the oceans," the Penn State researcher adds. "We are not yet seeing the same
effect in today's phytoplankton."
Besides being a major food source, phytoplankton are also important in the balance of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as opposed to the carbon that is sequestered in the
ocean sediment.
Photosynthesizing organisms use carbon dioxide to create energy and so remove carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. Some of the carbon that phytoplankton take out of the air
as carbon dioxide is used to make their calcium carbonate coatings. Because these
coatings eventually make it into the sediment, they do not immediately return to the
atmosphere. It is not until chalk or limestone beds are exposed to the elements that
weathering returns the carbon to the atmosphere.
"Today, we are sort of in the middle of a mass experiment," says Bralower. "With the
oceans warming, we do not really know what the end result will be, but we can look to
the fossil record to see how they were affected in the past. It appears that abrupt climate
change affects plankton with selectivity and most of the organisms bounce right back
after the change."
No impact phytoplankton are resilient to rising CO2 levels
Taylor 10 - Senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of
Environment & Climate News. (James M. Taylor, Ocean Acidification Scare Pushed
at Copenhagen, Feb 10
http://www.heartland.org/publications/environment%20climate/article/26815/Ocea
n_Acidification_Scare_Pushed_at_Copenhagen.html)
With global temperatures continuing their decade-long decline and United
Nations-sponsored global warming talks falling apart in Copenhagen, alarmists at
the U.N. talks spent considerable time claiming carbon dioxide emissions will
cause catastrophic ocean acidification, regardless of whether temperatures rise.
The latest scientific data, however, show no such catastrophe is likely to occur.
Food Supply Risk Claimed The United Kingdoms environment secretary, Hilary
Benn, initiated the Copenhagen ocean scare with a high-profile speech and
numerous media interviews claiming ocean acidification threatens the worlds food
supply. The fact is our seas absorb CO2. They absorb about a quarter of the total
that we produce, but it is making our seas more acidic, said Benn in his speech. If
this continues as a problem, then it can affect the one billion people who depend
on fish as their principle source of protein, and we have to feed another 2 to 3
billion people over the next 40 to 50 years. Benns claim of oceans becoming
more acidic is misleading, however. Water with a pH of 7.0 is considered neutral.
pH values lower than 7.0 are considered acidic, while those higher than 7.0 are
considered alkaline. The worlds oceans have a pH of 8.1, making them alkaline,
not acidic. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations would make the oceans less
alkaline but not acidic. Since human industrial activity first began emitting carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere a little more than 200 years ago, the pH of the oceans
has fallen merely 0.1, from 8.2 to 8.1. Following Benns December 14 speech and
public relations efforts, most of the worlds major media outlets produced stories
claiming ocean acidification is threatening the worlds marine life. An Associated
Press headline, for example, went so far as to call ocean acidification the evil twin
of climate change. Studies Show CO2 Benefits Numerous recent scientific studies
show higher carbon dioxide levels in the worlds oceans have the same beneficial
effect on marine life as higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have on
terrestrial plant life. In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Geophysical
Research, scientists examined trends in chlorophyll concentrations, critical
building blocks in the oceanic food chain. The French and American scientists
reported an overall increase of the world ocean average chlorophyll concentration
by about 22 percent during the prior two decades of increasing carbon dioxide
concentrations. In a 2006 study published in Global Change Biology, scientists
observed higher CO2 levels are correlated with better growth conditions for
oceanic life. The highest CO2 concentrations produced higher growth rates and
biomass yields than the lower CO2 conditions. Higher CO2 levels may well
fuel subsequent primary production, phytoplankton blooms, and sustaining
oceanic food-webs, the study concluded. Ocean Life Surprisingly Resilient In a
2008 study published in Biogeosciences, scientists subjected marine organisms to
varying concentrations of CO2, including abrupt changes of CO2 concentration.
The ecosystems were surprisingly resilient to changes in atmospheric CO2,
and the ecosystem composition, bacterial and phytoplankton abundances and
productivity, grazing rates and total grazer abundance and reproduction were not
significantly affected by CO2-induced effects. In a 2009 study published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists reported, Sea star
growth and feeding rates increased with water temperature from 5C to 21C. A
doubling of current [CO2] also increased growth rates both with and without a
concurrent temperature increase from 12C to 15C. Another False CO2 Scare
Far too many predictions of CO2-induced catastrophes are treated by alarmists as
sure to occur, when real-world observations show these doomsday scenarios
to be highly unlikely or even virtual impossibilities, said Craig Idso,
Ph.D., author of the 2009 book CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs. The
phenomenon of CO2-induced ocean acidification appears to be no different.

Phytoplankton are resilient empirics prove
Microbiology 11 *summarizing a study done by Ribeiro, S., Berge, T.,
Lundholm, N., Andersen, T. J., Abrantes, F., & Ellegaard, M. (2011).
Phytoplankton growth after a century of dormancy illuminates past resilience to
catastrophic darkness Nature Communications (May 2011, Phytoplankton
Resiliency to the Chicxulub Mass Extinction,
http://www.nasw.org/users/mslong/2011/2011_05/Phytoplankton.htm)

Phytoplankton can rebound after nearly a century of dormancy in the dark,
explaining why these microbes were resilient after the most recent global
photosynthesis disruption and the accompanying mass extinction.
The most recent mass extinction is commonly accepted to have been caused by an
asteroid or comet impact that blacked out the sky for months and darkened the sky
by 50% for approximately a decade. Most of the dinosaurs and many other species
died out
However, photosynthetic marine microbes seem to have fared relatively well after
this and previous global extinctions. Scientists aren't sure how light-dependent
microbes survived such a long period of global darkness, but resolving this
question has implications for photosynthetic microbial resiliency to future global
disruptions.
Sofia Ribeiro (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and coworkers have found
that phytoplankton preserved in sediment (kept in darkness) for nearly a century
can grow normally after dormancy. It's therefore reasonable to presume that
dormancy enabled similar microbes to withstand the global drop in sunlight over
65 million years ago.
Reviving phytoplankton.
The scientists isolated resting stages of Pentapharsodinium dalei from low-oxgyen
sediment cores. The microbes had been dormant for nearly a century (8712
years).
Various controls confirm dating reliability. Other microbes were also found in a
resting state, but recovery attempts focused on Pentapharsodinium dalei.
Recovery from the 450 isolated dormant cysts was approximately 43%, dependent
on the layer (28% recent layer, 61% intermediate layer, 5% oldest layer). Each
successful revival took place within two weeks.
Most remarkably, 18 randomly-selected strains (six each from the three
previously-mentioned layers) grew as normally expected, e.g. exponential growth.
Correcting for the random variance expected of different isolated microbial strains,
the scientists found that production rate, cell size, and cell division rate were
statistically the same between isolates from all three layers.
Implications.
Further research suggests that cyanobacteria and other microbes can also recover
after extended resting states. However, none of this suggests that a global
catastrophe has no long-term effects on photosynthetic microbes.
Most notable of these effects is a pronounced drop in microbial diversity. Such a
loss of diversity is very slow to remedy.

Sea level rise
Global warming lowers sea level rise (but sea level rise is inevitable)
Singer, 13 professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science
& Environmental Policy Project (Fred, Could Global Warming Slow Sea Level Rise? June
6
th
, 2013
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/could_global_warming_slow_sea_level_ri
se.html)//gingE
But recent observations and new analyses of existing data suggest an opposite result: A
climate warming could slow down SLR not accelerate it. To understand this
counterintuitive result, one must first get rid of false leads -- just as in a detective story.
The misleading argument here is the oft-quoted statement that the climate warmed by 1
F (0.6 C) in the last 100 years -- and that sea level rose by 18 cm. Both parts of the
statement are true; but the second part does not necessarily follow from the first. Two
clues The first clue that there might be something amiss with the IPCC logic comes from
the IPCC report itself. According to this authoritative source, the contribution to SLR of
the past century comes mainly from three sources: (i) thermal expansion of the warming
ocean contributed about 4 cm; (ii) the melting of continental glaciers about 3.5 cm. [Note
that the melting of floating sea ice does not raise SL] (iii) the polar regions, on the other
hand, produced a slight net lowering of sea level, with most of it coming from the
Antarctic [IPCC 1996; Table 7.3]. (The mechanism is intuitively easy to understand but
difficult to calculate: A warming ocean evaporates more water, and some of it rains out in
the Polar Regions, thus transferring water from the ocean into snow and ice at the polar
ice caps.) The major new result here is that when one simply adds up all these estimated
contributions (neglecting the large uncertainties), they account for only about 20 percent
of the observed rise of 18 cm. The temperature rise since 1900 cannot account for the
observed SLR. Something is missing here. An additional fact is discussed in detail in my
1997 book "Hot Talk, Cold Science" (Independent Institute, 1997). During the strong
warming of 1920-1940 there was no SLR -- indicating a rough balance between the
opposing effects. In fact, scrutinizing the record, I can even discern a slight lowering of
sea level, an over-compensation. Unfortunately, back then in 1997 we had no data on
Antarctic ice accumulation; so the hypothesis was not publishable. However, now we do
have sufficient data in support of such a scenario. But if, as surmised, ice accumulation
roughly balances ocean thermal expansion and contributions from melting mountain
glaciers, why then is sea level rising? Another riddle requiring a solution. The relevant
clue comes from corals and from geological observations: It seems that sea level has been
rising for the past centuries at about the same rate as seen by tidal gauges in the last 100
years. In other words, sea level was rising even during the colder Little Ice age, from
about 1400 to 1850 AD. This provides further support for the hypothesis that the
observed global SLR since 1900 is reasonably independent of the observed temperature
rise. [It is also a killing argument against a widely quoted ('semi-empirical') theory that
assumes rate of SLR is proportional to global surface temperature.] The full explanation
to this riddle had been suspected for some time, based on historic data on SLR from
corals (Fairbanks) and ice volume (Shackleton). But the picture was filled in only
recently (Bindschadler 1998) through measurements of the rate of melting of the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), by tracing the millennial-scale shrinking of the WAIS
[Conway et al. 1999]. Note that the WAIS is not floating sea ice; like a mountain glacier,
its melting contributes more water to the ocean, thus raising the global sea level. We can
therefore describe the broad scenario as follows: The strong temperature increase that
followed the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) about 18,000 years ago has melted enough
ice to raise sea level by 120 meters (400 feet). The rate of rise was quite rapid at first and
controlled by the melting of the huge ice sheets covering North America and the
Eurasian land mass. These disappeared about 8000-5000 years ago; but then, as sea
level rose, the WAIS continued to melt, albeit at a much lower rate -- and it is still
melting at about this rate today. The principal conclusion is that this melting (and
corresponding SLR of about 18 cm [7 inches] per century) will continue for another
several millennia, until the WAIS is all gone -- unless another ice age takes over. And
there is nothing that we can do to stop this future sea level rise! It is as
inevitable as the ocean tides. Fortunately, coral reefs will continue to grow, as they
have in the past, to keep up with SLR. The rest of us will just have to adapt to future SLR,
as our ancestors did some10,000 years ago. At least we are better equipped with
technology to deal with such environmental changes. Anthropogenic Global Warming
(AGW) may not affect SLR A final note: What about the effects of human-induced global
warming on SLR? Will it really increase the rate above its natural value, as predicted by
the IPCC? We do have a handle on this question by observing what happened when the
climate warmed suddenly between 1920 and 1940, before cooling between 1940 and
1975. The answer is quite surprising and could not have been derived from theory or
from mathematical models. The data show that SLR slowed down slightly when the
climate warmed and accelerated when the climate cooled. Evidently, ocean-water
thermal expansion and mountain-glacier melting were less important than ice
accumulation on the Antarctic continent (which would of course act to lower sea level).
By analogy, a warming produced by an increase in greenhouse gases should give the
same result: i.e., reduce the rate of rise of sea level. This is not a policy recommendation
that burning more coal might save Venice from drowning. It is a modest appeal to
politicians to take note of scientific developments and to make the necessary corrections
to the course of negotiations now underway.
Sea level rise is absurd science logic flows neg
Contescu 12 Professor Emeritus of Geology and Geography at Roosevelt University,
Ph.D. (Lorin, "600 MILION YEARS OF CLIMATE CHANGE; A CRITIQUE OF THE
ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING HYPOTESIS FROM A TIME-SPACE
PERSPECTIVE, Geo-Eco-Marina, 2012, Issue 18, pgs. 5-25, peer reviewed, Proquest,
RSpec)
Here again, several feedback phenomena must be considered. If the global temperature
will continue to rise, more sea water will evaporate, lowering the sea level, while
the same rise will produce a heat-induced expansion of ocean. So far it is not realistically
possible to estimate which phenomenon will prevail. It is quite possible that they will
each other cancel out. And the process of latent heat of evaporation, which is a
cooling process, will also come into play. Moreover, continuous evaporation will produce
clouds, which might or might not be positive feedbacks depending on their make-up and
their altitude. A consequence of cloud formation will eventually be precipitation which in
the polar areas will take the form of snow. It is important to take into consideration that
an opposite phenomena is still taking place. It is the isostatic rebound of the land,
which results from the melting ice from both ice caps, but especially from the Arctic one.
The weight of this enormous volume of melting ice has depressed the Earth's crust by
700-800 meters. Once the ice weight is removed, the crust is rebounding to reach its
normal isostatic level. Such isostatic adjustment will simultaneously lower the water
level, especially in the northern hemisphere.
No impact and adaptation
Agerup, 3 - Bachelor of Science in economics from Exeter (Martin, Adapt or Die p.
86-7 2003)//gingE
The IPCC expects sea levels to rise 988 cm by 2100 a wide-ranging figure, and, given
scientific uncertainties, the high figure should be taken with a pinch of salt. Even if sea
levels were to rise by as much as a metre, it would be a minor problem. In some parts of
the world, people would have to adapt to avoid flooding. The IPCC predicts that damage
to infrastructure in coastal areas would costs tens of billions of dollars. However, these
estimates are based on the rather absurd assumption that people and countries will just
idly sit by and watch. Instead countries would act to protect coastal areas just as the
people of Holland have done for centuries. This adaptation can be done with relatively
low costs. The IPCC estimates that for most countries the costs of protection are in the
region of 0.1% of GDP. The US Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the
cost of coastal protection against a whopping 1-metre rise in sea level would be just 1.5%
of one years GDP at current levels of output. Since sea levels rise gradually, the
investment could be spread out over 50 to 100 years. On top of that, most of the
investment would take place in a future where the US GDP would be anywhere from five
to ten times higher than the present. In other words, even a 1-metre sea level rise would
have little impact on human welfare, even if developed countries were to finance all
adaptive measures in developing countries.
Impact is exaggerated
Idso and Idso 07 Research Physicist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
Agricultural Research Service; Keith, Vice President of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change with a PhD in Botany; and Craig, former Director of
Environmental Science at Peabody Energy in St. Louis, Missouri and is a member of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union,
American Meteorological Society, Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences, Association of
American Geographers, Ecological Society of America [Separating Scientific Fact from
Personal Opinion A critique of the 26 April 2007 testimony of James E. Hansen made to
the Select Committee of Energy Independence and Global Warming of the United States
House of Representatives entitled "Dangerous Human-Made Interference with Climate
http://co2science.org/education/reports/hansen/hansencritique.php]

A good perspective on this issue is provided in the 16 March 2007 issue of
Science by Shepherd and Wingham (2007), who review what is known about
sea-level contributions arising from wastage of the Antarctic and Greenland
Ice Sheets, focusing on the results of 14 different satellite-based estimates of
the imbalances of the polar ice sheets that have been derived since 1998.
These studies have been of three major types - standard mass budget analyses, altimetry
measurements of ice-sheet volume changes, and measurements of the ice sheets'
changing gravitational attraction - and they have yielded a diversity of values, ranging
from an implied sea-level rise of 1.0 mm/year to a sea-level fall of 0.15 mm/year. Based
on their evaluation of these diverse findings, the two researchers come to the conclusion
that the current "best estimate" of the contribution of polar ice wastage to global sea level
change is a rise of 0.35 millimeters per year, which over a century amounts to only 35
millimeters, or less than an inch and a half. Yet even this small sea level rise may be
unrealistically large, for although two of Greenland's biggest outlet glaciers doubled their
mass-loss rates in 2004, causing many to claim that the Greenland Ice Sheet was
responding more rapidly to global warming than expected, Howat et al. (2007) report
that the glaciers' mass-loss rates "decreased in 2006 to near the previous rates." And
these observations, in their words, "suggest that special care must be taken
in how mass-balance estimates are evaluated, particularly when
extrapolating into the future, because short-term spikes could yield
erroneous long-term trends."


Tsunamis
No impact
No impact and status quo solves sediment differences prevent large-scale
tsunamis and current seismological studies solve preparedness
Berardelli, 7/8/10 contributing author of Science Magazines State of the Planet
2008 2009 (Berardelli, Cracking the Tsunami Code, Science Magazine,
http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/07/cracking-tsunami-code)//IS
It's a tale of two earthquakes. One, the second-biggest ever recorded, ripped the seafloor
just west of Sumatra, Indonesia, in December 2004 and unleashed a tsunami that caused
destruction across the entire Indian Ocean basin. The other, nearly as large, struck the
same general area 3 months later but caused only a localized tsunami and much less
coastal devastation. Published tomorrow in Science, an international team reports
finding what could be the critical difference between these disasters: the density of the
sedimentary rock overlying the quake zone. Measuring that variable in other,
geologically similar areas prone to major earthquakes could give seismologists and
emergency planners a better understanding of where to expect the worst.


Squo Solves
Status quo solves new tech
China Post, 12/13/13 (NCKU develops tsunami warning system, The China Post,
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/local/tainan/2013/12/13/395832/NCKU-
develops.htm)//IS
TAIPEI -- A research team at Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University said Thursday it
is developing a warning system that it believes can provide much needed warning time in
the event of a tsunami by monitoring ionospheric disturbances. The system is being
developed by a team led by Charles Lin, an associate professor at the university's
Department of Earth Sciences. Using a network of GPS receivers, the system can monitor
changes in the ionosphere caused by corresponding disturbances on the surface of the
Earth such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Early warning is possible because disturbances
in the iononsphere travel much faster than tsunamis. Ionosphere is a layer of electrons
and ion particles that surrounds the Earth, stretching from an altitude of about 100
kilometers to 800 km, the team said.

Volcanoes
Volcanoes defense
No impact to volcanoes Yellowstone proves and science checks
Patterson 11 - storm chaser, photographer/videographer, veteran, world traveler and a
news reporter (Christian, Yellowstone volcano not likely to erupt soon, 3-20-11,
Sundial, http://sundial.csun.edu/2011/03/yellowstone-volcano-not-likely-to-erupt-
soon/) //AD
*s/o to Kirby for cite

Natural disasters such as the volcano erupting in Hawaii and the earthquake in Japan
seem to be increasing in occurance, causing some to believe catastrophe is just around
the corner.
One such disaster some people are concerned about is the eruption of a supervolcano
called the Yellowstone Caldera located beneath Yellowstone National Park. This calamity
is as probable as an asteroid over two miles wide crashing into us. Therefore, panic is not
necessary.
First of all, there is a difference between a volcano and a supervolcano. The main
distinction is the amount of magma that would flow out of the earth. According to the
United States Geological Survey, if a volcano erupts more than 240 cubic miles of lava
engulfing the surrounding area, its a super volcano.
Add to this a volcanic feature called a caldera, which then makes the volcano one of the
most dangerous on earth. Calderas resemble an inverted volcano and have magma
chambers under so much pressure from built-up gases that cracked rings form toward
the exterior of the volcano. When an eruption occurs, large pyroclastic clouds relieve
pressure beneath the magma chamber and once all initial pressure is exerted, the
chamber collapses and the magma rises upward.
Volcanic experts say the Yellowstone Caldera is one of the largest on the planet. Other
large calderas also considered to be supervolcanoes exist in Long Valley, California,
Taupo, New Zealand and Toba, Indonesia.
Attention had not been fully given to this situation until the BBC and the Discovery
Channel aired a docudrama in 2005 about what could happen if the Yellowstone Caldera
blew. It explained how the last major eruption there happened about 630,000 years ago
and emphasized that we are long overdue.
The United States Geological Survey responded to the program saying the facts and
future projections were accurate. However, an eruption of magnitude 8 or greater is
highly improbable in our lifetime or even the next five to 10 generations.
Many people feed off chaos and negative events and the makers of this docudrama
tapped into this in an effort to increase ratings and make money. It definitely preys on
this fear to get us to wake up and pay attention, even when immediate action is not
necessary.
Yellowstone National Park is surrounded by seismometers and observed from space by
GPS satellite. Using these instruments, scientists are able to monitor earthquake activity
and any other movement of the ground enabling authorities to issue warnings when an
eruption is imminent.
A sudden explosion without any forewarning is almost impossible. When a volcano
erupts, certain changes occur around it, whether its gas emissions, frequent quakes or
changes in mountain size.

Humans can survive new initiatives are key to check extinction
Britt 05 - writer, editor and Director of Site Operations at SPACE.com, Managing
Editor of LiveScience, journalism degree from Humboldt State University in California
(Robert Roy, Super Volcano Will Challenge Civilization, Geologists Warn, LiveScience,
3-8-05, http://www.livescience.com/200-super-volcano-challenge-civilization-
geologists-warn.html) //AD
*s/o to Kirby for cite

The odds of a globally destructive volcano explosion in any given century are extremely
low, and no scientist can say when the next one will occur. But the chances are five to 10
times greater than a globally destructive asteroid impact, according to the new British
report.
The next super eruption, whenever it occurs, might not be the first one humans have
dealt with.
About 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba blew with a force
estimated at 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens. Ash darkened the sky all around the
planet. Temperatures plummeted by up to 21 degrees at higher latitudes, according to
research by Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.
Rampino has estimated three-quarters of the plant species in the Northern Hemisphere
perished.
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that
Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints
of life for all humans -- DNA -- are remarkably similar given that our species branched
off from the rest of the primate family tree a few million years ago
Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to the edge of extinction after the
Toba eruption -- around the same time folks got serious about art and tool making.
Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these
few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years.
Based on the latest evidence, eruptions the size of the giant Yellowstone and Toba events
occur at least every 100,000 years, Sparks said, "and it could be as high as every 50,000
years. There are smaller but nevertheless huge eruptions which would have continental
to global consequences every 5,000 years or so."
Unlike other threats to mankind -- asteroids, nuclear attacks and global warming to
name a few -- there's little to be done about a super volcano.
"While it may in future be possible to deflect asteroids or somehow avoid their impact,
even science fiction cannot produce a credible mechanism for averting a super eruption,"
the new report states. "No strategies can be envisaged for reducing the power of major
volcanic eruptions."
The Geological Society of London has issued similar warnings going back to 2000. The
scientists this week called for more funding to investigate further the history of super
eruptions and their likely effects on the planet and on modern society.
"Sooner or later a super eruption will happen on Earth and this issue also demands
serious attention," the report concludes.


Warming
Warming is slowing down most recent data proves
Rogers, 2014 President and co-founder of the Commodity Weather Group
[Matt, Meteorologist and President of the Commodity Weather Group, Global warming
of the Earths surface has decelerated, Washington Post, June 20 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/06/20/global-
warming-of-the-earths-surface-has-decelerated-viewpoint/, Jun 30 2014] LS
The recently-released National Climate Assessment (NCA) from the U.S. government
offers considerable cause for concern for climate calamity, but downplays the
decelerating trend in global surface temperature in the 2000s, which I document here.
Many climate scientists are currently working to figure out what is causing the
slowdown, because if it continues, it calls into question the legitimacy of many climate
model projections (and inversely offer some good news for our planet). An article in
Nature earlier this year discusses some of the possible causes for what some have to
referred to as the global warming pause or hiatus. Explanations include the quietest
solar cycle in over a hundred years, increases in Asian pollution, more effective oceanic
heat absorption, and even volcanic activity. Indeed, a peer-reviewed paper published in
February estimates that about 15 percent of the pause can be attributed to increased
volcanism. But some have questioned whether the pause or deceleration is even
occurring at all. Verifying the pause You can see the pause (or deceleration in warming)
yourself by simply grabbing the freely available data from NASA and NOAA. For the
chart below, I took the annual global temperature difference from average (or anomaly)
and calculated the change from the prior year. So the very first data point is the change
from 2000 to 2001 and so on. One sign of data validation is that the trends are the same
on both datasets. Both of these government sources show a slight downward slope since
2000:
Global Temperatures decreasing NOAA data shows
Rogers, 2014 President and co-founder of the Commodity Weather Group
[Matt, Meteorologist and President of the Commodity Weather Group, Global warming
of the Earths surface has decelerated, Washington Post, June 20 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/06/20/global-
warming-of-the-earths-surface-has-decelerated-viewpoint/, Jun 30 2014] LS
You can see some of the spikes associated with El Nio events (when heat was released
into the atmosphere from warmer than normal ocean temperatures in the tropical
Pacific) that occurred in 2004-05 and 2009-10. But the warm changes have generally
been decreasing while cool changes have grown. To be sure, both sets of data points
show an mean annual change of +0.01C during the 2000s. But, if current trends
continue for just a few more years, then the mean change for the 2000s will shift to
negative; in other words, the warming would really stop. The current +.01C mean
increase in temperatures is insufficient to verify the climate change projections for major
warming (even the low end +1-2C) by mid-to-late century. A peer reviewed study in
Nature Climate Change published in 2013 drew the same conclusion: Recent observed
global warming is significantly less than that simulated by climate models, it says.
Current slowdown will last
Rogers, 2014 President and co-founder of the Commodity Weather Group
[Matt, Meteorologist and President of the Commodity Weather Group, Global warming
of the Earths surface has decelerated, Washington Post, June 20 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/06/20/global-
warming-of-the-earths-surface-has-decelerated-viewpoint/, Jun 30 2014] LS
The main point here is that yes, we are indeed seeing this slowdown, it is real, but it is
only temporary. The recently-released NCA acknowledges the slowdown in Appendix 3
and even shows a chart of it (see below). However, it notes that these periods are
temporary, driven by natural variability-induced modifications to the climate system
(factors such as the El Nio-La Nia cycles). All of this may indeed be true, but note that
the current pause is longer than prior ones indicated on the chart, so again, the question
becomes (and they dont answer this) how long is too long? You can even see their red
line outlining the latest pause on the right side of the chart, but not extending to include
the last three years which look even longer than its predecessors.

Even rapid intervals of extreme warming dont cause extinction the fossil
record clearly disproves any existential impact
Willis et. al, 10[Kathy J. Willis, Keith D. Bennett, Shonil A. Bhagwat& H. John B.
Birks (2010): 4 C and beyond: what did this mean for biodiversity in the past?,
Systematics and Biodiversity, 8:1, 3-9,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14772000903495833, ]
The most recent climate models and fossil evidence for the early Eocene Climatic
Optimum (5351 million years ago) indicate that during this time interval atmospheric
CO2 would have exceeded 1200ppmv and tropical temperatures were between 510 C
warmer than modern values (Zachos et al., 2008). There is also evidence for relatively
rapid intervals of extreme global warmth and massive carbon addition when global
temperatures increased by 5 C in less than 10 000 years (Zachos et al., 2001). So what
was the response of biota to these climate extremes and do we see the large-scale
extinctions (especially in the Neotropics) predicted by some of the most recent models
associated with future climate changes (Huntingford et al., 2008)? In fact the fossil
record for the early Eocene Climatic Optimum demonstrates the very opposite.
All the evidence from low-latitude records indicates that, at least in the plant fossil
record, this was one of the most biodiverse intervals of time in the Neotropics(Jaramillo
et al., 2006). It was also a time when the tropical forest biome was the most extensive in
Earths history, extending to mid-latitudes in both the northern and southern
hemispheres and there was also no ice at the Poles and Antarctica was covered by
needle-leaved forest (Morley, 2007). There were certainly novel ecosystems, and an
increase in community turnover with a mixture of tropical and temperate species in mid
latitudes and plants persisting in areas that are currently polar deserts. [It should be
noted; however, that at the earlier PalaeoceneEocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at
55.8 million years ago in the US Gulf Coast, there was a rapid vegetation response to
climate change. There was major compositional turnover, palynological richness
decreased, and regional extinctions occurred (Harrington & Jaramillo, 2007). Reasons
for these changes are unclear, but they may have resulted from continental drying,
negative feedbacks on vegetation to changing CO2 (assuming that CO2 changed during
the PETM), rapid cooling immediately after the PETM, or subtle changes in plant
animal interactions (Harrington & Jaramillo, 2007).]
Warming not real-their authors have a political agenda and skew data -
temperatures havent increased in 15 years
Chasmar 14 2/26/14 (Jessica Chasmar, Patrick Moore-PhD in ecology British
Columbia, Greenpeace co-founder says no scientific proof humans cause climate
change, Washington times,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/26/greenpeace-co-founder-says-no-
scientific-proof-hum/)//JL
A co-founder of Greenpeace told a Senate panel on Tuesday that there is no scientific
evidence to back claims that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. Patrick
Moore, a Canadian ecologist who was a member of Greenpeace from 1971-86, told
members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee environmental
groups like Greenpeace use faulty computer models and scare tactics in further
promoting a political agenda, Fox News reported. There is no scientific proof that
human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming
of the Earths atmosphere over the past 100 years, Mr. Moore said. Today, we live in an
unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that
a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of
other species. It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a [two
degrees Celsius] rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species,
he continued. We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not
exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.
The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2
emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the
certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming, he
said. Mr. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986, accusing the organization of political activism.
After 15 years in the top committee I had to leave as Greenpeace took a sharp turn to the
political left, and began to adopt policies that I could not accept from my scientific
perspective, he said. Climate change was not an issue when I abandoned Greenpeace,
but it certainly is now. A United Nations report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change released in September indicated that global surface temperatures had
not increased for the past 15 years.

Global warming is a fallacy prefer newer, qualified, and unbiased studies
Bast et al, 14
(Joseph, president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, Global Warming: Not a Crisis,
http://heartland.org/ideas/global-warming-not-crisis, nd 2014, ak.)We do endorse the
gendered language in this card
Isnt There a Consensus? Science doesnt advance by consensus. A single scientist or
study can disprove a theory that is embraced by the vast majority of scientists. The
search for a consensus is actually part of what philosophers call post-normal science,
which isnt really science at all. Still, many people ask: What do scientists believe? Most
surveys cited by those who claim there is a consensus ask questions that are too vague to
settle the matter. It is important to distinguish between the statement that global
warming is a crisis and the similar-sounding but very different statements that the
climate is changing and that there is a human impact on climate. Climate is always
changing, and every scientist knows this. Our emissions and alterations of the landscape
are surely having impacts on climate, though they are often local or regional (like heat
islands) and small relative to natural variation. There is plenty of evidence that there is
no scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and dangerous. The multi-
volume Climate Change Reconsidered series cites thousands of articles appearing in
peer-reviewed journals that challenge the basic underlying assumptions of AGW
(Climate Change Reconsidered 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014). More than 30,000
scientists have signed a petition saying there is no threat that man-made global warming
will pose a threat to humanity or nature (Petition Project). Alarmists often cite an essay
by Naomi Oreskes claiming to show that virtually all articles about global warming in
peer-reviewed journals support the so-called consensus. But a no-less-rigorous study by
Benny Peiser that attempted to replicate her results searched the abstracts of 1,117
scientific journal articles on global climate change and found only 13 (1 percent)
explicitly endorse the consensus view while 34 reject or cast doubt on the view that
human activity has been the main driver of warming over the past 50 years. A more
recent search by Klaus-Martin Schulte of 928 scientific papers published from 2004 to
February 2007 found fewer than half explicitly or implicitly endorse the so-called
consensus and only 7 percent do so explicitly (Schulte, 2008). A survey that is frequently
cited as showing consensus actually proves just the opposite. German scientists Dennis
Bray and Hans von Storch have surveyed climate scientists three times, in 1996, 2003,
and 2007 (Bray and von Storch, 2010). Their latest survey found most of these scientists
say they believe global warming is man-made and is a serious problem, but most of these
same scientists do not believe climate science is sufficiently advanced to predict future
climate conditions. For two-thirds of the science questions asked, scientific opinion is
deeply divided, and in half of those cases, most scientists disagree with positions that are
at the foundation of the alarmist case (Bast, 2011). On August 2, 2011, von Storch posted
the following comment on a blog: From our own observations of discussions among
climate scientists we also find hardly consensus [sic] on many other issues, ranging from
changing hurricane statistics to the speed of melting Greenland and Antarctica,
spreading of diseases and causing mass migration and wars (von Storch, 2011). These
are not minor issues. Extreme weather events, melting ice, and the spread of disease are
all major talking points for Al Gore and other alarmists in the climate debate. If there is
no consensus on these matters, then skeptics are right to ask why we should believe
global warming is a crisis. Cognitive Dissonance? How can scientists say they believe
global warming is a problem, but at the same time not believe there is sufficient scientific
evidence to predict future climate conditions?
No impact warming will take centuries and adaptation solves
Mendelsohn 9Robert O. Mendelsohn 9, the Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, Yale
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, June 2009, Climate
Change and Economic Growth, online:
http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcwp060web.pdf
These statements are largely alarmist and misleading. Although climate change
is a serious problem that deserves attention, societys immediate behavior has an
extremely low probability of leading to catastrophic consequences. The
science and economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the
next few decades will lead to only mild consequences. The severe impacts
predicted by alarmists require a century (or two in the case of Stern 2006) of no
mitigation. Many of the predicted impacts assume there will be no or little
adaptation. The net economic impacts from climate change over the next 50 years will
be small regardless. Most of the more severe impacts will take more than a
century or even a millennium to unfold and many of these potential
impacts will never occur because people will adapt. It is not at all apparent
that immediate and dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart long
range climate risks. What is needed are longrun balanced responses.
Were already past the tipping point
Guterl 9 Fred Guterl 9, Executive Editor of Scientific American, Will Climate Go Over
The Edge?, 2009 http://www.newsweek.com/id/185822
Since the real world is so messy, climate scientists Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker
turned for insight to the distinctly neater world of mathematics. Last year, they
published an analysis in the journal Science arguing that climate models
were skewed in the direction of underestimating the warming effect of
carbon. The report reasoned that carbon emissions have the potential to trigger
many changes that amplify the warming effectwater absorbs more sunlight than ice,
humidity traps more heat, and so onbut few that would mitigate it. The odds, they
figure, are about one in three that temperatures will rise by 4.5 degrees C (the top of
the IPCC's range), but there's little chance at all that they'll rise by less than 2
degrees C. "We've had a hard time eliminating the possibility of very large
climate changes," says Roe. The answer is still couched in probabilities, but they've
shifted in a worrying direction. What can be done? Can a diplomatic miracle in
Copenhagen save the planet from the dreaded tipping point? Sea ice in the Antarctic
was supposed to last for 5,000 years until scientists found that the melting was
proceeding at a faster pace than expected. Now it will all be gone in a mere 850 years.
Bringing it back would require something like 10,000 years of cooler temperatures.
Is there any way to halt the process before it goes too far? No, says Susan
Solomon, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration in Boulder, Colorado. In a recent study in the Proceedings of the
National Academies of Science, she found that most of the carbon we've already
released into the atmosphere will hang around for another 1,000 years.
Even if world leaders somehow managed to persuade everybody to stop
driving cars and heating their homesbringing carbon emissions down to zero
immediatelythe Earth would continue to warm for centuries. The effect
of rising temperatures on rainfall patterns is also irreversible, says Solomon.
Parts of the world that tend to be dry (Mexico, north Africa, southern Europe and the
western parts of Australia and the United States) will continue to get drier, while wet
areas (the South Pacific islands, the horn of Africa) will keep getting wetter. "You
have to think of it as being like a dial that can only turn one way," she says.
"We've cranked up the dial, and we don't get to crank it back." The point of
a climate treaty, then, isn't so much to roll things back as to keep them from getting a
whole lot worsea worthy and important goal, if not a particularly inspiring one.
Warming inevitable even if we cut emissions to zeromultiple studies
confirm
Gillett et al 10director @ the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis
[Nathan, Ongoing climate change following a complete cessation of carbon dioxide
emissions. Nature Geoscience]
Several recent studies have demonstrated that CO2-induced 17 global mean temperature
change is irreversible on human 18 timescales1_5. We find that not only is this climate
change 19 irreversible, but that for some climate variables, such as Antarctic 20
temperature and North African rainfall, CO2-induced climate 21 changes are simulated
to continue to worsen for many centuries 22 even after a complete cessation of
emissions. Although it is 23 also well known that a large committed thermosteric sea
level 24 rise is expected even after a cessation of emissions in 2100, 25 our finding of a
strong delayed high-latitude Southern Ocean 26 warming at intermediate depths
suggests that this effect may be 27 compounded by ice shelf collapse, grounding line
retreat, and ensuing accelerated ice discharge in marine-based sectors of the 28
Antarctic ice sheet, precipitating a sea level rise of several metres. 29 Quantitative results
presented here are subject to uncertainties 30 associated with the climate sensitivity, the
rate of ocean heat 31 uptake and the rate of carbon uptake in CanESM1, but our 32
findings of Northern Hemisphere cooling, Southern Hemisphere 33 warming, a
southward shift of the intertropical convergence zone, 34 and delayed and ongoing ocean
warming at intermediate depths 35 following a cessation of emissions are likely to be
robust. Geo- 36 engineering by stratospheric aerosol injection has been proposed 37 as a
response measure in the event of a rapid melting of the 38 West Antarctic ice sheet24.
Our results indicate that if such a 39 melting were driven by ocean warming at
intermediate depths, as 40 is thought likely, a geoengineering response would be
ineffective 41 for several centuries owing to the long delay associated with 42 subsurface
ocean warming.

No modeling in China its structurally impossible
Downs 8 Eric, Fellow @ Brookings, China Energy Fellow, Foreign Policy, John L.
Thornton China Center U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, Chinas
Energy Policies and Their Environmental Impacts,
http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2008/0813_china_downs.aspx
China suffers from a disconnect between the increasingly prominent position of energy
issues on its domestic and foreign policy agendas and the capacity of the countrys
institutions to manage the energy sector. Some Chinese commentators have even argued
that the biggest threat to Chinas energy security is posed by the very institutions
responsible for enhancing it. Consequently, restructuring Chinas energy policymaking
apparatus has been a subject of intense debate in recent years as the country has
grappled with an unexpected surge in energy demand, growing dependence on energy
imports, rising global energy prices and periodic domestic energy supply shortages.
Authority over Chinas energy sector at the national level is fractured among more than a
dozen government agencies, the most important of which is the National Development
and Reform Commission (NDRC). Within the NDRC itself, responsibility for energy is
similarly scattered among multiple departments. Prior to the restructuring in March
2008, the key component was the Energy Bureau, which had a broad mandate but lacked
the authority, tools and manpower to fulfill it. In 2005, the government added another
cook to the kitchen with the establishment of the National Energy Leading Group, an
advisory body headed by Premier Wen Jiabao. While the leading groups creation
reflected recognition of the need to strengthen energy sector management, it did not
eradicate Chinas energy governance woes. Chinas fragmented energy policymaking
structure has impeded energy governance because there is no single institution, such as a
Ministry of Energy, with the authority to coordinate the interests of the various
stakeholders. For example, the implementation of energy laws is hampered by the fact
that those laws often do not specify the government agencies responsible for
implementation because of disputes over who should be in charge. Similarly, the fuel tax
that the NPC approved in 1999 has not been implemented because of the failure of the
relevant stakeholders to reach an agreement. The policy paralysis within the energy
bureaucracy stands in sharp contrast to the activism of Chinas state-owned energy
companies. These firms are powerful and relatively autonomous actors. Their influence
is derived from their full and vice ministerial ranks, the membership of some top
executives in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, industry expertise,
internationally listed subsidiaries and profitability (at least until recently). More often
than not, it is Chinas energy firms who initiate major energy projects and policies that
are later embraced by the government, such as the West-East Pipeline and the
acquisition of foreign energy assets. The companies also have some capacity to advance
corporate interests at the expense of national ones. For example, oil and power
generating companies have periodically reduced their output to pressure the government
to raise the state-set prices of refined products and electricity, which have not kept pace
with increases in the market-determined prices of crude oil and coal. Similarly, Chinas
national oil companies have ignored guidance from the central government about where
they should invest overseas. II. Chinas new energy policymaking structure The recent
changes to Chinas energy policymaking apparatus are the latest in a series of
institutional reforms aimed at improving energy governance. In March 2008, the NPC
approved two additions to Chinas energy bureaucracy the State Energy Commission
(SEC) and the National Energy Administration (NEA). The SEC, a high-level discussion
and coordination body whose specific functions, organization and staffing have not yet
been determined, will replace the National Energy Leading Group. The daily affairs of
the SEC will be handled by the NEA, a vice-ministerial component of the NDRC, which is
the successor to the NDRCs Energy Bureau. In addition to the Energy Bureau, the NEA
is also comprised of other energy offices from the NDRC, the Office of the National
Leading Group, and the nuclear power administration of the Commission of Science,
Technology and Industry for National Defense. The NEA has a broad mandate, which
includes managing the countrys energy industries, drafting energy plans and policies,
negotiating with international energy agencies and approving foreign energy
investments. The NEA, like its predecessor, will struggle to fulfill its mandate because it
lacks the authority, autonomy, manpower and tools to deal with the countrys energy
challenges. Although the NEAs capabilities in each of these areas are greater than those
possessed by the NDRC Energy Bureau, they still fall short of what the NEA needs to do
its job. Authority: The NEA has more political clout than its predecessor, but not enough
to mitigate the bureaucratic infighting that undermines energy decision-making. The
NEA is a vice-ministerial body, which is a step above that of the Energy Bureau, which
was a bureau-level organization. However, the NEA still does not have the authority it
needs to coordinate the interests of ministries, commissions and state-owned energy
companies. One of the frustrations of officials in the NDRC Energy Bureau was that the
energy companies often undercut their authority by circumventing the Bureau to hold
face-to-face discussions with Chinas senior leadership. The authority of the NEA is
somewhat enhanced by the appointment of Zhang Guobao, a Vice-Chairman of the
NDRC with full ministerial rank, as head of the NEA. While it was widely expected that
Zhang would retire, his new position is a reflection of his substantial energy expertise.
Zhang, who has worked at the NDRC since 1983, is a smart and skillful bureaucrat with
encyclopedic knowledge of Chinas energy sector. He has overseen the development of
some of the countrys major infrastructure projects, including the West-East Pipeline,
the transmission of electricity from west to east, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway and the
expansion of Beijing Capital International Airport. Autonomy: The NEA is a creature of
the NDRC. Some Chinese media reports speculated that the fact that the NEAs offices
will be separate from those of the NDRC and that the NEA will have its own Party Group
which will give the NEA greater autonomy in managing its affairs, including personnel
decisions are signs of the NEAs independence. However, the fact that Zhang Guobao
an NDRC lifer is head of the NEA and its Party Group indicates that the NEAs room
to maneuver will be constrained by the NDRC. Moreover, the NEAs independence is
limited by the fact that key tools it needs to effectively manage the energy sector are in
the hands of the NDRC. Tools: Arguably the greatest constraint on the NEAs ability to
fulfill its mandate is the fact that is does not possess the authority to set energy prices,
which remain the purview of the NDRCs Pricing Department. The issue of who would
end up with the power to determine energy prices was, in the words of Zhang Guobao, a
subject of constant dispute during the bureaucratic reorganization. Although the NEA
can make suggestions about energy price adjustments and should be consulted by the
NDRC on any proposed changes, the shots are still being called by the NDRC (and
ultimately the State Council, whose approval is needed for any major energy price
changes). The fact that the NDRC retained control over energy prices is hardly
surprising. The power to set prices is one of the NDRCs main instruments of
macroeconomic control, which it understandably is reluctant to relinquish, especially to
a subordinate component which might be tempted to adjust energy prices in ways that
run counter to broader NDRC objectives, such as combating inflation. The NEAs lack of
authority over energy prices makes its task of mitigating the current electricity shortages,
which are partly rooted in price controls, especially challenging. Electricity prices are set
by the state, while coal prices are determined by the market. The failure of electricity
price increases to keep pace with soaring coal prices has contributed to the national
power shortage because some electricity producers can't afford coal while others are
unwilling to operate at a loss. With no pricing power, the NEA has little choice but to
resort to administrative measures to achieve an objective that would be more effectively
realized by raising and ultimately liberalizing electricity prices. Personnel: The central
government is still managing the energy sector with a skeleton crew. Contrary to rumors
that the NEAs staff would be as large as 200, it ended up with just 112 people. This staff
quota is certainly larger than that of the NDRC Energy Bureau, which had only 50
people, but it does not represent a major increase in the number of people directly
involved in managing the energy sector at the national level. Moreover, some Chinese
media reports have speculated that the NEA may face the problem of too many generals
and not enough soldiers because at least half of the 112 slots at the NEA are for positions
at the deputy department head level and above. The Party organ that determines the
functions, internal structure and staff quotas for government institutions probably
resisted calls for more personnel out of concern that if it approved a large staff for the
NEA, then other government bodies would also press for more manpower at a time when
the State Council is trying to streamline the bureaucracy. In sum, Chinas new energy
administration is unlikely to substantially improve energy governance. The
organizational changes are tantamount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Although the energy bureaucracy looks a bit different, its limited capacities remain
largely unchanged. Consequently, we can expect to see a continuation of business as
usual: conflicts of interest will impede decision-making; the energy companies will
remain important drivers of projects and policies; state-set energy prices will continue to
contribute to periodic domestic energy supply shortfalls; and the NEA, with no authority
to adjust energy prices, probably will resort to second best administrative measures to
try to eradicate those shortages. The modest tinkering to Chinas energy policymaking
apparatus unveiled during the March 2008 NPC meeting reflects the conflicts of interest
that stymie energy decision-making. Despite widespread recognition among Chinese
officials and energy experts of the need to get the countrys energy institutions right
and the growing chorus of voices calling for the establishment of a Ministry of Energy
(MOE), there are powerful ministerial and corporate interests that favor the status quo.
The opposition to the creation of a MOE, a hot topic of debate in Chinese energy circles
in recent years, was led by the NDRC and the state-owned energy companies. The mere
specter of a MOE strikes fear in the heart of the NDRC because it would deprive the
NDRC of a substantial portion of its portfolio and important tools of macroeconomic
control. The NDRCs aversion is shared by the energy firms who are reluctant to have
another political master and afraid that a MOE would limit their direct access to Chinas
leadership. Such opposition helps explain why the government was unable to forge a
consensus in favor of more robust changes to Chinas energy policymaking apparatus.
Implications for the United States First, US policymakers should recognize that Chinas
fractured energy policymaking apparatus may constrain the Chinese government from
doing all that US policymakers would like it to do and indeed what Chinese leaders
themselves might want to do to enhance international energy security and combat
climate change. If China falls short of our expectations it may not reflect a conscious
decision by Beijing to shirk its global responsibilities but rather the limited capacity of its
national energy institutions to bend other actors, notably firms and local governments,
to its will.


Leadership

Chinese Clean Tech Leadership

Status quo solves Chinese clean tech investment.
WSJ 7/14, (July 14, 2014, The Daily Startup: New Fund Looks to Boost U.S. Clean-
Tech Firms in China, Wall Street Journal,
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/14/the-daily-startup-new-fund-looks-to-
boost-u-s-clean-tech-firms-in-china/)//HH

GSR Ventures has joined with Oak Investment Partners to create a new, independent
fund, G-O Scale Capital, that will invest in clean-technology companiesespecially ones
that can scale in China, Yuliya Chernova reports in VentureWire.
Two other funds that currently invest in clean-tech saw that the best time for investing in
the sector might be now, when much of the risk in some of the technologies has been
taken out, at the same time as valuations cooled. But they didnt get the resources, in
part because many limited partners in U.S. funds were burned by bad returns on clean-
tech deals.
People involved in the new fund say clean-tech investment is rife with opportunities in
China, as the governement there pushes for investment in clean energy.
G-O Scale is seeking to raise $500 million for the new fund.

Status quo solves cleantech.
Anderson 7/18, global marketing director for cleantech at Ernst & Young, (Scott
Edward, July 18, 2014, My Top 5 Reasons Cleantech Is Alive and Well,
http://theenergycollective.com/greenskeptic/433171/my-top-5-reasons-cleantech-alive-
and-well)//HH

Here's My Top 5 reasons cleantech is alive and well:
1.) China. China finally seems poised to address its outrageous pollution problem. The
Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection estimates it will cost China
upwards of $800 billion to clean its air. $800 billion. Cleaning up Beijing alone could
cost as much as $163 billion. And its water doesn't fair much better: seventy percent of
the groundwater in the north China plain is unfit for human contact. Not just
consumption, contact. And only half the water sources for Chinese cities are safe to
drink. The Chinese government says it will commit 1.7 trillion yuan ($277 billion) to
combat air pollution over the next five years, which is a start, but until then we'll keep
seeing scenes like the "LED sunrise" on Tiananmen Square that went viral.
2.) Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. This is a cleantech success story. I don't care
whether Nest Labs ever considered itself a cleantech company since its founding in 2011.
If cleantech is the set of new technologies and business model innovations that help use
natural resources more efficiently, effectively, and responsibly, then Nest, which took a
ubiquitous, yet poorly designed technology (the thermostat), made it smart and fun to
save energy in homes because its cool and easy to use. That is cleantech.
3.) Solar, distributed solar. I know, solar was a dirty word for some investors, including
the American tax payer, who got burned by solar 1.0. But there's a new game in town
now that solar panels are cheap and financing distributed solar has become easier thanks
to innovators like SolarCity, Sungevity, and the like. Installations are on the rise and
investment is pouring back in.
4.) Tesla Model S. Motor Trend Car of the Year. 2014 Detroit News Readers' Choice
Award as North American International Auto Show Most Innovative Vehicle. Yes, D-E-T-
R-O-I-T News. Tesla announced earlier this year it had sold 6,900 of its Model S in the
fourth quarter -- twenty-five percent higher than the previous quarter and roughly
twenty percent more than expected. And they recently announced the Model 3 (formerly,
Model E, but it turns out Ford owned that), which will sell for about $40,000, Tesla is in
line for growth and more growth. That's for a company with $27.25b market cap.
5.) Many more innovations are needed. Energy efficiency, recycling, water use, as well as
purity and scarcity, and food are all ripe for cleantech disruptions, innovations, and
solutions. There are still plenty of opportunities out there for entrepreneurs, investors,
and others to tackle resource scarcity, use, and management. We've only just begun to
address the issues our planet faces. And the need for innovative financing to enable these
solutions is also going to grow. Call it what you will, "cleantech" is going to be a growth
engine for many years to come.
Cleantech isn't dead. It hasn't crashed, it hasn't lost its value, and it has only grown more
important and necessary. Cleantech is alive and well.

Other nations check cleantech leadership
Smead 7/21, staff writer for Energy Digital, cites a report by Cleantech Group, the
World Wildlife Foundation, and The Swedish Angecy for Economic and Regional
Growth, (Kevin, July 21, 2014, Top 10 Countries with Clean Tech Innovation Potential,
http://www.energydigital.com/top10/3458/Top-10-Countries-with-Clean-Tech-
Innovation-Potential)//HH

In a new report out from Cleantech Group, the World Wildlife Foundation, and the The
Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (or Tillvxtverket), 40 countries
were examined for their potential for entrepreneurial clean tech startups. The report
takes a 10-year look down the line and ranks each country on a basis of 15 different
indicators. Lets take a look at the top 10.
10. Ireland
Ireland is a strong contender in the cleantech field, with a lot of its efforts concentrated
on tidal and wave energy. There is also a strong innovating force in the country, with
support from prominent institutions in science and engineering. The growth outlook for
Ireland looks extremely promising.
9. Germany
Germany remains a leader in the renewable energy market and operates one-third of the
worlds installed solar capacity, despite its often cloudy climate. Germany also has long
term goals in massively reducing carbon emissions, though this could lead to
governmental tension with the cleantech industry. Still, the country has a huge amount
of cleantech funds floating around and will likely continue driving innovation in the next
ten years.
8. Switzerland
Despite current weak financial support, Switzerland has extremely high innovation
inputs. The cleantech industry is also driven by Switzerlands high output of
environmental patents and highly-supportive governmental policies. The only downside
for the country is its lack of attractiveness for renewable energy deployments and below-
average commercialized cleantech.
7. Canada
Canadas cleantech industry is currently average, though many innovating factors are in
their early stages, meaning the country could see a big payoff in several years. While
there are plenty willing to innovate in the country, they could be held back by lack of
funding and governmental support. With those things in place, Canada could become a
powerhouse in cleantech innovation.
6. UK
The UK has strong access to cleantech financing and a high innovation input, making it a
strong contender in the green tech innovation field. There is a lack of policy certainty
after 2020, which could be a potential detriment to driving innovation, but that can still
be addressed. The UK also needs a greater commercialization of cleantech innovation.
5. Denmark
Denmark has one of the two highest cleantech budgets on this list, with the other country
being Finland. Relative to the size of its economy, Denmark overwhelmingly invests in
cleantech. Its also looking internationally for partnerships in places such as China. This
is attracting investors both locally and abroad, making Denmarks future a green one.
4. Sweden
Sweden tops the list for innovation drivers, for the country has high innovation inputs
and strong entrepreneurial attitudes. It is also home to quite a few high-impact cleantech
startups. It is also a major consumer of renewable energy. There is still a large gap
between innovation and commercialization, however. This is a positive, really, as it spells
out a large potential for Swedens immediate future.
3. USA
Not surprisingly, the US is noted for its thriving private cleantech sector. Startups are the
biggest driving factor, attracting investments both in the country and internationally.
However, with the lack of clarity from the federal government regarding energy policy,
the future remains somewhat uncertain. There are still quite a few strong green
initiatives, such as the reduction of carbon emissions 30 percent by 3030 and the raising
of fuel emission standards to make the countrys outlook a positive one.
2. Finland
Several factors have made Finland a cleantech powerhouse, such as its lack of fossil fuels
and harsh climate. There is an immediate need to innovate, and plenty of Finnish
companies are up to the task. Cleantech in Finland currently employs 50,000 people,
and the report projects that number will nearly double by 2020.
1. Israel
Israel is considered the definitive cleantech innovation archetype for both embedding
entrepreneurial spirit into its educational system and into its societys everyday norms as
well as for predisposing its start-ups to resource innovationas a survival mechanism to
overcome resource constraints and energy dependency. Given the size of its economy,
Israel has a large amount of cleantech companies and is still growing. There is
overwhelming evidence that it will remain a leader in the cleantech industry in the next
decade.


China Soft Power
China sopo fails
Structural factors ensure Chinese soft power will fail
Keck 13 assistant editor of The Diplomat (Zachary, "Destined To Fail: Chinas Soft
Power Push," The Diplomat, 1-7-13, http://thediplomat.com/2013/01/07/destined-to-
fail-chinas-soft-power-offensive/?all=true) //AD

Yet even as China inaugurated its first organization dedicated to enhancing Beijings soft
power, a number of disparate events in China were illustrating why the CCPs charm
offensive is doomed to fail. For example, in recent weeks the Chinese government has
redoubled its efforts to censor the internet. After social media users in China exposed a
series of scandals involving low-level government officials, the CCP adopted new
regulations that require internet service providers to quickly delete illegal posts and
turn over the evidence to government officials. Additionally, after trying to require
citizens to use their real names on social media sites like Weibo, the new regulations
require citizens to use their real identities when signing up with an internet provider.
More secretly, according to many inside China, authorities have been strengthening the
great firewall to prevent users from employing various methods in order to gain access to
a growing number of sites that are banned. China is hardly the only government
concerned about the political instability unfettered internet access can generate. In fact,
last month China joined 89 countries in supporting a United Nations
telecommunications treaty that over 20 nations opposed over fears that it would open
the door to greater government control over cyberspace. But while Chinas suppression
of information may resonate with political elites in authoritarian states, the world is
living in the information age and attempts to restrict the flow of information for political
reasons will not endear China to the global masses that soft power seeks to attract.
Chinas internet policies also conflict with the stated goals of its soft power offensive in
more concrete ways as well. For example, one of the primary goals of the CPDA is to
increase the number of people-to-people exchanges with other countries. However, if the
CCP is successful in preventing users from accessing popular sites like Facebook,
Twitter, You Tube, and the New York Times, it is likely to discourage foreigners from
living or studying abroad in China. Similarly, blocking access to these sites inhibits
communication between Chinese and foreigners over cyberspace. Along with tighter
restrictions on the Internet, Chinese authorities have also increased their scrutiny on
media outlets, both domestic and foreign. Domestically, the CCP ushered in the New
Year by closing down the fiercely liberal magazine, Yanhuang Chunqiu, ostensibly
because its registration had been invalid since August 2010. Then, on Friday, 51
prominent journalists issued an open letter demanding the resignation of Tuo Zhen, the
Communist Partys propaganda chief in Guangdong Province, who they accused of
raping the Southern Weeklys editorial page when he allegedly altered its annual New
Years Greeting right as it went to press, and without the knowledge or consent of the
editor. The journalists were later joined by over two dozen prominent academics from
the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who published their own open letter
calling for Tuo's resignation. Southern Weekly (also referred to as Southern Weekend) is
a highly regarded reform-minded Guangdong newspaper, and its annual New Years
Greeting has traditionally pushed the bounds of acceptable political discussion in China.
This years editorial originally parodied Xi Jinpings "Chinese Dream" by calling for the
realization of the dream of constitutionalism in China where civil rights and the rule-
of-law are respected and upheld. After Tuos changes, the editorial expressed gratitude to
the Communist Party for helping the country achieve the Chinese Dream. According to
David Bandurski, editor of China Media Project, "This kind of direct hands-on
interference is really something new and extreme even by China's strict regulation of
domestic media. Indeed, after the government tried to silence the growing outrage over
Tuo's actions, including by shutting down Southern Weekly staff members' personal
Weibo accounts, the entire editorial staff at the newspaper decided to stage a strike,
marking the first time in over two decades that the editorial staff of a major Chinese
newspaper has gone on strike over government censorship, according to the South China
Morning Post. China also continued its campaign against foreign journalists and news
organizations last week when Chris Buckley, an Australian-national and China
correspondent for the New York Times, was forced to leave the country because Beijing
wouldnt renew his visa. Following Buckleys departure the New York Times said its
China bureau chief, Philip PPanauthor of Out of Maos Shadowhas been waiting
since March to receive his own credentials. Beijing later claimed Buckley hadnt
submitted the proper paperwork, but his case follows on the heels of Al Jazeeras Melissa
Chans expulsion from the country and the Washington Posts Andrew Higgins finally
ending his three-year quest to gain reentry into China, which failed even after the
newspaper enlisted the help of Henry Kissinger. Thus, the more plausible explanation for
Buckleys inability to renew his visa is that Beijing is retaliating against foreign
journalists because of the extraordinary reporting organizations like the New York Times
have been doing on politically taboo subjects in China, such as stories on the enormous
amount of wealth the families of senior leaders have accumulated. This reporting is also
why the websites of the New York Times and Bloomberg News are no longer accessible in
China, and why reporters from these organizations werent able to attend the unveiling
of the Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th Party Congress in November. its ability
to tolerate (much less cultivate) South Korean rapper Psy, and the flash mobs hes
inspired in places as varied as Jakarta, Bangkok, Sydney, Dhaka, Mumbai,
Dubai,American college campuses and shopping malls, Taipei, Hong Kong, and, yes, the
Chinese mainland. to export its cultural products, as Peng Kan, the author of the op-ed
rightly notes, through official communication channel. Indeed, its telling that Chinas
most popular non-governmental figures abroad are all opponents of the CCP. One such
individual is democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo, who celebrated his 57th birthday on
December 28th and the 3rd anniversary of being sentenced to an 11-year prison term on
December 25th. This sentence only increased Lius international stature where he has
been celebrated widely and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 (which the CCP
responded to by placing his wife under house arrest). Indeed Lius international
renowned was on display last month when 134 Nobel laureates sent Xi Jinping a letter
urging him to release Liu. Eclipsing Liu in popularity at least in the West, however, is Ai
Weiwei, the famous Chinese artist and dissident. Ai Weiweis remarkable artistic talent
made him famous in some circles, initially including the CCP and across the globe before
his turn to social activism. It is undeniable, however, that much of his popularity has
come from his courageous and witty challenge to Communist Party rule in China. It is
this charismatic political dissent that explains why documentaries of him win at
Sundance, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times interviews him while visiting China,
and his Gangam Style parody becomes an instant You Tube sensation, despite the fact
that its underlying political message is lost on almost all its viewers. hardly alone in In
fact, this problem is practically inherent in authoritarian states (just ask Vladimir Putin).
and David and Goliath is one of the most recognizable stories from Jewish and Christian
religious texts. But this fact does not make Liu and Ai Weiwei any less damaging to the
CCPs ability to project soft power. and the soft power individuals like Ai Weiwei
command under the current political leadership. Panauthor of Out of Maos Shadow
has been waiting since March to receive his own credentials. Beijing later claimed
Buckley hadnt submitted the proper paperwork, but his case follows on the heels of Al
Jazeeras Melissa Chans expulsion from the country and the Washington Posts Andrew
Higgins finally ending his three-year quest to gain reentry into China, which failed even
after the newspaper enlisted the help of Henry Kissinger. Thus, the more plausible
explanation for Buckleys inability to renew his visa is that Beijing is retaliating against
foreign journalists because of the extraordinary reporting organizations like the New
York Times have been doing on politically taboo subjects in China, such as stories on the
enormous amount of wealth the families of senior leaders have accumulated. This
reporting is also why the websites of the New York Times and Bloomberg News are no
longer accessible in China, and why reporters from these organizations werent able to
attend the unveiling of the Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th Party Congress in
November. Finally, the CCPs soft power offensive is doomed to fail because of its ability
to tolerate (much less cultivate) cultural ambassadors. In the realm of soft power, a
countys entertainers, artists, and intellectuals are some of its strongest assets. One
needs only to look to South Korean rapper Psy, and the flash mobs hes inspired in
places as varied as Jakarta, Bangkok, Sydney, Dhaka, Mumbai, Dubai,American college
campuses and shopping malls, Taipei, Hong Kong, and, yes, the Chinese mainland. A
country as large and dynamic as China undoubtedly has many potential worldwide
celebrities. And yet, as a China Daily op-ed points out, China is still far from making a
product like Gangnam Style. China does export a large amount of cultural products every
year, but few of them become popular abroad. The major reason China fails to export its
cultural products, as Peng Kan, the author of the op-ed rightly notes, is that
Government organizations and enterprises are the main force behind the exports.But
these organizations and enterprises cannot promote satires like Gangnam Style
through official communication channel. But cultural products without entertainment
value rarely become popular in overseas markets. Indeed, its telling that Chinas most
popular non-governmental figures abroad are all opponents of the CCP. One such
individual is democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo, who celebrated his 57th birthday on
December 28th and the 3rd anniversary of being sentenced to an 11-year prison term on
December 25th. This sentence only increased Lius international stature where he has
been celebrated widely and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 (which the CCP
responded to by placing his wife under house arrest). Indeed Lius international
renowned was on display last month when 134 Nobel laureates sent Xi Jinping a letter
urging him to release Liu. Eclipsing Liu in popularity at least in the West, however, is Ai
Weiwei, the famous Chinese artist and dissident. Ai Weiweis remarkable artistic talent
made him famous in some circles, initially including the CCP and across the globe before
his turn to social activism. It is undeniable, however, that much of his popularity has
come from his courageous and witty challenge to Communist Party rule in China. It is
this charismatic political dissent that explains why documentaries of him win at
Sundance, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times interviews him while visiting China,
and his Gangam Style parody becomes an instant You Tube sensation, despite the fact
that its underlying political message is lost on almost all its viewers. China is hardly
alone in making dissidents it persecutes famous internationally. In fact, this problem is
practically inherent in authoritarian states (just ask Vladimir Putin). Theres a nearly
universal tendency for people to sympathize with an underdog who is courageously
battling a powerful force like a government, which is why a Tunisian street vendor
setting himself on fire can spark uprisings throughout the Arab world, and David and
Goliath is one of the most recognizable stories from Jewish and Christian religious texts.
But this fact does not make Liu and Ai Weiwei any less damaging to the CCPs ability to
project soft power. Symbolic figures like Liu and Ai Weiwei ingrain into peoples minds
the perception that the CCP is synonymous with injustice. And hardly any emotion is as
universally held as the righteousness of justice, however one defines it. On a more
primeval basis, people are attracted to confidence, and attempts to suppress information
and dissidents creates the perception that, despite all its power and remarkable
achievements, the CCP remains at its core fearful and paranoid. Few people are attracted
to, much less want to emulate, those they consider fearful or paranoid. Which is why,
despite Chinas ancient history of soft power, and the soft power individuals like Ai
Weiwei command, modern Chinas soft power will remain limited under the current
political leadership.

China doesnt understand soft power well enough to use it effectively its
social not governmental
Nye 13 - Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
(Joseph S, What China and Russia Don't Get About Soft Power, Foreign Policy, 4-29-
13,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/29/what_china_and_russia_don_t_g
et_about_soft_power?page=0,1) //AD

In his new book, China Goes Global, George Washington University's David Shambaugh
shows how China has spent billions of dollars on a charm offensive to increase its soft
power. Chinese aid programs to Africa and Latin America are not limited by the
institutional or human rights concerns that constrain Western aid. The Chinese style
emphasizes high-profile gestures. But for all its efforts, China has earned a limited return
on its investment. Polls show that opinions of China's influence are positive in much of
Africa and Latin America, but predominantly negative in the United States, Europe, as
well as India, Japan and South Korea. Even China's soft-power triumphs, such as the
2008 Beijing Olympics, have quickly turned stale. Not long after the last international
athletes had departed, China's domestic crackdown on human rights activists undercut
its soft power gains. Again in 2009, the Shanghai Expo was a great success, but it was
followed by the jailing of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo and screens were dominated
by scenes of an empty chair at the Oslo ceremonies. Putin might likewise count on a soft
power boost from the Sochi Olympics, but if he continues to repress dissent, he, too, is
likely to step on his own message. China and Russia make the mistake of thinking that
government is the main instrument of soft power. In today's world, information is not
scarce but attention is, and attention depends on credibility. Government propaganda is
rarely credible. The best propaganda is not propaganda. For all the efforts to turn Xinhua
and China Central Television into competitors to CNN and the BBC, there is little
international audience for brittle propaganda. As the Economist noted about China, "the
party has not bought into Mr. Nye's view that soft power springs largely from
individuals, the private sector, and civil society. So the government has taken to
promoting ancient cultural icons whom it thinks might have global appeal." But soft
power doesn't work that way. As Pang Zhongying of Renmin University put it, it
highlights "a poverty of thought" among Chinese leaders. The development of soft
power need not be a zero-sum game. All countries can gain from finding each other
attractive. But for China and Russia to succeed, they will need to match words and deeds
in their policies, be self-critical, and unleash the full talents of their civil societies.
Unfortunately, that is not about to happen soon.

China Soft power is ineffective laundry list of structural factors
DeLisle 2010 - director of the Asia Program at FPRI, the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of
Law and professor of political science, University of Pennsylvania (Jacques,Soft Power
in a Hard Place: China, Taiwan, Cross-Strait Relations and U.S. Policy, fall 2010,
Foreign Policy Research Institute, https://www.fpri.org/docs/delisle.chinataiwan_1.pdf)
//AD

In much of the developing world, the apparent love affair with China likely remains
shallow and fragile. The ambiguous and much-debated China Model or Beijing
Consensus is only supercially understood and disappointments that would accompany
attempted implementation have not yet been encountered. The embrace of China may
prove little more than an implicit quid pro quo for diplomatic support, modest
development assistance and foreign investment. These are not the most pure or robust
forms of softpower. In some cases and on some accounts, they do not even count as soft
power. With Chinas growing economic presenceconcentrated in extractive industries,
low-end service sectors, and manufactured exportscome looming and already-
materializing risks to Chinas image in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Complaints
of labor abuses, neocolonialism, environmental degradation and hollowing out of labor-
intensive local economic sectors have already begun to surface. Nearer Chinas
periphery, economic integrationdriven bandwagoning with China is easily exaggerated.
As more careful analyses have pointed out, East and Southeast Asian states are wary of
China, remain more attracted to U.S. values than PRC ones, and have combined growing
links to China with recommitments to ties with the United States through strategies that
can be variouslyif not wholly satisfactorilycharacterized as balancing, double-
bandwagoning or hedging.64 Throughout much of the non-Western world, seeming
Sinophilia is to some extent super-cial and self-indulgent tweaking of a sole superpower
that is seen as havingbeen on a binge of neglect and abuse. According to major global
public opinion surveys and inuential Chinese scholars own estimates, China has scored
only limited successes and still badly trails the United States in soft power.65 Second, as
we have seen, Chinas soft power resources are plagued by internal contradictions. To
build and emphasize some dimensions is to undermine others. Playing up residual
communism can narrow the relevance and appeal of the China Model. Trumpeting
strong commitments to sovereignty can raise doubtsespecially when Taiwan is the
issue or when Beijing backs pariah regimesabout Beijings claims to be a benevolent,
peace-seeking and responsible power. And so on. Third, key types of Chinese soft power
resources remain thin. As many analysts at home and abroad have noted, Chinas
political institutions and ofcial values do not enjoy broad appeal, nor does Chinas
record on socialequity, the environment, international human rights and other
matters.66 The international relevance, content and even existence of a China Model for
development are as much foci of debate as they are rich sources of soft power that can
alter foreigners attitudes and preferences in ways that serve Chinese interests. Chinas
soft power remains heavily statist, lacking the popular culture, commercial and civil
society dimensions that provide much of the might of American soft power.67A slowing
of Chinas growth rate or rise in its perceived collateral costs is far from unimaginable
and would dim the luster of the China Model. Even continued success could sap soft
power as a more prosperous China would become, like Taiwan, seemingly less relevant to
the developing world. Fourth, China may suffer from a particularly pronounced case of
the general problem that soft power resources can be difcult to deploy, especially to
achieve afrmative (as opposed to defensive) policy aims. The attractive force of a China
Model of development or vigorous defenses of sovereignty or traditional Chinese culture
do not translate neatly or more than very indirectly into support in the international
system for likely PRC policy agendas that go beyond defusing fears of a rising China.68
Many of Chinas high-prole soft power-building international activities have been pro-
status quo (for example, supporting a state-centric international system and a relatively
liberal international economic order and largely accepting thenDeputy Secretary of State
Zoellicks call on China to be a responsible stakeholder) or have served values that are
more like the United States than the PRCs (in the case of humanitarian and democracy-
promotion agendas associated with UN peacekeeping operations and other PRC moves
to engage with the international human rights regime).69 Seemingly more revisionist
efforts (mostly on economic issues and especially with the advent of the 2008 global
nancial crisis) so far have been, variously, rhetorical, vague, tentative and not very
inuential. Especially in the closing years of the twenty-rst centurys rst decade, China
has given reason to doubt its will or ability to stick to a line that will maximize its soft
power. Some of what Beijing says and does is bad for Chinas soft-power inuence with
key international constituencies. Examples include: newly haughty (if, on the merits,
plausible) lectures about the shortcomings of American-style capitalism and
Washingtons regulatory regime; proud and sometimes strident nationalism at the 2008
Beijing Olympics and in response to perceived provocations from alleged foreign-backed
separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang; high-prole actions against pro-democracy, pro-
human rights and pro-civil liberties elements; declarations that Western-style democracy
is not appropriate for China; and prominent statements implying or asserting that
theworld needs to learn to deal with China on Chinese terms.


Democracy
No impact to democracynot a one size fits all solutionempirically fails to
stop human rights abuses
Scruton, 13Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, is an English philosopher who specialises in
aesthetics. He has written over thirty books. (Roger, August 9
th
2013, BBS News, A
Point of View: Is democracy overrated?, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-
23607302)//IK
Democracy is championed as a universal good by the West, but we over-estimate its
power to guarantee personal and political freedom, argues Roger Scruton. For some
time, the leading Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the
solution to political conflict, and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to
encourage the emergence of democracy in countries which have not yet enjoyed its
benefits. And they continue to adhere to this assumption, even when considering events
in the Middle East today. We can easily sympathise with it. For democracies do not, in
general, go to war with each other, and do not, in general, experience civil war within
their borders. Where the people can choose their government, there is a safety valve that
prevents conflicts from over-heating. Unpopular governments are rejected without
violence. The championship of democracy has therefore become a settled feature of
Western foreign policy. In retrospect, the Cold War has been seen as a conflict between
democracy and totalitarianism, in which democracy finally triumphed. And with
democracy came the liberation of the people of the former communist states. Where
there had been tyranny and oppression, there was now freedom and human rights. And
if we study the words of Western politicians, we will constantly find that the three ideas -
democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath, and assumed in all
circumstances to coincide. That, for many of our political leaders, is the lesson to be
drawn from the Cold War and the final collapse of the Soviet empire. In my view, the
idea that there is a single, one-size-fits-all solution to social and political conflict around
the world, and that democracy is the name of it, is based on a disregard of historical and
cultural conditions, and a failure to see that democracy is only made possible by other
and more deeply hidden institutions. And while we are willing to accept that democracy
goes hand in hand with individual freedom and the protection of human rights, we often
fail to realise that these three things are three things, not one, and that it is only under
certain conditions that they coincide. Democracy was introduced into Russia without any
adequate protection for human rights. And many human rights were protected in 19th
Century Britain long before the emergence of anything that we would call democracy. In
the Middle East today, we find parties standing for election, like the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, which regards an electoral victory as the opportunity to crush
dissent and impose a way of life that for many citizens is simply unacceptable. In such
circumstances democracy is a threat to human rights and not a way of protecting them.
The totalitarian system endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and
the state I had the opportunity to study some of these issues during the 1980s, when
visiting friends and colleagues who were attempting to plant the seeds of opposition in
the communist countries. These were public-spirited citizens, who ran the risk of arrest
and imprisonment for activities which you and I would regard as entirely innocent. They
ran classes for young people who had been deprived of an education on account of their
parents' political profile. They established support networks for writers, scholars,
musicians and artists who were banned from presenting their work. They smuggled
medicines, bibles, religious symbols and textbooks. And because charities were illegal
under communism and religious institutions were controlled by the Communist Party,
all this work had to be conducted in secret. The totalitarian system, I learned, endures
not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It
endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing
nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party. By studying the
situation in Eastern Europe, I came quickly to see that political freedom depends upon a
delicate network of institutions, which my friends were striving to understand and if
possible to resuscitate. So what are these institutions? First among them is judicial
independence. In every case where the Communist Party had an interest, the judge was
under instructions to deliver the verdict that the Party required. It didn't matter that
there was no law that the victim had breached. If necessary, a law could be invented at
the last moment. If the Party wanted someone to be in prison, then the judge had to put
that person in prison. If he refused, then he would end up in prison himself, if he was
lucky. In such circumstances the rule of law was a complete fiction: law was simply a
mask worn by the Party, as it dictated its decisions to the people. Attempts to bring
democracy to Egypt have run into trouble. Then there is the institution of property
rights. Normal people in the communist state had virtually nothing to their name -
nothing legal, that is. Their houses or flats were owned by the state, their few personal
possessions could not be freely traded in the market, and their salary and pension
depended on their political conformity and could be removed at any time. In these
circumstances the entire economy went underground. No court of law would enforce the
contracts that people needed if they were to get on with their lives. You might have a deal
with your neighbour to exchange vegetables for maths lessons. But if one of you defected
and the other took the dispute to law, the only result would be that both of you went to
prison for conducting an illegal business. All transactions therefore depended upon
personal trust, in a situation in which trust was in shorter and shorter supply. Hence
society was riven by conflicts and suspicions, which neither law nor politics could
remedy. And the Communist Party rejoiced in this situation, since it prevented people
from combining against it. George Bernard Shaw: "Democracy is a device that ensures
we shall be governed no better than we deserve" Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the
worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from
time to time." Clement Atlee: "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is
only effective if you can stop people talking" Tom Stoppard: "It's not the voting that's
democracy, it's the counting" Then there is freedom of speech and opinion. The freedom
to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since
Locke in the 17th Century as the pre-condition of a political society. This freedom was
enshrined in the US constitution, defended in the face of the Victorian moralists by John
Stuart Mill, and upheld in our time by my dissident friends. We take this freedom so
much for granted that we regard it as the default position of humanity - the position to
which we return, if all oppressive powers are removed from us. But my experience of
communist Europe convinced me of the opposite. Orthodoxy, conformity and the
hounding of the dissident define the default position of [hu]mankind, and there is no
reason to think that democracies are any different in this respect from Islamic
theocracies or one-party totalitarian states. Of course, the opinions that are suppressed
change from one form of society to another, as do the methods of suppression. But we
should be clear that to guarantee freedom of opinion goes against the grain of social life,
and imposes risks that people may be reluctant to take. For in criticising orthodoxy, you
are not just questioning a belief - you are threatening the social order that has been built
on it. Also, orthodoxies are the more fiercely protected the more vulnerable they are. And
in 2009, Clive James argued liberal democracies are are the 'first and essential
requirement for all countries of the world' Both those principles are surely obvious from
the reaction of Islamists to criticisms directed at their religion. Just as it was in the wars
of religion that ravaged Europe in the 17th Century, it is precisely what is most absurd
that is most protected. And critics are not treated merely as people with an intellectual
difficulty. They are a threat, the enemies of society and, for the believer, the enemies of
God. So it was too under communism, in which a system of government had been built
on theories that may have looked plausible in the early days of the industrial revolution
but which in the post-war economy of Europe were palpably ridiculous. For that very
reason it was the greatest heresy to criticise them. Finally, there is legitimate opposition.
This was perhaps the greatest casualty of communism as it afflicted Europe. When Lenin
imposed the communist system on Russia it was in the form of a top-down dictatorship,
in which orders were passed down to the ranks below. It was a kind of military
government, and opposition could no more unite against it than soldiers in the ranks can
unite against their commanders. In times of emergency this kind of discipline is perhaps
necessary. But it is the opposite of civilised government. It has been assumed in this
country from the time of the Anglo-Saxons that political decisions are taken in council,
after hearing all sides to the question, and taking note of the many interests that must be
reconciled. Long before the advent of democracy, our parliament divided into
government and opposition, and except in stressful periods during the 16th and 17th
Centuries it was acknowledged that government without opposition is without any
corrective when things go wrong. That is what we saw in the Soviet Union and its empire
- a system of government without a reverse gear, which continued headlong towards the
brick wall of the future. In the underground universities of communist Europe, my
friends and colleagues studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for
day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would
finally give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again
today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to
examine what democracy actually requires.
No impact to democracynot necessary for peace
Kupchan, 11-- Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University (Charles A,
April 2011, Enmity into Amity: How Peace Breaks Out, http://library.fes.de/pdf-
files/iez/07977.pdf)//IK
Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, democracy is not a necessary condition for
stable peace. Although liberal democracies appear to be better equipped to fashion zones
of peace due to their readiness to institutionalize strategic restraint and their more open
societies an attribute that advantages societal integration and narrative/identity
change regime type is a poor predictor of the potential for enemies to become friends.
The Concert of Europe was divided between two liberalizing countries (Britain and
France) and three absolute monar- chies (Russia, Prussia, and Austria), but nevertheless
preserved peace in Europe for almost four decades. General Suharto was a repressive
leader at home, but after taking power in 1966 he nonetheless guided Indonesia toward
peace with Malaysia and played a leading role in the founding of ASEAN. Brazil and
Argentina embarked down the path to peace in 1979 when both countries were ruled
by military juntas. These findings indicate that non-democracies can be reliable partners
in peace and make clear that the United States, the EU, and democracies around the
world should choose enemies and friends on the basis of other states foreign policy
behavior, not the nature of their domestic institutions.
Democracy doesnt solve war
Mueller 9pol sci prof and IR, Ohio State.Widely-recognized expert on terrorism
threats in foreign policy. AB from U Chicago, MA in pol sci from UCLA and PhD in pol
sci from UCLA (John, Faulty Correlation, Foolish Consistency, Fatal Consequence:
Democracy, Peace, and Theory in the Middle East, 15 June 2007, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-
state.edu/faculty/jmueller/KENT2.PDF)
In the last couple of decades there has been aburgeoning and intriguing discussion about
the connection between democracy and war aversion.7 Most notable has been the
empirical observation that democracies have never, or almost never, gotten into a war
with each other. This relationship seems more correlative than causal,however. Like
many important ideas over the last few centuries, the idea that war is undesirable and
inefficacious and the idea that democracy is a good form of government have largely
followed the same trajectory: they were embraced first in northern Europe and North
America and then gradually, with a number of traumatic setbacks, became more
accepted elsewhere. In this view, the rise of democracy not only is associated with the
rise of war aversion, but also with the decline of slavery, religion, capital punishment,
and cigarette smoking, and with the growing acceptance of capitalism, scientific
methodology, women's rights, environmentalism, abortion, and rock music.8While
democracy and war aversion have taken much the sametrajectory, however, they have
been substantially out of synchronization with each other: the movement toward
democracy began about 200 years ago,but the movement againstwar really began only
about 100 years ago (Mueller 1989, 2004). Critics of the democracy/peace connection
often cite examples of wars or near-wars between democracies. Most of these took place
before World War I--that is, before war aversion had caught on.9 A necessary, logical
connection between democracy and war aversion, accordingly, is far from clear. Thus, it
is often asserted that democracies are peaceful because they apply their domestic
penchant for peaceful compromise (something, obviously, that broke down in the United
States in 1861) to the international arena or because the structure of democracy requires
decision-makers to obtain domestic approval.10 But authoritarian regimes must also
necessarily develop skills at compromisein order to survive, and they all have domestic
constituencies that must be serviced such as the church, the landed gentry, potential
urban rioters, the nomenklatura, the aristocracy, party members, the military,
prominent business interests, the police or secret police, lenders of money to the
exchequer, potential rivals for the throne, the sullen peasantry.11 Since World War I, the
democracies in the developed world have been in the lead in rejecting war as a
methodology. Some proponents of the democracy-peace connection suggest that this is
because the democratic norm of non-violent conflict resolution has been externalized to
the international arena. However,developed democracies have not necessarily adopted a
pacifist approach, particularly after a version of that approach failed so spectacularly to
prevent World War II from being forced upon them. In addition, they were willing
actively to subvertor to threatenand sometimes apply military force when threats
appeared to loom during the Cold War contest. At times this approach was used even
against regimes that had some democratic credentials such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala
in 1954, Chile in 1973, and perhaps Nicaragua in the 1980s (Rosato 2003, 590-91). And,
they have also sometimes used military force in their intermittent efforts to police the
post-Cold War world (Mueller 2004, chs. 7, 8). It is true that they have warred little or
not at all against each other--and, since there were few democracies outside the
developed world until the last quarter of the twentieth century, it is this statistical
regularity that most prominently informs the supposed connection between democracy
and peace. However, thedeveloped democracies hardly needed democracy to decide that
war among them was a badidea.12 In addition, they also adopted a live-and-let-live
approach toward a huge number of dictatorships and other non-democracies that did not
seem threatening during the Cold War--in fact, they often aided and embraced such
regimes if they seemed to be on the right side in the conflict with Communism.
Moreover, the supposed penchant for peaceful compromise of democracies has not
always served them well when confronted with civil war situations, particularly ones
involving secessionist demands. The process broke down into civil warfare in democratic
Switzerland in 1847 and savagely so in the United States in 1861. Democracies have also
fought a considerable number of wars to retain colonial possessions--six by France alone
since World War II--and these, as James Fearon and David Laitin suggest, can in many
respects be considered essentially to be civil wars (2003, 76). To be sure, democracies
have often managed to deal with colonial problems peacefully, mostly by letting the
colonies go. But authoritarian governments have also done so: the Soviet Union, for
example, withdrew from his empire in Eastern Europe and then dissolved itself, all
almost entirely without violence. Thus, while democracy and war aversion have often
been promoted by the same advocates, the relationship does not seem to be a
causal one. And when the two trends are substantially out of step today, democracies
will fight one another. Thus, it is not at all clear that telling the elected hawks in the
Jordanian parliament that Israel is a democracy will dampen their hostility in the
slightest. And various warlike sentiments could be found in the elected parliaments in
the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s or in India and then-democratic Pakistan when
these two countries engaged in armed conflict in 1999. If Argentina had been a
democracy in 1982 when it seized the Falkland Islands (a very popular undertaking), it is
unlikely that British opposition to the venture would have been much less severe. "The
important consideration," observes Miriam Fendius Elman after surveying the literature
on the subject, does not seem to be "whether a country is democratic or not, but whether
its ruling coalition iscommitted to peaceful methods of conflict resolution." As she
further points out, the countries of Latin America and most of Africa have engaged in
very few international wars even without the benefit of being democratic (for a century
before its 1982 adventure, Argentina, for example, fought none at all) (1997, 484, 496).
(Interestingly, although there has also been scarcely any warfare between Latin
American states for over 100 years or among Arab ones or European ones for more that
50--in all cases whether democratic or not--this impressive phenomenon has inspired
remarkably few calls for worldwide Arab colonialism or for the systematic transplant of
remaining warlike states to Latin America or Europe.) And, of course, the long peace
enjoyed by developed countries since World War II includes not only the one that has
prevailed between democracies, but also the even more important one between the
authoritarian east and the democratic west. Even if there is some connection, whether
causal or atmospheric, between democracy and peace, it cannot explain this latter
phenomenon. Democracy and the democratic peace become mystiques: the role of
philosophers and divines Democracy has been a matter of debate for several millennia as
philosophers and divines have speculated about what it is, what it might become, and
what it ought to be. Associated with these speculations has been a tendency to emboss
the grubby gimmick with something of a mystique. Of particular interest for present
purposes is the fanciful notion that democracy does not simply express and aggregate
preferences, but actually somehow creates (or should create) them. In addition, the
(rough) correlation between democracy and war aversion has also been elevated into a
causal relationship.
Democracy fails
Rothstein and Teorell 8 (Bo, August Rhss Chair in Political Science at University of
Gothenburg, *AND Jan Teorell, PhD in government, associate professor of political
science at Lund University, research fellow at the Quality of Government Institute,
Gothenburg University, April 2008, What Is Quality of Government? A Theory of
Impartial Government Institutions, Governance: An International Journal of Policy,
Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 21, No. 2,
http://www.sahlgrenska.gu.se/digitalAssets/1358/1358049_what-is-quality-of-
government.pdf)
Empirically, there is no straightforward relationship between democracy in the access to
public power and impartiality in the exercise of public power. On the contrary,
democracy seems to be curvilinearly related to the level of corruption (Montinola and
Jackman 2002; Sung 2004). Empirical research indicates that some democratization
may at times be worse for impartiality than none. For example, some of the worst cases
of corruption have appeared in newly democratized countries, such as Peru under its
former president Fujimori (McMillan and Zoido 2004). Conversely, some undemocratic
countries have shown impressive results in curbing corruption and establishing fairly
impartial bureaucracies, prime examples being Hong Kong and Singapore (Root 1996).
Moreover, the track record of democracy in terms of producing valued social outcomes is
surprisingly uneven. The inherently ambiguous results in the empirical research on
whether democracy matters for growth is perhaps the most prominent example (see, e.g.,
Kurzman, Werum, and Burkhart 2002; Przeworski and Limongi 1993; Sirowy and
Inkeles 1990). True, democracy usually comes out as a strong predictor of human rights
(Davenport and Armstrong 2004; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999). But democracy should
arguably be dened at least partly in terms of human rights such as personal integrity
(Hadenius 1992; Hadenius and Teorell 2005), so this nding is not all that surprising. A
case in point is the relationship between democracy and the probability of civil war.
Empirical research shows an inverted U-curve, with strong autocracies and full
democracies being least likely to engage in civil violence (Hegre et al. 2001).
Curvilinearity is of course not tantamount to a null effect, but this does indicate that
some democracy may at times be worse than none (although a lot of democracy
is better than some). A related argument is the democratic peace theory, where the
strong empirical regularity pertains to the dyadic level, that is, between pairs of states,
both of which are democracies (Oneal and Russett 1999). Monadically speaking,
however, democracies are not signicantly less aggressive than autocracies ,
whereas the incidence of incomplete democratization even seems to make a country
more likely to go to war (Manseld and Snyder 2005). Finally, some recent work
seriously questions the presumed positive effects of democracy on human development,
arguing that this is either extremely slow and evolving over decades (Gerring, Thacker,
and Alfaro 2005) or, even worse, vanishes completely once missing data bias have been
corrected for (Ross 2006). Simply put, knowing the extent to which a country is
democratic or not cannot help in explaining the multitude of highly valued economic and
social consequences of QoG documented in the literature.



Dollar Heg
No impact to dollar heg Net better for the economy
Saft 5/19/2011 -Reuters columnist (James, Good riddance to dollar hegemony,
Reuters, http://blogs.reuters.com/james-saft/2011/05/19/good-riddance-to-dollar-
hegemony/, DM)

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. While the U.S. will fight it kicking and screaming, the dollars
upcoming fall from its central global role will be a blessing all round. The World Bank
on Tuesday predicted that the dollar will lose its place by 2025 as the principle global
reserve currency, to be supplanted by a multipolar world where it, the euro and the yuan
will share top billing. First off, things have come to a sorry pass when the dollar is going
to lose out to two currencies of which one, the euro, many people worry may cease to
exist, and the other, the yuan, isnt even properly convertible. But beneath the ignominy
lies a simple truth: being the worlds main reserve currency is a bit like being a pop star;
there are lots of fringe benefits but it is very easy to end up in financial rehab. There are
several supposed central benefits to being the worlds principal reserve currency; lower
funding costs, a home-field advantage in financial intermediation and better control over
ones own monetary policy. All three have been a mixed blessing, at best, for the U.S. and
may yet turn out to be mostly malign. Countries whose currencies are key in the
international monetary system benefit from domestic macroeconomic policy autonomy,
seigniorage revenues, relatively low borrowing costs, a competitive edge in financial
markets, and little pressure to adjust their external accounts. It has also produced a
potentially destabilizing situation in which (a) the worlds leading economy, the United
States, is also the largest debtor, and (b) the worlds largest creditor, China, assumes
massive currency mismatch risk in the process of financing U.S. debt, according to the
World Banks report titled Multipolarity: The New Global Economy. Another
shortcoming of the current system is that global liquidity is created primarily as the
result of the monetary policy decisions that best suit the country issuing the
predominant international currency, the United States, rather than with the intention of
fully accommodating global demand for liquidity, it added. Because people must buy
dollars to make many financial transactions, and central banks choose to hold dollars as
a store of value, the dollar is too strong, borrowing in dollars is too cheap and there are
inadequate controls on unsustainable behavior such as running current account deficits.
Status quo triggers the impact BRICS transitioning away
Koenig 4/8/2014 Former World Bank Economist, writes for Global Research, ICH,
the VOR, and the author of the book Implosion (Peter, Russias Petro-Ruble Challenges
US Dollar Hegemony. China Seeks Development of Eurasian Trade, Global Research,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/russias-petro-ruble-challenges-us-dollar-hegemony-
china-seeks-development-of-eurasian-trade/5377086, DM)

Russia has just dropped another bombshell, announcing not only the de-coupling of its
trade from the dollar, but also that its hydrocarbon trade will in the future be carried out
in rubles and local currencies of its trading partners no longer in dollars see
Voice of Russia Russias trade in hydrocarbons amounts to about a trillion dollars per
year. Other countries, especially the BRICS and BRCIS-associates (BRICSA) may soon
follow suit and join forces with Russia, abandoning the petro-dollar as trading unit for
oil and gas. This could amount to tens of trillions in loss for demand of petro-dollars per
year (US GDP about 17 trillion dollars December 2013) leaving an important dent in
the US economy would be an understatement. Added to this is the declaration today by
Russias Press TV China will re-open the old Silk Road as a new trading route linking
Germany, Russia and China, allowing to connect and develop new markets along the
road, especially in Central Asia, where this new project will bring economic and political
stability, and in Western China provinces, where New Areas of development will be
created. The first one will be the Lanzhou New Area in Chinas Northwestern Gansu
Province, one of Chinas poorest regions. During his visit to Duisburg, Chinese
President Xi Jinping made a master stroke of economic diplomacy that runs directly
counter to the Washington neo-conservative factions effort to bring a new
confrontation between NATO and Russia. (press TV, April 6, 2014) Using the role of
Duisburg as the worlds largest inland harbor, an historic transportation hub of Europe
and of Germanys Ruhr steel industry center, he proposed that Germany and China
cooperate on building a new economic Silk Road linking China and Europe. The
implications for economic growth across Eurasia are staggering. Curiously, western
media have so far been oblivious to both events. It seems like a desire to extending the
falsehood of our western illusion and arrogance as long as the silence will bear.
Germany, the economic driver of Europe the worlds fourth largest economy (US$ 3.6
trillion GDP) on the western end of the new trading axis, will be like a giant magnet,
attracting other European trading partners of Germanys to the New Silk Road. What
looks like a future gain for Russia and China, also bringing about security and stability,
would be a lethal loss for Washington. In addition, the BRICS are preparing to launch a
new currency composed by a basket of their local currencies to be used for
international trading, as well as for a new reserve currency, replacing the rather
worthless debt ridden dollar a welcome feat for the world. Along with the new
BRICS(A) currency will come a new international payment settlement system, replacing
the SWIFT and IBAN exchanges, thereby breaking the hegemony of the infamous
privately owned currency and gold manipulator, the Bank for International Settlement
(BIS) in Basle, Switzerland also called the central bank of all central banks. To be sure
the BIS is a privately owned for profit institution, was created in the early 1930s, in the
midst of the big economic melt-down of the 20th Century. The BIS was formed precisely
for that purpose to control the worlds monetary system, along with the also privately
owned FED and the Wall Street Banksters the epitome of private unregulated
ownership. The BIS is known to hold at least half a dozen secret meetings per year,
attended by the worlds elite, deciding the fate of countries and entire populations. Their
demise would be another welcome new development. As the new trading road and
monetary system will take hold, other countries and nations, so far in the claws of US
dependence, will flock to the new system, gradually isolating Washingtons military
industrial economy (sic) and its NATO killing machine. This Economic Sea Change may
bring the empire to its knees, without spilling a drop of blood. An area of new hope for
justice and more equality, a rebirth of sovereign states, may dawn and turn the spiral of
darkness into a spiral of light
Dollar heg declining in the status quo BRICS and Petrodollar
GSW 1/7/2014 Gold Silver Worlds, news site specializing in reporting on gold and
silver (Signs of A Cracking Dollar Hegemony, GSW,
http://goldsilverworlds.com/money-currency/signs-of-a-cracking-dollar-hegemony/,
DM)

The US dollar has been functioning as the world reserve currency for several decades.
However, its strength has been fading over the years. As we wrote in Research Shows
ALL Paper Money Systems Failed, when the tie between the dollar and gold had been
removed by President Nixon, he clearly stated: Your dollar will be worth just as much
tomorrow as it is today. The effect of this action is to stabilize the dollar. Looking at the
long term chart of the value of the dollar, it seems that those words were to be taken
very, very literally. Since then, the dollar has been in a waterfall decline. Although a
world reserve currency does not give away easily, there are certainly enough signs of a
structural change. Not only are the number of signs increasing, they are also becoming
more structural. 2014 is probably not yet the year in which a dollar collapse will play out;
it will for sure be a year in which we can expect a continuation of this deteriorating
pattern. The most important evolution lately is the increased effort from China to back
away from the dollar. The Chinese are doing so in two different ways. First, the yuan is
increasingly being used as the currency of exchange in trading agreements. Second, the
People Bank of China is decreasing its dollar holdings. Apart from that, the tensions
between the US and Saudi Arabia are increasing. The importance of this is directly
related to the petrodollar system, in which Saudi Arabia plays a fundamental role. The
Wall Street Journal had it spot on. In their newspaper of 12/4/13, an article stated that
very quietly, the use of the Chinese yuan in trade finance has overtaken the Euro and
the yen, making the yuan the second-most used currency in trade finance. Moreover,
the Shanghai Futures Exchange is preparing to price its crude oil futures contracts in
yuan. According to Reuters, China overtook the United States as the worlds top oil
importer in September and aims to make the yuan traded oil contract the benchmark in
Asia. China is the only country in the world that is a major crude producer, consumer
and importer. It has all the necessary conditions to establish a successful crude oil
futures contract. The Peoples Bank of China is supporting these developments with
adaptive monetary policies. Their policy makers recently made clear they will rein in
dollar purchases that limit the yuans appreciation. The foreign-exchange reserves from
China rose to $3.66 trillion in the third quarter of last year. That is a staggering amount,
knowing that a major part of those holdings is in US dollars. Chinas holdings of
Treasuries increased by $25.7 billion, or 2%, to $1.294 trillion in September, the biggest
gain since February. The Chinese central bank is committed to have less intervention
and smaller gains in foreign-exchange reserves which does not bode well for dollar
denominated US government debt. Source: Bloomberg. Obviously the US is responding
to this threat, as Finian Cunningham from Press TV explained. Recent military tensions
between the two countries in the East China Sea is superficially over Chinas unilateral
declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washingtons ire is the recent
Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar, he
wrote. The petrodollar system is one of the most important indicators to
watch in order to gauge the timing of the collapse of the US dollar. According
to Jim Rickards, the petrodollar system is now collapsing for two reasons: The US has
abused its privileged reserve currency position by printing trillions of dollars in an effort
to create inflation. More recently, President Obama has taken steps to anoint Iran as the
regional hegemon of the Middle East, and to ease the way, in stages, toward Irans
possession of nuclear weapons capability. This is viewed as a stab-in-the-back by the
Saudis and the Israelis and will lead quickly to Saudi Arabia obtaining nuclear weapons
from Pakistan. Ron Paul added to this that the Saudis are furious at what they perceive
to be the US not holding up its part of the petrodollar deal. He says: The Saudis believe
that as part of the US commitment to keep the region safe for the monarchy, the US
should have attacked their regional rivals, Syria and Iran, by now. This would suggest
that they may feel that they are no longer obliged to uphold their part of the deal, namely
selling their oil only in US dollars. The Saudis have even gone so far as to suggest a
major shift is underway in their relations with the US. Several countries tend to
strengthen each other in an attempt to evade the international petrodollar system. Saudi
Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Russia are among those countries. Increasingly, they are
setting up their deals in other currencies, including gold. Confidence is the basis of the
dollar based world reserve currency. Each sign of loss of confidence will be critical
in the deterioration of the dollars leading role. Going forward, according to
Ron Paul, we should particularly watch for the relationship between the US and Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis, with their unprecedented language towards the US, could become a
turning point. As soon as we hear US officials talking about the need to transform the
monarchy in Saudi Arabia into a democracy it could really mark the end game. Other
signs to watch for include a Gulf Cooperation Council central bank, a BRICS multilateral
bank, the increasing use of the yuan, a regional ruble zone on the Russian periphery and
the creation of a true Eurobond backed by the full faith and credit of all members of the
European Monetary System. Rickards says that, while no one of these developments is
decisive, each one of them represents an alternative to the dollar for a specified set of
transactions. Cumulatively these developments could push the dollar past a tipping
point, where it collapses suddenly and unexpectedly after an initially slow decline.
Green tech
Green tech fails
Green energy will take too long to develop and is too expensive
LaMonica 10 - Senior writer for CNET (Martin LaMonica, , Clean-energy miracles:
Myth or viable strategy?, CNET, 9/24/10, http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-
20017470-54.html) //AD

"You don't create miracles by throwing money at something--that's never
been the case," Bravo said. "It's not like you'll wake up one morning and Bill
Gates has funded a project that saved the Earth." Many of today's green-
technology entrepreneurs and investors have come from the IT industry, where the
pace of change has been rapid and relentless. But the major energy transitions
that happened in the past--from wood to coal, for example--took decades.
Expecting energy to operate at the same pace as Moore's Law and the
world of bits and bytes is misguided, said Elisabeth Moyer, assistant professor
of atmospheric science at the University of Chicago. "There's been a lot of excessive
techno-optimism based on people's experience with information technology. It's just
not that way in energy. You're constrained by the laws of physics," Moyer said during
a talk. "It's going to be big, hard, expensive, and slow. There's really no way
around it." What are your options? The Obama administration made clean-energy
investments a big part of the economic stimulus package and continues to make
energy research a priority through a number of initiatives. The ARPA-E agency, for
example, is tasked with placing bets on breakthrough energy technologies in areas
such as energy storage and recycling carbon dioxide from power plants. High-profile
investor Vinod Khosla, who manages a $1 billion green-technology fund, regularly
argues that people underestimate the impact of technology innovation. Khosla chases
potential game-changing ideas, such as Calera, which has a process for making
cement using waste carbon dioxide, and Kior, a start-up that is testing a process to
make bio-gasoline from wood. "A better way to forecast the future is to invent it
because it's been proven that extrapolating the past doesn't work," Khosla said at the
ARPA-E Summit in March. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has invested in TerraPower, a
company pursuing a nuclear reactor design that would use spent fuel from other
nuclear power plants, allowing it to operate for decades without fueling. Speakers on
the energy panel at EmTech yesterday advocated for more technology research and
development in renewable energy, biofuels, and carbon capture and storage. But they
made clear that the immediate future will continue to be dominated by
hydrocarbons and that all energy sources, including renewable energy,
come with tradeoffs and costs. Looking for a clean-energy home run (photos)
View the full gallery ExxonMobil, for example, has a research and development
projectwith Synthetic Genomics to make liquid fuels from genetically
engineered strains of algae. But algae production takes huge amounts of
water. Making a modest amount of oil from algae--about 150,000 barrels per
day--would require all the water that Mexico City consumes in a day, said
Shell's Bravo. Solar, which accounts for less than 1 percent of power generation in the
U.S., is more expensive than wind for making electricity. However, both require large
amounts of land to do a very large scale and are intermittent, which makes managing
reliability of the grid more complicated, said John Reilly, associate director for
research at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
Storage on the grid can help shore up wind and solar, but high costs mean
it will be used relatively little--mainly for providing short periods of
power under an hour, he said. The developed world can and should use energy
more efficiently, but overall usage around the globe is certain to go up in the coming
decades as the developing world uses more energy to raise its standard of living,
panelists said. Nuclear power, which is seeing a surge of construction in China, costs
about twice what a pulverized coal plant does, Reilly said. "As soon as you look at
something that looks like a silver bullet, you see that it's tarnished and
not moving as fast as you thought," he said.



Multiple barriers to viable green tech developmentsinvestment alone doesnt solve
Jamison 10 Entrepreneur-in-Residence at CalCEF Innovations and also a
principal with Infrastructure Capital Partners (Eliot, From Innovation to
Infrastructure: Financing First Commercial Clean Energy Projects, California Clean
Energy Fund, June 2010,
http://www.ghgreductionsummit.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=45Zm85UZq5I%3D&ta
bid=77) //AD

Financial capital is an essential part of innovation without which risks
cannot be taken and breakthrough solutions cannot be achieved. GHG
reduction will require multiple solutions and multiple sources of
financial capital from research funding to pilot projects to product
manufacturing. Governments have allocated significant amounts of money to find
solutions that will contribute to meeting GHG reduction goals. However, the total
dollars needed to implement these solutions is far greater than the
funding currently available. Current literature suggests that there are a
number of financial barriers to the development and deployment of clean
energy technologies. These include: Clean energy technologies are not
cost competitive with fossil fuel energy sources while progress has been
made in bringing down the cost of some clean technologies (e.g., solar,
onshore wind) virtually all of the technologies are more costly than
conventional sources. The Venture Capital mismatch investment
horizons for venture capital firms do not match the development
timeframes for complex clean technology developments (up to 10 years
for new device concepts); in most cases, VCs investments have a
timeframe on the order of only three years before exiting. Substantial
Capital Requirements The capital requirements to advance the clean
technology industry are huge. Given the current level of technology risk
and the challenges associated with private finance noted above,
governments will have to play a role in catalyzing the market, including
providing significant funds.



Clean tech cant compete with fossil fuels still too expensive
Rotman 11 - editor for Technology Review (David, Praying for an Energy Miracle,
Technology Review, 4, http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/32383/) //AD

In its conference room is a large chart showing the declining cost of electricity
produced by solar panels over the last three decades. The slightly bumpy downward-
-sloping line is approaching a wide horizontal swath labeled "grid parity"the
stage at which electricity made using solar power will be as cheap as
power generated from fossil fuels. It is the promised land for renewable power,
and the company, 1366 Technologies, believes its improvements in manufacturing
techniques can help make it possible for solar power to finally get there. It's an
ambitious target: even though silicon-based photovoltaic cells, which convert
sunlight directly to electricity, have been coming down in price for years, they
are still too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. As a result, solar power
accounts for far less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity production. And 1366 founder
Emanuel Sachs, who is the company's chief technology officer and an MIT professor
of mechanical engineering, says thateven though solar might be "within striking
distance" of natural gas, existing solar technology won't be able to compete with coal.
"To displace coal will take another level of cost reduction," says Sachs. That's where
1366's breakthrough comes in. The company is developing a way to make thin sheets
of silicon without slicing them from solid chunks of the element, a costly chore. "The
only way for photovoltaics to compete with coal is with technologies like ours," he
says.The problem, however, is that we are probably not just a few
breakthroughs away from deploying cheaper, cleaner energy sources on a
massive scale. Though few question the value of developing new energy
technologies, scaling them up will be so difficult and expensive that many policy
experts say such advances alone, without the help of continuing government subsidies
and other incentives, will make little impact on our energy mix. Regardless of
technological advances, these experts are skeptical that renewables are
close to achieving grid parity, or that batteries are close to allowing an
electric vehicle to compete with gas-powered cars on price and range. In
the case of renewables, it depends on how you define grid parity and whether you
account for the costs of the storage and backup power systems that become necessary
with intermittent power sources like solar and wind. If you define grid parity as
"delivering electricity whenever you want, in whatever volumes you
want," says David Victor, the director of the Laboratory on International
Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, then today's new
renewables aren't even close. And if new energy technologies are going to scale
up enough to make a dent in carbon dioxide emissions, he adds, "that's the definition
that matters." Not surprisingly, Gross's solution is based on software. Large solar
thermal plants cost more than a billion dollars to build, and one reason for the high
cost is that tens of thousands of specially fabricated mirrors have to be precisely
arranged so that they focus the sunlight correctly. But what if you used plain mirrors
on a simple metal rack and then used software to calibrate them, adjusting each one
to optimize its position relative to the sun and the central tower? It would take huge
amounts of computing power to manipulate all the mirrors in a utility-scale power
plant, but computing power is cheapfar cheaper than paying engineers and
technicians to laboriously position the mirrors by hand. The potential savings are
impressive, according to Gross; he says that eSolar can install a field of mirrors for
half what it costs in other solar thermal facilities. As a result, he expects to produce
electricity for approximately 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, enticingly close to the
price of power from a fossil-fuel plant.Still, it's not good enoughat least in the
United States, where natural-gas plants can produce power for around 6
cents per kilowatt--hour.

Green mercantilist policies would limit any clean energy innovation
Stepp and Atkinson 12 Robert Atkinson is the founder and president of the
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Obama administration appointed
him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board, Bush
administration appointed him chair of Congressionally-created National Surface
Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; Matthew Stepp is a Senior Analyst
with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) specializing in
climate change and clean energy policy (Matthew Stepp and Robert Atkinson, June 2012,
Green Mercantilism: Threat to the Clean Energy Economy http://www2.itif.org/2012-
green-mercantilism.pdf) //AD

Green Mercantilism Limits Incentives for Foreign Firms and Entrepreneurs to
Innovate. Green mercantilism also hurts clean energy innovation by limiting the size of
the global market and discouraging foreign firms from investing in innovation. Tariffs,
domestic content requirements, and other subsidies distort the allocation of production
by often increasing the number of production facilities (so firms can benefit from the
incentives or meet domestic requirements), which doesnt allow firms to reach higher
scales of manufacturing. This ultimately limits clean energy cost reductions in the short
and longterm. Also, countries protecting their indigenous industries shrink the market
available for foreign innovators to commercialize new products. An artificially smaller
market combined with unfairly supported industries, IP theft or forced technology
transfer effectively limits
entrepreneurs and firms Schumpeterian profit potentialthe profits captured from
innovative activityand reduces the incentive for making risky investments in
innovative ideas. Why should U.S. firms invest in the kind of advanced, cutting edge
research needed to transform the global energy system if the odds are high that firms in
other nations will steal the technology to compete against them? Why should the
government invest in research at leading universities that might lead to another
American Superconductor if the odds are high that the Chinese will steal the trade
secrets to potentially dramatically reduce American Superconductor market share and
U.S. jobs? Why would an entrepreneur invest time and money in a brand new idea if the
market is effectively cut off from competition? The answer to all of these questions in a
clean energy industry dominated by green mercantilist is they shouldnt. And were
starting to see this type of reaction from U.S. policymakers. U.S. federal policy has
historically been the main driver of breakthrough technology development, which
includes high-profile investments in the development of the Internet, the jet engine, and
the microchip to name a few. And the federal governments investment in breakthrough
clean energy innovation has been no different. From 2009 through 2014, the federal
government will have invested $150 billion in the research, development, scale-up, and
deployment of clean energy.94 But green mercantilism is resulting in significant political
backlash for continuing these vital investments. For example, Chinas green mercantilist
practices allowed its manufacturers to capture significant market share at the expense of
U.S. industries, contributing to high-profile bankruptcies like Evergreen Solar and
Solyndra. These bankruptcies have become the focus of opposition to U.S. clean energy
policy, including vital clean energy innovation programs like the ARPA-E and
publicprivate research partnerships through the National Labs. This opposition is
resulting in stagnant or declining budgets at a time when the United States should be
doubling down on investments in innovation.95 Combining the effects of green
mercantilist-protected firms lack of incentive to innovate with its impact on foreign
clean energy investments, green mercantilism could potentially lock-in inferior clean
technologies while limiting the development of next-generation clean energy
technologies. Without strong and consistent incentives to innovate, the clean energy
industry will not see the necessary levels of investment required to develop and deploy
cost competitive clean energy that isnt reliant on subsidies and guide the world to
drastically lower carbon emissions. Clean energy policy experts Melanie Hart and Kate
Gordon concur: The long-term result [of Chinese subsidization] is that a small number
of heavily
subsidized Chinese manufacturers could dominate the global solar market. That may
make Chinese leaders happy, but if those firms are not producing the best solar
technologiesfor example, if their solar panels are not as efficient as they need to be to
compete with traditional fossil fuelsthat can slow solar-market development
worldwide. As a result, this leaves policymakers and consumers with a choice: cheaper
existing clean tech that is reliant on government subsidies or cheaper next-generation
clean technologies that are competitive on their own through innovation. A green
mercantilist approach not only continues the former but makes the latter much more
difficult, both substantively and politically.


Heg

Heg doesnt solve war the international community is resilient and
disruptions are temporary
Preble Aug 3, 2010 - Christopher A. Preble is the vice president for defense and
foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He holds a Ph.D in History from Temple
University (Christopher A., U.S. Military Power: Preeminence for What Purpose? The
Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/blog/us-military-power-preeminence-what-
purpose)
Over at National Journals National Security Experts blog, this weeks question focuses
on the recently released Hadley-Perry alternative QDR. Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. of
NationalJournal.com asks: The U.S. military is already unaffordable and yet it needs to
be larger to sustain Americas global leadership, especially in the face of a rising China.
Thats the bottom line from a congressionally chartered bipartisan panel, co-chaired by
Stephen Hadley, George W. Bushs national security adviser, and William Perry, Bill
Clintons Defense secretary. The report, released July 29, is the independent panels
assessment of and commentary on the Pentagons own Quadrennial Defense Review,
released earlier this year. Frequent expert blog contributor Gordon Adams, among
others, has already blasted the Hadley-Perry report for making the underlying
assumption that the U.S. can and should continue to invest heavily in being a global
policeman. Is Adams right that the Hadley-Perry report calls for an unaffordable answer
to the wrong question? Or are the reports authors correct when they argue that the U.S.
must be the leading guarantor of global security? And if the U.S. must lead, has the
Hadley-Perry panel laid out the right path to doing so? My response: Dan Goure says
that U.S. military preeminence is not unaffordable. That is probably correct. Even
though we spend in excess of $800 billion annually on national security (including the
cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Departments of Homeland Security and
Veterans Affairs) we could choose to spend as much, or more, for a while longer. We
could choose to shift money out of other government programs; we could raise taxes; or
we could continue to finance the whole thing on debt, and stick our children and
grandchildren with the bill. But what is the point? Why do Americans spend so much
more on our military than does any other country, or any other combination of
countries? Goure and the Hadley-Perry commissioners who produced the alternate QDR
argue that the purpose of American military power is to provide global public goods, to
defend other countries so that they dont have to defend themselves, and otherwise
shape the international order to suit our ends. In other words, the same justifications
offered for American military dominance since the end of the Cold War. Most in
Washington still embraces the notion that America is, and forever will be, the worlds
indispensable nation. Some scholars, however, questioned the logic of hegemonic
stability theory from the very beginning. A number continue to do so today. They
advance arguments diametrically at odds with the primacist consensus. Trade routes
need not be policed by a single dominant power; the international economy is complex
and resilient. Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs of mitigating
their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose or gain the most. Islamic
extremists are scary, but hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling
Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we
spend more today to fight Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than
we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. Many factors have contributed
to the dramatic decline in the number of wars between nation-states; it is unrealistic
to expect that a new spasm of global conflict would erupt if the United States
were to modestly refocus its efforts, draw down its military power, and call on other
countries to play a larger role in their own defense, and in the security of their respective
regions. But while there are credible alternatives to the United States serving in its
current dual role as world policeman / armed social worker, the foreign policy
establishment in Washington has no interest in exploring them. The people here have
grown accustomed to living at the center of the earth, and indeed, of the universe. The
tangible benefits of all this military spending flow disproportionately to this tiny corner
of the United States while the schlubs in fly-over country pick up the tab. In short, we
shouldnt have expected that a group of Washington insiders would seek to overturn the
judgments of another group of Washington insiders. A genuinely independent
assessment of U.S. military spending, and of the strategy the military is designed to
implement, must come from other quarters.
Heg doesnt prevent war wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait
prove
Monteiro 11 - Nuno P. Monteiro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale
University (Nuno P. Monteiro, Unrest Assured Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00064)
In contrast, the question of unipolar peacefulness has received virtually no attention.
Although the past decade has witnessed a resurgence of security studies, with much
scholarship on such conflict-generating issues as terrorism, preventive war, military
occupation, insurgency, and nuclear proliferation, no one has systematically connected
any of them to unipolarity. This silence is unjustified. The first two decades of the
unipolar era have been anything but peaceful. U.S. forces have been deployed in
four interstate wars: Kuwait in 1991, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan from 2001 to the
present, and Iraq between 2003 and 2010.22 In all, the United States has been at war for
thirteen of the twenty-two years since the end of the Cold War.23 Put another way, the
first two decades of unipolarity, which make up less than 10 percent of U.S. history,
account for more than 25 percent of the nations total time at war.24 And yet, the
theoretical consensus continues to be that unipolarity encourages peace. Why? To date,
scholars do not have a theory of how unipolar systems operate.25 The debate on
whether, when, and how unipolarity will end (i.e., the debate on durability) has all but
monopolized our attention.
Unipolar primacy causes backlash re-work key to stability and peace
Michael Mazarr 3/12/14 - professor and associate dean at the U.S. National War College.
[A Strategy of Discriminate Power: A Global Posture for Sustained Leadership, The
Washington Quarterly Volume 37, Issue 1, 2014, Taylor & Francis,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1080/0163660X.2014.89
3179, ml]
The leading challenge for U.S. grand strategy over the next decade is to exercise
persistent global leadership under the shadow of intensifying constraints. These include
fiscal shortfalls that limit resources, fading international deference to U.S. wishes,
mismatches between the leading security challenges and instruments of power to
confront those challenges, and the loss of key military superiorities alongside the
appearance of new vulnerabilities. At stake are international stability and the safety of
the U.S. homeland. The primary task for U.S. strategists now is to find a sustainable
global role more appropriate to available means that can safeguard leading U.S. interests
and avoid embroiling more limited U.S. power in secondary issues. Tackling this
daunting challenge of strategyarriving at a more restrained and selective U.S. posture
would be more straightforward if the world no longer turned to the United States for
leadership. Washington could comfortably trim its role and presence if the international
system could maintain itself without a leading U.S. diplomatic, military and economic
role; if the norms and institutions that sustain order, from global trade regimes to
multilateral accords on such issues as cyber and climate, showed no worrisome cracks;
or if Washington could pass substantial responsibility to a rising power with shared
values. But none of these things is true. International politics appears to be skidding into
an inflection point at which norms, values, and institutions that have been crucial to
maintaining the peace and encouraging shared interests are under assault, new rivalries
are blossoming,1 and new sources of instability from radicalism to cyber conflict are
becoming prevalent. To subtract another broadly stabilizing forceU.S. powerfrom the
equation at such a delicate moment would risk peace and stability in ways profoundly
damaging to U.S. interests. U.S. strategists thus face a powerful dilemma: the need for
persistent, even in some cases intensified, global leadership with declining resources and
leverage. How can the U.S. exercise persistent global leadership under the shadow of
intensifying constraints? The United States needs a new recipe for national security
capable of satisfying many conflicting requirements: leadership and restraint, global
influence and reduced regional presence, decisiveness and selectivity. It does not need a
new grand strategy per se; the appetite in official circles for overarching concepts
appears limited, and in any case the essential aspects of a de facto grand strategy are
already in place. What the United States needs, instead, is a new way of pursuing that
long-standing and widely accepted grand strategy, a concept for developing more
innovative and economical ways to achieve existing goals. The best candidate for such a
concept could be called discriminate power.2 U.S. strategy for the whole post-Cold War
era has rested in a demand for global primacy, asserting that U.S. power is the linchpin
of the international system.3 The strategy held that the United States cannot allow any
serious instability to go unchecked, and must maintain the capabilities necessary to
underwrite this ambitious role. Because of its emphasis on the geopolitical risks of great
power balancing, the current paradigm has emphasized traditional military power as the
source of global credibility. This approach is under assault from a variety of rising
constraints.4 Geopolitically, many states (like China and Russia, but also including U.S.
allies) chafe against U.S. primacy.5 Fiscally, declining defense budgets are generating
fewer resources to underwrite key instruments of power. At the same time, U.S. military
predominance is gradually ebbing, particularly in areas related to the most demanding
missions such as power projection into hostile areas. Regional powers are gaining area
denial capabilities, and small groups or individuals are acquiring new technologies and
techniques, from cyber to biological agents, with unprecedented ability to counteract
U.S. power. Over time, persisting with existing approacheseven as financial, strategic,
and political trends undercut themwill risk strategic insolvency.6 This would bring
increasing resistance, economic ruin, and strategic failure with consequences harming
U.S. credibility, diplomacy, and military operations. But the United States cannot
respond simply by withdrawing from the world scene; the U.S. presence is critical in
multiple areas, from climate change to terrorism to piracy to combating global organized
crime.7 It is also crucial on the Korean border, in acting as the glue for the NATO
alliance, and as the lead in potential responses to burgeoning and still unpredictable
Chinese power.8 There is substantial evidence, both in the perceptions of others and in
watching what happens to complex issues when the United States abandons a catalytic
role, that U.S. leadership and deterrence underwrite the load-bearing elements of the
international system. Any new approach must therefore deal with a fundamental
paradox. To continue in our current posture risks strategic bankruptcy, but to subtract
the stabilizing force of U.S. power from the global equation at a volatile moment would
be to risk peace and stability. Our current posture risks strategic bankruptcy, but
subtracting U.S. power risks peace and stability.
Soft power obsolete- inability of the US to control the situation in Crimea
proves
Cecire, 4/1/14
(Michael Hikari Cecire, Associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where
he contributes to the Project on Democratic Transitions, April 1, 2014, The National
Interest, The Limits of Soft Power, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-
limits-soft-power-10163, Accessed: 7/3/14, NC)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already punctured much of the prevailing foreign-
policy thinking that had become pro forma in Washington and Europe. In particular, the
notion that Western unilateral disarmament can somehow be balanced or compensated
for with less tangible forms of influencesoft powerhas much to answer for in this
ongoing crisis. By now, it is clear that Moscows actions in Crimea strongly demonstrate
the sharp limits of soft power, especially one that appears to have been decoupled from
hard power, the traditional final arbiter of interstate relations. Ukraine is not merely a
geopolitical setback, but a symptom of a misplaced faith in the potency of postmodern
soft power as foreign policy plan A through Z. Ukraines rapid transformation from homo
Sovieticusruled kleptocracy to inspiring popular revolution to the latest victim of
Russian imperialism has been astonishing. In the span of mere weeks, Ukraines political
cleavages have been magnified as the faultline of a tense geopolitical contest between the
Euro-Atlantic community and a revanchist, increasingly militant Russia. In the Western
scramble to come to terms with the new threat landscapelet alone formulating an
effective, unified responseCrimea has almost certainly already been lost.
Meanwhile, Russia seems poised to expand its writ into other areas of eastern Ukraine
just as it aggressively probes Euro-Atlantic readiness in the Baltic, Turkey, and the
Caucasus. In Washington, defense and administration officials appear resignedif only
unofficiallyto Russian control over Crimea (if not eastern Ukraine) and are digging in
for the long haul.

Heg is inevitable no challengers and power is relative
Bremmer and Gordon, 11 president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of
the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?; former director
of policy planning at the State Department, is head of research at Eurasia Group (Ian and
David, An Upbeat View of America's 'Bad' Year, New Yrok Times, 12/27/2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/opinion/an-upbeat-view-of-americas-bad-
year.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) //RGP
But the conventional wisdom obscures as much as it reveals. Specifically, the declinists
overlook the inconvenient truth that global power is relative. And comparing Americas
year to that of our present and potential adversaries paints an interesting picture: 2011
was not the year when the United States fell off the wagon. Instead, a look back at the
past 12 months suggests that U.S. power is more resilient than the narrative of inevitable
decline portrays. Take Al Qaeda, our most consistent adversary (by their definition and
ours) since the 9/11 attacks. Despite some severe missteps, we have in 10 years degraded
Al Qaedas capabilities to the point that they are having difficulty mounting attacks
against significant targets. In 2011, the United States killed Al Qaedas most effective
propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki; its operating chief, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman; and of course
its founder, chief executive and spiritual leader, Osama bin Laden. Moreover, the Arab
Spring undercut the notion that political change in the Middle East requires the violent
jihad that Bin Laden spent his career espousing. The fight against extremist Islam is an
impossible one in which to declare success. Yet the fact remains that while Al Qaeda
began the War on Terror with a horrific assault on the foremost symbols of U.S.
economic and military power, it leaves 2011 effectively leaderless, rudderless and
reduced to boasting about kidnapping defenseless U.S. aid workers. Irans leaders also
exit 2011 in worse shape than they entered it. Early in the year, they viewed the demise of
Middle Eastern potentates as accelerating their rise to regional dominance. Turkish
anger over the Mavi Marmara incident continued to draw Ankara closer to Tehran. Saudi
anger at the perceived lack of U.S. support for Egypts Hosni Mubarak seemed to
threaten a permanent rupture in the U.S. relationship with a key ally, and Iran assumed
that it would be the beneficiary of declining American influence in the Arab World. But
the Arab Spring has unfolded very differently. Irans closest, most vital, and in some
ways only Arab ally, Syrias Bashar al-Assad, ends the year leading an embattled, isolated
regime facing a combination of civil war and economic sanctions that his government is
unlikely to survive. Irans relationship with Turkey has deteriorated sharply, and, along
with Saudi Arabia, Ankara has in fact drawn closer to the United States. Indeed, the
nascent U.S.-Turkey-Saudi troika is one of the most important but least noticed trends of
the past few months. Combined with another year without nuclear weapons the
program apparently thwarted significantly by covert operations and a tightening vise
of economic sanctions, these events have left Irans leaders disoriented. After years of
growing consensus, Irans elites are now increasingly fragmented and at one anothers
throats. Moreover, Tehran spent the past few months engaged in a stunning series of
blunders: plotting with Mexican drug dealers to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the
United States and allowing regime supporters to storm the British Embassy in Tehran,
the combination of which has re-energized global efforts to squeeze Iran financially. The
assumption that Iran is the emerging regional power has shattered. China, which most of
the declinists identify as Americas greatest future rival, has likewise had a difficult 2011.
With U.S. willingness to lead receding, the international spotlight has fallen on Beijing.
And on every issue the euro zone crisis, climate change and rebalancing the global
economy China has declined to take the lead, to criticism and dismay at home and
abroad. Beijing has failed to reconcile rising domestic nationalism with assuaging its
neighbors increasing alarm over Chinese economic sustainability and strategic
hegemony. Chinas miscalculations in Northeast and Southeast Asia have allowed the
United States to reassert traditional alliances in the region (with Japan and South
Korea), establish new beachheads (placing a permanent U.S. Marine Corps presence in
Australia), and create a process and institutions (the Trans-Pacific Partnership) for a
balanced AsiaPacific regional architecture, rather than one dominated by the Middle
Kingdom. Compared to this, 2011 has not been a bad year for America. It is a stretch to
call the Iraq war a victory, but the endgame in the Afghan quagmire is slowly coming into
focus. And for all our fiscal problems, global funding has to flow somewhere, and our
capital markets are still unparalleled. China wont internationalize the renminbi, the
euro is fragile and gold is not a country. As a result, the dollar remains the worlds
reserve currency, and U.S. Treasury bills the global financial safe haven.

No Challengers
Kaplan and Kaplan, 11 Chief Geopolitical Analyst for Stratfor and senior fellow at
the Center for a New American Security in Washington; former vice chairman of the
National Intelligence Council as well as a longtime daily White House briefer and
director of the presidents daily briefing (Robert and Stephen, America Primed,
March/April 2011,
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/zselden/coursereading2011/Kapan.pdf) //RGP
But in spite of the seemingly inevitable and rapid diminution of U.S. eminence, to write
Americas great-power obituary is beyond premature. The United States remains a highly
capable power. Iraq and Afghanistan, as horrendous as they have proved to bein a
broad historical senseare still relatively minor events that America can easily
overcome. The eventual demise of empires like those of Ming China and late-medieval
Venice was brought about by far more pivotal blunders. Think of the Indian Mutiny
against the British in 1857 and 1858. Iraq in particularever so frequently touted as our
turning point on the road to destructionlooks to some extent eerily similar. At the time,
orientalists and other pragmatists in the British power structure (who wanted to leave
traditional India as it was) lost some sway to evangelical and utilitarian reformers (who
wanted to modernize and Christianize Indiato make it more like England). But the
attempt to bring the fruits of Western civilization to the Asian subcontinent was met with
a violent revolt against imperial authority. Delhi, Lucknow and other Indian cities were
besieged and captured before being retaken by colonial forces. Yet, the debacle did not
signal the end of the British Empire at all, which continued on and even expanded for
another century. Instead, it signaled the transition from more of an ad hoc imperium
fired by a proselytizing lust to impose its values on others to a calmer and more
pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.1 There is no reason to
believe that the fate of America need follow a more doomed course. Yes, the mistakes
made in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the United States own, but, though destructive,
they are not fatal. If we withdraw sooner rather than later, the cost to American power
can be stemmed. Leaving a stable Afghanistan behind of course requires a helpful
Pakistan, but with more pressure Washington might increase Islamabads cooperation in
relatively short order. In terms of acute threats, Iran is the only state that has exported
terrorism and insurgency toward a strategic purpose, yet the country is economically
fragile and politically unstable, with behind-the-scenes infighting that would make
Washington partisans blanch. Even assuming Iran acquires a few nuclear devicesof
uncertain quality with uncertain delivery systemsthe long-term outlook for the clerical
regime is itself unclear. The administration must only avoid a war with the Islamic
Republic. To be sure, America may be in decline in relative terms compared to some
other powers, as well as to many countries of the former third world, but in absolute
terms, particularly military ones, the United States can easily be the first among equals
for decades hence. China, India and Russia are the only major Eurasian states prepared
to wield military power of consequence on their peripheries. And each, in turn, faces its
own obstacles on the road to some degree of dominance. The Chinese will have a great
navy (assuming their economy does not implode) and that will enforce a certain level of
bipolarity in the world system. But Beijing will lack the alliance network Washington
has, even as China and Russia will always bebecause of geographyinherently
distrustful of one another. China has much influence, but no credible military allies
beyond possibly North Korea, and its authoritarian regime lives in fear of internal
disruption if its economic growth rate falters. Furthermore, Chinese naval planners look
out from their coastline and see South Korea and a string of islandsJapan, Taiwan and
Australiathat are American allies, as are, to a lesser degree, the Philippines, Vietnam
and Thailand. To balance a rising China, Washington must only preserve its naval and
air assets at their current levels. India, which has its own internal insurgency, is
bedeviled by semifailed states on its borders that critically sap energy and attention from
its security establishment, and especially from its land forces; in any case, India has
become a de facto ally of the United States whose very rise, in and of itself, helps to
balance China. Russia will be occupied for years regaining influence in its post-Soviet
near abroad, particularly in Ukraine, whose feisty independence constitutes a
fundamental challenge to the very idea of the Russian state. China checks Russia in
Central Asia, as do Turkey, Iran and the West in the Caucasus. This is to say nothing of
Russias diminishing population and overwhelming reliance on energy exports. Given
the problems of these other states, America remains fortunate indeed. The United States
is poised to tread the path of postmutiny Britain. America might not be an empire in the
formal sense, but its obligations and constellation of military bases worldwide put it in
an imperial-like situation, particularly because its air and naval deployments will
continue in a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world. No country is in such an enviable
position to keep the relative peace in Eurasia as is the United Statesespecially if it can
recover the level of enduring competence in national-security policy last seen during the
administration of George H. W. Bush. This is no small point. America has strategic
advantages and can enhance its power while extricating itself from war. But this requires
leadershipnot great and inspiring leadership which comes along rarely even in the
healthiest of societiesbut plodding competence, occasionally steely nerved and always
free of illusion.

I-LAW
I-law fails

International law fails to solve terror - disagreements
Brahm 03 - Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas (Eric, Beyond Intractability, International Law, September 03,
http://www.beyondintractability.org/bi-essay/international-law) //AD

The question of terrorism has also become a difficult one for states to deal with using
international law, particularly as targets become increasingly international. Some steps
have been taken to address these issues. A number of conventions have been created to
deal with issues ranging from aircraft hijacking to hostage-taking and abductions, but all
suffer from lack of enforcement. Part of the difficulty in dealing with terrorism is a
general lack of consensus over what groups and tactics would fall under such law. The
law, however, still largely reflects an overly state-centric view that makes it difficult to
deal with the growth of transnational groups. Taking action against groups often requires
infringing on sovereignty, another core principle of international law.

International law instigates conflict - power corruption
Brahm 03 - Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas (Eric, Beyond Intractability, International Law, September 03,
http://www.beyondintractability.org/bi-essay/international-law) //AD

Although much of this discussion has portrayed international law as a potential means of
conflict management or resolution, it should be remembered that law is itself a source of
significant conflict. The shape and content of law often favors particular groups or
countries. Not only is international law often most influential when it favors the
strongest, but the powerful are also typically the source of law. For example, because
much of international law is formed by the U.N., the Security Council has a
disproportionate influence in shaping it. One prominent example of might makes right in
international law is in the realm of laws related to trade and investment. Enforcement
comes largely through power, which means that the developed world often controls the
agenda. They have the market power to punish and entice smaller states to comply. The
creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 marked a dramatic
advancement in the development of trade law and enforcement mechanisms over what
existed under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO has been
widely criticized for "green room"[8] agenda-setting by the global North, and other
actions that put the South at a disadvantage.[9] New laws also create significant
administrative burden for poor states, which is perhaps not bad for the long run, but
makes for costly compliance.[10]


International law hierarchal - domestic system better
Brahm 03 - Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas (Eric, Beyond Intractability, International Law, September 03,
http://www.beyondintractability.org/bi-essay/international-law) //AD

International law has also been criticized as fundamentally Western. Certainly, most
international law is based on Western notions. One sign of this might be that the
Western Countries are more compliant with the international laws on human rights.[13]
Others argue, however, that the widespread acceptance of international law is evidence
that the principles on which it is based are not strictly Western. Still, it is not clear that
many developing countries are entirely free to accede to these rules, as the WTO example
above suggests. Western countries are able to provide incentives for less powerful
countries to accede to their wishes. Either way, however, it means that international law
has at least some force behind it, though not nearly as much as domestic legal systems.

Domestic solves
Domestic law solves
McGinnis and Somin 07 *Professor of Law at Northwestern and former deputy
assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice and
**Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University (John O. and Ilya, Stanford
Law Review, Should International Law be Part of Our Law? 59 Stan. L. Rev. 1175,
Lexis) //AD

If we are right to argue that raw international has a relative democracy deficit compared
to U.S. domestic law, this conclusion undermines claims that the United States should
simply evaluate international law norms on a case-by-case basis, following only those
that have beneficial consequences. The key question is: who does the evaluating? If it is
the ordinary domestic lawmaking process, then this approach is fully in accord with our
position: that the United States should only allow international law to override domestic
law if the former has been ratified by the domestic political process. If, on the other
hand, the mere existence of a norm of raw international law is taken as justification for
the claim that it is likely to have beneficial consequences, then the democracy deficit
provides good reason to reject this conclusion. To the extent that international law
suffers from a comparative democracy deficit, allowing it to override
domestic law will, on average, result in beneficial norms being replaced by
relatively more harmful ones. n104 This point holds true even if most rules of raw
international law actually produce beneficial results. For example, let us assume that
raw international law promotes "good" results 70% of the time, but because
of its relatively smaller democracy deficit, domestic law does so 75% of the
time. Even in this stylized situation, domestic law is likely to produce better results
than raw international law when the two conflict. Assuming that there are only
two alternative legal rules, one "good" and the other "bad," in this scenario domestic law
is likely to pick the good option and international law the bad one in about 56% of the
cases where the two diverge. n105 It is important to remember that our argument is
comparative. International norms are less likely to be of sound quality than
those created by an established democracy such as the United States. This will
be true both in cases where U.S. [*1199] law and international law directly conflict and
in those situations where international law seeks to regulate an issue that American law
has left to executive discretion or to the private sector. A domestic decision to leave an
issue to official discretion or to private initiative is just as likely to be superior to a
competing international law norm as a domestic decision to impose a legal rule by
statute.

No ilaw
Singular instances of international law do not spillover cultural barriers
and Congressional opposition check
Krisch 05 PhD in Law from University of Heidelberg, professor of international law
at the Hertie School of Governance, Senior Lecturer at the Law Department of the
London School of Economics and Political Science, Research Fellowship at the Max
Planck Institute for International Law, ICREA Research Professor, Diploma of European
Law of the Academy of European Law (Nico Krisch, The European Journal of
International Law Vol. 16 no.3, International Law in Times of Hegemony: Unequal
Power and the Shaping of the International Legal Order2005, http://insct.syr.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/Krisch-Nico.International-Law-in-Times-of-Hegemony.pdf)
// AD

2 Resistance to Multilateral Treaties
In the earlier periods of modern international law, rules were mostly customary and so
vague that dominant states had great latitude in applying them, and withdrawal and
interpretation were hardly distinguishable. And since the principle of sovereign equality
was only beginning to take hold, formal hierarchies among states were still much more
widespread. Thus, the need for dominant states to openly withdraw from international
law was quite limited; it only grew once the international legal system posed clearer
constraints on the exercise of dominance.
It is therefore in the 19th century, and especially with the rise of multilateral treaties and
British attempts to block them or refrain from them, that we can observe further forms
of withdrawal. These attempts were most pronounced in the area of Britains strongest
dominance: the seas.80 Here, especially in the second half of the century, many states
sought to establish a regime for naval warfare, but they faced significant obstruction by
the British.81 Thus, the Paris Declaration on the Law of the Sea of 1856 was adopted only
after protracted negotiations to overcome British resistance, and the London Declaration
on the Laws of Naval War of 1909 never entered into force because the House of Lords
refused to ratify it.82 Similarly, Britain resisted the Hague neutrality conventions of 1907
and failed to ratify them; these, too, formed overly far-reaching constraints on its ability
to bring its dominance to bear in wars. But the problems concerned not only substantial
rules; Britain also had significant problems with multilateral negotiations as such. For
example, its efforts early in the century to establish a system of maritime police against
the slave trade failed when pursued in multilateral fora: from 1817 to 1822, several
international conferences on the issue failed to produce palpable results, and Britain
eventually succeeded only by means of bilateral treaties.83 I will return to the issue of
bilateralism; suffice it here to note that a legal order that gives each state a formally
equal vote in law-making seems to erect obstacles that for a dominant state often appear
as unjustified, resulting in its withdrawal.
This becomes far more manifest in the case of the US today. After the rejection of the
Convention on Biodiversity, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on
Landmines, the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol
among others it has become commonplace to state a particular US reluctance to enter
into multilateral treaties. This reluctance appears even more marked in comparison with
other states, and in particular with US allies. Since World War II, the US has become
party to only 60 per cent of the treaties deposited with the UN Secretary- General that
have been ratified by more than half of all states. In contrast, other states are, on
average, party to 79 per cent of these treaties, and the other members of the G-8 to 93
per cent of them. However, it is so far unclear whether this trend has increased since the
end of the Cold War, or whether it merely continues a development dating back to 1945
or even before.84 In any event, US resistance to multilateral treaties manifests itself not
only in their complete rejection, but also in the various ways to limit the obligations
flowing from them, and especially in the frequent use of reservations. US reservations
are often so extensive as to render treaty obligations meaningless, and both treaty
supervision bodies and Western allies have raised serious objections to them.85 But the
practice of reservations is so important to the US that the Senate has urged the President
not to accept any treaty provisions excluding them;86 and where a treaty in fact contains
such a provision, as the ICC Statute and Landmine Convention do, the US has often
refused to become a party. Other states are increasingly reluctant to accept the
exceptionalist position of the US, and they not only rule out reservations, but also deny
US requests to grant it specific exemptions.87 Yet where the relatively egalitarian
multilateral process poses too many obstacles, the US often decides to withdraw
entirely; or, if necessary, it has recourse to bilateral treaties to remedy the outcome, as it
has with respect to the ICC.88 Of course, this attitude of the US does not necessarily
result from its predominant position: US reluctance to international treaties has strong
cultural roots, goes back to the late 18th century when the country was still weak, and
finds expression in the high hurdles erected by the US Constitution for treaty
ratification.89 Yet it is significant that these hurdles have, in practice, been lowered for
treaties deemed favourable namely those of an economic character that are now
usually concluded as executive agreements.90 And the fact that treaties reflecting or
supporting US dominance pass, while those that contain more significant constraints
fail, indicates that cultural factors only play a limited role.91

Science diplomacy
Current science diplomacy solves
Hormats 3/12 - Served Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the
Environment (Robert, Science Diplomacy and Twenty-First Century Statecraft) AAAS
http://www.sciencediplomacy.org/perspective/2012/science-diplomacy-and-twenty-
first-century-statecraft (LT)
SCIENCE diplomacy is a central component of Americas twenty-first century statecraft
agenda. The United States must increasingly recognize the vital role science and
technology can play in addressing major challenges, such as making our economy more
competitive, tackling global health issues, and dealing with climate change. American
leadership in global technological advances and scientific research, and the dynamism of
our companies and universities in these areas, is a major source of our economic, foreign
policy, and national security strength. Additionally, it is a hallmark of the success of the
American system. While some seek to delegitimize scientific ideas, we believe the United
States should celebrate science and see itas was the case since the time of Benjamin
Franklinas an opportunity to advance the prosperity, health, and overall well-being of
Americans and the global community. Innovation policy is part of our science diplomacy
engagement. More than ever before, modern economies are rooted in science and
technology. It is estimated that Americas knowledge-based industries represent 40
percent of our economic growth and 60 percent of our exports. Sustaining a vibrant
knowledge-based economy, as well as a strong commitment to educational excellence
and advanced research, provides an opportunity for our citizens to prosper and enjoy
upward mobility. America attracts people from all over the worldscientists, engineers,
inventors, and entrepreneurswho want the opportunity to participate in, and
contribute to, our innovation economy. At the same time, our bilateral and multilateral
dialogues support science, technology, and innovation abroad by promoting improved
education; research and development funding; good governance and transparent
regulatory policies; markets that are open and competitive; and policies that allow
researchers and companies to succeed, and, if they fail, to have the opportunity to try
again. We advocate for governments to embrace and enforce an intellectual property
system that allows innovators to reap the benefits of their ideas and also rewards their
risk taking. Abraham Lincoln himself held a patent on an invention, a device for
preventing ships from being grounded on shoals. He said in his Second Lecture on
Discoveries and Inventions in 1859 that patents added the fuel of interest to the fire of
genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things. The practice of science
is increasingly expanding from individuals to groups, from single disciplines to
interdisciplinary, and from a national to an international scope. The Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development reported that from 1985 to 2007, the number
of scientific articles published by a single author decreased by 45 percent. During that
same period, the number of scientific articles published with domestic co-authorship
increased by 136 percent, and those with international co-authorship increased by 409
percent. The same trend holds for patents. Science collaboration is exciting because it
takes advantage of expertise that exists around the country and around the globe.
American researchers, innovators, and institutions, as well as their foreign counterparts,
benefit through these international collaborations. Governments that restrict the flow of
scientific expertise and data will find themselves isolated, cut off from the global
networks that drive scientific and economic innovation. While the scientific partnerships
that the United States builds with other nations, and international ties among
universities and research labs, are a means to address shared challenges, they also
contribute to broadening and strengthening our diplomatic relationships. Scientific
partnerships are based on disciplines and values that transcend politics, languages,
borders, and cultures. Processes that define the scientific communitysuch as merit
review, critical thinking, diversity of thought, and transparencyare fundamental values
from which the global community can reap benefits. History provides many examples of
how scientific cooperation can bolster diplomatic ties and cultural exchange. American
scientists collaborated with Russian and Chinese counterparts for decades, even as other
aspects of our relationship proved more challenging. Similarly, the science and
technology behind the agricultural Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s was the
product of American, Mexican, and Indian researchers working toward a common goal.
Today, the United States has formal science and technology agreements with over fifty
countries. We are committed to finding new ways to work with other countries in science
and technology, to conduct mutually beneficial joint research activities, and to advance
the interests of the U.S. science and technology community. Twenty-first century
statecraft also requires that we build greater people-topeople relationships. Science and
technology cooperation makes that possible. For example, through the Science Envoy
program, announced by President Obama in 2009 in Cairo, Egypt, eminent U.S.
scientists have met with counterparts throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to
build relationships and identify opportunities for sustained cooperation. With over half
of the worlds population under the age of thirty, we are developing new ways to inspire
the next generation of science and technology leaders. Over the past five years, the
Department of States International Fulbright Science & Technology Award has brought
more than two hundred exceptional students from seventy-three different countries to
the United States to pursue graduate studies. Through the Global Innovation through
Science and Technology Initiative, the United States recently invited young innovators
from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to post YouTube videos describing
solutions to problems they face at home. The top submissions will receive financial
support, business mentorship, and networking opportunities.

No impact science diplomacy fails recent policies prove
Dickinson 10 - Director at SciDev Net (David, June 28, 2010, Science in diplomacy:
On tap but not on top, SciDev Net, http://scidevnet.wordpress.com/category/science-
diplomacy-conference-2010/)

Nuclear weapons: a case for science diplomacy
Theres a general consensus in both the scientific and political worlds that the principle
of science diplomacy, at least in the somewhat restricted sense of the need to get more
and better science into international negotiations, is a desirable objective.
There is less agreement, however, on how far the concept can or indeed should be
extended to embrace broader goals and objectives, in particular attempts to use science
to achieve political or diplomatic goals at the international level.
Science, despite its international characteristics, is no substitute for effective
diplomacy. Any more than diplomatic initiatives necessarily lead to good science.
These seem to have been the broad conclusions to emerge from a three-day meeting at
Wilton Park in Sussex, UK, organised by the British Foreign Office and the Royal Society,
and attended by scientists, government officials and politicians from 17 countries around
the world.
The definition of science diplomacy varied widely among participants. Some saw it as a
subcategory of public diplomacy, or what US diplomats have recently been promoting
as soft power (the carrot rather than the stick approach, as a participant described
it).
Others preferred to see it as a core element of the broader concept of innovation
diplomacy, covering the politics of engagement in the familiar fields of international
scientific exchange and technology transfer, but raising these to a higher level as a
diplomatic objective.
Whatever definition is used, three particular aspects of the debate became the focus of
attention during the Wilton Park meeting: how science can inform the diplomatic
process; how diplomacy can assist science in achieving its objectives; and, finally, how
science can provide a channel for quasi-diplomatic exchanges by forming an apparently
neutral bridge between countries.
There was little disagreement on the first of these. Indeed for many, given the increasing
number of international issues with a scientific dimension that politicians have to deal
with, this is essentially what the core of science diplomacy should be about.
Chris Whitty, for example, chief scientist at the UKs Department for International
Development, described how knowledge about the threat raised by the spread of the
highly damaging plant disease stem rust had been an important input by researchers
into discussions by politicians and diplomats over strategies for persuading Afghan
farmers to shift from the production of opium to wheat.
Others pointed out that the scientific community had played a major role in drawing
attention to issues such as the links between chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere and
the growth of the ozone hole, or between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
Each has made essential contributions to policy decisions.
Acknowledging this role for science has some important implications. No-one dissented
when Rohinton Medhora, from Canadas International Development Research Centre,
complained of the lack of adequate scientific expertise in the embassies of many
countries of the developed and developing world alike.
Nor perhaps predictably was there any major disagreement that diplomatic
initiatives can both help and occasionally hinder the process of science. On the positive
side, such diplomacy can play a significant role in facilitating science exchange and the
launch of international science projects, both essential for the development of modern
science.
Europes framework programme of research programmes was quoted as a successful
advantage of the first of these. Examples of the second range from the establishment of
the European Organisation of Nuclear Research (usually known as CERN) in Switzerland
after the Second World War, to current efforts to build a large new nuclear fusion facility
(ITER).
Less positively, increasing restrictions on entry to certain countries, and in particular the
United States after the 9/11 attacks in New York and elsewhere, have significantly
impeded scientific exchange programmes. Here the challenge for diplomats was seen as
helping to find ways to ease the burdens of such restrictions.
The broadest gaps in understanding the potential of scientific diplomacy lay in the third
category, namely the use of science as a channel of international diplomacy, either as a
way of helping to forge consensus on contentious issues, or as a catalyst for peace in
situations of conflict.
On the first of these, some pointed to recent climate change negotiations, and in
particular the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a good
example, of the way that the scientific community can provide a strong rationale for joint
international action.
But others referred to the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit last December to
come up with a meaningful agreement on action as a demonstration of the limitations of
this way of thinking.
It was argued that this failure had been partly due to a misplaced belief that scientific
consensus would be sufficient to generate a commitment to collective action, without
taking into account the political impact that scientific ideas would have.
Another example that received considerable attention was the current construction of a
synchrotron facility SESAME in Jordan, a project that is already is bringing together
researchers in a range of scientific disciplines from various countries in the Middle East
(including Israel, Egypt and Palestine, as well as both Greece and Turkey).
The promoters of SESAME hope that as with the building of CERN 60 years ago, and
its operation as a research centre involving, for example, physicists from both Russia and
the United States SESAME will become a symbol of what regional collaboration can
achieve. In that sense, it would become what one participant described as a beacon of
hope for the region.
But others cautioned that, however successful SESAME may turn out to be in purely
scientific terms, its potential impact on the Middle East peace process should not be
exaggerated. Political conflicts have deep roots that cannot easily be papered
over, however open-minded scientists may be to professional colleagues coming from
other political contexts.
Indeed, there was even a warning that in the developing world, high profile scientific
projects, particular those with explicit political backing, could end up doing damage by
inadvertently favouring one social group over another. Scientists should be wary of
having their prestige used in this way; those who did so could come over as patronising,
appearing unaware of political realities.
Similarly, those who hold science in esteem as a practice committed to promoting the
causes of peace and development were reminded of the need to take into account how
advances in science whether nuclear physics or genetic technology have also
led to new types of weaponry. Nor did science automatically lead to the reduction of
global inequalities.
Science for diplomacy therefore ended up with a highly mixed review. The consensus
seemed to be that science can prepare the ground for diplomatic initiatives and benefit
from diplomatic agreements but cannot provide the solutions to either.
On tap but not on top seems as relevant in international settings as it does in purely
national ones. With all the caution that even this formulation still requires.
Science diplomacy fails the Copenhagen conference proves
Morton 9 - Writer for The Age, news site (Adam, 2009, Copenhagen chaos as talks
fail, The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/environment/copenhagen-chaos-as-talks-fail-
20091219-l6r5.html)

THE Copenhagen climate change conference last night ended in chaos after a handful of
developing nations rejected a last-minute accord stitched up in a backroom between the
world's biggest emitters and announced unilaterally by US President Barack Obama.
Two years of negotiations on a new worldwide climate treaty effectively dissolved on the
United Nations conference room floor as Tuvalu and several Latin American countries
opposed Mr Obama's proposed compromise Copenhagen Accord brokered with the
leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
An exhausted Mr Obama called the accord - in which all major economies for the first
time accepted responsibility for lowering emissions, but are not legally bound to do so -
"an unprecedented breakthrough". But he acknowledged that it still fell short of what
was required to combat global warming.
After countless hours of highly emotion negotiations, it was finally decided that the UN
would ''take note'' of the accord but not adopt it - effectively just acknowledging its
existence.
The outcome pushes back work on a worldwide climate agreement by at least six months
and raises doubts about the long-term viability of the limited Kyoto Protocol, if a binding
treaty for non-developing countries is not signed next year.
Environmentalists warned that any delay would make it even less likely that global
emissions would peak by 2015, the date after which, the Intergovernmental Panel of
Climate Change has warned, the world is likely to pass the danger threshold of two
degrees warming.
The non-binding deal was widely criticised yesterday by Australian political leaders and
environmental groups for being superficial and weak.
Liberal Leader Tony Abbott said the result vindicated his party's decision not to support
the Federal Government's emissions trading scheme legislation, while Greens deputy
leader Christine Milne said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should be held responsible for
''trying to bully those who wanted a real deal into accepting his greenwash''.
Climate Institute policy director Erwin Jackson said the result was ''a collective failure of
the major emitters, in particular China and the US'' to secure a strong outcome from the
talks, while the institute's chief executive, John Connor, described the summit as a ''train
wreck par excellence''.
Mr Jackson said the conference was marred by a rich-poor split, mainly over the wealthy
nations' failure to embrace deep emissions cuts and the developing world's reluctance to
sign up to an international treaty. ''We're still putting national interests ahead of
all of us,'' he said.
But UN Secretary-General Ban K-Moon tried to put a positive spin on the conference,
claiming: ''Finally we seal the deal, and it is a real deal.''
It had certainly seemed that a deal had been struck when Mr Obama called a solo press
conference to declare a breakthrough.
But the wording of the proposed accord, an early version of which Mr Rudd had
contributed to, took most leaders, apparently including the Prime Minister, by surprise.
It was blocked by six countries - Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Tuvalu
- who accused the US of trying to dictate to the developing world and who dismissed the
plan as too weak to prevent serious climate change.
Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry said the accord's poorly defined emissions targets would lead
to the tiny island nation being inundated by rising seas. The funding offered in return
was not enough.
''In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future
and our people our future is not for sale,'' Mr Fry said.
Before last night's final pitch to seal the deal failed, Mr Rudd told reporters: ''This has
probably been the toughest set of negotiations that I have been involved in. The
difference between the parties was huge on a number of significant policy disagreements
we were able to narrow those areas of disagreement.''
Defeat of the proposal could deprive the poorest developing countries access to a
proposed $US30 billion ($A33 billion) green fund over the next three years to help them
adapt to lower emission targets.
Obama's Accord was the final, watered-down version of a document that had been
worked on for more than a week by leaders and officials from 25 countries selected by
the Danish Government. To win over the Chinese it included a softened section on
international scrutiny of emissions that instead would allow emerging economies to
monitor their own efforts, with only occasional outside checks.
It did not include emissions goals, but recognised scientific advice that global warming
should be kept to within two degrees. It did not specify a year by which emissions should
peak.
And while it asked countries to put their emission reduction targets into a register by
February 1, the accord did not spell out penalties for any country that failed to meet its
promise.
Most contentiously, the proposal was not legally binding.
Mr Obama acknowledged the proposal was weak, but said the strength of agreement
could be raised later. ''We know that they will not be by themselves, sufficient to get
where we need to get by 2050,'' he said.
Several leaders offered reluctant support for the accord, reasoning it was better than
nothing. The accord was debated in a final, all-night session in which, tellingly, none of
the major developing companies said to be backing the US spoke in support of it.
Lumumba Di-Aping, chairman of the G77 group of developing nations, compared those
behind the accord to the Nazis, saying it reflected ''the same set of values that tunnelled 6
million people in Europe into furnaces''.
The next UN climate summit is expected to be held mid-year in either Germany or
Mexico.

Science diplomacy fails - lacks unity and cant engage governments
National Research Council 12 - The National Research Council is the working arm of
the United States National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies,
inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine.
(U.S. and International Perspectives on Global Science Policy and Science pgs.33-34,
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33)
Many workshop participants underlined the failure of scientists to effectively
engage policy makers and the public in the understanding the role of science and
its potential value in diplomacy and in development. According to Volker ter
Meulen, the main challenges are the lack of a unified voice to speak on behalf of science
and the lack of experience within the political institutions to use science and effectively
communicate with the science community. This challenge is often compounded by the
multiplicity of other voices in a crowded world. In a very complicated diplomatic system,
involving NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, media, and new communication
modes and networks, the scientific community must learn how to inform and
engage more effectively with all these groups and governments. Furthermore,
several participants underscored the importance or recognizing that many of the major
policy challenges require science in diplomacy across a broad front. For example,
tackling the Millennium Development Goals requires understanding and action on food,
health, and the environment, which involves multiple government departments and
requires a coherent and integrated policy. Unfortunately, noted one discussant, there
are often organizational barriers within and between governments, in addition to the low
public understanding and support for such policies.

Lack of human capital, research infrastructure, and coherent strategies
prevent effective science diplomacy
National Research Council 12 - The National Research Council is the working arm of
the United States National Academies, which produces reports that shape policies,
inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine.
(NRC, 2012 U.S. and International Perspectives on Global Science Policy and Science
pgs.33-34, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13300&page=33)
A serious lack of human capital, coherent national science and technology
strategies, and research infrastructures in potentially partnering countries was
identified by some workshop participants as an important barrier to more effective
international engagement. Gebisa Ejeta and others stated that weak human
capacity, in part owing to brain drain, and the lack of adequate research infrastructure in
developing countries has too often derailed promising science-based developments or
worse, prevented their successful exploitation. Ejeta also underlined the differences in
goals and aspirations between institutions in the United States and those in developing
countries that often create an awkward dialogue about the objectives of collaborative
partnerships. Most of the advanced research institutions in the developed world aim at
creating a global public good; in contrast, research centers in most developing countries
focus on the development of locally needed products and services. Nevertheless, he
believed that the two goals are mutually supportive, and if the parties communicate and
work together, a win-win scenario often can be reached. He also noted an overreliance
in developing countries on external funding to capitalize on science diplomacy and global
science cooperation opportunities, which is, of course, largely because of insufficient
local resource commitment to science. There is a shortage of functional research centers
and science support architecture such as science and technology commissions merit-
based funding mechanism, or science academics in the developing world. Several
participants identified building such structures as an important goal of science
diplomacy.
Science diplomacy fails Obamas policies in the Middle East prove
Dickson 9 - Director of SciDev.net (David, 2009, The limits of science diplomacy,
SciDev.net, http://www.scidev.net/global/capacity-building/editorial-blog/the-limits-
of-science-diplomacy.html)

Using science for diplomatic purposes has obvious attractions and several benefits. But
there are limits to what it can achieve.
The scientific community has a deserved reputation for its international perspective
scientists often ignore national boundaries and interests when it comes to exchanging
ideas or collaborating on global problems.
So it is not surprising that science attracts the interest of politicians keen to open
channels of communication with other states. Signing agreements on scientific and
technological cooperation is often the first step for countries wanting to forge closer
working relationships.
More significantly, scientists have formed key links behind-the-scenes when more overt
dialogue has been impossible. At the height of the Cold War, for example, scientific
organisations provided a conduit for discussing nuclear weapons control.
Only so much science can do
Recently, the Obama administration has given this field a new push, in its desire to
pursue "soft diplomacy" in regions such as the Middle East. Scientific agreements have
been at the forefront of the administration's activities in countries such as Iraq and
Pakistan.
But as emerged from a meeting entitled New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy, held in
London this week (12 June) using science for diplomatic purposes is not as
straightforward as it seems.
Some scientific collaboration clearly demonstrates what countries can achieve by
working together. For example, a new synchrotron under construction in Jordan is
rapidly becoming a symbol of the potential for teamwork in the Middle East.
But whether scientific cooperation can become a precursor for political collaboration is
less evident. For example, despite hopes that the Middle East synchrotron would help
bring peace to the region, several countries have been reluctant to support it until the
Palestine problem is resolved.
Indeed, one speaker at the London meeting (organised by the UK's Royal Society and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science) even suggested that the
changes scientific innovations bring inevitably lead to turbulence and
upheaval. In such a context, viewing science as a driver for peace may be wishful
thinking.
Conflicting ethos
Perhaps the most contentious area discussed at the meeting was how science diplomacy
can frame developed countries' efforts to help build scientific capacity in the developing
world.
There is little to quarrel with in collaborative efforts that are put forward with a genuine
desire for partnership. Indeed, partnership whether between individuals, institutions
or countries is the new buzzword in the "science for development" community.
But true partnership requires transparent relations between partners who are prepared
to meet as equals. And that goes against diplomats' implicit role: to promote and defend
their own countries' interests.
John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser, may have been a bit
harsh when he told the meeting that a diplomat is someone who is "sent abroad to lie for
his country". But he touched a raw nerve.
Worlds apart yet co-dependent
The truth is that science and politics make an uneasy alliance. Both need the other.
Politicians need science to achieve their goals, whether social, economic or
unfortunately military; scientists need political support to fund their research.
But they also occupy different universes. Politics is, at root, about exercising power by
one means or another. Science is or should be about pursuing robust knowledge
that can be put to useful purposes.
A strategy for promoting science diplomacy that respects these differences deserves
support. Particularly so if it focuses on ways to leverage political and financial backing
for science's more humanitarian goals, such as tackling climate change or reducing world
poverty.
But a commitment to science diplomacy that ignores the differences acting for
example as if science can substitute politics (or perhaps more worryingly, vice versa), is
dangerous.
The Obama administration's commitment to "soft power" is already faltering. It faces
challenges ranging from North Korea's nuclear weapons test to domestic opposition to
limits on oil consumption. A taste of reality may be no bad thing.
Science diplomacy fails empirically proven with climate leadership - other
states unlikely to take action
Vanderheiden 12 - Associate Professor of Political Science and
Environmental Studies at University of Colorado and Professorial Fellow in
Canberra (Steve, Coaxing Climate Policy Leadership, Cambridge
University Press,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/science/docview/1318716823/A9B56B
8F1BD447EDPQ/4?accountid=14667)
The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership
in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without
giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by
which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as
action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of
triggering reciprocal actions by followers on behalf of that scheme, and argue that such
leadership can be coaxed by potential followers through pledges of reciprocal action that
are made conditional upon prior action undertaken by a leader. In the context of the
current international impasse over post-Kyoto climate change mitigation commitments,
I identify means by which leadership by the U.S. or China might be induced by such
conditional pledges, potentially allowing some obstacles to international collective action
on climate change mitigation to be overcome. With the failure of the international
community to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol in late 2011, and with
little prospect of U.S. ratification of any treaty framework that includes binding
greenhouse emission targets, hope for a sustainable and effective international climate
policy appears dim. As of 2012, only Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union
continue to endorse binding post-Kyoto greenhouse emissions targets, with countries
representing half the emissions controlled under Kyoto rejecting any further binding
mitigation commitments in the absence of a treaty framework that includes the United
States. Further, the remaining commitments are likely to be tested by political and
economic turmoil that strains the ability of the governments to maintain them. While the
"roadmap" that emerged from the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties
(COP-17) of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)--held in
Durban, South Africa--calls for a post-Kyoto treaty to be negotiated by 2015 and to take
effect by 2020, ongoing reluctance by China, India, and the United States to accept
binding emissions caps threatens to frustrate progress toward any such future
agreement. Given the rapidly closing window of opportunity to begin reversing current
trends of increasing global emissions and to eventually stabilize atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases at levels that would prevent the dire consequences
predicted by "business as usual" trajectories, significant mitigation action remains
urgently needed, with climate change adaptation programs becoming increasingly
important. As observers have noted, this stalemate in international policy development
shifts the onus to ground-up rather than top-down actions, including policy at the
national and subnational domestic level as well as private actions undertaken by civil
society actors. In the near future policy leadership may be widely diffused, residing with
nongovernmental organizations, private corporations, and local communities, rather
than with states. Such efforts can affect larger emissions trends at the margins, but to
solve the problem itself an international policy framework is still needed. As others have
stressed in recent exhortations for more leadership from such key actors as the United
States, in order to bring about such a framework the disparate and competing interests
that have thus far produced only an international climate policy impasse must be aligned
through the exercise of effective leadership. 1My aim here is to explore the decision
structure from which such leadership might potentially emerge and from which a fair
and effective climate policy framework might gain requisite international support. In
what follows, I identify several conditions for and obstacles to effective international
policy leadership with a view toward creating the conditions for that leadership to
emerge, and suggest how such an overtly strategic analysis might address some key
unexplored territory in climate ethics. First, I sketch the nature and role of leadership in
international climate policy negotiations, defining leadership as the ability to induce
action by other parties, and to subsequently generate further and reciprocal action by
followers. Next, I analyze the current decision structure related to national action on
climate change, showing how leadership might help to overcome resistance to
cooperation. I then suggest the use of conditional promising as a means for inducing
climate policy leadership by either the United States or China. By transforming the
decision structure from one in which the exercise of such leadership carries high risks
and promises few rewards into one with lower risks and higher probabilities of success,
this approach casts leadership as an essential element for mobilizing international
cooperation in protecting the climate system. Rather than viewing such leadership as a
spontaneous and persuasive power that need only be summoned by would-be leaders
and is thus independent of actions by potential follows, this approach understands
leadership as a power to trigger cooperation that in some cases can be induced by
pledges of reciprocal action. Rethinking Leadership The impasse over the main terms of
an effective international climate policy agreement can be understood in part as having
resulted from a failure of leadership. Although the UNFCCC called on developed
countries to "take the lead" in combating climate change, the United States in particular
has shirked that commitment, refusing even to follow other signatory nations in
accepting binding mitigation targets, let alone to lead them in doing so. In advance of the
2007 COP-13 meetings in Bali, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the United
States and China to "play a more constructive role" in climate policy negotiations. 2The
results of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections gave many people renewed hope that
America might finally eschew the climate policy obstructionism that characterized the
George W. Bush administration. Awarding President Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace
Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee remarked that "the USA is now playing a more
constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting."
However, the renewed effort at multilateral diplomacy for which Obama was recognized
never materialized. The president's late-hour effort to salvage a deal from the 2009 COP-
15 meetings resulted in the Copenhagen Accord, which abandoned multilateral
diplomacy for an end run around the established UNFCCC process and generated a
nonbinding pledge that includes no binding targets. Surely, this was not the leadership
that the secretary-general had called for or that the Nobel Committee had anticipated.
Even if potential leaders such as the U.S. president had acted differently, an effective
international policy may not have emerged. It is also unclear that others could have
made a difference, had they been in the relevant leadership positions. My aim is not to
scrutinize recent policy history or impugn particular actors as having failed to lead,
except insofar as this might yield insights into how such leadership might emerge in the
future. Rather, attributing ongoing disagreements over international climate policy to a
failure of leadership trades on the definition of leadership itself, which involves inducing
others to act in ways to which they are not currently inclined or to accept policy terms
toward which they are not currently disposed, and introduces what I call theproblem of
leadership. As explained below, the problem arises when cooperative action by some
potential leader becomes necessary for securing the reciprocal cooperation of others, but
the prospects for that exercise of leadership are affected by potential followers. Apart
from the terms of an effective and presumably fair international climate policy
framework capable of gaining the assent of the world's nations and their governments,
my aim here is to explore how the powers related to leadership can sometimes be used to
overcome policy divisions, as well as the role that leadership might potentially play in
securing such an agreement.


Separation of Powers (Federalism)
No impactboth parties undermine federalism regularly
Robb, 13 Robert Robb is a columnist for the Arizona Republic and a RealClearPolitics
contributor. (Robert, February 20
th
, 2013, Obama and the Death of Federalism,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/20/obama_and_the_death_of_fed
eralism_117073.html)//IK
President Barack Obamas State of the Union address illustrated what a dead letter
federalism is among Democrats. Not that further illustration was necessary. Federalism
holds that the national government should limit itself to things of truly national scope.
Things that are primarily of local concern should be left to state and local governments.
Federalism was a big deal to the founders. They wanted an energetic national
government, but one that was confined to enumerated national functions. The founders
also envisioned a bright line between the federal and state governments, each sovereign
within their own spheres. We are a long way from that. Today, the Democratic Party sees
virtually nothing as outside the purview of the federal government. The Republican Party
talks a good game about federalism, but usually ends up undermining the principle when
it acquires national power. Today, the lines between the federal government and state
and local governments are hopelessly blurred. The federal government spends over $600
billion a year on grants to state and local governments. Arizona state government
receives more in federal funds than it raises in general-fund taxes. Today, state
governments operate principally as service delivery mechanisms for federal social-
welfare programs. This means that there is no real political accountability for the
programs, which is why they grow and function like a blob.
Federalism impacts are empirically denied Obamacare and immigration
court rulings provegovernment has ample power to achieve meaningful
reforms without triggering backlash
Peltz-Steele, 12Richard J. Peltz-Steele is a professor teaching media law topics
including torts and freedom of information. He chairs institutional planning and
accreditation at UMass Law and serves on the University Strategic Planning Committee.
(Richard, July 8
th
, 2012, Dismantling Federalism Is A Shortcut With A Very Steep
Price, http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/07/08/dismantling-federalism-is-a-
shortcut-with-a-very-steep-price/)//IK
Recent decisions from the Supreme Court delivered a one-two punch to American
federalism. While media focus on the political impact of the immigration and healthcare
decisions on the elections, our constitutional system is reeling from a blow of greater
proportion. In the first high-profile decision, Arizona substantially lost its battle to
maintain a state immigration enforcement system. The dispute arose from the gap
between what the feds say and what they do, specifically the failure to police immigration
to the satisfaction of Arizona taxpayers. The decision in Arizona v. United States was
mostly about federal preemption of state law. And preemption law is notoriously fuzzy:
eye of the beholder unfortunately characterizes the Courts approach. The majority saw
the Arizona case as an instance of Congress so thoroughly occupying the field that no
room remained for state law. Justice Thomas, in a concise dissent, reasoned that
Congress had not precluded state law such as Arizonas, which merely echoes federal law.
Whatever one thinks of Justice Scalias dissent, he got the facts right. The difference
between majority and dissenter perceptions turns in part on whether the Presidents
inaction in enforcing federal immigration law has preemptive significance. And certainly,
as Scalia wrote, the Framers would have abhorred this result; the states always have
cherished their borders. One columnist wryly noted that the Framers would not have
signed a constitution abolishing slavery. True, but that deficiency of our Constitution was
addressed through amendment. No amendment yet has erased state borders.
Preemption always poses a fuzzy question, but the Courts ruling against Arizona takes a
bite out of state power. Expansive federal inaction was read to displace a traditionally
sound exercise of state police power that only sought to complement federal lawas
written. The states now seem more than ever at the mercy of the federal government and
its deep pockets to decide what is and is not the province of the state electorate. So what
local policy decisions will next take up residence between Capitol Hill and K Street?
Healthcare, it seems. In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Court substantially upheld the national
healthcare initiative advanced by the President, including the controversial individual
mandate. The Court majority rejected the mandate as an exercise of Commerce Clause
power. But leaving academic jaws agape, the majority capitalized on a marginal, throw-
it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks Government argument that the penalty for failure to
comply with the mandate was not a penalty at allrather, a tax within the power of the
Taxing Clause (as well as the Sixteenth Amendment, a further flimsy stretch). The
majoritys use of the Taxing Clause dealt another blow to federalism. Again pundits
derided the dissent, this time for getting hung up on the infamous hypothetical of
government-compelled broccoli consumption and stubbornly failing to acknowledge that
the individual decision not to buy health insurance (inaction again) is itself a regulable
commercial act. The problem of federalism can get lost in the shuffle. But in using the
Taxing Clause, the Court offered precious little in the way of limiting principles. Indeed,
the Taxing Clause now seems poised to become Congresss favorite new toy to run circles
around the Commerce Clause and its carefully erected barriers to federal omnipotence.
Whatever mandates formerly defied the reach of Congress may now be offered to
individuals as a choice, and persons lacking the wisdom to choose correctly may be
taxed accordingly. Congress need not even use the word tax; the Justices will strain
their eyes to find a tax wherever a penalty lies. Citizens refusing to buy their shares of
broccoli admittedly seems far-fetched. Imagine instead a domestic airline industry on
the brink of collapse. A federal bailout compels all persons to buy airline ticketsor to
invest in troubled banks, or to subscribe to failing newspapersits the patriotic choice,
after all. Agoraphobic? Prefer to keep money under the mattress and get your news from
TV? No problem; the tax on non-compliance comes due April 15. Federalism is not an
anachronism. The United States hashavesurvived because of a well drawn balance
between sovereign states and the federal government. This system of vertical separation
of powers is one of our essential checks and balances, right along with the three
branches of government (horizontal separation of powers) that kids learn about in
grade school. Imbalance in this formula can spell catastrophe; think Civil War or
European financial collapse. Immigration and healthcare are critical public policy
problems, but they are not intractable. Congress and the President have ample
constitutional power at their disposal to achieve meaningful reforms without running
roughshod over the States. Dismantling federalism is a shortcut with a steep price.
Impossible to sustain federalism
Graglia 8 [LOPEZ, MORRISON, AND RAICH: FEDERALISM IN THE REHNQUIST
COURT. By: Lino A. Graglia is the Rex G. Baker and Edna Heflin Baker Professor of
Constitutional Law at the University of Texas at Austin Harvard Journal of Law & Public
Policy, 01934872, Spring2008, Vol. 31, Issue 2]
It is clear that, at least in some circumstances, the advantages of decentralized policy
making outweigh its costs. That does not mean, however, that federalism
can usefully be instituted and maintained as a matter of constitutional law
enforceable by courts. Discussions of federalism often focus on the national and state
governments being assigned separate "spheres" of power by the Constitution, with each
being supreme in its own sphere. The reality, however, is that divided supremacy is an
oxymoron. (4) Policy making power is not a physical object that can be divided into non-
overlapping parts. Virtually everything in the real world has some connection to or
impact upon everything else. The federal government cannot have full power over
interstate trade, for example, if the states have full power over intrastate trade, which
competes with and otherwise affects interstate trade. The Constitution deals with
this problem by providing that when federal and state regulations conflict, as they often
and inevitably do, the federal regulation prevails. (5) It is the federal government,
therefore, that is the true sovereign, and, as American historyamply illustrates, the scope
of its ultimately unchecked sovereignty has consistently expanded over time and
will almost certainly continue to do so in the future.
No modeling
Moravcsik 05 (Andrew Moravcsik, Dream On America, Newsweek, January 31,
2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857387/site/newsweek/)//twonily
Not long ago, the American dream was a global fantasy. Not only Americans saw
themselves as a beacon unto nations. So did much of the rest of the world. East
Europeans tuned into Radio Free Europe. Chinese students erected a replica of the
Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. You had only to listen to George W. Bush's
Inaugural Address last week (invoking "freedom" and "liberty" 49 times) to appreciate
just how deeply Americans still believe in this founding myth. For many in the world, the
president's rhetoric confirmed their worst fears of an imperial America relentlessly
pursuing its narrow national interests. But the greater danger may be a delusional
Americaone that believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the American
Dream lives on, that America remains a model for the world, one whose mission is to
spread the word. The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world
views them was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans
see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush's
election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in
their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe "American ideas and customs"
should spread globally. Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC
poll see Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional allies,
the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82
percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support
for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India
viewed Bush's second Inaugural positively. Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's
first term is giving way to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the
average is 70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending
any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done so. Only one
third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial countries, would like to see
American values spread in their country. Says Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which
conducted the BBC report: "President Bush has further isolated America from the world.
Unless the administration changes its approach, it will continue to erode America's good
name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian
president Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen who
see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can say is, God bless
the rest of the world." The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only
do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the
country's social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream
goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would
have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something
America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international
institutionsglobalization, in a word. Countries today have dozens of political, economic
and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and
Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive waysnone made
in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails
an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and
respect for international lawa model that's caught on quickly across the former nations
of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or
Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate
culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S.
multinational, "then we overtake." Many are tempted to write off the new anti-
Americanism as a temporary perturbation, or mere resentment. Blinded by its own
myth, America has grown incapable of recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the
American Dream to fault. If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American model
political, economic, diplomaticit's partly for the very good reason that it doesn't work
as well anymore. AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution
was a revolutionary document, full of epochal innovationsfree elections, judicial
review, checks and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In
the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around the world copied the document, not least
in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today? When nations
write a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades, they seldom look to the
American model. When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional
experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to
former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a European-
style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money
talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or
at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow
that route." They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American
campaigns where, Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks govern election
victories." So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country,
Kosovo opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South
Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model, which leaders
deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to construct. Now fledgling
African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration, says John Stremlau, a
former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations
department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the
Americans." The new democracies are looking for a constitution written in modern times
and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains.
"To borrow Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'." Much in
American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the
United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor
the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign
systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the
provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale
University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the
world standard, has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva
Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as
the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International
Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only
reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step
with the rest of the world.

Federalism is resilient
Swaine 3 (Edward T., Assistant Professor in the Wharton School University of
Pennsylvania, Does Federalism Constrain the Treaty Power?, Columbia Law Review,
April, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 403, Lexis)//twonily
Federalism is the vampire of U.S. foreign relations law: officially deceased or
moribund at best, but in reality surprisingly resilient and prone to recover at
unsettling intervals. Linked with a dark period in our constitutional prehistory, foreign
relations federalism was supposedly given a lasting burial by the Constitution's
nationalization of foreign affairs authority; in foreign relations, the orthodox position
held, states 1 simply ceased to exist. 2 Nonetheless, rumors of their twilight existence
persist. [*405] With lingering memories of previous scares, 3 frightened law professors
have begun to huddle together in symposia to discuss a rash of recent sightings -
especially in the form of state-conducted foreign relations, obstacles to compliance with
international agreements, and special exemptions in treaties and implementing statutes.
4
Squo solves and no spillover
Young 03 (Ernest Young, Professor of Law at Texas, May 2003, Texas Law Review,
Lexis)//twonily
One of the privileges of being a junior faculty member is that senior colleagues often
feel obligated to read one's rough drafts. On many occasions when I have written
about federalism - from a stance considerably more sympathetic to the States than
Judge Noonan's - my colleagues have responded with the following comment: "Relax.
The States retain vast reserves of autonomy and authority over any number of
important areas. It will be a long time, if ever, before the national
government can expand its authority far enough to really endanger the
federal balance. Don't make it sound like you think the sky is falling."
soft power
Alt cause political constraints
Fukuyama, 14 Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanfords Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies, and a member of the Hoover Foreign Policy Working
Group on Grand Strategy (Francis, American Power Is Waning Because Washington
Won't Stop Quarreling, New Republic, October 2014,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116953/american-power-decline-due-
partisanship-washington) //RGP
I have two points to make about the relationship between economics and foreign policy.
The first is to distinguish between the domestic economic and domestic political
constraints on power; and the second is to argue for a new conceptual approach to the
integration of politics and economics. Political Constraints on American Power Lets
begin with the first issue, the distinction between domestic economic constraints and
domestic political constraints. The first has to do with the economic resources available
to the U.S. government relative to those of other political units, economic growth rates,
and the fiscal sustainability of the underlying growth models. The second has to do with
the degree to which the political system can translate those resources into effective
foreign and security policies. The latter might be thought of as a kind of discount rate
applied to the former, and that discount rate varies for different political entities. Many
of the discussions of American decline (or lack thereof) have failed to distinguish
between the underlying economic base and the political discount rate. I believe that
American society is not in decline because the overall situation of the economy is
relatively strong, but that the political system has been subject to considerable decay. Of
the major political actors in the world today, the political discount rate is probably
highest for the European Union (EU). The EU as a whole is somewhat larger in
population and total gross domestic product (GDP) than the United States (though not
in per capita terms), and it has had some success in turning that economic power into
political outcomes (for example, in exporting its policies on genetically modified
organisms, or GMOs, to Africa). But overall (and by design), it lacks a sufficiently
hierarchical decision-making structure that can delegate power and resources to an
executive. It is hard for the EU to be a strong unitary actor. This is the most true in
foreign and defense policy, where its inability to stabilize the Balkans in the 1990s or
prevent the United States from invading Iraq in 2003 were widely recognized. But this
lack of political decisiveness also extends to economic policy, where the European
Central Bank (ECB) has significantly weaker powers and autonomy than the United
States Federal Reserve. Chinas discount rate, by contrast, is relatively low, since it is
ruled by a relatively disciplined Communist Party that brooks no internal dissent. There
have been some questions raised about the Partys control over the Peoples Liberation
Army (PLA), but no real evidence that this amounts to a serious problem. Chinas
underlying economic power has been exaggerated, but has grown quickly and is rapidly
being turned into political influence in East Asia. The political discount rate for the
United States has historically been higher than for the EU, but lower than Chinas. I
would argue that the rate has been increasing in recent years, meaning that Americas
usable power is lower than its potential capacity. I do not believe that there are any
fundamental short- to medium-term economic constraints on Americas ability to
remain the worlds dominant power. The American economy has finally returned to
growth on the back of a domestic energy revolution, and is poised to achieve perhaps 3%
growth in 2014. Americas debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at over 12% in 2009 (including
federal, state, and local), but has fallen this past year to 6%, and according to the CBO
will fall to 4% next year. The real deficit problems lie further down the road, when our
aging population and health care costs will force the ratio up again by the early 2020s.
The long-term deficit problem is a very big and serious one, but it can only be solved
through entitlement reform, and not on the back of cuts in discretionary spending
(which includes the defense budget). If we fail to take on the entitlement problem, then
yes, defense and foreign policy will be heavily constrainedbut cutting the defense
budget preemptively to solve the anticipated deficit problem strikes me as a foolish
strategy because it will not deal with the real problem. However, I do believe that the
political discount rate that translates economic strength into internationally usable
power has increased for the United States as a result of the political polarization in
Washington. Here the problem lies more with the political elite and less with society. I
am not sure whether there are significantly deeper polarizations in American society
than previously on foreign policy issues the way there are on domestic economic and
cultural issues. After two expensive wars in the Middle East, both parties have become
more cautious in their support for intervention and a muscular foreign policy. The
Republican Party for the first time in two generations has seen the appearance of a
significant isolationist wing under the leadership of politicians like Senator Rand Paul.
Even on a sensitive issue like National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance there is no
Republican-Democrat polarization; rather, the cleavages run through both parties. What
is different now is a much more poisonous partisan atmosphere in Washington, which
sees virtually any policy issue as an arena for political combat and point-scoring. This
means that Congress is much less willing to delegate discretion to the executive branch
on foreign policy, and makes the president in turn preemptively cautious in exercising
power. There are two recent cases of this: the murder of Ambassador Stevens in
Benghazi and the current negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran. As suggested by the
recent Senate report, the Obama administration made numerous mistakes in the actions
leading up to Ambassador Stevenss death, but these tended to be errors of judgment by
middle-ranking officials (including perhaps the ambassador himself), and not by Hillary
Clinton or President Obama. The administration was guilty not of a cover-up, but of
trying to spin the incident to minimize damage in an election campaign. Nonetheless,
politicization of this event has consumed Washington for half a year, discouraged any
risk-taking with regard to Middle East policy, and reinforced the already excessive
emphasis on self-protection and diplomatic security as the first priority of U.S. regional
policy. Similarly, the bill currently before the Senate setting forth in great detail the
terms that any final nuclear agreement with Iran would have to meet is an unhelpful
infringement on the executive branchs discretionary powers. It is hard to see how any
complex negotiation could ever be completed when Congress lays down so stringent a
bottom line. This of course does not mean that the administration should be given a
blank check; Congress will have to approve any agreement that eventually emerges, since
many of the existing sanctions are legislatively imposed. But this is a very poor way to
proceed in a negotiation. The net effect of political polarization has been to shift control
over foreign policy back from the president to Congress in much the same manner as in
arguments over Vietnam in the 1970s and Central America in the 1980s. This reduces
executive discretion and increases the effective political discount rate. New Approaches
to the Integration of Economics and Politics A second issue is a conceptual one
concerning the way that we think about the relationship of economic and political policy.
From the Reagan years on, the United States has been the foremost proponent both of
economic liberalism (often dubbed neo-liberalism) in the global economy and of
democracy in the political sphere. The two were seen as working hand in glove, both as
intrinsically good objectives and ones that would be mutually supportive. The economic
part of the agenda took the form of the Washington Consensus, a series of liberalizing
measures to lower tariff barriers and push for a global free-trade system, privatization,
deregulation, and a general cutting back of state sectors. Economic liberalization along
Anglo-American rather than continental European lines was seen to be supportive of the
promotion of liberal democracies around the world. Liberalization would lead to
economic growth, which would produce larger middle classes, which in turn would be
more critical of authoritarian governments. Economic freedom was seen as part of a
package of liberal political rights. The policy of promoting both economic liberalization
and greater democracy succeeded to a great extent. Formerly closed economies like those
of the former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, China, India, and many
developing countries were opened up to the global economy. Global output quadrupled
between 1970 and the 2008 financial crisis, largely as a result of this liberalization.
Although democracy has not so far swept all the major economies, the number of
electoral democracies around the world went from about 35-40 to more than 100 today.

Alt cause economic policies
Fukuyama, 14 Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanfords Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies, and a member of the Hoover Foreign Policy Working
Group on Grand Strategy (Francis, American Power Is Waning Because Washington
Won't Stop Quarreling, New Republic, October 2014,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116953/american-power-decline-due-
partisanship-washington) //RGP
However, this particularly American approach to integrating economics and politics had
real limitations, and since the first warning signs at the time of the 1997 Asian financial
crisis, has gotten into increasing trouble. There were two critical weaknesses in the
economic liberalization agenda. The first was the fact that liberalization works much
better in the real economy than in the financial sector. In the late 1990s, there was
almost universal consensus among economists that freer and more globally integrated
financial markets would lead to more efficient capital allocation and thus higher growth.
However, it turned out that global financial markets are not necessarily efficient; they
are subject to bubbles, manias, and irrational exuberance, whose costs are ultimately
borne by taxpayers. Much of the apparent growth during the 2000s was illusory and
based on excessive bank risk-taking. Countries such as Mexico, Thailand, and South
Korea quickly got into trouble after they followed American advice and opened up their
capital accounts in the 1990s. Those countries that did not liberalize, like China, found
themselves protected from the damaging impact of volatile hot money. The United States
was hoisted by its own petard when it dismantled the Glass-Steagall regulatory regime in
the late 1990s and opened itself up to a wave of liquidity washing in from China and
other emerging markets. All of this facilitated the financial crisis of 2008 and led to the
most serious recession since the Great Depression. The second weakness was
distributional. As Michael Spences article indicates, the combination of globalization
and unfettered technological advance has had some rather unfortunate distributional
consequences. America and other advanced democracies have undergone a prolonged
period of deindustrialization, as manufacturing employment has stagnated, along with
the incomes of many working-class Americans. In the meantime, highly educated
Americans have seen massive increases in their incomes, together with a similarly
cosmopolitan global elite. During the 1990s and 2000s, the United States lost a great
deal of its manufacturing base and supply chains to China and other countries in Asia.
This was partly the inevitable result of capitals search for higher returns, but it did not
have to take as extreme a form as it did. Under the rubric of fighting protectionism, the
United States passively stood by as China undervalued its currency and moved U.S. jobs
to China. The economists insisted that we not mix political goals with economic
efficiency considerations, while our rival was doing just the opposite. The early phases of
this liberalizing period were good for global democracy, as middle classes spread across
the developing world. Perhaps someday this will lead to pressures for the
democratization of China. But it has had a potentially negative impact on democracy in
the developed world, and in the United States. With increasing recognition of the fact of
unequal development has come populist pushback against those elites who have profited
from globalization. At the moment, none of this populism has undermined the stability
of democracy in the developed world. But in the end, unequal distribution of the fruits of
economic growth is likely to erode the legitimacy of democratic systems. The problem as
I see it is to define a different way of integrating economics and politics that avoids the
exuberant neo-liberalism of the 1990s, while at the same time avoiding a return to
growth-undermining populist or redistributive policies. No one to date in the United
States or Europe has clearly articulated what such a model would be. It would have to
dethrone growth as the single measure of the performance of the economy and raise the
priority of employment and even distribution. It would have to define a new, larger role
for the state, particularly in the regulation of financial markets. It would need to focus on
middle-class employment, and perhaps consider ways of channeling innovation into
labor-utilizing innovation. It would explicitly target preservation of a manufacturing
base and keeping supply chains geographically close to the United States.
Internationally, definition of such a model will be important in maintaining American
leadership and soft power. Because of Wall Streets failures, the neo-liberal model has
been discredited around the world, and countries such as Brazil and Argentina are falling
back into bad habits with regard to industrial policy and subsidization. The United States
needs to figure out how to modify its neo-liberal model, owning up to past excesses but
preserving the core of an open international order. Free trade and deregulation cannot
be our only goals; indeed, re-regulation of the international banking sector is a critical
requirement if we are to avoid another financial crisis of the sort we suffered five years
ago. But neither domestic stability nor the projection of soft power abroad will be
possible without a different approach to economic policy.


Alt cause to soft power domestic issues
Quinn, 13 senior lecturer in international politics at the University of Birmingham in
Birmingham, Britain (Adam, NSA revelations threaten Obama's soft power and
America's global influence, The Christian Science Monitor, 10/29/2013,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/1029/NSA-revelations-
threaten-Obama-s-soft-power-and-America-s-global-influence) //RGP

For presidents, like sports-team managers, the tough weeks tend to outnumber the
jubilant. But even by the standards of an unforgiving job, Barack Obama could be
forgiven for feeling unusually buffeted of late. Many of the blows have come on the
domestic front, with the all-consuming stand-off of the government shutdown segueing
into frantic efforts to defend and repair the roll-out of Obamacare amid charges of fatal
technological incompetence. But if he were tempted to seek solace in the autonomy of
foreign policy as modern presidents have been wont to do there has been little
consolatory triumph to be found. In August and September, he was caught in a mighty
tangle over Syria, threatening military strikes over its chemical weapons use before being
hamstrung first by Britains refusal to join the charge and then by the reluctance of his
own Congress. The legacy of that mess continues to work itself out in unpredictable
ways, such as increasingly public tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia,
hitherto one of its more solid allies. Though the eventual Russian-orchestrated deal to
remove Syrias chemical weapons was a respectable one given the circumstances, the
episode as a whole spoke of an America straining to translate its power into influence, or
to maintain, a united front among its friends. Now the rolling scandal over National
Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, triggered by the mass leak of secrets by Edward
Snowden, has entered another phase of intensity, this time centered on Europe.
Revelations that the US tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
operated numerous listening posts on European soil, and sucked up vast quantities of
communications data from millions of citizens across Europe have broken in the press.
Public expressions of displeasure have been forthcoming, including a European Union
statement. Taken together, these vignettes of public dissension will be enough to make
many ask the question: Is the US losing its influence even over its allies? Is this just a
tricky moment for a particular president, or is it a harbinger of a broader trend? First,
the necessary caveats: Enduring alliance relationships resemble long marriages, in that
the mere presence of moments of strain, or even audible arguments, cannot be taken as
evidence of imminent separation. Looking back over the longer-term history of
Americas relations with its allies, episodes such as the Vietnam War, the Euromissile
crisis of the 1980s, and the controversial interventions in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s demonstrate that sharp differences of opinion and conflicting priorities are no
radical, new state of affairs. And however unhappy they may be with their recent
treatment, it is not obvious that countries such as Germany, France, or Saudi Arabia
have anywhere to go if they did decide the time had come to tout for alternative alliance
partners. It is not entirely clear how European annoyance might manifest in ways that
have practical importance. It is true the Europeans have it in their power to threaten
progress on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership process, but it is not
clear that such an action would harm the US more than Europe itself. In short, even if
they are disgruntled, necessity may ultimately prove a sufficient force to help them get
over it. The reason present friction between the US and its allies carries greater weight,
however, is that it arises in the context of a global shift in power away from the US and
its established allies and toward new powers. The prospect of American decline in
terms of relative international power is the focus of a great deal of debate over both
substance and semantics. But the central fact is that even the part of the USs own
intelligence apparatus charged with long-term foresight regards it as established that,
within 20 years, the world will have transitioned from the unipolar American
dominance of the first post-cold war decades to a world in which multiple centers of
power must coexist. The center of economic gravity has already shifted markedly toward
Asia during the last decade. This certainly does not mean any single new power is about
to rise to replace the US as a hegemonic force. Nor does it mean the US will be going
anywhere: The scale of its existing advantages across a range of fronts military,
economic, institutional is sufficiently great that it is assured a prominent place at the
table of whatever order may come. What it does mean is that Americans must presently
be engaged in thinking carefully about how best to leverage their advantages to retain the
maximum possible influence into the future. If they cannot continue to be first among
equals in managing the world order, they will wish at least to ensure that order is one
that runs in line with their own established preferences. Soft power Many of those who
are optimistic about the ability of the US to pull off this project of declining power
without declining influence place emphasis on two things: the extent to which the US has
soft power due to widespread admiration for its political and cultural values, and the
extent to which it has locked in influence through the extent of its existing networks of
friends and allies. Even if these advantages cannot arrest Americas decline on harder
metrics, if played properly, they can mitigate its consequences and secure an acceptable
future. Shoring up support from like-minded countries such as those of Europe ought to
be the low-hanging fruit of such an effort. So the current problems do harm on both
fronts. It will be difficult to maintain the allure of soft power if global opinion settles on
the view that American political discord has rendered its democracy dysfunctional at
home, or that its surveillance practices have given rein to the mores of a police state. And
it will be harder to preserve American status through the force of its alliances if its
politicians' economic irresponsibility (for example, publicly contemplating a default on
American national debt) or scandals over surveillance or drone strikes alienate their
public or cause their leaders to question the extent to which they really are on the same
side as the US.
US diplomacy fails empirics and new challengers prove
Morici, 14 professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of
Maryland, is a recognized expert on economic policy and international economics (Peter,
Soft Power and the Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy, Epoch Times, 6/21/2014,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/752412-soft-power-and-the-failure-of-u-s-foreign-
policy/) //RGP
U.S. foreign policy is failing. Russia is pushing into Ukraine and threatening Eastern
Europe; China is bullying Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the East and South
China seas; and terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa are displaced from one
place, only to multiply and create more lethal threats in others. Since the end of the Cold
War, both Democratic and Republican administrations have in varying measure
premised policy on the notion that economic incentives and other soft power can
cultivate peaceable democracies throughout the world and friendly societies adhering to
Western liberal values. The United States and Western Europe have offered China,
Russia, and developing countries access to markets, investment, foreign aid, and
technical cooperation, but, in many places, those have yielded few results other than to
finance threats to our common security. China remains an authoritarian regime led by an
oligarchythe Communist Partywith a poor human rights record. Its superior
economic performance, greatly assisted by trade with the United States, and the material
gains enjoyed by its citizens virtually ensure the Partys continued grip on power. Beijing,
however, sees American influence in the western Pacific as a threat and is actively
challenging U.S. naval superiority. Russia President Vladimir Putin and his loose
coalition of oligarchs appear to be more interested in restoring a lost empire and
amassing wealth at the top than genuinely improving the lot of ordinary citizens. They
are happy to sell natural gas to Europe to finance those ambitions, but dont count on
international commerce to make Russia a benign actor. If the United States doesnt
match Chinas navy and Russias army with resources and forceful actions when
challenged, those rivals will prevail in their regional ambitions. Still President Obama is
correct to warn flexing military muscle is not a stabilizing solution everywhere, especially
the Middle East and Africa. Perhaps Iraq best epitomizes the dilemmas terrorism poses.
If the United States provides air support or puts troops on the ground to defend
Baghdad, it may halt the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but it cant
defeat it. The ISIS is a curious hybrid of a terror organization and a brutal organized
army that can hold territory and potentially topple a government, but does not regularly
mass forces that can be destroyed in the field by a Western army. If stymied, its fighters
will simply move to other conflicts, like the civil war in Syria. Western democracies long
ago assigned religion a subordinate role. The state claims sovereignty from citizen
consent, not by appealing to divine right. For many Muslims, religion and state
legitimacy are inseparable, and throughout the Middle East and Africa, many are willing
to die to destroy democratic governments that could subordinate the authority of Islam
to secular governments. And ethnic rivalries are often cast in terms of religion. Without
democratic institutions that place individual freedoms above religion, it is hard to see
how competing claims of historically conflicting ethnic groups can be resolved and civil
wars ended, and animus toward the West and acts of terror stopped. Neither economic
engagement by the West nor American foreign aid can change those facts on the ground.
Radical Islam is premised on widely held ideas, and ideas are tough to destroy with
armies. In the end, the United States must recognize it is in for a long slog fighting
terrorism in the Middle East and Africa. No amount of national building and economic
aid will change that, but sometimes it can make matters worse. Sadly, armies and navies
still trump economics. Americans will have to pay the price or face menacing threats to
their security at home and interests abroad.
Aff not key to diplomacy
Lake, 10 Professor of Social Sciences, distinguished professor of political science at
UC San Diego (David A., Making America Safe for the World: Multilateralism and the
Rehabilitation of US authority,
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~dlake/documents/LakeMakingAmericaSafe.pdf) //AD

President Obama and his administration appear to recognize the need to bolster the
authority and legitimacy of the United States in the world. But virtue alone cannot
provide credible guarantees against future US opportunism. Unipolarity is an enabling
condition that persists. The problem of credibility is structural, and not one that a new
administration can solve simply by a new style or approach to foreign policy. Ironically,
to safeguard its authority requires that the United States embed its coercive capabilities
even deeper into multilateral institutions that can provide real checks on potential
opportunism.

US diplomacy fails too many foreign policy goofs
Dworzanksi 7-22 (Tom, Obama does nothing for our allies, or for us, Arizona
Central, 7-22-14, http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/letters/2014/07/22/obama-
does-nothing-for-our-allies-or-for-us/13024717/) //AD

Turmoil in the Middle East is and has been at fever pitch the past five years. Iran, Iraq,
Libya and Syria come to mind. The U.S. diplomacy efforts notably have failed to resolve
any of these situations. Our staunchest ally in the region, Israel, is basically left hanging
by a thread with rockets streaming in from Gaza, and the threat of a nuclear Iran grows
ever closer, and yet we rebuke Israel when they rightly attack those responsible. We
impose sanctions on Iran only until they start to take effect, and then we begin to remove
them. Elsewhere in the world, Vladimir Putin has rebuffed and "punked" President
Barack Obama repeatedly over his takeover of eastern Ukraine and the shooting down of
the Malaysian airliner. Our feeble, tepid response is to send MREs (ready-to-eat meals)
to Ukraine. The one crisis our president can resolve is the one on our southern border,
but again he fails to act effectively. Let history reflect the Obama administration for what
it is, the "Do Nothing" administration.

US soft power resilient
Bev 12 regular columnist to Forbes Indonesia, The Jakarta Post, and Strategic Review,
Associate Partner of Fortune PR Indonesia and based in Northern California (Jennie S,
The Power of American "Soft Power" 5/23/12,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/85broads/2012/05/23/the-power-of-american-soft-
power/)//AD

Almost four years since the beginning of the Great Recession, signified by the implosion
of the financial industry and the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the United
States is recovering. In fact, some sectors have grown to new heights. Thus, a declining
USA is no more than a myth. This myth is likely to continue for a while despite the
recession officially ending in June 2009 as the high unemployment and on-going
foreclosure crisis have cloaked significant economic improvements. In the last four
years, declinism and declinists have been spreading paralyzing dystopian analyses.
Combine this with Nouriel Dr. Doom Roubinis the perfect storm forecast in 2013
and you probably would become even more paralyzed. Daniel Gross best-selling book
Better, Stronger, Faster released in May 2012 is an exception. It is probably one of the
first books that presents encouraging facts in this recovery period rather than
discouraging views of Americas future. The mammoth has gotten back up, but it is
always the memory of ones fall that lingers in mind. We all remember that one fateful
day when we attended the 341(a) bankruptcy hearing to meet creditors and not the
thousands of days of financial stability. Just like we all remember vividly the day our
loved one was buried six-feet under when he died and not the beautiful decades he
shared his life with us. Failure and losing hurt, thus they are recorded for eternity in our
long-term memory. It is just how our brain works, thanks to millions of years of
evolution. The world was so shocked with the fall of USA, that its gradual rise hasnt yet
created a lasting mental image. Good news, American soft power is more powerful than
any fiscal policy and political maneuver. Joseph Nye of Harvard University Kennedy
School of Government says soft power refers to the ability to get through attraction
rather than coercion or payments. By to get it means to receive favorable treatments
based upon attractiveness of a countrys culture, ideals, and policies. For instance,
inspired by TV series about medical doctors, some children in Taiwan aspire to study
medicine at an American university. Infatuated by the idea of a fair trial, an Indonesian
dissident aspires to become a lawyer. Soft power can be hardcore power. And the
American brand is still the best out there. Also, thanks to low US dollar value, a record
62 million foreign tourists visited USA in 2011. In 2010, some 1.04 million immigrants
applied for permanent residency, following 1.13 million in the previous year, which
reflects the worlds insatiable faith in the US brand. The people of the world still believe
that the USA is the place to visit, to reside, and to prosper. US brands, such as
automobile giants Buick, GM, and Ford, continue to grow outside of the USA. US brands
continue to influence socio-political-economic wellbeing of people of the world:
Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are vital in demonstrations and social unrests. US
brands continue to serve peoples mobility and communication: Apple, Microsoft,
CISCO, Oracle, and Boeing. People of the world is a market of seven-billion, and most of
them have occasionally consumed black soda drinks called Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The US
government has lost its geopolitical epicenter, yet American brands keep the legend
alive. And the shift has occurred from public power to private power, from political
power to economic power, from hard power to soft power, with the end of the Cold War
as the turning point. The recent approval of the JOBS Act in April 2012 may as well pick
up where the failure of previous policies have left, as its intention is creating an
encouraging environment for growth of startup companies through more efficient and
lenient procedures of capital raising, including crowdsourcing, venture capitalizing, and
angel investing. And it is expected that every new investment would create at least six
new jobs. I can see the greatness of American brands supported by the JOBS Act creating
another shift in economic recovery, as once again a policy is providing a conducive
environment for growth, just like when Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was repealed by
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999. Now the question is: How far will the JOBS Acts ripple
effect go? And which direction does it go? North or south? Growth, stagnation, or
decadence? Still, I believe in the power of USA as a brand and American brands. The
world loves us.

Obama isnt Bush status quo solves diplomacy
Aziz, 13 (Omer, graduate student at Cambridge University, is a researcher at the Center
for International and Defense Policy at Queens University, The Obama Doctrine's
Second Term, Project Syndicate, 2-5, http://www.project-syndicate.org/blog/the-
obama-doctrine-s-second-term--by-omer-aziz) //AD

The Obama Doctrines first term has been a remarkable success. After the $3 trillion
boondoggle in Iraq, a failed nation-building mission in Afghanistan, and the incessant
saber-rattling of the previous Administration, President Obama was able to reorient
U.S. foreign policy in a more restrained and realistic direction.
He did this in a number of ways. First, an end to large ground wars. As Defense Secretary
Robert Gates put it in February 2011, anyone who advised future presidents to conduct
massive ground operations ought to have [their] head examined. Second, a reliance on
Secret Operations and drones to go after both members of al Qaeda and other terrorist
outfits in Pakistan as well as East Africa. Third, a rebalancing of U.S. foreign policy
towards the Asia-Pacific a region neglected during George W. Bush's terms but one
that possesses a majority of the worlds nuclear powers, half the worlds GDP, and
tomorrows potential threats. Finally, under Obama's leadership, the United States has
finally begun to ask allies to pick up the tab on some of their security costs. With the
U.S. fiscal situation necessitating retrenchment, coupled with a lack of appetite on the
part of the American public for foreign policy adventurism, Obama has begun the
arduous process of burden-sharing necessary to maintain American strength at home
and abroad.
What this amounted to over the past four years was a vigorous and unilateral pursuit of
narrow national interests and a multilateral pursuit of interests only indirectly affecting
the United States.
Turkey, a Western ally, is now leading the campaign against Bashar al-Assads regime in
Syria. Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Australia all now act as de
facto balancers of an increasingly assertive China. With the withdrawal of two troop
brigades from the continent, Europe is being asked to start looking after its own security.
In other words, the days of free security and therefore, free riding, are now over.
The results of a more restrained foreign policy are plentiful. Obama was able to
assemble a diverse coalition of states to execute regime-change in Libya where there is
now a moderate democratic government in place. Libya remains a democracy in
transition, but the possibilities of self-government are ripe. Whats more, the United
States was able to do it on the cheap. Irans enrichment program has been hampered by
the clandestine cyber program codenamed Olympic Games. While Mullah Omar remains
at large, al Qaedas leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been virtually decimated.
With China, the United States has maintained a policy of engagement and explicitly
rejected a containment strategy, though there is now something resembling a cool war
not yet a cold war as Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School puts it, between the two
economic giants.
The phrase that best describes the Obama Doctrine is one that was used by an
anonymous Administration official during the Libya campaign and then picked up by
Republicans as a talking point: Leading From Behind. The origin of the term dates not to
weak-kneed Democratic orthodoxy but to Nelson Mandela, who wrote in his
autobiography that true leadership often required navigating and dictating aims from
behind. The term, when applied to U.S. foreign policy, has a degree of metaphorical
verity to it: Obama has led from behind the scenes in pursuing terrorists and militants, is
shifting some of the prodigious expenses of international security to others, and has
begun the U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific region. The Iraq War may seem to be a distant
memory to many in North America, but its after-effects in the Middle East and Asia
tarnished the United States' image abroad and rendered claims to moral superiority
risible. Leading From Behind is the final nail in the coffin of the neoconservatives'
failed imperial policies.


STEM Leadership

They cant solve number of students are irrelevant

a.) Teachers
Galama and Hosek 08 Ph.D. and M.Sc. in physics, University of
Amsterdam; M.B.A. in business, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France and *Ph.D. and
M.A. in economics, University of Chicago; B.A. in English, Cornell University
(Titus and James, U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology, 2008,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG674.pdf)

With regard to teachers, the line of argument is that there are too few math and science
teachers and that they are not as well prepared as they should be. In Maryland in 2005,
there was apparently a gap between qualified teachers lost and qualified teachers gained
. . . in sciences like physics and chemistry, as well as in math (Wedekind, 2006). Many
reports offer accounts of the dwindling pool of teacher talent in math and science
because of, for example, higher earnings potential, more attractive compensation
systems, and better working conditions in the private sector (Business Roundtable,
2005; Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2004). The National
Academy of Sciences (2006) report states: [M]athematics and science teachers are, as a
group, largely ill-prepared, teaching out of field and without full certification.

b.) China will always win
Attis 07 Practice Manager with the Education Advisory Board, (David, Jul 23,
2007, Higher Education and the Future of U.S. Competitiveness,
http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud/PUB7202h)

Yet the debate in the United States continues to focus on graduating ever greater
numbers of scientists and engineers as the key to increasing U.S. competitiveness.
While we must continue to improve standards and encourage more students to
study science and engineering, we need to acknowledge that we will never
win the race to produce the highest test scores or the most engineers.
Simple demographics dictates that we will never outproduce China in engineers.
But that does not mean that Americas innovation capacity is doomed. The best
test-takers do not always make the best innovators, and a range of countries with
high test scoressuch as Japan, Singapore, Korea, and Chinaare increasingly
worried that their educational systems stress conformity at the expense of
creativity. The challenge is not to train the most scientists and engineers but to
train the scientists and engineers (and artists and anthropologists and managers)
who are best able to work within the global innovation system to create valuable
new products and services.

Impact empirically denied
Galama and Hosek 08 Ph.D. and M.Sc. in physics, University of
Amsterdam; M.B.A. in business, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France and *Ph.D. and
M.A. in economics, University of Chicago; B.A. in English, Cornell University
(Titus and James, U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology, 2008,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG674.pdf)

Despite the rhetoric and the intensive action on the Hill, some voices called for
restraint. The reports and testimony making a case for or arguing against an S&T
crisis are part of an ongoing policy debate.
One line of counterargument is that such warnings are far from unprecedented
and have never resulted in the crisis anticipated. The author of a Washington
Watch article noted that similar fears of a STEM6 workforce crisis in the 1980s
were ultimately unfounded (Andres, 2006). Neal McCluskey, a policy analyst
from the Cato Institute, noted that similar alarm bells were sounded decades
earlier (and in his view, have had underlying political agendas):
Using the threat of international economic competition to bolster federal control
of education is nothing new. It happened in 1983, after the federally
commissioned report A Nation at Risk admonished that our once unchallenged
preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is
being overtaken by competitors throughout the world, as well as the early 1990s,
when George Bush the elder called for national academic standards and tests in
order to better compete with Japan. (McCluskey, 2006)
Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado observed that such issues as poor
student performance have an even longer history, with no negative outcomes.
Arguments that certain other countries produce a greater proportion of scientist
and engineering students or that those students fare better on tests of
achievement . . . have been made for almost 50 years, he stated, yet over that
time frame the U.S. economy has done quite well (Pielke, 2006).



Tech Leadership

US will remain tech leaderinstitutions check
Acemoglu and Robinson, 12 Professors of Economics at MIT (Daron and James,
April 19
th
, 2012, The Christian Science Monitor, World's next technology leader will be
US, not China if America can shape
up,http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint/2012/0419/World-s-
next-technology-leader-will-be-US-not-China-if-America-can-shape-up)//IK
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Voices of both those convinced that China will eclipse the
United States as a global economic and military power and those who are confident of
continued US leadership are getting louder. Much of this debate focuses on the size of
the Chinese economy relative to the US economy or issues of military might. But what
matters for global leadership is innovation, which is not only the key driver of per capita
income growth but also ultimately the main determinant of military and diplomatic
leadership. It was the US that proved after Pearl Harbor how a prosperous economy can
rapidly increase its military power and preparedness when push comes to shove. So the
right question to ask is not who will be the military leader of the next century, but who
will be the technological leader. The answer must be: most probably the US but only if
it can clean up its act. The odds favor the US not only because it is technologically
more advanced and innovative than China at the moment, with an income per capita
more than six times that of China. They do so also because innovation ultimately
depends on a countrys institutions. Inclusive political institutions distribute
political power equally in society and constrain how that power can be exercised. They
tend to underpin inclusive economic institutions, which encourage innovation and
investment and provide a level playing field so that the talents of a broad cross-section of
society can be best deployed. Despite all of the challenges that they are facing, US
institutions are broadly inclusive, and thus more conducive to innovation. Despite all of
the resources that China is pouring into science and technology at the moment, its
political institutions are extractive, and as such, unless overhauled and revolutionized
soon, they will be an impediment to innovation




US tech leadership now
RAND, 8 RAND Corporation for policy analysis (US still leads the world in science
and technology, 6/12/2008, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/rc-
usl061008.php) //RGP
The United States accounts for 40 percent of the total world's spending on scientific
research and development, employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners and is
home to three-quarters of the world's top 40 universities. An inflow of foreign students
in the sciences -- as well as scientists and engineers from overseas -- has helped the
United States build and maintain its worldwide lead, even as many other nations
increase their spending on research and development. Continuing this flow of foreign-
born talent is critical to helping the United States maintain its lead, according to the
study. "Much of the concern about the United States losing its edge as the world's leader
in science and technology appears to be unfounded," said Titus Galama, co-author of the
report and a management scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "But the
United States cannot afford to be complacent. Effort is needed to make sure the nation
maintains or even extends its standing." U.S. investments in research and development
have not lagged in recent years, but instead have grown at rates similar to what has
occurred elsewhere in the world -- growing even faster than what has been seen in
Europe and Japan. While China is investing heavily in research and development, it does
not yet account for a large share of world innovation and scientific output, which
continues to be dominated by the United States, Europe and Japan, according to RAND
researchers. However, other nations are rapidly educating their populations in science
and technology. For instance, the European Union and China each are graduating more
university-educated scientists and engineers every year than the United States.
Policymakers often receive advice from ad hoc sources. Although their viewpoints are
valuable, they should be balanced by more complete and critical assessments of U.S.
science and technology, said report co-author James Hosek, a RAND senior economist.
The absence of a balanced assessment can feed a public misperception that U.S. science
and technology is failing when in fact it remains strong, even preeminent.

No impact to leadership decline the US can free-ride
RAND, 8 RAND Corporation for policy analysis (US still leads the world in science
and technology, 6/12/2008, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/rc-
usl061008.php) //RGP
As with other countries, U.S. economic growth, increase in standard of living, and S&T
progress depend on the United States ability to absorb (make economic use of) recent
innovations made at home or abroad. The rise of R&D and innovation activity in other
nations suggests that the pool of technology created outside the United States may be
growing and that the United States is likely to benefit from increased productivity from
technology invented abroad. There is no reason to believe that the globalization of S&T
and the rise of other nations impacts the United States capability to absorb new
technology directly, as this capability is to a large extent determined by private sector
know-how, business incentives, consumers willingness to try new technologies, and the
legal and regulatory framework. Some technology applications do not require much S&T
capacity, or much knowledge of S&T within the user community or the general public.
For example, solar collectors or filters for water purification can significantly enhance
the productivity of workers in a developing country without the need for them to
understand how these devices work. But many technology applications do require S&T
capacity (see Silberglitt et al., 2006a, 2006b). The S&T capacity of advanced countries,
including an educated and technically astute workforce and public, is the reason why
they are highly capable of implementing new technology, and why developing nations
such as China and India have partial capability, but are well ahead of Latin America, the
Middle East, and Africa in this regard.

Tyranny
No chance of tyranny
Constitutional Commentary 1996 (Winter, pp. 343-5)

A second, perhaps more interesting, difficulty with the prophylactic
approach is that it may rely on a too judicialocentric view of the workings of
government that exaggerates the Court's role in the separation-of-powers
struggle. Professor Redish's argument rests on the notion that it is vitally important
that the Court get its separation-of-powers jurisprudence right. The argument runs
something like this: Separation of powers is a bulwark of liberty - without it, the
individual protections of the Bill of Rights are nothing but paper. The Court defines
separation-of-powers law. If it messes up, then so much for liberty. The Court is bound
to mess up if it adopts anything other than a prophylactic approach to separation of
powers. It is therefore urgent that the Court adopt this approach. Fortunately, the
Framers' design is probably stronger than this argument presupposes. Separation-of-
powers gives each branch tools which enable ambition to counteract
ambition. The Court gets to decide cases. It justifies its decisions with opinions which
the other branches and the citizenry generally follow as authoritative. Thus, although the
Court does not have guns or money, it has words. These words are the Court's tools in
the separation-of-powers struggle. Any time the Court writes an opinion on
separation of powers, it self-consciously uses its particular power to shove
the boundaries of branch power - sometimes to profound effect, as a simple
hypothetical illustrates. Suppose Chief Justice Marshall had ended Marbury v. Madison
with the following paragraph: Then again, Congress has just as much right to interpret
the Constitution as I do - perhaps even more, because Congress is the branch closest to
the people, and it is the people's Constitution. I was just kidding about that judicial
review stuff. History would be very different, partially because such a result in Marbury
would have grossly undermined the Court's future ability to compete in the separation-
of-powers struggle successfully. On a more general level, Supreme Court opinions on
any topic can affect the balance of branch power. For instance, the Supreme Court can
undermine its authority by producing poorly reasoned opinions - or, much worse from a
realpolitik point of view, unpopular opinions. The power, however, of any given decision
to damage a Court staffed by relatively sane Justices is probably limited. This is an
institution that has survived Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. Of course, the other
branches also shove at the boundaries of branch power - FDR's Court-packing plan being
one notable example of this practice. Sometimes the law of unintended consequences
grabs hold. Perhaps the Court-packing plan concentrated the Justices' minds on finding
ways to hold New Deal legislation constitutional, but it also blew up in FDR's face
politically. At least for the last two hundred years, however, no branch has
managed to expand its power to the point of delivering an obvious knock-out
blow to another branch. Seen from this broader perspective, cases such as Morrison,
Bowsher v. Synar, and Mistretta v. United States surely alter the balance of branch
power at a given historical moment, but do not change the fundamental and brute fact
that the Constitution puts three institutional heavyweights into a ring where they are free
to bash each other. Judicialocentrism tends to obscure this obvious point because it
causes people to dwell on the hard cases that reach the Supreme Court. The power of
separation of powers, however, largely resides in its ability to keep the easy cases from
ever occurring. For instance, Congress, although it tries to weaken the President from
time to time, has not tried to reduce the President to a ceremonial figurehead a la the
Queen of England. Similarly, Congress does not make a habit of trying cases that have
been heard by the courts. This list could be continued indefinitely. The Supreme
Court has had two hundred years to muck about with separation-of-powers
doctrine. Over that time, scores of Justices - each with his or her own
somewhat idiosyncratic view of the law - have sat on the bench. Scholars
have denounced separation-of-powers jurisprudence as a mess. But the
Republic endures, at least more or less. These historical facts tend to
indicate that the Court need not rush to change its approach to separation of
powers to prevent a slide into tyranny.
Separation of powers are non-unique crises demand executive power
Gregory, 5 - researcher analyst at the Independent Institute, Graduate at UC Berkeley
(Anthony, Situational Totalitarianism Aug. 16
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory87.html)//gingE
Even in the "peacetime" years between the Cold War and the Global War Against Violent
Extremist Terrorists (or whatever the heck its called these days), America suffered under
Clintons very real despotism, in such obvious instances as Waco, which undoubtedly
had its operational precedents set at wartime. The drug war, too, with all its militaristic
precursors, has hardly been called off, and our liberties only suffer more each day on that
sad front as well. As Robert Higgs has explained, most famously in his brilliant work
Crisis and Leviathan, crises and especially wars lead to a "ratchet effect": Government
grows in size and power, ostensibly as it "responds to existential threats" (as
Krauthammer would put it), but then it does not retract all the way when the crisis ends.
Instead, government is more powerful than it was before the crisis began, although not
quite as tyrannical as it was during the hysterical, crisis-induced stampede toward
collectivism.
No threshold for the impact
Magill, 2k Professor of Law at Virginia (Elizabeth, Virginia Law Review, 2000, page
1198)//gingE
The challenges for advocates of the balance-of-power conception are also substantial.
Defenders of this conception must do no less than provide content to the conception
where none now exists. Adherents must be able to articulate what is meant by balance;
they must provide some way of measuring and comparing the quantum of power
possessed by government institutions and, likewise, provide and defend a benchmark
against which to measure whether an arrangement would upset that balance. Perhaps as
a substitute to that seemingly impossible task, defenders of this conception must identify
how tension and competition among the departments is created and maintained. Only
when that work is completed will courts be able to assess whether an arrangement would
dangerously dilute tension and competition.

Other branches check the impact
Magill, 2k Professor of Law at Virginia (Elizabeth, Virginia Law Review, 2000, page
1185-1186)//gingE
Sometimes this defense of separating functions is presented (like Currie's formulation)
as being about preventing arbitrary government action. Other times the idea is the same,
but it is unveiled in different vocabulary: Separated functions are a way to check and
balance the exercise of power, to limit factions, or to promote deliberation. The
coordination thesis does not work as a justification for institutional separation of
functions. On one reading, the thesis is just a variation on the argument that government
power should be dispersed. The insight is that a single institution should not control all
governmental power; to avoid that, the system provides three different authoritative
decision-makers. As just demonstrated, however, dispersing political power does not
require that power be classified into three categories and assigned to separate
institutions. To disperse power, there must be more than one authoritative decision-
maker, but institutional separation of government functions is not necessary. Arbitrary
action can be guarded against by requiring that three institutions--all engaged in the
same function called lawmaking--concur before liberty or property is taken from an
individual. It might be logical or convenient to say those institutions are exercising
different types of power. But classification of government power into three categories
and dispersal of it among different institutions does not play a distinctive role in this
understanding.

Military

Advanced submarines
Countries have been increasing tech for a while nowshould have seen the
impact
Eshel et al, 12 Staff writer for Tel Aviv Daily (David, New Submarines Use Advanced
Technology To Improve Performance Feb 1, 2012 http://aviationweek.com/awin/new-
submarines-use-advanced-technology-improve-performance)//gingE

The original stealth weapons, submarines may be second only to unmanned systems in
the degree to which they have exploited new technology in the past two decades. Major
advances have included air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems, increasing
submerged endurance and mobility; automation, reducing crew size (and consequently,
life-cycle costs) and improving habitability; electro-optical masts that can sweep the
horizon with high-definition in seconds and drop out of sight; and new torpedoes and
other weapons. On the near horizon is the the mating of SSKs with unmanned air and
underwater vehicles (UUV). One of the newest SSK designs in the world is the
TKMS/Kockums A26, in development for the Swedish Navy and due to become
operational late in the decade. The 1,800-ton A26 builds on experience with the Gotland
classwhich proved a headache for the U.S. Navy during two years of aggressor
operations out of San Diegoand likewise uses Stirling-cycle AIP propulsion, with a
submerged endurance of up to 18 days. (Kockums AIP technology is also used on Japan's
16SS.) New features include a low radar-cross-section sail, an integrated tube-type
multimission portal for swimmers and UUVs, and what the builder calls Genuine
Holistic Stealth Technology (Ghost), giving the A26 lower sonar signatures across all
bands than the Gotland. For example, noise and vibration isolation techniques are
improved, including damping plates between hull frames. Airflow speeds in ducts are
limited and cable and pipe turn radii are above set minima. The A26 has new features
such as a smart degaussing system that uses external sensors to match the boat's
magnetic signature to its background. It will be operated by a crew of 26. TKMS'
Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) unit in Kiel, Germany, is also leading a two-
year, $100 million upgrade of the Israeli navy's three Dolphin submarines at Israeli
shipyards. Dolphin, Leviathan and Tekuma will be joined by two more subs, enhanced
with AIP, under construction at HDW, while acquisition of a sixth is being negotiated.
The upgrade includes 10 launchers per boat for Rafael's Torbuster, a fourth-generation,
hard-kill decoy that seduces incoming torpedoes using technology based on the Rafael's
decoys for surface ships. Upon detection of an incoming torpedo, the sub releases the
decoy from an external launcher, which propels itself to a safe distance before attracting
the incoming torpedo by transmitting acoustic signals, using reactive acoustic deception.
Torbuster actively engages the torpedo as it closes in, activating an explosive warhead
when the target is at the closest proximity, inflicting sufficient damage to the torpedo to
neutralize it. The system is operated from a single console, a launcher control unit. The
operator is able to monitor the decoys in the launchers, to follow and activate the
launchers, and to control the system's safety interlocks and devices. Another element of
the upgrade is Rafael's Sea-Com, a hardened, secure, Internet protocol-based
communications suite integrating internal voice, data and video communications, as well
as external radio and satellite links. Sea-Com reduces sensor-to-shooter time through
efficient collaboration of multidisciplinary systems and real-time access to information
resources. Russia's Project 636 SSK, called Kilo in the West, set standards in the Cold
War, but its designerSt. Petersburg-based CDB Rubinis now playing catch-up after
years of underinvestment. Rubin's general director, Andrey Dyachkov, tells DTI that the
company is completing bench-testing of a prototype AIP system. The system is a
hydrogen fuel cell, as used by TKMS-HDW, but instead of operating on stored hydrogen,
it relies on chemical re- formation of the sub's diesel fuel, which eliminates special on-
board tankage and hydrogen infrastructure on shore. According to Dyachkov, this
technology has already been validated during AIP bench tests. This allows us to use the
standard diesel fuel and doesn't require complex ground support compared to the
German variant, he explained. Rubin plans to install AIP in the Amur 1650, offered for
the Indian navy's tender for six conventional submarines. An export version of Russia's
Project 677 Lada class, Amur has a surface displacement of 1,765 metric tons, submerged
speed of 19 kt. and a crew of 35. It is designed to strike both sea-based and fixed land-
based targets. The 66-meter (217-ft.) boat carries six torpedo tubes and Klub-S (SS-N-
27) missiles in 10 vertical launchers that can be fired in salvos. For the Indian tender it
also will be equipped with Russo-Indian PJ-10 BrahMos supersonic missiles fired from
the same launchers. The AIP can be installed in the Amur 1650 in a separate module
along with the conventional diesel-electric propulsion system. Using the AIP, the sub's
endurance can increase by two or three more weeks from 45 days currently, based on a
customer's request. Continuous submerged time increases from the current nine days to
14-20 days. The first Project 677 boat, the St. Petersburg, is undergoing reliability testing
with the Russian navy in the Baltic Sea. In 2012, it is expected to complete the testing of
its sonar system, says Dyachkov. The Admiralty Shipyards in St. Petersburg are
constructing two more, the Kronstadt and Sevastopol, but so far there are no funds for
completing these with AIP. Rubin plans to further increase Amur 1650 endurance by
replacing lead-acid batteries with lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries. The designers do not
report about their progress in this field, but say that lithium-ion batteries will be able to
increase the sub's submerged endurance and distance by 50% at low noise patrol speed
and threefold at full speed. Unlike the AIP, which is only compatible with the Amur, the
new batteries can also be offered for Rubin's Project 636 Kilo boats. Li-Ion batteries are a
key feature of another radical new submarine, under development since 2008 by South
Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD)the new-technology 510-ton KSM-
500A mini-sub. South Korea has two 150-ton Dolgorae-class minis for special operations
and ASW training, but as plans for a replacement have evolved, the requirements have
expanded. From the outset, the new sub was intended to attack large surface units, and
initial plans were for a 15-kt. speed, 2,000-nm range and two weeks of submerged
endurance. The ADD explained that the speed was the minimum required to escape from
a counterattack after firing torpedoes at major surface units, and the range covers
operations into the coastal waters of potential adversaries. For underwater endurance,
the ADD called for more than two weeks. Then, the March 2010 sinking of the corvette
Cheonan by a North Korean torpedomost likely from a Yono-class midget submarine
brought the small-sub concept into the spotlight as a possible counter to the North's 70-
strong sub fleet. The latest concept, the KSM-500A, unveiled in October 2011, is even
faster and has a three-week endurance. It carries six torpedoestwo 533-mm heavies to
attack surface ships and four 324-mm lightweights to target submarinesplus a payload
interface module that can hold missiles or mines. The craft is designed to carry 10 crew
and up to seven combat swimmers. The notable feature of the KSM-500A design is its
propulsion, which is all-electric. By dispensing with diesel generators and relying on Li-
Ion batteries with more than twice the energy density of lead-acid ones, the KSM-500A
will both be ultra-quiet and able to sprint for greater distances above 10 kt. than
current small submarines, the ADD claims. Packaging a motor, rotor, stator and
propellers into an integrated motor-propulsor eliminates the drive shaft and makes room
in the aft compartment for a payload module, while a flank-array sonar can extend over
almost the whole length of the hull because there is no noisy machinery in the aft section.
The KSM-500A concept is not yet frozen and a hybrid system, comprising an AIP unit
and Li-Ion batteries, is still an option. While lethality, survivability and mobility are still
the focus of most design efforts, DCNS, the French military shipyard, recently completed
the world's first study on the environmental impact of a submarine's life-cycle, seeking
innovative ways to reduce this impact. Eric Fusil, the study's leader, tells DTI that in
general when you improve the environmental impact your product also becomes more
efficient in terms of functionality and cost. This has been the case with Sepia [Submarine
with Environmental Performance Improvement Along-life], a name we chose with a nod
and a wink to the Latin name of the common cuttlefish, famous for its excellent ability to
camouflage. Sepia analyzed a submarine's damage to human health, ecosystems and
natural resources depletion, and the solutions foundwhile maintaining the same
strategic performances as a Scorpene submarinesave 160 tons of fuel a year, or 40%,
and cut the global environmental impact by 35% while eliminating liquid and solid waste
disposal at sea. The team considered every step of the entire life cycle and every part of
the ship, including packaging and related products such as consumables and electricity
consumption on the construction site. They looked at the materials used, the
manufacturing process, the period of active duty, maintenance and dismantling. All the
solutions we chose were at least at a prototype stage, says Fusil. The silicone hull
coating, for example, already exists. It not only reduces drag but is also non-toxic for the
organic matter (shells, etc.) which tries to latch onto the ship. They can latch onto this
surface for a short time, but it comes off in micro-particles, taking the matter with it,
explains Fusil. The Sepia design has a shrouded propulsor and dual drive motors, a
smaller one for patrol and a larger one for sprint. Li-Ion batteries would be used, helping
reduce life-cycle diesel consumption by 40%.

US is already behind and Russian and Chinese submarine ties will
overpower the US
Keck, 14 - Associate Editor of The Diplomat (Zackary Russia May Sell China New
Advanced Submarines March 28, 2014 http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/russia-may-
sell-china-new-advanced-submarines/)//gingE
Russia is developing a new advanced submarine class and may sell them to China,
according to reports in Russias media.

Last week, the head of Russias Navy, Adm. Viktor Chirkov, announced that Russia
would build new fifth-generation submarines dubbed the Kalina-class. Russia is
currently designing a fifth-generation conventional submarine, dubbed Project Kalina,
which will be fitted with an air-independent propulsion (AIP) system, Adm. Viktor
Chirkov said, according to Russian media outlets. Our industry promises to develop this
AIP system by 2017 and build the first boat fitted with such a system by 2018, he added.
The report did not specify what type of AIP technology would be used. Submarines
equipped with AIP technologies offer significant advantages over conventional diesel-
electric engines and even nuclear submarines. AIP systems allow submarines to stay
submerged far longer than diesel-electric submarines, which must surface more
frequently for oxygen, and thus give away their positions to potential adversaries. On the
other hand, submarines with AIP systems are much stealthier than nuclear-powered
submarines, which must constantly run pumps to cool their nuclear reactors. This pump
emits noises that can be used by adversaries to detect the submarines presence and
location. Thus, AIP-powered submarines can stay submerged for long periods of time
while remaining virtually silent. A number of countries, predominately Western ones but
also including ones like India, have acquired or are pursuing AIP-powered submarines.
There is also speculation, including by the Indian government, that Chinas Type 041
(Yuan-class) submarinesor at least some of the fleetmay be powered by AIP systems.
The development of the new Kalina-class submarines raises questions about a
prospective submarine deal Russia is negotiating with China. As The Diplomat has
reported before, Russia and China have long been in negotiations over Beijings desire to
purchase four of Russias fourth generation Lada-class submarines. However, Russias
decision to proceed with production of the fifth-generation Kalina-class submarines may
mean that Moscow will not continue producing the Lada-class submarines (so far, only
one Lada-class submarine, St. Petersburg, actually exists). According to Want China
Times, however, Voice of Russia reported soon after Admiral Chirkovs announcement
that Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably authorize the sale of the Kalina-class
submarines to China. Want China Times said that the Voice of Russia reportwhich
does not appear to be available in Englishwas based on the assessment of Vassily
Kashin, a senior research fellow from the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies
and Technologies. Thus, in no way has this been officially announced by the Russian
government. Moreover, Moscow may be floating the idea simply as another way of
pressuring the United States over its reaction to Russias annexation of the Crimea. Still,
selling China the new submarines would further enhance Beijings growing undersea
fleet, especially if China used the submarines to reverse engineer its own vessels based
on Russias technology.

Bombers solve any terminal impact
Spalding, 13 - military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (Robert, October 16,
2013 Submarines Alone Are Not Enough Nuclear Deterrent
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/10/submarines-alone-are-not-enough-
nuclear-deterrent/72032/)//gingE
There are ten primary missions outlined in the Department of Defenses 2012 strategy
guidance. Three of those missions require the Pentagon to maintain an effective
deterrent to nuclear war that, the guidance says, can under any circumstances confront
an adversary with the prospect of unacceptable damage, both to deter potential
adversaries and to assure U.S. allies and other security partners that they can count on
Americas security commitments. The CATO Institutes Christopher Preble and Matt
Fays recent article To Save the Submarines, Eliminate ICBMs and Bombers is a policy
recommendation that fails to meet DODs high standard for an effective nuclear
deterrent. While they mention the submarines inherent survivability, power and
accuracy, they neglect other aspects required of an effective deterrent force. The
deterrent force must be survivable, affordable, flexible, visible, available, credible and
provide stability. While each element of the triad comprises many of these attributes, no
one leg has them all. Affordability is also a key component of nuclear deterrent forces.
While the $60 billion dollars quoted for the new nuclear-armed submarines seems
daunting, it pales in comparison to the $400 billion for the Joint Strike Fighter,
according to the Government Accountability Office. Moreover, the entire nuclear
deterrence force represents only around $20 billion per year, according to Deputy
Defense Secretary Ash Carter. ICBMs are the least expensive leg to maintain. Bombers
still have a required conventional role, so making them non-nuclear nets only minor
savings. Thus, even with the addition of new submarines, the nuclear deterrent force is
incredibly affordable compared to the overall defense budget of $526 billion. The nuclear
deterrent force must be credible. While the United States enjoys a technological
advantage in submarine technology, there is no guarantee we will maintain it. The triad
of submarines, ICBMs and bombers provides a hedge in the case of a technological
breakthrough that renders any one system obsolete. It also provides insurance in the
case of a systemic technological failure. A nations leaders must think twice about using
nuclear weapons if they must strike another nations homeland. Submarines operating at
sea do not evoke targeting concerns similar to an ICBM field in North Dakota.
Submarines provide a viable second strike, but this also applies to ICBMs under any
circumstance short of an all-out strike from Russia. In addition, bombers can be
survivable when dispersed. Submarines are inherently flexible, but fortunately, bombers
and ICBMs share this trait. Bombers can be used for conventional operations and are
forward deployed. ICBMs can be re-targeted almost immediately. Submarines are not
visible. They are supposed to remain undetectable until they are needed. ICBM
operations are invisible as well. The actions to retarget ICBMs, or to bring them on/off
alert, all happen behind the veil of a silo. Bombers are the only visible component of the
triad. This makes them a vital component. No other leg can advertise American will
better than the bomber. The bomber can fly a mission as a show of resolve as occurred
during North Koreas recent nuclear provocation. They can also go on alert, which can
also be witnessed by adversaries. Deterrent forces also must be readily available. The
ICBMs are the most available of the triad. They are always on alert at very low cost,
allowing bombers to remain off alert for the majority of the time and for submarines to
be swapped out or repaired when needed. Once the war in Afghanistan winds to its
inevitable conclusion, phase 0 and 1 (Shape the Environment; Deter the Enemy)
operations must once again rise to the fore. The triad of submarines, ICBMs and
bombers has all of the qualities required of an effective deterrent force. The affordability
of the nuclear triad makes arguments against any one leg shortsighted.
Submarines are obsolete and dangerous
Jackson, 12 PhD, University of Mississippi, School of Pharmacy, Oxford, Mississippi
(Joseph D. June 27, Nuclear submarines are dangerous and obsolete
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20120627-OPINION-206270366)//gingE

One of the worst things that can happen to a ship, second only to a Titanic hull breach, is
a fire. The U.S. Navy is very cognizant of the dangers. In response to this threat, all U.S.
Navy ships are equipped with a very sophisticated fire detection, alarm and suppression
system. Why did not the USS Miami's system detect and respond (to last month's fire)?
Why was so much flammable clutter on board as to provide fuel for a fire of the intensity,
persistence and volume as was experienced? The distinctive odor of burning
polyurethane foam was conspicuous. Poly-foam is highly flammable, it has a low ignition
point and it extrudes large volumes of highly toxic smoke. It has no proper place on any
ship, especially a sub. As to the dissipation of the wreckage: It should be junked. All
nuclear subs should be junked. They have no credible strategic value. An
accident in a nuclear sub's power reactor core could produce a nuclear explosion, with
hundreds of dead (conservatively) and billions in property damage. A large part of the
Seacoast would be uninhabitable for a very long time (if such an incident occurred at
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard). There exists a technology that can detect, track and destroy
a sub by satellite in orbit. This is a reversal of the classic tactical situation of the sub.
Heretofore, the sub has been the predator, the silent and invisible hunter. A satellite
could "see" the sub; the sub could not see the satellite. The sub would never see it
coming. The satellite could launch three missiles with small nuclear warheads. They
would not be aimed at the sub; rather, they would be targeted to a range pattern
resembling the classic "navigator's cocked hat." If the sub was within t hat triangle (the
triangle of death), its hull would be crushed or it would be shaken so violently that its
crew would be killed and its machinery destroyed. Nuclear submarines are a dangerous
and obsolete weapons system. The relation of orbital (anti-submarine warfare) systems
to subs is similar to the battleship and aviation controversy. It is said that when the
Ostfriesland went down, under attack by Gen. William Mitchell's bombers, some of the
admirals wept.
Aerospace
Alt Causes
Alt cause worker shortage
Blakey, 3/13/14 President and CEO of the Aerospace Industry Association (Marion C.
The US Aviation Industry and Jobs: Keeping American Manufacturing Competitive,
Aerospace Industries Association, http://www.aia-
aerospace.org/sectors/civil_aviation/news/the_u.s._aviation_industry_and_jobs_keep
ing_american_manufacturing_competit)//IS
American aerospace workers are among the most highly productive and skilled workers
in the world. With a global market that is growing rapidly, we must maintain an
adequate supply of workers with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math
(STEM) disciplines and specific manufacturing skills for U. S. industry to continue to
dominate and benefit from the aerospace export market. And for aviation markets to
meet the forecasted demand, we will need to recruit and train hundreds of thousands of
new pilots and maintenance technicians, as a recent Boeing study has verified. We want
to sell those aircraft, train those pilots, and hire those mechanics. Unfortunately, today
America is simply not producing enough workers with the right technical skills. The U. S.
graduates around 300,000 students a year with bachelors or associate degrees in STEM
fields. The February 2012 report of the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology (PCAST) recommended that this be raised by one-third to meet our
economic needs. One startling fact is that less than 40% of students who start college
intending to earn a STEM degree actually complete the degree requirements. We need to
turn that around, and AIA and our member companies are working to do just that. We
are collaborating with other stakeholders to increase retention rates in engineering
programs by putting in place policies and practices, such as internships and mentoring,
which encourage and support the success of qualified students. And this is not just about
four year degrees. Community colleges and career technical education play an equally
important role in meeting our workforce needs. In fact, today one third of our current
STEM employees begin their education in community colleges. For years, aerospace
companies have experienced challenges in filling certain manufacturing and other
technical positions. Customized credentialing programs that prepare students with the
specifically required skills are playing an important role in addressing the existing STEM
skills gap and constitute another key element of our industry's workforce efforts. Our
STEM workforce challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the aerospace industry is
graying. In 2007, we found that almost 60 percent of the U.S. aerospace workforce was
age 45 or older. Today, 9.6 percent of our industry is eligible to retire, and projections
are that by 2017 -- just three years from now -- 18.5% of the entire industry will be
eligible to retire. At our largest corporations (those employing 100,000 or more), the
percentage retirement eligible is already 18.6 percent. We are experiencing a shortage of
STEM workers today, but the problem will be even greater when the bow wave of actual
retirement hits us in the next couple of years.


Squo Solves
Status quo solves GE investment
Morris, 7/18/14 led Aviation Week's ShowNews, the best-read daily news magazine
of aerospace trade shows, for nearly two decades. His background in business journalism
before joining Aviation Week includes stints at Reuters, the American Banker daily
banking newspaper and as business news editor at the Milwaukee Journal and the
Cincinnati Enquirer. (John, GE Invests As Defense Budgets Decline, Aviation Week,
http://aviationweek.com/farnborough-2014/ge-invests-defense-budgets-decline)//IS
Investment by GE Aviation in next-generation military engines will increase by 50% next
year even as military budgets decline in the U.S. and around the world. The goal: to
develop a sixth-generation fighter engine for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, and an
advanced engine for helicopters. They will all incorporate ceramic matrix composites
(CMCs) in the hot section, and 3-D printing (additive manufacturing) for difficult-to-
make parts. We havent had this much activity going on in next-gen military engines for
a couple of decades, says Jean Lydon-Rodgers, vice president and general manager of
GE Aviations military systems. Most people would be surprised to hear that, in the
middle of sequestration. I couldnt be more excited. She wont say specifically what
these engines are for, except to bring more power for less weight and extended range
though significant reductions in fuel burn. Applications could include future bombers
and strike aircraft (and UAVs), the re-engining of fighters such as the F-35, and
helicopters such as Black Hawks and Apaches. The engines could also be used for a
turboprop for future regional airliners based on the GE38 turboshaft that powers the
Sikorsky CH-53K, while versions of the GE38 could also re-engine Chinooks and V-22
Ospreys. Our R&D is at the highest level since the F136 [GEs alternative engine for the
F-35]. It is important right now to renew the technology in our portfolio because there
will be a demand for new-tech engines. Were not going to be able to rest on our laurels
or continuously upgrade our legacy fleets; we simply cannot add new technologies into
todays engines and expect them to have the capabilities the Air Force and Navy need.

Aerospace growing now state investments and industry projections prove
Prah, 4/2/14 adjunct professor of Journalism. She is a veteran Washington, D.C.,
reporter with more than 20 years reporting experience, including stints at Kiplinger,
McGraw-Hill, Congressional Quarterly and The Bureau of National Affairs. She currently
is a manger and senior staff reporter at Stateline.org(Pamela, Aerospace Manufacturing
Takes Off in Southern States, The Pew Charitable Trusts,
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
analysis/blogs/stateline/2014/04/02/aerospace-manufacturing-takes-off-in-southern-
states)//IS
U.S. manufacturing jobs in general were waning even before the recession, with
employment shrinking by 22 percent between 2002 and 2012. The aerospace sector grew
7 percent over that same period. Even with the fiscal austerity in Washington, D.C., sales
in the aerospace industry grew 41 percent from 2002 to 2012, driven largely by military
and international sales, Holloway said. And the sector is expected to grow. Boeing
projects a demand for 35,000 new planes by 2032. Airbus projects building more than
29,000 jets in the same period. States are fighting to land these jobs. Boeing, the world's
largest aerospace company, sparked a bidding frenzy among states last year when a
workers' union in Washington state rejected the company's contract offer and the
company started looking elsewhere to make its 777X jet. Missouri, for example, held an
emergency special legislative session in December 2013 and approved a $150 million a
year economic incentive package to lure Boeing there. Washington kept the project after
the union decided to accept the offer after all, including freezing pensions and changing
to a 401(k) plan. But the significant incentives being offered reflect the importance of
these jobs to states. These are crown jewel industries. States are not wrong to value
them inordinately, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, D.C.

Aerospace growing now increased production need and foreign
investment
Herb, 1/2/14 (Jeremy, Study predicts 5 percent defense and aerospace growth, The
Hill, http://thehill.com/policy/defense/194286-study-predicts-5-percent-defense-and-
aerospace-growth)//IS
But the overall defense and aerospace industry will still grow in 2014, thanks to boosted
revenue in the aerospace sector. It is likely that 2014 will bring high single to double-
digit levels of growth in the commercial aerospace sub-sector, as experienced in 2012
and expected in 2013, given the dramatic production forecasts of the aircraft
manufacturers, Deloitte says. The 2014 growth in the commercial aerospace industry is
being driven by record-setting production levels, due to the accelerated replacement
cycle of obsolete aircraft with newer fuel-efficient planes. The report predicts that by
2023, annual production levels in the commercial aerospace industry will increase by 25
percent. The Deloitte report also cites increases in passenger demand in places like the
Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region.
Air Power
Air power doesnt help overall military power
Farley, 14 assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International
Commerce (Robert, The Real Problem with the U.S. Air Force, The National Interest,
1/28/2014, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-real-problem-the-us-air-force-
9778?page=2) //RGP
Remarkably, Lowther fails to produce any examples of the USAF contributing good
advice to civilian policymakers. Since its founding, history is replete with examples of the
opposite; the Air Force counseled almost certainly disastrous escalation in the Korean
War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, without serious regard for the
political difficulties that U.S. civilian leaders faced at the time. The USAAF, the nearly
independent predecessor of the USAF, argued that the D-Day invasion was unnecessary,
a policy that would almost certainly have resulted in Soviet control of Europe. In 1990,
only the last-minute intervention of tactically minded generals prevented the Air Force
from presenting a campaign plan that would have left Saddam Husseins army intact and
in firm control of Kuwait. And so yes, the independent Air Force does given independent
advice, but this advice tends to lean heavily towards the idea that airpower can cheaply,
decisively win wars. This would be less of a problem were it not for the fact that strategic
airpower is alluring, especially to civilians who lack experience with military affairs. A
better approach would be to design military institutions to take an integrated view of
national power, rather than invoke competitive dynamics that will likely lead to
outlandish claims and bad policy recommendations. Its About Bureaucracy The creation
of the Air Force in 1947 turned airpower into a zero-sum game for the U.S. military
services. Aerospace innovations developed in one service threaten the turf of the other
two. This leaves the Air Force to justify itself through explicit denigration of the
contribution of the other services. Indeed, Dr. Lowther manages, in this short piece, to
imply that soldiers are incapable of understanding aerial maps, and that the Navy cant
contribute to antiaccess warfare. This is the inherent tension in the modern air force;
shorn of its original strategic bombing justification, it struggles to conceive of itself as a
support arm while simultaneously insisting that it is not a support arm. These problems
exist not because air force officers and airpower theorists are bad people, but rather
because weve established a system of military organization that makes destructive
interservice conflict inevitable. The Air Force didnt want the A-10, but felt compelled to
buy it in order to undercut Army demands for intrinsic aviation. The Air Force doesnt
want drones, but letting the Army have them would threaten the future of the service.
The Air Force has grown bored with its nuclear missiles, but cant give them up because
such a move would encroach upon institutional prerogatives.
Air power fails new weapons neutralize the advantage of air power
Goon and Kopp, 10 Graduate of the US Naval Test Pilot School; First Class Honours
from the University of Western Australia, Ph.D., M.A. from Monash University, Senior
Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Member of the
Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (Peter and Carlo, "A Perspective on the
Quadrennial Defense Review," Air Power Australia, 2/10/2010,
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-100210-1.html) //RGP
In the air combat domain, anti-access and area-denial weapons technologies comprise
rapidly deployable, highly mobile advanced radars and Surface to Air Missile systems,
counter-stealth radars, passive geolocation sensors, and advanced digital air defence C4
networks, all of which were developed to work in concert with advanced fighter aircraft
such as the Su-35S Flanker and the stealthy, F-22-like Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA, unveiled
last week. In the maritime combat domain, anti-access and area-denial weapons
technologies comprise advanced air, sea, sub and coastal battery launched supersonic
anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), terminally guided anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM),
quiet submarines armed with digital torpedoes, including supercavitating designs. In the
basing domain, proliferating cruise missiles and terminally guided ballistic missiles
render many existing US foreign bases effectively unusable for deployment of aircraft,
warships and ground forces, and the logistical elements needed to sustain these. These
weapons are now seriously challenging the ability of the United States and its close allies
to conduct military interventions in many parts of the world. A nation which is equipped
with much less than the full gamut of anti-access and area-denial weapons will be in the
position to hold key US and allied in theatre assets at serious risk. Over the coming
decade, this trend will drive the United States toward disproportionate responses if a
contingency demands intervention, as many elements of the existing and currently
planned US force structure will simply be unusable.

Air power not key to overall power projection
Buono, 3 commissioned through the Air Force Reserve Officer Training; assigned to
the Pentagon to lead the Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Daily Intelligence Briefing Team
for two years, followed by a tour as the Executive Officer to the Air Force Deputy Chief of
Staff for Air and Space Operations (Suzanne, US AIRPOWER AS A MILITARY
INSTRUMENT OF POLICY, THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIR AND SPACE
STUDIES, June 2003, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA425582) //RGP
Why Airpower is Perceived as Less Threatening There are many reasons why airpower,
notwithstanding all its recently developed and increasingly honed capability, is viewed as
significantly less aggressive and provocative than is the deployment of large-scale ground
forces. Some of these reasons may carry more weight at particular times or with
particular countries; others may be entirely overlooked or even occasionally invalid; and
still others may be held to be true at such deeply implicit societal levels that they are
scarcely acknowledged. In the aggregate, however, the following rationales present
compelling support for the perceived relative innocuousness of airpower. Airpower is
Perceived to be Weaker than it is Airpower is generally viewed as less capable than
ground power. This is largely a carry-over from earlier wars, though several more recent
battles have served to reinforce this belief further. It speaks to a demonstrable
perception that airpower, though now precise and high-tech, is still less powerful overall;
a tornado vice a hurricane. In recent history, the US operation in Somalia went far to
justify this opinion. From an airhead just barely off the beach, the stated initial intent of
getting relief supplies out into the countryside and past the warlords was only minimally
achieved at best; it was only with the introduction of the ground forces to escort the
supplies and guard the storehouses that the distribution efforts had any success. Not
long thereafter, however, with the highly-publicized downing of two Blackhawk
helicopters by fairly primitive Somali forces (and seemingly solely because of this), US
forces left Somalia with their collective tail between their legs. Airpower had been given a
black eye; beaten up by a force that scarcely even qualified as a bully in an operation that
wasnt even a war. The resounding perception was that the surgical, if not almost gentile,
nature of airpower could not hold its own even in the streets of a third world country.
This was also true in Vietnam. Despite constant bomb runs from every type of airplane in
the inventory, US airpower in Vietnam proved utterly incapable of stemming the flow of
supplies and troops streaming into South Vietnam from the North.

Deterrence
Deterrence fails multiple warrants
Vanaik, 14 Retired Professor of International Relations and Global Politics from the
University of Delhi (Achin, Ten Dillemas of Nuclear Deterrence, Dianuke.org,
5/13/2014, http://www.dianuke.org/ten-dillemas-of-nuclear-deterrence/) //RGP
We will investigate here what can be called the Ten Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence.
The presence of nuclear weapons between rival countries cannot guarantee the
prevention of nuclear exchange or war. It is always a gamble, and it is a gamble that can
always fail at some time in some place. The claim that nuclear deterrence works, at least
to such an extent that you can safely rely upon it, is untenable. It is untenable because
the conditions that must be established for assured safety to arise from the workings of
nuclear deterrence are so restrictive that these are impossible to establish in practice and
in the real world in which we live. This defect becomes clear when we understand what
nuclear deterrence is it is simply a psychological state of mind! It is a psychological
state of mind that must exist in the minds of ones nuclear opponents, i.e., among those
who decide on whether or not to push the nuclear button. And it is a state of mind that
you (who are relying on nuclear deterrence for your countrys security) must ensure will
always exist in your opponent although you can never guarantee or ensure that it will
always so hold. To put it another way: nuclear deterrence is nothing but the irrational
hope that a terrible fear of the consequences of nuclear war will continuously promote
wise decisions by fallible human beings operating under intense pressure in changing
circumstances that neither they nor you can fully control! If to become more secure you
need the threat power of nuclear weapons then you are trying to establish your security
by making the other side vulnerable and more insecure because they are afraid of what
your nuclear weapons can do. Similarly, the other side must try to make itself more
secure by making you more vulnerable and insecure to its own nuclear arsenal. This
situation is often called the security-insecurity paradox. Your own security is supposed to
rest on making the other side more fearful and insecure so that it behaves the way you
want it to. Then the other side seeks to overcome its insecurity to make itself more secure
by promoting greater insecurity/vulnerability in its opponent. Thus we have what can
also be called the vulnerability paradox. The way out of this would seem to lie in both
sides accepting mutual vulnerability and a mutual balance of terror. This then should be
a form of stability in the nuclear equation. Unfortunately, no such stability arises and
instead we have a constant and powerful spur to continuous nuclear arms racing. To
understand why this is so we first need to understand what are the basic conditions that
have to be met if there is to be nuclear security even by the logic of nuclear deterrence
thinking. According to this logic a country must have, what is called, an assured
second-strike capacity. Between two countries having nuclear weapons there is always
the possibility (and the temptation) that the country that uses its nuclear weapons in a
properly targeted fashion first can hope or expect to finish off all or most of the
opponents nuclear capacity to retaliate after such a first-strike. Therefore, a country
must be able to absorb a first-strike and have enough left over to devastate the
opponent so that the opponent is not tempted to strike first. Developing more nuclear
weapons in this way may seem to the side doing it a reasonable thing to do in order to
protect itself. But to the other side this means your opponent is making itself stronger in
the name of developing second-strike capacities but can also make an even more massive
first-strike (regardless of whether or not it declares a policy of No First Use), and
therefore must be a spur to the threatened side also developing more nuclear weapons in
the name of strengthening and ensuring the survival of its own second-strike capacity. A
third dilemma can be called the predictability issue. Since deterrence is a state of mind
in your opponent you are always tempted to try ways of making that opponents
behaviour more predictable, i.e., in accordance with what you want. Rather than simply
hope that fear of your nuclear arsenal will make the opponent behave the way you want it
to, you try and replace hope with some form of compulsion. To demand a high degree of
predictability about an opponents behaviour means a demand for repeated, regular,
institutionalised predictability and symmetry by each nuclear player vis--vis the other.
The reality is that this is not possible. But as long as one nuclear player or the other seeks
to establish what it thinks can be the conditions in which such assured and predictable
behaviour by the other side will be forthcoming, then this slides easily into a strategy of
not just simple deterrence but aggressive compellence. This strategy of compellence
involves certain kinds of nuclear preparations and their associated political implications
and signals whereby the other side is supposedly compelled to follow the pattern set by,
and more controlled by the first nuclear player. Not only is nuclear arms escalation
written into this compellence script but nuclear tensions are even more heightened than
otherwise. The certainties of compellence are substituted for the uncertain certainties
of normal deterrence. Something like this happened with the US pursuing such a
compellence strategy as part of its efforts to stabilise and control to its own advantage
the nuclear arms race of the late seventies and eighties. It is also a script written into the
BMD, which represents the US ambition nuclearly/militarily to dominate the world via
domination of space itself. Compellence is a more aggressive form of seeking political
advantage through nuclear weapons and there is no natural firebreak between the
dangerous instability of deterrence-based nuclear behaviour and the more dangerous
instability of compellence-based nuclear behaviour. It is not enough just to have nuclear
weapons or to claim that they are never going to be used and that their purpose is only to
prevent a nuclear conflict. Your nuclear threat must be credible. Indeed, an opponent
will not be deterred if it believes that the deterrer will never use his nuclear weapons.
Thus the capability and the will of the deterring country must not be doubted. The
enemy should be convinced that its nuclear opponent will use nuclear weapons if
pushed to the brink, or at least uncertain whether or not they will be used, but never
certain or confident that they will not be used. However, any second-use of nuclear
weapons is not, and cannot be, an act of security retrieval or enhancement. Once an
opponent has launched a first-strike against you then your security has gone. By using
your nuclear weapons second, all you are doing is engaging in an act of revenge to
make the other country suffer too. This is also a senseless act of revenge because it only
sets off a chain of further launches and counter-launches, which further devastates both
countries. This being so, the side using nuclear weapons first can entertain ideas that a
second-strike is not credible. Thus the question of credibility or willingness to use
nuclear weapons becomes very important. So governments that have nuclear weapons
despite occasional pronouncements that these will never be used do not actually want
the public or other governments to seriously believe them. This would undermine that
countrys credibility. In the face of all kinds of challenges and uncertainties
technological, military, etc. the capability to use nuclear weapons must be constantly
updated and fine-tuned and available for showing in a variety of circumstances. Also, the
political will to use nuclear weapons (presumably in the last resort) must be periodically
displayed. Thus the requirements of making ones nuclear deterrent credible creates
powerful pressure for the generation and sustenance of both an enduring politics of
nuclear-related hostility including nuclear brandishing and brinkmanship and of
arms racing between rivals. Nuclear perspectives/behaviour are the prisoner of, and
subordinated to, the more fundamental and overarching framework and context of
political hostility between nuclear-political rivals. Nuclearisation/militarisation are
themselves the symptoms or results or expressions of this prior hostility. They are not
their primary causes and therefore cannot be the solutions undoing this hostility. Indeed,
they exacerbate such tensions/hostility because nuclearisation is itself the
announcement that one is willing to inflict the utmost devastation to the opponent
country and society. It was not the supposed deterrent qualities of the US-Soviet nuclear
stand-off that eroded political hostilities but the other way around. It was the Gorbachev
initiated unraveling of Cold War politics that paved the way for the erosion of nuclear
tensions. The same principle of the prior importance of politics applies to the India-
Pakistan situation. And nuclear weapons, including the presumed powers of nuclear
deterrence, operate within this wider and more determining political context. The
rhythms of deterrence behaviour are subordinated to the more powerful rhythms of
political behaviour between mutually hostile countries. This gives rise to a classic
paradox in the search for stable deterrence: the conditions that are thought to make it
necessary to apply deterrence guarantee that it will not be stable. The extent to which
deterrence is genuinely stable is the extent to which it is unnecessary! India-Pakistan
cannot have a stable deterrence equation nor did the US and the Soviet Union. But
Britain and France can have a stable deterrent equation with each other precisely
because it is unnecessary for them to have such a nuclear equation.
Deterrence fails multiple problems with deterrence theory
Troiani, 13 intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (Brooks, Why Current
Deterrence Theory is Wrong, Waging Peace Today, 7/3/2013,
http://wagingpeacetoday.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-current-deterrence-theory-is-
wrong.html) //RGP
In its most basic theoretical form, deterrence is an equation involving two parties, where
one party weighs the gain it may make by pursuing a course of action against the price it
may pay by the retaliation of the other party. By way of illustration, it is useful to
consider two nations, Nation A and Nation B, whose interests collide on a particular
issue. If Nation A is known to be considering a course of action contrary to the interests
of Nation B, Nation B may signal its intent to retaliate if Nation A does indeed choose
that course of action. This leaves Nation A with a decision. First, it must decide whether
Nation B has the capability to carry out its threat, and, second, it must decide whether
Nation B has the will to carry out its threat. And the deciding factor in both of these
judgments is the credibility of Nation B's capability and will to carry out the threat. If, as
a result of this cost-benefit calculation, Nation A decides not to go ahead with the course
of action, then deterrence has been successful; but if Nation A decides that the gains out-
weigh the risk or price, and goes ahead regardless of the threat, then deterrence has
failed. This example, though, provides only the barest outline sketch of how deterrence
operates in the foreign policy arena. The simplicity of the theoretical formula belies the
complexity of international diplomacy in practice and critics of deterrence have focused
on the relative rigidity of the formula compared to the fluidity and unpredictability of
international diplomacy. Furthermore, deterrence rests heavily on certain assumptions
about the parties involved and the way they will react. First, deterrence rests heavily on
the belief that rationality will prevail throughout the process. Not only do the various
parties have to behave in fundamentally rational ways, but each party must perceive the
other as behaving in a fundamentally rational way. In practice, this leads to a
complicated process of perception and counterperception as policymakers and
intelligence bodies from each nation estimate and try to influence what the other is
thinking. Critics of deterrence rightly point out that the decisions of political leaders
often do not fall into neatly explainable categories and that however carefully the
deterrence situation may be controlled, ultimately the decision is a subjective one. In
foreign affairs as in everyday life, behavior in deterrence situations is based on instinct as
well as reason and this instinctive element can never be confidently discounted.
Moreover, the way both parties view the situation can be influenced qualitatively by any
number of factors, including irrationality, misperception, poor judgment, or even just
wishful thinking. In short, what may seem an unacceptable price to one person or under
some circumstances could well be judged by another under different circumstances to be
acceptable. Moreover, since history is filled with events that were quite simply
unpredictable, it is clearly difficult to account with any certainty for the myriad of
accidents, mistakes, and emotions that may play a part in a decision. At best, employing
deterrence is an approximation, but in the thermonuclear age, with weapons capable of
global annihilation, the stakes are higher than ever before. Because deterrence is very
much in the eye of the beholder, and actual intentions and capabilities are less important
than the other side's estimate of those intentions and capabilities, the process of
communicating and interpreting information is crucial. Known as signaling, this two-
way discourse is open to a wide range of possible scenarios. One involves explicit
communications, including public speeches and classified diplomatic correspondence.
Another is implicit measures such as partial mobilization or the placing of forces on alert
or more subtle measures designed to be detected by foreign intelligence bodies. Ideally,
each method is designed to exploit the complex interplay of perceptions and
counterperceptions. Sometimes deterrence fails. Often in the history of international
affairs the cost-benefit calculation has led to an unexpected result. In 1904 Russia
ignored Japanese warnings that its policies would lead to retaliation, resulting ultimately
in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1914 the Central Powers recognized that their policies
risked drawing the Entente into war in Europe, but continued regardless. During World
War II, Nazi Germany persisted with U-boat attacks on American transatlantic merchant
shipping despite President Franklin D. Roosevelt's explicit warnings that it would likely
provoke U.S. retaliation. In December 1941, despite U.S. military strength, Japan
calculated that its interests were best served by a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl
Harbor. In mid-1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev installed nuclear missiles in
Cuba despite President John F. Kennedy's explicit warnings that doing so would provoke
U.S. retaliation. And in 1991 the Middle East erupted in violence as Saddam Hussein
ignored the threat of U.S. intervention should Iraq invade Kuwait.

Tech advancements mean deterrence breaks down
Vanaik, 14 Retired Professor of International Relations and Global Politics from the
University of Delhi (Achin, Ten Dillemas of Nuclear Deterrence, Dianuke.org,
5/13/2014, http://www.dianuke.org/ten-dillemas-of-nuclear-deterrence/) //RGP
Constant technology advances in the development of nuclear warheads and in the
designing of the range and accuracy of delivery systems is also a major input in ensuring
the degenerative logic of deterrence-based thinking and behaviour. The more inaccurate
and relatively invulnerable or undetectable the nuclear missiles are the more stabilising
they are. That is to say, if the missiles are not very accurate then they can be used to
attack cities but not specific military targets. This makes them les useful as first-strike
weapons aiming to, or capable of, knocking out an opponents military installations
(including its nuclear missile installations and air bases) and more useful as second-
strike weapons able to devastate cities. In the jargon this is called the difference between
counter-value targets (e.g. cities) and counter-force ones (e.g. military/nuclear
infrastructure). Moreover, the best second-strike nuclear weapons are considered to be
those that combine low accuracy with relative invulnerability to a first strike. Thus
submarine-based nuclear-tipped missiles are seen as the best guarantor of second-strike
capacity. What happens, however, when land missile systems become more mobile
(always being moved around on rail or road systems rather than being stationed in fixed
silos), when there is 24 hour rotation of airplanes carrying nuclear weapons, and when
submarine launched missiles become ever more accurate (which is happening), and
when efforts at detection of submarines and anti-submarine warfare make steady
technical advances? What all this means is that technology advances are themselves
undermining the distinction between stabilising second-strike weapons and de-
stabilising first-strike weapons since the former can increasingly double up to do the job
of the latter. In short, this undermines hopes of stabilizing the nuclear equation. What is
more, new technological breakthroughs, like a developed Star Wars project of the kind
envisaged by the US, are profoundly destabilizing. One would need a separate essay to
explain this complexity fully. In short, because technology does not stand still neither
does nuclear arms development. This is not just a matter of replacing the old with the
new but also of creating new problems, difficulties and dangers.

Fog of war means deterrence breaks down
Vanaik, 14 Retired Professor of International Relations and Global Politics from the
University of Delhi (Achin, Ten Dillemas of Nuclear Deterrence, Dianuke.org,
5/13/2014, http://www.dianuke.org/ten-dillemas-of-nuclear-deterrence/) //RGP
The fear of a first-strike leads to the search for what are called survivability enhancing
practices. These are measures aiming to ensure that ones second-strike capacity even
after a first-strike is relatively unimpaired. But these very practices themselves
undermine the stability of the deterrence equation. The two most important such
measures are a) to disperse ones nuclear arsenal as widely as possible; and b) to adopt
what is in effect a launch-on-warning posture for ones missiles. Both give rise to grave
problems. The first involves a centralization-decentralization dilemma. It is not enough
to disperse the locations of nuclear delivery systems. There is also the problem of
decentralizing command and control over such systems. This is because there is always
the danger of what is called a decapitating first-strike. That is to say, an opponent can
not only strike first, but seek to decapitate the command and control system of the
opponent, i.e., finish off the key decision-makers who are the apex of the chain of
command over the nuclear arsenal. Even the establishing of redundant or multiple
chains of command to become operative in wartime may not prove adequate to the
impact of an effective decapitating first-strike. To avoid this dilemma one has to greatly
decentralize command and control to junior levels and more localized personnel at the
much lower rungs of the chain of command so they can carry out a second-strike. But
any such decentralization greatly enhances the possibility of an accidental launch or a
miscalculation (especially in wartime situations) that leads to a launch on the
presumption that an enemy nuclear attack is taking place or about to take place. We now
know from recently disclosed official documents how close a Russian submarine was to
launching a nuclear attack on a US ship during the Cuban Missile crisis on the basis of
just such de-centralised authority because it thought that ship was torpedoing its
submarine. [This event is now to be enshrined in a Hollywood movie.]. Pakistan, as a
much smaller country fearful of a possible decapitating first-strike by India, will have to
face a particularly acute dilemma of centralization-decentralization. But the problem is
acute enough for India as well. As for adopting a launch-on warning posture to ensure
second-strike capacity, this was the dominant form taken by the stationing of land-based
missiles of both the USSR and the US during most of the Cold War period. What this
means, of course, is that there is an inescapable trade-off between the requirements of
nuclear safety and guarding against the risks of a launch by accident or miscalculation,
and the requirements of deterrence efficacy. During the Cold War period (even
afterwards) there were various occasions when there were false alarms and in some of
those cases, matters came close to a head with the near launch by one side of its missiles.
[The best study of this is The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War by Bruce Blair, Brookings
Institute, 1993.]. But another rarely noticed point is that launch-on-warning raised a
fundamental question about nuclear deterrence. This question is not about whether or
not deterrence actually worked but whether it even existed! A launch-on-warning
posture meant that the US had less than 25 minutes before a Soviet missile could hit it
and therefore a maximum of only that much time to decide whether the alarm was a false
one or not. Since the US had submarines much more closely positioned to the Soviet
mainland, the latter had only around 10 minutes before there would be a hit, so that
much less time to decide on its response. In the US case from the time the alarm is raised
about a possible Soviet launch, 10-12 minutes would have to elapse for the missile to be
identified, its path tracked and the necessary information relayed to top command.
Another 2-3 minutes would elapse before this could be communicated to the President.
Any decision (whether this was a false alarm or a real one needing the order to fire off)
taken by the President if it was to be communicated to all necessary stations so as to be
carried out would require another 8-10 minutes. In short, out of the roughly 25 minutes
in which a decision by the President has to be made even if the President was in direct
telephonic communication with key aides he has literally only one or two minutes in
which to take a truly momentous decision. When the space and time allowed for human
decision is so shortened by adopting the posture of launch-on-warning, what then is one
to make of the claim that deterrence is in operation when there can never be any
foolproof check on an accidental launch by an opponent or false alarm by ones own
system? In the case of India, the best survivability practice would be for both sides to
move towards a launch-on-warning posture, which is something they may well do in the
future. But the missile flight time between the two countries at 5-8 minutes is so much
shorter than even in the Cold War case for the US. There is no way there can be even the
illusion of being able to maintain a proper check on preventing launches by accident or
miscalculation. The trade-off between wanting greater nuclear safety and deterrence
efficacy in South Asia is an even starker one than was the case between the great Cold
War rivals. According to the logic of nuclear deterrence thinking, it is not enough to have
a second-strike capacity that survives a possible first-strike. This capacity must be able to
inflict what is called unacceptable damage on the opponent. If after a first-strike you
only have a few weapons left over then your opponent may be prepared to take the risk of
a first-strike and absorb the second-strike. But what is unacceptable damage? And
how do you ensure that you have it after a devastating first-strike? The simple answer is
that the concept is inescapably vague and impossible to quantify and there is no
assurance that you can retain the ability to inflict such unacceptable damage after an
enemy first-strike on you or that the damage you might be able to inflict would be
unacceptable to the opponent. All that happens is that both sides have to embark on the
escalator of making more and better nuclear weapons in the futile search for achieving
such a second-strike capacity. George Lee Butler, who for 12 years headed the USs
Strategic Air Command (which is the service that has overall control of the US nuclear
arsenal) and who between 1992-5 was the key Presidential adviser (the one person the
President must consult before pressing the nuclear button) and subsequently turned
nuclear disarmer, said quite correctly in regard to the unacceptable damage issue that
this was impossible to quantify and impossible to operationalize. The US ended up
targeting over 16,000 locations in the USSR with its ready delivery systems but could
still never be sure that they could have an adequate second-strike capacity to cause
unacceptable damage. Butler revealed that he was himself so shaken, when he took
over supreme command, by the revelations of the insane logic that was operating in US
nuclear preparations in the name of deterrence efficacy that he began to systematically
question the basic assumptions of such thinking and the security paradigm based on
such thinking.
Japanese Nuke Power
Hype
No impact Data refutes hysteria
Schrope 4/2/13 - Freelance Writer for C&EN, a weekly scientific magazine (Mark,
Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes, Chemical and Engineering
News, Apr 2, 2013, https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-
Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html, DM)

Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented
some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more
lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy
prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make
the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place
of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI:
10.1021/es3051197). In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan,
critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy
source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health. I was very
disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear
power after the Fukushima accident, says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a
climate scientist at NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Working
with Goddards James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear
power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear powers advantages over fossil
fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Kharecha was
surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to
nuclear powers pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average
number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power
(Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related
to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to
power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among
coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung
cancer. The NASA researchers combined this information with historical energy
generation data to estimate how many deaths would have been caused if fossil-fuel
burning was used instead of nuclear power generation from 1971 to 2009. They similarly
estimated that the use of nuclear power over that time caused 5,000 or so deaths, such as
cancer deaths from radiation fallout and worker accidents. Comparing those two
estimates, Kharecha and Hansen came up with the 1.8 million figure. They next
estimated the total number of deaths that could be prevented through nuclear power
over the next four decades using available estimates of future nuclear use. Replacing all
forecasted nuclear power use until 2050 with natural gas would cause an additional
420,000 deaths, whereas swapping it with coal, which produces significantly more
pollution than gas, would mean about 7 million additional deaths. The study focused
strictly on deaths, not long-term health issues that might shorten lives, and the authors
did not attempt to estimate potential deaths tied to climate change. Finally the pair
compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated
that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the
equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere.
Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the
release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050. By comparison, previous
climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are
about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO2
concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming. Because
large-scale implementation of renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, faces
significant challenges, the researchers say their results strongly support the case for
nuclear as a critical energy source to help stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas
concentrations. Bas van Ruijven, an environmental economist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., says the estimates on prevented deaths
seem reasonable. But he wonders if the conclusion that nuclear power saves hundreds of
times more lives than it claims will convince ardent critics. The nuclear power issue is
so polarized that people who oppose nuclear power will immediately dispute the
numbers, Van Ruijven says. Nonetheless, he agrees with the pairs conclusions on the
importance of nuclear power.
The Impact is hype Damage is exaggerated
Kemm 10/12/2013 - a PHD nuclear physicist and is the CEO of Nuclear Africa (Kelvin,
Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster, CFact,
http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/

This is what has happened in the public mind concerning nuclear power over the last half
century. Concepts concerning nuclear reactions and nuclear radiation are in themselves
complicated and mysterious. Over the last couple of decades physics advances in fields
such as quantum mechanics, which is linked to nuclear processes has compounded
matters for the public. The image of strong and mysterious forces and effects is now well
entrenched. There are Hollywood movies and TV programmes about space travellers or
alien invaders who use time travel and quantum forces, and then battle to evade the
dangerous intergalactic nuclear zones. A consequence of all this is that
internationally the public is now really spooked when it comes to the topic
of nuclear power. A real fear factor looms over the mere word nuclear.
Newspapers love this, and really push imagery like; nuclear leak or
radiation exposure. To a nuclear physicist like me, I look upon such public
reaction half with amusement and half with dismay. The amusement comes from the fact
that so many people can be scared so easily by so little. It is like shouting: Ghost in the
bedroom, and everyone runs and hides in the hills. The dismay reaction is that
there is a body of anti-nuclear activists who do not want the public to know
the truth, and the anti-nukes enjoy stoking the fear factor and maintaining
public ignorance. Let us now ponder the Fukushima nuclear incident which has
been in the news again lately. Firstly let us get something clear. There was no
Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number of people killed by nuclear radiation at
Fukushima was zero. Total injured by radiation was zero. Total private property
damaged by radiation.zero. There was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a
major media feeding frenzy fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have
been a major radiation leak. At the time, there was media frenzy that reactors at
Fukushima may suffer a core meltdown. Dire warnings were issued. Well the reactors
did suffer a core meltdown. What happened? Nothing.
No Impact/Magnitude
No Impact Any radiation leaked is inconsequential
Kemm 10/12/2013 - a PHD nuclear physicist and is the CEO of Nuclear Africa (Kelvin,
Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster, CFact,
http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/

Recently some water leaked out of the Fukushima plant. It contained a very small
amount of radioactive dust. The news media quoted the radiation activity in the physics
measure of miliSieverts. The public dont know what a Sievert or a milliSievert is. As it
happens a milliSievert is a very small measure. Doubling a very small amount is still
inconsequential. It is like saying: Yesterday there was a matchstick on the football field;
today there are two matchsticks on the football field. Matchstick pollution has increased
by a massive 100% in only 24 hours. The statement is mathematically correct but silly
and misleading. At Fukushima a couple of weeks ago, some mildly radioactive water
leaked into the sea. The volume of water was about equal to a dozen home swimming
pools. In the ocean this really is a drop in the ocean. The radiation content was so little
that people could swim in the ocean without the slightest cause for concern. Any ocean
naturally contains some radioactivity all of the time anyway. There is natural radiation
around us all of the time and has always been there since the birth of the earth.
Understandably the general public do not understand nuclear radiation so the strangest
comments occur. On an internet blog some person stated that people on the north coast
of Australia must be warned about the radiation in the sea coming from Fukushima.
Good grief! Meantime the Fukushima site now looks like an oil refinery. A lot of storage
tanks have been built there to hold water that has been flushed through the damaged
reactors to aid in cooling. Quite frankly, scientifically speaking, the best thing to do with
the mildly radioactive waste water would be to intentionally pour it into the sea. The
water which is currently in the new Fukushima storage tanks has already been filtered to
remove radioactive Caesium. All that is left is a bit of radioactive Tritium. Tritium is
actually part of the water molecule anywayso what we really have iswell, water in
water. The Tritium atom is a hydrogen atom, Hydrogen Tritium which has two neutrons
in its nucleus which is a normal but rare variation in the hydrogen atom. Most hydrogen
atoms have only a single proton in the nucleus and no neutrons. A rare hydrogen
variation is called Deuterium and such atoms have one proton plus one neutron. Even
rarer than Deuterium is the Tritium form of hydrogen which has one proton plus two
neutrons. These variants are known as isotopes. Water is H2O and water molecules in
which the Tritium isotope of the hydrogen atom is found are molecules referred to as
Heavy Water. It really is just water, so you cant filter it out of the normal light water.
The Tritium heavy water is very mildly radioactive and is found normally in the sea all
over the world all of the time. This Tritium concentration in the one thousand storage
tanks at Fukushima is higher than that found naturally in the sea, but is still so low as to
pose no real danger at all. No doubt the Japanese government is too scared to
release this water into the sea because of the howl of criticism which would no doubt
follow. A further complication is that in the last couple of weeks the press has reported
further spillage of water. These reports are such that it looks like a continuous failure of
the Fukushima engineers to contain the situation. The latest spillage was about 400
litres of water, which is about as much liquid as would fill four motor car fuel tanks.
Reportedly, one of the one thousand storage tanks was not totally horizontal when it was
built so when it was filled to the top some water overflowed on one side. As soon as the
spillage occurred they fixed the problem. But the rules require the incident to be
reported, even though the spillage was not of any biological consequence to anyone, or to
any fauna or flora.
Future meltdowns will be smaller Fukushima was a perfect storm
Kemm 10/12/2013 - a PHD nuclear physicist and is the CEO of Nuclear Africa (Kelvin,
Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster, CFact,
http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/

The Fukushima incident will continue to attract media attention for some time to come, I
imagine. It has become such a good story to roll with that it will not just go away.
However, in sober reflection and retrospection one has to come to the conclusion that far
from being a nuclear disaster the Fukushima incident was actually a wonderful
illustration of the safety of nuclear power. The largest earthquake and
consequent tsunami on record struck an ageing nuclear power plant which was built to a
now obsolete boiling water reactor technology, and no nuclear damage resulted to people
and property in the neighbourhood. Poor management systems compounded matters
and were implicated in the failure of the cooling circuit. The reactor cores suffered a
meltdown. Due to the magnitude of the tsunami disaster there were no emergency
services able to help, they were deployed elsewhere or paralysed because there were no
roads or infrastructure available. Hydrogen gas leaked out of a reactor, collected under
the buildings roof and then exploded, blowing the roof off in front of the worlds TV
cameras. Fukushima had devices called recombiners designed to prevent the hydrogen
build-up but they were not working because they needed an external electricity supply.
Financially speaking and operationally speaking the reactors were wrecked, but nobody
was killed or injured by any nuclear radiation. Fukushima showed that a nuclear
power plant can take the maximum punch of natures brutality, and yet the
surrounding population does not fry and die as so often dramatically
predicted by the fear factor enthusiasts.
No impact to meltdowns Hysteria and empirics disprove
Wheeler 3/12/12 Producer of "This Week in Nuclear"; Manager in the Nuclear
Industry; Former Senior Reactor Operator; Nuclear Workforce Planning and Workforce
Development Expert (John Wheeler, Whos' Really to Blame for Fukushima Health
Impacts?, http://theenergycollective.com/johnwheeler/79128/anti-nuclear-hysterics-
not-melted-reactors-blame-fukushima-health-impacts, DM)

As is often the case, the passage of time yields clarity about events, and the nuclear
power plant accident at Fukushima is no different. It has become clear that the
misinformation and hysterics by anti-nuclear groups and individuals were mostly wrong.
Their doomsday prophesizing actually worsened human suffering and environmental
impacts by contributing to unwise decisions by political leaders in Japan and elsewhere
to shut down nuclear plants. In contrast, bloggers and experts from within the nuclear
community accurately predicted outcomes and human health impacts. As was predicted
on this blog and elsewhere, the multi-barrier reactor containment design protected the
public. Contrary to claims by anti-nuclear groups, the melted cores did NOT burn
through the reactor vessels. The containment structures remained virtually intact. The
damaged reactor fuel remained inside the reactor vessels and containment systems.
Despite preposterous claims by Greenpeace and others, there were no chunks of
plutonium scattered across the countryside. Only radioactive gasses escaped over the
land, and most of that gas was short lived Iodine that has long since decayed away. As
reported on Bloomberg and other news sources, no one in the public was harmed by
radiation from the damaged reactors. A small number of plant workers received higher
than normal radiation exposures, without lasting effects. Any hypothetical future health
effects will be immeasurably low and will be indistinguishable from normal disease rates
within the general population. No one, not even the Fukushima 50, was exposed to life
threatening amounts of radiation. Journalists who flew across the Pacific to cover the
story received more radiation exposure from cosmic rays in flight than they received
from the reactors once on the ground. The visually spectacular hydrogen explosions of
the plant buildings, while providing great fodder for anti-nuclear rhetoric had little
impact on the safety of the reactors, and harmed no one. The unit 4 fuel storage pools did
not empty of water and did not catch on fire. The fuel there remained safely submerged
and suffered no damage of any consequence. Finally, there was no need for the 50-mile
evacuation zone ordered by NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko. His decision still has nuclear
experts scratching their heads and wondering why. Jaczkos actions demonstrated he
lacks the experience and knowledge to ask the right questions at crucial moments. In
addition, he lacked the wisdom to recognize other more credible information was
available that contradicted his view. He needlessly rushed forward with an ill-advised
decision that was horribly wrong. This is not to imply there were no environmental or
economic impacts from the reactor accident of course there were! The expensive
cleanup in surrounding areas will take years and will cost billions. This is but a small
fraction of the total cost of recovery from the horrific earthquake and tsunami. The
earthquake and tsunami were responsible for untold human suffering and devastation.
That is where the focus of the world should have been and should continue to be. The
problems at the Fukushima nuclear plant accident have contributed needlessly to
Japans economic burden by prompting the irrational shutdown of nuclear plants across
the country. This has caused energy shortages and billions of dollars of additional costs
from skyrocketing imports of fossil fuels. Of course, the fossil fuels providers are
scrambling to rake in tens of billions of dollars in profits. The health effects to Japans
population were NOT from radiation, but from stress caused by the unfounded fear of
future health effects. The responsibility for this lies squarely on anti-nuclear activists
who relished in spouting fatalistic, exaggerated claims, and on an uninformed media who
presented those claims as virtual facts while downplaying opposing views from true
experts in the field.
No chance of large magnitude for a meltdown - Empirics
Science Daily 7/17/12 Major Science Online Newspaper, referencing Standord
Studies (Science Daly,
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2012/07/120717084900.htm, DM)

The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown was the most extensive nuclear disaster since
Chernobyl. Radiation release critically contaminated a "dead zone" of several hundred
square kilometers around the plant, and low levels of radioactive material were found as
far as North America and Europe. But most of the radioactivity was dumped in the
Pacific -- only 19 percent of the released material was deposited over land -- keeping the
exposed population relatively small. "There are groups of people who have said there
would be no effects," said Jacobson. A month after the disaster, the head of the United
Nations Science Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, for example, predicted
that there would be no serious public health consequences resulting from the radiation.
Global reach? Evaluating the claim, Ten Hoeve and Jacobson used a 3-D global
atmospheric model, developed over 20 years of research, to predict the transport of
radioactive material. A standard health-effects model was used to estimate human
exposure to radioactivity. Because of inherent uncertainties in the emissions and the
health-effects model, the researchers found a range of possible death tolls, with a best
estimate of 130. A wide span of cancer morbidities was also predicted, with a best
estimate of 180. Those affected according to the model were overwhelmingly in Japan,
with extremely small effects noticeable in mainland Asia and North America. The United
States was predicted to suffer between 0 and 12 deaths and 0 and 30 cancer morbidities,
although the methods used were less precise for areas that saw only low radionuclide
concentrations. "These worldwide values are relatively low," said Ten Hoeve. He
explained they should "serve to manage the fear in other countries that the disaster had
an extensive global reach."
No magnitude Japanese radioactive byproducts dont spread
Biello 1/7/14 -associate editor at Scientific American, hosts 60-Second Earth, a
Scientific American podcast covering environmental news, and is working on a
documentary with Detroit Public Television on the future of electricity (David, What
You Should and Shouldnt Worry about after the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdowns,
Scientific American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-to-worry-about-
after-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/, DM)

Another perennial concern is that the water contaminated with radioactive particles still
leaking from the stricken nuclear power plant site is poisoning Pacific Ocean fish and
other seafood. There is no doubt that ingesting radionuclides is one of the worst forms of
radiation exposure, because it continues for a long period of time. But, with the
exception of bottom-feeding fish and sessile (immobile) filter feeders caught in the
immediate vicinity, any radionuclides from Fukushima have been diluted by the vastness
of the Pacific to insignificant quantities. The extra radionuclides from Fukushima are
simply not enough to create a dose large enough to cause any human health effects
outside the immediate vicinity of the stricken nuclear power plant. Nor is the
radioactive contamination from Fukushima the cause of changes to Pacific sea-bottom
life observed in recent years off the U.S. west coast, as the marine scientists at Deep Sea
News recently noted. Those shifts most likely stem from the copious quantities of carbon
dioxide spewed by fossil fuelfired power plants that are changing the climate and, thus,
the tiny plants known as phytoplankton that serve as the base of the oceanic food chain.
When it comes to radiation, the nuclear weapons testing conducted from the 1940s to the
1980s contributed orders of magnitude more radioactivity to the oceans than Fukushima
(even when combined with Chernobyl, a much larger nuclear catastrophe). There is also
an estimated 37 x 10^18 becquerels worth of radioactivity in the oceans from naturally
dissolved uranium in seawater anyway, which some view as a future nuclear fuel source
but is not generally considered a health risk. (A becquerel measures the rate of radiation
emission.) And there are other naturally occurring radioactive elements in seawater as
well, such as polonium. That means the tuna caught in the Pacific have always been
naturally radioactive (and pose less risk than dental x-rays, as the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution notes). Or as marine scientist Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole
put it in a scientific paper on the subject published in 2012, "though [cesium] isotopes
are elevated 10 to 1,000 [times] over prior levels in waters off Japan, radiation risks due
to these radionuclides are below those generally considered harmful to marine animals
and human consumers, and even below those from naturally occurring radionuclides."
Marine scientists have calculated that, based on all the radioactive particles released (or
leaking) from Fukushima, a dose due to this most recent nuclear accident would add up
to a total of roughly one microsievert (a unit of radiation exposure) of extra radiation
roughly one tenth the average daily dose most Americans experience, one fortieth the
amount from a crossNorth America flight and one one-hundredth the exposure from a
dental x-ray. This also means that no one in the U.S. should be taking potassium iodide
pills, especially because there has been no radioactive iodine issuing from Fukushima for
several years now. (Radioactive iodine has a half-life of just eight days, meaning that all
of it was gone within three months of the March 2011 nuclear accident in Japan.)
Likewise, the debris from Fukushima that has begun to arrive on U.S. shores is also
relatively benign. In fact, any radiation from the flotsam is likely to have far less an
impact than the novel species it may carry with it across the Pacific, which could
potentially spark a biological invasion.
Miscalculation


Empirics and technology disprove miscalculation.
Quinlan, 9 (Michael, Former Permanent Under-Sec. State UK Ministry of Defense,
Thinking about Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-69)

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable
momentum in a developing exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid
confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what the situation of the
decisionmakers would really be. Neither side could want escalation. Both would be
appalled at what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for signs that the other
was ready to call a halt. Both, given the capacity for evasion or concealment which
modem delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in reserve significant
forces invulnerable enough not to entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to
question, as noted earlier, whether newer nuclearweapon possessors can be immediately
in that position; but it is within reach of any substantial state with advanced
technological capabilities, and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in the
development of forces.) As a result, neither side can have any predisposition to suppose,
in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on
copiously launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of
highly subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality required is plain. The
argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more
dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing
any possible prize that aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of
such an armoury must therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon
destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a judgement that the possessor would be
found lacking in the will to use it. If the attacked possessor used nuclear weapons,
whether first or in response to the aggressor's own first use, this judgement would begin
to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial possibility of the
aggressor leaders' concluding that their initial judgement had been mistakenthat the
risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had been seeking, and that for their
own country's , survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning such as
that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgement and
in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former
aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was
certain to work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible
scenarios, that the chance of its working must be negligible. An aggressor state would
itself be at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be
argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply
hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the
political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them
the less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask what is the alternativeit can only
be surrender. But a more positive and hopeful answer lies in the fact that the criticism is
posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context. The context
which concerned NATO during the cold war, for example, was one of defending vital
interests against a postlated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged,
or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest
is a legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in
conflict. That places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of
building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly
achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital interests have been defined in a way that is dear,
and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary, a credible
basis has been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also
sometimes suggested by critics that whatever might be indicated by theoretical
discussion of political will and interests, the military environment of nuclear warfare
particularly difficulties of communication and controlwould drive escalation with
overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded
as inevitably .so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the history of war
suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on
the principle 'When in doubt, lash out', the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new
situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is `If this
goes on to the end, we are all ruined'. Given that inexorable escalation would mean
catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of
framing arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military
commanders no widespread delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear
weapons without specific political direction. Many types of weapon moreover had
physical safeguards such as PALs incorporated to reinforce organizational ones. There
were multiple communication and control systems for passing information, orders, and
prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a
fairly intense level of strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of
conflict an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was
far from clear why he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained
possible to operate on a general fail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use. That
was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the arrangements which 1 a
nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some respects, the
logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be
certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow
from such an assumption. The likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and
never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely
calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixedit
would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of
escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers
would always have to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be
recognized. The first is that the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably
present in any significant armed conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may
have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any particular category of
weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him options
for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever
its degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, the necessary
inference is that a state attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military
resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a nuclear armoury of its own. But the
companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an inescapable
burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if
conflict does break out, for managing it, to a tolerable outcome--the only route, indeed,
intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence
beforehand. The working out of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in
deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example
plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit
without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to
place the onus of making the bigger, and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation
upon the aggressor volib wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender.
(The customary shorthand for this desirable posture used to be 'escalation dominance'.)
These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing them needs to start from
acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes available, no
options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without
escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for
those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and
Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs to be
taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such
direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor
state, with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with
rigorously. Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of
accident involving nuclear weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the
entire evaluation of whether war-prevention structures entailing their existence should
be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question. The first is that of a
single grave event involving an unintended nuclear explosiona technical disaster at a
storage site, for example, Dr the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system
with a live nuclear warhead. The second is that of some eventperhaps such an
explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of
radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a sequence of response and counter-
response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended. No
event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at
an opposite extreme it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures,
that nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span
despite not having happened for over sixty years). But human affairs cannot be managed
to the standard of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those
theoretical limits and weigh their reality and implications against other factors, in
security planning as in everyday life. There have certainly been, across the decades since
1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off
roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried
(in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements----it
no longer is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment
highly toxic material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some
commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive
activity and deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts of
this long experience would however be that the probability of any accident triggering a
nuclear explosion is extremely low. It might be further noted that the mechanisms
needed to set off such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in a large
number of ways the past sixty years have seen extensive improvements in safety
arrangements for both the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly
possible to see respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon
risk may be new or more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the
world has come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized detonation have
included early decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less
developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as
substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments more
widespread and diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and
readiness arrangements more tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of
nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it
is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert sequences for US
nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by, indicators mistaken or
misconstrued. In none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get at all near to
nuclear launch--extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival
and more logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty years of
experience presents itself once more: that the probability of initial misinterpretation
leading far towards mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear-weapon
possessor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release sequences have many steps,
and human decision is repeatedly interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey
that because a first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental
nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his
opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely
offers any ready example of major war started by accident even before the nuclear
revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase in caution. It was occasionally
conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or
unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a
potential adversary. No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years. The
probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did happen, the further hypothesis of
it initiating a general nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real
situation of decision-makers as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic
holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction.

Technical barriers and de-targeting solve miscalculation.
Slocombe 9 (Walter, senior advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad
and a former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, he is a four-time recipient of an
award for Distinguished Public Service and a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, De-Alerting: Diagnoses, Prescriptions, and Side-Effects, Presented at the
seminar on Re-framing De-Alert: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of Nuclear
Weapons Systems in the US-Russia Context in Yverdon, Switzerland, June 21-23)

Lets start with Technical Failure the focus of a great deal of the advocacy, or at least of
stress on past incidents of failures of safety and control mechanisms.4 Much of the de-
alerting literature points to a succession of failures to follow proper procedures and
draw from that history the inference that a relatively simple procedural failure could
produce a nuclear detonation. The argument is essentially that nuclear weapons systems
are sufficiently susceptible of pure accident (including human error or failure at
operational/field level) that it is essential to take measures that have the effect of making
it necessary to undertake a prolonged reconfiguration of the elements of the nuclear
weapons force for a launch or detonation to be physically possible. Specific measures
said to serve this objective include separating the weapons from their launchers, burying
silo doors, removal of fuzing or launching mechanisms, deliberate avoidance of
maintenance measures need to permit rapid firing, and the like. . My view is that this
line of action is unnecessary in its own terms and highly problematic from the point of
view of other aspects of the problem and that there is a far better option that is largely
already in place, at least in the US force the requirement of external information a
code not held by the operators -- to arm the weapons Advocates of other, more
physical, measures often describe the current arrangement as nuclear weapons being
on a hair trigger. That is at least with respect to US weapons a highly misleading
characterization. The hair trigger figure of speech confuses alert status readiness to
act quickly on orders -- with susceptibility to inadvertent action. The hair trigger
image implies that a minor mistake akin to jostling a gun will fire the weapon. The
US StratCom commander had a more accurate metaphor when he recently said that US
nuclear weapons are less a pistol with a hair trigger than like a pistol in a holster with the
safety turned on and he might have added that in the case of nuclear weapons the
safety is locked in place by a combination lock that can only be opened and firing made
possible if the soldier carrying the pistol receives a message from his chain of command
giving him the combination. Whatever other problems the current nuclear posture of the
US nuclear force may present, it cannot reasonably be said to be on a hair trigger.
Since the 1960s the US has taken a series of measures to insure that US nuclear weapons
cannot be detonated without the receipt of both external information and properly
authenticated authorization to use that information. These devices generically
Permissive Action Links or PALs are in effect combination locks that keep the
weapons locked and incapable of detonation unless and until the weapons firing
mechanisms have been unlocked following receipt of a series of numbers communicated
to the operators from higher authority. Equally important in the context of a military
organization, launch of nuclear weapons (including insertion of the combinations) is
permitted only where properly authorized by an authenticated order. This combination
of reliance on discipline and procedure and on receipt of an unlocking code not held by
the military personnel in charge of the launch operation is designed to insure that the
system is fail safe, i.e., that whatever mistakes occur, the result will not be a nuclear
explosion. Moreover, in recent years, both the US and Russia, as well as Britain and
China, have modified their procedures so that even if a nuclear-armed missile were
launched, it would go not to a real target in another country but at least in the US
case - to empty ocean. In addition to the basic advantage of insuring against a nuclear
detonation in a populated area, the fact that a missile launched in error would be on
flight path that diverged from a plausible attacking trajectory should be detectable by
either the US or the Russian warning systems, reducing the possibility of the accident
being perceived as a deliberate attack. De-targeting, therefore, provides a significant
protection against technical error. These arrangements PALs and their equivalents
coupled with continued observance of the agreement made in the mid-90s on de-
targeting do not eliminate the possibility of technical or operator-level failures, but
they come very close to providing absolute assurance that such errors cannot lead to a
nuclear explosion or be interpreted as the start of a deliberate nuclear attack.6 The
advantage of such requirements for external information to activate weapons is of course
that the weapons remain available for authorized use but not susceptible of
appropriation or mistaken use.

Miscalculation and accidental launch are impossible.
Bolkcom et al 6 Christopher Bolkcom, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division
of the Congressional Research Service, et al., August 11, 2006, U.S. Conventional Forces
and Nuclear Deterrence: A China Case Study, online:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33607.pdf

Once a conflict begins, participants can feel pressure to act quickly, to control events and
to manage the crisis in a way that meets its interests. This, in turn, can make the crisis
escalate quickly and unpredictably. For example, if its command and control systems
were protected from attack and offered redundant capabilities, and its forces were not
vulnerable to an early strike by the adversary, then a nation could delay its response,
await further information, and possibly seek alternate means to resolve the conflict. On
the other hand, if a countrys command and control infrastructure and its key forces were
vulnerable to attack early in a conflict, then it might feel compelled to act quickly, using
those forces before it lost them to attack, and before it had complete information about
the intent and capabilities of its adversary in pursuing the conflict. Preferably, the
capabilities or posture of a nations conventional and nuclear forces would not inherently
add to this instability. Specific U.S. crisis stability objectives in these scenarios may
include fielding forces that 1) are not vulnerable, and do not make Chinese forces
vulnerable to use it or lose it pressures, and 2) do not appear to be either vulnerable to
or capable of political or military decapitation. Both the United States and China have
currently deployed their long-range nuclear forces in ways that would not leave them
vulnerable to a first strike, and therefore, appear unlikely to undermine stability in a
crisis. Chinese forces lack the accuracy to attack U.S. land-based forces and cannot
effectively track and engage U.S. submarines that carry ballistic missiles (called SSBNs).
Chinese long-range missiles are deployed in deeply buried silos, protected by rough
terrain and mountains, or deployed on mobile launchers. Therefore, neither the United
States nor China would experience pressure to use these weapons before losing them.
Early warning and command and control systems, could, however, still be vulnerable to
disruption on both sides. Therefore, efforts to disrupt these assets, or other factors, such
as a desire to achieve tactical surprise, could stimulate prompt or accelerated responses
as soon as a crisis unfolds.


No risk of miscalculation deterrence checks
Madsen et al 2010 - bachelor student at Global Studies and Public
Administration at Roskilde University
[Tina Sndergrd, Maia Juel Giorgio, Mark Westh and Jakob Wiegersma,
Autumn 2010, Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia Global Studies,
http://dspace.ruc.dk/bitstream/1800/6041/1/Project%20GS-
BA,%20Autumn%202010.pdf]//SGarg
We have now assessed Waltzs three requirements for effective deterrence between
India and Pakistan. In regards to survivability of their nuclear arsenals, both meet this
requirement as they have clearly stated that their nuclear weapons should be able to
perform a retaliatory strike. Furthermore, India and Pakistan are procuring various
delivery vehicles, such as nuclear submarines, which enhance second-strike capability.
The second requirement, no early firing as a result of false alarm, is difficult to test
empirically, as it is nearly impossible to find out the reactions of soldiers who believe
they are under nuclear attack. However, by the fact that weapon components are
separated from fissile cores, time is given for commanders to react appropriately, which
reduces the risk of being subjected to false alarms. With regards to the third
requirement, India has an effective command and control system with regards to the
notion of force-in-being. As components take time to be assembled, unauthorized use or
accidents are not likely to occur. Even though there are insurgent elements that might
disrupt the Pakistani nuclear security in the future, it seems that currently, Pakistan, as
well as India, is not prone to immediate theft and accidents of its nuclear weapons.
Through their doctrines and statements, both countries believe in retaliatory action.
Therefore, it is possible to conclude, through Waltz framework, that both countries are
deterred by each other, and thus that deterrence is in effect

Navy
US naval power is literally the strongest thing ever
Mizokami, 6/6 - The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast
(Kyle, The Five Most-Powerful Navies on the Planet June 6, 2014
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-five-most-powerful-navies-the-planet-
10610)//gingE
Its a universal truth handed down since antiquity: a country with a coastline has a navy.
Big or small, navies worldwide have the same basic missionto project military might
into neighboring waters and beyond. The peacetime role of navies has been more or less
the same for thousands of years. Navies protect the homeland, keep shipping routes and
lines of communication open, show the flag and deter adversaries. In wartime, a navy
projects naval power in order to deny the enemy the ability to do the same. This is
achieved by attacking enemy naval forces, conducting amphibious landings, and seizing
control of strategic bodies of water and landmasses. The role of navies worldwide has
expanded in the past several decades to include new missions and challenges. Navies are
now responsible for a nations strategic nuclear deterrent, defense against ballistic
missiles, space operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. With that in
mind, here are the five most powerful navies in the world. United States First place on
the list is no surprise: the United States Navy. The U.S. Navy has the most ships by far of
any navy worldwide. It also has the greatest diversity of missions and the largest area of
responsibility. No other navy has the global reach of the U.S. Navy, which
regularly operates in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the
Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa. The U.S. Navy also forward deploys
ships to Japan, Europe and the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy has 288 battle force ships, of
which typically a third are underway at any given time. The U.S. Navy has 10 aircraft
carriers, nine amphibious assault ships, 22 cruisers, 62 destroyers, 17 frigates and 72
submarines. In addition to ships, the U.S. Navy has 3,700 aircraft, making it the second
largest air force in the world. At 323,000 active and 109,000 personnel, it is also the
largest navy in terms of manpower. What makes the U.S. Navy stand out the most
is its 10 aircraft carriersmore than the rest of the world put together. Not only are
there more of them, theyre also much bigger: a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier can
carry twice as many planes (72) as the next largest foreign carrier. Unlike the air wings of
other countries, which typically concentrate on fighters, a typical U.S. carrier air wing is
a balanced package capable of air superiority, strike, reconnaissance, anti-submarine
warfare and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief missions. The U.S. Navys 31
amphibious ships make it the largest gator fleet in the world, capable of transporting
and landing on hostile beaches. The nine amphibious assault ships of the Tarawa and
Wasp classes can carry helicopters to ferry troops or act as miniature aircraft carriers,
equipped with AV-8B Harrier attack jets and soon F-35B fighter-bombers. The U.S. Navy
has 54 nuclear attack submarines, a mix of the Los Angeles, Seawolf, and Virginia
classes. The U.S. Navy is also responsible for the United States strategic nuclear
deterrent at sea, with 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines equipped with a total of
336 Trident nuclear missiles. The USN also has four Ohio-class submarines stripped of
nuclear missiles and modified to carry 154 Tomahawk land attack missiles. The U.S.
Navy has the additional roles of ballistic missile defense, space operations and
humanitarian assistance/disaster relief. As of October 2013, 29 cruisers and destroyers
were capable of intercepting ballistic missiles, with several forward deployed to Europe
and Japan. It also monitors space in support of U.S. military forces, tracking the
satellites of potential adversaries. Finally, the U.S. Navys existing aircraft carriers and
amphibious vessels, plus the dedicated hospital ships USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort,
constitute a disaster relief capability that has been deployed in recent years to Indonesia,
Haiti, Japan and the Philippines.

New Laser technology solves naval innovation.
ONR 4/7, quotes the Chief of Naval Operations, quotes the Chief of Naval Research,
quotes the ONR Program Manager, (Office of Naval Research, April 7, 2014, All Systems
Go: Navy's Laser Weapon Ready for Summer Deployment,
http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=80172)//HH

ARLINGTON, Va. (NNS) -- Navy engineers are making final adjustments to a laser
weapon prototype that will be the first of its kind to deploy aboard a ship late this
summer.
The prototype, an improved version of the Laser Weapon System (LaWS), will be
installed on USS Ponce for at-sea testing in the Persian Gulf, fulfilling plans announced
by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert at the 2013 Sea-Air-Space Expo.
"This is a revolutionary capability," said Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew
Klunder. "It's absolutely critical that we get this out to sea with our Sailors for these
trials, because this very affordable technology is going to change the way we fight and
save lives."
Navy leaders have made directed-energy weapons a top priority to counter what they call
asymmetric threats, including unmanned and light aircraft and small attack boats that
could be used to deny U.S. forces access to certain areas. High-energy lasers offer an
affordable and safe way to target these threats at the speed of light with extreme
precision and an unlimited magazine, experts say.
"Our nation's adversaries are pursuing a variety of ways to try and restrict our freedom
to operate," Klunder said. "Spending about $1 per shot of a directed-energy source that
never runs out gives us an alternative to firing costly munitions at inexpensive threats."
Klunder leads the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which has worked with the Naval Sea
Systems Command, Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren
Division and others to make powerful directed-energy weapons a reality.
The Navy already has demonstrated the effectiveness of lasers in a variety of maritime
settings. In a 2011 demonstration, a laser was used to defeat multiple small boat threats
from a destroyer. In 2012, LaWS downed several unmanned aircraft in tests.
Over the past several months, working under the ONR Quick Reaction Capability
program, a team of Navy engineers and scientists have upgraded LaWS, and proved that
targets tracked with a Phalanx Close-In Weapon can be easily handed over to the laser's
targeting and tracking system. The result is a weapon system with a single laser weapon
control console, manned by a surface warfare weapons officer aboard USS Ponce who
can operate all functions of the laser-and if commanded, fire the laser weapon.
Using a video game-like controller, that sailor will be able to manage the laser's power to
accomplish a range of effects against a threat, from disabling to complete destruction.
The deployment on Ponce will prove crucial as the Navy continues its push to provide
laser weapons to the fleet at large.
Data regarding accuracy, lethality and other factors from the Ponce deployment will
guide the development of even more capable weapons under ONR's Solid-State Laser -
Technology Maturation program. Under this program, industry teams led by Northrop
Grumman, BAE Systems and Raytheon Corp. have been selected to develop cost-
effective, combat-ready laser prototypes that could be installed on vessels such as
guided-missile destroyers and the Littoral Combat Ship in 2016.
The Navy will decide next year which, if any, of the three industry prototypes are suitable
to move forward and begin initial ship installation for further testing.
"We are in the midst of a pivotal transition with a technology that will keep our Sailors
and Marines safe and well-defended for years to come," said Peter Morrison, ONR
program manager for SSL-TM. "We believe the deployment on Ponce and SSL-TM will
pave the way for a future acquisition program of record so we can provide this capability
across the fleet."


Empirics prove lasers work and will solve naval power within a decade.
Schechter and Majumdar 7/20, a writer on defense and security issues, served in the
Israel Defense Forces AND a defense aerospace reporter and analyst, (Erik and Dave,
July 20, 2014, Lasers Are No Longer a 'Star Wars' Fantasy, Wall Street Journal,
http://online.wsj.com/articles/erik-schechter-and-dave-majumdar-lasers-are-no-
longer-a-star-wars-fantasy-1405892997)//HH

Lasers have great potential as weapons. Laser beams travel at the speed of light, so no
rocket will ever outrun them. They are also remarkably cheap to generatea couple
dollars a pop, compared to launching a five, six or even seven-figure missile. And as long
as you've got electrical power, a laser cannon will never run out of ammunition. Lasers
are also versatile. They don't have to blow up a target to neutralize it. They can fry
electronics, sensors and navigation systems.
In the past, advocates of laser weapons tended to promise too much too soon. During the
Cold War, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," was supposed to develop a
space-based laser defense system to protect the U.S. from intercontinental ballistic
missiles. But $30 billion later, America had not a single miniature orbiting Death Star.
In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. military experimented with ground- and air-
based chemical laser weapons. But they relied on a noxious batch of chemicals not found
in the U.S. military logistics train. There were also bulky. The Airborne Laser had six
magazines, each the size of an SUV, and could only get off 20-40 shots before depleting
its chemical stores.
Ultimately, U.S. commanders felt that chemical lasers would burden a mobile force. By
contrast, some Israelis were eager to try them against mortar shells and Qassam rockets
from Gaza. Fans of Northrop Grumman's NOC +0.33% Tactical High-Energy Laser
lobbied hard in the press for a laser alternative to Iron Dome, which began development
in 2007. But the missile-interceptor idea had the backing of the Israeli government, and
the first Iron Dome battery was deployed in 2011.
The system performed well in 2012 and again during the current round of fighting with
Hamas. Its Tamir interceptor is expensive ($40,000-$100,000), but a rocket crashing
into downtown Beersheba is costlier. And Iron Dome conserves ammunition by only
shooting down projectiles bound for populated areas.
That's all good. But it does nothing to counter drone swarms or short-range mortar
attacks, like the one that killed an Israeli at the Erez Crossing last week. That's a job for a
laserand the best indication is that Rafael is now developing Iron Beam. As depicted in
company literature, Iron Beam is an electrically powered solid-state laser, mounted on a
semitrailer and designed to work in pairs to put maximum wattage on target.
Lasers do have drawbacks. They have difficulty operating in rain and fog, and their
beams travel in a straight line, so forget about firing over a hill. But they can serve as
supplementary defense systems. And as Israel's investment attests, weaponized solid-
state lasers will soon be a reality.
It is time the U.S. also took things to the next level. The U.S. military could develop a
100-kilowatt laser-cannon defense system, capable of shooting down drones, short-range
rockets and mortar fire, in fewer than five years. Within a decade, the U.S. could have a
far more powerful 300-kilowatt laser.
And when that happens, enemies who would buzz, bombard and otherwise swarm
forward-deployed American personnel would find their weapons destroyedliterallyin
a flash of light.



No internal link - Congressional technology retirements.
Eaglen 6/30, resident fellow in the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the
American Enterprise Institute, (Mackenzie, June 30, 2014, Why Americas Military
Dominance Is Fading, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-america%E2%80%99s-
military-dominance-fading-10772?page=2)//HH

In 2011, Congress prohibited the Navy from retiring the EP-3E spy aircraft. In 2013 and
2014, Congress rejected Pentagon plans to retire Navy cruisers and amphibious dock
landing ships (with one exception), as well as the RQ-4 Block 30 Global Hawk aircraft.
Other limiting actions by Congress to shed systems since 2001 include C-5 and C-130E
airlifters, along with B-52 and B-1 bombers.
To its credit, in many of the cases where Congress blocked proposed retirements, it
gradually gave ground. For instance, although it blocked all retirements to KC-135Es in
2005 and 2006, in 2007, it authorized the Air Force to retire twenty-nine in 2007 and up
to eighty-five in 2008, contingent upon progress towards developing a next generation
tanker. Similarly, while Congress prohibited all B-1 retirements in 2012, it relaxed its
position in 2013 and authorized the Pentagon to retire up to six bombers. These steps
were welcome measures to give the Pentagon more authority over its own budget. Yet
delaying and limiting retirements came at a very real cost: the Pentagon was forced to
find dollar-for-dollar savings elsewhere in its budget, reducing other military capabilities
and disrupting the Department of Defenses plans.
Meanwhile, Congress has frequently given Pentagon leaders broader leeway to curtail
and axe outright newer equipment programs. Many of the most notable examples came
in 2010 and 2011, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposed cancelling or
terminating production on weapons such as the F-22 fighter aircraft, the C-17 cargo
airplane, the CG (X) cruiser, the F-136 alternate engine, the Air Forces combat search
and rescue helicopter, the VH-71 Presidential helicopter and the Armys Future Combat
Systems.
Other high-profile terminated and truncated programs from recent years include the
Comanche helicopter, the EP-X reconnaissance aircraft, the Crusader self-propelled
howitzer, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System and
the C-27J airlifter. While in the case of the C-27J, the Pentagon was able to at least
salvage some value by transferring seven of the aircraft from the Air Force to Special
Operations Command and fourteen to the Coast Guard, all too often, such as with the
Comanche and EFV, the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars without
fielding any operational systems.
Missile defense systems have been especially hard hit, with cancellations or early ends to
the Multiple Kill Vehicle, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, the Airborne Laser, the Navys
Area Theater Ballistic Missile Defense program and the Third Generation Infrared
Surveillance program. Similarly, many satellite systems have also been the targets of
cuts, including the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental System and the
Air Forces Transformational SATCOM system.
High-profile systems have not been the only programs in development or production
targeted by the Pentagon leadership and Capitol Hill. Even smaller systems have been
shrunk, eliminated or killed, including the Armys Aerial Common Sensor, the Navys
Advanced Deployable System, the Precision Tracking Space Sensor and the Surface-
Launched Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile.
While clearly some retirement prohibitions and even some weapons cancellations may
have been prudent, the long-standing misrepresentation that Congress has never met a
new system it doesnt love is simply not accurate. The reality is that Congress fights
much harder as a bloc to protect equipment that has been in use for years rather than
pay for new equipment coming online.
While occasionally healthy, this knee-jerk instinct to oppose most plans to let go of the
older equipment threatens to hold back even further anemic U.S. military modernization
plans. Worse, this preference is increasingly funneling more dollars to what are often less
survivable systems.
In the long-run, Congress inability to change the status quo is eroding the militarys
readiness for the next fight and mortgaging the future for the present. Eventually, policy
makers will need to restore balance across the Defense Department portfolio to
adequately ensure tomorrows forces get the very best equipment, just like those who
served before them.

No internal link - funding cuts for T-AOEs destroys naval power.
Holmes 7/14, Staff Writer for the Diplomat, cites a report about U.S. Navy
considerations, (James R., July 14, 2014, US Surrenders Naval Logistics Supremacy,
http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/us-surrenders-naval-logistics-supremacy/)//HH

If the United States wants to escape the danger zone in its strategic competition with
China disproving Beijings fancy that it can rule the Western Pacific
decommissioning the U.S. Navys fastest, most capacious combat logistics ships is no
way to do it. Just the opposite. It telegraphs that America is no longer serious about
fighting far from North America for long spans of time. Competitors will take note.
Yet budget-cutters in Washington are compelling naval leaders to consider narrowing
this competitive advantage. And theyre doing so at a time when China finally appears to
be putting its own combat logistics house in order after decades of neglect. Over at
Defense News, Chris Cavas reports that U.S. Navy officials are considering
decommissioning or laying up, a halfway status between active service and the
boneyard the workhorse Supply-class T-AOEs.
T-AOEs are big, fast ships. In effect theyre mobile, floating warehouses that deliver fuel,
ammunition, and stores of myriad types to task forces underway at sea. They displace
about the same as a big-deck amphibious carrier such as USS America, a newcomer to
the active fleet. And unlike their slower, smaller brethren, they can keep up with the
speediest non-nuclear ships in the U.S. Navy fleet. The picture at the top depicts USS
Sacramento, one of the Supplys forebears, rearming not one but two Iowa-class
battleships at the same time, in the Persian Gulf in 1991. That gives you an idea of the
size and capability of these vessels.
Thats an unglamorous capability, to be sure. But its a capability as irreplaceable as
weapons and sensors for pummeling enemy fleets or enemy shores. Underway
replenishment UNREP, meaning the capacity to refuel, rearm, and reprovision at sea
without detouring into port has constituted a core U.S. Navy advantage since the days
when seamen bearing names like Halsey and Spruance plied the deep. It makes the fleet
a free-range fleet. Task forces thus equipped can roam the seas without putting into port
for supplies. Mahan noted, in his pre-UNREP age, that warships without forward bases
are like land birds, unable to fly far from home. So it is for seagoing forces without
their own logistics contingents.

Naval power is ineffective without international cooperation.
Farley 7/10, assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International
Commerce, (Robert, July 10, 2014, Managing the United States' Global Naval
Partnerships, http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/managing-the-united-states-global-
naval-partnerships/)//HH

How should the United States manage its partnerships with global navies? What do
these partnerships offer the United States? These questions have animated discussions
of maritime strategy over the last decade, with strong partisans landing on different sides
of each question. The latest blows follow Admiral James Foggos article in Proceedings:
Forging a Global Network of Navies.
Foggo argues that the United States Navy needs to continue to focus on building
partnerships with foreign navies, in order to accomplish ends that multiple maritime
nations share. Foggo cites a series of multilateral successes, including humanitarian
relief operations and anti-piracy efforts.
Foggos case builds upon a set of similar arguments that the Navy has made since the
early part of last decade. Initially termed the 1,000 Ship Navy, these proposals have
concentrated on leveraging partnerships in order to accomplish maritime ends. These
arguments culminated in the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.
Claude Berube and CDR Salamander push back against Foggo, invoking many of the
traditional concerns about cooperative strategies. In brief, the development of
relationships does not necessarily create political commitment on the part of
governments, partner capabilities can rarely match the capacity of the USN, partners
tend to lack political will on the issues most important to the United States, and
partnerships create unexpected friction that undermines efficiency.
These concerns are misplaced.
The global network of navies isnt about replicating the capabilities of U.S. forces in
every navy across the world. Any understanding of cooperation that fails to appreciate
this aspect will see cooperative action as inherently flawed. At the same time, failing to
understand the promise of cooperation is inherently self-limiting with respect to
maritime governance.
Instead, cooperative naval action means:
a) Recognizing that the accomplishment of many maritime tasks does not require the
best that the U.S, has to offer
b) Harnessing regional expertise, local political relationships, and local political will
The appropriate ambitions are What can be done with the vast material available to us
through cooperative channels, followed closely by How can we enhance specific
partner capabilities? and How can we increase general awareness of the rules of the
road?
None of this happens without cooperative effort, and in particular none of this happens
without a theoretical framework for understanding the contributions that navies can
make to one another. This is what the cooperative approach, in its various iterations, has
always promoted. Human-to-human interaction, facilitated by a broader strategic
approach, provides the foundations for integration.

Status quo solves -- Submarines.
Farley 5/3, assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International
Commerce, (Robert, May 5, 2014, US Navy Orders 10 Virginia-class Submarines at a
Record Cost of $17.6 Billion, http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/us-navy-orders-10-
virginia-class-submarines-at-a-record-cost-of-17-6-billion/)//HH

Earlier this week, the U.S. Navy announced a contract with General Dynamics and
Huntington Ingalls to build ten new Virginia-class submarines over the next ten years.
The deal, one of the largest in the history of military acquisition, ensures a continued
global role for the USNs silent service.
The USN has maintained a consistent nuclear attack submarine capability since the
1950s. Initially focused on anti-shipping missions, over time the SSN force has
developed critical anti-submarine warfare (ASW), recon, land attack, and even Special
Operations Forces (SOF) roles. More so than aircraft carriers or even manned aircraft,
we can expect that the USN will continue to need modern subs to manage these missions
over the lifespan of these boats. The fleet has proven so successful over the past decades
that attack subs are likely to acquire more missions, not fewer.
The deal also ensures that the United States will retain, for the foreseeable future, the
capacity to construct additional nuclear attack submarines. As Russia, France, and the
United Kingdom have learned, taking a break from the construction of nuclear
submarines leads to deterioration of the infrastructure necessary to maintain and update
the force. Submarine construction requires skilled workforce and engineering teams in
order to meet the narrow tolerances required for deep operations and silent running.

US controls half of the worlds naval power
Sides, 12 Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University
(John, October 23
rd
2012, How Strong Is the U.S. Navy Really?,
http://themonkeycage.org/2012/10/23/how-strong-is-the-u-s-navy-really/)//IK
In the last debate, Governor Romney made the claim that the US Navy is the smallest its
been since 1916 implying that the US Navy is regressing in terms of overall strength.
How accurate is this claim? We recently compiled a new data set on naval capabilities
and created a measure of state naval strength for all countries from 1865 to 2011. As
such, we are in a position to address the claims of the Romney campaign. Broadly stated,
our measure of state naval power is based on a states total number of warships (non-
fighting ships are excluded) and each ships available firepower. To make comparisons
over time, our annual measure is based on available firepower within the international
system in that year. (For more information, see our paper here.) In 1916, the US
controlled roughly 11% of the worlds naval power. This is an impressive number that
ranks the US third in naval strength behind the UK (34%) and Germany (19%), and just
ahead of France (10%). What about the US navy in 2011? In 2011, the US controlled
roughly 50% of the worlds naval power putting it in a comfortable lead in
naval power ahead of Russia (11%). The US Navy has decreased in absolute size as
Governor Romney argues (although this decline has been ongoing since the end of Cold
War). U.S. warships are more powerful now than in the past, as President Obama
implied. However, neither the number of warships nor the power of our ships is what is
most important for understanding military and political influence. It is relative military
power that matters most. In this respect, the U.S. navy is far stronger now than in 1916.
Alt cause- the Air Force is a comparatively bigger internal link than the Navy
Haffa 12, nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments in Washington, DC. His 24-year Air Force career included operational
flying assignments in reconnaissance and tactical fighter wings in Vietnam, the United
Kingdom, and the Republic of Korea. Dr. Haffa followed his Air Force duties with a
second career in the defense industry, and now is the Principal of Haffa Defense
Consulting in Naples, Florida.
Robert Haffa Jr., Ph.D., Full-Spectrum Air Power: Building the Air Force America
Needs October 12, 2012 http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/10/full-
spectrum-air-power-building-the-air-force-america-needs
The second contention is perhaps more argumentative because it raises the perennial
question in defense studies of how much is enough? Nevertheless, it is difficult to
oppose the conclusion that the Air Force is ill prepared to deter, prevent, and prevail in
the contingencies suggested above. The blame for this condition can be shared widely,
but the facts remain the same. The Air Force is operating a fleet of aircraft with an
average age of more than a quarter of a century. It has deferred major acquisition
programs for three decades. It possesses only 20 modern bombers and a handful of
fifth-generation fighters. Because of internal stumbles, procurement holidays, and a
global war on terrorists and insurgents, it missed the promise of a military-technical
revolution. Would-be adversaries have taken advantage of these lapses and have created
zones of anti-access and area denial that would deny to the Air Force and its joint
warfighting partners the tactics and techniques of forward deployment and employment
that have provided the foundation for U.S. military dominance during the Cold War and
since. The playing field of international armed conflict no longer tilts in Americas favor,
and it promises to slide further away if the U.S. does not alter some very unfavorable
trends. The third section of the study may strike many as thorough, but unrealistic. It is
fashionable for current think-tank studies making the rounds within the Beltway to
argue that maintaining or increasing current levels of defense spending would be a
mistake in this time of austerity and deficits. Instead, they suggest a number of remedies:
The Department of Defense can operate more efficiently and effectively, generating
considerable savings. Weapons acquisition can be reformed. Jointness should be
enhanced and redundancy attacked. Leap-ahead technologies need to be championed.
Perhaps some of this will occur. This study has taken the approach of outlining the
capabilities and capacities that the Air Force requires to underwrite the declared security
and defense policies of the United States without crunching numbers, making tradeoffs,
or computing cost-effectiveness. This paper briefly referenced John Gaddiss Cold War
analysis of the strategies of containment. During that period, strategies were shifted to
match perceived resources with objectives by adopting what Gaddis termed as
symmetric or asymmetric means. One of those asymmetric strategies, when national
solvency became paramount, was emphasizing the nations air power. Such a strategy
appears to have a contemporary application.[69] The suggestions offered in the third
chapter of the study might be considered as something akin to the joint Planning Force
of old that was unconstrained by budget ceilings. It also might resemble the late and
lamented Unfunded Priorities List, which the Armed Services used to lobby for some of
their favorite platforms and systems that did not make it into the Presidents budget.
Others might say this would be a good starting point for congressional earmarks, if
they were still around. Finally, some will deride the chapter as the worst possible product
of Pentagon planning: the laundry list. Yet all of these proposals are desirable and
feasible. In its own force planning and program development, the Air Force has
undoubtedly considered all of the options presented in this paper, but could not include
them under fiscal guidelines. The planning contingencies are not new, and the
capabilities and capacities recommended here are not, for the most part, revolutionary.
The Air Force leadership has made tough choices in trading off readiness,
modernization, and force structure. More tough decisions lie ahead. Therefore, a few
concluding recommendations in terms of priorities are warranted. The biggest threat to
U.S. national security interests in the near term is the growing military and nuclear
power of North Korea and Iran, two rogue states and would-be regional aggressors.
Therefore, the recommendations made within that section should be granted some
priority: continuing with the F-35 program, modernizing the legacy fighter force,
strengthening the ISR chain, acquiring the tanker, developing a hypersonic missile, and
focusing on air base defense against ballistic missiles. The next threat, more uncertain
and longer term, is Chinas growing A2/AD capabilities. The declared national strategy
and the priorities planned for the pivot to the Pacific and the AirSea Battle operational
concept provide the right direction for Air Force investments in this contingency. The Air
Force has time to build the new bomber, capitalize on the Navys UCAV, fortify space and
cyberspace, and develop a new ICBM, but it should not delay in reopening the F-22 line.
The shift in strategy from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism also provides the Air
Force with sound guidance to prioritize its investments. Focused and layered ISR,
increasing targeting and airborne capacity dedicated to counterterrorism operations, and
leveraging the contributions of the Air National Guard and Reserve will all contribute to
prevailing in this ongoing conflict. The decline of the U.S. Air Force is a choice, not a fate.

Alt cause to naval power declineUCLASS system support decreasing now
Forbes, 7/15 Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-VA) is Chairman of the Seapower and
Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. (J. Randy,
July 15
th
, 2014, The National Interest, UCLASS and The Future of Naval Power
Projection, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/uclass-the-future-naval-power-
projection-10889)//IK
While the carrier provides the Nation with a sovereign, mobile airfield that can be
positioned at the time and place of the Commander-in-Chiefs choosing, the true combat
power of this naval asset resides in the composition of its Air Wing. A carrier like the
USS Enterprise can have a service life that stretches from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the
War on Terror, but its enduring utility is enabled not just by its hull-life, but by the
continued modernization of aviation assets found on its flight deck. Given the scope of
Chinas counter-intervention modernization effort and Irans own anti-access/area-
denial investments, I believe the future air wing must comprise a mix of manned and
unmanned aircraft that provide extended-range operations, persistence, stealth, payload,
and electronic warfare. Central to this mix is the Navys unmanned carrier-launched
airborne surveillance and strike (UCLASS) system. The fundamental question we face
going forward is not about the utility of unmanned aviation to the future Air Wing, but
the type of unmanned platform that the UCLASS program will deliver and the specific
capabilities this vital asset will provide the Combatant Commander. Given the likely
operational environment of the 2020s and beyond - including in both the Western
Pacific Ocean and Persian Gulf - I believe strongly that the Nation needs to procure a
Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV) platform that can operate as a long-range
surveillance and strike asset in the contested and denied A2/AD environments of the
future. To achieve this, such a system should have broadband, all-aspect stealth, be
capable of automated aerial refueling, and have integrated surveillance and strike
functionality. Unfortunately, the current direction this program is taking will leave our
Naval forces with a platform that I fear will not address the emerging anti-access/area-
denial (A2/AD) challenges to U.S. power projection that originally motivated creation of
the Navy Unmanned Combat Air System (N-UCAS) program during the 2006
Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and which were reaffirmed in both the 2010 QDR
and 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance. Getting this program correct today and not
returning later to address the critical operational challenges facing the carrier in the
coming decade is one of the most fundamental decisions the United States can do to
secure its enduring advantage in power-projection. Given this important oversight
question, on Wednesday afternoon the Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee,
which I Chair, will conduct a hearing with both Navy and independent witnesses to
explore this topic in-depth. Specifically, the disproportionate emphasis in the
requirements on unrefueled endurance to enable continuous intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance (ISR) support to the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) would result in an
aircraft design that would have serious deficiencies in both survivability and internal
weapons payload capacity and flexibility. Furthermore, the cost limits for the aircraft are
more consistent with a much less capable aircraft and will not enable the Navy to build a
relevant vehicle that leverages readily available and mature technology. In short,
developing a new carrier-based unmanned aircraft that is primarily another unmanned
ISR sensor that cannot operate in medium to high-level threat environments would be a
missed opportunity and inconsistent with the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance which
called for the United States to maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our
access and freedom to operate are challenged. The House Armed Services Committee
(HASC), in its recent markup of the FY15 National Defense Authorization Act, agreed
with this assessment and concluded that it believes the Navy and indeed the Nation
require a long-range, survivable unmanned ISR-strike aircraft as an integral part of the
carrier air wings. In contrast, the HASC also determined that developing a new carrier-
based unmanned aircraft that is primarily another flying sensor would be a missed
opportunity with profound consequences for the practical utility of the carrier and thus
for the nation. The question of UCLASS is not just one of design and capability; it is also
about the role and responsibility the Congress has in cultivating, supporting, and
protecting military innovation. Like with the shift from cavalry to mechanized forces,
sailing ships to steam-powered vessels, the prioritization of the carrier over battleships,
or adopting unmanned aerial vehicles in the late 1990s, ideas that initiate difficult
changes and disrupt current practices are often first opposed by organizations and
bureaucracies that are inclined to preserve the status quo. I believe the Congress has a
unique role to help push the Department and the Services in directions that, while
challenging, will ultimately benefit our national security and defense policy. I therefore
intend to use the subcommittee hearing to explore not just the UCLASS program, but the
broader utility a UCAV can have on the Navys ability to continue to project
power from the aircraft carrier and the implications for the power
projection mission in the future if we proceed down the current course.
Alt cause to naval power declineenergy inefficient carriers and oil
constraints
Mabus, 6/30 Ray Mabus is the 75th Secretary of the Navy and former Governor of
Mississippi and Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Today he is visiting Tufts
University and speaking about energy and national security with the faculty and staff of
the Fletcher School of International Affairs. (Ray, June 30th, 2014, The Boston Globe,
US Navy sustainability is sound policy,
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/30/navy-sustainability-sound-national-
security-policy/9sFt1z85xbPJYOTxzKo9AL/story.html)//IK
The United States Navy has a history of leadership in energy innovation, from the
transition from sail to steam, the development of coal and then oil burning power plants,
or the move to nuclear power more than half a century ago. The propulsion of our ships,
aircraft, and equipment is a vital operational concern. But power and energy is also an
issue of national and international security. My responsibility as Secretary of the Navy is
to ensure that the Navy and Marine Corps have the right people, with the right training
and the right tools to defend our country. To accomplish those things, I focus on four
priorities: people, platforms, power, and partnerships. In Washington Im sometimes
asked, why is power or energy policy in there? It ought to be obvious. Without the energy
to power our platforms, we might not be there when it matters. Uniquely, naval forces
offer the capability to provide presence. Presence means being in the right place, not just
at the right time, but all the time. Presence helps deter potential conflicts, while helping
to control escalation when tensions begin to rise. Naval presence is persistent and does
not infringe on anyones sovereign territory. Our Navy and Marine Corps are our nations
insurance policy across the globe and they give our leaders options in times of crisis.
Related Kayyem: Pentagon is stopped from going green In todays world access to energy
and fuel can be a diplomatic pressure point and can be, and is, used as a geostrategic
weapon. Whether were talking about threats against the shipping lanes in the Middle
East, or the headlines we see in the papers today about European dependence on
Russian gas supplies and the effect on negotiations over Ukraine, energy and power are
only becoming more important to international security. Here in the United States, with
domestic production up and new oil and gas reserves being discovered, energy still
remains a security concern. Even if we were able to produce every single drop of oil or
gas that America needs domestically, we cannot control the price. Oil is the ultimate
global commodity, often traded on world markets based on speculation and rumor.
Prices run up at the slightest sign of global instability, as we have seen at the gas pump in
recent weeks. Commodities traders call this a security premium. Each $1 increase in
the price of a barrel of oil results in a $30 million bill for the Navy and Marine Corps. In
2011 and 2012 price fluctuations added an unplanned $3 billion to the Department of
Defenses fuel expenses. The potential bills from that security premium can mean that
we will have fewer resources for maintaining and training our military. In 2009 I
established formal energy goals for the Department of the Navy to help drive the Navy
and Marine Corps to strengthen our combat capability by using energy more efficiently
and by diversifying our sources of power. From the introduction of our biofuel powered
Great Green Fleet at the Rim of the Pacific Exercise in 2012 to the Marines introduction
of sustainable expeditionary power systems which they used in combat in Afghanistan,
we have made real progress over the last few years. Looking to the future we are
cooperating with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture on a national biofuels
initiative which will provide up to twenty five percent of the Navys fuel needs from a
50/50 blend of biofuel and conventional fuels at prices that are competitive with todays
fossil fuel based products. In the 21st century, as much as any other time in our history,
power matters. The Navy and Marine Corps are working hard to ensure that we use
energy efficiently and effectively in order to maintain or combat capability and improve
our strategic independence. The energy to fuel our ships, our aircraft, and our bases
helps guarantee our presence, and it helps guarantee our ability to respond and give the
President options in any crisis. It helps us ensure that the United States Navy and
Marine Corps remain the most powerful expeditionary fighting force in the world.
Tight budgets scale back important naval development projectsmeans the
aff will be scaled back as well
Grant, 7/11 Rebecca Grant is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C., and director of
the Washington Security Forum. (Rebecca, July 11
th
, 2014, The Washington Times,
GRANT: The dangerous decline in Americas maritime might: Threats on the open seas
require more and better ships,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/11/grant-the-dangerous-decline-in-
americas-maritime-m/?page=all)//IK
The threats to peace and order on the global seas are growing. Chinas authoritarian
government launched 17 new warships in 2013 and is in the process of producing 30
more this year. One of the countrys aircraft carriers nearly grazed a U.S. missile cruiser
off the Chinese coastline in December, prompting U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm.
Harry Harris to bemoan Chinas increasingly assertive behavior in the region.
Meanwhile, Russias maritime military presence is also on the upswing. Earlier this year,
a Russian fighter jet brazenly harassed one of our destroyers, the USS Donald G. Cook, in
the Black Sea for 90 minutes. In addition, an Iranian admiral recently openly
acknowledged his forces were preparing to target U.S. aircraft carriers because theyre a
symbol of Americas might. This trend cannot be allowed to continue apace. These are
dangerous countries bent on disrupting the international order America and her allies
have worked so hard to uphold. Unfortunately, national policymakers have not
responded well to these mounting challenges. Amid tightening budgets, many of the
development projects for new, more effective weapons and ships have been
scaled back or canceled entirely. Pentagon officials are moving to mothball
half the existing cruisers. Theres been serious talk of decommissioning an aircraft
carrier, and the Navy is rushing to design a new frigate-sized ship in hopes of shoring up
savings. As a result of policymakers inaction and apathy, Americas naval
capacities are fading. As Samuel Locklear, the admiral in charge of U.S. Pacific
Command, recently put it, the historic dominance that most of us in our careers have
enjoyed is diminishing. A big part of the problem is that policymakers thought the Navy
would be operating mainly in friendly waters close to the coast the littorals, as the
sailors say. The Navy started designing a littoral combat ship back in 2001 and planned
to restock the fleet with 50 of these low-cost, smaller ships. So far there are just four.
Squo solves navy owns an unparalleled fleet of aircraft carriers which are
key to power projection
Jones, 7/11 Brian Adam Jones is the editor-in-chief of Task &Purpose, a forum for
modern military veterans. Brian enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2009, after graduating
from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. He served honorably and separated from
active duty in February 2013. Working as a combat correspondent, he deployed to
Helmand province, Afghanistan from July 2011 - March 2012. He was named the Print
Journalist of the Year by the Marine Corps Division of Public Affairs for 2010 and 2011.
He is currently working on his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. (Brian,
July 11th, 2014, Business Insider: Military and Defense, This Chart Explains Why The
US Military Is Such A Dominant Global Force, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-
magnitude-of-american-naval-dominance-2014-7)//IK
The single most important contributor to the U.S.'s military dominance is the country's
powerful navy, which gives America the ability to project hard power just about
anywhere in the world. And this ability owes a lot to the Navy's unparalleled fleet of
aircraft carriers. The U.S. has 19 carriers. The rest of the world has only 12 aircraft
carriers combined. The U.S. carriers are also larger and more technically advanced than
any other country's. China's sole carrier, for instance, is a retrofitted Soviet-era
Ukrainian carrier that was originally supposed to be an off-shore casino. Our friends at
GlobalSecurity.org created a chart that captures not just the scope, but the size of the
U.S. aircraft carriers in comparison to the rest of the world. It's pretty stark, and gives an
idea of just how much of a gap in conventional military power there is between the U.S.
and everyone else.
Squo solvesnew purchases and tech investments
Grant, 7/11 Rebecca Grant is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C., and director of
the Washington Security Forum. (Rebecca, July 11
th
, 2014, The Washington Times,
GRANT: The dangerous decline in Americas maritime might: Threats on the open seas
require more and better ships,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/11/grant-the-dangerous-decline-in-
americas-maritime-m/?page=all)//IK
Fortunately, its not too late to change course and restore Americas maritime might. The
Navy must be prepared to meet force on force with the ships, aircraft and technologies
geared to combat rising threats. To start, our military needs to prepare for contested
seas. The long-range shipbuilding plan is the place to do it. That plan should hold fast to
the tough ships, such as carriers, destroyers and amphibious ships that operate well
anywhere and are constantly called when trouble breaks out. Legislators need to be
talking about how to afford new ships in light of fiscal tightening. The Navy is
planning to purchase several new types of vessels all at once starting around
2018, at an estimated tab of $18 billion to $24 billion per year. Appropriately
prioritizing will be crucial. The top priority needs to be the production and improvement
of aircraft carriers. as theyre particularly effective at combating the maritime
technologies being developed by hostile regimes. Specifically, carriers need to add
advanced planes such as the F-35 strike fighter and E-2D radar plane. Officials also need
to critically examine the existing fleet of littoral combat ships. The Pentagon has
proposed cutting the buy for such vessels from 54 to 32 out of concerns for their ability
to defend themselves against more advanced military adversaries in the Asia-Pacific.
Finally, the DDG-51 Burke class of destroyers the defining characteristic of which is
robust, multidimensional firepower needs to play a bigger role in our naval
operations. The Burke DDGs are uniquely equipped to counter the diversity of threats
now posed on the open seas. Plans to improve and expand our national naval capacities
need to come back to the center of the international security debate. Russia, China and
Iran are all heavily investing in their maritime military capabilities. U.S. commanders
from the Pacific to the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf are demanding more and
better ships. If the United States doesnt heed their request, the Navys power to combat
foreign threats and back up diplomatic outreach in once-peaceful waters will continue to
dwindle.

Other countries fill in for US naval decline-check China
Warships IFR 13, Warships International Fleet Review, leading naval news magazine
Is this the end of western naval supremacy? 6/28/2013
http://www.warshipsifr.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=125:is-
this-the-end-of-western-naval-supremacy&catid=36:commentary&Itemid=65
It is wrong therefore to draw the conclusion that right now is the moment when the East
surpasses Western naval supremacy. Measuring naval capability in platform numbers
alone is not the way to assess the potential fighting effectiveness of a nation state.
Todays situation is very reminiscent of the Cold War. Russias massive, breakneck naval
expansion was often cited as a cause for deep concern. But had confrontation turned to
conflict there are reasons to believe that Western naval forces would have prevailed.
Western military doctrine that encouraged commanders to take the initiative, depending
on the situation in their local area, would have been an important factor. The more rigid
Soviet-era command structures would have created approaches to combat that were
more stultified. In situations where tempo was important, Western naval forces would
have held an advantage. As China evolves its naval capability to challenge American
hegemony in Asia-Pacific, it will also need to find ways to overcome the bureaucratic
limitations that any centralised system place on its naval and military command
hierarchies. Other States that are expanding their naval capacity on a grandly ambitious
scale will face similar problems. India and Brazil are two such countries whose economic
progress is also allowing them to increase their maritime presence. With its new-found
oil wealth Brazil will initially concentrate on projecting naval power at the sub-regional
level, to ensure that its neighbours do not threaten its economic lifeline. For India, power
projection has to be at the regional level. It must be able to defend its SLOC in a time of
crisis. The common material aim of the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Indian, China) powers is
to create balanced naval forces with strike and intelligence collection assets above and
below the waterline. Investments in submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers as well
as Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) are obvious key developments. In the period from
2015-2035 the United States and its Western allies will still maintain a formidable naval
capability, even if the numbers of warships are less than have been previously deployed.
Alliances can help bridge capability gaps that may arise. The transition from the
certainties of the Cold War to a new international security landscape dominated by
China and the other BRIC countries is not yet complete. That transition may take
another 50 years. The question for the West is how it chooses to deal with that situation.
As the United States progresses with its strategic pivot towards Asia-Pacific some early
clues are emerging. The United States will deepen its relationships with Japan, Australia
and South Korea and also work closely with Vietnam, India and the Philippines. A new
form of maritime alliance may well emerge that is not dissimilar to NATO, only its remit
will be the security of the Pacific Rim. France will be an Indian Ocean player, as it has
bases already established in that region, while the UK must surely also aim to play its
part as a major maritime player East of Suez? In the wake of debilitating naval cuts, via
effective cooperation the Western naval powers dominance of the worlds oceans will
probably continue for the foreseeable future. It is easy to understand why current and
future major naval expansion in China, India and Brazil has been heralded by some
commentators as indicative of a fundamental shift in the balance of dominance away
from Western navies. For so long it was only the West (and Russia) that had the military
know-how, the strategic need and economic power to create carriers, nuclear-powered
submarines and complex surface combatants. They were also the only powers with the
experience of using such assets in times of peace and war, and the means of applying
them to protect national interests. The BRIC nations are at the beginning of a long
journey to acquire major naval forces and will now garner much operational experience
along the way, let us hope in peace rather than war. One major lesson provided by the
Soviet Union is that pursuing naval supremacy (by building huge numbers of submarines
and ships) can in the end prove so expensive that it causes the downfall of the very State
it is supposed to buttress. China, India and Brazil beware.

Naval funding and size not key to Asia Pivot
Kyle 14, regional analyst covering military issues in Asia.
William Kyle, The US Navy and the Pivot: Less Means Less March 31, 2014
http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/the-us-navy-and-the-pivot-less-means-less/
In fact, this new direction leaves the U.S. Navy in the unenviable position of being at the
vanguard of a Pacific Pivot while facing potentially dramatic reductions in force
structure and modernization budgets. However, it is not clear that the Pacific pivot
strategy actually requires a dramatic, Cold War-like increase in American naval presence
for successrather, it may be enough for the U.S. Navy to implement its own structural
pivot to better match American foreign policy goals with resources. In the wake of the
GWOT and 2008 financial crisis, many assessments predicted the end of Americas
unipolar moment, spurring the Obama administration to announce a new foreign
policy direction in 2011. Fighting popular perceptions of previous regional neglect,
Obama stressed that the United States was permanently turning its principal attention
towards Asia. In November 2011, this new Asia policy directive got its own catchphrase
when then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton published an article in Foreign Policy
magazine titled Americas Pacific Century , emphasizing both the current and future
importance of Asia and Americas desired role in the region. Thus was born the American
pivot to the Pacific. More than two years after Clinton first outlined that broad policy,
there are many indicators that the strategy is more than just another step in a U.S.-China
arms race. Since announcing the pivot, emphasis has been placed on involvement in
regional multilateralism and economic integration through pursuit of initiatives such as
the Trans-Pacific Partnership regional free trade agreement, accession to the East Asia
Summit, and establishment of a permanent mission to the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. The administration continues to play up regional involvement to convey
the message that the United States intends to remain an integral Pacific power. Although
security policy does constitute a key component of the unfolding, multifaceted Pacific
strategy, the very limited security initiatives implemented or proposed to date do not
appear to be the policy centerpiece. In reality, the pivot is (thus far) more of a
rhetorical statement of American interest in the preservation of the American-led status
quo, backed up with regional initiatives that do not require or include a significant
redistribution of hard power assets. Even so, this new emphasis on the Pacific theater
has significant repercussions for the U.S. Navy, in an era of diminishing resources and
unpropitious regional trends.

Port security
Security increasing nownew bilateral agreements
GT, 6/14 Guyana Times (US to boost local port security July 14, 2014
http://www.guyanatimesgy.com/2014/07/14/us-to-boost-local-port-security/)//gingE
As part of efforts to boost port security here, the US Embassy in Georgetown facilitated a
week-long workshop on auditing management systems. The training was conducted in
partnership with the US Coast Guard and the Maritime Administration of Guyana
(MARAD). It represents the third of four courses delivered to Guyanese officials from
multiple agencies. The workshop was based on international standards for auditing and
will assist employees of the port, Customs, port Police, health, the Guyanese Coast
Guard, and MARAD to perform effective inspections and audits and ensure that ports
remain secure. Secure ports reduce the risk of threats to the shipping community, which
in turn keeps the price of shipped goods lower by potentially reducing insurance costs to
shippers, and reducing the time it takes to get cargo in and out of Guyanas ports. The
efforts of Guyanas newly-trained auditors will strengthen the security of Guyanas ports
by identifying security vulnerabilities and developing solutions through the auditing of
security management practices. The broad representation of members from Guyanese
ports and the Guyanese Government represent a strong commitment to port security and
the facilitation of trade between Guyana and the US. The programme, funded through
the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), helps strengthen capacity and provide
practical skills to relevant security officials working in this critically important area.
Through such CBSI partnerships, the US and Guyana seek to enhance the bilateral
security relationship to create a partnership to combat transnational crime, develop
strong security institutions in Guyana, and advance the safety and security of the citizens
of Guyana.
US is already committed to increasing port securityprevious ineffective
measures are being addressed
GAO, 6/4 Government Accountability Office (MARITIME SECURITY: Progress and
Challenges with Selected Port Security Programs June 4, 2014
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-636T)//gingE
Maritime domain awareness and information sharing. DHS agencies along with other
port partners have taken actions to enhance visibility over the maritime domain and
facilitate cooperation among partners by collecting, assessing and sharing key
information. However, some challenges remain in implementing the tools necessary to
maintain this focus and increase coordination among stakeholders. For example, in
multiple reports since 2011, GAO found the Coast Guard's weak management of
technology acquisitionsthat were focused on enhancing maritime awareness and
increasing communication among partners resulted in these acquisitions not fully
achieving their intended purposes. DHS concurred with GAO's recommendations for
addressing these weaknesses. Security in domestic ports. Since 9/11, DHS components
have taken a wide variety of actions to better secure domestic ports. For example, the
Coast Guard has assessed risks to cruise ships in accordance with DHS guidance and is
providing escorts for high-risk vessels such as cruise ships and ferries while CBP is
reviewing passenger and crew data to target inspections. In addition, since 2002, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has provided almost $2.9 billion in
federal funding through the Port Security Grant Program (PSGP) to help defray the cost
of implementing security efforts in many ports and has established measures to improve
the administration of the PSGP. However, in 2014 FEMA stated that it is unabledue to
resource constraintsto annually measure reduced vulnerability attributed to enhanced
PSGP-funded security measures. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard have been administering a program requiring
maritime workers to obtain a biometric identification card to gain access to certain
facilities. However, in 2011, GAO recommended that DHS assess internal controls to
identify actions needed to address, among other things, weaknesses governing
enrollment and background checks. As of March 2014 this action had not been
completed. Protection of the global supply chain. DHS agencies, especially CBP, have
taken steps to enhance the security of the global supply chainparticularly for cargo
bound for the United States. Efforts have focused on assessing and mitigating cargo risk
before it enters U.S. ports by better targeting and scanning cargo, and establishing
security partnerships with the foreign countries and companies that ship cargo to the
United States. However, in multiple reports since 2005, GAO found that DHS programs
focused on protecting the global supply chain have been implemented with varying
degrees of success and that many would benefit from the DHS agencies conducting
further assessments of the programs, among other things. GAO has made
recommendations to address these issues and DHS has concurred or generally concurred
with most of these recommendations and has taken actions to address many of them.
New tech investment now
Lundquist, 13 - senior-level communications professional with more than 28 years of
public affairs experience in military, private association, and corporate service (Edward,
August 21, 2013 Maritime Security 2013 West Focuses on Improving Port and Coastal
Surveillance
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/maritime-security-2013-west-focuses-
on-improving-port-and-coastal-surveillance/)//gingE
Anh Duong, the director of Borders and Maritime Security division at the Department of
Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, says that threat to the nations
maritime border includes terrorists and smugglers, and they employ an adaptive
strategy. The bad guys tunnel under, fly over or sail around our borders. Our goal is to
bring knowledge and technology to address gaps in maritime border and cargo security,
Duong says. We focus on operations, innovation and partnerships. One of her
directorates major efforts involves the establishment of a coastal surveillance system,
which was demonstrated during the conference. The demonstration placed a Terma
Scanter 5202 surface surveillance radar at Carlsbad State Beach Park on the California
coast and connected it to the CSS by means of a cellular connection to the CSS network
at SRI Internationals facility in St. Petersburg, Fla. The feed was made available to U.S.
Customs and Border Protections Air and Marine Operations Center (AMOC) at March
Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif. The entire U.S. border operating picture, including
the coverage of the Terma radar, was displayed at the conference. It shows the flexibility
of the system, says Jim Moore, director of radar systems for Terma North America.
You can connect any sensor anywhere you have commercial cellular coverage. We
have a high-level integration with the Terma radar using a cell phone hot spot. You can
see the tracks, says Shane Mason, program manager for enterprise solutions with SRI
International. Its quite impressive.
New tech disproves the impact
Lee, 11 - (Elizabeth September 28, 2011 US Port Security Technology Evolving
http://www.voanews.com/content/us-port-security-technology-evolving-
130793378/173729.html)//gingE
"Every single container does get screened. Everything that comes off the ship goes
through radiation detection equipment," added Holmes. The ports of Los Angeles have
different high-tech devices that look for bombs, chemical and biological weapons.
Michael McMullen with the Port of Long Beach says technology is a big component of
security. "Most of the security that we do today is really done almost in a virtual state,"
he said. McMullen says there are underwater sonar sensors, high-tech radars that detect
every ship within 11 kilometers of the port and hundreds of cameras above ground. In a
room filled with computers and video monitors of all sizes, security analysts can track
everything that goes on in and around the port complex. The port has shared the
technology with personnel from Latin America and Asia so they can learn how these high
tech systems are integrated and apply them to their own port security. "Ports may all be
a little bit different, but what we're trying to do is very similar," Holmes explained. To
share information, John Holmes says the Port of Los Angeles held a port security
summit last year with countries that included China, Korea and Israel. Holmes says ports
around the world are vulnerable, using the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India as an
example. "In Mumbai, the attacks actually came from the water," he said. Security
experts say exchanging information will help them stay current with all the new high-
tech devices on the market. At a technology conference near Los Angeles, Fred Aldrich is
trying to sell a container scanning system. It would go on a ship and scan stacks of
containers before they reach land. "Our system would be installed at the foreign ports
and scanning and detection happens 24/7 autonomously," Aldrich said. Craig Crawford
with 3-D Image Tek, is trying to find buyers for his machine that converts video from 2-D
to 3-D. He says 3-D images provide depth and detail. He says it can be used for night
surveillance or even to diffuse a bomb. "It actually puts human eyes right on the threat
then they can manipulate it just like a surgeon would be during a surgery looking at the
wires identifying the threat," said Crawford. Port of Long Beach's Michael McMullen says
in the next two years, he expects 3-D technology to be one component of security at his
port that will help improve communication by providing even more detailed information.

Security increasing now
US Department of Homeland Security, 12 (October 19, 2012 Secure Freight
Initiative http://www.dhs.gov/secure-freight-initiative)//gingE
As part of the Departments layered approach to port and container security, the initial
phase of Secure Freight Initiative will deploy of a combination of existing technology and
proven nuclear detection devices to six foreign port beginning in early 2007. Containers
from the ports will be scanned for radiation and information risk factors before being
allowed to depart for the United States. In the event of a detection alarm, both homeland
security personnel and host country officials will simultaneously receive an alert.
Homeland Security is allocating nearly $30 million to fund the radiography equipment
and the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is
contributing $30 million to fund the installation of radiation portal monitors. NNSA will
lead the effort to integrate data from equipment for use in-country. Homeland Security is
responsible for installing the necessary communications infrastructure to transmit the
data to the United States and working with the host governments during the alarm
resolution process. Nuclear and Radiological Risk Assessment for Containers Data
gathered on containers bound for the United States in foreign ports participating in the
Secure Freight Initiative is transmitted in near real-time to U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) officers working in overseas ports and to the Departments National
Targeting Center. This data is combined with other available risk assessment
information such as currently required manifest submissions, to improve risk analysis,
targeting and scrutiny of high-risk containers overseas. All alarms from the radiation
detection equipment for any container will continue to be resolved locally. For containers
bound for the United States, we are working with host governments to establish
protocols that ensure a swift resolution by the host government and may include
instructing carriers not to load the container until the risk is fully resolved. Multiple
Layers of Port Security The Secure Freight Initiative builds upon a risk-based approach
to securing the international supply chain by leveraging programs like Department of
Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Megaports Initiative works with
foreign governments to install specialized radiation detection equipment in order to
deter, detect, and interdict illicit shipments of nuclear and other radioactive materials
The Departments Container Security Initiative enables CBP officers already working in
50 overseas ports to inspect high risk containers before they are loaded on vessels
destined for the U.S. The Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT)
partners 6,000 of the worlds leading U.S. importers with the Department of Homeland
Security to pre-screen of all of their cargo entering the country.
Security increasing
Powell, 11 Washington correspondent for the Houston Chronicle (Stewart, September
8, 2011 Top White House official says port security has been improved
http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2011/09/top-white-house-official-says-port-security-
has-been-improved/)//gingE
The top White House official responsible for protecting the nation against follow-on al-
Qaida attacks says there have been a number of very important improvements in
security at maritime ports such as the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel since the 9/11
attacks a decade ago. John Brennan, President Obamas counter-terrorism adviser, said
the administration has effectively extended U.S. maritime borders to ports around the
world by requiring U.S.-bound ships from countries with ties to terrorism to undergo
pre-departure security screening. Brennan was responding to security concerns raised
during a congressional field hearing in Houston last month. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-
Austin, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committees investigations
subcommittee, used the hearing to highlight the potential threat of al-Qaida affiliated
terrorists targeting oil and natural gas tankers en route into U.S. harbors by using
explosives-packed suicide boats, coordinated rocket-propelled grenade strikes or even
seizing control of the ships bridge. Houstons shipping channel and port handle 7,800
vessels a year and 150,000 barge movements on the waterway. On any given day, up to
30 oil and chemical tankers are moving along the ship channellocation of 31 percent of
the nations crude oil refining capacity. Were terrorist to cripple or sink a tanker in the
channel it could interrupt gasoline production and inflict enormous damage on the U.S.
economy. Brennan said authorities are constantly trying to balance security with
accessibility. The thing about the United States that we hold dear is that we are a
country that is known for its openness to the world, Brennan said. Therefore we cannot
hermetically seal it. We dont want to close off our ports, we dont want to close off our
coasts. Brennan said the federal government has implemented precautions that will
optimize our security by requiring U.S.-bound ships to clear their cargo in advance.
What we have looked at over the last ten years through successive administrations are
those steps and measures that we can take that will enhance that security, Brennan said.
But it cant just be inside the port. If they have already gotten there, theyve gotten too
far. Brennan said the U.S. approach depends upon cooperation by U.S. allies to help
carry out pre-departure screening of ships cargoes so that we have assurance that it has
met some security requirement of our own before it even comes close to our coastline.

Russia Militarization

Russia wont militarize
Arctic Focus, 14 (April 30, 2014 Russia wont militarize Arctic
http://arcticfocus.com/russia-wont-militarize-arctic/)//gingE
Despite the fact that last month a released Russian document hinted that Russia would
be deploying FSB security service and army units to the Arctic, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov is insisting that this is not the case. Yesterday, Lavrov said that Moscow
had no plans to increase Russias military presence in the Arctic region. He also said that
Moscow believes that currently existing laws will resolve any issue of ownership in the
Arctic. The existing legislation in the world allows (us) to deal successfully with all
issues which might arise. At the meeting of the Arctic Council taking place in Tromsoe,
Norway, Lavrov also told reporters that, We are not planning to increase our armed
forces presence in the Arctic. The decisions taken provide for strengthening the potential
of the coast guard. There will be no new forces in the Arctic and the strengthening of the
coast guard is said to be for search and rescue purposes only. Norwegian Foreign
Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere is hoping that all interested parties can cooperate peacefully
when it comes to the Arctic region. We will, as responsible governments and coastal
states, be able to manage the challenges and opportunities of this region without gliding
into conflict and negative competition, he told reporters at the meeting on Tuesday. At
yesterdays meeting, the Arctic Council countries agreed to work together more closely to
improve search and rescue efforts in the Arctic, along with working together to manage
the regions resources. The Arctic Council also agreed to develop a scientific task force
that will study the melting ice in the region and present the finding, which will be
reported to the U.N. climate change conference that will be taking place in December in
Copenhagen.

Heg makes Russian militarization inevitable
Roberts, 14 - Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal (Paul Craig, May 26, 2014 US hegemonic drive makes
war with Russia/China inevitable
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/05/26/364229/why-war-is-inevitable/)//gingE
The truth is hard to bear, but the facts are clear. Americas wars have been fought in
order to advance Washingtons power, the profits of bankers and armaments industries,
and the fortunes of US companies. Marine General Smedley Butler said, I served in all
commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time,
I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street,
and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. It is more or less
impossible to commemorate the war dead without glorifying them, and it is impossible
to glorify them without glorifying their wars. For the entirety of the 21st century the US
has been at war, not war against massed armies or threats to American freedom, but
wars against civilians, against women, children, and village elders, and wars against our
own liberty. Elites with a vested interest in these wars tell us that the wars will have to go
on for another 20 to 30 years before we defeat the terrorist threat. This, of course, is
nonsense. There was no terrorist threat until Washington began trying to create
terrorists by military attacks, justified by lies, on Muslim populations. Washington
succeeded with its war lies to the point that Washingtons audacity and hubris have
outgrown Washingtons judgment. By overthrowing the democratically elected
government in Ukraine, Washington has brought the United States into confrontation
with Russia. This is a confrontation that could end badly, perhaps for Washington and
perhaps for the entire world. If Gaddafi and Assad would not roll over for Washington,
why does Washington think Russia will? The Bush and Obama regimes have destroyed
Americas reputation with their incessant lies and violence against other peoples. The
world sees Washington as the prime threat. Worldwide polls consistently show that
people around the world regard the US and Israel as posing the greatest threat to peace.
The countries that Washingtons propaganda declares to be rogue states and the axis
of evil, such as Iran and North Korea, are far down the list when the peoples in the
world are consulted. It could not be more clear that the world does not believe
Washingtons self-serving propaganda. The world sees the US and Israel as the rogue
elements. The US and Israel are the only two in the world that are in the grip of
ideologies. The US is in the grip of the Neoconservative ideology which has declared the
US to be the exceptional, indispensable country chosen by history to exercise
hegemony over all others. This ideology is buttressed by the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz
doctrines that are the basis of US foreign policy. The Israeli government is in the grip of
the Zionist ideology that declares a greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. Many
Israelis themselves do not accept this ideology, but it is the ideology of the settlers and
those who control the Israeli government. Ideologies are important causes of war. Just as
the Hitlerian ideology of German superiority is mirrored in the Neoconservative ideology
of US superiority, the Communist ideology that the working class is superior to the
capitalist class is mirrored in the Zionist ideology that Israelis are superior to
Palestinians. Zionists have never heard of squatters rights and claim that recent Jewish
immigrants into Palestine invaders really have the right to land occupied by others
for millennia. Washingtons and Israels doctrines of superiority over others do not sit
very well with the others. When Obama declared in a speech that Americans are the
exceptional people, Russias President Putin responded, God created us all equal. To
the detriment of its population, the Israeli government has made endless enemies. Israel
has effectively isolated itself in the world. Israels continued existence depends entirely
on the willingness and ability of Washington to protect Israel. This means that Israels
power is derivative of Washingtons power. Washingtons power is a different story. As
the only economy standing after WWII, the US dollar became the world money. This role
for the dollar has given Washington financial hegemony over the world, the main source
of Washingtons power. As other countries rise, Washingtons hegemony is imperiled. To
prevent other countries from rising, Washington invokes the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz
doctrines. To be brief, the Brzezinski doctrine says that in order to remain the only
superpower, Washington must control the Eurasian land mass. Brzezinski is willing for
this to occur peacefully by suborning the Russian government into Washingtons empire.
A loosely confederated Russia . . . a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to
imperial mobilization. In other words, break up Russia into associations of semi-
autonomous states whose politicians can be suborned by Washingtons money.
Brzezinski propounded a geo-strategy for Eurasia. In Brzezinskis strategy, China and
a confederated Russia are part of a transcontinental security framework, managed by
Washington in order to perpetuate the role of the US as the worlds only superpower. I
once asked my colleague, Brzezinski, that if everyone was allied with us, who were we
organized against? My question surprised him, because I think that Brzezinski remains
caught up in Cold War strategy even after the demise of the Soviet Union. In Cold War
thinking it was important to have the upper hand or else be at risk of being eliminated as
a player. The importance of prevailing became all consuming, and this consuming drive
survived the Soviet collapse. Prevailing over others is the only foreign policy that
Washington knows. The mindset that America must prevail set the stage for the
Neoconservatives and their 21st century wars, which, with Washingtons overthrow of
the democratically elected government of Ukraine, has resulted in a crisis that has
brought Washington into direct conflict with Russia. I know the strategic institutes that
serve Washington. I was the occupant of the William E.Simon Chair in Political
Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, for a dozen years. The idea is
prevalent that Washington must prevail over Russia in Ukraine or Washington will lose
prestige and its superpower status. The idea of prevailing always leads to war once one
power thinks it has prevailed. The path to war is reinforced by the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative intellectual who formulated US military and foreign
policy doctrine, wrote among many similar passages: Our first objective is to prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or
elsewhere [China] that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet
Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy
and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region
whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global
power. In the Wolfowitz Doctrine, any other strong country is defined as a threat and a
power hostile to the US regardless of how willing that country is to get along with the US
for mutual benefit. The difference between Brzezinski and the Neoconservatives is that
Brzezinski wants to suborn Russia and China by including them in the empire as
important elements whose voices would be heard, If only for diplomatic reasons,
whereas the Neoconservatives are prepared to rely on military force combined with
internal subversion orchestrated with US financed NGOs and even terrorist
organizations. Neither the US nor Israel is embarrassed by their worldwide reputations
as posing the greatest threat. In fact, both are proud to be recognized as the greatest
threats. The foreign policy of both is devoid of any diplomacy. US and Israeli foreign
policy rests on violence alone. Washington tells countries to do as Washington says or be
bombed into the stone age. Israel declares all Palestinians, even women and children,
to be terrorists, and proceeds to shoot them down in the streets, claiming that Israel is
merely protecting itself against terrorists. Israel, which does not recognize the existence
of Palestine as a country, covers up its crimes with the claim that Palestinians do not
accept the existence of Israel. We dont need no stinking diplomacy. We got power.
This is the attitude that guarantees war, and that is where the US is taking the world. The
prime minister of Britain, the chancellor of Germany, and the president of France are
Washingtons enablers. They provide the cover for Washington. Instead of war crimes,
Washington has coalitions of the willing and military invasions that bring democracy
and womens rights to non-compliant countries. China gets much the same treatment. A
country with four times the US population but a smaller prison population, China is
constantly criticized by Washington as an authoritarian state. China is accused of
human rights abuses while US police brutalize the US population. The problem for
humanity is that Russia and China are not Libya and Iraq. These two countries possess
strategic nuclear weapons. Their land mass greatly exceeds that of the US. The US, which
was unable to successfully occupy Baghdad or Afghanistan, has no prospect of prevailing
against Russia and China in conventional warfare. Washington will push the nuclear
button. What else can we expect from a government devoid of morality? The world has
never experienced rogue elements comparable to Washington and Israel. Both
governments are prepared to murder anyone and everyone. Look at the crisis that
Washington has created in Ukraine and the dangers thereof. On May 23, 2014, Russias
President Putin spoke to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a three-day
gathering of delegations from 62 countries and CEOs from 146 of the largest Western
corporations. Putin did not speak of the billions of dollars in trade deals that were being
formalized. Instead Putin spoke of the crisis that Washington had brought to Russia, and
he criticized Europe for being Washingtons vassals for supporting Washingtons
propaganda against Russia and Washingtons interference in vital Russian interests.
Putin was diplomatic in his language, but the message that powerful economic interests
from the US and Europe received is that it will lead to trouble if Washington and
European governments continue to ignore Russias concerns and continue to act as if
they can interfere in Russias vital interests as if Russia did not exist. The heads of these
large corporations will carry this message back to Washington and European capitals.
Putin made it clear that the lack of dialogue with Russia could lead to the West making
the mistake of putting Ukraine in NATO and establishing missile bases on Russias
border with Ukraine. Putin has learned that Russia cannot rely on good will from the
West, and Putin made it clear, short of issuing a threat, that Western military bases
in Ukraine are unacceptable. Washington will continue to ignore Russia. However,
European capitals will have to decide whether Washington is pushing them into conflict
with Russia that is against European interests. Thus, Putin is testing European
politicians to determine if there is sufficient intelligence and independence in Europe for
a rapprochement. If Washington in its overbearing arrogance and hubris forces Putin to
write off the West, the Russian/Chinese strategic alliance, which is forming to counteract
Washingtons hostile policy of surrounding both countries with military bases, will
harden into preparation for the inevitable war.

Space Colonization
Impossible Misc
Space Col nearly impossible - too many barriers, Mars One proves
Keller 13 (Harry, chair of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society
and as a reviewer for Analytical Chemistry, assistant professor of chemistry at
Northeastern University, PhD in analytical chemistry from Columbia , Mars One:
Exciting Adventure or Hoax?, April 8, ETC Journal [educational technology & change],
http://etcjournal.com/2013/04/08/mars-one-exciting-adventure-or-hoax/)//DLG
Problem number one is radiation. Interplanetary space is filled with solar and cosmic
radiation. The former originates from the Sun and fluctuates on an eleven-year cycle.
The latter originates outside of our solar system from cataclysmic star events and black
holes. Both are potentially deadly. NASA has estimated that a three-year round-trip and
visit to Mars by astronauts would expose them to about one Siemen of radiation, the
recommended lifetime dosage. Annual exposure on Earth at sea level is in the
milliSiemens range. The effects of radiation exposure include cataracts, increased
likelihood of cancer, and sterility. Without radiation shielding on Mars, colonists will be
doomed to very shortened lifespans and would be unlikely to reproduce. Children, if
born, would have even more problems because rapidly developing cells are even more
sensitive to radiation effects. The reasons that radiation is such a problem on Mars but
not on Earth arise from the two things that shield us Earthlings from radiation: our
atmosphere and the Earths magnetic field. The Martian atmosphere is about 1/100 that
of the Earth. Essentially all radiation arrives on the surface. Mars has no magnetic field.
Scientists postulate that it is solid to the core and so has no liquid interior to generate a
magnetic field. The Earths magnetic field deflects arriving ionic cosmic rays and solar
radiation, although gamma rays are unaffected. This deflection to our polar radiation is
the reason that we see the aurora borealis near our north pole but not near the equator.
Those light displays are caused by energetic ions impacting the atmosphere. The
proposed Mars One habitats have no evident radiation shielding, and radiation is not
mentioned on their website. The best shielding would be a thick layer of liquid hydrogen,
but water can also function reasonably well. Oddly, metal shielding, unless very thick,
makes cosmic radiation worse because the rays hit metal atom nuclei and create a
shower of new radiation from what was a single ray. The colonists could go
underground to avoid radiation, but Mars One has no such plans. They do hope to build
extensions to the shelters from the Martian soil. We dont know how feasible this plan is
or whether the thickness of the soil walls will be sufficient to avoid significant radiation
damage. Moving on past the radiation issues, which may never be adequately resolved,
you will encounter a number of more mundane issues. These fall into two areas: physical
and psychological. Physical Problems The physical problems have to do with life
support and expansion. Life requires air, water, food, and shelter. With one percent of
Earths atmosphere, Mars has an atmosphere that we cannot breathe. Its mostly carbon
dioxide (95%) anyway with oxygen only as a trace component. Even if you compressed it,
you still could not breathe it. The colonists must live in a pressurized environment and
must scrub the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air to prevent stress and eventual death
from hypercapnia. Oxygen must constantly be generated from some source to make up
for oxygen consumed by the colonists. Plants grown for food can perform the functions
of carbon dioxide removal and oxygen generation, but early plans for Mars One suggest
that the space allotted for plants may not be sufficient for these purposes and must be
supplanted by mechanical and chemical processes, which will require power.
Substantial supplies of water will be required to support even four colonists who will be
living in a water-poor environment. The interior of the habitat may actually be moist
because it will not take much water to saturate the small atmosphere contained there.
Most edible plants transpire, and a moist atmosphere will reduce their water
requirements. Water will come from three sources: water carried on the mission, water
recycled from colonists, and water mined from the Martian soil. This last source may
be a problem because the best location for water is near the Martian poles, but the best
place for solar energy is near the Martian equator. We do not yet know if reasonable
amounts of water exist below the Martian surface at the equator. Water is also the most
likely source of oxygen. Electrolysis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen gases.
Therefore, water is necessary for both its own value and for replenishing air. Because
colonists must venture outside and so step through an airlock, losing air in the process,
and because the habitat will certainly have at least minor leaks, air must be constantly
replaced. The initial six habitat modules have been allocated in pairs. One pair has been
reserved for food production. The exact nature of the plants to be used has not been
described by Mars One. Unless colonists have a decent radiation shield, the plants will
neither grow nor reproduce well. Assuming such a shield is available, the plants must
convert sunshine to edible plant matter. The solar intensity is about 43% of that on
Earth, which will necessitate the use of efficient plants that can grow well in eternally
cloudy Earth climes. Most food plants must have strong sunlight. Hybrids may be
developed to compensate. Even so, its unclear whether the amount of space allocated
for food production will suffice to feed the entire colony. Even if the space is adequate,
the diet will be monotonous. The inefficiency of animals for food sources means that the
entire diet must be vegan. Yeast or similar organisms must be grown as well to provide
B12, which cannot be obtained from strictly plant sources. Colonists will never again see
a steak or filet of fish. They will have eggs or milk products. They wont even have the
produce of trees nuts, apples, citrus, etc. There will be no pepper, cinnamon, or
vanilla. Only the most efficient plants can be utilized for food on Mars. The variety will
certainly be limited. We cannot yet tell if colonists can grow some ginger or basil to help
alleviate the monotony of diet. Shelter will remain a serious problem for the foreseeable
future. Four people will inhabit six small modules of which four are reserved for
mechanical and food purposes. The shelter must remain airtight and insulating at all
times. Temperatures on the Martian surface drop to far below freezing at night. Although
the atmosphere is extremely thin, very strong winds create sandstorms that can erode
anything exposed outside, including the shelters. The materials from which shelters are
built must be strong enough to withstand the winds but light enough to ship to Mars, a
real engineering challenge. NASA's Curiosity Rover NASAs Curiosity Rover Heat will
be lost through the walls of the habitat even with the best insulation. This heat must be
replaced. The Mars colonists will find absolutely no coal, no oil, and no natural gas to use
as an energy source. Only solar and wind energy will be available unless they bring along
a nuclear power generator. Small ones, such as is being used by NASAs Curiosity rover,
can provide some power but not enough for this purpose. Heat will be a serious issue for
Mars One. Their plans call for large flexible solar panels to be rolled out onto the Martian
surface to capture the wan sunlight. The plans do not show calculations for expected
energy capture during the long Martian winters. With a year twice as long as ours,
winters are also twice as long. In addition, batteries must store this captured solar
energy. Lots of batteries will be needed to hold enough energy for heating and other
purposes such as oxygen generation throughout the Martian nights. The Mars One
information does not include battery specifications. Even the most efficient batteries are
heavy and will have to be lifted from Earth to Mars at $10,000 per pound. The colonists
must work outside of their habitat in the harsh Martian environment and so must have
Mars suits that are the equivalent of space suits. Maintaining these will be crucial to
extending the colony. Without petrochemical sources, its unclear what materials will be
used to replace the plastic components of these suits. If the colony is to be self-
sustaining, it must be able to expand using local materials. Water is too precious to use
for making concrete or even adobe if the basic materials could be obtained. Note that
cement requires lots of heat to make. To make iron, iron ore and enormous amounts of
energy are needed. Converting iron to steel requires more energy and lots of carbon, but
Mars has no fossil fuels as sources of carbon. Similarly, copper, zinc, and tin all require
massive amounts of energy far more than the solar arrays will provide. Colonists will
have to expand their solar arrays as they expand the colony if such expansion can be
done at all. The high-technology required for manufacturing these arrays will be far
beyond the capabilities of the Martian colony. With nothing to export, the colonists will
have to depend on Earth to send them the needed materials and will become
interplanetary beggars. If they have children, theyll have to expand their food tanks. Of
what will they construct them? Indeed, what building materials will the colonists have
for any purpose, even for making cooking pots or childrens toys? Medical issues have
not even been considered. The colonists would not have any access to modern medicine.
They would have to be carefully screened for genetic factors that predispose to disease.
Medical problems that we can handle readily here would result in death on Mars.
Psychological Pressures Even if power, air, water, food, shelter, and building materials
can be resolved, a very unlikely result, the colonists must face extreme psychological
pressures. A single small error by one colonist can kill them all. This could happen on
any day. Only digital material could be imported from Earth on a regular basis. With
sufficient power, the colonists could watch videos and listen to music. However,
conversation with Earth-bound families and friends would not be possible. The round-
trip delay for radio transmission is between 6 and 40 minutes. Say, Hello, and you hear
a response 20 minutes later on average. All communication with Earth would be
asynchronous. What would it take to make life on Mars bearable? How could you
overcome the monotony of food, of view, of company, of smells, of cramped living
spaces? You would never smell a pine forest again or see the ocean. There are no amber
waves of grain or even cityscapes. Youll have no blue skies or clouds and no hope of
ever experiencing them again in person. Youll be subject to extreme cabin fever. It
looks like Mars colonists will be in a constant state of stress from a long list of sources.
How can you stand this sort of stress? The answer typically lies in hope for the future, in
the belief that youre building something for your children and future generations.
Unless the problems of radiation, power, water, building materials, repairing and
replacing Mars suits, and the rest are solved, youve just sentenced yourself to a life in
prison, and that prison is the closest thing to hell that any living person can experience
over protracted periods. Without hope, Mars One is doomed today.
Space Colonization is Impossible
Stross 6/16/2007 - a celebrated Science Fiction author, a freelance journalist, a
programmer and a pharmacist at different times, holds degrees in Pharmacy and
Computer Science (Charlie, Charlie Stross: Space Colonization, Economists View,
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/the_economics_o.html)

The High Frontier, Redux, by Charlie Stross: ...I write SF for a living. Possibly because of
this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration and
space colonization. Space exploration? Yep, ... I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific
enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely...
Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently
stripped of indigenous inhabitants ... has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale
factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive. ... [I]f we're looking for
habitable real estate..., [w]hile exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial
planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a
pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about
ten miles. Try to get a handle on this: [using the metaphor] it takes us 2-5 years to
travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of
ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in
interplanetary travel are enormous, and ... the distances and times involved in
interstellar travel are mind-numbing. This is not to say that interstellar travel is
impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous
amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And
in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less
than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating
factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more
speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero
net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us
money). ... The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that,
in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic magic tech
that, ... from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws
of physics interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-
starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology
appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is
that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical
colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies
and the old home soil. What about our own solar system? After contemplating the
vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible
at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and
interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific
undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written.
But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization
things turn gloomy again. Bluntly, we're not going to get there by rocket ship.
Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible ... to maintain a Lunar presence for
a transportation cost ... to Moon Base One ... [of] not much more than a first-class return
air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash...
Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost ..., for a
mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle ... more like $1M. And that's
before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... If we want to go panning the
(metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots...
There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but ... Mission Control
would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back
and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps. When we look at the rest of the solar
system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As
Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I
see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as
hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever
writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's
no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make
it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so
hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy are robots
are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some
shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic
nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.
Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And
that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote
control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need
autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human
supervision, or we need astronauts in orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work
gangs around. On the other hand, Mars is a good way further away than the moon, and
has a deeper gravity well. All of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the
Martian surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not
holding my breath. Let me repeat myself: we are not going there with rockets. At least,
not the conventional kind... Again, as with interstellar colonization, there are other
options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some
analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of
$350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic
wands... And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology... So,
long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space,
including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in
today's money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible,
except ... We're human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment
that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area... Space itself is a very poor
environment for humans to live in. ... Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk ...,
and unlike solar radiation ... the energies of the particles responsible make
shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Five
and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars. Now, these problems are subject
to a variety of approaches including medical ones: does it matter if cosmic radiation
causes ... cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if
hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique..., we may
be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really
any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would
require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live their for the rest of their lives. In
general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build
infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move
our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take
their leave. After all, there's no there there just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic
gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I
submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the
heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen
by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And
closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow... [T]he
domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something
about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless,
inhospitable environment. Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in
winter then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
Reproduction
Reproduction impossible in Space
Joseph 2010 Ph.D from the Chicago Medical School and the Yale University Medical
School, celebrated neuroscientist (Rhawn, Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development,
and Sex In Outer Space, Journal of Cosmology,
http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars144.html)

6.1. MENSTRUATION AND OVULATION If females are to be part of a human mission
to Mars, then the long exposure to microgravity may cause menstrual efflux and
retrograde menstruation. Many women commonly experience some retrograde intra-
abdominal bleeding during menses which remains confined to the pelvis due to the
forces of gravity. However, because of lack of gravity these menstrual blood products
may induce retrograde menstruation and menstrual efflux during spaceflight. No
symptoms of endometriosis have been as yet detected in female astronauts on the space
shuttle (Jennings and Baker, 2008). However, since the longest space shuttle flights are
18 days, and women cycle 28 days, no definite conclusions can be drawn from this
finding. Another concern is the effects of radiation. Radiation exposure has caused
endometriosis in various species of primate (Fanton and Golden 1991; Wood et al. 1983).
Endometriosis ("inside the womb") is caused by hormonal changes and radiation
exposure, and is associated with the flourishing of endometrial-like cells outside the
uterine cavity and on the ovaries. A common symptom is severe cramping and pain in
the lower back, the legs, and the rectal and vaginal area, thereby making it difficult to
walk, sit, or have sex (Ballard et al. 2010; Buyalos and Agarwal, 2000). Moreover, the
increased number of endometrial-like cells on the ovaries, can cause anatomical
distorsions and adhesions which results in infertility (Buyalos and Agarwal, 2000).
According to Jennings and Baker (2008), menstruation during space flight lasting up to
18 days has never proved a problem and no symptoms of retrograde menstruation or
pain associated with endometriosis have been reported. Unfortunately, although a few
women have flown on the International Space Station for periods longer than 100 days
(e.g., Sunita Williams, 194 days, Dr. Peggy Whitson, 350 days) privacy concerns have
prevented the collection and reporting of data on female menstrual functioning for long
duration space missions. The hypothalamus, pituitary, gonadal (HPG) axis regulates
the ovulatory cycle, and is highly susceptible to environmental factors including stress
(Joseph 1998a, 1999a). Stress can exert adverse effects on the ovaries and can lead to
ovulation failure (Tau et al., 2002). Although it appears that short term spaceflight does
not affect the ovaries, the effects of a long duration mission are unknown. For example,
examination of the ovaries of postpartum rats after 920 of gestation showed no effect
on ovarian weight or number of preovulatory or atretic follicles (Tau et al., 2002) and
female rats ovulated and cycled normally (Serova and Denisova 1982). However,
although these females successfully mated with male rats during space
flight, no births resulted. Thus, spaceflight might be correlated with
negative effects on the capacity to become pregnant and/or on the viability
of the fetus while in space.
Space travel causes infertility
Joseph 2010 Ph.D from the Chicago Medical School and the Yale University Medical
School, celebrated neuroscientist (Rhawn, Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development,
and Sex In Outer Space, Journal of Cosmology,
http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars144.html)

6.2 MALE TESTOSTERONE, TESTES, AND FERTILITY The ovaries are more radiation
resistant than the testes (Suruda 1998), which suggests that males are more likely to
become infertile than females following long term radiation exposure, which can be
expected in space and on Mars. Perhaps the greater resistance of the female ovum
is due to its being approximately 20 times larger than the human sperm cell. The ovum
carries the X chromosome, whereas the male sperm may carry either an X or a Y
chromosome thus determining if the fetus is male (XY) or female (XX). It is also believed
that the male Y chromosome is more fragile than the larger female X chromosome. In
contrast to women, men are at a much greater risk to suffer damage to gametes
(Jennings and Baker 2008), i.e. sperm, which then puts the smaller Y chromosome at
risk. Damage to sperm can result in infertility or effect the sex ratio of offspring.
Likewise, alterations and reductions in testosterone levels can effect the sexual
orientation, and the sexual anatomy and sexual differentiation of the developing brain
leading to feminization (Joseph et al., 1978, 1982). It is noteworthy that jet pilots and
astronauts subjected to high G-force exposure have a higher frequency of daughters than
those who experienced low G Forces (Little et al. 1987). Male rats mated 5 days after
space flight to nonflight female rats bred successfully, but their offspring were grossly
abnormal. Abnormalities including physical retardation, showed growth retardation,
hemorrhages, hydrocephaly, ectopic kidneys, and enlargement of the bladder (Serova et
al., 1982). Male progeny also showed reduced epididymis weight at 30 days of age. By
contrast, females mated to male rats 2.53 months after short duration spaceflight
produced healthy, viable offspring (Santy et al. 1982). Unfortunately, these studies tell us
nothing about the effects of long-duration flights. Significant and profound reductions
in testosterone levels have been found in both men and male rates following short
duration flights (Tau et al., 2002). Reductions in testosterone would effect male sexual
functioning and fertility as androgens stimulates sperm production. In most spaceflight
studies, reductions in testosterone and the weight of testes has been reported (reviewed
by Tau et al., 2002).
Space Col is impossible Embryos cant develop
Joseph 2010 Ph.D from the Chicago Medical School and the Yale University Medical
School, celebrated neuroscientist (Rhawn, Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development,
and Sex In Outer Space, Journal of Cosmology,
http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars144.html)

Extended spaceflight missions require prolonged exposure to decreased gravity. Human
sexual reproduction and fetal development evolved in relation to living on Earth,
standing upright, and the influences of Earth gravity (Joseph 200a,b,c). Therefore, it
can be predicted normal fetal development (Joseph 2000c), would be effected
by reduced gravity (Ma et al., 2008; Ronca 2003). The adverse effects of
microgravity on embryos, cell structure and function have been demonstrated by
experiments performed in space or in altered gravity induced by clinostats. It is now well
established that cellular structure, morphology, and genetic expression may be
abnormally effected in microgravity and that the cytoskeleton and microtubules are
gravity sensitive and may be grossly altered (Crawford-Young 2006; Ma et al., 2008;
Ronca 2003). These gravity induced cellular changes exert a variety of deleterious effects
on embryogenesis. These include death of the embryo, failure of neural tube closure, and
gross abnormalities in the brain, heart, and limbs. Cells respond to their environment
within a three dimensional tissue structure. The number of adhesive structures in a cell
and its resulting cell polarity may change the way it will behave in microgravity. For
instance cells that are not polarized are more likely to die and undergo apoptosis or
develop abnormally as has been demonstrated in microgravity (Crawford-Young 2006).
Microgravity has a significant impact on both cell shape and cytoskeleton (Crawford-
Young 2006). Cells show signs of changes in the nucleus and in cell shape, and cells
which form layers become disorganized, such that the layers do not develop normally.
This would include the brain, the outer coating of which consists of 6 layers, and effect
the embroyonic neural tube which is also layered and becomes the brain (Joseph 1982,
1999a, 2000c). Embryonic neural tubes do not close properly due to the changes in cell
shape, migration, and adhesion, induced by altered gravity (Crawford-Young 2006).
Embyronic cells of differing types have different surface tensions and will separate into
groups and will sort so that the cells with greater surface tension are on the inside of a
tissue and those with less surface tension are on the outside. An example of this is the
embryonic and fetal brain and heart (Joseph 1982, 2000c). When the brain develops,
cells migrate to the surface area to form six layers consisting of different cell types. The
heart also develops as a process of cell migration. If cell migration movements are
altered in a developing animal in response to microgravity, the heart and other
structures formed by the somites will not develop, causing early embryonic death
(Crawford-Young 2006). Thus, any situation where cell mobility or cell lamellipodiae are
involved could be affected, such that the fetus and its brain, heart, and internal organs,
do not develop normally Hence, there have been no births of mammals in space (Tou et
al., 2002; Ronca, 2003). Early embryonic death could also be a direct result of
microgravity induced fluid shifts, alterations in cardiovascular functioning, muscle
wastage, skeletal demineralization, and decreased red bood cells, all of which would
affect the ability to sustain a pregnancy.

No risk of space weapons
Rosen 13 - Armin Rosen, an Atlantic Media fellow, The Atlantic, January 16, 2013,
"Give Peace a Chancein Space",
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/give-peace-a-chance-in-
space/267223/

"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea," a military academy
commandant voiced by Willem Dafoe intones toward the end of a now-classic 1997
episode of The Simpsons. "They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain." This was meant as a joke, but the latter half of that statement would soon
prove eerily prescient when India and Pakistan battled over Kashmir's Siachen glacier --
a strategically irrelevant ice field sitting over 18,000 feet above sea level -- during the
Kargil War in 1999. For now, the prospect of military conflict in outer space still resides
in the realm of dystopia or absurdity, to the point that a White House petition
demanding the construction of a Star Wars-style "Death Star" could be treated as a
harmless prank. In rejecting the petition this week, the White House rightly wondered
why a debt-strapped U.S. government would spend $850 quadrillion on a weapons
system "with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship."
Thankfully, the prospect of an orbital space-to-earth battlestation doesn't even need to
be treated seriously. But it wasn't always this way. In 1952, the eminent rocket scientist
Werner Von Braun imagined that a future space station would function as an orbital
nuclear platform. Space historians believe that Russia's Salyut 3 space station, which was
launched in June of 1974, had a cannon on board, in case a craft or satellite from an
enemy country attempted to disrupt its mission. The Soviet Union experimented with
Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems in the 1960s and 70s -- basically nuclear
delivery systems that were capable of orbiting the earth. The U.S. even detonated a
nuclear weapon over 200 miles above the Pacific Ocean in July of 1962, an incident
known as Starfish Prime that, according to Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan
McDowell, halved the useful lifetime of all satellites then in orbit, knocked out power in
Hawaii, created an artificial Van Allen Belt that persisted for five years, and released
radiation into the atmosphere that wouldn't fully dissipate until the end of the decade.
For a time, it was all but taken for granted that space would not only be militarized, but
weaponized -- used as a venue or staging area for violent clashes between space-faring
nations, or attacks on the surface of the earth. Space war wasn't a punch line, but a
possibility that nuclear-armed powers didn't think they could afford to ignore. The
results of the Starfish event hint at one reason why that changed. "This is a great weapon.
It does a lot of damage -- but it also killed everything you had yourself," McDowell says
of the results of the high-altitude nuclear test. War in space was sure to have a
cataclysmic effect on the country with the most space assets, regardless of the end result.
But what about war from space? For powerful space-faring countries, space-to-earth or
earth-to-space combat is about as practical as it is desirable -- which is to say, not very.
"Space is incredibly useful for the military for a lot of things," McDowell explains. "It's
great for intelligence, communication and navigation. The natural thing is to ask, 'where
are my X-Wing fighters?' The fact is that it's hard to find a rationale for them." Laura
Grego, a senior scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, explained why an orbital weapons platform -- the kind of big-ticket military
asset that you might want a fleet of X-Wing-type vehicles to protect -- is impractical for
attacking targets on earth. "Everything in space is moving at rapid speeds. At the same
time, the earth is rotating underneath it....as it's going around, you can't hold [the
weapon] above your target. You might be over one country for 15 minutes and then
you're gone." This tiny orbital window is called the absentee ratio, and an ICBM, which
can hit any target on earth within minutes, isn't constrained by one. McDowell added
that in order to reach atmospheric velocity, a rocket needs to reach a breakneck seven
kilometers-per-second, far faster than the four to five kilometers-per-second an ICBM
must travel. From a purely strategic standpoint, orbiting a weapon for space-to-ground
use is more expensive and far less useful than existing, more earth-bound capabilities.
Simply orbiting a nuke, while possible, is good for little other than blackmail, or, at best,
a Dr. Strangelove or Dead Hand-style insurance policy for a paranoid and heavily-armed
space-faring state. The space nuke would be a means of ensuring that someone (or some
thing) has the capability of effectively wiping out most or perhaps all of the 1,016
satellites that currently orbit the earth, while rendering their orbits so debris-strewn as
to be totally and perhaps permanently useless. Such dangerous and cavalier behavior is
the stuff of cinematic super-villainy -- not statecraft. But there's another, more idealistic
reason humanity is safe from the scourge of space war. And ironically, it suggests that we
might not be safe forever. The ban on Death Star-like orbital weaponry is one of the more
robust norms in international law. A prohibition on stationing weapons of mass
destruction in space, as well as the total demilitarization of the Moon, is enshrined in
article 4 of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which 126 countries have signed. As
University of Nebraska law professor and space law expert Frans von der Dunk notes,
the treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space without banning
their actual use in space. The stationing and use of kinetic or conventional weaponry is
also allowed. Yet the most worrying aspect of the current legal regime is that the laws of
war extend to the heavens as well. "The general international law on the law of force and
the prohibition on the use of military force also applies in outer space," says von der
Dunk. "If, as part of your self-defense you need your satellite to shoot down the satellite
of your aggressor...that is perfectly allowed." Even so, the 1967 treaty demonstrates that
in space, the peaceniks seem to be winning, at least for now. Joan Johnson-Freese of the
Naval War College explained that there are two ways that, at the most schematic level,
there are two ways the international legal regime could conceive of outer space: "On one
end you put the view that space is a common heritage of mankind," she says. "The other
end of the spectrum is that air, land and sea are all environments, and all those
environments have been weaponized and therefore it's inevitable that space too will also
become weaponized." The latter formulation raises a number of chilling possibilities:
most people probably don't expect a war to break out in space, but the soldiers at Siachen
probably didn't expect to be fighting atop an 18,000 mountain pass either. Humanity has
proven willing to fight over literally anything, so long as the capability exists. Why should
we assume space will be different? Space hasn't been weaponized, and the general anti-
weaponization tilt of the 1967 treaty is part of the reason why. That tilt has gained the
status of a respected legal norm, one arguably strengthened by the fact that the treaty
itself was founded ona bedrock of mutual self-interest. "In the 1960s, the superpowers
were able to agree that there was more of a benefit in keeping the other party from doing
it than they saw a drawback in themselves being forced to abstain from it," von der Dunk
says of the U.S. and Soviet Union's view towards stationing weapons of mass destruction
in space. In other words, each side believed that preventing their opponent from
weaponizing space was worth the potential strategic cost of foreclosing on their own
ability to weaponize space. Even after the Cold War, the norm has endured.

Deterrence checks space weapon usage
Shixiu, 2007, Bao, senior fellow of military theory studies and international relations
at the Institute for Military Thought Studies, Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA of
China. He formerly served as director of the Institute. He recently was a visiting scholar
at the Virginia Military Institute in the United States. His research focuses on China-U.S.
relations in the field of comparative security strategies and the application of deterrence
theory. Deterrence Revisited: Outer Space*, pdf, KHaze
It is a well-known phenomenon that the use of nuclear weapons is considered taboo.
Along with the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, the use of nuclear weapons in war
is almost unimaginable. The utilitization of nuclear weapons is therefore almost entirely
limited to a role of deterrence. What about the taboo of space weapons? More and more
specialists are looking at the impact of space debris thatresults from the use of space
weapons.10 Large amounts of space debris caused by space weapons will invariably
threaten space assets of all space-faring countries, not just intended target countries.
Any attack by one country against another using space weapons will result in many
losers. With so much of commercial, scientific and military activity increasingly reliant
on space, there exists a considerable and growing taboo against using space weapons in a
situation of conflict. Thus, under the conditions of American strategic dominance in
space, reliable deterrents in space will decrease the possibility of the United States
attacking Chinese space assets. At a fundamental level, space weapons like nuclear
weapons will not alter the essential nature of war. Throughout history, there has been
much ink spilled over new weapons that have the unique power and ability to change the
underlying quality of war. For example, military theorists once exaggerated the tanks
role in deciding the wars outcome during World War I.11 The atom bomb itself is
probably the most salient example, as many analysts and politicians described the
weapon as the unique ultimate weapon.12 But this was a fundamental misunderstanding
of war and its implements. Nuclear weapons crossed a threshold in terms of their
immense capacity for destruction. But deterrence, mutual assured destruction and the
nuclear taboo evolved to consign the use of nuclear weapons to a near impossibility,
negating its utility as a tool of war-fighting. Weapons to change the nature of war have
not emerged in the past and will not emerge in the future. As such, space weapons will
not be the ultimate weapon nor will they be able to decide the outcome of war, even if
they are used as a first strike.
Space misperceptions wont escalate- empirics, communication, diplomacy
Lambakis, 2001, Steven, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Space Weapons:
Refuting the Critics, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6612,
KHaze
Those who believe we run extraordinary risks stemming from clouded perceptions and
misunderstandings in an age of computerized space warfare might want to take a look at
some real-world situations of high volatility in which potentially provocative actions took
place. Take, for example, the tragedies involving the USS Stark and USS Vincennes. In
May 1987,an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet fighter attacked the Stark on patrol to protect neutral
shipping in the Persian Gulf, killing 37 sailors. Iraq, a "near-ally" of the United States at
the time, had never before attacked a U.S. ship. Analysts concluded that misperception
and faulty assumptions led to Iraqs errant attack. The memory of the USS Stark no
doubt preoccupied the crew of the USS Vincennes, which little over a year later, in July
1988, was also on patrol in hostile Persian Gulf waters. The Vincennes crew was involved
in a "half war" against Iran, and at the time was fending off surface attacks from small
Iranian gunboats. Operating sophisticated technical systems under high stress and rules
of engagement that allowed for anticipatory self-defense, the advanced Aegis cruiser
fired anti-aircraft missiles at what it believed to be an Iranianmilitary aircraft set on an
attack course. The aircraft turned out to be a commercial Iran Air flight, and 290 people
perished owing to mistakes in identification and communications. To these examples we
may add a long list of tactical blunders growing out of ambiguous circumstances and
faulty intelligence, including the U.S. bombing in 1999of the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade during Kosovo operations. Yet though these tragic actions occurred in near-war
or tinderbox situations, they did not escalate or exacerbate local instability. The world
also survived U.S.-Soviet "near encounters" during the 1948 Berlin crisis, the 1961 Cuban
missile crisis, and the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. Guarded diplomacy won the day
in all cases. Why would disputes affecting space be any different? In other words, it is not
at all self-evident that a sudden loss of a communications satellite, for example, would
precipitate a wider-scale war or make warfare termination impossible. In the context of
U.S.-Russian relations, communications systems to command authorities and forces are
redundant. Urgent communications may be routed through land lines or the airwaves.
Other means are also available to perform special reconnaissance missions for
monitoring a crisis or compliance with an armistice. While improvements are needed,
our ability to know what transpires in space is growing so we are not always in the
dark. The burden is on the critics, therefore, to present convincing analogical evidence to
support the notion that, in wartime or peacetime, attempts by the United States to
control space or exploit orbits for defensive or offensive purposes would increase
significantly the chances for crisis instability or nuclear war. In Washington and other
capitals, the historical pattern is to use every available means to clarify perceptions and
to consider decisions that might lead to war or escalation with care, not dispatch.

Space-based missile defense is infeasible and ineffective at best
UCS 11 (Union of Concerned Scientists, Space Based Missile Defense, May,
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/space-based-md-factsheet-5-6-11.pdf,
EMM)
Space-Based Defenses: Enormously Expensive, Inherently Ineffective A space-based
boost-phase defense is intended to intercept attacking missiles during the first few
minutes of their flight, while the missiles engines are still burning. To reach attacking
missiles during this very short time, SBIs must be stationed in low-altitude orbits.
However, in these orbits SBIs move rapidly with respect to the ground and cannot stay
over any one location on Earth. To keep at least one interceptor within reach of a given
missile launch site at all times therefore requires many SBIs in orbit. A 2003 American
Physical Society study showed that many hundreds or thousands of SBIs would be
required to provide limited coverage against ballistic missiles launched from areas of
concern. This estimate is consistent with the size of the space layer in the Global
Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) missile defense system, which was proposed
(but not built) by the George H.W. Bush administration in the early 1990s. GPALS called
for 1,000 to 5,000 SBIs. Doubling the number of missiles that such a defense could
engage would require doubling the size of the entire constellation of SBIs. Moreover,
given the technology expected for the next decade, each SBI would weigh up to a ton or
more. As a result, deploying such a system would be enormously expensive and actually
would exceed U.S. launch capabilities. Additionally, such a system would raise
significant issues for crowding and traffic management in space. Yet even if such a large
system were built and the technology worked perfectly, it would not provide a reliable
defense, for two reasons. First, even if the constellation of hundreds to thousands of
interceptors described above were in place, only one or two SBIs would be in position to
reach any given launching missile in time to destroy it. Consequently, the defense could
be overwhelmed by simultaneously launching multiple missiles from one location.
Second, the system could not protect itself from attacks intended to remove interceptors.
Because SBIs would be in low-altitude orbits they could easily be detected and
trackedfrom the ground; an adversary would know their current and future locations. As
a result, any SBI would be vulnerable to attack by inexpensive short- or medium-range
missiles. These missiles would burn out at too low an altitude to be intercepted by the
SBI, but they could loft homing ASAT weapons at it. By destroying relatively few SBIs in
this way, an attacker could create a gap in the defense through which it subsequently
could launch its long-range missiles. In short,a defense based on deploying hundreds or
thousands of SBIs at enormous cost could be defeated by a handful of enemy missiles.



Proliferation
Iran prolif
No impact to Iran prolif it stabilizes the region
Waltz, 12 Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
(Kenneth, Why Iran Should Get the Bomb, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137731/kenneth-n-waltz/why-iran-should-get-
the-bomb) //RGP
It should not. Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn
that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff.
In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore
stability to the Middle East. POWER BEGS TO BE BALANCED The crisis over Iran's
nuclear program could end in three different ways. First, diplomacy coupled with serious
sanctions could convince Iran to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. But this
outcome is unlikely: the historical record indicates that a country bent on acquiring
nuclear weapons can rarely be dissuaded from doing so. Punishing a state through
economic sanctions does not inexorably derail its nuclear program. Take North Korea,
which succeeded in building its weapons despite countless rounds of sanctions and UN
Security Council resolutions. If Tehran determines that its security depends on
possessing nuclear weapons, sanctions are unlikely to change its mind. In fact, adding
still more sanctions now could make Iran feel even more vulnerable, giving it still more
reason to seek the protection of the ultimate deterrent. The second possible outcome is
that Iran stops short of testing a nuclear weapon but develops a breakout capability, the
capacity to build and test one quite quickly. Iran would not be the first country to acquire
a sophisticated nuclear program without building an actual bomb. Japan, for instance,
maintains a vast civilian nuclear infrastructure. Experts believe that it could produce a
nuclear weapon on short notice. Such a breakout capability might satisfy the domestic
political needs of Iran's rulers by assuring hard-liners that they can enjoy all the benefits
of having a bomb (such as greater security) without the downsides (such as international
isolation and condemnation). The problem is that a breakout capability might not work
as intended. The United States and its European allies are primarily concerned with
weaponization, so they might accept a scenario in which Iran stops short of a nuclear
weapon. Israel, however, has made it clear that it views a significant Iranian enrichment
capacity alone as an unacceptable threat. It is possible, then, that a verifiable
commitment from Iran to stop short of a weapon could appease major Western powers
but leave the Israelis unsatisfied. Israel would be less intimidated by a virtual nuclear
weapon than it would be by an actual one and therefore would likely continue its risky
efforts at subverting Iran's nuclear program through sabotage and assassination -- which
could lead Iran to conclude that a breakout capability is an insufficient deterrent, after
all, and that only weaponization can provide it with the security it seeks. The third
possible outcome of the standoff is that Iran continues its current course and publicly
goes nuclear by testing a weapon. U.S. and Israeli officials have declared that outcome
unacceptable, arguing that a nuclear Iran is a uniquely terrifying prospect, even an
existential threat. Such language is typical of major powers, which have historically
gotten riled up whenever another country has begun to develop a nuclear weapon of its
own. Yet so far, every time another country has managed to shoulder its way into the
nuclear club, the other members have always changed tack and decided to live with it. In
fact, by reducing imbalances in military power, new nuclear states generally produce
more regional and international stability, not less. Israel's regional nuclear monopoly,
which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled
instability in the Middle East. In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked
nuclear state exist. It is Israel's nuclear arsenal, not Iran's desire for one, that has
contributed most to the current crisis. Power, after all, begs to be balanced. What is
surprising about the Israeli case is that it has taken so long for a potential balancer to
emerge. Of course, it is easy to understand why Israel wants to remain the sole nuclear
power in the region and why it is willing to use force to secure that status. In 1981, Israel
bombed Iraq to prevent a challenge to its nuclear monopoly. It did the same to Syria in
2007 and is now considering similar action against Iran. But the very acts that have
allowed Israel to maintain its nuclear edge in the short term have prolonged an
imbalance that is unsustainable in the long term. Israel's proven ability to strike
potential nuclear rivals with impunity has inevitably made its enemies anxious to
develop the means to prevent Israel from doing so again. In this way, the current
tensions are best viewed not as the early stages of a relatively recent Iranian nuclear
crisis but rather as the final stages of a decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis that will
end only when a balance of military power is restored. UNFOUNDED FEARS One reason
the danger of a nuclear Iran has been grossly exaggerated is that the debate surrounding
it has been distorted by misplaced worries and fundamental misunderstandings of how
states generally behave in the international system. The first prominent concern, which
undergirds many others, is that the Iranian regime is innately irrational. Despite a
widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is made not by "mad mullahs" but by
perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders. Although Iran's
leaders indulge in inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, they show no propensity for self-
destruction. It would be a grave error for policymakers in the United States and Israel to
assume otherwise. Yet that is precisely what many U.S. and Israeli officials and analysts
have done. Portraying Iran as irrational has allowed them to argue that the logic of
nuclear deterrence does not apply to the Islamic Republic. If Iran acquired a nuclear
weapon, they warn, it would not hesitate to use it in a first strike against Israel, even
though doing so would invite massive retaliation and risk destroying everything the
Iranian regime holds dear. Although it is impossible to be certain of Iranian intentions, it
is far more likely that if Iran desires nuclear weapons, it is for the purpose of providing
for its own security, not to improve its offensive capabilities (or destroy itself). Iran may
be intransigent at the negotiating table and defiant in the face of sanctions, but it still
acts to secure its own preservation. Iran's leaders did not, for example, attempt to close
the Strait of Hormuz despite issuing blustery warnings that they might do so after the EU
announced its planned oil embargo in January. The Iranian regime clearly concluded
that it did not want to provoke what would surely have been a swift and devastating
American response to such a move. Nevertheless, even some observers and policymakers
who accept that the Iranian regime is rational still worry that a nuclear weapon would
embolden it, providing Tehran with a shield that would allow it to act more aggressively
and increase its support for terrorism. Some analysts even fear that Iran would directly
provide terrorists with nuclear arms. The problem with these concerns is that they
contradict the record of every other nuclear weapons state going back to 1945. History
shows that when countries acquire the bomb, they feel increasingly vulnerable and
become acutely aware that their nuclear weapons make them a potential target in the
eyes of major powers. This awareness discourages nuclear states from bold and
aggressive action. Maoist China, for example, became much less bellicose after acquiring
nuclear weapons in 1964, and India and Pakistan have both become more cautious since
going nuclear. There is little reason to believe Iran would break this mold. As for the risk
of a handoff to terrorists, no country could transfer nuclear weapons without running a
high risk of being found out. U.S. surveillance capabilities would pose a serious obstacle,
as would the United States' impressive and growing ability to identify the source of fissile
material. Moreover, countries can never entirely control or even predict the behavior of
the terrorist groups they sponsor. Once a country such as Iran acquires a nuclear
capability, it will have every reason to maintain full control over its arsenal. After all,
building a bomb is costly and dangerous. It would make little sense to transfer the
product of that investment to parties that cannot be trusted or managed. Another oft-
touted worry is that if Iran obtains the bomb, other states in the region will follow suit,
leading to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But the nuclear age is now almost 70
years old, and so far, fears of proliferation have proved to be unfounded. Properly
defined, the term "proliferation" means a rapid and uncontrolled spread. Nothing like
that has occurred; in fact, since 1970, there has been a marked slowdown in the
emergence of nuclear states. There is no reason to expect that this pattern will change
now. Should Iran become the second Middle Eastern nuclear power since 1945, it would
hardly signal the start of a landslide. When Israel acquired the bomb in the 1960s, it was
at war with many of its neighbors. Its nuclear arms were a much bigger threat to the
Arab world than Iran's program is today. If an atomic Israel did not trigger an arms race
then, there is no reason a nuclear Iran should now. REST ASSURED In 1991, the
historical rivals India and Pakistan signed a treaty agreeing not to target each other's
nuclear facilities. They realized that far more worrisome than their adversary's nuclear
deterrent was the instability produced by challenges to it. Since then, even in the face of
high tensions and risky provocations, the two countries have kept the peace. Israel and
Iran would do well to consider this precedent. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will
deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war
between two nuclear-armed states. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence
will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small. No other country in the region
will have an incentive to acquire its own nuclear capability, and the current crisis will
finally dissipate, leading to a Middle East that is more stable than it is today. For that
reason, the United States and its allies need not take such pains to prevent the Iranians
from developing a nuclear weapon. Diplomacy between Iran and the major powers
should continue, because open lines of communication will make the Western countries
feel better able to live with a nuclear Iran. But the current sanctions on Iran can be
dropped: they primarily harm ordinary Iranians, with little purpose. Most important,
policymakers and citizens in the Arab world, Europe, Israel, and the United States
should take comfort from the fact that history has shown that where nuclear capabilities
emerge, so, too, does stability. When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more
may be better.
No impact to Iran prolif
Jones, 13 Professor with the Ottawa and Stanford Universities (Peter, Tehran bomb
wont cause rapid nuclear proliferation expert, The Voice of Russia, 2/20/2013,
http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_02_20/Tehran-bomb-won-t-cause-rapid-nuclear-
proliferation-expert/http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_02_20/Tehran-bomb-won-t-cause-
rapid-nuclear-proliferation-expert/) //RGP
One of the arguments against Irans nuclear program is that it will trigger a cascade of
proliferation across the Middle East, Prof. Peter Jones with the Ottawa and Stanford
Universities writes. He said many hawkish experts, including Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, warned the world of a rapid proliferation across the region, with
Saudi Arabia, then Turkey, then Egypt etc inevitably acquiring nuclear weapons. There
is considerable historical evidence to suggest that this would not happen. If it did, it
would take a long time, the pundit argues. So far, only four more nations India,
Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have acquired nuclear arms. In each case, the reasons
why they decided to build nuclear weapons had to do with the specifics of their security
situations rather than a reflex action, Prof. Johns stresses. No Arab country built an A-
bomb after Israel did. He goes on to point out that the so-called proliferation narrative
has gripped the majority of analysts and practitioners of international affairs. It is also
ample justification for those who wish to attack Iran. Experience seems to show that
most of them [Arab countries] would eventually counter an Iranian bomb by moving
even further into the security embrace of the United States an outcome profoundly at
odds with Irans interests, the expert says. So, what is proliferation narrative? It is a
scare tactic to justify a war with Iran, he stresses.

No Impact- Iranian prolif stabilizes the region creates a counter to Israeli
nukes.
Kaye and Wehrey, 7 Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation; International
Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation (Dalia and Frederic, A Nuclear Iran: The
Reactions of Neighbours, RAND,
https://bu.digication.com/cgs_team_y5/Research_2) //RGP
Public opinion in the Arab world is largely sympathetic to an Iranian nuclear option,
viewing it as a counter to Israel and a way to overcome the perceived double standard of
allowing Israel, but not others in the region, to get away with the bomb.55 Turkish
public opinion also does not perceive Iran or the nuclear issue in particular as a threat,
nor does the current Islamist leadership in Ankara (serious concerns are largely limited
to the Turkish military).56 Some regional security elites also expressed some acceptance,
and even benefits, of a nuclear Iran, although they are more inclined to recognise the
accompanying dangers than the public at large. In Jordan, for example, some strategic
analysts suggested that Iran could serve as a balance to Israel and suggested that many
in the region view the issue this way.57 A high-level Jordanian official raised the example
of South Asia to suggest that the nuclear tests actually had a stabilising regional effect by
leading to a renewed peace effort.58 Interestingly, one Israeli analyst also suggested that
a bilateral nuclear balance between Israel and Iran while dangerous in many other
ways could also lead to political agreements by putting more pressure on Israel to deal
with Syria and Lebanon.59 In the Gulf, regional tolerance of a nuclear-armed Iran is
even more likely, particularly by Oman. Given its long history of economic and cultural
interdependence with Iran, Muscat has adopted the most accomodating posture of all
the Gulf states. A retired Omani military commander pointed to Irans pre- revolutionary
support of Oman during the 1970s insurgency in the western Dhofar region, arguing for
a degree of continuity in neighbourly relations that would overcome Irans belligerent
rhetoric or regional fears of a Shia bomb.60 Why should we be more afraid of a nuclear-
armed Iran than a nuclear Pakistan? this same official asked. In contrast to fears of an
emboldened Iran, he believed that a nuclear-armed Iran would incur increased economic
burdens and that its conventional forces would atrophy. A Kuwaiti scholar echoed this
prediction of economic decline, arguing that a nuclear-armed Iran, faced with increased
isolation and sanctions, warranted increased Kuwaiti investment in anti-smuggling
capabilities, to counter the anticipated spike in Iranian black-market activity.61
Nuke Prolif
Nuclear proliferation is slow, doesnt cascade, and doesnt cause conflict
60 years of empirics prove
DeGarmo, 11Professor of International Relations at Southern Illinois University
(Denise, August 25th, 2011, Policy Mic, Proliferation Leads to Peace,
http://mic.com/articles/1463/nuclear-proliferation-leads-to-peace)//IK
Unfortunately, while the fear of proliferation is pervasive, it is unfoundedand
lacks an understanding of the evidence. Nuclear proliferation has been slow.
From 1945 to 1970, only six countries acquired nuclear weapons: United States, Russia,
United Kingdom, France, China, and Israel. Since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty came into effect in 1970, only three countries have joined the nuclear
club: India, Pakistan, and North Korea. In total, only .05% of the worlds
states have nuclear weapons in their possession. Supporters of non-proliferation
seem to overlook the fact that there are states currently capable of making nuclear
weapons and have chosen not to construct them, which illustrates the seriousness with
which states consider their entrance into the nuclear club. Included on this list are such
actors as: Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, South Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa.
The attraction of nuclear weapons is multifold. Nuclear weapons enhance the
international status of states that possess them and help insecure states feel more secure.
States also seek nuclear capabilities for offensive purposes. It is important to point out
that while nuclear weapons have spread very slowly, conventional weapons
have proliferated exponentially across the globe. The wars of the 21
st
century
are being fought in the peripheral regions of the globe that are undergoing
conventional weapons proliferation. What the pundits of non-proliferation forget
to mention are the many lessons that are learned from the nuclear world. Nuclear
weapons provide stability just as they did during the Cold War era. The fear ofMutual
Assured Destruction (MAD) loomed heavily on the minds of nuclear powers through out
the Cold War and continues to be an important consideration for nuclear states today.
States do not strike first unless they are assured of a military victory, and the probability
of a military victory is diminished by fear that their actions would prompt a swift
retaliation by other states. In other words, states with nuclear weapons are deterred by
another states second-strike capabilities. During the Cold War, the United States and
Soviet Union could not destroy enough of the others massive arsenal of nuclear weapons
to make a retaliatory strike bearable. Even the prospect of a small number of nuclear
weapons being placed in Cuba by the Soviets had a great deterrent effect on the United
States. Nothing can be done with nuclear weapons other than to use them for deterrent
purposes. If deterrence works reliably, as it has done over the past 60 plus
years, then there is less to be feared from nuclear proliferation than there is
from convention warfare.
Tech diffusion has already happened, but prolif is extremely slow
Hymans, 12 Assistant Professor in the School of International Relations at the
University of Southern California (Jacques E.C., May/June 2012, Botching the Bomb,
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 3 or
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137403/jacques-e-c-hymans/botching-the-
bomb)//IK
"TODAY, ALMOST any industrialized countrycan produce a nuclear weapon in four
to five years," a former chief of Israeli military intelligence recently wrote in The New
York Times, echoing a widely held belief. Indeed, the more nuclear technology and
know-how havediffused around the world, the more the timeline for building a
bomb should have shrunk. But in fact, rather than speeding up over the past four
decades, proliferation has gone into slow motion. Seven countries launched
dedicated nuclear weapons projects before 1970, and all seven succeeded in relatively
short order. By contrast, of the ten countries that have launched dedicated nuclear
weapons projects since 1970, only three have achieved a bomb. And only one of the six
states that failed -- Iraq -- had made much progress toward its ultimate goal by the time
it gave up trying. (The jury is still out on Iran's program.) What is more, even the
successful projects of recent decades have neededa long time to achieve their ends. The
average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched before 1970 was about
seven years; the average timeline to the bomb for successful projects launched after 1970
has been about 17 years. International security experts have been unable to
convincingly explain this remarkable trend. The first and most credible conventional
explanation is that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) has prevented a cascade
of new nuclear weapons states by creating a system of export controls, technology
safeguards, and on-site inspections of nuclear facilities. The NPT regime has certainly
closed off the most straightforward pathways to the bomb. However, the NPT became a
formidable obstacle to would-be nuclear states only in the 1990s, when its export-control
lists were expanded and Western states finally became serious about enforcing them and
when international inspectors started acting less like tourists and more like detectives.
Yet the proliferation slowdown started at least 20 years beforethe system was
solidified. So the NPT, useful though it may be, cannot alone account for this
phenomenon.

Other sources of fissile material are alt causes to prolif
World Nuclear Organization 11 [International organization studying nuclear power
and weapons, Safeguards to Prevent Nuclear Proliferation, June 2011,
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf12.html]//twonily
Civil nuclear power has not been the cause of or route to nuclear weapons in any country
that has nuclear weapons, and no uranium traded for electricity production has ever
been diverted for military use. All nuclear weapons programmes have either preceded or
risen independently of civil nuclear power*, as shown most recently by North Korea. No
country is without plenty of uranium in the small quantities needed for a few
weapons. Former US Vice-President Al Gore said (18/9/06) that "During my eight years
in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was
connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in
both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs." He is not
correct. Iran has failed to convince anyone that its formerly clandestine enrichment
program has anything to do with its nuclear power reactor under construction (which is
fuelled by Russia), and North Korea has no civil reactor program. In respect to India and
Pakistan, which he may have had in mind, there is evidently a link between military and
civil, but that is part of the reason they are outside the NPT. Perspective is relevant :
As little as five tonnes of natural uranium is required to produce a nuclear weapon.
Uranium is ubiquitous, and if cost is no object it could be recovered in such quantities
from most granites, or from sea water - sources which would be quite uneconomic for
commercial use. In contrast, world trade for electricity production is almost 70,000
tonnes of uranium per year, all of which can be accounted for. There is no chance that
the resurgent problem of nuclear weapons proliferation will be solved by turning
away from nuclear power or ceasing trade in the tens of thousands of tonnes each
year needed for it.
No prolif and long timeframe
Kahl 12 (Colin H. Kahl 12, security studies prof at Georgetown, senior fellow at the
Center for a New American Security, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the
Middle East, Not Time to Attack Iran, January
17, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137031/colin-h-kahl/not-time-to-attack-
iran?page=show
Kroenig argues that there is an urgent need to attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure soon,
since Tehran could "produce its first nuclear weapon within six months of deciding to do
so." Yet that last phrase is crucial. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has
documented Iranian efforts to achieve the capacity to develop nuclear weapons at some
point, but there is no hard evidence that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
has yet made the final decision to develop them. In arguing for a six-month
horizon,Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-
grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a bomb. According to 2010
Senate testimony by James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and recent statements by the former heads of Israel's national intelligence and
defense intelligence agencies, even if Iran could produce enough weapons-
grade uranium for a bomb in six months, it would take it at least a year to produce
a testable nuclear deviceand considerably longer to make a deliverable weapon. And
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (and the
source of Kroenig's six-month estimate), recently told Agence France-Presse that there is
a "low probability" that the Iranians would actually develop a bomb over the next
year even if they had the capability to do so. Because there is no evidence that Iran has
built additional covert enrichment plants since the Natanz and Qom sites were outed in
2002 and 2009, respectively, any near-term move by Tehran to produce weapons-
grade uranium would have to rely on its declared facilities. The IAEA
would thus detect such activity with sufficient time for the international community to
mount a forceful response. As a result, the Iranians are unlikely to commit to building
nuclear weapons until they can do so much more quickly or out of sight, which could be
years off.
No impact to prolif their ev is biased
rationality, nuclear deterrence and defense posture check escalation
Waltz 12 Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University (Kenneth N., Jul/Aug,
Why Iran Should Get the Bomb, EBSCO)
UNFOUNDED FEARS One reason the danger of a nuclear Iran has been grossly
exaggerated is that the debate surrounding it has been distorted by misplaced
worries and fundamental misunderstandings of how states generally behave in
the international system. The first prominent concern, which undergirds many others, is
that the Iranian regime is innately irrational. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary,
Iranian policy is made not by "mad mullahs" but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who
want to survive just like any other leaders. Although Iran's leaders indulge in
inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, they show no propensity for self-destruction. It
would be a grave error for policymakers in the United States and Israel to assume
otherwise. Yet that is precisely what many U.S. and Israeli officials and analysts have
done. Portraying Iran as irrational has allowed them to argue that the logic of nuclear
deterrence does not apply to the Islamic Republic. If Iran acquired a nuclear weapon,
they warn, it would not hesitate to use it in a first strike against Israel, even though doing
so would invite massive retaliation and risk destroying everything the Iranian regime
holds dear. Although it is impossible to be certain of Iranian intentions, it is far more
likely that if Iran desires nuclear weapons, it is for the purpose of providing for its own
security, not to improve its offensive capabilities (or destroy itself). Iran may be
intransigent at the negotiating table and defiant in the face of sanctions, but it still acts to
secure its own preservation. Iran's leaders did not, for example, attempt to close the
Strait of Hormuz despite issuing blustery warnings that they might do so after the EU
announced its planned oil embargo in January. The Iranian regime clearly concluded
that it did not want to provoke what would surely have been a swift and devastating
American response to such a move. Nevertheless, even some observers and policymakers
who accept that the Iranian regime is rational still worry that a nuclear weapon would
embolden it, providing Tehran with a shield that would allow it to act more aggressively
and increase its support for terrorism. Some analysts even fear that Iran would directly
provide terrorists with nuclear arms. The problem with these concerns is that they
contradict the record of every other nuclear weapons state going back to 1945. History
shows that when countries acquire the bomb, they feel increasingly vulnerable and
become acutely aware that their nuclear weapons make them a potential target in the
eyes of major powers. This awareness discourages nuclear states from bold and
aggressive action. Maoist China, for example, became much less bellicose after acquiring
nuclear weapons in 1964, and India and Pakistan have both become more cautious since
going nuclear. There is little reason to believe Iran would break this mold.
Prolif doesnt cause war
Waltz 7Professor at UC Berkely (Kenneth, Professor UC Berkeley, A Nuclear
Iran, Journal of International Affairs, 3-22, Lexis)
First, nuclear proliferation is not a problem because nuclear weapons have not
proliferated. "Proliferation" means to spread like wildfire. We have had nuclear military
capability for over fifty years, and we have a total of nine militarily capable nuclear
states. That's hardly proliferation; that is, indeed, glacial spread. If another country gets
nuclear weapons, and if it does so for good reasons, then that isn't an object of great
worry. Every once in a while, some prominent person says something that'sobviously
true. Recently, Jacques Chirac [president of France] said that if Iran had one or two
nuclear weapons, it would not pose a danger. Well, he was right. Of course, he had to
quickly retract it and say, "Oh no, that slipped out, I didn't know the microphone was
on!" Second, it doesn't matter who has nuclear weapons. Conversely, the spread of
conventional weapons makes a great deal of difference. Forinstance, if a Hitler-type
begins to establish conventional superiority, it becomes very difficult to contain and
deter him. But, with nuclear weapons, it's been proven without exception that whoever
gets nuclear weapons behaves with caution and moderation. Every country--whether
they are countries we trust and think of as being highly responsible, like Britain, or
countries that we distrust greatly, and for very good reasons, like China during the
Cultural Revolution behaves with such caution. It is now fashionable for political
scientists to test hypotheses.Well, I have one: If a country has nuclear weapons, it will
not be attacked militarily in ways that threaten its manifestly vital interests. That is 100
percent true, without exception, over a period of more than fifty years. Pretty
impressive.
Prolif inevitable-- Conventional superiority
Gerson and Boyars 7 (Michael Gerson, Member CNAs Center for Strategic Studies,
MA in International Relations University of Chicago, and Jacob, Intern CNAs Center
for Strategic Studies, MA in Security Studies Georgetown University, The Mix of New
Subjects and Deterrent Against US Power, 9-18,
http://www.cna.org/documents/D0017171.A2.pdf)
The mix of new subjects of U.S. deterrence, such as emerging peer competitors,
belligerent rogues, and terror groups, demands new thinking about old assumptions.
Chief among these is the rational actor model upon which deterrence theory is
predicated. Effective deterrence requires identifying who matters and how to influence
them. Before, it was assumed that adversaries would utilize centralized decision-making
and exhibit unity of authority, and American assumptions about deterrence rested on the
belief that the enemy would have a high-confidence chain of command and would act in
rational ways that carefully considered cost/benefit calculations. In todays threat
environment, however, it is possible that U.S. capabilities could cause adversaries to
disperse their authority in a way that decreases their control of the chain of command,
causing the U.S. to lose confidence in its assessments of the relevant actors and their
individual goals and objectives. Individuals within a regime might act in ways that are
rational to them given their culture, worldview, and strategic objectives, but which may
not be in keeping with the predictions of the rational actor model. As one panelist
argued, an opponent with nothing to lose, such as a North Korean regime on its last legs,
might, even without being suicidal, undertake seemingly ill-advised actions with grave
consequences. In this new deterrence calculus, adversary intentions are just as important
as their capabilities. The more diverse sources and types of threats require the U.S. to
think not just about how many nuclear weapons an adversary has in its arsenal, but how
a state or group might intend to use its more limited capabilities in ways we hope to
prevent. As one panelist argued, rogue states interest in nuclear weapons is partly a
function of Americas overwhelming conventional superiority. Just as American
conventional forces were outmatched in Western Europe during the Cold War,
necessitating a strategic shift to reliance on nuclear weapons to deter Soviet conventional
aggression in Europe, so too rogues have shifted their focus to nuclear weapons in
response to U.S. conventional superiority. This suggests that U.S. nuclear weapons
strategies, whatever they may be, play no role in influencing whether rogues are
interested in obtaining nuclear weapons of their own. U.S. conventional, not nuclear,
forces are the primary threat to rogues, and as long as the U.S. maintains substantial
conventional forces, rogue states will continue to view nuclear weapons as the only
possible deterrent against U.S. power.
Prolif is slow
Yusuf 9 (Moeed, Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the
Study of the Longer-Range
Future Boston University, Predicting Proliferation: The History of the Future of
Nuclear Weapons, Brookings Policy Paper 11, January,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/01_nuclear_proliferation_
yusuf/01_nuclear_proliferation_yusuf.pdf)
It is a paradox that few aspects of international security have been as closely scrutinized,
but as incorrectly forecast, as the future nuclear landscape. Since the advent of nuclear
weapons in 1945, there have been dozens, if not hundreds of projections by government
and independent analysts trying to predict horizontal and vertical proliferation across
the world. Various studies examined which countries would acquire nuclear weapons,
when this would happen, how many weapons the two superpowers as well as other
countries would assemble, and the impact these developments might have on world
peace. The results have oscillated between gross underestimations and terrifying
overestimations. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the fear that nuclear
weapons might be acquired by so-called rogues states or terrorist groups brought
added urgency and increased difficulty to the task of accurately assessing the future
of nuclear weapons. A survey of past public and private projections provides a timely
reminder of the flaws in both the methodologies and theories they employed. Many of
these errors were subsequently corrected, but not before, they made lasting impressions
on U.S. nuclear (and non-nuclear) policies. This was evident from the time the Atoms
for Peace program was first promulgated in 1953 to the 1970 establishment of the
Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and more recently during the post-Cold War
disarmament efforts and debates surrounding U.S. stance towards emerging nuclear
threats. This study offers a brief survey of attempts to predict the future of nuclear
weapons since the beginning of the Cold War.1 The aim of this analysis is not merely to
review the record, but to provide an overall sense of how the nuclear future was
perceived over the past six decades, and where and why errors were made in prediction,
so that contemporary and future predictive efforts have the benefit of a clearer historical
record. The survey is based on U.S. intelligence estimates as well as the voluminous
scholarly work of American and foreign experts on the subject. Six broad lessons can be
gleaned from this history. First, it reveals consistent misjudgments regarding the extent
of nuclear proliferation. Overall, projections were far more pessimistic than actual
developments; those emanating from independent experts more so than intelligence
estimates. In the early years of the Cold War, the overly pessimistic projections
stemmed, in part, from an incorrect emphasis on technology as the driving factor in
horizontal proliferation, rather than intent, a misjudgment, which came to light with the
advent of a Chinese bomb in 1964. The parallel shift from developed-world proliferation
to developing-world proliferation was accompanied by greater alarm regarding the
impact of proliferation. It was felt that developing countries were more dangerous and
irresponsible nuclear states than developed countries. Second, while all the countries
that did eventually develop nuclear weapons were on the lists of suspect states, the
estimations misjudged when these countries would go nuclear. The Soviet Union went
nuclear much earlier than had been initially predicted, intelligence estimates completely
missed Chinas nuclear progress, and India initially tested much later than U.S.
intelligence projections had anticipated and subsequently declared nuclear weapon
status in 1998 when virtually no one expected it to do so. Third, the pace of proliferation
has been consistently slower than has been anticipated by most experts due to a
combination of overwhelming alarmism, the intent of threshold states, and many
incentives to abstain from weapons development. In the post-Cold War period, the
number of suspected threshold states has gradually decreased and the geographical focus
has shifted solely to North-East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. There is also
much greater concern that a nuclear chain reaction will break out than was the case
during the Cold War.
History proves prolif is inevitable but does not escalate
Hersman 9 (Rebecca, Senior Research Professor Center for Counterproliferation
Research, Trend Lines and Tipping Points for Nuclear Proliferation, Stimson Center, 1-
14, http://www.stimson.org/events.cfm?ID=655)
Rebecca Hersman noted that proliferation is a multi-step process, and that this dial-up
or dial-down process is not linear. A national proliferation strategy can therefore take a
few or many years. In her view, cascades require that multiple countries match
capability to intent at an accelerating rate. She noted that synchronizing capability and
intent is very difficult. The concept of tipping points is problematic in that it suggests
sudden and rapid decisions by multiple countries to cross a singular proliferation
boundary. The historical record suggests otherwise that nuclear decision-
making is usually incremental, and could stall or reverse course at many stages. There
is little historical evidence to suggest that a rapid expansion in the number of nuclear-
armed states is likely in the future, let alone inevitable.

Prolif
Defense
no impact to prolif no spillover
Kahl et. al 13 (Colin H., Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and
an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown Universitys
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Melissa G. Dalton, Visiting Fellow at the
Center for a New American Security, Matthew Irvine, Research Associate at the Center
for a New American Security, February, If Iran Builds the Bomb, Will Saudi Arabia Be
Next?
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AtomicKingdom_Kahl.pdf,
2013) //AD
***cites Jacques Hymans, USC Associate Professor of IR***

I I I . LESSONS FRO M HISTOR Y Concerns over regional proliferation chains, falling
nuclear dominos and nuclear tipping points are nothing new; indeed, reactive
proliferation fears date back to the dawn of the nuclear age.14 Warnings of an inevitable
deluge of proliferation were commonplace from the 1950s to the 1970s, resurfaced
during the discussion of rogue states in the 1990s and became even more ominous
after 9/11.15 In 2004, for example, Mitchell Reiss warned that in ways both fast and
slow, we may very soon be approaching a nuclear tipping point, where many countries
may decide to acquire nuclear arsenals on short notice, thereby triggering a proliferation
epidemic. Given the presumed fragility of the nuclear nonproliferation regime and the
ready supply of nuclear expertise, technology and material, Reiss argued, a single new
entrant into the nuclear club could catalyze similar responses by others in the region,
with the Middle East and Northeast Asia the most likely candidates.16 Nevertheless,
predictions of inevitable proliferation cascades have historically proven false (see
The Proliferation Cascade Myth text box). In the six decades since atomic weapons were
first developed, nuclear restraint has proven far more common than nuclear
proliferation, and cases of reactive proliferation have been exceedingly rare. Moreover,
most countries that have started down the nuclear path have found the road more
difficult than imagined, both technologically and bureaucratically, leading the
majority of nuclear-weapons aspirants to reverse course. Thus, despite frequent
warnings of an unstoppable nuclear express,17 William Potter and Gaukhar
Mukhatzhanova astutely note that the train to date has been slow to pick up steam, has
made fewer stops than anticipated, and usually has arrived much later than expected.18
None of this means that additional proliferation in response to Irans nuclear ambitions
is inconceivable, but the empirical record does suggest that regional chain reactions are
not inevitable. Instead, only certain countries are candidates for reactive proliferation.
Determining the risk that any given country in the Middle East will proliferate in
response to Iranian nuclearization requires an assessment of the incentives and
disincentives for acquiring a nuclear deterrent, the technical and bureaucratic
constraints and the available strategic alternatives. Incentives and Disincentives to
Proliferate Security considerations, status and reputational concerns and the prospect of
sanctions combine to shape the incentives and disincentives for states to pursue nuclear
weapons. Analysts predicting proliferation cascades tend to emphasize the incentives for
reactive proliferation while ignoring or downplaying the disincentives. Yet, as it
turns out, instances of nuclear proliferation (including reactive proliferation) have been
so rare because going down this road often risks insecurity, reputational damage and
economic costs that outweigh the potential benefits.19 Security and regime survival are
especially important motivations driving state decisions to proliferate. All else being
equal, if a states leadership believes that a nuclear deterrent is required to address an
acute security challenge, proliferation is more likely.20 Countries in conflict-prone
neighborhoods facing an enduring rival especially countries with inferior
conventional military capabilities vis--vis their opponents or those that face an
adversary that possesses or is seeking nuclear weapons may be particularly prone to
seeking a nuclear deterrent to avert aggression.21 A recent quantitative study by Philipp
Bleek, for example, found that security threats, as measured by the frequency and
intensity of conventional militarized disputes, were highly correlated with decisions to
launch nuclear weapons programs and eventually acquire the bomb.22 The Proliferation
Cascade Myth Despite repeated warnings since the dawn of the nuclear age of an
inevitable deluge of nuclear proliferation, such fears have thus far proven largely
unfounded. Historically, nuclear restraint is the rule, not the exception and the degree
of restraint has actually increased over time. In the first two decades of the nuclear age,
five nuclear-weapons states emerged: the United States (1945), the Soviet Union (1949),
the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960) and China (1964). However, in the nearly 50
years since China developed nuclear weapons, only four additional countries have
entered (and remained in) the nuclear club: Israel (allegedly in 1967), India (peaceful
nuclear test in 1974, acquisition in late-1980s, test in 1998), Pakistan (acquisition in late-
1980s, test in 1998) and North Korea (test in 2006).23 This significant slowdown in the
pace of proliferation occurred despite the widespread dissemination of nuclear know-
how and the fact that the number of states with the technical and industrial capability to
pursue nuclear weapons programs has significantly increased over time.24 Moreover, in
the past 20 years, several states have either given up their nuclear weapons (South Africa
and the Soviet successor states Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine) or ended their highly
developed nuclear weapons programs (e.g., Argentina, Brazil and Libya).25 Indeed, by
one estimate, 37 countries have pursued nuclear programs with possible weaponsrelated
dimensions since 1945, yet the overwhelming number chose to abandon these activities
before they produced a bomb. Over time, the number of nuclear reversals has grown
while the number of states initiating programs with possible military dimensions
has markedly declined.26 Furthermore especially since the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into force in 1970 reactive proliferation has been
exceedingly rare. The NPT has near-universal membership among the community of
nations; only India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea currently stand outside the treaty.
Yet the actual and suspected acquisition of nuclear weapons by these outliers has not
triggered widespread reactive proliferation in their respective neighborhoods. Pakistan
followed India into the nuclear club, and the two have engaged in a vigorous arms race,
but Pakistani nuclearization did not spark additional South Asian states to acquire
nuclear weapons. Similarly, the North Korean bomb did not lead South Korea, Japan or
other regional states to follow suit.27 In the Middle East, no country has successfully
built a nuclear weapon in the four decades since Israel allegedly built its first nuclear
weapons. Egypt took initial steps toward nuclearization in the 1950s and then expanded
these efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s in response to Israels presumed capabilities.
However, Cairo then ratified the NPT in 1981 and abandoned its program.28 Libya, Iraq
and Iran all pursued nuclear weapons capabilities, but only Irans program persists and
none of these states initiated their efforts primarily as a defensive response to Israels
presumed arsenal.29 Sometime in the 2000s, Syria also appears to have initiated nuclear
activities with possible military dimensions, including construction of a covert nuclear
reactor near al-Kibar, likely enabled by North Korean assistance.30 (An Israeli airstrike
destroyed the facility in 2007.31) The motivations for Syrias activities remain murky,
but the nearly 40-year lag between Israels alleged development of the bomb and Syrias
actions suggests that reactive proliferation was not the most likely cause. Finally, even
countries that start on the nuclear path have found it very difficult, and exceedingly time
consuming, to reach the end. Of the 10 countries that launched nuclear weapons projects
after 1970, only three (Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa) succeeded; one (Iran)
remains in progress, and the rest failed or were reversed.32 The successful projects have
also generally needed much more time than expected to finish. According to Jacques
Hymans, the average time required to complete a nuclear weapons program has
increased from seven years prior to 1970 to about 17 years after 1970, even as the
hardware, knowledge and industrial base required for proliferation has expanded to
more and more countries.33 Yet throughout the nuclear age, many states with potential
security incentives to develop nuclear weapons have nevertheless abstained from doing
so.34 Moreover, contrary to common expectations, recent statistical research shows that
states with an enduring rival that possesses or is pursuing nuclear weapons are not more
likely than other states to launch nuclear weapons programs or go all the way to
acquiring the bomb, although they do seem more likely to explore nuclear weapons
options.35 This suggests that a rivals acquisition of nuclear weapons does not inevitably
drive proliferation decisions. One reason that reactive proliferation is not an automatic
response to a rivals acquisition of nuclear arms is the fact that security calculations can
cut in both directions. Nuclear weapons might deter outside threats, but leaders have to
weigh these potential gains against the possibility that seeking nuclear weapons would
make the country or regime less secure by triggering a regional arms race or a preventive
attack by outside powers. Countries also have to consider the possibility that pursuing
nuclear weapons will produce strains in strategic relationships with key allies and
security patrons. If a states leaders conclude that their overall security would decrease
by building a bomb, they are not likely to do so.36 Moreover, although security
considerations are often central, they are rarely sufficient to motivate states to develop
nuclear weapons. Scholars have noted the importance of other factors, most notably the
perceived effects of nuclear weapons on a countrys relative status and influence.37
Empirically, the most highly motivated states seem to be those with leaders that
simultaneously believe a nuclear deterrent is essential to counter an existential threat
and view nuclear weapons as crucial for maintaining or enhancing their international
status and influence. Leaders that see their country as naturally at odds with, and
naturally equal or superior to, a threatening external foe appear to be especially prone to
pursuing nuclear weapons.38 Thus, as Jacques Hymans argues, extreme levels of fear
and pride often combine to produce a very strong tendency to reach for the bomb.39
Yet here too, leaders contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons have to balance the
possible increase to their prestige and influence against the normative and reputational
costs associated with violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If a countrys
leaders fully embrace the principles and norms embodied in the NPT, highly value
positive diplomatic relations with Western countries and see membership in the
community of nations as central to their national interests and identity, they are likely
to worry that developing nuclear weapons would damage (rather than bolster) their
reputation and influence, and thus they will be less likely to go for the bomb.40 In
contrast, countries with regimes or ruling coalitions that embrace an ideology that
rejects the Western dominated international order and prioritizes national self-reliance
and autonomy from outside interference seem more inclined toward proliferation
regardless of whether they are signatories to the NPT.41 Most countries appear to fall in
the former category, whereas only a small number of rogue states fit the latter.
According to one count, before the NPT went into effect, more than 40 percent of states
with the economic resources to pursue nuclear programs with potential military
applications did so, and very few renounced those programs. Since the inception of the
nonproliferation norm in 1970, however, only 15 percent of economically capable states
have started such programs, and nearly 70 percent of all states that had engaged in such
activities gave them up.42 The prospect of being targeted with economic sanctions by
powerful states is also likely to factor into the decisions of would-be proliferators.
Although sanctions alone proved insufficient to dissuade Iraq, North Korea and (thus
far) Iran from violating their nonproliferation obligations under the NPT, this does not
necessarily indicate that sanctions are irrelevant. A potential proliferators vulnerability
to sanctions must be considered. All else being equal, the more vulnerable a states
economy is to external pressure, the less likely it is to pursue nuclear weapons. A
comparison of states in East Asia and the Middle East that have pursued nuclear
weapons with those that have not done so suggests that countries with economies that
are highly integrated into the international economic system especially those
dominated by ruling coalitions that seek further integration have historically been less
inclined to pursue nuclear weapons than those with inward-oriented economies and
ruling coalitions.43 A states vulnerability to sanctions matters, but so too does the
leaderships assessment regarding the probability that outside powers would actually be
willing to impose sanctions. Some would-be proliferators can be easily sanctioned
because their exclusion from international economic transactions creates few downsides
for sanctioning states. In other instances, however, a state may be so vital to outside
powers economically or geopolitically that it is unlikely to be sanctioned regardless
of NPT violations. Technical and Bureaucratic Constraints In addition to motivation to
pursue the bomb, a state must have the technical and bureaucratic wherewithal to do so.
This capability is partly a function of wealth. Richer and more industrialized states can
develop nuclear weapons more easily than poorer and less industrial ones can; although
as Pakistan and North Korea demonstrate, cash-strapped states can sometimes succeed
in developing nuclear weapons if they are willing to make enormous sacrifices.44 A
countrys technical know-how and the sophistication of its civilian nuclear program also
help determine the ease and speed with which it can potentially pursue the bomb. The
existence of uranium deposits and related mining activity, civilian nuclear power plants,
nuclear research reactors and laboratories and a large cadre of scientists and engineers
trained in relevant areas of chemistry and nuclear physics may give a country some
latent capability to eventually produce nuclear weapons. Mastery of the fuel-cycle the
ability to enrich uranium or produce, separate and reprocess plutonium is particularly
important because this is the essential pathway whereby states can indigenously produce
the fissile material required to make a nuclear explosive device.45 States must also
possess the bureaucratic capacity and managerial culture to successfully complete a
nuclear weapons program. Hymans convincingly argues that many recent would-be
proliferators have weak state institutions that permit, or even encourage, rulers to take a
coercive, authoritarian management approach to their nuclear programs. This approach,
in turn, politicizes and ultimately undermines nuclear projects by gutting the
autonomy and professionalism of the very scientists, experts and organizations needed
to successfully build the bomb.46 Alternative Sources of Nuclear Deterrence Historically,
the availability of credible security guarantees by outside nuclear powers has provided a
potential alternative means for acquiring a nuclear deterrent without many of the risks
and costs associated with developing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability. As
Bruno Tertrais argues, nearly all the states that developed nuclear weapons since 1949
either lacked a strong guarantee from a superpower (India, Pakistan and South Africa) or
did not consider the superpowers protection to be credible (China, France, Israel and
North Korea). Many other countries known to have pursued nuclear weapons programs
also lacked security guarantees (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya,
Switzerland and Yugoslavia) or thought they were unreliable at the time they embarked
on their programs (e.g., Taiwan). In contrast, several potential proliferation candidates
appear to have abstained from developing the bomb at least partly because of formal or
informal extended deterrence guarantees from the United States (e.g., Australia,
Germany, Japan, Norway, South Korea and Sweden).47 All told, a recent quantitative
assessment by Bleek finds that security assurances have empirically significantly
reduced proliferation proclivity among recipient countries.48 Therefore, if a country
perceives that a security guarantee by the United States or another nuclear power is both
available and credible, it is less likely to pursue nuclear weapons in reaction to a rival
developing them. This option is likely to be particularly attractive to states that lack the
indigenous capability to develop nuclear weapons, as well as states that are primarily
motivated to acquire a nuclear deterrent by security factors (as opposed to status-related
motivations) but are wary of the negative consequences of proliferation.

Prolif will be slow zero risk
Tepperman 09 [Jonathan, Newsweek International's first Assistant Managing
Editor (now Deputy Editor), Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb 8-29,
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/08/28/why-obama-should-learn-to-love-the-
bomb.html, SM]

The risk of an arms racewith, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb
after Iran got oneis a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive.
"In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now
with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace."
Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them
absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them.
That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in
the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent
programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighborsEgypt or Saudi
Arabia, saymight not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of
a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent
suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as
Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or
two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be
so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.

The impact is all hype lack of empirical data
Potter and Gaukhar 08 Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of
Nonproliferation Studies and Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation
Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and *Research Associate at the
James Martin Center (William C, Gaukhar, , Divining Nuclear Intentions: a review
essay. International Security, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 139169, Google
scholar) //AD

For much of the nuclear age, academic experts, intelligence analysts, and public
commentators periodically have forecast rapid bursts of proliferation, which have failed
to materialize. Central to their prognoses, often imbued with the imagery and metaphors
of nuclear dominoes and proliferation chains, has been the assumption that one states
nuclearization is likely to trigger decisions by other states to go nuclear in quick
succession. Today the proliferation metaphors of choice are nuclear cascade and
tipping point, but the implication is the samewe are on the cusp of rapid, large-scale
nuclear weapons spread. It is with some justification, therefore, that the study of
proliferation has been labeled the sky-is-still-falling profession.1 Although
proliferation projections abound, few of them are founded on, or even informed by,
empirical research and theory.2 This deficiency, though regrettable, is understandable
given the small body of theoretically or empirically grounded research on forecasting
proliferation developments, and the underdeveloped state of theory on nonproliferation
and nuclear decisionmaking more generally. Also contributing to this knowledge deficit
is the stunted development of social science research on foreign policyoriented
forecasting and the emphasis on post hoc explanations, rather than predictions on the
part of the more sophisticated frameworks and models of nuclear decisionmaking.

Solves war
Prolif solves war - encourages rationality
Shen 11IR prof at Hong Kong Institute of Ed. (Simon, Have Nuclear Weapons Made
the DPRK a Rogue State? 2011, J. of Comparative Asian Development, v. 10, iss. 2, t&f)
//AD

In our traditional mentality, the determination to denuclearize the DPRK quite explicitly
assumes that nuclear weapons are evil; as Scott Sagan (2003, p. 49) puts it, Nuclear
weapons have been given a bad name. This negative perception of nuclear weapons is
built upon the basis of the huge devastation that would result in the world if a nuclear
war, of whatever scale, broke out. Coupled with the peculiar nature of the DPRK's
autocratic regime, a nuclear-armed DPRK is then perceived as too hostile and
destructive to its neighbours. However, applying the analogy of more may be better, an
alternative discourse with respect to nuclear proliferation maintained by Waltz could
well pinpoint a far more optimistic scenario. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Waltz
asserts that nuclear proliferation not only reduces the possibility of going to war, but also
encourages new nuclear states, which used to rule in a radical manner domestically, to
behave in an increasingly rational manner diplomatically. At the extreme, Waltz suggests
that nuclear proliferation may maintain peace rather than threaten global security.
Surprisingly, the application of his theory to the DPRK is rather limited; and is confined
only to media reports (Swami, 2010). In his classic study Waltz (1995) proposes five
fundamental assumptions to illustrate his argument. First, he argues that the
international system is anarchical, i.e., no global authority protects security, provides
public goods or controls domestic affairs above the state level. As a result, states have to
ensure their own security by preventing attack from other states themselves. In other
words, the anarchical system drives states to self-help. The absence of a world
government then prompts individual states to gain access to weapons to compensate for
a sense of insecurity. Acquisition of nuclear weapons and inducement of an arms race
between states show the self-help system at work. Second, as states coexist in a
condition of anarchy, they try hard to advance the sophistication of weapons and
enhance military capability as much as possible to avoid aggression from adversaries
(Waltz, 1995, p. 4). This self-strengthening process is what Waltz calls security
maximization. What do states do with their weapons throughout this process? Waltz
thinks that states mainly possess the weapons for a defensive purpose. When a state
enhances its military capability (the relevant gain), its neighbouring states immediately
face relevant loss to the military equilibrium. In consequence, the latter have to
strengthen their military power in response to the relevant loss in order to maintain a
balance of power. Waltz (1995, p. 5) explains the defensive intention of security
maximization as follows: One way to counter an intended attack is to build fortifications
and to muster forces that look forbiddingly strong. To build defenses so patently strong
that no one will try to destroy or overcome them would make international life perfectly
tranquil, I call this the defensive ideal. However, this statement does not imply that these
states will not use weapons to attack others. In the event that a state perceives gains from
aggression to outweigh the cost of war, battle might break out. Waltz argues that this
scenario is unlikely to happen between nuclear powers. Since Waltz, different schools
deriving from neo-realism have offered different assumptions on the likeliness of
conflicts owing to different assessments of uncertainty and risk, such as offensive realism
or defensive realism. Some might put the defensive rationale by indicating that states
tend to keep the nuclear weapons as an existential deterrent so as to deter others from
military actions (Naval Studies Board & US Research Council, 1997). Third, Waltz (1995,
pp. 7, 9) maintains that nuclear weapons, unlike conventional weapons, give an easy
clarity for states to predict the action of other states and thereby makes war less likely.
This is because all states realize that nuclear weapons have the potential to cause
unlimited and devastating suffering. At the extreme, the concept of mutual assured
destruction (MAD) sends a very clear message to both sides should two nuclear powers
go to war. In contrast, as the suffering from conventional weapons can be to some extent
contained, states might deem the cost of such war affordable and recklessly wage war
and suffer the results of miscalculation. Waltz (1995, p. 9) defines the fundamental
essence of nuclear weapons thus: In a nuclear world, prediction is easy to make because
it does not require close estimates of opposing forces. In a conventional world,
deterrent threats are ineffective because the damage threatened is distant, limited, and
problematic. Fourth, Waltz (1995, p. 7) assumes state actors are rational and are able to
predict scenarios as well as calculate their self-interests, so that states will not take the
risk of going to war when they predict the battle could only win much and might lose
everything. Waltz offers the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate this point. As
nuclear weapons can wreak unlimited damage to states, the strategy of MAD further
makes states cautious. This deterrent effect in a nuclear world consequently avoids any
miscalculation of gains and losses. Regardless of the regime type, historical context and
the political spectrum, nuclear weapons and nuclear wars constantly imply a massive
relevant loss to states, thus preventing them from going to war. Even if the historical
context might determine a nuclear pair, such as the US and the Soviet Union, China and
the Soviet Union, India and Pakistan, many realists argues that rational calculation is
more fundamental than bitterness (Rajain, 2005). As Waltz (1995, p. 12) puts it: Those
who believe that bitterness causes wars assume a close association that is seldom found
between bitterness among nations and their willingness to run high risks. In short,
states will not go to nuclear war as they are rational actors in international relations.
Fifth, when calculation of the prospects makes nuclear states reluctant to go to war,
Waltz suggests horizontal nuclear proliferation is encouraged in world politics while
vertical proliferation is made redundant. Vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons,
according to Waltz, was demonstrated during the Cold War, especially between the US
and the Soviet Union, when the number of nuclear warheads and their technological
quality rapidly increased. Waltz (1995, p. 7) argues that further vertical proliferation is
unnecessary since only a few nuclear weapons and a second strike capability may be a
sufficient deterrent to other would-be attackers. Rather, horizontal proliferation, which
means the spread of nuclear weapons to different countries, is seen by Waltz as more
crucial in preserving peace in the world. When more states possess nuclear weapons,
calculations about using them become complicated (Waltz, 1995, p. 15). States will thus
be reluctant to take the risk of starting a nuclear war because of the uncertainty of the
response from other states and the certainty of unlimited nuclear destruction to both
sides should a nuclear response be elicited. This helps exclude the option of using
nuclear weapons for the mere purpose of interest maximization.


Relations
Latin America Relations
Alt cause Cuba
Alt cause - Cuba policy uniquely key to LA relations - highly symbolic of the
US attitude towards the entire region
Sweig and Bustamante 13 - Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin
America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations; Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at Yale University (Julia E. and
Michael J, Cuba After Communism, Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug2013, Vol. 92, Issue 4)
//AD

The geopolitical context in Latin America provides another reason the U.S. government
should make a serious shift on Cuba. For five years now, Obama has ignored Latin
America's unanimous disapproval of Washington's position on Cuba. Rather than
perpetuate Havana's diplomatic isolation, U.S. policy embodies the imperial pretensions
of a bygone era, contributing to Washington's own marginalization. Virtually all
countries in the region have refused to attend another Summit of the Americas meeting
if Cuba is not at the table. Cuba, in turn, currently chairs the new Community of Latin
American and Caribbean States, which excludes Washington. The Obama administration
has begun laying out what could become a serious second-term agenda for Latin America
focused on energy, jobs, social inclusion, and deepening integration in the Americas. But
the symbolism of Cuba across the region is such that the White House can definitively
lead U.S. -- Latin American relations out of the Cold War and into the twenty-first
century only by shifting its Cuba policy. To make such a shift, however, Washington must
move past its assumption that Havana prefers an adversarial relationship with the
United States. Ral Castro has shown that he is not his brother and has availed himself
of numerous channels, public and private, to communicate to Washington that he is
ready to talk. This does not mean that he or his successors are prepared to compromise
on Cuba's internal politics; indeed, what Castro is willing to put on the table remains
unclear. But his government's decisions to release more than 120 political prisoners in
2010 and 2011 and allow a number of dissident bloggers and activists to travel abroad
this year were presumably meant to help set the stage for potential talks with the United
States. Meanwhile, the death of Hugo Chvez, the former Venezuelan president, and the
narrow margin in the election of his successor, Nicols Maduro, have made it clear that
Havana has reasons of its own to chart a path forward with the United States. In the last
decade or so, Cuba came to depend on Venezuela for large supplies of subsidized oil, in
exchange for a sizable brigade of Cuban doctors staffing the Chvez government's social
programs. Political uncertainty in Caracas offers a potent reminder of the hazards of
relying too heavily on any one partner. Havana is already beginning to branch out. In
addition to financing the refurbishing of Mariel Harbor, the Brazilians have extended a
line of credit to renovate and expand five airports across the island and have recently
signed a deal to hire 6,000 Cuban doctors to fill shortages in Brazil's rural health
coverage. Even so, in the long run, the United States remains a vital natural market for
Cuban products and services. Of course, as the 1990s proved, even a huge financial
setback may not be enough to drive Havana to Washington's door. Half a century of U.S.
economic warfare has conditioned Cuban bureaucrats and party cadres to link openness
at home or toward the United States with a threat to Cuba's independence. Some hard-
liners might prefer muddling through with the status quo to the uncertainty that could
come from a wider opening of their country. The best way to change such attitudes,
however, would be for Washington to take the initiative in establishing a new diplomatic
and economic modus vivendi with Havana. In the short term, the two countries have
numerous practical problems to solve together, including environmental and security
challenges, as well as the fate of high-profile nationals serving time in U.S. and Cuban
prisons. Most of the policy-steps Obama should take at this stage -- removing Cuba from
the list of state sponsors of terrorism, eliminating obstacles for all Americans to travel
there, and licensing greater trade and investment -- would not require congressional
approval or any grand bargain with Havana. Although it might be politically awkward in
the United States for a president to be seen as helping Castro, on the island, such
measures would strengthen the case that Cuba can stand to become a more open,
democratic society without succumbing to external pressure or subversion. Deeper
commercial ties, moreover, could have repercussions beyond the economic realm, giving
internal reformers more leeway and increasing support on the island for greater
economic and political liberalization. In 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stood
beside U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow and announced that the Soviet
Union would eliminate its multibillion-dollar annual subsidy to Cuba. CIA analysts and
American pundits immediately began predicting the imminent demise of the Cuban
Revolution and a quick capitalist restoration. More than 20 years have passed since then,
Fidel Castro has retired, and 82-year-old Raul Castro is now serving the first year of what
he has said will be his final five-year term as president. In 2018, when Daz-Canel takes
the reins, Cuba in all likelihood will continue to defy post-Cold War American fantasies
even as it moves further away from its orthodox socialist past. For the remaining
members of Cuba's founding revolutionary generation, such a delicate transformation
provides a last opportunity to shape their legacy. For Cubans born after 1991, the coming
years may offer a chance to begin leaving behind the state of prolonged ideological and
economic limbo in which they were raised. Obama, meanwhile, has a choice. He can opt
for the path of least political resistance and allow the well-entrenched bureaucrats,
national security ideologues, and pro-embargo voices in his own country to keep Cuba
policy in a box, further alienating regional allies and perpetuating the siege mentality
among Cuban officials. Or he can dare to be the president who finally extracts the United
States from Cuba's internal debate and finds a way for Washington and Havana to work
together. Both the Cuban people and U.S. national interests would benefit as a result.

Alt cause - The embargo crushes Latin American relations - it is the litmus
test
Sheridan 09 (Mary Beth Sheridan; Washington Post Staff Writer, May 29, 2009,
U.S. Urged to Relax Cuba Policy to Boost Regional Relations, LexisNexis Accessed
7/17/13) //AD

The U.S. government is fighting an effort to allow Cuba to return to the Organization of
American States after a 47-year suspension. But the resistance is putting it at odds with
much of Latin America as the Obama administration is trying to improve relations in the
hemisphere. Eliminating the Cold War-era ban would be largely symbolic, because
Cuba has shown no sign of wanting to return to the OAS, the main forum for political
cooperation in the hemisphere. But the debate shows how central the topic has become
in U.S. relations with an increasingly assertive Latin America. The wrangling over Cuba
threatens to dominate a meeting of hemispheric foreign ministers, including Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton, scheduled for Tuesday in Honduras. "Fifty years after
the U.S. . . . made Cuba its litmus test for its commercial and diplomatic ties in Latin
America, Latin America is turning the tables," said Julia E. Sweig, a Cuba scholar at the
Council on Foreign Relations. Now, she said, Latin countries are "making Cuba the
litmus test for the quality of the Obama administration's approach to Latin America."
President Obama has taken steps toward improving ties with Cuba, lifting restrictions on
visits and money transfers by Cuban Americans and offering to restart immigration talks
suspended in 2004. But he has said he will not scrap the longtime economic embargo
until Havana makes democratic reforms and cleans up its human rights record. Ending
the embargo would also entail congressional action. Obama is facing pressure to move
faster, both from Latin American allies and from key U.S. lawmakers. Bipartisan bills are
pending in Congress that would eliminate all travel restrictions and ease the embargo.
Cuba has sent mixed signals about its willingness to respond to the U.S. gestures. Latin
American leaders say that isolating Cuba is anachronistic when most countries in the
region have established relations with communist nations such as China. The OAS
secretary general, Jos Miguel Insulza, has called the organization's 1962 suspension
of Cuba "outdated" -- noting it is based on the island's alignment with a "communist
bloc" that no longer exists. However, he has suggested that OAS members could
postpone Cuba's full participation until it showed democratic reforms. Cuban exile
organizations and some U.S. lawmakers are strongly opposed to readmitting the island.
"If we invite Cuba back in, in spite of their violations, what message are we sending to
the rest of the hemisphere -- that it's okay to move backwards away from democracy and
human rights, that there will be no repercussions for such actions?" Sen. Robert
Menendez (D-N.J.), a Cuban American, demanded in a speech. He threatened to cut off
U.S. funding for the OAS -- about 60 percent of its budget -- if the measure passed.
Clinton said last week that Cuba should be readmitted only if it abided by the OAS's
Democratic Charter, a set of principles adopted in 2001 that commits countries to hold
elections and to respect human rights and press freedoms. Most Latin American
countries broke relations with Cuba after its 1959 revolution. Nearly all have restored
diplomatic ties, and the United States will soon be the only holdout in the hemisphere.
The Cuba ban could be lifted by a two-thirds vote of the OAS foreign ministers on
Tuesday. However, the organization generally works by consensus, and several countries
have indicated they do not want a showdown with the United States. Diplomats have
been trying in recent days to hammer out a compromise. U.S. diplomats introduced a
resolution that would instruct the OAS to open a dialogue with Cuba about its "eventual
reintegration," consistent with the principles of "democracy and full respect for human
rights and fundamental freedoms." A diplomat said last night that the United States
appears to be softening its opposition to lifting the ban as long as Cuba's full
reinstatement is contingent on moving toward democracy. He spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. Venezuela, an ally of Cuba, has
indicated it will not support any resolution that includes such conditions. "This is
'Jurassic Park,' " fumed Venezuelan Ambassador Roy Chaderton. "We're still in the Cold
War." Some Latin American diplomats worry that the Cuba imbroglio could further
marginalize the OAS. The organization is respected for monitoring elections, and it has
tried to broker disputes in the hemisphere. But critics lambaste it as largely a debating
society. Venezuela has threatened to quit the organization and form an alternative
regional group. It has set up a leftist trade alliance known as ALBA with several poor
countries in Latin America. Cuba has derided the OAS as a U.S.-dominated tool of the
United States. Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in
Washington, said the Cuba resolution has trapped the Obama administration between
two of its priorities: democracy promotion and better relations with its neighbors. In
2001, the U.S. government supported the Democratic Charter, a milestone in a region
once known for dictatorships. But Obama told hemispheric leaders in Trinidad and
Tobago last month that he wanted to form closer partnerships and not have the United
States dictate policy. "There's really two different values at play here: multilateralism
versus democracy. You can't have multilateralism and then let one country, i.e. the U.S.,
make the decision for a multilateral organization," Hakim said.
Alt causes
Alt cause - Snowden
Achtenberg 7/12, Reporter for NAFTA (Elizabeth, The Detention of Evo Morales: A
Defining Moment For Latin America?, July 12, 2013,
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/7/11/detention-evo-morales-defining-moment-latin-
america) //AD

As the international uproar continues over last weeks grounding of Bolivian
President Evo Moraless plane in Europe, after U.S. officials apparently
suspected whistle-blower Edward Snowden of being on board, many
questions remain unanswered about the United States role and motives.?
1892? Presidential jet grounded in Vienna. Credit: EFE/ La Razn.? But one thing is
certain: if the U.S. government was seeking to intimidate Morales and other
Latin American leaders who might consider harboring Snowden, its strategy
has completely backfired. Instead, the incident has bolstered Moraless
domestic and international standing, consolidated regional unity, and
emboldened the bloc of leftist governments that seeks to counter U.S.
dominance in the region. It has also dealt a damaging, and potentially fatal,
blow to the future of U.S.Latin American relations under the Obama
administration.

Alt cause - Surveillance scandals
Castaldi 7/12, Reporter for Reuters (Malena, South American bloc repudiates U.S. on
spying, Snowden, July 12, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/12/us-usa-
security-snowden-latinamerica-idUSBRE96B0TP20130712) //AD

(Reuters) - South American leaders sent a tough message to Washington on
Friday over allegations of U.S. spying in the region and to defend their right
to offer asylum to fugitive U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.?
Washington wants Snowden arrested on espionage charges after he divulged extensive,
secret U.S. surveillance programs. Stuck in the transit area of Moscow's international
airport since late June, he is seeking asylum in various countries.? Capping two weeks
of strained North-South relations over the Snowden saga, presidents from
the Mercosur bloc of nations met in Montevideo, Uruguay. Complaints
against the United States were high on the agenda, as Washington warned the
international community not to help the 30-year-old computer whiz get away.? "We
repudiate any action aimed at undermining the authority of countries to
grant and fully implement the right of asylum," Mercosur said in a statement at
the close of Friday's summit.? "We emphatically reject the interception of
telecommunications and espionage activities in our countries, as they are a
violation of human rights and citizens' right to privacy and information," it
said.? The Mercosur bloc comprises Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and
Paraguay.? "This global espionage case has shaken the conscience of the
people of the United States and has upset the world," Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro said. "It raises key issues of political ethics."? The meeting
began as reports emerged that Snowden plans to eventually travel to Latin America after
seeking temporary asylum in Russia. Leftist leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua
have offered him asylum.? The U.S.-Russian relationship would be troubled if Moscow
were to accept an asylum request from Snowden, the U.S. State Department said on
Friday.? LATIN AMERICAN RESPONSE? Leaders throughout Latin America are
furious over reports that the U.S. National Security Agency targeted most
Latin American countries with spying programs that monitored Internet
traffic, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico.? "This is the
world we live in; a world with new forms of colonialism," Argentine
President Cristina Fernandez said in her closing remarks in Montevideo. "It
is more subtle than it was two centuries ago, when they came with armies to
take our silver and gold."? Colombia, Washington's closest military ally in
Latin America, and Mexico, its top business partner, joined the chorus of
governments seeking answers after the espionage allegations were
published by a leading Brazilian newspaper on Tuesday.? "Any act of
espionage that violates human rights, above all the basic right to privacy,
and undermines the sovereignty of nations, deserves to be condemned by
any country that calls itself democratic," Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told
reporters on arrival at the meeting.? Rousseff, who was imprisoned and tortured under
military rule in Brazil in the early 1970s, said the rights issue was particularly important
for South American countries that lived under dictatorships for years and are now
democracies.? U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay made her first comment on
the Snowden case on Friday, saying people needed to be sure their
communications were not being unduly scrutinized and calling on all
countries to respect the right to seek asylum.? Snowden said in a letter posted on
Friday on the Facebook page of the New-York based Human Rights Watch that the
United States has been pressuring countries not to accept him. And U.S. President
Barack Obama has warned of serious costs to any country who takes him in.? Despite
their public offers of asylum and fiery rhetoric, few in Latin America seem particularly
keen to welcome Snowden and risk damaging trade and economic ties with
Washington.? Cuba and Venezuela are both in a cautious rapprochement with the United
States that could be jeopardized if they helped Snowden.? Still, leaders recalled that
many of their own citizens sought asylum abroad during the military
dictatorships of the Cold War era.? South American leaders rallied in
support of Bolivian President Evo Morales last week after he was denied
access to the airspace of several European countries on suspicion the 30-
year-old Snowden might be on board his plane as Morales flew home from a
visit to Russia.? Bolivia is an associate member of Mercosur and Morales
attended Friday's meeting.


Russia-China Relations
No China-Russia allianceSCS proves that Russia doesnt want to get drawn
in with the US
Chunshan, 6/21 Mu Chunshan is a Beijing-based journalist. Previously, Mu was part
of an Education Ministry-backed research project investigating the influence of foreign
media in shaping Chinas image. He has previously reported from the Middle East,
Africa, Russia and from around Asia. (Mu, June 21
st
2014, The Diplomat, Why Doesnt
Russia Support China in the South China Sea? Strategic and political factors keep
Moscow from backing Beijing on the South China Sea
disputes.http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/why-doesnt-russia-support-china-in-the-
south-china-sea/)//IK
Recently, tensions over maritime disputes in the South China Sea seem to have
surpassed even those caused by the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. China and Vietnam are
embroiled in their worst political conflict in decades over an oil drilling platform near the
Paracel Islands. The resulting anti-China protests in Vietnam brought China-Vietnam
relations to a temporary halt. In addition, the Philippines detention of Chinese
fishermen has increased the discord between China and the Philippines. With all these
frictions occurring at the same time, the situation in the South China Sea has suddenly
become very serious. Against this background, we have seen the U.S. criticize China,
express support for Vietnam, and shield the Philippine military. But we have not heard
Russia, Chinas strategic partner, take a stand on the South China Sea disputes, much
less publicly support Chinas position. This has upset some people in China, who now
think that China-Russia relations arent as good as previously imagined. Even on the
Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between China and Japan, Russia has kept an ambiguous
position. In my eyes, however, this does not mean that Russias is of two minds in its
relationship with China. Instead, there are complicated political and strategic factors,
including four main reasons I will list below. First, the China-Russia relationship is
different from U.S.-Philippines relations. China and Russia are not allies. There is
no alliance treaty between them, while there are security treaties between the U.S.
and the Philippines as well as between the U.S. and Japan. In an alliance relationship,
each side has treaty obligations to provide political and even military support to its
partner. In international relations, this is the highest-level type of bilateral relationship.
While the China-Russia relationship has some characteristics of a comprehensive
strategic partnership, the two parties are not bound by treaty obligations to strive for
each others international space and national interests. For a long time, Chinas state
media has been emphasizing and promoting the positive factors in China-Russia
relations, while overseas media also often over-praise this relationship. Sometimes
media outlets even posit that China and Russia are allies without an alliance treaty.
This has led many people to believe that China-Russia political cooperation is boundless,
causing a great improvement to Chinas security situation. But the facts of international
relations tell us that no matter how good the China-Russia relationship is, it wont
influence Chinas basic policy in the South and East China Seas. The fact is that China-
Russia relations are fundamentally based on mutual interests. The South China Sea is
not a place where Russia can expand its interests, nor is it necessary for Russia to
interfere in this region absent a formal alliance with China. Chinese people cannot
misinterpret the character of China-Russia relations and expect too much from Russia.
Second, Russia enjoys good relations with countries bordering the South China Sea and
does not need to offend Southeast Asia for the sake of China. As noted above, Russia is
not enthusiastic about publicly backing China on the South China Sea issue. One of the
most important reasons for this is that Russia enjoys good relations with many of the
Southeast Asian countries. For example, Russias predecessor, the Soviet Union, was
historically even closer to Vietnam than it was to China. Because of the USSRs strong
support, Vietnam was able to fight off the United States. Afterward, Vietnam began to
undertake anti-China activities, again with Soviet backing. After the collapse of the
USSR, Russia inherited this extraordinary friendship. There are no major obstacles to
the development of the Russia-Vietnam relationship there are no serious disputes or
conflicts on either the historical or the practical level. And there is one particular area of
cooperation between the two countries: defense, where cooperation has stretched from
World War II to today. Many of Vietnams weapons come from Russia, such as the Kilo-
class diesel submarines fueling the growth of Vietnams navy. In addition, in the second
half of 2014 Russia will deliver four Su-30MK2 fighters to Vietnam, which could
potentially become weapons in a future China-Vietnam confrontation. Russia also enjoys
a good relationship with the Philippines. For example, two years ago, three Russian navy
vessels (including the anti-submarine destroyer Admiral Panteleyev) arrived in Manila
for a three-day port visit. According to Russia, this visit helped improve Russia-
Philippine ties. Third, its unnecessary for Russia to seek out a direct confrontation with
the U.S. over the South China Sea. Currently Russias focus is on Europe, especially the
Ukraine crisis that has already solidified the confrontation between Russia and the West.
Such a problem will be difficult to solve in the short term. Given this, Russia has
neither the desire nor the ability to confront the U.S. in the South China
Sea. Besides, the South China Sea disputes are not really conflicts between China and
the United States. The disputes stem from disagreements between the South China Sea
border countries about the history and the status quo of maritime rights. The U.S. is only
an influencing factor, not a determining factor that will determine the future of the
situation. In this context, as an outsider and bystander, Russia has even less of a
motivation to support China and criticize the U.S. Fourth, the development of China has
actually caused some worries within Russia. To some people in the West, the discord
between China and other South China Sea countries could help restrict Chinas
expansion into other regions. In Russia, there has always been some concern that
Chinas development will lead to the Russian far east being gradually occupied by the
Chinese, with this vast territory, along with its resources, becoming fodder for Chinas
development. Although Russian officials are optimistic about the potential for
cooperation in the far east, they have never for a moment relaxed their guard against
Chinas so-called territorial expansion.
Russia- China alliance is temporaryenergy policy provescooperation
with both EU and US is more important to both
Schiavenza, 6/23Matt Schiavenza is an International Affairs correspondent with the
International Business Times. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Daily Beast, and
Huffington Post. (Matt, July 23
rd
, 2014, International Business Times, China Can Offer
Little Help To Russia In Current Crisis, http://www.ibtimes.com/china-can-offer-little-
help-russia-current-crisis-1637268)//IK
In the six days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was brought down by a missile over
eastern Ukraine, amid intensifying suspicions of Russian involvement, the European
Union has struggled to reconcile its desire to sanction Russia with its reliance on the
countrys energy resources. But for Russia, dealing with U.S. and EU sanctions since
earlier this year over the Ukraine crisis, the inverse dilemma is no less vexing: How to
wean its economy off its dependence on European imports. Once endowed with a
complex economy that exported manufactured goods, Russia is now an energy state:
Today, oil and natural gas account for two-thirds of its exports and 80 percent of its
foreign exchange earnings. No other major economy in the world -- Russias currently
ranks ninth by GDP -- depends so much on oil and gas prices for its health. Europe is by
far Russias largest customer. The continent imported 170 billion of Russias 195 billion
cubic meters of natural gas in 2013, and several countries -- including Russia's neighbors
and former subjects Finland, Estonia and Latvia -- get their natural gas from no one else.
But despite this leverage, strained relations with Europe have inflicted significant
damage on Russias economy. GDP grew by only 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2014,
while unemployment rose above 5 percent. Lately, things have only grown worse. Since
July 17, the day of the MH17 disaster (and one day after the U.S. announced its own
increased sanctions), the Micex, Russias main stock exchange index, has fallen by 7
percent. Russia has suffered some $70 billion in capital flight so far in 2014, while low
investment -- exacerbated by high interest rates -- might push the country into recession
before the end of the year. Given these solutions, its only natural that Russia has looked
elsewhere for a lifeline: the East. Russia and China have grown chummy in recent years,
as the two have found common cause in thwarting Washingtons geopolitical ambitions
on the United Nations Security Council. More recently, Russia and China have stepped
up their economic cooperation. In May, following a decade of negotiations, the two
countries finalized a pipeline deal which, upon its completion in 2018, will send 38
billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China. That wasnt all: Rosneft, one of Russias
major energy companies, will also supply China National Petroleum Corporation with
365 million tons of oil over the next 25 years. Reluctant to focus only on China, Moscow
has also cemented deals with Beijings regional adversary Japan, which imports 8
percent of its gas from Russia -- an amount likely to increase as a result of Tokyos post-
Fukushima abandonment of nuclear energy. Moscow is also negotiating with New Delhi
over a $30 billion pipeline that will export oil to Indias rapidly growing population. But
before Russias so-called pivot to Asia transforms the countrys trade profile, Europe
remains entrenched as Russias dominant economic partner. Only 6 percent of Chinas
oil imports currently come from Russia, far less than the amount from distant Saudi
Arabia and Angola. For Beijing, Moscow is one of several key energy partners, hardly the
only game in town. And alongside the much-heralded gas pipeline with Russia, Beijing
has inked a pipeline deal with energy-rich Turkmenistan that will, upon completion,
discharge 55 billion cubic meters of gas to China. Russias relatively light footprint in
Asia represents a historical norm: Russias wealth and population are still concentrated
in its European end, and the country, for historical as well as logistical reasons, still sees
Europe as its primary economic sphere of influence. According to Dmitry Gorenburg, a
Russia expert at CNA, Russias energy ties with China are best thought of as a temporary
marriage of convenience rather than a long-term strategic pivot. If down the road
theres a de-escalation in the current crisis with Ukraine, and Europe lifts or partially
lifts sanctions, the tendency in Moscow would be to refocus on Europe, Gorenburg said.
The ideal for Russia is for China to be an additional customer in pipeline deals, not a
substitute for Europe, says Gorenburg. The one thing we have to remember is that
China, as close as theyve gotten with Russia on energy, their economic cooperation and
trade with the U.S. and the EU is always far more important than whatever theyve got
going on with Russia, Gorenburg said.
No alliance lack a common agendaChinese military assertiveness
threatens Moscow
Mankoff, 13 Jeffrey Mankoff is a fellow and deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia
Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. (Jeffrey,
July 11
th
, 2013, The New York Times, The Wary Chinese-Russian Partnership,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/opinion/global/the-wary-chinese-russian-
partnership.html?_r=0)//IK
Moscow and Beijing characterize their relationship as a comprehensive strategic
partnership, but their cooperation is mostly tactical. The two countries approach the
world from quite different vantage points. China is a rising power, with a fast-growing,
export-driven economy eager to benefit from globalization. Russia is a stagnating petro-
state seeking to insulate itself from the forces of change. Moscow touts its partnership
with Beijing mostly to prove to the rest of the world that Russia still matters, while China
views it as a low-cost way of placating Russia. Lacking much of a common agenda,
cooperation is limited to areas where their interests already overlap, like bolstering
trade. In the parts of the world that matter most to them, Russia and China
are more rivals than allies. Take Southeast Asia. Beijings assertive claims to
maritime boundaries in the South China Sea have rattled Americas regional partners
and led Washington to deepen its security cooperation with Vietnam, the Philippines and
other states whose territorial claims China disputes. But to Beijings frustration, Moscow
has remained silent on the territorial disputes, even as Russian energy companies have
signed deals with Vietnam to develop oil and gas resources in the South China Sea in
waters claimed by China. Meanwhile, Russias defense industry is expanding its weapons
sales throughout Southeast Asia, including selling advanced attack submarines to the
Vietnamese Navy. In Central Asia, Chinese economic power is rapidly pushing Russia
aside. Chinese capital is paying for new roads, railroads and pipelines that lock the
Central Asian states ever tighter into the Chinese embrace. Last year, all the Central
Asian nations save Uzbekistan traded more with China than with Russia. Thanks to the
opening of a gas pipeline from Central Asia to China in late 2009, Beijing has been able
to take a hard line with Moscow on negotiations to build a new Russia-China pipeline.
Russias push to bring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan into its customs union with Belarus and
Kazakhstan, along with Vladimir Putins call to establish an Eurasian Union by 2015, are
based heavily on a desire to limit the reorientation of the Central Asian states economies
toward China. Nor does sporadic cooperation between the Russian and Chinese
militaries alter the fact that Chinas assertiveness worries Russia at least as much as it
worries the United States. Russian military commanders acknowledge that they see
China as a potential foe, even as official statements continue to focus on the alleged
threat from the United States and NATO. In July 2010, Russia conducted one of its
largest ever military exercises, which aimed at defending the sparsely populated Russian
Far East from an unnamed opponent with characteristics much like those of the Peoples
Liberation Army.

US-China Relations
Relations are improving now and are resilient increased commitment to
bilateral relations by both Presidents Obama and Jinping
Podesta et. al. 14 - John Podesta currently serves as Counselor to President Barack
Obama. At the time of this reports writing, he was chair of the Center for American
Progress, which he founded in 2003. Podesta previously served as White House chief of
staff from 1998 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton and was co-chairman of the Obama
transition team in 2008. Tung Chee Hwa is the Founding Chairman of the China-U.S.
Exchange Foundation and the Vice Chairman of the Eleventh National Committee of the
Peoples Political Consultative Conference. He previously served as the first chief
executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from 1997 to 2005. Samuel R.
Berger is Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group. He served as national security advisor
to President Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Prior to his service in the Clinton
Administration, Berger spent 16 years at the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson.
Wang Jisi is President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies and
professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University. Professor Wang is a
member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of the Foreign Ministry of China and
is president of the Chinese Association of American Studies. (John, Tung Chee Hwa,
Samuel Berger, Wang Jisi, February 2014, US/China Relations: Toward a New Model of
Major Power Relationship Center for American Progress,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34511.pdf)

In February 2012, during a Washington, D.C., visit, then Chinese Vice President Xi
Jinping raised the prospect of a new type of relationship between major countries in the
21st century.1 As State Councilor Dai Bingguo said about the concept, China and the
U.S. must create the possibility that countries with different political institutions,
cultural traditions and different economic systems can respect and cooperate with each
other.2
A year later, President Barak Obama and President Xi Jinping conducted an informal,
shirt-sleeve summit in southern California to establish a solid working
relationship between the two presidents. Then National Security Adviser Tom Donlion
described the challenge facing President Obama and President Xi at the summit as
turning the aspiration of charting a new course for our relationship into a reality and to
build out the new model of relations between great powers.3
We have been interested in the idea of a new model of major power relations ever since
we attended the lunch in Washington when then Vice President Xi first raised it. We,
along with our respective institutionsthe Center for American Progress in Washington
and the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation in Hong Konghad already been engaged in
track II high-level dialogue between Chinese and American scholars for several years by
then. We were quite familiar with the challenge, as then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton put it, to write a new answer to the age-old question of what happens when an
established power and a rising power meet.4
In conjunction with the initiative of the two presidents, we proposed that our track II
focus on the very topic that engaged the leaders: building a new model of major power
relations between the United States and China. To prepare for the dialogue, experts in
Washington, California, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong drafted and exchanged
papers, printed in this volume, on the U.S. and Chinese perspectives on what a new
model of major power relations would look like in practice; how the bilateral relationship
fits into regional and international structures; what governing principles for the
relationship could be; and how to take steps towards a positive, constructive
relationship. The two sides discussed their approaches and findings in a series of video
conference calls through the spring and summer of 2013.
In September 2013, we convened a distinguished group of American and Chinese experts
to discuss the concepts raised in the papers. The group is listed with their affiliations at
the beginning of this volume.

US-China relations improving recent talks prove both countries are
committed to longterm bilateral relations
Sant 7-11 writer for VOA news (Shannon Van Sant, July 11, 2014, China-US Talks
Crucial to Repair Relations Voice of America,
http://www.voanews.com/content/china-us-talks-crucial-to-repairing-
relationship/1955351.html)

BEIJING
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials concluded their
visit to China on Thursday for the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, but did not report
any breakthroughs. Their trip came at a key moment in U.S. China relations which have
been tested by many events over the last year.
Common ground
In his closing statement Kerry said China and the U.S. found common ground on climate
change, nuclear non-proliferation, North Korea and the importance of the rule of law
among other issues.
For the world's two biggest economies, finding common ground on important issues has
been a struggle, and Xiaohe Cheng, a Professor of International Relations at Renmin
University, says Kerrys visit came at a crucial time.
I think China realized it needs to stabilize its relationship with the United States, and I
think it realized this is a good opportunity to stabilize its relationship with the United
States, Xiaohe Cheng said.
More hacking allegations
U.S. China relations were again tested this week, with new media reports that Chinese
hackers tried to infiltrate databases containing the personnel files of U.S. government
employees. China denied the charge. Beijing had already canceled a working group due
to take place this week on cyber security issues. That move was in response to a U.S.
decision to indict five Chinese military officers for launching cyber attacks on American
institutions.
Chinas territorial claims have also roiled Sino-U.S. relations over the last year. Chinas
declaration of an air defense zone over waters contested with Japan and its construction
of a billion dollar oil rig in the South China Seas inspired protests from its neighbors and
the United States.
Fostering positive relations
Despite all of the tensions, Chinese state-backed media coverage of the meetings this
week was mostly positive, with the Peoples Daily writing that officials made positive
achievements and released important information for improving and developing U.S.-
China relations. The newspaper went on to state that the people-to-people exchange
has also consolidated the foundation of U.S.-China friendship.
While few concrete achievements were announced at the meetings conclusion, Cheng
said they were likely constructive.
I walked away with the strong impression that China and the U.S. relationship would
not be so bad as we had thought and may improve a little bit because in Xi Jinpings
speech he attached great importance on China and U.S. relations, he stated.
Still, Chinas increasingly assertive stance in foreign affairs, particularly over its
territorial claims, may further challenges bilateral ties. Cheng said territorial disputes
that were once between China and its neighbors now involve the United States. Inside
China, some observers blame the U.S. for attempting to contain and encircle China.
Outside China, analysts blame the increased tensions on Chinas aggressive actions in
disputed waters, such as its deployment of a massive oil rig offshore Vietnam.
These are issues between China and some its neighbor nations, but they have come
more to do with the China U.S. relations, because the U.S. as a third party is deeply
involved with these issues, explained Xiaohe Cheng.
The next high-level meeting between the two countries' leaders is expected to be in
November, when President Barack Obama is scheduled to attend the APEC Economic
Leaders' meeting.

No motivation for US/China war relations are resilient
Lee 13 (Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of on Singapore, The Atlantic, Interview:
Lee Kuan Yew on the Future of U.S.- China Relations, March 5,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/interview-lee-kuan-yew-
on-the-future-of-us-china-relations/273657/)
How likely is a major confrontation between the United States and China? Competition
between the United States and China is inevitable, but conflict is not. This is not the Cold
War. The Soviet Union was contesting with the United States for global supremacy.
China is acting purely in its own national interests. It is not interested in changing the
world. There will be a struggle for influence. I think it will be subdued because the
Chinese need the United States, need U.S. markets, U.S. technology, need to have
students going to the United States to study the ways and means of doing business so
they can improve their lot. It will take them 10, 20, 30 years. If you quarrel with the
United States and become bitter enemies, all that information and those technological
capabilities will be cut off. The struggle between the two countries will be maintained at
the level that allows them to still tap the United States. Unlike U.S.-Soviet relations
during the Cold War, there is no irreconcilable ideological conflict between the United
States and a China that has enthusiastically embraced the market. Sino-American
relations are both cooperative and competitive. Competition between them is inevitable,
but conflict is not. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are
more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been
cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate,
they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive. A stabilizing
factor in their relationship is that each nation requires cooperation from and healthy
competition with the other. The danger of a military conflict between China and the
United States is low. Chinese leaders know that U.S. military superiority is overwhelming
and will remain so for the next few decades. They will modernize their forces not to
challenge America but to be able, if necessary, to pressure Taiwan by a blockade or
otherwise to destabilize the economy. China's military buildup delivers a strong message
to the United States that China is serious about Taiwan. However, the Chinese do not
want to clash with anyone -- at least not for the next 15 to 20 years. The Chinese are
confident that in 30 years their military will essentially match in sophistication the U.S.
military. In the long term, they do not see themselves as disadvantaged in this fight.
China will not let an international court arbitrate territorial disputes in the South China
Sea, so the presence of U.S. firepower in the Asia-Pacific will be necessary if the U.N.
Law of the Sea is to prevail.

No risk of a US-China war relations are resilient and interdependence
checks
Glaser 11 - , Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the
Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University, (CHARLES GLASER, March/April, Will China's Rise
Lead to War?, Foreign Affairs,)

So far, the China debate among international relations theorists has pitted optimistic
liberals against pessimistic realists. The liberals argue that because the current
international order is defined by economic and political openness, it can accommodate
China's rise peacefully. The United States and other leading powers, this argument runs,
can and will make clear that China is welcome to join the existing order and prosper
within it, and China is likely to do so rather than launch a costly and dangerous struggle
to overturn the system and establish an order more to its own liking.
The standard realist view, in contrast, predicts intense competition. China's growing
strength, most realists argue, will lead it to pursue its interests more assertively, which
will in turn lead the United States and other countries to balance against it. This cycle
will generate at the least a parallel to the Cold War standoff between the United States
and the Soviet Union, and perhaps even a hegemonic war. Adherents of this view point
to China's recent harder line on its maritime claims in the East China and South China
seas and to the increasingly close relations between the United States and India as signs
that the cycle of assertiveness and balancing has already begun.
In fact, however, a more nuanced version of realism provides grounds for
optimism. China's rise need not be nearly as competitive and dangerous as the
standard realist argument suggests, because the structural forces driving major
powers into conflict will be relatively weak. The dangers that do exist, moreover,
are not the ones predicted by sweeping theories of the international system in general
but instead stem from secondary disputes particular to Northeast Asia--and the security
prevalent in the international system at large should make these disputes easier for the
United States and China to manage. In the end, therefore, the outcome of China's rise
will depend less on the pressures generated by the international system than on how well
U.S. and Chinese leaders manage the situation. Conflict is not predetermined--and if the
United States can adjust to the new international conditions, making some
uncomfortable concessions and not exaggerating the dangers, a major clash might well
be avoided.
A GOOD KIND OF SECURITY DILEMMA
STRUCTURAL REALISM explains states' actions in terms of the pressures and
opportunities created by the international system. One need not look to domestic factors
to explain international conflict, in this view, because the routine actions of independent
states trying to maintain their security in an anarchic world can result in war. This does
not happen all the time, of course, and explaining how security-seeking states find
themselves at war is actually something of a puzzle, since they might be expected to
choose cooperation and the benefits of peace instead. The solution to the puzzle lies in
the concept of the security dilemma--a situation in which one state's efforts to increase
its own security reduce the security of others.
The intensity of the security dilemma depends, in part, on the ease of attack and
coercion. When attacking is easy, even small increases in one state's forces will
significantly decrease the security of others, fueling a spiral of fear and arming. When
defending and deterring are easy, in contrast, changes in one state's military forces will
not necessarily threaten others, and the possibility of maintaining good political
relations among the players in the system will increase.
The intensity of the security dilemma also depends on states' beliefs about one another's
motives and goals. For example, if a state believes that its adversary is driven only by a
quest for security--rather than, say, an inherent desire to dominate the system--then it
should find increases in the adversary's military forces less troubling and not feel the
need to respond in kind, thus preventing the spiral of political and military escalation.
The possibility of variation in the intensity of the security dilemma has dramatic
implications for structural realist theory, making its predictions less consistently bleak
than often assumed. When the security dilemma is severe, competition will indeed be
intense and war more likely. These are the classic behaviors predicted by realist
pessimism. But when the security dilemma is mild, a structural realist will see that the
international system creates opportunities for restraint and peace. Properly understood,
moreover, the security dilemma suggests that a state will be more secure when its
adversary is more secure--because insecurity can pressure an adversary to adopt
competitive and threatening policies. This dynamic creates incentives for restraint and
cooperation. If an adversary can be persuaded that all one wants is security (as opposed
to domination), the adversary may itself relax.
What does all this imply about the rise of China? At the broadest level, the news is
good. Current international conditions should enable both the United States and China
to protect their vital interests without posing large threats to each other. Nuclear
weapons make it relatively easy for major powers to maintain highly
effective deterrent forces. Even if Chinese power were to greatly exceed U.S. power
somewhere down the road, the United States would still be able to maintain nuclear
forces that could survive any Chinese attack and threaten massive damage in
retaliation. Large-scale conventional attacks by China against the U.S. homeland,
meanwhile, are virtually impossible because the United States and China are
separated by the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, across which it would be difficult to
attack. No foreseeable increase in China's power would be large enough to overcome
these twin advantages of defense for the United States. The same defensive advantages,
moreover, apply to China as well. Although China is currently much weaker than the
United States militarily, it will soon be able to build a nuclear force that meets its
requirements for deterrence. And China should not find the United States' massive
conventional capabilities especially threatening, because the bulk of U.S. forces, logistics,
and support lie across the Pacific.
The overall effect of these conditions is to greatly moderate the security dilemma. Both
the United States and China will be able to maintain high levels of security now and
through any potential rise of China to superpower status. This should help Washington
and Beijing avoid truly strained geopolitical relations, which should in turn help ensure
that the security dilemma stays moderate, thereby facilitating cooperation. The United
States, for example, will have the option to forego responding to China's modernization
of its nuclear force. This restraint will help reassure China that the United States does
not want to threaten its security--and thus help head off a downward political spiral
fueled by nuclear competition.
No impact to cooperation and its impossible
Friedberg 9/2012 - Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author
of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia
(Aaron, Bucking Beijing, Foreign Affairs,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138032/aaron-l-friedberg/bucking-beijing)

Recent events have raised serious doubts about both elements of this strategy. Decades
of trade and talk have not hastened China's political liberalization. Indeed, the last few
years have been marked by an intensified crackdown on domestic dissent. At the same
time, the much-touted economic relationship between the two Pacific powers has
become a major source of friction. And despite hopes for enhanced cooperation, Beijing
has actually done very little to help Washington solve pressing international problems,
such as North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons or Iran's attempts to develop them.
Finally, far from accepting the status quo, China's leaders have become more forceful in
attempting to control the waters and resources off their country's coasts. As for
balancing, the continued buildup of China's military capabilities, coupled with
impending cuts in U.S. defense spending, suggests that the regional distribution of
power is set to shift sharply in Beijing's favor. WHY WE CAN'T ALL JUST GET ALONG
Today, China's ruling elites are both arrogant and insecure. In their view, continued rule
by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is essential to China's stability, prosperity, and
prestige; it is also, not coincidentally, vital to their own safety and comfort. Although
they have largely accepted some form of capitalism in the economic sphere, they remain
committed to preserving their hold on political power. The CCP'S determination to
maintain control informs the regime's threat perceptions, goals, and policies. Anxious
about their legitimacy, China's rulers are eager to portray themselves as defenders of the
national honor. Although they believe China is on track to become a world power on par
with the United States, they remain deeply fearful of encirclement and ideological
subversion. And despite Washington's attempts to reassure them of its benign
intentions, Chinese leaders are convinced that the United States aims to block China's
rise and, ultimately, undermine its one-party system of government. Like the United
States, since the end of the Cold War, China has pursued an essentially constant
approach toward its greatest external challenger. For the most part, Beijing has sought to
avoid outright confrontation with the United States while pursuing economic growth and
building up all the elements of its "comprehensive national power," a Chinese strategic
concept that encompasses military strength, technological prowess, and diplomatic
influence. Even as they remain on the defensive, however, Chinese officials have not
been content to remain passive. They have sought incremental advances, slowly
expanding China's sphere of influence and strengthening its position in Asia while
working quietly to erode that of the United States. Although they are careful never to say
so directly, they seek to have China displace the United States in the long run and to
restore China to what they regard as its rightful place as the preponderant regional
power. Chinese strategists do not believe that they can achieve this objective quickly or
through a frontal assault. Instead, they seek to reassure their neighbors, relying on the
attractive force of China's massive economy to counter nascent balancing efforts against
it. Following the advice of the ancient military strategist Sun-tzu, Beijing aims to "win
without fighting," gradually creating a situation in which overt resistance to its wishes
will appear futile. The failure to date to achieve a genuine entente between the United
States and China is the result not of a lack of effort but of a fundamental divergence of
interests. Although limited cooperation on specific issues might be possible, the
ideological gap between the two nations is simply too great, and the level of trust
between them too low, to permit a stable modus vivendi. What China's current leaders
ultimately want -- regional hegemony -- is not something their counterparts in
Washington are willing to give. That would run counter to an axiomatic goal of U.S.
grand strategy, which has remained constant for decades: to prevent the domination of
either end of the Eurasian landmass by one or more potentially hostile powers. The
reasons for this goal involve a mix of strategic, economic, and ideological considerations
that will continue to be valid into the foreseeable future.
Relations are impossible
Zhang 12/13/2012 -Editor-in-Chief, Co-Founder at WiseLit (Henry, US-China
Relations: Why Obama's 'Asia Pivot' Strategy Could Lead to Disaster, Policy Mic,
http://www.policymic.com/articles/20675/us-china-relations-why-obama-s-asia-pivot-
strategy-could-lead-to-disaster)
This American response is due in part to the surprising advancements made by the
Chinese military, such as the successful developments of its aircraft carrier, advanced jet
fighters, and more cost-effective drones. China-U.S. relations expert Wu Xinbo advises
the U.S. not to just focus on China's rising capabilities, but also to "pay attention to how
China will use its military power." It is not surprising that China wants to catch up
militarily, as it is a dominant economic power that has the means to do so. However, the
Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army may not necessarily want to
undermine U.S. global military preeminence, but rather wish to assert their country's
sovereignty in regional disputes involving territories in the East and South China seas.
The Chinese might threaten U.S. dominance in these regions insofar as they
see American forces as encroachments that they must guard against.
Conversely, Washington sees itself as an important player in the Pacific, with certain
obligations and diplomatic interests to which it must attend. Notable strategic
maneuvers stemming from this perception include the stationing of 250 U.S. Marines in
Australia, and military drills with Japan.
Alt causes to US-China relations
Haenle 1/15/2014 - director of the CarnegieTsinghua Center, adjunct professor at
Tsinghua University on International Relations, formerly served on the national Security
Council on East Asia (Paul, What Does a New Type of Great-Power Relations Mean for
the United States and China? Carnegie Endowment,
http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/01/15/us-china-relations-2013-new-model-of-
major-power-relations-in-theory-and-in-practice/gyjm?reloadFlag=1)

First, the U.S. and China need to start actively cooperating together on global challenges
where we have mutual interests. In the past, our countries have focused on bilateral
issues. Today, however, the major challenges and opportunities for the U.S.-China
relationship will come in working together to address critical global challenges such as
nuclear proliferation, energy and food security, terrorism, climate change, Middle East
instability, cyber security, and global financial reform and recovery. The need to find
tangible ways to work together constructively on global challenges was evident at
Sunnylands. Obama and Xi concluded their discussions with an announcement to
enhance cooperation on combating nuclear proliferation by continuing to apply pressure
on Pyongyang, and to work together to combat climate change by discussing ways to
reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons. If we can engage in more effort together that
produce real benefits for our peoples as well as the rest of the world, this will be an
important step toward making the new model of major country relations a reality.
Second, Chinese and American leaders will need to resist the expectation that either side
will change the other sides views on long-standing and historical areas of disagreement
between our two countriessuch as Taiwan or human rights overnight. Many in
Washington are concerned that the new model of great power relations concept is an
effort by China to compel the U.S. to respect Chinas core interests, create Chinese
spheres of influence, and get the U.S. to accommodate China's interests on Beijings
terms. This type of approach will not work, and making this a starting point for
discussions on the new paradigm will only set this exercise up for failure. On many of
these issues, including Taiwan, the United States and China have agreed to disagree
since their first communiqu in 1972. But in a more positive context of greater
cooperation on global issues, our leaders will be in a better place to work on and reduce
these areas of long-standing disagreement. Third, our countries have new areas
of tensions in the relationship that exacerbate mistrust and that we need to
address with urgency. In 2013, these issues included revelations of Chinese cyber
hacking of American commercial and military secrets to dangerous risks deriving from
regional territorial disputes in the South and East China Sea, including Beijings recent
announcement of a new Air Defense Identification Zone. These challenges, especially the
latter, hold the potential for confrontation between our militaries if we do not renew our
military to military efforts to increase transparency and cooperation. These important
issues must be addressed head-on, not sidestepped. But as we work vigorously through
these current disagreements, we should not allow these areas of friction to define or
overwhelm our broad and robust relationship. But we must address them with
urgency and find ways to reduce these disagreements and enhance trust if
we are to achieve a new type of major country relations.
US-EU Relations
No impact and collapse inevitable
Leonard, 12 (Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on
Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank., 7/24/2012, "The End of the
Affair", www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/24/the_end_of_the_affair)
But Obama's stellar personal ratings in Europe hide the fact that the Western alliance
has never loomed smaller in the imagination of policymakers on either side of the
Atlantic. Seen from Washington, there is not a single problem in the world to be looked
at primarily through a transatlantic prism. Although the administration looks first to
Europeans as partners in any of its global endeavors -- from dealing with Iran's nuclear
program to stopping genocide in Syria -- it no longer sees the European theater as its
core problem or seeks a partnership of equals with Europeans. It was not until the
eurozone looked like it might collapse -- threatening to bring down the global economy
and with it Obama's chances of reelection -- that the president became truly interested in
Europe. Conversely, Europeans have never cared less about what the United States
thinks. Germany, traditionally among the most Atlanticist of European countries, has led
the pack. Many German foreign-policy makers think it was simply a tactical error for
Berlin to line up with Moscow and Beijing against Washington on Libya. But there is
nothing accidental about the way Berlin has systematically refused even to engage with
American concerns over German policy on the euro. During the Bush years, Europeans
who were unable to influence the strategy of the White House would give a running
commentary on American actions in lieu of a substantive policy. They had no influence
in Washington, so they complained. But now, the tables are turned, with Obama passing
continual judgment on German policy while Chancellor Angela Merkel stoically refuses
to heed his advice. Europeans who for many years were infantilized by the transatlantic
alliance, either using sycophancy and self-delusion about a "special relationship" to
advance their goals or, in the case of Jacques Chirac's France, pursuing the even more
futile goal of balancing American power, have finally come to realize that they can no
longer outsource their security or their prosperity to Uncle Sam. On both sides of the
Atlantic, the ties that held the alliance together are weakening. On the American side,
Obama's biography links him to the Pacific and Africa but not to the old continent. His
personal story echoes the demographic changes in the United States that have reduced
the influence of Americans of European origin. Meanwhile, on the European side, the
depth of the euro crisis has crowded out almost all foreign policy from the agenda of
Europe's top decision-makers. The end of the Cold War means that Europeans no longer
need American protection, and the U.S. financial crisis has led to a fall in American
demand for European products (although U.S. exports to Europe are at an all-time high).
What's more, Obama's lack of warmth has precluded him from establishing the sorts of
human relationships with European leaders that animate alliances. When asked to name
his closest allies, Obama mentions non-European leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan
of Turkey and Lee Myung-bak of South Korea. And his transactional nature has led to a
neglect of countries that he feels will not contribute more to the relationship -- within a
year of being elected, Obama had managed to alienate the leaders of most of Europe's big
states, from Gordon Brown to Nicolas Sarkozy to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Americans hardly remember, but Europe's collective nose was put out of joint by
Obama's refusal to make the trip to Europe for the 2010 EU-U.S. summit. More recently,
Obama has reached out to allies to counteract the impression that the only way to get a
friendly reception in Washington is to be a problem nation -- but far too late to erase the
sense that Europe matters little to this American president. Underlying these superficial
issues is a more fundamental divergence in the way Europe and the United States are
coping with their respective declines. As the EU's role shrinks in the world, Europeans
have sought to help build a multilateral, rule-based world. That is why it is they, rather
than the Chinese or the Americans, that have pushed for the creation of institutionalized
global responses to climate change, genocide, or various trade disputes. To the extent
that today's world has not collapsed into the deadlocked chaos of a "G-zero," it is often
due to European efforts to create a functioning institutional order. To Washington's
eternal frustration, however, Europeans have not put their energies into becoming a full
partner on global issues. For all the existential angst of the euro crisis, Europe is not as
weak as people think it is. It still has the world's largest market and represents 17 percent
of world trade, compared with 12 percent for the United States. Even in military terms,
the EU is the world's No. 2 military power, with 21 percent of the world's military
spending, versus 5 percent for China, 3 percent for Russia, 2 percent for India, and 1.5
percent for Brazil, according to Harvard scholar Joseph Nye. But, ironically for a people
who have embraced multilateralism more than any other on Earth, Europeans have not
pooled their impressive economic, political, and military resources. And with the
eurozone's need to resolve the euro crisis, the EU may split into two or more tiers --
making concerted action even more difficult. As a result, European power is too diffuse
to be much of a help or a hindrance on many issues. On the other hand, Obama's United
States -- although equally committed to liberal values -- thinks that the best way to
safeguard American interests and values is to craft a multipartner world. On the one
hand, Obama continues to believe that he can transform rising powers by integrating
them into existing institutions (despite much evidence to the contrary). On the other, he
thinks that Europe's overrepresentation in existing institutions like the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund is a threat to the consolidation of that order. This is
leading a declining America to increasingly turn against Europe on issues ranging from
climate change to currencies. The most striking example came at the 2009 G-20 in
Pittsburgh, when Obama worked together with the emerging powers to pressure
Europeans to give up their voting power at the IMF. As Walter Russell Mead, the U.S.
international relations scholar, has written, "(I)ncreasingly it will be in the American
interest to help Asian powers rebalance the world power structure in ways that
redistribute power from the former great powers of Europe to the rising great powers of
Asia today." But the long-term consequence of the cooling of this unique alliance could
be the hollowing out of the world order that the Atlantic powers have made. The big
unwritten story of the last few decades is the way that a European-inspired liberal
economic and political order has been crafted in the shell of the American security order.
It is an order that limits the powers of states and markets and puts the protection of
individuals at its core. If the United States was the sheriff of this order, the EU was its
constitutional court. And now it is being challenged by the emerging powers. Countries
like Brazil, China, and India are all relatively new states forged by movements of national
liberation whose experience of globalization has been bound up with their new sense of
nationhood. While globalization is destroying sovereignty for the West, these former
colonies are enjoying it on a scale never experienced before. As a result, they are not
about to invite their former colonial masters to interfere in their internal affairs. Just
look at the dynamics of the United Nations Security Council on issues from Sudan to
Syria. Even in the General Assembly, the balance of power is shifting: 10 years ago, China
won 43 percent of the votes on human rights in the United Nations, far behind Europe's
78 percent. But in 2010-11, the EU won less than 50 percent to China's nearly 60 percent,
according to research by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Rather than being
transformed by global institutions, China's sophisticated multilateral diplomacy is
changing the global order itself. As relative power flows Eastward, it is perhaps inevitable
that the Western alliance that kept liberty's flame alight during the Cold War and then
sought to construct a liberal order in its aftermath is fading fast. It was perhaps
inevitable that both Europeans and Americans should fail to live up to each other's
expectations of their respective roles in a post-Cold War world. After all, America is still
too powerful to happily commit to a multilateral world order (as evidenced by Congress's
reluctance to ratify treaties). And Europe is too physically safe to be willing to match U.S.
defense spending or pool its resources. What is surprising is that the passing of this
alliance has not been mourned by many on either side. The legacy of Barack Obama is
that the transatlantic relationship is at its most harmonious and yet least relevant in 50
years. Ironically, it may take the election of someone who is less naturally popular on the
European stage for both sides to wake up and realize just what is at stake.

No impact - US/EU fights inevitable but theres no scenario for escalation
Ahearn, Archick, Belkin 7 Authors of the CRS report for Congress on US-EU
relations (Raymond Ahearn, Kristin Archick, Paul Belkin, May 17, 2007, U.S.-European
Union Relations and the 2007 Summit Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division,
http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS22645.pdf/)

The U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations have supported the EU project
since its inception as a way to foster a stable Europe, democratic states, and strong
trading partners. The United States has welcomed EU efforts since the end of the Cold
War to expand the political and economic benefits of membership to central and eastern
Europe, and supports the EU aspirations of Turkey and the western Balkan states. The
United States and the EU share a huge and mutually beneficial economic relationship.
Two-way flows of goods, services, and foreign investment now exceed $1.0 trillion on an
annual basis, and the total stock of two-way direct investment is over $1.9 trillion.
Nevertheless, the U.S.-EU relationship has been challenged in recent years as numerous
trade and foreign policy conflicts have emerged. The 2003 crisis over Iraq, which bitterly
divided the EU and severely strained U.S.-EU relations, is most notable, but the list of
disagreements has been wide and varied. Although Europeans are not monolithic in their
views, many EU member states have objected to at least some elements of U.S. policy on
issues ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to U.S. treatment of terrorist
detainees to climate change and aircraft subsidies. Since 2003, however, both sides
have made efforts to improve relations, and successive U.S.-EU summits
have sought to emphasize areas of cooperation and partnership. At the same
time, challenges and some tensions remain in the U.S.-EU relationship.

No impact - Relations are resilientdisputes never escalate
Veric & Ivarsson 6 - Students and Writers at the Geneva Graduate Institute (Andrea
Veric and Viktoria Ivarsson, Allies or competitors? Assessing US-EU trade relations
1/13/08,http://hei.unige.ch/sections/sp/courses/0506/dupont/roundtable/EU%20and
%20US%20trade%20relations.pdf]

As the trade relations between the EU and the US are governed in a large
part by the GATT and the WTO, both actors defend free-trade principles, but
they often accuse each other for pursuing protectionist policies such as
imposing tariffs, quotas and other direct barriers to trade typically imposed at EU or US
borders or giving unfair advantages to its own exporters through state subsidies or
safeguard actions as in the current case of imposition of tariffs on steel import by the US
government. Such traditional trade disputes - famous example: Bananas case
(where the EU was found guilty for discrimination against banana imports by US
companies in Latin America in 1997; or the Foreign Sales Corporation (the FCS
scheme provided for an exemption to the general tax rules which results in substantial
tax savings for US companies exporting though FSCSs) - involved or still involves
(see current Boeing/Airbus case) usually a complaint of the EU against the US (see
above). Some of those disputes concerning agriculture (see other group) and steel
became increasingly frequent during the 1980, leading to the use of counter-measures in
the case the defendant part did not offer any concessions (DS-mechanism of WTO).
These so-called also mini trade wars account for only about 1-2 % of the
total value of transatlantic trade and investment, but they are in the current
media affairs and carry the potential to spill over to other areas of the transatlantic
relationship3. They account for about 22% of EU trade, but represent over 47% of the EU
s WTO disputes, therefore indicating its preference to use/take the profit of WTO DS-
mechanism). Important to note: many authors have shown that primarily large countries
will win trade wars4 and since the EU is talking with one single voice, its further
integration increases its negotiating power in the WTO. But recent trade disputes show
new occurrences: those of new-style regulatory disputes concerning the trade-
distorting effects of behind-the-border domestic regulations that act as non-tariff
barriers to international trade in goods, services and intellectual property5. The US and
the EU face what some authors term system friction in an increasing
number of issues: in consumer protection, the data privacy and audiovisual
services, in public concerns about environment or the food safety
(Trademarks and geographical indicators, GMOs, Beef hormones). These trade relations
have moved into the public making trade a high-profile business reflecting rather the
difference of ideological perceptions of the two societies than market-access clashes: the
EU does not accept hormone treated beef because of the consumers health concern, not
because it intends to protect EU farmers. The same argument is stated for GMOs which
have to be subject to even more strict regulations, officially not to prevent US goods from
the EU market, but because European consumers fundamentally distrust genetically
altered foods. 6 But can we go as far as to say that the old belief that freer trade is a win-
win situation is questioned by the EU and the US? What does their considerable amount
of cooperation consist of? Having looked at the issues over which the EU and the US
come into conflict, we now turn our attention to those issues they agree on. Indeed,
though they are fierce competitors on some trade fronts, they form the most
important bilateral trade relationship in the world. To cite some numbers that
illustrate this point: they account for 1/5 of each others bilateral trade, amounting to 1
billion euro a day; in 2003, 25.8% of EU exports were to the US, while 16.8% of goods
imported to the EU came form the US. The EU invested more than 52% of its total FDI
during the 1998-2001 period in the US, while US investment in the EU was more that
61% of EU FDI inflows during that same period.7 So clearly the two are important to
each other, and the fact that they are also the two largest players in global trade explains
why they cooperate significantly bilaterally but are also heavily involved in cooperation
on the multilateral level, in particular and contrary to popular belief in the WTO. We
should thus note that trade related disputes we and others have mentioned
cover a very small percentage of EU-US trade. So although the media would tend
to portray the EU-US trade relationship as bitter and acrimonious, it is in fact a
partnership, where the key word is cooperation. Casting aside the multilateral scene to
focus on the bilateral relationship, several initiatives illustrate this last point, i.e. that the
EU and the US are committed partners. There is the New Transatlantic Agenda
and EU-US Joint Action Plan of 1995, whose goals are stated in this texts preface as:
Promoting peace and stability, democracy and development around the world.
Together, we will work for an increasingly stable and prosperous Europe; foster
democracy and economic reform in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Russia,
Ukraine and other new independent states; secure peace in the Middle East; advance
human rights; promote non-proliferation and cooperate on development and
humanitarian assistance. Responding to global challenges. Together, we will fight
international crime, drug-trafficking and terrorism; address the needs of refugees and
displaced persons; protect the environment and combat disease. Contributing to the
expansion of world trade and closer economic relations. Together, we will strengthen the
multilateral trading system and take concrete, practical steps to promote closer
economic relations between us. Building bridges across the Atlantic. Together, we
will work with our business people, scientists, educators and others to improve
communication and to ensure that future generations remain as committed as we are to
developing a full and equal partnership.8 Then there is the Transatlantic Economic
Partnership of 1998: it covers the two countries cooperation on multilateral issues and
on bilateral issues that include technical regulatory barriers, services, government
procurement, intellectual property, agriculture including food safety, plant and animal
health and biotechnology, the environment, labour, consumers, competition law
procedures, and electronic commerce.9 Finally we think another initiative worth
mentioning is the 2002 Positive Economic Agenda, whose main achievements include:
Launch of the Financial Markets Dialogue; Resumption of exports of Spanish
clementines to the U.S.; Launch of EU-U.S. regulatory co-operation in four priority
areas: cosmetics, automobile safety, metrology and nutritional labeling; Conclusion of
the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) on certificates of conformity for marine safety
equipment.10 You see that all of these agreements aim to help achieve common
objectives that are mutually beneficial to the two countries. If we now turn to the reasons
for cooperation on the one hand and intense disagreement on the other, I think we can
say that whereas cooperation on trade issues has occurred for economic,
political and historical reasons, trade disputes between the US and the EU
arise due for political considerations. What I mean by this is that it makes
economic sense for the EU and the US to cooperate, and indeed they do, as we
have shown; whereas the trade disputes are essentially economic nonsense, and
occur because of a clash in vested political interests, often influenced by
powerful lobbies. Further, it reflects the different consumer interests and ideological
perceptions, perhaps even morals, between populations on both sides of the Atlantic.
Having said this, recent trends show that the two have increased cooperation on
topics where they had trade disputes, in particular standards and
regulations. As to the question of what the trend of EU-US disputes will be in the
future, we will leave that question open, with a poem by former EU Commissioner for
Trade and current DG of the WTO Pascal Lamy as food for thought:
Consult before you legislate;
Negotiate before you litigate;
Compensate before you retaliate;
And comply - at any rate.11



US-Japan Relations
Alt Causes
Alt causes to relations
Xu 7/1, writer/editor for council on foreign relations (Beina ,The U.S.-Japan Security
Alliance, council on foreign relations, july 1 2014, http://www.cfr.org/japan/us-japan-
security-alliance/p31437)
Introduction Forged in the wake of World War II, the U.S.-Japan security alliance has
served as one of the region's most important military relationships and as an anchor of
the U.S. security role in Asia. Revised in 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and
Security grants the United States the right to military bases on the archipelago in
exchange for a U.S. pledge to defend Japan in the event of an attack. The partnership has
endured several geopolitical transitions, rooting its framework in the postwar security
environment and expanding in the aftermath of the Cold War with the rise of China and
a nuclearizing North Korea. Cooperation during the Gulf and Iraq wars and the March
2011 Tohoku earthquake reaffirmed the strength of the alliance, but challenges remain.
The U.S. military presence on Okinawa, North Korea's nuclearization, territorial disputes
with China, and Japan's recent push to upgrade its defense preparedness have all
challenged the alliance's resilience as the Obama administration considers the direction
of its strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.
Alt cause for Japan Relations Okinawa
Chanlett-Avery et al. 13. Specialist in Asian Affairs. [Emma, Mark E. Manyin
Specialist in Asian Affairs, William H. Cooper Specialist in International Trade and
Finance, Ian E. Rinehart Analyst in Asian Affairs. February 15, 2013
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA5779
37] SALH

The U.S.-Japan relationship is broad, deep-seated, and stable but has been handicapped
by the political paralysis in Tokyo. The annual replacement of prime ministers since
2006 has made long-term planning with Japan complicated, particularly as the United
States seeks reliable partners in the Obama Administrations rebalancing to Asia
strategy, also known as the Pacific Pivot. Both Tokyo and Washington seek to manage
relations with a rising China, as well as address the North Korean threat. Alliance
cooperation at the working level has been strong, driven closer by assertive Chinese
behavior and North Korean provocations. Although major basing issues in Okinawa
remain stubbornly unresolved, other security matters such as ballistic missile defense
cooperation have progressed under both the DPJ and LDP governments. The joint
response to the March 2011 disasters remains a vivid reminder to both sides of the
underlying strength of the alliance. It remains uncertain how Prime Minister Abe will
fare as a steward of the relationship. On the one hand, he is known as a strong supporter
of the U.S. alliance and promotes a number of security positions that align with the
United States. He is an advocate of building relations with fellow democracies,
particularly advancing security ties with Australia and India. On the other hand, Abe
faces questions about his ability to steer foreign policy away from divisive regional issues
that could hurt U.S. interests. (See section below for discussion.) In addition, domestic
political divisions mean that major U.S. priorities such as Japan joining negotiations for
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (see Economic Issues section for more) and allowing for
more advanced defense cooperation (see Alliance Issues section for more) will likely
remain on hold until after the July 2013 Upper House elections.
Alt cause to relations - Okinawa
Xu 7/1/2014 Writer and Editor for the Council on Foreign Relations (Beina, The
U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, CFR, http://www.cfr.org/japan/us-japan-security-
alliance/p31437)

One of the most contentious issues in the alliance has been the stationing of U.S.
Marines on Japan's Okinawa prefecture, which hosts around 65 percent of total U.S.
forces in Japan and is also the poorest of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Locals deeply
resent the outsize burden of hosting U.S. troops at the Futenma base and have voiced
serious concerns about the accidents and incidents of crime (including recurring cases of
sexual assault) that have persisted on the base. The gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl in
1995 by three U.S. servicemen galvanized eighty-five thousand locals to protest. A year
after the mass demonstration, then prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto directly asked
then U.S. president Bill Clinton to return Futenma to Japanese control. Other allegations
of sexual violence by U.S. military personnel in Okinawa surfaced in 2008 and 2012, and
various plans for relocating Futenma were put forward, but they were met with local
opposition. In a more recent bid to reconcile tensions, the United States and Japan
agreed in May 2006 to a U.S.-Japan Roadmap for Realignment Implementation that
would relocate the Futenma Air Station out of the crowded city of Ginowan, build a new
runway in the waters off of Camp Schwab, and transfer eight thousand Marines to Guam.
But this proposal devolved into a political maelstrom when the Democratic Party of
Japan's Yukio Hatoyama, who opposed the relocation during his campaign, became
prime minister in 2009. Since then, Washington and Tokyo have made other overtures
to resolve the long-standing issue. The two parties altered the pact in April 2012,
disconnecting the transfer of Marines from the construction of the new base, and in April
2013 they reached a deal to return Futenmaand five other U.S. basesby the late
2020s. "It's been very corrosive for the alliance," Smith says of the Okinawa
issue. "It has focused our attention on this one particular base, when the real challenge
for the alliance has been to come up with a broader framework for the sustainability of
U.S. forces in Japan."


Turn
Increasing Japan alliance causes war with China draws in Russia and
guarantees extinction
Symonds 13 Center for Research on Globalization (Peter, Dangerous Crossroads:
US-Japan Talks Escalate War Preparations against China, Global Research,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/dangerous-crossroads-us-japan-talks-escalate-war-
preparations-against-china/5353040)//trepka
The so-called 2 plus 2 meeting in Tokyo this week of US Secretary of State John Kerry
and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel with their Japanese counterparts marked a
significant escalation of the US military build-up against China. The lengthy joint
statement announced major deployments of hi-tech US weaponry to Japan and a green
light for Japanese remilitarisation, within the framework of a more robust alliance.
Thursdays talks took place in the wake of the Obama administrations decision to
postpone an imminent military attack on Syria last month in the face of mass popular
opposition, both in the United States and around the world. The 2 plus 2 meetings
make clear that despite the postponement of war with Syria, Washingtons plans for
military escalation are proceeding apace. Washingtons decision to back down provoked
consternation among US allies not only in the Middle East, but in Asia, where Obamas
pivot has encouraged Japan and other countries to adopt a more aggressive stance
towards China. Fears that American allies could be left out on a limb were underscored
this week when Obama cancelled his high-profile trip to South East Asia amid the crisis
in Washington generated by the government shutdown. While the Obama
administration has repeatedly declared the rebalancing of US military forces to the
Indo-Pacific region would be quarantined from austerity measures, such pledges are
called into question by the political turmoil over the budget. The 2 plus 2 meeting on
Thursday sent the unmistakable message that the US is proceeding with its military
build-up in Asia that includes stationing 60 percent of American naval and air force
assets in the region by 2020. The American deployments announced in the joint
statement are all directed at strengthening US-Japanese military against China. These
include: * The stationing of a second X-band early warning radar in Japan near Kyoto,
as part of joint anti-ballistic missile systems. While nominally directed against North
Koreas primitive nuclear capabilities, these weapons are part of the Pentagons
preparations for nuclear war against China and Russia. * The basing of advanced P-8
surveillance and anti-submarine planes starting in December 2013 and long-range
Global Hawk drones next year. The stepping up of US maritime surveillance in the East
China and South China Seas, where the US pivot has exacerbated tense maritime
disputes with China, including with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu island, is
particularly provocative. * Two squadrons of MV-22 Osprey vertical take-off transport
planes will enhance the capacity of the Japanese military to rapidly deploy troops in the
event of a conflict over the Senkakus. The Pentagon also plans to deploy F-35B vertical
take-off stealth fighters by 2017again for the first time outside the USboosting its
ability to carry out its Air-Sea Battle strategy for a blitzkrieg against military targets
inside China. The Obama administrations pivot to Asia, which began in mid-2009
and was openly announced in November 2011, has inflamed nationalism and militarism
throughout the region. Nowhere is this more evident than in Japan, where the right-wing
government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which took office last December, has boosted
military spending, toughened its stance on the Senkakus, and taken steps to free the
military from the constraints imposed by the Japanese constitution, which formally
forbids external military aggression. In the joint 2 by 2 statement, the US welcomed
Japans intention to make more proactive contributions to addressing the challenges
faced by the international community; its decision to establish a National Security
Council; its expanded military budget; its re-examination of the legal basis for collective
self-defence; and regional contributions, including capacity building effects vis--vis
South East Asian countries. Abe is proceeding with his election pledge to build a
strong Japan with a strong military. His government is seeking to either circumvent
or amend the constitution to allow for collective self-defencethat is, the ability of
Japanese imperialism to wage war with the US including pre-emptive military strikes.
Japan has already pledged to boost the coast guard in the Philippinesthe former US
colony and leading South East Asian partner in confronting China. The 2 by 2
statement also laid out closer US-Japanese military collaboration in intelligence sharing,
cyber warfare and space-based maritime domain awarenessthat is, the use of spy
satellites for surveillance of the Western Pacific. Japan and the US also reaffirmed their
agreement on US military bases on Okinawa, which have provoked deep popular
opposition. Tokyo has agreed to pay $3.1 billion towards the relocation of 9,000 US
Marines to Guam as part of the Pentagons broader restructuring of US forces
throughout the region, including to Australia and the Philippines. This weeks
ministerial meeting was the first time that such high-level talks were held in Tokyo,
rather than Washington, in recognition of Japans greater responsibilities. The Obama
administration clearly regards the Abe government as a central partner in its efforts to
contain and prepare for war against China. The planned revision of the Guidelines for
Japan-US Defence Cooperation will formalise robust new military arrangements.
The escalation of US military deployments to East Asia and US encouragement of
Japanese militarism as an adjunct to the Pentagon testify to the utter recklessness of US
foreign policy. Staggered by an intractable capitalist crisis in the United States and
worldwide, US imperialism is intensifying its pursuit of global hegemony through
military intimidation and war. Amid growing popular opposition to war, the tempo of
US military aggression has accelerated since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in
2008, threatening an even greater conflagration. Having temporarily stepped back from
an attack on Syriaa war that risked a confrontation with Iran, Russia and Chinathe
US has stepped up its preparations for just such a conflict. In every country, the drive to
war is being accompanied by the whipping up of poisonous nationalism and a relentless
assault on the living standards of working people. The only social force able to prevent
war is an independent movement of the international working class to abolish its root
causeglobal capitalism and its outmoded nation state systemand reorganise the
world economy on socialist lines for the benefit of all humanity.
Relations Resilient
US - Japan relations are resilient
Xu 7/1/2014 Writer and Editor for the Council on Foreign Relations (Beina, The
U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, CFR, http://www.cfr.org/japan/us-japan-security-
alliance/p31437)

Forged in the wake of World War II, the U.S.-Japan security alliance has served as one of
the region's most important military relationships and as an anchor of the U.S. security
role in Asia. Revised in 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security grants the
United States the right to military bases on the archipelago in exchange for a U.S. pledge
to defend Japan in the event of an attack. The partnership has endured several
geopolitical transitions, rooting its framework in the postwar security environment
and expanding in the aftermath of the Cold War with the rise of China and a nuclearizing
North Korea. Cooperation during the Gulf and Iraq wars and the March 2011 Tohoku
earthquake reaffirmed the strength of the alliance, but challenges remain. The U.S.
military presence on Okinawa, North Korea's nuclearization, territorial disputes with
China, and Japan's recent push to upgrade its defense preparedness have all challenged
the alliance's resilience as the Obama administration considers the direction of its
strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.
Relations resilient Fukushima cooperation and new economic deals
Xu 7/1/2014 Writer and Editor for the Council on Foreign Relations (Beina, The
U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, CFR, http://www.cfr.org/japan/us-japan-security-
alliance/p31437)

The coordination between U.S. and Japanese military forces after the devastating March
2011 earthquake and consequent tsunami that struck Tohoku demonstrated the
resilience of the alliance. The SDF conducted rescue operations in tandem with
thousands of U.S. forces under Operation Tomodachi, the largest bilateral mission in the
history of the alliance. U.S. forces aided the SDF in clearing Sendai's airport, assisted in
search-and-rescue teams, and prepared Japan's defense readiness. This high level of
support echoed Japan's own cooperation during the Gulf and Iraq wars. In November
2001, the government of Junichiro Koizumi dispatched the Maritime Self-Defense Force
to the Indian Ocean to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, marking Japan's
first overseas military action during a combat operation. A year later, Japan drafted a bill
that would allow the SDF to be dispatched to postwar Iraq, and in 2003 it sent forces to
aid in postwar reconstruction efforts. At a 2 + 2 meeting in early October 2013, the
United States agreed to deploy reconnaissance drones to Japan, which also pledged up to
$3.1 billion to relocate five thousand U.S. Marines from Okinawa to Guam. Ministers
also agreed to rewrite the guidelines for U.S.-Japanese Defense Cooperation for the first
time since 1997 in revisions that would expand cooperation on counterterrorism and
bolster the allies' ability to respond to an attack on Japan. "The United States has an
even bigger roleto not only mediate, but create a new framework of cooperation in the
region." Yukio Okamoto, former special adviser to prime ministers Ryutaro Hashimoto
and Junichiro Koizumi In July 2014, Japan took a step toward a more active role in
regional security when Abe announced that his cabinet had approved a reinterpretation
of the antiwar Constitution that would allow Japanese forces to aid friendly nations
under attack. The decision marks a significant shift from a position that had strictly
limited Japan to act solely in its own defense. "Japan, for half a century, has expanded its
military capability in ways that raise questions about the interpretation of Article Nine in
its constitution," says Smith. "And the question has become, 'How much can Japan do in
the alliance?'" Some experts have defined the modern-day alliance to be more inclusive,
advocating initiatives such as trade and energy cooperation as the road to a future
framework. "This is bigger than just the military. These are instruments we use to
improve our own national prosperity and security, and that's fundamentally what this
alliance should be about," Smith says. The multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership has
been a highly promising economic development that observers hope will tighten the
alliance. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster forced Japan to reconsider its energy
policies, Washington agreed to a long-term liquefied natural gas export deal with Japan
that could see the United States become a supplier for the island country. "This is the
most relevant the alliance has been in a long time," says Lind. "With the ebb and flow of
what's going on in the region, these are two countries that are highly
incentivized to make this work."

US-Russia relations
Putin rhetoric proves relations resilient
VOA, 7/4 Voice of America (VOA News July 04, 2014 Putin Calls for Better US-Russia
Relations http://www.voanews.com/content/putin-calls-for-better-us-russia-
relations/1950684.html)//gingE
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for better relations between Russia and the
United States in a congratulatory message to President Barack Obama on the U.S.
Independence Day holiday. Putin expressed hope in his message Friday that the
currently strained relations between the two nations will develop on a "pragmatic and
equal foundation" despite their differences. The Russian president said the two nations
carry special responsibility for safeguarding international stability and security, and
should therefore cooperate in the interests of the entire world. Relations between
Washington and Moscow have been at a low not seen since the Cold War since Russia
annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula earlier this year. The U.S. and its European allies
have curbed diplomatic cooperation with Russia and introduced sanctions in response to
the annexation. The United States and the European Union have threatened to enact
more sanctions aimed at ending Moscow's support for pro-Russian separatists inside
Ukraine's borders.
Alt causes to relationsMH 17
Labott, 7/20 - CNN Foreign Affairs Reporter (Elise, Sun July 20, 2014 Jet downing a
'game-changer' in world relations with Russia
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/18/politics/russia-ukraine-world-
relations/index.html)//gingE
Washington (CNN) -- The United States predicts the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17, likely by pro-Russian rebels, will fundamentally shift the relationship between
Russia and the international community. "It is a game-changer," one senior State
Department official said. While Washington has stopped short of blaming Russia, U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said Friday the United States
believes the jet carrying nearly 300 people was downed by a surface-to-air missile fired
by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. Due to the sophistication of the Buk missile
system believed to have been used, Power said it was "unlikely that the separatists could
effectively operate the system without assistance from knowledgeable personnel." That
means "we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel in operating the
systems," she added. Officials said regardless of whether Russian operatives were
manning the system, Russia bears responsibility for the attack because of its military and
political support for the rebels. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its delivery of
sophisticated military equipment, officials said. "While it may take us some time to
firmly establish who shot down a plane filled with innocents, most (U.N. Security
Council) members and most members of the international community have been
warning for months about the devastation that would come if Russia did not stop what it
started, if it did not rein in what it unleashed," Power said. Another senior U.S. official
said that the "responsibility is Russia's whether they had Russian personnel there or they
gave them equipment and an instruction manual" on what to do. "These separatist
leaders are taking orders from Russia and (Russian President Vladimir Putin) has to
realize the consequence of sending heavy and sophisticated weapons to a gang of
sociopaths, extremists, violent thugs, nationalists and agents who are just given weapons
and told to make chaos," the official said.

Resiliency checks any impact
Speedie, David 8/16/13 - Director, U.S. Global Engagement Program, Senior Fellow
(No, the Sky Is Not Falling, Carnegie Council, August 8, 2013,
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/0166.html,
accessed: 8/24/13, LR)

Be all this as it may, Chicken Little is wrong; nor, indeed, is this "the lowest point [in
U.S.-Russia relations] since the fall of the Soviet Union," as Kathy Lally solemnly
observed in a recent Washington Post article. The title of her article is here revealing:
"U.S.-Russia relations turn chillyagain." The key word is, of course, "again," and it
reinforces two simple truths: we have seen this before, and matters between the
two have been worse. Let us pose the question: Is the current state of affairs actually
worse than, or even as bad as, that which arose from the expansion of NATO to Russia's
borders in the 1990s? Or the bombing of Russia's ally, Serbia, by U.S.-led NATO forces in
1999? On the personal level, there was the infamous photograph of Obama and Putin
seated together at the June 2013 summit in Northern Ireland, each in a grim "I'd rather
not be here," eye-contact avoiding pose. But is this actually worse than the caustic
exchange between Putin and then-President George W. Bush at the Beijing Olympics,
when differences over Russian-Georgian hostilities provoked the description of Putin by
Bush: "cold as ice"?

Politics overwhelms
Speedie, David 8/16/13 - Director, U.S. Global Engagement Program, Senior Fellow
(No, the Sky Is Not Falling, Carnegie Council, August 8, 2013,
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/0166.html,
accessed: 8/24/13)

In sum, and to repeat, we are not in uncharted territory here: there have been moments
of historically high tension, graver than today. The dialogue must resume, for a couple of
reasons: first, itengagementis, as we have just argued, the right thing to do. Second,
it is the sensible thing to do, given the gravity of the challenges and Russia's singular
potential contribution to their amelioration. Russia, after all, borders, and must deal
with, virtually every nasty neighborhood on the planet, from North Korea to the Middle
East. The stakes for Russia could not be higher. A mature and sensible approach here
could reverse what has been, in Russian eyes at least, a 20-year pattern of triumphalist
policy on the part of the United Stateswe won the Cold War, we'll call the post-Cold
War shots, if you want to come on board, that's fine, if not, we'll proceed anyhow. In an
essay for the 2008 book To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine
(edited by Melvyn P. Lefler and Jeffrey W. Legro), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
political science professor Stephen Van Evera writes: "What grand strategy should the
United States adopt in the post-9/11 era? . . . The world's major powers should organize
themselves into a grand alliance, or concertalong the lines of the 1815 Concert of
Europeto take united action against WMD proliferation, WMD terrorism and threats
to the global commons. The United States should lead in creating and sustaining this
new concert." To the extent that this ambitious concert is achievable, and for all the
differences that exist and will persist, Russia would be an indispensable member. Our
common strategic interests outweigh our differences; let's not allow the latter to prevail.


Relations have been low for a while
Fly 11 Foreign Policy initiative executive director (Jamie, Time to Abandon Reset?
10/10/11, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/279602/time-abandon-reset-jamie-
m-fly)
Putins return should serve as a wakeup call for President Obama and his advisers. The
reset policy profoundly misreads not only why U.S.-Russia relations chilled in the first
place, but also what is truly required to improve them. The problem was not U.S.
rhetoric or actions, but the nature of the Russian regime. U.S.-Russian relations will not
be on a firm footing until Moscow changes its strategic outlook and the Russian people
are truly free to choose their own leaders. Rather than coddle the Kremlin, the Obama
administration should embrace the strategic goal of helping Russia move toward a truly
representative democracy. Unfortunately, the administrations focus on questionable
efforts to obtain Russian acquiescence on certain issues such as the New Strategic
Arms Reduction Treaty, limited cooperation on Iran, and the Northern Distribution
Network into Afghanistan has prevented administration officials from speaking
frankly and repeatedly about the true nature of the Russian regime. Instead,
administration officials tried to argue that the iPad-toting, tweeting President Medvedev
represented a more moderate face of the new Russia, and that administration priorities
with Russia were aimed at bolstering Medvedev vis--vis Putin. In November 2010, Vice
President Biden outlined the administrations thinking, telling journalists: I do believe
that there is a play here. Biden added: Medvedev has rested everything on this notion
of a reset. Who knows what Putin would do? My guess is he would not have gone there
[in terms of committing to the reset], but maybe. The administrations investment in
Medvedev came even as opposition parties were harassed and blocked from competing
in elections, peaceful protesters jailed, journalists beaten and killed, and routine legal
norms repeatedly violated under Medvedevs leadership. Russias rhetoric and
threatening actions toward its neighbors also changed little under Medvedev, and the
U.S. reset had the unfortunate affect of implying to U.S. allies in the region that
Washington was all too willing to overlook their interests in the pursuit of cooperation
with Moscow. Moving forward, the Obama administration should recognize that there
are few areas in which genuine U.S.-Russian cooperation is both possible and mutually
advantageous. Combating the spread of nuclear weapons may seem like such an area,
but experience has shown that Russia has little desire to deal seriously with proliferators
like Iran and North Korea. Indeed, Russia has repeatedly rebuffed and watered down
Obamas attempt to address Irans, Syrias, and North Koreas nuclear misbehavior in the
U.N. Security Council. Russia has also blocked U.S. and European efforts to condemn the
brutal crackdown underway in Syria by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and dragged its
feet as the Security Council debated the emerging crisis in Libya earlier this year. The
United States will continue to need Russias permission to fly over its territory to supply
NATO forces in Afghanistan via the Northern Distribution Network even more so as
U.S.-Pakistani ties deteriorate but this alone is not a reason to gloss over Russias
record. The Obama administration should instead take this opportunity to advance a
democracy-centered approach to Moscow. The United States must make clear that
Russias authoritarianism is unacceptable. Every beating and killing of a journalist, every
mass arrest at an opposition rally, every rigged election, and every thuggish public
statement made by a member of the regime must be roundly and repeatedly condemned
by the U.S. government at the highest levels. Recent legislative sanctions sponsored by
Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) in response to the murder of Russian tax lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky are a worthy and notable example of this approach. In addition, the United
States should use Russias interest in accession to the World Trade Organization to raise
the profile of these human-rights concerns. The administration must also do more to
assist our ally Georgia, including through weapons sales, which have not occurred since
Russias 2008 invasion. With the return of Vladimir Putin, U.S.-Russian relations are
headed for even more turbulent times. Unfortunately, the White House seems oblivious
to that reality. In response to Putins announcement, Bidens November 2010 caution
was thrown to the wind as White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declared: While we
have had a very strong working relationship with President Medvedev, its worth noting
that Vladimir Putin was prime minister through the reset. . . . We will continue to build
on the progress of the reset whoever serves as the next president of Russia.

Relations dont translate into global issues
Ostapenko, 9
[Trend News, Normalization in U.S.-Russian relations not to change political situation
in world: analyst at French studies institute, 7-8,
http://en.trend.az/news/important/opinion/1501081.html]
Normalization of relations between the United States and Russia will not assume a global
significance and will not change the situation in the world, since today Russia does not
play the role it played formerly, Dominic Moisi, analyst on Russian-American relations,
said. "There is a country that is essential for the future of the world, it is not Russia, but
it is China," Moisi, founder and senior advisor at the French Institute for International
Relations (IFRI), told Trend News in a telephone conversation from Paris Speaking of
the growing role of China, Moisi said that the Chinese are soon going to be the number
two economy in the world. Russian economy can not compete. As another important
aspect of the increasing weight of China in the world, Moisi considers the absence of
problems with the aging of population, unlike European countries, including Russia.

Collapse wont cause war
Dimitri Simes 07 Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec2007, Vol. 86 Issue 6, p36-52, 16p, 3bw,
Losing Russia, President of the Nixon Center and Publisher of The National Interest.

These numerous disagreements do not mean that Russia is an enemy. After all, Russia
has not supported al Qaeda or any other terrorist group at war with the United States
and no longer promotes a rival ideology with the goal of world domination. Nor has it
invaded or threatened to invade its neighbors. Finally, Russia has opted not to foment
separatism in Ukraine, despite the existence there of a large and vocal Russian minority
population. Putin and his advisers accept that the United States is the most powerful
nation in the world and that provoking it needlessly makes little sense. But they are no
longer willing to adjust their behavior to fit U.S. preferences, particularly at
the expense of their own interests.

Russia is too reliant on the West
Andrew C. Kuchins 08, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 2-29, 08, The RussianElection
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/080229_cq_russia_election_kuchins.pdf

That does not mean, however, that we are on the brink of a new Cold War era of
confrontation with Russia. Russias primary goal for the next generation will be
economic growth and modernization of the country. The needs there are immense. A
Cold Warlike military competition bankrupted the USSR, and no serious Russian
politician wants to re-run that kind of exercise today. The Russian political elite also
understand that to have any chance of meeting their ambitious economic goals, they will
have to be more and not less integrated in the global economy and especially with
Europe. Their real, not imaginary threats are currently radical Islam and terrorism to the
south and longer-term concern about Chinas development to the east: neither
contingency will be effectively addressed by hostility toward the West, just the opposite.
On the darker side, we should expect increasing Russian assertiveness often contrary to
our interests in the countries on its western periphery including Ukraine, Georgia, and
others.

The impact is inevitable
Dimitri Simes 07 Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec2007, Vol. 86 Issue 6, p36-52, 16p, 3bw,
Losing Russia, President of the Nixon Center and Publisher of The National Interest.

Working constructively with Russia does not mean nominating Putin for the Nobel Peace
Prize or inviting him to address a joint session of Congress. Nor is anyone encouraging
Russia to join NATO or welcoming it as a great democratic friend. What Washington
must do is work with Russia to advance essential U.S. interests in the same way that the
United States works with other important nondemocratic states, such as China,
Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia. This means avoiding both misplaced affection and the
unrealistic sense that the United States can take other countries for granted without
consequences. Few deny that such cooperation should be pursued, but Washington's
naive and self-serving conventional wisdom holds that the United States can secure
Russia's cooperation in areas important to the United States while maintaining complete
freedom to ignore Russian priorities. U.S. officials believe that Moscow should
uncritically support Washington against Iran and Islamist terrorists on the theory that
Russia also considers them threats. However, this argument ignores the fact that Russia
views the Iranian threat very differently. Although Russia does not want a nuclear-armed
Iran, it does not feel the same sense of urgency over the issue and may be satisfied with
intrusive inspections preventing industrial-scale uranium enrichment. Expecting Russia
to accommodate the United States on Iran without regard to U.S. policy on other issues
is the functional equivalent of expecting Iraqis to welcome the U.S. and coalition troops
as liberators in that it fundamentally ignores the other side's perspective on U.S. actions.




Terrorism
Bioterror

No threat of Bioterrorism --

1. Cost.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Beyond the accessibility and availability of biological agents is the hurdle of having
financial means to acquire them. Aum Shinrikyo had considerable options, as they were
one of the most well funded terrorist organizations. With roughly $1 billion in funds,
they owned several buildings, including hidden medical facilities, and were able to fund
bioweapon trials (Thompson, 2006). While individuals like Larry Wayne Harris were
able to pay for these organisms online, the availability of these pathogens has been
regulated in recent years to prevent such events from occurring (Tucker, 2000).
Acquiring an agent via theft can also be monetarily taxing, as bribes and the equipment
to transport the pathogen could be costly. Attempting to isolate a pathogen naturally is
also extremely expensive, requiring all the necessary laboratory equipment, which in the
case of viruses, is extensive. Beyond the technical know-how needed for this method, the
purchasing of the equipment alone is a major deterrent. One can not simply collect dirt
and isolate anthrax.


2. Disease Effectiveness.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Once a non-state actor has made it past the first hurdle and acquired an agent, the real
work begins. Weaponizing an agent through cultivation (the process of growing
biological pathogens) and dissemination (spreading the pathogen to individuals for
disease transmission) are two of the most technically demanding and failure-prone
components of bioterrorism. While terrorists with financial resources can gain access to
laboratory equipment for weaponizing, as it is technically dual-use, this does not
guarantee proficiency using it. Dual use refers to the fact that the equipment needed for
creating bioweapons is the same equipment needed to help isolate pathogens for vaccine
or treatment research. Figure 3 provides a clear view of how dual use can work to the
bioterrorists advantage (Thompson, 2006). All the laboratory equipment is
commercially available, albeit pricey. After purchasing the equipment (glassware,
desktop fermenter, and standard nutrient media) and obtaining the pathogen, the ability
to isolate and grow the pathogen comes into play. Viruses are the most difficult in that
they cannot live outside a living cell, but require fertilized eggs in which to grow. Just as
Aum Shinrikyo attempted to isolate toxin strains of botulism from soil, they ran into the
necessity for technical knowledge needed to isolate large quantities via enrichment
materials (Thompson, 2006; Tucker, 2000).
Purifying toxins is especially difficult. Rosenau noted that, botulinum toxins are
extremely difficult to purify, particularly in large quantities, and are highly unstable in
pure from. Purification entails the separation of the toxin from the cells that create it.
The difficulty of producing a sufficiently pure toxin is compounded by the fact that the
protein-destroying enzyme is generated at the same time as the toxin. Maintaining the
toxicity of the material as it is purified is extremely difficult (Rosenau, 2001). U.S.
government researchers have found that attempts to reach 95% purity (the level to truly
cause mass illness) reduces the amount of the toxin to 70-80% (Rosenau, 2001). Toxins
especially degrade quickly when exposed to sunlight and air, which means they can lose
their efficacy by a rate of 4% per minute (Rosenau, 2001).
The same issue also arises when attempting to isolate a toxic form of anthrax. Anthrax is
naturally occurring in soil and does not cause illness (except in livestock and rare cases
of humans), but isolating and transforming specific B. anthracis dormant spores into
active, aerosolized particles is technically very complex (Zubay, 2005). The spore itself is
highly resistant to environmental stresses but is also very unstable in its vegetative state,
which requires extensive microbiological knowledge and experience to cultivate spores
and not kill them when they are in the vegetative state. Attempts to isolate and grow B.
anthracis are also compounded by the knowledge needed to identify the correct strain
(Rosenau, 2001; Zubay, 2005). There are several bacillus species, but identifying and
growing the correct one requires years of knowledge. Once the correct bacteria is
isolated, awaking it from the dormant state becomes progressively challenging, as it
requires heat or chemical shock without killing the pathogen (Zubay, 2005; Roseanu,
2001).
Bacteria are probably the easiest of the pathogens to isolate and cultivate, but viruses are
considerably more difficult. Both Rajneeshees and Aum Shinrikyo had considered
obtaining and utilizing viruses like Ebola (a viral hemorrhagic fever) and HIV (Carus,
2002; Tucker, 2000). Viruses like those that appeal to terrorists are extremely difficult to
isolate and grow, as the required host cells must be living. Consider the weaponization of
influenza, which is easier to obtain naturally than any other category A or B agent.


3. Professional Expertise.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

The technical knowledge and experience necessary for isolating, cultivating, and
weaponizing pathogens for bioweapons is a particular hurdle that has prevented several
terrorist organizations from being successful. Given the technical difficulty in housing,
cultivating, and weaponizing an agent, the need for persons trained in virology,
pathology, or microbiology is crucial. The mental degradation of Aum Shinrikyo
members through drug use and paranoia is suggested to have severely reduced their
ability continue such technically proficient work (Tucker, 2000). While drug use and
paranoia was rampant in Aum, these matters were coupled with general technical
hurdles that required substantial scientific experience to solve the issues. Aums head
microbiologist and bioweapons specialist, Seiichi Endo, was unable to cultivate a lethal
strain of botulism, which most likely was a result of his inexperience in microbiology
(Rosenau, 2001). Endo was trained as a molecular biologist, not a microbiologist, so as
their head of bioweapons he significantly lacked the necessary technical expertise.
The Amerithrax attacks highlight the extensive expertise that is needed for large-scale,
complex biological attacks. Anthrax, as previously discussed, is extremely volatile and
difficult to weaponize, which is why the suspect was believed to be an extremely
experienced microbiologist with years of experience not just in the field, but also with
that particular organism. Acquiring a lethal strain of anthrax or botulinum is especially
difficult as there are several strains that can be harmless. Only an experienced researcher
or laboratory microbiologist would know how to isolate and cultivate the lethal strains.
The Rajneeshees were able to easily acquire S. typhirium (arriving on bactrol disks) and
grow the bacteria in larger quantities as a result of an experienced laboratory technician
who also manufactured it into liquid form (Carus, 2002). The ability to transfer and grow
bacteria, especially salmonella, is far easier than that of botulinum or anthrax, but still
requires a basic understanding of the laboratory practices.
Knowledge and skills to use the equipment is also a considerable hurdle. Laboratory
equipment, especially that needed to isolate and weaponize mass quantities of bacteria
or virus, is extremely complex and can be dangerous. Equipment misuse or poor
technique can be devastating to the individual working on the experiment. Tucker found
that because of sloppy laboratory practices, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult
reportedly became infected with Q-fever, a rickettsial disease they were prepping as a
biological weapon. Even cult leader Shoko Asahara is believed to have acquired the
debilitating illness (Tucker, 2000).


4. Dissemination.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Dissemination is considered to be the greatest of hurdles in bioterrorism. Tucker has
noted that although persistent chemical agents such as sulfur mustard and VX nerve gas
are readily absorbed through the intact skin, no bacteria or viruses can enter the body by
any route unless the skin is already broken. Thus, BW agents must either be ingested or
inhaled to cause infection (Tucker, 2000). A biological weapon must have a means of
transmission, and to be effective, this transmission should reach as many people as
possible.


5. Aerosolization.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

There are several routes of dissemination, but the one most attempted and of most
concern to biosecurity experts is aerosolization. Aerosolization is a means of creating a
cloud that contains the infectious agents via microscopic droplets for victims to inhale.
Respiratory inhalation is the most dangerous form for both plague and anthrax, which
underscores the appeal that aerosolization has for terrorists. Aerosolization also has the
capacity to infect large numbers of people over substantial geographical spaces.
Calculations found that 100 kilograms of anthrax spread over Washington, D.C., could
kill 1-3 million people, versus a one-megaton nuclear warhead, which would kill a
maximum of 1.9 million (Carus, 2002).
The Amerithrax attacks were a good example of aerosolization in the most rudimentary,
non-technical delivery form. The perpetrator did not develop an aerosolization method,
but rather the spores were so finely prepared that they easily traveled in the air. While
this route of dissemination is the most appealing, it also had the largest technical
hurdles. For effective inhalation, the particles in an aerosol cloud have to be roughly 1-5
microns (one-millionth of a meter) in size (Carus, 2002). Particles larger than 5 microns
will be caught through the respiratory tract filter and often are too heavy to travel, thus
they fall quickly and are not as effective voyagers. Aum Shinrikyo is one particular group
that attempted to use aerosolization in the truest technical form (Carus, 2002). By
developing delivery systems like sprayers that aerosolize pathogens into a cloud,
terrorists can discretely release large amounts of bioweapons into a wide geographical
area.
Aerosolization, however, is an extremely complicated process. To spread an agent
through the air, it must be in either liquid (slurry) or dry form, which in and of itself is an
arduous task. Those preparing it must then address both physical issues (to ensure the
sprayer nozzles do not become clogged) and biological issues (to ensure that the
organisms can survive once aerosolized). An agent in liquid form can be aerosolized
using a modified commercially available sprayer, but problems remain. Most agents die
in the spraying process- estimates range as high as 99% (Rosenau, 2001). In contrast, a
dry agent is relatively simple to disseminate, but most experts agree producing it is a
dangerous process almost certainly beyond the capabilities of non-state actors (Carus,
2002). Rosenau also noted that to truly cause massive casualties, an aerosolized cloud,
not just sprayed material (like Windex), is needed (Rosenau, 2001).
The slurry form of a pathogen can quickly clog spraying canisters or fall to the bottom of
the container, rendering it ineffective. Aum Shinrikyo experienced this with their
attempts to spread what they believed to be B. anthracis from a rooftop building in
Tokyo. The bacteria slurry, which was actually a harmless anthrax strain, was not
refrigerated until the very last minute, so the slurry settled at the bottom (Tucker, 2000).
A pathogen in liquid or slurry state is also more difficult to aerosolize, as its size is larger,
so it tends to fall more quickly. Rosenau also noted that bacteria tend to die more quickly
in a slurry form as they are aerosolized (Rosenau, 2001). Perhaps one of the biggest
issues with aerosolization is the fact that the pathogens tend to lose their toxicity not
only in the aerosolization process, but also as they enter the atmosphere. Environmental
conditions, which will be discussed later, pose serious risks to the viability of pathogens.
Overall, aerosolization is the most effective dissemination strategy, but also has the
largest number of complications. Aerosolization, while the most appealing as it can lead
to higher efficacy if done correctly, poses the largest amount of technical obstacles for
non-state actors to overcome. The delivery system requires substantial technological
prowess, but also the form of the pathogen can alter the efficacy of the aerosolization.
Dry or slurry format can create problems in the actual delivery device, as well as efficacy
for the pathogen to stay within 1-5 microns in size and travel considerable distances.


6. Wind.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Environmental and meteorological conditions are surprisingly a large component of the
successful bioterrorism attacks. Wind speeds and direction present a serious hurdle for
aerosolization attempts. Environmental conditions, specifically wind, create large
variation in outcomes, which could defeat the organization pursing them. Aerosolization
is the most effective method of dissemination, but beyond its technical hurdles, it is also
the most susceptible to environmental conditions. Particles must be between 1-5 microns
for effective inhalation and aerosolization devices. Wind can carry pathogen particles far
distances, but it can also greatly diminish the efficacy of dissemination. Rosenau has
noted that, if wind speed is less than 5 mph, the aerosol will be limited in coverage. If
wind speed exceeds 30 mph the aerosol disintegrates, loses its integrity, and effects on
the target cannot be predicted (Rosenau, 2001).


7. Heat & Humidity
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Heat, moisture, and precipitation can also severely impact the ability to release a
pathogen into the environment. Most agents are extremely vulnerable to sunlight and
heat. Biological agents released in the day, like those used by Aum Shinrikyo, have
significantly higher failure rates. UV radiation is a significant vulnerability for
microorganisms, with many unable to survive longer than 30 minutes in sunlight. While
anthrax is able to survive these tough conditions as a result of its induced spore form,
humidity in the air may hinder its ability to disperse (Tucker, 2000). Rainy seasons and
environments with relative high humidity levels can prevent microorganisms from
aerosolizing.
Recent studies analyzing the role of humidity and temperature on the transmission of
influenza found that relative humidity (RH) levels played a large role. In high RH (80%),
influenza droplets settle too rapidly, making aerosolized transmission exceedingly
difficult. Aerosolized transmission was highest at low RH (20-35%) and at some higher
RH levels (65%), but not beyond 80%. The lowest transmission occurred at medium and
extremely high RH levels. The study also found that transmission efficacy was inversely
correlated with temperature. Lower temperatures (5C) permitted a statistically
significant higher rate of transmission compared to 20 C (Lowen, 2007). Given the role
of humidity and temperature on pathogen survival and aerosolized transmission, finding
conducive environmental conditions may be exceedingly difficult.


8. Altitude of Dissemination.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Altitude draws upon all of the aforementioned environmental conditions. As Aum
Shinrikyo found through their rooftop dissemination attempt, locations too high may
face wind, rain, and smog conditions that render these attempts useless. The oxygen
levels of high altitude conditions can also increase the rate of microbial decay, as some
bacteria are aerobic, meaning they require oxygen. The biggest concern with high-
altitude dissemination attempts is the role of wind and geographical distance. Wind
changes can alter the course of pathogen distribution, but also inhibit its spread. Higher
altitude locations will have higher wind speeds, which will break down the aerosols
integrity. Aum Shinrikyo thought that a higher building would equate to a larger
geographical distribution, however, it also heavily contributed to their failure
(Thompson, 2006; Rosenau, 2001).


9. Incubation period.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

The time from exposure to infection and communicability may pose another roadblock
for terrorists. This epidemiological obstacle for bioweapons has not been heavily
researched, but several terrorist groups have reportedly encountered it. Incubation
periods can range from hours to weeks depending upon the organism. Incubation
periods of diseases are variable and dependent upon the type of exposure (inhalation,
bloodborne, or mucous membrane) the organism itself, susceptibility of the host, and the
targets physiological conditions, all of which cannot be accounted for by a non-state
actor.
There are several stages to infection, but as seen in Figure 4, there can be considerable
time between exposure, incubation, and symptoms (Symptoms, n.d.). Toxins, like
botulism, can cause illness in a matter of hours, while viruses tend to take longer.
Incubation periods represent a roadblock for bioterrorism because they have relatively
large ranges and are difficult to predict. The Rajneeshees found this to be a problem, as
they needed to infect a large group of the county population to prevent them from voting
(Thompson, 2006). S. typhimurium did not just infect and incapacitate people all on one
day, but rather over the course of roughly a week (Carus, 2002). If the intention of the
attack is to cause illness during a certain time window, incubation periods can seriously
erode the efficacy of such an attack. Incubation periods can also allow for pathogen
identification and for treatment to be initiated before some of the exposed population is
sickened. In the Amerithrax attacks, some individuals were sick before others, which
triggered an investigation and allowed for an outbreak investigation to follow up with all
exposed persons and initiate treatment (Preston, 2003; Thompson, 2006).



Status quo solves Bioterrorism --

1. Surveillance.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

While most do not know the intricacies of its methods, disease surveillance provides a
substantial strategy for diminishing the impact of bioterrorist events. Disease
surveillance is the systematic collection and analysis of data to identify and monitor
patterns within disease distribution. Public health is designed to provide disease
surveillance and epidemiological response in cases of disease outbreaks. While not all
countries have the same level of surveillance capability, governments, both nationally
and through international agreements, have created public health organizations to
prevent and control the spread of disease.
In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),
work to provide public health support at a national level. Beyond these organizations,
each U.S. state has a health department, as do their counties. Disease surveillance is
performed either actively or passively. Active surveillance entails going out and
collecting the information, while passive surveillance employs counterparts (such as
hospitals, clinics, and universities) to collect data and pass it along. Most public health
systems are passive unless there is an outbreak, mostly as a result of lack of resources.
(Buehler, 2004).
Disease surveillance in the United States starts with a healthcare facility receiving a
patient and obtaining labs or physician diagnosis that can confirm illness. Larger
hospitals will have their own microbiology department that is capable of running
extensive laboratory work from blood cultures to respiratory viral panels. State
laboratories are commonly used for rare or complex tests that other facilities are unable
to process. These tests tend to involve uncommon pathogens such as shiga-toxin
producing Eschericia coli (the E.coli strain that was notorious for causing national
outbreaks and associated deaths) and botulism. Once test results are reported, hospitals
are required to report certain diseases to their county health departments. Each state has
a list of reportable communicable diseases that range from anthrax, to plague, and
syphilis (ADHS, n.d.).
Hospitals and state laboratories both report these cases with patient information to
county health departments, who then report them to state health departments. Rare
cases like measles or botulism would prompt communication with the CDC. Disease
surveillance from specimen collection to county health department response can take a
day in some cases. Specific diseases on reportable lists (those of the Category A, B, or C)
require immediate phone calls, versus faxing or electronically reporting within a period
of business days (ADHS, n.d.). Hospitals, state health departments, and county health
departments all work very closely and in many cases are in communication on a daily
basis.
Disease surveillance in the U.S. is taken very seriously at a health care level. It is very
common for public health departments to do in-service education with emergency
department physicians annually for training on uncommon diseases or zebras. After
the Amerithrax attacks, there was a heightened awareness and education regarding
bioweapon pathogens, so much so that physicians began to include them on differential
diagnoses (initial triage diagnosis prior to any confirmatory lab work), which may have
led to physician hypersensitivity regarding bioweapon issues.
There was a wave of eagerness to identify these pathogens after Amerithrax, leading to a
hypersensitivity towards Category A agents (Cosgrove, 2005; Leitenberg, 2005).
Jokingly coined zebras, these pathogens are rarely seen, but continuous education is
provided to first responders. While there are gaps in any chain, the level of disease
surveillance that occurs within the U.S. would very quickly pick up an usual agent and
initiate response in a quick manner (NNDSS, n.d.).
This continuous education and reinforced disease reporting make it harder for
bioweapons to go undetected. During large gatherings like sporting events and concerts,
public health departments will touch base with health care facilities to remind them of
the risk for outbreaks, and will perform active surveillance during the event. Syndromic
surveillance has become increasingly common. This form of surveillance involves data
collection regarding over-the-counter medications from drug stores, as well as
emergency room visits involving chief complaints matching certain criteria (Henning,
20004). Syndromic surveillance uses logic-based software to detect large groups of
people purchasing medication and/or seeking medical care for the same illness in a
geographical area or time frame. There is also continuous development of more
sensitive, real-time surveillance methods, which makes bioterrorism that much more
difficult to carry out.


2. Identification.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Once patients enter a healthcare facility, whether that of a primary care physician or a
hospital emergency department, their symptoms are assessed and specimens are often
taken. Since the Amerithrax attacks, several studies have addressed the knowledge gaps
in the ability of physicians (especially emergency) to identify zebras or Category A
agents (Cosgrove, 2005; Moye, 2007). As a result of these studies, extensive education
has been enforced so that emergency and primary care physicians, as the first
diagnosticians, would be able to more accurately identify or pick up on the symptoms
associated with such illnesses. Physicians that see large patient populations are more
exposed to a wide range of diseases, thus honing their diagnostic abilities. In areas where
certain diseases are endemic (Y. pestis, plague, is endemic in states like Arizona and New
Mexico, so physicians in these states are more familiar with the clinical signs and
symptoms) or in patient populations where a disease occurs randomly (botulism in
children or prisons), these diagnostic tools continuously are tested (Nania, 2013).
Overall, the gap in diagnostic capabilities has been identified and attention to
bioterrorism and the commonly associated pathogens have been reinforced in the
medical community. Healthcare workers from nurses to infection preventionists are
educated at workshops and through federally funded training with the Department of
Homeland Security Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP), are better able to respond
and handle epidemics and bioterrorism events (CDP, n.d.). Identification, while sensitive
to human error, has become much stronger since the Amerithrax attacks, making
bioterrorism a center stage topic for physicians. The increased education and capabilities
to identify rare pathogens, especially those commonly used in bioterrorism, would likely
prevent bioterrorism events from growing.


3. Medicine.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

While many consider bioweapons to be unstoppable or without response measures, there
are treatment methodologies in place to respond to their use. Vaccination and treatment
techniques pose a severe hurdle for bioterrorists to overcome. For example, there are
treatment protocols in place for all six Category A agents. Plague, anthrax, and tularemia
are all treated with IV antibiotics, while botulism is treated with an antitoxin. Viral
hemorrhagic fevers (VHF) are trickier: although Ribavirin, an antiviral, has shown
efficacy against certain viruses, others can only be combatted with supportive care
measures (Nania, September 2, 2013).
Smallpox is perhaps the most difficult, as there is currently no treatment for it, but
immediate vaccination following exposure has been shown to be an effective response
measure. Supportive care measures are also used in the case of smallpox. While smallpox
and VHF may seem like effective bioweapons, they present difficulties. Both agents are
viruses, making them difficult to handle and weaponize, and more importantly, both are
extremely rare. No documented cases of smallpox have occurred in almost 40 years, and
VHF occurs infrequently through small outbreaks in Africa. These two pathogens are so
unique and so feared in the health community that even one case triggers massive
response measures (Smallpox, 2007). Treatment for Category B agents is also available
through certain common antibiotics, protocols, and methods like IV vasopressors if ricin
is ingested (Category Agents, n.d.; Nania, 2013).
Overall, treatment for bioweapon agents is highly available and in the U.S. and some
other countries, poses a substantial roadblock for terrorist goals that might include large
outbreaks. The U.S. and other industrialized nations (such as Australia and those
countries in the European Union) are constantly improving response measures for
bioweapons, while health response systems in developing countries are still very
rudimentary (Global infectious disease factsheet. 2013). Efforts within the U.S. also focus
on improving responses to international health crises and emerging infectious diseases,
as borders do not constrict health disasters. Continued efforts to treat and even vaccinate
against these pathogens will only make this more of a barrier for potential bioterrorists.
Vaccination capacity in the U.S. is also a considerable hurdle facing some forms of
bioterrorism. Smallpox and anthrax both have vaccination programs available that could
be mass distributed within several days through the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).
There is also work on vaccine for plague that could be applied (Titball, 2001).
Vaccination programs are effective and can be rolled out quickly with Point of
Distributions (PODs). PODS are specialized units used to quickly and effectively
distribute vaccinations and prophylaxis to large populations. Recent response to
pandemic influenza like H1N1 (swine flu) made public health systems even more
effective in the art of mass vaccination, education, and response measures. After the
Amerithrax attacks, President Bush initiated a mass smallpox vaccination program that
was later halted, but the effect nonetheless showed that national vaccination production
and distribution can occur (Cohen, 2004). Mass vaccination can halt the transmission of
disease and prevent the further spreading of infections, as done with polio and smallpox.


4. Response.
GBD 5/20, publishes the latest news and insights pertaining to health threats from
pathogens, emerging infectious diseases and CBRN agents, (Global Biodefense, May 20,
2014, Capabilities Analysis of Bioterrorism: Roadblocks Facing Non-State Actors Use of
Bioweapons, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/20/bioterrorism-roadblocks-
facing-non-state-actors-use-of-bioweapons/)//HH

Public health preparedness is by no means a new concept, but since the Amerithrax
attacks it has attracted more funding and resources. The U.S. public health system has
become more attuned to the realistic threats that bioweapons and infectious diseases
pose. Federal funding has supplied health departments and related organizations with
more personnel training capacity (Koenig, 2007). Public health preparedness and
response to bioterrorism and pandemics are common components in public health and
healthcare education.
DHSs Center for Domestic Preparedness offers dozens of fully funded certification
courses for first responders and public health personnel. Some may view the recent
H1N1 outbreak as an over-hyped pandemic, but the response that took place helped
mitigate the spread of the virus (Cressey, 2010). The education that came from H1N1
allowed the public health system to review and change their plans to be more effective
and adaptable. Response measures employed in public health emergencies such as
pandemics and bioterrorism events involve isolation, quarantine, mass vaccination or
prophylaxis (treatment to prevent disease), and education.
Because the presence of public health as a component of preparedness has considerably
advanced since the Amerithrax attacks, non-state actors looking to pursue bioterrorism
in the U.S. face formidable challenges. The use of PODs, isolation procedures, and mass
education will likely reduce the efficacy of such attacks. Earlier attacks like Amerithrax,
the Rajneeshees, and small, criminal based attacks such as lab technicians poisoning
doughnuts with salmonella, have increased both the awareness and understanding of
what a biological attack entails and the tools needed to carry out an attack.
The media attention (television and social media) that the Amerithrax attacks received
provided a substantial amount of information to individuals outside the public health
system. Current and future response measures are moving away from control
methodologies and are now focusing on prevention like syndromic surveillance, creating
additional deterrents that can mitigate the impact that bioterrorism events cause
(Buehler, 2004; Henning, 2004). The growing ability to quickly identify and respond to
outbreaks of disease has the potential to greatly minimize the force of bioweapon attacks.


5. Air and Surface Sampling.
Anandwala 5/13, associate dean for public health practice and associate professor of
epidemiology at Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice,
quotes and cites former chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security,
(Riya V., May 13, 2014, Study Validates Air Sampling Techniques to Fight
Bioterrorism, Global Biodefense, http://globalbiodefense.com/2014/05/13/study-
validates-air-sampling-techniques-to-fight-bioterrorism/)//HH

Air and surface sampling techniques currently used by the US government are effective
in fighting bioterrorism and potentially saving lives, a Saint Louis University researcher
finds.
Results published in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism by Alexander Garza, M.D., MPH,
former chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security and a team of
researchers from Los Alamos National Lab reviewed the data from a series of
experiments simulating a bioterrorism attack against the Pentagon. Garza is now the
associate dean for public health practice and associate professor of epidemiology at Saint
Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice.
In 2005 and 2009, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA) in order to simulate a
deliberate attack, staged the release of a harmless bacteria that is biological similar to
Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes the disease anthrax. They then evaluated the
local response procedures to such an attack. In conjunction with this exercise, the
Department of Homeland Security ran its own experiments to test the efficacy of an air
and surface sampling system known as BioWatch in detecting these biological agents in
the environment.
In the experiments, multiple kilograms of benign material were released, which included
a small portion of the anthrax simulant. The team collected samples of the air through
several portable sampling units and had them analyzed at specialized laboratories.
We were able to detect the biological organisms released several kilometers from where
the agent was originally released, Garza said. We were not entirely surprised by the
results. Since all of the modeling that had been done to date showed that air samplers
should be able to detect these types of attack, what was missing was empirical evidence
showing that these systems would work in real world conditions. We now have that
evidence.
The traditional way to detect that someone has been exposed to a biological agent is to
wait until a person becomes symptomatic and then hope that the clinician is able to
correctly diagnose the patient, Garza said, which is exactly what happened during the
anthrax attacks in 2001.
Garza points out the problem with this approach is that once people become sick they are
likely to die, which can potentially lead to significant casualties in a large-scale attack.
This experiment confirmed that a biological attack could be detected earlier using air
sampling which means public health would have more time to respond.


Generic Terrorism
Squo Solves
Status quo solves terrorism is declining and targets are changing
Berger, 12/3/13 CNN National Security Analyst (Peter, Hyping the terror threat?
CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/03/opinion/bergen-u-s-terror-risk/)//IS
In short, the data on al-Qaeda-linked or -influenced militants indicted in the United
States suggests that the threat of terrorism has actually markedly declined over the past
couple of years. Where Feinstein and Rogers were on much firmer ground in their
interview with Crowley was when they pointed to the resurgence of a number of al Qaeda
groups in the Middle East. Al Qaeda's affiliates in Syria control much of the north of the
country and are the most effective forces fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In
neighboring Iraq, al Qaeda has enjoyed a renaissance of late, which partly accounts for
the fact that the violence in Iraq today is as bad as it was in 2008. The Syrian war is
certainly a magnet for militants from across the Muslim world, including hundreds from
Europe, and European governments are rightly concerned that returning veterans of the
Syrian conflict could foment terrorism in Europe. But, at least for the moment, these al
Qaeda groups in Syria and Iraq are completely focused on overthrowing the Assad
regime or attacking what they regard as the Shia-dominated government of Iraq. And, at
least so far, these groups have shown no ability to attack in Europe, let alone in the
United States.

Status quo solves deterrence and target change
Jenkins, 1/29/14 director of the National Transportation Safety and Security Center
at the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI), established by Congress in 1991 as a
research institute based at San Jose State University in California. Jenkins has directed
MTI's continuing research on protecting surface transportation against terrorist attacks.
In 1996, President Clinton appointed Jenkins to be a member of the White House
Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. He served as an advisor to the National
Commission on Terrorism and has served on the U.S. Comptroller General's Advisory
Board. (Brian Michael, Does Anti-Terrorism Security Actually Work? Real Clear
Science, http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/01/29/does_anti-
terrorism_security_actually_work_108473.html)//IS
Despite an increase in the volume of terrorism worldwide, terrorist attacks remain
statistically rare events. Unlike bank robbers, who go where the money is, terrorists can
attack anything, anywhere, any time. Statisticians treat terrorist attacks as random
events. Terrorists can avoid security by attacking soft targets, such as public places that
are difficult to protect. That terrorists have moved toward softer targets can be
interpreted as an indirect indicator that security works. However, it also may reflect the
terrorists' growing determination to kill in quantity, which can be done most easily in
crowded public places. Not all terrorist perpetrators worry about being caught in the act,
or even about escaping. Even the terrorists' operational failures cause fear, which is the
objective of terrorism. The psychological effects of terrorism make it hard to apply an
economic cost-benefit analysis. While terrorism ranks low as a source of risk, the people
regard it as a major dangerpublic tolerance for terrorism is near zero. Many criticize
security as being "just for show." However, illusion is an important component of
security. The objective is to convince would-be attackers that they will fail. We tend to
focus on detection and prevention. Judging by the evidence, the most important effect of
security is deterrence. There are very few instances where terrorists are caught trying to
smuggle weapons or bombs on board airliners. If deterrence is working, that means
fewer attempts, but it is difficult to count things that don't occur.



Nuclear Terror
No risk of nuclear terror- too many barriers
Mueller, 10 - professor of political science at Ohio State (John, Calming Our Nuclear
Jitters, Issues in Science and Technology, http://www.issues.org/26.2/mueller.html)
Politicians of all stripes preach to an anxious, appreciative, and very numerous choir
when they, like President Obama, proclaim atomic terrorism to be the most immediate
and extreme threat to global security. It is the problem that, according to Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, currently keeps every senior leader awake at night. This is hardly
a new anxiety. In 1946, atomic bomb maker J. Robert Oppenheimer ominously warned
that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could blow up
New York. This was an early expression of a pattern of dramatic risk inflation that has
persisted throughout the nuclear age. In fact, although expanding fires and fallout might
increase the effective destructive radius, the blast of a Hiroshima-size device would
blow up about 1% of the citys areaa tragedy, of course, but not the same as one 100
times greater. In the early 1970s, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor proclaimed the
atomic terrorist problem to be immediate, explaining at length how comparatively
easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a bomb. At the
time he thought it was already too late to prevent the making of a few bombs, here and
there, now and then, or in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late. Three
decades after Taylor, we continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their easy task. In
contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire
and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of
the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the
tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful. The most plausible route
for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to manufacture an atomic device
themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched
uranium). This task, however, remains a daunting one, requiring that a considerable
series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed theft of fissile
material is exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of guards, but because
chase would be immediate. A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to
smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a
host of greedy confederates, including brokers and money-transmitters, any one of
whom could turn on them or, either out of guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff
that is useless. Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist was
accomplished, the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins none too delicately puts it,
have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates.
If terrorists were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material,
they would then probably have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and
probably while being pursued by security forces. Crossing international borders would be
facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they
appear and are often under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators. If
border personnel became suspicious of the commodity being smuggled, some of them
might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward
money that would probably be offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft
had been discovered. Once outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists
would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb
and then to populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians,
machinists, and administrators. The group would have to be assembled and retained for
the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were generated among friends,
family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back
home. Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the
cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and certainly their
careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would
probably become the targets of an intense worldwide dragnet operation. Some observers
have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could
get enough fissile material. But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior
physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerlands Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude
that the task could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group. They point out that
precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a
good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign. They also
stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the
technical requirements in several fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger,
former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a
similar argument, pointing out that uranium is exceptionally difficult to machine
whereas plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose
basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed. Stressing the daunting
problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host of other issues,
Younger concludes, to think that a terrorist group, working in isolation with an
unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies could fabricate a
bomb is farfetched at best. Under the best circumstances, the process of making a
bomb could take months or even a year or more, which would, of course, have to be
carried out in utter secrecy. In addition, people in the area, including criminals, may
observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of
technicians unlikely to be locals. If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished
product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to be transported to and smuggled
into the relevant target country where it would have to be received by collaborators who
are at once totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining,
detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives. The financial costs of
this extensive and extended operation could easily become monumental. There would be
expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay off. Some
operatives might work for free out of utter dedication to the cause, but the vast
conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable array of criminals and
opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high
as possible. Any criminals competent and capable enough to be effective allies are also
likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and
psychologically equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who
warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if with
great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is not
impossible. But although it may not be impossible to surmount each individual step, the
likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly
small. Table 1 attempts to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome under the
scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them,
would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be required to go though an exercise that
looks much like this. If and when they do, they will undoubtedly conclude that their
prospects are daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is
possible to calculate the chances for success. Adopting probability estimates that
purposely and heavily bias the case in the terrorists favorfor example, assuming the
terrorists have a 50% chance of overcoming each of the 20 obstaclesthe chances that a
concerted effort would be successful comes out to be less than one in a million. If one
assumes, somewhat more realistically, that their chances at each barrier are one in three,
the cumulative odds that they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over
three billion. Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even
more problematic. They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-
minded nuclear state for delivery abroad because the risk would be high, even for a
country led by extremists, that the bomb (and its source) would be discovered even
before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would
not approve, including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the terrorist
group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The terrorist group might also seek to
steal or illicitly purchase a loose nuke somewhere. However, it seems probable that
none exist. All governments have an intense interest in controlling any weapons on
their territory because of fears that they might become the primary target. Moreover, as
technology has developed, finished bombs have been out-fitted with devices that trigger
a non-nuclear explosion that destroys the bomb if it is tampered with. And there are
other security techniques: Bombs can be kept disassembled with the component parts
stored in separate high-security vaults, and a process can be set up in which two people
and multiple codes are required not only to use the bomb but to store, maintain, and
deploy it. As Younger points out, only a few people in the world have the knowledge to
cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon. There could be dangers in the
chaos that would emerge if a nuclear state were to utterly collapse; Pakistan is frequently
cited in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under such
conditions, nuclear weapons would probably remain under heavy guard by people who
know that a purloined bomb might be used in their own territory. They would still have
locks and, in the case of Pakistan, the weapons would be disassembled. The al Qaeda
factor The degree to which al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that seems to want to target
the United States, has pursued or even has much interest in a nuclear weapon may have
been exaggerated. The 9/11 Commission stated that al Qaeda has tried to acquire or
make nuclear weapons for at least ten years, but the only substantial evidence it
supplies comes from an episode that is supposed to have taken place about 1993 in
Sudan, when al Qaeda members may have sought to purchase some uranium that turned
out to be bogus. Information about this supposed venture apparently comes entirely
from Jamal al Fadl, who defected from al Qaeda in 1996 after being caught stealing
$110,000 from the organization. Others, including the man who allegedly purchased the
uranium, assert that although there were various other scams taking place at the time
that may have served as grist for Fadl, the uranium episode never happened. As a key
indication of al Qaedas desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of
conversations in Afghanistan in August 2001 that two Pakistani nuclear scientists
reportedly had with Osama bin Laden and three other al Qaeda officials. Pakistani
intelligence officers characterize the discussions as academic in nature. It seems that
the discussion was wide-ranging and rudimentary and that the scientists provided no
material or specific plans. Moreover, the scientists probably were incapable of providing
truly helpful information because their expertise was not in bomb design but in the
processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a
nonstate group. Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent planner of the 9/11 attacks,
reportedly says that al Qaedas bomb efforts never went beyond searching the Internet.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department
of Energy examined documents and other information that were uncovered by
intelligence agencies and the media in Afghanistan. They uncovered no credible
information that al Qaeda had obtained fissile material or acquired a nuclear weapon.
Moreover, they found no evidence of any radioactive material suitable for weapons. They
did uncover, however, a nuclear-related document discussing openly available
concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some weapons-related issues. Just a day or
two before al Qaeda was to flee from Afghanistan in 2001, bin Laden supposedly told a
Pakistani journalist, If the United States uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us,
we might respond with chemical and nuclear weapons. We possess these weapons as a
deterrent. Given the military pressure that they were then under and taking into
account the evidence of the primitive or more probably nonexistent nature of al Qaedas
nuclear program, the reported assertions, although unsettling, appear at best to be a
desperate bluff. Bin Laden has made statements about nuclear weapons a few other
times. Some of these pronouncements can be seen to be threatening, but they are rather
coy and indirect, indicating perhaps something of an interest, but not acknowledging a
capability. And as terrorism specialist Louise Richardson observes, Statements claiming
a right to possess nuclear weapons have been misinterpreted as expressing a
determination to use them. This in turn has fed the exaggeration of the threat we face.
Norwegian researcher Anne Stenersen concluded after an exhaustive study of available
materials that, although it is likely that al Qaeda central has considered the option of
using non-conventional weapons, there is little evidence that such ideas ever developed
into actual plans, or that they were given any kind of priority at the expense of more
traditional types of terrorist attacks. She also notes that information on an al Qaeda
computer left behind in Afghanistan in 2001 indicates that only $2,000 to $4,000 was
earmarked for weapons of mass destruction research and that the money was mainly for
very crude work on chemical weapons. Today, the key portions of al Qaeda central may
well total only a few hundred people, apparently assisting the Talibans distinctly
separate, far larger, and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan. Beyond this tiny
band, there are thousands of sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the
globe. They mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations,
and variously dare each other to actually do something. Any threat, particularly to the
West, appears, then, principally to derive from self-selected people, often isolated from
each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds. From time to time some of these
people, or ones closer to al Qaeda central, actually manage to do some harm. And
occasionally, they may even be able to pull off something large, such as 9/11. But in most
cases, their capacities and schemes, or alleged schemes, seem to be far less dangerous
than initial press reports vividly, even hysterically, suggest. Most important for present
purposes, however, is that any notion that al Qaeda has the capacity to acquire nuclear
weapons, even if it wanted to, looks farfetched in the extreme. It is also noteworthy that,
although there have been plenty of terrorist attacks in the world since 2001, all have
relied on conventional destructive methods. For the most part, terrorists seem to be
heeding the advice found in a memo on an al Qaeda laptop seized in Pakistan in 2004:
Make use of that which is available rather than waste valuable time becoming
despondent over that which is not within your reach. In fact, history consistently
demonstrates that terrorists prefer weapons that they know and understand, not new,
exotic ones. Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran and once its deputy intelligence officer
for transnational threats, warns, We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have
exaggerated. In fact, we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed, and miserable
opponents that they are. al Qaeda, he says, has only a handful of individuals capable of
planning, organizing, and leading a terrorist organization, and although the group has
threatened attacks with nuclear weapons, its capabilities are far inferior to its desires.
Policy alternatives The purpose here has not been to argue that policies designed to
inconvenience the atomic terrorist are necessarily unneeded or unwise. Rather, in
contrast with the many who insist that atomic terrorism under current conditions is
rather likely indeed, exceedingly likelyto come about, I have contended that it is
hugely unlikely. However, it is important to consider not only the likelihood that an
event will take place, but also its consequences. Therefore, one must be concerned about
catastrophic events even if their probability is small, and efforts to reduce that likelihood
even further may well be justified. At some point, however, probabilities become so low
that, even for catastrophic events, it may make sense to ignore them or at least put them
on the back burner; in short, the risk becomes acceptable. For example, the British could
at any time attack the United States with their submarine-launched missiles and kill
millions of Americans, far more than even the most monumentally gifted and lucky
terrorist group. Yet the risk that this potential calamity might take place evokes little
concern; essentially it is an acceptable risk. Meanwhile, Russia, with whom the United
States has a rather strained relationship, could at any time do vastly more damage with
its nuclear weapons, a fully imaginable calamity that is substantially ignored. In
constructing what he calls a case for fear, Cass Sunstein, a scholar and current Obama
administration official, has pointed out that if there is a yearly probability of 1 in 100,000
that terrorists could launch a nuclear or massive biological attack, the risk would
cumulate to 1 in 10,000 over 10 years and to 1 in 5,000 over 20. These odds, he suggests,
are not the most comforting. Comfort, of course, lies in the viscera of those to be
comforted, and, as he suggests, many would probably have difficulty settling down with
odds like that. But there must be some point at which the concerns even of these people
would ease. Just perhaps it is at one of the levels suggested above: one in a million or one
in three billion per attempt.

One in a million chance of nuke terror
DeGroot 9 Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews (Gerard DeGroot,
November 2009. Dismissing Doomsday, Arms Control Today,
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_11/BookReview)

In examining the terrorist scenario, Mueller analyzes the process of funding,
designing, building, transporting, and detonating a weapon and breaks the
process down into 20 clearly identified tasks. As he stresses, the terrorist
needs to succeed at each task, while those who wish to stop him require only
one success. Even the very generous 50-50 odds that he gives for each stage in the
process mean the accumulated likelihood of success is less than one in a
million. Examined through that lens, a decision to pursue nuclear weapons seems
ludicrous. It makes no sense for a terrorist organization to invest huge sums of money,
time, and effort in such a risky enterprise because its purpose can be served much more
easily by strapping a few pounds of gelignite to the body of a fanatic and sending him
into a crowded train. For these reasons, Mueller is not greatly concerned by reports that
al Qaeda has been seeking nuclear material and information for bomb-making.
No nuke terrorprefer our evidence their evidence is hype and fear-mongering
Gavin 10 - Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Robert S. Strauss
Center for International Security and Law, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs,
University of Texas at Austin (Francis,Same As It Ever Was, International Security,
Vol. 34, No. 3 (Winter 2009/10), pp. 737)

The possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States is widely
believed to be a grave, even apocalyptic, threat and a likely possibility, a
belief supported by numerous statements by public officials. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the inevitability of the spread of nuclear terrorism and of a successful
terrorist attack have been taken for granted.48
Coherent policies to reduce the risk of a nonstate actor using nuclear weapons clearly
need to be developed. In particular, the rise of the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear
technology network should give pause.49 But again, the news is not as grim as
nuclear alarmists would suggest. Much has already been done to secure
the supply of nuclear materials, and relatively simple steps can produce further
improvements. Moreover, there are reasons to doubt both the capabilities
and even the interest many terrorist groups have in detonating a nuclear
device on U.S. soil. As Adam Garfinkle writes, The threat of nuclear
terrorism is very remote.50
Experts disagree on whether nonstate actors have the scientific, engineering,
financial, natural resource, security, and logistical capacities to build a nuclear bomb
from scratch. According to terrorism expert Robin Frost, the danger of a
nuclear black market and loose nukes from Russia may be overstated.
Even if a terrorist group did acquire a nuclear weapon, delivering and
detonating it against a U.S. target would present tremendous technical
and logistical difficulties.51 Finally, the feared nexus between terrorists
and rogue regimes may be exaggerated. As nuclear proliferation expert
Joseph Cirincione argues, states such as Iran and North Korea are not the
most likely sources for terrorists since their stockpiles, if any, are small
and exceedingly precious, and hence well-guarded.52 Chubin states that
there is no reason to believe that Iran today, any more than Sadaam
Hussein earlier, would transfer WMD [weapons of mass destruction] technology
to terrorist groups like al-Qaida or Hezbollah.53
Even if a terrorist group were to acquire a nuclear device, expert Michael
Levi demonstrates that effective planning can prevent catastrophe: for
nuclear terrorists, what can go wrong might go wrong, and when it
comes to nuclear terrorism, a broader, integrated defense, just like controls
at the source of weapons and materials, can multiply, intensify, and compound
the possibilities of terrorist failure, possibly driving terrorist groups to reject
nuclear terrorism altogether. Warning of the danger of a terrorist acquiring a
nuclear weapon, most analyses are based on the inaccurate image of an
infallible tenfoot- tall enemy. This type of alarmism, writes Levi, impedes
the development of thoughtful strategies that could deter, prevent, or
mitigate a terrorist attack: Worst-case estimates have their place, but the
possible failure-averse, conservative, resource-limited five-foot-tall
nuclear terrorist, who is subject not only to the laws of physics but also to
Murphys law of nuclear terrorism, needs to become just as central to our
evaluations of strategies.54
A recent study contends that al-Qaidas interest in acquiring and using nuclear
weapons may be overstated. Anne Stenersen, a terrorism expert, claims that
looking at statements and activities at various levels within the al-Qaida
network, it becomes clear that the networks interest in using
unconventional means is in fact much lower than commonly thought.55 She
further states that CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] weapons do
not play a central part in al-Qaidas strategy.56 In the 1990s, members of al-
Qaida debated whether to obtain a nuclear device. Those in favor sought the
weapons primarily to deter a U.S. attack on al-Qaidas bases in Afghanistan.
This assessment reveals an organization at odds with that laid out by
nuclear alarmists of terrorists obsessed with using nuclear weapons against
the United States regardless of the consequences. Stenersen asserts, Although there
have been various reports stating that al-Qaida attempted to buy nuclear
material in the nineties, and possibly recruited skilled scientists, it appears
that al-Qaida central have not dedicated a lot of time or effort to developing
a high-end CBRN capability. . . . Al-Qaida central never had a coherent
strategy to obtain CBRN: instead, its members were divided on the issue, and
there was an awareness that militarily effective weapons were extremely
difficult to obtain. 57 Most terrorist groups assess nuclear terrorism
through the lens of their political goals and may judge that it does not
advance their interests.58 As Frost has written, The risk of nuclear terrorism,
especially true nuclear terrorism employing bombs powered by nuclear
fission, is overstated, and that popular wisdom on the topic is significantly
flawed.59
Zero risk of the impact - Terrorists cant get nukes multiple barriers to
overcome
Delvoie 8 - Senior Fellow at the Centre for International. Relations at Queen's
University. (Louis A. Delvoie, TERRORISM: GLOBAL INSECURITY OR GLOBAL
HYPERBOLE?, http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo6/no4/views-vues-eng.asp)

The threat of terrorism is, of course, real. It demands that governments act to protect the
safety of their citizens and their realms. As Canadas deputy prime minister, Anne
McLellan, said in a speech in 2004: We must always be vigilant about new threats, and
we must always be looking for ways to improve and coordinate our intelligence, our
prevention strategies and our emergency response capabilities. We must continuously
review our plans, update our systems and test our people. This all makes perfect sense,
and for a government to do anything less would be downright irresponsible in terms of
protecting Canadians and of ensuring Canadas continued access to the all-important US
market. This is, however, a very far cry from the jeremiads of pundits of all
professions and persuasions, who daily proclaim that, because of
international terrorism, we are now living in a world of unprecedented
danger and that combating terrorism should be or should become the first
and overarching priority of all Western governments. Such
pronouncements, in fact, betray a wilful or woeful ignorance of history, and
of contemporary realities.
A sense of proportion is essential in all things, including the assessment of
threats. What is al Qaeda and its associated networks? It is a loose grouping of
perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand more-or-less well-educated and
more-or-less well-organized individuals spread out across Northern Africa and the
Eurasian landmass. In recent years, it has proved itself capable of mounting a few
localized but spectacular operations in New York, Washington, Bali, Casablanca,
Mombassa and Madrid. These operations resulted in the deaths of some 5000 people
and the destruction of a dozen buildings. All eminently regrettable, but hardly the
Third World War.
But, the argument goes, al Qaeda or one of its offshoots could acquire
nuclear weapons and/or intercontinental ballistic missiles, and thus become
far more dangerous to the West. True, it could. And the Queen could undergo a sex
change operation and become King. Both eventualities are, however, somewhat
remote. The acquisition, storage, transport and detonation of nuclear
weapons are all full of complexities that far exceed the competencies
required to highjack and pilot civilian aircraft. As for ICBMs, the
technological, industrial and military capabilities required to produce,
deploy and launch them are ones that are totally beyond the reach of non-
state actors. And even if al Qaeda could, by stealth, acquire one or two small nuclear
devices (the so-called suitcase bombs of Cold War era folklore) the damage they could
inflict would be essentially limited to one location, and would certainly pose no
generalized threat to the West as a whole.
The simple fact is that the people of the Western world have not, in living
memory, enjoyed a more benign international security environment than
the one they enjoy today. The first half of the Twentieth Century was dominated by
two world wars, in which it is estimated that nearly 100 million people died. The second
half of the century was dominated by the Cold War, in the course of which the
superpowers arrayed against each other arsenals comprising thousands of nuclear
weapons and delivery systems capable of killing hundreds of millions of people, and of
taking much of the planet back to the Stone Age. And, of course, the Cold War played
itself out in numerous bloody proxy conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan,
Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and so on. No comparable threat exists today. When
stacked up against the armed might of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and
Soviet Russia, the ragtag bands of al Qaeda cut a pretty pathetic figure.
This is not to suggest that major security issues and threats do not exist in the
contemporary world. Africa is still the scene of horrendous civil wars. In the Congo alone
more than three million people have died in five years of internecine conflict, and
fighting continues in Sudan, Somalia, the Ivory Coast and Uganda. For the peoples of
Southern Africa, the ravages of HIV/AIDS may lead to the collapse of entire societies. At
a more conventional level of inter-state rivalries, the highly complex set of
relationships that link Pakistan, India, China and Japan could lead to
conflict in the longer term, and they merit sustained attention. But these are not
threats directed at the West, and they certainly do not emanate from
terrorism.
The question may well be asked whether all of the hyperbole about international
terrorism really matters. The answer is a resounding yes, on several fronts. In
countries such as Canada, the United States and Great Britain, it has led to the adoption
of emergency legislation that calls into question a host of traditional civil rights and that
are amenable to widespread abuse. It has also led to hasty and ill-thought-out
governmental reorganizations, most notably in the United States where the new
Department of Homeland Security has been described by one American commentator,
Michael Crowley in the New Republic, as a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with clumsily-
stitched-together limbs and an inadequate, misfiring brain. Finally, it has resulted in
the diversion of vast budgetary resources to anti-terrorism programs, some of which at
least could have been devoted more usefully to health care, higher education or
conventional defence capabilities.
The terrorism fixation also has perverse consequences internationally. In the discourse
of political and religious ideologues, and in that of ignoramuses of all persuasions who
do not even understand the simple distinction between Islamic and Islamist, it is used to
demonize and convict one billion Muslims for the sins of a few hundred. In so doing, it
creates heightened levels of animosity and suspicion on both sides in relations between
Western and Muslim societies. The fixation has also been systematically exploited by the
leaders of countries such as Russia, India and Israel, to cover up the excesses and
widespread human rights violations committed by their security forces in Chechnya,
Kashmir and Palestine. By portraying these complex political, ethnic and territorial
conflicts as little more than theatres in the war on terrorism, they have managed to
escape the scrutiny and censure to which they would otherwise have been subjected on
the part of Western countries. That too does not go unnoticed in the Muslim world.
In short, international terrorism of the al Qaeda variety is a real threat that should not be
taken lightly. What is more, it is unlikely to disappear soon, for it goes to the heart of
deep divisions within the Muslim world itself, just as much as it represents a campaign
against Western interests and policies. That said, it is not an existential
threat, and there is not a bearded terrorist under every bed in the Western world. It is
a limited and manageable threat. It can be managed and minimized through
effective action by, and cooperation among, intelligence and security services worldwide.
The sooner politicians and others perceive and portray it in its true proportions, the
better off we shall all be.




War

Arctic Conflict
Resources create cooperation and deter conflict
Hong, 11 postdoctoral fellow with the China Institute, University of Alberta (Nong,
Arctic Energy: Pathway to Conflict or Cooperation in the High North? Journal of
Energy Security, May 31, 2011,
http://www.ensec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=310:arctic-
energy-pathway-to-conflict-or-cooperation-in-the-high-
north&catid=116:content0411&Itemid=375)//gingE
The high cost of doing business in the Arctic suggests that only the worlds largest oil
companies, most likely as partners in joint venture projects, have the financial, technical,
and managerial strength to accomplish the costly, long-lead-time projects dictated by
Arctic conditions. Incentives to settle outstanding disputes would rise with the
increasing potential economic returns posed by exploitation and the resulting
polarization within the international system. While there are disagreements between the
Arctic states on maritime boundaries, there are still reasons to believe that these
disagreements can be resolved amicably. The prospect for conflicts relating to
unresolved boundary disputes seems remote. The existing vehicles for dispute resolution
and cooperation in the region, UNCLOS and the Arctic Council, will also help to reduce
tensions. Joint management of resource fields is another option that might come into
play as countries involved in a dispute might see more advantage in approaching the
disagreement this way rather than losing a claim in an international tribunal.
Cooperation between Norway and Iceland regarding the development of the Dreki field
could serve as a model for similar arrangements in the future. Another example is the
continental shelf dispute concerning an area rich in natural gas between Russia and
Norway in the Barents Sea. Both countries dispute the other's interpretation of where
their borders extend into the offshore EEZ. While it is possible that there could be a
conflict between the two countries over this area, it seems highly unlikely given the
potential costs versus the potential benefits. Geopolitical issues are not exclusively
conflicts over interests, although such concerns tend to dominate. They can also reflect
cooperative, multilateral initiatives by which a state pursues its interests vis--vis others.
Such cooperative ventures are often considered desirable and even unavoidable when a
state is seeking a result that cannot be achieved unilaterally. At the same time,
cooperation frequently establishes a level of governance in some cases formally, in
others less formally by which mutual understanding can clarify intentions and help to
build trust. Recognizing and respecting each others rights constitutes the legal basis for
cooperation between Arctic and non-Arctic states. In accordance with UNCLOS and
other relevant international laws, Arctic states have sovereign rights and jurisdiction in
their respective areas in the region, while non-Arctic states also enjoy rights of scientific
research and navigation. To develop a partnership of cooperation, Arctic and non-Arctic
states should, first and foremost, recognize and respect each other's rights under the
international law. Examples between Arctic and non-Arctic states are there. On 22
November 2010, the Sovcomflot Group (SCF) and China National Petroleum
Corporation (CNPC) signed a strategic long-term cooperation agreement. The parties
agreed to develop a long-term partnership in the sphere of seaborne energy solutions,
with the SCF fleet serving the continually growing Chinese imports of hydrocarbons.
Taking into account the significant experience gained by Sovcomflot in developing the
transportation of hydrocarbons in the Arctic seas, SCF and CNPC agreed upon the
format for coordination in utilizing the transportation potential of the Northern Sea
Route along Russias Arctic coast, both for delivering transit shipments of hydrocarbons
and for the transportation of oil and gas from Russias developing Arctic offshore fields
to China. A new fleet of tankers designed to operate in ice as well as additional heavy-
duty ice breakers will be built to that end. South Koreas Samsung Industries is looking
into filling the technological gap to make it possible to deliver Arctic natural gas across
the pacific ocean to East Asia. Russia is building massive duel-bowed oil tankers that are
set to come into use as soon as next year. While traveling forward, the ships move as they
normally would through open water. But when the vessels move backward, they can act
as ice-breakers. Construction is underway on two 70,000-tonne ships and two more
125,000 tonne ships and there are rumors that another five are on order.

Impact exaggeratedmost resources already belong to someone
Mahony, 13 Editor for the EU Observer (Honor, Fears of Arctic conflict are
'overblown' 19.03.13 http://euobserver.com/foreign/119479)//gingE
BRUSSELS - The Arctic has become a new frontier in international relations, but fear of
potential conflict in the resource-rich region is overblown, say experts. For long a
mystery because of its general impenetrability, melting ice caps are revealing more and
more of the Arctic region to scientists, researchers and industry. Climate change experts
can take a more precise look at a what global warming is doing to the planet, shipping
trade routes once considered unthinkable are now possible, and governments and
businesses are in thrall to the potential exploitation of coal, iron, rare earths and oil. The
interest is reflected in the growing list of those wanting to have a foot in the Arctic
council, a forum of eight countries with territory in the polar region. While the US,
Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Canada form the council, the
EU commission, China, India, South Korea and Japan have all expressed an interest in
having a permanent observer status. "The Arctic has become a new meeting place for
America, Europe and the Asia Pacific," says Damien Degeorges, founder of the Arctic
Policy and Economic Forum. During a recent conference on Arctic shipping routes in the
European Parliament, Degeorges noted that "China has been the most active by far in the
last years." He points to its red-carpet treatment of politicians from Greenland, a
territory that recently got full control over its wealth of natural resources. Bejing also
cosied up to Iceland after the island's financial meltdown. The two undertook a joint
expedition to the North Pole and the Chinese have the largest foreign embassy in
Reykjavik. Meanwhile, South Korea's president visited Greenland last year and shipping
hubs like Singapore are holding Arctic conferences. The interest is being spurred by
melting icebergs. Last year saw a record low of multi-year ice - permanent ice - in the
polar sea. This means greater shipping and mineral exploitation potential. There were 37
transits of the North East Passage (NEP), running from the Atlantic to the Pacific along
the top of Russia, in 2011. This rose to 47 in 2012. For a ship travelling from the
Netherlands to China, the route around 40 percent shorter than using the traditional
Suez Canal. A huge saving for China, where 50 percent of its GDP is connected to
shipping. Russia is also keen to exploit the route as the rise in temperatures is melting
the permafrost in its northern territory, playing havoc with its roads and railways.
According to Jan Fritz Hansen, deputy director of the Danish shipowners association,
the real breakthrough will come when there is a cross polar route. At the moment there
are are two options - the North East Passge for which Russia asks high fees for transiting
ships - or the much-less developed North West Passage along Canada. His chief concern
is that "trade up there is free. We don't want protectionism. Everyone should be allowed
to compete up there." And he believes the biggest story of the Arctic is not how it is
traversed but what will be taken out of it. According to the US Geological Survey (2009),
the Arctic holds 13 percent of undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered gas
supplies. Greenland is already at the centre of political tussle between the EU and China
over future exploitation of its rare earths - used in a range of technologies such as hybrid
cars or smart phones. "The biggest adventure will be the Arctic destination. There is a lot
of valuable goods that should be taken out of nature up there," he said. This resource
potential - although tempered by the fact that much of it is not economically viable to
exploit - has led to fears that the Arctic region is ripe for conflict. But this is
nonsense, says Nil Wang, a former Danish admiral and Arctic expert. Most resources
have an owner "There is a general public perception that the Arctic region holds great
potential for conflict because it is an ungoverned region where all these resources are
waiting to be picked up by the one who gets there first. That is completely false," he said.
He notes that it is an "extremely well-regulated region," with international rules saying
that coastal states have territorial jurisdiction up to 12 nautical miles off their coast. On
top of that is a further 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone "where you own
every value in the water and under the seabed." "Up to 97 percent of energy resources is
actually belonging to someone already," says Wang. He suggest the actors in the region
all want to create a business environment, which requires stable politics and security.


US seeking military ties
Reuters, 13 (November 23, 2013 U.S. Urges Cooperation In The Arctic
http://www.rferl.org/content/us-russia-arctic-energy-canada/25177459.html)//gingE

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called on nations to cooperate to avoid conflict
as they develop the rapidly thawing Arctic region. In a speech on Friday in Halifax,
Canada, Hagel also repeated that the United States will "exercise sovereignty" in order to
maintain freedom of navigation in the region. He added that Washington will seek
deeper military ties with other Arctic states, including Russia and Canada. Last year,
Arctic ice shrank to its lowest levels since observation from satellite began in the 1970s,
and experts believe that by 2050, summer ice will vanish in the Arctic altogether due to
global climate change. As the ice melts, competition is increasing to develop energy
resources and control transportation lanes. In September Russian President Vladimir
Putin said Russia will reestablish a Soviet-era base to patrol the Northern Sea route.


Cooperation in the arctic is more likely than conflict
Fries, 12 Senior fellow at The Arctic Institute, undergraduate degree in Neuroscience
from the University of Virginia (Tom, April 18, 2012 Perspective Correction: How We
Misinterpret Arctic Conflict http://www.thearcticinstitute.org/2012/04/perspective-
correction-how-we.html)//gingE
War and conflict sell papers -- the prospect of war, current wars, remembrance of wars
past. Accordingly, a growing cottage industry devotes itself to writing about the prospect
of conflict among the Arctic nations and between those nations and non-Arctic states,
which is mostly code for China. As a follower of Arctic news, I see this every day, all the
time: eight articles last week, five more already this week from the Moscow Times,
Scientific American or what-have-you. Sometimes this future conflict is portrayed as a
political battle, sometimes military, but the portrayals of the states involved are
cartoonish, Cold-War-ish...its all good guys and bad guys. Im convinced that this is
nonsense, and I feel vindicated when I see the extent to which these countries' militaries
collaborate in the high North. From last week's meeting of all eight Arctic nations'
military top brass (excepting only the US; we were represented by General Charles
Jacoby, head of NORAD and USNORTHCOM) to Russia-Norway collaboration on search
& rescue; from US-Canada joint military exercises to US-Russia shared research in the
Barents...no matter where you look, the arc of this relationship bends towards
cooperation. But there's a bigger misconception that underlies the predictions of
future Arctic conflict that we read every week. This is the (usually) unspoken assumption
that the governments of these states are capable of acting quickly, unilaterally and
secretly to pursue their interests in the Arctic. False. This idea that some state might
manage a political or military smash-and-grab while the rest of us are busy clipping our
fingernails or walking the dog is ridiculous. The overwhelming weight of evidence
suggests that the governments of the Arctic states are, like most massive organizations,
bureaucratic messes. Infighting between federal agencies is rampant all around, as are
political shoving matches between federal and state/provincial/regional governments.
Money is still scarce, and chatter about military activism isnt backed up by much:
Canada is engaged in a sad debate over the downgrading of the proposed Nanisivik port;
the United States icebreaker fleet is barely worth mentioning and shows little sign of
new life in the near-term future; US Air Force assets are being moved 300+ miles south
from Fairbanks to Anchorage; and Russias talk about a greater Arctic presence has been
greatly inflated for the sake of the recent elections. In a more general sense, we have
viciously polarized governments in the US and, to a lesser extent, Canada, as well as
numerous hotter wars elsewhere that will take the lions share of our blood and
treasure before the Arctic gets a drop of either. The smaller states might be able to act
more nimbly, but Norway and Denmark are successful Scandinavian social-market
economies with modestly-sized militaries who arent likely to put military adventurism
in the Arctic at the top of their to-do lists. Theyre also patient decision-makers who are
making apparently sincere (if not always successful) efforts to incorporate their resident
indigenous communities into national politics. This makes fast, unilateral, secret action
unlikely. And then there is Russia. From the outside, it can often seem as though the
Russian government rules by fiat. This reasonably leads to the concern that someone
might take it into his head to assert Russias military might or otherwise extend the
countrys sovereignty in the Arctic. But it is fairly clear that Russias success is currently,
and for the near-term future, dependent on its position within the constellation of global
hydrocarbon suppliers. To continue to develop its supply base, Russia needs the
assistance of the oil majors of neighboring states, and indeed it is showing signs of
warming up to foreign engagement with its Arctic hydrocarbons in significant ways. Its
political relationships with its regular customers are also critical to its future success.
Russia isnt likely to wantonly sour those relationships by acting aggressively against all
four of its wealthy, well-networked littoral brothers in Europe and North America. Its
not only the handcuffs of many colors worn by the Arctic states that will keep them from
getting aggressive, it is also the good precedents that exist for cooperation here. Russia
and Norway recently resolved a forty year-old dispute over territory in the Barents. There
are regular examples of military cooperation among the four littoral NATO states and
between Norway and Russia. Even the US and Russia are finding opportunities to work
together. Meanwhile, the need to develop search-and-rescue capabilities is making cross-
border cooperation a necessity for all Arctic actors. There are numerous international
research and private-sector ventures, even in areas other than hydrocarbons. These will
only grow in importance with time. In fact, it would seem that for many of these
countries, the Arctic is a welcome relief - a site where international collaboration is
comparatively amicable.

Asia War
Russia checks central Asian war
Gresh, 12 Assistant Professor of International Security Studies at National Defense
University in Washington, D.C. (Dr. Geoffrey, Russia, China, and stabilizing South
Asia, The South Asia Channel, 3/12/2012,
http://southasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/12/russia_china_and_stabilizing_s
outh_asia) //RGP
As the U.S. begins to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Russia and China have both
declared a desire to increase their military presence throughout Central and South Asia.
This new regional alignment, however, should not be viewed as a threat to U.S. strategic
national interests but seen rather as concurrent with strategic and regional interests of
the United States: regional peace, stability and the prevention of future terrorist safe
havens in ungoverned territories. As China and Russia begin to flex their military
muscles, the U.S. military should harness their expanded regional influence to promote
proactively a new period of responsible multilateral support for Afghanistan and
Pakistan. This past December it became clearer that Russia had begun to re-assert its
regional presence when the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) granted
Russia the veto power over any member state's future decision to host a foreign military.
CSTO members, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, have
become increasingly valuable U.S. partners in the Northern Distribution Network after
Pakistan shut down U.S. military supply routes running from the south into Afghanistan
when NATO troops killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November in the border area of
Salala. Though it appears the route may soon open again, the United States must still
adopt a new strategy that works more closely with Russia and the CSTO to maintain the
Northern Distribution Network long into the future, which currently accounts for about
60 percent of all cargo transiting Central Asia en route to Afghanistan. Certainly, the U.S.
risks being unable to control many aspects of the Northern Distribution Network as it
withdraws from the region, and this may in turn adversely affect Afghanistan's future
success. However, if the United States remains concerned about leaving the region to a
historically obdurate regional rival like Russia, it should also bear in mind that Russia
has a vital strategic interest in the future stability of the region. Russia has approximately
15 million Muslims living within its borders, with an estimated 2 million Muslims in
Moscow. Russia is fearful of what occurs on its periphery and wants to minimize the
spread of Muslim extremism that may originate from an unstable Afghanistan or
Pakistan. In addition, Russia does not want regional instability that threatens its oil and
gas investments. In particular, Russia wants to ensure that it continues to influence the
planning and implementation of the potentially lucrative natural gas pipeline that may
one day traverse Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. In a recent meeting
with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov discussed Russia's commitment to preserving peace and stability throughout the
AfPak region, and rejected the use of violence by al-Qaeda and its affiliates that aim to
undermine the current Afghan government. Furthermore, he pledged to bolster bilateral
ties and work cooperatively with Pakistan to achieve stability in Afghanistan. A newly-
elected President Vladimir Putin also recently wrote in a campaign brief that "Russia will
help Afghanistan develop its economy and strengthen its military to fight terrorism and
drug production." It is not lost on the U.S. government that Russia is proposing to
succeed where the U.S. has struggled. However, if Russia does succeed in helping
establish a secure Afghanistan and Pakistan that can prevent the spread of bases for
terrorism then it is a victory for everyone. Aside from Pakistan, and in line with
promoting security throughout the region, Russia announced recently that it will provide
$16 million to Kyrgyzstan to assist with border security in the south. Russia also agreed
recently to pay $15 million in back rent for its four military facilities across the country,
including an air base, a torpedo test center on Lake Issyk-Kul, and a communications
center in the south. Further, Russia signed a security pact with Tajikistan last fall to
extend its basing lease for 49 years, in addition to a bilateral agreement that will enable
Russia to become more integrated into Tajikistan's border security forces that oversee an
830-mile border with Afghanistan. Providing similar types of U.S. aid and security
support will also help ensure that the valuable Northern Distribution Network remains
open and secure for supply lines into Afghanistan. If the northern trade routes are shut
down it would adversely affect aid arriving to Afghanistan and therefore jeopardize the
stability of Afghanistan and the region. It would also be in opposition to Russia's regional
interests. Rather than citing these examples in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as a
demonstration of how the U.S. will soon lose out in the region to a resurgent Russia,
policymakers can view them as an indication of how Russian interests align with the U.S.
to help maintain regional security. More importantly, if Russia wants to take a more
active future role in Central Asia, the U.S. should address this shift and work directly
with Russia and other CSTO members to ensure that the Northern Distribution Network
remains operational in the distant future.

China solves
Gresh, 12 Assistant Professor of International Security Studies at National Defense
University in Washington, D.C. (Dr. Geoffrey, Russia, China, and stabilizing South
Asia, The South Asia Channel, 3/12/2012,
http://southasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/12/russia_china_and_stabilizing_s
outh_asia) //RGP
Another powerful regional player, China, also has a vested interest in the stability of the
AfPak region, and has already begun to play a more active security role. It was reported
this past January, for example, that China intends to establish one or more bases in
Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Subsequently, at the end of February,
Beijing played host to the first China-Afghanistan-Pakistan trilateral dialogue to discuss
regional cooperation and stability. Due to China's shared borders and vibrant trade with
both Afghanistan and Pakistan -- not to mention China's estimated 8 million Turkic-
speaking Muslim Uyghurs living in western Xinjiang Province -- it has a direct interest in
ensuring that both Afghanistan and Pakistan remain stable long into the future. Bilateral
trade between China and Pakistan, for example, increased 28 percent in the past year to
approximately $8.7 billion. China also signed an oil agreement with Afghanistan in
December that could be worth $7 billion over the next two decades. Additionally, China
is concerned about the rise of its Uyghur separatist movement that maintains safe
havens in both countries, in addition to the spread of radical Islam. The United States
should push China to become more actively engaged in Pakistan's security affairs as
China has a direct interest in moderating radicalism in Pakistan and keeping it stable.
Indicative of Pakistan's strategic value to China, since 2002 China has financed the
construction and development of Pakistan's Gwadar deep water port project. China has
contributed more than $1.6 billion toward the port's development as a major shipping
and soon-to-be naval hub, which is located just 250 miles from the opening of the
Persian Gulf. A Pakistan Supreme Court decision in 2011 enabled China to take full
control of Gwadar from a Singapore management company further establishing China's
firm position in the Pakistani port city. The creation of a new Chinese military network in
Pakistan between Gwadar and the FATA would enable China to oversee the transit and
protection of Chinese goods and investments that travel from both the coast and interior
through the Karakorum corridor to China's Xinjiang Province. China already has an
estimated 4,000 troops in Gilgit Baltistan, part of the larger and disputed Kashmir, and
just recently it was reported after a January 2012 trip by Pakistani Army Chief General
Ashfaq Kayani to China that Pakistan is considering leasing Gilgit Baltistan to China for
the next 50 years. Such a move would indeed escalate tensions with India to the south,
but from a Pakistani perspective, China would be positioned better than it already is to
assist with any future Pakistani national security concerns. And from a Chinese
perspective, it would improve their ability to monitor any illicit Uyghur activities aimed
at inciting further rebellion in western China. With interest comes responsibility, and in
the wake of the recent reports predicting the establishment of a more robust Chinese
military network across Pakistan, it is time that China begins to supplement its increased
involvement in Pakistan by helping to maintain peace and stability throughout the entire
AfPak region. Certainly after fighting two long wars, the United States can no longer be
the sole world power responsible for the region, and both China and Russia have been
U.S. security free-riders for too long. They have benefited financially while NATO
continues to lose soldiers and accrue a massive war debt. After 11 years of war, it is time
the United States work more proactively with Russia, China, Pakistan and the Central
Asian Republics to create solutions for the future stability and collective security of the
region. Indeed, we may not have a choice, and the United States should embrace the
transformation of a new era in Eurasia's heartland.

India-China cooperation solves
TOI, 14 Times of India (India wants to contribute solidly to Asia-Pacific stability:
BJP, 6/1/2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/India-
wants-to-contribute-solidly-to-Asia-Pacific-stability-BJP/articleshow/35904092.cms)
//RGP
SINGAPORE: India wants to contribute "very solidly" to the peace and stability process
in Asia-Pacific, as it looks forward to further strengthening ties with China, Japan and
South Korea, a senior BJP leader has said. Tarun Vijay, MP and a representative of
India's new BJP-led government at the Shangri-La Dialogue said that India wants a
strong and strategic partnership with China. He said India and China should create a
mechanism that entails more people-to-people contact with emphasis on trade, industry,
culture and youth exchange. "We want to move ahead in areas like trade, industry,
culture and youth exchange and create a mechanism where India and China will have
more people-to-people contact," Vijay said. He also described Japan as an all-weather
friend of India. Vijay said the Narendra Modi-led government looks forward to
strengthening relations with countries such as China, Japan and South Korea and would
give priority to its neighbourhood. "We want to contribute very solidly in the peace and
stability process in Asia-Pacific," said Vijay, a member of the parliamentary committee
on external relations. The BJP lawmaker said the new Indian government has put its best
foot forward by inviting the leaders of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(Saarc) countries for bilateral talks after Narendra Modi was sworn in as the Prime
Minister. "The bilaterals have brought a new feeling of warmth and cordiality and sent a
message that we can walk, work, dream and achieve together," Vijay was quoted as
saying by The Sunday Times.
Asian Hotspots

No SCS warescalation would be counterproductive for Chinas goals over
the region
Wing 12 reporter for Voice of America (Terry, Voice of America, September 4
th
, 2012,
Will South China Sea Disputes Lead to War?,
http://www.voanews.com/content/south-china-sea-war-unlikely/1501780.html)//IK
A minor military clash in the South China Sea is, rather worryingly, a distinct and
growing possibility, according to Ian Storey from the Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies in Singapore. Storey, an expert on Asia Pacific maritime security, goes even
further. He envisions the possibility of differences over fishing rights or energy
exploration turning into a military clash. Caused by miscalculation, misperception or
miscommunication, its just a question of time before one these skirmishes results in loss
of life, Storey said. A South China Sea War is Unlikely But that doesnt mean a war.
Storey said an escalation into full-blown conflict is unlikely. It is in no
countrys interests to spill blood or treasure over this issue the costs far
outweigh the benefits, Storey said. Other experts agree. James Holmes of the U.S.
Naval War College says admires how China has been able to get its way in spreading it
claims of sovereignty without becoming a bully. [China] gradually consolidated
the nation's maritime claims while staying well under the threshold for
triggering outside -most likely American -intervention, said Holmes. Is war
about to break out over bare rocks? I don't think so. writes Robert D. Kaplan, Chief
Political Strategist for the geopolitical analysis group Stratfor. Kaplan, however, doesnt
give much hope for negotiations. The issues involved are too complex, and the power
imbalance between China and its individual neighbors is too great, he said. For that
reason, Kaplan says China holds all the cards. Kaplan doesnt look for Chinese military
aggression against other claimants. That, he says, would be counterproductive for
its goals in the region. It would completely undermine its carefully crafted peaceful
rise thesis and push Southeast Asian countries into closer strategic alignment with the
US, said Kaplan. At the same time, he said Chinese leaders probably will be unable to
compromise. The primordial quest for status still determines the international system,
and these bare rocks in the South China Sea have become, in effect, logos of nationhood,
Kaplan said.
No Asian war Arms trade treaty limits escalation
Fides, 12 the Agenzia Fides is the news agency for the Vatican (Agenzia Fides,
December 7th, 2012, Asian Bishops' Appeal: "No to war and arms trade,"
http://www.news.va/en/news/asia-asian-bishops-appeal-no-to-war-and-arms-
trade)//IK
Bangkok (Agenzia Fides) - The Asian Bishops call for "an end to wars and hostilities in
the different contexts of Asia", "greater institutional commitment to global peace", "the
immediate stop to the trafficking of arms," which helps to steep the continent in blood.
As reported to Fides by Fr. Nithiya Sagayam, Ofm Cap, Secretary of the Office for Human
Development, within the Federation of the Asian Episcopal Conferences (FABC), the
Bishops joined the initiative launched by the FABC Office during the 50th anniversary of
Pope John XXIIIs Encyclical, "Pacem in Terris" and in view of "Disarmament Week",
sponsored by the UN, while many nations are preparing to sign the Treaty on the
Arms Trade, which seeks to limit and regulate the phenomenon. Numerous
religious leaders of Asia, including two Cardinals, 20 Archbishops, 10 bishops, as well as
another 5,000 representatives of different faiths have joined the appeal, which was sent
to Fides Agency, since the text was subsequently extended to other religious
communities. The appeal was delivered to the Secretary General of the United Nations,
Ban Ki Moon. The document is addressed to world leaders asking them to "work for
peace and harmony through disarmament" and "approving the Treaty on
arms trade." "Every weapon that is produced is a theft from those who are hungry," he
recalls. The arms trade, which has a global turnover of 1,000 billion dollars a year, is a
major cause of severe and extensive human rights abuses. Some governments spend
more on military expenditure than on social development, communication infrastructure
and health care put together. The Bishops point out that the Arms Trade Treaty, which
provides control and monitoring mechanisms, "will provide an important contribution to
promoting a true culture of peace through responsible collaboration between the states."
The arms trade fuels war, causes serious delays in the human development, produces
instability and conflict, spreads a culture of violence and crime. The ultimate goal must
be disarmament, to avoid violence, death and genocide. (PA) (Agenzia Fides 12/7/2012)
A Sino-Japanese war wont happen balance of power, economic incentives
and ideology check
Beauchamp 14 (Zack Beauchamp, Editor of TP Ideas and a reporter for
ThinkProgress.org, Why Everyone Needs To Stop Freaking Out About War With
China, 2/7/14, http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/07/3222021/china-japan-
war/)
Chinas been out of the news lately the State of the Union only have mentioned it twice
but Americas allies are getting antsy about it. Just this Wednesday, Filipino President
Benigno S. Aquino III compared China to Nazi Germany, telling the world to remember
that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II
when it thinks about Chinese territorial claims in Asian waters. Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe recently reached back to the other world war, repeatedly warning the Davos
summit in January that East Asia, much like Europe pre-World War I, was a violent
tinderbox primed to explode after one bad incident. Of the two, Abes comparison is by
far more reasonable, and he did dispatch a deputy to say Japan absolutely did not
beleive war was coming, but the damage was done. Asia experts are warning about the
risk of a new Cold War between Japan and China and others are terrified by the
prospect of a hot one. This is all dramatically overblown. War between China and Japan
is more than unlikely: it would fly in the face of most of what we know about the two
countries, and international relations more broadly. Its not that a replay of 1914 is
impossible. Its just deeply, vanishingly unlikely. One of the easiest ways to evaluate the
risks of Sino-Japanese war is by reference to three of the most important factors that
shape a governments decision to go to war: the balance of power, economic incentives,
and ideology. These categories roughly correspond to the three dominant theories in
modern international relations (realism, liberalism, and constructivism), and theres
solid statistical evidence that each of them can play a significant role in how
governments think about their decisions to use military force. So lets take them in turn.
The main source of tension is an East China Sea island chain, called the Senkakus in
Japan and Diaoyus in China. While there are other potential flashpoints, the current
heightened tensions are centered on the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. Japan currently
controls the islands, but China claims them, and the Chinese military has made
increasingly aggressive noises about the islands of late. But theres one big factor
shaping the balance of power in East Asia that means the talk is likely to remain just
that: nuclear weapons. The tagline for World War I in 1914 The War To End All
Wars would have a decidedly different meaning in 2014, as wars end would be
accomplished by the worlds end. So whereas, in 1914, all of the European powers
thought they could win the war decisively, East Asias great powers recognize the risk of a
nuclear exchange between the United States and China to be catastrophic. Carleton
Universitys Stephen Saideman calls this the end of the preemption temptation;
nobody thinks they can win by striking first anymore. Indeed, despite the words of some
of its military leaders, China (at least nominally) has a no-clash-with-Japan policy in
place over the islands. That also helps explain why the most commonly-cited
Senkaku/Diaoyu spark, accidental escalation, isnt as likely as many suggest. When The
Wall Street Journals Andrew Browne writes that theres a real risk of an accident
leading to a standoff from which leaders in both countries would find it hard to back
down in the face of popular nationalist pressure, hes not wrong. But it wont happen
just because two planes happen across each other in the sky. In 2013, with tensions
running high the whole year, Japan scrambled fighters against Chinese aircraft 433
times. Indeed, tensions have flared up a number of times throughout the years (often
sparked by nationalist activists on side of the other) without managing to bleed over into
war. Thats because, as MIT East Asia expert M. Taylor Fravel argues, there are deep
strategic reasons why each side is, broadly speaking, OK with the status quo over and
above nuclear deterrence. China has an interest in not seeming like an aggressor state in
the region, as thats historically caused other regional powers to put away their
differences and line up against it. Japan currently has control over the islands, which
would make any strong moves by China seem like an attempt to overthrow the status quo
power balance. The United States also has a habit of constructive involvement, subtly
reminding both sides when tensions are spiking that the United States and its rather
powerful navy would prefer that there be no fighting between the two states.
Moreover, the whole idea of accidental war is also a little bit confusing . Militaries dont
just start shooting each other by mistake and then decide its time to have a war. Rather,
an incident thats truly accidental say, a Japanese plane firing on a Chinese aircraft in
one of the places where their Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) overlap
changes the incentives to go to war, as the governments start to think (perhaps wrongly)
that war is inevitable and the only way to win it is to escalate. Its hard to envision this
kind of shift in calculation in East Asia, for all of the aforementioned reasons. Its wrong
to talk about incentives to go war in purely military terms. A key component of the
Senkaku/Diaoyou is economic: the islands contain a ton of natural resources,
particularly oil and gas. But far more valuable are the trade ties between the two
countries. China is Japans largest export market, so war would hurt Japan more than
China, but itd be pretty painful for both. Proponents of the World War I parallel find a
lot to criticize about this point. They like to cite Norman Angell, a pre-World War I
international relations theorist famous for arguing that war was becoming economically
obsolete. Angell is now often used interchangeably with Dr. Pangloss in international
relations talk, a symbol of optimism gone analytically awry. But Angell gets a bad rap.
He didnt actually say war was impossible; he merely claimed that it no longer was worth
the cost (if you remember the aftermath of World War I, he was right about that). The
real upshot of Angells argument is that, unless theres some other overwhelming reason
to go to war, mutually profitable trade ties will serve as a strong deterrent to war. Angell
may have been wrong about Europe, but hes probably right about East Asia. M.G. Koo, a
political scientist at Chung-Ang University, surveyed several Senkaku-Diaoyu flareups
between 1969 and 2009. He found that economic ties between the two countries played
an increasingly large role in defusing tensions as the trade relationship between the two
countries deepened. The 1978 crisis over the islands is a good example. Bilateral trade
had grown substantially since the end of the last big dispute (1972), but they had entered
into a new phase after Chinese Premier Deng Xiaopings economic reforms began in
1978. A key part of the early modernization plan was the Peace and Friendship Treaty
(PFT) with Japan, a diplomatic treaty that (among other things) facilitated a rush of
Japanese firms into the Chinese market. According to Koo, policy circles in China and
Japan had increasingly recognized that the [Senkaku/Diaoyu] sovereignty issue could
possibly jeopardize the PFT negotiations, thus undermining economic gains. The
leadership tamped down tensions and, afterwards, shelving territorial claims for
economic development seemingly became the two countries diplomatic leitmotif in the
treatment of the island dispute. Theres reason to believe todays China and Japan
arent bucking the historical pattern. Despite a year of heated rhetoric and economic
tensions over the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, bilateral trade has been recovering nicely of
late. Quartzs Matt Phillips, looking over the numbers, concluded that the China-Japan
trade war is pretty much over. Sure, Chinese business leaders are making some
nationalistic noises, but Phillips points out that the lack of mass, nationalistic protests
in China suggests the powers-that-be have decided theres no need for that to hurt an
important business relationship. Trade really does appear to be calming the waves in
the East China Sea. The last thing people worried about war between China and Japan
cite is ideology. Specifically, a growing nationalism, linked to the history of antagonism
between the two traditional East Asian powers, that threatens to overwhelm the
overwhelming military and economic rationales that militate against war. At its root,
Asia experts Tatsushi Arai and Zheng Wang write, the Diaoyu/Senkaku dispute is an
identity-based conflict in which the divergent memories, perceptions, attitudes, and
aspirations of the two national communities combine in volatile combinations. The gist
of the problem is that both countries believe they have historical claims to the islands
that extend at least back to 1895; Chinese books date its control way back in the Ming
Dynasty. Japan claims it formally annexed the Senkakus after World War II; China
claims that Japan should have handed the Diaoyus back as part of its post-World War II
withdrawal from Chinese territory. This historical conflict cuts across modern lines of
tension in particularly dangerous ways. Japan, always threatened by Chinas
overwhelming size, is baseline skeptical of Chinas military and economic rise.
Aggressive moves in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute suggest to Japanese citizens that
Chinas plan is to eclipse and ultimately dominate Japan. China, by contrast, still has
deep, visceral memories of the brutal Japanese occupation during World War II, and its
history books cast Japan as the enemy responsible for its subordinate status in the past
two centuries of global politics. Japanese defenses of the Senkakus come across as, once
again, an attempt to keep China down. To some observers, the risk that these
nationalist impulses pressure leaders into military escalation during a crisis is the
greatest risk of war. The toxic mix of two rising nationalisms and unresolved mutual
resentments makes the risks of an accidental conflict becomes uncomfortably real,
Isabel Hilton writes in The Guardian. Times Michael Crowley agrees, writing that
national pride and historical grievance threaten to drag in the U.S. into a Pacific
war. But the importance of nationalism as a driving force on both the Chinese and
Japanese side has been overblown. In fact, a deeper look at the prevailing ideological
winds in both China and Japan suggest much more pacific forces are likely to carry the
day. First, while its easy to see China as an aggressive expansionist power bent on
retaking its rightful place in East Asia by force, thats simply inconsistent with Chinas
track record to date. In an influential 2003 article, Iain Alasdair Johnston, a professor of
China in World Affairs at Harvard, argued that theres overwhelming evidence China is
more-or-less happy with the current international order. Johnston tested various
measures of Chinese interest in upending the global order like its willingness to work
inside the U.N. and internal dialogues within PRC strategists about overtaking the
United States and found very little evidence of China seeking to overturn the global
structure, including the U.S.JapanKorea alliance system that sets the terms in East
Asia. The regime appears to be unwilling, according to Johnston, to bear the
economic and social costs of mobilizing the economy and militarizing society to balance
seriously against American power and influence in the region, let alone globally. The
Chinese leaderships ideology is better understood, in Johnstons view, as centering on
expanding Chinas power inside the international order rather than overturning through
gambles like military aggression in the Senkaku/Diaoyu chain. In the face of 2013s
flurry of headlines about a newly aggressive China, Johnston revisited his thesis. He
found basically no evidence that the Chinese leadership had changed its tune. Panicked
writers, in Johnstons analysis, were focusing on minor changes in Chinese policy to the
exclusion of major continuities (like continued and deepening economic ties with the
United States). They were also consistently misinterpreting Beijings thinking during
major so-called aggressive moves. Take the 2010 Senkaku-Diaoyu flareup, after a
Chinese trawler tried to ram some Japanese coast guard ships near the islands. Johnston
found no evidence of serious Chinese escalation the most serious such step reported,
an embargo on shipping rare earth metals to Japan, was either very weakly enforced or
never happened. Moreover, Beijing took explicit steps to tamp down anti-Japanese
nationalism, placing anti-war editorials in major party outlets and shutting up the most
anti-Japanese voices on the Chinese web during the most diplomatically sensitive time in
the dispute. In short, Chinas track record in the past ten years suggests the government
doesnt share the hardline nationalist sentiment it occasionally indulges in. Rather, the
Chinese government is interested in very moderate regional advances that stop well
short of war, and is capable of shutting down the sort of nationalist outburst from its
population that might goad the government into war well before such protests might
start affecting policy. What about Japan? Its true that Abe himself holds some fairly
hardline nationalist views. For instance, he wont admit that Japan waged an aggressive
war during World War II, which is a pretty gobsmacking bit of revisionism if you think
about it. In December, Abe visited a shrine that honors (among others) Japanese war
criminals from that era, a move that contributed to the recent bout of nationalistic
strife. But there are a number of reasons to think that the resurgent Japanese
nationalism Abe represents isnt going to force war during a crisis. For one thing, his
governments coalition partners would do their damndest to block escalation. New
Komeito, whose support keeps Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power, is
an odd duck: pacifict Buddhist libertarians is way oversimplified, but it gets the point
across. Regardless, they are extremely serious about their pacifism its at the core of
their political identity, and it inclines them towards a more generous stance towards
Beijing. Theyd exert a calming pressure in any crisis. Now, there are rumblings that the
LDP and New Komeito may part political ways. But the cause of the split a
disagreement over rewriting or reinterpreting Article 9, the pacifist article in Japans
constitution reveals the broadest check on Japanese nationalism. Simply put, the
Japanese people still retain much of the nations post-World War II pacifist core, and
Abes government has governed accordingly. Mike Mochizuki, the Japan-U.S. Relations
Chair at George Washington University, took a hard look at Japanese opinion about
militarization in the Abe era. He and his coauthor, Samuel Porter, found enormous
Japanese opposition to anything resembling a significant return to active military status.
For instance, 56 percent of Japanese voters supported seeing the treaty as prohibiting
collective self-defense (meaning defense of its allies when attacked). A miniscule 7
percent wanted to see Japanese troops fighting on the frontlines with the U.S.
military. So why did they support Abes aggressive LDP? In a word, the economy.
Japans citizens arent deeply aligned with the LDP philosophy 83 percent, according
to Mochizuki and Porter, felt that a party that can effectively oppose the LDP is
necessary in government. Rather, they threw out the previous government because the
economy was in tatters. Sixty percent of Japanese voters want Abe to focus on the
economy, while only 9 percent see foreign policy as the priority. Abes government,
nationalist stunts aside, isnt unaware of this reality. Because China is Japans number
one trading partner, reviving Japans economy will be inordinately difficult if fractious
political relations with China are allowed to damage JapanChina economic relations,
Mochizuki and Porter argue. If SinoJapanese relations were to deteriorate further and
lead to a more precipitous drop in Japanese exports to China, this would jeopardize
Abes growth strategy and thereby threaten his political survival. As a consequence, they
conclude, the Prime Ministers approach to the Senkaku dispute will be measured and
will not entail full-blown militarization, let alone short term escalation. Abe and the
LDP rank militaristic nationalism a distant second to the nations economic health. Of
course its possible that, at one point in the future, all of this changes. Chinese hard
power continues to grow, Japan remilitarizes in a big way, and the United States pulls
back it security guarantee. In that world, a combination of security competition and
nationalist fever might well swamp the economic incentives against war. But its
important to remember that were nowhere close to that reality. Too often, our political
discourse dramatically inflates the threats facing the United States, leading to distorted,
paranoid policy responses when something more measured would do. Theres a lot
going in East Asia that matters to American policymakers. We should focus on solving
those real problems, not the ephemeral specter of a vanishingly unlikely war.
No escalatory wars in the Asia-Pacific the impacts are contained takes
into account every scenario for Asian conflict
Bitzinger and Desker, 08Richard A. Bitzinger is a Senior Fellow at the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Barry Desker is Dean of the S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies and Director of the Institute of Defense and Strategic
Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. (Richard and Barry, December
1st, 2008, IISS, Why East Asian War isUnlikely-- The Asia-Pacific, if not an area of
serenity and calm, is certainly more stable than one might expect.,
http://www.iiss.org/en/publications/survival/sections/2008-4e2e/survival--global-
politics-and-strategy-december-2008-january-2009-27d4/50-6-09-bitzinger-desker-
a264)//IK
The Asia-Pacific region can be regarded as a zone of both relative insecurity and strategic
stability. It contains some of the worlds most significant flashpoints the Korean
peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, the Siachen Glacier where tensions between nations
could escalate to the point of major war. It is replete with unresolved border issues; is a
breeding ground for transnational terrorism and the site of many terrorist activities (the
Bali bombings, the Manila superferry bombing); and contains overlapping claims for
maritime territories (the Spratly Islands, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands) with considerable
actual or potential wealth in resources such as oil, gas and fisheries. Finally, the Asia-
Pacific is an area of strategic significance with many key sea lines of communication and
important chokepoints. Yet despite all these potential crucibles of conflict, the Asia-
Pacific, if not an area of serenity and calm, is certainly more stable than one might
expect. To be sure, there are separatist movements and internal struggles, particularly
with insurgencies, as in Thailand, the Philippines and Tibet. Since the resolution of the
East Timor crisis, however, the region has been relatively free of open armed warfare.
Separatism remains a challenge, but the break-up of states is unlikely. Terrorism is a
nuisance, but its impact is contained. The North Korean nuclear issue, while not fully
resolved, is at least moving toward a conclusion with the likely denuclearisation of the
peninsula. Tensions between China and Taiwan, while always just beneath the surface,
seem unlikely to erupt in open conflict any time soon, especially given recent
Kuomintang Party victories in Taiwan and efforts by Taiwan and China to re-open
informal channels of consultation as well as institutional relationships between
organisations responsible for cross-strait relations. And while in Asia there is no strong
supranational political entity like the European Union, there are many multilateral
organisations and international initiatives dedicated to enhancing peace and stability,
including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Proliferation
Security Initiative and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. In Southeast Asia,
countries are united in a common geopolitical and economic organisation the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which is dedicated to peaceful
economic, social and cultural development, and to the promotion of regional peace and
stability. ASEAN has played a key role in conceiving and establishing broader regional
institutions such as the East Asian Summit, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea)
and the ASEAN Regional Forum. All this suggests that war in Asia while not
inconceivable is unlikely.
No impact to Central Asian instability
Blinova, 4/7/2014 - writer for Voice of Russia, (Ekaterina, "Europe, Mideast and
Central Asia pose biggest threat to intl stability in 2014 - political analysts," Voice of
Russia, http://www.global-sentinel.com/world/3719-europe-mideast-and-central-asia-
pose-biggest-threat-to-intl-stability-in-2014-political-analysts)//IS
Situation in the Caucasus will remain stable. Still the Ukrainian turmoil will doubtlessly
affect the dynamism of political processes in the region. The intentions of Georgia and
Azerbaijan to change their current status quo could become a serious challenge for
Russia. However, according to another possible scenario, the new government and the
President of Georgia will strengthen ties with their Russian counterparts in economic
and security spheres, leaving aside the question of Abkhazia and South Ossetia status.
Increasing tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan may provoke a series of incidents
on the Nagorno-Karabakh border. Its extremely unlikely, though, that these local
conflicts will turn into large-scale military confrontation.
The activity of terrorist groups of Northern Caucasus will decrease in general, but the
attempts of jihadists and the Ukrainian right radical groups to establish alliances will
apparently take place.
It should be noted that three pivotal regional players Iran, Russia, and Turkey will
most probably prevent any destabilizing extremist activity in their own neighborhoods:
none of them is interested in breaking the status quo.

Central Asia is uniquely at risk now
Voloshin, 12/3/13 - widely published Russia/CIS expert and consultant collaborating
with the Jamestown Foundation and the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of the John
Hopkins University. (Georgiy, "," The Diplomat, thediplomat.com/2013/12/central-asia-
dim-security-prospects-ahead/)//IS
Now that Washington no longer views Central Asia as a priority region for its foreign
policy, given its ongoing disengagement from Afghanistan, which has consumed much of
Washingtons attention since the early 2000s, it remains to be seen whether Russia will
be capable of assuming full responsibility for the regions security in the post-2014
context. This task actually may be complicated by a number of factors. First among these
is Russias ambiguous relationship with most of the local regimes, which have tended to
build their post-independence domestic discourses on the rejection of the Soviet legacy
and Moscows geopolitical domination.
Second, there is Chinas continued absence from Central Asias security affairs. While
China actively pursues interstate cooperation within the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO), this multilateral structure has never been close to becoming, as
some earlier predicted, a local equivalent of NATO. In actuality, Beijing still prefers to
reap the fruits of its growing economic ties with the region, especially in the energy field,
while Russia does the dirty work of training local security forces and worrying about
security and stability on the ground.
Third, relations among Central Asians themselves remain tense, thus drastically
reducing the opportunity for productive security cooperation in the foreseeable future,
even in the face of growing terrorist and extremist threats from the south. Ties are
poisoned as much by repetitive border incidents erupting in the unstable Fergana Valley
as by unsettled water disputes, beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies (for instance, in the
field of natural gas trade) and sometimes personal animosities at the leadership level.
With these three factors combined, Central Asia may now be facing a dim future, much
in line with the characterization Zbigniew Brzezinski offered for the region back in 1997,
when he famously called it the Eurasian Balkans.
No impact to China rise or China nationalism
Holslag 9 --- Head of Research, Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies
(Jonathan, Civil Unrest and Chinas Growing Pains, The Globalist,
http://www.theglobalist.com/civil-unrest-and-chinas-growing-pains/)//trepka
The quest for national unity will also be translated into a stronger yearning for status at
the international level. China does not desire to replace Americas hegemony, but it
wants to be respected as a great nation and a rising regional power with international
interests. China must convince its neighbors of the common need for regional stability.
It must also convey the message that Chinas rise brings nothing but mutual gains for
those around it. From other developing countries, China will expect sympathy, esteem
and support for its development track. Its message to Western powers will be:
Concentrate on your own problems, refrain from criticism and keep your markets open.
The baseline of Chinas diplomacy remains to avoid confrontation, but disappointment
will be met with stauncher resistance to calls for reform. The bolder China gets, the
more tempting it will be to criticize the many flaws of its development. While Chinas
nationalism may appear ugly to some Westerners, a certain degree of realism and
modesty is due in this situation.
U.S. involvement checks escalation.
Ottens 10 [Nick, Atlantic Sentinel, Tension? What Tension?,, 1/18/2010,
http://atlanticsentinel.com/2010/01/tension-what-tension/]

The United States is bound by law to arm Taiwan however and a recent sale of missiles
met with strong Chinese disapproval. Sino-American relations are still shaky but as
Clinton said last Tuesday, Americas future is linked to the future of this region, and the
future of this region depends on America. Obama was even happy to call himself a
Pacific President and for good reasons: East Asia is fast becoming the new core of the
world economy while politically, its integration can be fragile at times. US involvement is
able spark discontent but it also helps smooth over differences by providing greater
power leadership to those nations fearing Chinese domination. The political discord
should not be exaggerated. Todays tension springs from relatively minor disagreements
and will, in the end, be resolved.

Arctic Oil War

Cooperation in the Arctic, not war.
Olsvig 7/22, Chair of the Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region,
(Sara, July 22, 2014, Strong cooperation for a peaceful Arctic,
http://arcticjournal.com/press-releases/819/strong-cooperation-peaceful-arctic)//HH

In our conference statement from 2012, we recommend that the role and participation
of the Permanent Participants is secured and that mechanisms to increase their financial
and human resources to participate fully in all the activities of the Arctic Council are
provided.
While including more observers to the Arctic Council we need to make sure that we keep
and develop the best part of the cooperation the cooperation between the Arctic states
and the Permanent Participants.
I acknowledge the delicate balance the Arctic Council needs to find in regards to the
inclusion of new observers. In many issues we are faced with in the Arctic, we need the
involvement of non-Arctic states. Shipping routes, fisheries, resource development,
infrastructure, satellite communication and surveillance, and especially health and social
issues are areas that need broader international cooperation. In our committee we have a
strong focus on research and capacity building. Much can be done by enhancing the
cooperation between Arctic states and we have from its beginning supported for example
the University of the Arctic. But more must be done to enhance cooperation going east-
west across the Arctic and between the Arctic and the rest of the World, and existing
structures like the University of the Arctic must be further developed

Arctic influence spurs cooperation, not war.
Ria Novosti 5/22, global news source quoting the program director at the George
Washington Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, (May 22, 2014,
Arctic Cooperation May Ease Russia-US Tensions Analyst,
http://en.ria.ru/world/20140522/190037278/Arctic-Cooperation-May-Ease-Russia-US-
Tensions--Analyst.html)//HH

WASHINGTON, May 22 (RIA Novosti), Leandra Bernstein Tense relations between
Russia and the US and NATO could potentially be cooled through Arctic cooperation,
according to the program director at the George Washington Institute for European,
Russian, and Eurasian Studies.
I think the Arctic is, today at least, one of the last places for cooperation with Russia
following the Ukrainian crisis, Marlene Laruelle said.
US-Russia [Arctic] cooperation will probably be less directed to cooperation on security
issues because of the Ukrainian crisis, she specified, but there are several other
elements that are still open for discussion.
Since 2011 the US has increased its stake in Arctic security and development and
currently holds the chairmanship for the Arctic Council. The US is planning to invest
$1.5 billion focusing on the Arctic, according to former State Department official Heather
Conley.
However, US assets in the region are limited and they rely on dated technology and
borrowed equipment from other Arctic nations. Russia is currently the only country
employing nuclear-powered icebreakers.
The securitization trend we see in the Arctic from the Russian side is mostly not an issue
of military aggressiveness, but it is a business issue, Laruelle said.
Concerning Russias delimitation of its continental shelf and control over the North Sea
Pass, Laruelle said Russia is playing by the rules. The demarcation of national and
international waterways is contested within the Arctic Council, but the first voyage of a
Chinese merchant ship, Hong Xing, through the North Sea Pass last year set a precedent
when the ship adhered to all Russian requirements for passage.
There are hopes that increased trade will take place through Arctic routes. The route is
expected to see between ten and twelve commercial trips this year.
Laruelles remarks were part of a panel discussion at the Wilson Center on the interests
of the Arctic nations, and the increasing participation in the region by non-Arctic
players, particularly China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.


No Arctic tensions now
Berkman, 6/23 - research professor at the Marine Science Institute and Bren School of
Environmental Science and Management (Paul Arthur, 06.23.2014 Stability and Peace
in the Arctic Ocean through Science Diplomacy
http://www.sciencediplomacy.org/perspective/2014/stability-and-peace-in-arctic-
ocean-through-science-diplomacy)//gingE

High north, low tensions has been the mantra of diplomats, as coined by former
Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Stre. After all, the Cold War is over and
cooperation has been evolving in productive directions ever since for the North Polar
region. Lessons of the Arctic, such as those from the Antarctic, reveal science as a tool of
diplomacy that creates bridges among nations and fosters stability in regions. It is well
known that science is necessary for Earth system monitoring and assessment, especially
as an essential gauge of change over time and space. Science also is a frequent
determinant of public policy agendas and institutions, often for early warning about
future events. However, even more than an immediate source of insight, invention, and
commercial enterprise, science provides continuity in our global society with its evolving
foundation of prior knowledge. These and other features of science diplomacy,1 as a field
of human endeavor, are relevant to our global future in the Arctic. Building on the East-
West breakthrough in the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, with his Murmansk speech in
October 1987, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev envisioned a shared path where the
community and interrelationship of the interests of our entire world is felt in the
northern part of the globe, in the Arctic, perhaps more than anywhere else. Recognizing
that scientific exploration of the Arctic is of immense importance for the whole of
mankind, Gorbachev called for creation of a joint Arctic Research Council. Emerging
from his Murmansk speech, the International Arctic Science Committee was founded in
1990, followed by the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in 1991, which revealed a
common future among Arctic countries and peoples. Also involving the eight Arctic
states,2 the Barents-Euro Arctic Council and Standing Committee of the Conference of
Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region were formed in 1993 and 1994, respectively.
Eventually established in 1996, the Arctic Council breathed life into a circumpolar
community of the eight states and six indigenous peoples organizations inhabiting the
region north of the Arctic Circle. As a high level forum, the Arctic Council has become
central in an institutional arena for the high north that includes the above organizations
along with many others, starting with the 1920 Treaty Concerning the Archipelago of
Spitsbergen. With its forty-two signatories, this treaty still stands as a beacon of peaceful
development in the high north. Together, the six scientific working groups of the Arctic
Council are facilitating knowledge discovery and contributing to informed decisions
about common Arctic issues of sustainable development and environmental
protection. As a direct consequence of the Arctic Council, pan-Arctic agreements are
being signed by all Arctic states, beginning with the 2011 search and rescue agreement
and 2013 marine oil pollution response agreement. Interests of twelve non-Arctic states,
including China and India, also are being accommodated as they are brought in as
observers to the Arctic Council. Moreover, the so-called Arctic Five3 coastal states are
reaching territorial agreements. As noted in their 2008 Ilulissat Declaration,
sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in large areas of the Arctic Oceanare
being addressed cooperatively under the Law of the Sea, particularly with regard to
outer limits of the continental shelf. This commitment includes the United States, even
though it has not yet ratified the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Highlighting the cooperation, Russia and Norway signed an agreement in 2010 about
Barents Sea resources, ending a dispute that had escaped their resolution for the
previous four decades.

Conflict is all hype
Dyer, 12 - London-based independent Canadian journalist, syndicated columnist and
military historian (Gwynne, 8/4/2012, "Race for Arctic Mostly Rhetoric",
www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/race-for-arctic-mostly-rhetoric-
164986566.html)//gingE

Russian television contacted me last night asking me to go on a program about the race
for Arctic resources. The ice is melting fast, and it was all the usual stuff about how there
will be big strategic conflicts over the seabed resources -- especially oil and gas -- that
become accessible when it's gone.
The media always love conflict, and now that the Cold War is long gone, there's no other
potential military confrontation between the great powers to worry about. Governments
around the Arctic Ocean are beefing up their armed forces for the coming struggle, so
where are the flashpoints and what are the strategies? It's great fun to speculate about
possible wars.
In the end I didn't do the interview because the Skype didn't work, so I didn't get the
chance to rain on their parade. But here's what I would said to the Russians if my server
hadn't gone down at the wrong time.
First, you should never ask the barber if you need a haircut. The armed forces in every
country are always looking for reasons to worry about impending conflict, because that's
the only reason their governments will spend money on them.
Sometimes they will be right to worry, and sometimes they will be wrong, but right or
wrong, they will predict conflict. Like the barbers, it's in their professional interest to say
you need their services.
So you'd be better off to ask somebody who doesn't have a stake in the game. As I don't
own a single warship, I'm practically ideal for the job. And I don't think there will be any
significant role for the armed forces in the Arctic, although there is certainly going to be a
huge investment in exploiting the region's resources.
There are three separate "resources" in the Arctic. On the surface, there are the sea lanes
that are opening up to commercial traffic along the northern coasts of Russia and
Canada. Under the seabed, there are potential oil and gas deposits that can be drilled
once the ice retreats. And in the water in between, there is the planet's last unfished
ocean.
The sea lanes are mainly a Canadian obsession, because the government believes the
Northwest Passage that weaves between Canada's Arctic islands will become a major
commercial artery when the ice is gone. Practically every summer, Prime Minister
Stephen Harper travels north to declare his determination to defend Canada's Arctic
sovereignty from -- well, it's not clear from exactly whom, but it's a great photo op.
Canada is getting new Arctic patrol vessels and building a deep-water naval port and
Arctic warfare training centre in the region, but it's all much ado about nothing. The
Arctic Ocean will increasingly be used as a shortcut between the North Atlantic and the
North Pacific, but the shipping will not go through Canadian waters. Russia's "Northern
Sea Route" will get the traffic, because it's already open and much safer to navigate.
Then there's the hydrocarbon deposits under the Arctic seabed, which the U.S.
Geological Survey has forecast may contain almost one-fourth of the world's remaining
oil and gas resources. But from a military point of view, there's only a problem if there is
some disagreement about the seabed boundaries.
There are only four areas where the boundaries are disputed. Two are between Canada
and its eastern and western neighbours in Alaska and Greenland, but there is zero
likelihood of a war between Canada and the United States or Denmark (which is
responsible for Greenland's defence).
In the Bering Strait, there is a treaty defining the seabed boundary between the United
States and Russia, signed in the dying days of the Soviet Union, but the Russian Duma
has refused to ratify it. The legal uncertainty caused by the dispute, however, is more
likely to deter future investment in drilling there than lead to war.
And then there was the seabed-boundary dispute between Norway and Russia in the
Barents Sea, which led Norway to double the size of its navy over the past decade. But
last year, the two countries signed an agreement dividing the disputed area right down
the middle and providing for joint exploitation of its resources. So no war between NATO
(of which Norway is a member) and the Russian Federation.
Which leaves the fish, and it's hard to have a war over fish. The danger is rather that the
world's fishing fleets will crowd in and clean the fish out, as they are currently doing in
the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.
If the countries with Arctic coastlines want to preserve this resource, they can only do so
by creating an international body to regulate the fishing. And they will have to let other
countries fish there, too, with agreed catch limits, since they are mostly international
waters. They will be driven to co-operate, in their own interests.
So no war over the Arctic. All we have to worry about now is the fact the ice is melting,
which will speed global warming (because open water absorbs far more heat from the
sun than highly reflective ice), and ultimately melt the Greenland icecap and raise sea
levels worldwide by seven metres. But that's a problem for another day.



Balkan War
No risk of Balkan war countries are too exhausted from previous wars
Siletsky 11 writer for Voice of Russia (Igor, April 26, 2011, Do the Balkans want a
War?, Voice of Russia, http://voiceofrussia.com/2011/04/26/49426351/)

The Balkans are on the verge of a new war, Western political observers and analysts have
been saying. They believe that a precedent for the worsening of the situation was given to
the countries of the Former Yugoslavia by the international community, when it
sentenced Croatian General Ante Gotovina. For their part, Russian political analysts who
see no prerequisites for a new conflict, say that a new outbreak of tensions is beneficial
for the West.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY or The Hague
Tribunal) delivered a verdict for three Croatian generals on April 15th. All of them were
accused of committing crimes against the Serbs during Operation Storm 1995. According
to the court ruling, Ante Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years in prison, Mladen Markac
to 18 years, and the third defendant Ivan Cermac was acquitted.
So why has the verdict triggered such stormy emotions not only among the Croats but
also in the Western countries. The point is that throughout the history of the existence of
The Hague Tribunal the key defendant for the UN court, who was often referred to as
Doctor Evil was Yugoslavias last president Milosevic and of course, his supporters and
Serbia itself. There even appeared people in some countries in Europe and in the USA
who started saying that the justice of The Hague was one-sided. This postulate needed no
proofs for either Russia or the other countries, which were not involved in the anti-
Yugoslav coalition. However, judging by the facts, those in The Hague have decided to
improve their image and to put into life the principle that was declared by the tribunal
itself, that is, that all sides are to blame for the atrocities and that no nation was more
responsible than the other. As a result, the Croatian generals, who were accused of
ousting 100,000 peaceful civilians and of murdering hundreds of Serbs, were jailed. As it
might seem, justice was obtained. And the fact that the Croats have got angry is simply
an expected side effect.
However, what followed was that the angry progressive public- meaning the leading
Western media - has undertaken to conduct an investigation of its own. The
Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The Jerusalem Post,
after studying Storm Operation 1995, came to the conclusion that Ante Gotovina had
committed no crimes at all. Moreover, the general is a real Croatian patriot and hero,
and that his campaign had not only restored Croatias territorial integrity but had also
destroyed the dream of the deceased Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic about Greater
Serbia. Besides, the Western editions said that by its irresponsible verdicts The Hague
Tribunal is stirring up a new war.
The first thought that comes to mind after reading all these journalist investigations is
that the West wants to preserve the status quo in the Balkans, which suits it. In this
system Belgrade acts as a guilty child, who is still under punishment. And all the other
parts of the Former Yugoslavia act as sufferers, whose sufferings are linked on the violent
senior and who receive small presents and bonuses in consolation. Thus, Kosovo has
obtained independence, and Croatia is only one step away from the accession into the
European Union (EU). By the way, the Croats themselves are not looking forward to this.
However, therere other reasons as well. Should The Hague Tribunal start conducting an
unbiased investigation, many influential persons will be surely hurt. And not only in the
Balkans. Suffice it to mention here the information concerning the current Kosovo
authorities that was made public by the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte -
that Pristina was involved in the trafficking of human organs. And that not only the
Croats also killed the Serbs and not only vice versa. That is why it is necessary to
continue studying the latest Balkan crisis, the Head of the Centre For the Study of the
Modern Balkan Crisis under the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of
Sciences Yelena Guskova says:
"The new data about the human organ trafficking and about the atrocities, committed by
the Croats , offer proof that it is necessary to study the Balkan crisis and that it is
necessary to be objective while doing this. Of course, therere many conflicts in the
world. But if we start analyzing how all the other countries developed in the 90s and
what occurred to the Balkans and to the post-Balkan space, well undoubtedly arrive
at the conclusion that the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims have already
suffered too much. They have no potential to take up arms again. Thus, to say
that a new war will break out in the Balkans soon is no good."
Thus, instead of intimidating the Balkan nations by saying that a new war will break out,
it is necessary to afford the UN court an opportunity to go on with its investigations. And
the Croats, the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Bosnians will decide themselves how they
should coexist together. One thing is certain though: they not start fighting because they
had enough of it.
No chance of Balkan escalation of spilloverempirics prove
Eland 99 Director of Defense Policy Studies at the CATO Institute (Ivan, May 3,
1999, The War against Serbia: Illusion Versus Reality, CATO Institute
http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/scripts/printtech.cgi/dailys/05-03-99.html)

In reality, the ostensible humanitarian justification for the war is secondary at best.
It's the underlying perception that European security is threatened that's really
driving this military intervention. The United States rarely intervenes militarily when
there is no perception that its interests are at stake. So the military operation
advertised as a NATO mission to relieve human suffering is actually a ham-handed
U.S. attempt to defend perceived American security interests. Those perceived
interests flow from the Clinton administration's domino theory of instability
and concerns about preserving NATO's credibility. Instead of a fear of communism
spreading from country to country, the administration's refurbished domino theory
sees "instability" -- unless checked -- spreading and engulfing large parts of Europe.
Instability has always existed in the volatile and remote Balkan nations,
but it hasn't spread outside the region since 1914. The administration constantly
alludes to the specter of World War I. But in the events leading up to that
war, two powerful and hostile alliances exploited instability in the region
-- a situation much different from the one that exists today. At present,
instability in the Balkans has no relationship to American vital interests.
And getting into a war to preserve "NATO's credibility" sounds eerily like the "peace
with honor" justification that kept the United States bogged down in Vietnam for an
extra five years. In Vietnam, over a seven-year period, the average tonnage of bombs
dropped per month was almost double that dropped per month during Desert Storm,
which was in turn much greater than the tonnage dropped on Serbia and Kosovo
during the past month. Seven years of pounding from the air did not dissuade the
North Vietnamese from their battle to unify Vietnam (nor did an air onslaught alone
persuade Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait). It's doubtful that a few months
of far less intense attacks on Serbia will stop the Serbs' nationalistic effort to maintain
the unity of Serbia.

No impact institutions prevent escalation with Russia
Sleivyte 8 - Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Advanced Research and
Assessment group (Janina Sleivyte, Feb 2008, Shrivenham Paper Number 7, Russias
European Agenda and the Baltic States)

The main criterion for evaluating whether or not institutions are relevant in the
international system is their capacity to bring and maintain international
peace. Applying this approach to the BSR, the logic runs as follows: through
interactions and cooperation, the outcome of which is cooperative
security, international institutions (NATO in particular) have promoted
and maintained peace conflict-free conditions for the regions
development. This demonstrates that international institutions have had a
stabilising effect on inter-state relations, particularly on Russo-Baltic
relations. The positive influence of the environment of multilateral security and
cooperation in stabilising Russo-Baltic relations has manifested itself
many times since the early 1990s, the most notable of them being Soviet
troop withdrawal and the NATO enlargement in the region. International
institutions, such as NATO and the EU, as well as frameworks of multilateral
cooperation, such as the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS), the Northern
Dimension (ND), the Northern European Initiative (NEI) and E-PINE, all these
mechanisms served to mitigate Russo-Baltic relations by engaging them in
regional cooperation.53 This is what is meant by security through
interdependence cooperative security: establishing as many bilateral and
multilateral ties as possible and building on very practical initiatives, pooling
resources and working together.

Negotiation would occur first in the Baltics this prevents conflict
SGS 7 (Seminar on Global Security And Strategy 2030, Helsinki 28-29 November 2007,
http://www.defmin.fi/files/1154/Abstracts_in_English.pdf)

By 2030 Russia will be a world power economically, politically and militarily. Its
position of authority in the international community will be based on its ability to
exploit its vast natural resources. Its aim will obviously be to provide a counterbalance
to the US domination of world politics, and with this in mind it will be ready to
develop its relations with the EU, China, India and Japan. Its political system will
nevertheless possess some of the features of an authoritarian regime. Russia will look
on the expansion of NATO as being contrary to its national interests and will oppose
Finnish membership. When Finland does join NATO, however, this will not detract
from its relations with Russia in any permanent sense. Increased shipping in the
Baltic Sea may heighten tension in the area, but a military conflict is
unlikely, as it would be to the advantage of all the countries and
commercial actors in the region to solve the problems by negotiation.

Bangladesh Instability
! Inevitable
Political Instability Inevitable in Bangladesh
Uddin 7/1/2014 Writes for the New Age Newspaper (Jasim, New FY begins with
challenges in investment, political fronts, New Age, http://newagebd.net/26367/new-
fy-begins-with-challenges-in-investment-political-fronts/#sthash.TdQUYOOd.dpbs)

The government will face some major challenges including boosting private investment,
bringing momentum in economic activities, achieving GDP growth at higher rate and
containing inflation in the new fiscal year 2014-2015 that begins today amid looming
risk of political instability, economists and business leaders said on Monday.
Achieving the targets set in the budget documents will be tough even in the normal
circumstances as many of the targets are over ambitious, they said. Any political
instability which seems inevitable will create tough challenges for the government
in implementation of the budget for the year, causing tremendous pressure in the
economy, they said. Economists and businessmen on Monday told New Age that
maintaining macroeconomic stability through ensuring enough investment in the private
sector and restoring momentum in economic activities, achieving revenue collection and
export earnings target and containing high inflation would be tough for the
government. Ensuring law and order situation in the country particularly ensuring
personal safety will also be a major challenge for the government, they said. The budget
for the FY 2014-2015 will be implemented from today. The parliament on Sunday passed
the budget of Tk 2,50,506 crore with a deficit of Tk 67,552 crore or 5 per cent of the gross
domestic product. In the budget, the government has set target of achieving growth at
7.3 per cent and bringing down inflation at 6 per cent. Finance minister AMA Muhith in
his budget speech mentioned that favourable weather and political stability were
required for achieving growth target and other budgetary assumptions including
investment, inflation and export earnings. Opposition alliance led by the Bangladesh
National Party has already threatened to launch tough movement against the
government after Eid-ul Fitr demanding new national elections. Centre for Policy
Dialogue executive director Mostafizur Rahman said that the country needed peaceful
environment and political stability to achieve 7 per cent economic growth and more.
The countrys economy has some inherent resilience to grow by 5 per cent to 6 per cent.
But the government should ensure political stability for economic growth by 7 per cent to
8 per cent, he said. All sectors including industrial and agricultural production,
services, transportation, export, inflation and investment will directly or indirectly be
disrupted if there is any political unrest like hartal and violence in the new fiscal year.
Investment including foreign direct investment will be adversely affected as investors
will not come up with term investment amid political uncertainties and policy
unpredictability, he said adding that foreign investors would also refrain from new
investment. Increasing budget implementation capacity is also another requirement to
achieve the targets set in the budget which is bigger than the governments
implementation capacity, he said. Mostafiz stressed on ensuring inclusive and
discussion-based political culture in the country to avoid further political uncertainties
and instability. Bangladesh Bank data showed that the credit growth in the private
sector stood at 11.5 per cent in March much below from the central bank target of 16.5
per cent. In the last fiscal year, the economy grew by 6.12 per cent against the target of
7.2 per cent. Former caretaker government adviser Mirza Azizul Islam said that the
targets demonstrated in the budget were over ambitious which would be challenging to
achieve even in the normal economic and political circumstances. It will be more
challenging for the government to implement the budget in terms of achieving GDP
growth rate, implementing annual development programme, containing inflation and
achieving revenue collection targets, he said. Political instability will disrupt
investment, employment generation, revenue collection leading slower economic growth
in the country, he apprehended. Former Bangladesh Bank governor Salehuddin Ahmed
said improving investment environment, removing political uncertainties, ensuring law
and order and good governance in the banking sector were the major challenges for the
government. Till now, there is no sign of improvement of business and investment-
friendly environment in the country, he mentioned.
No Escalation
India and China check Instability
Curtis and Hossain 1/28/2014 -*Senior Research Fellow in the Asian Studies Center
at The Heritage Foundation, **Hossain is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and
Director of the Daily Ittefaq, a newspaper in Bangladesh (*Lisa and ** Maneeza,
Combating Islamism in South Asia: Keeping Bangladesh on the Democratic Path, The
Cutting Edge,
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=82994&pageid=&pagename=)

While domestic issues continue to dominate the election campaign, the way in which
Bangladeshi leaders manage relations with neighboring powers India and China is
becoming increasingly important. China is slowly building up ties to Bangladesh and
competing with India for dominance in the region. China is Bangladeshs top supplier of
military equipment and biggest trading partner. Trade between Bangladesh and China
surpassed $8 billion in 2012. China has pledged to build a deep-sea port at Sonadia
Island, off the coast of Coxs Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh, and expressed interest in
establishing a transport link connecting Chittagong in Bangladesh to Kunming in
China. IndoBangladeshi ties have improved considerably during Sheikh Hasinas
tenure. Trade between the two neighbors is soaring upwards of $5 billion (approximately
10 percent of which represents Bangladeshi exports to India). Indian conglomerates have
been awarded major infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, including construction of a
$1.6 billion coal-fired power plant. New Delhi has appreciated the Awami League
governments actions against terrorist groups and its crackdowns on insurgents from
India that seek shelter in Bangladesh. IndoBangladeshi cooperation led to the
arrest of several insurgent leaders that had been operating in Indias
northeast. Dhaka handed over terrorist suspects to New Delhi, even before the two
sides had established an extradition treaty. But their 2,500-mile-long shared border has
also been the source of much friction. Bangladesh is resentful of Indian border fencing
and several incidents of Indian border security forces killing innocent Bangladeshis.
No impact Status quo should have triggered it
Santos, 1/17/14 Staff Writer at Devex (Lean A., Aid in the balance Bangladesh's
political mess, Devex, https://www.devex.com/news/aid-in-the-balance-bangladesh-s-
political-mess-82675)//IS

Weeks after Sheikh Hasina was reelected for her second consecutive term as prime
minister, Bangladesh continues to suffer from political instability which
undermines the countrys development progress. A month prior to the vote, the nation
was in the middle of a political standoff, with various political groups vying for a seat in
parliament, and the possibility of a neutral interim government was even considered to
dispel parity in the country. All this, and several political assassinations in Dhaka, have
led, one way or another, to the countrys development being a victim of political
instability. The political unrest is viewed with grave concern by donors, which fear this
instability could render development programs ineffective and are slowly reducing funds
World Bank data recently revealed a significant drop in foreign aid commitments, an
almost 28 percent slip from $1.6 billion in 2013 to $1.2 billion in 2014. The countrys
central bank, on the other hand, said in a report last month that overall foreign aid
metrics has generally decreased. The report noted that aid disbursements in the latter
half of 2013 decreased by over 31 percent to $557 million from $809 million the previous
year. Reforms urgent The Asian Development Bank acknowledges the problem and
warns that delays in development projects undermine the countrys development. Delay
in implementation of development projects continues to constrain Bangladeshs
development, the Manila-based multilateral institution said in its Bangladesh country
partnership microsite. Although the regional bank said it remains committed to the
development efforts in the South Asian nation, the government needs to do its
homework if it truly wants to get back on the road to progress. Bangladesh needs to
develop infrastructure, boost investment, improve the business climate, enhance the
efficiency of the finance sector and the capital market, develop skills, and improve
governance in order to further grow, an ADB spokesperson told Devex.
Alt Cause
Structural alt causes to Bangladesh Instability
Sultan 3/8/2014 Writes for Radical Notes, a news website focusing on coordinating
radical voices globally, with a focus on South Asia (Nazmul, Theorising the Present
Political Crisis in Bangladesh, Radical Notes,
http://radicalnotes.com/2014/03/08/theorising-the-present-crisis-in-bangladesh/,
DM)

In the case of Bangladesh, the foundation of the present political order was laid by the
event of 1971. The political horizon of the national conditions the form of political
legitimacy and draws the spectrum of partisanship. The dominant form of legitimacy
that exists in Bangladesh is correlated with the Bengali nationi.e. the Bengali nations
right to rule over itself. This form of legitimacy has no determinate dovetailing with the
institutionalised regime of the political. If the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and other
legally autonomous spheres of political order cannot lay claim to be autonomous
agencies and are easily folded under the agency of the ruling regime, this is primarily
because of the reason that these institutions cannot appeal to the founding legitimacy in
the way the extra-institutional people do. Granted, these institutions have their own
logics of operation, and yet they have no agency to assert their political autonomy. Even
whatever legitimacy the operation of pastoral power provides to the ruling regime, it is
always vulnerable vis--vis the claims of the extra-institutional people. In any case, the
imbalance of power, I would suggest, has a deeper root than sheer
institutional dysfunctionality. The ruling regime is in a position to control and
navigate the institutions at the level of decision, if not at the level of institutional logic.
The concentration of power in the hand of the ruling regime results in an
irresolvable tension within the sphere of political power. At the moment of election
that is, the moment when the power is to be transferred the systematic absence of an
autonomous procedurality and the attendant concentration of power in the ruling regime
enter into a sharp contest. The opposition party along with the civil society and any
other actors concerned with a fair election cannot but oppose the occurrence of
elections under the aegis of the ruling regime. There are two forms of determinate
contest in the political sphere: (i) the apparent and predominant contest between the
political parties, who, in their identity and difference, form the political society; (ii) the
simultaneous tension between the political and civil societies. The Non-partisan
Caretaker Government was a solution that kept the suspended power within the political
society with the aim of mitigating the tension between the two main parties. This option
has lost its credibility owing to the introduction of the second form of contest following
the rupture of the military-backed regime. The military-backed caretaker regime has
established that the suspension of political power for the caretakers to come into being
is not immune to the intrusion of the civil society into the sphere that the political society
claims as its own. There is clearly a generalised opposition to the civil society from the
partisans of political society. Evidently, both the BNP and the AL are not willing
to leave power to a caretaker government that is open to the influence of
extra-political-society actors. Thus the BNP came up with another option, that of
the national government. Clearly, this would be more immune to the risks than what
the old model of the caretaker government faced. The problem is there is not enough
political force present in the political sphere to make the AL accept this otherwise
amenable demand. The political ambition of the ruling party lies in outdoing both the
external civil society and the opposition party (internal to political society) by way of
rhetorically reducing the opposition party and the civil society to the same level.
CCP Instability
Alt causes to CCP instabilitycorruption, public protests, and disloyal
military
Bosco, 7/15 Joseph A. Bosco is a member of the U.S.-China task force at the Center
for the National Interest and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. He previously served as China country desk officer in the office of
the secretary of Defense from 2005-2006. (Joseph A., July 15
th
2014, The Diplomat, The
Implications of Chinas Anti-Corruption Drive: The West should worry about a campaign
that makes an autocratic regime with revisionist intent more effective.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/the-implications-of-chinas-anti-corruption-
drive/)//IK
Clean, transparent government is a basic tenet of Western political liberalism, so we are
naturally inclined to support government reform efforts elsewhere. But in the case of the
Peoples Republic of China, should we be rooting for Xi Jinpings version of an anti-
corruption campaign to succeed, or to fail, in its intended purposes? Or should we hope
it succeeds spectacularly in ways not intended by Communist Party leaders, as glastnost
and perestroika did under Mikhail Gorbachev? Xis campaign is designed to accomplish
multiple Party objectives, none of which necessarily serve Western interests in regional
peace and stability. His first goal is to expand and consolidate his personal power over
any challengers in Chinas political and military bureaucracies. Targeting political rivals
as financial miscreants, bribe-takers, or power-abusers is a time-tested way of dealing
with them (and not just in China). Would a more powerful and potentially more
autocratic Xi be more or less likely to confront the West? Given the aggressive
predilections he has demonstrated since taking Chinas helm, there is little reason to be
sanguine about a further accretion of Xis political, and military, power. The broader aim
of the current crackdown as with past efforts is to refurbish the tarnished image of
the CCP and restore some of its lost legitimacy as the moral guardian of the Chinese
people. Communist ideology has long ceased to motivate ordinary Chinese, or even many
Party leaders. Instead, they rely on economic success ostensibly distributed fairly
across society and their default position: enhanced military power and virulent
nationalism against the United States and Japan. The economic fairness pillar of
domestic legitimacy has been crumbling in recent decades. The nations remarkable
growth in wealth, combined with the CCPs ongoing monopoly on power and opaque
governance, has spawned massive corruption at all levels of political and military
authority. Every year, China experiences almost 200,000 public protests against land
seizures, environmental degradation, bribery, and other official misconduct. To the
extent Xis team can clean up the Augean stables of official corruption or to be seen as
seriously trying they may win at least grudging public approval and thus have less need
to play the anti-West, anti-Japan card. The problem with that scenario is that the
limited, half-way measures Xi is deploying are exceedingly unlikely to get at the core
cause of official corruption. As with all dictatorships, that is the absolute political power
wielded by the CCP and the lack of transparency and public accountability that enables
and protects the wrongdoers. Moreover, there is little reason to believe that greater
public approval of Xis rule and a transitory semblance of political legitimacy will
moderate the increasingly aggressive foreign policy embodied in his China dream. He
has made it painfully clear to Chinas neighbors that Deng Xiaopings days of hiding
capabilities and biding time are over. The period of Chinas peaceful rise has yielded to
military muscle-flexing, sweeping regional claims, and aggressive actions not only
against smaller, weaker countries, but also against a U.S. now seen as irresolute and
faltering, and a Japan clearly divided on the use of military force, despite Prime Minister
Shinzo Abes strong security emphasis. Which brings us to the third major purpose of
Xis corruption crackdown: the reform and strengthening of Chinas military. The
Peoples Liberation Army has long been riddled with graft and illicit business collusion.
In a dramatic demonstration that the PLA will not be immune from the cleanup, the CCP
last week expelled Gen. Xu Caihou, former vice chair of the Central Military Commission,
the highest military official purged since the Mao era. Since his ascendancy to Chinas
pinnacle in November 2012, Xi has made further growth of Chinas military power a
paramount objective of his rule. His first official travel was to key PLA bases where he
urged the troops to make ready for real combat. He sees military corruption as
impeding the PLAs emergence as a modern, effective fighting force able to execute
expanding missions, particularly in the maritime domain. That is not a result the West
will welcome. There is an analogy in U.S. policy toward China. Decades of Washingtons
obsession with military-to-military engagement provide an object lesson in what a more
efficient and effective Chinese military brings us. That officer-to officer interaction was
intended (a) to develop greater personal contacts and understanding at all levels of our
military establishments in order to avert or manage potential crises; (b) to help
professionalize the PLA and imbue it with such Western values as subordination to
civilian control and respect for the population it is charged with protecting; and (c) to
impress Chinese observers with Americas awesome technological capabilities and
dissuade them from challenging U.S. military superiority. The well-intentioned U.S.
initiative has failed on all three counts: (1) During the EP-3 crisis, Americas ambassador
in Beijing tried in vain to reach any of the military contacts he had assiduously cultivated
during his stint as head of the Pacific Command. (2) The PLA has indeed become more
professional, capable and effective and more confident in challenging other navies,
including the U.S. Seventh Fleet, in the East and South China Seas and the Taiwan Strait.
As for subordinating military aspirations to civilian control, yes, the PLA understands
the concept, but its loyalty is to the Communist Party, not to the Chinese state or
citizenry. It demonstrated that sad reality on June 4, 1989, when the Peoples Army
turned its guns and tanks on the Chinese people: the students, workers and professionals
gathered peacefully in Beijing and cities across China. (3) Far from being awed or
intimidated by American technical prowess, the PLA has exploited the close contact to
correct its own technological and operational deficiencies. Using know-how freely given
by trusting Americans, or stolen from them, China has developed asymmetrical
capabilities that have enabled deployment of a serious counter-deterrent strategy of its
own. A growing fleet of attack submarines and an expanding arsenal of anti-ship cruise
and ballistic missiles now provide China with a credible area denial/anti-access strategy,
greatly complicating U.S. planning for contingencies in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere
in East Asia. Given the aggressive ends to which an improved Chinese military will be
put, we cannot wish Xi well in his quest to make it more effective. The region was safer
with the inferior PLA capable only of defending the homeland rather than projecting
Chinese power throughout the region and with a PLA rife with corruption and
inefficiency. The Chinese people, the region and the world will be more secure with a
China that undertakes the ultimate clean government project: changing the Communist
Party itself and its inherently corrupt monopoly of power. A Chinese government
confident in its political legitimacy will not need to fear its own people or whip them into
nationalist hostility against conjured foreign threats. It will develop in peace with its
neighbors and play a constructive role in a regional and international order that already
has immensely benefited modern China. The Chinese people themselves want that kind
of country and understand the need for fundamental structural change. They showed
that at Tiananmen Square and in the millions of civil protests over the ensuing twenty-
five years. Yet many in the West will agree with the Chinese governments self-serving
argument that such fundamental political change will inevitably lead to massive
domestic and regional instability. That need not be the case if Chinas leaders will openly
put the nation on the path to gradual, staged, predictable democratic evolution as
Taiwan and other Asians have done. Voice of America and Radio Free Asia should
encourage that process in China as VOA and Radio Free Europe did in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The risks of stirring political ferment in China
and incurring the (further) resentment of its leaders must be weighed against the
dangers posed by the course they are presently pursuing, one that is leading inexorably
to regional conflict. Until the world is presented with a strong and democratic China, it is
better to face a militarily weaker authoritarian China. It is in regional and Western
security interests for Xi to fail in his narrow reform goals designed to prepare China for
coercion and conflict and instead to pursue a larger, more benign China dream.
TONS of alt causeseconomic, political, and social problems on an
international scale foster instability
Shambaugh, 12 David Shambaugh is a Professor and Director of the China Policy
Program at George Washington University, and a nonresident Senior Fellow in the
Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.(David,
September 18
th
, 2012, China-US Doctrines, Instability and Unpredictability in China:
The New Normal?, http://www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-
development/instability-and-unpredictability-in-china-the-new-normal/)//IK
A string of unpredictable recent events in China have left China Watchers worldwide
wondering what is going on? For a state that prides itself in maintaining stability (wei
wen) at all costs, the nation seems increasingly unstable and unpredictable. After twenty
years of managed leadership successions, steady economic growth, basic social stability,
and a generally positive foreign policywe have recently witnessed unpredictable
instability in all these spheres. China watchers ask: Is this the new normal in China? If
so, policymakers worldwide should start hedging their policies and relationships with
China in order to protect their interests and guard against potential fallout. In the
political realm, a raft of events has transpired in recent months that collectively indicate
that all is not well in the body politic. Most recently, Chinas heir-apparent, Xi Jinping,
disappeared from public view for two weekswith no explanation offered to the Chinese
public or the world for his absence. Although Mr. Xi has now resurfaced, the totally
secretive manner in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dealt with the
disappearance flies in the face of its pretensions (under Hu Jintao) to increase
transparency in party and state affairs. The total silence about the fate of deposed
Chongqing party chief and Politburo leader Bo Xilai is also symptomatic of an insecure
state. Bos wife has been convicted of murder and his former police chief is now on trial
for attempting to defect to the United States (and other charges)but Bo himself still sits
incommunicado. While we anticipate charges being publicly levied against him by the
CCPs Central Discipline Inspection Commission in any day now (probably once his ex-
police chief is found guilty), the fact that Bos case has dragged on for months with no
news is another indication that the political system has frozen up. Personalities aside, the
CCPs much-anticipated 18th Party Congress remains in abeyance. While it should be a
carefully-scripted and stage-managed event, it has been anything but that. Dates for the
Congress, long anticipated for September or October, have not even been announced.
Nor has the required prerequisite party plenum taken place. Reports of vicious and
protracted factional infighting abound, and speculation of who will be promoted to the
inner sanctum of power continues unabated. Something is clearly wrong. This is not the
way the CCP normally does business. Chinas public and social media are increasingly
skeptical of the whole system, and they are more vocally saying so on the vibrant social
media networks. Meanwhile, the political uncertainties are compounded by economic
uncertainties. The national economy is facing a severe slowdown. Whether 7%, 5%, or
possibly even lower GDP growththe Chinese economy is experiencing its most
profound contraction since 1989-1992. The problem is that statistics in China are
distorted by the state (at lower as well as higher levels) and nobody really knows the real
severity of the downturn. Markets do not like uncertainty, and money is flowing out of
the country in significant amounts while foreign investment inflows have also dropped
off. Inventories of goods are piling up, as export markets dry up and factories operate at
overcapacity. Non-performing loans and bank debts are again building to a serious
extent. Local government finances are particularly fraughtestimated by the central
government at 11 trillion RMBor one-quarter of Chinas output. Disguised debt makes
the problem even bigger. The government has tried stimulus measures ($160 bn.
recently announced), but more infrastructure spending is not what China needs.
Spending on software, not hardware, is what China needs: social services, financial
services, the service sector, and the knowledge economy. In some ways the downturn
offers a golden opportunity to undertake the rebalancing the government has long
talked about, to free up all the pent-up personal savingsbut people wont spend
because they are afraid of their futures and hedge against personal uncertainties. Those
with excess fundsthe middle classare parking it offshore out of the country in
property and foreign bank accounts (a clear indication of the fragility of the CCP and
political system). Uncertainties and instabilities are also gripping society. Inflation and
unemployment are both on the rise. With the export sector hurting, Chinas 120 million
migrant labor pool faces fewer opportunities on the coast and are now again floating
around the interior looking for work. Crime has spiked in several cities. Tibet and
Xinjiang remain ethnically restive. And the yawning gap in social equity widens by the
day. This adds up to a combustible and unpredictable social situation. Finally, China
faces many new uncertainties externally. Its relations with the United States have shown
various signs of strain for months. Its relations with Japan have deteriorated sharply
over the disputed islands in the East China Sea. Its relationships in Southeast Asia have
also been badly battered by its excessive territorial claims in the South China Sea. Ties
with Australia and India reveal frictions and mistrust. Public opinion polls elsewhere in
the worldin Europe, Africa, and Latin Americaall indicate mixed perceptions of
China. Chinas foreign policy thus faces considerable uncertainties as well. Taken
together, this set of Chinese uncertainties adds up to a considerable volatility in the
nations domestic and global position. After growing accustomed over the past two
decades to considerable stability and predictability in and with China, the world had now
better be more prepared for greater instabilities and unpredictability. It may be the new
normal.
Multiple mechanisms in the CCP prevent collapse
Yongnian 12 political scientist and political commentator on China who has
studied and written on many aspects of contemporary China and especially
on Chinese politics
(Zheng, Why the Chinese Communist Party will not collapse, ProQuest,
Articles Plus,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1039061125?pq-
origsite=summon) SM
China may be a one-party state but the CCP is open and pluralistic, embracing new social
groups and encouraging internal competition "When will the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) collapse?" This is almost a standard question that people ask when they look at
China ever since the 1989 pro-democracy movement. The rise of the Jasmine Revolution
and the collapse of the regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years led
many to believe that the days of the CCP are numbered, and it could collapse in years,
months, and even days. The fall of Mr Bo Xilai, which was seen as a bitter power struggle
within the regime, has reinforced this pessimism. However, such a perception is far from
the reality. The CCP continues to survive and expand. Today, it has become the largest
political party in the world, with more than 80 million members. While it is legitimate to
ask whether the CCP will collapse given the fact that the party is facing mounting
problems, it is more important and meaningful to ask why it has survived and developed.
The survival of the CCP since the reform and opening up of China is not due to chance.
In the past three decades, the CCP has transformed from a one-party dictatorship to an
increasingly open party system. This differentiates the CCP from other communist
parties in the Eastern Bloc before they collapsed. After the fall of communism, Eastern
European states chose the Western path, allowing different interests to found different
political parties. To avoid such a misfortune, the CCP chose a different way by opening
the political process to all social and interest groups. Thanks to this choice, China has
evolved into an open party system under one-party rule. Openness is becoming an
important feature of China's party system. Any political system that is not open will
become exclusive and closed. Only with openness can politics be inclusive. In the West,
political openness materialises through external pluralism, that is, multi-party politics,
in which every kind of interest can find representation in a party. In China, political
openness is realised through internal pluralism, which means the openness of the party.
When different interests emerge in society, the ruling party opens itself to them,
absorbing them into the regime and representing their interests through different
mechanisms. The transformation of the CCP has been very rapid. Since no opposition
party is allowed, for any social group, entering the political process of the CCP is the
most efficient way to express its interests. The "Three Represents" concept proposed by
Mr Jiang Zemin in the early 2000s typically reflects the CCP's realistic perception that it
has to represent different social interests. Today, China's increasingly large middle class,
including private entrepreneurs, has demonstrated very strong demand for political
participation. This is why the ruling party kept pace with the times by not only providing
constitutional protection to non-state-owned sectors, including private enterprises, but
also allowing and encouraging private entrepreneurs to join the ruling party. The change
of the nature of party membership is an indicator. In the Maoist era, workers, peasants
and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) constituted the majority of CCP membership,
while since the reform, intellectuals, professionals and the newly risen social stratum
have made up an increasing proportion in the party. After the successful incorporation of
private entrepreneurs into the party and the political process, the CCP has now begun to
put an emphasis on "social management" to expand its ruling foundation by absorbing
more social forces, which have gained significant growth and development in the past
decades. As the social base of the CCP enlarges, the demand for intra-party democracy
has also increased. This is why the ruling party has been emphasising the importance of
intra-party democracy and searching for manifold inner-party democracy in the past
decade. The effectiveness of such internal pluralist openness is no less than that of any
other system. Internal pluralism differentiates China from regimes in the Arab world
where most regimes are closed, with one family (monarchy) or a few families chronically
monopolising political power and dominating the country. The number of people
entering politics from the lower social levels is much larger in China than in many other
countries, including democratic ones. The rule of the CCP is not based on a political
family. It is a mass party with highly diversified interests. A second feature of China's
party system is that political openness has facilitated the rapid alternation of political
elites. The nature of Western democracy is to realise peaceful alternation of political
elites through periodical elections. China has refused to follow the path of Western
democracy and has developed a very efficient system of power succession. The late Deng
Xiaoping was successful in establishing two related systems - one is the exit system for
aged leaders, that is, the retirement system; the other is the recruitment system to recruit
talent from all levels of society. Because of the age limit (that is, all leaders should retire
from their positions once they reach the age of retirement), the speed of elite succession
at all levels is incomparable to any other system, including democracy. The system has
produced two advantages. First, it avoids personal dictatorship which prevailed from
Mao Zedong to Deng. One contributing factor is "intra-party democracy" or intra-party
collective leadership system engendered by internal pluralism. There are serious checks
and balances in the highest leadership of the CCP. The Standing Committee of the
Political Bureau, the highest and most powerful decision-making body, is often regarded
as the symbol of a highly centralised political system or authoritarianism. However, its
nine members have almost equal power, with each having his/her decision-making area
and having the most important say in that area. The term limit also matters. Now, in
general, leaders including the General Secretary of the CCP, the President of State,
Premier and those holding other important positions are allowed to serve at most two
terms in office, that is, 10 years. This system is not hugely different from many Western
presidential systems. Obviously, the term limit is an effective institutional constraint on
personal dictatorship. That is to say, although China does not have a Western form of
democracy, it has found a similar way to prevent personal dictatorship. When a person
or a family has dominated a country for several decades, the system is prone to
malpractices and abuses, which are intolerable to the society. These institutional features
enable Chinese politics to refresh itself at an extremely fast pace and can thus effectively
reflect generational changes and changes of interests. Compared to many other political
systems, the Chinese political system facilitates the rapid and massive renewal of public
officials. With the rigid enforcement of an age limit, thousands of officials leave their
positions every year, with the same number of officials assuming these positions.
Although such rapid mobility has its own disadvantages, it undeniably reflects the
changing times. A third feature of China's party system is its conduciveness to prompt
policy changes. In theory, the obstacle to policy change in multi-party systems should be
smaller than that in one-party states, for policies can change with the alternation of
ruling parties. When a new party comes to power, it can discontinue policies initiated by
the former ruling party. However, this is often not the case. In many democracies,
opposition parties no longer serve their constructive roles; instead, they oppose merely
for the sake of opposing. Under such circumstances, substantial policy changes often
become very difficult. In China, this is not the case. Although the Chinese society often
complains that the ruling party is too slow in making policy changes, they are
implemented on a more rapid basis than in other political systems. From the 1980s to
the 1990s and to this century, China has achieved several significant policy changes, such
as the decision to open up the economy. It is difficult to understand the huge changes in
China in these decades without taking into account the ruling party's immense ability to
respond to situations with appropriate policy changes. Intra-party democracy has so far
enabled the CCP to remain open. However, if intra-party democracy is inevitable, formal
rules and norms which can regulate competition are crucial. To eliminate the
possibilities of hidden rules, competition rules would have to be explicit, fair and
transparent. Otherwise, when hidden rules dominate political competition, democracy
will be jeopardised, destroying the unity of intra-party competition and weakening the
ruling party, increasing the risk of political instability. The Bo Xilai affair is a good
example. This case has seriously undermined the unity of the party leadership,
particularly in the eyes of the population. But whether or not the CCP will survive
depends on how further intra-party democratisation will be introduced.

Past reforms make Chinese stability inevitable
China Daily, 11 (China is stable, confident. 3/21.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2011-03/21/content_12200545.htm)
Social and political turbulence is rocking some Middle East and North African countries,
making many international observers speculate about the situation in China. China's
political and social landscape is stable because of three decades of reform and opening-
up, says an article in People's Daily. Excerpts: The Communist Party of China
(CPC) has been committed to transforming the country's leadership,
improving governance according to the needs of the people at the time ever
since launching reform and opening-up. Thanks to the lessons from history, the
CPC has been taking measures since the 1980s to reform the leadership
system, and establish a retirement, succession, and collective leadership
system. The key to maintaining political stability is inviting all the people to participate
in politics. The CPC and the government know that if people are barred from
participating in politics, their voices will not be heard and interests not
safeguarded, and that could lead to turbulence. The CPC and the
government leaders are committed to guaranteeing people's participation in
politics by perfecting the electoral systems of the National People's Congress
and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In fact, they are
reforming the entire political system and making themselves open to
supervision by the public and the media, promoting inner-party democracy and
according priority to public opinion. China has been undergoing market-oriented
economic reform over the past three decades. In 1992, China formally made the
market the basic mechanism for resources allocation and vowed to build a vibrant
socialist market economy. It is committed to opening up to the outside world,
and its accession to the World Trade Organization further accelerated its integration into
the world economy. Thanks to the reform, long-term economic growth has
greatly enhanced China's national strength. It now has enough financial
resources to build a social security system covering the entire population,
improve the social security, health and education systems, and allocate more funds for
the development of poor areas. There is no doubt that Chinese people want
stability, to cash in on the historic opportunity for development, develop the economy,
improve the living standards of the people and enhance national strength. Implementing
these reforms is not easy. But the CPC and the government are confident of doing
so with the total support of the people. Though many of the changes the leadership
has brought were seen as impossible in the beginning, they are a reality today. Some
international observers, however, are still not aware of that reality, or simply do not want
to accept that China has made great progress in economic and political fields. China may
face many difficulties, even setbacks, in implementing many of the reforms. But the
CPC and the government are confident of overcoming them on the way to
building a socialist, harmonious society. The above facts show that the situation in
China is totally different from that in some of the Middle East and North African
countries. China has chosen an inclusive path of reform, and economic, social
and political development. Reform and opening-up and the rapid pace of
development have built a solid institutional foundation and infrastructure,
which provide economic, social and political stability.

CCP will never collapse- the regime continually adapts.
Hsu 8 (Szu-chien- Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science at
Academia Sinica, Edited by I Yuan, Crossstrait at the Turning Point, Chapter 7, Pg 142-
144,
http://iir.nccu.edu.tw/attachments/research/publication/crossstrait_at_the_turning_p
oint/ch7.pdf) RA
It is undeniable that the CCP regime has in recent years adopted many new
political reforms to strengthen its ruling capacity and legitimacy, such as
allowing a competitive election at the grassroots level, rationalizing
administrative structure, strengthening party and administrative
supervision, or even allowing citizens to be involved in certain participatory
channels to influence policy making and local leading official nomination.
The adaptive, flexible, and even responsive nature of these reforms has changed the
evaluation of Western scholars on the sustainability, stability, or even legitimacy of the
CCP regime. Andrew Nathan has characterized the CCP regime as achieving
authoritarian resilience which he held will not democratize but will not be immune
from challenges for its survival either. 99 Regarding how the regime enhances its
legitimacy by institutionalizing more channels for input, Nathan identified four major
institutions except for the much mentioned competitive village election: the
Administrative Litigation Law, the letters-and-visits (xinfang), the Peoples Congress
and United Front, and the media as tribunes of the people. 100 Bruce Dickson detected
that the CCP regime has been adaptive in creating new inclusive institutions
such as co-optional and corporatist arrangements for new economic and
social elites while maintaining exclusive measures for unsanctioned social
elements so that the political monopoly of its Leninist Party-State can
endure. 101 David Shambaugh believed that, although the CCP regime is both
experiencing atrophy and adopting adaptation at the same time, so far
the CCP regime has done fairly effectively in its adaptation to cope with the
challenges of atrophy, 102 and will eventually evolve incrementally into a new kind of
party-state, the eclectic state. 103 Susan Shirk also found the CCP regime has been
surprisingly resilient in making use of these measures to stall the threat
from public unrest, and may be capable of surviving for years to come as
long as the economy continues to grow. 104 Dali Yang offered a more
optimistic view. As observed by him, the CCP regime has made a wide range
of governance reforms including administrative rationalization, divestiture of
businesses operated by the military, and the building of anticorruption mechanisms, to
strengthen the capacity to cope with unruly markets, curb corruption, and bring about a
regulated economic order. 105 These efforts have helped CCP regime to improve
its governance quality, which was intended to keep its monopoly of political
power instead of regime transition, and probably will succeed in doing so in
the intermediate term, according to Yang. 106 As Stephen White once
pointed out, those communist regimes that adopted consultative or
feedback capacities of their systems tend to allow their leaderships to
reduce the risk of popular discontent and earn legitimacy. 107 Such an
enhanced legitimacy of the communist regime has been detected in China.
Shi Tianjian and Chen Jie both observed in their survey that the CCP regime enjoys
relatively high public support. 108 A recent Pew survey also shows that 86% of the
surveyed Chinese population is satisfied with the direction of the country,
which ranks number one among all the surveyed 24 countries. 109
No impact to CCP instability theres huge room for growth and reform
Rachman, 12 Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs columnist at the Financial Times.
A political crisis will not stop China, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8994cfc6-71b5-
11e1-b853-00144feab49a.html#axzz1plphCbSK Accessed 6/24/12 BJM
My book-shelves in London groan with titles such as Eclipse: Living In the Shadow of
Chinas Economic Dominance and When China Rules the World. But travel to China
itself, and you will find plenty of people who are sceptical about the notion that the
country is a rising superpower. The sceptics are not just jaundiced western expats or
frustrated Chinese liberals. Wen Jiabao, the countrys prime minister, does a
pretty good job of talking down the Chinese miracle. He has called the
countrys economic growth unbalanced and unsustainable. Last week, he
warned that if China does not push ahead with political reform, it is
vulnerable to another cultural revolution that could sweep away its
economic gains. Mr Wens comments were swiftly followed by the fall from grace of
Bo Xilai, the controversial Communist party boss in Chongqing. This outbreak of high-
level political infighting has been seized upon by China-sceptics as further evidence that
the countrys much-vaunted stability is a myth. So who is right? The people who think
China is a rising superpower, or those who insist that it is a deeply unstable country?
Oddly enough, they are both correct. It is clearly true that China has enormous
political and economic challenges ahead. Yet future instability is highly
unlikely to derail the rise of China. Whatever the wishful thinking of some in the
west, we are not suddenly going to wake up and discover that the Chinese
miracle was, in fact, a mirage. My own scepticism about China is tempered by the
knowledge that analysts in the west have been predicting the end of the
Chinese boom almost since it began. In the mid-1990s, as the Asia editor of The
Economist, I was perpetually running stories about the inherent instability of China
whether it was dire predictions about the fragility of the banking system, or reports of
savage infighting at the top of the Communist party. In 2003, I purchased a much-
acclaimed book, Gordon Changs, The Coming Collapse of China which predicted that
the Chinese miracle had five years to run, at most. So now, when I read that Chinas
banks are near collapse, that the countryside is in a ferment of unrest, that the cities are
on the brink of environmental disaster and that the middle-classes are in revolt, I am
tempted to yawn and turn the page. I really have heard it all before. Yet, it is equally hard
to believe that either the Chinese economic or political systems can continue along the
same lines indefinitely. Rapid, export-driven growth of 8-9 per cent a year is not
sustainable forever. And Chinas political system looks increasingly
anachronistic, as demands for democracy spread around the world. Mr Wen
was probably implying as much last week, when he said that the Arab peoples demand
for democracy must be respected and cannot be held back by any force. It is clearly
true that China has very difficult political and economic transitions ahead. There are,
however, encouraging precedents from the rest of Asia. South Korea and
Taiwan have both moved from fairly brutal one-party states to functioning
democracies and from low-cost manufacturing to high-tech consumerism. The sheer
scale of China and its uniquely traumatic history will make the countrys political and
economic transformation that much harder. In particular, if China were to move towards
free elections, it would almost certainly see the rise of separatist movements in Tibet and
Xinjiang. Given the depth of Chinese nationalism, it is unlikely that these would be
treated with subtlety or sensitivity. As well as struggling to preserve the countrys
territorial integrity, a more democratic China would find itself coping with all sorts of
barely-suppressed social tensions particularly if it scraps restrictions on movement
between the countryside and cities. Yet even if one envisages the very-worst case
scenario the outbreak of a civil war that need not mean that China will fail to
make it to superpower status. If you doubt it, consider the rise of the last
emerging superpower to shake the world. The US fought a civil war in the
1860s and yet was the worlds largest economy by the 1880s. Or take
Germany and Japan: countries that were defeated and devastated in a world war yet
which swiftly resumed their positions among the worlds leading economies. What the
US, Germany and Japan had in common is that they had discovered the
formula for a successful industrial economy something that seems to be
able to survive any amount of turmoil. After more than 30 years of rapid economic
growth, it is clear that China too has mastered the formula. Some China sceptics prefer to
compare the countrys rapid growth to that of the Soviet Union or to Japan in the 1980s.
But the USSRs inefficiency was disguised because it never competed on world markets:
China, by contrast, is already the worlds largest exporter. As for the Japanese bubble,
that burst when the country was already far richer on a per-capita basis than China is
now. The Chinese economy, because it is relatively poor, still has huge scope
for modernisation. In politics, as in economics, Chinas weaknesses also hint at
untapped potential. As last weeks infighting illustrated, the country is still
burdened with an immature political system. If and when China achieves
the fifth modernisation, as the dissident Wei Jingsheng once called
democracy, it will have surmounted the biggest remaining obstacle to
superpower status.
CCP collapse would be stable
Dr. Gilley 06- PHD from Princeton university in political science is now an associate
professor of political science (Bruce, Elite-led democratization in China: Prospects,
perils, and policy implications, International Journal 61.2, Spring 2006, proquest)//sjl
Certainly there are many scholars who write in the tradition of popular
overthrow, expecting that democracy will come to China through a sharp
conflict between a rising civil society and an unreformed communist state.
Those who warn of rising class conflict or looming social conflict reflect a
kind of romantic view of democratizations grounded in the enduring
memory of the French Revolution. However, the popular overthrow
scenario depends on a dramatically weakened state that on most accounts
does not exist. As Guo Xiaoqin shows, a host of economic, intellectual,
ideological, social, and institutional structures ensure that the state remains
dominant over society in China.10 There is a broad scholarship that comes
to roughly equal conclusions, in particular concerning business,
institutions, and social attitudes. As Van Sun, a scholar-activist for the state-
led approach to political change argues, "(experience suggests that drastic
political change may worsen rather than alleviate corruption. So far,
incremental change has proved a workable strategy for China. It appears to
be what most Chinese want, and they likely will continue to rely on the state
as the engine of change."11

China-india war
Relations improvingnew multilateral agreements
Panda, 7/16 - Associate Editor of The Diplomat (Ankit, Modi-Xi Fortaleza Meet: A
Promising Start July 16
th
, 2014 http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/modi-xi-fortaleza-
meet-a-promising-start/)//gingE
Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Fortaleza,
Brazil, just before the opening of the BRICS summit there. While the encounter was not
particularly path-breaking or unexpected, it established an important rapport between
two leaders who will have to work together for some years to come. As my colleague
Shannon Tiezzi noted in her report on China Power, the meeting builds on the
momentum attained by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi during his June trip to New
Delhi. What is reassuring about the trajectory of India-China relations (if you are one to
believe diplomatic rhetoric) is that the leaders of both nations are approaching the entire
gamut of strategic issues between the two countries: the trade deficit, border disputes,
multilateral organizations, and investment. The underlying assumption is that sustained
progress on these issues will ultimately build trust between India and China a factor
that has been somewhat lacking in recent years. As far as bilateral diplomacy goes
between China and India, appearances right now are as good as they can be. China
wasted little time following the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments ascension
and the brief dialogue between Modi and Xi in Fortaleza seemingly checked all the
boxes. Ive called Chinas overtures towards India since the BJPs victory an attempt at a
reset in relations (yes, referring to the failed U.S. initiative towards Russia circa 2009).
Nothing witnessed in Fortaleza challenges this, really. If anything, the biggest addition to
Chinas warm overture toward India is Xis invitation for India to attend the APEC
Summit for the first time and even potentially ascend to the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. China further invited India to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank. Beijings reasons for pursuing the reset with India at this time are in part a product
of its diplomatic troubles to the east. At the same time, China genuinely does see an
opportunity to deepen its relationship with India as it makes a political transition into an
era where the erstwhile opposition Hindu nationalists are in near-complete control of
the countrys executive and legislative. Should Indias relations with China grow warmer
at this point, New Delhi is less likely to cozy up to the United States and Russia (or at
least such is the logic for Beijing). However, despite the warmth of the Fortaleza
encounter, New Delhi has not entirely abandoned its strategic distrust of Beijing. Modis
recent trip to Bhutan and the Indian central governments novel plans to actively develop
the borderlands of Arunachal Pradesh highlight just two recent BJP actions that suggest
the era of China paranoia is far from over in India.

Relations stable
Madan, 13 fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and
director of the new India Project (Tanvi, October 2013 Indias Relations with China: The
Good, the Bad and the (Potentially) Ugly
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/10/08-india-china-relations-
madan)//gingE
There have been good signs for those interested in stable, cooperative Sino-Indian
relations. In the spring, just after hed formally taken office, Chinese President Xi
Jinping proposed a five-point formula to improve ties between the two countries.
Positive vibes were detected at Xis subsequent meeting with Singh on the sidelines of
the BRICS summit in Durban in March. There have been numerous public Chinese
declarations of the importance of the relationshipperhaps not seen since the first half
of the 1950s. The Chinese ambassador to India unusually took to the editorial pages of an
Indian newspaper to emphasize, To strengthen good-neighbourly and friendly
cooperation with India is Chinas strategic choice and established policy which will not
change. Chinese officials have indicated that greater efforts should be made toward a
boundary settlement. The two countries have strategic and economic dialogues in place.
They restarted their defense dialogue earlier this year and are expected to resume joint
military exercises shortly. China and India also have specialized dialogues on issues like
Afghanistan, Central Asia and counterterrorism. The agreement to discuss Afghanistan
was considered a departure from previous Chinese policy; Beijing had earlier been
reluctant to add it to the agenda because it would have likely meant talking about
Chinese ally Pakistan. Along with regional discussions, China and India have also
cooperated in the multilateral realm, including on issues like trade and climate change.
Premier Li chose India as his first overseas stop, with the Chinese government indicating
that the choice was very deliberate. Hosting an Indian youth delegation, Li put a
personal spin on the choice, noting the the seeds of friendship sown when he visited
India 27 years agoa trip that he said left a lasting impact. During the May visit, he
stressed the need to build trust and especially emphasized the economic benefits of
greater ties. Those economic ties have already grown. China is one of Indias largest
trading partners. Bilateral trade in goods has gone from less than $3 billion in 2000 to
$66.57 billion in 2012. While investments havent kept the same pace, they have also
grown. In India, the interest in doing business with China is evident beyond the private
sector and the central governmentalong with visits by a number of Indian CEOs, China
has also seen visits from chief ministers of a number of Indians states, including Andhra
Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. Narendra Modi, current chief minister
of the state of Gujarat and prime ministerial candidate for the forthcoming national
election for the BJP (Indias largest opposition party), has also traveled to China. While
Modi has expressed hawkish views on China on the geopolitical front, he has expressed
admiration for that countrys economic achievements. The governments of both
countries have reasons for wanting stable ties: the desire for a peaceful periphery in
order to focus on domestic socio-economic objectives; the need for stability in South
Asia, especially with the impending American drawdown of forces from Afghanistan;
existing and potential economic ties; and the prospect for cooperation in the multilateral
realm. For Delhi, in addition, a stable relationship with China opens up the possibility
that Beijing might use its leverage with Islamabad to shape Pakistans behavior in a way
that might benefit India. For Beijing, theres desire to limit Indias burgeoning
relationships with the United States and Japan, as well as with other countries in what
Beijing considers its backyard. Moreover, as China is preoccupied with eastern maritime
disputes and the North Korean situation, stable relations on its southern and
southwestern flank would also help the Chinese leadership.

China rise wont trigger war
Acharya, 14 - professor of international relations at American University, Washington
DC (Amitav, Jun 28, 2014 Six reasons Chinas rise wont trigger a world war, as
Germanys had done a century ago
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Six-reasons-Chinas-rise-
wont-trigger-a-world-war-as-Germanys-had-done-a-century-
ago/articleshow/37337660.cms)//gingE
Exactly a century ago, on June 28, 1914, the assassination of the archduke of the Austro-
Hungarian empire in Sarajevo triggered World War I. In Asia, the rise of China and
territorial disputes between China and its neighbours have raised concerns that Europe's
past could become Asia's future. The Economist has warned that in East Asia "disputes
about clumps of rock could become as significant as the assassination of an archduke".
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has compared current China-Japan tensions with
the German-British rivalry before World War I. American philosopher George Santayana
wrote: "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." But the use of
historical analogies can be deceptive unless one recognises what has changed as much as
what has not. Let's consider six main differences between Europe of 1914 and Asia of
2014. First, Europe in 1914 was multipolar; the world in 2014 is better described as a
multiplex that is, multiple great powers bound together by complex forms of restraint
and interdependence. Some argue that interdependence among European powers did
little to prevent World War I. But European economic interdependence in 1914 was
narrow and regional; today's interdependence is broader, deeper and global in scope.
Intra-Asian interdependence today is based not only on trade (which is now more than
half of Asia's total trade), but also on production networks, finance and investments. US-
China economic ties are marked by the financial equivalent of the Cold War's Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD) situation. Massive Chinese holdings of US treasury bonds
(amounting to $1.317 trillion in November 2013, or one-third of China's total foreign
exchange reserves) not only finances US debt, but ensures that any precipitate Chinese
withdrawal of those will seriously devalue its currency and wealth. A major reason for
World War I was the attempt by a rising Germany to achieve hegemony. A multiplex
world, as in a multiplex theatre, has multiple actors and directors powers,
international organisations, multinational corporations; transnational activists and
terrorist networks (the villains), making it difficult and unlikely (more so than in a
simple multipolar world) for any single power like China to achieve hegemony, which
might be a trigger for war. A second difference has to do with nuclear weapons. They did
not exist in 1914. Because of their enormous destructive power, nuclear weapons are a
major factor in discouraging war among great powers. Third, the world in 1914 was rife
with competition for overseas colonies among the great powers. This contributed in no
small measure to the First World War. There is no such colonial competition today.
Fourth, in the society and politics of Europe in 1914 there was a strong and widely held
belief that war was necessary to maintain stability and balance of power. As Bismarck
put it in his famous "iron and blood" speech to the Prussian parliament in 1862, "After
all, war is, properly speaking, the natural condition of humanity." Today such beliefs
about the necessity of war, like war itself, are much harder to find. Fifth, in 1914 there
were very few institutions in Europe, or the world at large, to control geopolitical rivalry.
The European Concert of Powers created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars had
withered away. In 2014, there are multiple global and regional institutions. Asian
institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are criticised for not
doing enough to resolve the region's disputes, but they do provide channels of
communication and develop principles of conduct to constrain the use of force. A sixth
difference involves the nature of governments. In a 2013 speech, then Stanford
University president David Starr Jordan feared that "some half-crazed archduke or some
harassed minister of state" might start a war in Europe. Today, Asia's leaders base their
legitimacy primarily on economic growth which will be seriously harmed if war breaks
out. However one might judge China's leaders today, they are not guided by impulsive
adventurism without regard for the severe consequences of using military confrontation.
Neither do they see war as a natural condition or necessary means for China to attain
great power status.
China War
No war
No US-China war geography, interdependence, and energy
Follett, 6/24/14 Research Associate at the Cato Institute, Masters degree student in
Public Policy and George Mason University, winner of Haynes-Cabot Scholarship for
Academic Achievement and the Seymour Martin Lipset Scholarship to GMU (Andrew,
China and the US: Destined to Cooperate? The Diplomat,
http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/china-and-the-us-destined-to-cooperate/)//IS
The 21st century will be defined by the relationship between the American superpower
and rising China. A new Cold War would threaten the world order while a mutually
beneficial association could bring all prosperity. The latter scenario is more likely. The
geography, economies, and energy resources of the US and China align their core
interests. First, geography. The US is located on the most resource and capital-rich
continent, North America. The American Midwest consists of valuable arable land and is
bisected by the worlds largest navigable rivers, allowing the export of food and products
at bargain prices. Nearby nations have either historically been on friendly terms
(Canada) or lack the ability to present a threat (Central America and the Caribbean)
without an external sponsor. This benign environment has allowed America to focus on
projecting power and dominating global merchant marine traffic. Since China lies across
an ocean dominated by the American Navy, neither directly threatens the other. China,
meanwhile, is a populous and vast land power with a long coastline. Yet Chinas focus
has historically turned inward, with only sporadic efforts to build a naval presence.
Chinas heartland is exposed to Russia from the north, Japan to the east, various
fractious states to the west, and the rising powers of Thailand, India, and Vietnam to the
south. In other words, China is surrounded, and its biggest threats are from other land-
based powers, particularly Russia and India. China therefore cannot afford to antagonize
America, since it would require American support or tacit neutrality in any conflict with
Russia or India. Geography ensures that China does not see American naval dominance
on its shores as a comparable threat. A Chinese move against American interests would
open it to aggression from its neighbors while simultaneously cutting off a needed ally.
No Chinese government is foolish enough to risk multiple high-intensity wars. The
geography of China and the US dictate their core interests as mutually non-threatening
states, and make cooperation more likely since both have an interest in opposing Russia.
Secondly, the American and Chinese economies are destined to become more
interdependent, and integrated economies usually lead to geostrategic alliances. The US
follows a laissez-faire economic model, entailing a boom-and-bust cycle that is harsher
than in more planned systems. When the free market dictates economic ap
portionment, at the height of the cycle resources are often applied to unwise projects.
During recessions, companies either downsize or go out of business, resulting in short
spurts of high unemployment. America tolerates these fluctuations because she long ago
decided to trade economic stability for higher long-term growth. This has succeeded over
the past century. This growth, combined with other advantages, ensures the US will
endure as a superpower. America utilizes its advantages to maintain a global maritime
trade order in the form of organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary
Fund, and World Trade Organization, resulting in economic growth for the world and a
successful consumption-based economy at home. Contrastingly, Chinas economy is a
sort of state capitalism distinct from the European state champion model. The
economy is based around exporting finished manufactured goods to America, further
integrating both economies. Chinas two-decade-plus surge in economic growth will
soon end, yet given the lack of progress in transitioning to a more consumption-based
economy, China has not achieved what its large population considers an equitable
distribution of resources and benefits. Such imbalances foster domestic tensions. The
growth constraints facing Chinas economy will only create additional problems with
fewer new resources at Beijings disposal. The Chinese slowdown has already led to
political infighting, and this is likely to continue in the future. Addressing this problem
while transitioning to a consumption-based economy may reduce the ability of the ruling
Communist Party to project power abroad while retaining it at home. Complementation
Economically, America is strong in areas like food production, education, technology,
and precision industrial manufacturing. China, by contrast, is strong in areas like heavy
industry, light manufacturing, and cheap labor. This presents a recipe for
complementary econo-mic interdependence. Finally, both countries will move closer
geopolitically because of their complementary energy interests. Most of Chinas foreign
policy centers on attempts to acquire new energy resources, particularly oil. Over the
following decades, China will seek to become more self-sufficient by expanding its
hydropower capacity and coal plants. America shares this goal, and with the shale
revolution will likely end up exporting energy to China, including oil and liquid natural
gas. This gives America a geopolitical lever over China by increasing economic
interdependence. The American situation on energy resources, particularly oil and
natural gas, outclasses Chinas. Oil is non-renewable, and members of the Organization
or Petroleum Exporting Countries will likely be unable to meet Chinas growing demand.
However, America now controls the worlds largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River
Formation. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil-shale,
roughly half of which may be recoverable. This single geologic formation could contain
more oil than the rest of the worlds proven reserves combined. As Chinese demand
rises, Beijing will likely become the top importer of this oil. No other oil source can
supply Chinas needs as efficiently. Eastern European and Russian oil shale reserves are
smaller and less politically and economically extractable than Americas emerging
sources. If America invests a comparatively small portion of its new energy-based wealth
into a larger Navy to secure a Pacific trade route to China, the economic integration of
the two nations will be virtually irreversible. Already, foreign investments are
pouring into the new Middle East of America and Canada, despite strong opposition
from the current administration. American control over future markets for natural gas is
almost as certain as for oil. The US produces natural gas abundantly and is building the
facilities to export it to foreign markets, including China. China imports roughly 56
percent of its oil and this number grows each year. Beijing plans to increase reserves by
acquiring new offshore resources and secure reserves abroad. Since between 60
percent to 70 percent of its imported oil originates in Africa or the Middle East, the only
way to inexpensively transport it is by sea. This makes China vulnerable to economic
warfare from India, which can severe much of its supply at will. This is a strategic
concern and makes war with India more likely. China doesnt have many other domestic
energy options with the exception of coal, which carries high health and environmental
risks. Renewable energy is too expensive, hydraulic power creates instability in rural
areas, and social biases prohibit nuclear power. For technical reasons, Chinas untapped
oil shale reserves, though large, would be prohibitively expensive to process. They are
estimated to be economically recoverable at $345 a barrel, more than triple the price of
American oil shale. An American boom in natural gas cannot fully bail out China;
nonetheless it will certainly be part of the solution. Domestic political pressures,
environmental concerns and rising demand for portable fuels mean the crux of Chinese
foreign policy for the foreseeable future will be aimed at acquiring new oil supplies and
protecting existing supply lines across the Indian Ocean. The South China Sea is critical
to Chinas goals because most imported oil from Africa must cross it, and the sea
contains its own marginal reserves close to China. Inadequate naval forces guarantee
China will continue to depend upon the American Navy to protect its oil trade. The
dispute surrounding the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands does not change that. In any case,
heightened regional competition for energy assets will diminish as American reserves
come online over the next five to ten years. In the energy sector, America will ultimately
transition to an energy and fuel exporter and China will ultimately import American
resources. This will further connect their economies and build strong economic ties. Both
China and America hope for a mutually beneficial arrangement to meet their security
and development goals. Geographic, economic, and energy considerations ensure
these two nations will become more interdependent throughout this century.

No US-China war interdependence and no flashpoints
Lind and Press, 9/18/13 *associate professor of government at Dartmouth College
** associate professor of government at Dartmouth, and the author of Calculating
Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Cornell, 2005) (Jennifer and Daryl,
Can the United States and China Avoid Armed Conflict? Headline Digest,
http://headlinedigest.com/2013/09/can-the-united-states-and-china-avoid-armed-
conflict/)//IS
The paramount question looming over twenty-first century international politics is: will
the United States and China get along? Most national-security experts express guarded
optimism. Although rising powers have historically clashed with their established
rivalsadopting revisionist foreign policies to secure more influence, territory, or
statusthis time, people say, is different. China is a major stakeholder in the current
economic order and has no reason to overthrow the very system that has allowed it to
grow rich and powerful. The regional maritime disputes that do exist over small
uninhabitable isletsmay arouse emotions but do not demonstrate a deep revisionist
streak in Beijing. In short, a status quo Washington and a status quo Beijing need not
clash.

Crimean War
Public support for peace deters conflicts and prevents escalation
Rojansky and Yalowitz 6/25/2014 *Was Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia
Program at the Carnegie Endowment, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and
American University, **Former ambassador to Belarus and Georgia (*Matthew, **
Kenneth, No matter what Putin says Russian people have no appetite for war,
Reuters, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/06/25/russian-people-have-no-
appetite-for-war-no-matter-what-putin-says/)

But the crucial fact is that the public on each side does not have any appetite for a
sustained conflict. Attention has focused on the key leaders President Barack Obama,
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. Putin has used his acts of aggression to build public support.
Yet the focus should be on whether the Russian people want renewed
confrontation or would even countenance something like a new Cold
War. Russia may not be a democracy, but it is also not the totalitarian Soviet Union.
The flip side of Putins brand of authoritarian populism is his reliance on public opinion
to maintain legitimacy. Putins popularity ratings have soared from roughly 50 percent
to more than 80 percent since the annexation of Crimea, and his domestic opposition
has been effectively muted. The less educated, more conservative and nationalistic
segments of the Russian public have enthusiastically bought into his attacks on the West
for ignoring or threatening Russias strategic interests. More than half of all Russians,
according to the polling agency VCIOM, now agree that relations with the West can only
be tense and be based on distrust. Nor is this a new phenomenon eastward expansion
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western support for Kosovo independence
and the color revolutions throughout the post-Soviet periphery all heightened
Russians sense that the West was taking advantage of their weakness. Popular support
for translating this anti-Western resentment into a sustained confrontation, however,
appears shallow at best. Though another Russian polling agency, the Levada Center,
reports negative attitudes toward the United States at a 20-year high, both Levada and
VCIOM confirm that nearly two-thirds of Russians view isolation from the West as
unlikely or impossible. In addition, despite strong opposition to the new Western-
backed government in Ukraine, most Russians oppose further military
intervention there, even while they support diplomatic and economic
assistance for Russian speakers in the region. Russian troops are still
present near Ukraines eastern border, but Putin has clearly backed off
from a full-scale invasion likely calculating that the Russian public would not
tolerate the high costs of a prolonged and bloody conflict in Ukraine. If the current
ceasefire fails and leads to greater bloodshed, Russian public opinion could still shift in
favor of intervention. For now, however, Russians expect more from their leaders to
sustain health, pension and education investments, deliver concrete progress on the
economic modernization agenda and stem the brain drain and capital flight that are
weighing down economic growth. Additional punitive sanctions from the West,
especially on Russias revenue-generating energy and natural resource exports, would
make these tasks far harder. So Putin has strong incentives to quit escalating
confrontation and focus on consolidating his early gains. Fortunately for the Kremlin,
there is also little appetite on the Western side for deepening the conflict.
Europeans are largely interested in preventing the unraveling of their main
accomplishment since World War II the economic growth, stability, and
democratization brought about through European Union integration. Though the
annexation of Crimea has restored enthusiasm for a robust NATO alliance, in the last EU
parliamentary elections voters rejected calls for increased military spending. European
businesses are also not ready to sever extensive economic ties with Russia. For their
part, Americans are confronting a bevy of difficult foreign-policy issues chaos in Iraq,
Chinas rise and nuclear negotiations with Iran. Putin and Russia provide fodder for
campaign trail bombast or cable news talk shows, but neo-containment is not a high
priority for either the U.S. public or their elected leaders. If there is a silver lining in the
current Ukraine crisis, it is that the public on all sides are not enthusiastic for a new
Cold War. This does not provide a blueprint for starting to restore relations but it means
there may be a ceiling to the mutual hostility and distrust.
No impact Putin reducing tensions
Heritage 7/7/2014 -Brussels Bureau Chief and European Affairs Editor for Reuters
(Timothy, Putin's silence on Slaviansk signals desire to de-escalate Ukraine crisis,
Reuters, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/07/uk-ukraine-crisis-putin-
idUKKBN0FC1UI20140707)

They could also suggest Putin is not about to replay in eastern Ukraine the sequence of
events that led to Russia's annexation of Crimea in March and that he is intent on de-
escalating the crisis to avert the risk of new Western sanctions and reduce
the threat of instability on Russia's border. In the past few weeks, he has
withdrawn most troops massed near the frontier, asked parliament to cancel a resolution
approving the use of military force in Ukraine and engaged in diplomacy with the West.
Moscow has also signalled a willingness to allow stronger controls at the border, through
which Ukraine says the rebels have received military supplies. Barring a dramatic turn
back towards armed intervention by Russia, Putin's goal appears to be to find a
way to reduce tension in Ukraine without losing face or popularity. "As a
result of four months of aggression in Ukraine, Putin found himself at a fateful fork in
the road," former Kremlin adviser Andrei Illarionov wrote in a blog posted on the
website of liberal Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on Saturday. Abandoning the
rebels risks a loss of support and could fuel opposition to Putin in Russia, he said, but the
other choice - sending in the armed forces - would lead to an inevitable confrontation
with the West. Putin's popularity has risen to new highs over his handling of the
Ukraine crisis, in which the toppling of a president sympathetic to Moscow threatened in
February to end Russia's ability to influence events in a country it long dominated. The
reclaiming of Crimea in March stirred patriotism and won Putin almost unanimous
praise at home, though the rebellion that followed in eastern Ukraine raised fears in the
West that Moscow was about to send in troops, despite his denials that Moscow was
orchestrating the uprising and supporting it militarily. Putin reiterated in a speech to
Russian ambassadors gathered in Moscow last week that he reserved the right to protect
Russian speakers abroad by "using the entire range of available means from political
and economic to operations under international humanitarian law and the right of self-
defence." But he has signaled repeatedly that he wants to reduce tensions - even though
he may wish to keep them simmering just enough to unsettle Ukraine's pro-western
leadership. Loath as he is to say it, Russia is increasingly worried that sanctions could
inflict serious damage on its $2 trillion economy, which is already heading towards
recession, potentially denting Putin's popularity. The reduction in tensions so far has
helped strengthen the rouble and Russian shares, which rose last week to eight-month
highs before slipping back. This makes it no surprise that he had by late Monday made
no public comment on the fall of Slaviansk, while Foreign Ministry remarks and state
media coverage focused on humanitarian problems and the ferocity of the government
forces' onslaught. Russia also sent a positive sign on its commitment to talks at the
weekend by attending the latest meeting on ending the violence under the auspices of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). GOALS ACHIEVED?
Putin could have another reason for de-escalation; he may already have
achieved all he can in Ukraine, at least for now. He may be gambling that what
is already on offer from Kiev could be enough to satisfy the nationalist sentiment he has
unleashed in Russia but could yet struggle to contain.
No escalation to Crimean War US wont get involved
Morrissey 3/30/2014 Notable American Political Blogger, formerly wrote at his own
blog, the Captains Quarters (Ed, Obama: Were not going to war with Russia over
Crimea, Hot Air, http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/20/obama-were-not-going-to-
war-with-russia-over-crimea/, DM)

We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine, the
president said in an interview with NBCs San Diego affiliate, KNSD, one of several he
did Wednesday. What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to
make sure that weve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message,
which is that Ukraine should decide their destiny. Obama said that he sees Russian
President Vladimir Putin acting out of weakness, not out of strength in attempting to
take control of Crimea. Putin, the president said, is not comfortable with former
members of the Soviet Union making moves to align themselves with the West. In
another interview, with St. Louis NBC affiliate KSDK, Obama also said that a military
option is not on the table. Obviously, you know, we do not need to trigger an actual war
with Russia, he said. The Ukrainians dont want that. Nobody would want that.
Politifact would rate this as true, because literally no one wants that. Thats not a
Bidenesque literally, but a literal literally. No one wants it, no one would approve it, and
for a couple of really good reasons we have no national interest in who governs
Crimea, and an attempt to start a war there would make Dieppe look well-
considered. Its in the Russians back yard. So why bother saying it at all? Thats
the curious aspect of this. Obama has an annoying habit of attempting to present his
critics arguments in his own fantasy reductio ad absurdum constructs that end up
bearing no resemblance to the actual criticisms, all to paint himself as the voice of
centrist reason. This, however, just makes him look as out of touch as the rest of his
foreign policy with an extra added dollop of weakness as the a la mode touch. Paul
Mirengoff calls this a false choice, and a bad signal to send: In ruling out military
action, Obama explained that the Ukrainians dont want [an actual war with Russia],
nobody would want that. But if Russia continues to devour their country, the
Ukrainians are no less likely to want a war than any of Russias other neighbors or
former client states would be under similar circumstances. Accordingly, Obamas
statement can be read by Russia as ruling out any U.S. military to stop any future
aggression within the former Soviet Union and perhaps within its entire former sphere of
influence. Perhaps Obama would have been better advised not to have made this
statement. The other problem with the statement is that, to use Obamas former pet
phrase, it presents us with a false choice. Americas options arent limited to taking
military action and mobilizing diplomatic resources to send a clear message. We
could, for example, provide weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. Ukraine could then
decide whether to use them in the event of further Russian aggression. Ukraine has, in
fact, requested weapons and ammunition, but Obama turned down the request. I
suspect we have not supplied Ukraine with weapons because we want to diminish the
prospect of Ukrainian resistance in the event Russia moves into Eastern Ukraine (which
Russia seems at least as likely as not to do). Ukrainian resistance is not in Obamas
interest, as he likely sees it, because the resulting bloodbath would further embarrass his
administration. And that question may become acute quickly. NATOs top concern at
the moment is that Vladimir Putin wont stop at Crimea, Secretary-General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen told Foreign Policys Yochi Dreazen: NATOs top official acknowledged in
an interview that Russias annexation of Crimea had established certain facts on the
ground that would be difficult to change and said the military alliance was increasingly
concerned that Moscow might also invade eastern Ukraine.
Cyberwar
No escalation or immediate effects
Rid, 13 - non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a reader in the Department of
War Studies at Kings College, London (Thomas, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Or Will
It? September 9, 2013
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/9/09%20cyber%20war/20130909_c
yberwar_transcript.pdf)//gingE
So, if you look back at the 25 years that we have of cyber conflict, so, we avoid the word
war for many of the same reasons that Thomas does, but we can still say, look, weve
been having these things that are understandable as national security conflicts since
1986, and that includes everything from espionage to some of the things that Thomas
describes as sabotage, to high-end attacks that dont cross into war. We still dont see
that anybody has ever died from a cyber attack. So, I absolutely agree with Thomas that
its an odd kind of war thats never had a single casualty, but there is this conflict thats
happening at the technology level with these very strong national security implications
that we can take a look at and that we can learn from, and most importantly, can help us
understand what might be happening next, because Thomas has been great at
underlying this point and saying, the discussion on this has been very flat. There hasnt
been much thought about what we mean by war, about what kinds of war. Frankly, were
continuing to be pulled back by people talking about the digital Pearl Harbor, and we
realized in this book, weve been 14 talking about digital Pearl Harbors for 20 of the 70
years since the actual Pearl Harbor. So, theres obviously some kind of dynamic going on
that were not understanding if were getting that wrong so much. Ill cover just some of
the main lessons that weve been looking at and that weve found when we looked at
cyber conflict as history. Most importantly, you can learn from the history. There
actually is a history that you can take from. Many of our colleagues that speak on this
topic youll hear say, the only constant is change and its moving so quickly. Thats true at
the technology level, but so what? If you look at it as a national security conflict, the
kinds of dynamics have been relatively the same since 1986. Just like you could take a
fighter pilot from 1916 and a fighter pilot today, and even though the technologies come
so much more lethal and the battles are taking place at faster speeds over wider rangers,
theyre still going to be zooming in and shooting each others fighters down and talking
about some guy on a six, because the fundamental dynamics of fighting in the air havent
changed that much and the same thing is true here. Also, we find that the more
strategically significant the cyber conflict, the more similar it is to conflict in the air, land
and sea. So, Ill say that again. The more strategically significant the cyber conflict, the
more 15 similar it is, and that also is like conflict -- if you hear many of the American
generals today that are involved in cyber, theyll tell you about how its speed of light and
how two kids in their basement can have capabilities and deterrence is tough, and all of
those things are true at the tactical level, but since when do we want our Four-Star
Generals talking about fighting from -- the truths of fighting in foxholes? The generals
should be looking to abstract up whats true at the tactical level to whats up at the
strategic level. For example, speed of light, you hear General Alexander talk about how
cyber is speed of light all the time. It is true, but I came from the Air Force, I see many
others here. In the Air Force, the dogfight could be over before you even know youre in a
dogfight, but air campaigns take place over weeks, months, and years, and thats what we
see in cyber. A single cyber attack has almost never had -- a speed of light cyber attack
has almost never had strategic consequences. Its almost always a back and forth
between adversaries that unfolds over days, months, years. Likewise, warning tends to be
very simple for cyber attacks. Thats not what you hear from the Ft. Meade crowd. You
hear that its very difficult because its speed of light, but the largest attacks take place in
a geopolitical context, that you dont get attacked out of the blue, you get attacked when
one nation is -- one national rival is angry at 16 another national rival, which makes
warning a lot easier. It also generally takes attribution off the table because in almost
all of the cyber conflicts that weve looked at over the past 25 years -- disruptive cyber
conflicts -- its been pretty obvious whos been doing the attacking, which I think has
great implications for deterrence and what kinds of conflicts we might see next.

Multiple factors check the terminal impact and its empirically disproven
Rid, 13 - non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a reader in the Department of
War Studies at Kings College, London (Thomas, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Or Will
It? September 9, 2013
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/9/09%20cyber%20war/20130909_c
yberwar_transcript.pdf)//gingE
I dont see myself in the business of speculation. The fact is, weve never seen a single
blackout -- electricity blackout caused by a cyber attack. Weve seen people try. Certainly
its theoretically possible, but weve never seen it in practice. Or, for instance, weve never
seen a single person killed or injured as a result of a cyber attack. In fact, the single only
external cyber attack that has ever caused physical damage to a machine was Stuxnet. All
other control system incidents that had a kinetic effect were insider attacks, which is a
5088 different story. So, what does that mean? That means we have to be able to answer
the question, why? We cant just ignore the question, why has nothing happened yet, and
I think we see a strange combination of two main actors. One, those with the intention to
do harm, havent got the motivation to do so, because I assume that some people would
be able to use that as a tool, and those with the motivation to do harm, dont have the
capability to do so. That may change at some point in the future, but -- and once that
happens, then of course theres going to be more chance of uncertainty and friction, but I
would be hesitant to speculate more than that. MR. SINGER: What would chance,
friction, the fog of war, look like in this space? MR. HEALEY: Its very deep. I mean, the
uncertainty in this field is far more than I would say in warfare in the other domains,
starting, not least, that youve -- and two of the biggest differences of conflict in this
domain isnt speed, isnt that the borders are kind of funny, isnt difficulty of attribution,
all the other things that get quoted, its that its owned, run, and operated by the private
sector for their own purposes. In all the conflict in the other domains, civilians would try
and get out of the battlefield if they 5089 can. Here theyve built everything within it,
almost everything within it, for their own purposes. Theres uncertainty in the effects of
your weapons, theres uncertainty in the targeting of your weapons, theres uncertainty
in you can develop this whole capability and if theyve got backup tapes, then your whole
plan is ruined. So, theres far more uncertainty in this conflict in cyberspace than in
other places. I liked -- I agree with the bits that Thomas has just said. Id go a touch
further in that -- because I want to say how this is similar to the other domains. I mean,
weve come up with some things that make it different like the role of the private sector,
but if youre in the military, the Air Force, you knew you cant just bomb a factory or
bomb a runway because theyre going to come back and theyre going to fix it. This is why
AWPD was so wrong and so much of our World War II planning was wrong, because
after you bomb something, they fix it. And when we look at cyber conflict, we know its
easy to take something down, its extremely easy in cyberspace to take a target down. Its
very difficult to keep it down over time. Even Stuxnet, I mean, that was a back and forth
over months, years, of back and forth to keep down the centrifuges. Shamoon. General
Alexander loves to talk about how the Iranians took down 30,000 computers, essentially
turned them into 5090 paperweights, at Saudi Aramco. But you know what? They took
down 30 computers, but the computers got replaced and supposedly the Iranians were
trying to do this to disrupt oil production, and they didnt. So, General Alexander says
this as, oh, my gosh, this is a terrible story. I see it as a defeat because if they were doing
it to disrupt oil production and they failed, then we shouldnt be talking that they
destroyed 30,000 computers, we should be talking about they failed in their strategic
objective. MR. SINGER: So, Jay, doesnt this in some ways, though, counter your
previous call to use this in Syria? Because we heard from these two that the reasons not
to use it in Syria was, to use another bad metaphor, essentially if youre a coach of a
football team, you dont use the trick play on Middle Eastern State University, you save it
for the big game out East. And then you said, but I want to use it to actually show that
theres a new norm, that we can carry out these operations, sort of open up a new space
of whats viable. But youre just -- the counter to this would be, couldnt, one, the Syrian
regime could say, goodness, youve started -- opened up a new realm of war in our
operation, but the second is, aha, we defeated you. You turned off your computers for a
day and now weve got them back on. Would we be handing them an easy win? MR.
HEALEY: Theres two answers to the question, its a 509 great question. One is to use
cyber, remember, its very difficult to keep things down. I dont think were going to be
able to keep the air defenses down, power down, command and control down, for more
than a couple of hours, maybe a day or two at most, so its to open up a window so that
we can do conventional military strikes rather than a substitute for. I dont think our
capabilities are there to really keep it down for a long period. That takes a lot of effort. I
see it much more as just opening a window so that we can do our regular kinetic things.
MR. SINGER: Basically just do Operation Orchard, which the Israelis did. MR. HEALEY:
Correct. Second is, weve already put the war fighting norms out there and then we got
caught doing it. We tried to say that some of the -- that what China was doing for
espionage was completely beyond the pale, but somehow what we were doing with
Stuxnet was okay. That was always a tough argument to make, that Chinese espionage
was just far too much, but our actually destroying stuff, thats cool. And now that weve
also got caught with espionage, were already seen to be the war makers. Were already
seen to be the worst even though I would -- theres -- Im not saying we are. So, all Im
saying with Syria is, lets at least maybe show that this can be done in a humanitarian
way, not just -- 5092 MR. SINGER: Okay. Ian, you wanted -- MR. WALLACE: Yeah, I
just want to say I think the reasons why we havent seen any massive cyber physical
attack, particularly against the United States and her allies is because the United States is
the biggest military power in the world and, you know, there is a deterrence effect that
comes from that. What instead I think you see is people who are, to date at least,
calculating how they can poke Uncle Sam in a way that doesnt provoke enough of a
reaction to get a, either military or in some senses any other kind of response, back at
them.

No escalation
Rid, 13 - non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a reader in the Department of
War Studies at Kings College, London (Thomas, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Or Will
It? September 9, 2013
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/9/09%20cyber%20war/20130909_c
yberwar_transcript.pdf)//gingE
Using cyber capabilities is not producing more violence, as this label of cyber war would
lead us to think, thats the core argument, its not producing more violence, it in fact
takes -- oftentimes takes violence and physical risk out of the question. So, Ill very
briefly give you three reasons, three illustrations of this argument, and I think then we
should already move into the discussion. First, perhaps the most consequential use of
computer attack is sabotage. Attacking a system, and when I say system, it can be all
sorts of things, in order to degrade its efficiency or possibly damage the system --
sabotage, thats sort of where sabotage comes from in the early 9 20th century,
withdrawing efficiency from a system. In previous times, if you sabotaged a system, say,
by throwing a monkey wrench -- thats the American equivalent to the sabot, the French
wooden shoe that strikers would throw into machines, if you like -- if you throw sand or
mechanical devices into a machine in order to sabotage it, in that classical context, then
you would damage the machine, you would damage property. You would actually, if you
like, do something violent because it damages something mechanically, physically.
Today, in the context of cyber attacks, it is easier to distinguish between violent sabotage,
because for violent effects you would have to weaponize the target system, like Stuxnet
did, with very arcane payloads. Its easier to distinguish violent sabotage from nonviolent
sabotage. So, for instance, the Saudi Aramco attack in 2012 and the Saudi oil company
was sabotaged, was entirely nonviolent, but it was highly effective, of course. So, that is
an interesting distinction to make that nonviolent sabotage has become possible and
probably also easier. Violent sabotage may have become more, shall we say, intelligence
intensive. Thats a point to be discussed, perhaps later. Second, very quickly, intelligence
operations, espionage operations, here also I think in this day and age, as we are learning
as a result of the ongoing revelations post-10 Snowden, intelligence operations and
espionage in the 21st century can exploit this new technical environment in ways that
were practically unimaginable only a generation ago. (Inaudible) before the Internet was
already impressive, but with the Internet the possibilities of (inaudible), of extra trading
information from a target, without the target noticing, are drastically increased. So,
again, the same thing, in order to exploit espionage in the cyber context, if you like, you
can --probably you have to take less risk, you may not even have to infiltrate physically --
you may not have to infiltrate a target to plant bugs, you may not have to recruit agents
in order to help you on the ground. It can be done remotely. Not always, but often. That
also makes it easier -- it, in a way, takes out physical risk, takes out potential violence,
not adding more to cyber operations. And very quickly, the third feature if you look at
subversion, is undermining political authority. Here weve also seen that a new
communication environment can be used to undermine authority effectively without first
resorting to political violence, without going to use terrorist tactics in order to
undermine the legitimacy of a government thats very much taking us into the realm of
counterterrorism and really counterinsurgency theory, but you can use -- you can
influence public opinion even if youre not a powerful media organization, in more
effective 11 ways today. Thats an entirely separate problem, subversion. Now, here also
violence becomes more problematic blurred. This, in a nutshell is the books core
argument that violence changes its shape. Let me, perhaps, close my short opening
remarks by responding to an argument that I know from experience at least ten people in
this room now have in their head. They think, well, maybe we should adapt the notion of
violence, maybe we should adapt the notion of what counts as war, as a use of force, to
the 21st century, maybe we have to -- why use Clausewitz? The guys been dead for 130-
something years. Shouldnt we be a little more progressive here? To which I would
respond, we have not updated our notions of what is violence, what is war, with the rise
of air power, which hasnt been around when Clausewitz was around. We havent
updated our notion of war with the arrival of nuclear weapons, necessarily. Ultimately,
and I appreciate that some of you here in this room may have served in warzones, who
experienced political violence in other contexts. I think, and I say this as somebody also
who is teaching in the Department of War Studies, we have to respect violence, we have
to respect war in a fundamental, existential way. So, exfiltrating data, even crashing an
entire companys network, and physically disabling data, is 12 different from hurting,
injuring, and killing human beings, even a single one, and I think thats a fundamental
philosophical distinction that we have to keep in mind, I think, and we owe it to those
who have had that experience, in a way.
East China Sea

Peace talks promote a framework of cooperation instead of conflict.
Jagran Post 7/9, global news source located in India, quotes Xi Jinping, the General
Secretary of China, (Jagran Post News Desk, July 9, 2014, China, US hold high-level
talks; vow to improve ties, http://post.jagran.com/china-us-hold-highlevel-talks-vow-
to-improve-ties-140489899)//HH

Xi, opening the two-day annual talks in Beijing, said problems in bilateral ties are not to
be afraid of as long as both sides work to solve them.
Considering their different histories and cultures "it is natural that China and US may
have different views and even frictions on certain issues", Xi said.
"This is what makes communication and cooperation even more necessary," he said at
the joint opening ceremony of the sixth China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue
(SED) and the fifth China-US High-Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchange.
"Our interests are more than ever interconnected," Xi said, adding that the two nations
"stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation".
"If we are in confrontation it will surely spell disaster for both countries and for the
world," he said.
Xi called on the need for Pacific powers to "break the old pattern of inevitable
confrontation".
"One can ill afford a mistake on fundamental issues, a mistake that may possibly ruin the
whole undertaking," he said.
In Washington, US President Barack Obama also issued statement coinciding with the
beginning of the talks here, saying US is committed to the goal of developing a "new
model" of relations with China defined by increased practical cooperation and
"constructive management" of differences.
Speaking on the "new model", Xi said, "Building a new model of major-country
relationship between China and United States is unprecedented in history. There is no
ready-made experience from which to learn."
Xi said China and US have overcome difficulties and continued to progress in the past 35
years, thanks to the leaderships understanding of contemporary conditions.
"Today, our two countries should better observe the times and think creatively to open
new prospects in bilateral cooperation," Xi said.
US delegation led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew
will hold two-day talks with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang and State Councilor Yang
Jiechi to strike what Chinese officials describe a "new type" of relationship to further
bilateral ties.
This year's strategic dialogue covers a wide range of topics of domestic and foreign
policy, including climate change, science and innovation, Sudan and South Sudan, UN
peacekeeping and the illegal trade in animals and plants, as well as interactions in the
Asia-Pacific region, officials said.
The bilateral talks come as tensions between the two nations have risen in recent months
wracked by maritime disputes.
Both sides do not see eye to eye on maritime tensions between China and Japan over the
disputed islands. They also have differences over the South China Sea disputes China has
with Vietnam and other neighbours.
During a meeting between Xi and US President Barack Obama in California in June
2013, they decided to build a new-model relationship featuring no conflict and no
confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation.
The consensus proceeds from the conditions of the two countries and the world and
serves the fundamental interests of the peoples, Xi said.
It is a strategic decision and reflects the two countries' will to avoid friction between
major powers, he said.
Xi called on both sides to keep up with the times in developing bilateral relations.

Mutually Assured Destruction and dialogue prevents conflict escalation.
Himalayan Times 7/9, Global news source located in Nepal, quotes Xi Jinping, the
General Secretary of China and quotes John Kerry, US Secretary of State, (July 9, 2014,
China's Xi warns confrontation with U.S. would be disaster,
http://www.thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=China%27s+Xi+warns+co
nfrontation+with+U.S.+would+be+disaster&NewsID=420622)//HH

BEIJING: Confrontation between China and the United States would be a disaster and
both must respect each others' sovereignty, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on
Wednesday as he opened annual talks between the world's two biggest economies.
The two-day talks being led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary
Jack Lew will likely take in China's currency, North Korea's nuclear programme and
escalating tensions between China and neighbours in the South China Sea and with
Japan in the East China Sea.
Charges over hacking and Internet spying have also been a factor in tensions between
Beijing and Washington. In May, the United States charged five Chinese military officers
with hacking U.S. companies, prompting Beijing to suspend a Sino-U.S. working group
on cyber issues. China has denied wrongdoing.
Xi said Sino-U.S. cooperation was of vital importance.
"China-U.S. confrontation, to the two countries and the world, would definitely be a
disaster," he told the opening ceremony of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue at a
government guest house in the west of the city.
"We should mutually respect and treat each other equally, and respect the others
sovereignty and territorial integrity and respect each others choice on the path of
development."
Xi added that both countries should strengthen cooperation in fighting terror and speed
up talks on a bilateral investment treaty to reach an agreement at an early date.
At the talks, Kerry will raise growing U.S. concerns over China's "problematic behaviour"
in the South China Sea, U.S. officials said earlier.
The United States has not taken sides in the disputes but has been critical of China's
behaviour in the potentially energy-rich South China Sea, where the Philippines,
Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have overlapping territorial claims with China.
Beijing, though, views the United States as encouraging Vietnam and the Philippines to
be more aggressive in the dispute.
Kerry said the United States was not seeking to "contain" China.
"We welcome the emergence of a peaceful, stable, prosperous China that contributes to
the stability and development of the region, and chooses to play a responsible role in
world affairs," he said.
"We have a profound stake in each others success," Kerry added. "I can tell you that we
are determined to choose the path of peace and prosperity and cooperation, and yes,
even competition, but not conflict."

ASEAN checks East China Sea War.
Kyodo News 7/22, global news source quoting ASEAN diplomatic sources, (July 22,
2014, ASEAN to voice concern over disputes in South, East China seas, Global Post,
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/140722/asean-
voice-concern-over-disputes-south-east-china-sea)//HH

ASEAN diplomatic sources told Kyodo News on Tuesday that at the 47th ASEAN Foreign
Ministers Meeting scheduled to be held next month in Myanmar's administrative capital
Naypyitaw, the foreign ministers will touch on territorial disputes in the South China Sea
and the East China Sea.
On the East China Sea, in particular, one of the sources quoted a draft of the meeting's
joint statement as saying, "We expressed our concerns over the current tensions in the
East China Sea. We urged all parties concerned to resolve territorial and maritime
disputes in a peaceful manner, in accordance with international laws. We stressed the
importance of protecting the freedom of navigation in and over-flight in the area and
called on parties to refrain from taking unilateral action that would increase tensions and
change the status quo."
Energy War

No impact to energy wars US/China interdependence solves
Barnett 12 - Dr. Barnett holds a PhD in political science from Harvard University.
(Thomas P. M., May 29, 2012, Death to Resource Wars! Time,
http://nation.time.com/2012/05/29/death-to-resource-wars/)
Shale gas production has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to advances in fracking,
which involves injecting a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to
extract fuel. Nice Washington Post piece on Saturday about how the center of gravity in
global oil exploration and production is shifting to the Western hemisphere. No, the bulk
of global conventional oil reserves still sits in the Persian Gulf, but the larger point is
worth exploring: we no longer project global futures where East and West
logically fight over Middle East energy reserves. Those expected long-term
dynamics are collapsing right now before our eyes. Its not just the new conventional oil
finds in the Americas, but the lifting of unconventional reserves (so-called tight oil).
Then theres the fracking revolution in natural gas that favors the Western Hemisphere
in a big, big way, because four of the top seven reserves in the world (U.S., Argentina,
Mexico, Canada) are found here. The fracking revolution kicks off two additional mini-
revolutions in energy: the accelerated shift to natural gas-powered vehicles, reducing the
oil demand even further, and the displacement of coal in electricity generation frees up
the cleanest and most high-quality coal in the world for export to Asia, where electricity
demand is skyrocketing. So heres the geo-strategic reality shaping up: the Western
Hemisphere doesnt need the Persian Gulf, which is source #5 to the U.S. market, after
the U.S. itself, North America, South America and Africa. But not only is the U.S.
increasingly less worried about the Persian Gulf and more willing logically to let
that become Asias problem to manage (its their oil after all, as more than half of it
heads their way now, and that percentage will only grow), it also becomes a trusted and
important energy supplier to Asia (liquid natural gas and coal over time). Toss in Chinas
growing food reliance on the Western Hemisphere, which only grows with that nations
middle class, and the climate change that makes it harder to grow food over there, and
were looking at a global future in which China and the U.S. are intertwined
in basic resource dependencies: they need our food and energy, and we need their
savings. Those realities are already firmly in place: the Western hemisphere largely feeds
the Eastern one in terms of major grain flows (reflecting underlying water-resource
realities), and Asia has been the primary saver in the global financial system for several
decades now. So no, there is no civilizational fight over the Middle East. All
that imagined nonsense falls by the wayside. Likewise, the strategic pivot
pursued by the U.S. today is a complete whiff in strategic terms. Globalization has
already conquered East Asia, creating the vast and inescapable interdependencies
described here. That battle, however you want to describe it, is already over. Dont feel
bad by any of this. I like my military types to be a bit slower strategic awareness-wise
than my politicians (just consider the reverse), and I like my politicians to be a good step
behind my business types. Theyll all get the message soon enough. Because this future is
staring them in the face.

Cooperation with China solves any risk of energy conflicts
The Breakthrough 8 (The Breakthrough, May 12, 2008, The Future: Violent
Resource Wars or Clean Energy Economy? The Breakthrough,
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_future_violent_resource_wa)
It's hard to imagine a scarier world than the one Michael Klare predicts in his May 1
commentary in the Nation. Global resources are dwindling and demand for them is
exploding; desperate for control, the world's major industrial powers are gearing up for a
violent resource war. We may be getting along fine with China and Russia for now, but
we're also vying with them for control of resources in poor, unstable nations -- what
happens when we have to pick sides of a bloody internal conflict? Does it make you feel
better that the U.S. Defense Department has "undertaken a massive modernization of
the combat fleet...an endeavor that could take decades to complete and consume
hundreds of billions of dollars"? Klare has a better idea, and thank goodness, because by
the time he finally rolled it out, I was beginning to lose faith in the future: It is essential
that America reverse the militarization of its dependence on imported energy and ease
geopolitical competition with China and Russia over control of foreign resources.
Because this would require greater investment in energy alternatives, it would also lead
to an improved energy economy at home (with lower prices in the long run) and a better
chance at overcoming global warming. Any strategy aimed at reducing reliance on
imported energy, especially oil, must include a huge increase in spending on alternative
fuels, especially renewable sources of energy (solar and wind), second-generation
biofuels (those made from nonedible plant matter), coal gasification with carbon capture
and burial (so that no carbon dioxide escapes into the atmosphere to heat the planet)
and hydrogen fuel cells, along with high-speed rail, public transit and other advanced
transportation systems. The science and technology for these advances is already largely
in place, but the funding to move them from the lab or pilot-project stage to full-scale
development is not. The challenge, then, is to assemble the many billions--even trillions-
-of dollars that will be needed. The principal obstacle to this herculean task is the very
reason for its necessity in the first place: massive spending on the military dimensions of
overseas resource competition. I estimate that it costs approximately $100 billion to
$150 billion per year to enforce the Carter Doctrine, not including the war in Iraq.
Extending that doctrine to the Caspian Sea basin and Africa will add billions. A new cold
war with China, with an accompanying naval arms race, will require trillions in
additional military expenditures over the next few decades. This is sheer lunacy: it will
not guarantee access to more sources of energy, lower the cost of gasoline at home or
discourage China from seeking new energy resources. What it will do is sop up all the
money we need to develop alternative energy sources and avert the worst effects of global
climate change. And this leads to a final recommendation: rather than engage in
militarized competition with China, we should cooperate with Beijing in developing
alternative energy sources and more efficient transportation systems. The arguments in
favor of collaboration are overwhelming: together, we are projected to consume 35
percent of the world's oil supply by 2025, most of which will have to be imported from
dysfunctional states. If, as is widely predicted, global oil reserves have begun to shrink by
then, both of our countries could be locked in a dangerous struggle for dwindling
supplies in chronically unstable areas of the world. The costs, in terms of rising military
outlays and the inability to invest in more worthwhile social, economic and
environmental endeavors, would be staggering. Far better to forswear this sort of
competition and work together on the development of advanced petroleum alternatives,
super-fuel-efficient vehicles and other energy innovations. Many American and Chinese
universities and corporations have already initiated joint ventures of this sort, so it is not
hard to envision a much grander regime of cooperation. As we approach the 2008
elections, two paths lie before us. One leads to greater reliance on imported fuels,
increased militarization of our foreign fuel dependency and prolonged struggle with
other powers for control over the world's remaining supplies of fossil fuels. The other
leads toward diminished reliance on petroleum as a main source of our fuel, the rapid
development of energy alternatives, a reduced US military profile abroad and
cooperation with China in the development of innovative energy options. Rarely has a
policy choice been as stark or as momentous for the future of our country.

No impact to energy resource wars actors are rational
Heinberg 11 - Richard Heinberg is an American journalist and educator who has
written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion.
He is the author of eleven books. He serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon
Institute. (Richard, Jun2 20, 2011, Resource Wars: Geopolitics in a World of Dwindling
Energy Supplies Oil Price. Com,
http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Resource-Wars-Geopolitics-In-A-World-
Of-Dwindling-Energy-Supplies.html)
**modified for abelist language//we dont endorse abelist language
As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the worlds diminishing
resourcesfossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been
fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase.
Nations need increasing amounts of energy and materials to produce economic growth,
butas we have seenthe costs of supplying new increments of energy and materials are
increasing. In many cases all that remains are lower-quality resources that have high
extraction costs. In some instances, securing access to these resources requires military
expenditures as well. Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning
political power balances throughout the world. The U.S., as the worlds superpower, has
the most to lose from a reshuffling of alliances and resource flows. The nations leaders
continue to play the game of geopolitics by 20th century rules: They are still obsessed
with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the worlds foremost resource
prize (a situation largely necessitated by the countrys continuing overwhelming
dependence on oil imports, due in turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions
stretching back at least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S.
inertia: Most experts agree that there is little to be gained from the conflict, but
withdrawal of forces is politically unfeasible. The United States maintains a globe-
spanning network of over 800 military bases that formerly represented tokens of
security to regimes throughout the worldbut that now increasingly only provoke
resentment among the locals. This enormous military machine requires a vast supply
system originating with American weapons manufacturers that in turn depend on a
prodigious and ever-expanding torrent of funds from the Treasury. Indeed, the nations
budget deficit largely stems from its trillion-dollar-per-year, first-priority commitment to
continue growing its military-industrial complex. Yet despite the countrys gargantuan
expenditures on high-tech weaponry, its armed forces appear to be stretched to their
limits, fielding around 200,000 troops and even larger numbers of support personnel in
Iraq and Afghanistan, where supply chains are both vulnerable and expensive to
maintain. In short, the United States remains an enormously powerful nation militarily,
with thousands of nuclear weapons in addition to its unparalleled conventional forces,
yet it suffers from declining strategic flexibility. The European Union, traditionally allied
with the U.S., is increasingly mapping its priorities independentlypartly because of
increased energy dependence on Russia, and partly because of economic rivalries and
currency conflicts with America. Germanys economy is one of the few to have emerged
from the 2008 crisis relatively unscathed, but the country is faced with the problem of
having to bail out more and more of its neighbors. The ongoing European serial
sovereign debt crisis could eventually undermine the German economy and throw into
doubt the long-term soundness of the euro and the E.U. itself. The U.K. is a mere shadow
of its former imperial self, with unsustainable levels of debt, declining military budgets,
and falling oil production. Its foreign policy is still largely dictated in Washington,
though many Britons are increasingly unhappy with this state of affairs. China is the
rising power of the 21st century, according to many geopolitical pundits, with a surging
military and lots of cash with which to buy access to resources (oil, coal, minerals, and
farmland) around the planet. Yet while it is building an imperial-class navy that could
eventually threaten Americas, Beijing suffers (as we have already seen) from domestic
political and economic weaknesses that could make its turn at the center of the world
stage a brief one. Japan, with the worlds third-largest national economy, is wary of
China and increasingly uncertain of its protector, the U.S. The country is tentatively
rebuilding its military so as to be able to defend its interests independently. Disputes
with China over oil and gas deposits in the East China Sea are likely to worsen, as Japan
has almost no domestic fossil fuel resources and needs secure access to supplies. Russia
is a resource powerhouse but is also politically corrupt and remains economically
crippled. (Devastated) With a residual military force at the ready, it vies with China and
the U.S. for control of Caspian and Central Asian energy and mineral wealth through
alliances with former Soviet states. It tends to strike tentative deals with China to
counter American interests, but ultimately Beijing may be as much of a rival as
Washington. Moscow uses its gas exports as a bargaining chip for influence in Europe.
Meanwhile, little of the income from the countrys resource riches benefits the populace.
The Russian peoples advantage in all this may be that they have recently been through
one political-economic collapse and will therefore be relatively well-prepared to navigate
another. Even as countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua reject
American foreign policy, the U.S. continues to exert enormous influence on resource-rich
Latin America via North American-based corporations, which in some cases wield
overwhelming influence over entire national economies. However, China is now actively
contracting for access to energy and mineral resources throughout this region, which is
resulting in a gradual shift in economic spheres of interest. Africa is a site of fast-growing
U.S. investment in oil and other mineral extraction projects (as evidenced by the
establishment in 2009 of Africom, a military strategic command center on par with
Centcom, Eucom, Northcom, Pacom, and Southcom), but is also a target of Chinese and
European resource acquisition efforts. Proxy conflicts there between and among these
powers may intensify in the years aheadin most instances, to the sad detriment of
African peoples. The Middle East maintains vast oil wealth (though reserves have been
substantially overestimated due to rivalries inside OPEC), but is characterized by
extreme economic inequality, high population growth rates, political instability, and the
need for importation of non-energy resources (including food and water). The
revolutions and protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen in early 2011 were
interpreted by many observers as indicating the inability of the common people in
Middle Eastern regimes to tolerate sharply rising food, water, and energy prices in the
context of autocratic political regimes. As economic conditions worsen, many more
nationsincluding ones outside the Middle Eastcould become destabilized; the
ultimate consequences are unknowable at this point, but could well be enormous. Like
China, Saudi Arabia is buying farmland in Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Nations
like Iraq and Iran need advanced technology with which to maintain an oil industry that
is moving from easy plays to oilfields that are smaller, harder to access, and more
expensive to produce, and both Chinese and U.S. companies stand ready to supply it. The
deep oceans and the Arctic will be areas of growing resource interest, as long as the
worlds wealthier nations are still capable of mounting increasingly expensive efforts to
compete for and extract strategic materials in these extreme environments. However,
both military maneuvering and engineering-mining efforts will see diminishing returns
as costs rise and payoffs diminish. Unfortunately, rising costs and flagging returns from
resource conflicts will not guarantee world peace. History suggests that as nations
become more desperate to maintain their relative positions of strength and advantage,
they may lash out in ways that serve no rational purpose. Again, no crisis is
imminent as long as cool heads prevail. But the world system is losing stability.
Current economic and geopolitical conditions would appear to support a forecast not for
increasing economic growth, democracy, and peace, but for more political volatility, and
for greater government military mobilization justified under the banner of security.

European Instability
No risk of an impact Europe has measures built in place to deter conflict
and strengthen cooperation
Cameron 10 Senior Adviser, European Policy Centre, Adjunct Professor, Hertie
School of Governance, Berlin. (Fraser, September 2010, The European Union as a
Model for Regional Integration Council on Foreign Relations,
http://www.cfr.org/world/european-union-model-regional-integration/p22935)
Introduction While the European Union (EU) has long been the most developed model
of regional integration, it was severely shaken by the recent economic crisis, causing
increasing doubts about the integration process. The lack of a timely and coherent
response to the euro crisis called into question the integrity of the eurozone, whose
structural and institutional fault lines have been revealed by the financial crisis. These
doubts coincide with dramatic changes in the global economic order involving the
relative decline of the EU and United States and the rise of Asia. The likely economic
adjustments are already threatening social cohesion and political stability in Europe.
The crisis has temporarily weakened the EU's status as a model for regional
integration, but as the EU recovers its confidence, as it always has after
previous crises, it will continue to be the leading example for other efforts at
regional integration. The EU Model Since the early 1950s, the EU has been a pioneer in
regional integration. The most important principles underlying the success of the EU
project include: Visionary politicians, such as Robert Schuman of France and Konrad
Adenauer of Germany, who conceived of a new form of politics based on the
supranational "community method" rather than the traditional balance-of-power model.
Support from the United States was also crucial in the early years. Leadership
generated by the Franco-German axis. Despite many problems, Paris and Berlin have
been and remain the driving force behind European integration. The political will to
share sovereignty and construct strong, legally based, common institutions to oversee
the integration project. A consensus approach combined with solidarity and tolerance.
The EU approach is based on not isolating any member state if they have a major
problem (such as Greece in the most recent crisis), hesitance to move forward with
policies until the vast majority of member states are ready, and a willingness to provide
significant financial transfers to help poorer member states catch up with the norm.
These four tenets have guided the EU well over the years and enabled the institutions
to survive many crises, from French president Charles de Gaulle's "empty chair"
tactic of withdrawing French representatives from EU political bodies in protest of
moves to introduce qualified majority voting (QMV) to failed referendums on new
treaties in a number of member states, including rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by
France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the Lisbon Treaty by Ireland in 2008. More
recently, the EU has adopted a more flexible approach resulting in a multi-speed Europe
with several tiers of integration. For example, not all member states are in the eurozone,
or in the Schengen passport-free zone; this arrangement has allowed some of the more
Euro-skeptic countries such as the United Kingdom to opt out of certain obligations.
Nevertheless, the core tenet of the EU is readiness to share sovereignty and operate
through strong common institutions. Other Regional Groupings There have been several
attempts to achieve regional integration outside of Europeincluding the Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), African Union (AU), Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC), and Mercosur in South Americabut they have all failed to achieve anything
resembling the progress of the EU. ASEAN is the most advanced of these efforts and
regularly sends delegations to Brussels to seek ideas from the EU experience; however,
ASEAN remains a strictly inter-governmental body and there is no indication of interest
in sovereignty sharing. It is a similar story elsewhere: no other regional body is
anywhere near the EU in terms of political or economic cooperation, let
alone integration. Indeed, no other grouping has even gotten to first base in terms of
the basic requirements of integration, namely dealing with historical reconciliation and
developing the necessary political will. There have been innumerable declarations from
groupings in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central America about the
desirability of closer cooperation and even integration, but the record shows that the
rhetoric has not been matched by action. Although the EU is also guilty of exaggerated
rhetoric, it has steadily moved forwardeven if on occasion it seems to take two steps
forward, one step back. As the EU's experience demonstrates, historical reconciliation is
a critical element in developing the necessary political will for cooperation and,
ultimately, integration. The fundamental basis for the success of the EU is the historical
reconciliation between France and Germany, achieved by years of sustained political
effort from the leaders of both countries. In stark contrast, there has been no such effort
in many other parts of the world where there are ambitions of regional integration. In
East Asia, for example, there can be no integration without genuine reconciliation
between Japan and China, and Japan and Korea. The East Asia experience is replicated
elsewhere with unresolved problems and deep suspicions between, for example, Brazil
and Argentina, India and Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia and its neighbours. Only after
historical reconciliation can countries proceed gradually along the various steps required
to create a regional community such as a free trade area, a customs union, a single
market, a single currency, a common passport area, and a common foreign policy. The
State of the Union Compared to most other regions of the world, the EU is a haven of
peace, prosperity, and security. Following the global economic crisis, however,
there are several major challenges facing the EU that, if not tackled with urgency and
determination, could threaten the entire European project. Namely, the EU has grown
and integrated rapidly without commensurate strengthening of its political and
economic institutions. The emerging gap between necessary coordination and
institutional capacity in the EU suggests a lesson for other regional groupings if and
when they arrive at later stages of the integration process.
No impact Europe is politically stable recent elections prove
Ugeux 5-26 Chairman and CEO, Galileo Global Advisors and Adjunct professor at
Columbia Law School. (Georges, 5/26/2014, The European Parliamentary Elections
Provide Stability and Warnings Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georges-ugeux/the-european-
parliamentar_b_5392457.html)

There are two ways to look at the European Parliamentary elections that concluded
today. 1.Political stability Contrary to what many media will display this Monday, the
results of the elections show a remarkable stability. The three major political
families of Europe (Conservative, Socialists and Liberals) will likely reach at least 60
percent of the 751 seats of the Assembly. While that majority narrowed from 70 percent,
this vote ensures the continuity of Europe and its institutions, a commitment to market
economy and a critical support to the Eurozone. It is remarkable that such a diverse
continent with 29 Member States could provide stability and, even more unlikely,
coherence between three political families that have been dominating the European
nations since World War II. Europeans like Europe. It should dispel the image carried
often enough by U.S. politicians or media of a politically unreliable partner for the
United States. Europeans are closely united around values such as social
justice, peace and progress. They also believe in privacy ahead of security, history
ahead of experimentation. Having such a powerful 500 million people political and
economic partner should be a source of admiration rather than denigration by the
American people. Yet countries who have centuries of conflicts against each other, speak
as many languages as they have countries, and sometimes several per country,
substantial national and regional characteristics will never be a unified counterparty.
Complexity and diversity, however, do not translate into inconsistency and, for historic
and modern reasons, many of the European and U.S values are rooted into common
religious and social beliefs. 2.Loud and serious warnings Not everything is good,
however, in this election. The emergence of anti-European feelings in some countries
resulted in an increase of the share of the Eurosceptics in the European Parliament from
5 to 10 percent. It would be wrong, however, to consider this emergence as a single
movement. The themes are radically different in various countries, and will not provide a
platform that will act with any form of common voice. Anti immigration was core to the
emergence of the UKIP as the leading UK party in this election as well as in the more
moderate Danish extreme right leading position. Anti austerity dominates the rhetoric
in over-indebted Italy but without the emergence of an extreme right party. Greece sees a
movement towards a now leading extreme left, not the extreme right. France is a
domestic situation dominated by the appalling records of the Socialists and the
Conservatives who have consistently taken credit for European achievements and
blamed them for their problems. The appalling leadership of Nicolas Sarkozy and
Francois Hollande makes both leading parties co-responsible for this debacle that,
worryingly, includes elements of racism. This is not the Tea Party, united in racism and
militarism, pseudo-inspired by the Evangelism. However, it could create the same trend
towards conservative radicalization. 3.Redefining Europe's objectives: growth and
employment The lack of good opinions in the modus operandi of the European
institutions is, however, an underlying theme of these elections, and most importantly,
in the massive abstentions of voters (56 percent). In turn, it increased the relative weight
of the extremes. Europeans are fundamentally pro-European in their huge majority.
However, the "deficit of democracy" is there. The European Parliament has no right of
initiative. Only the European Commission, solidly locked by the Member States, enjoys
that privilege. As Angela Merkel -- whose country strongly backed the leading parties --
declared during the campaign, Europe has to be an engine of growth and employment.
Not with money, but with the right policies. That should now be the key objectives of
European countries, building a competitiveness with Asia and America. For this reason, I
hope that Martin Schultz, the German leader of the Socialist fraction, will become the
new President of the Commission. The former President of the European Parliament has
the right leadership and will work out the institutional paralysis of Europe that makes it
hostage of unanimity. For all his personal qualities, Jean-Claude Juncker, albeit the
candidate of the leading European party, the PPE, has too much baggage and bears a
huge responsibility for the mismanagement of the European sovereign crisis.


AT: Ukraine crisis spill over
No impact to Ukraine crisis when a civilian plane is shot down it forces
leaders to see the horrors of war empirics prove
Ignatius July 17 Ignatius studied political theory at Harvard College and economics
at Kings College, Cambridge. He was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering at
various times the steel industry, the Justice Department, the CIA, the Senate, the Middle
East and the State Department. (David, July 17, 2014, Will the Malaysia Airlines crash
de-escalate the Ukraine crisis?, Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/07/17/will-the-
malaysian-airlines-crash-de-escalate-the-ukraine-crisis/)

This is a hotline moment: When a civilian passenger plane is shot down over a war zone,
leaders are forced to see and hopefully, discuss the unintended consequences of
battle and the accidental risk of war. But, paradoxically, horrifying moments like this can
also encourage government leaders to break from the status quo and its cycle of
escalation and think about ways to move back from the brink.
The caveats, first: At this writing, all we know for sure is that Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH17 crashed Thursday in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew
members. The plane was near the border-area battleground between Ukraines military
and pro-Russian separatists. The Ukrainian rebels have received heavy weapons from
Russia, reportedly including anti-aircraft missiles that might be able to reach the
33,000-foot altitude at which the plane reportedly was flying.
For now, its a retaliatory war of words: Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko called it a
terrorist act, with the implication that the Russian-backed separatists were to blame.
Andrei Purgin, a leader of the breakaway Donetsk Peoples Republic in eastern
Ukraine, denied that the insurgents were responsible or that they had missiles that could
have downed the plane.
This nightmare incident could have a perverse benefit, if it leads Russia to reconsider the
consequences of its reckless campaign in Ukraine. The incident illustrates how a
confrontation can escalate beyond what any side intends or desires. We mark such a
mistake next month, with the hundredth anniversary of World War I, when European
powers went to war through a series of lockstep mobilizations that led to a ruinously
bloody war from which Europe and Russia arguably have never recovered. Nobody
intended that outcome, but nobody could stop it, either.
Recent history offers two examples in which inadvertent attacks on civilian airliners
demonstrated the risks of military confrontation but also led, over time, to a process of
sober reflection and eventual de-escalation.
The first such incident was the Sept. 1, 1983 attack that downed Korean Air Lines Flight
007 near Sakahlin Island, a missile testing zone on the far eastern coast of what was then
the Soviet Union. The plane was brought down by a Soviet fighter jets, but Moscow
initially denied responsibility and then claimed the passenger jet had been on a spy
mission. In truth, it was a hideous accident in the fog of the Cold War that illustrated
how Moscow and Washington were operating on a hair trigger. The vituperative reaction
in Washington led some Soviets to fear that all-out war might be ahead and this, in
turn, contributed to a period of reflection that eventually led both sides to consider new
arms control agreements and other measures of dtente. Indeed, viewed through
historys lens, you can discern a connection between the KAL shootdown and the
eventual end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union.
Disasters sometimes create political space and allow leaders to take actions that
previously were unthinkable. That was the case with another fatal accidental attack on a
civilian airliner in this case the July 3, 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the
U.S.S. Vincennes. The Navy guided-missile cruiser was stationed in the Persian Gulf
protecting oil tankers during the eighth year of the Iraq-Iran war. The attack, the result
of misidentification according to the U.S., resulted in the death of 290 passengers and
crew. Iran said at the time it believed the attack was deliberate on the part of the United
States. That was almost certainly wrong, but it lead Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah
Khomeini, to conclude that the war with Iraq was unwinnable and to sue for peace. As he
put it, Khomeini drank from the poisoned chalice and agreed to negotiate an end to the
war. Here, again, you can draw a line from a disastrous mistake in battle to an eventual
settlement of conflict.
Nobody knows if the tragic events over eastern Ukraine will lead to wise reflection in
Moscow and a move toward de-escalation, or whether tensions will exacerbate even
further. Sometimes, disaster makes people stop and think; other times, it just leads to
worse disaster. But certainly the loss of the Malaysia Airlines jet should encourage
European nations, such as Germany, that sanctions against Russia that push it toward
peace are preferable to letting the haphazard process of tit-for-tat continue.

No impact MH17 is turning point and will cause Putin to back down due to
tougher sanctions
Strobel and Spetalnick 7-18 Matt is a White House correspondent who has covered
news on four continents for Reuters, from Latin American coups and drug wars to the
O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles to the Balkans conflict to the second
Palestinian Intifada to the Iraq war. He has covered George W. Bush and is now covering
President Barack Obama. Strobel is Diplomatic Editor at Thomson Reuters. (Matt and
Warren, July 18, 2014, Downing of airliner seen as pivotal moment in Ukraine crisis
Reuters, http://news.yahoo.com/downing-airliner-seen-pivotal-moment-ukraine-crisis-
033853552.html)


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The downing of a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine
could be a turning point for the Ukraine crisis, if it convinces reluctant Europeans to get
behind tougher "sectoral" sanctions long-sought by U.S. President Barack
Obama.Although its unclear exactly who was behind the apparent ground-launched
missile that destroyed the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, U.S. allies who have tried to
occupy the middle ground in the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West
since the end of the Cold War may now support bolder action to end the fighting in
Ukraine.
"Some people thought Ukraine didnt have anything to do with them. They are now
discovering their error," one senior U.S. official said, adding that this could shatter the
view in some European capitals that the conflict was largely contained. Current and
former U.S. officials, as well as independent analysts, say the tragedy would sharpen
global attention on Ukraine's raging separatist conflict and Moscow's role in fueling it.
That, in turn, could be a catalyst for stronger sanctions that could inflict real damage on
Russias economy.
The European Union's reticence over tougher sanctions reflects concerns among many of
its member states about trade and industrial ties with Moscow and heavy reliance on
Russian energy.
But with more than half of the nearly 300 people killed in the downing of the plane
Dutch citizens, and more than a dozen more from other EU nations, that could change.
There is also hope in Washington that Russian President Vladimir Putin, faced with
possibly the worst unintended consequences of the Ukrainian crisis, may experience
what one U.S. official described as a "moment of sanity" and work to stop the violence in
majority Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine."This could be a tipping point," said
Sam Charap, a former U.S. State Department official and now senior fellow at the
International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington."It could be just what it takes
to make the Russians step back," he said. "This is just what Putin didn't want but it's the
kind of scenario that becomes much more likely when you give a lot of undertrained and
unreliable people sophisticated weaponry."
Putin could also draw a completely different lesson and decide that, with U.S.-Russian
relations already at a post-Cold War low, he has little to lose in defying Western pressure
and instead increase support for the rebels, the officials said.Much would depend on the
level of public outrage over the destruction of the plane, and any evidence of involvement
by pro-Russian separatists.
"SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES"
Ukraine accused the pro-Moscow militants, aided by Russian military intelligence
officers, of firing a long-range, Soviet-era SA-11 ground-to-air missile. The separatists
have said they took control of such a missile system last month and used it to shoot down
a Ukrainian military transport plane on Monday.
The rebels denied involvement in Thursday's crash and said a Ukrainian air force jet had
brought down the flight.
The United States has led the way on Western sanctions against Russia, announcing on
Wednesday new measures targeting key institutions including Gazprombank and
Rosneft Oil Co, as well as other energy and defense companies. The European Union has
imposed some sanctions, including new penalties this week, but its steps have lagged
Washington and have been weaker.
"This will undermine the case of those who have been reluctant," the U.S. official said.
Obama will also be under growing pressure from Capitol Hill - and from the Ukrainian
government - for more military training and an increase in shipments of advanced arms
to Ukraine's fledgling security forces, something the White House has been reluctant to
offer for fear of escalating the conflict.
The airliner tragedy could also lead to a new push in Europe to rescind arms embargoes
that were implemented in the dying days of Ukraine's former pro-Russian Ukrainian
government that fell last year, U.S. government sources said. "There should be serious
consequences if we find out that it was either Russian agents, Russian equipment or
Russians directly that was responsible for the downing of this airliner," New Hampshire
Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte said in a speech on the Senate floor.
The Netherlands declared a day of national mourning for its 154 dead. Twenty-eight
passengers were Malaysian, 27 Australian, 12 Indonesian, nine British, four German,
four Belgian, three Filipino and one Canadian. All 15 crew were Malaysian. While the
downing of the Malaysian plane is shaping up as defining moment in the crisis, some
analysts caution against overstating its impact on already-dismal U.S.-Russia
relations."Its a very big deal no matter what," said Matthew Rojansky, a Russia expert at
the Wilson Center think-tank in Washington.But he said this should not be viewed as a
"watershed moment" like the Soviet Union's downing of a Korean airlines passenger jet
in 1983 at the height of the Cold War."There is still a lot of uncertainty about what
happened," he said. "That means plenty of deniability for Putin even if the attack is
traced back to separatist rebels."A second U.S. official said Thursdays tragedy "could
lead to a moment of pullback" by the opposing sides in the Ukraine conflict, paving the
way for talks and possibly a compromise.The international reaction to Thursdays
tragedy could go two ways, the official said. It could cause countries to understand the
growing danger of the Ukraine conflict, or prompt them to "put their heads in the sand".
No impact to Ukraine crisis no spill over other EU nations will leverage
economic sanctions and use diplomatic force against Russia
Beauchamp 3-2 - Zack Beauchamp is Editor of TP Ideas and a reporter for
ThinkProgress.org. He has also written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines. Zack
holds B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from Brown University and an M.Sc in
International Relations from the London School of Economics. (Zach, 2014, Why the
Crisis in Ukraine isnt the Start of another Cold War, Think Progress,
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/03/02/3349241/crimea-ukraine-putin-dreamer/)

While it might have been nice to hear the Secretary of State say on Meet The Press
Sunday that you just dont in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by
invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text, that characterization of
Russias involvement in Ukraine is not the kind of aggressive military response thats
going to reassure those who see this as an issue of strong Putin versus feckless Obama.
To people inclined to condemn American weakness in the face of Russian aggression,
John Kerrys condemnation of Russias military incursion into Crimea might sound like
more empty words.
But that entire frame is mistaken, and not because Kerry also said all options are on the
table. The fact is that Russias Ukraine move is an act of weakness, not
strength an act, as Kerry aptly characterized it, anachronistic in both moral and
strategic terms. The fact that Russia is trying something like this exposes the countrys
global strategy as fundamentally mismatched to 21st century realities. There isnt a
new Cold War.
There are basically two reasons, one practical and one ideological, behind Russias
aggressive play to keep Crimea and Ukraine in its orbit. First, Russia has military
interests in Ukraine, particularly in the Crimean city Sevastopol. Sevastopol is a critical
Russian naval base, one that allows it easy access to the Mediterranean that it otherwise
wouldnt enjoy. Note Sevastopols location on this map:
The bases significance was highlighted during the 2008 war with Georgia, when the
Russian fleet staged blockades in the Black Sea and was used to launch amphibious
landings, The Financial Times Kathrin Hille writes. It has also proved its usefulness to
Russia in the Libya crisis, anti-piracy missions in the Indian Ocean and Moscows role in
dismantling Syrias chemical weapons.
The second reason is ideological. Crimea has a 60 percent ethnic Russian population and
was actually part of Russia until 1954. Moreover, Russia sees both Crimea and Ukraine
writ large as part of its historical sphere of influence, the territory over which it
naturally enjoys political and social hegemony. The more Ukrainians move to a pro-
Western orientation which is how the whole Ukraine crisis started in the first place
the more Vladimir Putin feels like Russia is being disrespected and isolated in precisely
the place he likely feels it ought to dominate.
The military and ideological reasons are tied together by Putins core project of
rebuilding Russia as a regional and global power. Sevastopol is of critical importance as
Russia seeks to regain some of the global clout that has been dwindling since the
disintegration of the Soviet empire, Hille concludes. If Ukraine slides out of Russias
orbit, Putin loses both a critical military asset and an example of Russias renewed
geopolitical ascendance. It makes sense that hed go to dramatic lengths to ensure
Ukrainians dont endanger his plans.
But Putins project is a pipe dream. Russia will not come close to its Cold War power
peak during Putins lifetime especially if it relies on ham-fisted military interventions
to keep its closest neighbors in line.
It is almost impossible to predict exactly how situations this volatile will go down. Russia
may well push internal Ukrainian politics in its favor, or even successfully annex Crimea.
But foreign occupations, as America has learned, are particularly poor ways to make the
territory youre occupying friendly. It may seem different for Russia in Crimea and East
Ukraine, with their preponderance of ethnic Russians, but its not that simple. Ten
percent of the Crimean population, for instance, are Tatars, a Muslim group that would
make Russias life very difficult. The Tatars are well-organized and have a long history of
putting up fierce resistance to Russian control over Crimea; theyre the main reason,
according to Tufts Universitys Oxana Shevel, that its hard to believe Russia will be able
to establish control and to effectively annex Crimea.
It is a nightmare for everyone, Igor Sutyagin, a Russian military expert, told the
Guardian. The entry of Russian troops would be a deep humiliation for Ukraine It
would be a second Chechnya.
An occupation of Crimea would be expensive and politically isolating. It also risks a
damaging war with Ukraines relatively strong military, an unforced error given how
restrained Kyiv has been to date. The very fact that Russia might need to annex parts of
Ukraine to maintain political control betrays Moscows weakness: An invasion is a tool of
the desperate, to be used only when safer, more cost-effective tools are no longer
available.
Indeed, Putin has previously used more tempered strategies cutting off gas exports, its
U.N. Security Council veto, and arms sales to modestly advance Russian interests. The
military action in Ukraine is a tacit acknowledgement that the Ukrainian revolution has
threatened Russias national greatness project too fundamentally for these risky
options to be worth trying. Again, thats an indication of Putins fundamental fragility,
not Cold War cunning.
Russias turn to blunt military force in Ukraine is emblematic of the basic flaws behind
its push to regain its global and regional standing. The reality is that Russia is a middling
power with nuclear weapons; it can frustrate America in Syria, but it cant make progress
towards bending the world to its will using the sort of strategies it has tried to date.
Military power alone cant do the trick. In a world of free trade and highly globalized
markets, territorial conquest simply isnt a good way to make your country stronger. In
fact, its harmful. War has lost its evident appeal, political scientist John Mueller
correctly notes, because substantial agreement has risen around the twin propositions
that that prosperity and economic growth should be central national goals and that war
is a particularly counterproductive device for achieving these goals. War wont bring
Ukraine into Russias fold, let alone a broader swath of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Russias military also isnt what it once was. Russia spends a slightly higher percentage of
its GDP on its military than the United States does, yet the United States still spends
almost seven times as much in actual dollar amounts. Russia doesnt have much room to
expand its military spending, in other words, yet the size of its economy means it simply
cant come close to competing with the United States and its allies. Nor is Russia
anything like China, where rapid economic growth means that it may have a chance to
become a truly global power player.
Thats another thing Russia lacks. The United States has military bases around the
world because it cultivated political relationships with all sorts of different countries. Its
telling that Russia needs Sevastopol it doesnt have the kind of friends that give it
anywhere else to turn, plans for an economic Eurasian Union notwithstanding.
The more aggressively Putin acts, the more likely this quiet isolation is to
deepen. Eastern European nations are already eyeing Putin nervously, threatening to
increase defense spending and tighten their ties with the West to balance Russia on its
front door. The United States and European nations can leverage diplomatic and
economic tools to punish Russia. Aggressive expansionism of the sort Putin may be
trying in Ukraine not only fails to pay off geopolitically, but it ends up undermining the
economic and diplomatic foundations of 21st century national power.
The more Putin attempts to tighten his grip on Ukraine, then, the more real power slips
through his fingers. The Ukrainian situation should best be thought of as a matter of
upholding international law, protecting Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy, and
mitigating humanitarian risks not refighting the Cold War.

No impact to Ukraine crisis 5 reasons
Burke 3-3 International Relations researcher and Political Editor at Urban Times.
(Eoghan, 2014, 5 Reasons Why The Ukrainian Crisis Won't Lead To World War III,
Urban Times, http://urbantimes.co/2014/03/5-reasons-why-the-ukrainian-crisis-is-
unlikely-to-lead-to-world-war-iii/)

Despite dramatically escalating tensions between the West and Russia over the ongoing
Ukrainian crisis, here are 5 reasons why all out war is not a likely outcome.
1. The US Has Not Even Threatened To Use Its Military
John Kerry threatens sanctions against Russia
It is telling that over the past couple of days the possibility of the US deploying its army
in Ukraine has not been threatened as an option. Despite Secretary of State John Kerrys
assertion that all options are on the table, it appears that an attempted political and
economic isolation of Russia will be the favoured method of punishing Putins
indiscretions in Crimea.
In a statement to the press, a senior US official indicated that military options were not
currently being considered:
Right now, I think we are focused on political, diplomatic and economic options.
Frankly our goal is to uphold the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, not to
have a military escalation I dont think were focused right now on the notion of some
U.S. military intervention. I dont think that necessarily would be a way to de-escalate
the situation.
2. Western Governments Would have Little Success In Selling Military
Intervention
Protesters against a military strike on Syria
Both David Cameron and Barack Obama will have learnt from their failure to win
support for military strikes on Syria. Despite Bashar al-Assad crossing Obamas red
line by using chemical weapons against his own people, the UK parliament voted
against possible military strikes. The US Congress narrowly avoided voting on what
would have been an extremely divisive issue after a deal was brokered with the Russians
to pursue a diplomatic solution
It is likely that a potential military intervention in Ukraine would receive equally scant
public and political support in both countries.
3. Putin Would Not Have Invaded Had He Thought Military Retaliation Was
Likely
It appears Putin no longer fears the West
Vladamir Putin has proven time and time again to be a master strategist when it comes
to international affairs. Last years foreign policy victories over the US on Snowden and
Syria proved this to be the case. If the immediate deployment of NATO troops to protect
the Ukraine was likely, the invasion of Crimea would have been a reckless and potentially
suicidal act on Moscows part, regardless of its significant interests in the Ukraine.
The Wests inability to act against Assad in Syria will have fed into Russian confidence in
acting in such a heavy handed manner in the Ukraine. Moreover, US and European
impotence during the 2008 invasion of Georgia will have provided further assurances of
Moscows impunity in carrying out regional relations as it sees fit.
Once more, Forbes magazines most powerful man has defied the West. Putin has acted
strongly and decisively, placing the ball firmly in the court of Obama and his allies.
4. David Vs. Goliath
Ukraines newly appointed Navy chief Denis Berezovsky has defected to pro-Russia
Crimean authorities.
Without the assurance of western military intervention backing them up, Ukraines
fledgling government will be very reluctant to act alone against the Russian
forces currently occupying the Crimean Peninsula.
Despite the government calling up all army reservists and Ukrainians volunteering for
military service in their droves, the size and fire-power of the Ukrainian army is dwarfed
by that of its powerful neighbour.
Ukrainian forces dispatched to Crimea in the past few days have already begun to
surrender and in some cases switch allegiance to the pro-Russian local authorities.
5. Mutually Assured Destruction
The threat of nuclear war will make direct conflict between the US and Russia extremely
unlikely
The Cold War military doctrine which has so far ensured no two nuclear powers have
engaged in a full scale military conflict will remain a significant deterrent in the
Ukrainian case.
Despite enduring a bitter military rivalry and arms race which lasted for over 4 decades,
the US and Soviet Union never engaged in direct confrontation with each
other as each side was aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences of
nuclear war.
With both the US and Russia holding considerable military nuclear capabilities, the
possibility of direct military confrontation is very low.
Food War
No shortages food is abundant
Poole, 6 Institute for Food and Development Policy (Holly Kavana, 12 Myths About
Hunger, http://www.foodfirst.org/12myths)

Myth 1: Not Enough Food to Go Around Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best
describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to
provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many
other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats,
and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day
worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and
vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most
people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available
food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right
now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.

No food shortages
Goklany 9Worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private
sector for over 35 years. Worked with IPCC before its inception as an author, delegate
and reviewer. Negotiated UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Managed the
emissions trading program for the EPA. Julian Simon Fellow at the Property and
Environment Research Center, visiting fellow at AEI, winner of the Julian Simon Prize
and Award. PhD, MS, electrical engineering, MSU. B.Tech in electrical engineering,
Indian Institute of Tech. (Indur, Have increases in population, affluence and technology
worsened human and environmental well-being? 2009,
http://www.ejsd.org/docs/HAVE_INCREASES_IN_POPULATION_AFFLUENCE_AN
D_TECHNOLOGY_WORSENED_HUMAN_AND_ENVIRONMENTAL_WELL-
BEING.pdf, AMiles)
Although global population is no longer growing exponentially, it has quadrupled
since 1900. Concurrently, affluence (or GDP per capita) has sextupled, global
economic product (a measure of aggregate consumption) has increased 23-fold and
carbon dioxide has increased over 15-fold (Maddison 2003; GGDC 2008; World Bank
2008a; Marland et al. 2007).4 But contrary to Neo- Malthusian fears, average human
well-being, measured by any objective indicator, has never been higher. Food
supplies, Malthus original concern, are up worldwide. Global food supplies per capita
increased from 2,254 Cals/day in 1961 to 2,810 in 2003 (FAOSTAT 2008). This
helped reduce hunger and malnutrition worldwide. The proportion of the population
in the developing world, suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17
percent between 196971 and 20012003 despite an 87 percent population increase
(Goklany 2007a; FAO 2006).

No impact
No impact to food wars
Bhatiya, 9/12/13 - Policy Associate at The Century Foundation, where he works on
issues related to U.S. foreign policy, with a specific focus on South Asia and climate
change. Previously, he was a Research Fellow for the Streit Council.He has earned
History degrees from The George Washington University (M.A.) and Marist College
(B.A.) (Neil, Placing Food Security in the Discussion on Armed Conflict, The Century
Foundation, http://tcf.org/work/additional-focus/detail/placing-food-security-in-the-
discussion-on-armed-conflict)//IS
Recent events have forced new attention to the connection between food security and
armed conflict. Around 2008, world food prices rose rapidly, causing demonstrations in
many countries around the world. The reduction of food subsidies in several Arab
countries, for example, has been identified as a contributing factor to the unrest of the
Arab Spring. Rapid climate change has focused attention on the potential disruptions
caused by rising temperatures and erratic weather on agricultural systems. Discussions
of Syria have included space for asking how climate changein this case, extreme
droughtmay have contributed to the tensions that led to the outbreak of their civil war.
As Harvesting Peace is quick to point out, though, the analytic lens is more complex than
saying that food insecurity directly causes conflict. Food securitydefined by availability
(sufficient supply), access (to the market), utilization (meeting nutritional needs), and
stability (regularity of access) of foodcan be impacted by armed conflict, a statement
for which the evidence is pretty clear. But the evidence that food insecurity also
contributes to conflict is less direct. Rather, the literature suggests that it contributes to
instability in the same way other economic and social factors would contribute to
conflict. For the most part, however, the specifics of this relationship have been
understudied. New research highlighted in Harvesting Peace shows that in lower-income
countries food price shocks have an outsized impact on stability, because low-income
households devote a much larger share of their income to purchasing food. Also, the
competency of governments is a factor that interacts directly with food insecurity. A
government that is flexible enough to respond immediately to a sudden food crisis, by
market interventions to slow inflation or increase supply, is much less likely to see
sustained domestic unrest (especially if those measures are targeted at urban consumers,
who can organize more easily than their rural counterparts). Studies also show that
poverty-based food insecurity can provide an incentive structure for groups to support or
participate in armed conflict, if there is a belief that such participation could garner
access or control over resources.

Food wars dont happen
Salehyan 08/13/07 Professor of Political Science University of North Texas (Idean,
The New Myth About Climate Change, Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922)//IS
First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that
resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several
studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to
conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and
insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala
University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in
the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100
armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and
Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward
trend.
Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of
environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the
U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been
experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has
yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds
of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe
shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most
extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars.
Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural
disasters.

Alt Causes
Alt cause water scarcity
Martelle, 11/3/13 Veteran journalist Scott Martelle has written books on the Ludlow
Massacre and the Red Scare clampdown on civil liberties, directly quoting the WRI
(Scott, Climate Change to Cut Global Food Production, Increase Water Demand,
TruthDig,
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/climate_change_to_cut_global_food_
production_increase_water_demand)//IS
The second report, by the nonprofit World Resources Institute, warns that more than a
quarter of the planets food production comes from highly water-stressed areas,
according to Salons coverage of the study. That includes half of irrigated cropland,
which itself is responsible for 40 percent of the global food supply, Salon says, defining
water stress as a region in which 40 percent or more of the renewable water supply is
used up each year. The WRI sees significant global stresses, which you can assess here
using the organizations interactive Web tool. The tension between crop production and
available water supply is already great, as agriculture currently accounts for more than
70 percent of all human water withdrawal. But the real problem is that this tension is
poised to intensify. The 2030 Water Resources Group forecasts that under business-as-
usual conditions, water demand will rise 50 percent by 2030. Water supplies, however,
will notand physically cannotgrow in parallel. Agriculture will drive nearly half of
that additional demand, because global calorie production needs to increase 69 percent
to feed 9.6 billion people by 2050. The food-water tension wont just be felt by
agriculture, either. Agricultures growing thirst will squeeze water availability for
municipal use, energy production, and manufacturing. With increasing demand in all
sectors, some regions of the world, such as northern China, are already scrambling to
find enough water to run their economies.

Alt cause migrating pests
Roberts, 9/2/13 graduated from the University of Southampton, Carbon Brief
Assistant Researcher/Writer, former intern at the Environmental Justice Foundation,
former data analyst at the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (Freya, Pests
moving polewards threaten global food security, The Carbon Brief,
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/09/pests-moving-polewards-increase-the-risk-
to-global-food-production-(1)/)//IS
Fungi, insects and bacteria look set to pose an increasing threat to global food
production in years to come, new research reveals. As temperatures rise, crop-destroying
pests and diseases are spreading from the tropics toward the poles at a rate of nearly
three kilometres per year. The rising problem of pests in some of the world's most
productive farmland presents a real threat to global food security, as climate change
makes higher latitudes like the US and Europe more hospitable to pests that wouldn't
otherwise survive. How bad is the pest problem? For farmers worldwide, pests are
already a serious problem. They are responsible for the loss of between 10 and 16 per
cent of all crops during production, and result in further losses after harvest i.e. due to
infestations in food stores. From microscopic fungi, bacteria and viruses to insects and
other animals, there are numerous different species which affect everyday staples like
cereals, potatoes, fruit and vegetables. These pests have evolved to breed quickly and
disperse easily, allowing them to move readily to find new hosts.

Multiple alternate causes to food prices
Teslik 08 Assistant Editor at Council on Foreign Relations (Lee Hudson, Food
Prices, 6/30/2008, http://www.cfr.org/publication/16662/food_prices.html)
Before considering factors like supply and demand within food markets, it is important
to understand the umbrella factors influencing costs of production and, even more
broadly, the currencies with which and economies within which food is traded. Energy
Prices. Rising energy prices have direct causal implications for the food market. Fuel is
used in several aspects of the agricultural production process, including fertilization,
processing, and transportation. The percentage of total agricultural input expenditures
directed toward energy costs has risen significantly in recent years. A briefing from the
U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that the U.S. agricultural industrys total
expenditures on fuel and oil are forecast to rise 12.6 percent in 2008, following a rise of
11.5 percent in 2007. These costs are typically passed along to customers and are
reflected in global spot prices (i.e. the current price a commodity trades for at market).
The input costs of electricity have also risen, furthering the burden. Though it isnt itself
an energy product, fertilizer is an energy-intensive expense, particularly when
substantial transport costs are borne by local farmersso that expense, too, is reflected
in the final price of foodstuffs. (Beyond direct causation, energy prices are also correlated
to food prices, in the sense that many of the same factors pushing up energy prices
population trends, for instance, or market speculationalso affect food prices.)
Currencies/Inflation. When food is traded internationallyparticularly on commodities
exchanges or futures marketsit is often denominated in U.S. dollars. In recent years,
the valuation of the dollar has fallen with respect to many other major world currencies.
This means that even if food prices stayed steady with respect to a basket of currencies,
their price in dollars would have risen. Of course, food prices have not stayed steady
they have risen across the boardbut if you examine international food prices in dollar
terms, it is worth noting that the decline of the dollar accentuates any apparent price
increase. Demand Demand for most kinds of food has risen in the past decade. This
trend can be attributed to several factors: Population trends. The worlds population has
grown a little more than 12 percent in the past decade. Virtually nobody argues that this
trend alone accounts for rising food pricesagricultural production has, in many cases,
become more efficient, offsetting the needs of a larger populationand some analysts
say population growth hasnt had any impact whatsoever on food prices. The
shortcomings of a Malthusian food-price argument are most obvious in the very recent
past. Richard Posner, a professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago,
argues this point on his blog. He notes that in 2007 the food price index used by the FAO
rose 40 percent, as compared to 9 percent in 2006clearly a much faster rate than
global population growth for that year, which measured a little over 1 percent.
Nonetheless, experts say population trends, distinct from sheer growth rates, have had a
major impact on food prices. For instance, the past decade has seen the rapid growth of a
global middle class. This, Posner says, has led to changing tastes, and increasing demand
for food that is less efficient to produce. Specifically, he cites an increased demand for
meats. Livestock require farmland for grazing (land that could be used to grow other
food), and also compete directly with humans for food resources like maize. The
production of one serving of meat, economists say, is vastly less efficient than the
production of one serving of corn or rice. Biofuels. Experts say government policies that
provide incentives for farmers to use crops to produce energy, rather than food, have
exacerbated food shortages. Specifically, many economists fault U.S. policies diverting
maize crops to the production of ethanol and other biofuels. The effects of ramped-up
U.S. ethanol productionwhich President Bush called for as part of an initiative to make
the United States energy independentwas highlighted in a 2007 Foreign Affairs
article by C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer. Runge and Senauer write that the push
to increase ethanol production has spawned ethanol subsidies in many countries, not
just the United States. Brazil, they note, produced 45.2 percent of the worlds ethanol in
2005 (from sugar cane), and the United States 44.5 percent (from corn). Europe also
produces biodiesel, mostly from oilseeds. In all cases, the result is the diversion of food
products from global food markets, accentuating demand, pinching supply, and pushing
up prices. Joachim von Braun, the director general of IFPRI, writes in an April 2008
briefing (PDF) that 30 percent of all maize produced in the United States (by far the
largest maize producer in the world) will be diverted to biofuel production in 2008. This
raises prices not only for people buying maize directly, but also for those buying maize
products (cornflakes) or meat from livestock that feed on maize (cattle). Speculation.
Many analysts point to speculative trading practices as a factor influencing rising food
prices. In May 2008 testimony (PDF) before the U.S. Senates Committee on Homeland
Security, Michael W. Masters, the managing partner of the hedge fund Masters Capital
Management, explained the dynamic. Masters says institutional investors like hedge
funds and pension funds started pouring money into commodities futures markets in the
early 2000s, pushing up futures contracts and, in turn, spot prices. Spot traders often
use futures markets as a benchmark for what price they are willing to pay, so even if
futures contracts are inflated by an external factor like a flood of interest from pension
funds, this still tends to result in a bump for spot prices. Still, much debate remains
about the extent to which speculation in futures markets in fact pushes up food prices.
In general we [economists] think futures markets are a good reflection of whats likely
to happen in the real future, says IFPRIs Orden. Orden acknowledges that more capital
has flowed into agricultural commodities markets in recent years, but says that he tends
to think these markets are pretty efficient and that you shouldnt look for a scapegoat in
speculators. Supply Even as demand for agricultural products has risen, several factors
have pinched global supply. These include: Development/urbanization. During the past
half decade, global economic growth has featured expansion throughout emerging
markets, even as developed economies in the United States, Europe, and Japan have
cooled. The economies of China, India, Russia, numerous countries in Southeast Asia,
Latin America, and Eastern Europe, and a handful of achievers in the Middle East and
Africa have experienced strong economic growth rates. This is particularly true in Asian
cities, where industrial and service sector development has clustered. The result has
often been a boost for per capita earnings but a drag on domestic agriculture, as
discussed in this backgrounder on African agriculture. Farmland has in many cases been
repurposed for urban or industrial development projects. Governments have not,
typically, been as eager to invest in modernizing farm equipment or irrigation techniques
as they have been to sink money into urban development. All this has put an increased
burden on developing-world farmers, precisely as they dwindle in number and supply
capacity. Production capacity in other parts of the world has increased by leaps and
bounds as efficiency has increased, and, as previously noted, total global production
exceeds global demand. But urbanization opens markets up to other factors
transportation costs and risks, for instance, which are particularly high in less accessible
parts of the developing worldand prevent the smooth functioning of trade, even where
there are willing buyers and sellers. Weather. Some of the factors leading to recent price
increases have been weather-related factors that tightened supply in specific markets. In
2008, for instance, two major weather events worked in concert to squeeze Asian rice
productionCyclone Nargis, which led to massive flooding and the destruction of rice
harvests in Myanmar; and a major drought in parts of Australia. Estimates indicate
Myanmars flooding instantly destroyed a substantial portion of Myanmars harvest,
limiting the countrys ability to export rice. Meanwhile, Australias drought wiped out 98
percent of the countrys rice harvest in 2008, forcing Canberra to turn to imports and
further straining Asias rice market. Trade policy. Agricultural trade barriers have long
been faulted for gumming up trade negotiations, including the Doha round of World
Trade Organization talks. But in the midst of the recent food pinch, a different kind of
trade barrier has emerged as a problemexport bans. As discussed before (in the
instance of the Philippines meeting difficulty in its efforts to import rice), several
exporters have tightened the reins in light of domestic supply concerns. According to the
UNs World Food Program, over forty countries have imposed some form of export ban
in an effort to increase domestic food security. India, for instance, imposed bans on
exporting some forms of rice and oil in June 2008a move that took food off the market,
led to stockpiling, and brought a spike in prices. China, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia,
among other countries, have introduced similar bans. The distorting effects of these
barriers are particularly troubling in the developing world, where a much larger
percentage of average household income is spent on food. The African Development
Bank warned in May 2008 that similar moves among African countries could rapidly
exacerbate food concerns on the African continent. A group of West African countries,
meanwhile, sought to mitigate the negative effects of export bans by exempting one
another. Food aid policy and other policies. Experts say flaws in food aid policies have
limited its effectiveness and in some cases exacerbated price pressures on food. CFR
Senior Fellow Laurie Garrett discusses some of these factors in a recent working paper.
Garrett cites illogical aid policies such as grants for irrigation and mechanization of crop
production that the Asian Development Bank plans to give to Bangladesh, a densely
populated country without a spare millimeter of arable land. Garrett also criticizes food
aid policies (U.S. aid policies are one example) that mandate food aid to be doled out in
the form of crops grown by U.S. farmers, rather than cash. The rub, she says, is that food
grown in the United States is far more expensive, both to produce and to transport, than
food grown in recipient countries. Such a policy guarantees that the dollar value of
donations goes much less far than it would if aid were directed to funds that could be
spent in local markets. Other experts note additional policies that limit supply. In a
recent interview with CFR.org, Paul Collier, an economics professor at Oxford
University, cites European bans on genetically modified crops as a prime example.

Food security improving now
Financial Times, 5/28 (Boost for global food security, 5/28/2014,
http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2014/05/boost-for-global-food-security/, JMP)

Some good news for a change. Food security - the availability and affordability of food
has got better, according to research published on Wednesday. The 66-page report from
the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by DuPont, the chemicals company, found
that despite last years freak weather patterns - drought in California, heatwaves in
Australia and floods in Russia food security improved in almost three-
quarters of the worlds countries. Food security is a growing concern, given the
expectation that the worlds population is likely to peak at 10bn mid-century, meaning an
extra 3bn mouths to feed. The biggest improvements were in countries with the worst
food security problems, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where only two South Africa and
Botswana have a global food security index of more than 50 per cent. This has led to a
narrowing of the gap with the most food-secure countries headed by the US where
improvements were slower. Lower wheat and rice prices were behind the improvement,
as was a better world economy. The EIU report backs up the Food and Agriculture
Organisations recent research showing a fall in the number of hungry people from 868m
in 2010-12 to 842m still 12 per cent of the global population.


No impact wars wont escalate
Allouche 11 fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Brighton, UK (Jeremy,
"The sustainability and resilience of global water and food systems: Political analysis of
the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political systems and global trade"
Food Policy, Volume 36, Supplement 1)

This article has provided an overview of the current and future challenges in terms of
global food and water systems. The major focus of the argument has been on how
resource scarcity is a contested and subjective concept which cannot fully explain
conflict, political instability or food insecurity. The politics of inequality and allocation
are much more important variables in explaining water and food insecurity. This is
particularly true for conflicts. Although resource scarcity has been linked to international
wars, the current data shows that most conflict over water and food are much more
local. But there again, although resource scarcity can be linked to malnutrition, hunger
and water insecurity, in the majority of cases, water and food insecurity are rarely about
competition over resources but rather reflect the politics of allocation and inequality. In
this respect, war and conflicts aggravate these insecurities not just on the short term but
also on the long term. At the global level, food security has considerably improved and
provides the means to address these insecurities. Trade can certainly be seen as a way to
address access for countries that are under severe stress in terms of food and water and
provides logical grounds for questioning the various water and food wars scenarios.
Although global trade and technological innovation are key drivers in providing stable
and resilient global systems, the most destabilizing global water-related threat is
increasing food prices and hunger. Overall, decision-makers should show greater
concern for the human beings who make their living in agriculture, so that those at risk
of livelihood and food-security failures, especially under anticipated scenarios of climate
change, will be less deprived. Current debates linked to global food security and climate
fail to address the political dimension of resource scarcity which is primarily linked to
the politics of inequality, gender and power.


No solvency
The aff isnt nearly enough to solve transforming the economy is key
Vidal, 10/15/12 the Guardians environment editor. He joined the paper in 1995 after
working for Agence France Presse, North Wales Newspapers and the Cumberland News.
He is the author of McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial (1998) and has contributed chapters
to books on topics such as the Gulf war, new Europe and development.(John, Food
Scarcity: The Timebomb Setting Nation Against Nation, The Guardian,
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/food-scarcity-the-timebomb-setting-nation-against-
nation)//IS
Brown says: An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. The
world has lost its safety cushions and is living from year to year. This is the new politics
of food scarcity. We are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for
itself. What in the past would have been a relatively simple question of developing
better seeds, or opening up new land to grow more food, cannot work now because the
challenge of growing food without destroying the environment is deepening. Brown
adds: New trends such as falling water tables, plateauing grain yields and rising
temperatures join soil erosion and climate change to make it difficult, if not impossible,
to expand production fast enough. Four pressing needs must be addressed together, he
says. Instead of better seeds, tractors or pumps to raise water, he claims, feeding the
world now depends on new population, energy, and water policies. Water scarcity,
especially, concerns him. We live in a world where more than half the people live in
countries with food bubbles based on farmers over-pumping and draining aquifers. The
question is not whether these bubbles will burst, but when. The bursting of several
national food bubbles as aquifers are depleted could create unmanageable food
shortages. If world population growth does not slow dramatically, the number of people
trapped in hydrological poverty and hunger will only grow. The madness of the food
system since 1950 astonishes him. Last year, the US harvested nearly 400 million tons of
grain, of which one third went to ethanol distilleries to fuel vehicles. Meanwhile, more
than 130 million people in China alone, he estimates, live in areas where the
underground water resources are being depleted at record rates. Why cant politicians
understand that every 1C above the optimum in the growing season equates to roughly a
10 percent decline in grain yields? he asks. Yet if the world fails to address the climate
issue, the earths temperature this century could easily rise by 6C, devastating food
supplies. The ever greater number of weather-related crises suggests strongly that
climate change is beginning to bite and that the heatwaves, droughts and excessive
rainfall around the world in the last few years have not been a blip, but a new reality We
have ignored the earths environmental stop signs. Faced with falling water tables, not a
single country has mobilised to reduce water use. Unless we can wake up to the risks we
are taking, we will join earlier civilizations that failed to reverse the environmental
trends that undermined their food economies. He says we know the answers. They
include saving water, eating less meat, stopping soil erosion, controlling populations and
changing the energy economy. But they must be addressed together We have to
mobilise quickly. Time is the scarcest resource. Success depends on moving at wartime
speed. It means transforming the world industrial economy, stabilising populations and
rebuilding grain stocks.

No impact
No impact to food shortages civilization can survive
Beach, 6/6/14 Toronto-based freelance writer and political activist (Justin, Stop
Worrying, Humans Aren't Going Extinct Any Time Soon, The Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-beach/human-extinction_b_5457038.html)//IS
In 2014 there are more nuclear weapons than ever, but we don't really talk about them
very much. Instead we talk, primarily about the possibility of human extinction due to
climate change, food shortages, ocean acidification or, occasionally, super-volcanos or
comet collisions. All of these things are possible, and all of them are very unlikely to
cause the extinction of humanity. Given our current population, if something killed
99.99 per cent of the human population, 700,000 people would survive and those people
would have the knowledge necessary to make drinking water safe, create sanitation
systems, advanced communication systems, make medicines, transportation systems
and generate electricity. During the 20th century, we experienced the dust bowl and the
great depression, two world wars, worldwide pandemics, numerous genocides and still
managed to triple our population and double life expectancy in 100 years. We are a
resilient species. It is likely that, by the end of this century, we'll inhabit a second planet
and vastly increase our life expectancy rather than face extinction.

No risk of resource wars---historical evidence all concludes neg---
cooperation is way more likely and solves
Jeremy Allouche 11 is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development
Studies at the University of Sussex. "The sustainability and resilience of global water and
food systems: Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity,
political systems and global trade" Food PolicyVolume 36, Supplement 1, January 2011,
Pages S3-S8 Accessed via: Science Direct Sciverse
Water/food resources, war and conflict The question of resource scarcity has led to
many debates on whether scarcity (whether of food or water) will lead to conflict and
war. The underlining reasoning behind most of these discourses over food and water
wars comes from the Malthusian belief that there is an imbalance between the
economic availability of natural resources and population growth since while food
production grows linearly, population increases exponentially. Following this
reasoning, neo-Malthusians claim that finite natural resources place a strict limit on
the growth of human population and aggregate consumption; if these limits are
exceeded, social breakdown, conflict and wars result. Nonetheless, it seems that
most empirical studies do not support any of these neo-Malthusian
arguments. Technological change and greater inputs of capital have
dramatically increased labour productivity in agriculture. More generally,
the neo-Malthusian view has suffered because during the last two centuries
humankind has breached many resource barriers that seemed
unchallengeable. Lessons from history: alarmist scenarios, resource wars and
international relations In a so-called age of uncertainty, a number of alarmist
scenarios have linked the increasing use of water resources and food insecurity with
wars. The idea of water wars (perhaps more than food wars) is a dominant discourse
in the media (see for example Smith, 2009), NGOs (International Alert, 2007) and
within international organizations (UNEP, 2007). In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon declared that water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a
potent fuel for wars and conflict (Lewis, 2007). Of course, this type of discourse has
an instrumental purpose; security and conflict are here used for raising
water/food as key policy priorities at the international level. In the Middle East,
presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers have also used this bellicose
rhetoric. Boutrous Boutros-Gali said; the next war in the Middle East will be over
water, not politics (Boutros Boutros-Gali in Butts, 1997, p. 65). The question is not
whether the sharing of transboundary water sparks political tension and alarmist
declaration, but rather to what extent water has been a principal factor in
international conflicts. The evidence seems quite weak. Whether by president
Sadat in Egypt or King Hussein in Jordan, none of these declarations have been
followed up by military action. The governance of transboundary water has
gained increased attention these last decades. This has a direct impact on the global
food system as water allocation agreements determine the amount of water that can
used for irrigated agriculture. The likelihood of conflicts over water is an important
parameter to consider in assessing the stability, sustainability and resilience of global
food systems. None of the various and extensive databases on the causes of
war show water as a casus belli. Using the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set
and supplementary data from the University of Alabama on water conflicts, Hewitt,
Wolf and Hammer found only seven disputes where water seems to have been at least
a partial cause for conflict (Wolf, 1998, p. 251). In fact, about 80% of the incidents
relating to water were limited purely to governmental rhetoric intended for the
electorate (Otchet, 2001, p. 18). As shown in The Basins At Risk (BAR) water event
database, more than two-thirds of over 1800 water-related events fall on
the cooperative scale (Yoffe et al., 2003). Indeed, if one takes into account a
much longer period, the following figures clearly demonstrate this argument.
According to studies by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
organized political bodies signed between the year 805 and 1984 more than 3600
water-related treaties, and approximately 300 treaties dealing with water
management or allocations in international basins have been negotiated since 1945
([FAO, 1978] and [FAO, 1984]). The fear around water wars have been driven by a
Malthusian outlook which equates scarcity with violence, conflict and war. There is
however no direct correlation between water scarcity and transboundary
conflict. Most specialists now tend to agree that the major issue is not scarcity per se
but rather the allocation of water resources between the different riparian states (see
for example [Allouche, 2005], [Allouche, 2007] and [Rouyer, 2000]). Water rich
countries have been involved in a number of disputes with other relatively water rich
countries (see for example India/Pakistan or Brazil/Argentina). The perception of
each states estimated water needs really constitutes the core issue in transboundary
water relations. Indeed, whether this scarcity exists or not in reality, perceptions of
the amount of available water shapes peoples attitude towards the environment
(Ohlsson, 1999). In fact, some water experts have argued that scarcity drives the
process of co-operation among riparians ([Dinar and Dinar, 2005] and [Brochmann
and Gleditsch, 2006]). In terms of international relations, the threat of water wars
due to increasing scarcity does not make much sense in the light of the recent
historical record. Overall, the water war rationale expects conflict to occur over
water, and appears to suggest that violence is a viable means of securing national
water supplies, an argument which is highly contestable. The debates over the likely
impacts of climate change have again popularised the idea of water wars. The
argument runs that climate change will precipitate worsening ecological conditions
contributing to resource scarcities, social breakdown, institutional failure, mass
migrations and in turn cause greater political instability and conflict ([Brauch, 2002]
and [Pervis and Busby, 2004]). In a report for the US Department of Defense,
Schwartz and Randall (2003) speculate about the consequences of a worst-case
climate change scenario arguing that water shortages will lead to aggressive wars
(Schwartz and Randall, 2003, p. 15). Despite growing concern that climate change will
lead to instability and violent conflict, the evidence base to substantiate the
connections is thin ([Barnett and Adger, 2007] and [Kevane and Gray, 2008]).

No risk of war from food shortages
Barnett 2k
(Jon, Australian Research Council Fellow in the School of Social and
Environmental Enquiry at the University of Melbourne, Review of
International Studies 26, April)
The ways in which population growth leads to environmental degradation are reasonably
well known. However, the particular ways in which this leads to conflict are
difficult to prove. In the absence of proof there is a negative style of argumentation,
and there are blanket assertions and abrogations; for example: the relationship is rarely
causative in a direct fashion, but we may surmise that conflict would not arise so
readily, nor would it prove so acute, if the associated factor of population growth were
occurring at a more manageable rate.38 It is possible though, that rather than inducing
warfare, overpopulation and famine reduce the capacity of a people to wage
war. Indeed, it is less the case that famines in Africa in recent decades have produced
first rate breeding grounds for conflict; the more important, pressing, and avoidable
product is widespread malnutrition and large loss of life.

Generic Great Power War

Ideology

War is obsolete - trends show great powers cut down military spending
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
Since the end of the Second World War, direct conflict among the great powers has been
seemingly non-existent, marking the longest absence of major war since the days of the
Roman Empire.8 Given the scale and frequency of major war in previous centuries, this
absence may be the single most important discontinuity that the history of warfare has
ever seen.9 Though not without tension, great power relations are now generally
characterized by a sense of peace, with states carrying out aggressions through
diplomatic or economic, rather than military, means. Indeed, as the threat of major war
has declined, most great powers have chosen to invest fewer resources in developing a
strong military, undergoing a notable downsizing in both the size of their armed forces
and the quantity of weapons at their disposal since 1945.10 While most great powers had
possessed forces numbering several million men throughout much of the twentieth
century, as of the late 1990s, the only states maintaining forces exceeding a million and a
half were India and China, and at that time, China had announced it would be cutting
half a million of its troops.11 In addition to directly cutting their forces, most states have
also eliminated conscription, a once useful system that provided a great deal of cannon
fodder for the institution of major war.12 Air forces, naval forces, and nuclear weapons
stores have also witnessed similar reductions worldwide.13 Indicative of the current
sense of great power peace, these reductions would also seem to imply that none of the
great powers anticipates a major war to break out any time in the near future, supporting
the idea that major war is becoming obsolete.

War is unthinkable rationality and capitalist peace theory are too
integrated
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
member of MIT's program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies
(Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security, Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ
The forty-five years that have now passed since the end of World War II without
interstate war in Europe is the longest such period in its post-medieval history.' Many
scholars and commentators have attributed the present "long peace" among
the major powers to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. When President
Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that a nuclear war
cannot be won and must not be fought, they were only reiterating what has become an
almost universally accepted piety in current public and scholarly discussion of
international relations.2 John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday3 advances a much
stronger thesis: major war was already becoming obsolete by the time of the First World
War; World War I1 repeated and reinforced that lesson. The development of nuclear
weapons was accordingly irrelevant to the process; it was, so to speak, the flourish under
the finis at the end of the story. Muellers central argument is that war-among western,
modernized nation-has become subrationally unthinkable. An idea becomes
impossible not when it becomes reprehensible or has been renounced, but when it fails
to percolate into ones consciousness as a conceivable option. Thus, two somewhat
paradoxical conclusions about the avoidance of war can be drawn. On the one hand,
peace is likely to be firm when wars repulsiveness and futility are fully
evident-as when its horrors are dramatically and inevitably catastrophic. On
the other hand, peace is most secure when it gravitates away from conscious
rationality to become a subrational, unexamined mental habit. At first, war
becomes rationally unthinkable- rejected because its calculated to be ineffective and/or
undesirable. Then it becomes subrationally unthinkable-rejected not because its a bad
idea but because it remains subconscious and never comes off as a coherent possibility.
Peace in other words, can prove to be habit forming, addictive. (p. 240.) The
obsolescence of war, argues Mueller, is thus the result of a change in mental habits
through socio-cultural evolution, not a change in the terms of a calculation:
unthinkable, not unprofitable. When the whole postwar European security system is
rapidly changing, Muellers claims merit careful consideration. The burden of this essay
is that Mueller is right in his result, but that his argument fails to sustain his conclusion.
Mueller hardly explains the cultural change that has made wars unthinkable, and fails to
explore the interconnections among cultural, political, and economic changes in the
evaluation of interstate war. It is because wars of the kind under consideration have
become unprofitable, both economically and politically, that they have become
unthinkable. Finally, he is too cavalier in his dismissal of the significance of nuclear
weapons.

Ideological repulsion not only prevents but transforms war modern
conflict aims to reduce casualties and prevent large scale conflict
Miller 12 Students Editor at E-International and Relations Research Assistant at Pacific
Resolutions (Sarah, The Transformation of War, E-International Relations Students,
8/16/12, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/16/the-transformation-of-war/)//BZ
Although war may create a strong sense of emotional and spiritual satisfaction, it also
creates repulsion in those who fight and in wider society. The euphoria at the beginning
of WWI turned into repulsion with the war and war in general; the nationalism and
intolerance of dissent in the US in the early days of the 2003 Iraq War gave way to
widespread disgust with the war and questioning of American motives. The myth of war
sooner or later gives way to the sensory reality of war, and when it does, the public no
longer celebrates but rather condemns the violence (Hedges, 2002). Furthermore, in the
past century there does seem to have been a transformation in how people think of war.
War in general is no longer glorified as an honourable practice, but is instead
criminalized, with those who initiate it seen as rogue actors (Mandelbaum, 1998). Ray
attributes this change to modern ideas about the value of the individual human life,
which are expressed not only in changing attitudes toward war, but also in changes
toward capital punishment and human sacrifice (Ray, 1989), and perhaps the rise of the
global human rights regime. A parallel could be made with slavery: a shift in attitudes
about the morality of slavery was instrumental in its demise as an accepted practice
(Ray, 1989), and while slavery still exists today, it is a criminal enterprise that is rejected
by public opinion and by law. There is an important difference between institutionalized
legal slavery and criminalized slavery, and similarly there is a difference between these
two types of war. The outcome of this modern moral shift toward war, given the fact that
war continues to exert an emotional pull on people and societies, is arguably neither the
disappearance of war, nor the continuation of business as usual, but rather the
transformation of war. War, a protean activity (Keegan, 1998), has transformed in order
to remain acceptable to modern attitudes. In response to the almost universal repulsion
with long and bloody wars, the destructiveness of war has been limited through
technologies and tactics (Coker, 2008). So, for example, there has been increasing
development and use of precision weaponry to minimize civilian casualties, as well as
unmanned technology such as drones to lessen, and one day perhaps eliminate,
military casualties on our own side. Warfare has become increasingly constrained by
laws prohibiting the use of certain weapons. Similarly, war is justified through rhetoric of
self-defence or humanitarianism, not in terms of the national interest or honour and
glory for the nation. The requirement, by domestic opinion and international law, that
wars be just in their means and in the reasons for waging them, is a serious constraint
on the ability and willingness of states to go to war for classical national interests.
World wars ingrained values of negotiation and futility in war nuclear
weapons dont make a difference
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
member of MIT's program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies
(Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security, Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ
After a brief discussion of the century-long peace between the United States and Canada,
and an even briefer reference to the rise of the liberal state and the absence of war among
liberal democracies, Mueller directly addresses his main theme, the changing social
evaluation of war.4 Before World War I, he argues, only a small minority spoke against
war. Quakers opposed war as immoral, as they did slavery, religious intolerance, and
many other then-widespread and socially-approved practices embodying mans
inhumanity to man. Non-religious humanists shared these views. So did those who saw
war as inimical to commerce and economically ruinous, from Montesquieu, Kant,
Buckle, and Adam Smith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Norman Angel1
in the twentieth. The majority view, however (or at least the majority of those who
recorded their views), approved of war. War was an admirable stage for the display of
heroism and virility for the individual and glory for the nation at one end of the spectrum
of ideas, and a psychologically inevitable product of aggressiveness rooted in human
nature and a necessary element of human progress in social Darwinian terms at the
other. The First World War changed these ideas. The magnitude of the slaughter, the
costs to both victors and vanquished, the horribly inhuman and degrading circumstances
of combat itself led to a bone-deep revulsion, a colossal confirmation [of] the
repulsiveness, immorality and futility of war.5 According to Mueller, there were three
possible lessons to be drawn from the experience of World War I: collective security had
somehow to be substituted for individual self-help; military preparations, including
newer and more formidable weapons, had to be maintained at a level that would deter
war; conflicts had to be negotiated out rather than fought out. Most of the
world drew the third lesson. Unfortunately, Mussolini, Hitler, and the leaders of Japan
were socially and culturally outsiders who had not shared the lessons of the First World
War. They continued to believe in both the nobility and necessity of war. Mussolini was a
foolish romantic pushing an unwilling Italian people into military adventures. The
Japanese leadership was an ideological remnant of pre-World War I times, with a
romantic view of war and a belief in the positive political and social role of the military in
their own great task of modernization. Hitler, with his racist ideology, resentment
against Versailles and quest for Lebensraum, was an entrepreneurial genius of both
politics and war. None of them wanted genuinely to negotiate conflicts: the attempts of
the other European states to do so, and the United States to avoid them- in short,
"appeasement"-led to the Second World War. For Mueller, Hitler's leadership in
Germany was a necessary condition for the outbreak of war; he is silent on whether it
was also sufficient. The Second World War repeated and reinforced the lessons of the
first and this time they were better learned. Among the developed nations there were
now no dropouts who had failed to attend class. The atomic bomb played no significant
part in these lessons. The war taught that U.S. productive power was itself a great
deterrent; Detroit was as important as the atom bomb (pp. 82-84). Further, the actual
use of the bomb against Japan was significant only because half of its leadership was
already prepared to surrender (pp. 87-88). Finally, the absence of civil war against the
occupying Nazis and their puppet governments (beyond the relatively small scale
guerrilla resistance in occupied Europe) showed that the population had lost its stomach
for war (pp. 91-92). Roughly half of Mueller's book, chapters 5-9, depicts the major
events of the period of the long peace since World War 11. Mueller sees the success of
containment as reflecting the satisfaction of the victors with and acceptance by the losers
of the postwar situation; nuclear weapons are essentially irrelevant. The Korean War was
a stabilizing event; it demonstrated the inutility of limited war. Khrushchev's policy of
bluster and crisis-creation similarly failed, as did his efforts at seduction of the non-
communist world by the examples of Soviet success in competitive economic growth-"we
will bury you"-and the space race. The failure of U.S. intervention in Vietnam's civil war
was followed by China's abandonment of the Cold War, and in turn by Soviet recognition
of its "overreach" in the Third World and the demise of the cold war.

Public discontent makes war unlikely even in non-democracies
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
member of MIT's program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies
(Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security, Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ
So far, the discussion of how the coming of industrialization has changed the calculus of
war has focused on its economic elements. But the political calculus is at least as
important, if not more so. It is presidents, prime ministers, and party secretaries who
play central roles in making decisions about war and peace, not finance ministers,
budget directors, and central bankers. Here, too, the last century-and-a-half has brought
a profound transformation. Governments have become popular and populist even when
not democratic; the welfare of the general population, conceived in a broad sense, is their
chief business, and it is to achieving this that they bend their efforts. Of course, this is
true u fortiori in democratic societies, in which the question, are you better off now than
you were however many years ago? is always a useful electoral cry for one or another of
the political corn petit or^.^^ But even authoritarian and repressive governments in
modern societies need the consent, however tacit and grudging, of the mass of the
governed. Economic well-being and social peace are the chief elements on which this
consent rests. Making war can rarely contribute positively to these goals. In the short
run, the mass of the public bears heavy costs. The public, not a small army of
professionals, pays the price in blood, whether as soldiers or as city dwellers subject to
attack from the air. They suffer the immediate hardships consequent on wartime
economic mobilization. If the arguments above are correct, it is most unlikely that there
is compensation in the long run sufficient to outweigh the costs, even to families that
have not suffered death or injury. Welfare-oriented societies typically produce leaders
who are attuned to and reflect their societies' goals. They compete for their positions by
appealing to the public as improvers of public welfare, whether by positive action, or by
promising to unleash the natural forces of progress. Peace, not war, is seen as the
natural state of affairs by leaders as well as the public. Further, the dominance
of the nation-state as a focus of popular sentiment has delegitimated wars of conquest;
they are not only unlikely to be profitable, they are viewed as wrong. Gellner quotes Lord
Acton: "Thus began a time when the text simply was, that nations would not be governed
by foreigners. Power legitimately attained, and exercised with moderation, was declared
invalid. "24 Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine exemplified just such an
illegitimate change of rule. Current examples are even clearer. The Israeli military
occupation of the West Bank and the Soviet-installed regimes in Eastern Europe have all
been characterized by an extremely high level of persisting political hostility between
their populations and the dominant power.

War is obsolete no longer useful and ideologically extinct
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
Is major war now obsolete? Surely no question is more important. The threat and the
fact of organized violence on the largest possible scale have dominated the twentieth
century. There has hardly been a moment between 1914 and 1998 when major war - or
the anticipation of it or planning for it - was not a powerfully influential fact of
international life. There was scarcely apolitical development of any consequence that was
unaffected by major war, actual or prospective. This question has an answer. The answer
is yes': major war is obsolete, if this statement's two adjectives are properly defined. It is
major war, not war in general - collective killing for some purpose - that is obsolete, as
the contents of any daily newspaper make clear. War has not been abolished. What is
increasingly unlikely is a war fought by the most powerful members of the
international system, drawing on all of their resources and using every weapon at
their command, over a period of years, leading to an outcome with revolutionary
geopolitical consequences including the birth and death of regimes, the redrawing of
borders and the reordering of the hierarchy of sovereign states. There have been four
such wars in the last two centuries: the wars of the French Revolution (1792-1815); the
First World War (l9l4-l8)', the Second World War (1939-45); and the Cold War (late
1940s- early 1990s). It is the numerically small but historically monumental class of wars
to which these four conflicts all belong that is obsolete. Major war is not impossible.
None of the countries that would take part in another major conflict has renounced War
entirely; indeed, all are prepared to fight. A major war is unlikely but not unthinkable.
There are still people charged with the responsibility for waging such a conflict and they
continue to think about it. But it is obsolete in the sense that it is no longer in fashion. It
is obsolete in the sense that it no longer serves the purpose for which it was designed. It
has gone out of fashion not through any decree or ruling, but rather as the result of
trends and developments that are not under the control of any agency or authority. To
obsolesce is intransitive verb. Obsolescence is not imposed or created by anyone or
anything; it happens. In the case of major war, the signs that obsolescence is happening
are abundant. The trend began while the most recent major War was still under way. The
Cold War lacked a central feature of its three predecessors: direct battles between and
among the belligerent powers. Since it ended, the trend toward obsolescence has
gathered momentum. Major war is talked and written about less than before. Articles,
essays, books, lectures and symposia are more likely to study the global economy than
global warfare. Crises in Europe and Asia are economic rather than military in nature.
The shift has apparently also made an impression on the vast majority of the worlds
inhabitants who do not read articles or attend conferences on inter- national affairs. In
the summer of 1998, as in other summers, the US film industry sought to appeal to what
is evidently a broad interest in and presumably fear of, the Earth's destruction.
Hollywood, whose economic viability depends on accurately gauging the global Zeitgeist
offered two motion pictures with a contemporary version of the apocalypse as their
theme. In the films Deep Impact and Armageddon, however, the threat of total
destruction came not, as in previous examples of the genre, from major war waged with
weapons of mass destruction (WIVID). Rather, it came from the random workings of the
cosmos, in the forms, respectively, of an asteroid and a meteor rushing towards Earth
that must be destroyed or deflected by heroic measures if life as we know it is to
continue. Major war is apparently no longer plausible enough to serve as the premise of a
major motion picture, which is one sure sign of obsolescence at work. Yet another sign is
the appearance of a term to describe the trends that contribute to it: debellicisation.'
Unlike the word that is perhaps closest to being a synonym warlessness - its Latin
root gives debellicisation a solid, scientific aura, like a newly discovered species of plant
or element of the periodic table. And while warlessness implies an achieved condition,
debellicisation suggests an ongoing process.

No war with major powers too focused economically even if tensions rise
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
The world's largest country by population and its largest country by area differ in
important ways. Two years before the new millennium, China's economy, power and
international status are growing while Russia's are shrinking. Russia is a democracy,
albeit a shaky one. Chinese politics are not, and never have been, conducted according to
democratic principles. Russia is part of the European system of common security. In
East Asia there is no such system - there are no treaties regulating armaments of which
China can be a part. But Russia and China are similar in one crucial way: the continuing
obsolescence of major war depends most heavily on them. This is not because either is
the most powerful member of the international system, a distinction that will surely
belong to the US until well into the twenty-first century. It is not because the government
of either country is the most bellicose on the planet, a title Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein seems likely to retain as long as he remains in power. Rather, of the countries
that could start a major war, Russia and China are the two most likely to do so. 9' They
are large enough and powerful enough, actually or potentially, economically and
militarily, to qualify as potential great powers. Their attitudes towards international
politics and armed conflict are closer to those of the great powers at the end of the
nineteenth century than to the views prevailing in the debellicised late twentieth-century
democracies. Neither country is fully or irreversibly democratic; China is not democratic
at all. Neither is used to conciliation within its own borders, let alone in dealings with
other countries. National prestige is of prime importance to both; the memory of lost
status and past humiliations - for Russia, in the very recent past - rankles in sections of
both countries' political classes. For both governments, spheres of influence are not
entirely obsolete: Russia claims one on the territory of the former Soviet Union; China
asserts a proprietary interest in the South China Sea. For all these reasons, in neither
Russia nor China has the traditional interest in military balances been entirely eclipsed
by the prevailing Western concern with trade balances. Still, at the end of the twentieth
century neither country appears to be girding for a major war. Both are focused
inward, preoccupied with economic rather than military matters. Neither
fully endorses the policies and practices of the US, but the differences are sources of
irritation rather than confrontation. Russia and China persist, for example, in purveying
armaments and technology suitable for making WMD to countries that the US insists
should not have them; but this is the occasion for diplomatic friction instead of war.
Neither Moscow nor Beijing is entirely satisfied with all of the political, military and
economic arrangements of the post-Cold War world, especially Washingtons central role
in devising and managing them. But neither government is committed, as were their
orthodox communist predecessors, to the violent overthrow of those arrangements.

Changes in aspect of society have made major wars redundant and
undesirable
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
Political, social and technological trends that began or have accelerated in the twentieth
century have made major war obsolete by raising its costs while reducing the incentives
for waging it. Major war is obsolete in the way that styles of dress are obsolete: it is
something that is out of fashion and, while it could be revived, there is no present
demand for it. Major war is obsolete in the way that slavery, dueling or foot-binding are
obsolete: it is a social practice that was once considered normal, useful- even desirable -
but that now seems odious.3 It is obsolete in the way that the central planning of
economic activity is obsolete: it is a practice once regarded as a plausible, indeed a
superior way of achieving a socially desirable goal, but that changing conditions have
made ineffective at best, counter-productive at worst. It is possible that not only major
war - protracted struggles among great powers with revolutionary consequences for
international politics - but even modern war - the use of mechanized weapons in formal
battles between the professional armed forces of sovereign states - is dying out. The toll
that modern weapons extract and the diminishi.ng benefits their use seems likely to
bring, which are potent factors in the foreign policies of the great powers, must weigh on
the calculations of the lesser ones as well" True, Washington is even now preparing to
fight two modern wars. The precedents for the two 'major regional contingencies' that
form the basis for post-Cold War US military planning are wars the US fought in Korea
in the early 1950s and in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Not coincidentally, the regimes against
which the US went to war on those occasions remain in power in both places. But neither
North Korea's Kim Il Sung nor Iraq's Saddam Hussein believed, when they launched the
attack that began each war, that it would lead to a military confrontation with the US,
and it is unlikely that either regime is eager to repeat the experience. Warlessness may
still be unknown on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East, but there is no reason
to doubt that deterrence has put down roots in both places. Of the varieties of war, it is
not the Second World War model that is growing in popularity. It is, rather,
'unconventional' conflict s, waged by irregular forces that attack civilian not military
targets. Guerrillas, terrorists, members of private militias - even malevolent computer
hackers - seem to be displacing the form ally trained, well-equipped, publicly funded
soldier who waged the twentieth century's wars. The practice of war, once the
prerogative of the strong of the international system, is instead increasingly the tactic of
the weak.

Even if ideology is still present, modern attitudes and diplomacy make
conflict improbable
Mandelbaum 99 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Learning to be
Warless, Survival, Summer 1999, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 139-152)//BZ
War is a venerable human activity, dating back millennia; and even if the category of war
for which obsolescence is claimed includes only the four great conflicts of the modern
era, that still makes it more than two centuries old. Nor have human aggressiveness and
political differences, the combustible mixture from which all wars arise, disappeared.
Thus the burden of proof - or rather the burden of argument, since the assertion is not
subject to absolute proof - rests on those of us who suggest what must be the case if
major war is truly obsolete, namely that something fi.1ndamental has changed in
international politics. The comments here are intended to elaborate that argument,
made originally in the Winter 1998-99 issue of Survival, as well as to respond, in part, to
my colleagues' points. They fall into four categories: the definition of obsolescence; its
ingredients; its significance; and the implications of my argument for national foreign
policies. What, precisely, does it mean to say that major war is 'obsolete'? On the
spectrum of probability, obsolete falls somewhere between impossible and unlikely.
Major war had already become unlikely during the Cold War because of the existence of
nuclear weapons, which had (and have) the power to make war between and among the
major powers catastrophically expensive. What is new is a combination of cultural
attitudes and diplomatic arrangements that make major war, in Europe at least, even
less likely than it was during the last decades of the East-West rivalry, when deterrence
through the threat of mutual annihilation was in force. Then the major powers were
afraid of war because the costs might be too high. Now, in addition, they are uninterested
in war because the benefits of winning are judged so modest. What I have called in my
1996 book The Dawn of Peace in Europe, the continent's 'common security order' has
two parts. The first, visible part, and the crown jewel of late Cold War and post-Cold War
diplomacy, is a landmark series of treaties limiting armaments. These treaties reduce the
insecurity endemic to a world divided into independent sovereign states. The mere fact
of sovereignty, or, as it is called in the literature of international relations, the 'anarchy'
of the international system, is a potential cause of war because it means that every
country must guard against the possibility that it might be attacked; there is no global
authority to prevent this. These treaties provide for transparency, so that every country
can know exactly what armaments every other one has, and what they are doing with
their arms. The treaties also reconfigure nuclear and non-nuclear weapons in Europe to
make them suitable for defence but not attack. The net effect is to engender a higher
degree of confidence than modem Europe has ever had that there will be no major war
there. Underpinning the treaties is a complex of attitudes, widely held and deeply rooted
in the industrial democracies, although less prominent elsewhere, that I have called
'warlessness'. Warlessness is what motivates Europeans and North Americans to limit
their weapons voluntarily in ways that build confidence among potential adversaries that
they harbour no aggressive designs. It is the conviction that war is both abnormal and
undesirable, and that it is usually illegitimate to fight for the goals on behalf of which
wars have been waged in the past: wealth, territory, glory.

Generic Interdependence

Interdependence generates non-violent solutions to disputes
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
For interdependence to promote peace, economic processes must either remove
incentives for states to engage in conflict or reduce the uncertainty states face when
bargaining in the shadow of costly contests. Since removing incentives to act aggressively
only increases incentives for opponents, the former explanation must typically occur in
special "boundary" conditions (discussed later). We argue that interdependence
makes it easier to substitute nonviolent contests for militarized disputes in
signaling resolve. States that possess a range of methods of conflict resolution have
less need to resort to the most destructive (and costly) techniques. Liberal dyads can
damage mutually valuable linkages to communicate credibly. States without linkages
must choose between a very limited set of options, including-more often-war. The
conflict model with uncertainty shows why this is so. Recall that A's best response is an
offer that an opponent weakly prefers to fighting. If the opponent (B) has private
information about its war costs (c), then A's optimal offer derives from a rational guess
(the distribution of reservation prices for different types of player B). A calculates its
offer as the best demand it can make to each opponent weighted by the odds that a given
opponent "type" is the actual adversary. Players B whose war costs are high accept,
whereas those with low costs fight. Conventional descriptions of interdependence see
war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The
problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an opponent's
reticence to fight. If an opponent (B) is reluctant, then state A can make larger demands
without risking war. Assume that interdependent dyads are those that derive some
benefit from economic linkages (h, say h = $10). If A and B avoid a fight, then each
receives the settlement plus the benefit ($100 - d + $10 and d + $10, respectively). B's
war costs are again between $0 and $40. Conventional explanations for interdependence
identify the fact that B receives (d + $10) instead of (d) for accepting A's demand as
leading to peace. If demands are the same, then not fighting is more beneficial in
interdepen- dent dyads, and B should more often prefer A's demand to fighting. Yet
unless we assume that A is ignorant of its own interdependence with B (not very
plausible), A's demand must be different. A's best offer is one that B just prefers to a
fight. Since benefits increase under interdependence, A simply demands
commensurately more. In the previous example, A offers $30 (A receives $100 - d =
$70). If interdepen- dent, A proposes that B accept $20 plus the benefit ($10). The same
range of states B that accepted $30 previously (since $30 - $50 - c if c > $20) now
accepts $20 (since $20 + $10 [the benefit] - $50 - c if c - $20). State A again makes an
offer that a given opponent just prefers to fighting, weighted by the odds that B is the
given opponent. Interdependence is simply subsumed in bargaining. Since they fail to
reduce uncertainty, opportunity costs generally do not alter the prospects of engaging in
costly contests.48 Economic interdependence can motivate peace in two ways. First,
conflict may occasionally be so expensive relative to the expected value of fighting that
states prefer any offer rather than enduring a contest. Suppose B's war costs range from
$50 to $90. B's expected value for war thus ranges from $0 to -$40. Because B stands to
lose more from fighting than its value for the stakes, B prefers to concede. We refer to
this as a boundary solution because it is possible only by assuming that stakes in the
contest are bounded. Bounded stakes are reasonable, especially when issues are of
tertiary importance or when costs are extreme (as in nuclear war). Interdependent dyads
may avoid costly contests if economic linkages decrease the expected value of
competition to the point where one party prefers conceding to competing. Yet economic
benefits seldom equate in consequence to nuclear war. Issues over which states may
consider major contests are unlikely to meet boundary conditions for interdependence.
Instead, boundary solutions are relevant when liberal states experience relatively minor
conflict. Finally, competition can continue even given boundary conditions. Liberal
dyads deterred from war can still compete by manipulating the risk of contests.49
Second, instead of deterring conflict, interdependence can convey credible sig- nals,
obviating the need for costly military contests. Actors' behaviors potentially inform
observers about the value of strategic variables, dissipating private informa- tion.
Interdependent states that endure opportunity costs in pursuit of political objectives
differentiate themselves from other, less resolved, competitors. To the degree that
nonviolent conflict allows observers to identify opponents, costly signaling also allows
efficient ex ante bargaining. States seek to obtain settlements while competing for
preferable terms. War is less often necessary when states possess nonviolent methods
that credibly inform.

No incentive for war economic interdependence and democracy
Gartzke, 07 (Eric, Professor Erik Gartzke from University of California San Diego La
Jolla, CA, Columbia University, The Capitalist Peace,
http://pages.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_ajps_07-1.pdf, 2007, gf)
The discovery that democracies seldom fight each other has led, quite reasonably, to the
conclusion that democracy causes peace, at least within the community of liberal polities.
Explanations abound, but a consensus account of the dyadic democratic peace has been
surprisingly slow to materialize. I offer a theory of liberal peace based on capitalism and
common interstate interests. Economic development, capital market integration, and the
compatibility of foreign policy preferences supplant the effect of democracy in standard
statistical tests of the democratic peace. In fact, after controlling for regional
heterogeneity, any one of these three variables is sufficient to account for effects
previously attributed to regime type in standard samples of wars, militarized interstate
disputes (MIDs), and fatal disputes. 1 If war is a product of incompatible interests and
failed or abortive bargaining, peace ensues when states lack differences worthy of costly
conflict, or when circumstances favor successful diplomacy. Realists and others argue
that state interests are inherently incompatible, but this need be so only if state interests
are narrowly defined or when conquest promises tangible benefits. Peace can result from
at least three attributes of mature capitalist economies. 1 Additional tests of key
variables, model specifications, and possible confounding factors appear in the appendix.
A Stata do file replicating all aspects of the analysis is available from the author. First,
the historic impetus to territorial expansion is tempered by the rising importance of
intellectual and financial capital, factors that are more expediently enticed than
conquered. Land does little to increase the worth of the advanced economies while
resource competition is more cheaply pursued through markets than by means of
military occupation. At the same time, development actually increases the ability of
states to project power when incompatible policy objectives exist. Development affects
who states fight (and what they fight over) more than the overall frequency of warfare.
Second, substantial overlap in the foreign policy goals of developed nations in the post
World War II period further limits the scope and scale of conflict. Lacking territorial
tensions, consensus about how to order the international system has allowed liberal
states to cooperate and to accommodate minor differences. Whether this affinity among
liberal states will persist in the next century is a question open to debate. Finally, the rise
of global capital markets creates a new mechanism for competition and communication
for states that might otherwise be forced to fight. Separately, these processes influence
patterns of warfare in the modern world. Together, they explain the absence of war
among states in the developed world and account for the dyadic observation of the
democratic peace. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 2007,
Pp. 166191. The notion of a capitalist peace is hardly new. Montesquieu, Paine, Bastiat,
Mill, Cobden, Angell, and others saw in market forces the power to end war.
Unfortunately, war continued, leading many to view as overly optimistic classical
conceptions of liberal peace. This study an be seen as part of an effort to reexamine
capitalist peace theory, revising arguments in line with contemporary insights much as
Kantian claims were reworked in response to evolving evidence of a democratic peace.
Existing empirical research on the democratic peace, while addressing many possible
alternatives, provides an incomplete and uneven treatment of liberal economic
processes. Most democratic peace research examines trade in goods and services but
ignores capital markets and offers only a cursory assessment of economic development
(Maoz and Russett 1992). Several studies explore the impact of interests, though these
have largely been dismissed by democratic peace advocates (Oneal and Russett 1999a;
Russett and Oneal 2001). These omissions or oversights help to determine the
democratic peace result and thus shape subsequent research, thinking, and policy on the
subject of liberal peace. This study offers evidence that liberal economic processes do in
fact lead to peace, even accounting for the well-documented role of liberal politics.
Democracy cohabitates with peace. It does not, by itself, lead nations to be less conflict
prone, not even toward other democracies. The argument and evidence provided here
are bound to draw criticism. Skepticism in the face of controversial claims is natural,
reasonable, even essential for the cumulation of knowledge. The democratic peace
observation is supported by an exceptionally large and sophisticated body of research. 2
At the same time, excessive deference to previous conclusions privileges conventional
wisdom. 3 A willingness to doubt that which we have come to believe is a hallmark of
scientific inquiry. Indeed, the weight of existing evidence does not directly contradict this
study as previous research has typically failed to address the 2 Empirical regularity
cannot be the only reason for broad interest in the democratic peace. As Cederman
(2003) points out, the relationship between the frequency and intensity of wars is also
lawlike (literally a power rule). This relationship has generated little interest and
received almost no attention since its discovery by Richardson (1960). 3 Accumulation is
not cumulation. Replication offers a limited form of robustness. As one author puts it, Is
it surprising that repeatedly testing the same primary independent and dependent
variables generally produces the same results? (Van Belle 2006, 14). Jervis (1976) offers
an entertaining parable based on the writings of A. A. Milne. While out hunting
woozles, Piglet and Winnie-the-Pooh mistake their own tracks in the snow for those of
their elusive prey. As the two frightened characters circle back on their own trail, the
evidence of woozles mounts....claims of classical liberal political economists like
Montesquieu, Richard Cobden, and Norman Angell. As with previous research, this
study finds support for a liberal peace, though the key causal variables, and some major
policy implications, are considerably changed.

Modern trade eliminates incentives for war no gains, high costs,
communication
Pevehouse 4 Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin (Jon,
Interdependence Theory and the Measurement of International Conflict, The Journal
of Politics, February 2004, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp.247-266,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3449781 )//BZ
Liberal theorists also make a number of claims concerning the prevention of
international conflict, each of which draws upon a different causal logic. First, one set of
claims asserts that economic trade replaces conquest as a means of
exchange, thus lowering expected levels of conflict. What would formally be gained
through war can now be traded. Rosecrance's (1986) concept of the "trading state" is an
example of this theory and illustrates how trade and exchange may decrease the
incentives to engage in conflict. This variant of liberalism holds that higher levels of
trade can remove the economic-based incentives for conflict, leading to a more peaceful
international environment.' A second and more common logic posits that open
commerce dampens political conflict by promoting economic dependence. This
argument, which Stein refers to as "binding commercial liberalism" (1993, 353), has been
stressed in most recent studies of international conflict (Oneal and Russett 1997, 1999a).
Open trade encourages specialization in the production of goods and services, rendering
private traders and consumers dependent on foreign markets. These actors have an
incentive to avoid wars with key trading partners, since disruptions in
commercial relations would be costly. Governments, which have reason to respond to
demands made by key constituents and to enhance a country's economic performance,
face similar incentives. A third and more recent strain of interdependence theory has
grown out of the rationalist causes of war literature (see Fearon 1995) and offers a
similar prediction about trade and conflict. This argument, laid out by Morrow (1999) as
well as Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer (2001) begins with the idea that trade levels among
states are not private information. Thus, by itself, trade cannot cause binding since either
side knows the other's constraints when entering a costly bargaining contest. What trade
does give a state, however, is a broader pallet from which to select signals, so pairs of
states with higher levels of trade are more likely to provide signals (through state
economic polices or through markets) which will avert war. If this "pallet" argument is
true, major conflicts will be deterred since states can use trade as a signaling device to
show resolve.

Even if it generates conflicts, interdependence provides the safest ways to
resolve them
Pevehouse 4 Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin (Jon,
Interdependence Theory and the Measurement of International Conflict, The Journal
of Politics, February 2004, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp.247-266,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3449781 )//BZ
In sum, liberal and realist camps make strong predictions about the impact of trade on
conflict and cooperation. Liberals proffer that through multiple causal processes, trade
provides disincentives to fight, as well as positive inducements to cooperate. For some
realists, trade can provide opportunities and motivation for states to engage in conflict,
rendering relations between states more hostile. Other realists predict no systematic
relationship between trade and conflict, with other political and military factors
overwhelming any influence of commerce. One crucial issue rarely discussed in this
literature, however, is the nature of these competing claims. For instance, there is no
logical reason why trade cannot simultaneously increase conflict and cooperation. Thus,
H2 and H3 could both be correct with regard to the trade and conflict relationship.
Liberals and realists may have very well identified two parts of the same picture.
Interdependence may well increase probability that states engage in some hostilities, yet
interdependence may also deter states from entering protracted hostilities or engaging in
high-intensity conflict. The observable implication of this dynamic would be that
interdependent states are more likely to experience some conflict, but the overall
frequency of conflict should remain low. There are at least two dynamics arising from the
previous hypotheses that could give rise to this conditional relationship. First, one logic
of H3 states that because states interact more with higher trade, there are more issues
over which states may fight. As the issues between states expand in scope and complexity
with increasing interdependence, the probabil- ity for at least occasional conflict should
rise. Yet, the average observer of the modern international system would not expect
commercial disputes, for example, to spill over into severe armed military conflict. No
matter how nasty the "banana wars" get, no one expects a resort to extended physical
violence. Even if interdependence spurs noneconomic disputes, trade ties
will generate pressures to minimize costly conflicts. As commercial liberals
emphasize, private traders and consumers can generate domestic pressures, creating
high costs for state leaders who would allow an intermittent dispute to escalate to
protracted conflict. Indeed, these internal pressures will likely be highest when some
tensions already exist- signaling to private traders and firms that this stream of income
may be in jeopardy. Thus, trade may be the harbinger of the presence of tensions, but it
should also deter their expansion. Second, if the logic of the signaling argument
(Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2001) generating H2 is correct, then one should see the
peaceful benefits of international trade after some hostilities exist. In this argument,
interdependence helps convey resolve after tensions arise by giving states more "tools" to
communicate. This resolve is presumably communicated by hostile actions short of all-
out war. Thus, trade interdependence gives a state the ability to signal resolve through
hostile actions so that protracted tensions do not arise. This yields the same observable
implication as the previous logic-increased interdependence will be associated with some
interstate conflict, yet stop its enlargement. Presumably, escalation will bring more
intense and more frequent conflict, increasing the frequency of hostile interactions
within a dyad. For crises that do not escalate, the number of hostile interactions will
remain limited.

Realisms false - economic, not military focuses keeps states alive Soviet
Union proves
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
The institution with which war historically has been connected is the state, which, as the
saying goes, was made by war for the purpose of making war. Sovereign states remain a
central presence in human affairs at the end of the twentieth century. But in the societies
that waged the modern era's major wars, the state has found a different purpose. It has
become an economic institution. To spur production and manage redistribution have
become its twin missions. In all Western countries, social-welfare programmes claim a
greater share of the national treasure than the cost of underwriting the armed forces. In
addition to how it spends its money, the kind of person selected to lead it is a measure of
the states purpose. Here, too, the shift from warfare to welfare is apparent. In Germany
and Japan post-1945, the supreme national leader was selected for economic rather than
military expertise. Later, the UK and France both followed suit: Harold Wilson took up
Winston Churchill's post; Giscard d'Estaing assumed Charles de Gaulle's. With the end
of the Cold War, the US has fallen into line. Its current chief executive is a man with no
military experience or expertise who gained and held the presidency by defeating two
opponents who were both Second World War heroes. Bill C1inton's principal public
talent is empathy - no doubt a virtue, but not a martial one. His two electoral victories
are signs of the times, or at least of what the US electorate has taken to be the tenor of
the times in the 19903. Perhaps most tellingly, the test of the legitimacy of
governments, and thus the survival of contemporary regimes, is likely to be
economic rather than military. The Soviet Union was not defeated on the field of
battle. It collapsed from within, in no small part because of economic failures. The
regime's efforts to succeed in the military sphere, its enormous expenditures on weapons
and armed forces, contributed to those economic failures." In the summer of 1998, the
Soviet Union's successor, Boris Yelts'1n's government in Moscow, was threatened by the
weakness not of the Russian military (although it was certainly weak) but of the Russian
rouble. Sovereign states are pushed towards an economic rather than a military
emphasis because they are governed by democratic principles. The first and, for
debellicisation, the most relevant of these principles is popular sovereignty, control of
the government by the populace. Most people are more interested in becoming wealthy
than in risking their lives in war. Yet another reason for the obsolescence of major war at
the twentieth century's close, therefore, is the fact that a growing number of sovereign
states are increasingly democratic.

Economic Interdependence

No war no benefits, high costs, and international institutions mitigate
risks
Miller 12 Students Editor at E-International and Relations Research Assistant at Pacific
Resolutions (Sarah, The Transformation of War, E-International Relations Students,
8/16/12, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/16/the-transformation-of-war/)//BZ
Many scholars who argue that the worst of war is behind us, that war is becoming
obsolete, or that major inter-state war is disappearing, base their arguments on wars
failure to be a rational policy instrument in modern times (Kaysen, 1990; Keegan, 1998;
Mandelbaum, 1998; Mueller, 1989). They emphasize the higher economic cost of going
to war and the diminished gains from winning one (Kaysen, 1990; Mandelbaum, 1998),
because of trade and economic interdependence, the states new role as a market state,
and the declining importance of territory for a states economy (Kaysen, 1990). They also
credit the existence of other, less costly ways to solve political problems, primarily
through international institutions, and stress the role that international organizations
have played in mitigating the insecurities of an anarchical international system
(Mandelbaum, 1998). Some emphasize the role of particularly destructive modern
technologies, especially nuclear weapons, saying that these change the calculation of risk,
and damage wars ability to serve as a policy instrument (Kaysen, 1990; Waltz, 1981).
According to Kaysen, no state will initiate a war unless it expects to gain
politically or economically, and the changes in both these areas in the past 150 years
have altered this calculation, so that war no longer recommends itself as a useful
instrument (1990).

Currency interdependence raises absolute costs of war
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Monetary interactions may also be a source of interdependence. States may choose to
subordinate monetary sovereignty to a foreign power through a fixed exchange- rate
regime, pool sovereignty in a monetary union, or assert their own sovereignty under a
floating exchange-rate regime.29 Interstate monetary relations can be characterized by
intermittent cooperation, competition, and coercion.30 Attempts by one state to increase
its monetary authority (a relative gain) may produce "public bads" that diminish
absolute gains. Hence, monetary interaction may be considered as part of the general
notion of economic interdependence.31 Although they reduce state autonomy in
monetary policymaking, higher levels of monetary dependence raise the incentives to
cooperate.

International markets means war destroys investment delinking caps
economic growth
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Capital seeks higher risk-adjusted returns. Risk is contingent on government
restrictions, the degree of domestic capital market integration into world markets, and
the overall exposure of the economy to direct investments. This has three implications
for international conflict. First, states in conflict may place more stringent government
restrictions on foreign exchange, payments settlement, capital repatriation, or even
nationalization. Since conflict threatens investments among disputing states, it makes
such investments less desirable and capital becomes relatively scarce. Second, political
shocks produce negative externalities affecting investments. Military conflict increases
uncertainty and risk to any capital investment, all else being equal, and reduces risk-
adjusted rates of return. The more globally integrated a state's capital market, the more
likely that capital will flee. Third, states that are heavily exposed to capital flows are more
vulnerable to disruptions. Policy actions that increase risk for capital are costlier for
political leaders and thus demonstrate stronger resolve. States that are heavily
dependent on international capital markets for national economic well being are much
more vulnerable to the will of these markets. States can disengage their economies from
the global system. They can also seek to restrict the movement of capital across their
borders. However, attempts to limit the influence of international markets on domestic
economies also limit growth. States cannot restrict the free movement of capital without
raising the cost of production.

Strategic and economic interdependence reduce conflict increased
security, deterrence, economic costs and risks
Maoz 9 Professor at UC Davis and former Head/Professor of Graduate Shool of
Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University (Zeev, The Effects of Strategic and
Economic Interdependence on International Conflict across Leyvels of Analysis,
American Journal of Political Science, January 2009, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 223-240,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25193877 ) //BZ
The liberal paradigm regards both strategic and economic interdependence as a good
thing. Although Keohane and Nye discuss arms races as an example of "bad
interdependence" (1977, 8-9), this is done in passing. Most liberal theorizing on
interdependence and conflict is focused on economic ties. However, liberal
institutionalist ideas allow inferences about the effects of strategic interdependence on
conflict and cooperation. Strategic interdependence is more than a common capability
pool. Alliances are institutions that reduce uncertainty and manage distributional issues
(Keohane and Martin 1995). Strategically interdependent states are unlikely to engage in
conflict due to their increased security and ability to deter aggression (Kegley and
Raymond 1982). Finally, as strategic interdependence in the international system
increases, the incentives for conflict decline.7 Liberal scholars tie economic
interdependence to rational positivism and peace. "[T]he international operation of the
industrial spirit is as remarkable as any part of its actions ... Whatever may have been the
original effect of the military spirit in extending human association, it not only had then
completely exhausted, but it could never have been comparable to the industrial spirit in
admitting the total assimilation of the human race" (Comte [1854] 2000, 181-82). The
effect of economic interdependence on peace extends from the state to the system. States
are reluctant to initiate conflict against enemies with whom they do not have direct trade
ties because the uncertainty and instability associated with conflict may cause their
trading partners to look for other markets, thus adding an in direct cost to the direct cost
of conflict (Crescenzi 2005; Gasiorowski 1986; Gasiorowski and Polacheck 1982; Po
lacheck 1980, 1997; Russett and Oneal 2001 ). Global interdependence increases
coordination, cooperation, transparency, and trust, thereby reducing global levels of
conflict.


Interdependence raises mutual costs of war
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Democratic peace research was inspired by the Kantian prophesy of a "perpetual peace,"
but Kant's recipe (often called the "liberal peace") consists of much broader conditions,
including republican government, a league of nations, and common markets.11
Beginning in the 1970s, students of political economy began to evaluate evidence that
interdependence inhibits conflict behavior. Debate continues, but consensus appears to
be that interdependence is associated with peace. Work by Robert O. Keohane and
Joseph S. Nye, James A. Caporaso, Karl W. Deutsch, James M. Rosenau, and John A.
Kroll made conceptual contributions by clarifying definitions of interdependence.'2
However, these studies lack theoretical precision and fail to delineate key processes. One
is left to ponder the origins of interdependence. Exactly how do multiple channels alter
incentives to compete? Also, complex interdependence appears to imply dyadic
consequences, but the argument as posed is almost exclusively systemic. There are many
ways to conceive of interdependence. The central logic of most studies of conflict and
interdependence is that states are less likely to fight if there exist additional
opportunity costs associated with military force. "International commerce, being
a transaction between nations, could conceivably also have a direct impact on the
likelihood of peace and war: once again the [economic] interests might overcome the
passions, specifically the passion for conquest."'3 Evidence has mounted that trade
interdependence reduces interstate disputes.14 John R. Oneal and Bruce M. Russett
argue that Kant was right-liberalism leads to peace.15 In addition to interdependence,
law, civil liberties, executive constraints, and a bargaining culture all reduce disputes.
Interdependence has a greater effect than democracy, growth, or alliances in reducing
conflict in contiguous states.

Capital markets prevent states from engaging in military conflict
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argues that "movable wealth" encourages peace
between and within states. Mobile capital constrains the sovereign domestically. "The
richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving
any trace ... [so that] rulers have been compelled to govern with greater wisdom than
they themselves would have thought."32 Trade is only one manifestation of the global
spread of capitalism.33 Since capital markets dwarf the exchange of goods and services,
firms should weigh the risks of investment much more heavily than trade. Foreign
production facilities are vulner- able to nationalization in a way that trade is not.
Further, even the threat of lost revenues makes investors skittish. Globalization has
increased capital mobility and monetary cooperation even as it redefines the terms on
which states compete. State policies aim to preserve political autonomy, but states are
faced with a dilemma when seeking to influence interstate finance. Vittorio Grilli and
Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti suggest that states impose capital controls for four reasons:
limiting volatile short-term capital flows, retaining domestic savings, sustaining
structural reform and stabilization programs, and maintaining the tax base.34 States
engage financial repression for similar reasons.35 However, states may find capital
controls less useful when facing integrated capital markets and pressures to liberalize
from powerful interest groups such as multinational corporations and financial institu-
tions.36 Edward L. Morse points out that when states fail to reduce their vulnera- bility
and solve the crises that arise through interdependence, they may seek to externalize
problems.37 Interdependence may even transmit economic crises.38 Thus, the literature
suggests that interdependence could increase conflict between states while decreasing
the chances of violent, militarized behavior.


Monetary interdependence solves war empirics prove
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
By increasing the economic interdependence of members, monetary policy coordination
creates a mechanism that allows credible signals of political resolve through economic
acts. For example, the post-World War II Bretton Woods system was essentially a zone
in which members pegged currencies to the dollar, expecting convertibility of the dollar
into gold. On 26 July 1956 Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez
Canal. On 31 October British and French forces attacked Egypt after negotiations to
resolve the crisis failed. Despite vocal opposi- tion from the United States, Britain and
France decided to continue efforts to seize the canal and overthrow the Nasser regime.
On 5 November the U.S. government started to sell pounds. British reserves fell by 15
percent within a month. U.S. Treasury secretary George Humphrey informed Britain that
unless it obeyed the UN resolution and withdrew from Suez, the United States would
continue to sell pounds and block British access to International Monetary Fund (IMF)
reserves. On 6 November Britain ordered a cease-fire, in effect forcing the French to end
military operations as well.56 It may be questioned whether the United States would
have intervened militarily to block British and French efforts in Egypt; fortunately, such
an effort was not necessary. The Bretton Woods system made it possible for the United
States to demonstrate resolve short of military force, jeopardizing valuable economic
linkages but averting the need for costlier actions. In summary, traditional studies of
economics and international conflict only pay attention to a particular type of market,
the goods market, and one channel of economic linkages, international trade. The
influence of economics is underesti- mated and the causal mechanisms overly simplified.
We argue that linkages between economics and peace are more complex than previously
postulated. Interdependence through capital and trade acts as a costly signal,
reducing uncertainty about relative resolve and lessening the need for militarized
disputes. Instead of being deterred by opportunity costs, interdependent states can use
opportunity costs as costly signals demonstrating resolve.

Economic linkages reduces the likelihood of conflict
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Trade and direct investment increase cross-border economic contact and raise a state's
stake in maintaining linkages. Monetary coordination and interdepen- dence demand
that states strike deals. Through such interactions, states create a broad set of mutually
beneficial economic linkages. While these linkages may deter very modest clashes, their
main impact is as a substitute method for resolving conflict. Political shocks
that threaten to damage or destroy economic linkages generate information, reducing
uncertainty when leaders bargain. Threats from interdependent states carry more weight
than threats from autarchic states precisely because markets inform observers as to the
veracity of political "cheap talk." Multiple channels of economic interactions help states
to credibly communicate, increasing the "vocabulary" available to states in attempting to
assess relative resolve. A signaling interpretation of interdependence offers some
promise both analyti- cally and in terms of international events. If costly signaling
through economic interdependence reduces states' recourse to military violence, then
increasing economic interdependence (globalization) implies the prospect of a more
pacific global system. The magnitude of the pacific effect of interdependence is difficult
to assess, however, since other factors, such as increasing polarization, may add to the
motives for conflict. At the same time, the signaling argument implies that much of the
variance in the propensity for conflict is unknowable.83 Before we can have greater
confidence in our results, we need to examine a larger data sample, including all dyads
and longer time spans. Precise measures may be obtained by limiting the sample to U.S.
dyads. Finally, the effects of democracy on conflict appear to require additional
assessment. However, our findings provide evidence (and a rationale) suggesting that
liberal economics may be at least as salient to peace as liberal politics.

Economic exchange reduces conflict community, benefits, and higher
costs to war
Reed 3 Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice University (William,
Information and Economic Interdependence, The Journal of Conflict Resolution:
Building a Science of World Politics, February 2003, Vol. 47,
No. 1, pp.54-71,
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/3176182.pdf?&acceptTC=true
&jpdConfirm=true&&acceptTC=true)//BZ
Working within the liberal peace research program, John Oneal and Bruce Russett
(1997, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2001) have published several papers supporting the
contention that trade promotes peace or at least has a robust pacifying effect on the
onset of militarized conflict. Moreover, Oneal and Russett argue that the pacifying effect
of economic interdependence holds important clues about the observed peace between
and among democratic states. Democracy may reduce the probability of militarized
conflict by indirectly increasing the amount of economic interdependence (Russett and
Oneal 2001). In related work, Lisa Martin (2000) asserts that democratic states may be
better equipped to foster economic interdependence because they are better able to make
credible commitments with respect to the terms of trade. In sum, economic
interdependence allows for more efficient bargaining. Similar lines of inquiry claim that
increased contact in the form of economic exchange between states can decrease
the probability of conflict. For example, Deutsch et al. (1957) argue that trade can
lead to the development of a sense of community, and this shared community may make
conflict less likely. Moreover, Polachek, Robst, and Chang (1999) claim that because
states know conflict will distort the benefits from trade, trade deters militarized conflict.
Put simply, the costs of conflict are higher for trading states, and with greater costs, the
expected value for militarized conflict is lower. Thus, ceteris paribus, trading states can
expect to gain less from a militarized clash than would nontrading states and, as a result,
are more likely to accept a bargained outcome short of militarized conflict.

Economic interdependence reduce motives to go to war lack of conquest
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
Throughout history, one of the primary motivating factors for engaging in war was
conquest, the capturing of another states territory and the resources it contained. As
indicated above, conquest was especially profitable in landholding societies, where land
was the main source of economic and political power. It was also a worthy endeavour in
early trading societies where city centers became the hub of economic activity and
contained valuable assets that could be easily captured in war. However, the extent to
which conquest is still a profitable endeavour in the contemporary world, such that the
benefits of undertaking this activity exceed the costs, is questionable, especially for the
great powers. Although the opportunity for a one-time looting remains, and is likely even
more advantageous than it was in the past given the available loot, the long-term benefits
associated with major war and conquest seem to be lost.54 Ultimately, it would seem
that, when dealing with wars among great powers, this endeavour is no longer beneficial
for a number of reasons, including the growth of nationalism, the economic
interdependence among states, and the increasingly global scale of production.
Beginning with the idea of nationalism, it would seem that as these sentiments have
grown, the benefits associated with conquest have become less of a guarantee. Attacking
a country with even a minor element of nationalist sentiment, which appears to be held
in some form by all of the great powers, is a dangerous endeavour, as one risks ensuing
political hostility on the part of the conquered.55 Not only would the conquering states
have to undergo the costs of stifling uprisings, but the energy and efficiency with which
the conquered economy operates would likely be lost, leading to less than favourable
results than the conquering state had hoped to achieve.56 In this sense, rather than
undertaking the risks associated with conquest, it would seem far more prudent to
simply increase domestic production and continue engaging in trade with the rest of the
world. Indeed, in todays world, economic strength does not arise so much from the
control of territory and resources as it does from access to global markets.57 States now
operate in a truly global economy, relying on one another for imported goods and serving
as markets for one anothers exports. Although such interstate trade has been occurring
for centuries, the economic interdependence among states that we are witnessing today
is truly unprecedented, with states economic prosperity depending on peaceful trading
relations with other states. Possessing the strongest economies in the world, the great
powers are especially dependent on these relations. In fact, it was their efforts that
brought about the World Trade Organization (WTO), formerly the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), to supervise these trading relations and ensure that they
proceed in an orderly manner. In this sense, to engage in war with one another and
disrupt these critical relations would seem equivalent to economic suicide, boding
particularly badly for their populations who rely on international trade for their well-
being.58 Thus, the loss of the significant economic gains that typically accompany global
trade would seem to serve as another deterrent to the pursuit of major war. Closely
related to this, it is arguable that the significant decline in the benefits of conquest
among the most highly advanced countries is due to changes in the structure of global
production. Proposed by political scientist Stephen Brooks, this argument asserts that
trade is being overtaken by global production as the most important integrating force in
the international economy.59 In fact, much of the trade in todays world is a by-product
of the globalization of production, of the outsourcing of the production of goods and
services to locations around the globe in an attempt to minimize production costs.60
Such globalization is changing the incentives facing states and contributing to the
shifting profitability of major war. As Brooks suggests, the globalization of production
has played a profound role in the transition of most modern states from economies
based on land to ones based on knowledge and human capital, a fact that has greatly
lowered the benefits of conquest.61 In the post-World War II period, the globalization of
production has taken off as communication and transportation technologies have
allowed development, research, and management to take place in one area of the world
while production occurs in another. This trend has allowed the most advanced countries
of the world to increasingly specialize in knowledge-based industries as developing
countries undertake the necessary production processes. As these changes have
occurred, the benefits of conquest among great powers have significantly declined.
Whereas, in the past, the economic assets available to the conqueror could be easily
seized, whether in the form of land, machines, etc., this is no longer the case. After all,
although they can be captured, human beings and the information they possess are
highly mobile and difficult to definitively acquire. The geographic dispersion of
production associated with this globalizing process has also shifted the profitability
calculations surrounding major war.62 As global firms, which are typically based in the
great power countries, have been increasingly outsourcing their production to areas of
the developing world, the idea of conquering a great power country has declined in
appeal as such a conquest would likely only result in obtaining a small portion of the
global production chain. Even until quite recently, if a state invaded a country with a
particular production sector, it would possess the entire chain of production and be able
to produce all of the necessary inputs for the particular good. However, to do so now
would likely require conquering multiple countries. Although it may be argued that
possessing even a small portion of the production chain is valuable, the point to be made
here is that it is less valuable than it would have been in the past. The argument is not
that there are no benefits to be obtained from one great power conquering another, but
that such benefits are significantly declining. The final point of Brooks' analysis that is
worthy of note pertains to the role of foreign direct investment (FDI). Brooks points out
that, in addition to the declining profitability of conquest, a substitute can be found in
the form of FDI, which has become increasingly more prevalent since the Second World
War. According to Brooks, FDI allows states to achieve many of the same benefits of
conquest without actually undergoing any of the costs.63 In this sense, although not a
perfect substitute, when combined with the decreasing profitability associated with
conquest, it is arguable that FDI has further reduced incentives for engaging in major
war. Ultimately, it would seem that, economically speaking, the benefits to be attained
from major war have declined to the point of virtual non-existence. Not only are the
anticipated gains less significant, but major war would also likely disrupt the trade and
foreign investment upon which the economies of these countries depend. In fact, those
citizens whose livelihoods are contingent on these economic relations remaining stable
can be expected to lobby against major war and in favour of great power peace. However,
this is only truly possible in a democracy, the spread of which also seems to have
contributed to the obsolescence of major war.

Deterrence

War empirically denied even during heightened tensions scale of
destruction and risk of retaliation is too large to be feasible
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
Major war in the twentieth century is more costly - that is, more destructive - than
previous wars of any kind. Ten million people died fighting during the First World War
and millions more perished from war-related disease. The death toll for the Second
World War was 50m, although fewer than half of the victims were in uniform? The two
world wars were more costly than any in the past, chiefly because the instruments of war
were more deadly and destructive. It is perhaps true that the twentieth century's great
wars did not destroy a larger proportion of the productive capacities of the societies that
waged them, nor kill a higher percentage of these societies' populations, than previous
conflicts.' But the opportunity costs of twentieth-century wars were higher because the
benefits of peace were greater. There was far more productive capacity to destroy in the
twentieth century than ever before. Because life expectancy was higher, moreover, those
killed by war in the last 100 years were deprived of more of life, and life of a higher
material quality, than the victims of previous conflicts. For most of recorded history,
famine and disease posed greater dangers to most people than war. In this century,
armed conflict came into its own as the most fearsome, and feared, cause of unnatural
death' In the last two centuries, the expansion of organized violence ran parallel to -
indeed, was part of - the expansion of economic production. Armed forces themselves
became industrial organizations. They recruited and trained young men to carry out
specialized tasks and systematically harnessed science and technology for the purpose of
mass production. What armed forces produced, on a mass scale, was not automobiles or
refrigerators; it was death and destruction. The ultimate creation of applying science and
technology to the art of warfare was, and is, nuclear weapons. The expansion of
destructive force that they embody is extraordinary. The firepower carried by one
submarine equipped with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles could inflict more damage on
any of the Second World War's belligerent powers than all the destruction any of them
suffered during the course of that conflict, which - especially in the cases of Germany,
Japan and the Soviet Union - was vast indeed. The destruction that a large-scale
exchange of nuclear weapons would cause - and it was widely assumed during the Cold
War that any use of them between the US and the Soviet Union would trigger a large-
scale exchange - was so great that it certainly would not meet one of the criteria for a
major war.' It would not be conducted over a period of years; it might last only hours. It
is questionable whether such a spasm of mass destruction, including mass killing, could
truly be called a war, defined as an act of organized violence for a political purpose. To
what political end would a nuclear war be a plausible means? The countries waging
it could count on destroying their adversary, but at the cost of their own
destruction. This is not a trade-off likely to commend itself to a minimally rational
person. The enormous, unprecedented, almost unimaginable destruction a nuclear war
could bring had a restraining effect on the two major nuclear powers during the Cold
War, which in tum was and is a principal element of the obsolescence of major war.
Washington and Moscow maneuvered to avoid placing themselves in a position in which
nuclear weapons might be used. The episodes when nuclear use seemed imminent - the
crises over Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962 - were rare, and the experience of living
through them enhanced the common Soviet and American determination that they
should not be repeated. The anticipation of nuclear combat had an effect on
governments com- parable to the impact on individual soldiers of the increasingly
dangerous and stressful reality of non-nuclear combat in the twentieth century: extreme
aversion. The circumspect behavior during the nuclear crises and the resolute efforts to
avoid them can be seen as a variation of the shellshock that made those who suffered
from it unfit to return to battle. While the cost of major war has risen sharply, what its
ever rising price can purchase now seems increasingly unattractive to potential
customers. Even independently of its costs, the incentives for major War have
shrivelled.


Realism means wars inevitable only a bipolar nuclear world prevents
conflict
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
member of MIT's program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies
(Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security, Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ
At a second and deeper level, Mueller fails to confront the traditional realist and neo-
realist argument that war is an inescapable feature of the anarchic international system
in which independent states seek power and security. After all, this is one of the
dominant models of international relations, if not the dominant one, and Mueller simply
does not engage with it. Kenneth Waltz offers a clear statement of the realist view:
conflict is the inevitable result of the structure of the international system.6 Independent
states seeking security in an anarchic system in which war is the ultima ratio of statecraft
will inevitably be in conflict, and conflict will regularly issue in war, as it has throughout
history. However, a bipolar system has better prospects than a multipolar one
for stability and the avoidance of war. With formidable nuclear, arsenals on both
sides, the prospects for avoiding war become better still; indeed, the probability of
major war among states having nuclear weapons approaches zero.7 Waltz
thus supports Muellers conclusion, at least for so long as the world of international
politics remains bipolar, but for entirely different reasons. And as bipolarity
disintegrates, it is not clear where Waltzs argument leads: will the stability effect of
absolute weapons outweigh the instability of shifting alliances that multipolarity
breeds?8 Though Mueller essentially dismisses the neo-realist case by ignoring it, he
does not hesitate to make use of neo-realist arguments himself. He explains the stability
of the post-World War II settlement in essentially neorealist terms: the war resulted in a
stable structure of power (pp. 95-97). Understanding why war has become obsolescent
requires an examination of the political and economic calculus of war. A necessary and
sufficient, or almost sufficient, condition for the disappearance of war is that all parties
concerned calculate a negative cost benefit ratio ex ante.9 No nation will start a war
unless it expects to gain in some way by doing so. Of course the prospective gain may be
a virtual rather than an absolute one: the avoidance of an even greater loss where the
alternative course of action requires submission in one way or another to the will of the
adversary. In the starkest and simplest terms, the key proposition of the more
comprehensive explanation is that for most of human history, societies were so
organized that war could be profitable for the victors, in both economic and political
terms. But profound changes in economics and politics in the last century and a half,
following the Industrial Revolution, have changed the terms of the calculation.

Scope and assurance of nuclear warfare purifies previous notions of
conventional deterrence and prevents conflicts better
Waltz 90 Political scientist at Berkley and one of the most prominent figures in
international relations for founding neorealism and structural realism (Kenneth,
Nuclear Myths and Political Realities, American Political Science Review, September
1990, Vol. 84 No. 3) //BZ
Uneasiness over nuclear weapons and the search for alternative means of security stem
in large measure from widespread failure to understand the nature and requirements of
deterrence. Not unexpectedly, the language of strategic discourse has deteriorated over
the decades. This happens whenever discussion enters the political arena, where words
take on meanings and colorations reflecting the preferences of their users. Early in the
nuclear era deterrence carried its dictionary definition, dissuading someone from an
action by frightening that person with the consequences of the action. To deter an
adversary from attacking one need have only a force that can survive a first strike and
strike back hard enough to outweigh any gain the aggressor had hoped to realize.
Deterrence in its pure form entails no ability to defend;a deterrents trategy promises not
to fend off an aggressor but to damage or destroy things the aggressor holds dear. Both
defense land deterrence are strategies that a status quo country may follow, hoping to
dissuade a state from attacking. They are different strategies designed to accomplish a
common end in different ways, using different weapons differently weapons differently
deployed. Wars can be prevented, as they can be caused, in various ways. Deterrence
antedates nuclear weapons, but in a conventional world deterrent threats are
problematic. Stanley Baldwin warned in the middle 1930s when he was prime minister
of England that the bomber would always get through, a thought that helped to
demoralize England. It proved seriously misleading in the war that soon followed.
Bombers have to make their way past fighter planes and through ground fire before
finding their targets and hitting them quite squarely. Nuclear weapons purify
deterrent strategies by removing elements of defense and war-fighting.
Nuclear warheads eliminate the necessity of fighting and remove the
possibility of defending, because only a small number of warheads need to
reach their targests. Ironically, as multiplication of missiles increased the ease with
which destructive blows can be delivered, the distinction between deterrence and
defense began to blur. Early in President Kennedy's administration, Secretary
McNamara began to promote a strategy of Flexible Response, which was halfheartedly
adopted by NATO in 1967. Flexible Response calls for the ability to meet threats at all
levels from irregular warfare to conventional warfare to nuclear warfare. In the 1970s
and 1980s more and more emphasis was placed on the need to fight and defend at all
levels in order to "deter."T he melding of defense, war-fighting, and deterrence overlooks
a simple truth about nuclear weapons proclaimed in the book title The Absolute Weapon
(Brodie 1946). Nuclear weapons can carry out their deterrent task no matter what other
countries do. If one nuclear power were able to destroy almost all of another's strategic
warheads with practical certainty or defend against all but a few strategic warheads
coming in, nuclear weapons would not be absolute. But because so much explosive
power comes in such small packages, the invulnerability of a sufficient number of
warheads is easy to achieve and the delivery of fairly large numbers of warheads
impossible to thwart, both now and as far into the future as anyone can see. The absolute
quality of nuclear weapons sharply sets a nuclear world off from a conventional one.

First-strike capabilities deter global conflicts
Lieber and Press 6 Assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Notre Dame and International Affairs Fellow at the Council of Foreign
Relations, and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
(Keir and Daryl, The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy,
International Security, Spring 2006, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 7-44,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2006.30.4.7)
The debates over nuclear forces during the Cold War suggest that a consensus on the
foreign policy implications of U.S. nuclear primacy will remain elusive. Hawks will
welcome the new era of nuclear primacy, believing that Americas dominance in both
conventional and nuclear weapons will help deter potential adversaries from challenging
the United States or its allies. For example, China may be deterred from attacking
Taiwan if Chinese leaders understand that their small nuclear force is unlikely to prevent
the United States from coming to Taiwan's defense-and if they fear that during a crisis or
war the United States may be tempted to attack their vulnerable arsenal. Hawks will
expect Chinese leaders to reconsider the wisdom of making thinly veiled nuclear threats
against the United States.

No opportunity cost to war and conventional weapons deter incentive
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
Although, initially, these developments did not serve as a deterrent to major war, as time
progressed, the physical costs associated with such total wars became evident,
culminating in the catastrophic World Wars of the twentieth century. These wars, which
saw the great powers mobilize their entire economies to devastate one another, far
exceeded those of the past in terms of destructiveness and scale.42 The loss of life tied to
these wars was significant, with ten million people dying fighting during World War I
and another fifty million during World War II, though, in the case of the latter, more
than half of those who perished were civilians.43 Although these numbers do not
necessarily indicate that the World Wars killed a larger proportion of these societies
populations than previous conflicts, insofar as life expectancy and quality of life had
improved, the opportunity cost associated with these casualties was higher.44 Moreover,
the costs of these wars were not limited to casualties. Beyond these high death tolls,
those states that saw the wars play out on their home soil witnessed the destruction of a
large amount of their infrastructure and tangible capital stocks.45 The diversion of their
economies to the pursuit of war also resulted in most states losing years of domestic
economic growth.46 Overall, the damage wrought by the First and Second World Wars,
and the memory of such, would seem to restrain any great power leader from
undertaking aggression. Although the Second World War witnessed the use of nuclear
weapons, it is arguable that conventional weapons would have been sufficient to deter
the great powers from engaging in future wars with one another. That is, as argued by
John Mueller, while certainly devastating, the destruction wrought by conventional
weapons during these wars implies that, even if nuclear weapons had never been created,
the great powers would still be averse to warring with one another.47 As indicated above,
it would seem that many of the great powers had been sufficiently sobered by the
atrocities of the First World War and would not have engaged in the Second if it were not
for Hitlers aggressive behaviour. To believe that they would then engage in a Third, even
without the presence of nuclear weapons, thus appears questionable. Ultimately, nuclear
weapons may have increased the destructive potential of major war, but this need not
imply that the destruction before was not sufficient for deterrence to occur. As

Democracy

Democracies wont go to war high national defense, unpopular, and
dangerous to political careers
Valentino et. al 10 Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College
(Benjamin, Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War, The
Journal of Politics, April 2010, Vol. 72, No. 2, pp.528-544,
www.jstor.org/stable/40784674) //BZ
Kant's essential insight into the relationship between regime type and war was that the
greater political accountability of democratic leaders to the citizens who
bear the burdens of war should compel these leaders to be highly sensitive
to war's costs. National defense, like public roads and clean drinking water, is a classic
public good. Democracies tend to provide public goods to their populations at much
higher levels than do nondemocracies because achieving and maintaining office in a
democracy requires leaders to win the support of large numbers of citizens as part of
their winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, 2003). Few things could be more
damaging to a democratic politician's career than the widespread belief that he had
failed to protect his country from attack or needlessly sent large numbers of citizens to
their deaths. Indeed, studies of American public opinion have shown consistently that
the popularity of wars and wartime presidents tend to decline as a function of battle
deaths (e.g., Gartner 2008; Gartner and Segura 1998; Larson 1996; Mueller 1973; but see
Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler 2005/2006). Other studies have found that democratic leaders
who embroil their countries in costly or losing wars are more likely to be removed from
office (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995; Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller
1992; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; but also see Goermans and Chiozza 2004). The
check pro- vided by democratic institutions, therefore, ensures that most democratic
leaders will be highly sensitive to the costs of war. In nondemocracies, on the other hand,
leaders owe their position in office to a much smaller, and usually less-representative
winning coalition. Non- democratic leaders have an incentive to sustain the political
support of this group through the provision of private, as opposed to public goods
(Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, 2003) even if the population at large has to pay a high
price for the provision of these goods. As a result, in times of war leaders of non-
democracies might favor military policies that impose high costs on citizens who are not
part of the winning political coalition in pursuit of wartime objectives that will benefit
their inner circles. For example, nondemocracies might be more likely to adopt military
strategies and tactics such as attrition or "human wave" attacks that may be costly in
lives in an attempt to secure control over territory and extract rents from its natural
resource wealth.

War between democracies is unlikely
Gartzke et. al 01 Associate Professor, Political Science at University of
California, San Diego (Eric, Investing in Peace: Economic Interdependence
and International Conflict, International Organization, Spring 2001, Vol.
55, No. 2, pp.391-438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078636) //BZ
Scholarly attention has focused in recent years on the "democratic peace," the
observation that liberal polities rarely fight each other5 though appearing about as likely
to engage in disputes generally.6 Democracies behave differently toward each other than
toward nondemocracies.7 Researchers initially sought to verify the statistical
observation, but work increas- ingly focuses on augmenting theoretical bases for the
democratic peace. A strong strain in the literature argues that domestic political factors
explain the relative absence of military violence among liberal states. States sharing
republican norms may be more willing to bargain, compromise, and fulfill contracts than
states without these norms.8 Alternately, democratic institutions may constrain leaders
from using force against leaders who are likewise constrained.9 Still others contend that
in democracies domestic audiences or opposition groups force the revelation of private
information responsible for costly contests, averting war.10

Democracy prevents war institutional stabilizing
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
Democracies tend not to go to war, at least not with one another. While the association of
democratic political systems with peaceful international conduct may not rise to the level
of a Newtonian law of history, neither can the post- l945 absence of armed conflict
between and among democracies reasonably be classified as completely coincidental, or
due entirely to the exigencies of the periods geopolitics. The correlation is not wholly
spurious." Democracy presents institutional obstacles to war by empowering the part of
society that, in the twentieth century, pays the highest price for conflict: the public. It
mandates the open conduct of public business, making surprise attacks more difficult to
launch. It often establishes a division of power among different bodies, making any
decision, including a decision for war, time- consuming. Standard features of democratic
government - elections, transparency and the separation of powers - make the infernal
machine of war difficult to operate. The democratic version of that machine is noisy, it
has many moving parts, and the parts themselves can rebel against the operators.
Democracy has, moreover, a cultural affinity with peace: the standard procedures of
compromise, accommodation and the peaceful resolution of disputes within the borders
of a democracy, when extended to relations with other sovereign states, reduce the
chance of armed conflict. Democratic politics contribute to warlessness in yet another
way. They help to weaken the effects of, although they do not eliminate, the one cause of
war that has survived the twentieth century intact, the cause that stands, in the eyes of
some, as the chief obstacle to universal debellicisation: the structure of international
politics.

Liberal democracies prevent war non-violence and common identities
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
The spread of liberal democracy, referring to a form of democracy that embraces a
market economy, juridical rights for citizens, and a government based on universal
suffrage, is another factor often deemed to account for the obsolescence of major war,
with many scholars noting that democratic states almost never war against one
another.64 This generalization, which is referred to as the democratic peace, has not
yet been refuted by history, and while it could be argued that it is merely a coincidence,
democracies having only existed for a short amount of time, it seems unlikely that this is
the case.65 As it stands, almost all of the great powers of the international system are
democratic, with China being the only exception. Thus, if the democratic peace theory
continues to hold with time, this could be another way to account for the obsolescence of
major war. To be sure, there are a number of possible reasons that liberal democracies
may be averse to going to war with one another and why the spread of this political
system has contributed to the thesis at hand. For one, as simplistic as it may seem, there
would seem to be a set of common identities and values that pervade these societies
which may make them wary of fighting one another. According to Michael Doyle, liberal
democracies typically subscribe to the basic notion that states have the right to be free
from foreign intervention.66 They have a mutual respect for one another as citizens of
the world who are all deserving of the same rights. Liberal democratic societies are also
characterized by norms of non-violence and, domestically, tend to avoid resorting to
large-scale violence due to institutional structures for redress. As a result, it is arguable
that two liberal democratic societies embracing this kind of political culture will take a
similar non-violent approach when interacting with one another, choosing to use
diplomatic means to solve disputes.67 Moreover, closely tied to the idea of liberal
democracy is the idea of secularism. Insofar as religious beliefs triggered many wars of
the past, the official separation of church and state would seem to remove a strong
motivator for violence from these states existing arsenal.68
ILaw/IOs

International organizations prevent escalation through peaceful outlets for
deliberation and pressure Suez crisis and North Korea prove
Chiba and Fang 14 Lecturer at the Department of Government at the University of
Essex, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University (Daina and
Songying, Institutional Opposition, Regime Accountability, and International Conflict,
The Journal of Politics, July 2014, Vol. 76, No. 3, pp. 798-813)//BZ
Prominent security organizations are created with the explicit purpose of deterring and
punishing aggression. Article 1 of the UN Charter states that the purpose of the
organization is to maintain international peace and security. Furthermore, UN Chapter
VI states that an attack on one country is considered an attack on all. Similar goals and
sentiment are expressed in the charters of regional security organizations, such as the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) and Organization of American States (OAS). Many
actors may consider appealing to the UN or a regional organization to ease the tension
when a military conflict erupts. Not only could the countries involved in the conflict do
so themselves, but other members of an IO, particularly the allies or adversaries of the
parties, could also take the initiative. Moreover, in the case of the UN, the Secretary-
General has the mandate to draw the attention of the Security Council to any matter
which in her opinion may threaten international peace and security. When such an
appeal does reach the floor of an IO, deliberation and position taking are likely to ensue.
What could be achieved by such activities, and how could it be achieved? We argue that
the process of institutional deliberation and eventual position taking can transmit
important information to the domestic audiences of a country that initiated a military
crisis. Thompson (2009, 211) argues that the primary role of the UN in international
affairs is to provide politically relevant information, rather than changing countries
behavior directly through sanctions. The same is likely to be true for regional security
organizations as they have even fewer resources and mandate from their member states
than the UN. The nature of the information can vary depending on the identity of the
receiver. A domestic public would want a leader who can bring good policy outcomes.
Such outcomes would require that a leader be competent in choosing a policy that is
likely to succeed and be forthcoming about her policy intentions. In particulsar, leaders
can have different policy preferences than their publics; thus it is important for domestic
audiences to discern whether a policy choice reflects a leaders private interest or the
public interest, in addition to their usual concern about a leaders competence. The
information from IOs during a military crisis can help the public assess both its leaders
competence and her policy intentions. First, deliberation and position taking by an IO
during a crisis can reveal international support or opposition of a foreign policy, which
may not be expected by the leaders and the public of the country pursuing the policy.
During the Suez Crisis in 1956, which broke out when President Nasser of Egypt
nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France took the initiative to call a meeting of the
Security Council before they took military actions against Egypt. They felt that certain
ritual motions must be gone through. That is, the two countries intended to go through
the UN to provide a cover for their military actions and satisfy domestic pressure (Bailey
1990, 126; Kingseed 1995, 76). But the unfolding of the events surprised them. Although
they were able to block an unfavorable resolution at the Security Council, the issue
nevertheless ended up at an emergency session in the General Assembly and resulted in
a resolution that demanded an immediate cease-fire of the Western allies (Bailey 1982b,
579, 612). The resolution put Britain and France in an awkward position in justifying
their policy in front of both domestic and international audiences. Second, the
deliberation that leads to the final decision of an IO can reveal the intensity of
international support or opposition, particularly of those who are the allies of the
countries involved. The allies of a dispute initiator may need to bring an issue to an
international body to credibly convey its opposition to the action to a world audience.
British and French leaders were surprised by the level of intensity with which the United
States opposed their use of force through UN deliberation during the Suez Crisis (Bailey
1982b, 612). The prior efforts by the United States to try to resolve the crisis peacefully,
including two conferences in London, did not convince them that Eisenhower was
serious in his position against military actions by his most important Western allies. In
fact, they thought that once they began fighting, the United States would have no choice
but to support them (Nichols 2011, 284). Instead, the United States showed its resolve by
taking the issue to the UN General Assembly when Britain and France vetoed a
resolution in the Security Council. Eisenhower had to go through the UN to reveal his
intentions and resolve credibly to Britain and France, as well as to other international
actors. 2 Nassar confessed that he had previously believed that the British and French
would not embark on a policy that had not been cleared with Eisenhower; after the UN
General Assembly resolution, he expressed his appreciation for the U.S. effort and
conceded to a U.S. representative that he had been wrong (Nichols 2011, 228). More
recently, in a similar effort to demonstrate Chinas resolve to break with its longtime ally
on nuclear issues, the Chinese government joined the United States in sponsoring a UN
resolution condemning North Koreas nuclear test. It is an unusual step taken by China
to make its policy position credible to the North Korean leaders, who reacted with
surprise and anger. In both cases, the IO served an informational role that
cannot be replaced by bilateral diplomacy. Such revelation has implications for
the success of a policy and thus informs domestic audiences of their leaders competence
if they can receive the information. While an IO may not have enforcement power by
itself, its decision opens the door for member states to exert diplomatic or
economic pressure to help ensure that the decision be carried out and
coordinate their actions in doing so. After the UN General Assembly resolution
during the Suez Crisis, private-market actors and the U.S. government helped initiate a
run on the pound that put tremendous strain on Britains economy and thus its ability to
finance its military actions. When no such means are available from member states to
enforce an IO decision, public debate in the IO can still serve as a demonstration of
disapproval, as a form of pressure, or simply to place on record what the sponsor regards
as normative international behavior (Bailey 1982a, 132). On the other hand, even if a
military action is successful, lacking international support of the policy would mean that
changes brought about by the success are difficult to sustain, because there are parties
that actively seek to undermine them. Third, the deliberation in an IO and the position
taking by IO members can reveal new information concerning the true policy intentions
of a leader, which may not be in line with those of the public. During the UN deliberation
on the crisis, Britain put out a number of versions as to why it took military actions. At
first, it argued that the ultimatum that the two Western allies sent to Egypt and Israel
(with whom they conspired) was to end the initial fighting between Egypt and Israel and
to protect the Suez Canal. After their own military actions began on October 31, 1956, the
British representative to the UN, Pierson Dixon, argued that the military intervention
was to prevent the spread of conflict (Bailey 1982b, 600). Finally, on November 6, when
virtually the whole of the UN was against the Tripartite Aggression, the justification was
that the British actions were self-defense (Bailey 1982b, 612). The retreat in justifications
reflected that the then British Prime minister, Anthony Eden, did not expect that the
British public would support his military actions if they were informed of his true policy
intention, which was to take back the control of the Canal. 3 Prior to the military actions,
he kept in the dark even some of the key Cabinet members he felt would oppose his plan
(Kingseed 1995, 84).

International organizations stop conflicts despite regime type and stage of
escalation even if they cant directly stop them, only IOs can coordinate
international efforts to respond
Chiba and Fang 14 Lecturer at the Department of Government at the University of
Essex, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University (Daina and
Songying, Institutional Opposition, Regime Accountability, and International Conflict,
The Journal of Politics, July 2014, Vol. 76, No. 3, pp. 798-813)//BZ
The question of whether IOs hold promise for reducing interstate conflict continues to
attract attention in international relations research, with the answer having enormous
policy implications. Policy makers increasingly turn to IOs to mitigate tensions
in the world at a time when unilateralism is seen to be both ineffective and
unpopular. The existing empirical evidence suggests that IOs play a preventive role in
interstate conflict. What we ask in this study is a complementary question: can IOs have
a pacifying effect when a military crisis is already underway and is poised to escalate?
Our analysis suggests that the answer is positive, conditional on the degree of regime
accountability. It is important to note that either one of the two factors in the causal
mechanism alone is not sufficient to bring about the effect: without an IOs involvement
and opposition, a public may not be able to develop a well-informed opinion on which to
anchor their pressure on the government, while an IOs opposition itself lacks an
enforcement mechanism. Territorial disputes provide a hard test for our theory, and the
fact that we find evidence of IOs reversing the course of military crises on such issues
increases our confidence that our theory has broad policy relevance. First, domestic
politics provides a source of enforcement for IOs, and therefore, even if an IO does not
have the means to enforce its decisions directly, taking a stance against the escalation of
a crisis may still be meaningful. Second, because the strength of domestic enforcement
varies by regime accountability, IOs can apply external punishment (e.g., economic
sanctions) with different degrees of severity, in addition to publicizing the offense
committed by a government. More specifically, the international community should
generally apply more severe external punishment to a less accountable regime to change
its policy. It is no accident that in recent history severe sanctions have been imposed on
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to change the course of their nuclear programs; UN
opposition alone has had little effect. One could argue that the interim nuclear deal
reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UNSC in November 2013
was brought about by long-term UN sanctions. These cases suggest that the enforcement
capability of IOs is still essential for the set of countries whose domestic publics have
little means to constrain their leaders. On the other hand, strategies that can generate
domestic pressure, such as persistent public condemnation by an IO, can be more cost
efficient in forcing an accountable regime to back down from an aggressive policy. For
such a strategy to succeed, domestic audiences must have access to media reports of IO
position taking as well as the means to hold their leaders accountable. While these
conditions are often associated with democracies, recent development in digital
communications opens up the possibility that they are also present in an authoritarian
regime. With the speed with which news stories spread on the Internet, for example, an
authoritarian regime such as China, where there are 560 million Internet users, can be
under increasing public pressure in all aspects of its public policy, including foreign
policy. The technological advancement not only makes international news much more
accessible to a public, it also reduces the barriers for a large number of individuals to
coordinate their opposition to a governments policy. It is likely, then, the traditional
institutional divide between democracies and nondemocracies becomes less important
an indicator for regime accountability, and the finding of our study is applicable to a
broader range of regime types.

Organizations prevent armed conflict cooperation with regional efforts
bolster timing
Othman et al. 13 Laboratory of Citizenship & Leadership, Institute for Social Science
Studies at University Putra Malaysia (Jamilah, International Actors for Armed Conflict
Prevention: A Conceptual Exploration, Asian Social Science, 8/21/13, Vol. 9, No. 15,
http://dx.doi.org/ass.v9n15p199 )//BZ
The international society is increasingly interested in importance of' armed conflict
prevention in order to avoid or minimize unnecessary damage (Ackermann, 2003).
Indeed, many international agents such as the UN, NGOs, and regional organizations
maintain efforts and play a major role in field armed conflict prevention. However, there
have been several cases that these preventive efforts and actions fail to prevent the
outbreak of" armed conflict or unintentionally yield even negative outcomes. Hence,
increasing effectiveness of' preventive strategy is one of major issues in conflict
prevention. As explored in this article, regional organizations increase the effectiveness
of preventative strategy. Although the UN is strong agent for prevention, regional
organizations have more strength in timing of action, country context-specific, and
coordination of multilateral actions and strategies. Of course, compared with the UN,
regional organizations have limitation in capability conducting various strategies and
actions and sufficient resources, it can be simply overcame by requesting help. Other
international preventive agents such as NGOs, educational institutions, and the media
are also important, but have limitation in taking initiative due to lack of political
leadership. Therefore, to enhance the effectiveness of preventive strategy, regional
organization should take initiative, interacting with other international preventive agents
and incorporating their actions. Wedgwood (1996) also emphasized live advantages of
regional organizations in conflict management: rapid action; facilitating to build
confidence; avoiding to raising unnecessary tensions; preventing misperception among
conflict parties; and minimizing mistakes such as condescension or colonialism.

Treaties prevent war mutually assured destruction provides the greatest
deterrent
Mandlebaum 98 Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and director of the Project
on East-West Relations for the Council on Foreign Relations (Michael, Is Major War
Obsolete?, Survival, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 20-38)//BZ
Two things may be said about the realist outlook. First, its premises are accurate.
Anarchy remains the defining precept of international relations. Political independence
is a condition of conflict and there is much more of it now than there was 100 years ago.
Far from creating a global Leviathan capable of smothering all war-like impulses, the
twentieth century has seen a quadrupling of the number of independent countries since
1945. Second, in the final decade of this century, a political innovation has appeared that
reduces, although it does not eliminate, the insecurity that anarchy produces. That
innovation is a system of regulating armaments in Europe, a system that generates the
antidote to insecurity: confidence." Armaments are both a cause and a consequence of
the insecurity that anarchy creates for all sovereign states. Because they feel insecure,
states equip themselves with weapons that in turn make others feel insecure. Even with
the purest of benign intentions, no country would be willing to do without any means of
self-defence. Total disarmament is thus not possible. But a series of treaties signed at the
end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War p eriod regulate both
nuclear and non-nuclear arms in ways designed to engender confidence throughout
Europe that no country harbours aggressive intentions towards any other signatory?'-1
Two features of these treaties convey reassurance. First, the treaties make military forces
more suitable for defence than for attack. For nuclear weapons, concentrated in the
hands of two countries, the US and Russia, this involves, ironically, ratifying the
unchallengeable supremacy of the offence. When the assured capacity to destroy
the other side is mutual, it serves as a deterrent against attack. The 1995
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty reconfigures military forces on the
continent according to the principle of 'defence dominance' by mandating numerical
equality and reducing the size of the forces - numerical advantage ordinarily being
required for a successful attack - and by limiting the types of weapons on which an
attacking force would rely. The second confidence-inspiring feature of the European
arms agreements is transparency. Every country in Europe knows which armaments the
others have and what each is doing with them. (Limits are set on the scope and frequency
of military exercises lest they be used to camouflage actual attacks.) Satellite
photography and on-site inspections have turned Europe, where armed forces are
concerned, into a larger version of a department store continuously and comprehensively
monitored by video cameras to prevent shoplifting.

Hegemony

Military intervention good prevents escalation of conflicts
Kaysen 90 Economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
member of MIT's program in Defense and Arms Control Studies, and co-chair of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Committee on International Security Studies
(Carl, Is War Obsolete?, International Security, Spring 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4) //BZ
Mueller's analysis reveals inadequacies at three different levels. The inadequacies detract
least from the author's central argument at the first level, which characterizes the
chapters summarized immediately above. These chapters present a curious and
inconsistent mixture of Mueller's central thesis with a more conventional, neo-realist
analysis of events. The fears of the advocates of containment and the consequent military
responses in Korea and Vietnam were, Mueller argues, not all unreasonable at the time
(p. 213); thus U.S. intervention in Vietnam may well have prevented a third world war,
by stimulating a premature Chinese attempt at a coup in Indonesia. If delayed, the coup
attempt might well have succeeded, emboldening Khrushchev and Mao to further use of
force and accordingly creating a panic reaction in the United States leading to major war.

Hegemony is key to maintaining peace US dominance solves obsolete war
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
However, having said this, it is important to note that, in and of itself, the extended
absence of major war is a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for the obsolescence of
major war. In fact, it is arguable that the current absence is not an indication of the
institutions obsolescence, but simply a temporary period of peace within the broader
cycle of major war, a cycle linked to the rise and fall of world orders.14 On this view,
international stability is tied to the presence of a hegemon that is capable of maintaining
order in an anarchic international system due to its economic and military supremacy.15
When such hegemony is challenged by a rising power, this theory asserts that major war
is likely to break out as power becomes more equally distributed and the control
maintained by the hegemon is lost.16 Thus, just as the hegemonic presence of Great
Britain ushered in a period of peace during the nineteenth century, it would seem that
the prolonged peace we are currently witnessing may be attributable to the dominance of
the United States in the contemporary international system, a dominance that remains
open to challenge, particularly by rising powers like China and India. In this sense,
instead of indicating its obsolescence, the current absence of major war may simply be a
temporary manifestation of American hegemony that will inevitably be challenged and
lost in the future, thus continuing the cycle of major war.17

Indirect competition between great powers is inevitable moving towards
non-militaristic systems
Sangha, 11 (Karina, Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Waterloo and
received her BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Victoria, The
Obsolescence of Major War: An Examination of Contemporary War Trends, 2011, gf)
The significance of the current absence of major war cannot be stressed enough. And yet,
while significant, it is important to note that the years following the Second World War
have not been marked by absolute peace, not even for the great powers. Shortly after the
conclusion of the Second World War, the Cold War broke out, a contest between the
Soviet Union and the United States that would define the next few decades of history.
Although most of the wars fought during this period took place in the Global South, the
Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective allies often participated in these
battles, providing logistical support or even their own military forces. These proxy wars,
wherein powerful countries utilized civil conflicts in the developing world to carry out
their aggressions and extend their influence, resulted in indirect engagement among
great power forces.21 Thus, although the last half century or so has not witnessed a
major war in the proper sense, the great powers have engaged in indirect battles against
one another. In the post-Cold War period, proxy wars are no longer a well exercised
avenue for great power aggressions, and, as indicated above, in recent years, even the
United States and the Soviet Union have undergone notable reductions in the size of
their armed forces and the amount of weaponry at their disposal. Yet, in spite of this,
many great powers continue to prepare for and engage in war. What is noteworthy,
however, is that the wars in which great powers are currently involved seem to
fundamentally differ from those of the past. No longer do such wars seem to be primarily
about expanding territory or influence, nor are they fought between great powers.
Rather, these wars now seem to be generally motivated by humanitarian concerns,
taking the form of collective operations sanctioned by multilateral institutions that aim
to ensure the stability of developing countries wrought by violence.22 The North Atlantic
Treaty Organizations (NATO) efforts in Kosovo in 1999 and, more recently, in
Afghanistan would seem indicative of such forms of intervention, with many great
powers working together to protect human rights and promote human security
worldwide. To be sure, such protection is more necessary now than ever before as less
conventional forms of violence, such as terrorism, have begun to flourish.23 Ultimately,
although the great powers are still engaged in war, such aggressions are no longer
targeted at one another, nor do they appear to be aggressions in the proper sense. It
would seem that their engagement in battle has undergone an evolution away from
major war to humanitarian interventions, an evolution that can be tied to the shifting
perceptions of war among populations in the developed world.Indeed, beyond analyses
as to the frequency of major war, further support for the obsolescence of this institution
can be found in a shift towards a non-militaristic political psychology.24 Evidenced not
only by the reductions in military preparedness worldwide, but also by cultural and
political trends, this shift would seem to be cementing in the developed world,
particularly among the great powers whose behaviour is our primary concern.

AT: Diversionary Theory


Internal pressures dont cause external conflict multiple options means
diversionary wars arent the most probable
Oakes 6 B.A. in Political Science from Davidson and Ph.D. in Political Science from
Ohio State University (Amy, Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland
Islands, Security Studies, July-September 2006, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.431-463,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/0963641060102835
4)//BZ
Although high levels of domestic unrest seem to heighten embattled rulers compulsion
to act and their propensity to accept policy risks, one cannot rely solely on the magnitude
of domestic unrest to make accurate predictions regarding whether states will initiate a
diversionary conflict. Internal upheaval may be necessary for diversionary war, but it is
clearly not sufficient because internal instability does not invariably result in war. In
response to domestic turmoil, leaders typically want to do something, and they can
choose from a number of alternatives. Why, then, do leaders select one option from their
menu of policies rather than another. The existing literature follows an apparently logical
approach in considering the question of diversionary conict by examining the
relationship between domestic factors, such as unrest and the use of force. If we take a
step back, we discover that this traditional approach might be overly narrow. We need to
consider the problem from the decision-makers perspective. Governments can respond
to domestic unrest in a variety of ways, which is to say they have a menu of options,
including (1) co-opting the opposition through reform, (2) repressing the opposition by
adopting restrictive legislation or through internal policing, or (3) initiating a
diversionary conict.7 Thus, instead of the question, does domestic unrest tend to
precipitate international conict? we might ask, under what conditions do leaders
choose diversionary conict from the menu of at least theoretically available policy
options? As Gordon Craig succinctly states, The duty of the historian is to restore to the
past the options it once had.8 Ignoring the reality that governments choose from a
range of policies may mask signicant relationships between internal and external
conict.9

Diversionary wars dont work high risk, short-term, alternative policies
solve
Oakes 6 B.A. in Political Science from Davidson and Ph.D. in Political Science from
Ohio State University (Amy, Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland
Islands, Security Studies, July-September 2006, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.431-463,
http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/0963641060102835
4)//BZ
But this view is probably wrong. There are convincing reasons to expect low extractive
capacity states to initiate conflicts in response to domestic unrest. Waging a war or
provoking an international crisis under any conditions is a risky strategy. Rulers who
initiate an international conflict in the hope of generating social cohesion often seem to
foolishly ignore the lessons of history. Even when these military ventures succeed, the
hoped for rally- around-the-flag effect, when it arises, is generally short-lived." If the war
drags on and requires greater than anticipated sacrifices, the mobilization process will
aggravate the social fragmentation it was waged to ease. The Italian government, for
example, entered World War I in part to reduce internal divisions, but the longer-than-
anticipated war inflamed opposition to the state. And this war Italy won." If a
diversionary war ends in defeat, the end of the regime is often at hand. The use of
diversionary force is also a relatively poor strategy for dealing with unrest
because, unlike repression or reform, it fails to tackle the root problem-a
dissatisfied population. Any amelioration in unrest '5 dependent on the continuing
diversion of the public, a situation that could end at any time. The problem with offering
circuses without bread is that the population is still hungry after the performance ends.
Consequently, Arthur Stein warns that "political leaders who count on foreign
adventures to unify their countries and cement their positions should think again.

Diversionary war is net-negative for positions of power and economic
performance is just a drop in the bucket uniquely true for democracies
Chiozza and Goemans 4 Assistant Professor Vanderbilt University and Associate
Professor at University of Rochester (Giacomo and Hein, International Conflict and the
Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still "Ex Post" Inefficient?, American Journal of Political
Science, July 2004, Vol. 48. No. 3, pp. 604-619,
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/1519919.pdf?&acceptTC=true
&jpdConfirm=true)//BZ
The first thing to notice in Table 3 is the magnitude of the impact of domestic political
institution on leaders' survival probabilities. Regardless of the status of the economy,
and regardless of their performance in the international arena, Autocratic leaders enjoy a
level of security in office that is not matched by any other types of leaders. Authoritarian
leaders have about a 73% chance of surviving in office one year or more, about a 55%
probability of surviving at least 3 years, and a 22.5% probability of staying in power at
least 10 years. Leaders of Mixed regimes and of Democracies cannot count on
such long horizons: for them, the chances of staying in power at least one year range
from about 7.8% to 15.5%. The probability of surviving five years or more drops to even
smaller percentages. These probabilities are only marginally affected by economic
conditions. Regardless whether the economy expands or contracts, leaders' chances of
remaining in of? fice change by no more than a few percentage points. Even an
impressive economic boom in four consecutive years produces only minor tenure
benefits. But if good economic performance is not substantially re- warded, neither is
bad economic performance harshly punished. Let us consider democratic leaders
(parliamentary and presidential, respectively), that is, leaders who supposedly should be
under the constant threat of domestic adversaries ready to criticize their record. A leader
of a parliamentary (presidential) democracy who can boast of a good economy has about
a 10.6% (16.7%) chance of remaining if office one year or more, a 2.7% (7.2%) chance of
surviving three years or more, and a .7% (3.3%) chance of surviving in office for five
years or more. But if the economy is in a recession, those probabilities drop to 8.9%
(14.5%), 1.9% (5.7%), and .4% (2.4%). Thus, a poor economic performance hardly spells
doom even for democratic leaders. International conflict has a much more
pronounced effect. In the scenario we analyze, a leader is involved in a crisis or a war
as challenger for his entire first year in office, and remains at peace thereafter. This
simplified situation allows us to bring to the fore how the combination of the two
dimensions of conflict participation and outcomes affects the political careers of leaders.
First, conflict involvement as a challenger substantially increases the probability of
surviving at least one year in office for all types of leaders. Second, once the conflict is
over, outcomes have their impact. Losing substantially increases the risk of removal
compared to winning or drawing, for all types of leaders and at both levels of conflict
intensity.

Generic War

No war economic interdependence, MAD, and a fear of public backlash
checks back against irrational leaders AND even if war happens, it wont
escalate
Aziz 3-6 John Aziz is the economics and business editor at TheWeek.com. He is also
an associate editor at Pieria.co.uk. Previously his work has appeared on Business Insider.
(John, 2014, Don't worry: World War III will almost certainly never happen The Week,
http://theweek.com/article/index/257517/dont-worry-world-war-iii-will-almost-
certainly-never-happen)

Assured mutual destruction has limited recent skirmishes to proxy battles.
Next year will be the seventieth anniversary of the end of the last global conflict. There
have been points on that timeline such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and a
Soviet computer malfunction in 1983 that erroneously suggested that the U.S. had
attacked, and perhaps even the Kosovo War in 1999 when a global conflict was a real
possibility. Yet today in the shadow of a flare up which some are calling a new Cold
War between Russia and the U.S. I believe the threat of World War III has almost
faded into nothingness. That is, the probability of a world war is the lowest it has been in
decades, and perhaps the lowest it has ever been since the dawn of modernity.
This is certainly a view that current data supports. Steven Pinker's studies into the
decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have fallen and fallen since World War II.
But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Instead,
we must look at the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude
whether the decrease in war is sustainable.
So what's changed? Well, the first big change after the last world war was the
arrival of mutually assured destruction. It's no coincidence that the end of the last
global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. The possibility of
complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and
expanding total wars. Instead, the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam
and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than letting their rivalries expand into
full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. Sure, accidents could happen,
but the possibility is incredibly remote. More importantly, nobody in power wants
to be the cause of Armageddon.
But what about a non-nuclear global war? Other changes economic and social in
nature have made that highly unlikely too.
The world has become much more economically interconnected since the last global war.
Economic cooperation treaties and free trade agreements have intertwined
the economies of countries around the world. This has meant there has been a
huge rise in the volume of global trade since World War II, and especially since the
1980s.
Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and
medicine are produced on a global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. An
example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative culmination of thousands of
hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It
incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in
Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi
Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. Aluminum from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Iron,
perhaps mined in Australia. These raw materials are turned into components memory
manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United
States. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components
back and forth around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped
once again around the world to the consumer.
In a global war, global trade becomes a nightmare. Shipping becomes more expensive
due to higher insurance costs, and riskier because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship
sinkings. Many goods, intermediate components or resources including energy
supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become
temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Sometimes such as occurred in the Siege of
Leningrad during World War II the supply of food can be cut off. This is why countries
hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil, coal, and
gas. These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of
the early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. But in today's ultra-
globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation even for
large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources
required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business
and livelihoods would be wiped out.
In other words, global trade interdependency has become, to borrow a phrase from
finance, too big to fail.
It is easy to complain about the reality of big business influencing or controlling
politicians. But big business has just about the most to lose from breakdowns in global
trade. A practical example: If Russian oligarchs make their money from selling gas and
natural resources to Western Europe, and send their children to schools in Britain and
Germany, and lend and borrow money from the West's financial centers, are they going
to be willing to tolerate Vladimir Putin starting a regional war in Eastern Europe (let
alone a world war)? Would the Chinese financial industry be happy to see their multi-
trillion dollar investments in dollars and U.S. treasury debt go up in smoke? Of course,
world wars have been waged despite international business interests, but the world today
is far more globalized than ever before and well-connected domestic interests are more
dependent on access to global markets, components and resources, or the repayment of
foreign debts. These are huge disincentives to global war.
But what of the military-industrial complex? While other businesses might be hurt due
to a breakdown in trade, surely military contractors and weapons manufacturers are
happy with war? Not necessarily. As the last seventy years illustrates, it is perfectly
possible for weapons contractors to enjoy the profits from huge military spending
without a global war. And the uncertainty of a breakdown in global trade could hurt
weapons contractors just as much as other industries in terms of losing access to global
markets. That means weapons manufacturers may be just as uneasy about the prospects
for large-scale war as other businesses.
Other changes have been social in nature. Obviously, democratic countries do not tend to
go to war with each other, and the spread of liberal democracy is correlated against the
decrease in war around the world. But the spread of internet technology and social media
has brought the world much closer together, too. As late as the last world war,
populations were separated from each other by physical distance, by language barriers,
and by lack of mass communication tools. This means that it was easy for war-mongering
politicians to sell a population on the idea that the enemy is evil. It's hard to empathize
with people who you only see in slanted government propaganda reels. Today, people
from enemy countries can come together in cyberspace and find out that the "enemy" is
not so different, as occurred in the Iran-Israel solidarity movement of 2012.
More importantly, violent incidents and deaths can be broadcast to the world much more
easily. Public shock and disgust at the brutal reality of war broadcast over YouTube and
Facebook makes it much more difficult for governments to carry out large scale military
aggressions. For example, the Kremlin's own pollster today released a survey showing
that 73 percent of Russians disapprove of Putin's handling of the Ukraine crisis, with
only 15 percent of the nation supporting a response to the overthrow of the government
in Kiev. There are, of course, a few countries like North Korea that deny their citizens
access to information that might contradict the government's propaganda line. And
sometimes countries ignore mass anti-war protests as occurred prior to the Iraq
invasion of 2003 but generally a more connected, open, empathetic and democratic
world has made it much harder for war-mongers to go to war.
The greatest trend, though, may be that the world as a whole is getting richer.
Fundamentally, wars arise out of one group of people deciding that they want whatever
another group has land, tools, resources, money, friends, sexual partners, empire,
prestige and deciding to take it by force. Or they arise as a result of grudges or hatreds
from previous wars of the first kind. We don't quite live in a superabundant world yet,
but the long march of human ingenuity is making basic human wants like clothing,
water, food, shelter, warmth, entertainment, recreation, and medicine more ubiquitous
throughout the world. This means that countries are less desperate to go to war to seize
other people's stuff.
Now, the future is infinite and today's trends don't last forever. Declarations of the "end
of history" often come back to haunt those who make them, and I am well aware that a
world war is still possible. Trying to predict the actions of nations in the present is hard
enough, and further into the future becomes exponentially more difficult. (Then again,
my take is like Pascal's Wager: If I'm wrong, who's going to be around to tell me so?)
Further into the future, severe climate change, and resource depletion, for example,
could lead to new pressures to go to war (although climate mitigation and adaptation as
well as recycling technologies mean both of these possibilities are avoidable). The
development of robotic soldiers and drones may make it easier for countries (or even
corporations) to go to war. Technical errors, computer glitches, or diplomatic
misunderstandings can lead to war. Terrorism, inequality, and internal political or civil
strife can all create the pressure for war.
But the tendency toward inertia is strong. It is clear at least that the incentives for
world war are far lower than they were in previous decades, and the
disincentives are growing. The apocalyptic visions of a new world war between
nations or empires that three generations of children have been raised into continue to
diminish.
Genocide
Genocide is unpredictable and theres no proof of solvency
Journal of Genocide Research, 5 (2005 Volume 7, Issue 3 September From the
Editor: can genocide be prevented? No! Yes? Perhaps
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a723853705&fulltext=71324092
8 pages 307 308)//gingE
One fundamental problem with genocide prevention is that it cannot be tested and
results definitively proved. It can only be hypothetically asserted that a step taken
against a serious breach of human rights today may, perhaps, thwart a genocide five
years down the road. Terminating violence well before it erupts is an entirely different
ball game. Since there is no window to the future, all interventions claiming to have
halted a process heading towards genocide are mere speculations and will remain so
unless one accepts that we live in deterministic/predictable world. As long as the future
remains a tabula rasa until it becomes the present, prevention amounts to little more
than a serious guessing game. Who is prepared to say he/she saw genocide in the about
to disintegrate Yugoslavia? What were the concrete and indisputable symptoms of an
impending crisis? As far as the profession of genocide studies is concerned, primary
emphasis should be on research of actual or near genocides and not on that which
inherently - with few exceptions - is unknowable, no matter how sophisticated the
methodology of prediction. In a lecture on genocide prediction held at Yale four years
ago, this writer concluded there can be no common denominator for all genocides
allowing for a common methodology of prediction. There are, in other words, no hard
and fast early warning signals except for vague generalities that may and, more likely,
may not lead to an escalation in the direction of genocide. A primary purpose of
Genocide Studies is, of course, the hope that policy makers will be assisted by the
insights of researchers. But theirs is to be activists, the opposite mindset of disinterested
scholarship. The two - research and public policy - must be carefully kept distinct. Their
blurring leads to scholar-activists, a slippery slope to polemics and the loss of credibility.
It is a position held by Genocide Research, a stance that clearly and unambiguously
distinguishes it from other journals dealing with genocide but tempted to opening the
door to partisan prescriptions.

Irrationality makes the impact inevitable and its not our responsibility
Kuperman, 2 - Visiting Scholar for Center for International Studies, USC (Alan,
"Rwanda In Retrospect http://www.isanet.org/noarchive/kuperman.html)//gingE
As the above discussion should make clear, there is no humanitarian intervention policy
that the international community can adopt that is likely to eliminate completely massive
civilian violence from communal conflicts. However, two key lessons from this study can
help to inform a more enlightened intervention policy. First, although perhaps
disconcerting, we must acknowledge that such tragedies are most often the direct result
of conscious decisions taken by leaders of the subordinate groups that become the
primary victims of massive civilian violence. These subordinate-group leaders launch
violent challenges against the state in full knowledge that the state will retaliate violently
against members of their own group. When thousands of subordinate group civilians are
slaughtered, the international community is shocked, but leaders of the group are not
because they intentionally pursued this disastrous outcome. International voices of
opinion politicians, media, NGOs, the UN and other international organizations
react to such violence by proclaiming that the international community has a
responsibility to protect the innocent civilians of the subordinate group. However,
regardless of whether one believes in a general cosmopolitan responsibility to those
outside ones own political community, most observers would agree that the primary
responsibility for protecting a group falls on the group itself, and by delegation upon its
leaders. If a group chooses to sacrifice its own civilians, it is not obvious that the
international community automatically has a responsibility to deny the group that
choice.

They cant solve the root causes of discrimination which makes the impact
inevitable
Totten, 4 - Professor of Curriculum at the University of Arkansas (Samuel, The
intervention and prevention of genocide: Sisyphean or doable? June 1, The Journal of
Genocide Researchhttp://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=)//gingE
The critical need to address the systemic issues that contribute to conflict and, in certain
cases, to genocide If there is to be any hope of preventing genocide (versus intervening
after a genocide has already begun), then it is crucial for intergovernmental
organizations, non-governmental organizations, individual governments, policymakers,
and scholars to address the underlying root causes of human rights infractions that often
serve as catalysts to mass violenceand, in certain cases, genocide. In other words,
sincere efforts and real progress must be made in undertaking key structural changes
that address those factors underlying violent conflict. Not to do so is bound to result in
situations where the international community is condemned to reacting to grave crises
already under way in which hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands or more may
have already been killed. Among some of the many issues that need to be addressed
and the earlier the betterare: racism; rabid or racial anti-Semitism; other types of
extreme prejudice and/or discrimination that marks a particular group of people as
other international and/or national economic policies that exacerbate social tensions
and fuel conflict (including harmful economic inequalities); and scarcity of resources
(land, food, water, energy, etc.) and/or over-population, which, in turn, exacerbates the
former. Each and every one of these problems is complex, and will require in-depth
study in order to address them in an effective manner. To neglect them entirely, to
address them in a piecemeal fashion, or to attempt to patch them with a band-aid
approach is tantamount to inviting genocide to rear its ugly face yet again.

Indo-Pak War

Indian Officials want peace.
PTI 7/17, quotes the Minister of State for External Affairs in India, (July 17, 2014, India
says it is committed to building peaceful, friendly ties with Pakistan, India TV News,
http://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/india-committed-building-peaceful-friendly-
ties-pakistan-39282.html)//HH

New Delhi: India today said it remains committed to building peaceful and friendly ties
with Pakistan and expects it to abide by the commitment to prevent its territory and
territory under its control from being used for terrorism against India.
In a written reply to Rajya Sabha on the governments policies and programmes for
enhancing bilateral relationship with SAARC countries, Minister of State for External
Affairs Gen V K Singh said India will continue to engage pro-actively with all members of
the grouping.
On Pakistan, he said the government remains committed to building peaceful, friendly
and cooperative ties with Pakistan in an environment free from terror and violence. It is
Indias desire to intensify and accelerate the process of trade normalisation and
implement the steps agreed in September 2012 at the Commerce Secretary level, he
said.
The Minister said the government hopes that bilateral relations with Pakistan will
progress in economic, cultural and political fields in the same manner that Indias
relations with her other SAARC neighbours have progressed in the recent years, built on
partnerships for development and mutual prosperity.
It is Indias expectation that Pakistan abides by its commitment to prevent its territory
and territory under its control from being used for terrorism against India, Singh said.

Pakistan wants peace and cooperation - diplomatic dialogue.
APP 7/22, news source quoting the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Pakistan,
(July 22, 2014, Pakistan pursuing policy of peaceful relations in region, The Nation,
http://www.nation.com.pk/national/22-Jul-2014/pakistan-pursuing-policy-of-peaceful-
relations-in-region)//HH

WASHINGTON - Pakistan is pursuing policy of promoting peaceful relations with all
neighboring countries including Afghanistan and India and wants to resolve all
outstanding issues with New Delhi through dialogue, Tariq Fatemi, Special Assistant to
Prime Minister, said.
Whether it is Afghanistan, Iran or India, there has been a consistent effort to reach out
the leadership of these countries, Fatemi said at Washington think tank Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, while spelling out Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs
vision for regional peace.
Ambassador Fatemi said the international community including Washington recognises
Islamabads efforts towards improved relations in the region. Pakistans ambassador to
the United States Jalil Abbas Jilani was also present during the discussion, attended by
American think tank experts and analysts on South Asia.
On Afghanistan-Pakistan relations, the seasoned diplomat said, the two countries have
been able to improve bilateral ties since the inception of the new democratic government
in Pakistan in May 2013 as a lot of doubts have been cleared. Pakistan believes in a policy
of non-interference in Afghanistans internal affairs and wants other countries to adhere
to the same, he told the think tank.
With regard to Pakistan-India relations, he said Prime Minister Sharif traveled to New
Delhi for inaugural ceremony of his new Indian counterpart Narendra Modi and the two
leaders had a cordial meeting.
It was a serious and focused engagement in which Prime Minister Sharif made it clear
that he wanted the relationship to move on the right note.
Pakistan wants to resolve the political, security and trade issues with India through a
comprehensive dialogue, the special assistant said. The two prime ministers decided
that the dialogue process would be resumed at the level of foreign secretaries.
Islamabad, he said, is waiting for Indian response on where the two foreign secretaries
would meet. Fatemi said Pakistan is confident that before the two prime ministers meet
again, their foreign secretaries would have met.
He said Pakistan and India would work on realising goal of non-discriminatory market
access, once the dialogue is revived.
It is not only good for Pakistan and India but the entire region housing 1.5 billion people
that India and Pakistan live in a relationship that is mutually advantageous.

Recent bilateral trade talks are revitalizing relations.
India Briefing 6/30, Indian News Source, quotes the Pakistani Federal Minister for
Commerce, (June 30, 2014, India and Pakistan Move to Liberalize Trade Ties,
http://www.india-briefing.com/news/india-pakistan-move-liberalize-trade-ties-
8641.html/)//HH

DELHI Indias Minister for Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman will discuss a
new roadmap for trade liberalization with Pakistani Federal Minister for Commerce
Khurram Dastgir Khan next month.
Easing visa restrictions, eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade, promoting mobile
connectivity and opening additional banking channels between the two countries are
expected to be among several key issues the two ministers discuss on the sidelines of the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Ministerial Council in
Bhutan on July 24.
I will meet the Indian state minister for commerce for resumption of bilateral trade
talks, Khan was quoted as saying last week. We missed an early deadline of December
31, 2012 to remove all hurdles in trade relations. Now the two governments will try to
agree on [a] fresh roadmap.
Talk of a roadmap for the normalization of trade relations follows an unprecedented
meeting between Indian PM Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif
at Modis swearing-in ceremony last month.
Sharifs visit to New Delhi in May was the first by a Pakistani leader since accusations of
Pakistani involvement in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks dealt a near-fatal blow to the
two countries relationship and froze progress on the resolution of outstanding political
and economic issues.


Iran War
US-Iran alliance now
Cohen and Yan, 6/18/14 *CNN News Wire Editor, form AP Bureau Chief, **CNN
News Editor (Tom and Holly, U.S. and Iran: From sworn enemies to partners on Iraq?
CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/18/politics/us-iran-iraq/)//IS
Defense Minister Chuck Hagel noted Wednesday that the United States and Iran
cooperated early in the Afghanistan war. He told a congressional panel that "we had
worked with the Iranians on that western border of Afghanistan." "So there's some
history here of sharing common interests," Hagel said, citing "significant differences"
with Iran, but adding that "I don't think these issues come neatly wrapped in geopolitical
graduate school papers." Even a conservative member of Congress who once advocated
military strikes on Iran said Washington may need Tehran's help. "I'll talk to anybody to
help our people from being captured or killed," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina said. "And this is a time where the Iranians in a small way might help."
Graham made clear he disapproved of Iran, calling authorities "thugs and killers," then
summed up the situation by saying: "But we are where we are." A host of experts agree,
including Meghan O'Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser during the Iraq
war. "There is a political solution here that I think could be both in Iran's interest and the
U.S. interest," O'Sullivan said. Whether the United States likes it or not, working with
Iran on the Iraq crisis might be a necessary evil, retired Maj. Gen. James "Spider" Marks
said. "There are necessary steps that we have to take with Tehran that we've probably
never taken before, and would prefer not to take," Marks said.

US and Iran alliance forming now
Miami Herald, 6/25/14 (A U.S.-Iran alliance on Iraq? Is the enemy of our enemy
our friend? The Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/25/4201185/a-
us-iran-alliance-on-iraq-is.html)//IS
But those negatives apparently arent enough to prevent Washington from considering
calling Iran a potential partner in the battle against a group of al Qaida-inspired
militants who are trying to overtake Iraq. Washington and the Shiite Muslim-led
government in Tehran find themselves on the same side in defending the Shiite-
dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki against the assault from
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group thats quickly and
violently gained control of swaths of Iraq. With options limited, the combination of crisis
and mutual interest might make possible what many foreign policy experts once thought
unthinkable: that the U.S. and Iran, archenemies since the taking of 50 hostages at the
U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, become partners, frenemies for the sake of Iraq. It may
be an unholy alliance to some folks but countries dont have allies, they have interests,
said retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a senior adviser at the National Security
Network, a liberal research center. And in this case, Iran is a natural ally of the U.S.
They want a stable country around them, and thats what we want. From a purely
realpolitik, Kissinger view of the world, we may have some strange bedfellows here. The
White House apparently thinks so, too. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns
discussed the Iraq situation last week with Iranian officials on the sidelines of a meeting
in Vienna on Irans nuclear program. President Barack Obama, in announcing the
deployment of 300 advisers to Iraq last week and holding out the possibility of airstrikes,
noted that Iran can play a constructive role if it is helping to send the same message to
the Iraqi government that were sending, which is that Iraq only holds together . . . if the
interests of Sunni, Shia and Kurds are all respected.
International actors check Iran War
Straw 2/15/2013 (John Whitaker "Jack, Labour MP since 1979, Cabinet member from
1997 to 2010, Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006
under Blair, Even if Iran gets the Bomb, it wont be worth going to war, The Telegraph,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9892742/Even-if-Iran-gets-the-Bomb-it-
wont-be-worth-going-to-war.html, DM)

If Iran were to attack Israel, or, say, one of its Arab neighbours, international law is clear:
the victim has the right to retaliate. But such an attack is highly improbable. Under
Article 42 of the UN Charter, the Security Council can authorise military action where
theres a threat to international peace and security. Such resolutions were the legal
basis for the actions against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and Libya in 2011. But there are
no such Article 42 resolutions against Iran; and there wont be China and
Russia would veto them. There are Security Council resolutions against Iran under
Article 41, but this Article explicitly excludes measures involving the use of force. These
resolutions have progressively tightened international sanctions against Iran, because of
its lack of full co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With
even tougher measures imposed by the US and the EU, sanctions have severely restricted
Irans international trade, and led to the collapse of its currency, and high inflation.

US wont get drawn in to Iran-Israeli war
Solomon 2/13/2014 Columnist with the National Post, contributor to the WSJ,
coauthor seven books, Formerly advisor to President Jimmy Carters Task Force on
Global Resources and the Environment (Lawrence, The U.S. Won't Save Israel From
Iran, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/israel-
iran_b_4771465.html, DM)
WE DO NOT DEFEND THE ABLEIST LANGUAGE OF THE AUTHOR

It should surprise no one that President Barack Obama didn't have Israel's
back -- he has too many personal associations with Israel-haters to make him a reliable
ally. But more fundamentally, it should surprise no one that an American president
doesn't have Israel's back. American presidents have routinely ignored Israel's security
needs, or turned on Israel, when doing so served American political interests. Americans
look after American interests and if Israel's vital interests clash with American interests
of the day, Americans will look after their own needs. Before Israel declared
independence in 1948, the U.S. under President Harry Truman demanded that Israel
postpone its declaration and place itself under UN Trusteeship. If Israel, didn't, warned
Truman's Secretary of State, George Marshall, the U.S. would impose an arms embargo
on Israel, even though the British, Jordanians and Egyptians were arming the Arabs. The
effect of the Arabs being armed and the Israelis unarmed, the Americans said, would be a
second Holocaust. The Americans also threatened UN sanctions against Israel. The
American position was understandable -- the U.S. expected Israel to lose and didn't want
to needlessly offend the much more populous and energy-rich Arab invaders. The U.S. at
the time was competing with the Soviet Union -- this was the beginning of The Cold War
-- and it didn't want Arab oil to fall under Soviet control. When Israel declared
independence the Americans remained true to their word -- they imposed an embargo,
and maintained it throughout Israel's war of independence, refusing to allow any arms
sales to Israel, or even gifts of arms by American Jews, even though Israel was heavily
outnumbered and outgunned by six Arab armies. When it became clear in 1949 that
Israel would win its War of Independence, Truman remained unsympathetic to Israel,
demanding that Israel give up its territorial gains and make concessions to the Arabs,
even though the Arabs were the aggressors and even though the war was still ongoing.
Truman saw Israel's actions as "dangerous to peace" according to Truman's ambassador
to Israel, who delivered Truman's demands, amid threats of UN sanctions, to Israel's
Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. President Dwight D Eisenhower, who succeeded
Truman, was no more sympathetic to Israel's security needs. When Egypt violated
international law and the Armistice Agreement with Israel by blockading shipping in to
Israel, the Eisenhower Administration stayed silent -- his policy was pro-Egyptian
because he hoped to woo Egypt's leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to the anti-Communist
camp. Eisenhower also became hostile to Israel. In 1956, after Egypt seized the Suez
Canal, an international waterway owned by the U.K. and France, these two countries and
Israel jointly invaded Egypt to restore their rights and to open up shipping. Although
U.S. president Eisenhower acknowledged that Egypt's "grave and repeated provocations"
had led to the invasion, he was so determined to curry friendship with the Arab world
that he forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw. To force the UK to do his
bidding, Eisenhower threatened to financially cripple [devastate] the UK - America's ally
in World War II -- by selling U.K. bonds to devalue the pound and blocking a $1-billion
IMF loan that the U.K. desperately needed. And to get Israel to withdraw from territories
captured in the war, Eisenhower threatened Israel with expulsion from the UN, adding
gravitas to his demands by making them in a radio and television address to the
American people from the White House. Other U.S. presidents also treated Israel
harshly. Although we think of Israel as being militarily dependent on the U.S., the truth
is far different. In the first decades following Israel's creation in 1948, the U.S. was less
friend than foe, generally siding with Israel's Arab neighbours. The U.S. not only sold
arms to Israel's enemies, it also lavished them with economic and military aid through a
Marshall-type plan for the Middle East. Meanwhile, the U.S. gave Israel little economic
aid and no military aid in the early years -- the first military grant wouldn't come until
1974, a quarter century after Israel's founding. Until the Kennedy Administration in the
1960s, when the U.S. allowed Israel to purchase defensive anti-aircraft HAWK missiles --
but no planes, tanks, or offensive weapons -- the U.S. refused to even sell arms to help
the fledgling state defend itself. In every war involving Israel, the Arab states were the
aggressors yet in every war, the Israelis knew they were fighting not only against the
Arabs on the battlefield but against the U.S. diplomatically. The U.S. pressured Israel,
generally successfully, to stop its military advances and to give up war gains. The U.S.
under President Ronald Reagan opposed Israel's decision to destroy Saddam Hussein's
Osirak nuclear reactor, and when Israel went ahead in 1981 Reagan embargoed delivery
of F-16 fighters to punish Israel. The U.S. under President George H Bush insisted that
Israel not retaliate against Iraq when Saddam Hussein launched 39 Scud missiles into
Israel. The U.S. under President George W Bush opposed Israel's decision to destroy
Syria's nuclear reactor, which Israel did anyway, and it opposed an Israeli military strike
on Iran. The U.S. has historically been strongly predisposed against Israeli military
action. Israel is on its own. The stars are aligned for a unilateral attack.
No chance of Iran war Hype, no incentive, and too similar to Iraq
Emanuel 1/20/2012 Formerly of the air force, was an reporter in Iraq, degree from
UGA, currently studying at Harvard, has written for CBS, USA Today, and the WSJ (Jeff,
Why Were Not Going to War with Iran, Red State,
http://www.redstate.com/diary/jeff_emanuel/2012/01/20/why-were-not-going-to-war-
with-iran/, DM)

Thats right: the claim that America or Israel is on the cusp of attacking Iran is as old as
the Islamic Republic itself. Such assertions have peppered media reports, op-eds, and
other commentary for three decades and change at this point a fact which should give
folks pause about taking such claims any more seriously now than at any point in recent
history. Yes, Iran is hostile to the U.S. and its interests, and yes, it is almost certainly
working as quickly as it can on the development of a nuclear weapon. However, despite
growing hysteria on the part of media and analysts, and despite public debates
like that being hosted by Foreign Affairs (the best piece among which is this one by Colin
Kahl, former head of Middle East policy at the Pentagon), a western-initiated war with
Iran is little more likely now than at any point in the last three decades, if not altogether
less so. This isnt to minimize Irans nuclearization effort as an issue. President Obama
clearly has a decision to make when it comes to dealing with Irans apparently inexorable
march toward becoming a nuclear weapons state, as will the next president should
Obama be defeated in this years election. Thus far, the administration has issued firm
statements while consistently moving its red line of acceptable nuclear progress
backward in response to each Iranian action. As Pepe Escobar noted at CBSNews
Online: Lets start with red lines. Here it is, Washingtons ultimate red line, straight
from the lions mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the
Iranians, Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that theyre
trying to develop a nuclear capability. And thats what concerns us. And our red line to
Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. Thats a red line for us. How strange, the way
those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was
enrichment of uranium [Auth. note: As Olli Heinonen has recently noted, the Fordow
plant is currently producing 20% enriched uranium an important step in producing
weapons-grade uranium] . Now, its evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be
brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The
most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence
Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon
(as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday). Why does the standard
U.S. response to Irans advancement past each impassable line-in-the-sand ultimatum
appear to be to shrug, take ten more paces backward, draw a new line, and demand that
Iran not cross that one? The two-fold answer to that is as simple as it is frustrating for
those who prioritize non-proliferation (particularly to state supporters of terror like Iran)
very highly. First, it is highly unlikely that an aerial campaign would be able to
successfully eliminate Irans nuclear program, which is made up of deeply buried,
hardened targets spread across multiple sites (though Matthew Kroenig has argued in
Foreign Affairs that the majority of sites that serve as the most critical targets are within
reach of conventional airborne munitions). Further, attempting to strike these sites
would have a net negative effect on the U.S.s interests; as President Bushs Director of
Central Intelligence Michael Hayden reiterated just this week, When we talked about
this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that
which we are trying to prevent an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear
weapon and that would build it in secret. A certain effect of striking or even eliminating
the program (if that were possible) but leaving the regime intact would be to double their
resolve to establish a nuclear weapons capability, in no small part because success in that
pursuit would provide it the security of deterrence (and the freedom to continue its effort
to be a bully in the region and beyond), as North Korea has repeatedly demonstrated.
Given these limitations and first-order effects, the next-best option would seem to be to
carry out an operation that simultaneously eliminated Teherans nuclear sites and
deposed the regime. This is akin to what FPIs Jamie Fly and AEIs Gary Schmitt have
suggested, with one major difference: Fly and Schmitt appear to be calling for an solely
aerial campaign (augmented, almost certainly, by other conventional standoff
weaponry), but with a target list that is expanded beyond sites that are directly related to
the nuclear program. They write: A limited strike against nuclear facilities would not
lead to regime change. But a broader operation might. It would not even need to be a
ground invasion aimed specifically at toppling the government. The United States would
basically need to expand its list of targets beyond the nuclear program to key command
and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and
facilities associated with other key government officials. The goal would be to
compromise severely the governments ability to control the Iranian population. This
would require an extended campaign, but since even a limited strike would take days and
Iran would strike back, it would be far better to design a military operation that has a
greater chance of producing a satisfactory outcome. With all due respect to Fly and
Schmitt, its a very good thing that this suggestion will never come to fruition, in large
part because it is one of the worst suggestions that has been put forth to date for dealing
with the Iranian nuclear issue. If simply bombing those sites which can be identified and
reached with conventional weapons is an ineffective way of dealing with Irans program,
then attacking those sites and striking Teherans key command and control elements
from 30,000 feet AGL or from up to 1,000 nautical miles away, then leaving the
resulting chaotic mess for the Iranian people (and those still remaining in the military-
governmental complex) to clean up and rebuild from is an exponentially more effective
way of ensuring that whatever does emerge from the rubble will not in any way be
positively disposed to the U.S. and its interests. In other words, the idea that the best
possible option on Iran would be to fly in, break everything (in hopes of prompting
regime collapse), and then immediately leave is, quite simply, mind-boggling. This
brings us to the second reason why an attack on Iran is as unlikely now as it has been at
any time in recent history, if not more: the fact that the only option to truly ensure that
the existing program is done away with, and to create the most favorable odds that Irans
efforts at nuclearization would not be reconstituted in greater secrecy at the earliest
possible moment, would be to mount an air-and-ground invasion that deposed the
regime; disbanded the Revolutionary Guard; and manually searched for; reported, and
destroyed all weapons of mass destruction and WMD production facilities that it found;
and trusted that freeing the people from the tyranny of their government and the
punishment it had brought, and meted out, upon them would immediately win them to
Americas side and its cause. Does that sound familiar? If not, then George Santayana
would like to have a quick word with you, because Ive just basically described the 2003
coalition invasion of Iraq, and that is precisely why no such invasion of Iran is in the
offing at any time in the near future. Had America not had the experience of breaking
Iraq, and learning the hard way just how difficult it is to put such a Humpty Dumpty
together again, then a campaign against Iran might not be such a far-fetched idea.
However, with Iraq planted firmly in our short-term memory (despite the withdrawal of
uniformed troops this December, that effort is still far from over), and with Afghanistan
still so unstable that the coalition is once again stepping up peace and power-sharing
talks with the Taliban, the simple and unavoidable fact is that there will not be even a
fraction of the public, expert, or official governmental support for an invasion of Iran
that there was for the action taken against Afghanistan and Iraq last decade.
Additionally, Irans geographic location virtually guarantees that militants will stream
into the Persian state from every direction in massive numbers, augmenting an organic
insurgency and waging a low- and medium-intensity conflict and domestic terror
campaign that could well make both Afghanistan and Iraq seem relatively tame in
comparison. These facts argue very convincingly for the risk of an attack on Iran being
as low as it has been for the preceding decades, despite the constant media speculation
and hype about a supposedly impending attack that has been a feature of reports and
analyses across that period.
Middle east war
No impact
no impact to middle east warnational incentives and empirics
Maloney and Takeyh 07 *senior fellow for Middle East Policy at the Saban Center
for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution AND **senior fellow for Middle East
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (Susan and Ray, International Herald
Tribune, 6/28, Why the Iraq War Won't Engulf the Mideast,
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0628iraq_maloney.aspx) //AD

Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war
either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining
the upper hand in Iraq.
The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians
everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces
to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could
threaten domestic political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward
regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending
troops to Iraq.
Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis
returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict.
Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the 1990s, when Arab
fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant
about who is coming in and going from their countries.
In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested approximately 200 people
suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along part
of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom.
Finally, there is no precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they
are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the Saudis did send small contingents to fight
the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or never made it. In the
1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in
establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the
Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was
regarded as someone else's fight.
Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman
and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American
fight.
As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests
through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and
influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely
and unnecessary.
So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may
abet, but will remain within the borders of Iraq.
The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its
experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to
contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East.

No Middle East escalation - empirics
Drum, 07 political blogger for the Washington Monthly (Kevin, The Chaos Hawks,
9/9, Washington monthly,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_09/012029.php) //AD

Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost
impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in
Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will
become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go
up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven
bigger than the entire continent of Europe.
Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East.
Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the
second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in
Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War
and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade.
No regional conflagration.

No escalation Kerry peace talks
Jakes 7-20 - AP National Security Writer at The Associated Press, Washington
Correspondent at Hearst Newspapers, Chief Political Writer at Times Union of Albany
(Lara, John Kerry headed to Middle East in bid for cease-fire, 7-20-14, Denver Post,
Associated Press, http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_26184120/u-s-sharpens-
criticism-hamas-urges-cease-fire) //AD

WASHINGTON Secretary of State John Kerry is heading back to the Middle East as
the Obama administration attempts to bolster regional efforts to reach a ceasefire and
sharpens its criticism of Hamas in its conflict with Israel.
The State Department said Kerry would leave early Monday for Egypt where he will join
diplomatic efforts to resume a truce that had been agreed to in November 2012. In a
statement Sunday evening, department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the U.S. and
international partners "deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation, and the
loss of more innocent life."
The Obama administration has toned down its earlier rebuke of Israel for attacks on the
Gaza Strip that have killed civilians, including children, although both President Barack
Obama and Kerry expressed concern about the rising death toll.
The U.S. will urge the militant Palestinian group to accept a cease-fire agreement that
would halt nearly two weeks of fighting with Israel. More than 430 Palestinians and 20
Israelis have been killed in that time.
Cairo has offered a cease-fire plan that is backed by the U.S. and Israel. But Hamas has
rejected the Egyptian plan and is relying on governments in Qatar and Turkey for an
alternative proposal. Qatar and Turkey have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is
also linked to Hamas but banned in Egypt.
Making the rounds of Sunday talk shows, Kerry pointed to Hamas' role in the violence.
"It's ugly. War is ugly, and bad things are going to happen," Kerry told ABC's "This
Week." But, he added, Hamas needs "to recognize their own responsibility."
Both Obama and Kerry said Israel has a right to defend itself against frequent rocket
attacks by Hamas from the Gaza Strip. Kerry accused Hamas of attempting to sedate and
kidnap Israelis through a network of tunnels that militants have used to stage cross-
border raids.
He said on CNN's "State of the Union" that Hamas must "step up and show a level of
reasonableness, and they need to accept the offer of a cease-fire."
Then, Kerry said, "we will certainly discuss all of the issues relevant to the underlying
crisis."
The nearly two-week conflict appeared to be escalating as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was
already in the region to try to revive cease-fire efforts.

Alt cause
No solvency - Saudi-Iran conflict alt cause
Green and Admon 09 - research fellows at the Middle East Media Research Institute
("Saudi-Iranian Tension Increases Following Clashes Between Houthi Rebels, Saudi
military, 11-13-09, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print3782.htm) //AD

The current clashes between the Saudi security forces and the Houthi rebels who have
infiltrated Saudi Arabia from Yemen have intensified the steadily escalating conflict
between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is part of the cold war in the Middle East between
the pro-Saudi camp and the pro-Iranian camp. Saudi Arabia and Yemen accuse Iran of
encouraging, training, funding, and arming the Houthi rebels. Iran's goals, they claim,
are to increase its regional influence and to undermine their stability and security, and
perhaps also to gain a safe sea route to Sudan and northward. Articles in Saudi and
Yemeni dailies called the Houthis "Iranian agents," and argued that they, like Hizbullah,
are selling their blood and their land in order to further Iran's interests. The dailies
claimed that Iran is stirring up conflicts in Sunni countries as part of its efforts to export
its revolution, and called on these countries to retaliate by encouraging Sunni insurgency
in Iran. Since the outbreak of the clashes, Saudi Arabia has enjoyed broad support from
Arab countries, including even countries belonging to the pro-Iranian camp, which could
indicate the beginning of a change in their orientation. For example, Syria condemned
the "infringement on the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia" and supported "its
legitimate right to defend its sovereignty and its territory." [1] Solidarity with Saudi
Arabia was also expressed at a conference of the Gulf Cooperation Council, held in Qatar.
[2] The Saudi-Iranian tension also intensified lately on the religious level, in the wake of
some recent statements by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad relating to the upcoming Hajj celebrations in Saudi Arabia.
These were perceived by the Saudis as inciting against Saudi Arabia and threatening it,
and as having the potential to spark political riots similar to the July 1987 clashes
between Iranian pilgrims and the Saudi security forces. Voices in Saudi Arabia protested
that Iran was trying to exploit the religious festival for political purposes and even to
sabotage it in order to tarnish Saudi Arabia's reputation and undermine its standing as
the Custodian of the Two Holy Places.

Resource War
No ! Misc
No impact to resource wars, its all hype
Victor 11/2007 -professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific
Studies and director of the Schools new Laboratory on International Law and
Regulation at the University of California at San Diego, PHD In Political Science from
MIT (David, What Resource Wars?, National Interest, Page 1)

Most of this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy.
Classic resource wars are good material for Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely
occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong some
conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing them
requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and
largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do arise, the
weak link isnt a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance. Resource Wars are
largely back in vogue within the U.S. threat industry because of Chinas spectacular
rise. Brazil, India, Malaysia and many others that used to sit on the periphery of the
world economy are also arcing upward. This growth is fueling a surge in world demand
for raw materials. Inevitably, these countries have looked overseas for what they need,
which has animated fears of a coming clash with China and other growing powers over
access to natural resources.
No resource wars - Empirics
Victor 11/2007 -professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific
Studies and director of the Schools new Laboratory on International Law and
Regulation at the University of California at San Diego, PHD In Political Science from
MIT (David, What Resource Wars?, National Interest, Page 6)

The sweep of history points against classic resource wars. Whereas colonialism
created long, oppressive and often war-prone supply chains for resources such as oil and
rubber, most resources today are fungible commodities. That means it is almost always
cheaper and more reliable to buy them in markets. At the same time, much higher
expectations must be placed on China to tame the pernicious effects of its recent efforts
to secure special access to natural resources. Sudan, Chad and Zimbabwe are three
particularly acute examples where Chinese (and in Sudans case, Indian) government
investments, sheltered under a foreign-policy umbrella, have caused harm by rewarding
abusive governments. That list will grow the more insecure China feels about its ability
to source vital energy and mineral supplies. Some of what is needed is patience because
these troubles will abate as China itself realizes that going out is an expensive strategy
that buys little in security. Chinese state oil companies are generally well-run
organizations; as they are forced to pay the real costs of capital and to compete in the
marketplace, they wont engage in these strategies. The best analog is Brazils experience,
where its state-controlled oil company has become ever smarterand more market
orientedas the Brazilian government has forced it to operate at arms length without
special favors. That has not only allowed Petrobras to perform better, but it has also
made Brazils energy markets function better and with higher security.
No impact to resource wars Its more likely to cause cooperation
Verhoeven 5/29/2012 -lecturer in the Department of Politics and International
Relations, Oxford University (Harry, Dambisa Moyos Resource War Argument is
Flawed, Politics In Spires, http://politicsinspires.org/dambisa-moyos-resource-war-
argument-is-flawed/)

Yet there is a strong and deep academic literature, that draws on extensive
interdisciplinary evidence from economics, political science, anthropology and history,
which shows how simplistic and misguided such arguments about resource wars are,
both when approached theoretically and through Asian or African case studies. Both
historically and contemporarirly, growing resource scarcity does not tend
to lead to conflict but to cooperation, even (or perhaps especially) in regions like
the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Moreover, the idea that wars are caused by
exogenous environmental triggers as opposed to endogenous political-economic
drivers has always been very convenient for powerful groups who try to depolicitise
asymmetries in power and wealth and argue that scarcity is not man-made but really an
Act of God that we cant or shouldnt contest. Moyo is similarly simplistic about China,
presenting the country as a largely monolithic actor that thinks with one mind and has
one purpose. In her latest book, Winner Takes All, there is little discussion of the intense
rivalry between different factions within the Chinese Communist Party and the impact
this has on foreign and economic policy; there was also little discussion of other key
faultlines federal government vs. regional players, state-owned enteprises competing
among themselves, as well as against purely private actors that explain why it is
unhelpful to generalise and see everything through a One China lens. Such broad
brushstrokes overstate the degree of coherence in Chinese policy, particularly vis--vis
Africa, and offer little in terms of opportunities for policy engagement with different
Chinese actors.
No risk of resource wars just threat construction and even if there was a
war, resources are not the root cause
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)

Rising energy prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have
animated fears that the world may be headed for a spate of "resource wars" - hot
conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources. Such fears come in many
stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells especially loudly in three
areas.
First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of
the resources it needs - such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals - and has already
"gone out" to the world with the goal of securing what it wants. Violent conflicts may
follow as the country shunts others aside. A second potential path down the road to
resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-
rich countries. Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the
hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which could multiply stresses on
natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about
mass migrations.
Most of this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy.
Classic resource wars are good material for Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely
occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong some
conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing
them requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are
used and largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do
arise, the weak link isn't a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance.

No resource wars no scarcity and its cheaper to buy rather than steal
goods
Tetrais 12 - Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratgique
(FRS), Past positions include: Director, Civilian Affairs Committee, NATO Assembly
(1990-1993); European affairs desk officer, Ministry of Defense (1993-1995); Visiting
Fellow, the Rand Corporation (1995-1996); Special Assistant to the Director of Strategic
Affairs, Ministry of Defense (1996-2001), (Bruno, "The Demise of Ares: The End of War
as We Know It?", Summer 2012, csis.org/files/publication/twq12SummerTertrais.pdf)
**edited for gendered language // we dont endorse gendered-language

The Unconvincing Case for New Wars Is the demise of war reversible? In recent
years, the metaphor of a new Dark Age or Middle Ages has flourished. 57 The rise of
political Islam, Western policies in the Middle East, the fast development of emerging
countries, population growth, and climate change have led to fears of civilization,
resource, and environmental wars. We have heard the New Middle Age theme
before. In 1973, Italian writer Roberto Vacca famously suggested that mankind
(humankind) was about to enter an era of famine, nuclear war, and civilizational
collapse. U.S. economist Robert Heilbroner made the same suggestion one year later.
And in 1977, the great Australian political scientist Hedley Bull also heralded such an
age. 58 But the case for new wars remains as flimsy as it was in the 1970s.
Admittedly, there is a stronger role of religion in civil conflicts. The proportion of
internal wars with a religious dimension was about 25 percent between 1940 and 1960,
but 43 percent in the first years of the 21st century. 59 This may be an effect of the
demise of traditional territorial conflict, but as seen above, this has not increased the
number or frequency of wars at the global level. Over the past decade, neither Western
governments nor Arab/Muslim countries have fallen into the trap of the clash of
civilizations into which Osama bin Laden wanted to plunge them. And ancestral
hatreds are a reductionist and unsatisfactory approach to explaining collective violence.
Professor Yahya Sadowski concluded his analysis of post-Cold War crises and wars, The
Myth of Global Chaos, by stating, most of the conflicts around the world are not rooted
in thousands of years of history they are new and can be concluded as quickly as they
started. 60 Future resource wars are unlikely. There are fewer and fewer conquest
wars. Between the Westphalia peace and the end of World War II, nearly half of conflicts
were fought over territory. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been less than 30
percent. 61 The invasion of Kuwait a nationwide bank robbery may go down in history as
being the last great resource war. The U.S.-led intervention of 1991 was partly driven by
the need to maintain the free flow of oil, but not by the temptation to capture it. (Nor was
the 2003 war against Iraq motivated by oil.) As for the current tensions between the two
Sudans over oil, they are the remnants of a civil war and an offshoot of a botched
secession process, not a desire to control new resources. Chinas and Indias energy
needs are sometimes seen with apprehension: in light of growing oil and gas scarcity, is
there not a risk of military clashes over the control of such resources? This seemingly
consensual idea rests on two fallacies. One is that there is such a thing as oil and gas
scarcity, a notion challenged by many energy experts. 62 As prices rise, previously
untapped reserves and non-conventional hydrocarbons become economically attractive.
The other is that spilling blood is a rational way to access resources. As shown by the
work of historians and political scientists such as Quincy Wright, the economic
rationale for war has always been overstated. And because of globalization,
it has become cheaper to buy than to steal. We no longer live in the world of 1941,
when fear of lacking oil and raw materials was a key motivation for Japans decision to
go to war. In an era of liberalizing trade, many natural resources are fungible goods.
(Here, Beijing behaves as any other actor: 90 percent of the oil its companies produce
outside of China goes to the global market, not to the domestic one.) 63 There may be
clashes or conflicts in regions in maritime resource-rich areas such as the South China
and East China seas or the Mediterranean, but they will be driven by nationalist
passions, not the desperate hunger for hydrocarbons.

No resource wars empirics prove cooperations more likely
Koubi et al. 14 - Senior Scientist and Professor at the Center for Comparative and
International Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and professor
at the Institute of Economics at the University of Bern (Valley, Do natural resources
matter for interstate and intrastate armed conflict?, Journal of Peace Research, March
2014, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 227-243,)//BZ
Much of the existing empirical work on the resource scarcityconflict nexus relies on
qualitative studies of specific countries or regions (e.g. Homer-Dixon, 1994, 1999;
Percival & Homer-Dixon, 1998; Bchler et al., 1996; Kahl, 2008; Brown, 2010). This
research identifies various cases in which resource scarcity seems to have contributed to
violent conflict, mostly at local or national levels. However, social, economic, and
political conditions, which may also affect conflict besides resource scarcity, vary
considerably between different types of resources as well as areas of the world. Case
studies of specific countries or regions can hardly account for these different conditions,
and it is therefore difficult to generalize their results. Hence, we concentrate on the
recent large-N research in the remainder of this section, and structure the discussion
according to conflict types, that is, interstate vs. intrastate conflict and the kind of
resource under study. First, with regard to interstate conflict, extant quantitative work
almost exclusively focuses on one specific type of renewable resource, namely water.
Empirical analyses in this context suggest that states tend to cooperate rather than fight
over shared water resources (Dinar et al., 2007; Brochmann, 2012) and that
institutionalized agreements can reduce dispute risk (Zawahri & Mitchell, 2011; Tir &
Stinnett, 2012). The theoretical underpinning of much of this research is that joint
democracy and/or international water management institutions facilitate cooperative
solutions to water problems even in situations of scarcity. Furthermore, side-payments,
issue linkages, or economic and political ties between countries also prevent interstate
conflict over water. While scholars do not fully rule out conflict over scarce water
resources, they find that if conflict materializes then it occurs in the form of disputes and
political tensions, but not in the form of armed hostilities or even water wars (e.g.
Gledisch & Hegre, 2000; Gleditsch et al., 2006; Hensel, Mitchell & Sowers, 2006;
Brochmann & Hensel, 2009; Dinar, 2009). Second, with regard to intrastate conflict,
quantitative studies examining the effects of resource scarcity have generated a wide
range of empirical findings, which, however, do not allow for a clearcut conclusion. For
example, Hauge & Ellingsen (1998) find that land degradation, freshwater scarcity, and
deforestation all have positive and significant effects on the incidence of armed conflict
(see also Raleigh & Urdal, 2007; Gizelis & Wooden, 2010). Theisen (2008), however,
shows more convincingly than Hauge & Ellingsen (1998) that only very high levels of
land degradation increase civil conflict risk, while water scarcity has no effect at all. In
contrast, Hendrix & Glaser (2007) report that land degradation has no impact, whereas
more water per capita actually increases the risk of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa.
Urdal (2005, 2008) finds that a combination of land scarcity and high rates of
population growth increases the risk of civil conflict to some extent, and that scarcity of
agriculturally productive land is positively correlated with civil conflict when agricultural
wages decline. stby et al. (2011) do not obtain evidence for an effect of land pressure on
violence in Indonesian provinces. Similarly, Theisen (2012) does not find that land
pressure affects civil conflict in Kenya. Finally, Meier, Bond & Bond (2007) report that
increased vegetation rather than scarcity is positively associated with the incidence of
organized raids. In sum, this lack of robust statistical evidence supporting the scarcity
argument led Theisen (2008: 810) to conclude that scarcity of natural resources
has limited explanatory power in terms of civil violence . We tend to share this
assessment and Table I gives an overview of the different studies discussed in the
previous paragraphs. As demonstrated there, quantitative research on the link between
renewable resources and conflict does not provide robust evidence for the claim that
resource scarcity leads to intra- or interstate conflict. Some large-N findings even
strongly contradict common findings of earlier qualitative case studies. Essentially, these
results point to a more complex relationship between resource scarcity and conflict than
most resource scarcity theorists currently envision.

Turn - increased resource nationalism contributes to more economic
growth
Holland 13 Holland is CEO of Gold Fields (Nick Holland, August 16, 2013, Resource
nationalism can mean growth and prosperity Business Day live,
http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2013/08/16/resource-nationalism-can-mean-growth-
and-prosperity)

AT A time when the global mining industry is besieged by falling commodity prices,
soaring input costs and investor apathy, resource nationalism strikes fear into the hearts
of many mining executives and investors. At Gold Fields we have a different view.
We are strongly in favour of a more equitable distribution of the benefits of the mining
economy, provided that we governments and the mining industry are aligned on
which economic pie it is we are sharing. Is it the ever-shrinking mining earnings pie that
has become the norm in most countries, or is it the growing mining economy pie so
elusive to most countries?
A debate of this sensitivity requires well-defined parameters. We view resource
nationalism as "government actions to extract the maximum developmental impact and
value from a countrys natural resources for its people". We believe this is the right, if not
the duty, of every government.
Most developing countries with a natural resource endowment, including South Africa,
have a legacy of poverty and inequality. To address this, and to see more sustainable
growth, we need to maximise the socioeconomic benefits from the extraction of natural
resources without shrinking the mining pie.
Unfortunately, however, there is often a disconnect between governments and mining
companies on how to achieve this. Most miners instinctively perceive resource
nationalism as one of their top risks. This perception has been fuelled by governments
that operate from a strong position: ore bodies are fixed and mining companies cannot
pack up and move to a lower-cost destination. They thus make an easy target as
governments, trying to close their fiscal shortfalls, increase the tax burden and other
fiscal imposts on mining enterprises. This has had the effect of growing governments
share of the mining pie at the expense of other stakeholders, especially workers and,
crucially, the providers of capital. Combined with lower commodity prices and increasing
input costs, it has led many investors to abandon the mining industry in favour of less
risky sectors.
Raising the fiscal burden may generate some revenue for governments in the short term,
but in the longer term it accelerates the decline of the sector. Mining becomes less
profitable; marginal mines are tipped over the edge and closed, while many new projects
fail to attract the required capital and are abandoned. Jobs are inevitably lost. The
mining pie is shrinking and we find ourselves in a lose-lose situation.
The mining industry has undoubtedly contributed to this dire situation. For decades, we
have disguised our true costs to look better to providers of capital by focusing solely on
cash costs, rather than reporting all the costs that go into mining. This created the
impression that, even at present depressed prices, the industry is making healthy profits,
when it is, in fact, marginal. The recent introduction of the all-in sustaining cost and all-
in cost reporting metrics by the World Gold Council aims to correct this misconception.
At Gold Fields we believe that, for far too long, stakeholders have squabbled about how
to divvy up a shrinking pie rather than debating how to grow the pie by liberating the
developmental and wealth-creating potential of the mining economy.
This potential is enormous.
Forty countries are classified as "mining rich". These include the Brics countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa), where the mining economy accounted for about
2% of their combined gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, the equivalent of $200bn.
It also contributed a combined 9%, or $170bn, to the GDP of the top seven most
resource-rich countries (Ghana, Zambia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Chile, and
Ukraine). Unlike most sectors, mining has a significant multiplier effect on the economy;
our studies show it varies between two and three times in most developing countries.
Taking this into account a mere 1% rise in mining GDP has the potential to generate
about $9bn a year in economic value for the combined 12 Brics and top seven resource-
rich countries. Compounded at 1% over five years, the economic value-add to these
countries could be about $45bn.
Similarly, the number of additional jobs linked to one in the mining sector is significant.
In Ghana, one mining position supports about 28 other jobs, and in Peru, about 19. In
South Africa, according to the Chamber of Mines, mining supports about 1.4-million
direct, indirect and induced jobs, and each of these supports about nine dependents.
Despite all its perceived shortcomings, there can be no doubt that mining, executed
responsibly, is a significant force for sustainable growth. It should not be underestimated
that whole communities directly and often exclusively depend on the sustainability and
growth of the mining sector.
However, all of this is academic if the sector fails to attract the capital needed to realise
this growth and so liberate its developmental and wealth-creating potential. At present,
the providers of capital are frustrated. On the one hand, governments are marginalising
them by reducing their share of the shrinking mining pie through increased taxes and
other imposts, while the industry, on the other hand, has very little to show for the
capital it has invested over the years. Many of these investors have deserted the industry,
depriving it of new capital, leaving mines mothballed and potentially viable ore bodies
undeveloped. Growth in the mining industry is stagnant the pie is shrinking.
If we want the capital providers to resume investment, and the pie to grow again, we
need to take a fresh approach. A good place to start would be to align the interests of all
stakeholders in a way that would again make it attractive for capital providers.
Some of the basic requirements are:
Collaborative partnership between governments and miners, who are better able to
operate and develop ore bodies and who are good social partners;
Competitive tax and royalty systems that provide investors with acceptable risk-
weighted returns and through which governments can participate in the upside;
Ensuring the full costs and benefits of mining (social, environmental and economic) are
taken into account when evaluating the viability of projects;
A stable legislative and regulatory environment to reduce risk; and
A fair and reasonable application of the "use it or lose it" principle, so ensuring that
potentially productive ore bodies are not lying idle in corporate hands.
We have seen the successful implementation of this model in many countries. Chile, Peru
and Botswana are recent examples.
In South Africa, the mining industry is clearly at a crossroads. Our choices are, to borrow
a phrase from Clem Sunter, between the low road of squabbling for a share of an ever-
shrinking mining pie, which is the reality today, or the high road of a long-term
collaborative partnership to grow the pie.
The high road may not be the easiest option, but as I hope I have illustrated, it is the only
option that will liberate the developmental and wealth-creating potential of the mining
economy.
If we continue on our present path, we will remain firmly rooted to the low road.
However, if we are serious about following the high road, all stakeholders, led by
governments and mining companies, the unions and communities, need to create a new
collaborative partnership committed to growing the mining pie.
AT: Resource flooding war
No impact resources are not the controlling factor for conflict
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)

Pernicious tents
The second surge in thinking about resource wars comes from all the money that is
pulsing into resource-rich countries. There is no question that the revenues are huge.
OPEC cashed US$650 billion for 11.7 billion barrels of the oil it sold in 2006, compared
with $110 billion in 1998, when it sold a similar quantity of oil at much lower prices.
Russia's Central Bank reports that the country earned more than $300 billion selling oil
and gas in 2006, about our times its annual haul in the late 1990s. But will this flood
in rents cause conflict and war?
There is no question that large revenues - regardless of the source - can fund a lot of
mischievous behavior. Iran is building a nuclear-weapons program with the revenues
from its oil exports. Russia has funded trouble in Chechnya, Georgia and other places
with oil and gas rents. Hugo Chavez opened Venezuela's bulging checkbook to help
populists in Bolivia and to poke America in ways that could rekindle smoldering
conflicts. Islamic terrorists also have benefited, in part, from oil revenues that leak out of
oil-rich societies or are channeled directly from sympathetic governments.
But resource-related conflicts are multi-causal. In no case would simply cutting
the resources avoid or halt conflict, even if the presence of natural resources can
shift the odds. Certainly, oil revenues have advanced Iran's nuclear program, which is a
potential source of hot conflict and could make future conflicts a lot more dangerous. But
a steep decline in oil probably wouldn't strangle the program on its own. Indeed, while
Iran still struggles to make a bomb, resource-poor North Korea has already arrived at
that goal by starving itself and getting help from friends. Venezuela's checkbook allows
Chavez to be a bigger thorn in the sides of those he dislikes, but there are other thorns
that poke without oil money.
As we see, what matters is not just money but how it is used. While al-Qaeda conjures
images of an oil-funded network - because it hails from the resource-rich Middle East
and its seed capital has oily origins - other lethal terror networks, such as Sri Lanka's
Tamil Tigers and Ireland's Republican Army, arose with funding from diasporas rather
than oil or other natural resources. Unlike modern state armies that require huge
infusions of capital, terror networks are usually organized to make the most of scant
funds.
During the run-up in oil and gas prices, analysts have often claimed that these revenues
will go to fund terror networks; yet it is sobering to remember that al-Qaeda came out in
the late 1990s, when oil earnings were at their lowest in recent history. Most of the tiny
sums of money needed for the September 11 attacks came from that period. Al-Qaeda's
daring attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurred when oil-rich
patrons were fretting about the inability to make ends meet at home because revenues
were so low. Ideology and organization trump money as driving forces for terrorism.
Most thinking about resource-lubed conflict has concentrated on the ways that windfalls
from resources cause violence by empowering belligerent states or sub-state actors. But
the chains of cause and effect are more varied. For states with weak governance and
resources that are easy to grab, resources tend to make weak states even weaker
and raise the odds of hot conflict. This was true for Angolas diamonds and Nigerias oil,
which in both cases have helped finance civil war. For states with stable authoritarian
governments - such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, most of the rest in the western Gulf, and
perhaps also Russia and Venezuela - the problem may be the opposite. A sharp decline in
resource revenues can create dangerous vacuums where expectations are high and paltry
distributions discredit the established authorities.
On balance, the windfall in oil revenues over recent years is probably breeding more
conflict than would a crash in prices. However, while a few conflicts partly trace
themselves to resources, it is the other pernicious effects of resource windfalls, such as
the undermining of democratic transitions and the failure of most resource-reliant
societies to organize their economies around investment and productivity, that matter
much, much more. At best, resources have indirect and mixed effects on conflict.

AT: Climate ChangeResource wars
No risk of resource wars from climate change
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)

Climate dangers
The third avenue for concern about coming resource wars is through the dangers of
global climate change. The litany is now familiar. Sea levels will rise, perhaps a lot;
storms will probably become more intense; dry areas are prone to parch further and wet
zones are likely to soak longer. And on top of those probable effects, unchecked climate
change raises the odds of suffering nasty surprises if the world's climate and ecosystems
respond in abrupt ways. Adding all that together, the scenarios are truly disturbing.
Meaningful action to stem the dangers is long overdue.
In the United States over the last year, the traditional security community has become
engaged on these issues. Politically, that conversion has been touted as good news
because the odds of meaningful policy are higher if hawks also favor action. Their
concerns are seen through the lens of resource wars, with fears such as: water shortages
that amplify grievances and trigger conflict; migrations of "climate refugees", which
could stress border controls and also cause strife if the displaced don't fit well in their
new societies; and diseases such as malaria that could be harder to contain if tropical
conditions are more prevalent, which in turn could stress health-care systems and lead to
hot wars.
While there are many reasons to fear global warming, the risk that such dangers
could cause violent conflict ranks extremely low on the list because it is
highly unlikely to materialize. Despite decades of warnings about water wars, what
is striking is that water wars don't happen - usually because countries that share water
resources have a lot more at stake and armed conflict rarely fixes the problem. Some
analysts have pointed to conflicts over resources, including water and valuable land, as a
cause in the Rwandan genocide, for example. Recently, the UN secretary-general
suggested that climate change was already exacerbating the conflicts in Sudan.
But none of these supposed causal chains stay linked under close scrutiny -
the conflicts over resources are usually symptomatic of deeper failures in governance and
other primal forces for conflicts, such as ethnic tensions, income inequalities and other
unsettled grievances. Climate is just one of many factors that contribute to tension. The
same is true for scenarios of climate refugees, where the moniker "climate" conveniently
obscures the deeper causal forces.
The dangers of disease have caused particular alarm in the advanced industrialized
world, partly because microbial threats are good fodder for the imagination. But none of
these scenarios hold up because the scope of all climate-sensitive diseases is mainly
determined by the prevalence of institutions to prevent and contain them rather than the
raw climatic factors that determine where a disease might theoretically exist. For
example, the threat industry has flagged the idea that a growing fraction of the United
States will be malarial with the higher temperatures and increased moisture that are
likely to come with global climate change.
Yet much of the American South is already climatically inviting for malaria, and malaria
was a serious problem as far north as Chicago until treatment and eradication programs
started in the 19th century licked the disease. Today, malaria is rare in the industrialized
world, regardless of climate, and whether it spreads again will hinge on whether
governments stay vigilant, not so much on patterns in climate. If Western countries
really cared about the spread of tropical diseases and the stresses they put on already
fragile societies in the developing world, they would redouble their efforts to tame the
diseases directly (as some are now doing) rather than imagining that efforts to lessen
global warming will do the job. Eradication usually depends mainly on strong and
responsive governments, not the bugs and their physical climate.

Resource wars caused by climate change are fear-mongering designed to
fuel threat construction
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)

Rethinking policy
If resource wars are actually rare - and when they do exist, they are part of a complex of
causal factors - then much of the conventional wisdom about resource policies needs
fresh scrutiny. A full-blown new strategy is beyond this modest essay, but here in the
United States, at least three lines of new thinking are needed.
First, the United States needs to think differently about the demands that countries with
exploding growth are making on the world's resources. It must keep their rise in
perspective, as their need for resources is still, on a per capita basis, much smaller than
typical Western appetites. And what matters most is that the United States must focus on
how to accommodate these countries' peaceful rise and their inevitable need for
resources.
Applied to China, this means getting the Chinese government to view efficient markets as
the best way to obtain resources - not only because such an approach leads to correct
pricing (which encourages energy efficiency as resources become more dear), but also
because it transforms all essential resources into commodities, which makes their
particular physical location less important than the overall functioning of the commodity
market. All that will, in turn, make resource wars even less likely because it will create
common interests among all the countries with the greatest demand for resources. It will
transform the resource problem from a zero-sum struggle to the common task of
managing markets.
Most policymakers agree with such general statements, but the actual practice of US
policy has largely undercut this goal. Saber-rattling about CNOOC's attempt to buy
Unocal - along with similar fear-mongering around foreign control of ports and new
rules that seem designed to trigger reviews by the Committee on Foreign Investment in
the United States when foreigners try to buy American-owned assets - sends the signal
that going out will also be the American approach, rather than letting markets function
freely.
Likewise, one of the most important actions in the oil market is to engage China and
other emerging countries fully in the International Energy Agency - which is the world's
only institution for managing the oil commodity markets in times of crisis - yet despite
wide bipartisan consensus on that goal, nearly nothing is ever done to execute such a
policy. Getting China to source commodities through markets rather than mercantilism
will be relatively easy because Chinese policymakers, as well as the leadership of state
enterprises that invest in natural resource projects, already increasingly think that way.
The sweep of history points against classic resource wars. Whereas colonialism created
long, oppressive and often war-prone supply chains for resources such as oil and rubber,
most resources today are fungible commodities. That means it is almost always cheaper
and more reliable to buy them in markets.
At the same time, much higher expectations must be placed on China to tame the
pernicious effects of its recent efforts to secure special access to natural resources.
Sudan, Chad and Zimbabwe are three particularly acute examples where Chinese (and in
Sudan's case, Indian) government investments, sheltered under a foreign-policy
umbrella, have caused harm by rewarding abusive governments. That list will grow the
more insecure China feels about its ability to source vital energy and mineral supplies.
Some of what is needed is patience because these troubles will abate as China itself
realizes that going out is an expensive strategy that buys little in security.
Chinese state oil companies are generally well-run organizations; as they are forced to
pay the real costs of capital and to compete in the marketplace, they won't engage in
these strategies. The best analog is Brazil's experience, where its state-controlled oil
company has become ever smarter - and more market oriented - as the Brazilian
government has forced it to operate at arm's length without special favors. That has not
only allowed Petrobras to perform better, but it has also made Brazil's energy markets
function better and with higher security.
Beyond patience, the West can help by focusing the spotlight on dangerous practices -
clearly branding them the problem. There's some evidence that the shaming already
underway is having an effect - evident, for example, in China's recent decision to no
longer use its veto in the UN Security Council to shield Sudan's government. At the same
time, the West can work with its own companies to make payments to governments (and
officials) much more transparent and to close havens for money siphoned from
governments. Despite many initiatives in this area, such as the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative and the now-stalled attempt by some oil companies to "Publish
What You Pay", little has been accomplished. Actual support for such policies by the
most influential governments is strikingly rare. America is notably quiet on this front.
With regard to the flow of resources to terrorists - who in turn cause conflicts and are
often seen as a circuitous route to resource wars - policymakers must realize that this
channel for oil money is good for speeches but perhaps the least important reason to
stem the outflow of money for buying imported hydrocarbons. Much more consequential
is that the US call on world oil resources is not sustainable because a host of factors -
such as nationalization of oil resources and insecurity in many oil-producing regions -
make it hard for supply to keep pace with demand. This yields tight and jittery markets
and still-higher prices.
These problems will just get worse unless the United States and other big consumers
temper their demand. The goal should not be "independence" from international
markets but a sustainable path of consumption. When the left-leaning wings in American
politics and the industry-centered National Petroleum Council both issue this same
warning about energy supplies - as they have over the last year - then there is an urgent
need for the United States to change course. Yet Congress and the administration have
done little to alter the fundamental policy incentives for efficiency. At this writing, the
House and Senate are attempting to reconcile two versions of energy bills, neither of
which, strikingly, will cause much fundamental change to the situation.
Cutting the flow of revenues to resource-rich governments and societies can be a good
policy goal, but success will require American policymakers to pursue strategies that they
will find politically toxic at home. One is to get serious about taxation. The only durable
way to rigorously cut the flow of resources is to keep prices high (and thus encourage
efficiency as well as changes in behavior that reduce dependence on oil) while channeling
the revenues into the US government treasury rather than overseas.
In short, that means a tax on imported oil and a complementary tax on all fuels sold in
the United States so that a fuel import tax doesn't simply hand a windfall to domestic
producers. And if the United States (and other resource consumers) made a serious
effort to contain financial windfalls to natural-resources exporters, it would need - at the
same time - to confront a more politically poisonous task: propping up regimes or easing
the transition to new systems of governance in places where vacuums are worse than
incumbents.
Given all the practical troubles for the midwives of regime change, serious policy in this
area would need to deal with many voids.
Finally, serious thinking about climate change must recognize that the "hard" security
threats that are supposedly lurking are mostly a ruse. They are good for the threat
industry - which needs danger for survival - and they are good for the greens who
find it easier to build a coalition for policy when hawks are supportive. Building a policy
on this house of cards is no way to muster support for a problem that requires several
decades of sustained effort. One of the greatest hurdles in the climate debate - one that is
just now being cleared, but will reappear if policy advocates seize on false dangers - has
been to contain the entrepreneurial skeptics who have sown public doubt about the
integrity of the science on causes and effects of climate change.
The false logic now runs in both directions. Not only will climate change multiply threats
by putting stress on societies, but a flood of articles warns of new territorial conflicts as
warming opens the formerly ice-bound Arctic for exploration. Russia recently planted a
flag on the seabed at the North Pole. In fact, the underlying causes of this exploration
rush are ambiguous property rights and advances in undersea drilling that are unrelated
to climate change. A similar pattern unfolded in the 1950s in Antarctica, which led to a
standoff of territorial claims and no real harm to the region, no production of usable
minerals and no resource wars.
The real dangers lie in the growing risk that climate change could be a lot worse than the
likely scenarios, which could create severe and direct harm to societies that is much more
worrisome than the indirect and remote risk of climate-induced resource wars. Yet
politicians give more attention to imagined insecurities from climate change and rarely
talk about climate as a game of odds and risk management. They talk even less about the
resource war that nobody should want to win - mankind's domination of nature. For the
real losers in unchecked climate change will be natural ecosystems unable, unlike
humans, to look ahead and adapt.

AT China
Chinese strategy checks resource wars
Victor 11/2007 -professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific
Studies and director of the Schools new Laboratory on International Law and
Regulation at the University of California at San Diego, PHD In Political Science from
MIT (David, What Resource Wars?, National Interest, Page 2-3)

Most importantly, Chinas going-out strategy is unlikely to spur resource wars
because it simply does not work, a lesson the Chinese are learning. Oil is a fungible
commodity, and when it is sourced far from China it is better to sell (and buy) the oil on
the world market. The best estimates suggest that only about one-tenth of the oil
produced overseas by Chinese investments (so-called equity oil) actually makes it back
to the country. So, thus far, the largest beneficiaries of Chinas strategy are the rest of the
worlds oil consumersfirst and foremost the United Stateswho gain because China
subsidizes production. Until recently, the strategy of going out for oil looked like a good
bet for Chinas interests. But, despite threat-industry fear-mongering, we need not
worry that it will continue over the long term because Chinese enterprises are already
poised to follow a new strategy that is less likely to engender conflict. The past strategy
rested on a trifecta of passing fads. One fad was the special access that Chinese state
enterprises had to cheap capital from the government and by retaining their earnings.
The ability to direct that spigot to political projects is diminishing as China engages in
reforms that expose state enterprises to the real cost of capital and as the Chinese state
and its enterprises look for better commercial returns on the money they invest. Second,
nearly all the equity-oil investments overseas have occurred since the late 1990s, as
prices have been rising. Each has looked much smarter than the last because of the
surging value of oil in the ground. But that trend is slowing in many places because the
cost of discovering and developing oil resources is rising. And the third passing fad in
Chinas going-out strategy is the fiction that China can cut special dealssuch as by
channeling development assistance to pliable host governmentsto confer a durable
advantage for Chinese companies. While there is no question that the special deals are
rampantby some measures, most of Chinas foreign assistance is actually tied to
natural-resources projectsthe Chinese government and its overseas enterprises are
learning that it is best to avoid these places for the long haul. Among the special havens
where Chinese companies toil are Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Iran and Zimbabweall
countries where even Chinese firms find it hard to assure adequate stability to reliably
extract natural resources. As China grapples with these hard truths about going out, the
strategy will come unstuck. It wont happen overnight, but evidence in this direction is
encouraging. China already pursues the opposite strategyseeking reliable hosts,
multiple commercial partners and market-oriented contractswhen it secures natural
resources that require technical sophistication. Chinas first supplies of imported natural
gas, which started last year at a liquefied natural gas terminal in Shenzhen, came from
blue-chip investments in Australia, governed by contracts and investments with major
Western companies. With time, China will shift to such arrangements and away from the
armpits of governance. At best, badly governed countries are mediocre hosts for projects
that export bulk commodities, such as iron ore and raw crude oil. These projects,
however, are least likely to engender zero-sum conflicts over resources because it is
particularly difficult to corner the market for widely traded commodities, as China has
learned with its equity-oil projects. Resources that require technical
sophistication to develop tend to favor integration and stability, rather than
a zero-sum struggle.
AT: Terror
Wont cause terrorism, its driven by ideology
Victor 11/2007 -professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific
Studies and director of the Schools new Laboratory on International Law and
Regulation at the University of California at San Diego, PHD In Political Science from
MIT (David, What Resource Wars?, National Interest, Page 3-4)

As we see, what matters is not just money but how it is used. While Al-Qaeda conjures
images of an oil-funded networkbecause it hails from the resource-rich Middle East
and its seed capital has oily originsother lethal terror networks, such as Sri Lankas
Tamil Tigers and Irelands Republican Army, arose with funding from diasporas rather
than oil or other natural resources. Unlike modern state armies that require huge
infusions of capital, terror networks are usually organized to make the most of scant
funds. During the run-up in oil and gas prices, analysts have often claimed that these
revenues will go to fund terror networks; yet it is sobering to remember that Al-Qaeda
came out in the late 1990s, when oil earnings were at their lowest in recent history. Most
of the tiny sums of money needed for the September 11 attacks came from that period.
Al-Qaedas daring attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurred
when oil-rich patrons were fretting about the inability to make ends meet at home
because revenues were so low. Ideology and organization trump money as
driving forces for terrorism.

Russia Ukraine war
Defense
New strategy key to prevent conflict
Kissinger 14 secretary of state (Henry A., How the Ukraine Crisis Ends, 3/05/14,
Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-
the-ukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-
d34c451760b9_story.html) //AD

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country.
Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from
there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined
before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the
Battle of Poltava in 1709, were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet Russias
means of projecting power in the Mediterranean is based by long-term lease in
Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and
Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and,
indeed, of Russia. The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness
and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraines
relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is
the art of establishing priorities. The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a
country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was
incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 , when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils.
Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian , became part of Ukraine only in 1954
, when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year
celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. The west is largely Catholic; the
east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly
Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other as has been the
pattern would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an
East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the
West especially Russia and Europe into a cooperative international system. Ukraine
has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of
foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art
of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence
Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian
politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction,
then by the other. That is the essence of the conflict between Viktor Yanu-kovych and his
principal political rival, Yulia Tymo-shenko. They represent the two wings of Ukraine
and have not been willing to share power. A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek
a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek
reconciliation, not the domination of a faction. Russia and the West, and least of all the
various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has made the situation
worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself at a
time when many of its borders are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of
Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. Putin should come to
realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce
another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an
aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a
serious strategist on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and
psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and
psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers. Leaders of all sides should return to
examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome
compatible with the values and security interests of all sides: 1. Ukraine should have the
right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe. 2.
Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up. 3.
Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of
its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between
the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture
comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence
and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility
toward Russia. 4. It is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia
to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimeas relationship to Ukraine on a
less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraines sovereignty over
Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimeas autonomy in elections held in the presence of
international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the
status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.

Diplomatic solutions check escalation
Jackson 14 White House specialist, USA Today (David, Obama calls Putin, proposes
solution to Ukraine dispute, 3/07/14, USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/03/06/obama-ukraine-putin-sanctions-
crimea/6113865/) //AD

President Obama urged Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a one-hour phone call
Thursday to pursue a diplomatic solution to his military incursion into Crimea, including
direct talks between Russia and Ukraine with outside observers.
Obama also proposed a pullback of troops to pre-existing Russian bases, international
monitors to protect the rights of all populations in Ukraine, and support for new
Ukrainian elections in May, the White House said in a statement about the conversation
with Putin.
"President Obama indicated that there is a way to resolve the situation diplomatically,
which addresses the interests of Russia, the people of Ukraine, and the international
community," the White House said.
In its own statement, the Kremlin said Putin told Obama that relations should not suffer
over Ukraine.
"The president of Russia emphasized the paramount importance of Russian-US relations
for ensuring stability and security in the world," the Kremlin said. "These relations
should not be sacrificed due to disagreements over individual albeit extremely
significant international problems."
Both sides said that aides would continue negotiations.
The phone call the first known contact between Obama and Putin since Saturday
came hours after the U.S. president said that new sanctions on Russia will "impose a
cost" for its military action in Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Obama also said he opposes a referendum
that would allow parts of Crimea to break away from Ukraine and join Russia, saying
that would violate Ukraine's constitution and international law.
While calling for a "path to de-escalation," Obama also said that "if this violation of
international law continues, the resolve of the United States and our allies and the
international community will remain firm."
Obama spoke after placing visa restrictions and economic sanctions on Russians who are
determined to have been involved in military action in Ukraine.
Describing the Russian activity in Crimea as "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the
national security and foreign policy of the United States," an Obama executive order calls
for denying visas and blocking financial transactions of designated Russians.
"The order does not target the country of Ukraine, but rather is aimed at persons
including persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean region
without the authorization of the government of Ukraine who undermine democratic
processes and institutions in Ukraine," Obama said in a message to Congress.
The sanctions could also apply to some Ukrainians if they are found to have been
involved in efforts to destabilize the country.
The sanctions announced Thursday are limited. They affect only funds in the United
States, or controlled by U.S. financial institutions abroad. Visa restrictions and
cancellations affect only travel to the United States.

No escalation to Crimean War US wont get involved
Morrissey 3/30/2014 Notable American Political reporter, the Captains Quarters
(Ed, Obama: Were not going to war with Russia over Crimea, Hot Air,
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/20/obama-were-not-going-to-war-with-russia-
over-crimea/, DM)

We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine, the
president said in an interview with NBCs San Diego affiliate, KNSD, one of several he
did Wednesday. What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to
make sure that weve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message,
which is that Ukraine should decide their destiny. Obama said that he sees Russian
President Vladimir Putin acting out of weakness, not out of strength in attempting to
take control of Crimea. Putin, the president said, is not comfortable with former
members of the Soviet Union making moves to align themselves with the West. In
another interview, with St. Louis NBC affiliate KSDK, Obama also said that a military
option is not on the table. Obviously, you know, we do not need to trigger an actual war
with Russia, he said. The Ukrainians dont want that. Nobody would want that.
Politifact would rate this as true, because literally no one wants that. Thats not a
Bidenesque literally, but a literal literally. No one wants it, no one would approve it, and
for a couple of really good reasons we have no national interest in who governs
Crimea, and an attempt to start a war there would make Dieppe look well-
considered. Its in the Russians back yard. So why bother saying it at all? Thats
the curious aspect of this. Obama has an annoying habit of attempting to present his
critics arguments in his own fantasy reductio ad absurdum constructs that end up
bearing no resemblance to the actual criticisms, all to paint himself as the voice of
centrist reason. This, however, just makes him look as out of touch as the rest of his
foreign policy with an extra added dollop of weakness as the a la mode touch. Paul
Mirengoff calls this a false choice, and a bad signal to send: In ruling out military
action, Obama explained that the Ukrainians dont want [an actual war with Russia],
nobody would want that. But if Russia continues to devour their country, the
Ukrainians are no less likely to want a war than any of Russias other neighbors or
former client states would be under similar circumstances. Accordingly, Obamas
statement can be read by Russia as ruling out any U.S. military to stop any future
aggression within the former Soviet Union and perhaps within its entire former sphere of
influence. Perhaps Obama would have been better advised not to have made this
statement. The other problem with the statement is that, to use Obamas former pet
phrase, it presents us with a false choice. Americas options arent limited to taking
military action and mobilizing diplomatic resources to send a clear message. We
could, for example, provide weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. Ukraine could then
decide whether to use them in the event of further Russian aggression. Ukraine has, in
fact, requested weapons and ammunition, but Obama turned down the request. I
suspect we have not supplied Ukraine with weapons because we want to diminish the
prospect of Ukrainian resistance in the event Russia moves into Eastern Ukraine (which
Russia seems at least as likely as not to do). Ukrainian resistance is not in Obamas
interest, as he likely sees it, because the resulting bloodbath would further embarrass his
administration. And that question may become acute quickly. NATOs top concern at
the moment is that Vladimir Putin wont stop at Crimea, Secretary-General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen told Foreign Policys Yochi Dreazen: NATOs top official acknowledged in
an interview that Russias annexation of Crimea had established certain facts on the
ground that would be difficult to change and said the military alliance was increasingly
concerned that Moscow might also invade eastern Ukraine.

Public support for peace deters conflicts and prevents escalation
Rojansky and Yalowitz 6/25/2014 *Was Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia
Program at the Carnegie Endowment, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and
American University, **Former ambassador to Belarus and Georgia (*Matthew, **
Kenneth, No matter what Putin says Russian people have no appetite for war,
Reuters, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/06/25/russian-people-have-no-
appetite-for-war-no-matter-what-putin-says/)

But the crucial fact is that the public on each side does not have any appetite for a
sustained conflict. Attention has focused on the key leaders President Barack Obama,
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. Putin has used his acts of aggression to build public support.
Yet the focus should be on whether the Russian people want renewed
confrontation or would even countenance something like a new Cold
War. Russia may not be a democracy, but it is also not the totalitarian Soviet Union.
The flip side of Putins brand of authoritarian populism is his reliance on public opinion
to maintain legitimacy. Putins popularity ratings have soared from roughly 50 percent
to more than 80 percent since the annexation of Crimea, and his domestic opposition
has been effectively muted. The less educated, more conservative and nationalistic
segments of the Russian public have enthusiastically bought into his attacks on the West
for ignoring or threatening Russias strategic interests. More than half of all Russians,
according to the polling agency VCIOM, now agree that relations with the West can only
be tense and be based on distrust. Nor is this a new phenomenon eastward expansion
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western support for Kosovo independence
and the color revolutions throughout the post-Soviet periphery all heightened
Russians sense that the West was taking advantage of their weakness. Popular support
for translating this anti-Western resentment into a sustained confrontation, however,
appears shallow at best. Though another Russian polling agency, the Levada Center,
reports negative attitudes toward the United States at a 20-year high, both Levada and
VCIOM confirm that nearly two-thirds of Russians view isolation from the West as
unlikely or impossible. In addition, despite strong opposition to the new Western-
backed government in Ukraine, most Russians oppose further military
intervention there, even while they support diplomatic and economic
assistance for Russian speakers in the region. Russian troops are still
present near Ukraines eastern border, but Putin has clearly backed off
from a full-scale invasion likely calculating that the Russian public would not
tolerate the high costs of a prolonged and bloody conflict in Ukraine. If the current
ceasefire fails and leads to greater bloodshed, Russian public opinion could still shift in
favor of intervention. For now, however, Russians expect more from their leaders to
sustain health, pension and education investments, deliver concrete progress on the
economic modernization agenda and stem the brain drain and capital flight that are
weighing down economic growth. Additional punitive sanctions from the West,
especially on Russias revenue-generating energy and natural resource exports, would
make these tasks far harder. So Putin has strong incentives to quit escalating
confrontation and focus on consolidating his early gains. Fortunately for the Kremlin,
there is also little appetite on the Western side for deepening the conflict.
Europeans are largely interested in preventing the unraveling of their main
accomplishment since World War II the economic growth, stability, and
democratization brought about through European Union integration. Though the
annexation of Crimea has restored enthusiasm for a robust NATO alliance, in the last EU
parliamentary elections voters rejected calls for increased military spending. European
businesses are also not ready to sever extensive economic ties with Russia. For their
part, Americans are confronting a bevy of difficult foreign-policy issues chaos in Iraq,
Chinas rise and nuclear negotiations with Iran. Putin and Russia provide fodder for
campaign trail bombast or cable news talk shows, but neo-containment is not a high
priority for either the U.S. public or their elected leaders. If there is a silver lining in the
current Ukraine crisis, it is that the public on all sides are not enthusiastic for a new
Cold War. This does not provide a blueprint for starting to restore relations but it means
there may be a ceiling to the mutual hostility and distrust.

No impact Putin reducing tensions
Heritage 7/7/2014 -Brussels Bureau Chief and European Affairs Editor for Reuters
(Timothy, Putin's silence on Slaviansk signals desire to de-escalate Ukraine crisis,
Reuters, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/07/uk-ukraine-crisis-putin-
idUKKBN0FC1UI20140707)

They could also suggest Putin is not about to replay in eastern Ukraine the sequence of
events that led to Russia's annexation of Crimea in March and that he is intent on de-
escalating the crisis to avert the risk of new Western sanctions and reduce
the threat of instability on Russia's border. In the past few weeks, he has
withdrawn most troops massed near the frontier, asked parliament to cancel a resolution
approving the use of military force in Ukraine and engaged in diplomacy with the West.
Moscow has also signalled a willingness to allow stronger controls at the border, through
which Ukraine says the rebels have received military supplies. Barring a dramatic turn
back towards armed intervention by Russia, Putin's goal appears to be to find a
way to reduce tension in Ukraine without losing face or popularity. "As a
result of four months of aggression in Ukraine, Putin found himself at a fateful fork in
the road," former Kremlin adviser Andrei Illarionov wrote in a blog posted on the
website of liberal Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on Saturday. Abandoning the
rebels risks a loss of support and could fuel opposition to Putin in Russia, he said, but the
other choice - sending in the armed forces - would lead to an inevitable confrontation
with the West. Putin's popularity has risen to new highs over his handling of the
Ukraine crisis, in which the toppling of a president sympathetic to Moscow threatened in
February to end Russia's ability to influence events in a country it long dominated. The
reclaiming of Crimea in March stirred patriotism and won Putin almost unanimous
praise at home, though the rebellion that followed in eastern Ukraine raised fears in the
West that Moscow was about to send in troops, despite his denials that Moscow was
orchestrating the uprising and supporting it militarily. Putin reiterated in a speech to
Russian ambassadors gathered in Moscow last week that he reserved the right to protect
Russian speakers abroad by "using the entire range of available means from political
and economic to operations under international humanitarian law and the right of self-
defence." But he has signaled repeatedly that he wants to reduce tensions - even though
he may wish to keep them simmering just enough to unsettle Ukraine's pro-western
leadership. Loath as he is to say it, Russia is increasingly worried that sanctions could
inflict serious damage on its $2 trillion economy, which is already heading towards
recession, potentially denting Putin's popularity. The reduction in tensions so far has
helped strengthen the rouble and Russian shares, which rose last week to eight-month
highs before slipping back. This makes it no surprise that he had by late Monday made
no public comment on the fall of Slaviansk, while Foreign Ministry remarks and state
media coverage focused on humanitarian problems and the ferocity of the government
forces' onslaught. Russia also sent a positive sign on its commitment to talks at the
weekend by attending the latest meeting on ending the violence under the auspices of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). GOALS ACHIEVED?
Putin could have another reason for de-escalation; he may already have
achieved all he can in Ukraine, at least for now. He may be gambling that what
is already on offer from Kiev could be enough to satisfy the nationalist sentiment he has
unleashed in Russia but could yet struggle to contain.

Russia War

Economic interdependence prevents a US-Russia War.
Stewart 3/7, staff writer for the New York Times, cites a study by J.P. Morgan
Securities, quotes a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in
Washington, (James B., March 7, 2014, Why Russia Cant Afford Another Cold War,
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/business/why-russia-cant-
afford-another-cold-war.html?_r=0)//HH

Russia is far more exposed to market fluctuations than many countries, since it owns a
majority stake in a number of the countrys largest companies. Gazprom, the energy
concern that is Russias largest company by market capitalization, is majority-owned by
the Russian Federation. At the same time, Gazproms shares are listed on the London
stock exchange and are traded over the counter as American depositary receipts in the
United States as well as on the Berlin and Paris exchanges. Over half of its shareholders
are American, according to J. P. Morgan Securities. And the custodian bank for its
depository receipts is the Bank of New York Mellon.
Many Russian companies and banks are fully integrated into the global financial system.
This week, Glencore Xstrata, the mining giant based in Switzerland, was in the middle of
a roughly $1 billion debt-to-equity refinancing deal with the Russian oil company
Russneft. Glencore said it expected to complete the deal despite the crisis. Glencores
revenue last year was substantially larger than the entire gross domestic product of
Ukraine, which was $176 billion, according to the World Bank.
Continue reading the main story
The old Soviet Union, in stark contrast, was all but impervious to foreign economic or
business pressure, thanks in part to an ideological commitment to self-sufficiency. As
recently as 1985, foreign trade amounted to just 4 percent of the countrys gross
domestic product, and nearly all that was with the communist satellite countries of
Eastern Europe. But the Soviet Unions economic insularity and resulting economic
stagnation was a major cause of the Soviet Unions collapse. According to Mr. Talbott,
the Soviet Unions president at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, was heavily influenced by
Soviet economists and other academics who warned that by the turn of the century in
2000, the Soviet economy would be smaller than South Koreas if it did not introduce
major economic reforms and participate in the global economy.
To attract investment capital, Mr. Gorbachev created the Moscow stock exchange in 1990
and issued an order permitting Soviet citizens to own and trade stocks, bonds and other
securities for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. (Before then, Russia had
a flourishing stock exchange in St. Petersburg, established by order of Peter the Great. It
was housed in an elegant neoclassical building directly across the waterfront from the
Winter Palace. As a symbol of wealth and capitalism, it was one of the earliest casualties
of the revolution.)
Even before this weeks gyrations, the Russian stock market index had dropped near 8
percent last year, and it and the Russian economy have been suffering from low
commodity prices and investor concerns about the Federal Reserves tapering of bond
purchases factors of little significance during the Cold War.
By contrast, today Russia is too weak and vulnerable economically to go to war, Mr.
Aslund said. The Kremlins fundamental mistake has been to ignore its economic
weakness and dependence on Europe. Almost half of Russias exports go to Europe, and
three-quarters of its total exports consist of oil and gas. The energy boom is over, and
Europe can turn the tables on Russia after its prior gas supply cuts in 2006 and 2009.
Europe can replace this gas with liquefied natural gas, gas from Norway and shale gas. If
the European Union sanctioned Russias gas supply to Europe, Russia would lose $100
billion or one-fifth of its export revenues, and the Russian economy would be in rampant
crisis.

Sanctions prevent Russian War.
slund 4/22, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in
Washington, (Anders, April 22, 2014, Russia Is in No Economic Shape to Fight a War,
Moscow Times, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/russia-is-in-no-
economic-shape-to-fight-a-war/498728.html)//HH

In particular, Russia is likely to be highly vulnerable to financial sanctions. One month
ago, the Western discussion on possible sanctions against Russia focused on whether
they could be effective. During the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund in
Washington April 12 to 13, the question was turned around: Do we really want to destroy
Russia that fast? The dominant theme was that geopolitical risk is back, and Russia is
seen as the main risk.
Official Russian reactions to the Western threat of sanctions have been that Russia's
state corporations would invest in Russia and that Russia would establish its own
payments system, making itself independent of the Western financial system. But none
of this is realistic.
In its March report on the Russian economy, the World Bank showed that the country's
total foreign debt at the end of January was $732 billion. The distribution between public
and private debt is only available from October last year. Then, state banks had $128
billion and nonfinancial state corporations $164 billion of foreign debt. Adding $80
billion of government foreign debt, Russia's total public foreign debt was $372 billion,
while its international currency reserves are $477 billion, but much of those can be
frozen as well.
This makes Russia highly vulnerable to international financial sanctions. In an insightful
article in Foreign Affairs magazine on April 10, Robert Kahn argued that "Russia's
relationship to global financial markets integrated, highly leveraged and opaque
creates vulnerability, which sanctions could exploit to produce a Russian 'Lehman
moment': a sharp, rapid deleveraging with major consequences for Russia's ability to
trade and invest."
That could mean a "sudden stop" of international finance to Russia, which would have
devastating consequences for its economy. State banks and other state-controlled
corporations are not creditors to the West but big borrowers. Companies such as Rosneft
have larger debts than their market capitalization, and their debts are held abroad. If
they are not able to roll over their large foreign debts, they will be starved of capital.

Incentives to avoid conflict solve Russian war.
Sharma 3/21, Honorary Research Fellow, Politics and International Relations at
University of Auckland, quotes the director of Brookings Institution, (Ashok, March 21,
2014, Despite rhetoric, Russia and US cant afford another Cold War,
http://theconversation.com/despite-rhetoric-russia-and-us-cant-afford-another-cold-
war-24551)//HH

The United States has denounced the Russian involvement in Crimea as a brazen
military incursion and its annexation of the territory as "nothing more than a land grab
by Moscow. In the pre-referendum phase of Crimea,Washington adopted a tough
posture, sending 12 F-16 fighters and 300 military personnel to Poland for joint NATO
training.
But after the Russian takeover of Crimea the US has ruled out any military incursion in
the Ukraine over Crimea issue and has preferred to opt for economic measures, putting
sanctions on 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials and hinting at more stringent measures
to come.
In his turn Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told John Kerry there would be
consequences if any significant economic sanctions were enacted by the US. The stand-
off continues.
After the end of Cold War the ideological differences between US and Russia seemed to
fade, especially on how to deal with terrorism; the US dealing with the consequences of
9/11 and Russia, mindful of its own problems with terrorism, co-operating.
But the US-Russia confrontation over Georgia in 2008 initiated a string of spats: tussles
in the UN over Syria and the Iranian nuclear programme exposed fundamental
differences in the two countries' foreign policy interests, while Russias granting of
asylum to Edward Snowden and the launch of a talk show on state radio hosted by
fugitive Wikileaks boss Julian Assange shortlived but irritating to Washington
seemed to be prime examples of Moscow thumbing its nose at the US. But this latest
stand-off on the Ukrainian crisis has developed into the worst East-West confrontation
since the Cold War.
Both sides have accused each other of precipitating the crisis in Ukraine. Barack Obama
has talked tough, promising escalating penalties if Russia doesnt back down over
Crimea, but so far his rhetoric contrasted with his actions appear to be the opposite of
his predecessor Teddy Roosevelts mantra: Speak softly, and carry a big stick.
Moscow treated the announcement of the US sanctions package with derision, with the
deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin mocking Comrade Obama via Twitter and
asking: What should do those who have neither accounts nor property abroad? Or U
didnt think about it?
But despite these considerable strains in their partnership, the US and Russia remain
linked by many important security issues. Economic constraints and a desire for geo-
strategic stability limit the wisdom and affordability of a Cold War-style stand-off
between the two.
The US and European Union have struggled to co-ordinate a response to Russias boldest
military adventure since the 2008 Georgia war because the stakes are very different for
both parties. The EU-Russia trade volumes including vast gas imports and engineering
exports are 15 times the level of trade between the US and Russia trade.
The response from the US has been more combative because Washington considers it
has far less to lose from a trade war, hence the tougher rhetoric and the dispatch of
fighter jets and military personnel to Poland and Lithuania and the threats to exclude
Russia from the G8 meeting.
The EU response, meanwhile, has been feeble, perhaps because EU member states have
a range of different priorities. The EU summit that was held to respond to the Russian
intervention in Ukraine ended with an agreement on small steps, and a warning that
sanctions could follow if Moscow does not abide by the international law.
Other EU measures include an agreement to postpone negotiations on a more liberal visa
regime for Russians, to halt the move towards a new EU-Russian all-encompassing
relations pact and to stop arrangements for the G8 summit to be held in Sochi in June
2014.
Common ground
Both the US and Russia are nuclear superpowers and they have a common interest in
and responsibility for managing global nuclear stability. They need to manage not only
their own nuclear weapons but work towards nuclear non-proliferation and security,
which remains an important aspect of international security.
Despite their disagreement on certain strategic and economic issues in the Middle East,
the two super-powers have converging interests in the region, including halting
proliferation and tackling Islamic radicalism. Despite their differences on Iran, for
example, both have an interest in not letting Iran develop a nuclear weapons capability.
Both countries have problems with Islamic fundamentalism but Russias war on terror
is ongoing and bitter in several of its republics, most prominently Chechnya, Dagestan,
Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and Tatarstan. In the post- 9/11 scenario, the counter-
terrorism collaboration contributed an element of confidence and mutual trust between
Russia and the US-led West on this new asymmetric security challenge of the post-Cold
War era. The fight against terrorism remains a paramount issue on which both will need
to collaborate.
The financial constraint will remain a factor for both sides. Strobe Talbott, the director of
Brookings Institution, opines that Russia cant afford the old Soviet style of military
stand-off as it has now a stock market which is not immune to international crises. In
fact, unlike the Soviet era of economic self-sufficiency, today the Russian economy is tied
to foreign economic forces and market fluctuations.
Russias economy has performed well over the past decade because of its energy boom, a
large part of which is due to sales to Europe, which gets one third of its oil and gas from
Russia, so Moscow cant afford to risk a reduction of sales to Europe. Likewise, though
far stronger economically than Russia, the US cant afford another war Iraq and
Afghanistan have already taken their toll on Wall Street and Washington cant afford
further military adventurism.
The changing geo-strategic dynamics further limit the Cold War style stand-off. Both
have to compete with other rising and aspiring great powers, particularly China. Though
China sided with Russia in the Syrian crisis and many other issues in the Middle East,
Beijing is pursuing its own strategic interests rather than lining up with Moscow. On the
Ukraine issue Beijing has called for a diplomatic solution, supported Ukraines
sovereignty and territorial integrity, and abstained in UNSC votes.
In conclusion, the US and Russia will damage their own interests if they continue this
kind of stand-off. Both should look for a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian crisis.



Russia wants to cooperate with the US on terrorism.
Voice of Russia 6/27, quotes the Russian Foreign Minister, (June 27, 2014, Russia
willing to renew antiterrorism cooperation with US - Lavrov,
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_06_27/Russia-willing-to-renew-antiterrorism-
cooperation-with-US-Lavrov-3527/)//HH

Moscow is willing to renew the mutual cooperation with the US in the fight against the
international terrorism, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "Us and Americans had
a fairly effective bilateral mechanism that linked various agencies involved in
counterterrorist operations. Since last year this mechanism was suspended by our
American colleagues, and now we feel their eagerness to resume the antiterrorism
cooperation. Were ready for that, its up to our American colleagues now," Lavrov said.
Lavrov on US actions in Syria
Russias Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that he hopes that the US financial aid to
the Syrian opposition "wont fall into the wrong hands" and will help resolve the Syrian
crisis. "Our American partners, with whom we thoroughly discuss every aspect of this
situation, assure us that theyll only provide aid to the groups that distance themselves
from terrorists. I hope that this aid wont fall into the wrong hands," said Lavrov during a
press conference following the negotiations with the Republic of Fiji Foreign Minister
Inoke Kubuabola.

Russia wants to cooperate on MH17
Orjollet and Neo 7/21, Staff writers for Agence French Presse, (Stephane and Hui
Min, July 21, 2014, Putin vows to cooperate as blame for MH17 crash piles on Russia,
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/371235/news/world/putin-vows-to-
cooperate-as-blame-for-mh17-crash-piles-on-russia)//HH

GRABOVE Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to cooperate with outraged
world leaders seeking access to the site of downed flight MH17, after Washington
squarely pointed the finger of blame at Moscow for the crash.
The under-fire Russian leader appeared to seek to temper international fury after US
Secretary of State John Kerry said the missile system used to shoot down the Malaysia
Airlines jet was "transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists."
The UN Security Council is on Monday due to consider a resolution demanding that pro-
Russian separatists provide "unrestricted access" to the site in rural eastern Ukraine, as
concerns rise over evidence tampering, the fate of victims' remains and black boxes.
In separate phone calls, Putin promised Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte "full
cooperation" in retrieving the bodies and black boxes, while Australia's premier Tony
Abbott said the Russian leader had said "all the right things."
Both countries suffered heavy losses when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was blown out
of the sky on Thursday by what is believed to have been a surface-to-air missile, killing
298 and dramatically raising the stakes in Ukraine's bloody three-month conflict.
The separatists' violent bid for independence is the latest chapter in a prolonged crisis
sparked by Kiev's desire for closer ties with the EU a sentiment many in the Russian-
speaking east do not share.


Russia cant afford warglobal economic integration
Stewart 14 [James B. Stewart for the NY Times, Why Russia Cant Afford Another
Cold War, 3/7/14, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/business/why-russia-cant-
afford-another-cold-war.html?_r=0] l.gong
Russian troops pour over a border. An autocratic Russian leader blames the United
States and unspecified radicals and nationalists for meddling. A puppet leader pledges
fealty to Moscow. Its no wonder the crisis in Ukraine this week drew comparisons to
Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 or that a chorus of pundits proclaimed the
re-emergence of the Cold War. But theres at least one major difference between then
and now: Moscow has a stock market. Under the autocratic grip of President Vladimir
Putin, Russia may be a democracy in name only, but the gyrations of the Moscow stock
exchange provided a minute-by-minute referendum on his military and diplomatic
actions. On Monday, the Russian stock market index, the RTSI, fell more than 12
percent, in what a Russian official called panic selling. The plunge wiped out nearly $60
billion in asset value more than the exorbitant cost of the Sochi Olympics. The ruble
plunged on currency markets, forcing the Russian central bank to raise interest rates by
one and a half percentage points to defend the currency. Mr. Putin seems to have
stopped a potential invasion of Eastern Ukraine because the RTS index slumped by 12
percent on Monday, said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for
International Economics in Washington. On Tuesday, as soon as Mr. Putin said he saw
no need for further Russian military intervention, the Russian market rebounded by 6
percent. With tensions on the rise once more on Friday, the Russian market may again
gyrate when it opens on Monday. Mr. Putin seems to be following the old Soviet
playbook, in Ukraine, Strobe Talbott, an expert on the history of the Cold War, told me
this week. But back then, there was no concern about what would happen to the Soviet
stock market. If, in fact, Putin is cooling his jets and might even blink, its probably
because of rising concern about the price Russia would have to pay. Mr. Talbott is the
president of the Brookings Institution, a former ambassador at large who oversaw the
breakup of the former Soviet Union during the Clinton administration and the author of
The Russia Hand. Russia is far more exposed to market fluctuations than many
countries, since it owns a majority stake in a number of the countrys largest companies.
Gazprom, the energy concern that is Russias largest company by market capitalization,
is majority-owned by the Russian Federation. At the same time, Gazproms shares are
listed on the London stock exchange and are traded over the counter as American
depositary receipts in the United States as well as on the Berlin and Paris exchanges.
Over half of its shareholders are American, according to J. P. Morgan Securities. And the
custodian bank for its depository receipts is the Bank of New York Mellon. Many Russian
companies and banks are fully integrated into the global financial system. This week,
Glencore Xstrata, the mining giant based in Switzerland, was in the middle of a roughly
$1 billion debt-to-equity refinancing deal with the Russian oil company Russneft.
Glencore said it expected to complete the deal despite the crisis. Glencores revenue last
year was substantially larger than the entire gross domestic product of Ukraine, which
was $176 billion, according to the World Bank. The old Soviet Union, in stark contrast,
was all but impervious to foreign economic or business pressure, thanks in part to an
ideological commitment to self-sufficiency. As recently as 1985, foreign trade amounted
to just 4 percent of the countrys gross domestic product, and nearly all that was with the
communist satellite countries of Eastern Europe. But the Soviet Unions economic
insularity and resulting economic stagnation was a major cause of the Soviet Unions
collapse. According to Mr. Talbott, the Soviet Unions president at the time, Mikhail
Gorbachev, was heavily influenced by Soviet economists and other academics who
warned that by the turn of the century in 2000, the Soviet economy would be smaller
than South Koreas if it did not introduce major economic reforms and participate in the
global economy. To attract investment capital, Mr. Gorbachev created the Moscow stock
exchange in 1990 and issued an order permitting Soviet citizens to own and trade stocks,
bonds and other securities for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. (Before
then, Russia had a flourishing stock exchange in St. Petersburg, established by order of
Peter the Great. It was housed in an elegant neoclassical building directly across the
waterfront from the Winter Palace. As a symbol of wealth and capitalism, it was one of
the earliest casualties of the revolution.) Photo Even before this weeks gyrations, the
Russian stock market index had dropped near 8 percent last year, and it and the Russian
economy have been suffering from low commodity prices and investor concerns about
the Federal Reserves tapering of bond purchases factors of little significance during
the Cold War. By contrast, today Russia is too weak and vulnerable economically to go
to war, Mr. Aslund said. The Kremlins fundamental mistake has been to ignore its
economic weakness and dependence on Europe. Almost half of Russias exports go to
Europe, and three-quarters of its total exports consist of oil and gas. The energy boom is
over, and Europe can turn the tables on Russia after its prior gas supply cuts in 2006 and
2009. Europe can replace this gas with liquefied natural gas, gas from Norway and shale
gas. If the European Union sanctioned Russias gas supply to Europe, Russia would lose
$100 billion or one-fifth of its export revenues, and the Russian economy would be in
rampant crisis. Mr. Putin may be living in another world, as the German chancellor,
Angela Merkel, put it this week, but surely even he recognizes that the world has changed
drastically since 1956 or 1968. He has no doubt been getting an earful from his wealthy
oligarch friends, many of whom run Russias largest companies and have stashed their
personal assets in places like London and New York. The oligarchs would not dare to
challenge him, a prominent Russian economist told me. (He asked not to be named for
fear of retribution.) But they would say something like they would have to lay off
workers and reduce tax payments. During the Cold War, there were few, if any, Russian
billionaires. Today, there are 111, according to Forbes magazines latest rankings, and
Russia ranks third in the number of billionaires, behind the United States and China.
The economist noted that the billionaire Russian elite who are pretty much
synonymous with Mr. Putins friends and allies are the ones who would be severely
affected by visa bans, which were imposed by President Obama on Thursday. Other
penalties might include asset freezes. Many Russian oligarchs have real estate and other
assets in Europe and the United States, like the Central Park West penthouse a trust set
up by the Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev bought for $88 million. This is what may
have already forced Putin to retreat, the Russian economist said. And while the Cold
War was a global contest between Marxism and capitalism, there is today no real
ideological component to the conflict except that Putin has become the personification of
rejecting the West as a model, Mr. Talbott said. He wants to promote a Eurasian
community dominated by Moscow, but thats not an ideology. Russias economy may be
an example of crony capitalism, but it is capitalism. Theres not even a shadow of
Marxism-Leninism now. What brought down the old Soviet Union and ended the Cold
War was the economic imperative to make Russia into a modern, efficient, normal state,
a player in the international economy, not because of military power but because of a
strong economy, Mr. Talbott continued. But to have a modern economy, you need the
rule of law and a free press. Mr. Putin, he said, isnt advancing Russias progress. The
Russian economist agreed. The pre-2008 social compact was that Putin would rule
Russia while Russians would see growing incomes, he said. Now, the growth has
stalled, and he needs ideology, coupled with propaganda and repressions. Apparently,
the Soviet restoration is the only ideology he can come up with. Russia does have
uniquely strong ties to Ukraine. Of all the former provinces of the old Soviet Union, its
the most painful to have lost and the one many Russians would most want to have back,
Mr. Talbott said. The ties between Kiev and Moscow go back over 300 years. Ukraine is
the heart of Russian culture. With Russian troops entrenched in the Crimean peninsula
and some Russian Ukrainians clamoring for annexation, there may be little the United
States or its allies can do to restore the status quo. Containment, in a muted and
modified way, will once again be the strategy of the West and the mission of NATO, Mr.
Talbott predicted. But not another Cold War, which is surely a good thing. A
propaganda war is completely feasible, the Russian economist said. The recent events
were completely irrational, angering the West for no reason. This is what is most scary,
especially for businesses. Instead of reforming the stagnating economy, Putin scared
everybody for no reason and with no gain in sight. So it is hard to predict his next
actions. But I think a real Cold War is unlikely.


SCS
No US Involvement
No impact the US wont get drawn in
Esguerra and Burgonio, 4/29/14 writers for the Philippine Daily Inquirer
(Christian and TJ, No firm commitment from US to defend PH, the Philippine Daily
Inquirer, http://globalnation.inquirer.net/103033/no-firm-commitment-from-us-to-
defend-ph#ixzz38Cxs058a )//IS
But in turn, Obama gave no categorical commitment whether the 62-year-old Mutual
Defense Treaty (MDT) between the two countriesthe backbone of the Enhanced
Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) signed by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin
and US Ambassador Philip Goldbergwould apply in case the Philippines territorial
dispute with China escalates into an armed confrontation. Steering clear of the question,
Obama instead pointed to Beijings interest in abiding by international law, saying
larger countries have a greater responsibility to do so. Our goal is not to counter
China; our goal is not to contain China, he said in a joint press conference with
President Aquino in Malacaang, reflecting a delicate balancing act throughout his
weeklong trip that earlier took him to Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Our goal is to
make sure that international rules and norms are respected, and that includes in the area
of maritime disputes. We dont go around sending ships and threatening folks, Obama
said.

The US wont let itself get involved in the SCS most recent evidence
Nguyen et, al., 7/8/14 public sector East Asia analyst at the World Bank in
Washington, D.C. (Huong Mai, U.S. Should Act Unilaterally To Protect The Smaller
Nations Of The South China Sea, Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/07/08/protect-the-smaller-nations-of-the-
south-china-sea/)//IS
While assistance from the United States in defending the Philippine maritime territory
would be optimal, this cannot be solely relied upon. The United States signed the Mutual
Defense Treaty of 1951 with the Philippines, but is arguably neglecting its obligations to
defend the Philippines in the South China Sea against Chinese incursions. While China
militarizes and builds structures on islands and shoals within the Philippine exclusive
economic zone, such as Panatag Shoal, the United States is conducting joint military
exercises, and developing new trade agreements, with China. The United States limits its
response to token military aid and cheap talk about Chinese violation of international
law. Since the 2012 standoff, neither has the Philippines done anything significant
militarily to stop China. While the Philippine military cannot come close to defeating
China in a conventional naval battle, the Philippines could use special operations tactics
against structures and Chinese naval assets on Panatag shoal to make Chinas incursions
prohibitively costly.



No impact
No impact China will cooperate and doesnt want escalation
Esguerra, 6/11/14 writer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer (Christian, China envoy:
Sea dispute temporary, the Philippine Daily Inquirer,
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/106181/china-envoy-sea-dispute-
temporary#ixzz38D0DXXl8)//IS
MANILA, PhilippinesAmid his countrys assertive behavior in the South China Sea,
Chinas ambassador to the Philippines on Tuesday assured Filipinos that the territorial
dispute would be temporary and was optimistic that it would eventually be resolved
peacefully. Speaking during the 13th Filipino-Chinese Friendship Day celebration in
Manila, Ambassador Zhao Jianhua said his country and its Asian neighbors share a
common aspiration to maintain regional peace and stability. Compared with our
thousand-year-old friendship and extensive cooperation, the difficulties we are facing on
[the] South China Sea issue are temporary, he said in the presence of President Aquino
and other top government officials. It is our common responsibility to handle the South
China Sea issue in a proper and peaceful manner. In his speech, the President reiterated
his governments position that the dispute with China was not the sum total of its
relationship with the Philippines. Using its nine-dash line doctrine, Beijing is claiming
practically the entire South China Sea, including areas located well within the
Philippines exclusive economic zone. Still, Zhao said his government has always
attached great importance to its relations with the Philippines, and I believe that we have
the wisdom, patience and courage to settle the disputes through negotiations and
consultations.

No impact regional interdependence and Chinese reform
Beattie, 6/25/14 editor of Voice of America News (Victor, Will Regional Ties Prevent
South China Sea Conflict? Voice of America News,
http://www.voanews.com/content/singapore-pm-regional-ties-will-prevent-south-
china-sea-conflict/1944515.html)//IS
WASHINGTON Despite rising nationalist sentiment in the South China Sea region,
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said he thinks a growing regional
interdependence will prevent any maritime conflicts from occurring. Speaking Tuesday
at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, Lee said the Asia-Pacific region
is changing, especially with a rising China. He said other countries are becoming
stronger and their interactions have become more intense in the past 10 years, as trade
and people movements grow. But, with such interaction, he said, come more friction
points, such as territorial disputes in the South China Sea. "None of the Southeast Asian
countries want to have a fight with China. In fact, China, too, goes considerably out of its
way to develop friendly relations with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations),
Lee said. But, there is this issue of the territorial and maritime disputes, he added. It
is not easy to resolve because of another factor that has changed in the past 10 years,
because nationalism has become a stronger sentiment and a stronger factor in
influencing governments. Lee said this is particularity true in Japan and China. South
China Sea He said China maintains that its historic claims on most of the South China
Sea precede international law and this has to be recognized. "Im not a lawyer, so I
presume there is some plausibility in that argument. But, from the point of view of a
country which must survive in an international system, where there are big countries and
small and outcomes cannot be determined just by might is right, I think international
law must have a big weight in how disputes are resolved, Lee said. Lee suggested China
follow the example of another big power, the United States, in generally abiding by
international law. He said if China can reach that position, it will have made a great
achievement. Historically, Lee said, China knows that other big powers that have risen
by the use of might, such as Spain, Portugal, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the
British Empire, have all fallen. He said China is trying to avoid making the same mistake.
Lee said that while China is successfully transforming its economy, it still has not figured
out what he calls social management maintaining social harmony while finding ways to
engage the population and its demand for a greater say. But, Lee said he is confident
Chinese leaders are committed to the path of reform.


No escalation for SCS War Tensions are low
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan

History initially suggests that the South China Sea is not a flashpoint. The loss of life
resulting from the use of force there pales in comparison to those in East Asias
traditional flashpoints. For instance, in the unresolved Korean War (195053), which
remains at the heart of continuing tensions on the Korean Peninsula, an estimated two
million military personnel were either killed or unaccounted for.7 A comparable number
of casualties occurred in the Chinese Civil War (19461949), which left todays Taiwan
flashpoint as a direct product.8 Further, at a time when some analysts are talking up the
prospects of war between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, it is worth
recalling that an estimated 1535 million perished during the course of the second Sino
Japanese War (193745).9 While history is not destiny, more recent estimates suggest
that the combustion of any one of these flashpoints today could prove equally
devastating. Richard Bush and Michael OHanlon of the Brookings Institution, for
example, predict that a conflict over Taiwan could spark a nuclear war involving 1.5
billion people and produce a fundamental change in the international order.10 Similar
estimates produced at the time of the 199394 North Korean nuclear crisis suggested
that war on the Korean Peninsula could cost half a million lives and up to US$1 trillion
in its first ninety days.11 Conflict between Asias two most powerful navies in the East
China Sea could prove equally devastating, particularly given that China and Japan are
also the worlds second- and third-largest economies, respectively. Total trade between
these two historical great powers of East Asia currently stands at U.S. $345 billion.12 It
is hard to envisage a credible scenario where a skirmish in the South China
Sea could erupt into a conflict of similar proportions. The nationalist
foundations of these disputes are fundamentally different from those underpinning East
Asias traditional flashpoints. By way of example, recent polling suggests that 87 percent
of the Chinese public view Japan negatively, whilst 50 percent anticipate a military
dispute with Japan.13 Reflecting this sentiment, when Tokyo announced its decision to
purchase contested Islands in the East China Sea from their private owner in September
2012, this sparked widespread anti-Japanese protests across China that spread to more
than 100 cities.14 Such public displays of nationalist sentiment stand in marked contrast
to June 2013 anti-China protests in Hanoi following Vietnamese allegations that a
Chinese vessel had rammed and damaged a Vietnamese fishing boat. Subsequently, a
mere 150 protesters gathered in the city center.15 Crowds of comparable size have
attended anti-Chinese protests in the Philippines. For instance, a March 2012 protest
outside the Chinese Embassy in Manila that organizers expected to draw 1,000
protesters attracted barely half that number.
No SCS Escalation Lack of Interest from Great Powers
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan

The strategic geography of the South China Sea also militates against it being a genuine
flashpoint. Throughout history, large bodies of water have tended to inhibit the
willingness and ability of adversaries to wage war. In The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics, for instance, John Mearsheimer refers to the stopping power of water, writing
of the limits that large bodies of water place on the capacity of states to project military
powerrelative, at least, to when they share common land borders.17 Even when clashes
at sea do occur, history suggests that these generally afford statesmen greater time
and space to find diplomatic solutions. As Robert Ross observes, in such cases
neither side has to fear that the others provocative diplomacy or movement of troops is
a prelude to attack and immediately escalate to heightened military readiness. Tension
can be slower to develop, allowing the protagonists time to manage and
avoid unnecessary escalation.18 Ross observation, in turn, dovetails elegantly
with the issue of proximity, which Hoyt regards as a defining feature of a flashpoint. The
antagonists in the South China Sea disputes are less proximate than in the case of the
Korean Peninsulawhere the two Koreas share a land border that remains the most
militarized on earth. The same can be said of the Taiwan flashpoint. Indeed, the
proximity of Taiwan to the mainland affords Beijing credible strategic options and
arguably even incentivesinvolving the use of force that are not available to it in the
South China Sea.19 Finally, and related to the third of Hoyts criteria, the South China
Sea cannot be said to engage the vital interests of Asias great powers. To be sure, much
has been made of Indias growing interests in this part of the world particularly
following reports of a July 2011 face-off between a Chinese ship and an Indian naval
vessel that was leaving Vietnamese waters.20 However, New Delhis interests in the
South China Sea remain overwhelmingly economic, not strategic, driven as they are by
the search for oil. Moreover, even if New Delhi had anything more than secondary
strategic interests at stake in the geographically distant South China Sea, it is widely
accepted that Indias armed forces will for some time lack the capacity to credibly defend
these.21 Similarly, while much has been made of Tokyos willingness to assist Manila
with improving its maritime surveillance capabilities,22 for reasons of history and
geography, Tokyos interests in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute, the Korean
Peninsula, and even the Taiwan flashpoint dwarf those which it has at stake in the more
distant South China Sea. The extent to which this body of water genuinely
engages the vital interests of China and the United States continues to be
overstated.
No escalation China doesnt have the capabilities
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan, The South
China Sea is Not A Flashpoint, The Washington Quarterly,
https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Taylor_PDF.pdf

That said, it is equally important not to exaggerate the pace and scope of Chinas military
modernization, conflating trends in the Southeast Asian distribution of power with a
potential Chinese challenge to U.S. primacy in the broader Western Pacific. China
currently does not possess the capability to project substantial power into
the South China Sea, and will likely remain unable to do so for at least
another two decades, its ongoing experimentation with aircraft carriers
notwithstanding. As Dan Blumenthal has observed, the PLA lacks a sustained power
projection capability associated with asserting full control over the area, including
sufficient at-sea replenishment and aerial refueling capabilities, modern destroyers with
advanced air defense capabilities, and nuclear submarines, as well as regional bases to
support logistical requirements.42 Added to this, questions have risen regarding the as
yet largely unproven ability of PLA Navy crews to undertake prolonged operations at sea,
particularly under conditions of high-intensity conflict.43
US wont get drawn in Alliances arent strong enough
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan, The South
China Sea is Not A Flashpoint, The Washington Quarterly,
https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Taylor_PDF.pdf

Yet, despite the fact that Washington ultimately refused to side with the
Philippines during the April 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff, there is little
evidence to suggest any such crisis of confidence amongst Americas closest AsiaPacific
allies. In its May 2013 Defense White Paper, for example, Canberra characterizes
Australias alliance with the United States as being our most important defence
relationship and a pillar of Australias strategic and security arrangements.44 The
United States was certainly swift to demonstrate the credibility of its alliance
commitment to Seoul following the March 2010 sinking of the Cheonan, undertaking a
series of high-profile military exercises with South Korea in waters proximate to China
and in the face of strong opposition from Beijing.45 Likewise in November 2013,
Washington sent a strong signal of support for Tokyo by flying two B-52 bombers
through Chinas newly announced Air Defense Identification Zone without informing
Beijing in advance.46 U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel backed up this show of
defiance with unequivocal confirmation that Article V of the U.S.Japan Mutual Defense
Treaty extends to the Senkaku Islands.47
These examples call into question the connection that some commentators draw between
U.S. strategy toward the South China Sea and the continued viability of the United
States Asian alliances. What they instead appear to demonstrate is that U.S.
alliance relationships with Australia, Japan, and South Korea are simply in
a different category than those it has with the Philippines and Thailand.

Japan cant solve
No impact of Japanese Soft Power on the South China Sea
Lam 1/2013 -Researcher at the East Asian Institute of the National University of
Singapore, has authored numerous (Peng Er, Japan and China as Charm Rivals: Soft
Power in Regional Diplomacy, as part of a larger article: Soft Power: Resonating with
the Preferences of a Target Country?, UMich Press, pg 132-133, DM)

My only reservation about Suns superb book is that China and Japan may not be
consciously engaging in soft-power competition with each other in South Korea and
Southeast Asia, although this does appear to be the case in Taiwan. Tokyo adopted a
softer approach toward Southeast Asia after the violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in
Bangkok and Jakarta during Prime Minister Tanaka Kakueis visits in 1974. Japans
strategic shift to a good-neighbor policy had little to do with competition with China. In
recent years, Beijing and Tokyo have wooed Southeast Asia with free trade agreements
and economic partnerships while jostling to protect their respective interests in the
South China Sea. This competition is framed by economics and geopolitics but not
necessarily soft power. In this regard, the two countries today may indeed be rivals
in Southeast Asia but are not necessarily charming ones.
Wont Happen
No impact to SCS war, Chinas not interested
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan, The South
China Sea is Not A Flashpoint, The Washington Quarterly,
https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Taylor_PDF.pdf

But doubts remain over whether Beijing truly regards the South China Sea
as a core interest. Michael Swaine reports that his investigation of Chinese official
sources failed to unearth a single example of a PRC official or an official PRC document
or media source that publicly and explicitly identifies the South China Sea as a PRC core
interest.25 By contrast, Chinese officials have not exhibited such reticence when
referring publicly to Taiwan or Tibet in such terms. Nor has Beijing shown any
reluctance to threaten or to actually use military force in relation to these. During the
199596 Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing twice fired ballistic missiles into waters off Taiwan
in an effort to intimidate voters in advance of the islands first democratic presidential
election.26 China went further in March 2005 when the National Peoples Congress
passed an anti-secession law requiring the use of non-peaceful means against Taiwan
in the event its leaders sought to establish formal independence from the mainland.27
Explicit threats and promises of this nature are absent in official Chinese statements on
the South China Sea even when, as in May 2012, the normally smooth-talking Vice
Foreign Minister Fu Ying ambiguously warned the Philippines not to misjudge the
situation and not to escalate tensions without considering consequences at the height
of the Scarborough Shoal standoff.28 Indeed, although Beijing appears eager to
demonstrate its growing naval capabilities by conducting military exercises in the South
China Seaas in March 2013 when it controversially conducted exercises within 50
miles of the Malaysian coastlineit is striking that Chinese efforts to actually exercise
jurisdiction in this region continue to be confined, by and large, to the use of civil
maritime law enforcement vessels.29 This stands in contrast to the East China Sea,
where exchanges between Beijing and Tokyo have quickly escalated to involve the use of
military ships and aircraft. In early 2013, for instance, Tokyo accused Chinese warships
of locking weapons-guiding radar onto a Japanese helicopter and a destroyer in two
separate incidents.30 In November 2013, Beijing went on to announce a controversial
new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea and initially
threatened to take defensive action against aircraft that did not disclose their flight plans
prior to entering the zone and identifying themselves when operating within it.31
Unlike its recent behavior in the East China Sea, Beijings approach toward the
South China Sea disputes has traditionally been one of conflict de-
escalation. Beijings clear preference has been to manage such tensions bilaterally.
Following a period where an increase in Chinese maritime patrols led to a rise in the
number of clashes with Vietnamese (and Philippine) vessels, for instance, Beijing and
Hanoi reached agreement in October 2011 on principles for settling maritime disputes.
Likewise in June 2013, China and Vietnam agreed to establish new hotlines to assist with
managing incidents at sea and dealing with fishing disputes.32 Beijing has also
shown some willingness to take the multilateral route. Most famously, China
signed a non-binding Declaration on Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea with
ASEAN in November 2002. While protracted progress continues, the official position of
both China and ASEAN remains to establish a legally binding code of conduct in the
South China Sea intended to incorporate mechanisms for avoiding incidents at sea, crisis
management, confidence building measures, and joint development.33 Beijing has
certainly not shown similar flexibility in relation to any of its other publicly-declared
core interests. At Chinas insistence, for example, discussion of Taiwan is strictly off
limits in Asias multilateral forums.
Bilateral Cooperation Checks Conflict
Taylor 3/1/2014 PHD, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the
Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific (Brendan, The South
China Sea is Not A Flashpoint, The Washington Quarterly,
https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Taylor_PDF.pdf

Finally, the capacity of Beijing and Washington to navigate crises in their
bilateral relationship further suggests that the South China Sea is not a
flashpoint. Over the past two or more decades, the United States and China have gone
to great lengths to manage bilateral tensions and prevent them from spiraling out of
control. A recent example occurred in May 2012, when the two arrived at a mutually
acceptable solution after the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng sought refuge at
the U.S. embassy in Beijing.48 In the South China Sea, two major, modern SinoU.S.
crises have been successfully managed. The first occurred in April 2001, when a U.S. EP-
3 conducting routine surveillance in airspace above the South China Sea collided with a
Chinese J-8 jet fighter and was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island.
To be sure, efforts to address this crisis did not initially proceed particularly smoothly,
as Chinese officials refused to answer incoming calls from the U.S. Embassy.
Ultimately, however, those most intimately involved in the crisissuch as then-
Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Dennis Blairhave written
subsequently how top U.S. officials made every effort to exercise prudence and
restraint while they collected more information about the nature of the incident. They
have also acknowledged that their Chinese counterparts made a series of grudging
concessions that ultimately resulted in success...after they decided that it was important
to overall SinoU.S. relations to solve the incident.49 Again in March 2009, while
diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Washington heightened in the immediate
aftermath of an incident involving the harassment of the USNS Impeccable by five
Chinese vessels, good sense also prevailed as senior U.S. and Chinese officials issued
statements maintaining that such incidents would not become the norm and pledging
deeper cooperation to ensure so.50 Added to these examples of effective crisis
management, it is also worth noting that Washington reportedly facilitated a
compromise to the April 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff.51
Senkaku Conflicts

Impact inevitable
Panda, 14 - Associate Editor of The Diplomat (Ankit, April 16, 2014 Why the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Dispute Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon
http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/why-the-senkakudiaoyu-dispute-isnt-going-away-
anytime-soon/)//gingE
Its a shame that relations between Japan and China have deteriorated so sharply in
recent years. Perhaps no dispute highlights this deterioration better than the territorial
spat over the sovereignty of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands a favorite topic for many of
us writing here at The Diplomat. For the moment, high-level diplomacy between China
and Japan is effectively non-existent and will likely remain so as long as Shinzo Abe
remains in charge in Tokyo. His reputation as an ardent Japanese nationalist is
unpalatable to Chinese leaders who perceive him as out to revise Japans post-war
pacifist constitution and normalize Japans military posture to the detriment of Chinese
interests in the region. The Senkaku/Diaoyu conflict, however, in reality was not borne
of Abe. The nationalization of the islands was one of the final acts of the Democratic
Party of Japans Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda during his last months in office. Noda
purchased the islands, upsetting the careful de facto balance of ambiguous sovereignty
that China and Japan had enjoyed for years. Sure, an earlier incident in 2010, when a
Chinese fishing boat collided with Japanese coast guard caused a major diplomatic row,
resulting in a temporary Chinese embargo on rare-earth metal exports to Japan, but the
dispute was not a constant source of tension between the two countries. In those days,
Chinese and Japanese diplomats were able to make progress on other issues,
unencumbered by the territorial dispute. Nodas purchase of the islands was well-
intentioned. He nationalized the islands to prevent the ultra-nationalist Shintaro
Ishihara, then the governor of Tokyo, from purchasing the islands and carrying out
Japanese construction projects there to project sovereignty. Noda figured that the
purchase would actually preserve the status quo but he was unfortunately wrong. The
shift from de facto to de jure sovereignty has led to over 18 months of tension between
China and Japan tension that was aggravated when Shinzo Abe came to power in
December 2012. There have been a few solutions proposed for resolving the
Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between Japan and China. One solution that comes to mind
was proposed by Singapores Kishore Mahbubani, who has argued that what Japan must
do is return to the status quo ante, by selling the islands to a private Japanese
foundation or environmental group, ostensibly to preserve their undeveloped natural
beauty. Presumably, this would lead to state of affairs where neither Japan nor China
would have a strong de jure claim to the islands. In my view, the matter isnt that simple.
Its not about ownership, but about state preferences. Currently, the Senkaku/Diaoyu
islands exist as a zero sum preference proposition. Japan owns them, but China wants to
own them the islands can only exist in one of those states of ownership, so there
necessarily has to be a loser in this game. What was unique about the status quo ante was
that preferences were effectively positive sum. The state of the islands was such that both
Chinese and Japanese leaders could remain content or if not content, tolerant of the
sovereign status of those territories, even if theyve were technically under dispute.
Neither side grumbled publicly about the state of the islands (at least not as regularly as
today). A return to that status quo ante today seems incredibly unlikely. Regarding
Chinas current policy towards the East China Sea, including its imposition of an air
defense identification zone last November, we see that the only win condition possible
for Beijing with regard to the dispute is an acknowledgment by Japan and the
international community that the Diaoyu islands are sovereign Chinese territory.
Additionally, where the dispute was once a relative footnote in China-Japan relations, it
is today a central topic so much so that any concession by either China and Japan on
the islands would amount to a massive public relations defeat with important
ramifications for those countries relations with other states in the region. What makes
resolving the conflict even more difficult today is that neither side is willing to treat
the issue as a divisible one with non-polarized outcomes again, either China
owns the islands or Japan does. There is no middle ground. In the same piece where
Mahbubani makes the case for Japan re-privatizing the islands, he mentions that Japan
could offer China a way out in the form of having the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
adjudicate the final status of the islands. While that isnt ideal either (since one side
would lose face in such a judgment), it is closer to a tenable solution if it resulted in some
sort of positive sum and divisible sovereignty-sharing arrangement, where both Japan
and China are able to claim the islands and exploit its resources. Despite the wide
availability of scholarly models for resolving disputes, international relations in the real
world play out rather inelegantly, almost always resulting in winners and losers.
Neither China nor Japan is ready to take any steps at this point that would
allow for a mutually acceptable resolution of the dispute. Thats why I fear that
the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands will continue to remain high on the list of the Asia-Pacifics
potential flashpoints for some time to come.

US involvement magnifies the conflictUS interventionism is seen as
favoritism
Xiao, 13 - professor at Fudan Universitys Institute of International Studies and
Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Foreign Policy (Ren, U.S. Should Not
Take Side on Diaoyu Islands February 1, 2013 http://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-
policy/u-s-should-not-take-side-on-diaoyusenkaku/)//gingE
On January 18, while meeting with the press in Washington, D.C. together with the
Japanese Foreign Minister, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated, although the
United States does not take a position on the ultimate sovereignty of the islands, we
acknowledge they are under the administration of Japan and we oppose any unilateral
actions that would seek to undermine Japanese administration. This was a development
partial to Japan and was a step back from its previous position. Clearly, it was Japan
that unilaterally took actions to nationalize the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and thus
altered the status quo. Stating the above via its Secretary of State, Washington actually
adopted a practice of being partial to Tokyo on this issue. The objective of the Japanese
Foreign Ministers visit was thus probably realized, but this was unfair to China. The
United States has a historical responsibility for the dispute over Diaoyu/Senkaku
Islands. In 1972, when the administrative power over Okinawa was reverted to Japan,
Diaoyu was inappropriately included. In essence, this was a territorial dispute between
Japan and China. Any arrangement made between Japan and the U.S. was invalid.
Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of State unambiguously declared at the time that no
U.S. act involved any part of the issue of sovereignty over Diaoyu/Senkaku. According to
the 1971 words by Secretary of State William Rogers, the Okinawa Reversion Treaty
does not affect the legal status of those islands [Diaoyu/Senkaku] at all. In his letter of
October 20, 1971, Acting Assistant Legal Adviser Robert Starr stated, The United States
has made no claim to the Senkaku Islands and considers that any conflicting claims to
the islands are a matter for resolution by the parties concerned. This demonstrated U.S.
government was aware that the sovereignty issue on Diaoyu/Senkaku was unresolved.
The problem is, over the past forty years, Japan grasped the de facto control over
Diaoyu/Senkaku and took steps to strengthen this kind of control. More seriously,
starting from a few years ago, the position of the Japanese government shifted to stating
that there is no territorial dispute between Japan and China. Namely, Diaoyu/Senkaku
belongs to Japan and there is no controversy. Not surprisingly, China was firmly
opposed this stance and yet it showed considerable restraint. As a result, the situation
remained under control and peace was lasting. In September 2010, the inexperienced
Democratic Party of Japan mishandled the fishing boat incident at Diaoyu, which quickly
escalated to an alarming degree. Consequently, this poorly managed incident greatly
disrupted the hard-won benign state of the Sino-Japanese relationship. Unfortunately,
Japan did not seem to learn a lesson from this incident. Last year, when the purchasing
and nationalizing Diaoyu/Senkaku movement was gaining momentum, China
repeatedly reminded and suggested that the Japanese government be careful regarding
the so-called nationalization. President Hu Jintao met with Prime Minister Noda of
Japan face to face during the APEC Meeting in Vladivostok and cautioned against the
Japanese government making a wrong decision. Disappointingly, Japan ignored all the
warnings and, just two days later, went ahead with the so-called nationalization. This
was like opening the Pandoras box, which ignited anger and strong reactions from
China. Now, everybody realizes that the warning Mr. Niwa, recent Japanese Ambassador
to China, made last year to The Financial Times was absolutely correct. The reality is that
purchasing or nationalizing the islands will strike a severe blow to Sino-Japanese
relations, one of the most important bilateral relationships. More recently, the
Diaoyu/Senkaku standoff escalated to a new level as the Japanese and Chinese fighter
jets were mobilized. This development made observers feel that the possibility of a
military conflict was imminent. No doubt, a military conflict is in nobodys interest and
something no one wants to see. The high priority for the two countries is to manage the
crisis, avoid escalation, and prevent a military conflict. Against this backdrop, Prime
Minister of Japan Abe Shinzo dispatched Yamaguchi Natsuo, the party leader of Japans
pacifist New Komeito, to China,with a letter. Yamaguchi was carefully chosen for this
mission. For many years, New Komeito has kept a good relationship with Beijing, and
the political party is a part of Japans current ruling coalition. While meeting with
Yamaguchi Natsuo on January 25, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called on a timely, proper
resolution to sensitive bilateral issues. Yamaguchi presented the Japanese Prime
Ministers handwritten letter to Xi during the meeting. At this special time, the visit
was useful indeed. Effective communication between the two sides is absolutely
essential. At the end of the day, Japan has to give up the position that there is no
territorial dispute between Japan and China and to admit that Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands
are disputed. Only on that basis can the two sides try to find a way out. At this stage, the
item high on the agenda is not who possesses sovereignty but rather what efforts they
should make to soften the tension and prevent from any military conflict. Washington
has a responsibility to urge Tokyo to do so. Erecting a protectionist umbrella is not
favorable to getting beyond this crisis. A more neutral stance is a better option.

No escalation
Beitelman, 12 - PhD student in Political Science at Dalhousie University and a Doctoral
Fellow at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (David,
September 17 2012, Senkaku Islands Dispute: Do Not Believe the Hype, China and Japan
Are Not About to Go to War http://mic.com/articles/14910/senkaku-islands-dispute-do-
not-believe-the-hype-china-and-japan-are-not-about-to-go-to-war)//gingE
The world is abuzz with the rising tensions between China and Japan in the East China
Sea, where the two are quarreling over the energy-rich Senkaku Island chain (known as
the Diaoyu Islands in China). Complicating the issue is a similar dispute between South
Korea and Japan over another energy rich island chain in the East Sea/Sea of Japan,
known as Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea. Add this to the already tense
territorial relationship between various states in the Asia-Pacific region which include
the Philippines, Thailand, India, and Vietnam, and it is no wonder many are discussing
the prospects of outright military conflict erupting in the region. But despite the rhetoric
and saber rattling, the prospects for conflict are less than those who sell the news would
have you believe. Most troubling to observers are the anti-Japanese demonstrations that
have been flaring up across China and a naval "show of force" by the Chinese navy into
Japanese controlled waters. But it is important to keep this all in perspective. Chinas
economy is slowing and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is preparing for a
change in leadership. Whats more, the CCP has been at the receiving end of a lot of
criticism in the wake of the Gu Kailai murder trial and its revelation of wide-spread
corruption by her husband, Bo Xilai, a high-ranking CCP official. There is also the
bizarre case of the son of another high-ranking CCP official, Ling Jihua, who died after
he crashed his Ferrari while naked and in the company of two women. The CCP derives a
great deal of its legitimacy from the countrys impressive economic performance over the
past 30 or so years. With the economy slowing and the perception that the ruling party is
corrupt, out of touch, and incompetent, while in the midst of a power transition, it
becomes easy to see why the CCP may benefit from ratcheting up nationalist sentiment,
particularly against its long-time rival Japan. It is unlikely the Chinese government
would allow the situation to escalate to a point of actual conflict. Not only does China
have important economic relations with its neighbors, including Japan, it knows it is a
conflict it cannot win. The rise in tensions in the South China Sea come in midst of
Americas "Pacific pivot" a large scale multi-dimensional strategic realignment of
military, economic, and political resources to the Asia-Pacific region that began in
earnest in November 2011. The United States is looking to build an institutional
framework in the region similar to the one it created in Europe after World War II. At
the center of this framework is, arguably, a need to "contain" China, or at least strongly
influence its strategic calculus as it modernizes its military and becomes a more assertive
regional and global power. Should the situation in the region come to blows, China is
well aware that those it would be fighting have military alliances and agreements with
the United States. Fighting Japan or South Korea is one thing. Fighting the United States
is another. Fighting any combination of the U.S. and another regional power
particularly Japan is simply un-winnable. More important when considering the
prospects for conflict in the region is the simple financial calculus: states go to war when
the cost of doing so is less than the perceived rewards. While these islands may be rich in
energy resources, it is unlikely that they exceed the economic and political costs of a war
between any of these countries. A war between Japan and China would be a crippling
blow to an already fragile global economy, particularly to the economies of those states
involved. NATO taking out Libya could be done on the cheap; war between China and
Japan cannot. It is not for nothing that China has already stated it would not use force to
resolve territorial issues in the region. China and Japan may be flexing their muscles a
bit, but both know it is in their best interests to resolve differences through negotiation,
not war.


No escalation in SCS
Spitzer 12 (Kirk, U.S. Takes A Pass For Now On China Sea Disputes TIME, 6-
11-12, http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/06/11/u-s-takes-a-pass-for-now-on-china-
sea-disputes/#ixzz1zTcVBswz)//AD

For its part, China has played down the dispute with Japan in recent months, and has
promised that it wont interfere with anyones navigation rights in the South China Sea.
And it would seem foolish even to try. For all its double-digit defense spending, China is
still many years away from being able to challenge U.S. military power, and no doubt
knows that. Nor would it seem to have much to gain; Chinas economy is thoroughly
dependent on sea-going trade and cutting off any shipping would mean cutting off its
own, as well.

US action boosts tension in the region
Pitlo 12 MA Asian Studies student from the Asian Center, University of the
Philippines, his commentaries have been published in Forging a New Philippine Foreign
Policy, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, East Asia Forum, and Institute for
Peace and Conflict Studies (Lucio Blanco, The Philippines-China Disputes In The South
China Sea: The US Factor Analysis, 10-28-12, Eurasia Review,
http://www.eurasiareview.com/28102012-the-philippines-china-disputes-in-the-south-
china-sea-the-us-factor-analysis/) //AD

United States involvement or attempts by the US to get involved in the South China Sea
(SCS) disputes is seen by some as a major factor in intensifying tensions in one of the
worlds most critical regional flashpoints. China, as well as some ASEAN countries, does
not welcome US participation in resolving the impasse over conflicting maritime and
territorial claims in the strategic semi-enclosed sea. As such, countries like the
Philippines, as well as Vietnam, have been perceived by some as aggravating the already
tense situation by openly inviting US intervention and internationalizing what some see
as a purely regional matter. This argument had long been played and, while it may make
sense, certain historical circumstances raise questions over its indisputability.

Improved regional ties solve SCS stability
Guangjin 12 Staff writer for China Daily (Cheng, Better Ties Hold Key to S China Sea
Disputes, 2-14-12, China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-
02/14/content_14599318.htm) //AD

BEIJING - China is ready to explore solutions to South China Sea disputes under
reasonable conditions, while stressing that the most important immediate task is to
advance practical cooperation with Southeast Asian countries to create an atmosphere in
which to solve these disputes, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.
"On the South China Sea issue, China's stance is clear, which is known by the Vietnamese
side," ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a regular news conference, when asked
about Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh's ongoing visit to China.
Minh began a four-day visit to China on Sunday, his first since becoming the country's
foreign minister in August.
The two countries are in a dispute over some islands in the South China Sea.
Liu said the two sides have agreed that, considering the overall nature of bilateral ties,
the dispute should be resolved through friendly negotiations.
"China is ready to consider exploring solutions to the South China Sea disputes with all
relevant parties under reasonable conditions," said Liu.
Of the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations members, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Malaysia and Brunei have claims to territories in the South China Sea.
China and ASEAN adopted guidelines on the implementation of the Declaration on the
Conduct of Parties in July, which is a non-binding agreement.
Liu said China is open-minded and willing to actively promote the final conclusion of a
"code of conduct of parties in the South China Sea" when the conditions are right.
"The pressing task for now is that all parties take opportunities to implement the DOC,
and promote practical cooperation in the South China Sea to safeguard regional peace
and stability," Liu said.
According to Reuters, Vietnam is opening up to Western defense firms amid tensions in
the South China Sea.
Minh met with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on Sunday. Yang said China was
ready to work with Vietnam to implement the consensus reached by the leaders of the
two countries, and enhance political mutual trust, deepen cooperation and properly
handle sensitive issues, in order to promote the sustained, sound and stable development
of bilateral ties.
Minh said Vietnam cherishes its traditional friendship and cooperation with China.

Southeast Asia Instability
Alt Causes
Alt cause Indonesia debt
Fabi and Suroyo 7/16/14 *Asian shipping correspondent **economic reporter
(Randy and Gayatri, INTERVIEW-Indonesia looks at ways to halt surge in private
foreign debt, Reuters, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/16/indonesia-economy-
debt-idUKL4N0PQ2L820140716)//IS
JAKARTA: Indonesias financial authorities are looking at ways to limit a surge in
foreign debt among private firms and want to enlist the help of banks, worried that
runaway lending could spark instability in Southeast Asias largest economy. The central
bank has expressed concern over a rise in the debt service ratio (DSR), which climbed to
46.3 per cent in the first quarter from 36.8 per cent in the same period last year due to a
surge in private external debt. Bank Indonesia prefers the DSR, which is the ratio for
repayments on external debt principal plus interest compared to a countrys total export
earnings, to be below 35 per cent. If the economy slows down and exports dont pick up,
the private sector has to be prudent offshore, Mirza Adityaswara, senior deputy
governor of Bank Indonesia, said yesterday. The point is there should be regulation to
make sure offshore borrowing is done prudently. The amount of private external debt
almost doubled to US$145.6 billion (RM465 billion) last April from around US$83.8
billion in 2010.
Impact Inevitable
Instability is inevitable ISIS spillover
Hunt, 7/7/14 South-east Asia correspondent for The Diplomat and has worked in
journalism for more than 25 years. He has served as bureau chief for Agence France-
Presse in Cambodia and in Afghanistan during the Taliban occupation where he was
commended by the United Nations for the best and most insightful coverage of the
Afghan civil war. (Luke, ISIS: A threat well beyond the Middle East, The Diplomat,
http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/isis-a-threat-well-beyond-the-middle-east/)//IS
The threat of Islamic militants deploying terror tactics across Southeast Asia is making
an unwelcome comeback. Driven in part by the relentless drive into Iraq by Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi, the threat has already emerged in Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and the
Philippines. Authorities in these countries fear home-grown Islamic militants in league
with Baghdadi and his Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will return and plot their
own caliphate, not unlike Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) did when it launched its own terror
campaign in league with al-Qaeda more than a decade ago. Arrests have been made in
Malaysia amid reports that four new terrorist groups have emerged to stake a claim over
much of mainland Southeast Asia. All are Sunni Muslims with Shiites in their sights.
Police are also looking for another five Malaysian men who fled to the Philippines where
they are believed to be in hiding with the Abu Sattaf. The arrests followed the release of a
video from ISIS senior clerics, titled There Is No Life Without Jihad. In the video, Abu
Muthanna al Yemeni from Britain boasts about the many countries that have supplied
ISIS mercenaries, adding: We have brothers from Bangladesh, from Iraq, from
Cambodia, Australia, UK. Muslim leaders in Cambodia rejected the claims although
diplomats says hundreds of foreign nationals, including Khmers, are fighting with ISIS.
Among them are those who studied in madrassas in the Middle East. In recent days ISIS
has changed its name to simply the Islamic State, after more than 15,000 militiamen
loyal to Baghdadi extended the civil war in Syria southwards into Iraq, reaching as far as
the northern outskirts of Baghdad. It insists a caliphate has been established across both
countries and has released a map outlining its territorial ambitions, stretching from the
Atlantic coast of Spain and Morocco to the western border of Myanmar. In Malaysia, and
elsewhere in Southeast Asia, recruitment for ISIS and its vitriolic anti-Shia campaign is
occurring through social media outlets, including Facebook. One analyst pointed to Lotfi
Ariffin, who has 24,796 followers and was a member of Malaysias hardline Islamic party
PAS. It is worrisome, yes, said Shahriman Lockman, a senior foreign policy analyst at
Malaysias Institute of Strategic & International Studies. If they wanted a safe haven for
their training and operations, they could easily go to the numerous failed states in Africa.
But they chose to operate from Malaysia, where the risk of being under surveillance is
much higher. Among them was 26-year-old Ahmad Tarmimi Maliki, said to be
Malaysias first suicide bomber after he reportedly drove a military vehicle ladened with
explosives into an Iraqi military post, killing 25 soldiers, six weeks ago. Details of the
attack were published on the ISIS website under the headline Mujahidin Malaysia
Syahid Dalam Operasi Martyrdom. Malaysian police have also arrested 19 people over
the last two months in a counterterrorism operation the authorities hope will end any
plans by jihadists of establishing recruitment and training centers in the Southeast Asian
country. Meanwhile, the Royal Malaysian Navy is conducting background checks on staff
after an officer was arrested for harboring militants plotting attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Analysts said ISIS leader, Baghdadi, is attracting support and filling a void left by the
killing of Osama bin Laden, with promises of an Islamic state and his ruthless approach
to jihad. ISISs priority has to be to sustain and consolidate its present campaign in
Syria and Iraq rather than dissipate resources and personnel in non-core areas for the
movement such as Southeast Asia, said Gavin Greenwood, a regional security analyst
with Hong Kong-based Allan & Associates. However, ISISs success to date has and no
doubt will continue to attract recruits to the movement with any survivors to what may
be years of fighting from countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and
Thailand representing a threat based on their skills and experience.

No impact
No impact or at least no spillover Thailand proves
The Manila Times, 1/18/14 (In Thailand, political instability threatens new
opportunities in Southeast Asia, The Manila Times, http://www.manilatimes.net/in-
thailand-political-instability-threatens-new-opportunities-in-southeast-
asia/68869/)//IS
The popular unrest that has brought Thai politics to a standstill is not particularly
remarkable; political instability in the country has occurred cyclically over the past
decade, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. What is remarkable about the
current bout of turmoil is that it could prevent Thailand from benefiting from emerging
economic developments in Southeast Asia. Over the past century, Thailands geopolitical
advantages, namely its strategic location and ethnic and cultural influence, have
conferred on the country a regional leadership role. But Southeast Asia is changing:
Manufacturers are leaving China as it moves up the value chain, the region is slowly
integrating economically, the United States is turning its attention away from the Middle
East toward the Asia-Pacific region, and Beijing is trying to expand its influence in
Southeast Asia. If instability persists, Thailand may not be able to lead or even benefit
from these new regional realities. Since the 2006 military coup, Thai politics has become
predictable. Political forces use public protests to forward their agenda, governments fall
amid protests or military intervention, and a new election is held. Thailands political
cycle is partly a result of the countrys inherent insolubility, whereby elites in Bangkok
traditionally have ruled the more populous but politically marginalized rural regions. But
now, the rural masses are finding the power to select representatives who do not
conform to the traditional political-economic model.


Stuctural violence
Impact uniqueness
we control impact uniqueness status quo is structurally improving
Ridley 10 visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor
of The Economist, and award-winning science writer, (Matt, The Rational Optimist,
2010 pg. 13-15) //AD

If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since 1800, the
population of the world has multiplied six times , yet average life expectancy has
more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times . Taking a
shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet
Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-
third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect
to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder,
childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis,
malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less
likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to
be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush
toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world
population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population
pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It
is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement. Averages conceal a lot. But
even if you break down the world into bits, it is hard to find any region that was
worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. Over that half-century, real income per head
ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra
Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and
infant survival in none. In the rest they have rocketed upward. Africas rate of
improvement has been distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the
world, and many southern African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the 1990s
as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before recovering in recent years). There were also
moments in the half-century when you could have caught countries in episodes of
dreadful deterioration of living standards or life chances China in the 1960s,
Cambodia in the 1970s, Ethiopia in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the
2000s, North Korea throughout. Argentina had a disappointingly stagnant twentieth
century. But overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the world is remarkably,
astonishingly, dramatically positive. The average South Korean lives twenty-six more
years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns
fifteen times as much as his North Korean counter part). The average Mexican lives
longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more
than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was
in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has
dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but
the poor have done even better. The poor in the developing world grew their
consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000.
The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-
lived than they were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 per cent less
fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955. Despite a doubling of the
world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty
(defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s. The percentage
living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half to less than 18 per
cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a
cause for despair: at the current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035
though it probably wont. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced
more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.

We control uniquenesshuman well-being is on the rise
Goklany 09Worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private
sector for over 35 years. Worked with IPCC before its inception as an author, delegate
and reviewer. Negotiated UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Managed the
emissions trading program for the EPA. Julian Simon Fellow at the Property and
Environment Research Center, visiting fellow at AEI, winner of the Julian Simon Prize
and Award. PhD, MS, electrical engineering, MSU. B.Tech in electrical engineering,
Indian Institute of Tech. (Indur, Have increases in population, affluence and technology
worsened human and environmental well-being? 2009,
http://www.ejsd.org/docs/HAVE_INCREASES_IN_POPULATION_AFFLUENCE_AN
D_TECHNOLOGY_WORSENED_HUMAN_AND_ENVIRONMENTAL_WELL-
BEING.pdf) //AD

Although global population is no longer growing exponentially, it has quadrupled since
1900. Concurrently, affluence (or GDP per capita) has sextupled, global economic
product (a measure of aggregate consumption) has increased 23-fold and carbon dioxide
has increased over 15-fold (Maddison 2003; GGDC 2008; World Bank 2008a; Marland
et al. 2007).4 But contrary to Neo- Malthusian fears, average human well-being,
measured by any objective indicator, has never been higher. Food supplies, Malthus
original concern, are up worldwide. Global food supplies per capita increased from 2,254
Cals/day in 1961 to 2,810 in 2003 (FAOSTAT 2008). This helped reduce hunger and
malnutrition worldwide. The proportion of the population in the developing world,
suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 196971
and 20012003 despite an 87 percent population increase (Goklany 2007a; FAO 2006).
The reduction in hunger and malnutrition, along with improvements in basic hygiene,
improved access to safer water and sanitation, broad adoption of vaccinations,
antibiotics, pasteurization and other public health measures, helped reduce mortality
and increase life expectancies. These improvements first became evident in todays
developed countries in the mid- to late-1800s and started to spread in earnest to
developing countries from the 1950s. The infant mortality rate in developing countries
was 180 per 1,000 live births in the early 1950s; today it is 57. Consequently, global life
expectancy, perhaps the single most important measure of human well-being, increased
from 31 years in 1900 to 47 years in the early 1950s to 67 years today (Goklany 2007a).
Globally, average annual per capita incomes tripled since 1950. The proportion of the
worlds population outside of high-income OECD countries living in absolute poverty
(average consumption of less than $1 per day in 1985 International dollars adjusted for
purchasing power parity), fell from 84 percent in 1820 to 40 percent in 1981 to 20
percent in 2007 (Goklany 2007a; WRI 2008; World Bank 2007). Equally important, the
world is more literate and better educated. Child labor in low income countries declined
from 30 to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003. In most countries, people are freer
politically, economically and socially to pursue their goals as they see fit. More people
choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live
under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb and property.
Social and professional mobility has never been greater. It is easier to transcend the
bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth in the lottery of life. People
work fewer hours, and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time
(Goklany 2007a). Figure 3 summarizes the U.S. experience over the 20th century with
respect to growth of population, affluence, material, fossil fuel energy and chemical
consumption, and life expectancy. It indicates that population has multiplied 3.7-fold;
income, 6.9-fold; carbon dioxide emissions, 8.5-fold; material use, 26.5-fold; and
organic chemical use, 101-fold. Yet its life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years
and infant mortality (not shown) declined from over 100 per 1,000 live births to 7 per
1,000. It is also important to note that not only are people living longer, they are
healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and
2004/2005 and, despite better diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart
and respiratory diseases) occur 811 years later now than a century ago (Fogel 2003;
Manton et al. 2006). If similar figures could be constructed for other countries, most
would indicate qualitatively similar trends, especially after 1950, except Sub-Saharan
Africa and the erstwhile members of the Soviet Union. In the latter two cases, life
expectancy, which had increased following World War II, declined after the late 1980s to
the early 2000s, possibly due poor economic performance compounded, especially in
Sub-Saharan Africa, by AIDS, resurgence of malaria, and tuberculosis due mainly to poor
governance (breakdown of public health services) and other manmade causes (Goklany
2007a, pp.6669, pp.178181, and references therein). However, there are signs of a
turnaround, perhaps related to increased economic growth since the early 2000s,
although this could, of course, be a temporary blip (Goklany 2007a; World Bank 2008a).
Notably, in most areas of the world, the healthadjusted life expectancy (HALE), that is,
life expectancy adjusted downward for the severity and length of time spent by the
average individual in a less-than-healthy condition, is greater now than the unadjusted
life expectancy was 30 years ago. HALE for the China and India in 2002, for instance,
were 64.1 and 53.5 years, which exceeded their unadjusted life expectancy of 63.2 and
50.7 years in 19701975 (WRI 2008). Figure 4, based on cross country data, indicates
that contrary to Neo-Malthusian fears, both life expectancy and infant mortality improve
with the level of affluence (economic development) and time, a surrogate for
technological change (Goklany 2007a). Other indicators of human well-being that
improve over time and as affluence rises are: access to safe water and sanitation (see
below), literacy, level of education, food supplies per capita, and the prevalence of
malnutrition (Goklany 2007a, 2007b).



War turns sv
War fuels structural violence
Goldstein 01
PROF OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS @ AMERICAN UNIV (JOSHUA, WAR AND
GENDER, P. 412)

First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for
peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, if you want peace, work
for justice. Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender
justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach
brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the
assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality
runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism,
gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars
outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other
injustices. 9 So,if you want peace, work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice (gender
and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of
analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military
may be the most important way to reverse womens oppression. The dilemma is that
peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral
grounding, yet, in light of this books evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main
cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

Nuclear war outweighs prioritizing structural violence makes conflict
inevitable
Boulding 78 professor of economics and director of the Center for Research on
Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan (Ken Boulding, Journal of Conflict
Resolution, June 1978, Future Directions in Conflict and Peace studies, Vol. 22 No.2
pp. 342-354)//CC

Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of
development of the really poor. He tried to amalga- mate this interest with the peace
research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by
downgrading the study of inter- national peace, labeling it "negative peace" (it should
really have been labeled "negative war") and then developing the concept of "structural
violence," which initially meant all those social structures and histories which produced
an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued
by analogy that if people died before the age, say, of 70 from avoidable causes, that this
was a death in "war"' which could only be remedied by something called "positive peace."
Unfortunately, the concept of structural violence was broadened, in the word of one
slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like. Another factor in
this situation was the feeling, certainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, that nuclear
deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence and that the problem of nuclear war
had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a most dangerous illusion
and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems
ofdisarmament and stable peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments, for
which most of the peaceresearchers are not particularly well qualified. To my mind, at
least, the quality of the research has suffered severely as a result.' The complex nature of
the split within the peace research community is reflected in two international peace
research organizations. The official one, the International Peace Research Association
(IPRA), tends to be dominated by Europeans somewhat to the political left, is rather,
hostile to the United States and to the multinational cor- porations, sympathetic to the
New International Economic Order and thinks of itself as being interested in justice
rather than in peace. The Peace Science Society (International), which used to be called
the Peace Research Society (International), is mainly the creation of Walter Isard of the
University of Pennsylvania. It conducts meetings all around the world and represents a
more peace-oriented, quantitative, science- based enterprise, without much interest in
ideology. COPRED, while officially the North American representative of IPRA, has very
little active connection with it and contains within itself the same ideological split which,
divides the peace research community in general. It has, however, been able to hold
together and at least promote a certain amount of interaction between the two points of
view. Again representing the "scientific" rather than the "ideological" point of view, we
have SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, very generously (by
the usual peace research stand- ards) financed by the Swedish government, which has
performed an enormously useful service in the collection and publishing of data on such
things as the war industry, technological developments, arma- ments, and the arms
trade. The Institute is very largely the creation of Alva Myrdal. In spite of the remarkable
work which it has done, how- ever, her last book on disarmament (1976) is almost a cry
of despair over the folly and hypocrisy of international policies, the overwhelming power
of the military, and the inability of mere information, however good, go change the
course of events as we head toward ultimate ca- tastrophe. I do not wholly share her
pessimism, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed with the results of this first
generation of the peace research movement. Myrdal called attention very dramatically to
the appalling danger in which Europe stands, as the major battleground between
Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union if war ever should break out. It may
perhaps be a subconscious recognition-and psychological denial-of the sword of
Damocles hanging over Europe that has made the European peace research movement
retreat from the realities of the international system into what I must unkindly describe
as fantasies of justice. But the American peace research community, likewise, has
retreated into a somewhat niggling scientism, with sophisticated meth- odologies and
not very many new ideas. I must confess that when I first became involved with the
peace research enterprise 25 years ago I had hopes that it might produce some- thing like
the Keynesian revolution in economics, which was the result of some rather simple ideas
that had never really been thought out clearly before (though they had been anticipated
by Malthus and others), coupled with a substantial improvement in the information
system with the development of national income statistics which rein- forced this new
theoretical framework. As a result, we have had in a single generation a very massive
change in what might be called the "conventional wisdom" of economic policy, and even
though this conventional wisdom is not wholly wise, there is a world of difference
between Herbert Hoover and his total failure to deal with the Great Depression, simply
because of everybody's ignorance, and the moder- ately skillful handling of the
depression which followed the change in oil prices in 1-974, which, compared with the
period 1929 to 1932, was little more than a bad cold compared with a galloping
pneumonia. In the international system, however, there has been only glacial change in
the conventional wisdom. There has been some improvement. Kissinger was an
improvement on John Foster Dulles. We have had the beginnings of detente, and at least
the possibility on the horizon of stable peace between the United States and the Soviet
Union, indeed in the whole temperate zone-even though the tropics still remain uneasy
and beset with arms races, wars, and revolutions which we cannot really AFFord. Nor
can we pretend that peace around the temper- ate zone is stable enough so that we do
not have to worry about it. The qualitative arms race goes on and could easily take us
over the cliff. The record of peace research in the last generation, therefore, is one of very
partial success. It has created a discipline and that is something of long-run
consequence, most certainly for the good. It has made very little dent on the
conventional wisdom of the policy makers anywhere in the world. It has not been able to
prevent an arms race, any more, I suppose we might say, than the Keynesian economics
has been able to prevent inflation. But whereas inflation is an inconvenience, the arms
race may well be another catastrophe. Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see new
horizons for peace and conflict research to get it out of the doldrums in which it has been
now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true
that war, the breakdown of Galtung's "negative peace," remains the greatest clear and
present danger to the human race, a danger to human survival far greater than
poverty, or injustice, or oppression, desirable and necessary as it is to eliminate these
things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and an inconven- ience to the
human race, but it has rarely been fatal to the process of evolutionary development as a
whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources.
Even in the twenti- eth century, with its two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, it
has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a larger
proportion of premature deaths. Now, however, advancing technology is creating a
situation where in the first place we are developing a single world system that does
not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore
if any- thing goes wrong everything goes wrong. The Mayan civilization could collapse in
900 A.D., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being aware of
the fact. When we had a number of iso- lated systems, the catastrophe in one was
ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving systems. The one-world system,
therefore, which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving
us, is inherentlymore precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all the
more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable
catastrophes. The necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every
improvement in technology, either of war or of peacex
Util
All lives infinitely valuableonly ethical option is maximizing number saved
Cummisky, 96 (David, professor of philosophy at Bates, Kantian Consequentialism, p.
131)

Finally, even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and
compensate for killing onebecause dignity cannot be added and summed this waythis
point still does not justify deontological constraints. On the extreme interpretation, why
would not killing one person be a stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am
concerned with the priceless dignity of each, it would seem that I may still save two; it is
just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss of one. Consider
Hills example of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless statutes only by
destroying one, then I cannot claim that saving two is not outweighed by the one that
was not destroyed. Indeed, even if dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the
extreme interpretation inconsistent with the idea that I should save as many priceless
objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and thus compensate for the
loss of one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as many as I can. In short,
it is not clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the ordinary killing/letting-die
distinction or even how it conflicts with the conclusion that the more persons with
dignity who are saved, the better.

Util consequences outweigh- moral absolutism reproduces evil
Issac, 2 (Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49
No. 2, Spring)

Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world one must attend to the means that are
necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise,
power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is
not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness
undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind
of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity
of ones intentions does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring
violence or refusing to make common cause with morally comprised parties may seem
like the right thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see
that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of
powerlessness, it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the
standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially immoral
stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about
unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than
the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with good may
engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is the
lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be
sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing
these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways.
Moral absolutism inhibits THIS judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It
promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Util comes before ethics
Kateb 92 Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at
Princeton (George, The Inner Ocean, p.110-111)

The highest worth of Schell's book lies in his insistence that we should all contemplate
the nuclear situation from the perspective of possible human extinction and be overcome
by the obligation, no matter what, to try to avoid human extinction. Yet as Schell says,
human extinction (as well as the extinction of most species in nature) is not the intention
of anyone in power. What must be seen is that the absolute end can come about even
though no one intends it. "We can do it," he says, "only if we don't quite know what we're
doing."
Schell's work attempts to force on us an acknowledgment that sounds far-fetched and
even ludicrous, an acknowledgment that the possibility of extinction is carried by any use
of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited or how seemingly rational or seemingly
morally justified. He himself acknowledges that there is a difference between possibility
and certainty. But in a matter that is more than a matter, more than one practical matter
in a vast series of practical matters, in the "matter" of extinction, we are obliged to treat a
possibility-a genuine possibility-as a certainty. Humanity is not to take any step that
contains even the slightest risk of extinction.
The doctrine of no-use is based on the possibility of extinction. Schell's perspective
transforms the subject. He takes us away from the arid stretches of strategy and asks us
to feel continuously, if 'we can, and feel keenly if only for an instant now and then, how
utterly distinct the nuclear world is. Nuclear discourse must vividly register that
distinctive-ness. It is of no moral account that extinction may be only a slight possibility.
No one can say how great the possibility is, but no one has yet credibly denied that by
some sequence or other a particular use of nuclear weapons may lead to human and
natural extinction. If it is not impossible it must be treated as certain: the loss
signified by extinction nullifies all calculations of probability as it nullifies
all calculations of costs and benefits.
Extinction is a prerequisite to morality
Bok, 88- Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis (Sissela, Applied Ethics and Ethical
Theory, Ed. David Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, JSTOR)//MY

The same argument can be made for Kants other formulations of the Categorical
Imperative: So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of
every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means; and So act
as if you were always through actions a law-making member in a universal Kingdom
of Ends. No one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk
eliminating humanity in the person of himself and every other or to risk the death of
all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their
collective death for the sake of following ones conscience would be, as Rawls said,
irrational, crazy. And to say that one did not intend such a catastrophe, but that one
merely failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be beside the point
when the end of the world was at stake. For although it is true that we cannot be held
responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a
case where we would have to take such a responsibility seriouslyperhaps to the
point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent person, in order that the world
not perish.


Taiwan War
Mearsheimer is wrongNo Taiwan war China will negotiate
Lin, 2/27 Thalia Lin serves as an Executive Officer in the Taipei Economic and
Cultural Representative Office in the U.S. (Thalia, February 27
th
, 2014, The National
Interest, Dont Say Goodbye to Taiwan, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/dont-
say-goodbye-taiwan-9966)//IK
With regard to John J. Mearsheimers essay Say Goodbye to Taiwan [March-April
2014], Mr. Mearsheimer presents hypothetical scenarios involving the implications for
Taiwan in a future U.S.-Mainland China great power relationship. In his pessimistic
assessment, among other things, he ultimately misses the mark by suggesting that time
is not on Taiwans side. The truth, we believe, is the opposite. Mr. Mearsheimer seems to
dismiss outright Taiwans ability to influence Mainland China in any real way, writing
Unfortunately for Taiwan, it has no way of influencing events so that [an economic
slowdown or domestic political problems] actually becomes reality. What he glosses
over is the reality of Taiwans success as a market-oriented democracy: That Taiwan can,
with time, influence Mainland China in a positive way. Particularly since President Ma
Ying-jeou took office in 2008, Taiwan and Mainland China have signed 19 cross-Strait
agreements, including an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement; the number of
Mainland students studying in Taiwan rose from 823 to over 24,000; and 37 percent of
the eight million tourists to visit Taiwan in 2013 were mainland Chinese. As time passes,
Taiwans success will definitely enlighten and make a positive impact on the general
public of the Mainland. This is why, in his 2012 inauguration address, President Ma
Ying-jeou talked about Taiwans successes in recent years, including cross-Strait
rapprochement that has won broad public support and dramatically reduced tension
between Taiwan and Mainland China. President Mas most salient point, though, was
that Taiwans experience in establishing democracy proves that it is not
impossible for democratic institutions from abroad to take root in an
ethnically Chinese society. This increased interaction is also occurring on an
administrative and to some extent political level: Earlier this month, Wang Yu-Chi,
minister of Taiwans Mainland Affairs Council, and Zhang Zhijun, minister of Mainland
Chinas Taiwan Affairs Office, met and exchanged opinions on cross-Strait relations,
marking the first ministerial meeting between the two governments since 1949. The
essay concludes that even the best case scenario for Taiwan is a Beijing solution.
However, the people on Taiwan simply will not accept a Beijing-led resolution, even a so-
called Hong Kong strategy. Ultimately, the future of Taiwan will be decided by
its 23 million people. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait, as President Ma said in his
2011 New Years message, should not quarrel over political power, independence versus
reunification, or Taiwans breathing room on the international stage. We should instead
focus on encouraging and helping each other grow in terms of the core values of
freedom, democracy, human rights, and rule of law.
No Taiwan warperception of intervention hurts Chinese foreign policy,
and Taiwan integration will be slow and peaceful
Keck 13 Zachary Keck is Managing Editor of The Diplomat where he authors The
Pacific Realist blog. He also writes a monthly column for The National Interest.
Previously, he worked as Deputy Editor of e-International Relations and has interned at
the Center for a New American Security and in the U.S. Congress, where he worked on
defense issues. (Zachary, The Diplomat, Why China Won't Attack Taiwan. It is
extremely unlikely that China will invade Taiwan, much less succeed. December 24
th
,
2013, http://thediplomat.com/authors/zachary-keck/)//IK
Although relatively muted in recent years, Taiwan is seen as the greatest potential
flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. Indeed, U.S. defense analysts perceive Chinas
expanding Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities primarily through the lens of
preventing the U.S. from intervening should Beijing invade Taiwan. Consequently, the
main concepts the U.S. military has developed for countering A2/AD namely, Air-Sea
Battle and a blockade approach appear to be based on the assumption that a shooting
war with China would break out over Taiwan. In many ways, the concern over Taiwan is
well-placed. China covets the island far more than any other piece of real estate,
including the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. For CCP leaders and many ordinary Chinese,
Taiwan is one of the vast remaining vestiges of the countrys century of humiliation.
Acquiring Taiwan would also significantly enhance the PLAs ability to project power
outwardly. Despite improvements in cross-Strait relations in recent years, China has
refused to rule out the possibility of invasion. Besides having the motivation to acquire
Taiwan, China seemingly is rapidly acquiring the capability to take the island by force. In
recent years, the cross-Strait military balance has rapidly shifted in Beijings favor, and
this trend is almost certain to continue so long as Chinas economy continues to grow.
Today, China has at least 1,600 ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan, and Taiwans own
Ministry of Defense admits that China will have sufficient military capabilities to mount
a full cross-Strait attack by 2020. This has led some U.S. analysts, particularly academics
of the Realist persuasion, to argue that the U.S. should gradually cede Taiwan to the
Peoples Republic of China. For example, Charles Glaser argued in a controversial
Foreign Affairs article in 2011 that, given the risks of nuclear war between China and the
United States, the United States should consider backing away from its
commitment to Taiwan. This would remove the most obvious and contentious flash
point between the United States and China and smooth the way for better relations
between them in the decades to come. Similarly, in a recent talk in Taiwan, John
Mearsheimer argued that short of acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent, Taiwans
best option is to pursue the Hong Kong strategy toward Beijing. Under the Hong Kong
strategy, Taiwan accepts the fact it is doomed to lose its independence and become part
of China. It then works hard to make sure that the transition is peaceful and that it gains
as much autonomy as possible from Beijing. Although the trend lines are undoubtedly
working in Chinas favor, it is ultimately extremely unlikely that China will try
to seize Taiwan by force. Furthermore, should it try to do this, it is unlikely to
succeed. Even assuming Chinas military capabilities are great enough to prevent the
U.S. from intervening, there are two forces that would likely be sufficient to deter China
from invading Taiwan. The first and least important is the dramatic impact this would
have on how countries in the region and around the world would view such a move.
Globally, China seizing Taiwan would result in it being permanently viewed
as a malicious nation. Regionally, Chinas invasion of Taiwan would diminish any
lingering debate over how Beijing will use its growing power. Every regional power
would see its own fate in Taiwan. Although Beijing would try to reassure countries by
claiming that Taiwan was part of China already, and thus the operation was a domestic
stability one, this narrative would be convincing to none of Chinas neighbors.
Consequently, Beijing would face an environment in which each state was dedicated to
cooperating with others to balance against Chinese power. But the more important
deterrent for China would be the uncertainty of success. To be sure, Chinas military
capabilities are growing to the point where it will soon be assured of its ability to quickly
defeat Taiwans military forces. A little longer down the road it will also likely be
confident that it can prevent the U.S. from intervening in the conflict. However, as recent
U.S. military conflicts have adequately demonstrated, being able to defeat another
nations armed forces and being able to pacify the country are two different things
altogether. It is in this latter aim that Chinas strategy is likely to falter. Taiwanese are
adamantly opposed to being incorporated into a non-Democratic China. These feelings
would only harden in the aftermath of the invasion. Thus, even if it quickly defeated
Taiwans formal military forces, the PLA would continue to have to contend with the
remnants of resistance for years to come. Such a scenario would be deeply unsettling for
leaders in Beijing as this defiance would likely inspire similar resistance among various
groups on the mainland, starting first and foremost with ethnic minorities in the western
China. Should the PLA resort to harsh oppression to squash resistance in Taiwan, this
would deeply unsettle even Han Chinese on the mainland. In fact, the clear parallels with
how Imperial Japan sought to pacify Taiwan and China would be lost on no one in China
and elsewhere. The entire situation would be a nightmare for Chinese leaders.
Consequently, they are nearly certain to avoid provoking it by invading Taiwan. The only
real scenario in which they would invade Taiwan is if the island nation formally declared
independence. But if Taiwanese leaders have avoided doing so to date, they are unlikely
to think the idea is very wise as China goes stronger. Thus, the status-quo in the
Taiwanese strait is unlikely to be changed by military force. Instead, Beijing is likely to
continue drawing Taiwan closer economically, and seeking to disrupt the U.S.-Taiwanese
bilateral relationship. The hope would be that leaders in Taipei will ultimately conclude
that they cannot resist being absorbed into China, something China itself can facilitate
this by offering favorable terms.
Alt causes to Taiwan warreassertion of democracy and military control
Yeoh, 14 Professor at the University of Malaya, Studies Ethnic Fragmentation and
Public Economies and the Political Economy Of Contemporary China (Emile Kok-Kheng,
April 2014, University of Malaya, Chinese/Taiwanese Nationalism, Cross-Strait
relations and an Inevitable War? A Review of Dong-ching Days Inevitable War?!
(2012), http://ics.um.edu.my/images/ics/IJCSV5N1/yeohreview.pdf)//IK
From the clash of conventional mainland Chinese and emerging Taiwanese nationalism,
Day moves on in Chapter 4 to placing the conflict in the wider context of the Sino-US
clash of interest a favourite topic for writers of international relations and strategic
studies on which innumerable papers have long been churned out year after year in
recent decades. Of particular interest here is that, as Day argues, amidst all the rhetoric
of mainland political leaders and scholars emphasizing Chinas peaceful rise or
peaceful development, the alarming, disproportionate growth in Chinese military
expenditure, her self-justified aggressive assertion of sovereignty over almost all of South
China Sea, her untiring reiteration of past national humiliation, her exploitation of the
society's age-old hatred for Japan and her arrogant refusal to abrogate the possibility of
the use of force towards Taiwan to the extent of writing the non-peaceful solution into
her Anti-Secession Law definitely do not help to placate her neighbours and the US and
dispel their worries of a China threat. The centrality of Taiwan in the Sino-US rivalry
for Asia-Pacific hegemony, given the undisputed geopolitical strategic importance of the
island state for America, has made increasing Taiwanese economic dependence on China
a real worry for America, according to Day, citing a Rand Corporation project for the US
Defense Department, Chinese Economic Coercion against Taiwan: A Tricky Weapon to
Use 11 . The research pointed to the possibility that as the Taiwanese economy is getting
increasingly dependent on China, there could be pressure on Taiwan at some point in
time to make a reckless move to declare independence to avoid Chinese economic
oppression getting out of control as time might not be on Taiwans side. Alternatively,
being unable to effectively achieve her political objectives via economic means for too
long, China might yet resort to military means to force unification with Taiwan, amidst a
feeling of defeat from the failure of playing her economic trump card and the
concomitant increasing anxiety over Taiwans eventually declaring independence
witness the sudden Sunflower Movement that is sweeping Taipei through March-April
201 4 right at this very moment of writing, led by hundreds of thousands of student
protesters enraged by President Ma Ying-jeous Politburo-esque maneuver 1 2 to enact
a trade pact with China to open up the island states service industries without fulfilling
the promise to allow a clause-by-clause review before implementation. The ultimate
source of the protest movement is the increasing wariness felt by Taiwans younger
generation of, besides and more than the economic impacts of effective merging the two
economies though the trade pact, the foreboding sense of Chinas incremental political
control over Taiwan and the Hongkongization ofTaiwans hard-won democracy.
No US intervention Taiwan settling SCS conflicts through dialogue and
consultation
Chia-Chen et al. 7/12 reporters for Focus Taiwan News Channel (Hsien Chia-chen,
Wen Kuei-hsiang and Evelyn Kao, July 12th, 2014, Focus Taiwan News Channel,
Taiwan renews call for peaceful resolution of South China Sea disputes,
http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201407120026.aspx)//IK
Taipei, July 12 (CNA) The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday reaffirmed Taiwan's
sovereignty over four island groups in the South China Sea, while urging neighboring
countries and territories involved in territorial disputes in the area to resolve their
differences through dialogue and negotiation. From the perspective of history, geography
and international law, the Spratly Islands, as well as the Paracel, Macclesfield and Pratas
island groups and their surrounding waters are all undoubtedly an inherent part of the
Republic of China (Taiwan) territory, said MOFA spokeswoman Anna Kao. The ROC
government is willing to uphold the basic principles of "safeguarding sovereignty,
shelving disputes, promoting peace, reciprocity and joint exploration" and work with
other countries to maintain regional peace and stability, Kao said. The government is
also urging neighboring countries to exercise self-restraint so that the South China Sea
disputes can be resolved peacefully through dialogue and consultation, Kao said. She was
commenting on a proposal Friday by Michael Fuchs, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of
state for Strategy and Multilateral Affairs, for claimant states to clarify and agree to
voluntarily freeze certain actions and activities that escalate disputes and cause
instability in the region. Fuchs said the U.S. wants the 10-nation Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China to have "a real and substantive discussion"
to flesh out a call for self-restraint contained in a Declaration of Conduct they agreed to
in 2002, with a view toward signing a formal maritime Code of Conduct. He said it would
be up to the claimants to decide what elements should be included in a freeze, but these
could include recommitting not to establish new outposts or seize territory another
claimant had occupied before the 2002 declaration. Claimants could also define what
types of actions would be considered provocative and what were merely efforts to
maintain a long-existing presence dating back to before 2002, Fuchs suggested. "For
example, alterations that fundamentally change the nature, size or capabilities of the
presence could fall under the freeze, whereas routine maintenance operations would be
permissible," he told a Washington think tank. The U.S. is expected to push the proposal
at a gathering of Asian foreign ministers in Myanmar next month. Kao said that Taiwan
and the U.S. have maintained an effective communication channel and have
a good understanding of each other's stance on a peaceful resolution to the
South China Sea territorial disputes. Taiwan is working to further exchange views
with the U.S. on its proposal and the situation in the South China Sea, she added. Also
Saturday, ruling Kuomintang Legislator Lin Yu-fang said that Fuchs' proposal does not
take aim at Taiwan because Taiwan has not taken any of the actions against
which the U.S. advised. "We are not one of the troublemakers; the U.S. fully
understands this," Lin added. (Hsien Chia-chen, Wen Kuei-hsiang and Evelyn Kao)

Business ties and regime stability solve
Gilly 13 --- Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the PhD Program in
Public Affairs and Policy in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland
State University. He specializes in the comparative politics and international relations
of China and Asia (Bruce, Policy Succession and the Next Cross-Strait Crisis, Asia
Policy, http://www.web.pdx.edu/~gilleyb/Gilley_TaiwanPolicySuccession.pdf)//trepka
Although some Taiwan analysts have warned that a fragmentation of power would
lead Xi to take an assertive stance on Taiwan to show he is not a weak leader,24 all
signs suggest that his assumption of power was largely uncontroversial and enjoyed
broad support. Xi also assumed chairmanship of the Central Military Commission at
the same time that he became party general secretary in 2012, which indicates a strong
consensus about his military control. His rapid rollout of a range of new initiatives on
anti-corruption and economic reform suggests that his position is not weak within the
leadership and also provides him with a repertoire of effective options to deal with
domestic unrest. Moreover, as the next section discusses, there is no evidence that Xi is
predisposed to a diversionary attack on Taiwan given his affinities with its people.

Trade War
Trade does not solve warno correlation between trade and peace
MARTIN et al 8 (Phillipe, University of Paris 1 PantheonSorbonne, Paris School of
Economics, and Centre for Economic Policy Research; Thierry MAYER, University of
Paris 1 PantheonSorbonne, Paris School of Economics, CEPII, and Centre for
Economic Policy Research, Mathias THOENIG, University of Geneva and Paris School of
Economics, The Review of Economic Studies 75)
Does globalization pacify international relations? The liberal view in political science
argues that increasing trade flows and the spread of free markets and democracy should
limit the incentive to use military force in interstate relations. This vision, which can
partly be traced back to Kants Essay on Perpetual Peace (1795), has been very
influential: The main objective of the European trade integration process was to prevent
the killing and destruction of the two World Wars from ever happening again.1 Figure 1
suggests2 however, that during the 18702001 period, the correlation
between trade openness and military conflicts is not a clear cut one. The first
era of globalization, at the end of the 19th century, was a period of rising trade openness
and multiple military conflicts, culminating with World War I. Then, the interwar period
was characterized by a simultaneous collapse of world trade and conflicts. After World
War II, world trade increased rapidly, while the number of conflicts decreased (although
the risk of a global conflict was obviously high). There is no clear evidence that the
1990s, during which trade flows increased dramatically, was a period of
lower prevalence of military conflicts, even taking into account the increase in the
number of sovereign states.
No trade wars not in the interest of a nations economy
Qingfen 12 reporter for China Daily News (Ding Qingfen (China Daily), Frictions to
'heat up' over trade, May 30, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-
05/30/content_15418479.htm)
Trade frictions between China and the United States will probably become more heated
in the months ahead, but no trade war will break out between the two biggest
economies in the world, Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade
Organization said on Tuesday. "As Chinese trade with the rest of the world grows, there
is a normal statistical proportion of trade frictions, and we believe that the frictions can
be handled peacefully," said Lamy. "But nothing like a trade war." Lamy made the
remarks in an interview conducted at the Beijing 2012 Round Table on WTO Accession
Best Practices for the least developed countries, which was held in the capital city.
During the forum, Chen Deming, minister of commerce, said China is willing to help the
least developed countries in the world join the WTO. Having them in the organization
will be good for the world economy and global trade, as well as for China. China, together
with other countries in the WTO, is calling for a simplification of the procedures
countries must go through to join the trade organization. Agreements meant to bring
about that goal are expected to be signed by July, Chen said. Last week, the Ministry of
Commerce wrote on its website about policies used to support wind, solar and other
sorts of renewable energy projects in five US states, including Washington, New Jersey,
Massachusetts, Ohio and California, saying they violate WTO policies and trade treaties.
China also complained to the WTO about the US imposition of anti-subsidy duties on
$7.29 billion worth of Chinese goods from 22 different categories that were imported to
the US last year. The announcements came on the heels of the US Commerce
Department's preliminary decision to place anti-dumping tariffs of up to 250 percent on
imports of Chinese solar cells. Analysts at home and abroad expressed worries that
China's response to that action will provoke a trade war between the two nations. Lamy,
though, said a member of the WTO has the right to challenge other members if it thinks
they have violated trade rules. "Sometimes, China challenges the US, EU, with anti-
dumping or countervailing duties, and sometimes it is other way round," he said. "There
are trade frictions, trade disputes, but there are no trade wars." As the US
presidential election draws near, the US may take further actions against China and its
trade policies in the hope of quieting critics who complain about their countrys trade
deficit with China and high unemployment rate, experts said. Obama has announced
plans to establish a trans-agency trade enforcement unit that will be charged with
investigating the policies and practices of the countrys most important trade partners.
In November, China began investigating whether the US was improperly using subsidies
to lower the price of US products. That scrutiny came a month after the seven US solar
manufacturers filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission and the
Department of Commerce. The Ministry of Commerce said the US has used subsidies in
ways that are "inconsistent with the WTO rules and rulings in many regards". "Trade
frictions are a normal statistical proportion volume of trade," Lamy said. "As trade
grows, the number of trade frictions grows." The Commerce Department is scheduled to
make a final determination on solar tariffs in early October. The US agency also
announced it would investigate Chinese exports of wind turbines, saying makers of that
equipment have received unfair government subsidies. It plans to make an
announcement on Wednesday about the duties it will impose on those products. Along
with the EU and Japan, the US filed a complaint in March with the WTO to challenge
Chinas policies governing exports of rare-earth minerals. "We are concerned that during
the financial crisis, protectionism is growing," Lamy said. "That's the reality." "But on the
whole, there are not dramatic surges of protectionist measures, although there are signs
that remain worrying. It's like going to a doctor from time to time. We do checkups, and
we tell the patients, 'Be careful'."

The U.S. will never abandon free trade--institutions and self-interest check
Ikenson, 09 director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies (Daniel, Center for
Trade Policy Studies, Free Trade Bulletin 37, A protectionism fling,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10651)
A Growing Constituency for Freer Trade The WTO/GATT system was created in the first
place to deter a protectionist pandemic triggered by global economic contraction. It was
created to deal with the very situation that is at hand. But in today's integrated global
economy, those rules are not the only incentives to keep trade barriers in check. With the
advent and proliferation of transnational supply chains, cross-border direct investment,
multinational joint ventures, and equity tie-ups, the "Us versus Them" characterization
of world commerce no longer applies. Most WTO members are happy to lower tariffs
because imports provide consumers with lower prices and greater variety, which
incentivizes local business to improve quality and productivity, which is crucial to
increasing living standards. Moreover, many local economies now rely upon access to
imported raw materials, components, and capital equipment for their own value-added
activities. To improve chances to attract investment and talent in a world where capital
(physical, financial, and human) is increasingly mobile, countries must maintain policies
that create a stable business climate with limited administrative, logistical, and physical
obstacles. The experience of India is instructive. Prior to reforms beginning in the 1990s,
India's economy was virtually closed. The average tariff rate on intermediate goods in
1985 was nearly 150 percent. By 1997 the rate had been reduced to 30 percent. As trade
barriers were reduced, imports of intermediate goods more than doubled. The tariff
reductions caused prices to fall and Indian industry suddenly had access to components
and materials it could not import previously. That access enabled Indian manufacturers
to cut costs and use the savings to invest in new product lines, which was a process that
played a crucial role in the overall growth of the Indian economy.16 India's approach has
been common in the developing world, where most comprehensive trade reforms during
the past quarter century have been undertaken unilaterally, without any external
pressure, because governments recognized that structural reforms were in their country's
interest. According to the World Bank, between 1983 and 2003, developing countries
reduced their weighted average tariffs by almost 21 percentage points (from 29.9 percent
to 9.3 percent) and unilateral reforms accounted for 66 percent of those cuts.17 The
Indispensible Nation The United States accounts for the highest percentage of world
trade and has the world's largest economy. The WTO/GATT system is a U.S.-inspired
and U.S.-shaped institution. Recession in the United States has triggered a cascade of
economic contractions around the world, particularly in export-dependent economies.
Needless to say, U.S. trade policy is closely and nervously observed in other countries.
But despite the occasional anti-trade rhetoric of the Democratic Congress and the
protectionist-sounding campaign pledges of President Obama, the United States is
unlikely to alter its strong commitment to the global trading system. There is simply too
much at stake. Like businesses in other countries, U.S. businesses have become
increasingly reliant on transnational supply chains. Over 55 percent of U.S. import value
in 2007 was of intermediate goods, which indicates that U.S. producers depend highly on
imported materials, components, and capital equipment. And there is also the fact that
95 percent of the world's population lives outside of the United States, so an open trade
policy is an example to uphold.

Free trade doesnt cause peace
Montgomery et al 12- Alexander H., Associate Professor, Political Science at Reed
College (War, Trade, and Distrust: Why Trade Agreements Dont Always Keep the
Peace, 2012, http://irps.ucsd.edu/ehafner/pdfs/Paper_Hafner-
Burton_War%20Trade%20and%20Distrust_2012.pdf\\CLans)
Many before us have been skeptical of the claim that interdependence promotes peace
among states. It is well understood that international institutions can have adverse
effects on conflicts among member states, mismanaging crisis situations and worsening
conflict intensity (Gallarotti, 1991), or producing rivalry among states due to their
relative social positions (Hafner-Burton and Montgomery, 2006). We are nevertheless
among the first to directly tackle the principal claims supporting the liberal thesis that
trade institutions dampen conflict, and to propose an explanation for why conflict often
characterizes outcomes. This is important because we observe significant instances of
violent conflict4 between PTA members: the 1990s alone included border clashes
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, members of the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS); the outbreak of war in the Great Lakes, with foreign involvement in the
Democratic Republic of Congo from Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe,
all members of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA); the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and violent border clashes between Egypt and Sudan, all
members of the Council of Arab Economic Unity (CAEU); and fighting between India
and Pakistan, members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC). North and South Korea frequently are involved in violent incidents; both are
members of the Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries
(GSTP). A majority of these disputants are also members of the WTO. Powers contends
that in Africa, 16% of all militarized international disputes registered by the Correlates of
War data from 1950 to 1992 occurred between PTA members (Powers, 2003, 2004).
These examples show clearly that members of the same trade institution can and do
conflict, that conflict often breaks out into violence, and that commerce is frequently not
enough to keep the peace. They stand in sharp contrast to the liberal expectation that
trade institutions dampen conflict through an increase in trust. Trade institutions do
increase repeated contact between members; however, contact does not necessarily build
trust or a sense of community. The lessons of European integration theory suggest that
building community through upgrading the common interest between PTA members
requires a minimum level of homogeneity: a pluralist social structure, a high level of
economic and industrial development, and ideological similarity (Haas, 1960). Security
communities are also most likely to develop through economic relations among Western
nations, as even the most institutionalized forms of integration in the developing world.
As per the usual convention, we define violent MIDs to be any MID in which at least
one death occurred. Conflict Management and Peace Science 29(3) cannot be said to
create the mutual identification at the core of the concept (Bearce, 2003). Although
evidence suggests that economic integration has led to the formation of a collective
identity and trust among member states of the European Union over time, it is well
understood that democratic features of liberal democracies enable the community in
the first place (Russett and Oneal, 2001: 166). The liberal argument that trade
institutions dampen conflict by building trust among leaders to overcome commitment
problems consequently chiefly applies to the Western world of advanced democratic
nations. Yet the overwhelming majority of trade institutions manage trade between
partners that include at least one developing or nondemocratic state, and there is no
evidence to show that these institutions build trust over asymmetrical distribution of
gains. Boehmer, Gartzke, and Nordstrom cogently argue that states that belong to many
different international institutions may have a greater number of international interests
to competitively defend and a greater array of opportunities to enact aggressive behavior
in defense of those perceived interests (Boehmer et al., 2002). We extend this argument
one step further; trade institutions create and shape states interests, affecting not only
the number of potential issues for dispute, but also establishing conditions that can lead
to distrust. Institutions do this by placing states in social positions of power within
international relations, which shape expectations for behavior by defining which issues
are legitimate for contestation via military means and enable states to coerce, bribe,
reward, or punish each other. We address this possibility in the next section.


Water War
Alt Causes
Alt causes to water wars
Goldenberg, 2/8/14 Suzanne Goldenberg is the US environment correspondent of
the Guardian and is based in Washington DC. She has won several awards for her work
in the Middle East, and in 2003 covered the US invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. She is
author of Madam President, about Hillary Clinton's historic run for White House
(Suzanne, Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war, The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-water-shortages-
threat-terror-war)//IS
"Almost all of those red hotspots correspond to major aquifers of the world. What Grace
shows us is that groundwater depletion is happening at a very rapid rate in almost all of
the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world." The Middle East, north
Africa and south Asia are all projected to experience water shortages over the coming
years because of decades of bad management and overuse. Watering crops, slaking thirst
in expanding cities, cooling power plants, fracking oil and gas wells all take water from
the same diminishing supply. Add to that climate change which is projected to
intensify dry spells in the coming years and the world is going to be forced to think a
lot more about water than it ever did before. The losses of water reserves are staggering.
In seven years, beginning in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers lost 144 cubic kilometres of stored freshwater or about the same
amount of water in the Dead Sea, according to data compiled by the Grace mission and
released last year. A small portion of the water loss was due to soil drying up because of a
2007 drought and to a poor snowpack. Another share was lost to evaporation from lakes
and reservoirs. But the majority of the water lost, 90km3, or about 60%, was due to
reductions in groundwater.


Timeframe
Water wars have a long timeframe, stay localized, and US power solves now
Goldenberg, 2/8/14 Suzanne Goldenberg is the US environment correspondent of
the Guardian and is based in Washington DC. She has won several awards for her work
in the Middle East, and in 2003 covered the US invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. She is
author of Madam President, about Hillary Clinton's historic run for White House
(Suzanne, Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war, The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-water-shortages-
threat-terror-war)//IS
The chances of countries going to war over water were slim at least over the next
decade, the national intelligence report said. But it warned ominously: "As water
shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basins will
increasingly be used as leverage; the use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist
objectives will become more likely beyond 10 years." Gleick predicted such conflicts
would take other trajectories. He expected water tensions would erupt on a more local
scale. "I think the biggest worry today is sub-national conflicts conflicts between
farmers and cities, between ethnic groups, between pastoralists and farmers in Africa,
between upstream users and downstream users on the same river," said Gleick. "We have
more tools at the international level to resolve disputes between nations. We have
diplomats. We have treaties. We have international organisations that reduce the risk
that India and Pakistan will go to war over water but we have far fewer tools at the sub-
national level."


No impact
Water scarcity doesnt lead to war
Jackson, 2/28/14 Dual M.A. with emphasis on water governance. Former Research
Assistant at the University for Peace, (Moses Water, Conflict, and Peacebuilding in
Development: Lessons for Practitioners, The Wilson Center,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/water-conflict-and-peacebuilding-development-
lessons-for-practitioners-toolkit-launch)//IS
A lot of times we believe that scarcity drives conflict, said Aaron Wolf, professor and
department chair of geosciences at Oregon State University, when in fact, scarcity is
not the sole driver of conflict; its not even the primary driver of conflict.
Wolf directs the schools Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation
and has been at the forefront of major efforts to understand and address international
water conflict. What we found in the Basins at Risk study was that if you have a rapid
change that exceeds the institutional capacity to absorb the change, thats where you find
conflict, he said. In practice, this means the management of shared water resources is as
much about governance mechanisms as it is about geography

Cooperation before conflict and tons of alt causes
McConnell 2/25/14 Staff Writer at the IIP (Kathryn, Effective Water Management
Can Prevent Conflict, USAID Says, Bureau of International Information Programs
http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2014/02/20140225294041.html#axz
z37mBVzSrO)//IS
Also affecting water management is the issue of the lack of transparency about water
rights and private sector contracts that can mask preferential treatment or corrupt
governance, the report says. Corruption can increase marginalization and exploitation
of disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, it notes.
Other factors that affect water availability, quality and access are traditional practices,
water politics, upstream and downstream flows, pollution, climate change and natural
disasters, the report says. It says that low resilience to environmental disruptions can
lower economic productivity, trigger unemployment and damage public perceptions of
the competence of government institutions.
Water is a shared interest even in deeply divided communities and regions, Chris
Kosnik, acting director of USAIDs Office of Water, said at the Wilson Center. As well,
water can be a powerful connector encouraging cooperation and negotiation in lieu of
competition or violence, he said.
.


No water scarcity most conclusive studies go neg
Katz 11Director of the Akirov Institute for Business and Environment at Tel Aviv
University (David, Hydro-Political Hyperbole, Global Environmental Politics, February
2011, Muse) //RGP
A number critiques have been leveled against both the theory and the empirical evidence
behind the water wars hypothesis. One critique of the environmental security literature,
of which much of the published material on water wars is guilty, is that warnings and
threats of future violence are often considered as evidence.28 Statements from the 1980s
that the next war in the Middle East will be over water have already proven false.
Research has shown, however, that even the more general predictions of imminent water
wars that are based on comments by officials may be suspect. Leng, for instance, found
no correlation between the frequency of threats of war and the onset of war.29
Examining conflict and cooperation over water resources, Yoffe and colleagues noted
over 400 incidents of water-related verbal exchanges by political figures between 1948
and 1999 that were conflictual in nature, but only 37 instances of violent conflict of
varying levels of intensity. Thirty of these were from the Middle East, none were [End
Page 15] more recent than 1970, none were all-out wars, and in none was water the
central cause of conflict.30Proponents of water war scenarios often premise their dire
conclusions on the fact that water is essential for life and non-substitutable.31 Yet water
for basic needs represents a small share of total water use, even in arid countries.32
Economists and others point out that over 80 percent of world freshwater withdrawals
are for the agricultural sector, a relatively low-value use and one in which large gains in
efficiency could be made by changes in irrigation techniques and choice of crops. Thus,
economic critiques of the water war hypothesis stress that the value of water that would
be gained from military conflict is unlikely to outweigh the economic costs of military
preparation and battle, much less the loss of life.33 Some authors have even questioned
the empirical basis for the conclusion that freshwater is increasingly scarce, 34 an
assumption on which the water war hypothesis relies. Such a cornucopian view claims
that people adapt to scarcity through improvements in technology, pricing, and
efficiencyrendering water less scarce, not more so. Perhaps the strongest case against
the likelihood of water wars is the lack of empirical evidence of precedents. Wolf found
only one documented case of war explicitly over water, and this took place over 4500
years ago.35 Moreover, he could document only seven cases of acute conflict over water.
Yoffe and colleagues also find that armed conflict over water resources has been
uncommon.36 They found that cooperation was much more common than conflict, both
globally and in all world regions except the Middle East/North Africa. This pattern may
explain why only a limited number of case studies of water conflict are presented in the
water wars literature. Analysts have criticized environmental security arguments that
are based on case studies because such works tend to have no variation in the dependent
variable.37 Many large sample statistical studies have attempted to address such
shortcomings, however, in several cases these studies too have come under fire. For
instance, a number of large-sample statistical studies find correlations between water-
related variables and conflict, however, few, if any, provide convincing support for causal
relationships. Moreover, several studies found that water availability had no impact on
the likelihood of either domestic or international conflict, 38 including at least one study
that attempted to replicate earlier studies [End Page 16] that claimed to have found such
correlations.39 Moreover, the results of several studies that do find correlations between
water and conflict are either not robust or are contrasted by other findings. For instance,
Raleigh and Urdal find that the statistical significance of water scarcity variables is
highly dependent on one or two observations, leading them to conclude that actual
effects of water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant.40 Jensen and Gleditsch
find that the results of Miguel and colleagues are less robust when using a recoding of the
original dataset.41 Gleditsch and colleagues found that shared basins do predict an
increased propensity for conflict, but found no correlation between conflict and drought,
the number of river crossings, or the share of the basin upstream, leading them to state
that support for a scarcity theory of water conflict is somewhat ambiguous.42

Agricultural advancements solve
Clancy, 14 GreenBiz senior writer, is an award-winning business journalist
specializing in coverage of transformative technology and in translating tech-speak into
business benefits (Heather, 11 innovations to fight food and water scarcity, GreenBiz,
2/25/2014, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/02/25/new-report-emerging-
agriculture-technology) //RGP
Precision agriculture is one of the unexpected bright spots in a new International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) report that examines 11 agricultural innovations many
hold up as the answer to the world's burgeoning food scarcity, water shortage and
climate change challenges. None of the technologies considered can address these
concerns on its own, but taken in aggregate they could help improve global crop yields by
up to 67 percent by 2050 while reducing food prices by nearly half, reports IFPRI.
"Advances in technology represent one of the most powerful resources for increasing
yields and mitigating the impact of water scarcity and climate change," said Shenggen
Fan, director general of IFPRI, during a press conference to discuss the report, "Food
Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies."
The impact of doing nothing? As just one scenario, it is estimated that maize crop yields
could decline by as much as 18 percent over that same timeframe, making it even more
difficult to feed the world's growing population. "The cost of inaction could be
dramatically negative," said Mark Rosegrant, lead author of the IFPRI report. As you
might expect, however, adoption of these technologies won't happen without accelerated
private sector investments and changes in public policy and infrastructure priorities. No
solution stands alone The 174-page report illustrates and details various scenarios
involving three primary crops: maize, rice and wheat. There are 11 innovations
considered, separately and in combination. 1. Crop protection Methods of managing
pests, diseases and weeds 2. Drip irrigation Approaches that involve applying water
directly around roots 3. Drought tolerance Plant varieties that can process available
moisture more readily and that are less vulnerable to water deficiency 4. Heat tolerance
Varieties that can withstand or thrive in higher temperatures 5. Integrated soil fertility
management New fertilizer and composting combinations 6. Nitrogen use efficiency
Plants that respond better to fertilizers 7. No-till Farming that involves little or no soil
disturbance and potentially the use of cover crops 8. Organic agriculture Cultivation
that excludes manufactured fertilizers, growth enhances or genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) 9. Precision agriculture GPS-assisted, machine to machine
solutions that combine information collected by sensors with automated management
10. Sprinkler irrigation Water delivered through overhead nozzles 11. Water
harvesting: Irrigation that uses earth dams, channels and other ways of directing water
toward crops "The reality is that no single agricultural technology or farming practice
will provide sufficient food for the world in 2050," Rosegrant said. "Instead, we must
advocate for and utilize a range of these technologies in order to maximize yields." For
example, under best case scenarios, no-till farming could help improve yields for maize
by 20 percent by 2050, but layering better irrigation methods into those same fields
could boost that improvement to 67 percent. The impact of precision agriculture varies
dramatically, depending on the crop. When it comes to improving production, it is the
fourth most effective innovation for improving maize yields. But for rice and wheat,
precision agriculture ranks behind nitrogen-use efficiency and no-till techniques.
Overall, the report suggests that by applying precision agriculture, global rainfed wheat
yields could be improved by 25 percent by 2050. But the results vary dramatically
depending on the crop and the region. "Globally, the largest production increases
compared to the baseline in 2050 are achieved through no-till and heat tolerance for
maize, [nitrogen-use efficiency] and [precision agriculture] for rice, and non-till and
[precision agriculture] for wheat," notes the report. Suggestions for scale From an
anecdotal standpoint, younger farmers are particularly interested in precision
agriculture techniques because they have grown up around information technology, said
Robert Carlson, president of the World Farmers Organization. "Every farmer wants to
improve their lives; they want to progress; they want a more secure future," he said. In
North America, for example, precision agriculture has been particularly useful as a
measure for fine-tuning fertilizer placement and application, helping farms reduce
overhead. Other experts participating in the IFPRI discussion point to successful
applications in India and China as further evidence that precision agriculture may be
catching on more quickly than anticipated. Encouraging farmers to change their business
practices simply to counteract climate change or food scarcity is likely to be a losing
argument, however, according to several experts discussing the report. "I would think
that famers would say that they would adopt these recommendations based on whether
they will see a return on their investment," Carlson said. One online modeling tool for
doing that is IFPRI's AgriTech Toolbox, which helps farmers, researchers and
policymakers analyze how various technology or agricultural practices could affect farm
yields, food prices, natural resource use, land use, global trade, malnutrition and hunger.
It covers 10 innovations discussed in the report.

No water wars problems arent large enough to escalate
Now Lebanon, 10 (Improbable War or Impossible Peace? 2/10/2010,
http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=145813) //RGP
Water wars, the Blue Gold rush, the century of water wars: These threatening
formulas have emerged over the past few years. Future conflicts of varying intensity are
predicted, and the control of hydra resources is at stake. The 20th century was
supposedly that of the black gold wars. Ecological concerns have thus driven
futurologists to dub the 21st century the century of blue gold wars. So many wars are in
sight! One can live without petroleum, but not without water. Yet when looking at things
from a historical perspective, one must consider these tragic predictions in context. The
enumeration of the acts of violence that are directly linked to the control of aquifers since
ancient times leads after much pain to a shorter list of less intense eruptions of violence,
including riots and skirmishes between various villages . These are almost systematically
localized, isolated, popular acts of violence. Governments are seemingly unwilling to
allow themselves to be dragged into conflicts triggered by local problems. The paradox is
as follows: The only resource that is indispensable for life generates minor tensions,
whereas non-necessary, and even superfluous, resources have given rise to conflicts and
inequalities, leading economists to speak of a natural resources curse. This paradox
prevails among Middle Eastern leaders. With water you can make politics. With land
you can make war, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a seminar
on the sustainable management of water in 1995 . Israeli and Palestinian officials make
only a marginal reference to the water issue in their public speeches. This is a long way
behind the issue of security for the Israelis, and the issues of refugees, settlements and
the status of Jerusalem for the Palestinians. One should certainly keep in mind that such
a statement by the Israeli prime minister was politically motivated, but this position is
symptomatic of the symbolic value of land and the instrumental value of water.
Nevertheless, one should keep in mind that while water is, in all likelihood, not an issue
in a future war, it is still a herald of peace. In fact, North Africa and the Arabian
Peninsula are the most arid regions of the globe. In the Middle East, Turkey, Iraq,
Lebanon and Israel are the only countries that are relatively spared from water
shortages. Syria is in a situation of hydric stress. In other words, according to the United
Nations, available resources are estimated between 1,000 and 1,700 m3 per individual
per year. Other countries in the region suffer from hydric shortage (less than 1,000 m3
per individual per year). The average level of water resources in the region hovers around
1,400 m3 per individual per year. This level will witness a 50% decrease by 2025 due to
population growth. Agriculture squanders up to 90% of freshwater supplies compared to
a world average of 70% , while industry and domestic use make up the remaining 10%.
One of the most contentious issues in the region is Israels water consumption, which is
several times higher than that of its neighbors due to treaties that grant it privileged
access to the regions hydric resources. Yet these tensions do not underlie the disputes
between those countries. The unequal division of water resources is actually just one
dimension of these disputes, and not necessarily a dimension that drives crises to
escalate.

No impact to water scarcity cooperation solves
Van Weezel, 9 PhD Student Economics Department at Royal Holloway, University of
London (Stijn, Water Scarcity: Trigger for Conflict or Cooperation, Wageningen
University, August 2009, edepot.wur.nl/15942) //RGP
7. Conclusions This research has tried to find an answer to the question whether in the
future it is plausible that in the Euphrates-Tigris water basin a war will be caused by
water scarcity. The focus has been on the Euphrates-Tigris river basin because it is
situated in a region that is rife with conflict and is mentioned in academic literature as
the basin were violent conflict caused by water scarcity is plausible. The result of this
research can be divided into three parts: the major developments for the coming 20-40
years, the political consequences of these developments, and to what extent this will
increase the risk for water-related conflict. This research started by distinguishing the
different forms and levels of water scarcity in order to understand the causes and
consequences. Scarcity induced conflict is not the direct result of environmental
deprivation but it is influenced by the social and political factors attached to the use of a
certain resource. We also distinguished that water scarcity can either be a demand or a
supply problem. Concerning the major developments in the coming 20-40 years, we saw
that developments will take place that will cause, or increase, both the demand and
supply side of the water scarcity problem in the region. Major contributing factors to
future water scarcity are the expected population growth and the effects of
environmental change such as the alteration of the local climate. In essence this means
that in the future there will be less water available, which will be used by more people.
The Euphrates and Tigris are unmistakably important for all of the riparians who rely on
the rivers for hydropower, irrigation water, and water for domestic use. Syria and Iraq
rely heavily on the rivers' water since there are little alternative sources of fresh water in
their territory. For water withdrawal the downstream riparians are dependent on the
goodwill of the upstream riparians. Turkey can decide to restrict the flow of the water on
both rivers since it is the upstream country, while Syria can decide to withdraw more
water from the Euphrates which will leave less to use for Iraq. Reducing the flow of the
river often leads to firm reactions. Water is a vital resource for the well-being of the
individual and society, and in an arid area such as the Middle East the availability of
sufficient water can be viewed as a matter of national security. Some suggest that due to
the fact that water is essential for mankind this resource is prone to conflict and this
potential will be unleashed in circumstances of increased scarcity. In academic literature
a number of factors are given that will add to the conflict potential of a situation. This
research found that a majority of these factors are present in the river basin region and
that some of them might have an increasing influence due to the absence of sufficient
coping mechanisms such as institutions and cooperative initiatives. The role of these
factors is likely to increase in the future due to the given circumstances. This research
used four scenarios in order to see how these factors interact with the social and political
circumstances and to check whether the political consequences would give indication to
suspect a violent escalation of the situation by 2030-2050. This research found that only
under the circumstances of one scenario there will be an increased risk on violent
conflict and that there will be a large possibility that one of the downstream riparians
might use force in order to secure its water resources. This scenario included that this
riparian must believe that its military is stronger and military action would only be
logical if it followed after a significant restriction of the flow of river water. The other
outcomes of the scenarios were much more positive. In all the cases the conclusion was
that conflict is not very likely, even with remaining hostile tensions between some of the
riparians. Military action in order to secure water resources is only viable when there are
no other solutions. It is much cheaper to solve the problem by peaceful means such as
diplomacy or by using technologies, than by initiating a military operation which will
bring about large costs. In the one scenario where violent conflict is possible, the initial
action would only concern the destruction of water infrastructure. Is cooperation a more
likely outcome? In some scenarios it is, but the intensity of these cooperative initiatives
differ per scenario. In one scenario this research found that closer cooperation between
the riparians would be a logical result of the given circumstances. This development
would be mainly caused by the improved relations between the riparians. The remaining
two scenarios also show no significant signs that the chance of violent conflict would
increase although there are no significant signs either suggesting cooperation as a more
likely outcome. In one case the river basin would be regulated by the strong hegemonic
position of Turkey, while in the other

West African Refugee conflict

No impact no risk of African refugee conflict
Barrett 05 PhD Military & Strategic Studies, U of Calgary (Robert, June 1,
Understanding the Challenges of African Democratization through Conflict
Analysis http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID726162_code327511.pdf?
abstractid=726162&mirid=1)
Westerners eager to promote democracy must be wary of African politicians who
promise democratic reform without sincere commitment to the process. Offering money
to corrupt leaders in exchange for their taking small steps away from autocracy may in
fact be a way of pushing countries into anocracy. As such, world financial lenders and
interventionists who wield leverage and influence must take responsibility in considering
the ramifications of African nations who adopt democracy in order to maintain elite
political privileges. The obvious reason for this, aside from the potential costs in human
life should conflict arise from hastily constructed democratic reforms, is the fact that
Western donors, in the face of intrastate war would then be faced with channeling funds
and resources away from democratization efforts and toward conflict intervention based
on issues of human security. This is a problem, as Western nations may be increasingly
wary of intervening in Africa hotspots after experiencing firsthand the unpredictable and
unforgiving nature of societal warfare in both Somalia and Rwanda. On a costbenefit
basis, the West continues to be somewhat reluctant to get involved in Africas dirty wars,
evidenced by its political hesitation when discussing ongoing sanguinary
grassroots conflicts in Africa. Even as the world apologizes for bearing witness to the
Rwandan genocide without having intervened, the U nited S tates, recently using the
label genocidein the context of the Sudanese conflict (in September of 2004), has only
proclaimed sanctions against Sudan, while dismissing any suggestions at actual
intervention (Giry, 2005). Part of the problem is that traditional military and diplomatic
approachs at separating combatants and enforcing ceasefires have yielded little in
Africa. No powerful nations want to get embroiled in conflicts they cannot win
especially those conflicts in which the intervening nation has very little interest.

Outside powers wont intervene in African conflicts no escalation
Docking 07 African Affairs Specialist with the US Institute of Peace (Tim, 2007,
Taking Sides Clashing Views on African Issues, p. 376)
Since the tragedy in Somalia, the trend has been for Western nations to refuse to
send troops into Africa's hot spots. Jordan recently underscored this point when it
expressed frustration with the West's failure to commit soldiers to the UNAMSIL
mission as a reason for the withdrawal of its troops from Sierra Leone. America's
aversion to peacekeeping in Africa also reflects broader U.S. foreign policy
on the continent. Africa occupies a marginal role in American foreign policy in general (a
point highlighted by conference participants).
No impact to climate refugees
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)
Climate dangers
The third avenue for concern about coming resource wars is through the dangers of
global climate change. The litany is now familiar. Sea levels will rise, perhaps a lot;
storms will probably become more intense; dry areas are prone to parch further and wet
zones are likely to soak longer. And on top of those probable effects, unchecked climate
change raises the odds of suffering nasty surprises if the world's climate and ecosystems
respond in abrupt ways. Adding all that together, the scenarios are truly disturbing.
Meaningful action to stem the dangers is long overdue.
In the United States over the last year, the traditional security community has become
engaged on these issues. Politically, that conversion has been touted as good news
because the odds of meaningful policy are higher if hawks also favor action. Their
concerns are seen through the lens of resource wars, with fears such as: water shortages
that amplify grievances and trigger conflict; migrations of "climate refugees",
which could stress border controls and also cause strife if the displaced don't fit well in
their new societies; and diseases such as malaria that could be harder to contain if
tropical conditions are more prevalent, which in turn could stress health-care systems
and lead to hot wars.
While there are many reasons to fear global warming, the risk that such dangers
could cause violent conflict ranks extremely low on the list because it is
highly unlikely to materialize. Despite decades of warnings about water wars, what
is striking is that water wars don't happen - usually because countries that share water
resources have a lot more at stake and armed conflict rarely fixes the problem. Some
analysts have pointed to conflicts over resources, including water and valuable land, as a
cause in the Rwandan genocide, for example. Recently, the UN secretary-general
suggested that climate change was already exacerbating the conflicts in Sudan.
But none of these supposed causal chains stay linked under close scrutiny -
the conflicts over resources are usually symptomatic of deeper failures in governance and
other primal forces for conflicts, such as ethnic tensions, income inequalities and other
unsettled grievances. Climate is just one of many factors that contribute to tension. The
same is true for scenarios of climate refugees, where the moniker "climate" conveniently
obscures the deeper causal forces.
The dangers of disease have caused particular alarm in the advanced industrialized
world, partly because microbial threats are good fodder for the imagination. But none of
these scenarios hold up because the scope of all climate-sensitive diseases is mainly
determined by the prevalence of institutions to prevent and contain them rather than the
raw climatic factors that determine where a disease might theoretically exist. For
example, the threat industry has flagged the idea that a growing fraction of the United
States will be malarial with the higher temperatures and increased moisture that are
likely to come with global climate change.
Yet much of the American South is already climatically inviting for malaria, and malaria
was a serious problem as far north as Chicago until treatment and eradication programs
started in the 19th century licked the disease. Today, malaria is rare in the industrialized
world, regardless of climate, and whether it spreads again will hinge on whether
governments stay vigilant, not so much on patterns in climate. If Western countries
really cared about the spread of tropical diseases and the stresses they put on already
fragile societies in the developing world, they would redouble their efforts to tame the
diseases directly (as some are now doing) rather than imagining that efforts to lessen
global warming will do the job. Eradication usually depends mainly on strong and
responsive governments, not the bugs and their physical climate.


Yes War

No interdependence, deterrence, or mutually assured destruction.
Gosnell and Orzetti 12, Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, pursuing a
graduate degree in international security at Georgetown University, AND Second
Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Coprs, has a Masters degree from Georgetown
Universitys Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, cites a study by the Center for
Naval Analyses called Grand Strategy: Contemporary Contending Analyst Views and
Implications for the U.S. Navy, (Rachael and Michael, April 2012, Now Hear This - Is
Great-Power War Still Possible?, U.S. Naval Institute,
http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012-04/now-hear-great-power-war-still-
possible)//HH
*default to existential war impacts; empirics disprove economic interdependence,
deterrence theory is irrational and a myth, and mutually assured destruction doesnt
check.*

The Center for Naval Analyses recently published Grand Strategy: Contemporary
Contending Analyst Views and Implications for the U.S. Navy , a survey of potential U.S.
strategies being debated in the academic and defense communities. The study identifies
four competing lines of strategic thought: maintaining American hegemony, selective
engagement, offshore balancing, and integrating collective international efforts. Two
additional optionsisolationism and world governmentare noted and disregarded as
not viable. Under this list of strategic options a sharp division is apparent, dictated by
the question, Is great-power war obsolete?
This fundamental question must be answered before any logical strategic decisions can
be made. If great-power war is possible, then the de facto existential threat to U.S.
interests, latent in the international system, must be addressed before all others. There
are enormous implications for weapon procurement, operational doctrine, and force
levels driven by this single issue.
Global strategists point to economic globalization and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons as modern guarantors of peace among major powers. However, we contend that
these very rational hedges against violence can still be shattered by decidedly irrational
and reactionary forces. Thus, the possibility of great-power war between China and the
United States cannot be ruled out.
Economic interdependence offers benefits beyond the sheer transfer of capital and
goodsthere can be no doubt of that. However, history renders globalizations deterrent
effects at least somewhat questionable. Substantial economic interdependence existed
throughout Europe prior to World War I, and Japan was hugely dependent on American
oil imports in the years leading up to World War II. It was this dependence that made
the U.S oil embargo intolerable, ultimately motivating the Japanese to attack Pearl
Harbor.
On the other hand, the existential threat of nuclear weapons has certainly resulted in a
universal desire keep Pandoras Box firmly shut. While we concede the remarkable
ability of weapons of mass destruction to dampen the oscillations of great-power
relations, it is unclear that the nuclear restraint against total war ever takes limited war
off the table as a strategic option. More fundamentally, though, the arguments for a
nuclear-based state of peace are constrained by the limits of rationality. Rational
bounds do not apply to the ephemeralyet extremely powerfulwaves of bellicose
nationalism that can sweep up an entire nation.
National pride is embedded in the Chinese DNAand rightly so. In certain segments of
society, however, the sentiment manifests itself with a particular fervor, and some
elements of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) epitomize this zeal. Alarmingly, the
Communist Party leadership appears increasingly unable to act as a check on the
military. Both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had ironclad control over the PLA, having
earned unquestionable credibility during the Long March. Neither General Secretary of
the Communist Party Hu Jintao nor First Secretary Xi Jinping can claim a similar
rapport with the PLA. Neither possesses a comparable level of control. Any surge of
aggressive nationalism, either in the PLA or among the greater masses, could
conceivably compel contemporary party leadership toward a bellicosity it does not
desire.
How might this happen? The two most likely scenarios deal with Chinese core interests
in the Pacific: sovereignty in the South China Sea and Taiwan.
The South China Sea is no stranger to conflict. Its location and material promise have led
to a host of conflicting territorial claims and brought the Chinese and Vietnamese to
armed conflict over the Spratly Islands in the late 1980s. After a period of relative calm,
tensions have once again begun to flare. American commitment to freedom of the seas in
the region, exemplified by Secretary of State Hillary Clintons July 2010 speech in Hanoi,
Vietnam, provides ample opportunity for a Sino-American butting of heads. Similarly,
the Republic of China remains a perennially sore issue for the Chinese; the furor over the
sale of American F-16s provides an ample platform for future, more-polarizing
interactions over Taiwan.
War between China and the United States is unlikely. Economic interdependence and
nuclear weapons are powerful, persuasive deterrents against it. However, Sino-American
dealings, particularly in Taiwan or the South China Sea, provide instances in which the
powder keg of Chinese nationalism could explode, effectively forcing party leadership
into a series of irrational but irreversible actions. As such, the possibility of great-power
war, unlimited or otherwise, cannot be ruled out. U.S. policymakers must plan
accordingly.

Nuclear war causes extinction.
Rudhart 7/22, staff writer for Austrian Tribune, cites a study done by a team of
environmental and U.S. atmospheric scientists, (Helena, July 22, 2014, New Study
Shows How Nuclear War Can destroy the world,
http://austriantribune.com/informationen/144159-new-study-shows-how-nuclear-war-
can-destroy-world)//HH

A blasting of mushroom cloud, an explosion of hot air and a flash of light: All this is
enough to leave people horrified. However, a new study discloses that there is much
more to a nuclear war that one cannot even think about. In fact, novelists and
filmmakers have been tackling this crucial subject for decades and many are clear in
their approach and some just confronting it.
Presently, a team of environmental and U.S. atmospheric scientists have glanced at what
all the debris, ash and dust in the air can result in. Through the advanced climate
predicting software, they ran computer models on a fight between India and Pakistan.
As expected, the outcome was bad. Even for this limited nuclear war, it is estimated a
one-to-one degree drop in global temperature and a 9% cut in worldwide rainfall. Now,
this equals to worldwide crop failures.
According to a separate study conducted by the scientists, the projected death toll
increases to 2 billion lives. Shockingly, this is a result of little nuclear war, not a big one
like the fight of China and Russia.
Further, the report states, "A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in
which each side detonates 50 15 Kt weapons could produce about five Megatons of black
carbon". This would automatically result in 'nuclear winter', which will last 25 years,
double than that of past estimates.
In overpopulated areas, 20-50% loss is predicted in the density of the ozone layer. This
would cause widespread damage to the natural ecosystem, agriculture and not to forget,
it will lead to human skin cancer. Now, it can be rightly said that this is too much for a
limited nuclear war.






Misc
Asteroids
Slayer
Low probability, long timeframe and the status quo solves
Globus, 6/6/14 has worked on the asteroid mining, space settlement, Hubble, ISS,
X37, Earth observation, TDRSS, cubesats, lunar teleoperation, spaceflight affects on
bone, computational fluid dynamics visualization, molecular nanotechnology and space
solar power. He founded and has run the annual NASA Ames Space Settlement Student
Design Contest for 22 years. He currently sits on the board of the National Space Society.
(Al, Understanding the Asteroid Threat, Rooster GNN,
http://en.roostergnn.com/2014/06/06/understanding-the-asteroid-
threat/128689/)//IS
What is the current probability of an asteroid striking Earth? Depends on the size. Little
ones hit every day. A city killer once or twice a century. Extinction event about every 100
million years (its been 66 million years). These, of course, are averages. We could get an
extinction event tomorrow or not for 200 million years. Fortunately, we know where
almost all of the big asteroids (extinction event) that could hit Earth are and none of
them will hit us for at least 100 years. We dont know where 90% of the somewhat
smaller asteroids are ones that could devastate a region (say, the Eastern seaboard).
We only know the location of 1% of the city killers. Even better, if we detect an incoming
asteroid in time we could deflect it. Thus, if we were to mount a vigorous detection
campaign we could make the probability essentially zero. This would cost around 1% of
our civil space program budget. See
http://space.alglobus.net/papers/PlanetaryDefensePolicy2014.pdf which is close to the
NSS position on the matter.


Squo Solves
Status quo UN policies solve
Moskowitz, 10/28/13 Associate Editor at Scientific American, covering space &
physics (Clara, United Nations to Adopt Asteroid Defense Plan, Scientific American,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/un-asteroid-defense-plan/)//IS
The U.N. plans to set up an International Asteroid Warning Group for member nations
to share information about potentially hazardous space rocks. If astronomers detect an
asteroid that poses a threat to Earth, the U.N.s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer
Space will help coordinate a mission to launch a spacecraft to slam into the object and
deflect it from its collision course. Lu and other members of the Association of Space
Explorers (ASE) recommended these steps to the U.N. as a first step to address at the
long-neglected problem of errant space rocks. No government in the world today has
explicitly assigned the responsibility for planetary protection to any of its agencies, ASE
member Rusty Schweickart, who flew on the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, said Friday at the
American Museum of Natural History. NASA does not have an explicit responsibility to
deflect an asteroid, nor does any other space agency. The ASE advocates that each
nation delegate responsibility for dealing with a potential asteroid impact to an internal
agencybefore the event is upon us.

Status quo solves asteroids plenty of time for solutions
Wall, 11/22/13 Senior Writer at Space.com, former science writer for the Idaho
National Laboratory and has been. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the
University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a
graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz
(Mike, How Humanity Could Deflect a Giant Killer Asteroid, Space.com
http://www.space.com/23530-killer-asteroid-deflection-saving-humanity.html)//IS
Scientists hope Sentinel and other asteroid-hunting instruments will spot dangerous
NEOs several decades before they could potentially slam into Earth. That's enough lead
time to mount a successful deflection effort, which would likely involve launching two
separate space missions, former Apollo astronaut and B612 co-founder and chairman
emeritus Rusty Schweickart told SPACE.com earlier this year. The first mission, he said,
would send a robotic probe on a collision course with the asteroid, knocking it off course
via kinetic impact. The second would follow up, launching a "gravity tractor" spacecraft
to fly along with the space rock, nudging it further via a tiny but consistent gravitational
tug. Such a strategy would probably work on asteroids up to 1,300 feet (400 m) wide,
Schweickart said at the Oct. 25 press conference. Anything bigger than that likely
demands a different response, he added, such as a series of kinetic impacts or blasting
the asteroid with a nuclear bomb. Colossal asteroid impacts that cause mass extinctions
are extremely rare events. For example, strikes like the one that killed off the
dinosaurs (and roughly 80 percent of all Earth's species) 65 million years ago happen
roughly once every 100 million years, Schweickart said. But smaller (and much more
frequent) strikes can still be devastating. In 1908, an object thought to be just 130 feet
(40 m) wide, or perhaps even smaller, exploded above the Podkamennaya Tunguska
River in Siberia, flattening roughly 770 square miles (2,000 square km) of forest.
Impacts like the "Tunguska Event" which would have destroyed New York City, Tokyo
or any other metropolis if they had been in the asteroid's crosshairs occur once every
300 years on average, Schweickart said. So it makes sense to focus on city-killers and
other relatively small asteroids rather than the behemoths when thinking about how to
deflect space rocks especially since the true giants are so easy to spot. "We're not going
to be surprised by something that large," Schweickart said of asteroids like the dinosaur-
killer. "We will have lots of time to worry about it, or mix our martinis, or whatever
we're going to do."



Cancer
Cures now
Cat poop cures cancer :3
PTI 7-16 (Cure for cancer: Cat poop parasite remedy, 7-16-14, Indian Express Group,
Financial Express, http://www.financialexpress.com/news/cure-for-cancer-cat-poop-
parasite-remedy/1270428) //AD

A mutated strain of a cat poop parasite has been found to reprogramme the natural
power of the immune system to kill cancer cells, scientists say.
Toxoplasma gondii (T gondii) is a single-celled parasite found in a cat's intestines, but it
can live in any warm blooded animal.
T gondii affects about one-third of the world's population. Most people have no
symptoms, but some experience a flu-like illness. Those with suppressed immune
systems, however, can develop a serious infection if they are unable to fend off T gondii.
A healthy immune system responds vigorously to T gondii in a manner that parallels how
the immune system attacks a tumour.
"We know biologically this parasite has figured out how to stimulate the exact immune
responses you want to fight cancer," said David J Bzik, professor of Microbiology and
Immunology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
In response to T gondii, the body produces natural killer cells and cytotoxic T cells. These
cell types wage war against cancer cells. Cancer can shut down the body's defensive
mechanisms, but introducing T gondii into a tumour environment can jump start the
immune system.
"The biology of this organism is inherently different from other microbe-based
immunotherapeutic strategies that typically just tickle immune cells from the outside,"
said Barbara Fox, senior research associate of Microbiology and Immunology.
"By gaining preferential access to the inside of powerful innate immune cell types, our
mutated strain of T gondii reprogrammes the natural power of the immune system to
clear tumour cells and cancer," Fox said.
Since it isn't safe to inject a cancer patient with live replicating strains of T gondii, Bzik
and Fox created "cps," an immunotherapeutic vaccine.
Based on the parasite's biochemical pathways, researchers delete a Toxoplasma gene
needed to make a building block of its genome and create a mutant parasite that can be
grown in the laboratory but is unable to reproduce in animals or people.
Even when the host is immune deficient, cps still retains that unique biology that
stimulates the ideal vaccine responses.
"Aggressive cancers too often seem like fast moving train wrecks. Cps is the microscopic,
but super strong, hero that catches the wayward trains, halts their progression, and
shrinks them until they disappear," said Bzik.
Published laboratory studies from the Geisel School of Medicine labs have tested the cps
vaccine in extremely aggressive lethal mouse models of melanoma or ovarian cancer and
found unprecedented high rates of cancer survival.

Squo solves - Cancer treatments being developed now
Hunt 6-27 (Jazelle, Promising Cancer Treatments on the Horizon, 6-27-14,
http://www.blackvoicenews.com/news/news-wire/49670-promising-cancer-
treatments-on-the-horizon.html) //AD

While there is no known cure for cancer, a flurry of FDA approval requests to treat the
most threatening cancer cases has researchers optimistic that progress is being made
toward an eventual cure.
As Dr. William Chambers, national vice president of Extramural Research for the
American Cancer Society, explains, Things are happening on all fronts, not just in
research, but in clinicals as well.
Much of the developments are around immunotherapy, an established concept that
includes all treatments that employ or manipulate a patients own immune system to
target the illness.
Researchers seem to be most interested in improving cancer vaccines, which can be
preventative (prophylactic), or used as treatment (therapeutic). Two prophylactic
vaccines that fight viruses known to cause cancer are already on the market, i.e., the HPV
and hepatitis B vaccines. But so far, such vaccines only work for the small subset of
cancers caused by viruses. Still, this hasnt stopped researchers from trying to create a
vaccine against cancer itself.
Most effort has been toward therapeutic vaccines, which seek to immunize those who
already have cancer, Chambers says. But because there are so many factors, its tough
to provoke an immune response.
Therapeutic vaccines either boost overall immune response, or teach a patients immune
system to recognize and target afflicted cells.
Provenge, the first, and currently only, FDA-approved therapeutic vaccine, does the
latter. Provenge is used for prostate cancer and has been shown to add close to four more
months of life for near-terminal patients. Although the mortality rate is low for prostate
cancer, Black men are more than twice as likely as White men to die from it. They are
also 60 percent more likely to contract it in the first place, according to the American
Cancer Society.
Provenge is whats known as a dendritic cell vaccine. It is created from a patients own
immune cells, and cancer cells. The immune cells are enhanced for growth, taught to
recognize those cancer cells, and re-implanted into the patient, where the cells multiply
and alert the immune system to fight cancer cells like the one sampled.
On another front, Pfizer is partnering with a French pharmaceutical company to create a
standardized tumor-cell-based vaccine. This type of treatment samples a tumor cell and
reengineers it to be more detectable to the immune system; when the cell is reintroduced
to a patient, his or her immune system recognizes and attacks all cells like it. Unlike
customized vaccines such as Provenge, this treatment uses a random tumor sample from
a patient to create a generalized vaccine that can be used in anyone with a comparable
diagnosis.
Pfizers is slated to being clinical trials for this treatment next year.
In addition to vaccines, there are monoclonal antibodies, man-made proteins engineered
to infiltrate unchecked cancer cells, and make them visible to the bodys immune system.
AstraZeneca, for example, is poised to release such a treatment, known as MEDI4736. In
its first round of clinical trials, tumors shrank in 19 percent of patients (diagnosed with a
few different cancers), and another 39 percent had their cancer stabilize for a year or
longer. The treatment is currently in its final round of trials.
A Swiss company is developing a similar treatment for bladder cancer; in its first clinical
trial, 52 percent of patients saw their tumors shrink in 12 weeks. Merck is working on a
monoclonal antibody to extend the lives of patients with advanced melanoma.
There are also impressive cancer treatment developments happening outside of
immunotherapy. This month, researchers at Cleveland Clinic reported theyve discovered
a protein that could slow the growth and spread of cancerous tumors.
Pfizer is ready to release a drug that slows breast cancer development and extends the
lives of patients whose advanced-stage breast cancers have spread. In its second round of
trials, the drug, palbociclib, reduced the risk of the cancer worsening by 51 percent, and
stabilized the patients for close to 20 months.
Of course, these innovative, often personalized treatments come as significant cost. The
required three doses of Provenge total $93,000. Medicaid covers it, but 40 percent of
prostate cancer patients are under the age of eligibility. Yervoy, FDA-approved to extend
survival in patients with advanced melanoma, is $120,000. The companies that make
each treatment offer payment plans.
Like anything, prices will go down with general application, but yes, its expensive and
labor intensive. [B]ut they are getting better at it, Chambers says.
Even when the medical community masters these advancements, treatment will likely
remain expensive for patients (even with insurance), until the market is flooded.
The success were seeing in clinicals is pretty impressive, and Im optimistic this will
move forward quickly, says Chambers of the American Cancer Society. And Im
seriously hoping that will be the case becauseits really looking promising.

Climate Migrants
Refugee flows are declining our ev drastically postdates
Corcoran 6/21 former representative in the Australian House of Representatives for
the Australian Labor Party (Ann Corcoran, 6/21/14, UN and media lackeys hype
numbers for World Refugee Day,
http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/un-and-media-lackeys-
hype-numbers-for-world-refugee-day/)//twontwon
Several people reported this headline to me: For First Time Since WWII There Are More
Than 50 Million Refugees. My first thought was directed at the UNliar, liar, pants
on fire!but maybe I should be directing my annoyance at the AP reporters and the
headline writer because I wondered how that 50 million refugees jives with the Pew
study (using UN numbers) that says the number of refugees is down to between 10 and
12 million from a peak in the early 90s of 18 million. (see graph below right) Here is
the story, hat tip Judy, that I wasnt going to waste my time on, but since it is
everywhere, I will (waste my time) and post it: TAZA KHORMATO, Iraq (AP) In a
battered car loaded with blankets and clothes, Hassan Abbas and his mother left a dusty
town in northern Iraq, fleeing this weeks violence and joining what the United Nations
says is the largest worldwide population of displaced people since World War II. The
U.N. refugee agencys latest annual report, released Friday, found more than 50 million
people worldwide were displaced at the end of last year, reflecting an ever-expanding
web of international conflicts. Last years increase in displaced people was the largest in
at least two decades, driven mainly by the civil war in Syria, which has claimed an
estimated 160,000 lives and forced 9 million people to flee their homes. Now Iraq is
adding to that tide. Notice the word displacedthat does not mean they are by
definition all refugees. Twenty paragraphs into the story we learn this: Of 51.2 million
displaced people worldwide last year, 16.7 million were refugees outside their countries
borders. More than half of the refugees under UNHCRs care 6.3 million had been
in exile for more than five years, the agency said. That 16.7 million is likely inflated as
well, but even so it is still LESS than the peak in the early 1990s of 18 million.

The thesis of their advantage is made up climate refugees are massively
exaggerated
Fresco 8 cross disciplinary professor with a focus on international sustainable
development @ Univ. Amsterdam, sat on the Delta Commission as a Global Warming
adaptation advisor for the Netherlands (Louise O. Fresco, 12/12/8, Hype Wont Solve
Climate Problem, http://www.spiegel.de/international/opinion-hype-won-t-solve-
climate-problem-a-596019.html)//twontwon
I have just finished reading another large pile of articles about the topic and listening to
various speeches. And the elements of hype and carelessness I have come across are
increasing. All sorts of things are thrown together under the banner of climate change
as if it is responsible for all of the world's problems. From a practical viewpoint, it is
impossible to unravel what is caused by weather fluctuations, the lack of economic
growth or failed government policy -- to say nothing of proving the current effects of
structural changes in the climate. For example, everyone quotes the number of "200
million climate refugees". But closer examination reveals that migrants name drought as
the least important reason for leaving their country. If at all. Even where drought is
involved, it cannot be determined with certainty that it is due to climate change, because
weather fluctuations happen all the time. There are authors who claim that fertile land
has already been lost to the rising sea level, a claim for which there is little evidence. I
also regularly read articles stating that climate change is leading to a decrease in food
production and is behind the recent explosion in food prices. That notion that food
production will decrease in the long term is still questionable -- in some areas production
could even increase, and recent price increases have nothing to do with climate change.
Such a suggestion is misleading at best, if not fraudulent. And then there are the
politicians who repeatedly state that we cannot continue with business as usual, like the
Polish president said last week. But we are long past that point. Sustainable production
has penetrated our way of thinking. It is not enough by any stretch of the imagination,
but you can't maintain that we haven't learned anything.
No impact to climate refugees
Victor 7 - David G Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director
of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. (David
G., November 14, 2007, What resource wars? Asia Times,
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK14Dj03.html)//SB
Climate dangers The third avenue for concern about coming resource wars is through the
dangers of global climate change. The litany is now familiar. Sea levels will rise, perhaps
a lot; storms will probably become more intense; dry areas are prone to parch further
and wet zones are likely to soak longer. And on top of those probable effects, unchecked
climate change raises the odds of suffering nasty surprises if the world's climate and
ecosystems respond in abrupt ways. Adding all that together, the scenarios are truly
disturbing. Meaningful action to stem the dangers is long overdue. In the United States
over the last year, the traditional security community has become engaged on these
issues. Politically, that conversion has been touted as good news because the odds of
meaningful policy are higher if hawks also favor action. Their concerns are seen through
the lens of resource wars, with fears such as: water shortages that amplify grievances and
trigger conflict; migrations of "climate refugees", which could stress border
controls and also cause strife if the displaced don't fit well in their new societies; and
diseases such as malaria that could be harder to contain if tropical conditions are more
prevalent, which in turn could stress health-care systems and lead to hot wars. While
there are many reasons to fear global warming, the risk that such dangers could
cause violent conflict ranks extremely low on the list because it is highly
unlikely to materialize. Despite decades of warnings about water wars, what is
striking is that water wars don't happen - usually because countries that share water
resources have a lot more at stake and armed conflict rarely fixes the problem. Some
analysts have pointed to conflicts over resources, including water and valuable land, as a
cause in the Rwandan genocide, for example. Recently, the UN secretary-general
suggested that climate change was already exacerbating the conflicts in Sudan. But
none of these supposed causal chains stay linked under close scrutiny - the
conflicts over resources are usually symptomatic of deeper failures in governance and
other primal forces for conflicts, such as ethnic tensions, income inequalities and other
unsettled grievances. Climate is just one of many factors that contribute to tension. The
same is true for scenarios of climate refugees, where the moniker "climate" conveniently
obscures the deeper causal forces. The dangers of disease have caused particular alarm in
the advanced industrialized world, partly because microbial threats are good fodder for
the imagination. But none of these scenarios hold up because the scope of all climate-
sensitive diseases is mainly determined by the prevalence of institutions to prevent and
contain them rather than the raw climatic factors that determine where a disease might
theoretically exist. For example, the threat industry has flagged the idea that a growing
fraction of the United States will be malarial with the higher temperatures and increased
moisture that are likely to come with global climate change. Yet much of the American
South is already climatically inviting for malaria, and malaria was a serious problem as
far north as Chicago until treatment and eradication programs started in the 19th
century licked the disease. Today, malaria is rare in the industrialized world, regardless
of climate, and whether it spreads again will hinge on whether governments stay vigilant,
not so much on patterns in climate. If Western countries really cared about the spread of
tropical diseases and the stresses they put on already fragile societies in the developing
world, they would redouble their efforts to tame the diseases directly (as some are now
doing) rather than imagining that efforts to lessen global warming will do the job.
Eradication usually depends mainly on strong and responsive governments, not the bugs
and their physical climate.




Famine
No impact humans can feed themselves post-warming
Hertsgaard, 13 - independent journalist and author for 20 years specializing in the
topic of global warming (Mark, How to Feed the World After Climate Change, Slate,
7/18/13,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/04/heat_resistant_seeds
_ecological_agriculture_growing_food_after_climate_change_.2.html)//gingE
More and more agricultural experts are saying we need a shift to ecological agriculture,
sometimes known as agro-ecology. Ecological agriculture eschews applying chemical
fertilizers to soil; rather, it favors compost and manure, which increase the soils fertility
and ability to retain waterkey advantages against hot, dry weather. And rather than
monocultures, agro-ecology fosters a diverse agricultural landscape where natures
processes are utilized not only to grow food but to maintain the health of the soil, water,
and biodiversity that make agriculture possible in the first place. In western Africa, for
example, thousands of the poorest farmers on earth are capturing scarce rainfall and
rejuvenating soil fertility by growing trees amid their fields of millet and sorghum.
Despite enduring some of the hottest, driest weather on earth, these farmers have
returned greenery to 12.5 million acres of landenough to see from outer space, courtesy
of satellite imagery from the U.S. Geological Survey. More important, underground
water tables have been replenished, and crop yields have doubled and tripled. Mixing
forests and farmland is also being explored in China, where Lin Erda, a senior
government scientist, has joined with Greenpeace to endorse ecological agriculture as
the best way to cope with climate change. Raising ducks and fish in rice paddies, for
example, reduces both greenhouse gas emissions and the need for chemical fertilizers;
the fish decrease the methane that the paddies would otherwise emit, while the ducks
control pests. But how does ecological agriculture compare against industrial
agricultures greatest strengthits ability to produce prodigious amounts of food? Thats
a vital question on a planet where, even today, one in seven people goes hungry. In
Africa, extensive field studies show ecological agriculture matching the yields of
conventional agriculture, while also boosting water supply and soil fertility. But Africa is
a special case. Bypassed by the Green Revolution of the 1970s, it never got used to the
inflated yields that industrial agriculture made possible. In the United States and
Europe, switching from industrial to ecological agriculture has invariably caused an
initial decline in yields. However, after a brief transition period of three to five years,
ecological agricultures yields rebound to equal those of industrial agriculture, according
to a 30-year study conducted by the Rodale Institute. And ecological agricultures
advantages promise to be even greater under climate change. In drought years, Rodale
found, its yields were 31 percent higher than conventional yields. Ecological agriculture
also built rather than depleted soil fertility while recharging groundwater supplies.
Finally, it produced 40 percent fewer greenhouse gases than industrial agriculture. My
daughter was born into what I call Generation Hotthe 2 billion young people
worldwide who will spend the rest of their lifetimes coping with the hottest, most volatile
climate human civilization has ever known. Agriculture, it turns out, is one of the few
tricks humanity still has up its sleeve to avoid the unmanageable and manage the
unavoidable of climate change. Lets not squander it.
Cant solve alt causes
Spector, 13 - reporter for businessinsider.com (Dina, What Our World Would Look
Like Without Honeybees 6/22/13,
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/What-Our-World-Would-
Look-Like-Without-Honeybees-4616120.php)//gingE
A world without honeybees would also mean a world without fruits, vegetables, nuts, and
seeds. Nearly one-third of the world's crops are dependent on honeybees for pollination,
but over the last decade the black-and-yellow insects have been dying at unprecedented
rates both in the United States and abroad. [Jump straight to the photos] Pesticides,
disease, parasites, poor weather, and the stress of being trucked from orchard-to-orchard
to pollinate different crops all play a role in the decline of managed honeybee
populations. A lack of bees threatens farmers who depend on these nectar- and pollen-
eating animals for their pollination services. We have few planned defenses against a
honeybee disaster. The Farm Bill, passed on June 10, 2013, allocates less than $2 million
a year in emergency assistance to honeybees. "The bottom line is, if something is not
done to improve honeybee health, then most of the interesting food we eat is going to be
unavailable," warns Carlen Jupe, secretary and treasurer for the California State
Beekeepers Association. Honeybees as a species are not in danger of extinction, but their
ability to support the industry of commercial pollination, and by extension, a large
portion of our food supply, is in serious danger. Whole Foods recently imagined what our
grocery store would like in a world without bees by removing more than half of the
market's produce. Here, we also take a purely hypothetical look at how the human diet
and lifestyle would change if honeybees and other bee pollinators disappeared from our
planet one day. This is the worst case scenario it's possible that human ingenuity and
alternate pollinators can mitigate some of these outcomes, but not necessarily all of
them.

New tech advancements means that food production will continue to
increase.
Zubrin, 11 President of Pioneer Astronautics, Senior Fellow with the Center for
Security Policy (Robert, Why its Wrong to Agree with the Malthusians About Ethanol
May 13, 2011 http://www.ilcorn.org/daily-update/182-why-it-rsquo-s-wrong-to-agree-
with-the-malthusians-about-ethanol/)//gingE
In an op-ed article printed in the Denver Post May 8, editorial columnist Vince Carroll
endorsed the view of population control advocate Lester Brown that the U.S. corn
ethanol program is threatening the worlds poor with starvation. This endorsement is
especially remarkable in view of the fact that, as the otherwise generally astute Mr.
Carroll has correctly noted many times in the past, all of Lester Browns many previous
limited-resources doomsday predictions have proven wildly incorrect. In fact, Lester
Brown is wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential of the ethanol program for
exactly the same reason he has been repeatedly wrong about the alleged famine-inducing
potential of population growth. There is not a fixed amount of grain in the world.
Farmers produce in response to demand. The more customers, the more grain. Not only
that, but the larger the potential market, the greater the motivation for investment in
improved techniques. This is why, despite the fact that the world population has indeed
doubled since Lester Brown, Paul Ehrlich, and the other population control zealots first
published their manifestos during the 1960s, people worldwide are eating much better
today than they were then. In the case of Americas corn growing industry, the beneficial
effect of a growing market has been especially pronounced, with corn yields per acre in
2010 (165 bushels per acre) being 37 percent higher than they were in 2002 (120 bushels
per acres) and more than four times as great as they were in 1960 (40 bushels per acre.)
Not only that, but in part because of the impetus of the expanded ethanol program,
another doubling of yield is now in sight, as the best farms have pushed yields above 300
bushels per acre. As a result, in 2010, the state of Iowa alone produced more corn than
the entire United States did in 1947. Of our entire corn crop, only 2 percent is actually
eaten by Americans as corn, or 12 percent if one includes products like corn chips and
corn syrup. These advances in productivity do not only benefit the United States.
Americas farmers are the vanguard for their counterparts worldwide. New seed strains
and other techniques first demonstrated on our most advanced farms, subsequently
spread to average farms, and then go global, thereby raising crop yields everywhere.

Human Rights
Aff cant solve human rights abuses no international US influence
Kaye, 13 - Professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law (David,
Stealth Multilateralism. September/October 2013. Foreign Affairs.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139649/david-kaye/stealth-
multilateralism?cid=rss-rss_xml-stealth_multilateralism-000000)//gingE
The same holds true for a number of human rights treaties that the Senate has refused to
ratify, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Rights of
Persons With Disabilities, among others. Each agreement establishes a committee of
experts to monitor compliance and interpret provisions, and although none issues
binding decisions, they influence policymakers worldwide, as well as judges in domestic
and international courts. Because it has no voice on these committees, the United States
cannot influence the course of the law, even by dissent. Even when the Senate does
approve a human rights treaty, it often adds conditions that forfeit the United States'
ability to influence the law, a subtle form of rejection. For example, when the Senate
approved the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in 1992) and the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (in
1994), it did so only after securing reservations that stipulated that the treaties would
have no legal force in U.S. courts absent further congressional or state action. As a result,
when it comes to a wide range of human rights issues covered by these treaties--such as
protections against torture, the right to a fair trial, freedom of expression, religious
liberty, the right to political participation, and so on-the United States lacks a formal
mechanism to affect how other states and international courts interpret the evolving
norms. U.S. judges interpret similar federal and state constitutional provisions, but they
rarely influence the broader efforts to embed human rights norms in the laws of foreign
countries. Unlike U.S. judges, foreign judges in domestic and international courts-most
prominent among them the European Court of Human Rights-are guiding the
development of human rights law around the world. The Inter-American Court of
Human Rights, for example, interprets basic norms of human rights law, creating an
extensive jurisprudence that has a pronounced effect on states' behavior, but the United
States has failed to ratify the treaty that established it. And so Washington stands beyond
the court's jurisdiction, with the result that it cannot nominate U.S. judges to the court,
who could then participate as the court develops human rights law in the Americas.
There is a more direct concern, too. One might think that these kinds of courts cannot
influence the United States, but in an era when Americans travel and live and work
around the globe, the norms these courts shape might ultimately be applied by foreign
national courts, and legitimately so, to U.S. citizens. In a similar vein, Washington's
failure to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the ice, will probably reduce
the United States' influence on the development of the law governing war crimes, crimes
against humanity, and genocide. In particular, Washington cannot nominate judges to
the tribunal. That's a problem, because the court is likely to address legal issues that
implicate U.S. concerns, such as rules about targeting and detaining combatants, even
though Americans would rarely, if ever, find themselves subject to the ice's jurisdiction.
To get a sense of how this might work, consider the fact that besides Turkey, the United
States is the only NATO member not to have accepted the Rome Statute. If the ice's
jurisprudence evolves in ways that diverge from U.S. interpretations of the law of armed
conflict, NATO states may find themselves slowly but inexorably coming to different
views of the law's requirements. Such legal divisions could create real conflict in joint
operations, limiting the U.S. military's ability to do things it believes are lawful. Although
U.S. judges would not necessarily adopt the same positions as the U.S. government, they
would, more than others, intuitively understand the Pentagon's concerns in an area of
law that balances military and humanitarian interests.
No political will or economic ability makes the impact inevitable
Goodman and Jinks, 4 - Assistant Professor of Foreign, International, and
Comparative Law, Harvard Law School and Professor of Law, Arizona State University
College of Law (Ryan and Derek, Duke Law Journal, December, 54 Duke L.J. 621,
Lexis)//gingE
Before we proceed with our analysis, it is important to note the special characteristics of
human rights regimes that bracket our discussion and that make the investigation of
socialization processes especially productive in this arena. Most international regimes
seek to facilitate cooperation or coordination among states. 11 The global promotion of
human rights, however, is importantly different from both types of regimes. 12 For
several reasons, the prevalence of human rights violations is not reducible to a simple
collective action problem. First, states have substantial capacity to promote and protect
human rights within their territory without coordinating their efforts with [*629] other
states. Without question, states retain some substantial measure of effective autonomy in
this area. Second, many states have little clear interest in promoting and protecting
human rights abroad. Although "bad actors" impose externalities on other states in
extreme cases (for example, when poor human rights conditions trigger massive refugee
flows), these externalities arise only sporadically and typically affect only a few
(bordering) states. Third, many states have no interest in promoting and protecting
human rights domestically. Some states are simply willing to violate human rights when
it is convenient to do so, and they have no interest in accepting structural commitments
that may alter their current decision processes. Indeed, one of the central regime design
problems in human rights law is how best to influence "bad actors" to make fundamental
changes. The question whether international law can promote human rights norms may
be recast, in an important sense, as how human rights regimes can best harness the
mechanisms of social influence. The task of designing effective human rights regimes is
further complicated by several structural characteristics of international society that
undercut the potential effectiveness of some strategies. Consider two. First, international
human rights norms are not self-enforcing. 13 This point issues from the fact that human
rights regimes do not address coordination problems and that states have no clear, direct
interest in securing human rights protection in other states. Second, good faith
participants in such regimes are generally unwilling or unable to shoulder the
enforcement costs necessary to coerce recalcitrant states to comply with human rights
norms. This "enforcement deficit" - exacerbated by high enforcement costs and
negligible direct returns - is a political reality of the current international order.

Alt causescultural relativism
Ayton-Shenker, 95 - LL.M., in intl. human rights law, Law School of the U of Essex,
England. Human Rights Program at Hunter College of CUNY (Diana, The Challenge of
Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, http://www.un.org/rights/dpi1627e.htm)//gingE
This situation sharpens a long-standing dilemma: How can universal human rights exist
in a culturally diverse world? As the international community becomes increasingly
integrated, how can cultural diversity and integrity be respected? Is a global culture
inevitable? If so, is the world ready for it? How could a global culture emerge based on
and guided by human dignity and tolerance? These are some of the issues, concerns and
questions underlying the debate over universal human rights and cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism is the assertion that human values, far from being universal, vary a
great deal according to different cultural perspectives. Some would apply this relativism
to the promotion, protection, interpretation and application of human rights which could
be interpreted differently within different cultural, ethnic and religious traditions. In
other words, according to this view, human rights are culturally relative rather than
universal. Taken to its extreme, this relativism would pose a dangerous threat to the
effectiveness of international law and the international system of human rights that has
been painstakingly contructed over the decades. If cultural tradition alone governs State
compliance with international standards, then widespread disregard, abuse and violation
of human rights would be given legitimacy. Accordingly, the promotion and protection of
human rights perceived as culturally relative would only be subject to State discretion,
rather than international legal imperative. By rejecting or disregarding their legal
obligation to promote and protect universal human rights, States advocating cultural
relativism could raise their own cultural norms and particularities above international
law and standards.

Self interest means states wont comply
Tsutsui, 5 - Professor of political sociology at Stanford University (Kiyoteru, The
American Journal of Sociology, Human Rights in a Globalizing World: the paradox of
empty promises, www.stanford.edu/~emiliehb/Papers/hr_practices.pdf)//gingE
Scholars of international relations, particularly within the realist and neoliberal
traditions, expect this compliance gap between states commitment to international law
and states practices. Theses mainstream international relations perspectives often
regard the growing legalization of human rights principles as epiphenomenal
(Mearsheimer 1994/1995); or, they assume that states only comply with the principles of
international law when it is in their national interest and when international institutions
are designed to enforce observance of law (Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom 1996). In short,
the rationalist tradition has led scholars to expect that the human rights regime has
little impact on actual human rights practices. Treaties are simply not designed
to make ratifying governments accountable for their commitments.
Lithium Batteries

Lithium batteries not key new developments solve
Cuthbertson, 14 technology reporter at the International Business Times UK
(Anthony, Printable, Bendable Batteries Will Transform Wearable Technology,
International Business Times, 7/22/2014, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/printable-
bendable-batteries-will-transform-wearable-technology-1457734) //RGP
A California-based startup has developed a flexible, long-lasting and rechargeable
battery that could have wide-reaching applications within medical devices, wearable
sensors and even on-body electronics. Imprint Energy aims to overcome what it sees as
the longstanding limitations of currently available battery technologies which hamper
the advancement of portable electronics. The company intends to achieve this through
its zinc-polymer batteries, which offer numerous size, cost and safety benefits to
traditional lithium-based batteries. flexible battery wearable "Imprint Energy will
address these shortcomings with its breakthrough zinc-based rechargeable battery
technology, ZincPoly," the firm says in its mission statement. "(ZincPoly) enables the
production of ultrathin, flexible, high energy density rechargeable batteries for
significantly lower cost and without the design limitations of safety concerns of other
battery technologies." The batteries can be printed on sheets by widely-used industrial
screen printers, allowing for customisable product designs. Weird wearables Company
co-founder Christine Ho developed the technology while she was still a graduate student
at the University of California. The non-toxic, non-volatile properties of the batteries that
Ho developed meant that they were safe to use, even within a bio-electronic context,
such as implanted medical devices. Related Solar Cells Integrated Into Fabrics Could
Power Wearable Electronics Wearable Tech Improves Efficiency in the Workplace The
zinc-based batteries have since been tested on wrist-worn devices but Ho claims that
they could potentially be used even on "weird parts of your body like your eye". Imprint
energy recently secured $6million (3.5m) in Series A funding from Phoenix Venture
Partners, Flextronics and AME Cloud in order to advance product development. It is also
hoped that the proceeds and partners will assist the company in establishing itself in the
wearable electronics and Internet of Things markets. Brooks Kincaid, co-founder and
president of Imprint Energy, said: "Flextronics provides us with an attractive channel to
potential customers and brings a wealth of experience in design, manufacturing and
logistics that will help us scale."

Status quo solves new advancements
Iacurci, 14 staff writer (Jenna, Sand-Based Batteries Outperform the Current
Standard, Nature World News, 7/9/2014,
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/7976/20140709/sand-based-batteries-
outperform-the-current-standard.htm) //RGP
ACURCI
It turns out that sand is the key ingredient to creating more efficient batteries,
researchers at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering
found. Sand-based lithium ion batteries outperformed the current industry standard by
three times. "This is the holy grail - a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way
to produce high performance lithium ion battery anodes," graduate student Zachary
Favors, working with engineering professors Cengiz and Mihri Ozkan, said in a
statement. Most people in a hurry don't have time to wait hours for their iPhones, iPads
or even electric cars to fully charge. But with a new design of lithium-ion batteries, you
don't have to; they reboot portable electronics in as little as 10 minutes. Graphite is the
material currently used for anodes, or the negative side of batteries. But as technology is
advancing and becoming more powerful, graphite cannot keep up. In his research,
Favors focused on using silicon dioxide, or quartz - a primary component in sand - as a
replacement for graphite at the nanoscale level. His primary objective was to create
better lithium-ion batteries that can be used for personal electronics and electric
vehicles. The problem with nanoscale silicon is that it degrades quickly and is hard to
produce in large quantities. To get around this snag, Favors researched areas in the
United States where sand has a high percentage of quartz - he ended up in the Cedar
Creek Reservoir, east of Dallas. Through a series of purification steps, Favors ended up
with pure silicon - whose porous, sponge-like consistency has resulted in its improved
performance. The results could mean expanding the expected lifespan of silicon-based
electric vehicle batteries up to three times or more. Consumers would no longer have to
pay thousands of dollars for replacement batteries for their mobile devices, tablets or
even electric cars, and it could mean having to recharge battery-powered products every
three days, instead of every day. Now, the research team is trying to produce larger
quantities of the nano-silicon beach sand and is planning to move from coin-size
batteries to pouch-size batteries that are used in cell phones. The findings were
published July 8 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
Status quo solves lithium batteries
Bloomberg News, 14 (Lithium battery boom drives $6.2 billion deal, LA Times,
7/15/2014, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lithium-deal-20140715-story.html)
//RGP
The race to control the worlds biggest source of lithium used in everything from iPad
batteries to electric cars and everyday drugs is on. Albemarle Corp. agreed today to pay
$6.2 billion in cash and stock for Princeton, New Jersey-based Rockwood Holdings Inc.,
the largest lithium producer. Rockwood is one of four companies that control about 90
percent of the market for lithium. Demand for the metal will expand as much as three
times faster than the overall economy, Baton Rogue, Louisiana-based Albemarle said
today in an investor presentation. Growth in lithium will come from the continued
proliferation of electronic devices as well as energy storage, with the prospects for
battery growth within the automotive industry especially attractive, Albemarle Chief
Executive Officer Luke Kissam told analysts on a conference call. We are going to see an
inflection point in lithium. Other lithium producers are just as bullish. The world
market may double in a decade with demand growing at 7 to 10 percent annually, Chiles
Soc. Quimica & Minera de Chile SA said in April. Tesla Motor Inc. the carmaker led by
Elon Musk, plans a battery gigafactory that may consume as much as 17 percent of
current lithium output, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in February. Tesla said in March
that the $5 billion plant will only use only raw materials sourced in North America. The
Albemarle deal is the latest example of consolidation in the highly concentrated lithium
industry. In 2012, Chinas Chengdu Tianqi Industry Group Co. agreed to buy Australias
Talison Lithium Ltd., owner of the worlds largest open-pit lithium mine. Chengdu later
agreed to sell a stake in the mine to Rockwood, which had unsuccessfully bid for Talison.
Talison, Rockwood, Philadelphia-based FMC Corp. and SQM control about 90 percent of
worldwide lithium production, according to Jefferies & Co. Albemarle agreed to pay
$50.65 in cash and 0.4803 of a share for each Rockwood share. That values Rockwood at
$85.53 a share, or 13 percent more than yesterdays closing price, the companies said in
a statement. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is providing financing for the cash portion of
the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2015. Albemarle investors will
own 70 percent of the combined company and Rockwood holders the rest. Albemarles
Kissam will be CEO. Albemarle said the deal isnt contingent on the completion of
Huntsman Corp.s planned acquisition of Rockwoods titanium- dioxide business.
Todays deal is the largest takeover of a diversified chemicals company since Solvay SA
bought Rhodia SA in 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It will add to
Albemarles cash earnings per share in the first year, according to the statement.
Albemarle expects about $100 million in cost savings by 2016. Rockwood rose 12 percent
to $84.95 at 9:58 a.m. in New York while Albemarle was up 0.8 percent at $73.18.


Meltdowns
No impact empirics
Marder, 11 staff writer (Jenny, Mechanics of a Nuclear Meltdown Explained, PBS,
3/15/2011, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/mechanics-of-a-meltdown-
explained/) //RGP
After a powerful explosion on Tuesday, Japanese workers are still struggling to regain
control of an earthquake and tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant amid worsening
fears of a full meltdown. Which raises the questions: What exactly is a nuclear
meltdown? And what is a partial meltdown? This term meltdown is being bandied
about, and I think people think that you get the fuel hot and things start melting and
become liquid, said Charles Ferguson, physicist and president of the Federation of
American Scientists. But there are different steps along the way. Inside the core of the
boiling water reactors at Japans Fukushima Dai-ichi facility are thousands of zirconium
metal fuel rods, each stacked with ceramic pellets the size of pencil erasers. These pellets
contain uranium dioxide. Under normal circumstances, energy is generated by
harnessing the heat produced through an atom-splitting process called nuclear fission.
As uranium atoms split, they produce heat, while creating whats known as fission
products. These are radioactive fragments, such as barium, iodine and Cesium-137. In a
working nuclear reactor, water gets pumped into the reactors heated core, boils, turns
into steam and powers a turbine, generating electricity. Basically, each uranium atom
splits into two parts, and you get a whole soup of elements in the middle of the periodic
table, said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research. A reactor is like a pressure cooker. It contains boiling
water and steam, and as temperature rises, so does pressure, since the steam cant
escape. In the event of a cooling failure, water gets injected to cool the fuel rods, and
pressure builds. This superheated core must be cooled with water to prevent overheating
and an excessive buildup of steam, which can cause an explosion. In Japan, theyve been
relieving pressure by releasing steam through pressure valves. But its a trade-off, as
theres no way to do this without also releasing some radioactive material. A nuclear
meltdown is an accident resulting from severe heating and a lack of sufficient cooling at
the reactor core, and it occurs in different stages. As the core heats, the zirconium metal
reacts with steam to become zirconium oxide. This oxidation process releases additional
heat, further increasing the temperature inside the core. High temperatures cause the
zirconium coating that covers the surface of the fuel rods to blister and balloon. In time,
that ultra-hot zirconium metal starts to melt. Exposed parts of the fuel rods eventually
become liquid, sink down into the coolant and solidify. And thats just the beginning of a
potentially catastrophic event. This can clog and prevent the flow of more coolant,
Ferguson said. And that can become a vicious cycle. Partial melting can solidify and
block cooling channels, leading to more melting and higher temperatures if adequate
cooling isnt present. A full meltdown would involve all of the fuel in that core melting
and a mass of molten material falling and settling at the bottom of the reactor vessel. If
the vessel is ruptured, the material could flow into the larger containment building
surrounding it. That containment is shielded by protective layers of steel and concrete.
But if that containment is ruptured, then potentially a lot of material could go into the
environment, Ferguson said. Meltdown can also occur in the pools containing spent fuel
rods. Used fuel rods are removed from the reactor and submerged in whats called a
spent fuel pool, which cools and shields the radioactive material. Overheating of the
spent fuel pools could cause the water containing and cooling the rods to evaporate.
Without coolant, the fuel rods become highly vulnerable to catching fire and
spontaneously combusting, releasing dangerous levels of radiation into the atmosphere.
Water not only provides cooling, but it provides shielding, said Robert Alvarez, a
nuclear expert and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. [Radiation] dose
rates coming off from spent fuel at distances of 50 to 100 yards could be life-
threatening. Since spent fuel is less radioactive than fuel in the reactor core, these pools
are easier to control, said Peter Caracappa, a professor and radiation safety officer at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. But theyre also less contained. If material is released,
it has a greater potential to spread because theres no primary containment, he said.
Most of the problems with the backup generators were caused by the tsunami flooding
them. But Makhijani suspects that unseen damage from the earthquake may be adding
another challenge. I think because the earthquake was so severe, theres probably a lot
of damage becoming apparent now, he said. Valves might have become displaced, and
there may be cracked pipes. We cant know, because theres no way to suspect. Yesterday,
they had trouble releasing a valve. And theyve had trouble maintaining coolant inside,
which means leaks.
No extinction empirics reactors leak literally all the time
Nichols 13 columnist @ Veterans Today (Bob Nichols, 4/6/13, All Nuclear Reactors
Leak All of he Time, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/04/06/all-reactors-leak-all-
the-time/)//twonily
(San Francisco) Reportedly Americans widely believe in God and lead the world in the
percentage of citizens in prison and on parole. That is actual reality from an imaginary
character in a TV show. The Gallup Poll also says it is true and has been for years. Most
Americans believe that nuke reactors are safe and quite sound, too. Wonder why they do
that? Most people at one time in their lives watched as steam escapes from a pressure
cooker and accept it as real and true. A reactor is very much the same thing . The
cooks, called Operators, even take the lid off from time to time too. A nuclear reactor
is just an expensive, overly complicated way to heat water to make steam. Of course all
reactors leak ! All nuclear reactors also actually manufacture more than 1,946
dangerous and known radioactive metals, gases and aerosols. Many isotopes, such as
radioactive hydrogen, simply cannot be contained . So, they barely even try. It is
mostly just a show for the rubes.[1]
Even explosions dont cause leaks empirics
Bellona News 11 (9/12/11, Breaking: Explosion rocks French nuclear facility; no
radiation leaks apparent, http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/accidents-and-
incidents/2011-09-breaking-explosion-rocks-french-nuclear-facility-no-radiation-leaks-
apparent)//twonily
There is no immediate evidence of a radioactive leak after a blast at the southern
French nuclear facility of Marcoule near Nimes which killed one person and injured four
others, one seriously, French media have reported and safety officials have confirmed.
There was no risk of a radioactive leak after the blast , caused by a fire near a
furnace in the Centraco radioactive waste storage site, said officials according to various
media reports. The plants owner, national electricity provider EDF, said it had been an
industrial accident, not a nuclear accident. For the time being nothing has made it
outside , said one spokesman for Frances Atomic Energy Commission who spoke
anonymously to the BBC. The Centraco treatment centre, which has been operational
since February of 1999, belongs to a subsidiary of EDF. It produces MOX fuel, which
recycles plutonium from nuclear weapons. [Marcoule] is French version of Sellafield. It
is difficult to evaluate right now how serious the situation is based on the information we
have at the moment. But it can develop further, said Bellona nuclear physicist Nils
Bhmer. The local Midi Libre newspaper, on its web site, said an oven exploded at the
plant, killing one person and seriously injuring another. No radiation leak was reported,
the report said, adding that no quarantine or evacuation orders were issued for
neighboring towns. A security perimeter has been set up because of the risk of leakage.
The explosion hit the site at 11:45 local time. The EDF spokesman said the furnace
affected had been burning contaminated waste, including fuels, tools and clothing, which
had been used in nuclear energy production. The fire caused by the explosion was under
control, he told the BBC. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was in
touch with the French authorities to learn more about the nature of the explosion. IAEA
Director General Yukiya Amano said the organisations incident centre had been
immediately activated, Reuters reports. A statement issued by the Nuclear Safety
Authority also said there have been no radiation leaks outside of the plant. Staff at the
plant reacted to the accident according to planned procedures, it said. Frances Nuclear
Safety Authority, however, is not noted for its transparency. Operational since 1956, the
Marcoule plant is a major site involved with the decommissioning of nuclear facilities,
and operates a pressurised water reactor used to produce tritium. The site is has also
been used since 1995 by French nuclear giant Areva to produce MOX fuel at the sites
MELOX factory, which recycles plutonium from nuclear weapons. Part of the process
involves firing superheated plutonium and uranium pellets in an oven. The Marcoule
plant is located in the Gard department in Languedoc-Roussillon region, near Frances
Mediterranean coast. Marcoule: Sellafields French brother Its first major role upon
opening was weapons production as France sought a place among nuclear nations. Its
reactors generated the first plutonium for Frances first nuclear weapons test in 1960. Its
reactor producing tritium as fuel for hydrogen as well as other weapons related reactors
sprang up as the arms race gained international traction. The site also houses an
experimental Phenix fast-breeder reactor which since 1995 has combine fissile uranium
and plutonium into mixed oxide or MOX fuel that can be used in civilian nuclear power
stations.

Coal plants disprove the impact they emit way more radiation than a
global meltdown
Worstall 13 Forbes Contributor focusing on business and technology (Tim Worstall,
8/10/13, The Fukushima Radiation Leak Is Equal to 76 Milion Bananas,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukushima-radiation-leak-
is-equal-to-76-million-bananas/)//twonily
Not that Greenpeace is ever going to say anything other than that nuclear power is the
work of the very devil of course. And the headlines do indeed seem alarming: Radioactive
Fukushima groundwater rises above barrier Up to 40 trillion becquerels released into
Pacific ocean so far Storage for radioactive water running out. Or: Tepco admitted on
Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium may
have leaked into the sea since the disaster. Most of us havent a clue what that means of
course. We dont instinctively understand what a becquerel is in the same way that we do
pound, pint or gallons, and certainly trillions of anything sounds hideous. But dont
forget that trillions of picogrammes of dihydrogen monoxide is also the major ingredient
in a glass of beer. So what we really want to know is whether 20 trillion becquerels of
radiation is actually an important number. To which the answer is no, it isnt.
This is actually around and about (perhaps a little over) the amount of radiation the
plant was allowed to dump into the environment before the disaster. Now there are
indeed those who insist that any amount of radiation kills us all stone dead while we
sleep in our beds but Im afraid that this is incorrect . Were all exposed to radiation
all the time and we all seem to survive long enough to be killed by something else so
radiation isnt as dangerous as all that. At which point we can offer a comparison.
Something to try and give us a sense of perspective about whether 20 trillion nasties of
radiation is something to get all concerned about or not. That comparison being that the
radiation leakage from Fukushima appears to be about the same as that from 76 million
bananas. Which is a lot of bananas I agree, but again we can put that into some sort of
perspective. Lets start from the beginning with the banana equivalent dose, the BED.
Bananas contain potassium, some portion of potassium is always radioactive, thus
bananas contain some radioactivity. This gets into the human body as we digest the
lovely fruit (OK, bananas are an herb but still): Since a typical banana contains about
half a gram of potassium, it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq. Excellent, we now have
a unit that we can grasp, one that the human mind can use to give a sense of proportion
to these claims about radioactivity. We know that bananas are good for us on balance,
thus this amount of radioactivity isnt all that much of a burden on us. We also have that
claim of 20 trillion becquerels of radiation having been dumped into the Pacific Ocean in
the past couple of years. 20 trillion divided by two years by 365 days by 24 hours gives us
an hourly rate of 1,141,552,511 becquerels per hour. Divide that by our 15 Bq per banana
and we can see that the radiation spillage from Fukushima is running at 76 million
bananas per hour. Which is, as I say above, a lot of bananas. But its not actually that
many bananas. World production of them is some 145 million tonnes a year. Theres a
thousand kilos in a tonne, say a banana is 100 grammes (sounds about right, four
bananas to the pound, ten to the kilo) or 1.45 trillion bananas a year eaten around the
world. Divide again by 365 and 24 to get the hourly consumption rate and we get 165
million bananas consumed per hour. We can do this slightly differently and say that the
1.45 trillion bananas consumed each year have those 15 Bq giving us around 22 trillion
Bq each year. The Fukushima leak is 20 trillion Bq over two years: thus our two
calculations agree. The current leak is just under half that exposure that we all get from
the global consumption of bananas. Except even thats overstating it. For the banana
consumption does indeed get into our bodies: the Fukushima leak is getting into the
Pacific Ocean where its obviously far less dangerous. And dont forget that all that
radiation in the bananas ends up in the oceans as well, given that we do in fact urinate it
out and no, its not something that the sewage treatment plants particularly keep out of
the rivers. There are some who are viewing this radiation leak very differently: Arnold
Gundersen, Fairewinds Associates: [...] we are contaminating the Pacific Ocean which is
extraordinarily serious. Evgeny Sukhoi: Is there anything that can be done with that, I
mean with the ocean? Gundersen: Frankly, I dont believe so. I think we will continue to
release radioactive material into the ocean for 20 or 30 years at least. They have to pump
the water out of the areas surrounding the nuclear reactor. But frankly, this water is the
most radioactive water Ive ever experienced. I have to admit that I simply dont agree.
Im not actually arguing that radiation is good for us but I really dont think that half the
radiation of the worlds banana crop being diluted into the Pacific Ocean is all that much
to worry about. And why we really shouldnt worry about it all that much. The
radiation that fossil fuel plants spew into the environment each year is around 0.1 EBq.
Thats ExaBecquerel, or 10 to the power of 18. Fukushima is pumping out 10 trillion
becquerels a year at present. Or 10 TBq, or 10 of 10 to the power of 12. Or, if you prefer,
one ten thousandth of the amount that the worlds coal plants are doing . Or
even, given that there are only about 2,500 coal plants in the world, Fukushima is, in this
disaster, pumping out around one quarter of the radiation that a coal plant does in
normal operation. You can worry about it if you want but its not something thats
likely to have any real measurable effect on anyone or anything.

Nanotech
Nanotech inevitable 2015 budget provides more money to fund the NNI
and multiple federal agencies are investing
National Nanotechnology Initiative no date - Official website of the United States
National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI, NNI Budget Nano.gov,
http://www.nano.gov/about-nni/what/funding)

The 2015 Federal Budget provides more than $1.5 billion for the National
Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a continued investment in support of the
Presidents priorities and innovation strategy.
The cumulative NNI investment since fiscal year 2001, including the 2015 request, now
totals almost $21 billion. Cumulative investments in nanotechnology-related
environmental, health, and safety research since 2005 now total nearly $900 million.
Starting with the FY 2015 Budget, funding is reported by five Programs Component
Areas (PCAs) and five additional subcategories. The new PCAs are more broadly
strategic, fully inclusive, and consistent with Federal research categories. The change in
PCA structure was implemented as part of the updated 2014 NNI Strategic Plan.
The 2015 NNI Budget supports nanoscale science and engineering R&D at 11
agencies. Federal organizations with the largest investments are:
National Institutes of Health (NIH): nanotechnology-based biomedical research at the
intersection of life and physical sciences
National Science Foundation (NSF): fundamental research and education across all
disciplines of science and engineering
Department of Energy (DOE): fundamental and applied research providing a basis for
new and improved energy technologies
Department of Defense (DOD): science and engineering research advancing defense and
dual-use capabilities
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): fundamental research and
development of measurement and fabrication tools, analytical methodologies, metrology,
and standards for nanotechnology
Other agencies and agency components investing in mission-related nanotechnology
research are Department of Homeland Security, Food and Drug Administration,
Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Consumer Product Safety
Commission, Department of Transportation (including the Federal Highway
Administration), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (including the National
Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Forest Service, and the Agricultural Research
Service).
US is investing in nanotechnology as well as other nations its inevitable
Sargent 11 [January 19, 2011, **John F. Sargent Jr. Specialist in Science and
Technology Policy, Nanotechnology: A Policy Primer,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34511.pdf, Google, Congressional Research Service,
accessed August 23, 2011, AJ]

The development of this emerging field has been fostered by significant and
sustained public investments in nanotechnology R&D. Nanotechnology R&D is
directed toward the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to
100 nanometers. At this size, the properties of matter can differ in fundamental and
potentially useful ways from the properties of individual atoms and molecules and of
bulk matter. Since the launch of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000
through FY2011, Congress has appropriated approximately $14.2 billion for
nanotechnology R&D, including approximately $1.8 billion in FY2011 funding under the
current continuing resolution (P.L. 111-322). More than 60 nations have established
similar programs. In 2006 alone, total global public R&D investments reached an
estimated $6.4 billion, complemented by an estimated private sector investment of $6.0
billion. Data on economic outputs used to assess competitiveness in mature technologies
and industries, such as revenues and market share, are not available for assessing
nanotechnology.
Other countries are gaining control of nano status quo solves
Sargent 11 - Specialist in Science and Technology Policy (January 19, 2011, **John F.
Sargent Jr., Nanotechnology: A Policy Primer,, Google, Congressional Research
Service, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34511.pdf)

Many other nations and firms around the world are also making substantial
investments in nanotechnology to reap its potential benefits. With so much potentially
at stake, some members of Congress have expressed interest and concerns about the
U.S. competitive position in nanotechnology R&D and success in translating R&D
results to commercial products.

Nanotech is funded under in the government budget solves
Roco, 12 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (M.C., National
Nanotechnology Investment in the FY 2013 Budget, 8/19, American Society of
Mechanical Engineers.http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rdreport2013/13pch23.pdf)
The FY 2013 Presidents Request of $1.77 billion for federal investment in
nanotechnology is 4.1 percent over the FY 2012 budget estimate of $1.70 billion.
Approximately 65 percent of the total NNI funding supports academic research. About
25 percent of NNI funding supports R&D at government laboratories and about 10
percent supports industry R&D, of which about 6 percent is for SBIR/STTR. NNI-
sponsored R&D is reported in eight program component areas (PCAs). While
fundamental research (PCA 1) remains the largest single NNI investment category, the
research on nanodevices and systems (PCA 3) and in nanomanufacturing (PCA 5) would
total about the same as PCA 1 under the FY 2013 request. Environmental, health and
safety (PCA 7) would have an investment of about $105 million, representing about 6%
of total NNI investment. The fastest growing PCAs since 2010 are in the areas of
nanomanufacturing (PCA 4) and EHS (PCA 7). The requested nano-EHS (PCA 7)
investment in 2013 is almost 20% above 2011 actual spending, without accounting for
inflation. This increase is guided by the revised NNI EHS Research Strategy that was
released in October 2011 (posted on www.nano.gov). Cumulatively, the NNI agencies
have allocated over $650 million to EHS research since 2005, including the requested
amounts in the 2013 budget. The PCAs and proposed FY 2013 funding levels across all
NNI agencies are as follows: (1) fundamental nanoscale phenomena and processes,
$498 million; (2) nanomaterials, $368 million; (3) nanoscale devices and systems, $412
million; (4) instrumentation research, metrology, and standards for nanotechnology,
$69.2 million; (5) nanomanufacturing, $89 million; (6) major research facilities and
instrumentation acquisition, $190 million; (7) environment, health, and safety (EHS),
$105 million; and (8) education and societal dimensions, $34 million. Nanotechnology
is partially transitioning its R&D focus from nanoscale components to nanosystems, and
from basic research to innovations that support national priorities such as energy,
manufacturing, healthcare, and environmental protection (see Nanotechnology
Research Directions for Societal Needs in 2020 (M.C. Roco, C. Mirkin, M. Hersam,
eds.), Springer, 2011; available on http://www.wtec.org/nano2/).

Squo solves- NNI already have a nanotechnology initiative to solve
Roco, 12 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (M.C., National Nanotechnology
Investment in the FY 2013 Budget, 8/19, American Society of Mechanical
Engineers.http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rdreport2013/13pch23.pdf)
Three NNI Signature Initiatives4 (a) Sustainable Nanomanufacturing $84 million
with participation from DOD, DOE, IC/DNI, NASA, NIOSH, NIST, NSF and USDA/FS.
This initiative aims to establish manufacturing technologies for economical and
sustainable integration of nanoscale building blocks into complex, large-scale systems,
with two areas of focus: design of scalable and sustainable nanomaterials, components,
devices, and processes; and nanomanufacturing measurement technologies. are planned
with a total budget of $306 million: (b) Nanotechnology for Solar Energy Collection and
Conversion $112 million with participation from DOD, DOE, IC/DNI, NASA, NIST,
NSF, and USDA/NIFA. The primary aim of this initiative is to use nanotechnology to
improve photovoltaic solar electricity generation, solar thermal energy generation and
conversion, and solar-to-fuel conversions. (c) Nanoelectronics for 2020 and Beyond
$110 million with participation from DOD, DOE, IC/DNI, NASA, NIST and NSF. The
initiative aims to explore new or alternative state variables for computing; merge
nanophotonics with nanoelectronics; explore carbonbased nanoelectronics; exploit
nanoscale processes and phenomena for quantum information science; and augment the
national nanoelectronics research and manufacturing infrastructure network
(university-based infrastructure).
Probability
Low risk survey of people in the field
Kravyanski, 12/27/11 BA in Journalism & Communications (J. Michael, The
Benefits and Risks of Nanotechnology, Yahoo Voices, http://voices.yahoo.com/the-
benefits-risks-nanotechnology-10742441.html)//IS
With all of the benefits and risks associated with nanotechnology most people don't seem
too concerned about it. A recent study conducted by the National Science Foundation
discovered that more than 67 percent of the people who responded to a survey expressed
positive views of nanotechnology and said it would be likely to improve their lives,
particularly in the medical arena. About 37 percent said the main risks were unexpected
consequences and harmful side effects. Another 13 percent said it was weaponization and
9 percent thought medical and environmental contamination were the main risks. At 5
percent or less people felt privacy, expense and product failure concerns were risk
factors. When it came to regulation about 50 percent said government regulation is
necessary to address safety concerns. The researchers recruited and surveyed a panel of
76 adults over the course of 32 months. These individuals included community opinion
leaders, environmental stakeholders, members of various church groups and other
citizens. In addition to completing multiple surveys over time, the panelists also took
part in structured interviews with open-ended questions on nanotechnology.


Oil dependency
Dependency decreasing
Jaffe and Morse, 13 * Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A.
Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas ** the Global
Head of Commodities Research at Citigroup in New York and American energy
economist (Amy Meyers and Edward, October 16, 2013. The End of OPEC.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/16/the_end_of_opec_america_energy
_oil#sthash.IQYLzPBr.dpbs)//gingE
Since January 2011, at the dawn of the rebellions against dictatorial governments in
North Africa, the amount of oil "offline" or being blocked from production by either
domestic turmoil (in Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) or international sanctions (in
Iran) has generally been above 2 million barrels per day (m b/d), four times the average
level of supply outages before the so-called Arab Spring. Then Libya erupted once again
this past summer, taking another 1.2 m b/d, or more, offline. But the impact of these
disruptions has been relatively mild, given that over the same period, production in
North America, the heartland of the three revolutionary changes in unconventional
hydrocarbon production (shale, deep water, and oil sands), has grown by more than 2.5
m b/d. And more is on the way. Growth in renewable energy has also been significant in
recent years in the United States and beyond, and rising fossil fuel costs and strong
government intervention have created new market opportunities. World biofuels
production has doubled to over 1.2 m b/d since 2006, but wind power has grown in oil-
equivalent terms from 1 m b/d to 2 m b/d since 2008 (and is accelerating at about a 20
percent annualized clip). Solar power, meanwhile, grew from 20,000 b/d of oil-
equivalent energy in 2008 to 400,000 b/d last year. But the impact of all this change in
the energy world will go far beyond just replacing continuing Arab Spring outages.
Unconventional oil and gas and the clean-tech booms are spawning a host of new,
smaller oil and gas exploration companies committed to innovation and willing to take
on risk. They have no stake in the multibillion-dollar megaproject world of the
international majors and national oil companies, and as such, they have fewer concerns
about sustaining high profits from giant assets found decades ago. They are enabling the
United States the opportunity to take a lead in changing the way energy is bought and
sold -- not just in the United States, but globally. Energy innovation is taking many
forms in the United States, creating major export opportunities and giving Washington
the tools it needs to ensure that the conditions of a 1973-style oil embargo will not repeat
themselves. The oil embargo was so devastating because strong economic growth
throughout the 1960s had taken up the margin of spare oil-productive capacity in the
United States and across the world, leaving the Middle East's oil producers with undue
monopoly power. Similar razor-thin extra productive capacity left markets highly
vulnerable in 2006 and 2007, when OPEC made contraseasonal cuts in output to
increase prices, instead of considering the risks to global economic growth. But as oil and
gas production from U.S. and Canadian shale formations rises, the ability of oil
producers like Russia to use an "energy weapon" to gain extra benefits from consuming
countries is diminishing. U.S.-led innovation in alternative fuels (including natural gas-
vehicle fueling technology and electric vehicles), energy-efficiency technologies, battery
storage, and smart-grid solutions, working together with and complementing the supply
surge in unconventional oil and gas, should also change the face of demand, giving
consumers around the world more freedom of choice. And as the United States becomes
an energy exporter -- at competitive prices -- that should seal the deal. By providing
ready alternatives to politicized energy supplies, the United States can use its influence
to democratize global energy markets, much the way smartphone and social media
technologies have ended the lock on information and communications by repressive
governments and large multinational or state-run corporations. Abundant U.S. natural
gas is just the first step. Booming domestic natural gas supplies have already displaced
and defanged Russia's and Iran's grip on natural gas buyers. By significantly reducing
American domestic requirements for imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), rising U.S.
shale gas production has had the knock-on effect of increasing alternative LNG supplies
to Europe, breaking down fixed pricing from entrenched monopolies. But this is just the
beginning: Over the coming decade, the United States looks likely to overtake Russia and
rival Qatar as a leading supplier of natural gas to international markets. The geopolitical
role of U.S. natural gas surpluses in constraining Russia's ability to use its energy as a
wedge between the United States and its European and Asian allies should strengthen
over time, to the extent that Barack Obama's administration stays the course with
approving the construction of LNG export terminals. American unconventional oil and
gas plays from Texas to Pennsylvania are also generating new surpluses of natural gas
liquids, which are increasingly exported as transportation fuel or petrochemical
feedstock to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere -- reducing demand growth for oil from the
Middle East. And U.S. crude oil exports might also be possible some day, strengthening
America's lead in market-related pricing for kingpin crude oil, much the way rising
North Sea production did in the 1980s. As an increasing number of companies and
investors flock to North America to develop prolific unconventional resources, Middle
East heavyweights like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran are losing their lock on remaining
exploitable reserves, reducing their ability to band together and create artificial
shortages. Already, Mexico and Argentina are reading the tea leaves and reversing
protectionist resource nationalism policies, instead pushing through reforms to attract
capital investment to their doorsteps. Abundant U.S. natural gas is also spawning new
American-designed engine and modular fueling station technologies to readily use
natural gas as a fuel in trucks, trains, and ships, ending oil's monopoly in transport.
Some 40 m b/d of the global 85 m b/d oil market is open for competition from natural
gas -- in the form of compressed natural gas for cars and buses, and LNG for heavy-duty
vehicles and marine transportation. We conservatively expect at least 2 m b/d of
currently projected oil demand to cede to natural gas by 2020, further weakening
perspectives on future global oil-demand growth and once again chipping away at
Middle Eastern influence. American innovation and exports of energy supply and
technology will open global energy markets to competitive investments and consumer
choice. But Washington needs to embrace this choice by resisting the call to continue to
ban energy exports to protect vested business interests or for resource nationalistic
reasons. Indeed, we need to reverse the mindset of the oil embargo years -- a mindset of
supply shortages and husbanding of resources -- and move back to a more traditional
promotion of free markets. The energy sector has done this in the trade of petroleum
products, where the United States is simultaneously the world's largest importer and
exporter. The United States is heading in this same direction for trade in natural gas,
whether by pipeline to Mexico and eastern Canada or the export of LNG. And it should
move in the same direction with crude oil exports as pressures mount from growing
surpluses midcontinent and on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

US is decreasing dependence now
Seeking Alpha, 12 (5/25, A Surprising And Promising Trend In The U.S. Economy:
Sharply Declining Oil Imports, http://seekingalpha.com/article/617371-a-surprising-
and-promising-trend-in-the-u-s-economy-sharply-declining-oil-imports)//gingE
We've all been hearing about all kinds of ominous developments, and certainly the last
few weeks have not been fertile ground for optimism. I was, therefore, surprised on going
through energy statistics when I discovered the powerful trend that has recently emerged
in the United States economy: Oil imports are going down at a steady pace. In fact, oil
imports have plummeted. Net imports of oil and refined products (total imports of crude
and refined products minus exports of crude and refined products) have declined from
12.363 million barrels per day in January and February 2006 to 7.784 million barrels per
day in the same two months of 2012. While net import figures are not available for more
recent time periods, other data suggests that the trend is continuing. During this same
time period, net imports from Canada have actually been increasing from 2.227 million
barrels per day in 2006 to 2.639 barrels per day in 2012. As a result, net imports from
the rest of the world ex Canada have been cut almost in half from 10.336 million barrels
per day in 2006 to 5.567 million barrels per day in 2012. There are a few complicated
moving parts behind these numbers. There has been a huge increase (roughly a tripling)
in the export of refined products from the United States. Apparently what has happened
is that, as domestic demand for gasoline and distillate has declined, the U.S. refinery
industry has more refinery capacity than is necessary for the U.S. market and is now
refining crude oil in order to supply refined products to the export market. While total
imports are down somewhat, net imports are down much more because of the large
increase in exports of refined products. Behind this trend are several key developments.
Domestic oil production has increased more than 1 million barrels per day during this
time period (this increase in domestic oil production is an important part of the
increased real GDP during this time period). In addition, despite the fact that real GDP
has increased, domestic consumption of petroleum and petroleum products has
decreased by more than 3 million barrels per day during the same time period. This
appears to be partly due to increased production of ethanol (which displaces gasoline),
increased vehicle mileage (as more fuel efficient new cars enter the market), less driving,
relatively warm winters, and some displacement of oil by natural gas in the heating and
transportation markets. These trends seem to be continuing and, while we still import a
tremendous amount of oil, the strategic and economic vulnerability of the United States
to the world oil market may be on the decline. What are the implications of this
development for investors and for the country in general? First of all, it may produce a
change in the nature of the business cycle. In the past, virtually every recession coincided
with a run up in oil prices. Higher oil prices sucked dollars out of the U.S. economy and,
at the same, created inflationary pressures which led to monetary tightening just as
consumers had less money to spend because of higher gasoline prices. While U.S.
gasoline prices will still be driven by world oil prices, a price increase will not suck as
much money out of the domestic economy and will lead, instead, to a shifting around of
wealth and economic activity within the United States (and its very economically
integrated neighbor, Canada). Secondly, national security policy may be subject to a
change in emphasis. To the degree that the United States is less vulnerable to an
interruption in oil imports, we may see the use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a
price stabilizer rather than a true strategic backstop. In addition, the United States may
pursue other goals in Middle Eastern policy with more determination. Of course, other
countries are importing more and more oil all the time and we may come to a point at
which China becomes a major player in the Middle East. Fourth and most importantly, I
think that the trend illustrates the beginnings of a long-term displacement of petroleum
by natural gas in the transportation market which will probably start in the more
advanced economies. Natural gas has already displaced some 500,000 barrels of oil per
month in the transportation market. This is a proverbial "drop in the bucket", but the
trend is steady and powerful and companies like Clean Energy Fuels (CLNE) are poised
to take advantage of the trend as it accelerates. Each economic recovery and expansion
emphasizes certain sectors of the economy - tech in the 1990s, housing in the 2000s. It is
likely that a renaissance in the U.S. energy industry will be an important part of any
further leg up in the U.S. economy. Picking winners and losers within the industry is still
difficult although the majors, including Exxon (XOM) and Conoco (COP), look very
cheap at these price levels.
Decreasing now
Spencer, 13 - Middle East Correspondent for the Telegraph (Richard, 13 Dec 2013
Fracking boom frees the US from old oil alliances
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/oil/10476647/Fracking-boom-frees-the-US-
from-old-oil-alliances.html)//gingE
Fatih Birol is one of those people who run the world without the man in the street ever
having heard of them. From a discreet office in Paris, he keeps an ever-sensitive finger
on the world's pulse. A few years ago, he was warning of the pressure on oil supplies
from explosive economic growth in Asia. In 2007, he was among the first to spot that
China's emissions of greenhouse gases were about to overtake America's - a key factor in
world talks on climate change. Last year, he made another striking prediction: he
forecast the eclipse of an unchallenged energy giant. Saudi Arabia would shortly be
overtaken as the world's biggest producer of crude oil by its most important client, the
United States, he said. In a world consumed with fears over financial crisis, joblessness,
war in Syria, and international jihad, the academic predictions of people like Mr Birol
tend to get overlooked. Yet as chief economist of the International Energy Agency (and,
like a surprising number of the world's most important men, a Turk) he is closer to the
action on all those issues than many care to realise. The belief that the world's economy,
security and geopolitics are subordinate to America's need for oil is a truism so
universally acknowledged that it is regurgitated on every concerned news site the web
over. Yet this is what he said in his annual outlook on the important trends of the
moment: "By around 2020, the United States is projected to become the largest global oil
producer," he wrote. "The result is a continued fall in US oil imports, to the extent that
North America becomes a net oil exporter around 2030. "The United States, which
currently imports around 20 per cent of its total energy needs, becomes all but self-
sufficient in net terms a dramatic reversal of the trend seen in most other energy-
importing countries." Far from sending its armies round the world to secure oil, in other
words, before long it will be sending marketing consultants to sell it. A dramatic reversal
indeed: it seems like only yesterday that every commentator was talking about Peak Oil,
the theory that the world's biggest reserves had all been discovered and that the planet's
booming population would all soon be scrapping over the dribbles that still came out of
the pipelines that remained. Now, with fracking technology revolutionising output in the
United States - soon to be followed by other countries - that talk has dried up rather
quicker than the pipelines ever did.
Overpopulation
Increasing population solves tech
Mulligan, 9 economics professor at the University of Chicago. (Casey B., The More
the Merrier: Population Growth Promotes Innovation, 9-23,
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/the-more-the-merrier-population-
growth-promotes-innovation)//gingE
A recent study reiterated the conclusion that population growth ought to be controlled in
order to combat global warming, and other world problems. I beg to differ. The authors
of studies like these have exaggerated the benefits of population control, because they
ignore some of the significant economic benefits of large populations. The director-
general of Unicef has been quoted as saying, Family planning could bring more benefits
to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human
race. And one of the benefits of reduced population, it is claimed, is reduced carbon
emissions and therefore mitigation of climate change. This statement takes technology
for granted, yet technology itself depends on population. Especially important
among the sources of technical progress discoveries are trial and error, and
incentives. Reasonable people can disagree about the relative importance of these two,
but both are stimulated by population. The more people on earth, the greater the chance
that one of them has an idea of how to improve alternative energies, or to mitigate the
climate effects of carbon emissions. It takes only one person to have an idea that can
benefit many. Plus, the more people on earth, the larger are the markets for new
innovations. Thus, even if the brilliant innovators would be born regardless of
population control, their incentives to devote effort toward finding new discoveries and
bringing them to the marketplace depend on the size of that marketplace. And its clear
that incentives matter for innovative activity: Thats why we have a patent system that
helps innovators obtain financial rewards for their inventions. Not surprisingly, research
has shown that market size stimulates innovative activity, as in the case of
pharmaceutical research that is especially intense for conditions that have more victims.
It may take a long time for population growth to either give birth to an inventor brilliant
enough, or motivate enough incentives, to have an impact on the climate. But thats not a
reason to turn to population control, because it also takes a long time for population
controls impact to be noticeable. Although the calculations are inherently uncertain, the
value of the additional innovation stimulated by additional population may be
significant. In my academic work I have calculated that the value, to the entire
marketplace through this channel, of an additional person may be on the same order of
magnitude of the value that person places on his own life. For example, a person who can
earn $2 million in his own lifetime may, by his presence in the worldwide marketplace,
stimulate innovative activity that is worth a few hundred thousand dollars. The role of
technical change has been repeatedly underestimated. For example, someone a century
ago who claimed that the earth could have enough food to support nine billion people
(population control advocates now think that the earths population can easily get there)
would have been considered crazy. But with todays technology it is easy to see how many
billions can be fed. Some of the important solutions to climate change will also come
from technological progress.

Population growth is decreasing and Malthusian thinking is flawed
Pearce, 9 - international speaker on environmental issues @ Yale and Cambridge (Fred,
The overpopulation myth, 3-8-2010,
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-overpopulation-myth/)//gingE
The idea that growing human numbers will destroy the planet is nonsense.
But over-consumption will Many of todays most-respected thinkers, from Stephen
Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other
environmental perils will all fail unless we do something about population growth. In
the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, in the last 200 years, population
growth has become exponential The world population doubles every forty years. But
this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is
slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to
women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as
many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own
good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.
Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six
kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for
girls who dont make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book,
Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement
level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to
Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and
Tunisia. It also includes China, where the state decides how many children couples can
have. This is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much
difference any more: Chinese communities around the world have gone the same way
without any compulsionTaiwan, Singapore, and even Hong Kong. When Britain
handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility rate in the world:
below one child per woman. So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that
women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got
rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the worlds poorest
nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their
mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers
had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of
Catholicism, women have two children on averageand this is falling. Nothing the
priests say can stop it. Women are doing this because, for the first time in history, they
can. Better healthcare and sanitation mean that most babies now live to grow up. It is no
longer necessary to have five or six children to ensure the next generationso they dont.
There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more
children. But even here they are being rational. Women mostly run the farms, and they
need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields. Then there is the middle east,
where traditional patriarchy still rules. In remote villages in Yemen, girls as young as 11
are forced into marriage. They still have six babies on average. But even the middle east
is changing. Take Iran. In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight
children to less than two1.7 in factwhatever the mullahs say. The big story here is
that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with or
without tough government birth control policies in place, most countries tell the same
tale of a reproductive revolution. That doesnt mean population growth has ceased. The
worlds population is still rising by 70m a year. This is because there is a time lag: the
huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom may only have had
two children each. That is still a lot of children. But within a generation, the worlds
population will almost certainly be stable, and is very likely to be falling by mid-century.
In the US they are calling my new book The Coming Population Crash. Is this good
news for the environment and for the planets resources? Clearly, other things being
equal, fewer people will do less damage to the planet. But it wont on its own do a lot to
solve the worlds environmental problems, because the second myth about population
growth is that it is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet. In fact, rising
consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most
of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding
substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth
is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you
choose, a small proportion of the worlds people take the majority of the worlds
resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Lets look at carbon dioxide
emissions: the biggest current concern because of climate change. The worlds richest
half billion peoplethats about 7 per cent of the global populationare responsible for
half of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent of the
population are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. Virtually all of the extra 2bn
or so people expected on this planet in the coming 30 or 40 years will be in this poor half
of the world. Stopping that, even if it were possible, would have only a minimal effect on
global emissions, or other global threats. Ah, you say, but what about future generations?
All those big families in Africa will have yet bigger families. Well, thats an issue of
course. But lets be clear about the scale of the difference involved. The carbon emissions
of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30
Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians. A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten
children and, in the unlikely event that those ten children all live to adulthood and have
ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting
less carbon dioxide than you or me. It is over-consumption, not over-population that
matters. Economists predict the worlds economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If
this does indeed happen, less than a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human
numbers. True, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they
doand I hope they dotheir impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the height of
arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental
footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to
get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we? Some green activists need to take a long
hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert
Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce
demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He
opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the
poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives
of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist
asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly
introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthuss Law. In Hard
Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called
Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a
caricature of Malthus. Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching
British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his
ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be
allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death
toll in the Irish potato famine. We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame
the worlds poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich.
The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the
consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.


Population growth is sustainableincreased production and supply
Harren, 11 - Writer at Lifenews (Mia, Overpopulation is a Myth: Plenty of Food and
Space Exists 5-29-11, http://www.lifenews.com/2011/05/29/overpopulation-is-a-myth-
plenty-of-food-and-space-exists/?pr=1)//gingE
Proclamations of overpopulation have circulated for decades. Are they true? First off,
what is meant by the word overpopulation? It has nothing to do with the amount of
people but rather to the resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human
activities. To be overpopulated, a nation must have insufficient food, resources and living
space. With the world population at around 6.8 billion last year, food and living space
are hardly a concern. In 1990, it was estimated that the world could feed up to 35 billion
people. Most sources estimate that the global population will level out at around 9.2
billion in 2050, and then start to decline. Indian economist Raj Krishna estimates that
India alone is capable of increasing crop yields to the point of providing the entire
worlds food supply. Lack of food is not the problem but rather the need for more
efficient distribution. Another supposed problem is living space. In 2003, the entire
population of the world could fit inside the state of Arkansas. The world may seem
crowded, but its because humans cluster together for trade and companionship, not for
lack of room. Even so, there are those who insist that we will continue to breed
exponentially, causing a population explosion. Paul Ehrlich first introduced this idea in
1968 with his book, The Population Bomb. It succeeded in scaring the masses, just as
Thomas Malthus did, but these theories suffer under the impression that humans are the
only thing fluctuating. Population rose six-fold in the next 200 years. But this is an
increase, not an explosion, because it has been accompanied, and in large part made
possible, by a productivity explosion, a resource explosion, a food explosion, an
information explosion, a communications explosion, a science explosion, and a medical
explosion, wrote community development specialist Abid Ullah Jan in an article
published in 2003 called Overpopulation: Myths, Facts, and Politics. Poverty, too, is
not the effect of overpopulation, but rather the aftermath of poor leadership. In Ethiopia,
government officials are blamed for causing poverty by confiscating food and exporting it
to buy arms. In Africa, economic problems are seen as a result of excessive government
spending, taxes on farmers, inflation, trade restrictions and too much government
ownership. Depopulation is more likely to cause economic distress than these other
factors.

Technology and economic growth solve overpopulation problems
Bailey, 10 - B.A. in philosophy and economics @ University of Virginia, economist for
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, (Ronald, The Eternal Return of
Overpopulation, 10-19-10, http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/19/the-eternal-
return-of-overpopu)//gingE
Overpopulation panic is back. Concerns about a world too full of filthy human children
motivated eco-terrorist James Lee when he held employees of the Discovery Channel
hostage at gunpoint in September. But the deranged Lee is far from alone when it comes
to worrying about overpopulation. The May-June cover of the progressive magazine
Mother Jones asked, Whos to Blame for the Population Crisis? British journalist
Matthew Parris wrote an op-ed in September in the London Times asserting, If you
want to save the planet, stop breeding. Parris further coyly suggested that we study
Chinas example, for lessons good and bad. But on World Population Day in July,
British journalist Fred Pearce argued that population is not the problem. Pearces
relatively sanguine article at the environmentalist website Grist provoked Robert Walker,
former head of the anti-gun group Handgun Control and now executive vice-president of
the Population Institute, to respond at the same site with an article titled Of course
population is still a problem. Walker asks Pearce what he evidently thinks are deep
questions: Looking ahead, Fred, will these countries [with anticipated population
growth in Africa and Asia] be able to feed themselves? Will they have enough safe
drinking water? Will their lands be deforested or their rivers polluted? Will their
maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates remain unacceptably high? Will they
be caught in a demographic poverty trap? Will they become failed states? If you have
good answers to these questions, please let me know. Lets take a stab at providing good
answers to Walkers questions. Will the world be able to feed itself in 2050? As it
happens, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological
Sciences) devoted its September 27 issue to analyzing the issue of global food security
through 2050. One of the specially commissioned research articles projects that world
population will reach around 9 billion by 2050 and that in the second half of the 21st
century, population stabilization and the onset of a decline are likely. This should allay
Ryersons concern that the worlds resources are not infinite and therefore cannot
support an infinite population of humans. So okay, infinite human population growth
isnt likely, but can the Earth adequately feed 9 billion people by 2050? Well, yes, suggest
two other of the Royal Society articles. A review of the relevant scientific literature led by
Keith Jaggard from Rothamsted Research looks at the effects of climate change, CO2
increases, ozone pollution, higher average temperatures, and other factors on future crop
production. Jaggard and his colleagues conclude [PDF], So long as plant breeding
efforts are not hampered and modern agricultural technology continues to be available to
farmers, it should be possible to produce yield increases that are large enough to meet
some of the predictions of world food needs, even without having to devote more land to
arable agriculture. Applying modern agricultural technologies more widely would go a
long way toward boosting yields. For example, University of Minnesota biologist Ronald
Phillips points out that India produces 31 bushels of corn per acre now which is at the
same point U.S. yields were in the 1930s. Similarly, South Africa produces 40 bushels
(U.S. 1940s yields); Brazil 58 bushels (U.S. 1950s yields); China 85 bushels (U.S. 1960s
yields). Todays modern biotech hybrids regularly produce more than 160 bushels of
corn per acre in the Midwest. For what its worth, the corporate agriculture giant
Monsanto is aiming to double yields on corn, soybeans, and cotton by 2030. Whether or
not specific countries will be able to feed themselves has less to do with their population
growth than it does with whether they adopt policies that retard their economic growth.
Another article looking at the role of agricultural research and development finds that
crop yields have been recently increasing at about 1 percent per year. In that article
researchers estimate that spending an additional $5 to $10 billion per year would
increase food output by 70 percent over the next 40 years. Note that world population is
expected to increase by about 33 percent over that period. What about safe drinking
water? Water is more problematic. The researchers commissioned by the Royal Society
run a model that projects that competition for water to meet environmental flow
requirements (EFRs) and municipal and industrial demand will cause an 18 percent
reduction if the availability of water worldwide for agriculture by 2050. Interestingly,
the amount of freshwater withdrawn for municipal and industrial use was 4.3 percent in
2000 and is estimated to increase to 5.9 percent by 2050. So the main competition for
agricultural water is maintaining flows for environmental reasons. Since water is now
often unpriced and subsidized, it gets used very inefficiently. As water becomes scarcer
farmers and other users will have incentives to adopt water sparing techniques, such as
drip irrigation. In addition, researchers are close to developing drought tolerant crops.
The study also notes that water stressed regions will be able to import water in the
form of food produced in areas with abundant water. With regard to deforestation and
polluted rivers, the answer is probably yes for many of the poorest countries. However,
speeding up economic growth and technological improvements will dramatically lower
the risks of these undesirable outcomes. As noted above, enough food to feed 9 billion
can be grown on land currently devoted to agriculture. With regard to water pollution, it
is one of the first environmental problems that poor countries begin to clean up as they
grow wealthier. A recent study found that in every country where average annual per
capita income exceeds $4,600 forests are stable or increasing [PDF]. In addition,
technological progress offers the possibility that humanity will increasingly reduce its
future demands on nature by a process of dematerialization [PDF], that is, obtaining
more value while using less material. Maternal mortality rates have fallen substantially
from 422 per 100,000 live births to 251 per 100,000 live birthsover the past 30 years,
according to a study published in The Lancet this past April. Sadly, the study noted,
More than 50% of all maternal deaths were in only six countries in 2008 (India,
Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Oddly, some activists opposed the publication of The Lancet article, fearing that the good
news would stifle their fundraising. The worlds infant mortality rate has never been
lower. Most countries, even very poor countries, continue to experience declines in
infant mortality. Walkers last two questions about poverty traps and failed states are
related, but not in a way that supports his implied points. As Wheaton College economist
Seth Norton explains, "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little
economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law. He adds, "The relationship is a
powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of
economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those
measures." Fertility rates are high in failed states like Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Pakistan,
Nigeria, and Yemen, because of the lack of rule of law which inexorably generates
poverty. Norton persuasively argues that such places are so chaotic that its like living in
giant open access commons. In those cases people often reason that more children
means more hands for grabbing unowned and unprotected resources for the family. Such
anarchic places would be particularly ill-suited to implementing the kind of population
control policies Walker favors. According to research published by the Royal Society, it
looks as though the world will be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050, perhaps even
allowing some farmland to revert to nature. Water is a problem, but economic and
technological solutions show promise in ameliorating it. But more importantly, Walker
and other overpopulationists get the causality backwards. Poverty is the cause and high
fertility is the symptom. Poverty traps and failed states which result in high maternal
death rates, starvation, pollution, and deforestation are not created by
population, but by bad policies. Working to spread economic freedom and political
liberty is a lot harder than self-righteously blaming poor people for breeding too much.
But it's the only real option.

No impact to overpopulation their warrants are false
Bailey, 9 - B.A. in philosophy and economics @ University of Virginia, economist for
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, (Ronald, Our Uncrowded Planeted, 10-1-
09, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/september/our-uncrowded-
planet)//gingE
Imminent doom has been declared again. But dont worry, neo-Malthusian predictions
of overpopulation are wrong. Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public
discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of
the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street
Journals MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell. Farrell
asserts that overpopulation is the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism,
the world. Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end
capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what
he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond's 12-factor equation of population
doom. It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and
human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Lets take them one by one. 1. Overpopulation
multiplier: Looking at the most recent United Nations population projections, it is likely
that world population will peak somewhere between 8 and 9 billion near the middle of
this century (current population is about 6.8 billion) and then begin declining back
toward 6 billion by 2100. In addition, if lower fertility rates are the goal, promoting
economic freedom is the way to achieve it. In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics
professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the
inverse relationship between economic freedom and fertility. Norton found that the
fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children
per woman while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility
rate of 1.82 children per woman. Crop yields have been increasing at a rate of about 2
percent year for 100 years and now population is growing at 1 percent per year. 2.
Population Impact multiplier: Farrell mirrors Diamond's concern that the world's poor
want to become rich. This means that they aim to consume more. Can the Earth sustain
increased consumption? Yes, economic efficiency is dematerializing the economy and
thus will spare more land and other resources for nature. As Jesse Ausubel, director of
the human environment program at Rockefeller University, and colleagues have shown,
although the average global consumer enjoyed 45 percent more affluence in 2006 than
in 1980, each consumed only 22 percent more crops and 13 percent more energy. See
below for more information on positive trends in agriculture, water usage, and forest
growth. 3. Food: Farrell says we are running out. It is true that far too many people are
on the verge of starvation and the recent economic crisis has pushed even more in that
direction. But Farrell and Diamond overlook the fact that crop yields have been
increasing at a rate of about 2 percent per year for 100 years and now population is
growing at 1 percent per year. Agronomist Paul Waggoner argued in his a 1996 article,
"How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?," published in the journal
Daedalus, that "if during the next sixty to seventy years the world farmer reaches the
average yield of todays U.S. corn grower, the 10 billion will need only half of todays
cropland while they eat todays American calories." If Waggoner is rightand all signs
are that he isthe future will be populated by fat people who will have plenty of
wilderness in which to frolic. 4. Water: There is no doubt that a lot of fresh water is being
wasted. However, we know how to solve that problemcreate property rights and free
markets for water. For example, water use per capita in the United States has been
declining for two decades. Farrell and Diamond propagate the stale water wars meme.
Transboundary water cooperation rather than conflict is the norm. "The simple
explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," notes Aaron Wolf, the
Oregon State University professor who heads up the Program in Water Conflict
Management. Wolf observes that history records that the last water war occurred 4500
years ago between Lagash and Umma over irrigation rights in what is now Iraq. Farrell
claims that forests are being destroyed at an accelerating rate. He is wrong. Forest
regrowth is the actual trend in many places. 5. Farmland: First note that vast increases in
agricultural productivity over the past half century spared an area about the size of South
America from being plowed up to produce food for the current population. In a 2000
Science article, soil scientist Pierre Crosson and colleagues noted, "studies of the onfarm
productivity effects based on 1982 N[ational] R[esource] I[nventory] cropland erosion
indicated that if those rates continue for 100 years, crop yields (output per hectare)
would be reduced only 2 to 4 percent. These results indicate that the productivity effects
of soil erosion are not significant enough to justify increased federal outlays to reduce the
erosion, but not all agree." In any case, soil erosion is a problem that is being addressed
by modern high-tech no-till agriculture. 6. Forests: Farrell claims that forests are being
destroyed at an accelerating rate. He is wrong. Forest regrowth is the actual trend in
many places. A 2006 article on forest trends in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences found "Among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and
Agriculture Organizations comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no
nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative
rate of growing stock change." In fact, leaving aside Brazil and Indonesia, globally the
forests of the world increased by about 2 percent since 1990. And there is further good
newsa quarter to a third of the tropical forests that have been cut down are now
regenerating. 7. Toxic chemicals: Farrell writes, "Consider the deadly impact of
insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics ... the list is endless." When one
actually considers the impact on synthetic chemicals on people, it turns out that the
more man-made chemicals, the higher do human life expectancies rise. Contrary to
activist claims, trace amounts of synthetic chemicals are not producing a cancer
epidemic. In fact, cancer incidence rates in the U.S. have been falling for nearly a decade.
8. Energy resources, oil, natural gas, and coal: Farrell is just incoherent here. He hints at
"peak oil," and supplies may become tight, but that would largely be a result of political
factors, not the depletion of reserves. As for coal and natural gas supplies, no one is
suggesting their imminent depletion. 9. Solar energy: Farrell does not here mean
photovoltaic power, but rather the Earth's "photosynthetic capacity, that is, the ability
of plants to turn sunlight into food, fuel, and other useful products. Apparently, he thinks
that humanity is using too much of it. To the extent this is a problem, biotech advances
are already addressing it by researching ways to boost crop productivity by transforming
plants from less efficient C3 photosynthesizers to the more efficient C4 pathway. The
world's poor want to become rich. This means that they aim to consume more. Can the
Earth sustain increased consumption? Yes. 10. Ozone layer: Farrell seems unaware of the
fact that this problem has already largely been dealt with. To the extent this was a
problem, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that banned the refrigerants that were depleting
the ozone layer has fixed it. This month, NASA reported a slightly positive trend of ozone
increase of almost 1 percent per decade in the total ozone from the past 14 years. 11.
Diversity: Biodiversity trends are notoriously difficult to predict. In 1979, Oxford
University biologist Norman Myers suggested in his book The Sinking Ark that 40,000
species per year were going extinct and that 1 million species would be gone by the year
2000. Myers suggested that the world could "lose one-quarter of all species by the year
2000." At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, Thomas Lovejoy, former
president of The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment
announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between
now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still
came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth." Lovejoy
drew up the first projections of global extinction rates for the Global 2000 Report to the
President in 1980. If Lovejoy had been right, between 15 and 20 percent of all species
alive in 1980 would be extinct right now. No one believes that extinctions of this
magnitude have occurred over the last three decades. What happens to humanity if many
species do go extinct? In a 2003 Science article called "Prospects for Biodiversity,
Martin Jenkins, who works for the United Nations Environment Programme-World
Conservation Monitoring Center, pointed out that even if the dire projections of
extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct, they "will not, in
themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." The Science article notes, "In
truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased
material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like
farms] Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually
marginal and local." 12. Alien species: Farrell claims, "transferring species to lands where
they're not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects." Mostly not. Biologist
Mark Davis chalks up most opposition to "alien" species to prejudice and muddy
thinking, adding in the current issue of the New Scientist that "you may be surprised to
learn that only a few per cent of introduced species are harmful. Most are relatively
benign." As I pointed out nine years ago, the preference for native over non-native
species is essentially a religious one. It has no warrant in biology. While there certainly
are environmental problems, current trends do not portend a looming population
apocalypse. Instead, the 21st century will be more likely remembered as the century of
ecological restoration.

Poverty

No internal link - child marriages.
Phillip 7/23, general assignment national reporter for the Washington Post, cites
statistics from the Girl Summit in London, and a study by UNICEF, (Abby, July 23, 2014,
Heres proof that child marriage and poverty go hand in hand, Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/23/heres-proof-that-
child-marriage-and-poverty-go-hand-in-hand/)//HH

Some 700 million women alive today were married before they turned 18. More than one
in three of them were married before they turned 15, according to new statistics released
ahead of the first ever Girl Summit in London.
Some, like Lubaba Abdella in Ethiopia, have been taken out of school, married, divorced,
and sent to work far from home before their 18th birthday, according to the Guardian.
Child marriage is a human rights violation and one that disproportionately affects poor
girls.
Like Abdella, who was married when she was 16, they tend to be victims of cultural
norms that turn young girls into commodities, according to a report by the Overseas
Development Institute. But it only results in reinforcing poverty, disease and lack of
education in their communities.
Women who are married as children become vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases
and are less likely to receive an education or health care during pregnancy, according to
UNICEF.
According to a new report by the British government and UNICEF, if efforts to end these
practices continue at their current pace, the world will lose the battle altogether.
And while there is no easy solution to the problem, new data underscore one critical fact:
that poverty and education often go hand in hand with practices that harm girls before
they even become women.
Here's the proof:
1. In every region where child marriage is prevalent, poor women are most affected:
2. In the Dominican Republic, India and Bangladesh, for example, rich women marry
years later than their poor counterparts. In India, where a third of the world's child
marriages occur, and in the Dominican Republic, the gap between the median age of
marriage for the rich and the poor is four years.
3. In all the places where more than 50 percent of women are married as children, those
marriages are more common in rural communities.
4. Child marriage is more common among uneducated women in every country where it
is still practiced.
5. Child-marriage rates have been decreasing, but if progress doesn't accelerate, the
number of child brides will plateau by 2050.

Status Quo solves poverty - Ryans proposal.
Goldfarb 7/22, staff writer covering the White House, focusing on President Obamas
economic, financial and fiscal policy, quotes Paul Ryan, (Zachary A., July 22, 2014, Paul
Ryan to unveil anti-poverty plan, Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ryan-to-propose-new-anti-poverty-
plan/2014/07/22/74eceea8-11ec-11e4-98ee-daea85133bc9_story.html)//HH

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will shift this week from his
years-long focus on cutting federal spending to an anti-poverty proposal that seeks to
overhaul the safety net but also leaves in place existing levels of funding.
The proposal, which will be announced Thursday amid a battery of new ideas from Ryan,
is part of an effort to reorient the Republican Party away from battles of recent years and
toward addressing the economic anxieties of the most disadvantaged Americans.
The new proposal, called an Opportunity Grant, would begin on a pilot basis. It would
consolidate a range of safety-net programs from food stamps to housing vouchers
into a single grant offered to states. State governments, working with local officials and
nonprofit and faith groups, would then distribute the money, with strict accountability
standards. Medicaid, the health program for the poor, would not be included.
This proposal seeks to combine the resources of the federal government with the vast
knowledge of states and local communities, according to a Ryan document obtained by
The Washington Post. By offering a more dynamic form of aid, the federal government
can create a safety net that both catches the falling and supports the striving.
The idea of block granting federal money to states has long been a linchpin of
conservative thinking on fighting poverty. But while it has also long been used as a way
to cut spending, what is striking about Ryans proposal is that he pledges to keep safety-
net expenditures the same as they would be under current law.
It is important to note that this is not a budget-cutting exercise this is a reform
proposal, the Ryan document says.
As budget chairman, Ryan has made a name for himself as an advocate for sharp
spending cuts as part of an effort to balance the books.

Urbanization solves Poverty.
Clemente 7/22, Staff Writer for Forbes, (Jude, July 22, 2014, Urbanization: Reducing
Poverty and Helping the Environment, Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2014/07/22/urbanization-reducing-
poverty-and-helping-the-environment/)//HH

Movement into urban areas is occurring on a staggering scale, over 70 million people a
year. The world is now 53% urbanized, compared to 29% in 1950 and 39% in 1980. By
2050, some 70% of the 9.6 billion humans will live in cities, and we could have as many
100 megacities (population over 10 million), against 24 such cities today. In particular,
coal-based China and India are in the midst of the largest urbanizations in world history,
and it will continue for decades. This historic transformation will play the main role in
the worlds energy future (see Figures 1, 2). City dwellers tend to have higher incomes
and better access to energy services, largely why higher electrification rates in cities are
associated with more economic opportunity. With over 80% of the world still living in
undeveloped nations, the energy demand on the horizon is massive. In total, cities will
swell by around 2.8 billion by 2050. The last time this happened (1955-2010):
Coal demand increased from 2 billion tonnes to 7.1 billion tonnes
Oil demand grew from 10 million b/d to 88 million b/d
Natural gas use rose from 8 Tcf to 113 Tcf
Cement use rose over 3 billion tonnes
Steel consumption increased from 200 million tonnes to 1,400 million tonnes.
Nuclear power rose from nil to 2,500 TWh
From 2013-2025, Chinas National Development and Reform Commission plans to
spend $6.4 trillion to bring 400 million people to cities.

Status quo solves - poverty levels have been cut in half in the last 20 years.
Holmes and Evans 7/18, Global Citizen Ambassador AND chief executive officer of
The Global Poverty Project, (Katie and Hugh, July 18, 2014, Ending extreme poverty by
2030 isnt just a dream, its possible, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ending-extreme-
poverty-2030-isnt-just-dream-its-possible)//HH

In the last 15 years, the world has seen the most successful anti-poverty push in history.
The number of people living in extreme poverty has been cut in half, from 43% in 1990 to
fewer than 20% today. More children are in school than ever before. And the reduction
of child deaths from preventable causes has fallen by more than 30%.
Weve come a long way in the fight to end extreme poverty.
Yet more than 1 billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day, a figure many may find
hard to believe. And rightfully so. But the truth is, due to a successful concerted global
effort, our world is on the path to ending extreme poverty. A feat never before achieved
in human history.
At the World Bank spring meeting in 2013, finance ministers from around the world
agreed to the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. And last fall, we stood on stage at
the Global Citizen Festival with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim as he challenged
his fellow leaders to honor that commitment, to go beyond their current efforts, and to
publicly declare their countrys support for a world without extreme poverty.
Now is our chance to hold them accountable.
At a time when the world is as technologically advanced as its ever been, one in 10
children worldwide still go through life without an education. While medical revolutions
are underway in the Western world, in sub-Saharan Africa, too many children never
reach their 5th birthday due to diseases we know how to prevent. And while speed and
convenience continue to propel the next market breakthrough, one in three people still
live without access to a restroom.
Yet in these statistics lies the opportunity. At no point in history has the world been more
interdependent, interconnected, and informed. But with that knowledge and
connectivity comes the responsibility to change the systems we know arent working.
It wont be easy change never is. But if we work together and take action to show our
leaders how ending extreme poverty isnt just the right thing to do, its the only thing to
do, we believe we can see a world free of this injustice by 2030.
As Nelson Mandela so famously said, Millions of people in the worlds poorest countries
remain imprisoned, enslaved, and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It
is time to set them free.
We agree.

Capitalism makes poverty and inequality inevitable.
Robertson and Leumer 7/2, Lecturer at San Francisco State University, member of
the California Faculty Association, AND member of the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters, (Ann and Bill, July 2, 2014, Does Capitalism Inevitably Produce
Inequalities?, http://www.globalresearch.ca/does-capitalism-inevitably-produce-
inequalities/5389460)//HH

To begin with, in capitalist society it is much easier to make money if you already have
money, and much more difficult if you are poor. So, for example, a rich person can buy
up a number of foreclosed houses and rent them out to desperate tenants at ridiculously
high rates. Then, each time rent is paid, the landlord becomes richer and the tenant
becomes poorer, and inequalities in wealth grow.
More importantly, at the very heart of capitalism lies an incentive that leads to the
increase of inequalities. Capitalism is based on the principle of competition, and
businesses must compete with one another in order to survive. Each company, therefore,
strives to maximize its profits in order to achieve a competitive advantage. For example,
they can use extra profits to offset lowering the price of their product, undersell their
opponents, and push them out of the market.
But in order to maximize profits, businesses must keep productive costs to a minimum.
And a major portion of productive costs includes labor. Consequently, as a general rule,
in order for a business to survive, it must push labor costs to a minimum. And that is
why, of course, so many businesses migrate from the U.S. and relocate in countries like
China, Viet Nam, Mexico, and Bangladesh where wages are a mere pittance.
This inherent tendency to maximize profits while minimizing the cost of labor directly
results in growing inequalities. Stiglitz himself mentions that C.E.Os today enjoy
incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio
than in the past. In fact, in 1970, the ratio was roughly 40 times. C.E.O.s who succeed in
suppressing wages are routinely rewarded for their efforts. Hence, not only is there an
incentive to keep wages low for the survival of the business, there is a personal incentive
in play as well.


Refugees
No Impact - Studies
WDR 7/29/2010 -World Development Report, a part of the World Bank (The Impacts
of Refugees on Neighboring Countries: A Development Challenge, World Bank,
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CEQQ
FjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsiteresources.worldbank.org%2FEXTWDR2011%2FResourc
es%2F6406082-
1283882418764%2FWDR_Background_Paper_Refugees.pdf&ei=XoDMU5vxK8jvOYnv
geAM&usg=AFQjCNHDuPQt-gOvn1QsfX23U07sYnvdEQ&sig2=T-
zd0Fvm5V4QqwAYz71c4g)

In recent decades, several studies have focused on the impact of refugees on the local
economies of hosting countries (Chambers 1986, Whitaker 1999, Alix-Garcia 2007). In
Tanzania, an assessment was undertaken of the impact of Rwandan refugees on local
agricultural prices between 1993 and 1998 ( Alix-Garcia, 2007). The study found a
significant increase in the prices of some agricultural goods (e.g., cooking bananas, beans
and milk) and a decrease in the price of aid-delivered goods (e.g., maize). As a result,
many Tanzanian farmers who produced a surplus benefited from an increased demand
for their agricultural products in local markets. Anecdotal evidence suggested that on
average, farmers doubled the size of their cultivated land and their production of
bananas and beans during 1993-1996 (Whitaker, 2002). The increase in the size of the
local markets also boosted business and trade activities conducted by both hosts and
refugees. At the same time, welfare indicators such as electricity, televisions, and
refrigerators increased in host population households near refugee camps (Whitaker,
2002). A recent impact evaluation of refugee camps in Daadab, Kenya (Nordic Agency
for Development and Ecology, 2010),9 which hosts one of the largest refugee populations
in the world, estimates that the total annual direct and indirect benefits of the
camp operation for the local host community were around US$ 82 million
in 2009, and is projected to reach US$ 100 million in 2010. Some of the funds
for the camp operation are allocated to infrastructure investments that benefit the host
community. The impact of the Daadab camps on the local host community are widely felt
through trading opportunities and reduced food and commodity prices. Furthermore,
refugee camps have developed major local markets with considerable purchasing power
in relation to pastoral products such as milk and livestock. However, despite these
positive indicators, the presence of refugees is also associated with the depletion of
firewood and building materials as well as competition for grazing land in the immediate
vicinity of the camps. The assessment concludes that impacts on the host community are
complex and have both negative and positive aspects. Depending on the situation of the
individual household, the positive and negative impacts of the refugee presence will play
out differently, however, on balance, the study found that there were more positive
than negative impacts on the host area. One of the positive contributions that
refugees can make to host countries is skills and knowledge that can be utilized for the
benefit of local people. In this regard, the multiple ways in which refugees pursue their
livelihoods can make significant contributions to the local economy. For instance, in
Amman, Jordan, well-educated Iraqi refugees staff hospitals and universities and
contribute know-how to local businesses (Crisp et al, 2009).10 Another important
contribution of refugees to local economies is associated with their access to
transnational resources provided by other refugees and co-nationals living abroad,
including remittances and social networks (Jacobsen, 2002). A study of Somali refugees
and remittances explains how cash transfers to refugees have impacts on receiving
communities (Horst and Van Hear, 2002). Individual remittances that often go to
displaced families and relatives are used to meet basic livelihood needs. Similarly,
research on the Somali Diaspora in Canada points out how informal banking systems
have facilitated cash transfers to Somali refugees in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen
(Hamza, 2006). These resources have contributed not only to the improvement of living
conditions at the household level, but also to those in refugee camps, especially in terms
of housing, water provision, and telephone services. However, it is important to mention
that in general remittances can also enhance inequalities since they are unevenly
distributed and poorer households may not have relatives in the Diaspora.11
Rocket Launches
No uq for their scenario
Salant, 7/17 - Digital Journalist, Expertise in Entertainment, Government, Social
media, Environment & green living, General business news & info (Nathan, Commercial
rocket launches space station supply capsule
http://www.digitaljournal.com/technology/commercial-rocket-launches-space-station-
supply-capsule/article/390265)//gingE
Accomac - Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket took off Sunday from a NASA facility
on the Virginia coast, carrying more than 3,500 pounds of supplies and equipment to the
International Space Station. The Cygnus space capsule mounted atop the rocket is
loaded with food, science experiments and new odor-resistant exercise clothes for the
six-person space-station crew, according to the Associated Press. "It's like Christmas in
July," said former US astronaut Frank Culbertson, now an Orbital Sciences executive.
Bright sunlight and clouds limited visibility from the ground at launch, but skywatchers
from North Carolina to New Jersey might have gotten a chance to see the rocket as it
climbed through Earth's atmosphere, the AP said. The ship is due to arrive at the space
station, which was 260 miles above Australia when the rocket lifted off from NASA's
Wallops Island launch facility, on Wednesday. Most of the shipment consists of food for
the crew of US, Russian and German astronauts. The new workout clothing is resistant
to bacteria and odor, enabling astronauts to work out for two hours a day with fewer
clothing changes needed. The cost of the mission is being paid for by NASA under its
$1.9 billion contract with the Virginia-based company, entered into when the space
shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. The European Space Agency also delivers supplies to the
station, but its final ship is scheduled to launch at the end of June. Current plans call for
the Cygnus capsule to stay at the space station for about a month before it gets filled with
trash and cut loose to burn up in the atmosphere. Saturday was the 5,000th day of
continuous human habitation at the space station, the AP said.

Space X disproves impact uniqueness
Wall, 7/14 Senior Writer (Mike, SpaceX Rocket Launches 6 Commercial Satellites
into Orbit http://www.space.com/26320-spacex-rocket-commercial-satellite-
launch.html)//gingE
The private spaceflight company SpaceX launched six commercial satellites into low-
Earth orbit today (July 14) in a mission that was expected to include a key rocket-
reusability test. The company's Falcon 9 rocket streaked into space from the pad at
Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT) Monday,
carrying six spacecraft for the satellite-communications firm ORBCOMM. The satellites
are the first members of the OG2 (short for "ORBCOMM Generation 2") constellation,
which should provide a big upgrade over the current OG1 network, company officials
said. SpaceX is expected to launch a total of 17 OG2 craft using the Falcon 9. The OG2
satellites, which weigh about 375 lbs. (170 kilograms) each, were built by Sierra Nevada
Corp. They're destined for an elliptical orbit that will take them between 382 and 466
miles (615 to 750 kilometers) above Earth's surface. A successful delivery of the OG2
satellites may have been the main objective of Monday's launch, but it wasn't the only
one. SpaceX also aimed to bring the Falcon 9's first stage back to Earth in a soft ocean-
splashdown, to test out and advance reusable-rocket technology. It was not clear
immediately after liftoff how well this test went. Developing fully and rapidly reusable
launch vehicles is a key priority of SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk, who has said
that this breakthrough could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100. In doing so,
reusable rockets could help open the solar system for manned exploration, perhaps even
making a Mars colony economically feasible. SpaceX attempted a similar first-stage
return during the last Falcon 9 liftoff in April, which blasted the robotic Dragon capsule
toward the International Space Station on a cargo mission for NASA. That test went well;
datashowed that the rocket stage did indeed make a controlled landing in the Atlantic
Ocean, though rough seas destroyed it before recovery boats could reach the splashdown
scene. Monday's launch was originally planned for May 10, but the cancellation of a pre-
launch Falcon 9 static-fire test and scheduling constraints pushed the liftoff back by
about two months. The launch also comes on the heels of SpaceX receiving certification
from the U.S. Air Force of its Falcon 9 rocket after three successful flights, a major step
in the company's plan to compete for U.S. military satellite launch contracts.

Commercial space exploration increasing now and Space X is developing
alternative fuel sources
Dean, 7/14 Florida Today (James, SpaceX rocket shoots off launch pad to deploy
satellites
http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/spacex/2014/07/14/spacex-
launch-rocket-orbcomm-satellites/12629033/)//gingE
CAPE CANAVERAL -- Successful rocket launches don't usually end with a "kaboom," but
SpaceX's did Monday morning. A Falcon 9 rocket roared from its Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station pad at 11:15 a.m. and delivered a half-dozen commercial communications
satellites to a spot-on orbit within 15 minutes, completing the mission for Orbcomm Inc.
While the rocket's upper stage climbed, the first stage slowed its hypersonic speed, flew a
controlled descent to a splashdown zone in the Atlantic Ocean and deployed a set of
landing legs. It was then SpaceX's latest attempt to advance development of a reusable
booster ended with a bang. "Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were
good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom)," SpaceX CEO Elon
Musk reported on Twitter. Musk said more analysis was needed to determine if it was
the splashdown or the "body slam" that followed when the stage tipped over on its side
that caused the damage. Boats were expected to try to fish the booster or its remains
from the water. A successfully water recovery is likely necessary before SpaceX can try to
fly a rocket back to a landing site at the Cape, something Musk had hoped might be
possible this year. The previous Falcon 9 flight in April achieved a soft ocean landing
the first ever attempted by a liquid-fueled booster but the stage broke up in stormy
seas that kept recovery crews at bay for two days. SpaceX believes reusing rocket
boosters, which are normally discarded after one use, will dramatically lower launch
costs and revolutionize the launch industry. While the recovery experiment did not go as
well as hoped Monday, Musk was able to enjoy a celebratory glass of champagne with
Orbcomm CEO Marc Eisenberg at SpaceX's Cape Canaveral launch control center. The
bubbly may have been waiting on ice for months, since the mission endured delay after
delay since April due to problems with the Eastern Range, the rocket, satellites and
weather. Two countdowns scrubbed last month. Now Orbcomm, a publicly traded
provider of machine-to-machine communications, finally has its first six of 17 second-
generation satellites in orbit about 500 miles up. "It feels like I just gave birth to
sextuplets," Eisenberg said after the launch. "We've been at this for so long. We always
knew it would happen the right way, it was just a question of when. We're pretty excited
to get it launched." The six small satellites, each 380 pounds, filled a hole in New Jersey-
based Orbcomm's aging constellation of 25 first-generation satellites flying in four
orbital planes. Each new spacecraft can provide more capacity than the entire legacy
network. "The whole network is going to get pretty drastically better," said Eisenberg.
"We're expecting almost immediate financial impact when we put these in service in the
next 30 to 60 days." The satellites and ground sensors help track the location of trucks
and ships moving around the globe, ensure refrigerated rail cars are keeping contents
cool and monitor the health of heavy construction equipment. The remaining 11 satellites
in the roughly $200 million Orbcomm Generation 2 constellation will launch on another
Falcon 9, possibly before the end of the year. The launch was the 10th by a Falcon 9 since
it began flying in 2010, and the fifth by the upgraded version that debuted last fall.
SpaceX hopes to launch another commercial communications satellite from the Cape
within a few weeks. Before that, United Launch Alliance is targeting launches of military
satellites on July 23 and July 31.

Space Budget
Cuts are inevitablecost overruns and inefficiencies ruin NASAs budget
and effectiveness
Block, 11 [Robert Block, Orlando Sentinel, Bloated NASA losing its lustre; Storied
agency must become leaner in an era of shrinking federal budgets, The Vancouver Sun
(British Columbia), January 1, 2011, Lexis, Evan]
Early last month, a private company called SpaceX launched an unmanned version of its
Dragon capsule into orbit, took it for a few spins around Earth, and then brought it home
with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The total cost -- including design, manufacture,
testing and launch of the company's Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule -- was roughly $800
million US. In the world of government space flight, that's almost a rounding error. And
the ability of SpaceX to do so much with so little money is raising some serious questions
about NASA. The agency that once stood for American technical wizardry is seriously
starting to lose its lustre. Already, Brevard County high school students are talking in
bowling alleys over orders of cheese fries about wanting to go work for SpaceX, not the
agency that 40 years ago put Americans on the moon. Inside NASA, some employees
have taken to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the letters "WWED," which stands for
"What Would Elon Do?" -- a reference to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, the
Internet tycoon who invested his own fortune in pursuit of his dream of sending humans
into space at affordable prices. It's that lack of affordability that is killing NASA, experts
say. Aerospace-industry executives, NASA contractors and employees all warn that
unless the storied agency can become leaner and more efficient in an era of shrinking
federal budgets, it could find itself becoming a historical footnote. "NASA and industry
need to partner together to change our approach," says Jim Maser, the president of Pratt
& Whitney Rocketdyne, which has designed virtually every rocket engine used by NASA
since the dawn of the space program. Over the past six years, NASA has spent nearly $10
billion US on the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule -- its own version more or less of what
SpaceX has launched -- and came up with little more than cost overruns and technical
woes. In October, Congress scrapped the Constellation moon program and ordered the
agency to start over to design a rocket and capsule capable of taking humans to explore
the solar system. Maser warns that, without reforms, NASA will simply repeat the
Constellation experience. "Given that we are not going to get the budget increase that
was hoped for under Constellation, given that [the budget] is going to be relatively flat
with a still-aggressive agenda, if NASA and industry continue to do business in the
traditional manner, I don't think NASA's charter will be fulfilled," he said.
No impact NASA will find other means to achieve their goals within budget
constraints
Dreier 13 (Casey, Director of Advocacy at TPS, Top NASA Scientists Grapple with
Budget Cuts, December 10, The Planetary Society,
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/2013/20131210-top-nasa-scientists-
grapple-with-budget-cuts.html)//DLG
Top NASA scientists tried to focus on the bright side Monday, highlighting the
unprecedented productivity of current space science missions, despite a continued future
of diminishing budgets. Dr. Ellen Stofan, NASA's Chief Scientist, and Dr. John
Grunsfeld, the head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate and Hubble-repair astronaut,
both emphasized the breadth of science returns at the 2013 American Geophysical Union
meeting in San Francisco. "The positive thing about meetings like this is that you see
our results getting an enormous amount of press and an enormous amount of support
and interest from the American people," said Dr. Stofan. "And the more we have that, the
more were doing our job. The first few questions from the press were about the
unusually harsh cuts to NASA's Planetary Science Division in recent years, including
more than $200 million in cuts proposed in 2014. In response, Grunsfeld listed a
number of missions currently operating in space, keeping the focus off the upcoming
mission gap in the second half of this decade. He also highlighted the two planetary
missions currently in development. We have plans to go visit [the asteroid] Bennu with
OSIRIS-REx to bring back a pretty substantial sample. We are back involved with
ExoMars 2016 and 2018. We have InSight, a geophysical monitoring station on Mars,
and an AO for 2020 Mars on the street, Grunsfeld said. OSIRIS-REx is a medium-class
planetary mission that is scheduled to launch in 2016. InSight, a small Discovery-class
mission, is also slated for 2016. NASA is contributing a non-scientific communications
package to the European Trace-Gas Orbiter in 2016 and the Mars Organic Molecule
Analyzer (MOMA) instrument on the ExoMars lander in 2018. Given the tough fiscal
climate, I actually feel very proud of how weve been able to try and address almost all of
the high-priority items in the Decadal Surveys," Grunsfeld said. "The one we have the
most problem with is the cadence of missions. We are constrained in missions. Mission
cadence refers to how often NASA can fly a new spacecraft. Keeping a regular cadence is
crucial for a healthy scientific community and a reliable industrial base for engineering
design and construction. The National Research Council's Decadal Survey, which is the
official consensus of the scientific community, recommends flying small missions
(Discovery-class) every two years, medium missions (New Frontiers-class), every five
years, and a flagship once every decade. When asked about the next opportunities for
scientists to propose small- and medium-class missions, Jim Green, the Director of
NASAs Planetary Science Division said that NASA is planning to release a draft
Discovery mission announcement in 2014. Preparing a draft now, he said, will allow
NASA to react quickly if Congress adds more money to the Planetary Science Division
before the year ends. Green said that the next New Frontiers-class mission will be
selected after the peak funding requirements for OSIRIS-REx are met, which is likely to
be after 2015. These releases are just the "Announcements of Opportunity," which begin
a multi-year process of mission selection. Given that no selection will be made before
2016 or 2017, its likely that the soonest a new mission would be ready to fly would be
2021 or 2022. The Clipper Europa mission concept, currently estimated at $2.1 billion,
remains off the table. But NASA is trying to find creative ways to work within their
constraints. Said Grunsfeld: "Ive challenged [our program managers] to look at other
options: what about Discovery and a half? Or New Frontiers and half? Not a flagship, but
something that would allow us to do one of these challenging missions. The spirit is: lets
use technology and use some of our capabilities to see if we can do 70% of the science
objectives of, say, a Europa mission, at half the cost. That might be worth the trade.

No impact space policy fails and is ineffective
Cowing 13 - Editor at NASA Watch, an astrobiologist, and a former NASA employee
(Keith, October 2, 2013, Why Does Space Policy Always Suck? Nasa Watch,
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2013/10/why-does-space.html)
Keith's note: Sigh, yet another NAS SSB meeting on "public and stakeholder Opinions"
that is closed to the "public" and "stakeholders" i.e. the taxpayers who paid for it. As
previously noted on NASA Watch, these expensive ($3.6 million) panels, composed of
the usual suspects plus a few newbies, take years to churn out an end product. The
product is watered down and is biased toward the pre-ordained opinions of Congress,
the committee, and the select consultants that the SSB consults. No description is ever
presented to the public as to how input is solicited, processed, or collated - nor does the
public have any recourse whereby they can find out how the committee conducted itself.
The end result is presented to Congress. Congress reads the cover page, holds a hearing,
and asks NASA to respond within 90 days to questions that miss the original point that
the NAS committee was chartered to discuss. The White House then ignores the report -
as does NASA - and Congress. Everyone then pats themselves on the back - and the
process starts all over again - ignoring everything that the NAS SSB just did.
Because that is how it is done.
This self-perpetuating space policy echo chamber existed before sequesters,
shutdowns, and CRs and it will continue to exist once this current budget nonsense is
resolved - and it will survive as future congressional calamities ensue.
Yet people still wonder why, after all these years, the process whereby space policy is
developed sucks so very much - and why NASA finds it harder and harder to do what it is
chartered to do.
Yet Another Slow Motion Advisory Committee on Human Space Flight, earlier post
"Net result: the committee's advice will be out of synch with reality and somewhat
overtaken by events having taken a total of 3 years, 7 months to complete. Oh yes: the
cost of this study? $3.6 million.. The soonest that a NASA budget could be crafted that
took this committee's advice into account would be the FY 2016 budget request. NASA
and OMB will interact on the FY 2016 budget during Fall 2014 and it won't be
announced until early 2015 - 4 1/2 years after this committee and its advice was
requested in the NASA Authorization Act 2010."
NASA Wants You To Nominate The Advisors It Ignores
"Charlie Bolden listens (I guess) to what the committee members have to say and then
ignores 99% of what is said. Its mostly a slow-motion Kabuki theater: NASA people
moving in the shadows - but little real substance up front."

No impact to the space budget private sector will fill in and current
King 13 quals (Ledyard, November 12, 2013, With tight budget, NASA may see more
private partnerships USA Today,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/12/nasa-budget-private-
sector/3510345/

WASHINGTON Call it opportunity. Call it cold reality. The nation's space program is
increasingly reliant on private partners to send astronauts into space as its slice of the
federal budget diminishes.
And an industry report issued Tuesday suggests that trend must continue if the U.S.
wants to maintain its global leadership in space exploration.
At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA's share of the federal budget was about 4.5
percent. Now, it's less than one-half of 1 percent at a time when Russia and China are
increasingly competitive in space exploration.
NASA's share of the budget could shrink even more in January if a budget deal a
congressional committee is working on does nothing to prevent another round of
sequestration spending cuts.
The agency's role as the world's trailblazer in space could disappear within a decade
because it lacks the resources for missions beyond low earth orbit "without significant
help," said Robert Bigelow, president of Bigelow Aerospace, which produced the report
released Tuesday.
"If there is no outside help over the next 10 years, only a very modest human exploration
effort is possible," Bigelow told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.
NASA commissioned Bigelow, which builds expandable spacecraft, to examine how
private companies could team up with the space agency to achieve mutual goals at a time
of tight budgets and political squabbling over the space program's future.
Bigelow cited signs of progress in cargo delivery missions to the International Space
Station by private aerospace companies after the shuttle retired. NASA also hopes to use
companies to ferry astronauts from U.S. soil as early as 2017, if sequestration is avoided.
But returning to the moon or sending astronauts to Mars NASA's highest-profile goal
will require private help, Bigelow said.
Despite the uncertain budget situation, the head of NASA's human exploration program
said "tremendous progress" is being made on the Orion capsule designed to carry
astronauts to Mars by the 2030s, and on the heavy-lift SLS rocket that will propel them
there.
Speaking earlier Tuesday at a symposium on efforts to send humans into deep space,
NASA Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier said the project's private partners
have been moving ahead with various phases.
The rocket booster's preliminary design review and some avionics testing is complete.
The Orion crew capsule has undergone nine parachute tests and a water recovery
simulation, and its heat shield is essentially finished.
A test of the capsule remains on target for next year. And a test flight of the rocket and
the capsule is on track for 2017.
"The takeaway here is there's real work moving forward," Gerstenmaier said. "This is no
longer a paper program."
The discussion was held at the Newseum a few blocks from the Capitol.
Gerstenmaier, who later attended the news conference with Bigelow, was joined by
representatives from major aerospace companies Aerojet Rocketdyne, ATK, Boeing
and Lockheed Martin working to make the Mars mission a reality.
Work on the program, which would include an asteroid retrieval mission within the next
few years, continues, despite Congress' inability to provide the space agency or most
other federal agencies with a complete budget for fiscal 2014, which began Oct. 1.
In 2013, NASA received nearly $16.9 billion, down from $18.4 billion two years earlier.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved a NASA budget of $16.6 billion in
fiscal 2014 (in line with sequestration levels). The Senate Appropriations Committee
assumes an end to sequestration and is calling for $18 billion. President Barack Obama
has requested $17.7 billion.
Gerstenmaier said not knowing what the final budget will be is even worse than knowing
a budget cut is certain. NASA projects often take years to fund and build, so year-to-year
budget uncertainty makes planning a challenge.
"But if we can build this program as sustainable with the funding levels we've got and it
doesn't make or break or stop all activity, then we can make real progress," he said of the
Mars mission.
But even as aerospace executives touted the progress on that mission, they also
expressed dismay that the U.S. is paying Russia more than $70 million per seat to
transport astronauts to the space station.
John Elbon, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space Exploration, said he
thought about that when he visited Baikonur, Kazakhstan, last week for the launch of a
Russian rocket.
"I couldn't help but think while I was there that here I was, halfway around the world in
one of two spots (including China) where humans could be launched into space, and
neither of those two is the United States," he said. "So I think it's absolutely critical that
we move forward with SLS and Orion so we can recapture that leadership that is
rightfully ours, we think. If we don't pick up that mantle, there are other countries in the
world that are ready to."

Uranium Shortages

No Uranium Shortage, there is oversupply, not under.
Diniz 7/2, staff writer for Uranium Investing News, quotes Equity Analyst, Mining at
Raymond James Ltd., (Vivien, July 2, 2014, Uranium: The Short Term Is Bad, but the
Long Term Looks Great, http://uraniuminvestingnews.com/18684/uranium-the-short-
term-is-bad-but-the-long-term-looks-great.html)//HH

Youve got this overarching oversupply issue that is definitely a wet blanket on spot and
term prices, Sadowski said, adding, there is simply too much supply out there and very
limited and discretionary demand; its not enough demand to soak up that supply.
When asked where that oversupply is coming from, Sadowski pointed at both primary
and secondary supply sources.
While there have been some mine shutdowns and production cutbacks in the post-
Fukushima uranium market, not many operations have closed. In fact, Sadowski
explained, the uranium companies that have been hit the hardest by the weak price
environment are those with projects in the pipeline development-stage projects.
So how come some companies are still operating profitably? One reason, said Sadowski,
is long-term, fixed-price contracts.
A lot of companies, like Cameco (TSX:CCO,NYSE:CCJ) and Rio Tinto
(NYSE:RIO,ASX:RIO,LSE:RIO), are delivering into contracts that are priced much
higher than the $28 per pound that we are seeing in the spot market right now.
Sadowski also highlighted new producers like Ur-Energy (TSX:URE) and a handful of
other in situ leach companies that were savvy enough to sign fixed-price deals when
prices werent as low. As a result of such contracts, those in situ leach companies have
been able to weather the storm not only due to low production costs, but also due to
contract pricing.
And though many companies have scaled back their production, state-backed entities
such as in China and Russia dont care as much about the economics of their mines,
said Sadowski. As a result, continued production from them is adding to the already
overflowing market.
Secondary supply
With several avenues of primary supply impacting the market, the last thing we need are
secondary sources adding to the equation. Unfortunately, thats exactly what theyre
doing.
Investors may have heard the term underfeeding being tossed around the marketplace
lately. In the latest industry report from Raymond James, Sadowski highlights that many
investors expected that with Japanese reactors offline, the reactors would no longer
consume uranium and that would be the end of it. However, enrichment companies
which sell enriched uranium to the utilities ended up with extra capacity at their
plants, and since these enrichment plants run more efficiently with all their centrifuges
spinning at the same time, they opted to run their centrifuges with smaller amounts of
uranium, squeezing out more enriched end product and further adding to uranium
supply.
As investors must, by this point, understand, producers and utilities didnt halt their
course just because demand from Japan stopped. The same applies to supply. When
Russias HEU agreement ended in 2013, the overarching belief was that there would be a
very sharp drop off in supply and that overnight 24 million pounds of uranium would
vanish from the supply chain.
Thats not what happened.
As Sadowski explained, the Russians were taking [uranium from warheads] and
blending it with old blend stock to make low-enriched uranium that was being shipped to
the US. But to create the blend stock, they had to enrich lower-grade uranium. A process
that was taking up capacity at the enrichment plants. But now that that process is over
and they are no longer enriching that blend stock, they have the spare capacity at the
enrichment plants.
Therefore, Russia is also running its centrifuges longer on smaller amounts of uranium,
re-enriching tailings and adding yet again to the secondary supply.
Its not as if that 24 million pounds went to zero all of a sudden, Sadowski said. And
though specific numbers arent available, supply did not go from 24 million pounds to
zero. Its more like it went from 24 million pounds down to 12 or 15 million pounds, he
noted.
So where does that leave us?
For years now, analysts have been touting the uranium supply shortage, but looking at
the current market, that prospect no doubt seems laughable.

No Uranium shortage - Japan proves.
Handwerger 7/17, he says he is a stock analyst and best selling writer syndicated
internationally, but at least he cites statistics and facts, (Jeb, July 17, 2014, Japanese
Nuclear Reactors Reigniting Uranium Mining, Mining Feeds,
http://www.miningfeeds.com/2014/07/17/japanese-restart-nuclear-reactors-reigniting-
uranium-mining-sector/)//HH

Contrarian investors buy uranium stocks when the banks and large miners cut their
price targets.
Japan announced that two nuclear reactors were approved for restart.
The Japanese Nuclear Restart could change the negative and bearish sentiment on the
uranium mining sector.
Uranium decline has been due to Japan shutting down reactors. The price may begin
rising as nuclear reactors are turned back on.
Be prepared for a rally in the uranium mining sector as end user look to once again
begin securing long term uranium supply.
Last week I was interviewed about uranium (OTCPK:URPTF) byJapan announces that
two reactors are approved to be safe and are able to be turned back on. This is a
psychological game changer as the uranium priced has slid for more than three years
over 60% as Japan idled their reactors after the 2011 Fukushima Disaster.
Uranium has hit decade lows due to the closures in Japan. Many believed Japan would
never return to nuclear. They were wrong.
This approval by the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority signals the fact that major
industrial nations require nuclear for cheap and clean energy. This decision by the
Japanese NRA tell us the Japanese economy can no longer rely on expensive liquefied
natural gas and renewable sources. They must turn to the safer next generation nuclear
reactors.
Look for the spot price and the uranium miners (NYSEARCA:URA) to reverse on this
fundamental catalyst and the negative sentiment to turn much more positive. The
actions of the major producers and banks led me as a contrarian to become more bullish
and forecast a bounce off the bottom.
Many of the current producers have had to cancel or mothball higher cost projects due to
the low spot price. Before the news today many of the banks have reduced long term
price outlooks and were bearish on the sector. The banks and large miners may be wrong
about uranium. The current surplus may turn to a deficit very quickly as Japan turns
back on the nuclear reactors.