Opponent: Harvard Westlake NL | Judge: Sophia Gottfried
1ac- workforce adv 1nc- cap k case 1ar- all 2nr- all 2ar- all
Damus Hollywood Invitational
1
Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah
1ac- democracy adv 1nc- hospitals da case 1ar- case hospitals da 2nr- lay 2ar- case
Damus Hollywood Invitational
1
Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah
1ac- democracy adv 1nc- hospitals da case 1ar- case hospitals da 2nr- lay 2ar- case
Meadows Invitational
1
Opponent: Diamond Bar NC | Judge: Claudia Ribera
1ac- Covid 1nc- BioTech da Climate patents da BioTerror PIC India soft power da case 1ar- all 1nc- Climate patents da case 2ar- all
Meadows Invitational
4
Opponent: Lexington FM | Judge: Santalucia Hernandez
1ac- Covid 1nc- Global Instability da Innovation da China Heg da case 1ar- all 2nr- China Heg da case 2ar- case China Heg da
Meadows Invitational
5
Opponent: Harvard Westlake AD | Judge: Amy Nyberg
1ac- Covid 2nc- T-reductions Pharma da Native Patent Rights cp case 1ar- all 2nr- T-reductions Native Patent Rights cp case 2ar- case Native Patent Rights cp T-reductions
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0-Util
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing First, pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn’t seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Moreover, only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. All other values can be explained with reference to pleasure; Occam’s razor requires us to treat these as instrumentally valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012) These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe. Reducing the risk of extinction is always priority number one. Bostrom 12 Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford., Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Forthcoming book (Global Policy). MP. http://www.existenti...org/concept.pdf Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 10 54 humanbrain-emulation subjective life-years (or 10 52 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1 chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.
11/7/21
0-Util
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing First, pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn’t seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Moreover, only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. All other values can be explained with reference to pleasure; Occam’s razor requires us to treat these as instrumentally valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012) These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe. Reducing the risk of extinction is always priority number one. Bostrom 12 Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford., Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Forthcoming book (Global Policy). MP. http://www.existenti...org/concept.pdf Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 10 54 humanbrain-emulation subjective life-years (or 10 52 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1 chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.
11/7/21
0-contact
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah Hi, I'm Simone (she/her) spisarik2023@ihs.immaculateheart.org
11/7/21
NovDec- Democracy Adv
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah Advantage one is democracy The US is instigating a global democratic crisis – any lapse in US policy spills over Werner 7/9 (Jake, a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.) “Does America Really Support Democracy—or Just Other Rich Democracies?” Foreign Affairs, 7/9/2021. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-07-09/does-america-really-support-democracy-or-just-other-rich BC In a speech he delivered in February, U.S. President Joe Biden painted a portrait of a world fundamentally divided between democracy and autocracy. “We’re at an inflection point,” he said, “between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face . . . that autocracy is the best way forward, . . . and those who understand that democracy is essential . . . to meeting those challenges.” Biden has insisted that both his domestic and foreign agendas put the United States in the best possible position to win this epochal conflict. But this fixation on a clash between autocracy and democracy obscures a deeper divide in geopolitics. The United States asserts leadership of the world’s democracies, but it actually stands opposed to most democracies on many of the most significant global issues. From the COVID-19 pandemic to global trade rules, from climate change to economic development, the United States is actively frustrating the priorities of most of the world’s democracies. In the process, U.S. foreign policy is—in the name of democracy—compounding the global crisis of democracy and delegitimizing U.S. power. Rich and poor democracies share many problems. Forty years of increasingly concentrated wealth, deteriorating public goods, eroding stability for workers, and a disintegrating sense of collective belonging have provided raw material for nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism in democracies of all levels of wealth. The Biden administration understands this. In speech after speech, Biden has made an essential point: people are losing faith in democracy because democracy is not meeting their needs. In his domestic agenda, Biden recognizes that investing in the common good, providing greater power and security to labor, and mobilizing people to confront the climate crisis are all crucial to the project of fending off illiberal politics and reviving democracy in the United States. Yet Biden’s foreign policy suffers from a strange disconnect. Rather than pursuing a global strategy to revive faith in the common good, Biden focuses on outcompeting China—as if people outside the United States value democracy not because it empowers them but because it is synonymous with U.S. power. Biden argues that for the sake of democracy, Americans must “develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future.” That would certainly help Americans and people in other rich, technologically advanced democracies. That might help U.S. investors, but is not a vision of a global economy in which all democracies can deliver for their people. A different approach is possible, one capable of reversing the global antidemocratic tide by opening new opportunities for people around the world. It will require a better framework for understanding today’s conflicts, one more capacious than a myopic binary that pits liberal democracy against its authoritarian other. INVISIBLE DEMOCRACIES The claim that the United States is at odds with most democracies may feel jarring, but that is only because U.S. leaders and media so often conflate the “world’s democracies” with the handful of rich countries, including former colonial powers in Europe (and Japan) and states that began as settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada. A 2020 New York Times article, for example, headlined the findings of a Pew Research Center poll this way: “Distrust of China Jumps to New Highs in Democratic Nations.” The poll was not, however, about “democratic nations.” Most of the world’s largest democracies—countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa—were not included, nor were many smaller democracies such as Botswana, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. It was instead a poll of people in (as Pew itself put it) “advanced economies.” According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, democratic developing countries are home to twice as many people as rich democracies—three times as many, if one counts semidemocratic “hybrid regimes” such as those in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Turkey. Yet the world’s many poor democracies remain largely peripheral to the worldview of U.S. policymakers. They enter into Beltway conversations only when they threaten regional stability or become useful in wider geopolitical conflicts. This invisibility is understandable. Precisely because they are poor, the democracies of the global South exert far less influence over world politics and the global economy than their wealthy counterparts. The rich democracies account for about 15 percent of world population but enjoy 43 percent of global GDP as measured by purchasing power (59 percent in dollar terms), and their military budgets amount to nearly two-thirds of the world’s war spending. Many Americans also share a feeling of cultural or ethnic affinity with the rich democracies that does not extend to the poor democracies. Confusing democracy with wealth fundamentally distorts strategic thinking about what U.S. leaders so often proclaim to be a top priority: ensuring that democracy flourishes around the world. Poor and rich democracies alike have been moving in an illiberal direction in recent years. But a foreign policy aimed at renewing and supporting democracy will fail if it is based solely on the preferences of rich countries. That’s because the democracies of the global South, more often than not, have interests that are very different from those of the rich democracies—interests that frequently align with more authoritarian developing countries. In other words, one effect of framing the major struggle in the world today as a fight between democrats and authoritarians is to render invisible the inequality that characterizes the global economy, which is often the more consequential division. A right to strike solves 3 warrants—
Worker strikes withhold labor from wealthy elites to make way for new progressive legislature. Pope 18 (James Gray, a distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and serves on the executive council of the Rutgers Council of AAUP/AFT Chapters, AFL-CIO.) “Labor’s right to strike is essential,” PSC Cuny, September 2018. https://www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/september-2018/laborE28099s-right-strike-essential RR POLITICAL CLIMATE What provoked Cuomo and de Blasio to close ranks and launch a simultaneous attack on workers’ rights? Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon had the audacity to include in her platform a plank endorsing public workers’ right to strike. No wonder Cuomo and de Blasio struck back: Like Bernie Sanders, Nixon threatened the grip of Wall Street-backed politicians on what was once the party of working people. The right to strike should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting candidate who claims to care about working people. It isn’t some transitory policy fix; it’s a fundamental human right, recognized in international law. Without the right to strike, workers have no effective recourse against unhealthy conditions, inadequate wages, or employer tyranny. Before the American labor movement began its long decline, unions made the right to strike a litmus test for supporting candidates. Labor leaders held that anti-strike laws imposed “involuntary servitude” in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Corporate interests ridiculed this claim, arguing that the Amendment guaranteed only the individual right to quit and go elsewhere. But workers and unions held their ground. “The simple fact is that the right of individual workers to quit their jobs has meaning only when they may quit in concert, so that in their quitting or in their threat to quit they have a real bargaining strength,” Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) General Counsel Lee Pressman explained. “It is thus hypocritical to suggest that a prohibition on the right to strike is not in practical effect a prohibition on the right to quit individually.” Labor leaders quoted the Supreme Court’s statement that the Amendment was intended “to make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” Although they never convinced the Supreme Court that this principle covered the right to strike, Congress did embrace the core of their claim when it protected the right to strike in two historic statutes, the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 and the Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The “individual unorganized worker,” explained Congress, “is helpless to exercise actual liberty of contract and to protect his freedom of labor.” A DEMOCRATIC NEED The recent teacher strikes underscore another, equally vital function of the strike: political democracy. It is no accident that strikers often serve as midwives of democracy. Examples include Poland in the 1970s, where shipyard strikers brought down the dictatorship, and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, where strikers were central to the defeat of apartheid. Even in relatively democratic countries like the United States, workers often find it necessary to withhold their labor in order to offset the disproportionate power of wealthy interests and racial elites. During the 1930s, for example, it took mass strikes to overcome judicial resistance to progressive economic regulation. Today, workers confront a political system that has been warped by voter suppression, gerrymandering and the judicial protection of corporate political expenditures as “freedom of speech.” With corporate lackeys holding a majority of seats on the Supreme Court, workers may soon need strikes to clear the way for progressive legislation just as they did in the 1930s. 2. Strikes are key political tools— they incentivize being active in political institutions and transform conditions. Reddy 1/6 (Diana S., a Doctoral Fellow at the Law, Economics, and Politics Center at UC Berkeley Law, and a PhD candidate in UCB's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program.) ““There Is No Such Thing as an Illegal Strike”: Reconceptualizing the Strike in Law and Political Economy,” The Yale Law Journal, 1/6/21. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-illegal-strike-reconceptualizing-the-strike-in-law-and-political-economy RR B. Striking as Political For those who believe that a stronger labor movement is needed to counterbalance the concentrations of economic and political power in this new Gilded Age, the question is not just whether the law is bad (it is), but whether strikes can be effective nonetheless. If labor activists are correct that there is “no such thing” as an illegal strike, just an unsuccessful strike, the question follows: what makes a strike successful enough, under current conditions, to transcend legal constraints?154 To some extent this is an empirical question, and one on which there are many opportunities for generative research. Beginning with the theoretical, however, I suggest that the success of strikes must be measured in more than economic wins in the private sphere. Like their Progressive Era progenitors, their success must be in raising political consciousness in the public sphere—in making the stakes of the twenty-first century labor question apparent.155 As noted above, under current labor law, strikes are conceptualized as “economic weapons,” as hard bargaining.156 And while legal terminology is distinct from on-the-ground understandings, unions have often emphasized the economic nature of the strike as well. Strikes are “the power to stop production, distribution and exchange, whether of goods or services.”157 A strike works because “we withhold something that the employer needs.”158 At the same time, there has been a corresponding tendency to dismiss the more symbolic aspects of the strike. To quote White again, “while publicity and morale are not irrelevant, in the end, they are not effective weapons in their own right.”159 These arguments are important. A strike is not simply protest; it is direct action, material pressure. But with union density lower than ever, ongoing automation of work tasks that renders employees increasingly replaceable, and decades of neoliberal cultural tropes celebrating capital as the driver of all economic growth and innovation, it is a mistake to think of publicity and morale as nice-to-haves, rather than necessities. Instead, striking must be part of building what sociologists have described as the “moral economy,” cultural beliefs about fair distribution untethered to technocratic arguments about what is most efficient.160 And in that way, striking is and must be understood as political. The term political, of course, has many meanings—engendered by law, culture, and the relationship between the two. Building on the work of other scholars, I have argued that neo-Lochnerian readings of the First Amendment which have categorized labor protest as solely economic, and therefore apolitical, are one mechanism by which unions have lost legitimacy (and legal protection) as a social movement.161 Under current law, what precisely constitutes the political is less than clear, though. In distinguishing “political” speech from other kinds of speech for the purpose of First Amendment analysis, the Supreme Court has at times equated the political with: electioneering;162 speech directed to or about the government;163 or most broadly, “speech and debate on public policy issues.”164 Within labor parlance, by contrast, the term “political strike” is specifically used to refer to strikes that are “designed to win a specific political outcome, such as the passage of legislation or a change in regulation.”165 Consistent with the NLRA’s construction of unions as economic entities, strikes which are solely “political” and without sufficient nexus to the employment relationship, are deemed unlawful secondary boycotts.166 But my argument here for reconceptualizing the strike as political is not about more “political strikes,” or about electoral politics, or even necessarily about state action. Based on a vision of the “political” as normative engagement directed towards collective decision-making—it is about destabilizing jurisprudential line drawing between the economic and the political in the first place.167 It is recognizing that all strikes are political or have the potential to be—in that all strikes are protest meant to transform collective conditions, not merely bargaining towards immediate, transactional ends. To use political science terminology, strikes are contentious politics: “Episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects.”168 They are a way through which workers engage in claims-making when business and politics as usual have proven nonresponsive.169 They do not only address the employer; they engage the polity. The need to reconceptualize the strike as outward-facing towards the public, not just inward-facing towards the employer, is partly a function of material changes, both in economic production and union density. As labor scholar Jane McAlevey points out, “Today’s service worker has a radically different relationship to the consuming public than last century’s manufacturing worker had . . . In large swaths of the service economy, the point of production is the community.”170 For this reason, she argues that effective strikes today must engage the public to be successful.171 Union density is also many times higher now in the public sector than in the private one, an upending of the realities of unionization mid-century.172 As illustrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, it is easier to see the economic work of unions as political (qua affecting government policy, spending, and debt) in the public sector.173 Yet, the shift is also about recognizing that it was a legal and an ideological accommodation that made the work of unions in their representative capacity appear as “economic,” and thus outside politics. The work of unions has been artificially “bifurcated” vis-à-vis the political realm.174 For years, as Reuel Schiller has argued, unions have engaged in “two sets of activities that appear barely related to one another”: private, transaction bargaining in the workplace; combined with broad, public mobilization around electoral politics. But there were always alternate visions of the relationship between the economic and the political within union advocacy and workplace governance.175 If “establishing terms and conditions of employment is a political act involving not just a worker and an employer, but also a union, an industry as a whole, and the state,” then union advocacy is a political act too.176 Strikes are part of the “contest of ideas.” Reconstructing a purposefully political philosophy, jurisprudence, and tactical repertoire of collective-labor advocacy is a project that is new again; and it will inevitably require deliberation, debate, and compromise.177 For the time being, though, one thing seems apparent. Strikes must be a part of engaging a broad swath of the public in reconceptualizing political economy. 3. Strikes are key to take decisive action if democracy is threatened. Madeloni 20 (Barbara, is the education coordinator at Labor Notes and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.) “Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup,” LaborNotes, 10/15/20. https://labornotes.org/2020/10/unions-are-beginning-talk-about-staving-possible-coup RR UNIONS ARE THE BEDROCK If these resolutions represent a growing realization that labor must act in the face of threats to a peaceful transfer of power, we can expect to see similar resolutions pass in the days ahead. But if these resolutions are to have teeth, the leaders who voted to endorse these actions need a plan to talk with members, name the risk, and prepare workers. Organized workers will be essential to upholding a fair election and peaceful transfer of power. “Labor unions are a bedrock institution in any democracy and have always had a special role to play in defending democracy in society,” UE President Carl Rosen told me in an email. “This is especially true in the U.S. today. Unions should be at the front lines in defense of American democracy and should be prepared to take decisive action if our democratic traditions are threatened.” Democracies are key to solve climate change— US democratic leadership is key. Fiorino 9/22 (Daniel J, is the Director of the Center for Environmental Policy at American University in Washington DC. He his author of Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity, 2018). ) “Democracy is suited to tackle climate change,” Democracy Without Borders, 9/22/21. https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/20869/democracy-is-suited-to-tackle-climate-change/ RR Comparing democratic and authoritarian systems Climate change is a complex challenge, the largest collective action problem in history, and a classic illustration of the concept of a wicked problem. It is distinctive in many ways: unlike most forms of air or water pollution, the effects are not immediately obvious; harms occur mostly in the future, with a perceived temporal mismatch of costs and benefits. Scientific uncertainty allows opponents of action at least to raise doubt. Further, acting on the causes of the problem requires basic changes in economic and social systems, not just incremental fine-tuning. Democracies overall are more suited to handling climate change There is good reason to believe, however, that democracies overall are more suited to handling climate change than their authoritarian counterparts. Among the reasons studied in the literature are the relatively free flows of information on problems and solutions in democracies; their administrative capacities and lower levels of corruption; their more active engagement in global problem-solving; multiple points of access in policy making (pluralism); superior scientific and technical capacity; and dynamic, innovative economies. Overall better governance capacities, such as less corruption, are part of their advantage (see for instance Dasgupta and De Cian 2018 as well as Povitkina 2018). The research on the climate capacities of democracies strongly suggests they are no less and probably more capable then authoritarian regimes. A 2013 study of national policies found that countries with a history of and experience with democracy generally have better climate mitigation laws and policies. In another study of climate policy, authoritarian regimes did not perform better than established democracies and actually lag far behind. Democracy critics often point to recent experience in the United States, where the Trump administration had reversed nearly every climate initiative of the Obama administration and withdrew from the 2015 Paris agreement. These policy reversals do not bode well for democratic arguments about climate change. Nonetheless, only hours after being sworn in, President Biden moved to reinstate the US to the Paris accord. Overall, the United States also illustrates the strengths of democracies: pluralism, innovation, open flows of information, and political accountability. In particular, federalism enables states—California, New York, Washington, and Hawaii, among them—to act as innovative clean energy and climate leaders. Why the democracy issue matters Lovelock has said in this book that surviving climate change “may require, as in a war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency” (p. 95). The problem is that this will be a perpetual war. Climate change is not something one just solves. Mitigating its causes and adapting to its effects is a constant struggle. And democracy is not something we can put on the shelf and revive when a crisis passes, if it does. Warming causes extinction – any reduction should be prioritized above every other impact Ramanathan et al. 17 Veerabhadran Ramanathan is Victor Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences and director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Dr. William Collins is an internationally recognized expert in climate modeling and climate change science. He is the Director of the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Prof. Dr Mark Lawrence, Ph.D. is scientific director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Örjan Gustafsson is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Analytic Chemistry at Stockholm University, Shichang Kang is Professor, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, and Molina, M.J., Zaelke, D., Borgford-Parnell, N., Xu, Y., Alex, K., Auffhammer, M., Bledsoe, P., Croes, B., Forman, F., Haines, A., Harnish, R., Jacobson, M.Z., Lawrence, M., Leloup, D., Lenton, T., Morehouse, T., Munk, W., Picolotti, R., Prather, K., Raga, G., Rignot, E., Shindell, D., Singh, A.K., Steiner, A., Thiemens, M., Titley, D.W., Tucker, M.E., Tripathi, S., and Victor, D., authors come from the following 9 countries - US, Switzerland, Sweden, UK, China, Germany, Australia, Mexico, India, “Well Under 2 Degrees Celsius: Fast Action Policies to Protect People and the Planet from Extreme Climate Change,” Report of the Committee to Prevent Extreme Climate Change, September 2017, http://www.igsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Well-Under-2-Degrees-Celsius-Report-2017.pdf TDI Climate change is becoming an existential threat with warming in excess of 2°C within the next three decades and 4°C to 6°C within the next several decades. Warming of such magnitudes will expose as many as 75 of the world’s population to deadly heat stress in addition to disrupting the climate and weather worldwide. Climate change is an urgent problem requiring urgent solutions. This paper lays out urgent and practical solutions that are ready for implementation now, will deliver benefits in the next few critical decades, and places the world on a path to achieving the longterm targets of the Paris Agreement and near-term sustainable development goals. The approach consists of four building blocks and 3 levers to implement ten scalable solutions described in this report by a team of climate scientists, policy makers, social and behavioral scientists, political scientists, legal experts, diplomats, and military experts from around the world. These solutions will enable society to decarbonize the global energy system by 2050 through efficiency and renewables, drastically reduce short-lived climate pollutants, and stabilize the climate well below 2°C both in the near term (before 2050) and in the long term (post 2050). It will also reduce premature mortalities by tens of millions by 2050. As an insurance against policy lapses, mitigation delays and faster than projected climate changes, the solutions include an Atmospheric Carbon Extraction lever to remove CO2 from the air. The amount of CO2 that must be removed ranges from negligible, if the emissions of CO2 from the energy system and SLCPs start to decrease by 2020 and carbon neutrality is achieved by 2050, to a staggering one trillion tons if the carbon lever is not pulled and emissions of climate pollutants continue to increase until 2030. There are numerous living laboratories including 53 cities, many universities around the world, the state of California, and the nation of Sweden, who have embarked on a carbon neutral pathway. These laboratories have already created 8 million jobs in the clean energy industry; they have also shown that emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants can be decoupled from economic growth. Another favorable sign is that growth rates of worldwide carbon emissions have reduced from 2.9 per year during the first decade of this century to 1.3 from 2011 to 2014 and near zero growth rates during the last few years. The carbon emission curve is bending, but we have a long way to go and very little time for achieving carbon neutrality. We need institutions and enterprises that can accelerate this bending by scaling-up the solutions that are being proven in the living laboratories. We have less than a decade to put these solutions in place around the world to preserve nature and our quality of life for generations to come. The time is now. The Paris Agreement is an historic achievement. For the first time, effectively all nations have committed to limiting their greenhouse gas emissions and taking other actions to limit global temperature change. Specifically, 197 nations agreed to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” and achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of this century. The climate has already warmed by 1°C. The problem is running ahead of us, and under current trends we will likely reach 1.5°C in the next fifteen years and surpass the 2°C guardrail by mid-century with a 50 probability of reaching 4°C by end of century. Warming in excess of 3°C is likely to be a global catastrophe for three major reasons: • Warming in the range of 3°C to 5°C is suggested as the threshold for several tipping points in the physical and geochemical systems; a warming of about 3°C has a probability of over 40 to cross over multiple tipping points, while a warming close to 5°C increases it to nearly 90, compared with a baseline warming of less than 1.5°C, which has only just over a 10 probability of exceeding any tipping point. • Health effects of such warming are emerging as a major if not dominant source of concern. Warming of 4°C or more will expose more than 70 of the population, i.e. about 7 billion by the end of the century, to deadly heat stress and expose about 2.4 billion to vector borne diseases such as Dengue, Chikengunya, and Zika virus among others. Ecologists and paleontologists have proposed that warming in excess of 3°C, accompanied by increased acidity of the oceans by the buildup of CO2 , can become a major causal factor for exposing more than 50 of all species to extinction. 20 of species are in danger of extinction now due to population, habitat destruction, and climate change. The good news is that there may still be time to avert such catastrophic changes. The Paris Agreement and supporting climate policies must be strengthened substantially within the next five years to bend the emissions curve down faster, stabilize climate, and prevent catastrophic warming. To the extent those efforts fall short, societies and ecosystems will be forced to contend with substantial needs for adaptation—a burden that will fall disproportionately on the poorest three billion who are least responsible for causing the climate change problem. Here we propose a policy roadmap with a realistic and reasonable chance of limiting global temperature to safe levels and preventing unmanageable climate change—an outline of specific science-based policy pathways that serve as the building blocks for a three-lever strategy that could limit warming to well under 2°C. The projections and the emission pathways proposed in this summary are based on a combination of published recommendations and new model simulations conducted by the authors of this study (see Figure 2). We have framed the plan in terms of four building blocks and three levers, which are implemented through 10 solutions. The first building block would be fully implementing the nationally determined mitigation pledges under the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In addition, several sister agreements that provide targeted and efficient mitigation must be strengthened. Sister agreements include the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs, efforts to address aviation emissions through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), maritime black carbon emissions through the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the commitment by the eight countries of the Arctic Council to reduce black carbon emissions by up to 33. There are many other complementary processes that have drawn attention to specific actions on climate change, such as the Group of 20 (G20), which has emphasized reform of fossil fuel subsidies, and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). HFC measures, for example, can avoid as much as 0.5°C of warming by 2100 through the mandatory global phasedown of HFC refrigerants within the next few decades, and substantially more through parallel efforts to improve energy efficiency of air conditioners and other cooling equipment potentially doubling this climate benefit. For the second building block, numerous subnational and city scale climate action plans have to be scaled up. One prominent example is California’s Under 2 Coalition signed by over 177 jurisdictions from 37 countries in six continents covering a third of world economy. The goal of this Memorandum of Understanding is to catalyze efforts in many jurisdictions that are comparable with California’s target of 40 reductions in CO2 emissions by 2030 and 80 reductions by 2050—emission cuts that, if achieved globally, would be consistent with stopping warming at about 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Another prominent example is the climate action plans by over 52 cities and 65 businesses around the world aiming to cut emissions by 30 by 2030 and 80 to 100 by 2050. There are concerns that the carbon neutral goal will hinder economic progress; however, real world examples from California and Sweden since 2005 offer evidence that economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions and the data for CO2 emissions and GDP reveal that growth in fact prospers with a green economy. The third building block consists of two levers that we need to pull as hard as we can: one for drastically reducing emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) beginning now and completing by 2030, and the other for decarbonizing the global energy system by 2050 through efficiency and renewables. Pulling both levers simultaneously can keep global temperature rise below 2°C through the end of the century. If we bend the CO2 emissions curve through decarbonization of the energy system such that global emissions peak in 2020 and decrease steadily thereafter until reaching zero in 2050, there is less than a 20 probability of exceeding 2°C. This call for bending the CO2 curve by 2020 is one key way in which this report’s proposal differs from the Paris Agreement and it is perhaps the most difficult task of all those envisioned here. Many cities and jurisdictions are already on this pathway, thus demonstrating its scalability. Achieving carbon neutrality and reducing emissions of SLCPs would also drastically reduce air pollution globally, including all major cities, thus saving millions of lives and over 100 million tons of crops lost to air pollution each year. In addition, these steps would provide clean energy access to the world’s poorest three billion who are still forced to resort to 18th century technologies to meet basic needs such as cooking. For the fourth and the final building block, we are adding a third lever, ACE (Atmospheric Carbon Extraction, also known as Carbon Dioxide Removal, or “CDR”). This lever is added as an insurance against surprises (due to policy lapses, mitigation delays, or non-linear climate changes) and would require development of scalable measures for removing the CO2 already in the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 that must be removed will range from negligible, if the emissions of CO2 from the energy system and SLCPs start to decrease by 2020 and carbon neutrality is achieved by 2050, to a staggering one trillion tons, if CO2 emissions continue to increase until 2030, and the carbon lever is not pulled until after 2030. This issue is raised because the NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) accompanying the Paris Agreement would allow CO2 emissions to increase until 2030. We call on economists and experts in political and administrative systems to assess the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of reducing carbon and SLCPs emissions beginning in 2020 compared with delaying it by ten years and then being forced to pull the third lever to extract one trillion tons of CO2 The fast mitigation plan of requiring emissions reductions to begin by 2020, which means that many countries need to cut now, is urgently needed to limit the warming to well under 2°C. Climate change is not a linear problem. Instead, we are facing non-linear climate tipping points that can lead to self-reinforcing and cascading climate change impacts. Tipping points and selfreinforcing feedbacks are wild cards that are more likely with increased temperatures, and many of the potential abrupt climate shifts could happen as warming goes from 1.5°C in 15 years to 2°C by 2050, with the potential to push us well beyond the Paris Agreement goals. Where Do We Go from Here? A massive effort will be needed to stop warming at 2°C, and time is of the essence. With unchecked business-as-usual emissions, global warming has a 50 likelihood of exceeding 4ºC and a 5 probability of exceeding 6ºC in this century, raising existential questions for most, but especially the poorest three billion people. A 4ºC warming is likely to expose as many as 75 of the global population to deadly heat. Dangerous to catastrophic impacts on the health of people including generations yet to be born, on the health of ecosystems, and on species extinction have emerged as major justifications for mitigating climate change well below 2ºC, although we must recognize that the uncertainties intrinsic in climate and social systems make it hard to pin down exactly the level of warming that will trigger possibly catastrophic impacts. To avoid these consequences, we must act now, and we must act fast and effectively. This report sets out a specific plan for reducing climate change in both the near- and long-term. With aggressive urgent actions, we can protect ourselves. Acting quickly to prevent catastrophic climate change by decarbonization will save millions of lives, trillions of dollars in economic costs, and massive suffering and dislocation to people around the world. This is a global security imperative, as it can avoid the migration and destabilization of entire societies and countries and reduce the likelihood of environmentally driven civil wars and other conflicts. Staying well under 2°C will require a concerted global effort. We must address everything from our energy systems to our personal choices to reduce emissions to the greatest extent possible. We must redouble our efforts to invent, test, and perfect systems of governance so that the large measure of international cooperation needed to achieve these goals can be realized in practice. The health of people for generations to come and the health of ecosystems crucially depend on an energy revolution beginning now that will take us away from fossil fuels and toward the clean renewable energy sources of the future. It will be nearly impossible to obtain other critical social goals, including for example the UN agenda 2030 with the Sustainable Development Goals, if we do not make immediate and profound progress stabilizing climate, as we are outlining here.
The Building Blocks Approach The 2015 Paris Agreement, which went into effect November 2016, is a remarkable, historic achievement. For the frst time, essentially all nations have committed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and take other actions to limit global temperature and adapt to unavoidable climate change. Nations agreed to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” and “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (UNFCCC, 2015). Nevertheless, the initial Paris Agreement has to be strengthened substantially within fve years if we are to prevent catastrophic warming; current pledges place the world on track for up to 3.4°C by 2100 (UNEP, 2016b). Until now, no specifc policy roadmap exists that provides a realistic and reasonable chance of limiting global temperatures to safe levels and preventing unmanageable climate change. This report is our attempt to provide such a plan— an outline of specifc solutions that serve as the building blocks for a comprehensive strategy for limiting the warming to well under 2°C and avoiding dangerous climate change (Figure 1). The frst building block is the full implementation of the nationally determined mitigation pledges under the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and strengthening global sister agreements, such as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs, which can provide additional targeted, fast action mitigation at scale. For the second building block, numerous sub-national and city scale climate action plans have to be scaled up such as California’s Under 2 Coalition signed by 177 jurisdictions from 37 countries on six continents. The third building block is targeted measures to reduce emissions of shortlived climate pollutants (SLCPs), beginning now and fully implemented by 2030, along with major measures to fully decarbonize the global economy, causing the overall emissions growth rate to stop in 2020-2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Such a deep decarbonization would require an energy revolution similar to the Industrial Revolution that was based on fossil fuels. The fnal building block includes scalable and reversible carbon dioxide (CO2 ) removal measures, which can begin removing CO2 already emitted into the atmosphere. Such a plan is urgently needed. Climate change is not a linear problem. Instead, climate tipping points can lead to self-reinforcing, cascading climate change impacts (Lenton et al., 2008). Tipping points are more likely with increased temperatures, and many of the potential abrupt climate shifts could happen as warming goes from 1.5°C to 2°C, with the potential to push us well beyond the Paris Agreement goals (Drijfhout et al., 2015). In order to avoid dangerous climate change, we must address these concerns. We must act now, and we must act fast. Reduction of SLCPs will result in fast, near-term reductions in warming, while present-day reductions of CO2 will result in long-term climate benefts. This two-lever approach—aggressively cutting both SLCPs and CO2 –-will slow warming in the coming decades when it is most crucial to avoid impacts from climate change as well as maintain a safe climate many decades from now. To achieve the nearterm goals, we have outlined solutions to be implemented immediately. These solutions to bend down the rising emissions curve and thus bend the warming trajectory curve follow a 2015 assessment by the University of California under its Carbon Neutrality Initiative (Ramanathan et al., 2016). The solutions are clustered into categories of social transformation, governance improvement, market- and regulation-based solutions, technological innovation and transformation, and natural and ecosystem management. Additionally, we need to intensely investigate and pursue a third lever—ACE (Atmospheric Carbon Extraction). While many potential technologies exist, we do not know the extent to which they could be scaled up to remove the requisite amount of carbon from the atmosphere in order to achieve the Paris Agreement goals, and any delay in mitigation will demand increasing reliance on these technologies. Yet, there is still hope. Humanity can come together, as we have done in the past, to collaborate towards a common goal. We have no choice but to tackle the challenge of climate change. We only have the choice of when and how: either now, through the ambitious plan outlined here, or later, through radical adaptation and societal transformations in response to an ever-deteriorating climate system that will unleash devastating impacts—some of which may be beyond our capacity to fully adapt to or reverse for thousands of years. 2. Major Climate Disruptions: How Soon and How Fast? “Without adequate mitigation and adaptation, climate change poses unacceptable risks to global public health.” (WHO, 2016) The planet has already witnessed nearly 1°C of warming, and another 0.6°C of additional warming is currently stored in the ocean to be released over the next two to four decades, if climate warming emissions are not radically reduced during that time (IPCC, 2013). The impacts of this warming on extreme weather, droughts, and foods are being felt by society worldwide to the extent that many think of this no longer as climate change but as climate disruption. Consider the business as usual scenario: 15 years from now: In 15 years, planetary warming will reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature (Ramanathan and Xu, 2010; Shindell et al., 2012). This exceeds the 0.5°C to 1°C of warming during the Eemian period, 115,000– 130,000 years ago, when sea-levels reached 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today (Hansen et al., 2016b). The impacts of this warming will affect us all yet will disproportionately affect the Earth’s poorest three billion people, who are primarily subsistence farmers that still rely on 18th century technologies and have the least capacity to adapt (IPCC, 2014a; Dasgupta et al., 2015). They thus may be forced to resort to mass migration into city slums and push across international borders (U.S. DOD, 2015). The existential fate of lowlying small islands and coastal communities will also need to be addressed, as they are primarily vulnerable to sea-level rise, diminishing freshwater resources, and more intense storms. In addition, many depend on fsheries for protein, and these are likely to be affected by ocean acidifcation and climate change. Climate injustice could start causing visible regional and international conficts. All of this will be exacerbated as the risk of passing tipping points increases (Lenton et al., 2008). 30 years from now: By mid-century, warming is expected to exceed 2°C, which would be unprecedented with respect to historical records of at least the last one million years (IPCC, 2014c). Such a warming through this century could result in sea-level rise of as much as 2 meters by 2100, with greater sea-level rise to follow. A group of tipping points are clustered between 1.5°C and 2°C (Figure 2) (Drijfhout et al., 2015). The melting of most mountain glaciers, including those in the Tibetan-Himalayas, combined with mega-droughts, heat waves, storms, and foods, would adversely affect nearly everyone on the planet. 80 years from now: In 80 years, warming is expected to exceed 4°C, increasing the likelihood of irreversible and catastrophic change (World Bank, 2013b). 4ºC warming is likely to expose as much as 75 of the global population to deadly heat (Mora et al., 2017). The 2°C and 4°C values quoted above and in other reports, however, are merely the central values with a 50 probability of occurrence (Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). There is a 5 probability the warming could be as high as 6°C due to uncertainties in the magnitude of amplifying feedbacks (see Section 4). This in turn could lead to major disruptions to natural and social systems, threatening food security, water security, and national security and fundamentally affecting the great majority of the projected 11.2 billion inhabitants of the planet in 2100 (UN DESA, 2015). 3. What Are the Wild Cards for Climate Disruption? Increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases radiative forcing (the difference between the amount of energy entering the atmosphere and leaving) and thus increases the global temperature (IPCC, 2013). However, climate wild cards exist that can alter the linear connection with warming and anthropogenic emissions by triggering abrupt changes in the climate (Lenton et al., 2008). Some of these wild cards have not been thoroughly captured by the models that policymakers rely on the most. These abrupt shifts are irreversible on a human time scale (100 years) and will create a notable disruption to the climate system, condemning the world to warming beyond that which we have previously projected. These climate disruptions would divert resources from needed mitigation and upset mitigation strategies that we have already put in place.
Unmasking Aerosol Cooling: The frst such wild card is the unmasking of an estimated 0.7°C (with an uncertainty range of 0.3°C to 1.2°C) of the warming in addition to mitigating other aerosol effects such as disrupting rainfall patterns, by reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfates and nitrates as part of air pollution regulations (Wigley, 1991; Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). Aerosol air pollution is a major health hazard with massive costs to public health and society, including contributing to about 7 million deaths (from household and ambient exposure) each year (WHO, 2014). While some aerosols, such as black carbon and brown carbon, strongly absorb sunlight and warm the climate, others refect sunlight back into space, which cools the climate (Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008). The net impact of all manmade aerosols is negative, meaning that about 30 of the warming from greenhouse gases is being masked by co-emitted air pollution particles (Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008). As we reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement policies to eliminate air pollution, we are also reducing the concentration of aerosols in the air. Aerosols last in the atmosphere for about a week, so if we eliminate air pollution without reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases, the unmasking alone would lead to an estimated 0.7°C of warming within a matter of decades (Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). We must eliminate all aerosol emissions due to their health effects, but we must simultaneously mitigate emissions of CO2 , other greenhouse gases, and black carbon and co-pollutants to avoid an abrupt and very large jump in the near-term warming beyond 2°C (Brasseur and Roeckner, 2005). 2. Tipping Points: It is likely that as we cross the 1.5°C to 2°C thresholds we will trigger so called “tipping points” for abrupt and nonlinear changes in the climate system with catastrophic consequences for humanity and the environment (Lenton, 2008; Drijfhout et al., 2015). Once the tipping points are passed, the resulting impacts will range in timescales from: disruption of monsoon systems (transition in a year), loss of sea ice (approximately a decade for transition), dieback of major forests (nearly half a century for transition), reorganization of ocean circulation (approximately a century for transition), to loss of ice sheets and subsequent sea-level rise (transition over hundreds of years) (Lenton et al., 2008). Regardless of timescale, once underway many of these changes would be irreversible (Lontzek et al., 2015). There is also a likelihood of crossing over multiple tipping points simultaneously. Warming of close to 3°C would subject the system to a 46 probability of crossing multiple tipping points, while warming of close to 5°C would increase the risk to 87 (Cai et al., 2016). Recent modeling work shows a “cluster” of these tipping points could be triggered between 1.5°C and 2°C warming (Figure 2), including melting of land and sea ice and changes in highlatitude ocean circulation (deep convection) (Drijfhout et al., 2015). This is consistent with existing observations and understanding that the polar regions are particularly sensitive to global warming and have several potentially imminent tipping points. The Arctic is warming nearly twice as quickly as the global average, which makes the abrupt changes in the Arctic more likely at a lower level of global warming (IPCC, 2013). Similarly, the Himalayas are warming at roughly the same rate as the Arctic and are thus also more susceptible to incremental changes in temperature (UNEP-WMO, 2011). This gives further justifcation for limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. While all climate tipping points have the potential to rapidly destabilize climate, social, and economic systems, some are also self-amplifying feedbacks that once set in motion increase warming in such a way that they perpetuate yet even more warming. Declining Arctic sea ice, thawing permafrost, and the poleward migration of cloud systems are all examples of self-amplifying feedback mechanisms, where initial warming feeds upon itself to cause still more warming acting as a force multiplier (Schuur et al., 2015).
11/7/21
NovDec- Democracy Adv
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah Advantage one is democracy The US is instigating a global democratic crisis – any lapse in US policy spills over Werner 7/9 (Jake, a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.) “Does America Really Support Democracy—or Just Other Rich Democracies?” Foreign Affairs, 7/9/2021. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-07-09/does-america-really-support-democracy-or-just-other-rich BC In a speech he delivered in February, U.S. President Joe Biden painted a portrait of a world fundamentally divided between democracy and autocracy. “We’re at an inflection point,” he said, “between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face . . . that autocracy is the best way forward, . . . and those who understand that democracy is essential . . . to meeting those challenges.” Biden has insisted that both his domestic and foreign agendas put the United States in the best possible position to win this epochal conflict. But this fixation on a clash between autocracy and democracy obscures a deeper divide in geopolitics. The United States asserts leadership of the world’s democracies, but it actually stands opposed to most democracies on many of the most significant global issues. From the COVID-19 pandemic to global trade rules, from climate change to economic development, the United States is actively frustrating the priorities of most of the world’s democracies. In the process, U.S. foreign policy is—in the name of democracy—compounding the global crisis of democracy and delegitimizing U.S. power. Rich and poor democracies share many problems. Forty years of increasingly concentrated wealth, deteriorating public goods, eroding stability for workers, and a disintegrating sense of collective belonging have provided raw material for nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism in democracies of all levels of wealth. The Biden administration understands this. In speech after speech, Biden has made an essential point: people are losing faith in democracy because democracy is not meeting their needs. In his domestic agenda, Biden recognizes that investing in the common good, providing greater power and security to labor, and mobilizing people to confront the climate crisis are all crucial to the project of fending off illiberal politics and reviving democracy in the United States. Yet Biden’s foreign policy suffers from a strange disconnect. Rather than pursuing a global strategy to revive faith in the common good, Biden focuses on outcompeting China—as if people outside the United States value democracy not because it empowers them but because it is synonymous with U.S. power. Biden argues that for the sake of democracy, Americans must “develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future.” That would certainly help Americans and people in other rich, technologically advanced democracies. That might help U.S. investors, but is not a vision of a global economy in which all democracies can deliver for their people. A different approach is possible, one capable of reversing the global antidemocratic tide by opening new opportunities for people around the world. It will require a better framework for understanding today’s conflicts, one more capacious than a myopic binary that pits liberal democracy against its authoritarian other. INVISIBLE DEMOCRACIES The claim that the United States is at odds with most democracies may feel jarring, but that is only because U.S. leaders and media so often conflate the “world’s democracies” with the handful of rich countries, including former colonial powers in Europe (and Japan) and states that began as settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada. A 2020 New York Times article, for example, headlined the findings of a Pew Research Center poll this way: “Distrust of China Jumps to New Highs in Democratic Nations.” The poll was not, however, about “democratic nations.” Most of the world’s largest democracies—countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa—were not included, nor were many smaller democracies such as Botswana, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. It was instead a poll of people in (as Pew itself put it) “advanced economies.” According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, democratic developing countries are home to twice as many people as rich democracies—three times as many, if one counts semidemocratic “hybrid regimes” such as those in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Turkey. Yet the world’s many poor democracies remain largely peripheral to the worldview of U.S. policymakers. They enter into Beltway conversations only when they threaten regional stability or become useful in wider geopolitical conflicts. This invisibility is understandable. Precisely because they are poor, the democracies of the global South exert far less influence over world politics and the global economy than their wealthy counterparts. The rich democracies account for about 15 percent of world population but enjoy 43 percent of global GDP as measured by purchasing power (59 percent in dollar terms), and their military budgets amount to nearly two-thirds of the world’s war spending. Many Americans also share a feeling of cultural or ethnic affinity with the rich democracies that does not extend to the poor democracies. Confusing democracy with wealth fundamentally distorts strategic thinking about what U.S. leaders so often proclaim to be a top priority: ensuring that democracy flourishes around the world. Poor and rich democracies alike have been moving in an illiberal direction in recent years. But a foreign policy aimed at renewing and supporting democracy will fail if it is based solely on the preferences of rich countries. That’s because the democracies of the global South, more often than not, have interests that are very different from those of the rich democracies—interests that frequently align with more authoritarian developing countries. In other words, one effect of framing the major struggle in the world today as a fight between democrats and authoritarians is to render invisible the inequality that characterizes the global economy, which is often the more consequential division. A right to strike solves 3 warrants—
Worker strikes withhold labor from wealthy elites to make way for new progressive legislature. Pope 18 (James Gray, a distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and serves on the executive council of the Rutgers Council of AAUP/AFT Chapters, AFL-CIO.) “Labor’s right to strike is essential,” PSC Cuny, September 2018. https://www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/september-2018/laborE28099s-right-strike-essential RR POLITICAL CLIMATE What provoked Cuomo and de Blasio to close ranks and launch a simultaneous attack on workers’ rights? Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon had the audacity to include in her platform a plank endorsing public workers’ right to strike. No wonder Cuomo and de Blasio struck back: Like Bernie Sanders, Nixon threatened the grip of Wall Street-backed politicians on what was once the party of working people. The right to strike should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting candidate who claims to care about working people. It isn’t some transitory policy fix; it’s a fundamental human right, recognized in international law. Without the right to strike, workers have no effective recourse against unhealthy conditions, inadequate wages, or employer tyranny. Before the American labor movement began its long decline, unions made the right to strike a litmus test for supporting candidates. Labor leaders held that anti-strike laws imposed “involuntary servitude” in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Corporate interests ridiculed this claim, arguing that the Amendment guaranteed only the individual right to quit and go elsewhere. But workers and unions held their ground. “The simple fact is that the right of individual workers to quit their jobs has meaning only when they may quit in concert, so that in their quitting or in their threat to quit they have a real bargaining strength,” Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) General Counsel Lee Pressman explained. “It is thus hypocritical to suggest that a prohibition on the right to strike is not in practical effect a prohibition on the right to quit individually.” Labor leaders quoted the Supreme Court’s statement that the Amendment was intended “to make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” Although they never convinced the Supreme Court that this principle covered the right to strike, Congress did embrace the core of their claim when it protected the right to strike in two historic statutes, the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 and the Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The “individual unorganized worker,” explained Congress, “is helpless to exercise actual liberty of contract and to protect his freedom of labor.” A DEMOCRATIC NEED The recent teacher strikes underscore another, equally vital function of the strike: political democracy. It is no accident that strikers often serve as midwives of democracy. Examples include Poland in the 1970s, where shipyard strikers brought down the dictatorship, and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, where strikers were central to the defeat of apartheid. Even in relatively democratic countries like the United States, workers often find it necessary to withhold their labor in order to offset the disproportionate power of wealthy interests and racial elites. During the 1930s, for example, it took mass strikes to overcome judicial resistance to progressive economic regulation. Today, workers confront a political system that has been warped by voter suppression, gerrymandering and the judicial protection of corporate political expenditures as “freedom of speech.” With corporate lackeys holding a majority of seats on the Supreme Court, workers may soon need strikes to clear the way for progressive legislation just as they did in the 1930s. 2. Strikes are key political tools— they incentivize being active in political institutions and transform conditions. Reddy 1/6 (Diana S., a Doctoral Fellow at the Law, Economics, and Politics Center at UC Berkeley Law, and a PhD candidate in UCB's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program.) ““There Is No Such Thing as an Illegal Strike”: Reconceptualizing the Strike in Law and Political Economy,” The Yale Law Journal, 1/6/21. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-illegal-strike-reconceptualizing-the-strike-in-law-and-political-economy RR B. Striking as Political For those who believe that a stronger labor movement is needed to counterbalance the concentrations of economic and political power in this new Gilded Age, the question is not just whether the law is bad (it is), but whether strikes can be effective nonetheless. If labor activists are correct that there is “no such thing” as an illegal strike, just an unsuccessful strike, the question follows: what makes a strike successful enough, under current conditions, to transcend legal constraints?154 To some extent this is an empirical question, and one on which there are many opportunities for generative research. Beginning with the theoretical, however, I suggest that the success of strikes must be measured in more than economic wins in the private sphere. Like their Progressive Era progenitors, their success must be in raising political consciousness in the public sphere—in making the stakes of the twenty-first century labor question apparent.155 As noted above, under current labor law, strikes are conceptualized as “economic weapons,” as hard bargaining.156 And while legal terminology is distinct from on-the-ground understandings, unions have often emphasized the economic nature of the strike as well. Strikes are “the power to stop production, distribution and exchange, whether of goods or services.”157 A strike works because “we withhold something that the employer needs.”158 At the same time, there has been a corresponding tendency to dismiss the more symbolic aspects of the strike. To quote White again, “while publicity and morale are not irrelevant, in the end, they are not effective weapons in their own right.”159 These arguments are important. A strike is not simply protest; it is direct action, material pressure. But with union density lower than ever, ongoing automation of work tasks that renders employees increasingly replaceable, and decades of neoliberal cultural tropes celebrating capital as the driver of all economic growth and innovation, it is a mistake to think of publicity and morale as nice-to-haves, rather than necessities. Instead, striking must be part of building what sociologists have described as the “moral economy,” cultural beliefs about fair distribution untethered to technocratic arguments about what is most efficient.160 And in that way, striking is and must be understood as political. The term political, of course, has many meanings—engendered by law, culture, and the relationship between the two. Building on the work of other scholars, I have argued that neo-Lochnerian readings of the First Amendment which have categorized labor protest as solely economic, and therefore apolitical, are one mechanism by which unions have lost legitimacy (and legal protection) as a social movement.161 Under current law, what precisely constitutes the political is less than clear, though. In distinguishing “political” speech from other kinds of speech for the purpose of First Amendment analysis, the Supreme Court has at times equated the political with: electioneering;162 speech directed to or about the government;163 or most broadly, “speech and debate on public policy issues.”164 Within labor parlance, by contrast, the term “political strike” is specifically used to refer to strikes that are “designed to win a specific political outcome, such as the passage of legislation or a change in regulation.”165 Consistent with the NLRA’s construction of unions as economic entities, strikes which are solely “political” and without sufficient nexus to the employment relationship, are deemed unlawful secondary boycotts.166 But my argument here for reconceptualizing the strike as political is not about more “political strikes,” or about electoral politics, or even necessarily about state action. Based on a vision of the “political” as normative engagement directed towards collective decision-making—it is about destabilizing jurisprudential line drawing between the economic and the political in the first place.167 It is recognizing that all strikes are political or have the potential to be—in that all strikes are protest meant to transform collective conditions, not merely bargaining towards immediate, transactional ends. To use political science terminology, strikes are contentious politics: “Episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects.”168 They are a way through which workers engage in claims-making when business and politics as usual have proven nonresponsive.169 They do not only address the employer; they engage the polity. The need to reconceptualize the strike as outward-facing towards the public, not just inward-facing towards the employer, is partly a function of material changes, both in economic production and union density. As labor scholar Jane McAlevey points out, “Today’s service worker has a radically different relationship to the consuming public than last century’s manufacturing worker had . . . In large swaths of the service economy, the point of production is the community.”170 For this reason, she argues that effective strikes today must engage the public to be successful.171 Union density is also many times higher now in the public sector than in the private one, an upending of the realities of unionization mid-century.172 As illustrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, it is easier to see the economic work of unions as political (qua affecting government policy, spending, and debt) in the public sector.173 Yet, the shift is also about recognizing that it was a legal and an ideological accommodation that made the work of unions in their representative capacity appear as “economic,” and thus outside politics. The work of unions has been artificially “bifurcated” vis-à-vis the political realm.174 For years, as Reuel Schiller has argued, unions have engaged in “two sets of activities that appear barely related to one another”: private, transaction bargaining in the workplace; combined with broad, public mobilization around electoral politics. But there were always alternate visions of the relationship between the economic and the political within union advocacy and workplace governance.175 If “establishing terms and conditions of employment is a political act involving not just a worker and an employer, but also a union, an industry as a whole, and the state,” then union advocacy is a political act too.176 Strikes are part of the “contest of ideas.” Reconstructing a purposefully political philosophy, jurisprudence, and tactical repertoire of collective-labor advocacy is a project that is new again; and it will inevitably require deliberation, debate, and compromise.177 For the time being, though, one thing seems apparent. Strikes must be a part of engaging a broad swath of the public in reconceptualizing political economy. 3. Strikes are key to take decisive action if democracy is threatened. Madeloni 20 (Barbara, is the education coordinator at Labor Notes and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.) “Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup,” LaborNotes, 10/15/20. https://labornotes.org/2020/10/unions-are-beginning-talk-about-staving-possible-coup RR UNIONS ARE THE BEDROCK If these resolutions represent a growing realization that labor must act in the face of threats to a peaceful transfer of power, we can expect to see similar resolutions pass in the days ahead. But if these resolutions are to have teeth, the leaders who voted to endorse these actions need a plan to talk with members, name the risk, and prepare workers. Organized workers will be essential to upholding a fair election and peaceful transfer of power. “Labor unions are a bedrock institution in any democracy and have always had a special role to play in defending democracy in society,” UE President Carl Rosen told me in an email. “This is especially true in the U.S. today. Unions should be at the front lines in defense of American democracy and should be prepared to take decisive action if our democratic traditions are threatened.” Democracies are key to solve climate change— US democratic leadership is key. Fiorino 9/22 (Daniel J, is the Director of the Center for Environmental Policy at American University in Washington DC. He his author of Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity, 2018). ) “Democracy is suited to tackle climate change,” Democracy Without Borders, 9/22/21. https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/20869/democracy-is-suited-to-tackle-climate-change/ RR Comparing democratic and authoritarian systems Climate change is a complex challenge, the largest collective action problem in history, and a classic illustration of the concept of a wicked problem. It is distinctive in many ways: unlike most forms of air or water pollution, the effects are not immediately obvious; harms occur mostly in the future, with a perceived temporal mismatch of costs and benefits. Scientific uncertainty allows opponents of action at least to raise doubt. Further, acting on the causes of the problem requires basic changes in economic and social systems, not just incremental fine-tuning. Democracies overall are more suited to handling climate change There is good reason to believe, however, that democracies overall are more suited to handling climate change than their authoritarian counterparts. Among the reasons studied in the literature are the relatively free flows of information on problems and solutions in democracies; their administrative capacities and lower levels of corruption; their more active engagement in global problem-solving; multiple points of access in policy making (pluralism); superior scientific and technical capacity; and dynamic, innovative economies. Overall better governance capacities, such as less corruption, are part of their advantage (see for instance Dasgupta and De Cian 2018 as well as Povitkina 2018). The research on the climate capacities of democracies strongly suggests they are no less and probably more capable then authoritarian regimes. A 2013 study of national policies found that countries with a history of and experience with democracy generally have better climate mitigation laws and policies. In another study of climate policy, authoritarian regimes did not perform better than established democracies and actually lag far behind. Democracy critics often point to recent experience in the United States, where the Trump administration had reversed nearly every climate initiative of the Obama administration and withdrew from the 2015 Paris agreement. These policy reversals do not bode well for democratic arguments about climate change. Nonetheless, only hours after being sworn in, President Biden moved to reinstate the US to the Paris accord. Overall, the United States also illustrates the strengths of democracies: pluralism, innovation, open flows of information, and political accountability. In particular, federalism enables states—California, New York, Washington, and Hawaii, among them—to act as innovative clean energy and climate leaders. Why the democracy issue matters Lovelock has said in this book that surviving climate change “may require, as in a war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency” (p. 95). The problem is that this will be a perpetual war. Climate change is not something one just solves. Mitigating its causes and adapting to its effects is a constant struggle. And democracy is not something we can put on the shelf and revive when a crisis passes, if it does. Warming causes extinction – any reduction should be prioritized above every other impact Ramanathan et al. 17 Veerabhadran Ramanathan is Victor Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences and director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Dr. William Collins is an internationally recognized expert in climate modeling and climate change science. He is the Director of the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Prof. Dr Mark Lawrence, Ph.D. is scientific director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Örjan Gustafsson is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Analytic Chemistry at Stockholm University, Shichang Kang is Professor, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, and Molina, M.J., Zaelke, D., Borgford-Parnell, N., Xu, Y., Alex, K., Auffhammer, M., Bledsoe, P., Croes, B., Forman, F., Haines, A., Harnish, R., Jacobson, M.Z., Lawrence, M., Leloup, D., Lenton, T., Morehouse, T., Munk, W., Picolotti, R., Prather, K., Raga, G., Rignot, E., Shindell, D., Singh, A.K., Steiner, A., Thiemens, M., Titley, D.W., Tucker, M.E., Tripathi, S., and Victor, D., authors come from the following 9 countries - US, Switzerland, Sweden, UK, China, Germany, Australia, Mexico, India, “Well Under 2 Degrees Celsius: Fast Action Policies to Protect People and the Planet from Extreme Climate Change,” Report of the Committee to Prevent Extreme Climate Change, September 2017, http://www.igsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Well-Under-2-Degrees-Celsius-Report-2017.pdf TDI Climate change is becoming an existential threat with warming in excess of 2°C within the next three decades and 4°C to 6°C within the next several decades. Warming of such magnitudes will expose as many as 75 of the world’s population to deadly heat stress in addition to disrupting the climate and weather worldwide. Climate change is an urgent problem requiring urgent solutions. This paper lays out urgent and practical solutions that are ready for implementation now, will deliver benefits in the next few critical decades, and places the world on a path to achieving the longterm targets of the Paris Agreement and near-term sustainable development goals. The approach consists of four building blocks and 3 levers to implement ten scalable solutions described in this report by a team of climate scientists, policy makers, social and behavioral scientists, political scientists, legal experts, diplomats, and military experts from around the world. These solutions will enable society to decarbonize the global energy system by 2050 through efficiency and renewables, drastically reduce short-lived climate pollutants, and stabilize the climate well below 2°C both in the near term (before 2050) and in the long term (post 2050). It will also reduce premature mortalities by tens of millions by 2050. As an insurance against policy lapses, mitigation delays and faster than projected climate changes, the solutions include an Atmospheric Carbon Extraction lever to remove CO2 from the air. The amount of CO2 that must be removed ranges from negligible, if the emissions of CO2 from the energy system and SLCPs start to decrease by 2020 and carbon neutrality is achieved by 2050, to a staggering one trillion tons if the carbon lever is not pulled and emissions of climate pollutants continue to increase until 2030. There are numerous living laboratories including 53 cities, many universities around the world, the state of California, and the nation of Sweden, who have embarked on a carbon neutral pathway. These laboratories have already created 8 million jobs in the clean energy industry; they have also shown that emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants can be decoupled from economic growth. Another favorable sign is that growth rates of worldwide carbon emissions have reduced from 2.9 per year during the first decade of this century to 1.3 from 2011 to 2014 and near zero growth rates during the last few years. The carbon emission curve is bending, but we have a long way to go and very little time for achieving carbon neutrality. We need institutions and enterprises that can accelerate this bending by scaling-up the solutions that are being proven in the living laboratories. We have less than a decade to put these solutions in place around the world to preserve nature and our quality of life for generations to come. The time is now. The Paris Agreement is an historic achievement. For the first time, effectively all nations have committed to limiting their greenhouse gas emissions and taking other actions to limit global temperature change. Specifically, 197 nations agreed to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” and achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of this century. The climate has already warmed by 1°C. The problem is running ahead of us, and under current trends we will likely reach 1.5°C in the next fifteen years and surpass the 2°C guardrail by mid-century with a 50 probability of reaching 4°C by end of century. Warming in excess of 3°C is likely to be a global catastrophe for three major reasons: • Warming in the range of 3°C to 5°C is suggested as the threshold for several tipping points in the physical and geochemical systems; a warming of about 3°C has a probability of over 40 to cross over multiple tipping points, while a warming close to 5°C increases it to nearly 90, compared with a baseline warming of less than 1.5°C, which has only just over a 10 probability of exceeding any tipping point. • Health effects of such warming are emerging as a major if not dominant source of concern. Warming of 4°C or more will expose more than 70 of the population, i.e. about 7 billion by the end of the century, to deadly heat stress and expose about 2.4 billion to vector borne diseases such as Dengue, Chikengunya, and Zika virus among others. Ecologists and paleontologists have proposed that warming in excess of 3°C, accompanied by increased acidity of the oceans by the buildup of CO2 , can become a major causal factor for exposing more than 50 of all species to extinction. 20 of species are in danger of extinction now due to population, habitat destruction, and climate change. The good news is that there may still be time to avert such catastrophic changes. The Paris Agreement and supporting climate policies must be strengthened substantially within the next five years to bend the emissions curve down faster, stabilize climate, and prevent catastrophic warming. To the extent those efforts fall short, societies and ecosystems will be forced to contend with substantial needs for adaptation—a burden that will fall disproportionately on the poorest three billion who are least responsible for causing the climate change problem. Here we propose a policy roadmap with a realistic and reasonable chance of limiting global temperature to safe levels and preventing unmanageable climate change—an outline of specific science-based policy pathways that serve as the building blocks for a three-lever strategy that could limit warming to well under 2°C. The projections and the emission pathways proposed in this summary are based on a combination of published recommendations and new model simulations conducted by the authors of this study (see Figure 2). We have framed the plan in terms of four building blocks and three levers, which are implemented through 10 solutions. The first building block would be fully implementing the nationally determined mitigation pledges under the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In addition, several sister agreements that provide targeted and efficient mitigation must be strengthened. Sister agreements include the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs, efforts to address aviation emissions through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), maritime black carbon emissions through the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the commitment by the eight countries of the Arctic Council to reduce black carbon emissions by up to 33. There are many other complementary processes that have drawn attention to specific actions on climate change, such as the Group of 20 (G20), which has emphasized reform of fossil fuel subsidies, and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). HFC measures, for example, can avoid as much as 0.5°C of warming by 2100 through the mandatory global phasedown of HFC refrigerants within the next few decades, and substantially more through parallel efforts to improve energy efficiency of air conditioners and other cooling equipment potentially doubling this climate benefit. For the second building block, numerous subnational and city scale climate action plans have to be scaled up. One prominent example is California’s Under 2 Coalition signed by over 177 jurisdictions from 37 countries in six continents covering a third of world economy. The goal of this Memorandum of Understanding is to catalyze efforts in many jurisdictions that are comparable with California’s target of 40 reductions in CO2 emissions by 2030 and 80 reductions by 2050—emission cuts that, if achieved globally, would be consistent with stopping warming at about 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Another prominent example is the climate action plans by over 52 cities and 65 businesses around the world aiming to cut emissions by 30 by 2030 and 80 to 100 by 2050. There are concerns that the carbon neutral goal will hinder economic progress; however, real world examples from California and Sweden since 2005 offer evidence that economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions and the data for CO2 emissions and GDP reveal that growth in fact prospers with a green economy. The third building block consists of two levers that we need to pull as hard as we can: one for drastically reducing emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) beginning now and completing by 2030, and the other for decarbonizing the global energy system by 2050 through efficiency and renewables. Pulling both levers simultaneously can keep global temperature rise below 2°C through the end of the century. If we bend the CO2 emissions curve through decarbonization of the energy system such that global emissions peak in 2020 and decrease steadily thereafter until reaching zero in 2050, there is less than a 20 probability of exceeding 2°C. This call for bending the CO2 curve by 2020 is one key way in which this report’s proposal differs from the Paris Agreement and it is perhaps the most difficult task of all those envisioned here. Many cities and jurisdictions are already on this pathway, thus demonstrating its scalability. Achieving carbon neutrality and reducing emissions of SLCPs would also drastically reduce air pollution globally, including all major cities, thus saving millions of lives and over 100 million tons of crops lost to air pollution each year. In addition, these steps would provide clean energy access to the world’s poorest three billion who are still forced to resort to 18th century technologies to meet basic needs such as cooking. For the fourth and the final building block, we are adding a third lever, ACE (Atmospheric Carbon Extraction, also known as Carbon Dioxide Removal, or “CDR”). This lever is added as an insurance against surprises (due to policy lapses, mitigation delays, or non-linear climate changes) and would require development of scalable measures for removing the CO2 already in the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 that must be removed will range from negligible, if the emissions of CO2 from the energy system and SLCPs start to decrease by 2020 and carbon neutrality is achieved by 2050, to a staggering one trillion tons, if CO2 emissions continue to increase until 2030, and the carbon lever is not pulled until after 2030. This issue is raised because the NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) accompanying the Paris Agreement would allow CO2 emissions to increase until 2030. We call on economists and experts in political and administrative systems to assess the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of reducing carbon and SLCPs emissions beginning in 2020 compared with delaying it by ten years and then being forced to pull the third lever to extract one trillion tons of CO2 The fast mitigation plan of requiring emissions reductions to begin by 2020, which means that many countries need to cut now, is urgently needed to limit the warming to well under 2°C. Climate change is not a linear problem. Instead, we are facing non-linear climate tipping points that can lead to self-reinforcing and cascading climate change impacts. Tipping points and selfreinforcing feedbacks are wild cards that are more likely with increased temperatures, and many of the potential abrupt climate shifts could happen as warming goes from 1.5°C in 15 years to 2°C by 2050, with the potential to push us well beyond the Paris Agreement goals. Where Do We Go from Here? A massive effort will be needed to stop warming at 2°C, and time is of the essence. With unchecked business-as-usual emissions, global warming has a 50 likelihood of exceeding 4ºC and a 5 probability of exceeding 6ºC in this century, raising existential questions for most, but especially the poorest three billion people. A 4ºC warming is likely to expose as many as 75 of the global population to deadly heat. Dangerous to catastrophic impacts on the health of people including generations yet to be born, on the health of ecosystems, and on species extinction have emerged as major justifications for mitigating climate change well below 2ºC, although we must recognize that the uncertainties intrinsic in climate and social systems make it hard to pin down exactly the level of warming that will trigger possibly catastrophic impacts. To avoid these consequences, we must act now, and we must act fast and effectively. This report sets out a specific plan for reducing climate change in both the near- and long-term. With aggressive urgent actions, we can protect ourselves. Acting quickly to prevent catastrophic climate change by decarbonization will save millions of lives, trillions of dollars in economic costs, and massive suffering and dislocation to people around the world. This is a global security imperative, as it can avoid the migration and destabilization of entire societies and countries and reduce the likelihood of environmentally driven civil wars and other conflicts. Staying well under 2°C will require a concerted global effort. We must address everything from our energy systems to our personal choices to reduce emissions to the greatest extent possible. We must redouble our efforts to invent, test, and perfect systems of governance so that the large measure of international cooperation needed to achieve these goals can be realized in practice. The health of people for generations to come and the health of ecosystems crucially depend on an energy revolution beginning now that will take us away from fossil fuels and toward the clean renewable energy sources of the future. It will be nearly impossible to obtain other critical social goals, including for example the UN agenda 2030 with the Sustainable Development Goals, if we do not make immediate and profound progress stabilizing climate, as we are outlining here.
The Building Blocks Approach The 2015 Paris Agreement, which went into effect November 2016, is a remarkable, historic achievement. For the frst time, essentially all nations have committed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and take other actions to limit global temperature and adapt to unavoidable climate change. Nations agreed to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” and “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (UNFCCC, 2015). Nevertheless, the initial Paris Agreement has to be strengthened substantially within fve years if we are to prevent catastrophic warming; current pledges place the world on track for up to 3.4°C by 2100 (UNEP, 2016b). Until now, no specifc policy roadmap exists that provides a realistic and reasonable chance of limiting global temperatures to safe levels and preventing unmanageable climate change. This report is our attempt to provide such a plan— an outline of specifc solutions that serve as the building blocks for a comprehensive strategy for limiting the warming to well under 2°C and avoiding dangerous climate change (Figure 1). The frst building block is the full implementation of the nationally determined mitigation pledges under the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and strengthening global sister agreements, such as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs, which can provide additional targeted, fast action mitigation at scale. For the second building block, numerous sub-national and city scale climate action plans have to be scaled up such as California’s Under 2 Coalition signed by 177 jurisdictions from 37 countries on six continents. The third building block is targeted measures to reduce emissions of shortlived climate pollutants (SLCPs), beginning now and fully implemented by 2030, along with major measures to fully decarbonize the global economy, causing the overall emissions growth rate to stop in 2020-2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Such a deep decarbonization would require an energy revolution similar to the Industrial Revolution that was based on fossil fuels. The fnal building block includes scalable and reversible carbon dioxide (CO2 ) removal measures, which can begin removing CO2 already emitted into the atmosphere. Such a plan is urgently needed. Climate change is not a linear problem. Instead, climate tipping points can lead to self-reinforcing, cascading climate change impacts (Lenton et al., 2008). Tipping points are more likely with increased temperatures, and many of the potential abrupt climate shifts could happen as warming goes from 1.5°C to 2°C, with the potential to push us well beyond the Paris Agreement goals (Drijfhout et al., 2015). In order to avoid dangerous climate change, we must address these concerns. We must act now, and we must act fast. Reduction of SLCPs will result in fast, near-term reductions in warming, while present-day reductions of CO2 will result in long-term climate benefts. This two-lever approach—aggressively cutting both SLCPs and CO2 –-will slow warming in the coming decades when it is most crucial to avoid impacts from climate change as well as maintain a safe climate many decades from now. To achieve the nearterm goals, we have outlined solutions to be implemented immediately. These solutions to bend down the rising emissions curve and thus bend the warming trajectory curve follow a 2015 assessment by the University of California under its Carbon Neutrality Initiative (Ramanathan et al., 2016). The solutions are clustered into categories of social transformation, governance improvement, market- and regulation-based solutions, technological innovation and transformation, and natural and ecosystem management. Additionally, we need to intensely investigate and pursue a third lever—ACE (Atmospheric Carbon Extraction). While many potential technologies exist, we do not know the extent to which they could be scaled up to remove the requisite amount of carbon from the atmosphere in order to achieve the Paris Agreement goals, and any delay in mitigation will demand increasing reliance on these technologies. Yet, there is still hope. Humanity can come together, as we have done in the past, to collaborate towards a common goal. We have no choice but to tackle the challenge of climate change. We only have the choice of when and how: either now, through the ambitious plan outlined here, or later, through radical adaptation and societal transformations in response to an ever-deteriorating climate system that will unleash devastating impacts—some of which may be beyond our capacity to fully adapt to or reverse for thousands of years. 2. Major Climate Disruptions: How Soon and How Fast? “Without adequate mitigation and adaptation, climate change poses unacceptable risks to global public health.” (WHO, 2016) The planet has already witnessed nearly 1°C of warming, and another 0.6°C of additional warming is currently stored in the ocean to be released over the next two to four decades, if climate warming emissions are not radically reduced during that time (IPCC, 2013). The impacts of this warming on extreme weather, droughts, and foods are being felt by society worldwide to the extent that many think of this no longer as climate change but as climate disruption. Consider the business as usual scenario: 15 years from now: In 15 years, planetary warming will reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature (Ramanathan and Xu, 2010; Shindell et al., 2012). This exceeds the 0.5°C to 1°C of warming during the Eemian period, 115,000– 130,000 years ago, when sea-levels reached 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today (Hansen et al., 2016b). The impacts of this warming will affect us all yet will disproportionately affect the Earth’s poorest three billion people, who are primarily subsistence farmers that still rely on 18th century technologies and have the least capacity to adapt (IPCC, 2014a; Dasgupta et al., 2015). They thus may be forced to resort to mass migration into city slums and push across international borders (U.S. DOD, 2015). The existential fate of lowlying small islands and coastal communities will also need to be addressed, as they are primarily vulnerable to sea-level rise, diminishing freshwater resources, and more intense storms. In addition, many depend on fsheries for protein, and these are likely to be affected by ocean acidifcation and climate change. Climate injustice could start causing visible regional and international conficts. All of this will be exacerbated as the risk of passing tipping points increases (Lenton et al., 2008). 30 years from now: By mid-century, warming is expected to exceed 2°C, which would be unprecedented with respect to historical records of at least the last one million years (IPCC, 2014c). Such a warming through this century could result in sea-level rise of as much as 2 meters by 2100, with greater sea-level rise to follow. A group of tipping points are clustered between 1.5°C and 2°C (Figure 2) (Drijfhout et al., 2015). The melting of most mountain glaciers, including those in the Tibetan-Himalayas, combined with mega-droughts, heat waves, storms, and foods, would adversely affect nearly everyone on the planet. 80 years from now: In 80 years, warming is expected to exceed 4°C, increasing the likelihood of irreversible and catastrophic change (World Bank, 2013b). 4ºC warming is likely to expose as much as 75 of the global population to deadly heat (Mora et al., 2017). The 2°C and 4°C values quoted above and in other reports, however, are merely the central values with a 50 probability of occurrence (Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). There is a 5 probability the warming could be as high as 6°C due to uncertainties in the magnitude of amplifying feedbacks (see Section 4). This in turn could lead to major disruptions to natural and social systems, threatening food security, water security, and national security and fundamentally affecting the great majority of the projected 11.2 billion inhabitants of the planet in 2100 (UN DESA, 2015). 3. What Are the Wild Cards for Climate Disruption? Increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases radiative forcing (the difference between the amount of energy entering the atmosphere and leaving) and thus increases the global temperature (IPCC, 2013). However, climate wild cards exist that can alter the linear connection with warming and anthropogenic emissions by triggering abrupt changes in the climate (Lenton et al., 2008). Some of these wild cards have not been thoroughly captured by the models that policymakers rely on the most. These abrupt shifts are irreversible on a human time scale (100 years) and will create a notable disruption to the climate system, condemning the world to warming beyond that which we have previously projected. These climate disruptions would divert resources from needed mitigation and upset mitigation strategies that we have already put in place.
Unmasking Aerosol Cooling: The frst such wild card is the unmasking of an estimated 0.7°C (with an uncertainty range of 0.3°C to 1.2°C) of the warming in addition to mitigating other aerosol effects such as disrupting rainfall patterns, by reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfates and nitrates as part of air pollution regulations (Wigley, 1991; Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). Aerosol air pollution is a major health hazard with massive costs to public health and society, including contributing to about 7 million deaths (from household and ambient exposure) each year (WHO, 2014). While some aerosols, such as black carbon and brown carbon, strongly absorb sunlight and warm the climate, others refect sunlight back into space, which cools the climate (Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008). The net impact of all manmade aerosols is negative, meaning that about 30 of the warming from greenhouse gases is being masked by co-emitted air pollution particles (Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008). As we reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement policies to eliminate air pollution, we are also reducing the concentration of aerosols in the air. Aerosols last in the atmosphere for about a week, so if we eliminate air pollution without reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases, the unmasking alone would lead to an estimated 0.7°C of warming within a matter of decades (Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). We must eliminate all aerosol emissions due to their health effects, but we must simultaneously mitigate emissions of CO2 , other greenhouse gases, and black carbon and co-pollutants to avoid an abrupt and very large jump in the near-term warming beyond 2°C (Brasseur and Roeckner, 2005). 2. Tipping Points: It is likely that as we cross the 1.5°C to 2°C thresholds we will trigger so called “tipping points” for abrupt and nonlinear changes in the climate system with catastrophic consequences for humanity and the environment (Lenton, 2008; Drijfhout et al., 2015). Once the tipping points are passed, the resulting impacts will range in timescales from: disruption of monsoon systems (transition in a year), loss of sea ice (approximately a decade for transition), dieback of major forests (nearly half a century for transition), reorganization of ocean circulation (approximately a century for transition), to loss of ice sheets and subsequent sea-level rise (transition over hundreds of years) (Lenton et al., 2008). Regardless of timescale, once underway many of these changes would be irreversible (Lontzek et al., 2015). There is also a likelihood of crossing over multiple tipping points simultaneously. Warming of close to 3°C would subject the system to a 46 probability of crossing multiple tipping points, while warming of close to 5°C would increase the risk to 87 (Cai et al., 2016). Recent modeling work shows a “cluster” of these tipping points could be triggered between 1.5°C and 2°C warming (Figure 2), including melting of land and sea ice and changes in highlatitude ocean circulation (deep convection) (Drijfhout et al., 2015). This is consistent with existing observations and understanding that the polar regions are particularly sensitive to global warming and have several potentially imminent tipping points. The Arctic is warming nearly twice as quickly as the global average, which makes the abrupt changes in the Arctic more likely at a lower level of global warming (IPCC, 2013). Similarly, the Himalayas are warming at roughly the same rate as the Arctic and are thus also more susceptible to incremental changes in temperature (UNEP-WMO, 2011). This gives further justifcation for limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. While all climate tipping points have the potential to rapidly destabilize climate, social, and economic systems, some are also self-amplifying feedbacks that once set in motion increase warming in such a way that they perpetuate yet even more warming. Declining Arctic sea ice, thawing permafrost, and the poleward migration of cloud systems are all examples of self-amplifying feedback mechanisms, where initial warming feeds upon itself to cause still more warming acting as a force multiplier (Schuur et al., 2015).
11/7/21
NovDec- Workforce Adv
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake NL | Judge: Sophia Gottfried Plan Plan: The United States should recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Advantage 1 — Workforce Advantage one is the workforce Labor unrest is increasing and there is momentum to strike, but current laws leave workers powerless. Semuels 10/8 (Alana, Journalist and currently senior economics correspondent at TIME magazine, previously The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe.) “U.S. Workers Are Realizing It’s the Perfect Time to Go on Strike,” TIME, 10/8/21. https://time.com/6105109/workers-strike-unemployment/ RR Thousands of workers have gone on strike across the country, showing their growing power in a tightening economy. The leverage U.S. employees have over the people signing their paychecks was amplified in Friday’s jobs report, which showed that employers added workers at a much slower-than-expected pace in September. The unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points during the month, to 4.8 percent, the government said Friday, and wages are continuing to tick up across industries as employers become more desperate to hire and retain workers. In the first five days of October alone, there were 10 strikes in the U.S., including workers at Kellogg plants in Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee; school bus drivers in Annapolis, Md.; and janitors at the Denver airport. That doesn’t include the nearly 60,000 union members in film and television production who nearly unanimously voted to grant their union’s president the authority to call a strike. Jess Deyo is one of nearly 700 nurses who have been on strike as part of the longest healthcare strike in Massachusetts history. For the past seven months, Deyo has reported for duty at the hospital in Worcester, Mass. where she worked as a nurse for more than 15 years, sometimes bringing her daughters, and standing outside through the chills of spring and the heat of summer. The nurses are demanding higher nurse-to-patient ratios after a harrowing 19 months of working during a pandemic. “There’s no choice to give up on the strike,” she says. “It’s bigger than us—it’s for everyone.” Most of these strikes aren’t counted by the federal government, which in the 1980s started only tracking strikes that involved 1,000 or more workers and that lasted one full shift or longer. There have only been 11 of those so far this year, according to government data, at places like Volvo Trucks and Nabisco. But academics at Cornell University launched a strike database on May 1 that uses social media and Google alerts to keep track of all the strikes and protests happening in the U.S., even if they involve just a few workers. The database shows a picture of growing worker activism, of small actions that tell a story of how people at workplaces small and large are feeling after 19 months of a global pandemic, says Johnnie Kallas, a PhD student who is the director of Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker. It has documented 169 strikes so far in 2021. “Workers are fed up with low pay and understaffing, and they have more labor market leverage with employers needing to hire right now,” he says. “You are seeing a little bit more labor unrest.” Of course, compared to half a century ago, there still aren’t many strikes in the U.S. There were 5,716 strikes in 1971 alone, according to government data from when the government tracked smaller strikes. And the share of unionized workers in the U.S. is near an all-time low, with just 12.1 of workers represented by unions last year. But the activism comes at a time when approval of labor unions—even among Republicans—is trending upwards—and when a low unemployment rate is giving leverage to workers who have long put up with poor conditions and pay. A Gallup poll released in the beginning of July showed that 68 of Americans approve of labor unions, higher than it had been in years and up significantly from the 48 approval in 2009 during the throes of the Great Recession. The poll also showed that 47 of Republicans said they approved of unions—the highest share since 2003—and that 90 of Democrats did. Greater income inequality, more strikes Part of the support of unions and organizing may come from Americans’ discontent with growing inequality, much as inequality a century ago galvanized a labor movement then, says Tom Kochan, a professor of work and employment research at MIT. There are a growing number of billionaires in America–708 as of August—with a net worth of $4.7 trillion as of August 17. That’s more than the total net worth of the bottom 50 of Americans. “I think the accumulated effects of the loss of good jobs in manufacturing, stagnant wages, growing inequality, and the growing disparity between executives and managers and the workforce—all of that is fueling increases in organizing,” he says. Some of this labor activism was happening before the pandemic, Kochan says, when even the government’s strike tracker showed an uptick in unrest. Teachers in states like Arizona and Oklahoma started striking in 2018 because of low pay and a lack of public funding. In 2020, NBA athletes walked out of a playoff game to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc. The year 2019 saw 25 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, the most since 2001. In 2017, 48 of non-unionized workers said they would vote to join a union if given the chance, higher than the share who said that in 1995 (32) and 1977 (33), according to Kochan’s research. The pandemic worsened working conditions for thousands of workers like Deyo. Kellogg workers at a plant in Battle Creek, Mich., told the local news that they were lauded as heroes for working 16 hour days, seven days a week during the pandemic, and rather than reward them, the company recently decided to offshore some of their jobs. They went on strike on Oct. 5. Musicians at the San Antonio Symphony say they voluntarily accepted an 80 pay cut last season, and that the symphony then proposed first to permanently cut their pay by 50 and then to cut the number of full-time members from 72 to 42. They went on strike on Sept. 27. Do strikes work? For their part, employers say that they’re being fair, and that workers are being unreasonable. Kellogg provides workers with benefits and compensation that are among the industry’s best, a company spokesman, Kris Bahner, said in a statement. The company says it has not proposed moving any jobs from the Ready to Eat Cereal plants, which are the plants where the workers are striking, as part of negotiations. The San Antonio Symphony said, in a statement, that the union and the symphony agreed to a 25 reduction in weekly salary for the 2020-2021 season, but that because there were fewer performances and because fewer musicians could fit on stage because of social distancing guidelines, some musicians did make 80 less than they would have made in a normal season. The symphony needs to make “fundamental changes,” a spokesperson said, and it cannot afford to spend more than it makes through ticket sales and donations. Carolyn Jackson, the CEO of St. Vincent’s, where Deyo and hundreds of other nurses are striking, says that the nurses are trying to push a 1:4 nurse to patient ratio that Massachusetts voters rejected by a large margin in 2018. The hospital has done research and decided its staffing is appropriate, and that its staffing ratios are in fact better than most other hospitals in the state, she says. Ryan says the hospital announced it was hiring 100 permanent replacement nurses in May during a COVID-19 surge, and that the striking nurses are insisting on getting their old positions back. That the hospital is not budging speaks to the fact that despite this increase in worker activism, workers may not gain much more power in the long run. Over the last 40 years, the government has made it much more difficult for workers to both form unions and to strike, says Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Amazon was able to effectively interfere in a union vote among its workers this spring, she says, preventing the union from succeeding. Of course, a hearing officer at the National Labor Relations Board has recommended that the board throw out the results of the Amazon election and do it over, which speaks to a resurgence of government support for labor. President Joe Biden said he wanted to be “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Labor has support at the state and local levels too: California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a packet of pro-worker bills, including one that prohibits companies from imposing quotas on warehouse workers that prevent them from following health and safety law, and another that prohibits employers from paying workers with disabilities less than the state’s minimum wage. And in January, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill that forbids fast food restaurants from firing workers unless the employer has just cause, making New York City the first jurisdiction in the country that essentially ended at-will employment. But even that support may not be enough to force a widespread change of working conditions in an economy where employees haven’t had much leverage since before the Great Recession, or earlier. Even some of the recent strikes haven’t led to workers’ desired outcomes. A five-week Nabisco strike recently ended with many of workers’ demands met, for instance, but the company still won the ability to pay weekend workers less than they do currently. As for Jess Deyo and the Worcester nurses, many have been forced to move on. After Deyo’s unemployment benefits ended and her health insurance premiums spiked, she decided she needed to find another job so that she could support her family. She’s a single mother. She found a job working as a nurse at a doctor’s office, where she says she feels more appreciated than she’s ever felt at work. The hours are better and she finally feels respected. But she makes $13 less an hour. Strikes are key to revitalizing labor unions. Bahn 19 (Kate, the director of labor market policy and interim chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth) “The once and future role of strikes in ensuring U.S. worker power” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 8/29/19. https://equitablegrowth.org/the-once-and-future-role-of-strikes-in-ensuring-u-s-worker-power/ RR At the same time, there is an increasing consensus today that unions are a positive force for increasing worker power and balancing against economic inequality. In polling of support for unions and specific aspects of collective bargaining, Equitable Growth grantee Alex Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University, along with William Kimball and Thomas Kochan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, find that support for unions has grown overall, with nearly half of U.S. workers in 2018 saying they would vote for a union if given the opportunity. This is a significant increase from one-third of workers supporting unionization in 1995. According to their research, workers primarily value unions’ role in collective bargaining and ensuring access to benefits such as healthcare, retirement, and unemployment insurance. Strikes have historically been one of the strongest tools used by unions to ensure they have power to engage in collective bargaining. But striking was viewed as a negative attribute in the survey done by Hertel-Fernandez, Kimball, and Kochan. Yet, when they presented workers with the hypothetical choice of a union exercising strike power with other attributes of unions, such as collective bargaining, support increased. But strikes, of course, do not take place in a bubble. The wider climate of worker bargaining power and institutions that support labor organizing plays a role in making this historically crucial tool effective again. So, too, does the power of employers to resist these organizing efforts when the labor market lacks competition that would increase worker bargaining power. Labor shortages now are because of low wages— unions reverse that by allowing for bargaining. Lopezlira and Jacobs 9/3 (Enrique, is the director of the Low-Wage Work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is a labor economist, directing and conducting research on how policies affect working families, with a particular focus on how these policies impact racial and gender equity. Doctorate in Economics from Howard University) (Ken, the chair of the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he has been a labor specialist since 2002.) “Don’t Mistake the Disappointing Jobs Numbers for a Labor Shortage,” Barron’s, 9/3/21. https://www.barrons.com/articles/dont-mistake-the-disappointing-jobs-numbers-for-a-labor-shortage-51630698151 RR Today’s jobs report shows a complicated picture for workers. The economy added only 235,000 jobs in August, despite near-record vacancies, while hourly wages grew faster than expected. But hold off a moment before calling it a labor shortage. Yes, some employers are experiencing difficulty filling jobs as the economy begins to recover from the effects of the pandemic. But this alone is just one part of the picture. A labor shortage means there aren’t enough workers, and that is simply not the current case. While there are plenty of workers available, there are far fewer available, willing, and able to work at the current wages being offered. In other words, it isn’t that demand for workers is too high, it’s that wages are too low. While it is true that wages have increased recently for some workers, it would be incorrect to believe that all workers now enjoy higher wages and greater bargaining power with employers. Unfortunately, the truth is millions of workers continue to earn low wages that make it nearly impossible for them to make ends meet. The pandemic has made the economic situation for low-wage workers more dire, but typical workers’ pay has been growing very slowly over the last 40 years. Economic theory states wages are tied to productivity, but this is only in theory. The reality is that since 1979 the gap between pay and worker productivity has widened significantly, with productivity growing 62 over this period, while wages only grew by 18. But if workers are more productive than ever before, why have they received few of the benefits of this increased productivity? The answer is that a greater share of the gains are going to those at the top—through higher salaries at the high end of the income distribution, as well as ever-larger corporate profits. And this has been made even worse by the pandemic, during which the net worth of billionaires in the U.S. increased by $1 trillion at the same time that 20 million workers lost their jobs. Summer 2021 has seen some welcomed wage growth at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution. In terms of industries, the highest wage growth has been in leisure and hospitality (in restaurants and bars, for instance), which traditionally pays some of the lowest wages, and which saw the largest wage drops when Covid-19 hit. Even with these wage increases, real wages for these service-sector workers have rebounded only to prepandemic trends. For workers in these sectors to experience real improvements in earnings, wages need to grow even further. However, there is no guarantee that the recent wage growth will last, let alone that further increases will materialize. One way to help ensure a strong wage floor is by increasing the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have higher minimum wages than the federal level, but that means there are 21 other states that do not. Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and indexing it to inflation, would help make sure all workers, regardless of where they live, receive decent pay—and that the value of their wages does not again erode over time. While the minimum wage raises the floor, more is needed to improve wages and working conditions for the rest of America’s workers. Central to achieving a broad-based improvement in pay is enabling workers who wish to do so to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Unions have been shown to improve not just wages and benefits, but also to reduce socioeconomic disparities. Unions raise wages and increase access to benefits for all workers, with the largest gains for those who earn the least in nonunion workplaces: women and workers of color. Unions don’t only benefit their members. When more workers in an industry are unionized, pay rises across the industry. Unions also play an important role in promoting worker health and safety. As the Covid-19 crisis began, unionized workers were more likely to have access to personal protective equipment and paid sick days. Throughout the crisis, unions fought for strong worker protections on the job to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and to get the economy going again. While support for unions is high, America’s labor laws make it extremely difficult for workers to organize and win collective bargaining. In just one egregious example, currently if an employer violates the National Labor Relations Act, there are no financial penalties. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which has now passed the House of Representatives and is waiting to be heard in the Senate, would change that. The PRO Act would create stronger remedies, expand bargaining rights, and put the decision over whether or not to join a union in the hands of the workers, where it belongs. Many workers at the bottom have received raises over the last year. A growing body of evidence finds that policies which improve wages and family incomes help reduce racial disparities while having long-term, positive effects on a wide range of societal outcomes–from child and adult health to civic participation. These structural and legal factors provide an important roadmap for us to ensure a robust and sustainable recovery that works for all Americans. Whether wage increases for the majority of workers continue depends on the decisions we make as a society. Industrial workforce shortages are happening now— Covid and inability to compete. Scull and Stone 8/28 (John, an associate in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. His practice focuses on representing employers in workplace law matters, including preventive advice and counseling.) (James, a principal of the Cleveland, Ohio, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. From the opening of the office in 2006 until early 2020, Jim served as office managing principal in Cleveland. At that time, he stepped down to focus on his busy practice and increased task force activities within practice groups and serving as co-leader of the firm’s Manufacturing industry group.) “Manufacturing Labor Shortage: Cultivating Skilled Labor By Engaging Local Communities,” JDSupra, 8/28/21. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/manufacturing-labor-shortage-1463687/ RR The worker shortage in manufacturing has been exacerbated by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which erased over a decade of job gains in the manufacturing sector, eliminating more than 1.4 million positions, according to a report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI). To counter the trend, manufacturers should consider working with local schools and youth programs to develop a sustainable pipeline of talent. While approximately 820,000 of the jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic have since been backfilled, nearly 500,000 positions remain open and manufacturing employers have had difficulty filling these roles. According to the MI report, manufacturing employers say it is currently 36 percent harder to find talent than it was in 2018, even though the unemployment rate today is much higher. This manufacturing employment shortage is likely to intensify as the number of unfilled manufacturing positions in the United States is expected to grow to approximately 2.1 million by 2030 — damaging the U.S. economy by up to $1 trillion. While the pandemic certainly played a large role in damaging the U.S. manufacturing sector’s employment numbers, the worker shortage is nothing new. There are approximately five million fewer Americans employed in the manufacturing sector today than 20 years ago. Employers hope to reverse this trend and are under pressure to do so quickly as the median age of an American working in manufacturing is 44 years old, and older workers are retiring faster than they are being replaced. A strong industrial workforce is key to US military primacy Bloomberg Editorial Board 4/7 (Members of the editorial board will write and edit in other capacities within Bloomberg Opinion. Because our columnists have always spoken for themselves, they will continue as before — though columnists will still refrain from endorsing candidates, a policy we have had in place since we started in 2011.) “America’s Depleted Industrial Base Is a National Security Crisis,” Bloomberg, 4/7/21. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/america-s-depleted-industrial-base-is-a-national-security-crisis RR President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address is most famous for its warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. But Eisenhower also stressed the defense industry’s importance to the country’s security: After all, it helped the U.S. maintain superiority over its rivals, forestall great-power conflict and win the Cold War. Six decades on, America’s military remains the most advanced in the world — but the industrial base supporting it has deteriorated. Industry consolidation, domestic manufacturing decline and dysfunctional federal budgeting have combined to reduce competition throughout the defense supply chain, eroding military readiness and potentially jeopardizing national security. As Congress considers the Defense Department’s next budget, investing in a more nimble, innovative and resilient defense-industrial base should be among its highest priorities. Some parts of the defense industry, to be sure, continue to flourish. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, with the Pentagon’s budget consuming more than half of all federal discretionary spending. Revenue for defense contractors has increased by 83 since 2011, with annual spending per company doubling in the past five years alone. That money, however, is flowing to a reduced cast of contractors. An analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the number of Pentagon “prime vendors” — those that receive contracts directly from the government — has dropped by 36 in the last decade. An even smaller handful has reaped the most gains. According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly half of the 183 major contracts awarded by the Pentagon in 2018 went to just five contractors and their subsidiaries. Such concentration imposes costs on both the military and the public. The first is financial. More than two-thirds of major Defense Department contracts are awarded without a competitive bidding process, according to the GAO; most of the rest receive bids from two or fewer companies. Fewer bidders means pricier contracts: Between 2008 and 2018, the average acquisition cost of a U.S. weapons program, in constant dollars, increased by 12.5. A lack of suppliers also undermines America’s ability to respond to crises. The Pentagon has identified a “staggering” number of cases where it relies on a single vendor for critical components. It’s down to a lone domestic source of both ammonium perchlorate, a key ingredient for warship propulsion systems, and chaff, a material that fighter jets release to evade enemy radar systems. A sole manufacturer provides all of the Army’s gun and howitzer barrels and mortar tubes. Meanwhile, offshoring has made the supply chain more vulnerable to trade disruptions, cyberattacks and sabotage. This attenuation of the U.S.’s military supply chain poses a growing national security risk — and it demands a bold response. President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan includes $180 billion in investments to strengthen U.S. supply chains. The administration should use the Defense Production Act and other authorities to boost support for smaller domestic suppliers of critical goods and services. The Pentagon should also streamline its cumbersome contracting and acquisition process, which discourages innovation and crowds out nontraditional vendors. Initiatives like the Trusted Capital program, which connects investors with companies developing new military technologies, should be expanded. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department should increase scrutiny of defense-industry mergers and acquisitions to limit excessive consolidation. A well-functioning supply chain depends on a diverse array of private-sector companies. The viability of those companies, in turn, depends on a sufficient supply of skilled labor. Upgrading the skills of both service members and the civilian workforce that supports the military is critical. The Pentagon should expand digital training for current employees and offer promotions and higher pay to civilian staff with advanced technical skills. Congress should boost funding for the department’s Skills Imperative initiative, which brings together schools and employers to address defense-industry workforce needs. It should also encourage apprenticeship programs in key sectors, such as shipbuilding, that lack qualified workers. As Eisenhower recognized, America’s influence abroad depends on its strength at home. Revitalizing the defense-industrial base is essential not only for national security, but also for the preservation of peace around the world. US primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the global order and causes nuclear war Brands and Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press; GrRv) Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold War era. The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history. Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers. Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America? Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38 These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come. The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than simply acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster its defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable achievements. Retrenchment causes nationalism, war, and protectionism – optimists falsely assume current cooperative trends will continue without the US security guarantee Matthew Fay 17, Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies @ The Niskanen Center, 11/16/17, “America Unrestrained?: Engagement, Retrenchment, and Libertarian Foreign Policy,” https://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/America-Unrestrained.pdf A number of the arguments libertarians make in favor of retrenchment have merit, but the cost-benefit analysis derived from them is based on a deterministic view of international politics. Libertarian retrenchers assume that international politics would remain more or less the same absent American engagement and that America’s domestic politics would remain the same even if the international system become more conflict-prone. Given the inherent uncertainty of forecasting, the costs and benefits of engagement and retrenchment need to be considered in a more probabilistic fashion.86 This section begins by exploring a number of scenarios that could occur should the United States adopt a grand strategy of retrenchment. It then reassesses the costs and benefits of retrenchment for a free society. In a system with more independent states balancing against one another, is war more or less likely? Libertarians are placing a bet that all else would remain equal in international politics if the United States retrenches. While they assume a world where an increased number of states are balancing against one another would remain peaceful, the reality is not entirely clear. Using basic realist premises about state behavior under international anarchy, it is easy to identify a number of scenarios less rosy than the one libertarians assume would occur should the United States retrench. These scenarios might include a world of increased nationalism, eroding norms against military aggression, increased economic autarky, and the further spread of nuclear weapons as states look to produce security for themselves. Some states may also fail to balance against threats in the wake of American retrenchment, increasing the likelihood the United States will be drawn into a major war. Libertarians assume that in the absence of an alliance with the United States, other countries would simply increase their defense spending if they felt threatened. However, internal balancing is not a mechanical process. According to John Mearsheimer, leaders of states facing security competition are likely to use nationalism to garner support from their populations for the necessary regeneration of military capabilities.87 Writing at the end of the Cold War, Mearsheimer suggested that Europe would revert to a pattern of recurrent warfare. The absence of the United States and the Soviet Union would leave Europe, once again, an anarchic multipolar system. The structure of the system would force the states to compete with one another, as they had prior to the Cold War. Mearsheimer argued that pre-1945 “hypernationalism” was a product of “security competition among the European states, which compelled elites to mobilize public support for national defense efforts.”88 American retrenchment could similarly lead to an anarchic, multipolar Europe—thus increasing the chances of war on the continent. Such a system could engender nationalist sentiments among the populations of Europe, heightening animosities between national groups. These heightened animosities could help erode norms against military aggression that have facilitated the decline in interstate war. Nationalist groups within a country can seize on these sentiments to pursue confrontational and expansionist policies.89 Encouraging support for increased military capabilities through nationalism might lead populations to see war as once again a means to national glory or maintaining national honor. Matters of national prestige and honor can lead to the initiation of wars when bound up in territorial claims, while at the same time increasing the intensity and duration of a conflict.90 Nationalism and security competition might also erode the pacifying effects of economic openness. Realism suggests states are concerned about relative gains.91 States in security competition might be wary of trading with one another due to concerns about how a potential rival’s economic gains might provide it with an advantage if translated into military power. They may also adopt autarkic policies for fear of undermining their economic and military self-sufficiency.92 Territorial conquest has become increasing anachronistic in international politics. However, the proliferation of protectionist policies might once again make aggression and preventive war seem like strategically sensible ways for states to secure the resources necessary to reduce the ability of potential rivals to cut them off economically. If the risk of territorial aggression increases, the possession of nuclear weapons would become an attractive option for some states whose security was previously guaranteed by the United States. Nuclear weapons are most useful for deterring major territorial aggression, meaning their potential utility increases as the potential for war does.93 A number of U.S. allies have either previously pursued nuclear weapons or have the capability to do so. They might choose to obtain a nuclear arsenal once responsible for their own security. Pursuit is inevitable Wright 20 (Thomas, director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, former lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy, PhD from Georgetown University and M.Phil. from Cambridge University) “The Folly of Retrenchment: Why America Can’t Withdraw From the World,” Foreign Affairs, 4/2020 JL A fifth problem with retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support. The American people may favor greater burden sharing, but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military superiority makes the United States safer, and almost three-quarters think that alliances contribute to U.S. security. A 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense spending. As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment, and as the United States’ democratic allies objected to its withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate between retrenchment and reengagement, creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by Washington, its allies, or its rivals. Heg is sustainable – America has strong bones Ikenberry 18 (John, Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University) reviewing book by Beckley (Michael, Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018 It has become conventional wisdom that the United States is in decline, the uni-polar era is ending, and China is on the rise. In this smart and sophisticated book, Beckley tackles this thesis head-on. He does not dispute that the United States has its problems or that misguided leaders often squander its advantages. But he points out that the United States’ deep geographic, demographic, and institutional reserves give the country unique resilience. The United States is the only great power without regional rivals. Its companies and universities dominate the world. And most important, Beckley argues that it has by far the best fundamentals for future economic growth, thanks to its abundant natural resources, favorable demographics, secure property rights, and lasting political institutions. China’s growth prospects, in contrast, are “dismal.” Beckley also thinks the declinists use the wrong measures of power. GDP, for example, exaggerates the influence of populous but poor countries, such as China, while overlooking problems that drain those countries’ economic and military resources. He does not argue that the United States can—or should—try to preserve the unipolar era, but he does think that it will long remain the world’s leading power.
Nuclear war causes extinction – famine and climate change Starr 15 (Steven, Director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program and a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility) “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” Federation of American Scientists, 10/14/2015 DD
While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Following the detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180 million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. For an explanation of the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts. The scientists who completed the most recent peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would quickly prevent up to 70 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. For an explanation of nuclear winter, see Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences. Nuclear winter would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and animals to starve to death. Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a sophisticated study to tell us that no food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic environment?
11/7/21
SeptOct- Covid AC
Tournament: Meadows Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Diamond Bar NC | Judge: Claudia Ribera 1AC – Plan Plan – The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for COVID-19 medicines. 1AC – Inherency Contention 1 is Inherency.
Rich countries are blocking a WTO patent-waiver proposal necessary to boost global production of COVID vaccines. Meredith 21. (Sam Meredith is a Correspondent at CNBC in London, covering international politics, energy and business news) “Rich countries are refusing to waive the rights on Covid vaccines as global cases hit record levels,” CNBC, April 22, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/22/covid-rich-countries-are-refusing-to-waive-ip-rights-on-vaccines.html TDI LONDON — The U.S., Canada and U.K. are among some of the high-income countries actively blocking a patent-waiver proposal designed to boost the global production of Covid-19 vaccines. It comes as coronavirus cases worldwide surge to their highest level so far and the World Health Organization has repeatedly admonished a “shocking imbalance” in the distribution of vaccines amid the pandemic. Members of the World Trade Organization will meet virtually in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday to hold informal talks on whether to temporarily waive intellectual property and patent rights on Covid vaccines and treatments. The landmark proposal, which was jointly submitted by India and South Africa in October, has been backed by more than 100 mostly developing countries. It aims to facilitate the manufacture of treatments locally and boost the global vaccination campaign. Six months on, the proposal continues to be stonewalled by a small number of governments — including the U.S., EU, U.K., Switzerland, Japan, Norway, Canada, Australia and Brazil. “In this Covid-19 pandemic, we are once again faced with issues of scarcity, which can be addressed through diversification of manufacturing and supply capacity and ensuring the temporary waiver of relevant intellectual property,” Dr. Maria Guevara, international medical secretary at Medecins Sans Frontieres, said in a statement on Wednesday. “It is about saving lives at the end, not protecting systems.” The urgency and importance of waiving certain intellectual property rights amid the pandemic have been underscored by the WHO, health experts, civil society groups, trade unions, former world leaders, international medical charities, Nobel laureates and human rights organizations. Why does it matter? The waiver, if adopted at the General Council, the WTO’s highest-level decision-making body, could help countries around the world overcome legal barriers preventing them from producing their own Covid vaccines and treatments. Advocates of the proposal have conceded the waiver is not a “silver bullet,” but argue that removing barriers toward the development, production and approval of vaccines is vital in the fight to prevent, treat and contain the coronavirus. The pandemic is raging through developing economies and inflicting loss on a horrific scale. Lindsey 21. (Brink Lindsey) “Why intellectual property and pandemics don’t mix,” Brookings Institution, June 3, 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/ TDI Although focusing on these immediate constraints is vital, we cannot confine our attention to the short term. First of all, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. Although Americans can now see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the rapid rollout of vaccines, most of the world isn’t so lucky. The virus is currently raging in India and throughout South America, overwhelming health care systems and inflicting suffering and loss on a horrific scale. And consider the fact that Australia, which has been successful in suppressing the virus, recently announced it was sticking to plans to keep its borders closed until mid-2022. Criticisms of the TRIPS waiver that focus only on the next few months are therefore short-sighted: this pandemic could well drag on long enough for elimination of patent restrictions to enable new vaccine producers to make a positive difference. 1AC – WTO Credibility Contention 2 is WTO Credibility.
The new head of the WTO is on track to push for reform and an increased role in the international arena, but is hindered now due to lack of vaccine agreement. Baschuk 4-27. (Bryce Baschuk is a Bloomberg Reporter) "WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee," Bloomberg, April 27, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee TDI The head of the World Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Read More: Arcane WTO Pact Moves to Center of Vaccine Debate: Supply Lines Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. ‘More Pragmatism’ “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. Read More: U.S. Trade Chief Meets Pfizer, AstraZeneca About Vaccine Supply As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies. Patent waiver is necessary to revitalize WTO’s credibility as an international dispute mechanism – creates momentum for further reform. Meyer 6-18-21. (David Meyer is the Editor of CEO Daily and a senior writer on Fortune’s European team. Author of the digital rights primer, Control Shift: How Technology Affects You and Your Rights. “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn,” Fortune, June 18, 2021. https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ TDI The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform. Okonjo-Iweala's role The WTO's new director general, whose route to the top was unblocked in early 2021 with the demise of the Trump administration, is certainly keen to fix the problems that contributed to the early departure of her predecessor, Brazil's Robert Azevedo. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text" on the issue of an IP waiver for COVID vaccines, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, has said. Dursun Aydemir—Anadolu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Earlier this week, when the U.S. and EU agreed a five-year ceasefire in a long-running dispute over Boeing and Airbus aircraft subsidies, Okonjo-Iweala tweeted: "With political will, we can solve even the most intractable problems." However, Mercurio is skeptical about her stewardship having much of an effect on the WTO's reform process. "Upon taking over she stated it was time for delegations to speak to each other and not simply past each other, but at the recent General Counsel meeting delegations simply read prepared statements in what some have described as the worst meeting ever," he says. "On the other hand, Ngozi is very much someone who will actively seek solutions to problems, and in this way different to her predecessor. If the role of mediator is welcomed, she could have an impact not in starting discussions but in getting deals over the finish line." No alt causes – how the WTO acts now with Covid will shape its role in the international economy for decades to come. Evenett and Baldwin 20. (Simon J. Evenett is Professor of International Trade and Economic Development at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Co-Director of the CEPR Programme in International Trade and Regional Economics. Richard E. Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. “Revitalising multilateral trade cooperation: Why? Why Now? And How?” November 10, 2020. https://voxeu.org/content/revitalising-multilateralism-pragmatic-ideas-new-wto-director-general TDI Purposeful, pragmatic steps towards noble goals Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that tireless campaigner against Apartheid, once remarked that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time”. After a decade of drift and backsliding, the task of revitalising multilateral trade cooperation may seem daunting. It may seem even more so after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant slump in world trade. Yet, in the same emergency lies the seeds of revival – especially, if trade diplomats can demonstrate the relevance of the WTO to national governments fighting this pandemic – ideally through an accord that eases the cross-border shipment of needed medical goods and medicines. Step by pragmatic step, the WTO can regain its centrality in the world trading system. Ultimately, the pandemic affords the opportunity to reframe discussions on multilateral trade cooperation away from the stalemate, frustration of recent years between governments, and the Uruguay Round mindset that ran into diminishing returns years ago. Rather, discussions between governments need to draw lessons from the second global economic shock in 15 years so as to rebuild a system of global trade arrangements capable of better tackling systemic crises and, more importantly, better able to contribute to the growing number of first-order challenges facing societies in the 21st century. Doing so will require revisiting the very purpose of the WTO. Specifically, action now over Covid creates goodwill to establish global trade as a norm and preserve the relevance of the trading system post-Covid. González 20. (Anabel Gonzalez is a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and former Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica “Revitalising multilateral trade cooperation: Why? Why Now? And How?” November 10, 2020. https://voxeu.org/content/revitalising-multilateralism-pragmatic-ideas-new-wto-director-general TDI EXTRAORDINARY TIMES DEMAND EXTRAORDINARY ACTION As of 2 November 2020, there are 46.9 million COVID-19 cases across all regions, with the number of deaths exceeding 1.2 million, and rising.2 The economic and social impacts of the pandemic and its containment measures are not less daunting. Global growth is estimated at -4.9 in 2020, with over 95 of countries projected to have negative per capita income growth (IMF 2020). Trade volumes are expected to decrease by between 13 and 32 from last year,3 while foreign direct investment flows could plunge by up to 40 (UNCTAD 2020). Is it estimated that the equivalent of 555 million jobs have been lost in the first half of this year (ILO 2020), which in turn could push up to 100 million more people into extreme poverty and would almost double the number of persons suffering from acute hunger (FAO 2020). While there is some evidence that goods trade may be rebounding and that the worst-case trade scenario projected in April could be averted (CPB 2020, WTO 2020a), the recovery from the deepest global recession since World War II will depend on the sustained and effective containment of the virus and the quality of government policies. The World Bank/IMF Development Committee warned that the pandemic has the potential to erase development gains for many countries (World Bank 2020a). Some consequences may also be long-lasting, such as lower investment, erosion of human capital, and a retreat from global trade and supply linkages (World Bank 2020b). It is no understatement to say these are extraordinary times. In many countries, governments are providing significant levels of fiscal support to try to stabilise their economies, sustain companies and minimise the impact on workers; in many others, limited fiscal space and informality constraint governments’ capacity to mitigate the damage. For advanced and developing economies alike, trade is a powerful, cost-effective tool to alleviate the devastating effects of COVID-19 on the health and economic fronts. And yet, protectionism is gaining an upper hand, deepening some of pre-pandemic confrontations that were already threatening the global economy. The short-term response to the virus and longer-term growth prospects depend on strong multilateral cooperation to scale back obstacles to trade and investment, increase business certainty and leverage opportunities which the pandemic has accelerated in areas like the digital economy. It is also needed to preserve stable and coordinated international relations to avoid that heavy threats implicit in the pandemic could result in catastrophic disorders or conflicts (Jean 2020). But it will not happen automatically. Unless governments accelerate their efforts to collaborate, growing protectionism and increased distortions to global value chains (GVCs) risk being a by-product of the virus, at the same time further exacerbating its negative implications. This demands extraordinary action. This chapter addresses the question of what role for trade ministers at the WTO in times of crises with a view to activating global cooperation to overcome COVID-19. In addition to the introductory section, the second section explores the need to reactivate the WTO to underpin collaboration among governments, the third section argues that trade ministers should call the shots during crisis, the fourth section suggests eight actions for ministers to rein in protectionism and mitigate further damage, the fifth section refers to the mechanics on how and when to do it, and a final section offers concluding remarks. REACTIVATE THE WTO Trade needs to be part of the response to COVID-19 and its upshots, and countries cannot afford the WTO, hobbled as it has been lately, to muddle through. Moreover, as the world confronts more frequent and severe profound shocks such as financial crises, terrorism, extreme weather and pandemics (McKinsey Global Institute 2020), the WTO needs to step up its role during systemic crises. The fact that the organisation has been faltering, that there is a leadership vacuum and that distrust runs high among major traders will not make it any easier. Exacerbated tensions related to the pandemic can only add to the feeling that WTO rules have been conceived for a very different context, increasing the risk of a loss of legitimacy (Jean 2020). This is not about a major reset of the WTO. It is about (re)activating the organisation to serve its members as they combat the devastating impact of the pandemic and the global recession. The WTO needs broader reform, in particular to address structural changes in the global economy. While extremely important, this discussion should not hamper the ability of the WTO to deliver at times of systemic crisis. Moreover, should the WTO – or more accurately, its members – demonstrate they can actually rise to the occasion in the context of COVID-19, they will also contribute to increasing trust levels on the ability of the organisation to produce results. The starting point is a shift in mindset: governments need to understand that international trade is not a problem in the crisis, but rather a core element of the solution (Baldwin and Evenett 2020). Take the shortages of medical supplies. There are three methods of assuring supply: stockpiling, investments in manufacturing capacity and trade. Of these options, relying on international trade is the most efficient and economic choice, provided the WTO can help assure security of this method of supply (Wolff 2020a). To be sure, many nations have taken unilateral steps to facilitate trade, especially in medical supplies and medicines. The Global Trade Alert reports that while 91 jurisdictions have adopted a total of 202 export controls on these goods since the beginning of 2020, 106 jurisdictions have executed 229 import policy reforms on these goods over the same period.4 After initial border closures, some neighbouring countries are beginning to facilitate the cross-border flow of goods. At the regional level and among subsets of countries, governments have issued different statements to keep trade lanes open and supply chains moving (see Table A1 in the Annex). After a tepid declaration from G20 leaders, trade ministers reaffirmed their determination to cooperate and coordinate to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on trade and investment and to lay a solid foundation for a global economic recovery. They also endorsed a set of short-term collective actions on trade regulation, trade facilitation, transparency, operation of logistics networks and support for small enterprises, and a group of longer-term actions on WTO reform, GVC resilience and investment; monitoring of implementation was left to senior officials (G20 2020). These actions are positive and reflect the political will of governments to collaborate to some extent – even if they have not fully countered the flurry of barriers and restrictions surrounding trade in critical medical gear. They are no substitute for trade cooperation at the global level, either. In the case of medical products, for example, the EU, the US and China account for almost three-quarters of world exports (WTO 2020b); cooperation initiatives that do not include these members would fall short on impact. The venue for cooperation should be global and open to all, even if not all 164 WTO members opt to engage in all initiatives. TRADE MINISTERS SHOULD CALL THE SHOTS DURING CRISES Challenges notwithstanding, governments need to act now to empower the WTO to play an active part in coordinating the response to the pandemic. The WTO is more than an organisation immersed in myriad drama on the shores of Lake Geneva; it is a solid framework for global trade cooperation. It is in countries’ interest to preserve the relevance of the WTO; its role can be critical in helping members help themselves. In a member-driven organisation such as the WTO, the role of the Director-General and the Secretariat is important and can and should be enhanced, for example with greater power of initiative and strengthened monitoring and analytics capabilities. The WTO dedicated page on the pandemic is a step in the right direction.5 But the ultimate responsibility to provide direction and act rests with governments. The WTO is nothing more and nothing less than the collectivity of its members (Steger 2020), a point that is frequently forgotten in the public discourse. Without strong leadership, frequent engagement and serious interest among members in addressing its challenges, the WTO itself cannot deliver results (Cutler 2020). Paraphrasing VanGrasstek (2013), the multilateral trading system receives its inspiration from economists and is shaped primarily by lawyers, but it can only operate within the limits set by politicians. Post Covid WTO legitimacy and credibility re necessary to prevent a downward spiral of protectionism. Solís 20. (Mireya Solís is director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. “The post COVID-19 world: Economic nationalism triumphant?” July 10, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/07/10/the-post-covid-19-world-economic-nationalism-triumphant/ TDI The damage caused by the worst global health crisis in a century is vast. The new coronavirus has traveled far and fast, infecting more than 8.7 million people and killing more than 460,000. One after another, economies have gone into lockdown to slow down the spread of the disease. The combined supply and demand shocks have ravaged the world economy with the most severe downturn since the Great Depression; anticipated drops to international trade and investment flows of 30 and 40, respectively; and unemployment spikes in many countries. The pandemic has cost lives and livelihoods and has erased the chances of returning to the status quo ante, but it has also brought little clarity regarding what kind of international order it will usher in. Is the future one of deglobalization, decoupling, and reshoring of economic activity? The pandemic hit an already wounded multilateral trading system. The chances that the World Trade Organization (WTO) can deliver a multilateral round of trade negotiations to slash tariffs across the board and update the trade and investment rulebook are nil. But the WTO has also lost its central role as arbiter of trade disputes among its members. In December 2019, the Appellate Body ceased to function due to the U.S. block of new appointments, citing judicial overreach. At a time of rising protectionism, the erosion of a rules-based mechanism to adjudicate disputes bodes ill. Longstanding challenges to the WTO have been exacerbated by an abdication of leadership from the great powers to ensure its survival. China has been the godchild of globalization, leveraging its accession to the WTO to become workshop for the world and a huge domestic market coveted by foreign firms. But China lost its appetite for economic reform, reinvesting on a state capitalism model that imposes heavy costs on other nations. Unchecked subsidies and privileges awarded to its state-owned enterprises, insufficient protection of intellectual property, foreign investment restrictions, forced technology transfers, and cyber protectionism all make the Chinese government’s self-proclamation as champion of global free trade ring hollow. The Trump administration judges the WTO incapable of tackling the China challenge, but instead of creating coalitions of like-minded countries to bring about effective multilateral trade governance, it appears determined to further harm cripple the international organization. It has offered no blueprint to fix the dispute settlement mechanism, has abused the national security exemption to raise tariffs against allies, and is gearing up for its most fundamental assault to date on the WTO: a tariff reset through which the U.S. may unilaterally abandon its commitments on bound tariffs and apply larger duties to force other countries to open their markets. Trade spats as other countries retaliate in kind is a more likely result. Tariff wars and the battle for technology supremacy have come to define U.S.-China great power competition. After a grueling trade conflict, the United States and China reached a limited trade agreement in January 2020. The deal marked a pause in the tariff war and addressed some non-tariff barriers on foreign direct investment and intellectual property; but it left intact the core of Chinese industrial policy (public subsidies and state-owned enterprises) and retained U.S. duties on $360 billion worth of Chinese products. China’s massive purchase commitments ($200 billion) were quickly rendered unattainable by the severe economic downturn in China due to COVID-19. In fighting for the new economic order, setting standards on cutting-edge technologies will be at the forefront. China is using all the levers of industrial policy to gain technological primacy in areas like AI and quantum computing. Telecom and the battle over 5G offer a preview of quarrels to come. Deeply concerned with the cybersecurity risks that Chinese telecom giants like Huawei pose, the U.S. government placed the company on its Entity List, banning American exports without a license. It has since tightened the restrictions by barring foreign companies from supplying Huawei with products manufactured with American equipment and technology. National security concerns are increasingly encroaching on existing webs of economic interdependence. Wary of China’s acquisition of critical technology, countries like the United States, Australia, and Japan have tightened their screening of foreign direct investment. The pandemic has only exacerbated concerns that weakened companies in strategic sectors are at risk of foreign takeover. COVID-19’s impact on the international trading system is twofold. It has reinforced existing trends such as the deceleration and now drop in the volume of international trade, the rise of economic security as governments expand their toolkit to restrict trade and investment flows, and it has laid bare the fallout in U.S.-China relations. But the pandemic also brought new challenges that exposed the extent to which trade cooperation is in short supply. Export protectionism has risen in prominence with national restrictions on shipments of essential medical supplies and personal protective equipment. The WTO allows for such curbs for public health purposes – provided the measures are temporary and transparent. Few countries, however, have bothered to comply with their notification commitments. The blow comes at a time when the WTO is adrift with the decision of Director General Roberto Azevedo to step down early, opening the search for new leadership in a climate of divisiveness. Graph detailing the number of countries that imposed export restrictions on various categories of medical supplies and devices in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Are we on the eve of a renationalized world economy? That is the aspiration of several American and European public officials who fault extended global supply chains and overdependence on China for the current mishaps in tackling the pandemic. But the view that economic nationalism and reshoring of manufacturing is a fail-safe path to security and prosperity is wrong. For one, it skirts the responsibility of governments to properly stockpile essential medical supplies. Furthermore, the export curbs will be counterproductive, eliminating incentives for producers to expand capacity and increasing the cost of much needed medicines and medical devices. If the recent lockdowns have taught us anything, it is that exclusive reliance on the domestic market is too risky. Diversification of supply, redundancies in the manufacturing chain, and stockpiling programs are better alternatives. In this endeavor, global supply chains are part of the solution, not the problem. COVID-19 will not produce an exodus of foreign companies from the Chinese market. Recent surveys of American companies with operations in China show that most firms intend to stay put. A February survey of Japanese companies conducted by Tokyo Shoko Research shows that only a fraction (4) are considering exit from China. Therefore, the Japanese government’s $2.2 billion fund to restructure supply chains should be understood as risk management, not decoupling. When international companies map out their business strategies, they must factor in heightened risks – protectionism, national security controls, and economic lockdowns. Hence, efforts by middle powers to offer an interim arbitration mechanism at the WTO to handle trade disputes and to commit to maintaining open supply chains in essential medical goods are the right antidote to rising economic nationalism. As a staunch supporter of rules-based trade and with its decision to forego export protectionism in the current crisis, Japan has much to contribute to these efforts. Trade solves great power competition – regionalism causes militarized crises. Lake 18. (David Lake is a Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. "Economic Openness and Great Power Competition: Lessons for China and the United States,” April 30, 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3171196/ TDI I develop two central arguments. First, historically, great power competition has been driven primarily by exclusion or fears of exclusion from each power’s international economic zone, including its domestic market. Great powers in the past have often used their international influence to build zones in which subordinate polities – whether these be colonies or simply states within a sphere of influence – are integrated into their economies. These economic zones, in turn, are typically biased in favor of the great power’s firms and investors, with the effect of excluding (in whole or part) the economic agents of other great powers. These other great powers, in response, are then compelled to develop or expand their own exclusive economic zones. The “race” for economic privilege can quickly divide the world up into economic blocs. Like the security dilemma, great powers need not actually exclude one another from their zones; the fear of exclusion alone is enough to ignite the process of division. The race for privilege then draws great powers into over-expanding into unprofitable regions and, more important, militarized competition. Economic and military competition are thus linked, with the former usually driving the latter. The most significant military crises have, historically, been over where to draw the boundaries between economic zones and subsequent challenges to those boundaries. Economic closure and fear of closure have been consistent sources of great power conflict in the past – and possibly will be in the future. The major exception to this trend was the peaceful transfer of dominance in Latin America from Britain to the United States in the late nineteenth century. This suggests that economic closure and great power competition is not inevitable, but a choice of the great powers themselves. Second, this international competition is driven, in turn, by domestic, rent-seeking groups and their economic interests. In all countries, scarce factors of production, import competing sectors, and domestically-oriented firms have concentrated and intense preferences for market restricting policies, including tariffs and the formation of exclusive economic zones. Consumers and free trade-oriented groups have diffuse preferences for market enhancing policies, and thus tend to lose at the ballot box and in the making of national policy. This inequality in preference intensity does not mean protectionists always win; after 1934, the United States insulated itself by shifting authority to the executive and negotiating reductions through broad, multi-product international agreements.8 Yet, as the recent return to economic nationalism of the Trump administration suggests, protectionism often wins out. Rent-seeking is a central tendency, not an inevitable success. Contemporary great power relations are at a critical juncture. As China’s influence expands, the role of special economic interests in China is especially worrisome. In pursuit of stability, political support, or private gains, the government will always be tempted to create economic zones that favor its nationals. In this way, China will be no different than the majority of great powers before it. But, given the expansive role of the state in the Chinese economy, especially its backing of outward foreign investments by its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and the close ties between business elites and its authoritarian political leaders, however, it will be even harder for China to resist biasing any future economic zone to benefit its own firms. Although China has gained greatly from economic openness, its domestic political system will be prone to rent-seeking demands by important constituents in areas of future influence. Critically, the United States is also moving toward economic closure with the election of President Trump on a platform of economic nationalism. Demands for protection against Chinese goods have been growing over time.9 The “China shock” that followed Beijing’s joining the World Trade Organization was a huge disruption to the international division of labor, U.S. comparative advantage, and especially U.S. industry.10 The Trans-Pacific Partnership, though now defunct, was “marketed” by President Barak Obama as a means of “containing” China, both economically and militarily, but was opposed by virtually all of the candidates in the 2016 presidential election for its trade-enhancing potential. President Trump has already signaled a much more hostile and protectionist stance toward China – as well as calling for the repeal of NAFTA and even questioning the utility of the European Union. Not only has he imposed tariffs on washing machines, solar panels, steel and aluminum, dangerously declaring the latter two issues of national security, he is making exceptions on these tariffs for friends and allies. 11 Implicitly targeting China, these protectionist moves by the administration risk creating preferential trading blocs not seen since the 1930s. He has also now proposed punitive tariffs on over $60 billions of imports from China into the United States.12 Acknowledging his inconsistencies on many policy issues, Trump’s economic nationalism has remained the core of his political agenda. The threat to the liberal international economy is not only that China might seek an economic bloc in the future, but that the United States itself is turning more exclusionary. For each great power to fear that the other might seek to exclude it from its economic zone is not unreasonable. If so, great power competition could break out in the twenty-first century not because of bipolarity or any inevitable tendency toward conflict, but because neither great power can control its own protectionist forces nor signal to the other that it would not exclude it from its economic zone. The British-U.S. case, again, suggests that exclusion and competition are not inevitable, but the current danger of economic closure is real and increasing. This article is synthetic in its theory and merely suggestive in its use of historical evidence. The theory aims to integrate current work on political economy and national security, not to develop a completely original take on this relationship. In turn, rather than testing the theory in any rigorous sense or delving into particular cases to show the theoretical mechanisms at work, so to speak, it surveys selected historical episodes to illustrate central tendencies. It is the recurring pattern across multiple cases that suggests why we should worry today. The remainder of this essay is divided in three primary sections. Section I briefly outlines the analytics of economic openness and great power competition. Section II focuses on historical instances of great power competition, highlighting the role of economic openness as a central cleavage in international politics. Section III examines contemporary policies in and between China and the United States. The conclusion suggests ways that the potential for conflict may be mitigated. The Open Economy Politics of Great Power Competition All states have a tendency towards protectionism at home and exclusive economic zones abroad. A tendency, though, is not an inevitability. The pursuit of protection and economic zones by domestic interests is conditioned by the political coalition in power at any given time and institutions that aggregate and bias the articulation of social groups. 13 The tendency is also influenced, however, by the actions of other countries. Protectionism can sour great power relations, but it is the desire for exclusive economic zones that drives great power competition and, given the possibility of coercion, influences grand strategy. Thus, the theory sketched here integrates insights from international political economy (see below), the literature on domestic politics and grand strategy,14 and systemic theories of international relations.15 Independently, WTO cred solves nuclear war – allows an off-track for nuclear weapons. Hamann 09. (Georgia Hamann is a J.D. Candidate, Vanderbilt University Law School, “Replacing Slingshots with Swords: Implications of the Antigua-Gambling 22.6 Panel Report for Developing Countries and the World Trading System,” 2009. TDI Voluntary compliance with WTO rules and procedures is of the utmost importance to the international trading system.'0 0 Given the increasingly globalized market, the coming years will see an increase in the importance of the WTO as a cohesive force and arbiter of disputes that likely will become more frequent and injurious. 01' The work of the WTO cannot be overstated in a nuclear-armed world, as the body continues to promote respect and even amity among nations with opposing philosophical goals or modes of governance. 10 2 Demagogues in the Unites States may decry the rise of China as a geopolitical threat, 0 3 and extremists in Russia may play dangerous games of brinksmanship with other great powers, but trade keeps politicians' fingers off "the button. ' 10 4 The WTO offers an astounding rate of compliance for an organization with no standing army and no real power to enforce its decisions, suggesting that governments recognize the value of maintaining the international construct of the WTO. 105 In order to promote voluntary compliance, the WTO must maintain a high level of credibility. 106 Nations must perceive the WTO as the most reasonable option for dispute resolution or fear that the WTO wields enough influence to enforce sanctions. 10 7 The arbitrators charged with performing the substantive work of the WTO by negotiating, compromising, and issuing judgments are keenly aware of the responsibility they have to uphold the organization's credibility. 108 1AC – Developing Economies Contention 3 is Developing Economies.
Scenario 1 is India. India is in crisis – the recent COVID surge is fundamentally different from that of the past. Khullar 21. (Dhruv Khullar is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where he writes primarily about medicine, health care, and politics. He is also a practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College) “India’s Crisis Marks a New Phase in the Pandemic,” The New Yorker, May 13, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/indias-crisis-marks-a-new-phase-in-the-pandemic TDI Laxminarayan’s walks have changed in recent weeks. Coronavirus deaths in India have skyrocketed, and a frightening atmosphere has descended. New Delhi is roughly as dense as New York City, with some thirty thousand residents per square mile. But now Laxminarayan passes just a few scattered people; almost everyone stays inside if they can, venturing out only in search of food, medication, or medical care. Before the surge, mask-wearing had declined, but now everyone’s face is covered again. “You need public-health enforcement when the pandemic is invisible,” Laxminarayan told me. “Now fear is the dominant force changing people’s behavior.” Government statistics indicate that the virus is newly infecting millions of Indians each week, and that some twenty thousand or thirty thousand people are dying weekly. But most experts, including Laxminarayan, believe that those numbers capture a fraction of the true covid-19 toll. “It’s a war zone,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s worse than what you’re reading in the papers or seeing on TV. Whatever the numbers are, they don’t tell the full story. The human toll is devastating.” The current surge differs fundamentally from India’s experience last year. “This is truly a national wave,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s not urban. It’s not rural. It’s not north or south. It’s everywhere.” He went on, “During the first wave, the poor suffered the bulk of the health and economic toll. Now everyone is affected. I personally don’t know a single family that doesn’t have covid in it right now. I don’t mean in their extended family. I mean in their nuclear family.” In late April, after his dentist’s parents both died and after a colleague fell ill and couldn’t get oxygen, Laxminarayan decided to shift from covid research to covid relief. He and his team at C.D.D.E.P. decided to focus on India’s oxygen-supply problem, which has fundamentally limited the nation’s hospital capacity. They launched an initiative called OxygenForIndia, raising eight and a half million dollars in two weeks; with the help of corporate partners, among them Verizon Media, Logitech, and UiPath, they have secured more than two thousand oxygen concentrators—portable devices that remove nitrogen from the air to produce purified oxygen—and thirty thousand cylinders to store gaseous oxygen. By some estimates, those cylinder donations add up to more gaseous oxygen than India has received through foreign aid to date. “Right now, no one wants to leave a hospital bed they’re in,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s the only place they know perhaps they can get oxygen. We want to assure people they will have oxygen at home, so that hospital capacity is freed up for the sickest patients.” Laxminarayan thinks that bolstering critical-care capacity is a long-term proposition—“You can’t make doctors and nurses overnight”—and that India is better served today by making more efficient use of its existing infrastructure. OxygenForIndia has already started delivering oxygen to people’s homes, but the organization’s larger goal is to partner with hospitals in urban areas: Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata, among others. Doctors, along with algorithms, will triage patients upon presentation or as they improve before discharge. Those deemed safe to go home with supportive oxygen will be given a Q.R. code to be scanned at a nearby warehouse, where they can collect an oxygen cylinder or concentrator to keep as long as they need. (Cylinders must be refilled at the warehouse each day; concentrators can be used continuously at home.) “I’m hoping this is a scalable model that can be used by other countries when they face their big covid wave,” Laxminarayan said. “Because there’s no reason to believe they won’t.” The air around us, which contains twenty-one-per-cent oxygen, must be concentrated and purified to produce the medical-grade gas that people need when the coronavirus besieges their lungs. The most efficient way to accomplish this—the default in wealthy countries—is for factories to produce liquid oxygen, which tanker trucks then deliver to hospitals, where it can be stored in large containers and then piped into patients’ rooms. Many hospitals in poor countries, however, aren’t equipped to store liquid oxygen, and must rely on an external supply. If a hospital is in a remote location, this can be a serious logistical challenge. Another option is to install on-site plants that extract oxygen from the air. These systems, which use a technology known as pressure swing adsorption, or P.S.A., are expensive, and require maintenance. In October, the Indian government announced plans to build a hundred and sixty-two such plants around the country; thus far, thirty-three have been installed. Laxminarayan’s organization also hopes to create dozens of oxygen-generation plants at Indian hospitals. For now, many hospitals rely on simpler, decentralized technology, which comes with disadvantages: the gaseous oxygen contained in cylinders can cost ten times as much as its liquid equivalent, and oxygen concentrators are usually intended for only one or a few patients at a time. Whatever the process, it’s clear that too many Indians are going without the oxygen they need. Since this February, India’s oxygen requirements have increased fifteenfold; it now needs nearly three times as much medical-grade oxygen as it did during the height of its first wave. Some hospitals have run out of oxygen, and others are on the precipice. Hospitals won’t admit patients whom they can’t treat; many Indians therefore suffer a suffocating illness at home. The government is doing what it can: granting oxygen-transport vehicles an ambulance-like status on roads; leveraging the national railway service to move tankers around the country; enlisting the air force to transport empty containers back to factories to be refilled. On Wednesday, India’s Supreme Court ordered the federal government to present a more comprehensive plan to meet New Delhi’s oxygen needs. Meanwhile, foreign governments and international aid organizations are sending ventilators, concentrators, and cylinders. Still, each day brings fresh reports of people dying because they can’t get oxygen. (The shortage is likely to spread: globally, the deficit of medical oxygen—the gap between what’s needed and what’s being produced—has tripled in recent months, in part owing to the unmet need in India but also because of growing demand in South America and the Middle East.) Technically, Indians have access to universal health coverage: the country’s constitution guarantees everyone a “right to life,” and people can receive care at government facilities free of charge. But, over decades, low levels of public financing have led to poor quality and severe staff and supply shortages. India’s federal government spends around one per cent of G.D.P. on health care—far less than most large economies. Moreover, states share responsibility with the federal government for health-care delivery, and that has resulted in a large variation in funding and quality. Many Indians therefore opt to pay for private health care, if they can afford it, and the private sector now provides most care in India, even though commercial health insurance is available to only a fraction of the population and out-of-pocket costs can be devastating. In 2018, the central government launched a major effort aimed at insuring that low-income people could receive care at private facilities. But relatively few Indians have a regular place of care where they can receive ongoing management of their medical conditions or outpatient testing and treatment for covid-19. The coronavirus has severely strained India’s critical-care capacity, which was lacking even before the pandemic: during normal times, the country has around fifteen per cent of the critical-care specialists it needs. More generally, India has nine doctors for every ten thousand people—about half the global average, and only a third as many as the U.S. There’s also the issue of maldistribution: two-thirds of India’s population lives in rural areas, where only twenty per cent of the nation’s doctors work. (Shortages of nurses and other clinicians can be even worse.) VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER The Pandemic Through the Eyes of a Three-Year-Old Still, India’s physician-to-patient ratio is higher than that of Bangladesh, Nepal, or any nation in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the globe’s myriad health-care systems share the fundamental constraints that have transformed India’s second wave into a humanitarian crisis—including an oxygen-delivery infrastructure that is unable to meet the demands of a vast viral surge. Many Indians have experienced the current surge as a surprise. But the forces driving it are fundamentally familiar. “Society opened up without restraint,” K. Srinath Reddy, the president of the Public Health Foundation of India and the former chair of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, told me. “It was widely perceived that the pandemic is behind us, that we are unlikely to have a second wave. We didn’t just return to 2019—we entered 2021 with an extra degree of exuberance.” Politicians encouraged people to gather at massive rallies; cricket stadiums filled with fans; malls opened to shoppers and weddings welcomed guests. The government sanctioned the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious festival, and millions of people made the pilgrimage to Haridwar, in the northern state of Uttarakhand, to wash in the River Ganges. The festival started on April 1st and continued for nearly three weeks before the coronavirus toll became unbearable and undeniable. Afterward, people carried the virus back to far-flung cities and villages. “The euphoria of putting the pandemic behind us was a widely prevalent emotion, and it suited everyone,” Reddy said. “Industry wanted to get back to full production. Small traders wanted to get back to business. Ordinary citizens wanted to get back to their lives.” Many countries have engaged in wishful thinking during the pandemic; all have struggled to fight the virus while avoiding economic collapse. The Indian experience speaks specifically to the problem of endurance, and raises the question of how long low- and middle-income countries can maintain pandemic protocols absent a clear time line for widespread vaccination. The U.S. and much of Europe have navigated the pandemic while looking forward to early and reliable access to vaccines; if we didn’t have a firm end date, we at least knew that an end was approaching. Under such conditions, politicians and the public can examine, debate, and accept the costs of restrictions. But that calculus is harder, perhaps impossible, without some assurance that pandemic life is temporary. ADVERTISEMENT The global vaccination effort has faltered, with poor countries receiving a fraction of the vaccines they had expected. covax, the world’s primary initiative to promote vaccine equity, had planned to deliver two billion doses in 2021; so far, it’s sent out about fifty million. Less than half of one per cent of all covid-19 vaccines have been administered in poor nations. “We’re now in this very strange situation where we’re talking about fourteen-year-olds in America getting vaccinated, while older people around the world remain vulnerable and entire countries are devastated,” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s public-health school, told me. “It’s a moral issue, but it’s also an epidemiological one. We’re placing everyone at risk when we let the virus run rampant. It creates a huge substrate for new variants. We need to quadruple our efforts to get the world vaccinated. That has to be the No. 1 priority for the Biden Administration going forward.” The U.S. has committed four billion dollars to covax, which still faces a funding shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. Last week, the Biden Administration also announced its support for waiving intellectual-property protections for covid-19 vaccines. The proposed waiver—it must be approved by the World Trade Organization—has been hailed by many public-health practitioners; the director-general of the W.H.O., Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called Biden’s support for the proposal “a monumental moment” in the fight against the pandemic. But others have sounded a cautionary note, raising the possibility that the spectre of patent waivers will disincentivize companies from investing in vaccine and drug development in the future. “I wonder whether we want to send potential firms the message that the larger the health crisis, the less we will respect and protect your I.P.,” Craig Garthwaite, a professor at Northwestern University, tweeted, after the Biden Administration’s announcement. “That’s a great system if you think this is the last pandemic we’ll face.” That causes Indo-Pak conflict escalation. Somos 20. Christy Somos is a CTVNews.ca Writer) “COVID-19 has escalated armed conflict in India, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and the Philippines, study finds,” CTV News, December 17, 2020. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/covid-19-has-escalated-armed-conflict-in-india-pakistan-iraq-libya-and-the-philippines-study-finds-1.5236738 TDI INDIA India saw a rise in armed conflict during the study period, with violent clashes in the Kashmir region between Kashmiri separatists facing off against the Indian military, as well as conflicts between Pakistan and India. “So what mostly drove the increase in conflict intensity…were basically due to two factors,” Ide said. “The first being that there is some evidence that Pakistan sponsors or supports these insurgents in Kashmir, to encourage them to increase their attacks on Indian forces because they perceived them to be weak and struggling with the pandemic.” The second factor, Ide explained, was that while Indian government enacted a “pretty comprehensive lockdown in Kashmir, and sealing it way from international media attention…launched more intense counter-insurgency efforts and…cracked down on any pro-Pakistani sympathy expressions.” IRAQ Iraq had an increase in armed conflict, but Ide noted that the overall intensity did not change that much – a “very slight upward trend” in scale that was not linear. What did increase were attacks by ISIS in April, May, and June. “The Iraqi government was really in trouble,” he said. “They had enormous economic loss, they had to go head-to-head and use troops and funds to combat the pandemic – the international coalition supporting the government partially withdrew troops or stopped their activities.” “The Iraqi government was really in a position of weakness.” Ide said the Islamic State exploited the pandemic and the thin resources at hand to the government to expand territorial control, conquer new areas and to stage more attacks. LIBYA The civil war in Libya between the Government of National Accord’s (GNA) forces and the Libyan National Army escalated during the study period, after a ceasefire brokered in January was broken, Ide said. “As soon as international attention shifted to the pandemic…they really escalated the conflict, tried to make gains while hoping the other side is weakened because of the pandemic, hoping to score an easy military victory” Ide said. “It didn’t happen.” The UN Security Council noted in a May report that the pandemic was bolstering the 15-month conflict, citing the history of more than 850 broken ceasefire agreements and “a tide of civilian deaths” on top of a worsening outbreak. PAKISTAN The ongoing conflict with India saw a rise in armed conflict in Pakistan during the study period – which were unrelated to the pandemic, but also a rise in Taliban-affiliated groups and anti-government sentiments due to pandemic restrictions, Ide said. “There were a lot of anti-government grievances,” Ide said. “There were restrictions on religious gatherings, which religious groups did not like, and there were some negative economic impacts which affected the local people.” Ide said those two factors could have been exploited by the Taliban in a quest to recruit more followers. Later in the study period, a swath Pakistani government officials were struck with COVID-19, leaving the country with a leadership crisis, which saw an increase of attacks by Taliban groups in May. Extinction. Roblin 21. (Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China, "If the Next India-Pakistan War Goes Nuclear, It Will Destroy the World," The National Interest, March 26, 2021. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/if-next-india-pakistan-war-goes-nuclear-it-will-destroy-world-181134 TDI Here's What You Need to Remember: India and Pakistan account for over one-fifth world’s population, and therefore a significant share of economic activity. Should their major cities become irradiated ruins with their populations decimated, a tremendous disruption would surely result. Between February 26 and 27 in 2019, Indian and Pakistani warplanes launched strikes on each other’s territory and engaged in aerial combat for the first time since 1971. Pakistan ominously hinted it was convening its National Command Authority, the institution which can authorize a nuclear strike. The two states, which have retained an adversarial relationship since their founding in 1947, between them deploy nuclear warheads that can be delivered by land, air and sea. However, those weapons are inferior in number and yield to the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by Russia and the United States, which include megaton-class weapons that can wipe out a metropolis in a single blast. Some commenters have callously suggested that means a “limited regional nuclear war” would remain an Indian and Pakistani problem. People find it difficult to assess the risk of rare but catastrophic events; after all, a full-scale nuclear war has never occurred before, though it has come close to happening. Such assessments are not only shockingly callous but shortsighted. In fact, several studies have modeled the global impact of a “limited” ten-day nuclear war in which India and Pakistan each exchange fifty 15-kiloton nuclear bombs equivalent in yield to the Little Boy uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Their findings concluded that spillover would in no way be “limited,” directly impacting people across the globe that would struggle to locate Kashmir on a map. And those results are merely a conservative baseline, as India and Pakistan are estimated to possess over 260 warheads. Some likely have yields exceeding 15-kilotons, which is relatively small compared to modern strategic warheads. Casualties Recurring terrorist attacks by Pakistan-sponsored militant groups over the status of India’s Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state have repeatedly led to threats of a conventional military retaliation by New Delhi. Pakistan, in turn, maintains it may use nuclear weapons as a first-strike weapon to counter-balance India’s superior conventional forces. Triggers could involve the destruction of a large part of Pakistan’s military or penetration by Indian forces deep into Pakistani territory. Islamabad also claims it might authorize a strike in event of a damaging Indian blockade or political destabilization instigated by India. India’s official policy is that it will never be first to strike with nuclear weapons—but that once any nukes are used against it, New Dehli will unleash an all-out retaliation. The Little Boy bomb alone killed around 100,000 Japanese—between 30 to 40 percent of Hiroshima’s population—and destroyed 69 percent of the buildings in the city. But Pakistan and India host some of the most populous and densely populated cities on the planet, with population densities of Calcutta, Karachi and Mumbai at or exceeding 65,000 people per square mile. Thus, even low-yield bombs could cause tremendous casualties. A 2014 study estimates that the immediate effects of the bombs—the fireball, over-pressure wave, radiation burns etc.—would kill twenty million people. An earlier study estimated a hundred 15-kiloton nuclear detonations could kill twenty-six million in India and eighteen million in Pakistan—and concluded that escalating to using 100-kiloton warheads, which have greater blast radius and overpressure waves that can shatter hardened structures, would multiply death tolls four-fold. Moreover, these projected body counts omit the secondary effects of nuclear blasts. Many survivors of the initial explosion would suffer slow, lingering deaths due to radiation exposure. The collapse of healthcare, transport, sanitation, water and economic infrastructure would also claim many more lives. A nuclear blast could also trigger a deadly firestorm. For instance, a firestorm caused by the U.S. napalm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed more people than the Fat Man bomb killed in Nagasaki. Refugee Outflows The civil war in Syria caused over 5.6 million refugees to flee abroad out of a population of 22 million prior to the conflict. Despite relative stability and prosperity of the European nations to which refugees fled, this outflow triggered political backlashes that have rocked virtually every major Western government. Now consider likely population movements in event of a nuclear war between India-Pakistan, which together total over 1.5 billion people. Nuclear bombings—or their even their mere potential—would likely cause many city-dwellers to flee to the countryside to lower their odds of being caught in a nuclear strike. Wealthier citizens, numbering in tens of millions, would use their resources to flee abroad. Should bombs beginning dropping, poorer citizens many begin pouring over land borders such as those with Afghanistan and Iran for Pakistan, and Nepal and Bangladesh for India. These poor states would struggle to supports tens of millions of refugees. China also borders India and Pakistan—but historically Beijing has not welcomed refugees. Some citizens may undertake risky voyages at sea on overloaded boats, setting their sights on South East Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Thousands would surely drown. Many regional governments would turn them back, as they have refugees of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar in the past. Fallout Radioactive fallout would also be disseminated across the globe. The fallout from the Chernobyl explosion, for example, wounds its way westward from Ukraine into Western Europe, exposing 650,000 persons and contaminating 77,000 square miles. The long-term health effects of the exposure could last decades. India and Pakistan’s neighbors would be especially exposed, and most lack healthcare and infrastructure to deal with such a crisis. Nuclear Winter Studies in 2008 and 2014 found that of one hundred bombs that were fifteen-kilotons were used, it would blast five million tons of fine, sooty particles into the stratosphere, where they would spread across the globe, warping global weather patterns for the next twenty-five years. The particles would block out light from the sun, causing surface temperatures to decrease an average of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit across the globe, or 4.5 degrees in North American and Europe. Growing seasons would be shortened by ten to forty days, and certain crops such as Canadian wheat would simply become unviable. Global agricultural yields would fall, leading to rising prices and famine. The particles may also deplete between 30 to 50 percent of the ozone layer, allowing more of the sun’s radiation to penetrate the atmosphere, causing increased sunburns and rates of cancer and killing off sensitive plant-life and marine plankton, with the spillover effect of decimating fishing yields. To be clear, these are outcomes for a “light” nuclear winter scenario, not a full slugging match between the Russian and U.S. arsenals. Global Recession Any one of the factors above would likely suffice to cause a global economic recession. All of them combined would guarantee one. India and Pakistan account for over one-fifth world’s population, and therefore a significant share of economic activity. Should their major cities become irradiated ruins with their populations decimated, a tremendous disruption would surely result. A massive decrease in consumption and production would obviously instigate a long-lasting recessionary cycle, with attendant deprivations and political destabilization slamming developed and less-developed countries alike. Taken together, these outcomes mean even a “limited” India-Pakistan nuclear war would significantly affect every person on the globe, be they a school teacher in Nebraska, a factory-worker in Shaanxi province or a fisherman in Mombasa. Unfortunately, the recent escalation between India and Pakistan is no fluke, but part of a long-simmering pattern likely to continue escalating unless New Delhi and Islamabad work together to change the nature of their relationship. Scenario 2 is South Africa. The third wave of the pandemic is fueling instability in South Africa. Egwu 21. (Patrick Egwu is a Nigerian freelance journalist currently based in Johannesburg, where he is an Open Society Foundations fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand) “South Africa’s Twin Crises Are Feeding Each Other,” Foreign Policy, July 20, 2021. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/20/south-africa-covid-19-struggles-deadly-third-wave-zuma-violence/ TDI South Africa is coping with two crises at once—a political storm caused by the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma, whose followers have caused chaos on the streets, and a deadly new wave of COVID-19 that’s hospitalizing thousands of people a day. On July 3, South Africa hit a record 26,000 cases of COVID-19, one of the highest new daily totals reported since the pandemic started over a year ago. The country has been battling a deadly third wave of the pandemic, following previous peaks during the first and second waves between April and December 2020. As of July 19, South Africa has recorded 2.3 million cases and 67,000 deaths since the pandemic started, according to the country’s Department of Health. On June 27, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the country would move to adjusted alert level 4 of lockdown for 14 days as the country faced a rising number of COVID-19 infections. After the end of the two-week lockdown and with a continuous spike in cases, Ramaphosa addressed the nation again on July 11 and announced an additional 14 days of restrictions. Ramaphosa was facing both the COVID-19 situation and the violence across the country by pro-Zuma supporters.. Banks and government buildings temporarily closed to avoid attacks. On July 12, Ramaphosa addressed the nation over persistent public violence and announced the deployment of soldiers to two provinces—Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, the hometown of Zuma, where the violence started. As of July 13, more than 70 people had been killed and about 1,200 arrested. “This violence may indeed have its roots in the pronouncements and activities of individuals with a political purpose and in expressions of frustration and anger,” Ramaphosa said, but added that no grievance or political cause could justify the violence and destruction. The violence has affected access to health services, with front-line workers unable to reach vaccination stations and pharmacies often shuttered to avoid vandalism and looting. The unemployment and visible inequalities in the country exacerbated the violence. Thousands of South Africans have lost their jobs following lockdown restrictions, and there has been little government support for the economy. The violence created an opportunity to explore illegal options of survival. On top of this, the brutal police enforcement of the lockdown last year has aggravated existing tensions around police brutality, contributing to the unrest. Ramaphosa acknowledged this in his address: “This moment has thrown into stark relief what we already knew: that the level of unemployment, poverty, and inequality in our society is unsustainable.” As in so many other countries, the delta variant of COVID-19 now appears to be dominant, although the government has not published separate statistics for the different variants yet. Hospitals and front-line workers in the country are overwhelmed with the number of patients they are receiving each day. In some provinces, such as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, many hospitals are operating above capacity, with shortage of spaces and oxygen for patients. Front-line health care workers have been hit hard. As of December 2020, over 38,000 health care workers in South Africa had tested positive for the virus, with more than 390 dead, according to data cited by Ramaphosa. Dozens Killed in South Africa Protests COLM QUINN The government is responding by calling for massive recruitment of health volunteers to beef up the staff strength at public hospitals. Earlier on in the pandemic, African countries made some gains against the virus through precautionary measures such as border closures. For instance, in March 2020, South Africa was the first country on the continent to declare a state of national disaster on the pandemic, and stiffer restrictions were announced. But these initial successes are gradually being lost with the new wave of infections and growing death rate. The gradual relaxation of restrictions to save South Africa’s ailing economy, which started last June, has worsened the situation. The World Bank says South Africa is among the most unequal countries in the world—something the pandemic has only inflamed. The unemployment rate in the country stood at 33 percent at the end of March and is highest among youth aged 15 to 24. As the third wave continues to ravage the country, just 4 million people—about 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 60 million—have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Department of Health. COVID is pummeling South Africa’s fragile economy and fueling the worst rioting since 1994. Steinhauser and Parkinson 21. (Gabriele Steinhauser writes about politics and economics in southern Africa and beyond and helps manage The Wall Street Journal's reporters on the continent. Joe Parkinson is the Wall Street Journal’s Africa Bureau Chief, leading a team of correspondents chronicling business, policy and geopolitical trends across the continent. “Third Covid Wave Upends Fragile South Africa, a Warning for Developing World,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-pandemic-south-africa-riots-a-warning-for-developing-world-11626711622 TDI Wave after wave of coronavirus is pummeling South Africa’s fragile economy and its largely unvaccinated population, creating a spiral of death, lockdowns and anger that has fueled the country’s worst rioting since the collapse of white minority rule in 1994. At least 215 people died in the violence across South Africa’s two most populous provinces, and more than 3,400 have been arrested. While the looting had quieted by Monday, the situation remains tense in parts of the country. Saaberie Chishty paramedic Farah Williams said that after weeks of back-to-back calls from patients, the phones went quiet last week during the riots. The violence was initially sparked by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma earlier this month, and has exacerbated a power struggle within the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party since Nelson Mandela’s election as the country’s first Black president 27 years ago. President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the unrest was an attempted insurrection against South Africa’s democracy and intended to sabotage its economy. The political protest quickly devolved, becoming an outlet for the frustrations of an impoverished majority long shut out of the country’s economy. South Africa is struggling to emerge from a record contraction of 7 last year. Each surge of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns are putting more pressure on the divided nation, where 43 of workers were without a job at the end of March. “We were sitting on a dormant volcano here, where all of us might perish if it erupts,” said Xolani Dube, a political analyst with the Xubera Institute for Research and Development, a nonpartisan think tank in the southeastern city of Durban. “Now the volcano has erupted.” The human and economic dislocation in South Africa, where just 2.8 of people have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, shows how difficult it will be for many emerging economies to recover from the pandemic. The violence in South Africa—as well as in countries including Colombia and Sudan—offers a stark example of how diminishing incomes and the rising cost of food are adding to more than a year of pandemic suffering, exacerbating political instability. The World Bank estimates that more than 160 million people will have been pushed into poverty as a result of Covid by the end of 2021, widening the gap between the world’s richest and poorest nations. The pandemic has led 41 million people to the brink of famine, according to the World Food Program. Africa instability goes nuclear. Mead 13. (Walter Mead is a James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities, Bard College) “Peace in The Congo? Why the World Should Care,” The American Interest, December 15, 2013. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/15/peace-in-the-congo-why-the-world-should-care/ One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether this destructive dynamic can be contained, or whether the demand for ethnic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to convulse world politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create millions more victims. The Congo conflict is a disturbing piece of evidence suggesting that, in Africa at least, there is potential for this kind of conflict. The Congo war (and the long Hutu-Tutsi conflict in neighboring countries) is not, unfortunately alone. The secession of South Sudan from Sudan proper, the wars in what remains of that unhappy country, the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the rise of Christian-Muslim tension right across Africa (where religious conflict often is fed by and intensifies “tribal”—in Europe we would say “ethnic” or “national”—conflicts) are strong indications that the potential for huge and destructive conflict across Africa is very real. But one must look beyond Africa. The Middle East of course is aflame in religious and ethnic conflict. The old British Raj including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka offers countless examples of ethnic and religious conflict that sometimes is contained, and sometimes boils to the surface in horrendous acts of violence. Beyond that, rival nationalisms in East and Southeast Asia are keeping the world awake at night. The Congo war should be a reminder to us all that the foundations of our world are dynamite, and that the potential for new conflicts on the scale of the horrific wars of the 20th century is very much with us today. The second lesson from this conflict stems from the realization of how much patience and commitment from the international community (which in this case included the Atlantic democracies and a coalition of African states working as individual countries and through various international institutions) it has taken to get this far towards peace. Particularly at a time when many Americans want the US to turn inwards, there are people who make the argument that it is really none of America’s business to invest time and energy in the often thankless task of solving these conflicts. That might be an ugly but defensible position if we didn’t live in such a tinderbox world. Someone could rationally say, yes, it’s terrible that a million plus people are being killed overseas in a horrific conflict, but the war is really very far away and America has urgent needs at home and we should husband the resources we have available for foreign policy on things that have more power to affect us directly. The problem is that these wars spread. They may start in places that we don’t care much about (most Americans didn’t give a rat’s patootie about whether Germany controlled the Sudetenland in 1938 or Danzig in 1939) but they tend to spread to places that we do care very much about. This can be because a revisionist great power like Germany in 1938-39 needs to overturn the balance of power in Europe to achieve its goals, or it can be because instability in a very remote place triggers problems in places that we care about very much. Out of Afghanistan in 2001 came both 9/11 and the waves of insurgency and instability that threaten to rip nuclear-armed Pakistan apart or with trigger wider conflict India. Out of the mess in Syria a witches’ brew of terrorism and religious conflict looks set to complicate the security of our allies in Europe and the Middle East and even the security of the oil supply on which the world economy so profoundly depends. Africa, and the potential for upheaval there, is of more importance to American security than many people may understand. The line between Africa and the Middle East is a soft one. The weak states that straddle the southern approaches of the Sahara are ideal petri dishes for Al Qaeda type groups to form and attract local support. There are networks of funding and religious contact that give groups in these countries potential access to funds, fighters, training and weapons from the Middle East. A war in the eastern Congo might not directly trigger these other conflicts, but it helps to create the swirling underworld of arms trading, money transfers, illegal commerce and the rise of a generation of young men who become experienced fighters—and know no other way to make a living. It destabilizes the environment for neighboring states (like Uganda and Kenya) that play much more direct role in potential crises of greater concern to us. The plan solves both scenarios and WTO IP rules are a barrier to scaled-up vaccine production. Pandey 21. (Ashutosh Pandey) “Rich countries block India, South Africa's bid to ban COVID vaccine patents,” DW, April 2, 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/rich-countries-block-india-south-africas-bid-to-ban-covid-vaccine-patents/a-56460175 The World Trade Organization (WTO) talks on a proposal by India and South Africa to temporarily suspend intellectual property (IP) rules related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments hit a roadblock on Thursday after wealthy countries balked at the idea, Germany's dpa news agency reported. The two developing countries say the IP waiver will allow drugmakers in poor countries to start production of effective vaccines sooner. India and South Africa had approached the global trade body in October, calling on it to waive parts of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). The suspension of rights such as patents, industrial designs, copyright and protection of undisclosed information would ensure "timely access to affordable medical products including vaccines and medicines or to scaling-up of research, development, manufacturing and supply of medical products essential to combat COVID-19," they said. The proposal was vehemently opposed by wealthy nations like the US and Britain as well as the European Union, who said that a ban would stifle innovation at pharmaceutical companies by robbing them of the incentive to make huge investments in research and development. This would be especially counterproductive during the current pandemic which needs the drugmakers to remain on their toes to deal with a mutating virus, they argue. The WTO talks are taking place as some wealthy countries face criticism for cornering billions of COVID shots — many times the size of their populations — while leaving poor countries struggling for supplies. Experts say the global scramble for vaccines, or vaccine nationalism, risks prolonging the pandemic. "We have to recognize that this virus knows no boundaries, it travels around the globe and the response to it should also be global. It should be based on international solidarity," said Ellen 't Hoen, the director of Medicines Law and Policy — a nonprofit campaigning for greater access to medicines. "Many of the large-scale vaccine manufacturers are based in developing countries. All the production capacity that exists should be exploited…and that does require the sharing of Not enough production capacity Supporters of the waiver, which include dozens of developing and least-developed countries and NGOs, said the WTO's IP rules were acting as a barrier to urgent scale-up of production of vaccines and other much needed medical equipment in poor countries.