1ac-cap nc-t action legal trust cp climate da 1ar-all nr-cp da 2ar-same
Silver and Black
2
Opponent: Pine View EL | Judge: Ean Neiswager
1ac-teacher unions nc-t spec pay cp nlra cp case 1ar-all nr-pay cp and turns 2ar-case pay cp
Silver and Black
3
Opponent: Loyola LR | Judge: Nethim Liyanage
1ac-us populism nc-t wsde cp econ da police pic case 1ar-condo pics bad case cp and da nr-wsde cp econ da turns 2ar-cp da
Silver and Black
6
Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: Josh Weingarten
1ac-capmicroworkers whole res nc-wsde cp postwork case 1ar-all nr-wsde cp case 2ar-all
UW Western
1
Opponent: Logan AX | Judge: Arianna Nelson
1ac-whole res nc-legal trust cp asteroid mining da case 1ar-case (dropped cp) da nr-cp da case 2ar-case
UW Western
5
Opponent: Mount Vernon TK | Judge: Amadea Datel
1ac-colonialism weaponization structural violence nc-util ssp legal trust asteroid mining case 1ar-all nr-ssp mining case util 2ar-all
Western JV Nationals
2
Opponent: Harvard Westlake ADi | Judge: Reece Aguilar
1ac-cap nc-natural persons pic case 1ar-all nr-same 2ar-case
Western Series
3
Opponent: Logan DK | Judge: Sarah Cole
1ac-whole res emissions debris structural violence nc-fw sbsp pic legal trust asteroid mining case 1ar-all (except fw) nr-fw legal trust asteroid mining case 2ar-same
Woodward Nationals
1
Opponent: Lake Highland Vennam | Judge: Ishan Rereddy
1ac-FALC nc-legal trust cp mining da cap good case 1ar-same nr-same 2ar-same
Woodward Nationals
5
Opponent: Vestavia Hills DS | Judge: Jacob Nails
1ac-queer pess nc-subversivism k natural persons pic presump case 1ar-all nr-natural persons pic presump case 2ar-same
Woodward Nationals
4
Opponent: Immaculate Heart SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss
1ac-china nc-asteroid pic legal trust cp russia fill in da case 1ar-all nr-legal trust fill in DA case 2ar-AC taiwan scenario
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Cites
Entry
Date
Asteroid Mining PIC China
Tournament: Woodward Nationals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss The People’s Republic of China should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for asteroid mining.
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly?...would probably kill you.) Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could get ...the warmest periods.” An asteroid collision would ensure extinction – would fundamentally alter the biosphere, don’t underestimate its risk. Hudson 19 Wesley Hudson ’19, news reporter for Express, “Asteroid alert: NASA warning as kilometre long space rock set to skim Earth at 25,000mph”, 8/28/19, Express, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1170826/asteroid-news-NASA-latest-space-rock-asteroid-1998-HL1-earth-danger-apocalypse AN ASTEROID almost...have no defence.”
3/19/22
Contact Info
Tournament: na | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na email (preferred): leahfischer26@marlborough.org phone: 310-488-9438
10/9/21
Fill in DA
Tournament: Woodward Nationals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss 3 Russia and China are in a space arms race- the plan causes China to bow out and Russia wins. This independently turns case because their Bowman and Thompson + Rogin cards are not about a Russian-Sino alliance, but about an arms race between the countries. Bowman and Thompson 20: Bradley Bowman, Jared Thompson {Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Jared Thompson, a U.S. Air Force major and visiting military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, }, 20 - ("Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space," Foreign Policy, 11-12-2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/31/russia-china-space-war-treaty-demilitarization-satellites/)//marlborough-wr/ Consider the actions ...capabilities to attack satellites.
Unchecked Russian influence in space will inevitably lead to war – the asymmetric advantage given to them by the plan is key for Russian space heg. They are uniquely more aggressive than China, and the CP is the only way to limit them. Don’t let them say Russia needs China – Stent only says that Russia supports Chinese aggression, not that they’re dependent on it, which means Russia heg independently turns case. Boulègue and Unal 20: Mathieu Boulègue, Beyza Unal {Unal is Deputy Director, International Security Programme, Boulègue is a Research Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme}, 20 - ("Russia’s Behaviour Risks Weaponizing Outer Space," Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank, 7-27-2020, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/07/russias-behaviour-risks-weaponizing-outer-space)//marlborough-wr/ Russia’s use of...space warfare becomes a reality.
3/19/22
JF-legal trust, asteroid mining, case
Tournament: UW Western | Round: 1 | Opponent: Logan AX | Judge: Arianna Nelson 1 TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty ought to be amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for an International Legal Trust System Since several legal and policy issues may arise from the actual legal framework, a new international legal regime for outer space shall: (a) Provide for property rights or a lease allocation system, both incentivising investments in the space sector. The system would be supervised and led by the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). (b) Establish the rule of law in outer space. A laissez faire system could turn into anarchy whereby countries and companies could race to grab as many resources as possible bringing considerable potential conflict. (c) Recognise outer space as common heritage of mankind, instead of res communis.24 (d) Provide a sustainable exploitation of celestial bodies, to avoid the uncontrolled production of space debris or to prevent the complete exhaustion of the celestial bodies’ masses or their natural orbits.25 The United Nations should manage the ordered and sustainable economic development in outer space for the present and future generations. (e) Prevent the militarisation of outer space and favours the international collaboration, which are the same aims of the Outer Space Treaty’ drafters. (f) Consider the weak points of the Moon Agreement which led to nations’ refusal to sign. Only a widely accepted agreement would have the power of law in the international context. The abovementioned requirements could be met by establishing an international Legal Trust System (ILTS). A trust is an arrangement that assigns assets to one or more trustees that will manage them in the interest of one or more beneficiaries. The latter may include the trustee or the settlor.26 Translated in the ILTS, mankind would assume the role of settlor and beneficiary of the outer space resources. The UNOOSA would act as main trustee of outer space resources and trading property rights and leases to companies and countries. The rights over the celestial bodies or over its resources would depend on the nature of the celestial body itself. For example, property rights are preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could just disappear after the exploitation. Both leases and property rights can be provided over lands and mining sites on Mars. Leases or defeasible titles are preferable for some land mass on those celestial bodies which could hypothetically be used by humankind pending an Earth disaster. In the case of lucrative activities, such as mining, companies will choose whether to get the exclusive use over the resource through payment of the lease or through annual payment linked to net proceeds or to production charges. 7.6 The Functioning of the International Legal Trust System When a company is interested in leasing or buying an outer space resource, before starting any operations, it must send a plan of work to the United Nations. The plan of work shall include all the details of the activity that would be carried out; it shall be consistent with pre-established parameters of sustainability and shall not interfere with other space activities. If the UN approves the company plan of work, the country of the company assumes the role of co-trustee for the specific resource. Thus, as a cotrustee, countries must investigate whether all activities of their national companies are consistent with the plan of work authorised by the UN. These supervisory duties would be added to the responsibility of nations for all space objects that are launched within their territory.27 The UN, as main trustee, would oversee that countries are performing their duties. This model would be the ordinary one. There would be also an extraordinary model, in which the UN would be the only trustee. This model would be possible in two instances: when the country of the applicant for a private company is not technologically able to act as a trustee or when the applicant of the activity is a country itself. Furthermore, as stated previously, the beneficiaries of this trust are the countries of the world and their citizens; hence all mankind would take concrete profit from lease transactions and benefit sharing. The income from the sales, leases and benefit sharing can be distributed to mankind by financing international global goals, following a similar model of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, which addressed poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Finally, the International Legal Trust System would meet acceptance because every country would obtain benefit sharing to improve its living standard and space faring nations would rely on property rights.
The legal trust would incentivize investment in space while preventing conflict and ensuring sustainable development and the equitable distributions of resources. Finoa ’20 – Ivan Finoa Department of Law, University of Turin, “An international legal trust system to deal with the new space era,” 71st International Astronautical Congress (IAC) – The CyberSpace Edition, (12-14 October 2020). https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/66728932/_IAC_20_E7.VP.8.x58518_An_international_legal_trust_system_to_deal_with_the_new_space_era_BY_IVAN_FINO-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1642044926andSignature=asvt6StaK5n9UnpXuJIlo4ziI839WzFYjDZy37bm70ObGy3vFJyHwWNGxhn2beze4QzYDPPX0pVEXAwYvDaINVNxN01Ify8YwG5loNRddlat-grf3iawic7KvwqPowxFe2GuemVvbB-KW8ZVBxigwS-gelSKIVy4KYR9UgiDrM6e6deEBnUTcULSwmsH-JdHNg13ytZ3vNVMMlxZW2MPOCRuB2WlOHdCLoC86VqafSoMwuec-d~Aisbgyt5F2vO-GjvI60bR7h2MSp0iT6P7apIDUUpHUsDGbvcdxp22HSxXdlvr7lSqtLnL5rKxujGDYq~R9B~WuGiorVL2hn74UQ__andKey-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZACT Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty.
2 The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?
Taking away property rights scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle of "non-appropriation" upon which the international law of outer space is based stems from the desire of the international community to ensure that outer space remains an area beyond the jurisdiction of any state(s). Similar ideals emerge from UNCLOS (in relation to the High Seas) as well as the Antarctic Treaty, 42 although in the case of the latter treaty, it was finalised after a number of claims of sovereignty had already been made by various States and therefore was structured to "postpone" rather than prejudice or renounce those previously asserted claims.43 In the case of outer space, its exploitation and use is expressed in Article I of the Outer Space Treaty to be "the province of all mankind," a term whose meaning is not entirely clear but has been interpreted by most commentators as evincing the desire to ensure that any State is free to engage in space activities without reference to any sovereign claims of other States. This freedom is reinforced by other parts of the same Article and is repeated in the Moon Agreement (which also applies to "other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the earth")." Even though both the scope for space activities and the number of private participants have expanded significantly since these treaties were finalised, it has still been suggested that the nonappropriation principle constitutes "an absolute barrier in the realization of every kind of space activity., 4 ' The amount of capital expenditure required to research, scope, trial, and implement a new space activity is significant. To bring this activity to the point where it can represent a viable "stand alone" commercial venture takes many years and almost limitless funding. From the perspective of a private enterprise contemplating such an activity, it would quite obviously be an important element in its decision to devote resources to this activity that it is able to secure the highest degree of legal rights in order to protect its investment. Security of patent and other intellectual property rights, for example, are vital prerequisites for private enterprise research activity on the ISS, and these rights are specifically addressed by the ISS Agreement between the partners to the project and were applicable to the experiments undertaken by Mark Shuttleworth when he was onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, was senior news writer for Time.com, San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly? We’re only just beginning to guess. Asterank, a service that keeps track of some 6,000 asteroids in NASA’s database, prices out the estimated mineral content in each one in the current world market. More than 500 are listed as “$100 trillion.” The estimated profit on just the top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion.¶ Is it ours for the taking? Well, here’s the thing — we’re taking it already, and have been doing so since we started mining metals thousands of years ago. Asteroid strikes are the only reason rare metals exist in the Earth’s crust; the native ones were all sucked into our planet’s merciless iron core millions of years ago. Why not go to the source?¶ As a side project, space mining can grab water from the rocks and comets — water which, with a little processing makes rocket fuel. Which in turn makes even more currently unimaginable space operations possible, including ones that could give the planet all the energy it needs to avert climate catastrophe. Cislunar space — the bit around us and the moon, the local neighborhood, basically — is about to get very interesting.¶ It’s hard, even for the most asteroid-minded visionaries, to truly believe the full scope of this future space economy right now. Just as hard as it would have been in 1945, when an engineer named Vannevar Bush first proposed a vast library of shared knowledge that people the world over would access via personal computers, to see that mushroom into a global network of streaming movies and grandmas posting photos and trolls and spies who move the needle on presidential elections. ¶ No technology’s pioneer can predict its second-order effects.¶ The space vision thing is particularly difficult in 2019. Not only do we have plenty of urgent problems with democracy and justice to keep us occupied, but the only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans, startups that seemed to be going strong and had launched satellites already, were just bought by larger companies that are, shall we say, less comfortable executing on long-term visions.¶ Planetary Resources was founded in 2012 in a blaze of publicity. Its funding came from, among others, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, and the country of Luxembourg. It had inked an orbital launch deal with Virgin Galactic. And it was sold last October to a blockchain software company. (To 21st century readers, this paragraph would look like I’m playing tech world mad libs.)¶ In January, the other company, Deep Space Industries, also partly funded by Luxembourg (way to get in the space race, Luxembourg!), was sold to Bradford Space, owned by a U.S. investment group called the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation. Maybe these new overlords plan on continuing their acquisitions' asteroid mining endeavors rather than stripping the companies for parts. Both companies have been notably silent on the subject. “The asteroid mining bubble has burst,” declared The Space Review, one of the few online publications to even pay attention.¶ That’s also to be expected. After all, anyone trying to build Google in 1945 would go bankrupt. Just as the internet needed a half-dozen major leaps forward in computing before it could even exist, space industry needs its launch infrastructure.¶ Currently, the world’s richest person and its most well-known entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, respectively, are working on the relatively cheap reusable rockets asteroid pioneers will need. (As I was writing this, Bezos announced in an email blast that one of his New Shepherd rockets had flown to space and back five times like it was nothing, delivering 38 payloads for various customers while remaining entirely intact.) ¶ Meanwhile, quietly, Earth’s scientists are laying the groundwork of research the space economy needs. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has been in orbit around asteroid Ryugu for the last year and a half, learning everything it can. (Ryugu, worth $30 billion according to Asterank, is the website's #1 most cost-effective target.) The craft dropped tiny hopping robot rovers and a small bomb on its target; pictures of the small crater that resulted were released afterwards.¶ Officially, the mission is to help us figure out how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand whether all those useful metals clump together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors. If not, we can still get at the metals with other techniques, such as optical mining (which basically involves sticking an asteroid in a bag and drilling with sunlight; sounds nuts to us, but NASA has proved it in the lab). It’ll just take more time.¶ Effectively, we’ve just made our first mark at the base of the first space mineshaft. And there’s more to come in 2020 when Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth bearing samples. If its buckets of sand contain a modicum of gold dust, tiny chunks of platinum or pebbles of compressed carbon — aka diamonds — then the Duchy of Luxembourg won’t be the only deep-pocketed investor to sit up and take notice.¶ The possibility of private missions to asteroids, with or without a human crew, is almost here. The next step in the process that takes us from here to where you are? Tell us an inspiring story about it, one that makes people believe, and start to imagine themselves mining in space. How would you explain the world-changing nature of the internet to 1945? How would you persuade them that there was gold to be mined in Vannevar Bush’s idea? You’d let the new economy and its benefits play out in the form of a novel.¶ As Hayabusa dropped a bomb on Ryugu, Daniel Suarez was making the exact same asteroid the target of his fiction. Suarez is a tech consultant and developer turned New York Times bestselling author. His novels thus far have been techno-thrillers: his debut, Daemon, a novel of Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare, AI run rampant, made more than a million dollars.¶ So it was a telling shift in cultural mood that Suarez’s latest thriller is also a very in-depth description of — and thinly-disguised advocacy for — asteroid mining. In Delta-v, published in April, a billionaire in the 2030s named Nathan Joyce recruits a team of adventurers who know nothing about space — a world-renowned cave-diver, a world-renowned mountaineer — for the first crewed asteroid mission.¶ Elon Musk fans might expect this to be Joyce’s tale, but he soon fades into the background. The asteroid-nauts are the true heroes of Delta-v. Not only are they offered a massive payday — $6 million each for four years’ work — they also have agency in key decisions in the distant enterprise. Suarez deliberately based them on present-day heroes. The mission is essential, Joyce declares, to save Earth from its major problems. First of all, the fictional billionaire wheels in a fictional Nobel economist to demonstrate the actual truth that the entire global economy is sitting on a mountain of debt. It has to keep growing or it will implode, so we might as well take the majority of the industrial growth off-world where it can’t do any more harm to the biosphere.¶ Secondly, there’s the climate change fix. Suarez sees asteroid mining as the only way we’re going to build solar power satellites. Which, as you probably know, is a form of uninterrupted solar power collection that is theoretically more effective, inch for inch, than any solar panels on Earth at high noon, but operating 24/7. (In space, basically, it’s always double high noon). ¶ The power collected is beamed back to large receptors on Earth with large, low-power microwaves, which researchers think will be harmless enough to let humans and animals pass through the beam. A space solar power array like the one China is said to be working on could reliably supply 2,000 gigawatts — or over 1,000 times more power than the largest solar farm currently in existence. ¶ “We're looking at a 20-year window to completely replace human civilization's power infrastructure,” Suarez told me, citing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the coming catastrophe. Solar satellite technology “has existed since the 1970s. What we were missing is millions of tons of construction materials in orbit. Asteroid mining can place it there.”¶ Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.” A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska. Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high. There’s even this: if we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most. I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.) But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean. FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume, the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne, but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most of the planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant, it will die. A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without the underlying factor of climate change is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop. Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent. It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.” At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors. Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount. In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.” And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide.” Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier, and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods.” CASE
OV-none of their arguments actually talk about appropriation-mining isn’t uniquely appropriation and launches aren’t either. Go ahead, command f the doc-none of their cards are talking about appropriation so hold the line. 2. We concede util fw 3. Environment- a. Launches aren’t appropriation, so they have 0 solvency for any of their impacts-the private sector can still extract resources, send up satellites, etc. b. They don’t say that their impacts are uniquely a result of the private sector-public companies are carrying out these launches too and will just increase their efforts without private appropriation 4. On mining- no solvency- China cheats by creating domestic laws that contradict agreements McDevitt 19 Michael McDevitt is a Senior Fellow at CNA, a Washington DC area non-profit research and analysis company. During his 21 years at CNA he served as a Vice President responsible for strategic analyses, especially in East Asia and the Middle East. He has been involved in US security policy and strategy in the Asia-Pacific for the last 28 years, in both government policy positions and, following his retirement from the US Navy, as an analyst and commentator. He also attended the National War College and spent a year as a Chief of Naval Operations Fellow on the Strategic Study Group at the Naval War College. April 2019. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/transcripts/April20252C20201920Hearing20Transcript2028229.pdf But there one huge caveat to that statement, which is international law is fine as long as it moves their ball forward on what they hope to achieve. If it doesn't, suddenly, domestic law takes priority, and domestic law coming out of the National People's Congress can be cooked up pretty quickly. And so, they decide which law, which approach they want to use in the South China Sea or East China Sea, whichever one moves the ball most effectively. And so, one would have to worry about — now this may be a bridge too far but — a Chinese domestic space law. In fact, one may exist. I have no idea if it does or doesn't. But it would counteract any agreements that are either in place or that could be made. 5. Turn - private space exploration is key to solve all of the aff’s impacts. Rumende 21: Thevnin Rumende {mechanical engineering junior and Community Voices columnist, }, 21 - ("Opinion: Critics are overlooking the technological benefits of the billionaire space race," Shorthorn, 9-14-2021, https://www.theshorthorn.com/opinion/opinion-critics-are-overlooking-the-technological-benefits-of-the-billionaire-space-race/article_4cd73e2e-1512-11ec-874b-bb7e3009729b.html)//marlborough-wr/ There has been no shortage of opinion surrounding what has been derisively dubbed by some as the “pointless billionaire space race.” Pundits have not hesitated to express their ire toward what they view as a new pet project for billionaires. Despite the controversy that accompanies the uber-wealthy’s interest in the private space industry, this development and its effects deserve to be treated with more nuance. When discussing the topic of billionaires in space, the hatred and distrust toward these individuals often trumps any positive technological advancements their companies have achieved on the path to civilian space flight. Simply labeling their endeavors in commercial space flight “a rich person’s ‘joyride’” undercuts the sheer immensity of safely ferrying a person to and from the edge of space, and in the case of SpaceX, a private space manufacturer, having docked and undocked with the international space station in low-Earth orbit. While viewing the success of the current era of space transportation, one might overlook the fact that of the 355 astronauts who flew aboard NASA’s space shuttles from 1981 to 2011, 14 were killed. Simply put, many things can and have gone wrong when attempting to enter space, and any step taken closer to a safer launch system benefits all of humanity. However, for some people, they view the contest of private space companies as “a tragically wasteful ego contest,” a distraction from more pressing issues such as proliferating climate catastrophes, inequality, lack of health care and insufficient housing. This view is shortsighted as it fails to recognize the key role space is already playing in combating a host of the aforementioned crises. According to the World Economic Forum, space technology is helping end hunger by imaging vast swathes of agricultural land and by helping produce agricultural indexes, along with ensuring people access to clean water through the monitoring of reservoirs via satellite images. Cheaper and more efficient space launch systems mean deploying even more satellites to help better address these problems. The microgravity environment of space could potentially allow the fabrication of human organs using a 3D bioprinter. With the demand for yearly organ transplants dwarfing the supply, manufacturing organs in space would help address the overwhelming needs of medical patients. The most common contention leveled against these “space billionaires” is that the wealth they accumulate through their endeavors will only serve to enrich them, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. While these concerns are natural, they often overlook technology’s profound ability to democratize knowledge and reshape society for the better. The private space industry has already significantly reduced the capital investment necessary to embark on projects such as internet satellite constellations. Satellite internet providers have long promised the ability to provide secure internet connectivity to the remaining 3.7 billion unconnected people on the earth, but only now is it attainable. With current technology, nearly a third of the human population could access secure financial accounts and the vast library of human knowledge, once restricted to more developed nations, in under a decade. The significance of these two effects alone toward the advancement of humanity, which could be further advanced through private interests in space, would be incalculable. Like the creation of the internet and the opening of the western frontier in the U.S., the impact that the opening of space will have on the course of humanity is unforeseeable. But the impact is sure to be monumental. We shouldn’t let our distaste of certain billionaires cloud our view of the path that lies ahead. Just as the robber barons of yesteryear played a large role in shaping the nation but are now long forgotten, so too will Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson. 6. Mining isn’t appropriation-treaties and legal doctrines prove. 7. Regulations solve for space militarism-no war if plans for space have to be reviewed by the UN.
2/11/22
JF-us pic w japan prolif, climate da, case
Tournament: College Prep | Round: 2 | Opponent: Archbishop Mitty AS | Judge: Alex Baez US HEG PIC NC SHELL-CHINA+SPILLOVER CP Text: States excluding the United States ought to apply the principles of the Public Trust Doctrine to outer space as well as the limited use of private property management claims Space regulation scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05: Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle of “non-appropriation” upon which the international law of outer space is based stems from the desire of the international community to ensure that outer space remains an area beyond the jurisdiction of any state(s). Similar ideals emerge from UNCLOS (in relation to the High Seas) as well as the Antarctic Treaty, 42 although in the case of the latter treaty, it was arlborou after a number of claims of sovereignty had already been made by various States and therefore was structured to “postpone” rather than prejudice or renounce those previously asserted claims.43 In the case of outer space, its exploitation and use is expressed in Article I of the Outer Space Treaty to be “the province of all mankind,” a term whose meaning is not entirely clear but has been interpreted by most commentators as evincing the desire to ensure that any State is free to engage in space activities without reference to any sovereign claims of other States. This freedom is reinforced by other parts of the same Article and is repeated in the Moon Agreement (which also applies to “other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the earth”).” Even though both the scope for space activities and the number of private participants have expanded significantly since these treaties were arlborou, it has still been suggested that the nonappropriation principle constitutes “an absolute barrier in the realization of every kind of space activity., 4 ‘ The amount of capital expenditure required to research, scope, trial, and implement a new space activity is significant. To bring this activity to the point where it can represent a viable “stand alone” commercial venture takes many years and almost limitless funding. From the perspective of a private enterprise contemplating such an activity, it would quite obviously be an important element in its decision to devote resources to this activity that it is able to secure the highest degree of legal rights in order to protect its investment. Security of patent and other intellectual property rights, for example, are vital prerequisites for private enterprise research activity on the ISS, and these rights are specifically addressed by the ISS Agreement between the partners to the project and were applicable to the experiments undertaken by Mark Shuttleworth when he was onboard the ISS.46 Chinese investments are catching up and the US needs private companies to maintain space dominance – Chinese space heg risks extinction. Autry and Kwast 19: Greg Autry, Steve Kwast {Greg Autry is a clinical professor of space leadership, policy, and business at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. He served on the 2016 NASA transition team and as the White House liaison at NASA in 2017. He is the chair of the Safety Working Group for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. Steve Kwast is a Lieutenant General and commander of Recruiting, Training, Educating and Development for the Air Force. He is an astronautical engineer and Harvard Fellow in Public Policy., }, 19 – (“America Is Losing the Second Space Race to China,” Foreign Policy, 8-22-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/22/ arlbor-is-losing-the-second-space-race-to-china/) arlborough-wr/ The current U.S. space defense strategy is inadequate and on a path to failure. President Donald Trump’s vision for a Space Force is big enough. As he said on June 18, “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.” But the Air Force is not matching this vision. Instead, the leadership is currently focused on incremental improvements to existing equipment and organizational structures. Dominating the vast and dynamic environment of space will require revolutionary capabilities and resources far deeper than traditional Department of Defense thinking can fund, manage, or even conceive of. Success depends on a much more active partnership with the commercial space industry— and its disruptive capabilities. U.S. military space planners are preparing to repeat a conflict they imagined back in the 1980s, which never actually occurred, against a vanished Soviet empire. Meanwhile, China is executing a winning strategy in the world of today. It is burning hard toward domination of the future space markets that will define the next century. They are planning infrastructure in space that will control 21st-century telecommunications, energy, transportation, and manufacturing. In doing so, they will acquire trillion-dollar revenues as well as the deep capabilities that come from continuous operational experience in space. This will deliver space dominance and global hegemony to China’s authoritarian rulers. Despite the fact that many in the policy and intelligence communities understand exactly what China is doing and have been trying to alert leadership, Air Force leadership has convinced the White House to fund only a slightly better satellite command with the same leadership, while sticking a new label onto their outmoded thinking. A U.S. Space Force or Corps with a satellite command will never fulfill Trump’s call to dominate space. Air Force leadership is demonstrating the same hubris that Gen. George Custer used in convincing Congress, over President Ulysses S. Grant’s better experience intuition, that he could overtake the Black Hills with repeating rifles and artillery. That strategy of technological overconfidence inflamed conflict rather than subduing it, and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The West was actually won by the settlers, ranchers, miners, and railroad barons who were able to convert the wealth of the territory itself into the means of holding it. They laid the groundwork that made the 20th century the American Century and delivered freedom to millions of people in Europe and Asia. Of course, they also trampled the indigenous people of the American West in their wake—but empty space comes with no such bloody cost. The very emptiness and wealth of this new, if not quite final, frontier, however, means that competition for resources and strategic locations in cislunar space (between the Earth and moon) will be intense over the next two decades. The outcome of this competition will determine the fate of humanity in the next century. China’s impending dominance will neutralize U.S. geopolitical power by allowing Beijing to control global information flows from the high ground of space. Imagine a school in Bolivia or a farmer in Kenya choosing between paying for a U.S. satellite internet or image provider or receiving those services for free as a “gift of the Chinese people.” It will be of little concern to global consumers that the news they receive is slanted or that searches for “free speech” link to articles about corruption in Western democracies. Nor will they care if concentration camps in Tibet and the Uighur areas of western China are obscured, or if U.S. military action is presented as tyranny and Chinese expansion is described as peacekeeping or liberation. China’s aggressive investment in space solar power will allow it to provide cheap, clean power to the world, displacing U.S. energy firms while placing a second yoke around the developing world. Significantly, such orbital power stations have dual use potential and, if properly designed, could serve as powerful offensive weapons platforms. China’s first step in this process is to conquer the growing small space launch market. Beijing is providing nominally commercial firms with government-manufactured, mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles they can use to dump launch services on the market below cost. These start-ups are already undercutting U.S. pricing by 80 percent. Based on its previous success in using dumping to take out U.S. developed industries such as solar power modules and drones, China will quickly move upstream to attack the leading U.S. launch providers and secure a global commercial monopoly. Owning the launch market will give them an unsurmountable advantage against U.S. competitors in satellite internet, imaging, and power. The United States can still build a strategy to win. At this moment, it holds the competitive advantage in every critical space technology and has the finest set of commercial space firms in the world. It has pockets of innovative military thinkers within groups like the Defense Innovation Unit, under Mike Griffin, the Pentagon’s top research and development official. If the United States simply protects the intellectual property its creative minds unleash and defend its truly free markets from strategic mercantilist attack, it will not lose this new space race. The United States has done this before. It beat Germany to the nuclear bomb, it beat the Soviet Union to the nuclear triad, and it won the first space race. None of those victories was achieved by embracing the existing bureaucracy. Each of them depended on the president of the day following the only proven path to victory in a technological domain: establish a small team with a positively disruptive mindset and empower that team to investigate a wide range of new concepts, work with emerging technologies, and test innovative strategies. Today that means giving a dedicated Space Force the freedom to easily partner with commercial firms and leverage the private capital in building sustainable infrastructure that actually reduces the likelihood of conflict while securing a better economic future for the nation and the world. Japan Prolif NB The plan is a space shock that causes Asian arms races Dean Cheng 9, Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, Former Senior Analyst at the China Studies Division of the Center for Naval Analyses, Former Senior Analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, “Reflections On Sino-US Space Cooperation”, Space and Defense, Volume 2, Number 3, Winter 2009, https://www.usafa.edu/app/uploads/Space_and_Defense_2_3.pdf Broader International Implications Beyond the bilateral difficulties of cooperating with the PRC, it is also important to consider potential ramifications of Sino-US cooperation in space on the Asian political landscape. In particular, cooperation between Washington and Beijing on space issues may well arouse concerns in Tokyo and Delhi. Both of these nations have their own space programs, and while they are arguably not engaged in a “space race” with China (or each other), they are certainly keeping a close eye on developments regarding China. Of particular importance is Japan. The United States relationship with Japan is arguably its most important in East Asia. US interest in Japan should be self evident. Japan hosts 47,000 US troops and is the linchpin for forward US presence in that hemisphere. Japan is the second largest contributor to all major international organizations that buttress US foreign policy…. Japan is the bulwark for US deterrence and engagement of China and North Korea—the reason why those countries cannot assume that the United States will eventually withdraw from the region.35 For Japan, whose “peace constitution” forbids it from using war as an instrument of state policy, the United States is an essential guarantor of its security. Any move by the US that might undermine this view raises not only the prospect of weakening US-Japanese ties, but also potentially affecting Japan’s security policies. In this regard, then, it is essential not to engage in activities that would undercut perceptions of American reliability. Such moves, it should be noted, are not limited to those in the security realm. For example, the Nixon administration undertook several initiatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s that rocked Tokyo-Washington relations, and are still remembered as the “Nixon shocks.” While some of these were in the realm of security (including Nixon’s opening to China and the promulgation of the Nixon Doctrine), the others were in the trade area. These included a ten percent surcharge on all imports entering the US and suspended the convertibility of the dollar (i.e., removed the US from the gold standard).36 Part of the “shock” was the fundamental nature of these shifts. Even more damaging, however, was the failure of the Nixon Administration to consult their Japanese counterparts, catching them wholly off-guard. It took several years for the effects of these shocks to wear off. If the United States is intent upon expanding space relations with the PRC, then it would behoove it to consult Japan, in order to minimize the prospect of a “space shock.” Failing to do so may well incur a Japanese reaction. The decision on the part of Japan to build an explicitly intelligence-focused satellite was in response to the North Korean missile test of 1999, suggesting that Tokyo is fully capable of undertaking space-oriented responses when it is concerned.37 That, in turn, would potentially arouse the ire of China. The tragic history of Sino-Japanese relations continues to cast a baleful influence upon current interactions between the two states. If there is not a “space race” currently underway between Beijing and Tokyo, it would be most unfortunate if American actions were to precipitate one.
Japan will develop offensive strike---nuclear war Kelly C. Wadsworth 19, Non-Resident Kelly Fellow at Pacific Forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, PhD Student in International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, MBA and MA in International Studies (Korea Studies) at the University of Washington, Former Visiting Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, BA in International Relations and East Asia from the University of California, Davis, “Should Japan Adopt Conventional Missile Strike Capabilities?”, Asia Policy, Volume 14, Number 2, April 2019, p. 83-87 American proponents of Japan obtaining a conventional missile strike capability interviewed for this research argued that the United States could use a more capable ally in the region to address the threat posed by heightened Chinese naval activity. While that prospect might be a tempting short-term fix to offset the U.S. Department of Defense budget cuts over the last decade, the long-term interests of the United States in maintaining regional stability should also be considered. In addition to the negative reactions of Beijing and Seoul, a Japanese offensive strike capability could decrease regional confidence in the credibility of U.S. power in Asia. As noted above, some experts argue that if Japan strengthens its offensive capability, such a move might be interpreted by neighbors reliant on the U.S. nuclear umbrella as a sign that Tokyo is losing confidence in the United States’ credibility.71 This could start a chain reaction that causes more U.S. allies to hedge with China or to develop their own strike capabilities, further increasing instability in Asia. China. China would likely be the most vocal in its disapproval of a Japanese conventional missile strike capability, potentially offering not just harsh words but also harsh actions that could further decrease regional stability in an already tense security environment. China expressed dissent when Japan considered a preemptive strike option against the North Korean threat in 2006, arguing that the move was “extremely irresponsible” and would severely interfere with international diplomatic efforts, aggravating tensions in Northeast Asia.72 Over ten years later, the regional environment is even more tense as a result of North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and China’s island reclamation efforts in the East and South China Seas. Support from Washington for Tokyo’s armament would likely fuel Beijing’s narrative that an aggressive and hegemonic United States is fixated on containing China and would be used to justify China’s own increased militarization. It would likely also end any chance of dialogue between Washington and Beijing on facilitating peaceful resolutions to regional territorial disputes. Brad Roberts points out that adopting strike capability would assist Japan in cases where its interests do not align with those of the United States, as in potential gray-zone conflicts. 73 However, the ensuing heightened mistrust between the alliance partners and China may work to increase the likelihood of a gray-zone conflict—such as the 2010 collision of Japanese and Chinese boats in disputed territory—possibly escalating into war. In addition, if Japan had a conventional missile strike capability that could be used to “preempt” a perceived imminent attack from China, Beijing would in turn be more likely to consider preemption of Japanese strike abilities, causing a premature escalation of the crisis that would undoubtedly draw in the United States. South Korea. Despite significant progress on U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral security cooperation in recent years, Japan-ROK military relations remain increasingly tense, a situation that could easily spiral out of control if Japan adopted an offensive capability.74 When Japan, sparked by North Korea’s provocations in 2006, publicly debated the legality of a “preemptive strike” option, South Korean officials bluntly expressed their negative opinion of Japan’s intentions. A spokesperson for the Blue House secretariat, for example, remarked, “We have been alerted by this display of Japan’s inclination to aggression,” and that Japan was using the crisis “as an excuse to beef up their military.”75 South Koreans demonstrated a similar sentiment after Tokyo’s 2014 CSD proposal, with a 2015 poll showing that the majority of the public (56.9) perceived Japan as “militaristic,” up 3.8 percentage points from the previous year.76 If Tokyo were to push forward with the discussion of adopting a conventional missile strike capability, South Korean public opinion would likely become even more unfavorable toward Japan. At a time when enhanced trilateral cooperation is important to deter the evolving threats in the region, Japan advancing legislation to allow for conventional missile strike capabilities would likely derail those efforts, especially if labeled “preemptive.” Such a move could even push Seoul to hedge with Beijing, as the ROK is increasingly reluctant to join any initiative perceived to be aimed at containing China.77 With China as South Korea’s largest trading partner and the United States as its greatest security ally, the ROK is not eager to choose between the two sides. Southeast Asia. Countries in Southeast Asia are watching the Trump administration closely to see where Washington will draw the line on China’s military rise and growing regional assertiveness, and many are already hedging accordingly. For example, countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines are increasing their own conventional arsenal and naval capabilities as a result of Washington’s “slow erosion of credibility” in the region during the Obama administration.78 Defense of Japan 2018 seems to have confidence in the Trump administration’s commitment to maintaining a powerful presence in Asia.79 However, as discussed earlier, if Japan were to pursue an offensive defense strategy, the Southeast Asian countries could see this as a sign of Tokyo’s loss of faith in the United States’ willingness to uphold its defense commitments. China’s seizure of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012 has already eroded these countries’ confidence in the U.S. security guarantee to some extent.80 Declining credibility and corresponding hedging—through either growing armament or alignment with China—could not only further increase tensions and heighten the risk of a gray-zone escalation but also lead to greater Chinese military assertiveness and dominance in the region. Summary Climate Innovation DA NC NC – Regular The private sector is essential for space exploration – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings Into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth? Continued private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible – empirics prove. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 – (“Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again,” Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar Warming causes extinction – outweighs all aff impacts Miller-McDonald, 18 – (Samuel, Master of Environmental Management at Yale University studying energy politics and grassroots innovations in the US. 5-2-2018. “Extinction vs. Collapse.” Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-02/extinction-vs-collapse/) Climate twitter – the most fun twitter – has recently been reigniting the debate between human extinction and mere civilizational collapse, between doom and gloom, despair and (kind of) hope. It was sparked by an interview in The Guardian with acclaimed scientist Mayer Hillman. He argues that we’re probably doomed, and confronting the likelihood that we’re rushing toward collective death may be necessary to save us. The headline alone provoked a lot of reactions, many angered by the ostensible defeatism embedded in Hillman’s comments. His stated view represents one defined camp that is mostly convinced of looming human extinction. It stands in contrast to another group that believes human extinction is highly unlikely, maybe impossible, and certainly will not occur due to climate change in our lifetimes. Collapse maybe, but not extinction. Who’s more right? Let’s take a closer look. First, the question of human extinction is totally bounded by uncertainty. There’s uncertainty in climate data, uncertainty in models and projections, and even more uncertainty in the behavior of human systems. We don’t know how we’ll respond to the myriad impacts climate change is beginning to spark, and we don’t know how sensitive industrial civilization will be to those impacts. We don’t really know if humans are like other apex predators highly sensitive to ecological collapse, or are among the most adaptable mammals to ever walk the earth. One may be inclined to lean toward the latter given that humans have colonized every ecological niche on the planet except Antarctica. That bands of people can survive in and around deserts as well as the Arctic as well as equatorial rainforests speaks to the resilience of small social groups. It’s why The Road is so disturbingly plausible; there could be a scenario in which basically everything is dead but people, lingering in the last grey waste of the world. On the other hand, we’ve never lived outside of the very favorable conditions of the Holocene, and past civilizational and population collapses suggest humans are in fact quite sensitive to climatic shifts. Famed climate scientist James Hansen has discussed the possibility of “Venus syndrome,” for instance, which sits at the far end of worst case scenarios. While a frightening thought experiment, it is easily dismissed as it’s based on so many uncertainties and doesn’t carry the weight of anything near consensus. What’s more frightening than potentially implausible uncertainties are the currently existing certainties. For example: Ecology + The atmosphere has proven more sensitive to GHG emissions than predicted by mainstream science, and we have a high chance of hitting 2oC of warming this century. Could hit 1.5C in the 2020s. Worst-case warming scenarios are probably the most likely. + Massive marine death is happening far faster than anyone predicted and we could be on the edge of an anoxic event. + Ice melt is happening far faster than mainstream predictions. Greenland’s ice sheet is threatening to collapse and already slowing ocean currents, which too could collapse. + Which also means predictions of sea level rise have doubled for this century. + Industrial agriculture is driving massive habitat loss and extinction. The insect collapse – population declines of 75 to 80 have been seen in some areas – is something no one predicted would happen so fast, and portends an ecological sensitivity beyond our fears. This is causing an unexpected and unprecedented bird collapse (1/8 of bird species are threatened) in Europe. + Forests, vital carbon sinks, are proving sensitive to climate impacts. + We’re living in the 6th mass extinction event, losing potentially dozens of species per day. We don’t know how this will impact us and our ability to feed ourselves. Energy + Energy transition is essential to mitigating 1.5+C warming. Energy is the single greatest contributor to anthro-GHG. And, by some estimates, transition is happening 400 years too slowly to avoid catastrophic warming. + Incumbent energy industries (that is, oil and gas) dominate governments all over the world. We live in an oil oligarchy – a petrostate, but for the globe. Every facet of the global economy is dependent on fossil fuels, and every sector – from construction to supply chains to transport to electricity to extraction to agriculture and on and on – is built around FF consumption. There’s good reason to believe FF will remain subsidized by governments beholden to their interests even if they become less economically viable than renewables, and so will maintain their dominance. + We are living in history’s largest oil and gas boom. + Kilocalorie to kilocalorie, FF is extremely dense and extremely cheap. Despite reports about solar getting cheaper than FF in some places, non-hydro/-carbon renewables are still a tiny minority (2) of global energy consumption and will simply always, by their nature, be less dense kcal to kcal than FF, and so will always be calorically more expensive. + Energy demand probably has to decrease globally to avoid 1.5C, and it’s projected to dramatically increase. Getting people to consume less is practically impossible, and efficiency measures have almost always resulted in increased consumption. + We’re still setting FF emissions records. Politics + Conditions today resemble those prior to the 20th century’s world wars: extreme wealth inequality, rampant economic insecurity, growing fascist parties/sentiment, and precarious geopolitical relations, and the Thucydides trap suggests war between Western hegemons and a rising China could be likely. These two factors could disrupt any kind of global cooperation on decarbonization and, to the contrary, will probably mean increased emissions (the US military is one of the world’s single largest consumers/emitters of FF). + Neoliberal ideology is so thoroughly embedded in our academic, political, and cultural institutions, and so endemic to discourse today, that the idea of degrowth – probably necessary to avoid collapse – and solidarity economics isn’t even close to discussion, much less realization, and, for self-evident reasons, probably never will be. + Living in a neoliberal culture also means we’ve all been trained not to sacrifice for the common good. But solving climate change, like paying more to achieve energy transition or voluntarily consuming less, will all entail sacrificing for the greater good. Humans sometimes are great at that; but the market fundamentalist ideology that pervades all social, commercial, and even self relations today stands against acting for the common good or in collective action. + There’s basically no government in the world today taking climate change seriously. There are many governments posturing and pretending to take it seriously, but none have substantially committed to a full decarbonization of their economies. (Iceland may be an exception, but Iceland is about 24 times smaller than NYC, so…) + Twenty-five years of governments knowing about climate change has resulted in essentially nothing being done about it, no emissions reductions, no substantive moves to decarbonize the economy. Politics have proven too strong for common sense, and there’s no good reason to suspect this will change anytime soon. + Wealth inequality is embedded in our economy so thoroughly – and so indigenously to FF economies – that it will probably continue either causing perpetual strife, as it has so far, or eventually cement a permanent underclass ruled by a small elite, similar to agrarian serfdom. There is a prominent view in left politics that greater wealth equality, some kind of ecosocialism, is a necessary ingredient in averting the kind of ecological collapse the economy is currently driving, given that global FF capitalism by its nature consumes beyond carrying capacities. At least according to one Nasa-funded study, the combination of inequality and ecological collapse is a likely cause for civilizational collapse. Even with this perfect storm of issues, it’s impossible to know how likely extinction is, and it’s impossible to judge how likely or extensive civilizational collapse may be. We just can’t predict how human beings and human systems will respond to the shocks that are already underway. We can make some good guesses based on history, but they’re no more than guesses. Maybe there’s a miracle energy source lurking in a hangar somewhere waiting to accelerate non-carbon transition. Maybe there’s a swelling political movement brewing under the surface that will soon build a more just, ecologically sane order into the world. Community energy programs are one reason to retain a shred of optimism; but also they’re still a tiny fraction of energy production and they are not growing fast, but they could accelerate any moment. We just don’t know how fast energy transition can happen, and we just don’t know how fast the world could descend into climate-driven chaos – either by human strife or physical storms. What we do know is that, given everything above, we are living through a confluence of events that will shake the foundations of civilization, and jeopardize our capacity to sustain large populations of humans. There is enough certainty around these issues to justify being existentially alarmed. At this point, whether we go extinct or all but a thousand of us go extinct (again), maybe that shouldn’t make much difference. Maybe the destruction of a few billion or 5 billion people is morally equivalent to the destruction of all 7 billion of us, and so should provoke equal degrees of urgency. Maybe this debate about whether we’ll go completely extinct rather than just mostly extinct is absurd. Or maybe not. I don’t know. What I do know is that, regardless of the answer, there’s no excuse to stop fighting for a world that sustains life. CASE ADV 1- Myers 16 is about issues within the dynamics of countries in space, can’t topically solve for that without extra T. just because it is illegal under i-law doesn’t mean it can’t provoke conflict-our China cards prove. Turn - private space exploration is key to solve all of the aff’s impacts. Rumende 21: Thevnin Rumende {mechanical engineering junior and Community Voices columnist, }, 21 - ("Opinion: Critics are overlooking the technological benefits of the billionaire space race," Shorthorn, 9-14-2021, https://www.theshorthorn.com/opinion/opinion-critics-are-overlooking-the-technological-benefits-of-the-billionaire-space-race/article_4cd73e2e-1512-11ec-874b-bb7e3009729b.html)//marlborough-wr/ There has been no shortage of opinion surrounding what has been derisively dubbed by some as the “pointless billionaire space race.” Pundits have not hesitated to express their ire toward what they view as a new pet project for billionaires. Despite the controversy that accompanies the uber-wealthy’s interest in the private space industry, this development and its effects deserve to be treated with more nuance. When discussing the topic of billionaires in space, the hatred and distrust toward these individuals often trumps any positive technological advancements their companies have achieved on the path to civilian space flight. Simply labeling their endeavors in commercial space flight “a rich person’s ‘joyride’” undercuts the sheer immensity of safely ferrying a person to and from the edge of space, and in the case of SpaceX, a private space manufacturer, having docked and undocked with the international space station in low-Earth orbit. While viewing the success of the current era of space transportation, one might overlook the fact that of the 355 astronauts who flew aboard NASA’s space shuttles from 1981 to 2011, 14 were killed. Simply put, many things can and have gone wrong when attempting to enter space, and any step taken closer to a safer launch system benefits all of humanity. However, for some people, they view the contest of private space companies as “a tragically wasteful ego contest,” a distraction from more pressing issues such as proliferating climate catastrophes, inequality, lack of health care and insufficient housing. This view is shortsighted as it fails to recognize the key role space is already playing in combating a host of the aforementioned crises. According to the World Economic Forum, space technology is helping end hunger by imaging vast swathes of agricultural land and by helping produce agricultural indexes, along with ensuring people access to clean water through the monitoring of reservoirs via satellite images. Cheaper and more efficient space launch systems mean deploying even more satellites to help better address these problems. The microgravity environment of space could potentially allow the fabrication of human organs using a 3D bioprinter. With the demand for yearly organ transplants dwarfing the supply, manufacturing organs in space would help address the overwhelming needs of medical patients. The most common contention leveled against these “space billionaires” is that the wealth they accumulate through their endeavors will only serve to enrich them, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. While these concerns are natural, they often overlook technology’s profound ability to democratize knowledge and reshape society for the better. The private space industry has already significantly reduced the capital investment necessary to embark on projects such as internet satellite constellations. Satellite internet providers have long promised the ability to provide secure internet connectivity to the remaining 3.7 billion unconnected people on the earth, but only now is it attainable. With current technology, nearly a third of the human population could access secure financial accounts and the vast library of human knowledge, once restricted to more developed nations, in under a decade. The significance of these two effects alone toward the advancement of humanity, which could be further advanced through private interests in space, would be incalculable. Like the creation of the internet and the opening of the western frontier in the U.S., the impact that the opening of space will have on the course of humanity is unforeseeable. But the impact is sure to be monumental. We shouldn’t let our distaste of certain billionaires cloud our view of the path that lies ahead. Just as the robber barons of yesteryear played a large role in shaping the nation but are now long forgotten, so too will Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson. China cheats by creating domestic laws that contradict agreements McDevitt 19 Michael McDevitt is a Senior Fellow at CNA, a Washington DC area non-profit research and analysis company. During his 21 years at CNA he served as a Vice President responsible for strategic analyses, especially in East Asia and the Middle East. He has been involved in US security policy and strategy in the Asia-Pacific for the last 28 years, in both government policy positions and, following his retirement from the US Navy, as an analyst and commentator. He also attended the National War College and spent a year as a Chief of Naval Operations Fellow on the Strategic Study Group at the Naval War College. April 2019. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/transcripts/April20252C20201920Hearing20Transcript2028229.pdf But there one huge caveat to that statement, which is international law is fine as long as it moves their ball forward on what they hope to achieve. If it doesn't, suddenly, domestic law takes priority, and domestic law coming out of the National People's Congress can be cooked up pretty quickly. And so, they decide which law, which approach they want to use in the South China Sea or East China Sea, whichever one moves the ball most effectively. And so, one would have to worry about — now this may be a bridge too far but — a Chinese domestic space law. In fact, one may exist. I have no idea if it does or doesn't. But it would counteract any agreements that are either in place or that could be made.
The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth? Solves for the climate impact-government can’t effectively solve for their impacts through asteroid mining because it is too expensive and time consuming. On the norming adv-PIC solves
12/18/21
ND-T all states, violence pic, postwork, case
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Aragon ZA | Judge: Gentleman, Jonah Interpretation—the aff may not specify a just government A is an generic indefinite singular. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf *IS generic = Indefinite Singulars French, then, expresses the two types of reading differently. In English, on¶ the other hand, generic BPs are ambiguous between inductivist and normative¶ readings. But even in English there is one type of generic that can express only¶ one of these readings, and this is the IS generic. While BPs are ambiguous¶ between the inductivist and the rules and regulations readings, ISs are not. In¶ the supermarket scenario discussed above, only (44.b) is true:¶ (44) a. A banana sells for $.49/lb.¶ b. A banana sells for $1.00/lb.¶ The normative force of the generic IS has been noted before. Burton-Roberts¶ (1977) considers the following minimal pair:¶ (45) a. Gentlemen open doors for ladies.¶ b. A gentleman opens doors for ladies.¶ He notes that (45.b), but not (45.a), expresses what he calls “moral necessity.”7¶ Burton-Roberts observes that if Emile does not as a rule open doors for ladies, his mother could utter (45.b) and thereby successfully imply that Emile was not, or was¶ not being, a gentleman. Notice that, if she were to utter. . . (45.a) she¶ might achieve the same effect (that of getting Emile to open doors for¶ ladies) but would do so by different means. . . For (45.a) merely makes a¶ generalisation about gentlemen (p. 188).¶ Sentence (45.b), then, unlike (45.a), does not have a reading where it makes¶ a generalization about gentlemen; it is, rather, a statement about some social¶ norm. It is true just in case this norm is in effect, i.e. it is a member of a set of¶ socially accepted rules and regulations.¶ An IS that, in the null context, cannot be read generically, may receive a¶ generic reading in a context that makes it clear that a rule or a regulation is¶ referred to. For example, Greenberg (1998) notes that, out of the blue, (46.a)¶ and (46.b) do not have a generic reading:¶ (46) a. A Norwegian student whose name ends with ‘s’ or ‘j’ wears green¶ thick socks.¶ b. A tall, left-handed, brown haired neurologist in Hadassa hospital¶ earns more than $50,000 a year.¶ However, Greenberg points out that in the context of (47.a) and (47.b),¶ respectively, the generic readings of the IS subject are quite natural:¶ (47) a. You know, there are very interesting traditions in Norway, concerning the connection between name, profession, and clothing. For¶ example, a Norwegian student. . .¶ b. The new Hadassa manager has some very funny paying criteria. For¶ example, a left-handed. . .¶ Even IS sentences that were claimed above to lack a generic reading, such¶ as (3.b) and (4.b), may, in the appropriate context, receive such a reading:¶ (48) a. Sire, please don’t send her to the axe. Remember, a king is generous!¶ b. How dare you build me such a room? Don’t you know a room is¶ square? That outweighs—only our evidence speaks to how indefinite singulars are interpreted in the context of normative statements like the resolution. This means throw out aff counter-interpretations that are purely descriptive Violation—they specified China Vote neg: 1 Precision –any deviation justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits—specifying a just government offers huge explosion in the topic since they get permutations of hundreds of governments in the world depending on their definition of “just government”. DTD – same thing as drop the arg Topicality is a voting issue that should be evaluated through competing interpretations – it tells the negative what they do and do not have to prepare for No RVIs—it’s your burden to be topical.
Counterplan: A just government of the People’s Republic of China ought to guarantee the right to strike except for violent strike tactics.
Strikes can be violent, South Africa proves. This link turns the AC by harming the affected sector and decking the economy. Tenzam ’20 - Mlungisi Tenzam LLB LLM LLD Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020, The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandpid=S1682-58532020000300004 The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike.11The Constitution grants these rights to a "worker" as an individual.12However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14¶ The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to "advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace".16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society.¶ Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike 17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally.18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful.19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers' demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows:¶ "There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike ... A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won't win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say '1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC'. You won't win a strike like that."21¶ The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers' homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour.22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families' living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer's business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26¶ These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations' sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment27, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is associated with environmental pressures in at least four different ways, why do we have to maintain it at constant or increased levels? We hold that in industrial society four distinct levels of structural and cultural dependency on work may be discerned. These are to be understood as broad analytical categories which in reality comprise and cross individual and structural levels in various ways, and are all interdependent. Personal dependence. A first aspect is individual or personal dependence on work: Work as regular, gainful employment constitutes one of the central social relations in modern ‘work society’ and is a central point of reference in people’s lives. As a principal source of income, waged work fulfils the existential function of providing livelihoods and social security. It is constructed to secure basic social rights, social integration, recognition, status, and personal identity (Frayne 2015b; Weeks 2011). This is probably why ‘social’ is so often equated with ‘work’. State dependence. Secondly, dependence on work pertains to the modern welfare state: the revenues and economic growth generated through work contribute substantially to the financing of social security systems. Affording welfare is therefore a main argument for creating jobs. Wage labour is thus a dominating tool for redistribution; through wages, taxes on wages and on the consumption that production generates, almost all distribution takes place. Hence, what the job is, and what is being produced, is of secondary importance (Paulsen 2017). Work is moreover a convenient instrument of control that structures and disciplines society, and ‘renders populations at once productive and governable’ (Weeks 2011, 54; Gorz 1982; Lafargue 2014 1883). Specifically, the dominant neoliberal ideology, its condemnation of laziness and idealisation of ‘hardworking people’ has intensified the ‘moral fortification of work’. Accordingly, the neoliberal ‘workfare’ reforms have focused on job creation and the relentless activation for the labour market, effectively ‘enforcing work (…) as a key function of the state’ (Frayne 2015b, 16). Economic dependence. Thirdly, besides the economic imperative for individuals to ‘earn a living’ and pay off debt, modern economies are dependent on work in terms of an industrious labour force, long working hours for increasing economic output under the imperatives of capital accumulation, growth and competition, and rising incomes for increasing purchasing power and demand. Creating or preserving jobs constitutes the standard argument for economic growth. In turn, work as one basic factor of production creates growth. However, the relation between growth and employment is conditioned, amongst other factors, primarily by constantly pursued labour productivity: for employment to rise or stay stable, the economy must grow at a sufficiently high rate to exceed productivity gains, in order to offset job losses and avoid ‘jobless growth’. Moreover, faltering expansion triggers a spiral of recession which not only affects economic stability but results in societal crises as a whole (Jackson 2009; Paech 2012). However, besides being unsustainable and insatiable, growth is also increasingly unlikely to continue at the rates required for economic stability (Kallis et al. 2018; IMF 2015). The individual and structural economic dependence on work and economic growth therefore implies profound vulnerability as livelihoods and political stability are fatefully exposed to global competition and the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation, and constrained by ‘systemically relevant’ job and growth creating companies, industries and global (financial) markets (Gronemeyer 2012; Paech 2012). Cultural dependence. A fourth aspect concerns cultural dependence: The ‘work ethic’ is the specific morality described by Max Weber (19921905) as constitutive of modern industrial culture, 2 and determining for all its subjects as shared ‘common senses’ about how work is valued and understood. It means an ingrained moral compulsion to gainful work and timesaving, manifested in the common ideals of productivity, achievement and entrepreneurship, in the feeling of guilt when time is ‘wasted’, in personal identification with one’s ‘calling’, in observations of busyness, even burnout as a ‘badge of honour’ (Paulsen 2014), and in descriptions of a culture that has lost the ‘capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways’ (Thompson 1967, 91). Even for those who do not share such attitudes towards work, in a work-centred culture it is normal to (seek) work. It is so commonsensical that it seems impractical to question it, and it continues to be normalised through socialisation and schooling. Consequently, people become limited in their imagination of alternatives, the prospect of losing one’s job usually causes heartfelt fear (Standing 2011). For a work society that ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’, there can be nothing worse than the cessation of work (Hannah Arendt, cited in Gorz 1989, 7–8). The wage relation based on the commodity labour is, in other words, an essential functional feature of the industrial-capitalist system, and the exaltation of work remains its social ethic. For modern industrial society work is ‘both its chief means and its ultimate goal’ (Gorz 1989, 13; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2011); it is centred and structurally dependent on work, despite work’s environmentally adverse implications. This constellation constitutes the dilemma between work and the environment, and it is why we argue that work is absolutely central to present-day unsustainability and should accordingly be dealt with in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the problem with modern-day work from an environmental perspective? A number of quantitative studies have researched the correlation of working hours and environmental impacts in terms of ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption, both on micro/household and on macro/cross-national levels, and for both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013; Nässén and Larsson 2015; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). Based on these findings, and going beyond them, we develop a qualitative classification of ecological impacts of work broadly (not working hours only), distinguishing four analytically distinct factors (Hoffmann 2017). Fundamentally, all productive activity is based on material and energy throughputs within wider ecological conditions, which necessarily involves interference with the ecosphere. The appropriation and exploitation of non-human animals, land, soil, water, biomass, raw materials, the atmosphere and all other elements of the biosphere always to some extent causes pollution, degradation, and destruction. Thus, work is inherently both productive and destructive. However, this biophysical basis alone need not make work unsustainable, and it has not always been so (Krausmann 2017). Contributing to its unsustainability is, firstly, the Scale factor: the greater the amount of work, the more ‘inputs’ are required and the more ‘outputs’ generated, which means more throughput of resources and energy, and resulting ecological impacts. In other words, the more work, the larger the size of the economy, the more demands on the biosphere (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013). Obviously, there are qualitative differences between different types of work and their respective environmental impacts. Moreover, besides the evident and direct impacts, indirect impacts matter also. The tertiary/service sector is therefore not exempt from this reasoning (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), not only due to its own (often ‘embodied’) materiality and energy requirements, but also because it administrates and supports industrial production processes in global supply chains (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Haberl et al. 2009; Paech 2012). Additionally, modern work is subject to certain integrally connected and mutually reinforcing conditions inherent in industrial economic structures, which aggravate ecological impacts by further increasing the Scale factor. These include the systematic externalisation of costs, and the use of fossil fuels as crucial energy basis, which combined with modern industrial technology enable continuously rising labour productivity independently of physical, spatial or temporal constraints (Malm 2013). Taken together, this leads to constantly spurred economic growth with a corresponding growth in material and energetic throughputs, and the creation of massive amounts of waste. The latter is not an adverse side-effect of modern work, but part of its purpose under the imperatives of growth, profitability, and constant innovation, as evident in phenomena such as planned obsolescence or the ‘scrapping premium’, serving to stimulate growth and demand, and hence, job creation (Gronemeyer 2012). These conditions and effects tend to be neglected when ‘green jobs’ are promised to resolve the ecological crisis (Paus 2018), disregarding that the systematically and continuously advanced scale of work and production has grown far beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009). Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there was support for environmental perspectives in LO at this time – after all, the National Congress commissioned the programme, an environmental unit was established at headquarters and a majority of the congress accepted the programme – this waned significantly when the economy was threatened. This reflects the influence of the ‘jobs vs. environment’ conflict on processes of integrating environmental perspectives into the union agenda (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Union policies are embedded in a mode of production marked by what Marx called the ‘metabolic rift’. The concept is one of the pillars upon which Foster develops ‘Marx’s Ecology’ (Foster 2000, 155 f). It argues that the capitalist industrial system exploits the earth without restoring its constituents to it. More generally, Marx defined the labour process as metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between nature (external to humans) and human nature. When humans work on and with nature to produce the means of their survival, they also develop their knowledge and their capabilities, and transform their own human nature (Marx 1998). Polanyi later reduced the concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ to the commodification of land (Polanyi 1944), thus paving the way for a perspective that sees the solution in the control of the market, but disregards the relations of production as they are lived by workers in the production process. But to understand why trade unions have difficulties developing and especially holding on to environmental policies it is important to recognise that since nature has become a privately owned ‘means of production’ it has become workers’ Other. Unions have been reduced and have reduced themselves to care only for one part of the inseparable relationship between nature and labour. On the everyday level of policies this means that environmental strategies lose momentum in times of economic crises and when jobs are seen to be threatened. In this respect, unions are no different from political parties and governments. In spite of numerous publications by the ILO and Union organisations, which show that a move to a ‘green economy’ can create new jobs (Poschen 2012; Rivera Alejo and Martín Murillo 2014), unions have been reluctant to exchange ‘a bird in the hand for two in the bush’ – even if the bird in the hand becomes elusive. The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ‘postwork’ approach contribute to resolving these issues? The notions critique of work (Frayne 2015a, 2015b) or postwork (Weeks 2011) have emerged in recent years in social science research and popular culture, building on a long intellectual tradition of (autonomist and neo-)Marxist, anarchist, and feminist theory (Seyferth 2019; Weeks 2011). The critique of work targets work in a fundamental sense, not only its conditions or exploitation. It is aimed at the centrality of work in modern ‘work society’ as a pivotal point for the provision of livelihoods through monetary income, the granting of social security, social inclusion, and personal identity construction, on which grounds unemployed persons and unpaid activities are excluded from recognition, welfare provision and trade union support. Moreover, the crucial role of waged work in the functioning of the welfare state and the modern industrialised economy is part of this critique (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015b; Paulsen 2017). Although commonly taken as naturally given, this kind of societal order and its institutions such as the wage relation, labour markets, unemployment, or abstract time are historically and culturally exceptional modes of human coexistence (Applebaum 1992; Graeber 2018; Gorz 1989; Polanyi 2001 1944; Thompson 1967). This critique of the structures and social relations of work society is accompanied by the critique of its cultural foundation, the work ethic; an ideological commitment to work and productivism as ends in themselves, moral obligations, and as intrinsically good, regardless of what is done and at what cost (Gorz 1982; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2001). Postwork, however, is not only a critical stance. Criticising work and work society, aware of their historical contingency, implies the potential for an emancipatory transformation of industrial society. The focus is thereby not necessarily on abolishing work tout-court, but rather on pointing out and questioning its relentless centrality and asking what a more desirable, free and sustainable society might look like; a society in which work is no longer the pivotal point of social organisation and ideological orientation, including all questions and debates around this objective (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015a; Weeks 2011). As a relatively new and dynamically developing approach, postwork is, despite similar political claims, not uniform in its reasoning. Some, drawing on the classical ‘end-of-work’ argument (Frayne 2016), assume an imminent technology-induced massive rise in unemployment. This is welcomed as an opportunity to reduce and ultimately abolish work to liberate humankind (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Others emphasise the remarkable fact that throughout the past two centuries technological development has not challenged the centrality of work in modern lives, despite the prospect that technological change would allow for much shorter working hours (e.g., Keynes 1930). This has not materialised due to the requirements of a work-centred, work-dependent society. On the contrary, work has become more central to modern societies. These deeper structural and cultural aspects and dependencies seem to remain unaffected by technological trends (Paulsen 2017; Weeks 2011). The ecological case for postwork The perspective of postwork/critiques of work may enrich sustainability debates in many ways; here, our focus is again on ecological concerns. First, postwork offers a much needed change in focus in sustainability debates, away from narrow critiques of individual consumption and the overemphasis on ‘green jobs’, towards understanding work as one central cause of sustained societal unsustainability. Postwork directs the focus towards crucial overlooked issues, e.g. the ways in which work is ecologically harmful, or which problems arise due to the social and cultural significance of modern-day work, including existential dependencies on it. Postwork seeks to re-politicise work, recognising that its conception and societal organisation are social constructs and therefore political, and must accordingly be open to debate (Weeks 2011). This opens conceptual space and enables open-minded debates about the meaning, value and purpose of work: what kind of work is, for individuals, society and the biosphere as a whole, meaningful, pointless, or outright harmful (Graeber 2018)? Such debates and enhanced understanding about the means and ends of work, and the range of problems associated with it, would be important in several regards. In ecological regard it facilitates the ecologically necessary, substantial reduction of work, production and consumption (Frey 2019; Haberl et al. 2009). Reducing work/working hours is one of the key premises of postwork, aiming at de-centring and de-normalising work, and releasing time, energy and creativity for purposes other than work (Coote 2013). From an ecological perspective, reducing the amount of work would reduce the dependency on a commodity-intensive mode of living, and allow space for more sustainable practices (Frayne 2016). Reducing work would also help mitigate all other work-induced environmental pressures described above, especially the ‘Scale factor’ (Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), i.e. the amount of resources and energy consumed, and waste, including emissions, created through work. A postwork approach facilitates debate on the politics of ecological work reduction which entails difficult questions: for example, which industries and fields of employment are to be phased out? Which fields will need to be favoured and upon what grounds? Which kinds of work in which sectors are socially important and should therefore be organised differently, especially when altering the energy basis of work due to climate change mitigation which implies decentralised, locally specific, intermittent and less concentrated energy sources (Malm 2013)? These questions are decisive for future (un-)sustainability, and yet serious attempts at a solution are presently forestalled by the unquestioned sanctity that work, ‘jobs’ or ‘full employment’ enjoy (Frayne 2015b). Postwork is also conducive to rethinking the organisation of work. There are plausible arguments in favour of new institutions of democratic control over the economy, i.e. economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012). This is urgent and necessary to distribute a very tight remaining carbon budget fairly and wisely (IPCC 2018), to keep economic power in check, and to gain public sovereignty over fundamental economic decisions that are pivotal for (un-)sustainable trajectories (Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004). An obstacle to this is one institution in particular which is rarely under close scrutiny: the labour market, a social construct linked to the advent of modern work in form of the commodity of labour (Applebaum 1992). It is an undemocratic mechanism, usually characterised by high levels of unfreedom and coercion (Anderson 2017; Graeber 2018; Paulsen 2015) that allocates waged work in a competitive mode as an artificially scarce, ‘fictitious’ commodity (Polanyi 2001 1944). 4 It does so according to availability of money and motives of gain on the part of employers, and appears therefore inappropriate for distributing labour according to sustainability criteria and related societal needs. As long as unsustainable and/or unnecessary jobs are profitable and/or (well-)paid, they will continue to exist (Gorz 1989), just as ‘green jobs’ must follow these same criteria in order to be created. An ecological postwork perspective allows to question this on ecological grounds, and it links to debates on different modes of organising socially necessary work, production and provisioning in a de-commodified, democratic and sustainable mode. Finally, postwork is helpful for ecological reasons because it criticises the cultural glorification of ‘hard work’, merit and productivism, and the moral assumption that laziness and inaction are intrinsically bad, regardless the circumstances. Postwork is about a different mindset which problematises prevailing productivist attitudes and allows the idea that being lazy or unproductive can be something inherently valuable. Idleness is conducive to an ecological agenda as nothing is evidently more carbon-neutral and environment-sparing than being absolutely unproductive. As time-use studies indicate, leisure, recreation and socialising have very low ecological impacts, with rest and sleep having virtually none (Druckman et al. 2012). Apart from humans, the biosphere also needs idle time for regeneration. In this sense, laziness or ‘ecological leisure’, ideally sleep, can be regarded as supremely ecofriendly states of being that would help mitigate ecological pressures. Moreover, as postwork traces which changes in attitudes towards time, efficiency and laziness have brought modern work culture and modern time regimes into being in the first place and have dominated ever since (Thompson 1967; Weber 1992 1905), it provides crucial knowledge for understanding and potentially changing this historically peculiar construction. It can thereby take inspiration from longstanding traditions throughout human history, where leisure has usually been a high social ideal and regarded as vital for realising genuine freedom and quality of life (Applebaum 1992; Gorz 1989). Conclusions: postwork politics and practices We argued that modern-day work is a central cause for unsustainability, and should therefore be transformed to advance towards sustainability. We have contributed to this field of research, firstly, by developing a systematisation of the ecological harms associated with work – comprising the factors Scale, Time, Income, and Work-induced Mobility, Infrastructure, and Consumption – taking those studies one step further which investigate the ecological impacts of working hours quantitatively. One of the analytical advantages of this approach is that it avoids the mystification of work through indirect measures of economic activity (such as per capita GDP), as in the numerous analyses of the conflict between sustainability and economic growth in general. Our second substantial contribution consists in combining these ecological impacts of work with an analysis of the various structural dependencies on work in modern society, which spells out clearly what the recurring jobs-environment-dilemma actually implies, and why it is so difficult to overcome. While this dilemma is often vaguely referred to, this has been the first more detailed analysis of the different dimensions that essentially constitute it. Reviewing the literature in environmental sociology and sustainability research more generally, we also found the work-environment-dilemma and the role of work itself are not sufficiently addressed and remain major unresolved issues. We proposed the field would benefit from taking up the long intellectual tradition of problematising modern-day work, through the approach of postwork or critiques of work. While the described problems of unsustainability and entrenched dependencies cannot easily be resolved, we discussed how postwork arguments can contribute to pointing out and understanding them, and to opening up new perspectives to advance sustainability debates. A third contribution is therefore to have introduced the concept of postwork/critiques of work into sustainability research and the work-environment debate, and to have conducted an initial analysis of the ways in which postwork may be helpful for tackling ecological problems. Besides being ecologically beneficial, it may also serve emancipatory purposes to ‘raise broader questions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a life no longer so subordinate to it’ (Weeks 2011, 33). In order to inspire such ‘postwork imagination’ (Weeks 2011, 35, 110) and show that postwork ideas are not as detached from reality as they may sound, in this last section we briefly outline examples of existing postwork politics and practices. The most obvious example is the reduction of working hours during the 19th and 20th centuries. These reforms were essential to the early labour movement, and the notion that increasing productivity entails shorter working hours has never been nearly as ‘radical’ as today (Paulsen 2017). As concerns about climate change are rising, there is also renewed awareness about the ecological benefits of worktime reduction, besides a whole range of other social and economic advantages (Coote 2013; Frey 2019). Worktime reduction is usually taken up positively in public debate. Carlsson (2015, 184) sees a ‘growing minority of people’ who engage in practices other than waged work to support themselves and make meaningful contributions to society. Frayne (2015b) describes the practical refusal of work by average people who wish to live more independently of the treadmill of work. Across society, the disaffection with work is no marginal phenomenon (Graeber 2018; Cederström and Fleming 2012; Paulsen 2014, 2015; Weeks 2011); many start to realise the ‘dissonance between the mythical sanctity of work on the one hand, and the troubling realities of people’s actual experiences on the other’ (Frayne 2015b, 228). Public debates are therefore increasingly receptive to issues such as industries’ responsibility for climate change, coercive ‘workfare’ policies, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’, or ‘work-life-balance’, shorter hours, overwork and burnout; topics ‘that will not go away’ (Coote 2013, xix) and question the organisation of work society more fundamentally. 5 The debate about an unconditional basic income (UBI) will also remain. UBI would break the existential dependency of livelihoods on paid work and serve as a new kind of social contract to entitle people to social security regardless of paid economic activity. In addition to countless models in theory, examples of UBI schemes exist in practice, either currently implemented or planned as ‘experiments’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015). The critique and refusal of work also takes place both within the sphere of wage labour and outside it. Within, the notions of absenteeism, tardiness, shirking, theft, or sabotage (Pouget 1913 1898; Seyferth 2019) have a long tradition, dating back to early struggles against work and industrialisation (Thompson 1967), and common until today (Paulsen 2014). The idea of such deliberate ‘workplace resistance’ is that the ability to resist meaningless work and the internalised norms of work society, and be idle and useless while at work, can be recognised and successfully practised (Campagna 2013; Scott 2012). Similarly, there is a growing interest in productive practices, social relations, and the commons outside the sphere of wage labour and market relations, for example in community-supported agriculture. This initiates ways of organising work and the economy to satisfy material needs otherwise than by means of commodity consumption (Chamberlain 2018; Helfrich and Bollier 2015). For such modes of organising productive social relations in more varied ways, inspiration could be drawn from the forms of ‘work’ that are prevalent in the global South in the so-called informal sector and in non-industrial crafts and peasantry, neither of which resemble the cultural phenomenon of modern-day work with its origins in the colonial North (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Thompson 1967). This, however, contradicts the global development paradigm, under which industrialisation, ‘economic upgrading’, global (labour) market integration and ‘structural transformation’ are pursued. Modern work, especially industrial factory jobs and ideally in cities, is supposed to help ‘the poor’ to escape their misery (Banerjee and Duflo 2012; UNDP 2015). Many of these other forms of livelihood provisioning and associated ways of life are thus disregarded, denigrated or destroyed as underdeveloped, backward, poor, and lazy (Thompson 1967), and drawn into the formal system of waged work as cheap labour in capitalist markets and global supply chains – ‘improved living conditions’ as measured in formal pecuniary income (Rosling 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987). There are indications that these transformations create structural poverty, highly vulnerable jobs and an imposed dependence on wage labour (while few viable wage labour structures exist) (Hickel 2017; Srnicek and Williams 2015). There is also clear evidence of numerous struggles against capitalist development and for traditional livelihood protection and environmental justice (Anguelovski 2015). These are aspects where a postwork orientation is relevant beyond the industrialised societies of the global North, as it puts a focus on the modern phenomenon ‘work’ itself and the conditions that led to its predominance, as it questions the common narrative that ‘jobs’ are an end in themselves and justify all kinds of problematic development, and as it allows to ask which alternative, postcolonial critiques and conceptualisations of ‘work’ exist and should be preserved. To conclude, we clearly find traces of postwork organisation and politics in the present. However, these ideas are contested; they concern the roots of modern culture, society and industrial-capitalist economies. Waged work continues to be normalised, alternatives beyond niches appear quite impractical for generalisation. Powerful economic interests, including trade unions, seek to perpetuate the status-quo (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Job creation and (global) labour market integration (regardless of what kind) are central policy goals of all political parties, and presently popular progressive debates on a Green New Deal tend to exhibit a rather productivist stance. There is one particular aspect that appears hopeful: the present socio-economic system is unsustainable in the literal sense that it is physically impossible to be sustained in the long run. It was Weber (19921905) who predicted that the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order will be determining with overwhelming force until the last bit of fossil fuel is burnt – and exactly this needs to happen soon to avert catastrophic climate change. 6 This is the battlefield of sustainability, and lately there has been renewed urgency and momentum for more profound social change, where it might be realised that a different societal trajectory beyond work and productivism for their own sake is more sustainable and desirable for the future.
CASE Plan-No solvency. China is not a just government as shown by its aggression and political tactics domestically and internationally. They can’t argue for an ideologically pure version of the Chinese government-it is unattainable with or without the right to strike.
Violence PIC solves for their whole case-there are already violent uprisings within China, both from the people and the government. Providing the unconditional right to strike including violence only worsens the violence and instability within the government, increasing the probability of nuclear war. 2. Postwork K solves-before trying to purify the working systems that we currently have, we must question the necessity of the centrality of work. Changing the squo so that humans become more than labor capital is key to solving all of their impacts ADVANTAGE: Don’t buy their advantage- A) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (B) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (C) Complexity – the Advantage presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chainThe most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (D) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities. Backlash Turn Turn: More strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and 2019, after a decade of disinvestment in education that led to stagnant teacher salaries, policymakers have introduced proposals in states across the country to begin reinvesting, spurred in part by teacher walkouts and activism nationwide. While it is wonderful to finally see broad support for raising teacher salaries and investing in public schools, a predictable backlash has also emerged. Legislators in some states that were hotbeds of teacher activism are introducing bills to explicitly prohibit walkouts or punish teachers who participate, often with a sprinkling of additional anti-union provisions. Weakening unions and refusing to invest in education are long-standing conservative tenets, and these bills are evidence that we should expect conservative policymakers to return to them as soon as they believe them to be politically viable. The consequences of a decade of education funding cuts came into sharp relief last spring, after teachers staged walkouts in half a dozen states. The decade of disinvestment in education had its roots in the Great Recession, when many states were forced to drastically cut their K-12 education funding. But as the recovery got underway, many governors — particularly in red states — made intentional policy choices to cut taxes for wealthy residents and corporations rather than allow education funding to rebound to pre-recession levels as revenue increased. As a result, teacher wages stagnated, school budgets were strapped, and expenses such as building repairs and learning materials were deferred year after year. By 2018, reports of crumbling schools, students learning from decades-old textbooks, high teacher turnover, and staff shortages in these states became common. Teachers had reached their boiling point. The teacher walkouts have been very effective. Though they were a last resort, they finally got lawmakers’ attention in states that had seen the most chronic and severe cuts to education. In the states where teachers walked out, governors who hadn’t historically supported education funding agreed to enact significant pay raises and increases in education funding. For example, in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was forced to sign off on a teacher pay bill he had previously opposed that provided a 20 percent raise to the state’s teachers — some of the lowest-paid in the nation — and invested an additional $100 million in schools in the state. And now, in several states with low teacher pay that have so far avoided major protests, some governors have proposed salary increases. Remarkably, much of this movement is happening in deep-red states with historically low education spending. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster wants to give teachers a 5 percent pay raise; in Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has proposed a $5,000 increase; and in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed a $3,000 increase. In all three of these states, teachers are paid less than the national average. It’s likely that last year’s walkouts nudged these governors to consider teacher pay in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Though it goes against traditional conservative principles, supporting these raises is smart politics for these governors. There is widespread public support for increasing teacher pay, particularly in the states where walkouts occurred. But even as some conservative policymakers agree to raise teacher salaries, as the 2019 legislative sessions have begun, others in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have introduced bills that would make walkouts illegal and penalize teachers with fines, loss of their teaching licenses, or even jail time. Some of the bills also contain provisions designed specifically to weaken teachers unions, such as a requirement that teachers must opt in to dues each year, which sponsors hope will reduce membership by adding an extra step to the process. Legislators in walkout states have also introduced stand-alone proposals designed to make union membership more difficult and, therefore, less likely, such as a prohibition on districts withholding union dues from teachers’ paychecks. These backlash bills hint at a much more familiar conservative education agenda of slashing funding and working to weaken teachers unions. After all, it is this agenda that led to stagnant teacher salaries, deplorable conditions in many school buildings, and consequences for students whose schools were chronically underfunded in the first place. Supporting increases to teacher pay and greater investment in schools is the right thing to do for America’s students. Unfortunately, this wave of backlash makes clear that for some policymakers, it’s all about politics — and as soon as they have the chance, they’ll once again slash education funding and attack hardworking teachers.
Turn again: The right to strike just leads businesses to take stronger steps to stop unionization. Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are fundamentally framed by one-sided control over communication, with no free-speech rights for workers. Under current law, employers may require workers to attend mass anti-union meetings as often as once a day (mandatory meetings at which the employer delivers anti-union messaging are dubbed “captive audience meetings” in labor law). Not only is the union not granted equal time, but pro-union employees may be required to attend on condition that they not ask questions; those who speak up despite this condition can be legally fired on the spot.19 The most recent data show that nearly 90 of employers force employees to attend such anti-union campaign rallies, with the average employer holding 10 such mandatory meetings during the course of an election campaign.20 ¶ In addition to group meetings, employers typically have supervisors talk one-on-one with each of their direct subordinates.21 In these conversations, the same person who controls one’s schedule, assigns job duties, approves vacation requests, grants raises, and has the power to terminate employees “at will” conveys how important it is that their underlings oppose unionization. As one longtime consultant explained, a supervisor’s message is especially powerful because “the warnings…come from…the people counted on for that good review and that weekly paycheck.”22 ¶ Within this lopsided campaign environment, the employer’s message typically focuses on a few key themes: unions will drive employers out of business, unions only care about extorting dues payments from workers, and unionization is futile because employees can’t make management do something it doesn’t want to do.23 Many of these arguments are highly deceptive or even mutually contradictory. For instance, the dues message stands in direct contradiction to management’s warnings that unions inevitably lead to strikes and unemployment. If a union were primarily interested in extracting dues money from workers, it would never risk a strike or bankruptcy, because no one pays dues when they are on strike or out of work. But in an atmosphere in which pro-union employees have little effective right of reply, these messages may prove extremely powerful. ¶ It is common for unionization drives to start with two-thirds of employees supporting unionization and still end in a “no” vote. This reversal points to the anti-democratic dynamics of NLRB elections: voters are not being convinced of the merits of remaining without representation—they are being intimidated into the belief that unionization is at best futile and at worst dangerous. When a large national survey asked workers who had been through an election to name “the most important reason people voted against union representation,” the single most common response was management pressure, including fear of job loss.24 Those who vote on this basis are not expressing a preference to remain unrepresented. Indeed, many might still prefer unionization if they believed it could work. Where fear is the motivator, what is captured in the snapshot of the ballot is not preference but despair. ¶To understand what union elections look like in reality, we have profiled two cases in which workers sought to create a union and met with a harsh (and typical) employer backlash. In both cases—a tire plant in Georgia and a satellite TV company in Texas—the employer response ranges from illegally firing union activists to engaging in acts of coercion and intimidation that are illegal in any normal election to public office but are allowed under the NLRA. ¶
The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place.
RTS doesn’t solve their impacts-the Chinese government has long disrespected the rights of people, unconditional or not. Even if the aff fiats that the plan gets implemented, circumvention is inevitable due to the real-world conditions that the aff fails to take into account. Two issues with their Friedman ’17 card-1. collective bargaining and RTS are separate. All the card argues is that they accompany each other, but collective bargaining solves. These are two fundamentally different things and they cant solve because their solvency advocate advocates a separate plan. 2. They have no inherency-the government is already working to expand the right to strike within the country. If they argue any lack of success, that is more proof that it wouldn’t be followed-that’s a double bind. Either they have no inherency or they’ll never solve. There is nothing better for economic stability than the shift from the centrality of work-if economic gains and losses aren’t viewed as the main priority, there is both less change in the market, which increases stability, and no economic or political incentive to go to war. Warming impacts are the only extinction impacts that should be evaluated-warming is being enacted in the squo, limited human incentive to change it. Mutually assured destruction has held nuclear law in place for nearly a century, and wars where big powers have gotten involved have stayed non-nuclear because of self-preservation instincts. China has never had the right to strike fully implemented-there is no reason why it would uniquely cause these impacts now. They have long link chains between separate authors-don’t buy their arguments because of low probability.
11/9/21
ND-violence pic, postwork, case
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mountain View EN | Judge: Lu, Serena Counterplan: A just government ought to guarantee the right to strike except for violent strike tactics. Strikes can be violent, South Africa proves. This link turns the AC by harming the affected sector and decking the economy. Tenzam ’20 - Mlungisi Tenzam LLB LLM LLD Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020, The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandpid=S1682-58532020000300004 The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike.11The Constitution grants these rights to a "worker" as an individual.12However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14¶ The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to "advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace".16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society.¶ Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike 17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally.18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful.19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers' demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows:¶ "There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike ... A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won't win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say '1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC'. You won't win a strike like that."21¶ The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers' homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour.22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families' living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer's business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26¶ These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations' sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment27, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. POSTWORK K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is associated with environmental pressures in at least four different ways, why do we have to maintain it at constant or increased levels? We hold that in industrial society four distinct levels of structural and cultural dependency on work may be discerned. These are to be understood as broad analytical categories which in reality comprise and cross individual and structural levels in various ways, and are all interdependent. Personal dependence. A first aspect is individual or personal dependence on work: Work as regular, gainful employment constitutes one of the central social relations in modern ‘work society’ and is a central point of reference in people’s lives. As a principal source of income, waged work fulfils the existential function of providing livelihoods and social security. It is constructed to secure basic social rights, social integration, recognition, status, and personal identity (Frayne 2015b; Weeks 2011). This is probably why ‘social’ is so often equated with ‘work’. State dependence. Secondly, dependence on work pertains to the modern welfare state: the revenues and economic growth generated through work contribute substantially to the financing of social security systems. Affording welfare is therefore a main argument for creating jobs. Wage labour is thus a dominating tool for redistribution; through wages, taxes on wages and on the consumption that production generates, almost all distribution takes place. Hence, what the job is, and what is being produced, is of secondary importance (Paulsen 2017). Work is moreover a convenient instrument of control that structures and disciplines society, and ‘renders populations at once productive and governable’ (Weeks 2011, 54; Gorz 1982; Lafargue 2014 1883). Specifically, the dominant neoliberal ideology, its condemnation of laziness and idealisation of ‘hardworking people’ has intensified the ‘moral fortification of work’. Accordingly, the neoliberal ‘workfare’ reforms have focused on job creation and the relentless activation for the labour market, effectively ‘enforcing work (…) as a key function of the state’ (Frayne 2015b, 16). Economic dependence. Thirdly, besides the economic imperative for individuals to ‘earn a living’ and pay off debt, modern economies are dependent on work in terms of an industrious labour force, long working hours for increasing economic output under the imperatives of capital accumulation, growth and competition, and rising incomes for increasing purchasing power and demand. Creating or preserving jobs constitutes the standard argument for economic growth. In turn, work as one basic factor of production creates growth. However, the relation between growth and employment is conditioned, amongst other factors, primarily by constantly pursued labour productivity: for employment to rise or stay stable, the economy must grow at a sufficiently high rate to exceed productivity gains, in order to offset job losses and avoid ‘jobless growth’. Moreover, faltering expansion triggers a spiral of recession which not only affects economic stability but results in societal crises as a whole (Jackson 2009; Paech 2012). However, besides being unsustainable and insatiable, growth is also increasingly unlikely to continue at the rates required for economic stability (Kallis et al. 2018; IMF 2015). The individual and structural economic dependence on work and economic growth therefore implies profound vulnerability as livelihoods and political stability are fatefully exposed to global competition and the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation, and constrained by ‘systemically relevant’ job and growth creating companies, industries and global (financial) markets (Gronemeyer 2012; Paech 2012). Cultural dependence. A fourth aspect concerns cultural dependence: The ‘work ethic’ is the specific morality described by Max Weber (19921905) as constitutive of modern industrial culture, 2 and determining for all its subjects as shared ‘common senses’ about how work is valued and understood. It means an ingrained moral compulsion to gainful work and timesaving, manifested in the common ideals of productivity, achievement and entrepreneurship, in the feeling of guilt when time is ‘wasted’, in personal identification with one’s ‘calling’, in observations of busyness, even burnout as a ‘badge of honour’ (Paulsen 2014), and in descriptions of a culture that has lost the ‘capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways’ (Thompson 1967, 91). Even for those who do not share such attitudes towards work, in a work-centred culture it is normal to (seek) work. It is so commonsensical that it seems impractical to question it, and it continues to be normalised through socialisation and schooling. Consequently, people become limited in their imagination of alternatives, the prospect of losing one’s job usually causes heartfelt fear (Standing 2011). For a work society that ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’, there can be nothing worse than the cessation of work (Hannah Arendt, cited in Gorz 1989, 7–8). The wage relation based on the commodity labour is, in other words, an essential functional feature of the industrial-capitalist system, and the exaltation of work remains its social ethic. For modern industrial society work is ‘both its chief means and its ultimate goal’ (Gorz 1989, 13; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2011); it is centred and structurally dependent on work, despite work’s environmentally adverse implications. This constellation constitutes the dilemma between work and the environment, and it is why we argue that work is absolutely central to present-day unsustainability and should accordingly be dealt with in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the problem with modern-day work from an environmental perspective? A number of quantitative studies have researched the correlation of working hours and environmental impacts in terms of ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption, both on micro/household and on macro/cross-national levels, and for both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013; Nässén and Larsson 2015; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). Based on these findings, and going beyond them, we develop a qualitative classification of ecological impacts of work broadly (not working hours only), distinguishing four analytically distinct factors (Hoffmann 2017). Fundamentally, all productive activity is based on material and energy throughputs within wider ecological conditions, which necessarily involves interference with the ecosphere. The appropriation and exploitation of non-human animals, land, soil, water, biomass, raw materials, the atmosphere and all other elements of the biosphere always to some extent causes pollution, degradation, and destruction. Thus, work is inherently both productive and destructive. However, this biophysical basis alone need not make work unsustainable, and it has not always been so (Krausmann 2017). Contributing to its unsustainability is, firstly, the Scale factor: the greater the amount of work, the more ‘inputs’ are required and the more ‘outputs’ generated, which means more throughput of resources and energy, and resulting ecological impacts. In other words, the more work, the larger the size of the economy, the more demands on the biosphere (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013). Obviously, there are qualitative differences between different types of work and their respective environmental impacts. Moreover, besides the evident and direct impacts, indirect impacts matter also. The tertiary/service sector is therefore not exempt from this reasoning (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), not only due to its own (often ‘embodied’) materiality and energy requirements, but also because it administrates and supports industrial production processes in global supply chains (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Haberl et al. 2009; Paech 2012). Additionally, modern work is subject to certain integrally connected and mutually reinforcing conditions inherent in industrial economic structures, which aggravate ecological impacts by further increasing the Scale factor. These include the systematic externalisation of costs, and the use of fossil fuels as crucial energy basis, which combined with modern industrial technology enable continuously rising labour productivity independently of physical, spatial or temporal constraints (Malm 2013). Taken together, this leads to constantly spurred economic growth with a corresponding growth in material and energetic throughputs, and the creation of massive amounts of waste. The latter is not an adverse side-effect of modern work, but part of its purpose under the imperatives of growth, profitability, and constant innovation, as evident in phenomena such as planned obsolescence or the ‘scrapping premium’, serving to stimulate growth and demand, and hence, job creation (Gronemeyer 2012). These conditions and effects tend to be neglected when ‘green jobs’ are promised to resolve the ecological crisis (Paus 2018), disregarding that the systematically and continuously advanced scale of work and production has grown far beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009). Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there was support for environmental perspectives in LO at this time – after all, the National Congress commissioned the programme, an environmental unit was established at headquarters and a majority of the congress accepted the programme – this waned significantly when the economy was threatened. This reflects the influence of the ‘jobs vs. environment’ conflict on processes of integrating environmental perspectives into the union agenda (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Union policies are embedded in a mode of production marked by what Marx called the ‘metabolic rift’. The concept is one of the pillars upon which Foster develops ‘Marx’s Ecology’ (Foster 2000, 155 f). It argues that the capitalist industrial system exploits the earth without restoring its constituents to it. More generally, Marx defined the labour process as metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between nature (external to humans) and human nature. When humans work on and with nature to produce the means of their survival, they also develop their knowledge and their capabilities, and transform their own human nature (Marx 1998). Polanyi later reduced the concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ to the commodification of land (Polanyi 1944), thus paving the way for a perspective that sees the solution in the control of the market, but disregards the relations of production as they are lived by workers in the production process. But to understand why trade unions have difficulties developing and especially holding on to environmental policies it is important to recognise that since nature has become a privately owned ‘means of production’ it has become workers’ Other. Unions have been reduced and have reduced themselves to care only for one part of the inseparable relationship between nature and labour. On the everyday level of policies this means that environmental strategies lose momentum in times of economic crises and when jobs are seen to be threatened. In this respect, unions are no different from political parties and governments. In spite of numerous publications by the ILO and Union organisations, which show that a move to a ‘green economy’ can create new jobs (Poschen 2012; Rivera Alejo and Martín Murillo 2014), unions have been reluctant to exchange ‘a bird in the hand for two in the bush’ – even if the bird in the hand becomes elusive. The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ‘postwork’ approach contribute to resolving these issues? The notions critique of work (Frayne 2015a, 2015b) or postwork (Weeks 2011) have emerged in recent years in social science research and popular culture, building on a long intellectual tradition of (autonomist and neo-)Marxist, anarchist, and feminist theory (Seyferth 2019; Weeks 2011). The critique of work targets work in a fundamental sense, not only its conditions or exploitation. It is aimed at the centrality of work in modern ‘work society’ as a pivotal point for the provision of livelihoods through monetary income, the granting of social security, social inclusion, and personal identity construction, on which grounds unemployed persons and unpaid activities are excluded from recognition, welfare provision and trade union support. Moreover, the crucial role of waged work in the functioning of the welfare state and the modern industrialised economy is part of this critique (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015b; Paulsen 2017). Although commonly taken as naturally given, this kind of societal order and its institutions such as the wage relation, labour markets, unemployment, or abstract time are historically and culturally exceptional modes of human coexistence (Applebaum 1992; Graeber 2018; Gorz 1989; Polanyi 2001 1944; Thompson 1967). This critique of the structures and social relations of work society is accompanied by the critique of its cultural foundation, the work ethic; an ideological commitment to work and productivism as ends in themselves, moral obligations, and as intrinsically good, regardless of what is done and at what cost (Gorz 1982; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2001). Postwork, however, is not only a critical stance. Criticising work and work society, aware of their historical contingency, implies the potential for an emancipatory transformation of industrial society. The focus is thereby not necessarily on abolishing work tout-court, but rather on pointing out and questioning its relentless centrality and asking what a more desirable, free and sustainable society might look like; a society in which work is no longer the pivotal point of social organisation and ideological orientation, including all questions and debates around this objective (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015a; Weeks 2011). As a relatively new and dynamically developing approach, postwork is, despite similar political claims, not uniform in its reasoning. Some, drawing on the classical ‘end-of-work’ argument (Frayne 2016), assume an imminent technology-induced massive rise in unemployment. This is welcomed as an opportunity to reduce and ultimately abolish work to liberate humankind (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Others emphasise the remarkable fact that throughout the past two centuries technological development has not challenged the centrality of work in modern lives, despite the prospect that technological change would allow for much shorter working hours (e.g., Keynes 1930). This has not materialised due to the requirements of a work-centred, work-dependent society. On the contrary, work has become more central to modern societies. These deeper structural and cultural aspects and dependencies seem to remain unaffected by technological trends (Paulsen 2017; Weeks 2011). The ecological case for postwork The perspective of postwork/critiques of work may enrich sustainability debates in many ways; here, our focus is again on ecological concerns. First, postwork offers a much needed change in focus in sustainability debates, away from narrow critiques of individual consumption and the overemphasis on ‘green jobs’, towards understanding work as one central cause of sustained societal unsustainability. Postwork directs the focus towards crucial overlooked issues, e.g. the ways in which work is ecologically harmful, or which problems arise due to the social and cultural significance of modern-day work, including existential dependencies on it. Postwork seeks to re-politicise work, recognising that its conception and societal organisation are social constructs and therefore political, and must accordingly be open to debate (Weeks 2011). This opens conceptual space and enables open-minded debates about the meaning, value and purpose of work: what kind of work is, for individuals, society and the biosphere as a whole, meaningful, pointless, or outright harmful (Graeber 2018)? Such debates and enhanced understanding about the means and ends of work, and the range of problems associated with it, would be important in several regards. In ecological regard it facilitates the ecologically necessary, substantial reduction of work, production and consumption (Frey 2019; Haberl et al. 2009). Reducing work/working hours is one of the key premises of postwork, aiming at de-centring and de-normalising work, and releasing time, energy and creativity for purposes other than work (Coote 2013). From an ecological perspective, reducing the amount of work would reduce the dependency on a commodity-intensive mode of living, and allow space for more sustainable practices (Frayne 2016). Reducing work would also help mitigate all other work-induced environmental pressures described above, especially the ‘Scale factor’ (Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), i.e. the amount of resources and energy consumed, and waste, including emissions, created through work. A postwork approach facilitates debate on the politics of ecological work reduction which entails difficult questions: for example, which industries and fields of employment are to be phased out? Which fields will need to be favoured and upon what grounds? Which kinds of work in which sectors are socially important and should therefore be organised differently, especially when altering the energy basis of work due to climate change mitigation which implies decentralised, locally specific, intermittent and less concentrated energy sources (Malm 2013)? These questions are decisive for future (un-)sustainability, and yet serious attempts at a solution are presently forestalled by the unquestioned sanctity that work, ‘jobs’ or ‘full employment’ enjoy (Frayne 2015b). Postwork is also conducive to rethinking the organisation of work. There are plausible arguments in favour of new institutions of democratic control over the economy, i.e. economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012). This is urgent and necessary to distribute a very tight remaining carbon budget fairly and wisely (IPCC 2018), to keep economic power in check, and to gain public sovereignty over fundamental economic decisions that are pivotal for (un-)sustainable trajectories (Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004). An obstacle to this is one institution in particular which is rarely under close scrutiny: the labour market, a social construct linked to the advent of modern work in form of the commodity of labour (Applebaum 1992). It is an undemocratic mechanism, usually characterised by high levels of unfreedom and coercion (Anderson 2017; Graeber 2018; Paulsen 2015) that allocates waged work in a competitive mode as an artificially scarce, ‘fictitious’ commodity (Polanyi 2001 1944). 4 It does so according to availability of money and motives of gain on the part of employers, and appears therefore inappropriate for distributing labour according to sustainability criteria and related societal needs. As long as unsustainable and/or unnecessary jobs are profitable and/or (well-)paid, they will continue to exist (Gorz 1989), just as ‘green jobs’ must follow these same criteria in order to be created. An ecological postwork perspective allows to question this on ecological grounds, and it links to debates on different modes of organising socially necessary work, production and provisioning in a de-commodified, democratic and sustainable mode. Finally, postwork is helpful for ecological reasons because it criticises the cultural glorification of ‘hard work’, merit and productivism, and the moral assumption that laziness and inaction are intrinsically bad, regardless the circumstances. Postwork is about a different mindset which problematises prevailing productivist attitudes and allows the idea that being lazy or unproductive can be something inherently valuable. Idleness is conducive to an ecological agenda as nothing is evidently more carbon-neutral and environment-sparing than being absolutely unproductive. As time-use studies indicate, leisure, recreation and socialising have very low ecological impacts, with rest and sleep having virtually none (Druckman et al. 2012). Apart from humans, the biosphere also needs idle time for regeneration. In this sense, laziness or ‘ecological leisure’, ideally sleep, can be regarded as supremely ecofriendly states of being that would help mitigate ecological pressures. Moreover, as postwork traces which changes in attitudes towards time, efficiency and laziness have brought modern work culture and modern time regimes into being in the first place and have dominated ever since (Thompson 1967; Weber 1992 1905), it provides crucial knowledge for understanding and potentially changing this historically peculiar construction. It can thereby take inspiration from longstanding traditions throughout human history, where leisure has usually been a high social ideal and regarded as vital for realising genuine freedom and quality of life (Applebaum 1992; Gorz 1989). Conclusions: postwork politics and practices We argued that modern-day work is a central cause for unsustainability, and should therefore be transformed to advance towards sustainability. We have contributed to this field of research, firstly, by developing a systematisation of the ecological harms associated with work – comprising the factors Scale, Time, Income, and Work-induced Mobility, Infrastructure, and Consumption – taking those studies one step further which investigate the ecological impacts of working hours quantitatively. One of the analytical advantages of this approach is that it avoids the mystification of work through indirect measures of economic activity (such as per capita GDP), as in the numerous analyses of the conflict between sustainability and economic growth in general. Our second substantial contribution consists in combining these ecological impacts of work with an analysis of the various structural dependencies on work in modern society, which spells out clearly what the recurring jobs-environment-dilemma actually implies, and why it is so difficult to overcome. While this dilemma is often vaguely referred to, this has been the first more detailed analysis of the different dimensions that essentially constitute it. Reviewing the literature in environmental sociology and sustainability research more generally, we also found the work-environment-dilemma and the role of work itself are not sufficiently addressed and remain major unresolved issues. We proposed the field would benefit from taking up the long intellectual tradition of problematising modern-day work, through the approach of postwork or critiques of work. While the described problems of unsustainability and entrenched dependencies cannot easily be resolved, we discussed how postwork arguments can contribute to pointing out and understanding them, and to opening up new perspectives to advance sustainability debates. A third contribution is therefore to have introduced the concept of postwork/critiques of work into sustainability research and the work-environment debate, and to have conducted an initial analysis of the ways in which postwork may be helpful for tackling ecological problems. Besides being ecologically beneficial, it may also serve emancipatory purposes to ‘raise broader questions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a life no longer so subordinate to it’ (Weeks 2011, 33). In order to inspire such ‘postwork imagination’ (Weeks 2011, 35, 110) and show that postwork ideas are not as detached from reality as they may sound, in this last section we briefly outline examples of existing postwork politics and practices. The most obvious example is the reduction of working hours during the 19th and 20th centuries. These reforms were essential to the early labour movement, and the notion that increasing productivity entails shorter working hours has never been nearly as ‘radical’ as today (Paulsen 2017). As concerns about climate change are rising, there is also renewed awareness about the ecological benefits of worktime reduction, besides a whole range of other social and economic advantages (Coote 2013; Frey 2019). Worktime reduction is usually taken up positively in public debate. Carlsson (2015, 184) sees a ‘growing minority of people’ who engage in practices other than waged work to support themselves and make meaningful contributions to society. Frayne (2015b) describes the practical refusal of work by average people who wish to live more independently of the treadmill of work. Across society, the disaffection with work is no marginal phenomenon (Graeber 2018; Cederström and Fleming 2012; Paulsen 2014, 2015; Weeks 2011); many start to realise the ‘dissonance between the mythical sanctity of work on the one hand, and the troubling realities of people’s actual experiences on the other’ (Frayne 2015b, 228). Public debates are therefore increasingly receptive to issues such as industries’ responsibility for climate change, coercive ‘workfare’ policies, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’, or ‘work-life-balance’, shorter hours, overwork and burnout; topics ‘that will not go away’ (Coote 2013, xix) and question the organisation of work society more fundamentally. 5 The debate about an unconditional basic income (UBI) will also remain. UBI would break the existential dependency of livelihoods on paid work and serve as a new kind of social contract to entitle people to social security regardless of paid economic activity. In addition to countless models in theory, examples of UBI schemes exist in practice, either currently implemented or planned as ‘experiments’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015). The critique and refusal of work also takes place both within the sphere of wage labour and outside it. Within, the notions of absenteeism, tardiness, shirking, theft, or sabotage (Pouget 1913 1898; Seyferth 2019) have a long tradition, dating back to early struggles against work and industrialisation (Thompson 1967), and common until today (Paulsen 2014). The idea of such deliberate ‘workplace resistance’ is that the ability to resist meaningless work and the internalised norms of work society, and be idle and useless while at work, can be recognised and successfully practised (Campagna 2013; Scott 2012). Similarly, there is a growing interest in productive practices, social relations, and the commons outside the sphere of wage labour and market relations, for example in community-supported agriculture. This initiates ways of organising work and the economy to satisfy material needs otherwise than by means of commodity consumption (Chamberlain 2018; Helfrich and Bollier 2015). For such modes of organising productive social relations in more varied ways, inspiration could be drawn from the forms of ‘work’ that are prevalent in the global South in the so-called informal sector and in non-industrial crafts and peasantry, neither of which resemble the cultural phenomenon of modern-day work with its origins in the colonial North (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Thompson 1967). This, however, contradicts the global development paradigm, under which industrialisation, ‘economic upgrading’, global (labour) market integration and ‘structural transformation’ are pursued. Modern work, especially industrial factory jobs and ideally in cities, is supposed to help ‘the poor’ to escape their misery (Banerjee and Duflo 2012; UNDP 2015). Many of these other forms of livelihood provisioning and associated ways of life are thus disregarded, denigrated or destroyed as underdeveloped, backward, poor, and lazy (Thompson 1967), and drawn into the formal system of waged work as cheap labour in capitalist markets and global supply chains – ‘improved living conditions’ as measured in formal pecuniary income (Rosling 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987). There are indications that these transformations create structural poverty, highly vulnerable jobs and an imposed dependence on wage labour (while few viable wage labour structures exist) (Hickel 2017; Srnicek and Williams 2015). There is also clear evidence of numerous struggles against capitalist development and for traditional livelihood protection and environmental justice (Anguelovski 2015). These are aspects where a postwork orientation is relevant beyond the industrialised societies of the global North, as it puts a focus on the modern phenomenon ‘work’ itself and the conditions that led to its predominance, as it questions the common narrative that ‘jobs’ are an end in themselves and justify all kinds of problematic development, and as it allows to ask which alternative, postcolonial critiques and conceptualisations of ‘work’ exist and should be preserved. To conclude, we clearly find traces of postwork organisation and politics in the present. However, these ideas are contested; they concern the roots of modern culture, society and industrial-capitalist economies. Waged work continues to be normalised, alternatives beyond niches appear quite impractical for generalisation. Powerful economic interests, including trade unions, seek to perpetuate the status-quo (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Job creation and (global) labour market integration (regardless of what kind) are central policy goals of all political parties, and presently popular progressive debates on a Green New Deal tend to exhibit a rather productivist stance. There is one particular aspect that appears hopeful: the present socio-economic system is unsustainable in the literal sense that it is physically impossible to be sustained in the long run. It was Weber (19921905) who predicted that the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order will be determining with overwhelming force until the last bit of fossil fuel is burnt – and exactly this needs to happen soon to avert catastrophic climate change. 6 This is the battlefield of sustainability, and lately there has been renewed urgency and momentum for more profound social change, where it might be realised that a different societal trajectory beyond work and productivism for their own sake is more sustainable and desirable for the future.
ON CASE Backlash Turn Turn: More strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and 2019, after a decade of disinvestment in education that led to stagnant teacher salaries, policymakers have introduced proposals in states across the country to begin reinvesting, spurred in part by teacher walkouts and activism nationwide. While it is wonderful to finally see broad support for raising teacher salaries and investing in public schools, a predictable backlash has also emerged. Legislators in some states that were hotbeds of teacher activism are introducing bills to explicitly prohibit walkouts or punish teachers who participate, often with a sprinkling of additional anti-union provisions. Weakening unions and refusing to invest in education are long-standing conservative tenets, and these bills are evidence that we should expect conservative policymakers to return to them as soon as they believe them to be politically viable. The consequences of a decade of education funding cuts came into sharp relief last spring, after teachers staged walkouts in half a dozen states. The decade of disinvestment in education had its roots in the Great Recession, when many states were forced to drastically cut their K-12 education funding. But as the recovery got underway, many governors — particularly in red states — made intentional policy choices to cut taxes for wealthy residents and corporations rather than allow education funding to rebound to pre-recession levels as revenue increased. As a result, teacher wages stagnated, school budgets were strapped, and expenses such as building repairs and learning materials were deferred year after year. By 2018, reports of crumbling schools, students learning from decades-old textbooks, high teacher turnover, and staff shortages in these states became common. Teachers had reached their boiling point. The teacher walkouts have been very effective. Though they were a last resort, they finally got lawmakers’ attention in states that had seen the most chronic and severe cuts to education. In the states where teachers walked out, governors who hadn’t historically supported education funding agreed to enact significant pay raises and increases in education funding. For example, in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was forced to sign off on a teacher pay bill he had previously opposed that provided a 20 percent raise to the state’s teachers — some of the lowest-paid in the nation — and invested an additional $100 million in schools in the state. And now, in several states with low teacher pay that have so far avoided major protests, some governors have proposed salary increases. Remarkably, much of this movement is happening in deep-red states with historically low education spending. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster wants to give teachers a 5 percent pay raise; in Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has proposed a $5,000 increase; and in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed a $3,000 increase. In all three of these states, teachers are paid less than the national average. It’s likely that last year’s walkouts nudged these governors to consider teacher pay in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Though it goes against traditional conservative principles, supporting these raises is smart politics for these governors. There is widespread public support for increasing teacher pay, particularly in the states where walkouts occurred. But even as some conservative policymakers agree to raise teacher salaries, as the 2019 legislative sessions have begun, others in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have introduced bills that would make walkouts illegal and penalize teachers with fines, loss of their teaching licenses, or even jail time. Some of the bills also contain provisions designed specifically to weaken teachers unions, such as a requirement that teachers must opt in to dues each year, which sponsors hope will reduce membership by adding an extra step to the process. Legislators in walkout states have also introduced stand-alone proposals designed to make union membership more difficult and, therefore, less likely, such as a prohibition on districts withholding union dues from teachers’ paychecks. These backlash bills hint at a much more familiar conservative education agenda of slashing funding and working to weaken teachers unions. After all, it is this agenda that led to stagnant teacher salaries, deplorable conditions in many school buildings, and consequences for students whose schools were chronically underfunded in the first place. Supporting increases to teacher pay and greater investment in schools is the right thing to do for America’s students. Unfortunately, this wave of backlash makes clear that for some policymakers, it’s all about politics — and as soon as they have the chance, they’ll once again slash education funding and attack hardworking teachers.
Turn again: The right to strike just leads businesses to take stronger steps to stop unionization. Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are fundamentally framed by one-sided control over communication, with no free-speech rights for workers. Under current law, employers may require workers to attend mass anti-union meetings as often as once a day (mandatory meetings at which the employer delivers anti-union messaging are dubbed “captive audience meetings” in labor law). Not only is the union not granted equal time, but pro-union employees may be required to attend on condition that they not ask questions; those who speak up despite this condition can be legally fired on the spot.19 The most recent data show that nearly 90 of employers force employees to attend such anti-union campaign rallies, with the average employer holding 10 such mandatory meetings during the course of an election campaign.20 ¶ In addition to group meetings, employers typically have supervisors talk one-on-one with each of their direct subordinates.21 In these conversations, the same person who controls one’s schedule, assigns job duties, approves vacation requests, grants raises, and has the power to terminate employees “at will” conveys how important it is that their underlings oppose unionization. As one longtime consultant explained, a supervisor’s message is especially powerful because “the warnings…come from…the people counted on for that good review and that weekly paycheck.”22 ¶ Within this lopsided campaign environment, the employer’s message typically focuses on a few key themes: unions will drive employers out of business, unions only care about extorting dues payments from workers, and unionization is futile because employees can’t make management do something it doesn’t want to do.23 Many of these arguments are highly deceptive or even mutually contradictory. For instance, the dues message stands in direct contradiction to management’s warnings that unions inevitably lead to strikes and unemployment. If a union were primarily interested in extracting dues money from workers, it would never risk a strike or bankruptcy, because no one pays dues when they are on strike or out of work. But in an atmosphere in which pro-union employees have little effective right of reply, these messages may prove extremely powerful. ¶ It is common for unionization drives to start with two-thirds of employees supporting unionization and still end in a “no” vote. This reversal points to the anti-democratic dynamics of NLRB elections: voters are not being convinced of the merits of remaining without representation—they are being intimidated into the belief that unionization is at best futile and at worst dangerous. When a large national survey asked workers who had been through an election to name “the most important reason people voted against union representation,” the single most common response was management pressure, including fear of job loss.24 Those who vote on this basis are not expressing a preference to remain unrepresented. Indeed, many might still prefer unionization if they believed it could work. Where fear is the motivator, what is captured in the snapshot of the ballot is not preference but despair. ¶To understand what union elections look like in reality, we have profiled two cases in which workers sought to create a union and met with a harsh (and typical) employer backlash. In both cases—a tire plant in Georgia and a satellite TV company in Texas—the employer response ranges from illegally firing union activists to engaging in acts of coercion and intimidation that are illegal in any normal election to public office but are allowed under the NLRA. ¶
Governments currently in control resist shifts to anticapitalist ideas like communism, meaning that this increases the impact of the turn. There will be more restrictions on collective striking and unionization if the end goal is something that world leaders oppose. The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place. This means that they could never solve-they don’t control the links to their own impacts if all of their advocates are advocating for a plan that the aff doesn’t get. Postwork solves better because there is no need for unionization, so no resistance-meaningless work is a large part of the need for striking and work that remains is valued as more important. We solve for warming better- Resources are finite, extraction doesn’t assume declining energy yielded per energy invested. Ensures collapse by 2050, but the alt ensures a smooth transition before warming kills us No nuke war or extinction- Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities. They also don’t solve for their Eagleton nuke war/extinction cards-they don’t disrupt the monetary incentive for work which means that their case links better to nuke war. ON CASE OFFENSE
We win under their framework of deconstructing capitalism-the fight for striking for better pay reinforces the capitalist idea that work should be a central focus and that monetary incentives for work come first. 2. Communism doesn’t solve as well as postwork-communism still centralizes the necessity to work, which continues to destroy the environment, independently outweighing all of their case. 3. The aff doesn’t lead to communism-fighting for fair pay and stopping working to get back to work enforces capitalist ideals and continues the emphasis on monetary gains. Their goal is to make capitalism more appealing and effective by reducing inequality within our current system, but the neg plans to deconstruct those assumptions entirely. 4. PIC solves for their whole case-violence isn’t a necessary part of deconstructing capitalism, but putting that condition on striking makes it competitive with the aff.
11/9/21
ND-wsde, postwork, case
Tournament: Silver and Black | Round: 6 | Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: Josh Weingarten WSDE CP Plan text: Firms should be transformed into worker self-directed enterprises. Wolff ND - Richard D. Wolff professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School in New York City. He has also taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), “Start with Worker Self-Directed Enterprises,” The Next System Project. https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/RickWolff.pdf AT We therefore propose reorganizing enterprises such that workers become their own bosses. Specifically, that means placing the workers in the position of their own collective board of directors, rather than having directors be nonworkers selected by major shareholders. This is not primarily a matter of workers as owners of these enterprises (fine, but not required), nor primarily as managers (likewise fine, but not required). It is the tasks of direction—the decision making now assigned usually and primarily to corporate boards of directors and only secondarily to the major shareholders who choose them—that must be transferred to the workers collectively. We call such enterprises worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). They embody and concretize what we mean by economic democracy by locating it first and foremost inside the enterprises producing the goods and services upon which society depends. WSDEs represent the goal and their growth and proliferation represent the mechanism to transition from the present capitalist system to a far better next system. The strategic focus, then, is not upon the government, as in traditional liberal and socialist thinking; it is rather more microeconomic than macroeconomic. Of course, winning government support of WSDEs and their proliferation would be helpful and sought after—perhaps by political parties rooted in and funded by an emerging WSDE sector within otherwise private or state capitalist economies. But the main emphasis would be on working people who either convert existing enterprises into WSDEs or start new enterprises as WSDEs. Core Goals Briefly, what are the principal, core goals your model or system seeks to realize? Our core goal is the development of a major—and, if possible, prevailing—sector of the economy that is comprised of enterprises (offices, factories, farms, and stores) in which the employees democratically perform the following key enterprise activities: (a) divide all the labors to be performed, (b) determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and where it is to be produced, and (c) decide on the use and distribution of the output or revenues (if output is monetized) therefrom. Major Changes What are the principal changes you envision in the current system—the major differences between what you envision and what we have today? A large portion of existing capitalistically organized enterprises would have to transition out of structures in which owners, top managers, or boards of directors perform the key enterprise activities mentioned above. Principal Means What are the principal means (policies, institutions, behaviors, whatever) through which each of your core goals is pursued? The means to achieve the transition would need to be several. Laws would need to be enacted or changed to facilitate the conversion of capitalistically organized enterprises into WSDEs, the formation of new WSDEs, and the functioning of WSDEs. School curriculums would need to be changed and teachers be trained to explain, explore, and study WSDEs systematically as alternative-enterprise organizations alongside their traditional capitalist counterparts (corporations, partnerships, and family enterprises). Political parties and platforms need to emerge to represent the interests of WSDEs—the WSDE sector—in terms of state policies, much as now the Democrats and Republicans represent the interests of the capitalist sector. Empirics prove that self-directed firms are more democratic and successful. Jerry Ashton, 13 - ("The Worker Self-Directed Enterprise: A "Cure" for Capitalism, or a Slippery Slope to Socialism?," HuffPost, 1-2-2013, accessed 11-16-2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worker-self-directed-enterprise_b_2385334)//MS Decidedly so, Wolff responds, providing two financially successful examples of the workplace being a social activity governed by the norms of community, one in Spain and one in California. ¶ Wolff offers as his first example, the Mondragon Cooperative in the North of Spain. ¶ This co-op took its name from the Mondragan University founded by a local Catholic priest by the name of "Father Arizmendi" as a mechanism to enable the poor in that community to learn how to cooperatively run their own business. ¶ Beginning with six workers producing agrarian goods, some 55 years later it now employs 120,000 people employed in some 100 worker-owned enterprises and affiliated organizations. It is the 10th largest cooperative in Spain and a bulwark against that country's steep (elsewhere) unemployment rate of 22 percent. ¶ "This is a 'a family of cooperatives' in which the first commitment is to preserve jobs -- not satisfy stockholders." Wolff points out. ¶ That same philosophy infuses the Arizmendi Bakery comprising five "sister cooperatives" in the San Francisco Bay Area. Proudly assuming the name of the famous Basque Priest, this group gets rave reviews for its pastries and thin-crust pizza and handily outperforms its more traditional bakery competitors in both revenue and employee satisfaction. ¶ As their website proudly states, "We are a cooperative -- a worker-owned and operated business. We make decisions democratically, sharing all of the tasks, responsibilities, benefits and risks." ¶ Postwork K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is associated with environmental pressures in at least four different ways, why do we have to maintain it at constant or increased levels? We hold that in industrial society four distinct levels of structural and cultural dependency on work may be discerned. These are to be understood as broad analytical categories which in reality comprise and cross individual and structural levels in various ways, and are all interdependent. Personal dependence. A first aspect is individual or personal dependence on work: Work as regular, gainful employment constitutes one of the central social relations in modern ‘work society’ and is a central point of reference in people’s lives. As a principal source of income, waged work fulfils the existential function of providing livelihoods and social security. It is constructed to secure basic social rights, social integration, recognition, status, and personal identity (Frayne 2015b; Weeks 2011). This is probably why ‘social’ is so often equated with ‘work’. State dependence. Secondly, dependence on work pertains to the modern welfare state: the revenues and economic growth generated through work contribute substantially to the financing of social security systems. Affording welfare is therefore a main argument for creating jobs. Wage labour is thus a dominating tool for redistribution; through wages, taxes on wages and on the consumption that production generates, almost all distribution takes place. Hence, what the job is, and what is being produced, is of secondary importance (Paulsen 2017). Work is moreover a convenient instrument of control that structures and disciplines society, and ‘renders populations at once productive and governable’ (Weeks 2011, 54; Gorz 1982; Lafargue 2014 1883). Specifically, the dominant neoliberal ideology, its condemnation of laziness and idealisation of ‘hardworking people’ has intensified the ‘moral fortification of work’. Accordingly, the neoliberal ‘workfare’ reforms have focused on job creation and the relentless activation for the labour market, effectively ‘enforcing work (…) as a key function of the state’ (Frayne 2015b, 16). Economic dependence. Thirdly, besides the economic imperative for individuals to ‘earn a living’ and pay off debt, modern economies are dependent on work in terms of an industrious labour force, long working hours for increasing economic output under the imperatives of capital accumulation, growth and competition, and rising incomes for increasing purchasing power and demand. Creating or preserving jobs constitutes the standard argument for economic growth. In turn, work as one basic factor of production creates growth. However, the relation between growth and employment is conditioned, amongst other factors, primarily by constantly pursued labour productivity: for employment to rise or stay stable, the economy must grow at a sufficiently high rate to exceed productivity gains, in order to offset job losses and avoid ‘jobless growth’. Moreover, faltering expansion triggers a spiral of recession which not only affects economic stability but results in societal crises as a whole (Jackson 2009; Paech 2012). However, besides being unsustainable and insatiable, growth is also increasingly unlikely to continue at the rates required for economic stability (Kallis et al. 2018; IMF 2015). The individual and structural economic dependence on work and economic growth therefore implies profound vulnerability as livelihoods and political stability are fatefully exposed to global competition and the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation, and constrained by ‘systemically relevant’ job and growth creating companies, industries and global (financial) markets (Gronemeyer 2012; Paech 2012). Cultural dependence. A fourth aspect concerns cultural dependence: The ‘work ethic’ is the specific morality described by Max Weber (19921905) as constitutive of modern industrial culture, 2 and determining for all its subjects as shared ‘common senses’ about how work is valued and understood. It means an ingrained moral compulsion to gainful work and timesaving, manifested in the common ideals of productivity, achievement and entrepreneurship, in the feeling of guilt when time is ‘wasted’, in personal identification with one’s ‘calling’, in observations of busyness, even burnout as a ‘badge of honour’ (Paulsen 2014), and in descriptions of a culture that has lost the ‘capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways’ (Thompson 1967, 91). Even for those who do not share such attitudes towards work, in a work-centred culture it is normal to (seek) work. It is so commonsensical that it seems impractical to question it, and it continues to be normalised through socialisation and schooling. Consequently, people become limited in their imagination of alternatives, the prospect of losing one’s job usually causes heartfelt fear (Standing 2011). For a work society that ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’, there can be nothing worse than the cessation of work (Hannah Arendt, cited in Gorz 1989, 7–8). The wage relation based on the commodity labour is, in other words, an essential functional feature of the industrial-capitalist system, and the exaltation of work remains its social ethic. For modern industrial society work is ‘both its chief means and its ultimate goal’ (Gorz 1989, 13; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2011); it is centred and structurally dependent on work, despite work’s environmentally adverse implications. This constellation constitutes the dilemma between work and the environment, and it is why we argue that work is absolutely central to present-day unsustainability and should accordingly be dealt with in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the problem with modern-day work from an environmental perspective? A number of quantitative studies have researched the correlation of working hours and environmental impacts in terms of ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption, both on micro/household and on macro/cross-national levels, and for both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013; Nässén and Larsson 2015; Rosnick and Weisbrot 2007). Based on these findings, and going beyond them, we develop a qualitative classification of ecological impacts of work broadly (not working hours only), distinguishing four analytically distinct factors (Hoffmann 2017). Fundamentally, all productive activity is based on material and energy throughputs within wider ecological conditions, which necessarily involves interference with the ecosphere. The appropriation and exploitation of non-human animals, land, soil, water, biomass, raw materials, the atmosphere and all other elements of the biosphere always to some extent causes pollution, degradation, and destruction. Thus, work is inherently both productive and destructive. However, this biophysical basis alone need not make work unsustainable, and it has not always been so (Krausmann 2017). Contributing to its unsustainability is, firstly, the Scale factor: the greater the amount of work, the more ‘inputs’ are required and the more ‘outputs’ generated, which means more throughput of resources and energy, and resulting ecological impacts. In other words, the more work, the larger the size of the economy, the more demands on the biosphere (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013). Obviously, there are qualitative differences between different types of work and their respective environmental impacts. Moreover, besides the evident and direct impacts, indirect impacts matter also. The tertiary/service sector is therefore not exempt from this reasoning (Hayden and Shandra 2009; Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), not only due to its own (often ‘embodied’) materiality and energy requirements, but also because it administrates and supports industrial production processes in global supply chains (Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark 2015; Haberl et al. 2009; Paech 2012). Additionally, modern work is subject to certain integrally connected and mutually reinforcing conditions inherent in industrial economic structures, which aggravate ecological impacts by further increasing the Scale factor. These include the systematic externalisation of costs, and the use of fossil fuels as crucial energy basis, which combined with modern industrial technology enable continuously rising labour productivity independently of physical, spatial or temporal constraints (Malm 2013). Taken together, this leads to constantly spurred economic growth with a corresponding growth in material and energetic throughputs, and the creation of massive amounts of waste. The latter is not an adverse side-effect of modern work, but part of its purpose under the imperatives of growth, profitability, and constant innovation, as evident in phenomena such as planned obsolescence or the ‘scrapping premium’, serving to stimulate growth and demand, and hence, job creation (Gronemeyer 2012). These conditions and effects tend to be neglected when ‘green jobs’ are promised to resolve the ecological crisis (Paus 2018), disregarding that the systematically and continuously advanced scale of work and production has grown far beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009). Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there was support for environmental perspectives in LO at this time – after all, the National Congress commissioned the programme, an environmental unit was established at headquarters and a majority of the congress accepted the programme – this waned significantly when the economy was threatened. This reflects the influence of the ‘jobs vs. environment’ conflict on processes of integrating environmental perspectives into the union agenda (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Union policies are embedded in a mode of production marked by what Marx called the ‘metabolic rift’. The concept is one of the pillars upon which Foster develops ‘Marx’s Ecology’ (Foster 2000, 155 f). It argues that the capitalist industrial system exploits the earth without restoring its constituents to it. More generally, Marx defined the labour process as metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between nature (external to humans) and human nature. When humans work on and with nature to produce the means of their survival, they also develop their knowledge and their capabilities, and transform their own human nature (Marx 1998). Polanyi later reduced the concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ to the commodification of land (Polanyi 1944), thus paving the way for a perspective that sees the solution in the control of the market, but disregards the relations of production as they are lived by workers in the production process. But to understand why trade unions have difficulties developing and especially holding on to environmental policies it is important to recognise that since nature has become a privately owned ‘means of production’ it has become workers’ Other. Unions have been reduced and have reduced themselves to care only for one part of the inseparable relationship between nature and labour. On the everyday level of policies this means that environmental strategies lose momentum in times of economic crises and when jobs are seen to be threatened. In this respect, unions are no different from political parties and governments. In spite of numerous publications by the ILO and Union organisations, which show that a move to a ‘green economy’ can create new jobs (Poschen 2012; Rivera Alejo and Martín Murillo 2014), unions have been reluctant to exchange ‘a bird in the hand for two in the bush’ – even if the bird in the hand becomes elusive. The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ‘postwork’ approach contribute to resolving these issues? The notions critique of work (Frayne 2015a, 2015b) or postwork (Weeks 2011) have emerged in recent years in social science research and popular culture, building on a long intellectual tradition of (autonomist and neo-)Marxist, anarchist, and feminist theory (Seyferth 2019; Weeks 2011). The critique of work targets work in a fundamental sense, not only its conditions or exploitation. It is aimed at the centrality of work in modern ‘work society’ as a pivotal point for the provision of livelihoods through monetary income, the granting of social security, social inclusion, and personal identity construction, on which grounds unemployed persons and unpaid activities are excluded from recognition, welfare provision and trade union support. Moreover, the crucial role of waged work in the functioning of the welfare state and the modern industrialised economy is part of this critique (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015b; Paulsen 2017). Although commonly taken as naturally given, this kind of societal order and its institutions such as the wage relation, labour markets, unemployment, or abstract time are historically and culturally exceptional modes of human coexistence (Applebaum 1992; Graeber 2018; Gorz 1989; Polanyi 2001 1944; Thompson 1967). This critique of the structures and social relations of work society is accompanied by the critique of its cultural foundation, the work ethic; an ideological commitment to work and productivism as ends in themselves, moral obligations, and as intrinsically good, regardless of what is done and at what cost (Gorz 1982; Weber 1992 1905; Weeks 2001). Postwork, however, is not only a critical stance. Criticising work and work society, aware of their historical contingency, implies the potential for an emancipatory transformation of industrial society. The focus is thereby not necessarily on abolishing work tout-court, but rather on pointing out and questioning its relentless centrality and asking what a more desirable, free and sustainable society might look like; a society in which work is no longer the pivotal point of social organisation and ideological orientation, including all questions and debates around this objective (Chamberlain 2018; Frayne 2015a; Weeks 2011). As a relatively new and dynamically developing approach, postwork is, despite similar political claims, not uniform in its reasoning. Some, drawing on the classical ‘end-of-work’ argument (Frayne 2016), assume an imminent technology-induced massive rise in unemployment. This is welcomed as an opportunity to reduce and ultimately abolish work to liberate humankind (Srnicek and Williams 2015). Others emphasise the remarkable fact that throughout the past two centuries technological development has not challenged the centrality of work in modern lives, despite the prospect that technological change would allow for much shorter working hours (e.g., Keynes 1930). This has not materialised due to the requirements of a work-centred, work-dependent society. On the contrary, work has become more central to modern societies. These deeper structural and cultural aspects and dependencies seem to remain unaffected by technological trends (Paulsen 2017; Weeks 2011). The ecological case for postwork The perspective of postwork/critiques of work may enrich sustainability debates in many ways; here, our focus is again on ecological concerns. First, postwork offers a much needed change in focus in sustainability debates, away from narrow critiques of individual consumption and the overemphasis on ‘green jobs’, towards understanding work as one central cause of sustained societal unsustainability. Postwork directs the focus towards crucial overlooked issues, e.g. the ways in which work is ecologically harmful, or which problems arise due to the social and cultural significance of modern-day work, including existential dependencies on it. Postwork seeks to re-politicise work, recognising that its conception and societal organisation are social constructs and therefore political, and must accordingly be open to debate (Weeks 2011). This opens conceptual space and enables open-minded debates about the meaning, value and purpose of work: what kind of work is, for individuals, society and the biosphere as a whole, meaningful, pointless, or outright harmful (Graeber 2018)? Such debates and enhanced understanding about the means and ends of work, and the range of problems associated with it, would be important in several regards. In ecological regard it facilitates the ecologically necessary, substantial reduction of work, production and consumption (Frey 2019; Haberl et al. 2009). Reducing work/working hours is one of the key premises of postwork, aiming at de-centring and de-normalising work, and releasing time, energy and creativity for purposes other than work (Coote 2013). From an ecological perspective, reducing the amount of work would reduce the dependency on a commodity-intensive mode of living, and allow space for more sustainable practices (Frayne 2016). Reducing work would also help mitigate all other work-induced environmental pressures described above, especially the ‘Scale factor’ (Knight, Rosa, and Schor 2013), i.e. the amount of resources and energy consumed, and waste, including emissions, created through work. A postwork approach facilitates debate on the politics of ecological work reduction which entails difficult questions: for example, which industries and fields of employment are to be phased out? Which fields will need to be favoured and upon what grounds? Which kinds of work in which sectors are socially important and should therefore be organised differently, especially when altering the energy basis of work due to climate change mitigation which implies decentralised, locally specific, intermittent and less concentrated energy sources (Malm 2013)? These questions are decisive for future (un-)sustainability, and yet serious attempts at a solution are presently forestalled by the unquestioned sanctity that work, ‘jobs’ or ‘full employment’ enjoy (Frayne 2015b). Postwork is also conducive to rethinking the organisation of work. There are plausible arguments in favour of new institutions of democratic control over the economy, i.e. economic democracy (Johanisova and Wolf 2012). This is urgent and necessary to distribute a very tight remaining carbon budget fairly and wisely (IPCC 2018), to keep economic power in check, and to gain public sovereignty over fundamental economic decisions that are pivotal for (un-)sustainable trajectories (Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004). An obstacle to this is one institution in particular which is rarely under close scrutiny: the labour market, a social construct linked to the advent of modern work in form of the commodity of labour (Applebaum 1992). It is an undemocratic mechanism, usually characterised by high levels of unfreedom and coercion (Anderson 2017; Graeber 2018; Paulsen 2015) that allocates waged work in a competitive mode as an artificially scarce, ‘fictitious’ commodity (Polanyi 2001 1944). 4 It does so according to availability of money and motives of gain on the part of employers, and appears therefore inappropriate for distributing labour according to sustainability criteria and related societal needs. As long as unsustainable and/or unnecessary jobs are profitable and/or (well-)paid, they will continue to exist (Gorz 1989), just as ‘green jobs’ must follow these same criteria in order to be created. An ecological postwork perspective allows to question this on ecological grounds, and it links to debates on different modes of organising socially necessary work, production and provisioning in a de-commodified, democratic and sustainable mode. Finally, postwork is helpful for ecological reasons because it criticises the cultural glorification of ‘hard work’, merit and productivism, and the moral assumption that laziness and inaction are intrinsically bad, regardless the circumstances. Postwork is about a different mindset which problematises prevailing productivist attitudes and allows the idea that being lazy or unproductive can be something inherently valuable. Idleness is conducive to an ecological agenda as nothing is evidently more carbon-neutral and environment-sparing than being absolutely unproductive. As time-use studies indicate, leisure, recreation and socialising have very low ecological impacts, with rest and sleep having virtually none (Druckman et al. 2012). Apart from humans, the biosphere also needs idle time for regeneration. In this sense, laziness or ‘ecological leisure’, ideally sleep, can be regarded as supremely ecofriendly states of being that would help mitigate ecological pressures. Moreover, as postwork traces which changes in attitudes towards time, efficiency and laziness have brought modern work culture and modern time regimes into being in the first place and have dominated ever since (Thompson 1967; Weber 1992 1905), it provides crucial knowledge for understanding and potentially changing this historically peculiar construction. It can thereby take inspiration from longstanding traditions throughout human history, where leisure has usually been a high social ideal and regarded as vital for realising genuine freedom and quality of life (Applebaum 1992; Gorz 1989). Conclusions: postwork politics and practices We argued that modern-day work is a central cause for unsustainability, and should therefore be transformed to advance towards sustainability. We have contributed to this field of research, firstly, by developing a systematisation of the ecological harms associated with work – comprising the factors Scale, Time, Income, and Work-induced Mobility, Infrastructure, and Consumption – taking those studies one step further which investigate the ecological impacts of working hours quantitatively. One of the analytical advantages of this approach is that it avoids the mystification of work through indirect measures of economic activity (such as per capita GDP), as in the numerous analyses of the conflict between sustainability and economic growth in general. Our second substantial contribution consists in combining these ecological impacts of work with an analysis of the various structural dependencies on work in modern society, which spells out clearly what the recurring jobs-environment-dilemma actually implies, and why it is so difficult to overcome. While this dilemma is often vaguely referred to, this has been the first more detailed analysis of the different dimensions that essentially constitute it. Reviewing the literature in environmental sociology and sustainability research more generally, we also found the work-environment-dilemma and the role of work itself are not sufficiently addressed and remain major unresolved issues. We proposed the field would benefit from taking up the long intellectual tradition of problematising modern-day work, through the approach of postwork or critiques of work. While the described problems of unsustainability and entrenched dependencies cannot easily be resolved, we discussed how postwork arguments can contribute to pointing out and understanding them, and to opening up new perspectives to advance sustainability debates. A third contribution is therefore to have introduced the concept of postwork/critiques of work into sustainability research and the work-environment debate, and to have conducted an initial analysis of the ways in which postwork may be helpful for tackling ecological problems. Besides being ecologically beneficial, it may also serve emancipatory purposes to ‘raise broader questions about the place of work in our lives and spark the imagination of a life no longer so subordinate to it’ (Weeks 2011, 33). In order to inspire such ‘postwork imagination’ (Weeks 2011, 35, 110) and show that postwork ideas are not as detached from reality as they may sound, in this last section we briefly outline examples of existing postwork politics and practices. The most obvious example is the reduction of working hours during the 19th and 20th centuries. These reforms were essential to the early labour movement, and the notion that increasing productivity entails shorter working hours has never been nearly as ‘radical’ as today (Paulsen 2017). As concerns about climate change are rising, there is also renewed awareness about the ecological benefits of worktime reduction, besides a whole range of other social and economic advantages (Coote 2013; Frey 2019). Worktime reduction is usually taken up positively in public debate. Carlsson (2015, 184) sees a ‘growing minority of people’ who engage in practices other than waged work to support themselves and make meaningful contributions to society. Frayne (2015b) describes the practical refusal of work by average people who wish to live more independently of the treadmill of work. Across society, the disaffection with work is no marginal phenomenon (Graeber 2018; Cederström and Fleming 2012; Paulsen 2014, 2015; Weeks 2011); many start to realise the ‘dissonance between the mythical sanctity of work on the one hand, and the troubling realities of people’s actual experiences on the other’ (Frayne 2015b, 228). Public debates are therefore increasingly receptive to issues such as industries’ responsibility for climate change, coercive ‘workfare’ policies, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’, or ‘work-life-balance’, shorter hours, overwork and burnout; topics ‘that will not go away’ (Coote 2013, xix) and question the organisation of work society more fundamentally. 5 The debate about an unconditional basic income (UBI) will also remain. UBI would break the existential dependency of livelihoods on paid work and serve as a new kind of social contract to entitle people to social security regardless of paid economic activity. In addition to countless models in theory, examples of UBI schemes exist in practice, either currently implemented or planned as ‘experiments’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015). The critique and refusal of work also takes place both within the sphere of wage labour and outside it. Within, the notions of absenteeism, tardiness, shirking, theft, or sabotage (Pouget 1913 1898; Seyferth 2019) have a long tradition, dating back to early struggles against work and industrialisation (Thompson 1967), and common until today (Paulsen 2014). The idea of such deliberate ‘workplace resistance’ is that the ability to resist meaningless work and the internalised norms of work society, and be idle and useless while at work, can be recognised and successfully practised (Campagna 2013; Scott 2012). Similarly, there is a growing interest in productive practices, social relations, and the commons outside the sphere of wage labour and market relations, for example in community-supported agriculture. This initiates ways of organising work and the economy to satisfy material needs otherwise than by means of commodity consumption (Chamberlain 2018; Helfrich and Bollier 2015). For such modes of organising productive social relations in more varied ways, inspiration could be drawn from the forms of ‘work’ that are prevalent in the global South in the so-called informal sector and in non-industrial crafts and peasantry, neither of which resemble the cultural phenomenon of modern-day work with its origins in the colonial North (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Thompson 1967). This, however, contradicts the global development paradigm, under which industrialisation, ‘economic upgrading’, global (labour) market integration and ‘structural transformation’ are pursued. Modern work, especially industrial factory jobs and ideally in cities, is supposed to help ‘the poor’ to escape their misery (Banerjee and Duflo 2012; UNDP 2015). Many of these other forms of livelihood provisioning and associated ways of life are thus disregarded, denigrated or destroyed as underdeveloped, backward, poor, and lazy (Thompson 1967), and drawn into the formal system of waged work as cheap labour in capitalist markets and global supply chains – ‘improved living conditions’ as measured in formal pecuniary income (Rosling 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987). There are indications that these transformations create structural poverty, highly vulnerable jobs and an imposed dependence on wage labour (while few viable wage labour structures exist) (Hickel 2017; Srnicek and Williams 2015). There is also clear evidence of numerous struggles against capitalist development and for traditional livelihood protection and environmental justice (Anguelovski 2015). These are aspects where a postwork orientation is relevant beyond the industrialised societies of the global North, as it puts a focus on the modern phenomenon ‘work’ itself and the conditions that led to its predominance, as it questions the common narrative that ‘jobs’ are an end in themselves and justify all kinds of problematic development, and as it allows to ask which alternative, postcolonial critiques and conceptualisations of ‘work’ exist and should be preserved. To conclude, we clearly find traces of postwork organisation and politics in the present. However, these ideas are contested; they concern the roots of modern culture, society and industrial-capitalist economies. Waged work continues to be normalised, alternatives beyond niches appear quite impractical for generalisation. Powerful economic interests, including trade unions, seek to perpetuate the status-quo (Lundström, Räthzel, and Uzzell 2015). Job creation and (global) labour market integration (regardless of what kind) are central policy goals of all political parties, and presently popular progressive debates on a Green New Deal tend to exhibit a rather productivist stance. There is one particular aspect that appears hopeful: the present socio-economic system is unsustainable in the literal sense that it is physically impossible to be sustained in the long run. It was Weber (19921905) who predicted that the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order will be determining with overwhelming force until the last bit of fossil fuel is burnt – and exactly this needs to happen soon to avert catastrophic climate change. 6 This is the battlefield of sustainability, and lately there has been renewed urgency and momentum for more profound social change, where it might be realised that a different societal trajectory beyond work and productivism for their own sake is more sustainable and desirable for the future.
Aff Framing
Prefer our framework a. Turn: The aff reinforces a capitalist system through the plan-- the whole point of striking is to get back to work and unions are run by capitalist business owners who want increase in pay. b. Both the counterplan and K solve better for cap-the K decentralizes work which is key to cap and the counterplan means that the workers control the means of production which is much less capitalist than the aff. c. The role of the judge should be to determine who did the better job debating without any preexisting bias-anything else is self serving and arbitrary and skews fairness d. We win under their fw-both of our alternatives are more radical attempts to dismantle capitalism Case
Their plan’s very first card advocates for connecting workers together, not the unconditional right to strike. We connect workers better by allowing them to control the means of production which implicates our control over their advantage and solvency. The telos of the 1ac’s politics is the strike – that naturalizes capital’s control and is parasitic on political organizing. Eidlin 20 Barry Eidlin (assistant professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada), 1-6-2020, “Why Unions Are Good – But Not Good Enough,” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/marxism-trade-unions-socialism-revolutionary-organizing Labor unions have long occupied a paradoxical position within Marxist theory. They are an essential expression of the working class taking shape as a collective actor and an essential vehicle for working-class action. When we speak of “the working class” or “working-class activity,” we are often analyzing the actions of workers either organized into unions or trying to organize themselves into unions. At the same time, unions are an imperfect and incomplete vehicle for the working class to achieve one of Marxist theory’s central goals: overthrowing capitalism. Unions by their very existence affirm and reinforce capitalist class society. As organizations which primarily negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions with employers, unions only exist in relation to capitalists. This makes them almost by definition reformist institutions, designed to mitigate and manage the employment relationship, not transform it. Many unions have adapted to this conservative, managerial role. Others have played key roles in challenging capital’s power. Some have even played insurgent roles at one moment and managerial roles at others. When unions have organized workplace insurgencies, this has sometimes translated into political pressure that expanded democracy and led to large-scale policy reforms. In the few revolutionary historical moments that we can identify, worker organization, whether called unions or something else, has been essential. Thus, labor unions and movements have long been a central focus of Marxist debate. At its core, the debate centers around the role of unions in class formation, the creation of the revolutionary working-class agent. The debate focuses on four key questions. First, to what degree do unions simply reflect existing relations of production and class struggle, or actively shape those relations? Second, if unions actively shape class struggle, why and under what conditions do they enhance or inhibit it? Third, how do unions shape class identities, and how does this affect unions’ scope of action? Fourth, what is the relation between unions and politics? This question is comprised of two sub-questions: to what degree do unions help or hinder struggles in the workplace becoming broader political struggles? And how should unions relate to political parties, the more conventional vehicle for advancing political demands? The following is a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 2019). It assesses Marxist debates surrounding trade unions, oriented by the four questions mentioned previously. It proceeds historically, first examining how Marx and Engels conceived of the roles and limitations of trade unions, then tracing how others within Marxism have pursued these debates as class relations and politics have changed over time. While the chapter includes some history of labor unions and movements themselves, the central focus is on how Marxist theorists thought of and related to those movements. Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the unions of their time, although never systematically. The majority of their writings on unions responded to concrete labor struggles of their time. From their earliest works, they grasped unions’ necessity and limitations in creating a working-class agent capable of advancing class struggle against the bourgeoisie. This departed from previous variants of socialism, often based in idealized views of rebuilding a rapidly eroding community of artisanal producers, which did not emphasize class organization or class struggle. Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England about emerging forms of unionism, Engels observed that even though workers’ primary struggles were over material issues such as wages, they pointed to a deeper social and political conflict: What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They im¬ ply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. At the same time, Engels saw that, even as union struggles “kept alive the opposition of the workers to the … omnipotence of the bourgeoisie,” so too did they “compel the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.” Here Engels articulates the crux of the problem. First, unions are essential for working-class formation, creating a collective actor both opposed to the bourgeoisie and capable of challenging it for power. Second, they are an insufficient vehicle for creating and mobilizing that collective actor. Marx and Engels understood that unions are essential to working-class formation because, under capitalism, the system of “free labor,” where individual workers sell their labor power to an employer for a wage, fragments relations between workers and makes them compete with each other. As described in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’” leaving workers “exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” While workers organized based on other collective identities, such as race, ethnicity, or religion, only unions could unite them as workers against the source of their exploitation — the bourgeoisie. Unions serve “as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labor and capital rule.” But just as unions could allow the proletariat to take shape and challenge the bourgeoisie for power, Marx and Engels also saw that they were a partial, imperfect vehicle for doing so for two reasons. First, unions’ fundamentally defensive role, protecting workers against employers’ efforts to drive a competitive race to the bottom, meant that they limited themselves “to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it.” Thus, even militant trade unions found themselves struggling for “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” without challenging the bourgeoisie’s fundamental power, particularly the wage labor system. And some layers of the trade union officialdom were content to fight for privileges for their small segment of the working class, leaving most workers behind. Second, unions’ focus on wages and workplace issues tended to reinforce a division between economic and political struggles. This division was explicit with the more conservative “old” unions in Britain, which “barred all political action on principle and in their charters.” But even with more progressive formations, such as the early nineteenth century’s Chartists, or the late nineteenth century’s “new” unions, Marx and Engels saw that the transition from workplace struggles to politics was not automatic. For one, it varied across national contexts. Engels observed that French workers were much more likely to mobilize politically, while English workers “fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie.” But beyond national variation, they saw a recurring pattern of division, separating economic and political struggles by organization. Reflecting on the early to mid-nineteenth century English working-class movement, Engels noted a threefold divide between “socially-based” Chartists, “politically-based” Socialists, and conservative, craft-based trade unions. While the Chartists were “purely a working-men’s sic cause freed from all bourgeois elements,” they remained “theoretically the more backward, the less developed.” Socialists may have been more theoretically sophisticated, but their bourgeois origins made it difficult to “amalgamate completely with the working class.” Although young Engels thought an alliance of Chartism and socialism was underway, the alliance proved elusive. By the 1870s, Marx opined that politically, the English working class was “nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists.” Likewise, Engels had soured on the English working class. Both saw promise in the militant worker protest in the United States at the time, seeing the seeds of a nascent labor party. But that too fell short. Thus, unions failed in Marx and Engels’s central task: the formation of “a political organization of the working class as a whole.” Turns all aff impacts-their climate change and nuclear war scenarios all rest on the aff being anticapitalist. Microwork strikes are not anticapitalist either-the goal of striking is to make working conditions better, which would strengthen microwork if they have any solvency whatsoever, which strengthens all capitalist impacts of tech Tech saves lives through innovation-if the aff advocacy is to destroy the tech industry they are sacrificing lives for an unrealistic revolution which is ethically wrong.
No link: they don’t access any of their impacts because the plan reinforces a capitalist society by reaffirming the centrality of work via striking—don’t buy their impacts. They only work in a society where capitalism is checked, which doesn’t happen in the aff. 2. Even if you don’t buy that, the K fosters a space for discussions to happen—a post work society encourages questioning and discussions about work Backlash Turn Turn: The right to strike just leads businesses to take stronger steps to stop unionization. Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are fundamentally framed by one-sided control over communication, with no free-speech rights for workers. Under current law, employers may require workers to attend mass anti-union meetings as often as once a day (mandatory meetings at which the employer delivers anti-union messaging are dubbed “captive audience meetings” in labor law). Not only is the union not granted equal time, but pro-union employees may be required to attend on condition that they not ask questions; those who speak up despite this condition can be legally fired on the spot.19 The most recent data show that nearly 90 of employers force employees to attend such anti-union campaign rallies, with the average employer holding 10 such mandatory meetings during the course of an election campaign.20 ¶ In addition to group meetings, employers typically have supervisors talk one-on-one with each of their direct subordinates.21 In these conversations, the same person who controls one’s schedule, assigns job duties, approves vacation requests, grants raises, and has the power to terminate employees “at will” conveys how important it is that their underlings oppose unionization. As one longtime consultant explained, a supervisor’s message is especially powerful because “the warnings…come from…the people counted on for that good review and that weekly paycheck.”22 ¶ Within this lopsided campaign environment, the employer’s message typically focuses on a few key themes: unions will drive employers out of business, unions only care about extorting dues payments from workers, and unionization is futile because employees can’t make management do something it doesn’t want to do.23 Many of these arguments are highly deceptive or even mutually contradictory. For instance, the dues message stands in direct contradiction to management’s warnings that unions inevitably lead to strikes and unemployment. If a union were primarily interested in extracting dues money from workers, it would never risk a strike or bankruptcy, because no one pays dues when they are on strike or out of work. But in an atmosphere in which pro-union employees have little effective right of reply, these messages may prove extremely powerful. ¶ It is common for unionization drives to start with two-thirds of employees supporting unionization and still end in a “no” vote. This reversal points to the anti-democratic dynamics of NLRB elections: voters are not being convinced of the merits of remaining without representation—they are being intimidated into the belief that unionization is at best futile and at worst dangerous. When a large national survey asked workers who had been through an election to name “the most important reason people voted against union representation,” the single most common response was management pressure, including fear of job loss.24 Those who vote on this basis are not expressing a preference to remain unrepresented. Indeed, many might still prefer unionization if they believed it could work. Where fear is the motivator, what is captured in the snapshot of the ballot is not preference but despair. ¶To understand what union elections look like in reality, we have profiled two cases in which workers sought to create a union and met with a harsh (and typical) employer backlash. In both cases—a tire plant in Georgia and a satellite TV company in Texas—the employer response ranges from illegally firing union activists to engaging in acts of coercion and intimidation that are illegal in any normal election to public office but are allowed under the NLRA. ¶
The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place. Smith ’11, their only card that talks about strikes being anti-capitalist directly, is about union solvency, not strike solvency so that card should be disregarded. Automation, Outsourcing, and Offshoring Turn Turn: Increasing the cost of labor will just accelerate automation, outsourcing, and offshoring. Alt causes and backlash from firms deck aff solvency. Groshen and Holzer ’19 - Erica Groshen Senior Economics Advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Research Fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Harry J. Holzer Prof. of Public Policy, Georgetown U., “Helping workers requires more than silver bullets,” Brookings Institution (Web). Nov. 25, 2019. Accessed Nov. 19, 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/helping-workers-requires-more-than-silver-bullets/ AT But no single silver bullet solution exists that can solve our skills and earnings problems. Why? Because no single or dominant cause explains stagnating earnings or rising inequality in the US. Thus, simplistic “silver bullet” policies would likely be ineffective or even do more harm than good.¶ Some “silver bullets” are too scattershot. For instance, free college for all would shunt billions of dollars of tax revenue into subsidizing higher education for the wealthy at a time when federal budgets are already deeply in the red. A Universal Basic Income would be even more expensive, and could induce workers to stop seeking many new jobs that will be created over time.¶ Other proposals could harm those they aim to help or be ineffective. Imposing a uniform $15 federal minimum wage, even by 2025 (as many now propose), could induce employers to eliminate jobs for low-wage workers in already distressed communities. Proposals to expand unionism alone might generate only small increases, in light of employers’ ability of to resist collective bargaining by automating, relocating their facilities, or outsourcing work to other firms.¶ To sensibly raise wages and reduce inequality among American workers, we must recognize that a confluence of causes are at work, which requires a combination of evidence-based policy responses. The causes include labor market forces like technical change, globalization, and too few well-educated workers; they also include changes in labor institutions beyond weakened unions and a lack of worker “voice.” Indeed, a growing set of employer practices, such as outsourcing some activities to other firms (which is often called employment “fissuring”) likely contribute to weak outcomes as well. Such practices break the time-honored links between a firm’s profitability and its workers’ earnings, and diminish employer interest in training workers to make them more productive.¶ Without important, systematic policy changes, the earnings and employment of US workers – especially those without college degrees – will likely continue to deteriorate. More trade and automation in the form of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) will almost certainly lead millions of workers to be displaced, while our failure to adequately fund public institutions of higher education and workforce services will limit workers’ readiness for new jobs that will be created. In other areas – including federal wage and hour laws, worker rights to representation on the job, and employer staffing arrangements – we are surely still moving in the wrong direction. Turns micro-strike cards in plan-automation increases as the right to strike does, and they argue automation bad in their case so we don’t have to read independent impact cards. These turns outweigh the case and put them in a double bind-either unionization is weakened and they don’t solve for anything or unionization is stronger and they promote capitalism, meaning that they either do nothing or the opposite of what they claim to do. The counterplan solves for 100 of the aff-workers cannot be exploited if they control the means of production and we solve for all cap impacts because communist societies are structured around workers owning the means of production.
12/4/21
SO-T, HIF CP, Innovation DA
Tournament: Presentation | Round: 4 | Opponent: Archbishop Mitty AS | Judge: Nick Fleming T IP Protection T Data Exclusivity
IP is a specific, definable category which doesn’t include data exclusivity. WTO “World Trade Organization.” WTO, https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel1_e.htm. Intellectual property rights are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds. They usually give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time. Intellectual property rights are customarily divided into two main areas: Copyright and rights related to copyright.back to top The rights of authors of literary and artistic works (such as books and other writings, musical compositions, paintings, sculpture, computer programs and films) are protected by copyright, for a minimum period of 50 years after the death of the author. Also protected through copyright and related (sometimes referred to as “neighbouring”) rights are the rights of performers (e.g. actors, singers and musicians), producers of phonograms (sound recordings) and broadcasting organizations. The main social purpose of protection of copyright and related rights is to encourage and reward creative work. (ii) Industrial property.back to top Industrial property can usefully be divided into two main areas: One area can be characterized as the protection of distinctive signs, in particular trademarks (which distinguish the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings) and geographical indications (which identify a good as originating in a place where a given characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographical origin). The protection of such distinctive signs aims to stimulate and ensure fair competition and to protect consumers, by enabling them to make informed choices between various goods and services. The protection may last indefinitely, provided the sign in question continues to be distinctive. Other types of industrial property are protected primarily to stimulate innovation, design and the creation of technology. In this category fall inventions (protected by patents), industrial designs and trade secrets. The social purpose is to provide protection for the results of investment in the development of new technology, thus giving the incentive and means to finance research and development activities. A functioning intellectual property regime should also facilitate the transfer of technology in the form of foreign direct investment, joint ventures and licensing. The protection is usually given for a finite term (typically 20 years in the case of patents). While the basic social objectives of intellectual property protection are as outlined above, it should also be noted that the exclusive rights given are generally subject to a number of limitations and exceptions, aimed at fine-tuning the balance that has to be found between the legitimate interests of right holders and of users. HIF CP Counterplan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to implement and fund a Health Impact Fund as per the Hollis and Pogge 08 card. Counterplans negate – they are advocating for a plan so any opportunity cost to that plan disproves that the aff is a good idea. They only have to be either textual or functionally competitive – one is enough to prove that it is an opportunity cost – solves for their offense because perms protect against cheaty counterplans The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders.
Innovation DA The link cards can probably also be used as turns on case The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients.
COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29: Jaci Mcdole and Stephen Ezell {Jaci McDole is a senior policy analyst covering intellectual property (IP) and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). She focuses on IP and its correlations to global innovation and trade. McDole holds a double BA in Music Business and Radio-Television with a minor in Marketing, an MS in Education, and a JD with a specialization in intellectual property (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). McDole comes to ITIF from the Institute for Intellectual Property Research, an organization she co-founded to study and further robust global IP policies. Stephen Ezell is vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He comes to ITIF from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003 to study the practice of innovation in service industries. At Peer Insight, Ezell led the Global Service Innovation Consortium, published multiple research papers on service innovation, and researched national service innovation policies being implemented by governments worldwide. Prior to forming Peer Insight, Ezell worked in the New Service Development group at the NASDAQ Stock Market, where he spearheaded the creation of the NASDAQ Market Intelligence Desk and the NASDAQ Corporate Services Network, services for NASDAQ-listed corporations. Previously, Ezell cofounded two successful innovation ventures, the high-tech services firm Brivo Systems and Lynx Capital, a boutique investment bank. Ezell holds a B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an honors certificate from Georgetown’s Landegger International Business Diplomacy program.}, 21 - ("Ten Ways Ip Has Enabled Innovations That Have Helped Sustain The World Through The Pandemic," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-29-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-enabled-innovations-have-helped-sustain-world-through)//marlborough-wr/ To better understand the role of IP in enabling solutions related to COVID-19 challenges, this report relies on 10 case studies drawn from a variety of nations, technical fields, and firm sizes. This is but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. From a paramedic in Mexico to a veteran vaccine manufacturing company in India and a tech start-up in Estonia to a U.S.-based company offering workplace Internet of Things (IoT) services, small and large organizations alike are working to combat the pandemic. Some have adapted existing innovations, while others have developed novel solutions. All are working to take the world out of the pandemic and into the future. The case studies are: Bharat Biotech: Covaxin Gilead: Remdesivir LumiraDX: SARS-COV-2 Antigen POC Test Teal Bio: Teal Bio Respirator XE Ingeniería Médica: CápsulaXE Surgical Theater: Precision VR Tombot: Jennie Starship Technologies: Autonomous Delivery Robots Triax Technologies: Proximity Trace Zoom: Video Conferencing As the case studies show, IP is critical to enabling innovation. Policymakers around the world need to ensure robust IP protections are—and remain—in place if they wish their citizens to have safe and innovative solutions to health care, workplace, and societal challenges in the future. THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN RandD-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries.5 To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years.6 For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).7 In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent.8 Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average.9 A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.”10 Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs.11 Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry.12 To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future.13 THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO INNOVATION Although anti-IP proponents have attacked biopharmaceutical manufacturers particularly hard, the reality is all IP-protected innovations are at risk if these rights are ignored, or vitiated. Certain arguments have shown a desire for the term “COVID-19 innovations” to include everything from vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and PPE to biotechnology, AI-related data, and educational materials.14 This could potentially open the floodgates to invalidate IP protection on many of the innovations highlighted in this report. However, much of the current discussion concerning IP focuses almost entirely on litigation fears or RandD incentives. Although RandD is an important aspect of IP, as previously mentioned, these discussions ignore the fact that IP protection can be—and often is—used for other purposes, including generating initial capital to create a company and begin manufacturing and, more importantly, using licensing agreements and IP to track the supply chain and ensure quality control of products. This report highlights but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. In 2018, Forbes identified counterfeiting as the largest criminal enterprise in the world.15 The global struggle against counterfeit and non-regulated products, which has hit Latin America particularly hard during the pandemic, proves the need for safety and quality assurance in supply chains.16 Some communities already ravaged by COVID-19 are seeing higher mortality rates related to counterfeit vaccines, therapeutics, PPE, and cleaning and sanitizing products.17 Polish authorities discovered vials of antiwrinkle treatment labeled as COVID-19 vaccines. 18 In Mexico, fake vaccines sold for approximately $1,000 per dose.19 Chinese and South African police seized thousands of counterfeit vaccine doses from warehouses and manufacturing plants.20 Meanwhile, dozens of websites worldwide claiming to sell vaccines or be affiliated with vaccine manufacturers have been taken down.21 But the problem is not limited to biopharmaceuticals. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has recovered $48 million worth of counterfeit PPE and other products.22 Collaborative efforts between law enforcement and manufacturers have kept numerous counterfeits from reaching the population. In countries with strong IP protection, the chances of counterfeit products reaching the market are significantly lower. This is largely because counterfeiting tends to be an IP-related issue, and these countries generally provide superior means of tracking the supply chain through trademarks, trade secrets, and licensing agreements. This enables greater quality control and helps manufacturers maintain a level of public confidence in their products. By controlling the flow of knowledge associated with IP, voluntary licensing agreements provide innovators with opportunities to collaborate, while ensuring their partners are properly equipped and capable of producing quality products. Throughout this difficult time, the world has seen unexpected collaborations, especially between biopharmaceutical companies worldwide such as Gilead and Eva Pharma or Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, Inc. Throughout history, and most significantly in the nineteenth century through the widespread development of patent systems and the ensuing Industrial Revolution, IP has contributed toward greater economic growth.23 This is promising news as the world struggles for economic recovery. A 2021 joint study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO) shows a strong, positive correlation between IP rights and economic performance.24 It states that “IP-owning firms represent a significantly larger proportion of economic activity and employment across Europe,” with IP-intensive industries contributing to 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (€6.6 trillion; US$7.9 trillion).25 The study also shows 38.9 percent of employment is directly or indirectly attributed to IP-intensive industries, and IP generates higher wages and greater revenue per employee, especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises.26 That concords with the United States, where the Department of Commerce estimated that IP-intensive industries support at least 45 million jobs and contribute more than $6 trillion dollars to, or 38.2 percent of, GDP.27 In 2020, global patent filings through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system reached a record 275,900 filings amidst the pandemic, growing 4 percent from 2019.28 The top-four nations, which accounted for 180,530 of the patent applications, were China, the United States, Japan, and Korea, respectively.29 While several countries saw an increase in patent filings, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia both saw significant increases in the number of annual applications, with the top two filing growths of 73 percent and 26 percent, respectively.30 The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a lot of things, but it certainly couldn’t stop innovation. There are at least five principal benefits strong IP rights can generate, for both developing and developed countries alike.31 First, stronger IP protection spurs the virtuous cycle of innovation by increasing the appropriability of returns, enabling economic gain and catalyzing economic growth. Second, through patents—which require innovators to disclose certain knowledge as a condition of protection—knowledge spillovers build a platform of knowledge that enables other innovators. For instance, studies have found that the rate of return to society from corporate RandD and innovation activities is at least twice the estimated returns that each company itself receives.32 Third, countries with robust IP can operate more efficiently and productively by using IP to determine product quality and reduce transaction costs. Fourth, trade and foreign direct investment enabled and encouraged by strong IP protection offered to enterprises from foreign countries facilitates an accumulation of knowledge capital within the destination economy. That matters when foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of productivity growth in most countries.33 There’s also evidence suggesting that developing nations with stronger IP protections enjoy the earlier introduction of innovative new medicines.34 And fifth, strong IP boosts exports, including in developing countries.35 Research shows a positive correlation between stronger IP protection and exports from developing countries as well as faster growth rates of certain industries.36 The following case studies illustrate these benefits of IP and how they’ve enabled innovative solutions to help global society navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Data exclusivity is uniquely key to innovation. Lybecker ‘14 Kristina Lybecker {Dr. Kristina M. Lybecker is an Associate Professor of Economics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where she is also the Associate Chair of the Department of Economics and Business and the Gerald L. Schlessman Professor of Economics. Dr. Lybecker earned a B.A. in Economics and Latin American Studies from Macalester College and received her Ph.D. in Economics in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Dissertation was on “Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals: Product Piracy and the Transition to Stronger Intellectual Property Rights in Developing Countries.”}, 14 - ("When Patents Aren’t Enough: The Case for Data Exclusivity for Biologic Medicines," IPWatchdog, 7-9-2014, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2014/07/09/patents-arent-enough-data-exclusivity-for-biologic-medicines/id=50318/)//marlborough-wr/ Biologic medicines are fundamentally different from traditional “small molecule” therapies, presenting a host of new challenges in the design and enforcement of the intellectual property (IP) architecture that will protect them.2 Protecting the intellectual property of biologics is complicated, difficult, and essential to the future of medicine. This new frontier is also one of the remaining hurdles in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Trade Agreement negotiations. The debate over protecting biologics focuses on a proposed twelve years of data exclusivity and the consequences this will have for international trade, global public health, and access to medicines. The nuances of producing biologics greatly complicate the logistics of protecting their intellectual property, making patents alone inadequate for safeguarding their IP. Data exclusivity protection allows for a period of time following marketing approval during which competing firms may not use the innovative firm’s safety and efficacy data, from proprietary preclinical and clinical trial results, to obtain marketing authorization for a generic version of the drug. From the moment when the compound first shows medicinal promise, data is generated and compiled, a process that is both expensive and time consuming. Data exclusivity provides the innovative firm with a period of protection for their investment in clinical trials and data collection, regardless of the length of time required to bring the drug to market. Although complementary, patents and data exclusivity protection incentivize innovation in different ways and serve distinct purposes. Patents provide protection for innovations that meet the standards of patentability and are novel, nonobvious, and useful. In the context of biopharmaceuticals, patents protect both breakthrough discoveries as well as incremental improvements. Due to the length of the drug-development and patent-approval processes, effective patent terms rarely correspond to FDA approval. Accordingly, in some cases innovative therapies may experience patent expiry shortly after making it to market. In contrast, data exclusivity protects the tremendous investments of time, talent, and financial resources required to establish a new therapy as safe and effective. This is accomplished by requiring competing firms seeking regulatory approval of the same or a similar product to independently generate the comprehensive preclinical and clinical trial data rather than rely on or use the innovator’s data to establish safety and efficacy of their competing product. Alternatively, the competing firm may wait a set period of time after which they are able to utilize the innovator’s prior approval in an abbreviated regulatory approval, eliminating the need for independently generated data. Data exclusivity is not an extension of patent rights, and it does not preclude a third party from introducing a generic version of the innovator’s therapy during the data exclusivity period, provided that the innovator’s data is not used to secure marketing approval. Fundamentally, data exclusivity protection incentivizes biopharmaceutical firms to invest the necessary time and financial resources in establishing the safety and efficacy of their product and prevents competitors from free riding on these efforts for a limited period of time. Kristina The Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 provided innovative drug firms with a period of patent extension as well as a period of data exclusivity, in the hopes of providing a return on their investment and an incentive for future innovation.3 These protections have been crucial to the development of the innovative drugs and therapies that currently enhance and extend life. They are even more critical to the future of the biopharmaceutical industry and the development of biologic medicines that are more targeted and more complex. In an analysis of the appropriate length of data exclusivity, a financial model was utilized to determine how long the exclusivity period must be to provide a typical pioneer biologic a positive return on investment. Drawing on a representative portfolio of pioneer biologics, the break-even period ranges from thirteen to sixteen years.4 An appropriate period of protection is essential if the promise of biologics is to come to fruition. Beyond the importance of biologics to public health and longevity, innovation is crucial to trade and economic prosperity. As evidence of the importance of these sectors, in 2011 IP-intensive industries exported more than $1 trillion in goods and services, which accounts for approximately seventy-four percent of total 2011 U.S. exports.5 Moreover, the biopharmaceutical industry is a significant contributor. The biopharmaceutical industry of the United States is the fourth-largest U.S. exporter among IP-intensive industries, with exports valued at $49.4 billion in 2010.6 Accordingly, the TPP Trade Agreement should include the proposed twelve years of data exclusivity and provide innovative firms with the incentives needed to continue to invest in the breakthrough therapies that will extend and enhance life for years to come. Technology inevitably evolves faster than the legal architecture that surrounds it. The provision of data exclusivity protections is a straightforward legal step to catch up to the science that brings us biologic medicines. Biologic medicines are critical to the healthcare advances of the future, and data exclusivity is vital to innovative biologics. The period of data exclusivity provides innovators with an incentive to invest in the testing data necessary to prove a drug’s safety and efficacy by granting them a measure of certainty that they will enjoy a fixed amount of time during which they maintain proprietary control of the test data that resulted in the approval of its drug before requiring that data be made available to generic imitators. As technology changes to enable the development of new biologic vaccines and therapies, intellectual property protection must also evolve to ensure protection for these products. If we believe in the importance of biologic medicines for the future of healthcare, we must protect them.
Comprehensive studies prove that data exclusivity is the best way to ensure innovative future medicines. This turns case. Goldman et al ‘13 Dana P Goldman (Dean of the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair Leonard D. Schaeffer Director’s Chair, Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy, and Economics) et al., 10-21-2013, "The Benefits From Giving Makers Of Conventional `Small Molecule' Drugs Longer Exclusivity Over Clinical Trial Data," PubMed Central (PMC), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3804334Accessed 10/6/2021 JH Data exclusivity refers to the period of time after approval of a new drug and before a generic manufacturer can access the clinical trial data that was submitted by the drug's originator during the approval process. Given the high cost of conducting clinical trials, data exclusivity provides strong intellectual property protection to pharmaceutical innovators. In the United States, the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, also known as the Hatch-Waxman Act, establishes the process by which generic drug manufacturers can seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manufacture and market conventional drugs. Conventional drugs are created through chemistry, whereas the term biologics refers to drugs created from living organisms. ¶The Hatch-Waxman Act provides originators of new conventional drugs with five initial years of data exclusivity, and three extra years for supplemental applications, for uses other than the ones for which the drug was originally approved. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 provides a six-month extension for previously approved drugs when such drugs are subsequently approved for use in pediatric populations. By comparison, the data exclusivity period in Europe is ten years for both conventional drugs and biologics, plus an additional year if a new indication is added for which the drug provides significant clinical benefits compared to existing therapies.1 In the United States, biologic drugs were granted a 12-year exclusivity period under the Affordable Care Act. We are not aware of any pending legislation to lengthen data exclusivity for conventional drugs in the US. ¶In 2007, the National Academies of Science and Engineering called for the United States to “adopt the European data exclusivity period” of 10–11 years and recommended that research be conducted to determine whether even that period of time is adequate, “given the complexity and length of drug development today.”2 The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has proposed fourteen years of data exclusivity for conventional drugs.3 Unfortunately, the health policy literature contains no information about the effects such a policy would have on innovation, longevity, and social welfare. We believe our study is the first to address these issues. ¶Data exclusivity provides intellectual property protection that is distinct from patent protection. In the United States, a patent becomes effective at the date of filing—typically long before clinical trials start—whereas data exclusivity begins on the date a drug is approved for marketing by the FDA. ¶In addition, a patent is subject to challenge. The Hatch-Waxman Act allows a would-be generic competitor to contest the validity of a patent in court. Such litigation now occurs for the vast majority of new drugs, and typically commences shortly after FDA approval.1 Data exclusivity, by contrast, cannot be legally challenged. ¶The duration of the data exclusivity period entails a trade-off between current and future generations. A longer period delays competition from generic drug companies, effectively extending the originator's exclusive position in the marketplace. The prospect of higher profits gives drug companies a stronger incentive to innovate—both to create new drugs and to find new indications for existing products. An increase in innovation, in turn, benefits future generations of consumers. At the same time, however, a delay in generic competition imposes a greater spending burden on current consumers. So an increase in the length of data exclusivity benefits future generations, but at the expense of today's drug consumers. ¶Although some have questioned whether profits drive innovation, empirical evidence strongly supports this relationship. The Orphan Drug Act of 1983, which provides pharmaceutical companies with incentives to develop drugs for treating rare diseases or conditions for which there are small patient populations, was followed by a sharp increase in the number of drugs approved for this market.4 Higher profits from vaccines have been associated with a significant increase in the number of clinical trials to develop new vaccines.5 There is also evidence that manufacturers have delayed new drug launches rather than accept a lower anticipated price.6 ¶Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Linn7 concluded that a 1 percent increase in the potential market size for a drug class leads to a 3–4 percent growth in the entry of new drugs.7 To our knowledge, this is the only study that estimates this relationship for the entire drug market. As Darius Lakdawalla and colleagues observe,8 the relationship identified by Acemoglu and Linn presumes that increases in the number or share of the aged population (60+ years old) driven by past baby booms or busts also increase innovation in drug classes targeted toward the aged. Moreover, it presumes that pharmaceutical innovation does not drive historical trends such as baby booms of busts; there is no evidence that contradicts this presumption. Applying this relationship between market size and innovation to average sales within a drug class, innovators produce one additional drug for every additional $97.5 million of annual potential revenue. Because the cost of a new conventional drug is estimated to be $800 million,9 innovators require a 12 percent annual return on their investment—within accepted boundaries for the return on capital in the drug industry. ¶In this paper we analyze the effect of a longer period of data exclusivity for conventional drugs on both current and future generations. We do not consider the effects of a change in the data exclusivity period for biologics. We focus on a twelve-year duration because, as noted above, this is data exclusivity period recently approved by Congress for biologics. As such, it serves as a natural benchmark for extended data exclusivity for conventional drugs. ¶We address three specific policy questions: How would extending the initial five years of data exclusivity for new conventional drugs in the United States affect innovation? How would a longer period of data exclusivity affect the health of current and future generations? What is the dollar value of a longer period of data exclusivity to US society?¶ STUDY DATA AND METHODS ¶Our analysis has two main components. First, we estimated the effect of a longer period of data exclusivity on revenues to pharmaceutical companies. We used retrospective data from the drugs@FDA database10 and the FDA Electronic Orange Book11 of approved drug products to construct a representative profile of protection from generic competition during a drug's life cycle. ¶Second, we feed that result into our global pharmaceutical policy model8 to determine the effect of increased pharmaceutical revenues on drug innovation and consumers' longevity. The model is a set of dynamic interactions that link present health and innovation to their future values. For example, next year's health status depends on today's health, on the drug treatments that are available, and on a set of random health “shocks” that vary with an individuals' own risk-factors such as age, health behaviors, and current disease conditions. An example of a shock would be exposure to an infection. ¶Following Joseph Lipscomb and colleagues,12 we assume a real (inflation-adjusted) “social” discount rate of 3 percent in our baseline analysis. This discount rate captures the manner in which society discounts benefits in the future compared to benefits today. It is distinct from companies' cost of capital – the amount of interest they need to pay to borrow money – which is typically higher than 3 percent.9 ¶For our baseline analysis, we assume an innovation elasticity of 3.0, meaning that a 1 percent increase in expected drug revenue leads to a 3 percent increase in the number of drugs approved within the class each year. This assumption is slightly conservative and understates changes in innovation, longevity, and welfare, relative to the findings of Acemoglu and Linn.7 ¶Increased innovation in turn affects population health. The global pharmaceutical policy model uses the health benefits documented in the clinical literature as a result of recent drugs for seven major conditions (heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, stroke and mental illness). The model also accounts for the increased likelihood of treatment associated with drug innovation. As innovation expands because of greater data exclusivity, the life expectancy of older Americans improves; this improvement results mainly from the increased likelihood of treatment, not the health benefits of new drugs. With longer life expectancy, the population of potential drug users grows, further increasing revenues and stimulating innovation over time. We model innovation and health through 2060. ¶The monetary value of increased longevity, that is, the amount consumers are willing to pay for longer life spans, has long been a subject of debate. An analysis by Richard Hirth and colleagues of attitudes and behavior related to mortality risk showed that the median value of a life-year ranges from $110,200 to $505,400 (in 2004 US dollars).13 Research by Kip Viscusi and Joseph Aldy implies that the value of a life-year ranges from $150,000 to $360,000.8,14 ¶In our baseline analysis, we assign a monetary value for increased longevity of $200,000 per life-year, though in sensitivity analyses we consider a range of values for this and other parameters. Additional details about our methods, data, and assumptions are provided in a technical appendix.15 ¶Limitations ¶Simulations of this sort have certain limitations. Because laws, regulations, science, and medicine are likely to change in unforeseen ways, the retrospective data we relied on may not characterize the future. Some plausible changes, for example, an increase in the number of successful challenges to patent validity,1 may cause us to understate the effects of longer data exclusivity. Other changes such as government price controls, which would reduce potential profits available to drug companies, may cause us to overstate effects. Still other changes, such as advances or setbacks in science and medicine that are impossible to anticipate, could lead to either understated or overstated effects. ¶We do not model behavioral responses to a longer period of data exclusivity due to the technical complexity and lack of good evidence. For example, a generic drug company might attempt to bypass lengthier data exclusivity periods in the United States by conducting clinical trials of a generic version of an already-approved drug. If drug developers believe that generic manufacturers would behave in this way, our results overstate the long-term effects of longer data exclusivity. ¶We do not model non-mortality benefits, for example, treatments for mental health conditions, pain, and rheumatoid arthritis. Such benefits account for much of the value of many drugs, yet there was insufficient evidence on the non-mortality benefits of new drugs. If these benefits are important, our estimates of the benefits of longer data exclusivity are conservative. ¶Finally, we do not calculate the potential benefits of a data exclusivity period shorter than the current Hatch-Waxman provisions. ¶STUDY RESULTS ¶Applying our findings about increased revenues over a drug's life cycle, we found that extending data exclusivity to twelve years would increase lifetime drug revenues by 5.0 percent on average. ¶Exhibit 1 explains how we reached this result. The exhibit shows the proportion of conventional drugs that had protection against generic competition under existing law—arising from either patents or data exclusivity—and the proportion of such drugs that would have had protection if data exclusivity had lasted twelve years. The drugs in our sample began facing generic competition eight years after launch. With a twelve-year period of data exclusivity, by contrast, all the drugs would have faced no generic competition for at least twelve years after launch. ¶We also determined that expanding data exclusivity to twelve years would result in 228 extra drug approvals between 2020 and 2060, relative to the number of approvals that we project under the current Hatch-Waxman data exclusivity provisions. We lay out these data in Exhibit 2, which illustrates the impact of increasing the period of data exclusivity to twelve years on the number of conventional drug approvals in the United States. ¶We found that a twelve-year data exclusivity period has little beneficial effect on longevity at age fifty-five. Americans in the early 2020s will bear the cost of increased drug spending with relatively little increased innovation and therefore relatively little benefit in terms of longevity. However, people turning fifty-five in the year 2060 can expect increased life expectancy of 1.44 years as opposed to 1.30 years under the status quo (Exhibit 3). The difference—1.7 months—is a result of innovation in the interceding years—that is, the new drugs brought to market because of lengthier data exclusivity. As a point of comparison, the elimination of obesity in the United States could increase life expectancy at birth by 2.5 to 13.0 months. ¶By 2060, these Americans would spend $3,400 per capita (in 2009 US dollars) over their remaining lives on drugs developed as a result of longer data exclusivity (Exhibit 4). Given the substantial value of a life-year, the benefit of increased longevity would be $13,800, or $10,400 when you calculate benefits minus costs. The increase in “welfare” or well-being is smaller, but still positive, between 2020 and 2060. ¶Sensitivity Analyses ¶The baseline model implies that a longer period of data exclusivity would be of value to future generations of Americans. How sensitive are these results to our assumptions? To answer this question, we varied the value of a life-year ($50,000 to $300,000), the innovation elasticity (0.5 to 4.0), the social discount rate (2 percent to 4 percent), and the revenue impact of a twelve-year period of data exclusivity (base case plus or minus 25 percent). ¶In most of these scenarios, the net benefit of a twelve-year period of data exclusivity to people age fifty-five was positive from 2020 through 2060. The costs exceeded the benefits—and so longer data exclusivity was harmful—only for the lowest levels of the innovation elasticity (0.5–1.0) and the value of a life-year ($50,000). These parameter levels are much smaller than the best available evidence (described earlier). Hence, even though there is uncertainty about model parameters, a lengthier data exclusivity period would likely be beneficial overall. ¶DISCUSSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS ¶Recent discussions about the appropriate length of data exclusivity for new drugs have focused on biologics,1 but as noted above, the National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy2 and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline3 have proposed increasing the data exclusivity period for conventional drugs, as several European countries have done. ¶Unfortunately, there has been no quantitative analysis of the effects of a longer data exclusivity period on innovation, longevity, and societal welfare. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide such estimates. Our analysis suggests that Americans would benefit in the long term from a longer period of data exclusivity. ¶This finding is robust with respect to plausible assumptions about the effect of revenues on innovation and other factors. Nevertheless, there is uncertainty regarding potential changes in regulations, science, and medicine that were not incorporated into our model. ¶The idea of extending data exclusivity for conventional drugs has not garnered much political support. It appears that elected officials are unlikely to embrace legislation that would result in higher drug prices. Our research suggests such legislation would spur innovation that would benefit future generations. Data exclusivity is necessary to ensure effective clinical research Bing 21 Dr. Han Bing (senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). “TRIPS-plus Rules in International Trade Agreements and Access to Medicines: Chinese Perspectives and Practices.” Global Development Policy Center, Global Economic Governance Iniative. GEGI Working Paper 049, April 2021. JDN. https://www.bu.edu/gdp/files/2021/04/GEGI_WP__Bing_FIN.pdf
Undisclosed test or other data refer to the data obtained in the entire medicine development process to demonstrate the medicine’s safety, efficacy and quality. The medicines and healthcare products regulatory agencies in various countries analyze and evaluate whether to approve the marketing of a new medicine based on such data. Since it is obtained from scientific studies, undisclosed test or other data are unable to satisfy the requirements of patent grant and cannot be protected by patent rights. However, the cost of obtaining marketing approval is expensive and the first registrant needs to be significant to overcome the negative price effects of competition from pharmaceutical manufacturers that free ride on the initial registrant’s marketing approval. Therefore, it is argued that, without a period of monopoly, the new drug developers will have no incentive to “conduct the costly clinical research and trials necessary to obtain marketing approval” (Chow and Lee 2018). Given its importance to the pharmaceutical industry, the United States is a strong proponent of adding such a provision in the TRIPS Agreement (Chow and Lee 2018). However, since the TRIPS Agreement was formally implemented 25 years ago, WTO members had not yet unified their opinions on the application of this provision. The United States, the European Union, and some members argue that, taking into account the considerable amount of efforts and costs for generating the necessary data, unless permitted by the originator, undisclosed test or other data should be granted exclusive rights against disclosure for a specific period of time (UNCTAD and ICTSD 2013, 613-615). During the period, government agencies shall not only protect such data against disclosure, but also prevent generic drug manufacturers from relying upon the data to obtain marketing approval. Developing countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, and Thailand provide a non-exclusive protection on undisclosed test or other data, that is, such data are protected against unfair commercial use, but not granted exclusive rights, which allows government agencies to rely on such data to approve the marketing of generic medicines (UNCTAD and ICTSD 2013, 615-616). Developing countries believe that if the US and European practices were adopted, the marketing of generic medicines would be delayed, thereby unreasonably restricting the public access to medicines (UNCTAD and ICTSD 2013, 621). Prior to accession to the WTO in 2001, there were no data exclusivity provisions in China. After joining the WTO, China has assumed the obligation to protect such data in compliance with the TRIPS Agreement. Unlike most WTO members, as a condition for accession to the WTO, China agreed to provide data exclusivity protection for a period of six years (Feng 2010). Included in the Part V “Trade-Related Intellectual Property System” of the Report of the Working Party on the Accession of China (World Trade Organization 2001), China reiterated the content of and added what is not stipulated in Article 39(3) of the TRIPS Agreement. That is, during the period of six years, China does not allow approval of marketing for generic medicines, in order to provide exclusive protection for undisclosed test or other data of new chemical entities (World Trade Organization 2001, 284). Moreover, such protection is independent of patent protection, which means such data are protected whether a medicine is granted patent or not. The period of six years exclusive protection for undisclosed test or other data is longer than the period of 5 years of protection in the US and a number of bilateral free trade agreements.
Pharmaceutical innovation is key to protecting against future pandemics, bioterrorism, and antibiotic resistance. Marjanovic and Fejiao ‘20 Marjanovic, Sonja, and Carolina Feijao. Sonja Marjanovic, Ph.D., Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Carolina Feijao, Ph.D. in biochemistry, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. in quantitive biology, Imperial College London; B.Sc. in biology, University of Lisbon. "Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management: From Troubleshooting to Sustainable Models of Engagement." (2020). Quality Control As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sci-ences companies have been called on to develop medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for pressing public health challenges. The COVID-19 crisis is one such challenge, but there are many others. For example, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and avian and swine flu are also infectious diseases that represent public health threats. Infectious agents such as anthrax, smallpox and tularemia could present threats in a bioterrorism con-text.1 The general threat to public health that is posed by antimicrobial resistance is also well-recognised as an area in need of pharmaceutical innovation. Innovating in response to these challenges does not always align well with pharmaceutical industry commercial models, shareholder expectations and compe-tition within the industry. However, the expertise, networks and infrastructure that industry has within its reach, as well as public expectations and the moral imperative, make pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences sector an indispensable partner in the search for solutions that save lives. This perspective argues for the need to establish more sustainable and scalable ways of incentivising pharmaceu-tical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health. It considers both past and current examples of efforts to mobilise pharmaceutical innovation in high commercial risk areas, including in the context of current efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In global pandemic crises like COVID-19, the urgency and scale of the crisis – as well as the spotlight placed on pharmaceutical companies – mean that contributing to the search for effective medicines, vaccines or diagnostics is essential for socially responsible companies in the sec-tor.2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing indus-try-wide efforts unfold at unprecedented scale and pace. Whereas there is always scope for more activity, industry is currently contributing in a variety of ways. Examples include pharmaceutical companies donating existing com-pounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID-19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating tri-als for potentially effective medicine or vaccine candidates; and in some cases rapidly accelerating in-house research and development to discover new treatments or vaccine agents and develop diagnostics tests.3,4 Pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with each other in some of these efforts and participating in global RandD partnerships (such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative effort to accel-erate the development of potential therapies for COVID-19) and supporting national efforts to expand diagnosis and testing capacity and ensure affordable and ready access to potential solutions.3,5,6 The primary purpose of such innovation is to benefit patients and wider population health. Although there are also reputational benefits from involvement that can be realised across the industry, there are likely to be rela-tively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pres-sure not to be seen as profiting from the pandemic. In the United Kingdom for example, GSK has stated that it does not expect to profit from its COVID-19 related activities and that any gains will be invested in supporting research and long-term pandemic preparedness, as well as in developing products that would be affordable in the world’s poorest countries.7 Similarly, in the United States AbbVie has waived intellectual property rights for an existing com-bination product that is being tested for therapeutic poten-tial against COVID-19, which would support affordability and allow for a supply of generics.8,9 Johnson and Johnson has stated that its potential vaccine – which is expected to begin trials – will be available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic.10 Pharma is mobilising substantial efforts to rise to the COVID-19 challenge at hand. However, we need to consider how pharmaceutical innovation for responding to emerging infectious diseases can best be enabled beyond the current crisis. Many public health threats (including those associated with other infectious diseases, bioterror-ism agents and antimicrobial resistance) are urgently in need of pharmaceutical innovation, even if their impacts are not as visible to society as COVID-19 is in the imme-diate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infec-tious disease in recent times – for example those associated with Ebola and Zika outbreaks.11 However, it has done so to a lesser scale than for COVID-19 and with contribu-tions from fewer companies. Similarly, levels of activity in response to the threat of antimicrobial resistance are still low.12 There are important policy questions as to whether – and how – industry could engage with such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innova-tion conditions.
10/10/21
SO-innovation da, hif cp
Tournament: Presentation | Round: 5 | Opponent: Midlothian AC | Judge: Davd Salazar OFF Counterplan text: the member nations of the World Trade Organization should implement and fund a Health Impact Fund as per the Hollis and Pogge 08 card The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders.
INNOVATION DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients.
COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29: Jaci Mcdole and Stephen Ezell {Jaci McDole is a senior policy analyst covering intellectual property (IP) and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). She focuses on IP and its correlations to global innovation and trade. McDole holds a double BA in Music Business and Radio-Television with a minor in Marketing, an MS in Education, and a JD with a specialization in intellectual property (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). McDole comes to ITIF from the Institute for Intellectual Property Research, an organization she co-founded to study and further robust global IP policies. Stephen Ezell is vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He comes to ITIF from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003 to study the practice of innovation in service industries. At Peer Insight, Ezell led the Global Service Innovation Consortium, published multiple research papers on service innovation, and researched national service innovation policies being implemented by governments worldwide. Prior to forming Peer Insight, Ezell worked in the New Service Development group at the NASDAQ Stock Market, where he spearheaded the creation of the NASDAQ Market Intelligence Desk and the NASDAQ Corporate Services Network, services for NASDAQ-listed corporations. Previously, Ezell cofounded two successful innovation ventures, the high-tech services firm Brivo Systems and Lynx Capital, a boutique investment bank. Ezell holds a B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an honors certificate from Georgetown’s Landegger International Business Diplomacy program.}, 21 - ("Ten Ways Ip Has Enabled Innovations That Have Helped Sustain The World Through The Pandemic," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-29-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-enabled-innovations-have-helped-sustain-world-through)//marlborough-wr/ To better understand the role of IP in enabling solutions related to COVID-19 challenges, this report relies on 10 case studies drawn from a variety of nations, technical fields, and firm sizes. This is but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. From a paramedic in Mexico to a veteran vaccine manufacturing company in India and a tech start-up in Estonia to a U.S.-based company offering workplace Internet of Things (IoT) services, small and large organizations alike are working to combat the pandemic. Some have adapted existing innovations, while others have developed novel solutions. All are working to take the world out of the pandemic and into the future. The case studies are: Bharat Biotech: Covaxin Gilead: Remdesivir LumiraDX: SARS-COV-2 Antigen POC Test Teal Bio: Teal Bio Respirator XE Ingeniería Médica: CápsulaXE Surgical Theater: Precision VR Tombot: Jennie Starship Technologies: Autonomous Delivery Robots Triax Technologies: Proximity Trace Zoom: Video Conferencing As the case studies show, IP is critical to enabling innovation. Policymakers around the world need to ensure robust IP protections are—and remain—in place if they wish their citizens to have safe and innovative solutions to health care, workplace, and societal challenges in the future. THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN RandD-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries.5 To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years.6 For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).7 In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent.8 Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average.9 A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.”10 Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs.11 Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry.12 To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future.13 THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO INNOVATION Although anti-IP proponents have attacked biopharmaceutical manufacturers particularly hard, the reality is all IP-protected innovations are at risk if these rights are ignored, or vitiated. Certain arguments have shown a desire for the term “COVID-19 innovations” to include everything from vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and PPE to biotechnology, AI-related data, and educational materials.14 This could potentially open the floodgates to invalidate IP protection on many of the innovations highlighted in this report. However, much of the current discussion concerning IP focuses almost entirely on litigation fears or RandD incentives. Although RandD is an important aspect of IP, as previously mentioned, these discussions ignore the fact that IP protection can be—and often is—used for other purposes, including generating initial capital to create a company and begin manufacturing and, more importantly, using licensing agreements and IP to track the supply chain and ensure quality control of products. This report highlights but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. In 2018, Forbes identified counterfeiting as the largest criminal enterprise in the world.15 The global struggle against counterfeit and non-regulated products, which has hit Latin America particularly hard during the pandemic, proves the need for safety and quality assurance in supply chains.16 Some communities already ravaged by COVID-19 are seeing higher mortality rates related to counterfeit vaccines, therapeutics, PPE, and cleaning and sanitizing products.17 Polish authorities discovered vials of antiwrinkle treatment labeled as COVID-19 vaccines. 18 In Mexico, fake vaccines sold for approximately $1,000 per dose.19 Chinese and South African police seized thousands of counterfeit vaccine doses from warehouses and manufacturing plants.20 Meanwhile, dozens of websites worldwide claiming to sell vaccines or be affiliated with vaccine manufacturers have been taken down.21 But the problem is not limited to biopharmaceuticals. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has recovered $48 million worth of counterfeit PPE and other products.22 Collaborative efforts between law enforcement and manufacturers have kept numerous counterfeits from reaching the population. In countries with strong IP protection, the chances of counterfeit products reaching the market are significantly lower. This is largely because counterfeiting tends to be an IP-related issue, and these countries generally provide superior means of tracking the supply chain through trademarks, trade secrets, and licensing agreements. This enables greater quality control and helps manufacturers maintain a level of public confidence in their products. By controlling the flow of knowledge associated with IP, voluntary licensing agreements provide innovators with opportunities to collaborate, while ensuring their partners are properly equipped and capable of producing quality products. Throughout this difficult time, the world has seen unexpected collaborations, especially between biopharmaceutical companies worldwide such as Gilead and Eva Pharma or Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, Inc. Throughout history, and most significantly in the nineteenth century through the widespread development of patent systems and the ensuing Industrial Revolution, IP has contributed toward greater economic growth.23 This is promising news as the world struggles for economic recovery. A 2021 joint study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO) shows a strong, positive correlation between IP rights and economic performance.24 It states that “IP-owning firms represent a significantly larger proportion of economic activity and employment across Europe,” with IP-intensive industries contributing to 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (€6.6 trillion; US$7.9 trillion).25 The study also shows 38.9 percent of employment is directly or indirectly attributed to IP-intensive industries, and IP generates higher wages and greater revenue per employee, especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises.26 That concords with the United States, where the Department of Commerce estimated that IP-intensive industries support at least 45 million jobs and contribute more than $6 trillion dollars to, or 38.2 percent of, GDP.27 In 2020, global patent filings through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system reached a record 275,900 filings amidst the pandemic, growing 4 percent from 2019.28 The top-four nations, which accounted for 180,530 of the patent applications, were China, the United States, Japan, and Korea, respectively.29 While several countries saw an increase in patent filings, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia both saw significant increases in the number of annual applications, with the top two filing growths of 73 percent and 26 percent, respectively.30 The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a lot of things, but it certainly couldn’t stop innovation. There are at least five principal benefits strong IP rights can generate, for both developing and developed countries alike.31 First, stronger IP protection spurs the virtuous cycle of innovation by increasing the appropriability of returns, enabling economic gain and catalyzing economic growth. Second, through patents—which require innovators to disclose certain knowledge as a condition of protection—knowledge spillovers build a platform of knowledge that enables other innovators. For instance, studies have found that the rate of return to society from corporate RandD and innovation activities is at least twice the estimated returns that each company itself receives.32 Third, countries with robust IP can operate more efficiently and productively by using IP to determine product quality and reduce transaction costs. Fourth, trade and foreign direct investment enabled and encouraged by strong IP protection offered to enterprises from foreign countries facilitates an accumulation of knowledge capital within the destination economy. That matters when foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of productivity growth in most countries.33 There’s also evidence suggesting that developing nations with stronger IP protections enjoy the earlier introduction of innovative new medicines.34 And fifth, strong IP boosts exports, including in developing countries.35 Research shows a positive correlation between stronger IP protection and exports from developing countries as well as faster growth rates of certain industries.36 The following case studies illustrate these benefits of IP and how they’ve enabled innovative solutions to help global society navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. This sets a precedent that spills over to all future diseases – Hopkins 21: Jared S. Hopkins {Jared S. Hopkins is a New York-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering the pharmaceutical industry, including companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Merck and Co. He previously was a health-care reporter at Bloomberg News and an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Jared started his career at The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho covering politics. In 2014, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award For Young Journalists for an investigation into charities founded by professional athletes. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series about neglect at a residential facility for disabled kids. Jared graduated from the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park with a bachelor's degree in journalism}, 21 - ("U.S. Support for Patent Waiver Unlikely to Cost Covid-19 Vaccine Makers in Short Term ," WSJ, 5-7-2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-support-for-patent-waiver-unlikely-to-cost-covid-19-vaccine-makers-in-short-term-11620414260)//marlborough-wr/ The Biden administration’s unexpected support for temporarily waiving Covid-19 vaccine patents won’t have an immediate financial impact on the companies making the shots, industry officials and analysts said. Yet the decision could mark a shift in Washington’s longstanding support of the industry’s valuable intellectual property, patent-law experts said. A waiver, if it does go into effect, may pose long-term risks to the vaccine makers, analysts said. Moderna Inc., MRNA -4.12 Pfizer Inc. PFE -3.10 and other vaccine makers weren’t counting on sales from the developing countries that would gain access to the vaccine technology, analysts said. If patents and other crucial product information behind the technology is made available, it would take at least several months before shots were produced, industry officials said. Yet long-term Covid-19 sales could take a hit if other companies and countries gained access to the technologies and figured out how to use it. Western drugmakers could also confront competition sooner for other medicines they are hoping to make using the technologies. A World Trade Organization waiver could also set a precedent for waiving patents for other medicines, a long-sought goal of some developing countries, patient groups and others to try to reduce the costs of prescription drugs. “It sets a tremendous precedent of waiving IP rights that’s likely going to come up in future pandemics or in other serious diseases,” said David Silverstein, a patent lawyer at Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider LLP who advises drugmakers. “Other than that, this is largely symbolic.” The DA outweighs on time-frame and magnitude: Need to sustain effective research now to avoid future pandemics Lander 8/4/21 Eric Lander, President Biden’s Science Advisory and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) “Opinion: As bad as Covid-19 has been, a future pandemic could be even worse—unless we act now” 8/4/21, The Washington Post RM Coronavirus vaccines can end the current pandemic if enough people choose to protect themselves and their loved ones by getting vaccinated. But in the years to come, we will still need to defend against a pandemic side effect: collective amnesia. As public health emergencies recede, societies often quickly forget their experiences — and fail to prepare for future challenges. For pandemics, such a course would be disastrous. New infectious diseases have been emerging at an accelerating pace, and they are spreading faster. Our federal government is responsible for defending the United States against future threats. That’s why President Biden has asked Congress to fund his plan to build on current scientific progress to keep new infectious-disease threats from turning into pandemics like covid-19. As the president’s science adviser, I know what’s becoming possible. For the first time in our history, we have an opportunity not just to refill our stockpiles but also to transform our capabilities. However, if we don’t start preparing now for future pandemics, the window for action will close. Covid-19 has been a catastrophe: The toll in the United States alone is more than 614,000 lives and has been estimated to exceed $16 trillion, with disproportionate impact on vulnerable and marginalized communities. But a future pandemic could be even worse — unless we take steps now. It’s important to remember that the virus behind covid-19 is far less deadly than the 1918 influenza. The virus also belongs to a well-understood family, coronaviruses. It was possible to design vaccines within days of knowing the virus’s genetic code because 20 years of basic scientific research had revealed which protein to target and how to stabilize it. And while the current virus spins off variants, its mutation rate is slower than that of most viruses. Unfortunately, most of the 26 families of viruses that infect humans are less well understood or harder to control. We have a great deal of work still ahead. The development of mRNA vaccine technology — thanks to more than a decade of foresighted basic research — was a game-changer. It shortened the time needed to design and test vaccines to less than a year — far faster than for any previous vaccine. And it’s been surprisingly effective against covid-19. Still, there’s much more to do. We don’t yet know how mRNA vaccines will perform against other viruses down the road. And when the next pandemic breaks out, we’ll want to be able to respond even faster. Fortunately, the scientific community has been developing a bold plan to keep future viruses from becoming pandemics. Here are a few of the goals we should shoot for: The capability to design, test and approve safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of detecting a pandemic threat (for covid-19, that would have meant May 2020); manufacture enough doses to supply the world within 200 days; and speed vaccination campaigns by replacing sterile injections with skin patches. Diagnostics simple and cheap enough for daily home testing to limit spread and target medical care. Early-warning systems to spot new biological threats anywhere in the world soon after they emerge and monitor them thereafter. We desperately need to strengthen our public health system — from expanding the workforce to modernizing labs and data systems — including to ensure that vulnerable populations are protected. And we need to coordinate actions with our international partners, because pandemics know no borders. These goals are ambitious, but they’re feasible — provided the work is managed with the seriousness, focus and accountability of NASA’s Apollo Program, which sent humans to the moon. Importantly, these capabilities won’t just prepare us for future pandemics; they’ll also improve public health and medical care for infectious diseases today. Preparing for threats is a core national responsibility. That’s why our government invests heavily in missile defense and counterterrorism. We need to similarly protect the nation against biological threats, which range from the ongoing risk of pandemics to the possibility of deliberate use of bioweapons. Pandemics cause massive death and disruption. From a financial standpoint, they’re also astronomically expensive. If, as might be expected from history and current trends, we suffered a pandemic of the current scale every two decades, the annualized cost would exceed $500 billion per year. Investing a much smaller amount to avert this toll is an economic and moral imperative. The White House will put forward a detailed plan this month to ensure that the United States can fully prepare before the next outbreak. It’s hard to imagine a higher economic or human return on national investment. Ecosystem sensitivity from climate change means future pandemics will cause extinction—assumes COVID Supriya 4/19 Lakshmi Supriya got her BSc in Industrial Chemistry from IIT Kharagpur (India) and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech (USA). She has more than a decade of global industry experience working in the USA, Europe, and India. After her Ph.D., she worked as part of the RandD group in diverse industries starting with semiconductor packaging at Intel, Arizona, where she developed a new elastomeric thermal solution, which has now been commercialized and is used in the core i3 and i5 processors. From there she went on to work at two startups, one managing the microfluidics chip manufacturing lab at a biotechnology company and the other developing polymer formulations for oil extraction from oil sands. She also worked at Saint Gobain North America, developing various material solutions for photovoltaics and processing techniques and new applications for fluoropolymers. Most recently, she managed the Indian RandD team of Enthone (now part of MacDermid) developing electroplating technologies for precious metals.) “Humans versus viruses - Can we avoid extinction in near future?” News Medical Life Sciences, 4/19/21, https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210419/Humans-versus-viruses-Can-we-avoid-extinction-in-near-future.aspx RM Expert argues that human-caused changes to the environment can lead to the emergence of pathogens, not only from outside but also from our own microbiome, which can pave the way for large-scale destruction of humans and even our extinction. Whenever there is a change in any system, it will cause other changes to reach a balance or equilibrium, generally at a point different from the original balance. Although this principle was originally posited by the French chemist Henry Le Chatelier for chemical reactions, this theory can be applied to almost anything else. In an essay published on the online server Preprints*, Eleftherios P. Diamandis of the University of Toronto and the Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, argues that changes caused by humans, to the climate, and everything around us will lead to changes that may have a dramatic impact on human life. Because our ecosystems are so complex, we don’t know how our actions will affect us in the long run, so humans generally disregard them. Changing our environment Everything around us is changing, from living organisms to the climate, water, and soil. Some estimates say about half the organisms that existed 50 years ago have already become extinct, and about 80 of the species may become extinct in the future. As the debate on global warming continues, according to data, the last six years have been the warmest on record. Global warming is melting ice, and sea levels have been increasing. The changing climate is causing more and more wildfires, which are leading to other related damage. At the same time, increased flooding is causing large-scale devastation. One question that arises is how much environmental damage have humans already done? A recent study compared the natural biomass on Earth to the mass produced by humans and found humans produce a mass equal to their weight every week. This human-made mass is mainly for buildings, roads, and plastic products. In the early 1900s, human-made mass was about 3 of the global biomass. Today both are about equal. Projections say by 2040, the human-made mass will be triple that of Earth’s biomass. But, slowing down human activity that causes such production may be difficult, given it is considered part of our growth as a civilization. Emerging pathogens Although we are made up of human cells, we have almost ten times that of bacteria just in our guts and more on our skin. These microbes not only affect locally but also affect the entire body. There is a balance between the good and bad bacteria, and any change in the environment may cause this balance to shift, especially on the skin, the consequences of which are unknown. Although most bacteria on and inside of us are harmless, gut bacteria can also have viruses. If viruses don’t kill the bacteria immediately, they can incorporate into the bacterial genome and stay latent for a long time until reactivation by environmental factors, when they can become pathogenic. They can also escape from the gut and enter other organs or the bloodstream. Bacteria can then use these viruses to kill other bacteria or help them evolve to more virulent strains. An example of the evolution of pathogens is the cause of the current pandemic, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Several mutations are now known that make the virus more infectious and resistant to immune responses, and strengthening its to enter cells via surface receptors. The brain There is evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 can also affect the brain. The virus may enter the brain via the olfactory tract or through the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) pathway. Viruses can also affect our senses, such as a loss of smell and taste, and there could be other so far unkown neurological effects. The loss of smell seen in COVID-19 could be a new viral syndrome specific to this disease. Many books and movies have described pandemics caused by pathogens that wipe out large populations and cause severe diseases. In the essay, the author provides a hypothetical scenario where a gut bacteria suddenly starts producing viral proteins. Some virions spread through the body and get transmitted through the human population. After a few months, the virus started causing blindness, and within a year, large populations lost their vision. Pandemics can cause other diseases that can threaten humanity’s entire existence. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this possibility to the forefront. If we continue disturbing the equilibrium between us and the environment, we don’t know what the consequences may be and the next pandemic could lead us to extinction.
ON CASE
AT INNOVATION/BIOTERROR Patents are good---key to innovation Laxminarayan 1, Ramanan Laxminarayan directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. He is also a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. - See more at: http://www.cddep.org/profile/ramanan_laxminarayan#sthash.YqaghohJ.dpuf Spring 2001 http://www.rff.org/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Download/RFF-Resources-143-antibiotic.pdf The Role of Patents Firms that manufacture antibiotics face conflicting incentives with respect to resistance. On the one hand, bacterial resistance to a product can reduce the demand for that product. On the other hand, the resistance makes old drugs obsolete and can therefore encourage investment in new antibiotics. Pharmaceutical firms are driven to maximize profits during the course of the drug’s effective patent life—the period of time between obtaining regulatory approval for the antibiotic and the expiration of product and process patents to manufacture the drug. Given the paucity of tools at the policymaker’s disposal, the use of patents to influence antibiotic use may be worth considering. A longer effective patent life could increase incentives for a company to minimize resistance, since the company would enjoy a longer period of monopoly benefits from its antibiotic’s effectiveness. Patent breadth is another critical consideration. When resistance is significant, other things being equal, it may be prudent to assign broad patents that cover an entire class of antibiotics rather than a single antibiotic. In such a situation, the benefits of preserving effectiveness could outweigh the cost to society of greater monopoly power associated with broader patents. Broad patents may prevent many firms from competing inefficiently for the same pool of effectiveness embodied in a class of antibiotics, while providing an incentive to develop new antibiotics. TRIPs encourages innovation Margaret Kyle and Yi Qian 14, Kyle is Professor of Economics. Center for Industrial Economics, “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO INNOVATION: EVIDENCE FROM TRIPS,” https://www.nber.org/papers/w20799 The TRIPS Agreement, which generally strengthened and harmonized IPRs across countries, does appear to have changed market outcomes. On average, access to new pharmaceuticals has at least not decreased following TRIPS. Point estimates show an increase in the probability of new product launch and quantities sold, although differences are not always statistically significant. While patents are also associated with higher prices, there is some evidence that prices in poorer countries have fallen, though not to the level of off-patent products. However, the effect of IPRs may be confounded by other policy changes. It is certainly possible that in the absence of countervailing policies, stronger IPRs would have resulted in a larger increase in prices. It is also likely that IPRs have very different implications for countries with a large generic sector (e.g., India) than for most of the developing countries we examine. Nevertheless, we believe the results should be considered relatively good news about the relationship between IPRs and access to innovative medicines, although considerable work remains to improve the latter. Longer patents are net-good, downsides aren’t outweighed by the benefits David Abrams 9, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, “Did TRIPS Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis of Patent Duration and Incentives to Innovate,” https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/274/ Let us consider the increase in value of innovation due to a one– standard-deviation increase in patent-term extension. The standard deviation of the term extension (by class) is 114 days (see Figure 6 for the full distribution). Multiplying this by the coefficient above, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in patent term extension is associated with an increase of about seven monthly patents. From a mean of approximately thirty-four, in percentage terms, this comes to a twenty-one percent increase in value of innovation—a very substantial increase. It seems unlikely that the deadweight loss due to exclusive rights would be enough to offset this considerable gain, suggesting that an increase in patent terms could lead to greater welfare. Not having patents worsens bioterror, because incentive to innovate is taken away-that’s both disad and on case responses. This increases bioterrorists’ incentive to weaponize disease, because companies are turned away from innovating. This means that neg controls link to all impact, meaning that you must err neg because of our additional impact of future pandemics. 1.
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SO-utilinnovation
Tournament: Presentation | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brookfield East DJ | Judge: Cortez, Ben 1 The standard is consistency with utilitarianism 1 Preventing extinction is the most ethical outcome Bostrom 13 (Nick, Professor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology University of Oxford, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, Global Policy Volume 4, Issue 1, February 2013 AKONG) Some other ethical perspectives We have thus far considered existential risk from the perspective of utilitarianism (combined with several simplify- ing assumptions). We may briefly consider how the issue might appear when viewed through the lenses of some other ethical outlooks. For example, the philosopher Robert Adams outlines a different view on these matters: I believe a better basis for ethical theory in this area can be found in quite a different direction—in a commitment to the future of human- ity as a vast project, or network of overlapping projects, that is generally shared by the human race. The aspiration for a better society—more just, more rewarding, and more peaceful—is a part of this project. So are the potentially end- less quests for scientific knowledge and philo- sophical understanding, and the development of artistic and other cultural traditions. This includes the particular cultural traditions to which we belong, in all their accidental historic and ethnic diversity. It also includes our interest in the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the hope that they will be able, in turn, to have the lives of their children and grandchil- dren as projects. To the extent that a policy or practice seems likely to be favorable or unfavor- able to the carrying out of this complex of pro- jects in the nearer or further future, we have reason to pursue or avoid it. ... Continuity is as important to our commitment to the project of the future of humanity as it is to our commit- ment to the projects of our own personal futures. Just as the shape of my whole life, and its connection with my present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of any iso- lated experience, so too the shape of human history over an extended period of the future, and its connection with the human present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of the (total or average) quality of life of a popula- tion-at-a-time, considered in isolation from how it got that way. We owe, I think, some loyalty to this project of the human future. We also owe it a respect that we would owe it even if we were not of the human race ourselves, but beings from another planet who had some understanding of it (Adams, 1989, pp. 472–473). Since an existential catastrophe would either put an end to the project of the future of humanity or drasti- cally curtail its scope for development, we would seem to have a strong prima facie reason to avoid it, in Adams’ view. We also note that an existential catastrophe would entail the frustration of many strong preferences, sug- gesting that from a preference-satisfactionist perspective it would be a bad thing. In a similar vein, an ethical view emphasising that public policy should be determined through informed democratic deliberation by all stake- holders would favour existential-risk mitigation if we suppose, as is plausible, that a majority of the world’s population would come to favour such policies upon reasonable deliberation (even if hypothetical future peo- ple are not included as stakeholders). We might also have custodial duties to preserve the inheritance of humanity passed on to us by our ancestors and convey it safely to our descendants.23 We do not want to be the failing link in the chain of generations, and we ought not to delete or abandon the great epic of human civili- sation that humankind has been working on for thou- sands of years, when it is clear that the narrative is far from having reached a natural terminus. Further, many theological perspectives deplore naturalistic existential catastrophes, especially ones induced by human activi- ties: If God created the world and the human species, one would imagine that He might be displeased if we took it upon ourselves to smash His masterpiece (or if, through our negligence or hubris, we allowed it to come to irreparable harm).24 We might also consider the issue from a less theoreti- cal standpoint and try to form an evaluation instead by considering analogous cases about which we have defi- nite moral intuitions. Thus, for example, if we feel confident that committing a small genocide is wrong, and that committing a large genocide is no less wrong, we might conjecture that committing omnicide is also wrong.25 And if we believe we have some moral reason to prevent natural catastrophes that would kill a small number of people, and a stronger moral reason to pre- vent natural catastrophes that would kill a larger number of people, we might conjecture that we have an even stronger moral reason to prevent catastrophes that would kill the entire human population.
2 Actor specificity – Util is the only moral system available to policymakers. Goodin 95 Robert E. Goodin 95 professor of government at the University of Essex, and professor of philosophy and social and political theory at Australian National University, “Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy”, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, May 1995, BE Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices - public and private alike - are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus - if they want to use it at all - to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of gener- alities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that. A No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen.
3 Pleasure and pain are intrinsically 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, brackets in original 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. 4 No act-omission distinction – A Psychology – choosing to omit is an act itself – governments decide not to act which means being presented with the aff creates a choice between two actions, neither of which is an omission. B Actor specificity – governments are culpable for omissions because their purpose is to protect the constituency – otherwise they would have no obligation to make murder illegal. Only util can escape culpability in the instance of tradeoffs – i.e. it resolves the trolley problem because a deontological theory would hold you responsible for killing regardless. Actor spec o/w – different agents have different ethical standings that affect their obligations and considerations.
5 Every study of credible social theories concludes consequentialism is good---Scientific studies of biology, evolution, and psychology prove that deontological proclivities are only illogical layovers from evolution - Util isn’t about treating humans as objects: it’s about treating each person equally and choosing the action that maximizes human life, which is the ultimate human good Greene 2010 – Joshua, Associate Professor of Social science in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul published in Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, accessed: www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf) What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not a pristine rational enterprise, that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of emotional dispositions, which themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces, both biological and cultural. Because of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any rationally coherent normative moral theory that can accommodate our moral intuitions. Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a theory, or even part of one, almost certainly doesn't. Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization. It seems then, that we have somehow crossed the infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism about a whole class of normative moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive an "ought" from and "is." That is, our method has been inductive rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the available evidence that the phenomenon of rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a rationalization of evolved emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). Missing the Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist deontologists will remain unmoved by the arguments presented here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I have simply misunderstood what Kant and like-minded deontologists are all about. Deontology, they will say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition. It's not defined by its normative differences with consequentialism. Rather, deontology is about taking humanity seriously. Above all else, it's about respect for persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings can share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b). This is, no doubt, how many deontologists see deontology. But this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be misleading. The problem, more specifically, is that it defines deontology in terms of values that are not distinctively deontological, though they may appear to be from the inside. Consider the following analogy with religion. When one asks a religious person to explain the essence of his religion, one often gets an answer like this: "It's about love, really. It's about looking out for other people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer accurately captures the phenomenology of many people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate for distinguishing religion from other things. This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out for other people, avoid self-absorption, have a sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words, secular humanists and atheists can assent to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of view, in contrast, what's distinctive about religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious institutions and doctrines. And they're right. These things really do distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to be secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the same way, I believe that most of the standard deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish deontology from other approaches to ethics. (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining d eontology.) It seems to me that consequentialists, as much as anyone else, have respect for persons, are against treating people as mere objects, wish to act for reasons that rational creatures can share, etc. A consequentialist respects other persons, and refrains from treating them as mere objects, by counting every person's well-being in the decision-making process. Likewise, a consequentialist attempts to act according to reasons that rational creatures can share by acting according to principles that give equal weight to everyone's interests, i.e. that are impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that the real differences may not be what deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good strategy for answering this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as consequentialists) and then work backward in search of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists and consequentialists disagree. If you ask a deontologically-minded person why it's wrong to push someone in front of speeding trolley in order to save five others, you will get characteristically deontological answers. Some will be tautological: "Because it's murder!" Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify the means." "You have to respect people's rights." But, as we know, these answers don't really explain anything, because if you give the same people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make the opposite judgment, even though their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or both of these cases. Talk about rights, respect for persons, and reasons we can share are natural attempts to explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel when we find ourselves having emotionally driven intuitions that are odds with the cold calculus of consequentialism. Although these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there seems to be "something deeply right" about them because they give voice to powerful moral emotions. But, as with many religious people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really explain what's distinctive about the philosophy in question.
2 The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29: Jaci Mcdole and Stephen Ezell {Jaci McDole is a senior policy analyst covering intellectual property (IP) and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). She focuses on IP and its correlations to global innovation and trade. McDole holds a double BA in Music Business and Radio-Television with a minor in Marketing, an MS in Education, and a JD with a specialization in intellectual property (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). McDole comes to ITIF from the Institute for Intellectual Property Research, an organization she co-founded to study and further robust global IP policies. Stephen Ezell is vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He comes to ITIF from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003 to study the practice of innovation in service industries. At Peer Insight, Ezell led the Global Service Innovation Consortium, published multiple research papers on service innovation, and researched national service innovation policies being implemented by governments worldwide. Prior to forming Peer Insight, Ezell worked in the New Service Development group at the NASDAQ Stock Market, where he spearheaded the creation of the NASDAQ Market Intelligence Desk and the NASDAQ Corporate Services Network, services for NASDAQ-listed corporations. Previously, Ezell cofounded two successful innovation ventures, the high-tech services firm Brivo Systems and Lynx Capital, a boutique investment bank. Ezell holds a B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an honors certificate from Georgetown’s Landegger International Business Diplomacy program.}, 21 - ("Ten Ways Ip Has Enabled Innovations That Have Helped Sustain The World Through The Pandemic," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-29-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-enabled-innovations-have-helped-sustain-world-through)//marlborough-wr/ To better understand the role of IP in enabling solutions related to COVID-19 challenges, this report relies on 10 case studies drawn from a variety of nations, technical fields, and firm sizes. This is but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. From a paramedic in Mexico to a veteran vaccine manufacturing company in India and a tech start-up in Estonia to a U.S.-based company offering workplace Internet of Things (IoT) services, small and large organizations alike are working to combat the pandemic. Some have adapted existing innovations, while others have developed novel solutions. All are working to take the world out of the pandemic and into the future. The case studies are: Bharat Biotech: Covaxin Gilead: Remdesivir LumiraDX: SARS-COV-2 Antigen POC Test Teal Bio: Teal Bio Respirator XE Ingeniería Médica: CápsulaXE Surgical Theater: Precision VR Tombot: Jennie Starship Technologies: Autonomous Delivery Robots Triax Technologies: Proximity Trace Zoom: Video Conferencing As the case studies show, IP is critical to enabling innovation. Policymakers around the world need to ensure robust IP protections are—and remain—in place if they wish their citizens to have safe and innovative solutions to health care, workplace, and societal challenges in the future. THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN RandD-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries.5 To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years.6 For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).7 In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent.8 Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average.9 A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.”10 Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs.11 Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry.12 To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future.13 THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO INNOVATION Although anti-IP proponents have attacked biopharmaceutical manufacturers particularly hard, the reality is all IP-protected innovations are at risk if these rights are ignored, or vitiated. Certain arguments have shown a desire for the term “COVID-19 innovations” to include everything from vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and PPE to biotechnology, AI-related data, and educational materials.14 This could potentially open the floodgates to invalidate IP protection on many of the innovations highlighted in this report. However, much of the current discussion concerning IP focuses almost entirely on litigation fears or RandD incentives. Although RandD is an important aspect of IP, as previously mentioned, these discussions ignore the fact that IP protection can be—and often is—used for other purposes, including generating initial capital to create a company and begin manufacturing and, more importantly, using licensing agreements and IP to track the supply chain and ensure quality control of products. This report highlights but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. In 2018, Forbes identified counterfeiting as the largest criminal enterprise in the world.15 The global struggle against counterfeit and non-regulated products, which has hit Latin America particularly hard during the pandemic, proves the need for safety and quality assurance in supply chains.16 Some communities already ravaged by COVID-19 are seeing higher mortality rates related to counterfeit vaccines, therapeutics, PPE, and cleaning and sanitizing products.17 Polish authorities discovered vials of antiwrinkle treatment labeled as COVID-19 vaccines. 18 In Mexico, fake vaccines sold for approximately $1,000 per dose.19 Chinese and South African police seized thousands of counterfeit vaccine doses from warehouses and manufacturing plants.20 Meanwhile, dozens of websites worldwide claiming to sell vaccines or be affiliated with vaccine manufacturers have been taken down.21 But the problem is not limited to biopharmaceuticals. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has recovered $48 million worth of counterfeit PPE and other products.22 Collaborative efforts between law enforcement and manufacturers have kept numerous counterfeits from reaching the population. In countries with strong IP protection, the chances of counterfeit products reaching the market are significantly lower. This is largely because counterfeiting tends to be an IP-related issue, and these countries generally provide superior means of tracking the supply chain through trademarks, trade secrets, and licensing agreements. This enables greater quality control and helps manufacturers maintain a level of public confidence in their products. By controlling the flow of knowledge associated with IP, voluntary licensing agreements provide innovators with opportunities to collaborate, while ensuring their partners are properly equipped and capable of producing quality products. Throughout this difficult time, the world has seen unexpected collaborations, especially between biopharmaceutical companies worldwide such as Gilead and Eva Pharma or Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, Inc. Throughout history, and most significantly in the nineteenth century through the widespread development of patent systems and the ensuing Industrial Revolution, IP has contributed toward greater economic growth.23 This is promising news as the world struggles for economic recovery. A 2021 joint study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO) shows a strong, positive correlation between IP rights and economic performance.24 It states that “IP-owning firms represent a significantly larger proportion of economic activity and employment across Europe,” with IP-intensive industries contributing to 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (€6.6 trillion; US$7.9 trillion).25 The study also shows 38.9 percent of employment is directly or indirectly attributed to IP-intensive industries, and IP generates higher wages and greater revenue per employee, especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises.26 That concords with the United States, where the Department of Commerce estimated that IP-intensive industries support at least 45 million jobs and contribute more than $6 trillion dollars to, or 38.2 percent of, GDP.27 In 2020, global patent filings through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system reached a record 275,900 filings amidst the pandemic, growing 4 percent from 2019.28 The top-four nations, which accounted for 180,530 of the patent applications, were China, the United States, Japan, and Korea, respectively.29 While several countries saw an increase in patent filings, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia both saw significant increases in the number of annual applications, with the top two filing growths of 73 percent and 26 percent, respectively.30 The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a lot of things, but it certainly couldn’t stop innovation. There are at least five principal benefits strong IP rights can generate, for both developing and developed countries alike.31 First, stronger IP protection spurs the virtuous cycle of innovation by increasing the appropriability of returns, enabling economic gain and catalyzing economic growth. Second, through patents—which require innovators to disclose certain knowledge as a condition of protection—knowledge spillovers build a platform of knowledge that enables other innovators. For instance, studies have found that the rate of return to society from corporate RandD and innovation activities is at least twice the estimated returns that each company itself receives.32 Third, countries with robust IP can operate more efficiently and productively by using IP to determine product quality and reduce transaction costs. Fourth, trade and foreign direct investment enabled and encouraged by strong IP protection offered to enterprises from foreign countries facilitates an accumulation of knowledge capital within the destination economy. That matters when foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of productivity growth in most countries.33 There’s also evidence suggesting that developing nations with stronger IP protections enjoy the earlier introduction of innovative new medicines.34 And fifth, strong IP boosts exports, including in developing countries.35 Research shows a positive correlation between stronger IP protection and exports from developing countries as well as faster growth rates of certain industries.36 The following case studies illustrate these benefits of IP and how they’ve enabled innovative solutions to help global society navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. This sets a precedent that spills over to all future diseases – Hopkins 21: Jared S. Hopkins {Jared S. Hopkins is a New York-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering the pharmaceutical industry, including companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Merck and Co. He previously was a health-care reporter at Bloomberg News and an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Jared started his career at The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho covering politics. In 2014, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award For Young Journalists for an investigation into charities founded by professional athletes. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series about neglect at a residential facility for disabled kids. Jared graduated from the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park with a bachelor's degree in journalism}, 21 - ("U.S. Support for Patent Waiver Unlikely to Cost Covid-19 Vaccine Makers in Short Term ," WSJ, 5-7-2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-support-for-patent-waiver-unlikely-to-cost-covid-19-vaccine-makers-in-short-term-11620414260)//marlborough-wr/ The Biden administration’s unexpected support for temporarily waiving Covid-19 vaccine patents won’t have an immediate financial impact on the companies making the shots, industry officials and analysts said. Yet the decision could mark a shift in Washington’s longstanding support of the industry’s valuable intellectual property, patent-law experts said. A waiver, if it does go into effect, may pose long-term risks to the vaccine makers, analysts said. Moderna Inc., MRNA -4.12 Pfizer Inc. PFE -3.10 and other vaccine makers weren’t counting on sales from the developing countries that would gain access to the vaccine technology, analysts said. If patents and other crucial product information behind the technology is made available, it would take at least several months before shots were produced, industry officials said. Yet long-term Covid-19 sales could take a hit if other companies and countries gained access to the technologies and figured out how to use it. Western drugmakers could also confront competition sooner for other medicines they are hoping to make using the technologies. A World Trade Organization waiver could also set a precedent for waiving patents for other medicines, a long-sought goal of some developing countries, patient groups and others to try to reduce the costs of prescription drugs. “It sets a tremendous precedent of waiving IP rights that’s likely going to come up in future pandemics or in other serious diseases,” said David Silverstein, a patent lawyer at Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider LLP who advises drugmakers. “Other than that, this is largely symbolic.” Pharmaceutical innovation is key to protecting against future pandemics, bioterrorism, and antibiotic resistance. Marjanovic and Fejiao ‘20 Marjanovic, Sonja, and Carolina Feijao. Sonja Marjanovic, Ph.D., Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Carolina Feijao, Ph.D. in biochemistry, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. in quantitive biology, Imperial College London; B.Sc. in biology, University of Lisbon. "Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management: From Troubleshooting to Sustainable Models of Engagement." (2020). Quality Control As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sci-ences companies have been called on to develop medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for pressing public health challenges. The COVID-19 crisis is one such challenge, but there are many others. For example, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and avian and swine flu are also infectious diseases that represent public health threats. Infectious agents such as anthrax, smallpox and tularemia could present threats in a bioterrorism con-text.1 The general threat to public health that is posed by antimicrobial resistance is also well-recognised as an area in need of pharmaceutical innovation. Innovating in response to these challenges does not always align well with pharmaceutical industry commercial models, shareholder expectations and compe-tition within the industry. However, the expertise, networks and infrastructure that industry has within its reach, as well as public expectations and the moral imperative, make pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences sector an indispensable partner in the search for solutions that save lives. This perspective argues for the need to establish more sustainable and scalable ways of incentivising pharmaceu-tical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health. It considers both past and current examples of efforts to mobilise pharmaceutical innovation in high commercial risk areas, including in the context of current efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In global pandemic crises like COVID-19, the urgency and scale of the crisis – as well as the spotlight placed on pharmaceutical companies – mean that contributing to the search for effective medicines, vaccines or diagnostics is essential for socially responsible companies in the sec-tor.2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing indus-try-wide efforts unfold at unprecedented scale and pace. Whereas there is always scope for more activity, industry is currently contributing in a variety of ways. Examples include pharmaceutical companies donating existing com-pounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID-19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating tri-als for potentially effective medicine or vaccine candidates; and in some cases rapidly accelerating in-house research and development to discover new treatments or vaccine agents and develop diagnostics tests.3,4 Pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with each other in some of these efforts and participating in global RandD partnerships (such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative effort to accel-erate the development of potential therapies for COVID-19) and supporting national efforts to expand diagnosis and testing capacity and ensure affordable and ready access to potential solutions.3,5,6 The primary purpose of such innovation is to benefit patients and wider population health. Although there are also reputational benefits from involvement that can be realised across the industry, there are likely to be rela-tively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pres-sure not to be seen as profiting from the pandemic. In the United Kingdom for example, GSK has stated that it does not expect to profit from its COVID-19 related activities and that any gains will be invested in supporting research and long-term pandemic preparedness, as well as in developing products that would be affordable in the world’s poorest countries.7 Similarly, in the United States AbbVie has waived intellectual property rights for an existing com-bination product that is being tested for therapeutic poten-tial against COVID-19, which would support affordability and allow for a supply of generics.8,9 Johnson and Johnson has stated that its potential vaccine – which is expected to begin trials – will be available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic.10 Pharma is mobilising substantial efforts to rise to the COVID-19 challenge at hand. However, we need to consider how pharmaceutical innovation for responding to emerging infectious diseases can best be enabled beyond the current crisis. Many public health threats (including those associated with other infectious diseases, bioterror-ism agents and antimicrobial resistance) are urgently in need of pharmaceutical innovation, even if their impacts are not as visible to society as COVID-19 is in the imme-diate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infec-tious disease in recent times – for example those associated with Ebola and Zika outbreaks.11 However, it has done so to a lesser scale than for COVID-19 and with contribu-tions from fewer companies. Similarly, levels of activity in response to the threat of antimicrobial resistance are still low.12 There are important policy questions as to whether – and how – industry could engage with such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innova-tion conditions. Bioterror causes extinction---early response key Farmer 17 (“Bioterrorism could kill more people than nuclear war, Bill Gates to warn world leaders” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/biological-terrorism-could-kill-people-nuclear-attacks-bill/) Bioterrorists could one day kill hundreds of millions of people in an attack more deadly than nuclear war, Bill Gates will warn world leaders. Rapid advances in genetic engineering have opened the door for small terrorism groups to tailor and easily turn biological viruses into weapons. A resulting disease pandemic is currently one of the most deadly threats faced by the world, he believes, yet governments are complacent about the scale of the risk. Speaking ahead of an address to the Munich Security Conference, the richest man in the world said that while governments are concerned with the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, they are overlooking the threat of biological warfare. Mr Gates, whose charitable foundationis funding research into quickly spotting outbreaks and speeding up vaccine production, said the defence and security establishment “have not been following biology and I’m here to bring them a little bit of bad news”. Mr Gates will today (Saturday) tell an audience of international leaders and senior officers that the world’s next deadly pandemic “could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist”. He told the Telegraph: “Natural epidemics can be extremely large. Intentionally caused epidemics, bioterrorism, would be the largest of all. “With nuclear weapons, you’d think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won’t stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.” He said developments in genetic engineering were proceeding at a “mind-blowing rate”. Biological warfare ambitions once limited to a handful of nation states are now open to small groups with limited resources and skills. He said: “They make it much easier for a non-state person. It doesn’t take much biology expertise nowadays to assemble a smallpox virus. Biology is making it way easier to create these things.” The increasingly common use of gene editing technology would make it difficult to spot any potential terrorist conspiracy. Technologies which have made it easy to read DNA sequences and tinker with them to rewrite or tweak genes have many legitimate uses. He said: “It’s not like when someone says, ‘Hey I’d like some Plutonium’ and you start saying ‘Hmmm.. I wonder why he wants Plutonium?’” Mr Gates said the potential death toll from a disease outbreak could be higher than other threats such as climate change or nuclear war. He said: “This is like earthquakes, you should think in order of magnitudes. If you can kill 10 people that’s a one, 100 people that’s a two... Bioterrorism is the thing that can give you not just sixes, but sevens, eights and nines. “With nuclear war, once you have got a six, or a seven, or eight, you’d think it would probably stop. With bioterrorism it’s just unbounded if you are not there to stop the spread of it.” By tailoring the genes of a virus, it would be possible to manipulate its ability to spread and its ability to harm people. Mr Gates said one of the most potentially deadly outbreaks could involve the humble flu virus. It would be relatively easy to engineer a new flu strain combining qualities from varieties that spread like wildfire with varieties that were deadly. The last time that happened naturally was the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, which went on to kill more than 50 million people – or nearly three times the death toll from the First World War. By comparison, the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed just over 11,000 was “a Richter Scale three, it’s a nothing,” he said. But despite the potential, the founder of Microsoft said that world leaders and their militaries could not see beyond the more recognised risks. He said: “Should the world be serious about this? It is somewhat serious about normal classic warfare and nuclear warfare, but today it is not very serious about bio-defence or natural epidemics.” He went on: “They do tend to say ‘How easy is it to get fissile material and how accurate are the plans out on the internet for dirty bombs, plutonium bombs and hydrogen bombs?’ “They have some people that do that. What I am suggesting is that the number of people that look at bio-defence is worth increasing.” Whether naturally occurring, or deliberately started, it is almost certain that a highly lethal global pandemic will occur within our lifetimes, he believes. But the good news for those contemplating the potential damage is that the same biotechnology can prevent epidemics spreading out of control. Mr Gates will say in his speech that most of the things needed to protect against a naturally occurring pandemic are the same things needed to prepare for an intentional biological attack. Nations must amass an arsenal of new weapons to fight such a disease outbreak, including vaccines, drugs and diagnostic techniques. Being able to develop a vaccine as soon as possible against a new outbreak is particularly important and could save huge numbers of lives, scientists working at his foundation believe.
Case Framing
They don’t say what the Categorical Imperative is or why consequentialism isn’t consistent with it 2. “Ought” means “should” – it’s not a moral obligation Merriam-Webster, 19 – (“Ought," http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/ought) Ought is almost always followed by to and the infinitive form of a verb. The phrase ought to has the same meaning as should and is used in the same ways, but it is less common and somewhat more formal. The negative forms ought not and oughtn't are often used without a following to. 3. Kantian theory collapses into consequentialism -- the only reason a maxim would be bad to universalize is that it produces bad consequences. 4. And hold the Aff to a high burden of proof to exclude Neg impacts. The Aff is going to get up in the next speech and say that the Neg impacts don’t link without giving a clearly warranted reason, so you give more weight to arguments from the Neg about how the NC arguments link in.
5. And even if you don’t buy any of this, we still win under Kantianism
Free-riding - People should have a right to property and their ideas; anything else violates the categorical imperative because they don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their labor 2. Extinction first –
Permissibility negates – the aff hasn’t proven an active obligation as indicated by ought.
10/9/21
jf-legal trust, climate change, t
Tournament: Peninsula Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake MT | Judge: Shikhar Srivastava 1 Interp: “Unjust” is defined by Oxford Languages: “Unjust” (n.d.) Retrieved Jan. 22, 2022. Google.com – Definitions from Oxford Langauges not based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair. "resistance to unjust laws"
This entails that the affirmative must advocate a topical change in the status quo.
Violation: They don’t defend a course of action.
Justice is normative. To say that something is unjust entails that it ought to be stopped or redressed. The aff advocacy is a meaningless abstraction unless it defends a course of action.
2. Truth testing is awful.
A) It turns an urgent public policy question into an esoteric question of philosophical labels, which kills real world decision-making skills – i.e. without a plan there is no counterplan or disad ground;
B) It turns negating into an endless quest for counterwarrants, which make the debate irresolvable because we don’t know how many counterwarrants justify a neg ballot, and kills clash because the discussion is about assessing the salience of extreme examples rather than engaging with a competing advocacies.
C) It kills precision by forcing both sides to defend sweeping generalizations that no responsible scholar would ever defend without qualification. Plans require more rigorous scholarship.
Don’t let them say that the resolution has no actor or verb. Their advocacy only needs to entail the resolution to be topical. Proving that a plan baring the private appropriation of outer space by private entities produces the most just world proves the resolution true. They get to choose which actor would best accomplish this objective because a plan with any actor might entail the resolution.
Don’t let them say the interp is unpredictable – the Aff read a plan in virtually every round at College Prep and Harvard-Westlake.
2 TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty being amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space is just. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for an International Legal Trust System Since several legal and policy issues may arise from the actual legal framework, a new international legal regime for outer space shall: (a) Provide for property rights or a lease allocation system, both incentivising investments in the space sector. The system would be supervised and led by the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). (b) Establish the rule of law in outer space. A laissez faire system could turn into anarchy whereby countries and companies could race to grab as many resources as possible bringing considerable potential conflict. (c) Recognise outer space as common heritage of mankind, instead of res communis.24 (d) Provide a sustainable exploitation of celestial bodies, to avoid the uncontrolled production of space debris or to prevent the complete exhaustion of the celestial bodies’ masses or their natural orbits.25 The United Nations should manage the ordered and sustainable economic development in outer space for the present and future generations. (e) Prevent the militarisation of outer space and favours the international collaboration, which are the same aims of the Outer Space Treaty’ drafters. (f) Consider the weak points of the Moon Agreement which led to nations’ refusal to sign. Only a widely accepted agreement would have the power of law in the international context. The abovementioned requirements could be met by establishing an international Legal Trust System (ILTS). A trust is an arrangement that assigns assets to one or more trustees that will manage them in the interest of one or more beneficiaries. The latter may include the trustee or the settlor.26 Translated in the ILTS, mankind would assume the role of settlor and beneficiary of the outer space resources. The UNOOSA would act as main trustee of outer space resources and trading property rights and leases to companies and countries. The rights over the celestial bodies or over its resources would depend on the nature of the celestial body itself. For example, property rights are preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could just disappear after the exploitation. Both leases and property rights can be provided over lands and mining sites on Mars. Leases or defeasible titles are preferable for some land mass on those celestial bodies which could hypothetically be used by humankind pending an Earth disaster. In the case of lucrative activities, such as mining, companies will choose whether to get the exclusive use over the resource through payment of the lease or through annual payment linked to net proceeds or to production charges. 7.6 The Functioning of the International Legal Trust System When a company is interested in leasing or buying an outer space resource, before starting any operations, it must send a plan of work to the United Nations. The plan of work shall include all the details of the activity that would be carried out; it shall be consistent with pre-established parameters of sustainability and shall not interfere with other space activities. If the UN approves the company plan of work, the country of the company assumes the role of co-trustee for the specific resource. Thus, as a cotrustee, countries must investigate whether all activities of their national companies are consistent with the plan of work authorised by the UN. These supervisory duties would be added to the responsibility of nations for all space objects that are launched within their territory.27 The UN, as main trustee, would oversee that countries are performing their duties. This model would be the ordinary one. There would be also an extraordinary model, in which the UN would be the only trustee. This model would be possible in two instances: when the country of the applicant for a private company is not technologically able to act as a trustee or when the applicant of the activity is a country itself. Furthermore, as stated previously, the beneficiaries of this trust are the countries of the world and their citizens; hence all mankind would take concrete profit from lease transactions and benefit sharing. The income from the sales, leases and benefit sharing can be distributed to mankind by financing international global goals, following a similar model of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, which addressed poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Finally, the International Legal Trust System would meet acceptance because every country would obtain benefit sharing to improve its living standard and space faring nations would rely on property rights.
The legal trust would incentivize investment in space while preventing conflict and ensuring sustainable development and the equitable distributions of resources. Finoa ’20 – Ivan Finoa Department of Law, University of Turin, “An international legal trust system to deal with the new space era,” 71st International Astronautical Congress (IAC) – The CyberSpace Edition, (12-14 October 2020). https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/66728932/_IAC_20_E7.VP.8.x58518_An_international_legal_trust_system_to_deal_with_the_new_space_era_BY_IVAN_FINO-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1642044926andSignature=asvt6StaK5n9UnpXuJIlo4ziI839WzFYjDZy37bm70ObGy3vFJyHwWNGxhn2beze4QzYDPPX0pVEXAwYvDaINVNxN01Ify8YwG5loNRddlat-grf3iawic7KvwqPowxFe2GuemVvbB-KW8ZVBxigwS-gelSKIVy4KYR9UgiDrM6e6deEBnUTcULSwmsH-JdHNg13ytZ3vNVMMlxZW2MPOCRuB2WlOHdCLoC86VqafSoMwuec-d~Aisbgyt5F2vO-GjvI60bR7h2MSp0iT6P7apIDUUpHUsDGbvcdxp22HSxXdlvr7lSqtLnL5rKxujGDYq~R9B~WuGiorVL2hn74UQ__andKey-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZACT Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty. 3 The private sector is essential for space exploration – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth? Continued private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible – empirics prove. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 - ("Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Warming causes extinction – outweighs all aff impacts Miller-McDonald, 18 – (Samuel, Master of Environmental Management at Yale University studying energy politics and grassroots innovations in the US. 5-2-2018. "Extinction vs. Collapse." Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-02/extinction-vs-collapse/) Climate twitter – the most fun twitter – has recently been reigniting the debate between human extinction and mere civilizational collapse, between doom and gloom, despair and (kind of) hope. It was sparked by an interview in The Guardian with acclaimed scientist Mayer Hillman. He argues that we’re probably doomed, and confronting the likelihood that we’re rushing toward collective death may be necessary to save us. The headline alone provoked a lot of reactions, many angered by the ostensible defeatism embedded in Hillman’s comments. His stated view represents one defined camp that is mostly convinced of looming human extinction. It stands in contrast to another group that believes human extinction is highly unlikely, maybe impossible, and certainly will not occur due to climate change in our lifetimes. Collapse maybe, but not extinction. Who’s more right? Let’s take a closer look. First, the question of human extinction is totally bounded by uncertainty. There’s uncertainty in climate data, uncertainty in models and projections, and even more uncertainty in the behavior of human systems. We don’t know how we’ll respond to the myriad impacts climate change is beginning to spark, and we don’t know how sensitive industrial civilization will be to those impacts. We don’t really know if humans are like other apex predators highly sensitive to ecological collapse, or are among the most adaptable mammals to ever walk the earth. One may be inclined to lean toward the latter given that humans have colonized every ecological niche on the planet except Antarctica. That bands of people can survive in and around deserts as well as the Arctic as well as equatorial rainforests speaks to the resilience of small social groups. It’s why The Road is so disturbingly plausible; there could be a scenario in which basically everything is dead but people, lingering in the last grey waste of the world. On the other hand, we’ve never lived outside of the very favorable conditions of the Holocene, and past civilizational and population collapses suggest humans are in fact quite sensitive to climatic shifts. Famed climate scientist James Hansen has discussed the possibility of “Venus syndrome,” for instance, which sits at the far end of worst case scenarios. While a frightening thought experiment, it is easily dismissed as it’s based on so many uncertainties and doesn’t carry the weight of anything near consensus. What’s more frightening than potentially implausible uncertainties are the currently existing certainties. For example: Ecology + The atmosphere has proven more sensitive to GHG emissions than predicted by mainstream science, and we have a high chance of hitting 2oC of warming this century. Could hit 1.5C in the 2020s. Worst-case warming scenarios are probably the most likely. + Massive marine death is happening far faster than anyone predicted and we could be on the edge of an anoxic event. + Ice melt is happening far faster than mainstream predictions. Greenland’s ice sheet is threatening to collapse and already slowing ocean currents, which too could collapse. + Which also means predictions of sea level rise have doubled for this century. + Industrial agriculture is driving massive habitat loss and extinction. The insect collapse – population declines of 75 to 80 have been seen in some areas – is something no one predicted would happen so fast, and portends an ecological sensitivity beyond our fears. This is causing an unexpected and unprecedented bird collapse (1/8 of bird species are threatened) in Europe. + Forests, vital carbon sinks, are proving sensitive to climate impacts. + We’re living in the 6th mass extinction event, losing potentially dozens of species per day. We don’t know how this will impact us and our ability to feed ourselves. Energy + Energy transition is essential to mitigating 1.5+C warming. Energy is the single greatest contributor to anthro-GHG. And, by some estimates, transition is happening 400 years too slowly to avoid catastrophic warming. + Incumbent energy industries (that is, oil and gas) dominate governments all over the world. We live in an oil oligarchy – a petrostate, but for the globe. Every facet of the global economy is dependent on fossil fuels, and every sector – from construction to supply chains to transport to electricity to extraction to agriculture and on and on – is built around FF consumption. There’s good reason to believe FF will remain subsidized by governments beholden to their interests even if they become less economically viable than renewables, and so will maintain their dominance. + We are living in history’s largest oil and gas boom. + Kilocalorie to kilocalorie, FF is extremely dense and extremely cheap. Despite reports about solar getting cheaper than FF in some places, non-hydro/-carbon renewables are still a tiny minority (2) of global energy consumption and will simply always, by their nature, be less dense kcal to kcal than FF, and so will always be calorically more expensive. + Energy demand probably has to decrease globally to avoid 1.5C, and it’s projected to dramatically increase. Getting people to consume less is practically impossible, and efficiency measures have almost always resulted in increased consumption. + We’re still setting FF emissions records. Politics + Conditions today resemble those prior to the 20th century’s world wars: extreme wealth inequality, rampant economic insecurity, growing fascist parties/sentiment, and precarious geopolitical relations, and the Thucydides trap suggests war between Western hegemons and a rising China could be likely. These two factors could disrupt any kind of global cooperation on decarbonization and, to the contrary, will probably mean increased emissions (the US military is one of the world’s single largest consumers/emitters of FF). + Neoliberal ideology is so thoroughly embedded in our academic, political, and cultural institutions, and so endemic to discourse today, that the idea of degrowth – probably necessary to avoid collapse – and solidarity economics isn’t even close to discussion, much less realization, and, for self-evident reasons, probably never will be. + Living in a neoliberal culture also means we’ve all been trained not to sacrifice for the common good. But solving climate change, like paying more to achieve energy transition or voluntarily consuming less, will all entail sacrificing for the greater good. Humans sometimes are great at that; but the market fundamentalist ideology that pervades all social, commercial, and even self relations today stands against acting for the common good or in collective action. + There’s basically no government in the world today taking climate change seriously. There are many governments posturing and pretending to take it seriously, but none have substantially committed to a full decarbonization of their economies. (Iceland may be an exception, but Iceland is about 24 times smaller than NYC, so…) + Twenty-five years of governments knowing about climate change has resulted in essentially nothing being done about it, no emissions reductions, no substantive moves to decarbonize the economy. Politics have proven too strong for common sense, and there’s no good reason to suspect this will change anytime soon. + Wealth inequality is embedded in our economy so thoroughly – and so indigenously to FF economies – that it will probably continue either causing perpetual strife, as it has so far, or eventually cement a permanent underclass ruled by a small elite, similar to agrarian serfdom. There is a prominent view in left politics that greater wealth equality, some kind of ecosocialism, is a necessary ingredient in averting the kind of ecological collapse the economy is currently driving, given that global FF capitalism by its nature consumes beyond carrying capacities. At least according to one Nasa-funded study, the combination of inequality and ecological collapse is a likely cause for civilizational collapse. Even with this perfect storm of issues, it’s impossible to know how likely extinction is, and it’s impossible to judge how likely or extensive civilizational collapse may be. We just can’t predict how human beings and human systems will respond to the shocks that are already underway. We can make some good guesses based on history, but they’re no more than guesses. Maybe there’s a miracle energy source lurking in a hangar somewhere waiting to accelerate non-carbon transition. Maybe there’s a swelling political movement brewing under the surface that will soon build a more just, ecologically sane order into the world. Community energy programs are one reason to retain a shred of optimism; but also they’re still a tiny fraction of energy production and they are not growing fast, but they could accelerate any moment. We just don’t know how fast energy transition can happen, and we just don’t know how fast the world could descend into climate-driven chaos – either by human strife or physical storms. What we do know is that, given everything above, we are living through a confluence of events that will shake the foundations of civilization, and jeopardize our capacity to sustain large populations of humans. There is enough certainty around these issues to justify being existentially alarmed. At this point, whether we go extinct or all but a thousand of us go extinct (again), maybe that shouldn’t make much difference. Maybe the destruction of a few billion or 5 billion people is morally equivalent to the destruction of all 7 billion of us, and so should provoke equal degrees of urgency. Maybe this debate about whether we’ll go completely extinct rather than just mostly extinct is absurd. Or maybe not. I don’t know. What I do know is that, regardless of the answer, there’s no excuse to stop fighting for a world that sustains life. CASE
Capitalism will expand elsewhere if not in space Shamas and Holden, 2019, Victor Shamas and, Oslo Metropolitan University, Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo, Norway; Thomas Holden, Independent scholar, Oslo, Norway, 2019, Palgrave Communications, One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 Outer space serves at least two purposes in this regard. In the short-to medium-term, it allows for the export of surplus capital into emerging industries, such as satellite imaging and communication. These are significant sites of capital accumulation: global revenues in the worldwide satellite market in 2016 amounted to $260 billion (SIA, 2017, p. 4). Clearly, much of this activity is taking place ‘on the ground'; it is occurring in the ‘terrestrial economy'. But all that capital would have to find some other meaningful or productive outlet were it not for the expansion of capital into space. 2. Governments solve the excesses of capitalism in space. Fernolz 19 Tim Fernolz, 2019, How to build a space economy that avoids the mistakes of terrestrial capitalism, https://qz.com/work/1767415/can-nasa-build-a-space-economy-that-leaves-capitalisms-problems-behind/ The good news is that we aren’t close to a world like the one depicted in the movie Elysium, where the ultra-wealthy repair to space and leave the rest of us behind. Our public and private interests will be far more intertwined, in part because governments have designed it that way. Most of the major space agencies are compelled by law in their home countries to support private economic activity, which means for example that NASA, by law, views the success of US companies in space as part of its mission, and not a distraction or a threat. The reality is that public space agencies, particularly NASA in the United States, remain the largest spenders in space and control the conditions for private organizations acting in orbit. Their challenge—and opportunity—is to manage the transition to a new, multi-stakeholder world in orbit by successfully subsidizing new initiatives without letting the benefits escape the public at large. Much of the work of establishing our space economy is prosaically earthly: Competition policy, labor rights, and corporate taxation. But with critiques of capitalism’s distributional failures at the center of public discourse, there are also sweeping challenges to address: Namely, can the orbital economy be structured better than its terrestrial analogue? 3. Private entities working with governments resolves the link and better address the symptoms of capitalism by collaborating to solve climate change. Maanas Sharma, 21 - ("The Space Review: The privatized frontier: the ethical implications and role of private companies in space exploration," No Publication, 9-7-2021, 12-6-2021https:www.thespacereview.com/article/4238/1)AW In recent years, private companies have taken on a larger role in the space exploration system. With lower costs and faster production times, they have displaced some functions of government space agencies. Though many have levied criticism against privatized space exploration, it also allows room for more altruistic actions by government space agencies and the benefits from increased space exploration as a whole. Thus, we should encourage this development, as the process is net ethical in the end. Especially if performed in conjunction with adequate government action on the topic, private space exploration can overcome possible shortcomings in its risky and capitalistic nature and ensure a positive contribution to the general public on Earth. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks The implications of commercial space exploration have been thrust into the limelight with the successes and failures of billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. While private companies are not new to space exploration, their prominence in American space exploration efforts has increased rapidly in recent years, fueled by technological innovations, reductions in cost, and readily available funding from government and private sources.1 In May 2020, SpaceX brought American astronauts to space from American soil for the first time in almost 10 years.2 Recognizing the greatly reduced costs of space exploration in private companies, NASA’s budget has shifted to significantly relying on private companies.3 However, private space companies are unique from government space agencies in the way they experience unique sets of market pressures that influence their decision-making process. Hence, the expansion of private control in the space sector turns into a multifaceted contestation of its ethicality. The most obvious ethical concern is the loss of human life. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks.4 However, the possible increase in mishaps is largely overstated. Companies recognize the need for safety aboard their expeditions themselves.5 After all, the potential backlash from a mishap could destroy the company’s reputation and significantly harm their prospects. According to Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, Head of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy’s Geopolitics and Global Futures Programme, “because there were no alternatives to government space programs, accidents were seen to some degree as par for the course… By comparison, private companies actually have a far more difficult set of issues to face in the case of a mishap. In a worst case scenario, a private company could make an easy scapegoat.” 6 Another large ethical concern is the prominence capitalism may have in the future of private space exploration and the impacts thereof. The growth of private space companies in recent years has been closely intertwined with capitalism. Companies have largely focused on the most profitable projects, such as space travel and the business of space.7 Many companies are funded by individual billionaires, such as dearMoon, SpaceX’s upcoming mission to the Moon.8 Congress has also passed multiple acts for the purpose of reducing regulations on private space companies and securing private access to space. From this, many immediately jump to the conclusion that capitalism in space will recreate the same conditions in outer space that plague Earth today, especially with the increasing push to create a “space-for-space” economy, such as space tourism and new technologies to mine the Moon and asteroids. Critics, such as Jordan Pearson of VICE, believe that promises of “virtually unlimited resources” are only for the rich, and will perpetuate the growing wealth inequality that plagues the world today.9 However, others contend that just because private space exploration has some capitalist elements, it is by no means an embodiment of unrestricted capitalism. A healthy balance of restricted capitalism—for example, private space companies working through contracts with government agencies or independently under monitoring and regulation by national and international agreements—will avoid the pitfalls that capitalist colonialism faced down here on Earth. Even those who are generally against excessive government regulation should see the benefits of them in space. Lacking any consensus on definitions and rights in space will create undue competition between corporations as well as governments that will harm everyone rather than helping anyone. To create a conducive environment for new space-for-space exploration, one without confrontation but with protection for corporate astronauts, infrastructure, and other interests, governments must create key policies such as a framework for property rights on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.7,10 hough there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. Another key matter to note is restricted capitalism in space “could also be our salvation.”11 Private space exploration could reap increased access to resources and other benefits that can be used to solve the very problems on Earth that critics of capitalism identify. Since governments offset some of their projects to private companies, government agencies can focus on altruistic projects that otherwise would not fit in the budget before and do not have the immediate commercial use that private companies look for. Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, discusses how “this strategy allows the space agency to continue ‘exploring the fringe where there really is no business case’” but still has important impacts on people down on Earth.12 Indeed, this idea is a particularly powerful one when considering the ideal future of private companies in space exploration. Though there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. As governments utilize services from private space companies, “instead of being bogged down by the routine application of old research, NASA can prioritize their limited budget to work more on research of other unknowns and development of new long-term space travel technologies.”13 According to the Council on Foreign Relations, such technologies have far-reaching benefits on Earth as well. Past developments obviously include communications satellites, by themselves a massive benefit to society, but also “refinements in artificial hearts; improved mammograms; and laser eye surgery… thermoelectric coolers for microchips; high-temperature lubricants; and a means for mass-producing carbon nanotubes, a material with significant engineering potential; and household products.”2 Agencies like NASA are the only actors able to pursue the next game-changing missions, “where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.”8 These technologies have revolutionized millions, if not billions, of lives, demonstrating the remarkable benefits of space exploration. It follows then that it is net ethical to prioritize these benefits. 4. Aff should be evaluated based on solvency even if they’re making a moral statement-their entire first advantage is talking about spaceflight and space tourism, which they can’t ban, meaning that it’s not the most just course of action. Our legal trust counterplan ACTUALLY SOLVES, because only the neg has the ability to regulate space travel and appropriation alike. 5. The aff pretends to end capitalism while they fail to manage space travel and dismiss private appropriation as a general rule. Not only is capitalism booming on Earth, as our cards explain, they fail to mitigate climate change and private companies can still expand into space as long as they don’t own it 6. Legal trust solves for Riederer 18-companies will only be able to appropriate space if they are actively contributing to positive measures. Regulating all of private space travel solves better than banning a single aspect-the aff sits back after contributing to a flawed reform while capitalism multiplies through other aspects of space 7. The aff cant cause the end of capitalism-don’t buy their advocacies claiming that they do. Banning the private appropriation of space means that they can still extract resources, partake in space tourism, and increase space debris and emissions. These are all of the things that the aff are emphasizing as harmful, none of which are actually appropriation 8. We’re winning under their fw-the aff covers their eyes and pretends that all of their issues are solved by declaring appropriation unjust, which allows for the suffering of marginalized groups because not much is actually appropriation. The neg forces companies to submit all plans involving space to the UN, which means that all exploration benefits humanity 9. The end of capitalism simply isn’t happening through outer space, so this debate should be over who solves structural violence better-this is clearly the neg based on all of our answers
1/22/22
legal trust CP
Tournament: Woodward Nationals | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lake Highland Vennam | Judge: Ishan Rereddy TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty ought to be amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for an International Legal Trust System Since several legal...rely on property rights.
3/19/22
mining DA
Tournament: Woodward Nationals | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lake Highland Vennam | Judge: Ishan Rereddy The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one... here on Earth?
Taking away property rights scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle...onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly?...probably kill you.) Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could...the warmest periods.” An asteroid collision would ensure extinction – would fundamentally alter the biosphere, don’t underestimate its risk. Hudson 19 Wesley Hudson ’19, news reporter for Express, “Asteroid alert: NASA warning as kilometre long space rock set to skim Earth at 25,000mph”, 8/28/19, Express, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1170826/asteroid-news-NASA-latest-space-rock-asteroid-1998-HL1-earth-danger-apocalypse AN ASTEROID almost...have no defence.”
3/19/22
natural persons pic
Tournament: Western JV Nationals | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake ADi | Judge: Reece Aguilar CP: States ought to ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for natural persons, and states ought to recognize the right to property for natural persons in space. OR CP: the private appropriation of outer space by natural persons is just.
The individual right to property is a basic human right that should be extended to space.
Faires 19 Wes Faires, “The role of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in supporting space property rights,” The Space Review, August 5, 2019. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3771/1 CT A long-discussed issue has been the absence of provisions pertaining to private entities under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Interpretations in favor of private property rights hold that the purpose of Article II’s ban on “national appropriation” was to place a limitation on member nations’ attempts to exercise territorial and political sovereignty over any part of outer space: to restrict territorial disputes between countries from extending beyond Earth. Without an explicit prohibition of private property rights in the treaty, their development with respect to private entities is unencumbered. Opposition has fluctuated from the position that the prohibition of national appropriation in Article II served to exclude development of property rights for private citizens: without a national entity with the ability to “confer” or pass down property rights to “sub-national” citizens, forward progress is rendered impossible. There were later attempts to classify private citizens as “nationals” in order to apply to them the prohibition of ‘national appropriation’. The 1979 Moon Agreement places an explicit ban on property for a host of entities, including “natural persons,” until such time as an international regime can be formulated. Two nations, the United States and Luxembourg, have enacted legislation favorable to property and mineral rights regarding space resources. This was met with opposition from some in the international community, who called into question whether such unilateral acts were in and of themselves a violation of the non-appropriation principle of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Perhaps in the future, the concept of “property rights” will have evolved beyond the terrestrial concepts of ownership, sovereignty, and territorial acquisition, under a new treaty framework structured by private entities, developed outside the auspices of any nation-state or supranational regime. Until such time, what is needed is a base-level favorable affirmation of private property rights in outer space, one that serves as a foundation for their evolution beyond national borders and which is accepted across the board. To this end, the solution to 50 years of ambiguity regarding private property rights under the under the current UN Outer Space Treaty framework is found within the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 17: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. -UN General Assembly. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights." United Nations, 217 (III) A,1948, Paris, Art. 17 The commercial space sector would welcome language favorable to private property rights in space, with specific emphasis on the re-affirmation of Article 17 as it pertains to property rights for private entities. Beyond Article 17, utilization of the UDHR as a default mechanism in situations where legislation is not yet developed can yield an immediate benefit for humanity. On the national level, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly integrated into national space policy. Adoption of the UDHR into space policy by state parties to the Outer Space Treaty is essentially a reaffirmation of one of the fundamental principles of the United Nations, and can take place without litigation or implementation of new national legislation, and with no accusation of violation of “national appropriation.” In the international arena, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seamlessly into to conducting legislative proceedings pertaining to outer space, given that: The overarching thematic priority for UNISPACE + 50 and beyond is “Sustainable Development in Space.” A critical aspect of this calls for ensuring the principles of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are upheld. The 2030 Agenda is grounded in, and re-affirms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (A/RES/70/1 para. 10, para. 19). The task at hand is to compel the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) to commit to upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Solidarity on such a core foundational UN principle as the UDHR solidifies reflection of Agenda 2030. I propose that UN Secretariat take this opportunity to move forward with Sustainable Development, and lead the way in incorporation the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into international space policy. It is time to recognize property rights as the universally declared human right that it is: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.” The definition of property and scope of the UDHR was not limited to any one definition or territory. The UDHR was intended from the outset to be universal: “It is not a treaty; it is not an international agreement … It is a Declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms, to be stamped with the approval of the General Assembly by formal vote of its members, and to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.” -Eleanor Roosevelt, “On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” December 9, 1948 Here in its 70th year of adoption, acceptance of the UDHR into space policy by the international community would be both timely and logical. It reaffirms adherence to a fundamental United Nations cornerstone, and provides an opportunity to strengthen the commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At a time when feasibility of extraction of minerals from celestial bodies is fast approaching, it is our responsibility to ensure that the transition occurs free of any terrestrial shackles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers an acceptable foundational framework from which property rights can evolve off-planet, that can be embraced by the private sector, adopted across national levels, and upheld in the international arena The CP protects individual property rights while solving case since the aff still applies to corporations.
No perms: The CP would expand the rights of individuals in space, from the mere right to use, to the full bundle of rights protected by private property.
The aff imagines a future that includes space settlement. Space settlement with private appropriation is better than settlement without appropriation.
Absent legally enforced personal rights, like property, space settlements are likely to be dominated by tyrannical governments or corporations. Turns case.
Cockell 08 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “AN ESSAY ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY,” JBIS, VOL. 61, pp. 255-275, 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258317782_An_Essay_on_Extraterrestrial_Liberty/links/0c96053053a02cfb24000000/An-Essay-on-Extraterrestrial-Liberty.pdf CT 6. EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY For Berlin 20, ‘negative’ liberty meant the pursuit of individual liberty by removing those mechanisms that exert control over one’s actions. Western liberal democracies pursue, for the most part, philosophies of negative liberty, by attempting to reduce the role of government in individual lives. A restricted sphere of negative liberty is created by tyrannies, in which encroachment into the lives of individuals reduces the number and scope of activities in which people consider themselves free, or at least able to make decisions that can be implemented independently of the State. Of course, by retreating into a core set of activities in which one is completely free, one is in the process of relinquishing liberty, as the scope of free actions is voluntarily reduced. This is in itself a form of slavery. Societies where the scope of negative liberty is reduced can be described as more enslaved, even if the people there may not describe themselves as such, because they have in fact escaped State slavery by retreating from those very activities in which control is exerted. The crucial point is that the sphere within which negative liberty is possible is necessarily constrained by the environmental conditions under which one exists. The more extreme the environmental conditions, the fewer social activities can occur without collective oversight. More saliently, the people themselves may actually request such oversight, to protect their safety from others who would abuse it, with the resulting dangers. Some of these systems of monitoring can be found in societies on Earth. We cannot drive automobiles without safety checks. Our water must be passed through treatment works— life support systems if you will—that ensure that what we are drinking is safe. Indeed, even in some of the most mature terrestrial democracies, a remarkable quantity of basic consumables and resources come to us through systems of compliance overseen by the State. This is a form of control that most people accept because we consider it in our interest. We do not usually see such invasions of our liberty as tyranny, but rather as benevolent actions by the State to ensure our safekeeping. But they are incursions nevertheless, and while democracy is functioning such oversights need not necessarily concern us; or at least they do not worry most of the public, who are more concerned with having fresh water than more abstract thoughts about the allowable extent to which the State should have influence over their water quality. In extraterrestrial environments, spacesuits, water quality, food production, habitat pressurisation and so on and so forth will be subject to regulation by corporations or the State. As on Earth, perhaps many of these incursions will be regarded as acts of beneficence by the State in the interests of safety, and will be willingly accepted. But one fact is undeniable: the extent of negative liberty must be less in extraterrestrial environments than on Earth, and quite significantly less. Even the air will be subject to quality controls and checks. Forms and permissions will be associated with the very act of breathing. No philosophy of advancing the domain of negative liberty, no clever sophistry, can change this truth, which is brought into being by basic survival needs. An undeniable effect will be to expand the opportunities for tyranny. Where the mechanisms for central control are necessarily enlarged in their scope and diversity, a greater number of levers exist, and enable individuals and organisations to exert control and assume power. A reduction in negative liberty does not necessarily imply greater tyranny, but it certainly makes it possible. In extraterrestrial environments, where centralised interventions must be frequent, how much weaker is freedom and how much easier is tyranny to enforce? We cannot know the answers until we undertake the experiment, but we can be fairly sure that the qualitative answer must be ‘more easily’. More insidiously, the restriction of the borders of negative liberty, caused by the apparent need to protect individuals from the irresponsible actions of others, can itself be perpetuated as a form of liberty. The use of alcohol in extraterrestrial environments is one example. On Earth, the excessive use of alcohol may result in broken windows and arrests, but once the windows are repaired little damage has been done to society as a whole. Hence, although there is a negative social collective impact of excessive alcohol use, the prohibition of alcohol consumption of any kind is generally regarded as an infringement of civil liberties that the public will not tolerate. This is why, of course, attempts to do exactly this in the past have been met by black marketeering. But in extraterrestrial environments, a broken window may imply depressurisation, and the instant death of many individuals. The potential impact on society of the irresponsible and thoughtless actions of individuals is greater, and it might seem justifiable to restrict greatly, or even prohibit, the civil liberty of alcohol use, in the interests of collective safety. This principle can be applied to many diverse social interactions that could be construed as threatening people, and the prevention of which can be advanced as the protection of individual and social freedom through the process of restricting negative liberty. Liberty encompasses the freedom that individuals have to actively pursue their own objectives (‘positive liberty’ sensu Berlin). An obvious mechanism by which this becomes practical is the creation of social mechanisms and institutions through which the ‘active’ pursuit of this ‘positive’ sense of liberty is made possible, for example the welfare State. Organisations established to act as conduits for the free expression of different points of view, or to act as means to achieve practical objectives, are not always liberal. Even in some of the most developed democracies, societies and organisations may become dominated by elite closed circles of people, and media channels may be influenced by moguls who use outlets to perpetuate specific corporate views. What prevents these incursions into the structures of liberty from descending into wholesale tyranny? In reality, very little. The subversion of democratic States, or States on the verge of democracy, into societies more reminiscent of dictatorships has many historical precedents. The principal mechanisms that allow individual freedom to triumph over the slide towards tyranny include the legally agreed freedoms that individuals have to establish competition against dominating organisations, and the culture that ensures that the freedom to create organisations is not then abused to destroy the very democratic organisations that guarantee that freedom. In a society in which the freedom to organise and assemble institutions is protected by law, those organisations that distort and alter their environments, or the information they propagate, are likely to be usurped by institutions that reflect a different style of thinking, by the process of individual choice. However, these alternative visions can only be effective, and one can only assert them over the prevailing opinions with confidence, when one has sufficient information to be confident of their likely veracity. On Earth, to express many ideas and counter-opinions one does not need supreme confidence in the truth. If one’s opinion turns out to be in error one gives up, accepts the viewpoint of the adversary and continues one’s life. These opportunities to challenge, however, are central to the power of the individual to confront institutions. But there is one social situation in which the individual’s power is markedly reduced, even rendered completely ineffective against a collective body. Health and safety is one of the most effective levers of social influence and justified coercion, because it invokes the protection of people confronted with life and death situations. Consider, for example, an oxygen supply system on the Moon. The authority that runs such a system might seek control over a political dissenter by threatening to move him or her and their family to a new zone of habitation, on the grounds that the oxygen supply to their habitat is faulty. By doing this, they will remind these individuals who is in control of their survival, and coerce them through fear into mitigating their dissent, thereby creating a more malleable individual and reducing the challenge to collective authority. Governing organisations have access to a vast realm of information that no single individual can hope to have 21. They know, for example, about the oxygen demand, its rate of supply, the pipes that supply it, the maintenance history of the oxygen producing machines, and so on and so forth. For an individual to declare that the intention of the authority to move them to another habitat is for controlling political purposes, he or she must also have access to all such information, which they can then use to demonstrate that there is no safety concern. If they do not have access to this information, then it becomes a simple task for the authorities to portray them as dishonourable individuals inveighing against the hard work of other individuals who are working to secure their individual safety and the security of society 22. They can be then be ostracised, and their general behaviour will be treated as disingenuous. However, to have access to all the information to convincingly uphold a complaint is never possible, because an individual can never know whether they are missing a single crucial fact that makes all the difference to their safety. Even armed with what they perceive to be all the information available, the individual is faced with a choice between allowing an incursion on their home and liberty, or taking the risk that their presumption of having full information is correct. Faced with such a choice, the individual is likely to opt for the former in the interests of caution, particularly in an environment where the other choice may imply death from a failed oxygen system. In the extreme case, this first course of action would be further reinforced in a particularly coercive, venal society where the individual might even be convinced of the capability of the authorities to engineer the failure of their oxygen system and their death, in order to crush dissent, even if their complaint was in fact justified. The end point of this process, when applied across many activities in life, is a colony of automatons performing tasks for an extraterrestrial authority, with their freedom reduced to a withered core of activities in the most private confines of their habitats. Extraterrestrial environments make such an endpoint not merely a possible outcome, but a likely one. This attack on liberty is made possible because the pursuit of individual safety can be made an unchallengeable requirement of a ‘free’ society 23. Freedom from instantaneous death caused by the external environment is the common freedom on which all individuals should converge, and any social structure or plan that brings people closer to that reality must surely be praiseworthy? The removal of other freedoms to achieve the safety of society is excusable. From this position, the environment can itself become the instrument of positive liberty. In this way, and in a rather unique way, encroachment on freedom of thought and movement, in the interests of ensuring the protection of the freedom of the individual against the lethality of the environment, can be transformed into a justifiable and universalisable doctrine of control 24. Unfortunately this approach receives succour from every major tradition of social philosophy that we know on Earth. From Grotius to J.S. Mill, the right to self-preservation has been considered the core of individual liberties 25, a point beyond which no State may go, and which every individual has the right to take it upon him or herself to secure—indeed, such a notion has even been referred to as a ‘natural law’ 26. Even Hobbes’ view of the necessity of sovereign control 27 turns on the right of each individual in a fight to preserve themselves. It is possible to spend much of one’s life on Earth without undue concern for self-preservation. Apart from those unfortunate individuals who confront a burglar or gang, most people will not actually come face to face with the need to infringe others’ rights to self-preservation. Fortunately, although the right to self-preservation is theoretically an unchallengeable right of all people, it remains, in a civil society, one sufficiently protected by the laws, and by regulations against various street crimes that might infringe self-preservation. If, as has been traditional on the Earth, the right to selfpreservation is also held to be a basic right of all people in extraterrestrial environments, then the keys to despotism are handed over to those in control of society. Self-preservation is threatened on a day-to-day basis by the lethality of the environment. In such an environment, each individual does indeed represent a much greater threat to every other individual than on the Earth, because unpredictable and criminal actions against the infrastructure represent a continuously present and potentially catastrophic threat to self-preservation. The authorities therefore have the excuse to implement draconian systems of control to protect the right of every individual to self-preservation. Worse than this, however, the people will voluntarily, in exercising their right to selfpreservation, and to protect themselves, accept more farreaching control over the lives of others 28. Where death is a more likely outcome of criminal action, the Hobbesian State of nature, and the tendency to vigorously guard against it, becomes a more tangible reality 29. A lack of property rights enables tyranny in space by creating a monopoly on power and stifling individual expression.
Cockell 10 Charles S. Cockell (Center for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research – Open University, Milton Keynes), “Essay on the Causes and Consequences of Extraterrestrial Tyranny,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.63, pp. 15-37, January 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Cockell/publication/258402359_Essay_on_the_Causes_and_Consequences_of_Extraterrestrial_Tyranny/links/00b495305364b3f6e8000000/Essay-on-the-Causes-and-Consequences-of-Extraterrestrial-Tyranny.pdf CT Perhaps the most important economic argument is that a centrally-planned system of production is likely to become autarkic, bearing in mind the political problems outlined earlier. In principle, there is no reason why a centrally-planned system of manufacture should not trade its products with other entities, but in reality if there is no profit motive for the organisation to do so, it will not achieve the same level of inducement to put the effort into overcoming the difficult obstacles of interplanetary trade if it is only charged with fabricating enough of a product to satisfy domestic demand. The problem of autarky is just one of the many problems associated with the system, which ultimately lends itself to political tyranny. The centrally-planned economy is unlikely, despite best efforts, to truly produce what people want and, like centrallyplanned states on the Earth, it cannot predict fashions and desires in the future that will necessarily make its economic output limited and dull compared to private entities, which are constantly striving to try to sell consumers new items. The worst effect of the strictly controlled economy will be the stifling of individual creativity, the opportunity to combine to produce, and the emergence of the political culture that results from the need to generate all the functionaries and state officials, with their attendant powers, that will be required to do the planning in the first place. The logic of a centrally-planned economy, and the attraction of this in the face of the possible failure of entities producing things so basic as oxygen, should be resisted even though it may lead to a less ordered and structured economic network 53. The role of the state in this schemata should be to ensure that sufficient entities exist (and more so for redundancy) to produce what is needed and to encourage a vigorous growth in these industries. It should only intervene to exert wholesale control over the means of production when a failure in some entity, or entities, threatens lives. Rejecting a centrally-planned economy would imply competing means of production, which itself almost certainly implies the presence of a system of private property. The public ownership of all goods might appear superficially to be a security against the possibility of people going short of vital goods. In the early stages of the establishment of settlements, it might well be the case that public ownership of certain commodities such as water and some food provisions will be required to ensure that they are distributed fairly to all occupants. However, for all the reasons just adumbrated, some incentive for production must exist independently of the people running the settlement. Quite apart from this, the problem in a highly isolated group is that complete control of all property by a single authority opens the door to political tyranny. An attraction of a Marxian society might be the economic equality that would result from the previously discussed mechanisms. Central planning, in particular, would obviate the chances of single, private entities accumulating a vast proportion of the wealth and individuals associated with these organisations becoming their own economic tyrants. There is merit in this view, and achieving equality would certainly prevent this outcome. Yet, regulations on monopolies and other tax mechanisms could be used to some degree to prevent excessive and despotic accumulations of wealth. Aside from the most severe cases, there are rational motives for allowing inequality. The environment of outer space is lethal, difficult to work in and a costly place in which to establish enterprises. To rely on the establishment of large networks of human settlements throughout the Solar System, solely on the back of state enterprise and centrally-directed orders, is likely to be folly. There is good reason to question what motives privately-funded people, let alone state organisations, would have for exploring the far reaches of space anyway. So, every incentive must be found to drive groups to establish enterprises for resources, tourism or whatever else is deemed necessary in order to expand. A Marxian system of equality in outer space, even if this could be achieved through some type of agreed social order, will erode the incentive to establish new enterprises from which trade can flow. Arguments that the driven will explore and settle space to expand the reach of humanity, to make it a multiplanet species and to advance science, independent of any economic incentive, are likely to be as ineffective as they were in stimulating productivity in the communist states of the Earth. People are motivated by these laudable and altruistic arguments, but the impulsion to work to secure the common good is not common and it is probably not sufficiently universal to be sure of achieving the results required in outer space. The sense of community, which is perceived to be another golden egg of the Marxian vision, depends of course on what sense of community we are talking about. As I have elaborated elsewhere, the sense of community in a centrally-organised society driven to complete equality is likely - and very rapidly in the environment of outer space - to turn into a highly autarchic control structure in which there is certainly an evident community, but where the freedom of the individual is all but destroyed 54. The society of contented slaves is most likely to emerge in an environment where continuously lethal external conditions give every excuse for control structures to expand into lives with ever more vigour by the process of the tendency of humans to expand their power bases. The maturation of tyranny will be facilitated because the Marxian vision is a single doctrine vision. How exactly this vision will manifest in the environment of space is unpredictable, but any single doctrine society that seeks to protect centrally planned objectives can never tolerate dissenters. It has been recognised for a long time that it is in the nature of singledoctrine societies to remove countervailing views, either through political dictates, peer pressure or the generation of terror and it follows that, eo ipso, few lesser arguments need be entertained against the Marxian vision of an extraterrestrial society. The ease with which the deadly environment can be turned into the common enemy and used to justify the protection and advancement of a single and inflexible political and economic vision makes any social order that promulgates one — and only one — path to social success dangerous. The details of those parts of a Marxian plan that can succeed and those that cannot, therefore, whither into insignificance in the face of the need to encourage a plurality of ideas about how extraterrestrial society should be ordered.
Property rights are the essential building blocks of a fully inclusive and functional government. Turns case since they envision a democratically governed space that is impossible without appropriation. UNDP ’08 - Working Group on Property Rights, 2008, 'Empowering the Poor Through Property Rights', in Making the Law Work for Everyone Volume II, Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, United Nations Development Programme, New York, pp. 63-128 https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/ch2.pdf AT This transition has reduced global poverty substantially, but as outlined above, billions of people around the world still lack secure property rights, which hinders their economic, political and social security. In order to examine how poverty can best be relieved, and why access to property rights is fundamental to the empowerment of the poor, it is necessary to identify building blocks of a fully-functional property system. Such a system operates in the following four ways: 1) As a system of rules that defines the bundle of rights and obligations between people and assets.15 Property ownership creates ties that bind individual citizens together through the formation of networks of economic and legal rights and corresponding obligations. The credible enforcement of these rights and obligations requires a judicial mechanism that allows for equitable, transparent and efficient dispute resolution. 2) As a system of governance. Property systems are a central facet of state functionality, and as such are an important measurement of fiduciary and administrative effectiveness. The institutional order of the state is based on technical rules and relationships which define interactions between stakeholders, ranging from direct ownership of land to promulgation of rules that govern security of land and house tenure, land planning, zoning, taxing and other aspects of property management. Technological innovation, which has radically reduced the cost of information, has generated the possibility for further transparency and accountability in property systems as an instrument of governance. 3) As a functioning market for the exchange of assets. A fully functional property system allows land, houses, moveable property, equity shares, and ideas to be transformed into assets to be bought and sold at rates determined by market forces. This subjects the exchange of property to a level of transparency and accountability, and allows for the development of financial mechanisms — including credit 67 and insurance — to facilitate transactions and improve economic outcomes. Land, houses and moveable property can thus be leveraged, and assets transformed from static investments into capital which can be bought and sold. However, property rights are a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the development of these financial mechanisms; they also develop through partnership between the market, special funds targeted at access to finance, and the state. 4) As an instrument of social policy. In the absence or failure of the market, the state often plays a direct role in addressing the needs of the poor. The state has at its disposal instruments that can be used to endow its citizens with assets as they relate to property, such as public housing, low interest loans and the distribution of state land. Such instruments help to overcome natural competition for assets. The state also supports social cohesion through the development of co-ownership of infrastructure and services by government and the citizen, supporting the equilibrium between individual and collective interests. Provision of infrastructure by the state critically affects the value and desirability of assets, and can therefore fundamentally affect opportunities for the poor. Impact is Democide – Empirically, murder by tyrannical governments is the biggest impact. It outweighs war and cap. There is a direct relationship between the lack of personal freedom and democide.
Wayman 17 summarizing Rummel Wayman F.W. (2017) Rummel and Singer, DON and COW. In: Gleditsch N. (eds) R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54463-2_9 CT At Rummel’s website, the dominant theme is that power kills (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/). As he began one of his books (Rummel, 1994: 1), ‘Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and from this work on genocide and government mass murder … The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily.’ A major supporting idea is the term regime, as operationalized by Rummel (1995) and used as the organizing principle for his datasets on ‘democide—genocide and mass murder’ (Rummel, 1998: 1). This idea of a regime is important to his work because there is a lot of variation from regime to regime in the regime’s amount of power, and also in the number of people the regime kills. And Rummel’s dominant theme is that those two characteristics of a regime (power and deaths) co-vary. In my own ordinary language, a regime is a type of government controlling a state apparatus. As Rummel (1995: 9) says, ‘The changes from the Kaiser monarchy to the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s rule … give us three different German regimes. … I count 432 distinct state regimes during the period from 1900 to 1987’. Hence, there would be the czarist regime in Russia until 1917, and then the communist regime from 1917 to 1991. Between February and October 1917, there should I think be a transition period and transitional regime (under Kerensky). Individual rulers, such as general secretaries Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, and their governments, do not represent distinct regimes of their own, but instead are all leaders, successively, of different administrations in the communist regime. To me, Rummel’s (1983) article made the first really convincing case for the inter-liberal or inter-democratic peace. I have since challenged thousands of people, from classrooms to conferences where I am speaking, to name any other proposition in the social sciences that is surprising or counter-intuitive, and that has (according to its advocates at least) no exceptions. No one has ever been able, in my presence, to name such a proposition—other than Rummel’s. The COW Project generated the data for the bulk of the hypothesis tests in IR for decades (Wayman and Singer, 1990: 247–248). And ‘realist theory informed 90 of the hypotheses tested by IR scholars up to the 1970s’ (Walker, 2013: 148). It was a bit of a shock that an anti-realist hypothesis, the inter-democratic peace, had produced such a paradigm-shattering result. Sadly, I never heard Singer say a good word about Rummel’s studies confirming the inter-democratic peace hypothesis. Rummel had used COW data on wars, plus other people’s data on democracy, Liberalism, and freedom of nations, to contradict one of Singer’s claims (namely, Singer’s contention that the inter-democratic peace was based on too few cases and too flawed in other ways to be taken to be true; Small and Singer, 1976). Deciphering Singer’s true position on this is complicated. When Geller and Singer (1998) produced a literature review of scientific studies of international conflict, while they did caution that the evidence is ‘not indisputable’, they did acknowledge that ‘the evidence in the area of the joint freedom proposition is consistent and cumulative. Democratic dyads are less likely to engage in war than are non-democratic pairs’ (Geller and Singer, 1998: 87–88). But on the other hand, on his own at his weekly COW seminar, Singer was much more skeptical about the inter-democratic peace. So it is not surprising that, four years after Geller and Singer’s assessment, one of Singer’s students, Henderson (2002) wrote a book that constituted an attack on the democratic peace literature. In the opening paragraph, Henderson says, ‘It struck me as strange that one of the doyen of the behavioral revolution would be such an avid critic of what some scholars hail as the closest thing to an empirical law in the field’. Instead, Singer seemed more interested in the international or interstate system. While Waltz (1979: 94) defined ‘international political structures in terms of states’, Singer spoke of ‘the national state as level of analysis’ (Singer, 1961: 82–89). Thus, whereas Waltz writes of a system whose basic units are sovereign states, Singer ends up with two systems: an inter-state system and an international system. The international system consists of entities that have an international political goal (including … state creation or survival), engage in international political behavior (including inter-state or extra-state conflict, alliances, trade, or international organizations), or engage in political behavior that has international consequences (such as civil wars). The international system … includes … terrorist groups (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 27). Nested within this international system is the interstate system, beginning in 1816, distinguished in terms of ‘recurring international interactions between and among the interstate system members’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Singer’s COW data are organized around a focus on state system membership. Basically, between 1816 and 1919 an entity is a state system member if it has 500,000 people or more and is diplomatically recognized at an adequate level by Britain and France, while after 1919 it is a state if it is a League of Nations or UN member or has 500,000 people and diplomatic recognition by two major powers. (Note that ‘state’ becomes a short-hand for ‘state system member’; Bremer and Ghosn, 2003.) Much confusion results from the short-hand expressions ‘state’ and ‘system’. ‘Whenever the word “system” was used without a modifier, Singer and Small were referring to the interstate system’ (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010: 16). Likewise, the ‘states’ whose characteristics are listed in the COW datasets are not the population of states, but the population of state system members. Singer’s most widely-cited explanatory articles on interstate war are probably Deutsch and Singer (1964) and Singer, Bremer and Stuckey (1972). Both operate at the system level of analysis. It may be that Singer’s devotion to the interstate system is part of what made him reluctant to embrace the inter-democratic peace. As he said in another widely-cited article, the international system level of analysis ‘almost inevitably requires that we postulate a high degree of uniformity in the foreign policy codes of our national actors’, and ‘the system-oriented approach tends to produce a sort of “black box” or “billiard ball” concept of national actors’. This is consistent with his foreign policy instincts, which were loath to attribute ‘white hats’ to the ‘free world’ and ‘black hats’ to the Soviet Union, in the assigning of blame for the dangers to world peace in the Cold War era. Singer’s posture was very different from Rummel’s, with Rummel in favor of Reagan’s foreign policy and against détente. In these Cold War contexts, Singer may have been uncomfortable with Rummel’s summary that ‘freedom preserves peace and life’. Singer wrote ‘it is evident that my research and teaching has unambiguously been problem-driven’, and ‘for reasons that I struggle to articulate, the problem has been, and remains, that of war’ (Singer, 1990: 2). The COW Project was founded by him at the University of Michigan in 1963, the year after the world nearly was destroyed, had the Cuban Missiles Crisis gone badly. International war attracted Singer’s best efforts at finding the ‘causes of war and conditions of peace’ (1990: 3). As he and Small put it, their focus is a ‘preoccupation with the elimination of international war and the possible role of solid explanatory knowledge in that enterprise’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). The first COW war handbook, Wages of War (Singer and Small, 1972) was consequently limited to international wars. Karl Deutsch subsequently convinced Singer that there was a need for a comparable list of civil wars. This led to a new handbook, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980, presenting a ‘comprehensive list that will enhance … study of civil wars’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 204). The civil war list is accompanied with a cautionary note, ‘International war remains our major concern … A research assault on explanation of civil war … is clearly a task better left to others’ (Small and Singer, 1982: 17). Consequently, the COW project had many datasets (such as the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset) on the correlates of interstate war, but nothing comparable on the civil war data. Nevertheless, the publication of the civil war data was a valuable contribution to studies of civil war, and was also a step toward the full delineation of the totality of modern war. This was followed, in the third COW handbook (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010) with a definition and list of non-state wars, completing the full reckoning of the patterns of war in the past two centuries. Also, the focus of Singer on international war was somewhat vindicated by his co-authored article revealing that, over the time since the Congress of Vienna, inter-state wars had resulted in 32 million battle deaths, intra-state wars only 18 million (Sarkees, Wayman and Singer, 2003). Critics often ask if the COW project has a state-centric bias. A more subtle and I think effective line of inquiry is to ask why the COW project has emphasized state-system-membership rather than simple sovereignty and independence as the defining characteristic of the state. This can cause confusion. For example, a number of non-state wars, including the main phase of one of the deadliest wars in history, the Taiping Rebellion, have been fought in areas that would be considered to be states by students of comparative politics. This and other related difficulties have led pioneers outside the COW project (Gleditsch, 2004; Fazal, 2007), as well as Singer’s successor at the COW Project (Bremer and Ghosn, 2003) to propose various revisions and expansions of the concept of the state, to go beyond the COW state membership definition. These difficulties and challenges continue to provide important frontiers for research on war and the state in coming years. In contrast to Singer, Rummel seems to me to have taken a more inductivist, practical approach to states and similar entities. On his website, powerkills.com, one finds a focus on killing, even of one person. The perpetrators are often leaders of totalitarian states, such as Mao, but can also be rebel leaders (the young Mao) or a king (Leopold of Belgium) who controls what some call a colony (the Belgian Congo) but Rummel calls Leopold’s personal property. The unit of analysis becomes the regime and regime-like power-centers such as Leopold’s Congo or Mao’s rebel territory. Rummel (1986) concluded that ‘War isn’t this century’s biggest killer’. As he said then, ‘About 35,654,000 people have died in this century’s international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts. … The number of people killed by totalitarian or extreme authoritarian governments already far exceeds that for all wars, civil and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war’. He itemized 95 million killed by communist governments, but only ‘831,000 killed by free democratic governments’. Those killed by free democratic governments were always foreigners: In no case have I found a democratic government carrying out massacres, genocide and mass executions of its own citizens … Absolutist governments (those that Freedom House would classify as not free) are not only many times deadlier than war, but are themselves the major factor causing war and other forms of violent conflict. They are a major cause of militarism. Indeed, absolutism, not war, is mankind’s deadliest scourge of all. In light of all this, the peaceful, nonviolent fostering of civil liberties and political rights must be made mankind’s highest humanitarian goal … because freedom preserves peace and life (Rummel, 1986).