AC- China NC- Nebel T Russia Fill-In DA bilateralism CP Asteroid Mining PIC
Damus
1
Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Serena Lu
AC- Healthcare Workers NC- Nebel T - Workers Pandemic PIC Work K 1AR- all NR- Post Work K case 2AR- all
Damus
3
Opponent: Brentwood AR | Judge: George Zhang
1AC- Autonomy NC- Util Police PIC Work K V2 case 1AR- all pics bad NR- Police PIC util case pics bad 2AR- all
Damus
6
Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva
AC- EU AC NC- Postwork K Pandemic PIC Nebel T Countries case 1AR- Grammar voting issue all NR- voting issue pic case 2AR- case pic
Jack Howe
2
Opponent: Christopher Columbus NG | Judge: Ben Cortez
AC- public health covid advantage aff NC- innovation da covid cp nebel t case 1AR- all but nebel NR- all 2AR- all
Jack Howe
4
Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Brett Boelkens
AC- Opioids NC- Cap K Nebel T Opioid HIF CP Case turnsanswers 1AR- all perf con grammar voting issue NR- Cap K perf con grammar voting issue case turns 2AR- Cap case
Jack Howe
6
Opponent: Perry JA | Judge: Gabriela Gonzalez
AC- Evergreening NC- HIF CP Neolib K Trade DA case 1AR- all perf con NR- perf con cap k case 2AR- cap k case
AC- rhetorical decolonization NC- "Global South" Word Pic T-hypothetical implementation Indigenous Peoples Pic case 1AR- all NR- "Global South" Word PIC 2AR- case Word Pic
Nano Nagle
1
Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Gordon Krauss
AC- Cap AC NC- Nebel T T WTO Medicalization DA case 1AR- all NR- Medicalization DA case 2AR- all
Nano Nagle
3
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Emmiee Malyugina
AC- Jordan AC NC- Data Exclusivity Innovation DA HIF CP T Plural Case 1AR- all condo agent cp theory aff RVIS NR- condo agent cp theory HIF innovation 2AR- case HIF Innovation
Peninsula
2
Opponent: Midtown FB | Judge: Dillon Johnson
AC- states license to private companies NC- Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining DA GEO PIC case 1AR- all NR- Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining Case 2AR- all
Peninsula
4
Opponent: Lexington AM | Judge: Savit Bhat
AC- Commons Asteroid Mining AC NC- Asteroid Mining DA Legal Trust CP Extra T case 1AR Meta Theory (aff gets RVIS Topicality comes first) condo solvency advocate theory case NR- all 2AR- meta theory
Peninsula
5
Opponent: Plano East Senior RP | Judge: Tej Gedela
AC- Lunar Heritage NC- Legal Trust Lunar Heritage CP Lunar miningtourism DA Nebel T Case 1AR- all NR- CP DA case 2AR- all
UNLV
2
Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Gordon Krauss
AC- Chinese Solar Panels NC- Nebel T New Affs Bad Regulation CP Xi DA Legal Trust CP case 1AR- all no solvency advocate theory bad NR- Legal Trust Xi DA case 2AR- all
UNLV
4
Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Yoyo Lei
AC- Military Tracking Satellites NC- Nebel T T - Appropriation US PIC Case 1AR- all NR- Nebel T 2AR- all
UNLV
6
Opponent: Bridgeland PT | Judge: Andrew Torrez
AC- Kant NC- Util legal trust cp asteroid da NR- utillegal trust cp asteroid da
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Cites
Entry
Date
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Tournament: na | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na Hi I'm Anya. Contact me with any questions!
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 2 | Opponent: Midtown FB | Judge: Dillon Johnson 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?
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 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, 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.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes 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 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.” 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 a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
1/22/22
JF- Asteroid Mining PIC
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati The People’s Republic of China should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for asteroid mining.
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?
Chinese private companies are specifically key. Cohen 21: Ariel Cohen, 21 - ("China’s Space Mining Industry Is Prepping For Launch – But What About The US?," Forbes, 10-26-2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/10/26/chinas-space-mining-industry-is-prepping-for-launch~-~-but-what-about-the-us/?sh=6d03b9072ae0)//marlborough-wr/ In April of this year, China’s Shenzen Origin Space Technology Co. Ltd. launched the NEO-1, the first commercial spacecraft dedicated to the mining of space resources – from asteroids to the lunar surface. Falling costs of space launches and spacecraft technology alongside existing infrastructure provides a unique opportunity to explore extraterrestrial resource extraction. Current technologies are equipped to analyze and categorize asteroids within our solar system with a limited degree of certainty. One of the accompanying payloads to the NEO-1 was the Yuanwang-1, or “little hubble” satellite, which searches the stars for possible asteroid mining targets. The NEO-1 launch marks another milestone in private satellite development, adding a new player to space based companies which include Japan’s Astroscale. Private asteroid identification via the Sentinel Space Telescope was supported by NASA until 2015. As private investment in space grows, the end goal is to be capable of harvesting resources to bring to Earth. According to Shenzen Origin Space Technology company website: “Through the development and launch of the spacecraft, Origin Space is able to carry out low-Earth orbit space junk cleanup and prototype technology verification for space resource acquisition, and at the same time demonstrate future asteroid defense related technologies.” In the end, it will come down to progressively lowering the cost of launched unit of weight and booster rocket reliability – before fundamentally new engines may drive the launch costs even further down. The April launch demonstrates that China is already succeeding while the West is spinning its wheels. The much touted Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries (DSI) DSI -1.6 were supposed to be the vanguard of extra-terrestrial resource acquisition with major backers including Google’s GOOG -2.6 Larry Page. But both have since been acquired, the former by block chain company ConsenSys and the latter by Bradford Space, neither of which are prioritizing 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? 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.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes 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 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.” 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 a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
2/19/22
JF- Asteroid Mining PIC
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati The People’s Republic of China should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for asteroid mining.
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?
Chinese private companies are specifically key. Cohen 21: Ariel Cohen, 21 - ("China’s Space Mining Industry Is Prepping For Launch – But What About The US?," Forbes, 10-26-2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/10/26/chinas-space-mining-industry-is-prepping-for-launch~-~-but-what-about-the-us/?sh=6d03b9072ae0)//marlborough-wr/ In April of this year, China’s Shenzen Origin Space Technology Co. Ltd. launched the NEO-1, the first commercial spacecraft dedicated to the mining of space resources – from asteroids to the lunar surface. Falling costs of space launches and spacecraft technology alongside existing infrastructure provides a unique opportunity to explore extraterrestrial resource extraction. Current technologies are equipped to analyze and categorize asteroids within our solar system with a limited degree of certainty. One of the accompanying payloads to the NEO-1 was the Yuanwang-1, or “little hubble” satellite, which searches the stars for possible asteroid mining targets. The NEO-1 launch marks another milestone in private satellite development, adding a new player to space based companies which include Japan’s Astroscale. Private asteroid identification via the Sentinel Space Telescope was supported by NASA until 2015. As private investment in space grows, the end goal is to be capable of harvesting resources to bring to Earth. According to Shenzen Origin Space Technology company website: “Through the development and launch of the spacecraft, Origin Space is able to carry out low-Earth orbit space junk cleanup and prototype technology verification for space resource acquisition, and at the same time demonstrate future asteroid defense related technologies.” In the end, it will come down to progressively lowering the cost of launched unit of weight and booster rocket reliability – before fundamentally new engines may drive the launch costs even further down. The April launch demonstrates that China is already succeeding while the West is spinning its wheels. The much touted Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries (DSI) DSI -1.6 were supposed to be the vanguard of extra-terrestrial resource acquisition with major backers including Google’s GOOG -2.6 Larry Page. But both have since been acquired, the former by block chain company ConsenSys and the latter by Bradford Space, neither of which are prioritizing 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? 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.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes 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 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.” 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 a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
2/19/22
JF- Asteroid Mining PIC
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati The People’s Republic of China should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for asteroid mining.
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?
Chinese private companies are specifically key. Cohen 21: Ariel Cohen, 21 - ("China’s Space Mining Industry Is Prepping For Launch – But What About The US?," Forbes, 10-26-2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/10/26/chinas-space-mining-industry-is-prepping-for-launch~-~-but-what-about-the-us/?sh=6d03b9072ae0)//marlborough-wr/ In April of this year, China’s Shenzen Origin Space Technology Co. Ltd. launched the NEO-1, the first commercial spacecraft dedicated to the mining of space resources – from asteroids to the lunar surface. Falling costs of space launches and spacecraft technology alongside existing infrastructure provides a unique opportunity to explore extraterrestrial resource extraction. Current technologies are equipped to analyze and categorize asteroids within our solar system with a limited degree of certainty. One of the accompanying payloads to the NEO-1 was the Yuanwang-1, or “little hubble” satellite, which searches the stars for possible asteroid mining targets. The NEO-1 launch marks another milestone in private satellite development, adding a new player to space based companies which include Japan’s Astroscale. Private asteroid identification via the Sentinel Space Telescope was supported by NASA until 2015. As private investment in space grows, the end goal is to be capable of harvesting resources to bring to Earth. According to Shenzen Origin Space Technology company website: “Through the development and launch of the spacecraft, Origin Space is able to carry out low-Earth orbit space junk cleanup and prototype technology verification for space resource acquisition, and at the same time demonstrate future asteroid defense related technologies.” In the end, it will come down to progressively lowering the cost of launched unit of weight and booster rocket reliability – before fundamentally new engines may drive the launch costs even further down. The April launch demonstrates that China is already succeeding while the West is spinning its wheels. The much touted Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries (DSI) DSI -1.6 were supposed to be the vanguard of extra-terrestrial resource acquisition with major backers including Google’s GOOG -2.6 Larry Page. But both have since been acquired, the former by block chain company ConsenSys and the latter by Bradford Space, neither of which are prioritizing 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? 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.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes 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 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.” 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 a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
2/19/22
JF- Bilateralism CP
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati CP: The United States and the People’s Republic of China ought to increase bilateral engagement on space issues by resuming the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange. The PRC should give all information and developed products regarding the appropriation of outer space to the United States.
Solves: - Space war - Crisis escalation - Miscalc - Space debris - heg – revitalizes US leadership
KAFURA 2/10 CRAIG KAFURA (Assistant director for public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project), “RENEW SPACE DIALOGUE WITH CHINA” War on the Rocks, 2/10/2022. Accessed 2/11/2022. https://warontherocks.com/2022/02/renew-space-dialogue-with-china/ CT
In 2013, the United States needed to warn the People’s Republic of China about a potential satellite collision in low Earth orbit. Washington’s only way of doing so: sending a close approach notification to a fax number in China, which they hoped would be received, read, and acted upon in time to avoid disaster. Fortunately, at the 2014 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the United States and China were able to discuss the problem and find a better solution: email. Things improved further the following year, with the two sides establishing a direct link for both sides to share information about potential satellite collisions. That success was followed by launch of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue in 2015 and two Space Security Exchanges chaired by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May and December of 2016. However, despite the increasing relevance of space to broader issues in the Sino-American relationship, neither group has met since 2017. Renewing these space dialogues is an urgent priority because the stakes for strategic drift are catastrophic. Next time a potentially dangerous issue arises in space — and there will be a next time — in the absence of these regular points of contact, the two countries might not be so lucky. It’s thus high time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange to prevent space accidents from inadvertently escalating into conflict. Both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange were born out of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the Obama administration’s flagship effort to engage China. The annual multi-day dialogue ran from 2008 to 2016, consisted of both economic and strategic dialogue tracks, and brought together American and Chinese heads of state and top policymakers from a wide range of departments across the U.S. and Chinese governments. And it was through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue that the United States and China were able to move from the fax era into the age of email. As a recent report on the Strategic and Economic Dialogue from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and the American Friends Service Committee shows, dialogue mechanisms like the Space Security Exchange and Civil Space Dialogue are key to managing the significant asymmetries in the relationship between the United States and China. The differences in the American and Chinese governance systems can easily create unintentional misunderstandings of both policy and intent. The substantive content of these dialogues can help reduce misperceptions and identify areas of potential cooperation, while consistent, repeated dialogues provide regular points of contact that can persist through the ups and downs inherent in Sino-American relations. With both sides seeking to put guardrails on the relationship, and with a tentative agreement to engage in dialogue on strategic issues, the Biden administration should propose — and Beijing should accept — a renewal of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue and Space Security Exchange. After years of silence, there is certainly a lot to talk about. Military Uses of Space: Seizing the High Ground China’s space security developments are long in the making. Beijing designated space as a new domain of warfare in its 2015 defense white paper, arguing that outer and cyber space had “become new commanding heights in strategic competition.” And as the Department of Defense’s 2021 report to Congress on China’s military and security developments highlights, space and counterspace operations are increasingly important for the People’s Liberation Army. Run out of the Strategic Support Force, the Space Systems Department is responsible for nearly all of China’s military operations in space, including launch, surveillance, and warfare. While many of their space capabilities are focused on command, control, and intelligence functions, others have more offensive aims. That includes the ground-based anti-satellite weapon demonstrated very publicly in 2007, which destroyed a Chinese weather satellite and created a massive space debris field that continues to endanger other objects in low-earth orbit. The Financial Times’ 2021 reporting on a purported Chinese nuclear-capable hypersonic missile test — in which a platform launched from China circled the globe before diving to attack a target — fixed Washington’s attention on these emerging space-adjacent technologies and revived Cold War memories of similar Soviet systems as well as the nuclear arms race. While Chinese officials have denied the military applications of the test, hypersonic gliders like the DF-17 are hardly the only new technology in development. As the most recent report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence notes, Beijing is deeply involved in the development of space and counterspace capabilities, with such capabilities “intended to target U.S. and allied satellites” and “integral to potential military campaigns by the People’s Liberation Army.” Nor is China the only one with eyes fixed on the heavens. News reports claim that the United States is poised to unveil a previously secret space weapon. Key targets of this unveiling: policymakers in Moscow and Beijing. Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pushed for greater transparency around American military capabilities in space, arguing that “deterrence does not happen in the classified world.” But as with nuclear arms, deterrence and reassurance go hand in hand. And just as analysts have noted the need to avoid a nuclear arms race with China, the United States should seek to avoid sparking an arms race in space. A space arms race — particularly further testing of destructive anti-satellite weapons — puts the peaceful use of space at risk for the whole of humanity. Space Issues Are Strategic Issues Given both the U.S. and Chinese footprints in outer space, space issues are also strategic issues. And recent reports that the Chinese military is moving to a launch-on-warning footing for its nuclear forces makes a resumption of bilateral space security exchanges with China all the more urgent. As the 2021 Department of Defense report on Chinese capabilities notes, part of China’s early warning system to detect ballistic missile launches is space-based, as is the U.S. system. At the same time, the Department of Defense reports that Chinese experts focus on the need to “cripple or destroy the enemy’s information system … by making it blind, deaf or paralyzed.” Both the United States and China expect the other to target space-based assets, such as early-warning satellites, with just this goal in mind. This is a deadly combination. It would be all too easy for either side to interpret a satellite accident — either a collision with debris or a simple system failure — as an attempt to take out its early-warning network and thus the first strike in a potentially nuclear war. At the time of the June 2021 Biden-Putin summit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian noted China’s willingness “to have bilateral dialogue with relevant sides with mutual respect and on an equal footing” on issues of strategic stability. The United States should take them up on their offer in a renewed Space Security Exchange. The initial U.S.-China Space Security Exchanges, held in May and December of 2016, were led by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with additional participants from the Chinese Ministry of Defense and the China National Space Agency. Frank Rose, then assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, chaired the talks for the U.S. side, saying they were “a very good dialogue … a real discussion rather than just an exchange of talking points.” However, those dialogue processes lapsed after 2016 and have not been renewed. Reviving the U.S.-China Space Security Exchange would bring bilateral discussions on space security in line with how Washington engages other countries on space issues — at present, the United States has over a dozen dialogues on space security with countries like Japan, India, and Russia. Moreover, a regular, repeated dialogue on space security issues would bring together U.S. and Chinese officials working on space security, establish common understandings of one another’s national policy, and allow them to build working relationships that could help defuse a crisis before it escalates. Civil Space: It’s Getting Crowded Up Here But it’s not just the military use of space that Washington and Beijing need to discuss. Civilian space issues, too, are part of the geostrategic landscape. And with low Earth orbit getting increasingly crowded, both sides have issues that need to be addressed. In 2021, China’s Tiangong space station twice had to maneuver to avoid colliding with StarLink satellites put into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation. In response, China submitted a formal complaint through the United Nations, pointing to the responsibilities of all countries party to Outer Space Treaty. Ratified in 1967, the treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, establishes that space and celestial bodies will be freely explored for peaceful purposes, and precludes claims of sovereignty over non-Earth territories — though it does not go so far as to ban military activities in space. The treaty also states that countries are responsible for the actions of their nations’ commercial actors — and thus the United States is responsible for the actions of SpaceX. This isn’t the first time SpaceX has been criticized for its behavior in outer space. And the problem is only going to grow more serious: The 2,000 StarLink satellites currently deployed are only a fraction of the planned total of 30,000 as part of SpaceX’s second-generation low Earth orbit broadband constellation. Of course, America’s SpaceX is not the only one interested in building massive satellite constellations. The newly-created state-owned (and independent of existing telecoms) China Satellite Network Group has been tasked with launching China’s own broadband satellite constellation, with plans for roughly 13,000 satellites. With so many satellites heading into low Earth orbit in the coming years, experts fear additional near-misses — or even collisions — between orbiting satellites. Why the concern over satellite collisions? In a word, debris. Whether produced by an anti-satellite weapons test or an accidental collision, any collision in low Earth orbit creates additional orbiting space debris, which in turn increases the probability of additional collisions — and more debris. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to a catastrophic cascade of collisions (“Kessler Syndrome”) of the type featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Academy Award-winning film Gravity. Such a cascade event would leave low Earth orbit an inhospitable place for human spaceflight. With the United States and China both launching thousands of satellites into orbit in the coming years, bilateral dialogue between the two will be critical to reining in the growth of space debris. A formal dialogue process such as the Civil Space Dialogue would provide officials on both sides an arena to identify critical problems, connect the appropriate authorities to one another, and address issues of common concern. Making Space to Keep Outer Space an Open Space Resuming the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue is also an easier to bar to clear than other, broader forms of civil cooperation between the United States and China on space issues. One barrier to that cooperation is the Wolf amendment, which limits engagement with China on space issues. Named for former Rep. Frank Wolf, the language has been included in the annual appropriations bill since 2011 and puts a number of obstacles in front of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(as well as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Space Council) for any efforts to coordinate or collaborate with China or any Chinese company. While not a ban on interactions with China on space issues, the amendment has certainly chilled past efforts at engaging China in these areas. The U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue, hosted by the U.S. Department of State, provided an easier path to get American and Chinese space experts in the same room (though officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were still required to submit advanced certification to Congress that the meeting would not violate the Wolf restrictions in order to participate in the dialogue). Resuming a pair of dialogues might not seem like enough given the stakes and the scope of issues at hand. Space policy experts have proposed a range of potential policies for the United States to pursue, including a voluntary moratorium on anti-satellite weapons tests, legally binding agreements on space security as part of a broader space arms control agenda, and even a global ban on anti-satellite testing. These proposals all have their merits. But the United States is a long way from engaging China in an arms control framework for space. At present, U.S.-Chinese relations are still in rough shape, with limited engagement on most issues. While officials from the Biden administration have stated their desire to engage China in discussions of nuclear arms control, the United States and China are not currently engaged in any such talks. Nor have the United States and China ever concluded a bilateral nuclear arms control agreement, though the United States has far more experience negotiating over nuclear weapons than on space arms control. The U.S.-Chinese relationship also now lacks the overarching framework for discussion once provided by the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which, though oft maligned in Washington, D.C., produced many successful outcomes for the United States. If the United States and China cannot manage to sustain a basic level of dialogue on space issues, grander proposals — no matter their policy rigor — will never take off. These two dialogue processes can also focus and motivate internal policy discussions in Washington and Beijing. As space experts have pointed out, one obstacle to the United States promoting a common set of space norms in its own behavior is that the United States itself does not have a shared understanding across agencies of what those norms should be. One of the conclusions from our investigation of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was the role that the annual dialogue process served in forcing both sides — American and Chinese alike — to engage in interagency negotiations back home over issues of common concern. A call for engagement and dialogue with China might seem quaint given the public funeral for the era of engagement. Yet the Biden administration has continued to seek a dialogue process with Beijing, as indicated by the repeated engagements between high-level U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts and by President Joe Biden’s own direct dialogues with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Per Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the Biden administration’s approach to China is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be” — a line oft repeated by administration officials. Space issues, both civil and security, are and will continue to be a mixture of collaboration and competition. But both the United States and China should engage with one another to ensure that that competition does not lead to space becoming an adversarial arena. Given the outstanding space issues in the Sino-American relationship, it’s time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange.
2/19/22
JF- Bilateralism CP
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati CP: The United States and the People’s Republic of China ought to increase bilateral engagement on space issues by resuming the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange. The PRC should give all information and developed products regarding the appropriation of outer space to the United States.
Solves: - Space war - Crisis escalation - Miscalc - Space debris - heg – revitalizes US leadership
KAFURA 2/10 CRAIG KAFURA (Assistant director for public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project), “RENEW SPACE DIALOGUE WITH CHINA” War on the Rocks, 2/10/2022. Accessed 2/11/2022. https://warontherocks.com/2022/02/renew-space-dialogue-with-china/ CT
In 2013, the United States needed to warn the People’s Republic of China about a potential satellite collision in low Earth orbit. Washington’s only way of doing so: sending a close approach notification to a fax number in China, which they hoped would be received, read, and acted upon in time to avoid disaster. Fortunately, at the 2014 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the United States and China were able to discuss the problem and find a better solution: email. Things improved further the following year, with the two sides establishing a direct link for both sides to share information about potential satellite collisions. That success was followed by launch of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue in 2015 and two Space Security Exchanges chaired by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May and December of 2016. However, despite the increasing relevance of space to broader issues in the Sino-American relationship, neither group has met since 2017. Renewing these space dialogues is an urgent priority because the stakes for strategic drift are catastrophic. Next time a potentially dangerous issue arises in space — and there will be a next time — in the absence of these regular points of contact, the two countries might not be so lucky. It’s thus high time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange to prevent space accidents from inadvertently escalating into conflict. Both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange were born out of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the Obama administration’s flagship effort to engage China. The annual multi-day dialogue ran from 2008 to 2016, consisted of both economic and strategic dialogue tracks, and brought together American and Chinese heads of state and top policymakers from a wide range of departments across the U.S. and Chinese governments. And it was through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue that the United States and China were able to move from the fax era into the age of email. As a recent report on the Strategic and Economic Dialogue from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and the American Friends Service Committee shows, dialogue mechanisms like the Space Security Exchange and Civil Space Dialogue are key to managing the significant asymmetries in the relationship between the United States and China. The differences in the American and Chinese governance systems can easily create unintentional misunderstandings of both policy and intent. The substantive content of these dialogues can help reduce misperceptions and identify areas of potential cooperation, while consistent, repeated dialogues provide regular points of contact that can persist through the ups and downs inherent in Sino-American relations. With both sides seeking to put guardrails on the relationship, and with a tentative agreement to engage in dialogue on strategic issues, the Biden administration should propose — and Beijing should accept — a renewal of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue and Space Security Exchange. After years of silence, there is certainly a lot to talk about. Military Uses of Space: Seizing the High Ground China’s space security developments are long in the making. Beijing designated space as a new domain of warfare in its 2015 defense white paper, arguing that outer and cyber space had “become new commanding heights in strategic competition.” And as the Department of Defense’s 2021 report to Congress on China’s military and security developments highlights, space and counterspace operations are increasingly important for the People’s Liberation Army. Run out of the Strategic Support Force, the Space Systems Department is responsible for nearly all of China’s military operations in space, including launch, surveillance, and warfare. While many of their space capabilities are focused on command, control, and intelligence functions, others have more offensive aims. That includes the ground-based anti-satellite weapon demonstrated very publicly in 2007, which destroyed a Chinese weather satellite and created a massive space debris field that continues to endanger other objects in low-earth orbit. The Financial Times’ 2021 reporting on a purported Chinese nuclear-capable hypersonic missile test — in which a platform launched from China circled the globe before diving to attack a target — fixed Washington’s attention on these emerging space-adjacent technologies and revived Cold War memories of similar Soviet systems as well as the nuclear arms race. While Chinese officials have denied the military applications of the test, hypersonic gliders like the DF-17 are hardly the only new technology in development. As the most recent report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence notes, Beijing is deeply involved in the development of space and counterspace capabilities, with such capabilities “intended to target U.S. and allied satellites” and “integral to potential military campaigns by the People’s Liberation Army.” Nor is China the only one with eyes fixed on the heavens. News reports claim that the United States is poised to unveil a previously secret space weapon. Key targets of this unveiling: policymakers in Moscow and Beijing. Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pushed for greater transparency around American military capabilities in space, arguing that “deterrence does not happen in the classified world.” But as with nuclear arms, deterrence and reassurance go hand in hand. And just as analysts have noted the need to avoid a nuclear arms race with China, the United States should seek to avoid sparking an arms race in space. A space arms race — particularly further testing of destructive anti-satellite weapons — puts the peaceful use of space at risk for the whole of humanity. Space Issues Are Strategic Issues Given both the U.S. and Chinese footprints in outer space, space issues are also strategic issues. And recent reports that the Chinese military is moving to a launch-on-warning footing for its nuclear forces makes a resumption of bilateral space security exchanges with China all the more urgent. As the 2021 Department of Defense report on Chinese capabilities notes, part of China’s early warning system to detect ballistic missile launches is space-based, as is the U.S. system. At the same time, the Department of Defense reports that Chinese experts focus on the need to “cripple or destroy the enemy’s information system … by making it blind, deaf or paralyzed.” Both the United States and China expect the other to target space-based assets, such as early-warning satellites, with just this goal in mind. This is a deadly combination. It would be all too easy for either side to interpret a satellite accident — either a collision with debris or a simple system failure — as an attempt to take out its early-warning network and thus the first strike in a potentially nuclear war. At the time of the June 2021 Biden-Putin summit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian noted China’s willingness “to have bilateral dialogue with relevant sides with mutual respect and on an equal footing” on issues of strategic stability. The United States should take them up on their offer in a renewed Space Security Exchange. The initial U.S.-China Space Security Exchanges, held in May and December of 2016, were led by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with additional participants from the Chinese Ministry of Defense and the China National Space Agency. Frank Rose, then assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, chaired the talks for the U.S. side, saying they were “a very good dialogue … a real discussion rather than just an exchange of talking points.” However, those dialogue processes lapsed after 2016 and have not been renewed. Reviving the U.S.-China Space Security Exchange would bring bilateral discussions on space security in line with how Washington engages other countries on space issues — at present, the United States has over a dozen dialogues on space security with countries like Japan, India, and Russia. Moreover, a regular, repeated dialogue on space security issues would bring together U.S. and Chinese officials working on space security, establish common understandings of one another’s national policy, and allow them to build working relationships that could help defuse a crisis before it escalates. Civil Space: It’s Getting Crowded Up Here But it’s not just the military use of space that Washington and Beijing need to discuss. Civilian space issues, too, are part of the geostrategic landscape. And with low Earth orbit getting increasingly crowded, both sides have issues that need to be addressed. In 2021, China’s Tiangong space station twice had to maneuver to avoid colliding with StarLink satellites put into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation. In response, China submitted a formal complaint through the United Nations, pointing to the responsibilities of all countries party to Outer Space Treaty. Ratified in 1967, the treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, establishes that space and celestial bodies will be freely explored for peaceful purposes, and precludes claims of sovereignty over non-Earth territories — though it does not go so far as to ban military activities in space. The treaty also states that countries are responsible for the actions of their nations’ commercial actors — and thus the United States is responsible for the actions of SpaceX. This isn’t the first time SpaceX has been criticized for its behavior in outer space. And the problem is only going to grow more serious: The 2,000 StarLink satellites currently deployed are only a fraction of the planned total of 30,000 as part of SpaceX’s second-generation low Earth orbit broadband constellation. Of course, America’s SpaceX is not the only one interested in building massive satellite constellations. The newly-created state-owned (and independent of existing telecoms) China Satellite Network Group has been tasked with launching China’s own broadband satellite constellation, with plans for roughly 13,000 satellites. With so many satellites heading into low Earth orbit in the coming years, experts fear additional near-misses — or even collisions — between orbiting satellites. Why the concern over satellite collisions? In a word, debris. Whether produced by an anti-satellite weapons test or an accidental collision, any collision in low Earth orbit creates additional orbiting space debris, which in turn increases the probability of additional collisions — and more debris. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to a catastrophic cascade of collisions (“Kessler Syndrome”) of the type featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Academy Award-winning film Gravity. Such a cascade event would leave low Earth orbit an inhospitable place for human spaceflight. With the United States and China both launching thousands of satellites into orbit in the coming years, bilateral dialogue between the two will be critical to reining in the growth of space debris. A formal dialogue process such as the Civil Space Dialogue would provide officials on both sides an arena to identify critical problems, connect the appropriate authorities to one another, and address issues of common concern. Making Space to Keep Outer Space an Open Space Resuming the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue is also an easier to bar to clear than other, broader forms of civil cooperation between the United States and China on space issues. One barrier to that cooperation is the Wolf amendment, which limits engagement with China on space issues. Named for former Rep. Frank Wolf, the language has been included in the annual appropriations bill since 2011 and puts a number of obstacles in front of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(as well as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Space Council) for any efforts to coordinate or collaborate with China or any Chinese company. While not a ban on interactions with China on space issues, the amendment has certainly chilled past efforts at engaging China in these areas. The U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue, hosted by the U.S. Department of State, provided an easier path to get American and Chinese space experts in the same room (though officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were still required to submit advanced certification to Congress that the meeting would not violate the Wolf restrictions in order to participate in the dialogue). Resuming a pair of dialogues might not seem like enough given the stakes and the scope of issues at hand. Space policy experts have proposed a range of potential policies for the United States to pursue, including a voluntary moratorium on anti-satellite weapons tests, legally binding agreements on space security as part of a broader space arms control agenda, and even a global ban on anti-satellite testing. These proposals all have their merits. But the United States is a long way from engaging China in an arms control framework for space. At present, U.S.-Chinese relations are still in rough shape, with limited engagement on most issues. While officials from the Biden administration have stated their desire to engage China in discussions of nuclear arms control, the United States and China are not currently engaged in any such talks. Nor have the United States and China ever concluded a bilateral nuclear arms control agreement, though the United States has far more experience negotiating over nuclear weapons than on space arms control. The U.S.-Chinese relationship also now lacks the overarching framework for discussion once provided by the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which, though oft maligned in Washington, D.C., produced many successful outcomes for the United States. If the United States and China cannot manage to sustain a basic level of dialogue on space issues, grander proposals — no matter their policy rigor — will never take off. These two dialogue processes can also focus and motivate internal policy discussions in Washington and Beijing. As space experts have pointed out, one obstacle to the United States promoting a common set of space norms in its own behavior is that the United States itself does not have a shared understanding across agencies of what those norms should be. One of the conclusions from our investigation of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was the role that the annual dialogue process served in forcing both sides — American and Chinese alike — to engage in interagency negotiations back home over issues of common concern. A call for engagement and dialogue with China might seem quaint given the public funeral for the era of engagement. Yet the Biden administration has continued to seek a dialogue process with Beijing, as indicated by the repeated engagements between high-level U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts and by President Joe Biden’s own direct dialogues with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Per Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the Biden administration’s approach to China is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be” — a line oft repeated by administration officials. Space issues, both civil and security, are and will continue to be a mixture of collaboration and competition. But both the United States and China should engage with one another to ensure that that competition does not lead to space becoming an adversarial arena. Given the outstanding space issues in the Sino-American relationship, it’s time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange.
2/19/22
JF- Bilateralism CP
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati CP: The United States and the People’s Republic of China ought to increase bilateral engagement on space issues by resuming the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange. The PRC should give all information and developed products regarding the appropriation of outer space to the United States.
Solves: - Space war - Crisis escalation - Miscalc - Space debris - heg – revitalizes US leadership
KAFURA 2/10 CRAIG KAFURA (Assistant director for public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project), “RENEW SPACE DIALOGUE WITH CHINA” War on the Rocks, 2/10/2022. Accessed 2/11/2022. https://warontherocks.com/2022/02/renew-space-dialogue-with-china/ CT
In 2013, the United States needed to warn the People’s Republic of China about a potential satellite collision in low Earth orbit. Washington’s only way of doing so: sending a close approach notification to a fax number in China, which they hoped would be received, read, and acted upon in time to avoid disaster. Fortunately, at the 2014 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the United States and China were able to discuss the problem and find a better solution: email. Things improved further the following year, with the two sides establishing a direct link for both sides to share information about potential satellite collisions. That success was followed by launch of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue in 2015 and two Space Security Exchanges chaired by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May and December of 2016. However, despite the increasing relevance of space to broader issues in the Sino-American relationship, neither group has met since 2017. Renewing these space dialogues is an urgent priority because the stakes for strategic drift are catastrophic. Next time a potentially dangerous issue arises in space — and there will be a next time — in the absence of these regular points of contact, the two countries might not be so lucky. It’s thus high time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange to prevent space accidents from inadvertently escalating into conflict. Both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange were born out of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the Obama administration’s flagship effort to engage China. The annual multi-day dialogue ran from 2008 to 2016, consisted of both economic and strategic dialogue tracks, and brought together American and Chinese heads of state and top policymakers from a wide range of departments across the U.S. and Chinese governments. And it was through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue that the United States and China were able to move from the fax era into the age of email. As a recent report on the Strategic and Economic Dialogue from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and the American Friends Service Committee shows, dialogue mechanisms like the Space Security Exchange and Civil Space Dialogue are key to managing the significant asymmetries in the relationship between the United States and China. The differences in the American and Chinese governance systems can easily create unintentional misunderstandings of both policy and intent. The substantive content of these dialogues can help reduce misperceptions and identify areas of potential cooperation, while consistent, repeated dialogues provide regular points of contact that can persist through the ups and downs inherent in Sino-American relations. With both sides seeking to put guardrails on the relationship, and with a tentative agreement to engage in dialogue on strategic issues, the Biden administration should propose — and Beijing should accept — a renewal of the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue and Space Security Exchange. After years of silence, there is certainly a lot to talk about. Military Uses of Space: Seizing the High Ground China’s space security developments are long in the making. Beijing designated space as a new domain of warfare in its 2015 defense white paper, arguing that outer and cyber space had “become new commanding heights in strategic competition.” And as the Department of Defense’s 2021 report to Congress on China’s military and security developments highlights, space and counterspace operations are increasingly important for the People’s Liberation Army. Run out of the Strategic Support Force, the Space Systems Department is responsible for nearly all of China’s military operations in space, including launch, surveillance, and warfare. While many of their space capabilities are focused on command, control, and intelligence functions, others have more offensive aims. That includes the ground-based anti-satellite weapon demonstrated very publicly in 2007, which destroyed a Chinese weather satellite and created a massive space debris field that continues to endanger other objects in low-earth orbit. The Financial Times’ 2021 reporting on a purported Chinese nuclear-capable hypersonic missile test — in which a platform launched from China circled the globe before diving to attack a target — fixed Washington’s attention on these emerging space-adjacent technologies and revived Cold War memories of similar Soviet systems as well as the nuclear arms race. While Chinese officials have denied the military applications of the test, hypersonic gliders like the DF-17 are hardly the only new technology in development. As the most recent report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence notes, Beijing is deeply involved in the development of space and counterspace capabilities, with such capabilities “intended to target U.S. and allied satellites” and “integral to potential military campaigns by the People’s Liberation Army.” Nor is China the only one with eyes fixed on the heavens. News reports claim that the United States is poised to unveil a previously secret space weapon. Key targets of this unveiling: policymakers in Moscow and Beijing. Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pushed for greater transparency around American military capabilities in space, arguing that “deterrence does not happen in the classified world.” But as with nuclear arms, deterrence and reassurance go hand in hand. And just as analysts have noted the need to avoid a nuclear arms race with China, the United States should seek to avoid sparking an arms race in space. A space arms race — particularly further testing of destructive anti-satellite weapons — puts the peaceful use of space at risk for the whole of humanity. Space Issues Are Strategic Issues Given both the U.S. and Chinese footprints in outer space, space issues are also strategic issues. And recent reports that the Chinese military is moving to a launch-on-warning footing for its nuclear forces makes a resumption of bilateral space security exchanges with China all the more urgent. As the 2021 Department of Defense report on Chinese capabilities notes, part of China’s early warning system to detect ballistic missile launches is space-based, as is the U.S. system. At the same time, the Department of Defense reports that Chinese experts focus on the need to “cripple or destroy the enemy’s information system … by making it blind, deaf or paralyzed.” Both the United States and China expect the other to target space-based assets, such as early-warning satellites, with just this goal in mind. This is a deadly combination. It would be all too easy for either side to interpret a satellite accident — either a collision with debris or a simple system failure — as an attempt to take out its early-warning network and thus the first strike in a potentially nuclear war. At the time of the June 2021 Biden-Putin summit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian noted China’s willingness “to have bilateral dialogue with relevant sides with mutual respect and on an equal footing” on issues of strategic stability. The United States should take them up on their offer in a renewed Space Security Exchange. The initial U.S.-China Space Security Exchanges, held in May and December of 2016, were led by the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with additional participants from the Chinese Ministry of Defense and the China National Space Agency. Frank Rose, then assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, chaired the talks for the U.S. side, saying they were “a very good dialogue … a real discussion rather than just an exchange of talking points.” However, those dialogue processes lapsed after 2016 and have not been renewed. Reviving the U.S.-China Space Security Exchange would bring bilateral discussions on space security in line with how Washington engages other countries on space issues — at present, the United States has over a dozen dialogues on space security with countries like Japan, India, and Russia. Moreover, a regular, repeated dialogue on space security issues would bring together U.S. and Chinese officials working on space security, establish common understandings of one another’s national policy, and allow them to build working relationships that could help defuse a crisis before it escalates. Civil Space: It’s Getting Crowded Up Here But it’s not just the military use of space that Washington and Beijing need to discuss. Civilian space issues, too, are part of the geostrategic landscape. And with low Earth orbit getting increasingly crowded, both sides have issues that need to be addressed. In 2021, China’s Tiangong space station twice had to maneuver to avoid colliding with StarLink satellites put into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation. In response, China submitted a formal complaint through the United Nations, pointing to the responsibilities of all countries party to Outer Space Treaty. Ratified in 1967, the treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, establishes that space and celestial bodies will be freely explored for peaceful purposes, and precludes claims of sovereignty over non-Earth territories — though it does not go so far as to ban military activities in space. The treaty also states that countries are responsible for the actions of their nations’ commercial actors — and thus the United States is responsible for the actions of SpaceX. This isn’t the first time SpaceX has been criticized for its behavior in outer space. And the problem is only going to grow more serious: The 2,000 StarLink satellites currently deployed are only a fraction of the planned total of 30,000 as part of SpaceX’s second-generation low Earth orbit broadband constellation. Of course, America’s SpaceX is not the only one interested in building massive satellite constellations. The newly-created state-owned (and independent of existing telecoms) China Satellite Network Group has been tasked with launching China’s own broadband satellite constellation, with plans for roughly 13,000 satellites. With so many satellites heading into low Earth orbit in the coming years, experts fear additional near-misses — or even collisions — between orbiting satellites. Why the concern over satellite collisions? In a word, debris. Whether produced by an anti-satellite weapons test or an accidental collision, any collision in low Earth orbit creates additional orbiting space debris, which in turn increases the probability of additional collisions — and more debris. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to a catastrophic cascade of collisions (“Kessler Syndrome”) of the type featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Academy Award-winning film Gravity. Such a cascade event would leave low Earth orbit an inhospitable place for human spaceflight. With the United States and China both launching thousands of satellites into orbit in the coming years, bilateral dialogue between the two will be critical to reining in the growth of space debris. A formal dialogue process such as the Civil Space Dialogue would provide officials on both sides an arena to identify critical problems, connect the appropriate authorities to one another, and address issues of common concern. Making Space to Keep Outer Space an Open Space Resuming the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue is also an easier to bar to clear than other, broader forms of civil cooperation between the United States and China on space issues. One barrier to that cooperation is the Wolf amendment, which limits engagement with China on space issues. Named for former Rep. Frank Wolf, the language has been included in the annual appropriations bill since 2011 and puts a number of obstacles in front of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(as well as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Space Council) for any efforts to coordinate or collaborate with China or any Chinese company. While not a ban on interactions with China on space issues, the amendment has certainly chilled past efforts at engaging China in these areas. The U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue, hosted by the U.S. Department of State, provided an easier path to get American and Chinese space experts in the same room (though officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were still required to submit advanced certification to Congress that the meeting would not violate the Wolf restrictions in order to participate in the dialogue). Resuming a pair of dialogues might not seem like enough given the stakes and the scope of issues at hand. Space policy experts have proposed a range of potential policies for the United States to pursue, including a voluntary moratorium on anti-satellite weapons tests, legally binding agreements on space security as part of a broader space arms control agenda, and even a global ban on anti-satellite testing. These proposals all have their merits. But the United States is a long way from engaging China in an arms control framework for space. At present, U.S.-Chinese relations are still in rough shape, with limited engagement on most issues. While officials from the Biden administration have stated their desire to engage China in discussions of nuclear arms control, the United States and China are not currently engaged in any such talks. Nor have the United States and China ever concluded a bilateral nuclear arms control agreement, though the United States has far more experience negotiating over nuclear weapons than on space arms control. The U.S.-Chinese relationship also now lacks the overarching framework for discussion once provided by the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which, though oft maligned in Washington, D.C., produced many successful outcomes for the United States. If the United States and China cannot manage to sustain a basic level of dialogue on space issues, grander proposals — no matter their policy rigor — will never take off. These two dialogue processes can also focus and motivate internal policy discussions in Washington and Beijing. As space experts have pointed out, one obstacle to the United States promoting a common set of space norms in its own behavior is that the United States itself does not have a shared understanding across agencies of what those norms should be. One of the conclusions from our investigation of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was the role that the annual dialogue process served in forcing both sides — American and Chinese alike — to engage in interagency negotiations back home over issues of common concern. A call for engagement and dialogue with China might seem quaint given the public funeral for the era of engagement. Yet the Biden administration has continued to seek a dialogue process with Beijing, as indicated by the repeated engagements between high-level U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts and by President Joe Biden’s own direct dialogues with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Per Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the Biden administration’s approach to China is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be” — a line oft repeated by administration officials. Space issues, both civil and security, are and will continue to be a mixture of collaboration and competition. But both the United States and China should engage with one another to ensure that that competition does not lead to space becoming an adversarial arena. Given the outstanding space issues in the Sino-American relationship, it’s time to re-launch both the Civil Space Dialogue and the Space Security Exchange.
2/19/22
JF- China Regulation CP
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 2 | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Gordon Krauss Text: The United States should invest all in developing space-based solar power and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) should commit to investing more money and research into regulation of space based solar power.
2/5/22
JF- Extra T Asteroid Mining Commons
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lexington AM | Judge: Savit Bhat Interpretation – The affirmative can only garner offense from “the appropriation of outer space by private entities being unjust”. To clarify, they can’t garner offense off of methods to solve private entities appropriating outer space such as treaties or actor action.
Violation – They have extra offense from having states adopting a global public trust doctrine regulating space resources.
Standards: 1 Limits – Only our interp accurately sets the upper limit to the topic. The CI will let the aff garner offense from any possible way to reduce property rights/private appropriation, which can range from treaties like OST, PTD, Common Heritage or state/actor action, which there are hundreds of. 0 chance the neg can prep for all possible offense relating to space possible and forces random LARP generics, turns edu by spreading us thin Voters - 1 Education – 2-month time limit on the topic means every round is valuable. Specific education about the direct question the resolution asks is the only take away we get from this event. Precision in what they aff can read forces concise topic research in a limited area that allows us to deeply explore every area of the topic. 2 Fairness – Fairness controls engagement with the 1AC and what we are actually able to do in the round. If the game stops becoming fair we have no reason to play in the first place. If every round was 80/20 skewed towards the aff then no one would ever be able to play the game. Fairness is key to clash and is an internal link into any of their offense
Paradigms - Extra T is drop the debater – We indict your ability to read and garner offense from the affirmative in the first place. Competing interps over reasonability – Reasonability is always arbitrary and innvites judge intervention No RVIs on Extra T –
1/23/22
JF- GEO PIC
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 2 | Opponent: Midtown FB | Judge: Dillon Johnson PIC without Actor - The appropriation of geostationary orbit by private entries is just. GEO is different than LEO because a.) it’s much further out from the earth b.) satellites in GEO continuously occupy the same location in space. The non-appropriation principle applied to geostationary orbit locks in inequality by shutting out less advanced states. CP solves by greenlighting the sale and lease of GEO slots.
Thornburg 19 MATTHEW THORNBURG (associate editor), “Are the Non-appropriation Principle and the Current Regulatory Regime Governing Geostationary Orbit Equitable for All of Earth’s States?,” The Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol 40 (2019). http://www.mjilonline.org/are-the-non-appropriation-principle-and-the-current-regulatory-regime-governing-geostationary-orbit-equitable-for-all-of-earths-states/ CT Notions of fairness and common benefit ring throughout the body of international law governing outer space. Indeed, the very preamble of the Outer Space Treaty (“OST”) declares that: The exploration and use of outer space should be carried on for the benefit of all peoples irrespective of the degree of their economic or scientific development…”1 However, such noble, egalitarian ideas for the future use of outer space may actually create unequal outcomes down on Earth. This blog seeks to briefly highlight just one example of the unfair limits on the use of outer space for less-developed countries as a result of the Outer Space Treaty’s (“OST”) non-appropriation principle. As the law currently stands, geostationary orbit – a constant orbital position above Earth’s equator – is governed by the OST and is therefore subject to the treaty’s attendant ban on national appropriation. Spaces, or slots, in geostationary orbit2 are desired because they are exceedingly convenient for communicating with earth. They are highly limited and as a consequence, highly valuable. Moreover, these spaces are allotted on a first-come-first-served basis3 making them virtually unattainable by less scientifically and economically advanced states4, or those that are just plain late to the game. The ban on national appropriation is enumerated in the Second Article of the OST, which states: “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by other means.”5 The geostationary orbital position is generally agreed upon by experts6 as part of “outer space” and consequently, forbidden from appropriation. The OST is clear in prohibiting claims of sovereignty, but the subsequent clauses leave much to interpretation when considering what other acts constitute “national appropriation.” In other words, the question surrounding geostationary orbital slots is “whether the continued exclusive occupation by a geostationary satellite of the same physical area is a violation of the ban on national appropriation”7 by use, occupation, or other means. In his article, Major Legal Issues Arising from the Use of the Geostationary Orbit, Stephen Gorove says that, “it is not clear that a satellite in geostationary orbit would be able to maintain its exact position and occupy the same area over a period of time…” so as to “appropriate” and thus violate Article II of the OST The analysis should not turn on whether the satellites in geostationary orbit maintain their exact position. Instead, it is the continual use of the orbital slot that should be examined in light of the OST prohibition. The average lifespan of a geostationary satellite is 15-20 years,8 effectively shutting out any other state’s use of that slot for at least that long. A time frame of this nature seems to be the exact type of “use or occupation” the treaty seeks to foreclose because of the consequent unequal access to the use of space, and the consequent potential to cement the economic interests of certain nations and firms. Compounding this concern is the fact that operators of the geostationary satellites need only refile with the International Telecommunications Union (“ITU”) to “renew” a slot and replace old satellites with new ones.9 Essentially, such operators keep the orbital slot indefinitely. In light of the OST – a treaty dominated by goals of fair and equitable use and access to space – endless use of these valuable slots should rise to the level of national appropriation by means of use, occupation, or other means. The system of geostationary orbital space allocation has elicited several responses, the most famous of which was the Bogotá Declaration (“Declaration”), drafted in resistance to the non-appropriation principle. This was a proclamation by eight equatorial states, which claimed that the geostationary orbit directly above their borders was an integral part of the land over which they exercised complete and exclusive sovereignty.10 Accordingly, each state claimed that its sovereignty had been breached by the presence of foreign satellites. This argument failed to garnish much support and the Declaration was not signed by a single space faring nation. The Declaration’s opponents refused to entertain the idea of sovereignty over geostationary orbit as it would be an affront to the non-appropriation principle. Though according to the Declaration, this principle is exactly what “enabled the de facto sovereignty over geostationary orbit of dominant, global north states”11 in the first place. By simply appealing to the non-appropriation principle, scientifically and economically advanced states can reject arguments similar to the Bogotá Declaration out of hand while maintaining their own unfettered use of space. The non-appropriation principle makes orbital slots available to “all” states by law, but in reality they are only available to states with the scientific and economic means to use them. In a world where the non-appropriation principle has become customary international law,12 less developed states have attempted to benefit from outer space in other ways. For example, in 1991 the ITU granted Tonga six orbital positions, but shortly thereafter, its national satellite company began renting and auctioning its spaces to other satellite companies, including a Colorado firm.13 There were various rebukes of Tonga’s actions by both states and private companies, describing the practice as “a transparent attempt to secure as many orbital slots as possible to trade as a commodity for pecuniary gain.”14 It was also viewed as a violation of the fundamental principle of non-appropriation. In an effort to avoid such situations occurring again in the future, the ITU now conducts rigorous reviews in an effort to ensure that there are genuine intentions for orbital slots.15 Following Tonga, it’s clear that states cannot trade an orbital slot granted to them as a pseudo-commodity claim. Based on the lukewarm response to the Bogotá Declaration, it also seems that the international community will not recognize orbital slights by virtue of a nation’s sovereign right to the space over its territory. Of course, there are valid arguments supporting the international rejection of the Bogota Declaration, especially since the national-appropriation principle constitutes international law. But as shown by Tonga, under the current system, even if a less-developed state is afforded geostationary slots, the non-appropriation principle prevents the financial benefit from the sale or lease of such slot.16 In contrast, private communications firms, and by proxy their home states, are able to benefit financially by selling a stable stream of satellite transmissions to consumers. If the non-appropriation principle allows such private financial gain, why shouldn’t it allow a state to gain in any way it sees fit from the allocation of orbital slots? The principle’s net effect is maintaining the status quo for those states that won the race of placing satellites in geostationary orbit. Effectively then, orbital slots are only valuable for one reason: their use. Only those states with the capabilities to support government space programs, or the economic stability to support space-capable private firms, will be able to place satellites into geostationary orbit. It seems that the non-appropriation principle has had the effect of replicating in space the global financial imbalance on Earth. While the non-appropriation principle has appeared to create disproportionate results regarding the use of outer space, such results do appear to be the unintended consequences of an optimistic treaty governing space. Nevertheless, it is critical that the international community begins to reconsider the effects of that treaty, and the legal regime as a whole, on the equitable use of space. As the economic potential of outer space is further unlocked, the function of the non-appropriation principle may have become outdated. Certainly, any change to longstanding international law – namely a revision of the ban on national appropriation – would have significant unintended consequences of its own. However, with the increasing exploitation of outer space for financial gain, the effect of the non-appropriation principle on geostationary orbital allotment will be one of many examples of less developed states being foreclosed from participating in, and benefiting from, the use of space.
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.
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.
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
1/23/22
JF- Lunar Mining and Tourism DA
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 5 | Opponent: Plano East Senior RP | Judge: Tej Gedela Extinction is possible now, lunar mining is vital to colonizing space and ensuring human survival – provides resources and development of human transportation and settlement Lowman 8 – PhD, geophysicist (14 January 2008. “Why Go Back to the Moon?” http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/series/moon/why_go_back.html)
Returning to the 21st century: Given these splendid accomplishments by astronauts on the Moon, why bother to go back? Should we not "declare victory" and stay on (or near) Earth? Here are some reasons go back, although not necessarily to "colonize" the Moon. First, and most fundamental: the last few decades of space exploration and astronomy have shown that the universe is violent and dangerous, at least with respect to human life. To give a pertinent example: in 1908 an object of unknown nature – probably a comet – hit Siberia with a force equivalent to a hydrogen bomb. Had this impact happened a few hours later, allowing for the Earth’s rotation, this object would have destroyed St. Petersburg and probably much else. Going back some 65 million years, it is now essentially proven that an even greater impact wiped out not only the dinosaurs but most species living on Earth at the time. The importance of catastrophic impacts has only been demonstrated in recent decades, and space exploration has played a key role. The bleak conclusion to which these facts point is that humanity is vulnerable as long as we are confined to one planet. Obviously, we must increase our efforts to preserve this planet and its biosphere, an effort in which NASA satellites have played a vital role for many years. But uncontrollable external events may destroy our civilization, perhaps our species. We can increase our chances of long-term survival by dispersal to other sites in the solar system. Where can we go? At the moment, human life exists only on the Earth. But with modern technology, there are several other possibilities, starting with the Moon itself. Men have lived on the Moon for as long as three days, admittedly in cramped quarters, but they found the lunar surface easy to deal with and the Moon’s gravity comfortable and helpful. (Dropped tools, for example, didn’t float away into space as they do occasionally in Earth orbit.) To be sure, it would be an enormous and probably impossible task to transform the Moon into another Earth. However, it is clear that a lunar outpost comparable to, for example, the Little America of the 1930s, is quite feasible. But what could such an outpost accomplish? First, it could continue the exploration of the Moon, whose surface area is roughly that of North and South America combined. Six "landings" in North America would have given us only a superficial knowledge of this continent, and essentially none about its natural resources such as minerals, oil, water power, and soil. The Moon is a whole planet, so to speak, whose value is only beginning to be appreciated. The Moon is not only an interesting object of study, but a valuable base for study of the entire Universe, by providing a site for astronomy at all wavelengths from gamma rays to extremely long radio waves. This statement would have been unquestioned 30 years ago. But the succeeding decades of spectacular discoveries by space-based instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have led many astronomers such as Nobel Laureate John Mather to argue that the Moon can be by-passed, and that instruments in deep space at relatively stable places called Lagrangian points are more effective. A meeting was held at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in November 2006, on "Astrophysics Enabled by the Return to the Moon." This institute runs the Hubble Space Telescope program. However, the consensus emerging from the Baltimore meeting was that there are still valuable astronomical uses for instruments on the lunar surface. For example, low-frequency radio astronomy can only be effective from the far side of the Moon, where static from the Earth’s aurora is shielded. Another example of Moon-based astronomy can be the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), by radio telescopes that on the far side would be shielded from terrestrial interference. Small telescopes on the Moon’s solid surface could be linked to form interferometer arrays with enormous resolving power. Astronomy in a limited sense has already been done from the Moon, namely the Apollo 16 Ultraviolet telescope emplaced by Apollo astronauts and before that, the simple TV observations of Earth-based lasers by the Surveyor spacecraft. The much-feared lunar dust had no effect on these pioneering instruments. The Moon may offer mineral resources, so to speak, of great value on Earth. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, working with the Fusion Technology Institute of the University of Wisconsin, has shown that helium 3, an isotope extremely rare on Earth, exists in quantity in the lunar soil, implanted by the solar wind. If – a very big if – thermonuclear fusion for energy is produced on Earth, helium 3 would be extremely valuable for fusion reactors because it does not make the reactor radioactive. A more practicable use of helium 3, being tested at the University of Wisconsin, is the production of short-lived medical isotopes. Such isotopes must now be manufactured in cyclotrons and quickly delivered before they decay. But Dr. Schmitt suggests that small helium 3 reactors could produce such isotopes at the hospital. In any event, research on the use of helium 3 would clearly benefit if large quantities could be exported to the Earth. Returning to the most important reason for a new lunar program, dispersal of the human species, the most promising site for such dispersal is obviously Mars, now known to have an atmosphere and water. Mars itself is obviously a fascinating object for exploration. But it may even now be marginally habitable for astronaut visits, and in the very long view, might be "terraformed," or engineered to have a more Earth-like atmosphere and climate. This was described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Red Mars and its successors Green and Blue Mars. A second Earth, so to speak, would greatly improve our chances of surviving cosmic catastrophes. Where does the Moon fit into this possibility? First, it would continue to give us experience with short interplanetary trips, which is what the Apollo missions were. These would demonstrably be relatively short and safe compared to Mars voyages, but would provide invaluable test flights, so to speak. More important, shelters, vehicles, and other equipment built for the Moon could be over-designed, and with modification could be used on Mars after being demonstrated at a lunar outpost. Where could humanity expand to beyond Mars and the Moon? At this point, still early in the history of space exploration, it is impossible to say. The Galilean satellites of Jupiter, in particular Ganymede, might be habitable, but we venture here far into the field of science fiction. However, an outpost on the Moon is clearly possible, and would provide an invaluable stepping-stone to Mars. A species living on three planets would be far more likely to have a long history than one living only on the Earth. To put the arguments for a return to the Moon, and a lunar outpost, in the most general terms: the Moon is essentially a whole planet, one that has so far been barely touched. But this new planet is only a few days travel away and we have already camped on it. To turn our backs on the Moon would be equivalent to European exploration stopping after Columbus’s few landings, or China’s destruction of its giant ships to concentrate on domestic problems in the 15th century.
However, without private appropriation space colonization will not happen – no incentives, and would result in conflict. Thomas 05 Jonathan Thomas,“Privatization of Space Ventures: Proposing a Proven Regulatory Theory for Future Extraterrestral Appropriation,” 1 BYU Int'l L. and Mgmt. R. 191 (2005). https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/ilmr/vol1/iss1/7CT
The current corpus juris spatialis based on res communis has received wide criticism by legal commentators, in part because of the practical limitations of its idealistic principles in application. For example, one commentator addressing the potential problems of future colonization of celestial bodies argued that the prohibition against private and national appropriation may cause deleterious effects when colonizers build settlements. Although these colonizers may occupy the property, they will have no legal control of their communities and could be uprooted for the purposes of putting that property to a better use for the benefit of common heritage. This risk may serve as a strong disincentive to the preservation of sectarian colonization in a res communis society. Other commentators argue that the current corpus juris spatialis based on the idealistic res communis principle has actually slowed the development of outer space exploration because privately and publicly funded organizations cannot appropriate outer space.61 Under the corpus juris spatialis, there exists no probability or possibility of return on investments, which results in insufficient monetary incentive for businesses or private persons. Even with the daunting needs created by increasing population and consumption, and decreasing resources on earth, many states may not even attempt to exploit extraterrestrial resources because the current corpus juris spatialis does not guarantee that their own citizens will benefit from the investments made with their tax dollars. A future lack of resources, combined with a body of law that mandates common ownership of potential resources, may create a black market for extraterrestrial resources, or it may engender armed conflicts over the lack of supplies available to states.63 Lunar mining is key to get to Mars – provides cheaper launches, fuel, and technological innovation Dolzome et al in 10 (Dolzome, Mining and Explosives specialist. John Millis, About Guide for space and astronomy. David Morrison, NASA Lunar Science Institute Senior Scientist. 2010. “Mining the Moon Makes Mission to Mars Realistic”
Why going to Mars is so important? Is it linked to Mars resources exploitation? Amongst the impressive list of (good) reasons to start such a challenging endeavor, there has been, at that stage, very few or no mention of mining resources exploitation. To which extend lunar mining operations would pave way for mission to mars? Most of specialists agree on the following: A lunar base built from locally extracted construction materials and metals would by-pass the limitation in term of embarked weight we are currently facing with Earth’s-launched rockets. The Moon could be an excellent pit stop for further missions (propellant, energy, water, oxygen). The Moon would also be a real size laboratory to assess and improved all the technology involved. Lower attraction (1/6th of Earth’s) and absence of atmosphere, would make easier and cheaper spaceships take off to Mars and beyond. Discovery of Lunar ice have been a major event. Chandrayaan-1 detected in 2009 both water and hydroxyl molecules (oxygen and hydrogen atoms) trapped or mixed up in the regolith. This comes to confirm Deep Impact Probe and Cassini Space Probe unexpected readings. “Finding water on the Moon has surprised and excited scientists. Water was not expected, since the moon rocks brought back by Apollo from the equatorial regions of the Moon were extremely dry. Since then more sensitive instruments have detected small amounts of water in chemical combination with other minerals. But the biggest discovery was of frozen water (ice) in some dark craters near the lunar north pole and south pole. The floors of these craters are among the coldest places in the solar system, so once a water molecule arrives there, it stays forever as ice. The amount of ice on these crater floors turns out to be larger than expected. This ice, which contains other molecules besides water, records the history of comet impacts on the Moon over the past billion years. In addition, we may someday be able to mine this ice and use the water to make rocket fuel and oxygen for astronauts to use”,wrote David Morrison, NASA Lunar Science Institute Senior Scientist In 2010, John Millis, About Guide for Space and Astronomy wrote: “Should We Return to the Moon? Is It Worth the Risk? (…) there are valuable resources on the Moon that we can use for other space missions. Particularly, liquid oxygen is a major component of the propellant needed for current space travel. NASA believes that this resource can be easily extracted from the Moon and stored at deposit sites for use by other missions -- particularly by a manned mission to Mars”.
The plan will spur further space exploration, asteroid defense and space tourism Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut, 4 (October 2004, Harrison H., Popular Mechanics, “Mining the Moon,” vol. 181, no. 10, Academic Search Premier, JMP)
Returning to the moon would be a worthwhile pursuit even if obtaining helium-3 were the only goal. But over time the pioneering venture would pay more valuable dividends. Settlements established for helium-3 mining would branch out into other activities that support space exploration. Even with the next generation of Saturns, it will not be economical to lift the massive quantities of oxygen, water and structural materials needed to create permanent human settlements in space. We must acquire the technical skills to extract these vital materials from locally available resources. Mining the moon for helium-3 would offer a unique opportunity to acquire those resources as byproducts. Other opportunities might be possible through the sale of low-cost access to space. These additional, launch-related businesses will include providing services for government-funded lunar and planetary exploration, astronomical observatories, national defense, and long-term, on-call protection from the impacts of asteroids and comets. Space and lunar tourism also will be enabled by the existence of low-cost, highly reliable rockets. With such tremendous business potential, the entrepreneurial private sector should support a return to the moon, this time to stay. For an investment of less than $15 billion — about the same as was required for the 1970s Trans Alaska Pipeline — private enterprise could make permanent habitation on the moon the next chapter in human history. "Learning how to mine the moon for helium-3 will create the technological infrastructure for our inevitable journeys to Mars and beyond." "A new, modernized Saturn rocket should be capable of launching 100-ton payloads to the moon." Failure to colonize guarantees extinction Munevar '19 Gonzalo; 4/19/19; Professor at Lawrence Technical University; "Deflecting Existential Risk with Space Colonization," https://filling~-~-space.com/2019/04/19/deflecting~-~-existential~-~-risk~-~-with~-~-space~-~-colonization/ Why do you argue that “failure to move into the cosmos would condemn us to oblivion”? By having a significant presence in the solar system in the next few thousands of years and beyond, we will be in a better position to deflect asteroids and comets that might bring the end of humanity, and much other Earth life, in a horrible collision. And if perchance one such catastrophe proves inevitable (e.g. a rogue planet passing through the solar system), humanity would still survive by having colonized Mars and other bodies, as well as by having built artificial space colonies of the type advocated by Gerard O’Neill. Once the sun begins to turn into a red giant in a few billion years, we must have long moved into the outer solar system. In the very long run, we have to move into other solar systems. Relativistic--speed starships would be nice, but they are not necessary for the task of moving humanity to the stars. We can reach them, slowly but surely, by propelling some of our space colonies away from the sun, carrying perhaps millions of human beings. They would take advantage of the many resources to be found in the Oort Cloud, and then of equivalent clouds in other solar systems. Even interstellar space has resources to offer. Nuclear energy, probably fusion, would likely be required. It may take us tens of thousands of years, but in the cosmic time scale, that is but a blink in the eye. What are these catastrophic threats? Are there any records of catastrophic events happening before humans appeared on Earth? I have already mentioned collisions with asteroids and comets. Although the active geology of our planet tends to erase the record of many collisions, we can find a well--preserved record on the Moon and Venus, the two closest bodies to Earth. On the 600--million--years--old Venusian surface, the spacecraft Magellan discovered about one thousand impact craters at least twice the diameter of meteor craters on Earth. This impact record makes it reasonable to estimate a catastrophic impact on Earth every half a million years or so. Collisions with bodies of 5 km across would happen, on the average, every 20 million years. Apart from the Alvarez asteroid (crater near Yucatan) that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the majority of species on Earth 65 million years ago, there have been at least two more impacts by asteroids 10 km or larger in the last 300 million years.
1/23/22
JF- Nebel V2
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 4 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Yoyo Lei Interpretation—the aff may not defend a subset of appropriation. Appropriation is a 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? Their plan violates. Rules readings are always generalized – specific instances are not consistent. 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 In general, as, again, already noted by Aristotle, rules and definitions are not relativized to particular individuals; it is rarely the case that a specific individual¶ forms part of the description of a general rule.¶ Even DPs of the form a certain X or a particular X, which usually receive¶ a wide scope interpretation, cannot, in general, receive such an interpretation in the context of a rule or a definition. This holds of definitions in general, not¶ only of definitions with an IS subject. The following examples from the Cobuild¶ dictionary illustrate this point:¶ (74) a. A fanatic is a person who is very enthusiastic about a particular¶ activity, sport, or way of life.¶ b. Something that is record-breaking is better than the previous¶ record for a particular performance or achievement.¶ c. When a computer outputs something it sorts and produces information as the result of a particular program or operation.¶ d. If something sheers in a particular direction, it suddenly changes¶ direction, for example to avoid hitting something. 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 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 type of appropriation offers huge explosion in the topic since space is, quite literally, infinite. Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps –reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation Hypothetical neg abuse doesn’t justify aff abuse, and theory checks cheaty CPs No RVIs—it’s their burden to be topical.
2/6/22
JF- New Affs Bad
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 2 | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Gordon Krauss A. Interp: The affirmative must disclose the plan text at least 30 minutes before the round. B. Violation- they ran a new affirmative C. Standards a. Clash – having no idea what the debate will be about makes being neg impossible – the aff gets plan text choice and infinite prep to craft the most strategic case. No disclosure makes this impossible to overcome b/c it means the neg only gets 4 mins of prep to answer a strategy that the AFF had 5 months to prep. b. Discourages tricks – plan text disclosure discourages cheap shot aff’s. If the aff isn’t inherent or easily defeated by 20 minutes of research, the case should lose. They had months – the neg is entitled to some research time to make sure the AFF is inherent, topical, and controversial. Otherwise bad AFF’s can win on purely surprise factor, which is a bad model b/c it encourages finding the most fringe surprising case possible instead of a well researched and defensible aff D. Voters a. This is UNIQUELY important in this round because their choice of aff …. (uses uncommon definitions/a small country/a specific subsect) b. Vote on substantive engagement: otherwise we’re speaking without debating and there’s nothing to separate us from dueling oratory. It also creates the most valuable long-term skills since we need to learn how to defend our beliefs in any context, like politics.
2/5/22
JF- Russia Fill In DA
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati Russian space program powerless without a Sino-Russian space alliance right now, but in order to circumvent the plan, China helps Russia fill in as the US’s space leader Luke Harding {Guardian foreign correspondent. His book Shadow State is published by Guardian Faber.}, 21 - ("The space race is back on – but who will win?," Guardian, 7-16-2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/the-space-race-is-back-on-but-who-will-win)//marlborough-wr/ The biggest challenge to US space supremacy comes not from Russia – heir to the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme, which launched the Sputnik satellite and got the first human into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin – but from China. In 2011 Congress prohibited US scientists from cooperating with Beijing. Its fear: scientific espionage. Taikonauts are banned from visiting the ISS, which has hosted astronauts from 19 countries over the past 20 years. The station’s future beyond 2028 is uncertain. Its operations may yet be extended in the face of increasing Chinese competition. In its annual threat assessment this April, the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) described China as a “near-peer competitor” pushing for global power. It warns: “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.” The Biden administration suspects Chinese satellites are being used for non-civilian purposes. The People’s Liberation Army integrates reconnaissance and navigation data in military command and control systems, the DNI says. “Satellites are inherently dual use. It’s not like the difference between an F15 fighter jet and a 737 passenger plane,” Hilborne says. Once China completes the Tiangong space station next year, it is likely to invite foreign astronauts to take part in missions. One goal: to build new soft-power alliances. Beijing says interest from other countries is enormous. The low Earth orbit station is part of an ambitious development strategy in the heavens rather than on land – a sort of belt and rocket initiative. According to Alanna Krolikowski, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a “bifurcation” of space exploration is under way. In one emerging camp are states led by China and Russia, many of them authoritarian; in the other are democracies and “like-minded” countries aligned with the US. Russia has traditionally worked closely with the Americans, even when terrestrial relations were bad. Now it is moving closer to Beijing. In March, China and Russia announced plans to co-build an international lunar research station. The agreement comes at a time when Vladimir Putin’s government has been increasingly isolated and subject to western sanctions. In June, Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping renewed a friendship treaty. Moscow is cosying up to Beijing out of necessity, at a time of rising US-China bipolarity. These rival geopolitical factions are fighting over a familiar mountainous surface: the moon. In 2019 a Chinese rover landed on its far side – a first. China is now planning a mission to the moon’s south pole, to establish a robotic research station and an eventual lunar base, which would be intermittently crewed. Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to put a woman and a person of colour on the moon by 2024. SpaceX has been hired to develop a lander. The return to the moon – after the last astronaut, commander Eugene Cernan, said goodbye in December 1972 – would be a staging post for the ultimate “giant leap”, Nasa says: sending astronauts to Mars. Krolikowski is sceptical that China will quickly overtake the US to become the world’s leading spacefaring country. “A lot of what China is doing is a reprisal of what the cold war space programmes did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said. Beijing’s recent feats of exploration have as much to do with national pride as scientific discovery, she says. But there is no doubting Beijing’s desire to catch up, she adds. “The Chinese government has established, or has plans for, programmes or missions in every major area, whether it’s Mars missions, building mega constellations of telecommunications satellites, or exploring asteroids. There is no single area of space activity they are not involved in.” “We see a tightening of the Russia-China relationship,” Krolikowski says. “In the 1950s the Soviet Union provided a wide range of technical assistance to Beijing. Since the 1990s, however, the Russian space establishment has experienced long stretches of underfunding and stagnation. China now presents it with new opportunities.” Russia is poised to benefit from cost sharing, while China gets deep-rooted Russian technical expertise. At least, that’s the theory. “I’m sceptical this joint space project will materialise anytime soon,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Gabuev says both countries are “techno-nationalist”. Previous agreements to develop helicopters and wide-bodied aircraft saw nothing actually made, he says.
Russia and China are in a space arms race- the plan causes China to bow out and Russia wins 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 of the United States’ two great-power adversaries when it comes to anti-satellite weapons. China and Russia have sprinted to develop and deploy both ground-based and space-based weapons targeting satellites while simultaneously pushing the United States to sign a treaty banning such weapons. To protect its vital space-based military capabilities—including communications, intelligence, and missile defense satellites—and effectively deter authoritarian aggression, Washington should avoid being drawn into suspect international treaties on space that China and Russia have no intention of honoring. The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which Beijing and Moscow have submitted at the United Nations, is a perfect example. PPWT signatories commit “not to place any weapons in outer space.” It also says parties to the treaty may not “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects” or engage in activities “inconsistent” with the purpose of the treaty. On the surface, that sounds innocuous. Who, after all, wants an arms race in space? The reality, however, is that China and Russia are already racing to field anti-satellite weapons and have been for quite some time. “The space domain is competitive, congested, and contested,” Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, said in January. “Our competitors, most notably China and Russia, have militarized this domain.” Beijing already has an operational ground-based anti-satellite missile capability. People’s Liberation Army units are training with the missiles, and the U.S. Defense Department believes Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit.” That is where America’s most sensitive nuclear communication and missile defense satellites orbit and keep watch. Similarly, Moscow tested a ground-based anti-satellite weapon in December that could destroy U.S. or allied satellites in orbit. That attack capability augments a ground-based laser weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin heralded in 2018. In a moment of candor, Russia’s defense ministry admitted the system was designed to “fight satellites.” To make matters worse, both countries are also working to deploy space-based—or so-called “on-orbit”—capabilities to attack satellites. This link turns their first scenario, and unchecked Russian influence risks extinction Fisher ‘15 (Max, Foreign affairs columnist @ VOX, "How World War III became possible," 6/29, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war) That is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I: an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments, disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and will not force the other party into conflict. Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself. Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon. In some ways, that logic has grown even more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness, has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view appears to be radically different. Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear weapons even in a more limited war. This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited" nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable. "It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War." Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine.
2/19/22
JF- Russia Fill In DA
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati Russian space program powerless without a Sino-Russian space alliance right now, but in order to circumvent the plan, China helps Russia fill in as the US’s space leader Luke Harding {Guardian foreign correspondent. His book Shadow State is published by Guardian Faber.}, 21 - ("The space race is back on – but who will win?," Guardian, 7-16-2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/the-space-race-is-back-on-but-who-will-win)//marlborough-wr/ The biggest challenge to US space supremacy comes not from Russia – heir to the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme, which launched the Sputnik satellite and got the first human into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin – but from China. In 2011 Congress prohibited US scientists from cooperating with Beijing. Its fear: scientific espionage. Taikonauts are banned from visiting the ISS, which has hosted astronauts from 19 countries over the past 20 years. The station’s future beyond 2028 is uncertain. Its operations may yet be extended in the face of increasing Chinese competition. In its annual threat assessment this April, the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) described China as a “near-peer competitor” pushing for global power. It warns: “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.” The Biden administration suspects Chinese satellites are being used for non-civilian purposes. The People’s Liberation Army integrates reconnaissance and navigation data in military command and control systems, the DNI says. “Satellites are inherently dual use. It’s not like the difference between an F15 fighter jet and a 737 passenger plane,” Hilborne says. Once China completes the Tiangong space station next year, it is likely to invite foreign astronauts to take part in missions. One goal: to build new soft-power alliances. Beijing says interest from other countries is enormous. The low Earth orbit station is part of an ambitious development strategy in the heavens rather than on land – a sort of belt and rocket initiative. According to Alanna Krolikowski, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a “bifurcation” of space exploration is under way. In one emerging camp are states led by China and Russia, many of them authoritarian; in the other are democracies and “like-minded” countries aligned with the US. Russia has traditionally worked closely with the Americans, even when terrestrial relations were bad. Now it is moving closer to Beijing. In March, China and Russia announced plans to co-build an international lunar research station. The agreement comes at a time when Vladimir Putin’s government has been increasingly isolated and subject to western sanctions. In June, Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping renewed a friendship treaty. Moscow is cosying up to Beijing out of necessity, at a time of rising US-China bipolarity. These rival geopolitical factions are fighting over a familiar mountainous surface: the moon. In 2019 a Chinese rover landed on its far side – a first. China is now planning a mission to the moon’s south pole, to establish a robotic research station and an eventual lunar base, which would be intermittently crewed. Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to put a woman and a person of colour on the moon by 2024. SpaceX has been hired to develop a lander. The return to the moon – after the last astronaut, commander Eugene Cernan, said goodbye in December 1972 – would be a staging post for the ultimate “giant leap”, Nasa says: sending astronauts to Mars. Krolikowski is sceptical that China will quickly overtake the US to become the world’s leading spacefaring country. “A lot of what China is doing is a reprisal of what the cold war space programmes did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said. Beijing’s recent feats of exploration have as much to do with national pride as scientific discovery, she says. But there is no doubting Beijing’s desire to catch up, she adds. “The Chinese government has established, or has plans for, programmes or missions in every major area, whether it’s Mars missions, building mega constellations of telecommunications satellites, or exploring asteroids. There is no single area of space activity they are not involved in.” “We see a tightening of the Russia-China relationship,” Krolikowski says. “In the 1950s the Soviet Union provided a wide range of technical assistance to Beijing. Since the 1990s, however, the Russian space establishment has experienced long stretches of underfunding and stagnation. China now presents it with new opportunities.” Russia is poised to benefit from cost sharing, while China gets deep-rooted Russian technical expertise. At least, that’s the theory. “I’m sceptical this joint space project will materialise anytime soon,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Gabuev says both countries are “techno-nationalist”. Previous agreements to develop helicopters and wide-bodied aircraft saw nothing actually made, he says.
Russia and China are in a space arms race- the plan causes China to bow out and Russia wins 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 of the United States’ two great-power adversaries when it comes to anti-satellite weapons. China and Russia have sprinted to develop and deploy both ground-based and space-based weapons targeting satellites while simultaneously pushing the United States to sign a treaty banning such weapons. To protect its vital space-based military capabilities—including communications, intelligence, and missile defense satellites—and effectively deter authoritarian aggression, Washington should avoid being drawn into suspect international treaties on space that China and Russia have no intention of honoring. The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which Beijing and Moscow have submitted at the United Nations, is a perfect example. PPWT signatories commit “not to place any weapons in outer space.” It also says parties to the treaty may not “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects” or engage in activities “inconsistent” with the purpose of the treaty. On the surface, that sounds innocuous. Who, after all, wants an arms race in space? The reality, however, is that China and Russia are already racing to field anti-satellite weapons and have been for quite some time. “The space domain is competitive, congested, and contested,” Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, said in January. “Our competitors, most notably China and Russia, have militarized this domain.” Beijing already has an operational ground-based anti-satellite missile capability. People’s Liberation Army units are training with the missiles, and the U.S. Defense Department believes Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit.” That is where America’s most sensitive nuclear communication and missile defense satellites orbit and keep watch. Similarly, Moscow tested a ground-based anti-satellite weapon in December that could destroy U.S. or allied satellites in orbit. That attack capability augments a ground-based laser weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin heralded in 2018. In a moment of candor, Russia’s defense ministry admitted the system was designed to “fight satellites.” To make matters worse, both countries are also working to deploy space-based—or so-called “on-orbit”—capabilities to attack satellites. This link turns their first scenario, and unchecked Russian influence risks extinction Fisher ‘15 (Max, Foreign affairs columnist @ VOX, "How World War III became possible," 6/29, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war) That is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I: an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments, disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and will not force the other party into conflict. Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself. Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon. In some ways, that logic has grown even more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness, has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view appears to be radically different. Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear weapons even in a more limited war. This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited" nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable. "It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War." Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine.
2/19/22
JF- Russia Fill In DA
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SP | Judge: Saketh Kotapati Russian space program powerless without a Sino-Russian space alliance right now, but in order to circumvent the plan, China helps Russia fill in as the US’s space leader Luke Harding {Guardian foreign correspondent. His book Shadow State is published by Guardian Faber.}, 21 - ("The space race is back on – but who will win?," Guardian, 7-16-2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/the-space-race-is-back-on-but-who-will-win)//marlborough-wr/ The biggest challenge to US space supremacy comes not from Russia – heir to the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme, which launched the Sputnik satellite and got the first human into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin – but from China. In 2011 Congress prohibited US scientists from cooperating with Beijing. Its fear: scientific espionage. Taikonauts are banned from visiting the ISS, which has hosted astronauts from 19 countries over the past 20 years. The station’s future beyond 2028 is uncertain. Its operations may yet be extended in the face of increasing Chinese competition. In its annual threat assessment this April, the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) described China as a “near-peer competitor” pushing for global power. It warns: “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.” The Biden administration suspects Chinese satellites are being used for non-civilian purposes. The People’s Liberation Army integrates reconnaissance and navigation data in military command and control systems, the DNI says. “Satellites are inherently dual use. It’s not like the difference between an F15 fighter jet and a 737 passenger plane,” Hilborne says. Once China completes the Tiangong space station next year, it is likely to invite foreign astronauts to take part in missions. One goal: to build new soft-power alliances. Beijing says interest from other countries is enormous. The low Earth orbit station is part of an ambitious development strategy in the heavens rather than on land – a sort of belt and rocket initiative. According to Alanna Krolikowski, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a “bifurcation” of space exploration is under way. In one emerging camp are states led by China and Russia, many of them authoritarian; in the other are democracies and “like-minded” countries aligned with the US. Russia has traditionally worked closely with the Americans, even when terrestrial relations were bad. Now it is moving closer to Beijing. In March, China and Russia announced plans to co-build an international lunar research station. The agreement comes at a time when Vladimir Putin’s government has been increasingly isolated and subject to western sanctions. In June, Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping renewed a friendship treaty. Moscow is cosying up to Beijing out of necessity, at a time of rising US-China bipolarity. These rival geopolitical factions are fighting over a familiar mountainous surface: the moon. In 2019 a Chinese rover landed on its far side – a first. China is now planning a mission to the moon’s south pole, to establish a robotic research station and an eventual lunar base, which would be intermittently crewed. Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to put a woman and a person of colour on the moon by 2024. SpaceX has been hired to develop a lander. The return to the moon – after the last astronaut, commander Eugene Cernan, said goodbye in December 1972 – would be a staging post for the ultimate “giant leap”, Nasa says: sending astronauts to Mars. Krolikowski is sceptical that China will quickly overtake the US to become the world’s leading spacefaring country. “A lot of what China is doing is a reprisal of what the cold war space programmes did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said. Beijing’s recent feats of exploration have as much to do with national pride as scientific discovery, she says. But there is no doubting Beijing’s desire to catch up, she adds. “The Chinese government has established, or has plans for, programmes or missions in every major area, whether it’s Mars missions, building mega constellations of telecommunications satellites, or exploring asteroids. There is no single area of space activity they are not involved in.” “We see a tightening of the Russia-China relationship,” Krolikowski says. “In the 1950s the Soviet Union provided a wide range of technical assistance to Beijing. Since the 1990s, however, the Russian space establishment has experienced long stretches of underfunding and stagnation. China now presents it with new opportunities.” Russia is poised to benefit from cost sharing, while China gets deep-rooted Russian technical expertise. At least, that’s the theory. “I’m sceptical this joint space project will materialise anytime soon,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Gabuev says both countries are “techno-nationalist”. Previous agreements to develop helicopters and wide-bodied aircraft saw nothing actually made, he says.
Russia and China are in a space arms race- the plan causes China to bow out and Russia wins 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 of the United States’ two great-power adversaries when it comes to anti-satellite weapons. China and Russia have sprinted to develop and deploy both ground-based and space-based weapons targeting satellites while simultaneously pushing the United States to sign a treaty banning such weapons. To protect its vital space-based military capabilities—including communications, intelligence, and missile defense satellites—and effectively deter authoritarian aggression, Washington should avoid being drawn into suspect international treaties on space that China and Russia have no intention of honoring. The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which Beijing and Moscow have submitted at the United Nations, is a perfect example. PPWT signatories commit “not to place any weapons in outer space.” It also says parties to the treaty may not “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects” or engage in activities “inconsistent” with the purpose of the treaty. On the surface, that sounds innocuous. Who, after all, wants an arms race in space? The reality, however, is that China and Russia are already racing to field anti-satellite weapons and have been for quite some time. “The space domain is competitive, congested, and contested,” Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, said in January. “Our competitors, most notably China and Russia, have militarized this domain.” Beijing already has an operational ground-based anti-satellite missile capability. People’s Liberation Army units are training with the missiles, and the U.S. Defense Department believes Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit.” That is where America’s most sensitive nuclear communication and missile defense satellites orbit and keep watch. Similarly, Moscow tested a ground-based anti-satellite weapon in December that could destroy U.S. or allied satellites in orbit. That attack capability augments a ground-based laser weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin heralded in 2018. In a moment of candor, Russia’s defense ministry admitted the system was designed to “fight satellites.” To make matters worse, both countries are also working to deploy space-based—or so-called “on-orbit”—capabilities to attack satellites. This link turns their first scenario, and unchecked Russian influence risks extinction Fisher ‘15 (Max, Foreign affairs columnist @ VOX, "How World War III became possible," 6/29, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war) That is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I: an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments, disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and will not force the other party into conflict. Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself. Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon. In some ways, that logic has grown even more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness, has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view appears to be radically different. Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear weapons even in a more limited war. This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited" nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable. "It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War." Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine.
2/19/22
JF- T Appropriation
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 4 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Yoyo Lei Interpretation: Appropriation is permanently taking property for exclusive use. Gorove 69: Stephen Gorove, Interpreting Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, 37 Fordham L. Rev. 349 (1969). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol37/iss3/2 With respect to the concept of appropriation the basic question is what constitutes "appropriation," as used in the Treaty, especially in contradistinction to casual or temporary use. The term "appropriation" is used most frequently to denote the taking of property for one's own or exclusive use with a sense of permanence. Under such interpretation the establishment of a permanent settlement or the carrying out of commercial activities by nationals of a country on a celestial body may constitute national appropriation if the activities take place under the supreme authority (sovereignty) of the state. Short of this, if the state wields no exclusive authority or jurisdiction in relation to the area in question, the answer would seem to be in the negative, unless, the nationals also use their individual appropriations as cover-ups for their state's activities.5 In this connection, it should be emphasized that the word "appropriation" indicates a taking which involves something more than just a casual use. Thus a temporary occupation of a landing site or other area, just like the temporary or nonexclusive use of property, would not constitute appropriation. By the same token, any use involving consumption or taking with intention of keeping for one's own exclusive use would amount to appropriation. Violation: satellites aren’t appropriation. These companies do not take the EXCLUSIVE use of anything in space. These satellites can be launched by that doesn’t mean that’s appropriation.
Vote neg – two impacts:
Limits. Expanding the topic to anything that involves merely launching something into the atmosphere expands the topic into numerous new tech areas which undermines core neg prep. 2. Topic literature. Our definition has intent to define and exclude in the context of the OST, which is the core of all topic research and the only predictable source.
Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. No RVIs – they don’t get to win for following the rules.
2/6/22
JF- US PIC
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 4 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Yoyo Lei NC Shell – China + Spillover CP Text: States ought to ban appropriation of outer space by private entities via military tracking satellites except for the United States. 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 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 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/america-is-losing-the-second-space-race-to-china/)//marlborough-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.
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 Despite the seemingly unbalanced nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance, the argument for “balancing” the alliance with Japan’s development of an independent conventional missile strike capability does not take into account important repercussions that could undermine both regional stability and U.S. credibility. In addition, updated Japanese defense guidelines, such as CSD, already give Japan a “greater role” in global security. Unless future U.S. administrations drastically reduce the U.S. military presence in Asia, the benefit of a more equal alliance would not outweigh the potential costs of Japan’s adoption of a conventional missile strike capability. CONCLUSION The arguments supporting Japan’s acquisition of a conventional missile strike capability do not hold weight in the current regional, economic, and alliance environments. The development of such a capability is not a practical solution for Japan to abate the threat from the DPRK, and the move could be perceived by China and South Korea as facilitating a U.S. strategy of containment. Traditional restrictions on the Japanese defense budget would not practically allow the buildup of the military capabilities required for a conventional missile strike force, a restriction that cannot be changed without support from a military-wary public. At first glance, a “normal” Japan that is capable of contributing to U.S. deterrence efforts might seem appealing from an alliance perspective, especially after the 2010 U.S. defense budget cuts, and an increasingly threatening regional security environment. Yet, though the U.S.-Japan alliance may be unbalanced in terms of capabilities, the United States has broader interests in regional stability that will be better promoted if Japan maintains a purely defensive force. A strike-capable Japan might not only escalate an already tense regional standoff with China but also elicit a harsh response from other countries against Tokyo and Washington. It could also erode the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, potentially leading to increased militarization throughout Asia. If the environment surrounding any of these three arguments changes—for example, if the United States’ actions discredit its reliability to protect Japan under the alliance, if Japanese public support allows an increase in the JSDF’s budget, or if the United States can no longer maintain a credible military deterrence in Asia—Japan would have a strong argument to move forward with conventional missile strike capabilities. In that case, both parties should exercise prudence in their public communications of planned alliance cooperation on the matter and about how or why the alliance would choose to employ such abilities. Hawkish suggestions of the potential to increase U.S. dominance in the region should be avoided.81 China is rightfully wary of any reference to conventional prompt global strike. Such rhetoric coming from Japan or the United States combined with the decision to move forward on conventional missile strike capabilities could be considered a threatening signal by Beijing.82 Without calculated prudence in regional dialogues, even the discussion of Tokyo acquiring conventional missile strike capabilities could ultimately worsen the regional security environment rather than improve it.
2/6/22
JF- Xi DA
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 2 | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Gordon Krauss Despite resistance, the CCP regime is stable now – but challenges to legitimacy cause lashout Ball, MA in IR, 20 (Joshua, University of St. Andrews, https://globalsecurityreview.com/degree-chinas-internal-stability-depend-economic-growth/, April 10) BW For decades, Western academics, policymakers, and analysts assumed that China’s embrace of capitalist economic policies would set the stage for democratic reform. Almost three decades later, however, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains firmly in power under the increasingly autocratic leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping. While the CCP-controlled government faces a range of threats from groups within its borders, the idea of a downturn in the Chinese economy remains a very legitimate threat. The Chinese government has radically modernized its economic policies over the past three decades, completely reversing their initial Marxist or Maoist aversion to providing monetary compensation for labor. These reforms are responsible for the significant growth of the Chinese middle class, which has the potential to be the most influential group in China when looked at in regards to socio-economic status. As a result, the considerably large middle class has come to perceive the CCP as being responsible for their rising levels of prosperity. China has undoubtedly experienced the effects of the 2008-2009 global economic crisis; it indeed fared much better than the majority of the world. However, China still faces many hurdles to overcome. Rising Debt and Escalating Unemployment for Chinese College Graduates It is becoming increasingly difficult in China for college graduates to find jobs, the volume of China’s exports is dropping, and tens of millions of workers are out of work. The possibility of a financial crisis in China could challenge Beijing’s ability to hold up its side of the deal with the population. Since the inception of Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents,’ meant to attract private entrepreneurs to party membership, the middle and upper classes have seen the party as being responsible for their economic well-being. The government provides an environment for a healthy, regulated economy, to encourage the creation of private wealth and property, and in return has its rule legitimized by its people. Arguably, while it is individuals are responsible for the creation of personal wealth, the party made it possible. If the government or party cannot guarantee jobs to the people, there remains the little reason for the people to tolerate the strict control that the party maintains over the state. If the CCP-controlled government cannot sustain economic growth, it could be perceived by members of the growing middle class as violating the social contract that has existed between China’s citizens and the country’s ruling party elite. The CCP could face a challenge to its legitimacy if and when the time comes that it is unable to guarantee a healthy economy, prompting potential discontent from the middle class. Beijing has a track record of effectively suppressing unrest The Chinese government has become particularly adept at maintaining or regaining control over its people via means of physical repression, censorship, and through the creation of an environment where fear of speaking out is a legitimate means of control. Indeed, the likelihood of an economic downturn eliminating the CCP’s influence is minimal. Rising social discontent isn’t likely to be enough to force the party itself from power, but it might be sufficient to tempt some members of the elite to take advantage of the situation to their political benefit, thus leading to internal instability within the party and damaging its credibility. While the CCP has an extraordinary ability to suppress dissent, many argue that it can only contain such dissent for so long. However, due to the rapid proliferation of advanced technologies including surveillance, censorship, and controlled access to information, the Chinese authorities are empowered as never before, to monitor, identify, and censor those whose activities are a perceived threat to the party. Nevertheless, a sustained economic downturn poses a threat to the CCP’s legitimacy. Continued civil unrest on the part of groups desiring independence from CCP rule as a result of religious suppression and ethnic inequality illustrate not-insignificant threats to the party’s ability to maintain total control over the Chinese state. Regardless, the most significant threat to the power monopoly held by the CCP is a pronounced economic downturn. The plan erodes CCP legitimacy. Xi and CCP leadership have made the privatization of space their top priority for military and economic superiority. Marlborough reads yellow: Patel 21 (Neel, space reporter for MIT Technology Review, and I also write The Airlock newsletter, your number one source for everything happening off this planet. Before joining, he worked as a freelance science and technology journalist, contributing stories to Popular Science, The Daily Beast, Slate, Wired, the Verge, and elsewhere. Prior to that, he was an associate editor for Inverse, where I grew and led the website’s space coverage.) “China’s surging private space industry is out to challenge the US” MIT Technology Review, 1/21/2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ BC How did China get here—and why? Until recently, China’s space activity has been overwhelmingly dominated by two state-owned enterprises: the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Limited (CASIC) and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). A few private space firms have been allowed to operate in the country for a while: for example, there’s the China Great Wall Industry Corporation Limited (in reality a subsidiary of CASC), which has provided commercial launches since it was established in 1980. But for the most part, China’s commercial space industry has been nonexistent. Satellites were expensive to build and launch, and they were too heavy and large for anything but the biggest rockets to actually deliver to orbit. The costs involved were too much for anything but national budgets to handle. That all changed this past decade as the costs of making satellites and launching rockets plunged. In 2014, a year after Xi Jinping took over as the new leader of China, the Chinese government decided to treat civil space development as a key area of innovation, as it had already begun doing with AI and solar power. It issued a policy directive called Document 60 that year to enable large private investment in companies interested in participating in the space industry. “Xi’s goal was that if China has to become a critical player in technology, including in civil space and aerospace, it was critical to develop a space ecosystem that includes the private sector,” says Namrata Goswami, a geopolitics expert based in Montgomery, Alabama, who’s been studying China’s space program for many years. “He was taking a cue from the American private sector to encourage innovation from a talent pool that extended beyond state-funded organizations.” As a result, there are now 78 commercial space companies operating in China, according to a 2019 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. More than half have been founded since 2014, and the vast majority focus on satellite manufacturing and launch services. For example, Galactic Energy, founded in February 2018, is building its Ceres rocket to offer rapid launch service for single payloads, while its Pallas rocket is being built to deploy entire constellations. Rival company i-Space, formed in 2016, became the first commercial Chinese company to make it to space with its Hyperbola-1 in July 2019. It wants to pursue reusable first-stage boosters that can land vertically, like those from SpaceX. So does LinkSpace (founded in 2014), although it also hopes to use rockets to deliver packages from one terrestrial location to another. Spacety, founded in 2016, wants to turn around customer orders to build and launch its small satellites in just six months. In December it launched a miniaturized version of a satellite that uses 2D radar images to build 3D reconstructions of terrestrial landscapes. Weeks later, it released the first images taken by the satellite, Hisea-1, featuring three-meter resolution. Spacety wants to launch a constellation of these satellites to offer high-quality imaging at low cost. To a large extent, China is following the same blueprint drawn up by the US: using government contracts and subsidies to give these companies a foot up. US firms like SpaceX benefited greatly from NASA contracts that paid out millions to build and test rockets and space vehicles for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. With that experience under its belt, SpaceX was able to attract more customers with greater confidence. Venture capital is another tried-and-true route. The IDA report estimates that VC funding for Chinese space companies was up to $516 million in 2018—far shy of the $2.2 billion American companies raised, but nothing to scoff at for an industry that really only began seven years ago. At least 42 companies had no known government funding. And much of the government support these companies do receive doesn’t have a federal origin, but a provincial one. “These companies are drawing high-tech development to these local communities,” says Hines. “And in return, they’re given more autonomy by the local government.” While most have headquarters in Beijing, many keep facilities in Shenzhen, Chongqing, and other areas that might draw talent from local universities. There’s also one advantage specific to China: manufacturing. “What is the best country to trust for manufacturing needs?” asks James Zheng, the CEO of Spacety’s Luxembourg headquarters. “It’s China. It’s the manufacturing center of the world.” Zheng believes the country is in a better position than any other to take advantage of the space industry’s new need for mass production of satellites and rockets alike. Diversionary conflict – it escalates. Hassid, PhD, 19 (Jonathan, PoliSci@Berkeley, AssistProfPoliSci@IowaState, A Poor China Might Be More Dangerous Than a Rich China, in Foreign Policy Issues for America, ed. Richard Mansbach DPhil and James McCormick PhD, Routledge) China has a number of political differences and potential conflicts with the United States, some of which are summarized in Chapter 4. From China’s vast maritime territorial claims, the anomalous status of Taiwan to America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea, its treatment of Tibetans and Islamic minorities like the Uighurs, and its reluctance to implement UN-sponsored sanctions to force North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons, there are many potential flash points in the Sino-U.S. relationship. Many analysts noted that at the 19th Party Congress Xi Jinping promoted a more aggressive and muscular foreign policy, promising that China would become a world superpower by 2050. This fact alone could presage eventual conflict with the current reigning superpower, the United States. Indeed, many in China and across Asia feel that President Trump’s pullout from the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have already signaled US retreat from the region, opening the way for a more assertive Chinese foreign policy. Some analysts go further, arguing that China is even now trying to build its own world order and muscle out U.S. trade influence by signing new bilateral trade agreements with historical U.S. allies like Canada. These signs may point to potential conflict in the future. However there is also reason to be hopeful; relations between the two giants were normalized in the 1970s, and thus far China and the United States have avoided serious conflict. In part this has been a result of U.S. policies in the region and because China has been able to increase its global status peacefully. But perhaps the most important reason conflict has been avoided is because Beijing has looked inwardly, concentrating on generating economic growth within its borders rather than making trouble beyond them. President Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that the United States must be more assertive in foreign affairs and in realizing its national interest regardless of the impact on others. His rhetoric has been highly combative. From vowing to declare China a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office – a claim he has since abandoned – to arguing that China has been cheating America in trade deals and denouncing the U.S. trade deficit with China, Trump has appeared to prefer confronting Beijing rather in engaging and cooperating with China. But this appearance of confrontation may belie a different reality. Many have noted that Trump and his family have personal business ties with China, including large investments and numerous pending trademark applications. Actions like Trump’s 2018 public support for state-owned Chinese tech company ZTE – coming just two days after the Chinese government announced a US $500m investment in a Trump-branded property in Indonesiaiii – further suggest to some that Beijing might be directly manipulating the US president to benefit Chinese foreign policy. Combined with the perception, common in Chinese official circles, that the United States under Trump is actually retreating from its commitments in Asia, the result might be additional areas of potential conflict with China and misperception and misunderstanding between the two. What might happen if there were an unintended Sino-American military confrontation in the South China Sea or the Sea of Japan, just as the Chinese economy slumps and triggers spreading labor unrest and disturbances at home? What might happen if Xi Jinping’s goal of having “no poverty in China by 2020” proves impossible, and China’s middle class becomes alienated from the regime and political dissent spreads owing to acute economic and/or environmental distress? Under such circumstances, China’s history suggests that Xi and other leaders might decide a “minor” foreign conflict would be a way to divert the attention of Chinese citizens from their domestic concerns. In China’s past, as we have seen, such “domestically-influenced” conflicts have been contained, but the very success of these previously limited conflicts might make Chinese leaders overconfident about their ability to avoid military escalation. Mistakes are easy to make, especially if the potential foe has a leader who tweets militant threats. If Beijing sought to distract an unhappy population by stirring up Chinese nationalism toward the United States, Taiwan, or Japan regarding maritime territorial claims, for example, and believes the Trump administration will not intervene, the two might careen toward a war that neither wants. An incident caused by a trigger-happy U.S. pilot or Chinese naval officer might escalate into a war that neither Washington nor Beijing sought. In the end, then, it may arguably better for the Trump administration that China continues to flourish economically. A prosperous China means that the United States has a valuable trading partner and – in certain issues – even a strategic partner. An impoverished China, however, might be bad news for everyone.
2/5/22
ND- Nebel T Workers
Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Serena Lu Interpretation: workers is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that a just government ought to recognize the unconditional right of a specific type of workers to strike. Nebel 19 Jake Nebel Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. , 8-12-2019, "Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution," Briefly, https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/ SM Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. 1.1 “Colleges and Universities” “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universities generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. Fourth, it is extremely unlikely that the topic committee would have written the resolution with the existential interpretation of “colleges and universities” in mind. If they intended the existential interpretation, they would have added explicit existential quantifiers like “some.” No such addition would be necessary or expected for the generic interpretation since generics lack explicit quantifiers by default. The topic committee’s likely intentions are not decisive, but they strongly suggest that the generic interpretation is correct, since it’s prima facie unlikely that a committee charged with writing a sentence to be debated would be so badly mistaken about what their sentence means (which they would be if they intended the existential interpretation). The committee, moreover, does not write resolutions for the 0.1 percent of debaters who debate on the national circuit; they write resolutions, at least in large part, to be debated by the vast majority of students on the vast majority of circuits, who would take the resolution to be (pretty obviously, I’d imagine) generic with respect to “colleges and universities,” given its face-value meaning and standard expectations about what LD resolutions tend to mean.
It applies to workers:
Upward entailment test – spec fails the upward entailment test because saying that a just government ought to recognize the right of one type of workers to strike does not entail that all nations ought to recognize the right of all workers to strike 2. Adverb test – adding “usually” to the res doesn’t substantially change its meaning
Vote neg:
Semantics outweigh: it’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement – there’s no way to use ground if debaters aren’t prepared to defend it
2. Limits – there are countless affs accounting for thousands of different professions and any combination thereof– unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden – potential abuse doesn’t justify foregoing the topic and 1AR theory checks PICs
3. TVA solves – read as an advantage to whole rez
Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation
11/6/21
ND- Nebel T Workers
Tournament: Damus | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva Interpretation—the aff may not defend a subset of governments 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? Rules readings are always generalized – specific instances are not consistent. 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 In general, as, again, already noted by Aristotle, rules and definitions are not relativized to particular individuals; it is rarely the case that a specific individual¶ forms part of the description of a general rule.¶ Even DPs of the form a certain X or a particular X, which usually receive¶ a wide scope interpretation, cannot, in general, receive such an interpretation in the context of a rule or a definition. This holds of definitions in general, not¶ only of definitions with an IS subject. The following examples from the Cobuild¶ dictionary illustrate this point:¶ (74) a. A fanatic is a person who is very enthusiastic about a particular¶ activity, sport, or way of life.¶ b. Something that is record-breaking is better than the previous¶ record for a particular performance or achievement.¶ c. When a computer outputs something it sorts and produces information as the result of a particular program or operation.¶ d. If something sheers in a particular direction, it suddenly changes¶ direction, for example to avoid hitting something. 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 the member nations of the EU. TVA solves – read as an advantage to whole rez 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 government offers huge explosion in the topic since they get permutations of hundreds of governments in the world. Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps –reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation Hypothetical neg abuse doesn’t justify aff abuse, and theory checks cheaty CPs No RVIs—it’s your burden to be topical.
11/7/21
ND- Pandemic PIC
Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Serena Lu Plan Text: A just government ought to recognize the right of healthcare workers to strike except for healthcare workers responding to pandemics. Nurse strikes devastate hospitals Wright 10 Sarah H. Wright July 2010 "Evidence on the Effects of Nurses' Strikes" https://www.nber.org/digest/jul10/evidence-effects-nurses-strikes (Researcher at National Bureau of Economic Research) U.S. hospitals were excluded from collective bargaining laws for three decades longer than other sectors because of fears that strikes by nurses might imperil patients' health. Today, while unionization has been declining in general, it is growing rapidly in hospitals, with the number of unionized workers rising from 679,000 in 1990 to nearly one million in 2008. In Do Strikes Kill? Evidence from New York State (NBER Working Paper No. 15855), co-authors Jonathan Gruber and Samuel Kleiner carefully examine the effects of nursing strikes on patient care and outcomes. The researchers match data on nurses' strikes in New York State from 1984 to 2004 to data on hospital discharges, including information on treatment intensity, patient mortality, and hospital readmission. They conclude that nurses' strikes were costly to hospital patients: in-hospital mortality increased by 19.4 percent and hospital readmissions increased by 6.5 percent for patients admitted during a strike. Among their sample of 38,228 such patients, an estimated 138 more individuals died than would have without a strike, and 344 more patients were readmitted to the hospital than if there had been no strike. "Hospitals functioning during nurses' strikes do so at a lower quality of patient care," they write. Still, at hospitals experiencing strikes, the measures of treatment intensity -- that is, the length of hospital stay and the number of procedures performed during the patient's stay -- show no significant differences between striking and non-striking periods. Patients appear to receive the same intensity of care during union work stoppages as during normal hospital operations. Thus, the poor outcomes associated with strikes suggest that they might reduce hospital productivity. These poor health outcomes increased for both emergency and non-emergency hospital patients, even as admissions of both groups decreased by about 28 percent at hospitals with strikes. The poor health outcomes were not apparent either before or after the strike in the striking hospitals, suggesting that they are attributable to the strike itself. And, the poor health outcomes do not appear to do be due to different types of patients being admitted during strike periods, because patients admitted during a strike are very similar to those admitted during other periods. Hiring replacement workers apparently does not help: hospitals that hired replacement workers performed no better during strikes than those that did not hire substitute employees. In each case, patients with conditions that required intensive nursing were more likely to fare worse in the presence of nurses' strikes. Hospitals are the critical internal link for pandemic preparedness. Al Thobaity 20, Abdullelah, and Farhan Alshammari. "Nurses on the frontline against the COVID-19 pandemic: an Integrative review." Dubai Medical Journal 3.3 (2020): 87-92. (Associate Professor of Nursing at Taif University) The majority of infected or symptomatic people seek medical treatment in medical facilities, particularly hospitals, as a high number of cases, especially those in critical condition, will have an impact on hospitals 4. The concept of hospital resilience in disaster situations is defined as the ability to recover from the damage caused by huge disturbances quickly 2. The resilience of hospitals to pandemic cases depends on the preparedness of the institutions, and not all hospitals have the same resilience. A lower resilience will affect the sustainability of the health services. This also affects healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals 5, 6. Despite the impact on healthcare providers, excellent management of a pandemic depends on the level of preparedness of healthcare providers, including nurses. This means that if it was impossible to be ready before a crisis or disaster, responsible people will do all but the impossible to save lives.
Healthcare workers are key to saving millions of lives during COVID-19 through treatment and administering vaccines Garrett Ilg, 21 - ("Celebrating Healthcare Workers and the Technology that Empowers Them," Oracle APAC, 4-7-2021, https://www.oracle.com/apac/news/announcement/blog/celebrating-healthcare-workers-technology-2021-04-05.html?source=:so:ch:or:awr::::)/AK As we observe the World Health Organization’s World Health Day on April 7, I want to celebrate the people and institutions on the front lines of healthcare worldwide—especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Their steely dedication and relentless innovation have produced multiple, highly effective coronavirus vaccines in record time. They’ve administered close to 460 million doses of those vaccines, according to the WHO, saving countless millions of lives. And they’ve treated a large subset of about 125 million confirmed cases, often at great personal risk and with insufficient resources. Oracle’s National Electronic Health Records Database and the Oracle Public Health Management System, built by a global team that worked round the clock, in partnership with government and non-government institutions, played a critical role in that Herculean effort. In addition to electronically screening hundreds of thousands of volunteers for COVID-19 clinical trials, the system has collected millions of daily health updates from patients and healthcare providers. It was designed from the ground up to scale to the populations of entire nations as COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available. New Pandemics are deadlier and faster are coming – COVID is just the beginning Future pandemics cause extinction Eleftherios P. Diamandis 21 (works for the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. “The Mother of All Battles: Viruses vs. Humans. Can Humans Avoid Extinction in 50-100 Years? 4/13/21 https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202104.0397/v1 The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID 19 disease, has taught us unexpected lessons about the dangers of human extinction through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID 19 pandemic is now being controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics and vaccines, it became clear that our current lifestyle and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to face the next dangerous pandemic, not just overcoming the one that is upon us now. Is there any evidence that even worse pandemics could strike us in the near future and threaten the existence of the human race? The answer is unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses of bats, pangolins and other exotic animals that live in remote forests in order to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates that the human gut microbiota harbor billions of viruses which are capable of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune system, lung, brain, liver, kidney, heart etc. It is possible that the development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to contagious viruses which can cause pandemics, leading to destruction of vital organs, causing death or various debilitating diseases such as blindness, respiratory, liver, heart and kidney failures. These diseases could result n the complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the extinction of human race. In this essay, I will first provide a few independent pieces of scientific facts and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly not all) hypothetical scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction. I hope that these scary scenarios will trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.
11/6/21
ND- Post Work K
Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Serena Lu 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. This culminates in 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.
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.
11/6/21
ND- Util NC
Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brentwood AR | Judge: George Zhang The standard is consistency with utilitarianism. 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. 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.
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. 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. Autonomy collapses to util – violation of autonomy is a consequence On their consequentialism bad arguments a) All their stuff about human happiness is how they evaluate how autonomy is good or not; when they say things like “help workers everywhere” and “bad working conditions” these contextualize what is good based on consequences b) There are violations to personal autonomy all the time- taxes, schooling, health decisions, etc. The affirmative has to prove that their impact of autonomy is uniquely important. c) When people are dead there is no longer autonomy
11/6/21
ND- Work K V2
Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brentwood AR | Judge: George Zhang 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. This is the biggest violation to autonomy. 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. This culminates in 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.
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.
11/6/21
SO- COVID CP
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 2 | Opponent: Christopher Columbus NG | Judge: Ben Cortez Counterplan: High-income country governments, backed by the United States, should provide all necessary funding to purchase COVID-19 vaccines developed by drug companies at any reasonable cost and distribute them as requested world-wide. Lindsay 6/11 - Brink Lindsay, Brookings, 6-11, 2021, Why intellectual property and pandemics don’t mix, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/ Waiving patent protections is certainly no panacea. What is needed most urgently is a massive drive of technology transfer, capacity expansion, and supply line coordination to bring vaccine supply in line with global demand. Dispensing with patents in no way obviates the need for governments to fund and oversee this effort.¶ Although focusing on these immediate constraints is vital, we cannot confine our attention to the short term. First of all, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. Although Americans can now see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the rapid rollout of vaccines, most of the world isn’t so lucky. The virus is¶ currently raging in India and throughout South America, overwhelming health care systems and inflicting suffering and loss on a horrific scale. And consider the fact that Australia, which has been successful in suppressing the virus, recently announced it was sticking to plans to keep its borders closed until mid-2022. Criticisms of the TRIPS waiver that focus only on the next few months are therefore short-sighted: this pandemic could well drag on long enough for elimination of patent restrictions to enable new vaccine producers to make a positive difference.¶ Furthermore, and probably even more important, this is almost certainly not the last pandemic we will face. Urbanization, the spread of factory-farming methods, and globalization all combine to increase the odds that a new virus will make the jump from animals to humans and then spread rapidly around the world. Prior to the current pandemic, the 21st century already saw outbreaks of SARS, H1N1, MERS, and Ebola. Everything we do and learn in the current crisis should be viewed from the perspective of getting ready for next time.¶ The Nature of the Patent Bargain¶ When we take the longer view, we can see a fundamental mismatch between the policy design of intellectual property protection and the policy requirements of effective pandemic response. Although patent law, properly restrained, constitutes one important element of a well-designed national innovation system, the way it goes about encouraging technological progress is singularly ill-suited to the emergency conditions of a pandemic or other public health crisis. Securing a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments would thus establish a salutary precedent that, in emergencies of this kind, governments should employ other, more direct means to incentivize the development of new drugs.¶ Here is the basic bargain offered by patent law: encourage the creation of useful new ideas for the long run by slowing the diffusion of useful new ideas in the short run. The second half of the bargain, the half that imposes costs on society, comes from the temporary exclusive rights, or monopoly privileges, that a patent holder enjoys. Under U.S. patent law, for a period of 20 years nobody else can manufacture or sell the patented product without the permission of the patent holder. This allows the patent holder to block competitors from the market, or extract licensing fees before allowing them to enter, and consequently charge above-market prices to its customers. Patent rights thus slow the diffusion of a new invention by restricting output and raising prices.¶ The imposition of these short-run costs, however, can bring net long-term benefits by sharpening the incentives to invent new products. In the absence of patent protection, the prospect of easy imitation by later market entrants can deter would-be innovators from incurring the up-front fixed costs of research and development. But with a guaranteed period of market exclusivity, inventors can proceed with greater confidence that they will be able to recoup their investment.¶ For the tradeoff between costs and benefits to come out positive on net, patent law must strike the right balance. Exclusive rights should be valuable enough to encourage greater innovation, but not so easily granted or extensive in scope or term that this encouragement is outweighed by output restrictions on the patented product and discouragement of downstream innovations dependent on access to the patented technology.¶ Unfortunately, the U.S. patent system at present is out of balance. Over the past few decades, the expansion of patentability to include software and business methods as well as a general relaxation of patenting requirements have led to wildly excessive growth in these temporary monopolies: the number of patents granted annually has¶ skyrocketed roughly fivefold since the early 1980s. One unfortunate result has been the rise of “non-practicing entities,” better known as patent trolls: firms that make nothing themselves but buy up patent portfolios and monetize them through aggressive litigation. As a result, a law that is supposed to encourage innovation has turned into a¶ legal minefield for many would-be innovators. In the pharmaceutical industry, firms have abused the law by piling up patents for trivial, therapeutically irrelevant “innovations” that allow them to¶ extend their monopolies and keep raising prices long beyond the statutorily contemplated 20 years.¶ Patent law is creating these unintended consequences because policymakers have been caught in an ideological fog that¶ conflates “intellectual property” with actual property rights over physical objects. Enveloped in that fog, they regard any attempts to put limits on patent monopolies as attacks on private property and view ongoing expansions of patent privileges as necessary to keep innovation from grinding to a halt. In fact, patent law is a tool of regulatory policy with the usual tradeoffs between costs and benefits; like all tools, it can be misused, and as with all tools there are some jobs for which other tools are better suited. A well-designed patent system, in which benefits are maximized and costs kept to a minimum, is just one of various policy options that governments can employ to stimulate technological advance—including tax credits for RandD, prizes for targeted inventions, and direct government support.¶ Public Health Emergencies and Direct Government Support¶ For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis. It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing. Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation. Vaccinating the world in any kind of reasonable time frame will require large-scale technology transfer to drug firms in other countries and rapid expansion of their production capacity. And looking beyond the current pandemic to the longer term, we need ample, redundant global vaccine production capacity that is widely distributed around the planet. To achieve these goals as rapidly as possible will require the active cooperation of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which is why the direct support model now needs to be extended. What is needed now is an Operation Warp Speed for the world, in which we make it worth current vaccine producers’ while to share their know-how broadly and ramp up global capacity. Here again, we must recognize that the choice isn’t between people on the one hand and profits on the other. Rather, the key to good pandemic response policy is ensuring that incentives are structured so that drug company profit-seeking and global public health are well aligned. That means opting out of the default, decentralized patent bargain in favor of generous but well-focused direct government support.
9/18/21
SO- Cap K
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 4 | Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Brett Boelkens The Aff’s portrayal of a world with reduced IP protections as an “information commons” where the opiod crisis is solved by deregulation perpetuates the neoliberal myth of increased competition ensuring a perfect market Kapczynski 14 (Amy, a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog. Her areas of research include information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health.) “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’S LEVIATHAN” Duke Law, Law and Contemporary problems, 2014. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4710andcontext=lcp BC Over the last decade or so, a powerful set of critiques has emerged to contest the dominant account just sketched out as well as the contemporary state of IP law.12 These arguments have come from many directions, some even arising from scholars who previously were champions of the dominant account.13 The most prominent and potent line of theoretical critique in the legal literature has come in the guise of arguments for free culture and the “information commons” and has been most influentially articulated by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.14 Both have stressed the problems with expansive exclusive rights regimes in information and have also sketched a set of actually existing alternatives to market-based exclusionary forms of information and cultural production. Lessig has written a series of influential books that have made him a “rock star of the information age,”15 particularly for young Internet and free-culture activists. He has argued powerfully, for example, that existing copyright law is in deep conflict with the radical new possibilities for creativity in the digital age. As he points out, when a mother posting a video of her toddler dancing to a Prince song on YouTube is threatened with a $150,000 fine for copyright infringement, something has gone seriously awry.16 Lessig also contends that copyright law today is too long, too expansive, and instantiates a “permission culture” that is antithetical to free expression in the age of the remix.17 As he puts it, “the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries,” creating the possibility of markets that “include a much wider and more diverse range of creators,” if not stifled by incumbents who use IP law to “protect themselves against this competition.”18 Benkler’s work has also been extraordinarily formative in the field, particularly for his insights into the multiplicity of modes of information production. As he has stressed, the conventional justification for IP does not account for the many successful and longstanding modes of market nonexclusionary information production.19 For example, attorneys write articles to attract clients, software developers sell services customizing free and opensource software for individual clients, and bands give music away for free to increase revenues from touring or merchandise.20 More pathbreaking still is Benkler’s account of the importance of “commons-based peer production,” a form of socially motivated and cooperative production exemplified by the volunteer network that maintains Wikipedia or the groups of coders who create open-source software products such as the Linux operating system.21 In the digital networked age, as Benkler describes, the tools of information production are very broadly distributed, “creating new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture.”22 These changes have increased the relative role in our information economy of nonproprietary production and facilitate “new forms of production that are based neither in the state nor in the market.”23 Because commons-based peer production is not hierarchically organized and is motivated by social dynamics and concerns, it also offers new possibilities for human development, human freedom, a more critical approach to culture, and more democratic forms of political participation.24 This line of critique has been profoundly generative and has helped launch an important new conceptualization of the commons as a paradigm. That paradigm, as a recent book puts it, “helps us ‘get outside’ of the dominant discourse of the market economy and helps us represent different, more wholesome ways of being.”25 Proponents of the commons concept draw upon contemporary articulations of successful commons-based resource management by Elinor Ostrom and her followers.26 They do mobilize retellings of the political and economic history of the commons in land in Europe before enclosure,27 and recent evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that suggests that humans have deep tendencies toward cooperation and reciprocation.28 They argue that A key revelation of the commons way of thinking is that we humans are not in fact isolated, atomistic individuals. We are not amoebas with no human agency except hedonistic “utility preferences” expressed in the marketplace. No: We are commoners—creative, distinctive individuals inscribed within larger wholes. We may have unattractive human traits fueled by individual fears and ego, but we are also creatures entirely capable of self-organization and cooperation; with a concern for fairness and social justice; and willing to make sacrifices for the larger good and future generations.29 This stands, of course, as a powerful rebuke to the neoliberal imaginary, which “constructs and interpellates individuals as . . . rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’— the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.”30 III Given this radical—and, in my view, critically important—attempt to rethink the subject at the core of neoliberal accounts, it is all the more striking that proponents of the commons often appear to adopt a neoliberal image of the state. For example, the introduction to a recently edited volume that gathers writings on the commons from seventy-three authors in thirty countries (entitled, tellingly, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State) has this to say: The presumption that the state can and will intervene to represent the interests of citizens is no longer credible. Unable to govern for the long term, captured by commercial interests and hobbled by stodgy bureaucratic structures in an age of nimble electronic networks, the state is arguably incapable of meeting the needs of citizens as a whole.31 The commons, they suggest, is a concept that seeks not only to liberate us from predatory and dysfunctional markets, but also from predatory and dysfunctional states. Something immediately seems incongruous here. If people are inherently cooperative reciprocators, why are states irredeemably corrupt? After all, as Harold Demsetz famously wrote in his 1967 attack on Arrow’s optimism about state production of information, “government is a group of people.”32 Lessig, one of the progenitors of the language of the commons in the informational domain, often leads with a similar view of the state: If the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering. Markets work better than Tammany Hall in deciding who should get what, when. Or as Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase put it, whatever problems there are with the market, the problems with government are more profound.33 Lessig reveals his own sense of the power of this conception of the state when he seeks to tar IP law with the same brush; we should rebel against current IP law, he suggests, because we should “limit the government’s role in choosing the future of creativity.”34 Benkler is more measured but admits as well to viewing the state as “a relatively suspect actor.”35 We should worry, he suggests, that direct governmental intervention “leads to centralization in the hands of government agencies and powerful political lobbies,”36 a view that echoes the neoliberal account described above. It should perhaps not surprise us that leading critics of neoliberal information policy embrace a neoliberal conception of the state. After all, neoliberalism is not merely an ideology, but also a set of policy prescriptions that may have helped to call forth the state that it has described. As David Harvey puts it, “the neoliberal fear that special-interest groups would pervert and subvert the state is nowhere better realized than in Washington, where armies of corporate lobbyists . . . effectively dictate legislation to match their special interests.”37 There are, it must be said, few areas of law that better exemplify this problem than IP law. For example, Jessica Litman has documented the astonishing process through which the 1976 Copyright Act was drafted, in which Congress delegated most of the drafting to interest groups that were forced to negotiate with one another.38 Other scholars have offered similarly startling accounts of the genesis of the most important IP treaty today, the TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. TRIPS came into force in 1996, revolutionizing international IP law by both imposing new standards and by rendering them enforceable through the WTO’s disputeresolution system, which authorizes trade retaliation to enforce its judgments. Most countries in the world are members of TRIPS, and the Agreement introduced, for developing countries in particular, substantial new obligations, such as the obligation to grant patents on medicines and food-related inventions. Several excellent histories of the treaty have been written, documenting its beginnings as a brash idea proposed by “twelve chief executive officers (representing pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries).”39 As Susan Sell has described, the TRIPS Agreement was a triumph of industry organizing. Through TRIPS, Industry revealed its power to identify and define a trade problem, devise a solution, and reduce it to a concrete proposal that could be sold to governments. These private sector actors succeeded in getting most of what they wanted from a global IP agreement, which now has the status of public international law.
Attempts to reform the WTO are neoliberal attempts to sustain the US regime of accumulation – the contradictions of neoliberalism are why credibility is low, not IP protection Bachand 20 (Remi, Professor of International Law, Département des sciences juridiques, member of the Centre d’études sur le droit international et la mondialisation (CÉDIM), Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada) “What’s Behind the WTO Crisis? A Marxist Analysis” The European Journal of International Law, 8/12/2020. https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article-abstract/31/3/857/5920920?redirectedFrom=fulltext BC To offer our own explanation, we must recall two aspects of our theoretical framework. The first is Robert Cox’s claim113 that the function of international organizations is to ensure the creation and reproduction of hegemony. To be more accurate, they serve, if we follow his argument, to defend and to expand the ‘mode of production’ (we elected to substitute this term for the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ that appears to be more appropriate for our means) of the dominant social classes of the dominant state. Joining this idea with the école de la régulation and social structure of accumulation theory writing114 according to which a regime of accumulation needs some regulation institutions to help resolve its contradictions (and ensure profits and capital accumulation to dominant social classes), we can conclude that the Geneva organization’s function in the US hegemonic order is to make sure that neoliberalism works well enough to provide a satisfying rate of profit for US capitalists. Going in that direction, Kristen Hopewell shows that the WTO’s creation participated in a shift in global governance from ‘embedded liberalism’ to neoliberalism115 and was slated to be an important part of that governance. Using the conceptual framework developed earlier, we can infer that the WTO was thus given a regulation function that was to ensure the operationalization of counteracting factors to the fall of the rate of profit for US capitalists. Now, as we have seen, the US rate of profit has been extremely unstable in the last two decades and Chinese expansion (and that of other ‘emerging countries’) allows one to predict that the situation could easily worsen in the future. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the crisis that has been striking neoliberalism for the last 20 years may also result in a crisis of the organizations that are supposed to manage its contradictions, especially the WTO. Concretely, this organization seems unable to fulfil its regulatory function anymore, which is to ensure US capitalists a good rate of profit and opportunities to operationalize enough counteracting factors to negate its fall. To go further, we now need to return to Stephen Gill’s claim that the function of an international organization is to limit political and economic possibilities. It is to exclude, in other words, options that are incompatible with the social order promoted by the hegemon from what is possible and achievable.116 Effectively, the WTO was created to play such a role. Indeed, promoting liberalization of goods and services, protecting (notably intellectual) property rights and attacking subsidies (in non-agriculture sectors), just to give a few examples, all serve to severely reduce state interventions into the economy and to circumscribe or at least to strongly impede the turn towards an alternative model to neoliberalism Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence. Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.
The alt is to reject the aff in favor of a critique that cultivates educated hope - evaluate the aff and alt on the level of ideological commitments – these policies won’t happen which takes out consequentialism good offense – BUT until we unlearn the assumption that getting government out of the way will let markets flourish and solve all our problems, we'll never be able to engage in robust, communitarian policymaking that truly centers human need and our obligations to others. Their cards about engaging in politics are wrong bc they give a false guise of fixing the issue, stopping radical movements. Wilson 17: Julie A. Wilson {Julie A. Wilson is Associate Professor, Allegheny College, Department of Communication Arts and Theatre. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Critical Media Studies and a M.A. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. Her B.A. came from Macalester College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa}, 17 - ("Neoliberalism (Key Ideas in Media andamp; Cultural Studies): 9781138654631: Media Studies Books @ Amazon.com," Routledge, 7-19-2017, https://books.google.com/books?id=5pouDwAAQBAJandpg=PT29andlpg=PT29anddq=22unlearn+neoliberalism22andsource=blandots=vIhe_sQ1Wkandsig=ACfU3U0i7yO8ittjco_PDzZGO7rxU89CYAandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwiN4631n_ryAhUdCTQIHWLNAzcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepageandqandf=false)//marlborough-wr/ New Stories for New Worlds As we will see in our mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, competition's totalizing yet tenuous power over our everyday lives is rooted in what Keating calls “status quo stories”—those stories that get told in popular culture, and that we often tell ourselves, which cement our relationship to our present conjuncture and our investment in the world as we currently know it. She explains: Generally spoken with great certainty, these and similar comments (commands, really) reflect unthinking affirmation of the existing reality and a stubborn, equally unthinking resistance to change. Because we believe that our status-quo stories represent accurate factual statements about ourselves, other people, and the world, we view them as permanent, unchanging facts. This belief in the status-quo's permanence becomes self-fulfilling: We do not try to make change because change is impossible to make. “It's always been that way,” we tell ourselves, “so why waste our energy trying to change things?” “People are just like that-it's human nature, so plan accordingly and alter your expectations! There's no point in trying to change human nature!" Status-quo stories trap us in our current circumstances and conditions; they limit our imaginations because they prevent us from envisioning alternate possibilities.10 Status-quo stories double down on reality, making it seem like those socially constructed forces impinging on us are natural rather than historical, political, and subject to change. “Status-quo stories have a numbing effect,” Keating writes. “When we organize our lives around such stories or in other ways use them as ethical roadmaps or guides, they prevent us from extending our imaginations and exploring additional possibilities."11 One of my students aptly described neoliberal culture as a “status-quo storytelling machine.” To keep us living in competition, neoliberalism generates a host of status-quo stories about the naturalness and inevitability of self-enclosed individualism. Indeed, we might say that self-enclosed individualism operates as the foundational status quo story of neoliberal culture, where competition has become synonymous with all of life. Self-enclosed individualism keeps us not only divided from one another, but also actively pitted against each other. We are stuck in an oppositional consciousness that refuses to acknowledge our social interconnections, even though, as our shared anxieties suggest, we've never had more in common than right now! No matter where we are or what we're doing, neoliberal culture encourages us to see each other through a competitive lens that makes the transformation of our social world, and ourselves, impossible. We become incapable of acknowledging how our fortunes and fates are entwined with those of others who are living very different realities. We become callous and hardened to the suffering of others. We see suffering and death everywhere, and while this might register as bad or wrong or upsetting, we nonetheless stay stuck within the horizons of our own self-enclosed bubbles. The devastating powers of status-quo stories are clear in so many of the conversations we have on college campuses about power, privilege, and difference. In fact, I started teaching courses on neoliberal culture to help my students understand the broader histories and contexts that were impinging on these conversations and making them so fraught, and ultimately so unproductive. Time and time again, in open community forums and classroom discussions of systemic inequalities, I watched students voice painful personal experiences only to get nowhere. Indeed, when asked to consider various forms of privilege, many of my white, male students get defensive. The idea that they haven't earned their place through their own decisions and hard work, but rather benefited from inherited wealth and opportunity, means that they are not good people from the perspective of neoliberalism. Talking about issues of privilege threatens to diminish their sense of self and individual value, so they recoil from conversations that ask them to see their place within broader legacies of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Accordingly, they hold on tight to status-quo stories of self-enclosed individualism to protect themselves, doubling down on their privilege to secure their status in a competitive world. However, it is important to see that status-quo stories of self- enclosed individualism also inform my students from historically oppressed and marginalized groups. These students suffer daily: they live in an environment that professes to celebrate “diversity,” while, in the context of their own lives, they are reminded again and again just how much they don't belong or matter. Not surprisingly, they demand “safe spaces” and protection for themselves and their peers, and they often draw hard lines between allies and enemies. Here too though, we see neoliberal stories at work. What matters for my students, and rightly so, is the way that “microaggressions”—those daily, mundane experiences of discrimination that accumulate over time-diminish their own capacities for flourishing as self-enclosed individuals. My point here is not to suggest that privileged students and marginalized students are the same because they are both invested in a version of self-enclosed individualism. Rather, my point is they share a situation; despite their different and unequal social positions, they have similar feelings-of defensiveness and a fear of failure—and status-quo stories in common. These commonalities do not imply evenness or equality, but rather interconnection, that is, a shared conjuncture. It is the recognition of this conjunctural interconnection that can thread our lives together and open up possibilities for more egalitarian futures. However, living in competition and the oppositional consciousness it demands obscure these commonalities and the interconnections that could bring students into new relations with one another. As a result, we stay caught up in the world as we know it. We stay stuck in competition, even though we all are yearning for different worlds. We desperately need new stories, stories that offer us different pathways to each other. As Keating puts it, we need stories that help us move from “me” to “we” consciousness.12 However, this book is not going to write these new stories for you. Rather, the goal of this book is to provide you with the resources for writing these new stories in and through your own lives. The Work of Critique Ultimately, writing new stories will require a new sense of yourself and your world, as well as what is possible, and realizing this new sense will require, first and foremost, cultivating a deeply critical orientation toward the world as we currently know and experience it. This critical orientation dislodges the sense of inevitability of neoliberalism, self-enclosed individualism, and living in competition; it knows that things don't have to be this way and, thus, senses the possibilities for resistance and transformation that are everywhere. It is so crucial to understand that this critical orientation is not simply about saying that aspects of neoliberal culture are “bad” or "wrong.” Rather, the work of critique is about seeing the flows of power and ways of thinking that make the neoliberal conjuncture possible and hold it together. Critique is therefore a mode of knowing—a form of everyday intellectual work—that is aimed at exposing the myriad workings of power and its status-quo stories. As Michel Foucault explains, “A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.”13 To clarify Foucault's idea, let's think back to the student discussions of power and privilege discussed above. The work of critique is not simply about pointing out privilege, although this is, of course, vital work. The work of critique goes beyond pointing out what's wrong and seeks to unravel the socially constructed conjuncture in which these problems emerge and get negotiated. For only then can we step outside of the competitive, oppositional consciousness of neoliberal culture and begin to imagine a radically different future built on equality and shared security. This work of dislodging the inevitability of our conjuncture and its status-quo stories is hard but vital intellectual work that requires not only critique of our social world, but also transformation of ourselves. Indeed, truly critical work is always profoundly disruptive of our own identities and knowledges. This work can be immensely painful, as it strips away the certainty and comfort provided by status-quo stories. This work can also be, and should be, immensely joyful and life-giving, as it enables us to free ourselves from the status-quo stories and devastating limitations they put on our lives, imaginations, and social relationships. This mix of pain and joy at the heart of critical work comes from the way that critique asks us to “lose confidence” in our world. As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes, Losing confidence: it can be a feeling of something gradually going away from you, being eroded. You sense the erosion. You might stumble, hesitate, falter; things might gradually unravel so you end up holding onto the barest of threads. It might be an experience in the present that throws things up, throws you off balance.... When you lose confidence it can feel like you are losing yourself: like you have gone into hiding from yourself.4 Losing confidence in your world is thus a form of existential crisis —you are disoriented; your world is shattered. At the same time, losing confidence in status-quo stories means gaining confidence for resistance and transformation. We become bolder, less anxious, more optimistic, capable of social interconnection, political intervention, and acting on and from a place of commonality. This is real freedom. Critique is ultimately about unlearning our world so that we might reconstruct it anew. Losing confidence in neoliberal culture means being able to say no to it in the conduct of our daily lives. In these capacities for resistance, we gain confidence that another world might actually be better, worth opening ourselves up to, worth fighting for. We begin to cultivate what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated hope is not “a romanticized and empty” version of hope; rather, it is a form of hope enabled by critique that “taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.” With educated hope, our sense of who we are and of what might be possible shifts in profound ways. This is when those new worlds we are longing for open up. What’s to Come Each of the chapters that follow offer a variety of intellectual tools for mapping the neoliberal conjuncture. Taken together, they are designed to produce a holistic and thick understanding of neoliberalism and its myriad powers to shape our identities, sensibilities, social worlds, and political horizons. Having a thick understanding of neoliberalism means that you feel in your bones that there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism and its status-quo stories. It means that you understand that neoliberalism is the outcome of a range of contingent historical processes that have consequences across social, political, economic, and cultural fields. In other words, by the end of our journey, you'll know how our neoliberal conjuncture has been, and continues to be, constructed. You'll also, therefore, be able to sense the other worlds on the horizon that are just waiting to be constructed, so long as, together, we can develop the resources, capacities, and stories of interconnection for bringing them into being. More specifically, the book is divided into two sections. The first section, titled “Critical Foundations,” focuses on cultivating a broad, critical orientation toward neoliberal culture. The first chapter charts the rise of neoliberal hegemony through four historical phases. The goal is to illustrate exactly how competition came to be the driving cultural force in our everyday lives. As we will see, there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism. It was a political and class-based project to remake capitalism and liberal democracy that was conceived, organized for, and eventually won. In the second chapter, we delve into the world of neoliberal theory and its critical consequences. Here we'll explore exactly what neoliberal thinkers believe about the state, markets, and human actors, and what distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier schools of liberal thought. We'll also interrogate what I call the four Ds—disposability, dispossession, disimagination, and de- democratization—which, taken together, enable us to clearly see and articulate what is so devastating about the rise of neoliberalism. The third chapter examines the cultural powers specific to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism advances through culture, specifically through the promotion of an enterprise culture that works to impose competition as a norm across all arenas of social life. In order to see and specify how neoliberalism works through culture, we take contemporary education as a case study and unpack the entangled cultural powers of neoliberal governmentality, affect, and ideology. The second section is titled “Neoliberal Culture.” In these chapters, we explore the worlds of neoliberal labor, affect, and politics respectively, tracing what happens when our everyday lives as workers, individuals, and citizens become organized around living in competition. The fourth chapter examines how neoliberalism turns everyday life into a “hustle,” where all the contexts of daily life become animated by the demands of neoliberal labor. At stake here are the ways in which we are all hustling to get by, yet we stay radically divided from one another along lines of gender, race, and class thanks to the norm of self- enterprise. The next chapter hones in on what it feels like to inhabit enterprise culture by exploring neoliberal affect and the care of the self. As we already know, living in competition breeds widespread anxiety, not to mention depression and illness, making self-care an ongoing, pressing problem of everyday life. While neoliberal culture offers us plenty of tools for self-care that ultimately keep us stuck in our self-enclosed individualism, this chapter also considers how self-care might be a site for resistance and political intervention. The final chapter focuses on neoliberal politics, tracing what happens to citizenship and social action in our contemporary conjuncture. As we'll see, neoliberalism privatizes our political horizons by remaking democracy into a market competition for visibility and equality. Throughout this mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, we will engage in a mode of critical work that will, hopefully, enable you to unlearn neoliberalism and thus begin to write new stories about our conjuncture—including both our commonalities and differences—and the alternative worlds we are yearning for. Indeed, our critical work will only matter to the extent that it opens up our individual and collective horizons to a future beyond living in competition.
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Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 6 | Opponent: Perry JA | Judge: Gabriela Gonzalez The Aff’s portrayal of a world with reduced IP protections as an “information commons” where the evergreen is solved by deregulation perpetuates the neoliberal myth of increased competition ensuring a perfect market Kapczynski 14 (Amy, a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog. Her areas of research include information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health.) “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’S LEVIATHAN” Duke Law, Law and Contemporary problems, 2014. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4710andcontext=lcp BC Over the last decade or so, a powerful set of critiques has emerged to contest the dominant account just sketched out as well as the contemporary state of IP law.12 These arguments have come from many directions, some even arising from scholars who previously were champions of the dominant account.13 The most prominent and potent line of theoretical critique in the legal literature has come in the guise of arguments for free culture and the “information commons” and has been most influentially articulated by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.14 Both have stressed the problems with expansive exclusive rights regimes in information and have also sketched a set of actually existing alternatives to market-based exclusionary forms of information and cultural production. Lessig has written a series of influential books that have made him a “rock star of the information age,”15 particularly for young Internet and free-culture activists. He has argued powerfully, for example, that existing copyright law is in deep conflict with the radical new possibilities for creativity in the digital age. As he points out, when a mother posting a video of her toddler dancing to a Prince song on YouTube is threatened with a $150,000 fine for copyright infringement, something has gone seriously awry.16 Lessig also contends that copyright law today is too long, too expansive, and instantiates a “permission culture” that is antithetical to free expression in the age of the remix.17 As he puts it, “the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries,” creating the possibility of markets that “include a much wider and more diverse range of creators,” if not stifled by incumbents who use IP law to “protect themselves against this competition.”18 Benkler’s work has also been extraordinarily formative in the field, particularly for his insights into the multiplicity of modes of information production. As he has stressed, the conventional justification for IP does not account for the many successful and longstanding modes of market nonexclusionary information production.19 For example, attorneys write articles to attract clients, software developers sell services customizing free and opensource software for individual clients, and bands give music away for free to increase revenues from touring or merchandise.20 More pathbreaking still is Benkler’s account of the importance of “commons-based peer production,” a form of socially motivated and cooperative production exemplified by the volunteer network that maintains Wikipedia or the groups of coders who create open-source software products such as the Linux operating system.21 In the digital networked age, as Benkler describes, the tools of information production are very broadly distributed, “creating new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture.”22 These changes have increased the relative role in our information economy of nonproprietary production and facilitate “new forms of production that are based neither in the state nor in the market.”23 Because commons-based peer production is not hierarchically organized and is motivated by social dynamics and concerns, it also offers new possibilities for human development, human freedom, a more critical approach to culture, and more democratic forms of political participation.24 This line of critique has been profoundly generative and has helped launch an important new conceptualization of the commons as a paradigm. That paradigm, as a recent book puts it, “helps us ‘get outside’ of the dominant discourse of the market economy and helps us represent different, more wholesome ways of being.”25 Proponents of the commons concept draw upon contemporary articulations of successful commons-based resource management by Elinor Ostrom and her followers.26 They do mobilize retellings of the political and economic history of the commons in land in Europe before enclosure,27 and recent evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that suggests that humans have deep tendencies toward cooperation and reciprocation.28 They argue that A key revelation of the commons way of thinking is that we humans are not in fact isolated, atomistic individuals. We are not amoebas with no human agency except hedonistic “utility preferences” expressed in the marketplace. No: We are commoners—creative, distinctive individuals inscribed within larger wholes. We may have unattractive human traits fueled by individual fears and ego, but we are also creatures entirely capable of self-organization and cooperation; with a concern for fairness and social justice; and willing to make sacrifices for the larger good and future generations.29 This stands, of course, as a powerful rebuke to the neoliberal imaginary, which “constructs and interpellates individuals as . . . rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’— the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.”30 III Given this radical—and, in my view, critically important—attempt to rethink the subject at the core of neoliberal accounts, it is all the more striking that proponents of the commons often appear to adopt a neoliberal image of the state. For example, the introduction to a recently edited volume that gathers writings on the commons from seventy-three authors in thirty countries (entitled, tellingly, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State) has this to say: The presumption that the state can and will intervene to represent the interests of citizens is no longer credible. Unable to govern for the long term, captured by commercial interests and hobbled by stodgy bureaucratic structures in an age of nimble electronic networks, the state is arguably incapable of meeting the needs of citizens as a whole.31 The commons, they suggest, is a concept that seeks not only to liberate us from predatory and dysfunctional markets, but also from predatory and dysfunctional states. Something immediately seems incongruous here. If people are inherently cooperative reciprocators, why are states irredeemably corrupt? After all, as Harold Demsetz famously wrote in his 1967 attack on Arrow’s optimism about state production of information, “government is a group of people.”32 Lessig, one of the progenitors of the language of the commons in the informational domain, often leads with a similar view of the state: If the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering. Markets work better than Tammany Hall in deciding who should get what, when. Or as Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase put it, whatever problems there are with the market, the problems with government are more profound.33 Lessig reveals his own sense of the power of this conception of the state when he seeks to tar IP law with the same brush; we should rebel against current IP law, he suggests, because we should “limit the government’s role in choosing the future of creativity.”34 Benkler is more measured but admits as well to viewing the state as “a relatively suspect actor.”35 We should worry, he suggests, that direct governmental intervention “leads to centralization in the hands of government agencies and powerful political lobbies,”36 a view that echoes the neoliberal account described above. It should perhaps not surprise us that leading critics of neoliberal information policy embrace a neoliberal conception of the state. After all, neoliberalism is not merely an ideology, but also a set of policy prescriptions that may have helped to call forth the state that it has described. As David Harvey puts it, “the neoliberal fear that special-interest groups would pervert and subvert the state is nowhere better realized than in Washington, where armies of corporate lobbyists . . . effectively dictate legislation to match their special interests.”37 There are, it must be said, few areas of law that better exemplify this problem than IP law. For example, Jessica Litman has documented the astonishing process through which the 1976 Copyright Act was drafted, in which Congress delegated most of the drafting to interest groups that were forced to negotiate with one another.38 Other scholars have offered similarly startling accounts of the genesis of the most important IP treaty today, the TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. TRIPS came into force in 1996, revolutionizing international IP law by both imposing new standards and by rendering them enforceable through the WTO’s disputeresolution system, which authorizes trade retaliation to enforce its judgments. Most countries in the world are members of TRIPS, and the Agreement introduced, for developing countries in particular, substantial new obligations, such as the obligation to grant patents on medicines and food-related inventions. Several excellent histories of the treaty have been written, documenting its beginnings as a brash idea proposed by “twelve chief executive officers (representing pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries).”39 As Susan Sell has described, the TRIPS Agreement was a triumph of industry organizing. Through TRIPS, Industry revealed its power to identify and define a trade problem, devise a solution, and reduce it to a concrete proposal that could be sold to governments. These private sector actors succeeded in getting most of what they wanted from a global IP agreement, which now has the status of public international law.
Attempts to reform the WTO are neoliberal attempts to sustain the US regime of accumulation – the contradictions of neoliberalism are why credibility is low, not IP protection Bachand 20 (Remi, Professor of International Law, Département des sciences juridiques, member of the Centre d’études sur le droit international et la mondialisation (CÉDIM), Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada) “What’s Behind the WTO Crisis? A Marxist Analysis” The European Journal of International Law, 8/12/2020. https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article-abstract/31/3/857/5920920?redirectedFrom=fulltext BC To offer our own explanation, we must recall two aspects of our theoretical framework. The first is Robert Cox’s claim113 that the function of international organizations is to ensure the creation and reproduction of hegemony. To be more accurate, they serve, if we follow his argument, to defend and to expand the ‘mode of production’ (we elected to substitute this term for the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ that appears to be more appropriate for our means) of the dominant social classes of the dominant state. Joining this idea with the école de la régulation and social structure of accumulation theory writing114 according to which a regime of accumulation needs some regulation institutions to help resolve its contradictions (and ensure profits and capital accumulation to dominant social classes), we can conclude that the Geneva organization’s function in the US hegemonic order is to make sure that neoliberalism works well enough to provide a satisfying rate of profit for US capitalists. Going in that direction, Kristen Hopewell shows that the WTO’s creation participated in a shift in global governance from ‘embedded liberalism’ to neoliberalism115 and was slated to be an important part of that governance. Using the conceptual framework developed earlier, we can infer that the WTO was thus given a regulation function that was to ensure the operationalization of counteracting factors to the fall of the rate of profit for US capitalists. Now, as we have seen, the US rate of profit has been extremely unstable in the last two decades and Chinese expansion (and that of other ‘emerging countries’) allows one to predict that the situation could easily worsen in the future. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the crisis that has been striking neoliberalism for the last 20 years may also result in a crisis of the organizations that are supposed to manage its contradictions, especially the WTO. Concretely, this organization seems unable to fulfil its regulatory function anymore, which is to ensure US capitalists a good rate of profit and opportunities to operationalize enough counteracting factors to negate its fall. To go further, we now need to return to Stephen Gill’s claim that the function of an international organization is to limit political and economic possibilities. It is to exclude, in other words, options that are incompatible with the social order promoted by the hegemon from what is possible and achievable.116 Effectively, the WTO was created to play such a role. Indeed, promoting liberalization of goods and services, protecting (notably intellectual) property rights and attacking subsidies (in non-agriculture sectors), just to give a few examples, all serve to severely reduce state interventions into the economy and to circumscribe or at least to strongly impede the turn towards an alternative model to neoliberalism Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence. Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.
The alt is to reject the aff in favor of a critique that cultivates educated hope - evaluate the aff and alt on the level of ideological commitments – these policies won’t happen which takes out consequentialism good offense – BUT until we unlearn the assumption that getting government out of the way will let markets flourish and solve all our problems, we'll never be able to engage in robust, communitarian policymaking that truly centers human need and our obligations to others. Their cards about framework are wrong. It’s a prerequisite to analyze our ideological stance before analyzing policies. If a policy is racist it doesn’t matter what it solves. Wilson 17: Julie A. Wilson {Julie A. Wilson is Associate Professor, Allegheny College, Department of Communication Arts and Theatre. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Critical Media Studies and a M.A. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. Her B.A. came from Macalester College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa}, 17 - ("Neoliberalism (Key Ideas in Media andamp; Cultural Studies): 9781138654631: Media Studies Books @ Amazon.com," Routledge, 7-19-2017, https://books.google.com/books?id=5pouDwAAQBAJandpg=PT29andlpg=PT29anddq=22unlearn+neoliberalism22andsource=blandots=vIhe_sQ1Wkandsig=ACfU3U0i7yO8ittjco_PDzZGO7rxU89CYAandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwiN4631n_ryAhUdCTQIHWLNAzcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepageandqandf=false)//marlborough-wr/ New Stories for New Worlds As we will see in our mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, competition's totalizing yet tenuous power over our everyday lives is rooted in what Keating calls “status quo stories”—those stories that get told in popular culture, and that we often tell ourselves, which cement our relationship to our present conjuncture and our investment in the world as we currently know it. She explains: Generally spoken with great certainty, these and similar comments (commands, really) reflect unthinking affirmation of the existing reality and a stubborn, equally unthinking resistance to change. Because we believe that our status-quo stories represent accurate factual statements about ourselves, other people, and the world, we view them as permanent, unchanging facts. This belief in the status-quo's permanence becomes self-fulfilling: We do not try to make change because change is impossible to make. “It's always been that way,” we tell ourselves, “so why waste our energy trying to change things?” “People are just like that-it's human nature, so plan accordingly and alter your expectations! There's no point in trying to change human nature!" Status-quo stories trap us in our current circumstances and conditions; they limit our imaginations because they prevent us from envisioning alternate possibilities.10 Status-quo stories double down on reality, making it seem like those socially constructed forces impinging on us are natural rather than historical, political, and subject to change. “Status-quo stories have a numbing effect,” Keating writes. “When we organize our lives around such stories or in other ways use them as ethical roadmaps or guides, they prevent us from extending our imaginations and exploring additional possibilities."11 One of my students aptly described neoliberal culture as a “status-quo storytelling machine.” To keep us living in competition, neoliberalism generates a host of status-quo stories about the naturalness and inevitability of self-enclosed individualism. Indeed, we might say that self-enclosed individualism operates as the foundational status quo story of neoliberal culture, where competition has become synonymous with all of life. Self-enclosed individualism keeps us not only divided from one another, but also actively pitted against each other. We are stuck in an oppositional consciousness that refuses to acknowledge our social interconnections, even though, as our shared anxieties suggest, we've never had more in common than right now! No matter where we are or what we're doing, neoliberal culture encourages us to see each other through a competitive lens that makes the transformation of our social world, and ourselves, impossible. We become incapable of acknowledging how our fortunes and fates are entwined with those of others who are living very different realities. We become callous and hardened to the suffering of others. We see suffering and death everywhere, and while this might register as bad or wrong or upsetting, we nonetheless stay stuck within the horizons of our own self-enclosed bubbles. The devastating powers of status-quo stories are clear in so many of the conversations we have on college campuses about power, privilege, and difference. In fact, I started teaching courses on neoliberal culture to help my students understand the broader histories and contexts that were impinging on these conversations and making them so fraught, and ultimately so unproductive. Time and time again, in open community forums and classroom discussions of systemic inequalities, I watched students voice painful personal experiences only to get nowhere. Indeed, when asked to consider various forms of privilege, many of my white, male students get defensive. The idea that they haven't earned their place through their own decisions and hard work, but rather benefited from inherited wealth and opportunity, means that they are not good people from the perspective of neoliberalism. Talking about issues of privilege threatens to diminish their sense of self and individual value, so they recoil from conversations that ask them to see their place within broader legacies of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Accordingly, they hold on tight to status-quo stories of self-enclosed individualism to protect themselves, doubling down on their privilege to secure their status in a competitive world. However, it is important to see that status-quo stories of self- enclosed individualism also inform my students from historically oppressed and marginalized groups. These students suffer daily: they live in an environment that professes to celebrate “diversity,” while, in the context of their own lives, they are reminded again and again just how much they don't belong or matter. Not surprisingly, they demand “safe spaces” and protection for themselves and their peers, and they often draw hard lines between allies and enemies. Here too though, we see neoliberal stories at work. What matters for my students, and rightly so, is the way that “microaggressions”—those daily, mundane experiences of discrimination that accumulate over time-diminish their own capacities for flourishing as self-enclosed individuals. My point here is not to suggest that privileged students and marginalized students are the same because they are both invested in a version of self-enclosed individualism. Rather, my point is they share a situation; despite their different and unequal social positions, they have similar feelings-of defensiveness and a fear of failure—and status-quo stories in common. These commonalities do not imply evenness or equality, but rather interconnection, that is, a shared conjuncture. It is the recognition of this conjunctural interconnection that can thread our lives together and open up possibilities for more egalitarian futures. However, living in competition and the oppositional consciousness it demands obscure these commonalities and the interconnections that could bring students into new relations with one another. As a result, we stay caught up in the world as we know it. We stay stuck in competition, even though we all are yearning for different worlds. We desperately need new stories, stories that offer us different pathways to each other. As Keating puts it, we need stories that help us move from “me” to “we” consciousness.12 However, this book is not going to write these new stories for you. Rather, the goal of this book is to provide you with the resources for writing these new stories in and through your own lives. The Work of Critique Ultimately, writing new stories will require a new sense of yourself and your world, as well as what is possible, and realizing this new sense will require, first and foremost, cultivating a deeply critical orientation toward the world as we currently know and experience it. This critical orientation dislodges the sense of inevitability of neoliberalism, self-enclosed individualism, and living in competition; it knows that things don't have to be this way and, thus, senses the possibilities for resistance and transformation that are everywhere. It is so crucial to understand that this critical orientation is not simply about saying that aspects of neoliberal culture are “bad” or "wrong.” Rather, the work of critique is about seeing the flows of power and ways of thinking that make the neoliberal conjuncture possible and hold it together. Critique is therefore a mode of knowing—a form of everyday intellectual work—that is aimed at exposing the myriad workings of power and its status-quo stories. As Michel Foucault explains, “A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.”13 To clarify Foucault's idea, let's think back to the student discussions of power and privilege discussed above. The work of critique is not simply about pointing out privilege, although this is, of course, vital work. The work of critique goes beyond pointing out what's wrong and seeks to unravel the socially constructed conjuncture in which these problems emerge and get negotiated. For only then can we step outside of the competitive, oppositional consciousness of neoliberal culture and begin to imagine a radically different future built on equality and shared security. This work of dislodging the inevitability of our conjuncture and its status-quo stories is hard but vital intellectual work that requires not only critique of our social world, but also transformation of ourselves. Indeed, truly critical work is always profoundly disruptive of our own identities and knowledges. This work can be immensely painful, as it strips away the certainty and comfort provided by status-quo stories. This work can also be, and should be, immensely joyful and life-giving, as it enables us to free ourselves from the status-quo stories and devastating limitations they put on our lives, imaginations, and social relationships. This mix of pain and joy at the heart of critical work comes from the way that critique asks us to “lose confidence” in our world. As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes, Losing confidence: it can be a feeling of something gradually going away from you, being eroded. You sense the erosion. You might stumble, hesitate, falter; things might gradually unravel so you end up holding onto the barest of threads. It might be an experience in the present that throws things up, throws you off balance.... When you lose confidence it can feel like you are losing yourself: like you have gone into hiding from yourself.4 Losing confidence in your world is thus a form of existential crisis —you are disoriented; your world is shattered. At the same time, losing confidence in status-quo stories means gaining confidence for resistance and transformation. We become bolder, less anxious, more optimistic, capable of social interconnection, political intervention, and acting on and from a place of commonality. This is real freedom. Critique is ultimately about unlearning our world so that we might reconstruct it anew. Losing confidence in neoliberal culture means being able to say no to it in the conduct of our daily lives. In these capacities for resistance, we gain confidence that another world might actually be better, worth opening ourselves up to, worth fighting for. We begin to cultivate what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated hope is not “a romanticized and empty” version of hope; rather, it is a form of hope enabled by critique that “taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.” With educated hope, our sense of who we are and of what might be possible shifts in profound ways. This is when those new worlds we are longing for open up. What’s to Come Each of the chapters that follow offer a variety of intellectual tools for mapping the neoliberal conjuncture. Taken together, they are designed to produce a holistic and thick understanding of neoliberalism and its myriad powers to shape our identities, sensibilities, social worlds, and political horizons. Having a thick understanding of neoliberalism means that you feel in your bones that there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism and its status-quo stories. It means that you understand that neoliberalism is the outcome of a range of contingent historical processes that have consequences across social, political, economic, and cultural fields. In other words, by the end of our journey, you'll know how our neoliberal conjuncture has been, and continues to be, constructed. You'll also, therefore, be able to sense the other worlds on the horizon that are just waiting to be constructed, so long as, together, we can develop the resources, capacities, and stories of interconnection for bringing them into being. More specifically, the book is divided into two sections. The first section, titled “Critical Foundations,” focuses on cultivating a broad, critical orientation toward neoliberal culture. The first chapter charts the rise of neoliberal hegemony through four historical phases. The goal is to illustrate exactly how competition came to be the driving cultural force in our everyday lives. As we will see, there is nothing natural or inevitable about neoliberalism. It was a political and class-based project to remake capitalism and liberal democracy that was conceived, organized for, and eventually won. In the second chapter, we delve into the world of neoliberal theory and its critical consequences. Here we'll explore exactly what neoliberal thinkers believe about the state, markets, and human actors, and what distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier schools of liberal thought. We'll also interrogate what I call the four Ds—disposability, dispossession, disimagination, and de- democratization—which, taken together, enable us to clearly see and articulate what is so devastating about the rise of neoliberalism. The third chapter examines the cultural powers specific to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism advances through culture, specifically through the promotion of an enterprise culture that works to impose competition as a norm across all arenas of social life. In order to see and specify how neoliberalism works through culture, we take contemporary education as a case study and unpack the entangled cultural powers of neoliberal governmentality, affect, and ideology. The second section is titled “Neoliberal Culture.” In these chapters, we explore the worlds of neoliberal labor, affect, and politics respectively, tracing what happens when our everyday lives as workers, individuals, and citizens become organized around living in competition. The fourth chapter examines how neoliberalism turns everyday life into a “hustle,” where all the contexts of daily life become animated by the demands of neoliberal labor. At stake here are the ways in which we are all hustling to get by, yet we stay radically divided from one another along lines of gender, race, and class thanks to the norm of self- enterprise. The next chapter hones in on what it feels like to inhabit enterprise culture by exploring neoliberal affect and the care of the self. As we already know, living in competition breeds widespread anxiety, not to mention depression and illness, making self-care an ongoing, pressing problem of everyday life. While neoliberal culture offers us plenty of tools for self-care that ultimately keep us stuck in our self-enclosed individualism, this chapter also considers how self-care might be a site for resistance and political intervention. The final chapter focuses on neoliberal politics, tracing what happens to citizenship and social action in our contemporary conjuncture. As we'll see, neoliberalism privatizes our political horizons by remaking democracy into a market competition for visibility and equality. Throughout this mapping of the neoliberal conjuncture, we will engage in a mode of critical work that will, hopefully, enable you to unlearn neoliberalism and thus begin to write new stories about our conjuncture—including both our commonalities and differences—and the alternative worlds we are yearning for. Indeed, our critical work will only matter to the extent that it opens up our individual and collective horizons to a future beyond living in competition.
9/19/21
SO- Data Exclusivity Innovation DA
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Emmiee Malyugina 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.
10/9/21
SO- Global South Word PIC
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Honor VD | Judge: Dylan Liu, Joel Lemuel, Gabriela Gonzalez Plan Text: Endorse the entirety of the 1AC except for the words “global south” Re-Design- ("The ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Don’t use it!," RE-DESIGN, 11-11-2018, http://re-design.dimiter.eu/?p=969)/AK The ‘Global South‘ and ‘Global North‘ are increasingly popular terms used to categorize the countries of the world. According to Wikipedia, the term ‘Global South’ originated in postcolonial studies, and was first used in 1969. The Google N-gram chart below shows the rise of the ‘Global South’ term from 1980 till 2008, but the rise is even more impressive afterwards. Nowadays, the Global South is used as a shortcut to anything from poor and less-developed to oppressed and powerless. Despite this vagueness, the term is prominent in serious academic publications, and it even features in the names of otherwise reputable institutions. But, its popularity notwithstanding, the ‘Global South’ is a terrible term. Here is why. The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading. First, they are descriptively inaccurate, even when they refer to general notions such as (economic) development. Second, they are homogenizing, obscuring important differences between countries supposedly part of the Global South and North groups. In this respect, these terms are no better than alternatives that they are trying to replace, such as ‘the West‘ or the ‘Third World‘. Third, the Global South/Global North terms imply a geographic determinism that is wrong and demotivational. Poor countries are not doomed to be poor, because they happen to be in the South, and their geographic position is not a verdict on their developmental prospects. The Global South/Global North terms are inaccurate and misleading. First, they are descriptively inaccurate, even when they refer to general notions such as (economic) development. Second, they are homogenizing, obscuring important differences between countries supposedly part of the Global South and North groups. In this respect, these terms are no better than alternatives that they are trying to replace, such as ‘the West‘ or the ‘Third World‘. Third, the Global South/Global North terms imply a geographic determinism that is wrong and demotivational. Poor countries are not doomed to be poor, because they happen to be in the South, and their geographic position is not a verdict on their developmental prospects. Let me show you just how bad these terms are. I focus on human development, broadly defined and measured by the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI tracks life expectancy, education, and standard of living, so it captures more than purely economic aspects of development. The chart below plots the geographic latitude of a country’ capital against the country’s HDI score for 2017. (Click on the image for a larger size or download a higher resolution pdf). It is quite clear that a straight line from South to North is a poor description of the relationship between geographic latitude and human development. The correlation between the two is 0.48. A linear regression of HDI on latitude returns a positive coefficient, and the R-squared as 0.23. But, as is obvious from the plot, the relationship is not linear. In fact, some of the southern-most countries on the planet, such as Australia and New Zealand, but also Chile and Argentina, are in the top ranks of human development. The best summary of the relationship between HDI and latitude is curvilinear, as indicated by the Loess (nonparametric local regression) fit. You can say that we always knew that and the Global South was meant to refer to ‘distance from the equator’ rather than to absolute latitude. But, first, this is rather offensive to people in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and the southern part of South America. And, second, there is still far from a deterministic relationship between human development and geographic position, as measured by distance from the equator. The next plot (click on the image for a larger size, download a pdf version here) shows exactly that. Now, overall, the relationship is stronger: the correlation is 0.64. And after around the 10th degree, it is also rather linear, as indicated by the match between the linear regression line and the Loess fit. Still, there is important heterogeneity within the South/close to equator and North/far from equator countries. Singapore’ HDI is almost as high as that of Sweden, despite the two being on the opposite ends of the geographic scale. Ecuador’s HDI is just above Ukraine’s, although the former is more than 50 degree closer to the equator than then latter. Gabon’s HDI is higher than Moldova’s, despite Gabon being 46 degrees further south than Moldova. This is not to deny that there is a link between geographic position and human development. By the standards of social science, this is a rather strong correlation and fairly smooth relationship. It is remarkable that no country more the 35 degrees from the equator has an HDI lower than 0.65 (but this excludes North Korea, for which there is no HDI data provided by the UN). But there is still important diversity in human development at different geographic zones. Moreover, the correlation between geographic position and development need to be causal, let alone deterministic. There are good arguments to be made that geography shapes and constraints the economic and social development of nations. My personal favorite is Jared Diamond’s idea that Eurasia’s continental spread along an East-West axis made it easier for food innovations and agricultural technology to diffuse, compared to America’s continental spread along a North-South axis. But geography is not a verdict for development, as plenty of nations have demonstrated. Yet, the Global South/Global North categories suggest otherwise. What to use instead? OK, so the Global South/Global North are bad words, but what to use instead? There is no obvious substitute that is more descriptively accurate, less homogenizing and less suggestive of (geographic) determinism. But then don’t use any categorization that is so general and coarse. There is a good reason why there is no appropriate alternative term: the countries of the world are too diverse to fit into two boxes: one for South and one for North, one for developed and one for non-developed, one for powerful, and one for oppressed. Be specific about what the term is referring to, and be concrete about the set of countries that is covered. If you mean the 20 poorest countries in the world, say the 20 poor countries in the world, not countries of the Global South. If you mean technologically underdeveloped countries, say that and not countries of the Third World. If you mean rich, former colonial powers from Western Europe, say that and not the Global North. It takes a few more words, but it is more accurate and less misleading. It is a bit ironic that the Global South/Global North terms are most popular among scholars and activists who are extremely sensitive about the power of words to shape public discourses, homogenize diverse populations, and support narratives that take a life of their own, influencing politics and public policy. If that’s the case, it makes it even more imperative to avoid terms that are inaccurate, homogenizing and misleading on a global scale. If you want to look at the data yourself, the R script for the figures is here and the datafile is here.
They use “global south” multiple times including in their tage line of the Vat 02 tagline and they say it multiple times in cx.
Regardless of whether or not you believe in Word PICs, the entire affirmative is based off of rhetorical precision. That is their solvency mechanism. Their use of the “Global South” in both taglines and cards perpetuates insidious stereotypes about people from different countries and means they can’t solve. They can’t perm out of this because they would sever out of their entire 1AC that predicates itself on rhetorical precision.
9/19/21
SO- Indigenous Peoples PIC
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Honor VD | Judge: Dylan Liu, Joel Lemuel, Gabriela Gonzalez CP Text: We should use rhetorical decolonization to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines in the member nations of the World Trade Organization except for medicines except for those medicines created, discovered, preserved, or primarily used by Indigenous peoples. IP rights for those medicines should be expanded in a flexible and culturally appropriate context according to principles of IP law including but not limited to repression of unfair competition, recognition of rights, equity and benefit-sharing, prior informed consent, full and effective participation of knowledge holders, and an appropriate framework for access as per the Sinjela and Ramcharan card. IP rights should never prevent Indigenous people from taking advantage of their own knowledge.
Indigenous people need strong intellectual property rights to traditional medicines – their unique medicinal knowledge is open to appropriation and theft from larger Western pharmaceutical companies without it – Sinela and Ramcharan ‘05 SINJELA, MPAZI, and ROBIN RAMCHARAN. “Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Medicines of Indigenous Peoples through Intellectual Property Rights: Issues, Challenges and Strategies.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–24. LK At one stage a desire began to emerge in indigenous circles for a forum in the United Nations that dealt not only with human rights issues but with the broad range of environmental, developmental and cultural issues affecting indigenous populations. This led to calls for the establishment, as a subsidiary body of the ECOSOC, of a permanent forum on indigenous issues. This forum was finally established in 2000 and met for the first time at UN headquarters in New York in the summer of 2002.9 The Permanent Forum has thus far held three sessions. As of the time of writing there is a debate going on whether the buo Commission's Working Group on Indigenous Populations should be continued in the light of the establishment of the Permanent Forum. Some governments have apparently favored the discontinuance of the Working Group while indigenous peoples favor its continuation. At the Summer Session of the ECOSOC in 2004 the Secretary General of the United Nations submitted a report summarizing the views of States and indigenous organizations on this issue, and, as of the time of writing, the issue still remains open. The study by Mr. Martinez Cobo, the Working Group on Indigenous issues, the working group on a draft declaration and the Permanent Forum have thus been the main building blocks within the United Nations in the past four decades to advance the human rights of indigenous peoples. In the course of their work, they have, inter alia, highlighted the need for the protection of the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples. Following on from the work of Mr. Martinez Cobo, cultural heritage and intellectual property have been issues of interest to the Working Group. In 1992, the Working Group and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a Technical Conference on Indigenous peoples at which participants recommended that the United Nations develop more effective measures to protect the intellectual and cultural property rights of indigenous peoples.10 A 1993 report by Erica Daes, Chairperson of the Working Group, on the protection of cultural and intellectual property, noted that the term "'indigenous' embraces the notion of a distinct and separate culture and way of life, based on long-held traditions and knowledge which are connected, fundamentally, to a specific territory. Indigenous peoples cannot survive, or exercise their fundamental human rights as distinct nations, societies and peoples, without the ability to conserve, revive, develop and teach the wisdom they have inherited from their ancestors."" The Chairperson was "compelled to the conclusion" that the distinction between cultural and intellectual property, from the indigenous viewpoint, was an artificial one. Indeed, "Industrialized societies tend to distinguish between art and science, or between creative inspiration and logical analysis. Indigenous peoples regard all products of the human mind and heart as interrelated, and as flowing from the same source: the relationship between the people and their land, their kinship with other living creatures that share the land, and with the spirit world. Since the ultimate source of knowledge and creativity is the land itself, all of the art and science of a specific people are manifestations of the same underlying relationship, and can be considered as manifestations of the people as a whole."12 It is not a coincidence that Article 8(j) of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted at the Rio Earth Summit, creates legal obligations for States party to respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous people related to the conservation and sustainable use of bio diversity. The protection of cultural and intellectual property "is connected fundamentally with the realization of the territorial rights and self determination of indigenous peoples".13 The Chairpersons' report noted that the Working Group had received news from "indigenous representatives from every continent about the priority and urgency they attach to the protection of their spiritual and cultural life, arts and scientific and medical knowledge".14Consequently, the Draft Declaration prepared by the Sub-Commission, while recognizing in its preamble the "inherent rights and characteristics of indigenous peoples, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources," provided for the right to fully participate, inter alia, in the cultural life of the State (Article 4), the right to revitalize and practice their cultural traditions (Article 11), the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their language, oral traditions, writing systems and literatures (Article 13) and, more importantly for present purposes, "the right to their traditional medicines and health practices, including the right to the protection of vital medicinal plants, animals and minerals" (Article 22). In this vein, the draft Article 27 provides that "indigenous peoples have the right to special measures to protect, as intellectual property, their sciences, technologies and cultural manifestations, including genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs and visual performing arts". Moreover, Article 28 provides that States should seek the free and informed consent of indigenous peoples "prior to commencement of any projects on their lands and territories, particularly in connection with natural resource development or exploitation of mineral or other sub-surface resources".15 In December 1995, to give impetus to the Decade for Indigenous People, the UN General Assembly adopted a Program of activities aimed at strengthening international cooperation for the solution of problems faced by indigenous people in such areas as human rights, the environment, development, health, culture and education. Among the specific actions to be taken were: "the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous people and their empowerment to make choices which enable them to retain their cultural identity while participating in political, economic and social life, with full respect for their cultural values, languages, traditions and forms of social organization" and (ii) a request for specialized agencies of the UN system and other international and national agencies, as well as communities and private enterprises, "to devote special attention to development activities of benefit to indigenous peoples".16 WIPO has responded accordingly and the report by the Coordinator of the UN Decade for Indigenous Peoples has noted that WIPO's response "has been dramatic" as there is an entire division as part of the regular budget which is now responsible for traditional knowledge and related issues.17 The Permanent Forum has maintained a keen interest in traditional knowledge, soliciting information from all relevant parts of the UN system, notably WIPO.18 The last three sessions of WIPO have focused on its activities in the areas of intellectual property and genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, and are described in greater detail below. Before proceeding to a consideration of the protection of the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples, we shall in the next section, examine a major heritage of indigenous peoples - traditional medicine. TM, an important part of TK, refers to medicines used by local, tribal and indigenous communities. Such medicine is often herbal and sometimes combined with spiritual elements, such as those practiced by the shaman in tribal communities.19 TM has been refined over centuries of practice by communities who have inherited knowledge from their ancestors. For example, Felix, a member of the Arawak indigenous community of Guyana who works in the Shanklands resort on the banks of Essequibo River, conveyed his impressive knowledge of his community's medicinal uses of various plants and trees in the tropical rainforest. Using the native names of trees, he related the use of the 'yarula' tree for preventing and curing malaria, the use of the 'kakaballi' tree for treating diarrhea and the use of the 'capadulla' tree as a local viagra.20 While relying on textbooks for the Latin names, Felix's knowledge came from his father, the shaman in his community and from inherited knowledge among his people. Thus, often such knowledge is held communally and does not 'belong' to any single person or entity. Equally often, such knowledge cross-cuts communities as well as territorial boundaries. These aspects have implications for intellectual property protection, which we will consider below. The type of TM differs from community to community depending on the type of healing system that is historically prevalent. Until recently non-western healing systems and medicines were disregarded by western health systems, which insist on the development of medicines and healing techniques based on scientific proof and testing. Centuries-old healing systems of the world, such as Chinese traditional medicine and Indian Ayurveda, were given scant attention as the 'scientific' approach was allegedly missing. In Chinese medicine, for example, "disease is viewed as a disharmony of the various elements of the body and the personality of the patient. Chinese therapeutic thought concerns the entire organism's balance, rather than being devoted to clearly localizing and defining the nature of the illness" as in western medicine.21 The argument that non-western medicine is not based on scientific evidence may well ignore the centuries of trial and error, which has actually gone into making a particular medicine or remedy appropriate to a given community. Western science has grudgingly accepted alternative healing systems. However, they have readily sought after TK/IK, which could lead to the production of new drugs, "especially since the cost of putting new drugs on the market is becoming very high".22 Erica Daes noted in her 1993 report, cited above, that studies found that "using traditional knowledge increased the efficiency of screening plants for medical properties by more than 400 percent".23 Already by 1993, estimates of the total world sales of products derived from traditional medicines ran as high as USD 43 billion.24 However, only a tiny fraction of the profits are returned to the indigenous peoples and local communities. For example, it was estimated in the early 1990s, "that less than 0.001 per cent of profits from drugs developed from natural products and traditional knowledge accrue to the traditional people who provided technical leads for research".25 Attempts by Western governments and drug producing companies to harness such TK and TM for their own benefit have led to phenomena such as 'bio piracy' (theft of genetic resources by 'bioprospectors'). Concern has arisen for the preservation of biological diversity and genetic resources. The United States National Cancer Institute had already, by 1960, began a global program to collect and study naturally occurring substances and had tested some 35,000 plant species and a larger number of micro-organisms by 1981. This process intensified with the advent of research to combat AIDS. Pharmaceutical companies, necessarily driven by profit, have become increasingly aware of the potential economic rewards of TK/TM. Among the major US pharmaceutical companies engaged in screening plant species were Merck and Co., Smithkline Beecham, Monsanto, Sterling and Bristol Meyers. But this creates a conflict with the holders of TK/TM. The problem was stated thus by former Filipino President, Fidel Ramos at a ceremony for the signing of a Traditional and Alternative Health Care Law (R.A. 8423) in Manila on 9 December 1998: "We have looked forward to other nations for new technologies and cures, even for ordinary ailments. Indeed, many other nations have been exploiting the potentials of our own resources, claiming them as their own discoveries without giving due credit to us, and in addition to making tremendous profits at our own expense".26 The problem was recognized by Mrs. Daes in her report in 1993, namely that 'collectors' or bio-prospectors, "do not ordinarily have any formal contractual arrangements ... with the indigenous peoples upon whose knowledge of ecology they may rely. Indigenous people have also objected to alleged appropriation of their bodily substances which is taking place in the context of the Human Genome Diversity Project.28
9/19/21
SO- Innovation DA
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 2 | Opponent: Christopher Columbus NG | Judge: Ben Cortez 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.
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SO- Medicalization DA
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 1 | Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Gordon Krauss The aff embraces medicine as the starting point for the revolution, which dooms their movement. The discursive terrain of health and specifically what is considered legitimate health science evidence is coursing through academia and determining what we understand as cost containment, health efficiency, and disease. Creating a regime of truth that relegates values as un-scientific, perpetuating micro-fascisms and marginalizing multiple forms of knowledge. Holmes and Murray 6 Dave Holmes RN PhD, Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Nursing, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Stuart J Murray PhD, Department of English Ryerson University Toronto, Ontario, Canada, International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism, 2006; 4: 180–186 Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena. Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure. Conclusion The Cochrane Group, among others, has created a hierarchy that has been endorsed by many academic institutions, and that serves to (re)produce the exclusion of certain forms of research. Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power. We can already hear the objections. The term fascism represents an emotionally charged concept in both the political and religious arenas; it is the ugliest expression of life in the 20th century. Although it is associated with specific political systems, this fascism of the masses, as was practised by Hitler and Mussolini, has today been replaced by a system of microfascisms – polymorphous intolerances that are revealed in more subtle ways. Consequently, although the majority of the current manifestations of fascism are less brutal, they are nevertheless more pernicious. We believe that fascism is a concept that is not associated with any particular person or location. Therefore, we will use this term as defined by Deleuze and Guattari,1 and now used by a number of contemporary authors. Within the healthcare disciplines, a powerful evidence based discourse has produced a plethora of correlates, such as specialised journals and best practice guidelines. Obediently following this trend, many health sciences scholars have leapt onto the bandwagon, mimicking their medical colleagues by saturating health sciences discourses with concepts informed by this evidence-based movement.2 In the words of Michel Foucault, these discourses represent an awesome, but oftentimes cryptic, political power that ‘works to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it’ (p. 136).3 Unmasking the hidden politics of evidence-based discourse is paramount, and it is this task that forms the basis of our critique. Drawing in part on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari,1,4 the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena. The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari1 proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure. Evidence-based health sciences: definition and deconstruction As a global term, EBHS (evidence-based health sciences) reflects clinical practice based on scientific inquiry. The premise is that if healthcare professionals perform an action, there should be evidence that the action will produce the desired outcomes. These outcomes are desirable because they are believed to be beneficial to patients.5 Evidence based practice derives from the work of Archie Cochrane, who argued for randomised controlled trials (RCTs being the highest level of evidences) as a means of ensuring healthcare cost containment, among other reasons.6 In 1993, the Cochrane Collaboration, serving as an international research review board, was founded to provide clinicians with a resource aimed at increasing clinician–patient interaction time by facilitating clinicians’ access to valid research.2 The Cochrane database was established to provide this resource, and it comprises a collection of articles that have been selected according to specific criteria.7 For example, one of the requirements of the Cochrane database is that acceptable research must be based on the RCT design; all other research, which constitutes 98 of the literature, is deemed scientifically imperfect.6 At first glance, EBHS seems beneficial for positive patient outcomes, which is a primary healthcare objective.8 As a consequence, it is easy for healthcare researchers and clinicians to assume that EBHS is the method to assure that patients receive optimal care.9 While EBHS does acknowledge that healthcare professionals possess discrete bodies of knowledge, EBHS advocates defend its rigid approach by rationalising that the process is not self-serving because improved healthcare and increased healthcare funding will improve patient outcomes.2,7,10 Consequently, EBHS comes to be widely considered as the truth. 9 When only one method of knowledge production is promoted and validated, the implication is that health sciences are gradually reduced to EBHS. Indeed, the legitimacy of health sciences knowledge that is not based on specific research designs comes to be questioned, if not dismissed altogether. In the starkest terms, we are currently witnessing the health sciences engaged in a strange process of eliminating some ways of knowing. EBHS becomes a ‘regime of truth’, as Foucault would say – a regimented and institutionalised version of ‘truth’. The health sciences take their lead from institutional medicine, whose authority is rarely challenged or tested probably because it alone controls the terms by which any challenge or test would proceed. Once it was adopted by medicine, the health sciences accepted RCTs as the gold standard of evidence-based knowledge. It is deeply questionable whether EBHS, as a reflection of stratification and segmentation, promotes the multiple ways of knowing deemed important within most health disciplines. Moreover, we must ask whether EBHS serves a state or governmental function, where ready-made and convenient ‘goals-and-targets’ can be used to justify cuts to healthcare funding.6 We believe that health sciences ought to promote pluralism – the acceptance of multiple points of view.2 However, EBHS does not allow pluralism, unless that pluralism is engineered by the Cochrane hierarchy itself.7 Such a hegemony makes inevitable the further ‘segmentation’ of knowledge (i.e. disallowing multiple epistemologies), and further marginalise many forms of knowing/knowledge. Importantly, the evidence-based movement is neither ‘progressive’ nor a ‘natural’ development in health sciences: it is a trend that is engineered. As a response to this, a vigilant resistance must arise from within the health disciplines themselves, and one way of deploying such resistance is by using a tool called ‘deconstruction’. Drawing on the work of the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is notoriously difficult to define because it is a practice, and not a fixed concept based on abstract ‘facts’ or ‘evidence’. For our purposes, we might say that it is the critical practice of exposing the foundations that underpin the apparent truth-value of a certain concept or idea, challenging the way that it appears to us as self-evidently or ‘naturally’ so. In the words of one of Derrida’s early translators, the task of deconstruction is ‘to locate and “take apart” those concepts which serve as axioms or rules for a period of thought’.11 More precisely, deconstruction works to demonstrate how concepts or ideas are contingent upon historical, linguistic, social and political discourses, to name but a few. We deconstruct our taken-for-granted ‘truths’ by attending to how they came to be constructed in the first place. One method is to critically analyse the sets of binary oppositions that have informed the history of Western thought, for example, mind versus body. While each term is implicit in the definition of the other (suggesting they are not utterly discrete), Derrida argues that within such binaries, one term is always privileged at the expense of the other. Here, we might think of mind over body (matter), but to these we might add sets of correlative terms – essentially hierarchies – such as reason over emotion, male over female, logic over myth or even quantitative measure over qualitative measure. In the name of a justice-to-come, deconstruction looks towards the future by interrogating the hierarchical power that operates at the heart of these binaries. Thus, implicit in deconstruction is a suspicion of the essentialist and hierarchical nature of institutional knowledge. In a deconstructive vein, we must ask not only, ‘What constitutes evidence?’ but also, what is the ‘regime of truth’ (Kuhn would call this a ‘paradigm’ and Foucault an ‘épistèmé’) that dictates when or how one piece of evidence shall count as evidence, while another is denigrated or excluded altogether? In other words, what makes one piece of evidence so ‘self-evidently’ meaningful for us at this precise historical moment, while another appears so ‘self-evidently’ meaningless or nonsensical? Attending to this internal logic of exclusion is both democratising and, arguably, it is just better science! It is not insignificant that the word ‘evidence’ contains the Latin root videre, which means ‘to see’. The etymology of the term itself suggests a visual bias that still holds sway in the ‘enlightened’ empirical sciences today.12,13 But we might ask: what is the fate of that evidence that is invisible to us – invisible, and yet still marginally felt and attested to? Unmapping health sciences It is becoming increasingly evident that an unvarying, uniform language – an ossifying discourse – is being mandated in a number of faculties of health sciences where the dominant paradigm of EBHS has achieved hegemony.14 This makes it difficult for scholars to express new and different ideas in an intellectual circle where normalisation and standardisation are privileged in the development of knowledge. The critical individual must then resort to resistance strategies in front of such hegemonic discourses within which there is little freedom for expressing unconventional thoughts. Rather than risk being alienated from their colleagues, many scientists find themselves interpellated by hegemonic discourses and come to disregard all others. Unfortunately, privileging a single discourse (evidence-based medicine (EBM)) situated within a single scientific paradigm (postpositivism) confines the researcher to a yoke of exactly reproducing the established order. To a large degree, the dominant discourse represents the ladder of success in academic and research milieus where it establishes itself as a weapon used against those who praise the freedom of scientific inquiry and the free debate of ideas. When only one discursive formation (EBM) finds itself on the discursive terrain (health sciences), academics and researchers constitute a united community whose ways of speaking and thinking thwart both creativity and plurality in the name of efficiency and effectiveness. We believe that EBM, which saturates health sciences discourses, constitutes an ossified language that maps the landscape of the professional disciplines as a whole. Accordingly, we believe that a postmodernist critique of this prevailing mode of thinking is indispensable. Those who are wedded to the idea of ‘evidence’ in the health sciences maintain what is essentially a Newtonian, mechanistic world view: they tend to believe that reality is objective, which is to say that it exists, ‘out there’, absolutely independent of the human observer, and of the observer’s intentions and observations. They fondly point to ‘facts’, while they are forced to dismiss ‘values’ as somehow unscientific. For them, this reality (an ensemble of facts) corresponds to an objectively real and mechanical world. But this form of empiricism, we would argue, fetishises the object at the expense of the human subject, for whom this world has a vital significance and meaning in the first place. An evidence-based, empirical world view is dangerously reductive insofar as it negates the personal and interpersonal significance and meaning of a world that is first and foremost a relational world, and not a fixed set of objects, partes extra partes. Of course, we do not wish to deny the material and objective existence of the world, but would suggest, rather, that our relation to the world and to others is always mediated, never direct or wholly transparent. Indeed, the sociocultural forms of this mediation would play a large part in the way the world appears as full of significance. Empirical facts alone are quantities that eclipse our qualitative and vital being-in-the-world. For example, how should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40 probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?15–18 From a variety of perspectives, those we label as ‘postmodern authors’ offer a robust critique of evidence-based health sciences and their objectivist world view. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard sees postmodernism as the end of universal or ‘meta-narratives grands récits’ that characterise the totalising Reason of Modernity.19 In broad strokes, postmodern authors provide a critique of the knowing subject, who is alleged to be a contextless, abstract and autonomous ego, implicitly male, white, Western and heterosexual. The clinician can often be considered such an institutional subject who is presumed both to know the truth of disease and to have the moral and intellectual authority to prescribe treatment. Foucault, for one, is critical of this power, which he describes with the metaphor of the ‘clinical gaze’ – a panoptic kind of ‘expert seeing’ that both determines in advance what will appear, and, more ominously, what will be silently internalised by the patient, and will govern his or her own inner experience and significant values. ‘That which is not on the scale of the gaze’, Foucault writes, ‘falls outside the domain of possible knowledge’ (p. 166).12 Thus, the authority of the clinician must be understood as a discursive power that shapes the realm of the possible and, in doing so, often ignores certain symptoms that would allow a more appropriate diagnosis. At the same time, the absolute authority of the gaze becomes the manner in which the patient will see him- or herself. Obvious examples here are the hysterisation of the female body and the pathologisation of homosexuality within medical discourse. In the face of such phenomena being now widely regarded as social/medical constructions, we might have hoped that health sciences would become more critical of its authority and the process through which it re/produces modern binaries (e.g. normal/pathological, male/female). A starting point for health sciences would be to promote the multiplicity of what Foucault describes as subjugated forms of knowledge (savoirs assujettis): these forms of knowledge are ways of understanding the world that are ‘disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, and knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity’ (p. 7).20 These forms of knowledge arise from below, as it were, in contradistinction to the top-down approach that characterises the hegemonic thrust of EBHS. For Foucault, a subjugated knowledge is not the same thing as ‘common sense’. Instead, it is ‘a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential’ (pp. 7–8).20 In our view, this positive process begins with a critique of EBHS and its hegemonic norms. As we have argued, according to postmodern authors, these norms institute a hidden political agenda through the very language and technologies deployed in the name of ‘truth’. Again, Foucault sums up this position in his critique of modern medicine: ‘Medicine, as a general technique of health even more than as a service to the sick or an art of cures, assumes an increasingly important place in the administrative system and the machinery of power’ (p. 176).21 Here, in such an ‘administrative system’ and a ‘machinery of power’, we find a classic allusion to what Hannah Arendt defines as totalitarianism or fascism, as we defined it earlier. For her, somewhat optimistically, totalitarian regimes are not the simple result of an innate evil in humankind; rather, totalitarianism is a political phenomenon that emerges from a confluence of socio-historical forces. She writes that 20th century totalitarianism is essentially an ideology that arose to fill a political vacuum in post-World War I Europe, when positive laws increasingly came to be replaced by terror.22 Arendt herself draws the link between totalitarian ideology and the modern sciences, and so we are justified to turn to her, among others, to find a trenchant critique of EBHS. The ‘regime of truth’ that has emerged from the EBM is an ideology that is supported by a number of contingent factors – contingencies that EBHS would mistakenly classify as ‘truths’. An ideology is monolithic: those who adhere to the ideology believe it ‘can explain everything and every occurence sic by deducing it from a single premise’ (p. 468).22 She warns that totalitarianism ‘is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody’s vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of Nature’ (pp. 461–462).22 But, as we have remarked, History and Nature are made; these forms therefore call for an ever-renewed critique. Their aff is medical colonization and a form of empire building. As medicine expands access it will become a way to demonstrate the benevolence of US empire. PATTON 11 Collen Hill, for over 25 years, has been a student of medicine, a nurse, a physician assistant, and an educator. She has been a registered nurse in small rural hospitals in Appalachia and large cities, with practice settings ranging from rural emergency rooms, to large military medical centers, and rural home health nursing in Alabama. IMAGES OF EXPERIENCE: DECOLONIZING MEDICINE, A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree, DOCTOR OF EDUCATION, STATESBORO, GEORGIA If we take the word Oriental and replace it with the word patient, this quotation still rings with truth and implications that we need to address, critique and investigate for the possibilities of change. Said (1979) also described the patient as also a “body of knowledge” (p. 43). Human being no longer represents the term used in medical teachings and practice. It has become, and remains today, an object to be judged, studied, and illustrated within a context not of its own making. Medicine has a very long and intricate relationship with imperialism and colonialism historically. Medicine was a part of the ideology as well as the accountancy of empire. D. Schoute once argued that when the British occupied the Dutch East Indies early in the nineteenth century they replaced the Dutch company’s narrowly ‘commercial’ medical outlook (aimed solely at keeping its European employees alive) with an ‘idealist’ vision of medicine in the service of the entire population, Indonesian and European alike. Even before the scientific breakthroughs of the late nineteenth century, imperial powers were beginning to use medicine as a demonstration of their benevolent and paternalistic intensions, as a way of winning support from a newly subject population, of balancing out the coercive features of colonial rule, and of establishing a wider imperial hegemony than could be derived from conquest alone. (Arnold, 1988, p. 16) Over time, medicine acquired an imperialism of its own. Today, Western medicine continues to dominate and colonize not only the patients within America, but within other regions and countries, in order to explore new therapies at the risk of those deemed less than us. It is true that we utilize the poorest in other countries to perform research for medications. Our country continues beyond the times of European colonialism to use medicine and healthcare as a method of “medical counterinsurgency operations” (Levy, 1978, p. 298). Providing care to our enemies who are wounded or captured is often methods of intelligence gathering. Yet I believe that American medicine, as an institution practiced at home, is a form of colonialism, even to those of us who reside within this country’s boundaries. I offer this quote by James Paul (1978): Medicine has from the beginning functioned in the service of imperialism, supporting logically the voracious search for ever wider markets and profitable deals.…We can also see how medical sciences, rather than eliminate the social roots of ill health, promotes a commodity-based disease therapy. And finally, we can better grasp the role of the doctor, not as benevolent practitioner of universal science but as purveyor of capitalist values and as enthusiastic agent of imperial rule. (p. 272) However, the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, reminds us that “culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is thickly—described” (Geertz, 1973, p. 14). In his text, The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz explains the importance and awareness of looking beyond generalization. A thin description is one that focuses our attention on the superficial meaning or explanation of an act, word, gesture, or custom. As an American woman, I may explain a nod as a gesture of agreement or affirming. However, a nod in a nomadic tribe in Africa would mean something very negative or dismissive. As Geertz stated: Although one starts any effort at thick description, beyond the obvious and superficial, from a state of general bewilderment as to what the devil is going on—trying to find one’s feet—one does not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-handed. (Geertz, 1973, p. 27) My hope is that my varied experiences of medicine – as a student, a nurse, a physician assistant, and now an educator – provide me with an ability to go beyond bewilderment and to study and describe the experiences I have seen and what these meanings and actions may tell us about the world of the patient and medicine. “Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study;…they are adopted from other, related studies, and refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems” (Geertz, 1973, p. 27). In choosing to study medicine through the theoretical ideas of Critical theory, Critical humanism, and Postcolonialism—the hope is for new understandings and interpretations—a true thick description.
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SO- Nebel T
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 2 | Opponent: Christopher Columbus NG | Judge: Ben Cortez Interpretation: medicines is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that member nations of the World Trade Organization reduce intellectual property protections for a subset of medicines. Nebel 19 Jake Nebel Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. , 8-12-2019, "Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution," Briefly, https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/ SM Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. 1.1 “Colleges and Universities” “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universities generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. Fourth, it is extremely unlikely that the topic committee would have written the resolution with the existential interpretation of “colleges and universities” in mind. If they intended the existential interpretation, they would have added explicit existential quantifiers like “some.” No such addition would be necessary or expected for the generic interpretation since generics lack explicit quantifiers by default. The topic committee’s likely intentions are not decisive, but they strongly suggest that the generic interpretation is correct, since it’s prima facie unlikely that a committee charged with writing a sentence to be debated would be so badly mistaken about what their sentence means (which they would be if they intended the existential interpretation). The committee, moreover, does not write resolutions for the 0.1 percent of debaters who debate on the national circuit; they write resolutions, at least in large part, to be debated by the vast majority of students on the vast majority of circuits, who would take the resolution to be (pretty obviously, I’d imagine) generic with respect to “colleges and universities,” given its face-value meaning and standard expectations about what LD resolutions tend to mean.
9/18/21
SO- Nebel T v 2
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 4 | Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Brett Boelkens Interpretation: medicines is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that member nations of the World Trade Organization reduce intellectual property protections for a subset of medicines. Nebel 19 Jake Nebel Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. , 8-12-2019, "Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution," Briefly, https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/ SM Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. 1.1 “Colleges and Universities” “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universities generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. Fourth, it is extremely unlikely that the topic committee would have written the resolution with the existential interpretation of “colleges and universities” in mind. If they intended the existential interpretation, they would have added explicit existential quantifiers like “some.” No such addition would be necessary or expected for the generic interpretation since generics lack explicit quantifiers by default. The topic committee’s likely intentions are not decisive, but they strongly suggest that the generic interpretation is correct, since it’s prima facie unlikely that a committee charged with writing a sentence to be debated would be so badly mistaken about what their sentence means (which they would be if they intended the existential interpretation). The committee, moreover, does not write resolutions for the 0.1 percent of debaters who debate on the national circuit; they write resolutions, at least in large part, to be debated by the vast majority of students on the vast majority of circuits, who would take the resolution to be (pretty obviously, I’d imagine) generic with respect to “colleges and universities,” given its face-value meaning and standard expectations about what LD resolutions tend to mean.
It applies to medicines:
Upward entailment test – spec fails the upward entailment test because saying that nations ought to reduce IPP for one medicine does not entail that those nations ought to reduce IPP for all medicines 2. Adverb test – adding “usually” to the res doesn’t substantially change its meaning because a reduction is permanent
Vote neg:
Semantics outweigh: a. T is a constitutive rule of the activity and a basic aff burden – they agreed to debate the topic when they came here b. Jurisdiction – you can’t vote aff if they haven’t affirmed the resolution c. It’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement – there’s no way to use ground if debaters aren’t prepared to defend it
2. Limits – there are countless affs accounting for thousands of medicines – unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden – potential abuse doesn’t justify foregoing the topic and 1AR theory checks PICs
There are over 20,000 affs FDA 11/18 (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, federal agency of the Department of Health and Human Service) “Fact Sheet: FDA at a Glance,” 11/18/2020 JL There are over 20,000 prescription drug products approved for marketing. FDA oversees over 6,500 different medical device product categories. There are over 1,600 FDA-approved animal drug products. There are about 300 FDA-licensed biologics products. 3. TVA solves – read as an advantage to whole rez
Paradigm issues:
Drop the debater – their abusive advocacy skewed the debate from the start 2. Comes before 1AR theory – NC abuse is responsive to them not being topical 3. Competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation – better than their reasonability standard that prioritizes subjectivity 4. Education is a voter – why schools fund debate
On their underview stuff- 1AR theory comes first except for topicality – it is top abuse since the first speech makes it impossible for the neg to respond to any substance Topicality theory is drop the debater because the neg can never engage in substance
9/19/21
SO- Opioid HIF CP
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: 4 | Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Brett Boelkens 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 and abolish the WTO, while maintaining opioid patents. The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines and encouraging research in what the aff calls “alternative” 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. Eliminating the WTO ends U.S. global hegemony Bello, PhD, 2000 (Walden, Sociology @ Stanford, https://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1352/ecologist/Should20WTO20be20abolished.pdf) The idea that the world needs the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is one of the biggest lies of our time. The WTO came about, in 1995, mainly because it was in the interest of the US and its corporations. The European Union, Japan and especially the developing countries were mostly ambivalent about the idea; it was the US which drove it on. Why? Because though the US, back in 1948, blocked the formation of an International Trade Organisation (ITO), believing that, at that time, the interests of its corporations would not be served by such a global body, it had changed its mind by the 1990s. Now it wanted an international trade body. Why? Because its global economic dominance was threatened. The flexible GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) system, which preceded the WTO, had allowed the emergence of Europe and East Asia as competing industrial centres that threatened US dominance even in many high-tech industries. Under GATT’s system of global agricultural trade, Europe had emerged as a formidable agricultural power even as Third World governments concerned with preserving their agriculture and rural societies limited the penetration of their markets by US agricultural products. In other words, before the WTO, global trade was growing by leaps and bounds, but countries were using trade policy to industrialise and adapt to the growth of trade so that their economies would be enhanced by global trade and not be marginalised by it. That was a problem, from the US point of view. And that was why the US needed the WTO. The essence of the WTO is seen in three of its central agreements: the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), and the Agreement on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs). The purpose of TRIPs is not to promote free trade but to enhance monopoly power. One cannot quarrel with the fact that innovators should have preferential access to the benefits that flow from their innovation for a period of time. TRIPs, however, goes beyond this to institutionalise a monopoly for high-tech corporate innovators, most of them from the North. Among other things, TRIPs provides a generalised minimum patent protection of 20 years; institutes draconian border regulations against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and – contrary to the judicial principle of presuming innocence until proven guilty – places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process patents. What TRIPs does is reinforce the monopolistic or oligopolistic position of US high tech firms such as Microsoft and Intel. It makes industrialisation by imitation or industrialisation via loose conditions of technology transfer – a strategy employed by the US, Germany, Japan, and South Korea during the early phases of their industrialisation – all but impossible. It enables the technological leader, in this case the US, to greatly influence the pace of technological and industrial development in the rest of the world.
US Primacy causes endless war, terror, authoritarianism, prolif, and Russia-China aggression. Ashford, PhD, 19 (Emma, PoliSci@UVA, Fellow@CATO, Power and Pragmatism: Reforming American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, in New Voices in Grand Strategy, 4, CNAS) Humility is a virtue. Yet in the last quarter century, American policymakers have been far more likely to embrace the notion of America as the “indispensable nation,” responsible for protecting allies, promoting democracy and human rights, tamping down conflicts, and generally managing global affairs. Compare this ideal to the U.S. track record – endless Middle Eastern wars, the rise of ISIS, global democratic backsliding, a revanchist Russia, resurgent China, and a world reeling from the election of President Donald Trump – and this label seems instead the height of hubris. Many of the failures of U.S. foreign policy speak for themselves. As the daily drumbeat of bad news attests, interventions in Iraq and Libya were not victories for human rights or democracy, but rather massively destabilizing for the Middle East as a whole. Afghanistan – despite initial military successes – has become a quagmire, highlighting the futility of nation- building. Other failures of America’s grand strategy are less visible, but no less damaging. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe helped to reignite hostility between Russia and the West. Worse, it has diluted the alliance’s defensive capacity and its democratic character. And even as the war on terror fades from public view, it remains as open-ended as ever: Today, the United States is at war in seven countries and engaged in “combating terrorism’ in more than 80.1 To put it bluntly: America’s strategy since the end of the Cold War – whether it is called primacy or liberal internationalism – may not be a total failure, but it has not been successful either. Many have tried to place blame for these poor outcomes.2 But recrimination is less important than understanding why America’s strategy has failed so badly and avoiding these mistakes in future. Much of the explanation is the natural outcome of changing constraints. Iraq and Libya should not be viewed as regrettable anomalies, but rather the logical outcome of unipolarity and America’s liberal internationalist inclination to solve every global problem. It’s also a reliance on flawed assumptions – that what is good for America is always good for the world, for example. Support for dangerous sovereignty-undermining norms adds to the problem; just look at the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which has proved not to protect populations or stabilize fragile states, but to provoke chaos, encourage nuclear proliferation, and undermine the international institutions. Perhaps, if nothing else had changed, a form of watered-down liberal internationalism that foreswore interventionism and drew back from the war on terror might have been possible.3 But international politics are undergoing a period of profound transformation, from unipolarity to regional or even global multipolarity. Primacy – and the consistent drumbeat of calls in Washington to do more, always and everywhere – is neither sustainable nor prudent. Nor can we fall back on warmed-over Cold War–era strategies better suited to an era of bipolar superpower competition.
9/19/21
SO- T Hypothetical Implementation
Tournament: Jack Howe | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Honor VD | Judge: Dylan Liu, Joel Lemuel, Gabriela Gonzalez Interp: The affirmative must only garner offense off of the consequences of hypothetical policy implementation of the resolution: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. To clarify, affs cannot be extra-T.
Violation: 1 Garnering offense from form implies their speech act is an advocacy. CX proves and hold the line – at best, they’re Extra-T which still links to our predictability offense. 2 The 2nd card pretty clearly indicts debate and the entirety of the 1AC is about rhetoric NOT consequences. If I read a DA, they’d claim performative offense. 3 The aff affirms rhetorical decolonization within member states – the topic pretty clearly doesn’t say anything about decol
Vote neg— 1 Predictable limits – not affirming the resolution makes debate impossible because they get to affirm anything – literally thousands of aff. Their interp incentivizes affirming uncontestable statements like “2+2=4” or “racism bad” and the lack of a stable mechanism means they can always de-link from the few responsive generics.
2 Strategy skew – the aff is incentivized to solve any disad if they can go beyond a topical action
3 TVAs: There’s a bio colonialism aff– affirm ending IP that derives medicines from indigenous knowledge. It's okay if this doesn't solve their offense—the disads to the TVA are neg ground. This teaches debaters to work within imperfect situations for marginal gains, and forces them to refine their arguments round to round which hijacks their survival arguments.
T is drop the debater and competing interps—
The round has been irreparably skewed—I had to read T in order to engage the aff and that altered allocation on other issues which means you risk making the incorrect decision on substance especially if they don’t read a counter interp for debate 2. It’s an indict of their advocacy—they don’t defend topical action so if I win T their entire advocacy goes away and you have to default neg No RVIs – you don’t win on being topical
9/19/21
SO- T Plural
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Emmiee Malyugina Interpretation and violation – topical affs must defend two or more member nations. A. Member nations means more than one member nation B. Nations is plural. Requires multiple nations to enact the plan. WordHippo, ND - ("What is the plural of nation?," ND, 10-5-2021https:www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-plural-of/nation.html)AW The plural form of nation is nations. Prefer our interpretation and vote neg
Neg Engagement – it’s the foundation of the activity and they destroy it a. Ground – single countries have no lit base because few people write about them and the core of the topic centers on international policy 2. They allow hundreds of affs—one for every member nation—they could defend the US, China, Luxembourg, Israel, Iran, Canada, Iceland, Jordan, or anyone else reducing IPP—the aff will always be over-prepared against negs who have to prep against numerous tiny affs. Two impacts – a) advocacy skills—they never have to defend their positions against well-researched objections since we can’t predict and prep for every specific aff ahead of time, which kills real world policymaking skills because we can’t debate what will be the best solution to the problem. b) Loss of ground destroys fairness- generic disad don’t link – the neg loses an enormous part of the link to innovation, heg, and medical safety. Forcing bigger and more predictable affs solves. Means their topic prevents the neg from effectively preparing and kills clash. c) Our interp allows multiple affs but avoids the limits disad – forcing them to defend multiple states limits the number of affs and forces affs to read a single advantage to both countries they defend so negs can’t just PIC out of one and read disads to the other—our interp substantially limits the topic but gives them affs like the EU member nations, China and Russia, India Pakistan. Vote on competing interps anything else is arbitrary and unfair.
10/9/21
SO- WTO T
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 1 | Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Gordon Krauss Interp – topical affs must fiat an action through the World Trade Organization. Member nations of the WTO make policies as a whole – WTO ND (World Trade Organization) “What is the WTO?” https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/whatis_e.htm BC The WTO is run by its member governments. All major decisions are made by the membership as a whole, either by ministers (who usually meet at least once every two years) or by their ambassadors or delegates (who meet regularly in Geneva). Violation – they don’t – their just fiat “revolutionary medicine” without WTO as the actor. They also concede this during CX.
TVA solves: they could have read their aff through WTO action Their carrol ’6 card literally says “this approach emphasizes the need for counter-hegemonic movement to walk on both legs TAKING UP STATE-CENTERED ISSUES as well as issues resident in national and transnational civil societies. Indeed, RECLAIMING THE STATE is elemental to counter hegemony today” — this proves their interp is bad because it means they need to engage state actors to solve their aff, which they straight up don’t
Prefer
Ground – justifies affs about any country reducing any IP protection on medicine – only our interp ensures link magnitude by ensuring it is an international reduction for IPP for medicine which is key to generics like the innovation DA, WTO bad, consult the WHO, and the IP NC -- privileges the aff by stretching pre-tournament neg prep too thin and precluding nuanced rigorous testing of aff. 2. Topic ed – WTO IP wavers are the core topic controversy – their aff is just rebo;yiond. Outweighs aff flex -- prep is determined by what is popular in the lit and we only have 2 months to debate the topic. ALSO provides better link magnitude to all your generics because this is the statis point the topic is centered around. Paradigm issues:
Drop the debater – their abusive advocacy skewed the debate from the start 2. Competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation 3. Fairness is a voter ¬– necessary to determine the better debater 4. Education is a voter – why schools fund debate