Chuck Ballingall Memorial Invitational at Damien High School
2
San Marino- FS
Samuel, Nebiyu
College Prep
2
Archbishop Mitty AP
Sadagopan, Padmanabhan
Harvard Westlake Tournament
4
Peninsula AY
Liyanage, Nethmin
Heart of Texas Invitational
2
Peninsula EL
Walters, Leighton
Heart of Texas Invitational
5
Little Rock Central XJ
Hiligoss, Derek
Heart of Texas Invitational
8
Westlake AH
Sims, John
Jack Howe Memorial- CSU
2
Academy of Higher Learning- SB
Chuang, Luan
WBFL League 3
2
Brentwood AL
Thakre, Riya
WBFL League 3
2
Brentwood AL
Thakre, Riya
WBFL League 3
2
Brentwood AL
Thakre, Riya
Tournament
Round
Report
0-Contact Info
1
Opponent: Information | Judge:
Contact Info
Chuck Ballingall Memorial Invitational at Damien High School
2
Opponent: San Marino- FS | Judge: Samuel, Nebiyu
AC- COVID vaccine production low NC- Innovation DA COVID Funding CP
College Prep
2
Opponent: Archbishop Mitty AP | Judge: Sadagopan, Padmanabhan
1AC Space debris exploitation of workers 1NC Climate Innovation DA private better
Harvard Westlake Tournament
4
Opponent: Peninsula AY | Judge: Liyanage, Nethmin
1AC Cosmic Colonialism 2NC Legal trust fund CP At cap Asteroid mining dA 1AR condo AT Asteroid mining Cap 2NR CP Asteroid Mining Cap
Heart of Texas Invitational
2
Opponent: Peninsula EL | Judge: Walters, Leighton
1AC Vaccine Imperialism 1NC Innovation DA HIF CP 1AR Perm the CP
Heart of Texas Invitational
5
Opponent: Little Rock Central XJ | Judge: Hiligoss, Derek
1AC antiblackness K 1NC T 3-off 1AR FW T Case 1NR case T FW 2AR Blackfemme DA case
Heart of Texas Invitational
8
Opponent: Westlake AH | Judge: Sims, John
1AC Inherency India Adv South Africa Adv 1NC Global Universal Health Care CP Innovation DA 1AR A2 Innovation 1NR All
Jack Howe Memorial- CSU
2
Opponent: Academy of Higher Learning- SB | Judge: Chuang, Luan
AC-China HEG NC- Disclosure Theory HIF CP Innovation DA
WBFL League 3
2
Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya
1AC Rules Inequality 1NC Asteroid Mining Climate Change 1AR AT Asteroid Mining AT CC Cap K
WBFL League 3
2
Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya
1AC Rules Inequality 1NC Asteroid Mining Climate Change 1AR AT Asteroid Mining AT CC Cap K
WBFL League 3
2
Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya
1AC Rules Inequality 1NC Asteroid Mining Climate Change 1AR AT Asteroid Mining AT CC Cap K
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
1NC v Little Rock Central AFF
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Little Rock Central XJ | Judge: Hiligoss, Derek CASE AT: Debate Unfair Now One—they don’t solve this. If you vote affirmative, all that happens is they go onto to debate in the next round. Two—Moral Hazard argument—they have to answer the question why are they here? If debate is unfair because it doesn’t maintain equal access for minorities, they would be better served by lobbying a school district superintendent for more funding for debate or working at a UDL to keep under-privileged students in the activity. Three—lack of limits is worse—it means large, well-funded schools could monopolize research to lock people out of the discussion. It also means that people who can’t afford to spend 90 of their time on debate will be forced to exit the activity because it becomes uncompetitive to do so. Some people have to work to eat, and eat to live—it’s not cost effective for them to debate in this world and those students are primarily the under-privileged ones. Four—decision-making skills outweigh—inculcation of advocacy skills allows people to argue for reform in debate better in external forums which are suited to hear challenges for changes in debate, they have to learn to defend their advocacies against well prepared opponents so that when they arrive at these forums they will be able to defend specific implementations for change—i.e. the forum for race discussions held at NU. AT: Afro-Pess Offense
Fatalism DA. Their arguments are reductionist. Ontology and transhistorical racism don’t pre-determine institutional victories. Segregation, Jim Crow and slavery are all historically specific moments. Yes, racism exists today but paying attention to the way it’s changed and previous political successes are critical to preventing fatalism. Reed 18 Adolph Reed -- professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. The Baffler, The Trouble With Uplift. How black politics succumbed to the siren song of the racial voice, No. 41 The politics thus advanced is profoundly race-reductionist, discounting the value of both political agency and the broad pursuit of political alliances within a polity held to be intractably and irredeemably devoted to white supremacy. This fatalistic outlook works seamlessly to reinforce the status of racial voices who emphasize the interests and concerns of a singular racial collectivity. Central to these pundits’ message is the assertion that blacks have it worse, in every socio-cultural context that might be adduced. This refrain is also consistent in two important ways with the reigning ideology of neoliberal equality. First, the insistence that disparities of racial access to power are the most meaningful forms of inequality strongly reinforces the neoliberal view that inequalities generated by capitalist market forces are natural and lie beyond the scope of intervention. And second, if American racism is an intractable, transhistorical force—indeed, an ontological one, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has characterized it—then it lies beyond structural political intervention. In other words, Coates and other race-firsters diminish the significance of the legislative and other institutional victories won since Emancipation, leaving us with only exhortations to individual conversion and repentance as a program. This is why, for example, Coates and other proponents of reparations seem unconcerned with the strategic problem of piecing together the kind of interracial popular support necessary to actually prevail on the issue. Such problems do not exist for them because the role of the representative black leader or voice is precisely to function as an alternative to political action. Instead, the order of the day is typically to perform racial authenticity in a way that doubles as an appeal for moral recognition from those with the power to bestow it. Winning anything politically—policies or changes in power relations—is not the point. That is why the jeremiads offered by contemporary racial voices so commonly boil down to calls for “conversations about race” or equally vapid abstractions like “racial reckoning” or “coming to terms with” a history defined by racism. The black leadership role was always at best an accommodation to disfranchisement, going back to its first modern incarnation with Booker T. Washington and his cohort of racial advocates. It is a politics of elite transaction. That is not in itself necessarily a bad thing—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “black cabinet,” or Federal Council of Negro Affairs, advised him on matters related to black Americans. But unlike today’s freelance racial voices, they were administration functionaries, and most had standing in racial advocacy, education, labor, and government institutions prior to joining the “cabinet.” The backdoor dealings between King and Johnson during the Selma campaign that DuVernay found too messy to include in her portrait of King’s heroic persona were also part of mundane political maneuvering, the inside-outside game of institutional politics. King and the SCLC, like FDR’s black cabinet, had constituencies that underwrote their standing as representatives of racial interest—which in turn gave them leverage to make political demands and pursue policy agendas. A. Philip Randolph used the March on Washington Movement to pressure President Roosevelt in 1941 to issue “Executive Order 8802,” prohibiting racial discrimination in the national defense industry. Randolph, Bayard Rustin, the Negro American Labor Council, and others organized the 1963 March on Washington as part of an inside-outside strategy to build support for a jobs program and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. All this painstaking political effort could not be farther from the careerist pursuits of contemporary racial voices, whose standing depends entirely on the favor of powerful opinion-shaping elites in corporate media and elsewhere. Thus, for example, Touré Neblett and others in MSNBC’s stable were unceremoniously expunged from the lineup of talking heads when the network reconfigured its marketing priorities. More dramatically, Melissa Harris-Perry, apparently believing that her viewing audience gave her leverage, openly rebuffed the network’s demand to reorient her program to fit in with its election coverage. In short order, she and her program vanished without a trace from its schedule. Such incidents, and scores of others like them, make it indelibly clear where the lines of authority run when it comes to winning elite-media recognition as a black voice. For Their Own Good The race voices I’ve discussed express a particular class perspective among black Americans, one that harmonizes with left-neoliberal notions of justice and equality. That harmony may help explain why those racial voices—like the black political class in general—are so intent on disparaging the social-democratic politics associated with Bernie Sanders, even though a 2017 Harvard-Harris survey found that Sanders was far more popular with African Americans than with any other demographic category except declared Democrats. He boasted a 73 percent favorable rating among black voters—higher than his approval numbers among Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and considerably higher than those for whites or even 18-34 year-olds. This disjunction between popular opinion and the priorities of the black chattering class underscores the extent to which the racial programs and priorities advanced by those recognized black voices remain much as they were in the Age of Washington. Now as then, we have a leadership stratum dedicated to the class-skewed pursuit of “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” And the net effect of this top-down model of black discourse is to tether a politics of racial representation to the ruling-class agendas that generate and intensify inequality and insecurity for working people across American society, including among the ranks of black Americans. Black Clintonites, like Congressmen John Lewis (D-GA), James Clyburn (D-SC) and Cedric Richmond (D-LA), all clearly displayed this commitment during the 2016 Democratic primaries when they attacked Sanders as “irresponsible” in calling for non-commodified public goods in education, health care, and other areas. Richmond’s rebuke was especially telling in that he couched it in terms of his role as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and the group’s “responsibility to make sure to know that young people know that” a social-democratic agenda is “too good to be true.” Richmond’s invocation of civic instruction for the young may be revealing in another way. Lurking beneath that piety is the deeply sedimented common sense of underclass ideology, which posits a population mired in pathologies and hemmed in by an overwhelming racism, and the corollary of interventions aiming to enhance capabilities for individual mobility. (It is, indeed, this same tacit rhetoric of permanent crisis that fuels the notion that black young people must be raised on a diet of inspirational movies.) This vision of unyielding black pathology is yet another testament to the harmony of antiracist and neoliberal ideologies—and it, too, harks directly back to the origins of the black leadership caste at the dawn of the last century. Washington and Du Bois, together with Garvey and other prominent racial nationalists, envisioned their core constituency as a politically mute black population in need of tutelage from their ruling-class-backed leaders. Touré F. Reed persuasively argues that the mildly updated version of this vision now serves as an essential cornerstone of the new black professional-managerial class politics. Underclass mythology grounds professional-class claims to race leadership, while providing the normative foundation of uplift programs directed toward enhancing self-esteem rather than the material redistribution of wealth and income. Exhortations to celebrate and demand accolades, career opportunities, and material accumulation for black celebrities and rich people—e.g., box office receipts for black filmmakers or contracts and prestigious appointments for other well-positioned black people—as a racial politics are consistent with the sporadic eruptions of “Buy Black” campaigns since the 1920s and 1930s. Such efforts stood out in stark contrast to more working-class based “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns that demanded employment opportunities in establishments serving black neighborhoods. Like “Buy Black” campaigns, which seem to have risen again from the tomb of petit-bourgeois wishful thinking, projections of successes for the rich and famous as generic racial victories depend on a sleight-of-hand that treats benefits for any black person as benefits for all black people. This brings to mind comedian Chris Rock’s quip that he went to his mailbox every day for two weeks after the not guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial looking for his “O. J. prize,” only to be disappointed. At times, this tendency to absorb the plural into the singular can be strikingly crude and transparently self-interested. The torrent of hostility directed at Rachel Dolezal for having represented herself as black rested on groundless—sometimes entirely made up—claims that she had appropriated jobs, awards, and other honorifics intended for blacks. In addition to the annual contretemps over whether blacks win enough of the most prestigious Oscars, recent racial controversies in the art world illustrate how easily the narrowest guild concerns can masquerade as burning matters of racial justice. The Brooklyn Museum’s hiring of a white person as consulting curator of African art sparked objections that the hire perpetuated “pervasive structures of white supremacy in the art field.” The 2017 furor over the Whitney Biennial’s display of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”—inspired by the infamous 1955 photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body—reduced to a question of ownership of “black suffering,” or more accurately, of the right to represent and materially benefit from the representation of black suffering. The protesters’ objection, as Walter Benn Michaels put it succinctly, was that “black pain belongs to black artists.” It’s worth noting that one of the leading critics of the painting and its display was Hannah Black, who contended that “non-black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand” the gesture Till’s mother, Mamie, made in insisting on an open-casket funeral. Black, who not only called for the painting to be removed from display, but also offered an “urgent recommendation” that it be destroyed, is a Briton who lives in Berlin. From a different standard of cultural proprietorship, one might argue that Schutz, as an American, has a stronger claim than Black to interpret the Till story. After all, the segregationist Southern order and the struggle against that order, which gave Till’s fate its broader social and political significance, were historically specific moments of a distinctively American experience. In fact, most claims of cultural ownership and charges of appropriation are bogus. While sometimes they provide an instrumental basis for tortious claims, as in pursuit of restitution for Nazi and other imperialists’ looting of artifacts, more often they posit a dead-end conflation of fixed and impermeable racial identity with cultural expression. As Michaels has argued for more than twenty-five years, the discourse of cultural ownership stems from the pluralist mindset that treats “culture” as a key marker of social groups and thereby inscribes it as racial essentialism.¶ In order to legitimate what Michaels describes as “racial rent-seeking,” a curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse, proposing a trickle-down model of racial progress, anchored in the mysticism of organic black community. Against this exoticized backdrop, neoliberal race leaders stage the beguiling fantasy that individual “entrepreneurialism” is the key path to rising above one’s circumstances—i.e., the standard American social myth that obscures the deeper need to combat systemic inequalities. The most tragic, and pathetic, expressions of this faith are the versions of the “gospel of prosperity,” which fuse pop self-realization psychology and a barely recognizable Christianity to exploit desperation and the desire for life with dignity and respect among their black-majority congregations. The false hopes of the prosperity gospel encourage already vulnerable people to fall prey to all sorts of destructive get-rich-quick schemes; they are the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” channeled through a market-idolatrous Protestant psychobabble. Black ministers and other proponents of entrepreneurialist ideology as racial uplift also played a largely unrecognized role in pushing subprime mortgages, and even payday loans, in black communities. The racial trickle-down success myth is partly a vestige of an earlier era, during which individual black attainments could be seen as testaments to the race’s capacities—and a refutation of the white-sanctioned view of black people as generally inferior. Even then, however, this model of black uplift was enmeshed in the race theory of the time—notably the belief that a race’s capacities were indicated by the accomplishments of its “best” individuals—and it was always inflected with the class perspectives of those who saw themselves as such individuals. The class legacies of this foundational moment in modern black politics may well contribute to the firm insistence among today’s “black voices” that slavery and Jim Crow mark the transcendent truth of black Americans’ experience in the United States—and that an irreducible racism is the source of all manifest racial inequality. That diagnosis certainly masks class asymmetries among black Americans’ circumstances as well as in the remedies proposed to improve them. Nevertheless, we continue to indulge the politically wrong-headed, counterproductive, and even reactionary features of the “representative black voice” industry in whatever remains of our contemporary public sphere. And we never reckon with the truly disturbing presumption that any black person who can gain access to the public microphone and performs familiar rituals of “blackness” should be recognized as expressing significant racial truths and deserves our attention. This presumption rests on the unexamined premise that blacks share a common, singular mind that is at once radically unknowable to non-blacks and readily downloaded by any random individual setting up shop as a racial voice. And despite what all of our age’s many heroic narratives of individualist race-first triumph may suggest to the casual viewer, that premise is the essence of racism. 2. Insularity DA – Making debate entirely about the debate space replicates the insular logic of academia where the only relevant consideration is contributing to the discipline rather than changing material conditions. Their Aff doesn’t solve any manifestation of racism in debate they have described. Voting for the Aff strikes an anti-racist pose that effects white catharsis while requiring no commitment to actual change.
3. No solvency - Changing debate fails. Atchison and Panetta, 09 (Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of Georgia, Assistant Professor and Director of debate at Wake Forest University, and Edward Panetta, Phd Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and Director of Debate at Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication, Historical Developments and Issues for the Future, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p. 317-334) This section will address the "debate as activism perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community problems in individual debates. In contrast to the "debate as innovation" perspective, which assumes that the activity is an isolated game with educational benefits, proponents of the "debate as activism" perspective argue that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate community and society at large. If the first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no substantive insulation between individual debates and the community at large. ¶ From our perspective, using individual debates to create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First, individual debates are, for the most part, insulated from the community at large. Second, individual debates limit the conversation to the immediate participants and the judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third, locating the discussion within the confines of a competition diminishes the additional potential for collaboration, consensus, and coalition building. The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to generate community change. Although any debate has the potential to create problems for the community (videotapes of objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely does any one debate have the power to create communitywide change. We attribute this ineffectiveness to the structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective forgetfulness of the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format that has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in preliminary debates in rooms that are rarely populated by anyone other than the judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the best debating, but the ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tabulation room.¶ Given the limited number of debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little documentation of what actually transpired during the debate round. During the period when judges interact with the debaters, there are often external pressures (filing evidence, preparing for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyone outside the debate to pay attention to the judges' justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much better audience because debates still occur simultaneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that asking a judge to vote to solve a community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is the best strategy for addressing important problems. 4. Agency DA – Treating antiblackness as an ontological fact denies Black agency to render the meanings of their lives and envisions a world without particularly. Antiblackness is diverse, evolving, and people experience it differently. The monolithic conception denies the value of resistance and reifies racial hierarchy. Gordon, ‘17 – (Lewis, Professor @ UConn, “Afro pessimism,” Critical Exchange, Contemporary Political Theory, 12-7, pp 1–33, Springer) ‘‘Afropessimism’’ came out of ‘‘Afro-pessimism.’’ The elimination of the hyphen is an important development, since it dispels ambiguity and in effect announces a specific mode of thought. Should the hyphen remain, the ambiguity would be between pessimistic people of African descent and theoretical pessimism. The conjoined, theoretical term is what proponents often have in mind in their diagnosis of what I shall call ‘‘the black condition.’’ The appeal to a black condition is peculiarly existential. Existentialists reject notions of human ‘‘nature’’ on the grounds that human beings live in worlds they also construct; they produce their socalled essence. That does not mean, however, human beings lack anchorage. Everyone has to start from somewhere. Existentialists call that somewhere a condition or conditions for these reasons, and the world human beings produce or through which we live is sometimes called ‘‘human reality.’’ Critics of existentialism often reject its human formulation. Heidegger, for instance, in his ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ lambasted Sartre for supposedly in effect subordinating Being to a philosophical anthropology with dangers of anthropocentrism (Heidegger, 1971). Yet a philosophical understanding of culture raises the problem of the conditions through which philosophical reflections could emerge as meaningful. Although a human activity, a more radical understanding of culture raises the question of the human being as the producer of an open reality. If the human being is in the making, then ‘‘human reality’’ is never complete and is more the relations in which such thought takes place than a claim about the thought. The etymology of existence already points to these elements. From the Latin ex sistere, ‘‘to stand out,’’ it also means to appear; against invisibility in the stream of effects through which the human world appears, much appears through the creative and at times alchemic force of human thought and deed. Quarrels with and against existential thought are many. In more recent times, they’ve emerged primarily from Marxists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, even though there were, and continue to be, many existential Marxists and even existentialists with structuralist and poststructuralist leanings. I begin with this tale of philosophical abstraction to contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such as Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III, emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by poststructuralism even in many cases that avow ‘‘Marxism.’’ Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a reductive poststructuralism, however, through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel McNeil (2011, 2012) observed, by Fanon and his intellectual heirs. The critical question that Afropessimism addresses in this fusion is the viability of posed strategies of Black liberation. (I’m using the capital ‘‘B’’ here to point not only to the racial designation ‘‘black’’ but also to the nationalist one ‘‘Black.’’ Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks and Blacks have a central and centered role in their thought.) The world that produced blacks and in consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists, a crushing, historical one whose Manichaean divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated. Worse, any effort of mediation leads to confirmed black subordination. Overcoming this requires purging the world of antiblackness. Where cleansing the world is unachievable, an alternative is to disarm the force of antiblack racism. Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose relevance – at least politically and at levels of cultural and racial capital or hegemony. Wilderson (2008), for instance, explores my concept of ‘‘an antiblack world’’ to build similar arguments. Sexton (2011) makes similar moves in his discussions of ‘‘social death.’’ As this forum doesn’t afford space for a long critique, I’ll offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms. The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one) devoted to it. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value. Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human.
10/17/21
Contact Information- email
Tournament: 0-Contact Info | Round: 1 | Opponent: Information | Judge: yumanakamae24@marlborough.org
10/11/21
Global Universal Healthcare CP
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 8 | Opponent: Westlake AH | Judge: Sims, John CP Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization should establish a global system that provides universal healthcare to all of those nations’ citizens. This system should centrally purchase medicines in accordance with all IP rights and laws and should then universally distribute that medicine, with funds from the richest and healthiest going to subsidize the care of the poorest and sickest as per recommendations made by the CP evidence.
2) In order for universal healthcare to be achieved for all citizens, the system has to be global so that inequity between countries (not just within countries) may be resolved. Faulkner, 19 - ("Global Universal Healthcare: Is It Within Reach?," Middletown Media, 5-4-2019, https://muncievoice.com/22657/global-universal-healthcare-is-it-within-reach/)//va One of the biggest questions about global healthcare is how the costs will be distributed. In developed countries, raising taxes is a valid answer, but in some poorer nations, there is little room for tax reform on an already underprivileged population. So what can be done about it? ¶ For global universal healthcare to work, costs must be shared globally. This may mean charity in third-world nations, and more public and private partnerships in those areas. In other cases, global organizations can be formed, and surrounding nations that are more prosperous will need to help share the burden of costs with their neighbors. ¶ The biggest key with global universal healthcare is a shift in mentality from selfishness and nationalism to a worldwide perspective on healthcare and the welfare of world citizens. No one entity can do it alone. ¶ Is global universal healthcare within reach? With modern technology and communication and the innovations we have seen in healthcare, the answer is yes. The question then becomes: “Will we reach for it together?” ¶
3) Most people lack access to quality basic healthcare even though they spend shocking amounts of money trying to get it – a global universal healthcare system would pool resources to ensure everyone’s access at a much more efficient price and would solve better than the money currently spent on aid because it would establish infrastructure and employ rural community health workers Guardian, 18 - ("Universal health care, worldwide, is within reach," Economist, 4-26-2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/04/26/universal-health-care-worldwide-is-within-reach)//va BY MANY measures the world has never been in better health. Since 2000 the number of children who die before they are five has fallen by almost half, to 5.6m. Life expectancy has reached 71, a gain of five years. More children than ever are vaccinated. Malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS are in retreat. ¶ Yet the gap between this progress and the still greater potential that medicine offers has perhaps never been wider. At least half the world is without access to what the World Health Organisation deems essential, including antenatal care, insecticide-treated bednets, screening for cervical cancer and vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Safe, basic surgery is out of reach for 5bn people. ¶ Those who can get to see a doctor often pay a crippling price. More than 800m people spend over 10 of their annual household income on medical expenses; nearly 180m spend over 25. The quality of what they get in return is often woeful. In studies of consultations in rural Indian and Chinese clinics, just 12-26 of patients received a correct diagnosis. ¶ That is a terrible waste. As this week’s special report shows, the goal of universal basic health care is sensible, affordable and practical, even in poor countries. Without it, the potential of modern medicine will be squandered. ¶ How the other half dies Universal basic health care is sensible in the way that, say, universal basic education is sensible—because it yields benefits to society as well as to individuals. In some quarters the very idea leads to a dangerous elevation of the blood pressure, because it suggests paternalism, coercion or worse. There is no hiding that public health-insurance schemes require the rich to subsidise the poor, the young to subsidise the old and the healthy to underwrite the sick. And universal schemes must have a way of forcing people to pay, through taxes, say, or by mandating that they buy insurance. ¶ But there is a principled, liberal case for universal health care. Good health is something everyone can reasonably be assumed to want in order to realise their full individual potential. Universal care is a way of providing it that is pro-growth. The costs of inaccessible, expensive and abject treatment are enormous. The sick struggle to get an education or to be productive at work. Land cannot be developed if it is full of disease-carrying parasites. According to several studies, confidence about health makes people more likely to set up their own businesses. ¶ Universal basic health care is also affordable. A country need not wait to be rich before it can have comprehensive, if rudimentary, treatment. Health care is a labour-intensive industry, and community health workers, paid relatively little compared with doctors and nurses, can make a big difference in poor countries. There is also already a lot of spending on health in poor countries, but it is often inefficient. In India and Nigeria, for example, more than 60 of health spending is through out-of-pocket payments. More services could be provided if that money—and the risk of falling ill—were pooled. ¶ The evidence for the feasibility of universal health care goes beyond theories jotted on the back of prescription pads. It is supported by several pioneering examples. Chile and Costa Rica spend about an eighth of what America does per person on health and have similar life expectancies. Thailand spends $220 per person a year on health, and yet has outcomes nearly as good as in the OECD. Its rate of deaths related to pregnancy, for example, is just over half that of African-American mothers. Rwanda has introduced ultrabasic health insurance for more than 90 of its people; infant mortality has fallen from 120 per 1,000 live births in 2000 to under 30 last year. ¶ And universal health care is practical. It is a way to prevent free-riders from passing on the costs of not being covered to others, for example by clogging up emergency rooms or by spreading contagious diseases. It does not have to mean big government. Private insurers and providers can still play an important role. ¶ Indeed such a practical approach is just what the low-cost revolution needs. Take, for instance, the design of health-insurance schemes. Many countries start by making a small group of people eligible for a large number of benefits, in the expectation that other groups will be added later. (Civil servants are, mysteriously, common beneficiaries.) This is not only unfair and inefficient, but also risks creating a constituency opposed to extending insurance to others. The better option is to cover as many people as possible, even if the services available are sparse, as under Mexico’s Seguro Popular scheme. ¶ Small amounts of spending can go a long way. Research led by Dean Jamison, a health economist, has identified over 200 effective interventions, including immunisations and neglected procedures such as basic surgery. In total, these would cost poor countries about an extra $1 per week per person and cut the number of premature deaths there by more than a quarter. Around half that funding would go to primary health centres, not city hospitals, which today receive more than their fair share of the money. ¶ The health of nations Consider, too, the $37bn spent each year on health aid. Since 2000, this has helped save millions from infectious diseases. But international health organisations can distort domestic institutions, for example by setting up parallel programmes or by diverting health workers into pet projects. A better approach, seen in Rwanda, is when programmes targeting a particular disease bring broader benefits. One example is the way that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria finances community health workers who treat patients with HIV but also those with other diseases. ¶ Europeans have long wondered why the United States shuns the efficiencies and health gains from universal care, but its potential in developing countries is less understood. So long as half the world goes without essential treatment, the fruits of centuries of medical science will be wasted. Universal basic health care can help realise its promise. ¶
4) The body responsible for medicine acquisition would be able to negotiate lower prices from pharma firms without violating IPR – having seven billion customers at a lower price is better than the status quo, so innovation ramps UP because there’s a guaranteed market. This is especially true for diseases like malaria that still haven’t been cured because it’s not profitable – the system is prepared to buy those medicines on a massive scale.
5) Public-private partnerships are key to universal health care systems and have been successful in the real world. The CP spills over to investment in education, sanitation, housing, and other public goods because countries have an incentive to pay less for emergency health care. Guardian, 17 - ("How to make global universal healthcare a reality," 7-7-2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jul/07/how-to-make-global-universal-healthcare-a-reality)//va Siddharth Chatterjee, resident coordinator to Kenya, United Nations, Nairobi, Kenya @sidchat1 @UNDPKenya Siddharth is leading efforts with the Ministry of Health to leapfrog primary health coverage through PPP initiatives in Kenya. Previously he worked for the Red Cross. Priya Balasubramaniam, senior public health scientist and director, PHFI-RNE Universal Health Initiative, Public Health Foundation of India,New Delhi, India Priya directs one of India’s seminal health policy exercises on health system reform and co-authored the government’s recommendations on universal health coverage as part of the country’s 12th Five Year Plan. Cicely Thomas, senior program officer, Results for Development, Washington DC, USA @results4dev @cicelysimone Cicely has over 10 years experience providing technical support for health system strengthening in LMICs. She is, along with Priya, also a coordinating committee member of the Health Systems Global Private Sector in Health Thematic Working Group. Jolene Skordis, director, UCL Centre for Global Health Economics, London, UK @JSkordis Jolene is an economist working to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of global health systems. Agnes Soucat, director, health financing and governance, World Health Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland @asoucat @WHO Agnes has over 25 years of experience in health and poverty reduction, and has previously worked at the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Anand Reddi, corporate and medical affairs, Gilead Sciences Inc, San Francisco, USA @ReddiAnand @GileadSciences Anand’s work for Gilead Sciences focuses on HIV and viral hepatitis in resource-limited settings. Helen Hamilton, policy advisor for health, Sightsavers, Haywards Heath, UK @HelenCHamilton @Sightsavers_Pol Helen leads health policy work on increasing access to health services for people with disabilities, neglected tropical diseases and eye illnesses 1 | Accept there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect healthcare model’ All healthcare models have their challenges in terms of systems capacity, fiscal space and good governance. I think the progress of countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka towards universal health is certainly laudable, but they each have different approaches to getting there. Thailand’s journey began incrementally and over the years through consistent investment in Primary Health Care (PHC). Meanwhile, India is more focused on achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) through mixed health markets featuring both public and private sector players. Priya Balasubramaniam, senior public health scientist and director, PHFI-RNE Universal Health Initiative, Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India ¶ 2 | Have the same healthcare provider for the rich and the poor If we have dual systems with the “national service” caring for the poor and the private sector caring for the rich, quality will be an afterthought. We need the rich and poor to be cared for by the same provider – this ensures that high quality will be a political priority as those with voting influence are directly affected by the quality of services provided. Jolene Skordis, director, UCL Centre for Global Health Economics, London, UK @JSkordis ¶3 | Give public-private partnerships serious consideration The PPP model needs to be taken to scale in PHC in order to achieve UHC in a planned time frame. I have worked in many parts of the developing world and in general governments have not been able to step up. Now is the time to test new models as the old system is not working. We need a blended service delivery mechanism. We have to open up the insurance space and governments must push for universal insurance cover for all citizens. This is what we’re trying to do in Kenya. Siddharth Chatterjee, resident coordinator to Kenya, United Nations, Nairobi, Kenya @sidchat1 @UNDPKenya ¶4 | Learn from the places getting it right Ghana’s health system isn’t the best I’ve seen but they’ve got some very fundamental things right and have been continually improving over many years. Some of the fundamentals are a commitment to all Ghanaians getting quality, affordable healthcare, and trying to create a national-level risk pool – so the healthier and wealthier subsidise the sicker and poorer. From small-scale experimentation with community-based health insurance, they scaled up to national health insurance, and are now working through the tough challenges of purchasing health services more strategically and sustainably for everyone. The private sector plays a significant role in Ghana’s healthcare provision – a recent World Bank study of Ghana’s private sector noted that Ghanaians access care from private sources more than half of the time. Cicely Thomas, senior programme officer, Results for Development, Washington DC, US @results4dev @cicelysimone ¶5 | Raise taxes to reach the poorest In the majority of developed countries, health services are mostly private. But they are publicly regulated and financed. What we have learned over time is that an equitable system always relies on cross-subsidy, from rich to poor and from healthy to sick. Progressive taxation and public subsidy to ensure access to services is the essence if we want to reach universality of access to health services. Agnes Soucat, director, health financing and governance, World Health Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland @asoucat @WHO ¶6 | Don’t focus on arbitrary targets for health spending The Abuja declaration expects African governments to spend 15 of GDP on healthcare. That’s not easy to do – and is not essential. Singapore spends about 5 of GDP on healthcare and has done a fantastic job in ensuring every citizen has access to a good quality service. Sri Lanka spends between 3–5 and India is pushing for 2.5. But the question should be about what can you do best with what you can afford to spend. There is no magic GDP number that will deliver UHC since every country has varied resources. Ultimately it is not only about more money, but also how you end up spending your existing health budget that matters. Resources are often misspent in the health sector with an inordinate focus towards hospital care. Siddharth Chatterjee and Priya Balasubramaniam ¶7 | Invest more in preventing people getting sick Health is not just the remit of health ministries – sanitation, housing, welfare and education are just a few of the bedrocks of improving population health. We shouldn’t think of healthcare as a pill or a hospital or programme to treat a single disease. Healthcare is clean water and a diet that does not place you at risk of diabetes or stunting. Healthcare is the education you need to find work and pay for a safe and warm home for your family. Healthcare is delaying early marriage and early pregnancy for vulnerable girls. Prevention has been relatively neglected in our policy priorities. Perhaps because prevention activities can seldom be charged for and people are not yet sick so it can be hard to convince both the public and policymakers of the benefits of preventative measures, even though prevention is usually the most cost-effective way to address disease. Jolene Skordis ¶8 | Make tackling individual diseases have a wider impact In resource-limited settings, what health initiatives can catalyse overall healthcare systems strengthening? Vertical initiatives anchored to one disease, such as the focus on HIV through PEPFAR and Global Fund, have led to broader health-system strengthening by alleviating the HIV burden as well as increasing outcomes in mother-to-child transmission. Anand Reddi, corporate and medical affairs, Gilead Sciences Inc, San Francisco, US @ReddiAnand @GileadSciences ¶9 | Focus on equity, not just the number of people reached If we look back at the millennium development goals it is clear that the focus on reaching big numbers has had a detrimental effect on equity. Too often, national policies do not specifically address how marginalised groups will be reached by development programmes in order to benefit from the new facilities and services provided. This problem is often made worse in low-income areas where the services are offered on a cost recovery basis. Helen Hamilton, policy adviser for health, Sightsavers, Haywards Heath, UK @HelenCHamilton @Sightsavers_Pol ¶10 | Be honest about how money shapes healthcare decisions India’s case (and that of South Africa, Brazil and the US) proves how users of a health services are often not the best judge of health services. We rely on doctors to tell us what care we need. If doctors can profit from giving us incorrect advice, they may well do so – particularly if there is little harm likely to be done (eg sending paying patients for extra, unneeded tests or procedures). This results in the cost of care increasing rapidly in the private sector, to the point where even the middle classes can’t afford health insurance in South Africa and the US. We need to remove the profit motive from healthcare if we want efficiency and effectiveness. Jolene Skordis ¶
Innovation DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which 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.
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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HIF CP Innovation DA V2
Tournament: Heart of Texas Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula EL | Judge: Walters, Leighton AT Global Health inequality 1NC---TRIPS=/=GHI
TRIPS reduces global health inequality Samir Raheem Alsoodani 15, “"The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) may offered an access to essential pharmaceutical drugs for developing countries,” Journal Of the College of law /Al-Nahrain University 2015, Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 393-410, https://www.iasj.net/iasj/article/109180 To conclude, it is beyond doubt that the TRIPS Agreement and its later, permanent amendment of 2005 attempted in good faith to address an urgent issue faced by many developing countries with regards to accessing essential medicine. To a certain extent in its basic tenets, it has had a profound and positive effect on the system, as it has made permanently possible the opportunity for the poorest countries to obtain medications more cheaply through manufacture in developing countries under a compulsory licensing system. Certain positive outcomes arguably include the fact that disputes have been brought under the jurisdiction of one regulatory body, and the least developed Members have found some redress in the power balance regarding costs paid to the pharmaceutical industries based in the wealthier, developed countries (even if this redress has only been to the extent of facilitating increased bargaining capability). This can be considered a triumph from the perspective of universal human rights. Health impact fund CP Counterplan text: the member nations of the World Trade Organization should implement and fund a Health Impact Fund as per the Hollis and Pogge 08 card The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders. Innovation DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which 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.
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. REDUCING IPR BAD: IPR is key to stopping counterfeits. Kilbride 2020 Patrick, vice president of International Intellectual Property for the Global Intellectual Property Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, IP Watchdog, "Calls for WTO to Suspend IP Rights for Vaccine Innovation Would Jeopardize Incredible Progress" December 9, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/12/09/calls-wto-suspend-ip-rights-vaccine-innovation-jeopardize-incredible-progress/id=128085/ Finally: A safe, legitimate marketplace. Patents facilitate a market for innovative medicines, throughout the development stage, as well as in commercialization. Licensing arrangements facilitate the types of collaborations that have proven so successful in 2020; they also ensure that third-party manufacturers are making, using, and selling COVID-19 solutions safely and ethically. Without it, counterfeiters and other bad actors could put shoddy, unreliable, and downright dangerous dupes on the market, all the while marketing them as legitimate products. It’s literally a matter of life and death: Thousands, if not millions, of people die each year at the hands of counterfeit drugs. Turns case – increased vaccine hesitancy means you’ll never solve. Baschuk 2021 Bryce, reporter for Bloomberg News, "Covid-19 pandemic: WTO holiday from vaccine talks draws calls for action" July 26, https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/covid-19-pandemic-wto-holiday-from-vaccine-talks-draws-calls-for-action-121072601721_1.html Specifically, opponents to the waiver say it would create a chaotic patchwork of laws, unravel existing industry partnerships, lead to a supply crunch for scarce vaccine inputs and inject even more uncertainty into already complex arrangements.¶ There’s also the possibility that an IP waiver could result in the production of counterfeit and substandard medicines, which could increase vaccine hesitancy that’s already pervasive in even the world’s wealthiest nations. 4. Turn: Reductions in IPR could result in unsafe or ineffective medicines. Turns solvency because too many people will be afraid of the vaccine to achieve herd immunity. Crosby et al. 21Daniel Crosby, Evan Diamond, Isabel Fernandez De La Cuesta, Jamieson Greer, Jeffrey Telep, Brian White; Crosby specializes in international trade, investment and matters related to public international law. Diamond is a partner on our Intellectual Property, Patent, Trademark and Copyright Litigation team.; 3-5-2021; "Group of Nearly 60 WTO Members Seek Unprecedented Waiver from WTO Intellectual Property Protection for COVID-related Medical Products"; https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/group-of-nearly-60-wto-members-seek-2523821/, JD Supra, accessed 7-21-2021; JPark Waiver risks uncontrolled use of patented technologies, without improving vaccine access. Pharmaceutical companies can provide, and have provided, licenses to distribute or scale-up production of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies at reduced cost. Such license agreements allow for expanded access in low- and middle-income countries, while also setting reasonable parameters so that patents and other IP rights are used to address the specific medical needs of the COVID-19 pandemic at hand, and not for other purposes. License agreements also allow for orderly technology transfer, including of unpatented “trade secret” information and other critical “know-how,” that may be essential to efficiently producing and scaling-up safe and effective versions of technologically complex vaccines and biologic drug products. Under the present TRIPS waiver proposal, however, member countries could try to exploit an extraordinarily broad scope of IP and copy patented technologies so long as they are “in relation to prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19.” For example, under an expansive reading of the proposed waiver language, a member country could try to produce patented pharmaceutical compounds that have other indicated uses predating COVID-19, if such compounds had later been studied or experimentally used for potential symptomatic relief or antiviral activity in COVID-19 patients. The same risks may be faced by manufacturers of patented materials or devices that have multiple uses predating COVID-19, but also may be used as “personal protective equipment” or components thereof, or in other measures arguably relating to COVID-19 “prevention” or “containment.” At the same time, it is unclear how the proposed TRIPS waiver could provide the technology transfer and know-how critical for making the complex molecules and formulations constituting the various COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine manufacture undertaken by an unauthorized party without the proper processes and controls could result in a different product that is potentially ineffective or results in unwanted health consequences. And even if an unauthorized manufacturer could overcome those substantial hurdles to reverse-engineer and scale up a safe and effective vaccine copy, it would likely take substantial time and a series of failures to do so. Notably, several of the original COVID-19 vaccine developers have recently faced low product yield and ot
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Tournament: College Prep | Round: 2 | Opponent: Archbishop Mitty AP | Judge: Sadagopan, Padmanabhan Climate Innovation DA NC NC – Regular The private sector is essential for space exploration – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth? Continued private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible – empirics prove. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 - ("Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Warming causes extinction – outweighs all aff impacts Miller-McDonald, 18 – (Samuel, Master of Environmental Management at Yale University studying energy politics and grassroots innovations in the US. 5-2-2018. "Extinction vs. Collapse." Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-02/extinction-vs-collapse/) Climate twitter – the most fun twitter – has recently been reigniting the debate between human extinction and mere civilizational collapse, between doom and gloom, despair and (kind of) hope. It was sparked by an interview in The Guardian with acclaimed scientist Mayer Hillman. He argues that we’re probably doomed, and confronting the likelihood that we’re rushing toward collective death may be necessary to save us. The headline alone provoked a lot of reactions, many angered by the ostensible defeatism embedded in Hillman’s comments. His stated view represents one defined camp that is mostly convinced of looming human extinction. It stands in contrast to another group that believes human extinction is highly unlikely, maybe impossible, and certainly will not occur due to climate change in our lifetimes. Collapse maybe, but not extinction. Who’s more right? Let’s take a closer look. First, the question of human extinction is totally bounded by uncertainty. There’s uncertainty in climate data, uncertainty in models and projections, and even more uncertainty in the behavior of human systems. We don’t know how we’ll respond to the myriad impacts climate change is beginning to spark, and we don’t know how sensitive industrial civilization will be to those impacts. We don’t really know if humans are like other apex predators highly sensitive to ecological collapse, or are among the most adaptable mammals to ever walk the earth. One may be inclined to lean toward the latter given that humans have colonized every ecological niche on the planet except Antarctica. That bands of people can survive in and around deserts as well as the Arctic as well as equatorial rainforests speaks to the resilience of small social groups. It’s why The Road is so disturbingly plausible; there could be a scenario in which basically everything is dead but people, lingering in the last grey waste of the world. On the other hand, we’ve never lived outside of the very favorable conditions of the Holocene, and past civilizational and population collapses suggest humans are in fact quite sensitive to climatic shifts. Famed climate scientist James Hansen has discussed the possibility of “Venus syndrome,” for instance, which sits at the far end of worst case scenarios. While a frightening thought experiment, it is easily dismissed as it’s based on so many uncertainties and doesn’t carry the weight of anything near consensus. What’s more frightening than potentially implausible uncertainties are the currently existing certainties. For example: Ecology + The atmosphere has proven more sensitive to GHG emissions than predicted by mainstream science, and we have a high chance of hitting 2oC of warming this century. Could hit 1.5C in the 2020s. Worst-case warming scenarios are probably the most likely. + Massive marine death is happening far faster than anyone predicted and we could be on the edge of an anoxic event. + Ice melt is happening far faster than mainstream predictions. Greenland’s ice sheet is threatening to collapse and already slowing ocean currents, which too could collapse. + Which also means predictions of sea level rise have doubled for this century. + Industrial agriculture is driving massive habitat loss and extinction. The insect collapse – population declines of 75 to 80 have been seen in some areas – is something no one predicted would happen so fast, and portends an ecological sensitivity beyond our fears. This is causing an unexpected and unprecedented bird collapse (1/8 of bird species are threatened) in Europe. + Forests, vital carbon sinks, are proving sensitive to climate impacts. + We’re living in the 6th mass extinction event, losing potentially dozens of species per day. We don’t know how this will impact us and our ability to feed ourselves. Energy + Energy transition is essential to mitigating 1.5+C warming. Energy is the single greatest contributor to anthro-GHG. And, by some estimates, transition is happening 400 years too slowly to avoid catastrophic warming. + Incumbent energy industries (that is, oil and gas) dominate governments all over the world. We live in an oil oligarchy – a petrostate, but for the globe. Every facet of the global economy is dependent on fossil fuels, and every sector – from construction to supply chains to transport to electricity to extraction to agriculture and on and on – is built around FF consumption. There’s good reason to believe FF will remain subsidized by governments beholden to their interests even if they become less economically viable than renewables, and so will maintain their dominance. + We are living in history’s largest oil and gas boom. + Kilocalorie to kilocalorie, FF is extremely dense and extremely cheap. Despite reports about solar getting cheaper than FF in some places, non-hydro/-carbon renewables are still a tiny minority (2) of global energy consumption and will simply always, by their nature, be less dense kcal to kcal than FF, and so will always be calorically more expensive. + Energy demand probably has to decrease globally to avoid 1.5C, and it’s projected to dramatically increase. Getting people to consume less is practically impossible, and efficiency measures have almost always resulted in increased consumption. + We’re still setting FF emissions records. Politics + Conditions today resemble those prior to the 20th century’s world wars: extreme wealth inequality, rampant economic insecurity, growing fascist parties/sentiment, and precarious geopolitical relations, and the Thucydides trap suggests war between Western hegemons and a rising China could be likely. These two factors could disrupt any kind of global cooperation on decarbonization and, to the contrary, will probably mean increased emissions (the US military is one of the world’s single largest consumers/emitters of FF). + Neoliberal ideology is so thoroughly embedded in our academic, political, and cultural institutions, and so endemic to discourse today, that the idea of degrowth – probably necessary to avoid collapse – and solidarity economics isn’t even close to discussion, much less realization, and, for self-evident reasons, probably never will be. + Living in a neoliberal culture also means we’ve all been trained not to sacrifice for the common good. But solving climate change, like paying more to achieve energy transition or voluntarily consuming less, will all entail sacrificing for the greater good. Humans sometimes are great at that; but the market fundamentalist ideology that pervades all social, commercial, and even self relations today stands against acting for the common good or in collective action. + There’s basically no government in the world today taking climate change seriously. There are many governments posturing and pretending to take it seriously, but none have substantially committed to a full decarbonization of their economies. (Iceland may be an exception, but Iceland is about 24 times smaller than NYC, so…) + Twenty-five years of governments knowing about climate change has resulted in essentially nothing being done about it, no emissions reductions, no substantive moves to decarbonize the economy. Politics have proven too strong for common sense, and there’s no good reason to suspect this will change anytime soon. + Wealth inequality is embedded in our economy so thoroughly – and so indigenously to FF economies – that it will probably continue either causing perpetual strife, as it has so far, or eventually cement a permanent underclass ruled by a small elite, similar to agrarian serfdom. There is a prominent view in left politics that greater wealth equality, some kind of ecosocialism, is a necessary ingredient in averting the kind of ecological collapse the economy is currently driving, given that global FF capitalism by its nature consumes beyond carrying capacities. At least according to one Nasa-funded study, the combination of inequality and ecological collapse is a likely cause for civilizational collapse. Even with this perfect storm of issues, it’s impossible to know how likely extinction is, and it’s impossible to judge how likely or extensive civilizational collapse may be. We just can’t predict how human beings and human systems will respond to the shocks that are already underway. We can make some good guesses based on history, but they’re no more than guesses. Maybe there’s a miracle energy source lurking in a hangar somewhere waiting to accelerate non-carbon transition. Maybe there’s a swelling political movement brewing under the surface that will soon build a more just, ecologically sane order into the world. Community energy programs are one reason to retain a shred of optimism; but also they’re still a tiny fraction of energy production and they are not growing fast, but they could accelerate any moment. We just don’t know how fast energy transition can happen, and we just don’t know how fast the world could descend into climate-driven chaos – either by human strife or physical storms. What we do know is that, given everything above, we are living through a confluence of events that will shake the foundations of civilization, and jeopardize our capacity to sustain large populations of humans. There is enough certainty around these issues to justify being existentially alarmed. At this point, whether we go extinct or all but a thousand of us go extinct (again), maybe that shouldn’t make much difference. Maybe the destruction of a few billion or 5 billion people is morally equivalent to the destruction of all 7 billion of us, and so should provoke equal degrees of urgency. Maybe this debate about whether we’ll go completely extinct rather than just mostly extinct is absurd. Or maybe not. I don’t know. What I do know is that, regardless of the answer, there’s no excuse to stop fighting for a world that sustains life. AT: Focusing on Earth
Space exploration and research is crucial to solving climate change on earth Greg Autry 19, 7-20-2019,( Greg Autry is an American space policy expert, educator, entrepreneur and author. He is a Clinical Professor of Space Leadership, Business and Policy at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. He serves as Chair of the Safety Working Group on the COMSTAC.) "Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/ The first glimpse humanity got of the world from above was transformative. In 1968, the U.S. astronaut William Anders returned from circling the moon in Apollo 8 with a photograph. It was a simple snapshot of the Earth, the whole Earth, rising above the desolate lunar surface. But it was also momentous, representing the very first time anyone had gotten far enough away to view how fragile the world was. The contrast between the lone blue-and-green marble and the cold emptiness of space was beautiful and shocking. As Anders later remarked, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Anders’s Earthrise photo provided conservationists with the iconic illustration they needed. On April 22, 1970, 20 million people turned out for the largest civic event in U.S. history: Earth Day. Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. IT WAS NASA SATELLITE DATA THAT REVEALED A FRIGHTENING AND GROWING HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER OVER THE SOUTH POLE, GALVANIZING PUBLIC CONCERN THAT, IN 1987, PRODUCED THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL: THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT ADDRESSING A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. MINING THE SOLAR SYSTEM COMES WITH ITS OWN POTENTIAL IMPACTS, BUT EXTRACTING RESOURCES FROM DISTANT AND LIFELESS WORLDS IS CLEARLY PREFERABLE TO THE CONTINUED DEGRADATION OF THE EARTH. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Perhaps the most powerful role space can play is as inspiration. Space tourism might seem like a frivolity for the rich, but it can be so much more. I’ve spent some time with astronauts, and they all report that seeing the Earth without borders and observing its fragile atmosphere shook them to their core, inspiring in them a powerful sense of connection and respect for the environment. As Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and physician who has studied this “overview effect,” put it, “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space. It’s palpable.” Subjecting thousands of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals to a transcendent experience couldn’t hurt—especially if less wealthy Earthlings soon get a chance to follow them. The leaders of the biggest space firms are already thinking way beyond tourism. Tory Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, envisions a future in which a thousand or more people work in Earth and moon orbits. These people would build stations, conduct research, and produce goods for use in space and on Earth. The Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos imagines a spacefaring civilization that keeps our home planet pristine and protected, as a sort of national park, while dirty extractive and manufacturing processes take place in orbital facilities. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to transform Mars back into the healthy world it once was and then fill it with life-forms from Earth—including a significant human population. Some experts have mocked this idea. But experts also lampooned Musk’s plans for reusing rocket boosters and building a high-performance electric car for the masses. The fact is that while some of the plans described by Musk, Bezos, and others might seem utopian or hubristic, given the realities of climate change, humanity needs hope. A future that concentrates only on managing apocalypse, without offering the potential for something better, is no future at all. In the worst scenario, our precious blue-and-green marble will end up looking like its neighbors Venus or Mars simply because we chose not to learn from them. 2. Non-unique - We have past the breaking point and current climate change is irrevirsible Brad Plumer and Henry Fountain 8/9 (Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Henry Fountain covers climate change, with a focus on the innovations that will be needed to overcome it.), 8-9-2021, "A Hotter Future Is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us.," NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/climate-change-report-ipcc-un.html Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece. But that’s only the beginning, according to the report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in. At 1.5 degrees of warming, scientists have found, the dangers grow considerably. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs. “We can expect a significant jump in extreme weather over the next 20 or 30 years,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds and one of hundreds of international experts who helped write the report. “Things are unfortunately likely to get worse than they are today.” Not all is lost, however, and humanity can still prevent the planet from getting even hotter. Doing so would require a coordinated effort among countries to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around 2050, which would entail a rapid shift away from fossil fuels starting immediately, as well as potentially removing vast amounts of carbon from the air. If that happened, global warming would likely halt and level off at around 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report concludes. But if nations fail in that effort, global average temperatures will keep rising — potentially passing 2 degrees, 3 degrees or even 4 degrees Celsius, compared with the preindustrial era. The report describes how every additional degree of warming brings far greater perils, such as ever more vicious floods and heat waves, worsening droughts and accelerating sea-level rise that could threaten the existence of some island nations. The hotter the planet gets, the greater the risks of crossing dangerous “tipping points,” like the irreversible collapse of the immense ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. “There’s no going back from some changes in the climate system,” said Ko Barrett, a vice-chair of the panel and a senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But, she added, immediate and sustained emissions cuts “could really make a difference in the climate future we have ahead of us.” The report, approved by 195 governments and based on more than 14,000 studies, is the most comprehensive summary to date of the physical science of climate change. It will be a focal point when diplomats gather in November at a U.N. summit in Glasgow to discuss how to step up their efforts to reduce emissions. A growing number of world leaders, including President Biden, have endorsed the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, though current policies in the major polluting countries are still far off-track from achieving that target. The 10 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are China, the United States, the European Union, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and Canada. The new report leaves no doubt that humans are responsible for global warming, concluding that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by nations burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat.
12/18/21
JanFeb WBFL 1NC
Tournament: WBFL League 3 | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya WBFL NC Because the resolution asks what is just, my value is Justice.
The criterion is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Allowing the private appropriation of outer space is critical to facilitate asteroid mining, which could transform life on Earth and solve an array of huge problems. 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 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.) Contention 2: Private companies in outer space provide critical information needed to solve climate change. Empirical evidence proves that private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 - ("Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Global warming can lead to extinction, which outweighs all the affirmative 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. AT: Turn - private space exploration is key to solve all of the aff’s impacts. Rumende 21: Thevnin Rumende {mechanical engineering junior and Community Voices columnist, }, 21 - ("Opinion: Critics are overlooking the technological benefits of the billionaire space race," Shorthorn, 9-14-2021, https://www.theshorthorn.com/opinion/opinion-critics-are-overlooking-the-technological-benefits-of-the-billionaire-space-race/article_4cd73e2e-1512-11ec-874b-bb7e3009729b.html)//marlborough-wr/ There has been no shortage of opinion surrounding what has been derisively dubbed by some as the “pointless billionaire space race.” Pundits have not hesitated to express their ire toward what they view as a new pet project for billionaires. Despite the controversy that accompanies the uber-wealthy’s interest in the private space industry, this development and its effects deserve to be treated with more nuance. When discussing the topic of billionaires in space, the hatred and distrust toward these individuals often trumps any positive technological advancements their companies have achieved on the path to civilian space flight. Simply labeling their endeavors in commercial space flight “a rich person’s ‘joyride’” undercuts the sheer immensity of safely ferrying a person to and from the edge of space, and in the case of SpaceX, a private space manufacturer, having docked and undocked with the international space station in low-Earth orbit. While viewing the success of the current era of space transportation, one might overlook the fact that of the 355 astronauts who flew aboard NASA’s space shuttles from 1981 to 2011, 14 were killed. Simply put, many things can and have gone wrong when attempting to enter space, and any step taken closer to a safer launch system benefits all of humanity. However, for some people, they view the contest of private space companies as “a tragically wasteful ego contest,” a distraction from more pressing issues such as proliferating climate catastrophes, inequality, lack of health care and insufficient housing. This view is shortsighted as it fails to recognize the key role space is already playing in combating a host of the aforementioned crises. According to the World Economic Forum, space technology is helping end hunger by imaging vast swathes of agricultural land and by helping produce agricultural indexes, along with ensuring people access to clean water through the monitoring of reservoirs via satellite images. Cheaper and more efficient space launch systems mean deploying even more satellites to help better address these problems. The microgravity environment of space could potentially allow the fabrication of human organs using a 3D bioprinter. With the demand for yearly organ transplants dwarfing the supply, manufacturing organs in space would help address the overwhelming needs of medical patients. The most common contention leveled against these “space billionaires” is that the wealth they accumulate through their endeavors will only serve to enrich them, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. While these concerns are natural, they often overlook technology’s profound ability to democratize knowledge and reshape society for the better. The private space industry has already significantly reduced the capital investment necessary to embark on projects such as internet satellite constellations. Satellite internet providers have long promised the ability to provide secure internet connectivity to the remaining 3.7 billion unconnected people on the earth, but only now is it attainable. With current technology, nearly a third of the human population could access secure financial accounts and the vast library of human knowledge, once restricted to more developed nations, in under a decade. The significance of these two effects alone toward the advancement of humanity, which could be further advanced through private interests in space, would be incalculable. Like the creation of the internet and the opening of the western frontier in the U.S., the impact that the opening of space will have on the course of humanity is unforeseeable. But the impact is sure to be monumental. We shouldn’t let our distaste of certain billionaires cloud our view of the path that lies ahead. Just as the robber barons of yesteryear played a large role in shaping the nation but are now long forgotten, so too will Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson. Capitalism Defense Capitalism will expand elsewhere if not in space Shamas and Holden, 2019, Victor Shamas and, Oslo Metropolitan University, Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo, Norway; Thomas Holden, Independent scholar, Oslo, Norway, 2019, Palgrave Communications, One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 Outer space serves at least two purposes in this regard. In the short-to medium-term, it allows for the export of surplus capital into emerging industries, such as satellite imaging and communication. These are significant sites of capital accumulation: global revenues in the worldwide satellite market in 2016 amounted to $260 billion (SIA, 2017, p. 4). Clearly, much of this activity is taking place ‘on the ground'; it is occurring in the ‘terrestrial economy'. But all that capital would have to find some other meaningful or productive outlet were it not for the expansion of capital into space. Governments solve the excesses of capitalism in space. Fernolz 19 Tim Fernolz, 2019, How to build a space economy that avoids the mistakes of terrestrial capitalism, https://qz.com/work/1767415/can-nasa-build-a-space-economy-that-leaves-capitalisms-problems-behind/ The good news is that we aren’t close to a world like the one depicted in the movie Elysium, where the ultra-wealthy repair to space and leave the rest of us behind. Our public and private interests will be far more intertwined, in part because governments have designed it that way. Most of the major space agencies are compelled by law in their home countries to support private economic activity, which means for example that NASA, by law, views the success of US companies in space as part of its mission, and not a distraction or a threat. The reality is that public space agencies, particularly NASA in the United States, remain the largest spenders in space and control the conditions for private organizations acting in orbit. Their challenge—and opportunity—is to manage the transition to a new, multi-stakeholder world in orbit by successfully subsidizing new initiatives without letting the benefits escape the public at large. Much of the work of establishing our space economy is prosaically earthly: Competition policy, labor rights, and corporate taxation. But with critiques of capitalism’s distributional failures at the center of public discourse, there are also sweeping challenges to address: Namely, can the orbital economy be structured better than its terrestrial analogue? Private entities working with governments resolves the link and better address the symptoms of capitalism by collaborating to solve climate change. Maanas Sharma, 21 - ("The Space Review: The privatized frontier: the ethical implications and role of private companies in space exploration," No Publication, 9-7-2021, 12-6-2021https:www.thespacereview.com/article/4238/1)AW In recent years, private companies have taken on a larger role in the space exploration system. With lower costs and faster production times, they have displaced some functions of government space agencies. Though many have levied criticism against privatized space exploration, it also allows room for more altruistic actions by government space agencies and the benefits from increased space exploration as a whole. Thus, we should encourage this development, as the process is net ethical in the end. Especially if performed in conjunction with adequate government action on the topic, private space exploration can overcome possible shortcomings in its risky and capitalistic nature and ensure a positive contribution to the general public on Earth. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks The implications of commercial space exploration have been thrust into the limelight with the successes and failures of billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. While private companies are not new to space exploration, their prominence in American space exploration efforts has increased rapidly in recent years, fueled by technological innovations, reductions in cost, and readily available funding from government and private sources.1 In May 2020, SpaceX brought American astronauts to space from American soil for the first time in almost 10 years.2 Recognizing the greatly reduced costs of space exploration in private companies, NASA’s budget has shifted to significantly relying on private companies.3 However, private space companies are unique from government space agencies in the way they experience unique sets of market pressures that influence their decision-making process. Hence, the expansion of private control in the space sector turns into a multifaceted contestation of its ethicality. The most obvious ethical concern is the loss of human life. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks.4 However, the possible increase in mishaps is largely overstated. Companies recognize the need for safety aboard their expeditions themselves.5 After all, the potential backlash from a mishap could destroy the company’s reputation and significantly harm their prospects. According to Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, Head of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy’s Geopolitics and Global Futures Programme, “because there were no alternatives to government space programs, accidents were seen to some degree as par for the course… By comparison, private companies actually have a far more difficult set of issues to face in the case of a mishap. In a worst case scenario, a private company could make an easy scapegoat.” 6 Another large ethical concern is the prominence capitalism may have in the future of private space exploration and the impacts thereof. The growth of private space companies in recent years has been closely intertwined with capitalism. Companies have largely focused on the most profitable projects, such as space travel and the business of space.7 Many companies are funded by individual billionaires, such as dearMoon, SpaceX’s upcoming mission to the Moon.8 Congress has also passed multiple acts for the purpose of reducing regulations on private space companies and securing private access to space. From this, many immediately jump to the conclusion that capitalism in space will recreate the same conditions in outer space that plague Earth today, especially with the increasing push to create a “space-for-space” economy, such as space tourism and new technologies to mine the Moon and asteroids. Critics, such as Jordan Pearson of VICE, believe that promises of “virtually unlimited resources” are only for the rich, and will perpetuate the growing wealth inequality that plagues the world today.9 However, others contend that just because private space exploration has some capitalist elements, it is by no means an embodiment of unrestricted capitalism. A healthy balance of restricted capitalism—for example, private space companies working through contracts with government agencies or independently under monitoring and regulation by national and international agreements—will avoid the pitfalls that capitalist colonialism faced down here on Earth. Even those who are generally against excessive government regulation should see the benefits of them in space. Lacking any consensus on definitions and rights in space will create undue competition between corporations as well as governments that will harm everyone rather than helping anyone. To create a conducive environment for new space-for-space exploration, one without confrontation but with protection for corporate astronauts, infrastructure, and other interests, governments must create key policies such as a framework for property rights on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.7,10 hough there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. Another key matter to note is restricted capitalism in space “could also be our salvation.”11 Private space exploration could reap increased access to resources and other benefits that can be used to solve the very problems on Earth that critics of capitalism identify. Since governments offset some of their projects to private companies, government agencies can focus on altruistic projects that otherwise would not fit in the budget before and do not have the immediate commercial use that private companies look for. Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, discusses how “this strategy allows the space agency to continue ‘exploring the fringe where there really is no business case’” but still has important impacts on people down on Earth.12 Indeed, this idea is a particularly powerful one when considering the ideal future of private companies in space exploration. Though there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. As governments utilize services from private space companies, “instead of being bogged down by the routine application of old research, NASA can prioritize their limited budget to work more on research of other unknowns and development of new long-term space travel technologies.”13 According to the Council on Foreign Relations, such technologies have far-reaching benefits on Earth as well. Past developments obviously include communications satellites, by themselves a massive benefit to society, but also “refinements in artificial hearts; improved mammograms; and laser eye surgery… thermoelectric coolers for microchips; high-temperature lubricants; and a means for mass-producing carbon nanotubes, a material with significant engineering potential; and household products.”2 Agencies like NASA are the only actors able to pursue the next game-changing missions, “where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.”8 These technologies have revolutionized millions, if not billions, of lives, demonstrating the remarkable benefits of space exploration. It follows then that it is net ethical to prioritize these benefits.
1/8/22
JanFeb WBFL 1NC
Tournament: WBFL League 3 | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya WBFL NC Because the resolution asks what is just, my value is Justice.
The criterion is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Allowing the private appropriation of outer space is critical to facilitate asteroid mining, which could transform life on Earth and solve an array of huge problems. 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 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.) Contention 2: Private companies in outer space provide critical information needed to solve climate change. Empirical evidence proves that private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 - ("Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Global warming can lead to extinction, which outweighs all the affirmative 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. AT: Turn - private space exploration is key to solve all of the aff’s impacts. Rumende 21: Thevnin Rumende {mechanical engineering junior and Community Voices columnist, }, 21 - ("Opinion: Critics are overlooking the technological benefits of the billionaire space race," Shorthorn, 9-14-2021, https://www.theshorthorn.com/opinion/opinion-critics-are-overlooking-the-technological-benefits-of-the-billionaire-space-race/article_4cd73e2e-1512-11ec-874b-bb7e3009729b.html)//marlborough-wr/ There has been no shortage of opinion surrounding what has been derisively dubbed by some as the “pointless billionaire space race.” Pundits have not hesitated to express their ire toward what they view as a new pet project for billionaires. Despite the controversy that accompanies the uber-wealthy’s interest in the private space industry, this development and its effects deserve to be treated with more nuance. When discussing the topic of billionaires in space, the hatred and distrust toward these individuals often trumps any positive technological advancements their companies have achieved on the path to civilian space flight. Simply labeling their endeavors in commercial space flight “a rich person’s ‘joyride’” undercuts the sheer immensity of safely ferrying a person to and from the edge of space, and in the case of SpaceX, a private space manufacturer, having docked and undocked with the international space station in low-Earth orbit. While viewing the success of the current era of space transportation, one might overlook the fact that of the 355 astronauts who flew aboard NASA’s space shuttles from 1981 to 2011, 14 were killed. Simply put, many things can and have gone wrong when attempting to enter space, and any step taken closer to a safer launch system benefits all of humanity. However, for some people, they view the contest of private space companies as “a tragically wasteful ego contest,” a distraction from more pressing issues such as proliferating climate catastrophes, inequality, lack of health care and insufficient housing. This view is shortsighted as it fails to recognize the key role space is already playing in combating a host of the aforementioned crises. According to the World Economic Forum, space technology is helping end hunger by imaging vast swathes of agricultural land and by helping produce agricultural indexes, along with ensuring people access to clean water through the monitoring of reservoirs via satellite images. Cheaper and more efficient space launch systems mean deploying even more satellites to help better address these problems. The microgravity environment of space could potentially allow the fabrication of human organs using a 3D bioprinter. With the demand for yearly organ transplants dwarfing the supply, manufacturing organs in space would help address the overwhelming needs of medical patients. The most common contention leveled against these “space billionaires” is that the wealth they accumulate through their endeavors will only serve to enrich them, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. While these concerns are natural, they often overlook technology’s profound ability to democratize knowledge and reshape society for the better. The private space industry has already significantly reduced the capital investment necessary to embark on projects such as internet satellite constellations. Satellite internet providers have long promised the ability to provide secure internet connectivity to the remaining 3.7 billion unconnected people on the earth, but only now is it attainable. With current technology, nearly a third of the human population could access secure financial accounts and the vast library of human knowledge, once restricted to more developed nations, in under a decade. The significance of these two effects alone toward the advancement of humanity, which could be further advanced through private interests in space, would be incalculable. Like the creation of the internet and the opening of the western frontier in the U.S., the impact that the opening of space will have on the course of humanity is unforeseeable. But the impact is sure to be monumental. We shouldn’t let our distaste of certain billionaires cloud our view of the path that lies ahead. Just as the robber barons of yesteryear played a large role in shaping the nation but are now long forgotten, so too will Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson. Capitalism Defense Capitalism will expand elsewhere if not in space Shamas and Holden, 2019, Victor Shamas and, Oslo Metropolitan University, Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo, Norway; Thomas Holden, Independent scholar, Oslo, Norway, 2019, Palgrave Communications, One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 Outer space serves at least two purposes in this regard. In the short-to medium-term, it allows for the export of surplus capital into emerging industries, such as satellite imaging and communication. These are significant sites of capital accumulation: global revenues in the worldwide satellite market in 2016 amounted to $260 billion (SIA, 2017, p. 4). Clearly, much of this activity is taking place ‘on the ground'; it is occurring in the ‘terrestrial economy'. But all that capital would have to find some other meaningful or productive outlet were it not for the expansion of capital into space. Governments solve the excesses of capitalism in space. Fernolz 19 Tim Fernolz, 2019, How to build a space economy that avoids the mistakes of terrestrial capitalism, https://qz.com/work/1767415/can-nasa-build-a-space-economy-that-leaves-capitalisms-problems-behind/ The good news is that we aren’t close to a world like the one depicted in the movie Elysium, where the ultra-wealthy repair to space and leave the rest of us behind. Our public and private interests will be far more intertwined, in part because governments have designed it that way. Most of the major space agencies are compelled by law in their home countries to support private economic activity, which means for example that NASA, by law, views the success of US companies in space as part of its mission, and not a distraction or a threat. The reality is that public space agencies, particularly NASA in the United States, remain the largest spenders in space and control the conditions for private organizations acting in orbit. Their challenge—and opportunity—is to manage the transition to a new, multi-stakeholder world in orbit by successfully subsidizing new initiatives without letting the benefits escape the public at large. Much of the work of establishing our space economy is prosaically earthly: Competition policy, labor rights, and corporate taxation. But with critiques of capitalism’s distributional failures at the center of public discourse, there are also sweeping challenges to address: Namely, can the orbital economy be structured better than its terrestrial analogue? Private entities working with governments resolves the link and better address the symptoms of capitalism by collaborating to solve climate change. Maanas Sharma, 21 - ("The Space Review: The privatized frontier: the ethical implications and role of private companies in space exploration," No Publication, 9-7-2021, 12-6-2021https:www.thespacereview.com/article/4238/1)AW In recent years, private companies have taken on a larger role in the space exploration system. With lower costs and faster production times, they have displaced some functions of government space agencies. Though many have levied criticism against privatized space exploration, it also allows room for more altruistic actions by government space agencies and the benefits from increased space exploration as a whole. Thus, we should encourage this development, as the process is net ethical in the end. Especially if performed in conjunction with adequate government action on the topic, private space exploration can overcome possible shortcomings in its risky and capitalistic nature and ensure a positive contribution to the general public on Earth. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks The implications of commercial space exploration have been thrust into the limelight with the successes and failures of billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. While private companies are not new to space exploration, their prominence in American space exploration efforts has increased rapidly in recent years, fueled by technological innovations, reductions in cost, and readily available funding from government and private sources.1 In May 2020, SpaceX brought American astronauts to space from American soil for the first time in almost 10 years.2 Recognizing the greatly reduced costs of space exploration in private companies, NASA’s budget has shifted to significantly relying on private companies.3 However, private space companies are unique from government space agencies in the way they experience unique sets of market pressures that influence their decision-making process. Hence, the expansion of private control in the space sector turns into a multifaceted contestation of its ethicality. The most obvious ethical concern is the loss of human life. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks.4 However, the possible increase in mishaps is largely overstated. Companies recognize the need for safety aboard their expeditions themselves.5 After all, the potential backlash from a mishap could destroy the company’s reputation and significantly harm their prospects. According to Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, Head of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy’s Geopolitics and Global Futures Programme, “because there were no alternatives to government space programs, accidents were seen to some degree as par for the course… By comparison, private companies actually have a far more difficult set of issues to face in the case of a mishap. In a worst case scenario, a private company could make an easy scapegoat.” 6 Another large ethical concern is the prominence capitalism may have in the future of private space exploration and the impacts thereof. The growth of private space companies in recent years has been closely intertwined with capitalism. Companies have largely focused on the most profitable projects, such as space travel and the business of space.7 Many companies are funded by individual billionaires, such as dearMoon, SpaceX’s upcoming mission to the Moon.8 Congress has also passed multiple acts for the purpose of reducing regulations on private space companies and securing private access to space. From this, many immediately jump to the conclusion that capitalism in space will recreate the same conditions in outer space that plague Earth today, especially with the increasing push to create a “space-for-space” economy, such as space tourism and new technologies to mine the Moon and asteroids. Critics, such as Jordan Pearson of VICE, believe that promises of “virtually unlimited resources” are only for the rich, and will perpetuate the growing wealth inequality that plagues the world today.9 However, others contend that just because private space exploration has some capitalist elements, it is by no means an embodiment of unrestricted capitalism. A healthy balance of restricted capitalism—for example, private space companies working through contracts with government agencies or independently under monitoring and regulation by national and international agreements—will avoid the pitfalls that capitalist colonialism faced down here on Earth. Even those who are generally against excessive government regulation should see the benefits of them in space. Lacking any consensus on definitions and rights in space will create undue competition between corporations as well as governments that will harm everyone rather than helping anyone. To create a conducive environment for new space-for-space exploration, one without confrontation but with protection for corporate astronauts, infrastructure, and other interests, governments must create key policies such as a framework for property rights on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.7,10 hough there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. Another key matter to note is restricted capitalism in space “could also be our salvation.”11 Private space exploration could reap increased access to resources and other benefits that can be used to solve the very problems on Earth that critics of capitalism identify. Since governments offset some of their projects to private companies, government agencies can focus on altruistic projects that otherwise would not fit in the budget before and do not have the immediate commercial use that private companies look for. Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, discusses how “this strategy allows the space agency to continue ‘exploring the fringe where there really is no business case’” but still has important impacts on people down on Earth.12 Indeed, this idea is a particularly powerful one when considering the ideal future of private companies in space exploration. Though there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. As governments utilize services from private space companies, “instead of being bogged down by the routine application of old research, NASA can prioritize their limited budget to work more on research of other unknowns and development of new long-term space travel technologies.”13 According to the Council on Foreign Relations, such technologies have far-reaching benefits on Earth as well. Past developments obviously include communications satellites, by themselves a massive benefit to society, but also “refinements in artificial hearts; improved mammograms; and laser eye surgery… thermoelectric coolers for microchips; high-temperature lubricants; and a means for mass-producing carbon nanotubes, a material with significant engineering potential; and household products.”2 Agencies like NASA are the only actors able to pursue the next game-changing missions, “where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.”8 These technologies have revolutionized millions, if not billions, of lives, demonstrating the remarkable benefits of space exploration. It follows then that it is net ethical to prioritize these benefits.
1/8/22
JanFeb WBFL 1NC
Tournament: WBFL League 3 | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood AL | Judge: Thakre, Riya WBFL NC Because the resolution asks what is just, my value is Justice.
The criterion is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Allowing the private appropriation of outer space is critical to facilitate asteroid mining, which could transform life on Earth and solve an array of huge problems. 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 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.) Contention 2: Private companies in outer space provide critical information needed to solve climate change. Empirical evidence proves that private space development is the only way to make sustainable energy feasible. Autry 19: Greg Autry {the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference, }, 19 - ("Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again," Foreign Policy, 7-20-2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/)//marlborough-wr/ Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Global warming can lead to extinction, which outweighs all the affirmative 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. AT: Turn - private space exploration is key to solve all of the aff’s impacts. Rumende 21: Thevnin Rumende {mechanical engineering junior and Community Voices columnist, }, 21 - ("Opinion: Critics are overlooking the technological benefits of the billionaire space race," Shorthorn, 9-14-2021, https://www.theshorthorn.com/opinion/opinion-critics-are-overlooking-the-technological-benefits-of-the-billionaire-space-race/article_4cd73e2e-1512-11ec-874b-bb7e3009729b.html)//marlborough-wr/ There has been no shortage of opinion surrounding what has been derisively dubbed by some as the “pointless billionaire space race.” Pundits have not hesitated to express their ire toward what they view as a new pet project for billionaires. Despite the controversy that accompanies the uber-wealthy’s interest in the private space industry, this development and its effects deserve to be treated with more nuance. When discussing the topic of billionaires in space, the hatred and distrust toward these individuals often trumps any positive technological advancements their companies have achieved on the path to civilian space flight. Simply labeling their endeavors in commercial space flight “a rich person’s ‘joyride’” undercuts the sheer immensity of safely ferrying a person to and from the edge of space, and in the case of SpaceX, a private space manufacturer, having docked and undocked with the international space station in low-Earth orbit. While viewing the success of the current era of space transportation, one might overlook the fact that of the 355 astronauts who flew aboard NASA’s space shuttles from 1981 to 2011, 14 were killed. Simply put, many things can and have gone wrong when attempting to enter space, and any step taken closer to a safer launch system benefits all of humanity. However, for some people, they view the contest of private space companies as “a tragically wasteful ego contest,” a distraction from more pressing issues such as proliferating climate catastrophes, inequality, lack of health care and insufficient housing. This view is shortsighted as it fails to recognize the key role space is already playing in combating a host of the aforementioned crises. According to the World Economic Forum, space technology is helping end hunger by imaging vast swathes of agricultural land and by helping produce agricultural indexes, along with ensuring people access to clean water through the monitoring of reservoirs via satellite images. Cheaper and more efficient space launch systems mean deploying even more satellites to help better address these problems. The microgravity environment of space could potentially allow the fabrication of human organs using a 3D bioprinter. With the demand for yearly organ transplants dwarfing the supply, manufacturing organs in space would help address the overwhelming needs of medical patients. The most common contention leveled against these “space billionaires” is that the wealth they accumulate through their endeavors will only serve to enrich them, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. While these concerns are natural, they often overlook technology’s profound ability to democratize knowledge and reshape society for the better. The private space industry has already significantly reduced the capital investment necessary to embark on projects such as internet satellite constellations. Satellite internet providers have long promised the ability to provide secure internet connectivity to the remaining 3.7 billion unconnected people on the earth, but only now is it attainable. With current technology, nearly a third of the human population could access secure financial accounts and the vast library of human knowledge, once restricted to more developed nations, in under a decade. The significance of these two effects alone toward the advancement of humanity, which could be further advanced through private interests in space, would be incalculable. Like the creation of the internet and the opening of the western frontier in the U.S., the impact that the opening of space will have on the course of humanity is unforeseeable. But the impact is sure to be monumental. We shouldn’t let our distaste of certain billionaires cloud our view of the path that lies ahead. Just as the robber barons of yesteryear played a large role in shaping the nation but are now long forgotten, so too will Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson. Capitalism Defense Capitalism will expand elsewhere if not in space Shamas and Holden, 2019, Victor Shamas and, Oslo Metropolitan University, Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo, Norway; Thomas Holden, Independent scholar, Oslo, Norway, 2019, Palgrave Communications, One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 Outer space serves at least two purposes in this regard. In the short-to medium-term, it allows for the export of surplus capital into emerging industries, such as satellite imaging and communication. These are significant sites of capital accumulation: global revenues in the worldwide satellite market in 2016 amounted to $260 billion (SIA, 2017, p. 4). Clearly, much of this activity is taking place ‘on the ground'; it is occurring in the ‘terrestrial economy'. But all that capital would have to find some other meaningful or productive outlet were it not for the expansion of capital into space. Governments solve the excesses of capitalism in space. Fernolz 19 Tim Fernolz, 2019, How to build a space economy that avoids the mistakes of terrestrial capitalism, https://qz.com/work/1767415/can-nasa-build-a-space-economy-that-leaves-capitalisms-problems-behind/ The good news is that we aren’t close to a world like the one depicted in the movie Elysium, where the ultra-wealthy repair to space and leave the rest of us behind. Our public and private interests will be far more intertwined, in part because governments have designed it that way. Most of the major space agencies are compelled by law in their home countries to support private economic activity, which means for example that NASA, by law, views the success of US companies in space as part of its mission, and not a distraction or a threat. The reality is that public space agencies, particularly NASA in the United States, remain the largest spenders in space and control the conditions for private organizations acting in orbit. Their challenge—and opportunity—is to manage the transition to a new, multi-stakeholder world in orbit by successfully subsidizing new initiatives without letting the benefits escape the public at large. Much of the work of establishing our space economy is prosaically earthly: Competition policy, labor rights, and corporate taxation. But with critiques of capitalism’s distributional failures at the center of public discourse, there are also sweeping challenges to address: Namely, can the orbital economy be structured better than its terrestrial analogue? Private entities working with governments resolves the link and better address the symptoms of capitalism by collaborating to solve climate change. Maanas Sharma, 21 - ("The Space Review: The privatized frontier: the ethical implications and role of private companies in space exploration," No Publication, 9-7-2021, 12-6-2021https:www.thespacereview.com/article/4238/1)AW In recent years, private companies have taken on a larger role in the space exploration system. With lower costs and faster production times, they have displaced some functions of government space agencies. Though many have levied criticism against privatized space exploration, it also allows room for more altruistic actions by government space agencies and the benefits from increased space exploration as a whole. Thus, we should encourage this development, as the process is net ethical in the end. Especially if performed in conjunction with adequate government action on the topic, private space exploration can overcome possible shortcomings in its risky and capitalistic nature and ensure a positive contribution to the general public on Earth. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks The implications of commercial space exploration have been thrust into the limelight with the successes and failures of billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. While private companies are not new to space exploration, their prominence in American space exploration efforts has increased rapidly in recent years, fueled by technological innovations, reductions in cost, and readily available funding from government and private sources.1 In May 2020, SpaceX brought American astronauts to space from American soil for the first time in almost 10 years.2 Recognizing the greatly reduced costs of space exploration in private companies, NASA’s budget has shifted to significantly relying on private companies.3 However, private space companies are unique from government space agencies in the way they experience unique sets of market pressures that influence their decision-making process. Hence, the expansion of private control in the space sector turns into a multifaceted contestation of its ethicality. The most obvious ethical concern is the loss of human life. Critics contend that companies must answer to their shareholders and justify their profits. This contributes to a larger overall psyche that prioritizes cost and speed above all else, resulting in significantly increased risks.4 However, the possible increase in mishaps is largely overstated. Companies recognize the need for safety aboard their expeditions themselves.5 After all, the potential backlash from a mishap could destroy the company’s reputation and significantly harm their prospects. According to Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, Head of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy’s Geopolitics and Global Futures Programme, “because there were no alternatives to government space programs, accidents were seen to some degree as par for the course… By comparison, private companies actually have a far more difficult set of issues to face in the case of a mishap. In a worst case scenario, a private company could make an easy scapegoat.” 6 Another large ethical concern is the prominence capitalism may have in the future of private space exploration and the impacts thereof. The growth of private space companies in recent years has been closely intertwined with capitalism. Companies have largely focused on the most profitable projects, such as space travel and the business of space.7 Many companies are funded by individual billionaires, such as dearMoon, SpaceX’s upcoming mission to the Moon.8 Congress has also passed multiple acts for the purpose of reducing regulations on private space companies and securing private access to space. From this, many immediately jump to the conclusion that capitalism in space will recreate the same conditions in outer space that plague Earth today, especially with the increasing push to create a “space-for-space” economy, such as space tourism and new technologies to mine the Moon and asteroids. Critics, such as Jordan Pearson of VICE, believe that promises of “virtually unlimited resources” are only for the rich, and will perpetuate the growing wealth inequality that plagues the world today.9 However, others contend that just because private space exploration has some capitalist elements, it is by no means an embodiment of unrestricted capitalism. A healthy balance of restricted capitalism—for example, private space companies working through contracts with government agencies or independently under monitoring and regulation by national and international agreements—will avoid the pitfalls that capitalist colonialism faced down here on Earth. Even those who are generally against excessive government regulation should see the benefits of them in space. Lacking any consensus on definitions and rights in space will create undue competition between corporations as well as governments that will harm everyone rather than helping anyone. To create a conducive environment for new space-for-space exploration, one without confrontation but with protection for corporate astronauts, infrastructure, and other interests, governments must create key policies such as a framework for property rights on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.7,10 hough there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. Another key matter to note is restricted capitalism in space “could also be our salvation.”11 Private space exploration could reap increased access to resources and other benefits that can be used to solve the very problems on Earth that critics of capitalism identify. Since governments offset some of their projects to private companies, government agencies can focus on altruistic projects that otherwise would not fit in the budget before and do not have the immediate commercial use that private companies look for. Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, discusses how “this strategy allows the space agency to continue ‘exploring the fringe where there really is no business case’” but still has important impacts on people down on Earth.12 Indeed, this idea is a particularly powerful one when considering the ideal future of private companies in space exploration. Though there is no one set way governments will interact with companies, the consensus is that they must radically reimagine their main purpose as the role of private space exploration continues to grow. As governments utilize services from private space companies, “instead of being bogged down by the routine application of old research, NASA can prioritize their limited budget to work more on research of other unknowns and development of new long-term space travel technologies.”13 According to the Council on Foreign Relations, such technologies have far-reaching benefits on Earth as well. Past developments obviously include communications satellites, by themselves a massive benefit to society, but also “refinements in artificial hearts; improved mammograms; and laser eye surgery… thermoelectric coolers for microchips; high-temperature lubricants; and a means for mass-producing carbon nanotubes, a material with significant engineering potential; and household products.”2 Agencies like NASA are the only actors able to pursue the next game-changing missions, “where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.”8 These technologies have revolutionized millions, if not billions, of lives, demonstrating the remarkable benefits of space exploration. It follows then that it is net ethical to prioritize these benefits.
1/8/22
Sept-Oct NC- Covid Funding CP Innovation DA
Tournament: Chuck Ballingall Memorial Invitational at Damien High School | Round: 2 | Opponent: San Marino- FS | Judge: Samuel, Nebiyu Link Turn: Innovation DA NC Materials 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. Covid CP 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.
10/2/21
Sept-Oct NC- HIF CP Innovation DA
Tournament: Jack Howe Memorial- CSU | Round: 2 | Opponent: Academy of Higher Learning- SB | Judge: Chuang, Luan Disclosure theory Debaters must disclose all of the positions that they have read in past debates on the wiki. Violation-they have no page on the wiki. Inserted screenshot of the wiki
standards 1.Intellectual integrity—The aff should not be able to win because of surprise but should have to defend their aff against rigorous neg prep. This is bad for education because 2.Evidence ethics—No disclosure allows debaters to get away with evidence ethics abuses because it is impossible for me to read through all of their cards closely in 4 minutes of prep. Evidence ethics is bad for education because it incentives people to cheat instead of learn about the topic. 3.Equitable access to prep—I disclosed all of my past neg positions on the wiki so they can prep against all the positions they will read but I do not know what their past affs have been, which kills fairness and skews the debate towards the aff.
Drop the debater to deter future abuse. Dropping the arg would entail dtd because their whole aff was new No RVIs because they should not win for bring fair Health impact fund CP Counterplan text: the member nations of the World Trade Organization should implement and fund a Health Impact Fund as per the Hollis and Pogge 08 card The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders. Innovation DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which 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.
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. Extinction ow under their framework bc kills eveyone