1ac- alienation 1nc- util new affs bad infra consult icj biz con 2nr- consult icj
Apple Valley
3
Opponent: Valley JS | Judge: Aryan Jasani
1ac- rawls 1nc- util colt peacemaker bizcon infra consult icj 2nr- util cp case
Apple Valley
5
Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Chris Castillo
1ac- cap 1nc- colt util truth testing consult icj 1ar- all 2nr- util case
CPS
2
Opponent: Newman Smith VY | Judge: Michael Harris
1AC- setcol 1nc- T-fwk util analytic cp space deterrence da innovation da xi lashout da 1ar- all 2nr - xi lashout util
CPS
3
Opponent: arnav simha | Judge: asher towner
1ac- ptd 1nc- srm cp copous cp case 1ar- all condo non gov action 2nr- copous cp case 2ar- cp
CPS
5
Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen
1ac- mining 1nc- copuous cp con con T-unjust 1ar- all con con bad condo bad agent cp bad 2nr- copuous cp 2ar- case cp
Cal Invitational
1
Opponent: American AS | Judge: Asher Towner
1AC - mining 1NC- kamooalewa pic T-appropriation mining da copous cp 2nr- copous cp mining da
Cal Invitational
3
Opponent: Denver East MB | Judge: Jacob Lugo
1AC- PTD 1NC- extra T non ownership CP judicial activism DA wild west pik 2NR- extra T DA case
Cal Invitational
5
Opponent: Harker DV | Judge: Derek Hilligoss
1AC- mining 1NC -us unilat cp mining da T-unjust 1ar- all 2NR- CP case 2ar- case CP
Greenhill
1
Opponent: Garland AA | Judge: Gordon Krauss
1ac- struc vio 1nc- util infra da consult who cp 1ar- all 2nr- CP
Greenhill
4
Opponent: Lexington AK | Judge: Selena Wu
ac- covid waiver 1nc- T-reduce china heg da waivers cp indo pak adv cp climate patents da 1ar- all condo pics 2nr- T 2ar- T case
Greenhill
5
Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Felicity Park
AC - Trade secrets 1NC - T-reduce T-ought pharma innovation da 1ar- all 2nr- T-ought case
Lexington
1
Opponent: Memorial SC | Judge: Claire Liu
1ar- racial cap 1nc- innovation da space primacy da util 1ar- all 2nr- case 2ar- case
Lexington
3
Opponent: St Agnes EH | Judge: Eric He
1AC- Megaconstellations 1NC- Precision AG DA Hacking DA Smart Cities DA Debris CP 1AR - all 2nr- Hacking DA case 2ar - case DA
Lexington
5
Opponent: Iowa City NW | Judge: Lukas Krause
1ac- kant 1nc- DA util ac 2nr- da case
Loyola
2
Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Javier Navarette
1ac- racial cap 1nc- espec new affs bad util innovation da 1ar- case 2nr- new affs bad
Loyola
3
Opponent: Marlborough RJ | Judge: Gordon Krauss
1ac- covid waiver 1nc- T-reduce WTO bad da CSA consult WHO 1ar- case 2nr- T CP
Loyola
6
Opponent: Marlborough JH | Judge: David Dosch
AC- covid waiver 1NC- WTO bad Consult WHO CP T-reduce 1ar- case 2nr- T case 2ar- T case
Meadows
2
Opponent: Salado HF | Judge: Claudia Ribera
1ac- covid waiver k aff 1nc- util climate patents da consult who cp disclosure theory 1ar- all 2nr- disclosure theory da
Meadows
4
Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher
1ac- some random porn shit 1nc- independent voter t-fwk theory hedge p and p colt peacemaker TT case 1ar- all 2nr- independent voter colt peacemaker TT 2ar- independent voter turn
Meadows
6
Opponent: Westwood PM | Judge: Asher Towner
1ac- biocolonialism 1nc- espec infra da analytic cp indigenous pic
Mid America Cup
2
Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Chris Theis
1AC- EU trade secretes 1NC- T-reduce Innovation DA EU info sharing cp 1ar- all 2nr- CP DA
Mid America Cup
3
Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Lukas Krause
1AC- cap kaff 1NC- espec innovation da US medicine distribution CP 1ar- all 2nr- framework cap good da
Nano Nagle
1
Opponent: Southlake Carroll CC | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary
1AC - whole res 1NC- infra da Info sharing CP innovation DA US medicine distribution CP 1ar- all condo 2nr - info sharing cp innovation da condo 2ar- condo
Nano Nagle
3
Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin
1AC- data exclusivities 1NC- T- medicine T-leslie Ptx Da CSA Truth testing log con multiple frameworks bad 1ar- aprioris bad all 2nr- CSA truth testing 2ar- aprioris bad
Nano Nagle
5
Opponent: Oxford VD | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen
1AC - Racial cap colonialism kaff 1NC - T-FWK Innovation DA v3 Nonnative setcol bad Util v2 1AR - all 2NR - innovation da util case 2ar- all
Peninsula
1
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Cortez
1AC- megaconstellatios 1nc- hacking da precision ag da hypersonics da adv cp 1ar- all condo utopian fiat 2nr- theory adv cp hacking da 2ar- case CP DA
Peninsula
3
Opponent: Brophy TJ | Judge: Aryan Jasani
1AC - Mining 1NC - US unilateral mining CP REMs PIC Mining DA 1AR - all condo pics 2nr- theory REMs PIC case 2ar- case CP
Peninsula
Doubles
Opponent: Vestavia DS | Judge: panel
1ac- queerness nc- new affs bad must open source T 2nr- T
Peninsula
6
Opponent: Valley MM | Judge: Eric He
1AC- Asian Identity 1NC- T asian debater PIC Cap K 1AR- all 2NR- Cap case
Tournament of Champions
1
Opponent: Lake Highland YA | Judge: Drew Thorburn
1AC- semiocap 1NC- new affs bad csa util 1AR- all 2NR- csa 2AR- rob over theory
Tournament of Champions
4
Opponent: Wichita East KH | Judge: Viren Abhyankar
1AC- whole res 1NC- hacking DA Kamolewa pic innovation da 1AR- condo 2nr- condo 2ar- condo
Tournament of Champions
5
Opponent: Memorial DX | Judge: JP
1AC- hobbes 1NC- tt tricks spikes on top ncc kant author quals case 1ar- all more aprioris rvi 2nr- eval after 1nc 2ar- theory paradigms eval after 1nc
UNLV
1
Opponent: Stockdale GS | Judge: Claudia Ribera
1AC- cap 1NC- T precision ag da case 2NR- case da
UNLV
3
Opponent: Peninsula AL | Judge: Gerard Grigsby
1AC- mining 1NC- T-extraction Kamaolewa pic case 1ar- all 2nr- T case
UNLV
5
Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo
1AC- US aff 1NC- Kant Nebel Appropriation spec disclosure space elevators pic plan flaw case 1ar- straight turned kant answered shells rvi 2nr- rvi appropriation spec 2ar- spec
USC
1
Opponent: Marlborough ZG | Judge: Ben Cortez
1ac- prisons 1nc- T court ptx refuse recognition cp util consult icj 2nr- condo T
USC
5
Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss
1ac- china 1nc- T UBI case 1ar- all 2nr- case 2ar- case
USC
Octas
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AW | Judge: panel
1AC- cap 1NC- cap good theory util da 2nr- cap good
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Important Information
Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Hi, I'm Dhruv! (he/him/his)
If you don't contact me for disclosure, you don't get any violations. Please don't read graphic descriptions of any kind of violence. If you think something could potentially be triggering, give the content warning at least 30 minutes before the round. If there's anything I can do to ensure a good round for you, please let me know!
NOTE: cites for Consult WHO CP aren't working- check Greenhill r1 open source
Happy Debating!
4/23/22
0 - Tournament Navigation
Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Apple Valley - APPLE VALLEY MINNEAPPLE DEBATE TOURNAMENT
Loyola- LOYOLA INVITATIONAL
Nano Nagle - Nano Nagle Classic and Nano Nagle RR
Valley - Mid America Cup
CPS - College Prep LD Invitational
Meadows - The Meadows Invitational
Lexington - Lexington Winter Invitational
USC - 2021 USC Trojan Invitational
UNLV - GOLDEN DESERT DEBATE TOURNAMENT AT UNLV
Peninsula - Peninsula Invitational
Greenhill - Greenhill Fall Classic
Cal Invitational - Cal Invitational UC Berkeley
4/23/22
FW - Util
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Javier Navarette The standard is act hedonistic util. Prefer – 1 – Pleasure and pain are intrinsic value and disvalue – everything else regresses – robust neuroscience. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. 2 – No intent-foresight distinction – if I foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of my deliberation since its intrinsic to my action No intent foresight distinction for states. Enoch 07 Enoch, D The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew Unviersity, Mount Scopus Campus, Jersusalem. (2007). INTENDING, FORESEEING, AND THE STATE. Legal Theory, 13(02). doi:10.1017/s1352325207070048 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-theory/article/intending-foreseeing-and-the-state/76B18896B94D5490ED0512D8E8DC54B2 The general difficulty of the intending-foreseeing distinction here stemmed, you will recall, from the feeling that attempting to pick and choose among the foreseen consequences of one’s actions those one is more and those one is less responsible for looks more like the preparation of a defense than like a genuine attempt to determine what is to be done. Hiding behind the intending-foreseeing distinction seems like an attempt to evade responsibility, and so thinking about the distinction in terms of responsibility serves 39. Anderson and Pildes, supra note 38. I will use this text as my example of an expressive theory here. 40. See id. at 1554, 1564. 41. For a general critique, see Mathew D. Adler, Expressive Theories of Law: A Skeptical Overview, 148 U. PA. L. REV. 1363 (1999–2000). 42. As Adler repeatedly notes, the understanding of expression Anderson and Pildes work with is amazingly broad, so that “To express an attitude through action is to act on the reasons the attitude gives us”; Anderson and Pildes, supra note 38, at 1510. If this is so, it seems that expression drops out of the picture and everything done with it can be done directly in terms of reasons. 43. This may be true of what Anderson and Pildes have in mind when they say that “expressive norms regulate actions by regulating the acceptable justifications for doing them”; id. at 1511. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 03 Aug 2014 IP address: 134.153.184.170 Intending, Foreseeing, and the State 91 to reduce even further the plausibility of attributing to it intrinsic moral significance. This consideration—however weighty in general—seems to me very weighty when applied to state action and to the decisions of state officials. For perhaps it may be argued that individuals are not required to undertake a global perspective, one that equally takes into account all foreseen consequences of their actions. Perhaps, in other words, individuals are entitled to (roughly) settle for having a good will, and beyond that let chips fall where they may. But this is precisely what stateswomen and statesmen—and certainly states—are not entitled to settle for.44 In making policy decisions, it is precisely the global (or at least statewide, or nationwide, or something of this sort) perspective that must be undertaken. Perhaps, for instance, an individual doctor is entitled to give her patient a scarce drug without thinking about tomorrow’s patients (I say “perhaps” because I am genuinely not sure about this), but surely when a state committee tries to formulate rules for the allocation of scarce medical drugs and treatments, it cannot hide behind the intending-foreseeing distinction, arguing that if it allows45 the doctor to give the drug to today’s patient, the death of tomorrow’s patient is merely foreseen and not intended. When making a policy-decision, this is clearly unacceptable. Or think about it this way (I follow Daryl Levinson here):46 perhaps restrictions on the responsibility of individuals are justified because individuals are autonomous, because much of the value in their lives comes from personal pursuits and relationships that are possible only if their responsibility for what goes on in the (more impersonal) world is restricted. But none of this is true of states and governments. They have no special relationships and pursuits, no personal interests, no autonomous lives to lead in anything like the sense in which these ideas are plausible when applied to individuals persons. So there is no reason to restrict the responsibility of states in anything like the way the responsibility of individuals is arguably restricted.47 States and state officials have much more comprehensive responsibilities than individuals do. Hiding behind the intending-foreseeing distinction thus more clearly constitutes an evasion of responsibility in the case of the former. So the evading-responsibility worry has much more force against the intending-foreseeing distinction when applied to state action than elsewhere. 3 – Actor spec – governments lack wills or intentions and inevitably deals with tradeoffs – outweighs because agents have differing obligations. 4 – No act omission distinction – choosing not to act is an action in of itself since you had to make an active decision to omit.
No calc indicts – a) no philosophy actually says that consequences don’t matter at all since otherwise it would indict every theory since b) we don’t need consequences – winning hedonism proves we’re the only one with impacts to it c) they’re blippy nibs that set the aff at an unfair advantage since they only have to win one while we have to beat them all – voting issue for fairness
Extinction first – 1 – Forecloses future improvement – we can never improve society because our impact is irreversible which proves moral uncertainty 2 – Turns suffering – mass death causes suffering because people can’t get access to resources and basic necessities 3 – Objectivity – body count is the most objective way to calculate impacts because comparing suffering is unethical
9/4/21
G - Asian Debater PIC
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 6 | Opponent: Valley MM | Judge: Eric He PIC: We endorse the aff besides reading it against another Asian debater in debate Solves all of your offense—allows you to engage in modes of transpacifism against other debaters besides Asians DAs: 1 Negation-~--if your aff is true, you force us to negate our own identity by defending the model minority as good or that there is no impact etc which is psychologically violent. Two impacts: A That fractures collectivity for your movement and destroys coalitions by pitting Asians against each other which is a tool of the white man. B Causes psychological violence for Asian debaters which outweighs by making the debate space non-inclusive
2/6/22
G - CSA
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Marlborough RJ | Judge: Gordon Krauss A. Interpretation: If the affirmative defends anything other The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines, then they must provide a counter-solvency advocate for their specific advocacy in the 1AC. (To clarify, you must have an author that states we should not do your aff, insofar as the aff is not a whole res phil aff) B. Violation: C. Standards:
Fairness – This is a litmus test to determining whether your aff is fair – a) Limits – there are infinite things you could defend outside the exact text of the resolution which pushes you to the limits of contestable arguments, even if your interp of the topic is better, the only way to verify if it’s substantively fair is proof of counter-arguments. Nobody knows your aff better than you, so if you can’t find an answer, I can’t be expected to. Our interp narrows out trivially true advocacies since counter-solvency advocates ensure equal division of ground for both sides. b) Shiftiness-Having a counter-solvency advocate helps us conceptualize what their advocacy is and how it’s implemented. Intentionally ambiguous affirmatives we don’t know much about can’t spike out of DA’s and CP’s if they have an advocate that delineates these things. 2. Research – Forces the aff to go to the other side of the library and contest their own view points, as well as encouraging in depth-research about their own position. Having one also encourages more in-depth answers since I can find responses. Key to education since we definitionally learn more about positions when we contest our own.
9/5/21
G - Cap K vs Asian Identity
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 6 | Opponent: Valley MM | Judge: Eric He Capitalism causes massive violence and inevitable extinction – the fundamental task is developing tools for organization and tactics to bring about revolution. Escalante ‘19 Alyson, revolutionary Marxist (duh), philosophy at U of Oregon. 09/08/2019. “Truth and Practice: The Marxist Theory of Knowledge”. https://failingthatinvent.home.blog/2019/09/08/truth-and-practic-the-marxist-theory-of-knowledge/ Pat The world we live in today is in a dire state. Climate destruction continues at a fast pace, and every with every passing day, capitalism proves itself to be incapable of addressing this. Capitalist production and its endless drive for resources to match artificial market demands has created a climate crisis that leaves us on the brink of potential extinction. Governments around the world are turning to far right and fascist leaders to assuage their fears of an uncertain future, and the most marginalized and oppressed suffer because of it. Fascism is on the rise, and history tells us very clearly what that can result in without opposition. The decaying US empire continues to lash out in violence across the globe in a desperate attempt to re-assert its power and hegemony. Whole countries are destroyed in its desperate bids for more fossil fuels. The world burns from America’s white phosphorus weaponry. The need for a revolutionary movement capable of replacing capitalism with something better has never been so clear. The choice between socialism or barbarism has never been so stark. More and more people are starting to realize that reform cannot save us, that capitalism and imperialism themselves are the problem, and that we must unite and band together to fight for a better world. The question then is: how will we know what strategies, what tactics, and what ideas to unite around? If the skeptics and postmodernists are correct that knowledge is always relative and localized, then we cannot built a global and universal strategy to unite around. If they are correct then we are doomed to small acts of localized or individual resistance in the face of apocalypse. To embrace such a vision of the world (with its accompanying epistemological skepticism) is to embrace defeat. The masses do not want to embrace defeat, they want to know how to fight back. Marxism can provide the tools necessary to engage in that fight. Marxism, with its self criticism and its insistence on incorporating the valuable ideas of its critics has created a means for unifying workers across the globe with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The Marxist belief in the possibility of true ideas, tested and verified in practice, creates the possibility for unity on a global scale. The scientific status of Marxism means that as our climate changes, as our world looks more and more grim, Marxism will adapt through struggle and practice; it will provide us with the ideas and tools we need to fight and win. There will be no victory for the workers of the world without the ability to wield a revolutionary science. What is at stake in questions of Marxist epistemology is the very possibility of creating a philosophical and scientific basis for revolution. We must defend this possibility. We must defend the scientific status of Marxism, and must insist on the possibility of victory. Labor competition was the foundation of Asian exploitation – their language games are meaningless and cede the question to neoliberal ends. San Juan Jr. ‘91 (E, PhD. “Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament of the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism”. American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 542-565) rc/Pat With the presumed collapse of the transcendental grounds for universal standards of norms and values, proponents of the postmodern “revolution” in cultural studies in Europe and North America have celebrated differance, marginality, nomadic and decentered identities, indeterminacy, simulacra and the sublime, undecidability, ironic dissemination, textuality, and so forth. A multiplicity of power plays and language games supposedly abounds. The intertextuality of power, desire, and interest begets strategies of positionalities. So take your pick. Instead of the totalizing master narratives of Enlightenment progress, postmodern thinkers valorize the local, the heterogeneous, the contingent and conjunctural. Is it still meaningful to speak of truth? Are we still permitted to address issues of class, gender, and race? What are the implications of this postmodern “transvaluation” of paradigms for literary studies in general and minority/ ethnic writing in particular? One salutary repercussion has been the questioning of the Eurocentric canonical archive by feminists, peoples of color, dissenters inside and outside. The poststructuralist critique of the self-identical Subject (by convention white, bourgeois, patriarchal) has inspired a perspectivalist revision of various disciplinary approaches in history, comparative aesthetics, and others. To cite three inaugural examples: Houston Baker’s text-specific inventory of the black vernacular “blues” tradition presented in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984), Arnold Krupat’s foregrounding of oral tribal allegory in American Indian autobiographies enabled by a “materially situated historicism” in The Voice in the Margin (1989), and Ramon Saldivar’s dialectical assessment of Chicano narrative as an “oppositional articulation” of the gaps and silences in American literary history, a thesis vigorously argued in Chicano Narrative (1990). Premised on the notion that everything is socio-discursively constructed, these initiatives so far have not been paralleled by Asian American intellectuals. Who indeed will speak for this composite group? One would suspect that the rubric “Asian American,” itself an artificial hypostasis of unstable elements, would preemptively vitiate any unilateral program of systematization. In addition, Asian Americans’ being judged by media and government as a “model minority,” some allegedly whiter than whites (see Themstrom 252; Lee), makes their marginality quite problematic. Perhaps more than other peoples of color, Asian Americans find themselves trapped in a classic postmodern predicament: essentialized by the official pluralism as formerly the “Yellow Peril” and now the “Superminority,” they nevertheless seek to reaffirm their complex internal differences in projects of hybrid and syncretic genealogy. Objectified by state-ordained juridical exclusions (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos share this historically unique commonality), they pursue particularistic agendas for economic and cultural autonomy. Given these antinomic forces at work, can Asian American writers collectively pursue a “molecular micropolitics” of marginality? What is at stake if a well-known authority on ethnic affairs like Ronald Takaki (whose recent book affords a point of departure for my metacommentary) tries to articulate the identity-in-difference of this fragmented and dispersed ensemble of ethnoP. (see Grigulevich and Kozlov 17-44). How does a postmodern politics of identity refract the innovative yet tradition-bound performances of the Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston and the Filipino American Carlos Bulosan? Given the crisis of the postmodern politics of identity, can we legitimately propose an oppositional “emergency” strategy of writing whose historic agency is still on trial or, as it were, on reprieve? My inquiry begins with remarks on Asian American history’s textuality as prelude to its possible aesthetic inscription. In composing Strangers from a Different Shore in a period when the planet is beginning to be homogenized by a new pax EuroAmericana, a “New World Order” spawning (as I write) from the Persian Gulf, Takaki has performed for us the unprecedented task of unifying the rich, protean, intractable diversity of Asian lives in the US without erasing the specificities, the ramifying genealogies, the incommensurable repertoire of idiosyncrasies of each constituent group—a postmodern feat of reconciling incommensurables, to say the least. There are of course many discrete chronicles of each Asian community, mostly written by sympathetic Euro-American scholars before Takaki’s work. But what distinguishes Takaki’s account, aside from his empathy with his subject and documentary trustworthiness, is its claim to represent the truth based on the prima facie experiences of individuals. At once we are confronted with the crucial problem plaguing such claims to veracity or authenticity: Can these subalterns represent themselves (to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak) as self-conscious members of a collectivity for-itself? Or has Takaki mediated the immediacy of naive experience with a theory of representation that privileges the homo economicus as the founding subject of his discourse? No one should underestimate Takaki’s achievement here in challenging the tenability of the received dogma (espoused by Nathan Glazer and other neoconservative pundits) that the European immigrant model of successful assimilation applies to peoples of color in the US (see Takaki, “Reflections”). Europe’s Others, hitherto excluded from the canonical tradition, are beginning to speak and present themselves so as to rectify the mystifying re-presentation of themselves. In this light, Takaki is to be credited above all for giving Asian Americans a synoptic view of their deracinated lives by making them (as protagonists who discover their roles and destinies in the process) perform the drama of their diverse singularities. This is stage-managed within the framework of a chronological history of their ordeals in struggling to survive, adapt, and multiply in a hostile habitat, with their accompanying rage and grief and laughter. By a montage of personal testimony—anecdotes, letters, songs, telegrams, eyewitness reports, confessions, album photographs, quotidian fragments, cliches and banalities of everyday life—juxtaposed with statistics, official documents, reprise of punctual events, Takaki skillfully renders a complex drama of Asians enacting and living their own history. We can perhaps find our own lives already anticipated, pantomimed, rounded off, and judged in one of his varied “talk stories”—a case of life imitating the art of history. Granted the book’s “truth-effects,” I enter a caveat. For all its massive accumulation of raw data and plausible images of numerous protagonists and actions spanning more than a century of wars and revolutions, Takaki’s narrative leaves us wondering whether the collective life-trajectory of Asian Americans imitates the European immigrant success story, spiced with quaint “Oriental” twists—which he clearly implies at the end. If so, it is just one thread of the national fabric, no more tormented nor pacified than any other. If not, then this history is unique in some way that escapes the traditional emplotment of previous annals deriving from the master narrative of hu mankind’s continuous material improvement, self-emancipation, and techno-administrative mastery conceived by the philosophes of the European Enlightenment. Either way, there is no reason for Asian Americans to feel excluded from the grand March of Progress. Our puzzlement, however, is not clarified by the book’s concluding chapter, which exposes the myth of the “model minority” in an eloquent argument, assuring us that Asian Americans did not “let the course of their lives be determined completely by the ‘necessity’ of race and class” (473). In the same breath Takaki warns of a resurgent tide of racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans manifested in the media, in campus harassments, in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin mistaken for a Japanese by unemployed Detroit autoworkers (and, I might add here, in the January 1989 massacre of Vietnamese and Cambodian schoolchildren in Stockton, California, by a man obsessed with hatred for Southeast Asian refugees). During this same period, in contrast, the judicial victory of the Japanese concentration camp internees’ demand for redress and reparations as well as the growing visibility of Asian American artists furnishes convincing proof that what David Harvey calls the post-Fordist post-Keynesian system (173-78) still allows dreams to come true, that is, allows Asian Americans the opportunity in particular “to help America accept and appreciate its diversity.” Calculating the losses and gains, Takaki prudentially opts for a meliorative closure. In retrospect, the telos of Strangers from a Different Shore can be thematized as the Asian immigrants’ almost miraculous struggle for survival and recognition of their desperately won middle-class status. What is sought is the redemption of individual sacrifices by way of conformity to the utilitarian, competitive ethos of a business society. Reversing the dismaying prospect for Asian Americans forecast in an earlier survey, American Racism (1970) by Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano, Takaki offers a balance sheet for general consumption: Asian Americans are no longer victimized by legislation denying them naturalized citizenship and landownership. They have begun to exercise their political voices and have representatives in both houses of Congress as well as in state legislatures and on city councils. They enjoy much of the protection of civil rights laws that outlaw racial discrimination in employment as well as housing and that provide for affirmative action for racial minorities. They have greater freedom than did the earlier immigrants to embrace their own “diversity”—their own cultures as well as their own distinctive physical characteristics, such as their complexion and the shape of their eyes. (473-74) It now becomes clear that despite its encyclopedic scope and archival competence, Takaki’s somewhat premature synthesis is a learned endeavor to deploy a strategy of containment. His rhetoric activates a mode of comic emplotment where all problems are finally resolved through hard work and individual effort, inspired by past memories of clan solidarity and intuitive faith in a gradually improving future. What is this if not a refurbished version of the liberal ideology of a market-centered, pluralist society where all disparities in values and beliefs—nay, even the sharpest contradictions implicating race, class, and gender—can be harmonized within the prevailing structure of power relations? This is not to say that such attempts to empower disenfranchised nationalities are futile or deceptive. But what needs a more than gestural critique is the extent to which such reforms do not eliminate the rationale for the hierarchical, invidious categorizing of people by race (as well as by gender and class) and their subsequent deprivation. Lacking such self-reflection, unable to problematize his theoretical organon, Takaki has superbly accomplished the articulation of the hegemonic doctrine of acquisitive/possessive liberalism as the informing principle of Asian American lives. Whether this is an effect of postmodern tropology or a symptom of “bad faith” investing the logic of elite populism, I am not quite sure. My reservations are shared by other Asian American observers who detect an apologetic agenda in such liberal historiography. At best, Takaki’s text operates an ironic, if not duplicitous, strategy: to counter hegemonic Eurocentrism, which erases the Asian American presence, a positivist-empiricist valorization of “lived experience” is carried out within the master narrative of evolutionary, gradualist progress. The American “Dream of Success” is thereby ultimately vindicated. This is not to suggest that historians like Takaki have suddenly been afflicted with amnesia, forgetting that it is the totalizing state practice of this ideology of market liberalism that underlies, for one, the violent colonial domination of peoples of color and the rape of the land of such decolonizing territories as the Philippines (my country of origin) and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. It is the social practice of an expansive political economy which converts humans to exchangeable commodities (African chattel slavery in the South) and commodified labor power, thus requiring for its industrial take-off a huge supply of free labor—hence the need for European immigrants, especially after the Civil War, and the genocidal suppression of the American Indians. It is the expansion of this social formation that recruited Chinese coolies for railroad construction (the “fathers” poignantly described in Kingston’s China Men) and Japanese and Filipino labor (and Mexican braceros later) for agribusiness in Hawaii and California and for the canneries in Alaska. It is this same hegemonic worldview of free monopoly enterprise, also known as the “civilizing mission” of Eurocentric humanism, that forced the opening of the China market in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the numerous military interventions in China and Indochina up to the Vietnam War and the coming of the “boat people.” Of course it is also the power/knowledge episteme of the modernization process in Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, Grenada, and all the neocolonial or peripheral dependencies of the world-system named by Immanuel Wallerstein as “historical capitalism” (13-43; see Amin). It is now generally acknowledged that we cannot understand the situation of Asian Americans in the US today or in the past without a thorough comprehension of the global relations of power, the capitalist world-system that “pushed” populations from the colonies and dependencies and “pulled” them to terrain where a supply of cheap labor was needed. These relations of power broke up families, separating husbands from wives and parents from children; at present they motivate the “warm body export” of cheap labor from Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere. They legitimate the unregulated market for brides and hospitality girls, the free trade zones, and other postmodern schemes of capital accumulation in Third World countries. The discourse of the liberal free market underpins these power relations, constructing fluid georacial boundaries to guarantee the supply of cheap labor. Race acquires salience in this world-system when, according to John Rex, “the language of racial difference. . . becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. . . . The exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to Capitalism.. . . Ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation” (406-07). The colonization and industrialization of the North American continent epitomize the asymmetrical power relations characteristic of this world-system. The sociocultural formation of global apartheid has been long in the making. Studies like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) or Richard Bamet and Ronald Muller’s Global Reach (1974), to mention only the elementary texts, show that the migration of peoples around the world, the displacement of refugees, or the forced expulsion and exile of individuals and whole groups (the Palestinian diaspora is the most flagrant) have occurred not by choice or accident but by the complex interaction of political, economic, and social forces from the period of mercantile capitalism to colonialism, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, continuing into the imperialism of the twentieth century. This genealogy of domination, the self-reproduction of its mechanisms and the sedimentation of its effects, is what is occluded in Takaki’s narrative (see Nakanishi). Their attempt to stage a semiotic break is an act that conflates “materialism” with “materiality” – violence is not some amalgamation of signs but is instead about flesh and bone – their project fuels capitalist pedagogy. McLaren 10 Peter, UC-Los Angeles and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Purdue University, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy” Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies 2010 10: 251 Ebert (2009; Ebert and Zavarzadeh, 2008) makes an important distinction between corporeality/materiality and matter/materialism. Materiality is related to objective idealism and refers to the acceptance of an idea in the mind as something real, something that escapes class interests. In this way, avant-garde scholars will deconstruct materialism as merely the effects of tropes and representations. It attempts to create a prefigurative origin for what is essentially an ontology. However, Ebert (2009) argues that this constitutes transforming materialism into materiality, into a contemplative corporeality of difference, purging materialism of its conceptuality and determinate meanings. Matter is turned into signs or the effect of signs or sign power. This has led to the recent interest in the politics of performativity—performing identities, performing pedagogy, performing class, and so on. However, Ebert argues that matter is not synonymous with physical objects; matter exists outside the consciousness of the subject, and it cannot be separated from its production and contradictions in history. Matter is objective reality in history. Ebert and Zavarzadeh (2008) characterize materialism as the objective (transformative) productive activities of humans involving them in social relations; these social relations occur under definite historical conditions that are independent of their will and are shaped by class struggle over the surplus produced by social labor. A materialism that excludes historical processes and operates as a medium of cultural practices is not materialism; it is materiality or what Ebert (2009) refers to as “matterism.” Avant-garde critics who would replace materialism with materiality (through the tropes of supplementarity, spectrality, undecidability, and difference) severely undercut the claim for the objectivity of class interests and ultimately replace class struggle with the struggle over the sign. Like Ebert, David McNally (2001) in his classic Marxist text, Bodies of Meaning, describes the deconstructive efforts of post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida as a form of linguistic idealism. In his critique of anti-fetishistic thought (like that of Marx), that palpates the farthest reach of linguistic meaning, Derrida devalues dialectical critique as useless by disavowing embodied human activity, by ignoring laboring human bodies and rejecting them as metaphysical illusions. When Derrida deals with issues of the economy, he is interested only in capital that begets capital—that is, in credit or fictitious capital. Likewise, in his critique of Saussure, he critiques the notion of a transcendental signified, a universal equivalent or what McNally refers to as meaning’s gold standard (something positive that can exist outside of an endless reference of commodities to other commodities). There is nothing extralinguistic for Derrida, since language suspends all reference to something outside of it. Similarly, for Derrida, money lacks a referent. It is driven by credit and speculation and lacks any material foundations. Derrida deals with fictitious or dematerialized money, money that can be produced without labor, that is, money as an expression of hyperreality. Capital in this view is nothing more than a self-engendering dance on a solipsistic path of self-fecundation. The real is folded into the representation. Derrida (and Baudrillard and others) assimilate the economy (the same one that is throwing people out of their homes and into the streets at present) into their poststructuralist model of language. Contrary to Derrida, Ebert and McNally maintain that value is not a sign freed from its referent; rather, value expresses itself in material form. It must pass through laboring bodies and their history of struggle, through toiling subjects and practical human activity that takes place in an organic social universe of skin, hair, blood, and bone. And capitalism abstracts from these bodies, and commodifies them. The work of McNally and Ebert implodes the limitations of post-structuralist thought in dealing with capitalist exploitation. According to Ebert (2009), revolutionary agents of social transformation act ethically when they attempt to resolve the contradictions of their objective location in relations of exploitation. Capitalist violence often doubles as cultural discourses, and Ebert views popular culture, especially, as a narcosis of violence, predicated on distracting subjects from the central antagonism of capitalist society—the struggles over the surplus labor of the other––thereby producing subjects who cannot grasp the totality of the system. In Ebert’s view, the pedagogical practices developed by the poststructuralist avant-garde theorize experience in relation to trauma, desire, and affective relations in general as if these relations were antiseptically cleaved from relations of class, thereby replacing a conceptual analysis of the social totality with liberating pedagogical narratives grounded in local affective strategies—strategies that serve unwittingly as epistemological covers for economic conditions that help the subject cope with the objective material conditions of capitalist exploitation. This leads ultimately to a de-historicization of social life and draws attention away from the way in which all human beings who populate capitalist societies are implicated in some manner in international class struggles and the social division of labor (see also Zavarzadeh, 2003). Ebert and Zavarzadeh describe this process as a “pedagogy of affect.” They write that The pedagogy of affect piles up details and warns students against attempting to relate them structurally because any structural analysis will be a causal explanation, and all causal explanations, students are told, are reductive. Teaching thus becomes a pursuit of floating details—a version of games in popular culture. Students seem to know but have no knowledge. This is exactly the kind of education capital requires for its new workforce: workers who are educated but nonthinking; skilled at detailed jobs but unable to grasp the totality of the system—energetic localists, ignorant globalists. This pedagogy provides instruction not in knowledge but in savviness—a knowing that knows what it knows is an illusion but is undeluded about that illusion; it integrates the illusion, thereby making itself immune to critique. Savviness is enlightened false consciousness: a consciousness that knows it is false, but its “falseness is already reflexively buffered.” (2008, pp. 107-108) Vote negative for communist organizing – that requires collective struggle and the establishment of centralized organization to inform both theory and practice. Kuhn ‘18 Gabriel, Austrian-born writer and translator living in Sweden. Among his book publications is “All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918-1919”. March 2018. “Don't Mourn, Organize! Is Communism a Pipe Dream—or a Viable Future?” https://brooklynrail.org/2018/03/field-notes/Dont-Morn-Organize-Is-Communism-a-Pipe-Dreamor-a-Viable-Future Pat The forms of organization this requires must go further than the affinity group but stop short of the vanguard party. Affinity groups do not answer the demand for mass organizing that mass societies require. But neither do vanguard parties. They attempt to lead the masses, not organize them, and that’s a big difference. The party model might in general be insufficient for mass organizing today. The networks that movementism gave way to are perhaps more appropriate, but only if they can overcome the assumption that the looser the connections are, the better. This assumption is wrong. Loose connections might suit the needs of an ever more flexible market economy, but not of effective political organizing. To “have contacts” is not enough; you need to do something with them. And you need to stay committed to the projects you initiate. I will try to flesh this out by listing the aspects I consider most important in organizing today.
We need to leave sectarianism behind. The left is weak and each additional division weakens it further. In a 2011 article titled “Movement, Cadre, and the Dual Power,” Joel Olson made a simple, yet very important observation: “We believe that the old arguments between communists and anarchists are largely irrelevant today.” This must be our point of departure. 2. We need theory that is adapted to our times. It must overcome the false contradiction between “class struggle” and “cultural struggle.” There is a fruitful debate about a “new class politics” in the German-speaking world. Sebastian Friedrich, one of its main proponents, drew these conclusions in an article published by Counterpunch: A new class politics does not relegate gender, race, and imperial legacy to issues that are supplementary to class relations. These issues, and the struggles they imply, are an integral part of class relations. In fact, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial struggles are the base on which effective unified class struggles must be launched.… A new class politics must clarify where and how the specific experiences of workers based on gender, race, citizenship, and other factors converge. It must reveal the overlapping interests of workers as members of the class. This makes common struggles possible. 3. We must not rely on the “objective forces” identified by historical materialism. Subjective forces are important for change. It is easy to underestimate how much neoliberalism shapes the lives even of people opposed to it. In the Global North, political activism has become a leisure activity that people engage in or not, depending on their mood, the identity they are trying to create for themselves, or the road of “self-improvement” they have chosen. In almost all cases, it is secondary to professional careers and personal comforts. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to get anything done. There is nothing wrong with being “voluntaristic.” Radical change is dependent on people wanting radical change, no matter how much Marxists still insist on economic realities determining individual consciousness and, therefore, individuals’ capacity for political action. An organization’s efficiency relies on the individual qualities of its members, that is, responsibility, reliability, and accountability. Making Things Concrete If we want communism to be more than a pipe dream, we have to be willing to face reality, even if it confuses, challenges, or even frightens us. We cannot ignore struggles that refer to communist ideals, simply because they aren’t the struggles we’d like to see. If our enthusiasm for communism remains limited to lecture halls and conference rooms, it won’t be anything the powerful will lose sleep over. The struggle that currently receives most attention among communists of all stripes in the Global North is the one in Kurdistan. In Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), forces affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, have established a direct-democratic council system, based on the “democratic confederalism” conceived by the imprisoned PKK leader Abduallah Öcalan. Öcalan describes democratic confederalism as “a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state,” and cites Murray Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” as a major influence. There are people who celebrate this as a form of anarchism. But as an observant friend of mine noted, an anarchism that is imposed by a leader is a strange kind of anarchism. Besides, there are reports from the ground that challenge the libertarian narrative. The editors of Lower Class Magazine, an online project dedicated to “low budget underground journalism,” travel regularly to Kurdistan and have the following to say: The Western left sees Rojava as the realization of a democracy “from below”: communes, councils, a confederation; no hierarchies, no party, a spontaneous mass project. Anarchists and “libertarian” communists wax lyrically about the dawn of a direct-democratic Shangri-La. … Yes, the change in Rojava comes “from below. It is based on the power of the people, no doubt. Communes and councils are at the heart of decision-making, that is true. But as essential is the following: None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for a vanguard leading the way. The revolution in Rojava proves that Leninist vanguardism is correct, not false. Another European journalist visiting the region noted that the cadres of the People’s Protection Units, YPG, relate to the councils of Rojava in the same way the Bolshevists related to the councils of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, there are troubling pragmatic alliances, which have included collaboration with the U.S. military. Yet the people behind Rojava Solidarity NYC sum up the situation well: Rojava, an autonomous region in Northern Syrian, the largest revolutionary territory of the 21st century, has projected anarchist and communist ideas to the forefront of political discourse and into the pragmatic and messy reality of everyday life. … From communal relationships to the councils and self-defense units, we can assess numerous potential routes by which we can create liberated communities at home, while learning from their possibilities and pitfalls. Rojava won’t be the answer to our problems. No single struggle ever is. But the developments in Rojava challenge us to discuss real-life strategies for radical change. It is easy to focus on shortcomings, but if this is all we ever do, where will it get us? Councils are essential for communist projects. Their power, which is based on the direct involvement and active participation of the masses, is curtailed as soon as political interest groups, such as parties, assume control over them. This conviction separated historical council communism, represented by figures such as Otto Rühle and Anton Pannekoek, from the Bolsheviks. Pannekoek wrote: The councils are no government; not even the most central councils bear a governmental character. For they have no means to impose their will upon the masses; they have no organs of power. All social power is vested in the hands of the workers themselves. Unless we want the transition to communism to entail enormous human suffering (which would be utterly absurd), we need to consider the fact that billions of people will need to be fed, sheltered, nursed, provided with access to clean water, and so forth. To produce according to the needs of the people rather than the needs of profit requires enormous efforts in planning, especially if current living standards are to be upheld. (Living standards don’t equal standards of consumption—the standards of consumption in the Global North cannot and should not be upheld, since they are unsustainable.) Furthermore, we must collectively dispose of industrial and nuclear waste, weapons of mass destruction, and ticking environmental bombs. None of this is possible without a level of centralization, no matter how visceral the reactions are that the word might provoke in some circles. Only a council system can combine the centralization required by the complexity of modern societies with participative democracy. Centralization requires formal structures. Participative democracy requires these structures to be transparent. They need to be bottom-up rather than top-down, and delegates must be directly responsible to their constituencies. The council system is the only administrative framework to provide that. Romanticizing particular struggles rarely does any good, no matter how council-based they are—or claim to be. If radicals in the Global North fail to address concerns with respect to struggles in the Global South, it is not respectful but condescending. To escape into the intellectual poverty of cultural relativism doesn’t help. We can only evolve from critical engagement. But real-life struggles are our starting point. It makes little sense to demand struggles for communism if we shy away from engaging with the ones that exist. Arundhati Roy put it simply after spending time with Maoist Naxalites in the forests of central India, an experience she chronicled in the book Walking with the Comrades. She said: “I went in because I wanted to tell the story of who these people are.” This informs revolutionary theory and, in turn, improves revolutionary practice. Most importantly, it is crucial for saving communist struggles from betraying their own principles. Everyone can watch failure unfold. The challenge lies in helping to prevent it.
2/6/22
G - Colt Peacemaker
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher Interpretation: The aff must explicitly specify a comprehensive role of the ballot in the form of a text in the 1AC where they clarify how offense links back to the role of the ballot, such as whether post-fiat offense or pre-fiat offense matters and what constitutes that offense with implications on how to weigh Violation: they don’t Standards:
Engagement – Knowing what counts as offense is a prerequisite to making arguments, so its impossible to engage the aff. Our interp ensures that I read something relevant to your method, and knowing how to weigh gives us a standard. Especially true since there is no norm on what “performative engagement” like there is for util offense Few impacts: a) Education – When two ships pass in the night we don’t learn anything - This also guts novice inclusion because now they can never learn arguments in round. b) Turns the aff – Your impacts are premised on engaging with issues of oppression, but no one will take seriously a position that can’t be clashed with c) Strategy Skew – You can recontextualize your ROTB to make up reasons why my offense doesn’t link in the 1AR Framing: You can’t use your ROB to exclude my shell. My shell simply constrains how you read your ROTB. My method is your ROTB with specification, so if I’m winning comparative offense, the shell outweighs even if method debates in general preclude theory. If they go for the Aff first that proves the abuse of my shell since they should have specified in the AC.
10/31/21
G - Con Con CP
Tournament: CPS | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen States ought to call a global constitutional convention and establish a constitution reflecting intergenerational concern with exclusive authority to ban appropriation of outer space by private entities and bind participating bodies to its result That solves the aff – it addresses shared anxieties while building political consensus Gardiner 14 1 Stephen M. Gardiner, Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, “A Call for a Global Constitutional Convention Focused on Future Generations,” 2014, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 299-315, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679414000379, EA A Constitutional Convention In my view, the above line of reasoning leads naturally to a more specific proposal: that we—concerned individuals, interested community groups, national governments, and transnational organizations—should initiate a call for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. This proposal has two components. The first component is procedural. The proposal takes the form of a “call to action.” It is explicitly an attempt to engage a range of actors, based on a claim that they have or should take on a set of responsibilities, and a view about how to go about discharging those responsibilities. The second component is substantive. The main focus for action is a push for the creation of a constitutional convention at the global level, whose role is to pave the way for an overall constitutional system that appropriately embodies intergenerational concern. The substantive idea rests on several key ideas. Still, for the purposes of a basic proposal, I suggest that these be understood in a relatively open way that, as far as is practicable, does not prejudge the outcome of the convention, and especially its main recommendations. First, the convention itself should be understood as “a representative body called together for some occasional or temporary purpose” and “constituted by statute to represent the people in their primary relations.”14 Second, a constitutional system should be thought of in a minimalist sense as “a set of norms (rules, principles or values) creating, structuring, and possibly defining the limits of government power or authority.”15 Third, the “instigating” role of the convention should be to discuss, develop, make recommendations toward, and set in motion a process for the establishment of a constitution. Fourth, its primary subject matter should be the need to adequately reflect and embody intergenerational concern, where this would include at least the protection of future generations, the promotion of their interests (where “interests” is to be broadly conceived so as to include rights, claims, welfare, and so on), and the discharging of duties with respect to them. It may also (and in my view should) include some way of reflecting concern for past generations, including responsiveness to at least certain of their interests and views. However, I will leave that issue aside in what follows. The proposal to initiate a call for a global constitutional convention has at least two attractive features. First, it is based in a deep political reality, and does not underplay the challenge. It acknowledges the problem as it is, both specific and general, and calls attention to the heart of that problem, including to the failures of the current system, the need for an alternative, and the background issue of responsibility. Moreover, though the proposal is dramatic and rhetorically eye-catching, it is so in a way that is appropriately responsive to the seriousness of the issue at hand, the persistent political inertia surrounding more modest initiatives, and the fact that (grave though concerns about it are) climate change is only one instance of the tyranny of the contemporary (and the wider perfect moral storm), and we should expect others to arise over the coming decades and centuries. The second attractive feature of the proposal is that, though ambitious, it is not alienating. While it does not succumb to despair in the face of the challenge, neither does it needlessly polarize and divide from the outset (for example, by leaping to specific recommendations about how to fill the institutional gap). Instead, it acknowledges that there are fundamental difficulties and anxieties, but uses them to start the right kind of debate, rather than to foreclose it. As a result, the proposal is a promising candidate to serve as the subject of a wide and overlapping political consensus, at least among those who share intergenerational concern. Selective Mirroring To quell some initial anxieties, it is perhaps worth clarifying the open-ended and non-alienating character of the proposal. One temptation would be to view the call for a global constitutional convention as a fairly naked plea for world government, a prospect that would be deeply alienating—indeed anathema—to many. However, that is not my intention. Though it is possible that a global constitutional convention would lead in this direction, it is by no means certain. At a minimum, no such body could plausibly recommend any form of “world government” without simultaneously advancing detailed suggestions about how to avoid the standard threats such an institution might pose. Moreover, it seems perfectly conceivable, even likely under current ways of thinking, that a global constitutional convention would pursue what we might call a selective mirroring strategy. Specifically, a convention would seek to develop a broader system of institutions and practices that reflected the desirable features of a powerful and highly centralized global authority but neutralized the standing threats posed by it (for example, it might employ familiar strategies such as the separation of powers). In all likelihood, one feature of a selective mirroring approach would be the significant preservation of existing institutions to serve as a bulwark against the excesses of any newly created ones. Whether and how such a strategy might be made effective against the perfect moral storm, and whether something closer to a “world government” would do better, would be a central issue for discussion by the convention. It spills over to foster broader intergenerational representation, but independence is key Gardiner 14 2 Stephen M. Gardiner, Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, “A Call for a Global Constitutional Convention Focused on Future Generations,” 2014, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 299-315, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679414000379, EA One set of guidelines concerns how the global constitutional convention relates to other institutions. The first guideline concerns relative independence: (1) Autonomy: Any global constitutional convention should have considerable autonomy from other institutions, and especially from those dominated by factors that generate or facilitate the tyranny of the contemporary (and the perfect moral storm, more generally). Thus, for example, attempts should be made to insulate the global constitutional convention from too much influence from short-term and narrowly economic forces. The second guideline concerns limits to that independence: (2) Mutual Accountability: Any global constitutional convention should be to some extent accountable to other major institutions, and they should be accountable to it. Thus, for example, though the global constitutional convention should not be able to decide unilaterally that national institutions should be radically supplanted, nevertheless such institutions should not have a simple veto on the recommendations of the convention, including those that would result in sharp limits to their powers. A third guideline concerns adequacy: (3) Functional Adequacy: The global constitutional convention should be constructed in such a way that it is highly likely to produce recommendations that are functionally adequate to the task. Thus, for example, the tasks of the global constitutional convention should not be assigned to any currently existing body whose design and authority is clearly unsuitable. In my view, this guideline rules out proposals such as the Royal Society’s suggestion that governance of geoengineering should be taken up by the United Nations’ Commission on Sustainable Development,20 or the Secretary-General’s recommendation of a new United Nations’ High Commissioner for Future Generations.21 Though such proposals may have merit for some purposes (for example, as pragmatic, incremental suggestions to highlight the importance of intergenerational issues), they are too modest, in my opinion, to reflect the gravity of the threats posed by climate change in particular, and the perfect moral storm more generally. Aims A second set of guidelines concerns the aims of the global constitutional convention. Here, the perfect moral storm analysis would suggest: (4) Comprehensiveness: The convention should be under a mandate to consider a very broad range of global, intergenerational issues, to focus on such issues at a foundational level, and to recommend institutional reform accordingly. (5) Standing Authority: Though the convention may recommend the establishment of some temporary and issue-specific bodies, its focus should be on the establishment of institutions with standing authority over the long term. These guidelines are significant in that they stand against existing issue-specific approaches to global and intergenerational problems, and encourage not only a less ad hoc but also a more proactive approach. In particular, the global constitutional convention might be expected to recommend institutions that would be charged with identifying, monitoring, and taking charge of intergenerational issues as such. For example, such institutions should address not only specific policy issues (such as climate change, large asteroid detection, and long-term nuclear waste) but also the need to identify similar threats before they arise. Proactive measures mitigate a laundry list of emerging catastrophic risks – extinction Beckstead et al. 14 Nick Beckstead, Nick Bostrom, Niel Bowerman, Owen Cotton-Barratt, William MacAskill, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Toby Ord, * Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, * Global Priorities Project, Centre for Effective Altruism; Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Global Priorities Project, Centre for Effective Altruism; Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, * Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, * Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, “Policy Brief: Unprecedented Technological Risks,” 2014, The Global Priorities Project, The Future of Humanity Institute, The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Unprecedented-Technological-Risks.pdf, Accessed: 03/13/21, EA In the near future, major technological developments will give rise to new unprecedented risks. In particular, like nuclear technology, developments in synthetic biology, geoengineering, distributed manufacturing and artificial intelligence create risks of catastrophe on a global scale. These new technologies will have very large benefits to humankind. But, without proper regulation, they risk the creation of new weapons of mass destruction, the start of a new arms race, or catastrophe through accidental misuse. Some experts have suggested that these technologies are even more worrying than nuclear weapons, because they are more difficult to control. Whereas nuclear weapons require the rare and controllable resources of uranium-235 or plutonium-239, once these new technologies are developed, they will be very difficult to regulate and easily accessible to small countries or even terrorist groups. Moreover, these risks are currently underregulated, for a number of reasons. Protection against such risks is a global public good and thus undersupplied by the market. Implementation often requires cooperation among many governments, which adds political complexity. Due to the unprecedented nature of the risks, there is little or no previous experience from which to draw lessons and form policy. And the beneficiaries of preventative policy include people who have no sway over current political processes — our children and grandchildren. Given the unpredictable nature of technological progress, development of these technologies may be unexpectedly rapid. A political reaction to these technologies only when they are already on the brink of development may therefore be too late. We need to implement prudent and proactive policy measures in the near future, even if no such breakthroughs currently appear imminent.
12/19/21
G - Disclose Changes
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo Interp: the aff must disclose all changes at least 15 minutes before the round Violation: screenshots Standards A Pre round prep- Not telling me changes mean that pre round neg prep was skewed—4 minutes of prep is not enough to put together a coherent 1nc or update our answers to the aff B academic integrity – disclosing changes is key to ensure that new evidence isn't miscut and we have an idea of what analytics will look like. Their model of debate justifies people making the underview 5 minutes long without telling me.
2/6/22
G - Espec vs Colonialism affs
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 6 | Opponent: Westwood PM | Judge: Asher Towner Interp – The aff must specify the influence and decision-making powers of tribal authorities over implementation of the plan in tribal lands in a delineated text in the 1AC. Violation – they dotn
Ambiguity is a tool for settlers to define the terms of engagement with tribes. The liberal intentions of the 1AC don’t matter—absent defined standards, the policies will reproduce colonial domination. Steinman ’12 Steinman, Erich. “Settler Colonial Power and the American Indian Sovereignty Movement: Forms of Domination, Strategies of Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology Vol. 117, No. 4, January 2012, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662708. PeteZ A traditional definition of "sovereignty" is: "The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which any independent state is governed."' 3 Questions regarding the sovereign rights of tribes are often the starting point of any federal Indian law issue. Although the whole of federal Indian law is quite complex,14 the essence of tribal sovereignty is simply the extent to which a tribe can attend to its own affairs and control its own cultural, societal, and economic development free from outside restraints. Under the current legal and political regimes, the extent of tribal control is ambiguous. The Handbook of Federal Indian Law lists three "fundamental principles" that demonstrate the anomalous and restricted nature of tribal sovereignty: (1) Indian tribes possess all the powers of a sovereign state; (2) conquest renders the tribes subject, however, to the legislative authority of the United States and terminates the tribes' external sovereign powers, but does not affect the internal sovereign powers of the tribes; and (3) these powers are subject to qualification by treaties and congressional legislation.' 5 Cohen's three principles demonstrate the dichotomy between internal and external sovereignty16 that pervades the concept of tribal sovereignty. Tribes are supposedly full sovereigns with respect to their own internal affairs and interests. At the same time, however, the United States government has completely extinguished their external sovereign powers.17 This state of affairs might not be problematic if defined standards for maintaining the relationship between the tribal and federal governments existed and the relationship were based upon the consent of the tribes. The history of tribal-federal relations demonstrates, however, that neither standards nor consent exist, and that the relationship is uncertain at best. Tribal-federal relations have periodically oscillated between two diametrically opposed views on the status of Indian Tribes. At one end of the spectrum is the belief that tribes are independent political communities and should control their own development.'8 At the other end lies the belief that the tribal system should be dismantled and individual Indians should be assimilated into the greater American society.19 While these views appear to be in extreme conflict, their implementation produces very similar results. The United States government dominates the tribal-federal relationship, allowing it to manipulate the situation to protect federal interests. The following historical background will demonstrate how the lack of definition and consent in the relationship promotes federal dominance. Vote neg— 1 – Critical Education – The policymaking process is not innocent. Force them to study how their practice of fiat can itself reproduce settler colonialism. For tribes, these details are life and death. 2 – Ground – Tribal sovereignty is the first question in any debate about policies that affect natives – avoiding it is unfair, irresponsible, and bad for education. 3 – Presumption – If their framing is right, then the state will always manipulate its policies to screw over tribes – you should presume no sovereignty. 4 – CX doesn’t check: (A) My interp forces them to research these issues before round. (B) I can’t prep a strat against their aff until CX. (C) Footnoting DA—reduces crucial issues of sovereignty to a mere afterthought. (D) Specifying sovereignty should be the default—I shouldn’t have to ask.
Fairness is a voter and comes first – A debate’s a game that requires effective competition and negation, which makes their offense inevitable, it internal link turns clash and engagement. B Can’t weigh the aff—it’s just as likely that they’re winning it because we weren’t able to effectively prepare to defeat it. C Inescapable – the AC conforms to every norm of debate – speed, speech times, ballots – proves they value playing the game and isolating fairness as the one bad rule is arbitrary. D Probability – ballots can’t shape our subjectivity or create broad political change but can rectify in-round skews. Education – it’s the only portable impact to debate CI – a) brightlines are arbitrary and self-serving which doesn’t set good norms b) it collapses since weighing between brightlines rely on offense defense DOD – a) it’s the only way to may up for time spent on theory b) it’s the only way to deter future abuse No RVI’s- a) logic – you shouldn’t win for being fair b) clash – people go all in on theory which decks substance engagement c) chilling effect – people will be too scared to read theory because RVI’s encourage baiting theory 1NC theory first - 1 Abuse was self-inflicted- They started the chain of abuse and forced me down this strategy 2 Norming- We have more speeches to norm over whether it’s a good idea since the shell was read earlier. Norming outweighs A Constutivism- It’s the constitutive purpose of theory debating B Sequencing- it’s a pre-requisite to actualizing any other voter like fairness or education
10/31/21
G - Methodological Spec
Tournament: Tournament of Champions | Round: 5 | Opponent: Memorial DX | Judge: JP Interpretation: Affirmatives must, if they read an empirical study, must have an explicit methodology delineated in under the citation or a general note before or after the card- I’ve inserted a list for what the method must include - Sample Size - Explanation of how the study was done - Potential formulas or trends line equations if derived - Location of the study - Qualifications of the individuals conducting the study Violation: Shah ev Prefer- 1 Evidence ethics and infinite abuse- They can endlessly lie and spin the methodology of the study the way they like in the 1AR so that they win every evidence debate. Judges can’t check its out of their jurisdiction to sift through articles of empirical studies. Speccing solves since it prevents you from lying and grants us the ability to contest it in the 1NC. Evidence ethics is an independent voting issue since it questions your ability to trust the evidence they have read prior to evaluation.
4/24/22
G - Multiple Frameworks Bad
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin Interpretation: Debaters may only read one independent framework justification. To clarify, your framework can contain at most a syllogism that leads to your framework’s conclusion and one independent reason to prefer that is not dependent on the syllogism. Violation: There are multiple independent reasons to prefer the util framework e.g. actor spec, TJFs, reductionism. 1 Strat Skew and Clash- Each of these arguments is functionally a NIB on the framework because if I drop even one of these, it’s game over. Reading one solves since it ensures aff framework flexibility while also ensuring legitimate clash. That outweighs on probability because util frameworks spam 15 blippy framework justifications and always go for one that doesn’t get responded to because of time. 2 Judge Intervention- Most of the warrants in the aff do not prove utilitarianism. They either prove a consequentialist theory, a hedonistic/egoist theory, or even negative consequentialism. That means Judges use their prior knowledge to fill in the gaps for the util framework rather than letting the aff syllogistically justify it. That outweighs on probability – it happens in every round in the west coast where debaters don’t even have syllogisms or just collapse to ASpec.
10/9/21
G - NC - LogCon
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin The standard is consistency with the logical consequence of the resolution. Prefer this –
Text – Oxford Dictionary defines ought as “used to indicate something that is probable.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/oughtMassa Ought is “used to express logical consequence” as defined by Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought)Massa 2. Debatability – a) my interp means debates focus on empirics about squo trends rather than irresolvable abstract principles that’ve been argued for years b) Moral oughts cannot guide action due to the is/ought fallacy – we cannot derive moral obligations from what happens in the real world 3. Neg definition choice – Anything else kills 1NC strategy since I premised my engagement on a lack of your definition. Their inherency proves the aff won’t happen. Either a) the aff is non-inherent and you vote neg on presumption or b) It is and it isn’t going to happen.
10/9/21
G - New Affs Bad
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Javier Navarette Interpretation: Debaters must disclose affirmative frameworks, advocacy texts, and advantage areas thirty minutes before round if they haven’t read the affirmative before Violation: They didn’t
Standards: 1 Clash- Not disclosing incentivizes surprise tactics and poorly refined positions that rely on artificial and vague negative engagement to win debates. Their interpretation discourages third- and fourth-line testing by limiting the amount of time we have to prepare and forcing us to enter the debate with zero idea of what the affirmative is. Negatives are forced to rely on generics instead of smart contextual strategies destroying nuanced argumentation. 2 Reciprocity – They get an infinite amount of time to frontline their aff to write the most efficient and effective answers to anything we could say against it while we get only four minutes in round. This gives them a tremendous advantage over us that makes it impossible to win substance.
9/4/21
G - Non-indigenous setcol bad
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 5 | Opponent: Oxford VD | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen Stop it – this is a procedural – you lose- non indigenous setcol is violent and makes debate exclusive which is a prereq to engagement Brough ‘17 Taylor Brough https://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/open-letter-to-non-black-native-people-in-debate/ (won CEDA in 2016, debated for Vermont)Elmer I am here preoccupied with our enunciative capacities in debate—with what I perceive “Native debate,” and specifically non-Black Native debaters, to be doing in service of Settler/Master (mis)recognition, what the consequences of such doing might be, and what it might mean to push against the disciplining force of recognition in debate. The ontological fact of genocide/sovereignty as a dual positioning for Native people, coupled with academia’s push to identify ourselves at the site of (coherent and recognizable) trauma (what Wilderson terms “intra-human conflicts”), has led Native thought in debate, broadly, to do three related things: 1) prioritize the coherent discussion of sovereign loss over one of genocide and its incoherence, 2) articulate ourselves as always in conversation with (read: traumatized by) the Settler, 3) distance ourselves from a Black/Red conversation or from Black/Red theorizing. These three moves are all antiblack in addition to being an insidious manifestation of the genocide that structures half of our (non?)being. Depressingly, if we were to historicize “Native debate,” we would have to begin with a litany of non-Native debaters reading “Give Back the Land,” offering sovereignty as a solution to a tragic history of genocide that relegates Native people to phobic/phillic objects of the past whose futures are in the hands of those Settlers who bravely dare to talk about them. The terrain in which everyone can become Native—or at least become an advocate for Natives—is a cleared landscape produced by genocide but also, significantly, produced by antiblack slavery. This history of non-Native debaters’ representations of sovereignty, land repatriation, and treaty rights as the only solution to genocide also reaches into the present. What is most disturbing to me about this ongoing history is that we have yet to tie virtually any debate round to actual, material land repatriation, sovereign gains, or the upholding of treaty rights. These material gains involve labor from Native people organizing at the grassroots level, not an academic labor from Settlers. Debate arguments do not facilitate sovereign benefits for Native peoples. Further, the struggle for sovereignty itself does not overcome or solve genocide. The removal of the Hunkpapa Lakota Oyate and their relatives at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock should be proof enough of this—sovereignty as a politic is often met with, rather than resolving, genocidal violence. Non-Black Native people in debate have performed a similar land-based politic. Native debate has become so associated with words like “land,” “sovereignty,” “space,” “place,” “treaty rights,” and others, that it is almost impossible to theorize Native debate absent sovereignty as a grammar that marks our existence. So both non-Native debaters (who claim to advocate for Native peoples’ sovereignty) and Native debaters (who claim to advocate for something that usually falls into the grammar of sovereignty) are talking in essentially the same register, with incredibly limited slippage towards genocide as a vector of violence. And, for Native people, like non-Natives, debate arguments do not and cannot facilitate the material elements of decolonization that these land-based arguments frequently rely upon. Sovereign gains don’t happen in debate rounds, but for some reason the (mis)recognition of Native enunciation as sovereignty persists, in that the word “land” harkens to Native debate in almost every instance, that almost every debate involving Native people reading perceptibly “Native” arguments includes a discussion of “treaties” or “sovereignty” or “land-based pedagogy” or “spatiality.” What other reason could this be than a structure of desire around recognition from the Settler/Master? If we really follow the history of how “Nativeness” has been misrepresented in debate by Settlers, it becomes clear that much of contemporary Native debate, strangely (or as I argue, not so strangely), mimics these misrepresentations. Of course, debate is an economy of (mis)recognition. That “Native” becomes coextensive with “land” in debate is no accident. It is an enunciation that has been evoked prior to the involvement of any Native debaters or coaches. And it is reiterated by non-Black Native debaters with increasing certainty about the truthiness of Native relationships to the land. Systematically absent from this conversation, of course, is a discussion of genocide. I have gestured above towards the ways that the desire for recognition from the Settler/Master motivates this conceptual move towards the register of sovereignty. As Wilderson writes, “The crowding out, or disavowal, of the genocide modality by the sovereign modality allows the Settler/’Savage’ struggle to appear as a conflict rather than as an antagonism. This has therapeutic value for both the ‘Savage’ and the Settler: the mind can grasp the fight, conceptually put it into words. To say, ‘You stole my land and pilfered and appropriated my culture’ and then produce books, articles, and films that travel back and forth along the vectors of those conceptually coherent accusations is less threatening to the integrity of the ego, than to say,- ‘You culled me down from 19 million to 250,000.’”4 This gesture towards conceptual coherence and therapeutic value is why there is a celebrated and ongoing association between “land” and “Native” in both non-Native argumentation and in arguments made by Native people. It is why we cannot theorize about Native debate absent the contingent register of sovereignty. I am hesitant to claim that sovereignty should be completely abandoned as an analytic for obvious reasons—I think Wilderson also gives credit to indigenous conceptions of sovereignty, what it unseats, and how it operates, while still articulating a critique of sovereignty unrivaled by much of Native studies. I am not interested in suggesting that all Native people ignore our peoples’ land relationships or histories of broken treaties as politic throughout the United States or the world. I agree with Qwo-Li Driskill’s suggestion, alongside similar ones from other Native theorists, that sovereignty must be re-theorized significantly rather than echoing the propertied enterprise that confers legibility to state formations. Regardless of my reluctance to disavow the potential for sovereignty as a politic outside debate rounds, I think it is obvious that sovereignty in its terms in debate—as a recognized and fundamentally “Native” utterance—is genocidal and anti-Black. Broadly, my argument is that genocide is an undertheorized arm of an antagonism that halfway positions Native people, and that the basis of such undertheorization is the desire to be (mis)recognized as nearly-Human by the Settler. This claim invites an investigation of the context of (mis)recognition in debate and what is particular about debate itself with regard to Wilderson’s theory of position.
10/9/21
G - Open Source Theory
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 2 | Opponent: Salado HF | Judge: Claudia Ribera Interpretation: Debaters must disclose all constructive positions on open source with the full text of all cards with highlighting on the 2021-22 NDCA LD wiki after the round in which they read them. Violation – 1 Debate resource inequities—you’ll say people will steal cards, but that’s good—it’s the only way to truly level the playing field for students such as novices in under-privileged programs. Antonucci 05 Michael (Debate coach for Georgetown; former coach for Lexington High School); “eDebate open source? resp to Morris”; December 8; http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/2005-December/064806.html a. Open source systems are preferable to the various punishment proposals in circulation. It's better to share the wealth than limit production or participation. Various flavors of argument communism appeal to different people, but banning interesting or useful research(ers) seems like the most destructive solution possible. Indeed, open systems may be the only structural, rule-based answer to resource inequities. Every other proposal I've seen obviously fails at the level of enforcement. Revenue sharing (illegal), salary caps (unenforceable and possibly illegal) and personnel restrictions (circumvented faster than you can say 'information is fungible') don't work. This would - for better or worse. b. With the help of a middling competent archivist, an open source system would reduce entry barriers. This is especially true on the novice or JV level. Young teams could plausibly subsist entirely on a diet of scavenged arguments. A novice team might not wish to do so, but the option can't hurt. c. An open source system would fundamentally change the evidence economy without targeting anyone or putting anyone out of a job. It seems much smarter (and less bilious) to change the value of a professional card-cutter's work than send the KGB after specific counter-revolutionary teams. Open source does equal the playing field Overing 18 – Bob Overing, LD Scholar (“Holiday Disclosure Post #6 – 10 Things Edition” JANUARY 12, 2018. http://www.premierdebate.com/disclosure-post-6/) Open source improves on usual disclosure practices in the obvious way – you can read their evidence for better preparation – and in a number of smaller ways too. It solves the analytics problem I discussed above, so round-altering uncarded arguments are available (though this doesn’t really apply to Harvard-Westlake), and it gives access to evidence from paywalled articles. Every season I coach debaters who lack access to major databases; for schools without robust online library offerings or teams without college coaches, this matters a lot. 2 Evidence ethics – open source is the only way to verify pre-round that cards aren’t miscut or highlighted or bracketed unethically. That’s a voter – maintaining ethical ev practices is key to being good academics and we should be able to verify you didn’t cheat 3 Depth of clash – it allows debaters to have nuanced researched objections to their opponents evidence before the round at a much faster rate, which leads to higher quality ev comparison – outweighs cause thinking on your feet is NUQ but the best quality responses come from full access to a case.
D Voter: The impact is fairness—a it’s an intrinsic good – debate is fundamentally a game and some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity, b probability – debate can’t alter subjectivity, but it can rectify skews which means the only impact to a ballot is fairness and deciding who wins, c it internal link turns every impact – a limited topic promotes in-depth research and engagement which is necessary to access all of their education Education is a voter – it gives us portable skills for life like research and thinking. Drop the debater – a) they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can’t respond to, b) it deters future abuse and sets a positive norm. Use competing interps – a) reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter, b) collapses to competing interps – we justify 2 brightlines under an offense defense paradigm just like 2 interps. No RVIs – a) illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance, b) norming – I can’t concede the counterinterp if I realize I’m wrong which forces me to argue for bad norms, c) chilling effect – forces you to split your 2AR so you can’t collapse and misconstrue the 2NR, d) topic ed – prevents 1AR blipstorm scripts and allows us to get back to substance after resolving theory
10/30/21
G - Permissibility and Presumption
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher Permissibility and presumption negate 1 Obligations- the resolution indicates the affirmative has to prove an obligation, and permissibility would deny the existence of an obligation 2 Falsity- Statements are more often false than true because proving one part of the statement false disproves the entire statement. Presuming all statements are true creates contradictions which would be ethically bankrupt. 3 Negating is harder (hedge) 4 Affirmation theory- Affirming requires unconditionally maintaining an obligation Affirm: maintain as true. That’s Dictionary.com- “affirm” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/affirm The role of the ballot is to determine whether the resolution is a true or false statement – anything else moots 7 minutes of the nc – their framing collapses since you must say it is true that a world is better than another before you adopt it. Negate because either the aff is true meaning its bad for us to clash w/ it because it turns us into Fake News people OR it’s not meaning it’s a lie that you can’t vote on for ethics They justify substantive skews since there will always be a more correct side of the issue but we compensate for flaws in the lit. Scalar methods like comparison increases intervention – the persuasion of certain DA or advantages sway decisions – T/F binary is descriptive and technical.
10/31/21
G - SRM CP
Tournament: CPS | Round: 3 | Opponent: arnav simha | Judge: asher towner CP Text – States should substantially increase their research and deployment of a solar radiation management policy. - Solar Radiation Management SRM is highly effective and cools to pre-industrial levels incredibly fast – it avoids the Impact Turns since it doesn’t reduce Carbon Emissions Bickel 13, J. Eric. "Climate engineering and climate tipping-point scenarios." Environment Systems and Decisions 33.1 (2013): 152-167. (PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems @ Stanford University, Associate Professor @ the University of Texas at Austin School of Engineering)Elmer SRM differs from air capture in that it seeks to reverse the energy imbalance caused by increased greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. This is achieved by reflecting back into space some fraction of the incoming shortwave radiation from the Sun. Calculations show that reflecting one to two percent of the sunlight that strikes the Earth would cool the planet by an amount roughly equal to the warming that is likely from doubling the concentration of GHGs (Lenton and Vaughan 2009). Scattering this amount of sunlight appears to be possible (Novim 2009). SRM holds the possibility of acting on the climate system on a time-scale that could prevent the abrupt and harmful changes discussed above (Novim 2009). In fact, SRM may be the only human action that can cool the planet in an emergency. As Lenton and Vaughan (2009) note, “It would appear that only rapid, repeated, large-scale deployment of potent shortwave geoengineering options (e.g., stratospheric aerosols) could conceivably cool the climate to near its preindustrial state on the 2050 timescale.”
12/18/21
G - T FW v1
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher interp - the aff must defend member nations of the WTO reduce intellectual property protections. To clarify - member nations must be governments that are members of the WTO. “Resolved” means to enact by law. Words and Phrases ’64 (Words and Phrases; 1964; Permanent Edition) Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. 4 Standards to Prefer: First - Fairness – radically re-contextualizing the resolution lets them defend any method tangentially related to the topic exploding Limits, which erases neg ground via perms and renders research burdens untenable by eviscerating predictable limits. Procedural questions come first – debate is a game and it makes no sense to skew a competitive activity as it requires effective negation which incentivizes argument refinement, but skewed burdens deck pedagogical engagement. Second - Clash – picking any grounds for debate precludes the only common point of engagement, which obviates preround research and incentivizes retreat from controversy by eliminating any effective clash. Only the process of negation distinguishes debate and discussion by necessitating iterative testing and effective engagement, but an absence of constant refinement dooms revolutionary potential. Third – SSD – their model that allows them to side-step the topic on both the Aff and Neg hurts debate as a site of role experimentation – choosing to individually engage both sides solves argument refinement and self-reflexivity breeding constantly evolving methodology which is key to activist resistance BUT side-stepping it ingrains ideological dogmatism by imposing artificial lines in the sand for what not to experiment replicating imperial ideologies about exclusion. Fourth – Topic Education – nitty gritty debates on details of medicine and health policy is key to knowledge generation of constructive strategies to solve oppression. Galea 18, Sandro. Healthier: Fifty thoughts on the foundations of population health. Oxford University Press, 2017. (Professor of Public Health at Boston University)Elmer How should we in academic public health engage with the issue of racism, at both interpersonal and structural levels? How might we best mitigate its effects? I suggest four possible approaches. First, we must tackle racism at the community level. In this capacity, some of us may choose to express solidarity with affected groups, participating in public shows of support. Such actions ensure that the issue of racism moves to the forefront of the public debate and stays there. Indeed, peaceful public statements of concern about a pressing social issue always have a place in an open society, and our responsibility to make these statements is not in any way inconsistent with our role as members of an academic community. Given that we are members of this community, my second suggestion relates to how our scholarship may pave the way for progress on this issue. The work of knowledge generation can help inform acute social needs, developing constructive strategies to help solve the urgent problems of our time—problems such as racism. This nudges us toward a scholarship of consequence, where we aim to shed light on the root causes of racial divides and the link between racism and the health of the public. To do this, we must prioritize our research questions accordingly. By focusing on what matters most, and orienting our scholarship toward areas of inquiry that tackle the foundational drivers of population health, we stand to make a real difference in creating a fairer, less racially fraught society. Third, we are charged at our various institutions with fostering an education environment that both teaches the foundations of our field and prepares students to engage with evolving issues of contemporary public health importance. That calls for an education that is dynamic and reflexive, but also one that is encouraging and respectful of the sharing of ideas. Such an academic climate does much to advance the goals of engendering mutual understanding and identifying solutions grounded in diversity of experience, opinion, and perspective. It is not enough to merely acknowledge disparities; we need to engage in difficult, sometimes uncomfortable discussions about these issues in order to understand one another and improve the often unacceptable conditions our scholarship makes all too apparent to us. Finally, insofar as public health centers around shaping the conditions that make people health, and insofar as those conditions depend on the introduction of health in all sectors, we need to work toward a health conversation that extends well beyond the walls of academia. This agitates for an engagement with the public conversation around the issue of racism wherever the conversation may arise. Public health’s unique perspective, informed by its scholarship, is well positioned to influence how we understand racism and its consequences for the well-being of populations. By clarifying the links between racism and health by making them unignorable in the public debate, we can then begin to advance solutions. Needless to say, racism and hate of any kind are intolerable, even when we do not take into account their health consequences. But health, as a universal aspiration, can serve as a clarifying lens for action, elevating the importance of creating a society free of racism, where health will no longer be determined by the color of a person’s skin. The actions of a committed, activist public health will go far toward bringing this about. TVA- read the aff but defend a political action by member nations of the WTO that reduces IP The state is a necessary stasis of analysis to organize micro-politics – the aff gets coopted because individual radicalism misunderstands how power operates. Bayat ’13 (Asef; Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois; 2013, “Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East,” pp. 41-45) The dearth of conventional collective action— in par tic u lar, contentious protests among the subaltern groups (the poor, peasants, and women) in the developing countries, together with a disillusionment with dominant socialist parties, pushed many radical observers to “discover” and highlight different types of activism, however small- scale, local, or even individualistic. Such a quest, meanwhile, both contributed to and benefi ted from the upsurge of theoretical perspectives, during the 1980s, associated with poststructuralism that made micropolitics and “everyday resistance” a popular idea. James Scott’s departure, during the 1980s, from a structuralist position in studying the behavior of the peasantry in Asia to a more ethnographic method of focusing on individual reactions of peasants contributed considerably to this paradigm shift .27 In the meantime, Foucault’s “decentered” notion of power, together with a revival of neo- Gramscian politics of culture (hegemony), served as a key theoretical backing for micropolitics, and thus the “re sis tance” perspective. The notion of “re sis tance” came to stress that power and counterpower were not in binary opposition, but in a decoupled, complex, ambivalent, and perpetual “dance of control.”28 It based itself on the Foucauldian idea that “wherever there is power there is re sis tance,” although the latter consisted largely of small- scale, everyday, tiny activities that the agents could aff ord to articulate given their po liti cal constraints. Such a perception of re sis tance penetrated not only peasant studies, but a variety of fi elds, including labor studies, identity politics, ethnicity, women’s studies, education, and studies of the urban subaltern. Thus, multiple researchers discussed how relating stories about miracles “gives voice to pop u lar re sis tance”29; how disenfranchised women resisted patriarchy by relating folktales and songs or by pretending to be possessed or crazy;30 how reviving extended family among the urban pop u lar classes represented an “avenue of po liti cal participation.”31 The relationships between the Filipino bar girls and western men were discussed not simply in terms of total domination, but in a complex and contingent fashion;32 and the veiling of the Muslim working woman has been represented not in simple terms of submission, but in ambivalent terms of protest and co- optation— hence, an “accommodating protest.”33 Indeed, on occasions, both veiling and unveiling were simultaneously considered as a symbol of re sis tance. Undoubtedly, such an attempt to grant agency to the subjects that until then were depicted as “passive poor,” “submissive women,” “apo liti cal peasant,” and “oppressed worker” was a positive development. The re sis tance paradigm helps to uncover the complexity of power relations in society in general, and the politics of the subaltern in par tic u lar. It tells us that we may not expect a universalized form of struggle; that totalizing pictures oft en distort variations in people’s perceptions about change; that local should be recognized as a signifi cant site of struggle as well as a unit of analysis; that or ga nized collective action may not be possible everywhere, and thus alternative forms of struggles must be discovered and acknowledged; that or ganized protest as such may not necessarily be privileged in the situations where suppression rules. The value of a more fl exible, small- scale, and unbureaucratic activism should, therefore, be acknowledged.34 These are some of the issues that critiques of poststructuralist advocates of “re sis tance” ignore.35 Yet a number of conceptual and political problems also emerge from this paradigm. The immediate trouble is how to conceptualize re sis tance, and its relation to power, domination, and submission. James Scott seems to be clear about what he means by the term: Class re sis tance includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-à- vis these superordinate classes.36 emphasis added However, the phrase “any act” blocks delineating between qualitatively diverse forms of activities that Scott lists. Are we not to distinguish between large- scale collective action and individual acts, say, of tax dodging? Do reciting poetry in private, however subversive- sounding, and engaging in armed struggle have identical value? Should we not expect unequal aff ectivity and implications from such diff erent acts? Scott was aware of this, and so agreed with those who had made distinctions between diff erent types of resistance— for example, “real re sis tance” refers to “or ga nized, systematic, pre- planned or selfl ess practices with revolutionary consequences,” and “token re sis tance” points to unor ga nized incidental acts without any revolutionary consequences, and which are accommodated in the power structure.37 Yet he insisted that the “token re sis tance” is no less real than the “real re sis tance.” Scott’s followers, however, continued to make further distinctions. Nathan Brown, in studying peasant politics in Egypt, for instance, identifi es three forms of politics: atomistic (politics of individuals and small groups with obscure content), communal (a group eff ort to disrupt the system, by slowing down production and the like), and revolt ( just short of revolution to negate the system).38 Beyond this, many resistance writers tend to confuse an awareness about oppression with acts of resistance against it. The fact that poor women sing songs about their plight or ridicule men in their private gatherings indicates their understanding of gender dynamics. This does not mean, however, that they are involved in acts of resistance; neither are the miracle stories of the poor urbanites who imagine the saints to come and punish the strong. Such an understanding of “resistance” fails to capture the extremely complex interplay of conflict and consent, and ideas and action, operating within systems of power. Indeed, the link between consciousness and action remains a major sociological dilemma.39 Scott makes it clear that re sis tance is an intentional act. In Weberian tradition, he takes the meaning of action as a crucial element. This intentionality, while signifi cant in itself, obviously leaves out many types of individual and collective practices whose intended and unintended consequences do not correspond. In Cairo or Tehran, for example, many poor families illegally tap into electricity and running water from the municipality despite their awareness of their behavior’s illegality. Yet they do not steal urban ser vices in order to express their defi ance vis-à- vis the authorities. Rather, they do it because they feel the necessity of those ser vices for a decent life, because they fi nd no other way to acquire them. But these very mundane acts when continued lead to signifi cant changes in the urban structure, in social policy, and in the actors’ own lives. Hence, the signifi cance of the unintended consequences of agents’ daily activities. In fact, many authors in the re sis tance paradigm have simply abandoned intent and meaning, focusing instead eclectically on both intended and unintended practices as manifestations of “re sis tance.” There is still a further question. Does re sis tance mean defending an already achieved gain (in Scott’s terms, denying claims made by dominant groups over the subordinate ones) or making fresh demands (to “advance its own claims”), what I like to call “encroachment”? In much of the re sis tance literature, this distinction is missing. Although one might imagine moments of overlap, the two strategies, however, lead to diff erent po liti cal consequences; this is so in par tic u lar when we view them in relation to the strategies of dominant power. The issue was so crucial that Lenin devoted his entire What Is to Be Done? to discussing the implications of these two strategies, albeit in diff erent terms of “economism/trade unionism” vs. “social demo cratic/party politics.” What ever one may think about a Leninist/vanguardist paradigm, it was one that corresponded to a par tic u lar theory of the state and power (a capitalist state to be seized by a mass movement led by the working- class party); in addition, it was clear where this strategy wanted to take the working class (to establish a socialist state). Now, what is the perception of the state in the “resistance” paradigm? What is the strategic aim in this perspective? Where does the resistance paradigm want to take its agents/subjects, beyond “preventing the worst and promising something better”?40 Much of the literature of re sis tance is based upon a notion of power that Foucault has articulated, that power is everywhere, that it “circulates” and is never “localized here and there, never in anybody’s hands.” 41 Such a formulation is surely instructive in transcending the myth of the powerlessness of the ordinary and in recognizing their agency. Yet this “decentered” notion of power, shared by many poststructuralist “re sis tance” writers, underestimates state power, notably its class dimension, since it fails to see that although power circulates, it does so unevenly— in some places it is far weightier, more concentrated, and “thicker,” so to speak, than in others. In other words, like it or not, the state does matter, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the potential of urban subaltern activism. Although Foucault insists that re sis tance is real when it occurs outside of and in de pen dent of the systems of power, the perception of power that informs the “re sis tance” literature leaves little room for an analysis of the state as a system of power. It is, therefore, not accidental that a theory of the state and, therefore, an analysis of the possibility of co- optation, are absent in almost all accounts of “resistance.” Consequently, the cherished acts of resistance float around aimlessly in an unknown, uncertain, and ambivalent universe of power relations, with the end result an unsettled, tense accommodation with the existing power arrangement. Lack of a clear concept of resistance, moreover, often leads writers in this genre to overestimate and read too much into the acts of the agents. The result is that almost any act of the subjects potentially becomes one of “resistance.” Determined to discover the “inevitable” acts of resistance, many poststructuralist writers often come to “replace their subject.”42 While they attempt to challenge the essentialism of such perspectives as “passive poor,” “submissive Muslim women,” and “inactive masses,” they tend, however, to fall into the trap of essentialism in reverse— by reading too much into ordinary behaviors, interpreting them as necessarily conscious or contentious acts of defi ance. This is so because they overlook the crucial fact that these practices occur mostly within the prevailing systems of power. For example, some of the lower class’s activities in the Middle East that some authors read as “re sis tance,” “intimate politics” of defi ance, or “avenues of participation” may actually contribute to the stability and legitimacy of the state.43 The fact that people are able to help themselves and extend their networks surely shows their daily activism and struggles. However, by doing so the actors may hardly win any space from the state (or other sources of power, like capital and patriarchy)— they are not necessarily challenging domination. In fact, governments often encourage self- help and local initiatives so long as they do not turn oppositional. They do so in order to shift some of their burdens of social welfare provision and responsibilities onto the individual citizens. The proliferation of many NGOs in the global South is a good indicator of this. In short, much of the re sis tance literature confuses what one might consider coping strategies (when the survival of the agents is secured at the cost of themselves or that of fellow humans) and effective participation or subversion of domination. There is a last question. If the poor are always able to resist in many ways (by discourse or actions, individual or collective, overt or covert) the systems of domination, then what is the need to assist them? If they are already po litically able citizens, why should we expect the state or any other agency to empower them? Misreading the behavior of the poor may, in fact, frustrate our moral responsibility toward the vulnerable. As Michael Brown rightly notes, when you “elevate the small injuries of childhood to the same moral status as suff ering of truly oppressed,” you are committing “a savage leveling that diminishes rather than intensifi es our sensitivities to injustice.” 44 Endorse the hard work of institutional reform – their sweeping claims lead to violence and can’t engage materiality. Condit ’15 (Celeste; 2/4/15; Ph.D. in Rhetorical Studies from the University of Iowa, B.S. in Speech from the University of Iowa, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, awarded author; Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol 101. Issue 1. “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,”) The theories of social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close of the twentieth century echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred extensive thought about the performances of individual identity and the relationship of identity to mass media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They are, however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described. One can sum up the most widely circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in the following, admittedly simplified, statement: There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-liberalism, global capitalism) that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don't know the shape of what will come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes after will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For an example, read Slavoj Žižek's attack on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate “democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after which, things in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it arises from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy theme is avoidable, even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change, which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.
TVA is terminal defense – proves our models aren’t mutually exclusive - any response to the substance of the TVA is offense for us because it proves our model allows for clear contestation. Form over Content doesn’t take it out since we don’t restrict Form, just the substantive burden of the Aff. Prefer Competing Interpretations – reasonability is arbitrary and causes a race to the bottom. This means reject Aff Impact Turns predicated on their theory since we weren’t able to adequately prepare for it.
10/31/21
G - Theory Hedge v1
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher Procedural fairness is a voter and outweighs a it’s an intrinsic good – debate is fundamentally a game and some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity, b probability – debate can’t alter subjectivity, but it can rectify skews which means the only impact to a ballot is fairness and deciding who wins, c it internal link turns every impact – a limited debate promotes in-depth research and engagement which is necessary to access all of their education. Reject 1AR theory A NO 3NR so 2ar gets to weigh however they want B time skew- 1NC theory first A Abuse was self-inflicted which takes out their infinite abuse claims B 1nc t/theory is more common, so resolving it first sets better norms B It definitionally comes prior since it was introduced first which takes out time skew. Also 7-6 time skew ow. Negating is harder so you grant me an rvi on all 1ar shells- Judge psychology they get a 2ar judge psychology advantage. Go for good shells if ur afraid of rvis. 1ar theory drop the arg. A They can spam no risk shells that make a 2n impossible since we have to adequately answer all of them and win substance. Use reasonability on 1ar shells. Aff skew — 1AR theory is really biased since 2ARs lbl every argument with new answers since no 3n–some strategic advantage is needed to check back 2AR sandbagging; reasonability is goldilocks: prevents abusive 1NCs cuz they’re unreasonable while the 2N has a fighting chance Winning offense is impossible – they get 3 minutes to lbl every one of our standards with no response, which means definitionally it’s impossible to win 2N offense, which means the bar should be "defense to 1AR standards" All theory paradigm issues the aff thinks are good must be in the 1ac since they have 1 more speech than me on theory so they should take a stance sooner so I don’t have to answer all of them in one speech while they can go for them in multiple – 2n issues are reciprocally answered by the 2ar. Drop the debater on 1nc shells to deter 1ac abuse since they started it. Use fairness and education. Competing interps because 2ars always go for ethosy reasonability dumps and win, which is arbitrary and a race to the bottom.
10/31/21
G - Truth Testing v1
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin Permissibility and presumption negate 1 Obligations- the resolution indicates the affirmative has to prove an obligation, and permissibility would deny the existence of an obligation 2 Falsity- Statements are more often false than true because proving one part of the statement false disproves the entire statement. Presuming all statements are true creates contradictions which would be ethically bankrupt. 3 Negating is harder – A Aff gets first and last speech which control the direction of the debate B Affirmatives can strategically uplayer in the 1ar giving them a 7-6 time skew advantage, splitting the 2nr C They get infinite prep time 4 Affirmation theory- Affirming requires unconditionally maintaining an obligation Affirm: maintain as true. That’s Dictionary.com- “affirm” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/affirm The role of the ballot is to determine whether the resolution is a true or false statement – anything else moots 7 minutes of the nc – their framing collapses since you must say it is true that a world is better than another before you adopt it. Negate because either the aff is true meaning its bad for us to clash w/ it because it turns us into Fake News people OR it’s not meaning it’s a lie that you can’t vote on for ethics They justify substantive skews since there will always be a more correct side of the issue but we compensate for flaws in the lit. Scalar methods like comparison increases intervention – the persuasion of certain DA or advantages sway decisions – T/F binary is descriptive and technical. a priori's 1st – even worlds framing requires ethics that begin from a priori principles like reason or pleasure so we control the internal link to functional debates. The ballot says vote aff or neg based on a topic – five dictionaries define to negate as to deny the truth of and affirm as to prove true so it's constitutive and jurisdictional. I denied the truth of the resolution by disagreeing with the aff which means I've met my burden. 6 Paradox of tolerance- to be completely open to the aff we must exclude perspectives that wouldn’t be open to the aff which means it’s impossible to have complete tolerance for ideas 7 Decision Making Paradox- in order to decide to do the affirmative we need a decision-making procedure to enact it but to choose a decision-making procedure requires another decision making procedure leading to infinite regress.
10/9/21
G - Truth Testing v2
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: TJ Maher The ballot says vote aff or neg based on a topic – five dictionaries define to negate as to deny the truth of and affirm as to prove true so it's constitutive and jurisdictional. I denied the truth of the resolution by disagreeing with the aff which means I've met my burden. Negate – 1 of is to “expressing an age” but the rez doesn’t delineate a length of time 2 the is “denoting a disease or affliction” but the WTO isn’t a disease 3 reduce is to “(of a person) lose weight, typically by dieting” but IP doesn’t have a body to lose weight. 4 medicine is “(especially among some North American Indian peoples) a spell, charm, or fetish believed to have healing, protective, or other power” but you can’t have IP for a spell. 5 The holographic principle is the most reasonable conclusion Stromberg 15Joseph Stromberg- “Some physicists believe we're living in a giant hologram — and it's not that far-fetched” https://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8847863/holographic-principle-universe-theory-physics Vox. June 29th 2015 War Room Debate AI Some physicists actually believe that the universe we live in might be a hologram. The idea isn't that the universe is some sort of fake simulation out of The Matrix, but rather that even though we appear to live in a three-dimensional universe, it might only have two dimensions. It's called the holographic principle. The thinking goes like this: Some distant two-dimensional surface contains all the data needed to fully describe our world — and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth. It might sound absurd. But when physicists assume it's true in their calculations, all sorts of big physics problems — such as the nature of black holes and the reconciling of gravity and quantum mechanics — become much simpler to solve. In short, the laws of physics seem to make more sense when written in two dimensions than in three. "It's not considered some wild speculation among most theoretical physicists," says Leonard Susskind, the Stanford physicist who first formally defined the idea decades ago. "It's become a working, everyday tool to solve problems in physics." But there's an important distinction to be made here. There's no direct evidence that our universe actually is a two-dimensional hologram. These calculations aren't the same as a mathematical proof. Rather, they're intriguing suggestions that our universe could be a hologram. And as of yet, not all physicists believe we have a good way of testing the idea experimentally. 6 Paradox of tolerance- to be completely open to the aff we must exclude perspectives that wouldn’t be open to the aff which means it’s impossible to have complete tolerance for an idea since that tolerance relies on excluding a perspective. 7 Decision Making Paradox- in order to decide to do the affirmative we need a decision-making procedure to enact it, vote for it, and to determine it is a good decision. But to chose a decision-making procedure requires another meta level decision making procedure leading to infinite regress since every decision requires another decision to chose how to make a decision. 8 The Place Paradox- if everything exists in a place in space time, that place must also have a place that it exists and that larger place needs a larger location to infinity. Therefore, identifying ought statements is impossible since those statements assume acting on objects in the space-time continuum. 9 Grain Paradox- A single grain of millet makes no sound upon falling, but a thousand grains make a sound. But a thousand nothings cannot make something which means the physical world is paradoxical. 10 Arrows Paradox- If we divide time into discrete 0-duration slices, no motion is happening in each of them, so taking them all as a whole, motion is impossible. 11 Bonini’s Paradox- As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable; for it to be more understandable it must be less complete and therefore less accurate. Therefore no philosophical or political model can be useful. 12 All analysis fails- substitution logic proves Wikipedia SummarizesWikipedia - “Paradox of analysis” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_analysis War Room Debate AI A conceptual analysis is something like the definition of a word. However, unlike a standard dictionary definition (which may list examples or talk about related terms as well), a completely correct analysis of a concept in terms of others seems like it should have exactly the same meaning as the original concept. Thus, in order to be correct, the analysis should be able to be used in any context where the original concept is used, without changing the meaning of the discussion in context. Conceptual analyses of this sort are a major goal of analytic philosophy. However, if such an analysis is to be useful, it should be informative. That is, it should tell us something we don't already know (or at least, something one can imagine someone might not already know). But it seems that no conceptual analysis can both meet the requirement of correctness and of informativeness, on these understandings of the requirements. To see why, consider a potential simple analysis: (1) For all x (any given member of a class or set), x is a brother if and only if x is a male sibling One can say that (1) is correct because the expression "brother" represents the same concept as the expression "male sibling," and (1) seems to be informative because the two expressions are not identical. And if (1) is truly correct, then "brother" and "male sibling" must be interchangeable: (2) For all x, x is a brother if and only if x is a brother Yet (2) is not informative, so either (1) is not informative, or the two expressions used in (1) are not interchangeable (because they change an informative analysis into an uninformative one) so (1) is not actually correct. In other words, if the analysis is correct and informative, then (1) and (2) must be essentially equal, but this is not true because (2) is not informative. Therefore, it seems an analysis cannot be both correct and informative at the same time. 13 Linguistics fail- Words do not have intrinsic or inherent meaning but are rather constructed by a set of sign and signifiers. For example, if I say the word pencil, a specific image pops into your head that doesn’t necessarily imply all pencils.
10/31/21
G - Wild West word PIK
Tournament: Cal Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Denver East MB | Judge: Jacob Lugo We endorse the entirety of the 1AC minus their use of the term ‘Wild West’ in 1AC Babcock Their invocation of a ‘Wild West’ that needs to be controlled and avoided is the same justification used to tame the ‘wild, savage native’ to justify colonialism Deondre Smiles, 10/26/20, "The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space," No Publication, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-spaceSR “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must always remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier. America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars…The American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest and most determined men and women ever to walk on the face of the Earth… Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, settled the Wild West…This is our glorious and magnificent inheritance. We are Americans. We are pioneers. We are the pathfinders. We settled the New World. We built the modern world.” -President Donald J. Trump, 2020 State of the Union address To most scholars, and certainly to the virtual majority of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, it is no secret that the country we call the United States of America was built upon the brutal subjugation of Indigenous people and Indigenous lands. Fueled by the American settler myths of terra nullius (no man’s land) and Manifest Destiny, the American settler state proceeded upon a project of cultural and physical genocide, with lasting effects that endure to the present day. The ‘settler myth’ permeates American culture. Words such as ‘pioneer’, the ‘West’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ grab the imagination as connected to the growth of the country in its early history. America sprang forth from a vast open ‘wilderness’. Of course, for Indigenous people, we know differently—these lands had complex cultural frameworks and political entities long before colonization. Words like ‘pioneer’ and ‘Manifest Destiny’, have deep meanings for us too, as they are indicative of the very real damage dealt against our cultures and nations, damage that we have had to work very hard to undo. Trump’s address raises key insights into the continuing logics of settler colonialism, as well as questions of its future trajectories. Trump’s invocation of ideas such as the ‘frontier’ and ‘taming the wilderness’ draws attention to the brutal violence that accompanied the building of the American state. Scholars such as Greg Grandin (2019) make the case that the frontier is part of what America is—whether it is the ‘Wild West’, or the U.S.-Mexican border, America is always contending with a frontier that must be defined. Language surrounding ‘frontier’ is troubling because it perpetuates the rationale of why the American settler state even exists—it could make better use of the land than Native people would, after all, they lived in wilderness. This myth tells us that what we know as the modern world was built through the hard work of European settlers; Indigenous people had nothing to offer or contribute. For someone like Mr. Trump, whose misgivings and hostility towards Native people have been historically documented, this myth fits well with his narrative as President—he is building a ‘new’ America, one that will return to its place of power and influence. Language matters and overdetermines the consequences of the plan Joelle Renstrom, 3-25-2021, "We Shouldn't Invoke Colonialist Language To Justify Missions To the Cosmos," Wire Science, https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/why-should-we-invoke-colonialist-language-to-justify-missions-to-the-cosmos/SR Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars to much fanfare, just days after probes from the UAE and China entered orbit around the Red Planet. The surge in Martian traffic symbolises major advancements in space exploration. It also presents an opportune moment to step back and consider not only what humans do in space, but how we do it – including the words we use to describe human activities in space. The conversation around the language of space exploration has already begun. NASA, for instance, has been rooting out the gendered language that has plagued America’s space program for decades. Instead of using “manned” to describe human space missions, it has shifted to using gender-neutral terms like “piloted” or “crewed.” But our scrutiny of language shouldn’t stop there. Other words and phrases, particularly those that invoke capitalism or colonialism, should receive the same treatment. To some extent, language influences the way we think and understand the world around us. A dramatic example comes from the Pirahã tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, whose language contains very few terms for describing numbers or time. A capitalist culture in which time equals money likely wouldn’t make sense to them. Similarly, language likely affects humans’ thoughts and beliefs about outer space. The words scientists and writers use to describe space exploration may influence who feels included in these endeavours – both as direct participants and as benefactors — and alter the way people interact with the cosmos. Take, for example, John F. Kennedy’s 1962 Moon Speech, in which he three times used the words “conquer” and “conquest.” While Kennedy’s rhetoric was intended to bolster U.S. morale in the space race against the USSR, the view of outer space as a venue for conquest evokes subjugation and exploitation and exemplifies an attitude that has resulted in much destruction on Earth. By definition, conquering involves an assertion of power and mastery, often through violence. Similarly, former President Donald Trump is the most recent American president to use the term “Manifest Destiny” to describe his motives for exploring space, tapping into a philosophy that suggests humanity’s grand purpose is to expand and conquer, regardless of who or what stands in the way. In a recent white paper, a group comprising subject-matter experts at NASA and other institutions warned of the hazards of invoking colonial language and practice in space exploration. “The language we use around exploration can really lead or detract from who gets involved and why they get involved,” Natalie B. Treviño, one of the paper’s coauthors, told me. Treviño, who researched decolonial theory and space exploration for her PhD at Western University in Canada, is a member of an equity, diversity and inclusion working group that makes equity-related recommendations in the planetary science research community. She notes that certain words and phrases can be particularly alienating for Indigenous people. “How is an Indigenous child on a reserve in North America supposed to connect with space exploration if the language is the same language that led to the genocide of his people?”
2/20/22
JF - Appropriation Spec
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo 1 Interpretation – the Affirmative must specify what type of Private Actor Appropriation they effect. Appropriation is extremely vague – no legal precedent which means no normal means. Pershing 19, Abigail D. "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today." Yale J. Int'l L. 44 (2019): 149. (Robina Fellow at European Court of Human Rights. European Court of Human Rights Yale Law School)Elmer Though the Outer Space Treaty flatly prohibits national appropriation of space,150 it leaves unanswered many questions as to what actually counts as appropriation. As far back as 1969, scholars wondered about the implications of this article.151 While it is clear that a nation may not claim ownership of the moon, other questions are not so clear. Does the prohibition extend to collecting scientific samples?152 Does creating space debris count as appropriation by occupation? While the answers to these questions are most likely no, simply because of the difficulties that would be caused otherwise, there are some questions that are more difficult to answer, and more pressing. As commercial space flight becomes more and more prevalent,153 the question of whether private entities can appropriate property in space becomes very important. Whereas once it took a nation to get into space, it will soon take only a corporation, and scholars have pondered whether these entities will be able to claim property in space.154 Though this seems allowable, since the treaty only prohibits “national appropriation,”155 allowing such appropriation would lead to an absurd result. This is because the only value that lies in recognition of a claim is the ability to have that claim enforced.156 If a nation recognized and enforced such a claim, this enforcement would constitute state action.157 It would serve to exclude members of other nations and would thus serve as a form of national appropriation, even though the nation never attempted to directly appropriate the property.158 Furthermore, the Outer Space Treaty also requires that non-governmental entities must be authorized and monitored by the entities’ home countries to operate in space.159 Since a nation cannot authorize its citizens to act in contradiction to international law, a nation would not be allowed to license a private entity to appropriate property in space.160 While this nonappropriation principle is great for allowing free access to space, thereby encouraging research and development in the field, it makes it difficult to create or police a solution to the space debris problem. A viable solution will have to work without becoming an appropriation. There is, however, very little substantive law on what actually counts as appropriation in the context of space.161 So, the best way to see what is and is not allowed is to look both at the general international law regarding appropriations and to look at the past actions of space actors to see what has been allowed (or at least tolerated) and what has been prohibited or rejected. 2 Violation: they don’t 3 Standards a Shiftiness – vague plan wording wrecks Neg Ground since it’s impossible to know which DAs link or which CPs are competitive since different types of appropriation like Space Mining, Space Col, and Satellites – absent 1AC specification, the 1AR can squirrel out of links by saying they don’t effect a certain type of appropriation or they don’t reduce private appropriation enough to trigger the link. Independently vote Negative on Presumption since the Aff gets struck down for being void-for-vagueness since they don’t have an explanation of what is effected or remaining after the Plan. Singer 10 Bill Singer 9-13-2010 “Yo, Congress, Keep On Truckin' -- Can You Dig It?” http://www.brokeandbroker.com/index.php?a=blogandid=554 (Bill Singer is a lawyer who represents securities-industry firms, individual registered persons, Wall Street whistleblowers, and defrauded public investors. For over three decades, Singer has represented clients before the American Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (formerly the NASD), the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, and in criminal investigations brought by various federal, state, and local prosecutors. Before entering the private practice of law, Singer was employed in the Legal Department of Smith Barney, Harris Upham and Co.; as a regulatory attorney with both the American Stock Exchange and the NASD (now FINRA); and as a Legal Counsel to Integrated Resources Asset Management. Singer was formerly Chief Counsel to the Financial Industry Association; General Counsel to the NASD Dissidents' Grassroots Movement; and General Counsel to the Independent Broker-Dealer Association. He was registered for a number of years as a Series 7 and Series 63 stockbroker.)Elmer All of which makes it critical that the laws, rules, and regulations of Wall Street be promulgated in an intelligible manner that clearly sets forth what is allowed and what is prohibited. What a provision was meant to say should be what it says -- there shouldn't be any guessing or uncertainty. Unfortunately, so much of what has been proposed as financial regulatory reform, and so much of what will likely emanate from the various agencies and commissions that will soon embark upon rulemaking, is vague. If there is one thing that courts will not tolerate it is vagueness. The law books are filled with agreements, contracts, rules, regulations, and laws that have been struck down as void for vagueness. I fear that much of FINREG may be headed for the same garbage can. b Topic Education – nuanced debates about private property in Outer Space requires specification since each form of appropriation has specific issues related to it so generalization disincentivizes in-depth research. Topic Education is a voter since we only debate the topic for two months.
2/6/22
JF - COPUOS CP
Tournament: CPS | Round: 3 | Opponent: arnav simha | Judge: asher towner Counterplan text: The Committee on the Peaceful use of Outer Space ought to establish an application system for property rights on celestial bodies. Applications and approval of property rights should be granted upon the condition of - open disclosure of data gathered in the exploration of a celestial body - Applications must be publicly announced - Property Rights will be made tradeable between private entities - Property Rights will be set to expire on the conclusion of a successful extraction mission - Private Entities will only be allowed one property right grant per celestial body and cannot have more than one grant at a time The counterplan establishes international norms for safe extraction of resources on celestial bodies while increasing RandD in outer space. Steffen 21 Olaf Steffen, Olaf is a scientist at the Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Sytems at the German Aerospace Center. 12-2-2021, "Explore to Exploit: A Data-Centred Approach to Space Mining Regulation," Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Systems, German Aerospace Center, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964621000515 accessed 12/12/21 Adam 4. The data-centred approach to space mining regulation 4.1. Core description of the regulatory regime and mining rights acquisition process The data gathered in the exploration of a celestial body is not only of value for space mining companies for informing them whether, where and how to exploit resources from the body in question, but also for science. The irretrievability of information relating to the solar system contained in the body that will be lost during resource exploitation carries a value for humanity and future generations and can thus be assigned the characteristic of a common heritage for all mankind as invoked in the Moon Agreement. This characteristic makes exploration data an exceptional and unique candidate for use in a mechanism for acquiring mining rights because its preservation is of public interest and its disclosure in exchange for exclusive mining rights does not place any additional burden on the mining company. The following principles would form the cornerstones of the proposed regulatory regime and rights acquisition mechanism based on exploration data: Without preconditions, no entity has a right to mine the resources of a celestial body. An international regulatory body administers the existing rights of companies for mining a specific celestial body. Mining rights to such bodies can be applied for from this international regulatory body, with applications made public. The application expires after a pre-set period. Mining rights are granted on the provision and disclosure of exploration data on the celestial body within the pre-set period, proposedly gathered in situ, characterising this body and its resources in a pre-defined manner. The explorer's mining right to the resources of the celestial body is published by the regulatory body in a mining rights grant. The data concerning the celestial body are made public as part of the rights grant within the domain of all participating members of the regulatory regime. The exclusive mining rights to any specific body are tradeable. The scope of the regulatory body with respect to the granting of mining rights is not revenue-oriented. The international regulatory body would thus act as a curator of a rights register and an attached database of exploration data. The concept is superficially comparable to patent law, where exclusive rights are granted following the disclosure of an invention to incentivise the efforts made in the development process. In the following section, the characteristics of such a regulatory regime are further discussed with respect to the formation of monopolies, market dynamics, conflict avoidance, inclusivity towards less developed countries and the viability of implementation. 4.2. Discussion and means of implementation The proposed regulatory mechanism has advantages both from a business/investor and society perspective. First, it prevents already highly capitalised companies from acquiring exploitation rights in bulk to deny competitors those objects that are easiest to exploit or most valuable, which would otherwise be possible in any kind of pay-for-right mechanism and could result in preventing market access to smaller, emerging companies. Thus, early monopoly formation can be avoided. The use of data disclosure for the granting of mining rights ensures the scientific community has access to this invaluable source of information. In this way, space mining prospecting missions can lead to a boost in research on small celestial bodies at a speed unmatchable by pure government/agency funded science probes. This usefulness to the scientific community could lead to sustained partnerships between prospecting companies and scientific institutions and could even provide a source of funding for the companies through RandD grants and public-private partnerships. The results of the exploration efforts contribute to research on the formation of planets and the history of the solar system and provide valuable insight for space defence against asteroids. The transition of exploration from a tailored mission profile with a purpose-built spacecraft to a standard task in space flight would also lead to a cost reduction of the respective exploration spacecraft through economies of scale. This describes the very benefits Elvis 24 and Crawford 25 imagined as possible effects of a space economy. Thus, there is an immediate return for society from the exploitation rights grant. It also reconciles the adverse interests of space development and space science as laid out by Schwartz 26. It ensures that, by exploitation, information contained in celestial bodies is not lost for future generations.The application period should not be set in a manner that creates a situation that can be abused through the potential for stockpiling inventory rights. Rather, it is intended to prevent conflict in the phase before exploration data gathered by a mission, as a prerequisite to the mining rights grant, is available. In other words, only one exploration effort at a time can be permitted for a specific body. The time frame between the application and the granting of mining rights (meaning: availability of the required exploration data set) should be tight and should only consider necessary exploration time on site, transit time and possibly a reasonable launch preparation and data processing markup. These contributors to the application period make it clear that the time frame could be dynamic and individualistic, depending on the exploration target (transit time and duration of exploration) and the technology of the exploration probe (transit time). After the expiration of the application period, applications for the exploration target would again be permissible. To prevent the previously mentioned stockpiling of inventory rights, credible proof of an imminent exploration intention would need to be part of the application process, for example, a fixed launch contract or the advanced build status of the exploration probe. Such a mechanism would not contradict the statement in the OST that outer space shall be free for both exploration and scientific investigation. Applications would not apply to purely scientific exploration. An application would only be necessary as a prerequisite for mining. Even resource prospecting could take place without an application (for whatever reason), with a subsequent application comprising in situ data already gathered. For such cases, the application process would need to provide a short period for objections to enable the secretive explorer to make their efforts public. The publication of the application for the mining rights, which is nothing more than a statement of intention to explore, thus provides a strong measure for avoiding conflict. The transparency of where exploration spacecraft are located and, at a later stage, where mining activities take place, provides additional benefits for the sustainable use of space, trust building and deterrence against malign misuse of mining technology. Involuntary spacecraft collisions of competitors in deep space are prevented by the reduction of exploration efforts at the same destination through the application for mining rights by one applicant at a time. As pointed out by Newman and Williamson 20, this is relevant because space debris does not de-orbit in deep space as in the case of LEO. Deep space may be vast, but the velocities involved mean that small debris particles are no less dangerous. Considering NEO mining with fleets of small spacecraft, malfunctions and/or destructive events could create debris clouds crossing Earth's orbit around the sun on a regular basis, presenting another danger to satellites in Earth's own orbit. Thus, by effectively preventing the collision of two spacecraft, one source of debris creation can be mitigated through this regulation mechanism. With respect to Deudney's 11 scepticism of asteroid mining and the dual-use character of technology to manipulate orbits of celestial bodies, it has to be stated that this potential is truly inherent to asteroid mining. An asteroid redirect mission for scientific purposes was pursued by NASA 49 before reorientation towards a manned lunar mission. In one way or another, each type of asteroid mining will require the delivery of the targeted resource to a destination via a comparable technology as formerly envisioned by NASA, be it as a raw material or a useable resource processed in situ, even if this is not necessarily done through redirecting the whole asteroid and placing it in a lunar orbit. However, to be misused as a weapon, space mined resources would have to surpass a certain mass threshold to survive atmospheric entry at the target. This seems unfeasible for currently discussed mining concepts using small-scale spacecraft as described in this article. Redirecting larger masses or whole asteroids would require far more powerful mining vessels or small amounts of thrust over long periods of time. The continuous, (for a mining activity) untypical change in the orbit of an asteroid would make a redirect attempt with hostile intent easily identifiable, effectively deterring such an activity in the first place by ensuring the identification of the aggressor long before the projectile hits its target. The proposed database would provide a catalogue of asteroids with exploration and mining activities in place that should be tracked more closely because of their interaction with spacecraft. This would, in fact, be necessary per se as a precaution to avoid catastrophic mishaps, such as the accidental change of a NEO's orbit to intercept Earth by changing its mass through mining. Space mining fails now due to profitability and unsafe tech which only the cp solves Steffen 21 Olaf Steffen, Olaf is a scientist at the Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Sytems at the German Aerospace Center. 12-2-2021, "Explore to Exploit: A Data-Centred Approach to Space Mining Regulation," Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Systems, German Aerospace Center, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964621000515 accessed 12/12/21 Adam - answers timeframe deficits - creates solvency vs inequality/developing nation affs The data-driven mechanism also addresses another potential risk of an emerging space-based resource economy: the reinforcing of the incontestable market positions of the market leaders based on an advantage in knowledge unattainable by new competitors. Explorations of celestial bodies will have a likelihood of failing from the perspective of the actual value of the explored object vs. the expected value. In this case, the costs of exploration would be a loss for the company, which could be significant and possibly ruinous considering the budgets needed for contemporary space agency-led exploration missions. Sanchez and McInnes 5 explicitly mention the uncertainties in object distribution models used in their asteroid distribution study and for the conclusions drawn concerning reachable object masses with certain delta-v capabilities of spacecraft. With an increasing number of exploration missions led by a company, the data collected may lead to better in-house models and a higher probability of exploring the ‘right’ body for the value/resources aimed at. This may even provide information on the best spacecraft designs for matching the targeted objects’ orbit distribution. This risk is known from the digital platform economy, where the companies that are now leading have an uncatchable advantage in user data compared with market newcomers, translatable to a more refined and comfortable user experience, attracting additional users and thus offering superior services to business customers. This also holds true for space mining companies. Through their lack of legacy mission data, market newcomers would have a higher risk of misallocating exploration missions, making investments in those companies riskier than in established companies. To avoid the preferred investment in a single or a few companies, the risk of the investment in emerging companies is reduced by the proposed mechanism by ensuring the equal access to data for market newcomers and established companies alike. From a prospecting risk perspective, the market entrance of a new company becomes progressively less risky for investors with increasing amounts of publicly available exploration data, promoting progressive and dynamic development. The long lead times of asteroid mining ventures coincide with a long time frame for an ROI. The exclusive mining rights granted after the exploration phase give investors security half-way into their space mining endeavours. The proposed tradability of the rights offers an early chance of gaining investment proceeds. It also offers the possibility of new business models: the classical asteroid mining system concept, as shown by Andrews et al. 43, for example, covers exploration, exploitation and resource transfer. This maximises the investment needed to develop the technologies required for the entire process chain. Giving exploration a value could lead to a division of labour. Dedicated prospecting companies could emerge, providing mining companies with the data and mining rights to a body with the specific resource profile they are seeking. In this way, the investment needed for a successful mining endeavour is divided between different specialised companies. This considerably reduces the risk for investors as well as the investment needed for a company to meet their business goals, which are now aimed at just a particular part of the overall space mining endeavour. Third-party applications for mining rights should be possible to allow a mining company to subcontract to exploration companies. Such a regulatory mechanism design would also be more easily inclusive of less developed countries. They could simply contract exploration missions made affordable through economies of scale to become part of the emerging space mining economy as holders of tradeable mining rights. Through a wise selection of such missions’ targets, they could gain powerful positions of influence. 1AC Babcock is entirely out of context – it is not saying that expanding the PTD on its own is sufficient to create sustainable space – it requires the creation of new international frameworks, guidelines, and debris mitigation efforts which is external to an expansion of the PTD – only the counterplan sets the ground floor for sustainable space development – independently your author concedes public space programs are not interested in a global common – we read blue Babcock 19 (, H., 2019. THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE, OUTER SPACE, AND THE GLOBAL COMMONS: TIME TO CALL HOME ET. online Lawreview.syr.edu. Available at: https://lawreview.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/H-Babcock-Article-Final-Document-v2.pdf#page=67 Accessed 15 December 2021 Professor Babcock served as general counsel to the National Audubon Society from 1987-91 and as deputy general counsel and Director of Audubon’s Public Lands and Water Program from 1981-87. Previously, she was a partner with Blum, Nash and Railsback, where she focused on energy and environmental issues, and an associate at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby and MacRae where she represented utilities in the nuclear licensing process. From 1977-79, she served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and Minerals in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Professor Babcock has taught environmental and natural resources law as a visiting professor at Pace University Law School and as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Catholic University, and Antioch law schools. Professor Babcock was a member of the Standing Committee on Environmental Law of the American Bar Association, and served on the Clinton-Gore Transition Team.)-rahulpenu Definitions of space sustainability The Secure World Foundation defines space sustainability as “ensuring that all humanity can continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit.”39 It is also described as “the ability of all humanity to continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit over the long term.” It is proposed that, read together, these broad definitions take as their premise that: (1) all humanity thus far is using space for peaceful purposes and for socioeconomic benefit; (2) this use is threatened; (3) measures must be taken to protect it; and (4) all humanity currently possesses the ability, in the sense of having a skill or the capacity, to ensure space sustainability for peaceful purposes. Under this conceptualization, the negative effect of not using space sustainably is primarily economic.40 Bearing in mind the governmental origins of space exploitation, where market economics did not play a primary role in decision making, the growing focus on the economic perspective in space affairs acknowledges Carolyn Deere’s opinion that problems emerge in the international domain from an absence of powerful economic interests.41 Of course, as more space applications are developed, economic interests become more prevalent in that market protectionism then underlies the rationales for many positions taken. Space sustainability is also conceptualized as defining good behavior, its boundaries, and disincentives for negative behavior in space.42 Space sustainability then becomes a much more limited political concept calling for specific measures to strengthen norms.43 Some notable examples follow: An International Code of Conduct—the European Union proposed a non-binding voluntary code whose purpose is “security, safety, sustainability” for all space activities providing for general measures on space operations and space debris.44 The Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of UNCOPUOS working group objective of establishing guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. Proposed International Civil Aviation Organization for Space—the establishment of an international organization focused on space safety and the establishment of binding safety standards similar to the International Civil Aviation Organization.45 Industry efforts for a global space situational awareness database Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Transparency and Confidence Building Measures. Depending on the forum for discussion and in line with the previously mentioned initiatives, the concept of space sustainability is also used interchangeably with the following: (1) space security, which entails access to space and freedom from threats;46 (2) space stability addressing space situational awareness;47 (3) space safety, which is protection from all unreasonable levels of risk (primarily protection of humans or human activities);48 and (4) responsible uses of space.49 These all reflect the two components of space sustainability as described by the founder of Secure World Foundation: “the first is the physical environment, which includes management of space debris, electromagnetic and physical crowding and congestion, and space weather.... The second component is the political environment, and includes promoting stability and preventing conflict between nations.”50 Bearing this in mind and notwithstanding the potential confusion caused by the interchangeability of terms used, at the core of all proposals conceptualizing space sustainability or related concepts are the notions that: (1) space assets are kept safe and secure, and that the assets are not harmed or interfered with; (2) peaceful space activities continue as free from purposeful/intentional or unintentional harmful interference; (3) the space environment is preserved for peaceful uses; and (4) international cooperative efforts are required. These four points are understood to be the current core conditions for and of space sustainability. It must be acknowledged that space sustainability, in this context, is severed from the ecological roots of sustainable development. Rationale for space sustainability The proposed baseline conditions for the current conception for space sustainability coincide with Gallagher’s analysis of the logic for space cooperation as “Space Governance for Global Security” where all space actors seek “to secure the space domain for peaceful use; to protect space assets from all hazards; and to derive maximum value from space for security, economic, civil, and environmental ends.”51 Based on this understanding, the current conception of and rationale for space sustainability ties more clearly to global security than to sustainable development. This logic emphasizes that “the more different countries, companies, and individuals depend on space for a growing array of purposes, the more they need equitable rules, shared decision-making procedures, and effective compliance mechanisms to maximize the benefits that they all can gain from space, while minimizing risks from irresponsible space behaviors or deliberate interference with legitimate space activities.”52 While it is acknowledged that such a need exists, the difficulty in reaching agreement on how to bring it about is one reason why some states are more focused on producing a dialogue on long-term sustainability. This is seen in the proliferation of reports outlining best practices and options that enhance sustainability through increased information sharing, as well as a focus on technical issues rather than on the creation of any new legal regimes. To minimize some of the risks of non-sustainable space use, Weeden53 proposes a three-pillar technical approach to space sustainability: (1) debris mitigation; (2) debris removal; and (3) space traffic management. This is conjoined with an immediate need for data in support of conjunction assessment and collision avoidance. This emphasis on data sharing/collection includes enabling research into potential solutions to the problem of space debris, and enhancing transparency and cooperation among states. Weeden also suggests that this narrow approach to space sustainability serves both to educate space actors about the severity of the space debris problem and to provide stability to reduce the likelihood of conflict. A common approach to data also serves as verification for a potential code of conduct in space, setting the stage for future space governance models. These proposals follow the logic of sustainability for global security. While this logic is in line with the dominant conceptualization of benefit sharing and freedom of outer space, the position taken in this article is that it does not adequately speak to sustainability from the perspective of aspirant space states. To do so requires a significantly broader discussion and solutions aimed towards aligning space law and policy with the sustainable development paradigm, if understood as being an inclusive paradigm and not focused on the individualistic/self-interested nature of the current conception of sustainable development. A systemic, sustainable development law approach calls for a conscious engagement with the web of overlapping social, environmental, cultural, and legal frameworks, as well as cultural considerations, economic policies, expectations, players, and interests.54 Bearing in mind current U.S. space policy,55 such a broad overarching objective may not be achievable as part of the dialogue on the “Long Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities,” but U.S. policy regarding preservation of the space environment nevertheless offers insights because international initiatives congruent with it are likely to garner the most support. Schrogl56 proposed that sustainability is rendered to threats and risks to satellite operations. This approach acknowledges the intersection of multiple issue areas: environment, security, mobility, knowledge, resources, and energy. This intersection of issue areas is more akin to the wider discourse of sustainability development of and on the Earth, and prompts a discussion of value to emerging and aspirant space actors. Otherwise, the dominant conceptualization of space sustainability removes any focus upon providing for the needs of those not among the most advanced space nations. This problem is highlighted in Peter and Rathgeber’s definition of space sustainability: Sustainable space activities can be seen as activities (in space, from space, through space and towards space) that meet the needs of the present space actors without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs of performing space related operations safely.57 Peter and Rathgeber claim that the emergence of new institutional space actors, particularly from the south, is putting a greater pressure on the space environment and that the participation of the south in space sustainability efforts is unsatisfactory.58 Yet, the role of less-advanced nations in sustainability initiatives is more so on the receiving end in that advanced nations seek to engage newcomers to space during the early phase of the development of future directives and codes of conduct for sustainable space activities; that is, not really to seek their input, but to ensure compliance by the less-advanced nations.59 Their space activities are judged as either threats to or consistent with space sustainability, rather than as part of articulating the content of space sustainability.60 This indicates that, for national space programs of established space nations, a truly international focus on space sustainability is not a priority. It is interesting to note, at this juncture in the discussion, a fundamental provision proposed by a group of developing states during the development of the U.N. Space Benefits Declaration.61 (1) All States should pursue their activities in Outer Space with due regard to the need to preserve Outer Space, in such a way as not to hinder its continued utilization and exploration. (2) States should pay attention to all aspects related to the protection and preservation of the Outer Space environment, especially those potentially affecting the Earth’s environment. (3) States with relevant space capabilities and with programs for the utilization and exploration of outer space should share with developing countries on an equitable basis the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for the proper development of programs oriented to the more rational utilization and exploration of Outer Space.62 Paragraph 3 is fundamental and truly revealing when read in the light of the analysis of Schrogl.63 Schrogl claims that the declaration takes up the problem of space debris, which might endanger future space utilization to a significant extent. However, he also states that “the wish of the Developing countries to be informed about debris prevention measures voiced. . . is reasonable but actually needs no mentioning since these technological developments are discussions and documented publicly to the greatest extent.”64
12/18/21
JF - Debris CP
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: St Agnes EH | Judge: Eric He Text – States should implement cooperative active debris removal measures aimed at mitigating debris from mega-constellations. ADR solves Debris ESA 17 ( April 14, 2017 “Active Debris Removal” https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Active_debris_removal) ESA, as a space technology and operations agency, has identified active removal technologies as a strategic goal. Active Debris Removal (ADR) is necessary to stabilise the growth of space debris, but even more important is that any newly launched objects comply with post-mission disposal guidelines – especially orbital decay in less than 25 years. If this were not the case, most of the required ADR effort would go to compensate for the non-compliance of new objects. Studies performed with long-term evolution models like DELTA have shown that a ‘business as usual’ scenario will lead to a progressive, uncontrolled increase of object numbers in LEO, with collisions becoming the primary debris source. The IADC mitigation measures will reduce the growth, but long-term proliferation is still expected, even with full mitigation compliance, and even if all launch activities are halted. This is an indication that the population of large and massive objects has reached a critical concentration in LEO. But even in a future scenario in which no further objects are added to the space environment (no launches, no debris release, no explosions), the results of simulations by ESA and NASA show that the number of debris objects would continue to grow even under these idealised conditions – under which a collision rate of once every 10 years can be assumed. Furthermore, an IADC study with six different models from 2013 show that in an almost perfect scenario with 90 compliance with the mitigation guidelines and with no explosions on orbit, the population suffers a steady increase, and a collision could be expected every 5–9 years. All these studies are a clear indicator that the population of large and massive objects has reached a critical density in LEO, and that mitigation alone is not sufficient. It is necessary to introduce a programme of remediation measures as well: active debris removal, in order to reduce the number of large and massive (mostly physically intact) objects . The current LEO environment contains about 3200 intact objects. An ESA analysis shows that the (lower) level of around 2500 intact objects (the status in the mid-1990s) would have a 50 probability of decreasing the overall debris population. If this is considered to be a desirable goal for remediation, the number of intact objects has to be reduced even while the world’s spaceflight activities continue. Averaged over the eight years 2004–12, about 72 objects were placed into LEO per year. However, since 2012, there has been a steep increase in the number of satellites placed in LEO, with the count now running at 125 objects per year (average over the four years 2013–16), mainly due to the increased use of small satellites. In addition, in 2015, several companies announced their intention to deploy large constellations of more than around 1000 satellites in LEO to provide fast Internet around the world. Limiting launch rates neither feasible nor helpful Therefore, limiting the launch rate or a further reduction of the allowed lifetime in orbit after the end of the mission (which would be two options to reduce the overall number of intact objects in space) do not seem feasible, because they cannot be mandated. For all new objects, strong compliance with post-mission mitigation measures would allow maintaining the number of intact objects at a level similar to the current one, and avoid having to deal with more objects in addition to those already in orbit. Therefore, in order to reduce the number of big objects in LEO, the only option is to actively remove large objects now in orbit and having a long remaining lifetime in space. This would provide several benefits: The most critical objects (those that would generate the most fragments in case of any collision, and that have a higher collision risk) could be removed from the environment first; Decommissioned objects could also be removed; A controlled deorbit could be performed (as large removal targets typically are also most critical in terms of on-ground risk). Studies at ESA and NASA show that with a removal sequence planned according to a target selection based on mass, area, or cumulative collision risk, the environment can be stabilised when on the order of 5–10 objects are removed from LEO per year (although the effectiveness of each removal decreases as more objects are removed). Active removal is efficient Active removal can be more efficient in terms of the number of collisions prevented versus objects removed when the following principles are applied for the selection of removal targets, which can be used to generate a criticality index and the according list: The selected objects should have a high mass (they have the largest environmental impact in case of collision); Should have high collision probabilities (e.g. they should be in densely populated regions and have a large cross-sectional area); Should be in high altitudes (where the orbital lifetime of the resulting fragments is long). Long-term environment simulations can be used to analyse orbital regions that are hotspots for collisions. The most densely populated region in LEO is around 800–1000 km altitude at high inclinations. The collision hotspots can be ranked by the number of collisions predicted to occur under a business as usual scenario. Polar Hotspots High-ranking hotspot regions are at around: 1000 km and 82º inclination; 800 km and 98º inclination; 850 km and 71º inclination. The concentration of critical-size objects in these narrow orbital bands could allow multi-target removal missions. Such missions could be specifically designed for one orbit type were a number of objects of the same type are contained While removal targets should be selected from a global perspective, legal constraints dealing with the ownership of space debris objects, and the validation thereof, cannot be neglected. Also, it should be kept in mind that legal responsibility for a coupled remover/target stack (i.e. when a removal spacecraft attaches itself to a inoperative body for deorbiting) is shared. While removal technology should be generic, i.e. applicable to a wide range of removal targets, which may also include nonESA objects, special emphasis on firm agreements with the owners of the object is required. Works for Mega-constellation Impacts. Hardy 20, Brian Patrick. Long-term effects of satellite megaconstellations on the debris environment in low earth orbit. Diss. 2020. (Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Elmer The results of this thesis demonstrate that satellite megaconstellations have the potential to leave a significant mark on the LEO debris environment, even centuries after they cease operations. Various test cases for the Starlink megaconstellation were analyzed in a new, medium-fidelity simulation for orbital debris evolution, and a variety of PMD and ADR rates for Starlink were considered. It was shown that if Starlink adheres only to the minimum regulatory requirement of 90 PMD for large constellations, then LEO debris levels will grow almost twice as fast as the baseline scenario with no megaconstellations. Improving Starlink’s PMD rate to 95 would lead to only 19 more debris, while 99 PMD is the preferred option that prevents any significant debris contributions at all. Importantly, Starlink’s choice of PMD strategy will affect its own collision risk very little over the short term, but the impact will be noticeable on multi-century timescales by the overall LEO environment. Finally, in scenarios with 90 and 95 PMD, active debris removal of non-operating Starlink satellites yields significant, if limited, benefits. The 90 PMD scenario combined with an ADR rate of 5 Starlink satellites per year, for example, is able to reduce debris levels to those seen for the 95 PMD scenario. This result suggests that active debris removal could be a viable mitigation strategy for megaconstellations with sub-optimal PMD rates.
1/15/22
JF - Extra T vs PTD
Tournament: Cal Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Denver East MB | Judge: Jacob Lugo 1 Interp – Affirmative’s may only Affirm that “The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust”. The Affirmative can only fiat a Plan that renders Appropriation unjust – anything beyond that is external to the scope of the Resolution and Extra-Topical. Unjust means against the Law. Black Laws No Date "What is Unjust?" https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/Elmer Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws. 2 Violation – “Establishing a Public Trust Doctrine” involves establishing a completely new governance regime that makes the Government a “trustee” over the Outer Space Environment which is beyond rendering Appropriation Unjust. Batcheller 10, G. R., et al. "The public trust doctrine: implications for wildlife management and conservation in the United States and Canada." Technical review (2010): 10-01. (New York State Division of Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources)Elmer The Public Trust Doctrine (PTD), with its origin in Roman civil law, is an essential element of North American wildlife law. The Doctrine establishes a trustee relationship of government to hold and manage wildlife, fish, and waterways for the benefit of the resources and the public. Fundamental to the concept is the notion that natural resources are deemed universally important in the lives of people, and that the public should have an opportunity to access these resources for purposes that traditionally include fishing, hunting, trapping, and travel routes (e.g., the use of rivers for navigation and commerce). 1AC Babcock specifically says the Plan would give the Government the ability and obligation to “preserve resources” which is an active action. Babcock 19 — Hope M. Babcock, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, B.A., Smith College, L.L.B., Yale University; (2019; “ARTICLE: THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE, OUTER SPACE, AND THE GLOBAL COMMONS: TIME TO CALL HOME ET”; University of Michigan Libraries, Nexis Uni; Syracuse University Law Review, Vol. 69; LFS—JCM – Recutish like diff section ISEE) *259 The doctrine also appears to be infinitely malleable. Original uses of the doctrine were restricted to only that "aspect of the public domain below the low-water mark on the margin of the sea and the great lakes, the waters over those lands, and the waters within rivers and streams of any consequence," 520and covered only traditional uses of those lands, like fishing and navigation. 521 Over time, the scope and application of the doctrine broadened to protect more public resources and different uses. 522 Thus, the doctrine expanded to protect new trust resources, such as dry sand beaches, inland lakes, groundwater, dry riverbeds, and wildlife, 523and passive uses of those resources, like scientific study. 524The original link to navigable water and tidelands disappeared. 525 Supporters of the *260 doctrine successfully advocated that it be applied to "wildlife, parks, cemeteries, and even works of fine art," 526 while arguing more recently its application to the atmosphere. 527 A doctrine that imposes a perpetual duty on the sovereign to preserve trust resources, prevents their alienation for private benefit, assures public access to them, and can be invoked by anyone seems particularly useful as a management tool in outer space. 528The fact that public access to trust resources is so central to the doctrine makes it reflective, not contradictory, of international space law's bar against appropriation of outer space and of the principle of space being the "province of all mankind." 529 It avoids the problems of alienation and exclusion associated with any of the management approaches associated with some form of private property and requires neither the creation of a new administrative authority nor the presence of a close-knit group of like-minded people. 530 Members of the public, both rich and poor, can invoke and enforce the doctrine as easily as the sovereign. 531 It is cost effective to the extent that no separate apparatus is required to implement it, and the doctrine has shown itself to be highly adaptable and innovative as different needs arise. 532 It could also fill the gap in international law with respect to managing celestial property. Therefore, of all the management approaches studied here, the PTD seems the most suited to keep order in space until a regulatory regime is imposed. However, the doctrine provides no incentives for development of trust resources; rather, it might be used to limit or curtail that development, making it an imperfect, perhaps even counter-productive solution by itself to the extent that such development might be *261 beneficial. 533Modifying the doctrine to allow limited use of private property management approaches, like tradable development claims, might buffer that effect - a form of overlapping hybridity between one type of property, a commons, and a management regime from another, private property, enabled by application of the PTD. Conclusion "Only a legal system that accommodates both the human need for resources and the necessary preservation of mankind's common heritage can fulfill these criteria."534 The future is now with regard to the development of outer space and its resources - it is no longer a question of whether humans will engage in these activities, but how soon they will. Technically advanced countries and private commercial enterprises are probing outer space and preparing for landing on an asteroid or the moon to extract their resources. 535Speculators are selling deeds to the moon's surface and preparing to exploit the tourism potential that space offers. 536 But, the legal framework for managing these initiatives is almost nonexistent. 537International treaties came into being before all this activity began in earnest and national laws that might apply are stunted by jurisdictional quandaries like the absence of national boundaries in outer space. 538Thus, there is an urgency to figure out how to control what happens in outer space before its resources are irreparably damaged or permanently monopolized by powerful countries and individuals. In the absence of regulation, much of the current debate centers on what property regime should be applied in outer space. 539The assumption is that by only allowing private property rights in space, countries and commercial enterprises will undertake the risks and costs of space development. 540However, unless international space law changes, it may prevent this from happening. If it changes, strong management controls will be necessary to prevent destruction or over-consumption of celestial resources, as well as monopolization and competitive behavior by participants, which could lead to hostilities and inequities. *262 This Article examines various private property regimes, including those of less than full fee ownership, to see if any would avoid the conflict with the international prohibition on appropriation of outer space and its resources. It concludes that none will because each retains the right to exclude and each is insensitive to the treaties' equity concerns. In contrast, considering outer space to be common is consistent with international space law in both respects. Hypothesizing that private property in outer space may yet prevail, this Article investigates different private property management approaches, such as the right of first possession, lotteries, and tradable development rights, to see if any would be cost effective, easy to implement and equitable, and would also prevent over-consumption, monopolization or the slide into rivalrous behavior. The Article concludes that each comes up short in some respect. Social norms as a management tool for property held in common, although compliant with international law, are also not up to the task. Instead, although ancient, the PTD, with its malleability, easy and cost-effective implementation and enforcement, non-consumption principle, and consistency with the goals that animate international space treaties, seems best suited to the task of protecting the public's interests in the global commons that is outer space as it has done for centuries in Earth-bound commons. But, as its principal terrestrial use has been to protect trust resources from development, the doctrine needs some modification to encourage development of celestial resources. Hence, this Article suggests that modifying the PTD to allow the application of private property management tools, like tradable development rights, will not only allow development, but also will assure that when it happens, it will not be just profitable for a few, but will also be sustainable and equitable. 3 The Standard is Extra-T - it establishes a new governance regime which goes past just saying “appropriation is unjust” since it imposes an active duty of the Government to manage and take care of Outer Space Resources – that wrecks Predictability since the Aff can claim different Advantages off of the process of the PTD which exists outside the core topic question of Appropriation Good/Bad that also allows them to spike DA links by saying they don’t apply under the PTD. 4 Paradigm Issues: a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation.
2/20/22
JF - Hacking DA
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: St Agnes EH | Judge: Eric He Hacking towards Satellites is coming now – incentives and vulnerabilities align. Culpan 21 Tim Culpan 11-2-2021 "The Next Big Hack Could Come From the Stars" https://archive.is/XElln#selection-3035.0-3040.0 (Bloomberg Opinion Columnist)Elmer “As space becomes more important, there becomes unfortunately even greater incentives for malicious actors to disrupt, deny or alter our space-based assets,” Bob Kolasky, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Risk Management Center, told the same conference organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “With space, whatever you put in orbit is what you must live with. Systems must be designed so that they can address threats and hazards throughout their lifespan.” What makes satellites and their associated land-based infrastructure more vulnerable is that the data they transmit can be easily accessed by anyone on Earth with $300 worth of TV reception equipment, allowing you to eavesdrop on unencrypted financial data or download information from Russian and American weather satellites in real time. A nefarious actor with its own satellite could even cause interference or block the signal from these orbiting stations. But among the scariest of scenarios would be for an adversary to break into the control systems of a satellite, redirect its movement or even crash it into another satellite or the planet. That may have already happened. According to one account, a breach at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington, D.C., in 1998 led to a U.S.-German satellite called ROSAT being overtaken and turned toward the sun, damaging the ultraviolet filter on its image sensors. This allegation has been denied, yet whether real or apocryphal the incident (the filter was indeed destroyed by the sun) shows the challenges of repairing hardware 360 miles above the earth’s surface or even investigating the cause of the malfunction. Megaconstellations solves satellite hacking – multiple warrants. Commercial Satellites are key due to production capacity. Hallex and Cottom 20 Hallex, Matthew, and Travis Cottom. "Proliferated commercial satellite constellations: Implications for national security." Joint Forces Quarterly 97.July (2020): 20-29. (Matthew A. Hallex is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Travis S. Cottom is a Research Associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses.)Re-cut by Elmer While potentially threatening the sustainability of safe orbital operations, new proliferated constellations also offer opportunities for the United States to increase the resilience of its national security space architectures. Increasing the resilience of U.S. national security space architectures has strategic implications beyond the space domain. Adversaries such as China and Russia see U.S. dependence on space as a key vulnerability to exploit during a conflict. Resilient, proliferated satellite constellations support deterrence by denying adversaries the space superiority they believe is necessary to initiate and win a war against the United States.28 Should deterrence fail, these constellations could provide assured space support to U.S. forces in the face of adversary counterspace threats while imposing costs on competitors by rendering their investments in counterspace systems irrelevant. Proliferated constellations can support these goals in four main ways. First, the extreme degree of disaggregation inherent in government and commercial proliferated constellations could make them more resilient to attacks by many adversary counterspace systems. A constellation composed of hundreds or thousands of satellites could withstand losing a relatively large number of them before losing significant capability. Conducting such an attack with kinetic antisatellite weapons—like those China and Russia are developing—would require hundreds of costly weapons to destroy satellites that would be relatively inexpensive to replace. Second, proliferated constellations would be more resilient to adversary electronic warfare. Satellites in LEO can emit signals 1,280 times more powerful than signals from satellites in GEO.29 They also are faster in the sky than satellites in more distant orbits, which, combined with the planned use of small spot beams for communications proliferated constellations, would shrink the geographic area in which an adversary ground-based jammer could effectively operate, making jammers less effective and easier to geolocate and eliminate.30 Third, even if the United States chooses not to deploy national security proliferated constellations during peacetime, industrial capacity for mass-producing proliferated constellation satellites could be repurposed during a conflict. Just as Ford production lines shifted from automobiles to tanks and aircraft during World War II, one can easily imagine commercial satellite factories building military reconnaissance or communications satellites during a conflict. Fourth, deploying and maintaining constellations of hundreds or thousands of satellites will drive the development of low-cost launches to a much higher rate than is available today. Inexpensive, high-cadence space launch could provide a commercial solution to operationally responsive launch needs of the U.S. Government. In a future where space launches occur weekly or less, the launch capacity needed to augment national security space systems during a crisis or to replace systems lost during a conflict in space would be readily available.31 Hacking on Satellites goes Nuclear. Miller and Fontaine 17 James Miller and Richard Fontaine 11-26-2017 "Cyber and Space Weapons Are Making Nuclear Deterrence Trickier" https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/11/cyber-and-space-weapons-are-making-nuclear-deterrence-trickier/142767/ (James N. Miller, Jr. is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for a New American Security. He served as U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2012 to 2014.)Elmer Cyber weapons are not, of course, the sole preserve of Russia. Washington has acknowledged its own development of them, and senior U.S. officials have highlighted their use against ISIS. Their possession by both Russia and the United States complicates traditional notions of strategic stability. Using non-kinetic, non-lethal cyber tools is likely to be very attractive in a crisis, and certainly in a conflict. Yet with both sides possessing the means to disrupt or destroy the other’s military systems and critical infrastructure – both war-supporting infrastructure as well as purely civilian infrastructure - a small “cyber-spark” could prompt rapid escalation. Such an attack could inadvertently “detonate” a cyber weapon that had been intended to lay dormant in the other side’s systems. Or a spark produced by sub-national actors – “patriotic hackers” inside or outside the government – could generate unintended cascading effects. The spark could even come via a false flag attack, with a third-party trying to pit the United States and Russia against one another. A second scenario could appear if armed conflict looks likely. At the outset, there would exist strong incentives to use offensive cyber and counter-space capabilities early, in order to negate the other side’s military. The U.S. and Russian militaries depend (though not equally) on information technology and space assets to collect and disseminate intelligence, as well as for command, control, and communications. Hence the incentive to use non-kinetic cyber or space attacks to degrade the other side’s military, with few if any direct casualties. By moving first, the cyber- or space-attacker could gain military and coercive advantage, while putting the onus on the attacked side to dare escalate with “kinetic” lethal attacks. Would the United States or Russia respond with, say, missile strikes or a bombing campaign in response to some fried computers or dead robots in outer space? Given the doubt that they would, large-scale cyber and space attacks – before a kinetic conflict even starts – are likely to be seen as a low-risk, high-payoff move for both sides. A third scenario plays out if one side believes that its critical infrastructure and satellites are far less vulnerable than the other side. In that case, a severe crisis or conflict might prompt the country to threaten (and perhaps provide a limited demonstration of) cyber attacks on civilian critical infrastructure, or non-kinetic attacks on space assets. Such a move would require the attacked side to respond not in kind but by escalating. So far, the three scenarios we have described could well undermine stability between the United States and Russia, but need not implicate nuclear stability. Yet consider this: U.S. and Russian nuclear forces rely on information technology and space assets for warning and communications. Attack the right satellites, or attack the right computers, and one side may disrupt the other’s ability to use nuclear weapons – or at least place doubt in the minds of its commanders. As a result, a major cyber and space attack could put nuclear “use-or-lose” in play early in a crisis. While we are generally accustomed to thinking about nuclear use as the highest rung on the escalatory ladder, such pressures – generated via non-nuclear attacks – could bring the horrors of a nuclear exchange closer rather than substituting for them.
1/15/22
JF - Hypersonics DA
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 1 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Cortez New Mega-Constellations are key to hypersonic defense and early warning systems. Dangwal 21 Ashish Dangwal, Ashish Dangwal holds a Master's degree in East-Asian studies and has a deep interest in Defence and Geopolitics related issues. He is interested in the impact of technology on foreign policy objectives as well as geopolitical operationality in the Indo-Pacific. Contact: ashishmichel@gmail.com, 12-9-2021, Latest Asian, Middle-East, EurAsian, Indian News, "US Plans To Build 'Constellation Of Satellites' To Identify, Detect and Track Russian, Chinese Hypersonic Missiles", https://eurasiantimes.com/us-plans-to-build-constellation-of-satellites-russian-chinese-hypersonic-missiles/?amp accessed on 12-22-2021 Adam The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency may acquire new satellites as part of a global missile-tracking space sensor array aimed at providing a defense shield against Russian and Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Current missile defense systems lack the capability required to effectively track and destroy hypersonic weapons. Due to its speed and hyper-maneuverability, hypersonic weaponry is designed to outmaneuver current detection systems. The growing capabilities of China and Russia in space have sparked concerns in the United States about potential threats to US assets. The precision attack capabilities of the US military are predominantly dependent on satellite technology. Infrared satellites also provide crucial intelligence for early warning systems that trace and identify nuclear warheads. In the last few years, the United States’ prime focus has been shifted to securing these assets. According to a new proposal released on December 6, the Space Development Agency plans to buy 28 satellites for a constellation known as Tracking Layer Tranche 1, which is expected to aid in the detection, identification, and tracking of hypersonic weapons and other advanced missile threats. SDA plans to award contracts to multiple vendors to build a constellation of up to 28 satellites divided into four orbital planes at an altitude of about 1,200 kilometers above Earth. Current Developments The launch of these 28 spacecraft is expected to begin in late 2024. It would increase the number of missile-detection satellites in the Tracking Layer Tranche 0, a batch of eight satellites currently being built by L3Harris and SpaceX for launch in 2023. The tracking layer would be used as a worldwide network of eyes to establish a defense shield against the ballistic and hypersonic missiles from Russia and China. The data acquired by missile-tracking satellites would be transferred through optical links to the Transport Layer, a communications satellite constellation that SDA is also developing. If a missile threat is detected, the location and trajectory data can be securely relayed over space and downlinked to military command centers. The Transport Layer, which is the backbone of National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA), is responsible for ground and marine targets, while the Tracking Layer–the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Reconnaissance (Next-Gen OPIR) constellation by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman NOC–is to establish effective targeting of advanced missiles. Private sector key to competent hypersonic defense. Judson 21Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College. “Here are the three companies selected to design hypersonic missile interceptors for MDA,” DefenseNews, 11/20/21, https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2021/11/20/heres-the-three-companies-selected-to-design-hypersonic-missile-interceptors-for-mda/ Proof DR WASHINGTON — The Missile Defense Agency has chosen Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Missiles and Defense to design the Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI) for regional hypersonic missile defense, the agency announced Nov. 19. The agency awarded other transactional agreements for an “accelerated concept design” phase of the program, according to the statement. The interceptors are intended to counter a hypersonic weapon during its glide phase of flight, a challenge as the missiles can travel more than five times the speed of sound and can maneuver, making it hard to predict a missile’s trajectory. The interceptors will be designed to fit into the U.S. Navy’s current Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense destroyers. It will be fired from its standard Vertical Launch System and integrated with the modified Baseline 9 Aegis Weapon System that detects, tracks, controls and engages hypersonic threats, the statement notes. “We are pleased to have these contractors working with us to develop design concepts for the GPI,” Rear Adm. Tom Druggan, MDA’s Sea-based Weapon Systems program executive, said in the statement. “Multiple awards allow us to execute a risk reduction phase to explore industry concepts and maximize the benefits of a competitive environment to demonstrate the most effective and reliable Glide Phase Interceptor for regional hypersonic defense, as soon as possible.” The initial development phase “will focus on reducing technical risk, rapidly developing technology, and demonstrating the ability to intercept a hypersonic threat,” according to a Nov. 19 Raytheon statement. “Raytheon Technologies systems are the cornerstone of today’s ballistic missile defenses. We’re building on that knowledge to advance the missile defense system for future threats,” Tay Fitzgerald, Raytheon’s vice president of strategic missile defense, said in the statement. “GPI’s speed, ability to withstand extreme heat, and maneuverability will make it the first missile designed to engage this advanced threat.” All three companies have experience in hypersonic weapons development.
Russian hyper sonics are faster than ever – squo defense can’t check. Bratersky 21 Alexander Bratersky, Alexander Bratersky is the Russia correspondent at Defense News. He has covered U.S.-Russian relations, NATO and Middle Eastern affairs, and Russian policy in Syria. He previously worked at the Moscow Times and Izvestia as a political reporter, as well as RIA Novosti as a Washington correspondent. 3-15-2021, accessed on 3-31-2021, Defense News, "Two down, more to go? With hypersonic weapons already in the field, Russia looks to improve features", https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2021/03/15/two-down-more-to-go-with-hypersonic-weapons-already-in-the-field-russia-looks-to-improve-features/ Adam MOSCOW — Hypersonic weapons are a top priority for the Russian government, a defense analyst with the state-run think tank IMEMO has told Defense News, and with two now fielded, the country is looking into further improving the technology. “The so-called hypersonic technology is essentially an evolutionary development. However, it provides new, combined abilities for missile weapons: increased speed and maneuverability, and improved accuracy,” Dmitry Stefanovich said. “I can’t imagine a person who is responsible for the decision-making in the country and who wouldn’t be interested in improving all those features.” By creating hypersonic technology that can overcome missile defense systems, Russia maintains “strategic stability and strategic balance,” President Vladimir Putin once told Russian news agency Tass in March 2020. For Russia, hypersonic technology is also a way to avoid a quantitative arms race like the Soviet Union went through during the Cold War, said Viktor Litovkin, a retired colonel and military analyst with Tass. “We have no money to get involved in a quantitative arms race. You need to have a little, but the highest quality, which will restrain the adversary,” he said. There are currently two hypersonic missiles with the Russian military: the Avangard and the Kinzhal. The former is a nuclear-capable missile reportedly able to fly faster than 20 times the speed of sound. The first Avangard infrastructure was set up in December 2019. The Kinzhal (or “Dagger” in English) is a nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile fielded in December 2017. Before entering the military’s inventory, it was tested with the MiG-31 fighter jet. Putin has said the weapon can exceed 10 times the speed of sound, but some missile experts have cast doubt on that capability. Russian media previously reported the Kinzhal physically resembles the 9M723 ballistic missile developed for the Iskander tactical missile system. “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck,” Stefanovich said of the similarity. Russia is also testing its 3M22 Zircon anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile, expected to be installed on the modernized submarine-killing ship Marshal Shaposhnikov. The vessel is undergoing its owns tests. The head of Tactical Missiles Corporation JSC, Boris Obnosov, told Tass last month that the Zircon’s testing is going according to schedule. The first launch of Zircon from the nuclear-powered submarine Severodvinsk will take place in June, industry officials said, according to reports from Tass this month. If testing goes well, the Zircon will be delivered to the military in the first half of 2022. Obnosov has said hypersonic projects are among the top priorities for his company, adding that there are “several dozen” hypersonic efforts ongoing in partnership with the country’s several research and development institutes. He said a center dedicated to hypersonic technology efforts could be established to oversee the projects, without providing further information. Tactical Missiles Corporation is Russia’s leading developer of hypersonic technology, so it might also be behind a recently tested prototype of an air-to-surface hypersonic missile meant for the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter jet. However, the company did not respond to questions from Defense News regarding its hypersonic projects. Hypersonics cause nuclear war Lamrani 18 Omar Lamrani, Omar Lamrani is a reporter that focuses on air power, naval strategy, technology, logistics and military doctrine for a number of regions, including the Middle East and Asia. He studied international relations at Clark University and holds a master's degree from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, where his thesis centered on Chinese military doctrine and the balance of power in the Western Pacific. Mr. Lamrani previously worked as an intern with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, where he was assigned to the Afghanistan desk. 2-20-2018, accessed on 12-17-2020, Stratfor, "An Arms Race Toward Global Instability", https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/arms-race-toward-global-instability Adam Further complicating matters are hypersonic missiles. The missiles' high speed — at least five times the speed of sound — facilitates their rapid use and boosts their rate of survival by making them difficult to intercept. In addition, some hypersonic weapons come equipped with a glide vehicle that extends their range, enabling forces to launch the weapons from beyond an enemy's reach. These factors offer militaries great incentive to incorporate hypersonic missiles into their arsenals. As more and more countries adopt hypersonic missiles, the weapons' offensive abilities may prove destabilizing. States may opt to strike first — perhaps with nuclear weapons — to take out an adversary's hypersonic missile caches before the enemy has a chance to use them. Losing Control While weapons technology is developing at a rapid clip, arms control treaties are deteriorating just as quickly. Key agreements between the United States and Russia were foundering well before Washington shifted its focus back to great power competition. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, and the critical Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is showing signs of considerable strain, which is bound to increase as Washington bolsters its defenses. Alarmed by the United States' growing investment in missile defense and super-fuze technology, Russia and China will try to enhance their offensive capabilities in kind. The resulting arms race would probably drive the last nail into the INF's coffin and perhaps even jeopardize the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Beijing, meanwhile, will strive to keep its competitive edge in hypersonic weapons development in an effort to get ahead of Washington's advancing missile defense capabilities. Though the countries will try to craft new arms control agreements to accommodate their changing world, the challenges of striking a deal among three great powers with disparate strengths will get in the way. Coupled with the fall of critical arms control regimes and the rise of disruptive weapons technology, the next great power competition could erode global stability. Tightening arms races and moribund arms control agreements will undermine the trust between the great global powers and discourage cooperation. Instead, more discord and conflict will erupt between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other.
1/22/22
JF - Innovation DA v1
Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Newman Smith VY | Judge: Michael Harris Space Commercialization drives Tech Innovation in the Status Quo – it provides a unique impetus. Hampson 17 Joshua Hampson 1-25-2017 “The Future of Space Commercialization” https://republicans-science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/TheFutureofSpaceCommercializationFinal.pdf (Security Studies Fellow at the Niskanen Center)Elmer The size of the space economy is far larger than many may think. In 2015 alone, the global market amounted to $323 billion. Commercial infrastructure and systems accounted for 76 percent of that 9 total, with satellite television the largest subsection at $95 billion. The global space launch market’s 10 11 share of that total came in at $6 billion dollars. It can be hard to disaggregate how space benefits 12 particular national economies, but in 2009 (the last available report), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimated that commercial space transportation and enabled industries generated $208.3 billion in economic activity in the United States alone. Space is not just about 13 satellite television and global transportation; while not commercial, GPS satellites also underpin personal navigation, such as smartphone GPS use, and timing data used for Internet coordination.14 Without that data, there could be problems for a range of Internet and cloud-based services.15 There is also room for growth. The FAA has noted that while the commercial launch sector has not grown dramatically in the last decade, there are indications that there is latent demand. This 16 demand may catalyze an increase in launches and growth of the wider space economy in the next decade. The Satellite Industry Association’s 2015 report highlighted that their section of the space economy outgrew both the American and global economies. The FAA anticipates that growth to 17 continue, with expectations that small payload launch will be a particular industry driver.18 In the future, emerging space industries may contribute even more the American economy. Space tourism and resource recovery—e.g., mining on planets, moons , and asteroids—in particular may become large parts of that industry. Of course, their viability rests on a range of factors, including costs, future regulation, international problems, and assumptions about technological development. However, there is increasing optimism in these areas of economic production. But the space economy is not just about what happens in orbit, or how that alters life on the ground. The growth of this economy can also contribute to new innovations across all walks of life. Technological Innovation Innovation is generally hard to predict; some new technologies seem to come out of nowhere and others only take off when paired with a new application. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is reasonable to expect that a growing space economy would open opportunities for technological and organizational innovation. In terms of technology, the difficult environment of outer space helps incentivize progress along the margins. Because each object launched into orbit costs a significant amount of money—at the moment between $27,000 and $43,000 per pound, though that will likely drop in the future —each 19 reduction in payload size saves money or means more can be launched. At the same time, the ability to fit more capability into a smaller satellite opens outer space to actors that previously were priced out of the market. This is one of the reasons why small, affordable satellites are increasingly pursued by companies or organizations that cannot afford to launch larger traditional satellites. These small 20 satellites also provide non-traditional launchers, such as engineering students or prototypers, the opportunity to learn about satellite production and test new technologies before working on a full-sized satellite. That expansion of developers, experimenters, and testers cannot but help increase innovation opportunities. Technological developments from outer space have been applied to terrestrial life since the earliest days of space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a website that lists technologies that have spun off from such research projects. Lightweight 21 nanotubes, useful in protecting astronauts during space exploration, are now being tested for applications in emergency response gear and electrical insulation. The need for certainty about the resiliency of materials used in space led to the development of an analytics tool useful across a range of industries. Temper foam, the material used in memory-foam pillows, was developed for NASA for seat covers. As more companies pursue their own space goals, more innovations will likely come from the commercial sector. Outer space is not just a catalyst for technological development. Satellite constellations and their unique line-of-sight vantage point can provide new perspectives to old industries. Deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit, as Facebook wants to do, can connect large, previously-unreached swathes of 22 humanity to the Internet. Remote sensing technology could change how whole industries operate, such as crop monitoring, herd management, crisis response, and land evaluation, among others. 23 While satellites cannot provide all essential information for some of these industries, they can fill in some useful gaps and work as part of a wider system of tools. Space infrastructure, in helping to change how people connect and perceive Earth, could help spark innovations on the ground as well. These innovations, changes to global networks, and new opportunities could lead to wider economic growth. Strong Innovation solves Extinction. Matthews 18 Dylan Matthews 10-26-2018 “How to help people millions of years from now” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good (Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University)Re-cut by Elmer If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.
12/18/21
JF - Judicial Activism DA
Tournament: Cal Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Denver East MB | Judge: Jacob Lugo Expanding PTD shatters the entire legal-regulatory balance Huffman 15 James L. Huffman is Dean Emeritus of Lewis and Clark Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He holds degrees from Montana State University (BS), The Fletcher School of Tufts University (MA) and the University of Chicago (JD). "WHY LIBERATING THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE IS BAD FOR THE PUBLIC." https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/19611-45-2huffman Since the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, environmental advocates have been in search of ways to circumvent the twin obstacles of political compromise and vested property rights. In a 1970 article, Professor Joseph Sax suggested that the common law public trust doctrine might provide an avenue for judicial intervention in the name of claimed public rights in a wide array of natural resources. Because the traditional doctrine was narrowly limited in terms of both public rights and affected resources, Sax published a second article ten years later, calling for courts to liberate the public trust doctrine from its historical parameters. While a few judges responded with generally limited extensions of the doctrine, Sax’s plea has been ignored by most courts—but not by academics. A flood of law review articles have resorted to shoddy history, retrospective theorizing about the origins and purposes of the doctrine, appeals to higher law and moral imperatives, and confusion of the idea of public trust in representative government with the public rights protected by the public trust doctrine in efforts to persuade courts to liberate the doctrine. Implicit, if not explicit, in all of these arguments is the claim that the common law origins of American law and the American judicial system vest courts with authority to amend old law and make new law. At risk in this vast and imaginative effort to liberate the public trust doctrine from its common law confines are the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, due process and secure property rights, and the economic prosperity on which environmental protection ultimately depends. Expanding PTD beyond precedent allows for unchecked judicial activism across the law – the plan applies it everywhere on earth, which ensures circumvention, authoritarianism, and shocks global rule of law Huffman 15 James L. Huffman is Dean Emeritus of Lewis and Clark Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He holds degrees from Montana State University (BS), The Fletcher School of Tufts University (MA) and the University of Chicago (JD). "WHY LIBERATING THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE IS BAD FOR THE PUBLIC." https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/19611-45-2huffman Modern progressives, like their early twentieth century predecessors, tend to be skeptical of democratic policymaking. They prefer to rely on experts, scientific management and expeditious executive action to implement policies they know to be right and good. Democracy, the separation of powers, constitutional rights, and the rule of law all get in the way. It was early frustration with these traditional American principles that led Professor Sax to call for liberating the public trust doctrine from its historical shackles. He recognized that if courts could be persuaded to expand and extend the doctrine, environmentalists could revolutionize American property law while claiming the mantle of the rule of law. Courts would rule for environmentalist claims not because it was the right thing to do but because the law required it. That barely a handful of courts have even acknowledged Sax’s invitation to liberate the public trust doctrine underscores that most judges, most of the time, do their best to interpret and apply the law as those affected by the law would reasonably expect them to. Most judges understand that people rely on those expectations in their interactions with others and in the risks they assume and to which they expose others. If it were otherwise, people would soon lose confidence in the courts as objective arbiters of disputes. This does not mean that the law is stuck in the past. The common law has always evolved. But it has evolved in a way that respects rather than undermines expectations. One of the great strengths of the common law method is in “serving the rule of law by adapting legal rules to the demonstrated needs and wishes of those who rely on law to bring at least a degree of certainty to their day-to-day lives.”226 Perhaps the best indication of widespread commitment to the rule of law is that judges seduced into lawmaking of the kind urged by public trust liberationists, like the liberationists themselves, invariably appeal to precedent in seeking to justify their rulings. This does not mean that the lawmaking judges shy away from explaining the policy benefits of their decisions, but one would be hard pressed to find a case in which a court acknowledges that its new rule has no basis in preexisting law. Rather, lawmaking judges follow the path advocated by Judge Richard Posner in his commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore.227 Posner explains that what he calls pragmatic judges should cover their lawmaking tracks by providing “legal-type judgment” as justification.228 Anyone who believes in the rule of law as a necessary principle of government in every free society should be troubled by this ends-driven, whatever-it-takes approach to judging in particular, and government in general. Even accepting, for the sake of argument, that we face a global environmental crisis as Professor Wood and many others assert,229 experience demonstrates that compromising the rule of law will harm rather than help efforts to meet any serious challenge. Saving a failing planet will require innovative thinking and creativity of the highest sort. History demonstrates that individual liberty and the rule of law are essential to such innovation and problem solving. Absent the rule of law, many a nation has failed to solve much lesser challenges.230 Rule of law solves war Feldman ‘8 Noah; September 28; Professor of Law at Harvard University School of Law; New York Times, “When Judges Make Foreign Policy,” lexis Why We Need More Law, More Than Ever So what do we need the Constitution to do for us now? The answer, I think, is that the Constitution must be read to help us remember that while the war on terror continues, we are also still in the midst of a period of rapid globalization. An enduring lesson of the Bush years is the extreme difficulty and cost of doing things by ourselves. We need to build and rebuild alliances — and law has historically been one of our best tools for doing so. In our present precarious situation, it would be a terrible mistake to abandon our historic position of leadership in the global spread of the rule of law. Our leadership matters for reasons both universal and national. Seen from the perspective of the world, the fragmentation of power after the cold war creates new dangers of disorder that need to be mitigated by the sense of regularity and predictability that only the rule of law can provide. Terrorists need to be deterred. Failed states need to be brought under the umbrella of international organizations so they can govern themselves. And economic interdependence demands coordination, so that the collapse of one does not become the collapse of all. From a national perspective, our interest is less in the inherent value of advancing individual rights than in claiming that our allies are obligated to help us by virtue of legal commitments they have made. The Bush administration’s lawyers often insisted that law was a tool of the weak, and that therefore as a strong nation we had no need to engage it. But this notion of “lawfare” as a threat to the United States is based on a misunderstanding of the very essence of how law operates. Law comes into being and is sustained not because the weak demand it but because it is a tool of the powerful — as it has been for the United States since World War II at least. The reason those with power prefer law to brute force is that it regularizes and legitimates the exercise of authority. It is easier and cheaper to get the compliance of weaker people or states by promising them rules and a fair hearing than by threatening them constantly with force. After all, if those wielding power really objected to the rule of law, they could abolish it, the way dictators and juntas have often done the world over. Law comes into being and is sustained not because the weak demand it but because it is a tool of the powerful — as it has been for the United States since World War II at least. The reason those with power prefer law to brute force is that it regularizes and legitimates the exercise of authority. It is easier and cheaper to get the compliance of weaker people or states by promising them rules and a fair hearing than by threatening them constantly with force. After all, if those wielding power really objected to the rule of law, they could abolish it, the way dictators and juntas have often done the world over. SOP decline causes global nuke war Dr. G. John Ikenberry 15, PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, “Getting Hegemony Right”, in Korean Attitudes Toward the United States: Changing Dynamics, Ed. Steinberg, p. 17-18 A critical ingredient in stabilizing international relations in a world of radical power disparities is the character of America itself. The United States is indeed a global hegemon, but because of its democratic institutions and political traditions it is--or can be--a relatively benign one. Joseph Nye's arguments on "soft power" of course come to mind here, and there is much to his point. But, in fact, there are other, more significant aspects of the American way in foreign policy that protect the United States from the consequences of its own greatness. When other major states consider whether to work with the United States or resist it, the fact that it is an open, stable democracy matters. The outside world can see American policymaking at work and can even find opportunities to enter the process and help shape how the overall order operates. Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo and even Beijing--in each of these capitals officials can readily find reasons to conclude that an engagement policy toward the United States will be more effective than balancing against U.S. power. America in large part stumbled into this open, institutionalized order in the 1940s, as it sought to rebuild the postwar world and to counter Soviet communism. In the late 1940s, in a pre-echo of today's situation, the United States was the world's dominant state--constituting 45 percent of world GNP, leading in military power, technology, finance and industry, and brimming with natural resources. But America nonetheless found itself building world order around stable and binding partnerships. Its calling card was its offer of Cold War security protection. But the intensity of political and economic cooperation between the United States and its partners went well beyond what was necessary to counter the Soviet threat. As the historian Geir Lundestad has observed, the expanding American political order in the half century after World War II was in important respects an "empire by invitation." The remarkable global reach of American postwar hegemony has been at least in part driven by the efforts of European and Asian governments to harness U.S. power, render that power more predictable, and use it to overcome their own regional insecurities. The result has been a vast system of America-centered economic and security partnerships. Even though the United States looks like a wayward power to many around the world today, it nonetheless has an unusual ability to co-opt and reassure. Three elements matter most in making U.S. power more stable, engaged and restrained. First, America's mature political institutions organized around the rule of law have made it a relatively predictable and cooperative hegemon. The pluralistic and regularized way in which U.S. foreign and security policy is made reduces surprises and allows other states to build long-term, mutually beneficial relations. The governmental separation of powers creates a shared decision-making system that opens up the process and reduces the ability of any one leader to make abrupt or aggressive moves toward other states. An active press and competitive party system also provide a service to outside states by generating information about U.S. policy and determining its seriousness of purpose. The messiness of a democracy can, indeed, frustrate American diplomats and confuse foreign observers. But over the long term, democratic institutions produce more consistent and credible policies--policies that do not reflect the capricious and idiosyncratic whims of an autocrat.
2/20/22
JF - Kamooalewa CP
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 3 | Opponent: Peninsula AL | Judge: Gerard Grigsby CP Text: Space faring nations should establish a multilateral agreement that restricts asteroid mining done by private entities except for on asteroid Kamo’oalewa. Kamo’oalewa is NEO asteroid comprised of lunar material Devlin 21 Hannah Devlin is the Guardian's science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. “Near-Earth asteroid is a fragment from the moon, say scientists.” November 11, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/11/near-earth-asteroid-is-a-fragment-from-the-moon-say-scientists Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The asteroid, named Kamo`oalewa, was discovered in 2016 but until now relatively little has been known about it. New observations suggest it could be a fragment from the moon that was thrown into space by an ancient lunar collision. Kamo`oalewa is one of Earth’s quasi-satellites, a category of asteroid that orbits the Sun, but remains relatively close to the planet – in this case about 9m miles away. Despite being close in astronomical terms, the asteroid is about the size of a ferris wheel and about 4m times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. Consequently, the Earth’s most powerful telescopes are needed to make observations. Using the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona, astronomers found the spectrum of reflected light from Kamo`oalewa closely matched lunar rocks from Nasa’s Apollo missions, suggesting it originated from the moon. They had initially compared the light with that reflected off other near-Earth asteroids, but drawn a blank. “I looked through every near-Earth asteroid spectrum we had access to, and nothing matched,” said Ben Sharkey, a PhD student at the University of Arizona and the paper’s lead author. After missing the chance to observe Kamo`oalewa in April 2020 owing to a shutdown of the telescope during the coronavirus pandemic, the team found the final piece of the puzzle in 2021. “This spring, we got much needed follow-up observations and went, ‘Wow it is real,’” Sharkey said. “It’s easier to explain with the moon than other ideas.” Space based solar power is being developed and transitions to 100 clean energy, but lunar regolith is key O’Neill 13 Ian O'Neill is a media relations specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. Prior to joining JPL, he served as editor for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific‘s Mercury magazine and Mercury Online and contributed articles to a number of other publications, including Space.com, Space.com, Live Science, HISTORY.com, Scientific American. Ian holds a Ph.D in solar physics and a master's degree in planetary and space physics. “How to Turn the Moon Into a Giant Space Solar Power Hub.” December 3, 2013. https://www.space.com/23810-moon-luna-belt-solar-power-idea.html When it comes to space and energy, we need to think big. That's what one Japanese company is doing — and they're reaching for the moon, literally. The best thing about the moon is that one lunar hemisphere is constantly bathed in sunlight (except for the occasional eclipse), so using solar arrays to generate power may not seem like such a stretch. Take China's recently-launched Chang'e 3 Yutu rover for example, it's solar powered. Also, Apollo astronauts set up solar-powered experiments on the lunar regolith. But how about wrapping the moon's equator in a 250 mile wide band of solar panels and beaming the power generated back to Earth? That's exactly what Shimizu Corporation is proposing and they reckon their concept could harness a steady stream of 13,000 terawatts of power. According to Business Insider, "the total installed electricity generation summer capacity in the United States was 1,050.9 gigawatts." Such a vast energy resource could be transformative for our civilization. As Obi-Wan might say: "That's no moon. It's a space (solar power) station." "A shift from economical use of limited resources to the unlimited use of clean energy is the ultimate dream of all mankind," says the company's website. "The LUNA RING, our lunar solar power generation concept, translates this dream into reality through ingenious ideas coupled with advanced space technologies." Indeed, advanced space technologies will be needed, not only to harvest solar energy and efficiently beam it back to Earth, but its very construction will require several leaps in robotic technology development. Also, this mother of all engineering tasks will need to see some significant changes in international space treaties before it sees light of day. Resembling a moon born from science fiction, the LUNA RING is just that, a ring around the moon. The ring, stretching 6,800 miles around the moon's circumference, will be constructed by robots that will "perform various tasks on the lunar surface, including ground leveling and excavation of hard bottom strata." The entire project will be overseen by a team of humans while the bulk of the robotic tasks can be teleoperated from Earth. Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos) It’s all very well building a huge array of solar panels around the moon, but how would the power be sent to Earth? As our atmosphere is virtually transparent to microwaves and lasers, Shimizu envisages solar energy being fed through microwave/laser transmitters located around the Earth-facing side of the moon. As the moon orbits the Earth and the Earth rotates, international receiving stations will feed electricity grids with plentiful lunar solar power as the moon rises to when it sets. The designers are keen to point out that this is a green energy resource that could benefit the whole of mankind. What's more, when the infrastructure is set up, other resources can be exploited — such as mining for precious minerals and fabricating products from regolith. One could imagine an international consortium of nations and/or companies that buy a stake in the LUNA RING to aid its construction. Each partner would then have rights to construct receiving stations in their geographical location of choice, weaning us off polluting sources of power. Japan, which was hurt by the devastating Fukushima meltdown in 2011, is actively seeking out alternative power resources to wean itself off nuclear energy — it doesn't get more "alternative" than this.
2/6/22
JF - Kant NC
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo Ethics must begin a priori and the meta-ethic is bindingness. 1 Uncertainty – our experiences are inaccessible to others which allows people to say they don’t experience the same, however a priori principles are universally applied to all agents. 2 Bindingness – I can keep asking “why should I follow this” which results in skep since obligations are predicated on ignorantly accepting rules. Only reason solves since asking “why reason?” requires reason which is self-justified. That means we must universally will maxims— any non-universalizable norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends. Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative. Prefer – All other frameworks collapse—non-Kantian theories source obligations in extrinsically good objects, but that presupposes the goodness of the rational will. Negate: 1 A model of freedom mandates a market-oriented approach to space—that negates Broker 20 (Tyler, work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review and the University of Memphis Law Review.) “Space Law Can Only Be Libertarian Minded,” Above the Law, 1-14-20, https://abovethelaw.com/2020/01/space-law-can-only-be-libertarian-minded/ TDI The impact on human daily life from a transition to the virtually unlimited resource reality of space cannot be overstated. However, when it comes to the law, a minimalist, dare I say libertarian, approach appears as the only applicable system. In the words of NASA, “2020 promises to be a big year for space exploration.” Yet, as Rand Simberg points out in Reason magazine, it is actually private American investment that is currently moving space exploration to “a pace unseen since the 1960s.” According to Simberg, due to this increase in private investment “We are now on the verge of getting affordable private access to orbit for large masses of payload and people.” The impact of that type of affordable travel into space might sound sensational to some, but in reality the benefits that space can offer are far greater than any benefit currently attributed to any major policy proposal being discussed at the national level. The sheer amount of resources available within our current reach/capabilities simply speaks for itself. However, although those new realities will, as Simberg says, “bring to the fore a lot of ideological issues that up to now were just theoretical,” I believe it will also eliminate many economic and legal distinctions we currently utilize today. For example, the sheer number of resources we can already obtain in space means that in the rapidly near future, the distinction between a nonpublic good or a public good will be rendered meaningless. In other words, because the resources available within our solar system exist in such quantities, all goods will become nonrivalrous in their consumption and nonexcludable in their distribution. This would mean government engagement in the public provision of a nonpublic good, even at the trivial level, or what Kevin Williamson defines as socialism, is rendered meaningless or impossible. In fact, in space, I fail to see how any government could even try to legally compel collectivism in the way Simberg fears. Similar to many economic distinctions, however, it appears that many laws, both the good and the bad, will also be rendered meaningless as soon as we begin to utilize the resources within our solar system. For example, if every human being is given access to the resources that allows them to replicate anything anyone else has, or replace anything “taken” from them instantly, what would be the point of theft laws? If you had virtually infinite space in which you can build what we would now call luxurious livable quarters, all without exploiting human labor or fragile Earth ecosystems when you do it, what sense would most property, employment, or commercial law make? Again, this is not a pipe dream, no matter how much our population grows for the next several millennia, the amount of resources within our solar system can sustain such an existence for every human being. Rather than panicking about the future, we should try embracing it, or at least meaningfully preparing for it. Currently, the Outer Space Treaty, or as some call it “the Magna Carta of Space,” is silent on the issue of whether private individuals or corporate entities can own territory in space. Regardless of whether governments allow it, however, private citizens are currently obtaining the ability to travel there, and if human history is any indicator, private homesteading will follow, flag or no flag. We Americans know this is how a Wild West starts, where most regulation becomes the impractical pipe dream. But again, this would be a Wild West where the exploitation of human labor and fragile Earth ecosystem makes no economic sense, where every single human can be granted access to resources that even the wealthiest among us now would envy, and where innovation and imagination become the only things we would recognize as currency. Only a libertarian-type system, that guarantees basic individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could be valued and therefore human fidelity to a set of laws made possible, in such an existence.
2 Banning private space appropriation inhibits the sale and use of spacecraft and fuel- that’s a form of restricting the free economic choices of individuals Richman 12, Sheldon. “The free market doesn’t need government regulation.” Reason, August 5, 2012. AHS RG Order grows from market forces. But where do market forces come from? They are the result of human action. Individuals select ends and act to achieve them by adopting suitable means. Since means are scarce and ends are abundant, individuals economize in order to accomplish more rather than less. And they always seek to exchange lower values for higher values (as they see them) and never the other way around. In a world of scarcity, tradeoffs are unavoidable, so one aims to trade up rather than down. (One’s trading partner does the same.) The result of this, along with other features of human action, and the world at large is what we call market forces. But really, it is just men and women acting rationally in the world.
2/6/22
JF - Megaconstellations Adv CP
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 1 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Cortez Text – States should - implement cooperative active debris removal measures aimed at mitigating debris from mega-constellations. - cooperate on the development of a cloud-based infrastructure system between private and public entities with the purpose of advancing overall cyber security and create a protected mandatory reporting system for government contractors and critical infrastructure employees - dismantle their antisatellite weapon systems and stop all development of space weapons - adopt a system of market share liability in regard to the creation of debris in outer space by private entities in accordance with Munoz-Patchen 18 1st plank solves Cyber-Attacks. Robertl and Vocl 21 Christopher Robertl and Vince Vocl. Christopher is the Senior Vice President of Cyber Intelligence and Supply Chain Security Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Vince VocI is the Executive Director Cyber Policy and Operations at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 5-14-2021, accessed on 8-8-2021, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "4 Ways U.S. Government Leaders Can Protect IP and Personal Data", https://www.uschamber.com/on-demand/cybersecurity/how-can-the-government-help-protect-intellectual-property-and-personal-data Adam During the past several months, U.S. adversaries have carried out significant cyber-enabled espionage campaigns, impacting a wide range of public and private sector targets. With our nation’s cybersecurity at risk, government leaders have quickly turned to legislative solutions to protect our intellectual property and personal data. Protected Mandatory Reporting Can Help Thwart Increasingly Sophisticated Cyberattacks Since the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 was passed, companies facing data breaches have been encouraged to share this information with the U.S. government. Yet cyberattacks have only become more sophisticated since then, according to Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “There is an evolving belief that the 2015 structure, on a voluntary basis, is not giving us the level of comprehensive security that we need,” said Warner. “The bad guys, when they’re focused, they’re going to have a fairly high probability of getting in.” In response, the Committee on Intelligence is working on a bipartisan level to create a structure that would mandate reporting for government contractors and critical infrastructure employees. “Some of the privacy and other kinds of counter-incentives don’t take place,” Sen. Warner noted, adding that affected companies would have limited immunity and anonymized information. “We can pulse the overall system in a way that will allow the public sector and private sector to respond in a more comprehensive way.” The U.S. Seeks to Work With Its Allies to Establish Cyber Incident Notification Systems After creating a limited mandatory reporting system in the country, Warner hopes that the U.S. can work with its allies to establish similar notification systems as well as multilateral cyber norms. “If our adversaries violate these norms and we can find appropriate attribution, there will be consequences to their actions,” Warner explained. “Our failure to have norms and a more robust notification system in existence … has allowed, in many ways, Russia and China to launch cyberattacks with virtual impunity.” “This is a problem of protecting intellectual property … and personal information,” he continued. “As long as we can provide that level of limited immunity with anonymity so that those reports are then not made public, I think we can earn industry support.” The U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission Outlines Priorities for 2021 In 2019, the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission was chartered to manage cyber risk and significant cyber events at home and abroad. With several of the Commission’s recommendations being codified into law in 2020, this year has seen a renewed focus in engaging the private sector. “We’re looking at ways that we can get to a common cloud-based environment between federal government agencies, state, local, tribal, territorial and the private sector, basically to get common visibility,” said Solarium commissioner Frank J. Cilluffo. “We’re also going to be zeroing in on what we’re calling SICI (systemically important critical infrastructure) ... which will basically hone in on the most critical of our critical infrastructures, our lifeline sectors, and establish a set of … benefits and burdens to truly get to that partnership between the public and private sector,” Cilluffo added. Public and Private Sector Collaboration Is Crucial to Cybersecurity Advancement “We want to make sure that at the end of the day, our companies, our national security agencies and our citizens as a whole are enhancing their overall cybersecurity efforts,” stated Cilluffo. “The bottom line is, we need to follow up our ideas with the resources.” “This is not going to be accomplished through Washington alone,” he stressed. “The private sector needs a front-row seat at his table and ultimately will be most critical to any success going forward.” Mark Montgomery, executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, agreed that partnership between the public and private sectors would be crucial for success in 2021. “We actually have to build, pay for and establish infrastructure for collaboration,” Montgomery noted. “Once you do that, the companies will see that their equities are protected … and their opinions matter, and then we’ll get things done.” 2nd solves for Mega-constellation Impacts. Hardy 20, Brian Patrick. Long-term effects of satellite megaconstellations on the debris environment in low earth orbit. Diss. 2020. (Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Elmer The results of this thesis demonstrate that satellite megaconstellations have the potential to leave a significant mark on the LEO debris environment, even centuries after they cease operations. Various test cases for the Starlink megaconstellation were analyzed in a new, medium-fidelity simulation for orbital debris evolution, and a variety of PMD and ADR rates for Starlink were considered. It was shown that if Starlink adheres only to the minimum regulatory requirement of 90 PMD for large constellations, then LEO debris levels will grow almost twice as fast as the baseline scenario with no megaconstellations. Improving Starlink’s PMD rate to 95 would lead to only 19 more debris, while 99 PMD is the preferred option that prevents any significant debris contributions at all. Importantly, Starlink’s choice of PMD strategy will affect its own collision risk very little over the short term, but the impact will be noticeable on multi-century timescales by the overall LEO environment. Finally, in scenarios with 90 and 95 PMD, active debris removal of non-operating Starlink satellites yields significant, if limited, benefits. The 90 PMD scenario combined with an ADR rate of 5 Starlink satellites per year, for example, is able to reduce debris levels to those seen for the 95 PMD scenario. This result suggests that active debris removal could be a viable mitigation strategy for megaconstellations with sub-optimal PMD rates. 3rd plank solves second advantage – states won’t posses asat capability to escalate 4th plank incentivizes sustainable use of space Munoz-Patchen 18 Chelsea Munoz-Patchen, Chelsea Muñoz-Patchen is an associate in the Houston office of Latham and Watkins. While attending University of Chicago Law School, Ms. Muñoz-Patchen was an articles editor for The Chicago Journal of International Law. Her research on regulating space debris was published in 2018. Ms. Muñoz-Patchen served as a research assistant for Professors Daniel Abebe and Jonathan Masur, focusing on intellectual property and constitutional law in the US and Ethiopia. Prior to law school, Ms. Muñoz-Patchen earned her BA and BS in Geography from Arizona State University. As a graduate student, she studied political ecology and people’s relationship to urban nature, and taught Introduction to Physical Geography labs. 7-1-2018, Semanticscholar, "Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty | Semantic Scholar", https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Regulating-the-Space-Commons3A-Treating-Space-Debris-Munoz-Patchen/607eff0141f48332a69ae8c5a3301d871057a4fa accessed 12/21/21 Adam - solves global commons Market-share liability has been suggested as a way to deal with the difficulty of identifying the individual ownership of objects and it could be put to use in the obligation to clean up debris.154 Market-share liability would allow for the apportionment of responsibility based on the respective contribution to the risk, and would not require the identification of individual pieces of space debris.155 Market-share liability has already been successfully applied where multiple parties contribute to a dangerous situation, but where it is virtually impossible to tie a particular party to the harm caused.156 Market-share liability was created in 1980 in the case Sindell v. Abbott Labororatories. 157 In Sindell, the Supreme Court of California devised the concept in response to a case in which pharmaceuticals that were marketed to pregnant women caused cancer in their children at least a decade later.158 Since the latent period was so long, the women naturally could not remember the specific pill manufacturer out of two hundred such manufacturers.159 The court found that each defendant’s market share could be determined fairly accurately, and therefore used market share as a basis for the apportionment of liability.160 While market-share liability has not been broadly adopted, this is likely because cases with fungible products and a serious causation problem are rare.161 Academics have taken this idea and sought to apply it to space debris, which has similar fungibility and causation issues, but their applications have been limited to a tort-like context.162 One author suggested that whenever a collision occurs due to an unidentifiable piece of debris and a functional space object, liability and compensation should be apportioned “among spacefaring nations equal to the percentages of the total debris population for which the particular nation is responsible.” 163 This mechanism frees the victim from having to prove causation by a specific nation, when that would be virtually impossible.164 There will be difficulties calculating the percentage with precision in such a system, but there is fairly accurate information from the U.N. including registry, sampling, mathematical models, and other records of known collisions and the resultant debris.165 Without strong buy-in, it may be challenging to get this rarely used domestic tort theory to apply in international space law, especially with the potential for disputes over the proper apportionment of market share.166 The states primarily responsible for existing debris are the U.S., Russia, and China – powerful countries unlikely to be pleased with this newfound expense. That said, though these nations would be paying the highest cost, this would be proportional to their respective contributions to the problem. Indeed, these nations may welcome this remedy, because their space activity is threatened by the proliferation of space debris and they likely value continuing their extensive and advanced use of space. This solution solves the free rider problem and would compensate any nation or company that cleans up space such that any nation (like the U.S., Russia, or China) fearing the collapse of its space program and unwilling to bear all the cleanup costs itself would see this as an attractive solution. It is even possible that liable states like the U.S. and Russia will be eager to aid in debris identification, so as to add to other states’ liability.167 This regulatory remedy would resolve the current tragedy of the commons. By assigning responsibility for the cost of cleanup, nations or companies would be incentivized to begin cleanup operations, because they would know that others will not freeride on their costly efforts. Instead, they will have guaranteed compensation from those responsible. Obtaining the funds is crucial, particularly since the high cost of deploying existing technology to destroy space debris has been a hindrance thus far.168 Using market-share liability is also a useful way to compensate victims of debris collisions and to incentivize spacefaring nations to avoid creating new debris in the future.169 However, this does not do enough to remedy the persistent existence of space debris, which is threatening the very continuation of space activity. The Outer Space Treaty creates an obligation on states to carry out space activities “for the ‘benefit and interests of all countries,’ and that outer space shall never be subject to national appropriation.” 170 To uphold their obligations under this treaty, nations should not be creating debris, because it interferes with the ability of others to conduct their space activities, or perhaps keeps them from space altogether. Due to this legal violation, and the negative externality created by property abandonment, states should be required to pay for the disposal of debris in proportion to the amount they create. While the creation of debris may be unavoidable, there are existing practices that can greatly minimize the proliferation of debris, and any debris that is nonetheless created can be dealt with through market-share liability payments. This collection of market-share disposal payments would not simply be a tax on operations or tort compensation for harmful acts. Instead, once liability is apportioned, (and this could be done on an ongoing or periodic basis to reflect new developments), nations or companies undertaking actions to clean up space would be compensated for their costs by the nations responsible according to their percentage of responsibility. The U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) could allocate the percentage of liability, drawing on its role in promoting international cooperation and the peaceful use of outer space, as well as preparing reports and studies.171 If any disputes were to arise from nonpayment, familiar procedures could be employed—perhaps by drawing from other notable space treaties that provide “established procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” 172 In many of the space treaties and conventions, including the Liability Convention, disputes and claims can be brought to the SecretaryGeneral of the U.N.173 These bodies could be utilized here to assure fairness in allocating liability and handling routine compensation disputes. This new regulatory regime can thus be grounded in the existing space treaty regime and administered by existing authorities. It would resolve the incentive problems that exist in the international commons of space through regulation that allocates the cost of debris cleanup to those who have created and continue to create it. The regime can also adapt as the outer space marketplace and the actors who comprise it shift over time, and as the registry of space objects, incidents, and tracking capabilities improves. This regulatory regime also ultimately would allocate cleanup funds to parties who would like to continue to operate in space, removing the disincentive to carry the cost in the face of potential freeriding.
1/22/22
JF - Mining DA
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brophy TJ | Judge: Aryan Jasani Commercial mining solves extinction from scarcity, climate, terror, war, and disease. Pelton 17—(Director Emeritus of the Space and Advanced Communications Research Institute at George Washington University, PHD in IR from Georgetown).. Pelton, Joseph N. 2017. The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! Springer. Accessed 8/30/19. Are We Humans Doomed to Extinction? What will we do when Earth’s resources are used up by humanity? The world is now hugely over populated, with billions and billions crammed into our overcrowded cities. By 2050, we may be 9 billion strong, and by 2100 well over 11 billion people on Planet Earth. Some at the United Nations say we might even be an amazing 12 billion crawling around this small globe. And over 80 of us will be living in congested cities. These cities will be ever more vulnerable to terrorist attack, natural disaster, and other plights that come with overcrowding and a dearth of jobs that will be fueled by rapid automation and the rise of artifi cial intelligence across the global economy. We are already rapidly running out of water and minerals. Climate change is threatening our very existence. Political leaders and even the Pope have cautioned us against inaction. Perhaps the naysayers are right. All humanity is at tremendous risk. Is there no hope for the future? This book is about hope. We think that there is literally heavenly hope for humanity. But we are not talking here about divine intervention. We are envisioning a new space economy that recognizes that there is more water in the skies that all our oceans. Th ere is a new wealth of natural resources and clean energy in the reaches of outer space—more than most of us could ever dream possible. There are those that say why waste money on outer space when we have severe problems here at home? Going into space is not a waste of money. It is our future. It is our hope for new jobs and resources. The great challenge of our times is to reverse public thinking to see space not as a resource drain but as the doorway to opportunity. The new space frontier can literally open up a “gold rush in the skies.” In brief, we think there is new hope for humanity. We see a new a pathway to the future via new ventures in space. For too long, space programs have been seen as a money pit. In the process, we have overlooked the great abundance available to us in the skies above. It is important to recognize there is already the beginning of a new gold rush in space—a pathway to astral abundance. “New Space” is a term increasingly used to describe radical new commercial space initiatives—many of which have come from Silicon Valley and often with backing from the group of entrepreneurs known popularly as the “space billionaires.” New space is revolutionizing the space industry with lower cost space transportation and space systems that represent significant cost savings and new technological breakthroughs. “New Commercial Space” and the “New Space Economy” represent more than a new way of looking at outer space. These new pathways to the stars could prove vital to human survival. If one does not believe in spending money to probe the mysteries of the universe then perhaps we can try what might be called “calibrated greed” on for size. One only needs to go to a cubesat workshop, or to Silicon Valley or one of many conferences like the “Disrupt Space” event in Bremen, Germany, held in April 2016 to recognize that entrepreneurial New Space initiatives are changing everything 1 . In fact, the very nature and dimensions of what outer space activities are today have changed forever. It is no longer your grandfather’s concept of outer space that was once dominated by the big national space agencies. The entrepreneurs are taking over. The hopeful statements in this book and the hard economic and technical data that backs them up are more than a minority opinion. It is a topic of growing interest at the World Economic Forum, where business and political heavyweights meet in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to stimulate new patterns of global economic growth. It is even the growing view of a group that call themselves “space ethicists.” Here is how Christopher J. Newman, at the University of Sunderland in the United Kingdom has put it: Space ethicists have offered the view that space exploration is not only desirable; it is a duty that we, as a species, must undertake in order to secure the survival of humanity over the longer term. Expanding both the resource base and, eventually, the habitats available for humanity means that any expenditure on space exploration, far from being viewed as frivolous, can legitimately be rationalized as an ethical investment choice. (Newman) On the other hand there are space ethicists and space exobiologists who argue that humans have created ecological ruin on the planet—and now space debris is starting to pollute space. Th ese countervailing thoughts by the “no growth” camp of space ethicists say we have no right to colonize other planets or to mine the Moon and asteroids—or at least no right to do so until we can prove we can sustain life here on Earth for the longer term. However, for most who are planning for the new space economy the opinion of space philosophers doesn’t really fl oat their boat. Legislators, bankers, and aspiring space entrepreneurs are far more interested in the views of the super-rich capitalists called the space billionaires. A number of these billionaires and space executives have already put some very serious money into enterprises intent on creating a new pathway to the stars. No less than five billionaires with established space ventures—Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow—have invested millions if not billions of dollars into commercializing space. They are developing new technologies and establishing space enterprises that can bring the wealth of outer space down to Earth. This is not a pipe dream, but will increasingly be the economic reality of the 2020s. These wealthy space entrepreneurs see major new economic opportunities. To them space represents the last great frontier for enterprising pioneers. Th us they see an ever-expanding space frontier that offers opportunities in low-cost space transportation, satellite solar power satellites to produce clean energy 24h a day, space mining, space manufacturing and production, and eventually space habitats and colonies as a trajectory to a better human future. Some even more visionary thinkers envision the possibility of terraforming Mars, or creating new structures in space to protect our planet from cosmic hazards and even raising Earth’s orbit to escape the rising heat levels of the Sun in millennia to come. Some, of course, will say this is sci-fi hogwash. It can’t be done. We say that this is what people would have said in 1900 about airplanes, rocket ships, cell phones and nuclear devices. The skeptics laughed at Columbus and his plan to sail across the oceans to discover new worlds. When Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France or Seward bought Alaska, there were plenty of naysayers that said such investment in the unknown was an extravagant waste of money. A healthy skepticism is useful and can play a role in economic and business success. Before one dismisses the idea of an impending major new space economy and a new gold rush, it might useful to see what has already transpired in space development in just the past five decades. The world’s first geosynchronous communications satellite had a throughput capability of about 500 kb / s. In contrast, today’s state of the art Viasat 2 —a half century later— has an impressive throughput of some 140 Gb/s. Th is means that the relative throughput is nearly 300,000 greater, while its lifetime is some ten times longer (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 ). Each new generation of communications satellite has had more power, better antenna systems, improved pointing and stabilization, and an extended lifetime. And the capabilities represented by remote sensing satellites , meteorological satellites , and navigation and timing satellites have also expanded their capabilities and performance in an impressive manner. When satellite applications first started, the market was measured in millions of dollars. Today commercial satellite services exceed a quarter of a billion dollars. Vital services such as the Internet, aircraft traffi c control and management, international banking, search and rescue and much, much more depend on application satellites. Th ose that would doubt the importance of satellites to the global economy might wish to view on You Tube the video “If Th ere Were a Day Without Satellites?” 2 . Let’s check in on what some of those very rich and smart guys think about the new space economy and its potential. (We are sorry to say that so far there are no female space billionaires, but surely this, too, will come someday soon.) Of course this twenty-fi rst century breakthrough that we call the New Space economy will not come just from new space commerce. It will also come from the amazing new technologies here on Earth. Vital new terrestrial technologies will accompany this cosmic journey into tomorrow. Information technology, robotics, artificial intelligence and commercial space travel systems have now set us on a course to allow us humans to harvest the amazing riches in the skies—new natural resources, new energy, and even totally new ways of looking at the purpose of human existence. If we pursue this course steadfastly, it can be the beginning of a New Space renaissance. But if we don’t seek to realize our ultimate destiny in space, Homo sapiens can end up in the dustbin of history—just like literally millions of already failed species. In each and every one of the five mass extinction events that have occurred over the last 1.5 billion years on Earth, some 50–80 of all species have gone the way of the T. Rex, the woolly mammoth, and the Dodo bird along with extinct ferns, grasses and cacti. On the other hand, the best days of the human race could be just beginning. If we are smart about how we go about discovering and using these riches in the skies and applying the best of our new technologies, it could be the start of a new beginning for humanity. Konstantin Tsiokovsky, the Russian astronautics pioneer, who fi rst conceived of practical designs for spaceships, famously said: “A planet is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” Well before Tsiokovsky another genius, Leonardo da Vinci, said, quite poetically: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” The founder of the X-Prize and of Planetary Resources, Inc., Dr. Peter Diamandis, has much more brashly said much the same thing in quite diff erent words when he said: “The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will go to Mars.” The New Space Billionaires Peter Diamandis is not alone in his thinking. From the list of “visionaries” quoted earlier, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX; Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic; and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and the man who financed SpaceShipOne, the world’s first successful spaceplane have all said the future will include a vibrant new space economy. Th ey, and others, have said that we can, we should and we soon shall go into space and realize the bounty that it can offer to us. Th e New Space enterprise is today indeed being led by those so-called space billionaires , who have an exciting vision of the future. They and others in the commercial space economy believe that the exploitation of outer space may open up a new golden age of astral abundance. They see outer space as a new frontier that can be a great source of new materials, energy and various forms of new wealth that might even save us from excesses of the past. Th is gold rush in the skies represents a new beginning. We are not talking about expensive new space ventures funded by NASA or other space agencies in Europe, Japan, China or India. No, these eff orts which we and others call New Space are today being forged by imaginative and resourceful commercial entrepreneurs. Th ese twenty-fi rst century visionaries have the fortitude and zeal to look to the abundance above. New breakthroughs in technology and New Space enterprises may be able to create an “astral life raft” for humanity. Just as Columbus and the Vikings had the imaginative drive that led them to discover the riches of a new world, we now have a cadre of space billionaires that are now leading us into this New Space era of tomorrow. These bold leaders, such as Paul Allen and Sir Richard Branson, plus other space entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin, and Robert Bigelow, Chairman of Budget Suites and Bigelow Aerospace, not only dream of their future in the space industry but also have billions of dollars in assets. These are the bright stars of an entirely new industry that are leading us into the age of New Space commerce. These space billionaires, each in their own way, are proponents of a new age of astral abundance. Each of them is launching new commercial space industries. They are literally transforming our vision of tomorrow. These new types of entrepreneurial aerospace companies—the New Space enterprises—give new hope and new promise of transforming our world as we know it today. The New Space Frontier What happens in space in the next few decades, plus corresponding new information technologies and advanced robotics, will change our world forever. These changes will redefi ne wealth, change our views of work and employment and upend almost everything we think we know about economics, wealth, jobs, and politics. Th ese changes are about truly disruptive technologies of the most fundamental kinds. If you thought the Internet, smart phones, and spandex were disruptive technologies, just hang on. You have not seen anything yet. In short, if you want to understand a transition more fundamental than the changes brought to the twentieth century world by computers, communications and the Internet, then read this book. There are truly riches in the skies. Near-Earth asteroids largely composed of platinum and rare earth metals have an incredible value. Helium-3 isotopes accessible in outer space could provide clean and abundant energy. There is far more water in outer space than is in our oceans. In the pages that follow we will explain the potential for a cosmic shift in our global economy, our ecology, and our commercial and legal systems. These can take place by the end of this century. And if these changes do not take place we will be in trouble. Our conventional petro-chemical energy systems will fail us economically and eventually blanket us with a hydrocarbon haze of smog that will threaten our health and our very survival. Our rare precious metals that we need for modern electronic appliances will skyrocket in price, and the struggle between “haves” and “have nots” will grow increasingly ugly. A lack of affordable and readily available water, natural resources, food, health care and medical supplies, plus systematic threats to urban security and systemic warfare are the alternatives to astral abundance. The choices between astral abundance and a downward spiral in global standards of living are stark. Within the next few decades these problems will be increasingly real. By then the world may almost be begging for new, out of- the-box thinking. International peace and security will be an indispensable prerequisite for exploitation of astral abundance, as will good government for all. No one nation can be rich and secure when everyone else is poor and insecure. In short, global space security and strategic space defense, mediated by global space agreements, are part of this new pathway to the future. Resource scarcity coming now and causes extinction—asteroid mining is the only way to solve Crombrugghe 18 – Guerric, Business Development Manager Brussels, Brussels Capital Region, “Asteroid mining as a necessary answer to mineral scarcity”, LinkedIn, 1/11/2018, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/asteroid-mining-necessary-answer-mineral-scarcity-de-crombrugghe We need minerals, and we always will. Yet, our reserves are finite and a 100 end-of-life recycling rate is impossible to achieve. Eventually, new entrants will therefore be required to sustain our system. While the business case for asteroid mining can obviously not be closed with current technologies, it will someday become a necessity. We may as well start preparing ourselves. Scarcity of resources, the challenge of the 21st century According to the World Bank, in 2016 humanity's growth rate was of 1.18 in terms of population, and 2.50 in terms of GDP. Both of these, in turn, drive our staggering resource consumption: there are more of us, and each of us needs more. On the other, the Earth is a closed system, and resources are only available in a finite amount. We all know by now that there is only this much oil and gas, but the same can actually be said for water, arable land, minerals, etc. These two simple observations have sparkled the debate around the scarcity of resources. Even with the best intentions, mathematics teaches us that it is impossible to indefinitely extract resources from a given finite supply 1. The problem arising in the short-term is the exhaustion of the existing supply. That limit is actually coming in fast. In a paper published in 2007, Stephen Kessler demonstrates that the global mineral reserves are only sufficient for the next 50 years. The figure on the right shows the ratio of known global reserve to global annual consumption, given a rough indication of adequacy in years. It dates from an earlier paper, published in 1994. Since then, the development of environmental-friendly technologies (e.g. batteries, electric engines, etc.) has drastically increased the consumption rate of high-tech metals such as cobalt, platinum, rare earths, or titanium. On the other hand, exploration programs have allowed to discover new deposits, notably of gold and diamond. We will certainly be able to continue to increase - or at least sustain - our reserves, but only temporarily. Recycling and other temporary fixes An obvious solution is recycling, i.e. rejuvenating our stocks. A popular concept to illustrate this idea is that of urban mining: retrieving the ores present in smartphones and other electronic devices. It may prove to be not only more environmental-friendly, be also safer and more cost-effective. Nevertheless, every solution based on recycling is, again, nothing more than a temporary fix, buying us a finite amount of time. The United Nations Environment Programme studied in a report the current recycling rate of 60 metals. More than half of them have an end-of-life recycling rate below 1, and less than one-third are above 50. Nickel, for example, is relatively easy to retrieve, with and end-of-life recycling rate of up to 63 under the best conditions. At that rate, less than 1 of the initial stock is available after only 10 cycle. Even with a staggering 99 efficiency, the same 1 limit is achieved in less than 460 cycles. Not bad, of course, but still not enough. Should our hunger for resources continue, and even with the most optimised recycling techniques, a second problem will arise in the longer term: the amount of resources needed at a given time will simply exceed the total available stock. Unless we manage to find growth vectors that do not require raw materials, that tipping point is an impassable limit. Its proximity obviously depends on our consumption rate. Asteroid mining? No matter which way we look at it, we will thus be short on resources, either through sheer exhaustion (i.e. transformation in an unrecoverable form) or because the demand will exceed the total reserves. We can - and should - talk about recycling, dematerialisation, and other more ethically questionable solutions such as bio-engineering. Nonetheless, no matter how good they are, these are only temporary fixes. If we don't radically change our lifestyle, we will sooner or later have to address the elephant in the room: the Earth is a closed system, we need new entrants. How can space help? Short answer: all these minerals can be found in space. Some are difficult to obtain, others are even more difficult, none are straightforward. The most accessible destination is near-Earth asteroids, a reservoir of over 17,000 known - and counting - giant rocks that regularly cross the orbit of our planet. They are commonly classified in three main families. The most interesting one, for our case, is that of the S-type asteroids. These are metallic bodies, containing first and foremost nickel, iron and cobalt, but also gold, ores from the platinum group. But the list doesn't stop there, many other minerals can be found in smaller amounts: iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, manganese, molybdenum, aluminium, titanium, etc. How do we get there? Let's take an example: Ryugu, formerly known as 1999 JU3. It's a C-type asteroid measured to be approximately one kilometre in size 2. In addition to nickel, iron and cobalt, it also contains a fair share of water, nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia. Its total value is estimated to be approximately 80 billion USD. Fantastic! But how do we get there and, most importantly, how much does it cost? Well, we may have the start of an answer to these questions. Reaching Ryugu is a technological challenge, but it is feasible. In December 2014, the Japanese space agency has launched a spacecraft, Hayabusa2, heading to the asteroid. Its mission includes the collection of a small sample which will be sent back to the Earth, with a landing planned for December 2020. The target for the sample size is at least 100 µg. The total cost of the mission was projected to be around 200 million USD. That's 2 trillion USD per gram. Let's be optimistic and assume that the sample retrieved is pure gold. At today's rate, it is worth 42.5 USD per gram. That's a difference of over 10 orders of magnitude. Some may argue that Hayabusa2 has many other objectives that retrieving a sample. The mission does indeed include multiple landers, thorough scientific investigations, etc. There is actually another asteroid sample return mission underway, which we could you as a second point of comparison: OSIRIS-Rex, from NASA. It's heading for Bennu, also a C-type asteroid, which it will reach in August 2018. Total cost of the mission: 980 million USD. Target sample size: at least 60 g. We achieve thus roughly speaking 16 million USD per gram. Better, but still 6 orders of magnitude off compared to pure gold. It's pretty much as good as it gets with existing state-of-the-art technologies. Not much of a business case. Should we forget about it? Referring back to our earlier conclusion on resource scarcity, we had two options. Either we drastically reduce our resource consumption, to such a degree that reserves can last for longer than humanity itself, or we extend our closed system, the Earth, to nearby asteroids. In the current state of affairs, I am honestly not sure which course of action is the easiest. As they get increasingly rare, the cost of minerals will go up. On the other hand, as explained in a previous article, we can expect the cost of space activities to go steadily down. Step by step, these 6 orders of magnitude will slowly get munched away from both ends, until eventually asteroid mining becomes a viable operation. In other words: it will only become financially interesting once minerals become a thousand times more expensive and space activities a thousand times cheaper. As a point of reference, the introduction of reusable rockets by SpaceX, widely considered as one of the few truly disruptive changes in the aerospace sector in the last few decades, has "only" brought a cost reduction of 30. While it's clearly amazing, we still need at least 220 innovations of the same calibre 3 before we can make it work (again: assuming the price of minerals simultaneously goes up by a factor of a thousand). It's therefore quite likely that space mining will not take place within our lifetime 4. How can we accelerate the process? Firstly, we can only celebrate and support the numerous private initiatives which contribute to make that reality happen, either indirectly (e.g. launchers, space systems, etc.) or directly (e.g. in-space manufacturing, lunar exploration, etc.). Shout out to all the folks who manage to keep the flame of space exploration burning while generating profit for their investors. Secondly, space agencies and other institutional actors should continue to act as promoters of pioneering mission such as Hayabusa2, OSIRIS-REx, or DART. We can only regret that the Asteroid Redirect Mission from NASA and the Asteroid Impact Mission from ESA were not funded. From my perspective, these should actually be amongst the top priorities of our space exploration agenda. Not only are they instrumental to our understanding of the solar system, but they are also essential if we want to avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs. It's a question of survival. As a bonus, they also pave the way towards cost-efficient asteroid mining. In the meantime, we might want to consume existing resources a bit more efficiently. Resource Shortages Exacerbate Conflict Wingo 13 - Dennis Wingo, Former CTO of the Orbital Recovery Corporation, Founder and CEO of Skycorp Inc, and Greentrail Energy Inc., Co-Founder and CTO of Orbital Recovery Inc. Leader of NASA's the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), First in history to rescue and operate a spacecraft (ISEE-3) in interplanetary space, and University of Alabama in Huntsville Consortium for Materials Development in Space Researcher At University of Alabama in Huntsville Consortium for Materials Development in Space “Commentary | The Inevitability of Extraterrestrial Mining”, Space News, 7/29/2013, https://spacenews.com/36511the-inevitability-of-extraterrestrial-mining/ I am honored to provide the counterpoint to my esteemed colleague Ambassador Roger Harrison’s negative contention concerning the mining of extraterrestrial materials off of planet Earth. Let’s begin with his ending: “The conclusion is inescapable, though liable to be escaped, i.e., that raw materials will never be mined in space and sold profitably within the atmosphere or anywhere else. … Asteroids will continue unvexed in their obits, and the Moon too.” I bring a different quote, from the book “Empire Express,” the story of the intercontinental railroad, from U.S. Army Lt. Zebulon Pike, for whom Pike’s Peak is named: “In various places there were tracts of many leagues, where the wind had thrown up sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean’s rolling wave, and on which not a spear of vegetable matter existed.” Pike’s visions of sand dunes, pathless wastes and sterile soils were reported, widely read and faithfully believed by geographers. The myth became innocently embellished by subsequent visitors, especially those in the party of Maj. Stephen H. Long, who traversed the whole area in 1820. It was reported to be “an unfit residence for any but a nomad population … forever to remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, and the jackal.” The delicious irony is that Mr. Harrison today lives in the shadow of Pike’s Peak, and the U.S. Air Force Academy where he teaches is in the middle of the confidently prophesied unmolested haunt. When Long’s report was written, the Erie Canal across New York was five years from completion and it was another 31 years before the first railroad was completed across the state. Mr. Harrison’s technical objections are for the most part valid today for his scenario, just as objections to a railroad across the North American continent were valid in the 1820s. However, technology is being developed today that will enable extraterrestrial mining, manufacturing and development just as technology was developed that would enable the creation of the national railroad. Mr. Harrison says it is an illusion that we are running out of resources. He is correct. That is not our claim. The claim is that extraction costs of economically viable terrestrial resources are rising dramatically and may soon exceed the cost of extraction from much more plentiful extraterrestrial sources. Today rapidly advancing costs and diminishing returns are rapidly redefining mining due to diminishing ore grades. This fact is developed in a 2012 distinguished lecture by Dan Wood before the Society of Environmental Geologists, “Crucial Challenges to Discovery and Mining — Tomorrow’s Deeper Ore Bodies.” This is a vitally important issue to solve as resource conflict has been the impetus for most wars in human history. We live in a global civilization of over 7 billion people, which will expand to over 9 billion before plateauing in mid-century. While American politicians are not paying attention to what this means, the rest of the world is noticing. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth and increasing global resource demand are addressed in “Iron Ore Outlook 2050,” a report commissioned for the Indian government. The GDP of the major powers (the United States, Europe, China, India and Japan) is forecast to rise from $48 trillion in 2010 to $149 trillion by 2050. The report’s substance is that with this massive increase in global GDP, an intensifying scramble for metal resources is inevitable. If the trend of resource consumption demand increase continues unabated, there are three likely potential outcomes. The first is collapse, forecast by the “Limits to Growth” school of thought. The second and more likely scenario is fierce national economic competition leading to wars over diminishing resources. The third, and most desirable, is to increase the global resource base by the economic and industrial development of the inner solar system. Mr. Harrison uses cost as the primary reason that extraterrestrial mining will never happen by focusing on a straw man argument related to mining asteroids in orbits far from Earth. Just as the U.S. railroad infrastructure began on shorter routes with lower capital requirements and shorter payback periods, asteroid mining can begin with our nearest neighbor, the Moon, where telepresence robotics, high-bandwidth communications and a short three-day trip for humans negate his premise. We know from the Apollo samples that plentiful metallic asteroidal materials exist in the lunar highlands. We also know from several missions that extensive water, titanium, thorium, uranium, aluminum and native iron all exist on the Moon, in easily separable oxide form. Improvements in remote sensing data from current missions and computer modeling continue to increase the amount of potential asteroidal material on the Moon, increasing confidence in the Moon first premise. The extensive resources of the Moon become the catalyst for an inner solar system-wide economy providing fuel, vehicles and the all-important experience in developing an industrial infrastructure off planet. The asteroids then become the force multiplier of inner solar system development with billions of tons of water, metals and free space energy from solar power. Mars figures in here as well as the second home of humanity, creating further demand for asteroidal resources, and providing something else that is becoming increasingly scarce on the Earth: hope for the future. The technical barriers that Mr. Harrison points to are being overcome just as those of the 19th century were. New technology developments in 3-D printing, additive manufacturing and advanced robotics are breaking down the final barriers to exploiting off-planet resources and indeed the industrial development of the inner solar system. It is not a question if, it is a question of when, and by whom. Just as the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 was a primary catalyst for a century of American economic growth, it should be the role of government to develop policies and concrete legislation to support this development for the continued health of the American economy and the future of all mankind. Those Conflicts go Nuclear Klare 13 – Michael T., professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, DC, " How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion", The Nation, 4/22/2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/how-resource-scarcity-and-climate-change-could-produce-global-explosion/ JHW Resource Shortages and Resource Wars Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction and war. It is important to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources—particular species of fish, animals and trees, for example—will become less abundant in the decades to come, and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilization like oil, uranium and copper will simply prove harder and more costly to acquire, leading to supply bottlenecks and periodic shortages. Oil—the single most important commodity in the international economy—provides an apt example. Although global oil supplies may actually grow in the coming decades, many experts doubt that they can be expanded sufficiently to meet the needs of a rising global middle class that is, for instance, expected to buy millions of new cars in the near future. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104 million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied. This, the report suggested, would be thanks in large part to additional supplies of “unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found” and “yet to be developed.” However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs (for energy that will be ever more difficult and costly to extract), environmental opposition, warfare, corruption and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to achieve increases of this magnitude. In other words, even if production manages for a time to top the 2010 level of 87 million barrels per day, the goal of 104 million barrels will never be reached and the world’s major consumers will face virtual, if not absolute, scarcity. Water provides another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant: about 40,000 cubic kilometers. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia and inner Amazonia where there are very few people, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, where the demand for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanization and the emergence of new water-intensive industries. The result, even when the supply remains constant, is an environment of increasing scarcity. Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity—or imminent scarcity—regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility and contentiousness. This pattern is very well understood, and has been evident throughout human history. In his book Constant Battles, for example, Steven LeBlanc, director of collections for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, notes that many ancient civilizations experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth, crop failures or persistent drought. Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller Collapse, has detected a similar pattern in Mayan civilization and the Anasazi culture of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. More recently, concern over adequate food for the home population was a significant factor in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Germany’s invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, according to Lizzie Collingham, author of The Taste of War. Although the global supply of most basic commodities has grown enormously since the end of World War II, analysts see the persistence of resource-related conflict in areas where materials remain scarce or there is anxiety about the future reliability of supplies. Many experts believe, for example, that the fighting in Darfur and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for access to scarce water supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels. “In Darfur,” says a 2009 report from the UN Environment Programme on the role of natural resources in the conflict, “recurrent drought, increasing demographic pressures, and political marginalization are among the forces that have pushed the region into a spiral of lawlessness and violence that has led to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than two million people since 2003.” Anxiety over future supplies is often also a factor in conflicts that break out over access to oil or control of contested undersea reserves of oil and natural gas. In 1979, for instance, when the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Washington began to fear that someday it might be denied access to Persian Gulf oil. At that point, President Jimmy Carter promptly announced what came to be called the Carter Doctrine. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter affirmed that any move to impede the flow of oil from the Gulf would be viewed as a threat to America’s “vital interests” and would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In 1990, this principle was invoked by President George H.W. Bush to justify intervention in the first Persian Gulf War, just as his son would use it, in part, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, it remains the basis for US plans to employ force to stop the Iranians from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean through which about 35 percent of the world’s seaborne oil commerce passes. Recently, a set of resource conflicts have been rising toward the boiling point between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia when it comes to control of offshore oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea. Although the resulting naval clashes have yet to result in a loss of life, a strong possibility of military escalation exists. A similar situation has also arisen in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are jousting for control over similarly valuable undersea reserves. Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Argentina and Britain are once again squabbling over the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentinians) because oil has been discovered in surrounding waters. By all accounts, resource-driven potential conflicts like these will only multiply in the years ahead as demand rises, supplies dwindle and more of what remains will be found in disputed areas. In a 2012 study titled Resources Futures, the respected British think-tank Chatham House expressed particular concern about possible resource wars over water, especially in areas like the Nile and Jordan River basins where several groups or countries must share the same river for the majority of their water supplies and few possess the wherewithal to develop alternatives. “Against this backdrop of tight supplies and competition, issues related to water rights, prices, and pollution are becoming contentious,” the report noted. “In areas with limited capacity to govern shared resources, balance competing demands, and mobilize new investments, tensions over water may erupt into more open confrontations.” Heading for a Resource-Shock World Tensions like these would be destined to grow by themselves because in so many areas supplies of key resources will not be able to keep up with demand. As it happens, though, they are not “by themselves.” On this planet, a second major force has entered the equation in a significant way. With the growing reality of climate change, everything becomes a lot more terrifying. Normally, when we consider the impact of climate change, we think primarily about the environment—the melting Arctic ice cap or Greenland ice shield, rising global sea levels, intensifying storms, expanding desert and endangered or disappearing species like the polar bear. But a growing number of experts are coming to realize that the most potent effects of climate change will be experienced by humans directly through the impairment or wholesale destruction of habitats upon which we rely for food production, industrial activities or simply to live. Essentially, climate change will wreak its havoc on us by constraining our access to the basics of life: vital resources that include food, water, land and energy. This will be devastating to human life, even as it significantly increases the danger of resource conflicts of all sorts erupting. We already know enough about the future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence: * Rising sea levels will in the next half-century erase many coastal areas, destroying large cities, critical infrastructure (including roads, railroads, ports, airports, pipelines, refineries and power plants) and prime agricultural land. * Diminished rainfall and prolonged droughts will turn once-verdant croplands into dust bowls, reducing food output and turning millions into “climate refugees.” * More severe storms and intense heat waves will kill crops, trigger forest fires, cause floods and destroy critical infrastructure. No one can predict how much food, land, water and energy will be lost as a result of this onslaught (and other climate-change effects that are harder to predict or even possibly imagine), but the cumulative effect will undoubtedly be staggering. In Resources Futures, Chatham House offers a particularly dire warning when it comes to the threat of diminished precipitation to rain-fed agriculture. “By 2020,” the report says, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50” in some areas. The highest rates of loss are expected to be in Africa, where reliance on rain-fed farming is greatest, but agriculture in China, India, Pakistan and Central Asia is also likely to be severely affected. Heat waves, droughts and other effects of climate change will also reduce the flow of many vital rivers, diminishing water supplies for irrigation, hydro-electricity power facilities and nuclear reactors (which need massive amounts of water for cooling purposes). The melting of glaciers, especially in the Andes in Latin America and the Himalayas in South Asia, will also rob communities and cities of crucial water supplies. An expected increase in the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons will pose a growing threat to offshore oil rigs, coastal refineries, transmission lines and other components of the global energy system. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will open that region to oil and gas exploration, but an increase in iceberg activity will make all efforts to exploit that region’s energy supplies perilous and exceedingly costly. Longer growing seasons in the north, especially Siberia and Canada’s northern provinces, might compensate to some degree for the desiccation of croplands in more southerly latitudes. However, moving the global agricultural system (and the world’s farmers) northward from abandoned farmlands in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Argentina and Australia would be a daunting prospect. It is safe to assume that climate change, especially when combined with growing supply shortages, will result in a significant reduction in the planet’s vital resources, augmenting the kinds of pressures that have historically led to conflict, even under better circumstances. In this way, according to the Chatham House report, climate change is best understood as a “threat multiplier…a key factor exacerbating existing resource vulnerability” in states already prone to such disorders. Like other experts on the subject, Chatham House’s analysts claim, for example, that climate change will reduce crop output in many areas, sending global food prices soaring and triggering unrest among those already pushed to the limit under existing conditions. “Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heat waves and floods, will also result in much larger and frequent local harvest shocks around the world….These shocks will affect global food prices whenever key centers of agricultural production area are hit—further amplifying global food price volatility.” This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of civil unrest. When, for instance, a brutal heat wave decimated Russia’s wheat crop during the summer of 2010, the global price of wheat (and so of that staple of life, bread) began an inexorable upward climb, reaching particularly high levels in North Africa and the Middle East. With local governments unwilling or unable to help desperate populations, anger over impossible-to-afford food merged with resentment toward autocratic regimes to trigger the massive popular outburst we know as the Arab Spring. Many such explosions are likely in the future, Chatham House suggests, if current trends continue as climate change and resource scarcity meld into a single reality in our world. A single provocative question from that group should haunt us all: “Are we on the cusp of a new world order dominated by struggles over access to affordable resources?” For the US intelligence community, which appears to have been influenced by the report, the response was blunt. In March, for the first time, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper listed “competition and scarcity involving natural resources” as a national security threat on a par with global terrorism, cyberwar and nuclear proliferation. “Many countries important to the United States are vulnerable to natural resource shocks that degrade economic development, frustrate attempts to democratize, raise the risk of regime-threatening instability, and aggravate regional tensions,” he wrote in his prepared statement for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.” There was a new phrase embedded in his comments: “resource shocks.” It catches something of the world we’re barreling toward, and the language is striking for an intelligence community that, like the government it serves, has largely played down or ignored the dangers of climate change. For the first time, senior government analysts may be coming to appreciate what energy experts, resource analysts and scientists have long been warning about: the unbridled consumption of the world’s natural resources, combined with the advent of extreme climate change, could produce a global explosion of human chaos and conflict. We are now heading directly into a resource-shock world. Mining solves Water Shortages Kean 15 Sam Kean December 2015 "The End of Thirst" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-end-of-thirst/413176/ (writer based in Washington DC for the Atlantic)Elmer Imagine turning on your tap and seeing no water come out. Or looking down into your village’s only well and finding it dust-dry. Much of the developing world could soon face such a scenario. According to the United Nations, 1.2 billion people already suffer from severe water shortages, and that number is expected to increase to 1.8 billion over the next decade, in part because of climate change. Developed countries probably won’t be immune. California and other states in the western U.S. are already experiencing extreme drought, and climate experts warn of even worse to come—multi-decade megadroughts. Mass migrations and wars over freshwater loom as real possibilities. Staving off disaster will require conservation, especially in agriculture, which consumes more than two-thirds of all the water humans use. Basic infrastructure maintenance would also go a long way: Some developing countries lose more than half their water through leaky pipes. But conservation and maintenance won’t solve all our water woes, especially as the planet warms and people continue to pack into cities. As a result, governments around the world are investing in new water-recycling and water-harvesting technologies. Here’s what the future of water might look like. 1. Drinking From the Sea … One obvious solution would be to drink ocean water. Converting seawater into freshwater by stripping out the salt—a process called desalination—offers several advantages. Roughly half the world’s population lives within 65 miles of an ocean, and saltwater accounts for about 97 percent of all water on Earth. Still, desalination presents obstacles. Older plants that boil seawater and collect the vapors, as many of those in the Middle East do, use ungodly amounts of energy. Newer plants that use reverse osmosis—whereby seawater is forced through membranes at high pressure—are more efficient, but still expensive and energy-intensive. The process also produces a briny waste that can harm marine life if not disposed of properly. We can nevertheless expect to see more desalination plants soon—thanks in part to Israel, which all but eliminated its chronic water shortages in the past decade by building four large reverse-osmosis plants, inspiring other countries to follow suit. A $1 billion plant operated by an Israeli company is about to open north of San Diego; it will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, providing up to 50 million gallons of water a day to Californians. 2. … Or From the Toilet Instead of desalination, some experts favor recycling wastewater—cleaning the water from showers, washing machines, and, yes, toilets—for human consumption. Most water-recycling plants clean water in two basic ways. First, they force it through filters, some of which have holes hundreds of times narrower than a strand of human hair. These filters remove waste particles, organic chemicals, bacteria, viruses, and other dreck. Second, chemicals like hydrogen peroxide or ozone and pulses of ultraviolet light destroy any pathogens that have slipped through. Water recycling is a proven technology: California recycles hundreds of millions of gallons each day for irrigation and other uses. So what’s stopping recycled wastewater from going directly to our taps? Human psychology. The very idea of drinking it disgusts many people. They view such water as irredeemably dirty, little better than toilet water. In reality, recycled water is some of the cleanest drinking water around—as good as or better than the best bottled water. (Breweries in Oregon and California have plans to make beer with recycled water for this very reason—it’s so clean that it’s tasteless, a blank slate.) More to the point, recycled water is far purer than most tap water. By the time the water in the Mississippi reaches New Orleans, for instance, every drop has been used by cities along the river multiple times, and the treatment it gets before going through the taps is nowhere near as extensive as what a water-recycling plant provides. Singapore and Namibia have recycled water for years with no adverse health effects, and nasa began recycling water on the International Space Station in 2008. (The Russian cosmonauts there don’t recycle their pee, but they give the Americans bags of it to recycle and then drink.) In the United States, a few parched towns in Texas and New Mexico drink recycled wastewater already, and last year the city of San Diego—which gets most of its water from rivers that are running dry—approved a $3 billion recycling plant that would provide one-third of its tap water, 83 million gallons a day, by 2035. San Diego had rejected essentially the same plan in 1998, but this time the city decided it had no other choice. 3. Microbe Power Rather than filtering out organic waste, water-recycling plants might one day be able to break it down with microbes, a process that could bring an ancillary benefit: electric power. As they digest the gunk in wastewater, certain species of bacteria, called electricigens, can liberate electrons, the stuff of electricity. Producing electrons is actually common in nature—much of photosynthesis involves shuttling them around. Unlike plants, though, electricigens don’t store electrons internally. They use microscopic appendages that look like hairs to deposit the electrons onto external surfaces, usually minerals. In experimental fuel cells, scientists have replaced the minerals with wires and harvested electrons. Someday the bacteria might even generate enough power to run a water-recycling plant, making it self-sufficient. 4. Keeping It Simple Some up-and-coming water technologies are startlingly straightforward. People on arid plateaus, for instance, can string a fine plastic mesh between two posts and use it to capture water from fog that rolls through, collecting the drops in storage tanks. Existing systems in one small Guatemalan village can collect 6,300 liters a day, and more during the wet season. Scientists think that updating the mesh with new materials and tighter weaves could dramatically improve yields. People could even channel the water into hydroponic gardens to grow food. Imagine famously foggy San Francisco with a farm on every rooftop. Oil films present another low-tech opportunity. Reservoirs lose appalling amounts of water to evaporation: By some estimates, more water escapes into the air than is used by humans. But covering the surface with an extremely thin layer—even just one molecule thick—of nontoxic chemicals derived from coconut or palm oil can cut evaporative losses. Wind tends to break up layers of oil, re-exposing the water to the elements. But drones or blimps equipped with sensors could someday monitor reservoirs and signal where oil needed to be re-applied. In one recent test, spreading oil over a lake in Texas (via boats) appears to have cut evaporation by about 15 percent. 5. Making It Rain Of course, for every modest proposal to save water, there’s an audacious one floating around. Take weather modification. Advocates of the idea hope to significantly boost precipitation using a process called “cloud seeding”: spraying clouds with a chemical like silver iodide, which acts as a nucleus around which water droplets collect. The droplets then fall to Earth as rain or snow. That’s the theory, at least. The first large-scale experiments, in the 1940s, generated a lot of excitement. More recently, weather modification has been dogged by accusations of hype and questions about its reliability. A six-year program in Wyoming claimed to have squeezed 5 to 15 percent more precipitation out of the clouds it seeded. Unfortunately, conditions were suitable for seeding only 30 percent of the time, so the total increase in precipitation was closer to 3 percent. That’s not nothing, especially during droughts. But weather modification may be the flying car of water technology—a tantalizing idea that’s forever on the horizon. 6. The Moon Shot If Earth does run dry, we might be able to save ourselves by mining water from asteroids and comets. Scientists have landed probes on these space rocks to study them. Future landers could mine them in deep space or possibly even drag them back toward Earth. Though the idea sounds far-fetched, space-mining companies already exist, and one of them, Planetary Resources, expects to start harvesting resources from asteroids in about a decade. According to Planetary Resources, a single 1,600-foot-wide asteroid could yield more platinum than has ever been mined in human history. But water could prove to be the real prize for space-mining companies. Some astronomers believe that the asteroid Ceres, which sits between Jupiter and Mars, may contain more freshwater (as ice) than all of Earth does. In addition to quenching people’s thirst, this water could be turned into fuel for interplanetary spaceships. In that case, an ample supply of water would be the key to a happy future not just down here on the ground, but up among the stars as well. Indo-Pak Water War goes Nuclear Klare 20 — Five College professor emeritus of peace and world security studies, and director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies (PAWSS), holds a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the Union Institute. (Michael; Published: 2020; "Climate Change, Water Scarcity, and the Potential for Interstate Conflict in South Asia"; Journal of Strategic Security 13, No. 4, Pages 109-122; https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.4.1826 Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol13/iss4/8)//CYang Interstate conflict over water might occur, the ICA indicated, when several states rely on a shared river system for much of their water supply and one or more of the riparian states sought to maximize the river’s flow for their own benefit at the expense of other states in the basin, amplifying any scarcities already present there. “We judge that as water shortages become more acute beyond the next ten years, water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage,” the ICA stated. An upstream state enjoying superior control over a river’s flow might exploit its advantage, say, to extract advantage in international negotiations or to attract international aid for infrastructure projects. As the ICA further noted, “…we assess that states will also use their inherent ability to construct and support major water projects to obtain regional influence or preserve their water interests.”16 The utilization of a state’s superior position in a shared river system to extract political or economic advantage can prove especially destabilizing, the ICA suggested, when weaker states in the system (typically the downstream countries) are especially vulnerable to water scarcity because of long-standing social, economic, and political conditions. Without identifying any particular states by name, the study suggested that this could occur when downstream states suffer from endemic corruption, poor water management practices, and systemic favoritism when it comes to the allocation of scarce water supplies. In such cases, any reduction in the flow of water by an upstream country could easily combine with internal factors in a downstream country to provoke widespread unrest and conflict. “Water shortages, and government failures to manage them, are likely to lead to social disruptions, pressure on national and local leaders, and potentially political instability,” the report noted.17 Although most discussion of the climate and water security nexus has continued to emphasize the risk of internal conflict arising from warming-related water scarcities, some analysts have pursued the line of inquiry introduced by the 2012 ICA, focusing on interstate tensions arising within shared river basins. This was a prominent theme, for example, of a 2013 study conducted by the National Research Council (NRC) on behalf of the IC. Entitled Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis, the 2013 NRC report sought to better identify the links between global warming, pre-existing social vulnerabilities, and the likelihood of conflict. While it echoed earlier studies by the CNA and NIC in identifying internal factors like poverty, ethnic discord, and governmental ineptitude as likely pre-conditions for climate-related conflict, it also examined dangers arising from dependence on shared river systems, especially in cases where cooperation among the riparian powers in managing the system is limited and global warming is expected to reduce future water flows.18 For the NRC, the river systems of greatest concern in this respect were those that originate in the Himalayan Mountains and depend, for a significant share of the annual flow, on meltwater from the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers are an important source of meltwater for many of Asia’s major rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong Rivers. These rivers originate in China but travel through India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam—countries with a combined population of over 3.4 billion people, or approximately 44 percent of the world’s total population.19 A large share of the population in these countries depends on agriculture for its livelihood, so ensuring access to adequate supplies of water is a prime local and national priority. During the monsoon season, heavy rains provide these rivers with abundant water, but during dry seasons they are dependent on glacial meltwater—and, with the rise in global temperatures, the Himalayan glaciers are melting, jeopardizing future water availability in these river basins. Given a history of ethnic and social discord within many of these countries and long-standing tensions among them, analysts fear that such shortages could aggravate both internal and external tensions and ignite interstate as well as intrastate conflict.20 As was the case of previous IC-initiated studies, the authors of the 2013 NRC report were reluctant to identify specific countries in their findings, referring again to “countries of security concern” or other such euphemisms. However, they did select one of these countries in particular: Pakistan. They chose that country for special analysis, the report indicated, because “Pakistan presents a clear example of a country where social dynamics and susceptibility to harm from climate events combine to create a potentially unstable situation.”21 Pakistan was said to suffer from multiple risk factors: Its economy is largely dependent on agriculture; much of the water used for irrigation purposes comes from just one source, the Indus River; control over the allocation of irrigation waters is often exercised by privileged elites, leaving millions of Pakistanis vulnerable to water shortages; and much of the water flowing into the Indus comes from China or from tributaries originating in India, leaving Pakistan in an unfavorable (downstream) position in the system. These conditions have led, in the past, to internal squabbles over water rights and to tensions with India over control of the Indus; now, with the likelihood of diminished meltwater from the Himalayan glaciers, the risk of water scarcity triggering violent conflict of one sort or another becomes that much greater.22 Pakistan, the Indus, and U.S. Security There is no doubt that Pakistan is considered by U.S. security analysts as a “state important to U.S. national security interests,” the term used by the Defense Intelligence Agency to describe countries of concern in the 2012 ICA on water. Not only is Pakistan a critical—if not always wholehearted—partner in the global war on terror, but it also possesses a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons whose security is a matter of enormous concern to American leaders.23 Should those munitions wind up with rogue elements of the Pakistani military (some of whose members are believed to maintain clandestine links to radical Islamic organizations), or even worse, should Pakistan descend into civil war and the weapons fall into untrustworthy or hostile hands, the safety of India and other US allies—as well as of American forces deployed in the region—would be at grave risk.24 Ensuring Pakistan’s stability therefore, has long been a major U.S. security objective, prompting regular deliveries of American arms and other military aid. Yet, despite billions of dollars in American aid, Pakistan remains vulnerable to social and ethnic internal strife.25 As noted, farming is the principal economic activity in Pakistan, and ensuring access to water is an overarching public and government concern. This means, above all, managing the use of the Indus—the country’s main source of water for irrigation and its major source of power for electricity generation. Pakistan’s rising population and growing cities, with their rings of factories, are placing an immense strain on the Indus, leading to competition between farmers, industrialists, and urban consumers. With water and power shortages becoming an increasingly frequent aspect of daily life, public protests—sometimes turning violent—have erupted across the country. In one particularly intense bout of rioting, following a prolonged power outage in June 2012, protestors burned trains, blocked roads, looted shops, and damaged banks and gas stations.26 However bad things might be in Pakistan today, climate change is likely to make conditions far worse in the years ahead. Prolonged droughts, climate scientists believe, will occur with increasing regularity, posing a severe threat to the nation’s agricultural sector and further reducing the supply of hydroelectric power. At the same time, warming is expected to increase the intensity of monsoon downpours, resulting in massive flooding (as occurred in 2010) and the loss of valuable topsoil, further adding to Pakistan’s woes. As the Himalayan glaciers melt, moreover, water flow through the Indus will diminish.27 With the competition for land and water resources bound to increase and with Pakistan already divided along ethnic and religious lines, widespread civil strife will become ever more likely, possibly jeopardizing the survival of the state. It is impossible to predict exactly how the United States might respond to a systemic breakdown of state governance in Pakistan. One thing is clear, however: At the earliest sign that the country’s nuclear weapons are at risk of falling into the hands of hostile parties, the American military would respond with decisive force. In fact, research conducted by the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) has revealed that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and specialized Army units have been training for such contingencies for some time and have deployed all the necessary gear to the region. In the event of a coup or crisis, the NTI revealed, “U.S. forces would rush into the country, crossing borders, rappelling down from helicopters, and parachuting out of airplanes, so they can secure known or suspected nuclear-storage sites.” Recognizing that any such actions by American forces could trigger widespread resistance by the Pakistani army and/or various jihadist groups, the U.S. Central Command, which has authority over all American forces in the region, has developed plans for backing up JSOC personnel with full-scale military support.28 Another scenario that has some analysts worried is the possibility that a time of sharply reduced water flow through the Indus will coincide with efforts by India to exploit its advantageous position as the upper riparian on three key tributaries of the Indus—the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej—to divert water for its own use, thereby depriving downstream Pakistan of vital supplies and provoking a war between these two countries. India was granted control over the three tributaries under the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, and various Indian leaders have threatened at times to dam the rivers or otherwise reduce their flow into Pakistan as a reprisal for Pakistani attacks on Indian bases in the disputed territory of Kashmir (through which the tributaries flow); this, in turn, has provoked counter-threats from Pakistani leaders.29 What analysts fear most, in such a situation, is that India, possessing superior conventional forces, would overpower Pakistan’s equivalent armies, leading Pakistan’s leaders to order the use of nuclear weapons against India, igniting a regional nuclear war. Such a conflict, scientists have calculated, would result in 50 to 125 million fatalities, and produce a dust cloud covering much of the Earth, decimating global agriculture—an outcome with enormous implications for American national security.30
1/22/22
JF - Non-ownership CP
Tournament: Cal Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Denver East MB | Judge: Jacob Lugo CP Text - States should declare that public guardianship obligations created by the non-ownership doctrine necessitate a reduction in private actor appropriation of Outer Space. Implementation of public trust doctrine protection will be arbitrary and capricious which ensures ecological harm. The counterplans application of non-ownership solves better and competes. Adler 05, Dean College of Law at Utah (Robert, The Law at the Water's Edge: Limits to ""Ownership"" of Aquatic Ecosystems, in Wet Growth: Should Water Law Control Land Use?, pg. 244) There are several other ways in which the non-ownership doctrine as applied to aquatic ecosystem resources and values differs from the existing public trust doctrine and is likely to be a superior tool to protect those resources and values. First, while some courts have endeavored to "unshackle" the public trust doctrine from its historic limits, the doctrine is, for the most part, constrained by those artificial geographic boundaries, and litigants seeking to enforce the public trust face a significant burden to overcome those presumed boundaries. The non-ownership doctrine and its implied government guardianship is defined not by artificial geographic limits but by actual determinations of the degree to which aquatic ecosystem values and services exist. Second, as explained above, the nature of the guardianship duty is a more logical model for government control of resources that cannot be owned and suggests that those resources must be protected and cannot be conveyed either for private economic gain or for public economic gain at the expense of ecological harms. Third, and most importantly, relative to the public trust doctrine the burden of proof should be flipped. Rather than requiring the government to prove that it owns or otherwise controls a resource under the public trust doctrine in order to justify protection, a landowner presumptively has no rights to impair ecosystem components, values, or services in a significant way, meaning the burden of proof is on the landowner to demonstrate ownership rights, and not vice versa. Like the public trust doctrine, of course, the "non-ownership" doctrine could suffer the fate of other efforts to develop rules of resource protection through a state-by-state and case-by-case approach, with the possibility of the same type of doctrinal fragmentation among states. For several reasons, however, the legal doctrine of "non-ownership" could avoid this common-law odyssey. First, the non-ownership doctrine was pronounced by the Court in Hughes as a matter of federal law in the context of a constitutional ruling. If the Court were to apply that same doctrine in the context of a constitutional takings challenge, it could achieve national status without the need for an uncertain crosscountry journey. While the public trust doctrine often is attributed to the Court's rulings in cases like Illinois Central and Shively v. Bowlby, in fact it had its origins in earlier state cases, and the Court has ruled that the geographic reach and other aspects of the public trust doctrine are a matter of state law. It was this perhaps unfortunate conclusion that has relegated the public trust doctrine to such an uncertain fate. Second, with due respect to the tremendous innovation and influence of the modern rejuvenation of the public trust doctrine, in addition to the inherent limitations discussed above, its application to a larger geography and a broader scope of trust resources relies heavily on a somewhat subjective, amorphous set of judgments about what advances public trust values and how those values should be balanced against other resources and values, both public and private. To be sure, application of the "non-ownership" doctrine will require sometimes difficult case by case judgments, as do virtually all efforts to protect ecological resources, whether judicial or regulatory in method. The core governing principle of non-ownership, however, is amenable to a far greater degree of uniformity. As a matter of law, once it is recognized that private-property rights do not include the right to destroy or degrade aquatic ecosystem resources, the role of government as guardian of those resources, whether through judicial or regulatory action, is less open to the type of discretion that characterizes the public trust doctrine. Under the guardianship principle, the government's role is to protect, not to choose from among a large number of potentially competing uses. The counterplan and the plan are mutually exclusive – application of the public trust doctrine establishes ownership while the counterplan is explicitly non-ownership. Severance permutations should be rejected because they eliminate all counterplan net benefits and disprove desirability of the plan Adler 05, Dean College of Law at Utah (Robert, The Law at the Water's Edge: Limits to ""Ownership"" of Aquatic Ecosystems, in Wet Growth: Should Water Law Control Land Use?, pg. 244) 4. "Non-Ownership" of Wildlife: Consequences and Implications Several legal implications flow from the realization that states do not own wildlife populations but can regulate their use under inherent police power authority. First, and most obviously, if the sovereign cannot "own" wildlife species or populations (as opposed to individual members of a species when lawfully captured or killed under relevant federal and state laws and regulations), a fortiori neither do private landowners. This corollary, of course, is entirely consistent with the traditional "capture" doctrine in wildlife law, but for different and more fundamental reasons. Under traditional principles, individuals cannot own wildlife until it is reduced to physical possession, and hence control, through lawful kill or capture. Under the non-ownership doctrine as announced in Hughes and its predecessors, wildlife in its natural state is inherently incapable of ownership. Indeed, such ownership would then be inconsistent with the state's more appropriate status as a legal guardian of wildlife resources. If the state "owned" wildlife in the sense that one can own a mineral, presumably it would have the power to deplete it entirely if it determines that it is in the state's (and society's) best economic or other interests to do so. 207 If it only has the authority to regulate and protect the resource "as between a State and its inhabitants," it does so more in the position of a legal guardian rather than as a trustee "owner" with the rights normally attendant thereto. The guardianship analogy is still imperfect, but it is superior to the public trust notion with respect to the nonhuman values inherent in wildlife and other ecosystem resources and to the extent that those natural objects are viewed as having rights of their own. As a matter of property law, a "trustee ... has title to trust property; a guardian of property does not have title to the property, but has only certain powers and duties to deal therewith for the benefit of the ward, the ward having title to the property. "208 The state as guardian cannot confer on private individuals, through its system of property law or otherwise, an ownership interest in what it is guarding. Nor can it simply dispose of that "property." ln contrast, dispositions of trust property are restricted.
2/20/22
JF - Precision Ag DA
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: St Agnes EH | Judge: Eric He Starlink is key to Precision Ag – key to food sustainability and increasing food supply to account for exponential population growth. Greensight 21 3-15-2021 "Can Starlink Save the World by Connecting Farms?" https://www.greensightag.com/logbook/can-starlink-save-the-world-by-connecting-farms/ (Data Management Consulting Firm)Elmer GreenSight innovates in a number of different areas, but one of the areas we are most passionate about is in agriculture. We’ve deployed our drone intelligence systems all over the world at all sorts of different facilities. One of the most challenging has been deployments at farms, and one of the biggest challenges has been connectivity. Connected farms are a requirement to feed the world, and Starlink will make that happen. Most urban and suburban households in the United States have had easy and reasonably inexpensive access to high speed internet access for 20 years. It is easy to forget that the situation is not the same for rural areas of the country. Many areas have no access to high speed, “broadband”, internet access, with some having only dialup internet access in their homes. According to the 2015 FCC broadband report, only 53 of rural households have access to high speed internet, even using low standards for “high” speed. On average farms have even less access, and that doesn’t even include high speed connectivity out in their fields. Cellular service is spotty especially on large farms in primarily agricultural areas, and legacy satellite systems provide slow upload speeds at expensive prices. Utilizing modern internet connected technologies and cloud based systems that require constant, high speed access can be a challenge at best and potentially impossible. A 2016 research study by Goldman and Sachs projected that by 2050, the world’s food production efficiency needs to increase by 50 to support our growing population. This paper backs up this conclusion with a lot of research, but the fundamental conclusion is that farming land area is unlikely to increase nor will the number of farmers. Increased global food production increases must come from productivity boosts. Researchers feel that productivity improvements from chemistry and genomics are unlikely to yield significant increases as they have in the past. They predict that the most likely area for these improvements are with precision farming techniques, notably precision planting and precision application of chemicals and water. The term “Precision Agriculture” was coined in the late 1960s and 1970s in seminal research that projected that in the future farming would be driven by data with inputs and practices varied and optimized based on weather, measurements from the field, and accurate year over year yield measurements. Since then, many tools and technologies have been developed that have made true precision agriculture more and more practical. Precision RTK GPS can guide equipment with precision better than an inch. Drones and satellite mapping of fields using remote sensing can map out health and detect problems with the crops. In field IoT sensors will stream live data (such as our partners Soil Scout). Soil genomics and analysis can analyze macro and micro nutrient content of the soil and track the genetics of the soil microbiome (like our friends at Trace Genomics). Robotic and automated farming equipment (like our partners at Monarch Tractor and Husqvarna are building) can vary applications and planting according to precomputed variable rate application maps. Despite all these breakthroughs, precision farming techniques still have a low penetration. There are many reasons for this (more than could be discussed in this article!) but one of them is inadequate connectivity. Most of these modern technologies rely on access to the internet and in many cases it just isn’t possible. For decades subsidies and programs have been rolled out to improve rural connectivity but the reality is that connecting up far flung areas is expensive, often labor intensive, and consequently from a pure business standpoint does not make sense for the connectivity providers. Even as infrastructure expands to more remote areas, there will always remain large swaths of rural america where conventional connectivity infrastructure is highly impractical. Most of GreenSight’s data processing is done in the cloud. Several gigabytes of imagery data are uploaded from our aircraft after every flight to be processed and delivered to our customers. Our custom artificial intelligence analyses the data and informs farmers to problem areas. From many remote farm fields, uploading can be a slow process. We’ve invested heavily in the portability of our systems and our upcoming next generation aircraft will be capable of onboard processing, but despite this connectivity will still be needed to make data available for farmers and other automated agriculture systems. Advanced sensing systems like ours have to be able to integrate with connected robotic sprayers, harvesters and tractors, unlocking the productivity potential of precision agriculture. Humanity needs precision agriculture, and connected data-driven systems will be a big part of that revolution. Beyond the global necessity, the economics for farmers work too! A 2018 USDA studies indicate that connecting US farmland will unlock $50B in industry revenue. We are extremely excited about Starlink and its potential to bring cost effective internet connectivity to farms and rural areas. Starlink levels the playing field for rural areas, enabling high speed connectivity everywhere. No longer will farmers have to wait for high speed wired connectivity to come to their area or install a complex mesh network on their property. IoT data can be streamed from fields as easily as it now streams from urban homes. Starlink will be a catalyzing force for chance, advancing access to precision agriculture globally and contributing to solving global food challenges. Food Insecurity goes nuclear – escalates multiple hotspots. Cribb 19 Julian Cribb 8-23-2019 “Food or War” https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/food-or-war/hotspots-for-food-conflict-in-the-twentyfirst-century/1CD674412E09B8E6F325C9C0A0A6778A (principal of Julian Cribb and Associates who provide specialist consultancy in the communication of science, agriculture, food, mining, energy and the environment. , His published work includes over 8000 articles, 3000 media releases and eight books. He has received 32 awards for journalism.)Elmer Future Food Wars The mounting threat to world peace posed by a food, climate and ecosystem increasingly compromised and unstable was emphasised by the US Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, in a briefing to the US Senate in early 2019. 'Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond', he said. 'Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.' Boldly, Coats delivered his warning at a time when the US President, Trump, was attempting to expunge all reference to climate from government documents. 23 Based upon these recent cases of food conflicts, and upon the lessons gleaned from the longer history of the interaction between food and war, several regions of the planet face a greatly heightened risk of conflict towards the mid twentyfirst century. Food wars often start out small, as mere quarrels over grazing rights, access to wells or as one faction trying to control food supplies and markets. However, if not resolved quickly these disputes can quickly escalate into violence, then into civil conflagrations which, if not quelled, can in turn explode into crises that reverberate around the planet in the form of soaring prices, floods of refugees and the involvement of major powers — which in turn carries the risk of transnational war. The danger is magnified by swollen populations, the effects of climate change, depletion of key resources such as water, topsoil and nutrients, the collapse of ecosystem services that support agriculture and fisheries, universal pollution, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the rise of vast megacities unable to feed themselves (Figure 5.3). Each of the world's food 'powderkeg regions' is described below, in ascending order of risk. United States In one sense, food wars have already broken out in the United States, the most overfed country on Earth. Here the issue is chiefly the growing depletion of the nation's mighty ground- water resources, especially in states using it for food production, and the contest over what remains between competing users — farmers, ranchers and Native Americans on the one hand and the oil, gas and mining industry on the other. Concern about the future of US water supplies was aggravated by a series of savage droughts in the early twentyfirst century in the west, south and midwest linked to global climate change and declining snow- pack in the Rocky Mountains, both of which affect not only agriculture but also the rate at which the nation's groundwater reserves recharge. 'Groundwater depletion has been a concern in the Southwest and High Plains for many years, but increased demands on our groundwater resources have overstressed aquifers in many areas of the Nation, not just in arid regions', notes the US Geological Survey.24 Nine US states depend on groundwater for between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of their total freshwater supplies, and five states account for nearly half of the nation's groundwater use. Major US water resources, such as the High Plains aquifers and the Pacific Northwest aquifers have sunk by 30—50 metres (100—150 feet) since exploitation began, imperilling the agricultural industries that rely on them. In the arid south- west, aquifer declines of 100—150 metres have been recorded (Figure 5.4). To take but one case, the famed Ogallala Aquifer in the High Plains region supports cropping industries worth more than US $20 billion a year and was in such a depleted state it would take more than 6000 years to replace by natural infiltration the water drawn from it by farmers in the past 150 years. As it dwindles, some farmers have tried to kick their dependence on ground- water other users, including the growing cities and towns of the region, proceeded to mine it as if there was no tomorrow.25 A study by Kansas State University concluded that so far, 30 per cent of the local groundwater had been extracted and another 39 per cent would be depleted by the mid century on existing trends in withdrawal and recharge.26 Over half the US population relies on groundwater for drinking; both rural and urban America are at risk. Cities such as New Orleans, Houston and Miami face not only rising sea levels — but also sinking land, due to the extraction of underlying ground- water. In Memphis, Tennessee, the aquifer that supplies the city's drinking water has dropped by 20 metres. Growing awareness of the risk of a nation, even one as large and technologically adept as the USA, having insufficient water to grow its food, generate its exports and supply its urban homes has fuelled tensions leading to the eruption of nationwide protests over 'fracking' for oil and gas — a process that can deplete or poison groundwater — and the building -of oil pipe- lines, which have a habit of rupturing and also polluting water resources. The boom in fracking and piping is part of a deliberate US policy to become more self-reliant in fossil fuels.27 Thus, in its anxiety to be independent of overseas energy suppliers, the USA in effect decided to barter away its future food security for current oil security — and the price of this has been a lot of angry farmers, Native Americans and concerned citizens. The depletion of US groundwater coincides with accelerating climate risk, which may raise US temperatures by as much as 4—5 oc by 2100, leading to major losses in soil moisture throughout the US grain belt, and the spread of deserts in the south and west. Food production will also be affected by fiercer storms, bigger floods, more heatwaves, an increase in drought frequency and greater impacts from crop and livestock diseases. In such a context, it is no time to be wasting stored water. The case of the USA is included in the list of world 'hot spots' for future food conflict, not because there is danger of a serious shooting war erupting over water in America in the foreseeable future, but to illustrate that even in technologically advanced countries unforeseen social tensions and crises are on the rise over basic resources like food, land and water and their depletion. This doesn't just happen in Africa or the Middle East. It's a global phenomenon. Furthermore, the USA is the world's largest food exporter and any retreat on its part will have a disproportionate effect on world food price and supply. There is still plenty of time to replan America's food systems and water usage — but, as in the case of fossil fuels and climate, rear-guard action mounted by corporate vested interests and their hired politicians may well paralyse the national will to do it. That is when the US food system could find itself at serious risk, losing access to water in a time of growing climatic disruption, caused by exactly the same forces as those depleting the groundwater: the fossil fuels sector and its political stooges. The probable effect of this will, in the first instance, be a decline in US meat and dairy production accompanied by rising prices and a fall in its feedgrain exports, with domino effects on livestock industries worldwide. The flip-side to this issue is that America's old rival, Russia, is likely to gain in both farmland and water availability as the planet warms through the twentyfirst century — and likewise Canada. Both these countries stand to prosper from a US withdrawal from world food markets, and together they may negate the effects of any US food export shortfalls. Central and South America South America is one of the world's most bountiful continents in terms of food production — but, after decades of improvement, malnutrition is once more on the rise, reaching a new peak of 42.5 million people affected in 2016. 28 'Latin America and the Caribbean used to be a worldwide example in the fight against hunger. We are now following the worrisome global trend', said regional FAO representative Julio Berdegué. 29 Paradoxically, obesity is increasing among Latin American adults, while malnutrition is rising among children. 'Although Latin America and the Caribbean produce enough food to meet the needs of their population, this does not ensure healthy and nutritious diets', the FAO explains. Worsening income inequality, poor access to food and persistent poverty are contributing to the rise in hunger and bad diets, it adds.30 'The impact of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean will be considerable because of its economic dependence on agriculture, the low adaptive capacity of its population and the geographical location of some of its countries', an FAO report warned.31 Emerging food insecurity in Central and Latin America is being driven by a toxic mixture of failing water supplies, drying farmlands, poverty, maladministration, incompetence and corruption. These issues are exacerbated by climate change, which is making the water supply issue worse for farmers and city people alike in several countries and delivering more weather disasters to agriculture. Mexico has for centuries faced periodic food scarcity, with a tenth of its people today suffering under-nutrition. In 2008 this rose to 18 per cent, leading to outbreaks of political violence. 2 In 2013, 52 million Mexicans were suffering poverty and seven million more faced extreme hunger, despite the attempts of successive governments to remedy the situation. By 2100 northern Mexico is expected to warm by 4—5 oc and southern Mexico by 1.5—2.5 oc. Large parts of the country, including Mexico City, face critical water scarcity. Mexico's cropped area could fall by 40—70 per cent by the 2030s and disappear completely by the end of the century, making it one of the world's countries most at risk from catastrophic climate change and a major potential source of climate refugees.33 The vanishing lakes and glaciers of the high Andes confront montane nations — Bolivia, Peru and Chile especially — with the spectre of growing water scarcity and declining food security. The volume of many glaciers, which provide meltwater to the region's rivers, which in turn irrigate farmland, has halved since 1975.34 Bolivia's second largest water body, the 2000 square kilometres Lake Poopo, dried out completely.35 The loss of water is attributed partly to El Niho droughts, partly to global warming and partly to over-extraction by the mining industries of the region. Chile, with 24,000 glaciers (80 per cent of all those in Latin America) is feeling the effects of their retreat and shrinkage especially, both in large cities such as the capital Santiago, and in irrigation agriculture and energy supply. Chile is rated by the World Resources Institute among the countries most likely to experience extreme water stress by 2040.36 Climate change is producing growing water and food insecurity in the 'dry corridor' of Central America, in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Here a combination of drought, major floods and soil erosion is undermining efforts to raise food production and stabilise nutrition. Food production in Venezuela began falling in the 1990s, and by the late 2010s two thirds of the population were malnourished; there was a growing flood of refugees into Colombia and other neighbouring countries. The food crisis has been variously blamed on the Venezuelan government's 'Great Leap Forward' (modelled on that of China — which also caused widespread starvation), a halving in Venezuela's oil export earnings, economic sanctions by the USA, and corruption. However, local scientists such as Nobel Laureate Professor Juan Carlos Sanchez warn that climate impacts are already striking the densely populated coastal regions with increased torrential rains, flooding and mudslides, droughts and hurricanes, while inland areas are drying out and desertifying, leading to crop failures, water scarcity and a tide of climate refugees.37 These factors will tend to deepen food insecurity towards the mid century. Venezuela's climate refugees are already making life more difficult for neighbouring countries such as Colombia. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has, in recent decades, removed around 20 per cent of its total tree cover, replacing it with dry savannah and farmland. At 40 per cent clearance and with continued global warming, scientists anticipate profound changes in the local climate, towards a drying trend, which will hammer the agriculture that has replaced the forest.38 Brazil has already wiped out the once- vast Mata Atlantica forest along its eastern coastline, and this region is now drying, with resultant water stress for both farming and major cities like Säo Paulo. Brazil's outlook for 2100 is for further drying — tied to forest loss as well as global climate change — increased frequency of drought and heatwaves, major fires and acute water scarcity in some regions. Moreover, as the Amazon basin dries out, if will release vast quantities of C02 from its peat swamps and rainforest soils. These are thought to contain in excess of three billion tonnes of carbon and could cause a significant acceleration in global warming, affecting everyone on Earth. 39 Latin America is the world capital of private armies, with as many as 50 major guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, terrorist, indigenous and criminal insurgencies over the past half century exemplified in familiar names like the Sandanistas (Nicaragua), FARC (Colombia) and Shining Path (Peru). 40 Many of these drew their initial inspiration from the international communist movement of the mid twentieth century, while others are right-wing groups set up in opposition to them or else represent land rights movements of disadvantaged groups. However, all these movements rely for oxygen on simmering public discontent with ineffectual or corrupt governments and lack of fair access to food, land and water generally. In other words, the tendency of South and Central America towards internal armed conflict is supercharged significantly by failings in the food system which generate public anger, leading to sympathy and support for anyone seen to be challenging the incumbent regimes. This is not to suggest that feeding every person well would end all insurgencies — but it would certainly take the wind of popular support out of a lot of their sails. In that sense the revolutionary tendency of South America echoes the preconditions for revolution in France and Russia in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Central Asia The risk of wars breaking out over water, energy and food insecurity in Central Asia is high.41 Here, the five main players — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — face swelling populations, crumbling Soviet-era infrastructure, flagging resource cooperation, a degrading land- scape, deteriorating food availability and a changing climate. At the heart of the issue and the region's increasingly volatile politics is water: 'Without water in the region's two great rivers — the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya — vital crops in the down- stream agricultural powerhouses would die. Without power, life in the upstream countries would be unbearable in the freezing winters' , wrote Rustam Qobil. Central Asia's water crisis first exploded onto the global consciousness with the drying of the Aral Sea — the world's fourth largest lake — from the mid 1960s43, following the damming and draining of major rivers such as the Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Naryn. It was hastened by a major drought in 200844 exacerbated by climate change, which is melting the 'water tower' of glacial ice stored in the Tien Shan, Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain ranges that feed the region's rivers. The Tien Shan alone holds 10,000 glaciers, all of them in retreat, losing an estimated 223 million cubic metres a year. At such a rate of loss the region's rivers will run dry within a generation.45 Lack of water has already delivered a body blow to Central Asia's efforts to modernise its agriculture, adding further tension to regional disputes over food, land and water. 'Water has always been a major cause of wars and border conflicts in the Central Asian region', policy analyst Fuad Shahbazov warned. This potential for conflict over water has been exacerbated by disputes over the Fergana valley, the region's greatest foodbowl, which underwent a 32 per cent surge in population in barely ten years — while more and more of it turned to desert.46 The Central Asian region is ranked by the World Resources Institute as one of the world's most perilously water-stressed regions to 2040 (Figure 5.6). With their economies hitting rock bottom, corrupt and autocratic governments that prefer to blame others for their problems and growing quarrels over food, land, energy and water, the 'Stans' face 'a perfect storm', Nate Shenkkan wrote in the journal Foreign Policy 47 Increased meddling by Russia and China is augmenting the explosive mix: China regards Central Asia as a key component of its 'Belt and Road' initiative intended to expand its global influence, whereas Russia hopes to lure the region back into its own economic sphere. Their rival investments may help limit some of the problems faced by Central Asia — or they may unlock a fresh cycle of political feuding, turmoil and regime change.48 A 2017 FAO report found 14.3 million people — one in every five — in Central Asia did not have enough to eat and a million faced actual starvation, children especially. It noted that after years of steady improvement, the situation was deteriorating. This combination of intractable and deteriorating factors makes Central Asia a serious internal war risk towards the mid twentyfirst century, with involvement by superpowers raising the danger of international conflict and mass refugee flight. The Middle East The Middle East is the most water-stressed region on Earth (see Figure 5.5 above). It is 'particularly vulnerable to climate change. It is one of the world's most water-scarce and dry regions, with a high dependency on climate-sensitive agriculture and a large share of its population and economic activity in flood-prone urban coastal zones', according to the World Bank. 49 The Middle East — consisting of the 22 countries of the Arab League, Turkey and Iran — has very low levels of natural rainfall to begin with. Most of it has 600 millimetres or less per year and is classed as arid. 'The Middle East and North Africa MENA is a global hotspot of unsustainable water use, especially of ground- water. In some countries, more than half of current water withdrawals exceed what is naturally available', the Bank said in a separate report on water scarcity. 50 'The climate is predicted to become even hotter and drier in most of the MENA region. Higher temperatures and reduced precipitation will increase the occurrence of droughts. It is further estimated that an additional 80—100 million people will be exposed by 2025 to water stress', the Bank added. The region's population of 300 million in the late 2010s is forecast to double to 600 million by 2050. Average temperatures are expected to rise by 3—5 oc and rainfall will decrease by around 20 per cent. The result will be vastly increased water stress, accelerated desertification, growing food insecurity and a rise in sea levels displacing tens of millions from densely popu- lated, low-lying areas like the Nile delta.51 The region is deemed highly vulnerable to climate impacts, warns a report by the UN Development Programme. 'Current climate change projections show that by the year 2025, the water supply in the Arab region will be only 15 per cent of levels in 1960. With population growth around 3 per cent annually and deforestation spiking to 4 per cent annually... the region now includes 14 of the world s 20 most water-stressed countries.'52 The Middle Fast/North Africa (MENA) region has 6 per cent of the world's population with only 1.5 per cent of the world's fresh water reserves to share among them. This means that the average citizen already has about a third less water than the minimum necessary for a reasonable existence — many have less than half, and populations are growing rapidly. Coupled with political chaos and ill governance in many countries, growing religious and ethnic tensions between different groups — often based on centuries-old disputes — a widening gap between rich and poor and foreign meddling by the USA, Russia and China, shortages of food, land and water make the Middle East an evident cauldron for conflict in the twentyfirst century. Growing awareness of their food risk has impelled some oil-rich Arab states into an international farm buying spree, purchasing farming, fishing and food processing companies in countries as assorted as South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Ukraine, the USA, Poland, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and Morocco. In some food-stressed countries these acquisitions have already led to riots and killings.53 The risk is high that, by exporting its own food—land—water problems worldwide, especially to regions already facing scarcity, the Middle East could propagate conflicts and government collapses around the globe. This is despite the fact that high-tech solar desalination, green energy, hydroponics, aquaponics and other intensive urban food production technologies make it possible for the region to produce far more of its own food locally, if not to be entirely self-sufficient. Dimensions of the growing crisis in the Middle East include the following. Wars have already broken out in Syria and Yemen in which scarcity of food, land and water were prominent among the tensions that led to conflict between competing groups. Food, land and water issues feed into and exacerbate already volatile sentiment over religion, politics, corruption, mismanagement and foreign interference by the USA, China and Russia. The introduction of cheap solar-powered and diesel pumps has accelerated the unsustainable extraction of groundwater throughout the region, notably in countries like Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. 54 Turkish building of new dams to monopolise waters flowing across its borders is igniting scarcity and potential for conflict with downstream nations, including Iraq, Iran and Syria. 55 Egypt's lifeline, the Nile, is threatened by Ethiopian plans to dam the Blue Nile, with tensions that some observers consider could lead to a shooting war. 56 There are very low levels of water recycling throughout the region, while water use productivity is about half that of the world as a whole. There is a lack of a sense of citizen responsibility for water and food scarcity throughout the region. Land grabs around the world by oil-rich states are threatening to destabilise food, land and water in other countries and regions, causing conflict. A decline in oil prices and the displacement of oil by the global renewables revolution may leave the region with fewer economic options for solving its problems. There is a risk that acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran may set off a nuclear arms race in the region with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Syria and possibly Turkey following suit and Israel rearming to stay in the lead. This would translate potential food, land and water conflicts into the atomic realm. Together these issues, and failure to address their root causes, make the Middle East a fizzing powder keg in the twentyfirst century. The question is when and where, not whether, it explodes — and whether the resulting conflict will involve the use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, thus affecting the entire world. China China is the world's biggest producer, importer and consumer of food. Much of the landmass of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is too mountainous or too arid for farming, but the rich soils of its eastern and southern regions are highly productive provided sufficient water is available and climate impacts are mild. Those, however, are very big 'ifs'. In 1995, American environmentalist Lester R. Brown both Eked and aroused the PRC Communist Party bosses with a small, hard-hitting book entitled Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet.57 In it he posited that Chinese population growth was so far out of control that the then-agricultural system could not keep up, and China would be forced to import vast amounts of grain, to the detriment of food prices and availability worldwide. His fears, so far, have not been realised — not because they were unsoundly based, but because China managed — just — to stay abreast of rising food demand by stabilising and subsidising grain prices, restoring degraded lands, boosting agricultural science and technology, piping water from south to north, developing high-intensity urban farms, buying up foreign farmland worldwide and encouraging young Chinese to leave the country. What Brown didn't anticipate was the economic miracle that made China rich enough to afford all this. However, his essential thesis remains valid: China's food supply will remain on a knife-edge for the entire twentyfirst century, vulnerable especially to water scarcity and climate impacts. If the nation outruns its domestic resources yet still has to eat, it may well be at the expense of others globally. Some western commentators were puzzled when China scrapped its 35-year 'One Child Policy' in 2015, but in fact the policy had done its job, shaving around 300 million people off the projected peak of Chinese population. It was also causing serious imbalances, such as China's huge unmarried male sur- plus. Furthermore, rising urbanisation and household incomes meant Chinese parents no longer wanted large families, as in the past. Policy or no policy, China's birthrate has continued to fall and by 2018 was 1.6 babies per woman — well below replacement, lower than the USA and nearly as low as Germany. Its population was 1.4 billion, but this was growing at barely 0.4 per cent a year, with the growth due at least in part to lengthening life expectancy. 58 For China, female fertility is no longer the key issue. The critical issue is water. And the critical region is the north, where 41 per cent of the population reside. Here surface and ground- waters — which support not only the vast grain and vegetable farming industries of the North China Plain but also burgeoning megacities like Beijing, Tianjin and Shenyang — have been vanishing at an alarming rate. 'In the past 25 years, 28,000 rivers have disappeared. Groundwater has fallen by up to 1—3 metres a year. One consequence: parts of Beijing are subsiding by 11 cm a year. The flow of the Yellow River, water supply to millions, is a tenth of what it was in the 1940s; it often fails to reach the sea. Pollution further curtails supply: in 2017 8.8 per cent of water was unfit even for agricultural or industrial use', the Financial Times reported.59 On the North China Plain, annual consump- tion of water for all uses, including food production, is about 27 billion cubic metres a year — compared with an annual water availability of 22 billion cubic metres, a deficit that is made up by the short-term expedient of mining the region's groundwater. 60 To stave off disaster, the PRC has built a prodigious network of canals and pipelines from the Yangtse River in the water-rich south, to Beijing in the water-starved north. Hailed as a 'lifeline', the South—North Water Transfer Project had two drawbacks: first, the fossil energy required to pump millions of tonnes of water over a thousand kilometres and, second, the fact that while the volume was sufficient to satisfy the burgeoning cities for a time, it could not supply and distribute enough clean water to meet the needs of irrigated farming over so vast a region in the long run, nor meet those of its planned industrial growth.61 Oft-mouthed 'solutions' like desalination or the piping of water from Tibet or Russia face similar drawbacks: demand is too great for the potential supply and the costs, both financial and environmental, prohibitive. China is already among the world's most water-stressed nations. The typical Chinese citizen has a 'water footprint' of 1071 cubic metres a year — three quarters of the world average (1385 cubic metres), and scarcely a third that of the average American (2842 cubic metres).62 Of this water, 62 per cent is used to grow food to feed the Chinese population — and 90 per cent is so polluted it is unfit to drink or use in food processing. Despite massive investment in water infrastructure and new technology, many experts doubt that China can keep pace with the growth in its demand for food, at least within its own borders, chiefly because of water scarcity.63 Adding to the pressure is that China's national five-year plans for industrialisation demand massive amounts more water — demands that may confront China with a stark choice between food and economic growth. 'The Chinese government is moving too slowly towards the Camel Economy. It has plans, incentives for officials; it invests in recycling, irrigation, pollution, drought resistant crops; it leads the world in high voltage transmission (to get hydro, wind and solar energy from the west of China). None of this is sufficient or likely to be in time', the Financial Times opined. As the world's leading carbon emitter, China is more responsible for climate change than any other country. It is also, potentially, more at risk. The main reason, quite simply, is the impact of a warming world on China's water supply — in the form of disappearing rivers, lakes, groundwater and mountain glaciers along with rising sea levels. To this is coupled the threat to agriculture from increasing weather disasters and the loss of ecosystem services from a damaged landscape. 65 China is thus impaled on the horns of a classic dilemma. Without more water it cannot grow its economy sufficiently to pay for the water-conserving and food-producing technologies and infrastructure it needs to feed its people. Having inadvertently unleashed a population explosion with its highly successful conversion to modern farming systems, the challenge for China now is to somehow sustain its food supply through the population peak of the mid twentyfirst century, followed by a managed decline to maybe half of today's numbers by the early twentysecond century. It is far from clear whether the present approach — improving market efficiency, continuing to modernise agricultural production systems, pumping water, trying to control soil and water losses and importing more food from overseas will work. 66 China has pinned its main hopes on technology to boost farm yields and improve water distribution and management. Unfortunately, it has selected the unsustainable American industrial farming model to do this — which involves the massive use of water, toxic chemicals, fertilisers, fossil fuels and machines. This in turn is having dreadful consequences for China's soils, waters, landscapes, food supply, air, climate and consumer health. Serious questions are now being asked whether such an approach is not digging the hole China is in, even deeper. Furthermore, some western analysts are sceptical whether the heavy hand of state control is up to the task of generating the levels of innovation required to feed China sustainably.67 Plan B, which is to purchase food from other countries, or import it from Chinese-owned farming and food ventures around the world, faces similar difficulties. Many of the countries where China is investing in food production themselves face a slow-burning crisis of land degradation, water scarcity, surging populations and swelling local food demand. By exporting its own problems, China is adding to their difficulties. While there may be some truth to the claim that China is helping to modernise food systems in Africa, for example, it is equally clear that the export of food at a time of local shortages could have dire consequences for Africans, leading to wars in Africa and elsewhere. How countries will react to Chinese pressure to export food in the face of their own domestic shortages is, as yet, unclear. If they permit exports, it could prove cata- strophic for their own people and governments — but if they cut them off, it could be equally catastrophic for China. Such a situation cannot be regarded as anything other than a menace to world peace. Around 1640, a series of intense droughts caused widespread crop failures in China, leading to unrest and uprisings which, in 1644, brought down the Ming Dynasty. A serious domestic Chinese food and water crisis today — driven by drought, degradation of land and water and climate change in northern China coupled with failure in food imports — could cause a re-run of history: 'The forthcoming water crisis may impact China's social, economic, and political stability to a great extent', a US Intelligence Assessment found. The adverse impacts of climate change will add extra pressure to existing social and resource stresses.' 68 Such events have the potential to precipitate tens, even hundreds, of millions of emigrants and refugees into countries all over the world, with domino consequences for those countries that receive them. Strategic analysts have speculated that tens of millions of desperate Chinese flooding into eastern Russia, or even India, could lead to war, including the risk of international nuclear exchange. 69 Against such a scenario are the plain facts that China is a technologically advanced society, with the foresight, wealth and capacity to plan and implement nationwide changes and the will, if necessary, to enforce them. Its leaders are clearly alert to the food and water challenge — and its resolution may well depend on the extent of water recycling they are able to achieve. As to whether the PRC can afford the cost of transitioning from an unsustainable to a sustainable food system, all countries have a choice between unproductive military spending and feeding their populace. A choice between food or war. It remains to be seen which investment China favours. However, it is vital to understand that the problem of whether China can feed itself through the twentyfirst century is not purely a Chinese problem. It's a problem, both economic and physical, for the entire planet — and it is thus in everyone's best interest to help solve it. For this reason, China is rated number 3 on this list of potential food war hotspots. Africa Food wars — that is, wars in which food, land and water play a significant contributing role — have been a constant in the story of Africa since the mid twentieth century, indeed, far longer. In a sense, the continent is already a microcosm of the world of the twentyfirst century as climate change and resource scarcity com- bine with rapid population growth to ratchet up the tensions that lead competing groups to fight, whether the superficial distinc- Mons between them are ethnic, religious, social or political. We have examined the particular cases of Rwanda, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa — but there are numerous other African conflicts, insurgencies and ongoing disturbances in which food, land and water are primary or secondary triggers and where famine is often the outcome: Nigeria, Congo, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Maghreb region of the Sahara, Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe have all experienced conflicts in which issues of access to food, land and water were important drivers and consequences. The trajectory of Africa's population in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century implies that the number of its people could quadruple from 1.2 billion in 2017 to 4.5 billion by 2100 (Figure 5.6). If fulfilled, this would make Africans 41 per cent of the world population by the end of the century. The UN Popula- tion Division's nearer projections are for Africans to outnumber Chinese or Indians at 1.7 billion by 2030, and reach 2.5 billion in 2050, which represents a doubling in the continent's inhabitants in barely 30 years. 70 While African fertility rates (babies per woman) remain high by world standards — 4.5 compared with a global average of 2.4 — they have also fallen steeply, from a peak of 8.5 babies in the 1970s. Furthermore, the picture is uneven with birthrates in most Sub-Saharan countries remaining high (around five to six babies/woman), while those of eight, mainly southern, countries have dropped to replace- ment or below (i.e. under 2.1). As has been the case around the world, birth rates tend to drop rapidly with the spread of urban isation, education and economic growth — whereas countries which slide back into poverty tend to experience rising birth- rates. Food access is a vital ingredient in this dynamic: it has been widely observed that better-fed countries tend to have much lower rates of birth and population growth, possibly because people who are food secure lose fewer infants and children in early life and thus are more open to family planning. So, in a real sense, food sufficiency holds one of the keys to limiting the human population to a level sustainable both for Africa and the planet in general. Forecasting the future of Africa is not easy, given the complexity of the interwoven climatic, social, technological and political issues — and many do not attempt it. However, the relentless optimism of the UN and its food agency, the FAO, is probably not justified by the facts as they are known to science — and may have more to do with not wishing to give offence to African governments or discourage donors than with attempting to accurately analyse what may occur. Even the FAO acknowledges however that food insecurity is rising across Sub-Saharan Africa as well as other parts. In 2017, conflict and insecurity were the major drivers of acute food insecurity in 18 countries and territories where almost 74 million food-insecure people were in need of urgent assistance. Eleven of these countries were in Africa and accounted for 37 million acutely food insecure people; the largest numbers were in northern Nigeria, Demo- cratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and South Sudan the agency said in its Global Report on Food Crises 2018.71 The FAO also noted that almost one in four Africans was undernourished in 2016 — a total of nearly a quarter of a billion people. The rise in undernourishment and food insecurity was linked to the effects of climate change, natural disasters and conflict according to Bukar Tijani, the FAO's assistant director general for Africa. 72 Even the comparatively prosperous nation of South Africa sits on a conflict knife-edge, according to a scientific study: 'Results indicate that the country exceeds its environmental boundaries for biodiversity loss, marine harvesting, freshwater use, and climate change, and that social deprivation was most severe in the areas of safety, income, and employment, which are significant factors in conflict risk', Megan Cole and colleagues found. 73 In the Congo, home to the world's second largest tropical forest, 20 years of civil war had not only slain five million civilians but also decimated the forests and their ecological services on which the nation depended. Researchers found evidence that reducing conflict can also help to reduce environ- mental destruction: 'Peace-building can potentially be a win for nature as well, and.. conservation organizations and govern- ments should be ready to seize conservation opportunities'. 74 As the African population doubles toward the mid century, as its water, soils, forests and economic wealth per capita dwindle, as foreign corporations plunder its riches, as a turbulent climate hammers its herders and farmers — both industrial and traditional — the prospect of Africa resolving existing conflicts and avoiding new ones is receding. The mistake most of the world is making is to imagine this only affects the Africans. The consequences will impact everyone on the planet.
1/15/22
JF - REMs PIC
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brophy TJ | Judge: Aryan Jasani Text: Space faring nations should - establish a multilateral agreement that restricts asteroid mining done by private entities except in the case of mining for Rare Earth Minerals. - The Committee on the Peaceful use of Outer Space should establish an application system for property rights on celestial bodies conditioned upon open disclosure of data and applications. Private entities will only be granted one property grant per celestial body. - Russia and China ought to end cooperation over outer space - China ought to ban Chinese private entities from working with Russian private entities The CP solves: 1 Solves Advantage 1 – Prevents the Sino-Russian alliance 2 Solves Advantage 2 – makes mining safe and establishes a regulatory regime. Steffen 21 Olaf Steffen, Olaf is a scientist at the Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Sytems at the German Aerospace Center. 12-2-2021, "Explore to Exploit: A Data-Centred Approach to Space Mining Regulation," Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Systems, German Aerospace Center, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964621000515 accessed 12/12/21 Adam 4. The data-centred approach to space mining regulation 4.1. Core description of the regulatory regime and mining rights acquisition process The data gathered in the exploration of a celestial body is not only of value for space mining companies for informing them whether, where and how to exploit resources from the body in question, but also for science. The irretrievability of information relating to the solar system contained in the body that will be lost during resource exploitation carries a value for humanity and future generations and can thus be assigned the characteristic of a common heritage for all mankind as invoked in the Moon Agreement. This characteristic makes exploration data an exceptional and unique candidate for use in a mechanism for acquiring mining rights because its preservation is of public interest and its disclosure in exchange for exclusive mining rights does not place any additional burden on the mining company. The following principles would form the cornerstones of the proposed regulatory regime and rights acquisition mechanism based on exploration data: Without preconditions, no entity has a right to mine the resources of a celestial body. An international regulatory body administers the existing rights of companies for mining a specific celestial body. Mining rights to such bodies can be applied for from this international regulatory body, with applications made public. The application expires after a pre-set period. Mining rights are granted on the provision and disclosure of exploration data on the celestial body within the pre-set period, proposedly gathered in situ, characterising this body and its resources in a pre-defined manner. The explorer's mining right to the resources of the celestial body is published by the regulatory body in a mining rights grant. The data concerning the celestial body are made public as part of the rights grant within the domain of all participating members of the regulatory regime. The exclusive mining rights to any specific body are tradeable. The scope of the regulatory body with respect to the granting of mining rights is not revenue-oriented. The international regulatory body would thus act as a curator of a rights register and an attached database of exploration data. The concept is superficially comparable to patent law, where exclusive rights are granted following the disclosure of an invention to incentivise the efforts made in the development process. In the following section, the characteristics of such a regulatory regime are further discussed with respect to the formation of monopolies, market dynamics, conflict avoidance, inclusivity towards less developed countries and the viability of implementation. 4.2. Discussion and means of implementation The proposed regulatory mechanism has advantages both from a business/investor and society perspective. First, it prevents already highly capitalised companies from acquiring exploitation rights in bulk to deny competitors those objects that are easiest to exploit or most valuable, which would otherwise be possible in any kind of pay-for-right mechanism and could result in preventing market access to smaller, emerging companies. Thus, early monopoly formation can be avoided. The use of data disclosure for the granting of mining rights ensures the scientific community has access to this invaluable source of information. In this way, space mining prospecting missions can lead to a boost in research on small celestial bodies at a speed unmatchable by pure government/agency funded science probes. This usefulness to the scientific community could lead to sustained partnerships between prospecting companies and scientific institutions and could even provide a source of funding for the companies through RandD grants and public-private partnerships. The results of the exploration efforts contribute to research on the formation of planets and the history of the solar system and provide valuable insight for space defence against asteroids. The transition of exploration from a tailored mission profile with a purpose-built spacecraft to a standard task in space flight would also lead to a cost reduction of the respective exploration spacecraft through economies of scale. This describes the very benefits Elvis 24 and Crawford 25 imagined as possible effects of a space economy. Thus, there is an immediate return for society from the exploitation rights grant. It also reconciles the adverse interests of space development and space science as laid out by Schwartz 26. It ensures that, by exploitation, information contained in celestial bodies is not lost for future generations.The application period should not be set in a manner that creates a situation that can be abused through the potential for stockpiling inventory rights. Rather, it is intended to prevent conflict in the phase before exploration data gathered by a mission, as a prerequisite to the mining rights grant, is available. In other words, only one exploration effort at a time can be permitted for a specific body. The time frame between the application and the granting of mining rights (meaning: availability of the required exploration data set) should be tight and should only consider necessary exploration time on site, transit time and possibly a reasonable launch preparation and data processing markup. These contributors to the application period make it clear that the time frame could be dynamic and individualistic, depending on the exploration target (transit time and duration of exploration) and the technology of the exploration probe (transit time). After the expiration of the application period, applications for the exploration target would again be permissible. To prevent the previously mentioned stockpiling of inventory rights, credible proof of an imminent exploration intention would need to be part of the application process, for example, a fixed launch contract or the advanced build status of the exploration probe. Such a mechanism would not contradict the statement in the OST that outer space shall be free for both exploration and scientific investigation. Applications would not apply to purely scientific exploration. An application would only be necessary as a prerequisite for mining. Even resource prospecting could take place without an application (for whatever reason), with a subsequent application comprising in situ data already gathered. For such cases, the application process would need to provide a short period for objections to enable the secretive explorer to make their efforts public. The publication of the application for the mining rights, which is nothing more than a statement of intention to explore, thus provides a strong measure for avoiding conflict. The transparency of where exploration spacecraft are located and, at a later stage, where mining activities take place, provides additional benefits for the sustainable use of space, trust building and deterrence against malign misuse of mining technology. Involuntary spacecraft collisions of competitors in deep space are prevented by the reduction of exploration efforts at the same destination through the application for mining rights by one applicant at a time. As pointed out by Newman and Williamson 20, this is relevant because space debris does not de-orbit in deep space as in the case of LEO. Deep space may be vast, but the velocities involved mean that small debris particles are no less dangerous. Considering NEO mining with fleets of small spacecraft, malfunctions and/or destructive events could create debris clouds crossing Earth's orbit around the sun on a regular basis, presenting another danger to satellites in Earth's own orbit. Thus, by effectively preventing the collision of two spacecraft, one source of debris creation can be mitigated through this regulation mechanism. With respect to Deudney's 11 scepticism of asteroid mining and the dual-use character of technology to manipulate orbits of celestial bodies, it has to be stated that this potential is truly inherent to asteroid mining. An asteroid redirect mission for scientific purposes was pursued by NASA 49 before reorientation towards a manned lunar mission. In one way or another, each type of asteroid mining will require the delivery of the targeted resource to a destination via a comparable technology as formerly envisioned by NASA, be it as a raw material or a useable resource processed in situ, even if this is not necessarily done through redirecting the whole asteroid and placing it in a lunar orbit. However, to be misused as a weapon, space mined resources would have to surpass a certain mass threshold to survive atmospheric entry at the target. This seems unfeasible for currently discussed mining concepts using small-scale spacecraft as described in this article. Redirecting larger masses or whole asteroids would require far more powerful mining vessels or small amounts of thrust over long periods of time. The continuous, (for a mining activity) untypical change in the orbit of an asteroid would make a redirect attempt with hostile intent easily identifiable, effectively deterring such an activity in the first place by ensuring the identification of the aggressor long before the projectile hits its target. The proposed database would provide a catalogue of asteroids with exploration and mining activities in place that should be tracked more closely because of their interaction with spacecraft. This would, in fact, be necessary per se as a precaution to avoid catastrophic mishaps, such as the accidental change of a NEO's orbit to intercept Earth by changing its mass through mining. Space mining kills the terrestrial mining industry – oversaturation. Zeisl 19 Yasemin Zeisl, MSc in International Relations and Affairs from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), “Three Salient Risks of Mining in Space,” 05/03/19, GlobalRiskIntel, https://www.globalriskintel.com/insights/three-salient-risks-mining-space, EA A potential overhaul of the mining industry if not the global economy is the second risk of mining in outer space. While resources of essential metals on Earth are also slowly declining, they will likely not deplete in the near future. Importing metals from space would therefore not substitute depleted terrestrial reserves but could rather cause an oversaturation of certain resources on the market. This development would lead to a price drop of metals that are sourced from space. Additionally, a reduction in price of rare metals such as rhodium, platinum, or gold may change the value of existing reserves on Earth. Metals that are expensive now may then be used more lavishly, and this development could boost future progress in technology and engineering. Despite this positive outlook, a transformation of the global economy through space mining may imperil profits and jobs in the existing mining industry. Perceived vulnerability to China hurts readiness and causes conflict. Parthemore 11, Christine. "Elements of security: mitigating the risks of US dependence on critical minerals." (2011). (Fellow at Center for a New American Security)Elmer Minerals are a subject of much contention. On one hand, the United States remains less prepared for supply disruptions, price spikes and trade disagreements related to the global minerals trade than most experts realize. On the other hand, public concern over reliable access to the minerals required in key sectors of the U.S. economy, in particular those needed to produce military equipment, is growing. Too frequently, however, such concerns are based on inaccurate assumptions. A sober and informed analysis suggests there are real vulnerabilities, which place critical national security and foreign policy interests at risk. In worst-case scenarios, supplies of minerals that the United States does not produce domestically may be disrupted, creating price spikes and lags in delivery. Even short of major supply disruptions, supplier countries can exert leverage over the United States by threatening to cut off certain key mineral supplies. The United States may also lose ground strategically if it continues to lag in managing mineral issues, as countries that consider assured access to minerals as far more strategically important are increasingly setting the rules for trade in this area. China’s rising dominance is at the heart of this growing public debate. Its 2010 cutoff of rare earth elements2 – a unique set of minerals that are difficult to process yet critical to many hightech applications – attracted particular attention. After Japan detained a Chinese trawler captain over a skirmish in the East China Sea, Japanese companies reported weeks of stalled shipments of rare earths from China amid rumors of an official embargo. This may sound like a minor trade dispute, but China currently controls production of about 95 percent of the world’s rare earths, which are critical to building laser-guidance systems for weapons, refining petroleum and building wind turbines. Coinciding with possessing this incredible leverage over the rest of the world, China has also reduced its export quotas for these minerals. For its part, the Chinese government contended that it did not put any formal export embargo in place, and that its plans to reduce exports simply reflect the need to meet growing domestic demand for rare earths. Japan-China relations experienced further strain in their already tense relationship. In the United States, many reporters, policy analysts and decision makers did not foresee this challenge. Feeling blindsided, some in the United States characterized the situation in a manner that demonized China rather than using the opportunity to better understand the true nature of U.S. supply chain vulnerabilities. The 2010 rare earths case and others are increasing interest in critical minerals among U.S. policymakers. Congress held hearings on the strategic importance of minerals between 2007 and 2010, and the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act required DOD to study and report on its dependence on rare earth elements for weapons, communications and other systems.3 During a 2009 hearing on minerals and military readiness, Republican Representative Randy Forbes of Virginia called minerals, “one of those things that no one really talks about or worries about until something goes wrong. It’s at that point – the point where we don’t have the steel we need to build MRAPs Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles or the rhenium we need to build a JSF Joint Strike Fighter engine that the stockpile becomes critically important.”4 In October 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stated that it would be “in our interests commercially and strategically” to find additional sources of supply for rare earth minerals, and stated that China’s recent cuts to rare earth exports “served as a wakeup call that being so dependent on only one source, disruption could occur for natural disaster reasons or other kinds of events could intervene.”5 In January 2011, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern for minerals required for producing defense equipment such as Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), which stated, “Clearly, rare earth supply limitations present a serious vulnerability to our national security. Yet early indications are that DOD has dismissed the severity of the situation to date.”6 Additionally, the Department of Energy (DOE) launched a multiyear effort to explore potential vulnerabilities in supply chains for minerals that will be critical to four distinct areas of energy technology innovation. While concern is growing, the media and policymakers often focus too narrowly on what may seem the most compelling indicators – usually import dependence or scarcity – in prescribing solutions to reduce U.S. vulnerabilities, in particular to supply disruptions in critical minerals such as rare earths. This focus is sparking protectionist attitudes, with some worrying that import dependence poses an inherent risk to the U.S. economy. Discussion of minerals also frequently focuses on supply scarcity and resource depletion in absolute terms. However, both the rhenium and rare earth minerals disruptions of the past five years were triggered by deliberate decisions made by political leaders to leverage their positions of strength, not by market forces, disorder or scarcities of these minerals. Countries often revert to hoarding, pressuring suppliers and otherwise behaving as if scarcities are present even when they are not, based solely on concerns that shortages are likely in the near term. In fact, neither scarcity nor import dependence alone is sufficient to signal vulnerability, and a combination of factors including concentration of suppliers is most often required for mineral issues to become security or foreign policy problems. This report, based on two years of research, site visits and discussions with stakeholders, explores how the supply, demand and use of minerals can impair U.S. foreign relations, economic interests and defense readiness. It examines cases of five individual minerals – lithium, gallium, rhenium, tantalum and niobium – and rare earth elements, such as neodymium, samarium and dysprosium, as a sixth group in order to show the complexity of addressing these concerns. Each of these minerals is critical for defense technologies and U.S. economic growth plans. They share characteristics with minerals that have caused important political or economic concerns for the United States in the past. Additionally, lithium is frequently cited in the media and in discussions of how clean energy supply chains are critical to meeting America’s future economic, energy and environmental goals. Within the past five years, two of these cases – rhenium and rare earth minerals – have involved supply disruptions or important threats of disruptions for the United States and its allies. Each of these minerals will require federal government attention in the coming years. Pg. 6-10 Strong Readiness solves conflict – amplifies diplomacy, strengthens alliances, and shores up credibility Inboden 16 William Inboden 2016 “The Role of a Strong National Defense” https://s3.amazonaws.com/ims-2016/PDF/2016_Index_of_US_Military_Strength_ESSAYS_INBODEN.pdf (PhD, is Executive Director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin)Elmer One of the few core responsibilities of the federal government mandated by the Constitution of the United States is “to provide for the common defence.”2 Upon commissioning, every American military officer swears an oath to “support and defend” this Constitution.3 Accordingly, the core mission of the American military is to protect and defend our nation. This means deterring potential aggressors and, if deterrence fails, fighting and winning wars. Any consideration of the military’s role and American defense policy must start with that foundational principle. Yet if the need for a strong military begins with the mission to fight and win wars, it does not end there. As the quote from Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of this essay illustrates, American leaders have long appreciated that a formidable military can produce abundant diplomatic and economic dividends, even—especially—when not wielded in wartime. The United States’ military capability supported our nation’s rise to global greatness over the past century, but this was often because of the increased influence and credibility produced by this capability rather than the overt use of force. Along the way, there developed an American strategic tradition that integrated military strength with diplomatic acumen, economic growth, and international influence.4 It is an historic tradition with an impressive heritage and continuing salience today. Drawing on the historical record, there are many ways beyond the kinetic use of force that a strong national defense bolsters our national power and global influence. A robust defense budget and defense policy also strengthens our nation in manifest other ways. A well-equipped defense enhances our capabilities and influence across virtually all other elements of national power: our economy, our diplomacy, our alliances, and our credibility and influence in the world. Conversely, an underresourced national defense threatens to diminish our national power across all of these other dimensions. A strong national defense is thus indispensable for a peaceful, successful, and free America—even if a shot is never fired. The diplomatic successes in building and maintaining a stable and peaceful international order achieved by the United States over the past century have been enabled by America’s military dominance. Conversely, the calamitous defense budget cuts and corresponding rise of potential peer competitors in the present day are already undermining America’s diplomatic and economic influence. A well-appointed military improves diplomacy with adversaries, strengthens our alliances, signals credibility and resolve, deters aggression, and enhances national morale. Yet this is not to disregard the manifest other dividends that a strong military can pay. There are multiple pathways by which investments in military hard power produce economic benefits. For example, the military’s role in protecting a stable international environment also creates predictable and secure conditions in which economic growth can flourish. The American security umbrella facilitated Western Europe’s postwar reconstruction and economic revival, and Asia’s half-century economic boom has been partly a function of America’s treaty alliances in the region maintaining peace and stability, exemplified by the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet protecting an open maritime order, freedom of navigation, and secure sea lanes.
1/22/22
JF - Smart Cities DA
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: St Agnes EH | Judge: Eric He Starlink connectivity is key to extension of the Internet of Things. Lumanlan 21 August Dominic M Lumanlan 8-14-2021 "How Elon Musk’s Starlink will be the future of the Internet" https://medium.com/@augustlumanlan2017/how-spacexs-starlink-will-be-the-future-of-the-internet-8f07adb4eb2 (Engineering Author)Elmer Applications of Starlink (and satellite technology in general) in the real world The Internet of things There’s a real need for optimization on every area of industry and we tend to optimize every tool we have with today’s electronics. And there’s nothing more that does that task well than the “internet of things”. The “Internet of things” wasn’t really invented by one person. It’s a term that has been used by anything related to tech and Internet companies today or anything that has to do with robots and super cool machines communicating with each other. Remember what I said about how the Internet is just made of up computers communicating via cables and home routers (and in this case, via Starlink satellites)? Well, this principle applies to anything that can communicate. The “Internet” is just a well-known term for a network made up of electronic devices that are used by today’s society, almost every second of most people’s lives. This means that you can form your own “internet” or communications network by connecting devices (or anything with a computer chip running on electricity) with copper wires or wireless communication. What Starlink can do is they can serve as an “internet” for anything that uses electricity like robots, computers, smartphones, smart homes, robotaxis electric cars, manufacturing and power plant electronic hardware — the application list goes on like crazy. One day, we might even see Starlink satellites controlling robots on Mars and providing “free wi-fi” there (now that’s a great incentive to go to Mars, hahaha). They can also optimize manufacturing processes by allowing robots and other systems in the manufacturing plant (of any kind of object really) to communicate and send data to each other. This can allow them to take actions that needed human supervision. This can allow manufacturing plants to be autonomous and need very little human intervention. Starlink can be the backbone of this operation and can save manufacturers millions of dollars every year just to optimize every manufacturing process. IOT key to sustainable Smart Cities – rapid population growth ensures need for sustainability for megacities. Appleton 21 Joe Appleton 5-11-2021 "WHAT IS IOT AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR SMART CITIES?" https://hub.beesmart.city/en/solutions/what-is-iot-and-why-is-it-important-for-smart-cities (Joe Appleton is bee smart city's content strategist, editor and writer. He has a particular interest in smart and sustainable cities and urban mobility.)Elmer Ever since the idea of a smart city was first introduced, Internet of Things technology has been a key pillar of smart city development. As technology advances and more countries embrace next-generation connectivity, IoT technology will continue to grow and have a bigger effect on the way we live. According to numbers from the Improving Internet of Things (IoT) Security with Software-Defined Network (SDN) study, there will be more than 75.44 billion connected IoT devices by 2025. With a forecast of over 7.33 billion mobile users by 2023 and more than 1,105 million connected wearable devices users by 2022, the Internet of Things is expected to grow into one of the smartest collective and collaborative systems in history. With room for so much potential and opportunity across a wide range of sectors, including urban mobility, security, sustainability, maintenance, healthcare, and management, it’s imperative that cities understand the benefits and opportunities of the Internet of Things for Smart Cities. Sophisticated interconnectivity is one of the fundamental building blocks of next-generation smart city development. Citizens and governments will be connected in ways that we’ve never seen before. IoT will deliver huge opportunities and benefits to smart cities, but this level of interconnectivity will also bring its own set of challenges. WHAT IS IOT? According to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the term Internet of Things is a broad term that can be used to describe any object connected to the internet. However, in recent years, the term IoT is increasingly being used to specifically describe objects that can “talk” to each other. It references the vast network of digital devices that communicate and interact with each other, and affect our daily lives. These devices include smart sensors, monitoring devices, AI programs, and actuators that can evaluate, monitor, and control certain aspects of city life. For example, data about the weather can be collected by multiple sensors, which can then be used to manage thermostats in public buildings, cutting emissions, and saving the city money. There is no uniform definition of what the Internet of Things is, and different organizations and individuals may suggest differences from one definition to the next. However, they all agree that the IoT is “a set of technologies for accessing the data collected by various devices through wireless and wired Internet networks.” What is IoT and why is it important for Smart Cities? WHY IS IOT IMPORTANT FOR SMART CITIES? IoT is important for every city. Currently, the world’s largest cities are Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, and Sao Paolo, with populations of 38 million, 29 million, 26 million, and 21 million respectively. Today, these megacities are notable because of their huge populations. In the future, there will be many more like them, with even denser populations. It’s predicted that more than 60 of the planet’s population will live in cities by the year 2030. It’s a bold prediction and one that could spell disaster if the appropriate measures aren’t taken. Large populations demand large resources. Residents will need access to water, efficient and environmentally-friendly transportation, clean air, and practical sanitation and waste management. With the clever use of smart city practices and widespread deployment of IoT technology, the cities of tomorrow will be able to meet the demands of their residents in an effective and efficient way. Connected technologies and big data can create smart solutions. These solutions can solve problems, increase the quality of life for a city’s residents, and lower the consumption of resources. For a truly smart city to function at its full potential, the Internet of Things is a vital ingredient. Unsustainable cities turn every impact and cause extinction – sustainable ones solve Cribb 17 Cribb, Julian. "The Urbanite (Homo Urbanus)." Surviving the 21st Century. Springer, Cham, 2017. 147-169. (principal of Julian Cribb and Associates who provide specialist consultancy in the communication of science, agriculture, food, mining, energy and the environment. , His published work includes over 8000 articles, 3000 media releases and eight books. He has received 32 awards for journalism.)Elmer By the mid-twenty-first century the world’s cities will be home to approaching eight billion inhabitants and will carpet an area of the planet’s surface the size of China. Several megacities will have 20, 30, and even 40 million people. The largest city on Earth will be Guangzhou-Shenzen, which already has an estimated 120 million citizens crowded into in its greater metropolitan area (Vidal 2010). By the 2050s these colossal conurbations will absorb 4.5 trillion tonnes of fresh water for domestic, urban and industrial purposes, and consume around 75 billion tonnes of metals, materials and resources every year. Their very existence will depend on the preservation of a precarious balance between the essential resources they need for survival and growth—and the capacity of the Earth to supply them. Furthermore, they will generate equally phenomenal volumes of waste, reaching an alpine 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025 (World Bank)—an average of six million tonnes a day—and probably doubling again by the 2050s, in line with economic demand for material goods and food. In the words of the Global Footprint Network “The global effort for sustainability will be won, or lost, in the world’s cities” (Global Footprint Network 2015). As we have seen in the case of food (Chap. 7), these giant cities exist on a razor’s edge, at risk of resource crises for which none of them are fully-prepared. They are potential targets for weapons of mass destruction (Chap. 4). They are humicribs for emerging pandemic diseases, breeding grounds for crime and hatcheries for unregulated advances in biotechnology, nanoscience, chemistry and artificial intelligence. Beyond all this, however, they are also the places where human minds are joining at lightspeed to share knowledge, wisdom and craft solutions to the multiple challenges we face. For good or ill, in cities is the future of civilisation written. They cradle both our hopes and fears. Urban Perils The Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paulo is a harbinger of the challenges which lie ahead for Homo urbanus, Urban Human. In a land which the New York Times once dubbed “the Saudi Arabia of water” because its rivers and lakes held an eighth of all the fresh water on the planet, Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city and its 20 million inhabitants were almost brought to their knees by a one-in-a-hundred-year drought (Romero 2015). It wasn’t simply a drought, however, but rather a complex interplay of factors driven by human overexploitation of the surrounding landscape, pollution of the planetary atmosphere and biosphere, corruption of officialdom, mismanagement and governance failure. In other words, the sort of mess that potentially confronts most of the world’s megacities. In the case of Sao Paulo, climate change was implicated by scientists in making a bad drought worse. This was compounded by overclearing in the Amazon basin, which is thought to have reduced local hydrological cycling so that less water was respired by forests and less rain then fell locally. This reduced infiltration into the landscape and inflow to river systems which land-clearing had engorged with sediment and nutrients. Rivers running through the city were rendered undrinkable from the industrial pollutants and waste dumped in them. The Sao Paulo water network leaked badly, was subject to corruption, mismanagement and pilfering bordering on pillage. Government plans to build more dams arrived 20 years too late. “Only a deluge can save São Paulo,” Vicente Andreu, the chief of Brazil’s National Water Agency (ANA) told The Economist magazine (The Economist 2014). Depopulation, voluntary or forced, loomed as a stark option, officials admitted. Although the drought eased in 2016, water scarcity remained a shadow over the region’s future. Sao Paulo is far from alone: many of the world’s great cities face the spectre of thirst. The same El Nino event also struck the great cities of California, leading urban planners—like others all over the world—to turn to desalination of seawater, using electricity and reverse osmosis filtration (Talbot 2014). This kneejerk response to unanticipated water scarcity echoed the Australian experience where, following the ‘Millennium Drought’ desalination plants were producing 460 gigalitres of water a year in four major cities (National Water Commission 2008)—only to be mothballed a few years later when the dry eased. By the early 2010s there were more than 17,000 desalination plants in 150 countries worldwide, churning out more than 80 gigalitres (21 billion US gallons) of water per day, according to the International Desalination Association (Brown 2015). Most of these plants were powered by fossil fuels which supply the immense amount of energy needed to push saline water through a membrane filter and remove the salt. Ironically, by releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, desalination exacerbates global warming and so helps to increase the probability of fiercer and more frequent droughts. It thus defeats its own purpose by reducing natural water supplies. A similar irony applies to the city of Los Angeles which attempted to protect its dwindling water storages from evaporation by covering them with millions of plastic balls (Howard 2015)—thus using petrochemicals in an attempt to solve a problem originally caused by … petrochemicals. These examples illustrate the ‘wicked’ character of the complex challenges now facing the world’s cities—where poorly-conceived ‘solutions’ may only land the metropolis, and the planet, in deeper trouble that it was before. This is a direct consequence of the pressure of demands from our swollen population outrunning the natural capacity of the Earth to supply them, and short-sighted or corrupt local politics leading to ‘bandaid’ solutions that don’t work or cause more trouble in the long run. Other forms of increasing urban vulnerability include: storm damage, sea level rise, flooding and fire resulting from climate change or geotectonic forces; governance failure, civic unrest and civil war exemplified in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria over the 2010s; disruption of oil supplies and consequent failure of food supplies; worsening urban health problems due to the rapid spread of pandemic diseases and industrial pollution and still ill-defined but real threats posed by the rise of machine intelligence and nanoscience (Gencer 2013). The issue was highlighted early in the present millennium by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who wrote: Communities will always face natural hazards, but today’s disasters are often generated by, or at least exacerbated by, human activities… At no time in human history have so many people lived in cities clustered around seismically active areas. Destitution and demographic pressure have led more people than ever before to live in flood plains or in areas prone to landslides. Poor land-use planning; environmental management; and a lack of regulatory mechanisms both increase the risk and exacerbate the effects of disasters (Annan 2003). These factors are a warning sign for the real possibility of megacity collapses within coming decades. With the universal spread of smart phones, the consequences will be vividly displayed in real time on news bulletins and social media. Unlike historic calamities, the whole world will have a virtual ringside seat as future urban nightmares unfold. Independently, Starlink bridges the Splinternet – that solves Fake News and Disinformation propagated from censorship – affordable, un-blockable, and accessible internet is key to stop Authoritarianism. Koetsier 20 John Koetsier 1-9-2020 "Elon Musk's 42,000 StarLink Satellites Could Just Save the World" https://archive.is/K6Lq0#selection-3087.0-3131.123 (I've been a journalist, analyst, and corporate executive, and have chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. I built the VB Insight research team at VentureBeat)Elmer Elon Musk’s other company, SpaceX, is building Starlink, a global communications constellation that could approach a staggering 42,000 satellites. And it could be all that stands between us and a fragmented world living in virtually — and actually — different realities. How? World War II can tell us the answer. In the early 1940s a tyrannical power using fake news, hate speech, military might and hegemonic power controlled most of Europe: the Nazis. They controlled public life, news and local economies. Resistance groups dotted the European mainland, with one lifeline for non-official communication from free countries: radio. As such, radios were contraband and confiscated. One of the activities the allies undertook to support resistance fighters was shipping in radios for communication and outside news. Today, radios aren’t at risk of being confiscated. But the internet is. And as a cloud-delivered service, hijacking the internet happens largely out of public sight, in servers and routers that enable services like Netflix and the BBC and Facebook and Google. It’s called splinternet, and it’s the ongoing division of a worldwide interconnected internet into separate and isolatable fiefdoms, each of which can be controlled and managed so that governing powers can control what their populations see. The Great Firewall of China is the most well-known example, but Iran, Syria and Vietnam also control significant portions of the internet for their populations. Russia just completed technology to wall off its internal networks, servers and internet users from the wider internet. And India, in its attempt to control unrest following its anti-Muslim citizenship law, has employed a particularly heavy-handed approach: simply blocking the internet entirely. (One unintended result: contractors in India can’t reach their employers in the U.S.) Another country, United Arab Emirates, took a different approach: outlawing all messengers except one that it built a digital backdoor into: Totok. However it happens, it allows governments to control what people see, read and hear from outside sources — and censor what their own people say. Starlink can change all of that. Elon Musk recently revealed details about how people will access StarLink. It will be incredibly simple, and it will enable access to the relatively free global internet from anywhere on the planet. Starlink Terminal has motors to self-adjust optimal angle to view sky. Instructions are simply: plug in socket, point at sky. These instructions work in either order. No training required. Elon Musk What that means is that anyone can access the internet from anywhere. Chinese citizens will be able to access Google and information about Tiananmen Square. Russian citizens will be able to see external analysis of Putin’s financial dealings if even Russia blocks outside sources. Indian protesters can’t be cut off from the internet. Of course, governments will make the Starlink Terminal illegal. But that in itself will be a victory. Censorship works best when it is invisible: when people don’t even know that there is alternate information, other understandings of reality. (Chinese teenage exchange students at a relative’s house last year, for example, had never heard of Tiananmen Square, and refused to believe stories that, they felt, painted China in a negative light.) But when a device to connect to the outside world becomes contraband, the glass walls become opaque. People realize that walls have been erected to prevent them from seeing other opinions. And that is at least one step to maintaining a free, open and accessible internet globally, which should help combat fake news, propaganda and information deprivation aimed at controlling populations. And it’s a step towards making the splinternet harder to achieve. 1,000 satellites will be enough to enable basic service, Musk has said. SpaceX just launched a third batch of 60 satellites, and is expected to continue launching that many every two weeks through the rest of 2020. (For context, only about 9,000 satellites have been launched in all of space history, about 5,000 of which are still in orbit. And only 2,000 are actually still operational. So even at a quarter or a fifth of total capacity, Starlink is a ridiculously large satellite constellation and unprecedented in human history — and astronomers have legitimate concerns about light pollution.) While Musk has applied for launch permission for up to 42,000 satellites, he’s unlikely to launch them all. But at the current pace, a global and unblockable internet service should be available in less than a year. This doesn’t mean that all will instantly be rosy. Governments, of course, can try to jam satellite signals. That’s unlikely to work — or even be possible — in all places and all times, however. They’re also likely to continue to try to engage in false flag and other misinformation projects. And people seem to be pretty good at fooling themselves these days: locking themselves in reality bubbles that block dissenting narratives. But any gaps in the emerging splinternet are opportunities for different perspectives and, hopefully, true facts to emerge.
1/15/22
JF - Space Deterrence DA v1
Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Newman Smith VY | Judge: Michael Harris Space Commercialization is key to Space Deterrence – Commercial Flexibility is key to deterrence by denial. Klein 19, John J. Understanding space strategy: the art of war in space. Routledge, 2019. (a Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research, Inc. and Adjunct Professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute)Elmer Recent U.S. space policy initiatives underscore the far-reaching benefits of commercial space activities. The White House revived the National Space Council to foster closer coordination, cooperation, and exchange of technology and information among the civil, national security, and commercial space sectors.1 National Space Policy Directive 2 seeks to promote economic growth by streamlining U.S. regulations on the commercial use of space.2 While the defense community generally appreciates the value of services and capabilities derived from the commercial space sector—including space launch, Earth observation, and satellite communications—it often overlooks one area of strategic importance: deterrence. To address the current shortcoming in understanding, this paper first describes the concept of deterrence, along with how space mission assurance and resilience fit into the framework. After explaining how commercial space capabilities may influence the decision calculus of potential adversaries, this study presents actionable recommendations for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to address current problem areas. Ultimately, DoD—including the soon-to-be reestablished U.S. Space Command and possibly a new U.S. Space Force—should incorporate the benefits and capabilities of the commercial space sector into flexible deterrent options and applicable campaign and contingency plans. Deterrence, Mission Assurance, and Resilience Thomas Schelling, the dean of modern deterrence theory, held that deterrence refers to persuading a potential enemy that it is in its interest to avoid certain courses of activity.3 One component of deterrence theory lies in an understanding that the threat of credible and potentially overwhelming force or other retaliatory action against any would-be adversary is sufficient to deter most potential aggressors from conducting hostile actions. This idea is also referred to as deterrence by punishment.4 The second salient component of deterrence theory is denial. According to Glenn Snyder’s definition, deterrence by denial is “the capability to deny the other party any gains from the move which is to be deterred.”5 The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS) highlights deterrence, and specifically deterrence by denial, as a vital component of national security. The NDS notes that the primary objectives of the United States include deterring adversaries from pursuing aggression and preventing hostile actions against vital U.S. interests.6 The strategy also observes that deterring conflict necessitates preparing for war during peacetime.7 For the space domain, the peacetime preparedness needed for deterrence by denial occurs in the context of space mission assurance and resilience. Mission assurance entails “a process to protect or ensure the continued function and resilience of capabilities and assets—including personnel, equipment, facilities, networks, information and information systems, infrastructure, and supply chains—critical to the performance of DoD mission essential functions in any operating environment or condition.”8 Similar to mission assurance but with a different focus, resilience is an architecture’s ability to support mission success with higher probability; shorter periods of reduced capability; and across a wider range of scenarios, conditions, and threats, despite hostile action or adverse conditions.9 Resilience may leverage cross-domain solutions, along with commercial and international capabilities.10 Space mission assurance and resilience can prevent a potential adversary from achieving its objectives or realizing any benefit from its aggressive action. These facets of U.S. preparedness help convey the futility of conducting a hostile act. Consequently, they enhance deterrence by denial. Commercial Space Enables Deterrence The commercial space sector directly promotes mission assurance and resilience efforts. This is in part due to the distributed and diversified nature of commercial space launch and satellites services. Distribution refers to the use of a number of nodes, working together, to perform the same mission or functions as a single node; diversification describes contributing to the same mission in multiple ways, using different platforms, orbits, or systems and capabilities.11 The 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy, in noting the benefits derived from the commercial space industry, states that DoD partners with the commercial sector’s capabilities to improve the U.S. space architecture’s resilience.12 Although U.S. policy and joint doctrine frequently acknowledge the role of the commercial space sector in space mission assurance and resilience, there is little recognition that day-to-day contributions from the commercial industry assists in deterring would-be adversaries. The commercial space sector contributes to deterrence by denial through multi-domain solutions that are distributed and diversified. These can deter potential adversaries from pursuing offensive actions against space-related systems. Commercial launch providers enhance deterrence by providing options for getting payloads into orbit. These include diverse space launch capabilities such as small and responsive launch vehicles, along with larger, reusable launch vehicles; launch rideshares for secondary payloads; and government payloads on commercial satellites. Various on-orbit systems also promote deterrence. For example, if an aggressor damages a commercial remote sensing satellite during hostilities, similar commercial satellites in a different orbital regime, or those of the same constellation, may provide the needed imagery. If satellite communications are jammed or degraded, commercial service providers can reroute satellite communications through their own networks, or potentially through the networks of another company using a different portion of the frequency spectrum. Regarding deterrence by punishment efforts, the commercial space sector can play a role, albeit an indirect one, through improved space situational awareness (SSA) and space forensics (including digital forensics and multispectral imagery). The commercial industry may support the attribution process following a hostile or illegal act in space through its increasingly proliferating network of SSA ground telescopes and other terrestrial tracking systems. The DoD may also leverage the commercial space sector’s cyber expertise to support digital forensic efforts to help determine the source of an attack. By supporting a credible and transparent attribution process, commercial partners may cause a would-be adversary to act differently if it perceives that its aggressive, illegal, or otherwise nefarious actions will be disclosed. Doing so can help bolster the perceived ability to conduct a legitimate response following a hostile attack, which may improve deterrence by punishment efforts. Commercial space capabilities may also facilitate the application of force to punish a potential aggressor. In addition to traditional military space systems, commercial satellite imagery and communication capabilities may be used in cueing and targeting for punitive strikes against an aggressor. Although the commercial space sector is not expected to be involved directly in the use of retaliatory force following a hostile act, commercial partners may help in providing the information used to identify those responsible and to facilitate any consequent targeting efforts. Space Deterrence Breakdowns causes War and Extinction. Parker 17 Clifton Parker 1-24-2017 “Deterrence in space key to U.S. security” https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/deterrence-space-key-us-security (Policy Analyst at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation)Elmer Space is more important than ever for the security of the United States, but it’s almost like the Wild West in terms of behavior, a top general said today. Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, spoke Jan. 24 at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His talk was titled, “U.S. Strategic Command Perspectives on Deterrence and Assurance.” Hyten said, “Space is fundamental to every single military operation that occurs on the planet today.” He added that “there is no such thing as a war in space,” because it would affect all realms of human existence, due to the satellite systems. Hyten advocates “strategic deterrence” and “norms of behavior” across space as well as land, water and cyberspace. Otherwise, rivals like China and Russia will only threaten U.S. interests in space and wreak havoc for humanity below, he said. Most of contemporary life depends on systems connected to space. Hyten also addressed other topics, including recent proposals by some to upgrade the country’s missile defense systems. “You just don’t snap your fingers and build a state-of-the-art anything overnight,” Hyten said, adding that he has not yet spoken to Trump administration officials about the issue. “We need a powerful military,” but a severe budget crunch makes “reasonable solutions” more likely than expensive and unrealistic ones. On the upgrade front, Hyten said he favors a long-range strike missile system to replace existing cruise missiles; a better air-to-air missile for the Air Force; and an improved missile defense ground base interceptor. ‘Critically dependent’ From satellites to global-positioning systems GPS, space has transformed human life – and the military – in the 21st century, Hyten said. In terms of defining "space," the U.S. designates people who travel above an altitude of 50 miles as astronauts. As the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten oversees the control of U.S. strategic forces, providing options for the president and secretary of defense. In particular, this command is charged with space operations (such as military satellites), information operations (such as information warfare), missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, global strike and strategic deterrence (the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and combating weapons of mass destruction. Hyten explained that every drone, fighter jet, bomber, ship and soldier is critically dependent on space to conduct their own operations. All cell phones use space, and the GPS command systems overall are managed at Strategic Command, he said. “No soldier has to worry about what’s over the next hill,” he said, describing GPS capabilities, which have fundamentally transformed humanity’s way of life. Space needs to be available for exploration, he said. “I watch what goes on in space, and I worry about us destroying that environment for future generations.” He said that too many drifting objects and debris exist – about 22,000 right now. A recent Chinese satellite interception created a couple thousand more debris objects that now circle about the Earth at various altitudes and pose the risk of striking satellites. “We track every object in space” now, Hyten said, urging “international norms of behavior in space.” He added, “We have to deter bad behavior on space. We have to deter war in space. It’s bad for everybody. We could trash that forever.” But now rivals like China and Russia are building weapons to deploy in the lower levels of space. “How do we prevent this? It’s bigger than a space problem,” he said. Deterring conflict in the cyber, nuclear and space realms is the strategic deterrence goal of the 21st century, Hyten said. “The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war,” he said. Hyten believes the U.S. needs a fundamentally different debate about deterrence. And it all starts with nuclear weapons. “In my deepest heart, I wish I didn’t have to worry about nuclear weapons,” he said. Hyten described his job as “pretty sobering, it’s not easy.” But he also noted the mass violence of the world prior to 1945 when the first atomic bomb was used. Roughly 80 million people died from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. Consider that in the 10-plus years of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans were killed. That’s equivalent to two days of deaths in WWII, he said. In a world without nuclear weapons, a rise in conventional warfare would produce great numbers of mass casualties, Hyten said. About war, he said, “Once you see it up close, no human will ever want to experience it.” Though America has “crazy enemies” right now, in many ways the world is more safe than during WWII, Hyten said. The irony is that nuclear weapons deterrence has kept us from the type of mass killings known in events like WWII. But the U.S. must know how to use its nuclear deterrence effectively. Looking ahead, Hyten said the U.S. needs to think about space as a potential war environment. An attack in space might not mean a response in space, but on the Earth. Hyten describes space as the domain that people look up at it and still dream about. “I love to look at the stars,” but said he wants to make sure he’s not looking up at junk orbiting in the atmosphere.
12/18/21
JF - Space Elevators CP
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo Text – The United States ought to ban Private Appropriation of Outer Space except for Space Elevators. It Competes: Space Elevators constitute Appropriation – they impede orbits. Matignon 19 Louis de Gouyon Matignon 3-3-2019 "LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE SPACE ELEVATOR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM" https://www.spacelegalissues.com/space-law-legal-aspects-of-the-space-elevator-transportation-system/ PhD in space law (co-supervised by both Philippe Delebecque, from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, and Christopher D. Johnson, from Georgetown University || regularly write articles on the website Space Legal Issues so as to popularise space law and public international lawElmer An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end in space beyond geostationary orbit. An orbit is the curved path through which objects in space move around a planet or a star. The 1967 Treaty’s regime and customary law enshrine the principle of non-appropriation and freedom of access to orbital positions. Space Law and International Telecommunication Laws combined to protect this use against any interference. The majority of space-launched objects are satellites that are launched in Earth’s orbit (a very small part of space objects – scientific objects for space exploration – are launched into outer space beyond terrestrial orbits). It is important to precise that an orbit does not exist: satellites describe orbits by obeying the general laws of universal attraction. Depending on the launching techniques and parameters, the orbital trajectory of a satellite may vary. Sun-synchronous satellites fly over a given location constantly at the same time in local civil time: they are used for remote sensing, meteorology or the study of the atmosphere. Geostationary satellites are placed in a very high orbit; they give an impression of immobility because they remain permanently at the same vertical point of a terrestrial point (they are mainly used for telecommunications and television broadcasting). A geocentric orbit or Earth orbit involves any object orbiting Planet Earth, such as the Moon or artificial satellites. Geocentric (having the Earth as its centre) orbits are organised as follow: 1) Low Earth orbit (LEO): geocentric orbits with altitudes (the height of an object above the average surface of the Earth’s oceans) from 100 to 2 000 kilometres. Satellites in LEO have a small momentary field of view, only able to observe and communicate with a fraction of the Earth at a time, meaning a network or constellation of satellites is required in order to provide continuous coverage. Satellites in lower regions of LEO also suffer from fast orbital decay (in orbital mechanics, decay is a gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies at their closest approach, the periapsis, over many orbital periods), requiring either periodic reboosting to maintain a stable orbit, or launching replacement satellites when old ones re-enter. 2) Medium Earth orbit (MEO), also known as an intermediate circular orbit: geocentric orbits ranging in altitude from 2 000 kilometres to just below geosynchronous orbit at 35 786 kilometres. The most common use for satellites in this region is for navigation, communication, and geodetic/space environment science. The most common altitude is approximately 20 000 kilometres which yields an orbital period of twelve hours. 3) Geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and geostationary orbit (GEO) are orbits around Earth at an altitude of 35 786 kilometres matching Earth’s sidereal rotation period. All geosynchronous and geostationary orbits have a semi-major axis of 42 164 kilometres. A geostationary orbit stays exactly above the equator, whereas a geosynchronous orbit may swing north and south to cover more of the Earth’s surface. Communications satellites and weather satellites are often placed in geostationary orbits, so that the satellite antennae (located on Earth) that communicate with them do not have to rotate to track them, but can be pointed permanently at the position in the sky where the satellites are located. 4) High Earth orbit: geocentric orbits above the altitude of 35 786 kilometres. The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the outward/upward centrifugal force, which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth. With the tether deployed, climbers could repeatedly climb the tether to space by mechanical means, releasing their cargo to orbit. Climbers could also descend the tether to return cargo to the surface from orbit. Private Companies are pursuing Space Elevators. Alfano 15 Andrea Alfano 8-18-2015 “All Of These Companies Are Working On A Space Elevator” https://www.techtimes.com/articles/77612/20150818/companies-working-space-elevator.htm (Writer at the Tech Times)Elmer Space elevators are solid proof that any mundane object sounds way cooler if you stick the word "space" in front of it. But there's much more than coolness at stake when building a space elevator – this technology has the potential to revolutionize space transportation, and the Canadian private space company Thoth Technology that was recently awarded a patent for its space elevator design isn't the only company in the game. One of the other major players is a U.S.-based company called LiftPort Group, founded by space entrepreneur Michael Laine in 2003. Its plan for a space elevator is vastly different from the one for which Thoth received a patent, however. Whereas Thoth's plans entail tethering a 12-mile-high inflatable space elevator to the Earth, LiftPort is shooting for the moon. Originally, LiftPort had planned to build an Earth elevator, too, but it abandoned the idea in 2007 in favor of building a lunar elevator. The basic design for a lunar elevator is an anchor in the moon that is attached to a cable that extends to a space station situated at a very special point. Known as a Lagrange Point, this is the gravitational tipping point between the Earth and the moon, where their gravitational pulls essentially cancel one another out. A robot could then travel up and down the tether, ferrying cargo between the moon and the station. Out farther in space, a counterweight would balance out the system. Both types of space elevator are intended to increase space access, but in very different ways. Thoth's Earth elevator aims to make launches easier by starting off 12 miles above the Earth's surface. LiftPort's space elevator aims to increase access to the moon in particular, because it is much easier to launch a rocket to the Lagrange Point and dock it at a space station than it is to get to the moon directly. There's a third major company based in Japan called Obayashi Corp. whose plans look like a hybrid of Thoth's and LiftPort's. Obayashi is not a space company, however – it's actually a construction company. Like Thoth, Obayashi plans to build an Earth elevator. But its Earth elevator would consist of a cable tethered to the blue planet, a robotic cargo-carrier, a space station, and a counterweight. It essentially looks like LiftPort's plans, but stuck to the Earth instead of to the moon. Yes Space Elevators – NASA confirms. Snowden 18 Scott Snowden 10-2-2018 "A colossal elevator to space could be going up sooner than you ever imagined" https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/colossal-elevator-space-could-be-going-sooner-you-ever-imagined-ncna915421 (Scott has written about science and technology for 20 years for publications around the world. He covers environmental technology for Forbes.)Elmer For more than half a century, rockets have been the only way to go to space. But in the not-too-distant future, we may have another option for sending up people and payloads: a colossal elevator extending from Earth’s surface up to an altitude of 22,000 miles, where geosynchronous satellites orbit. NASA says the basic concept of a space elevator is sound, and researchers around the world are optimistic that one can be built. The Obayashi Corp., a global construction firm based in Tokyo, has said it will build one by 2050, and China wants to build one as soon as 2045. Now an experiment to be conducted soon aboard the International Space Station will help determine the real-world feasibility of a space elevator. “The space elevator is the Holy Grail of space exploration,” says Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City College of New York and a noted futurist. “Imagine pushing the ‘up’ button of an elevator and taking a ride into the heavens. It could open up space to the average person.” Regardless of completion, Elevators spur investment in Nanotechnology Liam O’Brien 16. University of Wollongong. 07/2016. “Nanotechnology in Space.” Young Scientists Journal; Canterbury, no. 19, p. 22. Nanotechnology is at the forefront of scientific development, continuing to astound and innovate. Likewise, the space industry is rapidly increasing in sophistication and competition, with companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic becoming increasingly prevalent in what could become a new commercial space race. The various space programs over the past 60 years have led to a multitude of beneficial impacts for everyday society. Nanotechnology, through research and development in space has the potential to do the same. Potential applications of nanotechnology in space are numerous, many of them have the potential to capture and inspire generations to come. One of these applications is the space elevator. By using carbon nanotubes, a super light yet strong material, this concept would be an actual physical structure from the surface of the Earth to an altitude of approximately 36 000 km. The tallest building in the world would fit into this elevator over 42 000 times. The counterweight, used to keep the elevator taught, is proposed to be an asteroid. This would need to be at a distance of 100 000 km, a quarter of the distance to the moon. The benefits of such a structure would be enormous. 95 of a space shuttle's weight at take-off is fuel, costing US$ 20 000 per kilogram to send something into space. However, with a space elevator the cost per kilogram can be reduced to as little as US$ 200. Exploration to other planets can begin at the tower, and travel to and from the moon could become as simple as a morning commute to work. Solar sails provide the means to travel large distances and incredible speeds. Much like sails on a boat use wind, the solar sail uses light as a source of propulsion. Ideally these sails would be kilometres in length and only a few micrometres in thickness. This provides us with the ability to travel at speeds previously unheard of. Using carbon nanotubes once again, a solar sail has the capability to travel at 39 756 km/s which is 13 of the speed of light! This sail could reach Pluto in an astonishing 1.7 days, and Alpha Centauri in just 32 years. Space travel to other planets, other stars, could be possible with solar sails. The Planetary Society is funding for a space sail of itself, and has successfully launched one into orbit. NASA has also sent a sail into orbit, allowing it to burn up in the atmosphere after 240 days. Investing time and resources into nanotechnology for space exploration has benefits for society today. Materials such as graphene are being used in modern manufacturing at an increasing rate as the applications become utilised. Carbon nanotubes will change the way we think about materials and their strength. These nanotubes have a tensile strength one hundred times that of steel, yet are only a sixth of the weight. Imagine light weight vehicles using less petrol and energy as well as being just as strong as regular vehicles. With potentials to revolutionize the way we think about space travel, nanotechnology has a bright future. As a new field of science, it has the capability to push the human race to the outer reaches of our galaxy and hopefully one day to other stars. It will inspire generations of explorers and dreamers to challenge themselves and advance the human race into the next era. As Richard Feynman said in his 1959 talk 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom' "A field in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done. There is still plenty more to achieve. Nano tech solves warming Bhavya Khullar. September 4, 2017. Nanomaterials Could Combat Climate Change and Reduce Pollution. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nanomaterials-could-combat-climate-change-and-reduce-pollution/ The list of environmental problems that the world faces may be huge, but some strategies for solving them are remarkably small. First explored for applications in microscopy and computing, nanomaterials—materials made up of units that are each thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair—are emerging as useful for tackling threats to our planet’s well-being. Scientists across the globe are developing nanomaterials that can efficiently use carbon dioxide from the air, capture toxic pollutants from water and degrade solid waste into useful products. “Nanomaterials could help us mitigate pollution. They are efficient catalysts and mostly recyclable. Now, they have to become economical for commercialization and better to replace present-day technologies completely,” says Arun Chattopadhyay, a member of the chemistry faculty at the Center for Nanotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. To help slow the climate-changing rise in atmospheric CO2levels, researchers have developed nanoCO2 harvesters that can suck atmospheric carbon dioxide and deploy it for industrial purposes. “Nanomaterials can convert carbon dioxide into useful products like alcohol. The materials could be simple chemical catalysts or photochemical in nature that work in the presence of sunlight,” says Chattopadhyay, who has been working with nanomaterials to tackle environmental pollutants for more than a decade. Many research groups are working to address a problem that, if solved, could be a holy grail in combating climate change: how to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into useful products. Chattopadhyay isn’t alone. Many research groups are working to address a problem that, if solved, could be a holy grail in combating climate change: how to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into useful products. Nanoparticles offer a promising approach to this because they have a large surface-area-to-volume ratio for interacting with CO2 and properties that allow them to facilitate the conversion of CO2into other things. The challenge is to make them economically viable. Researchers have tried everything from metallic to carbon-based nanoparticles to reduce the cost, but so far they haven’t become efficient enough for industrial-scale application. One of the most recent points of progress in this area is work by scientists at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum and the Lille University of Science and Technology in France. The researchers developed a nanoCO2 harvester that uses water and sunlight to convert atmospheric CO2 into methanol, which can be employed as an engine fuel, a solvent, an antifreeze agent and a diluent of ethanol. Made by wrapping a layer of modified graphene oxide around spheres of copper zinc oxide and magnetite, the material looks like a miniature golf ball, captures CO2 more efficiently than conventional catalysts and can be readily reused, according to Suman Jain, senior scientist of the Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun in India, who developed the nanoCO2harvester. Jain says that the nanoCO2 harvester has a large molecular surface area and captures more CO2 than a conventional catalyst with similar surface area would, which makes the conversion more efficient. But due to their small size, the nanoparticles have a tendency to clump up, making them inactive with prolonged use. Jain adds that synthesizing useful nanoparticle-based materials is also challenging because it’s hard to make the particles a consistent size. Chattopadhyay says the efficiency of such materials can be improved further, providing hope for useful application in the future. CLEANSING WATER Most toxic dyes used in textile and leather industries can be captured with nanoparticles. “Water pollutants such as dyes from human-created waste like those from tanneries could get to natural sources of water like deep tube wells or groundwater if wastewater from these industries is left untreated,” says Chattopadhyay. “This problem is rather difficult to solve.” An international group of researchers led by professor Elzbieta Megiel of the University of Warsaw in Poland reports that nanomaterials have been widely studied for removing heavy metals and dyes from wastewater. According to the research team, adsorption processes using materials containing magnetic nanoparticles are highly effective and can be easily performed because such nanoparticles have a large number of sites on their surface that can capture pollutants and don’t readily degrade in water. Chattopadhyay adds that appropriately designed magnetic nanomaterials can be used to separate pollutants such as arsenic, lead, chromium and mercury from water. However, the nanotech-based approach has to be more efficient than conventional water purification technology to make it worthwhile. In addition to removing dyes and metals, nanomaterials can also be used to clean up oil spills. Researchers led by Pulickel Ajayan at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have developed a reusable nanosponge that can remove oil from contaminated seawater. Warming causes Extinction Kareiva 18, Peter, and Valerie Carranza. "Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back." Futures 102 (2018): 39-50. (Ph.D. in ecology and applied mathematics from Cornell University, director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment and Sustainability at UCLA)Re-cut by Elmer In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest. Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields). Climate change intersects with freshwater resources because it is expected to exacerbate drought and water scarcity, as well as flooding. Climate change can even impair water quality because it is associated with heavy rains that overwhelm sewage treatment facilities, or because it results in higher concentrations of pollutants in groundwater as a result of enhanced evaporation and reduced groundwater recharge. Ample clean water is not a luxury—it is essential for human survival. Consequently, cities, regions and nations that lack clean freshwater are vulnerable to social disruption and disease. Finally, ocean acidification is linked to climate change because it is driven by CO2 emissions just as global warming is. With close to 20 of the world’s protein coming from oceans (FAO, 2016), the potential for severe impacts due to acidification is obvious. Less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, is the interaction between climate change and the loss of oyster and coral reefs due to acidification. Acidification is known to interfere with oyster reef building and coral reefs. Climate change also increases storm frequency and severity. Coral reefs and oyster reefs provide protection from storm surge because they reduce wave energy (Spalding et al., 2014). If these reefs are lost due to acidification at the same time as storms become more severe and sea level rises, coastal communities will be exposed to unprecedented storm surge—and may be ravaged by recurrent storms. A key feature of the risk associated with climate change is that mean annual temperature and mean annual rainfall are not the variables of interest. Rather it is extreme episodic events that place nations and entire regions of the world at risk. These extreme events are by definition “rare” (once every hundred years), and changes in their likelihood are challenging to detect because of their rarity, but are exactly the manifestations of climate change that we must get better at anticipating (Diffenbaugh et al., 2017). Society will have a hard time responding to shorter intervals between rare extreme events because in the lifespan of an individual human, a person might experience as few as two or three extreme events. How likely is it that you would notice a change in the interval between events that are separated by decades, especially given that the interval is not regular but varies stochastically? A concrete example of this dilemma can be found in the past and expected future changes in storm-related flooding of New York City. The highly disruptive flooding of New York City associated with Hurricane Sandy represented a flood height that occurred once every 500 years in the 18th century, and that occurs now once every 25 years, but is expected to occur once every 5 years by 2050 (Garner et al., 2017). This change in frequency of extreme floods has profound implications for the measures New York City should take to protect its infrastructure and its population, yet because of the stochastic nature of such events, this shift in flood frequency is an elevated risk that will go unnoticed by most people. 4. The combination of positive feedback loops and societal inertia is fertile ground for global environmental catastrophes Humans are remarkably ingenious, and have adapted to crises throughout their history. Our doom has been repeatedly predicted, only to be averted by innovation (Ridley, 2011). However, the many stories of human ingenuity successfully addressing existential risks such as global famine or extreme air pollution represent environmental challenges that are largely linear, have immediate consequences, and operate without positive feedbacks. For example, the fact that food is in short supply does not increase the rate at which humans consume food—thereby increasing the shortage. Similarly, massive air pollution episodes such as the London fog of 1952 that killed 12,000 people did not make future air pollution events more likely. In fact it was just the opposite—the London fog sent such a clear message that Britain quickly enacted pollution control measures (Stradling, 2016). Food shortages, air pollution, water pollution, etc. send immediate signals to society of harm, which then trigger a negative feedback of society seeking to reduce the harm. In contrast, today’s great environmental crisis of climate change may cause some harm but there are generally long time delays between rising CO2 concentrations and damage to humans. The consequence of these delays are an absence of urgency; thus although 70 of Americans believe global warming is happening, only 40 think it will harm them (http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us-2016/). Secondly, unlike past environmental challenges, the Earth’s climate system is rife with positive feedback loops. In particular, as CO2 increases and the climate warms, that very warming can cause more CO2 release which further increases global warming, and then more CO2, and so on. Table 2 summarizes the best documented positive feedback loops for the Earth’s climate system. These feedbacks can be neatly categorized into carbon cycle, biogeochemical, biogeophysical, cloud, ice-albedo, and water vapor feedbacks. As important as it is to understand these feedbacks individually, it is even more essential to study the interactive nature of these feedbacks. Modeling studies show that when interactions among feedback loops are included, uncertainty increases dramatically and there is a heightened potential for perturbations to be magnified (e.g., Cox, Betts, Jones, Spall, and Totterdell, 2000; Hajima, Tachiiri, Ito, and Kawamiya, 2014; Knutti and Rugenstein, 2015; Rosenfeld, Sherwood, Wood, and Donner, 2014). This produces a wide range of future scenarios. Positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle involves the enhancement of future carbon contributions to the atmosphere due to some initial increase in atmospheric CO2. This happens because as CO2 accumulates, it reduces the efficiency in which oceans and terrestrial ecosystems sequester carbon, which in return feeds back to exacerbate climate change (Friedlingstein et al., 2001). Warming can also increase the rate at which organic matter decays and carbon is released into the atmosphere, thereby causing more warming (Melillo et al., 2017). Increases in food shortages and lack of water is also of major concern when biogeophysical feedback mechanisms perpetuate drought conditions. The underlying mechanism here is that losses in vegetation increases the surface albedo, which suppresses rainfall, and thus enhances future vegetation loss and more suppression of rainfall—thereby initiating or prolonging a drought (Chamey, Stone, and Quirk, 1975). To top it off, overgrazing depletes the soil, leading to augmented vegetation loss (Anderies, Janssen, and Walker, 2002). Climate change often also increases the risk of forest fires, as a result of higher temperatures and persistent drought conditions. The expectation is that forest fires will become more frequent and severe with climate warming and drought (Scholze, Knorr, Arnell, and Prentice, 2006), a trend for which we have already seen evidence (Allen et al., 2010). Tragically, the increased severity and risk of Southern California wildfires recently predicted by climate scientists (Jin et al., 2015), was realized in December 2017, with the largest fire in the history of California (the “Thomas fire” that burned 282,000 acres, https://www.vox.com/2017/12/27/16822180/thomas-fire-california-largest-wildfire). This catastrophic fire embodies the sorts of positive feedbacks and interacting factors that could catch humanity off-guard and produce a true apocalyptic event. Record-breaking rains produced an extraordinary flush of new vegetation, that then dried out as record heat waves and dry conditions took hold, coupled with stronger than normal winds, and ignition. Of course the record-fire released CO2 into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to future warming. Out of all types of feedbacks, water vapor and the ice-albedo feedbacks are the most clearly understood mechanisms. Losses in reflective snow and ice cover drive up surface temperatures, leading to even more melting of snow and ice cover—this is known as the ice-albedo feedback (Curry, Schramm, and Ebert, 1995). As snow and ice continue to melt at a more rapid pace, millions of people may be displaced by flooding risks as a consequence of sea level rise near coastal communities (Biermann and Boas, 2010; Myers, 2002; Nicholls et al., 2011). The water vapor feedback operates when warmer atmospheric conditions strengthen the saturation vapor pressure, which creates a warming effect given water vapor’s strong greenhouse gas properties (Manabe and Wetherald, 1967). Global warming tends to increase cloud formation because warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation of water into the atmosphere, and warmer temperature also allows the atmosphere to hold more water. The key question is whether this increase in clouds associated with global warming will result in a positive feedback loop (more warming) or a negative feedback loop (less warming). For decades, scientists have sought to answer this question and understand the net role clouds play in future climate projections (Schneider et al., 2017). Clouds are complex because they both have a cooling (reflecting incoming solar radiation) and warming (absorbing incoming solar radiation) effect (Lashof, DeAngelo, Saleska, and Harte, 1997). The type of cloud, altitude, and optical properties combine to determine how these countervailing effects balance out. Although still under debate, it appears that in most circumstances the cloud feedback is likely positive (Boucher et al., 2013). For example, models and observations show that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations reduces the low-level cloud fraction in the Northeast Pacific at decadal time scales. This then has a positive feedback effect and enhances climate warming since less solar radiation is reflected by the atmosphere (Clement, Burgman, and Norris, 2009). The key lesson from the long list of potentially positive feedbacks and their interactions is that runaway climate change, and runaway perturbations have to be taken as a serious possibility. Table 2 is just a snapshot of the type of feedbacks that have been identified (see Supplementary material for a more thorough explanation of positive feedback loops). However, this list is not exhaustive and the possibility of undiscovered positive feedbacks portends even greater existential risks. The many environmental crises humankind has previously averted (famine, ozone depletion, London fog, water pollution, etc.) were averted because of political will based on solid scientific understanding. We cannot count on complete scientific understanding when it comes to positive feedback loops and climate change.
2/6/22
JF - Space Primacy DA
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 1 | Opponent: Memorial SC | Judge: Claire Liu Commercial Space Race favors American Companies that cements space dominance – shift away endangers our lead – losing green-lights Chinese Dominance across the board. Autry and Kwast 19 Greg Autry and Steve Kwast 8-22-2019 "America Is Losing the Second Space Race to China" (Greg Autry, a clinical professor of space leadership, policy, and business at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, and Steve Kwast)Elmer America Is Losing the Second Space Race to China The private sector can give the United States a much-needed rocket boost. The current U.S. space defense strategy is inadequate and on a path to failure. President Donald Trump’s vision for a Space Force is big enough. As he said on June 18, “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.” But the Air Force is not matching this vision. Instead, the leadership is currently focused on incremental improvements to existing equipment and organizational structures. Dominating the vast and dynamic environment of space will require revolutionary capabilities and resources far deeper than traditional Department of Defense thinking can fund, manage, or even conceive of. Success depends on a much more active partnership with the commercial space industry— and its disruptive capabilities. U.S. military space planners are preparing to repeat a conflict they imagined back in the 1980s, which never actually occurred, against a vanished Soviet empire. Meanwhile, China is executing a winning strategy in the world of today. It is burning hard toward domination of the future space markets that will define the next century. They are planning infrastructure in space that will control 21st-century telecommunications, energy, transportation, and manufacturing. In doing so, they will acquire trillion-dollar revenues as well as the deep capabilities that come from continuous operational experience in space. This will deliver space dominance and global hegemony to China’s authoritarian rulers. Despite the fact that many in the policy and intelligence communities understand exactly what China is doing and have been trying to alert leadership, Air Force leadership has convinced the White House to fund only a slightly better satellite command with the same leadership, while sticking a new label onto their outmoded thinking. A U.S. Space Force or Corps with a satellite command will never fulfill Trump’s call to dominate space. Air Force leadership is demonstrating the same hubris that Gen. George Custer used in convincing Congress, over President Ulysses S. Grant’s better experience intuition, that he could overtake the Black Hills with repeating rifles and artillery. That strategy of technological overconfidence inflamed conflict rather than subduing it, and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The West was actually won by the settlers, ranchers, miners, and railroad barons who were able to convert the wealth of the territory itself into the means of holding it. They laid the groundwork that made the 20th century the American Century and delivered freedom to millions of people in Europe and Asia. Of course, they also trampled the indigenous people of the American West in their wake—but empty space comes with no such bloody cost. The very emptiness and wealth of this new, if not quite final, frontier, however, means that competition for resources and strategic locations in cislunar space (between the Earth and moon) will be intense over the next two decades. The outcome of this competition will determine the fate of humanity in the next century. China’s impending dominance will neutralize U.S. geopolitical power by allowing Beijing to control global information flows from the high ground of space. Imagine a school in Bolivia or a farmer in Kenya choosing between paying for a U.S. satellite internet or image provider or receiving those services for free as a “gift of the Chinese people.” It will be of little concern to global consumers that the news they receive is slanted or that searches for “free speech” link to articles about corruption in Western democracies. Nor will they care if concentration camps in Tibet and the Uighur areas of western China are obscured, or if U.S. military action is presented as tyranny and Chinese expansion is described as peacekeeping or liberation. China’s aggressive investment in space solar power will allow it to provide cheap, clean power to the world, displacing U.S. energy firms while placing a second yoke around the developing world. Significantly, such orbital power stations have dual use potential and, if properly designed, could serve as powerful offensive weapons platforms. China’s first step in this process is to conquer the growing small space launch market. Beijing is providing nominally commercial firms with government-manufactured, mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles they can use to dump launch services on the market below cost. These start-ups are already undercutting U.S. pricing by 80 percent. Based on its previous success in using dumping to take out U.S. developed industries such as solar power modules and drones, China will quickly move upstream to attack the leading U.S. launch providers and secure a global commercial monopoly. Owning the launch market will give them an unsurmountable advantage against U.S. competitors in satellite internet, imaging, and power. The United States can still build a strategy to win. At this moment, it holds the competitive advantage in every critical space technology and has the finest set of commercial space firms in the world. It has pockets of innovative military thinkers within groups like the Defense Innovation Unit, under Mike Griffin, the Pentagon’s top research and development official. If the United States simply protects the intellectual property its creative minds unleash and defend its truly free markets from strategic mercantilist attack, it will not lose this new space race. The United States has done this before. It beat Germany to the nuclear bomb, it beat the Soviet Union to the nuclear triad, and it won the first space race. None of those victories was achieved by embracing the existing bureaucracy. Each of them depended on the president of the day following the only proven path to victory in a technological domain: establish a small team with a positively disruptive mindset and empower that team to investigate a wide range of new concepts, work with emerging technologies, and test innovative strategies. Today that means giving a dedicated Space Force the freedom to easily partner with commercial firms and leverage the private capital in building sustainable infrastructure that actually reduces the likelihood of conflict while securing a better economic future for the nation and the world. Hegemony solves Extinction. Ikenberry 20 John Ikenberry 6-9-2020 “The Next Liberal Order: The Age of Contagion Demands More Internationalism, Not Less” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-06-09/next-liberal-order (Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, in South Korea)Elmer The rivalry between the United States and China will preoccupy the world for decades, and the problems of anarchy cannot be wished away. But for the United States and its partners, a far greater challenge lies in what might be called “the problems of modernity”: the deep, worldwide transformations unleashed by the forces of science, technology, and industrialism, or what the sociologist Ernest Gellner once described as a “tidal wave” pushing and pulling modern societies into an increasingly complex and interconnected world system. Washington and its partners are threatened less by rival great powers than by emergent, interconnected, and cascading transnational dangers. Climate change, pandemic diseases, financial crises, failed states, nuclear proliferation—all reverberate far beyond any individual country. So do the effects of automation and global production chains on capitalist societies, the dangers of the coming revolution in artificial intelligence, and other, as-yet-unimagined upheavals. The coronavirus is the poster child of these transnational dangers: it does not respect borders, and one cannot hide from it or defeat it in war. Countries facing a global outbreak are only as safe as the least safe among them. For better or worse, the United States and the rest of the world are in it together. Past American leaders understood that the global problems of modernity called for a global solution and set about building a worldwide network of alliances and multilateral institutions. But for many observers, the result of these efforts—the liberal international order—has been a failure. For some, it is tied to the neoliberal policies that produced financial crises and rising economic inequality; for others, it evokes disastrous military interventions and endless wars. The bet that China would integrate as a “responsible stakeholder” into a U.S.-led liberal order is widely seen to have failed, too. Little wonder that the liberal vision has lost its appeal. Liberal internationalists need to acknowledge these missteps and failures. Under the auspices of the liberal international order, the United States has intervened too much, regulated too little, and delivered less than it promised. But what do its detractors have to offer? Despite its faults, no other organizing principle currently under debate comes close to liberal internationalism in making the case for a decent and cooperative world order that encourages the enlightened pursuit of national interests. Ironically, the critics’ complaints make sense only within a system that embraces self-determination, individual rights, economic security, and the rule of law—the very cornerstones of liberal internationalism. The current order may not have realized these principles across the board, but flaws and failures are inherent in all political orders. What is unique about the postwar liberal order is its capacity for self-correction. Even a deeply flawed liberal system provides the institutions through which it can be brought closer to its founding ideals. However serious the liberal order’s shortcomings may be, they pale in comparison to its achievements. Over seven decades, it has lifted more boats—manifest in economic growth and rising incomes—than any other order in world history. It provided a framework for struggling industrial societies in Europe and elsewhere to transform themselves into modern social democracies. Japan and West Germany were integrated into a common security community and went on to fashion distinctive national identities as peaceful great powers. Western Europe subdued old hatreds and launched a grand project of union. European colonial rule in Africa and Asia largely came to an end. The G-7 system of cooperation among Japan, Europe, and North America fostered growth and managed a sequence of trade and financial crises. Beginning in the 1980s, countries across East Asia, Latin America, and eastern Europe opened up their political and economic systems and joined the broader order. The United States experienced its greatest successes as a world power, culminating in the peaceful end to the Cold War, and countries around the globe wanted more, not less, U.S. leadership. This is not an order that one should eagerly escort off the stage. Any alternative is worse and causes great power war. The major alternatives to a modernized world order supported by the United States appear unlikely, unappealing, or both. A Chinese-led order, for example, would be an illiberal one, characterized by authoritarian domestic political systems and statist economies that place a premium on maintaining domestic stability. There would be a return to spheres of influence, with China attempting to domi-nate its region, likely resulting in clashes with other regional powers, such as India, Japan, and Vietnam, which would probably build up their conventional or even nuclear forces. A new democratic, rules-based order fashioned and led by medium powers in Europe and Asia, as well as Canada, however attractive a concept, would simply lack the military capacity and domestic political will to get very far. A more likely alternative is a world with little order—a world of deeper disarray. Protectionism, nationalism, and populism would gain, and democracy would lose. Conflict within and across borders would become more common, and rivalry between great powers would increase. Cooperation on global challenges would be all but precluded. If this picture sounds familiar, that is because it increasingly corresponds to the world of today. The deterioration of a world order can set in motion trends that spell catastrophe. World War I broke out some 60 years after the Concert of Europe had for all intents and purposes broken down in Crimea. What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post– World War II, post–Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis. Now is the time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change. The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not. Specifically, solves Nuclear War – shift causes Transition Wars. Khalizad 16 Zalmay Khalizad 3-23-2016 “4 Lessons about America's Role in the World” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/4-lessons-about-americas-role-the-world-15574?page=show (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, counselor at the CSIS)Elmer Ultimately, however, we concluded that the United States has a strong interest in precluding the emergence of another bipolar world—as in the Cold War—or a world of many great powers, as existed before the two world wars. Multipolarity led to two world wars and bipolarity resulted in a protracted worldwide struggle with the risk of nuclear annihilation. To avoid a return such circumstances, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ultimately agreed that our objective must be to prevent a hostile power to dominate a “critical region,” which would give it the resources, industrial capabilities and population to pose a global challenge. This insight has guided U.S. defense policy throughout the post–Cold War era. Giving major powers the green light to establish spheres of influence would produce a multipolar world and risk the return of war between the major powers. Without a stabilizing U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf and U.S. relationships with Jordan and the Gulf States, Iran could shut down oil shipments in its supposed sphere of influence. A similar scenario in fact played out during the 1987 “tanker war” of the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually escalated into a direct military conflict between the United States and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program makes these scenarios even more dangerous. The United States can manage the rise and resurgence of great powers like China, Russia and Iran at an acceptable cost without ceding entire spheres of influence. The key is to focus on normalizing the geopolitics of the Middle East, Europe and the Asia-Pacific, which the United States can do by strengthening its transatlantic and transpacific alliances and adapting them to the new, dangerous circumstances on the horizon. The United States should promote a balance of power in key regions while seeking opportunities to reconcile differences among major actors.
1/15/22
JF - T- Extraction
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 3 | Opponent: Peninsula AL | Judge: Gerard Grigsby 1 Interpretation: appropriation means a claim of sovereignty- affs may only defend claims of sovereignty by private entities as unjust Appropriation refers to sovereign claims of land, not using or extracting resources- proven by OST’s guidelines, nation’s interpretations, and prior property regimes Wrench 19 Wrench, John. 2019. “Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law Non-Appropriation, No Problem: The Outer Space Treaty Is Ready for Asteroid Mining Non-Appropriation, No Problem: The Outer Space Treaty Is Ready for Asteroid Mining,” n.d. https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2546andcontext=jil. WL It is unlikely, however, that the non-appropriation principle is an absolute ban on the ownership of resources extracted in outer space. An interpretation of Article II supporting a blanket ban on resource ownership is unwarranted by the text of the OST and illfounded on account of the international community’s common practices. Scholars have noted that the international community has never questioned whether scientific samples harvested from celestial bodies belong to the extracting nation.60 Furthermore, space-faring members of the international community rejected the Moon Treaty precisely because it prohibited all forms of ownership in resources extracted from celestial bodies.61 The space-faring nations’ support for the OST, coupled with their rejection of an alternative set of rules governing extracted resources, is at the very least an indication of what those nations believe the non-appropriation principle to stand for. It is equally improbable that the international community drafted the non-appropriation principle to be merely idealistic rhetoric. The OST leaves no room for interpretations to squirm out from under its ban on sovereign claims of land.62 The following section illustrates, however, that the distinction between sovereign ownership of land, and the vestment of property rights in resources extracted from that land, is nothing new. Although the OST does not provide a comprehensive guideline for resource extraction in outer space, its foundational logic provides a workable distinction between ownership and use. This part explores three property regimes developed under the same fundamental constraints as the non-appropriation principle: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), the Antarctica Treaty System, and the prior appropriation doctrine as applied in United States water law.63 Under each regime, parties may establish some form of ownership in extracted resources despite being restricted from claiming sovereignty over the underlying land. Each section includes a brief discussion of the property regime’s history, its major traits and their relationship to the overarching characteristics of the non-appropriation principle. This part further describes how each property regime fits within the non-appropriation principle’s prohibition on claims to land, while prohibiting waste, separating land ownership from rights to extracted resources, enforcing liability for destruction or damage, and establishing a simple regulatory system to manage claims. Presume neg – all parties to the outer space treaty prohibit “appropriation” of resources by private entities. Melissa J. Durkee, J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia, ’19, "Interstitial Space Law," Washington University Law Review 97, no. 2 423-482 Those answering this question in the affirmative have access to a strong textual argument. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty specifically references "national" appropriation.17 9 The context surrounding that appears to confirm that the prohibition of "national" appropriation is directed at nations, as only a nation could have a legitimate "claim of sovereignty." 180 Moreover, "occupation" refers to old international legal doctrines that once allowed nations to claim territory based on occupation. The historical context within which the treaty was drafted supports this position, as the concern of the time was colonization, not commercial use of space resources. As for private parties, they are specifically anticipated by the treaty: Article VI states that States Parties bear international responsibility for activities by "non-governmental entities" as well as governmental agencies.' 8 1 The fact that they are anticipated by the treaty but not included in the Article II prohibition on appropriation suggests that the treaty intended to prohibit only national appropriation of outer space resources.18 2 Those claiming that the treaty prohibits both national appropriation and appropriation by private parties can marshal their own textual argument. Article VI defines "national activities in outer space" to include both "activities . .. carried on by governmental agencies" and those carried on by "non-governmental entities." 8 3 This definition of "national" must inform Article II's prohibition on "national" appropriation and thus extend to a nation's citizens and commercial entities as well as governmental activities. Moreover, a contrary interpretation defies logic: if nations themselves may not claim property rights to outer space objects, they have no power to confer those rights on their nationals.184 2 Violation: they only defend asteroid mining, which is simply extraction 3 Standards: a Limits – This topic is a limits disaster – infinite permutations of Countries and Appropriations moots all sense of predictable topic stasis. Allowing the Aff to be about “using” resources as Topical allows Affs about temporary satellites or licensing particular land properties which is outside the bounds of topic controversy which is about permancney. b Ground – shifting away from Permanency Good/Bad moots our Neg Generics about Private Property being Good since the 1AR can just re-contextualize out of it. 4 Paradigm Issues – a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
2/6/22
JF - T- Nebel
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Chris Castillo Interpretation: “Private entities” is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that a subset of nations ban the appropriation of outer space. Nebel 19. Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. He writes a lot of this stuff lol – duh. “Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution.” Vbriefly. August 12, 2019. https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/?fbclid=IwAR0hUkKdDzHWrNeqEVI7m59pwsnmqLl490n4uRLQTe7bWmWDO_avWCNzi14 TG Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universitiesz generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. It applies to “private entities” – adding “generally” to the rez doesn’t substantially change its meaning and the rez doesn’t entail that all entities ought to ban private appropriation
Violation: They spec US
Net benefits - 1 Limits – 195 recognized countries plus combinations and specific entities within countries makes negating impossible especially with no unifying disads against different policies, implementation and regulation procedures
2/6/22
JF - T- Unjust
Tournament: CPS | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen Interp – Unjust refers to a negative action – it means contrary. Black Laws No Date "What is Unjust?" https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/Elmer Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws. Violation – The Aff is a positive action – it creates a new concept for Space i.e. the creation of a multilateral agreement Standards – 1 Limits – making the topic bi-directional explodes predictability – it means that Aff’s can both increase non-exist property regimes in space AND decrease appropriation by private actors – makes the topic untenable. 2 Ground – wrecks Neg Generics – we can’t say appropriation good since the 1AC can create new views on Outer Space Property Rights that circumvent our Links 3 TVA – just defend that space appropriation is bad. Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. Use Competing Interps – A Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical. No RVI’s - A Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, B Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive.
12/19/21
JF - US Unilateral Mining CP
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brophy TJ | Judge: Aryan Jasani Text – The United States should unilaterally restrict asteroid mining done by private entities. Counterplan competes – the Plan is a multilateral agreement while the CP is just the United States. Solves the first advantage because China and Russia have no reason to be angry, and solves the second advantage because mining is regulated. Unilateral Actions solve – they’re legally binding and perceived internationally. Su 17 Jinyuan, S. U. "Space arms control: Lex lata and currently active proposals." Asian Journal of International Law 7.1 (2017): 61-93. Elmer The unilateral statements led by Russia are important confidence-building measures for the security of outer space. However, in international law unilateral acts may also imply binding obligations, subject to the fulfilment of some conditions. The binding character of an international obligation assumed unilaterally, as the customary principle of pacta sunt servanda, is based on good faith. The legal effect of unilateral statements made vis-à-vis the whole world community was addressed by the ICJ in the Nuclear Tests case, in which France committed to cease nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The ICJ expounded: It is well recognized that declarations made by way of unilateral acts, concerning legal or factual situations, may have the effect of creating legal obligations. Declarations of this kind may be, and often are, very specific. When it is the intention of the State making the declaration that it should become bound according to its terms, that intention confers on the declaration the character of a legal undertaking, the State being thenceforth legally required to follow a course of conduct consistent with the declaration. An undertaking of this kind, if given publicly, and with an intent to be bound, even though not made within the context of international negotiations, is binding. In these circumstances, nothing in the nature of a quid pro quo nor any subsequent acceptance of the declaration, nor even any reply or reaction from other States, is required for the declaration to take effect, since such a requirement would be inconsistent with the strictly unilateral nature of the juridical act by which the pronouncement by the State was made.92 China uses space coop to bolster perception of credible leadership – that causes space war and conventional conflict in the SCS Fisher 15 Richard D. Fisher 2-8-2015 “China’s Military Ambitions in Space and America’s Response” http://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Fisher_Testimony_2.18.15.pdf (President of Pacific Strategies, Inc)Elmer As with the former Soviet Union, China’s pursuit of regional and then global military power is not rooted in an existential threat, but in the CCP’s fears for its power position. This requires a CCP-led “rejuvenation” of China, entailing mobilization for greater power, ever more control over its own people, and then increasing control over others. Another result is China’s choice to be hostile to Western rules or concepts that may constrain China’s power. This justifies an essential Chinese rejection of American or Western conceptions of transparency and restraint, or verifiable weapons control in space which might constrain its power. This mirrors the CCP/PLA’s repeated refusal of U.S. requests to consider real nuclear weapons transparency and control, transparency over its nuclear and missile exports, and --from many of its neighbors and Washington -- fair settlement of territorial disputes which threaten war. The latter, especially in the South China Sea, is instructive. As it has gained military power in the South China Sea, China has sought to change the strategic environment and dictate new rules to increase its security at the expense of others. Once it gains commanding strength and position in space, will China do the same? For the United States, cooperation with China in space may yield some benefits, but it likely will have little impact on the direction and severity of terrestrial conflicts which will dominate relations with China. One can see the value of meeting with Chinese space officials, especially higher CCP and PLA leaders, to advance concerns over their actions in space and to promote transparency. But at this juncture, before China has achieved levels of “space dominance”, it is crucial to link any real cooperation with China to its behavior in space and elsewhere which threatens U.S. security. Furthermore, allowing China increasing access to U.S. space technology, space corporations, or government institutions at this time presents two risks. First it could encourage China to advance an illusion of cooperation with the U.S. and the West while differences on Earth become sharper. This could become useful for Beijing to deflect criticism on other issues, or even to obtain leverage over U.S. options and actions. Second, as has been proven repeatedly, China will exploit any new access for espionage gains to strengthen its own space and military sectors. 2 China’s increasing space power, however, like its growing economic and political power, cannot be “contained.” Russia appears ready to greatly expand space and military cooperation with China as part of a larger strategic alignment, while the European Space Agency is edging toward greater cooperation with China. These attractions may only increase if China has the only LEO manned space station in the mid-2020s. Already a top commercial space service and technology provider, China will use its gathering space diplomacy tools to aid its pursuit of economic, political and military influence in critical regions like Africa and Latin America. The challenge for the United States is to maintain the means to compete with China in space both in military and non-military endeavors. China’s potential for developing new space combat systems means the U.S. must be able to rapidly develop appropriate deterrent capabilities. There should also be a more developed U.S. capability to rapidly repopulate satellite systems taken down by PLA attacks, and there should be more terrestrial or airborne systems to compensate for lost navigation, communication and surveillance satellites. In addition, as the PLA moves substantially out to deep space, the Moon, or to the Lagrangian Points, it will be necessary for the U.S. to consider a compensating presence that is affordable, attractive to a coalition of democracies, and helps to deter China from seeking strategic advantage. Strategic priorities would suggest that a presence on or near the Moon is of greater importance than going to Mars. A multinational government-private presence on the Moon is one option, as is the likely less expensive option of a far cis-lunar presence to further develop manned deep space capabilities. As was the case with the former Soviet Union, relative peace on Earth or in space will not truly be possible until China evolves beyond its Leninist dictatorship. In its final years, the Soviet Union was on the cusp of deploying multiple space combat systems despite years of U.S.-Soviet space diplomacy. Real space cooperation between Russia the West became possible only after the fall of the Soviet Union, and may again become threatened by Russia’s slide into authoritarian aggression. Substantive cooperation with China in space offers no assurance that China will change its threatening behaviors on Earth or in space, but does create opportunities for China to exploit U.S. and Western space technology to gain potential military advantages. China uses to increase aggression in the SCS. Yang 18 Adam Yang 3-17-2018 “How Should the US Engage China in Space?” https://thediplomat.com/2018/03/how-should-the-us-engage-china-in-space (Major in the U.S. Marine Corp and a student at the Command and Staff College)Elmer Subsequently, China is pursuing international cooperation in space – not only for security and economic reasons, but also to bolster the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party to domestic and international audiences. The European Space Administration (ESA) has already expressed desires to cooperate with China on human space flight and the use of its future space station. China especially values its relationship with ESA due to the opportunities to trade and transfer technologies denied by the United States. China and Russia have also agreed to cooperate on human space flight and deep space exploration. Though these initiatives are not on the scale of a Maritime Silk Road, they do offer U.S. policymakers opportunities to work with a rising space power for positive ends. Finally, the US United States should pay attention to China’s diplomatic and engagement efforts with other nations. Contrary to the cooperative tenets for a Maritime Silk Road, in 2016, China convinced Cambodia to block an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) joint statement that recognized The Hague’s arbitration ruling on the South China Sea dispute in favor of the Philippines. In June 2017, Vietnam resisted China’s demands to vacate an oil venture within its EEZ, but eventually capitulated when China threatened to use force. The most concerning aspect for Vietnam was an atypical silence from its neighbors – particularly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore. Apparently, China’s political and economic leverage over these nations prevented them from publicly sympathizing with Vietnam or rebuking China’s actions. Seemingly, when pressed, China uses soft and hard power tactics bilaterally to dislodge multilateral initiatives that counter it interests. Could China disrupt the U.S.-European alliance as it did with ASEAN unity? At this stage, Chinese-European cooperation in space seems well intentioned. Nevertheless, U.S. policymakers should consider whether China’s growing space relations with Europe, Russia, or any other space power could complicate U.S. interests in other areas. As China strengthens its partnerships, its ability to shape laws, institutions and the strategic preferences of others increase as well. Unchecked maritime expansion risks Nuclear War Thayer and Han 19 (Bradley A. and Lianchao; professor of Political Science at the University of Texas San Antonio, fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University; vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, founder of the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars, legislative counsel and policy director in the US Senate for 12 years; ( 6-12-2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/E28098xi-doctrineE28099-proclaiming-and-rationalizing-chinaE28099s-aggression-62402, "The ‘Xi Doctrine’: Proclaiming and Rationalizing China’s Aggression," National Interest, Acc:9-20-2019 (ermo/sms) Using the occasion of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this month, Chinese Minister of National Defense and State Councilor Gen. Wei Fenghe, delivered a sharp message to the United States, which may be termed the “Xi Doctrine” on China’s use of force, after Chinese premier Xi Jinping. Wei declaring both China’s resolve to aggress to advance its interests and a rationalization for the use of force. Wei’s de facto threat of war should not be lost in his nuances, deliberate ambiguity, or in translation. His remarks were so bellicose that the world has noticed, as was certainly intended by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Empirical evidence of China’s aggression is increasingly common, from its attempt to dominate the South China Sea, the neo-imperialist effort to gain control of states through the Belt and Road Initiative, to its technological imperialism to control 5G and artificial intelligence technologies. What is rather less frequent are statements from high-level Chinese officials proclaiming the country’s intent to be aggressive and offering an attempted legitimizing principle justifying that aggression. While much of the content of Wei’s remarks were in keeping with the gossamer pronouncements on China’s peaceful intentions, as well as a paean to Xi Jinping’s leadership, they still conveyed that China is ready and willing to resort to war if the United States stands in its way of global expansion; and they made clear that China must go to war, or even a nuclear war, to occupy Taiwan. Specifically, there are four elements that comprise the Xi Doctrine and are indications of China’s signaling its willingness to use force. The first component is a new and alarming proclamation of the undisguised threats to use force or wage an unlimited war. China is becoming bolder as its military power grows. This is evidenced in Wei’s muscular remarks on the People’s Republic of China’s approach against Taiwan, his explicit statement that China does not renounce the use of force against Taiwan, and his effort to deter the United States and its allies from intervention should an attack occur. Wei forcefully stated: “If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but must go to war, and must fight for the reunification of the motherland at all costs.” “At all cost” means that China will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or launching another Pearl Harbor to take over Taiwan. This is a clear warning of an invasion. Second, the Xi Doctrine legitimizes territorial expansion. Through his remarks, Wei sought to convince the rest of the world that China’s seizure of most of the South China Sea is an accomplished fact that cannot be overturned. He made bogus accusations, which included blaming the United States for “raking in profits by stirring up troubles” in the region. He insisted that only ASEAN and China must resolve the issue. He claimed that China’s militarization on South China Sea islands and reefs were an act of self-defense. Should this be allowed to stand, then the Xi Doctrine will set a perilous precedent of successful territorial expansion, which will further entice China and jeopardize the peace of the region. Third, the doctrine targets the United States as a cause of the world’s major problems and envisions a powerful China evicting the United States from the region. Wei obliquely identified the United States as the cause wars, conflicts, and unrest, and sought to convey that the United States will abandon the states of the South China Sea (SCS) when it is confronted by Chinese power, a typical divide and conquer strategy used by the CCP regime. The Xi Doctrine’s fourth element is the mendacity regarding China’s historical use of force and current actions. While the distortions of history were numerous, there were three major lies that should be alarming for the states of the region and the global community. First, Wei said that China had never invaded another country, which is a claim so transparently false it can only be a measure of the contempt he held for the audience. China has a long history of aggression, including against the Tibetans and Vietnamese, and perhaps soon against the Taiwanese. Second, Wei argued that hegemony does not conform to China’s values when, in fact, China proudly was Asia’s hegemon for most of the last two thousand years. Lastly, he claimed that the situation in the SCS is moving toward stability—from China’s perspective this stability is caused by its successful seizure of territory. In fact, the SCS is far less stable as a result of China’s actions. Efforts to counter this grab are denounced by Wei as destabilizing, which is a bit like a thief accusing you of a crime for wanting your property returned. Wei’s belligerent rhetoric is an indication that the CCP regime faces deep external and internal crises. Externally, the Trump administration has shocked the CCP with the three major steps it has taken. First, it has shifted the focus of the U.S. national-security strategy and now identifies China explicitly as its primary rival—abandoning the far more muted policies of previous administrations. Second, Trump has acted on this peer competitive threat by advancing tangible measures, such as arms sales to allies and the ban of Huawei. Third, the administration has made credible commitments to assure partners and allies to counter China’s aggression and bullying. These have unbalanced the CCP regime, and its natural reaction is to bully its way out. Additionally, the CCP regime has perceived that the world today has begun to consider the negative implications of China’s rise, and the United States is determined to prevent what heretofore had been considered China’s unstoppable rise. From the perspective of CCP, conflict is increasingly seen as inevitable and perhaps even imminent. Wei’s bellicosity should be seen in this light, and the PLA is tasked with fighting and winning the war. Internally, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign that selectively targets his political rivalries, and his abandoning the established rules such as term limited of presidency, have introduced deep cleavages into the unity of the regime unity. China’s economic slowdown, made worse by the U.S. trade war, is a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy. Xi’s repression and suppression of the Chinese people, particularly human-rights defenders, Christians, Kazakhs, Uighurs, and other minorities, have miscarried. Drawing from the pages of unfortunate history, in a classic social-imperialist move, the regime wants to direct these internal tensions outward. At the same time, the nationalistic fervor advanced by the CCP’s propaganda and by the rapid military modernization have made many young militant officers in the PLA overconfident. This is infrequently noticed in the West. They can hardly wait to fight an ultimate war to defeat the arch-enemy. This plainly dangerous mentality echoes the Japanese military’s beliefs before Pearl Harbor.
1/22/22
ND - Business Confidence DA v1
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: LHP SS | Judge: Pat Fox Business Confidence is high now – best surveys. ICAEW 8-20 8-20-2021 "Business confidence remains at record high as economy gets sales boost" https://www.icaew.com/about-icaew/news/press-release-archive/2021-news-releases/business-confidence-remains-at-record-high-as-economy-gets-sales-boost (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales)Elmer Friday 20 August 2021: Business confidence has hit a record high for the second quarter in a row, a survey of chartered accountants published today has found. Business confidence at record high for second consecutive quarter, ICAEW survey finds Strong sales growth projections key to confidence boost Companies face new challenges as economy reopens Business confidence has hit a record high for the second quarter in a row, a survey of chartered accountants published today (FRIDAY 20 AUGUST 2021) has found. Sentiment tracked by ICAEW’s Business Confidence Monitor™ (BCM) found optimism at 47 on the quarterly index, its highest level since the survey was launched in 2004 and surpassing the previous record set last quarter. 1 The optimism was shared by businesses of all sizes across all sectors, nations and regions in the UK. The record reading was a likely reflection of the expectation of strong sales growth in the year ahead, especially in the domestic market where a record rise of 7.4 is predicted over the coming 12 months. Companies also expect a sharp boost in export sales, which will rebound to pre-pandemic rates of increase. 2 However, the likelihood of confidence remaining positive is highly dependent on the COVID-19 situation not deteriorating further, ICAEW said. Decisions on interest rates, the winding down of support schemes, such as furlough, could also have an impact on future business sentiment. Office for National Statistics figures published last week showed that Britain’s economy grew 4.8 between April and June, below the 5 that the Bank of England had forecast. Michael Izza, ICAEW Chief Executive, said: “Business confidence has now hit record levels for two quarters in a row - companies are clearly benefitting from rising customer demand as the economy reopens and life begins to return to normal. The high level of optimism is unsurprising but it remains vulnerable to a possible resurgence of COVID-19 as we head into the autumn. “While confidence is high across all sectors, with companies reporting record expectations for domestic sales growth, they also told us they face challenges from skills shortages, wage increases and rising costs. “This is a crucial stage for the economy. Despite having to cope with the winding down of government financial support and possible interest rate rises, businesses are definitely bouncing back, but finances are fragile and any additional costs could threaten the recovery.” Right to Strike has unintended effects that threaten growth and business confidence. Tenza 20, Mlungisi. "The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa." Obiter 41.3 (2020): 519-537. (lecturer in the field of Labour Law at the School of Law. He holds a LLM Degree.)Elmer 2 BACKGROUND When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers’ downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that “the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession”. 7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers’ stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country’s economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 3 THE COMMISSION OF VIOLENCE DURING A STRIKE AND CONSEQUENCES The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike. 11 The Constitution grants these rights to a “worker” as an individual.12 However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14 The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to “advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace”. 16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society. Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally. 18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful. 19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers’ demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows: “There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike … A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won’t win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say ‘1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC’. You won’t win a strike like that.” 21 The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers’ homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour. 22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families’ living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24 In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25 striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer’s business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26 Corporate optimism, specifically investment, drives self-sustaining recovery. Van der Welle 7-7 Peter Van der Welle 7-7-2021 “How capex holds the key to a self-sustaining economic recovery” https://www.robeco.com/latam/en/insights/2021/07/how-capex-holds-the-key-to-a-self-sustaining-economic-recovery.html (Strategist within the Global Macro team, M.A. in Economics from Tilburg University)Elmer Title: How capex holds the key to a self-sustaining economic recovery. Capital expenditure to fix supply shortages and meet burgeoning demand is seen figuring strongly in the post-Covid recovery. Author and summary omitted. Companies are expected to invest heavily in new equipment and capacity as they seek to meet the pent-up demand released from economic reopening. “The world is emerging from the pandemic, and much of the focus has been on the release of huge pent-up demand for goods and services that have been inaccessible for much of the past year,” says Peter Van der Welle, strategist with Robeco’s multi-asset team. “But there is a bigger issue regarding the ability of companies to supply these goods and services, due to the supply side constraints that have emerged through economic reopening. We believe this is powering a resurgence in capital expenditure by companies, and those which are investing in new equipment to meet greater demand will be the more sought after stocks.” Capex intentions Van der Welle says this trend can already be seen in the US Federal Reserve’s Capex Intentions Index, which shows that steep year-on-year increases in capital expenditures are planned. “So, that's promising for a near-term rebound in the capex cycle,” he says. “The market has already picked up on that theme because you can see a clear outperformance of capex-intensive stocks compared to the broader market year to date.” Fiscal dominance Van der Welle says five elements support the multi-asset team’s view that capex will rise from here onwards. “The first is the overarching macroeconomic picture in that we are increasingly moving towards an environment of fiscal dominance and away from one that has been monetary-led via quantitative easing,” he says. “Central banks have pursued very easy monetary policies, but they have hit the nominal lower bounds with regard to policy rates.” “This is a hard constraint because real rates are difficult for central banks to push even lower than they are nowadays, given the strong consensus among both central bankers and market participants that inflation is transitory.” Big spending plans For stimulus, fiscal policy is better suited to address the negative supply shock that Covid-19 has posed. Fiscal dominance can be seen in the huge infrastructure spending planned in the US, with the USD 1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan already in motion, and the USD 2 trillion American Jobs Plan going through Congress. In Europe, the disbursement of the EUR 750 billion EU Recovery Fund is due to start later in July. “An era of fiscal dominance is able to say goodbye to the secular stagnation thesis, which holds that the economy is suffering from under-investment,” says Van der Welle. “Under-investment due to insufficient demand, which was the biggest problem after the global financial crisis, has become less likely.” “We saw very subdued consumption growth both in the US and elsewhere between 2009 and 2019. That story is reversing in the US. Households’ income has been supported by fiscal policy during the Covid-19 recession, while burgeoning consumer demand in the reopening phase could prove to be more sticky as employment prospects continue to improve in the medium term.” Tobin’s Q looks good A third reason to expect higher capex is driven by ‘Tobin’s Q’ – the market value of a company divided by its assets' replacement cost. If this ratio is above one, then corporates have an incentive to invest directly in the underlying assets rather than buying another company at market value to acquire the same assets. The Tobin’s Q ratio is currently at 1.7 for the US. “So it's very expensive to do MandA, and it is wiser for corporates to invest in the underlying capital goods themselves,” Van der Welle says. “We should therefore expect a gradual move away from MandA activity towards companies making direct investments in capital goods.” Supply-side constraints The fourth element is the severe supply-side constraints seen in the global economy, as capacity shut down during the pandemic. “This is reflected in the ISM Prices Paid Index, which reached an all-time high in June in reflection of rampant shortages of raw materials and labor,” says Van der Welle. “Clearly the issue today following the pandemic is not demand related, but supply related. This will also trigger more awareness to push the productivity frontier and incentivize capital expenditure.” Less reliance on labor The fifth element is the partial substitution from labor to capital in the US against the backdrop of lingering labor shortages. “A decline in the labor force participation rate shows that people are not quickly returning to the labor force, as they have been disincentivized by the subsidies and pay checks they have gained from the stimulus plans, and/or structural changes in their work/life balance due to the pandemic,” says Van der Welle. “When the cost of labor becomes more expensive, substituting labor with capital becomes more attractive for employers. Typically, the inflection point for capex intentions becoming positive is when unit labor costs rise by more than 2 year on year, which is the case today.” Capex will lengthen the earnings cycle Regarding earnings, there is a significant relationship between capex intentions and productivity, though the lag from intending to invest to actually getting a realized productivity gain is quite long – up to several years. Higher capex that eventually brings higher productivity growth will sustain the earnings cycle, Van der Welle says. Higher productivity gives corporates more pricing power because they suppress unit labor costs, and that means profit margins can stay elevated for longer. Business confidence is the best indicator for growth. Khan 20, Hashmat, and Santosh Upadhayaya. "Does business confidence matter for investment?." Empirical Economics 59.4 (2020): 1633-1665. (Economics Professor at Carleton University)Elmer Abstract Business confidence is a well-known leading indicator of future output. Whether it has information about future investment is, however, unclear. We determine how informative business confidence is for investment growth independently of other variables using US business confidence survey data for 1955Q1–2016Q4. Our main findings are: business confidence has predictive ability for investment growth; (ii) remarkably, business confidence has superior forecasting power, relative to conventional predictors, for investment downturns over 1–3-quarter forecast horizons and for the sign of investment growth over a 2-quarter forecast horizon; and (iii) exogenous shifts in business confidence reflect short-lived non-fundamental factors, consistent with the ‘animal spirits’ view of investment. Our findings have implications for improving investment forecasts, developing new business cycle models, and studying the role of social and psychological factors determining investment growth. Introduction Business confidence is a well-known leading indicator of future output, especially during economic downturns, and receives attention from the media, policymakers and forecasters. Somewhat surprisingly, the direct link between business confidence and investment has not yet been investigated. Our paper fills this gap. We provide a quantitative assessment of the information in business confidence for future investment growth, after controlling for the conventional determinants such as user cost, output, cash flow and stock price. Understanding the predictive power of business confidence is valuable along three dimensions. First, it can help forecasters and policymakers improve their investment forecasts. Second, it can provide a rationale for explicitly including business confidence—either as causal or as anticipatory—in theoretical models of business cycles. Third, it can help motivate studies on the how investment managers’ social and psychological circumstances influence investment decisions over and beyond rational cost-benefit analyses.Footnote1 We consider the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)’s business confidence index for the USA as a measure of business confidence and ask the following three questions.Footnote2 Does business confidence have independent information about future business investment growth? Does it have forecasting power for investment downturns? Does it help in making directional forecasts—the positive or negative movements in the trajectory of investment growth? Previous literature that used business confidence has primarily studied its predictive properties for variables other than investment. Heye (1993) examines the relationship between business confidence and labour market conditions in the USA and other industrialized countries. Dasgupta and Lahiri (1993) show that business sentiments have explanatory power of forecasting business cycle turning points. Taylor and McNabb (2007) find that business confidence is procyclical and plays an important role in forecasting output downturns. Although we focus on business confidence, our paper is related to a large body of previous research that has studied consumer confidence or sentiment and its ability to forecast macroeconomic variables. Leeper (1992) finds that consumer sentiment does not help predict industrial production and unemployment, especially when financial variables are taken into account. On the other hand, Matsusaka and Sbordone (1995) reject the hypothesis that consumer sentiment does not predict output. Carroll et al. (1994), Fuhrer (1993), Bram and Ludvigson (1998), Ludvigson (2004) and Cotsomitis and Kwan (2006) find that the consumer attitudes have some additional information about predicting household spending behaviour. Lahiri et al. (2016) employ a large real-time dataset and find that the consumer confidence survey has important role in improving the accuracy of consumption forecasts. Christiansen et al. (2014) find that consumer and business sentiments contain independent information for forecasting business cycles. Barsky and Sims (2012) find that consumer confidence reflects news about future fundamentals and a confidence shock has a persistent effect on the economy. More recently, Angeletos et al. (2018) quantify the role of confidence for business cycle from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. They construct a measure of confidence within a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) framework by taking the linear combination of the VAR residuals that maximizes the sum of the volatilities of hours and investment at frequencies of 6–32 quarters. Their measure likely captures a mixture of consumer and business confidence and is, therefore, distinct from the survey-based measure that we use in our analysis. We find that business confidence leads US business investment growth by one quarter. It leads structures investment, which is one of the major components of business investment, by two quarters. Our empirical analysis shows that investors’ confidence has statistically significant predictive power for US business investment growth and its components (equipment and non-residential structures) after controlling for other determinants of investment. To better gauge the role of business confidence for investment growth, we also perform Out-Of-Sample (OOS) test for 1990Q1–2016Q4. Our findings suggest that the OOS test results are similar to the in-sample test results.Footnote3 While, as we found, business confidence has predictive power for total investment, it may also contain additional information on the trajectory of investment as captured by downturns and directional changes. This information would be of interest to policymakers in assessing the economy’s near-term outlook, over and above the general ability of business confidence to forecast investment. Indeed, we find that contemporaneous correlation between business confidence and investment growth rises during NBER recession dates. This property of the data suggests that it is worthwhile to explore the forecasting ability of business confidence for investment downturns and directional changes. Towards this end, we define investment downturns as business investment growth below the sample average for more than two consecutive quarters.Footnote4 Using a static probit forecasting model, we assess the OOS forecasting ability of business confidence for investment downturns for 1990Q1–2016Q4. A key finding of this approach in the literature is that term spread and stock price contain information for forecasting US recessions (Estrella and Mishkin 1998; Nyberg 2010; Kauppi and Saikkonen 2008). We follow a similar approach and find that business confidence has statistically significant forecasting power for investment downturns over 1–4-quarter forecast horizons in the US economy. It has stronger forecasting ability than the traditional predictors such as term spread, credit spread and stock price at 1–3-quarter forecast horizons. We also find strong evidence that the business confidence has good incremental predictive power for investment downturns over 1–4-quarter forecast horizons, controlling for other predictors of downturns. Economic decline results in multilateral breakdown that causes state collapse, conflict, climate change, and Arctic and Space War. McLennan 21 – Strategic Partners Marsh McLennan SK Group Zurich Insurance Group, Academic Advisers National University of Singapore Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, University of Pennsylvania, “The Global Risks Report 2021 16th Edition” “http:www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_2021.pdf Re-cut by Elmer Forced to choose sides, governments may face economic or diplomatic consequences, as proxy disputes play out in control over economic or geographic resources. The deepening of geopolitical fault lines and the lack of viable middle power alternatives make it harder for countries to cultivate connective tissue with a diverse set of partner countries based on mutual values and maximizing efficiencies. Instead, networks will become thick in some directions and non-existent in others. The COVID-19 crisis has amplified this dynamic, as digital interactions represent a “huge loss in efficiency for diplomacy” compared with face-to-face discussions.23 With some alliances weakening, diplomatic relationships will become more unstable at points where superpower tectonic plates meet or withdraw. At the same time, without superpower referees or middle power enforcement, global norms may no longer govern state behaviour. Some governments will thus see the solidification of rival blocs as an opportunity to engage in regional posturing, which will have destabilizing effects.24 Across societies, domestic discord and economic crises will increase the risk of autocracy, with corresponding censorship, surveillance, restriction of movement and abrogation of rights.25 Economic crises will also amplify the challenges for middle powers as they navigate geopolitical competition. ASEAN countries, for example, had offered a potential new manufacturing base as the United States and China decouple, but the pandemic has left these countries strapped for cash to invest in the necessary infrastructure and productive capacity.26 Economic fallout is pushing many countries to debt distress (see Chapter 1, Global Risks 2021). While G20 countries are supporting debt restructure for poorer nations,27 larger economies too may be at risk of default in the longer term;28 this would leave them further stranded—and unable to exercise leadership—on the global stage. Multilateral meltdown Middle power weaknesses will be reinforced in weakened institutions, which may translate to more uncertainty and lagging progress on shared global challenges such as climate change, health, poverty reduction and technology governance. In the absence of strong regulating institutions, the Arctic and space represent new realms for potential conflict as the superpowers and middle powers alike compete to extract resources and secure strategic advantage.29 If the global superpowers continue to accumulate economic, military and technological power in a zero-sum playing field, some middle powers could increasingly fall behind. Without cooperation nor access to important innovations, middle powers will struggle to define solutions to the world’s problems. In the long term, GRPS respondents forecasted “weapons of mass destruction” and “state collapse” as the two top critical threats: in the absence of strong institutions or clear rules, clashes— such as those in Nagorno-Karabakh or the Galwan Valley—may more frequently flare into full-fledged interstate conflicts,30 which is particularly worrisome where unresolved tensions among nuclear powers are concerned. These conflicts may lead to state collapse, with weakened middle powers less willing or less able to step in to find a peaceful solution
11/5/21
ND - Infrastructure DA v1
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: LHP SS | Judge: Pat Fox Infrastructure Bill passes now but every ounce of Biden PC is key. Caldego 10-19 Chris Cadelgo 10-19-2021 “Biden bets his agenda on the inside game” https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/19/biden-agenda-inside-game-516239 (White House Correspondent at POLITICO)Elmer Before Joe Biden can fully pitch the public on his solutions to a lingering pandemic and economic rockiness, he’s got to finish the sale to his own party’s lawmakers. As Democrats on Capitol Hill brace in anticipation of a brutal midterm, Biden is spending an extraordinary amount of time and political capital behind the scenes to convince them to rally around a common framework for social and climate spending. His congressional huddles have accelerated, from phone calls on the White House veranda to one-on-one and group meetings — including two high-stakes Tuesday sit downs with moderates and progressives. He’s dialing up old friends to take their temperature about how his presidency is really fairing far beyond the Beltway. White House aides, in their own recent conversations with nervous allies, have repeatedly cited the flurry of presidential calls as a sign itself of Biden's commitment to getting the bills over the finish line, at times bristling at claims that he hasn't been involved enough. But Biden’s hours and hours of meetings don’t just reflect the precarious moment in which his presidency finds itself. They underscore the heavy reliance his White House has placed on an inside game, rather than the bully pulpit, to dislodge recalcitrant holdouts and move their agenda. "The president is a longtime policy guy and relationship guy. So he brings both kinds of skills to his work" to corral his party behind a trillion-dollar-plus package of progressive priorities, said Biden's former primary rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Warren acknowledged, however, that Biden's level of influence over Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — both of whom met with Biden on Tuesday — remains to be seen: "We'll know the answer to that when we make it across the finish line and assess what we’ve got." Biden met Tuesday afternoon with Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), along with House progressives and moderates. "We just need to get to a number," Tester said after returning from the White House. "I think that he likes all the programs but I think everybody's negotiable at this point." Biden told progressives that tuition-free community college would likely be cut from the final package and the child tax credit may only be extended for a single year, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said after the meeting that tuition-free college is "probably going to be out," and certain climate priorities were "challenging." "At this point we don't have a certainty on the final thing, but what we're hearing is good," Jayapal said. "We feel like the vast majority, if not all, of our priorities are in there, in some way, shape or form.” As Biden has worked on lawmakers in private — sometimes not putting a hard stop on his schedule so as not to stifle progress — he’s largely, though not entirely, resisted riskier public pressure campaigns that could backfire and are viewed as against his nature. Often, Biden has had just a single public event each day. Occasionally, there’s been no public interfacing at all. Eight times since Labor Day, the daily guidance issued by the White House has included only private meetings with Biden. A planned barnstorming of the country to sell the Build Back Better platform this summer was overshadowed by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And congressional uncertainty amid infighting among Democrats on opposite poles of the party has overshadowed continuing trips by Cabinet officials and commandeered the media narrative in Washington. While Biden has held public events around the agenda, he has not done a formal press interview on it since Labor Day. On Wednesday, he will take a trip to his hometown of Scranton, Pa., to discuss the benefits of the legislative proposals, and on Thursday he will participate in a town hall broadcast on CNN. “The President won the most votes in history running on his Build Back Better agenda, unveiled the formal proposal in his first address to a joint session of Congress, and has made his case across the country ever since – along with his cabinet – which is deeply resonating with the American middle class," White House spokesman Andrew Bates said. Over the weekend, Biden called Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) to discuss the upcoming trip, according to the senator, who is working on expanding care for older people and people with disabilities. “He wanted to get some suggestions about issues we should focus on, while we’re there,” Casey said. Still, inside the White House, the lower-key strategy has been seen as a necessity: Democrats have such slim congressional majorities that Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have essentially no margin for error. That has put far more of the president’s focus on convincing a relatively small number of lawmakers to agree to details of the package, rather than using his time to sell policies that the general public supports. Chief among that small number of lawmakers are Manchin and Sinema, who remain resistant to the range of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion that Biden and progressive lawmakers have discussed as a compromise top line for the social spending bill. "I'm told that they've given signs on the parking spaces for these two senators at the White House, that they're there so often,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said of Manchin and Sinema. “This president has been engaged from the start, in working with all the leaders, and particularly with those two senators." As he does that, Biden has labored to project a sense of optimism about his progress. White House officials say they’re encouraged by what they described as the accelerated pace of the talks, even as the Oct. 31 timetable appears exceedingly ambitious. Another explanation for the approach was baked in long ago. Biden is a 36-year veteran of the Senate with a heightened sense of his own negotiating instincts and abilities to move major legislation through the chamber. A self-admitted schmoozer, he has avoided doing much to shame Manchin and Sinema, preventing many details from their conversations and about his own preferences from spilling into public view. “There’s a lot of complaining about what the message has been on this package, but when you’re trying to fight for every vote, the coverage inevitably becomes about the process and numbers,” said John Podesta, a top aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and a major climate activist. “When you are inside talking one-on-one to members trying to convince people to stay with you or come on board it’s very hard to create a press environment which is different from what they’ve got.” Biden has resumed his in-person meetings with Congress’ return to Washington, including Tuesday sit-downs that involved Vice President Kamala Harris and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. There's a deepening acknowledgment that he has to hurry. “They really are now in a circumstance where they will take on more and more water unless they can close the framework,” Podesta added. “I think they’ll do it. But it’s not like they have forever. We’re talking about this week or next week.” In his meetings, Biden has spent a considerable amount of time on the party’s collective sense of urgency, aides and allies said, telling members of his party that they simply have to deliver. The conversations have at times been crisp, with Biden telling some Democratic skeptics that in order to be part of the negotiating process, they need to articulate policies that they are for and not just what they oppose — a message similar to the one Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has delivered to Manchin and Sinema. Biden’s goal has been to help establish broad areas of agreement before filling in the specifics. At the same time, Biden has repeatedly cautioned his senior aides and officials not to rely on generalizations, and to prepare recommendations based on data and input from the lawmakers about their states and districts. He has stolen bits of face time with lawmakers wherever he can, keeping members back after bill signings, for example, to sound them out, and gathering with them in their districts when he’s been on the road. Moving beyond sticking points has been a challenge, and Biden is known to implore lawmakers to step back and ignore a particular area and to temporarily focus on others where they might be able to make progress. “When you see him artfully and deftly manage these hard conversations with members and guide them into a productive place, it helps remind you there is room for optimism and there is a pathway here,” said Louisa Terrell, director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Right to Strike Policies cause mass Partisan Fights. Kreighbaum et Al 21 Andrew Kreighbaum et Al 3-9-2021 "Landmark Labor Law Overhaul Passes House but Senate Fate Unclear" https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/landmark-labor-law-overhaul-passes-house-but-senate-fate-unclear (Reporter at Bloomberg Law)Elmer The House of Representatives passed the most significant overhaul of federal labor law in decades on Tuesday. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (H.R. 842) is the top legislative priority for organized labor groups and has the backing of President Joe Biden, but the business lobby is seeking to block the bill. Supporters also face a steep challenge overcoming a filibuster in the Senate. The bill cleared the House on a 225-206 vote. The chamber previously passed the PRO Act last year along mostly party lines. Advocates say the bill is even more critical after the coronavirus pandemic exposed the challenges for many workers seeking safe conditions. It cleared the House as workers at an Amazon plant in Alabama vote on whether to form a union, a campaign that has attracted national attention and a shoutout from Biden. Boosting workers’ right to unionize would “help combat the acceleration of economic inequality that undermines the middle class, that has only grown worse over the past year,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Tuesday ahead of the bill’s passage. Business lobby groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have said the bill would kill jobs, and promised to oppose it in the Senate. Worker Protections The PRO Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act, a federal law that guarantees private-sector employees the right to unionize, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as strikes. Among other changes, it would bar employers from retaliating against unionization efforts, protect workers’ right to strike, and override state “right to work” laws that allow employees to opt out of paying dues in unionized workplaces. Companies would be banned under the bill, for example, from holding “captive audience” meetings, in which workers are compelled to listen to anti-union messages from their employer. The legislation also would give the National Labor Relations Board power to levy fines against companies that engage in unfair labor practices, and require arbitration when unionized workers can’t reach agreement on a contract with employers. BGOV Bill Summary: H.R. 842, Private Sector Union Rights The bill would allow employees to hold union elections off of company premises and use mail or electronic ballots, a provision that supporters say is essential during the pandemic. Electronic ballots are currently banned. The PRO Act addresses the status of independent contractors—such as gig workers at ride-hailing and food delivery companies—by lowering the bar for contractors to prove they are employees under federal labor law. That would allow gig workers to organize unions and protest retaliation under the NLRA—rights currently guaranteed only to employees, not contractors. The legislation would adopt the same rigid test to determine workers’ employment status as a California law known as A.B. 5. Workers for app-based services were recently carved out of the state law by a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, bankrolled by gig companies. The California law also applies to employment rules governing overtime and minimum wage. The PRO Act, however, only addresses workers’ status under the National Labor Relations Act. Senate Opposition Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the ranking member on the Education and Labor Committee, said the legislation would hurt entrepreneurs and individual workers by “making unions bigger and the individual freedom smaller.” Republicans in the Senate, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have already gone on record opposing the PRO Act. Union leaders pledged to carry on the fight in the Senate. The legislation faces slim chances there without changes to filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to end debate on a bill and bring it to a vote. The vocal support from the Biden administration is significant for the future of the legislation, said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs and labor counsel at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We just don’t know what labor law reform is possible with an administration willing to expend critical political capital,” McNicholas said.
Infrastructure reform solves Existential Climate Change – it results in spill-over. USA Today 7-20 7-20-2021 "Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2021/07/20/climate-change-biden-infrastructure-bill-good-start/7877118002/Elmer Not long ago, climate change for many Americans was like a distant bell. News of starving polar bears or melting glaciers was tragic and disturbing, but other worldly. Not any more. Top climate scientists from around the world warned of a "code red for humanity" in a report issued Monday that says severe, human-caused global warming is become unassailable. Proof of the findings by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a now a factor of daily life. Due to intense heat waves and drought, 107 wildfires – including the largest ever in California – are now raging across the West, consuming 2.3 million acres. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people died in unprecedented triple-digit heat in Oregon, Washington and western Canada, when a "heat dome" of enormous proportions settled over the region for days. Some victims brought by stretcher into crowded hospital wards had body temperatures so high, their nervous systems had shut down. People collapsed trying to make their way to cooling shelters. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases Scientists say the event was almost certainly made worse and more intransigent by human-caused climate change. They attribute it to a combination of warming Arctic temperatures and a growing accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The consequences of what mankind has done to the atmosphere are now inescapable. Periods of extreme heat are projected to double in the lower 48 states by 2100. Heat deaths are far outpacing every other form of weather killer in a 30-year average. A persistent megadrought in America's West continues to create tinder-dry conditions that augur another devastating wildfire season. And scientists say warming oceans are fueling ever more powerful storms, evidenced by Elsa and the early arrival of hurricane season this year. Increasingly severe weather is causing an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States every year. "It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Rising seas from global warming Investigators are still trying to determine what led to the collapse of a Miami-area condominium that left more than 100 dead or missing. But one concerning factor is the corrosive effect on reinforced steel structures of encroaching saltwater, made worse in Florida by a foot of rising seas from global warming since the 1900s. The clock is ticking for planet Earth. While the U.N. report concludes some level of severe climate change is now unavoidable, there is still a window of time when far more catastrophic events can be mitigated. But mankind must act soon to curb the release of heat-trapping gases. Global temperature has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century. Scientists warn that in a decade, it could surpass a 2.7-degree increase. That's enough warming to cause catastrophic climate changes. After a brief decline in global greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, pollution is on the rise. Years that could have been devoted to addressing the crisis were wasted during a feckless period of inaction by the Trump administration. Congress must act Joe Biden won the presidency promising broad new policies to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions. But Congress needs to act on those ideas this year. Democrats cannot risk losing narrow control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2022 elections to a Republican Party too long resistant to meaningful action on the climate. So what's at issue? A trillion dollar infrastructure bill negotiated between Biden and a group of centrist senators (including 10 Republicans) is a start. In addition to repairing bridges, roads and rails, it would improve access by the nation's power infrastructure to renewable energy sources, cap millions of abandoned oil and gas wells spewing greenhouse gases, and harden structures against climate change.
It also offers tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and funds the construction of charging stations. (The nation's largest source of climate pollution are gas-powered vehicles.) Senate approval could come very soon. Much more is needed if the nation is going to reach Biden's necessary goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution in half from 2005 levels by 2030. His ideas worth considering include a federal clean electricity standard for utilities, federal investments and tax credits to promote renewable energy, and tens of billions of dollars in clean energy research and development, including into ways of extracting greenhouse gases from the skies. Another idea worth considering is a fully refundable carbon tax. The vehicle for these additional proposals would be a second infrastructure bill. And if Republicans balk at the cost of such vital investment, Biden is rightly proposing to pass this package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows bills to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote. These are drastic legislative steps. But drastic times call for them. And when Biden attends a U.N. climate conference in November, he can use American progress on climate change as
11/5/21
ND - Refuse Recognition CP
Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough ZG | Judge: Ben Cortez CP Text – In a Just Government, prisons ought to not crack-down on pre-existing worker strikes. Legally recognizing the right to strike renders it ineffective by de-radicalizing movements, decks solvency and turns case. White 18 (, A., 2018. Its Own Dubious Battle: The Impossible Defense of an Effective Right to Strike. online Colorado Law Scholarly Commons. Available at: https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/1261/ Accessed 7 November 2021 Ahmed White is the Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor of Law. Before arriving at the University of Colorado, he was a visitor at Northwestern University in 1999. He has also taught at Villanova Law School. Earlier in his career, Professor White's research focused heavily on the fate of rule of law norms and the rule of law concept in capitalist society, and on the role of criminal law and punishment as mechanisms of social control of the working class. More recently, Professor White's scholarship has taken a more definite historical turn. Much of his work concerns the history of law and labor relations from the early Twentieth Century through the New Deal period, as well as the viability of a functional system of labor rights in liberal society. The subjects of many of his articles over the last decade or so, these themes are central to his recent, acclaimed book, The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America (Oakland: University of California, 2016). They also feature in his second book, tentatively titled The Romance and the Suffering: Law, Violence, and the Tragic Fate of Radical Industrial Unionism in Twentieth Century America, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2021.)-rahulpenu The Wagner Act purported, for the first time in American history, to extend a definite, readily enforceable right to strike to most American workers. Not coincidentally, the years surrounding its enactment featured the most intense wave of labor conflict in the country’s history. When the statute became effective in 1937 (having been widely ignored by employers and blocked by hostile courts), the violence of strikes began to diminish, though not so much their frequency. For much of the period after the Second World War, strikes remained common even as they also became less ambitious in their aims and less militant in their conduct. Beginning about forty years ago, things changed again. Strikes suddenly became rare as well, to the point that workers today basically do not strike at all. From 1947 through 1976, the government documented an average of just over 300 “major work stoppages” (strikes and lockouts involving at least 1000 workers) every year; over the last decade, the annual average was only 14.10 Even the much-ballyhooed mini-strike wave of 2018 appears to be largely an illusion built on a combination of wishful thinking and a convenient misconstruction of a string of well-reported, and sometimes impressive, strikes, as a trend.11 In any event, militancy of the sort that was commonplace when Steinbeck wrote his book, along with the open strife and bloodshed that made the novel a work of undeniable realism, are nearly unheard of today. The waning of bloody battles may be a good thing. But there is not much to celebrate about the overall demise of strikes—not if you are a worker or care about the working class. For strikes are the most important mode of working class protest, the best way, it seems, for workers to directly challenge capitalist hegemony by their own hand, to alter the terms of exploitation if not to build a new world. As they have declined, so has the strength of the labor movement and, with this, the ability of workers to contest the power that employers wield over their work lives and economic fortunes. And so it is that with the demise of strikes, union representation has plummeted, wages have stagnated, economic inequality skyrocketed, and the everyday caprices and tyrannies of capitalist management have been entwined in the web of demeaning indignities, patronizing indulgences, and suffocating bureaucratic rules that define the contemporary workplace. Nevertheless, in most quarters the decline in strikes has been taken in stride, if noticed at all. For most people, strikes are hardly more than historical relics or quaint curiosities that seldom affect their daily lives or command much of their attention. Ironically, this is probably one reason the very modest labor conflict of the last year has been so overcharacterized. Once a preoccupation of newspaper editorialists, lawyers, and other commentators, a concern of government, and the subject of numerous hearings and reports, abundant litigation, and seemingly endless attempts at legislation, strikes are now rarely of any interest in any of these quarters. Where judges, politicians, and editorialists once worried greatly over how to deal with strikes of the kind that Steinbeck fictionalized, how to protect the economy (not to mention the interests of individual capitalists) from the disruptive effects of labor unrest, and sometimes how to preserve the ability of workers to strike in meaningful ways, their successors stand mute in the context of the near extinction of this form of protest. It has been two decades since Congress, which once grappled with these issues on a regular basis, has seriously confronted the question of strikes.12 Its last engagement with the right to strike attempts, in the early 1990s, to enact modest changes in the law relative to employers’ use of replacement workers during strikes. And even this effort, which collapsed in the mid 1990s, hardly seemed possessed of the kind of urgency that characterized earlier forays on these issues.13 Among the few Americans who well remember what strikes are and why they are important are labor scholars. For them, at least, strikes remain a preoccupation. Prominent students of labor like James Atleson, Julius Getman, Karl Klare, and James Pope—to name the most notable of this group—have expended much effort over the past few decades identifying and critiquing legal doctrines which have undermined the right to strike. Important to them in this regard are doctrines that give employers the prerogative to easily replace striking workers; that allow employers to enjoin and even fire strikers on the ground that they have engaged in coercive “misconduct,” or because they have protested the wrong issue or in the wrong way; that prohibit sympathy strikes and general strikes, and spontaneous “wildcat” strikes; and that funnel labor disputes off of picket lines and into legal proceedings and arbitrations.14 These doctrines have eviscerated a once-vital right to strike, these scholars tell us, subverting a prerogative that earlier in the century was central to improving conditions for workers and lending legitimacy to the very idea that workers have rights to claim in the first place. Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, especially, a massive and sustained campaign of strikes proved crucial to the formation of the modern labor movement, the political and legal validation of the Wagner Act, and ultimately the survival of the New Deal itself. This was true even as the Wagner Act itself seemed to play a crucial role in conveying to workers, for the first time, an effective right to strike. But the problem as far as the right to strike goes, we are told, is that the statute was later weakened and corrupted by the connivances of judges and Congress, urged on by a business community relentless in its contempt for organized labor, and abetted at times by inept or corrupt union leaders and a weak and politically diffident National Labor Relations Board (NLRB, the entity with primary authority for enforcing the labor law). And so the Wagner Act is said to have had a great potential, only to have been tragically “deradicalized,” as Klare puts it; and workers are said to have “lost” the right to strike, in Pope’s words, with devastating consequences for workers today and ominous portents for generations ahead.15 Critically, these authors argue, an effective right to strike must be restored at the expense of these unjustified impositions.16 Only then will the labor law regain its relevance and the labor movement its ability to improve the lives of workers. Early on, this attempt to defend an effective right to strike was the object of mean-spirited criticism by more conventional scholars who, in the guise of unmasking its interpretative shortcomings, rejected its radicalism and recoiled at its underlying supposition that law is not only malleable and untethered to its formal, elite iterations, but within the province of workers to reshape around their own interests and visions.17 Despite these efforts, which focused on the work of Klare and Katherine Stone, whose critique of post-war “industrial pluralism” shared a similar reasoning—or maybe, to some extent, anyway, because of them—support for this campaign to restore the right to strike seems like a mandate among scholars and commentators who purport to take seriously the interests of workers.18 And yet for all its appeal, this project nevertheless suffers from a remarkably negligent oversight, one that has nothing to do with morality of its pretense that the law is malleable and that workers can remake it—a proposition that is broadly true and eminently defensible. Instead, it has to do with its practical feasibility. In fact, as this Article argues, a critical reflection on this question suggests that the effort to realize an effective right to strike is actually quite impossible and that attempts to do so, however earnest and thoughtful they may be, represent as dubious a battle as the hopeless walkout dramatized in Steinbeck’s book. This doleful conclusion rests on a frank understanding of the legal and political realities in which strikes necessarily play out. There are many kinds of strikes, but those that are apt to be successful in challenging employers’ power and interests entail a level of militancy that sets them against well-entrenched notion of property and public order. This was true in the 1930s and 1940s when these values contradicted, at once, strike militancy and whatever radical potential the Wagner Act may have had. Ironically, it is perhaps even truer today, now that workers do in fact enjoy the right to strike, albeit only in more conventional ways. Seen in this light, those doctrines that have undermined the right to strike are not aberrations or jurisprudential failings—not mistakes in any sense, in fact, nor a retreat from some earlier, truer iteration of the labor law. Rather, they represent a settling of the labor law on bedrock precepts of the American life. However illegitimate those precepts may be from a vantage that questions capitalism’s essential legitimacy and takes the rights of workers seriously, they reign supreme, foreclosing an effective right to strike. All of this, as I argue in this Article, is made plainly evident by a critical review of the history of strikes and striking. To anticipate a bit more of the argument that follows, the strikes most crucial to the building of the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s were not built only around peaceful picketing and a withholding of labor. Rather, they were sit-down strikes and strikes built on mass picketing, as well as, to some extent, secondary boycotts. And strikes of this kind were never considered lawful or politically appropriate. Ironically, it was these strikes that legitimated the Wagner Act itself and the New Deal. But they could not legitimate themselves. Those who call for resurrecting the right to strike contend that the flourishing of strike militancy reflected, if not the inherent politics of the original Wagner Act before it was “de-radicalized,” then at least its potential. To be sure, it is clear that the Wagner Act was a remarkable document which did more to advance workers’ rights than any statute in American history; and it was at least ambiguous on the question of the legal status of strike militancy. But what seemed like its support for worker militancy was not a product of any particular potential. Rather, it was a reflection of the difficulty that judges, legislators, and other authorities, who dedicated themselves to restraining these strikes even as they flourished, encountered in prosecuting these values amid the unique economic and political conditions of the 1930s and 1940s. These obstructive conditions were quite temporary, though, and the authorities’ efforts culminated soon enough in the near-categorical prohibition of the tactics that had made strikes so effective. It is in this way that the history of strikes shows less in the way of de-radicalization than an encounter with the unyielding outer boundaries of what labor protest and labor rights can be in liberal society. As this all played out, it left in its wake a right to strike, but one whose power consists almost entirely of the ability of workers to pressure employers by withholding labor, while also maybe publicizing the workers’ issues and bolstering their morale. But while publicity and morale are not irrelevant, in the end they are not effective weapons in their own right. Nor are they generally advanced when strikes are broken. Moreover, the withholding of labor, unless it could be managed on a very large scale—something the law also tends to prohibit by its restrictions on secondary boycotts, by barring sympathy strikes and general strikes—is inherently ineffective in all but a small number of cases where workers remain irreplaceable. Of course, striking in such a conventional way accords with liberal notions of property and social order; but precisely because of this it is simply not coercive enough to be effective. And it is bound to remain ineffective, particularly in a context where workers far outnumber decent jobs, where mechanization and automation have steadily eaten away at the centrality of skill, where the perils that employers face in the course of labor disputes are as impersonal as the risks to workers are not, where employers wield overwhelming advantages in wealth and power over workers, where the state’s machinery for enforcing property rights and social order have never been more potent—where, in fact, capital is capital and workers are workers. From this perspective, the quest for an effective right to strike emerges as a fantasy—an appealing fantasy for many, but a fantasy no less, steeped in a misplaced and exaggerated faith in the law and a misreading of the class politics of modern liberalism. The campaign to resurrect such a right appears, too, not only as a dead-end and a distraction, but an undertaking that risks blinding those who support viable unionism and the interests of the working class to the more important and fundamental fact that liberalism and the legal system are, in the end, antithetical to a meaningful system of labor rights. It is for this reason that the call for an effective right to strike should be set aside in favor of more direct endorsement of militancy and a turn away from the law and instead towards a political program that might advance the interests of the working class regardless of what the law might hold. The argument that follows further elaborates these main contentions about the history of striking and the nature of strikes in liberal society, augmented by a discussion of the legal terrain on which all of this has played out. It unfolds in three main parts. Part I describes how the concept of a right to strike developed in concert with the history of striking itself, how both were influenced by the evolving condition of labor, and how this history created the circumstances under which it became possible to conceive of an effective right to strike without making this possible in fact. Part II consists of a critical review of the fate of coercive and disorderly strikes, especially those featuring sit-down tactics and mass picketing. It considers how the courts, the NLRB, and Congress confronted these strikes, and how they moved with increasing vigor to proscribe them as soon as these strikes emerged as effective forms of labor protest. Part III looks more carefully at the underpinnings of this repudiation of strike militancy, finding in court rulings and other pronouncements against the strikes an opposition to coercion and disorder that, even if sometimes invoked disingenuously, is nonetheless firmly anchored in modern liberalism and its conception of the appropriate boundaries of class protest and labor conflict. On this rests the argument that an effective right to strike is impossible and the pursuit of it, problematic. The final part is a brief conclusion that sums up some of the implications of this argument. We flip U/Q and the Aff Offense – 1AC Harvard Law Review is a negative card – status quo strikes work - the radical nature of Prison Strikes lies in it’s illegality to generate disorder – risk of offense on de-radicalization flips the Case – here’s your Card. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order to ensure that the Constitution truly does not stop at the prison walls, courts cannot simply accept prison administrators’ fears regarding strikes at face value and instead should rigorously test their credibility and basis in fact.143 And more importantly, by over-deferring and failing to engage in any analysis of the merits of prison strikes, courts miss an important opportunity. As this Note has argued, prison strikes represent an underappreciated aspect of prison life — the means by which prisoners have, throughout the course of American history, surfaced pressing problems of our carceral state and initiated important transformations in our prison system. Therefore, it is imperative to meaningfully consider why and how such strikes merit legal protection — even if such protection appears to fly in the face of the current state of the law and to defy conventional wisdom. To that end, this Part first explores the First Amendment as one potential avenue for considering the merits of prison strikes, by presenting three critical First Amendment values contained within prison strikes,144 and it then briefly discusses other potential legal avenues for courts and scholars to consider. A. Considering the First Amendment Values of Prison Strikes The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances.145 Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy.146 Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.”147 This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.”148 However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process;149 in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools150 to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders,151 with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.”152 This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them153 — creating hierarchical relationships154 that breed mistrust155 and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved.156 As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress.157 Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff.158 Such transparent and legitimated bargaining benefits both inmates and prisons as a whole. By initiating peaceful protests such as work stoppages, all inmates are able “to solve problems, maximize gains, articulate goals, develop alternative strategies, and deal with administrators without resorting to force or violence.”159 And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change”160 — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates,161 all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order.162 2. Speech. — A prison strike also represents a critical way by which inmates can express themselves.163 First, as alluded to above, a strike allows inmates to claim and communicate an identity — as more than just marginalized, ignored convicts with little to no self-determination, but instead as workers and human beings entitled to basic dignity. Such collective actions represent the “performative declaration and affirmation of rights that one does not (yet) have.”164 And, as Professor Jocelyn Simonson discusses, these strikes are collective contestations to “demand dignity, calling attention to the ways in which prisoners are treated as less than human and in the process reclaiming their own agency.”165 Such dignitary considerations, which courts have sought to protect under First Amendment principles, should therefore naturally extend to prisoners attempting to, through strikes, express their basic selfworth.166 Beyond representing a form of inherent, individual expression for inmates, prison strikes also represent a broader form of expression, allowing inmates to be visible to and heard by the public at large. Over the course of American history, inmates — by virtue of being locked up in isolated, impregnable penitentiaries — have largely been a silent and ignored segment of the American population.167 Through peaceful protests like the 2018 national prison strike, however, their suffering, their calls for reform, and their voices are, for the first time, directly expressed on a large scale, ringing out loudly beyond the prison walls and jumpstarting important conversations of criminal justice reform. It is critical to protect such expression; “indeed, it is from the voices of those who have been most harmed by the punitive nature of our criminal justice system that we can hear the most profound reimaginings of how the system might be truly responsive to local demands for justice and equality.”168 3. Petition for Redress. Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government.169 While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,”170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.”171 Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons.172 Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed;173 inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards,174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities,175 are given substandard medical care,176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances;177 most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services;178 and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates,179 and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims.180 And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden.181 As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”;182 peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world”183 and, in turn, gain attention from and access to the political branches able to implement policy reforms.184 As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transfor- mations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies.185 In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions.186 And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms.187 B. Considering Additional Legal Avenues for Protecting Prison Strikes The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.”188 But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law.
12/11/21
ND - T - A
Tournament: USC | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss Interpretation: the affirmative may not spec a government 1 The letter “A” is an indefinite article that modifies “just government” – the resolution must be proven true in all instances, not one particular instance CCC ND Capital Community College a nonprofit 501 c-3 organization that supports scholarships, faculty development, and curriculum innovation, “Articles, Determiners, and Quantifiers”, http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/determiners/determiners.htm#articles AG The three articles — a, an, the — are a kind of adjective. The is called the definite article because it usually precedes a specific or previously mentioned noun; a and an are called indefinite articles because they are used to refer to something in a less specific manner (an unspecified count noun). These words are also listed among the noun markers or determiners because they are almost invariably followed by a noun (or something else acting as a noun). caution CAUTION! Even after you learn all the principles behind the use of these articles, you will find an abundance of situations where choosing the correct article or choosing whether to use one or not will prove chancy. Icy highways are dangerous. The icy highways are dangerous. And both are correct. The is used with specific nouns. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something that is one of a kind: The moon circles the earth. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something in the abstract: The United States has encouraged the use of the private automobile as opposed to the use of public transit. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something named earlier in the text. (See below..) If you would like help with the distinction between count and non-count nouns, please refer to Count and Non-Count Nouns. We use a before singular count-nouns that begin with consonants (a cow, a barn, a sheep); we use an before singular count-nouns that begin with vowels or vowel-like sounds (an apple, an urban blight, an open door). Words that begin with an h sound often require an a (as in a horse, a history book, a hotel), but if an h-word begins with an actual vowel sound, use an an (as in an hour, an honor). We would say a useful device and a union matter because the u of those words actually sounds like yoo (as opposed, say, to the u of an ugly incident). The same is true of a European and a Euro (because of that consonantal "Yoo" sound). We would say a once-in-a-lifetime experience or a one-time hero because the words once and one begin with a w sound (as if they were spelled wuntz and won). Merriam-Webster's Dictionary says that we can use an before an h- word that begins with an unstressed syllable. Thus, we might say an hisTORical moment, but we would say a HIStory book. Many writers would call that an affectation and prefer that we say a historical, but apparently, this choice is a matter of personal taste. For help on using articles with abbreviations and acronyms (a or an FBI agent?), see the section on Abbreviations. First and subsequent reference: When we first refer to something in written text, we often use an indefinite article to modify it. A newspaper has an obligation to seek out and tell the truth. In a subsequent reference to this newspaper, however, we will use the definite article: There are situations, however, when the newspaper must determine whether the public's safety is jeopardized by knowing the truth. Another example: "I'd like a glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put the glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Exception: When a modifier appears between the article and the noun, the subsequent article will continue to be indefinite: "I'd like a big glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put a big glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Generic reference: We can refer to something in a generic way by using any of the three articles. We can do the same thing by omitting the article altogether. A beagle makes a great hunting dog and family companion. An airedale is sometimes a rather skittish animal. The golden retriever is a marvelous pet for children. Irish setters are not the highly intelligent animals they used to be. The difference between the generic indefinite pronoun and the normal indefinite pronoun is that the latter refers to any of that class ("I want to buy a beagle, and any old beagle will do.") whereas the former (see beagle sentence) refers to all members of that class
Violation – they only defend China
Vote neg:
Semantics outweigh: T is a constitutive rule of the activity and a basic aff burden – they agreed to debate the topic when they came here Standards: 2. Limits – there are 195 affs accounting for hundreds of governments— unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden – potential abuse doesn’t justify foregoing the topic and 1AR theory checks PICs. Banerjee 4/12 (Vasabjit Banerjee, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Mississippi State University),”How many states and provinces are in the world?” , The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/how-many-states-and-provinces-are-in-the-world-157847, April 12, 2021 SS There are 195 national governments recognized by the United Nations, but there are as many as nine other places with nationlike governments, including Taiwan and Kosovo, though they are not recognized by the U.N. Most of these countries are divided into smaller sections, the way the U.S. is broken up into 50 states along with territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam, and a federal district, Washington, D.C. They are not all called “states,” though: Switzerland has cantons, Bangladesh has divisions, Cameroon has regions, Germany has lander, Jordan has governorates, Montserrat has parishes, Zambia has provinces, and Japan has prefectures – among many other names.
3. Ground – spec guts core generics like the econ DA which rely on all governments having the unconditional right to strike because individual governments don’t have an impact on the global economy as a whole – also means there is no universal DA to spec affs 4. TVA solves – read as an advantage to whole rez
Paradigm issues:
Drop the debater – their abusive advocacy skewed the debate from the start 2. Comes before 1AR theory – NC abuse is responsive to them not being topical 3. Competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation 4. No RVIs – fairness and education are a priori burdens – and encourages baiting – outweighs because if T is frivolous, they can beat it quickly 5. Fairness is a voter ¬– necessary to determine the better debater 6. Education is a voter – why schools fund debate
12/12/21
ND - T - Unconditional
Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough ZG | Judge: Ben Cortez 1 Interpretation: The affirmative must defend an unconditional right to strike. This means that the Affirmative must defend that anyone regardless of job or occupation has a fundamental right to strike. Merriam Webster ND, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unconditionalsid not conditional or limited : ABSOLUTE, UNQUALIFIED 2 Violation – They only grant the Right to Strike to incarcerated workers. That by definition is a condition since they condition the right to strike on a particular occupation. Jensen ’18 (Eric; co-director of the Stanford Rule of Law Program, in collaboration with USAID, The Asia Foundation, and Stanford Law School; April 2018; “Introduction to the Laws of Timor-Leste”; Stanford Law School; https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Timor-Leste-Constitutional-Rights.pdf; Accessed: 10-30-2021; AU) If individuals want to defend their rights at work, the Constitution gives them the right form trade unions and to strike. Individuals are free to join and participate in professional associations that are peaceful. This includes trade unions. Individuals in trade unions have a right to organize their unions independent of the government or their employers. Trade unions should be free and independent, and individuals have the right to set the unions’ internal structure freely. Independent trade unions are important to allow individuals to organize with other workers to collectively defend their interests and their rights. It is important that they are independent so that they reflect the individuals’ interests and not the employer’s or the government’s interests. Individuals have the right to strike. If they feel that their employer is not respecting their rights or interests, employees can refuse to work in protest. The Constitution creates a duty that during a strike, the employer still has to maintain equipment and provide for safety. Individuals’ right to strike is limited by the law. The Constitution states that the right to strike is conditional on the strike being compliant with legal regulations that the government creates. This means that the government can pass laws that limit when and how individuals can exercise their right to strike. The right to strike is important to give individuals the power to defend their labor rights. 3 Standards – a Limits – there are endless conditions the aff can place on the right to strike – i.e based on occupation, national holidays, location of strike, etc. That makes the topic untenable since the Aff can just infinitely specify any condition or permutation of conditions which makes predictable preparation and in-depth clash impossible. b Neg Ground – specifying scenarios lets affs spike out of core, reduction-based disads like Bizcon and Small Businesses. Links are already non-existent on this topic – letting affs impose restrictions on RTS makes it even narrower. 4 TVA – establish a right to strike and read Teacher Unions as an Advantage. 5 Paradigm Issues – a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
12/11/21
ND - UBI CP
Tournament: USC | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Gordon Krauss Text: The People’s Republic of China ought to establish a universal basic income at 7,000 yuan a month to all legal adults Boosts GDP, labor force participation, prices, and wages, and solves inequality. Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, and Gennaro Zezza 17, Michalis Nikiforos is a research scholar working in the State of the US and World Economies program, Marshall Steinbaum is Research Director and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Gennaro Zezza is an associate professor of economics at the University of Cassino, Italy, 8-29-2017, "Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income," Roosevelt Institute, http://rooseveltinstitute.org/modeling-macroeconomic-effects-ubi//HM How would a massive federal spending program like a universal basic income (UBI) affect the macroeconomy? We use the Levy Institute macroeconometric model to estimate the impact of three versions of such an unconditional cash assistance program over an eight-year time horizon. Overall, we find that the economy can not only withstand large increases in federal spending, but could also grow thanks to the stimulative effects of cash transfers on the economy. We examine three versions of unconditional cash transfers: $1,000 a month to all adults, $500 a month to all adults, and a $250 a month child allowance. For each of the three versions, we model the macroeconomic effects of these transfers using two different financing plans - increasing the federal debt, or fully funding the increased spending with increased taxes on households - and compare the effects to the Levy model’s baseline growth rate forecast. Our findings include the following: • For all three designs, enacting a UBI and paying for it by increasing the federal debt would grow the economy. Under the smallest spending scenario, $250 per month for each child, GDP is 0.79 larger than under the baseline forecast after eight years. According to the Levy Model, the largest cash program - $1,000 for all adults annually - expands the economy by 12.56 over the baseline after eight years. After eight years of enactment, the stimulative effects of the program dissipate and GDP growth returns to the baseline forecast, but the level of output remains permanently higher. • When paying for the policy by increasing taxes on households, the Levy model forecasts no effect on the economy. In effect, it gives to households with one hand what it is takes away with the other. • However, when the model is adapted to include distributional effects, the economy grows, even in the taxfinanced scenarios. This occurs because the distributional model incorporates the idea that an extra dollar in the hands of lower income households leads to higher spending. In other words, the households that pay more in taxes than they receive in cash assistance have a low propensity to consume, and those that receive more in assistance than they pay in taxes have a high propensity to consume. Thus, even when the policy is tax- rather than debtfinanced, there is an increase in output, employment, prices, and wages. Levy’s Keynesian model incorporates a series of assumptions based on rigorous empirical studies of the micro and macro effects of unconditional cash transfers, taxation and government net spending and borrowing (see Marinescu (2017), Mason (2017), Coibion et al (2017), and Konczal and Steinbaum (2016)). Fundamentally, the larger the size of the UBI, the larger the increase in aggregate demand and thus the larger the resulting economy is. The individual macroeconomic indicators are (qualitatively) what one would predict given an increase in aggregate demand: in addition to the increase in output, employment, labor force participation, prices, and wages all go up as well. Even in a deficit-financed policy, an increase in the government’s liabilities is mitigated by the increase in aggregate demand. Specifically, the Levy model assumes that the economy is not currently operating near potential output (Mason 2017) and makes two related microeconomic assumptions: (1) unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply; and (2) increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior. Other macroeconomic models would make different, likely less optimistic forecasts, because they would disagree with these assumptions. Estimating the macroeconomic effects of UBI is a critical component of any policy evaluation, because what would appear to be a zero-sum transfer in static terms (money is simply transferred from some households to others) turns out to be positive sum in the macro simulation, thanks to the increase in aggregate demand and therefore in the size of the economy.
China’s using absence of Vaccine alternates to assert influence.
Zhao 4-29 Suisheng Zhao 4-29-2021 "Why China’s vaccine diplomacy is winning" https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/04/29/why-chinas-vaccine-diplomacy-is-winning/ (Professor and Director of the Center for China–US Cooperation at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver)Elmer Chinese COVID-19 vaccines have been shipped to more than 80 countries for market
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countries, receive the vaccines they need to finally beat COVID-19.
Waivers are a critical issue in the perceptual ineptness of America and the West.
Pratt and Levin 4-29 Simon Frankel Pratt and Jamie Levin 4-29-2021 "Vaccines Will Shape the New Geopolitical Order" https://archive.is/OgDcA~~#selection-847.23-857.11 (Simon Frankel Pratt is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Jamie Levin is an assistant professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada.)Elmer While home to vaccines produced by the likes of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca,
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inequities within already inequitable trade relationships between these countries and the global south.
Chinese leadership solves existential threats.
Yamei 18 Shen Yamei 18, Deputy Director and Associate Research Fellow of Department for American Studies, China Institute of International Studies, 1-9-2018, "Probing into the "Chinese Solution" for the Transformation of Global Governance," CAIFC, http://www.caifc.org.cn/en/content.aspx?id=4491 As the world is in a period of great development, transformation and adjustment,
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, refugees, climate change and public hygiene by debt forgiveness and assistance.
That solves the Case – China has the vaccine production capacity to vaccinate the world.
Mallapaty 6-9 Smriti Mallapaty 6-9-2021 "China is vaccinating a staggering 20 million people a day" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01545-3 (She has a master of science degree in environmental technology from Imperial College London.)Elmer For more than a week, an average of about 20 million people have been
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is crucial that everything arrives at the right location at the right time."
Climate Patents and Innovation high now and solving Warming but COVID waiver sets a dangerous precedent for appropriations - the mere threat is sufficient is enough to kill investment.
Brand 5-26, Melissa. "Trips Ip Waiver Could Establish Dangerous Precedent for Climate Change and Other Biotech Sectors." IPWatchdog.com | Patents and Patent Law, 26 May 2021, www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/26/trips-ip-waiver-establish-dangerous-precedent-climate-change-biotech-sectors/id=133964/. sid The biotech industry is making remarkable advances towards climate change solutions, and it is
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is unlikely they will continue to invest at the current and required levels.
Climate Patents are critical to solving Warming – only way to stimulate Renewable Energy Technology Investment.
Aberdeen 20 Arielle Aberdeen October 2020 "Patents to climate rescue: how intellectual property rights are fundamental to the development of renewable energy" https://www.4ipcouncil.com/application/files/4516/0399/1622/Intellectual'Property'and'Renewable'Energy.pdf (Caribbean Attorney-at-Law with extensive experience in legal research and writing.)Elmer Climate change is the most pressing global challenge and with the international commitment to reduce
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at different starting points but are now both dominant players in this area.
Warming causes Extinction
Kareiva 18, Peter, and Valerie Carranza. "Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back." Futures 102 (2018): 39-50. (Ph.D. in ecology and applied mathematics from Cornell University, director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment and Sustainability at UCLA)Re-cut by Elmer In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen,
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complete scientific understanding when it comes to positive feedback loops and climate change.
9/19/21
SO - Definition aprioris
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin Negate – 1 of is to “expressing an age” but the rez doesn’t delineate a length of time 2 the is “denoting a disease or affliction” but the WTO isn’t a disease 3 reduce is to “(of a person) lose weight, typically by dieting” but IP doesn’t have a body to lose weight. 4 medicine is “(especially among some North American Indian peoples) a spell, charm, or fetish believed to have healing, protective, or other power” but you can’t have IP for a spell. Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyCQgjECcQRhD5ATIECAAQQzIECAAQQzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6BwgAEEcQsAM6BwgAELADEEM6BwgjEOoCECc6BAgjECc6BQgAEJECOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARDRAzoKCAAQsQMQgwEQQzoHCAAQsQMQQzoICAAQgAQQsQM6CAgAELEDEIMBOgoIABCABBCHAhAUSgQIQRgAUMLMBFjS3QRgnt8EaAJwAngDgAG2A4gB-heSAQozLjExLjEuMi4xmAEAoAEBsAEKyAEKwAEBandsclient=gws-wizandved=0ahUKEwiwlru9gOHyAhUTWs0KHXphBIUQ4dUDCA8anduact=5 https://www.google.com/search?q=medicine+definitionandrlz=1C1CHBF_enUS877US877andoq=medicine+definitionandaqs=chrome.0.69i59.2986j0j7andsourceid=chromeandie=UTF-8
10/9/21
SO - EU Info Sharing CP
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Chris Theis Text - The European Union ought to - increase intellectual property protections for medicines - designate intellectual property protections on medicines as adversely affecting the international transfer of technology. The CP competes – 1 it increases IP protections and 2 it’s a temporary waiver NOT a permanent reduction. Member states can waive IP rights if they hamper the international flow of medical technology. WTO ’21 (World Trade Organization; 2021; “Obligations and exceptions”; World Trade Organization; Accessed: 8-30-2021; exact date not provided, but copyright was updated in 2021; AU) Article 8 Principles … 2. Appropriate measures, provided that they are consistent with the provisions of this Agreement, may be needed to prevent the abuse of intellectual property rights by right holders or the resort to practices which unreasonably restrain trade or adversely affect the international transfer of technology. SECTION 8: CONTROL OF ANTI-COMPETITIVE PRACTICES IN CONTRACTUAL LICENCES Article 40 1. Members agree that some licensing practices or conditions pertaining to intellectual property rights which restrain competition may have adverse effects on trade and may impede the transfer and dissemination of technology. 2. Nothing in this Agreement shall prevent Members from specifying in their legislation licensing practices or conditions that may in particular cases constitute an abuse of intellectual property rights having an adverse effect on competition in the relevant market. As provided above, a Member may adopt, consistently with the other provisions of this Agreement, appropriate measures to prevent or control such practices, which may include for example exclusive grantback conditions, conditions preventing challenges to validity and coercive package licensing, in the light of the relevant laws and regulations of that Member. … Designating IP protections as antithetical to the global health system revitalizes info-sharing. Youde ’16 (Jeremy; writer for World Politics Review; 4-29-2016; “Technology Transfer Is a Weak Link in the Global Health System”; World Politics Review; https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/18639/technology-transfer-is-a-weak-link-in-the-global-health-system; Accessed: 8-30-2021; AU) In mid-April, a spokesperson for the Ugandan government admitted that the country’s only functioning cancer treatment machine had broken earlier that month. The radiotherapy machine, donated by China to Uganda in 1995 and housed at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, is now considered beyond repair. While the government did acquire a second radiotherapy machine in 2013, it has not been operational because of delays in allocating 30 billion shillings—just shy of $9 million—to construct a new building to house it. The funding delay has lifted, but the machine won’t be up and running for at least six months. The government has announced plans to airlift some cancer patients to Nairobi for treatment, but that plan will only accommodate 400 of the estimated 17,000 to 33,000 cancer patients who need treatment annually in Uganda. This breakdown of technology is a human tragedy for the cancer patients from Uganda as well as elsewhere in East Africa that the radiotherapy machine helped treat. Beyond the personal level, though, the episode illustrates a larger shortcoming in global health. Total annual development assistance for health is approximately $36 billion, but that funding is overwhelmingly concentrated on specific infectious diseases. Noncommunicable diseases like cancer receive relatively little international funding—only 1.3 percent in 2015, and the dollar amount has declined since 2013. Funds to strengthen health systems, geared toward building and supporting a resilient health care system, are similarly low, making up only 7.3 percent of development assistance in 2015. Noncommunicable diseases kill more people every year than infectious diseases and accidents do, but this balance is not reflected in global health spending. ... These shortcomings also speak to larger problems in global health around issues of technology transfers and long-term commitments to keep that technology working. It’s one thing to provide necessary medical technologies in the first place; it’s another to ensure that those technologies are accessible and operational going forward. Despite the importance of technology transfers, questions of long-term support for them have received relatively little attention from the global health regime. As noncommunicable diseases like cancer cause an even-higher proportion of deaths each year, it will become all the more imperative that the international community address this gap in sharing and funding crucial health care technology. This does not mean that there are no efforts to facilitate technology transfers around the world. The Fogarty International Center, a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has had an Office of Technology Transfer since 1989 to make medical innovations developed in the United States more widely available. The World Health Organization (WHO) also has a Technology Transfer Initiative to improve access to health care technologies in developing countries. These efforts are laudable, but their interpretation of technology transfer is almost entirely rooted in access to pharmaceuticals and vaccines. To be sure, that is a very important issue—but it only deals with one narrow element of technology transfer. The problems of global health technology transfers illustrated in Uganda underscore a larger issue: the need for a so-called fourth industrial revolution, what has been described as “blurring the real world with the technological world.” This idea gained prominence earlier this year when it served as the theme for the World Economic Forum in Davos. For global health, this means embracing technology to find low-cost ways to promote health, spread education, and reach communities whose access to the health care infrastructure is weak. It expands on the notion of telemedicine and eHealth to make it more encompassing. According to health care entrepreneur Jonathan Jackson, the fourth industrial revolution could change global health by encouraging a shift in focus “from healthcare to health promotion.” Moving from high-cost treatment to low-cost prevention, he has argued, will have significant and far-reaching positive economic implications for developing countries around the world. Its inspiring sense of technological optimism notwithstanding, this sort of approach cannot be the sole focus of technology transfers in global health. Prevention is indeed important, but the fact of the matter remains that people will get sick—and those sick people will need treatment. Mobile applications and electronic access to health care providers can be useful, but they cannot replace a radiotherapy machine. Understanding the root causes of noncommunicable diseases goes far beyond individual choices and intersects with the larger political, economic and social context, so we cannot assume that cybertechnology alone can stop cancer. It is also important to remember that the results of greater technological innovation and integration won’t be free. Sub-Saharan African states, on average, spend $200 per person per year on health care. Even if technology allows costs to decline, they are still likely to be out of reach for many people in most of these countries—in the same way that the purchase and maintenance of medical technologies are prohibitively expensive in these same states today. Technology in and of itself is not useful unless it can be maintained over the long term. This, then, is a weak link in the larger global health system: How do we ensure access to life-prolonging medical technologies beyond pharmaceuticals and vaccines in a sustainable way? Consider two ideas. First, development assistance for health must orient more of its resources toward treating noncommunicable diseases and strengthening health systems. These are the areas in which these technologies are likely to be used, but are not currently supported by the international system. The changing nature of health and disease will only make them even more important in the years to come. Second, longer-term funding commitments would provide a greater opportunity to incorporate medical technologies into health care systems sustainably. Machines will break down, and technologies will fail. That is inevitable. But the global health regime, from the WHO and its regional organizations like the Regional Office for Africa to major donors like the United States government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, needs to figure out how to ensure that these problems do not put lives in peril. Technology alone will not improve global health unless it is properly supported and funded. International collaboration’s key to check future pandemics – otherwise, extinction. Dulaney ’20 Michael; digital journalist with the ABC June 2020; "'A question of when, not if': Another pandemic is coming – and sooner than we think", No Publication; https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-06-07/a-matter-of-when-not-if-the-next-pandemic-is-around-the-corner/12313372, accessed 4-12-2021 And as recently as September last year — just a few months before COVID-19 was detected in China — an independent watchdog set up by the WHO warned the world was "grossly" unprepared for the "very real threat" of a pandemic. But even more alarming is what the new coronavirus indicates about the future. Researchers say human impacts on the natural world are causing new infectious diseases to emerge more frequently than ever before, meaning the next pandemic — one perhaps even worse than COVID-19 — is only a matter of time. "We know that it's a probability, not a possibility," Dr Reid says. "The roulette wheel will start to spin again. "If you don't resolve the conditions that generated the problem, then we sit waiting for the next probability equation to come through. "And it will, and sadly it's possible that it's in our lifetime." The growing threat to human health Nearly all emerging pathogens like COVID-19 come from "zoonotic transfer" — essentially, when a virus present in animals jumps to infect humans. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates three out of every four new infectious diseases, and nearly all pandemics, emerge this way. Researchers have counted around 200 infectious diseases that have broken out more than 12,000 times over the past three decades. On average, one new infectious disease jumps to humans every four months. Animal species like civet cats (SARS), camels (MERS), horses (Hendra), pigs (Nipah) and chimpanzees (HIV) have all been implicated in the spread of new viruses at different times.
9/25/21
SO - Espec
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Javier Navarette Interpretation – the Affirmative must present a delineated enforcement mechanism for the Plan. There is no normal means since terms are negotiated contextually among member states. WTO No Date "Whose WTO is it anyway?" https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/org1_e.htmElmer When WTO rules impose disciplines on countries’ policies, that is the outcome of negotiations among WTO members. The rules are enforced by the members themselves under agreed procedures that they negotiated, including the possibility of trade sanctions. But those sanctions are imposed by member countries, and authorized by the membership as a whole. This is quite different from other agencies whose bureaucracies can, for example, influence a country’s policy by threatening to withhold credit. Violation: they don’t Standards 1 Shiftiness- They can redefine the 1AC’s enforcement mechanism in the 1AR which allows them to recontextualize their enforcement mechanism to wriggle out of DA’s since all DA links are predicated on type of enforcement i.e. sanctions bad das, domestic politics das off of backlash, information research sharing da if they put monetary punishments, or trade das. 2 Real World - Policy makers will always specify how the mandates of the plan should be endorsed. It also means zero solvency, absent spec, states can circumvent the Aff’s policy since there is no delineated way to enforce the affirmative which means there’s no way to actualize any of their solvency arguments. ESpec isn’t regressive or arbitrary- it’s an active part of the WTO is central to any advocacy about international IP law since the only uniqueness of a reduction of IP protections is how effective its enforcement is.
9/4/21
SO - Indigenous CP
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 6 | Opponent: Westwood PM | Judge: Asher Towner Counterplan Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to - reduce all Patents except for Patents owned by Indigenous people over Traditional Medical Knowledge - increase Patents used to protect Traditional Medical Knowledge based on a case-by-case consultation with Indigenous Patent Holders to ensure compatibility with communities’ values, norms, and objectives - model future actions governing Traditional Knowledge over their decision regarding Intellectual Property Protection of Traditional Medical Knowledge The Counterplan effectively preserves Indigenous Medical Knowledge which solves Biopiracy that destroys Biodiversity – Patents are key. - TK stands for Traditional Knowledge Erstling 8, Jay. "Using patent to protect traditional knowledge." Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 15 (2008): 295. https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187andcontext=facsch (Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota.)Elmer WHY PATENT PROTECTION? Putting the differences in the above paragraph aside, a recent WIPO IGC consultation paper reported that "a significant number of patent applications concern inventions which are in some way related to traditional knowledge."12 A community's new and innovative advancements in TK may meet the requirements to qualify as patentable inventions, for example. In such cases, the holders of the TK need to ask whether they wish to take advantage of patent protection, whether it is in their best interests to do so, and assuming positive answers to both questions, whether they have the resources to file, prosecute, and enforce patent applications. More typically, inventions claimed by others may make use of a community's TK in that the others will derive their inventions from the TK or base their inventions on it.13 When inventions derived from TK become the subject of patent applications, the relationship between the inventions and their underlying TK may be key to the inventions' patentability. For example, the TK may constitute prior art that destroys an invention's novelty or non-obviousness. As prior art, failure to disclose the TK may result in a violation of the duty in United States patent law to disclose all known information material to patentability. 4 The TK may also directly relate to the question of inventorship and entitlement to apply for a patent since the holders of the TK-and not the named inventor-may constitute the true inventors or co-inventors of the claimed invention. It is clear, then, that there are critical links between TK and the patent system. The question is whether and if so, how, those links can be exploited to foster protection for TK. This question is not a new one and has been the subject of considerable scholarship. 15 The answer, which may prove more difficult to achieve than to posit, seems to lie in the objectives of the patent system itself. While the primary objective of patent law is affirmative, i.e., to enable the grant of exclusive patent rights for qualifying inventions, a patent system also has an important defensive objective, to ensure the denial of rights to inventions that are already known or lack a sufficient level of inventiveness. In addition, a patent system has a vital informational objective, to guarantee the disclosure to third parties of all relevant information concerning the invention as a quid pro quo for the grant of exclusive rights. Countries wishing to use patents to protect TK would do well to consider measures that reflect all three objectives. Such a threepronged approach would focus on putting into place legislative or other mechanisms to provide for (1) defensive protection of TK, (2) disclosure of TK, with consequent provision for benefit sharing, and/ or (3) affirmative protection of qualified TK through the grant of patent rights. Defensive protection would ensure that none other than the holders of TK would be able to acquire intellectual property rights over that knowledge. a6 Effective measures would include, on the one hand, the adoption of legislation that recognizes TK as prior art and the creation of information systems to make TK searchable by patent offices,17 and, on the other, the establishment of strong trade secret measures that allow the holders of TK to maintain the confidentiality of their knowledge should they choose to do so.' 8 At the heart of the second prong-disclosure and benefit sharing-is a community's right to maintain control over its TK. Inherent in that control are measures that would require applicants for patents for inventions derived from or based on TK to disclose in the patent application the geographic source of that knowledge and to provide assurance that there has been prior informed consent to make use of the knowledge. The third prong of affirmative protection would make available information, mechanisms, and resources to holders of patentable TK to make sure that those who wished to take advantage of patent protection were able to assert their rights. WHY PROTECT TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE? Why should communities that hold TK choose to protect it? There is of course a moral rationale for protection, i.e., that communities should have the right to make use of their own TK pursuant to their own customs and policies, free from misappropriation or misuse by others. In addition, holders of TK may be motivated by economic, social, and environmental interests. Professor Graham Dutfield, a noted scholar on TK and intellectual property protection, has examined several of those interests. 19 With respect to economic mo tivators, Professor Dutfield has found that "some indigenous and local communities depend on traditional knowledge for their livelihoods and well-being, as well as to sustainably manage and exploit their local ecosystems. ' 2° For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 80 of the world's population relies on traditional medicine for primary health care, and organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank, and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) now encourage the use of TK in sustainable rural development programs. Protecting TK could therefore "help local people to maintain livelihood security and physical well-being while providing opportunities for economic development."'" Protecting TK may also benefit national economies by giving countries greater control over the commercial use of their knowledge. TKbased products, including plant-based medicines, health products, cosmetics, and non-wood forest products, represent many developing countries' value added and are a potentially lucrative source of export revenue, which sound use of TK protection could help realize. Because TK is often an essential element in the development of other products, such as pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, personal care, pesticides, and even industrial enzymes, protecting TK could also give developing countries an economic edge in doing business with the industries that make those products and thereby promote domestic growth.22 Protecting TK can also provide significant environmental benefits.23 Contrary to the common stereotype that subsistence agriculture is environmentally unfriendly, traditional methods of farming and natural resource management often incorporate a conservation ethic that can enhance biodiversity. TK protection would not only contribute to the preservation of the world's plant and animal diversity, it could also foster the fair and efficient dissemination of environmentally sound agricultural methods while benefiting the traditional communities that created them. Finally, while the patent system has been accused of facilitating biopiracy by tolerating third-party patenting of TK, using the patent system appropriately to protect TK can serve more to prevent biopiracy than to permit it. Biopiracy generally refers to the exploitation of traditional knowledge or genetic resources-typically by multinational companies-without the authorization of the holders of that knowledge, and/or the patenting of inventions based on traditional knowledge without the consent of the knowledge holders or payment of compensation.24 Several cases of alleged biopiracy, including patents granted for neem, turmeric, the enola bean, and quinoa, have aroused controversy and focused attention on how patenting can lead to unjust results.25 Although it is extremely difficult to estimate the extent to which biopiracy actually takes place in any particular country, protecting TK could provide some assurance against misappropriation by clarifying the duty that third parties owe to the holders of the knowledge when the knowledge has contributed to an invention that is the subject of a patent application. Thus there are convincing reasons for turning to the patent system to protect TK. The view is far from unanimous, however, that doing so makes sound policy. Many traditional communities are reluctant to embrace the patent system. The high cost of prosecuting and enforcing patents may be one cause for caution on the part of TK holders. Another may be the structure of the patent system itself. At a recent seminar on intellectual property, biotechnology, traditional knowledge, and social issues co-hosted by L'Institution Sciences Po and McGill University, Professor Tania Bubela expressed the commonly held view that: There is a mismatch between the IP rights framework and TK. The main problem is that IP rights are time limited. Patenting of TK also requires public disclosure but most TK is based on cultural and spiritual beliefs that do not always agree with disclosure. It is also very difficult to know who holds the traditional knowledge. An ap- propriate balance needs to be struck between national economic interests and the needs of the communities to which TK owes its existence.... 26 Based on the same reasoning, the majority of "Indigenous Groups in Attendance" at a 2000 UNCTAD Expert Meeting on Systems and National Experiences for the Protection of TK, Innovations and Prac tices recommended that "the current IPR system is inappropriate for the recognition and protection of traditional knowledge systems because of the inherent conflicts between these two systems.... 2 If patents are to be used effectively to protect TK, therefore, the concerns of the holders of TK will have to be addressed and measures adopted that are compatible with their communities' values, norms, and objectives. To the extent that some of the concerns may be based on lack of confidence in, or misconceptions about, the patent system, clarification and education will be essential to provide TK holders with both the self-assurance and the wherewithal to make appropriate use of patents. Using Patents to enforce Traditional Knowledge Protection has precedent. Erstling 8, Jay. "Using patent to protect traditional knowledge." Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 15 (2008): 295. https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187andcontext=facsch (Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota.)Elmer Advantages of Affirmative Protection Despite the above-mentioned limitations and challenges, patents have a place in a TK protection system. A prime example is the use of patents to protect Traditional Chinese Medicine. The practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine dates back to the beginning of Chinese history. At its most basic, it is "a systematic practice of distinguishing among various illness-causing imbalances of qi. It achieves health by restoring a patient's internal yin-yang equilibrium via herbal remedies and physical manipulation."1'69 Traditional Chinese Medicine is of enormous importance not only to the Chinese-and the world's healthcare systems, but also to the Chinese economy. 170 It is no surprise, therefore, that the Chinese Government has made it a policy to encourage the patenting of innovative Traditional Chinese Medicinal products. Although most developing countries tend to find disfavor with the TRIPS Agreement, the Agreement has proven to be a boon to the protection of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Prior to the adoption of Article 27.1 of the TRIPS Agreement, which required China to make patents available "for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology . . . " the Chinese Patent Law171 did not protect Traditional Chinese Medicine. Since the Law's amendment, there has been a significant uptake in patent activity, particularly related to Traditional Chinese Medicine-based pharmaceuticals, and many supporters of Traditional Chinese Medicine believe that this activity has served to incentivize investment in Traditional Chinese Medicine, increase the Traditional Chinese Medicine knowledge base, and transform Traditional Chinese Medicine into a major global export asset. 172 Since 1992, when the Patent Law was amended, applicants have filed patent applications with the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) at a rate of 1,400 cases a year, 173 but they have not limited their activity to China alone; they have also filed applications in countries such as Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Moreover, patent holders have begun to enforce the rights they have been granted. For example, in February 2007, China Business News reported that a Chinese patentee Traditional Chinese Medicine manufacturer won the first Traditional Chinese Medicine infringement case against another Chinese company. The patentee was awarded an injunction prohibiting the infringing company from selling the infringing products as well as damages. 174 The promotion of Traditional Chinese Medicine has led to the establishment of organizations such as the Shanghai Innovative Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine (SIRC), 75 which in turn has further encouraged patent protection for TK. Founded in 2000 with support from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Shanghai Municipal Government, SIRC seeks to modernize Traditional Chinese Medicine and innovate drug discovery "by integrating modern life science, chemistry, and information technology with Traditional Chinese Medicine"1 76 -just the right formula to maximize patenting potential. 177 Although the patent system may not be suited to all types of TK, using patents to protect Traditional Chinese Medicine seems to have achieved some success in encouraging new innovation and invention. Communities working to advance other areas of innovative TK may do well to follow China's example. Biodiversity loss is existential and outweighs other threats. Torres 16 Phil Torres 5-20-2016 “Biodiversity Loss: An Existential Risk Comparable to Climate Change” http://futureoflife.org/2016/05/20/biodiversity-loss/ (conservationist, science advocate and educator. 2 years based in Amazon rainforest, now exploring science around the world)Elmer The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. 48 of the world’s primates are threatened with extinction. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hageland CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
Text - The Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ought to pledge to a binding no-war pact arbitered by neutral third-party countries jointly agreed upon by both signees covering all forms of conflict including, but not limited to, full-fledged war, armed skirmishes, use of non-state actors for terrorism, and blocking of critical natural resources.
. Personally I see a lot of reasons to push for it now.
Counterplan isn’t Object Fiat – 1~ No Brightline – every Counterplan aims to solve Internal Links that go further than the Aff – collapses to No Counterplans which wrecks Neg Ground and 2~ You can answer the CP w/ non-enforcement/cheating, etc. which solves.
9/19/21
SO - Infrastructure DA v1
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Garland AA | Judge: Gordon Krauss Infrastructure passes now due to Biden and Pelosi involvement – Biden PC and tight timetables makes the margin for error literally ZERO Elliott 9-16 (Philip Elliott is a Washington Correspondent for TIME. Before joining TIME in early 2015, he spent almost a decade at The Associated Press, where he covered politics, campaign finance, education and the White House. He is a graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, September 16, 2021, accessed on 9-17-2021, Time, "Democrats Face a Grueling Two Weeks as Infighting Erupts Over Infrastructure", https://time.com/6098810/house-democrats-reconciliation/)//babcii House Democrats yesterday finished penning a 2,600-page bill that finally outlines the specifics of their ambitious “soft” infrastructure plan that won’t attract a single Republican vote. But no one was really rushing to Schneider’s for bottles of bubbly. For a party ready to spend $3.5 trillion to fund its social policy agenda, there were plenty of glum faces on Capitol Hill. In fact, one key piece of the legislation—a deal that would finally let Medicare negotiate lower prices with drug companies—fell apart in the Energy and Commerce Committee when three Democrats voted against it. It found resurrection a short time later when Leadership aides literally plucked it from the Energy and Commerce team and delivered it to the Ways and Means Committee for its approval instead. Even there, though, one Democrat voted against it, saying the threat it posed to pharmaceutical companies’ profits would doom it in the Senate. “Every moment we spend debating provisions that will never become law is a moment wasted and will delay much-needed assistance to the American people,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida later argued. Put another way? Brace for some nasty politics over the next two weeks as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tries to get this bill to a vote before the budget year ends on Sept. 30. And those 2,600 pages had better be recyclable. Democrats can only afford three defectors if they want to usher this bill into law, and they’re perilously close to failure. So far, five centrist Democrats in the House have said they prefer a scaled-back version of the Medicare component. But if Pelosi gives the five centrists that win, she risks losing the support of progressives who are already sour that things like a punitive wealth tax and the end to tax loopholes aren’t present in the current version of the bill. As it stands now, letting Medicare negotiate drug prices would save the government about $500 billion over the next decade. The scaled-back version doesn’t have an official cost, but a very similar version got its score in the Senate last year: roughly $100 billion in savings. Because Democrats are using a budgeting loophole to help them avoid a filibuster and pass this with bare majorities, that $400 billion gap matters a lot more than on most bills. Scaling back the Medicare savings means they would also have to scale back their overall spending on the bill—a big line in the sand for progressives who say they’ve already compromised too much. All of this, of course, comes as President Joe Biden and his top aides in the White House have been trying to get Senate centrists onboard. Just yesterday, he met separately with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, fellow Democrats who have expressed worries about the $3.5 trillion price tag but have been vague about what exactly they want to cut back on. With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50, and Vice President Kamala Harris in position to break the ties to Democrats’ victories, any shenanigans from those two independent thinkers scrambles the whole package. Oh, and that other bipartisan infrastructure plan that carries $550 billion in new spending? It’s still sitting on the shelf in the House. Pelosi said she’d bring it to the floor only when the bigger—and entirely partisan—bill was ready. And there’s plenty of grumbling about that package, too. If this is all beginning to sound like a scratched record that keeps repeating, it’s because this has become something of a pattern here in Washington. Things look pretty grim for legislation in town these days, despite Democrats controlling the House, the Senate and the White House. Their margin for error is literally zero, and so hiccups from a half-dozen centrists can forewarn a doomed agenda. So far, Pelosi has been a master of holding the line on crucial votes and has managed to maneuver her team to victories, including on an earlier pandemic relief package that passed with only Democratic votes. Now she’s trying again, but the clock is ticking, and $3.5 trillion is an eye-popping sum of money that rivals the spending the United States unleashed to close out World War II. Attacks on Pharmaceutical Profits triggers Mod Dem Backlash – it disrupts unity. Cohen 9-6 Joshua Cohen 9-6-2021 "Democrats’ Plans To Introduce Prescription Drug Pricing Reform Face Formidable Obstacles" https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/09/06/democrats-plans-to-introduce-prescription-drug-pricing-reform-face-obstacles/?sh=37a269917395 (independent healthcare analyst with over 22 years of experience analyzing healthcare and pharmaceuticals.)Elmer There’s considerable uncertainty regarding passage with a simple majority of the 2021 massive budget reconciliation bill. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin called on Democrats to pause pushing forward the budget reconciliation bill. If Manchin winds up saying no to the bill, this would scuttle it as the Democrats can’t afford to lose a single Senator. And, there’s speculation that provisions to reduce prescription drug prices may be watered down and not incorporate international price referencing. Additionally, reduced prices derived through Medicare negotiation may not be able to be applied to those with employer-based coverage. While the progressive wing of the Democratic Party supports drug pricing reform, several key centrist Democrats in both the House and Senate appear to be uncomfortable with particular aspects of the budget reconciliation bill, including a potential deal-breaker, namely the potential negative impact of drug price controls on the domestic pharmaceutical industry, as well as long-term patient access to new drugs. A paper released in 2019 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the proposed legislation, H.R. 3, would reduce global revenue for new drugs by 19, leading to 8 fewer drugs approved in the U.S. between 2020 and 2029, and 30 fewer drugs over the next decade. And, a new report from the CBO reinforces the message that drug pricing legislation under consideration in Congress could lead to fewer new drugs being developed and launched. Intense lobbying efforts from biopharmaceutical industry groups are underway, warning of what they deem are harms from price controls in the form of diminished patient access to new innovations. The argument, based in part on assumptions and modeling included in the CBO reports, asserts that price controls would dampen investment critical to the biopharmaceutical industry’s pipeline of drugs and biologics. This won’t sway most Democrats, but has been a traditional talking point in the Republican Party for decades, and may convince some centrist Democrats to withdraw backing of provisions that in their eyes stymie pharmaceutical innovation. If the budget reconciliation bill would fail to garner a majority, a pared down version of H.R. 3, or perhaps a new bill altogether, with Senator Wyden spearheading the effort, could eventually land in the Senate. But, a similar set of provisos would apply, as majority support in both chambers would be far from a sure thing. In brief, Democrats’ plans at both the executive and legislative branch levels to introduce prescription drug pricing reform encounter challenges which may prevent impactful modifications from taking place. Sinema specifically jumps Ship. Hancock and Lucas 20 Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas 5-29-2020 "A Senator From Arizona Emerges As A Pharma Favorite" https://khn.org/news/a-senator-from-arizona-emerges-as-a-pharma-favorite/ (Senior Correspondent, joined KHN in 2012 from The Baltimore Sun, where he wrote a column on business and finance. Previously he covered the State Department and the economics beat for The Sun and health care for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and the Daily Press of Newport News. He has a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.)Elmer Sen. Kyrsten Sinema formed a congressional caucus to raise “awareness of the benefits of personalized medicine” in February. Soon after that, employees of pharmaceutical companies donated $35,000 to her campaign committee. Amgen gave $5,000. So did Genentech and Merck. Sanofi, Pfizer and Eli Lilly all gave $2,500. Each of those companies has invested heavily in personalized medicine, which promises individually tailored drugs that can cost a patient hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sinema is a first-term Democrat from Arizona but has nonetheless emerged as a pharma favorite in Congress as the industry steers through a new political and economic landscape formed by the coronavirus. She is a leading recipient of pharma campaign cash even though she’s not up for reelection until 2024 and lacks major committee or subcommittee leadership posts. For the 2019-20 election cycle through March, political action committees run by employees of drug companies and their trade groups gave her $98,500 in campaign funds, Kaiser Health News’ Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. That stands out in a Congress in which a third of the members got no pharma cash for the period and half of those who did got $10,000 or less. The contributions give companies a chance to cultivate Sinema as she restocks from a brutal 2018 election victory that cost nearly $25 million. Altogether, pharma PACs have so far given $9.2 million to congressional campaign chests in this cycle, compared with $9.4 million at this point in the 2017-18 period, a sustained surge as the industry has responded to complaints about soaring prices. Sinema’s pharma haul was twice that of Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in November, and approached that of fellow Democrat Steny Hoyer, the powerful House majority leader from Maryland. It all adds up to a bet by drug companies that the 43-year-old Sinema, first elected to the Senate in 2018, will gain influence in coming years and serve as an industry ally in a party that also includes many lawmakers harshly critical of high drug prices and the companies that set them. Pharma backlash independently turns Case. Huetteman 19 Emmarie Huetteman 2-26-2019 “Senators Who Led Pharma-Friendly Patent Reform Also Prime Targets For Pharma Cash” https://khn.org/news/senators-who-led-pharma-friendly-patent-reform-also-prime-targets-for-pharma-cash/ (former NYT Congressional correspondent with an MA in public affairs reporting from Northwestern University’s Medill School)Elmer Early last year, as lawmakers vowed to curb rising drug prices, Sen. Thom Tillis was named chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property rights, a committee that had not met since 2007. As the new gatekeeper for laws and oversight of the nation’s patent system, the North Carolina Republican signaled he was determined to make it easier for American businesses to benefit from it — a welcome message to the drugmakers who already leverage patents to block competitors and keep prices high. Less than three weeks after introducing a bill that would make it harder for generic drugmakers to compete with patent-holding drugmakers, Tillis opened the subcommittee’s first meeting on Feb. 26, 2019, with his own vow. “From the United States Patent and Trademark Office to the State Department’s Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, no department or bureau is too big or too small for this subcommittee to take interest,” he said. “And we will.” In the months that followed, tens of thousands of dollars flowed from pharmaceutical companies toward his campaign, as well as to the campaigns of other subcommittee members — including some who promised to stop drugmakers from playing money-making games with the patent system, like Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Tillis received more than $156,000 from political action committees tied to drug manufacturers in 2019, more than any other member of Congress, a new analysis of KHN’s Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee who worked side by side with Tillis, received more than $124,000 in drugmaker contributions last year, making him the No. 3 recipient in Congress. No. 2 was Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who took in about $139,000. As the Senate majority leader, he controls what legislation gets voted on by the Senate. Neither Tillis nor Coons sits on the Senate committees that introduced legislation last year to lower drug prices through methods like capping price increases to the rate of inflation. Of the four senators who drafted those bills, none received more than $76,000 from drug manufacturers in 2019. Tillis and Coons spent much of last year working on significant legislation that would expand the range of items eligible to be patented — a change that some experts say would make it easier for companies developing medical tests and treatments to own things that aren’t traditionally inventions, like genetic code. They have not yet officially introduced a bill. As obscure as patents might seem in an era of public outrage over drug prices, the fact that drugmakers gave most to the lawmakers working to change the patent system belies how important securing the exclusive right to market a drug, and keep competitors at bay, is to their bottom line. “Pharma will fight to the death to preserve patent rights,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug pricing. “Strong patent rights are central to the games drug companies play to extend their monopolies and keep prices high.” Campaign contributions, closely tracked by the Federal Election Commission, are among the few windows into how much money flows from the political groups of drugmakers and other companies to the lawmakers and their campaigns. Private companies generally give money to members of Congress to encourage them to listen to the companies, typically through lobbyists, whose activities are difficult to track. They may also communicate through so-called dark money groups, which are not required to report who gives them money. Over the past 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent about $233 million per year on lobbying, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. That is more than any other industry, including the oil and gas industry. Why Patents Matter Developing and testing a new drug, and gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Drugmakers are generally granted a six- or seven-year exclusivity period to recoup their investments. But drugmakers have found ways to extend that period of exclusivity, sometimes accumulating hundreds of patents on the same drug and blocking competition for decades. One method is to patent many inventions beyond a drug’s active ingredient, such as patenting the injection device that administers the drug. Keeping that arrangement intact, or expanding what can be patented, is where lawmakers come in. Lawmakers Dig In Tillis’ home state of North Carolina is also home to three major research universities and, not coincidentally, multiple drugmakers’ headquarters, factories and other facilities. From his swearing-in in 2015 to the end of 2018, Tillis received about $160,000 from drugmakers based there or beyond. He almost matched that four-year total in 2019 alone, in the midst of a difficult reelection campaign to be decided this fall. He has raised nearly $10 million for his campaign, with lobbyists among his biggest contributors, according to OpenSecrets. Daniel Keylin, a spokesperson for Tillis, said Tillis and Coons, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, are working to overhaul the country’s “antiquated intellectual property laws.” Keylin said the bipartisan effort protects the development and access to affordable, lifesaving medication for patients,” adding: “No contribution has any impact on how Tillis votes or legislates.” Tillis signaled his openness to the drug industry early on. The day before being named chairman, he reintroduced a bill that would limit the options generic drugmakers have to challenge allegedly invalid patents, effectively helping brand-name drugmakers protect their monopolies. Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), whose warm relationship with the drug industry was well-known, had introduced the legislation, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act, just days before his retirement in 2018. At his subcommittee’s first hearing, Tillis said the members would rely on testimony from private businesses to guide them. He promised to hold hearings on patent eligibility standards and “reforms to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.” In practice, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act would require generics makers challenging another drugmaker’s patent to either take their claim to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which acts as a sort of cheaper, faster quality check to catch bad patents, or file a lawsuit. A study released last year found that, since Congress created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in 2011, it has narrowed or overturned about 51 of the drugmaker patents that generics makers have challenged. Feldman said the drug industry “went berserk” over the number of patents the board changed and has been eager to limit use of the board as much as possible. Patent reviewers are often stretched thin and sometimes make mistakes, said Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug development. Limiting the ways to challenge patents, as Tillis’ bill would, does not strengthen the patent system, he said. “You want overlapping oversight for a system that is as important and fundamental as this system is,” he said. As promised, Tillis and Coons also spent much of the year working on so-called Section 101 reform regarding what is eligible to be patented — “a very major change” that “would overturn more than a century of Supreme Court law,” Feldman said. Sean Coit, Coons’ spokesperson, said lowering drug prices is one of the senator’s top priorities and pointed to Coon’s support for legislation the pharmaceutical industry opposes. “One of the reasons Senator Coons is leading efforts in Congress to fix our broken patent system is so that life-saving medicines can actually be developed and produced at affordable prices for every American,” Coit wrote in an email, adding that “his work on Section 101 reform has brought together advocates from across the spectrum, including academics and health experts.” In August, when much of Capitol Hill had emptied for summer recess, Tillis and Coons held closed-door meetings to preview their legislation to stakeholders, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, the brand-name drug industry’s lobbying group. “We regularly engage with members of Congress in both parties to advance practical policy solutions that will lower medicine costs for patients,” said Holly Campbell, a PhRMA spokesperson. Neither proposal has received a public hearing. In the 30 days before Tillis and Coons were named leaders of the revived subcommittee, drug manufacturers gave them $21,000 from their political action committees. In the 30 days following that first hearing, Tillis and Coons received $60,000. Among their donors were PhRMA; the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the biotech lobbying group; and five of the seven drugmakers whose executives — as Tillis laid out a pharma-friendly agenda for his new subcommittee — were getting chewed out by senators in a different hearing room over patent abuse. Cornyn Goes After Patent Abuse Richard Gonzalez, chief executive of AbbVie Inc., the company known for its top-selling drug, Humira, had spent the morning sitting stone-faced before the Senate Finance Committee as, one after another, senators excoriated him and six other executives of brand-name drug manufacturers over how they price their products. Cornyn brought up AbbVie’s more than 130 patents on Humira. Hadn’t the company blocked its competition? Cornyn asked Gonzalez, who carefully explained how AbbVie’s lawsuit against a generics competitor and subsequent licensing deal was not what he would describe as anti-competitive behavior. “I realize it may not be popular,” Gonzalez said. “But I think it is a reasonable balance.” A minute later, Cornyn turned to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who, like Cornyn, was also a member of the revived intellectual property subcommittee. This is worth looking into with “our Judiciary Committee authorities as well,” Cornyn said, effectively threatening legislation on patent abuse. The next day, Mylan, one of the largest producers of generic drugs, gave Cornyn $5,000, FEC records show. The company had not donated to Cornyn in years. By midsummer, every drug company that sent an executive to that hearing had given money to Cornyn, including AbbVie. Cornyn, who faces perhaps the most difficult reelection fight of his career this fall, ranks No. 6 among members of Congress in drugmaker PAC contributions last year, KHN’s analysis shows. He received about $104,000. Cornyn has received about $708,500 from drugmakers since 2007, KHN’s database shows. According to OpenSecrets, he has raised more than $17 million for this year’s reelection campaign. Cornyn’s office declined to comment. On May 9, Cornyn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which proposed to define two tactics used by drug companies to make it easier for the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute them: “product-hopping,” when drugmakers withdraw older versions of their drugs from the market to push patients toward newer, more expensive ones, and “patent-thicketing,” when drugmakers amass a series of patents to drag out their exclusivity and slow rival generics makers, who must challenge those patents to enter the market once the initial exclusivity ends. PhRMA opposed the bill. The next day, it gave Cornyn $1,000. Cornyn and Blumenthal’s bill would have been “very tough on the techniques that pharmaceutical companies use to extend patent protections and to keep prices high,” Feldman said. “The pharmaceutical industry lobbied tooth and nail against it,” she said. “And when the bill finally came out of committee, the strongest provisions — the patent-thicketing provisions — had been stripped.” In the months after the bill cleared committee and waited to be taken up by the Senate, Cornyn blamed Senate Democrats for blocking the bill while trying to secure votes on legislation with more direct controls on drug prices. The Senate has not voted on the bill. Infrastructure reform solves Existential Climate Change – it results in spill-over. USA Today 7-20 7-20-2021 "Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2021/07/20/climate-change-biden-infrastructure-bill-good-start/7877118002/Elmer Not long ago, climate change for many Americans was like a distant bell. News of starving polar bears or melting glaciers was tragic and disturbing, but other worldly. Not any more. Top climate scientists from around the world warned of a "code red for humanity" in a report issued Monday that says severe, human-caused global warming is become unassailable. Proof of the findings by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a now a factor of daily life. Due to intense heat waves and drought, 107 wildfires – including the largest ever in California – are now raging across the West, consuming 2.3 million acres. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people died in unprecedented triple-digit heat in Oregon, Washington and western Canada, when a "heat dome" of enormous proportions settled over the region for days. Some victims brought by stretcher into crowded hospital wards had body temperatures so high, their nervous systems had shut down. People collapsed trying to make their way to cooling shelters. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases Scientists say the event was almost certainly made worse and more intransigent by human-caused climate change. They attribute it to a combination of warming Arctic temperatures and a growing accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The consequences of what mankind has done to the atmosphere are now inescapable. Periods of extreme heat are projected to double in the lower 48 states by 2100. Heat deaths are far outpacing every other form of weather killer in a 30-year average. A persistent megadrought in America's West continues to create tinder-dry conditions that augur another devastating wildfire season. And scientists say warming oceans are fueling ever more powerful storms, evidenced by Elsa and the early arrival of hurricane season this year. Increasingly severe weather is causing an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States every year. "It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Rising seas from global warming Investigators are still trying to determine what led to the collapse of a Miami-area condominium that left more than 100 dead or missing. But one concerning factor is the corrosive effect on reinforced steel structures of encroaching saltwater, made worse in Florida by a foot of rising seas from global warming since the 1900s. The clock is ticking for planet Earth. While the U.N. report concludes some level of severe climate change is now unavoidable, there is still a window of time when far more catastrophic events can be mitigated. But mankind must act soon to curb the release of heat-trapping gases. Global temperature has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century. Scientists warn that in a decade, it could surpass a 2.7-degree increase. That's enough warming to cause catastrophic climate changes. After a brief decline in global greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, pollution is on the rise. Years that could have been devoted to addressing the crisis were wasted during a feckless period of inaction by the Trump administration. Congress must act Joe Biden won the presidency promising broad new policies to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions. But Congress needs to act on those ideas this year. Democrats cannot risk losing narrow control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2022 elections to a Republican Party too long resistant to meaningful action on the climate. So what's at issue? A trillion dollar infrastructure bill negotiated between Biden and a group of centrist senators (including 10 Republicans) is a start. In addition to repairing bridges, roads and rails, it would improve access by the nation's power infrastructure to renewable energy sources, cap millions of abandoned oil and gas wells spewing greenhouse gases, and harden structures against climate change. It also offers tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and funds the construction of charging stations. (The nation's largest source of climate pollution are gas-powered vehicles.) Senate approval could come very soon. Much more is needed if the nation is going to reach Biden's necessary goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution in half from 2005 levels by 2030. His ideas worth considering include a federal clean electricity standard for utilities, federal investments and tax credits to promote renewable energy, and tens of billions of dollars in clean energy research and development, including into ways of extracting greenhouse gases from the skies. Another idea worth considering is a fully refundable carbon tax. The vehicle for these additional proposals would be a second infrastructure bill. And if Republicans balk at the cost of such vital investment, Biden is rightly proposing to pass this package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows bills to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote. These are drastic legislative steps. But drastic times call for them. And when Biden attends a U.N. climate conference in November, he can use American progress on climate change as a mean of persuading others to follow our lead. Further delay is not an option.
9/18/21
SO - Infrastructure DA v2
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 1 | Opponent: Southlake Carroll CC | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary Reconciliation passes now – the delay gives Biden time to work magic in the wings, but PC and focus are key Herb et al. 10-1 (Jeremy Herb, CNN Politics Reporter, Kevin Liptak, Reporter, Phil Mattingly, Senior White House Correspondent, Lauren Fox, CNN Congressional Correspondent, Melanie Zanona, Capitol Hill Reporter, “'It doesn't matter when': How Biden gave feuding House Democrats an off-ramp”, CNN Politics, 10-1-21, https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/01/politics/dems-biden-infrastructure-delay/index.html)//babcii (CNN)President Joe Biden didn't travel to Capitol Hill on Friday to close the deal, or to rally the troops through a final legislative gantlet. There was nothing cinematic -- or dramatic -- about the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue for the 36-year Senate veteran, who has more than once informed aides of his unparalleled ability to read, speak to and corral lawmakers. Instead, in remarks that lasted less than 30 minutes, Biden served a singular purpose: a presidential pressure relief valve. In a week deemed an "inflection point" by top aides, where the President was rarely seen in public as his entire domestic agenda hung in the balance, it marked a seemingly low bar to clear for success. There would be no miraculous deal to unlock the formula to move forward on the two key components Democrats are attempting to pass. The promised vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill would not materialize. But after days of intraparty warfare and feverish late-night negotiations, a reset was desperately needed -- and the best Biden could offer. In delivering an unscripted and at times unwieldy message that the infrastructure vote wasn't likely to happen -- and the top-line cost of the economic and climate package was going to have to come down -- the President made the bet that he can keep both sides of the intraparty feud on board in the critical days and weeks to follow. White House and Democratic leaders will now launch an all-out effort to win over the two Senate Democratic holdouts, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, as they shape what the multitrillion-dollar economic and social package looks like -- and how high its price tag will be. Congressional Democrats and White House officials say progress was made this week getting all sides closer to an agreement on the massive economic, climate and health care spending package that Democratic leaders intend to pair with the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that's passed the Senate already. But in the House, moderate and progressive Democrats were engaged in a slow-motion game of chicken over the infrastructure vote, with moderates demanding a vote on the infrastructure bill this week that had been pledged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- and progressives standing firm that they would vote it down without an agreement on the framework for the larger economic package. On Friday, Biden sought the off-ramp. It marked his most direct effort to date to cajole the House Democratic caucus at a moment when its members have grown increasingly frustrated about the amount of attention the President and his team have paid to their side of the Capitol. Though well received with several ovations, the appearance didn't serve to salve those wounds entirely -- with some saying afterward that his pep talk had actually exacerbated them. But it did deliver a critical message and a consequential moment, multiple members said: Compromise now -- or end up with nothing. It's likely too soon to say whether the debate this week is just a preamble to Democrats' enacting their historic agenda or if it's a feud that leads to legislative defeat, hobbling the President's party ahead of a tough midterm election cycle with little to show for controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House. 'Who knows what label I get' After the roughly half hour meeting with the President, Democrats described a leader who was in his element and not working to change minds as much as remind members of their shared and unified goals as a caucus. Throughout the infrastructure push, Biden has made clear to Democrats that party unity -- or, in some participants' interpretation, loyalty -- is of utmost importance with only the slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. He tried to break down the stalemate and the tensions that have hung over the party for weeks, reminding them that he's not on one side or the other. At one point, he made a reference to his own political ideology, saying, "Who knows what label I get." To which Pelosi replied: "President," prompting loud laughter from the room. Biden also talked about how he had redone his office to have paintings hung of Lincoln and FDR -- "A deeply divided country and the biggest economic transformation," said Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, "which is kind of the moment we're in." White House officials think the President accomplished what he went to do on Capitol Hill: Remind Democrats of what is at stake while relieving some of the pressure that had built up over the last several days and reiterating his commitment to passing both pieces of legislation. With that done, officials believe, negotiators have a better environment to be able to push toward a deal. "We're going to get this done," Biden told reporters as he left the meeting. "It doesn't matter when. It doesn't, whether it's in six minutes, six days or six weeks -- we're going to get it done." 'As long as we're still alive' Even before Friday, Biden had alluded in recent days to negotiations slipping beyond the week's end. With the stakes simply too high -- on both the political and policy fronts -- there are no plans to walk away. "It may not be by the end of the week," the President had responded when asked Monday how he would define success at the end of this week. "I hope it's by the end of the week." "But as long as we're still alive ...," Biden said before shifting course in his thought. Attacks on Pharmaceutical Profits triggers Mod Dem Backlash – it disrupts unity. Cohen 9-6 Joshua Cohen 9-6-2021 "Democrats’ Plans To Introduce Prescription Drug Pricing Reform Face Formidable Obstacles" https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/09/06/democrats-plans-to-introduce-prescription-drug-pricing-reform-face-obstacles/?sh=37a269917395 (independent healthcare analyst with over 22 years of experience analyzing healthcare and pharmaceuticals.)Elmer There’s considerable uncertainty regarding passage with a simple majority of the 2021 massive budget reconciliation bill. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin called on Democrats to pause pushing forward the budget reconciliation bill. If Manchin winds up saying no to the bill, this would scuttle it as the Democrats can’t afford to lose a single Senator. And, there’s speculation that provisions to reduce prescription drug prices may be watered down and not incorporate international price referencing. Additionally, reduced prices derived through Medicare negotiation may not be able to be applied to those with employer-based coverage. While the progressive wing of the Democratic Party supports drug pricing reform, several key centrist Democrats in both the House and Senate appear to be uncomfortable with particular aspects of the budget reconciliation bill, including a potential deal-breaker, namely the potential negative impact of drug price controls on the domestic pharmaceutical industry, as well as long-term patient access to new drugs. A paper released in 2019 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the proposed legislation, H.R. 3, would reduce global revenue for new drugs by 19, leading to 8 fewer drugs approved in the U.S. between 2020 and 2029, and 30 fewer drugs over the next decade. And, a new report from the CBO reinforces the message that drug pricing legislation under consideration in Congress could lead to fewer new drugs being developed and launched. Intense lobbying efforts from biopharmaceutical industry groups are underway, warning of what they deem are harms from price controls in the form of diminished patient access to new innovations. The argument, based in part on assumptions and modeling included in the CBO reports, asserts that price controls would dampen investment critical to the biopharmaceutical industry’s pipeline of drugs and biologics. This won’t sway most Democrats, but has been a traditional talking point in the Republican Party for decades, and may convince some centrist Democrats to withdraw backing of provisions that in their eyes stymie pharmaceutical innovation. If the budget reconciliation bill would fail to garner a majority, a pared down version of H.R. 3, or perhaps a new bill altogether, with Senator Wyden spearheading the effort, could eventually land in the Senate. But, a similar set of provisos would apply, as majority support in both chambers would be far from a sure thing. In brief, Democrats’ plans at both the executive and legislative branch levels to introduce prescription drug pricing reform encounter challenges which may prevent impactful modifications from taking place. Sinema specifically jumps Ship. Hancock and Lucas 20 Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas 5-29-2020 "A Senator From Arizona Emerges As A Pharma Favorite" https://khn.org/news/a-senator-from-arizona-emerges-as-a-pharma-favorite/ (Senior Correspondent, joined KHN in 2012 from The Baltimore Sun, where he wrote a column on business and finance. Previously he covered the State Department and the economics beat for The Sun and health care for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and the Daily Press of Newport News. He has a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.)Elmer Sen. Kyrsten Sinema formed a congressional caucus to raise “awareness of the benefits of personalized medicine” in February. Soon after that, employees of pharmaceutical companies donated $35,000 to her campaign committee. Amgen gave $5,000. So did Genentech and Merck. Sanofi, Pfizer and Eli Lilly all gave $2,500. Each of those companies has invested heavily in personalized medicine, which promises individually tailored drugs that can cost a patient hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sinema is a first-term Democrat from Arizona but has nonetheless emerged as a pharma favorite in Congress as the industry steers through a new political and economic landscape formed by the coronavirus. She is a leading recipient of pharma campaign cash even though she’s not up for reelection until 2024 and lacks major committee or subcommittee leadership posts. For the 2019-20 election cycle through March, political action committees run by employees of drug companies and their trade groups gave her $98,500 in campaign funds, Kaiser Health News’ Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. That stands out in a Congress in which a third of the members got no pharma cash for the period and half of those who did got $10,000 or less. The contributions give companies a chance to cultivate Sinema as she restocks from a brutal 2018 election victory that cost nearly $25 million. Altogether, pharma PACs have so far given $9.2 million to congressional campaign chests in this cycle, compared with $9.4 million at this point in the 2017-18 period, a sustained surge as the industry has responded to complaints about soaring prices. Sinema’s pharma haul was twice that of Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in November, and approached that of fellow Democrat Steny Hoyer, the powerful House majority leader from Maryland. It all adds up to a bet by drug companies that the 43-year-old Sinema, first elected to the Senate in 2018, will gain influence in coming years and serve as an industry ally in a party that also includes many lawmakers harshly critical of high drug prices and the companies that set them. Infrastructure reform solves Existential Climate Change – it results in spill-over. USA Today 7-20 7-20-2021 "Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2021/07/20/climate-change-biden-infrastructure-bill-good-start/7877118002/Elmer Not long ago, climate change for many Americans was like a distant bell. News of starving polar bears or melting glaciers was tragic and disturbing, but other worldly. Not any more. Top climate scientists from around the world warned of a "code red for humanity" in a report issued Monday that says severe, human-caused global warming is become unassailable. Proof of the findings by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a now a factor of daily life. Due to intense heat waves and drought, 107 wildfires – including the largest ever in California – are now raging across the West, consuming 2.3 million acres. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people died in unprecedented triple-digit heat in Oregon, Washington and western Canada, when a "heat dome" of enormous proportions settled over the region for days. Some victims brought by stretcher into crowded hospital wards had body temperatures so high, their nervous systems had shut down. People collapsed trying to make their way to cooling shelters. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases Scientists say the event was almost certainly made worse and more intransigent by human-caused climate change. They attribute it to a combination of warming Arctic temperatures and a growing accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The consequences of what mankind has done to the atmosphere are now inescapable. Periods of extreme heat are projected to double in the lower 48 states by 2100. Heat deaths are far outpacing every other form of weather killer in a 30-year average. A persistent megadrought in America's West continues to create tinder-dry conditions that augur another devastating wildfire season. And scientists say warming oceans are fueling ever more powerful storms, evidenced by Elsa and the early arrival of hurricane season this year. Increasingly severe weather is causing an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States every year. "It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Rising seas from global warming Investigators are still trying to determine what led to the collapse of a Miami-area condominium that left more than 100 dead or missing. But one concerning factor is the corrosive effect on reinforced steel structures of encroaching saltwater, made worse in Florida by a foot of rising seas from global warming since the 1900s. The clock is ticking for planet Earth. While the U.N. report concludes some level of severe climate change is now unavoidable, there is still a window of time when far more catastrophic events can be mitigated. But mankind must act soon to curb the release of heat-trapping gases. Global temperature has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century. Scientists warn that in a decade, it could surpass a 2.7-degree increase. That's enough warming to cause catastrophic climate changes. After a brief decline in global greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, pollution is on the rise. Years that could have been devoted to addressing the crisis were wasted during a feckless period of inaction by the Trump administration. Congress must act Joe Biden won the presidency promising broad new policies to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions. But Congress needs to act on those ideas this year. Democrats cannot risk losing narrow control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2022 elections to a Republican Party too long resistant to meaningful action on the climate. So what's at issue? A trillion dollar infrastructure bill negotiated between Biden and a group of centrist senators (including 10 Republicans) is a start. In addition to repairing bridges, roads and rails, it would improve access by the nation's power infrastructure to renewable energy sources, cap millions of abandoned oil and gas wells spewing greenhouse gases, and harden structures against climate change. It also offers tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and funds the construction of charging stations. (The nation's largest source of climate pollution are gas-powered vehicles.) Senate approval could come very soon. Much more is needed if the nation is going to reach Biden's necessary goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution in half from 2005 levels by 2030. His ideas worth considering include a federal clean electricity standard for utilities, federal investments and tax credits to promote renewable energy, and tens of billions of dollars in clean energy research and development, including into ways of extracting greenhouse gases from the skies. Another idea worth considering is a fully refundable carbon tax. The vehicle for these additional proposals would be a second infrastructure bill. And if Republicans balk at the cost of such vital investment, Biden is rightly proposing to pass this package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows bills to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote. These are drastic legislative steps. But drastic times call for them. And when Biden attends a U.N. climate conference in November, he can use American progress on climate change as a mean of persuading others to follow our lead. Further delay is not an option.
10/9/21
SO - Innovation DA v3
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 5 | Opponent: Oxford VD | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen Strong current IP guarantees causes massive Pharma innovation. Stevens and Ezell 20 Philip Stevens and Stephen Ezell 2-3-2020 "Delinkage Debunked: Why Replacing Patents With Prizes for Drug Development Won’t Work" https://itif.org/publications/2020/02/03/delinkage-debunked-why-replacing-patents-prizes-drug-development-wont-work (Philip founded Geneva Network in 2015. His main research interests are the intersection of intellectual property, trade, and health policy. Formerly he was an official at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, where he worked in its Global Challenges Division on a range of IP and health issues. Prior to his time with WIPO, Philip worked as director of policy for International Policy Network, a UK-based think tank, as well as holding research positions with the Adam Smith Institute and Reform, both in London. He has also worked as a political risk consultant and a management consultant. He is a regular columnist in a wide range of international newspapers and has published a number of academic studies. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Durham University (UK).)Elmer The Current System Has Produced a Tremendous Amount of Life-Sciences Innovation The frontier for biomedical innovation is seemingly limitless, and the challenges remain numerous—whether it comes to diseases that afflict millions, such as cancer or malaria, or the estimated 7,000 rare diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 patients.24 And while certainly citizens in developed and developing nations confront differing health challenges, those challenges are increasingly converging. For instance, as of this year, analysts expect that noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes will account for 70 percent of natural fatalities in developing countries.25 Citizens of low- and middle-income countries bear 80 percent of the world’s death burden from cardiovascular disease.26 Forty-six percent of Africans over 25 suffer from hypertension, more than anywhere else in the world. Similarly, 85 percent of the disease burden of cervical cancer is borne by individuals living in low- and middle-income countries.27 To develop treatments or cures for these conditions, novel biomedical innovation will be needed from everywhere. Yet tremendous progress has been made in recent decades. To tackle these challenges, the global pharmaceutical industry invested over $1.36 trillion in RandD in the decade from 2007 to 2016—and it’s expected that annual RandD investment by the global pharmaceutical industry will reach $181 billion by 2022.28 In no small part due to that investment, 943 new active substances have been introduced globally over the prior 25 years.29 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more than 500 new medicines since 2000 alone. And these medicines are getting to more individuals: Global medicine use in 2020 will reach 4.5 trillion doses, up 24 percent from 2015.30 Moreover, there are an estimated 7,000 new medicines under development globally (about half of them in the United States), with 74 percent being potentially first in class, meaning they use a new and unique mechanism of action for treating a medical condition.31 In the United States, over 85 percent of all drugs sold are generics (only 10 percent of U.S. prescriptions are filled by brand-name drugs).32 And while some assert that biotechnology companies focus too often on “me-too” drugs that compete with other treatments already on the market, the reality is many drugs currently under development are meant to tackle some of the world’s most intractable diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.33 Moreover, such arguments miss that many of the drugs developed in recent years have in fact been first of their kind. For instance, in 2014, the FDA approved 41 new medicines (at that point, the most since 1996) many of which were first-in-class medicines.34 In that year, 28 of the 41 drugs approved were considered biologic or specialty agents, and 41 percent of medicines approved were intended to treat rare diseases.35 Yet even when a new drug isn’t first of its kind, it can still produce benefits for patients, both through enhanced clinical efficacy (for instance, taking the treatment as a pill rather than an injection, with a superior dosing regimen, or better treatment for some individuals who don’t respond well to the original drug) and by generating competition that exerts downward price pressures. For example, a patient needing a cholesterol drug has a host of statins from which to choose, which is important because some statins produce harmful side effects for some patients. Similarly, patients with osteoporosis can choose from Actonel, Boniva, or Fosomax. Or take for example Hepatitis C, which until recently was an incurable disease eventually requiring a liver transplant for many patients. In 2013, a revolutionary new treatment called Solvadi was released that boosted cure rates to 90 percent. This was followed in 2014 by an improved treatment called Harvoni, which cures the Hepatitis C variant left untouched by Solvadi. Since then, an astonishing six new treatments for the disease have received FDA approval, opening up a wide range of treatment options that take into account patients’ liver and kidney status, co-infections, potential drug interactions, previous treatment failures, and the genotype of HCV virus.36 “If you have to have Hepatitis C, now is the time to have it,” as Douglas Dieterich, a liver specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told the Financial Times. “We have these marvellous drugs we can treat you with right now, without side effects,” he added. “And this time next year, we’ll have another round of drugs available.”37 Moreover, the financial potential of this new product category has led to multiple competing products entering the market in quick succession, in turn placing downward pressure on prices.38 As Geoffrey Dusheiko and Charles Gore write in The Lancet, “The market has done its work for HCV treatments: after competing antiviral regimens entered the market, competition and innovative price negotiations have driven costs down from the initially high list prices in developed countries.”39 As noted previously, opponents of the current market- and IP-based system contend patents enable their holders to exploit a (temporary) market monopoly by inflating prices many multiples beyond the marginal cost of production. But rather than a conventional neoclassical analysis, an analysis based on “innovation economics” finds it is exactly this “distortion” that is required for innovation to progress. As William Baumol has pointed out, “Prices above marginal costs and price discrimination become the norm rather than the exception because … without such deviations from behaviour in the perfectly competitive model, innovation outlays and other unavoidable and repeated sunk outlays cannot be recouped.”40 Or, as the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment found, “Pharmaceutical RandD is a risky investment; therefore, high financial returns are necessary to induce companies to invest in researching new chemical entities.”41 This is also why, in 2018, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated that because of high failure rates, biopharmaceutical companies would need to earn a 61.8 percent rate of return on their successful new drug RandD projects in order to match a 4.8 percent after-tax rate of return on their investments.42 Indeed, it’s the ability to recoup fixed costs, not just marginal costs, through mechanisms such as patent protection that lies at the heart of all innovation-based industries and indeed all innovation and related economic progress. If companies could not find a way to pay for their RandD costs, and could only charge for the costs of producing the compound, there would be no new drugs developed, just as there would be no new products developed in any industry. Innovating in the life sciences remains expensive, risky, difficult, and uncertain. Just 1 in 5,000 drug candidates make it all the way from discovery to market.43 A 2018 study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, “Unlocking RandD productivity: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation 2018,” found that “the average cost to develop an asset an innovative life-sciences drug including the cost of failure, has increased in six out of eight years,” and that the average cost to create a new drug has risen to $2.8 billion.44 Related research has found the development of new drugs requires years of painstaking, risky, and expensive research that, for a new pharmaceutical compound, takes an average of 11.5 to 15 years of research, development, and clinical trials, at a cost of $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion.45 IP rights—including patents, copyrights, and data exclusivity protections—give innovators, whether in the life sciences or other sectors, the confidence to undertake the risky and expensive process of innovation, secure in the knowledge they’ll be able to capture a share of the gains from their efforts. And these gains are often only a small fraction of the true value created. For instance, Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated inventors capture just 4 percent of the total social gains from their innovations; the rest spill over to other companies and society as a whole.46 Without adequate IP protection, private investors would never find it viable to fund advanced research because lower-cost copiers would be in a position to undercut the legitimate prices (and profits) of innovators, even while still generating substantial profits on their own.47 As the report “Wealth, Health and International Trade in the 21st Century” concludes, “Conferring robust intellectual property rights is, in the pharmaceutical and other technological-development contexts, in the global public’s long-term interests. Without adequate mechanisms for directly and indirectly securing the private and public funding of medicines and vaccines, research and development communities across the world will lose future benefits that would far outweigh the development costs involved.”48 Put simply, the current market- and IP-based life-sciences innovation system is producing life-changing biomedical innovation. As Jack Scannell, a senior fellow at Oxford University’s Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation has explained, “I would guess that one can buy today, at rock bottom generic prices, a set of small-molecule drugs that has greater medical utility than the entire set available to anyone, anywhere, at any price in 1995.” He continued, “Nearly all the generic medicine chest was created by firms who invested in RandD to win future profits that they tried pretty hard to maximize; short-term financial gain building a long-term common good.”49 For example, on September 14, 2017, the FDA approved Mvasi, the first biosimilar for Roche’s Avastin, a breakthrough anticancer drug when it came out in the mid-1990s for lung, cervical, and colorectal cancer.50 In other words, a medicine to treat forms of cancer that barely existed 20 years ago is now available as a generic drug today. It’s this dynamic that enables us to imagine a situation wherein drugs to treat diseases that aren’t available anywhere at any price today (for instance, treatments for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s) might be available as generics in 20 years. But that will only be the case if we preserve (and improve where possible) a life-sciences innovation system that is generally working. The current system does not require wholesale replacement by a prize-based system that—notwithstanding a meaningful success here or there—has produced nowhere near a similar level of novel biomedical innovation. The most efficacious mainstream drugs come from Indigenous Knowledge – empirics are on our side. King 91 Stephen King September 1991 "The Source of Our Cures: A new pharmaceutical company wants to provide reciprocal benefits and recognize the value of indigenous" https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/source-our-cures-new-pharmaceutical-company-wants-provideElmer FOR 500 YEARS, SINCE THE People of South America encountered Europeans on their soil, the global pharmacopoeia has been enriched by a number of important plant-derived medicines discovered and utilized by indigenous people. The skeletal muscle relaxant d-tubocurarine is derived from an Amazonian arrow poison better known as curare, Chonodendron tomentosum. The antimalarial drug quinine, obtained from the bark of the several species on Cinchona trees, was first called "Indian fever bark" by the Europeans until the name "Jesuit fever bark" became more popular. Quinidine, also produced from the bark of Cinchona species, is now used as an antiarrhythmic for people with cardiac problems. An important amoebocide and emetic drug emetine, obtained from the roots of Cephalis ipecacuana, was utilized by indigenous people in Brazil to treat dysentery. One of the world's most important local anesthetics, cocaine is derived from the leaves of Erthroxylum coca and is still used today as medicine by thousands of people in the Andean region of South America. Pilocarpine, a drug used to treat glaucoma, is derived from the plant Pilocarpups jaborandi and was utilized by indigenous people in Brazil as medicine. These are only a few examples of the mainstream drugs that have been developed based on the - acknowledged - traditional wisdom of indigenous people. Roughly 74 percent of the 121 plant-derived compounds currently used in the global pharmacopoeia have been discovered through research based on ethnobotanical information on the use of plants by indigenous people. It is well known that tropical forest ecosystems contain a tremendous diversity of plant species. Estimates cite a minimum of 250,000 flowering plant species worldwide, at least 90,000 of which are found in the neotropics. Fewer than one percent of these plants have been investigated even superficially for potential pharmacological activity. A surprisingly large proportion of this plant biodiversity is classified, utilized, and actively managed by indigenous and local people of tropical regions. Tropical forest people have a profound knowledge about the utility, of plants found in their environment - an observation confirmed by ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological research in the past decade (see references). At the same time interdisciplinary research by anthropologists, ecologists, geographers, and tropical agrnomists has shown that indigenous people and rural inhabitants of the neotropics have been - and continue to - actively managing plant genetic resources in their environment (Balee and Posey 1989; Irvine 1987; Denevan and Padoch 1988; Posey 1985); plants used as medicine are often moved and maintained as cultivated or wild/cultivated medical resources. Chinese Tribal Medicine proves Compatibility and our Innovation Links. Erstling 8, Jay. "Using patent to protect traditional knowledge." Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 15 (2008): 295. https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187andcontext=facsch (Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota.)Elmer Advantages of Affirmative Protection Despite the above-mentioned limitations and challenges, patents have a place in a TK protection system. A prime example is the use of patents to protect Traditional Chinese Medicine. The practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine dates back to the beginning of Chinese history. At its most basic, it is "a systematic practice of distinguishing among various illness-causing imbalances of qi. It achieves health by restoring a patient's internal yin-yang equilibrium via herbal remedies and physical manipulation."1'69 Traditional Chinese Medicine is of enormous importance not only to the Chinese-and the world's healthcare systems, but also to the Chinese economy. 170 It is no surprise, therefore, that the Chinese Government has made it a policy to encourage the patenting of innovative Traditional Chinese Medicinal products. Although most developing countries tend to find disfavor with the TRIPS Agreement, the Agreement has proven to be a boon to the protection of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Prior to the adoption of Article 27.1 of the TRIPS Agreement, which required China to make patents available "for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology . . . " the Chinese Patent Law171 did not protect Traditional Chinese Medicine. Since the Law's amendment, there has been a significant uptake in patent activity, particularly related to Traditional Chinese Medicine-based pharmaceuticals, and many supporters of Traditional Chinese Medicine believe that this activity has served to incentivize investment in Traditional Chinese Medicine, increase the Traditional Chinese Medicine knowledge base, and transform Traditional Chinese Medicine into a major global export asset. 172 Since 1992, when the Patent Law was amended, applicants have filed patent applications with the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) at a rate of 1,400 cases a year, 173 but they have not limited their activity to China alone; they have also filed applications in countries such as Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Moreover, patent holders have begun to enforce the rights they have been granted. For example, in February 2007, China Business News reported that a Chinese patentee Traditional Chinese Medicine manufacturer won the first Traditional Chinese Medicine infringement case against another Chinese company. The patentee was awarded an injunction prohibiting the infringing company from selling the infringing products as well as damages. 174 The promotion of Traditional Chinese Medicine has led to the establishment of organizations such as the Shanghai Innovative Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine (SIRC), 75 which in turn has further encouraged patent protection for TK. Founded in 2000 with support from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Shanghai Municipal Government, SIRC seeks to modernize Traditional Chinese Medicine and innovate drug discovery "by integrating modern life science, chemistry, and information technology with Traditional Chinese Medicine"1 76 -just the right formula to maximize patenting potential. 177 Although the patent system may not be suited to all types of TK, using patents to protect Traditional Chinese Medicine seems to have achieved some success in encouraging new innovation and invention. Communities working to advance other areas of innovative TK may do well to follow China's example. RandD’s key to innovation – otherwise, future pandemics. Marjanovic et al. ’20 (Sonja; Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge; May 2020; “How to Best Enable Pharma Innovation Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis”; RAND; https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA407-1.html; Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sciences 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 context.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 competition 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 pharmaceutical 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 sector. 2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing industry-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 compounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating trials 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 accelerate 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 relatively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pressure 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 combination product that is being tested for therapeutic potential 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, bioterrorism 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 immediate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infectious 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 contributions 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 innovation conditions. Evolving superbugs trigger extinction. Srivatsa ’17 (Kadiyali; specialist in pediatric intensive and critical care medicine in the UK. Invented the bacterial identification tool ‘MAYA’; 1-12-2017; "Superbug Pandemics and How to Prevent Them", American Interest; https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/01/12/superbug-pandemics-and-how-to-prevent-them/, Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) It is by now no secret that the human species is locked in a race of its own making with “superbugs.” Indeed, if popular science fiction is a measure of awareness, the theme has pervaded English-language literature from Michael Crichton’s 1969 Andromeda Strain all the way to Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 Station Eleven and beyond. By a combination of massive inadvertence and what can only be called stupidity, we must now invent new and effective antibiotics faster than deadly bacteria evolve—and regrettably, they are rapidly doing so with our help. I do not exclude the possibility that bad actors might deliberately engineer deadly superbugs.1 But even if that does not happen, humanity faces an existential threat largely of its own making in the absence of malign intentions. As threats go, this one is entirely predictable. The concept of a “black swan,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s term for low-probability but high-impact events, has become widely known in recent years. Taleb did not invent the concept; he only gave it a catchy name to help mainly business executives who know little of statistics or probability. Many have embraced the “black swan” label the way children embrace holiday gifts, which are often bobbles of little value, except to them. But the threat of inadvertent pandemics is not a “black swan” because its probability is not low. If one likes catchy labels, it better fits the term “gray rhino,” which, explains Michele Wucker, is a high-probability, high-impact event that people manage to ignore anyway for a raft of social-psychological reasons.2 A pandemic is a quintessential gray rhino, for it is no longer a matter of if but of when it will challenge us—and of how prepared we are to deal with it when it happens. We have certainly been warned. The curse we have created was understood as a possibility from the very outset, when seventy years ago Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, predicted antibiotic resistance. When interviewed for a 2015 article, “The Most Predictable Disaster in the History of the Human Race,” Bill Gates pointed out that one of the costliest disasters of the 20th century, worse even than World War I, was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. As the author of the article, Ezra Klein, put it: “No one can say we weren’t warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.”3 Even with effective new medicines, if we can devise them, we must contain outbreaks of bacterial disease fast, lest they get out of control. In other words, we have a social-organizational challenge before us as well as a strictly medical one. That means getting sufficient amounts of medicine into the right hands and in the right places, but it also means educating people and enabling them to communicate with each other to prevent any outbreak from spreading widely. Responsible governments and cooperative organizations have options in that regard, but even individuals can contribute something. To that end, as a medical doctor I have created a computer app that promises to be useful in that regard—of which more in a moment. But first let us review the situation, for while it has become well known to many people, there is a general resistance to acknowledging the severity and imminence of the danger. What Are the Problems? Bacteria are among the oldest living things on the planet. They are masters of survival and can be found everywhere. Billions of them live on and in every one of us, many of them helping our bodies to run smoothly and stay healthy. Most bacteria that are not helpful to us are at least harmless, but some are not. They invade our cells, spread quickly, and cause havoc that we refer to generically as disease. Millions of people used to die every year as a result of bacterial infections, until we developed antibiotics. These wonder drugs revolutionized medicine, but one can have too much of a good thing. Doctors have used antibiotics recklessly, prescribing them for just about everything, and in the process helped to create strains of bacteria that are resistant to the medicines we have. We even give antibiotics to cattle that are not sick and use them to fatten chickens. Companies large and small still mindlessly market antimicrobial products for hands and home, claiming that they kill bacteria and viruses. They do more harm than good because the low concentrations of antimicrobials that these products contain tend to kill friendly bacteria (not viruses at all), and so clear the way for the mass multiplication of surviving unfriendly bacteria. Perhaps even worse, hospitals have deployed antimicrobial products on an industrial scale for a long time now, the result being a sharp rise in iatrogenic bacterial illnesses. Overuse of antibiotics and commercial products containing them has helped superbugs to evolve. We now increasingly face microorganisms that cannot be killed by antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, or any other chemical weapon we throw at them. Pandemics are the major risk we run as a result, but it is not the only one. Overuse of antibiotics by doctors, homemakers, and hospital managers could mean that, in the not-too-distant future, something as simple as a minor cut could again become life-threatening if it becomes infected. Few non-medical professionals are aware that antibiotics are the foundation on which nearly all of modern medicine rests. Cancer therapy, organ transplants, surgeries minor and major, and even childbirth all rely on antibiotics to prevent infections. If infections become untreatable we stand to lose most of the medical advances we have made over the past fifty years. Disease perpetuates colonialism – it disproportionately hurts Indigenous people. Ostler 20 Jeffrey Ostler 4-29-2020 "Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/disease-has-never-been-just-disease-native-americans/610852/ (Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon.)Elmer As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most vulnerable are Native Americans. To understand how dire the COVID-19 situation is becoming for these communities, consider the situation unfolding for the Navajo Nation, a people with homelands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As of April 23, 1,360 infections and 52 deaths had been reported among the Navajo Reservation’s 170,000 people, a mortality rate of 30 per 100,000. Only six states have a higher per capita toll. The spread of COVID-19 is reminiscent of previous disease outbreaks that have ravaged Native American communities. Many of those outbreaks resulted in catastrophic loss of life, far greater than even the worst-case scenarios for COVID-19. Even the 1918–19 flu pandemic, in which an estimated 650,000 Americans died (0.6 percent of the 1920 population of 106 million), pales in comparison to the losses Native Americans have suffered from disease. Until recently, histories of disease and Native Americans have emphasized “virgin-soil epidemics.” According to this theory, popularized in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they brought diseases (particularly measles and smallpox) that indigenous people had never experienced. Because they had no immunity to these diseases, so the theory goes, the resulting epidemics took the lives of 70 percent or more of the Native population throughout the Americas. New research, however, provides a much more complicated picture of disease in American Indian history. This research shows that virgin-soil epidemics were not as common as previously believed and shifts the focus to how diseases repeatedly attacked Native communities in the decades and centuries after Europeans first arrived. Post-contact diseases were crippling not so much because indigenous people lacked immunity, but because the conditions created by European and U.S. colonialism made Native communities vulnerable. The virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis was valuable in countering earlier theories that attributed Native American population decline to racial inferiority, but its singular emphasis on biological difference implied that population collapses were nothing more than historical accidents. By stressing the importance of social conditions created by human decisions and actions, the new scholarship provides a far more disturbing picture. It also helps us understand the problems facing Native communities today as they battle the novel coronavirus. Virgin-soil epidemics undoubtedly occurred. In 1633, for example, a smallpox epidemic struck Native communities in New England, reducing the Mohegan and Pequot populations from a combined total of 16,000 to just 3,000. The epidemic spread to the Haudenosaunee in New York, but no farther west than that. Smallpox did not hit communities in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes until 1756–57, a century or more after initial contact with Europeans. When it did, it was because Native fighters, recruited to fight for the French against the British during the Seven Years’ War, had contracted the virus in the east and infected their communities when they returned home. Lack of immunity mattered, but it was the disruption resulting from war that promoted smallpox’s spread. Smallpox did not arrive in the Southeast until 1696, a century and a half after the Hernando de Soto expedition. It was once thought that de Soto’s men carried smallpox, but this view reflected the flawed assumption that Europeans were always infected with smallpox and always contagious. De Soto’s expedition did cause disease to erupt in Native communities, but the reason was that the expedition’s violent warfare led to outbreaks of pathogens such as dysentery, which was already present in the Americas. When smallpox finally hit the Southeast, it spread rapidly from Virginia to East Texas across networks created by an English trade in Native captives for enslavement in their coastal and West Indies colonies. Raiding, capturing, and transporting human bodies created pathways for the smallpox virus. To make matters worse, those bodies were already weakened by war and its companions—malnutrition, exposure, and lack of palliative care. By the end of the 18th century, most Native communities in what would eventually become the United States had been exposed to smallpox. Nevertheless, as smallpox recurred in the 19th century, its impact correlated not with a lack of prior exposure, but with the presence of adverse social conditions. These same conditions would also make Native communities susceptible to a host of other diseases, including cholera, typhus, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, scrofula, and alcoholism. Native vulnerability had—and has—nothing to do with racial inferiority or, since those initial incidents, lack of immunity; rather, it has everything to do with concrete policies pursued by the United States government, its states, and its citizens. Consider the impact of the Indian Removal Act. Formally adopted in 1830, this policy called for the relocation of Native peoples east of the Mississippi River to “Indian Territory” (what would eventually become Oklahoma and Kansas). Most everyone has heard of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but it is seldom considered a U.S.-caused health crisis. The expulsion of the Cherokee from their homeland in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee had three phases. In the first, the U.S. Army forcibly evicted Cherokees from their homes and held them for several months in concentration camps with inadequate shelter, insufficient food, and no source of clean water. The camps became death traps. Of the 16,000 people held in them, about 2,000 died from dysentery, whooping cough, measles, and “fevers” (probably malaria). In the second phase, the journey west, an additional 1,500 perished, as people, already sick and further weakened by malnutrition, trauma, and exposure, succumbed to multiple pathogens. In the months after reaching Oklahoma—the third phase—an additional 500 died from similar causes. The death toll was 4,000, or 25 percent of the original 16,000 forced from their homes. Although the Cherokee Trail of Tears is the most well known, there were dozens of other such forced removals. Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Senecas, Wyandots, Potawatomis, Sauks and Mesquakies, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Miamis, Kickapoos, Poncas, Modocs, Kalapuyas, and Takelmas represent only a partial list of nations that suffered trails of tears. Not all experienced the same mortality as the Cherokee, but many did, and for some, the toll was even higher. The allied Sauks and Mesquakies were forced to move four times from their villages in western Illinois—once to central Iowa, once to western Iowa, once to Kansas, and finally to Oklahoma. In 1832, the time of the first expulsion, the Sauks and Mesquakies numbered 6,000. By 1869, when they were finally sent to Oklahoma, their population was only 900, a staggering loss of 85 percent. Year after year, unrelenting diseases, including an outbreak of smallpox in 1851, took many lives. Low fertility and infant mortality, the result of malnutrition, sickness, and trauma, hindered population replacement. The Sauk and Mesquakie catastrophe was not an accident. It was a direct and foreseeable consequence of decisions made by the United States and its citizens to dispossess Native people of desirable lands and shove them someplace else. Navajos (Dinés, as they refer to themselves in their language) were also evicted from their homelands. In the winter of 1863–64, the U.S. Army pursued scorched-earth tactics—destroying their peach trees and cornfields—to drive them to a barren reservation at Bosque Redondo, on the Pecos River in New Mexico. On the 250-mile forced march, known as the Long Walk, several hundred of the 8,000 to 9,000 Dinés died en route. Over the next four years, Dinés lost as many as 2,500 of their people to disease and starvation. In their darkest hour, though, Diné leaders successfully prevailed on government officials to release them from their prison and return home. But even though their population has grown over time, the legacies of the Long Walk remain. The Diné historian Jennifer Denetdale observes that “severe poverty, addiction, suicide and crime on reservations all have their roots in the Long Walk.” As cases of COVID-19 began to appear on the Navajo Reservation in late March, tribal President Jonathan Nez spoke to his people on Facebook. Summoning memories of the Long Walk, he “called on citizens to help one another,” reminding them “that’s when the best came out of many of our ancestors, helping each other out, carrying the load for the elders, carrying the children for our mothers.” “Now it’s our turn,” he said, “to think of our future, our children, our grandchildren.” Ongoing colonialism makes fighting COVID-19 a challenge. Although the Navajo are a sovereign nation with resources of their own, Dinés have a high incidence of conditions—diabetes, hypertension, and lung disease—that increase their susceptibility to becoming severely ill from the coronavirus. Lack of access to clean water makes hand-washing difficult. Many people cannot afford food, hand sanitizer, and other necessities. And there is an acute shortage of hospital beds and medical personnel. Many public officials, health experts, and journalists are drawing attention to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. Even so, large segments of America are indifferent, if not outright hostile, to recognizing these disparities and the inequities underlying them. Native Americans are visible to the general public far more often as sports mascots than as actual communities. The Trump administration initially resisted providing any relief to tribal nations in the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in early April, and although the legislation ultimately appropriated $10 billion to tribal governments, the Treasury Department, tasked with distributing these funds, has failed to disburse them. According to New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, Treasury Department officials “don’t know how to interact in the appropriate way with tribes and they’re just not getting the job done.” Countering the invisibility of Native peoples, of course, means greater awareness of how COVID-19 is affecting them and enhanced efforts to provide resources to help them combat the current outbreak. It also means creating a deeper understanding of the history of American Indians and disease. Although the virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis may have been well intentioned, its focus on the brief, if horrific, moment of initial contact consigns disease safely to the distant past and provides colonizers with an alibi. Indigenous communities are fighting more than a virus. They are contending with the ongoing legacy of centuries of violence and dispossession.
10/9/21
SO - Pharma Innovation DA v1
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Javier Navarette Strong current IP guarantees causes massive Pharma innovation. - Answers Evergreening/Me-Too Drugs Stevens and Ezell 20 Philip Stevens and Stephen Ezell 2-3-2020 "Delinkage Debunked: Why Replacing Patents With Prizes for Drug Development Won’t Work" https://itif.org/publications/2020/02/03/delinkage-debunked-why-replacing-patents-prizes-drug-development-wont-work (Philip founded Geneva Network in 2015. His main research interests are the intersection of intellectual property, trade, and health policy. Formerly he was an official at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, where he worked in its Global Challenges Division on a range of IP and health issues. Prior to his time with WIPO, Philip worked as director of policy for International Policy Network, a UK-based think tank, as well as holding research positions with the Adam Smith Institute and Reform, both in London. He has also worked as a political risk consultant and a management consultant. He is a regular columnist in a wide range of international newspapers and has published a number of academic studies. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Durham University (UK).)Elmer The Current System Has Produced a Tremendous Amount of Life-Sciences Innovation The frontier for biomedical innovation is seemingly limitless, and the challenges remain numerous—whether it comes to diseases that afflict millions, such as cancer or malaria, or the estimated 7,000 rare diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 patients.24 And while certainly citizens in developed and developing nations confront differing health challenges, those challenges are increasingly converging. For instance, as of this year, analysts expect that noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes will account for 70 percent of natural fatalities in developing countries.25 Citizens of low- and middle-income countries bear 80 percent of the world’s death burden from cardiovascular disease.26 Forty-six percent of Africans over 25 suffer from hypertension, more than anywhere else in the world. Similarly, 85 percent of the disease burden of cervical cancer is borne by individuals living in low- and middle-income countries.27 To develop treatments or cures for these conditions, novel biomedical innovation will be needed from everywhere. Yet tremendous progress has been made in recent decades. To tackle these challenges, the global pharmaceutical industry invested over $1.36 trillion in RandD in the decade from 2007 to 2016—and it’s expected that annual RandD investment by the global pharmaceutical industry will reach $181 billion by 2022.28 In no small part due to that investment, 943 new active substances have been introduced globally over the prior 25 years.29 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more than 500 new medicines since 2000 alone. And these medicines are getting to more individuals: Global medicine use in 2020 will reach 4.5 trillion doses,up 24 percent from 2015.30 Moreover, there are an estimated 7,000 new medicines under development globally (about half of them in the United States), with 74 percent being potentially first in class, meaning they use a new and unique mechanism of action for treating a medical condition.31 In the United States, over 85 percent of all drugs sold are generics (only 10 percent of U.S. prescriptions are filled by brand-name drugs).32 And while some assert that biotechnology companies focus too often on “me-too” drugs that compete with other treatments already on the market, the reality is many drugs currently under development are meant to tackle some of the world’s most intractable diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.33 Moreover, such arguments miss that many of the drugs developed in recent years have in fact been first of their kind. For instance, in 2014, the FDA approved 41 new medicines (at that point, the most since 1996) many of which were first-in-class medicines.34 In that year, 28 of the 41 drugs approved were considered biologic or specialty agents, and 41 percent of medicines approved were intended to treat rare diseases.35 Yet even when a new drug isn’t first of its kind, it can still produce benefits for patients, both through enhanced clinical efficacy (for instance, taking the treatment as a pill rather than an injection, with a superior dosing regimen, or better treatment for some individuals who don’t respond well to the original drug) and by generating competition that exerts downward price pressures. For example, a patient needing a cholesterol drug has a host of statins from which to choose, which is important because some statins produce harmful side effects for some patients. Similarly, patients with osteoporosis can choose from Actonel, Boniva, or Fosomax. Or take for example Hepatitis C, which until recently was an incurable disease eventually requiring a liver transplant for many patients. In 2013, a revolutionary new treatment called Solvadi was released that boosted cure rates to 90 percent. This was followed in 2014 by an improved treatment called Harvoni, which cures the Hepatitis C variant left untouched by Solvadi. Since then, an astonishing six new treatments for the disease have received FDA approval, opening up a wide range of treatment options that take into account patients’ liver and kidney status, co-infections, potential drug interactions, previous treatment failures, and the genotype of HCV virus.36 “If you have to have Hepatitis C, now is the time to have it,” as Douglas Dieterich, a liver specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told the Financial Times. “We have these marvellous drugs we can treat you with right now, without side effects,” he added. “And this time next year, we’ll have another round of drugs available.”37 Moreover, the financial potential of this new product category has led to multiple competing products entering the market in quick succession, in turn placing downward pressure on prices.38 As Geoffrey Dusheiko and Charles Gore write in The Lancet, “The market has done its work for HCV treatments: after competing antiviral regimens entered the market, competition and innovative price negotiations have driven costs down from the initially high list prices in developed countries.”39 As noted previously, opponents of the current market- and IP-based system contend patents enable their holders to exploit a (temporary) market monopoly by inflating prices many multiples beyond the marginal cost of production. But rather than a conventional neoclassical analysis, an analysis based on “innovation economics” finds it is exactly this “distortion” that is required for innovation to progress. As William Baumol has pointed out, “Prices above marginal costs and price discrimination become the norm rather than the exception because … without such deviations from behaviour in the perfectly competitive model, innovation outlays and other unavoidable and repeated sunk outlays cannot be recouped.”40 Or, as the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment found, “Pharmaceutical RandD is a risky investment; therefore, high financial returns are necessary to induce companies to invest in researching new chemical entities.”41 This is also why, in 2018, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated that because of high failure rates, biopharmaceutical companies would need to earn a 61.8 percent rate of return on their successful new drug RandD projects in order to match a 4.8 percent after-tax rate of return on their investments.42 Indeed, it’s the ability to recoup fixed costs, not just marginal costs, through mechanisms such as patent protection that lies at the heart of all innovation-based industries and indeed all innovation and related economic progress. If companies could not find a way to pay for their RandD costs, and could only charge for the costs of producing the compound, there would be no new drugs developed, just as there would be no new products developed in any industry. Innovating in the life sciences remains expensive, risky, difficult, and uncertain. Just 1 in 5,000 drug candidates make it all the way from discovery to market.43 A 2018 study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, “Unlocking RandD productivity: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation 2018,” found that “the average cost to develop an asset an innovative life-sciences drug including the cost of failure, has increased in six out of eight years,” and that the average cost to create a new drug has risen to $2.8 billion.44 Related research has found the development of new drugs requires years of painstaking, risky, and expensive research that, for a new pharmaceutical compound, takes an average of 11.5 to 15 years of research, development, and clinical trials, at a cost of $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion.45 IP rights—including patents, copyrights, and data exclusivity protections—give innovators, whether in the life sciences or other sectors, the confidence to undertake the risky and expensive process of innovation, secure in the knowledge they’ll be able to capture a share of the gains from their efforts. And these gains are often only a small fraction of the true value created. For instance, Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated inventors capture just 4 percent of the total social gains from their innovations; the rest spill over to other companies and society as a whole.46 Without adequate IP protection, private investors would never find it viable to fund advanced research because lower-cost copiers would be in a position to undercut the legitimate prices (and profits) of innovators, even while still generating substantial profits on their own.47 As the report “Wealth, Health and International Trade in the 21st Century” concludes, “Conferring robust intellectual property rights is, in the pharmaceutical and other technological-development contexts, in the global public’s long-term interests. Without adequate mechanisms for directly and indirectly securing the private and public funding of medicines and vaccines, research and development communities across the world will lose future benefits that would far outweigh the development costs involved.”48 Put simply, the current market- and IP-based life-sciences innovation system is producing life-changing biomedical innovation. As Jack Scannell, a senior fellow at Oxford University’s Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation has explained, “I would guess that one can buy today, at rock bottom generic prices, a set of small-molecule drugs that has greater medical utility than the entire set available to anyone, anywhere, at any price in 1995.” He continued, “Nearly all the generic medicine chest was created by firms who invested in RandD to win future profits that they tried pretty hard to maximize; short-term financial gain building a long-term common good.”49 For example, on September 14, 2017, the FDA approved Mvasi, the first biosimilar for Roche’s Avastin, a breakthrough anticancer drug when it came out in the mid-1990s for lung, cervical, and colorectal cancer.50 In other words, a medicine to treat forms of cancer that barely existed 20 years ago is now available as a generic drug today. It’s this dynamic that enables us to imagine a situation wherein drugs to treat diseases that aren’t available anywhere at any price today (for instance, treatments for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s) might be available as generics in 20 years. But that will only be the case if we preserve (and improve where possible) a life-sciences innovation system that is generally working. The current system does not require wholesale replacement by a prize-based system that—notwithstanding a meaningful success here or there—has produced nowhere near a similar level of novel biomedical innovation. Reducing IP protections chills future investment – even the perception of wavering commitment scares off companies. Grabowski et al. ’15 (Harry; Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke, and a specialist in the intersection of the pharmaceutical industry and government regulation of business; February 2015; “The Roles Of Patents And Research And Development Incentives In Biopharmaceutical Innovation”; Health Affairs; https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2014.1047; Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) Patents and other forms of intellectual property protection play essential roles in encouraging innovation in biopharmaceuticals. As part of the “21st Century Cures” initiative, Congress is reviewing the policy mechanisms designed to accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of new treatments. Debate continues about how best to balance patent and intellectual property incentives to encourage innovation, on the one hand, and generic utilization and price competition, on the other hand. We review the current framework for accomplishing these dual objectives and the important role of patents and regulatory exclusivity (together, the patent-based system), given the lengthy, costly, and risky biopharmaceutical research and development process. We summarize existing targeted incentives, such as for orphan drugs and neglected diseases, and we consider the pros and cons of proposed voluntary or mandatory alternatives to the patent-based system, such as prizes and government research and development contracting. We conclude that patents and regulatory exclusivity provisions are likely to remain the core approach to providing incentives for biopharmaceutical research and development. However, prizes and other voluntary supplements could play a useful role in addressing unmet needs and gaps in specific circumstances. Technological innovation is widely recognized as a key determinant of economic and public health progress. 1,2 Patents and other forms of intellectual property protection are generally thought to play essential roles in encouraging innovation in biopharmaceuticals. This is because the process of developing a new drug and bringing it to market is long, costly, and risky, and the costs of imitation are low. After a new drug has been approved and is being marketed, its patents protect it from competition from chemically identical entrants (or entrants infringing on other patents) for a period of time. For firms to have an incentive to continue to invest in innovative development efforts, they must have an expectation that they can charge enough during this period to recoup costs and make a profit. After a drug’s patent or patents expire, generic rivals can enter the market at greatly reduced development cost and prices, providing added consumer benefit but eroding the innovator drug company’s revenues. The Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 (commonly known as the Hatch-Waxman Act) was designed to balance innovation incentives and generic price competition for new drugs (generally small-molecule chemical drugs, with some large-molecule biologic exceptions) by extending the period of a drug’s marketing exclusivity while providing a regulatory framework for generic drug approval. This framework was later changed to encompass so-called biosimilars for large-molecule (biologic) drugs through the separate Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009. Other measures have been enacted to provide research and development (RandD) incentives for antibiotics and drugs to treat orphan diseases and neglected tropical diseases. Discussion continues about whether current innovation incentives are optimal or even adequate, given evolving public health needs and scientific knowledge. For instance, the House Energy and Commerce Committee recently embarked on the “21st Century Cures” initiative, 3 following earlier recommendations by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on responding to challenges in “propelling innovation in drug discovery, development, and evaluation.” 4 In this context, we discuss the importance of patents and other forms of intellectual property protection to biopharmaceutical innovation, given the unique economic characteristics of drug research and development. We also review the RandD incentives that complement patents in certain circumstances. Finally, we consider the pros and cons of selected voluntary (“opt-in”) or mandatory alternatives to the current patent- and regulatory exclusivity–based system (such as prizes or government-contracted drug development) and whether they could better achieve the dual goals of innovation incentives and price competition. The essential rationale for patent protection for biopharmaceuticals is that long-term benefits in the form of continued future innovation by pioneer or brand-name drug manufacturers outweigh the relatively short-term restrictions on imitative cost competition associated with market exclusivity. Regardless, the entry of other branded agents remains an important source of therapeutic competition during the patent term. Several economic characteristics make patents and intellectual property protection particularly important to innovation incentives for the biopharmaceutical industry. 5 The RandD process often takes more than a decade to complete, and according to a recent analysis by Joseph DiMasi and colleagues, per new drug approval (including failed attempts), it involves more than a billion dollars in out-of-pocket costs. 6 Only approximately one in eight drug candidates survive clinical testing. 6 As a result of the high risks of failure and the high costs, research and development must be funded by the few successful, on-market products (the top quintile of marketed products provide the dominant share of RandD returns). 7,8 Once a new drug’s patent term and any regulatory exclusivity provisions have expired, competing manufacturers are allowed to sell generic equivalents that require the investment of only several million dollars and that have a high likelihood of commercial success. Absent intellectual property protections that allow marketing exclusivity, innovative firms would be unlikely to make the costly and risky investments needed to bring a new drug to market. Patents confer the right to exclude competitors for a limited time within a given scope, as defined by patent claims. However, they do not guarantee demand, nor do they prevent competition from nonidentical drugs that treat the same diseases and fall outside the protection of the patents. New products may enter the same therapeutic class with common mechanisms of action but different molecular structures (for example, different statins) or with differing mechanisms of action (such as calcium channel blockers and angiotensin receptor blockers). 9 Joseph DiMasi and Laura Faden have found that the time between a first-in-class new drug and subsequent new drugs in the same therapeutic class has been dramatically reduced, from a median of 10.2 years in the 1970s to 2.5 years in the early 2000s. 10 Drugs in the same class compete through quality and price for preferred placement on drug formularies and physicians’ choices for patient treatment. Patents play an essential role in the economic “ecosystem” of discovery and investment that has developed since the 1980s. Hundreds of start-up firms, often backed by venture capital, have been launched, and a robust innovation market has emerged. 11 The value of these development-stage firms is largely determined by their proprietary technologies and the candidate drugs they have in development. As a result, the strength of intellectual property protection plays a key role in funding and partnership opportunities for such firms. Universities also play a key role in the RandD ecosystem because they conduct basic biomedical research supported by sponsored research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act of 1980 (commonly known as the Bayh-Dole Act) gave universities the right to retain title to patents and discoveries made through federally funded research. This change was designed to encourage technology transfer through industry licensing and the creation of start-up companies. Universities received only 390 patents for their discoveries in 1980, 12 compared to 4,296 in 2011, with biotechnology and pharmaceuticals being the top two technology areas (accounting for 36 percent of all university patent awards in 2012). 13 RandD’s key to innovation – otherwise, future pandemics. Marjanovic et al. ’20 (Sonja; Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge; May 2020; “How to Best Enable Pharma Innovation Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis”; RAND; https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA407-1.html; Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sciences 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 context.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 competition 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 pharmaceutical 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 sector. 2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing industry-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 compounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating trials 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 accelerate 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 relatively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pressure 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 combination product that is being tested for therapeutic potential 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, bioterrorism 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 immediate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infectious 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 contributions 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 innovation conditions. Evolving superbugs trigger extinction. Srivatsa ’17 (Kadiyali; specialist in pediatric intensive and critical care medicine in the UK. Invented the bacterial identification tool ‘MAYA’; 1-12-2017; "Superbug Pandemics and How to Prevent Them", American Interest; https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/01/12/superbug-pandemics-and-how-to-prevent-them/, Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) It is by now no secret that the human species is locked in a race of its own making with “superbugs.” Indeed, if popular science fiction is a measure of awareness, the theme has pervaded English-language literature from Michael Crichton’s 1969 Andromeda Strain all the way to Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 Station Eleven and beyond. By a combination of massive inadvertence and what can only be called stupidity, we must now invent new and effective antibiotics faster than deadly bacteria evolve—and regrettably, they are rapidly doing so with our help. I do not exclude the possibility that bad actors might deliberately engineer deadly superbugs.1 But even if that does not happen, humanity faces an existential threat largely of its own making in the absence of malign intentions. As threats go, this one is entirely predictable. The concept of a “black swan,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s term for low-probability but high-impact events, has become widely known in recent years. Taleb did not invent the concept; he only gave it a catchy name to help mainly business executives who know little of statistics or probability. Many have embraced the “black swan” label the way children embrace holiday gifts, which are often bobbles of little value, except to them. But the threat of inadvertent pandemics is not a “black swan” because its probability is not low. If one likes catchy labels, it better fits the term “gray rhino,” which, explains Michele Wucker, is a high-probability, high-impact event that people manage to ignore anyway for a raft of social-psychological reasons.2 A pandemic is a quintessential gray rhino, for it is no longer a matter of if but of when it will challenge us—and of how prepared we are to deal with it when it happens. We have certainly been warned. The curse we have created was understood as a possibility from the very outset, when seventy years ago Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, predicted antibiotic resistance. When interviewed for a 2015 article, “The Most Predictable Disaster in the History of the Human Race,” Bill Gates pointed out that one of the costliest disasters of the 20th century, worse even than World War I, was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. As the author of the article, Ezra Klein, put it: “No one can say we weren’t warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.”3 Even with effective new medicines, if we can devise them, we must contain outbreaks of bacterial disease fast, lest they get out of control. In other words, we have a social-organizational challenge before us as well as a strictly medical one. That means getting sufficient amounts of medicine into the right hands and in the right places, but it also means educating people and enabling them to communicate with each other to prevent any outbreak from spreading widely. Responsible governments and cooperative organizations have options in that regard, but even individuals can contribute something. To that end, as a medical doctor I have created a computer app that promises to be useful in that regard—of which more in a moment. But first let us review the situation, for while it has become well known to many people, there is a general resistance to acknowledging the severity and imminence of the danger. What Are the Problems? Bacteria are among the oldest living things on the planet. They are masters of survival and can be found everywhere. Billions of them live on and in every one of us, many of them helping our bodies to run smoothly and stay healthy. Most bacteria that are not helpful to us are at least harmless, but some are not. They invade our cells, spread quickly, and cause havoc that we refer to generically as disease. Millions of people used to die every year as a result of bacterial infections, until we developed antibiotics. These wonder drugs revolutionized medicine, but one can have too much of a good thing. Doctors have used antibiotics recklessly, prescribing them for just about everything, and in the process helped to create strains of bacteria that are resistant to the medicines we have. We even give antibiotics to cattle that are not sick and use them to fatten chickens. Companies large and small still mindlessly market antimicrobial products for hands and home, claiming that they kill bacteria and viruses. They do more harm than good because the low concentrations of antimicrobials that these products contain tend to kill friendly bacteria (not viruses at all), and so clear the way for the mass multiplication of surviving unfriendly bacteria. Perhaps even worse, hospitals have deployed antimicrobial products on an industrial scale for a long time now, the result being a sharp rise in iatrogenic bacterial illnesses. Overuse of antibiotics and commercial products containing them has helped superbugs to evolve. We now increasingly face microorganisms that cannot be killed by antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, or any other chemical weapon we throw at them. Pandemics are the major risk we run as a result, but it is not the only one. Overuse of antibiotics by doctors, homemakers, and hospital managers could mean that, in the not-too-distant future, something as simple as a minor cut could again become life-threatening if it becomes infected. Few non-medical professionals are aware that antibiotics are the foundation on which nearly all of modern medicine rests. Cancer therapy, organ transplants, surgeries minor and major, and even childbirth all rely on antibiotics to prevent infections. If infections become untreatable we stand to lose most of the medical advances we have made over the past fifty years.
9/4/21
SO - Pharma Innovation DA v2
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Felicity Park Strong current IP guarantees causes massive Pharma innovation. - Answers Evergreening/Me-Too Drugs Stevens and Ezell 20 Philip Stevens and Stephen Ezell 2-3-2020 "Delinkage Debunked: Why Replacing Patents With Prizes for Drug Development Won’t Work" https://itif.org/publications/2020/02/03/delinkage-debunked-why-replacing-patents-prizes-drug-development-wont-work (Philip founded Geneva Network in 2015. His main research interests are the intersection of intellectual property, trade, and health policy. Formerly he was an official at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, where he worked in its Global Challenges Division on a range of IP and health issues. Prior to his time with WIPO, Philip worked as director of policy for International Policy Network, a UK-based think tank, as well as holding research positions with the Adam Smith Institute and Reform, both in London. He has also worked as a political risk consultant and a management consultant. He is a regular columnist in a wide range of international newspapers and has published a number of academic studies. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Durham University (UK).)Elmer The Current System Has Produced a Tremendous Amount of Life-Sciences Innovation The frontier for biomedical innovation is seemingly limitless, and the challenges remain numerous—whether it comes to diseases that afflict millions, such as cancer or malaria, or the estimated 7,000 rare diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 patients.24 And while certainly citizens in developed and developing nations confront differing health challenges, those challenges are increasingly converging. For instance, as of this year, analysts expect that noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes will account for 70 percent of natural fatalities in developing countries.25 Citizens of low- and middle-income countries bear 80 percent of the world’s death burden from cardiovascular disease.26 Forty-six percent of Africans over 25 suffer from hypertension, more than anywhere else in the world. Similarly, 85 percent of the disease burden of cervical cancer is borne by individuals living in low- and middle-income countries.27 To develop treatments or cures for these conditions, novel biomedical innovation will be needed from everywhere. Yet tremendous progress has been made in recent decades. To tackle these challenges, the global pharmaceutical industry invested over $1.36 trillion in RandD in the decade from 2007 to 2016—and it’s expected that annual RandD investment by the global pharmaceutical industry will reach $181 billion by 2022.28 In no small part due to that investment, 943 new active substances have been introduced globally over the prior 25 years.29 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more than 500 new medicines since 2000 alone. And these medicines are getting to more individuals: Global medicine use in 2020 will reach 4.5 trillion doses, up 24 percent from 2015.30 Moreover, there are an estimated 7,000 new medicines under development globally (about half of them in the United States), with 74 percent being potentially first in class, meaning they use a new and unique mechanism of action for treating a medical condition.31 In the United States, over 85 percent of all drugs sold are generics (only 10 percent of U.S. prescriptions are filled by brand-name drugs).32 And while some assert that biotechnology companies focus too often on “me-too” drugs that compete with other treatments already on the market, the reality is many drugs currently under development are meant to tackle some of the world’s most intractable diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.33 Moreover, such arguments miss that many of the drugs developed in recent years have in fact been first of their kind. For instance, in 2014, the FDA approved 41 new medicines (at that point, the most since 1996) many of which were first-in-class medicines.34 In that year, 28 of the 41 drugs approved were considered biologic or specialty agents, and 41 percent of medicines approved were intended to treat rare diseases.35 Yet even when a new drug isn’t first of its kind, it can still produce benefits for patients, both through enhanced clinical efficacy (for instance, taking the treatment as a pill rather than an injection, with a superior dosing regimen, or better treatment for some individuals who don’t respond well to the original drug) and by generating competition that exerts downward price pressures. For example, a patient needing a cholesterol drug has a host of statins from which to choose, which is important because some statins produce harmful side effects for some patients. Similarly, patients with osteoporosis can choose from Actonel, Boniva, or Fosomax. Or take for example Hepatitis C, which until recently was an incurable disease eventually requiring a liver transplant for many patients. In 2013, a revolutionary new treatment called Solvadi was released that boosted cure rates to 90 percent. This was followed in 2014 by an improved treatment called Harvoni, which cures the Hepatitis C variant left untouched by Solvadi. Since then, an astonishing six new treatments for the disease have received FDA approval, opening up a wide range of treatment options that take into account patients’ liver and kidney status, co-infections, potential drug interactions, previous treatment failures, and the genotype of HCV virus.36 “If you have to have Hepatitis C, now is the time to have it,” as Douglas Dieterich, a liver specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told the Financial Times. “We have these marvellous drugs we can treat you with right now, without side effects,” he added. “And this time next year, we’ll have another round of drugs available.”37 Moreover, the financial potential of this new product category has led to multiple competing products entering the market in quick succession, in turn placing downward pressure on prices.38 As Geoffrey Dusheiko and Charles Gore write in The Lancet, “The market has done its work for HCV treatments: after competing antiviral regimens entered the market, competition and innovative price negotiations have driven costs down from the initially high list prices in developed countries.”39 As noted previously, opponents of the current market- and IP-based system contend patents enable their holders to exploit a (temporary) market monopoly by inflating prices many multiples beyond the marginal cost of production. But rather than a conventional neoclassical analysis, an analysis based on “innovation economics” finds it is exactly this “distortion” that is required for innovation to progress. As William Baumol has pointed out, “Prices above marginal costs and price discrimination become the norm rather than the exception because … without such deviations from behaviour in the perfectly competitive model, innovation outlays and other unavoidable and repeated sunk outlays cannot be recouped.”40 Or, as the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment found, “Pharmaceutical RandD is a risky investment; therefore, high financial returns are necessary to induce companies to invest in researching new chemical entities.”41 This is also why, in 2018, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated that because of high failure rates, biopharmaceutical companies would need to earn a 61.8 percent rate of return on their successful new drug RandD projects in order to match a 4.8 percent after-tax rate of return on their investments.42 Indeed, it’s the ability to recoup fixed costs, not just marginal costs, through mechanisms such as patent protection that lies at the heart of all innovation-based industries and indeed all innovation and related economic progress. If companies could not find a way to pay for their RandD costs, and could only charge for the costs of producing the compound, there would be no new drugs developed, just as there would be no new products developed in any industry. Innovating in the life sciences remains expensive, risky, difficult, and uncertain. Just 1 in 5,000 drug candidates make it all the way from discovery to market.43 A 2018 study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, “Unlocking RandD productivity: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation 2018,” found that “the average cost to develop an asset an innovative life-sciences drug including the cost of failure, has increased in six out of eight years,” and that the average cost to create a new drug has risen to $2.8 billion.44 Related research has found the development of new drugs requires years of painstaking, risky, and expensive research that, for a new pharmaceutical compound, takes an average of 11.5 to 15 years of research, development, and clinical trials, at a cost of $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion.45 IP rights—including patents, copyrights, and data exclusivity protections—give innovators, whether in the life sciences or other sectors, the confidence to undertake the risky and expensive process of innovation, secure in the knowledge they’ll be able to capture a share of the gains from their efforts. And these gains are often only a small fraction of the true value created. For instance, Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated inventors capture just 4 percent of the total social gains from their innovations; the rest spill over to other companies and society as a whole.46 Without adequate IP protection, private investors would never find it viable to fund advanced research because lower-cost copiers would be in a position to undercut the legitimate prices (and profits) of innovators, even while still generating substantial profits on their own.47 As the report “Wealth, Health and International Trade in the 21st Century” concludes, “Conferring robust intellectual property rights is, in the pharmaceutical and other technological-development contexts, in the global public’s long-term interests. Without adequate mechanisms for directly and indirectly securing the private and public funding of medicines and vaccines, research and development communities across the world will lose future benefits that would far outweigh the development costs involved.”48 Put simply, the current market- and IP-based life-sciences innovation system is producing life-changing biomedical innovation. As Jack Scannell, a senior fellow at Oxford University’s Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation has explained, “I would guess that one can buy today, at rock bottom generic prices, a set of small-molecule drugs that has greater medical utility than the entire set available to anyone, anywhere, at any price in 1995.” He continued, “Nearly all the generic medicine chest was created by firms who invested in RandD to win future profits that they tried pretty hard to maximize; short-term financial gain building a long-term common good.”49 For example, on September 14, 2017, the FDA approved Mvasi, the first biosimilar for Roche’s Avastin, a breakthrough anticancer drug when it came out in the mid-1990s for lung, cervical, and colorectal cancer.50 In other words, a medicine to treat forms of cancer that barely existed 20 years ago is now available as a generic drug today. It’s this dynamic that enables us to imagine a situation wherein drugs to treat diseases that aren’t available anywhere at any price today (for instance, treatments for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s) might be available as generics in 20 years. But that will only be the case if we preserve (and improve where possible) a life-sciences innovation system that is generally working. The current system does not require wholesale replacement by a prize-based system that—notwithstanding a meaningful success here or there—has produced nowhere near a similar level of novel biomedical innovation. Trade Secrets are key to incentivize competitive Innovation – specifically key to protect start-ups. Gutfleisch 18, Georg. "Employment issues under the European Trade Secrets Directive: Promising opportunity or burden for European companies." European Company Law Journal 15 (2018): 175-181. (working as an Associate with Brandl and Talos Rechtsanwälte GmbH in Vienna, Austria, and recently studied in the LL.M. (International and European Business Law) program at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.)Elmer The protection of trade secrets can be considered as a prerequisite for the continuous growth and success of European companies as well as the general (technological) advancement and competitiveness of the European economy.7 Trade secrets can basically be described as secret information that is of value for its owner because of its secrecy. Trade secrets must be differentiated from other (registered) intellectual property rights, such as patents, designs or trademarks. They are not publicly registered and do not grant the trade secret owner an exclusive right against third parties. Most legal systems rank trade secret protection as part of unfair-competition law rather than intellectual property law.8 However, trade secrets are nevertheless related to intellectual property rights. In particular, they could be considered as a preliminary step or by-product to the intellectual property rights creation. Further, trade secrets could also be maintained as permanent alternative to (registered) intellectual property rights. They do not involve costs for the application or subsequent prolongations with the competent authorities and do not impose risks of disclosure during such proceedings.9 Especially small- and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups in the research and engineering business often rely on the confidentiality of sensitive information as basis of their existence.10 The importance of effective trade secret protection has been acknowledged by lawmakers globally. Back in 1994, the member states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) entered into the international Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement),11 which mandates the WTO member states to ensure the protection of undisclosed information without consent in a manner contrary to honest commercial practices. In addition, the Paris Convention on the protection of industrial property of 20 March 1883 (CUP Agreement)12 provides another international legal framework, which some scholars argue does afford protection to trade secrets.13 However, the rather vague minimum requirements of the TRIPS Agreement and the CUP Agreement resulted in significant differences in the national levels of trade secret protection, especially within the member states of the European Union (EU).14 The European Commission acknowledged this situation and started to actively engage with the issue of trade secret protection in the EU. In November 2013, the European Commission introduced its proposal for the TSD (together with an impact assessment and implementation plan).15 The TSD was then enacted in June 2016 after further input from the European Economic and Social Committee16 and the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs.17 The TSD has been based on two main reasons.18 On the one hand, it has been argued that the different levels of protection in Europe caused companies to refrain from exchanging confidential information across borders and hindered the proper development of research and innovation. On the other hand, European companies regularly faced competitive disadvantages when their trade secrets are misappropriated. Yes Link – the thesis of the Aff is mean to help ease burden of whistleblowers in winning suits to expose Trade Secrets – the mere threat of a weakening IPR and Secret Protection deters investment. Ezell et al. ’19 (Stephen; vice president of global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; 4-25-2019; “The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally”; Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationally; Accessed: 8-31-2021; AU) IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56
Pharma innovation solves Pandemics, ABR, and Bioterrorism – only Private Firms have the ability for preparedness and reaction. Marjanovic and Feijao 20 Sonja Marjanovic and Carolina Feijao May 2020 "Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management" https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA400/PEA407-1/RAND_PEA407-1.pdf (directs RAND Europe's portfolio of research in the field of healthcare innovation, industry and policy)Re-cut by Elmer 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, bioterrorism 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. Bioterrorism and future pandemics cause extinction. de Bretton-Gordon 20, Hamish. "Biosecurity in the wake of COVID-19: the urgent action needed." (2020). (Director at DBG Defense)C.VC Policymakers around the world did not grasp just how large the impact of a bio threat could be. Beyond the enormous human and economic impact, the current pandemic has exposed the weakness, lack of preparedness, and poor responsiveness of healthcare systems of even highly developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. And the virus has inflicted carnage, even though SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is not especially virulent. The world may be confronted with other viruses in the future whose combination of virulence (the harm a pathogen does to its host), transmissibility, and other characteristics pose much greater danger. While overwhelming evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 spontaneously spreading to humans, the advances in synthetic biology and the growth in the number of Level 3 and 4 biocontainment facilities around the world storing deadly viruses1 mean there is also the very real possibility that in the future, bad actors will try to engineer or steal/obtain a highly transmissible and highly virulent virus and unleash it onto the world. Another risk is accidental releases from such biocontainment facilities. COVID-19, a highly transmissible but not very virulent pathogen, has had a devastating global impact, a fact that will not have gone unnoticed by rogue states and terror organizations. Advances in synthetic biology have created tools that could be put to malevolent use. In the last two decades, scientists synthesized the poliovirus from its genetic sequence,2 recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus,3 and succeeded in modifying the H5N1 avian flu virus so that it resulted (in a research laboratory) in airborne transmission among mammals.4 In the future, we should think of weaponized biology as no less of an existential threat to the planet than weaponized atomic science. It should also be noted that the fear and panic that even a medium-scale bioterror attack could create could have dangerous implications that may rival or even surpass the immediate loss of life. The Need to Rethink Likelihood Given the fact that in late 2019 when, as far as is known, COVID-19 cases first started emerging in China, it had been more than a century since the previous catastrophic outbreak (the 1918-1919 “Spanish flu” pandemic),d it was unsurprising that many thought of such pandemics as a one-in-a-100-year event. Such assumptions should no longer hold. The encroachment of human settlements into areas that had previously been sanctuaries for wildlife5 and the popularity in some parts of the world of markets where people and wild animals are brought into proximity have made it more likely viruses will make the species leap to human beings.e And when they do, as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated, the interconnectedness of a world in which millions of people fly each day6 means they can spread very rapidly. There is also growing concern about engineered viruses. Not only have advances in synthetic biology (SynBio) created growing capacity for extremely dangerous viruses to be engineered in a laboratory, but the number of people with access to potentially dangerous ‘dual use’ technology has greatly expanded and continues to expand, making malevolent use of such technology ever more likely. In the August 2020 issue of this publication, scientists at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point warned that: The wide availability of the protocols, procedures, and techniques necessary to produce and modify living organisms combined with an exponential increase in the availability of genetic data is leading to a revolution in science affecting the threat landscape that can be rivaled only by the development of the atomic bomb. As the technology improves, the level of education and skills necessary to engineer biological agents decreases. Whereas only state actors historically had the resources to develop and employ biological weapons, SynBio is changing the threat paradigm. The cost threshold of engineering viruses is also lowering, with the West Point scientists warning that synthetic biology has “placed the ability to recreate some of the deadliest infectious diseases known well within the grasp of the state-sponsored terrorist and the talented non-state actor.”7 As already noted, another source of vulnerability is that deadly viruses could be stolen from or escape from a research laboratory. There are now around 50 Biosafety Level 4f facilities around the world, where the deadliest pathogens are stored and worked on, and this figure is set to increase in the next few years.g This is a large increase over the last 30 years, creating bigger risk of a breach. Of equal, if not greater concern are the thousands of Biosafety Level 3 labs globally,8 which handle deadly pathogens like COVID-19.9 Given what has been outlined above, the risk of a future destructive biological attack or another devastating global pandemic should no longer be seen as low. From this point forward, there should no higher priority for the international community than biosecurity.
9/19/21
SO - T - Medicines
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin 1 Interpretation – Affs must defend a reduction in intellectual property protections that protect the medicines. Medicines are physical substances American Heritage Dictionary of Medicine 18 The American Heritage Dictionary of Medicine 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company https://www.yourdictionary.com/medicineElmer "A substance, especially a drug, used to treat the signs and symptoms of a disease, condition, or injury." 2 Violation: Data exclusivity laws protect clinical trial data. They do not prohibit generic manufacturers from conducting their own trials to manufacture the medicine. https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/05/25/chart-of-the-week-how-data-exclusivity-laws-impact-drug-prices/sid Data exclusivity is a form of intellectual property protection that applies specifically to data from pharmaceutical clinical trials. While innovator firms run their own clinical trials to gain marketing approval, generic manufacturers typically rely on the innovator’s clinical trials for the same approval. Data exclusivity rules keep generic firms from relying on that data for 5 to 12 years, depending on the specific law. Data exclusivity operates independently of patent protection and can block generic manufacturers from gaining marketing approval even if the patent has expired or the original pharmaceutical product does not qualify for patent protection. Although data exclusivity laws are matters of domestic legislation, the United States, the EU and others increasingly demand in their free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations that their trading partners protect clinical trial data in this way. Data exclusivity is just one of a host of “TRIPS-plus” treaty provisions designed to raise the overall level of intellectual property protection for innovator firms. Although the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) does require Member states to protect clinical trial and other data from “unfair commercial use,” it does not require exclusivity rules that block the registration of generic products. 3 The Standard is Limits – They explode the topic to include drug discovery techniques, etc. that eviscerate a stable locus of predictability. Limits is a sequencing question to Clash and in-depth Education since we’re only able to prepare if there’s stable core controversies. 4 Paradigm Issues for theory– Fairness and education are voters – its how judges evaluate rounds and why schools fund debate DTD – it’s key to norm set and deter future abuse Competing interps – Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation – it also collapses since brightlines operate on an offense-defense paradigm No RVIs – A – Encourages theory baiting – outweighs because if the shell is frivolous, they can beat it quickly B – its illogical for you to win for proving you were fair – outweighs since logic is a litmus test for other arguments
10/9/21
SO - T- Leslie
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 3 | Opponent: Mitty AB | Judge: Sam McLoughlin Interpretation: “intellectual property protections” is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend WTO member nations reducing a subset of intellectual property protections. The upward entailment test and adverb test determine the genericity of a bare plural Leslie and Lerner 16 Sarah-Jane Leslie, Ph.D., Princeton, 2007. Dean of the Graduate School and Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy. Served as the vice dean for faculty development in the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, director of the Program in Linguistics, and founding director of the Program in Cognitive Science at Princeton University. Adam Lerner, PhD Philosophy, Postgraduate Research Associate, Princeton 2018. From 2018, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Center for Bioethics at New York University. Member of the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab. “Generic Generalizations.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. April 24, 2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generics/ TG
Generics and Logical Form In English, generics can be expressed using a variety of syntactic forms: bare plurals (e.g., “tigers are striped”), indefinite singulars (e.g., “a tiger is striped”), and definite singulars (“the tiger is striped”). However, none of these syntactic forms is dedicated to expressing generic claims; each can also be used to express existential and/or specific claims. Further, some generics express what appear to be generalizations over individuals (e.g., “tigers are striped”), while others appear to predicate properties directly of the kind (e.g., “dodos are extinct”). These facts and others give rise to a number of questions concerning the logical forms of generic statements. 1.1 Isolating the Generic Interpretation Consider the following pairs of sentences: (1)a.Tigers are striped. b.Tigers are on the front lawn. (2)a.A tiger is striped. b.A tiger is on the front lawn. (3)a.The tiger is striped. b.The tiger is on the front lawn. The sentence pairs above are prima facie syntactically parallel—both are subject-predicate sentences whose subjects consist of the same common noun coupled with the same, or no, article. However, the interpretation of first sentence of each pair is intuitively quite different from the interpretation of the second sentence in the pair. In the second sentences, we are talking about some particular tigers: a group of tigers in (1b), some individual tiger in (2b), and some unique salient or familiar tiger in (3b)—a beloved pet, perhaps. In the first sentences, however, we are saying something general. There is/are no particular tiger or tigers that we are talking about. The second sentences of the pairs receive what is called an existential interpretation. The hallmark of the existential interpretation of a sentence containing a bare plural or an indefinite singular is that it may be paraphrased with “some” with little or no change in meaning; hence the terminology “existential reading”. The application of the term “existential interpretation” is perhaps less appropriate when applied to the definite singular, but it is intended there to cover interpretation of the definite singular as referring to a unique contextually salient/familiar particular individual, not to a kind. There are some tests that are helpful in distinguishing these two readings. For example, the existential interpretation is upward entailing, meaning that the statement will always remain true if we replace the subject term with a more inclusive term. Consider our examples above. In (1b), we can replace “tiger” with “animal” salva veritate, but in (1a) we cannot. If “tigers are on the lawn” is true, then “animals are on the lawn” must be true. However, “tigers are striped” is true, yet “animals are striped” is false. (1a) does not entail that animals are striped, but (1b) entails that animals are on the front lawn (Lawler 1973; Laca 1990; Krifka et al. 1995). Another test concerns whether we can insert an adverb of quantification with minimal change of meaning (Krifka et al. 1995). For example, inserting “usually” in the sentences in (1a) (e.g., “tigers are usually striped”) produces only a small change in meaning, while inserting “usually” in (1b) dramatically alters the meaning of the sentence (e.g., “tigers are usually on the front lawn”). (For generics such as “mosquitoes carry malaria”, the adverb “sometimes” is perhaps better used than “usually” to mark off the generic reading.)
It applies to “medicines” – 1 upward entailment test – “reduce intellectual property protections for medicines” doesn’t entail reducing protections for exclusivities, because it doesn’t prove that we should derestrict other beneficial tech, 2 adverb test – member nations “ought to usually reduce intellectual property protections for medicines” doesn’t substantially change resolutional meaning
Violation – they only defend data exclusivities
Vote neg: 1 Limits – you can pick anything from patents to evergreening to random delay and there’s no universal disad since each one has a different function and implication for health, tech, and relations – explodes neg prep and leads to random medicine of the week affs which makes cutting stable neg links impossible. PICs don’t solve – it’s absurd to say neg potential abuse justifies the aff being flat out not T, which leads to a race towards abuse. Limits key to reciprocal engagement since they create a caselist for neg prep. TRIPS regulation doesn’t check bc the aff isn’t one of the 4 defined. 2 TVA – read the aff as an advantage to a whole rez aff. c/a paradigm issues
10/9/21
SO - T-Ought vs Harker
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Felicity Park 1 Interpretation – The Affirmative must defend a definite reduction of IP protections for Medicines. “Ought” means a particular obligation. American Heritage Dictionary 16 5th Edition by Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries Elmer Used to indicate obligation or duty. Obligation means a binding requirement – it denies an option. Black’s Law 90 Black’s Law Dictionary 2ND ED. “Obligation” https://thelawdictionary.org/obligation/ Elmer An obligation is a legal duty, by which a person is bound to do or not to do a certain thing. Civ. Code Cal. 2 Violation – The Aff does not definitely reduce IP Protections – there’s a world where the Courts don’t agree w/ the Plaintiffs. 3 Standards – a Limits – Allowing Conditions Affs explodes the Topic – there’s an infinite number of other conditions that become Topical if this Aff does - companies could be forced to go through a third-party audit to check if their IP protections were beneficial or not, public citizens could be asked to take a poll as to whether a certain IP patent should go through or not, etc. b Neg Ground – Conditions Affs allow the Aff to spike out of every Neg Arg – generics like Innovation don’t link if the Aff can say the Aff only applies if it is proven to not harm innovation or Biotech Heg since they can say “only if it doesn’t violate National Security”. No Neg Link arguments assume every condition since they’re all Patents Good/Bad meaning they either force us to research infinite conditions or we simply lose since the 1AR will no link everything. Proven in this instance, since the 1AR will always say “every Neg Arg will just be proven to be against the Public Good” making negating impossible. 4 TVA – unconditionally enforce the Plan regardless of plaintiff justifications.
9/19/21
SO - T-Reduce
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Marlborough RJ | Judge: Gordon Krauss 1 Interpretation - Reduce means permanent reduction – it’s distinct from “waive” or “suspend.” Reynolds 59 (Judge (In the Matter of Doris A. Montesani, Petitioner, v. Arthur Levitt, as Comptroller of the State of New York, et al., Respondents NO NUMBER IN ORIGINAL Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department 9 A.D.2d 51; 189 N.Y.S.2d 695; 1959 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 7391 August 13, 1959, lexis) Section 83's counterpart with regard to nondisability pensioners, section 84, prescribes a reduction only if the pensioner should again take a public job. The disability pensioner is penalized if he takes any type of employment. The reason for the difference, of course, is that in one case the only reason pension benefits are available is because the pensioner is considered incapable of gainful employment, while in the other he has fully completed his "tour" and is considered as having earned his reward with almost no strings attached. It would be manifestly unfair to the ordinary retiree to accord the disability retiree the benefits of the System to which they both belong when the latter is otherwise capable of earning a living and had not fulfilled his service obligation. If it were to be held that withholdings under section 83 were payable whenever the pensioner died or stopped his other employment the whole purpose of the provision would be defeated, i.e., the System might just as well have continued payments during the other employment since it must later pay it anyway. *13 The section says "reduced", does not say that monthly payments shall be temporarily suspended; it says that the pension itself shall be reduced. The plain dictionary meaning of the word is to diminish, lower or degrade. The word "reduce" seems adequately to indicate permanency.
2 Violation – the plan waives intellectual property protections temporarily, which is an indefinite suspension. That’s 1AC public citizen. Pre-empting the We Meet – Plan Text in a Vacuum is a useless guideline since words are contextually defined based on function – the only basis for determining Topicality should be if the implementation of the Plan as per their 1AC solvency evidence follows the directional meaning of the Topic’s intent – anything else allows the 1AR to re-contextualize what the Plan says forcing the 1NC to predict infinite 1AR spin since they’re not tied to their evidence. 3 Vote neg for limits and neg ground – re-instatement under any infinite number of conditions doubles aff ground – every plan becomes either temporary or permanent – you cherry-pick the best criteria and I must prep every aff while they avoid core topic discussions like reduction-based DAs which decks generics like Pharma Innovation and Bio-Tech. 4 Paradigm Issues – a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
9/5/21
SO - T-Reduce v2
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Felicity Park 1 Interpretation – “Reduce” means to annul. Black’s Law 90 Black’s Law Dictionary 2ND ED. “Reduce” https://dictionary.thelaw.com/reduce/Elmer In Scotch law. To rescind or annul. That means the Aff has to cancel IP protections in their entirety, they can’t just modify it. Black’s Law 90 Black’s Law Dictionary 2ND ED. “Annul” https://thelawdictionary.org/annul/ Elmer To cancel; make void ; destroy. To annul a judgment or judicial proceeding is to deprive it of all force and operation, either a6 initio or prospectively as to future transactions. Wait v. Wait, 4 Barb. (N. Y.) 205; Woodson v. Skinner, 22 Mo. 24; In re Morrow’s Estate, 204 Pa. 484, 54 Atl. 342. 2 Violation – They don’t remove the IP, the Trade Secret still has the same protection under law, it cannot be disclosed unless disclosure is in the public interest – the Aff only shifts who has to prove that NOT the actual protection. 3 Standards – a Limits – Allowing the Aff’s to deal with the enforcement of IP rather than the actual protection explodes the Topic – Affs can modify court proceedings, specify which courts hear the cases, how long those proceedings last, which agencies pursue legal action, etc. – it eviscerates a predictable stasis by shifting it away from IPP good/bad. b Neg Ground – Shifting the topic to enforcement means DAs like Innovation, Biotech Heg, Politics no longer apply since the Aff doesn’t have to reduce anything related to the IPP itself – proven by the fact we can’t read Trade Secrets Good vs this Aff since the 1AR will shift to the IP itself doesn’t change and if they were good, the Aff wouldn’t be enforced proving modifications are infinitely abusive. 4 TVA – eliminate Trade Secret protection of Pharma to eliminate deterrent litigation against whistle-blowers since there’s no longer a legal basis for enforcement.
9/19/21
SO - US medicine distribution CP
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 3 | Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: Lukas Krause CP Text – The United States federal government ought to establish a global leadership role in production and distribution of medicines to solve Pandemic and Neglected Diseases and treatments by engaging in talks with NATO and the G-7 and expanding support of Medical Distribution Programs using a framework focusing on alleviating structural health disparities in nations in the Global South and encourage public-private partnerships and facilitate overseas licensing agreements without reducing intellectual property rights.
9/25/21
SO - Util FW v1
Tournament: Nano Nagle | Round: 5 | Opponent: Oxford VD | Judge: Vanessa Nguyen The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing – that means act hedonism. 1 Util is key to debates about IP. Kar 19 Mohit; Writer at the Original Position; “Utilitarianism in the Context of Intellectual Property,” The Original Position; 9/18/19; https://originalpositionnluj.wordpress.com/2019/09/18/utilitarianism-in-the-context-of-intellectual-property/ Justin Jeremy Bentham is known as the founder of modern utilitarianism. He believed in production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view. With regards to intellectual property, he had opined that inventors and authors should be given absolute privilege over their work, which would ensure they get remunerated duly for their work, thus leading to further creative actions being taken by them. In this article, the author will make an analysis of the utilitarian theory as proposed by Jeremy Bentham and its interplay with Intellectual Property. According to utilitarians, the main purpose of property rights is the maximization of common well-being.i According to Jeremy Bentham, the common well-being here mentioned is the good for the greatest number of people in a population. He defined the principle of utility as carrying an object of production of maximum happiness in a given time in a particular society.ii The wealth of a society consists of the cumulative wealth of each of its individual members. The most effective way to increase individual wealth is to leave the management of wealth to the individual himself, since – between the individual and the government – it is the individual who can best manage his own wealth. The society gains benefits because the increase in individual wealth is also the increase of collective wealth. Sharing this wealth is managed by the government, through taxes. Bentham argued that the value of outcome of a society is positive if the total quantity of pleasure gained by each individual under its influence is greater than the total quantity of pain.iii Thus, Bentham put stress on the happiness and wealth of individuals in a society. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism advocates the maximization of common well-being and the proper use of resources available. To show us a practical point of view, he criticized the kind of trade strategies where a country prevents the purchase of cheaper products from another country only to protect its market. In his opinion, to pay more for a product that can be manufactured elsewhere with the same quality standards only to favor the national industry is a waste of resources.iv Bentham believed that trade barriers to foreign imports cannot increase trade and commerce in a particular country.v He termed it as a necessary evil which would give rise to monopolies and lower the quality of production.vi Transposing this theory to intellectual property rights, for the maximization of common welfare to be made, the legislators should strike a balance between, the monopoly of rights to stimulate creation and giving access to the population to inventions. Bentham defended the idea of a limited period of protection for patents and he believed in the absolute privilege of the inventor, so that the latter can recover the amounts invested during the inventive process, while being paid for his creative activity.vii The right must also help the inventor since without any laws to protect him; any third party could copy his invention and thus enjoy his work without any compensation being granted. The logic to defend the monopoly stems from the fact that, without the latter, the inventor would not be encouraged to put his product or invention on the market. In this case, it would be the society that would have lost wealth which could have been added to the common well-being. In the name of enriching common well-being, Bentham stresses the importance of patents in a society and even argues that their concession should be a free service offered to inventors.viii The contemporary version of this theory has been presented to us by William Landes and Richard Posner in two separate works, one on copyright and the other on trademark law.ix Economic analysis of intellectual property rights presented by these two authors demonstrates that the protection of intellectual property may be too expensive for society and it limits the use of products. If we extrapolate a little, this contemporary utilitarian vision can assert that the products by intellectuals should be easily copied since the copies of a product do not prevent the use of the same product by several people. William Landes and Richard Posner consider the creative process as divided into two parts.x If we use a book as an example, its production is split between the part comprising author’s time and effort plus publishing costs, and the second part includes publication and distribution costs of the book. Generally, it is the first of these two elements that demands the most investment. The second will be more or less expensive, depending on the quantity of copies that will be produced. When the work is complete, its reproduction does not require any investment at the creative level. Hence, they stated that striking a correct balance between access and incentives is one of the central problems of copyright law.xi In this way, as already mentioned, the lack of remuneration of creators for the exploitation of their works may have as a consequence the diminution of the cultural wealth of a society, given that the creators will not have the desire to continue to create unless paid. It is important to note that the lack of protection conferred by copyright would not change this problem. In a society where copyright protection does not exist, a book could be easily copied without the act of copying being considered an offense. When the contemporary utilitarian vision is applied, it indicates that the benefits that they bring to a society are: It makes it easier for consumers to choose the product which has the qualities corresponding most to its needs. Since consumers already know the brand, they should not search among a whole range of products available on the market; It encourages producers to maintain good quality of their products, because consumers associate the product quality with the brand attached to it; It improves the language. Landes and Posner believe that the brands create new words that end up being incorporated in the lexicon of the language.xii Suppose the utilitarian theory – that of Bentham, or Posner’ and Landes’ – would be applied to intellectual property as it stands today: the benefits that would be brought to society by this analysis would be the incentive for creativity, the optimization of production and the disappearance or diminution of similar inventions made by different individuals. Among these three advantages, we can consider the incentive to creation as the most important. In this case, the monopoly guaranteed by intellectual property stimulates creation in a society and, especially with regard to patents; inventions will bring more happiness and pleasure to society in general. This justifying argument is in harmony with Bentham’s utilitarianism. The problem here is that no one really knows what kind of invention would bring more or less happiness or pleasure to the society. Moreover, the term “monopoly concession” for patents, trademarks and copyright is not based on any empirical or objective study and is rather random. Optimization of production sees ownership monopolies intellectual property as a “service” to society since data from sale indicates the products for which the company has the most need. This approach could even justify increasing the period of protection of intellectual property products. The logic here is that the decrease in the protection period or even the removal of the protection would deprive the producers of information that enables them to optimize their production. Thereby, the withdrawal or diminution of protection could even be considered harmful to society. However, if we do not impose limitations to this theory, the result could be a disparity of investments in intellectual property over investments in other areas, such as education and health, as well as in general research activities. CONCLUSION Utilitarianism, as it stands today, is intimately linked to the information obtained from the use of intellectual property monopolies. The goal is to avoid duplication of production. The problem in this case is that in a society which values and encourages the production of new patents and new technologies, the plethora of patents complicates the process. This finding is based on the fact that new inventions normally rely on existing patents and the production of a new patented product will require a large number of licenses before it can begin. As Richard Posner said in his blog: ‘Patents are a source of great social costs, and only occasionally of commensurate benefits. Most firms do not actually want patents; for those firms, the costs involved in obtaining licenses from patentees are not offset by the prospect of obtaining license fees on their own patents.’ Outweighs – A Most articles about IP are written through util – means other frameworks can never engage with core questions of the lit and decks predictability – equal topic lit means fair ground. B TJFs first – substance begs the question of a framework being good for debate 2 Extinction first – A Forecloses future improvement – we can never improve society because our impact is irreversible B Turns suffering – mass death causes suffering because people can’t get access to resources and basic necessities C Moral obligation – allowing people to die is unethical and should be prevented because it creates ethics towards other people D Objectivity – body count is the most objective way to calculate impacts because comparing suffering is unethical E Moral uncertainty – if we’re unsure about which interpretation of the world is true – we ought to preserve the world to keep debating about it
10/9/21
SO - WTO Bad DA v1
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Marlborough RJ | Judge: Gordon Krauss WTO Credibility is on the brink – patent waivers are the make-it-or-break it issue – failure to pass the Plan dooms the WTO BUT passage signals success that generate momentum for structural change. Meyer 6-18 David Meyer 6-18-2021 "The WTO's survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn" https://archive.is/etPtf (Senior Writer at Fortune Magazine; Covers mostly European Business Affairs)Elmer The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Yes Link – the Plan is perceptively seen as bolstering the WTO since its by all WTO Members. WTO collapse solves extinction Hilary 15 John Hilary 2015 “Want to know how to really tackle climate change? Pull the plug on the World Trade Organisation” http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/want-to-know-how-to-really-tackle-climate-change-pull-the-plug-on-the-world-trade-organisation-a6774391.html (Executive Director, War on Want)Elmer Yet this grandiose plan soon fell victim to its own ambition. The WTO’s first summit after the launch of the Doha Round collapsed in acrimonious failure. The next was marked by pitched battles in the streets of Hong Kong as riot police fought Asian farmers desperately trying to save their livelihoods from the WTO’s free trade agenda. The WTO slipped into a coma. Government ministers must decide this week whether to turn off its life support. The answer is surely yes. It was the WTO’s poisonous cocktail of trade expansion and market deregulation that led to the economic crisis of 2008. Years of export-led growth resulted in a crisis of overproduction that could only be sustained with mountains of debt. The parallel deregulation of financial services meant that this debt soon turned out to be toxic, and the world’s banking system went into freefall. Nor is the WTO fit for purpose on ecological grounds. If last week’s climate talks in Paris taught us anything, it is that we must rethink the model of ever-expanding production and consumption in order to avoid planetary meltdown. Global capitalism may need limitless expansion in order to survive, but the planet is already at the very limits of what it can take. The choice is ours. Worst of all, it is the WTO’s ideology of unrestricted trade and corporate domination that lies behind all the bilateral trade deals that are proliferating at the moment, including the infamous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We need a radically different model of regulated trade and controlled investment if we are to have any chance of breaking the cycle of economic and ecological crisis. For the planet to survive, the WTO must die. The WTO ensures structural poverty of the Global South – multiple warrants. Walker 11 Aurelie Walker 11-14-2011 "The WTO has failed developing nations" https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/14/wto-fails-developing-countries (trade policy advisor at the Fairtrade Foundation. Aurelie has specialised in EU trade relations with Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. She has worked as trade negotiator for an East African government, as advisor to business and government in Southern Africa on the Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations and for European Institutions and think tanks. Aurelie now advocates on behalf on Fairtrade producers on international trade issues)Elmer Ten years ago, a new World Trade Organisation that put developing country needs at the centre of the international trade negotiation agenda was proposed. The Ministerial Declaration adopted at the start of the Doha Development Round of trade negotiations, on 14 November 2001, was a promising response to the anti-globalisation riots of the 1990s. But the WTO membership has failed to deliver the promised pro-development changes. Finding "development" in the Doha Development Round today is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Developing countries have been completely sidelined by the economic and political interests of global powers. Here are 10 examples of how the WTO has failed the poor: 1. Cotton: the Fairtrade Foundation revealed last year how the $47bn in subsidies paid to rich-country producers in the past 10 years has created barriers for the 15 million cotton farmers across west Africa trying to trade their way out of poverty, and how 5 million of the world's poorest farming families have been forced out of business and into deeper poverty because of those subsidies. 2. Agricultural subsidies: beyond cotton, WTO members have failed even to agree how to reduce the huge subsidies paid to rich world farmers, whose overproduction continues to threaten the livelihoods of developing world farmers. 3. Trade agreements: the WTO has also failed to clarify the deliberately ambiguous rules on concluding trade agreements that allow the poorest countries to be manipulated by the rich states. In Africa, in negotiations with the EU, countries have been forced to eliminate tariffs on up to 90 of their trade because no clear rules exist to protect them. 4. Special treatment: the rules for developing countries, called "special and differential treatment" rules, were meant to be reviewed to make them more precise, effective and operational. But the WTO has failed to work through the 88 proposals that would fill the legal vacuum. 5. Medicine: the poorest in developing countries are unable to access affordable medicine because members have failed to clarify ambiguities between the need for governments to protect public health on one hand and on the other to protect the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies. 6. Legal costs: the WTO pledged to improve access to its expensive and complex legal system, but has failed. In 15 years of dispute settlement under the WTO, 400 cases have been initiated. No African country has acted as a complainant and only one least developed country has ever filed a claim. 7. Protectionist economic policies: one of the WTO's five core functions agreed at its inception in 1995 was to achieve more coherence in global economic policy-making. Yet the WTO failed to curb the speedy increase in the number of protectionist measures applied by G20 countries in response to the global economic crisis over the past two years – despite G20 leaders' repeated affirmations of their "unwavering" commitment to resist all forms of protectionist measures. 8. Natural disaster: the WTO fails to alleviate suffering when it has the opportunity to do so. In the case of natural disaster, the membership will have taken almost two years to agree and implement temporary trade concessions for Pakistan, where severe flooding displaced 20 million people in 2010 and caused $10bn of damage. Those measures, according to the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, would have boosted Pakistan's exports to the EU by at least €100m this year. 9. Decision-making: the WTO makes most of its decisions by consensus – and achieving consensus between 153 countries is nearly impossible. But this shows another failure of the WTO: to break the link between market size and political weight that would give small and poor countries a voice in the trade negotiations. 10. Fair trade: 10 years after the start of the Doha Development Round, governments have failed to make trade fair. As long as small and poor countries remain without a voice, the role of campaigning organisations, such as Traidcraft and Fairtrade Foundation, which are working together to eliminate cotton subsidies, will remain critical. The WTO has failed to live up to its promises over the past decade, which reveals a wider systemic problem in the global community. True and lasting solutions to global economic problems can only come when the model of global competitiveness between countries becomes one of genuine cooperation.
Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to temporarily waive intellectual property protections for medicines related to the prevention, containment, and treatment of COVID-19, and notify and compensate stake-holding right holders.
Temporary, indefinite waivers by member nations solve distribution shortages.
WTO ’05 (World Trade Organization; 2005; "Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights as Amended by the 2005 Protocol Amending the TRIPS agreement"; WTO; https://www.wto.org/english/docs'e/legal'e/trips'e.htm~~#art1; Accessed: 6-26-2021) Where the law of a Member allows for other use (7) of the
AND
shall be non-assignable except with the assignment of the second patent.